Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is the life, writings, thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works of Christian theology and apologetics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all of his books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly decent working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and '30s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how different groups wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.

Poem: Lourdes

[Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, which commemorate the anniversary of the first apparition to St. Bernadette Soubirous on February 11th, 1858. I visited Lourdes in 2017, drank the water, and bathed in the spring, and there received what I regard as both a true revelation and a miraculous healing. I wrote this poem a number of years later in recognition of this event.]

Lourdes

My Lady

who dwell in the mountains

abandon me not

forget me not

in silence

hold me

Lady of the stillness

of those overshadowed valleys

and of the spring

that bubbles up

from the depths of our despair

dark and clouded

by our filth

colder

than our loneliness

Lady of the darkness

that holds our eyes

in the night

in the grotto

under the shadow 

of your crossed arms

and Lady of the lights

the tongues of flame

melting wax

that spills upon our hands

searing

as we stumble

in your footsteps

Lady of gleaming white

reflected light

amidst the darkness

Lady of the song

we sing to you

sinners, fools,

sick and old

dispossessed, abandoned

in masses driven

calling upon you

Lady of the stench

and all the ugliness

of our decaying bodies

and souls

Lady of the shit-pile

where your daughter lived

Lady of the great grey expanse of space

beneath the ground

where we shelter

huddled together

so many

from the clamor

and the light

and the fire

that devour us

Lady of the shadows

on the concrete walls

Lady of the cinder-blocks

and the steel

Lady of this age

Queen of this great City

of blood and iron

Lady of the masses

teeming

starving

herded

driven

anonymous

to labor

and extermination

Lady of the broken selves

cast into the trash can

Lady of all those 

whom unclean iron

has pierced

Lady of all those

whom radiant idols

have chilled

Lady of all those

whose inner chamber is empty

Lady of all those

whose door is sealed shut

or broken open

Lady of all those

whom this world has defeated

Lady of all those

the righteous have despaired over

let fall

dropped out of the picture

hidden in the calculation

whose evil

the good have tolerated

whose eternal loss

the wise and just

have accepted

Lady who pass beyond

the limits of our patience

and our love

Lady of our healing

Lady of our death

Lady of Lourdes

I call upon you

over all your names

your shrines upon the earth

because I called upon you

in the night

and in the night

you heard and answered

and because I fell back

naked

into your icy waters

and you caught me

Lady of Lourdes

Queen of this age

and of me

I praise you

Amen

Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power

Melania 2026 and the Fossilization of Power

What is power?

This is not, or should not be, a difficult question to answer. 

The most basic definition of power might be something like "making something happen." A more metaphysical answer might be "the actualization of potential existence by actual existence." A more human answer, encompassing pretty much every society and form of power throughout history, might be something like "the ability to make what you want happen." 

The human answer quite naturally connects power with desire or will--and in so doing explains why power is universally seen as something good or desirable by humans. All three definitions, though, show with equal clarity the basic directionality or teleology of power: actuality actualizing potency and something making something else happen. You want power because you will or desire that something happen--and because power itself is essentially and totally ordered to making something happen.

Yet, if power is defined by teleology, will, and desire, it is essentially and totally dependent on things outside itself--on the will and desire and actuality of the being that wields it, and on the being it is ordered to producing. Indeed, power is essentially and totally, not a thing in itself, even a being in itself, but merely a relation between beings. Potential being is actualized by already actual being, and in so doing produces more actual being: someone makes something happen. Without either actual term, power is incoherent and cannot exist. 

In being fulfilled, though, in causing something to be, power or potency is always and totally, as it were, used up, fulfilled, ended in the base etymological sense of the Greek telos. In the terms of Aristotelean and Thomist theology, God himself is what you get when the power of all being is entirely used up, leaving no conceivable potency whatsoever. God is finished, and in that sense powerless.

(Of course, though God himself has eternally completed in himself everything that could be, he still retains a free, contingent will that can, when and how he chooses, make other, lesser things exist, in a secondary, derivative sense, out of sheer gratuitous generosity. When he wills or desires it, he can make things happen, and so wield power.)

