It was late May and early June. Black Lives Matter protests were gripping cities across the nation. They were accompanied by violence and destruction, yet the media cheered and mayors announced their support. Polling indicated that the American public was sympathetic. But aside from spontaneous rioting in Minneapolis and a few other places, the whole affair seemed staged, following a familiar script of racial outrage and white guilt that has become transparently destructive and self-serving.
Protests continue. Police have been injured and hospitalized; a young white man was brutally beaten by protesters in Portland, Oregon. Yet these and other ugly episodes are largely ignored. There are legitimate grievances in the black community against police behavior. BLM, however, is largely a creature of the race industry that prospers in academia, the arts and entertainment industry, and HR departments of major corporations. It is this industry and its stock epithets (“systemic racism,” “white privilege”) that predominate in today’s antiracism, not realities on the ground. Mainstream journalists didn’t report on Minneapolis two months after the riots. As freelance journalist Michael Tracey bitterly observes, when it comes to the destruction of lives and livelihoods, the media establishment has “moved on.”
To remedy this omission, Tracey made a tour of cities battered by riots and protests. He visited not only hard-hit Minneapolis but also smaller cities such as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Olympia, Washington, taking pictures, making videos, and talking to hundreds of people. His report on the ruination of lives and livelihoods, “Two months since the riots, and still no ‘National Conversation,’” is a must read.
Why, asks Tracey, are the New York Times and other publications silent about the damage? First, there is the obvious partisanship of today’s editors and journalists. They won’t run stories about the full extent of the violence, because “they are extremely reluctant to produce any coverage which might reflect poorly on [the] ‘movement’ and potentially undermine its moral and political legitimacy.” In their minds, antiracism is too important to muddy with facts, and thus the “peaceful protests” narrative must be protected. Mainstream journalists are also keen to avoid any topic that might help Donald Trump’s chances in November.
These are plausible explanations, to which Tracey adds a third, which is richly suggestive:
The media, in its characteristic insularity and myopia, has instead chosen to pathologically fixate on a constant stream of Culture War inanities that stem loosely from this ongoing “movement”—such as the propriety of various statues and monuments, whether various food brands and sports teams are racist, and whether various micro-celebrities need to be “canceled” for some imagined transgression. They are also beset by the various hyper-moralizing staff revolts within their own elite institutions, leading them to adopt an inordinately “inward” editorial disposition on account of their own neurotic personnel issues. Under these narcissistic conditions, real-world human suffering becomes less of a pressing concern.
Tracey is surely right. Our mainstream media are not unlike other establishment institutions, self-involved and self-referential, much like gated communities eager to insulate themselves from reality.
I would go further. From the outset, journalists slotted the riots and protests into an Ivy League script about privilege and prejudice that is at once dangerously radical and conveniently domesticated. They did so not only because the script is familiar, but also because it gives them a sanctioned role in a program of “change” that won’t in any way threaten their privilege and status.
The notion of systemic racism implicates the whole of society. At first glance, eliminating it would seem to require re-engineering nearly every aspect of our lives. Because racism is “systemic,” we need to demolish “the system” and reconstruct it at a very basic level. This claim appeals to the highly educated, and for good reason. Only those who possess the specialized knowledge of “critical discourse” are qualified to identify systemic racism. The elite-educated are in the driver’s seat.
Consider Yale University. A few years ago, controversy erupted over the fact that one of its residential colleges was named after John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate. Activists argued that the name perpetuated the legacy of slavery—systemic racism. These claims were taken with utmost seriousness by Yale’s administration, the mainstream media, and the wider liberal establishment.
An enterprising reporter for Yale’s student newspaper, David Yaffe-Bellany, wondered to what degree the hothouse environment on his campus was framing the issue. To get perspective, he visited a community college in Alabama that is named after Calhoun and interviewed African-American student leaders there. His 2017 article, “The Other Calhoun,” quotes them describing the protests at Yale as laughable, a luxury of the rich. This ought to have given Yale activists pause. It did not. Learning that lower-class people are ignorant of the “true workings” of systemic racism only reassures the Ivy League personality.
