NEW FAITHS OF THE SELF

C. S. Lewis wrote that to be modern is to be consumed by the magical impulse “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” This entails giving up one’s soul in exchange for power. “Once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.” We will also have forsaken the ancient wisdom which holds that the soul is only truly free when in harmony with what is real.

Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton’s survey of America’s post-secular religious landscape, examines prominent twenty-first-century attempts to “subdue reality” by force of will. Contrary to the popular perception that America has become increasingly secular, Burton shows that religion is flourishing, albeit in non-traditional guises. Insofar as “religion,” in Burton’s functionalist usage, names those beliefs and practices that serve “both individually and societally to give us a sense of our world, our place in it, and our relationships to the people around us,” it has always and everywhere suffused human life. Today that suffusion is apparent even in avowedly “secular” institutions like the Supreme Court, which recently enshrined the sacral metaphysics of gender theory in law. The George Floyd protests also demonstrate the power of the progressive social justice religion to effect a nationwide Durkheimian “collective effervescence.”

Burton describes the new religions practiced by more than fifty percent of Americans today as “Remixed.” The religiously Remixed, “shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative internet and consumer capitalism,” prefer “intuitional spirituality” to institutional churches. They mix and match different practices to form their own rituals and belief systems. While most Remixed are “nones” or “spiritual but not religious,” many self-identified Christians also practice Remixing.

Remixed religion, Burton suggests, would be impossible apart from our long conditioning by consumer capitalism. At its heart, Remixed religion is selfish, choice-obsessed, therapeutic, and adaptable to expediency—making it a natural bedfellow of progressive politics. These new religions of the self may partially satisfy the human need for narrative and wonder, but they threaten to dissolve our civic institutions in a sea of “personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment.”

Burton traces the roots of the Remixed to the intuitionalist faiths of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and Quimby’s New Thought. While the postwar economic boom accelerated individualist trends in American religion, America has always been fertile ground for self-worship and charlatanry.

Today’s charlatans are the “spiritual entrepreneurs” who reinvent snake oil in the myriad guises of a “wellness” industry worth $4.2 trillion, exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience bazaar Goop. The theology of wellness is gnostic, pitting the intuitional self against society. According to the gospel of wellness, we each have a “moral responsibility to take care of ourselves first before directing any attention to others.” But because the work of “self-care” is never complete, care for the other is never quite justified.

Among the darker forms of self-worship, Burton examines the recent explosion of occultism among American progressives. This movement drew scrutiny last year when the proprietors of Catland, an occult supply store in Brooklyn, ritually cursed Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Modern witchcraft combines “progressive feminist politics with a fervent opposition to institutional Christianity—which is dismissed and derided as a bastion of toxic patriarchy, repression, and white supremacy.” Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of Catland, is an apologist for “black magic,” which is countercultural, dangerous, and a tool for resisting oppression. Bracciale, a white male, argues that non-whites and queer people should “decolonize” witchcraft and restore its African roots by embracing the language of white European Luciferianism. Such farce is typical of the incoherence of the Remixed.

Even apart from witchcraft, Remixed religions consistently exhibit Lewis’s magical impulse. For the Remixed, nature—especially our sexual nature—exists to bear the imprint of human will. “If wellness culture centers the perfectibility of the body as the locus of personal spiritual growth,” writes Burton, “then sexual utopianism takes that corporeality to its logical conclusion . . . why shouldn’t sexuality be the place for us to access not just pleasure but meaning and purpose?” Remixed sexuality casts a vision of a transformed social order. And that vision is increasingly popular. One-fifth of Americans admit to experimenting with “ethical non-monogamy”; even more have experimented with BDSM and other kinks. Authenticity, after all, requires acting on our desires. Refusing to indulge one’s kinks is thus to forsake one’s own perfection.

While the Remixed faith of the sexual utopian may seem like New Thought by way of Thelema, it is perhaps best understood as—to coin a phrase—neoliberalism of the body. Remixed religion is so appealing, in part, because it “is inseparable from a consumer-capitalist model of sexuality.”

