A Libertarian State is a Self-Inflicted Wound

 

In the Cold War, the West's great advantage was that our adversaries had crippled themselves with an authoritarian state.

Since the Cold War, our adversaries' great advantage is that we have crippled ourselves with a libertarian state.

Russian Exports of Anti-Democratic Extremism, Then and Now

 

The Russians promoted left-wing violent rejection of democracy in the 1970s to disrupt the West.

The Russians promote right-wing violent rejection of democracy today for the same reason.

Gender Complementarianism vs Male Headship

 

Male headship is not the natural counterpart of gender complementarianism, but its antithesis.

 

Complementary and equal entails dual headship. We need both parts of a complementary pair to have a functional whole.

 

The marital couple are meant to exercise headship, together, over the children.

Cabbage

 

The opposite of Garbage In; Garbage Out:

 Cabbage In; Coleslaw Out.

There is No Necessary Connection Between Conservatism and Profit

The conservative parties in all the developed world have become the great protectors of profit-making against all forms of regulation and compassionate limitation.

Yet there is nothing inherently conservative about profit seeking.  Quite the contrary - the profit motive is what makes capitalism so destructive of all traditional structures and relations, however creative that destruction might be.

The closest connection I see between conservatism and profit-seeking is the dour realism of (Calvinist-inflected) Adam Smith.  Smith knew that profit seeking is based on the vice of avarice.  He believed there was a way, though, to harness this individual vice into being a source of public good.  However, to keep profit seeking within safe bounds, the market needs to be constantly controlled by the state and tempered by the virtues produced in civil society.

Unfettered profit-seeking is not conservative; it is the enemy of conserving the known and the good.

Contrary to Rush Limbaugh, the Academy Does Not Teach That America is Irredeemable

There are a handful of academics who say America is irredeemable. There are a handful of fanatics on the other side who say America is a savior nation (as Limbaugh does) -- a position I, as a church elder, regard as open heresy. 

The vast majority of academics are engaged in the search for truth about their topic, whatever that topic is and wherever the search for truth takes them. As teachers, we necessarily have to address the simplistic ideas that students bring with them. Some things they believe are outright myths. Teaching them that American history contains bad things as well as good ones is an essential aspect of good teaching and good truth-seeking. Some students (and quite a few non-students, like Limbaugh) resist having their idols questioned. This leads some academics to use very forceful language to insist that the bad things really did happen. I still get students who were taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. There are still students who are taught that racism ended in the '60s. 

I know as a sociologist that is it very hard for most people to grasp the idea of social structures. We tend to reduce all social phenomena to individuals intending their individual action. This makes teaching challenging. But pointing out that bad things did happen, are still happening, and have left a structural residue which continues to have effects beyond what any individual intends, is not the same as teaching that America is irredeemable. 

Limbaugh, who makes his money from sensationalized fear mongering, probably does know better (he has admitted as much in his several divorce proceedings), but it would interfere with his business model to admit it to his "dittoheads."

[This was written in response to a friend asking about a specific Rush Limbaugh show from October 13, 2020, but repeats a theme he has expressed often.]

To Have a Scientific Mind

 

To become a scientist, to have a scientific turn of mind, is to become the kind of person whose mind can be changed by facts.

Perhaps the only kind.

What Really Trickles Down

Wealth gets hoarded.

Ideas trickle down.

Hersh's Politics is for Power is a Serious Indictment of Political Hobbyism

Eitan Hersh is a political science professor.  Like me, he is surrounded by people who follow and talk politics incessantly.

Yet also, like me, he became dissatisfied with just talking about it.

Worse, he noticed that when you are trying to organize a practical action to actually get candidates elected and bills passed, the people most informed about national politics are often no help. 

Moreover, they can talk national polls, but don't really know anything about the politics of their own community -- where their involvement could make a real difference.

Hersh has concluded that this intense involvement in following political news is best understood as a hobby -- on the same order as fishing or model railroading or Star Trek cosplay.  And that is fine as a leisure pursuit.

But political hobbyism misleads us into thinking that it contributes to the actual aim of politics: to gain power in order to make things better for citizens.

