Category: Being Human

The Hillbillies who Became Urban Poor

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

Progressives still don’t know the meaning of tolerance because they believe they are on the right side of history. Mencken understood the moralizing instinct that afflicts all uplifters, especially the ones that believe in progress (whether millennial or secular):

Poor people, let it be remembered, have just as many rights under a civilized government as rich people. The one obligation laid upon them is that they shall not claim as a right any privilege which will have the effect of destroying the rights of other folks. But do they destroy any other person’s right when they go to Back River on Sunday and drink a few bottles of beer, or when they go into the public parks and kiss their best girls, or when they take those girls to dances and there hug them con amore, or when they slake their thirst between waltzes with the malt of the country? I think not. On the contrary, it seems to me that they have an inalienable right to do these things, and to do any other normal and harmless thing which seems to them agreeable, and that any person who ventures to forbid them commits an intolerable offense against them.

A poor man’s amusements are his own affairs, and so are his vices. Even if those vices are of such a character and virulence that, long practiced, they will tend to endanger his health, he has still a clear right to practice them. The work he must do every day also tends to endanger his health, and yet who objects to it as immoral? Certainly not the Pecksniffs who pursue him with their platitudes and their complaining. These Pecksniffs, nine times out of ten, get a profit, directly or indirectly, out of that work of his, and are the chief opponents of all proposals that its hours be reduced or its pay increased. Then what right have they to preach to the man? What right have they, after paying him so ill, to dictate how he shall spend his pay and his leisure?

The trouble with all these efforts to uplift the poor, even when they are sincere, is that they concern themselves with effects to the exclusion of causes. Why, for example, do girls go wrong? Is it because they are naturally vicious? Not always. Too often it is because they are poor, or because their parents are poor. Poverty is the eternal enemy of self-respect, of intelligence, of personal dignity. Poor people, when they get any recreation at all, must take it in common with large numbers of their kind; they cannot. afford to go it alone. And that wholesale contact naturally breaks down their reserve and robs them of all fastidiousness. No wonder they begin to appear, in the end, as barbarians. No wonder their pleasures tend to offend the delicate sensibilities of the classes above them.

But that element of barbarousness, I believe, will never be wholly eradicated. To the man of refinement it may seem wholly disgusting to send a lard can to the corner saloon for six cents’ worth of beer, but to the man who can’t afford to drink more decently it presents the only alternative to going without. But should he then go without? I don’t think he should. He is as much entitled to joy in this world, and even to an occasional debauch, as any other man, and it is his misfortune rather than his fault if he must take it somewhat hoggishly. No human being can live upon work alone. He must have, too, his relaxation, his moment of forgetiulness, his fling. And if he can’t get it in an automobile, he is well within his rights when he seeks it in a barroom.

The current objection to the love-making customs of the poor is merely an objection to the vulgarity of the poor, and that vulgarity will persist as long as there are poor. Is it a fact that unrestrained hugging and kissing, in the parks and elsewhere, tends to promote the debanching of girls? I suppose it does. But that is one of the penalties of being poor. An immigrant working- girl of the class so numerous in Baltimore cannot ordinarily entertain her young man in her own home. Even if she has a home, it is usually too crowded for such benign uses. So she and he take to the parks, the dance halls and the excursion boats, preferring the gaze of strangers to that of more intimate and embarrassing critics. Naturally enough, this frank adoption of publicity tends to break down their self-consciousness and reserve, and so it is no wonder that their love-making sometimes becomes frankly clownish.

But why belabor them for it? Why ask them to show that refinement which is based so obviously on the possession of money? Why go on the assumption that whatever they do is inherently wrong? Why try to teach them tricks so hopelessly unadapted to the life that they must face and endure? Why, in brief, bound them and tyrannize over them? They are just as decent, at bottom, as any other class of people, and they have just as much right as any other class to frame their own definition of decency.

