American Conservatism, and the Socialist Specter Which Haunts It Still

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Back in February, Rod Dreher shared with his readers an idea for a new book: to introduce conservative Christians in America to "the warnings that people who grew up under socialism are sounding now to Americans about where our country is going....[this] is not primarily about economics, but rather about how the overall mentality of our culture, especially in our leading institutions, is preparing the way for socialism." This, predictably, led to a lot of argument in his comments section. What exactly, some of us asked Rod (and each other), was the "socialism" that existed under the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which he was presumably referring to, and how is that related to what he sees happening in the Democratic party and corporate America and large educational institutions today--especially given that his concern, as he said, wasn't with economics? In subsequent posts Rod brought up multiple different possible interpretations of what "social conservatism" or "social justice" mean, and how they are or are not compatible with "socialism"--with none of it, on my reading, being especially coherent. Ultimately he recognized that using the word "socialism," when what he really wanted to get at was what conservative religious believers needed to know when confronted with an ideologically secular conformity--a conformity that many who experienced the tyranny of various communist parties in Russia and eastern Europe have analyzed thoughtfully and well--"obscures more than it illuminates." Rod didn't cite Alan Jacobs when he came to this conclusion, but he should have--because Alan, I think, had it right: Rod wasn't concerned about socialism; he was concerned about the individualistic, ideological premises of liberal capitalism itself being even further entrenched in our society. As Alan put it:

What [traditional Christians] are battling against isn't a form of socialism, cultural or otherwise. I would argue rather that it’s the ultimate extension of the free market--a kind of metaphysical capitalism. The gospel of the present moment is, as I have frequently commented, “I am my own.” I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. That some kind of redistribution of access/prestige/attention and even economic resources might be needed to bring this gospel to those who have not previously been able to enjoy its benefits should not obscure for us what the core proclamation really is.

The fact that Rod saw the things he fears about ideological conformity as tied up with "socialism" is, unfortunately, a common mistake in America. Socialism is the bogeyman that conservatives of all stripes find easy to associate with all that distorts or corrupts those thinks they, in theory at least, hold most dear--namely, civil society, and the goods which social interactions in and through one's community, church, and family make possible. Given the rise of actually electable, self-identifying, democratic socialist politicians to national prominence in the Democratic party, it becomes doubly easy for Republican-voters of all stripes (including many conservatives, however defined) to simply associate "socialism" which whatever cultural concerns they have with the Democratic party's platform, or the statements they hear from various Democrats or presumably Democratic-sympathizing interest groups and movements. Sometimes those associations are accurate--but usually they are not. It would be unfortunate if some of the genuinely interesting struggles taking place among conservative writers today, whether it be Daniel McCarthy's "new conservative agenda" or Rod's own call to eschew any revival of "zombie Reaganism," continued to fail to take socialism--meaning, very fundamentally, putting social equality and collective empowerment before individual interests and private property--seriously. To do so is to leave the right side of the rhetorical battlefield empty, and thus available for our idiot president to fill.

Timothy Carney's mostly excellent new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse is a good example here. Carney is a talented writer, and he is clearly trying to set a higher bar for himself than the sort of conservative hackery was he was content with in his earlier books. This book has a real thesis, and in exploring that thesis--the question of the "localized erosion of civil society in our country," which he forthrightly admits in the acknowledgments isn't at all new, but rather hews closely to the ground which important sociologists and thinkers like Robert Putnam, William Julius Wilson, and many others have already plowed (p. 301)--Carney brings out many solid and thoughtful arguments. Starting with the data which shows it wasn't necessarily the most economically distressed white voters who decisively supported Donald Trump in 2016, but rather was the white voters who lived in the towns and cities where the social dysfunction which regularly attends the lives of the economically distressed (pp. 58, 62), Carney wants to explore why some places in America, and not simply certain groups of people, suffer. By comparing data sets specific to particular places, supplemented with some on the ground reporting, Carney smartly connects the collapse of certain sorts of economic opportunities--"low-skilled but reliable jobs....[which were] one of the many training grounds for life"--with the emergence of large numbers of people (mostly white men) who, failing to make America's supposed meritocracy work for them, find themselves flailing:

For college-educated men, high-skilled jobs still exist in today's economy, and those jobs often demand and cultivate the same virtues. For the man who was or would have been a factory worker, though, there aren't the salaried jobs of the elites or the reliable factory jobs of the past. There is instead irregular and even unreliable work--contractor jobs, occasional gigs. These are the sorts of jobs that don't reward or cultivate reliability or commitment, in a large part because they don't offer reliability of commitment in return. they reflect more an on-again, off-again relationship of convenience...and perhaps the cultivate other habits: detachment, the default stance of constantly looking for a better deal, and survival instinct that elevates self-preservation over loyalty (p. 82-83).

Leftist that I am, it is hard for me to understand how someone can notice the common denominator present in these places--the collapse of community, leaving in its wake far fewer examples of responsible citizenship and decent families and self-denying individuals; as Carney puts it explicitly, "the factory closing in Monessen destroyed Monessen as a community....[wiping] out the institutions of civil society"(p. 86)--and not come to the logical conclusion that the bulk of the problem is with what Jacobs rightly called "metaphysical capitalism": the acceptance of the supposedly overriding imperative to let individuals and corporations specialize and sort and relocate and maximize and to all the other things which homo economicus does so well. Carney poignantly describes how this cult of meritocracy and profit hollows out the human relationships that used to attend many once-stable communities (pp. 40-41), how it breaks apart those institutions--the church congregation, the local diner--which provided the places and contexts where mutual support and the goods of civil society could be experienced (pp. 102-103), how it deprives work of dignity and turns us all into interchangeable cogs in the Gig Economy (pp. 182-183). Yet when he visited Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, or activists working on the Sanders campaign in 2016, and saw the degree to which their actions in opposition to all of the above involved "building a mini-society" or "participating in community" or "making grass-roots connections"--in other words, when he himself acknowledged that the egalitarian aims of their work involved the strengthening of civil bonds, exactly the sort of thing that all good conservatives presumably cared about--he still couldn't help but basically discount them. "As progressives and socialists...[they] believed the solution to this real problem was centralizing power" (pp. 209-213). Is that really all that conservatives can see?

There are a couple of points in the book where Carney digs deep, and comes up with something perceptive about his own understanding of the world; maybe that understanding connects with why the socialism right in front of his face--at one point his own analysis leads him to praise the union-run unemployment insurance system of countries like Sweden and Denmark, and says the U.S. ought to do the same, putting labor unions in charge of distributing roughly $100 billion in welfare dollars every year! (p. 286)--can't be accepted in its own terms. In talking about Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the America Right, he quotes her statement that "the right can't understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life." He responds:

Hochschild...and others on the left perhaps can't understand that the folks of Trinity Baptist, Salt Lake City, and Oostburg see the church schools and the church slide as part of the public sphere and an integrative force. There's no admission charged on Sundays. The slides and coffee shops and concerts and sports teams at these churches tend to be open to all comers, and not merely believers. Even those who are exclusive when it comes to worship (see the Mormon temples) are inclusive when it comes to other events. The "gentiles" I met around Salt Lake City spoke fondly of bringing their kids to the monthly potlucks the local Latter-day Saints church would throw. The recovery aid programs that Hochschild described and that most churches have are open to all needy people. Homeless atheists or Catholics aren't turned away from Trinity Baptist. A mind-set that won't count these institutions as "public" is a mind-set that diminishes community and civil society (pp. 153-154).

