In the debate swirling around Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, one of the persistent claims has been that Dreher is advocating some sort of broad withdrawal from American culture. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I simply cannot see how such a conclusion could be drawn apart from the willful desire to read such a conclusion into the text.
Not being one to prooftext, allow me to prooftext. From page 82 in the chapter "A New Kind of Christian Politics": "To be sure, Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely." I don't know what sort of brokedown Google translator renders this back as "Grab your guns and head for the hills," but that is what some critics seem to see in such admonitions. It makes one wonder--and this is the cynic in me--if they actually read the book. Reading is so tedious. Throwing shade is considerably more fun.
Dreher's central point, and I'll stick with this chapter on politics for now, is that our whole system is screwed up and political salvation doesn't exist. Christians can't wait for the Republican on the white horse to ride in and restore the abandoned moral order. We need to be doing work, building institutions parallel to secular institutions that sustain and nourish our people in a dark time. Dreher marshals the examples of Czech dissidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Bendel to show an historical example of just such a counterculture. Frankly, I don't know how such a claim is in any way outlandish for a Christian. Indeed, one of the things that has struck me in my reading on the Benedict Option is how obvious much of it seems. Anyone who has read or even heard of Augustine's City of God ought to recognize just such a distinction in Christian history. St. Paul might have had a thing or two to say on the matter as well. We are always off base when we conflate a worldly kingdom with the eternal kingdom. Yet the temptation is ever-flourishing.
I'll end this mini-post (I'm sure this is the first of many on this important book) by letting Dreher talk for a minute. Here are two block quotes from the end of the chapter on politics:
"Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or join a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department."
Let's juxtapose that with the caricature of the critics: Buy a huge plot of land and put a bomb shelter on it. Make your daughters wear head coverings that they make on your home loom. Pray for the return of 1950s gender norms. Judge your neighbors... who are probably gay. Prevent your kids from having a life. Make sure they turn out as weird as possible.
I'd love to read an honest critique of that paragraph. Making music is hegemonic! Smartphones are making us smarter! More like, feast with your (white) neighbors! Seriously, what are people actually taking issue with? That paragraph is a beautiful vision of Christian engagement with the world.
More Dreher:
"But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all."
I understand having quibbles here if you're a secularist who lauds the demise of belief in the West. I don't understand how you can have a problem with this if you claim Christ. And here I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative Christian. What's to dispute? We find ourselves enfeebled because we have enfeebled ourselves. We have refused to do the hard work of culture building, trusting instead to a Moral Majority mindset that uses the cudgel of the state to enact our morality. Well, we lost that fight. Conservative Christians should acknowledge this and restructure. Liberal Christians should acknowledge that the new moral order is not all sunshine and roses. However, conservative Christians seem more eager to get the club back in our hands than to actually making sure our own house is clean. Liberal Christians deny that there is any problem at all.
But if we can see through the lies on both sides we can see that the path forward for the church is increased faithfulness to the call to take up our crosses and die. That, ultimately, seems to be Dreher's primary interest: building up the church so that we can be of use to the world. I'll keep reading, but I have a hard time seeing how I'll end up disagreeing.
I first came across the work of Steven Pressfield in a podcast episode for The Art of Manliness. It was called "Overcoming the Resistance" and I was deeply interested in the subject matter. I was talking with a coworker about it and he happened to have one of Pressfield's books called The War of Art. He leant it to me and it is in the process of kicking my ass. The concept is that we all have work to do that we fail to do because of the existence of a force Pressfield labels The Resistance. The Resistance can take many forms, both benign and pernicious, but basically consists of anything that contributes to our laziness of apathy. I present two gems:
"Of course not all sex is a manifestation of Resistance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust but Resistance.
It goes without saying that this principle applies to drugs, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing fat, sugar, salt, or chocolate."
Every time you do one of those things on that list you are denuding your impact. You are giving in. Now there might be some circumstances in which that can be appropriate--shopping, after all, is in some respects a necessity--but when you feel the emptiness afterward you know you were trying to avoid labor. Anyone who has ever had a drink or watched TV or eaten a pint of Ben and Jerry's to avoid something more pressing knows the feeling of emptiness Pressman describes.
Second:
"As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work."
I really resonate with this. Everything within popular and consumer culture militates against our real productivity. Everything is a short term fix for our restlessness. We buy and it scratches the itch, but doesn't heal the wound. So we try something else, equally useless. Our only real solution is to opt out.