But not everyone has the same purchasing power in the sexual marketplace, and thus not everyone can access the meaning-making power of Remixed sexuality. In her penultimate chapter, wryly titled “Twilight of the Chads,” Burton examines the ressentiment of “incels,” men who for want of good looks, money, or social skills are “involuntarily celibate.” Incels want to burn the world down (along with all the sexually successful Chads and Staceys), and Burton’s characteristic empathy is muted as she walks us through their misogynistic world. Incels are a small but noisy subset of what Burton calls “nihilistic atavism,” a Remixed religion focused on reclaiming ground lost to feminism and progressivism. At its most reasonable, the new atavism may resemble Jordan Peterson’s program of renewed male responsibility. But it is best characterized by outsized denizens of the “manosphere” such as Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), who advocates a muscle-bound, homoerotic Nietzscheanism that longs for the emergence of Übermenschen worth submitting to. It is hardly accidental that BAP’s obsession with submission resembles the sexual utopian’s affinity for kink.

Burton believes three rival strands of Remixed—social justice culture, nihilistic atavism, and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism—are battling to become America’s new civil religion. Each belligerent resembles the others. Whereas intersectional feminists want to destroy society for its misogyny and racism, new atavists want to destroy it for having yielded to the enervating forces of progressivism. Both the cult of social justice and the cult of techno-utopianism prize disruption, valorize the self, and see nature as an obstacle to the body’s perfection.

By emphasizing narrative, Burton renders complex phenomena accessible to general readers without sacrificing precision, and her analysis flows directly from the testimony of the Remixed themselves. But readers will be left with questions. To what extent is the egocentrism of American religion intrinsic to the American project itself? In the context of liquid modernity, are genuinely new faiths possible? Or are all new faiths doomed to serve only as therapies for the “spiritually fluid”?

Remixed religion is mutable and prone to imitation because, at its heart, it preaches only the self and its will to power. No civilization whose civic religion is so crassly nihilistic can long survive. And no self whose faith is Remixed can long endure as a self. Remixed religion is in the business of producing what Malachi Martin called “aspiring vacuums”: denatured souls dispossessed of the ability to will that which is proper to their natures; that is, individuals ripe for possession by the will of another. Most despairing of all, the Remixed are trained to welcome such demonic subjugation. One woman interviewed by Burton explains that during BDSM sessions she pictures herself as a “hollow cane of bamboo,” an empty vessel for external will (“energy”), rejoicing in the annihilation of self.

This is the false re-enchantment of the magician’s bargain. The unmaking of one’s soul is disguised by therapeutic appeasement. And yet re-enchantment remains perhaps the most important task for a civilization incapable of experiencing the meaning inherent in our world. That meaning cannot be “chosen” by humans. It can only be discovered—by participation in what Lewis called “Deep Magic,” the unbegotten power that sang the world into existence. Burton says in her introduction that she has rediscovered such enchantment in a return to faith. I’m not alone in hoping she will share that journey in her next book.

By Tara Isabella Burton and published in First Things on June 29, 2020 and can be found here.

Defining Social Justice | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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STEVEN PINKER’S MUSCULAR SECULARISM

Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes more than five hundred ­pages to making the case for “reason, ­science, ­humanism, and progress.” It’s not really clear why pushing a rolling stone downhill should be such hard work, but Pinker seems to think that the four horsemen of the Acro­polis are under attack now as never before. I can’t say I’d noticed. There aren’t that many people against reason or science, and as for humanism and progress, well, it all depends on what you mean.

For the most part, Enlightenment Now is an effective enough demonstration against professional doom-mongers that the world ­today is populated by more, healthier, ­wealthier, longer-lived, better-housed, better-educated, and better-equipped people than ever before. If Pinker confined himself to setting people straight on some key facts, no problem. But there is an element of mission creep as he glides effortlessly from the domain of facts and science to the domain of values and judgments—a domain in which the scientific method certainly has not managed to produce consensus. For Enlightenment Now is not just a recitation of reasons to be cheerful. It is also an exercise in confessional polemics, and it displays the virtues and vices of its genre. The polemics are in aid of secular humanism rather than Christianity or Islam, but the methods are much the same. It is often jolly and entertaining, especially when on the attack against confessional targets such as religion or postmodernism, but it can be preachy and it tends to the prolix. And it subjects its own presuppositions to somewhat less ­critical scrutiny than those of its opponents. Tedium is likely to beset those readers who simply want to focus on the arguments, though the liturgical incantation of the ­triumphs of the truth will comfort true ­believers. The tricks of the trade are all on show: selectivity, special pleading, sleight of hand, straw men, strategic statistics, suggestio falsi, suppressio veri.

