The Navy secretary's dangerously skewed priorities

 He's basing policy direction for his branch of the military on the utter hooey about the global climate being in a dire situation:

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro just released “Climate Action 2030,” a 32-page report which identifies climate change as an “existential threat” to the U.S. Navy and the nation. In the report’s Foreword, Del Toro writes that climate is “the focal point” for his tenure as Navy Secretary, and notes that both President Biden and Defense Secretary Austin share that view. The Navy Department, Del Toro writes, will be an “environmental leader” that takes “bold climate action.” 

Here's how this will translate into actionable steps: 

The Navy Department report establishes two performance goals: to “build climate resilience” and “reduce climate threat.” Del Toro’s stated goal is to have the Navy Department “reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” “stabilize ecosystems,” and “achieve … net-zero emissions by 2050.” Compare that to the goal of our nation’s most threatening naval adversary — China’s PLA Navy — which is to become the world’s leading naval power by 2049.

The Navy Department report is filled with color photographs of hurricanes, floods, electric vehicles, military families participating in an “oyster castle installation,” naval installations with solar panels, naval officers helping with disaster relief efforts, employees at a naval base planting salt marsh plants, electric-powered amphibious assault ships, and naval officers helping to install “mosquito surveillance and control equipment.” 

With regard to Del Toro noting that his focus is shared by Lloyd Austin and Biden, that's true. It's one of two points of focus, the other being the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion push.  

You want to talk some real existential threats? Situations such as Russia loading cruise missiles onto its submarines in the Black Sea and China surrounding Taiwan on massive "invasion rehearsal" drills in early May qualify or at least approach that status, don't they?

If the secretary is looking for a scenario to get that alarmed about, there's one staring him in the face. He doesn't need to get own board with a transition to play-like energy forms, the real aim of which would be to halt human advancement. 

 

The burden of being male

 I found this a right-between-the-eyes piece about spree killers. I'll excerpt at length, but I have some thoughts of my own to add. 

It finds a common theme among such individuals, discussion of which is unavoidable:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”

We don’t know yet what motivated Salvador Ramos, the teenage gunman who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, last week, but we do know that like most shooters, he was a misfit and social outcast. Early reporting suggests that he spent recent months harassing teen girls on social media, “repeating girls’ names until they paid attention to him”, and expressing to them his desire to get his “name out there” like the Canadian murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, was also an oddball with a history of making threats, although his immediate motives seem to have been more ideological than social or sexual. Even so, in the course of his white supremacist diatribe, he blamed “weak” “European men” for the degeneracy of the West and concluded that “strong men are needed to fix it”.

Whatever the nominal motivations behind them, rampage shootings are nearly always a product of wounded masculinity. “They are the most masculine of crimes,” says Ralph Larkin, a criminologist at John Jay College who has studied mass shootings for decades. “Can you think of more than four or five female mass shooters? There aren’t any.” Shooters, Larkin says, are “marginal males who feel they have been wronged by society, and so they pick up a gun. There is always a sense of violated entitlement, and I don’t care whether it’s school shootings or racist shootings.”

The phenomenon has its origins in that fabled decade, the1960s.  The impact of the upheaval wrought by that ten-year period, while already written about seemingly exhaustively, is not going to be fully comprehended for some time, if ever.

Modern mass shootings, according to Larkin, began in 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former Marine with an undiagnosed brain tumour, murdered his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower in downtown Austin, Texas, and shooting 14 people to death. Larkin speculates that the sudden rise in these shootings was a reaction to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and the corresponding rise in the status of women — a point on which some of the more historically minded murderers would no doubt agree. “We’re talking about toxic masculinity here.”

The boldface in the following portion is mine:

Toxic masculinity, of course, is a somewhat slippery concept. Colloquially, it refers to the elements of traditional masculinity — competition, stoicism, aggressiveness, physical strength, a willingness to resort to violence — that fit awkwardly or not at all into modern liberal culture. A 2019 explainer in the New York Times defined it as “a set of behaviours and beliefs” that men are socialised into from a young age, including “suppressing emotions or masking distress”, “maintaining an appearance of hardness”, and “violence as an indicator of power”. More than a few articles have flagged toxic masculinity, combined with Americans’ easy access to guns, as one of the causes of mass shootings.

These elements of masculinity can no doubt be “toxic” in the wrong circumstances — the problem is with the assumption that they are purely a product of cultural scripts, rather than reflections of something inherent in men. Francis McAndrew, a psychologist who has studied mass shootings, told me that while socialisation plays a role in encouraging some forms of male violence, it does not create it out of thin air. This is particularly true for young men, who are ultra-sensitive to status competition, which historically would have determined their ability to attract women and form alliances with other men. Young men, McAndrew says, have been selected to regard adolescent social hierarchies as a matter of life and death.

