In this week’s edition of Thinking Aloud, I am using a recent debate I had with Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) as an occasion to reflect on the work of stewarding cultural resources in a pluralistic age. I’m gonna talk about why cultural fragmentation can be a good thing. And I’m going to talk about what I think the culture war paradigm gets wrong. Mostly though, I’m going to expand on the image of culture as garden.
Before I jump in, here’s a few items to note.
First, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a chance to gather with family or friends, to take a turkey-induced nap, to watch the Cowboys get stomped into the ground, etc.
Second, I love everything about this tweet. I want a coffee table book filled with quotes like it:
Third, the new Amazon original film The Report (starring Adam Driver) is now streaming for Prime members. It’s a procedural drama about the efforts to create and distribute the report on CIA torture. It’s a well-made film and fair. Bush and Obama take some hits, McCain and Feinstein come off looking good. And as far as it goes, I think that’s how it should be.
Fourth, a couple of my (unmarried) friends and I are planning on watching The Irishman in its entirety next weekend. It’s a 3.5 hour film. So for parents or otherwise busy people, Twitter has produced a guide to watching the film as four episodes.
Fifth and finally, for someone who does aspire to write for the New Yorker, I do spend a lot of my time making fun of it. But it’s just such an easy target, and I have way too much time on my hands. Anyway, this tweet made me cackle:
Seriously. Everyone.
Gathering Fragments:
I called Rod Dreher an alarmist, and he countered that maybe he’s a prophet. And certainly that’s the way he is presented in this profile of him in….that’s right, the New Yorker. (Do you see the level of craft that goes into this??) More concretely, Dreher blogged and tweeted a lot last week about a well-known pastor saying he uses preferred pronouns when talking to transgender persons, and also about how Chick-Fil-A apparently doesn’t hate “the gays” now. Anyway, for Dreher this was just another in a dismal parade of signs revealing that the end is nigh, a parade no doubt featuring drag queens and rainbow flags and other such horrors.
In his response to our Twitter exchange, Dreher wrote a [long] blog post. I replied with a much shorter blog post (which Dreher graciously published), and Dreher followed that up with another long post of his own at the end of mine.
Here’s the crux of my argument:
Maybe it’s time to stop with the alarm-sounding, and get back to the gardening, the cultivation of the kind of little acts of great love which animated the life of the saint we call the Little Flower. Maybe the Benedict stuff needs to be more Benedictine: less concerned with the imperial power, who has it and how that can help or hurt the abstract cause of “religious liberty” (to riff on MacIntyre, “whose liberty, which religion?” Is this just pretext for certain corners of Christendom in a proxy war culture war, or more representative?), and more concerned with the Benedictine care of the people in our orbit: the quiet work of the orphanage, the hospital, the school, the parish church. I get that this is what you claim your Benedict Option is about, but it certainly isn’t what you spend your time blogging about.
I do really like the image of gardening, which I am remembering I was introduced to by the artist Makoto Fujimura, in his book Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life. But I want to complicate my use of the garden image because I don’t want to suggest that we should retreat to the idyllic and pastoral Shire. Because I think we are called to something more like the hobbit’s journey.
Let us imagine that our garden is a small community, perhaps inspired by the Benedictine rule. The circle of neighborhood, workplace, house of worship, favorite pub, etc.. First, we realize that our garden’s ecosystem is inherently connected to the broader global ecosystem. Dreher recognizes this, which is why he is not content to simply go away to do his own gardening, and is instead compelled to write bestsellers and get photographed for New Yorker profiles. Dreher understands that if there is soil erosion or polluted water, through loss or mismanagement or poison, then the plants in his own garden will suffer.
Okay, so if want to form a sustainable garden that can endure for generations, we cannot simply tend to our garden with no thought or effort toward a broader kind of horticulture in the context of a broader ecosystem. The question then is what does it look like to enter into that broader ecosystem, in which the gardens of others can look very different than our own?
Writing for Vox, Ezra Klein has a smart piece on culture wars in an increasingly post-Christian age. Klein centers his analysis on two recent speeches given by Trump’s attorney general, William Barr: one speech at Notre Dame, the other at The Federalist Society. Here are two Barr quotes that will give you a flavor:
This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means. And this is as it should be, but there is no getting around the fact that this puts conservatives at a disadvantage when facing progressive holy war, especially when doing so under the weight of a hyper-partisan media.
