The Fragility Of Baizuo Civilization

And: Wokeness As Progressive Ku-Kluckery; Exvangelicals & 'True' Protestantism

I know some of you weary of my focus on culture war stuff. Believe me, I don’t write about this topic because it’s fun. We are living through the auto-destruction of our civilization. Over the last half century or so, it has become fashionable in academic historical circles to speak of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West not as a collapse, but as merely the transition into a new way of being a civilization. It’s not true. As the Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins has unfashionably demonstrated, there was a dramatic loss of capability in material culture after Rome disintegrated. That is a powerful sign that the order that had made and sustained Rome had fallen. There were, of course, still people living in what had once been Rome, but they were living under dramatically different — and dramatically reduced — circumstances.

It is not the case that bad morals = failed civilization. The causes of Rome’s demise were many, and historians today still argue over them. What we can say — and was said very well by the (non-religious) Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, in his forgotten 1947 classic of historical sociology, Family and Civilization — is that any civilization that wants to survive has to depend on the stability of certain social forms.

In the book, Zimmerman shows that in ancient Greece and Rome, a collapse of “familism” — a worldview that placed the family at the core of society’s self-understanding — preceded a more general civilizational collapse. Zimmerman explains how and why this works. Signs of the ongoing and future collapse include declining fertility rates, abandonment of marital norms, widespread divorce, and the normalization of aberrant forms of sexuality. For contemporary readers, one striking aspect of the book is that Zimmerman published it in 1947, and saw all these things rising in the West in his day — and indeed, had been rising for centuries. Any conservative today who thinks this all began in the 1960s should read Zimmerman.

It is astonishing to see how prophetic this book was almost eighty years ago!

Parents must now try to rear a family under a social and legal system adjusted to those couples who do not want the paraphernalia of familism — common income, expenses, children, union for perpetuity, or serious familistic obligations. In our modern Western society the forgotten person is the man or woman who honestly and sincerely wants to be a parent. This affects our whole social system; it affects all the practicalities of life, from renting a house to economic advancement under our different forms of bureaucracy. If there are children, renting a house is difficult, changing jobs is difficult, social activities are difficult. In the words of Bacon, to have children is to give “hostages to fortune,” and one is no longer a free bargaining agent.

Zimmerman says further:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

Think about that when you see things like this, from a third grade Ontario classroom:

And think about what the Left is doing to our capacity to run a complex civilization when you read about things like this (UCSF is the University of California — San Francisco):

This is way, way beyond “har har, look at the stupid wokes!” This is the subversion of our entire system. This below shocked me, and I’m fairly unshockable. Watch the video here. This Biden federal judge nominee is openly contemptuous of basic jurisprudence, saying that DEI requires us to suspend our normal proofs of innocence — and so much more.

This is radical — I mean that literally: it strikes at the very roots of our justice system. This is the institutionalization of the old Leninist principle of “who/whom?”, in that he really believes that justice requires different standards based on your race and identity as an “oppressed” person. Joe Biden recommended him for the federal judiciary. If this man were a right-wing judge, and he advocated for special treatment for Christians, conservatives, and so on, he would have no place on the bench — not on the federal bench, not on the state bench, nowhere. That is not justice!

You might think I’m exaggerating. Listen to the clip. Imagine facing this judge in the courtroom. Imagine what filling the system with judges like this would do to our system of justice. This is what the Democrats are all about now. Vote For The Crook: It’s Important™.

Anyway, I raise this all today as a preface to a very important new paper, from the China analyst Nathan Levine. It’s about how Beijing is rolling in the West’s auto-destruction into its strategic planning. Here’s the summary paragraph:

Debates connected to the culture war, including even on such amorphous issues as the West’s slide into spiritual nihilism or the loss of its inner will, are directly relevant to international politics and even international security. Western strategic thinkers must take these issues into account just as analysts in Beijing or Moscow do. To do otherwise would be a dangerous mistake. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has made cultivating a civilizational “spirit of struggle” central to its mission while judging the West’s loss of the confidence to defend itself to be a fact of historic significance. At least for the sake of their own defense, Westerners may want to explore the possibility of thinking along similar lines.