“Today, you can go to college or move to a new city,” McAndrew says. “But when we were evolving, whatever happened during adolescence was a life sentence. And if you established yourself as a bad dude that nobody messed with, that could work to your advantage. Our minds are still stuck in that past of needing to be paid attention to. And the guys who don’t get that experience all kinds of dark emotions. They feel left out, they feel like losers, they feel desperate, and they need to make a statement.” 

Truth right there. Before I found my niches in writing and music, to which I was driven in no small part by this need to establish for myself some kind of substantive masculinity, I tried sports, specifically,  ninth-grade football and track. It went badly. It put me squarely into the most blatant pecking-order environment possible. 

But there's also a generational aspect to this, at least in a lot of cases. My relationship with my dad was fraught and complex, a subject into which I could be tempted to digress beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that raising a son was a task he undertook with the greatest intensity. When I started running in the evenings in late summer before football practice got underway, I remember him telling a neighbor - the father of two boys, who had very set notions of what a solid guy was - "That boy wants to play football so bad he can taste it." No, Dad, I was just looking for a way to get noticed by girls.

Macdougald, in this UnHerd piece, points out that there's irony in modern society's search for individuation, for its inclination to venerate the original. Our DNA winds up grouping us anyway:

Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.

These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are. “Individuality” is wonderful when your true self is a tall and handsome swimmer with an unexpected love of classical cello, or a beautiful girl who likes to go backpacking with her friends. But who, really, is someone like Salvador Ramos, an odd-looking boy who disturbs nearly everyone he talks to, whose hobbies include shooting people with BB guns and throwing dead cats at strangers’ houses? Does anyone, really, want someone like that to be himself? I doubt it.

I'd already been thinking along these lines this morning when I ran across this piece, and I'll further flesh out those thoughts, probably in a piece over at Precipice. So many of us in modern society are clamoring for some way back to a time of stability and reliable norms. On the other hand, we disparage much about those times - before the above-mentioned  1960s - because there seems, from our twenty-first century perspective, much about life then that was stultifying and repressive and damping to the imagination. 

I'd wager that the situation is more complicated.

As I say, I think I'm going to have more to say about it.

For now, I'd just point out that exercising responsible stewardship over this thing called masculinity is both necessary and difficult.  

 

 

 

There's no denying that a certain portion of the 2A-defender segment of the population relishes in an in-your-face stance

 I stand by what I said in the previous post about President Biden leading off his remarks about Uvalde with the business about "stand[ing] up to the gun lobby." It was tone deaf in the extreme and blew an opportunity to strike a unifying note.

A word must be said, however, about something that's come to my attention since I wrote it.

The photograph that accompanies an ad for Daniel Defense is nothing short of obscene. Daniel Defense is the manufacturer of the rifle with which he Uvalde shooter murdered 19 people. 

The manufacturer of an AR-15-style assault rifle that Salvador Ramos used to kill 19 kids and two teachers has been slammed for posting an online ad featuring a toddler clutching a similar weapon just days before the massacre.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” Daniel Defense wrote in the ad shared on Twitter on May 16, eight days before the slaughter at Robb Elementary School.

The line refers to a proverb in the Bible.

In the attached photo, a boy wearing a T-shirt that reads #Rascal is seen sitting cross-legged looking down at the scoped firearm with a magazine lying in front of him. An adult’s finger is pointing at the child.

The ad was posted on the same day Ramos turned 18.

The New York Post article linked and excerpted above includes the photo. 

This is the latest round of the cyclical digging in of heels that the two sides squared off against each other in our society's culture war engage in. Now it's the anti-gun side's turn, and they'll no doubt have a suitably inflamed response.

We saw this kind of provocative gesture at the end of 2021, when two Congresspersons, Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, posed for Christmas-greeting photographs with their families, with everyone holding rifles.

Look, I understand the principle behind the Second Amendment. A gun is the ultimate assertion of individual sovereignty. The framers understood that government per se, even one as carefully crafted to uphold freedom as the one they were enshrining, could amass power of a degree that would imperil that sovereignty. A while back, I wrote a post that, as part of a discussion about Ukraine, reflected on why the Alamo has such ongoing significance for Americans. William Barrett Travis and the defenders of the Alamo were aware that their deaths were pretty much a certainty. Still, they were compelled by their sense of honor to stand for that individual sovereignty.

And the other side in out present squaring-off has a view of government power that indeed doesn't sit well with most people who hold freedom among the primary values that make human life worth living.

But this copping of an attitude among a certain portion of the gun-rights-prioritizing Right is engaging in a form of self-congratulation that has a discernible parallel to the virtue signaling that's routinely on vivid display on the Left. Just as that sector preens about the extent to which it cares, so its mirror opposite puffs itself up with a self-image as the only bunch that really values freedom, by God.

One last observation: It's a damn shame that a word like "patriot" has become so fraught with ideological charge that those who are not ate up with this yeah-and-what-of-it mentality eschew its use. 

