What the book is about: The author, a believing and practicing Orthodox Christian, believes that the growing power of progressive and leftist influence is creating a “soft totalitarianism” in the US and other Western countries, and goes into detail about how Christians were oppressed by Soviet Bloc (“hard totalitarianism”), how they resisted, and how that may be used as a template for resistance now.
To support his claim about the current situation, he cites conversations with people who actually lived and resisted under Communist regimes and how they see similarities in our current society (well, pre-covid society), and at the beginning of the book cites the example of a pizza parlor suffering the wrath of an online mob (including death threats and arson threats) after the Christian owners refused to cater a same-sex wedding.
There is a lot here. A lot.
I was not previously familiar with Dreher’s writing before reading this book (which I learned of after a recommendation by left-but-not-“woke” atheists unhappy with the current public conversation). He is a Senior Editor at the American Conservative. In particular this piece, written about the December 2020 Jericho March Washington DC, is what I used to orient myself to his views on politics and religion in general. Based on that column and this book, I judge him to be not insane.
My thoughts, Level One:
There is no God. Never was. Nor any other supernatural beings. And when we die, our consciousness does not live on. We simply cease to be like the light from a broken bulb. Period. Therefore any religion based on the belief of any supernatural beings or power, or that there is life after death, is flatly false, and factually wrong. Declarations religions make about right and wrong need to be argued on their merits and passages in an ancient book or appeals to a higher power just don’t mean anything. They are the assertion, not the argument.
Dreher spends a lot of time going into the details of how the Communist regimes (a lot of examples from Czechoslovakia) oppressed Christians as a matter of policy, including torture, murder, and punishing the friends and families of dissidents. And every time, all I could think of was “You all did that too, when you could!” I just had Christopher Hitchens in the back of my head the whole book, “We have a right to remember how barbarically (religions) behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” When religion is in control of society, hell is here on Earth. It’s no better than the Communists.
#s 1 and 2 notwithstanding, the freedom of religion is a cornerstone of a free society. When religion is suppressed, hell is also here on Earth. Whatever the crimes of religion when it is in power, things are not one bit better when religion is forbidden. The separation of church and state, as brilliant an idea as there ever was, can not mean the elimination of the church from the state.
Recognizing the importance of freedom of religion doesn’t exactly work if religious people are then marginalized for, you know, actually practicing their religion. This gets tricky though, because religious texts are full of all sorts of fucked up things, including calls to murder people for some pretty flimsy reasons. But requiring people to actively participate in things they believe are wrong is... not right.
I don't believe what the author believes, so from my perspective this book is about one question with universal relevance:
How do you resist a consensus you do not believe in?
Christians in particular have one great advantage in resisting oppression and being willing to die for their beliefs: They believe they continue on after death, and they believe that being martyred for their beliefs in this world is but a prelude to peace and joy in the next.
I don't have that luxury.
This book, by the way, is named after the Alexander Solzhenitsyn essay written on the eve of his exile from the Soviet Union. I’d say it’s required reading for any human being wanting to live in a free society.
It basically says (to greatly simplify) that everyone has the power to say no, and that saying no by itself is significant.
I don’t agree with the essay entirely; “Will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.” seems to be egregiously bad advice because I would think you would want to be keenly aware of what such people say if attending such meetings is something you are wont to do, and being unable to suffer distortions in fiction and entertainment seems likely to make for an insufferable human being and a joyless society.
But this I'm with 1000%:
“And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul — don't let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general — let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.”
Live Not By Lies also leans on the example of the greengrocer from Václav Havel's The Power of the Powerless.
Relevant excerpt here.
Full essay here.
Basically it tells the story of a greengrocer who hangs a “Workers of the World, Unite!” sign in his window in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, not because he believes in it, but because it is required. Until one day he doesn't.
Yes, Havel’s Greengrocer has obvious parallels to recent goings-on and certain phrases1, but my mind starting making connections. Live Not by Lies (and all books of this sort) invokes Orwell’s 1984, and the more clever examples (such as the present book being reviewed) then point out that the current situation actually reminds more of Huxley’s Brave New World.
But the Orwell I connect with the Greengrocer is the Politics and the English Language essay.
