By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Donal Anthony Foley reviews Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, 256 pages, Hardcover and Kindle).
Live Not by Lies focuses on the ongoing Culture War in the West, which, Rod Dreher argues, faces the threat of a new “soft” totalitarianism, a movement which is making disturbing progress and which threatens our basic liberties.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Understanding Soft Totalitarianism” looks at how we have reached the present position, while the second, “How to Live in Truth,” examines what we can do to combat soft totalitarianism, whose advent Dreher sees as inevitable.
The introduction touches on the idea that what we are seeing now, in the gradual erosion of free speech through political correctness and other curtailments of freedom, is reminiscent of aspects of what went on under Communism, which was essentially a “hard” totalitarianism of surveillance, repression, violence, prisons, and torture.
Now, though, with the coming “soft” totalitarianism, we will be dealing with a system which won’t necessarily rely on physical coercion, but rather on “manipulating people’s love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.”
Dreher argues that the primary requirement in resisting soft totalitarianism is to build up one’s spiritual life, so that we can, in the telling phrase of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Live not by Lies.”
But he also focuses on the necessity of having a willingness to suffer, having strong bonds of fellowship with other believers, and maintains that, for many, a strong family life is likely to be the most important factor in opposing soft totalitarianism.
He expands on and illustrates some of these strategies through looking at the lives of some of those who stood up to old-style totalitarianism, such as Fr. Tomislav Kolakovic, who, at the end of War II, with Communism looming in Czechoslovakia, set up cells of young Catholics so that they could come together in fellowship to pray and study the faith. These became the backbone of the underground Church which was at the center of resistance to Communism in the country for the next forty years.
Dreher, drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, author of the important postwar book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, argues that such groups are necessary if people are to resist the tendency for totalitarianism to create a society of atomized, isolated individuals, who live in fear.
Christians in the West do not immediately face that sort of threat, but modern society’s desire for pleasure over principles will make it very difficult for most people to oppose soft totalitarianism. And so believers must be prepared to suffer for their faith if necessary, if they are not to succumb to an increasingly immoral and corrupt society.
Unlike the hard totalitarianism of Communism, the new soft totalitarianism doesn’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of “cultural production.” That is, its focus is on changing the culture through both the mainstream and social media, and also through the education system. Its primary goals are power and influence, and it rejects the principle of objective truth — and it also seeks to change the meaning of language.
As Big Business moves steadily leftward on social issues, toward “woke capitalism,” and the major Internet companies continue to expand the already huge influence they have over people’s lives, both public and private, the position is being established that “the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.” In other words, there is a push for a complete overturning of traditional moral and cultural values.
Dreher points to modern innovations such as “smart speakers” which can monitor and record any conversation in the room, and which are now installed in tens of millions of homes in the United States and around the world.
In George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, so-called telescreens were obligatory for upper-status citizens, and acted both to deliver propaganda and monitor individuals. Smart speakers, though, are not the imposition of a totalitarian state but the free choice of citizens who prefer convenience to the accumulating threat to their liberties that continual surveillance entails.
At the moment, the “Big Brother” behind all the smart speakers is essentially a salesman who through this continual monitoring hopes to sell people more merchandise, and also get them to act in a certain way. But Dreher argues that this modern Big Brother is “laying the foundations for soft totalitarianism, both in terms of creating and implementing the technology for political and social control and by grooming the population to accept it as normal.”
That this is not an idle threat is apparent from the situation in China, where a total surveillance state is being implemented through electronic methods of social control. According to Dreher, the danger is that we are being “conditioned to accept a Westernized version of China’s social credit system, which will enforce the tenets of the political cult of social justice.”
In order to combat this threat, Dreher argues that we can learn valuable lessons from the way people living under Communism were able to resist being corrupted by it, and then apply them to our own situation.
Old-style Soviet Communism was a system built on lies, and this demanded that those who courageously opposed this system had to somehow live outside the Communist mainstream, defend the truth, and be prepared to accept the consequences of that principled position.
And so anyone who wants to oppose soft totalitarianism will have to adopt the same mentality, and not uncritically accept media propaganda, while at the same time engage in building up small-scale communities, particularly through family groups and educational and religious fellowships. That way shared cultural memories, and traditional morality and religious values, can be maintained and passed on.
Rediscover The
Message Of Fatima
A weakness of the book, from a Catholic perspective, is that the author, as an Orthodox Christian (although apparently he was a Catholic), does not give any place to the message of Fatima, a message which is so intimately connected with the rise and consequences of Communism in Russia.
Our Lady warned about the “errors of Russia” — and what we are seeing now is an extension of those errors through soft totalitarianism. And thus the optimum way to combat these errors is exactly the same one as is found in the Message she outlined in 1917, that is a focus on penance and prayer, and particularly the prayer of the rosary, as well as devotion to her Immaculate Heart.
Just as St. Dominic defeated Albigensianism through the rosary, and great victories such as those at Lepanto were attributed to it, so the new forms of totalitarianism will ultimately be overcome through prayer, Marian devotion, and people living out their Christian lives in an authentic manner.
While individual and small-scale resistance to Communism, such as Dreher gives in the book, is of great value on a human level, it cannot bring about the large-scale changes required if the new soft totalitarianism is to be defeated.
Just as the 1984 consecration of Pope St. John Paul II led to the dissolution of Communism as an entity in Russia and Eastern Europe, so the Church, and indeed the world, needs to fully embrace the Message of Fatima and so overcome the threat from soft totalitarianism.
In sum, this is a book which will give the reader much to ponder, and one which should lead Catholics to engage with other believers in order to build up the necessary groups and connections which will make dealing with whatever the future throws at us much more effective.
And it should likewise be a catalyst for deepening one’s own Catholic faith life, and for a rediscovery of the crucial importance of the Message of Fatima.
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