All this proem is merely a way to say that the reason why people have from the beginnings of the human race universally wanted power is because there were things they wanted to happen. Which is to say, they were actual beings of will and desire who willed things that they saw as desirable but as yet only possible and so in need of being actualized--or, more simply, because they wanted what they wanted to happen. For this reason, though, the end of power is always and everywhere not power itself, but what you want: power is only and solely a means. 

Or, in other words: if people in fact want something, then they will want the power to get that thing, and nothing more or less. If they want different things, then they will want the perhaps very different form or degree of power necessary to get that other thing. If they do not happen to want anything, though, they will not want power. It is, really, that simple.

I watched Melania in theaters. It is the most devastating film I have seen since The Last Showgirl. It is also one of the greatest films I have ever seen, precisely because of its brutal, unstinting look at the spiraling whirlpool that is the contemporary American cult of power. 

I should say that I am not sure the film's devastating surrealism is entirely intentional--but I am also far from certain it is entirely unintentional. Rather, what makes the film great is precisely its artistic devotion to vividly and truthfully chronicling the artifice and craft of power as it is actually practiced by the rulers of the greatest Empire in the history of the human race--and because it centers on someone who is clearly an absolute master of this craft. Melania Trump, whatever else she may be, is a great artist--even if, like many great artists, she does not appear to consciously understand almost anything of what she is doing and why, and even if, also like many great artists, her life appears to be a living hell.

As with my review of Oppenheimer, a devastating film that compelled me to immediately struggle to process just what about it I viscerally hated, I find it very hard to capture just what made Melania such a terrifying and alienating and powerful experience for me. It would be easiest to just point to random details and moments in the film, moments that are indelibly graven upon my mind and heart and will probably never leave it.

Four people cluster around a glassy table in the impossibly ornate and labyrinthine and gigantic red-and-gold interior of Trump Towers, mirrors upon mirrors upon glass upon carpet curling in and ever in and around on themselves. They are waiting for Melania. She enters, a stiff figure in black and white, and they jump to life and begin their performances: the French fashion designer with his exaggerated mugging and rushed faux-friendliness, the rumpled American fashion designer with his large smiles and air of suppressed tension, the two Asian tailors in black-and-white uniforms standing silent and concerned in the background of every shot. 

They show her the suit for the Inauguration. Everything is perfect, she tells them with stiffly exaggerated friendliness, but the fabric is wrong, as is the waist, as is the lapel. She tells them matter-of-factly the specific changes she will need: they agree with each one enthusiastically. Then she leaves the room, and for about thirty seconds the camera lingers on these four people as they cluster around the table, talking in rushed, tense, oddly frustrated voices, trying to conform to her demands. "It is impossible," the male Asian tailor says. Then the camera follows the female Asian tailor as she leaves the room, in and around golden walls and golden paneling, and begins to climb a golden spiral staircase, up and around and up and around and--

Melania Trump, more than perhaps any First Lady since Jackie Kennedy, has a style and aesthetic of her own, one manifested throughout the film. Yet this aesthetic is, when one looks at it objectively, rather strange. In many different scenes, Melania tries on and requests alterations to and finally performs in a number of different outfits: but both the outfits and her alterations are always more or less the same. 

Melania's aesthetic, it turns out, can be rather easily summarized: black and white--which, she says at one point, are "her colors"--and straight lines, which she again and again demands alterations to achieve even in already quite straight garments, making sure the small bit of white blouse showing under her black coat is straight, making sure the neckline of her strapless white-and-black ballgown is straight, making sure her inauguration coat falls straight, tensely pointing to where the white strap around her black hat seems to her rounded and "loose" and not nearly straight enough. Every time she dons these similar black-and-white straight garments, her fashion designers praise them--but she simply stares stiffly in the mirror, tensely checking to make sure that she is as black and white and straight as she should be.

