The Meaning of Meanings

Infrastructure

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The Biden Infrastructure bill is getting a lot of criticism for what it isn’t—an infrastructure bill. That is, it’s only tangentially about infrastructure. Anywhere from 5-20% of the roughly $2 trillion goes to roads, bridges, and utilities—what we generally consider infrastructure. And not just us, but the dictionary too: “The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems.” Concrete, asphalt, steel, and wire, and the maintenance thereof—that’s what most people consider to be infrastructure. Or do they?

The Biden administration is thinking more creatively. I’m not going to argue on the virtues or venalities of the bill or why Congress should allocate $2 tril for it; I’m more interested in the terminology. To road-and-bridge maintenance, the administration adds

“Care infrastructure”: money for elder and child care
“Educational infrastructure”: money for building new schools
“Human infrastructure”: money for job-training and union organizing,
“Research infrastructure”: money for universities and think tanks (to come up with conclusions the government likes, says my cynical side)
“Environmental infrastructure”: money for incentivizing electric cars and phasing out gasoline engines

We can argue about each item on the list—and there are a lot of items—and whether government bureaucracy is the best way to facilitate them, but (being a language person), I’m most interested in the way the administration is finding so many applications of the world “infrastructure.” They’ve stretched it to embrace anything the administration wants to do, thereby making it practically meaningless. This shapeless blob of a word now covers broad consensus (roads and the power grid should be adequately maintained) as well as ideological fringes.

Such terminology is perilous, in that it

Blurs distinctions and definitions. This is a feature, not a bug, of postmodernism, which pretty much denies objective meaning. As an academic theory po-mo only harms students; as a governing philosophy it harms everybody.
Tends to make humans into a commodity: buying units to purchase desired products, workers to be trained, young minds to be conditioned, old people to be sidelined. American citizens become part of American “infrastructure.” And what does that mean?

“Infrastructure,” then, isn’t about asphalt and wire; it’s about forcing American society into a model favored by one end of the political spectrum. If everything is infrastructure, everything is subject to restructuring.

February 2, 2021February 3, 2021

Is this a Great Country . . . or What?

All through my public K-12 education I learned popular anthems like “The House I Live In,” “This Is a Great Country,” and “God Bless America,” along with the old standards (“America the Beautiful,” ‘My Country, ‘tis of Thee”). By 1967, though (my junior year), such guileless flag-waving wasn’t cool. I gave a speech against patriotism to the Rotary Club—not too smart, but truth to power and all that.

Patriotism was an outmoded idea, anyway, the cause of unending wars when we had so many problems to solve at home. Racism, the Feminine Mystique, poverty, the military-industrial complex—what was not to complain about? Shortly after came Nixon and Watergate and general “malaise.”

But you know what? Life wasn’t too bad. Most of us had enough food (even though prices were zooming in the 70s), a place to live (with double-digit interest rates, if you chose to buy), the freedom to move around and find another job if you didn’t like the one you had (we did that a lot). My husband had acquired a B.A. degree at tuition rates we could pay off within ten years. That degree that allowed him access to a white-color job once he got the wanderlust out of his system. Our black friends were no longer segregated—that’s why we could have black friends—no more moving to the back of the bus or “colored days” at the State Fair.

Also, I started reading history, and decided this country was actually pretty great after all. A complicated past, to be sure, but with a form of government that allowed for self-correcting over time. There was plenty of ugliness, but also plenty of hope and upward mobility: more than any other nation in history, anywhere on the globe. I grew up in what would now be considered poverty, yet we always had enough to eat and a roof over our heads and free education that actually educated us a little.

But ever since high school, the only time a certain subset of people—which at one time included me—can speak well of the United States is when they are running for office. Then, it’s the land we love, even though it may have lost its way or forgotten its ideals or listened to the wrong people too long. All this great country needed was the right people to get it back on track. That was the vibe from Barak Obama and Bill & Hilary Clinton, though it didn’t always sound like it was coming from the heart.

Joseph R. Biden is different. When he talks about this great country, I think he means it, as someone who started from a humble beginning and achieved the nation’s highest office—“Only in America.” He’s an old-time glad-handing political animal who knows how to work a room but his Inaugural Address came from a genuine core, however deeply buried.

