Dear Friends,
Happy mid-November! The weather is finally cooling here in Big Sky Country, and most of the leaves have fallen. It is starting to feel snowish. After a brutal and desolate summer which felt like living in a microwave oven (heavy smoke haze and high UV Index) we have been grateful for a pretty spectacular autumn.
Earlier this week I took a look at the forecast and decided that I might be seeing my last warmish day, so I endeavored to change the brakes on the old Beemer. (For those who don’t know, I am, by necessity, a “YouTube” mechanic—that is, I watch YouTube to learn how to do things and then I do things.) I have saved a great many thousands of dollars repairing my own vehicles, and it provides a great sense of personal satisfaction.
Anyway, I got the brake job finished with no problem and went to drive around the block to make sure everything was right. There was a hideous grinding noise. I’d made a rookie (and very common) mistake: I put one of the brake pads on backward. Yikes. It put some pretty solid grooves into the rotor, and the parts guy at the store couldn’t salvage it for me. So I had to put on a new rotor as well. But I still saved a ton of money and learned a very valuable lesson. I will never make that mistake again.
Walk And Chew Gum? Ridiculous.
From what I can gather in my new Twitter-free life, the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin is underway and people have opinions. And, once again, we are treated to a manifestation of the insane polarization of our body politic. I do not use the word “insane” flippantly—there seems to be some kind of deep spirit of delusion at work in our society. Everything—everything—is “either/or,” “for or against,” “us or them.” We have lost the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
There are people lionizing the patriotic bravery of Kyle Rittenhouse. American Hero!
There are people vilifying Kyle Rittenhouse: racist murderer!
Choose your side. No, really: choose your side. You only get one view. One perspective. You may only lionize Kyle Rittenhouse as a stand-in for “law and order” or demonize him as a symbol of “white supremacy” or some such. That is the level of cognition displayed by our media and pundit class, right and left, and it is the level of cognition they expect you to display. You should be offended.
Since everyone has an opinion, I will share mine. But I will not conform to one of the two options on offer.
Kyle Rittenhouse was an extremely foolish adolescent who (needlessly, as far as I can tell) put himself in grave danger. He purposely went to the vicinity of a mob riot armed with an AR-15. The end result of that decision was terrible, but not at all unpredictable. He shot and killed two people and wounded another.
This means that I cannot in any way lionize Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of brave hero. He wasn’t. He was an adolescent fool who should not be imitated. But, in fairness, it should be noted that “being an adolescent fool” is not, in and of itself, a crime, lest we jail staggering swaths of the U.S. population.
Kyle Rittenhouse was also, as the testimony and evidence seem to strongly suggest (we will see what the jury determines), defending his own life when he shot those three people. He was being attacked—indeed, the prosecution’s star witness admitted that Kyle didn’t shoot him until he advanced on him, hands down, with his gun (that’s what you call a “bad day” for a prosecutor). I think a murder conviction inappropriate—and the state should never have brought those charges. At best, the state has a thin case for manslaughter.
This means that I cannot in any way demonize Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of violent, black-lives-hating murderer.
It’s very liberating to think two thoughts in one’s head at the same time. The defendant is both foolish and not a murderer. Neither hero nor villain.
I think people should try that more.
For a helpful legal analysis of the Rittenhouse trial, I recommend Andy McCarthy’s column here. It’s only available to National Review subscribers.
McWhorter Whiffs
I’ve been reading John McWhorter’s brand-new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is a highly respected professor at Columbia University in New York City, teaching linguistics, American studies, and music history. I’ve enjoyed his writings for years, and really looked forward to this book.
It is both exhilarating and deeply disappointing.
First, the good: John McWhorter is a black intellectual ideally positioned and suited to take on the Critical Race Industrial Complex. And, boy, does he take it to the woodshed. His writing is at times brutal:
I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between The World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t.
Sometimes it just needs to be said. Ideally it shouldn’t matter, but the situational reality is that it helps if it is said by someone who isn’t white.
