Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: the blue pill of world-aversion
Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is your response to the challenges facing Christianity if you've become grumpy and world-averse, not because of "Low T" (No, really, he tells you himself, and see the beard? He's a lumberjack), but because you share the traits and values of a latent autistic-spectrum middle-aged man:
I told my wife the other day that as I’ve aged this last few years (I’m 48), I have seen latent autistic-spectrum tendencies within myself manifest more acutely. The other day I went into a restaurant in town to pick up some take-out food, and didn’t realize till I walked out how strangely I had behaved. I kept my eyes on my smartphone as I walked in, and barely looked up the whole time I sat at the counter and waited. I didn’t want to meet anybody’s gaze, because … why? Why was I so anxious?
This is happening more and more. I used to be very social, but I find now that solitude is what I crave most of all. I don’t think I’m seeking solitude from a position of strength, but from a position of weakness. I find it increasingly exhausting to be out and about, and I’m not sure why. I know I fought depression a couple of years ago, but I don’t think that’s what this is. You know what I think it is? Living most of my life online.
While we here at EQE may have been the first to point out that the ontology of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ perfectly mirrors and recapitulates his peculiar psychology - Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is nothing more or less than a visionary world 3D-printed from Rod Dreher's mind - we are hardly the only ones. Commenters on his own blog are saying the same thing to his face:
But I have to ask this, perhaps as the devil’s advocate. Is it possible that this aspect of your inner life is also partially behind your advocacy of the Benedict Option? I personally have always been attracted to the notion of a life of study and contemplation with like-minded fellows, cut off from the larger outer world which is going to hell in a handbasket, much as I imagine the monasteries of Europe functioned as the Dark Ages came crashing down upon the carcass of the Roman Empire. As appealing as I find this—I would love to spend time boning up on Latin and Greek—I always run up against the wall of the Gospels. As far as I can tell, Jesus called upon his followers to go forth and engage with the world, not withdraw from it, even in times of persecution—turning the other cheek and all that. We are supposed to be busy loving our neighbors, who are essentially defined as those as far removed from us as possible in society. How does something so fundamental become reconciled with the Benedict Option? And perhaps your personal inclination to live “not in the real world”?
However, if you're a woman in one of Rod's communes of petulant retreat, here's how you can probably expect to be treated if you don't tread the prescribed line:
amanda says:
May 15, 2015 at 6:23 pm
“… but I honestly don’t know if it will come down to actual persecution,…”
In Para 1 you are qualifying your persuecution …
BUT …
“Or, less kindly, it’s about telling the unwilling woman to lay back and enjoy it, because it’s really not so bad once you get used to it.”
… Para 4, you are comparing your situation to being raped.
Something very odd and insulting happened here.
[nfr: my, what a delicate flower. If you read in the newspaper someone accusing big business of "raping the environment," do you fall to pieces? -- rd]
The whole point of pursuing Christian religious liberty is to achieve Christian religious liberty, not to end up in a snark prison ruled by self-appointed cult patriarchs like Rod Dreher.
If you no choice but to share the traits and values of a grumpy, petulant, misogynistic latent autistic-spectrum middle-aged man, God bless you and keep you, and best of luck following the leadership of someone who's latest book on Dante is about the dark wood of consequences he found himself in when he tried to retreat to his home town and conduct a trial run of his Benedict Option™ among his family and friends, the people closest to him and who know him best.
However, if you don't share or can overcome those stunting traits which have led Rod Dreher on a spectacular career journey of bad reasoning and even worse choices, why not choose the Red Pill of reality instead?
Instead of the Blue Pill of Rod Dreher's solipsistic, latent-autistic Benedict Option™, choose the Red Pill instead, the Murray Option.
After all, our response to the challenges faced by Christians today should actually lead us to true religious liberty - and sooner, not later. It's not supposed to be just one more thing about the failing ways in which a Rod Dreher tries to apprehend the real world.
Wow. His response to that poor woman has my blood boiling. It's far from the first time that he has responded so nastily to a woman who dared to challenge him. Does the guy have a problem with smart, uppity women?
