R.R. Reno

R.R. Reno: “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates”

Published by Papa Giorgio

This comes by way of the WALL STREET JOURNAL:

  • Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates — Even those who aren’t woke seem damaged by the experience, and they’re deprived of role models.

I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.

As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.

Haverford is a progressive hothouse. If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities. And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.

Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.

The traditional Islamic world exhibited a modicum of tolerance. Christians and Jews were dhimmi, allowed to exist, but on the condition that they accepted their subordinate role in society. While studying this arrangement, sociologists coined the term “dhimmitude,” which refers to the mentality of those who have internalized their second-class status.

Haverford, like Harvard and other top tier schools, graduates fine young people, no doubt many with well-adjusted personalities and sensible views of the world. But in the past decade, dhimmitude has become widespread. Normal kids at elite universities keep their heads down. Over the course of four years, this can become a subtle but real habit of obeisance, a condition of moral and spiritual surrender.

Some resist. They would seem ideal for my organization, which aims to speak for religious and social conservatives. But even this kind of graduate brings liabilities to the workplace. I’ve met recent Ivy grads with conservative convictions who manifest a form of posttraumatic stress disorder. Others have developed a habit of aggressive counterpunching that is no more appealing in a young employee than the ruthless accusations of the woke.

In recent years, I’ve taken stock of my assumptions about who makes for the best entry-level employee. I have no doubt that Ivy League universities attract smart, talented and ambitious kids. But do these institutions add value? My answer is increasingly negative. Dysfunctional kids are coddled and encouraged to nurture grievances, while normal kids are attacked and educationally abused. Listening to Haverford’s all-college Zoom meeting also made it clear that today’s elite students aren’t going to schools led by courageous adults. Deprived of good role models, they’re less likely to mature into good leaders themselves.

My rule of thumb is to hire from institutions I advise young people to attend. Hillsdale College is at the top of that list, as are quirky small Catholic colleges such as Thomas Aquinas College, Wyoming Catholic College and the University of Dallas. In my experience, graduates from these sorts of places are well-educated. But more important, they’ve been supported and encouraged by their institutions, and they haven’t been deformed by the toxic political correctness that leaders of elite universities have allowed to become dominant.

Large state universities and their satellite schools are also good sources. In my experience, top-performing students at Rutgers are as talented but less self-important than Ivy Leaguers. They’re more likely to accept the authority of those more experienced. This allows for better mentoring, which in turn produces better results over time.

The biggest liability that comes with hiring graduates from places like Haverford and Harvard is that they have been socialized to panic over pseudocrises. Talk of systemic racism and fixation on pronouns inculcate in young people an apocalyptic urgency, a mentality that often disrupts the workplace and encourages navel-gazing about “diversity,” “inclusion” and other ill-defined notions that are far removed from the main work of my organization, which is good writing, good editing and good arguments.

A few years ago a student at an Ivy League school told me, “The first things you learn your freshman year is never to say what you are thinking.” The institution he attended claims to train the world’s future leaders. From what that young man reports, the opposite is true. The school is training future self-censors, which means future followers.

Mr. Reno is editor of First Things.

RPT’s Early Thoughts on the Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

Published by Papa Giorgio

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage shows just how much trouble American democracy is in.

In a strongly worded dissent, the conservative justice wrote that he did not care that gay marriage was now legal, but he said that the court’s ability to make this decision represented a threat to democracy.

“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” Scalia said.

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

The conservative justice railed against his fellow justices, calling the majority opinion “egotistical” and pointing out that the justices were a homogeneous group that didn’t represent the people. As proof, Scalia pointed out that many went to the same law schools, and none were evangelical or protestant Christians.

“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation,” Scalia said…

(Business Insider)

Two… yes, the number 2, has now become an objective concept in law over and above millions of years of evolution (Natures Law), or God’s Law (Natural Law) honing [or creating] the ideal that is the “male-female” relation. Both ideas, “Natures Law and natures God” (from the Declaration of Independence), under-girded the philosophy of the moment that wrote the greatest document/contract in human history.

The mission of the church in the West has just changed. Soon the number 2 will fall by the relativistic roadside to plural marriages. All these non-ideal familial structures (according to Nature or natures God) will erode the religious freedom the Founders set up.

But we have a generation that neither looks to history for guidance or to any religious/moral authority outside themselves.

This experiment will eventually fall into the edict of the French (Jacobin) idea of equality in outcome… And to be clear, the guillotine soon followed. Tyranny never follows far behind forced outcomes.

The priority of the male-female relationship is just a larger piece to the puzzle called “deconstructionism.”