Most pleasantly, McWhorter rightly identifies the mass ideological movement of Critical Theory (which is a broad umbrella covering various sub-species: Race, Queer, Feminist, Trans, etc.) as a new religion. A lot of people are starting to pick up on this—Andrew Sullivan nailed it in 2018 with his essay “America’s New Religions”—and I’ve been writing about it in this space for a long time. It is a new Gnosticism, a revival of a strain of ancient paganism, and the “Woke” are the new enlightened ones sent to liberate us all from our ignorance and blindness. McWhorter calls them “The Elect,” a fine term. The real value of his book is that he simply goes through various aspects of Critical Race Theory and demonstrates conclusively that these are religious exercises. There are creeds, confessions, dogmas, orthodoxy, rituals and, of course, heresies, anathemas, and excommunications.
So far, so good. The bad: McWhorter is an excellent scholar of linguistics, a pretty insightful cultural observer of America, and probably has a firm grasp of the history of music, but he is thoroughly out of his depth when he writes about religion.
His is a very simple world: Over here, on one side, is reason, common sense, right thinking, and a basically good moral compass. And over there is “religion.” All religion. Incredible as this may seem, McWhorter sees no distinction whatsoever between religions. They are all the same thing: irrational nonsense.
Consider this passage (italics are his):
America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic, what it is to educate a child, what it is to foster justice, what it is to express oneself properly, and what it is to be a nation is being re-founded upon a religion. This is directly antithetical to the very foundations of the American experiment. Religion has no place in the classroom, in the halls of ivy, in our codes of ethics, or in decreeing how all members of society are to express themselves, and almost all of us spontaneously understand that and see any misunderstanding of the premise as backward.
Oh, my. This is tissue-paper grade superficial, so much so I have a hard time believing a Columbia professor wrote it—a Columbia freshman, maybe. Where does he think America’s “sense” of reason, morality, aesthetics, education, justice, and so forth came from? In his formulation, it just “is.” Our sense of right-reasoning and morality and beauty is sui generis, self-attesting, and self-authenticating. It’s just “the way things ought to be,” and it is threatened by religion—note: not a deviant religion or dangerous religion or wrong religion (he doesn’t even understand those categories), but religion as such.
I’ve got some news for Professor McWhorter. America’s sense of the good, the true, and the beautiful did not spring ex nihilo from the head of some Enlightenment philosopher. Our “obvious” values are the product of religion. A particular religion whose atmosphere we have all absorbed and passed down for the better part of two millennia: Christianity. Have you ever noticed the weird coincidence that when Enlightenment philosophers wanted to ground reason and morality in something other than “religion,” it just so happened that their desired end products resembled Christian virtues like individual dignity and human rights and due process and the like? Just an accident, I’m sure. The better explanation is that those philosophers were themselves shaped in important ways by the very religion they claimed to reject.
It would serve McWhorter’s purpose far better and far more accurately to frame the Woke problem as a new and deviant religion, but to frame it as “religion in general” is extremely unhelpful as an intellectual and practical matter. It is a jarring, off-tempo, clanging gong in the midst of his otherwise harmonious symphony.
I wrote a newsletter back in July on this topic (which you can find here), but I wrote in my margin of McWhorter’s book, “Somebody needs to read some Tom Holland.” I’m referring to Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The gist of which is that all the things we value, whether it be reason, justice, the individual, freedom, human rights and dignity, and so forth, are themselves forged and shaped by the Christian revolution. They are not the products of pre-Christian antiquity (i.e., Greece and Rome), nor are they the spontaneous creations of Enlightenment philosophers. All that we hold dear—think of McWhorter’s opening sentence of that excerpt above: “what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic”—is the gift and legacy of a religious revolution in human history begun by the resurrection of one particular man.
I realize that’s inconvenient for an irreligious scholar in the ivy-halls of New York City in the 21st century, but I don’t make the rules. You’re going to have to deal with Jesus of Nazareth. It’s that simple. There is no real or honest way around it. I am saying far more than the need to deal with Jesus as a spiritual matter; you must do it as an intellectual matter, too. To take his gifts and to ignore, or worse, despise the Giver, or to pretend that you invented them or maybe just “found” them by happenstance or because that’s just the way the world works is a fraught and intellectually dishonest exercise.
And I suggest it’s better to deal with Jesus now rather than later.
Outstanding, Brian.