Living in the Book of Judges

A new review of my book, European out of wedlock births, the Great Replacement and more in this week's digest.

What I’m reading: We Were Never Woke by Musa al-Gharbi and Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki.

There will be no digest next week in honor of the US Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll try to include a lot of reading in here to tide you over.

First, Stiven Peter wrote a fantastic review of my book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture in the new issue of Mere Orthodoxy magazine. This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens - improving them in the process.

It has been more than two years since Aaron Renn wrote the “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Since then, it has easily become the most cited article in First Things. Renn’s framework has been discussed and dissected at length. However, the controversy with his views lies not in what he’s saying, but in what it means, namely that the past forms of Christian witness, from Billy Graham to Tim Keller, do not know how to address the cultural moment.

I appreciates that he assesses my work as coming from a consultant, not a theologian.

He is a consultant. Unlike academics and pastors, consultants are paid to analyze dysfunctional systems and make recommendations for improvement. The training of a consultant isn’t to be precise but practical, straight-to-the-point, actionable. In the same way that Hunter’s sociological training makes him a one-of-one in Evangelicalism, so Renn’s consultant experience makes him a one of one as well. Much of the initial pushback against Renn’s three worlds stems from misunderstanding the value a consultant delivers. Critics of Renn, who say that we “have always been in Babylon”, offer a theological response to a non-theological observation.

One of the things that I like is the way that he describes my three different worlds in terms of distribution of outcomes. He writes:

Now “positive world”, is a world where the people who hold cultural capital promote Christian values. What this means for the rest of the population is that not being a Christian poses a certain level of social risk for the average person. The more proximate people are to power, influence, etc. in the positive world, the more risk they expose themselves to by not being a Christian….It is “negative skewed” because it reflects negative outcomes for non-Christians in positive world. Moreover, it shows a simple point looked over in Renn’s description: there will be many people where there is little existential risk posed to not being a Christian, but for some, there is in fact a very large amount of risk. We might say that what happened to Gary Hart would lie at the tail of this distribution, being one of the more visible outcomes. However, Gary Hart dropping out reinforces the value structure and incentivizes everyone else to uphold Christian values.

He even has some helpful charts. These are more understandable in the context of his piece, but here’s a sample of the risk distribution of the Positive World.

His review is framed around the idea that our time is best compared to the Book of Judges, not the Babylonian exile.

The world of Babylon is a fragile world, it takes effort to maintain. Cultural capital must be stewarded and gate-kept to preserve Babylon’s power. The world of the Judges is not fragile. It is chaos. Without a divinely ordained figure that unites the tribes and introduces order (like Samuel), the era of the Judges simply continues.

Renn’s negative world should be taken to refer to the enhanced risk Christians face in society because of dissolution. Those who say we have always been in Babylon or that the Church has always been in negative word, risk overlooking the unique acidic effect libertine liberalism plays on society. Judges captures the eeriness of being a stranger and at risk in your own homeland. Babylon doesn’t. The strategies that work in Babylon may not work as well in Judges. Babylon has a concentrated enemy – a city, a king, or an institution. Judges is a spread-out amorphous minefield with extreme outcomes, like having a compromised Samson provide victory or the near slaughter of Benjamin. Neutral world strategies ignore these downside risks.

It’s a fantastic piece and I highly encourage you to read the whole thing.

My book also made Robert Ordway’s recommended reading list for this year.

And if you haven’t yet bought Life in the Negative World, pick it up today.

Out of Wedlock Births, European Style

The finance newsletter The Wednesday Letter does a weekly roundup of interesting charts and graphs. Here’s one of out of wedlock births in Europe.

Many of them are much higher than the United States (40%). Many of these births are to unwed couples. The USA actually has the highest share of single parent households in the world. But it shows the decline of traditional familialism. Interesting to look at which ones have unusually low rates.

Fooled by Randomness

There’s a great column by Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times on the role of luck in success.

I was reminded of [Rick] Astley after switching off a radio interview with an author — who will remain unnamed — the other day. The account of the forces shaping their writing was pleasant enough, rattling through a narrative of a home filled with books and parents who nurtured their love of stories.

