Introduction
In times of turbulent churn, one of the things you can usually anticipate is even more turbulence, especially from young men. Their reactions are often predictable, and therefore rational in one sense, while their selected scapegoat targets, upon which they vent, are often arbitrary and capricious. In other words, you can look at the situation beforehand and see that something is going to blow, and there will be clear reasons why it is going to blow, but it often hard to see in that moment who or what is going to get the blame.
The seismologists know that the volcano is going to go off because they can count the tremors, but they don’t know which side of the mountain is going to disappear, or which direction the lava will flow.
A man has a terrible day at work, such that we know he is going to have an equally terrible evening at home, but we don’t know exactly when or why he is going to kick the dog. Neither does the dog, incidentally.
Three Factors
There are three main factors in the turbulent churn of our times, three factors that have resulted in the emergence of “race realists,” the dog-kickers in my little parable. And here would be my description of the three big reasons why they had a “terrible day” at work.
First, we have had a generation or more of white heterosexual males being accused of being the intersectional bad guys. Whiteness is a cancer, heterosexual interests objectify women, and being masculine is by definition toxic. Assailed year-after-year on account of that identity, there was a point when they became surly about it, and embraced the identity that had been assigned to them, designated warts, real warts, and all.
The second contributor to this turbulence was the typical progressive economic incompetence and/or dogmatic hostility to growth which has led to the destruction of economic opportunities. It is actually possible to channel young masculine strength into a productive economy, but that is only true if you actually have a productive economy to channel them into. Young men can be steered away from violence and into opportunity, but the opportunity has to actually be there.
And third has been the torrent of visa holders, illegal aliens, and customer service reps operating out of Mumbai. The citizens of our republic were recently gobsmacked to discover that there were 55 million visa holders here. And during the four short Biden years, although they seemed pretty long, upwards of 12 million illegals came across the border. This finally got the attention it deserved, and yet because different colors were involved in that particular mess, some of the low IQ bros concluded that the colors were the problem.
Stack these three things together and what you have is a royal mess. Which is what we do in fact have.
Majority Minorities
Back in the old days, white heterosexual males were in the catbird seat. And then, over the span of a few decades, a coalition of the envious rose up, and they successfully managed to make the white heterosexual male the villain of the piece. They problematized the whole thing, and as a result the center of gravity in America has shifted to a strong majority of minorities. It didn’t have to add up, and frequently did not, because we are not talking about math here. The end result is that we now have a different kind of majority rule, with that majority consisting of accredited minorities.
In order to be an approved minority, you don’t actually have to be in the minority—take women, for example—you just have to be a member of an approved class that constitutes a rejection of the way things used to be around here.
Not only was there this change, but the change was defined as the very embodiment of evolutionary progress. We used to be blinkered and benighted, but now we are enlightened, and we know better than our ancestors when it comes to all this stuff.
And when the explosive reaction occurs, which is happening now, it is aimed at all the members of the new intersectionality, or at anyone who might have qualified to be in the intersectional mob. This is why the dank right has a thing about ethnic minorities, about women, and about Jews. It is an emotional reaction, not a worldview.
Who Did This?
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Ross Douthat for his Interesting Times podcast, and he was just full of intelligent questions. One of them was whether or not I was giving enough credit to liberalism/feminism for teaching us about certain things that we wanted to avoid in our attempted reboot of Christendom. I have said for some time that Christendom 1.0 had some bugs in it, and we wanted to learn from history and fix those in our roll out of Christendom 2.0. Ross was wondering why I wasn’t willing to give credit where credit was due. Didn’t we gain some awareness of our deficiencies from the critiques offered to conservative Christians from the liberals and feminists?
One of his examples was that there have been times in history when wife beating was acceptable. If we wanted it to be unacceptable in our next Christendom—which we certainly do—then why wouldn’t I be willing to say that we learned that valuable lesson from the feminists?
Now we are going to be talking about historical influences and causes for a little while here, and so I want to recognize at the front end that in such a venture it is awfully easy to fall into the post hoc fallacy, or to treat complex outcomes as though they were the product of simplistic causes—like we were putting the eight ball in the corner pocket. So let us remember that caution, and not press any of the points that I want to make here too far.
First, I would want to say that wise husbands, living in 200 A.D., would already know how un-Christlike and counterproductive it would be for them to beat their wives. Paul tells husbands not to be harsh or bitter against their wives (Col. 3:19). Peter tells husbands to treat their wives with honor, as the weaker vessel, as men with knowledge (1 Pet. 3:7). And Paul in another places instructs husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25). All of this from sources that had no contact with late twentieth century feminism. Wounds are certainly inflicted but the husbands takes them on for his wife, and does not inflict them on his wife. I don’t see any reason why a husband with a New Testament and the Spirit of God would need to receive any admonitions from feminists.
Second, I think is more likely that that it was actually the other way. The logic of the Christian teaching on women, which has elevated the status of women everywhere it has had any influence was a teaching that in some measure created the feminist heresy and the egalitarian excesses of liberalism. Heresies are often created by people who take a good point and who then overshoot with it. So a Christian society that winked at wife beating was a society that was, to that extent, inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture. But to the extent that they honored the Word of God, the implications of the scriptural attitude toward women would eventually work its way out, and they would see the inconsistency. Women would find themselves honored.
But then one of the temptations that sinful men always have is the sin of climbing up the scriptural ladder, and then licking the ladder away, so that they might pretend to have flown up there. This is the person who was born on third base and claims he hit a triple. And secularism does this a lot—they move in on many of the cultural gains established by Christianity, and they move in like squatters. They didn’t build it, they didn’t buy it, they didn’t remodel it—they just moved in and began lecturing the Christians about it. But because they are squatters, they don’t understand the internal logic of the standard, and so they immediately take it to the kind of feminist extremes that provoke the reactionaries. So, far from being the people who are qualified to teach the reactionaries a thing or two, they are actually the people who created the reactionaries in the first place.
And last, we need to budget for the fact that Christian teaching and the example of Christ work in societies the way that yeast works through a loaf of dough. The thing is gradual, and is gradual by design. For example, the Christian ethic is inconsistent with polygamy, but it took centuries for the logic of that ethic to work its way into our customs and laws. The same kind of thing with slavery.
We Have Our Bibles
So how should we treat our women? How should different ethnic groups relate to one another? The answer to that should be “we have our Bibles.” As my father taught me, always act, never react. Find out what the Scriptures teach, and then go and do that. We don’t need to go to the liberals and feminists, hat in hand, with a meek request that they show us how to be Christians. Do that, and you will find yourselves praising your daughter’s hormone treatment regimen.