Month: July 2012

Dismantling of a Culture

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Source: National Review Online | Kathryn Jean Lopez

America’s elites now disdain the rest of America.

David Gelernter, the Yale professor of computer science, has an alarming yet cautiously exuberant book out, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats). He tells us where we are and how and why we got here, and gives readers a pep talk, encouraging them to be the light (not “lite”) we need. He talks about it all with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is there a precise moment where you can say, yes, yes, this is the moment when America went “lite”?

David Gelernter

DAVID GELERNTER: The Cultural Revolution itself began right after World War II (when our leading colleges were still in the hands of the generally centrist WASP elite) and culminated around 1970, when intellectuals were in control, and preparing to use these universities as platforms for imposing their worldview throughout the schools’ establishment and cultural elite.

So America went lite starting around 1970. The big change was complete by the 1980s: In ’83, “A Nation at Risk” described the mediocrity of our schools; in ’87, Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind described the intellectual corruption of our universities. Both times, these disasters had (of course) already happened. And Bill Bennett, secretary of education under Reagan from ’85 to ’88, repeatedly drew the nation’s attention to this cultural disaster.

So by (say) 1990, America-Lite was a done deal. Each year since, we’ve seen a new crop of largely ignorant high-school and college graduates (children we have failed to educate) released into an ever dumber and denser cultural atmosphere.

LOPEZ: Is it a bit dramatic to call what’s happened here an actual “cultural revolution”? Was there blood? Mandates?

GELERNTER: American culture had its throat slit and bled to death at our feet. Isn’t that revolutionary enough? The blood is only metaphorical, but to the 40 percent of [all] infants [who are] born to single mothers this year, the consequences will be real.

In a piddling few decades, the world’s most powerful, influential cultural establishment happened to get demolished and rebuilt from the ground up. What had been basically a Christian, patriotic, family-loving, politically moderate part of society became contemptuous of biblical religion, of patriotism, of the family, of American greatness. The American cultural elite used to resemble (more or less) the rest of America. Today it disdains the rest of America. That’s a revolution.

Example: Look at (just) the arts in 1960 vs. 1990. In 1960, the whole country knew Robert Frost’s poetry; Leonard Bernstein was reaching large TV audiences for classical music with his Young People’s Concerts on CBS; theater and ballet were thriving, reaching larger audiences all the time; Hemingway was only the most famous of America’s serious novelists; and American avant-garde painting was a topic for Life magazine. (And European artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, and Giacometti were international celebrities.) In 1990, silence. High culture had become a term to laugh at. No blood; no mandates. Just an empty lot covered with weeds where the art used to be.

LOPEZ: Why is the “smashing of etiquette” so important? When I let — and expect and welcome — a man to hold the door for me and let me have the first cab again, will I know we’ve come through this storm?

GELERNTER: If these things are done in the archly cynical, self-conscious, self-mocking, God-forbid-I-should-actually-be-serious style in which we specialize (we post-cultural zombies) then of course they’ll mean nothing.

But if they’re done as a matter of course — like speaking grammatically — then (trivial as they are in themselves) they will speak eloquently about the actor and the society he comes from. These things used to be important because they said “this is an ‘ought’ society where we take our duties as seriously as our rights — not an inch-deep, egomaniac society where our rights are sacred but our duties are all owed to ourselves.”

LOPEZ: What was the “Great Reform” and what’s most important for us to understand about it today?

GELERNTER: In 1945, Yale and Harvard and their colleague institutions, America’s most powerful and influential colleges, were mostly run by and for the WASP elite. They all had intellectuals and scholars among their populations, but the ideal students, faculty, deans, and presidents were social and not intellectual leaders. The Great Reform was a beautiful impulse with dreadful consequences. The major colleges opened their gates to Jews, blacks, women, and other once-excluded groups.

What eventually followed was tragic. As May Day 1970 approached, Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, announced: “I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” These black revolutionaries were Black Panthers who were on trial for torturing to death one of their own members. They were terrorists and thugs. Or was Brewster expecting — in a sense, legitimizing — an armed insurrection against the American government?

LOPEZ: Why do you, a distinguished professor, call Barack Obama “an airhead liberal”?

GELERNTER: His casual, unscripted comments suggest that he is typical (only more so) of the graduates of his alma maters Columbia and Harvard: Whatever he knows or doesn’t know, he certainly projects no grasp of modern history or any history. He casually rejects the American Creed, which has always centered on American uniqueness, American exceptionalism, America as that city on a hill striving to be worthy to lead the whole world towards freedom, equality, democracy.

Obama doesn’t see it.

LOPEZ: But what about all the talk that he is a deep believer in all that is Left?

