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Matthew Schmitz, of conservative Catholic magazine First Things, criticises Elon Musk and the American right over family values
Specifically, he points to a clash between what he regards as an older or more traditional set of family values on the right, heavily influenced by religious conservatism, which emphasises stable marriages and households, care for children and spouses, parents' obligations towards their children and children's duties towards their parents, and so on; and a newer set, which regards parental behaviour as largely unimportant, and instead prioritises genetic predisposition.
He takes Musk as a good test case. Seen from the former perspective, Musk is a despicable father - he has flitted between women and been irresponsible and uninvolved with the raising of his children. Seen from the latter perspective, Musk has perhaps been quite a good father - he has fathered many children while going to deliberate effort to maximise their genetic potential. Should Musk be admired or condemned?
Schmitz is, of course, on the traditionalist side, and he tries to draw a link between Musk's behaviour a kind of libertarian-transhumanist worldview which, he argues, also implicitly endorses positions that Musk repudiates, such as transgenderism, or which the right-wing has traditionally opposed, such as abortion. Naturally he wants a reassertion of the traditional worldview.
Apart from Schmitz's entirely predictable conclusion, though, I think he's correct to identify a tension here. It's no surprise that people like Richard Hanania (who has often protested that he doesn't like conservatives) are in the genetics-first camp, and it's more interesting to note even more 'mainstream' Republicans, like Matt Gaetz, turning towards the genetics-first position. Is there a transformation going on in the right? Are new divides forming around family policy and technology? Or is there some way to square the circle?
Since we just talked about Musk the other day, and since I know the Motte has a large share of what I would consider libertarian(ish) genetics-first or heredity-first posters, it'd be interesting to hear some comments!
The right that Schmitz critiques is right-wing in the sense that it tends to be hostile to various elements of social liberalism, e.g. feminism, anti-racism, or LGBT rights. But it is not especially socially conservative in the sense of favoring traditional social arrangements. Thus people like Musk or Trump, who pretty much categorically fail at the traditional role of Father and a more general reject traditional masculine duties in favor of what amounts to perpetual boyhood. Frat boy conservatism is nothing new, of course, but it was generally something one was expected to outgrow, not a dominant aspect.
Hereditarianism isn't a necessary element for this value set, but it helps in that it provides a general purpose rationale for writing off any duties one might have to others. Help the poor? No point, bad genes. Raise your kids? You already donated your genes, parenting doesn't matter that much and besides taking care of children is for women. But this is fundamentally an ablative belief - if it were incontrovertibly proven false, few of its adherents would change their behavior much (which is not to say they're insincere, just that the belief is non-essential).
Actual hard hereditarians are pretty scarce on the ground, if for no other reason than it's a sufficiently intellectualized position as to escape mass appeal. People like Hanania exist, but they are largely gadflies without much influence.
Another way of putting it would be that Schmitz and company care about what fatherhood does to the father, as well as to the children.
A Motte poster defended Musk to me on the basis of outcomes for the children - "the goal is to raise the next generation of adults", and insofar as Musk has provided them with sufficient material abundance and with sufficient mentoring, he has discharged his duty and everything is all right, from a traditional perspective.
My reply to this was snarky, but I think substantially correct. From the traditionalist perspective, you do not only take into account the results for the child (they will argue about the child's welfare, but as you say, that's at least partially ablative), but also the results for the father. Fatherhood is meant to be morally forming, even educative, for the father as well as the child. The discipline of raising a child well should make you into a better, wiser human being.
Your mention of "perpetual boyhood" is a good way of putting it. Musk is a failure of masculinity because he's avoiding growing up, becoming responsible, disciplining himself, and so on. He is failing to learn the proper lessons of fatherhood. No amount of material provision for children can compensate for that.
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MAGA are bad Christians, but progressives are anti-Christian. MAGA are ostensinsibly Christian, or at least like Christians and will generally let them be, but progressives hate Christianity and will continue attacking it at every opportunity, or at least just stand by and watch while it is destroyed by their extremists. It's not a difficult choice, though Schmidtz seems to have misunderstood the situation.
