Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a truly Christian social justice warrior. (Interestingly, Father Kolaković introduced Maurin’s writing to his Family in Bratislava.) Maurin distinguished Christian social justice from the godless Marxist view. For Marxists, social justice meant an equal distribution of society’s material goods. By contrast, Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.

  In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice. Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby insightfully links sexual radicalism to the scientific roots of the Myth of Progress. He has written that “the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”10

  Without Christianity and its belief in the fallibility of human nature, secular progressives tend to rearrange their bigotries and call it righteousness. Christianity teaches that all men and women—not just the wealthy, the powerful, the straight, the white, and all other so-called oppressors—are sinners in need of the Redeemer. All men and women are called to confession and repentance. “Social justice” that projects unrighteousness solely onto particular groups is a perversion of Christian teaching. Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error. It is untrue, and therefore unjust.

  Moreover, for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just. Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratifies sin and undermines the natural family. In a 1986 encyclical, Pope John Paul II denounced a “spirit of darkness” that deceitfully posits “God as an enemy of his own creature, and in the first place as an enemy of man, as a source of danger and threat to man.”11

  Christians cannot endorse any form of social justice that denies biblical teaching. That includes schemes that apply identity politics categories to the life of the church. For example, answering calls to “decolonize” the church means imposing identity politics categories onto theology and worship, turning the faith into radical leftism at prayer.

  Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.

  Back to the Future?

  We have to throw away this crippling nostalgia for the future, especially the habit we Americans, a naturally optimistic people, have of assuming that everything will ultimately work out for the best. Diaghilev and the swells at that 1905 banquet had no idea that the beautiful death to which they raised their glasses was going to mean the murder of millions by the executioner’s bullet and engineered famine. Diaghilev was living abroad during the Russian Revolution, but having seen what the Bolsheviks swept away, he never returned home.

  On the other hand, even when facts give us little reason for optimism, we Christians must not surrender hope. Eight decades after that Moscow hotel banquet, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the nearby Kremlin, enslaved peoples across the Soviet empire were not aware that the vast machinery of totalitarianism was rusted to its core and would soon collapse. In fact, Flagg Taylor, an American political scientist who studies the Czech underground, told me that not a single dissident leader he interviewed for his research expected that the fall of communism would happen in their lifetimes.

  Vlado Palko, a Slovak academic who stood on the main square in Bratislava braving the police water cannons at the Candle Demonstration, was one of them. He was afraid that night in 1988, and had no reason to believe that the protest called by the underground church would have any effect. But as he told his wife before leaving their flat for the square, his dignity as a man depended on showing up to stand with his fellow Catholics, candle in hand, to pray openly for freedom.

  “I thought back then that communism would last for the next thousand years,” he tells me. “The truth was, it did not. And that is something for us to hope for today, under this soft tyranny of political correctness. It will end. The truth has power to end every tyranny.”

  Palko and the others were in good company. Nearly all Western experts, scholars who had spent a lifetime studying Soviet communism failed to predict its rapid demise. We never know when history will produce figures like Lech Walesa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel, and all the lesser known heroes of the resistance. They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.

  You don’t have to be a grizzled Cold Warrior to see that a notion of progress that depends on labor camps, police informers, and making everybody equally poor to achieve justice and equality is phony. It is much harder, though, to stand against the softer version. It seems to flow naturally from the Myth of Progress as it has been lived out in our mass consumerist democracy, which has for generations defined progress as the liberation of human desire from limits. But that is exactly what traditional Christians must do, though for many of us it will mean having to unlearn political myths that we have uncritically absorbed in a culture that until fairly recently thought and reasoned in broad Christian categories. Consider that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was led by black preachers who articulated the plight of their people in Biblical language and stories.

  Those days are over, and we will not be able to take the measure of the long struggle ahead if we don’t understand the essential nature of the opposition.

  It regards Christians as the most significant remaining obstacles on the Grand March, bearers of the cruel and outdated beliefs that keep the people from being free and happy. Wherever we hide, they will track us, find us, and punish us if that’s what it takes to make this world more perfect. This brings us to the final factor critical to understanding the radical challenge facing Christianity and discerning strategies of resistance: the power and reach of surveillance technology.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Capitalism, Woke and Watchful

  Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

  To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

  “Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

  Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living r
oom wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

  Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

  After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s 1990 reunification, the German government opened the vast files of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, to its victims. None of the Soviet Bloc states had a surveillance apparatus as thorough as East Germany’s, nor had any communist rivals developed a culture of snitching with roots as deep and wide in the population. Historians later discovered that vast numbers of East German citizens, with no prompting by the government, volunteered negative information about their friends and neighbors. “Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state,” reported the magazine Der Spiegel. This practice gave the East German police state an unparalleled perspective on the private lives of its citizens.

  Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity.