So I don’t get why he’s promoting Critical Race Theory, unless he doesn’t really understand it. The basic premise of CRT is that the United States is founded on racism (not a bug but a feature) and owes its wealth to slavery, all the way up to the present day. Biden has mandated “racial sensitivity training” (a euphemism for CRT) in all federal agencies and disbanded the 1776 Commission established by President Trump, calling it inaccurate and harmful. The 1776 Commission was intended to counteract the negativity embodied by CRT and the 1619 project, etc.—to restore some balance or to whitewash, depending on who’s talking about it.

I haven’t read the 1776 Report and can’t judge the whitewashing content. But I’ve read parts of the 1619 project and I think it’s both inaccurate and harmful. Has President Biden read either? Because if he has, and still buys into CRT, he can’t believe this is a great country. If the United States was founded on racism, what could possibly be great about it? The only solution is to dismantle our constitutional government and rebuild it from the ground up—which is just what some Critical Race theorists would like to do.

I assume that’s not what Joe Biden wants to do, or other patriotic Democrats. But it suggests that the deep division he wants to unify goes through his own heart (to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn). And through the Democratic party’s heart, and through the heart of America as well. If the USA is as bad as the critical theorists say, it’s not worth saving.

Just make up your mind.

September 29, 2020September 29, 2020

Cynical Theories: a Review

Have you read White Fragility or How to Be an Anti-Racist? Even if you haven’t read them, you’ve probably heard of them. I’ve heard from WORLD readers who are making a good-faith effort to examine their own biases by exposing themselves to challenging points of view from the Times best-seller list. I applaud the motivation, but some of those books should come with warning labels: Ideas produced in the hothouse atmosphere of the modern university may not be profitable for the real world.

So don’t read those without reading this: Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Cynical Theories, by two academics who have been there, tracks antiracism to its source. Also radical feminism, post-colonialism, toxic masculinity, trans identity, genderqueerness, body positivity, fat shaming, and intersectionality. Even if you’re not aware of those things, they are aware of you, especially if you’re white, straight, and male. Or if you disagree with any proposition from the toxic well of Theory.

“Theory” is the broadest term for all the academic disciplines examining power and privilege. It’s rapidly expanding to embrace all the academic disciplines, including the hard sciences and mathematics. How did this happen?

It goes back to a sickly academic trend called postmodernism. Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida were major advocates of postmodernism, with its prevailing view that truth is socially constructed. What you might understand as a “fact” is actually a composite of points of view, inferences, and assumptions from your social strata. In fact, there’s no such thing as a fact. Truth is not just relative, it’s meaningless. The only thing that matters is power: who has it, and how they exercise it.

Postmodernism killed literature by divorcing it from any meaning the author might have had in mind and “deconstructing” it to uncover the underlying power plays. The disease soon spread to the arts and social sciences. When I first learned about postmodernism in the early nineties, it seemed a dead-end philosophy. That turned out to be true, but I didn’t suspect what might revive its gasping, expiring body. The salvation of postmodernism was Theory, which clarified its precepts, expanded its reach, and made it, not an academic discipline, but a Dogma and a righteous Cause.

The precepts are these:

All knowledge is socially constructed, with language (“discourse”) as the creative agent. This includes the hard sciences and mathematics.
All knowledge works to privilege the identity group to which it belongs by race, sex, gender, nationality, or physical characteristics.
The identity group with the highest privilege are straight white males, who have successfully structured society to maintain their dominant position.
All other groups (and intersectional combinations of groups) are thereby oppressed.
The only remedy for oppression is to deconstruct white male privilege by making it stand down while other identities and “ways of knowing” achieve an equal place at the table.
If this set of propositions seems to lack empirical evidence, well, empiricism itself is a white male invention and thereby suspect.

Do you see anything that might need to be deconstructed here?

Like most social analysis, Cynical Theories probably overstates its case, but I found it helpful and illuminating. If leftist agnostics are blowing the whistle, we’d better listen.

June 25, 2020June 25, 2020

Emerging on a New World, Part Five: What Remains

When I was a kid we used to play a game called “Spin the Statue.” Whoever was It would take each participant by both hands, spin her around and let her go, at which time she was supposed to freeze in position. Once everyone was frozen, It would survey the group and assign each person a part in a scene or tableau (“You be the car, you’re the driver, you’re the road, and . . . uh . . . you be the stop sign”). Then turn around and count slowly to 10 while everyone assembled themselves, and when It turned back the scene should be in place. (Though not for long, especially for the person who ended up being the road.)

