Does the world really need this sophomoric and sneering attack on Hopkins, simply because it could score a few points (at least for other sophomores) on Rod Dreher? I rather doubt it. The words "rhetorical overkill" come to mind. They also appear to be coming to the mind of the blog owner, who appears to be finally catching on to the fact that there's something odd and a bit disturbing about a blog that's about *nothing* except trashing Crunchy Cons 24/7. I don't really have a big dog in this fight my own self. Rod's a friend. I thought his book was a worthy attempt at get past some of the dumber tribalisms of both Left and Right. It seems to me to be exploring some of the same ground that Peter Kreeft is remarking on here.
It appears to me that Rod's book gives offense for two reasons. One of them I can credit. I think Gilbert Meilander is simply right when he faults Dreher in the following passage:
A strong sense of impatience runs through the pages of Crunchy Cons. Perhaps it is the impatience of the prophet, and, to the degree that it is, one must attempt to learn from it. Still, over the years I have not found the folks who sit in church with me to be as vapid as Dreher seems to think they are. I admit that, on those occasions when for one reason or another I have been at a Catholic Mass, the liturgy (let us not even mention the hymnody) has largely failed to move me.
Still, even as a Lutheran, I would never say (as Dreher does), that “if the only contact a typical American Catholic has with Catholic teaching and thought is what he hears at Mass, he will remain a self-satisfied ignoramus.” I would not say it, in part, because I have watched ordinary bourgeois folk struggle in their different ways to take seriously what happens in the church’s worship. And I would not say it, in part, because, evidently unlike Dreher, I do not suppose they were self-satisfied ignoramuses before coming to church. Nor do I think that “traditional Christian values [make] so little apparent difference in the lives many conservative believers lead.”
Readers of my blog will know that I have crossed swords with Rod in the past on similiar issues. Rod's perpetual frustration and disappointment with ordinary Catholics for being ordinary is something I have criticized in the past. My own experience tells me that that Jesus rather likes ordinary people since he made so many of us. So I do take Meilander's critique as just and set it as one of the faults of the book that it assumes so many ordinary Christians are self-satisfied ignorami (since, in fact, typical American Catholics *do* experience their faith primarily through the liturgy). I can see how offended readers can easily conflate that attitude with everything Crunchy Cons has to say.
But there's something else at work in the critics I find less easy to credit. It is the tribalism I spoke of earlier. If there is sometimes a sense at work in Crunchy Cons that tastes are being raised to sacred ideals, I can only add that Crunchy Cons does a rather nice job of pointing out that many sacred ideals of the Left and Right are, in fact, merely tastes. The conversation that kicked off the book was, after all, quite telling. Somehow, someway, organic veggies and tofu were dubbed "Lefty" and eating them said something about you--at least according to those imbued with the tribal spirit. In the same way, as a non-smoker, I am often amused to listen to Rush Limbaugh talking as though defending Big Tobacco was a noble counter-cultural and meritorious thing. It's not, or course. But somehow Righties have imbibed the notion that the preference for Big Business over Big Government is automatically meritorious, even when that business kills millions around the world.
Where Crunchy Cons seems to me to be at the top of its game (and where its critics seem to me to fall over themselves in increasing silliness) is in the sort of thing exemplified by that ridiculous hatchet job on Hopkins. It's the notion (primarily on the Right, which is where most of the attacks come from) that Dreher's entirely Catholic love of the small, local, old and particular is somehow contemptible. I can't for the life of me see why. The most reasonable critique I've seen in my comboxes says "while I love the idea when it comes from Chesterton, it just annoys me when I read it coming from Rod." This, at least, recognizes that Rod has a point while still struggling to get past the bad taste left in the mouth from the "self-satisfied ignorami" diagnoses of ordinary people that likewise bother me. However, many critiques don't seem to make this attempt. There's a curiously tribal slash and burn approach from not a few critics that puzzles me. I can't help but think that it's partly due to a tribalism that reads attacks on Righty tastes as violations of the Sacred.
I could be wrong. But it does strike me that way quite often.
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