It has been another aspect of Daniel Defense's advertising theme:

Daniel Defense had planned to hold an exhibitor's booth at the NRA's annual convention, being held this Friday through Sunday in Houston, and had stated it was "proud to reunite with thousands of patriots." However, those plans appear to have been scrapped as the NRA's list of vendors no longer includes the gunmaker, per the Washington Post. 

And one way I know that I can hit "delete" on an email is if the header includes the word "patriot." I'll speak plainly here. It's certain to come from some drool-besotted Trumpist who wants me to kick in to a political campaign or sign up for one of those idiotic "VIP Gold Card" memberships. 

What I'm delving into here is a little touchy. I understand that. The line over which one crosses into snobbery looms.  Or at least the danger of flirting with insufferable condescension such as that displayed by Barack Obama in 2008 when he talked of a swath of Americans clinging to guns and religion is something one must be aware of.

But the in-your-face stuff is out there. It's a major factor in our ever-increasing polarization. Therefore, it merits our attention. 

Uvalde

 1.) I've held off on posting about it because I wanted to see what facts began to become clear after the initial round of hot takes, rumors and disjointed bits of information. 

2.) The whole school-shooting phenomenon is a symptom of a root malady. I don't know that I have anything all that original to say about that. Bari Weiss sums it up effectively at her Substack, as does the editorial team at Commentary in its daily podcast for Wednesday, as does Dennis Sanders this morning at Ordinary Times. 

The way I would articulate the crisis is this: Nothing binds us together as a society anymore. Not institutional religion, not our identity politics-driven educational system. We have no agreed upon standards for what makes for great literature, music or visual art. We're obliterating the basic architecture of the universe, particularly human sexuality. Consequently, we believe in nothing outside ourselves. That leads to narcissism and nihilism, which can lead to the "I'm-gonna-get-me-a-gun-and-gout-out-and-make-a-STATEMENT!" mindset.

3.) Biden's remarks were abysmally tone deaf and divisive. "Stand up to the gun lobby"? Seriously?

4.) That said, I commend the prudence of the politicians who are stepping away from speaking spots at the NRA convention. The timing and optics are not good.

5.) Beto O'Rourke was rightly put in his place. He acted like a supreme jerk.

6.) The Uvalde police department seems to be supremely incompetent, as evidenced by the train-wreck press conference at which reporters couldn't get answers to some pretty direct questions. 

China's getting pretty explicit about its aims

 Hey, neighbors, how about joining us in a little agreement? It's perfectly innocuous:

China wants 10 small Pacific nations to endorse a sweeping agreement covering everything from security to fisheries in what one leader warns is a “game-changing” bid by Beijing to wrest control of the region.

A draft of the agreement obtained by The Associated Press shows that China wants to train Pacific police officers, team up on “traditional and non-traditional security" and expand law enforcement cooperation.

China also wants to jointly develop a marine plan for fisheries — which would include the Pacific's lucrative tuna catch — increase cooperation on running the region's internet networks, and set up cultural Confucius Institutes and classrooms. China also mentions the possibility of setting up a free trade area with the Pacific nations.

China’s move comes as Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a 20-strong delegation begin a visit to the region this week.

Wang is visiting seven of the countries he hopes will endorse the “Common Development Vision” — the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea.

Wang is also holding virtual meetings with the other three potential signatories — the Cook Islands, Niue and the Federated States of Micronesia. He is hoping the countries will endorse the pre-written agreement as part of a joint communique after a scheduled May 30 meeting in Fiji he is holding with the foreign ministers from each of the 10 countries.

One of the invitees ain't sold on the idea:

But Micronesia’s President David Panuelo has written an eight-page letter to the leaders of other Pacific nations saying his nation won't be endorsing the plan and warning of dire consequences if others do.

Panuelo said in his letter, which the AP has obtained, that behind attractive words in the agreement like “equity” and “justice” are many worrying details.

Among other concerns, he said, is that the agreement opens the door for China to own and control the region's fisheries and communications infrastructure. He said China could intercept emails and listen in on phone calls.

Panuelo said in his letter that the agreement is “an intent to shift those of us with diplomatic relations with China very close to Beijing’s orbit, intrinsically tying the whole of our economies and societies to them.”

He warns the agreement would needlessly heighten geopolitical tensions and threaten regional stability.

In his letter, Panuelo said the Common Development Vision is “the single most game-changing proposed agreement in the Pacific in any of our lifetimes,” and it “threatens to bring a new Cold War era at best, and a World War at worst.”

I concluded yesterday's Precipice piece on the Biden administration's foreign policy with this concern:

My concern is whether or not anyone with a foreign-policy-related portfolio in the administration truly grasps the magnitude of the foundational changes happening to the overall world order. The way things have been for the past seventy-seven years is not the way they’re going to be going forward. The world stage is not going to be the nice, safe environment for trade and cultural exchange to which we’ve become accustomed. It’s going to be a lot more raw now.