For people who believe that the culture war is a distraction from the real business of life, y’all need to understand that America’s chief enemy, or at least its chief rival, does not see things that way. Levine goes on:

In this pessimistic view—the overall truth or falsehood of which must be left to the reader—the Western world, despite national differences, is notably united in generally sharing many of the same core civilizational challenges. As commonly reflected in Chinese as well as Western conservative discourse, these challenges, which have accelerated over approximately the past decade, include:

• Widespread sociocultural and political upheaval produced by the emergence and rapid proliferation of an ideology that foregrounds extreme attention to issues of identity (including racial, gender, and sexual identity) and victimhood, a morality of collective “social justice,” and a revolutionary objective of universal liberation from historical “oppression.” This ideology, an outgrowth of progressive left-liberalism, is today colloquially known as “Woke” in the West and “Báizuŏ” (白左: “White Leftism” or the “White Left”) in China. Báizuŏ has a generally derogatory connotation that implies that the White Left are bourgeois and insubstantial. It features what can be described in sociological terms as an “inversion of values,” or the subversion and reversal of traditional moral beliefs, strictures, and value judgements. This inversion means that the ideology manifests as distinctly oikophobic (fear of and hostility to one’s own homeland and culture) and ultimately antagonistic to Western civilization itself. This has resulted in sharp, largely generational divides over what previously were widely held Western values, such as the importance of freedom of speech, objective reason, meritocracy, patriotism, or the idea that individuals (rather than collectives) should be held culpable for crimes.

• A crisis of social atomization, loneliness, low social trust, mental illness, and drug addiction, contributing to a proliferation of “deaths of despair,” including by suicide, overdose, and alcoholism. In the United States, these deaths have helped to drive a fall in overall life expectancy. This crisis may be related to a broader context of sharp declines in reported religiosity and participation in traditional religious communities, as well as the suffusion of society by a more widespread, if less measurable, sense of nihilism and loss of meaning.

• A culturally significant background of persistent structural economic weaknesses, including the offshoring of manufacturing and an overall pattern of deindustrialization and financialization, the hollowing out of middle-class economic security, high rates of debt, and exceptionally tight housing markets that have largely priced out younger buyers. This has fostered persistent popular resentments about economic inequality and lack of social mobility.

• Rising crime, homelessness, and vagrancy as well as an increase in instances of disruptive protests, riots, looting, and political violence, reflecting a perceived general breakdown in social order.

• Loss of control over national borders and the normalization of illegal mass migration due to a political unwillingness to enforce immigration law along with an inability or unwillingness by Western societies to assimilate migrants into existing cultures and value systems.

• A failure in education systems’ ability or intention to transmit inherited knowledge and values across generations, reflecting a broader crisis of authority and institutional legitimacy and purpose.

• A breakdown in gender norms and relations between the sexes along with a collapse in family formation and fertility rates, driving a worsening demographic crisis that threatens the long-term survival of Western societies (although this particular crisis is arguably now even more acute in China), and a concurrent rise in the percentage of the population, especially among the young, identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) or other alternative sexual and gender identities.

• A significant collapse of public trust in major institutions, including across all branches of government, the law, corporations, media, education, and even the military. This collapse has proceeded alongside a broader decline in the popular legitimacy of elite institutional or “establishment” authority—a trend accelerated by the widespread adoption by many of these institutions of radical ideological positions corrosive to their own historical raison d'etre.

• A decline in overall levels of both patriotic sentiment and approval of democratic governance. Only around half of young Americans, for example, still favor democracy as the best form of government, while only around 40 percent of Americans and 30 percent of Europeans say they would be willing to fight to defend their country.

• Intensifying partisan political division, factionalism, and rivalry, producing growing risks of political instability, including breakdowns in the peaceful transfer of power and, in extremis, the potential for civil conflict or revolutionary regime change.

Taken together, these problems paint a picture of a civilization facing internal sociocultural challenges serious enough to risk steep decline. This image slots easily into a broader Chinese view, as expressed by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s frequently used slogan asserting that the central fact of the 21st century world is that the “East is rising, the West Declining.”

Read the whole thing. Levine goes into detail about this stuff.

Here in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is making a turn toward China. He has been openly skeptical for years now about the West’s willingness to defend its own civilization — not “defend” in the military sense, but in the cultural sense. Mass migration, gender ideology, wokeness — these are all symbols of deep rot. The center-left writer Peter Savodnik, noting that Marine Le Pen promises to deport Islamists if the National Rally comes to power, observes dryly, “The so-called far right promising to do the kind of thing normal governments used to do.” When common sense — when what even liberals twenty or thirty years ago would have called common sense — has become “far right,” you know your civilization has a problem.

