fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Let’s Be Real: Dark Age Ahead

Crisis magazine: 'Live Not By Lies' and 'The Benedict Option' are vital texts for Christian resistance
thumbnail-7

Well, this review of Live Not By Lies, in the Catholic magazine Crisis, was really something to wake up to. There’s this line at the end:

Live Not By Lies will cement Rod Dreher’s reputation as the most important Christian thinker of our age.

Thanks, everybody, I’m going back to bed now. Reviewer Michael Warren Davis is talking smack about Your Working Boy.

Seriously, though, I can’t thank Michael Warren Davis, the editor of Crisis, enough for his generous words. It’s a good review too, though I want to show him the respect of engaging with a critical part of it in a bit. But first, some of his praise. Notice how he identifies the totalitarian temptation with a generation’s emotional response to authority:

In his new book, Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher warns us that the Hitlers and Stalins of our age will not wear funny mustaches and slick uniforms as they did in the 20th century. “The totalitarian temptation presents itself with a twenty-first century face,” he writes. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is that face. It’s the face of grown women screaming in anger and disbelief into the cameras of their iPhones over the death of their fallen hero. It’s the face of grown men who tweet about collapsing on the floor, sobbing, on hearing the news of Ginsburg’s death.

So long as Millennials remain dominant in American politics, this will remain the prevailing mode of discourse. My generation was abandoned by our parents and our teachers. We were never given a moral education for fear of stunting our “individuality. We were never taught to reason. We were never taught to control our emotional or carnal impulses.

That’s why there isn’t one real “individual” in America under forty. We all became slaves to peer pressure, and to our own base appetites. That’s the great danger of this moment in American history. We are being ruled by children—children who can’t tell right from wrong, and who lack all self-control. Like all children, our new ruling class won’t hesitate to punish any deviation from their the latest infatuation with ostracism, abuse, and perhaps even violence.

The new totalitarians are overgrown children, which is why the new totalitarianism will be defined by these three characteristics: emotivism, hedonism, and conformism. It will look less like Nineteen Eighty-Four and more like Lord of the Flies.

I hadn’t though of the phenomenon with quite that clarity, I confess. I talk in the book about how the Millennials and Gen Z are so different in their politics — they’re far more likely to favor socialism, for example, and they are not, by and large, social conservatives — but there’s something about Michael Warren Davis’s words that resonate this morning. It’s probably because since I finished the manuscript, we’ve seen things from that generation that reinforce the trends cited in the book. We’ve watched Millennials and Gen Z’ers driving dissenters out of major media (just this past week, the ultrapopular podcaster Joe Rogan is facing pressure from within Spotify, which just acquired his podcast in a $100 million deal, to punish him for interviewing Abigail Shrier, a journalist who wrote a book about how the trans movement is harming teenage girls). Last weekend I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, which is about how social media and that technology in general has changed us. It has created a generation, well, like the one Michael Warren Davis describes. They have been formed by the methods of the online mob.

Anyway, I really am grateful that Michael Warren Davis’s review emphasizes that the coming totalitarianism really will be soft, but no less totalitarian for that fact. Christians need to open their eyes to the form it will take, and is taking. Far too many Christians believe that either we aren’t in a war, or that if we are, then we need to build a Maginot Line.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote this passage from the memoir of Dr. Silvester Krcmery, imprisoned by the communist for his faith:

We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

You had better take this seriously. Solzhenitsyn said the same thing. So did Arendt:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

Back to Michael Warren Davis:

Following the publication of The Benedict Option, Mr. Dreher was accused of being a “retreatist,” even a “defeatist.” Why? Because, as he says in In Live Not By Lies, Mr. Dreher believes that “The culture war is largely over—and we lost.” That seems to be the central thesis of Mr. Dreher’s work. He made the assertion early in The Benedict Option but didn’t spend much time defending it. The first half of Live Not By Lies is devoted to proving that thesis; the second half, to surviving the coming anti-Christian, totalitarian regime.

Now, one might argue that Christians are just one election away from reclaiming total control over this country’s political, religious, economic, and cultural institutions. So far, nobody has tried—probably because they can’t. After reading Live Not By Lies, there can be no shadow of a doubt that Mr. Dreher is right. He isn’t a pessimist, but a realist.

At its best, then, Live Not By Lies is a kind of prequel to The Benedict Option. The BenOp is not, as Mr. Dreher’s critics claim, a retreatist manifesto. It doesn’t lay out terms for unconditional surrender. It’s a manual for Christian partisans who have been driven into the jungles. The culture war, traditionally understood, is indeed lost. The Benedict Option is like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for a new phase of cultural guerrilla warfare.

