Rod Dreher

On the drive to work this morning, I listened to a Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with the Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart , in which Hart discussed his book "Atheist Delusions," which attacks Ditchkins et alia. In the interview, Hart observed that there is a juvenile naivete at the heart of these New Atheist books, a kind of Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason that ought to be completely untenable after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Hart said that the popular audience for the Ditchkins tomes have no interest in dealing with the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche, who warns his readers quite clearly that once we've murdered God, things could turn quite nasty indeed. You can't make a best-seller out of that kind of pessimistic (but realistic) atheism, Hart said. Nobody wants to hear it.

Hart's remarks put me in mind of Nick Kristof's recent columns about the insane cruelty of the war in Congo, and how innocent people are being tortured in unspeakable ways. See here and here. Here's a bit from that last Kristof column:

It's easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it's even easier to assume that we'd do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war's death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

You read on to find out what happened to one 19 year old young Congolese woman, and it stops you dead in your tracks. This is not a religious war, mind you. These savage combatants need no religious justification for their killing, any more than the Nazis did. If religion gives them an excuse to dehumanize their enemies, they'll take it. If it doesn't, they'll find something else.

This is not a matter of religion, or no religion. This is a matter of human nature, and what human beings are capable of absent civilized restraints. If you think people are bad with God, just imagine what they're capable of without Him. I finished the Kristof column and thought to myself, "How is it that people still believe in the basic goodness of man?"

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend who's a human rights lawyer. He often works on asylum cases, and deals with men and women who are escaping torture. He writes (and I post this with his permission):

Had a case from Africa last year, He was in a secret prison. He was tortured and escaped when a group was taken to the jungle to be executed. (he believes that he was able to make a connection with one of the guards who only pretended to shoot him. He crawled out of this hole, covered in blood.) He made his way to another country, where a kind ship captain allowed him to stow away. The man told him, I don't normally do this, but I'd always regret not helping you.

He was let off the side of a cargo ship and swam to shore in the port of Houston. We were successful in our asylum claim. While his case was pending his wife went missing and his children are in parts unknown. He sat sobbing in my office when he heard that.

And people say, 'man is basically good.'

Stories like this reinforce my belief that we cannot sustain goodness without God. I believe individuals can be good without God, and I know atheists of exemplary character. And I believe having God -- in the sense of professing belief in Him -- is not enough to prevent individuals and sometimes entire societies from turning to evil (I think from time to time of a story I told here about Serbian butchers -- Orthodox Christians, presumably -- massacring innocent Bosnian Muslims; it was related to me by my friend Rich, who was haunted by the black mold on the wall of the warehouse, feeding on the bodily fluids of the murdered men). But if we are to be good, God must be present, and present in a real way in our hearts, such that His laws are binding on our conduct. Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Templeton Prize address for more on this. You may also wish to consult the great Philip Rieff's book "The Triumph of the Therapeutic;" Rieff was an atheist, but he had a very dark view of the future of our post-theistic culture. Have a look at this longer post of mine from the Crunchy Con blog for a discussion of "Triumph of the Therapeutic."

Finally, take a look at this long essay from an old issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which the political scientist Glenn Tinder argues that we cannot sustain what we call goodness in our social and political order without God. Excerpt:

It will be my purpose in this essay to try to connect the severed realms of the spiritual and the political. In view of the fervent secularism of many Americans today, some will assume this to be the opening salvo of a fundamentalist attack on "pluralism." Ironically, as I will argue, many of the undoubted virtues of pluralism--respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings, to cite just two--have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. The question that secularists have to answer is whether these values can survive without these particular roots. In short, can we be good without God? Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons--values we ordinarily regard as secular--without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.

My basic take on this question is that of Evelyn Waugh, who, when chastised by a woman for his professed Christianity having so little apparent impact on his behavior, responded by saying something to the effect of, "You have no idea how much nastier I'd be without it."

And on that cheerful note, it has started snowing outside just now, meaning that Snowmageddon 2: Electric Boogaloo is upon us. See you on the other side.

The late media critic Neil Postman famously observed that the rise of broadcast media meant the end of childhood. His point was that childhood as a period of relative innocence is a socially constructed phenomenon, and is possible only when the adult world conspires to create a more or less impermeable bubble of innocence around the young, to allow their consciences to develop before having to deal with the harsh realities of adult life. A print culture allows adults to have discourse about things that aren't fit for young ears, Postman argued, but when all the "secrets" of the adult world are available to the young simply by turning on cable television, childhood collapses.