Progressives are anti-Christian? Every progressive I have met in my life has espoused the tenets of Christianity more than the sum total of Christians I have known in my life.
If anything from my experience, Christians hate Christianity. I can think in my 20+ years of living two Christians that met the minimum definition of a Christian, while I can think of plenty of atheist progressives who have gone beyond the minimum.
This is an unflattering paraphrase of what the author purports to be a progressive position. It is not a good example of progressive attitudes toward Christians, because it was not written by a progressive. I find it a useful text to encapsulate what I perceive to be a common attitude among Progressives, but if you want to assert that this attitude really is widespread among progressives, you need to provide actual examples of the behavior, not the mocking paraphrase.
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Do any of these progressives believe in God or go to church?
Because I'd say that's the absolute bare minimum. Someone who doesn't believe in God isn't a Christian, and someone who doesn't go to church isn't a practicing Christian.
Christian isn't a synonym for 'virtuous' or 'progressive'. It's a religion.
No. Most I know were raised Christian, then left the faith.
Progressives loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind means exactly that. Loving God is not following Christian doctrine; notice how when asked what the minimum was Jesus did not say "believe in Jesus", otherwise all of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica were doomed because they missed the Jesus boat. Loving God is loving God; and what is God? Love. And what is love, according to the Bible? "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Therefore, to love God is to love those things; kindness, patience, humbleness, honor, tranquility, etc. When love manifests, God manifests, and when that love is loved in return, God is loved as well.
I'm sympathetic to your point here, and certainly deeds tell more than words, cf. Matthew 7:21-23. However, I would be concerned that defining Christianity exclusively in terms of love is too broad. The category 'Christians' doesn't just mean everybody who loves, or everybody who loves the concept of love. That's a criterion that would capture many atheists, as well as practitioners of any number of non-Christian religions. I (though a Christian myself), find, for instance, Santideva to be one of the most eloquent religious exponents of unconditional love, and I would never call Santideva a Christian.
I suppose I think I would define Christianity in the broad, or visible, sense in terms of both doctrine and behaviour. A Christian is one who believes certain propositions (we can roughly summarise those with the Apostles' Creed, I suppose; you might reasonably object to me that the Creed doesn't mention any ethics, but I'd hold that taking the Creed seriously implies some downstream ethical commitments), and then behaves as if those propositions are true. It is necessary to be a Christian to believe that Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God died for the sins of the world and was raised to fullness of life, but to properly or fully be a Christian, that belief must shape and condition your behaviour. And that is what leads the Christian to do things like listen to what Jesus taught and attempt to behave accordingly (cf. John 14:15), or attempt to follow his example (cf. Philippians 2:5), and so on.
So while I certainly agree that patient, radical, self-sacrificing love is something that Christians are called to, I wouldn't say that it suffices as a definition of Christianity.
For what it's worth, on my understanding there are true Christians who are dyed-in-the-wool progressives and who are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. I think that much more important than whether a Christian is progressive/conservative is how that Christian goes about being progressive/conservative. But I tend to think that most prudential political judgements properly belong to the conscience of the individual Christian, though, as with all things in life, they ought to be informed and nourished by a properly Christian moral formation. That is much harder than it sounds, but all of us are fallible works in progress, and I suppose there's no Christian alive who can be confident that their politics perfectly match those of the Kingdom.
I think C. S. Lewis had something to say on that....
--The Last Battle
Certainly that represents my hopes.
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What are the tenets of Christianity, as you understand them?
What is the "minimum definition of Christianity", in your view?
The tenets of Christianity include the Ten Commandments and the principles of tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity.
The minimum definition of Christianity, as stated by Christ when asked, is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
I find it oddly bizarre that you've been down voted here for answering a question sincerely, without rancor.
I, sadly, don't.
A bump of that sweet, smoking gun, as you write in your bio. I sense you're here not exactly as a troll, but that you don't particularly feel you're among like minds.