The Empire is now too decayed to salvage. The Dark Age is coming, whether we like it or not. …

The review could have stopped right there and I would have been forever grateful to Michael Warren Davis for getting The Benedict Option correct, when so many others did not. I’ve tried to explain it over the years to people like this: consider that in the culture war, traditional Christians today are like the British army at Dunkirk. We can make a kamikaze charge at the enemy, but we would be destroyed. We can sit quietly and hope that the enemy will pass us by, but that would be hopelessly stupid. Or we can get on the flotilla waiting offshore and escape to England, where, in relative safety, we can keep our armies from being destroyed while we re-arm and train for the battles to come on some far-off D-Day.

The Benedict Option is about a strategic retreat to “England” — strategic, because it is not intended to be permanent, but only the most reasonable thing we can do under the dire circumstances, and is part of a long-term offensive strategy. Or, if you prefer MWD’s view, it’s about building base camps for guerrilla culture war. I think the reason so many Christians rejected the book is that they cannot bring themselves to accept the reality of post-Christianity. They don’t recognize that Sauron is gaining strength, and the Sarumans of our civilization are switching alliances. I spoke yesterday to a prominent lay Catholic who told me he has come to believe that the survival of the Catholic faith in the West is going to depend much more heavily on well-formed, believing Catholic laity than many of us realized. This aligned with what a middle-aged German Catholic told me in Rome two years ago: that he and his friends recognize that the Catholic Church institution in Germany is going to fall apart, and they are going to have to keep the faith alive in part by building strong networks between true-believing families, and strongly encouraging their children to marry within the network.

Does this sound weird to you? It sounds necessary to me. If you aren’t at least considering this kind of thing seriously, then I’m sorry, but you are not facing reality. And none of us have time to dither.

Michael Warren Davis’s review takes an interesting swerve when he talks about how the ultimate goal of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies must be the restoration of Catholicism in the West:

I understand the desire to link arms with our fellow Christians against our common foe. Still, when we talk of restoring a Christian society, we must ask: “What do you mean by ‘Christian’?” If Mr. Dreher is fighting to restore the Christian society championed by Catholics like Augustine of Hippo, Thomas More, Robert Bellarmine, and Christopher Columbus, then I’m with him. But if he’s content with Calvin’s Geneva or Luther’s Saxony, then I am not.

Well, as an Orthodox Christian, I would not be “content” with either the Catholic or the Reformed version, but I would be more content living in either than in what is emerging from the ruins of Christendom. My view in The Benedict Option, and even more strongly expressed in Live Not By Lies, is that we Christians do not have to agree on the ultimate goal we seek in order to build defensive alliances for the resistance. When the secret police (I’m speaking metaphorically) come for us, they are not going to come because we are Evangelical, or Catholic, or Orthodox; they are going to come because we are faithful Christians who will not bend the knee.

From Live Not By Lies:

Along with other prisoners, Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.

“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.

This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered,” becomes vital to spiritual survival.

That’s the kind of ecumenism of the trenches that I favor in this cultural moment. I am an Orthodox Christian, I know why I am an Orthodox Christian, and I intend to remain an Orthodox Christian, come what may. But my Christianity, and my understanding of the nature of the struggle into which we have all been thrown, makes me aware that if they come for the Baptists or the Catholics, they’ll be coming for me too. We either stick together, or hang separately.

More Davis:

We may survive in our BenOp communities, of course. But no confederation of “intentional communities” can restore Christendom to its glory. We aren’t strong enough to build a new, purer society on our own. We must have the grace of the Sacraments, the guidance of the Magisterium, and the strength of Tradition behind us. Otherwise, we’re building castles in the sand.

All of that notwithstanding, Live Not By Lies is indispensable for any Christian hoping not only to survive the fall of the Empire but to see a new Christendom emerge from its ruins. Those who are optimistic about the future of liberal-democratic capitalism will be thoroughly disillusioned—and they’ll thank Mr. Dreher for it.

Having realized that things are, in fact, much worse than they seem, they must then read The Benedict Option with fresh eyes. They must prepare for total war against modernity. Modern Man, in all his infantile fury, is surely gearing up for total war against us Christians. Those who don’t heed Mr. Dreher’s warnings and study his writings will not survive the coming Dark Age.

Read the whole thing. It’s a great review, and I thank Michael Warren Davis for it. I’m really grateful too for his reading linking both of my recent books as a single project of cultural analysis. Note well, though, that neither The Benedict Option nor Live Not By Lies is prescriptive in terms of what we Christians are ultimately seeking in terms of social order. That is beyond my ability to discern, and not immediately necessary, in my judgment. To use another World War II analogy, if you’re the French Resistance, the kind of government that will rule France after the Germans are expelled and defeated is an important question, and monarchists, Christian Democrats, socialists, communists, and others will have a different answer to that question. But the overwhelming tasks in front of them are to survive, and to defeat the enemy. That’s where small-o orthodox Christians are now, and we shouldn’t allow our ultimate concerns keep us from standing together (when we can without compromising our particular faith commitments) in the fight that is now upon us.

