Light On Dark Water

How Much Damage Did the Pope’s Interview Do?

I think that’s the question–not “did it do any damage?” Rod Dreher, in the New York Times, thinks it was a lot:

Whatever the evangelical merits of Pope Francis’s game-changing
interview, there can be no doubt that the pontiff has decisively
undercut the efforts of American Catholic politicians and Catholic
bishops on issues related to abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception –
and, ultimately, religious freedom.

(Read the whole thing.)

There’s also the question of how much good it did, if any–the “evangelical merits” of which Dreher speaks.  I haven’t seen any evidence of people who are not already committed Catholics receiving the message in anything like its entirety. The scornful comments on Dreher’s piece are indicative and typical. For the most part, what I’ve seen of secular reaction, even when positive, does not consider taking another look at what the Church offers but is at most only hopeful that this is a first step in moving the Church in a direction more acceptable to them.

And note the headlines on the accompanying opinions by an “activist” nun and a well-known abortion advocate, who are both very pleased and encouraged by the apparent abandonment of Catholics working politically against abortion etc. As I said in a comment on one of my other posts on this topic:

I’m
afraid the effect of this is going to be more, not less, divisiveness.
He seems to want the Church to make the outward turn that I’ve
anticipated and hoped for, but he may be doing it in a way that may
undermine it, by setting us to fighting among ourselves again.

Mario Cuomo must be loving this. Is Phil Donahue still alive?

Maclin Horton
,

99 responses to “How Much Damage Did the Pope’s Interview Do?”

  1. Art Deco

    Any relationship between Dreher’s emotional states and social reality is random.

    Phil Donahue is still alive. I had not realized that he retired as long ago as he did. I gather all of his contemporaries have also left the airwaves.

    I scanned the interview. I think the problem is not this particular interview, but the manner with which he interacts with his interlocutors (as well as a decline in journalistic professionalism). That may prove wearing over time.
    Leadership is important, but the problems have been for some time most severely manifest at the local level. There is nothing that prevents reverent liturgy and little that prevents satisfactory cathechesis. It is just that local priests are disinclined (because indifferent or because they do not care for the pushback they get from active laity). Rome needs to set a liturgical standard (with regard to which they have not been succeeding), but ultimately the most severe problem is that locals have lost a vigorous sense of what proper liturgy is (and, yes, Paul VI and John Paul II are responsible for that).

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  2. Mac

    Dreher’s not always wrong. I think he’s right here. The effect he’s describing is not rational, but it’s real.
    I don’t think this affects liturgy and catechesis in any direct way. It aids those inside and outside the Church who would like to see the Church stop getting in the way of the grand transformation that Obama promised.

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  3. Louise

    I have no definite opinion on this, but a couple of thoughts. One is that I think those parishioners who are not much into the internet (or at least the Catholic blogosphere) may be blissfully unaware of all this. It’s not my own observation necessarily, but it was the observation of one Catholic blogger.
    Commenters at the FB page of Forming Intentional Disciples seem to be suggesting that a number of people are looking again at the Church, but I don’t necessarily get the impression that it’s b/c they hope the Church will change its doctrine, it may be more that they like Pope Francis’ style.
    Who knows what Divine Providence will do?!

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  4. Mac

    Indeed. Thinking more about all this last night, with a little distance from the immediate controversy, I think I may be over-reacting to some degree. As is Rod Dreher–I mean, as Art says, Dreher is prone to emotionalism. So yes, the Frances Kisslings are trying to exploit the apparent opening, but that doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. Also, I know I’m continuing to react with irritation to the continuing put-downs of Benedict.
    That’s encouraging from the Intentional Disciples folks. I haven’t seen any of that, but I’m going by secular web sites and the commenters there.

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  5. Daniel Nichols

    Dreher is insufferable (did you catch the photo of him holding his new book? Ignore, if you can, the goofy hair and glasses and concentrate on the shit-eating grin, holding a book about the tragic death if his sister).
    Sorry, got distracted.
    It seems that the pope’s remarks are intended for the sort of American Catholic who interrupts any conversation about war or injustice with comments to the effect that these are inconsequential in light of the numbers of aborted babies. Like it or not, to the public it does seem that some Catholics reduce the Faith to pelvic issues.
    Of course if Rodney gets too annoyed he can always leave the Church. Oh, that’s right…

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  6. Daniel Nichols

    Oops; italics scrambled…

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  7. Robert Gotcher

    What irks me is when people either imply or outright say that if the pope’s comments make me uneasy, it is because I need to be unsettled. In other words, it is a sign of my spiritual immaturity. There is NO rational reason to be concerned.
    This is ad hominem at its finest.
    I’m not saying that I’m not spiritual immature or that I don’t need to be unsettled, but this is not a helpful response to concerns raised in a rational manner.
    The fact that I need to be unsettled does not automatically mean that the way the Pope is unsettling me is the right way. In other words, it doesn’t address my rational query about the affect his remarks have and how much responsibility he has, as pope, to consider that affect on various pastoral situations in the world, including in the U.S., even if the U.S. isn’t the center of the universe and all that.

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  8. Mac

    Italics fixed.
    Yes, that’s part of what bugs me, too, Robert. It’s very patronizing as well, which is always annoying. It suggests that you’ve never actually thought about these things, which are actually quite commonplace and very frequently discussed.
    “some Catholics reduce the Faith to the pelvic issues.” Yes, that’s true, and if he’d qualified it that way it wouldn’t have been a problem. But as he put it, he suggests that it applies to the whole Church, including his predecessors in office.

