Like a Lannister, Ross Douthat always pays his debts

As a non-Catholic, I can't say whether the liberal New York Times' young 30-something Catholic house conservative Ross Douthat was in the right or wrong in taking on the Papacy, its Synod, and all else contained in l'affaire "Douthat Letter" from Villanova girl theologian Katie Grimes and her evil cohorts Boris, Natasha, Moose, Squirrel and whoever else they were.

Scratch Ross Douthat's mane and he'll tickle your tummy

But I was pleased to see that, after the exquisite tongue bath Catholic rejectnik Rod Dreher gave him here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here - oooh, so many different places! - as the night follows the day the following week Ross dutifully tossed his cabana boy a shiny new quarter, even if it did ultimately turn out to be a rather superficial and perfunctory mention in passing:

But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you. (The Donald Trump phenomenon, Dreher notes, feeds off precisely this anxiety.

When it comes to the food chain of the online punditocracy, no doubt one takes the alms thrown to one by a Lannister gratefully, regardless.

Readers of a recent post of mine will find the Dreher post Douthat (understandably, for those familiar with Douthat's own often incomprehensible constructions) cites as the one my colleague Pikkumatti and I were also just discussing as an example of non-sequitur Scrabble Thinking, or perhaps Lego Thinking: stuff is pasted or snapped together to other stuff that may have only the most tenuous connection with the previous stuff but who cares and may also have other stuff embedded in it to form longer and longer molecular chains of stuff and, before you know it - Voila! - one now has a handsomely larger wad of stuff to fill a weekly contractual online stuff-filling obligation.

Certainly not the predictably big league click bait of implicitly roaring at Pope Francis himself, "Own your heresy!", but, still, for its intended purposes, it'll do, pig, it'll do.

As we all know, it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Rod Dreher to get a Benedict Option book deal without the essential aid of some solid upstream New York Times "authority linking" of the sort he previously got from David Brooks for his Ruthie Leming deal (now, from $1.98, new).

Hopefully, Ross may get around to even mentioning the BO by name any day now.

After all, in an age where Christianity desperately needs a thickening more than at any other time in its 2,000 year history, online Christian blogrolling and authority juice link building are really more crucial than ever before, aren't they.

What is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option good for?

Academic Christian logrolling, of course.

Let's imagine you're Rod Dreher's close friend Patrick Deneen and you establish something called the Tocqueville Forum at your university, Georgetown, in order to raise your profile and prestige above that of the other academics employed there. Helpful come salary review time, true, but there's also a cost: now you have to feed your new pet, and it eats content.

On the other hand, let's imagine you're Rod Dreher, also seeking to raise your profile and prestige by trying to montgolfier a phrase called the Benedict Option into The Religious Question of Our Time but, above all else, into a book you desperately hope might sell this time. You, in turn, need a friendly forum to act as if your idea had intellectual importance so a publisher, any publisher, will take you seriously this time.

Academic Christian forum needs content-fodder to legitimize and justify its existence. Vaporous Christian-sounding phrase needs academic Christian forum to legitimize and justify its existence.

Academic Christian means meets academic Christian ends meets...

This is the reciprocal, mutually referential push-pull marketing of the business of academic Christianity.

Patrick, Rod. Rod, Patrick.

Tocqueville Forum, Benedict Option. Benedict Option, Toqueville Forum.

Excellent. Now, who will be discussing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option at the Tocqueville Forum?

Who cares? Just as who cares that the Benedict Option itself is a no more than a completely elastic, indeterminate, all-inclusive tabula rasa? Both are entirely secondary concerns. The one and only important thing is that each serves as the mutually beneficial means to the ends of the other.

We anticipate including some thoughtful, constructive critics of the Benedict Option as well.

Of course we do.

But first, let's review our Christian priorities in play here. An indeterminate academic Christian forum of as yet non-existent panelists is already set for an all day discussion of an inchoate phrase of indeterminate intellectual and practical dimension.

What's important is that both parties are gainfully employed in support of one another. All the rest, including any Christianity involved, is merely detail filler. Have your disciples contact my disciples.

Mark Perkins says:
July 19, 2015 at 12:42 pm

Intriguing. Alan Jacobs or Ken Myers speaking?

[NFR: We haven’t nailed down the line-up yet. Watch this space. — RD]

Yes, we know that. We already understand the line-up is only of trivial, derivative importance relative to the joyful, transcending congress of forum-to-be-filled and filler-to-be-forumed.

Guess who won't be in the line-up?

Rod Dreher's TAC colleague Noah Millman.

His "Three Questions"? Not only is that piece still dead, deliberately deleted and suppressed by TAC for being thoughtfully and constructively critical far above and beyond the call of duty to Rod Dreher, but now TAC has deliberately contacted Google and had Google's previously cached version wiped as well.

So much for TAC's cover story of just a little "technical turbulence". And, obviously Georgetown, Patrick Deneen, and his Tocqueville Forum have no problem with a little TAC wet work of that sort in service of the greater cause outlined above.

John Zmirak Nope, neither thoughtful nor constructive. Obviously not enough tongue. Definitely not.

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille Nada. Too thoughtful and constructive.

Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue, whose prestige and utterance of the term "Benedict" is the only concrete element in this whole charade.

You're joking, right?

Patrick Deneen, far right, and Rod Dreher exercising a strategic Benedict Option withdrawal at New Orleans' legendary Galatoire's

This is how the ends-in-themselves links of academic Christian sausage are made these days, and this is the nature of the hygiene employed in their manufacture, including both the unclean hands and the diligent scrubbing of all wrongthinking.

Still, with any luck, both Dreher and Deneen will successfully manipulate your angst about the times you live in into another wonderful meal at Galatoire's like the one they enjoyed above this past March.

You, of course, won't be invited, nor would you expect to be, huddling in your own strategic retreat from life, nibbling a Ritz cracker, and grateful to the both of them for showing you the Way.