OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I don't want to get bogged down in an assessment of his career or character - what I would say is that this is explicitly the position that he argues for. Whether he's hypocritical or ineffective is, strictly speaking, beside the point, and I would argue that even evangelicals that strongly disagree with or even loathe David French as an individuals adopt a similar strategy.
What is, say, Al Mohler's strategy for Christianity in a de-Christianising America? I think it is, much like French's stated approach, summarisable as "just win the argument". The base structure of the American polity is not the problem - Christians don't need to seize the government or radically change the meaning of the constitution. What they have to do is get out there and win the culture. In this way both Mohler and French are operating in an evangelical tradition that goes back decades. It's the same playbook that someone like Billy Graham followed. Teach the nation. Nourish the public square. Win souls to Christ through public witness.
For what it's worth there are absolutely Catholic apologists who will argue that the modern day Catholic Church resembles the early church in form and structure. For instance, from Surprised by Truth, a book of testimonies by former-evangelical converts to Catholicism:
[Paul Thigpen:] Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the “primitive” Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I’d been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a “New Testament” model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and “Bible-only” teaching. But the early Church, I found, was, in reality, liturgical in worship; translocal and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred tradition that included the scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.
[Steve Wood:] During my Calvary Chapel days, I had a very low view of the sacraments; I was almost antisacramental. But when I discovered the true role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship and living, a corresponding appreciation for the role of the Church began to blossom. That’s when I did something really dangerous. I started reading the early Church Fathers firsthand. I had studied some early Church history, but too much of it was from perspectives limited by Protestant history textbooks. I was shocked to discover in the writings of the first-, second-, and third-century Christians a very high view of the Church and liturgy, very much unlike the views of the typical Evangelical Protestant. The worship and government of the early Church didn’t look anything like the things I saw at Calvary Chapel or in my own congregation. It looked a lot more, well, Catholic.
[Bob Sungenis:] Many Protestants claim that the Church of the first three centuries was a “pure” church, and only after the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine (in AD 312) did the church become “Catholic” and corrupt. But upon studying this issue, I found that the doctrines of post-Constantine Catholicism are the same doctrines, some in more primitive form, that were held by Christians for the preceding three centuries.
My study of the writings of the Church Fathers revealed that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession of sins to a priest, baptismal regeneration, salvation by faith and good works done through grace, that one could reject God’s grace and forfeit salvation, that the bishop of Rome is the head of the Church, that Mary is the Mother of God and was perpetually a virgin, that intercessory prayer can be made to the saints in heaven, that purgatory is a state of temporary purification which some Christians undergo before entering heaven. Except for the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary, all of these doctrines were repudiated by the Protestant Reformers. If the Catholic Church is in error to hold these beliefs, then it was in error long before Constantine legalized Christianity. This would mean that the Church apostatized before the end of the first century, when the apostles were still alive! An absurd theory which even the most anti-Catholic of Protestants can’t quite bring themselves to accept.
[Julie Swenson:] John Henry Newman, the famous Evangelical Protestant convert to Catholicism, once said, “Knowledge of Church history is the death of Protestantism.” He was right. My study of the early Church showed clearly that it was Catholic in its beliefs and practices—in fact, it had begun calling itself “Catholic” at least as early as the end of the first century.
Now, most of this is cherry-picking similarities and ignoring differences, or misrepresenting an early church that is a lot messier than this text admits - but nonetheless "the early church looked like the Catholic Church" is a claim that apologists make.
(And who the heck thinks that John Henry Newman was ever an evangelical Protestant?)
Realistically, I'd bet that if you had a time machine, the very early church would not easily slot into any of these confessional disputes. The early church was a scattered, often incoherent mess, and Catholic attempts to, for instance, project an episcopacy (much less a papacy!) back into the early church are extremely implausible. Probably partisans of every tradition would find elements of the early church that feel uncomfortable to them. Unfortunately much of the early church is poorly-known, leaving it something of a blank canvas for later traditions to project their presuppositions back on to.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
In my experience that's just a Catholic thing? Every non-Catholic church I've ever been to, even the woolly, beige, mainline, progressive/hippie types, has had a social gathering after church, tea and biscuits, the whole shebang, and if you're new they will invite you to join them with almost aggressive friendliness. As far as my life has gone it's pretty much only Catholics who go to mass, receive communion, and then get out without socialising.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
This might be your view on "separation of church and state." But I've encountered quite a lot of people, over more than 20 years, who disagree. Who argue that no, you can't vote your faith; or, at least if you do, that vote can't be allowed to influence the laws and government, because if it did, that would violate the separation of church and state, because said separation means the government is forbidden for doing anything that originates in religious belief.