GELERNTER: I can’t see that he gives a damn about [being] left-wing or any other principles. He thinks Left and speaks Left because that’s what seems natural to him, where he’s comfortable, what he was trained to think. But did he walk union picket lines, as he promised to? Did he lead the country to a better understanding of cap-and-trade and the horrors of carbon emissions, or (say) a better understanding of the need to protect women from vicious Taliban rule in Afghanistan? Does he care about democracy? If so, why did he support card-check; why does his attorney general oppose photo-ID requirements for voting?

LOPEZ: And a “PORGI (Post-Religious Globalist Intellectuals) establishment.” Is that to get you tea-party cred?

GELERNTER: If we don’t understand who’s running our leading colleges, we can’t even begin to understand our own culture. Our most powerful colleges have gigantic cultural influence through their alumni, graduate, and professional schools (especially their law, journalism, business, and education schools) and their direct influence on sister institutions throughout the nation. So who’s in charge? Once upon a time, there was a powerful WASP elite in this country. Obviously they weren’t all the same, and obviously we can generalize (either that or we can’t think). The WASP elite on the whole was politically moderate and Christian.

And what sort of people are running our powerful colleges today? Or are they so diverse, it is impossible to generalize?

In fact they’re radically un-diverse. They’re not all the same, there are dissenters, but culturally they are far more uniform than the old WASP elite ever were. You won’t find lots of church-goers among them. You won’t find lots of patriots. You will find plenty of intellectuals. You can call the PORGI establishment whatever you like, but there’s no way around the fact that the culturally uniform, conformist group in powerful positions at top colleges are likely to be post-religious and globalist and intellectuals — or at least intellectualizers, would-be intellectuals. So call them whatever you like, but they’re PORGIs to me.

LOPEZ: Why is that “post-religion” bit so important?

GELERNTER: Post-religious thinkers don’t even live on the same spiritual planet as Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans. Old-time atheists struggled with biblical religion and rejected it; modern post-religious thinkers struggled with nothing. Since the Bible and biblical religion underlie the invention of America, it’s hard (unsurprisingly) for post-religious people to understand America sympathetically. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, the most sacred of American texts, is (precisely) a sermon describing North and South as equally guilty in God’s eyes for the sin of slavery and, ultimately, for the war itself:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

The quote is from Psalms 19; Reagan’s famous “shining city on a hill” paraphrases the gospels. Expecting post-religious, Bible-ignorant thinkers to grasp America is like expecting a gerbil to sing Pagliacci. The gerbil might be brilliant in his way, but he’ll never make it in opera. (If this be species-ism, make the most of it!) How can my post-religious colleagues and countrymen, many of whom have never even opened a Bible, understand Lincoln or America or Americans?

LOPEZ: What do you mean when you say that “conservatives today are not complacent — but they can’t let themselves become complacent about complacency.”

GELERNTER: They can’t relax and take things easy and let the big, deep problems work themselves out. Conservatives are too apt to be obsessed by politics and to cede culture to their opponents. For a generation, conservatives have shrugged off education, and now they face a hard slog merely to defeat a grandiose failure of a left-liberal president in a disastrous economy, in dangerous times, in what is still a center-right nation. If this isn’t gross Republican incompetence, show me what is.

LOPEZ: Do liberals rage at injustice? Do conservatives love family, friends, and country? Do either do either particularly well? How can such a generalization be helpful outside of a country-music song?

GELERNTER: Yes, honest liberals do certainly rage at injustice. Of course conservatives love family, friends, and country. Not all conservatives are paragons (to say the least) and not all liberals are inch-deep phonies. But liberals and conservatives have chosen different emotions to display on their marquees.

Such generalizations are not merely helpful, they’re mandatory if we hope to stay sane. If conservatives can’t recognize the honest and honorable impulse at the bottom of liberalism, they aren’t serious; they are embarrassments to their fellow conservatives. When liberals can’t do likewise with respect to conservatives, we get the dishonest (sometimes obscene) trash-attacks on a George W. Bush or a Dick Cheney or a Sarah Palin.

LOPEZ: You write that we are “facing a terrible problem with a fairly simple solution. But the problem must be solved soon, or we lose a crucial advantage. There are still plenty of people around who were educated before the cultural revolution and remember the way we were: our schools, colleges, the press and the civilized world generally striving — with partial success at best, but fine persistence — to tell the truth. Principled conservatives and liberals remember it all fondly. They don’t want to go back in time. They don’t want to restore an old world; they want to build a new one that we can be as proud of as William DeVane was proud of America in 1957. We want a country whose national leaders are known for ‘integrity, idealism and skill’; where our college teachers are ‘learned and devoted’; where America herself is ‘the wonder and envy of other nations.’” You add: “In short, we want to go back to telling the truth.” But whose truth, Professor?