The entire essay is wonderful and important, but pay special attention to the “meaningless words” section.
If the use of a cliché is the sign of an inactive mind on autopilot, which seems a reasonable hypothesis to me, then I think the use of a political slogan (insisting on The Way Things Should Be that everyone would be subject to) surely signifies mental death. And when certain slogans become movements, it becomes murderous to thought.
So when any movement or slogan becomes a thing, I avoid it. When people using it pretend that it’s conveying an actual idea, I know I’m being talked down to. When it’s presented as truth that cannot be disagreed with, I know I’m dealing with a would-be authoritarian danger to my life.
That is not an exaggeration.
And it doesn’t matter if I agree with the intended sentiment. It doesn’t matter if I agree with the literal words. When they become this sort of slogan, when whatever thoughts and feelings and nuance and conditionals are expected to be swept away and you must agree wholeheartedly (or pretend to) or else that’s a sign that you’re a bad person and there must be consequences to your wrong thinking, then the phrase and the thought behind it become anti-thought, anti-human, and it is always right to resist and to support those that resist.
Anything you are not allowed to disagree with or even question functions the same way as a lie. Even if it’s true.
Anything you can chant at a protest, anything you’d see on a sign at a political rally (for any party): It’s not an idea, it’s a threat as far as I’m concerned.
There are examples which I’d guess we’re all thinking, but I don’t want to derail the overall idea with examples that would derail the conversation by becoming about the examples. So how’s this:
“Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech.”
Except… for it to be free, it really does, else speech isn’t any freer or any more a right than, say, murder or rape.
“Freedom to murder does not mean freedom from consequences of murdering.”
It’s the same thing.
If you think I’m attacking people when I’m attacking slogans, then we're not even having the same conversation. Slogans used in this way become completely divorced from the issues underlying them, and a completely separate issue from the people they are said to represent. They are their own entity, and are never good.
The politics surrounding an issue are not the issue itself, but a separate thing entirely.
Suffice it to say, there are things that the greater culture seems to believe, that I feel like I am required to believe, that I simply don’t. Other things I’m more ambivalent about, but the conversation around those issues are so toxic that fuck it, any opinion is OK with me, outside pressure be damned.
Let me give a couple of examples that feel out of fashion so I don’t feel like I’m dodging this whole thing completely, even if they aren’t the direct examples I had in mind:
After hours at conventions, I’m often in conversations with groups of people. After one convention, I forget which one it was, in 2018 or 2019 (jesus, forever ago now) there was a conversation not about trans people, but a trans person (who wasn’t present) was talked about as part of the issue being discussed. I noticed that I was using the trans person’s pronouns and, as I recall, nobody else in the conversation was.
Nobody questioned my use of this person’s pronouns, and I didn’t question anyone else’s lack of use. We just had our conversation where people expressed their thoughts without anyone telling anyone else how to talk.
After the George Floyd killing last year, it quickly came into fashion that “black” should be capitalized when referring to black people in writing. My thought was that it was important that black and white both be treated the same, but I read a column about why capitalizing “white” was a bad idea that I found very compelling. (Basically, that’s what white supremacists have traditionally done.) So that’s how I’m moving forward: neither get capitalized.
(As far as publishing style guides go, I will leave that entirely to the individual writer’s discretion.)
“If one person gets up and says, ‘You know what, this Holocaust? I'm not sure it even happened. In fact, I’m pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.’ That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with.”
All these thoughts and more flooded into my head as I read this book. It’s no exaggeration to say that it hit me like a fucking hammer. I hit a particularly nasty depressive state for quite some time. Because one inescapable truth, as I see it:
THE THING WHICH THIS AUTHOR CALLS SOFT TOTALITARIANISM IS 100% REAL AND HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
I wish I could say differently. I wish I could say “ha ha silly Christian, if you’d just give up your allegiance to things which don’t exist you'd see the world as it is!”
But...
I behave as if it is true, so therefore I believe it is true, no matter whatever else I may say.
