Lockdown Read : Live Not By Lies

Lockdown Read : Live Not By Lies 

Lockdown has taken away lot of pleasures but has given opportunity to go back to the best habit : Reading. In that continuation, I read Live Not By Lies . It is a work of Rod Dreher , The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option. The author  draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers.

For years, immigrants from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves many  countries  especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. 

Why the issues raised by author are relevant ? In fact, this kind of signal are visible in other countries. 

In the  book , Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Worldly success has not made Rod Dreher fonder of the world as he finds it. In another book “The Benedict Option”, published three years ago, the veteran commentator on religious affairs lamented that conservatives like him had been utterly vanquished in America’s culture wars. The moral gap between liberals and traditionalists had become unbridgeable, argued; the only hope for the godly lay in abandoning the fight for power and withdrawing from the social mainstream into self-contained families and communities.

Plenty of believers, in America and else- where, share Mr Dreher’s sense of alien- ation. But his work resonates for another reason. Many others who disavow the rest of his worldview have confronted the basic choice that he lays out: participation or flight. That fraught dilemma seems especially acute in an age of sharply polarised politics, but it is ancient.

During his Russian visit, Dreher learns how honest Soviet citizens tried to avoid having much to do with the system. Geology was a popular discipline among scientists, as it let researchers spend a good portion of their lives in far-flung and unsullied places. (Humbler jobs as furnace-stokers or nightwatchmen were another refuge for free spirits !) Dreher also speaks to people who lived through communism and know modern America. These battle-hard- ened folk say they find something horribly familiar about the emergence of intolerant thought police who can ruin careers, in academia or the professions, as punishment for dissent from the new orthodoxies on gender, race or sexuality.

Whatever you make of that analogy, there are some fundamental parallels be- tween the two places. Like Russia, America is vast, meaning retreat has always seemed physically possible, even enticing, wheth- er in the mountains of Idaho or the Arizona desert. Motives for withdrawal have in- cluded ideological dissent, Utopian experiments, eschatological hopes, the avoid- ance of social or technological change or the acceleration of such change. America has its Amish communities; the taiga and steppe of tsarist Russia accommodated schismatic groups such as the Old Believ- ers, who were theologically conservative but economically progressive.

Today the kind of flight proposed by Mr Dreher need not be physical. You can live on a remote island and engage furiously in political battles (Mr Dreher wages his own from Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Conversely, a city-centre flat can be a place of isolation, mbraced for intellectual reasons as well as pandemic-related ones. And in many modern democracies lots of liberal-minded people, too, have been tempted to desert the political and social mainstream, with or without a change of place. That has been most starkly true in cantankerous America and Brexit-era Britain.

Anthony Barnett, an English writer on democracy, observes a mood of retreat among older, left-leaning people in Eng- land and America: some over 50 are, he says, withdrawing from active politics into un-ideological passions such as gardening. The impulse, he thinks, derives less from fatalism than from an awareness that the job of fixing a broken system properly be- longs to a younger, untarnished genera- tion. The older cohort “know they were part of the problem”.

Retreat and reflection are a healthy re- sponse for liberal-minded activists chas- tened by populism, reckons Hugo Dixon, a co-leader of the failed campaign for a sec- ond popular vote on Brexit. They must pon- der why the old managerial style of politics was rejected in favour of abstract values like meaning and community. Nor are they the only ones to feel desolate or, for the time being, politically homeless. Linda Bilmes, a professor of public policy at Har- vard who served in Bill Clinton’s adminis- tration, points to the cadre of moderate Re- publicans who have been driven to abandon the fray. Whatever its outcome, the impending presidential election may push some Americans into a sort of inter- nal exile.

The case of Socrates

Conservatives longing for a safe space to marry and bring up children as they see fit; liberals in search of a quiet spot to lick their wounds: another category of people may harbour a different worry—about the im- pact on social cohesion when the disillu- sioned withdraw. One risk is that their flight from the arena will leave it free for opportunists and cynics, and that politics enters a degenerate spiral. Alongside that concern is a long-standing question of per- sonal morality. If you are deeply convinced that the present order is wrong, do you have the right to opt out rather than re- maining engaged and working for change?

Among the philosophical currents that shaped the West, a powerful one insists not merely on the right to engage in public discourses, but on the duty. The great Anglo-Irish theorist Edmund Burke reputedly warned that evil would prevail if good people stood aside. You need not be a totalitarian to find merit in Karl Marx’s adage that philosophers must change the world as well as understand it.

More recently some of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno, took refuge from Nazism in the United States; but their critique of modern society and populist culture, for all its cerebral opacity, was meant for active use, not just idle observation. Their ideas probably helped shape post-war German culture and immunise it against fresh to- talitarian temptation.

In some circumstances, the calculus changes. Former dissidents of the kind Mr Dreher meets might insist that the Soviet regime offered no leeway for improve- ment. Preserving their own integrity was as much as they could do—and that in itself could amount to a profound moral statement, incurring harsh retribution. Rancorous as they can be, though, have America and other democracies really reached similar point now? After all, for those who abhor national politics, there is a glorious array of alternative forms of engagement— from voluntary groups and local civic initiatives to conservation movements, not to mention the free exercise of speech online and elsewhere.

As it happens, the world’s first democra- cy, in ancient Athens, also fretted over de- grees of participation and the price of with- drawal. Many Athenians resented the apparent indifference to politics of the city’s wisest person, Socrates; some al- leged, not absurdly, that his seeming apathy had opened the way for vicious interludes of authoritarianism. On trial for his life Socrates insisted was anything but indifferent to the city’s welfare. He simply chose to stand a few paces back, challenging his fellow-citizens by asking basic, awkward questions and hence prodding them, like a gadfly, to act more wisely. “Socrates was not a quietist,” says Paul Cartledge, an expert from Britain on ancient democracy. The trouble was that some of his compatriots “saw politics, like religion, as something to be done in public if it was done at all”.

Today’s representative democracy finds it easier to accommodate a division of labour between thinkers and doers, actors and observers, participants and abstainers. Many citizens eschew even the minimal commitment of voting. But those who abstain will always face hard questions about whether leaving the stage was the only way to enact their principles.