GELERNTER: Everyone’s truth. Mankind’s. Truth transcends time, place, and cultural tastes. This is a revealing, sad question for what it says about the pervasiveness of deconstruction, post-structuralism, and other games we play with the truth, all so much easier and more fun than actually finding the truth. Who does Leviticus 19 belong to, or the Ten Commandments? To mankind, and they are true for all mankind. A whole generation has been taught that truth is just a matter of taste. This is false.

Sure, we disagree about evidence. Sometimes we ask the wrong questions. We might be the jury at a murder trial, with twelve different opinions among us and no sure way of knowing who is right. But one thing we do know for sure: The truth exists, whether we can find it or not.

LOPEZ: Is it really possible to move forward with the best of what we’ve had in a united way? Some of the religiously affiliated institutions went bankrupt, or were otherwise bought out or closed. Believers don’t know what they believe quite like they used to, memorizing the Baltimore Catechism and all. Now we’ve got a government openly mandating the religious to the sidelines while using altar boys to make the sale. Aren’t we beyond hope here in any kind of rebuilding? Some of us may remember . . . vaguely . . . but are the blueprints and the work ethic still there?

GELERNTER: This was and remains a religious country. There is nothing hypothetical (barring some unthinkable catastrophe) about the survival and success of Judaism and Christianity in America. Many left-wing religious brands are out of business or flailing helplessly as they take on water, but up-to-date religion never did make sense, because religion is our lifeline and a sort of love letter to our families, our ancestors, and our better selves.

LOPEZ: How is Internet education key to the wave of the future? Wasn’t it a decade ago?

GELERNTER: Sure. I’ll look at this in a personal way: In 1991 I published a book called “Mirror Worlds,” claiming that the cybersphere would turn into (in effect) the smooth surface of a New England millpond, reflecting everything around it. I claimed we’d “stop looking at our computers and start looking through them.” It’s taken some time, but we are clearly moving in that direction. In the mid ’90s I claimed that time-ordered real-time messaging streams (like Twitter or Facebook walls, or blogs, or our own much earlier Lifestreams) would become the dominant model of the Internet and web; it’s taken a while, but it’s coming on stronger all the time. I still think that nearly all the Internet education software I see is lousy. (Naturally I think mine is better!) But this is a trend that is underway, there is no longer any doubt of that.

LOPEZ: How are “self-hating WASPS . . . as important a phenomenon as self-hating Jews”?

GELERNTER: In 1945, WASPs ran our powerful colleges and the cultural elite. No one could force them aside. The feds had yet to dig their nails deep into university flesh. Civil-rights laws were weak. The weather reports all said “increasing liberalism”; that was the mood of the times. Nonetheless, socially prominent WASPs looked at these institutions their ancestors had built, funded, and supplied with art and money and books and buildings — and stepped aside.

As the WASPs passed on the torch, they spoke often about the rightness of tolerance and equal opportunity. But there’s another element to this revolution, and its overtone you only catch if you listen carefully (and yet it’s important).

When the British and French withdrew from their empires during this same post-war generation, they spoke of the justice of what they were doing. But they were also exhausted. They no longer had the heart for imperialism. They blamed themselves and (more) their ancestors for having got them empires to start with. They felt guilty, and we saw the up-flare of European self-hatred that has been so important to the modern world ever since.

Kingman Brewster was a hero of the cultural revolution. He was also a hero of the WASP elite, a lineal descendant of William Brewster, a leader of the Mayflower Pilgrims and of Plymouth Colony; he was suave, charming, accomplished, and brilliant. And he was very publicly “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” Robert Lowell, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara were all important, self-hating WASPS who came to dislike the nation their ancestors had built.

LOPEZ: You write that “our nation’s most serious problems are not economic or political. They are social, cultural, educational and (above all) spiritual. Conservative thinkers and leaders tend to ignore such problems. But our cultural oxygen is being displaced by a steady seep of poison. We had better act soon; in fact, now.” You then say with some confidence that “we will.” What gives you that confidence? Is it anything you are seeing before your eyes?

GELERNTER: Americans have come through tougher crises. Until the middle of 1942 we got beaten and fell back again and again before the Japanese Empire. The Cold War was half a century of jangling tension. Americans rise to the occasion. That’s our style.

LOPEZ: So much is cultural in America-Lite, but how much rides on this coming election? Is it pivotal on its own, or does it have to bring with it a certain cultural component? A rage and a love made manifest in civil society?