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  9. Mac

    And no, by the way, I haven’t seen the cover of his book. Some odd instinct, which you’d probably say is sound, has sort of kept me away from the publicity about the book.
    I mean, I don’t have anything like the same hostility to Dreher that you and Art do, but there is something vaguely off-putting, and I’m not even sure what it is.

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  10. Robert Gotcher

    Abortion isn’t a pelvic issue except by accident.

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  11. Daniel Nichols

    It’s not the cover of the book, it’s the photo of him holding it:http://leporibus.wordpress.com/ I was told that his advance was huge; so huge I thought it preposterous.

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  12. Art Deco

    Of course if Rodney gets too annoyed he can always leave the Church. Oh, that’s right…
    His legal name is actually “Ray O. Dreher, Jr.”. Papa Dreher goes by “Ray”.
    It seems that the pope’s remarks are intended for the sort of American Catholic who interrupts any conversation about war or injustice with comments to the effect that these are inconsequential in light of the numbers of aborted babies.
    The difficulty is as follows:
    1. What are your priorities?
    2. Which injustice? (And what do you suppose we do about it?)

    3. Which war? (And what do you suppose we do about it?).

    Actually, Dreher himself has adopted the essentially vacuous position that political violence is non-existent unless the United States military is a participant (or, perhaps, that political violence is invariably exacerbated when the U.S. military is a participant – they switch back and forth). That’s a palaeo signature. He manages to avoid the anti-semitism that is common (if not modal) in that subculture.

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  13. Daniel Nichols

    All injustice, all war. And to eradicate same as much as possible.
    As to my priorities, I hope that they are those of any Christian, which should include the common good of humanity.
    Michael Gerson continually surprises me; the guy wrote speeches for G W Bush, yet quite often is spot on; indeed, he gets the pope the way that few on any side of the paradigm does:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-pope-francis-

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  14. Mac

    More spam-catcher weirdness: Daniel’s 12:33pm comment was caught, and I just now freed it, but the 1:33pm got through. It should at least be consistent.
    Anyway: it’s pretty mean, but I admit I laughed at the caption of that photo.

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  15. Louise

    Also, I know I’m continuing to react with irritation to the continuing put-downs of Benedict.
    I feel that quite strongly myself.
    What irks me is when people either imply or outright say that if the pope’s comments make me uneasy, it is because I need to be unsettled. In other words, it is a sign of my spiritual immaturity. There is NO rational reason to be concerned.
    This is ad hominem at its finest.
    I agree, Robert.
    In other words, it doesn’t address my rational query about the affect his remarks have and how much responsibility he has, as pope, to consider that affect on various pastoral situations in the world, including in the U.S., even if the U.S. isn’t the center of the universe and all that.
    Right.

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  16. Art Deco

    In fairness to Dreher, he has spent his adult life in a line of work which is rapidly disappearing. He is the ice merchant, ca. 1950. He is currently employed by an opinion magazine which has one-tenth the circulation of the one he resigned from 11 years ago. Said magazine is on the patronage of a tech billionaire named Unz (who does not subscribe to some of its foundational signatures, so over the side they go). His attempt several years back to move from opinion journalism to public relations &c. came a cropper and by some accounts he was in danger of dismissal by the Templeton Foundation (or canned by the Foundation). He telecommutes and evidently now suffers from a chronic Epstein-Barr infection, which may be why his grooming is godawful. That’s a goof smile, not a coprophageous one.
    He insists his sister’s first degree relations reviewed the manuscript before he sent it to the publisher. I have seen some excerpts. Too much information. His sister did not much care for him, an opinion evidently shared to some degree by her husband and two of her three children. They all live quite proximate to each other around a town with fewer than 2,000 people in it. And we all know about it.

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  17. Art Deco

    “some Catholics reduce the Faith to the pelvic issues.” Yes, that’s true, and if he’d qualified it that way it wouldn’t have been a problem.
    The thing is, the pelvic issues are the one’s the individual can most readily address. “War”, not so much.

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  18. Art Deco

    I don’t have anything like the same hostility to Dreher that you and Art do
    In the interests of precision, not ‘hostility’ but ‘irritation’. The man’s writing is a report of his emotional condition, often lacking in concision, error laden at times, often consumed with striking attitudes, accusatory by default. He is also embarrassingly other-directed.

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  19. Daniel Nichols

    Rod Dreher, bringing together erstwhile enemies since 2005. Art and I actually agree about one thing…
    It is not the book, which I have not read, that is the issue. People I respect, like Bill Kauffman and Jeremy Beer, like the book (of course they are suckers for localism). It’s the big grin, holding a book you wrote about your dead sister. I can understand being pleased by the first copies of a book you wrote, for what is reputed to be a small fortune. It is that he does not have the common sense to look serious, when the subject of the book is of course tragic.
    I believe there was a contest on Facebook for supplying a caption for the photo. You can imagine how mean it got, as Dreher is so widely loathed. I almost felt sorry for him…

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  20. Mac

    What is the effect and seriousness of E-B? A quick look at Wikipedia left me unsure of it significance.
    “His sister did not much care for him, an opinion evidently shared….” !!! Well, I hope for their sakes that her relatives were not offended by the book. It’s always seemed to me to be very bad form to go into a lot of detail about friends and relations in a memoir or autobio, unless perhaps one can be both honest and mostly complimentary, or has gotten their genuine ok for it. I was appalled at what I read about the memoir of his parents that Frank Schaeffer published a few (or more) years ago.

