Rod Dreher's to-be-fabricated Benedict Option™
Here is the latest on the Obamacare Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ front, about which you will be able to find out what's in it once you pass it take it:
Above, a photo I just took of the books from my library that I have set aside for reading to inform me in the book I plan to write about the Benedict Option. I don’t believe this is an exhaustive list — I need to read Morris Berman, for example — but it is where I stand right now.
You see, when writer Damon Linker sweeps his arm and declares "the religious right is considering an all-out withdrawal from politics" and writer Rod Dreher embraces Linker's sweeping declaration about "our little project", both are lying to the public in the service of artificially fabricating and pushing demand for a strictly commercial writing opportunity they hope will pay ongoing benefits to each of them for years to come.
The very obvious reason why no "religious right", individually, much less as a sweeping whole, can possibly be considering a Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is that this little chimera, these dashing but invisible imperial pantaloons have yet to even be fabricated - as Rod Dreher explicitly tells you himself, above.
Rod Dreher's own mind is not yet even "informed" about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ which apparently you should be, and, according to Damon Linker, the entire religious right is already, considering taking.
Plainly speaking, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is, at best, only in wistful conceptual product development. Because Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ does not yet exist, entrepreneurial vendor-tailors of invisible, non-existent Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ Emperor's new clothing are irrefutably committing intellectual fraud.
More plainly and simply, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is an intellectual scam, specifically an intellectual pigeon drop in which you, the gullible mark, are asked to withdraw and part with your curiosity, your mouse clicks, your eyeballs on adjacent online advertising, and, ideally, the cost of Rod Dreher's book about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ which he will immediately deliver to you as a greater reward in exchange - just as soon as he reads his book list above, informs his mind, decides what combination of ingredients will sell best to you, the slack-jawed mark, and actually gets around to compiling and writing the thing.
Until that joyous and distant day, however, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will only be about you reading about Rod Dreher and Damon Linker and others talking about Rod Dreher continuing to talk about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™, solely for the sake of someday selling you an opportunistic, pseudo-intellectual consumer product artificially shaped and fabricated by the focus group this sentence just described.
The bottom line is that Rod Dreher is demonstrably, by his own words and actions, a pseudo-intellectual con artist, an eager and unapologetic scammer of the psychologically and spiritually needy and helpless, and Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is just the latest in his long line of pseudo-intellectual scams dating back to Crunchy Cons.
If, for whatever reason, you simply cannot live without what Rod Dreher would dearly love to sell you, God bless you and the best of luck to you, but on no uncertain terms understand this:
- No wholesale "religious right" is either preceding you, joining you, or even contemplating doing so, because
- What Rod Dreher is trying to sell you and what you may be so cheerfully eager to buy not only does not yet exist, it is not even yet fully formed in Rod Dreher's own mind.
Dreher is a classic "pseudo-intellectual"..
ReplyDeleteKeith: "a pseudo-intellectual con artist"
ReplyDeleteHis whole operation is so sleazy now that it makes me wonder if there is some precedent somewhere. I mean there has got to be some famous character in literature that can cited as a similar pseudo-intellectual con artist.
It baffles me how anyone can take RD seriously.
Oengus, see "Shea, Mark."
DeleteWe could probably come up with a hypothesis most people would find plausible along the lines of, "Any two dozen more or less decent books on how to live well can probably be distilled into one more or less decent book on how to live well."
ReplyDeleteBut granting that the pile of books shown -- plus, need I add, Morris Berman -- can probably be distilled into one more or less decent book on how to live well, what possible reason can anyone have to think Rod is capable of writing that book?
That's what I found so funny, Tom. That picture and reading list itself declares that the BO doesn't really have a determinate nature but can be assembled, like any recipe, from whatever ingredients the chef has on hand, can get wind of, and is capable of understanding.
DeleteBy that token, some other chef's BO might be radically different.
But, as long as Dreher gets credit for the brand name, it's all just product and it's all good, right?
What's even funnier is every commenter is now pelting him with new recommendations, each trying to get his favorite book (and thus his brilliance because of it) recognized by the great one who hasn't yet bothered to read the BO books he already thinks he needs. So far, the commenter-recommended list is easily 3 times the list pictured above.
DeleteBest comment by far: what about fiction? Is any fiction going to be included. Yes, indeedy. My question as well.
Tom wrote:
DeleteBut granting that the pile of books shown -- plus, need I add, Morris Berman -- can probably be distilled into one more or less decent book on how to live well, what possible reason can anyone have to think Rod is capable of writing that book?
Might I add that at least a few of those books don't appear to be light reading. It will be no small task to properly and analytically read those books, much less to synthesize them into an existing common theme, much less into a novel theme that hasn't yet been thought of. And then to write a meaningful book-length treatise on that novel theme? That's a significant task for someone who actually has the training, temperament, and skill for the job. I'd say that's far beyond the capability of our Cub Reporter.
OTOH, the expectations of Regan Arts may be someone less stringent than that.
Here's Dreher's contribution on the topic today:
ReplyDeleteI am at a real disadvantage trying to advocate for the Benedict Option because I don’t have a precise idea of what it looks like.
and:
The Anglican pastor’s e-mail helps me to understand why I have had so much trouble convincing many people that I’m not talking about a fundamentalist running-away from something bad. They can’t conceive of strategic withdrawal in any other terms, because they don’t have any experience of what that might look like, and can’t imagine it. I have lots of work to do. I need your help on this. Collaboration and crowdsourcing with you all through this blog has helped me with my last two books, and it will be a tremendous help with this one.
Dreher's pretty much grinning and confessing here that if he thought a book contract was to be had convincing fellow Christians that eating peanut butter was crucial to their cultural rescue, his blog would be awash in helping him think through and crowd source cold press versus hot press versus traditional monkey with rock and stone anvil and aflame - aflame! - with passionate debate about smooth versus crunchy. This is how you harvest a carefully curated pool of cult marks.
DeleteA friend figured Dreher out for me some time ago: we think he's sincerely wrong in trying to get conservative Christians to surrender the public square (in other words, he's a false-flag operation, a fake conservative), but you may be onto something. Anyway, once he'd been explained to me, plus I'm not into his schismatic religion (tried it years ago), I pretty much stopped reading him.
ReplyDeleteThere is such a thing as a strategic withdrawal with honor: acting Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sterniuk) keeping the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the Ukraine underground during Soviet rule. The Soviet sellout churchmen embraced schism.
Fogey, that's a great point. If Dreher actually were interested in preserving Christianity during dark times, there is much recent history to consult regarding what worked (the Ukrainians you mention) and what didn't.
DeleteOTOH, if the goal is not necessarily to save Christendom but is instead self-promotion, then those data are of no help. Self-promotion requires inventing a new "Option" to publish, better yet by getting inputs from your current and potential readership (many of whom have no interest whatsoever in saving Christian culture).