On Being a God in the Modern Age

A History of Japanese Religion; Joker 2; The Life of Charles de Gaulle

How does a man become a god?

Recently in this space, I discussed some of the more negative consequences of the human desire for transcendence--including that its rather frequently issuing in open or disguised impulses toward annihilation. 

While known in some measure to all of us, however, the desire for destruction is not an ordinary or common outcome of the human desire for transcendence. Much more common, because more rational, is the simple, obvious, straightforward desire to be God.

Of course, when I say that that desire is simple, obvious, and straightforward, I am speaking of the desire in and of itself, which flows directly from the nature and essence and rational constitution of the human being. As rational animals, human beings are defined by their ability to know: which is to say, to grasp, internalize, and become one with anything and everything there is. This rational capacity is by necessity infinite, not confinable to any particular set or subset of beings, and hence intrinsically capable of being fulfilled only by the transcendent, unified, simple, rational, and communicable infinity of being itself--which is to say, God. To know a thing is in a sense to be that thing--though not to remove the otherness or alterity of the thing in relation to oneself. Hence, all human beings by necessity desire to be God.

Of course, as Aquinas pointed out, God is an end that entirely escapes the grasp of man's reason; or, in other words, the knowledge of God does not and cannot take away God's infinite transcendence and infinite otherness to the human person--which is why the one absolute and ineluctable and perpetual and inescapable requirement for knowing God to any degree whatsoever or even to becoming one with him is that quality which Christians have called "humility," that act which Jews and pagans have called "sacrifice," and that absolute transformation of the self into an entity capable of knowing God not by any natural capacity but solely by means of God himself that comes only through crucifixion and death and might well be called "annihilation."

A History of Japanese Religion (2001)

What is Buddhism all about? 

Well, if you're someone educated in advanced Western education institutions over the past century or two--someone like me, for instance--your answer probably goes something like this: Buddhism is a skeptical, rationalistic, non-theistic religion that denies the existence both of God and the self and focuses on ascetic practice with the goal of freeing oneself from illusions and extinguishing desire. If you're a more ordinary person educated primarily on the Internet, on the other hand, your answer probably goes something like this: Buddhism is a peaceful religion of moral and mental self-improvement based on tolerance, compassion, and the use of meditation to relieve stress.

Well, both answers are wrong; though as usual the uneducated answer is significantly less wrong than the educated one. 

Anyway, I have long known in a vague sense that both of these accounts were inaccurate; it wasn't until I recently read a vast voluminous multi-author academic Japanese tome called A History of Japanese Religion, though, that I finally realized just how badly I and everyone else has been tricked.

This book is very long, very detailed, and more dedicated to giving facts than interpretations. After reading it, though, I now know that the dominant Buddhist school in Japan since the Middle Ages has been the Tendai school, which is a heterogenous and synthetic tradition that accepts all the major Mahayana sutras as authoritative while usually emphasizing the Lotus Sutra and its teaching of thousands of immortal preexistent Buddhas and Boddisattvas incarnating in thousands of worlds to achieve enlightenment and spread it to others, and often proclaiming belief in the eventual salvation of all sentient beings, which monks work towards via practices of gaining and transferring merit through ascetic practice and invocation of different Buddhas and recitation and burial of Sutras. 

Its main rival, I also learned, was the Shingon school, which is centered on the Great Sun Sutra and its proclamation of Vahairocana Buddha, the eternal, immovable, impassible, transcendent "cosmic Buddha" of whom all Buddhas and boddisattvas are mere aspects, and hence focuses on the goal of achieving enlightenment and Buddhahood and union with Vahairocana while in the present body, but which in practice was mostly concerned with the esoteric powers such Buddahood would grant you for doing magic and making it rain. 

I also learned about the more radical and devotional school of Jodo Buddhism, which teaches that in the present age of the decay of the law salvation can only be achieved through the "easy practice" of the nembutsu, or meditation on and invocation of Amida Buddha, who eons ago made the Original Vow that he would not enter enlightenment until all other sentient beings had done so, but who became an all-powerful Buddha anyway and now grants to all men who practice nembutsu (though not women) rebirth into his Pure Land, a sensual paradise of beautiful flowers and music in which all will inevitably achieve enlightenment. I also learned about the even more radical Jodo Shin offshoot, which teaches that a single verbal invocation of the nembutsu with true faith is sufficient for even the most depraved and evil person to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land, and which therefore rejects most clerical hierarchies and monastic practices and sometimes even morality itself in favor of exclusive reliance on the "easy-practice other-power nembutsu." I also learned about the Ji school, which also relies exclusively on nembutsu but practices it as a form of dance and via talismans that are inscribed by the Patriarch of the sect and if purchased grant worldly success and ensure rebirth. 

At the same time, I learned that Amida Buddha was accepted and worshiped by mainstream Tendai Buddhism also; but was very far from being the only Buddha to possess a Pure Land paradise into which people could be reborn by invoking him and/or meditating on him. I learned that worship of Kannon Buddha, for instance (who like all other Buddhas is very clearly a man but who is usually worshiped in modern China under the image of a young woman), often takes similar forms, as does worship of Maitreya Buddha, the "Buddha of the Future" accepted in all schools of Buddhism including Theravada, who 5,670,000,000 years in the future will sit under a tree, achieve enlightenment, and then preach a sermon that will grant all who hear it enlightenment as well; for now, though, he dwells in Tusita Heaven, a paradise into which his worshippers will be reborn and wait in bliss for those five billion years before descending to earth with him to hear his sermon. 

I also learned about the reformist school of Zen Buddhism, a conservative backlash against the major schools which denied the possibility of salvation to lay people and emphasized the absolute necessity for enlightenment of strict meditative practice. I also learned about the very angry reformist movement Nichiren Buddhism, which declared the absolute superiority of the Lotus Sutra to every other scripture and therefore mandated the achieving of salvation through exclusive recitation of this Sutra and/or its first words, but which was most famous for its practice of sending constant petitions to the government calling for the suppression and destruction of every other Buddhist group and temple. 

I also learned, though, that this hostile sectarian attitude was far from exclusive to the Nichiren: that Japanese Buddhist temples were famous for their fostering of "warrior monks" and armed retainers that would engage in warfare and carry out raids on other Buddhist temples, plundering them for resources and relics. I also learned, though, that for much of Japanese history the central government retained a remarkable degree of control over these temples, largely through severely restricting the number of people allowed to be ordained as Buddhist monks and parceling these ordination certificates out by sects and creating strict rankings of temple hierarchies within each sect. I likewise learned that during the Shogunate Buddhist temples were utilized as registrars and census-takers and tax bureaus of all local communities and as means of suppression for banned religious groups like Christianity, and also functioned as local money-lenders using very high-interest loans to take over more and more land from the peasantry. Hence, when the Meiji Restoration took place in the 19th century and Buddhism was dethroned by State Shinto, numerous Buddhist temples all over Japan were attacked by mobs and burned. I also learned some things about Shinto and State Shinto and modern religious movements in Japan, but frankly they weren't all that interesting. 

Anyway, I now know all these things; and such is my sad condition that all this information will be rattling around my brain for the rest of my mortal days. Pity me.

Still, the reason I read books about Buddhism was not to gain yet more useless trivia to haunt my thoughts late at night and in the shower, but to try to understand just what was up with Buddhism, not as an abstract belief, but as a concrete object, and what it was all about anyway. I came to an answer, too, which maybe is not a good idea. 

As I said last time, any generalization about historical entities like religions must of necessity abstract from a great deal of historical detail and particularity and difference; and therefore should be taken as much as possible practically and heuristically and with a grain of salt. Such general principles and heuristics, though, can under the right circumstances be very valuable indeed.

During my studies of Islam, a number of very general principles of what Islam as a historical object was all about did, in fact, form in my mind: and if I had to sum them all up in a single sentence and a single abstract idea (which is, again, a bad idea) it would be that historical Islam is largely about the idea of a divine licensing and regulation of individuals and peoples ruling over other individuals and peoples. 

Similarly, if I had to sum up the principles and heuristics produced in my mind by a great deal of tedious historical detail involving actual historical East Asian Buddhism, it would be that historical East Asian Buddhism is largely about the individual achieving of godhood through ritual and internal effort. 

Buddhism is a more diverse and heterogenous tradition even than Islam; and all the sects discussed above differ about precisely how one achieves such godhood, as well as on its essential nature, its effects, and/or its benefits. All, though, existed fundamentally in a vast cosmos inhabited by blissful powerful gods that are, were, or will be human beings and who have achieved, are achieving, or will achieve their exalted status individually through some kind of practice. And that is something quite notable.

Boiled down to this inexcusable degree of abstraction, one cannot deny that this is an extremely interesting and distinct worldview--and one that has many profound resonances with modernity and modern American society in particular. 

