Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part II)

Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part II)

After a careful first reading of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (2017), I find its central thesis to be found on page 83:

The real question facing us is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture. When is it cowardly not to cooperate with secular politicians out of an exaggerated fear of impurity–and when is it corrupting to be complicit?

Or as Miss Anscombe once put it:

It is indeed one of the troubles about government, that it is difficult to specify the ‘things that are Caesar’s.’[1]

This is the same question that confronts Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1966). Its historical inaccuracies aside, it develops the question of whether the King or the Church would rule England.

It is the same question the butler Stephens refuses to face in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) with regard to whether his employer was a Nazi sympathizer and if Stephens “did his duty” by never questioning his employer’s requests.

And what is the answer to Dreher’s and Anscombe’s and Bolt’s and Ishiguro’s dilemma? I suggested last time that it might involve Emersonian compensation. But now C. S. Peirce is nagging me, and I’m afraid he re-articulates the whole problem when he says:

Unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other’s opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix [stabilize] belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.[2]

See also: “Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part III).”

and:

“Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part I).”

NOTES

[1] “On the Source of the Authority of the State.” From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 132.

[2] “The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly. No. 12. (November, 1877.) 1-15.