Now as it happens, as a Mormon who lived in Utah for five years, I and friends of mine could relate numerous situations which would suggest that Carney's cheery portrait of Salt Lake City is hardly the whole story. No doubt similar stories could be told about any exclusive community attempting to balance its desire to maintain its identity while simultaneously being a good, civil society-contributing neighbor. This is one way in which Carney's writing and analysis, fine as it is, fails to grapple with the real difficulties of community-maintenance in the way which, say, Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City did--or, for that matter, Rod Dreher's own The Benedict Option. In both these works, as different as they are, the authors understand that the binding power which church institutions can contribute to civil society is unavoidably also an exclusionary one: that some doctrine, or standard, or authority, is going to have to be acknowledged, in one way or another, however "public" the church coffee shops or baseball leagues or recovery programs may appear to be.

Now, to the extent that such pluralism--that is, the various bodies, some of them being more open than others, all contributing in their own distinct ways to a healthy civil society--is experienced as a problem, it is arguably one which just takes us back to "metaphysical capitalism" again: the idea that "any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny." Of course, the liberal foundation of rights in this country, whatever its abuses, can't be cavalierly dismissed. But it is equally important to recognize where that doctrine leads, and to recognize that socialist principles can, and do, provide an alternative to it. Socialism (or democratic egalitarianism if you must) ought to be fruitfully pluralistic--and it usually is, as anyone who has spent any time in societies that embraced egalitarian principles, and made use of socialist policies to adhere to those principles, can probably tell you. But it is admittedly true that many types of socialism--particularly, but not only, the state socialist and communist parties which dominated much of the world for much of the 20th century--were unfriendly, to say the least, to any component of that pluralism which excluded, as of course churches often do, despite (or perhaps one could say "in connection with") their manifest role in providing for the development and the strengthening of social goods.

This isn't an argument that such civil bodies, once socially empowered, would or should never be changed by being more thoroughly economically integrated with the rest of society. Of course such bodies, churches included, can't do what they do alone; even Carney recognizes that without an economic foundation which protects good work--that is, without strong limits on the marketplace--communities will fail, and families and individuals will follow, with churches and other particularist, voluntary organizations usually being mostly powerless to slow that decline. (As John Médaille wonderfully put it, while conservatives insist that politics in downstream from culture, culture itself is "downstream from breakfast.") But perhaps if those who hope for the overthrow (or at least the significant modification) of capitalism wouldn't so often fail to understand the place of what could be, and historically often was, one of their key allies in preserving anti-capitalist, genuinely social and familial and egalitarian values in a community, conservatives--or at least those conservatives who are able to break away from the always-trust-the-market-first mentality of Cold War fusion conservatism--might realize that what they're looking for is something we socialists (or some of us, anyway) have been talking about all along.

Back in January, Erik Olin Wright, a brilliant and profoundly original socialist thinker, writer, and organizer passed away. His book Envisioning Real Utopias had an enormous impact upon me; when I first read it, I found myself explaining and re-explaining its ideas to myself and everyone I met for months. The most important thing it--and so many other of Wright's writings--did, I think, was explain how the Marxist shadow over socialist, anarchist, egalitarian, and all other utopian thinking has too often blinded thinkers on the left from recognizing something pretty obvious: that what we are looking to do is empower civil society, to make the mutual support communities provide stronger, to make our social and economic worlds more democratic. Hence we leftists need to be guided, first and foremost, by a "socialist compass," and we need to recognize everything that falls within that compass, including what he called "interstitial" entities and strategies--or in other words, what a non-sociologist might call the dozens, hundreds, thousands of initiatives and organizations (neighborhood co-ops, women's shelters, intentional communities, environmental groups, and many more) which provide spaces wherein civil society, and not capital, rules. He acknowledged that the more doctrinaire Marxist thinkers would see these as a distraction from the longed-for revolution, but insisted that their emancipatory potential is real (Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 322-327). And as for those civil associations which strengthen community and provide shelter from the hyper-individualism of liberal capitalism through particularist, sometimes exclusionary, even religious means? Should they be crushed by the secularizing Red Guards of some new socialist movement? Well...no. As Wright explained:

A vibrant civil society is precisely one with a multitude of heterogeneous associations, networks, and communities, built around different goals, with different kinds of members based on different sorts of solidarities....It is tempting to deal with this...by somehow defining civil society as only consisting of benign associations that are consistent with socialist ideals of democratic egalitarianism....I think this is an undesirable response....There is no guarantee that a society within which real power rooted in civil society predominates would be one that always upholds democratic egalitarian ideals. This, however, is not some unique problem for socialism; it is a characteristic of democratic institutions in general. As conservatives often point out, inherent in democracy is the potential for the tyranny of the majority, and yet in practice liberal democracies have been fairly successful at creating institutions that protect both individual rights and the interests of minorities. A socialist democracy rooted in social empowerment through associations in civil society would face similar challenges...My assumption here is not that a socialism of social empowerment will inevitably successfully meet this challenge, but that moving along the pathways of social empowerment will provide a more favorable terrain on which to struggle for these ideals than does either capitalism or statism (pp. 145-148).

I can easily imagine many conservatives--and socialists too--seeing the forgoing as a lot of murky meanderings, neither promising of real social empowerment nor conserving genuine community stability. My guess is that Carney wouldn't touch it, despite it, on my reading, allowing for exactly the kind of economic support and community respect that his own analysis seems to point directly towards. For my part, I find it beautiful; it reads as a perhaps unintended, but nonetheless carefully thought out and genuinely expressed, olive leaf to everyone who wants civil bonds to flourish, equal respect to increase, and communities to be stabilized--in other words, to promote economic and cultural goods that most people need to lead fulfilling lives. Here's the truth, conservatives: socialists (at least those who haven't unintentionally absorbed a metaphysics which is more capitalist and individualistic than anything else) want those things too. So as the threat of Trump leads some American conservatives to rethink what they believe and where they're going on, here's hoping that they'll realize that the socialism (or the "left conservatism") which keeps on haunting their own arguments is more a helpful ghost, than a specter to flee.

On Dreher's Benedict Option, the Christians and Localists Who Can Live It, and the Ones Who Can't

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Rod Dreher and I aren't close friends, but I've been blessed with the opportunity to associate with and learn from him a handful of times over the years, and like tens of thousands of his blog's regular readers, I've been further blessed by the ideas and arguments his writings have sparked in me--even the writings of his that I've thought to be overwrought, off-the-mark, or just plain wrong. The publication of The Benedict Option, a manifesto that he's been mulling over ever since he first staked out intellectual territory as a "crunchy conservative" more than ten years ago, feels like a capstone to that long intellectual association. I don't mean that to sound like a dramatic conclusion or completion; Rod and I, like many others, will no doubt continue to argue in a friendly way about all these issues for a long time to come. But this book helps me understand, better than I ever have before, a gap which exists between his perspective on what both community and Christianity mean and my own. Perhaps future events or arguments will lead to that gap being bridged, or perhaps they will widen it even further. For now, though, it exists, somewhat avoidable in its breadth, but by no means impossible to speak across. That, too, is a blessing.

I have three points to make about this book. The first is that it's really pretty great. Some chapters are better than others, but all are solid, as much as your mileage of appreciation may vary. (For example, I found chapter 2, "The Roots of the Crisis," in which Rod lays out the whole intellectual history of Western Christendom's rise to and fall from sociopolitical and cultural prominence in 26 pages, a little simplistic and pat, but those who aren't scholars may well disagree with me; on the other hand, I thought chapter 10, "Man and the Machine," was a sharp, haunting synthesis of the many powerful arguments which have been made regarding the "fatal error" of accepting unquestioningly "a world mediated by technology"...though I have no doubt that plenty of conservative Christian couples who only have children thanks to in vitro fertilization will be infuriated by his description of the damaging liberationist logic which he sees that practice as implicitly licensing--pp. 223, 234-235.) Overall Benedict Option is not, I think, Rod's best writing; ideas are most deeply and effectively explored when they are organically revealed in the context of a story, and he did that better when he told the tale of his sister's life, her death, and the hometown they shared in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (a book I couldn't write enough about when it first came out, and which I still buy copies of to give to students of mine as they graduate, marry, or move away), and then again when he wrote a spiritual autobiography of sorts as a sequel, How Dante Can Save Your Life. Benedict Option isn't organic in that sense; while there are stories in it, they are arranged to serve as parts of his argument. Here the ideas, not the stories, come first.