To be a Buddha is to be a god in at least several distinct senses: absolute and perfect knowledge of everything, infinite power, eternal life, and the public acclaim and ritual worship of the people. Some of this power and prestige, at least, accrues to those who are merely striving publicly to achieve Buddhahood. Even more of the prestige and power of godhood would accrue to those like the Shingon clerics who claimed to have in some sense and to some degree already achieved Buddhahood in this present life and present body; as well as those like the Jodo and Zen and Nichiren schools who merely claimed to have found the best or most reliable or easiest way to achieve it.

Of course, there are paradoxes to Buddhism as thus constructed; not least in the very nature of Buddhahood itself. Most Japanese schools believed that everyone could become a Buddha, or even that everyone would become a Buddha; still, a Buddha was never a thing like a saint, an actual historical person with a human life lived not too long ago in a place not far away. Though the Mahayana Buddhism of Japan claimed belief in thousands upon thousands of Buddhas and Boddisattvas, each with his own celestial Buddha-land and the capacity to incarnate himself in any one of the worlds or hells, extraordinarily few Buddhas were ever equated with any historical person. Most had lived either in the distant past like Amida Buddha, or would live only in the distant future, like Maitreya Buddha. Very many were functionally identical with gods, associated with particular cardinal directions or colors or emotions or or natural features; very many were in fact equated or syncretized with native Shinto gods and heroes. 

For the ordinary person, the hope of salvation rested much more often on the hope of enjoying a life of bliss in a Buddha's Pure Land than on becoming a Buddha yourself--something that was, in any case, judged almost universally impossible for a woman, who could in the view of all at best hope to be reborn as a man into a Pure Land and achieve enlightenment there. Most of the time, Buddhists were not all that different from Hindus; believers in a vast pantheon of deities, unified with humans and animals by a cosmic system of reincarnation and with each other by some kind of ultimate underlying supreme divine personhood or nature, but all available to be worshipped and implored and contemplated and emulated by qualified ritualists and ascetics and ordinary people alike. 

Still, however straightforwardly polytheistic popular Buddhism might be, the hope of becoming a permanent member of the class of immortal all-powerful Buddhas, sharing eternally in the attributes and powers of the ultimate Buddha-nature of cosmos, did give a distinctive twist to nearly every feature of Japanese Buddhist religiosity. To take a somewhat similar example, 19th century Mormonism was and remains in most practical senses just one more Protestant sect among many, obsessed with politics and business and family values and the evils of substance abuse: still, one cannot entirely discount the effects of its founder's famous declaration that "what God was, we are; what God is, we will be." However vague and distant the promise of Buddhahood or godhood for oneself, it makes a very great difference to know that what you worship is only a person like you who has accomplished a task that you might yet accomplish, that what you worship is only what you are striving to become, that what you worship is only something that you are going to do.

Many philosophers and theologians have commented on the extraordinary extraversion and activism of American culture. There are many ways to understand this cultural proclivity, from the pioneer mindset to the dislocation of colonization to the utopian nature of Protestant sectarianism. One relatively straightforward way to understand this proclivity is simply to see it in terms of this shared Mormon and Buddhist belief in the achievement of divinity through individual effort. 

Still, there are darker and deeper roots even to this relatively simple idea. To say that one becomes a god through individual effort is not to say what a god actually is, or what it's like to be one. That has to be filled in, usually from outside the religion altogether: by systems of class, political power, philosophy, or desire, or merely by the events of history. It is here that the true fundamental underlying chaos of both historical Buddhism and modern America finds its origin. 

In very strong contradistinction to popular American stereotypes, Buddhism is in history one of the most frequently and deeply violent and politicized faiths, instantiated from its earliest periods largely in warlike unitary states divided by and prone to crumbling into unitary, warlike factions and sects. Power and divinity devolves on individuals--and therefore on monarchs and sect-leaders alike. Power and divinity is achieved through active individual effort--and therefore by ascetics and conquerors alike. The ascetic who strives for Buddhahood in the monastery and sends out his warrior monks to plunder other monasteries finds his natural complement in the warlord who sends out his soldiers to plunder other states, enforces the Buddhist law, and richly endows the Buddhist monastery. 

Similarly, for modern Americans, divinity and power come to individuals on the basis of effort--and therefore flits indefinitely from Presidents to businessmen to sect leaders to youtubers. But I digress.

Still, there is no denying that there is something quite a bit...well, darker about the way in which Americans have increasingly come to conceptualize their ex-human gods than the way historical Buddhists conceived of their Buddhas. Even in the simplest and most rationalistic versions, the Buddha not only achieves enlightenment, but desires to share it with others--and so alleviate suffering. In the rich unitary worlds of Japanese Tendai and Shingon and Jodo and Jodo Shin Buddhism, the thousands of Buddhas and Boddisattvas one and all are engaged in a vast, cosmic plan to save all sentient beings, not only to compassionately end the suffering of their devotees, but to give them one and all an eternity of delighted enjoyment of unstained worlds of bliss. To be a Buddha, then, was to be not only powerful, not only knowledgeable, not only worshipped and served, not only blissfully contented and happy, but also compassionate and generously devoted to giving others what you already have.

In contrast, what is most striking about all the ideas of divinity in modern America is that they are, one and all, defined not by happiness but by unhappiness, not by compassion but by indifference, and not by giving but taking life. I framed this a while back by analogy with the ancient Greek cult of heroes; but there are other lenses through which to view it. 

One very good lens is the skeptical, rationalistic 19th century doctrine that I, like many others, was taught to equate with historical Buddhism: that the world is fundamentally an atomistic illusion indifferent to human desire in which the only goods worth seeking are knowledge and power. If we equate this knowledge and power with godhood and say it is achievable by individual human effort, then we have, I think, something not all that far from the modern American religion.

Whether this doctrine has anything to do with the origins of Buddhism, though, is quite a bit harder to say. Whatever Guatayama Buddha came to know under the bodhi tree, it may have simply been that the self was an illusion, all things were impermanent, and desire was consequently pointless and the cause of suffering and ought to be entirely suppressed. It is even possible that Guatayama Buddha, like those disciples who after 25 centuries at last recovered his true teaching, spoke entirely in German.

Still, it is worth pointing out how few steps even this patently modern and rationalistic formulation is from popular Buddhism; and how quickly and logically one can be transformed into the other.

Imagine: an ascetic claims to have achieved enlightenment, and is worshipped with religious devotion by his followers. When you ask him what that enlightenment is, he tells you that the self is an illusion, all things are impermanent, and desire is pointless and the cause of suffering and ought to be entirely suppressed. He suggests joining his order. 

If you accept his offer, it is most likely going to be on the basis that there is something more to the enlightenment he is offering than the rather depressing information he has told you so far. After all, if the self is an illusion and desire is pointless, there seems precious little point in joining a religious order, practicing difficult ascesis, and worshipping an ascetic like a god. At the very least, even if the secret is merely hidden knowledge of the illusory nature of all things, maybe knowing this secret will give you magic powers? 

By far the most straightforward conclusion you can draw from this situation, though, is that the man worshipped by the whole Buddhist community with public rites for having achieved enlightenment has simply succeeded in becoming a god; and is offering you the path to becoming a god too.

Put most abstractly, we might say that the fundamental problem of historical Buddhism and modern America alike is that both contain ethical systems whose end goal is formally an empty concept; and so is quite naturally and even necessarily filled in by real historical human beings with things they actually want. 

Most sects of Japanese Buddhism encouraged ordinary Buddhists to seek worldly benefits and riches with the help of the Buddhas; on the quite natural basis that whatever enlightenment might be, ordinary people would be motivated to work towards it by some food and sex and money. Shingon Buddhist practicitioners claimed that certain esoteric practices allowed them to achieve unity in their bodies with the eternal transcendent cosmic source of everything; but they also claimed that it allowed them to perform mystical rain-summoning rituals in exchange for cash. In theory, rebirth in Amida Buddha's Pure Land promised the opportunity to finally achieve true enlightenment and become a Buddha; in practice, Jodo and Jodo Shin devotions focused on the Buddha's boundless compassion for the sufferings of his devotees and on graphic descriptions of the foods and flowers and streams and music and endless delightful relaxation of life in his Pure Land. 

Properly understood, there is nothing even remotely incongruous about any of this. Indeed, far from representing a corrupt falling-away from the pure teachings of 19th century German rationalism, all of these systems are far more rational both in outline and in details than academic skeptical Buddhism.

