Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents was a much easier read in most ways than
Cynical Theories. I took several months to get through
Cynical Theories and about a week to get through this one. Rod Dreher’s book, while it refers to the academic theories discussed in the Pluckrose/Lindsay book, is not an academic discussion. It’s much more applied: How do you live in a society which is infiltrated by applied postmodernism, critical theory, and (Dreher argues) soft totalitarianism? It is also written specifically for a Christian audience, so one must read with at least openness to that perspective.
For me personally, it was very interesting to read this book after Cynical Theories. Cynical Theories spoke to my adult, postmodern and agnostic self, the one that went to university and absorbed a certain amount of academic knowledge and a few practical strategies for getting along with people. It also led to to consider why, despite many similarities, I seem to run different mental software from most of my peers. I thought this must have something to do with family and cultural background. How engaging then, that Live Not By Lies specifically addresses family life and encouraged me to explore this very question.
Regardless of whether you consider yourself a “Christian dissident” (it is a stretch for me to claim membership in this group, though I’m sympathetic), an interesting and valuable part of Live Not By Lies are the accounts of people who lived and grew up in Soviet Bloc and how they maintained their identity under a totalitarian state. It’s a fascinating insight into how different perspectives on society are formed. For me, it provides insight into my family life and background and why I have the perspective I do today.
The introduction to Live Not By Lies provides the thesis of the book:
Part one of this book makes the case that despite its superficial permissiveness, liberal democracy is degenerating into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. It explores the sources of totalitarianism, revealing the troubling parallels between contemporary society and the ones that gave birth to twentieth century totalitarianism. .... Part two examines in greater detail forms, methods, and sources of resistance to soft totalitarianism's lies. Why is religion and the hope it gives at the core of effective resistance? What does the willingness to suffer have to do with living in truth? Why is the family the most important cell of opposition? How does faithful fellowship provide resilience in the face of persecution? How can we learn to recognize totalitarianism's false messaging and fight its deceit? (pages xiv to xv)
The new, "soft" totalitarians will not (at least initially) gain control over people with threats or awful punishments. Rather, they will appeal to the desire to be safe and able to pursue any pleasure we want. This is at least partly because capitalism encourages people to think in terms of satisfying their desires, and stopping to consider if those desires are actually any good for you takes a lot of effort and is perhaps close to impossible anyway without reference to a concept of a greater good. (read my outtakes here) Meanwhile, multiple forces continue to undermine a coherent story of what that greater good might be. They are discussed in a series of subheadings: Loneliness and Social Atomization, Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions, The Desire to Transgress and Destroy, Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies, A Mania for Ideology, and a A Society that Values Ideology more than Expertise (pages 31 to 46). I don't have time to go into all the arguments, but those who follow what is called "the culture war" should be familiar with them. Progressives don't generally use the term culture war, so for them I call this section "all the reasons Those People won't accept on trust our program for improving the world."
Part 2 of Live Not By Lies moves away from explicit commentary on the contemporary world into accounts from people who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe. They tell their stories of how they maintained their identity and faith despite living in a society that was hostile in every sense including deadly force.
The first challenge is to not repeat the lies that the totalitarians insist you repeat. One might argue, the first step is recognizing that they are lies, but perhaps this is not even possible outside of the simple act of not repeating them. For example, many people refused to swear oaths or display/repeat slogans supporting the totalitarian state. This resulted in losing opportunities in education or jobs (but it its way, led to other opportunities). In extreme cases, pointing out state lies led to torture and imprisonment. But even outside of that, living in an environment where people avoided discussing their own observations of reality for fear of saying the wrong thing, led to a distortion of reality for everyone.