When I first started on this series, the whole world was in the middle of an economic freeze, with no one as It to tell us how we were supposed to reassemble ourselves. Most of us agreed some changes would be permanent—big cities would begin to hollow out, more workers would be working at home, and possibly (on the downside) economic depression and suicide would deepend. Some predicted explosions of excess when the lockdowns were lifted. I don’t recall anyone predicting literal explosions, but here we are.

Given the pressures of being cooped up for almost three months, any strong emotional trigger could set off a whole nation. One reason George Floyd’s death became the trigger is that it was so iconic. A black man crushed into the gravel with a white man’s knee on his neck—what better picture of the whole tragic history of race? The tinder was already there: the well-publicized 1619 Project, a dozen best-sellers from the recent past all on the same theme, widespread discontent at a supposed racist in the White House. All it needed was a spark.

When the center does not hold, things fall apart. The political center, guided by what we might loosely label “western values,” has been crumbling for decades. It’s impossible at this point to tell how many Americans even understand their country, or think it’s worth defending. There will be no savior from D.C., now or perhaps ever. Our culture, post-Christian, is quickly becoming post-American.

The one time in history God claimed a nation as his own, it wasn’t for national pride. “It was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your fathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery” (Deut. 7:8). The story of Israel’s roots, told in Genesis 12-50, is not the typical heroic narrative. Our own history is a complex narrative of lofty ideals and shameful deeds, heroic self-sacrifice and hypocritical greed. The potential for nobility creates a corresponding potential for venality. Freedom to achieve means freedom to deceive, and the United States is the story of both.

But it’s also the story of self-correcting over time: how the lofty ideals reassert themselves and remind us how far we’ve wandered. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is our national conscience, particularly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . .” It’s human nature to default to but some are more equal than others (see Jefferson the slave-owner), but the principle is sound and biblical, and sound because it’s biblical.

In the current wild spin, what shape have be spun ourselves into? Could be a spasm, or signal for real and lasting decline. The United States as originally conceived is definitely worth striving for, yet we know for a fact that no nation lasts forever. Sooner or later—and we can definitely pray for later—the United States will disunite.

But we are dual citizens, and What Remains is the Word of God. Truth is stumbling in the streets (Is. 59:14) but it won’t disappear. If we (as a nation) will not have truth for our conscience, we will have it as our consequence, played out in literal and figurative street fights. But we (as a royal priesthood) will always have a place to call home.

June 11, 2020June 11, 2020

Emerging on a New World, Part Four: Power

What is power?

My first year in high school, I felt unseen. About 2000 students attended that school, and I joined the restless masses that thronged the halls at every bell. I had one friend, a holdover from grade school who felt as insignificant as I. We hatched a plan to get to school early one day and bring screwdrivers, with which to remove as many light-switch covers, and any other removable hardware, as possible. And we did. Because those were the days before surveillance cameras, we got away with it. The only effect was this: for the next few days, every time I passed one of those little acts of vandalism, I thought, I did that.

It was small and silly, but at the time I was small and silly too. Still, I wonder if I was motivated by the same impulse that causes spray-painted slogans and smashed windows.

That’s one form of power: the ability to be heard, be seen, and make changes. Over the last few weeks it has mostly been exercised by people who feel themselves powerless, at least individually. Corporately they march in the streets, hoping to impose change by signs and slogans—or spray paint and Molotov cocktails. Certain kinds of change will almost certainly happen: the law and policy kind. The heart kind of change has already happened, sparked by a 9-minute video. That’s the same way hearts were changed almost 60 years ago. by news footage of police clubbing people on the Edmund Pettis Bridge and setting their dogs against peaceful protesters.

The protests (not the riots) are a result of that heart change, not a cause. Any meaningful change, in policy or attitude, will come from the heart, not from law or policy.

Here’s another definition of power, from Culture Making by Andy Crouch: “the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good.” Notice the verb. Political change must be imposed by law and threat. Cultural change can only be proposed, by persuasion and example. Imposition forces; proposition appeals. One breeds resentment, the other sympathy. To take one example, the legalization of same-sex marriage came about not by vandalizing wedding chapels and boycotting Bed Bath and Beyond, but by persuading enough of the public that marriage was a basic human right, to which many of our fellow humans were unfairly deprived.