19th century German rationalists believed that science had formally shown that only the physical world was real, and that the physical world itself was merely an atomistic, deterministic coagulation of parts. Knowing these truths, they believed, was desirable for two reasons. First, because understanding this truth gave one power, allowed one to dominate the physical world and direct it according to one's will. And second, because understanding this truth allowed one to understand that every object of experience, including oneself, was simply an illusory mask for the deterministic movements of atoms, and hence that all desire was illusive and pointless. A huge part of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can be straightforwardly read from this 19th century Buddhist-inflected or -masked viewpoint--and its transformation Japanese-style into more rational and human systems under the pressure of real human desire.

At root, though, this system is formally self-contradictory and so cannot possibly be true or even useful. 

Power, as I pointed out elsewhere, is entirely a function of desire; so that a system that promises power but destroys desire is a bit like an airplane with concrete wings and engines. Similarly, the reason that knowledge is desirable to human beings is because knowledge is fundamentally defined by relation to and possession of and enjoyment of a goodness and being that transcends the self. Conceiving knowing as the mere unmasking of illusions and breaking down of apparently good things into valueless invisible deterministic dominatable parts is about as straightforward and conclusive an argument for choosing illusion over knowledge as could possibly be made.

The positive part of me would like to think that no one prior to 19th century German academia was ever stupid enough to ever believe something like this; and certainly not the Buddha. If this system really ever was on offer, though, the people of Japan were quite right to reject it and substitute better things. 

Whatever it means to become a god, it certainly can't just be becoming an academic. Speaking for myself, I would much rather have the power to make it rain. 

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Also speaking for myself, I am one two or three people in the world who actually liked Joker 2: which is in my judgment simply the most forceful, honest, and unflinching polemic ever made against the modern and American idea of becoming a god.

Of course, I fully understand why most people who watched the film did not like it. Put simply, most people who watched Joker: Folie à Deux in 2024 were there because they had watched and liked the movie Joker in 2019; and a significant part of the running time of Joker: Folie à Deux is dedicated to a moralistic and totalizing denunciation of all the people who liked Joker. Films, common sense would say, ought to try to please their audiences; an insight that is not necessarily incompatible with frightening or disturbing or challenging their audiences. Still, I don't know offhand of a film as dedicated to morally condemning its audience as Joker 2: and that is one reason I love it.

Luckily, I didn't particularly love Joker; and, perhaps more importantly, found its general-audience success and global mega-hit status rather disturbing. The director of both films, Todd Philips, apparently shared my feelings, with rather more intensity. So I was, I guess, more or less the target audience for Joker 2, which grossed $200 million on a $200 million budget and received some of the worst audience scores and word of mouth of any major studio release in the past several decades. The people love my blog, though!

Anyway, there was not much discourse on Joker: Folie à Deux: but there was a heck of lot of discourse on Joker. In some strange way, and presumably by accident, Joker happened to fit perfectly into the zeitgeist of the year 2019, which was perhaps the worst zeitgeist in all of human history. 

I fully realize that I am maybe one of 5 to 10 people in America whose memories of 2019 and the first Trump term in general weren't wholesale replaced by CGI nostalgia and Youtube videos sometime during the Pandemic. The period before a major crisis or change in history is always remembered retrospectively according to people's feelings about the crisis and change itself. Hence the decade from 1900 to 1910 was and is remembered, according to the various tastes of those who fought and died in WW1, as either a lost age of innocence brutally annihilated by the violence of WW1 or as a mudpit of dirty complacent nonsense from which people were thankfully saved by the transcendental experience of combat in WW1. Neither is really true. By 1914, the age of decadence was long over, and society was gripped instead by an intensive activism manifested in numerous dueling religious and philosophical and political and intellectual sects, as well as by a brutal conflict between capital and labor that threatened to explode into full-scale revolution at any moment. Likewise, in America, the 1950s, one of the periods of most intense and rapid social and economic and political change and the most intense cultural decadence in all of human history, is somehow remembered in America as either a staid changeless boring repressive past from the which the 1960s saved us or as a pure timeless traditional ideal which the 1960s destroyed. Go figure.

Anyway, this is how it ended up with the 2010s; a decade I didn't particularly like the first time around. The Pandemic happened--the first thing that really happened in America, maybe, since WW2--and the most notable result is that for the first time, maybe, since WW2 several successive generations are now defined by an intensive nostalgia for 2010s pop culture and the 2010s Internet. 

Unfortunately, the 2010s had some of the worst culture in the history of the human race; and I alone am left, like a Rip Van Winkle in reverse with a shorter beard, to remind everyone of this.

The 2010s were a Decadent Age; the most decadent age, I think, since the actual Fin de Siecle of the turn of the 20th century. They were a Decadent Age largely for the very straightforward reason that the 2008 election of Barack Obama happened to coincide with the largest economic depression in American history; after which the 8 years and two Presidential terms of Barack Obama happened to coincide with the largest wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in American history. 

During these eight years, the fundamental tenor of the American economy and American life changed. America ceased to be a society defined by a strong and central middle class, and became a society defined more and more by its extremes: by on the one hand a new superrich tech and finance class that had plundered their way to power with the backing of the government and now were desperate to legitimize and hold onto those thefts by media and publicity and fear alike, and on the other hand by a new fluid lower and lower-middle class of desperate con men and gamblers terrified of falling into the abyss and trying to hustle their way to riches. It was that sense of desperation, among both rich and poor, that defined the 2010s. 

It was a time obsessed with the unanswerable finality and terrible fragility of immediate power; an age of pornography in media, gambling in economics, entertainment in politics. Whatever your moral beliefs, you could not deny that the stripper was sexy, that the tech oligarch was rich, that Barack Obama was well-spoken and compelling to watch--or alternately, that Donald Trump was funny and entertaining to watch. This was a decade that did not seduce, but overwhelmed. From the desperate middle-class man at his computer to the desperate homeless man in the street to the desperate rich man in his office to the desperate service worker at the bar, everyone and everything orbited the brute facticity of theft and violence. As a wise woman said at the time, the cruel men continue to win.

By 2019, this facticity had worn itself down quite a bit, and was showing its age. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016 was the greatest triumph of media showmanship over substance since the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008; both presidencies, though, ended in ennui. By 2016, the prophet who had stood among golden pillars with a ray of light resting on his uplifted face and declared that we were the ones we'd been waiting for was now a tired, wan bureaucrat alternately expressing vague moral disapproval and indulgence; by 2019, the eschatological demagogue who had declared American Carnage and his unique power to fix it all by force was a minor media figure like any other. Neither was ever really the ruler of America, let alone the world; that power belonged to the termites eating the floorboards, and the worms breeding in the sink.

While Obama and Trump sat in the Oval Office smiling at the cameras, day after day, hour after hour, the rich were stealing from the poor, and both were watching pornography on their smartphones; and what could possibly be the point of interfering with natural processes like these? 

Anyway, in the exhausted, jaded, sated zeitgeist of 2019, Joker made over a billion dollars by being a slightly fresher vessel for everyone's existing obsessions. Most of the tedious discourse over the film, as I recall it well at the time, was whether the film was right-wing or left-wing, or in other words whether it was Good because it highlighted poverty and mental health and thus implicitly supported the DSA and Bernie Sanders, or Bad because it was glorified violent political men who didn't trust institutions and thus implicitly supported the Alt-Right and Donald Trump. Really, taken on its own terms, the film is a fairly straightforward personal tragedy in the key of Martin Scorcese, centered like many of his films on a dislocated man in a big city struggling poverty, parental abuse, violence, and mental illness. What do I know, though?

Whatever its forebears in past decades, the film was a hit in 2024 because it played to a surprising number of the obsessions of the 2010s: superheroes, fear of poor people, fear of mentally ill people, child abuse, school shooters, gender conflicts, and random violence. To a sated global audience that had spent a decade pondering these topics in increasingly deranged ways, Joker promised a fresher, darker, grittier, and more transgressive take on the same dark and gritty old, same transgressive old. Though the film is in no reasonable way a Trumpist film, it succeeded at the box office for more or less the same reasons that Donald Trump won office in 2016: and by 2019 already qualified as nostalgia entertainment. 

The success of Joker clearly made its director Todd Philips very mad; it made me kind of mad, too. Then the Pandemic happened, and everyone spent a lot of time on the Internet and apparently decided that 2010s culture was the peak of human civilization because it was the last time they could remember feeling okay--and a floundering film industry signed on the dotted line to give Todd Philips however much money he wanted to rush Joker 2 into the post-Pandemic cinemas as fast as possible. And Todd Philips, who had apparently spent most of the Pandemic sitting at his computer reading thinkpieces on Joker and fuming, took the money, took his time, and ultimately delivered an eloquent, point-by-point moral denunciation of his own film, its audiences and fans, the decade of the 2010s, and America. 

This, of course, is what we actually needed during the Pandemic; the power to reflect critically on what had gotten us to this point, on the many failings of the society and culture and economy of the post-Cold War boom, and the courage to not merely desperately revive the past, but build a genuinely better future. Or, as Pope Francis put it quite correctly in 2020, we would emerge out of the Pandemic either much better than before, or much worse; it was impossible to simply restore what had been. 