This culture has, moreover, become tyrannical. I see students every day buried in the artificial light of their smartphones. I took a kid backpacking last week who brought a charger so he could play games in his tent at night. While camped. In the Canyonlands.
We are addicts, addicted above all to comfort. To what is easy. We have been lulled to sleep. And we need to wake. We need to fight the Resistance. We need to be useful.
Of the more absurd modern atheistic claims, the one that has caused me the most head-scratching has been the notion that morality exists because it benefits the survival of our species. Richard Dawkins has famously argued that our genes are "selfish" and propel us to survive. Somehow, this "selfish" impulse extends even to the point of doing seemingly stupid things (in terms of pure survival value) like rescuing other people not of our genetic background from burning buildings, swerving to avoid hitting a dog in traffic, or the more mundane charitable gift to OXFAM. None of those actions can in any way be adequately or satisfactorily explained by claiming genes are "selfish," an anthropomorphic and value-laden claim if ever one existed.* Yet the idea persists among atheists. And it persists, it must be maintained, because it has to persist. The moral impulse is undeniable and in a mechanistic scheme must be explained away rather than addressed directly. However, even the explanation offered by atheists is quite obviously a metaphysical position held by a philosophy that, ironically enough, denies metaphysics.
David Bentley Hart, in his book The Experience of God, draws out this inconsistency quite well. He sets up the mechanistic, atheistic dilemma here:
The most common strategy for 'naturalizing' ethics is a sort of evolutionary utilitarianism, with two distinct moments: first, the attempt to reduce the human ethical sense to a variety of traits that, by virtue of the evolutionary advantages they confer, have been implanted in us by natural selection; and then, second, a vague but earnest assertion that, for this very reason, ethical imperatives ought to be accorded real authority.
Hart's follow up comment argues, essentially, that the logical jump between the first and second points is ludicrous. If morality is merely a useful tool, or was a useful tool for earlier generations, there is no reason at all to think that such a morality is binding on us today. These imperatives can have no real authority for any individual. Every moral act is, rather, implicitly acknowledging the existence of a transcendent moral authority-giver, whether it pretends otherwise or not. People might invent/cling to outlandish notions of selfish genes overriding the wills of robotic human beings, in Dawkins's textbook example of crappy use of metaphor, but the central issue is not evaded by spectacular fabrications. Goodness, as a concept, is contingent on the existence of God.
This line of argument usually prompts the impetuous response from atheists: so, are you saying you need to believe in God to be a good person? I've always felt this question went wide of the mark. There is a natural law tradition in virtually every faith system that makes such a claim unnecessary. Of course we can be good without God. We can be good without God because we have been given a moral sense that is inextricably bound up in our vision of the world.
Hart dismisses this atheist canard.
Simply said, if there were no God, neither would there be such a thing as moral truth, nor such a thing as good or evil, nor such a thing as a moral imperative of any kind. This is so obviously true that the need to argue the point is itself evidence of how inextricable our hunger for a transcendent moral truth even is, even when all our metaphysical convictions militate against the existence of that truth. So, yes, it certainly is not the case that one needs to believe in God in any explicit way in order to be good; but it certainly is the case, as classical theism asserts, that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.
I think this accounts for the bluster of contemporary atheism. They know this is true. This is not a new idea. Dostoevsky was on the case here 150 years ago. The atheist response has been to invent metaphysical systems of transcendent value and deny that they are metaphysical or transcendent. They act as if saying such-and-such an impulse emanated from the brain over time explains it away. It does not, even if it could be proved.
One of the ineluctable truths of modern atheism is that it is built upon a foundation of Christian ethics. Even the claim--good without God--presupposes the existence of "good." And why ought "good" to exist in a world without "God." What sort of chemical reaction created it? What unseeing mechanistic cause hardwired it into our vision of the world? The only reason we have a vocabulary for goodness is because, as Hart contends, "our minds may have really glimpsed the form of the good, and so we can recognize goodness when we see it because it has left its impress and its fragrance and its sparks in our souls." We know what is good, in other words, because we all know God. Some of us are simply more honest about this fact.
* If this were true, it would also prompt merely an infinite regress of causality. If our genes are selfish and therefore somehow sentient, what gave our genes this power? If we find that cause, what gave that it's power? And on and on. You cannot bridge the gap from pure mechanistic landscape to intelligent consciousness through the simple addition of layers of sapience.
Michael Chabon is far and away one of the best American writers living today. I first read his work about 10 years ago when I picked up a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I have sense read most of his other works, both fictional and non.
