Yet

A friend of mine and I had lunch the other day. He told me that Obama had to go. I said it didn't matter. He said that the country was descending into a Nanny State, and that we were being turned into a socialistic society. I said he should have noticed this a long time ago, when the last twenty Administrations were in power.

Conservatives like T. S. Eliot critiqued the Nanny State for engendering a culture of boredom. He, in particular, hoped that the existence of "classes" actually structured or ordered society to provide meaning: an existence that is more than "hollow."He was, of course, incorrect.

To be sure, Eliot could not have imagined that virtual reality – in its present near-total extent – could have ever been so possible. Much less he did not know that such is not only possible, but so widespread. It is now the rule.

The post-industrial society has made fools of conservatives (I speak as one). With its ubiquitous and polluted fog of virtual reality – which eclipses reality, or direct experience of creation – conservatives who would still like to use the historic language of reality are left speechless. God knows there are too many shrill and bumpkin voices who fly the conservative banner, but are really boorish right-wingers.

It turns out that the right wing is not conservative at all. They do not conserve: it goes without saying that they are not interested in conserving the environment; but neither are they interested in conserving quiet community, decent agriculture, home industry and Christian sexuality. They are not really interested in conserving or perpetuating the virtues nested in the Beatitudes – especially meekness.

You may add, rightly, that the left wing cares not a whit for these things, and I am inclined to agree. The liberal movement has ever fought the Church and her moral witness: listen, if you've a mind to, to the cacophony of media slander against the "Thou Shalt Not's" of the Church. The left wing cannot tolerate, even in their vaunted multi-cultural sensitivity, the Church's insistence that one must not engage in physical or psychic sex outside the nuptial union; that one must not participate in the homosexual sub-culture; that one must not join or abet armed revolution or rebellion; that one must not speak or act in the customs of either Sodom or Gomorrah.

I may add, just as rightly, that the right wing also disapproves of certain "Thou Shalt Not's" – interdicts that are as Traditional as the ones just listed above. The right wing cannot abide being told that Church is not something you can invent out of marketing questionnaires; that virtue has little to do with value; that goodness and beauty have an inverse relationship with consumerism and comfort; that the virtue of protecting family and land should not be confused with the protecting of wealth and privilege – the protection of which is cowardice.

I am all for reactionarianism (if that is a word) – but one must have a Tradition one uses as a criterion with which to react. Ask a Tea-Partier what is important to him or her, and they will say nothing really Traditional. "Expedient," yes, and surely so: the politics of Tea-Partying & Townhall-Whining (e.g., no taxes, yes guns, no aliens, yes drilling, no GM workers, yes rich bankers) is much like the histrionic arguments of James Carville and Mary Matalin over dinner at home.

But is there any reference to "Tradition" as the nexus of moral imagination? As a force for the ordering of mind against the hegemony of world and shadow? As a culture for the harmony of the soul with Heaven, against the epidemic toxin of passion?

No. There is no one who succeeds or leads in politics who cares dearly for the permanent things and Tradition. There is no one who conserves Nature and Human Nature.

The main reason for this, I fear, is that post-industrial society has rendered the conservative critique trite at best, and probably idiotic. (Although I take issue with being called a "village idiot" together with my fundamentalist friends – with whom I join in solidarity at the abusive expectoration of Franky Schaefer.) The old myths of bootstrap and fishing now sound cloyingly stupid: the poor who are becoming poorer and more indentured will not be helped by Amway or Horatio Alger stories. It is not enough, nor was it ever enough, to tell the poor as a class to just get a job.

In this moment – however one wants to describe it, and whatever one wants to call it – the old prescriptions do not work. We would like all the poor people to work instead of taking a dole. We write books and hope that the poor will read them, so that they will raise themselves up by their own bootstraps – a physical feat, if taken literally, whose very impossibility underlines the mythical role this expression fulfills in the cult "rugged individuality." Then there is the old saw "give him a fish, and he's hungry again … teach him to fish, and he feeds himself." That, too, is a myth that cannot be realized until the poor gets just as much welfare (and socialistic intervention) as do the rich: one cannot fish when he is starving, or worried about sheltering himself or his children.

We have forgotten that the Gospel ethic demands feeding the poor: it is silent about the business of turning the poor into capitalists so that they can care for themselves and release us from the Gospel burden.