The second thing to say about this book is what all those ideas are for--but in all likelihood, anyone who has read this far already knows the answer to that question. Rod's great desire is for what he accepts as the truth claims and the culturally and spiritually formative power of traditional Christianity to be conserved, in the midst of a world which he sees as denying and undermining the conservation of both of those things left and right. By so doing, Rod argues that the moral stability (and thus the social and cultural stability as well) of Western civilization is at great risk. "We Christians in the West are facing our own thousand-year flood....The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization....This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world....The floodwaters are upon us--and we are not ready" (p. 8).

So far, so very much like many other reactionary jeremiads, whether from James Burham in the 1960s or from Newt Gingrich in the 2010s. But Rod's great insight, one which he has expanded upon and deepened as he has worked out the implications of being a "counter-cultural" conservative, is that the usual political tools of conservation which many American Christians have trusted in ever since the rise of post-WWII fusion conservatism--namely, using political organizing to capture and then maintain a commitment to the Republican party as a way to defend economic freedom, provide for a strong defense, and codify into law socially traditional Christian moral principles--have utterly failed. Hence the need for a turn to an older strategy--one older, as the above referenced intellectual history implies, than the founding of the United States, and indeed older than the entire post-Protestant Reformation socio-economic project of liberal individualism and moral pluralism. Rod's strategy is one of strategic withdrawal from (which also means, as Alan Jacobs astutely observed, a greater strategic attentiveness to) the ordinary cultural practices of the modern world around us, with the aim of developing sustainable local and communal alternatives to them, as the Benedictine monks of old did in the face of the chaos of the post-Roman world. "American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture...in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears. Could it be that the best way to fight [this] flood is to...stop fighting the flood?" (p. 12).

The idea of recasting a broad social and cultural transition and struggle as something other than a straight-up political battle between interest groups and party factions is hardly new, of course. But Rod expresses the ideal of this old vision--a humble, communitarian, civic, populist, local, familial, and "tending" vision, to use the language of political theorist Sheldon Wolin--beautifully:

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 a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that already 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....We faithful Orthodox Christians didn't ask for internal exile from a country we thought was our own, but that's where we find ourselves. We are a minority now, so let's be a creative one, offering warm, living, light-filled alternatives to a world growing cold, dead, and dark....Ceasing to believe that the fate of the American Empire is in our hands frees us to put them to work for the Kingdom of God in our own little shires (pp. 98-99).

Rod's description of "antipolitical politics" is deeply influenced by the writings of dissidents from Eastern Europe during the era of communist tyranny there, Vaclav Havel most particularly. He sees the Benedict Option as a way to talk about Christians building, as Czech and Soviet and other dissidents had to, "'parallel structures' in which the truth can be lived in community," a "parallel polis" for the sake of "establishing (or re-establishing ) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society" (pp. 91-92, 94). What he's talking about is coming to recognize that ordered actions and traditions, routines of integrity and sacrifice and commitment, performed in particular places among a shared community, are valuable in themselves, and not because it may have some practical consequence in the public world. In comparison to the utilitarian and individualistic assumptions of liberal modernity, this is a powerful vision.

It is also, in a perverse way, an appealing one; few are the people who haven't, at one point or another in their lives, enjoyed seeing themselves as the lone sane people in the room, as the brave and necessary and suffering resistance to a malevolent agenda, whether embodied in some ignorant bureaucracy or a hateful boss. But there is a complication which comes relying upon such language: it tends to reinforce a circle-the-wagons mindset, thus making the appeal to an alternative seem more exclusionary than perhaps it ought to be. The attention which Rod--a strong moral traditionalist when it comes to sexual morality, who writes that "the modern re-paganization called the Sexual Revolution can never be reconciled with orthodox Christianity" (p. 197)--has paid on his blog, and in this book, to same-sex marriage, transgender issues, and more, often takes this form. In a response to a review of The Benedict Option by Emma Green, in which she notes that the book provides very little advice on how conservative Christians should deal with "the LGBT Americans they blame for pushing them out of mainstream culture"--something Green correctly observes Benedict Option Christians couldn't avoid even if they wanted to, since there will always be "challenges at the boundaries of sub-cultures," Rod becomes a little defiant:

LGBT activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war. The struggle over gay rights is what is threatening our religious liberty, putting Christian merchants out of business, threatening the tax-exempt status and accreditation of Christian schools and colleges, inspiring the federal government to order public schools to allow transgenders into locker rooms....Our religious liberty and the doctrinal integrity of our churches, especially our understanding of human nature and the meaning of sex and the family, depends on it.

There are lots of "ours" in those sentences, just as the passages quoted above speak of "we Christians" a lot. Of course, American Christians are Rod's target audience, and he's one himself, so that makes sense. But the more you dig into this book, the clearer it becomes that, as much as what he has to say about liturgy ("corporeality is how God created us to function....liturgies do more than pass on information....they form our imaginations and our hearts"--pp. 109,111), work ("Germany's strict laws mandating shop closing times...make life less convenient for consumers...but...the protection of that regulation....cultivate[s] more balanced, integrated lives for the German people"--p. 178), community ("we have to start locally....in order to know what our neighbors need and want, we will have to be close to them"--p. 95), and technology ("to see the world technologically, then, is to see it as material over which to extend one's dominion....technology as a worldview trains us to privilege what is new and innovative over what is old and familiar and to valorize the future uncritically"--p. 221) may appeal to and positively provoke many, Rod really isn't speaking to all of us Christians. Which leads to the third thing to say about his book: that its persuasiveness is very much dependent upon looking inside yourself, and figuring out whether you are part of its true target audience or not.

Rod writes that the Benedict Option is of crucial importance to "orthodox Christians" (sometimes using a small o, sometimes a capital O) or "believing Christians" or "faithful Christians" or "serious Christians," all of whom "recognize the toxins of modern secularism." But recognizing that isn't probably enough--after all, there are thousands of liberal Christians and others who would readily admit to the role modern secularism has played in robbing American culture of a way of talking about the necessity of justice and the plague of greed. (Think of anything written by Ron Sider or Karen Armstrong or Jim Wallis or dozens of others, or most anything published in Sojourners or Commonweal.) So more specifically, Rod means "faithful Orthodox Christians...theological conservatives within the three main branches of historical Christianity." But even more, it means believers who have "internalized" the "classical Christian view" that "[t]he point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with [Christianity's] transcendent, eternal order" (pp. 18, 54). But even there we have a problem. At one point Rod refers to Hillary Clinton as someone "deeply hostile to core Christian values" (p. 89)--yet I strongly suspect that Clinton herself (a life-long church-attending Bible-quoting Methodist, one who has frequently spoken publicly about her prayer life) could quickly--and honestly--assent to believing that "the point of life is to pursue harmony with a transcendent eternal order." Rod has long been bothered--and rightly so--by "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," a sociological label developed to capture the vague spiritual sensibilities held by so many Americans, but allows that even that collection of beliefs includes the conviction that God "created and orders the world" (p. 10). So it can't simply be a matter of affirming the existence of a "transcendent, eternal order"; the Benedict Option is, I think, to Rod's mind, essential to the cultural survival of a Christianity with a very particular doctrinal version of the universal moral order.

