OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I suppose I count myself as one of the 'religious Blue Tribers' here; or as a Violet Triber, in that terminology. I was raised in a church, embraced faith as an adult, studied theology, and now I work full-time as a religious professional; and even in terms of private devotion, I spend a lot of time in prayer and meditation. I also tend to embrace more 'conservative' or 'traditional' social values as a result. But at the same time, I'm an upper-middle-class university-educated white-collar worker in a heavily verbal field. My native language, so to speak, is Blue Tribe. I speak fluent environmentalist, multiculturalist, and therapeutic. Even though I've come to embrace an ethos at odds with my native culture, so to speak, it still is my native culture and I automatically know how to move in it. If I went to a barbeque with a bunch of gun-owning ESPN-watching blue-collar workers, I would be extremely uncomfortable and would feel out of place, whereas if I go to a wine tasting with the archbishop, I automatically know how to fit in.
It's an awkward place to be in, and even though I've deliberately made more of an effort to understand and be sympathetic to the Red Tribe, even siding with them against traditional Blue Tribe authorities, I'll never be one of them.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher was skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi].
For what it's worth, having read Live Not By Lies as well as plenty of Dreher's pre-2015 work, I am extremely skeptical of Dreher's claim to skepticism here. Rod Dreher is temperamentally inclined to catastrophism, and even in 2013 or 2014 he was writing about the coming return of the Dark Ages and the collapse of Christian civilisation and so on.
For instance, here he is in 2014 saying that America is facing a "new Dark Age that our fellow Americans embrace as Enlightenment", and here in the same year approvingly quoting MacIntyre to the same effect. Here he is in 2013 asking "are we Rome?" and predicting civilisational collapse.
He presents himself as a naive ingenue who was shocked by what the communist dissidents told him in Live Not By Lies, but I think it is far more likely that he already knew what he wanted to hear, and found a handful of Eastern Europeans willing to tell him.
I don't think he was shocked. If there's anything new in Live Not By Lies (and the several years of blogging prior to it, of which it is a condensed summary), it's the analogy to the Soviet Union, but Dreher's actual diagnosis of the cultural moment has not changed. It's just saying "this is like Soviet Russia" rather than "this is like the fall of Rome".
(It is also, incidentally, what in my view makes Live Not By Lies such a tedious and intellectually sterile book - most of LNBL is just Dreher describing something in the USSR, then describing something in 21st century America which does not particularly resemble it, and then asserting that they're the same. The Russian famine of 1892 was not actually that similar to covid, for instance - not even in the sense in which Dreher asserts it, as a catastrophe demonstrating the inadequacy of existing state institutions. It goes on and on. There's a criticism of pre-revolutionary Russian aristocracy for being sexually licentious, which may well be true, but given the Soviet comparison that is most of the text, you'd think it would be worth noting that the Bolsheviks were relatively puritanical and banned pornography. But no. Or, say, I agree that the US needs a revitalisation of religion, but the enforced state atheism of the Soviet Union seems qualitatively different to the voluntary slide away from faith that we see in America. The Soviets killing clergy and throwing the rest into the gulags just doesn't seem a great analogy for the way that kids born post-1980 tend to fall away from religion. The situation is meaningfully different. I could go on for a while. At any rate, overall the book is just a series of analogies, none of which are quite successful, because, well, 21st century America is significantly different to the Soviet Union.)
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Eh, I'd argue that's not necessarily Red Tribe? To take a specific example - I think that, say, Patrick Deneen is from the Blue Tribe. He's a tradcath social conservative with loopy politics, but in terms of culture, background, education, and most importantly manner, he's Blue Tribe. He's not like, say, Jerry Falwell, who was I think clearly Red Tribe.
(One commenter on the original SSC post tried to define people like this as the 'Violet Tribe', giving people like Ross Douthat and Leah Libresco as examples. I think I would shrug and just say that Ross Douthat is Blue Tribe. He's a conservative Catholic Blue Triber.)
