#R.R. Reno

[ladysnowangel]

2024 nonfiction reading - completed all, but the Jackson biography.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Church Has the Answers for Those Seeking Freedom

The ancient question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” lingers over the Church and the current cultural milieu. In other words, if Jerusalem is the metaphorical spiritual center of the universe, what is its relationship with Athens, the rational center of the universe? What is the relationship between reason and revelation? Have we become so ‘mature’ and modern in our thinking that we have outgrown our need for revelatory religion? Isn’t all that is “really real” the material, the tangible, the subjective, the emotive? What then is left for the Church, for the believer in God, for Scripture, for the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

All of this leaves many with the unquenchable desire to be set free from ancient truths, taboos, beliefs, modes of thinking and, ultimately, free from God. The argument goes: “We used to need God, but now that science, modern medicine, and AI have emerged we don’t need God anymore. We have been set free from the need to believe in God. We believe in science, in self, in the State.” 

And what will take Christianity’s place? It’s not atheism. It is a new paganism. Or as R.R. Reno has argued, the return of the “strong gods” of antiquity—of mysticism, the dark arts, and scientism. It is a vision of the self as the center of all things: the ability to refashion human nature (e.g., make a biological boy into a girl), or even turn men into gods. This is to play God. 

As Christians, such questions leave us fearful, frustrated, confused, and angry. What are we to do if we are set free from the foundations that have undergirded Western civilization, including Christianity?

[godbeautyorder]

Multiculturalism teaches a superficial civic etiquette of ritualized affirmations and inclusions. It fails to encourage genuine solidarity, something that, given our fallen nature, always needs to be renewed, all the more so today when our economic system and new technologies atomize and isolate us.

R.R. Reno

[bobguz]

"We think it's a conspiracy, it's much worse. It's a consensus!" The Wes...

Theologian and First Things editor R.R. Reno joins The Winston Marshall Show for a sweeping intellectual conversation on nationalism, identity, and the postwar consensus that still haunts the West. Reno argues that the true crisis isn’t a conspiracy—but a consensus forged after WWII: a fear of nationalism, religion, and moral conviction, shaped by the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He calls this the age of “weak gods”—a culture hollowed out by relativism, therapeutic liberalism, and meaning without truth. From Karl Popper and the Open Society to the cult of DEI and the rise of populist rebellion, Reno makes the case that Western civilization is suffering from a kind of civilizational PTSD—and that only the return of “strong gods” like loyalty, love, and faith can offer redemption. All this—postwar ideology, the collapse of civic trust, mass migration, shared mythos, and the spiritual malaise of modern life…

[danhung]

American Strong Gods

Was recently shared a thought provoking if somewhat frustrating essay - American Strong Gods - by online essayist N.S. Lyons (pen name)

The article appears to be a distillation of theologian R.R. Reno's book Return of the Strong Gods. (I guess I'll have to add this to my reading list.)

Mr. Lyons' cops Reno's epochal analysis defining the "Long Twentieth Century" as a period after World War I and II where global leadership became consumed with a "never again" mentality that evolved into "an all-consuming obsession with negation". On this, I don't necessarily disagree even if I find Lyon's prose a bit distasteful. This observation largely embodies the same argument made by author Yascha Mounk in The Identity Trap. (A book I read early in 2024 that I think was prescient and cautionary.)

Mounk attempts less epochal analysis and instead gets more directly to the argument that social identity has become too dominant in political discourse and runs counter to liberal ideals and in fact adopts many of the tendencies of the fascistic tendencies it hopes to combat - skepticism of objective truth, intolerance of discourse, and identity sensitive legislation over "equal treatment". Mounk also proposes an alternative - a return to universalist values and a politics based on finding common ground. Basically, a political or even a national coalition built on identity sensitivity will always be fragile and that appeals to self-interest will generally win over purity tests on social sorting. Unfortunately, in 2024, it was Donald Trump that more closely embodied "No Red States, No Blue States, only the United States." That the messenger was either disingenuous or attaching a devil's bargain of oligharchy and kleptocracy only goes to further the point on how out of touch Democratic messaging has become.

