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.

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: the blue pill of world-aversion

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is your response to the challenges facing Christianity if you've become grumpy and world-averse, not because of  "Low T" (No, really, he tells you himself, and see the beard? He's a lumberjack), but because you share the traits and values of a latent autistic-spectrum middle-aged man:

I told my wife the other day that as I’ve aged this last few years (I’m 48), I have seen latent autistic-spectrum tendencies within myself manifest more acutely. The other day I went into a restaurant in town to pick up some take-out food, and didn’t realize till I walked out how strangely I had behaved. I kept my eyes on my smartphone as I walked in, and barely looked up the whole time I sat at the counter and waited. I didn’t want to meet anybody’s gaze, because … why? Why was I so anxious?

This is happening more and more. I used to be very social, but I find now that solitude is what I crave most of all. I don’t think I’m seeking solitude from a position of strength, but from a position of weakness. I find it increasingly exhausting to be out and about, and I’m not sure why. I know I fought depression a couple of years ago, but I don’t think that’s what this is. You know what I think it is? Living most of my life online.

While we here at EQE may have been the first to point out that the ontology of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ perfectly mirrors and recapitulates his peculiar psychology - Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is nothing more or less than a visionary world 3D-printed from Rod Dreher's mind - we are hardly the only ones. Commenters on his own blog are saying the same thing to his face:

But I have to ask this, perhaps as the devil’s advocate. Is it possible that this aspect of your inner life is also partially behind your advocacy of the Benedict Option? I personally have always been attracted to the notion of a life of study and contemplation with like-minded fellows, cut off from the larger outer world which is going to hell in a handbasket, much as I imagine the monasteries of Europe functioned as the Dark Ages came crashing down upon the carcass of the Roman Empire. As appealing as I find this—I would love to spend time boning up on Latin and Greek—I always run up against the wall of the Gospels. As far as I can tell, Jesus called upon his followers to go forth and engage with the world, not withdraw from it, even in times of persecution—turning the other cheek and all that. We are supposed to be busy loving our neighbors, who are essentially defined as those as far removed from us as possible in society. How does something so fundamental become reconciled with the Benedict Option? And perhaps your personal inclination to live “not in the real world”?

However, if you're a woman in one of Rod's communes of petulant retreat, here's how you can probably expect to be treated if you don't tread the prescribed line:

amanda says:
May 15, 2015 at 6:23 pm

“… but I honestly don’t know if it will come down to actual persecution,…”

In Para 1 you are qualifying your persuecution …

BUT …

“Or, less kindly, it’s about telling the unwilling woman to lay back and enjoy it, because it’s really not so bad once you get used to it.”

… Para 4, you are comparing your situation to being raped.

Something very odd and insulting happened here.

[nfr: my, what a delicate flower. If you read in the newspaper someone accusing big business of "raping the environment," do you fall to pieces? -- rd]

The whole point of pursuing Christian religious liberty is to achieve Christian religious liberty, not to end up in a snark prison ruled by self-appointed cult patriarchs like Rod Dreher.

If you no choice but to share the traits and values of a grumpy, petulant, misogynistic latent autistic-spectrum middle-aged man, God bless you and keep you, and best of luck following the leadership of someone who's latest book on Dante is about the dark wood of consequences he found himself in when he tried to retreat to his home town and conduct a trial run of his Benedict Option™ among his family and friends, the people closest to him and who know him best.

However, if you don't share or can overcome those stunting traits which have led Rod Dreher on a spectacular career journey of bad reasoning and even worse choices, why not choose the Red Pill of reality instead?

Instead of the Blue Pill of Rod Dreher's solipsistic, latent-autistic Benedict Option™, choose the Red Pill instead, the Murray Option.

After all, our response to the challenges faced by Christians today should actually lead us to true religious liberty - and sooner, not later. It's not supposed to be just one more thing about the failing ways in which a Rod Dreher tries to apprehend the real world.

Solomon on the Benedict Option

It is said that many wise sayings have been attributed to Solomon when the original author is unknown. And so it is in this case, when Solomon comments insightfully on the Benedict Option while choosing to remain anonymous:

So, Christians, either you marinate in Rod's BO, or you have no future. Accept Rod, the author of the "How the World Wronged Rod Dreher" series, as your Highmost Patriarch, or the meanies on Twitter will tweet at you so often that you'll be forced to buy a cupcake from a gay person. Or something even more horrifying. Deeply inhale his BO, the BO of Truth! Only Rod's BO will repel the gays and liberal Christians enough to allow the establishment of Rod's long-prophesied New Jonestown... sorry, New Jerusalem, in which Rod will never get picked on again, and will forever be able to make fun of his family and the rubes in his hometown without being called on it (oh, and also where no one will ever mention the name "Harrison Brace", either).

Got it.

