Rod Dreher: September 2007 Archives

Congratulations to Ross Douthat and Abigail Tucker on their marriage yesterday. As the Zohar says, "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Ross with a yadda-yadda." Good times, good times...

Remember my story about the bad monk who faked the weeping icon, and the role his fraud played in bringing my wife and me together? I wrote a Dallas Morning News column about it that's been published today, and did an interview about it with Father Chris Metropolous of the Orthodox Christian Network -- which you can listen to our download as a podcast here. Excerpt from my column:

I am glad it is not given to me to judge him. By one standard, Father Benedict deserves a millstone lashed to his neck for eternity. That's what I'd have given the old buzzard, but God's a better Christian than I am. And yet, I'm forced to admit that from Sam Greene's wicked deeds, my beloved family sprung. I can't help wondering: no fake icon, no visit to Austin, no meeting my true love.

This mystery throws everything off balance. It offends my sense of order and righteousness to recognize it, but the mere existence of my children is evidence that however miserable and mean and degraded, that dirty old monk, probably in spite of himself, was once an instrument of grace.

Did other good fruit emerge from this poisoned vineyard? Who knows, and who can say whether it counts for anything? But when Sam Greene is judged, there my little family stands, however reluctantly, as silent witnesses for the defense, pleading on his behalf for the same thing every one of us will one day need: mercy.

Miss Diana Krall loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And also a new greatest hits album.

When I linked last week to that NYTimes story about Dr. Jonathan Haidt and his research into the psychological origins of morality, I'd neglected this quote from the piece:

Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. “Educated liberals are the only group to say, ‘I find that disgusting but that doesn’t make it wrong,’ ” Dr. Haidt said.

Now, understand that Haidt is not speaking as someone hostile to liberals -- in the piece, he describes himself as one -- but is making a judgment based on his research. I find this fascinating for a couple of reasons. It would indicate that it requires intellectual effort to overcome an instinct that may be culturally and even genetically programmed into one's psyche. OK, that's not surprising. What's interesting, though, is that what Haidt theorizes is an instinct that individuals and cultures have acquired as a way of protecting themselves from potential threats, educated liberals seek to eradicate for the ideological goal of seeming not to judge.

This brings to mind the controversy earlier this week about the sadomasochism street festival. I think it safe to say that most normal people would find a) that one should inflict or receive severe pain for the sake of sexual gratification and b) that one should stand in the public square and announce one's pride in so doing -- that normal people would find those things instinctively disgusting. Now, obviously there are people who find these things not only not disgusting, but pleasing. And there are many more people, I think, who, while finding these things personally disgusting, would suppress the urge to declare them so, out of a sense that to make that kind of judgment is wrong.

We'd all agree that on certain topics, feelings of disgust are highly subjective and culture-bound. Eating a ham sandwich fills me with porkful delight, but would make someone raised in a devout Orthodox Jewish or Islamic home with revulsion. I get that. What interests me, though, are things that are pretty universally felt to be disgusting, but that "educated liberals" refuse to pass moral judgment on -- and indeed, to condemn those who do.

I remember the last time I watched a pornographic movie. I was in between college semesters, and one of my housemates that summer brought home a porn videocassette. We sat around watching it, and after a few minutes it made me so uncomfortable I had to leave the room. It wasn't because I had strong religious or ideological convictions -- indeed, if you had asked me then, I would have told you that there was nothing much wrong with watching that movie. It was rather that I felt a strong sense of disgust, of defilement, over watching that thing, and that in some way I didn't fully grasp, I was degrading myself and deforming my conscience by staying in that room. I walked out not on conviction, but on instinct. That stuff just creeped me out. I've always felt the same way about slasher movies. In retrospect, I've somehow understood that revulsion at taking pleasure in pornographic sex or pornographic violence is actually a protective mechanism against moral coarsening -- that those taboos exist for a reason, and oughtn't be violated.

If we grant that it's misleading to base one's moral reasoning entirely on what one and one's society finds to be revolting -- after all, to a cannibal, eating Uncle Pongo's liver is delightful -- to what extent is a felt sense of disgust a reasonable guide to moral behavior? To what extent do educated liberals, in the sense Dr. Haidt means, endanger themselves and society by refusing to moralize based on the disgust instinct?

Raymond Ibrahim, translator and editor of "The Al Qaeda Reader," points out that if you read Osama bin Laden's messages to the West, they're full of reciprocity -- the idea that we, al-Qaeda, go after the West to avenge sins against Muslims by the kaffir (infidels). But, Ibrahim says, if you read the words bin Laden and his followers direct towards Muslims, there's none of bin Laden's rhetoric about the need to punish the West for this or that thing. It's all about the theological command for Muslims to attack everyone who isn't Muslim.

This is important because it makes it clear that there is no way to stop al-Qaeda and its ideological cohorts, short of killing them. We could withdraw every Westerner from Islamic lands, and all the Jews in Israel could move to Broward County, and that would not deter al-Qaeda one whit. They hate us and fight us because we are not Muslim. The rest of their rhetoric is simply another form of warfare.