Regionalists and phobics (like me) who hate Leviathan worry about the growing and menacing pale of the State. But we are not brave enough to consider the strong possibility that the post-industrial world, inbreathing virtual reality, is predicated upon a State that is both humanitarian and totalitarian.

And that predication means, simply (and appallingly), that such a State is here to stay, no matter how many guns we tote to tea parties, no matter how many signs are waved – misspelt – by angry flabby short-panted white-sock-and-rockported Tommy-Bahama-shirted social security and medicare pensioners.

We always knew that "Tea-Partiers" -- a group who would be happier as hobbits in Bywater -- are generally unaware of their historic and occultic surroundings. That is made cringingly clear by so many signs depicting Obama as Hitler (comment from Jesse Owens on this one?), and by those that equate Nazism with Socialism.

But what we should consider is just how unaware we non-Tea-Whiners are. We who hold our nose (rightly) at the off-scourings of Dreck TV and Il Magnifico radio-rooter-rants – we like to read Kirk and Eliot and romance our sentiments with agrarian and regionalist lyrics. 

We are troubled, however, by apocalyptic visions. We do not like to disturb our Amish reveries: we push away unbidden suspicions that prophets like Berry may hold mainly for Arcadia (and not anywhere else), or only for little clusters like the insular community in M. Night Shyamalan's Village.

In an age where world hunger lurks monstrous around tomorrow, and coastlines likely will be sinking, can agriculture really abandon the legacy of Norman Borlaug?

Can conservatives really hope for social renewal? Can they intelligently hold fast to the dream of cultural triumph? The very substance of thought has changed. And that fact alone has rendered much conservative thinking wretchedly obsolete.

Despite the lullabye croonings of Internet cheerleaders like Vincent Rossmeier, our mode of communication has profoundly affected the quality of our ability to think, and the quality of the things we think about. When our thinking is forced by events to stretch beyond routine and the usual events of our week, we usually fall apart at the first onset of any disruptive passion. Moreover, the things we think about usually do not follow the solid lines of goodness and beauty: rather, they are overpopulated by demotic urges, menial demands for comfort and a denial of Time in favor of the Moment.

I would like to say, with Eliot, that we are surely the Hollow Men. But unlike Eliot, I have to remember that Hollow Men themselves are unable to say such a thing. By definition. They look in the mirror and do not recognize the face.

The Wasteland is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous, so invisible, that the fish is unaware of its vast and profound presence. We are fish.

Liberals cannot ever know this, to be sure. Their hope is ever in mortal princes, despite their incessant and perennial disappointment. They would rather believe in Benthamite doctrines than in the simple Law of God: but dealing with God means accepting the status of "sinner," and no self-respecting liberal will ever put up with that.

Right-wingers are hopelessly unable to learn this, because they are Philistine. They are not village idiots (it is more idiotic to say so). They simply do not care about things that should be cared for. They need to grow up out of their prurient addictions but they never will.

Conservatives should know this, but they have been ambushed by industrialism and the gas cloud of virtual reality. They should have discerned the spirit of antichrist. They were busy looking for him in the ecumenical movement, in heresies and other religions, in foreign nations. But wherever they looked in other times and places, he was there at their back creeping in.

The humanitarian, totalitarian State is here. It is only secondarily mediated by the Government. It is directly mediated by the media and marketplace, which has combined into one environment – and this environment has entered not only our home and hearth, but has interposed itself in the midst of our consciousness. There are very few thoughts these days that proceed unaccompanied by phosphorescence and pixilation.

Our problem is not the Nanny State. It is, rather, the Nanny Marketplace, whose commercials are broadcast these days on the dark side of our foreheads.

That is why I tell you not to worry so much about Obama or his Republican predecessors and successors: they are, to a man, impotent at stemming the tide (even if they cared). The conservative mistake in the last hundred years is that they were too political, and boorishly so. They cared more for elections than for stories, for art and poetry. They insinuated political contests into religion, of all things, and wondered why God discredited them at every turn. They abandoned philosophizing and turned instead to Philistine sarcasm (think of Buckley here).

They have willingly joined the Gadarene rush down over the cliff and into the briny sea.

