Wimpy
I believe it is accurate to state that the so-called Benedict Option as promoted by Rod Dreher had its genesis from about the time of the Brendan Eich brouhaha -- at which time Dreher concluded that the culture was lost and it was time to carry out a "strategic withdrawal" from the culture at large. Keith summarized Dreher's moral cowardice here on EQE at the time, pointing out that even Dreher's good buddy Andrew Sullivan called Dreher a coward:
And the only way to distinguish yourself from these hateful factions [those who persecute gays] is to make a positive case for your position. That's always possible. From the very beginnings of our faith, Christians have made such a positive case, even as they were being thrown to the lions. And Rod won't do it because someone might say something mean at the office!
Sarah Palin agreed with Andrew Sullivan. In response to which Dreher doubled down, making an argument from anecdote by referring to religious conservatives in academia being afraid to disclose their own beliefs about same sex marriage without risking their career.
Hence the Benedict Option, because there just isn't room for Christian conservatives in the larger culture.
Fast forward to last week, specifically the inmates taking control of the asylums of the U of Missouri, Yale, Claremont McKenna, et al., following which Dreher exhorts academic authorities to show some backbone:
Why are you people so afraid? I don't understand.
and
Strike back, empire. and strike hard.
That's Our Hero: asking others to do something that he wouldn't dream of doing. Picking fights for others, just like good ol' Wimpy:
And fair warning to those about to embark on the Benedict Option -- you'll be on your own, as far as its creator is concerned.
It's not just about the campuses - in virtually *every* post in the past few weeks, Rod "The Hulk" Dreher has called someone out for not being tough or aggressive enough on whatever topic he's writing about. Nearly every single post. Nobody's as tough as Rod. Everybody's a wimp except an Aspie from Louisiana. I don't recall ever seeing anything like this same level of direct aggression (from behind a keyboard, of course) from him before.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly, it does go a little uneasily with Rod's photo of his $93 Diana Krall tickets (when it comes to aggressive music to pump Rod up for the culture war, nothing beats soft jazz). But if Rod were there, he'd stand up to the bullies, I'm absolutely positive. Rod would stride out with his delicately moussed Sonic the Hedgehog haircut and Coke bottle glasses and defy the unwashed hordes with a cuttingly-delivered Philip Rieff quote, leaving them confused as he sashays away (much like the villains in "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" react with confusion and befuddlement to Ace and Gary's displays of, er, friendship).
Just as long as there are no midnight trips to the refrigerator involved.
Rod was talking about "the St. Benedict Option" on his Crunchy Con blog back in 2006. Wasn't the last chapter of that book titled "Waiting for Benedict"?
ReplyDeleteAt the time, it was Katrina and suitcase nukes Rod was running away from. Being called mean names by lefties isn't as scary when you're a National Review writer as it is when you're doing whatever it is he's doing now.
But maybe more people are afraid of gay marriage than suitcase nukes.
So, I'm afraid to ask, but has Rod weighed in on Paris? I gotta say I'm pretty impressed with this Hollande guy. He stands up to the ISIS bullies a lot better than Obama does.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, ISTM that setting up a BenOp commune in the midst of a big, cosmopolitan, European city might not be a great idea right now. Oysters or no oysters.
Mr. Dreher has indeed said some things about Paris. Within hours of the attack he tweeted the following: "So what of your refugee scheme, #AngelaMerkel? You will see what happened in Paris tonight multiplied massively all over Germany." He received quite a bit of criticism for it and then commented facetiously on his blog about folk getting their noses out of joint for his factious, simplistic, callous, and ill-timed remark. I gather from the Twitter that he is also blocking a number of users who simply disagree with him (which seems consistent with the observations of this post). In fact, he blocked me too, after I called him out for his earlier remark that he would buy dinner for the school security guard who body slammed a teenage girl (for refusing to get up from her desk), if the girl had been Mr. Dreher's daughter. The man exhibits every negative thing characterized in that Andrew Sullivan piece and far worse.
ReplyDeleteI gather from the Twitter that he is also blocking a number of users who simply disagree with him
DeleteThat's our Working Boy. #ControlFreakeryonSteroids
This post highlights for me how much Dreher and his Benedict Option actually have in common with the Mizzou and Yale students of recent notoriety.
ReplyDeleteAll want someone else to set up "safe spaces" for them which will only really be "safe spaces" in the sense that they become zones within which the reigning ideological or cult absolutism is rendered safe from challenge.
On a recent post where he chastised the students at Yale for their opposition to free speech, he stated in a comment, "The kid who said to Master Christakis, “Who the f–k hired you?” should be expelled." Such certainty of what the punishment should be for freely speaking in a public space entirely outside of the classroom from the advocate of free speech on college campuses. In any case, his blog is quite the safe space, with him moderating every last comment.
DeleteRod's whole life is a search for a space safe from girls who will pull down his pants and get cooties on his boudain.
ReplyDeleteToday he's freaking out that the Pope isn't being tough enough on those naughty Lutherans. Of course this is all part of the "Francis is destroying the Church!" conspiracy he has bought into hook, line, and sinker (what's a nice Orthodox boy doing spending so much time on Rorate??) and he's completely overlooking the fact that once again (yawn) Pope Benedict went there first, famously stating that there was nothing in the Augsburg Confession at odds with orthodox Catholic teaching.