Mackenzie Eaglin of the American Enterprise Institute is likewise concerned, and far more equipped that I to flesh it our with details:

America’s military leaders state time and again that China’s forcible assault on Taiwan, and therefore our response to it, is a near-term challenge. Given the lengthy time to plan, program, build and field credible combat power, a 2027 problem is really one of today. Alarm bells should be ringing in Congress as the president’s latest defense budget cuts readiness.

Given that ongoing support for Ukraine is straining some key U.S. military supplies and munitions, everyone should be concerned the China fight would demand even more and faster. As this Pentagon team is plagued with “next war-itis” by overly biasing research and development dollarsto prepare for future wars over purchasing from hot production lines today, the result is the erosion of our few remaining competitive advantages.

For fiscal 2023, the administration requested $119.4 billion in readiness compared to the fiscal 2022 request of $109 billion. The 9.84% increase is a decrease in real terms. To simply match 2019 (pre-pandemic) purchasing power under the 2.2% inflationary estimates that the Pentagon and White House are using to tout a “record” budget, the military would need to invest $133.84 billion. That still would only be a flat budget under today’s inflation.

The Army, Navy and Air Force are confronting a $26 billion gap between what the budget request provides them once adjusted for inflation and the levels of funding they would need to maintain buying power at 2019 levels.

In 2013, similar across-the-board cuts came in the form of sequestration, or a self-imposed spending freeze that disproportionately harmed the military due to inaction by politicians on debt reduction. Uniformed leaders described the abrupt cuts as the “biggest challenge to the military’s readiness.” The result is not “tough but necessary choices,” but rather destructive early decommissionings and retirements, along with extended deployments and unsafe work environments for troops.

The administration is shooting itself in the foot by not sustaining the readiness of the very systems they seek to modernize. By overusing systems and facilities without adequate maintenance, they won’t be prepared for modernization upgrades once they become available. In other words, lack of sustainment delays innovation implementation.

China's hegemonic ambitions are not a sometime-down-the-road thing. We'd better get hustling. 

UPDATE: China and Russia conducted a joint military exercise while Biden is in Tokyo visiting with Asian heads of state. 

 

 

 

 

The SBC report - initial thoughts

 These initial thoughts are going to be of a personal-reaction nature. Not because I'm inclined to take the subjective approach to matters of cultural import - quite the contrary; I generally feel that it's important to take into account the objective context for phenomena on the landscape - but because I feel I may be representative of a significant portion of the post-American public that is coming across this news item. 

Significant, but probably not majority. Polls show that most folks, particularly within generations younger than me (I'm a Boomer), are secular agnostics at best. They generally conduct their lives as if the whole question of ultimate reality was way down the list of their priorities. (I was actually living that way until I began seriously grappling with the matter.)

I'd just wager, though, that there is a swath of the populace that, like me, sees this kind of development and reacts along the lines of "Well, just dandy. Where am I to go for some leadership with integrity as I try to deepen my faith walk?"

Not that I have explored the Southern Baptist route in my feeling-my-way-back process.

I've written about that process several times. One notable example is a piece I did at Precipice, my Substack, entitled I Never Feel Like Waving My Arms: Why I Still Need Apologetics on a Regular Basis." 

A taste:

It’s not so much lingering doubt anymore. I’m done with cynical dismissals and gotcha questions. I have no patience with atheist snark. It reeks of a desire to assert superiority, which is hardly a mark of mature engagement with life’s most pressing questions. 

No, I’m quite willing to concede that where I still encounter sticking points, the onus is on me to dig deeper. That’s principally because, for all the institutional rot in so many denominations and boneheaded means of evangelizing, the people I respect the most in this world and in history have been deadly serious about their faith. 

I delved more extensively into the entire journey in a piece for Ordinary Times entitled, "Church Shopping, Again": 

I’ve only been what I’d consider an actual Christian for a decade at most. I had to feel my way through a process of sorting out a lifetime of head trips to get there.I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where my father had been a member since 1945. Our family was regular about attendance. I sang in the primary and junior choirs, went to Sunday school after the service, and was confirmed at age 14. My parents, particularly my dad, were comfortable with the approach the congregation took toward a life of faith. The minister was a mix of sociocultural preoccupations – this was the 1960s – and a genuine theological foundation rooted in southern Presbyterian thought. This fit well with our family’s lifestyle. We and our neighbors were typically middle class. There was cocktail hour before dinner, a Republican political affiliation, civic involvement (my father insisted I join the Boy Scouts when I turned 11), and an emphasis on manners and comportment. There was, however, room for the occasional dirty joke told in the company of close friends. My parents slowly and with visible discomfort relented on issues such as hair length, and, by the time I got to college, my drug use. 

