Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  Though Marxists took positivism in an extreme, utopian direction, positivist values are at the foundation of free-market liberalism. Both traditions believe that science drives progress and that progress can be measured by the alleviation of material needs. Contemporary philosopher John Gray says that there is much less distance between liberal democrats and Marxists than we like to think: “Technology—the practical application of scientific knowledge—produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”6

  The original American dream—the one held by the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers—was religious: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to serve God as dictated by their consciences. In our time, the American dream is not a religious ideal but rather one informed more by positivism than Christianity. For most people, the term means wealth and material stability and the freedom to create the life that one desires. The Puritan ideal was to use freedom to live by virtue, as defined by Christian Scripture; the modern American ideal is to use freedom to achieve well-being, as defined by the sacred individual—that is, a Self that is fully the product of choice and consent. The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.

  In modern politics, anyone who can be portrayed as an opponent of progress is often at a disadvantage. To oppose progress, to be against change, is to stand against the natural order of things. In liberal democracies, the struggle between the Right and the Left is really a contest between conservative progressives and radical progressives over the rate and details of change. What is not in dispute is the shared belief that the good society is one in which individuals have enough money and personal autonomy to do whatever they like.

  Progress as Religion

  For classical liberal devotees of the Myth of Progress, the ideal society is one in which everyone has equal freedom of choice. For radicals, it is one in which everyone is living with equality of outcome. Belief that one’s circumstances can be improved by collective human effort, though, is a powerful political motivator. It is difficult to see this from the perspective of the twenty-first century, but to believe that poverty, sickness, and oppression are not destined to be one’s fate was a revolutionary concept in human history. It gave people whose ancestors had scarcely known anything but want and suffering hope for the future.

  Marx likened religion to a drug because it blunted the pain of life for the masses, and in his view, took away from them the consciousness that they had the power to overturn the social order that immiserated them. Unlike progressives in the classical liberal tradition, Marx and his fellow radicals promised that radical politics, harnessing the power of science and technology, really could establish heaven on earth. They were atheists who believed that man could become like a god.

  As a perversion of religion, Progress as an ideology speaks appealingly to hungry human hearts. As Miłosz and other dissidents testify, communism answered an essentially religious longing in the souls of restless young intellectuals. Progressivism in all its forms appeals to the same desire in intelligent young people today—both secular and those within churches who are alienated from authoritative ecclesial traditions. This is why Christians today must understand that, fundamentally, they aren’t resisting a different politics but rather what is effectively a rival religion.

  This is how it was for young Russians of the late nineteenth century, who embraced Marxism with the fervor of religious converts. It gave its devotees a narrative that helped them understand why things are the way they are, and what they, as Marxists, should do to bring about a more just world. It was an optimistic philosophy, one that promised relief and bounty for all the peoples of the world.

  To create utopia, Marxists first had to rout Christianity, which they saw as a false religion that sanctified the ruling class and kept the poor superstitious and easy to control. The Russian radicals also hated the so-called Philistines—their word for the deplorable people who live out their daily lives without thinking of anything higher or greater. The radical intelligentsia regarded the Philistines as their complete opposites: the rough and beastly Goliaths to their clever Davids. They hated the Philistines with all-consuming intensity—no doubt partly because so many of them had come from such families.

  The comfortable Philistines were not the kind of people prepared to suffer and die for their beliefs. The Bolsheviks were. The tsarist government sent many of their leaders into Siberian exile, which did not break them but made them stronger.

  “Exile stood for suffering, intimacy, and the sublime immensity of the heavenly depths. It offered a perfect metaphor for both what was wrong with the ‘world of lies’ and what was central to the promise of socialism,” writes Yuri Slezkine.7 To be a revolutionary in those days was to share a sense of purpose, of community, of hope—and an electrifying bond of contempt, a contempt we see in the social justice movement today toward anyone who differs from its religious claims.

  As Slezkine has said, both the Christian faith and totalitarianism share an ultimate concern with the inner man. Christianity and communism—which is to say, the most radical form of progressivism—are best understood as competing religions. Despite the self-delusions of theologically progressive Christians, so too are Christianity and the easygoing nihilism that characterizes progressivism in our post-Christian era.

  Heresy-Hunters in Our Midst

  In 2019, I went to see the English public intellectual Sir Roger Scruton, in what turned out to be the last summer of his life, because of his work in the 1980s supporting dissidents in Eastern Europe. He was instrumental in helping to establish an underground university in Prague. As Britain’s best-known conservative academic, he subsequently emerged as one of the most penetrating and articulate critics of what we call “political correctness”—in part because he has so often been its victim.

  Settling into his farmhouse library in rural Wiltshire, Sir Roger agreed that we are not waging a political battle but are rather engaged in a war of religion. “There is no official line in this, but it all congeals around a set of doctrines which we don’t have any problem in recognizing.”

  He explained that in the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation. This “official doctrine” is not imposed from above by the regime but rather arises by left-wing consensus from below, along with severe enforcement in the form of witch-hunting and scapegoating.

  “If you step out of line, especially if you’re in the area of opinion-forming as a journalist or an academic, then the aim is to prevent your voice from being heard,” said Scruton. “So, you’ll be thrown out of whatever teaching position you have or, like me recently, made the topic of a completely mendacious fabricated interview used to accuse you of all the thoughtcrimes.”

  Scruton was referring to a left-wing journalist to whom he had recently granted an interview. The journalist twisted Scruton’s words to make him sound like a bigot and crowed on social media that he had taken the scalp of a “racist and homophobe.” Fortunately, a recording of the interview emerged and vindicated Sir Roger. Many others in our time who are accused of similar thoughtcrimes—Orwell’s term for ideological offenses—are not so lucky.