GELERNTER: A lot rides on it; too close for comfort. But let’s assume we beat Obama. Certainly he is ripe for beating. We breathe a sigh of relief — and go on turning out pre-programming, left-tilting airheads, class after class. The exact same thing happens if Romney wins. Obama has become a four-alarm fire in this dangerous world and we must beat him. Even so, America herself will win only when we get rid of our dangerously infected schools and universities and get new ones. In the long run, I am all for Harvard and Yale and Princeton coming back strong — but only after losing the best students year after year to Internet colleges — a string of losses that will change their whole worldview. Internet colleges won’t teach right-wing history to make up for today’s ubiquitous left-wing history. They’ll just teach history.

LOPEZ: Why do you quote Henry James so much?

GELERNTER: He’s got a lot to say.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Wesley J. Smith: Freedom of Worship’s Assault on Freedom of Religion

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– From the essay:

Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

Strident secularism is on the march and freedom of religion is the target, with secularist warriors attempting to drive religious practice behind closed doors by redefining religious liberty down to a hyper-restricted, “freedom of worship.”

Source: First Things On the Square | By Wesley J. Smith

Until very recently, the West saw religious liberty as a weight-bearing pillar of human freedom. Thus, the very first clause of the First Amendment (1789) states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

More broadly, Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

That’s unequivocal. Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

These days, that and $2 will buy you a small cup of Starbucks coffee. Strident secularism is on the march and freedom of religion is the target, with secularist warriors attempting to drive religious practice behind closed doors by redefining religious liberty down to a hyper-restricted, “freedom of worship.”

What’s the difference? Under freedom of worship, the Catholic and Orthodox churches both remain perfectly free to teach that the Eucharistic bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ. Muslims can continue to require women to be segregated from men at the mosque. But outside worship contexts, the state may compel the faithful to violate their faith by acting in accord with secular morality rather than consistently with their dogmatic precepts.

These assaults on religious practice are becoming increasingly commonplace. For example, a German trial judge recently outlawed the circumcision of children on the basis that the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”, to carry out their religious beliefs.

Circumcision is controversial today, but redefining the rite into “mutilation” or “child abuse” is blatant secular imperialism. For millennia, faith adherents have believed that circumcision is done for boys (rather than to them). Indeed, prohibiting the rite deprives male children of these faiths a religious benefit to which they are entitled while dispossessing them of a core aspect of their personal identity.

Jewish and Muslim religious practice is also under assault in the Netherlands, where a new law may outlaw methods of animal slaughter that comply with the obligations of kosher and halal. Religious liberty? What’s that? The atheist bioethicist Peter Singer sniffed that Jews and Muslims who don’t like the ban should just become vegetarians, writing that since the ban would not prohibit worship practices, no freedoms are being infringed.

We see the same freedom of worship assault against freedom of religion in President Obama’s “Free Birth Control Rule.” The Affordable Care Act now requires that most employers provide their workers with free contraception, sterilization, and other reproductive services. True, the rule exempted religious employers that oppose contraception, but the shield was drafted so narrowly that—surprise, surprise—it only protects freedom of worship. Specifically, to qualify for a religious exemption:

The “inculcation of religious values” must be the employer’s “purpose” for existing;
The employer must “primarily” employ “persons who share its religious tenets.”
The employer must “primarily” serve “persons who share its religious tenets.”

Lest there be any doubt, the rule further states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.” Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the order’s elementary school employees, probably would.

Religious liberty is also under assault from efforts to eviscerate the right of medical conscience. Victoria, Australia, for example, legally compels every doctor to participate in abortion—even if morally or religiously opposed—either by doing the deed when asked, or referring the pregnant patient to a doctor they know supports abortion. The Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) recently promulgated a similar ethical rule requiring all Dutch doctors to kill, or if opposed on religious or moral grounds, refer when legally qualified patients ask to be euthanized. In other words, the affected doctors are free to believe that participating in abortion and euthanasia are egregious sins; they just can’t legally or ethically escape so sinning and remain in practice.

At this point in the discussion, opponents of freedom of religion may bring up the Aztecs, arguing that a robust view of religious liberty would require allowing children to be sacrificed to pagan gods. Not so. Even fundamental liberties are not absolute. The law properly prohibits religious practice when there is a compelling government interest. For example, the state can force a Jehovah’s Witness child to be given life-saving blood transfusions even though doing so violates Witness dogma.

Here’s the bottom line. If the freedom of worship assault against freedom of religion succeeds, creed-motivated philanthropic and service organizations such as the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and religiously sponsored schools, hospitals, nursing homes, pregnancy counseling centers, etc., will be forced to choose between acting contrary to their faith and closing their doors. That would not only make our society far less free, but would materially harm the millions of men, women, and children whose lives are immeasurably benefited by faithful people practicing their religion in the public square.

