Everlasting Life: Annihilation, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Stalin and the Bomb, The Unconsoled

"You can combine up to a certain point; you can distort up to a certain point; after that you lose the identity; and with that you lose everything. [...] A thing that has changed entirely has not changed at all. It has no bridge of crisis. It can remember no change. If you wake up tomorrow and you simply are Mrs. Dope, an old woman who lets lodgings at Broadstairs—well, I don’t doubt Mrs. Dope is a saner and happier person than you are. But in what way have you progressed? What part of you is better? Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”

“No,” said Phillip, with suppressed but sudden violence, “I deny that any limit is set upon living things.”

-G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914)

We live in a time where more and more people want to stop existing. Considered historically, this is a surprisingly common desire--and a key to understanding many things present and past otherwise incomprehensible.

Last year, numerous otherwise normal people online, and an even greater number of abnormal people online, and also many people working for the United States Federal Government, embraced a twenty-year-old meme in which Werner Herzog narrates a single pilgrim penguin inexplicably leaving its colony and heading out into the frozen tundra to die alone in the cold. While for the old-fashioned pessimistic humanist Herzog this was supposed to once again point out the inhumanity and cruelty of the natural world which humans must transcend through reason, for innumerable people in America today this nihilistic story about an individual seeking death through isolation was instead seen as inspirational, even aspirational. Numerous otherwise sane people started talking about "Being the Penguin" as though lonely death by exposure and starvation was a desirable goal--and perhaps, for them, it was. Whatever Americans are in 2026, we certainly are not normal.

Still, if Americans are abnormal, they remain human; and our passion for death can in fact be understood in the light of universal human nature, via the concept and pragmatic, ethical reality of transcendence, which understood properly is as foundational to human action as food and drink is to human bodily life.

If, as Aristotle says, the soul is in a sense all things, at least by way of relation and telos, then the soul quite naturally and necessarily wants to transcend itself. If, as Aquinas says, man is ordered towards God as to an end that transcends his reason, then man quite naturally and necessarily desires to transcend himself. 

Transcendence, though, is a confusing concept. In the most basic sense, one thing transcends another when it has something in common with it, but also goes beyond it. In the proper Thomistic-metaphysical sense, one thing transcends a group of other things when it contains all their perfections in a higher, simpler, and more eminent way. Either way, though, a puzzle emerges: for what could it possibly mean for a thing to transcend itself?

One rather simple answer to that question might be that a thing transcends itself when it ceases to be itself, and becomes something else. If today I am Nathan Israel Smolin, and tomorrow I cease to be Nathan Israel Smolin and become Captain Bob "Captain Peabody" Peabody, a blue clayman veteran of the Second World War and also a blogger, there can be no doubt that I have transcended Nathan Israel Smolin in at least some sense. As Captain Peabody I can certainly reflect with satisfaction that I have left behind all the difficulties and limitations of Nathan-Israel-Smolin-hood; as well as in the concomitant fact that as Captain Peabody I will evince perfections and have experiences that Nathan Israel Smolin could never have had. And if it is the case that Nathan Israel Smolin must and will inevitably die, a transformation into Captain Peabody could well extend my life, and an indefinite series of such transformations extend it indefinitely, and so constitute a kind of eternal life beyond the span of human years.

For all that, though, there are (at least) two reasons that such a transformation does not constitute transcendence in either its metaphysical or ethical senses. The first is the simple fact that in gaining the perfections and advantages and experiences and memories and indefinable spark of being a blue clayman with a large apparent-rocket-launcher attached to the right side of my body I will have at the same time lost the indefinable spark of being Nathan Israel Smolin. Or, put another way, I will not have transcended or moved beyond the entire category of human (and clayman) personalities in such a way as to contain all the perfections of them in a supereminent way; rather, I will simply have moved from one member of that category to another. Or, put in the most fundamental way of all, I will not have found eternal life, but died.

In the second place comes the difficulty pointed out by G.K. Chesterton (via the honorable Dorian Wimpole) above, that in ceasing to be Nathan Israel Smolin I have in the proper sense simply ceased to be. Human personality and personhood, it turns out, is not simply an accidental relation added to a kind of quasi-physical substance; as rational beings, our personhood defines and constitutes each one of us in toto, body and soul. Even if (arguendum) in the transformation from Smolin to Peabody and from flesh to clay every single atom currently present in my body were kept and none discarded, the mere fact of altering my personal and rational identity from that of a human being from Alabama to a clayman from Claymatia would involve my destruction. For a transformation to be an improvement, let alone a true form of transcendence, something of the original must be preserved and survive the transition.