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Barr wants conservatives (particularly in the judicial context) to see that the Left is engaged in scorched-earth warfare (a claim that is contentious, but let’s concede it for arguments sake), and that he suggests it may be time for us to throw some elbows.
Klein quotes Jerry Falwell jr., who is not nearly as demure in his comments. “Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing “nice guys”. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!”
Since I just watched The Report, I’m thinking about how quickly the US went from being the victim of terror (9/11) to becoming the perpetrators of it (the Abu Ghraib prison, etc.) Whether in the name of safeguarding safety or simply beating the enemy at his own game, the US succumbed to its worst temptations, and according to Senator McCain betrayed its own values. I think Dreher’s culture war stuff, or the William Barr / Jerry Falwell jr. argument is a lot like the CIA attempting to justify “enhanced interrogation tactics.” But torture is torture, and even if the other side is doing it, that doesn’t mean you should.
Because I have Tolkien in mind, I’m not keen on the imagery of war that Dreher relies on as his main paradigm. And I’m especially not keen on the image of raising up culture-warriors who can use the playbook of “the enemy” (in this case, secularists? progressives?) in order to win by fighting dirty. You’ll remember that this war strategy is indeed pursued by a central character in Tolkien’s trilogy, the man whose mind is made of “metal and wheels.” Saruman begins the saga as a good wizard who is rightly concerned about Sauron, and who feels the urgency of the impending threat. But in his efforts to protect the good, Saruman becomes increasingly utilitarian: he is willing to justify any means necessary to secure the ends he desires. And we know how this story goes: Saruman creates deformed creatures (the arcs), becomes infatuated with power, and ultimately as readers of the books will know, he attempts to destroy the Shire, the very instantiation of the good that he was so motivated to protect when the story began.
Okay so if we’re not just staying in our own garden, ignoring soil erosion, but we’re also not out there swinging swords in some misguided holy war, then what exactly is the vision? How then should we live?
I think it’s about fragments. I think it’s about recognizing that we have some resources - perhaps a rare plant that is only found in our garden - that we can introduce and share with the broader ecosystems, but also that others have fragments that can enrich our garden. And so I think the image is one of gathering and sharing. I think the image is one of researching and creating medicinal herbs for cultural ailments, and that requires sustained engagement with a broken world, both to learn about its brokenness and also to learn strategies and solutions previously unknown to us.
Saruman’s will-to-power ethic ultimately harms himself as well as others. I think the gathering, gardening, restoring, healing verbs offer the would-be Saruman as much healing as they do the “secularists” or whoever it is that we want to save. And as Flannery O’Connor posits in her short story of the same name, in engaging in this redemption work, “the life you save may be your own.”
This might sound sentimental. I don’t mean it to be. I’m writing in a mode of imaginative reasoning in a world in which analytic reasoning is dominant. In doing so, I seek to draw from the example of figures like Tolkien, like C.S. Lewis, like George MacDonald, like Dante.
To provide a little more analytic work, however, here’s an extended excerpt from a recent Commonweal interview with the theologian Father David Tracy:
DAVID TRACY: “Fragments” is a category I developed some years ago. It was started as a major category by the German Romantics in the late eighteenth century. And of course it eventually became very popular with the literary modernists and even more with the postmodern writers who typically write in fragmentary ways. I defend it as a way to break totalities, to fragment all totality systems and open them to infinity, which has become a major category for my work.
In my opinion, all our traditions are in fragments. People like T. S. Eliot and others thought that was unfortunate—his famous line is “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” I don’t think of fragments in that way. Sometimes, of course, fragmentation can be negative. But in fact, the traditions—in philosophy, theology, the arts—have always been in fragments.
KW: For example?
DT: Well, no one uses the entire Bible. No one uses all of Greek philosophy. Given our temperament, or needs, or our culture’s needs, we all choose particular fragments of the great traditions that we think are exceptionally valuable right now. And therefore I find fragments a very valuable category that helps people, especially in theology, to understand that one can be cognizant of and faithful to the fundamental Christian tradition, but also to realize it’s not really possible to do the entire tradition. I believe it would take about seven or eight lifetimes to do the whole of Christian tradition—even just the theological part of it.
KW: What do you mean “do” the whole tradition?
