Another MavPhil public service message: Don't walk around with your head up your app!
You're a dumbass with a smartphone if you don't understand that it is perhaps the greatest enemy of situational awareness.
And if you pack heat, bear this in mind: if you have to go to guns, there's probably been a failure of situational awareness. (Steve Tarani) Head on a swivel! (Sebastian Gorka)
Under 14 minutes, by Massad Ayoob, one of the best. Words mean things, especially in a court of law. Precise, penetrating, and practical. As civil society collapses around us, and more and more of us must look to our own physical defense, you must also know how to avoid verbal entrapment by the prosecutorial shysters of the Left. 'Shyster,' as you know, is from the German sheissen, to shit. (I shit kid you not.)
A re-post from 20 July 2015. Things are falling apart so fast that July 2015 seems like a long time ago, even to an old man for whom tempus fugit is an understatement. The original posting occurred roughly four and a half years before the annus horribilis of 2020. And here we are more than half-way through 2022. The Amerikan police state is metastasizing as we speak. 87,000 new IRS agents armed with semi-automatic pistols and carbines to persuade the hyper-lawyered billionaire fat cats to 'pay their fair share' -- to ape the idiom of Fauxcahontas Warren? Think again you of the ovine and bovine and usefully-idiotic persuasion. It is one of the several modes of what I am now calling the Assault on the Middle. More on this, anon.
You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.
I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.
Granted, there is no formula: there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option. But there ought to be discussion -- not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece -- of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.
Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target. A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal. One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially. One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one: how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?
And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance. This is especially vexing for Christians. Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed? On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion. It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from. On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?
If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.
We are indeed living in very interesting times. How can one be bored?
The car of a neighbor sports a bumper sticker: "I vote pro-gun!"
I say go gray. Never advertise your political views when you are out and about in public. These are dangerous times as polarization peaks and comity collapses. You must of course speak out, stand up, and prepare. I am not advocating timid withdrawal from the fray. But there are more and less prudent ways to proceed. Prudence, you will recall, is one of the cardinal virtues.
The 'smart' phone. Every day I see people rendered deaf, DUMB, and blind to their surroundings by their phones. Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone!
Don't even think of packing heat in these days of rampant, Dem-induced, crime until you have thought through the whole business of situational awareness. Here is a video for you.
.........................
A reader familiar with these matters comments:
I agree with almost everything Ken says in this video. You've got to see it coming or your weapons will do you no good. Where I think he goes wrong is when he talks about situational awareness giving you time to decide. No. There is no time in the event for deliberation unless the threat is far away. Then you consider whether to engage or flee. But there is no running away if the threat is a few feet away and coming at you. And no time to decide what to do. You need to react with your weapon by trained reflex. It should actually surprise you how fast you draw and shoot. With practice you can draw and shoot a lot faster than you deliberate. At the gas pump always have your cc in your left hand and your right hand on your weapon. If someone jumps out from behind your car or the pump, bring you gun up across your chest into a close point and shoot. Practice this until it happens very fast, by reflex.
Deliberate now how you are going to train yourself to respond to a threatening sit. In the event surprise yourself by how fast you respond.
In contemporary Internet lingo, a gray man is typically a prepper who seeks to be unobtrusive and to blend in. He is 'gray' in that he tries not to call attention to himself, his beliefs, and his stock of guns, ammo, food, and other survival supplies that he hopes will see him and his family through a collapse of the social order. His 'bug-out bag' is at the ready should he need to split for his hideaway. He worries whether he can make his escape without drawing attention to himself.
It is the old Aesop tale of the Ant and Grasshopper revived and updated. The Grasshopper spends the summer in the pleasures of the moment, dancing and singing, giving no thought to the future. Comes the winter he must beg the Ant for provender, whereupon the And delivers a stern rebuke, telling the Grasshopper to dance the winter away.
The latter-day Grasshopper does not beg; he demands, in concert with others of his shiftless ilk. He cannot be reached by any rebukes or sermonizing. He is a dangerous hombre who poses a lethal threat. The latter-day Ant appreciates the threat and seeks to meet it by being both armed and unobtrusive.
He who provokes an evil-doer bears some responsibility for his evil-doing.
The gray man is the opposite of the 'tacti-cool' dude who foolishly flaunts his preparedness and advertises his tools. His truck sports NRA, Sig Sauer, and other decals. A bumpersticker reads, "I'm your huckleberry." The 'tacti-cool' dude carries open or with inadequate concealment. His T-shirt is tight so that you can admire his marvellous pectorals, but he 'prints' like crazy. If questioned, he insists on his Second Amendment rights. He is right to do so, but nonetheless imprudent. 'Liberals' have no respect for the rights he invokes, and there is no reaching them by any appeal to reason.
