Dear Reader (including those who support a squirrel insurgency),
Let me begin with a story I’ve told before. In college, I was invited to participate in a (fairly lame) leadership seminar. In addition to watching highlights from the 1980 men’s Olympic hockey victory over the Soviet Union and other motivational stuff, we took a personality test. I don’t think it was a Myers-Briggs assessment but it was something like that. My results were unusual; only 4 percent of people who took the test had my personality type. Graphically, most results showed two lines going in the same direction but at different heights like, say, a chart showing per-capita income and household income. Mine showed two lines starting in the middle and splitting off in different directions like a fork in the road. It was explained to me that the two lines going in almost symmetrically opposite directions usually indicated that the subject was from a divorced home where both parents tried to play the role of primary parent, or when married parents couldn’t agree on how to raise the kids. This was plausible to me, because even though my parents were fairly happily married, they were extremely different people, each with exceedingly strong views and personalities.
Anyway, the test administrator explained to me that perhaps the most notable thing about my personality type is that it tended to hold constant in almost all situations: high stress, low stress, and everything in between. People could rely on me to be the same person they knew, in thick or thin. I wouldn’t crack under pressure. This now has a fainter ring of truth to me, but at the time I took it as gospel.
I called my father and recounted this to him the way young people often do—with great enthusiasm and fascination with myself. “I’m a rock!” I told him. And things like that.
My dad listened as I got worked up. He could tell I was overly impressed with myself and this dubiously “scientific” finding. And then he said, “Mmmm, hmmm.” And then after a long pause, he replied, “That’s great … unless you’re always an a–hole.”
It hit hard in part because my dad so rarely cursed, but also because the cursing had the intended effect of puncturing my balloon of self-importance.
I think about this often. One of the lessons I took from this is that it’s better to be a fake decent person than an authentic ass. This week I had Tomer Persico on The Remnant to talk about his book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea. We didn’t talk as much as I would like about the arguments at the end of the book on the modern cult of authenticity. But Persico’s arguments track with a lot of the stuff I’ve written and talked about, particularly in my book Suicide of the West.
I don’t want to do a disservice to the scope and depth of his argument, but to cut to the chase, the idea that we—as in all of us—are made in the image of God was a revolutionary concept, first fleshed out by the Jews and universalized by the Christian faith. He traces this concept from biblical antiquity through the triumph of Pauline Christianity to the Protestant Reformation and, ultimately, to the present day. What began as the literal claim that humans are physically made in the image of God became a belief that we have innate dignity and autonomy because we have a divine spark within us.
Martin Luther turned things up a notch by insisting that his interpretation of biblical scripture was superior—truer—than the practices of the Catholic Church. But Luther’s argument wasn’t that his independent personal morality was right, but rather his interpretation of scripture was right and that he couldn’t abandon it just to go with the flow. Luther was clear that if he could be persuaded that the church’s biblical interpretations were more accurate, he would defer to them. But barring that, he was bound to stand by his own learned understanding of scripture.
“We are interested in the pure and true course,” Luther wrote, “prescribed in holy Scripture, and are little concerned about usage or what the fathers have said or done in this matter. … Herein we neither ought, should, nor would be bound by human traditions, however sacred or highly regarded.”
Luther argued that he had to stay true to his belief in an external truth. When asked to repudiate his writings at the Diet of Worms, he famously proclaimed: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
This argument evolved in the modern age. What began as an argument about the power of conscience to identify external morality morphed into an argument for internal morality. The idea of a divine spark that reflected the ultimate external source of truth and morality—God—became the idea that we are all, in effect, our own personal gods. Being “true to yourself” became an end in itself.
Please forgive the long excerpt, but Persico says it well:
Our subjectivity became suffused with ethical and religious meaning. Our psychological worlds became critical components in our search for identity. We define ourselves by our choices, our desires, our dreams, our creativity, our authenticity, our autonomy— no longer only by our place in the social matrix, or the fact that we are the mothers of someone or sons of someone else, members of some tribe or some social class. In time, our internally-sourced religious meaning, our inner relationship with the divine, is forgotten, as is the principle of the image of God itself. The moment that our reason and inner liberty assumed centerstage, it became less important to find external sources or even external objectives for them. There was less of a need for dialogue, or for a horizon. Instead, there emerged another need: to protect our reason and liberty from external threats—threats from bad people, from political authorities, and also from the supreme authority of God. Our reason and liberty, according to the thinking that emerged in the eighteenth-century West, compel us to reject God’s existence. Our autonomy has been sanctified, defined as freedom from external coercion, and thus as goading us to discard what was once defined as a necessary condition for its existence.