The importance of doctrine rears its head when Rod writes, briefly, about my own faith, Mormonism, and some of the ways our congregations work to encourage "unusually strong social bonds" and a "unified community of believers": "The Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) may not be Orthodox Christians, but they are exceptionally good at doing the kind of community building that...is a vital part of being a Christian" (pp. 131-132). I don't mean to make a big deal out of this generous passage, especially since Rod surely knew that his book would be read by any number of old-school evangelical Protestants for whom Mormonism is a dangerous cult and thus must be discussed carefully. But still: so we're not Orthodox Christians, in The Benedict Option's particular definition of "Orthodox Christians," even though he then goes on to say that we're doing exactly what, in his view, Orthodox Christians in today's secular world should be doing? Well, of course, I suspect he might reply; what you do is important, but so is where you stand, doctrinally and denominationally, when you do it. (Rod's complimentary words attracted some thoughtful attention in Mormon circles, but none focused on this particular point, perhaps mainly because most American Mormons couldn't care less about the doctrinal boundaries of traditional Christian denominations.)

So clearly, Rod's argument does not escape doctrinal presumptions. To his credit, he does not over-emphasize this. On the contrary, he speaks highly of intentional Christian groups which take an ecumenical approach to membership (so long as they "avoid watering down doctrinal distinctives for the sake of comity"--p. 137), and he never denies to those who don't hold to his correct doctrine of the eternal order the right to label themselves "Christians"; he never calls Hillary Clinton an apostate or an anti-Christ, for example. But still, he plainly believes that there are Christians--like himself--whose doctrinal take on "core Christian values" will make them targets when and if religious protections which long sheltered religious traditionalists from the full give and take of modern liberal pluralism are taken away...and then there are those that, for better or worse, are already pluralistic enough that living in a "post-Christian" nation will not be threatening. The Benedict Option is a strategy for the former group.

The clearest way to know if you are in that former group, I think, again comes back to sexual morality, about which Rod has written much and thoughtfully before. "Sexual practices are so central to the Christian life that when believers cease to affirm orthodoxy on the matter, they often cease to be meaningfully Christian," Rod writes, and the greatest example of that heterodoxy, in his view, is the belief that sexuality is subject to individual determination--that it is not essentially a corporeal, or communal, or cosmic, but rather a consumer good: "Sexual autonomy, seemingly the most prized possession of the modern person, is not only morally wrong but a metaphysical falsehood." Hence, the line is drawn. If you are essentially opposed or want to distance yourself from any kind of sexual identity or practice which exists aside from or outside of "the covenant through which a man and a woman seal their love exclusively through Christ," then Rod sees you as likely the kind of Christian that is probably in need to seeking a Benedict Option solution in your life  (p. 197, 200-201). If you're not, though, then the Benedict Option probably won't be necessary.

Of course, ideas have a life of their own, and the fact that Rod's argument for the Benedict Option includes elements that are pretty much incompatible with how my wife and I understand the needs of our family at the present time (for example, Rod's emphatic insistence that "it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system"--p. 155--really doesn't resonate with us) in no way prevents me from taking inspiration--a localist, communal, tending inspiration--from the ideas Rod presents. But it is, nonetheless, a cause for reflection when one comes across such a stark gap. Alan Jacobs strongly dislikes Rod's tendency to talk about the Benedict Option by way of "tip of the spear at our throats"-type formulations, but he wonders if he doesn't have a motivated interest for thinking that way, and that perhaps Rod and his audience of doctrinally traditional believers are "just better Christians" than he is. Liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon!) that I am--as much as I dislike the baggage carried by those particular labels--I confess: I wonder that as well. But I also wonder if Rod's determination on this point may at least partly reflect a perspective that hasn't yet been fully disentangled himself from the tight political association which right-wing Catholics and evangelical Protestants built into the electoral infrastructure of the Republican party from the 1970s through to the 2000s, an infrastructure that became so second-nature to culture war arguments in the wake of the 1960s that the America-centric perspective it lends to debates over Christianity's doctrines and social role is probably pretty hard to shake.

Two examples from The Benedict Option. While writing about the importance of staying involved enough to fight on a national level of religious liberty guarantees, even while focusing primarily on building up local and familial religious practices and resources, Rod comments that "without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections, Christians will not be able to build the communal institutions that are vital to maintaining our identity and our values" (p. 84). There's a lot of sense to that...and yet, it's a comment which he makes immediately after having devoted an entire chapter to thoughtfully (and justly!) praising the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia, Italy, as an antidote to the disorder of the modern world...an antidote which exists in a country where, obviously, there is no First Amendment. And yet, they abide.

Another, more relevant, example: Rod writes that "Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order" (p. 201). There are fascinating debates that could--and should!--be had here regarding natural law, Platonic philosophy and the Great Chain of Being, the Holy Spirit, the authority of tradition, and the Hebraic core of actual Biblical ethics (Rod insists that real Christians cannot "abandon clear, binding biblical teachings on homosexuality" (p. 213), but surely only the most blinkered devotee of Biblical inerrancy would insist that the traditional conservative condemnation of homosexuality as disordered can be fully elaborated from the seven short verses in the entire canon of the Bible which mention it)...but even setting all those discussions aside, it is worth noting that Rod speaks of "marriage" here--the civic, legal institution--as opposed to "sexual relations"--that is, the practice which impacts directly upon his understanding of the moral telos of our created embodiment. Which prompts the question: even if one accepts "the generativity of the divine order" as a doctrinal, cosmic, anthropological fact, what does that necessarily have to matter for how a society which does not have an established church--and Rod never calls for one!--chooses to legally respond to the reality of sexual pluralism (a reality which Rod does not deny, even going to far as to point out the many ways Christians need to repent of their "rejection and hatred" of gays and lesbians in the past--p. 213)? Yes, yes, there will be marginal cases, issues involving children, involving those who lack material resources and are culturally adrift, involving conflicts over clashing rights in arenas of medicine, education, business, caregiving, and more. I've never denied the importance of these marginal cases (much as I didn't care for much of the baggage attached to the case, I think Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius was correctly decided, and have said so repeatedly). But to take those marginal concerns, and see in them a wave which will flood public Christianity entirely away is, I suspect, to have at least some part of one's thinking frozen in an era when a particular kind of traditional Christian doctrine really did serve as an at least informal civic establishment in the United States, conveying the idea that if the dominant institutions and practices of public life weren't legally shaped around and weren't politically supportive of the cosmic order, the functions of the universe itself would be violated. Well, count me as modern--and, while you're at it, as Augustinian too: I just don't think, even if I believed all the foregoing was true (and I don't, not anymore; I changed my mind about same-sex marriage five years ago), I just don't see our collective individual choices necessarily having such permanent cultural warping effects on the world around us, nor do I see such cultural warpings as disturbing God's sovereign intentions for the universe even one tiny bit.

So I come to the end of this fine and challenging book and have to conclude: Rod's thoughtful and important call for strengthening our families and rebuilding our communities by way of the same rules of attentive withdrawal and humble practice which communist dissidents and Catholic monks alike long exemplified is one that I can be inspired by and learn from--but it's a lesson he's not actually directing it at me. This makes me sad, a little bit: because when I look at the end of the book, and I read passages like this...

The Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real work from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity's big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like (p. 236).