Imprudent advertising leads to pointless conversations and worse. Years ago, a man questioned my open carry deep in the Superstition Wilderness, claiming that guns are illegal in a National Park. I pointed out that we were in a National Forest. I don't think I got through to the idiot. But I did marvel at his foolishness in arguing with an armed man in the middle of nowhere.
There are foolish people who don't know what 'brandish' means. They see a man with a gun strapped to his belt and they call the cops claiming that some guy is 'brandishing' a firearm. This can lead to an unpleasant encounter with law enforcement. The wise man, understanding human nature, avoids contacts with cops, knowing full well their propensity for arrogance and overreach. Power corrupts. Power suborns moral sense. I say this as a hard-assed law and order conservative who believes in the death penalty. I believe that said penalty is not only morally permissible, but also in some cases morally obligatory.
And then there are the bad guys who, seeing an armed man, will calculate whether they can take his weapon from him. Or they may be planning an attack of some sort. The armed citizen, seen to be armed, will be the first target.
So I advise a certain grayness in these and related matters. Exercise your rights, but do not flaunt them. Stand on principles, but don't sacrifice prudence to principles.
Because of the influence of La Fontaine's Fables, in which La cigale et la fourmi stands at the beginning, the cicada then became the proverbial example of improvidence in France: so much so that Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title La Cigale. The painting was exhibited at the 1872 Salon with a quotation from La Fontaine, Quand la bise fut venue (When the north wind blew), and was seen as a critique of the lately deposed Napoleon III, who had led the nation into a disastrous war with Prussia.
'Sheltering at home' is no big deal with a functioning grid and all that it makes possible such as working at home and ordering goods and services online. Would it be 'racist' of me to suggest that the Chinese might want to destroy our grid with an electromagnetic pulse attack?
Leftists are not very good at threat prioritization. Obama, you will recall, pointed to 'global warming' as the numero uno threat to humanity. I understand that this 'threat' did not stop him from investing in beach-front property.
And what did Obama and his bunch do about the EMP threat? Precisely nothing. Unlike Trump.
Good will come of the current pandemic. People will learn how to be more self-reliant and less reliant on government. They will learn how to prepare for emergencies. They will learn how to slow down, prepare their own meals, stay home, travel less, read books, be more thoughtful and introspective, repair things, and anally cleanse without toilet paper. (No, I am not advocating a return to the Roman tersorium!) They will finally learn some life skills. Or so I hope.
But most important: we are now in a position as a nation to learn not to rely on enemies for our well-being. I now hand off to John Moody:
For instance, with China’s economy still reeling from the economic impact of the disease, maybe it’s time for America to rethink our insane over-dependence on China for everything from clothes, to computers, to smart-phones, to even the medicines we need to combat corona—which, despite politically correct howls to remain mute about it, started in China!
Yes, China makes things cheaper than Americans choose to make these days. Yes, China, when it is not busy imprisoning political dissidents and stealing our technology, has made huge advances in its manufacturing capabilities. And yes, it has proven to be a trading partner that takes advantage of us, but keeps pumping out the cheap consumer goods Americans love nearly as much as their freedom.
Attention, America: that freedom is at risk. The massive shutdown of China’s industrial output in response to the corona scourge has demonstrated just how thoroughly we have outsourced our manufacturing might in the name of saving a few bucks.
The leftist scum who are attempting to use the current crisis to attack President Trump are attacking the very man who alone has the courage to oppose the globalist, borderless madness.
. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.
Liberal 'projectionism' -- to give it a name -- can get your irenic ass killed.
Many survivalists are extremists. But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.
That being said, a wise man, while hoping for the best, prepares for the worst. But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective. A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that some recommend. But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand. Here are some questions you should ask yourself.
1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion meeting deadly force with deadly force? Are you prepared for a break down in civil order? 2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks? 3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries? 4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?
These are just some of the questions to consider. But how far will you go with these preparations? Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize? Wouldn't that be foolish? Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?
And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society? Under what conditions is life worth living? Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy to break through, beneath which is a hell of misery. (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.) When the going gets unbearable, could you see your way clear to providing your spouse with the means of suicide and then killing yourself? Are there good moral objections to such a course of action?
Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.
Obama and his administration did not think so. Trump has different and better ideas. Score another for Trump. Please watch the video. You will learn something from an expert.