In brief, we became modern individuals.
Now, obviously none of this is black-and-white or universally true. There are still plenty of believing Christians, and there are plenty of atheists who still recognize external notions of morality.
Still, this evolution is where we get so much of the pithy nihilism and glib solipsism of contemporary culture. The talk about “my personal truth,” the “personal is the political,” “you’re not the boss of me,” “I have to be true to myself,” and “who are you to judge?,” all rests atop the moral scaffolding of Judeo-Christian theology and anthropology. I chuckle when atheists try to steal moral authority from Jesus by saying “judge not lest ye be judged” as if Jesus was some kind of utilitarian libertarian. Jesus had some pretty judge-y views of right and wrong. And this is not purely a left-wing phenomenon.
The distrust of elites, experts, authority, even tradition—at least inconvenient tradition—that so animates the populist right is just another facet of modern antinomianism run amok.
I’ll forgo another tirade about romanticism—the counter-Enlightenment philosophy from whence we get a lot of this (not to be confused with the reactionary counter-Enlightenment philosophy of folks like de Maistre that sought to reaffirm rigid notions of external, specifically papal, authority).
If you can’t beat him, be him.
Instead, let’s talk about politics. There’s a school of Trump defenders who celebrate his “authenticity.” I think it’s funny how quite a few of these people claim to be very conservative traditionalists. And yet they invoke a decidedly modern, even postmodern, argument to defend Trump. It doesn’t matter if he’s rude, deceitful, or ignorant because he’s authentically himself. He doesn’t follow the norms or rules of politics or even conventional morality, and they love him for it because he’s true to himself. He “says what he thinks” and that’s good enough—even laudable—even when what he thinks is objective nonsense. Heavily influenced by Norman Vincent Peale and the prosperity gospel, Trump adheres to the romantic notion that he can make his personal truth an external truth through pure will.
But you’ve heard this from me before. What brings all of this to mind is the infectiousness of it. Because this approach has worked for Trump, Democrats are starting to conclude that they should emulate it.
“In the wake of Trump, it’s really important for us to understand that authenticity is the coin of the realm, that voters can smell insincerity more acutely than ever before,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, tells the Washington Post. “They know when you are using talking points or poll-tested language. They expect you to make mistakes.”
Tim Hogan, the Democratic National Committee’s senior adviser on messaging, explains that the emerging Democratic strategy “is not to have someone who needs to read a 40-page deck and calibrate before posting, but just go out and recruit people who know how to dunk.”
The Post is still enough of a family newspaper to avoid reprinting the expletives, but a big part of this strategy is to drop a lot more f-bombs. “Many Democrats are also swearing more,” the Post reports. “Democratic politicians’ use of the most common curse words spiked early this year and has outstripped Republicans’ use of profanity since February, according to a Washington Post analysis of social media posts, podcasts and other statements by public figures.”
And this brings me back to my dad’s reaction. Democrats think, not unreasonably, that Donald Trump is an a–hole. And their response is to behave likewise. Here they stand and they can do no other.
The Democrats—well, these Democrats—have concluded that they need to be “sincere” and “authentic,” and the way to demonstrate that is by cursing and mocking political opponents. This raises a number of questions. Are they saying that they’ve been fake all this time by not acting this way? Or are they saying they need to fake being crude and coarse in order to convince people they’re authentic and sincere?
Part of my enduring problem with the cult of authenticity is that it is so often a form of faddish conformity masquerading as nonconformity. The “rebel” who wears a T-shirt to a business meeting to prove his nonconformity is still allowing others to dictate his fashion. He’s just choosing to do the opposite as a kind of status-seeking flex.
If your personal philosophy is to simply play the contrarian, you’re still letting others determine what you think. If everyone says 2 plus 2 is 4, you’re no free-thinker and independent spirit by claiming it’s 5. You’re just taking the wrong position to prove an utterly false “independence.”