Meanwhile we have spent the 2020s so far working very very hard and sacrifice immeasurable money and innumerable lives to the overriding imperative of simply restoring the 2010s; or rather, to simulating the 2010s, repeating it all wrong in every detail and declaring the repetition more authentic than the original. Properly understood, this is the whole cultural meaning of AI; and the whole political meaning of Donald Trump's return to the Presidency. It is, come to think of it, the real meaning of more or less everything that has happened in the 2020s so far.

Joker 2 does not like the 2010s, though; and neither do I. What it likes least of all is the defining cultural note of the decade and the civilization: the simple preference for the unreal over the real, for the image over the referent, for the narrative over the life, for the icon over the person. Joker 2 is a film about how that preference is simply and inevitably a preference for murder.

If there is a filmic weakness to Joker 2, it is how much of the film consists in simply recounting the plot of Joker. Still, what makes the film dramatic, and not merely didactic, is the way in which these recountings take place in the context of what is really a bitter and totalizing conflict over the meaning of the events of the first film--a conflict that is not just between the film's characters but within them. 

As Joker portrays, and as Joker 2 largely recounts, Arthur Fleck was a poor, mentally ill, isolated man who took refuge from his mother's mental and physical and sexual abuse within a more positive fantasy world in which he was the son of a wealthy philanthropist destined by his loving mother to spread laughter to the world and in genuine love with a woman; when that fantasy was destroyed by facts and human cruelty (fired as an unsuccessful clown, his relationship revealed as a delusion, his therapist defunded, his mother revealed as a liar and abuser), Arthur killed several people, including his mother, and then planned in one final act to kill himself on his favorite talk show in front of its host, who in his mind was a kind of fantasy surrogate father, but instead grew enraged at the host's mockery and killed him instead, an random act of violence which inspired an orgy of anarchic violence by the city's dispossessed poor and Arthur's celebration as the iconic Joker. 

What does this story mean? Well, to many writers of thinkpieces and critics and even ordinary people in the 2010s, it means something right-wing, or something left-wing, or something Alt-Right, or something manosphere, or something anti-feminist, or something Occupy Wallstreet, or...

But why should a person mean any of these things?

This is something I have struggled with literally my entire life; and something I still struggle with daily. I genuinely do not understand how most Americans seem to see the world; I do not understand what passes for intelligence among the intelligentsia, for wisdom among the wise, for politics among anyone at all. 

People genuinely do not seem to believe that the real world is real--by which I do not mean merely factitious, composed of objective facts and information and narrative, but the opposite of factitious, composed of beings. They believe, or appear to believe, that facts are not a reflection and unfolding of the being of things, but that the being of things is a mere function of facts. They seem to think, in other words, that the fundamental nature of the world and of human beings within it is simply defined and determined by iconic value and narrative position. 

Joker 2 ultimately centers on the simple question of the relative existence or non-existence, and the relative value or lack of value, of Arthur Fleck and the Joker; or in other words, of a being and a fact, a person and an image. 

Arthur's attorneys choose to defend him on the claim that he is not responsible for his murders; the Joker is. Many people in the broader world seem to agree with this idea, people who placard the Joker's image on walls and wear makeup and and celebrate him as a hero of resistance to power. Our protagonist himself, meanwhile, is rather aggressively romanced by a fellow prisoner named Lee, whose life seems to eerily echo his own and who insists on having sex only when he is in persona and in makeup as the Joker. 

As Arthur, our hero is derided and mocked and brutally beaten and finally raped by his prison guards. In court, all the sordid and humiliating details of his life are exposed to public view. With his fantasy love from the first film on the stand, recounting to the court his pathetic obsession with her, his mother's mockery, and his own status as a gentle, kind man, Arthur can barely hold himself together. There is no value here, no respect, only endless humiliation.

The image, the fact, is admired, feared, loved, and treated as powerful and free and valuable and meaningful and worthy of attention and interest; no one at all finds the person and human being at all notable or interesting or anything but pathetic and embarassing. The choice, then, could hardly be clearer.

In obedience to all these pressures, Arthur decides to fire his defense attorney and defend himself in full makeup and costume as the Joker; a strategy that almost immediately breaks down as he is confronted by one of the victims of his violence. 

Gary is a man with dwarfism who had worked with Arthur as a clown. Arthur was the only person, he says, who was ever kind to him at work, the only person who didn't mock and mistreat him; and he cannot understand why the Arthur he knew would suddenly do all these horrible things, would dress in makeup and frighten him and try to hurt him. 

For this crisis, the Joker as image and persona is entirely irrelevant. The crux of Gary's trauma is not that there is a image or fact with power that he fears or admires, but that he knew a person who helped him, and who then did horrible things that hurt him. He was betrayed and hurt by a real relationship with a real person: a person named Arthur Fleck. In the face of this genuine relationship, the facade of the Joker entirely breaks down. Arthur tries to make fun of Gary, tries to defend himself; but finally subsides into silence. 

Then, in the film's central scene, Arthur gives his final statement dressed as the Joker; and declares that the Joker does not exist. The simple crux of the film is this deceptively simple assertion: in which is contained a wealth of practical wisdom. 

Whether the Joker or Arthur or more powerful, more admired, more loved, desired by the people at large or the fans or the critics or the culture, the fact remains that one of them exists and the other does not. The Joker is an iconic image used as a symbol by some people who exist to stand for some things that may or may not exist; but he himself does not exist. 

Arthur may or may not mean anything for anyone, but he is nonetheless is a person who exists, and therefore has a certain nature and wants certain things, chief among them to be loved and valued by other persons that also really exist; he is also a person who has really destroyed the lives of other people who really existed, and now do not. The Joker did not kill those people; the Joker, like the atom bomb, is at the end of the day a mere forest fire, a mere fact. The people existed; the person who killed them exists; the imagistic and narrative symbolization of the fact of the latter destroying the former does not exist. 

Or, as Arthur puts it: 

There is no Joker. It’s just me. I-I killed six people. I wish I didn’t, but I did. 

I just wanna…I just wanna blow it all up, and start a new life.

Knock knock. Who’s there? Arthur Fleck. Arthur Fleck who?

Even if the Joker existed, though, he could give Arthur what he wants. Arthur wants to be loved; and at least at first it appears that, because of the Joker, he has in fact found a woman who loves him. The film is interspersed with various musical sequences that seek to depict Arthur's fantasy vision of his love with Lee; and many critics criticized these sequences for not being as fun or creative as they should be. This, though, is to some extent the point: which is that the deceptive fantasies of a broken man are at the end of the day more disturbing and surreal than aesthetic. Whatever the anarchic love of the Joker and Harley Quinn for each other may be in image or fact, it is not much fun. 

This, though, is the love of Joker and Harley Quinn; the love of Arthur Fleck and Lee Quinzel is not so much surreal as violent and disturbing. Lee, it turns out, has lied to Arthur about everything; she is not a poor woman abused as a child who committed a crime and was sent to prison with him, but an idle rich girl who voluntarily checked herself into the asylum specifically to seduce him. She is a fan of the Joker; he is her (sexual) fantasy. Arthur Fleck the person, though, is nothing to her at all. When he renounces the Joker on the stand, she rejects him entirely. 

His violent male fans, too, want nothing to do with the real person: when they break him out of prison, he flees from them in terror; and one of them finally murders him in prison in the film's final moments. The point is none the less effective for being stark; and it is quite obviously and directly aimed by Todd Philips at the fans and audiences of his film, who watched a bleak movie about an abused poor man who goes insane and murders seven people and embraced it as a somewhat more transgressive and exciting take on the well-worn celebration of the iconic power of people becoming artists and superheroes.

As I've pointed out again and again, there is something rather extreme and creepy about the American obsession with the superhero film and artist biography, both of which center on the transformation of the ordinary boring living person into an iconic and powerful dead person; and Todd Philips, at least, finally noticed this a few years ago.

If Todd Philips was angry at his audiences for thinking that his film was in essence a celebration of the transformation of sadsack boring loser victim Arthur Fleck into powerful iconic exciting trademark-of-DC-comics the Joker, he also seemed to be quite mad at his audiences for thinking that his film was about Alt-Right politics: and he has a point there, too. 

Here, though, it is easy to misunderstand the point; since the alt right was a movement that started in 2015 and was more or less over, like most things from Trump's first term, by 2017. If there was something exciting, something transgressive, about Joker when it first came out, it was not that it reminded audiences of Episcopalian con man Richard Spencer, but simply that it took prevalent contemporary victim narratives, and at least on the surface appeared to reverse them. 