Being religious by itself doesn't make you Red Tribe. Heck, liking C. S. Lewis doesn't - as far as I can tell he's very popular among Christians of both colour tribes. So I'm wary of taking those things as definitive.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I just don't think moderation is the issue here. The mods as far as I can tell are generally doing a reasonable job. From my perspective the biggest problem with the state of the Motte is, well, the user base. It's this:
Every once in a while you get people from the opposite side of the political aisle, call everyone here nazis/far-right in an inflammatory manner and they get banned. I think their general sentiment is correct, though - this place is currently filled with moderates and people on the right political, and very few on the left. When I make a low-effort comment that would align with the red-tribe, I get tons of upvotes. When I see someone from the opposite side make a high-effort comment, it gets many downvotes. Now upvotes and downvotes don't mean much regarding the truth or quality of the post, but they do reveal the general user sentiment response to it.
The Motte has a culture. It even has, unfortunately, a groupthink. I don't think it's really possible to have a community of humans without one. But it means that the Motte has positions that it favours as a group, and positions that it disfavours as a group, and this is very obvious if you look at the distributions of likes. People here, just like people on Reddit, are reflexively upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they disagree with, regardless of intellectual rigour, and the same in terms of verbal responses. Trash that aligns with the majority consensus is favoured; gems that don't are disfavoured.
I'm sure anybody who's gone against that consensus has experienced this - you yourself describe an experience that I've had as well, where low-effort posts that agree with a majority view are heavily rewarded, whereas high-effort posts that I'm quite proud of are probably found under 'sort by controversial' or even 'most downvoted'.
Now it's easy to round that complaint to "people don't agree with me", so we have to be careful with comments like that. My actual preference, for here and for every web forum, is to just eliminate upvotes and downvotes entirely. I think they usually have negative consequences on a forum's culture - in particular, they enable that kind of mindless upvoting-stuff-I-agree-with behaviour, and by providing rapid feedback on how something is received, they make every post more of a spectacle. I find them the equivalent of the studio audience at a presidential debate, cheering for stuff they like and booing stuff they don't, all the while getting in the way of a reasonable discussion or debate between the people at the top.
However, changing that can't actually change the overall landscape, which is the way it is because the user base slants a certain way.
I don't think 'Red Tribe' is the right word here. Going by Scott's original formulation, I would be very surprised if there is more than a handful of Red Tribe people here. Red Tribe is not a synonym for 'conservative' or 'right-wing'. My read is that most of the Motte are Blue Tribe, understanding that to be to do more with education and manners, but also broadly speaking on the right. Even there I want to qualify a bit, because 'the right' is quite diverse, and while we have our share of tech-y-libertarians and people-with-weird-theories-about-race, I'm not sure we have much of that pick-up-truck-driving football-watching beer-drinking evangelical-church-attending gun-owning crowd that Scott called the Red Tribe.
The Motte has very few 'normal' leftists, but it also has very few 'normal' rightists. I always find it a bit weird and refreshing to have a chat with what I think of as 'normal' rightists. I don't want it to sound like I think those people are all lower-class idiots either - they're not. But I chat with people along those lines about politics and suffice to say it does not sound anything like the Motte, even when it is very educated.
Can the Motte change, and attract a more ideologically diverse user-base, and also make its atmosphere more attractive to people with different and challenging perspectives? I don't know. I suspect probably not. Most online communities can't change that easily.
But there's also a case that maybe it shouldn't change like that. Right now this is a place for a particular kind of weirdo, and there aren't a whole lot of spaces out there for people like this. You could accuse me, perhaps not without reason, of being one of the greys from this comic. It's true, I don't love the culture of the Motte and I'd like it to be different.
But then, in other contexts, I've been the pink one, and I know what it's like to be besieged by demanding greys. So maybe I should just forebear, and let the Motte be the Motte, even if that sometimes makes me want to hit things.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'm not particularly inclined to argue voting machines. As it happens I actually agree that voting machines and electronic votes in general are a terrible idea, and I feel glad that my country exclusively deals in paper ballots.
