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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.)
I'm convinced. I changed it to "Dreher had good reason to be skeptical".
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I don't think this characterization of "Most of the book" is accurate. That is what I expected the book to be from review and interviews, but I found that most of it consisted of stories of Eastern Bloc dissidents and their advice to fellow dissidents. Little of the text, after the introduction, refers to concrete events happening in America.
No matter what you agree with or disagree with in theory, I think it is worth reading for the stories of the dissidents alone, and I can't imagine describing it as "tedious" or "sterile". The book actually set me up for a serious change in my worldview. It so happened that I read Dreher's Live Not by Lies and Hazony's Conservatism back-to-back. Dreher's book convinced me that (1) leftist tyranny operates in a certain, seemingly strange manner, and (2) effective resistance to tyranny consists of living out certain principles -- but it did not explain why either of those things were the case. Then I read Hazony, and it was like reading Newton's Principia after studying Galileo's laws of gravity and Kepler's laws of orbital mechanics: Aha! This is the fundamental reason why this is this way and that is that way! I don't think any reading has ever changed (in my opinion, clarified) my worldview so much, so quickly.
On the other hand, I am also skeptical of Dreher's report about how his interviews unfolded, and I toned it down in my secondhand report. For example, where he said he talked to "many" (without saying how many), immigrants I said "several"; and I carefully claim that According to Dreher they all said yes [they see parallels], instead of claiming in my own voice that they all said yes and citing him. My guess is that his report is essentially true in its critical mass, but puffed up. FWIW the two Russian immigrants I know say the same thing.
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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