Alan Jacobs

Judge Aaron Persky empathized with Brock Allen Turner and could easily imagine what it would be like to lose sports fame (as Persky enjoyed), to lose a Stanford education (as Persky enjoyed), to lose the sort of easy success and high regard that a young, reasonably affluent Stanford graduate (like Persky was) can expect as a matter of right.  Judge Persky could easily imagine how dramatically different a state prison is from Stanford frat parties, and how calamitous was Turner’s fall.  That’s how Judge Persky convinced himself to hand such a ludicrously light sentence for such a grotesque violation of another human being.

But most people fed into the criminal justice system aren’t champion athletes with Stanford scholarships.  Most aren’t even high school graduates.  Most are people who have lived lives that are alien and inscrutable to someone successful enough to become a judge.  Judges might be able to empathize with having to quit their beloved college, but how many can empathize with a defendant who lost a minimum-wage job because they couldn’t make bail?  How many can empathize with someone more likely to sleep by a dumpster than exit a frat party next to one?  They can conceive of the humiliation of being on the sex offender registry after getting into an elite university, but can they conceive of the humiliation of being stopped, frisked, detained, and beaten with impunity because of the color of their skin?  Experience teaches that the answer is usually no.

This means that the system is generally friendly to defendants who look like Brock Allen Turner and generally indifferent or cruel to people who don’t look like him.  No high school dropout who rapes an unconscious girl behind a dumpster is getting six months in jail and a solicitous speech from the likes of Judge Persky.  Judges take their youth as a sign that they are “superpredators,” not as grounds for leniency.  If you tell a judge that they aren’t a danger to others, the judge will peer over his or her glasses and remark that people who rape unconscious girls in the dirt are self-evidently dangerous, and don’t be ridiculous.  Judges don’t think that a good state prison stretch will have too severe an impact – after all, what are they missing, really?

— Ken White

I developed a hatred for neckties in my youth, when I worked for several years in a bookstore that required me to wear at all times a big plastic name tag and a tie – even though I did most of my work in the stock room. (Once I severed the lower reaches of a tie while opening a box of books with a box cutter.) I would regularly loosen the tie so as not to be choked as I was bending and lifting, and my manager would just as regularly order me to tighten it again.

I took out my frustrations on these requirements by wearing on my name tag the name RASKOLNIKOV. Then one day a lady came up to me as I was shelving books, gently touched my arm, beamed at me, and said in a near-whisper, “It’s so brave of you not to Anglicize your name.”

It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

— The Fantasy of the Deathbed Conversion. Indeed. I wonder who makes that claim, or ever has? Also, there have been a great many deathbed conversions, even if Christopher Hitchens isn't one of them. (Oscar Wilde was, though: see Richard Ellman's biography for the definitive treatment of the issue.)

Nothing is more common in New Atheist rhetoric than the bald unsubstantiated assertion. Surely no group in history have ever prattled so much about “evidence” while not rousing themselves to seek any.

In writing about the Benedict Option, I have often lamented American Christians’ comparative neglect of the church in favor of something like obsessive focus on American electoral politics.

But the more that I think about how these people behave when they indulge those political obsessions – angry, intolerant, quick to fling bitter insults towards any who disagree with them – maybe it’s not the best idea to get them more interested in the church.

So: Never mind.

Some thoughts about this interview with Jürgen Klinsmann:

1. He’s remarkably explicit about the players who have disappointed him and why they have disappointed him. E.g.: “The Czech game, we gave the first cap to Emerson Hyndman, he disappeared.”
2. I don't know whether I should call that explicitness “commendable honesty” or “throwing his players under the bus.”
3. He agrees with the interviewer — and most other observers — that American soccer players don't get an early enough start, don't commit to the game at an early enough age: in Europe and Latin America “they select the kids very early and you have to swim in the cold water very, very early.”
4. But in this particular interview his emphasis seems to be on the players’ lack of progress between their late teens and their mid-twenties. His message is that they look great when they’re first being folded into the USMNT but then they fail to live up to their promise. “We drive an amazing amount of young talent in all different ways and then once they turn toward the professional level, from 17 or 18 until 22 or 23, that is where we kind of lose a lot of quality kids, because they don’t find their right footing.”
5. He sends mixed messages about the dominant cause of this disappointment. At one point he says “That talent is not there yet when it comes to the national team,” but he places a great deal more emphasis on a lack of will: “They don’t fight their way through into the club teams. Whatever they choose, wherever they go, whatever their direction is, they find ways to accept it instead of saying I’m not accepting it.”
6. At no point does he suggest that coaches — at the club or the national level — bear any responsibility for players’ failing to live up to their potential. Players who disappoint either are not talented enough or not committed enough. Period.