At one point, her designer tells her that a dress is "so you." But who is the "you" expressed by these severe confections of straight lines in white and black, by these oddly scripted and formal and stiff interactions with subordinates? Or is that really the question?

Short Story: La Cafe

[There has been a lot of discussion about the JFK assassination in the last year or so. Because of that, I felt it important to finally reveal to everyone the truth about who killed JFK and why. Please note that because of its setting and content, the below story unavoidably contains offensive language and content, and that I endorse absolutely none of the sentiments expressed therein.]

Nothing about the man stood out to me. He was entirely unusual in every respect–but that was what made him blend in.

La Cafe was, as its name indicated, a coffee shop at the outskirts of a college town. It was exactly one street over from the main road where undergraduate women clustered in Starbucks and Caribou Coffee, and had been around, or so locals told me, since at least the early 1970s, though there was some debate over whether the name might have changed in the mid-’80s. It served bitter black coffee, Great Value tea bags in lukewarm water, and obviously store-bought croissants. You had to add the sugar yourself from a porcelain bowl on the counter: whipped cream was not an option.

On the plus side, the purportedly Albanian family that owned La Cafe had not visited or exercised any oversight over the place for roughly forty years, and the manager, a 60-something woman named Beth who wore knitted winter hats all year round, spent her days in her “office” (the main storage room), gambling on her phone: she was rumored to be an alcoholic, but no one had caught her at it yet. As a result, anyone and everyone was welcome to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the minimally-heated interior of the place, or sit at any of the ten to twelve tables scattered around the grassy, uncovered patio outside, or use either of the two filthy bathrooms hastily relabeled as gender-neutral in the mid-2010s, without ever ordering anything at all. Most importantly, there was free, unsecured wi-fi.

Taken as a whole, then, La Cafe was shunned by anyone with taste, friends, social status, or an orientation towards modern coffee-shop-culture and/or personal safety, but embraced by poverty-stricken graduate students, homeless people, failed academics, intellectual poseurs, con men, the clinically insane, and various lonely cast-offs desperate for any kind of proximity to what they perversely persisted in regarding as the Life of the Mind.

Did I belong to any of those categories? That’s a good question. I didn’t think so at the time: but looking back I have my doubts.

Roughly two years prior to my meeting with the strange man, I had finally finished my PhD after nine and a half years of increasingly strained meetings with my advisor ended with a shouted ultimatum and a rushed, desultory defense over Zoom. For the next few years, I worked as an adjunct, failed to pay my rent, and sent off two applications a week for tenure-track positions and prestigious post-docs with names like “the Young Talent Enrichment Program.” I have never been able to work out whether this was the worst or something approaching the best time of my life.

Then, abruptly, on an icy March day where half of my Persian poetry class had again failed to turn in their final projects, I received an email from Messrs. Snodgrass and Beit cordially informing me that I had inherited from an estranged uncle more money than I had ever imagined.

Up to that point, I had assumed, like most people, that inheriting unimaginable sums from estranged uncles was something that only happened in stories. Since then, I have on innumerable occasions pointed out the folly of this all-too-common misconception: pointing out that most people in America still have siblings and therefore their children will have uncles, that some number of these uncles are statistically certain to become wealthy, that wealthy is said in many ways, that given the growing income gap what used to be considered merely upper middle class is now as good as rich anyway, that earning lots of money often clashes with the time and affections necessary for a happy family life and so leads to estrangement with family members, that even wealthy uncles must inevitably die, that they too must feel the basic cultural and indeed biological imperative to hand on something of themselves to the next generation, that an estrangement with one’s siblings need not necessarily apply to nieces and nephews, that a lack of personal contacts with those inheriting logically must mean less where estates are large and estate-planning largely carried out by lawyers, and that consequently there is in itself nothing more logical and indeed commonplace in human history than inheriting an unimaginable sum of money from an estranged uncle. 

Whenever the matter has come up socially since then, I have endeavored–more, I admit, for the sake of my own pride than anything else--to give the impression that the inheritance did not come as a surprise to me, that I had in fact expected it and planned on it for many years, and of course this was why I had pursued a graduate degree in such a poorly-renumerated field as Medieval Persian poetry, failed to complete my PhD in less than nine years, and then worked for two years as an adjunct.

