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AR 29:12 - "Luxury beliefs," and the "badly broken" West
In this issue:
CULTURE - What happens with the loss of "a living bridge to a stable past" as the grandparents in each generation vanish?
MORMONISM - "How the Mormon church protects itself from child sex abuse claims"
Apologia Report 29:12 (1,653)
March 20, 2024
CULTURE
"Rob Henderson's 'Troubled' Past" by Rod Dreher (RD Substack, Feb 29 '24) -- After first reading this, my (RP) reaction comprised just one word: "Wow." Dreher begins: "Rob Henderson's terrific new memoir Troubled is this year's Hillbilly Elegy: a poignant, at times gripping, story of a turbulent lower-class childhood, told by a young man who overcame its chaos and deprivation, but who, in so doing, also developed a critique of the ruling-class culture into which he was initiated as a Yale graduate.
"Henderson is known for developing the concept of 'luxury beliefs,' defined as opinions (usually about politics or social issues) held by rich people as a way to signal their status as morally concerned, but that they would never live by. For example, Henderson writes: 'Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation, or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me. … Drugs are frequently considered a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain. ...
"Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant, or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures."
Dreher adds: "Like J.D. Vance before him, the discipline of military life revealed to Henderson what he was capable of with focus and purpose."
Henderson: "In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the 20 students were raised by both of their birth parents.' ...
"Henderson's focus is on the personal habits that make for a thriving life. ...
"Henderson in Troubled ... demonstrates using social science research that 'being poor doesn't have the same effect as living in chaos.' ...
"Entering into this world ... is to become aware that American society, for all our wealth and technology, is failing. It is failing because it has lost its moral center, and moral discipline. ...
"This is the world Rob Henderson came from. It was a world of random violence, of persistent disorder, of near-ubiquitous drug-and-alcohol abuse. ...
"If I had to reduce what I felt during these early childhood years to a single word, the only one I can think of is: dread. Dread of being caught stealing, dread of punishment, dread of suddenly being moved somewhere else, dread of one of my foster siblings being taken away."
Dreher explains a scene where "young Rob's telling his friends that his divorced mom had become a lesbian."
Henderson: "After I explained that Mom was gay, Cristian replied, 'You're lucky, you know.' ...
"'Your mom is with a girl. Or a woman, or whatever. She's not going to bring random guys around. That's lucky,' Cristian said."
Dreher mentions a related comment someone online shared with him: "Dukeboy, a retired cop, said that so much sexual violence against children is committed by the males single mothers involve themselves with romantically. Studies bear this out. ...
Henderson: "Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be 'motivated.' Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they 'lack motivation.' But the military taught me that people don't need motivation, they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. ...
"I learned a lot about those who sit at or near the apex of that ladder, which led me to develop the concept of 'luxury beliefs' - ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes."
Dreher: "Specifically, he had to confront the spectacle of a university full of rich, privileged kids who told themselves that they were oppressed victims.
"At Yale, more students come from families in the top one percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent, and here they were ensconced in one of the richest universities in the world, claiming that they were in danger. Broadcasting personal feelings of emotional precarity and supposed powerlessness was part of the campus culture. ...
"In my second year, I learned about a psychology study that investigated moral intuitions. One question asked about incest between a brother and sister. The study found that across different countries, people overwhelmingly stated that sibling incest was wrong. One particular group of people the researchers tested, though, showed a moderate willingness to condone it: students at elite colleges. ... I asked them other questions, like whether it would be okay for an adult to have a romantic relationship with their parent - a man and his father, for instance - and every person I asked said yes."
Dreher: "Thus, 'luxury beliefs,' because they could endorse such things without paying a price. This one explains so much about contemporary American politics. ...
"The luxury belief class thinks that the unhappiness associated with certain behaviors and choices is primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviors and choices themselves. ...
"I've seen a review or two of Troubled faulting Henderson for not offering policy prescriptions. But that is precisely Henderson's point! These problems cannot be solved by the standard managerial strategy of throwing money at policy fixes. He writes that there is 'no shortcut' that can compensate for the lack of a two-parent family. ... There is a reason that the Great Society failed, and it's not 'systemic racism,' or whatever other excuse the Ruling Class offers.
"There is simply no way to talk seriously about the problems of poverty and dysfunction in American life without taking seriously the stories in Troubled. ... What he does is give an account from the bottom up, one built on actual experience growing up in the underclass - and one that calls out the self-blindness and hypocrisy of the people at the top of the social heap. ...
"Politics never comes up in Henderson's book; I have no idea how he identifies politically, but he will be coded as right-wing, because he attacks progressive shibboleths. ...
"Henderson tells the truth about how badly broken America is, and, by implication, how hard it's going to be to repair. Rich liberals (and some rich conservatives too) display their tolerance by endorsing politics and lifestyles that, when adopted by the poor, lead to widespread destruction and immiseration. And this same ruling class rationalizes its guilt away by blaming conservatives, or invented social blights like 'white supremacy'. ...
"I've told many times the story here about the old white man I knew back in Baton Rouge who lived most of his adult life in what became in the late 1970s-early 1980s a black neighborhood. ...
"He told me that the black community in our city had, for the most part, not only lost the concept of family, they had lost even the cultural memory of family. Only the grandmothers and grandfathers of his generation were left as a living bridge to that stable past - and they were dying. When they were gone, there would be nothing left."
Dreher concludes that "so few people who think and write about these things understand what [Henderson] knows from experience." <www.tinyurl.com/2nn39jh2>
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MORMONISM
"Recordings show how the Mormon church protects itself from child sex abuse claims" by Michael Rezendes and Jason Dearen (AP News, Dec 4 '23) -- the recordings of meetings over the course of four months and obtained by the Associated Press, reveal "Paul Rytting, director of the Risk Management Division for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, making a $300,000 offer to Chelsea Goodrich and her mother Lorriane in exchange for their silence regarding Chelsea's father John Goodrich [a former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who ‘is a free man, practicing dentistry in Idaho" and] who Chelsea accused of sexually abusing her." Links are also provided of two audio segments from the meetings.
"'Going into this meeting with Rytting, I felt like it would be very clear, once everything's laid out that, look, this is not something that we want to cover up,' said Eric Alberdi, a church member who attended the meetings as Chelsea's advocate and also made recordings, which he shared with the AP." <www.tinyurl.com/2jdn332k>
Related: "Mormon Church responds to AP story detailing 2015 Idaho abuse case" (Deseret News, Dec 4 '23) -- "The church strongly denied the allegation that it attempted to keep the abuse case a secret. ...
"The story noted that the settlement, which included a nondisclosure agreement about the amount of the settlement and recordings made of church officials discussing it, did not preclude the survivor from telling her story." <www.tinyurl.com/bd45b4fm>
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