RESOURCES

Peter Singer, The use and abuse of religious freedom

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

Book Review: The Second Russian Revolution (1987-1991)

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Belows is the review I wrote of Leon Aron’s new book Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991. It is a great read and I recommend it highly. It chronicles Glasnost, the period of awakening in Russia from around 1987-1991 that, Aron argues, was a moral awakening, indeed a repentance, of the first order that enabled the Russians to throw of the spiritual shackles of Communism.

Nothing is more powerful than a word spoken in truth, wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably one of the most influential moralists of the last century. Glasnost was the period where speaking the truths that got you killed just a year or two earlier resounded ever more loudly in the public square. Lest we complacent Westerners take this development for granted, let’s remember that we have largely left off believing that truth even has an objective character. We are very close to the (philosophical) materialist assumptions that justified such great brutality and suffering in Russia and which Glasnost finally overthrew.

The review was published by the Acton Institute.

Source: Acton Institute | By Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse

Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991. By Leon Aron (Yale University Press, June 2012). 496 pages

“There are different ways to understand how revolutions work,” writes Leon Aron in his new book Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and the Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991 that chronicles the collapse of Soviet Communism during Glasnost from 1987-1991. The most dominant is structuralism, an approach that draws from Marxist thought and sees the state as the central actor in social revolutions. In the structuralist view revolutions are not made, they happen.

Aron explains that structuralism has some merit because of its chronological linearity. It can reveal the events that lead from point A to B to C; an important function because the historian’s first step is to grasp what actually happened. But structuralism also has a grave flaw: the materialist assumptions (“objective factors”) informing it are deaf to the “enormously subversive influence of ideas.”

Structuralism, specifically, is subservient to Marxist dogma, particularly the relegation of the ideas into the category of idealism (non-being). It defines man as a passive actor in the fixed and impersonal currents that drive history that renders the historian blind to man’s moral character, particularly constituents such as “truth, memory, ideas, and ideals” that shape purpose and meaning and by them drive events.

Glasnost was a social revolution of the first order driven by these moral constituents, Aron writes. It arose not by the will of the Soviet state but because the state was already weakened. Aron quotes Tocqueville who first described how weakened states till the soil that leads to their dissolution:

It is not always that when things go from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people … suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressures …Thus the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seems to mend its ways … Patiently endured for so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance appears to become so intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.

Glasnost arose out of Perestroika, the effort to revive the moribund Russian economy by introducing market-based reforms and foster an increasing openness to the West. Internal progress was stymied by the moral rot that pervaded all levels of Russian society (alcoholism, cronyism, abortion, waste, fraud, despair, censorship, food shortages, murders, exiles). Perestroika could not succeed until the rot was first confronted.

Dry Tinder

Although Glasnost officially began in 1987, an event one year earlier lit the fuse. Unlike earlier Soviet rulers, Mikhail Gorbachev had a visceral dislike of the brutal terror that forced the compliance of Russian subjects to centralized economic planning. He choose instead to relax the restraints of the state on its subjects. After heated debate in the Politburo, the anti-Stalinist film Pokoyanie or Repentance was released and the floodgates opened. Russians were about to breathe the air denied them since Lenin first seized power.

Glasnost quickly took the shape of a national repentance in the full sense of that term. Censorship disappeared, not by state decree (the leadership had originally hoped to limit debate) but because millions of Russians sensed the shackles being broken and joined in to expunge the lies that held the terror state in place.

The discussions took place in journals and newspapers, on television, in homes and marketplaces. A flood of written material was produced, much of which Aron studied to shape his historical narrative, selecting that which that illustrated with great clarity the radical nature of this second revolution.

The recovery of the past is laborious and often painful because the loss of historical memory creates the loss of individual identity. The New Man of the Collective, that febrile illusion of materialists everywhere – be it Jacobin, Soviet, Nazi or any other incarnation – was the first lie that needed to be named and repudiated.

The loss of historical memory created what Aron calls the “deafened zone,” a place in the national consciousness that contained no memories, that was enforced by an exhaustive policy of censorship that not only concealed facts but by the “hourly construction and maintenance of a ‘parallel,’ ‘brilliant’” reality created a history that never existed. Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Grossman’s Life and Fatewere published for the first time during Glasnost and did much to define what the “deafened zone” actually was.

One develops moral self-awareness first by hearing truth and then seeing and acting on it. Once the “brilliant” history was revealed as the continuous cascade of lies that it was, the voices of those muted by the cacophony of the state-controlled media began to be heard, faintly at first but louder as more witnesses stepped forward. First up were those who recalled seeing friends and relatives of the millions murdered by the barbarous regime.

It is difficult to grasp the scope of Soviet brutality. The best we can do is examine the individual stories and multiply them again and again until the limits of imagination are reached. The suffering is too great for any one person to perceive although people who value truth will see that the ideas driving the regime were conceived in the fetid bowels of hell. Nothing else explains such abject depravity.