ReplyDeleteOne of the commenters said that Rod is to Catholicism like some bitter guy who just can't let go of his ex-girlfriend of ten years past. Indeed.
Dreher is always in favor of strict authority for strict authority's sake, except when it cramps his own style. He wanted his small town conservative father and sister to cut him some slack, but he won't cut anybody else any slack - not even his own daughter, whom he would submit to seeing beaten up by the police. What a weird, sick, twisted, unhealthy dude is Our Working Boy.
ReplyDeleteRod blegged today for input from the UK on BenOppish things going on there. Here, Rod; the brilliant British church cartoonist Dave Walker was already on it more than five years ago:
ReplyDeletehttp://cartoonchurch.com/content/cc/we-are-safe-here/
Rod's in beast mode, this morning, talking about kicking John Lennon's ass and taking us back to the Middle Ages to save us from conversion to Islam and unisex bathrooms. Someone needs to switch to decaf.
ReplyDeleteReaders Digest Condensed Dreher:
ReplyDelete"My sons are spent. My line has ended. Rohan has deserted us. Theoden's betrayed me. Abandon your posts! Flee, flee for your lives......look a squirrel...a squirrel with oysters.....mmmmm oysters"
Anonymous Maximus
A switch to decaf is indeed indicated, and he should probably take a pill and lie down for a while, too. I've been afraid he's going to have a stroke lately. It has to be phenomenally exhausting to be solely responsible for correcting so many thousands of people and cultural institutions who are wrong, wrong, wrong about everything. And weak. Who will not man up and be as strong as Rod tells them to be. It takes tens of thousands of words that Rod must type, type, type, to correct the masses. Apparently.
ReplyDeleteMaybe someone should start a fund to supply Julie Dreher with oysters to feed Rod all day, to make him shut up.
ReplyDeleteAnd right on cue, just as Anonymous Maximus predicted, Dreher just posted a View From Your Table of oysters that one of his Italian boyfriends ate.
ReplyDeleteYes. We have been walking this Enlightenment road for far too long, and it has us now in a dark wood.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to comprehend what a non-post-Enlightenment freedom of religion - the entire raison for the BO - argument would even look like, and anyone (Ruse, Zmirak, et al) who deals with the BO for or against must also deal with this same fundamental Dreher contradiction sooner or later.
One could argue, I suppose, that religious liberty has never been anything more than a right stemming from and solely residing in the hands of God, which leaves Christians the only remaining choice of praying and polishing thair martial weapons against their adversaries in a world where only might makes right.
I don't think poor old John Lennon is the real nihilist in what is ultimately only an emotionally romantic Dungeons and Dragons-type RPG for humanities majors.
Keith aptly notes:
DeleteOne could argue, I suppose, that religious liberty has never been anything more than a right stemming from and solely residing in the hands of God, which leaves Christians the only remaining choice of praying and polishing their martial weapons against their adversaries in a world where only might makes right.
This may be the only argument in a world in which the thin veneer of civilization lies shattered. But Dreher would disagree with the martial weapons part -- and he does so in that very same post :
It’s not just Paris, and this is very, very much not something that can be solved or prevented by force of arms.
So either the BennieOpt involves "strategic withdrawal" into groups so small and hidden that the marauders can't find them (and so small and hidden as to be entirely inconsequential), or it is as fictitious as More's Utopia but lacking its relevance.
Or, as you've posed previously, Keith, maybe Dreher is silently relying on a strong daddy figure to fill the void so Dreher doesn't have to think about difficult things. In Dreher's words:
How have we come to a point in which a former KGB agent who now rules Russia sounds more sensible and realistic, from a culturally conservative point of view, than any leader in the post-Christian West?
Or, as you've posed previously, Keith, maybe Dreher is silently relying on a strong daddy figure to fill the void so Dreher doesn't have to think about difficult things. In Dreher's words:
DeleteHow have we come to a point in which a former KGB agent who now rules Russia sounds more sensible and realistic, from a culturally conservative point of view, than any leader in the post-Christian West?
It's so hard to avoid being led back to Dreher's fraught relationship with his father, isn't it, fraught because Dreher pere was the wrong kind of father: not the obedient-to-Dreher fils-son-father Dreher wanted, that is, a strong protector, like a giant iron robot, who would endorse what Dreher variously liked while protecting him from the uncomfortable world outside.
Even now his Catholic concern trolling leaves us by a process of elimination with the only reliable BO faith, Russian Orthodoxy, a religion of strong men who brook no deviation from what Dreher desires this week.
The more one burrows into, unpacks, and analyzes the BO and its founder the less strange Scientology looks by comparison.
What would ultimately be hilarious to me would be to have some small, earnest, truly dedicated Christian congregation slap Dreher with a defamation suit for appropriating their church and name as an example of his ramblings. No gonna happen, irenicism being what it is, but other entities should really be thinking twice about allowing themselves to be aggrandized into this psychological, spiritual, moral, theological, and all around intellectual hot mess.