90% of the film's "right-wing" credibility, I hate to say, comes simply from the fact that Arthur Fleck happens to be a white man. To sated audiences fed on decades of Twin-Peaks-inspired female victimization by men, there was something, well, titillating about seeing a tale of male victimization by women. Hence the even more titillating discourses and hot takes and moral condemnations on both sides: was the film anti-feminist? was the film Alt-Right?

Joker 2 in a sense doubles down on this idea via the character of Lee, another abusive woman preying on a victimized man. More fundamentally, though, it attempts once again to blow up the entire perverse worldview on which all these discourses depend.

I don't talk much about feminism for the same reason that I don't talk much about socialism; because both terms mean so many entirely contradictory things, and are mostly utilized in practice as narrative position markers and social boundaries and ritual words of blessing and imprecation. Whatever feminism means, though, it cannot possibly be that boys are never abused by women; or that a narrative where a boy is abused by his mother is for that reason necessarily anti-feminist. Nor can it possibly mean that it is anti-feminist to note the very real phenomenon of women sexually obsessed with male serial killers and criminals. Nor, I hasten to say, whatever social conservatism or any other term that designates an actual political philosophy in fact means, it cannot possibly be that women are not frequently mistreated by men, or that it is somehow politically incorrect to notice when they are.

Once again, the issue is simply that reality is real; and there is a strange social and political and cultural pressure in America to pretend that it is not. For anyone with any experience of history or merely of life, it is obvious that a great number of different sorts of people exist, and that therefore a great number of different things happen. Some of the time, these people will fit our generalizations and prejudices and preferred narratives; sometimes they will not. Such is life.

There is nothing at all deceptive about making general statements and drawing general principles from the chaotic detritus of life; it is, in fact, not only necessary but deeply important for truthfully understanding even individual events and people. The difference between truth and falsehood in such settings is, as Chesterton pointed out long ago, simply a matter of proportion. A truthful proportion will always survive an exception.

Anyway, whatever Joker and Joker 2 are about, it is not the meaningless questions of whether white men or black men or white women or Asian men or any other group whatsoever are ever victims or always victims or ever oppressors or always oppressors; it is not even the much more important and real questions of whether or not there is structural racism or structural economic injustice or widespread and culturally-approved mistreatment of women (the answer to these questions is yes). 

The question of Joker 2 is not finally a question at all, but an answer, a moral truth. People are real, and images and symbols are not; and inasmuch as we politically and culturally and institutionally choose to prefer the latter over the former, we are politically and culturally and institutionally committing ourselves to violence and abuse and murder. 

This basic reality, I dare say, has a great deal more to do with contemporary gender relations than anything having to do with feminism or anti-feminism. There has not been a meaningful popular feminist or anti-feminist movement in America since the 1970s; but there have been an awful lot of icons and symbols and narratives about men and women, some political, many pornographic, and virtually all premised on this basic ingrained cultural preference for images over people. When one surveys with placid eye the last century of gender relations in America, it is hard not to sympathize with the great and wise feminist writer Bell Hooks, who at an event with the tedious advertiser Gloria Steinem simply said regretfully that she feared that on the whole they had made it more difficult rather than less for men and women to talk to and understand each other. 

Or, perhaps, we could simply update what Chesterton said in 1919, which was that while "feminism" (a term for a very different set of beliefs in his own day) had many just indignations and many just goals, it was not for all that a theory of the sexes. One could say the same for nearly all discourse on sex and gender in America in the 2020s.

It is not wrong, and indeed is often very right and necessary and urgent, to note and counter injustices and wrongs and dysfunctions in society and in ourselves. The fundamental issue with nearly every discourse in America today, though, is that we increasingly lack any positive baseline by which to even recognize evils, let alone overcome them. 

I am a great advocate of metaphysics; not just because I think metaphysics are true, but because I know how absolutely practically useful and necessary they are for nearly everything. The entire tragedy of Joker 2 boils down to one simple point about what exists and what does not exist; and many other discourses and areas of life depend practically on truths as simple and as metaphysical. That your wife exists, and an AI chatbot does not exist, is not just an abstract insight, but a practical imperative for love and life and survival and salvation--yet that statement depends on metaphysics if anything does.

That beings and persons exist, and images and artifacts and facts do not, is one principle of metaphysics absolutely essential to life and survival in our world today. Another is that dysfunction is derived and derivable from function, but that function is not derived or derivable from dysfunction. In other words: if I know what a thing is and what it is for, I can determine whether it is achieving its end or not and whether it is aiming at it well or badly; but the simple knowledge that a thing is not achieving its end or is not aiming at it does not tell me in the least what that thing is for. If I know that an archer is trying to shoot an arrow at a target, I can measure exactly how far off he is from achieving his end; if all I know is that an archer has shot me with an arrow, I cannot from that fact alone figure out what he was aiming at in the first instance; and if the same archer fails entirely to shoot an arrow from a bow but instead uses the bow as a makeshift guitar and the arrow as a toothpick, I am very unlikely indeed to deduce the nature of archery from those facts alone.

Similarly, no number of narratives or experiences of dysfunction between men and women can tell us what relations between the sexes are supposed to be like; let alone what each sex is in fact aiming at in will and desire and telos and fundamental nature. Such things cannot even tell us what are the duties and responsibilities of each sex to the other; since such recounting of responsibilities depends entirely on the recognition of power, and therefore function. Wherever one sex has power over the other, they also have responsibility; from this nearly every historical Christian more about man and woman can be straightforwardly derived, but hardly a single contemporary practice, based as they are instead on the fundamental American commitment to the competitive shifting of responsibility and celebration of lawless power.

Of course, if coming to a reasonable understanding of the proper relationship of the sexes is the goal, Joker 2's narrative of dysfunctional romance is no help at all; though it does tell us something, at least, about what is going wrong.

Images and symbols and narratives are not bad; they are necessary means of coming to grips with reality and people and therefore achieving our ends. Lee, though, is a woman who has come to process the reality of Arthur and his masculinity and her femininity and his sexuality and her sexuality and their relationship entirely through a rather constrained narrative about anarchic violence committed by an iconic symbolic fellow wearing facepaint. This is rather dysfunctional! Arthur, meanwhile, does his best to come to grips with his romance with Lee through fantasies that are, in bare outline, at least, much more basically positive and truthful, grounded as they are in music and dance and the art of the past about positive romance. Neither, though, are trying really to come to grips with each other as actually existing persons.

Put slightly differently, what is wrong with both Arthur and Lee is that they are not trying to be human beings at all, or even to love human beings; they are trying to be and to love gods. Like any good Buddhist monk, Arthur has undertaken extreme, individual ritual effort and achieved Buddhahood, the identification of his earthly self with a transcendent supramundane entity with absolute knowledge and power. By attaching herself to him publicly, Lee succeeds in achieving a similar transformation into Harley Quinn, recognized and revered by the Joker's followers as well. 

What is really and truly disturbing about both transformations, though--what is really and truly disturbing about the American obsession with iconic gods--is the nature of the Buddhahood they are seeking.

As discussed above, a Buddha could be imagined as many things, from a nature god to God himself to a compassionate savior; all were defined in some sense by their identification with the objects of human desire, knowledge and power and love and God. What is really strange about the American pantheon, as I have pointed out in the past, is that its gods are defined one and all by violence and death.

Even considered as an iconic god, the Joker is essentially a figure of violence received and given; the victim of abuse who visits death randomly on others. It is this which Harley Quinn loves and reshapes herself to resemble. But what could this possibly have to do with anything she, or any other human being, actually wants?

America's Buddhas are not enlightened ones, but images of mutilated people. This is the essential truth to grasp, the essential truth without which even the stark moral condemnation of Joker 2 is all but meaningless.

What makes Arthur into the Joker is precisely that he is an victim of violence alienated from his own self; it is this about which his fans make images, it is this they admire and emulate. Arthur did not play a positive image of human happiness and fulfillment, and find that his followers preferred this image to him--a situation that would be much more difficult, since any image of genuine happiness would necessarily have had a great deal to do with Arthur as a human person and his desires, and would necessarily have contained within itself at least implicitly the essential truth that being must be preferred to seeming. Arthur turned his own status as mutilated and dysfunctional and violated into an image of lawless power through indifferent violence: and it was this which was worshipped and emulated by his followers and fans and American cinematic audiences.

It is for this reason, above all else, that Arthur's apotheosis is entirely inextricable from his own violent death; one is simply the logical result and embodiment of the other. To be a dead man, one must die; to be an image of violence, one must be sacrificed. It is this which Arthur realizes when he finally comes face to face with his followers; and sees his own destruction looking back at him from all those painted faces, and flees in terror for his life. Of course, they get him in the end.

The life of the living is offered to the dead; the person is sacrificed to the image. This is in one way or the other the core ritual sacrifice of the American religion, repeated thousands of times a day on television and the Internet. 