I remember it coming up on euthanasia as well: note the question "Is your personal conscience so intertwined with your faith that you can’t make a distinction?", as if the interviewer thinks that people of faith ought to somehow divorce their entire worldview from their decision-making process.
Now Williams gives the correct answer, which is that of course his thought process is shaped in fundamental ways by his understanding of reality, which includes God, Christ, and so on, but that he also understands himself to have an obligation to speak into the public square in ways that are morally and intellectually legible even to non-Christians, but I think it's still striking that he even needs to explain this very basic principle.
But of course religious people can and should make political decisions based on their faith commitments. How could they possibly not?
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
This is probably the biggest barrier separating me from evangelicals at this point. I understand the temptation to burn down all the institutions, or to have our guy who hits back, or however you want to frame it, but I can't help but see that as strikingly inconsistent with the Christian behaviour, especially that of the early church, that we aspire to. Nowhere in scripture do I find anything that seems to support making pragmatic deals with villains for temporary benefit - on the contrary, the advice we are given is as follows.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Does this mean to give into every single progressive cultural issue? No, of course not. But I think it does rule out a certain kind of means-end pragmatism, where we do evil so that good may come. As you say, this does not demand total and unqualified meekness. We don't have to be doormats. But we should show moral integrity, forgiveness, and mercy, even in the face of persecution. "Never avenge yourselves" is pretty darn black and white.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Yes, I think that's fair. I do criticise Dreher sometimes, because as a person he clearly does not have his life together and I can't help feeling a lot of pity for him, and his post-Benedict books are generally bad, but most of The Benedict Option is basically correct. Evangelical emphasis on mission is good and necessary, and even if not taking power, navigating a world of politics and enemies is also necessary, but neither of those tasks supply their own justification. Without the internal formation necessary to sustain their sense of purpose, both will fail or become corrupted. Constant internal renewal, which is nurtured through things like discipline, community life, study, and prayer, is necessary. Insofar as the Benedict Option calls for that renewal I wholeheartedly endorse it.
I just sometimes can't resist taking the cheap shot, which is... well, as much as Dreher is annoyed by people saying Benedict is about retreat, the fault is at least partly his for poor communication, and I'd argue that the book does advocate a kind of retreat. It doesn't advocate unilateral retreat or surrender, but it does say that Christians should avoid or reduce focus on some of the fights they've currently been having while renewing a focus on internal cultivation. I'd say it's a call to pull back, or perhaps to fortify. I'd characterise that as a tactical retreat. I see that Dreher is not saying "we're routed, abandon ship!", but the change of emphasis or redirection of effort he calls for strikes me as a kind of retreat.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
I think this is a lasting fear that's characteristic of evangelicals. Sometimes it does verge on paranoia, but there's also plenty of evidence of it being a justified fear. Evangelicals are very distrustful of people who are successful in the secular world. If you can hold on to your evangelical faith in academia or politics, great, and there are some examples of people who've done that and retain credibility, but it's rare. There is a strong sense that these fields are solvents for faith, or examples of 'the world' in the biblical sense.
As a product of higher education myself I have to remind myself not to scoff at this fear. There are plenty of reasons to think it justified. It does also inhibit power-seeking in society. But that may be a feature, not a bug.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
Oh, absolutely. Somebody - possibly me? - needs to one day delve further into that world and write an effortpost on the postliberal world. It's almost entirely illiberal Catholics now, and it seems like they all converged on this position very swiftly. I'm not sure what I think the common factor is yet.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
This has been my experience with Catholics, for what it's worth - even just anecdotally, I have heard plenty of jokes along the lines of, "I'm a Catholic and that's why I don't give a fig what the pope says".