Emotional appeals work true and lasting change more than angry demands. Both are forms of power available even to the powerless, but how successfully any group proposes a new “cultural good” (such as meaningful change in race relations) depends on when, where, and especially how the proposal is made. Anger is powerful, but by nature anger doesn’t last in its purest form—it quickly burns off into resentment, vindictiveness, opportunism, radicalism, rationalization, frustration, apathy, and a host of other negatives.

“American race relations” is a huge, complex topic that has already taken up entire library stacks. I can’t address it in a column, except to say this: No one (except perhaps the very old, the very young, or the very sick) is completely powerless. Everyone has a certain degree of power and a platform for using it. Some will have a lot more than others, but all it takes is a voice, a mind, and a will.

The question is, what will you do with it?

The world proposes one way: get in their face and make demands.

Jesus offers another way: He who would be great among you must become your servant—not by groveling, but by hearing, encouraging, and investing.

Martin Luther King understood this. He could not make America change her biases, but he could persuade her to change her heart by harnessing the influence of the black church, challenging the conscience of the white church, inspiring youth, and reminding his fellow Americans of their founding ideals. He invested his power in service, not violence. As much as some present-day activists would like to deny it, change happened (I was there; I saw it).

They say peaceful power doesn’t work anymore. I say it’s the only thing that works. Destruction squanders power (I did that); investment builds it. Whatever you have in your hand builds your power base, which grows as you share it with someone else: knowledge, skill, connection, even friendship. This kind of power doesn’t spread as rapidly as the other kind, but it’s more durable, and certainly more stable.

May 28, 2020May 28, 2020

Emerging on a New World, Part Three: Magical Dysfunction

I review a lot of children’s books for a website called Redeemed Reader. A common theme in children’s fantasy is “magic” as a lost element in a disenchanted world. The protagonist is born with some supernatural gift or sensitivity that no one appreciates, but once presented with a problem he (or she) forges fearfully ahead and discovers calling, power, and purpose. The plot unfolds against a background of skepticism or outright hostility. In the Harry Potter series, muggles provide the contrast to magic, who are often irritating but generally harmless.

In Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, the Magisterium, a cartoony stand-in for organized religion, play the villains. I just read a delightful children’s fantasy that followed the Pullman plotline closely (but less dogmatically), complete with a monk-like order of naysayers intent on stomping out all witchery and wizardry.

I’m also seeing a lot of magical realism, where supernatural events occur in a real time and place, among characters with quirky names and personalities. The magic in these stories doesn’t have a source; it’s just there, or it’s somehow passed down through families, coming to rest upon an unassuming protagonist. A common element in all these books is the need to believe—in yourself, in your abilities, and especially in the “magic.”

I’m not sure what the increase in fantasy and magical realism for middle-schoolers tells us, except perhaps that when God goes out the door, magic creeps down the chimney. We have our supernatural yearnings, and need our supernatural fix.

Magic is one thing in literature; another thing in public policy. Some of the most ideological politicians like to claim science as their guide, as though “science” were a magic word. And in a way, it is. “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man: “one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse”—that being, to control nature and bend reality.

That Hideous Strength, Lewis’ fictional exposition of The Abolition of Man, pictures Science going full circle and merging with Magic in order to remake humanity. In his 1945 review of the novel, George Orwell approved the premise of THS, but “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”

Still . . . when God goes out the door, the supernatural creeps down the chimney. In the secular public square, life can’t be seen as a gift, because gifts imply givers. Life is therefore more of a problem, or series of problems, to be solved with facts and stats repeated like incantations. Capital-S Science becomes a religion–even a Magisterium–and imagination retreats into fantasy, e.g., children’s literature and the Marvel universe, offering hope that the world really is a fantastic place and there’s a little magic in all of us.

And you know what? It’s true. “Organized religion,” in the form of Christian doctrine, tells us that the world is fantastic, and humans are spiritual beings as well as physical. But since public policy can’t acknowledge that in any meaningful way, suppressed spirituality comes out in magical thinking via “science,” all the more as it drifts away from traditional forms of religion. In That Hideous Strength, every nation has its own spiritual genius—its “magic,” you might say, that defines its place in the world and calls it back to its truest self. Our truest self combines initiative and altruism in a dynamic that self-corrects as it progresses: at its best, something like the abolitionist movement. At its worst, Karenism.