ReplyDeleteBesides the very uncalled for insult to his commenter amanda, it shows a remarkable tone-deafness for a "professional" writer to make the lay-back-and-enjoy point, especially such a writer who incessantly reminds us ("Never Forget!") about his own defining event of having his pants pulled down 30 or so years ago. And especially such a writer who now has two published books (and counting!) centered on how his family didn't like him for who he was.
DeleteMakes me think that the trauma of his youth either didn't happen, or he's just using it to get victim bona fides or for some other sick reason.
I'll add that his lay-back-and-enjoy-it point in his post was itself a stretch. Dreher was responding to another writer's doubting that religious persecution will happen -- that other writer was not saying that it is happening but Christians should just tolerate it as best they can. Dreher went out of his way to make that horrid point, and he reacted predictably (for him) when amanda called him on it.
I first noticed him when he was in New York. He was a lot like Truman Capote: full blown waspish humor directed at lessor people, usually women and black people. It all came to an end when he made fun of the late singer, Aliyah's Catholic funeral. He mocked her , in his mind, tacky parents, and went over the top He's always been tone death and gentleness is not his strongest suit .
DeleteWho doesn't have a problem with smart, uppity women?
ReplyDeleteAs Howard Walowitz put it, "Women. Can't live with them, can't refute their basic hypotheses."
I have, by the way, written what I hope will be my only blogpost on the void in the intellectual world that is "the Benedict Option."
ReplyDeleteThe shorter version of this post is that the so-called Benedict Option is not Being John Malkovitch, where we enter a secret portal between floors and peer out at the world through the mind's eye of John Malkovitch, but rather Being Rod Dreher, where a similar psychogenic world presentation occurs. That is, except for whatever other disparate possibilities Dreher continues to try to arrogate to and aggregate under the BO brand. Marriage: it's the Benedict Option. So, amazingly, is orange juice. And beef, not just what's for dinner.
ReplyDeleteBut the emergence of a distinctly different Murray Option now gives us a clear basis of contrast and comparison, one I've just begun in my mind and one which we all should try to fill in more completely.
For one thing, Being Rod Dreher, as we've seen, essentially means cultivating a schadenfreude for the destruction and passing away of a world of perceived hostile bullies and meanies intent on pulling pants down. After they're all gone, at they're own hands or at the hands of Vladimir Putin, Rod & Company can come out and rewrite the world as they see fit.
We already know this will be a mean, selfish, dog in the manger Christianity, snatching at whatever oxygen masks might present themselves first and for their own members.
By contrast, the Murray Option leaves Christians joyfully embracing the world as it is while declaiming that, no, we're not sullen, slavish, passive-aggressive Denedict Optioneers, we have rights just like everyone else, and we're going to fight for those rights, just like everyone else, not convince the easily duped into resigning so that we might profit from them by writing books about their (unnecessary) helplessness.
Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is very much like Barack Obama's Obama Option, that is, Obama first, last, and always, ahead of Democrat or Republican, and the Devil take the hindmost once he's got his.
The Marray Option, by contrast, is both a more generous and more conservative approach that respects the world as it is and its inhabitants but, most importantly, it respects Christians and the powers they have right at hand to preserve their own rights, if they only assert the active will to do so.
Quite a distinction between Options, quite a different model of what human beings themselves are like.
I think as Pik goes on and reviews more of Murray and we contrast that with all the things we've heard about the BO so far we'll end up developing qyuite a laundry list of contrasts between Dreher's illusory Blue Pill Benedict Options for the resentful, revenge-driven internally afflicted Christian and Murray's reality-based Red Pill options for the free Christian determined to remain so.
Ack! Sorry for so many typos.
DeleteRelated to the difference between the Blue Pill Benedict Option as a refuge of the latent-autistic paradigm from the hateful outside world it avers and Murray's aggressive, world-embracing Red Pill option is the paradigm of BO as purity cult which Pauli has already addressed.
ReplyDeleteSo, to date we have
1. Latent-autistic Blue Pill world-aversion vs. aggressive, world-embracing Red Pill civil disobedience & support.
2. Blue Pill purity cult vs. Murray Option egalitarianism, where Christians have just as much right to rights as anyone else.
3....