Let me back up, though. 

Shortly after I’d been confirmed, my father took the minister to lunch and announced he was leaving the church. The final straw, he told him, was the PCUSA’s donation to Angela Davis’s defense fund. Fast forward to my college years and early adulthood. I dove with abandon into the full panoply of secular-yet-sporting-the-facade-of-spiritual-earnestness offerings available to a boomer coming of age: beat literature, eastern thought, rock music, and the aforementioned drugs. My ideological conversion experience preceded my religious one by a good three decades. 

I’d been attending a Unitarian fellowship, and one Sunday morning, the guest speaker was from the local Peace Fellowship (which met at the Presbyterian church where I’d grown up). He’d just come back from a “fact-finding” trip to El Salvador and Nicaragua and was eager to bad-mouth Reagan policy in the region.I’d just read Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian, and knew the speaker was leaving the most important part of the story out. During the Q&A portion of the service, I stood up and said as much, going into arcane detail about the Marxist-Leninist nature of the FMLN and the FSLN. I shocked myself, and the congregation as well. Jaws dropped. From there, I subscribed to National Review and Commentary and pursued a master’s degree in history. I also became a conference junkie. 

The most memorable gathering I attended was a spring 1987 event hosted by Midge Decter’s Committee for the Free World in Washington. Among the groups that had people in attendance was the Institute on Religion and Democracy. That group was at the forefront of the effort to keep leftist ideology out of institutional Christianity.I wrote my master’s thesis on mainline Protestantism’s leftward drift as a major cause of its denominations’ bleeding members since the 1960s. It turned out to be a sprawling mess, because it had to pass muster with faculty advisors who were not sympathetic to my take.The years passed, and I focused on levels of life such as career, marriage, my zeal for conservatism, travel and music.I finally started church-shopping a little over ten years. 

My longest stay was at a little country Methodist church. I went because the pastor was a friend. He’d been a student in my rock and roll history class at our community college. He was a recovering alcoholic whose sermons drove home the seriousness with which we ought to take the matter of grace.He was also great at fostering a sense of community. Chili suppers were particularly fun. He and I would talk smack about who had the more authentic recipe. He was moved to another church, and my attendance tapered off. I could tell how the next minister leaned on the question of a looming UMC split on the question of gay marriage. The families with children quit coming. The community feel dried up.Then I tried a few other churches, and then the situations recounted above transpired.

Since that piece ran, I have found what looks increasingly like my church home. It's of a denomination that structures things congregationally - that is, each church runs its own affairs without any kind of district-wide or national authority involved. I like the pastor a lot. His sermons always stick with me throughout the week. The people I've met clearly genuinely care about one another, and a lot of them are smart and funny, two traits I always find attractive. 

I'm sure that the longer I attend and the more I get involved, I'll find collective differences of opinion on something or other, but I'm inclined to think these would be handled in a spirit of fellowship and recognition that it's happening within the body of the Lord.

So shouldn't that be good enough? Shouldn't I just shrug and say, "Well the Baptists certainly have some things to iron out, but I'm on a solid path"?

That doesn't work. During this feeling-my-way process, I've run into too many theological and doctrinal questions that I'll have to grapple with at some point. 

For instance, there's the matter of the egalitarian-complimentarian dichotomy, and the question of whether one's spiritual health demands that one take a hard-and-fast stance on it. To the point of this essay, it has much to do with Beth Moore getting hounded out of the SBC.

There's also the matter of race.

My position on the impact of Critical Race Theory and the whole Ibram X. Kendi-Robin DiAngelo take on race is along the lines of that of John McWhorter and Glenn Loury: it's toxic. It's one of the main sources of our societal brittleness. 

But the official SBC response to it comes off as egregiously boneheaded:

In December, several well-known Black pastors broke with the Southern Baptist Convention after its seminary presidents, who are white, released a statement saying critical race theory, an academic concept that racism is deeply rooted in U.S. institutions to the benefit of white people, was "incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message."

At the end of a grueling year of racial reckoning for American society, some Black leaders saw the statement as ill-judged at best and, at worst, as a callback to the overwhelmingly white Southern Baptist Convention's founding in 1845 in defense of missionaries who owned enslaved people.

"It was the most tone-deaf statement they could have made," said William Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, which is a member of both the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention, the largest Black denomination in the U.S.

Over 400 Southern Baptist leaders replied, criticizing those in the denomination who "deny the existence of systemic injustice as a reality."

"Many who recognize systemic injustices are labeled as 'Marxists,' 'Liberals,' and 'Critical Race Theorists,' even though they are theologically orthodox and believe in the total sufficiency of Scripture," they wrote.

"Future cooperation remains possible and preferred if we commit to biblical justice and repentance in the SBC. However, if these commitments are not upheld, then it will signal to many in the SBC that cooperation has already ceased to exist," the statement warned.