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” — Mussolini 

Here is a portion of a short commentary by Gay Patriot:

…Does anyone expect the activist left to be satisfied with their political victory?  If you’ve studied the history of the Civil Rights movement, you know they didn’t stop after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. There are plenty of new frontiers for the Lesbian Gay Bullying Totalitarians to pursue and keep the donations to the Sharptons and Jacksons of the HRC and other professional activist organizations rolling in.

  • Banning disagreement or criticisms of gay behavior through “anti-bullying” and “hate speech” legislation;
  • Mandating school curricula to include “gay history” as well as museums and monuments to be demanded to gay heroes like Harry Hay, Larry Bruckner, and Harvey Milk;
  • Forcing religious institutions to recognize gay marriages;
  • Churches must be forced to perform gay marriages or lose tax exempt status. (Mosques, probably not)

No, this is not the end. This is nowhere near the end. This is just another milestone on the road to our social Pyongyang. The Supreme Court has rejected the rule of law twice in two days in favor of a Judiciary Politburo…

Two short articles by R.R. Reno that have impacted me a lot just reading them through once. It seems that this is the best, considering our current climate, response that is conservative and conservatively libertarian for our [again] current culture.

Government Marriage

A constitutional right for men to marry men and women to marry women is a done deal. That’s how I read the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear cases in which lower courts ruled that marriage laws in various states that recognize unions only of a man and a woman are unconstitutional. Lower courts will continue to draw this conclusion. If portions of the country resist, the Supreme Court will very likely intervene and find a right to same-sex marriage amid the penumbras and emanations of due process or equal protection.

We are thus fast approaching a fundamental distinction between government marriage and church marriage. Government marriage is… well, it’s hard to tell. The courts have studiously ignored traditional arguments about the meaning of marriage. That’s not surprising, because all thick descriptions of marriage end up focusing on the male—female difference, which isn’t very useful if your goal as a judge is to find a constitutional right of same-sex marriage.

Given this new legal reality, what are we to think and’ do? First, we need to recognize how miserably we have failed. We sought to convince our fellow citizens of some simple truths. That marriage is a universal institution found in all cultures. That it properly organizes, regulates, and sanctifies the sexual union of male and female. That to say otherwise is unprecedented, strange, and unwise as a social policy. We tried to speak these truths in many different ways but without success.

Clarity about our failure need not entail giving up on the arguments we’ve made. Sometimes things need to be said because they’re true. But facing our failure should lead us to a keener sense of what we’re up against. It’s very hard these days to speak about men as men and women as women. Last month I wrote about the perverse way in which political correctness prevents us from talking about the problems of date rape and sexual assault in a manner that acknowledges the unique sexual vulnerability of women. We have the same problem when it comes to marriage. Our culture dreams of equality so complete that the male—female difference becomes irrelevant. Why do we need an institution to regulate the union of men and women if there aren’t any real differences between men and women?

Our current culture of the intimate life adds to our confusion. Widespread cohabitation makes marriage seem increasingly irrelevant. Our date-then-fornicate social mores run counter to the traditional claim that we should discipline our sexual instincts in accord with the limitations imposed by the institution of marriage. The fact that this culture shapes a great deal of our lives and those of our children, friends, and relatives makes our situation all the more troubling. How can we speak clearly about marriage if we participate in trends that obscure its proper meaning?

And then there’s the general fear we all feel about being “judgmental.” We take for granted the minute regulation of our economic relations. We accept extensive educational expectations and adopt rigorous regimes of exercise and dieting. But when it comes to sex and sexual “iden­tity,” our culture finds regulation suspect, even odious. This involves more than solicitude for our perennial hedonistic impulses. Anxious efforts to secure “transgendered” rights don’t focus on sexual relations at all. Those rights secure the freedom for a male to think of himself as—and to be treated by others as—a female, and vice versa. Most people I know roll their eyes when talk turns to the rights of the “transgendered community.” But they also shrink from saying anything censorious. To give full voice to traditional moral judgments about sex, sexual identity, and relationships is insensitive, puritanical, or just plain bad manners.

In this respect, Pope Francis is both very right and very wrong. We have not found a way to talk about sex and marriage, at least not one we’re confident will humanize, which is what clarity about moral truth should do. But he’s dangerously wrong to suggest that the way forward is to “obsess” less. The opposite is the case, for as both Roger Scruton (“Is Sex Necessary?”) and James Kalb (“Sex and the Religion of Me”) observe in this issue, our age is already obsessed with sex. If we don’t speak—if our church leaders don’t speak—we’ll be absorbed into our culture’s way of thinking, and our children will be catechized by progressive creeds of sexual liberation.