That’s why, in the United States, I can’t see us either buying in to a massive socialist restructuring, or going back to small-government federalism. We keep drifting leftward while our peculiar American genius pulls us back, so that we’re stuck mid-stream. The pressure of the current will keep tugging our freedoms away, but even as that happens, our resistance may grow deeper roots.

No political solution will work very well. We’re seeing that already, with a patchwork of openings and closings, conflicting data, escalating anger, and a looming election that looks more like a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, I doubt anyone will be happy. This state of affairs will not be fixable by science or magic. But if we can’t fix it, I think there’s a way to navigate it, by a combination of practical thinking and spiritual muscle. And that’s a topic for next week.

May 21, 2020May 21, 2020

Emerging on a New World, Part Two: Nobody Knows Nothin’

When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good.

Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a landing platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long stretch of hard work.

For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that our political class is marked, not by positive thinking, but by magical thinking. Psychologically, “Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that one’s personal thoughts, fears, and goals influence the outside world. Young children indulge in magical thinking all the time: a child who prays every night that his parents will stop fighting, for example, could feel he’s to blame when Mom and Dad stop the fights by splitting up. It’s normal for kids, but a grownup who indulges in such fantasies is called a schizophrenic. Or a politician.

You remember when Barak Obama, after winning the Democrat presidential nomination, inspired his followers with rhetoric about the day the oceans stopped rising. Or Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “I alone can fix.” Trump at least had actually built things with steel and concrete, while Obama had built nothing but his own persona. But both were overpromising based on a magical (or at least inflated) view of themselves in the world.

During the Democratic debates Elizabeth Warren brought the hammer down on mild suggestions that there was no need to overhaul the entire health care system. You gotta Dream Big! If she ever got the chance to enact her Day-One agenda, “Big” would have included cancelling the constitution as Step One, since much of what she wanted to do was clearly outside its parameters. Elaborate promises are nothing new in political campaigns, but the size and scope of this year’s Democrat vision is breathtaking. Bernie Sanders, likewise, seemed to think he could materialize his socialist dream by yelling about it.

DreamBig: the Next Generation is even farther out in the galaxy. Got Climate Change? Let’s just re-structure our entire civilization. We won WWII, didn’t we?

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” said everybody from Mohammed Ali to your kindergarten teacher. They never add that somewhere between Believe and Achieve is a lot of stuff: planning, coordinating, hard work, setbacks, tedium, failures, and thousands of details. Since we don’t dream in details, the gaps between here and there are too readily filled with know-nothing thought. And that leads to last-minute sloppiness and long-term incompetence, like the Obamacare website rollout and Iowa Caucus 2020.

A habit of magical thinking is extremely dangerous when a real crisis spills out like an escaped virus from a lab. Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid. What can we do with that? I’m still thinking.

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020

Emerging on a New World, Part One: Doomsday Is Imminent (again)

My husband was raising the alarm early in the 1990s. Even wrote a booklet about it, which he distributed to friends and family. Our government was overspending—there was a hockey-stick graph that showed the federal budget shooting up in the stratosphere (a billion-dollar deficit!!), with certain consequences for the near future. We were in our forties at the time, and did not expect to collect our Social Security. Black Monday, when the Dow dropped by 22% in one day (10/22/87) was just the beginning: once the bond market collapsed, we’d be plunged into another Great Depression. We would have to start saving now: even stock up on commodities like paper products and imperishable food staples. So we built columns of toilet paper until we ran out of room and lost interest. Because nothing happened.

Around 1997, rumors about Y2K began. This would be an unprecedented catastrophe—payback for the hubris of linking the whole world in a network of 1’s and 0’s. Once every electronic clock in the world rolled over to 2-0-0-0 our mainframes would lose their collective minds and crash into incoherence, with planes falling out of the sky and money frozen in cyberspace, life-support machines malfunctioning and millions starving. It sounds crazy now, but I knew dozens of computer-savvy people who took it very seriously, to the point of moving to the country and storing up flour and ammo (like we did). Needless to say, the clock rolled over and nothing happened.

But the damage was done; everybody was hooked up to the internet now, and Doomsday predictions popped out blatting alarms with the regularity of wooden figures on a cuckoo clock. On the left it was Mother Earth crying for help as she was alternatively parched and flooded. On the right it was deep state, Illuminati, global currency reset causing massive social upheaval, stolen elections, martial law. Depending on which newsletter you subscribed to, the powers-that-be would make their big move THIS MONTH or BY THE END OF THE YEAR or SOON. And then, brothers and sisters, hang on, because it’s going to be a rough ride.