Postman wrote that before the advent of the Internet, which of course greatly exacerbates this dynamic and this problem. When I was a 13 year old boy, I recall that me and my friends were dying to get our hands on a Playboy or a Penthouse. But if nobody's father or older brother had any copies hidden under the bed, we were out of luck. As we almost always were. When I turned 14, our family got a giant satellite dish (this was 1981; remember how big they were then?), and I discovered that the Playboy Channel was broadcasting on Satcom 5, way on the other side of the night sky. I would sit up till 1 in the morning, to make sure mom and dad were asleep, then move the dish over to Satcom 5 to watch the soft porn channel with the volume turned all the way down. And then they scrambled the dang signal, ruining my life. Oh, the humanity.

The point is, my folks were not prepared for the way technology opened up an avenue for my own (self-induced) corruption. Nor were they as aware as they ought to have been of the lengths to which a 14 year old American male, even one raised in a morally conservative home, will go to look at naked women. Now that I'm a father, I think a lot about the kinds of things -- and temptations -- my kids will confront in their teenage years that I was protected from because the technology didn't exist back then. I'm pretty sure that if I had had access to Internet pornography sites back then, I would have looked at them. It's the nature of the 14 year old male beast. My wife and I have talked about this sort of thing at length, and I learn a lot from her experience as a teenager. I know that the male-female difference has something to do with it, but I really do think that if I had had the theological training she did, and more importantly, if I had been embedded in a peer group, and in a social setting, that took an actively dim view of pornography, I might have had the character to turn away from it when it presented itself to me. By the time I got to college, I had started to develop a real aversion to it as something foul, and I've never had the slightest interest in it since then. My challenge as a father is to help my children -- especially my boys -- navigate their way through the world of their emerging sexuality at a time when there are so many ways for them to pervert it.

But it's not simply a matter of helping kids mature sexually in healthy ways. What about grown-ups? I have a couple of friends who struggle heroically to conquer porn addiction, such that it affects the way they regard the computer in their own homes (sort of like an alcoholic who has to live with a liquor cabinet). Pornography has become so ubiquitous in our culture that, it seems, younger generations are losing their sensitivity to it. It's becoming normalized, and with it, a mechanistic attitude toward sex and sexuality that I find utterly dehumanizing. There's no point in arguing whether we should or shouldn't have the Internet, because many people misuse it for pornographic reasons. The Internet is a fact -- which leaves the rest of us to contemplate how technology is increasing our power to act on our beastly instincts, and what that means for social evolution.

Which brings us to the broader questions raised by Grindr, the iPhone app that allows gay men who want to have anonymous sex with strangers to find sexually willing partners within near geographic proximity. Here's a Daily Beast writer on his experience with Grindr (follow the jump for an excerpt):

According to the Freakonomics guys, black babies with "superblack" names (Roshanda, Darnell, etc.) don't do as well economically as black babies with "whiter" names -- but it's not because of the name itself. This is why, they say:

What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself. Giving a child a super-black name would seem to be a black parent's signal of solidarity with her community--the flip side of the "acting white" phenomenon.

In other words, if you have a "superblack" name (their word), chances are you come from a socioeconomic background that stacks the deck against your future success. A black Caitlin from that background would struggle just as much.

I confess that I'm pretty rigidly conservative about names, and don't understand why parents saddle their kids with weird names. Take those idiotic names white hipsters give to their kids, e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow naming her child "Apple." Here's a list of hipster names you might want to avoid (funny how so many of the male names are those of the old black janitors at my 1970s elementary school). And here are some rules of thumbs to avoid the mistake of giving your kid a hipster name. We almost violated this one:

4. AVOID THE NAMES OF HIGH-FALUTIN' WRITERS. This is kind of a thin line. We'd say Auden, Austen, Flannery, Harper, Tennessee and Tennyson are dripping in hipsterdom; Edith, Eudora, and Ellison, still okay.

...but "Flannery Dreher" didn't sound right for our daughter.

