\nproposed: the Benedict Option is mostly just the rest of the white ethnics jumping off the sinking ship of generic white Americanism
I mean I\u2019ve followed Rod Dreher for years, I don\u2019t doubt his sincerity that it was conceived in piety.
\nBut that is a thing about him, and it\u2019s something this New Yorker profile gets at (and suggests a parallel in the spiritual realism/nominalism distinction), he\u2019ll 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 \u201csavvy\u201d, 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\u2019s not even trying to justify it by that standard.\n\n\n
\n(It\u2019s 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\u2019re like \u201cokay, but you understand the important thing is that it throws 90kg rocks over 300m, right?\u201d)
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