REVIEW: Live Not By Lies – Rod Dreher (Penguin Random House, 2020)

With Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher continues in much the same vein that his 2016 effort The Benedict Option left off: a practical stab at dealing with the severe cultural rot that lurches ominously toward outright persecution. Where his previous book used the Benedictine Order and its impact on medieval Europe as its framework, Dreher here focuses on the Soviet empire’s totalitarianism and the efforts Christian dissidents used to survive its reign of terror.

I admit that I am not the biggest fan of Dreher’s work. There’s an annoying tendency to be equal parts on-the-mark and missing-the-point, and frequently at the same time; his concern over nominal Christian matters in the culture war held up alongside his Trump derangement is a good example. If we recognize the toxicity of modern life, and if we recognize that the media—generally speaking—are prime culprits in this toxicity’s promulgation, then we don’t have to necessarily like Trump to recognize and support his incessant badgering them. And yet, the value the man serves as a weapon in the war is completely lost on Dreher’s more elite-minded sensibilities.

I begin with this sort of apparent blindness because it characterizes the whole book. I don’t mean the Trump derangement specifically, but rather the sort of mindset that results in it. In diagnosing the problem, he seems to get most of the problem in focus, but he omits certain details important enough to make his diagnosis off. This flawed diagnosis results in suggesting remedies that can cure symptoms of the issue without ever getting to the main problem.

Nonetheless, the book itself isn’t altogether bad. Dreher’s excursions across Eastern Europe and Russia are informative and provide some levity to certain kinds of alarmism that Christian dissidents in the West tend to embrace. That aspect of the book is probably its highlight, which unfortunately means that it fails somewhat as an actual Manual for Christian Dissidents. His enthusiasm to wed his analysis to parallels with Soviet Russia cripples his understanding of how our Western totalitarianism is unfolding, despite the dearth of interviews he conducted with those that survived the Soviet regime.

Diagnosis

Before he addresses how to solve the problem, Dreher does his due diligence to lay out, briefly, what he believes the problem to be. As we know, however, the problems are legion; it would take more than one book, much less one half of one book, to address them all. Dreher opts for a quick summary; using how the communist revolution unfolded in Russia as a template, he focuses attention on technological surveillance, social conditioning, and revolution itself before moving onto his suggestions for treating the ailment.

Big Tech is, without a doubt, one of the most troubling aspects of the modern world in terms of its perfidiousness and the sheer scope of its influence. Dreher touches on only the aspect of its surveillance, however, which is arguably one of its least problematic aspects. This comes with an attempt to compare the surveillance state of the Soviet bloc with that of Silicon Valley’s, but the comparison is as inappropriate as much as it misses the point. Do these devices spy on us? Do our smartphones constantly hear everything around them? Does Alexa record everything you say? Has Google amassed a database of information to catalogue our psychological profiles based on our online activity? The answer to all of these questions is yes. But a better question is whether this is actually the most dangerous part of Big Tech’s invasion into our lives—to that, I’d argue that it isn’t, even as troubling as it is.

That argument aside, however, his comparison isn’t even an adequate one to begin with. Big Tech—together with the media, and financial capital—occupies a unique place in the American strata. They’re not governmental agencies, and they conduct business all around the world. This isn’t a matter of a government spying on you in order to put you in camps; it’s a matter of a global elite doing so in order to maintain control. The surveillance aspect to these machines is a secondary function of their use as social conditioning devices; you don’t need to actually spy on someone if you can control what they think.

Dreher doesn’t mention any of this, and within the scope of the book he put forward, he can’t; the Soviet propaganda machine did not work as effectively domestically as it overseas—Pravda, far from being the trend-setting priestly class of the regime the way that CNN and the New York Times are, was commonly known by every Russian to be a rag of lies. But he’s stuck trying to draw connections between Soviet Russia and the direction America is headed, and while there are a few, there aren’t enough to make this approach worth the investigation. The serious problems to Christian life posed by Big Tech are far greater than the establishment of a surveillance state, yet Dreher’s analysis leaves no room to get into them.

But bringing up the issue of Big Tech does bring up the issue of Social Justice Warriors and the cult of HR-department goons that have weaponized media in order to systematically unperson politically incorrect public figures. To his credit, he offers a brief explanation of SJWs, but like so much of his diagnosis, it’s an exercise that misses the mark as much as it hits it.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice. Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby insightfully links sexual radicalism to the scientific roots of the Myth of Progress. He has written that “the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”

Without Christianity and its belief in the fallibility of human nature, secular progressives tend to rearrange their bigotries and call it righteousness.¹

While quoting Hanby here might be appropriate, Hanby’s take is unnecessarily convoluted for Dreher’s purposes; the sexual revolution is much better characterized by Dreher’s following sentence. To paraphrase St. Augustine, you can conform your desires to the truth, or you will conform the truth to your desires. That’s the essence of sexual liberation, and it’s the exact modus operendi of the cult of social justice, communism, and modernity as a whole—it is, in fact, the shared principle common to both liberal democracy/capitalism and communism. They are ideologies based upon certain kinds of desires, and everything must be made to fit within those ideologies in order to service those desires.