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  21. Daniel Nichols

    And the advance is rumored, by D magazine (“D” as in “Dallas”) and the New York Post to be over a million bucks….

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  22. Mac

    Of course I have been amused by the Daniel-Art rapprochement on this subject.
    “so widely loathed”–gosh, I didn’t realize it was that bad. I don’t really get it. I don’t see him much differently from the way I see various other pundits–I mean, he doesn’t stand out that much to me. Sometimes I like what he says, sometimes I don’t. He’s not a regular read.

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  23. Mac

    A mil…[choking sound]. Good heavens. Is it actually out yet? How’s it selling? Never mind, I see on Amazon that it’s been out a while and is occupying the 30,388th position in their sales ranks. How pleased is that publisher, I wonder?

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  24. Tom

    I read Rod Dreher’s book and was inspired by it. The autobiographical parts reminded me of pieces I’ve read on this blog. Dreher doesn’t hide the fact that his sister didn’t think much of him – in fact, that’s what much of the book is about. It’s also a celebration of her life and what an exceptionally giving person she was. There’s a lot of insight into the good and bad of local communities – no easy answers. I also found it to be a strong expression of Christian faith and hope in the face of tragedy.
    One can fairly argue that Dreher reveals too much but that’s for his family to sort out. It seems at least plausible that they were okay with it. Likewise, how is it our business what kind of advance he got?
    I gave up on Dreher’s commentary a long time ago as he seemed to react and swing off into all kinds of directions. I was pleasantly surprised by the cohesiveness and basic Christian witness of this book.

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  25. Mac

    I quit both Dreher and Mark Shea about the same time for reasons similar to yours. A different twist in each case, but they both had (have?) a tendency toward frenzy that really began to wear on me. They can both be good at times but they’re not regular reads for me.
    I don’t begrudge him his million-dollar advance, if that’s what it really was–that seems awfully high for something not guaranteed to be a blockbuster. I’m just astonished by it.
    Anyway, I’m glad to hear some good things about the book. I am, obviously, not a big fan, but I can’t see that he deserves to be “widely loathed.”

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  26. Daniel Nichols

    Not to belabor it, but I believe that Dreher is widely loathed because he appears to have no core principles but seems to run on emotional reaction. That and he really is not that bright, in the sense of having original and creative thoughts. Plus, there is a huge dose of careerism in his shifting opinions. He seems to have adjusted very well, for example, to the non-interventionism at his new job. Not sure if he is up to being critical of Israel, as the opportunity of widespread Israeli brutality has not appeared since his naming as “senior editor at TAC…

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  27. Art Deco

    Plus, there is a huge dose of careerism in his shifting opinions. He seems to have adjusted very well, for example, to the non-interventionism at his new job.
    Actually, he has been Daniel Larison’s bitch for about six or seven years now, dating to the mid-point of his years as an editorial writer in Dallas. After the issue of Crunchy Cons, a blog was set up to critique the book and his other writings and one of the themes was his degree of deference to Daniel Larison.
    Given that Larison is more than a decade his junior, has had no employment other than writing for opinion magazines, and has an interest in political life that is purely avocational and laden with shticks, this has always struck me as odd.
    The American Conservative may have been founded by Pat Buchanan with the purpose of expositions of views of his type and may be maintained by this fellow Unz as a curious hobby, but it maintains the character established by by Buchanan’s deputy, Scott McConnell: a collecting pool of misfits with odd little hobby horses and conceits. The unseriousness of the enterprise goes all the way down and from stem to stern. What is ironic is that the publication’s editor fancies himself and his readers as the thinking men in town.

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  28. Rob G

    I can’t imagine Dreher got anything near $1 mil for his book. Especially since Crunchy Cons turned out to be somewhat of a bust. It didn’t sell nearly as well as expected.
    “Widely loathed” is an overstatement, except among certain Catholics who have never forgiven him for leaving the Church. Among the First Things crowd, for instance, he seems to be regarded with a sort of humorous tolerance — as an overly emotional guy who occasionally has some good things to say. The Neos don’t like him, but then I consider that a badge of honor.

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  29. Art Deco

    Neos don’t like him, but then I consider that a badge of honor.
    Actually, John Podhoretz once wangled him a job as a film critic for the New York Post. I doubt Elliot Abrams has ever written a word about anything Rod Dreher ever said.

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  30. Rob G

    Almost all of the Weekly Standard types that I know and/or have read really dislike him — based, of course on the “crunchy” questioning of certain aspects of capitalism, which is verboten.

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  31. Art Deco

    Almost all of the Weekly Standard types that I know and/or have read really dislike him
    Dreher’s object in Crunchy Cons was to contrive a strand of political thought out of his consumer tastes. It is not surprising the book was negatively reviewed.

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  32. Rob G

    “Dreher’s object in Crunchy Cons was to contrive a strand of political thought out of his consumer tastes.”
    The “strand” already existed. His tastes didn’t contrive it — they merely started him on his path towards it. All he attempted to do in the book was to point folks to something that already was there, but which mainstream conservatism had largely forgotten.

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  33. Mac

    I found Crunchy Cons a disappointment. There were a number of good things in it but it was seriously flawed. Starting with the title, which fairly screams “lightweight”.
    Regarding AmCon: as I may (probably) have said before, I stop in every now and then and usually find at least one thing that’s worth reading, but it has always seemed to me to have a crankish (and also cranky) quality

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  34. Rob G

    The way I look at C.C. is that if it got a few conservatives to read Berry and Kirk, or to think about the fact that there’s more than Limbaugh and Hannity out there in the conservative world, it’s a good thing.

