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People As They Are

If we're going to avoid civil war, we have to want harmony over winner-take-all
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Here’s a post that’s bound to make everybody mad. More mush from the Christian cuck! More excuses from bigotry from the Christianist! Et cetera. I use this blog as more of a notebook to write down my ideas than as a platform for fully formed ideas. I’m thinking out loud below, and beg your indulgence.

One of my favorite churches in Paris is St-Sulpice. In September 2017, I worshipped in the crypt chapel with a Romanian Orthodox community. I was shocked and horrified to see last weekend that it had been set on fire.

This is happening a lot in France these days. Excerpt:

A dozen Catholic churches have been desecrated across France over the period of one week in an egregious case of anti-Christian vandalism.

The recent spate of church profanations has puzzled both police and ecclesiastical leaders, who have mostly remained silent as the violations have spread up and down France.

Last Sunday, marauders set fire to the church of Saint-Sulpice — one of Paris’ largest and most important churches — shortly after the twelve-o’clock Mass.

Police have concluded that the fire was the result of arson and are now looking for possible suspects. The restoration of the church from the damage caused by the fire will reportedly cost several hundred million euros.

In Nimes (department of the Gard), near the border with Spain, the church of Notre-Dame des Enfants was desecrated in a particularly odious way, with vandals painting a cross with human excrement, looting the main altar and the tabernacle, and stealing the consecrated hosts, which were discovered later among piles of garbage.

Likewise, the church of Notre-Dame in Dijon, in the east of the country, suffered the sacking of the high altar and the hosts were also taken from the tabernacle, scattered on the ground, and trampled.

From what I can tell, nobody knows if the attackers were Muslims, left-wing radicals, or what.

Earlier this month, on International Women’s Day, feminists in Spain, Uruguay, and Argentina attacked churches, including throwing Molotov cocktails at them.

In Britain today, police are investigating after a man attacked five Birmingham mosques with a sledgehammer.  The reporting indicates that people are seeing this as probably a white supremacist attack, following Christchurch, but given the fact that Birmingham Muslims have been in the news lately for rejecting LGBT school lessons for their young children, the attacker might well turn out to have been some Social Justice Warrior.

As a religious believer, very little angers me more than violent attacks on places of worship. There’s a reason why they become the No. 1 target in cross-cultural wars: because they symbolize the thing a people one regards as the enemy holds most sacred. It’s hard to know how exactly that works in post-Christian France, but the general principle holds. In the Balkan wars, both Muslim and Christian fighters made a habit of desecrating the other side’s holy places. It was a horrible thing.

I’m not a religious universalist, but I find the desecration of religious places — all religious places — to be revolting in part because I believe that Augusto Del Noce was right: in the West, the most important sociopolitical goal to fight for today is to maintain the capacity of our societies to perceive transcendence.

Alex Massie has a thoughtful, challenging piece in the Spectator, musing on the presence of Muslims in Britain, and how the future Britain is to live together. He writes about the fact of anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK, and how there are different standards for evaluating white nationalist terrorists, and Muslim terrorists. But he concedes that the tension between Muslims in the UK and wider British society is not something that can be papered over with good intentions. More:

So it is complicated. And sometimes it is hard. Sometimes it means confronting uncomfortable realities. Rotherham was one such instance; the current controversy over LGBT teaching in Birmingham schools is another. British Islam must exist within the parameters of a liberal, increasingly secular, society. But while insisting upon that, it’s also necessary to be reminded that the exceptions to Muslim willingness to do that are just that: exceptions.

Too often too many people fail to make the necessary distinction between views which are distressingly prevalent and the fact they are not, despite that, all that prevalent. Of course sensible people know we have a real and serious problem with Islamist radicalisation. As many as 1,000 Britons have spent time with Islamic State and hundreds of them have returned home; that is a serious challenge. The greater one is doing what can be done to reduce the attraction of such enterprises in the first place.

It seems obvious that this cannot be done without the active support of British Muslims. In many instances, if an extremist is known to the security services it is because of information that has come from inside the Muslim community itself. This is sometimes presented as being atypical when in fact it’s typical.