The foe of real conservatism is the spirit of antichrist. The substance of real conservatism, as the inheritor and steward of permanent things, is of course orthodox Christianity. I say this with dread, as I worry that orthodoxy, in its American manifestation, is distinctly unready to confront this malevolent spirit. God is cleaning His House for sure, and His broom is sweeping many bureaucratic corners. Leadership in a time of trial and unease must be leadership that has attained apatheia, that can discern and test the spirits, that is practiced in the fight against passion and demonic insinuation. (This lack is the single reason why there is no correction of Orthodox jurisdictional miasma, and why so much Orthodox administration is in turmoil.)

There is not enough of this spiritual fight and test today. The darksome spirit is trying to cover and confuse the permanent things. He has set up billboards all over the interstate highways of our speeding minds, billboards that hide the hollowness with plastic and charming self-esteem … billboards that hide the waste and what lies foreboding on the horizon.

Mortal princes will never look beyond the billboards. Spiritual princes should, but have not.

Yet.

Comments

[Anthony]

Amen! Amen! Amen!

[Stephen]

Haunting essay! If I was single I would consider monasticism. Since I am not, my only choice is to swim up stream, against the strong currents of left and right and to develop apatheia without becoming apathetic. Any other advice...

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thanks, Anthony. And Stephen, there is an abyss that separates the demotic "apathetic" (i.e., boredom and ennui) and the virtuous "apatheia."

The latter is attained, through predominating Grace, by the active ascetical fight against passions, and the adoption of the virtues (e.g., the Beatitudes) that replace them and render them void.

I recommend reading (until doggy-eared -- the book, that is, not you) Hierotheos Vlachos' Orthodox Psychotherapy. I'm not happy with the translation, but it is revolutionary in the best sense of the word.

[John]

This is, without doubt, the best summary of the state of our culture that I have read in some time--absolutely masterful. My favorite lines:

"The right wing cannot abide being told that Church is not something you can invent out of marketing questionnaires; that virtue has little to do with value; that goodness and beauty have an inverse relationship with consumerism and comfort; that the virtue of protecting family and land should not be confused with the protecting of wealth and privilege – the protection of which is cowardice."

And:

"We have forgotten that the Gospel ethic demands feeding the poor: it is silent about the business of turning the poor into capitalists so that they can care for themselves and release us from the Gospel burden."

And:

"Right-wingers...simply do not care about things that should be cared for."

[ofgrace]

Wow! I don't need to understand all your literary references to understand this really hits the nail on the head (you are by far more learned than I). I'm constantly confronted with the billboard mentality (and worse) in my own small circle of influence where some closest to me are entrenched in the extremes of both major political ideologies and duking it out with each other. Forget Buckley: rather, try the malice of Coulter and Limbaugh vs. the Obama delusion enthusiast, who is president of his state's Planned Parenthood board! Lord, have mercy. Would to God that any of them could even BEGIN to hear this message. I'm a lone Orthodox crying in the wilderness in this little circle. Pray for me that God grant me grace for the ascetic struggle in my own life--that is more than enough to keep me busy for the rest of it. I desperately need to acquire the peace of the Holy Spirit, without which those around me perish as well.

[Bjorn Nysson]

It's priceless when one can link to a Christian hissing while namecalling his enemies vile things like "Tea Bagger".

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

Vile? Hissing?

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 12:41 AM, wrote:

[Jim]

Good essay, Father.

But the commenter may be right. Like a toddler making everybody laugh by repeating 4-letter words she doesn't understand, it's obvious you don't know what the word "tea bagger" means.

You don't, do you? Or are you deliberately referring to people you don't know by that word? It is a pretty filthy reference to use deliberately, and like any epithet the mere use of one betrays the nature of the one who flings it. Like excrement, it soils the flinger as much as the flingee.

[Winston Bunyan]

Stunning, powerful, and both eloquent and elegant, this needs to be shouted from the housetops.

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

I certainly do not use this reference in any scatological meaning. I suspect that most people do not. The word is commonly used even by some of the people themselves who gather at these events.

The "urban dictionary" about which many wring their hands carries so many listings that it can be used against any unwitting sentence: even -- and especially -- verses of the Bible. I am surprised that so many sunday school alum's are so current with this rather indecorous bibliography. Sure not the stuff of the church basement shelf.

I am not sure where this riposte came from, but I suspect it emerged from the usual sophisticated strategy of uncovering hidden and clearly unintended vulgar connotations, and then strumpeting them about with the hope of discrediting the critic, whilst leaving the critique completely unanswered.