Of course, it’s always true. We live in a society, as the meme tells us, and there will always be pressure on the individual to conform to various norms. And a certain amount of that is justified, because we are but primates who all too easily revert to tribal primitivism and barbarics. We are animals who have figured out a way to organize ourselves on a large scale, and doing so for the benefit of both the individual and society at the same time is a constant balancing act requiring constant conversation and argument. It’s never perfect at the best of times, and ignoring necessary issues, as well as the undercorrection and overcorrection of issues, are constant problems that must be dealt with, all the while the scale itself constantly shifts. As soon as any side of a conversation is shut down, then more people will suffer as balance is lost and unable to be regained until the conversation can open back up.
(I think weighting certain peoples’ suffering by demographic is immoral, by the by.)
But the freedom to disagree, in both thought and in speech, must be upheld in order for the individual to hold any weight on the societal scale. No one should have the power to say “No, you can’t say that.”2 And even more importantly and vitally, no one should ever, not ever, not even once, have the power to say “You must say that.”
And yes, there are things you’re thinking right now that shouldn’t ever be said. I’m certainly thinking of things I really wish no one should ever think or say. But our thinking on this can’t ever be imposed on others without opening the door for people to do the same to us for whatever unpopular thought we have3.
And I can’t even think of a situation where someone should rightfully be forced to say something they don’t believe. That’s just basic personhood at stake there.
Here’s something I sometimes admit, and I do acknowledge it is a rather lightweight source for something so important, one fundamental piece of media in my moral development was Ultima V. The computer game. Ultima IV was an interesting game, in that it had no real villain; the quest was to become the Avatar, the living embodiment of eight virtues: Compassion, Honesty, Honor, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Valor. Ultima V introduces a villain who becomes dictator and requires the public to practice these virtues in specifically defined ways… or else. It’s intended to be and indeed is a complete horror show. By fighting this villain, you are explicitly fighting for people’s rights to be unvirtuous. Most excellent.
You can’t command or force someone to be a good person, and forget attempting to do that, even attempting to enforce a definition of “good person” onto others is itself enough to make you a monster.
Conformity and consensus are horrible things to impose on others, and even more horrible things to have imposed on oneself.
I’m sure there are a great many things I am wrong about. I’m sure there are things I am very shortsighted about and would think differently with a different perspective on it. But if I am to change my thinking, then I need to work through and understand the issue to my satisfaction. If I am being ordered to think differently, rather than persuaded, I am going to dig in and resist and fuck right off with you then. And in the end, no matter the persuasion, I might just not agree with the proposition put before me and that’s that.
Of course, I have to think: If so many of my thoughts are so unpopular, if I’m so out of step with society… maybe I’m just not a good person?
I’ve certainly hurt people before. Sometimes I hurt them because I’m simply being selfish. Sometimes I think there is a greater principle at stake and holding to the principle is more important than the feelings of whoever I’m dealing with. Sometimes my needs and the needs of another person are just so opposed that someone is going to be hurt, and if I have the choice, why should it be me?
But the more I see of people proclaiming what is good and how they treat not only those who they see as bad, but even those not upholding goodness well enough, the more I think that I just don’t give a shit about being good. I know in my head that “being good” and “enforcing one’s own morality on other people” are just about opposite concepts, but the gut feeling I have these days is that “good” people are just complete assholes and I want nothing to do with them.
And it occurs to me that one of the reasons I do what I do, why I’ve always wanted to do what I do, is because of that very dynamic.
The PMRC (a bipartisan organization, by the way), the Satanic Panic, the Parent’s Television Resource, the Moral Majority, Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, all of these had profound effects on me as a child and teenager. I thought they were intensely evil and destructive to the creative spirit of human beings. They thought they were doing good, but all they were doing is crushing people who did not match their vision of good.
And it wasn’t even about real life, at least not the parts I saw and experienced. It was about targeting creativity, imagination, and the freedom to fucking think.
Those who resisted were great people. They always are.
It was wrong for TSR to cave in to the Mad Mothers (much more on that in two weeks in this space) and water down D&D, it was wrong for the music industry to cave and start using those content stickers. (The Hays code in films, the Comics code, the content labels they’re putting on movies and such these days, any ratings used as judgment and filter rather than neutral information, all of these things are disgusting as far as I’m concerned.)