Levine goes into detail to explain how Xi Jinping sees the West not as a model to be imitated, but as bearers of a cultural sickness to be kept at bay. He also observes that this gives China an advantage in our new multipolar order:

We should expect Beijing to double down on attempts to enhance its influence by portraying itself as a strong contrast to Western cultural and civilizational ills. Already, we can arguably see signs that this message is finding some success, including in the domestic and diplomatic choices of nations such as India, the Arab Gulf States, Hungary, or even Israel. It may behoove Washington and Brussels to consider with greater attention why that is the case and how this could be countered.

You know from reading me how hard the US Government pushes against Hungary, to attempt to force it to join the NATO war on Russia via its Ukraine proxy. In time — and not much time, either — Viktor Orban’s take on the war will have been thoroughly vindicated. Germany is destroying itself via several means, including doing Washington’s bidding by cutting off gas from Russia, which has hastened Germany’s deindustrialization. Orban does not oppose this war because he loves Russia (despite what Washington and Brussels want you to believe), but because he doesn’t see how it makes sense for European countries.

Along these lines, Brussels has been beating the hell out of Hungary for refusing to accept mass migration, and refusing to accept gender ideology — this, though both phenomena are wrecking Western countries that do accept them. Can you blame Hungary for looking East? I can’t, even though I have a lot of concern about it. How can you not, given China’s techno-totalitarianism? Yet if the alternative is to succumb to the terminal sickness of the dying West, what would you do if your mission as a national leader was to secure a future for your people?

I was talking recently to a Westerner who has lived for years in India. I mentioned casually that nobody actually supports Russia, versus Ukraine. That’s not true, he said. The Indians actually do support Russia, he claimed. They remember with gratitude how the Soviets sided with India in its 1971 war with Pakistan, and how Soviet naval intervention (against the US and the UK) was a key to India’s victory. I had no clue.

It is difficult even for critics of contemporary US policy, like me, to fully comprehend how the unstated expectation of global Western hegemony has conditioned our thinking. Living here in Hungary, and trying to understand the world from a different vantage point, has been transformative. I’ve come to understand that the same elites who hate religious and social conservatives like me back in the US are hated by many foreigners, for more or less the same reasons. George W. Bush once said, of the Islamic terrorists, “They hate us for our freedoms.” Well … maybe, if you stretch it. I can’t speak for the Islamists, who are enemies of civilization even if they happen to be right about this or that, but there are plenty of decent people abroad who fear America now because it is an ideologically-driven great power that seeks to impose its anti-civilizational ideology on the world.

Here is what Maximilian Krah, a leader of the German “far right” party AfD, would like to see:

Let the Chinese be Chinese, the Indians be Indian, the Africans be African and the Europeans be European. We must abandon the idea that the whole world must follow the same political and legal culture. Asia has its traditions, and they should govern themselves accordingly. The same goes for the Islamic world. Let Muslims follow their own order without trying to impose Western values on them.

So, the first step is to accept that major regions in the world should govern themselves by their own ideas of political and legal order. Then, foreign policy should be based on mutual interests.

The problem today is that the West believes its values are universal and enforces them through military and economic sanctions. Instead, I propose that Asians follow Asian rules, Muslims follow Muslim rules and Africans follow African rules while we start diplomacy based on mutual interests.

This idea aligns with Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraumordnung (large area order) rather than Immanuel Kant’s idea of a universal global order. I align with Schmitt’s perspective, not Kant’s.

Again, when a “far right” politician proposes what was once a common-sense approach to the world, you know things are seriously out of whack.

I believe we in the West have to fight as hard as we can to save what we have. But we also had better be developing Benedict Option communities to get us through what is likely to come.

Wokeness As Progressive Ku-Kluckery

Here’s a provocative essay from Tablet by B. Duncan Moench, explaining why wokeness is nothing more than a left-wing, postliberal version of the white supremacist ideology that used to run America. He says America was founded, and governed, as a LASP (Liberal Anglo-Saxon Protestant) society — and by “liberal,” he means classical liberal, in the sense that the US Constitution is a classical liberal document. Excerpt:

The woke take America’s foundational “city on the hill” mythos and reverse it—creating a photo-negative version of our national fable grounded in the same exceptionalist and Zionist mythos. In the new woke myth, America is no longer the global savior or promised land. Instead, America is responsible for everything bad in the world. There would be no human tragedies if not for Judeo-Christian “settler colonialists.” If it wanted to, the U.S. government could fix all contemporary injustice and even historical wrongs—the legacy of slavery, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. All it must do is wave its imperial magic wand and bring global misfortune to an end—starting in Gaza.