I feel the indictment in Hersh's stories.  I am moved to take more practical political action.

Tim Keller's Reason for God is Solid Apologetics for Individual Christians

Tim Keller, pastor of the PCA Church of the Redeemer in New York City, is a fine apologist in the C. S. Lewis tradition.  His The Reason for God is very good "mere Christianity" for sophisticated critics.

When I read Christian apologetics, I often find the author can give a solid account of how a Christian should relate to God and other individuals.

As a Christian sociologist, though, I am also looking to see what insight the author can give about how Christians should make and inhabit social structures.  In other words, I want more than Christian morality -- I want an account of Christian social ethics.

Ethics is the real weakness of the evangelical side of the church.  It is great on "changed lives," but throws up its hands at the architecture of "changed institutions."

In the individualistic traditions of Protestantism -- Baptists and all of their cousins -- this focus only on individuals is built into their DNA.

For the Catholic branch, and the magisterial Reformation strands, of Christianity, though, this neglect is a real weakness.  And of all the magisterial Reformation families -- Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican -- the Reformed have the most to offer to Protestant social ethics.

Which is why it is disappointing to see so learned and thoughtful a Presbyterian thinker as Tim Keller whiff on Christian ethics.  He says at the end of the book that Jesus will come back to redeem the whole world.

But what Christians are meant to do with our social structures in the meantime is left hanging.

Dreher Wants to Quit the World Over Sex

Reading Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

The issue that makes him give up on the world -- even more than consumerism, materialism, or abortion -- is the gay agenda.  This includes normalizing transgender people.  Also porn.

I appreciate that there are always challenges to living a fully committed Christian life, as Benedictine monks try to do.  And even for serious lay Christians, the world is full of challenges.  But I just don't see coexisting with gay people as the same as the Dark Ages.

Probing a bit deeper, I appreciated Dreher's praise of marriage and marriage-supporting communities.  I was therefore surprised that he entirely skirted the vexed issue of patriarchy, male headship, complementarity, or even any discussion of gender roles in the one-man, one-woman family. 

I think if he is going to sell people on a benedictine withdrawal into little Christian communities, he needs to settle whether that includes giving up on gender equality.

Douthat is Right That Half-Baked Christianities are a Bigger Threat Than Irreligion

In Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Ross Douthat puts his finger on four kinds of heresies that have rushed into the vacuum created by the retreat of the old Protestant Establishment. These heresies are recognizably kinds of Christianity, but embrace only one side of a classic paradox or tension.

• Alternative gospels, from the highbrow Gnostic Gospels to the lowbrow Da Vinci Code.
• Prosperity gospel, from Michael Novak's sanctification of capitalism to Joel Osteen's hucksterism.
• Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (the term is from sociologist Christian Smith) - think Eat, Pray, Love or Deepak Chopra.
• Nationalism, both messianic and apocalyptic.

In each case, the proponents have grasped half of a good thing, but miss the tempering wisdom of the mean between extremes.

The last heresy is the one most in my interest.  He says the great social movements do have a vision of improving the nation, but tempered with realism about sin.  Moreover, when they worked, these movements drew from both parties.  What Douthat thinks is unique about this moment is that there are messianic and apocalyptic strands in both the Republican and the Democratic Parties. 

Douthat notes that religious leaders tend to think unbelief is the great danger.  I have long thought that human beings are a believing species, because we want to understand why our existence is meaningful.  This means that when confidence in the great religions ebbs with a portion of the population, what they turn to is not stark unbelief and nihilism.  Instead, every kind of paganism rushes in. 

The heresies that Douthat notes are actually partly signs of life for the church -- they try to draw on the great patrimony of the world religions, especially the biblical strand.  That they do so in an unbalanced way is the common error of all humanity, as Aristotelian philosophy always reminds us.  But their hearts are, I think, pointing in the right direction.

Douthat says that each decline of faith in American history thus far has been followed by a resurgence of a chastened but vibrant renewal. He sees some possibilities of that renewal now.  I think I am more constitutionally optimistic than he is, so I see his hope and raise it.

Prothero's Culture Wars Argument Would Be Stronger if Race Were Central

(I am catching up on some religion and politics books that had been on my list for some time.)