I relate to this because I grew up in a family of very blunt speakers. Certainly, neither my parents nor brothers nor myself were always right about everything. And sometimes we talked over and past each other when it would have been more prudent to listen. But there was no shying away from difficult topics. There was no "We won't discuss this because someone's feelings might be hurt or it might be unpleasant." The highest value was recognizing and naming the truth of what is important. This has stayed with me, even as I have explored and challenged a variety of beliefs. I do not think that the search for truth can be uncoupled from the act of speaking and writing (other creative pursuits could also be included). This is why I have been fiercely protective, from my earliest memory, of my right and ability to express my thoughts.
Have I seen the value of telling the truth acted out in the society around me? Not necessarily. In my university years, my friends mostly wanted to sound witty, ironic and cynical. As we grew older and became active on social media, people started to share slogans that signaled comradery to people who agreed with them, and intimidation to those that didn't. Influencers "boost" signals or try to go viral, which basically means getting people to react to or repeat what someone said, mostly without any evidence of reflection. I find this creepy. On the other hand, I continue to have opportunities to engage in thoughtful conversation with individual people, in which at least sometimes we seem to be carefully considering and challenging our observations.
Other strategies that are outlined in Live Not By Lies involve maintaining cultural memory by explicitly teaching the history, religion and culture of the group. In the totalitarian states, this was usually done within families, or in small groups inside private homes. Czech mathematician and human rights activist Vaclav Benda called this a parallel polis: "an alternative set of social structures within which social and intellectual life could be lived outside of official approval. The parallel polis was a grassroots attempt to fight back against totalitarianism, which mandated, in Benda's words, 'the abandonment of reason and learning [and] the loss of traditions and memory.'" (page 121)
Vaclav Benda and his family are discussed at length as examples of how to create the parallel polis. As a family, they screened and discussed classic movies such as High Noon. They identified with the heroic stance taken by the characters. Kamila, Vaclav's wife, read for hours every day to their children, and a favourite was The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein. For the children, it was easy to draw a parallel between Mordor and the state which oppressed them. But neither is it that simple. Philip, Kamila and Vaclav's son says:
"[The Lord of the Rings] is about the East and the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that's not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire."
This is how Tolkein prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism's collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.
"What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures," [Philip] says. "She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others." (page 138-139)
I am reminded a lot again of my own family in this description. I believe my dad, coming from Greece where he experienced war, occupation and tyranny, shared many of the Benda family's attitudes about family as the bastion against a hostile world. My mother did not share the same background but came from a Canadian cultural and religious minority, so she knew what it felt like to be outside the mainstream. More so than the families of anyone I know, my parents tried to create their own little culture within our family. They had ambivalent feelings about their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds, so there was little effort to explicitly teach Russian or Greek traditions. Rather, they tried to take the best of what they had encountered and create something new.
Like the Bendas, there were always books and reading in our home, and while there were children's books, we were never limited to children's books. Those we had were also most likely to be classic children's novels. We had no TV until I was 11, but I remember seeing classic movies in a local artsy theatre: Charlie Chaplin's comedies and Ben Hur are ones I remember. Later we would borrow film reels from the library and watch documentaries and movies on select weekends. We might have accidentally been exposed to some 80s or 90s pop culture on those weekends but it was more likely to be The Sound of Music. My dad was haunted all his life by his wartime experiences and sought to understand them by reading and viewing anything to do with the World Wars. There was no effort to censor or protect our innocence from this history that I recall. I saw the footage of gas chambers and mass graves at Auschwitz on one of those family movie nights, when I was no more than 8 or 10 years old. There would also have been extensive discussion around it, though I don't recall details. There was also regular discussion of the Soviet gulags, as Stalin did not get a pass anymore than Hitler did.
Music was particularly important to my dad, and probably the deepest emotional connection I share with him. Our alarm clock every weekday morning was classical music mix tapes he had created. Although we did not play instruments, the house was outfitted with the best speaker system that could be purchased at the time. I attended my first ballet and opera at age 4, and later there were frequent trips to the orchestra. There was no pretension about these outings or an attempt to be something we weren't. We wore our best clothes, but they were always second hand. Fashionable clothes were a luxury that could be dispensed with; music, dance and song were not. As an adult, I feel as at home in a concert hall as I do in my own living room. I do like to have stylish clothes though.
