"I think the deep thing that’s happening is the rise of a very radical form of individualism everywhere in the world. … It means making meaning out of your own life in the way that you choose to do. So if you don’t see procreating the next generation out of that, you won’t do it."
This is what happens when a culture believes that meaning is entirely self-generated. No reason to consider children or grandchildren if the "meaning" of them doesn't appeal to the radical "self."
My nephew told me he wanted 1-2 children, his wife wanted 2-3, and they would probably compromise at 2. They are happy to have 3, and both are a few years shy of 30. There are still quite a few people in daily life who value children.
I generally question "the trend of the culture" as a singular item. Our culture has a lot of trends. That one is certainly rising, but how widely accepted or prevalent is it? The talking heads are all over it. Are they as influential or representative as they think they are?
This is one of the things that gave Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed a lot of its power: he traced this strain in American culture back to John Locke. By rights, Locke is (or should be, if people were taught about him, which they usually aren’t) a hero to Americans: Jefferson and the Founders could never have come up with the Declaration without him.
And yet Locke also believed that ALL commitments were purely voluntary: between husbands and wives; between parents and children; between men and God. (He also believed a lot of the usual ugly slurs about Catholics, but he was not remarkable in that.) The dark side of American individualism goes right back to Locke. No one has any true obligation to anything: whatever we do is freely chosen.
I know Professor Deneen’s thesis provoked a lot of people, but it’s pretty hard to argue with this part of it in particular.
I agree. It is interesting, though, that you must reach back for examples. Hopefully we concur that National Socialism was a blend of left and right. Yes, totalitarianism, hard and soft, is the main problem. There is also the culture the Left pushes (e.,g., anti-life, unsustainable open borders which will make all the world the third world) and the economics they believe which never work, and cause, in the long run, worse poverty that what they purport to fight.
Puritan totalitarianism not being the proximate cause of witchhunts, I believe, but that is a technicality, they were in collusion with it....I do however, fail to see what is "rightwing" about the communally living Puritans. I'm not sure politics divided into left and right until later in history.
In discussions below, eventually "A" accuses someone of having Cluster B personality disorder, but to be honest, I think that describes "A" herself.
(She only deleted posts with academic material, she and I were not arguing- She left the argumentative posts up and I have said this, even though I did not engage.)
"I would go back even farther and I would stress not individualism but the highly dysfunctional groupthink of totalitarianism."
Dysfunctional groupthink of the modern variety is rooted in radical individualism. See Dostovesky, F.
"May take a bit of effort to get your minds around that."
Yes, because it's nonsense. I'm no fan of the Puritans, but to call them totalitarian is to foist the description of a 20th C. phenomenon onto a 16th C. group.
You are using the term in a way that very few other people do. For one thing, the word was only coined in the early 20th C., if memory serves. If you argue that the phenomenon existed earlier, you have to demonstrate that those earlier manifestations meet the later denotative qualifications. It doesn't work in reverse, i.e., you can't just slap the term on an earlier movement because it resembles contemporary totalitarianism.
Witch-hunts in the English speaking world go back long before the Salem witch-hunts and even before Puritanism, for that matter. They existed all over Europe and the world, and still do in Africa and India.
Deneen’s thesis was very strong, and I remain half swayed by it. By his basic claim that our present disorders were baked into the cake. Because key to that cake mix were Hobbes and Locke.
Their utterly unnatural “natural man” anthroplogy functions as somethig like the mythical underpinning of our whole order. A liberal Book of Genesis.
But I’m not sure the post-60s decline was truly *inevitable*. Which is why I’m only half swayed.
What I wonder about is this, let’s assume Deneens thesis that where we are today is baked in the pie is correct . What’s the solution ? Is there a solution? What actually was the alternative to Hobbes and Locke? I’ve read a certain amount of Denneen and listened to him speak with Bishop Barron and Andrew Sullivan and I listen to him and find myself in agreement with much of what he says but I don’t get a coherent sense of what is to be done about it.
I don’t think he has a solution, or would presume to have one. Certainly at the end of Why Liberalism Failed he underlines that what comes next is unclear.
To me this fact isn’t a problem with him as scholar. He’s analyzing the status quo and tracing its causes.
Agreed. It's not always the diagnosticians that come up with the treatment plan. The idea that you can't call out the problem unless you also suggest a workable solution always seemed kind of silly to me.
As a scholar no. But if you argue something is a problem but there is no solution, is it actually a problem? Or are you faced with a perceptual or metaphysical problem at your end.If things must be that way , are they bad , good or beyond good and evil.
Deneen spoke at the First Things lecture in Austin a few years back (just after the book came out) and laid out his thesis. Afterwards, during Q&A, one of the attendees asked, "All of this seems right. Do you have any hope?"
Deneen responded "I... well, if... perhaps... No, not really."
He was a very important thinker in his times (if mostly posthumously). and praised, perhaps surprisingly, by Jeremy Bentham, as more empirically founded in his views than Locke.
When I encounter Locke and the other British Empiricists with their narrow, crabbed, lifeless, reductionist view of reality in general and human society in particular I instinctively put my back to the wall and my hand on my revolver. I believe that it was to these folks that Blake was referring in the “dark Satanic Mills” of “Jerusalem”.
My introduction to philosophy was Plato. Reading beyond him, oh, what a falling off there was.
Liberalism originated at the ideology of the factory and mining entrepreneurs of Britain. So yes, they were precisely the originators of the "dark Satanic mills." The original Tories were the landed aristocracy. The fight in parliament about the Corn Laws (high tariffs on imported grain) was between landowners who wanted tariffs to keep the price of grain high, and industrialists who wanted tariffs abolished so that cheap imported grain... would allow them to lower the wages of the employees.
All commitments ARE purely voluntary. An involuntary commitment is only effective until the enforcers turn their back. It does not follow that commitments should never be made, do no good, or that integrity doesn't require following through on a commitment. Deneen is wrong about Locke.
Unless I've missed it in his book or other works, I think another aspect that Deneen gets wrong is the historical. His is a well thought out critique of Liberalism, but did historical actors internalize Locke and make his thoughts their own? More specifically, did they only act upon Locke's thought, or did they incorporate other traditions (Christianity, Classical thought etc.)? At least it seems from detailed examinations of the American Founding Fathers, there was more in play in their thinking.
And did the ordinary man and woman in the street shape their actions according to such thinking, or more basic drives? For example, we might cite Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution, but did the ordinary people read him and act accordingly? My recollection of study during college was that popular pamphlets of the day cited more basic motives (food prices, taxes, etc.) rather than philosophical precepts.
From a historical perspective, I think Deneen fails.
The American Revolution was a unique amalgam of the Enlightenment AND the Great Awakening. Neither one is adequate to explain it all without the other -- and of course there were other factors, but these were major. I chose the word amalgam rather than blend because them were not homogenized into a single new elixir, it was more like twisted wire or woven thread, with distinct strands in the result.
What Deneen is arguing against is the idea that commitments are voluntarily "merely." Where Locke leaned in that direction he was wrong. Family commitments, for instance, are not purely or merely voluntarily because they involve dependence and duty. Children are born into families and will die without them. Try to explain to pre-modern people the idea that family commitments were purely voluntary and they'd look at you like you had two heads.
I could accept a lot of that as elaboration or friendly amendment rather than argument. In Sylvianne Diouf's book "Dreams of Africa in Alabama" about the slave ship Clothilde, she makes the point that marriage is not an option in western African culture, it is an obligation. Certainly one of the reasons for marriage institutions, which in some form are universal to all human cultures, is that sex drives are alluring and sex results in children. But if you explained to pre-modern people that there is not such thing as witchcraft and how we regret the Salem trials etc., they would also look at us like we had two heads. We have made some progress from pre-modern times, and then we have to sort out what is progress, what is degeneracy, and what is a blind alley. Consider that Alexander the Great thought it was perfectly acceptable to have an affair with the Persian king's boy, whereas modern Greeks want to have Alexander as a great national hero but pretend he has pure Christian values.
Also, Locke wrote in the context of a variety of monarchies, some absolute, others corrupt if not absolute. We can think twice about taking Locke to his sometimes logical conclusion, without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Agree and disagree. It’s true that all commitments are ultimately voluntary. But Locke was writing about them with a specific aim in mind: to convince people that they owed no involuntary commitment to a monarch (who at the time, happened to be Catholic). This is where he borrowed from Hobbes (whose influence he denied). The commitment lasts for as long as it makes sense: if the monarch doesn’t protect the people, then it can be rescinded. In context, Locke’s first goal is to convince people of their ultimate freedom, not to remind them that virtue entails their still honoring their commitments.
I think Rob G does well to point out the word “merely.” Yes, virtue has to be freely chosen to be truly virtuous. Yet Locke wasn’t just arguing in the abstract: he was an important part of a project (which began centuries before him) to liberate the individual. His focus was on the voluntary aspect of commitments because that was a significant step toward this liberation project. Which was, again, primarily governmental, not personal. It took until the 20th century until liberation became truly personal. (Related: the philosopher Ed Feser wrote a great book about Locke that is fair, balanced, and a great companion to Deneen’s volume.)
If you look at Locke’s life, it is similar to many philosophers’: he had no wife, no children, and a modern and “tolerant” view of religion (with the exception of his anti-Catholicism). It’s dangerous to conflate biography and philosophy, but on the subject of commitments—other than his demonstrated loyalty to his patron and some close friends—Locke did not have a lot of skin in the game.
A thorough commentary. In general, I favor the project of liberating the individual from monarchs and established churches. No, Locke wasn't arguing in the abstract, he was arguing in a specific context. Abstracting his words to other contexts is probably the mistake in application. Locke, incidentally, was not an abolitionist, but wrote in a manner tolerant of slavery, although I recall he argued that if an individual were enslaved, still his or her children should be freeborn. As the delegates to the constitutional convention confronted, government of the people, by the people, for the people is still government, and requires some general agreement on what is public business and what is private, what measures of coercion may be employed, and who is empowered to use them. A community does not survive in a state of anarchy, because some bully is always "free" to gather a gang of cronies and impose on everyone else.
Not arguing- I don’t understand your point. I’ve read most of his books and read him in The New Statesman and politically, over the years he’s shifted in various directions, Hayekian liberalism, Thatcherism, New Labour, Post Blair Labour, etc.