Anyway, here’s my take: Most academics who were raised as Christians and remain so have gone through a process of sifting their inheritance, taking what they perceive to be the wheat and burning the chaff. And they want to make it possible for their students to do the same. But I think they may not realize how hard that is for many students to do: a given student can easily go from thinking that all of the beliefs she inherited from their parents and her home church are wheat to thinking they are all chaff. When we’re introducing our students to new ideas, to a more capacious model of what Christianity is and can be — and this is something we all do for our students, whether we’re on the liberal or the conservative end of the theological spectrum, and whether we are intentional about it or not — we need always to be aware that as students try to accommodate this new knowledge, these new-to-them models of faith, their whole Christian lives can go up in flames. This is something we can’t afford to forget, ever.

… As someone who was raised in a functionally non-Christian family and became a Christian in college, I have something like an anthropological take on those of you who were raised in the faith. But X strikes me as one of those people who just can’t get past his conservative-evangelical upbringing: there’s so much about it that he hates and wants to repudiate, but whenever he tries to throw it away it ends up sticking to his hand, so back in his pocket it goes. This gets repeated with slight variations for decades.

I think it’s a matter of wanting to retain absolutely everything that’s good about an evangelical upbringing and discarding absolutely everything that’s bad, but life doesn’t work that way. You’re going to end up keeping some things you wish you could lose and losing some things you wish you could keep. Sad but inevitably true.

The powers and duties assigned to the emperor were broad and comprehensive. They were, moreover, rapidly enlarged as functions traditionally attached to republican magistracies were transferred one after another to the new executive, and executive action invaded fields which, under the former system, had been consecrated to senatorial or popular control. Finally, by virtue of specific provisions, the substance of which is indicated in the maxim princeps legibus solutus, the emperor was freed from constitutional limitations which might have paralyzed his freedom of action; while his personal protection was assured through the grant of tribunician inviolability (sacrosanctitas) as well as by the sanctions of the Lex Maiestatis. The prerogative was thus built up by a series of concessions, made by the competent authority of senate and people, no single one of which was in theory unrepublican.

— ibid.

In the light of these ancient concepts, Ceasar emerges as a figure at once fascinating and dangerous. For the spirit thus depicted is one of sublime egotism; in which the libido dominandi asserts itself to the exclusion of all possible alternatives and crushes every obstacle in its path. We have spoken of Caesar as a divisive force. That, indeed, he was: as Cato had put it, "he was the only one of the revolutionaries to undertake, cold-sober, the subversion of the republic"; … A force like this, however, does more than divide, it destroys. Hostile to all claims of independence except its own, it is wholly incompatible with that effective equality which is implied in the classical idea of the commonwealth. To admit it within the community is thus to nourish the lion, whose reply to the hares in the assembly of beasts was to ask: Where are your claws?

— Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940)

The model of Christian social formation that Rod Dreher calls the Benedict Option comes in for a great deal of criticism, some of it from people I wouldn’t expect to be so critical. Let’s seek some clarity about the sources of discomfort.

The Benedict Option, as I understand it, is based on three premises.

1. The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
2. In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
3. Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.

From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.

I have to say that I simply do not see how any thoughtful Christian could disagree with any of these premises or the conclusion that follows from them. If any of you do so dissent, please let me know how and why — I would greatly benefit from hearing your views.

So what’s the problem? My sense is that many of you shy away from Rod’s rhetoric, which you believe alarmist. But in itself that’s a shallow reason for setting aside the whole BenOp argument. Rod has already begun to identify some of the communities which he believes to be doing the BenOp right — do you think they aren’t? Do you think they’ve gone astray? If so, please explain how.

The critical responses to the BenOp I’ve seen have struck me as merely visceral. I’d like to see more careful and thorough articulation of the critiques. But if you don’t believe that the three premises I’ve listed above are true, then I think you’re whistling past the graveyard. And if you accept the premises but don’t agree with the conclusion, then we definitely need to do some exercises in logic.