When leaving the safety of your house, assuming it is well-secured, and while out and about at all times but especially in this holiday season, you should keep in mind the magic word or phrase, Code Yellow.
Nor have I read the above-linked responses. So I don't know whether they are the most intelligent or if they are all, or even any of them, intelligent. You decide.
Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
Here is a good article on the topic addressed to law enforcement officers, but useful for the ordinary citizen.
Under ORANGE below read 'if possible' for 'if necessary.'
Condition White is fine while in your house, assuming your house is well-secured. The minute you step out your door you should move to Condition Yellow, whether you are carrying or not. Train yourself to stay in Yellow as long as you are out and about.
I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read a paper at an A. P. A. meeting. Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street. I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt ti distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride. I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.
Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why liberal fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. If common sense makes me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk.
A reader offers the following comment on the immediately preceding post on the problem of dirty hands:
You write that even if one admits an absolute moral standard there are (hypothetically) situations wherein 'moral considerations are trumped by survival considerations'. Yet surely the latter collapses into the former, for what is the implicit presumption that it is good to survive but an axiological position? I use 'axiological' because it has a wider remit than moral/ethical . . . . In other words I would deny that your scenario actually 'gets outside' morality at all.
The issues are deep and difficult. I should make clear that I was not asserting that there are situations in which moral justifications are trumped by survival considerations, or by any non-moral considerations. I was merely examining how and whether this proposition enters the structure of the problem of dirty hands.
The question is whether both of the following propositions could be true. (1) It is objectively and absolutely morally wrong to kill innocent human beings, by nuking the cities of an enemy, say. (2) It is nonetheless justifiable in non-moral terms for a state, a nation, a culture, to do this to survive. (A 'reasons of state' justification.) If the joint truth of (1) and (2) is conceivable, then it is conceivable that there are situations in which moral considerations are trumped by non-moral ones.
Note that the issue is not whether nuking enemy cities, say, can be sometimes justified by moral reasoning. It can. Consequentialist moral reasoning justified Harry Truman's decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The issue is whether, on the supposition that nuking enemy cities and thus killing vast numbers of noncombatants is absolutely morally wrong --wrong always and everywhere regardless of circumstances and consequences -- the absolute moral prohibition can be trumped or overruled or suspended, not by a further moral consideration, but by a non-moral one.
To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abe would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abe slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling. We are also hard by the vexing Euthyphro Dilemma. (Is a command obligatory because God commands it, or does God command it because it is obligatory?) I bring up Abraham and Isaac only to suggest how there might be a 'dimension' relative to which even an absolute morality can be relativized -- to put it paradoxically.
If morality can be trumped 'from above,' it can be trumped 'from below.' Imagine someone arguing that moral prescriptions and proscriptions are for the sake of human life and not the other way around. Morality is for the living, not the dead. Now human living is always the living of particular animal individuals and particulars groups. So preservation of life, my life, our life, underpins all morality. Morality is for human flourishing; it cannot enjoin our destruction. Socrates was wrong: it is not better to suffer evil than to commit evil. It is sometimes better to commit evil than to suffer it, not morally better, but better for the sake of our preservation. The non-moral imperative of survival trumps the moral imperative to not shed innocent blood. If it is us versus them, it is better that we nuke them than that they nuke us. In some circumstances there is a non-moral rational justification for violating an absolute moral prohibition.
The Counterargument. "You are assuming that survival is a value, and you are justifying the contravention of the absolute moral prohibition by invoking that value. But that value is an objective moral value. So you are not outside morality, but presupposing morality."
A Response. First, survival is something we human animals value, but it is not a moral value; it is pre-moral presupposition of their being any moral values at all. Without agents, there are no actions, hence no free actions, hence no morally responsible actions, hence no moral and immoral actions and failures to act, hence no actions attuned to moral values. The existence of agents and their preservation are values prior to the moral sphere.
Second, survival cannot be an objective moral value. In Kantian terms, consider the "maxim" of the action that would flow from the objective moral value of survival if the latter were an objective moral value. The maxim would be something like: One ought always tolook to one's survival first regardless of moral prohibitions which, if honored, could terminate or severely impair one's quality of life.
Example. Iran together with other rogue-state allies launches a war of annihilation against Israel using so-called conventional weapons. Applying the above maxim, Israel could justify nuking Teheran and others population centers. But now here is the question: could the maxim be universalized? What is universalizability?
