The Ben Op as Late Capitalism's Wet Dream

Laurie Penny perfectly captured the middle-class zeitgeist in a quote a few weeks back when she wrote, "The ideal psychological culture for the current from of calamity capitalism is an apprehension of the coming collapse mated bluntly with the possibility of individual escape."

Nobody has been writing more about the coming collapse than Rod Dreher. His latest book, "The Benedict Option" ("Ben Op" for short) is about a coming collapse from calamity capitalism. Not an ecological collapse, as Penny writes about, but from capitalism itself. The current oligarchal movement in the world is one that is literally intended to liberate the market economy from the restraints that make it bearable to human beings. Reinhold Neibuhr once wrote,

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

But capitalism is the universal acid in which all of Neibuhr's humane virtues are dissolved: love is corrupted, faith is corrupted, and hope— hope is crushed beneath an incessant promise of instant gratification. The surfeit of bad pornography that commoditizes women's bodies into men's relief sleeves; the extravagence of bad media violence that feeds gunpowder-fueled fantasies of revenge without consequence; the saturation of advertising that both creates anxiety and promises relief; all of these melt into an unrecognizable slush the beauty of human beings.

Dreher's solution: toss it all. Saint Benedict set up the Catholic monastery system in the 6th century, and his vision of cloistered religious communities, walled gardens "still in the world but not of it," refuges from "the missionary field," such that one could spend most of their time within a community of faith.

Dreher's anxiety about the world is a perfect fit for the late era oligarch; he embodies a fear of a world he can't understand and can't control, and offers the possibility of individual escape, or the escape of a self-sustaining community. In a lot of ways, his fantasy is a bit like the Amish, only with vaccines and spreadsheets, but without birth control or websites.

You can't go forward into the past while the planet starts to fall apart around you.