Myths Shattered

This was only the beginning. “Any lasting polity espouses and propagates essential beliefs by which it lives,” writes Aron, and the Soviet Union “spawned a powerful mythology that legitimized political, economic, and social arrangements.” Sustained daily by constant propaganda and censorship and the restriction on travel except for the elites, it imposed severe penalties on any new version of the Soviet past and present. Yet, between 1987 and 1989, “virtually every constituent myth of this tale was shattered by uncensored truths.”

Legitimizing myths were becoming “unraveled” — a very dangerous development for the leadership because delegitimizing of the regime was a direct challenge to its power. Aron chronicles in considerable detail the unraveling that, in historical terms, happened in the blink of an eye. Here too Russian intellectuals began to weigh in. Economists pored over the “official” economic reports and pointed out they were riddled with lies; military analysts revealed the war in Afghanistan was a defeat (Russians believed they won) and unearthed the truth behind the Great Patriotic War, particularly Stalin’s enthrallment with Hitler and the millions fed as fodder to the Nazi war machine because of his inept leadership.

Aron describes too the damage that forced collectivization imposes on the soul. Glasnost enabled the Russian to see that Homo Sovieticus was both a “symbol of a spiritual crisis and its epitome.” The Soviet Man forgot how to work, was driven by envy, sloth, lying, and stealing, driven to drink, both humiliated and humiliator. The virtue necessary for stability and progress was methodically and mercilessly ground out of almost everyone. Despair left the soul and the nation bare.

Moral crises are healed by repentance. In Greek, repentance (metanoia) means “a turning or change of the mind;” literally a new way of seeing. Although Aron does not mention it, the call to repentance was made years earlier. In 1975 From Under the Rubble, a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and six other dissidents (all living in Russia at the time) was published that outlined with uncanny accuracy the steps necessary for the Russian restoration.

Glasnost, like every modern revolution, “was about reclaiming and extending human dignity … ” At first it imposed on the Russian leadership a new definition of socialism (Gorbachev sought to meld the new found freedom with socialist ideas) and foreign affairs. As time went on however, it became increasingly clear that the great collectivist experiment needed to be scrapped altogether. New ideas emerged that proclaimed that the quality of domestic and foreign policy were indissolubly dependent on the moral health of the citizenry. Universal values were to be recovered and implemented. A new democracy had to be crafted that was “based on deep-rooted morality and conscience.”

Aron’s masterful work may also contain a prophetic warning. Russia repudiated the materialist ideas that eroded the barriers against the tyranny while the nations of the West are embracing them. If Russia’s history proves moral renewal breaks the shackles of darkness, then our moral corruption may be blinding us to an enslavement coming our way.

Catholic Online: Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America Suddenly Resigns His Office: Why?

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Unbeknownst to most Orthodox, Met. Jonah was the voice of Orthodoxy in the other Christian communions. His words reached into Baptist meetings, Episcopal assemblies, even the Vatican. He traveled these halls effortlessly because he held to the simple teaching of the Gospel but in the fullness of the Orthodox moral tradition. That enabled him to be heard by our non-Orthodox brethren and strengthen them at the same time for he was able to impart a depth and wisdom that many were looking for but had yet to discover.

Met. Jonah’s successes, as well as the genuine fondness and respect shown him by Christians of other communions, shows us that Orthodoxy can speak to the larger culture and that it has some very important things to say. It also shows, as his forced retirement this week makes clear, that the afflictions borne by other other communions afflict us as well.

From the article:

There is another element in this which is of immediate importance, and directly follows on the above. As was written about by Robert Terwilliger, a great Anglican divine of the 20th century, there is a coming realignment within Christianity, one which we can already see the strains of. Whenever schisms happen within the Church, they are generally because certain individuals lead a group out of the Church, being disobedient to the Faith and Doctrine, and refusing to submit to the authority of the hierarchy, which is trying to discipline them and call them to repentance.

What is happening now is somewhat different: a split between those who hold to traditional, biblical faith as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church and the ecumenical councils; and those who espouse a secularized belief, subject to the rationalizations of the scholars according to contemporary philosophy, who dismiss the Fathers and the Councils as no longer relevant, who dismiss the moral teachings of the Scriptures and Fathers as culturally relative. This could be called, by one side, a break between traditional Christianity and post-modern worldly philosophy. Or it might be labeled as the freeing of people from fundamentalist oppression to the light of their own reason.

