"Miserabiliousness"

A reader sent me this comment on Rod Dreher's post Everything as Miserabilism. The reader had attempted to post it in the combox over there, but it was not approved. That's OK; we'll just read it and discuss it here. If the reader wants to claim the comment, the reader might do so in the combox; I'm posting this with permission. I really don't think Dreher reads this blog, at least not very much.

RD: Everything As Miserabilism

Certainly somewhere, somehow, in all of this there has got to be a tie-in to The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.

Maybe Ruthie was a kind of anti-miserabilist.

RD: At the end of my years as a Catholic, I had allowed anger over the abuse scandal to become almost the only way I could relate to the Catholic Church.

This is about the 10th thousand time you have reminded everybody about this. We are getting weary and miserable hearing about it, yet one more time. I suspect you might be having a bout of miserabilism here because miserabilists love to remind everybody not only about all their present miseries but all their past ones as well.

Perhaps, anti-miserabilists make miserabilists especially miserable in that the miserabilists obsess about what it is about those anti-miserabilists that makes them so dang un-miserable. I imagine that some miserabilists, being so obsessed with this perplexing issue, can concoct some very elaborate and far-reaching theories regarding the nature of Anti-Miserabilism.

Miserabilists might say to themselves something like this: “Why are all these dang anti-miserabilists not properly miserable like us? It just cannot be right. Don’t they know what’s going on in the world? Don’t they know that there’s something wrong with Kansas? There has got to be some kind of connection to anthropology or philosophy here! Maybe there’s this cultural predisposition among some backwards people that causes them to be anti-miserable when they should be cultivating all the proper feelings of misery that advanced people like ourselves have? After all, to be miserable is to be enlightened and refined and educated. Or maybe it is the food the anti-miserabilists eat? They are not getting the necessary nutrients and gastronomic experiences needed to render them properly miserable like us. Or maybe they listen to too much Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and they just don’t read enough profound and intellectual books like we do? They just need to study more Ludwig Wittgenstein or Søren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer! Or Friedrich Nietzsche! Ah, we know! There has got to be a Unified Field Theory of Miserabilism. That explains it. It must be like matter and anti-matter meeting each other, except that instead of everything disappearing in a flash of gamma rays, their Anti-Misery Field causes our Misery Field to become even more amplified, thus making us even more miserable.”

Now here are my comments. Let's start off with some self-plagiarizing from two years ago. I made this in response to the anonymous Orthodox commenter; I provide his/her comment in italics:

There is no reason ever to convert to the Orthodox Christian faith unless one genuinely believes that it is the true faith. From the beginning, the signals from Mr. Dreher were that he did not convert to Orthodoxy because he believed it was the truth, but only because it was not the Catholic religion. It was sad to witness.

Thanks for this, Reader, you speak wisdom. We can't know for sure what is going on in someone's mind, but the evidence supports your balanced analysis.

If there is one thing I am trying to bring to light in my posts about Rod Dreher it is that he is haunted by the Catholic Church day and night. He can't stop writing about his Catholic experiences even when he tries to write about something else. He can't stop criticizing the Catholic church even when he is in the midst of criticizing a different church. He has become the professional ex-Catholic which he claimed to loathe. I see only one happy ending for Rod and that's to come back to the Catholic church quietly and take a seven year hiatus from writing about religion. If he can't bring himself to do the first, the least he could do would be to try the second.

I still stand by these words, and I'm still trying to hope that he does come back. People who consider themselves friends with Rod who are Catholic are certainly hoping that he returns. And they know that he knows that they want him to return to the church.

Here are my last thoughts about the matter. On the day I converted to the Catholic faith as an adult, a priest gave a group of us a talk basically stating that what we were about to do was one of the most serious and consequential things anyone could do. Based on that he said “No one will think or feel any less of you if you get up and leave and decide you don’t want to go through with it.” Something like that. I don’t know if Rod heard the same thing, but it really doesn’t matter—as a potential convert embracing the faith you know it already. I lost a lot of friends by converting, and my family was more religious than Rod’s so there were harder feelings there. Joining the Catholic church isn’t something you do on a whim. However it seems to me that Rod may have left on a whim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man has tremendous guilt feelings about leaving the Church, and he is constantly “kicking against the goads” so to speak, and blogging endlessly about his departure is his continuing attempt at catharsis.

I don't think it's working. He's been at this for years now. We notice that the man's miserabilism about Catholicism flares up whenever there is Catholic stuff in the news. Flannery O’Connor famously stated that she didn’t know if the American South was Christ-centered, but it definitely was “Christ-haunted”. And along those lines, I believe that this man is haunted by the Catholic Church.

