What happened to Noah Millman's "Three More Benedict Option Questions"?
Yesterday Rod Dreher's The American Conservative colleague Noah Millman published a probing critique of Dreher's Benedict Option entitled "Three More Benedict Option Questions" which, unfortunately, you can now only read by way of Google's cached version; a screen capture of the cached version may also be found here.
This morning, after Rod Dreher had awakened from a customary long nap, Millman's article had mysteriously disappeared.
Perhaps TAC has simply misplaced Millman's post from yesterday critical of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and written without Dreher's editorial guidance or prior approval and it will re-emerge some time in the future.
In the meantime, if you happen to be one of those hapless bloggers who linked to Millman's piece and are having to deal with a 404 today, again:
Google's cached version.
Our screen capture of Google's cached version, in the event the latter swan dives into the memory hole as well.
Oh, you're quite welcome.
UPDATE (as they say): In fast-breaking Benedict Option news, this just in: Noah Millman's piece critical of the Benedict Option has been superseded by Rod Dreher's piece controlling the narrative from both sides:
While I was away in Italy and France these past nine days, there has been lots of talk, much of it critical, about the Benedict Option. I think I’ll answer these critics by interviewing myself.
As I explained above, whatever Rod Dreher does in fact defines the Benedict Option, so this sort of narrative control and revisionism is not only perfectly understandable but perfectly consistent as well. Moreover, if you find yourself in a Rod Dreher Benedict Option community, this is the sort of control you should look forward to embracing as your defense against the forces of cultural darkness.
Although I think the Clintons have always done this sort of narrative thing more elegantly, don't you?
Yeah, that "self-interview" really answered all the critics, didn't it? Now we know what the BOp really is. /sarc
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part of that ridiculous self-interview is the part where he distinguishes the BOp from the "Christian status quo":
I would distinguish the Benedict Option from the Christian status quo in a few ways, though.
First, for at least a generation, Christians have thought of themselves and their beliefs as normative in American life and culture. Liberals and secularists, the idea went, were outsiders trying to change America. Broadly speaking, Christians thought that it was sufficient to elect conservative Republicans who would appoint conservative judges, and the culture would take care of itself.
If that was ever true (I don’t think it was), it is certainly not true now. ... (and then goes on to regurgitate a piece from a fellow TAC writer).
Even if one accepts his straw-man premise, Dreher makes no point of his own as this "First" distinction. The quoted passage is gobbledy-gook, with the apparent point of it having been said in five words by Andrew Breitbart: "Politics is downstream from culture."
And there is no "Second" distinction. That's it.
It looks like Millman had been allowed to question the Benedict Option once in the past. But I guess that's the free speech limit over at The American Conservative.
ReplyDeleteRod has been nothing if not honest about his BO this whole time:
ReplyDelete- He has admitted, explicitly and implicitly, that he has no clue as to what it is; but that
- his role is to seed the germ phrase "Benedict Option", a fit to order, semiotic fusion of the vaguely traditional with cutting edge blockbuster marketing;
- around which conversations will be cultivated containing the key word (see also: key word) "Benedict Option";
- which conversations he will then collect, gushingly overwrite with copious and extraneous autobiographical material;
- which a chain-smoking editor will then hack through like Henry Morgan en route through the jungles to sack Panama;
- which Rod and the next publisher doomed to take a bullet will then try to sell as a book.
This will be an effort separate and discrete from anything undertaken by real life Christians attempting to make their way through life, post-Christian, post-cognitive or otherwise, although a few hapless souls will no doubt trade the equivalent of a nice Sunday dinner for their family for a copy.
As always, the map is not the terrain, and sometimes, it might not even be close, but selling maps is always quicker and easier than selling terrain.
Let's track around the compass a bit and try to look at the same thing from a different angle.
DeleteIf susceptibility to the Rod Dreher's of the world and their thinking (including thinking nothing at all of the imperial self-dealing central to self-interviewing) were to be viewed as a symptom of the pathologies rendering modern Christians helpless in the face of their increasing challenges rather than as a cure for them, how might that change our perceptions of our challenges (including our susceptible selves within such challenges) and our responses to them?
Finally: where does making a desperately post-relevant Rod Dreher relevant again really fall within contemporary Christians' priorities?
DeleteWouldn't a GoFundMe account, the modern equivalent of a tip jar or a street curb tambourine, where even your well-meaning kids could kick in a bit of their allowance or babysitting money if they're of a mind to, be just as merciful without driving everyone else into the weeds along with him?