Apart from being an accomplished cross-genre author and Pulitzer Prize winner, part of what inspires me about Chabon is his fastidious work ethic. He writes every day from 10 a.m.- 3 p.m. For non-writers out there that might seem like a short day at the office, to which I say: try it. Writing with dedication for an hour is hard. Part of Chabon's success comes from his ability to get up every day and put pen to paper (or fingers to keys).
But this post isn't about any of that. I am only writing right now to give the Author's Note to his recent novel Moonglow which is perfect in every way. Those other two paragraphs are what we might call filler.
Here it is:
In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
How can you not want to read a book that begins that way?
The school that I teach at won our first state championship in boys' basketball this year. After the game, a friend and I went our for a beer in an area of Denver that 10 years ago you would have just avoided to celebrate and chat. Apparently, there was a big St. Patrick's Day celebration going on in this area. Everyone was wearing green, shirts proclaiming dubious Irish heritage, shamrock necklaces, and the glazed over eyes of the daytime drunk.
As we left to drive back to our suburban homes I saw each of the following:
1) A man eating a piece of pizza. Not so much a notable event, right? All I can say is you haven't seen this guy try to eat a piece of pizza. He was so drunk he couldn't quite bring the pizza to his mouth in the conventional way. His solution: bring his mouth to the pizza. Except that didn't work either. The pizza drooped away. By the time he actually made contact, let's just say he had expunged a good deal of his innate human dignity.
2) A guy wearing a kilt running through an intersection tripped, fell, and ate pavement. I don't mean to be pedantic here, but the guy wasn't even wearing an Irish kilt; it was clearly the Scottish variety. Come to think of it, I doubt the guy was actually Scottish either. It's almost like he was just in this for the booze and not to celebrate his heritage! Anyway, he tried to make it through the orange flashing-hand signal and promptly tripped. Legs akimbo, Scottish kilt riding higher than anyone wanted.
3) As we drove down 20th street past Coors Field on our way to I-25 and the safety of our conventional homes, we were stopped at a stoplight next to a car full of returning revelers. They all looked rather worse for the wear, but the award for most dismal drunk face went to the girl in the back driver's side seat. She was slumped against the window, her face cradled in her hand, her eyes vacant. Such a great time. Can't wait till next year. St. Patty's Day!!!
I do not say all of this to make fun of drunk people on a Saturday afternoon (thought it must be pointed out that we saw all of this before the traditional 5 o'clock hour, and I am making fun of them). While my friend and I nursed our beer and talked life, I asked him if he ever missed his pre-child existence. We talked about that for awhile and decided that while parenting young kids doesn't always stack up well against a friend's trip to southeast Asia in the social media battles we are both actually as happy as we've ever been. We have wives who love us and who we get to see naked and sleep with every night; we have children who adore us and just want to hang out and read and play; we have jobs that provide satisfaction and we have enough on the line to work hard and try to make a living at what we do. All in all, a pretty satisfying existence.
And then we left to drive home and saw three case studies of people "living it up." The shockingly decorum-free pizza eating, the embarrassing trips in the middle of a crosswalk, and the drive of death on the way home from a drunken binge never quite show up on social media. We only see the moment three hours before, a drink or two in, when people feel liberated and happy and like this is all going to be so great, you guys, let's take a picture to remember it forever.
But I went home, sober and happy, kissed my wife and babies, read some books, did some cuddling, said prayers and sang a hymn, got more kisses, bid the children goodnight and sat with my wife in awe of the life we've been given. None of it made it onto Facebook, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
A week or so ago I posted an article about Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" that I had written for a course reader for our freshman students. I mentioned in that post that I am reconsidering my stance in that article. Not regarding the content of the poem, because I still largely agree with what I wrote then, but about the accuracy of Frost's metaphor for life.
I was prompted to think about this while reading Dennis Danielson's book, Milton's Good God. That book takes a broad look at the theodicy of Milton's epic poem and does so in large part by contextualizing Milton within seventeenth century (and prior) theologies. In the chapter on the importance of God's providence for any theodicy, Danielson discusses grace and free will within their Augustinian context.
Danielson begins by noting that, for Augustine, "grace" is primarily related to matters of salvation and damnation. (This is not perfectly so. Augustine believed that "grace" included good works emanating from salvation, but grace has long maintained this inextricable association with salvation.) Upon this point he elaborates. . .
[T]his recognition that grace and free will primarily concern matters of salvation and damnation will discourage the uncritical acceptance of the pagan, ethical model of choice involving fundamentally a decision between vice and virtue. . . The parting of the ways is symbolized by 'the Pythagorean letter,' Y; and the general picture is of a person standing in neither the way of vice nor the way of virtue but having to choose between these ways.