That, by the way, is something I was told in 2002 by a friend who was at that time involved in counterterrorism work. She said that the public never hears about all the ordinary American Muslims who are informing on radicals at work within their communities, because their lives would be in danger if this information were to become known. But counterterrorism work would be impossible without them, she told me.

More Massie:

The future is more diverse than the present. That is inevitable. We can make this a warm house for Britons of all faiths (or none), or we can make it a cold house. The latter option leads nowhere productive and, more likely, will end in disaster. The white-right and the Islamist-right share a dismal diagnosis but it is one that can be confronted, indeed refuted, without giving succour to one party or the other.

That requires a political, and cultural, arena which does not ignore or seek to minimise the difficulties of building a society in which multiple cultures are respected while coalescing to form one unified, coherent, whole. That means symbols of inclusivity and role models and all the other trappings of a ‘politically correct’ society actually do matter; it means accepting difference without fetishising it and reminding ourselves that there are many roads to modern Britain. And it means asking this question: are you helping or are you not?

Read the whole thing. 

Britain’s challenge with its large Islamic population is not the same at America’s, given that we don’t have nearly as large an Islamic population. But Massie’s general point is one that all of us — Left and Right — should think about seriously. This is not only about migration.

The standard complaint that you hear from people on the Right — people like me — is that the Left loves to think of itself as welcoming diversity, and being open-minded, but this is actually a sham. The Left has its in-groups and its out-groups. “Diversity” and “inclusivity,” at typically used on the Left, is a way of stigmatizing out-groups while making it sound like a virtuous act. This is the main reason why conservatives don’t take conversations about “diversity” and “inclusivity” seriously: because we believe they are nothing more than pretexts for liberals to justify their spitefully excluding us while giving themselves a cookie for it.

The thing is, liberals are not wrong to say that we have to figure out how to live with increased diversity. Let me give you an example from a couple of experiences I had in France a few years back.

France, as you know, has a very, very serious problem with Islamic radicalism. One day in Paris, I had lunch with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. I met her husband, a man born in France to Algerian parents. He was a business executive. Entirely secular. Great guy. Over the course of our lunch, I found out from them both about the kinds of active discrimination he faced in France simply because he is an Arab of Muslim background. Again, this man was born in France, raised in France, had no religion, and had in fact succeeded in business — but had to deal with non-subtle bigotry almost every day.

Later, on that same trip, my wife and I met an American couple in the Luxembourg Gardens. They were traveling, but planning to leave Paris early because the husband was fed up with France. Why? He is a neurosurgeon of Latino background, but dressed in tourist clothes, he looked to French cab drivers like an Arab. The neurosurgeon got to experience anti-Arab prejudice firsthand, in daily transactions, and it infuriated him. When he would finally get a cab, the drivers who picked him up expressed audible relief that he wasn’t an Arab Muslim. After that happening a few times, the doctor told his wife they were getting out of this city and country.

I doubt that I have to tell this blog’s readership about the many, many examples of anti-Semitism and anti-Christian bigotry, even violent bigotry, from French Muslims. What I learned from that trip to Paris, though, was from firsthand experience something I had only heretofore read: that French society makes it unusually difficult to join it if you are of Arab Muslim descent. (It should be noted here that the French are famously resistant to non-French people of any kind; perhaps perversely, it’s part of what I love about them.) We could talk all day long about whether or not it was a good idea for France to allow so many Muslims in decades past to immigrate into a country that was not prepared to assimilate them, and you could say the same about England and its Islamic population.

But they are present, and they aren’t going anywhere. In the US, our main immigration challenge is from Latin Americans, who also aren’t going anywhere, and who are changing America. So, Massie’s question is a good one for us too, with regard to whether or not we are making this evolving country a peaceable place to live: Are you helping, or are you not?

Well, what does it mean to “help”?

Right-wing questions: What if I genuinely believe the country is headed in a bad direction? Why should I help it make its way peaceably to the suicide leap from the lip of a cliff? Why shouldn’t I fight to turn it around? Why should I collaborate with evil?

Left-wing questions: What if I genuinely believe the country is headed in the right direction, and would be doing even better if not for these bigoted holdouts? Why should I consent to slowing down progress for the sake of these nasty people? Why should I collaborate with evil?