Pinker is not averse to having his cake and eating it. For “Enlightenment” turns out to be shorthand for “what I like.” And “­Enlightenment thinkers,” likewise, seem to cash out as “people like me.” Is it mere coincidence that the Johnstone Family Professor of ­Psychology at Harvard University sees the members of this various group as “inquisitive psychologists”? When they receive the Pinker seal of approval, they are “Enlightenment thinkers.” At other moments, they are peremptorily excommunicated. Thus ­Rousseau, an Enlightenment thinker on page 10, becomes on page 30 a Romantic reactionary pushing back hard against Enlightenment values, before being readmitted to the fold two hundred pages later.

The “Enlightenment thinkers” invoked throughout this story therefore remain an ill-defined and ill-assorted bunch. Their role in the argument is reminiscent of that of the “Fathers” in Christian controversy, with Pinker as the self-appointed pope whose ex cathedra obiter dicta decide what is, and what is not, in the authentic tradition. These “Enlightenment thinkers” are the subject of bold if unsubstantiated claims. Thus “most” of them, it seems, rejected the idea of an “anthropomorphic God” (as do most theologians). But “some” of them were deists (though not theists) and “others” pantheists, while “few” were Christians. In the absence of definitions or numbers, it is rather difficult to put this taxonomy to the test. It bolsters that sneaking suspicion that “people like me” is indeed the functional criterion.

But then again, some of the lists of “Enlightenment thinkers” call even that into question. The presentation of opponents of war gives us Swift, Dr. Johnson, Pascal, and Voltaire: two Tory Anglicans, a Jansenist, and a Jesuit-educated deist anticlerical. Historical scholarship on the Enlightenment has for quite some time deprecated the simplistic secularism of the interpretation that Pinker espouses. Enlightenment Europe remained predominantly Christian (though deism and atheism were now firmly on the intellectual and moral menu), and most of those who read the Enlightenment thinkers, and were influenced by them, were themselves Christians. Education, health care, and social and political reform (such as the abolition of slavery) may indeed have been Enlightenment causes, but this did not stop them being Christian causes as well, or at least causes for Christians. Christians of all kinds, Presbyterians, Quakers, Evangelicals, Catholics, clergy and laity alike, were busy in the processes by which what Pinker defines as Enlightenment values were given real expression in the nineteenth century. But confessional partisanship often encourages polemicists to exaggerate the achievements of their own side and to diminish those of others. There is no obvious reason why confessional atheists, or humanists, or rationalists like Pinker should break that particular mold.

The glide from science to ethics is accomplished with the aid of the trademark Pinker graphs, seventy-five in this book. Graphs make things look very simple and persuasive. In books like this, that’s what they’re for. But they depend on counting things, and counting things depends first and foremost on deciding what does and doesn’t count. Counting things has worked very well where “things” are clear-cut, predominantly in the natural sciences. But in the tangled webs of human society, things aren’t always like that, as Pinker is well aware. Counting things does not always make for good history (as was once said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, count”) and is virtually useless for purposes of philosophy. Moreover, carefully selected and carefully drawn as they are, Pinker’s graphs do not always bear out his slick ­generalizations.

The first education graph, for example, apparently informs us that until the Enlightenment, all languished in ignorance, while since that happy dawn, all have come to the light. But the graph itself tells a less ­binary story, showing a long, differen­tiated rise in much of Europe and the West since the later Middle Ages. In ­Pinker’s version of the story, religion is mentioned only to explain why Spain remained so long in benighted ignorance: all those nasty clergymen in control of the schools, teaching only creeds and catechisms. Maybe so: Education and literacy arguably advanced slowest in Europe where the Inquisition was strongest. Yet it was the clergy also, or at least definite Christians—including, toward the end, nuns—who provided almost all the schooling anywhere prior to 1800, and most of it over the next hundred years. In many countries, the march to near universal literacy was achieved largely under the leadership of priests and pastors—fastest, after the Reformation, in Protestant countries, perhaps because direct familiarity with the Scriptures was so highly prized. Over the longue durée it was the Church, and then the churches, which built up so many of the institutions of learning. Within the context of European culture, the high social valuation of education that Pinker appropriates for his secular Enlightenment was a Christian and even a medieval cultural legacy. But we hear nothing of this. Pinker himself is only too well aware of the insidious effects of cognitive bias. So it is salutary to observe how easy it is for even Steven, the high priest of reason, to succumb to it.