Woke elites are happy to play a privileged role in bringing justice to the nation. University presidents prostrate themselves before the altar of systemic racism. Yet none resign, which would be the honorable thing to do if one truly believes that one’s rise in the system and role in academic leadership isimplicated with great evils. This does not surprise me. The top-shelf people are quick to assume responsibility for the reconstruction of society. (Forms designating preferred pronouns, anyone?) In light of this great task, the Somali immigrant whose store in Minneapolis was looted by antiracist rioters is a distracting detail unworthy of their high labors. Property crimes? To be overly concerned about looting is itself a sign of racism!
The Ivy League script has uses beyond the leading role it ascribes to adepts in “critical theory.” It diverts attention from realities that do not admit of simple ideological explanations and easy moralism. Journalists and commentators fix our attention not on the high rate of violent crime in poor black communities or the incidence of heroin overdose and other “deaths of despair” in white working-class communities, but on bronze statues of long-dead slaveholders.
In our day, the postmodern activist steeped in “critical discourse” does not organize home health aides into a union that might gain them higher pay and decent benefits (an enterprise that would redound to the benefit of the many black and brown people in that low-paying profession). He instead addresses “root causes.” He agitates to get more blacks and women on corporate boards, or to change the “offensive” names on buildings at his own elite institution. (Woodrow Wilson was expunged at Princeton this summer.) These preoccupations reflect a belief in trickle-down justice, which is less plausible and more self-serving than trickle-down economics.
When the daughters of the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of New York rush out to join their ranks, when multinational corporations issue glowing affirmations of the “movement,” it is not hard to see that the BLM protests, peaceful or otherwise, serve the ruling class.
White Racialism
Two months after George Floyd’s death, Charles Blow expressed misgivings in his New York Times column. Will the outbursts of protest and calls for “change” make a difference for black people over the long run? Or even the short run? “I am very leery of tokenism,” Blow writes, “leery of the illusions of progress as the system holds fast.”
Blow has good reason to be suspicious. Michael Tracey’s interviews with people who lived through the looting and mayhem offer telling insights into America’s racial politics in 2020. A man on the West Side of Chicago explained the sociology of the protests:
Opportunistic “looting” should generally be distinguished from the more ideologically-motivated “rioting,” as those who “looted” were generally locals (mostly but not exclusively blacks) who simply took advantage of an unprecedentedly chaotic situation to seize goods. Whereas “riots” motivated by consciously insurrectionist ideology—consisting of arson attacks and other actions intended to maximize chaos—appear to have been largely instigated by left-wing activist whites.
This pattern is not unique to Chicago. Most who observed the protests noted how rapidly white participants came to predominate. The tens of millions of dollars donated in just two months to BLM and other organizations committed to “racial justice” came from white-dominated foundations and corporations as well as rich white individuals. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Though there are prominent black spokesmen, to be sure, antiracism, by all appearances, has become a white liberal project.
On August 10, 2020, the New York Times ran Jeffery Mays’s report on the debate in the New York City Council over defunding the police. The Democrat-dominated council was fractured. Council members representing poor minority neighborhoods were resisting calls for large cuts in the NYPD budget. West Bronx council member Vanessa Gibson said that her constituents “want to see cops in the community.” By contrast, members representing gentrified neighborhoods such as Williamsburg in Brooklyn led the charge for defunding.
The debate in the New York City Council had a racial component, but not one that accords with the media narrative. Council majority leader Laurie Cumbo, who represents poor, mostly black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, called the defunding push an instance of “colonization” by white progressives. Another Brooklyn council member spoke of defunding as “political gentrification.” Diana Ayala, who represents East Harlem and part of the South Bronx, reported thousands of emails supporting defunding police, most coming from people who live in other districts or out of state. Of the sixty or so phone calls she received from constituents, she said, “half were white or new to the community.”
In a well-researched report, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg summarizes polling data that highlight white ownership of antiracism:
The General Social Survey shows that beginning in 2010, the percentage of white liberals who disagreed with the statement: “Blacks should work their way up without special favors,” has grown in almost every subsequent year the question was asked. Starting in 2010, when 24% of white liberals (21% of white Democrats) said they disagreed with the statement, the number rose to 30% (23%) in 2012, then 36% (26%) in 2014, and finally to 52% (39%) in 2016. It sits at around 50% as of 2018.