On a related note, people are complaining about his use of "apocalypse", pointing out - quite rightly - that if he has to continually explain and redefine a common word for his own uses, maybe he should just say it in a way people understand. Similarly, he should really, really coming up with a better acronym for his project than "BO". At that moment, I literally couldn't get through typing that sentence without an outburst of laughter. There has to be something else in "After Virtue" that will make him feel sufficiently philosophical. It'll give him a chance to actually read the rest of the book other than just the last page.

Harrison Brace showed up on the blog here about a year ago by the way.

This is a key point: "...if he has to continually explain and redefine a common word for his own uses, maybe he should just say it in a way people understand." Yes. Writing is supposed to be a form of communication after all, and, in my humble opinion, it can be done even in the context of 21st Century content provision. If many people continually misunderstand you then maybe you're doing it wrong.

I love "apocalypses". The best part is the commentary and analysis afterward.

An Option to the so-called Benedict Option?

While Dreher has spilled a tanker-load of virtual ink over at his blog about his so-called eponymous "Benedict Option", he hasn't yet figured out what he means by it.  OTOH, our discussions have identified at least two salient characteristics:  it's self-promoting if not self-aggrandizing (Dreher being the "self"), and it is essentially rolling into a ball and letting others do the fighting.

But just like the question of what the Repubs in Congress are going to propose in place of Obamacare should the Supreme Court (rightly) drive a stake into Obamacare, it is a fair question to wonder whether there are any options to the utopian Dreher Bunker Option.  Only here at EQE, unlike the weak-kneed GOP leadership in Congress, we're going to try to answer that fair question.

Some time back I linked to a blurb of a new book by Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart (which I highly highly recommend) and co-author of the much-discussed The Bell Curve.  The new book is By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission:

In last Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Murray contributed the Saturday Essay (read the whole thing, as they say -- no paywall) in which he summarizes this promising concept. Here are a couple of pull quotes:

It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country, you could live your life as you saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else.... Americans were to live under a presumption of freedom.... 

We now live under a presumption of constraint....The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980.  A comparative handful of those crimes are "malum in se" -- bad in themselves.  The rest are "malum prohibitum" -- crimes because the government disapproves....

Whether we are trying to raise our children, be good stewards of our property, cooperate with our neighbors to solve local problems or practice our religious faith, the bureaucrats think they know better. And when the targets of the regulator state say they've had enough, that they will fight it in court, the bureaucrats can -- and do -- say to them, "Try that, and we'll ruin you." 

For example, see the sub-headline here :

"relatively unregulated, but that could change".  I bet it could, and I bet it will.

So what to do?  Here's his proposal:

And so my modest proposal:  Let's withhold that compliance through systematic civil disobedience. Not for all regulations, but for the pointless, stupid and tyrannical ones....

The risk in doing so, of course, is that one of the 70-odd regulatory agencies will find out what you're doing and come after you.  But there's a way around that as well:  Let's treat government as an insurable hazard, like tornadoes.

Sounds promising.

At the nudging of others (thanks!), I'm about to start reading Murray's book on the subject.  I'll drop a post here every so often during the process for comment if you are so inclined.  No, not in Dreherian canto-by-canto-Dante style so you can tell me how awesome I am.  Nor will I be fishing for a publishing deal on my book about how someone else's book helped me deal with (sorta, kinda, but not really) my peculiar problems that others caused me.  But maybe, if this makes sense, we few -- we happy few -- can find a way to take action instead of heading to the bunkers.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE (already) :  Great minds ... etc.  Pauli's contemporaneous post immediately below hits this very same point at the very same time.  This passage he quotes is right on point with the above:

...the Catholic enclaves will have to be defended by Catholic lawyers and political activists.

The reference to Catholics is because the piece quoted was written to Catholics.  But as we of course know from history and as Murray notes above, it isn't just the Catholic enclaves that will have to be defended, but the founding idea of the Nation.

UPDATE 2nd:  Thanks, Pauli, for pointing out that I omitted the title of the Murray book.  Fixed that above.

Carson Holloway on the Benedict Option

Catholics are practical people, even though we have some strange beliefs and practices. Carson Holloway provides practical advice about the Benedict Option and how the special snowflakes who live in the Benedict Option compounds will have to be protected from the wolves in our society even as the Hobbits in Tolkien's Shire were protected by his Dúnedain. Excerpt:

At the same time, I don’t see how, realistically, the Benedict option can be an option that excludes political activism for American Catholics. That activism will have to continue, for a couple of reasons.

First, Catholics will have to do what they can to help the larger society as long as they seem to have any chance of success. To take the most obvious example, Catholics cannot responsibly withdraw from politics while there is still some chance of effecting change with regard to abortion. If abortion kills innocent human beings, then Catholic cannot just shrug it off and walk away from the grubby business of politics. They will have to stay involved.

Second, I suspect that political activism will be necessary in defense of the Benedict option. Successfully living the Benedict option requires that the larger culture will leave you alone to do so. There are fairly powerful forces in the culture that would be happy to leave Catholics alone to do so. But there are also fairly powerful forces–forces of fanaticism–that won’t want to leave Catholics alone to live their lives according to their own standards. So the freedom to live the Benedict option is attainable but also in danger.