In the new regime of redefined marriage, we need to think long and hard about what we need to do—or refuse to do. For example, I can’t see how a priest or pastor can in good conscience sign a marriage license for “spouse A” and “spouse B.” Perhaps he should strike those absurdities and write “husband” and “wife.” Failing that, he should simply refuse the govern­ment’s delegation of legal power, referring the couple to the courthouse after the wedding for the state to confect in its bureaucratic way the amorphous and ill-defined civil union that our regime continues to call “marriage.”

More generally, I think we need to make a simple change in the way we talk about marriage. I propose dropping the term civil marriage and adopting the term govern­ment marriage. In the past, the state recognized marriage, giving it legal forms to reinforce its historic norms (or, in more recent decades, to relax them). Now the courts have redefined rather than recognized marriage, making it an institution entirely under the state’s control. That’s why it’s now government marriage rather than civil marriage. On this point I believe in the separation of church and state. The Church may participate in civil marriage. It should not participate in government marriage.

A Time to Rend

Getting out of the government-marriage busi­ness is exactly what Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz now urge. They’ve formu­lated a pastoral pledge. It requires ordained ministers to renounce their long-established role as agents of the state with the legal power to sign marriage certificates. I find their reasoning convincing. Easy divorce, prenuptial agreements, a general tolerance of cohabitation, the contraceptive mentality—this de­grades and obscures the meaning of marriage. But rede­fining marriage so that male—female complementarity is irrelevant? That’s a fundamental contradiction of the moss fundamental meaning of marriage.

Here’s the pledge:

In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing. In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will be­come the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with wom­en. As law-abiding citizens, we join in according the ap­propriate legal recognition to these partnerships where and when they are accorded the legal status of marriage.

As Christian ministers, however, we must bear clear wit­ness. This is a perilous time. Divorce and co-habitation have weakened marriage. We have been too complacent in our responses to these trends. Now marriage is being fundamentally redefined, and we are being tested yet again. If we fail to take clear action, we risk falsifying God’s Word.

The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman. Our biblical faith is committed to upholding, celebrating, and furthering this understand­ing, which is stated many times within the Scriptures and has been repeatedly restated in our wedding cere­monies, church laws, and doctrinal standards for centu­ries. To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.

Please join us in this pledge to separate civil marriage from Christian marriage by adding your name.

For a long time Christianity has sewn its teachings into the fabric of Western culture. That was a good thing. A Christian culture is not the same as a Christian commu­nity. No society is a church, no matter how thoroughly Christian its ethos. But as David Bentley Hart has writ­ten so eloquently, such a society will participate, however imperfectly, in the heavenly civilization of love. But the season of sewing is ending, and we need to separate that which is Christian from cultural forms taken over and reshaped for post-Christian purposes. Now is a time for rending, not for the sake of disengaging from culture or retreating from the public square, but so that our salt does not lose its savor.

We have posted the pledge on firstthings.com. Signa­tures welcome.

R.R. Reno, First Things, December 2014 (Num 248), 3-5.

Changing Terms On Our Terms ~ “Government Marriage”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Two short articles by R.R. Reno that have impacted me a lot just reading them through once. It seems that this is the best, considering our current climate, response that is conservative and conservatively libertarian for our [again] current culture.

Government Marriage

A constitutional right for men to marry men and women to marry women is a done deal. That’s how I read the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear cases in which lower courts ruled that marriage laws in various states that recognize unions only of a man and a woman are unconstitutional. Lower courts will continue to draw this conclusion. If portions of the country resist, the Supreme Court will very likely intervene and find a right to same-sex marriage amid the penumbras and emanations of due process or equal protection.

We are thus fast approaching a fundamental distinction between government marriage and church marriage. Government marriage is… well, it’s hard to tell. The courts have studiously ignored traditional arguments about the meaning of marriage. That’s not surprising, because all thick descriptions of marriage end up focusing on the male—female difference, which isn’t very useful if your goal as a judge is to find a constitutional right of same-sex marriage.

Given this new legal reality, what are we to think and’ do? First, we need to recognize how miserably we have failed. We sought to convince our fellow citizens of some simple truths. That marriage is a universal institution found in all cultures. That it properly organizes, regulates, and sanctifies the sexual union of male and female. That to say otherwise is unprecedented, strange, and unwise as a social policy. We tried to speak these truths in many different ways but without success.

Clarity about our failure need not entail giving up on the arguments we’ve made. Sometimes things need to be said because they’re true. But facing our failure should lead us to a keener sense of what we’re up against. It’s very hard these days to speak about men as men and women as women. Last month I wrote about the perverse way in which political correctness prevents us from talking about the problems of date rape and sexual assault in a manner that acknowledges the unique sexual vulnerability of women. We have the same problem when it comes to marriage. Our culture dreams of equality so complete that the male—female difference becomes irrelevant. Why do we need an institution to regulate the union of men and women if there aren’t any real differences between men and women?