But what really killed me when I read Live Not By Lies, or what I fear will really kill me, is that the left-authoritarianism it decries and warns against is to me the exact same thing.
The pressures created by those who believe in intersectionality and the diversity/equity/inclusion crowd are the same exact same thing as the pressures created by Tipper Gore and Mary Whitehouse. “We have a worldview that we require you to acknowledge and promote in your work, and if you dissent we will use all means available to crush you.” As if creative work is only valid and allowable if reflecting and supportive of certain attitudes. It must be propaganda or it must disappear.
And so when in a previous generation people like Frank Zappa and Jello Biafra would go on the front lines against the establishment, who’s there today? And how are they treated? When artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe created things that defied mainstream cultural norms, I remember the uproar as artists stood up to affirm their rights to create4.
It seems to me that many of the artists of today who would back then would have fought tooth and nail against the likes of Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly are today in league with the modern-day Robertsons and Schlaflys, agreeing that some things just should not be done.
And I see what happened, where I went wrong in my formulation of the world. The people against the Moral Majority types weren’t necessarily against the idea of an establishment crunching down on creative dissent, they were just against that establishment. A certain number of them wanted that power for themselves, instead of recognizing that nobody should have that power.
There are a lot of people out there who equate supporting a person’s right to say something as indistinguishable from agreeing with what they say, and there are also a lot of people out there who think if you agree with anything someone says, you’re on board with everything they say. That supporting someone’s right to choose means taking responsibility for their choices. What nonsense.
But me, I’m equally far away in opinion and temperament from that old cultural establishment as I am from this current one. It’s all the same to me, dictating what is and isn’t allowed (and who is and who isn’t allowed) in creative fields.
Shouldn’t it always be the people who decide that? With the consequences being, at most, being ignored? “Well shucks, that didn’t catch on,” instead of being actively prevented from reaching an audience?
But being part of the resistance against those trying to enforce conformity and consensus in the creative environment today have less inspirational sources to draw from. They’re more political than artistic. And that’s how I fell into listening to people like James Lindsay and John McWhorter and yes, Jordan Peterson, as people against what I see as the current cultural hegemony. It was a natural extension from earlier listening to the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, which was the extension of listening to Bill Hicks and George Carlin et al even earlier than that.
The fact that the politics of all the names I just mentioned are all over the place and don’t agree with each other is a feature, not a bug. The point is not “I agree with their vision,” the point is “I deny the efforts of people to tell me how I should think and I will read and listen to it all and side with those who at any particular time are standing up and saying ‘No.’”
And so I buy things that are out of fashion. Books by ‘Titania McGrath’ and Abigail Schrier and Douglas Murray and a similar cast of characters (while also buying books from people like Ibram X Kendi and Michel Foucault and Bill Ayers to make sure I don’t fall the pit of only hearing one side’s arguments, or trusting what one side says the other side’s arguments are) who are considered “bad,” just as a generation ago I was all about gathering as much Satanic material as I could because it too was considered “bad.”
After reading Live Not By Lies, I’ve been cheeky and calling this sort of thing samizdat.
And frankly, a lot of the stuff is actually bad. Most of the Satanic stuff is in hindsight juvenile and awful. Some of it stands up over time, but the point in the moment wasn’t the quality, it was about gathering the will to fight. And I expect most of the “anti-woke” personalities of today are likewise going to age very badly (a hell of a lot are complete garbage thinkers right now, cough cough Candace Owens), but the point is to just keep the viewpoints coming and find out what questions make people uncomfortable and live in that space. And just like the brand of Christianity that dominated cultural discourse in the 1980s, this new faith will pass as well. Hopefully. Probably to be replaced by some other nonsense just as toxic.
And when the tides turn, as they always do, I expect a good number of people standing up to say “No!” now, and the newer people coming along who will think like them, to be the ones pressing their thumbs down on other people. Such is the circle of life. I hope when that time comes I’m producing things and fraternizing with people that really piss them off, too.
But a few months back I made a decision to back off from listening to/reading a lot of the personalities involved in this. Deleted my personal twitter, unsubscribed from the vast majority of YouTube channels I’d been following, stopped reading the news even. Because I found it wasn’t actually helping me fight the battles I need to fight. It was just constant conflict and war and frankly the complete degradation of public discourse from the personal level all the way to what are supposed to be respected mainstream media sources.