As I have pointed out before in this space, America has over the past fifty years been obsessed with the concept and term of identity as no other in history--even while showing little or no understanding of what identity actually is. 

If personhood and personality and therefore identity is for rational beings (as both Aristotle and Aquinas new) fundamentally defined and even constituted by relation, we could quite easily predict that the pervasive isolation and atomization of our society would result in an obsessive fixation on identity. People always become obsessively fixated on important things they are in the process of losing. And if at times our society has seemed to show a kind of naive utopian optimism about identity as such--assuming as an article of faith that every asserted or imagined or even merely vaguely felt identity was ipso facto good and just and necessary for happiness and compatible with every other identity--we can also recognize in this identitarianist optimism the kind of avoidant magical thinking present in nearly every psychological experience of loss.

Still, if there is a primal terror that makes us cling to our identities against the world, if there is an animalistic rage that makes us use them as weapons, if there is an avoidant naiveté that makes us accept any and every identity merely as a shield against the infinite dark, there is nonetheless no denying that there is also, deeply rooted in us, a desire to transcend our identities, chosen or unchosen, shallow or deep; and that this desire can quite easily be twisted into an unslakable thirst for annihilation.

In the remaining paragraphs of this essay, then, I will be tracing this human thirst for annihilation through a number of different fictional stories and historical accounts, in all of which we will be attempting to understand the human proclivity for self-destruction not through the lenses of ethics or metaphysics, but via psychology and narrative and history. By understanding these accounts, we will, hopefully, come closer to understanding ourselves and our society--and in so doing, hopefully learn to counter the thirst for death wherever it is found in America, in others, and in ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

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

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

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

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

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

ENVOI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Political Trends: A Study

Future Political Trends: A Study

For roughly the past six months, I have been repeatedly mentioning, in my posts on this blog, my intention to write up something about current and future political trends. I have not done so for a number of reasons, including (in no particular order) disinterest, boredom, anger, disgust, Lent, Easter, the death of Pope Francis, the election of Pope Leo, my desire to write short stories, a school field trip, my birthday, and the onset of spring. Central to my delays, however, has been the fundamental grimness of the topic itself.

Another thing that happened in the interval, however, was Easter; which is, properly considered, the only thing that has ever really happened. It struck me, on Easter night, that Easter is, perhaps, the best standpoint from which to consider present political realities. It is certainly the best standpoint from which to consider the sweep of human history and human life as a whole. 

In any case, I firmly believe that eternal novelties like Easter are a much better means of understanding than the faded abstractions of political and economic ideology that dominate so much of discourse. 

As Chesterton said in the Daily Herald, quite rightly, political ideologies and analyses nearly always lag at least a half-century behind actual political systems. In the 1910s, he pointed out how profoundly unsuited the 18th and 19th century categories of Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and the like were for the era of syndicalism and great strikes and great states and secret societies and global warfare. In a similar vein, but even more so, the categories that we use for unraveling the tangled events of our time are practically all hoary 20th century abstractions such as Fascism, Naziism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, and the like--when they are not the same, even more faded 19th century abstractions such as Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Liberalism, and so forth. 

I would suggest that one of the greatest threats to our political life today, a threat that has again and again allowed evils to burgeon and flourish undetected, is simply the enormous gap between reality and our ability to analyze it. This may seem a rather distant and abstract threat, but is in reality among the most practical causes of the practical evils of our time. The year 2025 does not lack for crimes and tyrants--but it does profoundly, I am tempted to say unprecedentedly, lack for both practical recognition of these evils and practical efforts to counter them. And a foremost reason for this lack, I increasingly think, is simply that people cannot understand these evils, cannot recognize them, frequently do not even seem to notice them, because they happen to fall into gaps in their abstract, categorical understanding of such things. 

For some bizarre reason, the real estate developer, media mogul, and brand icon Donald Trump continues to be analyzed, again and again and at ever greater length and with ever greater portentous seriousness by ever more prestigious intellectuals, entirely by comparison with a mid-20th century Italian movement of ex-socialist, WW1-veteran-populated paramilitary squads turned revanchist dictatorship. Like any historical comparison, there are certainly truths to be drawn from this one--but the gap between reality and analytical abstraction is, nevertheless, so vast that nearly the whole of Trump's actual ideology and program and even legitimate crimes can be, and have been, and continue to be buried within. 