Precisely why we have such a Crisis of Meaning in Western culture currently, anything and everything is relative, there is no more truth moral compass the undergirds our collective psyche/ zeitgeist. No wonder people loose hope and commit suicide.
The CEOs are in all four feet with DEI because it's a proven tactic. It worked with feminism, dinnit? Making two incomes a "necessity", just like open borders, is a way to keep wages down and sheepify the general pop. DEI performs the same function. Honest to God if I ever went to Davos I'd bring a bottle of holy water with me.
Maybe I'm not fully awake, but unlike adding women to the workplace, DEI adds zero new workers so it produces no downward pressure on wages and leaves the bottom line unaffected (not counting the salary of a DEI Coordinator)
DEI requires more workers to maintain productivity. Each incompetent must be backstopped by an additional worker. This is a feature if progressivism. The same concept plays out in the renewable energy scam; each solar/wind mW has to be backed up by fossil or nuclear.
Sure, but DEI cuts profits in that case: more workers = less money for profits, bonuses and shareholder value.News flash: "Renewable" energy is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the day. No, it's not ready to take over the entire energy sector, and won;t be for a very long time, but it makes abundant sense to use it where possible.
So called renewables are not cheaper once subsidies, redundancy and grid damage are figured. They are a disaster for every country which has committed to them. Germany and GB for example.
The fossil fuel industry has its share of subsidies too.
I agree (and said so) that we can switch to all renewable, and yes, Germany was especially foolish in its "green" fantasies. But there a large and growing place for these energy sources. Note the China, not known for romantic policy follies, is very much on board.
China does things for it's own interest, including it's face to the outside world. They are currently opening new coal plants at an astounding rate because they understand energy.
I often hear the energy subsidy point but not sure what is meant by that besides normal business tax law.
Yes, but renewables are not necessarily environmentally friendly. I’m not entirely against solar and wind power, but I don’t like the quasi-religious way they’re viewed. I think nuclear is the least bad option, broadly.
Yes, DEI does undermine profitability, but what we’re seeing is that for some reason bunches of CEOs are willing to prioritize their own social status (enhanced by publicly embracing DEI) over profitability. A not insignificant number of shareholders too, of which the most influential and insidious are the financial giants that control huge amounts of shares of most Fortune 500s through their administration of everyone’s retirement funds (Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard in particular). They use what is literally other people’s money to pressure corporate boards on DEI and climate issues (packaged together as “ESG”).
I would agree, many others commenting here would also. But HR specialists would not: more spending on "control" is the life blood of their profession. Its a poverty pimp syllogism -- we need to extend the problem to justify more appropriations for us.
HR specialists are not looking for a return on an investment. Sure, their salary depends on a claim they are doing something beneficial, but that claim is vulnerable to real world contrary evidence. Ar best the DEI crap provides CYA coverage in event of lawsuits, but it yields no positive returns.
There's an underlying idea that a more diverse and tolerant company will attract more and better applicants because they're being drawn from a larger pool. The national "Pride" leader for the Northeast region of my company (Fortune 500) happens to be in my department so we hear this all. the. time. It's a company which year in, year out consistently ranks near the top in all the DEI nonsense.
I agree Jon. DEI is largely orthogonal to wage pressures in either direction up or down. In my personal experience it has raised the wages of minorities purely because they were minorities. Sounds great! But it creates envy and strife amongst the workforce, particularly white men like me who don't get these extra bumps in pay. It is ultimately a destructive force in the workplace.
In the late 50s, the National Association of Manufacturers made it a policy to push women into the workplace. I feel sure that the Chamber of Commerce agreed. The two-income family became a necessity by the 70s for most Americans. Open borders lowers pay for the working class. DEI adds a layer of affirmative action hires that makes companies seem diverse.
DEI is like a corporate tax. When the current government and culture conditions requires fealty to diversity, corporations hire a certain number of DEI candidates and have internal DEI programs and mouth the language in their public statements.
When the tide turns to some degree (as seems to be the case now) and when economic times get tougher, the DEI candidates who can't do anything other than run diversity programs, or be diverse in their identities, don't get special treatment. They go out the door with everyone else who isn't contributing enough to the bottom line.
My company isn't run by Americans. I don't think at the top levels they care much about diversity, even though the language is there. Most likely what they care about first and foremost is feathering their own nests. Whatever altruistic goals they might have I don't think align with either progressive or conservative concerns.
I disagree about managers, if we're talking the folks who actually deal with and direct employees. They too are hobbled by DEI requirements and are constantly looking over their shoulder to see HR breathing down their necks.
Well, that brings us to the difficulty of defining who is "managerial" and who is eligible for union membership. Some hospitals try to define any RN who sometimes works as a charge nurse for a shift as ineligible for coverage in a union contract. But, some companies want to include enough white collar positions among those eligible to vote on union recognition to dilute the pro-union sentiment among the real proles. Then its also true that sometimes the lower ranking managers are still more sensible in employee relations than the men (and women) in the top corporate offices.
No, a fictional character. I don't believe in either human vampires (although there is a biologically catalogued species of vampire bats, and there is a historical character named Vlad Dracula who impaled his enemies on stakes) or in werewolves. Victorian writers had dark imaginations, but hey, Victorian Britain will do that do a person.
Apparently my mom's friends wonder if JD Vance wears eyeliner, and I was like, "No, I think that's just his face." I could see it, though: Vance as goth kid. Couldn't stop laughing for a bit when that clicked.
Here is something I posted - photographic evidence - on JD's "eyeliner." As you know, it is unusually thick eyelashes growing in a line on his eyes. Few are so gifted.
Larissa Phillips: "As we were settling into rural life, the existence of this binary was becoming a topic of public debate, with actual scientists arguing against it. I was starting to wonder whether the fact that Americans are increasingly cut off from nature had something to do with this shift."
The fact that we are increasingly cut off from nature has something to do with A LOT of current shifts. This is one reason why although I've never farmed (though I would have liked to), I believe that the agrarian critique of modernity is a vital facet of the overall challenge, and that when it's ignored the critique misses an important element of the discussion. Recall that the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the land enclosures; the industrial and the agrarian have therefore been enmeshed since the beginning, and still are. We avoid discussion of this to our detriment.
Also, a blunt corollary: You can't live in wonder if you don't effing go outside. As Anton Barba-Kay writes, if you don't your "wonder" will be a phony, ersatz version, and a dangerous one.
Will be interesting to see if Kingsnorth takes this up. I mean more Phillips point—that the abandonment of agrarian life is specifically implicated in a grave evil: the abandonment of male and female as sexually complementary and fruitful.
He perhaps has. He’s certainly taken up many of the other aspects you hint at with “A LOT”. But I notice in him much more ire against “civilization” in any forthright formulation than against the ideological aggressions of our Left.
Reality check: most of us aren't able to live in the country. We need to find some way to deal with these issues in urbanized life. Buccolic fantasies aren't it.
I'll see your reality check and raise you one: I know of no agrarian writer on either side of the pond who argues A) that everyone should live in the country, and B) that rural life is necessarily "bucolic."
I used to work with a guy who grew up in Los Angeles. He recalled when large stretched of Orange County were agricultural (including oranges), that by 1990 or so were filled with residential developments. There is a point where the agricultural access begins to disappear. I grew up in a small midwestern city, and while our life was definitely urban, we had field trips to farms, access to substantial parks outside the city, and farms were just a short walk past city limits.
I think that part of his ire against "civilization" is because it has become so stridently anti-nature, which would include agriculture. Some of Paul's fellow Brits have written about this -- John-Lewis Stempel, Richard Mabey, James Rebanks, etc. They may not be anti-civilization, but they do see serious problems with modernity in relation to agriculture, food production, etc.
True. The point is we should have a better balance, where urban living is not so confining or isolating, and people have some access to the world at large, including the rural aspects of it.
If I could design an entire area from scratch, a concentrated urban core with shopping and apartment buildings, surrounded by a ring of manufacturing, and then a series of residential hubs with mass transit access, and some limited agriculture and parks between them. But the most intensive agriculture needs to be away from residential areas. We already have real estate agents advertising "beautiful rural views" and selling fairly expensive homes to people who then complain that farmers are running machinery in the fields at 4:00 am, or the smell of manure is spoiling their backyard barbecues, etc.
I had the same question about Kingsnorth. But in what I've read of his he hasn't made Phillips's point of farm life demystifying sex. It was a great insight by Phillips and one I suspect Kingsnorth might say: "Duh, why didn't I think of that."
In James Michener's "Centennial," he has a couple of girls at an orphanage in rural Pennsylvania discussing the prospect of being married in a few years. One of them remarks "Men can't be much different than horses."
Well, they were textile workers actually, but those were their concerns, among others mainly economic.
My maternal great-grandfather came from a long line of lace weavers in Scotland. Because of the nature of their craft they didn't get displaced until the 1920's, and that was due to cheap foreign imports of "Scottish" lace.
They were textile workers, among other things, after they were put in factories. True, some textile workers were doing cottage production before being centralized into factories, and that was part of the picture too.
What you are missing is that a good part of the past agricultural work force were driven off the land during earlier enclosures, and ended up in the mines and factories. Their perspective was different from long-time weavers, or those who remained on the land, but it was part of the picture.
Update from the UK - its wrong to suggest that the UKs only response to the Axel Radakubana murders is to crackdown on knife sales. Kier Starmer also announced a public inquiry into how Radakubana was able to evade the UK's counter terrorism measures.
The UK's main program to prevent the radicalisation of young people is called Prevent. On 2 or 3 occasions, a referal about Radakubana was made, only for it to be judged that he did not meet the threshold for an intervention. I imagine the public inquiry will ask how, as well as looking at other relevant organisations.
Interestingly, a public inquiry is exactly what some were calling for just a few days ago, to investigate the grooming gangs.
It's wrong to suggest that the UK government's only response to these murders is to look at knife sales.
It was started in 2007, after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. Since then, it has focused on Islamic terrorism, far-right terrorism, and (I think), Incel-related terrorism.
I don't know how succesful it has been. I imagine it would be difficult to say, as any success is by definition something we don't hear about - a young person who did not become radicalised.
