The Permanent Thangs

No to be confused with The Permanent Things. Whatever they are.

Long after our current President is known as "that dark-complected guy who talked too much" I hope people remember the blond, white chick with the smart-girl glasses who epitomize his presidency. One of the thangs to remember her by is this hashtag.

She is truly unbelievable. We are truly dumbfounded to find anyone this dumb.

A Kid's Imagination

Or maybe a dad's imagining of a kid's imagination. 

Not everyone may understand this . . . only the "classically trained".  

Those, like me, who raised classically trained children will get it too.

(H/T Guns.com)

What we're up against

As promised here, it's time for an installment of my take of By the People by Charles Murray, which I am in the process of reading.  The first portion of the book summarizes his take on how we got to where we are today, under the boot heel of a lawless regulatory state.  The book will later get to his prescription for how we can deal with that, which I will get to in later posts.

But for our purposes here in analyzing the so-called and undefinable Benedict Option and perhaps other options to that Option, the first part of the book usefully illustrates just what we, as nominally free people, are up against.  Pace Barack Obama, we should identify the actual enemy in order to develop our strategy. Mr. Murray summarizes that quite well, I think:

To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong, unifying leader.  The were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective.  

And quoting Woodrow Wilson:

...government is not a machine, but a living thing.  It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.  It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. ... All that progressives ask or desire is permission -- in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word -- to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.

Brought to you by the progressive movement

By the People sets out how the progressives put these ideas into practice via the judiciary:  elimination of constitutional limitations on the federal government, enabling use of civil litigation as a tool of wealth transfer for the "collective good", and unleashing the lawless regulatory state.  Mr Murray also sets out why we can't undo those actions directly.

My take from this is that we are up against a progressive movement that believes that the experts and elites ("disinterested", of course) can and ought to use the power of the State to change social institutions for the collective good as they see it.  Worse yet, the progressive movement seems to believe that human nature has evolved -- in the Darwinian sense -- such that the constraints presented by pre-modern documents such as the Constitution, as written and adopted, must also evolve.

And this is why, IMO, the so-called Benedict Option (as best one can understand it) would be useless.  Our progressive regulatory oppressors, or at least the true believers among them, will not accept limits on their ability to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective, even to the extent of leaving small insignificant groups alone.  And arguing merely from "tradition" (as in the weak tea of Dreher's SSM opposition) will be considered irrelevant by the progressives; after all, human nature has evolved, and constitutional liberties are to be interpreted according to the Darwinian principle as a result.

To the extent argument can still be used (which Murray seems to believe will be eventually fruitless -- but I'll see how the rest of the book turns out on that point), it will be essential to apply reason, backed by the knowledge that acting in accordance with reason is consistent with revealed truth and God's nature.

And in a more practical sense, we must say "no".  This will be the topic of the second part of By the People, and I will keep y'all updated as I work through it.

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.

Now run along and have fun. If you place your spiritual faith in Rod Dreher long enough and have the courage to dig deep enough, there's got to be a pony for you underneath there somewhere. Honest.

Tom on the Benedict Option

Over at Disputations, Tom's not in the mood to waste words on the Benedict Option.

If you ever come across the term "the Benedict Option," there's really only one thing you need to know about: It's nonsense.

More precisely, it's a meaningless term, a cypher. The thing it refers to is a non-thing. As such, it can mean anything. And a term that can mean anything isn't worth talking about.

I agree with this assessment entirely. And yet the correction of errors often requires the dealing with non-things patiently and tirelessly. For example, the monster under the bed is a non-thing, but some people require night after night of sleeping in their parents' bed because they are obsessed with that non-thing, until finally they figure out it doesn't exist. Also some people don't want to go to the basement without at least their big brother because there's something scary down there if you happen to be alone.

Those are two examples that come to mind immediately, and it hasn't escaped my notice that they pertain to very immature minds. This is probably accordant with the whole point; Tom goes on:

"The Benedict Option" was a cypher when Rod Dreher coined the term nine or ten years ago, a contentless label generated as a placeholder for the idea he hoped would follow from his feelings on reading the last paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for an "idea he hoped would follow from his feelings". Waiting not for Godot, not for Benedict.... merely waiting for an idea that never took any discernible shape....

Since then, Rod has written a lot about "the Benedict Option" without managing to define it in a way anyone who doesn't find what he writes convincing can comprehend. These days, although he still can't say what it is, he does insist it's hugely important to every Christian in America:

Again and again: these are not normal times. We can’t be about business as usual. The future of Christianity in America will be Benedictine — as in Benedict Option — or it won’t be at all.

That might give one pause.

The Pause it gives me is akin to the town council's pause after Corky St. Clair announces his dollar figure in Waiting for Guffman.



The Pause is more real than the non-thing that is the Benedict Option because it actually does something. It asks a single, one-word question:

"Seriously?"

Read the whole thing over at Tom's. He really does have a great blog, and I don't check it out nearly enough. I'll just leave you with one more line of his which could serve as a conclusion to any and every post we do on the Benedict Option:

My advice to anyone who might be interested in "new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained" is to think about them without reference to Rod Dreher or "the Benedict Option."

Hear, hear.

Benedict Option Endorsed by National Newspaper

...or, I don't know, is The Onion international? Either way, a wise Soup Ladeler interviewed by the premium press outlet had this to say about Christianity's future with young, cool people:

“Yeah, but as soon as the church is obscure and hip again they’ll come rushing back.”

Some people try to make Christianity more relevant by accepting various disordered yet fashionable lifestyles like homosexuality. Other people try to make it more relevant by withdrawing from society and into a to-be-defined type of bunker. One might be morally worse, but neither ends up working.