More Serious Than We Think
No.56: April 30, 2021
Dear Friends,
Yesterday marked the final day of “classroom” instruction for the two classes I’ve been teaching over the past twelve weeks. You’d think that would produce a huge sigh of relief, and you’d be right. So, Sigh! But the truth is the work is just beginning, as I get avalanched with papers and, soon, exams. Who knows how long it will take to dig myself out?
I am writing today from Dallas, Texas, where the family and I have absconded for a visit with dear friends. Naturally, after finishing up my wonderful Doctrine of Christ students first thing in the morning, the rest of the day was a whirlwind of mowing my lawn, packing, and getting ready to fly. Number 3 (7) had never flown before, and it was such a delight watching the eyes of a child light up as the aircraft lifts into the sky. It really is a kind of magic to which our adult senses are altogether dulled.
That is all prologue for why The Square Inch didn’t hit your inboxes yesterday.
Heading
There’s that, and there’s also the fact I’ve been preoccupied with teaching down the stretch and haven’t been paying close attention as normal to ongoing political and cultural matters. (This problem is something I face every week, and it’s called: Finding a Topic.)
On the plane last night I was listening to a podcast of political punditry—particularly, analyzing President Biden’s Joint Session speech the other night—and it reinforced to me that a great deal of what we get fired up about is not quite worth all the energy. Not that a full-throated ode to Statism and government intrusion into every sector of life doesn’t bother me. It’s just that these pundits were casually reminding me of the “to and fro” nature of American politics going back to McGovern and Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama, and. now Trump and Biden. We’re a closely divided country, and history tells us that every action brings a reaction, every party overreaches and sparks backlash, and this will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
It is highly unlikely that Joe Biden is going to be allowed to spend an additional $6 Trillion dollars on the Democrat wishlist. Not with the sliver majorities he has in Congress. Suffice it to say I find myself pretty bored by the political play-by-play these days. President Biden’s laundry list of everything the government can accomplish by borrowing staggering sums of money is boring. In fact, hearing the proposals the thought occurred to me that Democrats haven’t had a new idea in a hundred years.
It’s the cultural stuff that really matters. I am more alarmed by the fact that the governing party has been wholly taken over by their militant progressive wing. That wing’s progressivism on the fiscal side of things is old news; they will never abandon their Keynesian, top-down, Statist, central control model for economics. But we’ve seen that before. What is new is the triumph of cultural Marxism—not the cultural Marxism itself, for that was what the convulsions of the 1960s was all about. I mean the triumph of cultural Marxism. The fact that all our institutions—entertainment, higher education, media, legislatures, courts, churches (in many cases), corporations—simply expect us to take for granted the narrative that everything is about the power dynamics of oppressors and oppressed, particularly as applied to race and sex.
And have you noticed that there is never any problem identifying the oppressor and the oppressed? It’s simple: if you are a traditionalist or conservative of any kind or hold to any kind of creed or constraint on behavior (even “nature” itself!), or if you happen to share the skin color of people who crafted the creeds or constraints, you are an oppressor by definition. Oh, and if you, like Senator Tim Scott, don’t share the skin color but share the values, you’re an oppressor, too. It took zero time on Twitter for the hashtag #UncleTim to emerge when the Senator gave his response to the President the other night (We are a morally perverse nation, indeed). On the other hand, there’s a secret list of “favored” minorities who are automatically the oppressed. Unless you’re an Asian, of course. (This stuff gets pretty complicated and self-contradictory if you examine it too closely.) At any rate, the hippies of the 60s grew up; they now wear suits and ties and run government agencies.
What I mean by “triumph” is that these are not issues up for debate, at least in the public square. This ideology has, in so many sectors, become the default, “rational,” common sense view; dissenters are “deniers,” “phobes,” and enemies of humanity. When that ideology triumphs in the halls of power, the rubber meets the road. Joe Biden wanting to spend $300 Billion to fund some kind of Federal daycare scheme is not likely to be very consequential. His Department of Health and Human Services seeking to strip conscience protections for Catholic hospitals, forcing them to provide sex reassignment surgeries is very consequential.
There are a lot of threads to how we got here. One of which is the long-standing abdication of Congress to actually write laws. Instead, they pass bills granting sweeping authority to unelected bureaucracies to write the “regulations.” This is simply how the Federal Government “governs.” Want to change the gun laws? Have ATF craft a new “rule” out of thin air, making millions of law-abiding citizens felons with the stroke of a pen! Want to crack down on those bigoted Catholic surgeons who don’t believe in slicing into and removing perfectly healthy human organs? Have HHS craft a new “rule” out of thin air.
We are no longer governed by laws. It is arbitrary tyranny, made all the more dangerous by the entrenchment of a new orthodoxy that brooks no dissent. We are, in other words, in a culture war. I think it is just a far more serious one than the 24/7 carnival barkers of cable news and “outrage of the day” Twitter mavens would lead you to believe. It’s a generational one. It’s an institutional one. And politics is a symptom of the problem, not its primary locus.
Miscellany
As you might imagine, there’s fewer things that caught my attention this week. On Thursday I managed to get out and escape for awhile. I headed up to the cabin and cut firewood with Daughter #2. She was a tremendous help, and we had a delightful time driving the backroad listening to Johnny Cash, as well as her reading The Fellowship of the Ring aloud. I let her drive twenty miles or so, and she managed to not run us off the road into the river. I fished a few spots on the way home but got skunked. All in all, just a beautiful day with the lovely, interesting, funny person she’s become.
I appreciated Rich Lowry’s National Review essay on the racial makeup of police shootings in America.
My friend here in Dallas is the guy to whom I dedicated my published doctoral dissertation. I could never have done it without him those years in Aberdeen. “One who sticks closer than a brother.” Countless evenings sharing our research and writings, days taking the train to Edinburgh for research—all times I’ll treasure all my life. In our present-day lives we both don’t have a lot of outlet to discuss deep scholarly issues, so when we get together it is a kind of overindulgence of conversation. This afternoon we were talking about biblical eschatology—how Jesus was bringing the “end times” into the middle of history by his resurrection from the dead, and I mentioned a mutually favorite reference point: U2’s song, “The End of the World.” A song written from the perspective of Judas Iscariot:
“We ate the bread / drank the wine / everybody having a good time / except you / you were talking about the end of the world”
He was, indeed. Here’s a live performance of the song in Denver, 2011. I was there, and this was almost my exact vantage point—the camera must have been just behind me! What is cool about this video is that the audio is taken from the soundboard, so you can hear what the musicians are hearing in their monitors, including a “director” counting the beats. This was May 21st of that year, the day end-times “prophet” Harold Camping had predicted the literal end of the world. Bono had a few choice things to say about that!