A Reminder

I know this stuff is popping up everywhere to make sure conservatives aren't cowed by the accusation of inciting violence and as a (vain) attempt to shut the liberals up. But here are three really good links posted in the comments at this Slate article by commenter John Rohan to showcase the angry and violent tendencies of the American liberal:

• Cape Veterans. Anti-war nuts never fail to disappoint.
• Michelle Malkin. She kindly provides us with an "illustrated primer."
• Bin's Corner. A portfolio of Bush hatred and differing viewpoints on the best method to kill him.

Wow, I forgot about the Betty Williams stuff. It's in the 3rd link. Excerpt:

“I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent…. Right now, I would love to kill George Bush …. I don’t know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief.”

Was Betty Williams ever questioned or investigated for making a threat against Bush? No.

I Agree With Daniel Larison

Larison says here that "...[Jonah] Goldberg demonstrates once again that he still has no idea what "crunchy" conservatism is." And he is right because no one really knows what crunchy conservatism is. As Kathleen famously observed here:

"[C]runchy cons" is a cipher, therefore it's anything you want it to be. Great taste and less filling!

Of course, Bubba the Energizer Bunny has pointed out many times that Rod doesn't really know what crunchy conservatism is either. For example.

Jonah's post is sensible and worth reading, as usual. It's also read-able which distinguishes it from writing that blogger Mark Shea might nickname the "IreallyreallyreallyloatheJonahGoldbergandhislittledogtoo" blog.

Daniel Larison also comes to Crunchy Conservatism's defense, typically protesting that I don't know what I'm talking about. Uh huh. I read the book. I participated in endless debates with Rod about it when his original article came out. It seems to me that Larison wants it to mean something other than what Rod has said time again. Maybe this is because Larison thinks that Crunchy Conservatism amounts to a useful marketing tool for his brand of "paleo" conservatism. I don't know, and I'm not going to try to read the mind of someone who's shown such unremitting hostility towards me. But he does simply assert that Crunchy Conservatism is what he says it is — i.e. a reformulated anti-statist paleoconservatism which "abhors" federal interventionism — and I find his assertions otherworldly. I know Rod says some nice things about Russell Kirk and the Agrarians (though his use and abuse of Kirk left a lot of people cold). But that's hardly a compelling presentation of evidence.

Hey, go back and check out that Claremont review, "Soft in the Middle". It's a slam-dunk and it contains great lines such as

One supposes it would surprise Dreher to know that achieving a workable balance between "we" and "I" is one of the defining achievements of Western civilization, an achievement that goes a long way to explain why the East, and not the West, has been historically mired in despotism (see Herodotus, et al.).

Also, while we're on the subject of smack-downs, Kathleen just reminded me of the insightful Mises.org article which came out exactly a year ago entitled "Crunchy Conned". Excerpt:

It never occurs to the author that his crunchy way of living is a consumable good — nay, a luxury good — made possible by the enormous prosperity that permit intellectuals like him to purport to live a high-minded and old-fashioned lifestyle without the problems that once came with pre-capitalist living.

He has fallen for some romantic notion of the past — happy, faithful communities raising their own food and working their own land — without considering the downside: infant mortality, plagues, lack of sanitation, short lives, surgery without anesthesia, and all the rest. The market — that global matrix of exchange that forms its own order out of billions of individual decisions — is his benefactor, and he seems completely unaware of it. A writer like this can make an economist wish that the invisible hand were slightly more visible so that at least its merits could be appreciated.

There are times when his romanticism is overt: as when he favorably cites John Ruskin's claim that the Industrial Revolution "came at the cost of [England's] soul" and ended up "debasing the soul of man by treating people as mere consumers." This line of thinking makes good poetry but has nothing to do with reality. How does a switch from wood fuel to fossil fuel debase the soul?

All good stuff by these "smart guys".But indulge this average American and let me, for the record, explain to everyone what crunchy conservatism means to me. I just thought of this while playing Rockem Sockem Robots the other night. Remember the old commercial saying that "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum"? Crunchy Conservatism is embodied by that fifth dentist who flatly refused to be controlled by the corporate interests and all that. We don't really know what this wise prophet standing alone on the mountain peak recommended chewing, if anything, but I believe that whatever it was it is most certainly the key for our very survival, the regaining of our......"lost community soul". (Oooh! That was a good one! Yeah!) What do you think? What does Crunchy Conservatism mean to you?