It's sarcasm. Dry as dust sarcasm. I'd put an /s, but that's not my style of humor. I had a hunch when I made the step from lurker to poster that no matter what I said, and I mean what, I'd be downvoted and called a troll or a man; hence my username. My hunch was proven correct. There is a small fraction of users on here who genuinely want to debate, and the great majority else want to boo outgroup.
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The Christian theological virtues are faith, hope, and love. The cardinal virtues are temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice. I see ‘charity’ which is a synonym for love in your list. I don’t see anything, uh, supernatural.
I'm confused what you're trying to say.
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These seem like reasonable definitions.
I know neither the Christians you've met in your life, nor the Progressives. Maybe the Christians were really awful, and the Progressives really saintly. I am curious as to how you see the Progressives "loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind"; what does that mean to a non-Christian observing non-Christians? Likewise "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
My suspicion, perhaps unfounded, is that you are rounding these principles to "is a progressive". Perhaps I'm wrong, and there's more to it.
Do you believe your experience generalizes? Moving beyond Christians and Progressives you've personally met, I presume you'd agree that we can observe Christians and Progressives in society generally, and identify notable examples. When drawing from a reference class that broad, we ought to see extremes both ways. I can certainly find cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Progressives are acting in a significantly more Christian fashion than the Christians. Would you agree that there are identifiable, individual cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Christians do in fact seem more Christian than the Progressives?
Take the cake shop guy versus the trans activist; does it seem to you that Phillips was acting in a more Christian fashion, or Scardina?
Progressives loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind means exactly that. Loving God is not following Christian doctrine; notice how when asked what the minimum was Jesus did not say "believe in Jesus", otherwise all of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica were doomed because they missed the Jesus boat. Loving God is loving God; and what is God? Love. And what is love, according to the Bible? "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Therefore, to love God is to love those things; kindness, patience, humbleness, honor, tranquility, etc. When love manifests, God manifests, and when that love is loved in return, God is loved as well. Progressives loving their neighbors as yourself is also...just that.
I do believe my experiences generalize. My anecdotal evidence is just that; anecdotal. On its own it's not good evidence, which is why that isn't my only evidence. Observing Christians and progressives in society in general, it is obvious to me that progressivism is more aligned with the principles I described above; Christians, in general society, promote social conservatism, and God - who is love - is not compatible with social conservatism. I would agree that there are identifiable, individual cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Christians do in fact seem more Christian than the Progressives, but seeing as how Christians are famously homophobic and transphobic and progressives are not, I imagine those cases are rare.
Obviously Scardina; unless Phillips also refused to bake a cake for alcoholics, murderers, adulators, liars, thieves, and all of the other sins, which are seen as equally bad as homosexuality, then he is judging and condemning based on his own preferences and not because of his religion, which is un-Christian. Scardina called on Phillips to be truthful when he said he would serve LGBT customers, and Phillip was caught in his lie, which is also un-Christian.
I can readily agree that under a definition of "Christian" that considers social conservatism disqualifying, most Christians are not actually Christian. Likewise, under the definition of Christianity employed by the Westborough Baptist Church, only themselves and those who agree with them are the true followers of Christ. This is an obvious feature of arbitrary, bespoke definitions, which is why most people who wish to communicate clearly try to avoid them.
I do wonder, though: have you ever interacted with a serious addict? Suppose a meth junkie asks you for help securing more meth so that they can get very high. Under your definition of Christianity, what is the properly Christian response? What is the proper Christian response to a heroin addict asking to use your bathroom to shoot up?
Suppose, hypothetically, that Phillips had not refused to sell a cake to a trans person, but rather had refused to customize a cake to celebrate transition itself, in the same way that he would refuse to customize a cake themed to celebrate acts of alcoholism, murder, adultery, deceit, theft, or any other sin. Suppose designing artwork whose message was celebration of sinful behavior in general was what he was objecting to, and that Scardina's request was not to buy a cake generally, but to commission exactly this sort of sin-celebratory confectionary. In this hypothetical scenario, would your assessment of either Phillips' or Scardina's actions change?