It was the omission that was my flash point. The author left out their huge luck in having access to a vast familial financial cushion enabling them to scratch out time to write in a climate when writers’ earnings are more precarious than ever. That’s not to discount their writing talent but to place it alongside their great fortune. We are not good at talking about such luck because it doesn’t fit with our obsession with striving and talent. Ascribing every success to chance alone would make us all withdraw to our beds — hardly the stuff of motivational posters.

Interestingly, many people do seem to attribute their success to good luck, neglecting to mention key facts about their background such as coming from a wealthy family or having a very high IQ (luck, but of a different kind) or their hard work and actual strategies. They say things like, “Aw, shucks. I guess I just got lucky” suggesting they just got a lucky break, not that their mom was an heiress.

At the same time, as a society we are hesitant to admit how much of success does come down to good fortune of various varieties. This would expose of the lie of the so-called “meritocracy” that is no such thing.

Acknowledging luck’s role downplays our own specialness. Sam Friedman, co-author of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, told me that those he spoke to at the top of politics, business, cultural institutions and the professions put talent above luck in explaining their success. In interviews, many deployed it as “a refrain, a linguistic means to distance oneself from the suggestion of intentional or strategic career-building behaviour. Instead, luck often seemed to be used as a device to frame one’s success as flowing from spontaneous or serendipitous external recognition rather than calculated intention — ‘I was lucky to be recognised by x’ or ‘I was lucky to get y opportunity’.” Rather than being integral to their success, luck seemed to Friedman to serve to deflect from “accusations of power-seeking and hubris”.

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The problem with minimising the role of luck is that it underplays the likelihood that it can go the other way. The truth is effort or talent can’t make you wholly immune from misfortune. Divorce, illness, redundancy happen to the best of us. As Astley told me on the phone, the difference between success and failure is a knife edge.

Nassim Taleb wrote an entire book on this, Fooled by Randomness, that I consider a must read. If you haven’t already read it, my Newsletter #14 is a précis of Taleb’s work.

Newsletter #14: An Antifragile Church

On the subject of meritocracy, David Brooks wrote the cover story in next month’s Atlantic on how the Ivy League broke America. It’s a long but very good article. David Brooks has a gift of being able to take ideas that would otherwise be rejected and present them in a way the American elite will take in, or at least engage with. That’s very difficult to do. He’s something of the conscience of elite America. A friend of mine called Brooks, “The pastor of the Aspen Institute.” That’s a good way to put it.

The Great Replacement

You’ve probably heard the term controversial “Great Replacement” in regards to the immigration debate in America, but its origins are with the French leftist intellectual Renaud Camus, who has a much more expansive view of the concept.

Nathan Pinkoski, who is fluent in French, has a great look at Camus’ ideas.

By losing the capacity to perceive their own cultural excellence, Westerners lost the capacity to perceive how mass immigration would displace their own cultures and peoples. Mass immigration isn’t the work of a cabal, but of a cultural shift within the West that made mass immigration appear possible and desirable. The Little Replacement created the conditions for the Great Replacement. And that, Camus argues, is the world we have lived in since this process took off in the 1970s. Our peoples are being replaced.

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But the real problem here is much deeper than debates about how we define the French culture or the French people, or Western civilization writ large. If you think cultures can be added to and subtracted from human populations over time, without changing anything substantial about their communities, then what do you think human beings actually are? Camus has the answer: resources.

To resolve the tension between many cultures and one people, the presupposition of multiculturalism is that a people is not defined by a shared culture, but as a productive material unit. People are defined not by culture, but by economic output.

The transformation of humanity into resources is the process of 20th century managerialism or Taylorianism. Managerialism is more than just a set of methods to boost production in the workplace or standardize machinery; it’s a mode of encountering reality, and has its own anthropology and fundamental ontology. Managers see the world in terms of resources to be utilized, what Martin Heidegger calls “standing-reserve.” Workers are taught to perceive themselves in the same way, which makes them more compliant, easier to administer, and easier to replace. Men are treated and arranged as machines. In Camus’s vocabulary, they are “undifferentiated human matter.”