So . . . you think maybe it finally happened? Not with a bang, but a whimper?

As good as the postwar modern age has been to us westerners, with its abundant food and comforts and diversions, we seem addicted to unease. It’s almost as though we’re worried about having it too good. Not that there weren’t reasons for alarm. When I was a kid, the US and USSR apparently came very close to a nuclear showdown over Cuba. When I was in high school and college, two major assassinations and colleges literally on fire. In the 70s, a huge presidential scandal, double-digit inflation, an oil embargo, a general sense of “malaise.” That’s about when Paul Simon wrote

I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered; I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.

I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees . . .

In the 1980s, I was old enough to grouse about Kids These Days, but that was a pretty sunny decade except for media scares about nuclear holocaust and the ozone layer. Then came the 90s, when broadband access pulled us deep into the conspiracy weeds.

To my knowledge, though, nobody in the Alex-Jones fever swamp or the Greta-Thunberg eco-horror show predicted that a virus—mere scraps of DNA—would cut us off at the knees. Now I’m wondering if the collapse I always half expected has finally arrived. Time to head for the country, plant a garden, start sourcing a supply of meat from stock-raising neighbors?

Has dystopia finally come for us?

Probably not. And yet, there are some disquieting features about this crisis that I’ll have to work through in the next post.

October 2, 2018October 2, 2018

The Judge on the Altar

I don’t write about politics much, because it’s a trap. It’s too easy to see your own “side” as the good guys and the other side as mendacious maniacs (or pick your own alliteration). Worse, it’s too easy to hunker down in the mosh pit and convince yourself that this is the good fight: this bill before Congress, this election, this next Supreme Court Justice. There may certainly be elements of a good fight in any of these, but the real fight is taking place on another level altogether.

Having said that, I’m going to make a political observation. The Democrat party, as a whole (not convicting all Democrats) seems to have sunk their fortunes into a grab bag of propositions that can be lumped together under the heading of “Identity Politics”—IP for short. IP weaves the academic pursuits of latter-day Marxism, deconstructionism and intersectionality among strands of feminism, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ identity, and other aggrieved groups who haven’t even worked up to being aggrieved yet. Its policies lean toward statist solutions (i.e., big government; welfare; socialist tendencies). In the interests of bipartisanship, I agree that IP would never have taken hold without some justification. Forms of oppression has tainted our country, and injustice lingers on. I disagree about causes and solutions, and I strenuously disagree that oppression is the whole story. But that’s the problem: to many on the far side of IP, oppression is the whole story.

Identity Politics has become a cult. Its sacred history is a catalogue of oppression by white men, its eschatology is the emasculation of white men, its creed is White Men Are Oppressors, and its high priesthood is the Democrat leadership—many of whom are white men, redeemed by sacred rhetoric. Its high religious festivals are elections, both general and mid-term; its ethic is protest and resistance; its holy relics include abortion (as a symbol of a woman’s control over her destiny).

Cults have their heroes and villains and sacrificial victims. Last week we witnessed a ritual sacrifice, complete with ceremony, theater, laying on guilt, and one “lamb without blemish.”

Let me say at the outset, I don’t know the facts of the Ford-Kavanaugh case. Nobody does, except the accused and the accuser, and possibly not even those two, given the tricks that memory plays over time. But adherents of the cult were presented with the perfect victim: not only white and male, but a preppie! Not just privileged, but super-privileged! Not merely a boy scout, but a devout Catholic! Not just innocent of the charge (so he claims), but a virgin at the time! (So he claims.) Everything that radical leftism hates and longs to pull down was sitting before them in that committee room, and they knifed him.

He had his defenders, and won a procedural victory when the Senate Judicial Committee voted him out on strict party lines. But he’s bleeding, and if he makes it to the Supreme Court, he’ll bleed for the next decade at least (if not impeached by a Democrat majority). The cult has worked itself into an ideological frenzy on the merest suggestion. Among the accusations and conclusions I’ve encountered: he was probably drunk at the hearing, he falls into seething rages, he can’t be trusted to coach his daughter’s basketball team, he may have run a high-school rape ring, he got blind drunk at parties in college and there’s just no telling what he did or can do.

