Rod Dreher's Guilt, Implication, and The Emperor's New Clothes
I want to round out today's trifecta on what I'm going to be calling from now on Rod Dreher's signature "emperorography" by expanding on something Diane, Pik and I were discussing in the comments here, "emperorography" (because imperiography already means something different) now meaning that nebulous rhetorical gas Dreher frequently produces for marketing to credulous commenters who fear appearing stupid or uneducated by questioning him too closely about whether he actually said anything at all.
The title of the post, of course, already tips you off to the term's source.
This archetypal example of Dreherian emperorography began today in this tweet
@regulus_l @HarrisIII @ericmetaxas All Christians are not guilty ... but all of us are implicated. See the difference?
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 11, 2015
originally hawking this post by Dreher disingenuously attempting to suggestively equate the brutality of ISIS with historically bad treatment of blacks in the American South in order to skim off his cut of discussion controversy first generated by President Obama in his recent prayer breakfast remarks.
When Regulus started poking too deeply, Dreher tried to buy him off with the "guilt v. implication" legerdemain - do you see the difference?
Frankly, no I didn't, but the suggestive effort itself immediately reminded me of this classic rhetorical grift:
"Isn't it a beautiful piece of goods?" the swindlers asked him, as they displayed and described their imaginary pattern.
"I know I'm not stupid," the man thought, "so it must be that I'm unworthy of my good office. That's strange. I mustn't let anyone find it out, though." So he praised the material he did not see. He declared he was delighted with the beautiful colors and the exquisite pattern. To the Emperor he said, "It held me spellbound."
All the town was talking of this splendid cloth, and the Emperor wanted to see it for himself while it was still in the looms. Attended by a band of chosen men, among whom were his two old trusted officials-the ones who had been to the weavers-he set out to see the two swindlers. He found them weaving with might and main, but without a thread in their looms.
"Magnificent," said the two officials already duped. "Just look, Your Majesty, what colors! What a design!" They pointed to the empty looms, each supposing that the others could see the stuff.
What colors! What a design! And, true to our tale, the weaving continued long into the day. Keep in mind that, as with the insatiable need for cowbell, the only cure for that Dreherian emperorography fever is more Dreherian emperorography.
Sorry: me, Keith, are a monkey with the mind of a child, and I just don't see no difference between guilt and implication, Rod. Unless of course you're only implying there's a difference without actually being guilty of claiming one.
What I do see, what Dreherian emperorography raises to a high art, is the sort of vapid, content-free lyrical writing typically found in fables about seagulls, Hallmark cards, and your random internet meme-generator:
"All of us are readers...but not all of us can read. See the difference?"
Nice work if you can get it.
Remember, credulous townfolk, "How Emperorography Can Save Your Life" (or something similar) will be available for your squinting, unworthy eyes the day before your taxes are due.
Oh - or, if not, why not a similar self-help tome from the same esteemed publisher?
While I'm sure Dreher's "implicated" is intended to mean this sort of thing:
ReplyDeleteWhite skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose. Unlike the more overt individual and institutional manifestations of racism described above, white skin privilege is a transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society. White skin privilege serves several functions. First, it provides white people with “perks” that we do not earn and that people of color do not enjoy. Second, it creates real advantages for us. White people are immune to a lot of challenges. Finally, white privilege shapes the world in which we live — the way that we navigate and interact with one another and with the world.
and perhaps even this:
"Can I begin by saying I'm sorry," he said.
"I don't often say it. I'm sorry for being a man right now, because family and sexual violence is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children.,
it also means this and this, to name only a couple.
P.S. And the same thinking, of course, leads to this horror of horrors.
Actually, I overstated things a bit: one can never really be sure of what Dreher intends to mean by anything he posts. Wrapper/payload, sucking up, etc.
DeleteAnd to follow on to Keith's point of "what Dreherian emperorography raises to a high art, is the sort of vapid, content-free lyrical writing", it might be an interesting experiment (although an utter waste of time), to distill down Dreher's blogs to the ideas that he himself actually expresses. IOW, cut out all of the quoted passages, and the calls to "discuss amongst yourselves", and the "it's just a notebook", and boil them down to the topic sentences. One could have a shadow blog, if it were worth the trouble.
I'd venture to say there is less there than meets the eye. And it probably boils down to a few recurring themes.
Yeah...here's the rotten, "modest" mush at the heart of that onion:
DeleteThat’s the modest point I’m making here. If we are to understand why the sick savages of ISIS do what they do, part of the analysis has to take into consideration why the sick savages who were our ancestors did what they did.
Right! The best way to understand the brutal savagery of 21st Century radical Muslims with designs of restoring a Medieval caliphate in the Middle East is to study the predations of a tiny portion of a Protestant Scotch-Irish underclass facing disruptive economic competition in the post-Reconstruction Deep South of America in the latter half of the 19th Century, what Mencken later referred to as "The Sahara of the Bozart" and its subsequent historical legacy of Jim Crow. Maybe modest is too modest a term for such disingenuous imbecility.
