"And Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too"
As we here at EQE have said all along, from its inception Rod Dreher's so-called Benedict Option play has been nothing more than an open-ended, anything-encompassing cypher cannily crafted to land a publishing deal about whatever could be stuffed into that dimensionless container.
Not only does "The Benedict Option Means Precisely What I Choose It to Mean at Any Given Moment" as Pauli first reported here, now it also officially means "Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too":
So, we are going to see a proliferation of “options,” and that’s okay by me. Just remember that even though I’m going to make in my book a specifically Benedictine case for the Benedict Option, the term itself is a catch-all for responses based on accepting MacIntyre’s judgment on the dead end of modern moral discourse, and on a determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith as the broader culture grows more hostile to orthodox Christianity. Call it what you want, but that’s what we share.
Incidentally, here's Dreher's IKYABWAI response to Tom Piatak's critique of the big BO, commandeering the Rorshach imagery from John Zmirak's post:
[NFR: Chronicles, huh? Mmmmph. Yeah, it’s psychologically fascinating to watch certain people squirm so vigorously about this stuff. It’s turning into a Rorshach test on the right. Some of these guys, you wonder what they have to lose if people start taking the Benedict Option seriously, and trying to figure out how to live it locally. — RD
Heart of a lion in the determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith department there, I'd say, wouldn't you?
So, bottom line, as he did with this BO project's parental unit, Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher is going to take anyone's comments containing the word "option" and try to pitch a publisher on letting him write a book about them entitled The Benedict Option.
The only question remaining at this point is who the lucky publisher might be.
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Oh, man. This comment:
ReplyDelete....to watch certain people squirm so vigorously about this stuff. It’s turning into a Rorshach test on the right. Some of these guys, you wonder what they have to lose if people start taking the Benedict Option seriously, and trying to figure out how to live it locally.
First off, like, wow, wouldn't it be fascinating to watch Dreher "try to figure out how to live it locally."
Second off, it's not a Rorshach test at all because, uh, THERE IS NO INK ON THE PAPER. It's more like litmus test for common sense. It's a reality check.
Thirdly, who is squirming here? Who had Noah Millman's piece axed coming off vacation? People like Piatak and Frohnen and Zmirak are calmly pointing out problems with the notion of Benedict Option and suddenly they're squirming? As Mark Levin said long ago, Oh, the pain of it all.
BTW, stay tuned for an upcoming piece about the BO in National Review from one of our favorite authors.
There's at least one thing I think we can take heart from, Pauli. In sharp contrast to the Escriva Option or the Calvary Option or other options, now that Noah Millman's critique was preemptively put down, and particularly based on what Dreher says just before the quote I cited,
DeleteI told Caleb that a well-known professor I’m friends with said that in thinking our way through the Benedict Option, we shouldn’t feel so bound to MacIntyre, because he has not offered any detailed prescription for how to cure what he diagnoses.
I think the one thing we can all be relieved to know we'll still be getting plenty of along the way in Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is plenty of tranny voyeurism. After all, every journey still needs its North Star to steer by, so, with MacIntyre not holding him back, why not the one guaranteed to draw the most blog hits?
As Rod himself would say, hoo boy, playa!
I can only hope that Rod's mention of this advice from "a well-known professor [he's] friends with" is his way of saying he got the memo in Adam DeVille's recent article, "Would Alasdair MacIntyre live in a 'Benedict Option' Community?":
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/oezpqly
Given DeVille's account of the complete absence in all of MacIntyre's work of any mention of St. Benedict other than the one quote that Rod flogs endlessly, and AM's silence on intentional communities, knowing as he does how fraught and complicated such endeavors are, I would think maybe the person most relieved to see Rod feel less "bound to MacIntyre" could be MacIntyre.
Who I ever so wish would say something publicly about Rod's adoption of his one Benedict line and spinning of the vast something-or-other that he's spinning from it.
The Good Book Store doesn't have to stock good books, nor does it have to be a good book store, good books or bad. It's on Good Street. Which isn't really a good street, it was just named for Ralph Good. Whether Ralph was good, I couldn't say.
DeleteMore from Gabriel Sanchez:
ReplyDelete"Integralism Is Not An 'Option'"
http://opuspublicum.com/2015/07/29/integralism-is-not-an-option/
So, we are going to see a proliferation of “options,” and that’s okay by me.
ReplyDeleteThe key here are the quotation marks. We aren't going to see a proliferation of options, but a proliferation of "options," which is to say of articles and blog posts taking up Rod's rhetoric to counter his argument. What the authors call "options" are, for the most part, applications of long-standing Catholic spiritualities or rules of life to today's circumstances -- which of course is what these spiritualities and rules of life have been doing since they were codified. It's what they're for.