  The rapidly growing power of information technology and its ubiquitous presence in daily life immensely magnifies the ability of those who control institutions to shape society according to their ideals. Throughout the past two decades, economic and technological changes—changes that occurred under liberal democratic capitalism—have given both the state and corporations surveillance capabilities of which Lenin and Stalin could only have dreamed. In East Germany, the populace accustomed itself to total surveillance and made snitching normal behavior—this, as part of the development of what the state called the “socialist personality,” which considered privacy to be harmful. In our time and place, the willingness of people to disclose deeply personal data about themselves—either actively, on platforms like Facebook, or passively, through online data harvesting—is creating a new kind of person: the “social media personality,” who cannot imagine why privacy matters at all.

  The Rise of Woke Capitalism

  To Americans conditioned by the Cold War, the all-powerful state seemed the biggest threat to liberty. We grew up reading Orwell in high school and hearing news accounts of defectors from communist countries who testified to the horrors of life under total government control. Besides, American culture has always prized the lone individual who stands out from the herd. The most iconic American—the cowboy—testifies to this enduring value.

  The American conservative tradition, unlike that of Europe, has been philosophically antagonistic to the state. Yet recognizing that the Soviet Union and its allies were a genuine threat, postwar conservatives resigned themselves, putting up with big government as a necessary evil to protect American freedom.

  But they didn’t have to like it. To many on the Right, especially libertarians schooled by the novels of Ayn Rand, corporations seemed the natural opponent of the leviathan state. As institutions of private enterprise, corporations were seen by conservatives as more naturally virtuous than the state. The Cold War might have compelled conservatives to make peace with Big Government, but they were willing to accept Big Business as a bulwark against a too-powerful state—and on the global front, as an important weapon in advancing American soft power against Soviet hegemony.

  Though liberals are less inclined to sanctify business than conservatives, the end of the Cold War brought about the conversion of leading liberal politicians—think Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—to the gospel of market globalization, already fervently accepted by all but a cranky fringe of Republicans. Over the past quarter century, globalization and technological advances have enabled a staggering expansion of corporate power.

  Now an elite club of global megacorporations are more powerful than many countries. Walmart has more annual revenue than Spain and more than twice as much as Russia. ExxonMobil is bigger, revenuewise, than India, Norway, or Turkey. As international strategist Parag Khanna says, in a world where Apple has more cash on hand than two thirds of the world’s nations, “corporations are likely to overtake all states in terms of clout.”1 In an America that now runs on the internet, five companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google—have an almost incalculable influence over public and private life.

  At the same time, Big Business has moved steadily leftward on social issues. Standard business practice long required staying out of controversial issues on the grounds that taking sides in the culture war would be bad for business. That all changed in a big way in 2015, when the state of Indiana passed a religious freedom bill that would have given some protection to businesses sued for antigay discrimination. A powerful coalition of corporate leaders, including the heads of Apple, Salesforce, Eli Lilly, and others, threatened economic retaliation against the state if it did not reverse course. It did. Since then, lobbyists for national and international corporations have leaned heavily on state governments to pass pro-LGBT legislation and to resist religious liberty laws.

  The stereotype that college students leave their liberalism behind on campus when they graduate into the “real world” is badly outdated. In fact, today’s graduates are often taught to bring their social justice ideals with them and advocate for what is called “corporate social responsibility.” True, nobody has a good word to say for corporate social irresponsibility; like “social justice,” the phrase is a euphemism for a progressive cultural politics. As author Heather Mac Donald has written, “[G]raduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image.”2

  In her 2018 book, The Diversity Delusion, Mac Donald explored how corporate human resources departments function as a social justice commissariat. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have diversity offices, she reports, and the corporate mania for “equity, diversity, and inclusion” informs corporate culture at many levels, including hiring, promotion, bonuses, and governing the norms of interaction in the workplace.

  Some multinational corporations impose progressive cultural politics on workplaces in more socially conservative countries. Several Polish employees of the national branches of world-renowned corporations told me that they have felt compelled to participate in LGBT activism inside their companies. As Christians, they believed endorsing Pride violated their consciences, but given economic conditions in Poland, they feared refusing to conform would cost them their jobs.

  There is nothing wrong, of course, with trying to create workplaces where people are treated fairly, and judged according to performance. That’s what we call “justice”; social justice, as we have seen, is not the same thing. Mac Donald found little to no empirical evidence to support social justice strategies within the corporate world. Despite this, these supposedly hardheaded business executives ignore the bottom line when it comes to diversity programs and corporate social responsibility initiatives. It’s as if these rites and catechisms were more an expression of religious belief than a response to real-world conditions.

  The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by Big Business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment. Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.

  In his 2018 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment company BlackRock, said that corporate social responsibility is now part of the cost of doing business.

 
“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”3

  Poll results about consumer expectations back Fink up. Millennials and Generation Z customers are especially prone to seeing their consumer expenditures as part of creating a socially conscious personal brand identity. For many companies, then, signaling progressive virtues to consumers is a smart business move in the same way that signaling all-American patriotism would have been to corporations in the 1950s.

  But what counts as a “positive contribution to society”? Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

  The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism

  The politicization of life in corporations along social justice lines has occurred at the same time that Big Business has embraced amassing personal data as a key sales and marketing strategy.

  In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith must live with a telescreen in his apartment. The two-way device delivers propaganda but also monitors residents, allowing the totalitarian state to invade the privacy of people’s homes.