My, Rod is touch-y. Guess having to return home to his wife was a bit of a comedown from gayly prancing around southern Europe with a virile young man...
ReplyDeleteDreher is butt-hurt from too much boudain from Cassela and Sordello and too much back-talk from Noah Millman.
ReplyDeleteYou know, Dreher is a lot like Hillary Clinton. They claim they aren't tech-savvy, but they sure know how to delete stuff. And they both look ridiculous under the serious scrutiny of an unbiased interview. One main difference is that Hillary Clinton doesn't actually snap the photos herself which make her look goofy.
ReplyDeleteAs Pik has long ago established, what is true to Rod Dreher and what is aesthetically appealing to Rod Dreher are often identical and always interchangeable. Coupled with his ability to create for himself a radically isolated, purely self-affirmative cocoon and those who look to him to lead them into his Benedict Option should be seeing the warning signs that a similar socially pathological fate may await them.
ReplyDeleteOne sees from the range of comments to this self-interview post and Dreher's responses and non-responses to them that Rod imagines the world to be essentially a reflection of his own life. He therefore sees no conflicts between his own life as he lives it - jetting off to Europe at will, leaving wife and children behind - and the Benedict Option as he continues to recreate it, because both are entirely within his control, and those things not within his control are not a part of either in turn.
Silimarly, in his latest post he casually attributes this year's unusually wet weather to climate change while even the least informed local weatherman watcher knows instead that it's a function of a periodic climate cycle known as El Nino.
Now it's conceivably the case that Dreher is attributing the wet weather to climate change only out of a cynical interest in making the large cohort of progressives loyal to him now even larger.
But the more likely reason is that he's ignorant of El Nino because his connection to weather itself is tenuous; he's wholly an indoor kitty cat, after all. He doesn't interact with ordinary people much, particularly his fellow local citizens, he doesn't get local weather forecasts on his TV where his weatherman would be explaining El Nino, and so if he reads something online - the world he lives in - which helps affirm some part of his existing thinking, he has no alternative data or experience to contradict it. And, of course, why would he ever want to?
And yet, many Christians are still looking to this person as their prophet of salvation in times of challenge. Why not instead capture a crow, release it into the air with a ceremonial fling, and just start walking in whatever direction it flies?
The latest two Dreher posts reveal something else the potential BO recruit should weigh. When for Dreher the ceiling starts melting and the walls begin closing in - he exhibited exactly this same behavior when he was in his "dark wood" - his posts elongate to Castro-speech length and begin to ramble kaleidoscopically, as if he had determined to best way to stop the demons in their tracks were with a word-belt-fed Gatling gun.
ReplyDeleteWhat we are seeing I think, sadly, is the decomposition of someone who knows his professional life is unraveling around him. He's not able to supplement the random opportunities of the blogging life he's addicted to by writing books because his books don't sell very well. But his books don't sell very well because he's simply not a very good writer. Overall, his book prose is hackneyed and stilted, I sassed. But why is his book writing so poor? Because over his career as a professional writer he's made no effort to improve it (Lord knows I'm a long winded gas bag, but I'm no writer at all); eating is easier and more immediately pleasurable (just another reason we seldom see swine training for decathlons).
He could have put a conscientious effort into improving his professional trade craft, but blogging proved so much easier: he only need adopt this studiously harmless, folksy, chatty, Internet hairdresser's voice, and the lonely hearts and any others in academia or elsewhere needing the sort of friend or starf*ck they couldn't find in real life would flock to him magnetically. Any others he could simply ban, and - here's the great part: in blogging, he found the more people he tauntingly alienated, the more he got paid, given the economics of blog hits. Unfortunately, for that same reason, the pay scale is much lower in blogging, and, even more unfortunately for him, that alienating skill does not translate to the higher paying book sales. One actually has to deliver substantial value in book sales to earn several dollars per capita hit instead of merely several cents.
So it will be sad and interesting to me to see which Christians climb aboard this slow moving Amtrak train wreck. Some, like Ralph Wood and CT who could care less whether Dreher hails from Starhope, Starhill, or Coober Pedy, Mite!, won't really care one way or another, because they extract value by merely rubbing up against him, like a cat. But I tend to feel bad for the inevitable everyday person whose neediness Dreher's calculated blog voice touches in some way who decides his best move is to cash out his 401(k) and put it in whatever Dreher's shiny thing of that moment happens to be. He'll never make it to the Palio, and Dreher in turn will never even know his name, nor ever want to.