White liberals increasingly reject the mainstream, race-blind ideals of American society. But this rejection has no parallel in the attitudes of the black community:
Between 1994 and 2012, there was never a year in which more white liberals or Democrats [affirmed this statement] than their nonwhite counterparts. By 2016, however, a divide that started appearing in the preceding few years came into full relief—that year, 29% of nonwhite liberals (28% of nonwhite Democrats) and 38% of Black liberals (34% of Black Democrats), disagreed that “Blacks should work their way up without special favors.” In other words, by 2016, white liberals were almost 80% more likely to give this response than nonwhite liberals, and almost 40% more likely than Black liberals.
These trends were accelerating before George Floyd died. Observant people could see that white liberals in ideologically homogeneous Berkeley (“Hate has no home here!”), not African Americans in nearby Oakland, were preoccupied with race and racism.
Insisting upon the ubiquity of racism has become a white issue more than a black one. It is producing a racial polarization in American public life, a new “racialism,” as Darel Paul says in his review in this issue (“Against Racialism”). This racialism has become entrenched among wealthy and educated white liberals. Tellingly, this relentless racialism is not a priority for black community leaders. Charles Blow is right to worry. The BLM phenomenon is part of the white-dominated “system” Blow resents (and for which he works, as a columnist for the New York Times). When John Lewis was young, antiracism was a challenge to the white-dominated system. Today, it is part of that system.
Racism: An Elite Asset
In an earlier report for Tablet, “America’s White Saviors,” Zach Goldberg shows that the white liberal fixation on discrimination extends beyond concerns about the historic wound of slavery: “The percentage of white liberals perceiving ‘a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of discrimination against immigrants more than doubled between 2000 (29%) and 2013 (57%).” I’m willing to bet data would show a similar increase in white liberals’ perceptions of discrimination against gays and lesbians.
There are many reasons why white liberals lead the way in damning America as racist, bigoted, and homophobic. As many have noted, being “woke” is a religious phenomenon. Joshua Mitchell has observed that the de-Christianization of large sectors of American society, especially among white liberals who are heavily represented among the “nones,” leaves a large reservoir of unaddressed guilt. The weight of sin becomes oppressive, prompting people to search for scapegoats. Given our national history, the sin of racism becomes a powerful explanation for feelings of guilt. Identifying and condemning “white privilege,” especially the privilege of straight white males, allows non-religious Americans to offload their guilt, either by charging others with racism or through ritual confessions of their own privilege and vows to “do better.”
The accusation of racism also serves as a powerful canceling device, an important weapon in the arsenal of the white-dominated liberal establishment. To charge a person with racism is to disqualify him from any role in society.
Populism (the vague but unavoidable term for antiestablishment sentiments) threatens the liberal establishment. This mostly white cohort has a weaker grip on power today than it did a generation ago. Given the usefulness of “racism” as a way to cancel challengers, the liberal establishment has a powerful interest in amplifying the evil of racism and overstating its danger. That’s why “Hate Has No Home Here” yard signs are so prominent in upper-middle-class white neighborhoods and in cities dominated by liberals. These signs are not protesting local injustices. They are not-so-subtle accusations against those who are insufficiently “woke”—those who hate.
One needs but a passing acquaintance with liberal commentary on current events to know that it is an accepted fact that Trump’s supporters are racists and that populism (and even earnest expressions of patriotism) is a vehicle for white nationalism. President Obama recently used the charge of racism to discredit the Senate filibuster rule. In order for these accusations to work, white liberals must regularly catechize the public with warnings: Racism is a pressing and growing danger! Zach Goldberg documents the surge in the use of the words “racism” and “racist” in leading newspapers over the last decade. Incidences of these words have risen seven- and ten-fold in some cases.
Propaganda about the centrality of racism, epitomized by the New York Times’s 1619 Project, helps white liberals police their coalition. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Democratic party drew together groups marginalized by the Anglo-Protestant establishment: white Southerners, unionized labor, and immigrant (often Catholic) urban machines. These constituencies were diverse, even contradictory, but they were united in their bitterness over exclusion and the need to defend their minority interests. Over time, the Democratic coalition shed white Southerners and the descendants of European immigrants, exchanged public sector unions for industrial unions, and added African Americans, more recent immigrants, and children of the Anglo-Protestant establishment who, beginning in the 1960s, styled themselves antiestablishment (while retaining their wealth and privilege).
These constituencies in today’s Democratic party are as diffuse and contradictory as the old coalition. (How much do poor black Baptists in Harlem have in common with rich gay activists in Greenwich Village?) But the diverse elements, like those who made up the earlier New Deal coalition, are held together by bitterness over exclusion and the need to protect themselves from the putatively hostile and discriminatory majority.