The fixation on knives is emblematic of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the current administration. It is an attempt to shift focus away from the problem of immigration and the refusal to provide for public security. No sane person would being up the availability of knives as an explanation of murder.
I don't think there really is a fixation on knives. I think the real focus will be the findings on the inquiry, which will look at how Prevent and other institutions/programs did not stop the killer.
Regarding immigration, is that really the problem in this instance? We've learned that raducabanu was obsessed with violence. Whenever there's a school shooting in America, nobody blames immigration, because the perpetrators are usually white citizens.
Something i think that I and rod would agree on is the need to encourage and support young men, and help them find fulfilling work in the world.
Violence has many fathers. In GB and US a great deal of violence is directly attributable to uncontrolled immigration. This is not even debatable. The problem is easily corrected; border control and rapid deportation. Other violence is caused by lax police and judicial practices; also correctable. Now cultural issues caused by rejection of past moral and ethical constraints can be addressed.
I agree there are many causes of violence. I think there are some you missed out though. The availability of guns in the US. Anti-muslim sentiment leading to riots here in the UK. And many others. Of course, violence by recent migrants too.
The availability of weapons has zero impact on violence. Violence is strictly a matter of the human heart and can only be addressed at that point. Anti-muslim sentiment is directly related to the violence from that community which has been swept under the rug for reasons you will understand better than I.
Incorrect. There are no guns in the UK, so far few people die. Making it harder to get a knife, whilst not the only solution, seems like a sensible step to take.
As to the riots of last summer, there were many causes. False statements, misinformation if you will, was one cause. Prejudice was another. The fact that it was summer, when there was no soccer, might have been another.
Ben your substack looks really interesting in the fifteen minutes or so I just spent over there. I've noted a couple of times that you are giving information from the UK. I think that is valuable. Rod listens and values input, I know that. I could not figure out from your substack, as fascinating as it is, what has led you to subscribe. Would you tell us more if you choose?
Rombald, a UK expat, has also said some things here on the stack. (I'm an Anglophile, lived in the UK for just over a year, visit often).
I trust Rod who has not said anything wrong so far, but he has not claimed to know everything. He would like to see this story for instance, in which a 14 year old girl tells Rudakubana "you looked possessed and you ddin't look human."
I am not all that well informed. I have seen things that point to a combination of factors. Yes, Islamism is there but the slaughter in Rwanda is there (ethnic) and Rudakubana was under care for mental health before he stopped going and the system lost track of him. So terrorism, yes, but only Islamism in play here, no, nor do I think Rod is claiming that is all. I think the danger of allowing immigration at large scale from cultures that do not view and value life as the West still does with its not yet extinct Chritian influence, is the central concern, and I guess you see. - - Anyway, sincere thanks for giving input.
Well thank you for checking it out. I appreciate it.
I chose to subscribe to rod's substack because I'm interested in his more spiritual output. I have his book living on wonder, and enjoy a lot of it. He has a section on Ian m Gilchrist I really appreciated.
Im also curious about what's going on in rightwing/Christian right circles.
Some of my comments to rod have probably been too harsh, and I'll tone down the language. I enjoy the debate though. He called labour a woke zombie leftist government, and i really don't think that's accurate. This is a government that cut winter fuel allowance for the elderly, and is all about growing the economy.
Well, goodness, I'd hate to see the elderly cold and I am right wing. I do not think anyone here would want that. But yeah, I gotta admit, many would say to revive the Rwanda plan and give the money saved to the elderly who don't have fuel. We do not mean to be heartless, we just know there are limits to what can be done.
If you're asking me Kevin, no, not especially. I do however wonder about the language used to talk about these issues. Some people, in my opinion, find this issue too salient. It can be hard to understand exactly how to approach this issue, given how politicised it is.
Rudakubana didn’t have a clear ideology, so it’s difficult to see how Prevent would have been relevant, as it focuses on Islamists and far-rightists. His father did keep trying to get him psychiatric help. The trouble is that sitting alone all day watching videos about torture and genocide isn’t illegal.
Apparetly AR seemed normal until about the age of 13. He is now, plainly, a seriously mentally ill person. Marijuana can do this. Not only bring on violence while high, but alter brains in young people, according to Hitchens. With the increase in knife crimes - it is something like one a day in Germany - it sounds like this could be a big piece of the puzzle.
Hitchens: "Thousands of British families have seen their children tragically decline round about this point in their lives. Some lose the will to work or study and begin lives of drifting. Some lose their minds and can never find them again. In others, it is much, much worse. This is one of the biggest recent social changes in our society and nobody does anything about it because nobody talks about it. - - Enforcing the law against marijuana possession is one of the many things the police and courts no longer do. That is why there will be another Rudakubana along pretty soon."
The big issue these days with people having fewer kids is not that people don't want kids, but that people are not forming relationships at all. There's no government fix for that.
Sure there is. Rescind some of the “Dear Colleague” crap that Obama foisted on higher education that led directly to #MeToo and a generation of young men terrified to so much as look at young women at their schools. That and similar kinds of things are very responsible for a great deal of the social anxiety afoot these days. This stuff can be rescinded, very publicly and very vocally, and the more the feminist harridans shriek, the better society’s prospects become.
I disagree very much with this. Outside certain liberal hothouses the vast majority of people have never heard of "Dear Colleague" or any of the crap that ivory tower academics spin. If you want to blame something for fewer relationships then A) social media which creates the illusion of relationships (in effect, relationship junk food) and B) the Pandemic lockdowns which conditioned too many people, especially young people, to be alone. Oh, and feel free to add "Porn" to the list as well.
I agree with Jon here. I am 100 percent in favor of rescinding the "dear colleague crap," but I think there's something much deeper and darker going on. John Gray points out that this is even happening in Iran, which is about as culturally different from the US as you can imagine.
Certainly, the liberal temptation to exalt the individual and his desires is broader and older than Obama-era policy guidance. My point is that the government CAN do a great deal at restoring what it broke by vocally rescinding things like the Dear Colleague letter. That won’t be sufficient, to be sure, but the government has been the loudest voice in the room supporting this stuff.
Credit where it’s due, yes, Jon is right. The deep dark secret no one wants to really talk about is that the issue is really female economic independence and especially education, which does cross cultural boundaries.
The problem is that women are psychologically designed to “marry up”. “Feathering the nest” is more than a saying, it is a literal reality of female behavior. When they do not depend on a male provider for sustenance and the protection of themselves and their children (as is the case in all modern first world societies), they have the luxury of falling back on their instincts, which are to be extremely selective in terms of the males with whom they’ll willingly reproduce. To be clear, this is an important evolutionary function; women literally determine the future of the species through their choice of mates. This is an extraordinarily grave responsibility, and they are rightly made to be selective as a result.
Evolution did not account for the abundance and relative security of modernity, however. There is a reason why the societies with the highest fertility are those that are most backward, both culturally and economically. Culturally, they are generally medieval in their treatment of women, often treating them as little more than chattel, and as objects to be controlled. Economically they’re barely above subsistence agrarian in many cases, and/or are wracked with such violence and instability that they might as well be. Development and declining fertility seem to go hand in hand essentially everywhere.
This is a very complex and deep seated problem. And, as Jon suggests elsewhere, not one that is easily amenable to government action. We’re talking about some of the most fundamental forces that shape human nature - in this case, female sexual selectivity. The only possible solution is cultural. If our culture arbitrarily supplied status to women based on marital fidelity and fertility (how many children they had) we’d reverse the problem overnight, but you can’t legislate culture and our current culture largely penalizes women who want to have children. They will generally be limited in their career prospects, and unable to or at least impaired in participating in what are currently status signaling activities like international tourism and bragging about career advancement. The cultural incentives all align in the wrong direction for pro-natalism.
I don’t know how to fix this, short of observing that long run (very long run, to be clear) societal collapse and violence are increasing probabilities on our current trajectory, which will push us back to more pre-modern evolutionary considerations when and if it happens. Honestly, short of a particularly brutal reassertion of patriarchy on the Islamic model (which is highly unlikely), the only hope is that women will themselves launch a cultural revolution in favor of natalism; something along the lines of the recent tradwife phenomenon, but that catches on and becomes a real status signifier among a majority of women (and at least a significant minority of men). Is this likely? Nope. Is it something that government can encourage? Absolutely not. What is needed is influencers in the most fundamental sense. Time will tell whether any can emerge and cut through the feminist pushback.
Every institution of higher education has felt the hot breath of that Dear Colleague letter. Every heterosexual young man in every one of those schools is aware of the fraught environment at his school regarding interactions with women. The fear began earlier than the Obama letter, of course, but that Dear Colleague letter institutionalized it.
Also, you’re being obtusely literal. Jewish people in Germany in 1942 didn’t require copies of the minutes from the Wannsee Conference to realize that their lives were in danger, either. Regardless of who was explicitly aware of that Dear Colleague letter, the tenor of the times had developed a thoroughgoing antipathy toward normal young male behavior, conflating it unjustly with illicit assaultive behavior. The porn and social media pathologies are a RESPONSE to the original problems caused by the feminists.
As Rod points out, the phenomenon is worldwide and crosses many cultural boundaries.
And we've been through other eras of strict policing of these things. Yet they didn't impact marriage and fertility rates. The only historical precedent that comes close occurred in the aftermath of the two great Plague pandemics, in the 6th and 14th centuries.
As an additional data point, the people most exposed to academic fol-de-rol, the upper middle class, are still managing to form relationships and have kids. The greatest falloff has been among those of modest means and the non-college educated.
I can't recall if it was on Rod's substack or somewhere else, but I remember seeing a picture of a female undergraduate sitting at her computer wearing a pro-abortion shirt with a "Smash the Patriarchy" sign on the wall behind her. My guess is that a woman like that has little to no possibility of a longterm relationship with a man. The ideology students are being taught in the schools probably is more injurious to a relationship than male fear of being charged with harassment (as real as I'm sure that is).
Our host is correct. We have to fight the leftist culture but also provide viable alternatives. We must provide the counterculture. There can be no compromise with the leftist culture. The establishment conservatives and the neo-conservatives offer nothing but a limp stew of nuanced opposition to the left culture and meek alternatives.