So consider the word changed. But too many people are reading the Masters and Johnson dictionary, at the expense of Samuel Johnson's.

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 8:51 AM, wrote:

[Fr. Jonathan]

Thank you, John, for your words and your Commonplace site. "Ofgrace," thanks also, especially for the thoughts aroused by your moniker. You are right, of course, about the extremities of malice. Despite his sardonic drawl, Buckley was always entertaining and never boorish. One wishes for the old days. "Shouting from the housetops" reminds me, Winston, of how non-esoteric and non-machiavellian we must ever needs be.

[Mark]

"...Trying to cover and confuse permanent things..." The sadness, as you evoke, is that it has always been that way and still we forgot or let down our guard. If I remember correctly, Orthodoxy isn't fond of Revelation but the imagery is there. The Beast of the Sea and the Beast of the Land always conspire to deceive all the people who belong to this world. And the church lacking wisdom traded the gospel for politics.

[Symeon]

For those pruriently-minded or simply confused souls indignant over the term 'tea-bagger' used in this article, please note that the contemporary use of the term in American politics denotes a certain form of protest regarding the current administrations use of American tax dollars, and has, so far as I can judge, its provenance in an identification with the members of the 'Boston Tea Party'.

I'm astonished that this word is evoking this sort of indignation considering its ubiquitousness in the current news media... and I don't even watch or read the news, really!

Pardon me, Father, for the interjection, but I was concerned lest the comment thread here get out of hand quickly!

Mark-

I'm not sure from where or whom you got the idea that the Orthodox Church is not 'fond' of the Book of Revelation, but this is decidedly not so, as Her children are both the recipients and preservers of the prophecy. It has a place in Holy Scriptures that may be likened to the Holy of Holies in the temple- showing forth symbolically the eschatological manifestation of the Kingdom of God. It is rather out of reverence for the holy ( and inneffable) nature of the text and what it symbolizes that is not used in the lectionary, nor usually chosen by the holy fathers for commentary.

Forgive me for so saying, but it is by and large late-Protestant 'exegesis' that has made a mockery of this book with every Tom, Dick & Harry 'figuring out' the text in new and ridiculous fashion every fifteen minutes or so, according very much to the spirit of the times.

I know we are probably speaking from different 'ecclesiological' points of view, but I hope you would agree that the Church, being the Body of Christ, and the pillar and ground of Truth has never lacked wisdom and has never- though many foolish men have, as you note,- traded the Gospel for politics.

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

Thank you, Symeon, for this encouragement. I am not used to being accused of vulgarity, especially with etymology that is dredged from the effluvial repository of auspicious tomes like the "urban dictionary." You are right, too, about the place of the Apocalypse in Orthodoxy. Though it is not read
publicly in Service, it certainly does inform the dogma of Liturgy and History in Orthodoxy.

Mark: with Symeon's corrective about the place of Revelation aside, your phrase "and the imagery is there" is replete with meaning. "And the church lacking wisdom traded the gospel for politics" is a phrase I will vote for over and over again.

Blessings upon you pilgrims in the Wasteland and under His Severe Mercy.

[Marianne Nay]

Dear Fr. Jonathan,

I feel bound by fundamental etiquette to thank you for providing me with the phrase "Nanny Marketplace." I intend to use it as often as I find myself entangled in the aimless nation-wide pseudo-political pseudo-discussion that one cannot be assiduous enough in avoiding. It somehow perfectly encapsulates the fact that one might effect more Change and Hope by turning off one's gadgets than by signing up for every latest political revolution e-mail listing (and, more importantly, go some way to restoring Hope to its proper status as a virtue, i.e. an anti-slogan).

I graduated to voting age during the height of the Kerry-Bush mudfest. From this great epoch in our nation's history I especially recall the desperate entreaties of a certain partisan of MTV: "Vote or Die!" To my millennial generation civic duty had never been so sexy and thrilling. So off to the slot machine/voting both we went. Gay marriage! (Pull) Cha-ching! War is bad! (Pull) Cha-ching! Impeach Bush! Cha-ching! For some, of course, the battle cries sounded different, but the intent was in all cases to participate with full glitz in fashioning America to resemble one's personal idea of Pleasure Island.

It has been disheartening, to say the least, to realize that the great majority of political rhetoric today promotes this Civic Slot Machine view of voting.