". . . his posts elongate to Castro-speech length and begin to ramble kaleidoscopically, as if he had determined to best way to stop the demons in their tracks were with a word-belt-fed Gatling gun."
DeleteCastro and a kaleidoscopic word-belt-fed Gatling-gun -- Well done! I salute your composition of the best extended metaphor I've seen yet for Rod's work. And if that metaphor is mixed, I don't want to be grammatical.
Yeah, that pegs it. I described Dreher's writing as a "drum solo" once, but I've heard a few good drum solos. So Keith's metaphor is probably a more accurate one.
DeleteSpeaking of straw men, Jimmy T (who either is in fact a straw man or had the gall to stray off the reservation) serves as a foil for Dreher to deny spiking the three Millman questions, along with wondering whether the Emperor might be a little scantily clad. Evoking this response:
ReplyDelete[NFR: I have no idea why Noah’s article is not here anymore. I don’t manage the website. I thought I had answered those questions in the past. You do know that I’ve written more about the Ben Op than this self-interview, right? — RD]
Dang, Dreher should hire out to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Instead of ducking the press, Hillary should interview herself and then give the Dreher response: "If you have questions that weren't answered in my self-interview, I've already answered them so I won't again."
I decided to preserve the Millman piece in it's entirety on a special page here.
ReplyDeleteAnother one apparently banned for asking one of Noah's questions and for "attitude."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/critics-of-the-benedict-option/comment-page-3/#comment-7515087
LOL!
Delete[NFR: I just now realized that Noah posted today about the Benedict Option. I had not seen that post; I thought you were referring to the post back in May. Noah’s post today has not been deleted; here it is. I will answer those questions. But you know what? I’m really tired of your gripey, hostile attitude. I don’t understand why you read this blog, except for the sake of liberal outrage porn. But I don’t have to waste my time with your constantly kvetchy comments anymore. — RD]
But here it isn't - the link throws a 404.
There are two deep, embarrassing shames on exhibit here.
First, that Rod Dreher, self-appointed Christian prophet and impresario of the Benedict Option, is a pathological liar.
Second, that Rod Dreher, self-appointed Christian prophet and impresario of the Benedict Option, may be the only one who doesn't realize it.
Have you seen this?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/a-technical-note/
I asked over on the Twitter why the Noah Millman piece had disappeared, and the American Conservative actually answered me by sending me a link to that "Technical Note." An odd explanation. If the piece is not forthcoming (as in, the error was that it was published earlier than intended), then I find it a bit baffling.
I believe the term to describe that is "adorable".
DeleteQ: In what conceivable situation could questions about the Benedict Option ever appear "too early".
A: Only in that unique situation where it was make-or-break necessary that answers materialize prior to any questions that might be seeking them.
And, of course, this is why the Millman piece continues to remain de-published on TAC.
I don't think many realize that, with respect to Wick Allison and his TAC property, Rod Dreher is "Christian" in the same sense that nun porn is "Christian": both are fetish commodities appealing to extremely narrow markets, within which markets, however, their integrity commands a premium return.
Wick Allison's D Empire properties are, for the most part, expansively liberal and, in particular, gay and gay marriage friendly. That's one side of the street he harvests for profit.
On the other side of the street he farms the loudly "Christian", ostensibly anti-gay and anti-SSM Rod Dreher, the tip of whose spear is currently his Benedict Option. Allison's return on his singular TAC voice, Rod Dreher, is directly and immediately connected to the credibility of Dreher's current, eclipsing project, his Benedict Option. Any ding the BO takes, therefor, immediately dings Allison's TAC bottom line.
And so we see -
- Millman, clearly off the reservation, honestly pursuing questions about the Benedict Option
- This liability immediately becoming sequestered by being deleted by TAC
- Dreher replacing the liability with what TAC and Dreher both erroneously imagine to be an asset, namely Dreher's Soviet/Clintonista "self-interview", but which, like any lie told to cover a previous lie, only makes matters worse
- TAC's final, adorable contra-explanation for the whole escapade
As with the Christiany nun porn fetish commodity, the only value at play here is protecting the equally Christiany Dreher fetish commodity, actual Christian values like straightforwardness, honesty and truth-telling be damned.