"He went on to say that people want pleasant living, “the enjoyable, congenial life” more than anything else. Because “children cramp that, people are less and less willing to take on that commitment.”
More or less, yes. The opportunity cost of having kids has increased, because there are more "fun options" available to people than there were previously -- for social, cultural and economic reasons. Having kids means forgoing certain ways of living, certain freedoms, and a fair amount of disposable cash, and all of that represents opportunity cost. Those of us who are parents will say that there are other benefits to having kids, of course, but that doesn't mean that a significant slice of the population will beg to differ with us, and will choose otherwise, if they have the support (social/cultural/economic) to do so.
"This is exactly what some Catholic critics of contraception have said for decades: that the Pill turns straight people into functional homosexuals, in terms of their attitude towards sex. If pregnancy is not a risk factor, and societal stigma has disappeared, then aside from personal moral qualms, what is to restrict you from sleeping with as many people as you wish?"
I'd say what restricts that is the lack of a desire to do so. That's especially the case among heterosexual women, but not only so. A certain percentage of heterosexual men would love to see heterosexuality develop a culture akin to darkrooms and the like (ie, if women would play along), but a majority of heterosexual men would not last more than a few minutes in such an environment, I think, in terms of actual desire (rather than what they think they may desire).
I'd say that the bigger impact has been a rise of the heterosexual version of licentiousness, which is more serial "weak or no commitment" (ie nonmarital) monogamy, rather than what you see in gay male culture.
I would say, though, that the rise of this kind of relatively low commitment sexual culture among straight people, coupled with the known presence of a small minority of straight people who engage in a truly "no holds barred" subculture of sexual license, together made people more receptive to the idea of gay marriage rights, on the idea that the two sexual/romantic cultures were more similar than they actually, in fact, are. The LGBT advocates, and their allies in media, deliberately fostered this, too, but it wouldn't have been feasible if the heterosexual culture itself hadn't changed.
Britain is in their sad state because of the failings of 14 years of Conservative government. Boris Johnson was the man who failed the worst of that whole motley crew of British prime ministers. Johnson won a mandate in 2019 to make major reductions to illegal and legal immigration but he went back on his word. Johnson's landslide encompassed working class constituencies in Britain but he let them down.
Labour was the beneficiary of over a decade of terrible Conservative government. And now the British are stuck with 4 1/2 years of more Labour. Labour's position is impregnable for 4 1/2 years no matter how badly they govern. That's the British system. A poll I read today has Reform at 25 %, the Conservatives at 24 % and Labour at 23 %. Too bad. The British are stuck with Keir Starmer and his woke gang.
John Gray would not be most people’s cup of tea - here. But he’s an immensely “ tonic” writer. That is , he - often brilliantly- rips to shreds the underpinning of contemporary ideology. By all means read Straw Dogs and Seven Types of Atheism.This is Sullivan’s second pod cast with him . Sullivan can be very irritating. You have to ask - why he wastes time talking to people like Michelle Goldberg, James Carville and Kara Swisher. But remember he has had our host on at least twice. He’s at his best when he’s being less day to day topical and not pretending to be an incisive commentator on the American scene. For example his show where he discussed Michael Oakeshott was quite good.On Gray consider listening to his podcast on Tyler Cowen’s series. I respect Cowen but there’s a marvelous moment where Gray puts Cowen in his place.
Cathy Young cut her teeth on libertarianism. So I find it a trifle bizarre that she’s upset by EO’s suppressing DEI. But then again when I heard her on Sullivan’s Dish , she seemed far more worried about Ron DeSantis’ alleged authoritarianism than anything the Biden administration was doing. The Bulwark crowd strike me as not just wrong but really out of it.
By the way this was a better than average posting. I’m a little tired of demonic flying saucers and AI. Granted I’m also a bit tired of the pitches for Orthodoxy but that is a legitimate part of the world here . This isn’t my world. I merely visit.I’m quite capable of filtering.
I don't "pitch" for Orthodoxy. I'd love it if people would convert, but I'm not an apologist, and don't want to be one. My Christianity -- my Orthodox Christianity -- is the biggest part of my life. It's going to show up in a Substack newsletter called Rod Dreher's Diary. I welcome opposing views, or different views, certainly.
Hear, hear. Your "pitches," such as they are, generally sound organic and unforced. Speaking here as an Orthodox who dislikes all forms of triumphalism.
See my comment at the start. Rob, G, and Eric Mader are losing you contributing subscribers.
I will ask for a refund for this month's fee paid. Then I am gone. I did not come here, and contribute so heavily, to be attacked by goons. "Christian" goons at that.
Hey, man. Stick around. I, for one, want to hear about your ideas on totalitarianism. Some of us are just Christian goonies. It's a pretty wide-open place, though.
That is not what I have experienced here over the past eight hours. I also noticed that no one spoke in my defence as those goons attacked me. After making heavy contributions here, for all of you. Gratis. In fact...I paid Rod a subscriber fee in order to give all of you information. No more of that.
Though most of you are keen to profess your "Christianity". Oh? What kind of Christianity is that? The kind where I do all the giving, and you stand by watching the nutters amongst you attacking me?
Well, I just logged on about 30 minutes ago, so I missed the fray in the heat of the moment. Gonna go back and read the full interactions. I hope you stay, but that's up to you.
Your heart's in the right place, but he is at fault: he doesn't belong in this forum if that's how he chooses to carry on. Also, I'm thinking that a guy who talks so big should at least reveal his name.
This is totally appropriate, and if I were in your position, I would enthusiastically do the same! My only concern is that it is not entirely accurate to say that Protestant churches have become non- Sacramental and "rational" to the point of downplaying the mysteries of God, ignoring the ancient liturgy,and forgetting Church history and tradition. We belong to a wonderful LCMS congregation that celebrates all these things. Now the only point of contention is, are " LCMS" churches "Protestant?Many of us would be able to debate both sides of this. Remember that Luther never set out to break away from Catholicism until it became inevitable.
Rod, I saw that on twitter you are still defending Father Carlos Martins. You must have not read the allegations. He actually put the hair of a girl in his mouth. He’s a freak.
A Polish exorcist once said in an interview that he knew exorcists that have lost their faith or lost their mind. Father Carlos Martins seems to be one of the latter.
YES! I just read your first sentence on JD Vance summation of ProLife movement. That's it. That resonated (see Living in Wonder-resonate!) Family formation at the core of our culture. Delighting in God's plan for man and woman, husband and wife, and children! Making that great again.
Been catching up on the Bulwark recently. It is a sewer, a gathering of maniacs whose only function in life is to oppose Trump. Everything Trump does is wrong, no matter what it is or how positive its actual outcome. And if Cathy Young didn't exist, Bill Kristol would have to invent her. I remember a recent piece she wrote about questions she would ask of Marco Rubio. One was how to counteract disinformation, since the right has "wrongly" classified past efforts as censorship.
The problem isn't censorship, you see. It is deplorables calling legitimate efforts by that term. But you and Rufo got the dynamic right. The Youngs and Kristols of the world will forever say the problems are bad, but the solutions are always - always - worse. I say to Hell with them.
Laundry. Yes. With five kids in the house, it doesn't matter if it's a good day or a bad day or whatever, there is always laundry, and only a certain, very short amount of time it can be put off.
" “In some ways, straight people become like gay people … and your attitude towards sex changes a bit, because it becomes purely recreational….” This is exactly what some Catholic critics of contraception have said for decades: that the Pill turns straight people into functional homosexuals, in terms of their attitude towards sex."
Yes, this is PRESICELY why heterosexual union and homosexual union are UNEQUAL things. Nice of Sullivan (a most odious person) to state it so plainly.
Billboard Chris says, "They're talking about the backlash to LGBTQ. What they need to understand is it's really backlash to TQ, and it has only just begun."
What Billboard Chris (and SO MANY others) needs to understand is that as long as some amount of aberrant sex is normalized, the rest of aberrant sex is going to demand their day.
"I think the deep thing that’s happening is the rise of a very radical form of individualism everywhere in the world. … It means making meaning out of your own life in the way that you choose to do. So if you don’t see procreating the next generation out of that, you won’t do it."
Is that Gray, or Tony Kennedy?
This is what happens when a culture believes that meaning is entirely self-generated. No reason to consider children or grandchildren if the "meaning" of them doesn't appeal to the radical "self."
My nephew told me he wanted 1-2 children, his wife wanted 2-3, and they would probably compromise at 2. They are happy to have 3, and both are a few years shy of 30. There are still quite a few people in daily life who value children.
Of course. But the trend of the culture is to view childbearing like everything else: as a consumerist decision.
I generally question "the trend of the culture" as a singular item. Our culture has a lot of trends. That one is certainly rising, but how widely accepted or prevalent is it? The talking heads are all over it. Are they as influential or representative as they think they are?
This is one of the things that gave Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed a lot of its power: he traced this strain in American culture back to John Locke. By rights, Locke is (or should be, if people were taught about him, which they usually aren’t) a hero to Americans: Jefferson and the Founders could never have come up with the Declaration without him.
And yet Locke also believed that ALL commitments were purely voluntary: between husbands and wives; between parents and children; between men and God. (He also believed a lot of the usual ugly slurs about Catholics, but he was not remarkable in that.) The dark side of American individualism goes right back to Locke. No one has any true obligation to anything: whatever we do is freely chosen.
I know Professor Deneen’s thesis provoked a lot of people, but it’s pretty hard to argue with this part of it in particular.
I agree. It is interesting, though, that you must reach back for examples. Hopefully we concur that National Socialism was a blend of left and right. Yes, totalitarianism, hard and soft, is the main problem. There is also the culture the Left pushes (e.,g., anti-life, unsustainable open borders which will make all the world the third world) and the economics they believe which never work, and cause, in the long run, worse poverty that what they purport to fight.
Puritan totalitarianism not being the proximate cause of witchhunts, I believe, but that is a technicality, they were in collusion with it....I do however, fail to see what is "rightwing" about the communally living Puritans. I'm not sure politics divided into left and right until later in history.
In discussions below, eventually "A" accuses someone of having Cluster B personality disorder, but to be honest, I think that describes "A" herself.
(She only deleted posts with academic material, she and I were not arguing- She left the argumentative posts up and I have said this, even though I did not engage.)