DT: To really absorb, appropriate, and articulate the whole tradition. But that’s not necessary.
KW: It sounds to me that this approach is, in some sense, the form fitting the content.
DT: It is. You’re right.
KW: In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre lamented, like Eliot, the fact that all we have available now are fragments of previous moral traditions that turn up in classrooms like potshards that archeologists cannot make cohere. Clearly, MacIntyre is not fond of fragments.
DT: I like MacIntyre’s work very much. I think he is one of the best living Christian thinkers. But he himself is not doing the whole tradition. He even says [in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry] that there are too many Thomisms. He’s doing those aspects of Thomism that he finds particularly valuable for our own problems now. And that’s what I think everyone does whether they realize it or not. So by emphasizing, as I do, and developing the notion of fragments, I think I’m giving people a new way to look at our traditions, and it’s a liberating way. It’s not to shore up our ruin, it’s to undo the ruin and find new resources.
This isn’t relativism, this isn’t a denial that there are toxins, this isn’t an idealistic image of continual serenity. But it is a posture of humility, openness, courage, and hospitality that I think is better suited to living in a pluralistic age.
I think this is the vision. We recognize that fragmentation is the state of the world, we recognize that even adhering to a particular tradition (in my case, Catholicism), doesn’t fully overcome the contingency of our thinking, bounded in by place, time, experience, and education. And so we go out to gather, to find that beauty so ancient and so new (Augustine), to steward and share. And when we discover the plurality of the world, the unique qualities of gardens quite unlike our own, we rejoice.
One last image. If it is true that we are headed into a post-Christian future, I think we should pause to reflect on what that might mean. A post-Christian future is not like a pre-Christian past. This isn’t Celtic paganism, with ritualistic sacrifice and pervasive fear of evil spirits lurking in trees. A post-Christian future is one that even in reaction to Christianity, will be shaped by Christianity. In much the same way that the ex-Catholic or ex-evangelical often bears the imprint of their upbringing, a truly post-Christian world will likely still benefit from the residual effects of Christianity. And that’s assuming that Christianity disappears entirely, which I have no reason to believe will be the case. So here’s the image: rather than waging war over soil using pollutants or scorched tactics, let’s instead think about the kind of planting, watering, tilling work that can deepen the imprint of Christianity.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
In Commonweal, the best religious reporting all year: Katherine Lucky profiles the last two Shakers, representatives of a centuries-old religious tradition, who live in Maine. This is about history, it’s about bearing witness to a fading way of life, but it’s also about radical hope. It can be sad to read, but there’s some quiet humor too.
Alissa Wilkinson is one of my favorite film critics. She got her start at Christianity Today and now writes for Vox. In her review of Scorsese’s new film The Irishman, Wilkinson explores the deep spirituality that pervades all of his films and especially this new one. “Yet The Irishman still reads as a plea for understanding from his audience. It’s a deep dive into how one side of human life is the drive for power and sex and money, and the other side is a deep yearning for love and grace."
Nationalism is very much a debated concept. Theologian and philosopher William Cavanaugh wades in with an exceptional essay on the matter. An excerpt: “The First Things crowd is right to decry the destruction of local communities by global capitalism, but wrong to think that the nation-state is the defender of local community. Nation-states are built on the destruction of local forms of community. Nation-states arose by the absorption of authority and privileges previously belonging to municipalities, ecclesiastical bodies, guilds, clans and nobles. French nationalism is built on the death of Provençal, Occitan, Breton and a host of other local languages and identities. The withering of the institutions of civil society — unions, families, churches — in the face of the twin power of corporations and the state has accelerated over the last half-century.
In Politico, a thoughtful profile of Obama, post-presidency. Obama wants to be the elder statesman who stands above the fray dispensing timeless wisdom. Lately, he’s been pulled back to horse-race politics, and has weighed in on the 2020 race. Still, he’s careful not to give official endorsements.
In City-Journal, an essay about Epicurean philosophy: a piece that’s also about Playboy and St. Jerome and the Lean In movement. “The Epicurean has a practical, prudent way about his pleasures. Duration, intensity, and alternating amplitudes are key factors: how much, how long, and how bad is the hangover? He will avoid pleasures that lead to greater pain, such as the fifth glass of wine, unprotected sex, and a rail of cocaine…”