Although Dreher does not mention it—or may not realize it—the sexual liberation he only briefly touches on here is exactly why liberalism is so dangerous to peoples, cultures, and traditions. It is always a weapon wielded by those with enough power in order to reshape society. The Bolsheviks used it in Russia in the 20s, and the Israelis, now somewhat infamously, during the Second Intifada.

Maybe there’s something in common that these two off-the-cuff and admittedly cherry-picked examples have, but I’ll let you figure that out. Maybe it’s the same thing that he leaves out in referring to the Bolsheviks’ revolution in October:

The 1905 Revolution bought the Romanov dynasty time, but the Russian monarchy’s doom was sealed with the arrival of the Great War in 1914. Russia’s humiliating defeat called down the long-prophesied apocalypse in the form of the 1917 October Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party. Among revolutionary Russia’s far-left factions, Bolsheviks were relatively small in number, but under Lenin’s forceful leadership, they were smart, ruthless, and determined. Their victory proved that under certain conditions, a clever, dedicated minority can gain absolute power over a disorganized, leaderless, and indifferent mass.²

Here arises a big problem in his diagnosis. Revolutions don’t just sort of happen; they don’t materialize out of the aether after a certain set of ill-defined conditions are met. Revolutions are perpetrated and executed by people, usually by conspiracy, and undertaken at the expense of everyone outside of their group. The American revolution had the Founding Fathers, who used the press, local governments, and civilian groups to heighten tension across the colonies and eventually divorce from Britain. The French Revolution had its own characters with direct access to, again, the press, to lodges, and to institutions that made the Terror of Paris possible. Russia was no different.

It was more than Bolsheviks that toppled the Czar, but where Dreher means this in a social and economic sense, I refer specifically in the people involved. For a writer so interested in and who quotes Solzhenitsyn so much in this book, it’s puzzling—but not altogether unexpected—that Dreher brushes over this fact. It’s true that Russia’s internal stability was on uneasy footing, and that industrialization had thrown into disarray the nation’s sense of identity. But the problem is that viewing Russia’s revolution more as a collapse than as an actively hostile takeover by the Bolsheviks cripples any diagnosis of what’s going on in this country. If you don’t understand what a revolution is or how one works, how can you possibly expect to appropriately define what’s going on today?

There are a lot of problems with comparing pre-revolutionary Russia with the contemporary United States, but on this front, they’re very similar: the people egging on the self-styled revolutionaries in the streets are people hostile to a certain America, and not in some abstract idealistic sense, either. They’re hostile to what that America is, to its people, to its way of life. And, like the Bolsheviks, it’s too easy to find financial connections between themselves and foreign, often investment banking-related interests.

Dreher’s approach is one that seems blind to how severely the country’s liberal elite are compromised. The fact that every major corporation, half the government, and the entire media-entertainment complex side with the revolutionaries isn’t particularly mentioned, save as something of an afterthought. The corporations are out to make money, yes. But they’re also guided by the sort of ideological extremism that characterizes the goons on the ground.

We see Antifa sympathies in every Human Resources department of every international business that has a corporate board. We see the hallmarks of the sexual revolution used as rallying cries not just by the homosexuals parading down Main Street, but by the advertising departments of Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, and the New York Times. Dreher at least notes that this isn’t necessarily an organic phenomenon. The old assumption that impractical ideology learned in college was necessarily stamped out by the workplace simply isn’t true:

The stereotype that college students leave their liberalism behind on campus when they graduate into the “real world” is badly outdated. In fact, today’s graduates are often taught to bring their social justice ideals with them and advocate for what is called “corporate social responsibility.” True, nobody has a good word to say for corporate social irresponsibility; like “social justice,” the phrase is a euphemism for a progressive cultural politics. As author Heather Mac Donald has written, “[G]raduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image.”³

And yet, his recognition of the fact stops here. Why the students are being programmed in the first place, and by whom, escapes even his mention. Why the most powerful corporations in the world stand behind ideology as toxic as this sort of radical kulturkampf is not even given a passing remark. Dreher recognizes the revolutionary tendencies of the Social Justice mob, but based on his flawed understanding of revolutions, he fails to address the actual problem. The problem isn’t just the mob: it’s who controls the mob, and where the mob came from.