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Being a troll (and using Satanist imagery as part of trolling) does not seem particularly compatible with
I've met a lot of Christians that fail to live up to those things! Myself included, for all have sinned and fall short. But by goodness I find it a tough pill to swallow that you've met so many progressives who aren't impatient, hateful, envious, boastful, prideful, self-seeking, angered at the slightest whim of disagreement, who don't seek to get people fired and depersoned for decades-old offenses, and who don't treat the truth as little more than a tool to be disposed of when it's not in their favor.
Should artists be required to paint anything that someone asks in commission?
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I could see arguments either way, but I lean pretty hard toward "no".
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"tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity"
I'm on board with the accusation that many Christians are only nominally so. But it is absolutely laughable that you think Progs have exemplified these values to any significant degree given the last 10-15 years, if not more. I've seen almost none of these things from the Left as of late. Nor do I recall them exemplifying these values any more than the average person on the street from my teen years to early adulthood - a time when the idea of ever voting Republican for any reason was unthinkable to me.
Well, I dunno what to tell you other than that’s not my experience. Progressives I’ve known have demonstrated those things; conservatives I’ve known are so entrenched in their mommy and daddy issues the concepts are hard to reach. Tranquility? More like constantly stressed. Forgiveness? More like gossiping for lack of conversation topics. Humbleness? More like cowardice. And charity? More like “I got mine”.
Awesome. I guess our 'lived experiences' cancel each other out, then? As in, it should have been predictable that unverifiable statements like 'Progs I know are more Christian than actual Christians' was going to be an unproductive dead-end in this discussion, and why did you even bother with it?
Maybe your friends are totally angels. It's rather weightless compared to your vanguards that freak the fuck out when they see a crucifix in a public building, or give themselves the sweats over Pete Hegseth's tattoos. For extra fun, go look up who Bernie Sanders invited to sing at his recent rally. Meanwhile, the Left (coded non-religious) reports more mental health issues and their compassion dries up the moment 'refugees' get bussed to their towns.
Who are my vanguards who are freaking out at crucifixes and tattoos? Last I checked, being discriminatory towards religion wasn't in the progressive handbook.
Bernie Sanders invited a singer who had vulgar lyrics is...what, exactly?
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Even granting the framing that progressives are anti-Christian and MAGA are bad Christians, I'm not sure where that implies that Christians shouldn't challenge MAGA bad Christianity, attempt to drag it towards better Christianity, or even simply warn Christians against imitating MAGA? Christians can be in a tactical alliance with MAGA while also needing to maintain a sense of why MAGA is bad and they must not become MAGA.
Arguably under those circumstances, it's more important for Christians to clearly articulate criticisms of MAGA. Progressivism is obviously an enemy and there is no temptation to imitate it. But Christians might be tempted to imitate MAGA. So that path must be guarded more fiercely.
Christians are used to being the junior partner in a coalition with the big bully that can protect us from scary progressives. We don’t like musk’s or Trump’s personal behavior but we shut our mouths because the alternative would be to have our institutions forced to support abortion and push retarded gender ideology.
It does not seem Christian, to me, to excuse or justify what is evil? What you've said reminds me of the "we need our own Putin" argument from conservative Christians circa 2016 (criticised here). The last I checked Christians were not supposed to act out of fear. When Musk or Trump behave badly, it seems entirely appropriate, to me, for Christians to say that behaviour is bad and to issue a call to repentance.
Christians are supposed to be signs of contradiction to the world. As that blogger says, "the idea that we should keep our mouths shut instead of "dividing"... is an insidious falsehood that is totally off the mark".
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What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?
The chain of inference here seems quite long. Is Musk MAGA? When he claimed that massive "skilled" immigration was a good thing and got immediately hammered by the grassroots, were the people hammering him rejecting MAGA? Is MAGA bad, and if so, why?
From the inside, the proper way for Christianity to interact with politics is a very interesting question. Let's presume that "MAGA" stands for right-wing politics not explicitly guided by Christian principles; that seems to be your general intent here, though if you'd disagree I invite you to offer a more fitting definition.