The role that memories of exclusion and fears of future discrimination play in sustaining the Democratic party creates tremendous political incentives for white liberals (who continue to dominate the Democratic party) to emphasize racism and bigotry. They need discrimination, in order to hold their coalition together. Facts on the ground don’t matter. Racism (along with homophobia, sexism, and the threat of a Handmaid’s Tale–style fundamentalist takeover) must remain a threat; otherwise, the coalition comes apart.
Finally, as populists question the political competence and moral integrity of ruling elites, racism is a way to change the subject. Since the end of the Cold War, working-class wages have stagnated and marriage has collapsed. A half-million Americans died of drug overdoses during the last decade. Wars have been waged in the Middle East for nearly two decades, to no good effect. A plan to draw China into the American-led liberal democratic order has failed—and the cost of that failure has been the deindustrialization of our country. Today, 40 percent of children in America are born out of wedlock, millions reside here illegally, prisons are full, and urban schools fail to educate.
Our troubled society strongly suggests that our leaders have failed us for a generation. It is never easy to face failure, especially if you’ve been told how wonderful you are. (Creative! Entrepreneurial! Diverse!) And so it is not surprising that after George Floyd’s death our ruling class quickly pivoted to talking about racism. The great and the good would rather decry “systemic racism” and Robert E. Lee statues than address the problems they’ve ignored for too long, and in some instances caused.
Yes, minorities can suffer discrimination and be hindered by the legacy of discrimination. These problems require serious attention. But they are not among the immediate, mortal threats to the health of the American body politic. It is mischievous and self-serving for our leaders to say otherwise.
Drivers, Not Passengers
The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson to Edward Everett in 1824. In the twilight of his long life, Jefferson’s Enlightenment rationalism had perhaps lost some of its bouncy optimism. The hard experience of political contestation in the new nation made him aware that a democratic society is a fragile achievement. Our natural rights are God-given, but our ability to claim them responsibly and defend them against tyranny, especially the tyranny of indifference, is not.
What, then, is the “long training” we must embark upon to remain a free people? This question animates Matthew Crawford’s new book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Crawford is haunted by the well-founded worry that the West is moving toward a regime of utility-optimizing technocratic management. The dominance of this outlook will make us passengers in our lives rather than drivers.
The self-driving car serves as a synecdoche for this technocratic future. It makes two promises. The first is safety. Google and other companies pioneering the technology of computer-controlled navigation argue that taking human error off the highways will reduce collisions and save lives. The second promise is convenience. We will be liberated from the responsibilities of driving: the need to exercise due caution, maintain awareness of other drivers, and steer a large, complex machine. A self-driving car will allow the passenger to use the time as he wishes. He can check his email, shop online, or watch a video rather than concentrate on the road.
Greater safety and convenience—this seems like all gain and no loss. The gravamen of Why We Drive is to show that this assumption is false. By Crawford’s reckoning, an over-emphasis on safety and convenience leads to a great deal of loss and very little gain.
One of the most astute observations in Why We Drive comes when Crawford notes that the first and most obvious way to improve traffic safety is to increase driver competence. A teenager who has just received his license tends to be an unsafe driver. He needs experience on the road. After many hours of highway driving, the skills of maintaining constant speed and appropriate spacing, using the rearview mirrors, and checking the blind spot become second nature.
Further development of competence requires some risk-taking. Crawford gives a delightful description of “drifting” in his first car, an underpowered, worn-out VW Beetle with nearly bald rear tires that ripped out when he hit corners hard and stepped on the gas. This and other antics are by most descriptions “unsafe.” But by pushing limits, Crawford developed expertise at the wheel. His expertise has made him a safer driver. On an icy highway, he can feel his car’s performance more finely, and thus respond more astutely to difficult and dangerous situations. He is more likely to avoid hitting the child who runs in front of his car than are other drivers who have not tested—and thus learned in an intuitive way—their cars’ limits. This is the paradox of competence-based safety: The safest drivers are those who, in certain circumstances, court greater risk.