...I think to myself: yes, that's what I want and need. If I am to make rational sense of the fact that I find my soul responding to much of Rod's antipolitical politics, his parallel polis, his localist alternatives, and his traditionalism, will I need, ultimately, a deeper conversion? Maybe. Or maybe not. But in the meantime, I hope Rod never forgets: for all our disagreements (and some of them are pretty huge), there are plenty of capitalist dissidents and liberal communitarians and heterdox Christians and modern pluralists and aspiring "intenders" like me who think you're on to something. Even if you're not talking to us, we're listening, and we like a lot of what we hear, and are thankful for it.

Hanging Out with, and Learning from, Some Thoroughly Material Benedictines

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A few weeks ago I was able to, once again, do something that I enjoy doing immensely--take a group of students out on a local food tour, so they can learn firsthand about more sustainable approaches to building well-fed, healthy communities. Our hosts were the Elder family, and from them--or at least a portion of them: mother Becky, father Philip, son George, and daughter Alexis, to be specific--we were taught about the seasonal economics of blackberries, about some of the latest technological innovations in organic vegetable gardening, about the necessity of horses, about the political importance of small farms, and much more. Through it all, though, as we inquired about different types of lettuce, did some comparison tasting of goat's milk, and helped rescue a 4-month-old colt who'd gotten herself trapped under a fence, I kept thinking about something entirely different: Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option."

Amongst certain localist and conservative bloggers, Rod's arguments about the importance (sometimes he presents it as the necessity) of those who hold to traditional understandings of the Christian message to find ways to organize themselves separate from the usual--and what was at least for a long time nominally Christian--forms of civic and commercial and church life in America have sparked a great deal of debate in recent months. What would be involved in such separation, and what's the reason for it, and how will we know it when (or if) we ever see it? Rod, to his credit, hasn't presented himself as possessing any comprehensive answers to those questions--but it is pretty clear that his ideas are tending in a direction that Ken Myers described in an old lecture (which Rod extensively quoted from) as "moral and metaphysical." Or, to put in a slightly lengthier format, Rod seems to be coming around to seeing the argument for communities to root themselves in traditions and practices that keep them at least somewhat separate from the secular, commercial world as eschewing any kind of aspiration to a material permanence. As he wrote in response to Bruce Frohnen, who thoughtfully challenged Rod for relying, in his view, too much a kind of agrarian sentimentality, "I realize now that the best we can hope for in the world of America 2015 is to settle among people who love us, and whom we can love, and where we can worship God and do good work." Which is a beautiful vision, to be sure! But I wonder if in putting it that way, the argument for separateness is being undermined, however slightly.

Rod has visited the Elder's homestead--dubbed "Elderslie"--with me before. When he was here last year, Becky (who has been greatly impressed with Rod's work on behalf of explaining the importance of being rooted in one's place) showed off what she and her family have managed to build over the decades--farming properties, an independent school, a small milling business, a shared congregation, a sustainable network of local commercial producers of fruit, flowers, and more--and exclaimed "This is the Benedict Option!" I've no doubt he would still agree. But Elderslie is not centrally a congregational endeavor; their church life is a big part of what they have built, but the Elders and those who work with them and teach with them see themselves as attached to a much larger classical intellectual tradition, one that is clearly Christian but which is also just as clearly aimed at responding to matters of physical and environmental health, economic and educational independence, and fulfilling, socially contributing work. It is, in short, an act of resistance to that individualism which has, I would agree, warped our economic and environmental and social existence. To describe that kind of separateness as something which is motivated primarily by a congregational desire (to worship among like-minded folk, and preserve the attachments which make such worship meaningful!) would be reductive, I think.

Alan Jacobs refers to the Benedict Option as putting its priority on Christian "culture-making" and enabling those concerned about the values of the Christian tradition to be "fully shaped....by the Christian account of things." Again, for people like myself who care about tradition, that's a vital and inspiring point. But is thinking hard about how to build and preserve the roots of--and the socio-economic and legal space for--a culture mostly a (as Rod sometimes seems to suggest) liturgical phenomenon? Perhaps you could argue that Elderslie and other family and community operations like it really are "liturgical" in some sense, because their direct engagement in the practices that keep them going really do result in a kind of discipline and ritual to their lives. If so, then I suspect that the Benedict Option which has struck me as a needful way of helping to shape how we think about community in the 21st century will only grow more convincing in my mind. But if not--if Rod's Benedict Option really is, essentially, about protecting the "church of Jesus Christ," as Alan put it--then I think, at least right now, that it's allowing current arguments about religious liberty to narrow its focus too much (though Rod is, clearly, still thinking about this stuff, writing recently that "the Benedict Option is far more a response to pervasive consumerism, individualism, and atomism than anything to do with gay rights," which I think puts things right).


Rod has insisted, in response to Frohnen, that he's not an agrarian--and of course, that's true. But Frohnen has a point, I think--whether or not Rod's thinking about the Benedict Option currently points him this directly, I suspect (and I have written before) that it is very difficult to get to the kind lasting, sustainable separateness which he thinks (and I at least partly agree) is needed if those traditions supportive Christian virtues are to be fully lived and inculcated into one's children without at least some kind of anti-capitalist, agrarian mentality. Becky Elder took the time to preach to my students for a short time about Andrew Lytle, one of the Southern Agrarians, and his important essay "The Small Farm Secures the State"--one of the essential 20th-century Jeffersonian declarations against an economy based on distant specialization, monopolistic centralization, and all things big. If we don't, in our innumerable and diverse ways, seek to enable our families and communities and co-ops to become more capable of feeding themselves, then a pattern of dependency inevitably follows. Honestly, just how far could any church group go in building for itself a genuinely separate cultural track if the individuals who make up that group ultimately, fundamentally, have no real independence in their livelihood, in making the money to put food in their own and their children's mouths? Will liturgy suffice if your boss changes your shift to Sunday, religious liberty be damned? Will a strong pastor be enough to provide an education which reflects Christian priorities when all the families in the congregation are too busy to volunteer to help out in classes, because food costs and health care costs and mortgages require every family send both spouse out into the work force full-time?

I don't throw these out as gotcha questions, suggesting that there is something essential and obvious being overlooked here. On the contrary, smart conservatives and localists and radicals have looked exhaustively into these questions, struggling to find ways to respond to them as part of their pursuit of, or defense of, an at least partially Christian culture. The answers have ran the gamut, touching on all manner of technological, economic, ecclesiastical, and political constructs. Mediating institutions of various scales all potentially play a role in allowing this aim to be achieved, as are any number of different sorts of progressive compromises. (For the Elders, it's striking how sophisticated they've become in judging the ability of various markets to support their agricultural or material products so as to give them the resources they need, recognizing that there are some things that can be done very well organically--and profitably--here in south-central Kansas, and quickly seeking out alternative approaches, even international or high-end technological ones, when that isn't the case.) To the extent the Benedict Option is yet another engagement with these questions, perhaps one more particular to a time when traditional Christian cultural assumptions are fading away, it's a necessary addition to the communitarian and localist toolkit. But to rush past all this vital, practical, material work, and cast the Benedict Option as an imperative act of moral or metaphysical sanctuary in the face of the collapse of Christianity itself...that, I think, just misses the trees for the forest, if you know what I mean. (I should note that it's possible I can speak this way, wanting to push the particular and local mechanics rather than clutching at the biggest themes, because I simply don't see the "collapse of Christianity" happening at all, not one bit. Yes, strong protections of religious liberty and certain tax and legal privileges enjoyed by Christian institutions have been, I think, of tremendous civic benefit in American history, and deserve to be fought for--but it's not like their loss in a more secular America would equal some kind of Christian Armageddon, unless one happens to believe, as I presume the Francophile Rod does not, that France with its laïcité is a formally oppressive and persecuting anti-Christian society. As in many things, I agree with Damon Linker here.)