  Scruton told me that thoughtcrimes—heresies, in other words—by their very nature make accusation and guilt the same thing. He saw this in his travels in the communist world, where the goal was to keep the system in place with minimal effort.

  “For this purpose, there were thoughtcrimes invented every now and then with which to trap the enemy of the people,” he said. “In my day it was the ‘Zionist Imperialist Conspiracy.’ You could be accused of being a member of that, and nobody could possibly find a defense against the accusation because nobody knew
what it was!

  “It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”

  The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, bi-phobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”—his word—that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

  One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

  For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

  The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

  That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

  Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.8

  Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

  A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

  Understanding the Cult of Social Justice

  In the last chapter, we briefly examined how social justice warriors play a similar role in our society that Bolsheviks played in late imperial Russia, and sketched a profile of the typical SJW. Perhaps no public intellectual has thought so deeply about the fundamentally religious nature of these progressive militants than James A. Lindsay, an atheist and university mathematician.

  Lindsay contends that social justice fulfills the same psychological and social needs that religion once filled but no longer can. And like conventional religions, it depends on axiomatic claims that cannot be falsified but only accepted as revealed truths. This is why arguments with these zealots are about as productive as theological disputation with a synod of Taliban divines. For the social justice inquisitors, “dialogue” is the process by which opponents confess their sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed.

  Social justice warriors are members of what Lindsay calls an “ideologically motivated moral community.” Far from being moral relativists, SJWs truly are rigorists with a deep and abiding concern for purity, and they do not hesitate to enforce their sacrosanct beliefs. Those beliefs give meaning and direction to their lives and provide a sense of shared mission.

  What are those beliefs? A rough catechism based on Lindsay’s analysis9 goes something like this.

  THE CENTRAL FACT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IS POWER AND HOW IT IS USED

  Politics is the art and science of how power is distributed and exercised in a society. For SJWs, everything in life is understood through relationships of power. Social justice is the mission of reordering society to create more equitable (just) power relationships. Those who resist social justice are practicing “hate,” and cannot be reasoned with or in any way tolerated, only conquered.

  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVE TRUTH; THERE IS ONLY POWER

  Who decides what is true and what is false? Those who hold power. Religious claims, philosophical arguments, political theories—all of these are veils concealing will to power. They are only rationalizations for oppressors to hold power over the oppressed. The value of truth claims depends on who is making them.

  IDENTITY POLITICS SORTS OPPRESSED FROM OPPRESSORS

  In classic Marxism, the bourgeoisie are the oppressor, and the proletariat are the oppressed. In the cult of social justice, the oppressors are generally white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. The oppressed are racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. (Curiously, the poor are relatively low on the hierarchy of oppression. For example, a white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.) Justice is not a matter of working out what is rightly due to an individual per se, but what is due to an individual as the bearer of a group identity.

  INTERSECTIONALITY IS SOCIAL JUSTICE ECUMENISM

  People who bear identities within the so-called “matrix of oppression” link their identities to one another by way of intersectionality. The concept is that all those oppressed by the privileged classes—the patriarchy, whiteness, and so forth—are connected by virtue of their oppression and should challenge power as a united front. If one is not a member of an oppressed group, he or she can become an “ally” in the power struggle.

  LANGUAGE CREATES HUMAN REALITIES

  Social justice warriors believe that human nature is constructed largely through the use of linguistic conventions. This is why they focus heavily on “discourses”—that is, the style and content of modes of speaking that, in their view, legitimize certain ways of being and delegitimize others. SJWs tightly police the spoken and written word, condemning speech that offends them as a form of violence.

  Conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, and others who are outside the social justice movement frequently fail to grasp how to respond to the aggressive claims of its proponents. This is because they assume SJWs, who are typically not religious, operate under the established standards of secular liberal discourse, with its respect for discursive reasoning.

  A memorable example is the 2015 Yale University clash between professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis and enraged students from the residential college overseen by the faculty couple. Things went very badly for the Christakises, old-school liberals who erred by thinking that the students could be engaged with the tools and procedures of reason. Alas, the students were in the grip of the religion of social justice. As such, they considered their subjective beliefs to be a form of uncontestable knowledge, and disagreement as an attack on their identity.

  Some conservatives think that SJWs should be countered with superior arguments
and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat. You cannot know how to judge and act in the face of these challenges if you cannot see the social justice warriors for what they truly are—and where they do their work. It is easy to identify the shrieking student on the university quad, but it is more important to be able to spot the subversive presence of older SJWs and fellow travelers throughout institutional bureaucracies, where they exercise immense power.

  SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CHRISTIANITY

  The term social justice has long been associated with Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity (the term was coined by a nineteenth-century Jesuit), though now it has been embraced by younger Evangelicals. In Catholic social teaching, “social justice” is the idea that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, so that all can live up to their dignity as creatures fashioned in God’s image. In the traditional view, social justice is about addressing structural barriers to fairness among groups in a given society. It is based in large part on Christ’s teachings about the importance of mercy and compassion to the poor and the outcast.

  But Christian social justice is difficult to reconcile with secular ideals of social justice. One reason is that the former depends on the biblical concept of what a human being is—including the purpose for which all people were created. This presumes a transcendent moral order, proclaimed in Scripture and, depending on one’s confession, the authoritative teachings of the church. A just social order is one that makes it easier for people to be good.