The other way to increase safety involves protective devices. Some safety features insulate us from the harm of misfortune (and our own mistakes). That’s what roll bars and airbags do. Other devices are more nuanced. They intervene and either enhance our responses (anti-lock brakes) or correct our mistakes (stability controls). Crawford has no beef with any particular device, but he notes that if we pile them up they conspire to reduce the driver’s connection to the road. As anyone who has ridden a motorcycle at speed knows, the feeling of radical exposure (no roll bars or airbags on a two-wheeler!) rivets the rider’s attention to the task at hand. Anti-lock brakes and other recent upgrades interpose layers of technology between the driver’s actions and the car’s behavior. We still drive, true, but with less immediate responsibility. This arrangement, Crawford argues, demands less of the driver and offers less scope for the development of skills. Thus, over the long haul, safety technology in cars makes us safer (perhaps)—but also more dangerous to others, because we are less competent drivers.
As a rock climber, I’ve experienced the paradox of safety born of risk-taking. In the salad days of my youth, when I was ambitious to do extreme climbs, I incorporated “free soloing” into my training routine. Free soloing is by definition unsafe: It means climbing without a rope, the sole source of protection if, perchance, one falls. But I was taking the risk of climbing without a rope for the sake of greater safety, because it trained me to be calm, attentive, and purposeful under strain. These are the qualities one needs to do extreme climbs safely.
Safetyism is the mentality that assumes all dangers are to be avoided. But it erodes competence. One does not wish to climb with careless peoplee. But one also shuns those who insist on remaining encased in safety. They are dangerous climbing partners, because they have not developed the capacity to handle unpredictable and risky situations.
Freedom likewise requires competence. There is little to be gained by recklessness, but a citizenry that hangs upon the latest dictates of dietary experts before cooking a meal and cannot raise children without consulting therapists hardly inspires one with confidence in the future of democracy. Many have noted that risk aversion crimps the lives of even the most talented students. They are victims of résumé-and-career safetyism. Protected by helmets from the time they rode tricycles, they have been discouraged from taking emotional and intellectual risks. Until recently, political correctness was not driven by a Bolshevik will-to-power. Censorship arose from the imperative of safety. Everyone must be protected from emotional harms, real and imagined. University speech codes are cultural airbags. (This may be changing. Today’s radicalism adopts a more aggressive approach that seems to relish the virtual violence of canceling people.)
Convenience debilitates us in another way. Crawford has no objection to highway bypasses, flush toilets, email, or any other modern amenities. Yet the removal of obstacles may cost us the meaningful development of our capacities. Again, the issue is competence. An over-emphasis on removing difficulties can have the same disabling effect as an over-emphasis on safety.
The role of embodied, habitual knowledge as the foundation of competence is a leitmotif of Why We Drive, echoing the thrust of Crawford’s earlier book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Knowing how is different from knowing about—and more essential for life. Knowing how is perfected by doing things, and this kind of knowing often resides in our bodies, as it were, available in muscle memory as we face actual difficulties, rather than residing as an item in our conscious memory.
Drivers solve problems (correcting a skid) instinctively. They don’t frame them as physics problems. Disccerning the right thing to say on a first date does not admit of a theoretical solution. One needs a “feel” for the situation, which is why novels train our affect and intuition more effectively than do books of academic psychology. Entering into a narrative is a way of “trying on” experiences. Something similar obtains in civic life. Most voters are not policy wonks. They do not read party platforms. But they are not for that reason incompetent citizens. Insofar as they can navigate the difficulties of life with some success, they have learned to take the measure of others, a valuable skill when it comes time to vote.
Why We Drive is fun to read, which makes the sneaky smartness of the philosophical reflection all the more accessible. Reality is wonderful—a gift—but it is rarely convenient, Crawford teaches us. More often than not it is recalcitrant, uncooperative, even perilous. We develop our human capacities insofar as we engage reality and wrestle with its difficulty and its risks.
Crawford has a wonderful chapter about his project car, a 1975 VW Beetle. The account of his struggles draws out the blessings of reality’s inconvenience. He describes his war against rust, which is never-ending, and chronicles his ongoing search for parts that are beyond the catalogued universe of stock numbers. Like the experience of the disciples after the Resurrection, finding the right gear for a non-spec camshaft requires the kind of knowledge that comes from having seen and touched that which one seeks. Building a custom engine is a supremely inconvenient undertaking. That’s why it tutors so deeply. We learn not just the science of machines but the art of navigating through life, which likewise has its never-ending battles and difficult searches for missing parts.
