Sowing Memory to Reap Hope

By James Davenport

So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself? But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point. From lies.”

These words were penned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “Live Not by Lies!” , an essay released on the day he was arrested by the KGB in 1974. In it, he claims that the only thing one can do to resist totalitarianism is to live by the light of truth and vow to never uphold a lie. In his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher gives a similar exhortation to our own age. The soft totalitarianism of “woke” ideology is coming, he insists, and we must deny its lies.

There is an implicit analogy at the core of Dreher’s book: “woke” or progressive ideology is to America as Soviet totalitarianism was to the Soviet bloc. “Woke” culture is totalitarian because it “aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.” However, the way in which these two ideologies present themselves are different. Dreher calls woke ideology “soft totalitarianism” as opposed to the hard totalitarianism of Soviet Communism:

This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft terms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

This totalitarian threat will not break man down physically, but will rather seek to lull him into a pleasure state from which it can control him. Soft totalitarianism is more Huxley than Orwell. Dreher refers back to this analogy constantly and it helps to draw out the difference between therapeutic (or Soma-induced) totalitarianism and the harder Big Brother variety.

Just as Communist ideology exploited the lack of religion among many twentieth-century intellectuals, this new totalitarianism “appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression.” It is able to do this because of our therapeutic culture. Dreher appeals to Philip Rieff to show that man no longer lives according to transcendent moral principles but rather seeks to liberate the individual “to seek his own pleasures and to [manage] emergent anxieties.” With the rise of Psychological Man came a new “watery spirituality which could accommodate anything.” When religion slips away from a society, it is always replaced. Given the political, cultural, and social climate of our day, it makes sense that a soft, therapeutic, social justice-oriented totalitarianism would take its place rather than a hard totalitarianism.

The most explicit example Dreher gives of soft totalitarianism is what he calls the “Cult of Social Justice” and its “Social Justice Warriors.” He writes, “In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. . . . This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia.” Campus culture has grown up, Dreher tells us, and in the same way that it took over campus without a fight, it is now taking over society. The force of woke social justice doctrine preys on the minds and hearts of those who lack grounding in faith and traditional institutions.

Dreher spends much of the book’s first one hundred pages explaining his analogy to the Soviet era, offering signs in our society that suggest the advance of totalitarianism. He draws out similarities between Soviet Russia and the United States and dedicates a portion of the first half to “Woke Capitalism.” “The story of surveillance capitalism begins in 2003,” Dreher writes, “when Google . . . patented a process to allow it to use the vast amount of data it gathered from individual searches in a new way. The company’s data scientists had figured out how to utilize ‘data exhaust’… to predict the kind of advertising that would most appeal to individual users.” Big tech knows when you wake up, where you run, who you email, what you write, and everything you buy. According to Dreher, it is a hidden Big Brother—one we have learned to love and carry in our pockets.

Dreher frames his book in light of Fr. Kolaković, a Jesuit priest and anti-facist activist originally named Tomis Poglajen who fled from the Gestapo in Croatia and settled in Czechoslovakia. Having studied Communist totalitarianism and experienced the threat of Nazism, he set to the task of preparing Czechoslovakian Christians for persecution. In the end, Fr. Kolaković shepherded his flock through some of the worst persecution of Christtians in the twentieth-century.

Kolaković’s motto served to guide the dissidents: “See. Judge. Act. See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion then you are to act to resist evil.”

To teach the dissidents how to live this motto, Kolaković started small groups. They read Scripture, heard lectures on numerous topics, and built up an intellectual and spiritual community. Through this, these Christians were prepared when totalitarianism came. As a result, “though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.”

Dreher also tells the story of a particularly inspiring family—“The Benda clan of Prague.” The Bendas are a Catholic family whose patriarch, Václav, was sent to prison for four years in 1979 because he fought for human rights. The Bendas were at the center of the underground Catholic Church and would be integral to the Charter 77 resistance movement. Not only did they keep their family and faith strong, they also aided those interrogated by the Státní bezpečnost, the communist-era secret police. Living near the headquarters, the Bendas hosted those on their way to and from interrogation, providing them with love, hospitality, advice, and encouragement.