But I'm not sure how that specifically addresses the issue? Again, the StopTheSteal argument was premised on a number of specific claims of fraud. Moving from those claims to a generic argument that voting machines are a sub-optimal way to run an election - well, sure, I agree, I'll let you have that motte, but boy, that is a large and expansive bailey you've just vacated.
You can argue that no election conducted with voting machines should be considered legitimate. Sure - like I said, I don't like voting machines at all. But if so, then that also goes for 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996... in fact, over a century of American elections would have to be thrown out. (Half that if you restrict to computerised voting, but still, a long time.) That is not, however, the argument that StopTheSteal made.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Sure, it's possible that in a different system the results might have been different - but then you'd be hanging a claim about what the voters want, or what the voters voted for, on a pure hypothetical.
Something I've tried to be very conscious of recently is the way that ideologues construct 'the public' or 'the people' or 'the voters' in ways that agree with them, but in the absence of convincing evidence about what the people actually want or believe. This can be a communist believing that everyone will support the revolution, or a MAGA person believing that Trump in some way represents the popular will, or the way postliberal texts like Regime Change are premised on the assumption that most people on some level support the author's politics.
This is often just not plausible. We have polling on Trump over time as well, including from when he was president. He never broke 50% approval, and right now he clearly does not enjoy anything like majority support.
Like I said, there are issues where I think you can show an elite class stepping in to overrule the democratically-expressed will of the majority. But Trumpism specifically isn't an example of that. Majority popular support is something the man does not have and has never had.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I think 'directionally correct' in this case roughly translates to 'motte and bailey'. Or perhaps it's worse - perhaps it functions just to sanewash Trump.
That is, I can see an argument that systemic media bias, tech oligopoly, deep state institutions, etc., made the overall political landscape so distorted in the popular consciousness as to make a free and fair election impossible. That makes sense, and I have some sympathy for it as a position.
But that's a motte - that's a sanewashed, 'directionally correct' version of what the stolen election claims actually were.
The actually-existing version of StopTheSteal, the one that Trump endorsed, is not that. The Trump position was not "systemically slanted media landscape", but "literally cheating" - ballot dumps, fake voting machines, you name it.
The sanewashed version might be true! There's an argument that goes something like: "Democratic legitimacy is not merely a result of voting, but rather depends on robust norms of civic participation and deliberation, which must be resourced and facilitated by civic institutions. Such institutions include both public and private bodies, including media such as newspapers, television, radio, online social media, internet news and search, and so on. They also include the sources of information for public debate, such as academia, think tanks, or 'experts' broadly construed. In the United States, however, civic institutions are dominated by the left - by a silent, unspoken but nevertheless well-understood consensus - to such an extent that it is genuinely impossible for conservative or right-wing viewpoints to have a fair hearing in the public square. Such viewpoints can only be expressed in cordoned-off areas of conservative media, which by virtue of their isolation are unable to facilitate the kind of robust deliberation that democracy depends upon. Under these conditions - the total domination of the civic sphere by left-biased authorities - the very notion of democracy is degraded, and large sections of the population are effectively frozen out of democratic participation. No election held under circumstances such as these can be considered 'fair'."
I think that argument is probably true! I think it's not the whole story, but as far as it goes, it's true and it points to the crisis of American democracy.
It just doesn't get you to the stolen election claim that was actually made.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
It seems to me that it's worth bearing in mind that Trump lost the popular vote both times. 'The populist threat of the voters getting what they vote for' doesn't seem like a good description of Trump, since both times he ran for office the popular majority was against him.
There are cases where I think you can convincingly point to a Blue elite stepping in to overrule the clearly-expressed democratic will of the majority - Proposition 8 is an ageing example but a good one - but Trump, a candidate who has never commanded majority support, seems like a bad example of one.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Erm, can you clarify how this works?