The engaging quirkiness of Why We Drive (a fitting quality for a writer who drives a Karmann Ghia) is darkened by Crawford’s overriding worry: As Google’s software does a better and better job of providing us with what we want (often before we’re aware that we want it), we will become less and less competent. Disabled as drivers of our own lives, we will lose the capacity for self-government. Encased in safety and afforded every convenience, we will become passengers in an expert-designed social system—guided by machine learning, afforded few occasions to exercise our freedom (too dangerous!), and trained to have little desire to do so (too difficult!). It’s a well-founded worry, one I share.
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ The John and Daria Barry Scholarship sends students to the University of Oxford for two years of graduate study. Scholarship students are selected in accord with their academic promise, of course. But the Barry Scholarship also asks that recipients demonstrate independence of mind—an increasingly rare and precious quality in higher education. Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz heads the selection committee. As he put it, the Barry Scholarship honors the central virtue of the intellectual life: “respect for truth, difficult or complicated as it may be.”
♦ I’m delighted to report that former First Things junior fellow Connor Grubaugh has been awarded a Barry Scholarship. He has completed an MA in political philosophy at Notre Dame and will head to Oxford (travel restrictions permitting) to pursue his doctorate. We extend our congratulations.
♦ A decade ago, California entrepreneur Tim Busch founded the Napa Institute, inspired in part by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s First Things article “Catholics and the Next America.” Busch’s goal was to bring Catholic businessmen and professionals together with Catholic intellectual and spiritual leaders. The Institute hosts an annual summer conference. This year’s conference required forgoing in-person fellowship, but it featured an outstanding lineup in a virtual format. Ross Douthat, Mary Hasson, Curtis Martin, Tim Gray, George Weigel, Chris Stefanick, and Joshua Mitchell were speakers. The virtual conference included a panel discussion with Catherine Pakaluk and Trent Horn on the Church and socialism, as well as interviews with George Cardinal Pell and Robert P. George.
On October 13–14, the NAPA Institute will sponsor its second annual Principled Entrepreneurship conference. This year’s theme: “Ethical Management and Faith in the Era of Woke Capitalism.” The conference is co-sponsored by Catholic University’s Busch School of Business, and it, too, will be a virtual conference available for online participation. Register on the NAPA Institute’s website: napa-institute.org.
♦ In an op-ed in the Omaha World Herald, my former Creighton colleague Thomas Kelly implies that failing to support the latest Democratic party proposals for universal healthcare and other social programs is a moral evil on par with endorsing the Roe-mandated abortion regime. Kelly goes on to say that the current administration’s family separation policies, imposed on those caught crossing the border illegally, are an “intrinsic evil.” By that reasoning, putting anyone who is a parent in prison must be contrary to Catholic moral teaching.
♦ Kelly makes ready appeal to the episcopal authority of Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky. The bishop made the news in 2019 by rushing to denounce the kids from Covington Catholic High School who had gamely endured racist rants against them. Their crime? Wearing MAGA hats to the March for Life, and thereby associating themselves with “racist acts and a politics of hate.” (In truth, the boys bought the hats after the March while walking over to see the Lincoln Memorial.) In late July, Bishop Stowe manifested his belligerent partisanship yet again, saying, “If we keep people from getting the housing or the education they need, we cannot call ourselves pro-life.” He aims the salvo at Trump. But he hits instead the NIMBY policies in the Bay Area and other elite zip codes that have made it impossible for middle-income people to find housing (to say nothing of the poor)—as well as public teacher unions that block vouchers and charter schools, thus ensuring the monopoly of mediocrity that, sadly, prevents poor young people from getting the education they need.
♦ Fr. James Martin, S.J., offered a prayer at the end of the Democratic National Convention. He has come under sharp criticism in our pages. That’s all the more reason to commend him for asking those listening to open their hearts to “the unborn child in the womb.” May all of us pray that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will hearken to this call.
♦ In July, Turkish President Recep Erdogan announced that Hagia Sophia, the magnificent Byzantine church in Istanbul, would become a mosque. It had been so used since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But in the twentieth century, Ataturk undertook a secularizing campaign in Turkey and made Hagia Sophia into a museum. Erdogan is reversing this edict, with an eye to shoring up his Muslim base of support.