Stephen Prothero, in Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even if they Lose Elections) reviews previous culture wars in American history.  He defines culture wars as “angry public disputes that are simultaneously moral and religious and address the meaning of America.”

I think he is entirely right that we have always had culture wars, and probably always will.  We are not more polarized now than we were in past culture conflicts.  And some of those fights, against Catholics and Mormons, were more violent than what we have today.

His thesis is really interesting:
Conservatives start culture wars when the imagined past they think they are losing is already lost.  Liberals fight back, and eventually win.
Then the new, more inclusive culture becomes normal, the base for the next imagined past.

One big issue he slides past, though, is race.  He wants to separate race and culture, though he knows that the two are highly intertwined.  In particular, he skips over the Civil War and early Jim Crow. I think this is more wrong than right -- the struggle over the cultural meaning of race and white supremacy is a cultural and religious issue.

Moreover, if he had treated the race fight as the same kind of culture war as the more obviously religious conflicts, his final section on "contemporary culture wars" would be stronger.

His thesis is that conservatives start culture wars.  He says that the conservative narrative explaining the current culture war is that the liberals started it by "taking prayer out of schools" and legalizing abortion.  Not so, says Prothero -- if you look at the actual chronology of what mobilized the Religious Right, it was the threat to the tax exemption of the "segregation academies" that they created in response to school integration.  Race came first; abortion and "family values" were added later.

Prothero frames the core narrative of American cultural struggles as expanding liberty, with liberals including more groups over the resistance of more restrictive conservatives.

I think a stronger way of seeing this same history of struggle is over the equal humanity of different "races" as they were imagined by the competing religious cultures of the day.  The opposition to the Irish and the Jews was as racialized a fight as the suppression of black people was, and as today's opposition to Mexicans and Muslims is.

Insight Into the Fearful Fifth

I am coming to think that there is a permanent group -- call them the Fearful Fifth -- who want a strongman to govern.  This layer is the base of nationalist movements all over the world.

I was given some insight into this way of thinking from a workman with whom I was discussing elections.  He said he "wasn't into that politics stuff."  He was OK with whoever won because if they messed it up too much, the military would declare martial law.

He described himself as a military brat. He offered that this casual acceptance of martial law was his father's view of the normal way to make order in disorderly countries.

The Fearful Fifth (I hope it is only a fifth) does not fear fascism.  They welcome it as the ultimate, and perhaps only, solution to the problems of government.

White Privilege is About Race, Not Class

White privilege, by itself, doesn't tell us anything one way or the other about class. 

Whiteness is still an advantage for poor white people, too.

Alternative Religions by Secular Ideologies

The right-wing alternative to religion is libertarianism.

The left-wing alternative to religion is environmentalism.

Not Sure of Your Own Position? Resist the Temptation to Suppress the Free Speech of Others

April Kelly-Woessner is a political scientist who studies tolerance and viewpoint diversity in the academy.

In the Heterodox Academy podcast episode on "Declining Political Tolerance," she reports that the people who most want to suppress free speech, on the left and the right, are the ones least confident of their ability to defend their own position.

What is Southern Culture?

 This week will have guest bloggers from my Sociology Senior Seminar on Public Sociology.

            I remember the first week of my college like it was yesterday. I drove eight and a half hours from Pennsylvania with my mother. We are from a bigger city than where we were headed. Driving into Danville, at first, I immediately second guessed my decision because of the demographics and pure relative size of Danville. I had stepped into a town that, normally, at home we would consider to be “country” and “redneck” because of its small town, antique feeling it emitted.  I did not realize that to the citizens of Danville, and even Louisville and Lexington natives considered to be more refined than an actual country town, especially due to the prestigious nature of the college. My whole definition of southern towns was altered, and thus gave me hope for the next four years.

            The second week of freshman year was when everyone started to meet and co-mingle. During a conversation with a Kentucky Native they noticed that I had an accent and therefore, was not. This was news to me. I typically thought of an accent to be a country accent or an English accent. When prompted, I told them that I was from Pennsylvania. To this, they responded, “Oh you’re a Yankee!” This was the moment that I knew southern culture was real.

