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Good morning! Hope your week is off to a good start fellow Mottizens. I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently, and I strongly agree with nara that this place is one of the best, if not the best, places to find genuinely open political discourse on the internet.
Anyway, I want to talk about religion & modernity. The so-called 'RETVRN traditionalists' and neo-reactionaries, and how some insights from them play into the broader culture war. I was reading a post from a friend of mine on Substack, and he makes a great point with regard to religious folks trying to turn back the clock, so to speak:
I strongly agree that we live in a liberal time, and have deeply liberal instincts. We can't just pretend that we don't live our lives in a liberal way, and I suspect most people talking about a return to traditionalism are, as @2rafa has (perhaps uncharitably) opined on before, simply LARPers.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
Going off that last bit - once you get some years under your belt, it becomes clear from a personal standpoint that a more controlled lifestyle is just better. That saying that you have no head if you aren't a conservative in your 30s rings true in large part, in my humble opinion, because of this personal understanding. If you drink all the time, eat unhealthy food, smoke constantly, etc, you will very quickly find that your 'personal freedom' isn't worth much when you constantly feel terrible.
While convincing people may be much harder, I am convinced (heh) that it's the best way forward. As someone who changed my mind on the more traditional lifestyle largely through argumentation and personal experience, I am living proof that changing hearts and minds is possible on this front. Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
I won't deny that modern liberalism has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to the religious context. However, as I've argued, going back seems foolish and not that desirable even if we could. I'll end this with a further quote from the article I quoted above, as I think it ends better than I could:
Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.
Unfortunately, I think your is doing a lot of projecting.
When he (he?) says;
I think he's giving up the game a little bit. Simply saying, "C'mon, Man! You can't be serious" is a great way to get YesChad.jpeg'ed (I love that I keep getting to use that).
Well, No.
Our instincts are base and crude. We all want the basics; sex, salt (broadly;food), and shelter. Any human who lives in a group larger than a 40 person extended family is also going to have a general interest in social esteem. Satisfying only these base instincts is actually the enemy of both the traditionalists and liberals.
For traditionalists, it's direct and obvious. The more you seek after yourself, the more egotistical you become, the more you reject God's laws to subdue your base impulses and live a life of virtue. Even the proto-monotheism of the Platonic philosophers pretty much agrees with this. Easy.
For liberals, it's a little harder. They want you to be able to enjoy your basic urges to an extent and with the precondition of some sort of consent; personal in the sexual realm, and societal in the everything else realm. Eat as much as you want! But, oh, wouldn't it be good if we were all healthy too? You can make a ton of money and be a famous rich guy! But, oh, shouldn't some of what you make go to the less fortunate? You can have sex with anyone you want! Who consents ... now and forever after. And, oh, maybe don't be a sex pest even though that kind of lines up with sexually libertine attitudes. I guess what I'm saying is be attractive and charming if you want to have sex - and then you can have as much as you want. Until we (who?) decide you can't.
You can tell which side I'm on, but I think it's a fair claim to say that liberals believe in liberalism until trade-offs enter the frame. Then, they sidestep the need for individual sacrifice for the sake of social stability, let alone metaphysical virtue. So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where "hurt" is never clearly defined and can change subjectively. This is how liberalism ultimately leads to progressivism. Too many people start to do what they want, and society suffers. Now, there's an need to "Do somEthinG!" Cue whatever moral panic is in vogue at the moment.
A lot of this goes back to the sleight of hand that took place during the enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking was first about science and the scientific method (note: not "the science"). The trick was that political and philosophical thinkers bamboozled folks into believing the same thing could be applied to, well, politics, philosophy, and morality. We could "investigate" our beliefs and through some sort of evidentiary "thinking" determine what was ultimately good or bad. There are still practitioners of this today - dedicated ones. Sam Harris' tedious podcasts are all actually honest attempts to define "good" and "bad" without a single shred of the Divine. It takes six hours and he ends up with the most wishy-washy definition you could imagine; "whatever promotes human flourishing." Wow, six hours to hit one level of recursion.
One of the best arguments for traditionalism is that it confronts categorization error head on. This is what the state does. This is what the church does. This is what the family does. There are some levels of interdependence, sure, but, to the extent that they exist, they're mostly fixed (or, at least, there's some tradition in their definitions). What is "good" and "bad." God told us. We can absolutely puzzle over why He determined they are good and bad but, in the meantime and, actually, for all of time, we should OBEY (to quote a cool hat I saw once).