Writing about the political and theological implications of this announcement, Gabriel Reynolds notes the sharp contrast between the West’s culture of self-repudiation and Erdogan’s Islamic triumphalism:
There was a lot of brutality, conquest, and slavery in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the conquest of Constantinople was only one chapter of this bloody saga. Nevertheless it is the sort of thing most leaders are not fully comfortable with today. The legacy of the Spanish conquistadors, or the Americans who spread westwards and destroyed indigenous civilizations, is sharply criticized in public discourse and questioned in public school textbooks. For Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, there is nothing to question, let alone criticize, in the legacy of the Ottoman conquests.
On March 31, 2018 Erdogan recited the first Sura of the Qur’an in the Hagia Sophia, explaining that his prayer was for the “souls of all who left us this work as inheritance, especially Istanbul’s conqueror.” After the announcement for the change of the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque on July 10 Erdogan gave a long speech in which he declared: “The conquest of Istanbul and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque are among the most glorious chapters of Turkish history.”
We can gain strength through careful critical reflection on our heritage. It can lend depth and texture to our civilizational loyalties. But in a living tradition, affirmation must outweigh negation.
♦ Erdogan seems to have gotten that memo. Reynolds reports on telling discrepancies between the English-language explanation of the decision and the version provided in Arabic.
A pamphlet distributed by Erdogan’s office told two different stories. The English version begins: “Hagia Sophia’s doors will be, as is the case with all our mosques, wide open to all, whether they be foreign or local, Muslim or non-Muslim.” The Arabic version begins: “The revival of Hagia Sophia is a foretelling of the return of freedom to the Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem].” A bit further down, the English reads: “To what purpose Hagia Sophia will be utilized is a matter of Turkey’s sovereign rights.” The corresponding Arabic text reads: “The revival of Hagia Sophia is a greeting of peace sent out from the depths of our hearts to all of the cities which represent our culture, beginning with Bukhara, all the way to Andalusia.” The English version employs liberal notions of pluralism and rights. The Arabic speaks in the triumph of truth, at least as Muslims see it.
♦ In an incisive assessment of Ibram X. Kendi’s race-based radicalism, written for National Review, Christopher Caldwell observes:
The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will. In the recent wave of cancellations, silencings, forced recantations, and self-denunciations, it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
In today’s America, leveling the charge of racism is the socio-cultural equivalent of the old show trials and executions. It’s a method of professional and reputational assassination.
♦ In late July, Heather Mac Donald gave a talk arguing that BLM claims about police violence against black people are not supported by the facts. Her carefully argued talk was sponsored and recorded by the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank. After the talk was posted on YouTube, it was removed. YouTube censors deemed that it violated “community guidelines” that ensure that the video platform is a “safe space.” The Center of the American Experiment protested. YouTube relented but put an age restriction on viewing Mac Donald’s talk. Here is Mac Donald’s observation on this absurd treatment of a fact-driven lecture about today’s ideological fevers:
If your 12-year-old son goes on YouTube, he can watch a porn star giving a lap dance to a happily surprised young man. He can see nubile, naked girls spooning with a naked male and frolicking in Las Vegas hotel pools. Your 14-year-old daughter can watch videos on how and why to transition to the male gender.
Both your son and daughter can learn how to become an “antifa warrior.” Under the tutelage of an anarcho-communist YouTube host, they can celebrate the fiery destruction of a Minneapolis police precinct during the recent anti-police rioting in that city, a conflagration the anarcho-communist deems the “high point” of the rioting to date. They can get tips on how to suit up for further anti-police action — with helmets, water bottles and, of course, personal protective equipment.
Yet your children can’t watch a livestreamed speech on policing I gave Thursday, arguing that US law enforcement isn’t engaged in systemic violence against blacks. YouTube has deemed the speech inappropriate for children under 18 and blocked access to minors.
♦ In White Too Long, Robert P. Jones writes: “American Christianity’s theological core has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy.” Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Jemar Tisby agrees: “It’s hard to argue with his conclusion that white supremacy is somehow genetically encoded into white Christianity in the United States.” Tisby is straightforward about the implications: “White Christians have to face the possibility that everything they have learned about how to practice their faith has been designed to explicitly or implicitly reinforce a racist structure.” Genetically encoded? Everything they have learned? Tisby seems to think there’s a good chance that white people, by virtue of being white, can’t really be Christians. Such are the paradoxes of our time: Tisby, a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary and antiracist speaker in Christian circles, adapts and reiterates the crudest racist tropes.