But on the way to that soft, mushy, tangy tasting rotten onion heart, oh the spicy resentments to be played off one against the other! Republicans against Obama! Northerners against Southerners! Whites against blacks! Non-believers against Christians! And Incest Twister among all of their possible permutations!
Are you sure you guys want this creature back as a representative Catholic? After burrowing through the dissembling, resentment-manipulating machinations of a psychological-Mr. Burns-wannabee, we get to his breathtakingly stupid "modest" "honest" point: study Southern lynchings to understand ISIS. But of course. Next: we'll study why Laplanders crush the testicles of their reindeer with their teeth in order to understand female genital mutilation in Egypt.
I'm coming around to the point of view that the real reason Dreher's family despises him so is not because they think he's acting above his local raising, but rather because they see him up close as the pathologically ("soullessly so" is probably too strong to use around here, no?) insincere manipulator that he records himself to be in the posts we read, one who, because he will say anything, might reasonably be feared to do anything given the wrong circumstances.
Keith, to add to your accurate analysis of:
DeleteThat’s the modest point I’m making here. If we are to understand why the sick savages of ISIS do what they do . . .
I'd say: What's to understand? Is there a motivation that, once we "understand" it, can possibly justify the acts that ISIS is carrying out? Of course not.
This makes it even more transparent that Dreher's point has nothing whatsoever to do with ISIS, but is only intended to make us feel bad about ourselves, and to make himself feel better about himself by feeling bad about himself more (and sooner) than the rest of us.
Assuming that his point is valid -- and I'm not sure it is -- I just wonder how anything worthwhile is accomplished by discussing it. It strikes me as the same logic which states something like "You can't say you are pro-life unless you protest the death penalty as strenuously as you protest legalized abortion."
DeleteI mean, I would never suggest that someone has to attend the march for life to be against abortion, or to be against the death penalty or against contraception, etc. So the whole exercise in comparisons seems to be a way in which to manufacture hypocrisy and implicate everyone who doesn't mimic the exact content and tone of Dreher's argument.
He is almost describing a sort of collective guilt that we can never free ourselves from ever by virtue of the fact that others sharing our DNA have committed atrocities. But Christian belief teaches that there is only one thing which even comes close to that description: Original Sin.
Both Catholic and Orthodox tradition teaches that Original Sin gets wiped out in Baptism and what is left in the recipient of Baptism is a weak nature prone to sin. Then when actual sins are committed, these are fully owned by each sinner.
If I stand by while someone lynches a black then sure, I'm guilty, but what he is saying seems to be that everyone [who, as I've pointed out before, isn't starting a blog about it] in a certain radius who shares a skin color is standing by letting something bad happen.
The other thing that I think he is doing is playing with semantics. To be implicated is to be found guilty as most people use the word.
I'm coming around to the point of view that the real reason Dreher's family despises him....
DeleteI think that Dreher must despise everyone around him at least as much as they despise him. He's going to walk into a restaurant and hear people in there saying things like "damn Muslims at it again" and it has to drive him bonkers. Don't these people listen to NPR?
Are you sure you guys want this creature back as a representative Catholic
DeleteIt's a big church; there is room for nutcases.
I never felt that he was a representative Catholic any more than Andrew Sullivan or Mark Shea is.
It's a big church; there is room for nutcases.
DeleteIn an Easter Vigil homily some time back, the priest mentioned that someone had asked him why anyone would want to become Catholic, considering all of the problems in the Church.
The priest replied, "Yeah, the Church has problems -- 1.2 billion of them, as a matter of fact."
We've all got something that needs to be fixed -- that's why we're there.
Pauli: "The other thing that I think he is doing is playing with semantics"
DeleteThat is one reason why I no longer read any of RD's writings. I refuse to play along with his word games.
As for his motivations, there are many theories to choose from: petite-evil, corkhead, psycho-pathology, carnival show huckster, etc. Indeed, there is all kinds of crazy stuff on the Internet nowadays.
There comes a point where the only reasonable and proper response to something is just to turn aside and leave it behind.
That is one reason why I no longer read any of RD's writings. I refuse to play along with his word games.
DeleteWhile I can understand your reflex, Oengus, thinking upon these things does lead us to ultimately understand what Dreher means in his peculiar usage when he says "we" are all "implicated".
As the little boy who continues to pull the wings off of flies when he can find them, Rod intuitively grasps his congenital inability to avoid exploiting the pains of others for his own gain and expresses this self-awareness precisely as Pik articulated:
This makes it even more transparent that Dreher's point has nothing whatsoever to do with ISIS, but is only intended to make us feel bad about ourselves, and to make himself feel better about himself by feeling bad about himself more (and sooner) than the rest of us.