"I would go back even farther and I would stress not individualism but the highly dysfunctional groupthink of totalitarianism."
Dysfunctional groupthink of the modern variety is rooted in radical individualism. See Dostovesky, F.
"May take a bit of effort to get your minds around that."
Yes, because it's nonsense. I'm no fan of the Puritans, but to call them totalitarian is to foist the description of a 20th C. phenomenon onto a 16th C. group.
You are using the term in a way that very few other people do. For one thing, the word was only coined in the early 20th C., if memory serves. If you argue that the phenomenon existed earlier, you have to demonstrate that those earlier manifestations meet the later denotative qualifications. It doesn't work in reverse, i.e., you can't just slap the term on an earlier movement because it resembles contemporary totalitarianism.
Witch-hunts in the English speaking world go back long before the Salem witch-hunts and even before Puritanism, for that matter. They existed all over Europe and the world, and still do in Africa and India.
Deneen’s thesis was very strong, and I remain half swayed by it. By his basic claim that our present disorders were baked into the cake. Because key to that cake mix were Hobbes and Locke.
Their utterly unnatural “natural man” anthroplogy functions as somethig like the mythical underpinning of our whole order. A liberal Book of Genesis.
But I’m not sure the post-60s decline was truly *inevitable*. Which is why I’m only half swayed.
What I wonder about is this, let’s assume Deneens thesis that where we are today is baked in the pie is correct . What’s the solution ? Is there a solution? What actually was the alternative to Hobbes and Locke? I’ve read a certain amount of Denneen and listened to him speak with Bishop Barron and Andrew Sullivan and I listen to him and find myself in agreement with much of what he says but I don’t get a coherent sense of what is to be done about it.
If remember correctly, Deneen didn't offer a wide-ranging solution. He certainly framed the issue but left it for others to figure out.
I don’t think he has a solution, or would presume to have one. Certainly at the end of Why Liberalism Failed he underlines that what comes next is unclear.
To me this fact isn’t a problem with him as scholar. He’s analyzing the status quo and tracing its causes.
Agreed. It's not always the diagnosticians that come up with the treatment plan. The idea that you can't call out the problem unless you also suggest a workable solution always seemed kind of silly to me.
As a scholar no. But if you argue something is a problem but there is no solution, is it actually a problem? Or are you faced with a perceptual or metaphysical problem at your end.If things must be that way , are they bad , good or beyond good and evil.
Deneen spoke at the First Things lecture in Austin a few years back (just after the book came out) and laid out his thesis. Afterwards, during Q&A, one of the attendees asked, "All of this seems right. Do you have any hope?"
Deneen responded "I... well, if... perhaps... No, not really."
What actually was the alternative to Hobbes and Locke?
Robert Filmer
I’ve never heard of him. Can you tell us a bit, if only to save a Wiki trip?
Sorry, but:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Filmer
He was a very important thinker in his times (if mostly posthumously). and praised, perhaps surprisingly, by Jeremy Bentham, as more empirically founded in his views than Locke.
I'm fully convinced that "a" decline was inevitable; that it had to play out as it did in the 60's is less important to the overall thesis, I'd say.
Are you convinced that *a* decline was inevitable because it was baked into the cake in the way Deneen argues?
Yes. I believed that before I ever read him, or even heard of him.
When I encounter Locke and the other British Empiricists with their narrow, crabbed, lifeless, reductionist view of reality in general and human society in particular I instinctively put my back to the wall and my hand on my revolver. I believe that it was to these folks that Blake was referring in the “dark Satanic Mills” of “Jerusalem”.
My introduction to philosophy was Plato. Reading beyond him, oh, what a falling off there was.
I’d watch out with Blake. Frankly there is no telling what he was talking about much of the time.
True! He was a little more explicit in, e.g., “I see the Four-fold Man”:
“I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.”
Liberalism originated at the ideology of the factory and mining entrepreneurs of Britain. So yes, they were precisely the originators of the "dark Satanic mills." The original Tories were the landed aristocracy. The fight in parliament about the Corn Laws (high tariffs on imported grain) was between landowners who wanted tariffs to keep the price of grain high, and industrialists who wanted tariffs abolished so that cheap imported grain... would allow them to lower the wages of the employees.
All commitments ARE purely voluntary. An involuntary commitment is only effective until the enforcers turn their back. It does not follow that commitments should never be made, do no good, or that integrity doesn't require following through on a commitment. Deneen is wrong about Locke.
Unless I've missed it in his book or other works, I think another aspect that Deneen gets wrong is the historical. His is a well thought out critique of Liberalism, but did historical actors internalize Locke and make his thoughts their own? More specifically, did they only act upon Locke's thought, or did they incorporate other traditions (Christianity, Classical thought etc.)? At least it seems from detailed examinations of the American Founding Fathers, there was more in play in their thinking.
And did the ordinary man and woman in the street shape their actions according to such thinking, or more basic drives? For example, we might cite Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution, but did the ordinary people read him and act accordingly? My recollection of study during college was that popular pamphlets of the day cited more basic motives (food prices, taxes, etc.) rather than philosophical precepts.
From a historical perspective, I think Deneen fails.
The American Revolution was a unique amalgam of the Enlightenment AND the Great Awakening. Neither one is adequate to explain it all without the other -- and of course there were other factors, but these were major. I chose the word amalgam rather than blend because them were not homogenized into a single new elixir, it was more like twisted wire or woven thread, with distinct strands in the result.
What Deneen is arguing against is the idea that commitments are voluntarily "merely." Where Locke leaned in that direction he was wrong. Family commitments, for instance, are not purely or merely voluntarily because they involve dependence and duty. Children are born into families and will die without them. Try to explain to pre-modern people the idea that family commitments were purely voluntary and they'd look at you like you had two heads.
I could accept a lot of that as elaboration or friendly amendment rather than argument. In Sylvianne Diouf's book "Dreams of Africa in Alabama" about the slave ship Clothilde, she makes the point that marriage is not an option in western African culture, it is an obligation. Certainly one of the reasons for marriage institutions, which in some form are universal to all human cultures, is that sex drives are alluring and sex results in children. But if you explained to pre-modern people that there is not such thing as witchcraft and how we regret the Salem trials etc., they would also look at us like we had two heads. We have made some progress from pre-modern times, and then we have to sort out what is progress, what is degeneracy, and what is a blind alley. Consider that Alexander the Great thought it was perfectly acceptable to have an affair with the Persian king's boy, whereas modern Greeks want to have Alexander as a great national hero but pretend he has pure Christian values.
Also, Locke wrote in the context of a variety of monarchies, some absolute, others corrupt if not absolute. We can think twice about taking Locke to his sometimes logical conclusion, without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Agree and disagree. It’s true that all commitments are ultimately voluntary. But Locke was writing about them with a specific aim in mind: to convince people that they owed no involuntary commitment to a monarch (who at the time, happened to be Catholic). This is where he borrowed from Hobbes (whose influence he denied). The commitment lasts for as long as it makes sense: if the monarch doesn’t protect the people, then it can be rescinded. In context, Locke’s first goal is to convince people of their ultimate freedom, not to remind them that virtue entails their still honoring their commitments.
I think Rob G does well to point out the word “merely.” Yes, virtue has to be freely chosen to be truly virtuous. Yet Locke wasn’t just arguing in the abstract: he was an important part of a project (which began centuries before him) to liberate the individual. His focus was on the voluntary aspect of commitments because that was a significant step toward this liberation project. Which was, again, primarily governmental, not personal. It took until the 20th century until liberation became truly personal. (Related: the philosopher Ed Feser wrote a great book about Locke that is fair, balanced, and a great companion to Deneen’s volume.)
If you look at Locke’s life, it is similar to many philosophers’: he had no wife, no children, and a modern and “tolerant” view of religion (with the exception of his anti-Catholicism). It’s dangerous to conflate biography and philosophy, but on the subject of commitments—other than his demonstrated loyalty to his patron and some close friends—Locke did not have a lot of skin in the game.
A thorough commentary. In general, I favor the project of liberating the individual from monarchs and established churches. No, Locke wasn't arguing in the abstract, he was arguing in a specific context. Abstracting his words to other contexts is probably the mistake in application. Locke, incidentally, was not an abolitionist, but wrote in a manner tolerant of slavery, although I recall he argued that if an individual were enslaved, still his or her children should be freeborn. As the delegates to the constitutional convention confronted, government of the people, by the people, for the people is still government, and requires some general agreement on what is public business and what is private, what measures of coercion may be employed, and who is empowered to use them. A community does not survive in a state of anarchy, because some bully is always "free" to gather a gang of cronies and impose on everyone else.
Heh. Gray’s been ingesting “D.C. conservative” think on the side.
Not arguing- I don’t understand your point. I’ve read most of his books and read him in The New Statesman and politically, over the years he’s shifted in various directions, Hayekian liberalism, Thatcherism, New Labour, Post Blair Labour, etc.
I ain’t arguing either. It’s just a quip in reply to what Ted noticed.
Precisely why we have such a Crisis of Meaning in Western culture currently, anything and everything is relative, there is no more truth moral compass the undergirds our collective psyche/ zeitgeist. No wonder people loose hope and commit suicide.
The Malthusian climate cult must also play a role in limiting the desire for children.
The CEOs are in all four feet with DEI because it's a proven tactic. It worked with feminism, dinnit? Making two incomes a "necessity", just like open borders, is a way to keep wages down and sheepify the general pop. DEI performs the same function. Honest to God if I ever went to Davos I'd bring a bottle of holy water with me.
Maybe I'm not fully awake, but unlike adding women to the workplace, DEI adds zero new workers so it produces no downward pressure on wages and leaves the bottom line unaffected (not counting the salary of a DEI Coordinator)
DEI requires more workers to maintain productivity. Each incompetent must be backstopped by an additional worker. This is a feature if progressivism. The same concept plays out in the renewable energy scam; each solar/wind mW has to be backed up by fossil or nuclear.
Sure, but DEI cuts profits in that case: more workers = less money for profits, bonuses and shareholder value.News flash: "Renewable" energy is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the day. No, it's not ready to take over the entire energy sector, and won;t be for a very long time, but it makes abundant sense to use it where possible.