Nevertheless, in carrying out an analysis of present trends, and their likely future results, I would like to be absolutely clear about what I am doing, and why. I am not a historicist, let alone a historical fatalist: I do not believe in memetics, or Hegelian dialectics, or progress. When I speak of trends, I am speaking ultimately of either ideas or habits residing in the actual intellects and wills of actual people: ideas and habits which exercise great power over those people's actions, but never fully determine them. 

People can and do reject ideas they have held, especially when they are ideas that they have never consciously understood, but only passively absorbed from their environments. People can and do change their habits, including habits that have become deeply engrained in their minds and hearts and wills over many years. 

On the most abstract level, I consider history to be first and foremost the study of human actions and the motivations behind them; so that the fundamental historical question is not merely the positivistic query of "What happened?," but the much more intrusive demands "What did they do?" and "Why did they do it?"

What is true for historical actions writ large is even more true for the subset of human actions that make up political systems past and present. Governing, particularly in the modern world, is a highly complex and technical set of actions attempting to shape and respond to constantly shifting conditions. Still, it always depends first and foremost on conscious, considered human action; and conscious, considered human action depends first and foremost on rational ideas and goals. 

Yet people are not always, or perhaps even often, aware of the ideas and goals underlying their own actions, let alone the broader social conditions and trends to which they are responding. It is for this reason, above all, that this kind of analysis is useful. As anyone knows who has ever tried to change a deeply-engrained idea or habit, one of the most important steps is often merely recognizing the actual ideas one unconsciously holds, and the actual habits that one unconsciously possesses. Only then, as a rule, can one then set out to change them.

Hence, while I am engaged in this essay in modestly claiming to understand contemporary trends and their likely future impacts, I am not engaged in actually trying to predict the future. To do so would be to fall under the curse of Chesterton's game of Cheat the Prophet: the game whereby smart people predict the future by extending current trends indefinitely, and the human race thwarts them by the simple expedient of going and doing something else. In this post, I am quite self-consciously teeing up to play a round of this game with the human race, providing them with a helpful listing of the trends they will need to know about in order to defy them. In this, I heartily encourage the human race to cheat me: nay, I demand it. That is, in fact, the entire point of this exercise. If all my predictions are vindicated, I will be deeply, profoundly disappointed in you all.

Of course, the trends I discuss below are not uniformly positive or negative. Some are in my judgment evil, some few are good, some are, in themselves, merely neutral. Nonetheless, my modest claim is merely that if we wish to exercise some control over our collective destinies, it is helpful to know what is happening: only then can we choose to aid what is good, to resist what is evil, and, hopefully and above all, to repent and seek the good. This is my exhortation.

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Over the last few months, years, and/or decades of my life, I have seen some interesting things, read some interesting books, and come to some conclusions about the crises of modern political life. In the last few months in particular, these conclusions have been sharpened by discussions, debates, and reading and crystallized into a few relatively simple, albeit very broad and rather tentative, theses. 

In Defense of Overly Broad Theoretical Nonsense

I fully recognize that this blog post constitutes in essence a smattering of overly broad theoretical nonsense (see above). However, I would, as a historian, defend the value for history and politics alike of extremely broad theoretical constructions of particular topics, periods, etc. While there is always a great danger that theoretical constructions will overwhelm the actual concrete complexity of different societies, situations, events, persons, etc, in fact this danger is generally less, I think, when the theoretical constructions in question are deliberately broad and explicitly theoretical. No one is likely to mistake a blog post or a Chesterton book about the economic and social problems of humanity en masse for a work of historiography; but they may well mistake an academic-historical theory of life or death or economics or religion or human nature contained in and shaping a history textbook for historiography. Academia is in fact littered with half-baked general theories, littering the footnotes and text of books and articles of esteemed historians and college freshmen alike. I have at least, I hope, had the decency to separate my grand theories out and put them elsewhere to be laughed at.

For the moment, however, I must formally ask you to trust, not only that the below theses are based on many hours and thousands of pages of reading in various historical topics and periods, but that the below theses are not designed to replace such content or such reading, but merely to (hopefully) illuminate it.

These theses, I think, have at least something to say about the disasters unfolding around us, and what to possibly do about them. So here they are.

Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King

Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King 

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three]

Day had dawned before he was even aware he had been asleep, and when he awoke the priest Apollon was waiting by his cot, his old face drawn and worn, as if he had slept even less than Theodotus. Such hours suit me; the soldier and the deacon alike. Less sleep means less time for dreams.