While my parents were not very impressed with the cultures they were born into, they also weren't particularly trying to fit in to mainstream culture. My dad often spoke disparagingly of Greece, but he was not impressed with many things about Canadian life in the 80s and 90s, either. Divorce and sexual promiscuity horrified him, and he saw it mainly as shallowness and selfishness on the part of adults who should know better. Pop or rock music, movies with nudity, easily most culture from the 60s onward, was looked on with disdain. In fact I think my parents stopped paying any attention at all to pop culture after the 50s and 60s. They talked about the Beatles and Elvis but I am not sure they were ever aware of the existence of say ABBA or Madonna or Billy Joel. Michael Jackson I heard about, but never heard his music in our house. (Not until I got my own radio, at least.)
As you can imagine, this is all a bit complicated. I had a very rich childhood in many ways, filled with creativity and imagination and unique experiences. I have not described a fraction of them. I was enriched by all the beauty I was introduced to. Myself and my brothers were always academically precocious. We were shy but also confident and not easily influenced by trends that our peers fell for. But there is a cost to growing up more or less alienated from your social environment. As Jonathon Pageau would say: "But how does it scale up?" -- meaning, how do you take a belief or lesson or truth you learn as an individual and replicate it in your life and the life of your community. It's very difficult, and probably impossible, to do this as an individual. You need a community that is oriented around the same values.
In the sense of community, I see the Benda's experience as different from my own. Like us, they were isolated from the mainstream culture, such as it existed in the country: "Don't be afraid to be weird in society's eyes," says one subheading, and this is certainly a lesson myself and my brothers learned well. (Or when we were afraid, we didn't show it and pushed through it.) "In our classes at school, where we were different, we were different through our faith but also through our clothes," says Partik, another of the children. We were poor....It was totally impossible to buy anything fashionable, or to take part in any fad that was popular. Collectible toys that every child had, we didn't. Sometimes it was hard, but it made us stronger" (page 139). I agree: such an experience can make you stronger, and it's not good parenting to indulge every whim of a child or their peers anyway. Still, the music, toys, clothes and other culture are part of a collective consciousness that is important in forming an identity. It is not the things themselves, but the fact that others know and understand their meaning. If you are going to take that away, there needs to be something to replace it.
The Benda family as described in the book was not just a world unto themselves but always connected to something bigger as well. They were founding members of Charter 77, the main Czechoslovak dissident community. This connected them to a community of intellectuals. They maintained their Catholic faith within their family, but did not isolate themselves on that account. Kamila entertained a stream of visitors at their apartment every day, as many as twenty people at once. She taught seminars. Her children continued the practice, showing movies and then having discussions around them for example. Teachable moments result. "...We don't just screen new movies but older ones," says Patrik. "Jumping between eras helps the young people to understand the cultural context in which the films were made. The fact that the younger ones can learn from the knowledge and experience of the older ones is really meaningful" (page 145).
Reading Live Not By Lies helped me to consider the difference between solitude and solidarity. Facing a hostile social environment can teach people how to live in solitude, which is not a bad thing. For one thing, solitude is often helpful to know your own mind and creativity. If you are never alone, it may be hard to know where other people leave off and you begin. To be excluded is not always a terrible thing. On the other hand, solidarity provides an environment - even if populated by other outsiders - where practices and ideas and values are reinforced. Assuming they are healthy ones, this is a more sustaining way to live.
I can't change anything about my past, or other people's decisions (and who would want such a responsibility, anyway! Life is much to complex to say with certainty "if this had been done differently, then this would have resulted!" who really knows?) I can think about how I live my life, however. I have chosen less solitude for my family than my parents have. I view the culture surrounding us with rather less suspicion. Still, at least some of the points made in Live Not By Lies resonate with me. It leads me to wonder how best to balance solitude with solidarity.