♦ Writing in Quillette, an e-magazine that upholds the best traditions of free thought, Yoram Hazony argues in “The Challenge of Marxism” that “anti-racists” and “progressives” are best understood as latter-day Marxists. They aim at a radical reconstruction of society, and their appeal rests in utopian dreams of a final victory over “injustice”—an end that underwrites ruthless means. Our problem, Hazony writes, is that liberals, who ought to be a bulwark against the rising totalitarianism of the left, are disarmed. He describes a “dance” between liberalism and extreme leftism:
1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.
2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.
3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.
4. Return to #1 above and repeat.
Yes, a few liberals stand firm on principle. But the rest end up adopting progressive demands over time, as we’ve seen in universities over the last generation. Liberals imagine that they can manage this accommodation. The opposite has been the case. Recent events demonstrate that liberals are “supine lackeys” of the most extreme activists, “without the power to resist anything that ‘Progressives’ and ‘Anti-Racists’ designate as being important.” Preserving a free society, argues Hazony, will require liberals to enter into “a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.” Will top management at YouTube and elsewhere awaken to this reality rather than slumbering in woke delusions? In this respect, Gary Saul Morson’s account of feckless Russian liberals and their romance with radicalism (“Suicide of the Liberals”) offers useful warnings for our time.
♦ In June, the National Council of Jewish Women issued “The Jewish Case for Abortion Rights.” In response to this pro-abortion statement flying under the flag of the Jewish tradition, the Jewish Pro-Life Foundation (on whose board sits long-time First Things stalwart David Novak) countered with a strong statement of its own. Although not identical with Christian opposition to abortion, mainstream rabbinic legal reasoning severely limits abortion. Of particular note is the JPLF’s rejection of the canard that opposing abortion is a “Christian” position:
Jews should rejoice, not complain, that “the conversation around abortion has been driven by Christians,” and that “much of the argument for abortion access has been rooted in a very Christian perspective.” That is because despite the considerable theological differences between Judaism and Christianity, Christians quite correctly recognize that their morality—and that of the Jews—is rooted in a common source: the revealed Torah. As such, the “Christian perspective” here (and on many other moral issues) is in fact identical with the Jewish perspective. Whatever few differences there are between Jewish morality and Christian morality, the issue of abortion is not one of them.
♦ At the beginning of August, we welcomed Jacquelyn Lee as our incoming junior fellow. Jacquelyn is a graduate of the University of Dallas and spent 2019–2020 as a monastic intern at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut. She describes her transition from the monastery to New York as “like landing on a new planet.”
♦ Jacquelyn’s comment reminded me of a friend who ran an art program in New York. It offered a semester-long program for art students at Christian colleges and universities. He described the program as “study abroad in New York.”
♦ At the end of August, Bronwen McShea joined our team as writer-in-residence. She is completing a book on Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s influential niece, who played a powerful role in seventeenth-century church politics.
♦ In his column for the Catholic Thing, Fr. Gerald Murray gets it exactly right:
The cancel culture’s pervasive use of the accusation of hatred as the sole motive of those who disagree with the revolutionary agenda is a manipulative technique that plays upon the Christian’s proper obligation to love one’s neighbor. When agenda-driven progressives insist that a sincere Catholic is in fact a hater when he professes Catholic teaching and seeks to defend it, the hope is that the believer will eventually relent and accuse himself of failing to love that offended person, who is made to feel “unsafe” when contradicted. The attempt here is not to convince by reason, but to intimidate into submission by making “love of neighbor” into an ideological cudgel.
The Church stands in need of courageous Catholics who are well instructed and are not fooled by slogans and coercive shaming campaigns. In the order of knowledge, the most charitable thing one can do is to share the truth with others. In the case of those who reject that truth, charity demands that we not affirm that rejection out of a misguided notion that contradicting them is hurtful and offensive, hence un-Christian.
♦ The disruptions caused by the coronavirus lockdowns delayed our spring fundraising campaign, but not to ill effect. Readers responded with record-setting generosity, contributing more than $600,000, a 20 percent increase over recent years. These are difficult times. As I’ve documented above, the cancel culture is merciless and the forces of censorship are powerful. We’re grateful for the outpouring of support from our readership. Together we can stand against the pressures that seek to silence us.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
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