That the world as a whole sees less per-capita everyday lethal violence than in the early modern era, and vastly less than in ancient and again in prehistoric times, has become something of a truism. To get a sense of what living in the ancient world was really like, for example, try reading Josephus’s Jewish War, his account of the century or so culminating in the Roman sack of ­Jerusalem. But the self-­congratulatory narrative graphed in Enlightenment Now fails to persuade. It is difficult to see “the Enlightenment” as the bringer of peace when we consider the spectacular destruction and death tolls of the wars of the ensuing two centuries. Of course, using the vigorous gymnastics of controversial exigency, one can deflect responsibility for those wars onto “Counter-Enlightenment” forces. But it is harder for those who are not confessionally committed to the Enlightenment to exonerate it so completely from responsibility for revolutionary fervor, nationalism, imperialism, and Marxism—the driving forces of the ensuing slaughters. Pinker chalks up World War I to a populist nationalism that he feels entitled to cut off from the Enlightenment. But the Kultur of German propaganda in 1914–1915, endorsed by hundreds of scientists and academics, sounds like a war cry for Enlightenment values (or some of them) against decadence on one front and primitivism on the other.

Nor is one entirely persuaded by the secondhand statistics of Matthew White’s “necrometrics,” adduced to justify such claims as that “religious wars” (a tricky category if ever there was one, at times little more than a construct by which the emerging secular nation-states sought to legitimize their own power), particularly of an earlier age, were so much more destructive and lethal than the wars of the era of mature nation-states and global empires; and that civil wars tend to be less destructive and lethal than other wars (as say on page 164, before undercutting that view on 199). Of course it helps to define civil wars such as those in Britain in the seventeenth century and in France in the sixteenth century as “wars of religion.” (Pinker himself manages to insinuate that the American Civil War might somehow belong in that category.) And it may be just as helpful to set the innumerate claims of medieval chroniclers on a par with the meticulous casualty lists of modern conflicts, or to gloss over the extent to which, until relatively recent times, so much mortality in war was a matter of epidemic disease in unsanitary encampments (thus, often, displacing and intensifying the impact of disease rather than indexing brutality and cruelty). The whole exercise of weighing up wars in this way, though well worth the attempt, is fraught with those problems of definition and verification on which, in other contexts, Pinker himself is the first to insist.

What some critics identify as the bitter fruits of the Enlightenment, then, Pinker simply picks off and hangs on other trees. Populism, to which he is as allergic as the next bien pensant, owes part of its appeal to a thoroughly Enlightened rejection of aristocracy and authority. Nationalism is hardly unconnected with the Enlightenment. Some “Enlightenment thinkers” may have been “citizens of the world,” but most were more specifically rooted than that. Romanticism itself, which Pinker sees solely in terms of a “Counter-Enlightenment,” is a product of the Enlightenment as well as a reaction against it. The nation-state and nationalism, treated alike with aloof disdain, are a major part of the explanation for that massive decline in everyday levels of violence which Pinker documents. Either they are part of the Enlightenment, or they are not. Either way, the Pinker thesis will have to give a little.

For a more delicate and differentiated inquiry into the intellectual and moral condition of modernity, one might turn to Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which combines historical rigor with philosophical acuity, and fully acknowledges the material and moral achievements of Western modernity, while not allowing itself so readily to absolve that same modernity of the excesses and atrocities that Pinker offloads onto the obscurantist enemies of Enlightenment. Gregory’s disquieting but irrefutable observation that “the fundamental categories at the basis of Western modernity’s most influentially institutionalized philosophy—liberalism—cannot be rationally legitimated on the terms of the scientistic naturalism that prevails in research universities in the public sphere” offers a robust counter to Pinker’s humanistic huffing and puffing. Modern liberalism and modern science are both, from one point of view, products of the Enlightenment, but that does not make them the same thing, nor does it even establish any logical or necessary relation between them.