I'll agree that there is some LARPing. Even worse, there's a lot of admiring the problem while only offering the most sketchy of solutions. Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option isn't much more than "Go to church a lot, only hang out with other people who go to your church, homeschool your kids." It isn't bad advice, but it also isn't some sort of systemic gameplan to RETVRN. There are also, yes, trads of all types who are still living in the matrix. I can remember a conversation with a young woman whom I befriended while temporarily living in DC. She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
Say it with me; YesChad.jpeg.
This was not a secular woman. This was a woman who went to the Latin Mass regularly, dressed drastically modestly (long skirts and high necklines in August DC heat - props, girl!) and was very interested in having lots of babies with her husband. Or was she? Even an innocuous pre-marriage questionnaire was enough to hit the "THEY'RE TAKING MAH RIGHTS" nerve in her (thoroughly modern?) brain.
On the male side, there are tons of LARPing trad daddies who aren't ready for the reality that when the bible says that a wife must submit to her husband, the context isn't clear -- it may mean that the submission occurs only after DaddyCath has gotten into full guard and worked a triangle choke .... metaphorically, y'all. These are young men in tweed jackets who don't have enough social awareness to STFU when the 60 year old with 35 years of marriage and 7 kids is giving actual marital advice. They are hopeless if they think they can manage a new bride behind closed doors.
So how rad can we trade without living a lie? On a personal or family level, I think it's pretty easy. I live in a weird rural spot now where the downtown of the "town" near me has pride flags everywhere. I drink in those bars often. When my drinking buddies - purple haired and all - find out I'm a
young jedi in trainingnovice trad cath, they've all hit me with some version of "So you think a woman doesn't have a right to choose?!" to which I will reply "The laws (depending on state) say she can. In my eyes, it's murder and she'll have a lot to answer for. I'd never advise it" The follow up is usually some version of "well, but like, I mean ... politically, though..."And that's the slogan I'll conclude with - To be trad, you reject the premise that "the personal is political" (or however it's phrased). I get to act out and live my beliefs the way I want. When the state says I can't do that then, yes, there are issues. That's not (quite) the battle we're fighting today. Unfortunately, however, the front lines are definitely impacting kids. Some of @WhiningCoil's stories are truly terrifying.
Am I supposed to read something prescriptive in the question? It seems just common sense to ensure a couple has a plan in place on how to handle finances before getting married. Catholics have a systematic marriage prep for this reason - to make sure that the common causes of divorce are at least discussed prior to making a life-long commitment.
Is she assuming the priest was expecting a response of "husband works, I drag toddlers to supermarket?" Because normally they don't care, as long as you have an answer and you've talked about it with your betrothed. Also (at least for me) we didn't have to share the questionnaire with anyone, we just filled it out and talked with each other.
(Also @HereAndGone and @MadMonzer)
That whooshing sound you heard was the point going over your head.
Understand that I used that illustrative anecdote to make the point that this girl, who "talked the talk" of traditionalism, immediately balked upon the first real imperative to walk the walk. Of course a couple should have these conversations about household finances before they get married. And, yes, I am aware that, in the trad view, women were often expected to manage the money that the men made for a whole host of excellent reasons.
The point is that instead of this "trad" woman taking a breath and working with her fiancee and priest to develop a mutually acceptable, yet doctrinally sound, arrangement, she immediately over reacted in a way that betrayed a lot of very modern feminist thinking. This is why I used the "living in the matrix" imagery earlier. I agree that a lot of "trads" are actually just thoroughly modern people who decided to buy the TradCath / Christian Patriarchy / OrthoBro player Skin from the DLC loot box.
So, please attempt to modulate the 'tism a little and realize that I wasn't trying to offer an underdeveloped thesis on marital finances.
Are you being ableist at me? Mommy, mommy, Tollbooth was mean to me!
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No, my comment wasn't really directed towards you but towards the woman, who of course wouldn't read it. You are correct that it's weird for the woman to think she's traditionalist. I'm pointing out that she jumped to a conclusion very quickly, and it's probably the wrong conclusion. A bit of a Freudian slip.
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