If it's not obvious, I need to say explicitly: this is a disagreement over how one formulates priorities, not about the end goal. So I'll continue to read Rod, because he's one of the best and most important public voices dealing with these matters. Who knows what he--or I--will decide as time and arguments continue? Perhaps he'll come to recognize what I see as the foremost need to explore specific and sustainable material and economic arrangements as part of following lead of St. Benedict, or perhaps I'll come to agree with him that, ultimately, building up liturgical defenses of various metaphysical truths is only separateness that really, fundamentally matters. Or maybe we'll both change our minds somewhat. It's not as though any of the long lines of discussion and social organization which have kept alive humane concerns with community and culture-building in the midst of modern, secular liberalism--and here we can think of the Catholic Worker movement, Amish congregations, classically-oriented independent schools, and many more--have ever come to an end, saying that they've worked out the One True Way to attend to permanent things. And of course, in the midst of all this intellectual debate, folks like the Elders keep on experimenting and working, building their own Benedictine path. I'm grateful that they're around so that I can learn from them, and share with those I teach their ideas....and, last but not least, enjoy the delicious material bounties that they produce as well.

Local Wonderings in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife works at its primary rival.) One of the main reasons it's such a wonderful place is its sense of identity and vocation. It's much more than a "Christian bookstore," though it is that, and tremendously good at fulfilling that role in our community (see Rod Dreher sing its praises here, here, and here). But beyond that Eighth Day Books is the heart of a sub-community that has fascinated me ever since my family and I moved to Wichita nearly ten years ago. Traditionalist, usually (but not always) conservative, literate but only rarely academic, both reactionary and radical, Eighth Day grounds a motley, earnest, often brilliant collection of Christian thinkers and servers; even when I find myself somewhat perplexed by what I hear from some of them, I want to learn more. It's very ecumenical; the folks involved are Orthodox and Catholic and evangelical Protestant (and so long as they keep on letting me through the door, Mormon too); within their numerous overlapping circles, you can find schools, retreats, university programs and institutes, study groups, and more. Once a year, Eighth Day hosts an already-large-and-still-growing symposium, which this year was devoted to exploring the idea of "wonder" in a world where longstanding traditions of the civic place of Christianity have radically changed. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend one of the days of the conference this year, and I adored it. What I saw and heard around me this past weekend was an example of the sort of both strengthening and challenging local and cultural civic work which communitarians like myself have banged on about for years (but which we, in all honestly, have only rarely managed to contribute directly to ourselves).

Let me share some ideas prompted by three presentations I listened to. The first was the symposium opening provided by Erin Doom, the director of Eighth Day Institute (and yes, that is how you spell his name). Erin is a fascinating guy; I suspect he'd far prefer to be considered a lay theologian than a community organizer, but really he's both (and in fact, his efforts are themselves a testament to just how much working to make manifest and build up a community in a particular place is a type of Incarnational work). In presenting his vision of bringing together hundreds of people who, for reasons of curiosity or concern or just plain community attachment, wanted to spend two days learning, reading, and talking about the possibilities presented by our "secular age," Erin talked about a "dialogue of love" which is needed, one that can best be realized through a return to certain key ecumenical elements of the Christian tradition. For him (as well as for many others throughout history), these elements are scripture, icons, and liturgy--all of which may be seen as revealing a certain kind of radical localist perspective. What they have in common is an enduring presence--as stories which get adapted and interpreted but which also transcend the passing of time and fashions, as images which transcend their own replication and commodification, as seasons of time which transcend the manufactured pressures of socio-economic life. These are points of resistance to the pace and the profits of our contemporary capitalist and centralized world; they can become resources of retreat, for those who wish to either prepare to hold on to something old and good, or harness their strength to push for something new and good--or, really, both. Its a wonderful vision--made all the more persuasive because those in attendance at this conference, siting in an Orthodox cathedral in a mid-sized city in the center of the country, could see fruits of such all around them.

One of the headline speakers was Dr. James K.A. Smith, a scholar and theologian who had recently written a superb book explaining the philosopher Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age. It was about that book, and Taylor's fascinating (if convoluted) historical, cultural, and literary excavation of the meaning of secularism in the modern (that is, post 1500 A.D. or so) West, which Smith came to speak about. I was delighted to hear him, because--as some of this blog's readers may remember--I've made rather grandiose promises about reading A Secular Age on more than one occasion in the past, and always failed. Taylor is easily the most insightful and, I think, basically right-thinking contemporary moral and political philosopher I know, and his work has been greatly important to me--but in this case, I really appreciated having someone smart, witty, and provocative explain his ideas to me. The most important concept which of Taylor's which he unpacked--and also productively complicated--for us is the notion that the emergence over the past half-millennium of the "buffered self" (a notion of individuality that is, in principle at least, resistant to being shaped or determined meaningfully by outside forces which might pour into one, because the core of that individuality is psychologically and morally removed and protected from the larger world) is closely entwined with the collapse of a robust sense of sociality. While Taylor doesn't claim, and neither did Smith, that these were two entirely distinct or causally related phenomenon, it occurred to me that, if we grant that the festivals and rituals of the pre-modern West existed at least in part to moderate those anti-social pressures generated by the maintenance of the divisions and roles of a religiously defined world, then it seems reasonable to assume that human passions and their supporting understandings are going to always be at least partly self-interested. In which case, perhaps it was the transformation of the social world of the first thousand years of Christendom into something less dependable, more dangerous, and more characterized by divisive opportunities--and here I'm thinking of everything from scientific revolutions to religious wars to the rise of capitalism--which made the desire for "buffering" oneself from the mysteries of the wider world so appealing. Point being, the modern self, mostly closed off to the transcendent but perhaps curiously open to glimmers of it as such can be realized within our "immanent frame" can't be persuaded to attend to higher, impersonal goods by simply invoking the promise of tradition: the break with such is perhaps so deeply entwined with ordinary practices both personal and social that it is foolish to imagine that some new apologetic is going to open up atomists to what communion has to offer. Anyway, Smith's presentation and book are things I'm going to have to think about and write about some more.

Finally, it was wonderful to see Rod Dreher back in Wichita, and his presentation--both the parts I agreed with, and the parts I didn't--didn't at all disappoint. He's already reflected on some of his thoughts about participating in the Eighth Day Symposium here; let me just focus on something he said about "wonder."

"Wondering" has two complementary, yet still distinct, connotations. You can wonder about something, and be prompted to ask questions that you normally wouldn't ask. This was the main focus of Rod's presentation on the mass media, and how assumptions about certain "myths" end up closing down questions about worrisome or suspicious events or developments that really ought to be asked. I don't disagree with Rod about this reality at all, though I strongly suspect he and I would disagree somewhat on just what myths really are regent in newsrooms around the country today. But how does that phenomenon relate to another, deeper sense of wonder: that of being struck by the wonder, the mystery, of life? One seems to point towards the seeking of answers to questions, while the other suggests something which is beyond answers entirely.