The US needs Trump to 'expose all the flaws'... how exactly? What specifically does Trump do that another populist Republican couldn't?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I've noticed a trend in character creation along those lines - 'male' and 'female' in character creation are replaced with 'body type 1' and 'body type 2', and then player characters are referred to exclusively as 'they'. World of Warcraft is an example of this. It frankly makes me feel very uncomfortable and aggressively dehumanised.
What I find most frustrating about it is that it seems like the progressive case against doing this should be obvious - removing all gendered words and enforcing a single pronoun on everyone seems like, well, misgendering. If you took seriously the concern that using the wrong gendered language for someone might be cruel or even traumatic, it seems like you should be sensitive to this, and want to provide more options, rather than throwing everyone into a de-gendered basket of 'they'.
I conclude that they do not in fact take seriously that concern, and that it was and is not the actual underlying motive. Or at least, if there's a motive along the lines of "don't be cruel", it is not applied evenly to everyone, and indeed making certain types of people uncomfortable might be good.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.
See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.
For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
...does it? Does it really train any kind of 'moral immune system'?
It seems to me that it falls into the same category as, say, Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom, in that obviously the whole appeal of the story is the naked lady, and the moral is tacked on as an afterthought. The villainous elder is a convenient excuse for the artist to say that it's not really pornographic, even though that is obviously the appeal. There were ways depict a naked Susanna in ways that are not sensually or erotically appealing - but that is clearly not what happened in the case of Renaissance art. The beauty of the woman is quite clearly the point.
It's the pre-modern equivalent of, say, all those mid-century films about Nero or Caligulua, which delighted in titillating the viewer with detailed depictions of orgies and sex and murder, and then had the fig leaf of condemnation at the end where the hedonistic emperors are overthrown and virtue triumphs. But we all know what the real appeal is.
I would caution you not to take the fig leaf too seriously. I suggest that the quite-literally-naked eroticism of the Susanna story is central to its artistic appeal. The fact that there's a vague sort of moral cover for it (it's biblical! it condemns the behaviour!) is convenient, but to suggest that the entire theme is a subversion of libido seems quite breathtakingly naive, to me.
I notice also in your post a skepticism of '[leaving] artists to their own devices'. Even setting aside the way you reify 'The Past', I don't see any particular reason to think that commissioners of this art necessarily had high and virtuous motives. That's just a small handful of examples, and are we really so naive as to believe that bishops and nephews of popes in the Middle Ages of Renaissance were free of venal interests? It may be true that some artists are just horny and lack any concern for morality - but the same strikes me as true of nobles and church officials.
To be clear, I am not asserting that every single depiction of Susanna bathing is pornographic. On the contrary, I think that many of those depictions have artistic merit, and are often very well-composed and striking, or sometimes, as you say, subversive in their implications. But I assert that the enduring popularity of Susanna's bath as an artistic theme has something to do with its eroticism, in a way that goes beyond mere subversion.
Or more crassly: rich people from centuries in the past still liked to look at boobs.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.
Who is the 'you' in this paragraph?
Isn't the popularity of Susanna bathing, as a subject of art, significantly attributable to artists themselves wanting to produce it? And isn't that desire also largely explicable by the fact that it's a very sexy scene? I'm not sure we need a big explanation for why painters were very enthusiastic about painting an attractive woman in the nude. It seems a popular theme in general.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
The extent to which Catholicism requires agreeing with the pope is regularly contested along partisan lines.
Usually one side argues, "The pope is the vicar of Christ and visible leader of the church, from whom we learn and to whom we have an obligation to listen, and his words should be taken to heart by all Catholics", and the other side argues, "The pope is a human being and capable of error in ordinary circumstances, and there have been shockingly bad popes in the past. Respect for the papal office does not entail unthinking obedience to every off-the-cuff statement a pope makes, and good Catholics can and should, in obedience to sacred tradition, disagree with him where necessary".