And with regard to the sexual abuse exhaustively documented in the Guidepost Solutions Independent Investigation,  we as a larger society have had plenty of opportunity for at least a couple of years now to have our collective gasp.

Russell Moore's departure from the the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission brought to light most of what the Guidepost report confirms:

In February of 2019, Moore had supported SBC President J.D. Greear’s push to investigate 10 Southern Baptist churches where allegations of clergy sexual abuse had been made. The Executive Committee chose at the time to follow up on only three of the churches.

“This Executive Committee, through their bylaws workgroup, ‘exonerated’ churches, in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, from serious charges of sexual abuse cover-up,” Moore complained in his letter.

He also pointed to an incident where a speaker at an ERLC conference in 2019 criticized the Executive Committee.

In the fall of 2019, during a conference on sexual abuse in the SBC called Caring Well, Moore interviewed Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed team doctor Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assault. Denhollander criticized the Executive Committee for how it had reported on the case of Jennifer Lyell, who had accused a Southern Baptist seminary professor of abuse. 

“That enraged some Executive Committee trustee leadership, who communicated that they were incensed that we would allow such a story to be told,” Moore wrote. After the conference, Moore said in the letter, he had received a veiled threat from Executive Committee trustees, characterizing it as being delivered with Mafia-like menace: “You’ve got a nice little Commission there; would be a shame if something happened to it.”

So, as a still-wobbly Christian, as a conservative who still believes in Frank Meyer's fusionism, in eternal verities, in the vindication of a search for the true, honest, just, pure and lovely, and in the centrality of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to everything everywhere, what is going on within the SBC is not helpful at all in tipping my internal scales away from doubt and cynicism toward solid conviction.

I just hang on to the belief that such an abundance of counterfeit must mean that there is such a thing as real gold. 

 

 

 

Saturday roundup

 I've come across a lot of gems lately.

Clara Piano's review of The Economics of the Parables by Acton Institute founder Fr. Robert Sirico at Law & Liberty is one of those that compels me to put the book in question on my gotta-read-soon list. 

Piano has chosen to focus on one of the themes Sirico explores: the nonsensical nature of envy. (There are others, such as usury and interest, government debt, and business cycles.) As Piano explains:

To quote the great Peter Kreeft: “Envy, though not the greatest sin, is the only one that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction.” Once it becomes clear where prices (and wages) come from, the role of private property plays in society, and what profit and loss signals mean, envy is uncovered as the irrationality that it is. Economists have understood the mechanisms behind these market phenomena since the 16th-century priests of the School of Salamanca, but it is up to each generation not to forget these lessons. This latest book by Fr. Sirico is evidence that he is doing his part.

The pearl-of-great-price parable nicely illustrates the subjective nature of value, and what, therefore, a fine thing it is when buyer and seller agree on the value of something and a transaction of mutual benefit occurs:

One common frustration with economics, capitalism, or “the market” concerns how things are valued. Economists adhere to the subjective theory of value, which simply means that goods and services have value in the market because subjects—you and I–give them value. Jesus also assumes this in his Parable of the Pearl of Great Price, as Fr. Sirico recognizes in his chapter on the subject:

The pearl was a luxury good and is presented with no condemnation in the parable. Instead, Jesus portrays the merchant as wise for having his priorities right in selling what must have been a substantial amount of property in order to obtain it. What might be seen as a pointless material good, may be seen by others as something wonderful, even a reflection of the beauty of Creation itself. People’s perspectives, and thus the value they place on objects, differ.

If high prices tempt us to view all businesspeople as greedy, or if we are angry because teachers and nurses aren’t paid as much as CEOs, we would do well to recognize that the only sustainable way to change market outcomes is by changing what people value. Valuations can be mistaken (and often are), and incomes say nothing about the objective value of persons as such. The important moral question is not where economic value and prices come from, but what we ought to value.

What would be required for a shift in how we value various occupations? Sirico suggests, by examining the Parable of the Rock, a greater emphasis on the cultivation of virtue:

the lesson is that many unjust market outcomes are the result of fundamental institutions like families, churches, and schools, not fulfilling their responsibility to form characters oriented toward the good, true, and beautiful. Much of what economists refer to as “transaction costs” would be eliminated in an economy consisting entirely of saints, but that is unfortunately not the world we inhabit. Economics reveals how we depend on God and man for our everyday needs.

Anton Barba-Kay's essay "The Once and Vital Center" at The Hedgehog Review is a right-between-the-eyes examination of a frequent theme of my own: the increasing brittleness of society as polarization worsens. 