In his comments, Rod quotes one of the other speakers at the symposium, a Catholic theologian named Bo Bonner (who I've met, and I agree: he's a great, funny guy), who talked about how the most profound truths of the Christian tradition are wild and weird, and that if one is interested in preserving the kind of enchantment which Christianity once provided, in so many different ways, to communities all around the modern West, then it must be allowed to be wild and weird again. I don't think this is necessarily "weird" in the "keep Austin weird" sense (an attitude which is not entirely foreign to Wichita as well), though there is likely some overlap there; rather, I think it involves living in a tradition so firmly--which, please note, is not the same as living it "confrontationally," and maybe not even living it "evangelically" either--that you can know and demonstrate through one's own life choices all the little mysteries and questions and weirdnesses which are inherent to it. We tend to imagine "awe" as involving something grand and mighty, a miracle so imposing as to defy description, but maybe we need to remember that being awed and enchanted is characteristic of the many marvelous idiosyncrasies which may be seen, assuming we can show at least a modicum of charity for ourselves and others, in ordinary, local lived lives. Let's face it: Erin Doom is, in all likelihood, kind of a weird guy. And so is Rod, and so are you, and so am I. That weirdness, and the pleasant wonder and unexpected questions ("Why does she do that?") which goes along with it, is not going to be known--at least not in a manner which can bring us, in our places, to contemplate permanent things--if we have just one "myth," one story, to reductively explain away all our own motivations and hopes and dreams. And neither will it be known if our lives become so transient, so ambitious, so committed to material accomplishments that don't ever give ourselves (or the structures of our meritocratic economy never allows us) the time or the place to fully live lives that are our own.

Well, Eighth Day has its own weird and wonderful and "wondering-full" little place, here in Wichita, and it's a blessing and goad and delight to us all. There are bound to be such places, built by such people, where you live as well: small corners of genuine social realization, mysterious happenstances, worthy of wonder. Go out and find them. They'll be worth your time, I guarantee it.

Rod Dreher Speaking in Wichita, KS

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Of the very, very few people who regularly read this blog (when I actually bother to post something, which isn't often these days), I'm doubtful any of them live in Wichita, KS. But if it just happens that, amazingly enough, someone who sees this post does in fact live in or within driving distance of Wichita, KS, then let me invite you: the author, journalist, and blogger Rod Dreher, someone whom I consider to be one of the most important popular thinkers and cultural critics in America today, will be speaking on the Friends University campus next Monday and Tuesday. His first presentation will be March 24th, 7pm, in the Sebits Auditorium in the Riney Fine Arts Center, titled “Why Community Matters: How You Can Go Home Again, and Maybe Ought to.”; the second on March 25th, 9:30am, in the Alumni Auditorium in the Davis Building., titled “Heart vs. Head, Ruthie vs. Rod: Why a Mature Christian Needs Both Faith and Doubt.” Rod's presentations will revolve primarily around his wonderful book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (about which I have blogged here, here, and here), but he'll also be talking about family, community, localism, religious faith, and how traditional ways of life can be conserved in modern America. Whether you agree with Rod's priorities and perspectives or not, his is a voice and a story worth listening to and learning from. Hope anyone who can plausibly make it will find a way!

Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which I've already had a lot to say), in part because it creates an opportunity to bring in some of Rod's own reflections about what it has meant for him to tell this story about the relationship between himself, his hometown of St. Francisville, LA, and his saintly but judgmental sister Ruthie. Jeremy's review of Rod's story comes to a wise--if necessarily only partial--conclusion: "the truth is that communities need their boundary-challengers as much as they need their boundary-protectors, their Rods as much as their Ruthies—even if the former can never occupy a central place in those communities." This sobering thought, in turn, leads Rod to think about fidelity:

What Little Way is, in part, is a meditation on what it means to live a life of fidelity. You can only judge that by examining the telos of one’s faithfulness, of course. But even that is insufficient, because it is possible that there is nothing at all wrong with the telos of one’s fidelity, but that one has failed to see that it is not one’s nature to be absolutely faithful to a relative good. To put it in less abstract terms, there is nothing wrong with being faithful to one’s family and to one’s place, but not at the expense of one’s nature and calling.

This is a crucially important--though complicating--thought. Can it really be the case that some people are, by nature, constituted to be faithful to something other than those specific things (like family, community, and place) which constituted them, and which therefore arguably enabled their faithfulness in the first place? That would seem to be the implication of Rod's supposition--namely, that the realization of ones telos is not limited solely to a re-embrace of one's particular inheritance--and there are many good philosophical arguments in support of such. (For example, Charles Taylor: "We are now in an age in which...[t]he only way we can explore the order in which we are set, with an aim to defining moral sources, is through...personal resonance"--Sources of the Self, p. 512.) But what does that do to the very idea of valuing such specific things--things like St. Francisville parish--on their on terms, as opposed to transposing whatever it is they are and offer to some individualistic or utilitarian metric? As I wrote once before, "isn't the entire point of embracing stability and putting down roots and learning to live within limits exactly to deny that we our entirely a product of our own preference maximization?" To be sure, insisting on the value of being faithful to one's own resonance doesn't mean leaping (or falling) completely into individualism--but that doesn't mean one shouldn't be careful, all the same.

Such care should be taken by every person attracted to communitarian and localist thought, as I am--as well as by everyone who is critical of such. To put some philosophical meat on the bones of Rod's comment about, the premise of just about every possible expression of the idea that one's community or place or family has some virtue to it is the belief that such forms of attachment constitute in and through ourselves an end, a purpose, a narrative for our own lives--or as Rod put it, a "calling." (And I would insist that talking about callings in this way doesn't at all minimize the religious content implied by Rod's choice of words; as a Christian believer myself, I'm fully on board with the notion that, absent rare incidents of outright revelation, God's ends are ones that we realize in and through ourselves.) I'm leaning on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre here, but not just him: many have argued that the traditions which attachments incubate in us are the essential building blocks of judgment, cognition, and identity: that is, of being human in the fullest sense, being engaged in our lives purposively. But the complicating idea of Rod's story is that showing fidelity to, or giving respect to, those purposes and building blocks isn't necessarily the same as being defined by them. One can (and, at least in the modern United States, many, maybe even most people do) embody their attachment to a tradition by working out a purpose informed by a rejection of that community or place or family which shaped them. A contrarian or dissident or unconventional nature and calling still is--or at least still may be, assuming it does not take a destructive or nihilistic turn--one which remembers within itself a shaping, a tradition, which began with certain attachments, even if the customary implications of those attachments are now rejected. (The distinction between "memory" as "custom," in this context, is quite important, as Christopher Lasch argued in The True and Only Heaven; a community defined by acts of memory is characterized by "judgment," while custom suggests that which is "habitual and unconscious"--p. 133.)

I recently finished reading (after having set the book aside after one attempted reading too long ago) Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a book about which I can't say too much good--and one which, surprisingly, incorporates into it's story a great deal which anticipates and testifies to the complications which Rod's position suggests for any defense of community, identity, and fidelity. There is, for example, the story of Edward, the older brother of the book's narrator, John Ames, an old Congregationalist minister, the son and grandson of ministers, who through the book's narrative looks back with great profundity on his remarkable--and yet remarkably plain--life in the little, abolitionist-founded Iowa town of Gilead:

Edward studied at Göttingen. He was a remarkable man. He was older than me by almost ten years, so I didn't really know him very well while we were children....Edward left home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again for years. There weren't even many letters.

Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr Doktor. He must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind of Feuerbach. He was as samrt as could be, and my father was a little in awe of him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think....[T]he congregation took up collections to put him in college and then sent him to Germany....He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German literature and philosophy, and stayed there till be died. He married a German girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he lived. He was a good man.

He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, "I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir," and the color drained out of my father's face....[T]his was the dreaded confirmation of my parents fears. My father said, "You have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might show some respect for them." And Edward replied, and this was very wrong of him, "When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." My father left the table, my mother sat still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me the potatoes. (Gilead, pp. 24-26)

What I find most thoughtful in that passage is that John Ames, as his life comes to close and he writes the letter which forms the frame of the novel, is not saying that Edward was wrong for becoming a cosmopolitan (later Edward tells his younger brother, "John, you might as well know now what you're sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater--you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance."), not even for becoming an atheist, but for speaking so condescendingly to their father. And yet, the narrative also makes it clear that it is not as thought Edward had somehow lost all contact with or allegiance to the shaping which his religious upbringing had provided. One can't look into the mind of another person, not even a fictional other person, but I suspect that Robinson was allowing us to see, through the eyes of John Ames, that there was a purpose to Edward, an integrity and identity to him, which tied him to the community which John had made his whole life as much as every other character in the book.