Don’t Boycott Disney, Boycott Reading (and watching)

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Evidence of where the sensitive college students are coming from?

A Virginia school district has banned two classic American novels after parents complained they were racist.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been temporarily removed from shelves because they use the N-word more than 250 times.

…according to WTVR.com, Accomack County Public Schools has removed both books from the shelves of its schools while they investigate complains into the books which, which have been available for 56 years, in the case of Lee’s novel and 132 years with Huck Finn.

One mother complained: ‘There’s so much racial slurs and defensive wording in there that you can’t get past that. Right now, we are a nation divided as it is.’

. . . School authorities were forced to act on the complaint and removed the novels pending ‘a review committee consisting of the principal, the library media specialist, the classroom teacher (if involved, a parent and / or student, and the complainant will convene.’

One parent Teresa Wilkins said: ‘It’s in a book and they’ll feel they are able to say that to anybody, and so I don’t feel that that should be done.’

David Simon, award winning journalist, author, and creator of The Wire tweeted: ‘We are going backwards,’ after hearing about the controversy.

Sort of like saying The Wire has nudity and bad language. A lot of pietists out there.

It’s Only POTUS

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Michael Brendan Dougherty echoes the point that presidential elections are destroying America (and so we should let Congress pick POTUS):

The length of our presidential campaign atrophies self-governance. Instead of citizens governing themselves, Americans increasingly define their political lives by their membership in one tribe, and their support for its candidates. Instead of electing a leader, we pledge fealty as followers.

The bulk of our attention flows to the presidential race. And because there is so much attention there, the process attracts candidates who are merely seeking attention for themselves and not high office. In fact, that may be why the primaries feel more and more like reality television, and produced a reality TV president. Each debate is a new episode, and the political press waits for the latest news about which contestant is eliminated.

Because our mode of engaging with politics feels tribal, and because the process takes two years, many people experience it as a crushing psychological and social blow to be on the losing side. Citizens who identify with the losing presidential candidate feel like they are no longer a part of their country. They experience the transfer of the executive branch from one party to the other as a regime change that threatens them. Remember the red and blue maps of Jesusland and America that appeared during the Bush administration? Back then there was heady talk of Vermont seceding from the union to become a bastion of tolerance. Fast forward a few years, and conservatives were the ones spreading stories about Texas’ secession. This is not healthy. But it’s going to continue if we don’t begin to tame the presidential election itself.

The presidential election increases our sense that all issues are national issues. Even people who say they are addicted to politics often have no idea what is happening in their state or county government.

Dougherty adds a point that Aaron Sorkin, the creator of Jed Bartlet, the POTUS on West Wing, should take to heart:

One cause for the gigantism of our presidential election is the gigantism of the executive branch. The federal government employs more than 2 million people in the process of governing us.

Too bad that Sorkin doesn’t seem to recognize the monster that he fed (even if he did not create). His letter to his wife and daughters was typically hysterical (thanks to one of our southern correspondents):

White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic s‑‑‑heads everywhere.

But if POTUS were little more than a glorified dog catcher, would the stakes be so high?

When the World Thinks Well of You

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Chicago’s Mayor, Rahm Emanuel on Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich:

What does he offer the city itself as a whole – you’re not Catholic yourself are you?

I’m Jewish. I would just add that his message, well obviously he’s speaking first and foremost to Catholic followers, has a universal value to it, one of tolerance and one of inclusion.

No modernism to see here (cue shrug), but that salt seems to have lost its flavor.

Why Not Address President Obama?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

I’m with Chris Bodenner that Brandon Victor Dixon’s remarks to Vice President-elect Mike Pence after a performance of Hamilton was not all that disrespectful or edgy. Here’s part of the speech:

We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. And I encourage everybody to pull out your phones and tweet and post because this message needs to be spread far and wide, OK?

Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us here at Hamilton: An American Musical, we really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us — our planet, our children, our parents — or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.