To return to Mr. Lyons' lens on this observation, I can't help but find his 5,000 word essay timid. He his piece ends up more pretentious navel gazing or cowardly observational journalism. Let's take a look - quotes bolded and my thoughts below.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance.

Throughout the essay, Lyons' seems to want to define "closed society" as something distinct and separate from "fascism". He defines the distinction between open and closed society as a fight between "strong gods" - strong beliefs, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, and strong communal identities - and "weak gods" - notably tolerance, dialogue, equality and aspiration to a "vague universal humanitarianism." While strong collective beliefs sound good to me, what exactly is a closed society focused on "strong gods" if it cannot also accept tolerance, discourse, and equality?

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance.

Beneath the sesquipedalian (see I can do it too) text, Lyons' shows a near gleefulness over the dismantling of government apparatus without making an argument for whether it is desirable. He focuses on these "deep state" institutions being illiberal and unaccountable with the "objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes... and to suppress serious public discussion". Somehow Lyons makes the oxymoronic argument that society needs more discourse and democracy immediately after defining such characteristics as quintessential of "weak gods" universal humanitarianism.

Beyond these assertions, Lyons spends no time addressing why an administrative state may exist at all or how it would be replaced in the "strong gods" epoch he's expects we're returning to moving forward into.

This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back.

A simple quote cannot do justice to Lyons' argument for the Restoration of Gods (do read the section yourself). Lyons blames open society and the consensus aspiration of producing a world of peace and progress for leading us to civilizational dissolution and despair. He calls back Ancient Greek nation-states, describes society as heaving masses seeking "masculine" action, and describes Trump as an archetype for "doing battle against the destruction of masculine heroism". And this, he believes marks the end of the "Age of Hitler." No longer will the fear of a next Hitler grip our society!

Lyons alludes to "hysterical accusations of fascism" which never materialize and is either advocating for or observing society's return to embracing singular totems of power while dismissing its adjacency to fascism. His timorous qualifier "for better and worse" in describing the beginning of the end of the Age of Hitler speaks volumes.

The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

This is precisely the kind of over-intellectual, "I'm just calling balls and strikes" observational "insightfulness" that I hate. Have the balls to say, "I think fascism is what mankind needs." Even there, in 5,000 words of analysis, Lyons' somehow identifies hundred-year cycles which generally ended in conflagration and yet has no view that a return to a "strong gods" epoch could have a predictable outcome even if a century later? I myself would take "listless, self-abnegation" to war and strife if I had a choice.

If one identifies real - in fact potentially catastrophic risk - then have the courage to state your view. Lyons' spends 5,000 carefully-plucked-from-a-thesaurus words making his biases wholly apparent. He even somehow manages to dismiss the threat of fascism while with a straight-face glazing Trumpism's "archetype" of heroic male leadership dismantling the managerial state and putting national interests first. (What again is the dictionary definition of fascism?) And his big takeaway is "this could be good or bad but it's happening." I'm glad that in 50 years Lyons' will be able to smugly point at his blog and say "See, I saw it all happening" regardless of the outcome.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The Long Twentieth

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century.” The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.

The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.

As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.

The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a great crusade – characterized, ironically, by a fiery zeal and fierce intolerance. By making “never again” its ultimate priority, the ideology of the open society put a summum malum (greatest evil) at its core rather than any summum bonum (highest good). The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind; he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan, forever threatening to tempt mankind into new wickedness. This “second career of Adolf Hitler,” as Renaud Camus jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance. If it’s assumed that the only options are “the open society or Auschwitz” then maintaining zero tolerance for the perceived values of the closed society is functionally a moral commandment. To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.