As a matter of fact, this impression is false. I had not even the smallest inkling that my uncle–whom I had seen only twice in my entire life–would choose to leave any money to me, let alone what amounted to his entire fortune. To tell the truth, I had largely forgotten that I had an uncle, and had in fact told several women I dated in graduate school that my father was an only child–using this as a key psychological factor to explain why he had failed to understand my uniquely sensitive disposition and consequently left me unable to feel and receive normal human affection and so in desperate need of remedial attention from women. When I did occasionally remember my uncle, I certainly remembered that he was a fabulously successful and wealthy engineer–but given that my uncle’s first two marriages had between them produced two children, given that he had never actually directly spoken to me that I could remember, and given that the only time I had seen him interact with my father had ended in a shouting match, it had simply never occurred to me that he might choose to leave me anything.

I am still not really sure why he chose to do so. My leading theory has always been spite towards his own children: though I cannot entirely rule out spite towards his ex-wives, my father, his business associates, himself, and/or me. Life is unfortunately filled with mysteries, and I had no interest in unravelling any of them.

In any case, my sudden inheritance left me in a very sticky situation. On the one hand, I had for years been telling everyone I knew how much I hated my job, my students, and my field. On the other hand, my failed academic career had for more than ten years given me my only meaning in life, my entire sense of self, my only topic of conversation, and my only reason whatsoever for ever leaving my bed. Still, in the end I could think of no excuse that would hold water with my colleagues, my students, or my increasingly rare dates: I resigned.

During my time as an adjunct, I had frequently complained that I lacked the time to work on both my academic monograph on Rumi and a science-fiction novel in which my original viewpoint on life would be explored via a painstakingly detailed description of the poetry, literature, politics, society, and sex lives of alien grubs. Having quit my job, I no longer had an excuse not to work on these projects. Unfortunately, I quickly found that I loathed both of them as well.

Theoretically, I could have simply moved away to somewhere warm and inviting, or gone on vacation to the Bahamas and never come back. Every time I considered these options, though, my head would spin, a cold sweat would break out on the back of my neck, and I found myself unable to sleep for the next several days. Like it or not, this town had become my home–and the last thing I needed in the throes of such an emotionally disturbing transition (as I reminded myself constantly during this time, many lottery winners kill themselves) was a drastic change in milieu.

No longer having any colleagues, students, or advisors to ask about what I was doing, I briefly considered simply giving up any active efforts whatsoever, watching television all day, and ordering take-out for all my meals. A devastating encounter with a former student at Walgreen’s, however, confirmed me in my ultimately illusory, but nonetheless deeply felt need to at least fake some kind of productivity.

Hence, within about two months of my inheritance, I found myself spending ten hours a day, six days a week sitting behind my laptop at a corner table at La Cafe, scrolling through Twitter, watching Shakira music videos and DnD streams, and occasionally adding and then deleting a paragraph or two of text to my two project documents.

Who Will Rule in the Age to Come?

Who Will Rule in the Age to Come? 

Captain America: Brave New World; Caliphate Redefined; One Battle After Another; Eddington

I am apparently the last person in America who does not think that America is coming to an end.

In my last mega-essay on this blog, I posited that what has defined America and Americans most for the past hundred or two years has been a shared concept of heroism, which among other things has meant a shared devotion to death. Still, as I acknowledged at length in that essay, this heroic, mythological sense of America has been in actual history not the name of a nation or a nature or a people or institution or government or Empire, but merely the defining ideal of a particular Imperial elite, a homo imperialis. This nomadic elite has within the United States itself monopolized nearly all the positions of power in government, business, culture, and even religion once held by local and regional elites: and in the last century it has expanded its invisible networks of commerce and governance to encompass the entire world. For all that, as I suggested, its imprint on the ancient settled peoples of the world remains, like many Imperial predecessors, surprisingly light nonetheless. 