Liberalism and science both presuppose the fact-value distinction of the Enlightenment, but science is all about facts, and liberalism is all about values. The Pinker ­project, pursued through its seventy-five graphs, is to make us think that the values of liberalism can be established by the methods of science, that morality can be established em­pirically. Well, we’ve known since Kant that it can’t. Kant labored valiantly to base morality on reason alone, offering the dogmas of conscience and the categorical imperative as the dictates of pure practical reason. But here we have to take some heed of Nietzsche, who, more mercilessly than anyone else, called out the empirical nakedness of the Kantian imperator. At one level, all he does is stand Kant on his head, responding to the categorical imperative—“You must”—with the equally categorical interrogative of the obstreperous child: “Why should I?” It’s a good question.

While he figures in Pinker’s narrative simply as the arch-enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche takes us to the heart of the problem. For if he is the Enlightenment’s most potent critic, he is likewise its rebellious child, turning its distrust for authority against itself. Pinker is quite right to quote the immortal Jeeves’s lapidary judgment that Nietzsche was “fundamentally unsound.” But the Wodehousian allusion brings ­irresistibly to mind another of the master’s comic creations, the Reverend Harold ­Pinker, the clumsy clergyman who could not be trusted within ten feet of any occasional table freighted with ornamental crockery. An exponent of muscular secularism rather than muscular Christianity, Professor ­Steven Pinker shoulders his way into the china shop of history with equally devastating effect.

By Richard Rex and published in August 2018 in First Things and can be seen here.

Ethnic Gnosticism | Dr. Voddie Baucham

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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C. S. LEWIS ON MERE SCIENCE

By M.D. Aeschliman in October 1998 and can be found here.

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, to resist the two opposed temptations that the historian of science Richard Olson has labeled “science deified” and “science defied.” On this centenary of Lewis’ birth, we might describe his attitude as an appreciation of “mere science.”

“Science deified” is scientism, radical empiricism, materialism, or naturalism, an implicit or explicit rejection of all nonquantifiable realities or truths, including the truths of reason. Its logical terminus is determinism or “epiphenomenalism,” Huxley’s notion that the brain and mind are fully determined by-products of irrational physical processes. As the German materialist Bernhard Vogt put it, “Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys,” implying that thoughts are just as irrational and beyond our control. Vogt and the other materialists contradict themselves, though, because—as Lewis often noted—they claim that their own scientific thoughts are true.

The deification of science first became explicit in the writings of the atheistic French philosophes La Mettric, D’Holbach, and Diderot. Thoughtful twentieth-century commentators such as Lester G. Crocker and Aldous Huxley have seen its reductionism leading straight to the moral nihilism of the Marquis de Sade, and later to Social Darwinism and the Nietzschean transvaluation of values in the interest of amoral strength and force. Lewis’ Abolition of Man is, inter alia, an extended treatise against the deification of science.

Yet there is an opposite temptation that Lewis also criticized—the temptation to defy science, from the standpoint of either romantic/pantheistic gnosticism or theological fideism. The first was familiar to him from the theosophy of his close friends Owen Barfield and A. C. Harwood and from the whole history of Romanticism, culminating in the work and world of W. B. Yeats. (Yeats was probably the model for the magician in Lewis’ Dymer and for Merlin in That Hideous Strength.) The appeal of pantheistic gnosticism was something that Lewis understood and withstood; it lies at the heart of occult “New Age” spirituality, “Deep Ecology,” and a good deal of “Eco-feminism” today. Romantic self-absorption and pantheistic gnosticism are targets of Lewis’ satire in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Much as he criticized radical empiricism and its sterile, truncated rationalism, he was himself too much of a rationalist in the classic, Aristotelian sense to countenance esoteric or occult mysticism and the depreciation of reason. He would not defy science on romantic or gnostic grounds.