Treatment

The second half of Dreher’s book is intended to lay out a brief set of pointers on how to navigate the increasingly degraded culture. He continues to use anecdotes, interviews, and experiences from his sojourn in Russia, ending each chapter with a section entitled “See, Judge, Act.” This is where the manual part of the book comes into play.

Like part one, there’s a lot here that’s good, if common-sensical enough. The chapter titles themselves summarize exactly what he prescribes as the way forward for Christian dissidents: value the truth, remember your culture, establish strong families and communities, maintain your religion, embrace suffering, et cetera. We’ll only approach a few of these in critique.

The first chapter ends with what can only be inferred as the most indicting part of the book. “Value Nothing More Than Truth,” seems a benign enough title, as the chapter approaches how totalitarian regimes maintain a stranglehold over narrative and use force to define what is socially acceptable. His analysis is a little incomplete, but the substance is sensible enough. The problem is his characterization of what to do about it, and it plagues the rest of his suggested treatments.

Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.⁴

Sounds reasonable enough. But that’s all there is. Even in later chapters, when he discusses communities and family, the emphasis is purely on attempting to safeguard oneself from the culture, rather than trying to change the culture itself. The former is important—tantamount, of course—but doing the former will not naturally, eventually, or mysteriously accomplish the latter. But Dreher, at least putting this in context with The Benedict Option,seems unwilling to admit it.

Where Dreher does speak of organizing resistance, as in the chapter entitled Standing in Solidarity, he does so with the foregone conclusion that there will be no fight against the totalitarian takeover. It’s hard exactly to tell whether he thinks this takeover has already happened—as some of his statements in the early chapters imply—or that it’s going to happen soon. Exhortations for Christians to “educate themselves about the mechanics of running underground cells and networks while they are still free to do so”⁵ certainly indicate the latter. But if this is the case, why aren’t we preparing for open resistance as well?

Why are we to presume that the Church will return to the catacombs when all of our altars are still above ground? In 1793, the martyrs of the Vendée saw fit to defend the Faith with force when the Parisian revolutionaries came for them carrying cannon and bayonet. In 1936, the people of Spain reacted to the desecration of the Church and the murder of clergy by taking their country back from communists that had wormed their way into power. And this is to say nothing of the peasant revolts during the English Reformation when the Crown began its liturgical revolution in the sixteenth century.

Dreher’s emphasis returns to a problem with liberalism that even he seems unwilling to address: that by believing the tenants of the Faith, you are obliged to live certain ways and not to tolerate certain forms of behavior. If we are to take the Faith seriously, then we cannot presume our confessions of it to be entirely private affairs. This understandably rocks the boat when it comes to using “Christianity” as an umbrella term that includes religious beliefs as wide-ranging as Baptists and Russian Orthodoxy, but it’s nonetheless an important one to remember.

He is right about a lot, however. As he comments on the need for cultural literacy:

To those who want to keep cultural memory alive, Connerton warns that it is not enough to pass on historical information to the young. The truths carried by tradition must be lived out subjectively. That is, they must not only be studied but also embodied in shared social practices—words, certainly, but more important, deeds. Communities must have “living models” of men and women who enact these truths in their daily lives. Nothing else works.⁶

Dreher is on point, though to what degree, it’s again hard to tell. He still writes and lives within a liberal mindset, even as he critiques where liberalism butts up against what he seems to consider a private sphere of religious belief. Public confessions of the Faith are things that most Christians in the West have steadily scaled back since the revolution of 1968. More importantly, it isn’t enough just to be an upstanding citizen, you have to be an upstanding model Christian before that.

Leaving this aside, Dreher’s point focuses on a greater, though less-defined issue of narrative-crafting, and in particular, liberal capitalism’s and democracy’s unrelentingly corrosive character upon the traditions of the past. “‘What neither Nazism or Communism could do,’” Dreher quotes a Budapest survivor of Communism, Tamás Sályi, “‘victorious liberal capitalism has done.’”⁷ He’s right, of course, but again: to what degree is he willing to defend this? He takes a firmly illiberal stance in diagnosing the problem, and yet immediately surrenders the public square in prescribing a solution.

In the closing paragraphs of his chapter entitled “Cultivate Cultural Memory,” Dreher remarks that “Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense,” and as such, “we must also manifest cultural memory in communal deeds”.⁸ This sounds like an effort to maintain a public presence, but the community he’s referring to is one that remains underground. He’s talking about resistance cells, pockets of ideological insurgency, not demarcating lines on map.