I think you're right that some of it is due to different ways of identifying church members, at least. If you are baptised Catholic, you are on Catholic church rolls forever (or at least until you formally make them take you off, which almost nobody bothers to do), which tends to inflate the number of on-paper Catholics, and there are a lot of people who are 'Catholic' in a woolly cultural way without ever going to mass. By contrast, I think being on an evangelical church roll, or simply identifying as evangelical, is more likely to correlate with actually going to church.
So you're right that culture, so to speak, is often more powerful than written doctrine. Most Catholics have not read the Catechism, and those who have usually consider themselves free to disagree with it. Highly committed Catholics are a tribe unto themselves. Evangelicals don't have a single book like that (or, well, they are committed to their single book being the Bible, and nothing else), but evangelicals seem to more consistently hold to a set of common practices.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Right, this is basically what I have in mind - 'liberal' as in classical liberalism or liberal democracy, which is to say individualism, rights and liberties, protection for individual conscience, and so on.
Evangelicals are the 'liberal' option here because the traditional political theology of American evangelicals accepts things like the US constitution, freedom of speech, freedom of religion (and resists the idea of state churches), and so on, whereas traditional Catholic (and to an extent Orthodox) political theology accepts that the state can and should use coercion in matters of religion.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Ha! Let's hope so. One of my more cringeworthy opinions is that I genuinely like a lot of contemporary worship music. Liking Matt Redman is pretty lame, but you know what, those songs are catchy and uplifting, and there is value in that. I like Gregorian chants as well, but I guess I like all kinds of music. Heck, I kind of like Dan Schutte and Marty Haugen, so clearly I have no musical taste at all.
The figures are sobering, at any rate - for all that there's been time spent online talking about people flocking to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, those traditions are declining or at best holding steady. Evangelicals are the ones holding on. Maybe part of that is just because they are willing to occupy the public space, with less hesitation.
I wonder, though, how much we should factor in the changing nature of evangelical identification? There was a trend, I seem to recall, of otherwise-non-churchgoing conservatives starting to identify as 'evangelical Christian' without changing anything about their behaviour. Call that solidaristic identification, I suppose, because it seems like an identification with other parts of a political coalition. How widespread are changes like that?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This is, as I understand it, largely correct.
Israel certainly isn't wholly innocent of persecuting Christians. Israel is, intentionally, a country where the normative religion is Judaism, and everything else is subject to a measure of hostility. It is harder to be an Arab Christian in Israel than it is to be a Jew, and obviously that has something to do with the state's constitution. It is, however, still better to be a a Christian in Israel than to be a Muslim, and perhaps more importantly for comparative purposes, it's better to be an Israeli Christian than it is to be a Christian in almost any other Middle Eastern nation.
Again, not perfect, there are difficulties, and Israel is by no one's standards a shining beacon of religious neutrality and liberalism. But Israel is very easily one of the least-bad countries in the region.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's just trolling - it's trying to appeal to internet edgelords even at the expense of the movement it supposedly endorses. The only correct move for pro-life activists is to denounce it immediately.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I mentioned a little while back that I meant to write a top-level post about religion, denominational tradition, and political theology. I could draft and re-draft forever but an imperfect post that spurs conversation is better than a perfect post, so here we go.
In that previous discussion I described three 'options' for conservative or small-o orthodox Christian engagement with a culture that is largely abandoning Christian faith. I can't imagine I need to do much to prove that American culture is increasingly abandoning Christianity - the abandonment is especially obvious on the left, but even on the right, the Trump/MAGA right, despite occasionally making gestures in this direction, is substantially post-Christian.
The options I described, named after conservative Christians who have discussed some of these issues in the public square, are 1) the French Option, after David French, 2) the Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule option, after Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, and 3) the Dreher Option, after Rod Dreher. (And of course choosing this language is riffing on Dreher's book The Benedict Option.)