            I spent the rest of my three years here noticing what made me different from other people, specifically people from Kentucky (as they are pretty dominant on campus).  My natural route to graduation was to study this in any way shape or form I could. That form just so happened to be in the disciplines of Anthropology and Sociology.

            I had always compared my town to others, thinking that this is exemplary of what it means to grow up as a “Yankee”.  I had a narrow-minded view of my own culture. Harrisburg Pennsylvania was one of thousands of cities in the north, each with its own identity and culture. In the south, the major cities are far and few between. To me, cities are the hub of the surrounding groups of people. It is way easier to get information from a centralized source, than to get information from small local sources.

            When one thinks of the north and the south, one immediately begins with southern culture. This is always what I leaned on in conversations and comparisons, especially when I was explaining my school to people back home. They even aided in the fact that they would share similar experiences or thoughts that they had accumulated on southern culture. Typical things such as food, hospitality, specific dialogue, and customs, were front runners in our word-of-mouth data accumulation. If these things make up a southern culture, what makes up a northern culture?

            When one categorizes, like many do with southern culture, it does not work simply because northern food, hospitality, dialogue, and customs vary so much from each northern region. It is impossible to make assertions about what it means to have northern culture until northern culture is distinctly defined. I plan on doing this.

            My goals are to map out cultural boundaries. In order to do this, I need to look at both “concepts” in a historical lens, because this is what initially created these boundaries. Then, I plan on defining each culture in their own terms. I want to answer why these are separate boundaries, what made them separate, and what effect do they have now on American culture and life in general.

            I think the hardest part about all of this is to be able to set apart my preconceived bias and prejudice. It’s hard to do that when I’ve spent the last three years noticing what made me different. I have struggled a lot here at college, especially socially. I have always seen things differently, acted differently, and spoke different ways. It has been frustrating and frankly demeaning of my character because of how often I question if what I’m doing is wrong, or just wrong in southern culture aspects. I want to explore this, and ultimately find some peace of mind for myself and for anyone else who notices what I notice.

 Demi Kennedy

A Liberal Birth Order?

This week we will have guest bloggers from my Sociology Senior Seminar on Public Sociology.

Recently, I have been interested in thinking more critically about birth order, especially within my own family. Particularly, I have been wondering if there could be a connection between the rigidness of birth order expressed in children and the political ideologies of the family, mainly the parents. I know that it is nearly impossible to compare specific families, especially combine with their political views. For this reason, I will be focusing on my own family and personal experiences. I want to explore the idea that dynamic choices for children are not invalidated by parents, a child in a liberal family will likely feel comfortable choosing different paths. But, those paths might likely relate to the parents and those family ideologies.

A little background- I am the third of four sisters. My eldest sister, Nettie, is 25, living in New York city working for a publishing company. The second born, Maggie, is 23, currently applying to medical school, working at a veterinary office in my hometown. I am 21, currently attending Centre College. Finally, my little sister, Ellie, is 19, and attends the University of Louisville.

            To examine my own families birth order, I will discuss the education and career paths of my family in relation to our order, focusing mainly on Nettie and Maggie. My parents both attended Centre College, post-graduation my father continued his education at University of Louisville Medical School.  My sister Nettie, the eldest, decided to attend DePauw University in Indiana and is now working at a publishing company in New York City. My sister Maggie followed the path of my father, she attended Centre College and is planning to continue on to medical school (most likely at UofL). I decided to follow both my parent’s paths as well as my older sisters path of attending Centre College. My little sister, Ellie, decided to attend University of Louisville Speed School to focus on engineering.

            As you can see, there are definitely major trends in where my family decided to attend school – Go Colonels and Cards! However, I think the most interesting thing we gain from my personal case, is the fact that the one person who decided to not attend a basic family school is the first-born, Nettie. In research about birth-order that I have seen, it is usually the first-borns who follow one of the parent’s paths closely, to, essentially, do the comfortable thing, make the parents proud, and get attention from them. Could the reason that my eldest sister felt so comfortable asserting her own path and not following the usual first-born tendencies be that my parents were liberal enough to be open and express to her that they were open to her doing her own thing? Maybe Nettie did not take the road already traveled because she knew that my parents would support her. They would give her attention no matter what she did and they would be proud of her for that.