His writing style is worth the price of admission:

[F]or a culture as besotted with what is fresh, radical, innovative, and revolutionary as ours, the election of the oldest president in US history remains just remarkably uncool. Nostalgia, left and right, is one of our most powerful political motivations, and Biden is our vinyl president, an anachronism panic-purchased from an AARP catalogue to remind us of a simpler time when Congress legislated and the president was a decent, PG-rated man abiding by the laws of meteorology and object permanence. Biden expresses our collective wishful thinking that we might return to the old normal, or to the kinds of principles redolent of nowstalgic normality: bipartisan negotiation, basic technocratic competence, appeals to truths in common, deliberative persuasion—in sum, the unum part of the Great Seal, or, politically speaking, those characteristics making up the myth known as “The Center”—that thing Americans love to love and hate to hate, but are doing their best to keep unraveling.

Don't go yearning for this center to re-emerge, though:

It seems clear at this point, during this breathing space between Trump 45 and 47, that the center is not coming back. The new normal consists not in a new pattern but in the inability of a new pattern to settle into place. Even at his best, even when not precariously rifling his mind’s file cabinet for the mot juste, wobbling on the brink of a very senior moment, there has ever been an unsettling undertone to Biden’s moderate words—suppressed exasperation, a strained note of if-you-don’t-knock-it-off-back-there-I’m-going-to-turn-this-car-around, a grimace of worry, as if some part of him knows he is trying to force the convictions we would like to be convinced of, but no longer can be. The recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was garlanded with the adjective “bipartisan” by all the friendly press, while the headline on Fox News (motto: “We keep your eyes on the Squad”) was “Biden, Democrats celebrate after $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passes—despite some ‘no’ votes.” Nor was it a given that the bill would pass at all, with its compromises decried as failure and capitulation up to the last moment. Far from demonstrating the continuing viability of the political center, it showed only that one can still motivate the party strays through fear of a new electoral whacking—and that a lot of pork can still buy a little love.

The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness; it was not a norm of comity, civility, deference, or bonhomie. People used to have more formal manners, but they did not necessarily exercise them in their dealings with one another. The aspersions cast on Lincoln, Hoover, Nixon, or Clinton are no different in zeal or degree from those cast on Trump and Biden—if anything, they were nastier.1 Nor was the center a golden-mean position occupied by high-minded people forbearing from the fray. Politicians appealed to the center because it remained the best way to win the most votes—not because most people wanted to avoid taking extreme sides on any given issue. If Tom Daschle befriended Bob Dole, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia attended the opera together, that was an effect of the comparatively genteel 1990s rather than a cause.

Why did the center disappear? We decided it was boring:

The center’s greatest virtue was also its greatest liability: It was an insipid notion, not uplifting in itself. Yet, precisely by virtue of being preferred by no one in particular, it also moderated all positions by resolving them into a form in which they could communicate with each other. Only to the extent that there was a center could there be a principled difference between right and left at all. (It no more makes sense to think of Stalin as a figure of “the left” than Hitler as of “the right.”) Absent the center, there can be no two “sides” to any argument, only splintered confrontations between friend and enemy.

That point makes for a nice segue into a recommendation of Andy Smarick's piece at The Dispatch entitled "In Defense of Norms and Institutions." Grownups undertaking the mundane work of actually governing is not often particularly sexy, but it's how civil society has kept going:

 [T]hose warning about Armageddon and peddling a fix almost always live in the world of abstractions. The direst assessments and predictions and most radical proposals typically come from those with little to no experience in the actual work of public leadership. Often this is because the business model of the commentary world rewards overstatement. But it’s also the case that public service generally leads the servant toward prudence. The practical wisdom that comes from facing real-world problems, teaming with others to develop workable solutions, and being held accountable for results reduces the urge to catastrophize. Those shaped by experience are likelier to think in terms of specifics instead of concepts, to see concrete choices instead of memes, to appreciate opponents as people instead of avatars.

I can only nod my head so far in agreement, though. As I've pointed out here at LITD, even at the local level, governance has shown itself to be decidedly not immune to the diversity-equity-and-inclusion infection. And no, I have no fix to peddle. I will say, though, that those who see it have a duty to point it out.

At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan does just that, and in fact demonstrates that Critical Race Theory and Great Replacement Theory have more common characteristics than proponents of either would care to admit:

A liberalism that believes that racial identity is the core identity for an American, that “whiteness” is a definable American characteristic that needs to be “dismantled,” and that the central political struggle in the US is between older whites and younger non-whites, is a liberalism helpless in the face of white nationalism.

In fact, it is a liberalism that fuels and empowers, legitimizes and provokes white nationalism. It sees race first; it sees groups rather than individuals; it denies the possibility of color-blind citizenship; and it sees white people as a “problem” — in Jon Stewart’s formula — bigoted until proven otherwise, inherently oppressive, a race to be stigmatized and diluted as quickly and as broadly as possible. And this form of racial essentialism — this anti-white racism — is now propagated by every major cultural, corporate and educational institution as if it were God’s own truth.