Or, to start over from the right end: the Eucharist is not a symbol or an image, but the present reality that the transcendentally existing God became and remains a presently existing man. Every image or symbol of Christ is defined by its reference to this reality; and is venerated only because of this reference. A picture of Christ is bowed to, not because it is aesthetically pleasing or traditionally iconographical, but because it refers to the reality of Christ. The Eucharist is bowed to because it is God.

In the same way, a human person is not an image or a symbol, but the reality of the joining of body and soul, matter and rational essence. Every image or symbol of a human person is defined by its reference to this reality; and is treated with respect, wept at and smiled at and invested in and enjoyed, only because of this reference. A movie or television show or picture is watched and enjoyed, not because it is aesthetically pleasing or traditionally iconographical, but because it refers to the reality of the human person. A person is loved because they are a person.

It is not an accident that the Protestant theology that declared the Eucharist a symbol produced a society for whom the human person is treated as a symbol; or that the Protestant theology that rejected the veneration of images because of their referents produced a society that routinely practices the sacrifice of referents to their images. It is not an accident that the Protestant theology that practiced violence against images and the Eucharist produced a society obsessed with images and incarnations of violence. The first and characteristic form of modern, lawless freedom was the freedom of liberated Protestants to destroy images of Christ and Mary and defile the Eucharist; which is simply the Joker by another name.

Speaking for myself, I emphatically prefer the reality of the violated man to the image of his confused and indifferent violence; and that is why I liked Joker 2. I realize that neither is a very common taste.

A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle (2019)

After all this time reading about and watching about America, it is a genuine relief to turn to France and deal with human beings again.

Contained within the above discussion of the American obsession with images is an immediate and straightforward political theology; one that is almost precisely the opposite of what we might describe as a Catholic political theology. Rather than individual people contributing to and sharing in the common good that in turn directs people to their final end in God, the American political theology might be described as Buddhist, or centered in individual efforts to achieve godhood through ritual practice or violence. In American politics, individual people strive to alienate themselves from their human desires and mutilate parts of themselves and perform the correct rituals and say the right words to become an iconic image of violence and so be empowered to wield or at least channel the essentially alien force of immanentized divinity that is political power. 

Whew. I got exhausted just typing that. Let's forget all about that weird stuff and talk about French politics.

At least for the last few centuries, the French have been almost as obsessed as Americans or Japanese Buddhists with the idea of becoming a god: their idea of godhood, though, has been and remains resolutely political, for a resolutely political society--perhaps the last truly political society in the West, if not the world as a whole. 

There is even a building in Paris called the Pantheon, where people can be officially enshrined by the state as a god. Recent recipients of this honor include Jean Zay, Germaine Tillion, Maurice Genevoix, and Simonne Vidal. 

Who? You ask. Well, as I said, the French are the last political people on the planet; and so naturally for them becoming a god means being officially recognized by the state for one's contributions to the common fund of cultural knowledge and/or one's services to the political commonwealth. But that's really lame, you say. Yes it is, I sagely reply; but it remains nonetheless far more rational than anything in America for the last century. 

Of all the heroes and gods of France, none ranks so highly in 2026 as Charles de Gaulle. This year, a two-part film on Charles De Gaulle was released in theaters and grew through word of mouth to become one of the most successful French films of the year; the last time Americans made a film about a famous President of the United States, 2024's Reagan, it was a partisan election-year hackjob that was critically derided, received several Razzies, and grossed $30 million on a $25 million budget. This two-part De Gaulle film is already the second big-budget French film about Charles de Gaulle this decade; and I have no doubt there are more to come.

Charles de Gaulle resigned from office in 1968, and died in 1970; his stock, though, has risen steadily year to year, and decade to decade, ever since, and stands higher now than at any point since his resignation. Opinion polling consistently ranks him as among the most popular, respected, and known figures in French history, above Napoleon and Voltaire and Louis XIV and Charlemagne and sometimes even Joan of Arc. 

More or less every French city and town has some street or monument named after him; and though while in office he was reviled both on the Left and the far Right, he is now invoked regularly and ritualistically by every political figure of every party. Anti-colonialists and nostalgists for colonialism alike justify their stances with reference to his career and choices; socialists and capitalists alike defend their policies by comparison with his policies. His is a name that is in the most straightforward sense "public"--it belongs to the people, like the names of Zeus and Apollo and Caesar, and can be utilized ritually by anyone, from the President to the lowest immigrant, to sanction and to bless and to curse. 

If future historians ever approach De Gaulle skeptically, in the manner of 19th century historians, they would be quite within the bounds of reason to dehistoricize him entirely, and treat "De Gaulle" as a genius or tutelary spirit of modern French statehood and nationality. Even his name, as many have pointed out, is obviously not a personal name, but a personification: "the one of Gaul," the spirit of France. Does the Joker exist? 

Thus do the French make gods of men; but to do him credit, Charles de Gaulle spent much of his life striving with all his might and all his energy and intelligence to turn himself into a god of just this type. Almost from its beginning, De Gaulle aspired to be a walking symbol of "a certain idea of France," a living embodiment of the spirit and soul of the eternal French nation, a one-man incarnation of the State. That he succeeded so grandly is notable; but what is even more notable is that he did so without ever violating his fundamental personal commitments or bedrock personal integrity.

A Certain Idea of France is a recent, voluminous English-language biography of De Gaulle by Julian Jackson; with all the advantages and disadvantages of such a work. On the positive side, the work shows the bibliographical breadth typical of recent scholarship, effortlessly sifting through endless primary and secondary sources to construct a detailed and factual narrative dotted with personal anecdotes and political perspectives of contemporaries and associates. On the negative side, also like much recent scholarship the book lacks the kind of fundamental political perspective that would allow for a true historical dialogue with someone like De Gaulle. The book is excellent at chronicling the twists and turns and contradictions and ironies and tensions in both the character and the project; but leaves us to an extent even more mystified than before both about how he managed to do and be what he was.

As someone who knows nothing about details, though, and everything about grand sweeping historical narratives, I flatter myself that I can provide some of that missing explication. Taken on his own terms, Charles de Gaulle offers one of the best examples in history of how to utilize to their fullest the purely moral and political sources of legitimacy in the absence of actual state power or resources; as well as how to exploit those sources to gain other forms of power and forge alliances while retaining the essential legitimacy for oneself. Properly understood, Charles de Gaulle is far more of an analog of Hildebrand or Joan of Arc than Louis XIV or Napoleon. 

To grasp this point, a brief summary is in order. Charles de Gaulle was a conservative Catholic from a North French military family whose parents were fairly typical "social Catholics": involved in Catholic Action, theoretically friendly to the working classes, economically paternalistic, hostile to the Revolution but loyal to the Republic and willing participants in Ralliement. Throughout his early career, De Gaulle's basic profile did not differ much from many other Catholics in the military, including his emotive nationalism and practical derision for the largely Masonic and liberal ruling politicians of the Third Republic. De Gaulle's service in WW1 had a similar effect on him as it did on many such people; cementing his patriotism and loyalty to the Republic while pushing his thought towards the possibility of total failure and defeat for his nation. For many such men, the following decades led them quite naturally down a road towards fascism--or at least Vichy.

As Jackson chronicles well, however, three aspects set De Gaulle even in his early career very sharply apart from the right-wing military men increasingly drawn towards the mystical nationalism and anti-Semitism embodied the influential newspaper L'Action Francaise and its editor Charles Maurras. 

1) The first was a consistent personality trait that might be portrayed positively as pragmatism, or negatively as ambition. Put simply, even in his early career De Gaulle sought out contacts with those who were actually powerful and actually governed the state; which meant under the Third Republic French Parliamentarians.

Throughout his life, De Gaulle himself avowed theoretically a kind of pragmatism, or rather what might be better called, drawing from his Catholic upbringing and education, a kind of prudentialism; the belief that in history, plans and structures could never be rigid ideological constructs, but always goal-oriented adaptions to "the conditions" or "the facts." The goal was absolute, and determined in advance by De Gaulle himself; the means, however, were entirely adaptable. All this, though, set him rather decisively apart from the mystical ideologisms of the rising European right and left.

2) A second trait came similarly from De Gaulle's Catholic upbringing; though not precisely from the kind of Catholic upbringing that others had had. Put simply, De Gaulle was raised on a deliberately synthetic national tradition that already in his father and grandfather had sought to combine the "conservative" and "Catholic" histories of Medieval France and the Ancien Regime with the military and political glories of the Revolution and the Republic. Later in his career, and especially during WW2, De Gaulle was quite willing to appeal to Charlemagne and the Catholic nature of French nationhood while recruiting Jews and Communists and declaring Vive l'Republique on any and every occasion--in a way that was highly successful at uniting different factions of French opponents of Vichy, but viewed often by both his friends and enemies as flexible bordering on the dishonest.