Lewis knew that science was one of the great products of the human mind, but he insisted that it was a subset of reason and not simply equivalent to it. Scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, but it was not the only valid kind of reasoning: noncontradiction, validity, truth, value, meaning, purpose, and obligation were necessary presuppositions of the scientific method but not themselves scientific phenomena. Lewis thought that, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, scientists who were “animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” He satirically depicted such scientists in That Hideous Strength, especially in the figure of Frost. Of all radical empiricists, from La Mettrie and Hume to A. J. Ayer, who would undermine the authority of reason and its procedures, Lewis tirelessly pointed out this contradiction. He believed in the old adage that “the only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing,” because in some important sense language and thought themselves are non-natural, supernatural, transcendent, and metaphysical. “In order to think,” he wrote in 1942, “we must claim for our reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of irrational physical processes.”

Lewis’ love of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was due largely to his loyalty to an epistemology that he thought had been caricatured and misunderstood by Bacon, Descartes, and the French Encyclopedists of the eighteenth century. As a careful student of the history of philosophy and ideas, he knew that the great flowering of scientific thought in the seventeenth century had not only Greek roots, but medieval ones. Whitehead pointed out long ago, in Science and the Modern World, that the habits of medieval rationalism prepared the way for the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, an insight given far more documentation, depth, and scope in the writings of the historian and philosopher of science Stanley L. Jaki in our time. Long before Bacon, Jaki has written, Christian philosophy had steadily inculcated “the conviction . . . that since the world was rational it could be comprehended by the human mind, but as the product of the Creator it could not be derived from the mind of man, a creature.” The “metaphysical realism” of St. Thomas Aquinas (and of Richard Hooker in England) avoided the extremes of empiricism and idealism and thus paved the way for Newton.

Jaki’s work has confirmed some of Lewis’ insights about the origin and development of Western science, and particularly its indebtedness to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to escape from mistaken Aristotelian ideas about time and matter. The importance of the medieval thinkers Buridan and Oresme for science had been rediscovered by the great twentieth-century French physicist Pierre Duhem, whose own work Jaki has done so much to restore to the prominence it deserves. The active intellectual discrimination against Duhem, and subsequently against Jaki”despite their enormous erudition and unquestionable distinction—would not have surprised the man who wrote “The Inner Ring,” “Bulverism,” The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength.

For among historians of science it is most prominently Duhem and Jaki who have provided the documentation of the importance of theism and “metaphysical realism” not only for the origin and development of modern science, but also for the possibility of its coherent continuation and moral direction. Duhem and Jaki have provided security for Lewis’ claim that “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.”

And as a believer in the essential sanity and continuity of Western Civilization, Lewis would surely have concurred with Jaki’s characterization of the Middle Ages: “In Western philosophy that was the first and thus far the last major epoch in which broadly shared respect was paid to the fundamental difference between ends and means . . . . If we do not wish to help turn this most scientific age of ours into the most barbaric of all ages, we had better stop using the term ‘medieval’ as synonymous with obscurantist. In doing so, we may make our mental eyes more sensitive to that light which comes from the Middle Ages.”

John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Mac Donald: Statistics Do Not Support The Claim Of ‘Systemic Police Racism’

By  Ryan Saavedra and published on the DailyWire.com on June 3, 2020 and can be found here.

An op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal by Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, pushed back on the notion that there is widespread systemic racism in American law enforcement.

Violent riots have broken out in major cities across the over the death of George Floyd last week, resulting in police officers being attacked, businesses destroyed, and widespread arson and looting.

Mac Donald notes that while Floyd’s ultimately fatal arrest was horrifying — video shows that a police officer knelt on the 46-year-old’s neck for over eight minutes while Floyd said he could not breathe — it is not “representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians.”

A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing, Mac Donald writes; rather, crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions. Mac Donald writes:

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Mac Donald further highlights violence that was committed against blacks over the weekend in Chicago and notes that the reason that blacks die from homicide at a rate 8X higher than whites and Latinos combined is not because of the police, but because of crime.

Mac Donald also highlights studies by both the Justice Department under President Obama and the finding of an African-American Harvard economist:

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found similar results. “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers,” the report found. “Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.”

Did you know?

A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Many have tried, all have failed, to demonstrate that the police are “racist.”