The end of the Cold War then sent the open society consensus into overdrive. Far from moderating its zeal, the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor) seemed to validate the moral and practical superiority of the open society, and the post-Cold War establishment doubled down on the belief that the whole world could and should be rebuilt in its image, ushering in the end of history.

The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, “We [now] live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.”

If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to “expand atheism” in Nepal, or $7.9 million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding “binary-gendered language,” this is why. It’s the same reason the U.S. government was pouring millions into funding “charities” dedicated to breaking U.S. immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.

Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing. [...]

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. [...]

That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.

Restoration of the Gods

[...] Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler. [...]

Dawn of a New Century

Trump [...] is, in other words, neither cause nor mere symptom of populist upheaval but in a real sense an embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s now overturning the old order. [...]

The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended; now “you can just do things” again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has.

Abroad and in Washington, this brash attitude has caused much consternation and confusion (“Why is Trump threatening to invade Mexico, bully Canada, and annex Greenland from a NATO ally? Wasn’t he supposed to be an isolationist?”) But the principle behind all Trump’s behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward: he is willing to use American might however may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out “you can just do things” on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value only insofar as they benefit America. [...]

So while at a surface level the vibe of the Trump revolution might be mistaken as merely marking a return to circa-1990s libertarianism, with its individual freedom and “greed is good” free-market mindset, he represents a far more significant shift than that: back – or rather forward – more than a century. The globalist neoliberalism, interventionist one-world internationalism, and naive social progressivism of the 90s open society is dead and gone. Despite his political alliance with the Right-Wing Progressives of Silicon Valley, Trump’s new world is in a real sense distinctly post-liberal. [...]

A New World Opens

The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between “closed’ and “open” values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.

Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world [...]. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. [...] It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course.

[marshallsnyder1]

“In the popular imagination, the sexual was a spontaneous outburst. The “kids” weren’t going to take their repressive medicine any longer, and they hitchhiked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. But, as [Matthew] Crawford documents, the sexual revolution was always intertwined with the anti-fascist [if you’re not an anti-fascist, then you’re a fascist] political agenda, which predates the 1960s.” Sexual Revolution by Design.” R.R. Reno. First Things.

As hippie molotov cocktail culture bears down on traditional American values, the four ancient cardinal virtues, and three theological virtues, life takes on barbaric dimensions.

It’s no coincidence the 1967 Summer of Love imbedded with free sex and drugs precedes, by only the scant margin of two years, the Manson Family murder spree.

[livinglibertytoday]

It is only through re-infusing the political order with Christian truths and reconnecting it to its transcendent sources that the renewal for which we hope can be achieved. Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, by R.R. Reno (256 pages, Salem Books, 2016)

[apesoformythoughts]

We are facing a crisis of solidarity, not freedom, and this crisis of solidarity foretells a crisis of freedom. Atomized, isolated individuals adrift in a deregulated moral culture are easily dominated, whether by political manipulators or the directionless leadership of mass culture.

R.R. Reno

[godthings]

"[T]heology requires a discipline of the soul, not just the mind."

— R. R. Reno, Personal Great Books

[ladysnowangel]

Recent reads (1 and 3) and currently reading (2 and 4)

[liveandlovethequestions]

“[W]e should embrace our freedom in Christ. Intellectuals can be rigidly conformist. This is especially true in America, a highly conformist society. We fancy ourselves great patrons of independent thought, but deviance from established opinion usually invites censure. There’s far more diversity of opinion in a typical Catholic parish than among the faculty of an Ivy League university.

The freedom that Christians can contribute to intellectual culture—saying what others shrink for saying or cannot say—does not come from study. I’ve known many scholars (I include myself) beholden to the petty gods who superintend over a great deal of intellectual work: career, status, and illusions of immortal intellectual achievements. Instead, freedom comes from an interior conformity to Christ in prayer. The mind follows the heart.”