Christianity tried right-wing politics explicitly guided by Christian principles during the Bush administration, and it seems to me the result was disaster, even from a Christian perspective. The reasons for this disaster seem pretty straightforward to me: first-order Christian ends can't really be secured by Government power, second-order Christian ends mostly can't be secured without social consensus, and the Christians (along with everyone else, for the most part) were sufficiently blind to the realities of their situation that prudence in the exercise of power never materialized, and their political capital was entirely wasted.
As I see it, Christianity's interaction with MAGA has abandoned pursuit of first- and second-order Christian ends through the exercise of Government power, and are aiming exclusively for prudent exercise of power. That is, Christians are spending their political capital in an attempt to prevent rule by people who hate them, to secure some modicum of political and social stability, and to attempt to preserve and maintain peace and plenty. The hope is that if prudent exercise of power can be obtained, first- and second-order Christian ends can be pursued outside the arena of political power, as individuals and as churches.
Let's leave aside MAGA for the moment. What does "Challenge Bad Christianity" look like? To me, it seems like this involves preventing people from pushing non-Christian values and positions while claiming the mantle of "Christianity". An obvious example would be Pope Francis's various shenanigans. But neither Musk nor Trump are making any credible claim to be Christian, nor indeed any claim to speak for Christians. Both are very clearly pagans, and never made any notable attempt to claim otherwise. And indeed, this is how most Pro-Trump Christian discourse has gone: Trump is compared to Nebuchadnezzar, say, a pagan monarch with no claim to righteousness who can nonetheless serve as God's instrument. There hasn't been nearly as much discourse on Musk, but I'd expect it to evolve in a similar fashion.
I see no evidence that Christians have endorsed the paganism of either Musk or Trump. What I see is Christians accepting the evident reality: we no longer have the power to impose our values through law, even were it desirable to do so, and we no longer have the consensus necessary to impose our values on society, even were it desirable to do so. We cannot compel, but can only attempt to persuade, and those unwilling to be persuaded will do what seems right in their own eyes. Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.
If people actually want Christians to start policing non-Christians again, they should present a general case for when and why this is desirable, and also for why the desirability of such policing was not evident in the past. Absent such a case, it is difficult to take their arguments seriously. "Family Values" as a going concern died with the introduction of ubiquitous internet porn; people appealing to it now as though it were a live political entity are either deeply confused or lying.
I think they are doing most of those things, and I commend them for it. My top-level post here was in fact about a conservative Christian attempting to both issue a call to reform and repentance to MAGA and warn Christians away from being influenced by MAGA.
I'm not sure I'm arguing for a broadside, or for any kind of concerted political campaign. I'd hold that Christians ought to, where possible, speak the truth and call people to better behaviour. That may take a different form when it is issued to other Christians as when it is issued to secular society (and Christians should of course try to improve secular society), but either way I don't see a valid argument for Christian quietism.
It is, incidentally, worth noting that Trump himself claims to be a Christian, and Elon Musk, though stopping short of saying he's a Christian himself, identifies as a 'cultural Christian' and says that he's 'actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity'. For Christians to issue a call for Trump and Musk to live out Christian values more fully is not actually a call to pagans in the first place. Trump claims to be inside the tent; Musk has at least one foot in. So Christians asking Trump or Musk to behave in more Christian ways is by no means "policing non-Christians".
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This is an excellent take. I have tried to explain these things to people I know, but not half as well. A couple of points, though:
I think that Bush sincerely wanted this to work, but his personnel decisions did not reflect that. He largely chose neocons associated with his father’s administration, and they didn’t care about this at all. He also didn’t account for resistance from the permanent bureaucracy that has become so conspicuous since. So I think that there are some approaches left untried here, even if Christians no longer have the political power to attempt them.
Trump has occasionally expressed the fig-leaf level of Christian pretense expected of U.S. politicians, but this is even more transparent than it was with Obama. I do think that that, combined with outgroup homogeneity bias, has sincerely confused a few people on the left.
This is the heart of the matter.
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I couldn’t disagree with the author’s framing more. That said, I am not a First Things subscriber, and my take necessarily ends where the archived article does.
