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The culture war comes to you

Over the past few days, there has been a somewhat noticeable Twitter conflagration (when isn’t there?) over a tweet sent out by the Paris-based writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. The author most recently of Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Chatterton Williams is someone with whom I have been relatively friendly (I interviewed him for a podcast last year). If you want to read anything by him, I suggest the piece in The New Yorker, The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”.

The conflagration basically has to do with the fact that many American religious conservatives  objected to Chatterton Williams evincing a disrespectful attitude toward prayer. Rod Dreher, again, someone with whom I have been friendly, posted Christian Coronavirus Scapegoats on his blog and attacked the tweet. Dreher refers to Chatterton Williams as a “Blue Chekist.” It is a pedantic point, but Rod, not Thomas, actually has the blue check. But we all know what Rod meant, at least if we’re on Twitter. The “blue check” in a symbolic sense is the smug descendent of mid-2000s Jon Stewart. Generally, they have a preoccupation with “social justice,” and are embedded in the New York to D.C. media culture. The “blue check” is Lauren Duca.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is none of these things.  Rather, I think it’s defensible to describe him as an “IDW-adjacent” figure. Basically, a conventional late 20th-century liberal. As such, he takes a skeptical attitude toward conservative religion. In particular, toward conservative evangelical Protestantism, which is viewed as regressive and apocalyptic by 20th-century liberals. Recall Richard Dawkins’ interview of Ted Haggard in 2006 to get a sense.

With a serious world-wide pandemic coming toward us, I assume that many people of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ milieu were alarmed when they saw a photograph of Mike Pence leading the team tasked to respond to the pandemic praying. As the kids would say, “it’s not a good look.” The image was pregnant with many connotations.

Rod Dreher is not the only person who responded very negatively to the above tweet. I actually initially saw it via another conservative writer I follow. We can set aside the political opportunism of figures like Jeff Sessions. I think it is clear that many people were sincerely offended. Where the secular person might see a useless gesture at best, and a sinister one at worst, religious conservatives see normal, banal, and conventional behavior. For them, the act of prayer is a conventional part of daily life. It is not surprising they would be offended and angered that actions which they know to be in good will, and meritorious, were seen in a negative light.

The conflict between the secular intellectual and religious traditionalists is old in the modern West. It goes back a century at least, and conflicts are over substantive disagreements about the nature of the universe, and what that entails about the good life. But this is not truly the conflict that I believe religious conservatives are reacting to. Thomas Chatterton Williams’ tweet, which reflected late 20th-century tensions, was sucked into the undertow of 21st-century culture wars.

Though the blue checks may espouse secularism, their contempt and distrust toward religion has little to do with the metaphysical claims of religion, and all to do with the reality that they are presenting an alternative Weltanschauung to that of the religious conservative. They aim to replace religious morality with their own strident ethos. Whereas someone such as Richard Dawkins fixated on asking obnoxious questions dripping with acid contempt, the new cultural Left aims to revolutionize our understanding of what is good, right, and true, in a deeper manner. Dawkins himself is for this reason in bad odor with this set, because he still seems to prize thinking things through before agreeing to what the Ummah proposes.

In a dualistic form of Zoroastrianism, there is an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, who is the enemy of God. The nature of this spirit is the inversion of God, as the two serve as a sort of balance. Someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams is somewhat outside of the dualism of the contemporary Western culture war. He is broadly liberal, but he is also skeptical of Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He is an unbeliever in both regnant cults. Nevertheless, the above tweet was caught in the slipstream of the dualistic culture war. To some extent, we’re all drafted into this duality.

The conflict before us comes to us, even if we don’t seek it.

22 thoughts on “The culture war comes to you

  1. Also the blue checks are really white checks in blue circles! Why does no one ever notice this? (Sorry for the completely frivolous post.)

  2. They can pray all they want. Being unable to reach conclusions on the various beliefs of the faithful, I pass judgments on actions. And these men are imbeciles.

  3. Razib, you are right on point here.

    Chatterton Williams should stick to long form — where he shines. Twitter is just the srong place for nuance.

  4. I know nothing of the Twitter debate, but the coronavirus-prayer bit seems to me a kind of “virtue-signalling” by religious conservatives.

    “Virtue-signalling” is fine if actual progress is happening in the background. Pence’s track record in that department seems a bit iffy, though (something about him taking time to pray while blocking implementation of HIV-prevention programs when he was Governor of Indiana?)

  5. I don’t have a deep knowledge of American politics but I perceive Pence has a whiff of a 21st century Reagan and that gives northern liberals reasons to disparage him.

    Particularly in an election time where he could succeed Trump.

    But I understand the social conservatism of Evangelicals is antithechical to NYT types.

    I like Thomas but I can feel he holds his nose when it comes to conservative/IDW stuff.

    I was surprised to listen to him on an UK’s Spectator podcast as he has a British counterpart that doesn’t like Conservatives.

  6. Prayer in this particular instance may indeed be social signaling by the Repubs, but for the majority in almost any Western society it’s just one part of a normal response to any crisis they face. If you really believe in gods, a minute spent petitioning them makes perfect sense.
    It says something about the bubble that the modern clerisy exist in, that they don’t understand how they come off to the plebs when they make these kinds of criticisms. For them white liberal political ideology fills the sacral and religious function, and becomes their echo chamber.
    They can’t hear the plebeians, and so assume the plebs can’t hear them and are stunned when they get pushback.