Source: Catholic Onine | By. Dn. Keith Fournier

There is a radical cultural shift away from traditional Christianity, toward something unrecognizable

I followed with great interest and Christian hope the work of Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America. His passionate stance for the rights of our first neighbors in the womb and efforts to promote alliances between faithful Christians – Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical and Protestant – have set him apart. His compelling personal faith journey from an Anglican background into the Orthodox Church, by way of the fathers of the Church, is personally inspiring. I am a revert to the Catholic Church and walked a similar road through the apostolic Fathers home to Rome many years ago. Why did he suddenly resign?

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – I have followed with great interest and Christian hope the work of Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America. His passionate stance for the rights of our first neighbors in the womb and efforts to promote alliances between faithful Christians – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – have set him apart. His compelling personal faith journey from an Anglican background into the Orthodox Church, by way of the fathers of the Church, is personally inspiring. I am a revert to the Catholic Church and walked a similar road through the apostolic Fathers home to Rome many years ago.

Last month the Primate gave an address to the leaders of the Anglican Church in North America, who gathered in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. He showed his prophetic insights into the common struggle which faithful Christians must engage. Here are a few excerpts:

“There is another element in this which is of immediate importance, and directly follows on the above. As was written about by Robert Terwilliger, a great Anglican divine of the 20th century, there is a coming realignment within Christianity, one which we can already see the strains of. Whenever schisms happen within the Church, they are generally because certain individuals lead a group out of the Church, being disobedient to the Faith and Doctrine, and refusing to submit to the authority of the hierarchy, which is trying to discipline them and call them to repentance.”

“What is happening now is somewhat different: a split between those who hold to traditional, biblical faith as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church and the ecumenical councils; and those who espouse a secularized belief, subject to the rationalizations of the scholars according to contemporary philosophy, who dismiss the Fathers and the Councils as no longer relevant, who dismiss the moral teachings of the Scriptures and Fathers as culturally relative. This could be called, by one side, a break between traditional Christianity and post-modern worldly philosophy. Or it might be labeled as the freeing of people from fundamentalist oppression to the light of their own reason.”

“This is not the protestant/catholic divide; it is not the evangelical-charismatic vs. mainline divide. It cuts across all communities in the West, even affecting the Orthodox and Roman Churches in some degree. As Anglicans, you are no strangers to this: it is the reason you are here, and not in TEC. It is creating a massive realignment within Christianity; those who hold to the traditional Scriptural and patristic Faith and discipline of Orthodox Catholicism; and those who reject it, criticize it, and I will add, as you well know, persecute it. You and the ACNA are part of that realignment.”

“There is a radical cultural shift away from traditional Christianity, toward something unrecognizable. The “Secularists” (for lack of a better, non-pejorative term) reject the virgin birth of Christ, the resurrection, even His Divinity; that His words are recorded in the Scriptures and that the Scriptures are even relevant to our days; rather they are oppressive and keep humans in darkness. Another Episcopalian bishop, a certain Mr. Spong, wrote that “Christianity must change or die,” referring to traditional orthodoxy, espousing the radical secularization of the Episcopal Church and all Christianity. It is my prediction that it is not the Orthodox Churches that will die.”

“Solzhenitsyn said that “what the Soviet death camps could not do, Western secularism is doing more effectively. In Russia, 20 million died in the last century as martyrs for the Orthodox Faith, and countless millions of others were thrown in the gulag, for standing up against militant secularism. Many perished because they resisted the Renovationists whose schism distorted the Orthodox Faith. Whether you call it Soviet atheism, or Western secularism, it is the same enemy.”

“Our battle is against secularism. His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, has called for us to stand together against this enemy. This is the realignment: to stand together for the faith once delivered by Christ to the Apostles, and thence to the Bishops, without alteration, without change, without revisions; against those who would submit their faith to the current of the age, the wisdom of this world. We must stand together, and we cannot stand alone. Even the immense Roman Church is buffeted by the militant secularists, who defy authority and criticize that which they know not, and we can see in this country how increasingly fragile their unity is.

“Brothers and sisters, we must embrace the Cross of Jesus Christ, the foolishness of the Gospel, the wisdom that is not of this world. We must rejoice in the salvation that God has given us in His Son Jesus Christ, who was crucified for us and rose from the dead. We glory in His Resurrection, and await His Coming Again. We must overcome the divisions that separate us, so that we can stand united in one mind and one heart, confessing that God has come in the flesh to raise us to heaven. We must live according to the moral and ethical commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ enshrined in the Gospel, and reject sin and recognize its corruption.

“This is the orthodox faith of the Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils and the undivided Church. We will have to accept the scorn and derision of those who are of this world, even those who call themselves brethren, being cast out of their synagogues and ridiculed, sued in civil courts, and count all things as worthless that we have lost for the sake of Christ. This, my friends, is our cross. We have to support one another in bearing it. The closer we come, the greater our mutual support will be, and we will not lose heart, or forget that Christ has already won the victory: He has overcome the world. By accepting to go by way of His Cross, we too will share in His Victory.”