I would argue that this feature ought to be put side by side with, or perhaps even equated, with the prudentialism discussed above; since it merely did for history and the past what his prudentialism did for politics and the present. Neither, though, can be properly understood without realizing that De Gaulle's prudentialism depended entirely upon what I have called the fundamental transcendental structure of Catholic metaphysics and ethics. Charles De Gaulle was willing to work with anyone, and adjust his schemes and plans and institutional structures for any conditions, because for him they were merely means to an essentially transcendent goal of national salvation. Likewise, De Gaulle was willing to set the military victories of Louis IX, the Revolutionary Directorate, and Napoleon side by side because all were, for him, manifestations of the eternal and transcendent French nation. 

In his heart of hearts, De Gaulle was a mystical romantic Catholic nationalist; a believer in the transcendent reality of nations within and over the facts of history, but also in a transcendent supernatural or at least ecclesiastical and moral order over and above them. I am not myself a nationalist in this sense, though G.K. Chesterton was; but without it one will struggle to understand almost any action or even word of De Gaulle. Most of all one will struggle to understand what set him apart from so many other alleged nationalists who when the crisis came were willing to bow to Naziism, and surrender what for De Gaulle could never be surrendered: the honor of France before the world.

3) Thirdly, and most mundanely, De Gaulle was at least in one sense a resolute and determined and thoroughgoing anti-Imperialist--again in a Chestertonian sense. Taken in terms of his relationship with Imperialism and colonialism, De Gaulle was a moderate centrist; he viewed France's general "greatness" as an absolute goal and requirement, buttressed naturally by influence on other nations and the possession of colonies, but ultimately came to view France's colonies in Africa and the Middle East as an insupportable burden and is consequently remembered by many as a kind of visionary anti-colonialists man for making the decision to give them up. 

De Gaulle was an anti-Imperialist, though, in the deeper sense that he viewed nations as eternal realities and the natural basis of government and politics, and therefore was in practice a paranoid opponent of any earthly or political force that might seek to weaken or suppress or subject such nations. Put alternately, he was simply a cynic; a man who viewed international politics essentially as a competition between great states and nations, and therefore viewed with suspicion any attempt, however allegedly idealistic, to subject France to foreign political or military or economic power.

Or, more practically, from WW1 onwards, De Gaulle was a fanatical anti-German, whose entire career was dedicated to preparing for an inevitable war to the death with the anti-national abomination of the German Empire. From WW2 onwards, meanwhile, De Gaulle was quite a fanatical anti-American, who viewed the so-called "new international order" of the post-War years as an attempted economic, political, and military subjection of France and Europe to the barbaric nationless void of America. During the inter-war years, this anti-Germanism set him more and more in opposition to the prevailing French far Right, which more and more looked to Nazi Germany as a model and ally; and after WW2, it set him very strongly in opposition to several decades of American Presidents and French and British and German governments. The fund of insulting and denigrating language about De Gaulle from Americans 1940-1968 is nearly as large as the fund of insulting and denigrating language about him from Frenchmen during his Presidency. 

Anyway, these three factors help to explain both why De Gaulle, despite his background and upbringing, did not end up joining the French Far Right or supporting the Vichy regime; they also help to explain how he was able to bring together such a diverse coalition of right- and left-wing elements during WW2, and even provide some practical guidance for how he was able to govern France in the '60s for so long as a centrist non-partisan quasi-monarchical President. 

None of these, though, explain how De Gaulle became De Gaulle, the one absolute factor that allowed him to succeed everywhere he in fact succeeded, and be remembered all these decades after his death. This factor is in fact almost purely moral, even mystical, in nature; and cannot be conveyed except through narrative, art, and image. 

Charles De Gaulle succeeded in being very widely and at times universally seen by Frenchmen as a living embodiment of a French nation and state that transcended even the deep divisions between Right and Left, Republican and Ancien Regime, Catholic and liberal--nay, that transcended even the practical dissolution of the French state. The reason he succeed in this was not because of any complex policy or plan or ideology of his own, but because of a single act: an act in the story that is life.

The Third Republic was a deeply divided and polarized society, defined by the bitter anti-clerical hatred of the Masonic and liberal left for the anti-liberal and frequently anti-Semitic Catholic right. When the liberals seized power, even temporarily, they persecuted the Catholic Church and banned religious orders; when the right seized power, even temporarily, they did their best to strike back; and both sides repressed the socialist and syndicalist Left. The wounds of the Revolution and Napoleon ran very deep; and when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, it was these wounds as much as the military defeat that led very quickly to the collapse of the French government. The French military, right-wing and contemptuous of the liberal politicians and at least moderately sympathetic with the Nazis, did not betray the war effort; they fought and were defeated. They were not willing, however, to continue the fight; they asked the government to sue for armistice; and the government resigned, and in a bloodless coup the right-wing Catholic Marshal Philippe Pétain became Head of State and signed a treaty that split France between a weak nominally independent state in the West and a German Occupation Zone in the East. 

De Gaulle, after years of scheming, had gotten himself appointed Under-Secretary for War at the height of the crisis of the collapsing government in June of 1940; only a few days before, he had been made a General, and thus was the most junior such officer in the French military. He was also a former protege of Marshall Pétain, and shared his background and general politics if not his sense of personal propriety (Pétain was a famously unfaithful Catholic who had civilly married a divorced mistress and frequently cheated on her). While later De Gaulle would say that he had broken with Pétain in the mid-1920s over politics, Jackson argues fairly convincingly that the dispute actually centered on authorship credit for a history of the French army that De Gaulle had ghostwritten for Pétain but later chose to publish under his own name. 

Still, when it became clear to the junior General and Under-Secretary Charles De Gaulle that the French government was on the verge of signing an armistice with Germany at Pétain's instigation, he made the decision and carried out the act that was to make him immortal. 

Without telling anyone, on June 17th, 1940, Charles de Gaulle took a British plane out of France, where over the coming days he told the British government, Winston Churchhill, and all French exiles he met that both the armistice with Germany and the Pétain government were treasonous and illegitimate, and that as the result he was now the sole legitimate embodiment of the French state. On June 18th, he succeeded in persuading the British Cabinet (without Churchhill's participation) to let him make a French broadcast denouncing the "treason" of the new French government and calling for French soldiers to keep fighting and join him in England. On June 19th, he broadcast again and declared explicitly that the Pétain government was illegitimate. 

This "18 juin" later became De Gaulle's crowning moment, so much that it is still commemorated to this day; in reality, however, as Jackson chronicles, few Frenchmen heard it, and even fewer heeded it. Still, it was the act itself that mattered--an act embodied not just in a single radio broadcast but in the next five years of tireless efforts. During that time, De Gaulle acted resolutely and consistently according to the beliefs that he had expressed on June 18 and expressed again and again to everyone he encountered, French or American or British or German: 1) first, that Pétain's surrender of France to the Nazis was an illegitimate act; 2) second, that this act, along with the deceptive and coercive means of his coming to power, rendered Pétain's entire government illegitimate; 3) third, that because he, Charles de Gaulle, held a position in the French government and military on 17th and 18th June, and was the only member of that government who had not either resigned or participated in Pétain's treason, and because he had in his actions then and since embodied in himself the general will of the French people and the nature of the mystical French nation, he himself, as an individual, now constituted the legitimate French state for all domestic and international purposes.

The book's author Julian Jackson is certainly not a mystic nationalist; nevertheless, the starkness of his narrative renders De Gaulle's acts and accomplishments not less but more remarkable than the standard hagiographic account. As Jackson points out, on 17th and 18th June 1940 Charles de Gaulle really was acting entirely alone, without either the advice or assistance or support of anyone in the French government or military, both in rejecting the armistice and in fleeing to Britain to form a government-in-exile there. In the beginning, as he points out as well, Charles de Gaulle's "government-in-exile" was literally just Charles de Gaulle himself; and until October 1940 was more or less confined to a small staff working out of a single tiny office. 

Then, too, far from being, as Pétain accused him, a British puppet, the British government largely regarded De Gaulle with a mix of contempt and hostility, gave him as few resources as possible, and often outright banned him from communicating with or traveling to his forces in Africa and on the Continent. When the Americans joined the war, Roosevelt took an immediate and deeply personal dislike to De Gaulle and did everything in their power to prevent his Free French from being recognized by anyone as the legitimate embodiment of France rather than the Vichy. This was not a promising situation for a government-in-exile.