    I’m not actually sure if Chatterton Williams is typical of today’s clerisy, but this type of criticism of prayer is common in the group.

  7. Reductionist kooks, the lot of ’em!

    Ah, well, such is the human cognition.

    Once I hit 40 years old, and had therefore accumulated enough experience to glean the irredeemably infantile nature of human contention (including certain furnishings within my own former belief-sets, oh yes, mea-youthful-culpa!)…

    The surprising thing remaining is that the Scottish Enlightenment got over the eternally benighted voodoo hump and took its place in the sun briefly, period. Not that that Enlightenment’s foundational precepts are necessarily issuing altogether well, what with the sixth great extinction, and whatnot underfunded CDC/solar-flare substation backups eff-ups, compounded by over-leveraged agricultural ratios; bleak prospects!

    Let me ask you deep history fellows this– what are the historic analogues for urban blues surrounded by rural reds — the gruesomes to come? With the ineffectual blues entirely starved out/shelled unto rubble/well death-squadded, such as are the seemingly ineluctable coming scenes?

    To be clear, I am not a fan. Of any of it. I seek mere reasonableness at every turn. May there be enough mild-mannered souls to see us peacefully through the coming century or three.

  8. In the government, prayer is a shorthand for “we are saddened but won’t do anything”. As in, mass shootings.

    In the medical community, it’s generally outside of the professional norms.

    So as great as it can be in the community at large, in this specific settings it strikes decidedly wrong tone.

  9. Enemy in both camps…

    Let me ask you deep history fellows this– what are the historic analogues for urban blues surrounded by rural reds — the gruesomes to come? With the ineffectual blues entirely starved out/shelled unto rubble/well death-squadded, such as are the seemingly ineluctable coming scenes?

    Some possibilities (with a fair amount of speculation)

    1) The Maccabbean insurrection
    2) Shay’s Rebellion
    3) Paris Commune
    4) 19th C US populist movement
    5) Khmer Rouge
    6) The Iranian Revolution

    The focus of the post is US politics, but this divide seems evident in voting patterns in England (i.e. London vs. the rest) –> Brexit. This piece from the WaPo 18 months ago uses Poland, Turkey & Hungary as current analogues.

    Several years ago I read Scott’s Seeing Like a State and, while I don’t remember it in detail, I suspect that it is broadly relevant to this question.

  10. “Coronavirus Is What You Get When You Ignore Science”

    Either that or its what you get when you allow wet markets. Perhaps science says to ban wet markets, but I rather expect science to have no position on the subject.

    China is a very specific set of problems when it comes to diseases. Coronavirus isn’t the first, and it won’t necessarily be the last.

    Pray the Chinese take up vegetarianism.

  11. I am a “traditionalist conservative” and I find the tweet very funny. But I am Jewish.

  12. marcel proust :

    “Enemy in both camps…

    Let me ask you deep history fellows this– what are the historic analogues for urban blues surrounded by rural reds — the gruesomes to come? With the ineffectual blues entirely starved out/shelled unto rubble/well death-squadded, such as are the seemingly ineluctable coming scenes?

    Some possibilities (with a fair amount of speculation)”

    Vendeé? (Of course, in the case of being the “blues” – who should be named “reds”, btw – shelling unto rubble the “reds” – who should be named “blues” or “whites”…)

  13. Jason: “but for the majority in almost any Western society it’s just one part of a normal response to any crisis they face.”

    I doubt much about that; yes, I live in a city in the south of Portugal (an extremely secular combination – in Portugal both cities and the South tend to be secular, while the countryside and the North tend to be religious), but my impression is that, in the Western world, the outlier is more the religious US (of course, these even depend of what we consider “Western”).

  14. Miguel: I’m Canadian. I’ve lived in the UK (London, Manchester) and Germany (Baden). I’ve only visited the US for short business trips, so that’s where I’m coming from. And anecdotally, all the Portuguese I know are deeply religious.

  15. There appears to be 2 systems to track “likes” for the comments and seems each uses different tables in the database.

  16. @Enemy In Both Camps

    what are the historic analogues for urban blues surrounded by rural reds — the gruesomes to come?

    As far as I know, the center and the elites have always taken the grain from the peons.

  17. Jason: I’m Canadian too, and as you know, a scene like the one pictured in the tweet (crisis-response team gathers to pray before getting to work) would be unthinkable here, certain career suicide for any politician involved (except perhaps for three or four bible-belt ridings).

    I can’t imagine secularized European countries with a display like that either.

    I happen to live in a very Portuguese neighbourhood (about a third of the homeowners on my block were born there). My experience is that the old folks are religious, while those who immigrated in the 1980s and later are decidedly not so.

  18. “In the medical community, it’s generally outside of the professional norms.”

    Speaking as an I.M. Resident…it depends. Certainly, the archetypal American physician is a secular, Blue Tribe, typically Jewish/Indian/Asian, cosmopolitan that is fairly quiet about his religion (if any.)

    You will sometimes see open expressions of religiosity from foreign and Orthodox Jewish physicians, but that’s about it. That said, my medical school had a trauma staff lounge where the board was covered with appeals to the “Lord” and “Jesus.”

    HOWEVER, physicians are also not hostile to religion. There’s a relatively laissez-faire attitude towards the matter, and there are very few exponents of New Atheist views.

    So while you are correct that such prayers are outside professional norms, attacking or questioning religion is also outside professional norms.

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