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For Camus, the Great Replacement—mass immigration—may be the political issue of our times, but it is not the issue. The issue is the managerial, mechanical, technological revolution that substitutes us out for machines. We have learned that our humanity is replaceable.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

BBC: The real reason for the rise in male childlessness

But the picture of who is childless is changing. Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them – in particular lower income men.

A 2021 study in Norway found that the rate of male childlessness was 72% among the lowest five percent of earners, but only 11% among the highest earners – a gap that had widened by almost 20 percentage points over the previous 30 years.

Robin Hadley is one of those who wanted to have a child but struggled to do so. He didn’t go to university and went on to become a technical photographer in a university lab, based in Manchester, and by his 30s, he was desperate to be a dad.

NYT: The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent

Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favorite copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit” since her three children — now in their 20s and 30s — were young. She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family’s home with books. (All of her children could read before they started school, Ms. Birk recalled with pride.) She hoped one day to be a “cool” grandma who would share her favorite stories with a new generation.

But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is “right for them,” Ms. Birk said, it still breaks her heart. “I don’t have young children anymore, and now I’m not going to have grandchildren,” she said. “So that part of my life is just over.”

Pirate Wires: Is Technology Destroying Marriage?

The Guardian: The boys in our liberal school are different now that Trump has won

But as we sat down at our desks, we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around. It didn’t make much sense. We live in a mostly liberal town in the Hudson Valley where Harris-Walz signs were posted outside of most of our friends’ houses. This is not to say that families with dissenting opinions don’t live in our town. But the boys that were the most vocal in their enthusiasm about the election results have progressive parents just like ours.

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But now all that seemed as if it was just the beginning of a new wave of male conservatism that was infiltrating our school. Obsession with achieving a more muscular body through excessive exercise and intense dieting fueled by ridiculous social media campaigns fell far outside the realm of healthy self-care. And the desire to socialize only with other boys stood in stark contrast to the co-ed activities we were accustomed to since childhood.

Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder got a great review from Matthew Crawford in First Things - “Open this book and it gets real weird, real fast.”

Jordan Peterson’s new book on the Bible, We Who Wrestle With God, was just released. It seems to be getting mixed to hostile reviews. I liked this review in Christianity Today because, unlike so many others, it grapples with what is so compelling to many people about Peterson’s take on the Bible.

About a decade ago, a friend of mine mentioned a series of videos about the Bible he’d discovered online. It was by an obscure Canadian academic whom neither of us knew. My friend had been raised evangelical and remained a Christian, but after watching, he asked me a question he’s repeated many times since: “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me the Bible is interesting?”

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An odd ally for Christians, in other words, at least at first glance. Yet my Christian friend found Peterson a breath of fresh air. The reason, I’ve come to see, is simple. Peterson was speaking about the Bible as if it were the most important thing in the world, as if the stakes were a matter of life and death, as if the stories and themes of Scripture demanded an immediate existential decision on the part of everyone who encountered them. My friend was familiar with old-time religion. He wasn’t familiar with this.

Paul Kingsnorth gave the First Things Erasmus Lecture this year. A couple of evangelicals posted reactions, Jake Meador in Mere Orthodoxy and Joel Carini in his newsletter. From Carini:

Kingsnorth effectively articulates the perennial view of radical Christianity, that which has motivated the monastic stream of Catholic Christianity and the radical Reformation stream of Protestantism. According to this stream of theological thought, grace - the teachings of Christ, the new Commandment - abolishes nature - the orders of human life, family, property, and state.

The Nation: Party Under Country: Dissecting the Democratic Malaise - A good post-mortem from the left on the Democrats’ defeat in this year’s election.

David Brooks also wrote a great recent column in the Times on the junkification of American life.

The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Rod Dreher and Patrick T. Brown.

New this week:

• Why It's Critical to Manage for Institutional Trust - In an era of declining trust, leaders must actively earn and sustain it.

• Joseph Holmes looks at smiling movie villains, and how happiness became right coded.

• My podcast this week was with Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, on making public buildings beautiful again.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.