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  35. Mac

    Fair enough. It probably did that.

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  36. Art Deco

    The way I look at C.C. is that if it got a few conservatives to read Berry and Kirk, or to think about the fact that there’s more than Limbaugh and Hannity out there in the conservative world, it’s a good thing.
    Berry is engaging, but his material does not map particularly well to contemporary political disputes, nor does it need to. Hannity and Limbaugh speak with a particular idiom and speak about topical questions. That does not preclude other approaches to or emphases with regard to the discussion of political life. The following precis:
    http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/ten-conservative-principles/

    likely would be disputed by George Gilder and people of similar kidney, but not by too many others.

    You seem always to be contending with phantoms: Mr. Hannity’s viewership, the Weekly Standard‘s readership, Mr. Limbaugh’s listeners, &c. Popular discussion of political topics is not literary criticism. Get over it.

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  37. Art Deco

    The “strand” already existed. His tastes didn’t contrive it — they merely started him on his path towards it.
    Without much regard for my mortality, I do read his blog. No, he does elaborate upon some alternative strand of thought. He offers complaints, some of them well taken and some not. The Republican congressional caucus make an unedifying bunch. Now go read the comboxes at National Review. Their readership is if anything harsher than Dreher about the Republican Party politburo.
    The alt-right seems to have two basic dispositions toward public policy: 1.) indifference; 2.) a tendency to traffic in crank nostrums. A given exponent need not be concerned with policy questions, but someone has to be. You cannot govern by meditating on Russell Kirk’s ghost stories.

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  38. Rob G

    “Popular discussion of political topics is not literary criticism.”
    Huh? I don’t even know what that sentence means.
    “I do read his blog.”
    I was not referring to the blog, but to the book.
    “A given exponent need not be concerned with policy questions, but someone has to be.”
    Correct. But perhaps it’s wise to clarify diagnoses before one begins a treatment plan, else you might find yourself, say, treating an ulcer with aspirin.

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  39. Rob G

    Iow, policy questions are important, but if there are underlying philosophical problems, they might need to be addressed first.

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  40. Mac

    Obviously we need both. Airy theorizing and dreaming of a perfect order don’t accomplish much, but immersion in practical politics without much aim beyond winning elections is no better. Someone does have to be concerned with policy questions, sure. But policy questions had better be oriented toward larger purposes, too.

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  41. Mac

    “… we have no widespread and well-developed tradition of nonliberal thought to provide a counterweight. The absence of antiliberal symbols and traditions of discussion has made it difficult to articulate what is wrong with liberal demands and to present contrary views in way that makes sense in American public discussion…. Lacking both an inside understanding of politics and an adequate theoretical grasp of tradition and society, conservatives have been simple-minded, shortsighted, and easily manipulated. Politicians may want conservative votes and be willing on occasion to take symbolic stands in favor of popular traditions and prejudices, but the serious business of governing has been carried on by national elites, who are always liberal.”
    –Kalb, Liberal Tyranny

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  42. Daniel Nichols

    I do not loathe Mr Dreher; rather I find him really really annoying. But he is indeed widely loathed, both by conservatives who find his alleged crunchiness irritating, and real “crunchy” radicals, who find his conservatism contrary to holistic living. Not to mention, to any real critique of the system.
    For my part, what got me was his enthusiasm for total war during Israel’s assault on Lebanon a few years back, when he was posting links to neocons invoking Hiroshima, and the lad himself was renouncing any calls for proportionality.
    Of course he doesn’t talk like that anymore, which, sorry, just seems opportunistic, given his newfound status at TAC, which even though I am not a conservative, I find more appealing -except the libertarian economics- than most of you.
    And for what it is worth, I never ever criticized his move to Orthodoxy; I am not unsympathetic, though I think it wrongheaded.
    His involvement in intra-church intrigue, though, is another matter.

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  43. Paul

    Seeing your mention of Mark Shea made me wonder what he was up to these days. (Rod Dreher is somebody I’ve only ever heard of on this blog.)
    Here’s his take: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/09/jp-ii-benedict-and-francis-on-the-same-page.html

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  44. Rob G

    “he is indeed widely loathed, both by conservatives who find his alleged crunchiness irritating and real ‘crunchy’ radicals, who find his conservatism contrary to holistic living”
    It is, of course, only a certain sort of conservative that would find his crunchiness irritating (even if that sort is in the majority). On the other side it would seem to indicate on the radicals’ part an inadequate or incomplete understanding of conservatism.

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  45. Art Deco

    … we have no widespread and well-developed tradition of nonliberal thought to provide a counterweight.
    I think Mr. Kalb is simply too invested in explicit discourses at the expense of consideration of actual social practice. People who write like this seem to believe as if the taxonomies of social thought were more consequential than the content of social thought which in turn are more consequential than social practice. We do not need a ‘non-liberal’ social thought. We need an understanding of the right and the good and we need an understanding of social dynamics. In understanding these two, we contrive an understanding of formal institutions and law which make the best of things. You may call this understanding ‘liberal’ or ‘non-liberal’, but the only purpose of these categories is convenience.
    If he means explicit defenses of monarchical absolutism or a society of orders, or the jointure of throne-and-alter, no we have not. The thing is, the 1st has never existed in this country (from 1607 to the present). The 3d was multifarious, varying from one province to another, was seldom severe in its application, and dissipated in stages. As for the 2d, it dissipated in the northern part of the country over a period of 160-odd years (and was never aught but inchoate anyway); in the South, the society of orders was actually a caste system that had no analogue in occidental history past the classical period.
    Since the raw materials of the discussion were not there, you likely are not going to have the discussion.