The author frames this as a faction on the right discovering human genetics and deciding to jettison family values as a consequence; he emphasizes this with the label “genetic determinist.” This is backward. These are people who already occupied the secular center left to center right and weren’t adherents of family values in the first place. They were already okay with premarital sex (and occasionally adultery); they were already okay with divorce; they were already pro-choice, or at least not so pro-life as to have reservations about IVF. They are part of a right-wing coalition, and they have common cause with social conservatives, but no one was under the illusion that they were social conservatives.
I hold (loosely) that nature and nurture both matter and that the nature-nurture ratio is different in different areas of life. But I am not a consequentialist: if I thought that all life outcomes were 95% genetic, I wouldn’t cease to be a social conservative. It’s good to do the right thing because it is the right thing; positive consequences are frosting on the cake. (Even if you are a consequentialist, you should consider the implications for childhood happiness as well as adult outcomes.)
Looking up the author, Schmitz believes that social conservatives should make common cause with social democrats, not with libertarians or the pro-business right. If he has laid this out clearly and dealt with the difficulties in that position, I’d be interested to read it. In America most social democrats are also social progressives, and they have a history of leveraging the welfare state to promote social progressivism and oppose social conservatism. The current political alignment follows in part from that.
As it is, the piece comes off as a disingenuous attempt to find a label for right-wing social liberals that won’t also stick to left-wing social liberals. I expected better from First Things.
And you’ve underlined the reason that the religious right will remain the religious right- when push comes to shove, you get the little sisters of the poor situation going on.
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The family values voters were mostly Silent Generation and are mostly dead.
Musk is a Trump ally. But I think everyone on the right is aware that he only got there because the more authoritarian elements in the Democratic Party felt he wasn't toeing the line and decided to go after him.
But I do think there is less of a split than you think. The traditionalist right has always been pretty accepting of wealthy men being bad parents so long as their children were all well provided for. Musk is more shameless and extreme than is typical, but it's really less offensive to conservative sensibilities than a DINK couple.
The family values voters are still there. There’s a steady upper-teens-lower-20’s percent of the American population which are consistent social conservatives and the decline in Christianity has mostly halted.
That being said, this is not a big enough group to win a democratic election on its own.
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I guess the first thing I'd do is separate 'is' questions from 'ought' questions. 'is' questions may not be easily answerable but they are answerable as opposed to axiom conflicts. As a start:
'is':
'ought':
Your "ought" question is actually just a second "is" question
I thought someone might say that. I was trying to separate ‘is conventional parenting important to achieve desired outcome X’ and ‘is the experience of parenting in both sides in and of itself a terminal goal?’
Tried to edit for clarity.
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What Musk is doing is actually quite "traditional". Historically, powerful men didn't invest much time in raising their children, particularly young ones.
Traditionally powerful men cared about the raising of their legitimate(which these are, because they’re acknowledged) sons even if they didn’t do it personally. Musk doesn’t seem to care much about eg the schools they go to.
What's the evidence for that?
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Yes, I think you can plausibly argue that wealthy and powerful men fathering many children on a range of mistresses, and then minimally investing in them while also planning to select the most (genetically?) capable of them to pass the family name on to has been common throughout history.
The traditional/conservative/Catholic/Christian line that I imagine First Things would take would be that they are quite aware that their position has not been the norm, because virtue is hard and requires discipline and effort to achieve. The idea would be that traditionalism is a set of norms intended to tame barbarism, as it were, and that what we now see from the right, especially the tech right, is a moral backsliding. They're barbarians; they are the resurgence of a wretched old thing, rather than bold innovators, as they would presumably prefer to see themselves.
The goal is to raise the next generation of adults. Ideally, so that they are happy, capable, virtuous and have the fundamentals for success in their lives. Typically the role of the father in all this is material support and some kind of practical and moral guidance. The traditional nuclear family works well in that regard for most normal men. That said, I don't see an issue with providing those things in another way if one has the resources to do so. Materially speaking, Musk's children are provided for. And he could easily hire highly moral, capable and intelligent people to give them personal guidance, or arrange for them to spend time with such people. That's also a "traditional" solution. I think with some care, he could easily give them a life at least 95% of Americans would envy. If he manages that, it would be hard to condemn him as irresponsible.