Surely the old confessor must have similar dreams? For a moment, as the sleep cleared from his mind, he toyed with the idea of asking him about them. I saw so many like you, old man. Do you dream of the walls and the chains that held you? Or the men in fine robes who questioned you, day after day, always the same question, over and over again? Or the soldiers who held you by the arms and struck you on command? Or do you merely dream of the day they put out your eye? But the first words he spoke were more to the point: 

"My investigation of the palace is proceeding well. Today I must interview the clerics of the court."

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]

There is something very strange about the human mind. 

One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization. 

One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.

A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.

Varieties of Leftism

Varieties of Leftism

I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.

There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.

There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism." 

When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.

Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again. 

All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.

Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles. 

That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.

In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.

A Short Guide to Barefoot Walking

A Short Guide to Barefoot Walking

I do a lot of walking, and a lot of walking barefoot, regularly exploring roads, sidewalks, fields, and woods in this scandalous state of undress. When people learn this, they generally have some questions for me, questions like: why? 

I have never really been able to answer this question, so here is an essay on the topic.

The simplest and probably most truthful answer to the question is that I've been doing it since I was a kid, when my brothers and I would spend summers on a cattle farm in rural Ohio, and I kept doing it when I got older because some of my brothers did too and I thought it was kinda cool and I don't know, it was something to do, you know?

In the eyes of the general public, though, barefoot walking has gained a great deal of mystique that is almost entirely unjustified. I promise that I do not walk barefoot to gain health benefits in regard to my posture, or because I want to be in closer touch with the Earth my mother. Barefoot running is supposedly good for you, and lots of people now wear barefoot-shoes to imitate the barefoot stride, but to be honest every time I've tried to run barefoot I've gotten horrible shinsplints. Go figure.

Still, I think the above qualifies this essay as CULTURALLY RELEVANT. So if you, dear reader, ever feel compelled to try to get into walking barefoot, here is a Guide to the topic, which mostly explains in great detail why you absolutely should not get into walking barefoot. It is divided into BULLET POINTS and STEPS, which are all out of order, and culminates in a mystical ramble on the nature of intelligence and divinity. I'm sorry.

The End of the Armistice

[A new concept: after years of reading G.K. Chesterton's newspaper columns, I have really come to like the format. There is something interesting about seeing an essayist with a broad variety of interests comment in real time on things as they come up, whether general events or politics or religion or literature or life. This is not true of most modern newspaper columns, which are short and narrowly focused on partisan politics. With this in mind, I have set myself the task of writing a weekly "column" in which I comment on whatever the hell I want, with very little editing, and while limiting myself in length (c. 2000-3000 words) and complexity. I make no claims whatsoever that these "essays" will be even a hundredth as interesting as Chesterton's.]

The End of the Armistice

Prices are high, cost of living through the roof, inflation peaking, workers desperate for steady employment and higher wages, businesses desperate for labor, productivity down, resignations endemic, corporate profits through the roof, traditional sectors of the economy being hollowed out and replaced by new, creative forms of gambling and get-rich-quick schemes, reports of new, localized but increasingly apocalyptic conflicts appear daily on the news, there are rumblings of labor strikes and even revolution, and many people seem to find it impossible to do the most basic things.

What year is it? 1920.

At the beginning of the event known colloquially as "the Pandemic" (much as people in 1920 spoke colloquially of "the War"), I made a few observations and predictions which I have had no cause to retract:

1) That the Pandemic was the most significant global event since the World Wars, precisely because it was an event affected almost everyone, in every stratum of society throughout the world, immediately and extremely.

2) That in predicting how society and individuals would respond and react to the Pandemic, we should look to the World Wars.

3) That therefore the period after the Pandemic, like the periods after both Wars, would be marked by significant societal and political and international instability.

4) In particular, I believed that the immediate impact of Pandemic conditions would lead to an increase in stress and stress-related behaviors, a sense of personal and global instability a la "anything can happen," and therefore to simultaneous and staggered increases in both extreme risk-averse behavior and extreme risk-prone behavior. That is, faced with the knowledge that Events with extreme personal and global effects can happen apart from normal, societally- and intellectually-approved calculations and systems, people would spend a significant period of time oscillating between an irrational desire to flee from all dangers, and an equally irrational desire to risk anything and everything since they're probably doomed anyway. And the result of both of these impulses would be social and political instability.