I am more or less 90 percent on the Right here, but that 10 percent keeps me from finding a position that is both 100 percent intellectually consistent, and that also has much to do with the real world, inhabited by real people.

For me, the answer is that I really do believe the country is headed in a bad direction, and I am so alienated from its culture that I don’t see my future as, to use MacIntyre’s formulation, shoring up the imperium. And I don’t see any sense in fighting to “save” the culture from what it is becoming. People want this, and they’re going to get it. My mission, as I see it, is to save what can be saved of authentic Christian faith and culture, and to build the institutions and practices within which it can be passed on to future generations. That, and to pray for reconversion.

But.

I may not have much regard for the culture in the abstract, but I find it hard not to love individual people. I think of my friend Ryan Booth, a conservative Southern Baptist who took in a transgender couple during the great 2016 flood, when they had nowhere to go. Ryan is nobody’s idea of a progressive … but he is a Christian. He’s the kind of man I want to be. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and I wish I saw more of this from the Left: people who may reject everything we conservatives, especially religious conservatives, stand for, but who respect us as people who have the right to be wrong.

In the Birmingham standoff between Muslim parents and LGBT advocates (who have the state on their side), it seems to me from the outside that the Muslim parents don’t expect the state schools never, ever to mention LGBT people to their children. They just don’t want it to be done to the kids at such an early age. Why is it so bloody difficult to respect that, even as they ask UK Muslims to understand that post-Christian Britain is a place that does not conform to traditional Muslim mores? I am quite sure that the act of being a believing, practicing Muslim in the UK today requires far, far more quiet compromises in daily life than most non-Muslim Britons can imagine. In the Birmingham standoff, one gets the idea that the Left, having won the culture war, is just bouncing the rubble.

It seems to me that the most important practical goal all of us in our diverse societies should shoot for is living in peace and stability. It’s an unsexy goal, but a vital one. It means learning to compromise. Not just the Other Side learning to compromise, but Your Side as well. This is often hard, but especially so when you don’t believe the Other Side is willing to compromise at all.

The way we think of disputes in our culture is a big problem here. What if we resisted thinking about these conflicts in terms of winner-take-all, but rather in terms of achieving harmony? What if we stopped thinking about creating the perfect society, free of all injustice, and instead learned to be satisfied with incremental change — change that happens at a rate that can be absorbed by the diverse communities around us without causing maximal resentment, and sparking a backlash?

Sometimes there is no middle ground, e.g., the Three-Fifths Compromise. But the alternative, as we saw, was an actual civil war. That war, over slavery, was unavoidable. This was not a situation that was tolerable, and blood had to be shed to end it.

We don’t live in a situation so radical. Our conflicts, however fierce, are far more quotidian, though we ramp them up to world-historical showdowns. It’s as if it’s not enough to win; our opponents must have their faces ground into the dust.

I do not understand the pleasure some on the Left take in humiliating a Christian wedding cake baker and forcing him to violate his conscience and threatening to take his livelihood away — this, in a context of total legal victory for same-sex marriage, and an almost-total cultural victory. I do not understand the pleasure some on the Right take in making a Muslim mom and dad afraid to take their kids to Friday prayers at the mosque. (The fact that in the first case, the bullies have the full backing of the American establishment, and in the second case the bully seems to be an isolated thug, is politically meaningful, but never mind.)

Look, we can’t all have what we want in this society. Not you, not me, none of us — unless we are prepared to use violence, and we have a reasonable chance of succeeding by using it. If we don’t want a civil war, we need to slow down and give everybody the chance to absorb the immense changes that have come upon us. We have to want to live in peace and harmony, even if we have to give up something, more than we want to live at war with each other.

That, by the way, means that immigration has to slow down or, as in Europe’s case, stop completely. The cardinal who heads the Italian bishops’ conference is making things far worse by chastising Italians opposed to mass migration as racists and bad Christians. If, God forbid, there is serious civil unrest in Italy, even civil war, intransigent idealists like this cardinal — and Pope Francis — will bear some of the blame. You have to work with people as they are, not as you demand that they be. This is a lesson all of us — all of us — have to ponder.

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