The requirement that moral judgments be universalizable is, roughly, the requirement that such judgments be independent of any particular point of view. Thus, an agent who judges that A ought morally to do X in situation S ought to be willing to endorse the same judgment whether she herself happens to be A, or some other individual involved in the situation (someone who, perhaps, will be directly affected by A's actions), or an entirely neutral observer. Her particular identity is completely irrelevant in the determination of the correctness or appropriateness of the judgment. (Troy Jollimore, SEP)
It seems to me that the survival maxim cannot be universalized. I cannot coherently will that it should become a law of nature that everyone act according to the maxim. Kant's moral insight is that morality requires impartiality; it requires that one view matters impartially by abstracting from one's particular circumstances and identity. But survival is inherently partial. Living and surviving and flourishing in a material world is inherently one-sided: one cannot help but privilege one's own point of view.
My conclusion is that surivival, while a value, is not an objective moral value. So it seems to me that a survival justification of action that violates absolute moral norms is indeed non-moral and not moral in disguise.
Consider what a Stateside conservative talk jock, Dennis Prager, recently wrote:
The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer's house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say that Opdyke's actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.
In my view -- and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians -- she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because circumstances almost always determine what is moral, even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That's why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.
Surely Prager is contradicting himself. As Keith Burgess-Jackson comments, "It's shocking that this man doesn't understand the nature of a moral absolute. What he is espousing is situational ethics!" If there is an absolute prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then this prohibition is in force regardless of circumstances and consequences. What is absolutely immoral cannot be "made moral" by a particular set of circumstances.
Can a view like Prager's be rescued from contradiction? It is clear that what is absolutely immoral cannot be morally justified. But it does not follow that it cannot be justified. For there may be non-moral modes of justification.
Loaded with double-aught buckshot, the instrument of home defense depicted below has the power to separate the soul from the body in a manner most definitive. Just showing this bad boy to a would-be home invader is a most effective way to issue a 'trigger warning' in a reality-based sense of that phrase.
But let Uncle Bill give you a piece of friendly advice. You really don't want to have to shoot anyone. No matter how worthless the scumbag, he is some mother's son and a bearer, somewhere deep inside under a load of corruption, of the imago Dei. Taking a human life must always be the last resort, and this for moral, legal, prudential, and psychological reasons. You should aspire to die a virgin in this regard, assuming you are still 'intact.'
So here's my advice. Secure your home so that the miscreants cannot get in. That's Job One.
And of course never, ever, vote for criminal-coddling, criminal-releasing and gun-grabbing Democrats or liberals and always speak out loudly, proudly, and publicly for your Second Amendment rights. It is the Second that is the real-world back-up of the First and the others.
You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.
I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.
Granted, there is no formula: there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option. But there ought to be discussion -- not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece -- of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.
Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target. A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal. One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially. One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one: how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?
And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance. This is especially vexing for Christians. Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed? On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion. It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from. On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?
If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.
We are indeed living in very interesting times. How can one be bored?
In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option:
It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.
This is especially the case, as it seems to me, given the Left's relentless and characteristically dishonest assault on Second Amendment rights. The only real back up to the First Amendment is the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Second. You will have noticed that the Left never misses an opportunity to limit law-abiding citizens' access to guns and ammunition. What motivates leftists is the drive to curtail and ultimately eliminate what could be called 'real' liberties such as the liberty to own property, to make money and keep it, to defend one's life, liberty and property, together with the liberty to acquire the means to the defense of life, liberty and property.
Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
[. . .]
It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.
I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.
Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.
Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.
There is a potential problem with the Benedict Option, however. Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work, if one is really to possess it. The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own.
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target. A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal. One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially. One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one: how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?
We are indeed living in very interesting times. How can one be bored?
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead –- often not recognizing fully what they were doing –- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 244-245.)
This was written 34 years ago, 20 years before 9/11. It is the charter for Rod Dreher's recent talk of a Benedict Option. Excerpts from an eponymous article of his:
Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.
For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.
The Great Forgetting is taking a particular toll on American Christianity, which is losing its young in dramatic numbers. Those who remain within churches often succumb to a potent form of feel-good relativism that sociologists have called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which is dissolving historic Christian moral and theological orthodoxy.
A recent Pew survey found that Jews in America are in an even more advanced state of assimilation to secular modernity. The only Jews successfully resisting are the Orthodox, many of whom live in communities meaningfully separate and by traditions distinct from the world.
Is there a lesson here for Christians? Should they take what might be called the “Benedict Option”: communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life?