So called renewables are not cheaper once subsidies, redundancy and grid damage are figured. They are a disaster for every country which has committed to them. Germany and GB for example.
The fossil fuel industry has its share of subsidies too.
I agree (and said so) that we can switch to all renewable, and yes, Germany was especially foolish in its "green" fantasies. But there a large and growing place for these energy sources. Note the China, not known for romantic policy follies, is very much on board.
China does things for it's own interest, including it's face to the outside world. They are currently opening new coal plants at an astounding rate because they understand energy.
I often hear the energy subsidy point but not sure what is meant by that besides normal business tax law.
Yes, but renewables are not necessarily environmentally friendly. I’m not entirely against solar and wind power, but I don’t like the quasi-religious way they’re viewed. I think nuclear is the least bad option, broadly.
DEI does cut profits and undermine shareholder value--see Disney, United Airlines, and Boeing.
Yes, DEI does undermine profitability, but what we’re seeing is that for some reason bunches of CEOs are willing to prioritize their own social status (enhanced by publicly embracing DEI) over profitability. A not insignificant number of shareholders too, of which the most influential and insidious are the financial giants that control huge amounts of shares of most Fortune 500s through their administration of everyone’s retirement funds (Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard in particular). They use what is literally other people’s money to pressure corporate boards on DEI and climate issues (packaged together as “ESG”).
Control Jon, it all about control.
"Ordnung muss sein" but excess spending on "control" is a waste of money.
I would agree, many others commenting here would also. But HR specialists would not: more spending on "control" is the life blood of their profession. Its a poverty pimp syllogism -- we need to extend the problem to justify more appropriations for us.
HR specialists are not looking for a return on an investment. Sure, their salary depends on a claim they are doing something beneficial, but that claim is vulnerable to real world contrary evidence. Ar best the DEI crap provides CYA coverage in event of lawsuits, but it yields no positive returns.
No, they are not looking for return on investment, they are looking for maximizing their own budget, like any bureaucratic department.
There's an underlying idea that a more diverse and tolerant company will attract more and better applicants because they're being drawn from a larger pool. The national "Pride" leader for the Northeast region of my company (Fortune 500) happens to be in my department so we hear this all. the. time. It's a company which year in, year out consistently ranks near the top in all the DEI nonsense.
I agree Jon. DEI is largely orthogonal to wage pressures in either direction up or down. In my personal experience it has raised the wages of minorities purely because they were minorities. Sounds great! But it creates envy and strife amongst the workforce, particularly white men like me who don't get these extra bumps in pay. It is ultimately a destructive force in the workplace.
In the late 50s, the National Association of Manufacturers made it a policy to push women into the workplace. I feel sure that the Chamber of Commerce agreed. The two-income family became a necessity by the 70s for most Americans. Open borders lowers pay for the working class. DEI adds a layer of affirmative action hires that makes companies seem diverse.
DEI functions (or functioned) as a form of insurance against lawsuits and bad publicity.
Very true.
DEI is like a corporate tax. When the current government and culture conditions requires fealty to diversity, corporations hire a certain number of DEI candidates and have internal DEI programs and mouth the language in their public statements.
When the tide turns to some degree (as seems to be the case now) and when economic times get tougher, the DEI candidates who can't do anything other than run diversity programs, or be diverse in their identities, don't get special treatment. They go out the door with everyone else who isn't contributing enough to the bottom line.
My company isn't run by Americans. I don't think at the top levels they care much about diversity, even though the language is there. Most likely what they care about first and foremost is feathering their own nests. Whatever altruistic goals they might have I don't think align with either progressive or conservative concerns.
DEI as corporate tax is precisely the right analogy.
Agree with you on this.
And The Economist magazine pushes for it as the most efficient policy for highest and best use of the female work force.
Precisely. DEI is a great way for HR to control the employees -- one more tool to keep them in fear and empower the managers.
I disagree about managers, if we're talking the folks who actually deal with and direct employees. They too are hobbled by DEI requirements and are constantly looking over their shoulder to see HR breathing down their necks.
Well, that brings us to the difficulty of defining who is "managerial" and who is eligible for union membership. Some hospitals try to define any RN who sometimes works as a charge nurse for a shift as ineligible for coverage in a union contract. But, some companies want to include enough white collar positions among those eligible to vote on union recognition to dilute the pro-union sentiment among the real proles. Then its also true that sometimes the lower ranking managers are still more sensible in employee relations than the men (and women) in the top corporate offices.
Also, wooden stakes and a lot of garlic. And maybe a pack of silver bullets as well, just in case they are some other type of unholy entity.
Like Dracula said to Dr. Rosenberg in "Love At First Bite" ... silver bullets? That is for werewolves.
A relative of yours, I'll assume.
No, a fictional character. I don't believe in either human vampires (although there is a biologically catalogued species of vampire bats, and there is a historical character named Vlad Dracula who impaled his enemies on stakes) or in werewolves. Victorian writers had dark imaginations, but hey, Victorian Britain will do that do a person.
I didn’t know you were related to fictional characters! That’s cool.
We're all related to fictional characters. With perfect equality and equity.
How can you burn what’s already flaming?
Thank you Dave Chapelle.
Apparently my mom's friends wonder if JD Vance wears eyeliner, and I was like, "No, I think that's just his face." I could see it, though: Vance as goth kid. Couldn't stop laughing for a bit when that clicked.
Never heard of Irish eyes, but I'll take your word for it.
I heard the song but had no explanation.
And I always thought vance was the Yiddish word for bedbug.
That's really him. It's unusual, for sure.
Vance could sub for one the members of the Cure, no problem.
Dylan famously had an eyeliner period.
Little Alice Cooperish…haha
My wife has also speculated about that. I’m reminded a bit of Adam Lambert.
Well, I won't vote for a man who wears eye-liner!
The Hispanic actor Nestor Carbonell, a supporting player on "Lost,"also had that look. It was entirely natural but some fans called him Eyeliner Man.
Here is something I posted - photographic evidence - on JD's "eyeliner." As you know, it is unusually thick eyelashes growing in a line on his eyes. Few are so gifted.
https://x.com/LindaArnold4/status/1818199095686602858
edited because I left out the link, oops
Not a goth kid, but is a scifi/fantasy nerd. And a gamer. First VP who knows how to play Magic The Gathering.
And he's a Millennial—just 4 years older than me.
Vance is part of the Vibrant Delightful Diversity that Enriches Us All.
They should take the carrot.
Larissa Phillips: "As we were settling into rural life, the existence of this binary was becoming a topic of public debate, with actual scientists arguing against it. I was starting to wonder whether the fact that Americans are increasingly cut off from nature had something to do with this shift."
The fact that we are increasingly cut off from nature has something to do with A LOT of current shifts. This is one reason why although I've never farmed (though I would have liked to), I believe that the agrarian critique of modernity is a vital facet of the overall challenge, and that when it's ignored the critique misses an important element of the discussion. Recall that the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the land enclosures; the industrial and the agrarian have therefore been enmeshed since the beginning, and still are. We avoid discussion of this to our detriment.
Also, a blunt corollary: You can't live in wonder if you don't effing go outside. As Anton Barba-Kay writes, if you don't your "wonder" will be a phony, ersatz version, and a dangerous one.
Will be interesting to see if Kingsnorth takes this up. I mean more Phillips point—that the abandonment of agrarian life is specifically implicated in a grave evil: the abandonment of male and female as sexually complementary and fruitful.
He perhaps has. He’s certainly taken up many of the other aspects you hint at with “A LOT”. But I notice in him much more ire against “civilization” in any forthright formulation than against the ideological aggressions of our Left.
Reality check: most of us aren't able to live in the country. We need to find some way to deal with these issues in urbanized life. Buccolic fantasies aren't it.
I'll see your reality check and raise you one: I know of no agrarian writer on either side of the pond who argues A) that everyone should live in the country, and B) that rural life is necessarily "bucolic."
I grew up in suburban Orange County and both 4-H and FFA were very active. Having animals is definitely possible without living on a 10 acre farm.
I used to work with a guy who grew up in Los Angeles. He recalled when large stretched of Orange County were agricultural (including oranges), that by 1990 or so were filled with residential developments. There is a point where the agricultural access begins to disappear. I grew up in a small midwestern city, and while our life was definitely urban, we had field trips to farms, access to substantial parks outside the city, and farms were just a short walk past city limits.
I think that part of his ire against "civilization" is because it has become so stridently anti-nature, which would include agriculture. Some of Paul's fellow Brits have written about this -- John-Lewis Stempel, Richard Mabey, James Rebanks, etc. They may not be anti-civilization, but they do see serious problems with modernity in relation to agriculture, food production, etc.
True. The point is we should have a better balance, where urban living is not so confining or isolating, and people have some access to the world at large, including the rural aspects of it.
Maybe a Sub-Urban space. Minus strip malls :)
If I could design an entire area from scratch, a concentrated urban core with shopping and apartment buildings, surrounded by a ring of manufacturing, and then a series of residential hubs with mass transit access, and some limited agriculture and parks between them. But the most intensive agriculture needs to be away from residential areas. We already have real estate agents advertising "beautiful rural views" and selling fairly expensive homes to people who then complain that farmers are running machinery in the fields at 4:00 am, or the smell of manure is spoiling their backyard barbecues, etc.
I had the same question about Kingsnorth. But in what I've read of his he hasn't made Phillips's point of farm life demystifying sex. It was a great insight by Phillips and one I suspect Kingsnorth might say: "Duh, why didn't I think of that."
In James Michener's "Centennial," he has a couple of girls at an orphanage in rural Pennsylvania discussing the prospect of being married in a few years. One of them remarks "Men can't be much different than horses."
And the Luddites were former agrarian workers who deeply resented being forced to work by the clock rather than the diurnal and seasonal cycles.
Well, they were textile workers actually, but those were their concerns, among others mainly economic.
My maternal great-grandfather came from a long line of lace weavers in Scotland. Because of the nature of their craft they didn't get displaced until the 1920's, and that was due to cheap foreign imports of "Scottish" lace.
They were textile workers, among other things, after they were put in factories. True, some textile workers were doing cottage production before being centralized into factories, and that was part of the picture too.