Our current culture of the intimate life adds to our confusion. Widespread cohabitation makes marriage seem increasingly irrelevant. Our date-then-fornicate social mores run counter to the traditional claim that we should discipline our sexual instincts in accord with the limitations imposed by the institution of marriage. The fact that this culture shapes a great deal of our lives and those of our children, friends, and relatives makes our situation all the more troubling. How can we speak clearly about marriage if we participate in trends that obscure its proper meaning?

And then there’s the general fear we all feel about being “judgmental.” We take for granted the minute regulation of our economic relations. We accept extensive educational expectations and adopt rigorous regimes of exercise and dieting. But when it comes to sex and sexual “iden­tity,” our culture finds regulation suspect, even odious. This involves more than solicitude for our perennial hedonistic impulses. Anxious efforts to secure “transgendered” rights don’t focus on sexual relations at all. Those rights secure the freedom for a male to think of himself as—and to be treated by others as—a female, and vice versa. Most people I know roll their eyes when talk turns to the rights of the “transgendered community.” But they also shrink from saying anything censorious. To give full voice to traditional moral judgments about sex, sexual identity, and relationships is insensitive, puritanical, or just plain bad manners.

In this respect, Pope Francis is both very right and very wrong. We have not found a way to talk about sex and marriage, at least not one we’re confident will humanize, which is what clarity about moral truth should do. But he’s dangerously wrong to suggest that the way forward is to “obsess” less. The opposite is the case, for as both Roger Scruton (“Is Sex Necessary?”) and James Kalb (“Sex and the Religion of Me”) observe in this issue, our age is already obsessed with sex. If we don’t speak—if our church leaders don’t speak—we’ll be absorbed into our culture’s way of thinking, and our children will be catechized by progressive creeds of sexual liberation.

In the new regime of redefined marriage, we need to think long and hard about what we need to do—or refuse to do. For example, I can’t see how a priest or pastor can in good conscience sign a marriage license for “spouse A” and “spouse B.” Perhaps he should strike those absurdities and write “husband” and “wife.” Failing that, he should simply refuse the govern­ment’s delegation of legal power, referring the couple to the courthouse after the wedding for the state to confect in its bureaucratic way the amorphous and ill-defined civil union that our regime continues to call “marriage.”

More generally, I think we need to make a simple change in the way we talk about marriage. I propose dropping the term civil marriage and adopting the term govern­ment marriage. In the past, the state recognized marriage, giving it legal forms to reinforce its historic norms (or, in more recent decades, to relax them). Now the courts have redefined rather than recognized marriage, making it an institution entirely under the state’s control. That’s why it’s now government marriage rather than civil marriage. On this point I believe in the separation of church and state. The Church may participate in civil marriage. It should not participate in government marriage.

A Time to Rend

Getting out of the government-marriage busi­ness is exactly what Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz now urge. They’ve formu­lated a pastoral pledge. It requires ordained ministers to renounce their long-established role as agents of the state with the legal power to sign marriage certificates. I find their reasoning convincing. Easy divorce, prenuptial agreements, a general tolerance of cohabitation, the contraceptive mentality—this de­grades and obscures the meaning of marriage. But rede­fining marriage so that male—female complementarity is irrelevant? That’s a fundamental contradiction of the moss fundamental meaning of marriage.

Here’s the pledge:

In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing. In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will be­come the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with wom­en. As law-abiding citizens, we join in according the ap­propriate legal recognition to these partnerships where and when they are accorded the legal status of marriage.

As Christian ministers, however, we must bear clear wit­ness. This is a perilous time. Divorce and co-habitation have weakened marriage. We have been too complacent in our responses to these trends. Now marriage is being fundamentally redefined, and we are being tested yet again. If we fail to take clear action, we risk falsifying God’s Word.

The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman. Our biblical faith is committed to upholding, celebrating, and furthering this understand­ing, which is stated many times within the Scriptures and has been repeatedly restated in our wedding cere­monies, church laws, and doctrinal standards for centu­ries. To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.

Please join us in this pledge to separate civil marriage from Christian marriage by adding your name.

For a long time Christianity has sewn its teachings into the fabric of Western culture. That was a good thing. A Christian culture is not the same as a Christian commu­nity. No society is a church, no matter how thoroughly Christian its ethos. But as David Bentley Hart has writ­ten so eloquently, such a society will participate, however imperfectly, in the heavenly civilization of love. But the season of sewing is ending, and we need to separate that which is Christian from cultural forms taken over and reshaped for post-Christian purposes. Now is a time for rending, not for the sake of disengaging from culture or retreating from the public square, but so that our salt does not lose its savor.

We have posted the pledge on firstthings.com. Signa­tures welcome.

 R.R. Reno, First Things, December 2014 (Num 248), 3-5.