The broader topic here is that of voluntary withdrawal from a morally corrupt society and its morally corrupt institutions. There are various options. One could join a monastic order and live in community. This is the monastic cenobitic option. There is also the monastic eremitic option: one lives as a hermit within a religious context subject to its rules and having taken vows. Both the cenobitic and the eremitic options can be made less rigorous in various ways. One could attach oneself as an oblate to a monastery visiting it from time to time and participating in its communal prayers and other activities (Ora, labora, et lectio are the three 'legs' of the Benedictine 'stool.'). This could also be done in an eremitic way. (From the Greek eremos, desert.)
Spiritual withdrawal is of course greatly aided by physical withdrawal from cities into deserts and other remote locales; but one could voluntarily withdraw from a morally corrupt society while living in the midst of it in, say, Manhattan. (I cannot, however, advise setting up as the resident monk in a bordello in Pahrump, Nevada.)
What of the Maverick Option? As I have been living it since 1991 it does not involve drastic physical isolation: I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area which is also the edge of a rugged wilderness area. Ready access to raw nature (as opposed to, say, Manhattan's Central Park) may not be absolutely essential for spiritual development, but it is extremely conducive to it (in tandem with other things of course). Nature, experienced alone, removes one from the levelling effects of the social. (Henry David Thoreau: "I have no walks to throw away on company." That sounds misanthropic and perhaps from Henry David's mouth it was; but it can be given a positive reading.) It would be the height of folly to suppose that man's sociality is wholly negative; but its corrupting side cannot be denied. Encounter with nature in solitude pulls one out of one's social comfort zone in such a way that the ultimate questions obtrude themselves with full force. In society, they can strike one like jokes from a Woody Allen movie; in solitude, in the desert, they are serious. Nature is not God; but the solitary encounter with it, by breaking the spell of the social, can orient us toward Nature's God.
I will have more to say of the Maverick Option, its nature and pitfalls, in a later post.
Where Jeremiah counsels engagement without assimilation, Benedict represents the possibility of withdrawal. The former goal is to be achieved by the pursuit of ordinary life: the establishment of homes, the foundation of families, all amid the wider culture. The latter is to be achieved by the establishment of special communities governed by a heightened standard of holiness.
Although it can be interpreted as a prophecy of doom, the Jeremiah Option is fundamentally optimistic. It suggests that the captives can and should lead fulfilling lives even in exile. The Benedict Option is more pessimistic. It suggests that mainstream society is basically intolerable, and that those who yearn for decent lives should have as little to do with it as possible. MacIntyre is careful to point out that the new St. Benedict would have to be very different from the original and might not demand rigorous separation. Even so, his outlook remains bleak.
We need to catalog and examine all the options. A man once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. He was the wisest of mortals.
A recent Richard Fernandez column ends brilliantly:
We often forget that the sacred texts of mankind began as practical documents. They were checklists. And we may well rediscover this fact before the end. One can imagine the last two postmoderns crawling towards each other in the ruins of a once great city to die, and while waiting to expire engage in conversation to pass the time.
“Waldo,” the first said, “do you remember that tablet displayed in front of the Texas Statehouse. You know, back when there was a Texas?”
“Yeah, didn’t it have a whole bunch of stuff scrawled on it? Tell me again what it said,” replied the other.
“Waldo, it said, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ And ‘thou shalt not lie’.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes it also said, ‘thou shalt not steal’. Plus somewhere in the middle said, ‘thou shalt not have sex with people you weren’t married to.’”
“Yeah, I remember it now,” the second post-modern said. “What a bunch of hooey. It’s a right wing, nutjob, racist document called the Ten Commandments. It’s a religious document.”
“No Waldo,” the first replied. “That’s where you’re wrong. It ain’t no religious document. I just figured out it was a survival manual.”
Do you even have one? Dennis Bradford sent me this, which I recommend that you read. He didn't mention no shootin' ahrn, but then ah reckon Dennis is tad on the librul side . . . .
Almost anything can be made into a 'religion.' (I am using the term very loosely!) Survivalism, for example. See J. W. Rawles' SurvivalBlog.com for a taste. This post provides some insight into the mentality of a distaff survivalist. It is quite revealing, I think, of both the 'logic' and the propensity for extremism of the survivalist type. But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.
But don't get me wrong. A wise man, while hoping for the best, prepares for the worst. But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective. A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that the linked-to survivalist lady mentions. But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand. Here are some questions you should ask yourself.
1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion? 2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks? 3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries? 4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?
These are just some of the questions to consider. But how far will you go with these preparations? Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize? Wouldn't that be foolish? Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?
And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society? Under what conditions is life worth living? Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy to break through, beneath which is a hell of misery. (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.) When the going gets unbearable, can you see your way clear to shooting your spouse and then yourself? Are there good moral objections to such a course of action?
Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.
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