And the two sides switch depending on whether or not they like the current pope or not. There is very little consistency.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.
And the general theory here doesn't seem to hold? If your assertion is that a perspective's popularity on the Motte correlates with that perspective's unpopularity in real life, well, there are far too many counter-examples of that. It's true, anti-semitism is extremely unpopular in real life. Here are some things that are also extremely unpopular in real life: cannibalism, ISIS, police abolition, Satanism, paedophilia. Yet nobody argues for these positions on the Motte.
It's not a simple correlation, where the less popular an idea is, the more likely that idea's adherents are to come here and post long essays about it.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
When was the last time a billionaire white nationalist or Nazi was punched? The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy and it set off a whole debate on the left about whether it was acceptable. Meanwhile of course Jews get attacked sometimes - the ADL (I know you may not trust them, but I doubt they're all completely fictional) cites 161 violent assaults in 2023.
But I guess beyond this I'm not particularly sure why you're focusing on white nationalism? Yes, white nationalism is an extremely hated and ostracised position in the US. I agree that white nationalism is more hated as a position than Zionism is. What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.
Is your point just that you'd like for white nationalism to be at least as acceptable to argue for in public as Zionism?
In that case - great, good for you, but I hardly see how that reflects badly on Zionists. You can just advocate for white nationalism. No need to bring Zionism in at all.
(Unless the implication is that the reason white nationalism is widely hated is the Jewish conspiracy to destroy white culture and so on, but at that point we're just right back into the tiresome nonsense that I was sick of seeing in the first place.)
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Yes, I think this is true. 'Catholic' can continue to function as an identity even in the near-total absence of believe. 'Jew' and 'Muslim' both do the same thing to an extent as well, where they come to denote an ethnic or cultural background or upbringing. Protestantism largely does not do this. If you stop believing, you are no longer a Protestant or even a Christian.
Thus anecdotally I do often run into Catholics whose response to anything about doctrine or practice is roughly, "Oh, no one pays attention to that, don't worry." Catholicism can be grounded in something other than genuine, sincere belief. Protestantism cannot be.
(As a Protestant I'm inclined to see this as good, or at least, as not wholly bad. But that's a value judgement that could certainly be argued.)
I wonder how the supreme court looks if you track it, not by formally stated religious identity, but by actual practice? If we trust NCR, Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and certainly Barrett all seem to be practicing Catholics. Kagan is Jewish but it doesn't sound like like she's practicing? Gorsuch attends an Episcopalian church, and Jackson is very reticent on the subject, so I don't think I can tell how pious she is. At a glance it sounds like maybe a bit over half of the supreme court is meaningfully religious, in terms of personal practice?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Yes, that's where you'll find the majority of culture war Catholicism. What is the Catholic Church? Is it what Catholics actually do or believe? Is it the doctrine of the church? What is the doctrine of the church, and who defines it, and that way lies a whole debate around tradition, magisterium, the papacy, and more.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Yes, prior to Vatican II and especially prior to 1900 or so, the traditional Catholic position was basically that the state should formally endorse the Catholic Church, obey directives from the Vatican, and tolerate other religious positions either provisionally or not at all. Integralism is, broadly speaking, the traditional Roman position. If you ever get interested in the last two centuries of Spanish, French, or Italian history you will notice this causing a great deal of trouble. It's also responsible for a lot of traditional American (and Anglo in generally) anti-Catholicism. Taken seriously, it is the position that leads to drama like this.
However, Catholics, partly because of how extreme this position seems today, have largely been running away from it in the West, or have been looking for ways to reconcile Catholicism with American liberal values. Some have been more or less successful with this.
But anyway, if you dig into the European history a bit, 'discriminated against' is underselling it. This is/was a position that causes civil wars.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
What surprised me most in the reaction was this amusing line:
Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Well... yes.
Yes, there's a correct way to be Catholic. It involves believing and acting in accordance with Catholic teaching, which is very clear on some of those subjects.