The Bendas, like Fr. Kolaković, took a generational approach to resisting totalitarianism, consciously equipping the next generation to continue resisting. They nurtured the moral imaginations of their children by encouraging them to watch movies like the western classic High Noon and by reading books like The Lord of the Rings. Dreher mines the household culture of the Bendas to synthesize six practices that will help one resist totalitarianism and train children to do the same:

• Model moral courage

• Fill [Children’s] moral imagination with conceptions of the Good

• Don’t be afraid to be weird in society’s eyes

• Prepare to make great sacrifices for the greater good

• Teach [your children] they are part of a wider movement

• Practice hospitality and serve others

Dreher proposes that we should learn from Soviet-era dissidents in our own resistance. In a sense, Dreher takes the humble position of Kolaković. He desires to show us a way forward so we might be like the Bendas and like Kolaković himself. His success in this is mixed.

Dreher collects chilling accounts of twentieth-century oppression and connects them believably to our current state through readable and thorough analysis. He also provides stories from which we can learn the imitable virtues of prudence and fortitude required for resistance. But Dreher does not give enough emphasis to the need for institutions. He spends a great deal of time speaking about the importance of Christian small groups, but this is closely tied to his historical discussions of the small, dislocated bands of faithful Christians living under totalitarianism. They were making the best of what they had—which was little—but while our own cultural decline is still in earlier stages perhaps we should also look to broader local associations like rotary clubs, neighbor- hood community groups, and local parishes.

In Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, he writes about how as local associations wane the power of the state grows. In soft totalitarianism we see something similar: as local associations shrink and disappear, “woke” ideology grows in power. No matter where totalitarianism is imposed from, its power increases when local associations lose their importance. Dreher sees and notes this; however, his answer to the problem seems simply to be traditional Christianity. Indeed he writes, “If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you.” There is no doubt that Dreher’s conception of traditional Christianity contains some sense of an institutional Church; however, to fend off this soft totalitarianism we may also need institutions of a wider variety. America will require institutions that allow local communities and neighbors to band together. We must bolster our institutions and signal to the broader culture that there is another way. We can make the voice of reason heard on a larger scale because we are not powerless. Dreher’s neglect of these other institutions in his appeals to the reader suggests he either believes the institutional church can be a sufficient apparatus for these measures, or, more alarmingly, that things have gotten too bad for them to be viable remedies any longer. In the latter case—if indeed we can no longer use the foundations of our liberal republic, our legal system, and our local associations to keep this totalitarianism from taking control—Dreher’s warning and encouragement is all the more timely, less as a means of preventing a coming crisis than of weathering it.

Too many people today do not know the stories of the gulags. And so Dreher wrote this book—people must be reminded of the horrors of totalitarianism. Many of the stories he tells are enough to make one set down the book and weep, and this emotional response is important because it prompts action. Even more importantly, we need these stories because they remind us of how people resisted, how they kept their faith and their sanity. Memory provides the impetus to keep what we cherish; it is also the seed by which even what is taken from us can be regained. It is the cultivation of memory that will allow us to live by truth and not by lies.

James Davenport is the Academic Program Officer for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a graduate of the Templeton Honors College, where he studied politics, philosophy, and theology.

Our Restless Hearts

By Anthony Barr

What exactly is going on in Augustine’s famous prayer: “Give me chastity, but not yet”? Does Augustine want to be chaste or does he not? The puzzle is this: in praying for chastity, Augustine sabotages his desire for sin, but in praying for a delay in that chastity, Augustine simultaneously sabotages his desire for holiness. Are there two Augustines? How do we make sense of such a peculiar, and yet familiar, situation?

In her new book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, philosopher Agnes Callard explores this very question. She opens her book by observing that “we can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value-wise, from the people we are now.” And she endeavors to answer this question: how is it exactly that we acquire new values? How is it that we can “slowly develop new priorities, concerns, and attachments” in a way that is “not structured by a single moment of intention or decision at its inception”?

Callard imagines us as aspirants. She argues that “the aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view.” Callard explains that we act our way into new values: “We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us.” This isn’t ambition or wish-fulfilment, which both require that we have a very concrete idea of what we want, based on what we currently value. Instead, aspiration is about having a fuzzy idea: we want something we don’t quite understand, and we move toward values that we only dimly perceive until we possess them. Augustine has some idea of what chastity will mean for him, and he perceives its goodness enough to feel compelled toward it (or rather her, Lady Continence). But because his understanding is too limited, he is not quite able to immediately apprehend, and therefore embrace, this virtue for himself. Hence, the tortured prayer of the aspiring saint.

Callard’s book is firmly situated within the discipline of philosophy, but, like all good philosophy, it opens itself up in many directions to the questions and insights of theology. I want to consider the theological ramifications, but I do so while deeply indebted to the rigorous philosophical work that makes such theological reflection possible.

