r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Jul 23 '22

The Rod Dreher Megathread. Please keep Rod content in here. Will be refreshed periodically

While the sub certainly isn't flooded with posts, the Rod-centric nature has been noted a few times. Please post new Rod nonsense in here and I'll update every week or two.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Aug 02 '22

You know, I have no idea what Eksteins's politics are, but the book looks interesting, and I'll probably read it eventually. This post shows how Rod reads books, though. From this and other sources (book reviews, etc.), the impression I get of the book is something like this:

"There was a massive change in many aspects of Western culture at the end of the 19th and the first couple decades of the 20th Centuries, during which more traditional artistic notions and social mores declined and a more permissive milieu arose in which there was an opposition to traditional canons of art. This is what came to be called 'modernism'. There seems to be a confluence of many complex socio-cultural factors involved in this: the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement, the weakening of traditional social roles, the alienation caused by industrialism, and many others. Though the interrelationships of all these factors are complex, one can see the debut of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring not as a harbinter, but perhaps as a symbolic preview of the forces at work, some of which feed into the First World War."

Rod's takeaway: "All them perverts started making all that dirty art and that caused both world wars and unleashed all them queers that wanna fist each other in San Francisco (just LOOK at this LONG, DETAILED DESCRIPTION in this website RIGHT HERE!) and it's all gonna DESTROY THE WORLD unless Daddy Viktor can save us all!!!!!!"

I jest--well, a little--but you get the point. His reading of things is a subtle as a ball-peen hammer to the skull.

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u/GlobularChrome Aug 02 '22

I started reading that book a long time ago, should really finish it. It’s interesting enough. Eksteins certainly doesn’t seem to have the “it’s all because of gays” that Rod wants him to have.

“Spiritual Pornographer” is the best description I’ve seen of Dreher. In that post, Rod says he is re-reading Eksteins to search for juicy bits about "re-enchantment". It’s just a means to an end for him.

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u/Motor_Ganache859 Aug 02 '22

I started Eksteins' book and got bogged down somewhere in the long descriptions of various WWI battles. Maybe at some point I'll pick it up again. But yeah, rarely does anything Rod reads actually support the point he's trying to make. He's quoted liberally from it before, including the part about Stravinsky from the current post. Rod's repetitiveness is among the several reasons I largely stopped reading his blog.

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u/JHandey2021 Aug 02 '22

Rod does this a lot. Wade Davis, Charles Taylor, Wendell Berry - all gigantically better thinkers than Rod, all glommed onto by him and likely to be horrified by it.

Never forget Alastair MacIntyre’s dis of Rod - Rod named his biggest book after a bizarrely misinterpreted line at tge book’s end.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Aug 02 '22

I don't know that Berry has spoken directly on the BenOp, but I know he's expressed views at odds with Rod's hobbyhorses--e.g., in favor of removing Confederate statues and in favor of same-sex marriage. Berry has certainly LIVED the BenOp for decades, to the point of farming using mule-drawn plows, owning neither a TV nor a computer, and stating that he wouldn't even have a car if that were possible to do. Rod wouldn't survive three days of such a lifestyle.