What does President Obama not need to hear in this advice? Should he have been governing in a way to keep BLM protests from happening, opponents of gay marriage from feeling marginalized, and Americans with pre-Affordable Care Act health insurance from having to lose benefits in their existing their plans? Of course, a president has to make choices and not all of the electorate will be happy. But why do the elites in the U.S. — Democrats in D.C., Hollywood, university faculty, and mainstream journalists — think that partisanship in politics only happens when Republicans get elected?

And I wonder what Dixon makes of President Obama acting in a statesmanlike manner in meeting and greeting President-elect Trump? Was the President properly empathizing with those Americans who not only refused to vote for Trump but view his supporters as deplorable?

Localism is Great (beats pretty good) as Long as Charles Taylor is Your Neighbor

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Joshua Rothman has a thoughtful piece on Charles Taylor and ends on a surprisingly hopeful note considering the recent election and how fly-over country voted:

[Taylor] is in favor of localism and “subsidiarity”—the principle, cited by Alexis de Tocqueville and originating in Catholicism, that problems should be solved by people who are nearby. Perhaps, instead of questing for political meaning on Facebook and YouTube, we could begin finding it in projects located near to us. By that means, we could get a grip on our political selves, and be less inclined toward nihilism on the national scale. (It would help if there were less gerrymandering and money in politics, too.)

One imagines what this sort of rooted, meaningful democracy might look like. A political life centered on local schools, town governments, voluntary associations, and churches; a house in the woods with the television turned off. Inside, family members aren’t glued to their phones. They talk, over dinner, about politics, history, and faith, about national movements and local ones; they feel, all the time, that they’re doing something. It’s a pastoral vision, miles away from the media-driven election we’ve just concluded. But it’s not a fantasy.

But what about Phil Robertson’s community? Not even the Gospel Allies are willing to countenance those parts of America:

That “cultural curtain” prevents Robertson from seeing the reality of the Jim Crow era, allowing him to look back in wistful fondness. Yet I think there is also a personal element that keeps the former “white trash” farmhand from seeing the segregation of his youth as it truly was.

Robertson makes it clear that he didn’t come to Christ until the late 1970s. During the 1960s he was abusing drugs and alcohol, cheating on his wife, and hiding out in the woods to prevent being arrested by the authorities. His former fellow farmworkers might look on the 1960s as an era when African Americans were gaining access to long-overdue civil rights. But for Robertson, that decade was a time of self-destruction and familial strife. Since then Robertson has turned his life over to God and become, to use his catchphrase, “Happy, happy, happy.” In his mind, godliness is equated with happiness.

That is why I believe that when Robertson looks back on his youth, what he sees is not African Americans suffering under the evil of segregation, but men and women who were godly, and thus obviously had what he has now: a happiness that transcends mortal woes. He seems to think that because they were godly, the exterior signs of happiness (singing, smiling, etc.) can be construed as a sign of their having inner peace, if not peace with the world. It’s a noble, if naïve, idealization of his neighbors.

Does that noble intent excuse his insensitive remarks about the segregated South? Not at all. Robertson is a public figure and when he gives interviews in the media, he must take responsibility for how his words are perceived. While I believe he was attempting to pay tribute to the African-American Christians who preceded him in the faith, he has inadvertently offended many of his African American brothers and sisters.

And so it looks like the Gospel Industrial Complex is a much on the side of President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s one-world order as they are part of an organizational enterprise that disdains denominational attachments (is Tim Keller Presbyterian?). Can anyone imagine an evangelical academic or preaching/teaching celebrity writing what Damon Linker did about universalistic cosmopolitanism and humanitarian liberalism?

any outlook that resists or rejects humanitarianism is an atavistic throwback to less morally pristine times, with the present always superior to the past and the imagined even-more-purely humanitarian future always better still.

Concerned about immigrants disregarding the nation’s borders, defying its laws, and changing its ethnic and linguistic character? Racist!