And there is another, even more challenging parallel between Robinsons's and Rod's stories, a parallel which fleshes out the careful line regarding tradition and fidelity that forms the heart of this particular problem. Rod's estimation of his own story, as he has expressed it on his blog numerous times, is profoundly conditioned by the late revelation that his own parents--or at least his father--was somewhat dubious of the way he allowed his place, the community of St. Francisville, to define him for so long. When interviewing his father, the following exchange takes place: 

"There's something else I regret even more," he carried on. "I can see now, at the end of my life, that it would have been better if after your Mama and I got married, we had packed up and left here."

I couldn't believe what I had just heard.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I said: we should have left this place."

And then Paw told me how he had spent his entire life sacrificing for his mother, his father, his brother, his aunts, and his cousins--all of whom, in his recollection, worked him like a dog and never gave him a moment's thanks. They could always count on Ray to fix anything, to do any job they asked of him, to give up his free time and spend his own money, to help them. They used him up.

"I was a sucker," he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. "Aunt Lois was the only one of the whole bunch who was ever straight with me. But there was only one of her....Your sister, she was right to stand up to me over marrying Mike....And so were you, when you went back to Washington to be a writer. I was too strong-willed and stubborn back then. I regret that very much."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Daddy, I have to tell you, I don't know what to think about all this," I said. "Here I am, a man who turned his life upside down to move back here for the family, and because of the land. And now here you are telling me that you made an idol of family and place, and that you wish you had left it all behind when you were young, just like I did. What am I supposed to make of that?"

His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and then my father said: "That I'm a sorrier man than you." (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, pp. 258-261)

Anyone who reads Rod's book, and gets into his story of the divide which grew up between himself and Ruthie, the way she identified with the particularities of their hometown while he found himself struggling between his love for his family and his profound disconnect from the lives they lived (and, more importantly, the way they all thought--or didn't think--about the lives they lived), can't help be between surprised by this late revelation. But once again, Robinson had showed us something much the same. Very nearly at the end of his long, rambling, beautiful narrative, John Ames abruptly shares something new:

I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head, and said, "I just can't do it anymore."

He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, "Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago." And that irritated me. He said, "Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it." He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, "I have become aware that we have lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them"....

I don't recall that I actually said anything, taken aback as I was. Well, all he accomplished was to make me homesick for a place I never left. (Gilead, pp. 234-235)

"Homesick for a place I never left": what a powerful line that is. What I'm suggesting here, by way of Rod's story and Robinson's novel, is that a proper notion of fidelity--whether to a place or to the purpose that a place may constitute in and through us--would align all of us, localists and cosmopolitans alike, with that phrase. We all are, or at least can be, and arguably (I think, anyway) should be, homesick: or, to express the psychological state I have in mind more positively, always attendant to and seeking for the kind of purposive fulfillment which occurs when our circumstances match our identity, our calling. Reading Gilead makes me, among many other things, quite conscious of why so many people desire to live in big cities (with their complex economies and invasive regulations and diverse populations): because to experience the anonymity and fecundity and creativity which the busy-ness of humankind makes possible can serve as a salve for the frustration which that seeking so often involves. Edward--who had left home and benefited from the opportunities which a broader world made possible--had the wherewithal to take his and John's parents out of their place; they obviously took to such a displacement as a respite from the difficulty of their circumstances, but accepting that removal from place also changed them, introducing a break between them and their non-prodigal son. John does not judge his parents, he simply notes that change, their turning away from a constant homesickness and the consequent intensifying it had upon him, as one example of the mystery of place.

From Iowa to Florida is perhaps not so much different from St. Francisville to Paris. Rod has also, in thinking about how much his own Parisian experiences liberated and transformed him, and how those experiences were perhaps the crucial divide between his own life and his sister's, noted that making moves like that can only appear to others (and perhaps often to ourselves) as involving an outright rejection of tradition, an act of--here Rod borrows the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates-- "burning down the house":

I esteem devotion to prescriptive Tradition. But my sister lived by that ethic, and so did (does) my father--and it made me miserable. I ran away from here in part because the weight and the strictures of our family’s Tradition was too much to take. If it--if they--had been more flexible, allowing for some modification of the Tradition, I might have chosen a different path. But they could not see any other way. They were not conscious of Tradition as Tradition, which was the very thing that allowed them to be so devoted to it...but was also the same thing that prevented them from accepting any deviation from it.....The thing I have to concede is that I want the benefits of Tradition without the painful strictures. If I “burn down the Big House,” so to speak, where do I shelter? Where do my children shelter? The thing is, it’s not possible to live in the modern world and remain in the Big House. Human flourishing requires building a different house, one more suited to the way we live today. If we want things to stay the same, things have to change.

Figuring out exactly how we make this work--how we defend tradition as so important to providing our world with virtuous sources we may and should show fidelity to, for the sake of our own collective enrichment and identification, while at the same time not locking down what actually grounds those traditions, for the sake of allowing us all as individuals to move from standing in one place to standing in another--is probably a constant, irresolvable mystery, one which will always carry a fair amount of pain along with it. As Rod himself admits, "looking back on [my story] a year after I finished the manuscript, I can see that I was trying to talk myself into something that probably isn’t true, or at least is more mysterious and ambiguous than I was able to accept last yea...that I am outside that blessed circle, and can’t ever cross that boundary, no matter how far I’ve traveled." Rod, because he returned to St. Francisville after having left it, can be a part of that community, but he cannot seamless connect with it--he cannot stand where his sister stood, and enjoy his community's moral sources the way she did, because he changed, and she didn't. (And, of course, that means she can't show any fidelity to the moral sources and traditions which Rod has discovered, and the places where he discovered them, because she was never there, and couldn't ever see them for what they are in any case.)

All this is perhaps partly why Rod has increasingly become less interested in addressing who connects and who doesn't and why and what to do about it, and more interested in the stories of connection and disconnection themselves. I was originally a little put out by Rod's refusal to acknowledge the argument in his story, but after reading Gilead, I think I can appreciate better that, for example, if I tried to turn Robinson's novel into an argument about life in small towns, or the importance of religion, or the pain of growing older, I'd be doing the whole thing a disservice, and that's the sort of disservice Rod clearly doesn't want perform on his memory of Ruthie. Fair enough. But let's not forget what Lasch and Taylor and others have pointed out--that any act of memory, properly speaking, is going to be an action characterized by our own "personal resonance." We're all interpreting, in other words, all the time. And when we find--through experience, or argument, or both--our interpretations to be wrong, we change perspective, and try them again. That is, we argue, we try out new theoretical construals of our own lives, we keep trying to figure out what we are (or should be) showing fidelity to, whether we realize it or not.

The arguments about tradition are lengthy and contentious; perhaps there is no possibility they could be otherwise in our modern world. In fact, I would suspect that, should Rod choose this task, he could find in time that those same arguments and changes were present in Ruthie's world as well. I wonder if there might even be a way for him to someday write his story from Ruthie's point of view: a story of her relationship with a strange, intellectual, perhaps arrogant, yet worldly wise and accomplished older brother, and both the love and dissatisfaction she felt for him, and how those feelings, in their own unaccountable ways, changed and fit themselves into her place. A place where her students grew up and stayed, or grew up and left, and pastors came and stayed or left, and people were married and given in marriage, and the world and its traditions and all its occasions for fidelity just continued to turn.