I'm really enjoying Templeton Prize winner
Charles Taylor's massive tome, "A Secular Age." Unlike most philosophers, Taylor is a crystal-clear writer, and has the gift of being able to discuss profound and complex thoughts without giving himself over to impenetrable jargon.

In the passage I read last night, Taylor discusses the fundamental psychological shift that occurred with modernity, and how it orients us toward questions of religion (remember that the mission Taylor sets for himself in the book is to discuss how and why secularism rose in the West, and its implications for us today). In the pre-modern world, he writes, people saw the material world as charged with spiritual energy, and personality. Pagans saw spirits, and spiritual power, inhering in Nature, and in particular places. Christians retained many of those beliefs, though transferring much of that way of seeing the world to saints and relics, while still believing in evil spirits as actual entities which could bring harm to one. For the individual, Taylor writes, the boundary between a person and this spiritualized world was porous; absent God, the self had little protection from the spiritual forces in the world that threatened the self's integrity and well-being. For pre-moderns, says Taylor, to reject God would not mean to reject the reality of these spiritual forces; rather, it would mean rejecting the only hope one had that Good would ultimately triumph over the forces of chaos and evil.

This is a critically important point: to reject God did not mean rejecting the supernatural; it meant rejecting the best hope the individual had of protecting oneself from it. So most people found this literally unthinkable.

Human consciousness became modern, he writes, when the natural world became "disenchanted" -- that is, when man began to think of the world outside his own mind as spiritually inert, and having only the meaning we impute to it with our own minds. This, says Taylor, "buffers" the mind, putting a layer of protection between the individual and the outside world. It becomes less terrifying. It's the equivalent of saying, "There's no such thing as ghosts" -- and believing it as the truth. The disenchantment of the world ushered in Protestantism, and in turn secularism. You can see the logic. Closing the Taylor book and turning my lamp off last night, I thought that there really is no way to reconcile the African Anglicans with their UK and American counterparts; both live on completely opposite sides of the divide between modernity and pre-modernity.

The thing is, all of us in the West, believers included, live on one side of that divide, whether we want to or not. What I mean to say is that even though I, as an Orthodox Christian, plainly espouse a pre-modern belief system, the psychological and cultural environment that shaped me, and in which I live and breathe is modern and secular. As Taylor points out, this comes so natural to all us Westerners that it's hard to grasp how unusual this is in human experience, and how constructed it is.

We are so accustomed to thinking of our history in this regard as progressive, as one of gradual enlightenment from the forces of intellectual darkness, of priestcraft and sorcery preventing the mind from perceiving the world as it really is. It is impossible to deny that there is a lot of truth to this. Illness is caused by germs, for example, not evil spirits. This is a huge advance. Nobody can deny the immense intellectual and material progress that has been made by mankind learning to see the world a different way -- a way that is more accurate.

But -- and you knew there would be a but -- it is at least possible that in learning how to see the material world more clearly, we blinded ourselves to spiritual realities. That is, we abandoned, or turned off, the faculties of perception that allowed our pre-modern ancestors to see an aspect of reality that eludes us today, and that we are thus endarkened in some sense by our enlightenment. Let me give a couple of examples of what I mean, past the jump...

I don't care what you're doing, stop right now and watch this video postcard from New Orleans last night, passed along by a fellow Louisiana expat. Imagine the joy of these people, who have been down for so long, but who last night were on top of the world. Watch especially the bus driver -- if that man can't make you happy just by looking at him, you're beyond help. Oh, oh, oh, how I wish I were in NOLA right now...

Saints Superbowl Victory Celebration from Cottage Films on Vimeo.

That's the implication of a new cosmological finding. Excerpt from the report in New Scientist: If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger...

I watched the big game at the home of new friends and neighbors, all folks with Front Porch Republic sympathies. This morning, one of our crew, a Catholic theologian, writes to say: Every adult in the house last night was...

You've heard of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the approach to religion that sees God as a heavenly Dr. Phil, only to be consulted when we have a problem, which He's supposed to solve, but otherwise Someone we would prefer would stay...

This was the play of the game last night: Didn't it remind you of this?: The Saints' Tracy Porter was the hero who made both interceptions....

So I take the dog out for his morning constitutional, only to find that we can't safely cross the parking lot in front of our apartment. It's on a hillside and has patches of black ice all over it; I...