What prompted me to finally disconnect was that I became worried that I was getting a little too into those decrying how the current situation resembles (or soon will) China’s Cultural Revolution, I decided to step back and read Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism to get some perspective.
Very early on she compares what happened to the Jews under the Nazis to the aristocracy in the French Revolution:
According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privileges to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
This as explanation for the Terror and the Holocaust… while I constantly hear about decolonization and the evils of “whiteness” and the need for greater diversity and suddenly I really am wondering exactly what it is people are really wanting. Just as the cultural landscape changes and the people interested in their freedom when they were unpopular take the mantle of cultural deciders when they have the power to do so, I’m fearing that same sort of reversal on a wider level. Justice and social good come from breaking the cycle of oppression and dominance and actual equal treatment and opportunity… not from making sure everyone gets their turn holding the whip and wearing the yoke.
I really did have to stop paying attention to real life, because it’s nothing but shit, all the way down. And it always has been. I never could relate to people, I could never feel much emotion for real-world events or tragedies. I was always attracted to stories, and imagination. Thinking unmoored from concern and the taste and consequences in the real world. The more “wrong,” the better, because that showed independence of thought.
All I want is make my nonsense as I like without interference, and for other people to do the same, and for people to have every opportunity to decide for themselves if they like it or not.
In service of that, me and the people I collaborate with will create what we wish to create. It will be at times beauteous, at other times ugly. It will be sometimes acceptable, at other times un. Sometimes what we create will reflect our real-life values, and sometimes we will explore situations and scenarios inimicable to what we believe.
But the words, and thoughts, will be what we choose.
yeah, Live Not By Lies really wrecked me.
Note that neither I nor LotFP posted any black squares last summer.
In the public square sense. What I believe we should all just put up with when someone is in a park babbling nonsense isn’t something that a shopkeeper need tolerate inside his store.
I posit that if you don’t have any unpopular thoughts about very important things, you’re not even a real human being.
One common thread throughout Live Not By Lies and resisting Communism was the importance of family and community as a support system. People you could always speak the truth to, those whose backs you would always have, even when they were targeted by the full power of the state for offences they had actually committed. And as I write this last part of this post on April 12, over five months after beginning it — sorry if it’s a bit disjointed — I am in the middle of a week-long depressive episode. And not wanting to reach out to even the people closest to me so as to not inconvenience them. I think how I have failed to support people that needed me, and how others have failed to support me when I needed them. I think of how I still plan to conduct myself and my business in ways that will test my resolve to not fail other people like that again, to test other peoples’ resolve to stand by me. I think of how I do have a support community, of how I wish to be part of other peoples’ support communities… and I don’t for a second trust myself nor anyone else to stand fast when trouble comes, even while inviting such trouble. This realization makes me more depressed.
Still haven't read any Dreher, so I can't really agree or disagree with this piece as a review. However, it really kickstarted a couple of thought processes.
One is the weird historical association between Christianity and Rome (and its successors). Even Augustine used to oppose violence in debates within the Church, until he saw how incredibly expedient the Emperor's sword was in suppressing the Donatists. (See Augustine's lengthy letter with the mental gymnastics: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102093.htm Also, a quick wikipedia primer on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogatists)
The other concerns two historical events on April 12, 1204 and 1638. The first one is the sack of Constantinople, a messed up result of the incredibly politicized religious situation. The witless crusaders were first duped into a crusade to Egypt (by saying they were going to Jerusalem) and then duped into supporting a pretender to the Emperor's throne (didn't end well). The other historical event is the fall of the outer defenses of the Christian Shimabara rebels' "castle".
Both of the events display the incredible danger that arises from allying with the Emperors of the world when your religion is about a liberating message. "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
I'm having trouble parsing out the argument for freedom of speech in atheistic ethics, though. Just because a group of primates has found arguments and disagreement to be expedient, doesn't seem to make it into moral action. In a world of arbitrary values, why should the alleviation of human suffering be prioritized over the sacred cow of consensus?