It is, admittedly, a sad state of affairs when such words are worth repeating: that Christians and Catholics in particular should not be ashamed of their Faith in the public square—ashamed, in this case, meaning unwilling to frame one’s speech by its veracity. This, however, is itself a sin that Catholics are supposed to already be aware of. Every Easter we are reminded of Peter’s abandonment of Christ at the most dire hour, and again we are reminded that those who do not go to bat for their Faith are one in the same refusing to go to bat for Christ Himself. This isn’t to say that we’re called to override the speech of others, to be the sort of obnoxious walrus figure that puts his speech where it isn’t necessary, but we are called not to blaspheme even by omission or acquiescence.

Conclusion

So much of the book comes across as wildly out of touch with today’s situation. As expected of Dreher, he doesn’t actually give bad advice, so much as advice that is relevant only at the barest of levels. Rather than a manual for Christian dissidents, it’s more appropriate to call this a subsistence effort at maintaining your grip on sanity in a world very clearly swerving into madness. And this comes, in large part, from his misdiagnosis of both the problems facing Christians and the overall state of the culture.

His aforementioned chapter on Social Justice Warriors is a good example. He adequately addresses the means by which the cult of social justice operates, but it’s out of date. Diagnosing it was considered a relevant exercise half a decade ago, when the wake of GamerGate made the term national news. After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and more tech platform purges than can be kept count of, and especially after this summer of rioting, diagnosing the SJW cancer in our culture comes across as dangerously missing the point.

If you’re a literate person in the year 2020 and don’t know what a self-described Social Justice Warrior is or how they operate, you’re either lucky enough to be living in seclusion, or you won’t be engaged in the culture war in the first place. It could be argued that this is exactly the audience the book is targeting, and to Dreher’s credit, The Benedict Option seems to have made him a big enough name that he could reach such a demographic. This could explain the distinct shallowness to both the book’s descriptive and prescriptive elements, but it does little to make Dreher come across as a serious voice in the fight.

This book indicates that he’s seeking practical ways of coping with the stress of an unfriendly regime. This is no path to victory, either in a worldly sense—conquering the regime—or in a spiritual sense. He’s not advocating martyrdom, or at least, not openly. Dreher’s solution isn’t much of a solution at all, then, as the problems presented by Big Tech, Big Pharma (unaddressed), and the LGBT mob that has found its way into government curriculi (largely unaddressed) aren’t given their due attention. Dreher’s proposed solutions, which include having strong families, building a community, and actively developing your personal prayer life, are all good things to do, but they won’t be enough to safeguard your children, your parish, or your nation.

It can’t be called a total surrender, of course, but it can’t be called a winning strategy, either. And the problem is that strategies which try to shoot for anything less than victory result in failure almost without exception. The path forward for Christian dissidents is not to stay in our communities or unrealistically guard our children against the internet—the first leads to insularity that begets schism, and the second turns your children into pariahs among their own peers. The path forward requires a lot more than this. Much, much more.

There are already Christian dissidents who have communities, who guard as they can against the evils of popular culture and the internet, who have active interior lives. They’re commonly sidelined as traditionalists, at least within the Catholic Church. I’ll be the first to admit that the traditionalist “culture”, if it can be referred to as such a monolith, is riven with problems ranging from schism to gnosticism to mere impracticality. But there is a lot of good to be found in them, too, and they’re already considered “Christian dissidents”—not infrequently by their own Catholic brethren. These families don’t need this book; they’re both living embodiments and indictments of what it has to offer. But if it were not for these families that this book was written, then who exactly are the Christian dissidents to which the subtitle is addressed?

It is also clear from this book that the people who need to be addressed aren’t the slovenly among the laity, but the prelates and clergymen themselves. The Church itself has a responsibility to be active in the culture. Papal encyclicals and apostolic letters aren’t the issue here, either. Press statements, public releases, none of that is the point: the prelates are obliged to work with secular authorities in order to enable a Catholic culture conducive to properly-oriented life.

It’s up to the laity to organize, to form networks, to keep their families together—all the things Dreher mentions. But it’s up to the Church to be the guide through all of this, and not in some abstract or purely spiritual manner, either. Catholics in particular need to know that the Church has their back when they’re organizing rallies, like the March for Life, or praying public Rosaries outside of abortion clinics. If or when the persecutions begin, knowledge that the prelates themselves support the laity will determine whether an actual Catholic society can survive or whether the Church truly has to go underground. Our clergy are called shepherds for a reason.

In short, I certainly don’t recommend the book. It’s not a bad book, but it occupies the extremely unfortunate position of having no obvious audience and no meaningful point. It’s a book written five years too late, in certain regards, and one that misses the mark too often to draw meaningful conclusions from. It’s short, at least, and typical of Dreher, very clearly written, but nonetheless, I’d recommend you spend your time elsewhere.

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373.

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