Nor was De Gaulle himself, as Jackson recounts, all that impressive or charismatic either in person or on the radio. His main attribute was a freakish (for his time) tallness and an accompanying physical awkwardness that people regarded as comic; combined with a stiff, old-fashioned military manner and a surprisingly brusque and cold demeanor towards subordinates. Innumerable accounts exist of passionate French exiles called by the siren song of De Gaulle on the radio risking life and limb to join the Free French and meet the great De Gaulle only to find themselves being stiffly received in a small office by a cold man who quickly appraised their uses and told them their jobs without ceremony. In serving France and him, he said again and again during those years, people were simply doing their duty--and required no special treatment or applause. Practically every British official, up to and including Churchhill, who dealt with him came to loathe him as a conniving bastard and ingrate.

That even given these constraints De Gaulle succeeded by the end of the war in being universally recognized outside of France as the leader of the legitimate French government and a partner in the Allied Victory, while also being welcomed everywhere within France by massive crowds as the one and only Liberator of France represents one of the most remarkable political achievements in human history. Jackson's record is consequently worth studying in detail. 

Still, everything in some measure comes back to the single, lone acts of the 17th and 18th June, 1940; and the beliefs that De Gaulle came to during those days. Put mystically, Charles de Gaulle believed that in his lone rejection of the armistice and the treasonous government that had made it he was embodying and incarnating the transcendent French nation and the will of its people. Put more historically and rationally (as he himself sometimes put it during these years), we might say that he was making a series of risky and high-stakes bets on matters of fact: 1) First, that regardless of the military circumstances, the political reality was that the French people would never accept the moral legitimacy of either the Nazi government, its occupational authority over part of France, or the French government that had treasonably surrendered to it. 2) Second, that in the long run the Germans would lose the World War after America was drawn into the war. 3) And third, that if and when Germany lost the war the French government that had collaborated with the Germans would be seen as illegitimate both by the French people and by the victorious Allies. 

Underlying this third factor was a very stark and in fact quite pessimistic diagnosis of France's present and future position in the world--leading to an extremely bold and quixotic goal. When the Axis Powers lost the Second World War, Charles de Gaulle believed, France would be an occupied territory. If there were no recognized French authority and government universally accepted as one of the victorious Allies, France would be seen not as a victorious nation but as a defeated power, and consequently would have no representation and no voice in the new world order to be constructed. The combination of these factors would mean that France would be gravely dishonored, would lose her moral stature and "greatness" forever in both her own and the world's eyes--and never rise again.

The conclusion of this pessimistic analysis was that at all costs De Gaulle must succeed in one overriding task: building or embodying a solely French political authority that by the end of the war would be accepted internationally and domestically as a member of the Allies and a victorious Power. 

To accomplish this despite being under the thumb of a hostile British government with no resources of his own, De Gaulle grasped perhaps better than any other leader in history the art of using moral legitimacy to punch above any reasonable or practical political weight he possessed. One way he did this was mass media; another was direct, personal contacts and the building up of networks of fanatical personal supporters; another was the constant weakening and reshuffling and bullying of people under him. 

Among the most important methods De Gaulle utilized was the incessant angry, emotional denunciations he made to and about the British, and later the Americans and other Allies, at even the tiniest implied slight or restriction or failure to immediately grant a demand. Though these outbursts got De Gaulle a reputation as an ungrateful hysteric, they were, as he averred in private, in outline both rational and calculated. When in a position of weakness, he informed his confidants, the only way to get attention and power is to get and hold the attention of those with power and wear them down to get what you want. A cooperative De Gaulle who did not make waves would have been more liked within Westminster; but he would not have been accepted as an equal or even a junior partner. 

For the rest, De Gaulle's plan was relatively simple: to succeed against enormous odds and by hook and crook and British resources and fraud in gaining gradual control of French colonies in Africa; and from there to form actual or close enough French military divisions to participate in actual or close enough military actions as often and successfully as possible and publicize those actions in such a way as to ensure that the general public both in France and in the rest of the West came to view the Free French as a military participant in WW2; and from there to succeed in forcing the Allies to deal with him more and more and accept France to some extent at least nominally as a full member of the Allied Powers; and from there to ensure that, when the invasion of France took place, it would be accompanied by well-trained and drilled Free French military divisions; and from there to ensure that, after German collapse and retreat from France, at least some of the more important parts of France would be liberated by Free French divisions, and Charles de Gaulle would be on the scene to do at least some of the liberating, or at least celebrate it; and from there to ensure that when the post-war plans were made and the post-war order constructed, France was represented among the victorious Allies by the Free French and the government of De Gaulle.

(In this, it should be noted that the celebrated "French Resistance" had initially no part in De Gaulle's overall plans, which centered on the building of an alternate French government and military; it was only reluctantly and slowly that De Gaulle was persuaded to deal with the Resistance, and then mainly with the goal of bringing them under central control in preparation for the post-war settlement; they did ultimately play an important role, though, in preparing for his reception in France during the Liberation).

As a matter of fact, De Gaulle succeed only partially at all of these goals--with maybe his biggest setback being simply the personal dislike of the very WASP-y Episcopalian FDR for what he regarded as the bizarre mystical Catholic prima donna De Gaulle. Still, when the dust had settled, De Gaulle was universally accepted and hailed within France as the legitimate ruler of France, and celebrated throughout the West by the general public as a hero of the Allied Cause; and therefore eventually accepted by the Allies as the legitimate representative of France, to be included broadly among the Allied victors; and thus succeeded not so much in shaping the post-War order to France's benefit as saving France's honor, ensuring that she was treated not as a defeated and occupied power like Germany, but as a liberated but honored and victorious nation. And it really is true that virtually everything that has taken place in Europe since WW2 depends on that basic fact. 

WW2 is De Gaulle's moment of glory; his most impressive achievement, perhaps, is his return to power in the 1950s, where he succeeded in squaring the circle and inspiring both a coup and a simultaneous counter-coup both offering him the office of President and the power to write a new French Constitution himself. This followed a very long time in the wilderness, though, bitter years in which De Gaulle was widely derided as a has-been but tried his best to maintain his stature as a figure above party and partisanship and embodying the French nation in its purity--an effort that ultimately paid off, though largely by the collapse of his rivals. 

As President of France, De Gaulle governed as something close to a limited, democratic dictator--or more properly, monarch--bypassing the legislature and implementing his policies as much as possible via democratic referendum, but resigning the very first time such a referendum went against him. While in power, De Gaulle the nationalist did his best to ally with Germany and lay the groundwork for what would become the European Union--largely as an anti-American effort. As he put it, "What is the point of Europe? The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans." I have little doubt that if he were alive today, he would be supporting European unity against far-right nationalists for the same reason. Perhaps his most famous move was his shock decision in 1966 to take France out of NATO entirely, which did little but delay the inevitable; more impactful in the long run was his repeated blocking of the United Kingdom's attempts to join the European Community and economic partnership, which De Gaulle perceptively opposed as attempts to extend American influence. 

In any case, I have no interest in writing a hagiography for De Gaulle; or in simply telling funny stories about him. (Among the funniest, alas, have to do with his underhanded efforts to maintain economic and political control over former French colonies in Africa, which involved him in a perpetual succession of coups and counter-coups). 

Ultimately, de Gaulle's power even as President depended less on his constitutional position as on the moral status gained by his triumph in WW2; and the main thing that can be said about his rule as President is that he saw clearly, once again, the power that this moral legitimacy gave him, and that he used that power determinedly and clearly, not for personal power, but to achieve what he saw as France's best interests. In the process, he established the modern French state and constitution, the only durable one since the French Revolution, ended the bitter left-right divide that had divided France since the Revolution, and established France as the core with Germany of a new European Union with collective global status and power. This was not everything he wanted--in later years, he was prone to pessimistic rants about how the French people had lost their elan and he had only delayed their inevitable collapse into comfortable American dominance and obsolescence--but it was a great deal, more, certainly, than anyone in the 1930s or 1940s in France would have imagined possible. 

At the present, France is governed by the execrable Emmanuel Macron, and accomplishes little of note except sparking a political backlash; but there are more positive glimmers on the horizon. For my part, I would say something that I cannot fully justify now; which is simply that to the extent American global power and legitimacy continues to collapse in the 21st century, the only possible political authority capable practically and morally of taking up the mantle of global authority is a united Europe, in which France must play a foremost role. 

Charles de Gaulle was certainly not a saint; but he was a lifelong, practicing Catholic who was faithful to his wife and devotedly cared for a child with Down's Syndrome. He was also a man who aspired to godhood, of a type that is not quite pagan and not quite Catholic, but something, perhaps, in between the two.

If France still endures today as a distinctive nation with a genuine political culture, it is due in large part to Charles de Gaulle; and if at any point in the future, as is not improbable, France plays a consequential and positive role in the course of human history and the coming 21st century, the world will owe it in no large part to the solitary act of a junior French general who in his nation's darkest hour chose not to accept defeat.

And that, I think, is a godhood far superior to anything discussed above.