Fatherhood is not fungible.
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Yes- the people who drove "the right" are being transformed into corpses daily at a rate far in excess of people converting to progressivism. If their subsociety's memes are going to be allowed to survive (because the progressives will stamp them out given the opportunity, and to a large degree already have), they would be wise to throw their support behind the people who are going to treat them as a relatively benign curiosity rather than an existential threat.
Yes, but the problem is that there's only room for one traditional-type worldview, and the one that now fills that niche is dead-set on the destruction of the traditionalist worldview. Narcissism of small differences, and all that.
So now his side's only hope are the liberals. Because while the liberals of old did contribute to the rise of progressivism (in the sense that liberal mockery weakened traditionalism- which is why religious countries have anti-blasphemy laws), they're also by definition more likely to tolerate/get along with/not try to actively destroy less-orthodox family configurations, of which traditionalism now finds itself.
Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.
I don’t know that it’s a transformation of values. Political parties are alliances, and you are trying to take the government or some other institution by force, and you can’t do that without numbers. As such, you’ll take anyone you can get who will sign onto as many of your values as you can. At this juncture, the conservatives don’t control the means of cultural production (they have conservative media and explicitly Christian media, but this is fairly niche and doesn’t really set the cultural tone), don’t control any of education, nor do they control the deep state.
This is obviously a problem, and it’s going to take a pretty big alliance to move the needle here. Purity tests only make sense after the victory, not before. It’s actually the biggest tell that a group is a hegemon — it has the luxury of purging itself of those who do not agree with them. If you can maintain control without heresy, you’re in firm control of the cultural battlefield. Conservatives cannot make this mistake— if they start purging heresy before they get control over culture, education, and the government (and not just the elected government, the deep state is probably more important here) they’ll slide back into irrelevance and the left will go right back to preaching socialism and LGBT stuff and enforcing their agenda.
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I'm not quite following - is your suggestion that progressives are the new 'traditional-type worldview'?
Thus you would see traditional conservatives like Schmitz as a declining minority whose only hope of survival rests on finding an accord with other dominant factions, which at the moment include the progressives (who hate the traditionalists), the liberals (who are prepared to live and let live), and I suppose the new right? The libertarians, technologists, transhumanists, and utopians?
I think Schmitz would argue that the libertarian/technologist position is fundamentally unstable, and will collapse back into progressivism if it continues to follow its own (supposedly) nihilistic creed to its logical conclusion.
Yes, yes, and yes. Though I hesitate to call them "the new right" because they don't have anything to conserve yet, no entrenched interests to inflate; they're still on the upswing so that hasn't come out yet.
Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".
Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.
The liberal position is fundamentally unstable because the type of people it privileges cannot be entrenched in the same way a religious or identarian movement can. "Correct" is not an identity, though genetics have a non-trivial role to play in who is more often to be correct, and who is less- hence the movement's emphasis on making sure people who have genes that predict correctness are pushed so that they are correct more often and more productively.
And yes, this means that if there are differences here between subpopulations, they're going to get magnified. This will offend progressives, who are statistically more likely to be on the losing end of this (as part of why they're progressives). But if you can at least create and keep that cultural standard you'll at least be back at the point where you have enough seed corn that eating it becomes a possibility again.
I like this framing. What do you think makes this predictable though?
Yeah unfortunately I agree... Christianity is still working through the implications of birth control but I on the whole think it's good for the Christian worldview. There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.
Honestly, maybe I'm reaching a bit outside of the standard reactionary "fuck you men, reeee" (though I definitely think this is a major part of it, and understandably so), since that's the only mechanism of action I can come up with.
The problem with sexism in the Church is that on plain reading the Bible outright justifies it. So, the wicked can point to any number of verses that says "women exist for the benefit of men"- like, say, Genesis 1- and have a solid argument that takes words words words to defeat. "Lean not on your own understanding" is fucking catnip to a traditionalist because it means you can do nothing and call it devotion (which the progressives have their own carbon copies of re: "alternate ways of knowing").