In the last few years, though, increasing drastically since January 2025, I have encountered people who seem to think, or who in fact tell me, that America itself is on the verge of ending: by which they do not merely mean that American global hegemony will collapse, or that the United States federal government will collapse, but that life as ordinary Americans themselves have known it will entirely cease to be.

Once again, it is hard not to be struck by just how profoundly the most basic, underlying assumptions of people in America have entirely shifted over the past three or four decades. For about half of my life, everyone I met assumed on the deepest, most inchoate level that America would last forever. By this they did not merely mean that some vague American cultural distinctiveness or territorial unity or economic and social life would last forever: they really seemed to mean that the United States Federal Government and the Alabama State Government and the US Constitution and c. 2008 consensus liberal capitalist progressivism and Alphabet co. and Coca-Cola, inc and Verizon Communications Inc and Starbucks Corporation and McDonald's Corporation and Dr Pepper 7UP Inc and World of Warcraft and Barney the Dinosaur and Captain America would all be doing just fine a thousand years from now. 

And so as a child I would scandalize people, sometimes deliberately, more often accidentally, by merely stating that all of these things would inevitably fall apart and cease to be: as indeed they will. As the ancients knew well, nothing intrinsically bound up with change and decay and entropy and corruptibility can conceivably last forever, because to do so would contradict its most basic nature and the most basic nature of the sublunar world. 

Of course, if America in some or any of these senses was not merely another cultural or political or commercial entity, but rather the manifestation or even fulfillment of a transcendent spiritual entity and/or pseudo-Hegelian world-soul and/or immanentized divinity acting through particular historical conditions and institutions, then of course things would be different, and we would expect this to last forever, at least in some form. And this, I really and truly believe, is what virtually everyone in America, from Evangelical Christians to secular humanists and from conservatives to leftists, deep down really and truly believed when I was a child.

When I was a child, the smart adults told me to watch Babylon 5, because it was a smarter version of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Now that I am an adult, I can recognize that Star Trek Deep Space Nine is a profoundly great work of art, and Babylon 5 is a profoundly stupid piece of art. The primary (though by no means only) reason for this is that Deep Space Nine is in essence a television show defined by a fundamental doubt about whether it is in fact possible, and whether it would in fact be good, if the history of all peoples ended in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. On the other hand, Babylon 5 is a show defined above all else by the fervent, unswaying assertion that it will in fact be very, very, very good when the history of all peoples ends in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. In the final season of Babylon 5, after the US Military has committed a heroic and righteous and democratic military coup against the elected President of the United States, and after all the gods have been told by our American military/cult-leader hero to get the hell out of our Galaxy, the Interstellar Alliance is formed, a vast and vague liberal-democratic-proceduralist multi-cultural American government founded in a boring ceremony written by the prophet of a new non-theistic, pan-cultural religion, after which (to quote the inestimable "Babylon 5 wiki"):

"The Interstellar Alliance survived and fulfilled its duties for well over one million years after its formation, with the names of all major players in the ISA's creation remembered and even revered throughout this time. By this time the ISA had achieved mastery over organic technology, with some of its member races evolving beyond the need for physical bodies, becoming beings of energy."

To which the only possible response is AMEN!

Anyway, it is no longer 1998: and now instead people tell me that America and/or the world will end in a year or five years or twenty years. And I don't believe that either.

The secret to both of these remarkable states of affairs, I would argue, is one and the same: which is once again that despite having lost faith in the goodness of the immanentized divinities that have in modernity defined every institution and belief system, people still cannot help regarding institutions and peoples and realities in their light. If America ceases to be believed in as the final divine ending of all of human history, people assume deep down that America will simply cease to exist, or at least that its sleigh will stop running like Santa Claus' in Elf. And yet, most things in the world, even most human institutions, do not in fact cease to exist when people stop believing in them: that is, in fact, kind of the whole problem. 