Right, iirc they made their initial case by destroying power looms.
And clocks. They always made a point of smashing the clocks.
They were textile cottage workers. The equivalent among farm workers was the Captain Swing riots.
What you are missing is that a good part of the past agricultural work force were driven off the land during earlier enclosures, and ended up in the mines and factories. Their perspective was different from long-time weavers, or those who remained on the land, but it was part of the picture.
Update from the UK - its wrong to suggest that the UKs only response to the Axel Radakubana murders is to crackdown on knife sales. Kier Starmer also announced a public inquiry into how Radakubana was able to evade the UK's counter terrorism measures.
The UK's main program to prevent the radicalisation of young people is called Prevent. On 2 or 3 occasions, a referal about Radakubana was made, only for it to be judged that he did not meet the threshold for an intervention. I imagine the public inquiry will ask how, as well as looking at other relevant organisations.
Interestingly, a public inquiry is exactly what some were calling for just a few days ago, to investigate the grooming gangs.
It's wrong to suggest that the UK government's only response to these murders is to look at knife sales.
Nobody said it was the only response. You're garbling, friend.
You're being obtuse or disengenous. This post criticises the UK, stating that the problemnl is... Knives. It's called narrative curation.
Was Prevent any more successful than the Ministry of Loneliness?
It was started in 2007, after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. Since then, it has focused on Islamic terrorism, far-right terrorism, and (I think), Incel-related terrorism.
I don't know how succesful it has been. I imagine it would be difficult to say, as any success is by definition something we don't hear about - a young person who did not become radicalised.
Obtuse for the win.
The fixation on knives is emblematic of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the current administration. It is an attempt to shift focus away from the problem of immigration and the refusal to provide for public security. No sane person would being up the availability of knives as an explanation of murder.
I don't think there really is a fixation on knives. I think the real focus will be the findings on the inquiry, which will look at how Prevent and other institutions/programs did not stop the killer.
Regarding immigration, is that really the problem in this instance? We've learned that raducabanu was obsessed with violence. Whenever there's a school shooting in America, nobody blames immigration, because the perpetrators are usually white citizens.
Something i think that I and rod would agree on is the need to encourage and support young men, and help them find fulfilling work in the world.
Yes and there is no proof of epigenetic inheritance of trauma. It’s a dubious theory on several different layers.
Violence has many fathers. In GB and US a great deal of violence is directly attributable to uncontrolled immigration. This is not even debatable. The problem is easily corrected; border control and rapid deportation. Other violence is caused by lax police and judicial practices; also correctable. Now cultural issues caused by rejection of past moral and ethical constraints can be addressed.
I agree there are many causes of violence. I think there are some you missed out though. The availability of guns in the US. Anti-muslim sentiment leading to riots here in the UK. And many others. Of course, violence by recent migrants too.
The availability of weapons has zero impact on violence. Violence is strictly a matter of the human heart and can only be addressed at that point. Anti-muslim sentiment is directly related to the violence from that community which has been swept under the rug for reasons you will understand better than I.
Incorrect. There are no guns in the UK, so far few people die. Making it harder to get a knife, whilst not the only solution, seems like a sensible step to take.
As to the riots of last summer, there were many causes. False statements, misinformation if you will, was one cause. Prejudice was another. The fact that it was summer, when there was no soccer, might have been another.
If knives are banned, there are always shilleleghs. (I probably mis-spelled that.)
Ben your substack looks really interesting in the fifteen minutes or so I just spent over there. I've noted a couple of times that you are giving information from the UK. I think that is valuable. Rod listens and values input, I know that. I could not figure out from your substack, as fascinating as it is, what has led you to subscribe. Would you tell us more if you choose?
Rombald, a UK expat, has also said some things here on the stack. (I'm an Anglophile, lived in the UK for just over a year, visit often).
I trust Rod who has not said anything wrong so far, but he has not claimed to know everything. He would like to see this story for instance, in which a 14 year old girl tells Rudakubana "you looked possessed and you ddin't look human."
I am not all that well informed. I have seen things that point to a combination of factors. Yes, Islamism is there but the slaughter in Rwanda is there (ethnic) and Rudakubana was under care for mental health before he stopped going and the system lost track of him. So terrorism, yes, but only Islamism in play here, no, nor do I think Rod is claiming that is all. I think the danger of allowing immigration at large scale from cultures that do not view and value life as the West still does with its not yet extinct Chritian influence, is the central concern, and I guess you see. - - Anyway, sincere thanks for giving input.
Well thank you for checking it out. I appreciate it.
I chose to subscribe to rod's substack because I'm interested in his more spiritual output. I have his book living on wonder, and enjoy a lot of it. He has a section on Ian m Gilchrist I really appreciated.
Im also curious about what's going on in rightwing/Christian right circles.
Some of my comments to rod have probably been too harsh, and I'll tone down the language. I enjoy the debate though. He called labour a woke zombie leftist government, and i really don't think that's accurate. This is a government that cut winter fuel allowance for the elderly, and is all about growing the economy.
Well, goodness, I'd hate to see the elderly cold and I am right wing. I do not think anyone here would want that. But yeah, I gotta admit, many would say to revive the Rwanda plan and give the money saved to the elderly who don't have fuel. We do not mean to be heartless, we just know there are limits to what can be done.
It's also a government that is more interested in supporting Ukraine -- 100 year's worth -- than its own citizens.
Do you consider it rightwing to be prolife, or to be against transgender ideology? Just wondering about your perspective.
If you're asking me Kevin, no, not especially. I do however wonder about the language used to talk about these issues. Some people, in my opinion, find this issue too salient. It can be hard to understand exactly how to approach this issue, given how politicised it is.
Rudakubana didn’t have a clear ideology, so it’s difficult to see how Prevent would have been relevant, as it focuses on Islamists and far-rightists. His father did keep trying to get him psychiatric help. The trouble is that sitting alone all day watching videos about torture and genocide isn’t illegal.
Interesting thoughts from Peter Hitchens in Daily Mail Plus today on Rudakubana (I snuck behind the paywall): https://archive.is/4Fpqq#selection-1287.0-1307.272
Apparetly AR seemed normal until about the age of 13. He is now, plainly, a seriously mentally ill person. Marijuana can do this. Not only bring on violence while high, but alter brains in young people, according to Hitchens. With the increase in knife crimes - it is something like one a day in Germany - it sounds like this could be a big piece of the puzzle.
Hitchens: "Thousands of British families have seen their children tragically decline round about this point in their lives. Some lose the will to work or study and begin lives of drifting. Some lose their minds and can never find them again. In others, it is much, much worse. This is one of the biggest recent social changes in our society and nobody does anything about it because nobody talks about it. - - Enforcing the law against marijuana possession is one of the many things the police and courts no longer do. That is why there will be another Rudakubana along pretty soon."
The Life movement has been grassroots up, but what an encouragement and blessing to have heard these things from the new VP!
The big issue these days with people having fewer kids is not that people don't want kids, but that people are not forming relationships at all. There's no government fix for that.
Sure there is. Rescind some of the “Dear Colleague” crap that Obama foisted on higher education that led directly to #MeToo and a generation of young men terrified to so much as look at young women at their schools. That and similar kinds of things are very responsible for a great deal of the social anxiety afoot these days. This stuff can be rescinded, very publicly and very vocally, and the more the feminist harridans shriek, the better society’s prospects become.
I disagree very much with this. Outside certain liberal hothouses the vast majority of people have never heard of "Dear Colleague" or any of the crap that ivory tower academics spin. If you want to blame something for fewer relationships then A) social media which creates the illusion of relationships (in effect, relationship junk food) and B) the Pandemic lockdowns which conditioned too many people, especially young people, to be alone. Oh, and feel free to add "Porn" to the list as well.
I agree with Jon here. I am 100 percent in favor of rescinding the "dear colleague crap," but I think there's something much deeper and darker going on. John Gray points out that this is even happening in Iran, which is about as culturally different from the US as you can imagine.
Certainly, the liberal temptation to exalt the individual and his desires is broader and older than Obama-era policy guidance. My point is that the government CAN do a great deal at restoring what it broke by vocally rescinding things like the Dear Colleague letter. That won’t be sufficient, to be sure, but the government has been the loudest voice in the room supporting this stuff.
Credit where it’s due, yes, Jon is right. The deep dark secret no one wants to really talk about is that the issue is really female economic independence and especially education, which does cross cultural boundaries.
The problem is that women are psychologically designed to “marry up”. “Feathering the nest” is more than a saying, it is a literal reality of female behavior. When they do not depend on a male provider for sustenance and the protection of themselves and their children (as is the case in all modern first world societies), they have the luxury of falling back on their instincts, which are to be extremely selective in terms of the males with whom they’ll willingly reproduce. To be clear, this is an important evolutionary function; women literally determine the future of the species through their choice of mates. This is an extraordinarily grave responsibility, and they are rightly made to be selective as a result.
Evolution did not account for the abundance and relative security of modernity, however. There is a reason why the societies with the highest fertility are those that are most backward, both culturally and economically. Culturally, they are generally medieval in their treatment of women, often treating them as little more than chattel, and as objects to be controlled. Economically they’re barely above subsistence agrarian in many cases, and/or are wracked with such violence and instability that they might as well be. Development and declining fertility seem to go hand in hand essentially everywhere.
This is a very complex and deep seated problem. And, as Jon suggests elsewhere, not one that is easily amenable to government action. We’re talking about some of the most fundamental forces that shape human nature - in this case, female sexual selectivity. The only possible solution is cultural. If our culture arbitrarily supplied status to women based on marital fidelity and fertility (how many children they had) we’d reverse the problem overnight, but you can’t legislate culture and our current culture largely penalizes women who want to have children. They will generally be limited in their career prospects, and unable to or at least impaired in participating in what are currently status signaling activities like international tourism and bragging about career advancement. The cultural incentives all align in the wrong direction for pro-natalism.
I don’t know how to fix this, short of observing that long run (very long run, to be clear) societal collapse and violence are increasing probabilities on our current trajectory, which will push us back to more pre-modern evolutionary considerations when and if it happens. Honestly, short of a particularly brutal reassertion of patriarchy on the Islamic model (which is highly unlikely), the only hope is that women will themselves launch a cultural revolution in favor of natalism; something along the lines of the recent tradwife phenomenon, but that catches on and becomes a real status signifier among a majority of women (and at least a significant minority of men). Is this likely? Nope. Is it something that government can encourage? Absolutely not. What is needed is influencers in the most fundamental sense. Time will tell whether any can emerge and cut through the feminist pushback.