How is that controversial?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
I feel I have to be careful here - Rod Dreher is an example of a thinker who's on my side, more or less, but who I am deeply frustrated by at the same time.
Some of it might just be aesthetic. I admit that I really dislike his writing style, which to me comes off as a combination of folksy, long-winded, and proud. He is the kind of person who unironically refers to his own work as 'prophetic' and that rubs me the wrong way. It also frustrates me that I think he tends to be oversimplifying and uncharitable, such that even when I agree with him, I can't help wishing that he wasn't the one making the case. At any rate, I say that up-front just to establish that I'm not unbiased, and my instincts probably direct me towards being unfair to Dreher.
So, I read Live Not By Lies in the context of The Benedict Option, and in that context what struck me most was that it makes more-or-less identical recommendations, and the primary difference is that LNBL's historical comparison is Soviet communism, whereas TBO's comparison was the Dark Ages. So I probably focused mostly on that comparison, while paying less attention to things that I felt I had already heard from him.
I am skeptical of his interviews, or the weight he places on 'post-Soviet dissidents'. There are hundreds of millions of people who used to be members of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Many critics of the Soviet Union were religiously-inspired. It does not surprise me that Dreher was able to find a dozen or so people who said exactly what he wanted to hear. I'm not accusing him or his interviewees of being dishonest - just suggesting that he naturally gravitated to people with similar perspectives to himself.
Dreher in my reading doesn't do a great job of distinguishing his own subjective impressions from reality. Chapter eight of LNBL ('Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance') seems like a good example to me. He describes a couple of Christian dissidents in the Soviet sphere, and explains that he felt they had a kind of moral authority to them, a sense of spiritual peace and determination that other dissidents didn't have. A detached reader might be tempted to ask - is this just because Dreher likes Christians? He already had a narrative he wanted to tell, about wise and gracious Christian resistance to tyranny - did that colour his observations?
There's a lot like that, such that even when I agree with the overall point (I'm a Christian! I believe in grace-filled Christian resistance to tyranny!), I find myself retreating from his overall point.
And in other places I just find Dreher... rather hypocritical? Perhaps this reveals me as a Christian liberal, but after reading Dreher for a long time, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that he doesn't dislike ideological totalitarianism as such - he just dislikes when it's the wrong ideology. For instance, in LNBL he writes:
But back in TBO, he wrote about the medieval worldview in rhapsodic terms, and concluded:
What's the difference between "defining and controlling reality" and "[construing] reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually"? Both examples seem like descriptions of an integrating ideology that interprets all of reality for the subject, and which was made compulsory for the masses through the carrot and stick of education and persecution. Setting aside the part where medieval Christianity is ex hypothesi correct, and Marxism-Leninism false, what's the difference?
Or to pick one other example, when Dreher describes the totalitarian social pressures and persecutions that he expects Christians in America to face (and to be fair to him, many of which they do face, in many if not all parts of the country), his examples are things like needing to meet in secret, fearing blackmail, negative gossip among colleagues, needing to discuss their lifestyle and convictions in secret because the rumour of their lifestyle could lead to job losses, reputational damage, being ostracised in public, and so on. It surely can't fail to spring to mind that up until a few decades ago (and still now, in some parts of the US), all those pressures were faced by gay people. This never comes up.
Again, this is frustrating because I am technically on Dreher's side here. I'm not actually pro-LGBT. But I would have liked to see more perspective in the way he made his case. I don't think his banner conclusions are wrong, exactly. On the contrary, I find them almost banal - Christians should resolve to practice their faith together strongly in community, supporting and building each other up, and resisting pressures to abandon their convictions, while maintaining a deep cultural memory. Who's going to disagree with that? Overall I think I rate Dreher as a demagogue rather than a thinker. His arguments aren't particularly good, and aren't going to make much headway with anyone who doesn't already agree with him. But he writes with a lot of passion and verve. Maybe that's enough, for some.
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