DIVERSITY IS A BORE

Diversity has no plot. Or rather, it has half a plot, or one-fourth or one-fifth. I mean this in a literary sense. The elements of a diversity drama are bare and simple. In the beginning was the man, the white man, the straight white man, the Christian straight white man. And then there were many—women, blacks, browns, Hindus, Haitians, gays . . . it’s a storyline that is applied to our country, colleges, movies, and corporations, whether they fail or succeed in diversity.

That’s it, the story is set. Once we go from mono- to multi-, vanilla to thirty-nine flavors, nothing else follows or needs to follow. Diversity is an end in itself. Old plays had their opening, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement, but the diversity plot is a one-two, before and after. Our progressive leaders in business, media, education, and politics envision it in precisely this way.But of course, this is too abstract and unimaginative to serve as a satisfying plot. A novel needs more than that, and so does a national story, personal biography, social mores. Plot is the abstract arrangement of incidents, Aristotle said, but we need a little more individual flesh and blood than this demographic change admits. The struggle to get home, to pass through treacherous lands and return to family and possessions, as Odysseus does—that’s a plot. The discovery of a dead body and the steady detection of the killer, the escape from bondage in Exodus and Huckleberry Finn, the course of the Confederacy from the seizure of Mt. Sumter to the surrender at Appomattox, boy-gets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl-back . . . those are plots.

They have a compelling termination: freedom, home, love, defeat, truth. Aristotle also said that good plots are teleological. They drive toward meaningful conclusions; they have an “air of design.” Someone is murdered? We want to know whodunit. And not only that, we want a reason. A bank robbery that goes wrong and leaves a customer dead is abominable and horrible, but it isn’t literarily interesting unless, for instance, it comes out that the victim knew the culprits. Now we may have a mystery; there is more to learn.

But the diversity plot ends with . . . diversity. When progressive educators talk about a more diverse campus and classroom, they mean just that, more non-white faces. When HR departments in Silicon Valley call for more diversity, they generally mean more women. When politicians and business leaders proclaim, “Diversity is our strength!,” the plan ends right there. Nobody has in mind anything specific that the accomplished diversity will subsequently bring about.

It is no wonder that whatever intellectual content “diversity” once had—back when Justice Powell in the Bakke case cited it as a legal rationale that would rescue affirmative action after quotas were outlawed—has dissipated. The result of diversity was always going to be disappointing. It was anti-climactic. It wouldn’t make a good movie. When Barack Obama was elected president, the nation celebrated the diversification of the White House. But a few months later, as he turned to the nuts and bolts of governing, the president’s skin color counted for less and less. Diversity gave way to judgments of ideology and competence, pro and con. Obama’s electoral triumph would make a good plot, but it would have to end with his inauguration. The only people extending the diversity story past that day were some of Obama’s progressive defenders, who cast his critics as bigots who couldn’t handle the diversity he represented.

This is the only way diversity evokes excitement: by its absence, by resistance to it. That’s what gets (some) people motivated. A story can be crafted from that situation, with villains (privileged individuals who suppress historically-disadvantaged groups) and heroes (leaders of the oppressed). The action features deeds of discrimination, then the victims fighting back, and finally the toppling of the ancien régime.

But this isn’t really a tale of diversity. It’s older and more universal, bad guys in power overcome by underdogs. If it were a diversity plot, it would continue after the fall of the kings and dramatize a now multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-national setting. We would have a happy rainbow of groups and peoples and customs—and the audience would fall asleep.

This is why diversity survives only as a bureaucratic initiative. It has no more revolutionary thrust; the thrill is gone. It resides in the mouth of the VP of Communications, not in the heart of the disenfranchised. It suits corporate America better than the barrio and the ghetto. When you hear it, a dulling effect sets in.

In other words, when diversity emerges, interest in it slackens. Women’s Liberation in the 1960s sought to open academia and the professions to females. Their entry into the workplace made for a good plot (That Girl!, 9 to 5, Working Girl)—until women achieved parity with men. Then it got pedestrian. Females earn a whole lot more undergraduate and graduate degrees than men do, and have for many years. Medical schools are half men and half women, and so are law schools. But the parity doesn’t call out for drama. We have gender diversity in those spaces, and nobody seems to care.

Diversity is dull. It needs to fabricate an antagonist, an enemy, but the fabrications grow more strained every day. It can’t build a drama out of its own success, only its failure. In the old-fashioned domestic novel, resolution often came from marriage, which readers knew would lead to children and middle-age domesticity. There was a joyous result that readers imagined well beyond the last pages. (“Reader, I married him.”)