And this is the trap we are in. CRT and GRT are in a deadly and poisonous dance in our culture. They foster ever-increasing levels of racial identity in each other; they demonize whole populations because of skin color; they both believe liberal democracy is rigged against them; and the logic of their mutual, absolutist racial politics is civil conflict, not democratic deliberation.

Paul Rossi, a New York high school teacher, guest posts at Common Sense (Bari Weiss's Substack), telling a harrowing tale of how precarious his employment situation is, due to his refusal to buckle under to DEI:

Last fall, juniors and seniors in my Art of Persuasion class expressed dismay with the “Grace bubble” and sought to engage with a wider range of political viewpoints. Since the BLM protests often came up in our discussions, I thought of assigning Glenn Loury, a Brown University professor and public intellectual whose writings express a nuanced, center-right position on racial issues in America. Unfortunately, my administration put the kibosh on my proposal.

The head of the high school responded to me that “people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy” made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society. He added that “the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,” and discussing Loury’s ideas would “only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.” He preferred I assign “mainstream white conservatives,” effectively denying black students the opportunity to hear from a black professor who holds views that diverge from the orthodoxy pushed on them.

I find it self-evidently racist to filter the dissemination of an idea based on the race of the person who espouses it. I find the claim that exposing 11th and 12th graders to diverse views on an important societal issue will only “confuse” them to be characteristic of a fundamentalist religion, not an educational philosophy. 

My administration says that these constraints on discourse are necessary to shield students from harm. But it is clear to me that these constraints serve primarily to shield their ideology from harm — at the cost of students’ psychological and intellectual development. 

It was out of concern for my students that I spoke out in the “self-care” meeting, and it is out of that same concern that I write today. I am concerned for students who crave a broader range of viewpoints in class. I am concerned for students trained in “race explicit” seminars to accept some opinions as gospel, while discarding as immoral disconfirming evidence. I am concerned for the dozens of students during my time at Grace who shared with me that they have been reproached by teachers for expressing views that are not aligned with the new ideology.

One current student paid me a visit a few weeks ago. He tapped faintly on my office door, anxiously looking both ways before entering. He said he had come to offer me words of support for speaking up at the meeting. 

I thanked him for his comments, but asked him why he seemed so nervous. He told me he was worried that a particular teacher might notice this visit and “it would mean that I would get in trouble.” He reported to me that this teacher once gave him a lengthy “talking to” for voicing a conservative opinion in class. He then remembered with a sigh of relief that this teacher was absent that day. I looked him in the eyes. I told him he was a brave young man for coming to see me, and that he should be proud of that. 

Then I sent him on his way. And I resolved to write this piece.

And finally, there's "Frogs In Boiling Water," my latest at Precipice. It delves into the same basic theme as many of the pieces I'm recommending above. I daresay I have an original contribution to make, though. 

 

 

 

 

 

Which is it?

 Talk about mixed signals. 

This is an eye-opening move, is it not?

RUSSIA has started deploying nuclear missiles toward its border with Finland in wake of the nation's bold NATO bid.

Menacing mobile Iskander missiles were spotted being transported towards the dividing line as desperate Putin throws a troubling tantrum.

The video documentation is accompanied by some taunting narration:

Chilling dashcam footage appears to show a fleet of the deadly Iskander missiles en route to Vyborg - just 24 miles from the Finnish border - on Monday.

The commentary in the clip suggested a "new military unit is about to be formed" - in the immediate aftermath of the Nordic nation's NATO application. 

The person behind the lens explained: "As soon as the president of Finland said they were joining NATO, a whole division of Iskanders, seven of them…  is moving towards Vyborg.

“Looks like a new military unit is about to be formed in Vyborg or the region.

 “All the equipment is new, Ural trucks are driving it. So get ready Finns, to join NATO.

“New Urals, seven Iskanders, looks like a new military unit is being formed - well done.”

But then there's this:

[T]hree months into a Ukraine invasion that’s not going according to plan, and after two other countries close to Russia announced that they are joining NATO, Putin appears to be softening his tone, and resigning himself to the fact that NATO’s eastward expansion is happening anyway.

On Sunday, Finland—which shares an 800-mile border with Russia and was part of the Russian Empire for over a century—said it had applied to join NATO to ensure that its own national security would not be threatened by Russia in the future. On Monday, Sweden followed suit after a meeting amongst ruling party officials over the weekend, who voted to end the country’s 200-year neutrality policy.

“The issue at hand is whether military nonalignment will keep serving us well?” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Sunday. “We’re facing a fundamentally changed security environment in Europe.”

For months, Russian officials have warned against the two countries taking this decisive step, but now that it has actually happened, Putin appears to be doing his best to diminish the significance of the act.

"As for the expansion of NATO, including through new members of the alliance which are Finland, Sweden — Russia has no problems with these states,” Putin said Monday at a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance composed of several post-Soviet states.

This juxtaposition of developments bears watching.