Mr. George Harrison, MBE, whose life demonstrated more serious religious commitment than the life of Mr. Rod Dreher of St. Francisville, Louisiana, did not regard Mr. John Lennon, MBE as a "nihilist," the way Mr. Dreher does - nor did Mr. Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, a notable adult convert to Evangelical Christianity.
ReplyDeleteA man who wrote a song such as Imagine and who lived on the Upper West Side is far less a nihilist than he is a shrewd businessman who knows his customers.
DeleteAnd one who appreciates the finer things of life.
P.S. What Anon Max says below.
Nihilism (noun)
ReplyDelete1
a : a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless
b : a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths
2
a : a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility
b capitalized : the program of a 19th century Russian party advocating revolutionary reform and using terrorism and assassination
3
a : a word used, or more properly misused, by a male pseudo-intellectual LSU upperclassman (usually one minoring in philosophy to add gravitas to his resume) to try and impress (and hopefully get in the pants of) a tipsy, chubby, and homely freshman from Lake Charles. If successful the upperclassman will probably cry afterwards and the freshman will simultaneously feel both disappointment and horror.
Anonymous Maximus
Yeah...the Benedict Option is Sergeant Dreher's ROCOR recruiting storefront. Your only hope of defeating ISIS is to head downtown and sign up today:
ReplyDeleteIf the West is going to endure, it will have to return to its ancestral faith, Christianity, and do so in a serious, sustained way. I believe that it will, but not soon. The future of the West depends on the faithful, on those who really live the religious life, not just play at it. I believe that Orthodoxy will have a role to play in this revival. But the revival will come, one way or another.
But you can't be Protestant. That road leads inexorably to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
And you can't be a non-schismatic Catholic. That road leads inexorably through Francis serving the Eucharist to Lutherans.
That leaves only...well, you think about it a bit and we'll talk more, over coffee.
Again (Virgil & others), I don't have a thing against Orthodoxy. I do, however, have a rather obvious thing about dishonest bait-and-switch schemes, particularly where Christianity is the bait and the play is entirely based on psychological angst.
The most coherent response possible to Dreher's "The only way to save the West is to build a Legloland model of the Medieval Rus in the Rhine Valley" idea is in the comment from David a priest who converted from the Anglican Communion to Orthodoxy and back that was made back in 2012 in response to the column he linked:
DeleteI found that I needed to return to the Anglican Communion because I am culturally a Western Christian, and I see more clearly now than I did two years ago that the Western culture I was raised in is an inseparable part of who I am. It cannot be set aside without setting aside some things basic to who I am. Some might say, “What profit is there in saving your culture only to lose your soul?” However, I think that would be a false dichotomy. As I look around at the mostly eastern European congregations that are gathered in any Orthodox Church during the Divine Liturgy, I see that it is most often said at least partly in Slavonic, Greek or some other eastern language. It is obvious to me that, for those congregations, their ethnic identity and their being Christian are practically co-terminus. And perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing. The Christian Faith is fundamentally incarnational, and thus it naturally incarnates itself in a culture — be it Russian, or Greek, — or American, or British, or Chinese, or whatever.
I do not now belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church because I am not culturally Eastern, and I am unwilling and unable to live my life as a pretend Russian, or a pretend Greek. The faults of the Western Churches are the faults of Western culture. Eastern Orthodox Churches suffer from the faults of Eastern cultures. In the words of John Henry Newman, ”the Nation drags down its Church to its own level.”
Simply put, I was born and raised in the West so I am a Western Christian, I don’t think that I have any real option to be anything other than that. I have returned to trying to live out the ancient faith as best I can in the place in which I was raised and live. The Eastern Orthodox world, despite the things that it has to commend it, nevertheless has it’s own profound problems and I don’t think that running to it is the answer to what is wrong in the Western Church.
There may, of course, be valid reasons to embrace the Eastern Church to save one's soul, but to make the argument that is can revive Western Christendom is, as the kids say, crazytalk.
Anonymous Maximus
Anon Max said:
DeleteThere may, of course, be valid reasons to embrace the Eastern Church to save one's soul, but to make the argument that is can revive Western Christendom is, as the kids say, crazytalk.
But the mashup of Western culture and Eastern Christianity may be the very niche that Dreher wants the vaporware of the BennieOpt to serve. You don't see him traipsing around Eastern Europe and Russia with his "boyfriends" (as an Anon put it above) -- nope, you see him at horse races in Italy and eating quenelles in France, while bemoaning the state of Western Catholicism and the Enlightenment.
Perfect -- you get to pick and choose what you want from the larger culture -- such as enjoying fine dining while having a made-to-order excuse for not taking any responsibility for what surrounds it.
"But you can't be Protestant. That road leads inexorably to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."
ReplyDeleteI get your point, and that is sometimes his line. But OTOH, he'd very much love for you to be Protestant, if you're the kind of Evangelical who's eagerly buying his BenOp pitch at the moment. There seems to be a bigger market for the BO among Evangelicals than Orthodox.
See, saving the West is complicated. No wonder it makes Rod cranky.