In a way we should be grateful, for now we have been thoroughly disabused of the notion that the world as we have it is going to be reconciled with the Truth. Our battles as Christians are not with our so-called enemies, but with the enemy of all, and our hero is not political figure X but Christ Himself. The rest is just diversion and fantasy.

Keep up the writing, Father. It is a blessing to us.

[Fr. Gregory]

"I am not sure where this riposte came from, but I suspect it emerged from the usual sophisticated strategy of uncovering hidden and clearly unintended vulgar connotations, and then strumpeting them about with the hope of discrediting the critic, whilst leaving the critique completely unanswered."

Yes, I am afraid you are correct. I wonder if the same post-modern vocabulary "scholars" run around the "tea" events reminding them to be more careful with their self-appellations. I suspect that they do -- if they can pull themselves away from their Howard Stern re-runs.

Apatheia. That word again. One that hopefully will keep its meaning even if it finds its way into the un-urbane "dictionary".

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

You know, Fr. Gregory, that we're watching a new thing? Not only are the (non-conservative) right-wingers obtuse (in terms of classical learning), but now they are well-versed in the erotic grimoire.

Someone coined the term "Southpark Conservatives" a few years back -- which is troubling. It used to be, in the pre-lapsarian world of flannelgraph sunday school, that a
conservative would never say "darn" much less "damn," and Howard Stern would have evoked immediate exorcistic rituals (from fundamentalists who don't know how to manage such a business, but he would have occasioned them to try it anyways).

Now that the Right has pried open Pandora's dirty box, too many fundamentalists are being allowed to curse and go to R-rated movies.

I think this has jaded them to the point where they are no longer bothered by the crass hijinks of their prophet/profit entertainers.

Between you and me, I was really taken aback by the kerfuffle over the word "teabag." Not so much because of the scatological meaning (because there are scatological meanings in spades for most of our vocabulary -- hence the
effectiveness of a rather inane species of humor) ... but rather, I was surprised that so much lexical authority has been given, by "kum ba yah people" no less, to such a raunchy trove.

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

Marianne, you can keep the phrase "Nanny Marketplace" and use without needing to reference, as well-deserved for your own trenchant *bon mot's*.

To whit: "One's personal idea of Pleasure Island" ... "Civic Slot Machine view of voting" ... "nation-wide pseudo-political pseudo-discussion."

Since we're speaking privately, "let me disclose the gifts of age" (quoting Eliot here). I think that we are merely entertained with "pseudo-discussions," since the real powers and authorities that run things are not who we vote for, and never will.

We have just witnessed the most massive, egregious financial shift in history. By the time it's all said and done, trillions of dollars will have been moved from public assets to the coffers of ... who? And no one expects it to ever be paid back.

Meanwhile, the lower classes -- who used to be dependably critical of fat cats, tycoons, monopolists and canape-eaters -- now willingly file into air-conditioned buses and are trucked all over the country to protest a new entitlement for their own fellow lower-class citizens.

The thing I wonder about, Marianne, as a priest who is called on to lead his people in prayer for these powers and authorities, is just who I should pray for. I know I should pray for President Obama, the legislature and the judiciary -- and I do.

But what about their bosses?

And don't say it's the people, because, verily, it is not.

Thanks for your kind comment.

[Joe]

Father,

Not that I disagree with most of your observations--though I sometimes find your blog too relentlessly dyspeptic--but I'm not sure the Bywater hobbits' historical ignorance is as cringe-inducing as you suggest: "Nazi" is a contraction of the "Nationalsozialistische" in Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or National Socialist German Workers' Party).

And it was acolytes of radical Leftist Lyndon LaRouche who are responible for the ubiquitous-on-cable-news "Obama Hitler" sign.

[Fr. Jonathan Tobias]

Joe, I think I know where you're going with affixing the "left" label on
LaRouche, but I don't agree.
Also, while the Nazi's carried the word "socialist" in their name, there was
much more of a "right wing" and fascist direction in their policy. They
coalesced, in an environment that had grown weary of the usual
disappointments of democracy, under a charismatic tyranny that combined
ethnocentrism, xenophobia, racial mysticism, and corporate sponsorship.
There were some socialistic elements, but there were far more of the other
sort.

Remember that the Axis leaders were united in an "Anti-Comintern" agenda.

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 5:22 PM, wrote: