Jack Niewold's Blog

I’ve said for years that the central characteristic of progressive “art” is its arid, gray, tedious self-importance. I’m talking about movies and TV mainly, but also books and popular culture in general. When you strip away (1) the technological wizardry, (2) the cliché-ridden malefaction, (3) the de rigueur heretic trope, (4) the involuntary kowtowing to moral edginess, and (5) the obsession with a deeply ambivalent cosmic structure, you are left with something like Will Smith’s new movie, “After Earth.”

The reviews of the movie are clustered at the soporific boundary separating meaningless and phlegmatic. As Joe Morgenstern writes, “It…is…all…very…mysterious…and…deeply…dreary.”

I often have a sinking feeling even when watching cinematic blockbusters like the “Bourne” series or “Mission Impossible.” The question keeps occurring to me: ‘if these people inhabit such a nihilistic universe, why does any one of them care what happens to any of the others? Why haven’t they all committed suicide? Why all of this fervent chasing and killing of one another?’ This is what you come to, I suppose, when you empty reality of its spiritual and moral texture. Purposeless activity by good-looking droids on behalf of people and causes nobody believes in.

Much the same could be said about most of the passions and crusades that occupy our metrosexual culture. It is all…so boring.

Don’t get me wrong. There are good movies and books. “The Lord of the Rings” or either version of “True Grit” come to mind. Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn still write gripping stories. Don Delillo and Tom Wolfe write great literature. They just don’t contain liberal themes. Movies and books may be written or produced by liberals, but nobody, not even a liberal, will sit through a movie that adheres to an unrelenting progressive narrative.

Liberals, who don’t believe in their own sin, find it an indispensable component of their entertainment. They hold to no recognizable version of religion, but for them ontological evil is everywhere. They insist we adhere to their etiolated worldview when they themselves can’t and don’t.

On those occasions when liberalism is pursued consistently, you end up with a Jim Leach, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Leach was Mr. Rogers without the dash and charisma, whose platitudes and truisms were the stuff of sidelong parody. What’s worse, he really believed in his own earnest banality, in a way that diversity officers and climate change communicants believe in their own earnest banality.

So, if you want gesture without motion, noise without speech, gravity without gravitas (Morgenstern), by all means go see “After Earth.” If you want something you can live by, read Jane Eyre.

A few years ago, theologian Uwe Siemon-Netto wrote about the influence of the music of Bach on many Japanese young people. It’s not just the passages of scripture that often fill the chords of this music, but the spirit of the music itself, that was having such an impact on a younger, more alienated generation.

Not to be conspiratorial, but it is not at all inconceivable that in Europe the music of Bach and others will be found “offensive” as political correctness and cultural hyper-sensitivity work to excise anything of religious significance from the public life of the continent.

Those who wish to pooh-pooh such an idea simply haven’t been paying attention to the extent to which certain literature, religious speech and traditional values have come under what they call the “hermeneutic of suspicion” (an academic euphemism for progressive disdain). And when progressives disdain something, can suppression be far behind?

Ask many Christian inn-keepers throughout Europe, who are forced to violate their consciences and permit homosexual boarders or be sued out of existence.

My guess is that a majority of Europeans find nothing in this to be bothered about. The prohibition of some people’s religious rights in the interests of others’ chosen lifestyles seems not to be an issue.

Wouldn’t it be the height of irony for Bach cantatas and oratorios to be banished from the public square in the same cities where the minaret and the 3 PM call to prayers must be honored in the name of diversity?

In view of recent revelations about the IRS and other government agencies suppressing freedom of speech through administrative actions, I am reprising a piece I posted on Facebook about a year ago:

Three items: Just today there appeared in the news the story of Hollywood producer Gerald Molin, who was disinvited at the last minute from giving a graduation speech to a Montana high school. The principal of the school told him he would not be welcome because of his “conservative right-wing views.” Molin, one of Hollywood’s rare conservatives, co-produced the movies Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park, among others. 

Next, some of you will remember the article I posted last week concerning graduation speeches in general, and how liberal speakers are invited on average seven times as often as conservatives. 

Finally, recall that two weeks ago, when 43 Catholic organizations filed the largest lawsuit in American history against the Obama administration for its abridgement of the First Amendment via Obamacare, all of the major networks except Fox spiked the story. 

Is censorship alive and well in America? It would appear to be doing quite well, thank you. The above examples demonstrate three kinds of censorship: suppression of views held objectionable to some; selectivity of views that results in distortion; and refusal to report news that some consider harmful to their agenda. 

Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died this week at the age of 91. In 1953 he wrote a book that used to be a staple in high school English courses, the name of which was Fahrenheit 451. This dystopian novel has to do with a future society where the burning of books is considered necessary. Paper spontaneously combusts at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, hence the book’s title. Bradbury always said the book was not about censorship per se, but about the rise of a stultifying popular culture that focused on hedonism and entertainment. 

In the Fifties, intellectuals such as Bradbury were concerned about the deleterious effects of widespread television viewing. He feared that the enjoyment of literature would be lost. (These concerns and fears have been proven correct). In the novel, special squads of “firemen” (get it?) go about with the express purpose of burning books so that people would not be agitated by the ideas they might encounter in them. 

How might Bradbury write his book in today’s cultural setting? I doubt that he would center on the burning of books, hence the title would have to change. But the core image of a widespread culture that suppresses unpopular views through various kinds of censorship—soft and hard—would remain. 

Today there is an “official” Western culture. It is the creation of an interlocking trifecta of historical forces that both mandate it as the normal way to think and punish deviation from its norms. That trifecta is (1) the educational establishment, where, beginning with higher education and reaching down through elementary levels, a progressive agenda is made normative for our public schools, libraries and intellectual caste; (2) the entertainment establishment, where an ethos of romantic rebellion is constantly drummed into the heads of the young through rock music, television, movies and fashion; (3) the social “cloud,” a pervasive societal mood that promotes hyper-tolerance, moral relativism, and intellectual sloth. 

This “official” culture perpetuates itself through a mythology of liberation and defiance that masks its profound conformism. It does what every oppressive establishment does: It creates a bogeyman. In George Orwell’s 1984 the bogeyman is Emmanuel Goldstein. All citizens of Oceania are expected to spend two minutes daily denouncing Goldstein, who may or may not actually exist.

In Bradbury’s novel, it is the “readers,” a murky group that refuses to submit to the mindless hedonism of the cities.

In official culture today, the bogeyman is “the conservative, right-wingers” of the Montana school principal. 

This trifecta of historical factors has created a “adulescent” culture that is both sentimental and carnal, politically passionate and historically agnostic, religiously vacuous and moralistically self-righteous. 

Thus, a principal of a high school can unilaterally and quite openly “protect” his students by violating the very “tolerance” he might have spoken earnestly about at yesterday’s assembly. Neither he nor his students see any contradiction in this. 

Thus, as also recently happened,  a teacher can tell a student, without a whiff of irony, that being critical of Barack Obama in a social studies classroom can result in the student’s arrest. This same pony-tailed teacher may have recently celebrated the heroic acts of Rosa Parks during Black History Month. 

There is little doubt that this official culture exists today, and that it is promoted with great energy. There is likewise little doubt that much of that energy amounts to censorship of one kind or another. 

In Bradbury’s novel, the protagonist Guy Montag escapes the city and finds a subversive group in the countryside.  These are “the readers,” those who protect the books, and thus the old ideas. They live as hunted fugitives. 

Perhaps we haven’t quite come to that today, although you will be hard pressed to find conservative professors in most secular university humanities departments. Modern universities have been sanitized of conservatives of any kind. This is not stated policy, of course. But given a few more years, who knows?

If traditional ideas, Christian beliefs, and conservative teachings are already largely excluded from official culture, is it inconceivable that those ideas might at some time be made illegal, and those who hold them criminals? 

Bradbury wouldn’t have thought so.

Millions of Americans are and will remain unconcerned about the several scandals which have recently embroiled the presidency of Barack Obama. How can this be?

For many of them, plainly put, Barack Obama is the end of history. That is the defining truth of their lives. Their happiness is linked with his happiness; their troubles mirror his own. Ethical and moral considerations are unimportant except insofar as they promote Him, The One.

You and I find this outrageous and somewhat dreamlike, that there are those who consider themselves not subject to the laws and ethical imperatives that others of us, in our own imperfect way, attempt to observe.

This is not the ideal of Jesus, but of Lenin.

We should not kid ourselves by imagining these scandals will persuade the half of the country that voted for Barack Obama that he must go. Lying, cheating, stealing elections through bureaucratic intimidation–all with the blessing of a court media–are simply operational tactics to him, and increasingly for them. The cause is simply too important, too self-evidently righteous. Such matters of conscience are no better or worse than telling the truth or abiding by the laws of the land. They are what it is like to be beyond good and evil.

Getting caught is an occasion for anger, not repentance, as Jon Stewart has demonstrated with his obscenity-laced response to the IRS disclosures. Those who got caught or who revealed the sordid details of political favoritism in the IRS were stupid, and bad only insofar as they were stupid. Who let these useful idiots get out of line, anyway?

Letting four Americans die helplessly in Benghazi, followed by a web of lies to cover it up, are not acts of moral failure, cowardice or incompetence when doing so is part of a grand scheme to win a close election and retain power.

As one southern Democrat said in Congress, “death is a part of life.” This, unwittingly, represents the leitmotiv that threads through the most sacred tenets of progressivism.

Barack Obama is, in the thinking of the American bien pensant, the consummation of the historical process to date, and as such must be shielded from the Lilliputian slings and arrows of the older American way. He represents the summum bonum of the left-liberal-progressive-Democrat way of understanding time and place. He is the Nietzschean Übermensch.

All of this is poignantly frustrating to conservatives such as I, who imagine that the taint of scandal and ineptitude must bring this man and his minions to book. It will not. The breaking of our sacred institutions, the perversion of our heroic national myth, the harassment and prosecution of those who withstand the spirit of the times—all of this is but the necessary price you pay for the onward march of Progress.

In earlier instances of presidential megalomania, there were traditions, institutions and majorities that came into play to right the country. I fear these no longer exist in sufficient strength to pull the country back from the brink.

How it will end, I don’t pretend to know. But I am sure that, one way or another, we are not done with this.

Shortly after I graduated from high school, a classmate of mine volunteered for the military. Many did so in those days, in the era when the draft was still if full effect. I believe my friend Dale went into the Marines.

Dale came from a very religious family. Thus, it was especially disheartening when he came home on leave a few months later a completely changed individual. No longer the sweet, virginal young man I had known, Dale had now become crude, profane and cynical.

Military service had that effect on many young men of the ‘50s and ‘60s. As our culture in general began to coarsen, the armed services seemed to reinforce the worst trends of the times. The antiwar movement of the later ‘60s and the early ‘70s only added to the debauching of the warrior culture that had prevailed through WWII and Korea. Of course there were many exceptions, but in general, the American military by the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was at the lowest tide of its morale in living memory.

Today, our military is peerless, a fighting force with few equals in the history of the world. Though overextended, underfunded, and often unappreciated, the men and women of our armed forces are better trained, better educated, more professional, and more personally courageous than ever.

This in spite of the contrary, often hostile, impulses of the present administration.

How has this transformation come about?

Many answers can be given. The rise of technology has rendered the modern American warrior far more lethal and effective than before. Moreover, our society seems to have a more balanced understanding of the vital role of the military than was acceptable in the countercultural 1970s. Ronald Reagan’s influence cannot be overstated, with his Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and Naval Secretary John Lehman playing pivotal parts in the revitalization of modern fighting forces. Finally, the discrediting of the antiwar movement itself that resulted from the realization that it was not Vietnam, but the draft itself, that inspired that movement, has lifted a layer of confusion from the popular mind.

Still, these alone are more effects than causes, and do not in themselves explain the remarkable transformation of America’s military that began in the 1980s, and continues up to the present. Something else has taken place.

Robert Kaplan, a journalist with the Atlantic Magazine, has written over the years on this subject. It is his judgment that the most important factor in the resurrection of the modern American military is the widespread surge of evangelical Christianity. He calls this the “confederate” influence, by which he means that southern states, with their conservative and traditional values, have contributed not only the majority of modern warriors, but a worldview that is indispensable to military prowess, personal courage, and a sense of righteous cause.

In other words, an effective military presupposes a culture of spiritual certitude. Without that, as the experience of my friend Dale attests, militarism can lead to vulgarity and savagery. Only a strong religious self-confidence can mitigate and channel the violence necessary to defend civil life and freedom. Furthermore, only a vital sense of righteous cause can create the kinds of people we will increasingly require to face off against the fanaticisms that fill our world.

What are some corollaries of this?

First, attempts to abridge free religious expression within the military is a direct undermining of the very mores of the warrior ethos. Evangelism and spiritual expression are vital in a context where individuals face imminent mortality.

Second, the secular elites of the coastal aristocracies, the people who run the media, academic, and entertainment industries, by and large do not understand the degree to which their privileged way of life is made possible and defended by those who hold to the very religious worldviews they hold in contempt.

The current administration is a product of those coastal elites and their views of the world. Mr. Obama’s heroes and mentors—Van Jones, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Harry Boyte, James Cone, Marty Kaufman, and many others—is a Who’s Who of anti-war, anti-American, anti-tradition leftists. Ayers himself famously took part in the bombings of governmental buildings.

Mr. Obama is a pragmatist when it suits him, and at times he supports the military and its missions, but under it all he is a hard ideologue. Long-term, his basic impulse will be to defund and delegitimize the military.

Third, the current attempt to criminalize religious activity within the military would be suicide to the morale of those we rely on to protect us. Longer term, we must change the top leadership of the country to reflect values that are in line with national defense. This means a new president, and Republican majorities in the Senate and House.

But for the time being, we must resist attempts by those who seek to overturn a system they neither cherish, nor care to understand. I support my readers signing a petition being circulated by the Family Research Council to prevent these efforts.

Aristotle said that courage is the greatest virtue, because without it none of the rest are possible.

We have a strange definition of courage taking form in our culture. A basketball player tells the world that he is “gay” (homosexual, if you please). Such tokenism is considered courageous to the point that the Borgia in the White House calls him to congratulate and stroke him. The celebrity world, the only one that matters to our pretty people, fawns and falls over itself at the thought of another such “hero.”

Please. Does anybody remember what it is that homosexual people actually do to one another in order to, um, get it off? That conjures many things, but courage doesn’t come to mind.

Courage? How’s this? “RGIII” (Robert Griffin III, quarterback of the Washington Redskins) has said that “the tyranny of political correctness is holding our culture hostage.” He’s talking about the perennially aggrieved diversocrats who think “Redskins” is somehow racist. That’s real, career-threatening stuff for a professional athlete.

Unlike a third-string basketball player swooning the clean-fingernail crowd by humming their favorite tune.

Courage? Dr. Benjamin Carson, brilliant black neurosurgeon, taking on the groupthink of the black establishment and the slings and arrows of the progressive culturati.

Courage? Pastor Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American Christian, rotting away in Evin Prison in Tehran because he refuses to stop proclaiming the gospel. How about a phone call to him, Mr. President.

Courage? Political and religious prisoners slowly perishing in Havana’s gulags. That phone getting heavy, Mr. President?

Courage? The would-be whistleblowers on Benghazi whose jobs and careers are threatened by telling the world what really happened to our Ambassador and his security detail in Libya.

Where’s David Gregory when we really need him?

We live in a world of Potemkin morality, where noble words are used to describe meaningless gestures of acceptable custom, such as “coming out.”

First you lose the words. Then the language. Then the argument. Finally the civilization

We’ve all seen fundamentalism, right? Here are some of the more common features:

A paranoid, defensive, self-referencing style; a We-They worldview; the coining of an exclusivist language of values; the reinterpretation of common words; a general humorlessness and disinclination to irony and ambiguity; focus on a singular theme or subject.

Repression of traditional social graces; the turning of all human encounter into occasion for argument or conversion; a palpable  triumphalism and presumption of righteousness; the dogmatizing of all natural and social phenomena.

Ridicule and mockery as a style of public discourse; perfection of the put-down and the write-off.

A priori rejection of the possibility of one’s own failure or epistemological error.

Recognition, either implicit or explicit, of one paramount sacrament as the embodiment of the most holy.

Puritanical tastes and preferences; the exclusion of cognitive or methodological neutrality; proliferation of taboos and prohibited expressions amongst the initiated.

Polarization, the rendering of every person as either for or against oneself; the elimination of common grace; a division of reality into a large zone of the forbidden and a small redoubt of one’s own virtue.

An anti-intellectualism disguised as the scientific approach; the cherry-picking of studies and texts that support one’s own point of view; a constant appeal to certain “theories” and “sacred texts;” the rejection of countervailing evidence as mere bias or guile.

Taking refuge in conspiracy and third-way epistemologies; denial of the moral value of one’s opponents; an exegesis of history to make one’s own cause inevitable.

A schismatic impulse that increases with internal debate; excommunication of former allies; consummation of hatred towards those once closest to one’s own views; ever more explicit identification of heretics and deviants; ascription of moral absolutes to one’s enemies (not simply wrong, but evil; not merely mistaken, but sick).

Philosophical and pragmatic Manichaeism, where nature and history are interpreted as a cosmic struggle between (your) god and (their) devil; and yourself as one of the chosen few.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer called such people True Believers. Richard Hofstader once called them Christians. Many today call them Salafist Muslims. Increasingly, I call them Democrats.

We’re all familiar with them: people, departments, bureaucrats, government agencies, even fellow workers—all in charge of enforcing group standards that are only marginally related to the products and services the rest of us understand to be the purpose of our jobs and professions.

Every large organization has such overseers: schools, universities, corporate headquarters, medical clinics, hospitals, local, state and federal agencies.

In other words, these are the enforcers: the functionaries entrusted with making sure the rest of us abide by the proper ideology. In more brutal times, they were called commissars. Today they go by many harmless-sounding names, often involving the word “quality,” but not limited to that. They are the “quality assurance” people, but also the “risk managers,” the “review” people, the “control” people, the “diversity officers.” Their titles proliferate as quickly as their ranks.

Interesting, isn’t it, that those entrusted with the qualitative life of organizations spend the vast majority of their time and budgets on quantitative matters. They are the collectors and collators of stats, the disseminators of paper forms, the overseers of processes, the dispensers of certifications, the schedulers of workshops that reinforce their expectations and requirements.

They hear the complaints of the aggrieved, and monitor the attitudes of the offending. They administer freedom and quantify the happiness of the collective.

These people comprise whole echelons within organizations. Public school administrators, for instance, have grown in number far out of proportion to either students or teachers. Diversity officers within universities, both public and private, now consume huge percentages of already-tight operating budgets. Student senates and courts act in many cases as unfettered Star Chambers in efforts to impress behavioral and cognitive conformity on coed life.

This begs the question: Why are we awash with such people? What explains the role of these new workplace magistrates? Why do we unquestioningly accept their authority?

And who watches these watchers?

Any large bureaucracy, any complex organization, will require coordinated effort all down through the workforce. That has always been the case, but it used to be handled through the arts and mechanics of leadership and management. Today, however, it is different. Something has interposed itself between leaders and followers. Often neither of them is consciously aware of it, but it is real, and suffuses corporate and public life at every level in these times.