Worried that the historically Christian and (more recently) secular character of European civilization will be altered for the worse, not to mention that its citizens will be forced to endure increasing numbers of theologically motivated acts of terrorism, if millions of refugees from Muslim regions of the world are permitted to settle in the European Union? Islamophobe!

Fed up with the way EU bureaucracies disregard and override British sovereignty on a range of issues, including migration within the Eurozone? Xenophobe!

As far as humanitarian liberals are concerned, all immigrants should be welcomed (and perhaps given access to government benefits), whether or not they entered the country illegally, no matter what language they speak or ethnicity they belong to, and without regard for their religious or political commitments. All that matters — or should matter — is that they are human. To raise any other consideration is pure bigotry and simply unacceptable.

Earlier forms of liberalism were politically wiser than this — though the wisdom came less from a clearly delineated argument than from observation of human behavior and reading of human history. “Love of one’s own” had been recognized as a potent and permanent motive force in politics all the way back to the beginning of Western civilization, when Homer and Sophocles depicted it and Plato analyzed it. It simply never occurred to liberals prior to the mid-20th century that human beings might one day overcome particularistic forms of solidarity and attachment. They took it entirely for granted that individual rights and civic duties needed to be instantiated in particulars — by this people, in this place, with this distinctive history and these specific norms, habits, and traditions.

But now liberals have undergone a complete reversal, treating something once considered a given as something that must be extricated root and branch.

If people gave up their particular attachments easily, conceding their moral illegitimacy, that might be a sign that the humanitarian ideal is justified — that human history is indeed oriented toward a universalistic goal beyond nations and other forms of local solidarity. But experience tells us something else entirely. The more that forms of political, moral, economic, and legal universalism spread around the globe, the more they inspire a reaction in the name of the opposite ideals. The Western world is living through just such a reaction right now.

That means, of course, that Phil Robertson’s family, neighborhood, and church might harbor expressions that other people find objectionable. But since when did we think that people will always be easy to like and say things that make us feel happy? I guess the answer is — as long as we have been rearing children who go to college and expect to find nothing more challenging to their well being than cookies and milk (aside from the frat parties). Still, I wonder if those kids were accepted at every elite university to which they applied. If they received a rejection letter, did they burn the U.S. flag?

How to Achieve Racial Solidarity — Apply Ben Franklin’s Racism

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

When Thabiti Anyabwile complains about white evangelicals voting for Donald Trump, he should remember that Ben Franklin defined racial solidarity differently than the Washington DC pastor does. According to Franklin:

The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.

By that reckoning, many people of color voted for Donald Trump on Tuesday. It might undermine Anyabwile’s point (already attempted). But it would be a way of achieving the “white” identification with African-Americans for which the pastor strives.

Make America Sane

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

I won’t reveal how I voted. Nor can I claim to be happy about yesterday’s outcome (I married a woman who took it hard). But a piece of me thinks that a Donald Trump presidency may make it harder for certain sorts of outlooks or activities to be taken seriously.

The first is the grief counseling offered to students at U Mass Lowell:

Dear Students,

We at the Multicultural Affairs Office hope this email reaches you and you are doing ok. We know many of you stayed up waiting to hear of the election results. These are unprecedented times. The nation as well as our community is reacting in many different ways. We are reaching out to each of you because we know that this was an intense election and we are already hearing a number of reactions, feelings and emotions. This is a critical time to make sure that you, your friends, classmates, neighbors are doing ok and seeking the appropriate support especially if they need a place to process or work through what they’re feeling.

You may hear or notice reactions both immediate and in the coming weeks, some anticipated and many that may be difficult to articulate or be shared. While it may take some time to fully take in all the recent events, please also know that the OMA office is here for you. Our UMass Lowell community is here for you. Do not hesitate at all to come in or ask for support.