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  46. Art Deco

    For my part, what got me was his enthusiasm for total war during Israel’s assault on Lebanon a few years back, when he was posting links to neocons invoking Hiroshima, and the lad himself was renouncing any calls for proportionality.
    In the interests of precision:
    There was no total war. Israel has never engaged in anything resembling ‘total war’ at any time. The most thoroughgoing mobilization Israel has ever undertaken was during the period running from about November 1947 to February 1949, but military conflict of that sort is not what people have in mind when they utter terms like ‘total war’.
    All of the armed conflict that Israel was involved in between 1949 and 1978 was either over in a matter of days or fought over trash land adjoining Israel. Since 1977, Israel has had little or nothing in the way of engagement with state armies. All of Israels conflicts have been with paramilitary groups appropriating other people’s territory. There was no ‘assault on Lebanon’. There was an assault on Hezbollah, who are an illegitimate and flagitious organization.
    No one is concerned about ‘proportionality’ between cops and robbers. For good reason.

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  47. Rob G

    “We need an understanding of the right and the good and we need an understanding of social dynamics.”
    You get the first from philosophy. Liberalism’s philosophy is ethically and morally bankrupt. Hence, its understanding of social dynamics will necessarily be problematic, to say the least.

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  48. Paul

    “No one is concerned about ‘proportionality’ between cops and robbers.”
    Has anyone told the Police Complaints Commissioner?

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  49. Mac

    I think Shea is correct, Paul.
    I don’t generally disagree with Shea when I read him, but his often-frenzied rhetorical style is tiresome to say the least

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  50. Mac

    “We do not need a ‘non-liberal’ social thought. We need an understanding of the right and the good and we need an understanding of social dynamics….”
    You should read the book, Art. Your second sentence is in large part what it’s about. “liberal” and “non-liberal” are nomenclature required to talk about the situation, and he’s pretty clear about what he means by them. My point in quoting that particular passage was that I think his description of the weakness of American conservatism is pretty accurate. Probably applicable to conservatism throughout the industrial world. It is difficult to argue against liberalism starting from liberal assumptions.

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  51. Mac

    “…it would seem to indicate on the radicals’ part an inadequate or incomplete understanding of conservatism.”
    To say the least–since “conservative” is pretty much a synonym for “evil” on the left.

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  52. Art Deco

    Has anyone told the Police Complaints Commissioner?
    A police review board would be concerned with the use of excessive means to subdue a suspect. It would not be concerned that the patrolmen make it their business to subdue suspects.
    In Argentina during the period running from about 1973 to 1976, it was the usual practice for the authorities to retaliate against the EPR and the Montoneros in response to casualties suffered by the army and the police, but not to attempt to actually liquidate the Montoneros and the EPR as armed forces. In some circles, that counts as ‘proportionality’.

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  53. Mac

    I wasn’t going to wade into that “proportionality” thing that Daniel referred to, but as I remember it:
    John Podhoretz published a column in which he misunderstood the concept of “proportionality” in war at least as Catholics would define it, and took it to mean something like “you can never defend yourself with any force greater than that which was used to attack you.” Ok, whatever. But then he went on to make the truly vile argument that what we should have done in Iraq was to execute every male of military age. This he described as “steely-eyed determination” or something like that. I think Israel figured into the argument somehow, too. Maybe the Israeli incursion into Lebanon was the initiating topic. But I think the genocide prescription was in the context of Iraq.
    So Dreher read that, and, exhibiting the emotionalism that has been so often noted in his work, wrote a rather frenzied agreement with Podhoretz that was really more about the first part of Podhoretz’s argument. After calming down about, and having it pointed out to him that he had just advocated a level of barbarism that besides from being morally disgusting would be considered a major war crime by any body in a position to make the judgment, he backed off, saying he hadn’t really meant that.
    That was around the time of the release of Crunchy Cons, and caused Daniel, in the course of reviewing the book, to blast Dreher as “a neo-con with sandals.”
    I never thought Dreher really meant to be advocating semi-genocide. I thought he was just reacting and speaking very hastily and carelessly. Podhoretz, though, was in my mind permanently tainted.
    Possibly all this is still online if anyone wanted to try to dig it up. More trouble than I want to go to.

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  54. Art Deco

    It is difficult to argue against liberalism starting from liberal assumptions.
    What ‘liberal assumptions’? Recall Willmoore Kendall’s concise description of ‘the American tradition’: “ride ’em out of town on a rail”.
    Even into the post-War period, there was fairly vigorous social disapproval of discretionary divorce and bastardy. Basic social architecture held except around the edges.
    A number of western states have severe demographic churn (Nevada and Alaska especially), but that is not true in other parts of the country. As late as 1990, 65% of the population of the country lived in the state in which they were born and the majority lived within about 100 miles of where they grew up. In some states (Louisiana and Pennsylvania to name two), the share of the population who are natives is north of 80%. The amount of mobility is exaggerated in people’s minds.
    Discussion of social relations is going to incorporate the notion that people have a wide range of choice about where to live and what trade to follow. I am not sure how it could be any other way.

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  55. Mac

    “A police review board would be concerned with the use of excessive means to subdue a suspect.”
    That’s proportionality, in this case formalized in law and regulations, but surely that’s the basic idea.