Wokeness, or whatever you choose to call it, is a photo-negative ideology that merely inverts the country’s old Ku Klux Klan-style ethnopolitical mythos and updates it for today’s secularized—pseudo-multicultural and self-hating—era of Anglo American liberal culture. In wokeness’s new mythic ideal, no longer should the dreaded “white working class” MAGA Trump supporters be on top; rather, they should be on the bottom (double entendre intended), while their opposite-world enemies—Black, trans, handi-capable, antifa sex workers—should instead receive institutional preferences via DEI and whatever more aggressive social engineering project is planned next.

More:

Wokeness is a system of myths. Yet its accompanying rhetoric of “white privilege” and “white fragility” isn’t harmless. They are terms of hate. All people of an ethnic or religious group do not do anything. There is no universal ethnic or religious experience. Such claims—no matter who they are directed at—are ahistorical, unscientific, and anti-intellectual. They are the essence of racism. People forget the racial mythos of the KKK and the Nazis was chic among wealthy elites during their time. Wokeness and its photo-negative ideology is simply the racism en vogue now. Fashion, while nearly always nonsensical, also is not harmless. Today’s woke ethnopolitical mythology—like that of the Klan and the Nazis—demands a thought process intent on destroying everything in its path until its dream vision is actualized.

Read it all — it’s very good. The only chance that a highly diverse multicultural society like the US has at holding it all together and thriving is through classical liberalism — precisely the kind of thing that the Biden judicial nominee above hates. See, this is why I can’t surrender classical liberalism: I see no feasible alternative that is more just and livable. But the strongest currents on the Left are postliberal, and it seems inevitable that this is going to call forth a similar response on the Right — that is, not a defense of classical liberalism, but of right-wing postliberalism. I mentioned here yesterday that the young American traveler I spent time with over the weekend told me that it would shock me, as a Gen X conservative, how powerful post-Christian right-wing thought is among his generation.

He’s right — I don’t know this, but if it’s true, I can’t say that I’m surprised. The classical liberal Right — Republicans, basically — have done such a piss-poor job of defending it substantively (versus performatively), that we shouldn’t be surprised that young people drawn to the Right don’t believe in right-liberalism anymore. Plus, the decline of Christianity among the younger generations plays a big role, I’m sure. Not only do they not believe — well, more of them are unbelievers than in previous generations — but the substance of the Christianity they have rejected has in many cases been a feeble Moralistic Therapeutic Deist counterfeit of traditional Christianity. I wouldn’t believe in that nonsense either.

Again, though, the generational failures of older Christians — the Silents, the Boomers, the Xers — to articulate, teach, and defend a substantive traditional Christianity has played a role here in the demise of classical liberalism. This requires a reckoning. I don’t believe that you can long sustain classical liberalism without a meaningful Christian ethos undergirding it. It’s the Böckenförde Dilemma: The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.

The unpleasant implication is that absent Christianity, we are going to get a state that is illiberal. Viktor Orban is pilloried for having said that he wants Hungary to be an “illiberal democracy,” but as he explained, he means simply that he wants it to be a Christian democracy — that is, a democracy that openly embraces its Christian roots, and makes the basic principles of the Christian faith the basis for legislation. In the postwar period, there were political parties all over Europe who believed that. They were called Christian Democrats.

Those who are still around, as in Germany, long ago left their Christianity behind. As I’ve written here before, some of my conservative Catholic friends in Germany warn me that the AfD is not remotely Christian, and that I should be wary of them. Understood. Yet when the Christian Democratic party — especially its erstwhile leader, Angela Merkel — cannot or will not defend the basic integrity of Europe’s Christian civilization, including preventing mass numbers of foreigners who hate that foundation from entering and settling, then why should Christian or Christian-sympathetic Germans not vote for AfD, which might?

I’m not endorsing AfD, understand; I don’t know enough about them to say. I’m simply pointing out that there is a logic here. Until now, European voters have been able to be intimidated out of supporting so-called “far right” parties. But conditions have deteriorated to the point where the taboo doesn’t really work anymore. We are rapidly approaching the same point in post-Christian America. The day may come when we think of Trump as a Boomer liberal, of the sort we just don’t see anywhere anymore.

Exvangelicalism & ‘True’ Protestantism

Here’s an interesting piece from Mere Orthodoxy on “reading the Exvangelicals” — that is, people who have left the Evangelical churches, and who have written angry memoirs about it. This excerpt taught me something I didn’t know:

Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.  The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors.

Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture. In many ways, these evangelical churches proved a prominent anti-Protestant polemic correct; unmoored from the historic creeds and Protestant confessions, from church history, from any socio-cultural habits, or ecclesiastical institutional memory, ministers became little popes, and the culture they swam in created a clericalist order that squelched dissent or inquisitive dispositions among the laity. That clericalist order was not merely a religious one. It made common cause with the Republican Party through institutions like the Moral Majority and bred a theopolitical order that was post-Protestant.

The author, Miles Smith, concludes:

The focus on where Exvangelicals end up—heterodoxy, theological liberalism, or leaving the faith altogether—is a matter of interest, but it might be worth asking about the commitments of the churches where they came from. We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving “Protestant churches.”

I’m not so sure they did.

His point is that these angry Exvangelicals might have rejected something they thought was magisterially Protestant, but in fact was just Pastor Bob’s right-wing theological bricolage. Again, this is all news to me as someone who was raised very nominally Protestant; I’d love to know what you Evangelical or non-Evangelical Protestant readers have to say. What is magisterial Protestantism, anyway? On what grounds do you tell Pastor Bob and his congregation that they aren’t really Protestant?

From my own experience, I can easily imagine reading an angry memoir by an ex-Catholic or ex-Orthodox, who departed for Evangelicalism over what they perceived as the empty formalism of their church, or, in the Catholic case, in protest against the squishy therapeutic liberalism of their parish. You could say (and I would say!) that they left something that wasn’t really Orthodoxy or Catholicism. But that only takes us so far. Unlike non-creedal Protestantism, it really is possible to point to books and say, “This is what it means to be Orthodox/Catholic.” That said, if a person is brought up in a church community where none of that matters, can you really blame them for getting the wrong idea? If the institutional Church has been mistaken for the last 60 years, what does that do to the sense of stability upon which they’ve built their lives?

When I was back in the US recently I visited with old family friends, Boomer Catholics who have been lifelong regular massgoers. They said they are troubled by all these young people and their interest in Latin and pre-Vatican II stuff. What’s interesting is that this couple are not liberals in any sense of the word. They’re just ordinary people who go to mass on Sundays, donate time and money to the parish, and get on with life. They were older teenagers when the Council ended. They were told back then that everything had changed, and they believed it. They saw it, they lived it. And frankly, they resent being told by younger Catholics that they were doing it all wrong, that in order to be truly Catholic, things need to revert in some ways.

You know me, I sympathize with the young conservatives. But just as Miles Smith says Protestants should be careful not to judge too quickly or harshly the Exvangelicals, some of whom came by their alienation honestly, I think we theological and liturgical conservatives could probably use some humility. Among us Orthodox, it’s fairly common for converts to come into a heavily ethnic parish, and to disdain (silently or otherwise) the older folks for turning Orthodoxy into the tribe at prayer, ignoring its theological substance. It may be true that the parish needs to be reformed back towards the heart of the Gospel, and maybe we converts can help with that. But arrogance towards those who don’t know any better helps nobody.

Subscription Update

I am learning that more than a few of you subscribers have not been getting this newsletter regularly. I’m going to make this one free to all, in hope that some of you who haven’t been getting it will be able to see it. One of you told me that she is a paid subscriber — I verified this from my end — but Substack’s software doesn’t recognize this. It infuriates me, given how hard I work to provide good value for you all, and how loyal you are. I only realized how bad the problem was when one of you said in a message explaining why you canceled your subscription, “I haven’t received anything in months.”

Rest assured that I am working on this from my end. It has nothing to do with me, personally; it’s a Substack problem. But it’s affecting you and me, so I’m not going to rest until they fix it. In the meantime, please be aware that you can go to roddreher.substack.com and read my daily dispatch online. I think you have to sign in as a subscriber, though. If you are having trouble, please e-mail me at roddreher@substack.com, and I’ll keep a compilation to share with the Substack people, if I can get a real person to talk to me. Again, I’m really sorry for this.

I’m going to make this post free to all, just to make sure subscribers can see it.