Mothers and Vampires

One of Callard’s main points is that aspirational growth is rarely immediate. Sometimes we know we want to acquire new values, as in the case of the person who says, “I don’t enjoy classical music, but I want to, and so I am enrolling in this course to that end.” But often we don’t realize that we are moving toward new values, as is the case when I dutifully pray for my enemies and realize one day that I no longer feel animosity toward them, but rather love.

It is helpful here to think about the difference between becoming a vampire and becoming a parent. Callard writes (not, I imagine, from personal experience) that “when I become a vampire, I first decide to be bitten, and then the bite transforms me.” Specifically, after being bitten, “I will find myself with typically vampiric thoughts, habits, and values: a love of spiders, excellent fashion sense, and cold indifference toward humans.” But becoming a parent is not like becoming a vampire, not least because typically “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you. It is something you do.” And beyond that, “it is not something that you can do in a moment: we spend a long time becoming mothers and fathers.”

As a related point, the process of becoming a mother begins in the interior life, deep within the heart’s most intimate decision-making processes. Callard notes that “someone who is considering whether or not to throw out the birth control pills began the process of coming to acquire the values, perspective, interests, and concerns of a mother long before [she gets pregnant].” Likewise, the Catholic tradition speaks of the “baptism by desire.” We recognize that the Spirit works within us quietly, gently, long before there is external evidence of our transformation. Salvation, then, is not like becoming a vampire; it is much more like becoming a mother. And so we watch Augustine journeying toward God, and we see him as “located on a path of rational access” (and ascent!), working his way “into a new point of view.” And all the while, he only possesses an “inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp” of “some good” that he desperately desires to “know better.” Therefore, while this journey is sourced in faith and driven toward love, it is sustained by hope–the hope that the good is real, that it is knowable, that he will come to know it and be known by it.

Temptation and Sin

Callard wants us to see that our values shape the phenomenological horizons of our world, structuring our attention, perception, desires, and choices. She writes that “the things I value delimit the shape of my practical rationality, in that my values determine what shows up for me as a reasonable thing to do.” And it’s not just that our values prompt our immediate actions and reactions; they also condition our deliberation and discernment. She notes that “when I value something . . . I approve of my own affective entanglement with it. Thus valuing seems to include both an affective component and a cognitive one.”

But there are of course many times when we do not approve of our own desires or the affective entanglements that entrap us. We can think here of Augustine, the sinful but aspiring saint, confessing his fragmented self, confessing his desire both for chastity and for sin. Callard writes that the moral agent can in fact “feel alienated from her own assessment.” And indeed, another way to talk about being in a state of sin is to note that it undoes the integrity of the integrated self, leading to alienation from God, others, and ourselves.

The path to sin begins in temptation, which Callard writes about using the example of wanting a tasty cookie while dieting. In this example, there are two sets of competing values rooted in two different desires: on the one hand, the value of temperance (or perhaps continence) and the desire for health, and on the other hand, the value of pleasure and the desire for a specific cookie. In our deliberation, we might recognize both values/desires, saying something like, “While this cookie looks pleasing to the eye, I care more about keeping my diet for the sake of my health.” But of course, even though we do actually care about health, many times we find ourselves giving in to the temptation. And to be precise, when we yield to temptation, we are narrowing our horizons only to consider the immediate pleasure before us. Pope John Paul II defines concupiscence in this way, as a narrowing of vision, so that I only see you in the narrowest senses of sexual desire and so am motivated to act with you in ways that I would not if I had your full personhood in view.

And so, like St. Paul, we often find ourselves bemoaning our sorry state, in which we fail to do the good we want to do while doing the bad that we don’t want to do. “Wretched man,” cries St. Paul. “Give me chastity, but not yet,” echoes St. Augustine. Callard affirms that “it is frustrating to see that I, via my recalcitrant vision of the good, stand in the way of my attainment of the good.” But like St. Paul and St. Augustine, Callard does not believe this frustration needs to lead us to despair. She writes that “the fault lines that erupt in akratic action are at the same time the indications of my potential for growth.”

The Work of Perfection

In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ instructs us to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It is disquieting, to say the least, that this is given to us as an imperative. We are not like those vampires, transformed in a bite. Rather, we have an aspirational state of perfection toward which we must journey.

Callard writes that “the aspirant does not end up with a new value in the way that one might end up with an ulcer or an inheritance.” Instead, the aspirant “orchestrates her value-acquisition, driving herself toward a different value-condition from the one she is in.” And Callard adds that “from this vantage point, aspiration emerges as a kind of work.” Callard writes that “in her repeated attempts to ‘get it right,’ attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in,” the moral agent gains experience that will become “second nature.”

