The pre-historic GingerMan emerges

One of the blogs I read regularly is Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con. As an Orthodox Christian and social conservative, Dreher & I have little in common philosophically, but this is why I find it interesting to read him. I get some insight into a mind that works very differently from my own.

Shortly before I started this blog, I posted a reader comment to Dreher's blog. It was the first comment I had ever made there, or on any blog anywhere. But, a short time later, the GingerMan was born.

Thus, my blog comment on Dreher's site stands as a kind of proto-GingerMan climbing out of the primordial ooze of my thoughts and onto the dry land of the blogosphere, but still struggling to stand upright on its own (though I am not sure that Dreher would appreciate my choice of a Darwinian analogy here).

Here was Dreher's post in the midst of the initial unveiling of the credit crisis on Nov 20, 2008:

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger sees the economic crisis as fundamentally a crisis of faith and morals. [em: mine]

Excerpt:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions. [em: mine]

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Well, everybody said "Merry Christmas" back in 1929, and still. But I see his point.

Now, those who read Dreher regularly will readily see the appeal of this article to Rod's sensibilities. It refracts the economic crisis through a lens of moral degeneracy and reframes the narrative as one of retributive cosmic justice for our straying from the moral path we had formerly embraced. All that's missing is a few thunderbolts from the sky to bar-b-que Bernie Madoff in his shoes before he is imprisoned for massive financial fraud.

This struck me as utter bunk. And, it got my blood up. So, I posted the following comment (in part) as a reply:

This is just pathetic.

Let me tell you a fairy tale about the great Pastoral Fantasy of American past. Back then, people were nothing but wonderful, neighborly yeoman farmers. We were all Christian and lived by a strict moral code and an ethic of honor. Owing to this fact, there was no greed. It was just hand-shake agreements and square-dealing all-around. Then the Sixties came and the Garden of Eden was overrun with hippies and gays.

Ever hear of the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1600's?

[snip]

The reason the Greatest Generation may have been more “restrained” in their risk-taking appetite is not due to their superior sense of morality but because they had come through the searing experience of the Great Depression itself.

While you wave at this point in your comment at the bottom of the post, Rod, you are also way too quick to lay the blame for any societal ill at the feet of individual personal morality and lack of religious adherence. Otherwise, you wouldn't have posted this horses*** in the first place.

In a weird way, when I read such obvious self-congratulatory moralizing, I feel that I am more in touch with our collective "fallen nature" than conservatives such as Dreher. I don't think human nature has changed much over time, and the ethical failures of our current age (to the extent that this particular crisis itself even has a principally ethical root, which I dispute) are the same as they ever were. Whereas, Dreher and others long for some mythical Eden-like past where, owing to stricter religious observance across society, we escaped our capacity to sin and lived in a Latin Mass-centered moral paradise.

I don't believe such an ethical nirvana has ever existed (that's in Heaven, remember?). The critical moral issues that religions speak to were all present in the past and remain so today, irrespective of differences in formal modes of religious observance.

In short, being religious on the surface of one's life does not ensure an ethical core. You would think this would be a lesson someone such as Dreher would have internalized better than most. But, maybe it is one lesson that is only learned slowly and painfully.

As Dreher recently admitted:

Most Catholics, though, and most people in general, have a very difficult time seeing that their own side is capable of doing terrible things. Before the scandal, I was what you might call a political Catholic. Yes, I knew that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but in truth I believed that the real problem in the Church was the liberals. And I could give you a lengthy catalog of the bad they had done to and in the Church. Though I'm not a Catholic anymore, I don't think I was wrong about those things.

What I was wrong about, though, and very, very wrong indeed, was assuming that "our side" was therefore blameless. I really did think ideologically. Once, when I lived in Washington, someone brought up then-Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas for some reason. "Is he orthodox?" I asked. Yes, came the answer. And that settled it for me: Grahmann was one of the good guys. No more questions needed to be asked.

In fact, as I would find out once I got here, Grahmann was one of the bad guys in the Church. His public orthodoxy, while commendable, told us very little about the way he governed the Catholic Church in Dallas -- which, as it turned out, was terrible.

As I was beginning to report on the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I was warned by a reputable and deeply knowledgeable Catholic priest, a man who has been made to suffer for his orthodoxy, that I better not assume that just because a priest or layman claims to be orthodox, that they're trustworthy. Many villains hide beneath the cloak of orthodox Catholic piety, he told me. It's a feint they use to throw people off their scent. Trust me, he said, I've seen this a lot.

[snip]

What I found in actual experience is a mixed bag. I found liberal Catholic laymen and priests with whom I agree about little theologically, who were absolutely heroic in the scandal. I found conservatives with whom I agreed about most everything who were cowardly. What I found mostly, though, was that a man's true character could not be reliably discerned from his theological orientation. It was so much easier to be able to separate the sheep and the goats by ideology. But it's not real, and to give into that temptation is to set oneself up for humiliation, or worse, the perpetuation of evil. [em: mine]

[snip]

It's a temptation every one of us faces -- and if you don't think you face it, you are setting yourself up for a fall. I'm not saying there is no such thing as good and evil, right and wrong, or that all sides are always equally culpable in wrongdoing. What I'm saying is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: the line between good and evil runs right through the human heart. As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble.

"As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble." Now that's a place where Rod & I can agree in full voice.