Thus do we become "implicated" as the herd of goats Rod banishes into the wilderness for our collective sin of not feeling bad about ourselves for exploiting the pains of others firstest and mostest as he triumphantly has.
...our collective sin of not feeling bad about ourselves for exploiting the pains of others firstest and mostest as he triumphantly has.
DeleteAnd this is entirely my point about his take on the clergy scandal. His hysteria and outrage were not shared enough by the Catholics around him, therefore they were "implicated" to his mind. He has obviously always mistaken his hypercholeric anger for a virtue in this regard.
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/59135887.jpg
DeleteThe sort of performance Dreher turned in on this particular issue offers a different way of looking at his anal-retentive control-freakery, at least to me.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, we normally just think of him as being thin-skinned. But it may be that his hair trigger defensive perimeter is his lifelong mechanism for coping with what he already knows is his intellectual equivalent of a Tourette's Syndrome or an uncontrollably explosive bowel. He already knows he can't control his passive-aggressive provocations of everyone, nor his repeated mental failures when he tries to think beyond writing psychologically manipulative prose, and so has decided that the only place he can mentally survive with these sorts of defects is within a circle of wagons.
Lol - now I might be guilty myself here of making a distinction without a difference with respect to his being thin-skinned vs what I just said, but there seemed to be something in that whole ISIS-guilt-implication arc of the self-recognition of a hunted animal which understands itself as somehow having to live out its life as a 3-legged bunny, congenitally doomed to be easy pickings for predators.
Assuming that his point is valid -- and I'm not sure it is -- I just wonder how anything worthwhile is accomplished by discussing it.
ReplyDeleteWe're really sort of walking along Hanlon's Razor here aren't we.
I mean, the only real alternative to coming to the conclusion that Dreher is embracing a bit of petite-evil here by cynically republishing and milking accounts of black people being lynched and burned for his own gain is to come to the conclusion that he's so obtuse as to have a sphere of cork at the center of his noggin, like a baseball.
Now I've already made a case on another comment right here for him being a Cork Head, but, frankly, the whole enterprise really smells to me like a Devil-may-care case of petite-evil.
Rod Dreher and Mark Shea appear to be a two-headed schizophrenic monster. One head has the genteel intellectual facade. The other is pure fire-breathing psychotic contempt. Some of your statements seem to make my point:
ReplyDeleteAre you sure you guys want this creature back as a representative Catholic?
Well, Shea markets himself as one and EWTN promotes him as one.
As the little boy who continues to pull the wings off of flies when he can find them...
NOW I know why Shea fulminates on "torture" so much! Psychological projection, thy name is....
OTOH, we normally just think of him as being thin-skinned. But it may be that his hair trigger defensive perimeter is his lifelong mechanism for coping with what he already knows is his intellectual equivalent of a Tourette's Syndrome or an uncontrollably explosive bowel.
A finer description of Shea I have not seen.
It's a big church; there is room for nutcases.
Not when they don't get the counseling or spiritual direction they need....
Rod Dreher and Mark Shea appear to be a two-headed schizophrenic monster. One head has the genteel intellectual facade. The other is pure fire-breathing psychotic contempt. Some of your statements seem to make my point:
ReplyDeleteAre you sure you guys want this creature back as a representative Catholic?
Well, Shea markets himself as one and EWTN promotes him as one.
As the little boy who continues to pull the wings off of flies when he can find them...
NOW I know why Shea fulminates on "torture" so much! Psychological projection, thy name is....
OTOH, we normally just think of him as being thin-skinned. But it may be that his hair trigger defensive perimeter is his lifelong mechanism for coping with what he already knows is his intellectual equivalent of a Tourette's Syndrome or an uncontrollably explosive bowel.
A finer description of Shea I have not seen.
It's a big church; there is room for nutcases.
Not when they don't get the counseling or spiritual direction they need....
Hello! I see you captured this moment on Twitter. I am L. Regulus. I blogged about this exchange today, because I was reminded of it when I discovered Rod Dreher blocked me on Twitter. Which is strange, because this was the only brief exchange I had with him, and I was the picture of courtesy! Thank you for noticing.
ReplyDeleteWelcome, Curious! Ah yes, you have experienced the tender Christian charity of the world's most thin-skinned blogger. Dare to disagree or question, however politely, and -- chop-chop! Chalk it up to the profound insecurity of the playground bully. :D Love your blog, BTW.
DeleteYes, welcome. Curious Cottage / L. Regulus. Of course you were courteous, but courtesy does not count with Rod Dreher. Only agreement will suffice.
DeleteThank you for the welcomes! I've been back a few times here to read up on Dreher's "BenOp". I'm relieved to find...others. ;-)
Delete