I am reminded of Augustine’s words in a reflection on the Gospel of John in which he says, “He who created you without you will not justify you without you.” I think this is what it means for us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” I don’t mean to wade into the nuanced theological debates on free will, justification, and the like. I mean this in a much more ecumenical sense: we make every effort to become conformed to the image of Christ through our emulation of Him, but we recognize that this process is sourced in grace, and that it is only through His “precious and very great promises” that we “become partakers of the divine nature.” It is again not my goal here to detail the contours of our actions or God’s grace, but only to say that I think Callard gives us helpful conceptual frameworks for understanding our own moral responsibility. And nevertheless, for all the needed talk of the individual’s moral responsibility, Callard also gracefully notes that “this is not to deny that the aspirant receives help.”

Perfection is often understood merely as sinlessness. But I think the Christian tradition offers a deeper understanding of perfection and imperfection, and again, Callard is really helpful on this point. She notes that “something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous.” St. Athanasius among others believed that Adam and Eve, while sinless, were not yet fully perfected. Human perfection actually requires the incarnation; it requires God himself taking on our likeness and joining our nature to Himself in the person of Christ. The incarnation is thus a bridge, for it allows us to be united to God through the person of Christ. And therefore, perfection is not simply about moral responsibility or about aspiring to virtue. In fact, perfection is something far greater: aspiring toward deeper and deeper union with God.

We are imperfect beings, and our understanding is often imperfect in ways that harm or hinder us. And sometimes instead of aspiring toward, we simply flail around, lacking even the preliminary insight of what we ought to aspire toward. Here, Callard mercifully notes that “flailing is not nothing.” I am reminded of the Holy Spirit, who knows that we do not know how we ought to pray, and who groans in intercession on our behalf. And I think also of St. Lucy, who intercedes for Dante while he is still lost in the deep wood.

Callard writes that “we cannot hold off from making use of our values until such a time as they are securely in our possession; for what happens in the meanwhile is also life.”

And while it is frustrating to be both sinner and aspiring saint, I think it is the gift of grace that the “meanwhile” of becoming is often a place of profound goodness, and that all the while, “we have a great high priest who can sympa- thize with us in our weakness.”

Conclusion: Aspiring Toward the Infinite Good Philosopher Phillip Cary—my professor in college—wrote a richly consoling book offering Good News for Anxious Christians. He warns about the trap of infinite regression into ourselves. If our starting place for salvation is questions like, “Do I have enough faith?” or “Do I feel the presence?” or “Do I actually believe what I think I believe?” we can end up paralayzed by self-doubt and the inability to differentiate our truest self from possible self-deceptions. Cary observes that this kind of self-torment characterized much of Luther’s early years. After his liberation from this torment, Luther understood that the starting place can’t be our own interiority, it has to be the promises of Christ. “How do I know if I am saved?” asks Luther; well, I look to the promises that were made to me by Christ in my baptism, for that is where salvation is vouchsafed for me. Again, I mean this to be broadly ecumenical: this is not about debates over the efficacy of sacramental acts, for example. This is about where we direct our attention: either inward at ourselves or outward at God.

God is infinite and infinitely good, and that means that in our aspiration, we never reach the bottom of His nature. Callard writes of another philosopher, Talbot Brewer, and his work on what he calls “dialectical desire.” It is the nature of interpersonal love that it is a dialectic: I respond to your love with love and you respond to that love with love and I respond and you respond” and there is no cessation. Callard writes that “Brewer traces the concept of dialectical desire to the descriptions of the desire for union with God in Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas (as well as later Christian mystics).” She notes that this results in an “infinitude borne of the impossibility of, e.g, ‘satiating one’s appetite for God’—an infinity “written into the nature of the activity.” While Callard, as a proper philosopher, notes that such theological inquiries are beyond the scope of her project, I find it fascinating that she sees herself as opening the door to that kind of inquiry.

In the end, Callard’s book is a stirring exploration of aspiration in our everyday lives. Aspiration is all about attention toward, growth toward. Therefore her project is inherently and inevitably teleological in nature, just as we ourselves are teleological in our human nature. For indeed we are created for one definitive and glorious purpose: everlasting union with God. As Augustine so memorably wrote, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

Anthony Barr is a graduate of Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He writes for Ethika Politika, University Bookman, and the CiRCE Institute.