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  56. Rob G

    “What ‘liberal assumptions’?”
    First and foremost, the notion that the autonomous individual must, in order to be truly free, be “liberated” from the natural bonds of the traditional institutions of family, community, nation, and church (esp. the latter).

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  57. Art Deco

    I think you are referring to this Podhoretz quotation
    “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them … ? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”
    The column in question (as summarized in the New York Times) was on the subject of whether a democratic country can wage wars to win them. He was not precisely advocating this, but chewing over a question of whether we could ever do this if that is what was required to finish the job (he also made reference to counter-value bombing of cities during the 2d World War).
    Now, nine of Iraq’s 15 provinces were pacified without resort to anything out of the ordinary. Two are in troublesome condition (Baghdad and Kirkuk) and the four Sunni Arab provinces are a major mess. So, Iraq is currently in a situation that Columbia has been in since 1948 – about 40% of the population lives in areas with chronic political violence. The interesting question is why the Sunni forces are intent on fouling their own nest.

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  58. Art Deco

    Erg, Colombia. The country, not the University.
    There is not a readily observable ‘diplomatic’ solution to the problem that ails the Sunni governorates in Iraq. Current tactics succeeded in containing the violence but not extinguishing it. What do you do? The dilemmas do not go away because some egg-salad sandwich in the peanut gallery is uttering jeremiads.

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  59. Art Deco

    First and foremost, the notion that the autonomous individual must, in order to be truly free, be “liberated” from the natural bonds of the traditional institutions of family, community, nation, and church (esp. the latter).
    But who advocated that? Max Eastman did, ca 1914, but he was always an eccentric. You are taking a nest of attitudes that was atypical if not rare prior to 1966 and acting as if these were the default assumptions with regard to social life in this country. They were not.

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  60. Art Deco

    I should specify that the notion one migrates to seek one’s fortune is a familiar feature of popular culture (though that is not how most people have behaved since the close of the frontier). The notion that one migrates from one’s spouse was certainly not.
    And a social ethic which is congenial to migration is not surprising. I would not call it ‘liberal’, but rather what you would expect from a society formed of … migrants.

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  61. Rob G

    “You are taking a nest of attitudes that was atypical if not rare prior to 1966”
    Please. It’s practically the anthropological engine of the French Enlightenment, and to a less militant degree, the other ones as well.

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  62. Mac

    You really would need to read the book to engage his arguments fully, Art. A comment-box summary from me or Rob is not going to really do it justice. But one of his major points, which is hardly unique to him, can be summed up as the idea that the ideas which have become pathological in contemporary liberalism have been present in Western culture since the Enlightenment, but were balanced by other forces which have grown steadily weaker.

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  63. Mac

    Had not read Rob’s 1:10 when I posted my 1:31, but yeah.

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  64. Mac

    I’m not sure what point you’re making about J Podhoretz and Iraq, Art. That the problem of insurgent violence in Iraq is indeed difficult? No argument there. But yes, I’m sure that is the column in question.

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  65. Art Deco

    I’m not sure what point you’re making about J Podhoretz and Iraq, Art. That the problem of insurgent violence in Iraq is indeed difficult? No argument there. But yes, I’m sure that is the column in question.
    My point was that he was musing rather than advocating.
    I think the problem with ‘Rob G’s view of this is that cogitations by x, y, and z are superlatively important and that how people live their lives is but a delayed reaction to this. Non ci credo. Libraries are great cemeteries of the world’s mediocre literature and (without a doubt) 18th century France produced shelves and shelves of material known today only by Alan Kors and a few academic specialists.
    You see that disposition in other realms. I occasionally look in on a blog which is intensely concerned with peri-revolutionary correspondence. Jefferson’s letters to x, y, and z and Madison’s letters to x, y, and z. What the “Founding Fathers” thought and wrote are intensely interesting to most of these characters (bar a resident critics who chuckles at them all). Some of them actually dismiss as cranks and idiots people who point out the obvious: peri-revolutionary and federal era politicians had operated with and were operating with reference to an institutional matrix that had been in place for periods ranging from 30 years to 200 years. They were not ‘founders’ of those institutions.
    What the Marquis de Sade had to say about anything is of academic interest if you have the digestion. It is not how my grand-parents lived their lives, nor were they or their contemporaries demonstrably influenced by it.

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  66. Art Deco

    You really would need to read the book to engage his arguments fully, Art.
    Mortimer Adler pointed out some time ago that a great many books were only worth an inspectional reading.

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  67. Mac

    True, and some books are not worth opening at all. But I don’t think this is one of them.
    You seem to be unconvinced by the whole “ideas have consequences” thing except maybe in a very immediate sort of way. I’m not going to try to talk you out of that.

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  68. Mac

    Do you have a link to the Podhoretz column? I guess it must be something close to ten years old, so my memory is hazy, but I remember it as something more like a rhetorical question in which the clearly preferred answer was “yes, kill them all.”

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  69. Art Deco

    You seem to be unconvinced by the whole “ideas have consequences” thing except maybe in a very immediate sort of way.
    Not precisely. I am not convinced that ideas have the consequences people ascribe to them or that it is at all possible to do much more than speculate about the effect of idea sets on institutional development and collective behavior. I am very skeptical that the discussion of the intelligentsia of the age is more motivating than a popular trope. You do not hear “It’s a free country” much anymore, but that one phrase I suspect is more important than much involved discourse.