— R.R. Reno, The Christian Intellectual

[stoweboyd]

There are incontrovertible truths at the core of antiglobalist populism, as being pitched by Trump and Le Pen, as captured here by R.R. Reno:

Our country has dissolved to a far greater degree than those cloistered on the coasts allow themselves to realize. The once vast and unifying middle class has eroded over the last generation. Today we are increasingly divided into winners and losers. This division involves more than divergent economic prospects and income inequality. Globalism is an ideology of winners who stand astride our society as it is being remade by dramatic economic, demographic and cultural changes.

[...]

Globalism poses a threat to the future of democracy because it disenfranchises the vast majority and empowers a technocratic elite. It’s a telling paradox that the most ardent supporters of a “borderless world” live in gated communities and channel their children toward a narrow set of elite educational institutions with stiff admissions standards that do the work of “border control.” The airport executive lounges are not open and inclusive.

John Q. Public is not stupid. He senses that he no longer counts. And he resents the condescension of globalist elites, which is why Mr. Trump’s regular transgressions against elite-enforced political correctness evoke glee from his supporters.

But Reno’s title is wrong, because many Republicans -- elected officials, too -- are not America Firsters, they in fact form the conservative wing of the previously ruling unrepentant-neoliberal-globalists party.

Reno is also wrong in attempting to make a retreat to patriotic nationalism the only response to neoliberal globalism. The third alternative is mutualist commonsism.

And the grace note of the elitism inherent in airport executive lounges is a deft touch, suggesting globalist technocrats skirting flyover country. 

If there were an airline structured as a cooperative mutual organization -- owned by the employees and customers -- what would their airport lounges be like?

[joshbishopreads]

True conservatism affirms ordered liberty, not liberty pure and simple.

R.R. Reno in "Capitalism and Conservatism"

[dearanalogue-blog]

R. R. Reno teaches theology at Creighton University and is the author of In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity

From the article:

"For the great innovation of modern culture was the promise of progress without spiritual discipline. All we need to do is adopt the experimental method, calculate utility, institute the rule of law, establish democracy, trust the market. In each instance, scientific knowledge, the machinery of proper procedure, the invisible hand of a well-designed process, will carry us forward. If we will but believe in this promise, we are told, then we will be free to neglect our souls."

HT: Under MY Roof

[hours]

excerpts:

“An intellectual is not an intellectual unless he sees his work as an end in itself.”

———

“An intellectual isn’t an intellectual because he is secular or religious, but instead because he has something intelligent to say that makes a difference in how we think and act. Getting into the game is necessary because we need to develop our mental muscles and appropriately form our intellectual habits in accord with the issues of our day. We cannot learn to swim unless we jump into the river.

For the most part we quite properly swim with the current. Even in disciplines where deeper assumptions about the human condition guide interpretation—the social sciences, history, literature—the great bulk of instruction is for the best. A Christian sociologist needs to know how to design an effective research program. The faithful literary historian should know the primary sources.”

———

“Another imperative [for the Christian intellectual] is charity. A genuine intellectual serves truth, a Christian intellectual all the more so. The truth, moreover, is sought by other people as well, which is why the intellectual life means participating in a conversation rather than embarking on a solo voyage. A loving intellect therefore seeks to advance the intellectual lives of others.”

———

“A Christian intellectual should never fall victim to ‘presentism.’ It’s wise to spend an hour with an old author for every hour with a new one. That’s a rule of thumb secular intellectuals would do well to adopt as well. The most parochial intellectuals are the ones who know only the latest trends, schools of thought, and ideas. A Christian intellectual should be the opposite. He should be at home with many historical expressions of truth because he is the servant of the truth incarnate.”

———

“The freedom that Christians can contribute to intellectual culture—saying what others shrink for saying or cannot say—does not come from study. I’ve known many scholars (I include myself) beholden to the petty gods who superintend over a great deal of intellectual work: career, status, and illusions of immortal intellectual achievements. Instead, freedom comes from an interior conformity to Christ in prayer. The mind follows the heart.”