I’ve bumped into these allegations without even looking for them; just imagine what I’d find at fever swamps like Think Progress and Democrat Underground. They came not from anonymous angry birds on Twitter, but from mainstream journalists and pundits and authors. Brett Kavanaugh is no longer a man to them—he was never a man, but a symbol of white supremacy in all its wickedness. He’s the merciless slave-owner, the callous CEO, the ogre of the boardroom, the . . . the . . Republican.

The Halifax Chronicle Herald, Bruce MacKinnon

This cartoon was making the rounds over the weekend: Lady Justice, her scales knocked askew, flat on her back, held down with one hand over her mouth by a faceless attacker labeled “GOP.” Yeah, well—what about assumption of guilt, and lack of evidence, and equality under the law, which is why justice is supposed to be blind? To the IP faithful, “procedure” means “stonewalling.” What do they want? A conviction! When do they want it? Now!! And they’ve got it. In another age, they would be yelling, “To the guillotine!”—so we can be grateful for the procedural niceties that remain to us.

Just consider these cartoons, presented from opposite sides of the story. Which has the most emotional punch? Which has the most rational appeal? Can there be any reconciliation between these two views?

“But love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” The great reconciler is at work, but he only works through one heart at a time. Views aren’t reconcilable, but people are.

June 29, 2018June 29, 2018

Wordcraft and Warcraft

Rasmussen Reports published a poll on June 27 that got some wide reportage: apparently, 31% of Americans believe civil war is likely within the next 5 years. But 60% said, “Nah, don’t worry about it.” Almost that many pointed to opposition to Donald Trump’s policies as the spark to violence. That’s interesting—not the President’s policies themselves, but opposition to. I do have to wonder: when does overheated rhetoric become war?

The campus free-speech battles going on now are based on a premise that speech is violence: sticks, speech, and stones break my bones. I think it’s interesting that those more sensitive to verbal violence use the most violent words: Nazi, Fascist, bigot, racist, and much worse. In the infamous Charles Murray incident on the Middlebury campus last year, intemperate speech did lead to violence, but it wasn’t Charles Murray’s. He didn’t speak. They shouted him down.

The shouters do have a point, even though they misapply it: speech can be violence. Speech can also be love, temperance, pain, incentive, construction, inspiration, peace, and war. Words come so easily to most of us we forget where they come from and what they can do.

Where they come from is God. What they can do it create.

It’s no mere metaphor that Genesis 1 shows a Creator who creates by speaking. “Let there be” introduces a host of articulations that spin off untold quadrillions of particles, elements, classes, phyla, and species. That’s him–but for us it’s not all that different. Words are puffs of air—sounds shaped by breath and spit that ride on invisible waves to reach someone’s ear, where tiny bones and membranes convey them to nerves and synapses. This is a common-as-dirt example of the spiritual becoming material, as it did when “Let there be light” produced energy waves.

We see the same thing happen when Jerk! or Racist pig! or much more graphic terms produce a punch in the nose.

It’s easy to destroy with words; that’s why sins of the tongue get much more coverage in the Bible than any other kind. James 3 is only one example; you can open up the Psalms anywhere and find

The rules take counsel together, saying . .

He will speak to them in his wrath . . .

How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?

Give ear to my words O Lord

You destroy those who speak lies

For there is no truth in their mouths;

They flatter with their tongues . . .

(A random selection from Psalms 1-5)

And why does Jesus say we’ll be held accountable for every word we speak? We act as though he didn’t really mean it. Though if anyone would mean what he says, Jesus would.

Destructive words are easy, quick, and effective. Constructive words are not as easy or quick, but can be just as effective. Back to the Bible:

Your sins are forgiven.

How great is the Father’s love, that we should be called the children of God. And so we are! (I John 3:1)

Those who were not my people I will call “my people.” (Hosea 1:10)

He called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (I Peter 2:9)

Words create—on legal contracts, peace negotiations, architectural blueprints, declarations and speeches. Families begin with them, cities rise on them, churches are sustained by them, peace returns with them, hope rises on them.

Words are always on our tongues to say, hurtful and helpful. Enough of them can cause a shooting war; it’s happened before. But enough of the right words can restore peace.

People are walking toward you every day; whether on the street or in your home or even in your head. What words do you have for them?