It's like the whole point is to grow together, where the interests of one converge into the interests of the other like some sort of... marriage or something. Not sure why the Church would know anything about that, though.
Nothing whatsoever in Genesis 1 says or even implies that women exist for the benefit of men.
I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man? I'd argue that it's quite a tendentious and implausible reading of that verse to simply interpret it as suggesting female inferiority or servitude, but at any rate, it is not in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 only mentions gender once, in 1:27 ("male and female he created them"), and that verse does not suggest any superiority or inferiority.
This is still suggesting inferiority on plain reading. It doesn't have to be, of course... but then we read a little further and we see "your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you". Sure, the context is describing a curse, but that doesn't make it any less pre-ordained to occur.
So this is a real viewpoint, it's backed up relatively well by the text (both testaments), and even Jesus himself backs it up (by the way he addresses the woman at the fountain). Which means that the wicked, and wicked men in particular, will latch onto it and abuse it even in societal conditions that don't obey that fundamental curse as strictly as they once did.
The Church has to find a way to deal with those wicked men in a way that won't drive off the wise or damage the life script for the simple (they're running closer to biology, and traditionalist ways are objectively best for those people). Their success is mixed.
You mean in John 4? I don't see where that passage implies female inferiority? He asks the woman for a drink of water, and the text immediately indicates that he's asking her because the (male) disciples have gone into town to buy food, so it seems like he's comfortable asking people of either sex for nourishment. The woman's response does not mention sex either - she's surprised because he's a Jew and she's a Samaritan. The operative categories are ethnoreligious, not sex.
There is a subsequent discussion of the woman's husband, but again I don't see anything that implies that he considers her the inferior of men?
If I were looking for a gotcha passage showing Jesus giving priority to men or being demeaning of women, I feel like I could do better.
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‘Still working through’ is mostly not true- the RCC has articulated its reasons for condemnation and other sects have made their peace with it.
I am not a Roman Catholic. The Church is broader than the Patriarchate of Rome.
What sect hasn’t figured out what their stance on birth control is? Most conservative Protestants make some well defined allowances, orthodoxy allows most contraception while pretending not to, and other groups generally allow any use of contraception. The church fathers are pretty clear that the answer to not wanting a baby is ‘don’t have sex’(and indeed condemn contraceptive methods by name), but the groups considering the church fathers binding have decided what to do about that.
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Interestingly, if you look at other domains, the sides reverse. Liberals/Progressives attack the Trump administration on the grounds that they are not displaying the proper "good behavior and virtue" (i.e. "subverting our democracy," "norms", "rule of law", etc.) where Trumpist-rightists are arguing that, e.g. in the recent immigration kerfuffles, "the only terminal value [is] results" such that any district court which purports to order Tren de Aragua gangmembers brought back into the country after their deportation flight had already left US airspace cannot be legitimate on a fundamental level.
Even on family-planning issues, there's a similar dynamic between a progressive left that views upholding an ideal of women's role in society as the primary goal (virtue primacy), whereas the natalist right points at crashing TFR and marriage rates (material primacy).
Additional evidence that the mainstream left increasingly takes over the role of the status-quo conservative; If you're in control of the arbiters of good behaviour and virtue, critiquing it in your enemies is essentially free. This has been a conservative strategy for basically as long as humanity exists. This is especially obvious here in germany, where the churches increasingly openly align with the left (the Katholikentag [catholic day] barely even bothers inviting CDU politicians anymore, and the catholics are the less progressive wing of german christianity).
For this reason, "traditional conservatives" like Schmitz are in reality impotent regressives, harkening back to an old order nobody really believes in anymore.
People like Musk make much more sense in this framework; Obviously a shitposting technofuturist who wants to smash the status-quo has absolutely nothing to do with conservatism. And on the other side, Biden; A senile old nominal leader who not only doesn't, but simply can't, change anything is the archetype of (dysfunctional) conservatism.
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