This belief admittedly takes very different forms. If many right-wing people who host podcasts and have Twitter accounts are right, then after the desperate failed rally of Trumpism fades, America will be overrun with Third World barbarians and become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican warlords. If the smart people who write for the New Yorker and are interviewed on NPR are right, then some benevolent divine entity called Democracy will abandon the earth and return to the heavens, another malicious divine entity called Fascism will descend in its place, and...well, for an awful lot of them actually America will again become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican and Straight White Male warlords, while for others Adolf Hitler will return from the moon and start building exact-scale replicas of Auschwitz and Selma, Alabama while forcing everyone to wear vintage Nazi uniforms and goosestep. According to a recent Atlantic piece I read, America will for some reason become "feudal" early Medieval France.

What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that, as in all great epochs where great civilizations fall, the planets will stop spinning, the stars will fall from the skies, and on their thrones deep in the bowels of the earth the great powers will tremble: and when the dust settles, the world as we know it will have ended, and something totally new and strange and foreign will begin. 

Far be it from me to disagree with my superiors who run podcasts and write for the New Yorker, but as at least some kind of historian, I do not think this is in fact how history works.

I am not a Marxist: by which I primarily mean that I do not believe in inevitable dialectical historical progress, and hence regard the purported alternatives of violent proletariat revolution and accelerationism as categorically unhelpful. Nevertheless, Marxists when they existed played many positive roles in society, and one of them was reminding people that economics existed and that how people fed themselves was a rather important factor in history. And from this point of view, the idea that the territorial bounds of America will not continue to be the home of prosperous and powerful political entities for the foreseeable bounds of human history appears somewhat absurd.

A basic truth that should be repeated vastly more often is that from the perspective of the settled peoples of the world, America is not only a new country, but a very embryonic and drastically underpopulated one. In absolute and not relative terms, America has the largest amount of arable land of any country in the world, including India and China--and this, too, using the more restrictive definition of "arable land" to include not any land that could relatively easily be cultivated, but merely land actually under present cultivation for temporary crops. America, meanwhile, has about three times the land area of India, including vast amounts of land that could easily be cultivated and used to produce food. India, meanwhile, has about four times the population of the United States.

As I pointed out in my last post, the simple reality is that America is not an intensively settled country. Indeed, it is barely a settled country at all. This remains true not only relative to the famously populated nations of Asia, but even relative to the baseline of places like Europe. America has only about five times as many people as the United Kingdom of Britain, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, despite having seventeen times the land area.

Yet this fundamental disconnect is even greater than any statistics or demographics could possibly convey. Traveling across America is a fundamentally opposite experience to traveling across Europe. One does not travel from places through other places. Rather, one moves from one place to another through vast tracts of wilderness pierced by monumental, alien infrastructure built not to connect communities so much as to carry commodities from periphery to center. I have been frequently attacked since my childhood for saying that America is not a nation but an Empire: a statement that people usually interpreted to mean that I think that America does not exist, or that Americans have nothing in common, or even that America as a political entity is fundamentally evil. I do not really believe any of that, though: or rather, it has nothing really to do with what I do mean when I say that America is not a nation but an Empire. 

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which I mean this statement has to do, not with Americans' cultural unity or lack thereof, or the American government's repressiveness or lack thereof, or the prevalence or scarcity of Americans' post-1945 "overseas" military interventions, but merely with this rather basic matter of economic and political structure. America simply is not structured as a nation, where a government has arisen to embody and enable the communal life of a political collectivity of a settled people living for a long time in a place and sharing some kind of basic culture or language or religion or way of life in common. America is structured as an Empire: which is to say, taken as a whole, it is structured by a vast commercial and military infrastructure built from the top down over many different political collectivities formed out of people of many different cultures and languages and religions and ways of life. 

Even that, though, is rather too abstract to get at what I really mean, which is merely that most of America--most, even of American cities, let alone American suburbs and towns and countryside--consists not of places or things but of the empty space between things. 