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  70. Art Deco

    There is one way that I think that a discussion of ideas affects how things go: when the mindsets of a decision-making element are influenced. Also, you have idea ‘tides’. Over my lifetime, who has the burden of proof in a discussion, what people tend to consider and what they do not, and who is embarrassed and who is not have changed a great deal.

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  71. Marianne

    Here’s the link to that 2006 Podhoretz column: http://nypost.com/2006/07/25/too-nice-to-win-israels-dilemma/
    I just read the piece a couple of times and I’m not at all sure he does want the reader to have a “yes, kill them all” response.

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  72. Art Deco

    Do you have a link to the Podhoretz column?
    No, I found a New York Times article with a summary and some quotations. I think it was originally published in the New York Post, which I do not think has accessible archives.
    Re: Dreher and all this. I vaguely recall some controversy which landed in his old Beliefnet column and then continued on Caelum et Terra. I seem to recall it got rather heated. Dreher is not typically circumspect and is a sucker for the most dubious literature of doom (peak oil, electromagnetic pulse weapons, Nouriel Roubini, &c.). I seem to recall him in quite a panic about the battles between Israel and Hezbollah and Daniel composing briefs for Hezbollah (which I thought an odd thing to do). I had not recalled Podhoretz writings had anything to do with this. Podhoretz is a satisfactory book reviewer, but his topical commentary does not impress. His father should have steered him in some other direction.

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  73. Marianne

    Here’s “Crunchy Conned,” the 2006 post at the Caelum et Terra blog Art mentioned.
    Interesting discussion in the comments — with some very good commenting by Maclin and Francesca.

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  74. Mac

    Thanks, Marianne. That is indeed the J Pod piece in question. It isn’t quite as bad as I remember, but it does sound to me as if he thinks we should have, for instance, killed all the Sunni men between 18 and 35, or at least most of them. Not so sure I want to read the CetT controversy again…but I guess I will.
    And Art, yes, you’re mostly remembering the controversy as I do, except that I’m pretty sure Dreher jumped off from Podhoretz’s piece. No, he does not impress, to put it mildly. I don’t mean just this instance, but in general. When he wrote for NRO, he did not impress.

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  75. Marianne

    I agree that Podhoretz is not at his best writing topical commentary. But his movie reviews, for example, are pretty good (he’s the Weekly Standard’s movie critic). I think maybe his first love is movies, but that really didn’t quite fit into the family’s line of intellectual endeavor. He also might have been a pretty good comedy writer — some of his tweets are pretty darn funny. And filled with movie references.

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  76. Mac

    Now that you mention it, I think he was funny sometimes at NRO (I don’t read Weekly Standard very often). However, I was obliged to write him off as a film critic when he dismissed Bergman. That may have been on the occasion of Bergman’s death.

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  77. Robert Gotcher

    Ha! I commented on the Crunchy Conned blog post! What got into my mind to think that I knew enough to say anything intelligent about the subject is beyond me. Probably true of all my comments. I’d better be more careful.
    Also, it is interesting to me that I had no idea who Francesca was at that time. Later I ran into her work professional and really appreciated it.

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  78. Mac

    On the one hand, it doesn’t matter what you say in an internet argument, because it will be forgotten in a few days. On the other hand, it does, because it may be there forever if someone wants to retrieve it 7 years later.
    Actually, skimming that discussion, I’m slightly impressed. Most of it is intelligent and reasonable.

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  79. Daniel Nichols

    I did not say that Israel waged total war, only that Dreher advocated it:http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/08/02/crunchy-conned
    And proportionality is a fundamental principle of the just war theory, which is itself increasingly problematic. According to the last three popes, that is.

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  80. Art Deco

    I think maybe his first love is movies, but that really didn’t quite fit into the family’s line of intellectual endeavor.
    His father was for some time a literary critic and his mother an editor at Basic Books. It was later that they took up writing on social and political topics (she better at it than he). The elder Podhoretz and the elder Kristol were more impressive as editors than writers.

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  81. Paul

    I’ve just been reading the 2006 discussion. It’s a pity Francesca never got round to providing the Anscombe quote she half-remembered.
    I agree with Art that to a large extent people tend to tailor their ideas to their lifestyles, rather than the other way around. Or rather: that what ideas (particularly about social organization) we find acceptable and convincing is often limited (in ways we aren’t even aware of) by our own social experiences and expectations.
    This is why the Church is at a disadvantage with regards to Arianism in one century, and Protestantism in another, and liberalism in another – and can only keep on saying that forced marriage, or revenge killing, or contraception, or duelling is wrong, even if some members of the Church can’t see any way around engaging in those practices.
    But at the same time, the way people “frame” their problems can certainly have a big impact on the solutions they are willing to consider, or are likely to find convincing. Ideas are not entirely without consequences in either the short or the long term.

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  82. Art Deco

    I agree with Art that to a large extent people tend to tailor their ideas to their lifestyles, rather than the other way around.
    The distinction between a society composed of modest farmer-proprietors with allodial tenures and one composed of seigneurs and peasants with estates consisting of a fragmented jumble of demesne land and rustical land (over which the peasants have rights of usufruct only and with regard to which co-operative enterprise is a necessity) would seem not adequately described by the term ‘lifestyle’.

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  83. Paul

    Well, the word has perhaps been debased, but I meant it more in the sense an anthropologist might use it than a Sunday supplement; something more total than which consumer choices people make within a consumer society.