Live Not By Lies will be published on Tuesday September 29. If you would like to have a signed copy delivered to you after that date, order it exclusively here, through the independent bookseller Eighth Day Books. 

I am going to publish the Study Guide for the book on this blog in the next few days. It will be free and downloadable for everybody. Live Not By Lies is the kind of book that will ideally be read and discussed in small groups. One of the most important points the book makes — this, advised by the Soviet bloc dissidents — is that Christians need to build strong small fellowships. Reading and discussing Live Not By Lies together will be the beginning of that for many of us. This is not a book that is only for contemplation, but also for action.

UPDATE: Oh good grief. I wouldn’t have thought that I had to say that I don’t literally prefer to live in Calvin’s Geneva, or under a Catholic regime in which they tortured and killed heretics. I would bet my paycheck that Michael Warren Davis doesn’t either. But this is the Internet, and there are always people who are maximal literalists. What I took Davis to be saying is that he won’t be satisfied until we live in a civilizational order at which Catholicism is the center. Maybe he is a bona fide integralist; I don’t know. My view is that I would prefer to live in a civilizational order that had Reformed Protestantism or magisterial Catholicism as its basis than the post-Christian materialist order that we are fast approaching. For me, Christian liberal democracy is the best we can hope for in a modern pluralistic society, but if I had to choose between living in, say, Franco’s Spain versus what America is fast becoming, and will become in my lifetime, I would prefer Franco’s Spain as the lesser evil.

UPDATE.2: Reader Lord Karth, who works in New York state as a lawyer, comments:

Allow me to speak to this, if you please.

My work as a lawyer has been, for the last 34 years (32 in practice and 2 as a law clerk for a Family Court Judge) dealing with children and families. I have seen, literally, thousands of cases where families are in difficulty of one sort or another. I realize that I am speaking anecdotally, but I do not think that what I have observed is that far out of line with what others have experienced/observed. To wit:

My first case in Family Court (in 1988) involved a preteen boy accused of using a knife in a fight. He was sent to a juvenile detention center for several weeks before trial. That center has not increased in capacity, and the population of the county it is located in has not increased since then. Today, it does not accept kids accused of such things—it is full to capacity with very violent offenders (guns and gangs are frequently involved) and, increasingly, accused juvenile sexual offenders. It takes the commission of what for an adult would constitute a high-level felony to get sent to this facility—and it has been operating at capacity for at least the past 10 years. PRIOR to “bail reform” and the other nonsense that has been coming out of NeoProgressive Albany.

Requests for “orders of protection” are at an all-time high in the counties I work in. I see more cases involving threats of weapon use and threats of harm to pets than was the case even 10 years ago.

The volume of custody cases is also at historic highs. There are more cases involving domestic violence, substance abuse and serious neglect than there were in 2005–and, I believe, the volume has seriously increased since 2008.

The level of just plain immaturity has also risen. This past year, the NYS Legislature (a/k/a “The Wonderful Gang of ‘Happy Monkeys’ “) made pre-court mediation a virtual requisite for proceeding in Family Court. There were a great many people (including myself) who thought that this would wipe out caseloads back in January. Today, there is not ONE Family Court Judge or practitioner who is not overworked to the point of working 6 full days a week. (I regularly inquire about this caseload to the court clerks in the 5 counties I practice in.). Simply put, mediation is not working; many mediations dissolve in the first 10 minutes, sometimes violently.

I ascribe this to three developments: the utter collapse of family authority since the 1970s (particularly the near-total absence of fathers in lower-class and particularly black lower-class homes). I can literally count on the fingers of both my hands the number of delinquency cases I have been involved in in the last 10 years where the kids have come from intact families.

Secondly, the phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting/“safetyism” (documented in an Atlantic article a few years back). Parents of 2020 are far more likely to vehemently defend their children against accusations, even when the evidence is utterly overwhelming, and in the case of black parents, to make accusations of racism against the courts and even their kids’ own assigned defense lawyers. (We’re “in on it”, conspiring with the prosecutors and the courts, don’t you know.)

Third, the widespread availability of smartphones. The immediate-gratification feedback loop of the devices is much faster than even the loop for television was. There are many homes I have to examine where kids have very serious discipline problems—up to and including the actual use of violence if access to their phones is threatened in any way.

So it may not just be an older generation’s lament about “kids these days”. I’d bet some very serious money on this surge in immaturity being a verifiable fact.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now