All my life I have been fascinated by the human deserts of America--deserts not in the highly modern sense of a climatologically inhospitable place but in the much more ancient and fundamental sense of a place that is not human, where human beings do not live and where they are not welcome. For ancient Egyptians, these were the literal deserts, where only bandits and soldiers and nomads lived: for Medieval Germans, these were the great forests, where only robbers and monks lived. For America, though, these deserts are primal and absolute, and they are everywhere: they are both within and around every public building, only a few feet from every private home, outside and around and in-between every town and city and suburb and restaurant and coffee shop and gas station. 

If you try to exist in these spaces for any number of time, hang around them, wander around them, carry out any function of life in them from eating to sleeping to defecating to merely sitting and reading or thinking, people will regard you as a homeless person, a criminal, a gangster, a terrifying alien invader, a desert nomad, and there is a good chance that cops will come and arrest you. And this is, when you think about it, rather strange for places that are in theory public spaces. If you try to do any of these things in an ordinary American neighborhood, though, full of allegedly private spaces, you will find much the same state of affairs. It is increasingly true that even daring to live or letting one's children live in the primal deserts of one's own yard or porch or sidewalk or street is seen as suspicious deviant behavior. There is something rather bizarre about this American insistence on surrounding ourselves at all times with vast empty spaces, woods and yards and streets and parks and sidewalks and parking lots and parking decks and walls and fields and landscapes, that are not there for anyone human to live in or cultivate or use for any human purpose, but merely to pass through and act as background setting. Jean Baudrillard saw the desert as the primal scene and reality of American life, the true, original backdrop and screen in reference to which American life was oriented: and I think he was right.

In any case, this discussion is necessary to communicate just why I regard it as absurd to think that America will come to an end any time soon--as well as the highly restricted sense in which I think it possible that it will. The human race has from its beginning to its end shown a very strong bias for life over death: and in the long run, life always wins out over death. In the 20th century, the powers ruling the human race did their level best to overcome this ingrained bias with more enlightened counsels, setting entire populations to kill other populations down to the last child, scientifically gasing millions, turning ancient cities into piles of rubble, and for the first time deciding as a matter of policy that under certain circumstances they could and would kill hundreds of millions and render most of the earth's surface uninhabitable. Still, by the end of the century there were vastly more people alive than there had been at its beginning.

In a similar way, I have personally no doubt at all that in a hundred years, in five hundred years, in a thousand years, in two thousand years, there will be many, many people living in the bounds of what is now the United States of America: and I find it highly, highly unlikely that these people will be living in a filmic post-apocalyptic wasteland or a filmic Third World gangland. Even a substantial nuclear war with Russia or China, while always theoretically possible, would not change that basic calculus.

Of course, what I actually meant as a child when I said that America would not last forever had little to do with this: it was merely the (for me always obvious, though now confirmed by many thousands of pages of historical and philosophical reading) point that political and cultural entities always change and always come to an end and are always superseded and replaced by other political and cultural entities not because they are evil dystopias or tragically failed utopias or quasi-Gnostic failures to realize an infinite divine essence, but rather because all political and cultural entities are fundamentally secondary realities, existing only in and for the temporal world of contingency and change, and by their inmost nature subordinate to the actual personal and common goods of actual people, and for this reason necessarily changing as the practical needs or practical goods or unpractical whims of those people amid history require. 

To be honest, I see nothing particularly tragic about the idea that in five hundred years people living in what is now America will not be governed according to the originally-deeply-flawed and now long-superseded text of an 18th century written Constitution designed largely to prevent the regional elites in thirteen mercantile coastal colonies from using a national legislature to commercially and culturally dominate each other. In fact, it is the idea that they would be governed according to that constitution that strikes me as tragic and fills me with feelings of disappointment and sorrow: for it would necessarily mean that these future people were being governed badly, and also that they showed a rather severe lack of intelligence and imagination. The societies and governments of these people will hopefully be rather better than ours: they could conceivably be much worse: but in neither case will these people be living in America in the sense in which I today live in America, let alone the (extraordinarily different) sense in which people in 1790 were living in America.