Until we come to understand this, and who is behind it, we will be tossed to and fro with the winds of the times, willing accomplices in our own merely quantitative happiness.      

Years ago I was a “member” of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In those days, prior to the BOMC becoming a scrupulous proxy of the zeitgeist, you could actually load up on what are usually called “The Classics.” So I did. Trading in my earned dividends, I amassed several of the collected editions of great writers: Michael Grant on the histories of Greece and Rome, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Updike, Henry James, Jane Austen, Stephen Crane, J. R. R. Tolkien, Henry Thoreau, and many others.

Most of these are lush editions carrying the BOMC imprimatur. “Someday I’ll read them,” I thought, “but in the meantime they’ll add a certain panache to my library.”

As the song says, “that rainy day is here.” Actually, it’s been here for quite a while. And, as some of my friends know, I’m working my way through Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” (1847) at the moment. Years ago I read younger sister Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” the strange, gothic drama whose characters are more natural forces than human personalities.

In these years of reading classic literature, I’ve developed what scientist-intellectual Leon Kass calls “a prejudice for reading old books slowly.” Slow reading helps move you away from the story towards the spirit of the book. “Story” is usually a mere vehicle for the greater meaning of true art. Our age is impoverished in so many ways, but nowhere so much as in its obsession with mere story. For children, it is true, story is central, but one of the requirements of adulthood is the transcendence of bare narrative in the interests of significance and self-knowledge.

Popular culture is, of course, the purveyor of “bare narrative.” Its stories of reality, circulated endlessly via movie, rock music, political websites, and network news, are the surface understandings that limit the historical awareness and cultural allusions of most people today. It wasn’t always like that. Our ancestors were by and large much better informed in ancient wisdom, and really much smarter, than we are today. They habitually read old books, slowly.

“There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things,” thought Jane Eyre when she talked with Mrs. Fairfax. “The good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries puzzled, but did not draw her out. Mr. Rochester was Mr. Rochester in her eyes; a gentleman, a landed proprietor—nothing more: she inquired and searched no further, and evidently wondered at my wish to gain a more definite notion of his identity.”

Our contemporary Pax Liberaliana is a strictly quantitative existence, limited largely to assimilating  information and, as Alistair MacIntyre says, “emotivist propositions.” It has little time for books, especially ones such as “Jane Eyre.”  

Thinking about Amanda Thatcher’s reading of Ephesians 6 at her grandmother’s memorial yesterday reminded me of something. The line between good and evil runs not so much between man and man, but right down through the center of each one of us.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was always bringing us back to this. So does much of the great literature of the world. From Abraham, Saul and David through St. Peter, Sophocles and Dante and down through Hamlet, Othello and Lear, finally into our own times in the examples of Heathcliff, Jean Valjean and Frodo Baggins — the great protagonists and heroes of literature have been souls divided against themselves. This is at the heart of what we mean by the tragic worldview.

Most of the great human errors, on the other hand, have shared another view of the human: the view that the primary dividing line runs between men, groups, tribes, sexes, traditions, even civilizations. These totalizing heresies have brought misery and blight into the world — Marxism, Naziism, much of Islam, some medieval Christianity, feminism, gender, race, and identity movements, to name just a few.

This is the Manichean view of reality held by much of the progressive contemporary world. Deeper than surface differences, it is what unites free-thinking leftists and Islamic misogynists, offense-taking feminists and child pornographers, Unitarian women ministers and killers such as Che Guevara.

The We and the They must be maintained at all cost.

Of course we are seldom faced by such pure types, but rather mixtures. It is the preponderance of type that is at issue here. Which view of humanity is given preference? That is the heart of it.

St. Paul in the words of Ephesians is at pains to remind us that our first battle in life is not with the Other, but with the Self. Until that struggle is engaged, nothing else matters, since it is possible to win the world and lose the soul.

It is not only the New Testament that teaches this, but, as I have said, much great literature as well. That is why those who will not comprehend this understanding of reality are, in the most literal sense, illiterate.