What I noticed after writing that older post was that these options line up very easily with the three major branches of global Christianity - Protestantism (especially evangelical Protestantism, in the US), Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. The identification of the French Option with Protestantism needs to be nuanced somewhat; French is an evangelical specifically, and I think all these three options rise out of the collapse of the former American mainline. Mainline Protestantism constituted a kind of religious default for American society and a grounding set of institutions and values alike, but as it declines, there is competition over the void. Arguably there is a fourth option I haven't named - Progressive Christianity or Wokism or something else, call it the Bolz-Weber Option or something - but for now I am restricting myself to options for more-or-less conservative Christians.
Let's delve into these options a bit more.
Evangelical Protestantism is the youngest tradition of the three and has developed under conditions of American liberalism. It is therefore the most comfortable with liberal norms. It also tends to be very skeptical of hierarchies, institutions, and regulations - in part due to its own origins in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a kind of rebellion against theological modernists. Buried deep in the DNA of evangelicalism is a sense that one might be betrayed by one's own leadership, and I think we often find evangelicals with an in-principle hostility to higher organisation. Thus there is no one Evangelical Church, but rather scattered networks of independent churches, affiliating and disaffiliating and splitting and fusing as they feel called to do so. Enthusiastic church planting and charismatic celebrity pastors are products of this culture, as is frequent doctrinal dispute. There are loose ways for evangelicals to identify each other, from the Bebbington quadrilateral to simply asking whether a church is 'bible-believing', but there is, intentionally, no umbrella authority. Evangelicals thus also tend to be the most overtly patriotic Americans and are the most tightly wedded to the American project as such - they're the most likely to put tacky American flags up around churches! National or civic identity comes in to provide some of the structure that might otherwise come from a church hierarchy. (It's evangelicals who will sometimes talk about the US constitution being inspired by God, for instance, something very alien to other traditions.)
The French Option is the one I would summarise as "just win the argument". The gospel truth is mighty and will prevail. All you need to do is get out there, present the gospel, and let the Spirit do the rest. Virtue and moral character are important, but they cannot be compelled or produced by any coercive institution - they come from local practices and must be nurtured in local, congregational contexts, attentive to the word of God. Liberalism and viewpoint neutrality are not problems to be solved, but rather are themselves the opportunities to grow the church and create disciples.
All that said, the French or evangelical option is complicated significantly by Trump, with French himself badly out of step with most evangelicals. To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself. (And scandalous as Trump is, misbehaving mega-pastors are hardly new.) The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
To put a positive spin on it, the strength of the evangelical approach is that it has deep roots in American folkways, is easily compatible with the liberal American project, and it has a kind of confidence about itself that ought not be underrated. Its great weakness, I think, is the question of what happens if it can't 'win the argument'. What happens then? That's where we might see more of this flirting with authoritarian politics.
Of course, authoritarianism is nothing new to the second tradition, Roman Catholicism, and its integralist exponents today. I should make clear at the start that Catholicism is by far the largest individual church tradition in America (and certainly worldwide) and therefore admits of a great deal of diversity and factional strife. In this context I'm interested in the advocates of an expressly political Catholicism.
Here it is worth noting that Catholicism's relationship with political liberalism has always been strained. Up until the 1960s, the Catholic Church was more-or-less openly at war with liberalism, and continued to hold that the correct formation of a polity was for the secular authority to be subject to, or at least receiving direction from, the church. The history of Catholic-state relations in early 20th century Europe is illuminating in this regard; even in France, up until WWII there continued to be traditionalist hardliners condemning secularism and laicite as mistakes. America posed a problem - you may recall Catholics around 1900 explaining that the church ought to "[enjoy] the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority", and should not support separation of church and state. (Note that that was Pope Leo XIII, whom the current pope named himself after.) I was struck by a 1909 defense of forbidden books explaining plainly that it is the church's duty to watch over society and ban immoral speech. Vatican II represented, in some ways, the Catholic Church making peace with liberalism, but it has been an unsteady alliance, and I interpret the modern-day crop of integralists as looking back to an earlier model of church relationship with the state.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
In its full extent this vision is almost certainly unrealisable, at least in the United States - it's hard to imagine non-Catholics ever acceding to it, even among Catholics it is a tiny minority, and Catholic religious authorities, up to the pope himself, seem at best uninterested and at worst actively hostile to this vision. But to smaller extents it may be realisable or even influential in trying to push the United States more towards morals legislation, and Catholic politicians like J. D. Vance may be swayable to an extent. Moreover, among the three options I describe, the Catholic integralists stand out as the only ones with a clear plan to seize and utilise state power, which makes the prospect of their success - even if only a partial success - much more consequential.
The third option is one I've associated with Rod Dreher and therefore with Eastern Orthodoxy, though Dreher himself is an odd duck and not a great representative of the majority of Orthodox communities in the US. The thing about Orthodoxy is that, despite a handful of prominent converts, it primarily exists in ethnic enclaves, owing to the Orthodox churches' historical links to particular national communities. Both Protestants and Catholics have, in different ways, worked out how to evangelise to entirely new people and communities; I don't think the Orthodox have. (They have historically, looking at the spread of Orthodoxy across much of Eurasia; I just mean the modern day.) Traditionally Orthodox churches have been closely bound to political authority, and in some ways that's a pattern we still today with the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the Greek Orthodox tradition spent centuries existing within the Ottoman Empire, which I think gave a lot of Orthodox churches a habit of bunkering up and focusing on surviving and passing down the faith under conditions of being a minority, with little chance of dominating the wider society. To an extent the pattern repeats with the Russians under Soviet control, though since then the Russian Orthodox seem to have re-established the traditional alliance with the state. The point is that there is a deep well of resources, in the Orthodox tradition, for how to exist as a kind of society-within-a-society, without realistic hope of either converting the masses or obtaining power.
In practice, then, Orthodox communities in America and other Western nations tend to be expatriate or immigrant communities, relatively less interested in conversion, and more focused on internal discipline and cultivation. You can easily see the appeal for thinkers like Dreher, who believe that Christianity as a whole in America is soon going to be in the position of Orthodox in the Soviet Union, or in the Ottoman Empire.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. To many in the first two camps, this is abandoning the field before battle has been truly joined. If the Orthodox were to give battle, so to speak, they would need to find some way to compensate for their low numbers and their lack of institutional strength, most likely through alliance with this or that other Christian group. I find it unlikely that this will happen.
Perhaps more relevant to America as a whole are non-Orthodox churches or communities who nonetheless take the Orthodox, Dreher option. The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
Where does this leave conservative Christians in the US overall?
I think they're caught between several bad options. Both the "just win the argument" and the "seize state power" approaches seem very unlikely to succeed in the near or even medium term; and "retreat inwards, focus on community formation" is good as far as it goes, but represents a cession of huge amounts of cultural territory that Christians are rightly reluctant to cede.
I don't mean any of this as a counsel of despair myself - these are all judgements predicated on a cultural situation that itself may not last. At any rate, Christians are called to follow Jesus without counting the cost, so in a sense stressing over tactics like this is beside the point, or at the very least, a second-order consideration.
In terms of my own bias, it should be clear that I have the least affinity for the Catholic, Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule approach - I believe I called them 'bootlickers' last time. I admire the optimism and confidence of the evangelical approach even if I think it is often wide open to heretical teachings or pseudo-idolatry (which is how I think of most of MAGA), and I respect the Orthodox approach even if I think it is fundamentally limited. Personally what I hope for is a combination of the evangelical view of the world as mission space and its non-hierarchical, liberal approach to conversion with the focus on interior cultivation and community practice of Orthodox communities, but it is very rare that I get what I hope for in any field. So it goes.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
In the 15th century? We're talking about the end of the Reconquista, aren't we? I would have thought it would be hard to deny that in the 15th century the Spanish crown was definitely on the upswing. My thought is that the rise of the Catholic Monarchs, the successful (re)conquest of the entire peninsula, the Spanish Inquisition, and (some decades later) the colonisation of the Americas were all part of a big run of Spanish success.
I don't take the flow of American silver and gold into Spain as being the key factor here because the upswing we're talking about begins in the 15th century - we're talking 1480s onwards, aren't we?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
More wokeness benefits Nick Fuentes. The stronger the woke get, the stronger their right-wing mirror-image get. If America is well-governed by a functional conservative coalition and most people feel more-or-less happy with their governance, Fuentes has no audience.
Now he's doing well at the moment, but then, America is not well-governed at the moment either. Trump has disastrously low approval ratings and has failed to unify the country. In a sense, Fuentes was in a no-lose situation.
Extremists benefit from chaos and incompetence. Fuentes is no exception.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
By the same token you might point out that the First Amendment coincided with the rise of the United States from backwater ex-colonies to global superpower. X happening at the same time as Y just doesn't prove much about God's will.
In the case of Spain, there's an obvious common explanation - unifying the peninsula (except for Portugal) allowed for a huge increase in both the resources and more importantly the state capacity of the Spanish crown, allowing it to engage in a number of large-scale projects, including the colonisation of the Americas, the flourishing of early modern Spanish culture, and the inquisition. Some of these projects were good and some of them were bad. It's quite superstitious itself to declare that they must all be lumped together, or were all causative of each other. The inquisition caused cultural flourishing? Might as well argue the reverse as well - cultural flourishing causes religious persecution! This is not good logic.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
This sounds a lot like what Scott described as 'phatic' speech.
I mentioned recently that I work in a caring profession and spend most of my time talking to people. One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic. The goal of the conversation is not to arrive at insight, but rather to make a person feel heard, appreciated, and validated. Even if I am going to forget everything we talked about by lunchtime - and I confess that I usually am - my purpose in the space is not to learn or assimilate facts, or engage in some kind of analysis, but rather to convey to the person I am caring for, "You are important, and I care about you".
This goes especially for when people want to talk about politics. Smile, nod, show sympathy, but don't get into an argument or even an analysis. Sometimes people will say things I disagree with strongly and I'll just file away that disagreement and ask an open question. If someone rants about this or that politician, there are a lot of ways to politely engage in and redirect that conversation without either lying or making it a contest. Gaza is one that comes up sometimes, and I have gotten pretty good at noncommittal ways to move that one along.
People are usually not trying to share facts, and if you treat every conversation as an exercise in collaborative truth-seeking, you are the creepy weirdo, not them. Sometimes the correct response is to just nod, smile, say "yeah, I know where you're coming from", and then say something else. If someone says to me, "ugh, my job was awful today, I hate capitalism", I don't jump in with facts and arguments about how 'capitalism' however defined is not the reason why work is tedious and boring. I say, "oh gosh, sounds like you had a hard day, can I get you a cup of tea?", and then we move on.
Now you are correct that this kind of conversation is politically productive, and the kinds of complaints you can make are reflective of overall shifts. To use the above example, I pretty much never hear "ugh, I hate capitalism" from older people, but younger generations are much more likely to use that phrase as a generic statement of unhappiness. That does reflect a shift in values and political priorities. This goes for politicians as well - whether, in a particular local context, someone uses "ugh, Trump sucks" or "thanks Obama" or "let's go Brandon" as a casual complaint is genuinely reflective of something, and your phatic response to that serves to normalise that complaint. The same goes for praise as well; I have noncommittally nodded along to a lot of praise of Jacinda Ardern. But I tend to think these conversational changes are downstream of larger changes, and that the direction of the stream cannot be reversed by arguing or quibbling on this casual level. From an activist perspective, the way you should respond to or change the view of the "I hate capitalism" girl is not to argue with her on the spot, but to change the affect she associates with the word or concept of capitalism. You can't change the direction of the ocean currents by pushing the froth on the surface in the opposite direction; and we're mostly talking about conversational froth here.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
My rule of thumb with Wikipedia is:
Anything well-known (in the community of Wikipedia editors) and uncontroversial (in the community of etc.) is likely to be reliable. Look up, say, Maxwell's equations and you will find detailed and reliable information.
Anything well-known and controversial is going to be well-sourced but unreliable, likely in the direction of the preponderance of sources used by Wikipedia, which tend to be heavily biased not only towards left-wing sources, but also towards free sources on the internet. Wikipedia prohibits 'original research' which means that it will tend to uncritically repeat the syntheses found in supposedly reliable sources. So, for instance, Wikipedia's page on the January 6 riots is going to be a very well-sourced summary of the 'orthodox' liberal line.
Anything not well-known, regardless of controversy, is usually going to be the playground of whoever cares enough to write the article, which may be just one or two people. This used to be seen much more widely, but today it's easiest to find this when looking for articles on non-Western history, culture, or art. An article on an obscure non-Western monarch, for instance, may well be written and edited only by a single enthusiast from that monarch's own culture. One example of this at the moment might be the article on King Zhou of Shang, which includes a long excursion, footnoted exclusively to Chinese sources, dedicated to arguing that Zhou is the victim of a historical hit job and was not really that bad. This reads like the work of a single devoted Chinese editor, which remains on Wikipedia mainly because very few editors of English Wikipedia know or care about King Zhou.
In general Wikipedia will give you a summary of the consensus view of Western popular academia (that sounds like a contradiction, but I trust you know what I mean), with a moderate liberal bias. On subjects that are not heavily politicised, this is pretty decent. On subjects that are not subject to significant academic controversy, or which aren't extremely technical, this is also often decent. But on other subjects Wikipedia can range from actively misleading to outright spreading falsehoods.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
It has to ground out in something more than just pay, though, doesn't it? The idea that anything is productive if people are willing to pay for it would seem to make the idea of an unproductive or wasteful job impossible. But in practice we seem to understand that there are jobs that draw a paycheck without providing any real benefit.
I'd like to believe there's a difference between jobs like mine, which do produce benefits even if those benefits are not easily measured, and jobs that simply don't produce benefits at all.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I find productivity a particularly tricky concept in fields that don't, well, produce things in the traditional sense. For instance, I work in a caring profession. I spend most of my work time talking to people, logging that I talked to people, diagnosing people in need of being talked to, and bringing in outside specialists to talk to people. I don't prescribe any medicines, and I don't build or create anything physical. The outcomes of my work are all psychological - if I'm doing my job right, I make people feel better about their lives.
Is that productive? How would you go about quantitatively measuring my work? The best we can do is send around surveys and ask people how happy they are, and try to get some statistics going, but in my experience the survey process is so messy and full of confounders that I just don't think it tells us much.
Productivity seems like a measure that comes out of physical industries, like agriculture or manufacturing. It is easy to measure productivity when there is some kind of measurable product at the end. Is this farm more productive than that farm? Easy, let's look at how much grain each produces. It gets more complicated around manufacturing - a smaller number of higher quality products versus a larger number of lower quality products - but at least some of the same principles seem to apply.
But there is a lot of work that produces ephemeral things. Lots of work produces experiences. How do you measure, say, the productivity of a chef? At the most basic level, number of people fed, I guess, but in practice what a chef - and a whole restaurant - produces is not a certain number of calories on a plate, but rather a whole dining experience, and that's what people pay for.
Bare productivity seems like a useful metric in some contexts, but I am wary of applying it globally.
I think the real question is more like, "How much do we value this work?" That's inevitably a values-laden question, and cannot be answered outside of particular cultural contexts.
The question around the retirees is more about earning or deserving. Do these people deserve the benefits they are currently receiving? Have they earned them by doing work that other people value or appreciate? But that seems like a subtly different question to productivity, to me.
I'm aware - I do recognise your name from SB. I am also, sadly, familiar with the other people you mentioned as well, though I had better avoid going to any more details.
I'm happy to talk more privately, but as far as it goes for the Motte, I think the upshot is that those boards aren't really good alternatives if what you want is nuanced political conversation on the internet. I am very sympathetic to wanting an alternative to the Motte; SB and its splinters just aren't that alternative.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Well, SV was a Blueskyisation, which is its own form of seven zillion witches. The most progressive posters, mainly those who were fans of a censorious power mod (who in my view did deserve to be fired, but the firing process was arbitrary and incompetent), schismed off to their own website. As SB has coalesced more around progressive norms, that site's comparative advantage has faded and it's now dying. The Sietch was a second schism, that time over another case of staff arbitrariness and incompetence but that time related to the right-wing fringe. SB hasn't become more open to hard-right views, so the Sietchers have not returned.
QQ and DWW are a different situation. QQ was just people angry they couldn't post porn, and DWW was a single charismatic jerk angry about getting into trouble, who went off to start his own forum with blackjack and hookers where all speech would be allowed. DWW as far as I can tell never had much life in it at all. QQ survives just because, well, people like their NSFW quests.