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  84. Rob G

    “I am very skeptical that the discussion of the intelligentsia of the age is more motivating than a popular trope.”
    Unfortunately, some discussions of the intelligentsia, or the elites at least, have a way of filtering down to the popular level, then working perniciously there. This is how such ideas get legs. Think of “the Will & Grace effect,” for instance. Or to see how certain theological and philosophical ideas of the late Scholastics were eventually shown to be culture-changers via their widespread adoption and adaptation by the Reformers, see Brad Gregory’s recent, masterful, The Unintended Reformation, which is easily worth double the price of admission.

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  85. Mac

    “way of life,” maybe?
    The whole question of the influence of ideas on society is a big one, and naturally there’s reciprocity between what a society thinks and what it does. But big ideas work down and help to determine what a society regards as natural and proper–what it assumes. One of the points Kalb, Rob, and I would make is that Enlightenment/liberal ideas are now in that position. I’m not sure I can or want to set this out at more length in a combox discussion, though.

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  86. Mac

    Cross-posted with Rob.
    There are two related but different effects we’re talking about here. There’s the more or less direct more or less cause-and-effect working of the “Will and Grace effect,” where pop culture has an immediate and observable influence, but at a relatively superficial level. But there’s also the more subtle and long-term effect of a deep and thorough shift in conceptual framework, the sort of thing that happens slowly but from the viewpoint of centuries is quite noticeable and changes the way people think at a deeper level: e.g. the dominance of Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment.
    The former type of thing is probably much more powerful now than it was before electronic communications became omnipresent.

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  87. Paul

    Theodore Dalrymple makes quite strong claims for how influential elite thinking is among members of the underclass his patients were drawn from.

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  88. Mac

    With particularly disastrous results in the realm of sex and family.

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  89. Art Deco

    Theodore Dalrymple makes quite strong claims for how influential elite thinking is among members of the underclass his patients were drawn from.
    I have read Dalrymple and respect him. Question, what would be the transmission belt? The people Dalrymple deals with would have had considerable contact with social workers, educational apparatchiks, and the mass media. Those in these milieux are not original thinkers.

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  90. Art Deco

    Oh, and the mental health trade.

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  91. Mac

    Well, I think the fact that those you name are not original thinkers is part of the point: what starts out as some intellectual’s big idea becomes part of an atmosphere. The parties you name are just the ones that latch on to ideas because they’re progressive or fashionable.

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  92. Art Deco

    Well, I think the fact that those you name are not original thinkers is part of the point: what starts out as some intellectual’s big idea becomes part of an atmosphere.
    Or does it? Consider the possibility that professional mindsets may have ‘big ideas’ as raw material, but that does not explain how they get to be professional mindsets.

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  93. Daniel Nichols

    Art: I didn’t say that Israel waged total war, only that Dreher, and Kristol and Cohen and Podhoretz, to whom he linked, advocated it, and that he wanted to dismantle the principle of proportionality, which is essential to just war doctrine.
    We obviously have different views on Israel’s military actions, which while not qualifying as “total war” are callous and disproportionate.

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  94. Mac

    I don’t understand what you mean, Art. I wasn’t talking about “professional mindsets” particularly.

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  95. Art Deco

    My suggestion is that the interactions the convicts on Dalrymple’s patient roll have had with others have had as their most salient feature the kultursmog of the occupations in question. Social workers, educational apparatchiks, and ‘counselors’ are authorities who can render legitimate certain ways of looking at yourself and the world. They come by their own worldview by interactions amongst each other and from their formal schooling. The schooling is going to be influenced by big think, but the big think is stewed through two layers of recipients.
    Stop and think about what one encounters in the Church. You have Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium. That is the big think. Then you have sermons and pastoral counseling and what goes on in the confessional. It is influenced by the big think and uses its idiom, but often has a content that diverges. Who is attracted to the clergymen’s occupation, the consequence of the interactions they have with eachother, and the push-pull between clergy and laity affect content.

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  96. Art Deco

    Let us posit that in August of 1914, Germany occupies the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and two neighboring provinces of the Kingdom of Belgium (Liege and Luxembourg). The population of those areas in 1914 exceeded that of the population of southern Lebanon in 1982. That is about as far as Israel has ever advanced into the territory of a neighboring state (the Sinai peninsula is larger, but even today has only about 450,000 people living in it). Given the dimensions of the military operations involved and given that Israel’s military operations have not been particularly sanguinary within the circumscribed limits they have had, I am just not seeing from where this notion of ‘total war’ is coming.
    Robert Stacy McCain offered that if the war in the Levant was ever going to end, Israel had to re-enact Sherman’s March through Georgia (McCain is a native Georgian). I suppose that counts as total war. I am not sure how you get from McCain to Dreher or John Podhoretz or Wm. Kristol or Richard Cohen. McCain is dismissive of Dreher, has a social background fairly remote from that of Kristol and Podhoretz, and has in common with Cohen just that they both lived in metropolitan Washington at one point, worked for newspapers, and write topical commentaries. McCain’s writings focus on domestic politics and do not veer into topics like the Near East all that often.

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  97. Mac

    No argument with that (6:33). In the distinction I made earlier between relatively immediate and civilizational paradigm-determining, this falls more in the former.

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  98. Paul

    So if only people can avoid contact with schools, newspapers (and other media), hospitals, prisons and social workers, they will be safe from the percolating (and variously inflected) influence of big thinkers? I wouldn’t necessrily disagree, but I think this rather limits the area that is safe from the impact of the intelligentsia.

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  99. Mac

    Actually I would disagree. Things outside those institutions still have an effect. It would require pretty much total isolation. Attempts by various religious groups over the past 30 years or so to minimize that sort of contact have been far from universally successful.

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