But diversity has no such projection. In twenty years, I hope that we will see the word and the concept as something like an old coin that has passed through too many fingers, its stamp so flattened and obscured that it is unrecognizable and has no value at all.

By Mark Bauerlein and published on February 21, 2021 in First Things and can be seen here.

Your Child Won’t Be a Pro Gymnast, So Why Are You Missing Church?

And if it did, I missed it. I didn’t get to play baseball. I didn’t get to sing. I didn’t get to go. Or, at least, I’d get there late or leave early. No questions asked. In general, at least in the buckle of the Bible Belt, the prevailing culture respected this. Though there is much about my religious background I’d rather forget, this is one of those important things that has stayed with me.

I’m not going to be the one that will condemn anyone for missing a Sunday here or there. Even in my current life as a professional Christian (i.e. one who is paid to be in church), I get to take an occasional mental health Sunday, though I will generally worship somewhere else on that day.

I respect the fact that church is extraordinarily difficult for many. There may be seasons when Sunday mornings are a non-negotiable for work. Don’t forget that there are plenty of churches offering services and Masses at other times over the weekend. It might not be convenient, it might be exhausting, but it’s certainly possible.

Seeing as how this is something we do every week, you can’t argue, as some might wish, that once or twice a month constitutes regular church attendance. Or attending whenever dance competition season winds down. Or when baseball season winds down. Or when the show closes. Or when out-of-town family leaves. What you’re teaching your kids is that you should go to church if no other important things are happening in your lives. In other words, you’re teaching them that church really isn’t that important.

(Oh, and as a fan myself, I’m here to tell you that baseball is not meant to be a year-round sport. Tommy John surgery at 16 is not normal. For the love, stop burning your kid’s poor arm out.)

Regular church attendance is being there practically every time health and weather permit. The church’s liturgy, regardless of popular opinion, isn’t merely one particular way in which a person of faith can worship or find strength. It isn’t supposed to be just another church ministry, a way in which we bait and switch outsiders into nominally aligning themselves with us for a time, before they too stop coming regularly.

No, friends. The worship gathering is central to the Christian life. Your children need to participate in worship more than they need all those other activities.Imperfect as each individual body is, the church is perfected by the work of Christ. It’s the only place in which you and your children can be fully nourished as gospel people. And if they have to go without some extracurriculars, even if they are otherwise valid pursuits, so be it. That’s a sacrifice God’s people are called to make.

The church is complicit in this, no doubt about it.

By refusing to catechize people on the importance of liturgy, we’ve de facto taught them the opposite lesson.

By creating a smorgasbord of “worship” options, we’ve made worship completely optional.

By making worship all pop music and no Word and Sacrament, we’ve taught them that they can get everything they think they need from a podcast and some jesusy records.But we parents ought to know better. It’s our duty to know better, even. If our kids don’t understand the discipline of weekly worship, that’s completely, unequivocally on us. If we don’t teach them the importance of liturgy, especially as it grows more into the counter culture, who will?

Look around you, parents. There’s nobody else.

By Jonathan Aigner and published on Patheos  on February 14, 2020 and can be found here.

NBI Seminar: Divorce Procedure & Settlement Agreements

I  recently had the great opportunity to lead (perhaps “teach”) a continuing legal education seminar hosted by the National Business Institute (a.k.a. NBI, see here).  The subject was “Divorce Procedure & Settlement Agreements” and I had opportunity to speak on four main topics in particular: Client Screenings & Case Strategy, Filings & Pleadings (with Sample Language), Discovery, Lay Witnesses & Experts, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Although NBI published the materials, I retain the ownership of the portions I wrote, which I will post here in this blog. I have posted the aforesaid materials over the past few weeks a here are links to all of them:

• NBI Seminar: Alternative Dispute Resolution
• NBI Seminar: Discovery, Lay Witnesses & Experts
• NBI Seminar: Divorce Procedure & Settlement Agreements – Client Screenings & Case Strategy
• NBI Seminar: Divorce Procedure & Settlement Agreements – Filings & Pleadings (with Sample Language)