Danielson asserts that Christians have historically rejected such a visual of decision-making. Piggybacking off of the work of the early church father Lactantius, Danielson claims that "in a Christian view, there is not one 'neutral' road with two ways forking off it in the divergent directions of virtue and vice; there is but one road, which can be traveled in two opposite directions, toward light or toward darkness, toward heaven or toward hell." In other words, we are all traveling on the same road; the question is, which way are we traveling? Danielson concludes, "And if one is traveling the road to death, one will find no fork in the road: The only way to change direction is precisely to be turned around, converted."
This last line immediately brought to my mind the great moment of moral decision of the title character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. After killing King Duncan and his friend Banquo (spoiler alert!), Macbeth is suffering deep pangs of conscience over his actions. When deciding what to do next, specifically in regard to the thane Macduff who has shown signs of disloyalty to Macbeth's rule, Macbeth metaphorically imagines himself in a river of blood, in an image I find resonant with the Christian image of a single road:
. . . I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Macbeth acknowledges that he has put himself in an almost impossible situation. When I teach this section I always draw a (crappy) picture of a stick figure Macbeth stranded midway in a river of blood. If you've read or seen Macbeth, or know that it's a tragedy, you will know what decision he makes. He is going to try to "go o'er." He is going to press deeper into this river.
He needs conversion, to be turned around, as Danielson puts it. While he rejects that as an option, Macbeth, at the very least, is clear-eyed about his prospects. He cannot magically extricate himself from this river and take an adjacent, blood-free tributary that gets him out of trouble. It is forward towards hell or backwards toward repentance. He makes his decision and damns himself. (He also, I think, importantly overlooks something: there is no end to this river of blood; once he has stepped out into it, he has entered upon a never-ending cycle of death and betrayal to keep his kingdom. He can keep going, but there is no conceivable end.)
Unsurprisingly, I like the Christian model better. I don't think Frost had this type of thing in mind when he wrote his poem. It is probably slightly uncharitable to lump him in here. But I think the Christian model is preferable to the pagan, Y-model because the Christian view comports more with reality. For we are ever moral creatures making morally-weighted decisions. And there is but one road: narrow at one end and wide at the other.
I recently reread A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's classic World War I Novel. I went through a Hemingway phase, as should every young man, when I was in my early twenties, but I only read him sparingly now. To be honest, I find his style off-putting at times. It can be hard to sink into it, if only because it is so terse and clipped. I have a coworker who felt the same way for a long time but now finds himself drawn back to Hemingway regularly. Maybe such a transition will take place with me as well. It is not that I didn't enjoy the book; simply that it took me more time to get through than a typical novel.
Below is a passage from the book that is undoubtedly one of its most famous. To set a little context, Hemingway's protagonist, Frederic Henry, an American driving an ambulance for the Italian army in the period of WWI before the United States joined the conflict, is running away from the conflict and out-retreating the Italian army after the German advance at Caporetto.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
There is an absolutism to this passage that is disquieting. Everyone who lives to old age is neither gentle nor brave nor good? I wonder if Hemingway, or his protagonist, could have actually believed this or if it just sounds good. There is the appearance of wizened reflection here, but in reality this is simply overly dark claptrap. It sounds cool. It seems like it would be good to be "strong[er] at the broken places"--that sounds like moral, intellectual, spiritual growth through trial and adversity. But he removes that notion in the next sentence. The actual good refuse to break and this refusal leads to their untimely deaths.
I believe that Hemingway is implying that he falls into the category of the broken. He broke under the strain, whereas other characters within the book do not. I don't think I need to put a spoiler alert on a book that was published 90 years ago, but Henry's "wife," Catherine Barkley, dies at the end of the book in childbirth. The baby dies as well. There is an overwhelming sense of guilt that pervades the last several chapters. Hemingway was raised Catholic and that sensibility, though he rejected the faith, seemed to stick with him. In a way, Catherine needs to die. The baby, the product of this illicit affair, needs to die as well. There is some cosmic score being settled, if only in the author's mind. But Catherine does not strike me as an overly good or overly brave or overly gentle character. She is annoying, even cloying at times. Her death seems overly determined by authorial will.
Which leads me to believe that Hemingway was full of crap here. Everyone eventually breaks. Death comes for all. Cowards live and cowards die. Heroes live and heroes die. To imagine there is some metaphysical power--the world personified here--killing the brave and good and gentle is garbage.