Readers of my articles will quickly see why I took such hope in the work of this young Orthodox Metropolitan. You will also see why I am saddened to report that he has resigned his office. Here is the official statement:

Metropolitan Jonah tenders resignation

SYOSSET, NY [OCA]

In a letter addressed to the members of the Holy Synod of Bishops dated Friday, July 6, 2012, His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah tendered his resignation as Primate of the Orthodox Church in America. His Beatitude composed and signed the letter at his residence in Washington, DC, in the presence of Archpriest John Jillions, OCA Chancellor. On Saturday, July 7, the letter was presented to the Holy Synod in the course of a conference call in which all of the hierarchs participated, except His Eminence, Archbishop Alejo of Mexico City. The text of His Beatitude’s letter reads as follows.

“To the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America,

“Brothers,

“As per your unanimous request, as conveyed to me by Chancellor Fr. John Jillions, I hereby tender my resignation as Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, and humbly request another Episcopal assignment. I had come to the realization long ago that that I have neither the personality nor the temperament for the position of Primate, a position I never sought nor desired.

“It is my hope that due consideration will be made for my financial situation, both in any interim and in consideration for any future position. I am the main financial support for both my parents and my sister, beyond my own needs.

“I will appreciate your consideration in this, and beg forgiveness for however I have offended you, and for whatever difficulties have arisen from my own inadequacies and mistakes in judgment. Asking your prayers, I remain faithfully yours,

Metropolitan Jonah, Archbishop of Washington

I invite our readers around the globe to pray for Metropolitan Jonah and for the Orthodox Church in America. His letter seems to depict a sadness of spirit. It also raises a number of questions and concerns. I would welcome any further information and insight into this story and what prompted his resignation. I haver reached out to friends in the orthodox Church whom I deeply respect. Sadly, the reports emerging in the blogosphere indicate there may be more behind the former Metropolitan’s decision. For example, former Catholic become Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher opined

“They finally got him. What they don’t understand is that they probably signed the OCA’s death warrant in so doing – not because Jonah was necessarily an exceptional metropolitan (he had his problems as an administrator, and though a very good man, was temperamentally ill-suited for the job), but because the sleazy, corrupt way the Synod has handled this from the beginning shows them to be a pack of ravening wolves.”

Those are very harsh words. Pray for authentic peace for the Orthodox Church in America and pray for Metropolitan Jonah. Finally, pray that his successor continues to stand propehtically and courageously in this age which cries out for authentic collaboration between those who bear the name Christian.

Chicago Tribune: Chicago Native Quits as Leader of American Orthodox Church

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Metropolitan Jonah, center, is vested by Subdeacon Brother Gregory, left, and Subdeacon Gregory Lardin before a 2009 service at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago. (Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune / July 26, 2009)

Source: Chicago Tribune | By Manya A. Brachear

The Chicago native elected to the helm of the Orthodox Church in America resigned over the weekend, saying in a letter that he has “neither the personality nor the temperament” to lead the church.

[…]

Elected in late 2008 to lead one of several branches of Orthodox Christianity in the United States, Metropolitan Jonah had been a bishop for 12 days when he became primate. Parishioners looked to him for reforms after his predecessor retired amid allegations that millions of church dollars were used to cover personal expenses.

“People were looking for that new wind of leadership that he seemed to embody,” said the Rev. John Adamcio, rector at Holy Trinity Cathedral, the seat of the Chicago Diocese. “He was under an awful lot of pressure to right the ship and keep the church on course.”

[…]

He insisted on amplifying the church’s voice in the public square, moving the church’s headquarters from Syosset, N.Y., to Washington and speaking up against abortion rights. In 2009 he led a handful of Orthodox clergy to sign the Manhattan Declaration, a pledge to disobey laws that could force religious institutions to participate in abortions or bless same-sex couples.

The Rev. Mark Arey, director of Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, said Metropolitan Jonah’s approach was not typical of Orthodox Christianity. “Orthodoxy is not in favor of abortion, but we don’t campaign in the same way you see evangelical groups,” Arey said.

But the Rev. Johannes Jacobse, president of the American Orthodox Institute, agreed with the primate’s foray into politics.

“He saw what needed to be said, and he wasn’t afraid to say it,” said Jacobse, an Antiochian Orthodox priest. “That kind of independence is threatening to a church that has operated by the same rules and assumptions for a long time. Part of this, too, was he represented a cultural shift inside the church that some thought should not have taken place.”

Read the entire article on the Chicago Tribune website.

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