Every institution of higher education has felt the hot breath of that Dear Colleague letter. Every heterosexual young man in every one of those schools is aware of the fraught environment at his school regarding interactions with women. The fear began earlier than the Obama letter, of course, but that Dear Colleague letter institutionalized it.
Also, you’re being obtusely literal. Jewish people in Germany in 1942 didn’t require copies of the minutes from the Wannsee Conference to realize that their lives were in danger, either. Regardless of who was explicitly aware of that Dear Colleague letter, the tenor of the times had developed a thoroughgoing antipathy toward normal young male behavior, conflating it unjustly with illicit assaultive behavior. The porn and social media pathologies are a RESPONSE to the original problems caused by the feminists.
As Rod points out, the phenomenon is worldwide and crosses many cultural boundaries.
And we've been through other eras of strict policing of these things. Yet they didn't impact marriage and fertility rates. The only historical precedent that comes close occurred in the aftermath of the two great Plague pandemics, in the 6th and 14th centuries.
As an additional data point, the people most exposed to academic fol-de-rol, the upper middle class, are still managing to form relationships and have kids. The greatest falloff has been among those of modest means and the non-college educated.
I can't recall if it was on Rod's substack or somewhere else, but I remember seeing a picture of a female undergraduate sitting at her computer wearing a pro-abortion shirt with a "Smash the Patriarchy" sign on the wall behind her. My guess is that a woman like that has little to no possibility of a longterm relationship with a man. The ideology students are being taught in the schools probably is more injurious to a relationship than male fear of being charged with harassment (as real as I'm sure that is).
Exactly! Jon F
I have students who I’m pretty sure just text their boyfriend or girlfriend. Talking to people is scary. The world is dumb.
Our host is correct. We have to fight the leftist culture but also provide viable alternatives. We must provide the counterculture. There can be no compromise with the leftist culture. The establishment conservatives and the neo-conservatives offer nothing but a limp stew of nuanced opposition to the left culture and meek alternatives.
"He went on to say that people want pleasant living, “the enjoyable, congenial life” more than anything else. Because “children cramp that, people are less and less willing to take on that commitment.”
More or less, yes. The opportunity cost of having kids has increased, because there are more "fun options" available to people than there were previously -- for social, cultural and economic reasons. Having kids means forgoing certain ways of living, certain freedoms, and a fair amount of disposable cash, and all of that represents opportunity cost. Those of us who are parents will say that there are other benefits to having kids, of course, but that doesn't mean that a significant slice of the population will beg to differ with us, and will choose otherwise, if they have the support (social/cultural/economic) to do so.
"This is exactly what some Catholic critics of contraception have said for decades: that the Pill turns straight people into functional homosexuals, in terms of their attitude towards sex. If pregnancy is not a risk factor, and societal stigma has disappeared, then aside from personal moral qualms, what is to restrict you from sleeping with as many people as you wish?"
I'd say what restricts that is the lack of a desire to do so. That's especially the case among heterosexual women, but not only so. A certain percentage of heterosexual men would love to see heterosexuality develop a culture akin to darkrooms and the like (ie, if women would play along), but a majority of heterosexual men would not last more than a few minutes in such an environment, I think, in terms of actual desire (rather than what they think they may desire).
I'd say that the bigger impact has been a rise of the heterosexual version of licentiousness, which is more serial "weak or no commitment" (ie nonmarital) monogamy, rather than what you see in gay male culture.
I would say, though, that the rise of this kind of relatively low commitment sexual culture among straight people, coupled with the known presence of a small minority of straight people who engage in a truly "no holds barred" subculture of sexual license, together made people more receptive to the idea of gay marriage rights, on the idea that the two sexual/romantic cultures were more similar than they actually, in fact, are. The LGBT advocates, and their allies in media, deliberately fostered this, too, but it wouldn't have been feasible if the heterosexual culture itself hadn't changed.
Britain is in their sad state because of the failings of 14 years of Conservative government. Boris Johnson was the man who failed the worst of that whole motley crew of British prime ministers. Johnson won a mandate in 2019 to make major reductions to illegal and legal immigration but he went back on his word. Johnson's landslide encompassed working class constituencies in Britain but he let them down.
Labour was the beneficiary of over a decade of terrible Conservative government. And now the British are stuck with 4 1/2 years of more Labour. Labour's position is impregnable for 4 1/2 years no matter how badly they govern. That's the British system. A poll I read today has Reform at 25 %, the Conservatives at 24 % and Labour at 23 %. Too bad. The British are stuck with Keir Starmer and his woke gang.
John Gray would not be most people’s cup of tea - here. But he’s an immensely “ tonic” writer. That is , he - often brilliantly- rips to shreds the underpinning of contemporary ideology. By all means read Straw Dogs and Seven Types of Atheism.This is Sullivan’s second pod cast with him . Sullivan can be very irritating. You have to ask - why he wastes time talking to people like Michelle Goldberg, James Carville and Kara Swisher. But remember he has had our host on at least twice. He’s at his best when he’s being less day to day topical and not pretending to be an incisive commentator on the American scene. For example his show where he discussed Michael Oakeshott was quite good.On Gray consider listening to his podcast on Tyler Cowen’s series. I respect Cowen but there’s a marvelous moment where Gray puts Cowen in his place.
Cathy Young cut her teeth on libertarianism. So I find it a trifle bizarre that she’s upset by EO’s suppressing DEI. But then again when I heard her on Sullivan’s Dish , she seemed far more worried about Ron DeSantis’ alleged authoritarianism than anything the Biden administration was doing. The Bulwark crowd strike me as not just wrong but really out of it.
By the way this was a better than average posting. I’m a little tired of demonic flying saucers and AI. Granted I’m also a bit tired of the pitches for Orthodoxy but that is a legitimate part of the world here . This isn’t my world. I merely visit.I’m quite capable of filtering.
I don't "pitch" for Orthodoxy. I'd love it if people would convert, but I'm not an apologist, and don't want to be one. My Christianity -- my Orthodox Christianity -- is the biggest part of my life. It's going to show up in a Substack newsletter called Rod Dreher's Diary. I welcome opposing views, or different views, certainly.
Hear, hear. Your "pitches," such as they are, generally sound organic and unforced. Speaking here as an Orthodox who dislikes all forms of triumphalism.
Hear, hear what?
His whole comment.
😃
See my comment at the start. Rob, G, and Eric Mader are losing you contributing subscribers.
I will ask for a refund for this month's fee paid. Then I am gone. I did not come here, and contribute so heavily, to be attacked by goons. "Christian" goons at that.
Hey, man. Stick around. I, for one, want to hear about your ideas on totalitarianism. Some of us are just Christian goonies. It's a pretty wide-open place, though.
That is not what I have experienced here over the past eight hours. I also noticed that no one spoke in my defence as those goons attacked me. After making heavy contributions here, for all of you. Gratis. In fact...I paid Rod a subscriber fee in order to give all of you information. No more of that.
Though most of you are keen to profess your "Christianity". Oh? What kind of Christianity is that? The kind where I do all the giving, and you stand by watching the nutters amongst you attacking me?
Well, I just logged on about 30 minutes ago, so I missed the fray in the heat of the moment. Gonna go back and read the full interactions. I hope you stay, but that's up to you.
Your heart's in the right place, but he is at fault: he doesn't belong in this forum if that's how he chooses to carry on. Also, I'm thinking that a guy who talks so big should at least reveal his name.
This is totally appropriate, and if I were in your position, I would enthusiastically do the same! My only concern is that it is not entirely accurate to say that Protestant churches have become non- Sacramental and "rational" to the point of downplaying the mysteries of God, ignoring the ancient liturgy,and forgetting Church history and tradition. We belong to a wonderful LCMS congregation that celebrates all these things. Now the only point of contention is, are " LCMS" churches "Protestant?Many of us would be able to debate both sides of this. Remember that Luther never set out to break away from Catholicism until it became inevitable.
Rod, I saw that on twitter you are still defending Father Carlos Martins. You must have not read the allegations. He actually put the hair of a girl in his mouth. He’s a freak.
A Polish exorcist once said in an interview that he knew exorcists that have lost their faith or lost their mind. Father Carlos Martins seems to be one of the latter.
YES! I just read your first sentence on JD Vance summation of ProLife movement. That's it. That resonated (see Living in Wonder-resonate!) Family formation at the core of our culture. Delighting in God's plan for man and woman, husband and wife, and children! Making that great again.
Been catching up on the Bulwark recently. It is a sewer, a gathering of maniacs whose only function in life is to oppose Trump. Everything Trump does is wrong, no matter what it is or how positive its actual outcome. And if Cathy Young didn't exist, Bill Kristol would have to invent her. I remember a recent piece she wrote about questions she would ask of Marco Rubio. One was how to counteract disinformation, since the right has "wrongly" classified past efforts as censorship.
The problem isn't censorship, you see. It is deplorables calling legitimate efforts by that term. But you and Rufo got the dynamic right. The Youngs and Kristols of the world will forever say the problems are bad, but the solutions are always - always - worse. I say to Hell with them.
Laundry. Yes. With five kids in the house, it doesn't matter if it's a good day or a bad day or whatever, there is always laundry, and only a certain, very short amount of time it can be put off.
" “In some ways, straight people become like gay people … and your attitude towards sex changes a bit, because it becomes purely recreational….” This is exactly what some Catholic critics of contraception have said for decades: that the Pill turns straight people into functional homosexuals, in terms of their attitude towards sex."
Yes, this is PRESICELY why heterosexual union and homosexual union are UNEQUAL things. Nice of Sullivan (a most odious person) to state it so plainly.
Billboard Chris says, "They're talking about the backlash to LGBTQ. What they need to understand is it's really backlash to TQ, and it has only just begun."
What Billboard Chris (and SO MANY others) needs to understand is that as long as some amount of aberrant sex is normalized, the rest of aberrant sex is going to demand their day.