            When it was Maggie’s turn to decided where to go to school, she decided to take that well-traveled path because, well, no one had yet. It was a spot that was open and that she could fill to get attention from my parents.

            I could continue to explore my whole family’s choices, but I don’t want to go on and on, and I think that Nettie and Maggie get the point across. They exemplify children who made choices to gain attention from the parents. In the case of my liberal family, the eldest child felt comfortable and supported enough to not take the most common path. Maybe my parents, both youngest children, even pushed her to do her own thing (a common youngest child choice) and to not be a classic first born.

 Sally Ann Finn

Dear Jonathan Franzen, Giving Up is a Position of Privilege

This week will have guest bloggers from my Sociology Senior Seminar on Public Sociology.

            While falling down the rabbit hole of Twitter the other day, a Tweet popped up that caught my eye. “I would vote for this as the worst piece on climate change yet published this decade-” Alex Steffen begins, “flawed in both concept and execution, morally cowardly, and lavishly self-indulgent.” With gorgeous words such as those, I felt personally compelled to take a peek at the New Yorker article attached, and it continued to compel/frustrate me so much after reading it to the point of having to making this post. Mr. Jonathan Franzen, a famous (or rather infamous) essayist and novelist known for taking extreme positions on topics he feels compelled to discuss, as well as a self-declared “non-scientist” has spurred many to challenge his opinions due to his vocal take that keeping the world from succumbing substantially to climate change, and the hope contained within that, should be at this point considered fictitious. While Franzen does take on the issue of hope and its use in certain dialogues around climate change in a way that I believe is beneficial – that is, only using hope as an anchor for stopping climate change (because at this point the climate will change, we cannot reverse this nor fully prevent it)– he fails to come around to the reality that the main use of hope, amongst those like Greta Thunberg and supporters of the Green New Deal, is to prevent pure, unfettered disaster. It inspires and motivates individuals to take action, to be concerned for future generations, and to not become disengaged and let the world go to complete and utter shit, trading concern for others for interior decoration ideas for their underground bunkers. Not only that, but only a select few get to even have that privilege of abandoning active hope and even thinking said thoughts. Jonathan Franzen is clearly part of that.

Franzen is seemingly dropping the torch because he can; unlike many others he does not feel the immediate life-threatening effects of climate change such as climate displacement, inadequate access to food, public health issues, among many others. An award-winning author can afford to relocate, continue to maintain good health, and stray as far away as possible from any type of environmental bad – that is until disastrous, worldwide benchmarks are hit – which of course is guaranteed if we follow in Franzen’s do little or nothing footsteps. But this “climate apocalypse” is already happening for oppressed individuals trapped under combinations of income, citizenship, race, etc. To say that we should go ahead and stop pretending like we can enact any sort of monumental change is ignorant. No, we cannot prevent all of the major realities of climate change, such as temperature increase, infrastructure damage, or rising sea levels- but we can help those already being put in life and death situations to find significant amounts of relief, big and small, all while advocating and pressuring our government to decrease the severity of results with adequate top-down processes. There is a duty to be had among those with more say in the political realm and freer from certain bounds of climate injustice. Privileged folk such as Franzen are ignoring this, and with essays like these, seem to aim at and conjure up those who are on the fence about what to do (and are quite comfortable with their status in life), to abandon hope, abandon that drive to make lives better for others, and just accept that what whatever happens will happen.

   A lot of discourse around climate change stems from this internal reflection of how to feel – should we continue to hold onto hope and actively push for major reform, or prepare for the absolute worse and abandon all notions that any sort of reform will prevent a “climate apocalypse”? I think it’s appalling to give in to the latter, and I will do what I can to call out those who think it’s okay to quit. I believe, much like Eve Andrews, that “giving up is a bullshit move”, and rather unnatural. There’s still time to lessen the blow. There’s still time to make immediate improvements both big and small for those that need it most. Doing otherwise is simply a move driven by privilege, and should be judged and critiqued as such, as we continue the dialogue around our role in the climate movement. 

Salem Menze