kontextmaschine:

proposed: the Benedict Option is mostly just the rest of the white ethnics jumping off the sinking ship of generic white Americanism

I mean I’ve followed Rod Dreher for years, I don’t doubt his sincerity that it was conceived in piety.

But that is a thing about him, and it’s something this New Yorker profile gets at (and suggests a parallel in the spiritual realism/nominalism distinction), he’ll talk in moving detail about the felt, internal experience of holding, or abandoning, or changing ideological position which okay. But then at best in passing notice what strikes me and every other “savvy”, materialist writer as the important thing - how completely transparently that position serves a particular position or player in a particular balance-of-power conflict, and how he’s not even trying to justify it by that standard.

(It’s like someone will bring you a trebuchet they made, and talk about all the fine carving, and the experience of the craftsmen in making it and the crew in crewing it, and how it goes through several positions in meaningful, almost liturgical sequence, and you’re like “okay, but you understand the important thing is that it throws 90kg rocks over 300m, right?”)