Of course, it is certainly possible that these hypothetical future people will call themselves Americans, or call their political entity America--as they have every right to do. Some people get very mad at Medieval Germans and Italians for calling themselves Romans, as though Julius Caesar was likely to be upset about it: but after all, Julius Caesar was dead, and the Medieval Germans and Italians were alive, and they had every historical and human right to take whatever they thought was good in Ancient Rome, including the Ancient Roman language and the Ancient Roman name, and use it for their present purposes. So too I have no objection to the early American habit of calling themselves Romans; and no objection if in five hundred years people living in vastly different societies, whether in the bounds of what is now America or in India or China or Russia or anywhere else, decide to call themselves Americans. So great is my intellectual magnanimity that I do not even get mad when people in 2025 call themselves Americans despite having no substantial culture or values in common with their own ancestors of a few centuries ago.

Now the one thing I sincerely hope is not the case is that people in the future continue to believe in America--which is to say, in the modern legend of some kind of immanentized divinity expressing itself through the American economy or Constitution or government or way of life, who must be held to and worshipped and served regardless if He in any way helps or improves human beings' actual lives and even if He pervasively harms and destroys them. 

It is only if Americans continue to believe in that divinity, whether as the inevitable source of good or the equally inevitable source of evil, that I think there is any particular chance that they will find a way to prevent anyone from managing to live prosperously in the territory of America or calling themselves American in the future: whether by nuking the cities, salting the earth, fighting and winning the Great Gender War, building data centers everywhere that dry up all the rivers, preventing themselves or anyone else from having children, and/or in one of these ways or another making "American" into such a cultic name of fear that future generations shun it as they shun the names of Sodom and Gomorrah. Barring those unlikely scenarios, I think that, by and large, human life and history will continue: and so in some form will America.

What is actually going on in America in 2025, I would argue, is something quite different from the end of America or the world. It is merely another crisis of legitimacy, such as has periodically afflicted nearly every nation and government and Church and Empire and corporation and township from time to time, usually justly, and often for the good. 

These crises arise in essence from the unavoidable human fact that we are rational entities, and so act always in rational pursuit of some perceived objective good: and also the fact that we are familial and social and political entities, who cannot seek or gain any of the goods we desire as isolated individuals, but only as part of some institution or another. 

For both of these reasons, no institution can function except on the basis of some firmly-held belief on the part of those who make it up that the institution itself and its overall purpose and its particular rules and laws and policies and structures and acts and specific human leaders are all good in the sense of relatively rationally oriented towards the gaining of some thing genuinely desired and perceived as objectively desirable by human beings. And from time to time, in every institution to have ever existed, some people begin to think, correctly or incorrectly, that this is not quite true, or not quite as true as it used to be, or not quite as true as it should be. 

Of course, to some extent this will always be true some of the time for some people associated with every institution; it is only when this state of affairs reaches some point of extremity, both in severity and definiteness of belief and in numbers of people affected, that what results is a genuine crisis of legitimacy. These crises of legitimacy are temporary by nature: but for all that can last for decades or even centuries, or for as long as it takes for some genuine alternative to the present state of affairs to be proposed and desired and pursued by a sufficient number of people. In the end, though, after some kind of collapse or war or struggle for power or mass defection, either enough people become convinced that the institution and/or its leaders were just fine the way they were, or they change the institution and/or its leaders: and either way the crisis is resolved.

Anyway, I have for a really quite tedious amount of time been telling everyone that America was in a crisis of legitimacy--and I have not been the only one. Post-Pandemic, though, and also post-2024-election, the name and concept seems to be falling out of favor, replaced with other generally less legible and insightful concepts, from the birth of a new AI economy to the rise of fascism to America being great again. I still persist in regarding this as closer to the truth of What is Going On Right Now than any of those other options.

To "prove" my case, I will in this lengthy essay examine a number of recent works of art that in my view convey the contours of our crisis of legitimacy, as well as another work of art about a crisis of legitimacy in a Near Eastern power from 500 years ago. I apologize: this is simply my way.