Notions of basic decency, honesty, and civility have deep religious roots, but they do not necessarily depend on religion to be good and valuable. The “golden rule” is a good external rule even for atheists. Trump’s—and much of the right’s—prideful nonconformity to those basic rules is worthy of condemnation and I do not shirk from condemning it. But what is an even more damning and worthy condemnation is conforming to asininity in the desperate pursuit of seeming like an authentic a–hole, too.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: So this was pretty much the worst week for the Dingo since she was in intensive care with parvo 11 years ago. For those of you who don’t know, the Canine Update actually begins with that chapter. We got Zoë as a rescue puppy (you can read about that here). She was advertised as a German Shepherd mix, but we soon discovered that she was in fact a Carolina Dog. We also discovered that she was very, very ill with parvo and almost died. So many readers wanted to know how she was doing, I added a Canine Update to the G-File. After she got better, people still wanted to hear how she was doing. And then we got Pippa, and the horrible drama of integrating the white trash swamp dog huntress and the prim-and-not-quite-proper, goofy spaniel (I often said it was like living with the canine equivalent of Daryl from The Walking Dead and the dumbest sister from Downton Abbey). And by that point I was stuck with the Canine Update.
Anyway, Zoë has—had—bad chompers. Maybe squirrels and voles are nature’s candy corn and they rotted her teeth. A couple years ago, she had to have over 20 teeth pulled. This week, she had nearly all the rest pulled, including her canines. This came the day after Zoë and Pippa had already gone to the vet. So it was a terrible, no good, very bad week for both of the girls (Gracie was fine with it). The extractions took a long time and Zoë didn’t react well once home (she wouldn’t lie down and was panting raspily). So The Fair Jessica had to take Zoë to another vet in the middle of the night and they had to do X-rays—or claimed they did. I feel absolutely terrible about the whole thing, especially because I had to leave town. Anyway, they’re both doing okay now (though my bank account isn’t). Pippa was on a hunger strike until today. I could easily write another thousand words about how awful it is to put dogs through this kind of stress, even though it’s necessary. The vets were all unanimous that Zoë was in real pain because of her teeth, so we know it was the right thing. But that’s not a lot of solace for us—and especially not for them. Zoë has become such a sweet, good girl in her old age that this whole thing just breaks my heart. But I still love my toothless white trash swamp dog—and my dippy spaniel too.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Tom Simmons
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: A politically homeless conservative since 2015 who was a longtime National Review reader of Jonah and David French back in the day and admirer of Steve’s work on Fox and in print, I was a drawn to subscribe to The Dispatch when Jonah leaked the news from the G-File about it starting and have been reading ever since. I have continued to enjoy the breadth and depth of journalism from a center-right perspective.
Personal Details: A previously registered Republican from California makes me one of the least important political votes in the country … equally yoked with my brethren in D.C., unfortunately.
Pet’s Name: Otto Heinrich VonSimmons I
Pet’s Breed: Rough-coat St. Bernard
Gotcha Story: After Henry (Hank) Cornelius Simmons (the biggest, baddest American Bulldog known to Orange County, California) passed on Memorial Day weekend in 2017 we had a dry spell with quadrupeds. Our son was only 3 when Hank passed, so when we realized the boy needed to grow up with a dog, my wife started researching. We like giant breeds, so try a St. Bernard, they say—not a lot of energy, great for kids, great family protectors—or so the story went. We found Otto in Missouri in late 2020, from a breeder who’s been breeding Saints since 1988 and my son (read: his parents) got him at 8 weeks after flying him half way across the country from Kansas City to OC.
Pet’s Likes: Drooling, slobbering, demanding 15-minute backside rubs, being 190 pounds of awesome largeness, and treats … lots of treats … so much so that he barks like Chewbacca if he doesn’t get them at the appointed times.
Pet’s Dislikes: The arrival of the groomer, being turned away from the cold marble floors on warmer days, having his drool unnecessarily (to him alone) wiped with rags, small dogs who bark at his aforementioned largeness during hopeful playtime.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: Sneaking into his mom and dad’s closet and falling asleep up against his dad’s rack of suits, leaving a profuse amount of dog hair across each and every right sleeve of his dad’s suit jackets, waking up to hearing his dad’s very audible gasp, only to fall right back asleep and not understand the level of commotion or distress.
Bad Pet: His bipedal sister accidentally left the garage door open on a summer evening and (unknown to Otto) neighbors were nosing around on a summer stroll in his cul de sac without his permission so he promptly dispatched (see what I did there?) them in an Olympic 100-yard dash to a safer location behind a different neighbor’s front gate, yet continued to gently caution them about enforcing his perimeter of said cul de sac with a bark that is the equivalent fear inducement of racking a shotgun until his father sheepishly cajoled him back behind his actual perimeter and fence.
Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.