Today there is a Post-election self-care session from 12-4pm in Moloney. The event will include cookies, mandalas, stress reduction techniques and mindfulness activities. Counseling and Health Services will also be available. We have sent out messages through our Social Media sites as well as encouraging students to drop in all week. Above all, take good care and know that there is strength in our community that you can lean on.

Kind regards,
Office of Multicultural Affairs Staff

Do these people cower when reading accounts of the American founding for all of the self-actualized agency that colonists displayed in seeking self-determination and limited government? (Read: are they American?)

The second is Damon Linker’s description of the cosmopolitan w-w that has dominated the Obama years (thanks to Rod Dreher):

Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism — the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but ‘racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia’ — is the desire to delegitimise any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic… cosmopolitan liberals presume that all particularistic forms of solidarity must be superseded by a love of humanity in general, and indeed that these particularistic attachments will be superseded by humanitarianism before long, as part of the inevitable unfolding of human progress.

For those of us 2k Protestants who have managed to hyphenate ourselves, and found ways to recognize our multiple loyalties, the notion that all attachments to what Edmund Burke called little platoons block national progress is — well — unwelcoming. It’s also dumb. Were the Students for a Democratic Society wrong to exclude Young Americans for Freedom?

I don’t think President Trump will issue executive orders for colleges students to human-up or for Orthodox Presbyterians to sponsor OPC Pride Parades. But I do sense that he will not lend the support of the White House to the touchier and more ethereal sides of American character.

Day After Perspective

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

One of our many southern correspondents sent Kinky Friedman’s remarks about the election. Since the Bible tells us that all is vanity, Friedman is sounding 2k (there’s a syllogism in there somewhere):

Trump is not my hero. I prefer Mr. Anonymous. I like the guy who gives a million bucks to the children’s hospital and doesn’t insist that his name has to be up there. But that’s who Trump is, that’s who he’s been. It should be pointed out that we’re not in a position to know where greatness comes from. Not only did Jesus ride in on a jackass, but Gandhi was a yuppie lawyer living in London, with no interest in helping people.

If you look at the great ones, Mother Teresa, Winston Churchill, FDR, they were all aristocratic freaks with very little interest in others. They’re very much like Trump. I mean, particularly Churchill. He was a polo player in India and an adult butterfly collector. They liked to hang out at the country club, Rachel. They were very privileged people.

When they got into office, Churchill and FDR, they did something that Obama was never able to do: change. The agent of change, Obama, could not change himself. He remained a fixed point in a changing world. It’s just too bad; it’s who he is. He’s not the smartest guy in the room. He may be the glibbest. He may be the most facile. I believe, if he’s concerned about a legacy, I believe he can pretty well forget that.

All I’m saying is, we don’t know who the hero is until the ship sinks. Or when the plane is crashing. You don’t know who’s going to run back and save somebody, or who’s going to dress up like a woman so he can hide in a lifeboat.

I’m not moving to Canada yet, but if Michigan wants to secede and join the great North Country, I won’t fight.

Before You Put On Any More Sackcloth and Ashes

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Consider that secular judges are not always out to get Christians (even though it’s a good narrative to whoop up hysteria):

A decisive legal victory in British Columbia has put an evangelical Christian university one step closer in its bid to secure recognition for its proposed law school.

The Appeal Court of B.C. released a decision in favour of Trinity Western University on Tuesday, describing efforts by B.C.’s law society to deny accreditation to the school’s future lawyers as “unreasonable.”

The legal dispute centres around the university’s community covenant that bans its students from having sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage.

In a unanimous decision, a panel of five judges said the negative impact on Trinity Western’s religious freedoms would be severe and far outweigh the minimal effect accreditation would have on gay and lesbian rights.

“A society that does not admit of and accommodate differences cannot be a free and democratic society — one in which its citizens are free to think, to disagree, to debate and to challenge the accepted view without fear of reprisal,” says the 66-page judgment.

Warning: stay on your meds. No reason to return to the mania of postmillennial optimism.