An irony is that Rod's Benedict Option is not like these others. It's not an application of a long-standing spirituality or rule of life to today's circumstances. It's an application of the emotion of fear to today's circumstances.
Which alone is sufficient to doom Rod's project. He won't let go of the pretense that what he's trying to coalesce in his mind is fundamentally Benedictine; that's the base he returns to again and again in this game of tag he's been playing for nine years and counting. But Benedictine spirituality and fear of the modern world cannot be made to cohere into a single, new idea that isn't merely the sum of the two. To anyone who is not similarly fearful of the modern world, whatever Rod writes in his book about St. Benedict or his spiritual children will seem unconvincingly tacked onto the rest of the book, whatever that happens to look like.
My prediction: Even as he writes the manuscript, Rod will know he's not achieving his intellectual goals for this book. When it comes out, he will promote it dutifully, but he will already be looking for, if not testing out, the next great thing that, for real this time, will save him.
Where to turn, where to turn...ah, yes, that underserved audience of those who, free of materialist delusions, interact daily with alternate realities. They will welcome him as the prophet destiny has cast him to be.
DeleteThis essay explains succinctly why I will always have more in common with my pagan friend Franklin Evans than I do with modernist Christians — even conservative ones.
Things are becoming ever clearer, by the day: sooner or later, there will be a pony.
It's an application of the emotion of fear to today's circumstances.
DeleteBingo.
While I do not think BenOptioneers will ever veer as far into cult-like craziness as the Ultra-Orthodox Jews who drove that poor girl to suicide (see Pauli's blog post re same), I do think that the BenOp raises all kinds of "this-could-get-weird-fast" red flags.
Recently I read an intriguing post by Steve Kellmeyer, who strikes me as a grumpy curmudgeon in general but who does have a few good things to say. Anyway, the post was about thr Mother of God Community in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and its connection with an early leader of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Larry Tomzsak (sp?), who went on to leave the Church and co-found a Protestant group, People of Destiny, now the neo-Calvinist mega-church chain, Sovereign Grace Ministries. I know of many wounded and traumatized refugees from both Mother of God and People of Destiny / Sovereign Grace. These cult-like groups also played on people's fears -- and on their Pharisaical conviction that they were More Spiritual than the hoi polloi in the average Catholic parish. The results were not pretty.
Tom wrote:
DeleteAn irony is that Rod's Benedict Option is not like these others....It's an application of the emotion of fear to today's circumstances.
.... But Benedictine spirituality and fear of the modern world cannot be made to cohere into a single, new idea that isn't merely the sum of the two....
Very interesting. Hasn't "fear of the modern world" been the prime source of conflict in the Islamic world over the recent past? I'm no scholar on the topic, but those who are have made this very point. Islamic fundamentalism stems from the idea that the modern world is incompatible with Islam (heretical), just as Dreher poses that the modern classical liberal order is incompatible with what he calls small-o orthodox Christianity.
But of course both radical Islam and Dreher are wrong about this. Benedict XVI (Ha! There's your "Benedict" Option.) instructs us on this:
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
From those halcyon days of peak oil and bird flu, Dreher has intimately understood how fear can be translated into income for himself, in particular by using his skill at supplying himself as the vicarious subjective voice of the fear-habituated consumer. I think of this personal talent of his as the sexy chat line of existential terror: he doesn't tell the rube what he's wearing or what he's doing to himself, he tells them in subtle, evocative detail what he's fearing at the moment. The predictable response: OOOoooohhh!
DeleteI was going to write a post about the BO being solely a cynical business project, the history of which several have already pointed us to, but Tom is providing a framework to understand that most clearly right now.
In its most basic terms, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is nothing more than the how-to-strategically-buy-gold-now-to-survive-the-coming-financial-crash book re-pitched to the respective fear-needs of susceptible Christians. The moral question remaining then becomes one of how much energy should be spent trying to stand between people prone to buy these sorts of books and their destiny. I've done what I can, but, you know, I'm beginning to care less and less. Sometimes it may just be best to let Darwin make his picks.
Incidentally, Gabriel Sanchez' most recent comment on the matter which one of our anonymous commenters thoughtfully pointed us too is the clearest, cleanest, broadest samurai stroke through the whole noisome mess I've seen to date. Someone should find a way to build on that, if such a thing is even possible.
Here's my response to Tom and Pik's remarks in this comment thread.
DeletePlus: just read the Opus Publicum post and I agree that it for a very short piece it points out both the absurdity and the wrongheadedness of the BO very articulately.