West Port Experiment

In the last few months, I finished a couple of really insightful non-fiction titles. The first was R. R. Reno’s The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. This was the most helpful overview of what the “post-war consensus” (PWC) actually is and why it is on life support if not in its death pangs. Basically, the PWC was birthed in the aftermath of World War II and the horrors both on the battlefield and in the concentration camps. “Never again!” was the motto in Europe and the U.S., and the modus operandi of the elites was to tamp down on all discourse—religious, political, or social—that could elevate the blood pressure of the nations and so risk a reprise of the world wars. Liberalism in the broader sense of tolerance, acceptance, and openness, was the prevailing doctrine. But what it ended up doing was fueling the populisms and nationalisms we have witnessed in the last decade or so. In the end, we are humans who need “strong loves.” Something to be passionate about—and even die for!

I appreciate that Reno does not take the extra step to endorse various far right or hard kinist ideologies. But he certainly does explain how they have arisen, and that the PWC dogma only proved an accelerant. I tend to see how, on a sociological level, Jeroboam’s rebellion in 1 Kings reflected an ‘overcorrecting’ populism in response to Solomon’s austerity and Rehoboam’s juvenile swagger. That’s an explanation, not a carte blanche justification—the prophetic historian makes sure to tell us it was apostasy in the end. But how can you not be somewhat sympathetic with Jeroboam after Rehoboam’s knuckleheaded, hardline decree? I think that is how I’m viewing the general cultural, nationalistic mood. What you politically sow, you will reap. I do, however, worry about white supremacist and antisemitic extremes that are becoming fashionable, even within Christian circles. Yet the reign of the PWC during the length of the Cold War on has clearly demonstrated that globalist, classical liberalism is no real ally of historic, Protestant Christianity. When live-and-let-live results in transing the kids, we need to cry foul. We must think critically and distinguish between things that differ.

The other audiobook I listened to was Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell. A tour de force of social history. He explodes the conventional wisdom that black “ghetto” culture is the product of antebellum chattel slavery, and in fact, bears clear and unmistakable marks of having nursed on the mother’s milk of (drumroll, please . . .) Southern “white cracker” culture and its British counterparts. Or in other words, old “white trash,” with its lazy, irreverent, bellicose, and sexually permissive ways, heavily influenced the former slave population in the postwar South and beyond. But more, Sowell opens and handily closes the case that black, ghetto culture is fundamentally culturally conditioned; that is, there’s nothing wrong with their DNA, nor is their history a final determinant of their social and economic success. But more, this self-destructive, self-reproducing culture is only perpetuated and promoted by none other than the putative friends of African-Americans: white liberal elites.

Neither Reno nor Sowell are evangelical Christians. So they fall short of the real remedy for our modern woes, which is national repentance and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind. Yet I find them quite helpful in an explanatory, social and political way. And understanding of problems is a precondition of doing our part, however small, to fix them.