I would not recommend any of them for serious political discussion. The Sietch and SV are small, bitter echo chambers. QQ and DWW don't really have lasting politics discussions at all. And SB is a much larger but equally pointless echo chamber. Outside the occasional insightful poster, I'd say they're all around Reddit tier or lower.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
The Sietch is a bit too spittle-flecked for the tastes of most Mottizens, I think; and too dominated by the same half-dozen or so regulars.
The SB diaspora is a good example of the wider tragedy of the fragmenting internet. What used to be a more close-knit community with a range of opinions has, as it has grown, also narrowed its window for acceptable speech and become something of a shadow of its current self. It's a good example of self-siloing and the seven zillion witches effect.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think French would take two tacks here. Firstly, he'd argue that you underestimate what is and remains possible for Christians in the United States. It's all very well for you say that viewpoint neutrality is a spook, and only applies in some narrow scenarios, but those narrow scenarios undoubtedly matter. If you're proposing abandoning the kinds of constitutional protections that grant Christians rights to public spaces, it seems reasonable for people like French to point to the cost. Secondly, he'd challenge you as to what your alternative is. Fine, abandon the idea of viewpoint neutrality, and perhaps even the whole idea of classical liberalism. What then? What do you want to build instead?
For what it's worth I think that final crack about "assuming he doesn't know perfectly well" is conspiratorial and beneath you. Nor do I think French is particularly an obstacle to other Christians. French's entire position is for more free expression, more free association, and more free use of public resources, even for people whom he profoundly disagrees with. In what way is he standing in the way of anyone, much less other Christians? French has never to my knowledge said or done anything to limit the expression or mobilisation of people like Ahmari. What are the obstacles? I see French as one American Christian among many, who is trying to hold to a set of principles and navigate a very difficult cultural moment. His existence in no way inhibits others.
One side note that I'd meant to put into my last post, and which I am tossing up maybe putting into a top-level post - I think it is very relevant that French is an evangelical Protestant and Ahmari is a Catholic. Evangelicals tend to be much more skeptical of institutions and more in favour of liberalism, in part because of the role of Protestantism in the American founding, and in part because, going back to the modernist controversy, they have experienced betrayal by their own institutions. So they tend to be very skeptical of any argument that we need a strong, paternalistic authority, whether secular or religious, to get us all on the same page. Ahmari is an Iranian (cultural background more comfortable with religious authority wedded to state power) convert to Catholicism (a top-down hierarchical institution that up until the 1960s explicitly held that states ought to follow the direction of the church). If you'll pardon the slur, it does not surprise me that Ahmari is, by disposition, more of a bootlicker than French. Ahmari is coming from traditions that accept the right and even the duty of religious authorities to order society in a top-down way for the common good; French is coming from a tradition that sees that vision as prone to corrupt both true religion and civic society.
I remember a Catholic friend of mine once joking that there is nothing so Protestant as caring deeply about the Vatican's opinion on something.
To be fair to them this kind of casual disobedience of otherwise-well-understood rules is very common among religions. There are large parts of the world where Muslims casually drink alcohol. Most Jews don't entirely keep kosher, though many partially keep it. Catholics, of course, famously disregard the rules on everything from contraception to the Friday fast to the Sunday mass obligation. Even when the bright-line rules are universally known - as they generally are among practitioners of the religion - they are often only casually or partially observed.
In this context scrupulous observance is more common among converts than among people raised into the tradition. If you're born and raised Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or anything else, you have nothing to prove - you are confident in your inclusion in that community. Converts, however, do have something to prove. They need to work harder to fit in, especially since they may not know all the subtle, hidden signs of membership in a tribe. Moreover converts are on average more pious than cradle members of a faith (since changing religion is a cost), and also more likely to have made some kind of study of their new faith.
I notice that the Catholic postliberals have a lot of converts in their ranks. Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, J. D. Vance, etc., are all converts. Not all of them are - Patrick Deneen is from a Catholic family, and I'm not sure about Pilkington, Pecknold, or Feser - but I think they're overrepresented. Converts usually take the official, legible doctrine much more seriously.
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