Accordingly, the Catholic enclaves will have to be defended by Catholic lawyers and political activists.

This all stands to reason for anyone who understands the history or the world and the nature of evil, which are of course inexorably linked. Some Catholics will have to opt to be sheep dogs to use Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's analogy, an analogy recently popularized by the American Sniper book and movie. These people will not have the luxury of Benedict Option-ing.

I am planning to write more extensively on just how closely the Grossman/Kyle sheepdog analogy matches Tolkien's view of goodness, evil and just warfare in his Middle Earth, mainly because it is amazing to me how many Catholics who claim to know Tolkien's philosophy on these matters utterly misunderstand it. This was evidenced in spades during the Facebook conversation I recently mentioned. But I just want to conclude now by pointing out that if things are bad enough to describe them in apocalyptic language, then how can the planned withdrawal to little enclaves and platoons be anything which can be described as strategic when you are basically broadcasting this intention where your enemy can hear you loud and clear? Or, well, maybe I'm not being invited to all the clandestine planning meetings where they discuss secret tunnel entrances, etc. That's probably it.

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: Christianity's Don Draper in action

Because, as Pauli and Pikkumatti have each just amply demonstrated above, the one thing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ simply cannot be about logically is the defense and preservation of traditional Christianity in turbulent times, at the end of the day what is it?

Pure, unadulterated Madison Avenue, baby, where the Mad Man and his product are one and the same

Let's understand a reality at the outset. Like the very best whores, who don't present themselves as whores at all but as that woman you've been waiting for all your life (maybe a little bit of Mom, maybe a little of the Girl Next Door, and just enough of that one you really should have asked out but didn't but next time if there is one you betcha), the real Don Drapers of the world don't look or act like Don Drapers. They don't look like this:

That's what a TV show about a Don Draper Don Draper looks like.

Instead, a real Don Draper looks like this:

Awwww?!?! Like he just found a puppy! To the insecure, elderly lady who would easily drop kick the phone when the Jamaican scammer calls, this looks like what the aging, underutilized bosom has been waiting its whole life to embrace with a big old hug. What a sugar lump! Book ordered!

Similarly with other unfortunates of all stripes, from the revengeless nerd to the tenureless adjunct professor, this is the Online Friend, more important than they are, to be sure, but Not Too Good to like them. And to want to tell their story. And show them how to be saved.

Puppy Lump above is popularly known as a writer, occasionally mistakenly referred to as a journalist, but what he has in fact been for most of his career is a Don Draper, a packager and marketer of hopes, fears, anxieties and ideas, scavenged from others usually, but always in the service of his biggest client, himself.

His first book, Crunchy Cons, was just such a granola of disparate lifestyles and ideologies arbitrarily pulled together, slickly packaged, with a VW minibus and a Republican elephant (although Dreher has nothing but contempt for Republicans) on the cereal box cover instead of a toucan. And, of course, his breakthrough trademark brand: Crunchy Cons™.

Failing in the political counter-culture genre, he turned to the more dependable arena of bereavement: not everyone wears Birkenstocks, but everyone has family who die.

The rather foreseeable family backlash from turning his deceased sister into the next big breakfast cereal proved not to be a crisis for Don Puppy Lump, tilter at markets for himself, but another breakthrough opportunity: Ecce Puppy Lump, behold the victim, unjustly scourged by his own family, betrayed by his own body, ultimately to be saved by Dante - because Dante is quite trendy right now if you didn't know, but, more importantly, because a Medieval Italian poet provides a gateway back into the marketplace for Big Ideas.

Don Puppy Lump's first charge at the Big Idea market as editor of The John Templeton Foundation's new at the time Big Ideas Online blog (since reinvented at the liberal Slate) didn't fare that well. It seems someone named "Muzhik" couldn't keep his eye on the windmill and tried to run a squirrel up a tree instead.

But now he's back, making another run at the Big Ideas market with a brand pre-registered in the public consciousness as The Benedict Option™.

No one is quite sure what The Benedict Option™ product or service actually is or will be, but we are all already well-aware of its primary quality: it is as adhesive as The Booger from Hell. If you have an idea, or if a word is so reckless as to escape your mouth, The Benedict Option™ immediately sticks to it and incorporates it into itself like an amoeba absorbing its prey.

Unfortunately for Christians, somewhere along its travels this amoeba absorbed Christianity as its driving RNA. Conglomerated with everything else this amoeboid BO has accumulated along its eating tour - including not a small amount of its marketer's paranoid apocalyptic secular millenarianism - the Christianity of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is now expressing itself genetically like this from the apocalyptically entitled Christianity in Collapse:

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.

Well, there you have it, folks. From Christ's lips through Don Puppy Lump's white board to - who knows? - Guyana and beyond.

This is how a Don Draper repackages and markets ancient Christianity in an anxiety-ridden 21st CyberCentury. Call today! Operators are standing by.

Of course, you know, you could just go to church or Mass instead.