Don't Follow the News

[This is an old essay I wrote for a local Catholic publication a number of years ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons.]

Don’t Follow the News: A Manifesto

Don’t follow the news. Don’t watch it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t read it. Don’t engage with it. Don’t post about it or argue about it on social media. I have given this advice to friends, enemies, total strangers, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists. This is the most important advice I can give to Americans today.

Allow me to explain, in a somewhat roundabout and proverb-studded way, why I say this.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you’ve satisfied his hunger for a whole day, though, you’ve created a problem for all the people who also wanted to sell this man fish, or perhaps Hamburger Helper. Instead, try selling him a picture of a fish. When you come back to him ten minutes later, he will be even more desperate, even more fixated on fish, and his judgment will be even more impaired from the hunger. In short, he will be an even better customer than before. By the time the man finally dies of starvation a few months later, you will have had the opportunity to sell him an enormous number of pictures of fish, increasing the shareholder value of your publicly-traded fish media corporation to the greatest degree possible. Call this the economy.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Unfortunately, the money actually possessed by any given hungry and stupid man is finite. As an alternative to this system, consider one where a third party gives you money every time you manage to momentarily catch the man’s attention. Call this advertising.

There is nothing sadder than the death of a clown. A single clown, wearing the same outfit and performing the same set of tricks, possesses only a limited ability to catch and hold the same person’s attention. Also you have to pay the clown. Instead, consider getting people to send you pictures and videos and texts describing random things that may or may not be happening or have happened anywhere in the world. Using all of these, you should be able to attract the fool’s attention a great deal longer. Call this journalism.

Everyone is special. It turns out that not everything in your pile of random media is equally effective at catching and holding the fool’s attention. Perhaps you should consider constructing a robot to sort that pile into an infinity of smaller piles, each one associated algorithmically with a particular group of people. Use this robot’s findings to more effectively attract and hold your fool’s attention. Call this targeted advertising.

Sex sells. So does self-righteousness and homicidal rage. Thanks to your personal targeted advertising robot, you will soon discover that some types of content, and some types of human emotion, are more successful at attracting and holding your fool’s attention than others. Put simply, you want to be manipulating emotions that are easily activated, intense, overpowering, and self-reinforcing. You want to be able to hold up a picture and have your fool be instantly and intensely focused, resulting in a fool who is more pliant and receptive to similar content for all time thereafter. Call this, depending on the precise emotions targeted, pornography, advertising, political action, or the news.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that if you show a man a picture of his best friend being beaten to death by his oldest enemy, you will attract his attention very strongly. However, you will also produce any number of other highly incalculable effects, such as wailing and gnashing of teeth, intense depression, ritual acts of mourning, and so on, most of which stand in the way of attracting his attention again soon. Instead try showing him a picture of someone he has never met, who slightly resembles his best friend, being mildly to gravely inconvenienced by someone else he has never met, who has some random feature in common with his oldest enemy. It turns out that while this distant and possibly fictitious scenario produces a similar emotional reaction and gets the man’s attention just as effectively as a truthful account of a meaningful personal disaster, his reaction will be much more repeatable and manipulatable. Call this the news cycle.

Despair is the opiate of the masses. If you show someone a grave act of injustice happening to people they care about a few feet from them, odds are they will want to do something about it, whether that involves stopping the injustice in progress, punishing it, or perhaps creating a systemic societal revolution to prevent it from happening again. Show someone a grave act of injustice happening to perfect strangers half a world away, and they are much less likely to either want or be able to do anything about it. Show them five-hundred such injustices consecutively over the course of twenty-four hours, and they will enter a state of functional despair where the impulse to do anything meaningful in response to any injustice anywhere has totally disappeared. Minus hope, your fool’s reactions to injustice will become, as if by magic, shallow, manipulable, self-deluding, and selfish. Call this, depending on the personality of the man in question, either blackpill or entertainment.

It is expedient that one man should die for the people. Even when constantly subjected to injustices about which he can do nothing, your subject will still react to visual stimuli, building up a great deal of tension and anxiety and anger and stress. Given enough time, the man is capable of doing any number of regrettable things with these feelings, including acts of violence, rituals of mourning, psychological breakdowns, disengagement from mass media, religious conversion, or connection with other human beings. To stop these unprofitable trends in their tracks, do everything in your power to associate each and every injustice he is made to witness with groups of his fellow human beings. This will provide him with an outlet for his emotions, particularly if you can provide at the same time an arena where he can performatively and self-righteously condemn such people and be randomly cruel and hateful towards them. Find a way to monetize that, and call it social media.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Follow this process to its logical conclusion and you will have produced a society full of despairing, isolated individuals whose time, attention, and energy is totally and continually taken up with passively absorbing media that preys on their emotions and/or being randomly cruel to each other on the Internet. Meanwhile the stock market flourishes. Call this, in a final flourish of black humor, politics.

I repeat myself: nevertheless, don’t follow the news. Don’t follow the news because it’s trying to monopolize your attention for ad dollars. Don’t follow the news because most of what it shows you is either false or is deliberately designed to prevent you from doing anything about it. Don’t follow the news because it will consistently appeal to your basest instincts. Don’t follow the news because it will train you to be totally inactive and despairing in the face of injustice. Don’t follow the news because it will isolate you and teach you to hate your fellow human beings. 

A Catholic is called to live a virtuous life, a life in which through habitual action, aided by divine grace, his immediate, unthinking reactions to people, places, and things are more and more conformed to the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, and the charitable. A virtuous person does not react to injustice except so as to mourn it or work towards setting it right through  prayer and virtuous action. A virtuous Christian does not give himself over to hatred or contempt for fellow human beings, but works for their salvation through prayer and charitable action. All this requires, however, a great deal of training and retraining of our basic habits and affections. And this training requires, as its absolute sine qua non, that one not spend all one’s time and energy on a training regimen with precisely the opposite purpose.

I concede that it is not impossible to follow the news in a virtuous, charitable way. One can learn about evils happening a world away, and pray for those affected. One can learn about evils happening close to home, and work to correct them. To a limited degree. 

We live, however, in a society of addicts, and when dealing with addicts, moderate approaches are seldom effective. Which is why en masse, on balance, I would say to my fellow American Catholics: don’t follow the news. 

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

The following post will most likely interest very few people; but, well, it interests me. 

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying the history of Christian and Catholic doctrine; and have even published a scholarly volume on the subject. There are a number of interesting facets or aspects of such a study: one, which is absolutely central to any serious contemporary Christian theology, may be called the theory of development, or more precisely theories of development, encompassing all the various attempts, from Antiquity to the present day, to understand theoretically the mix of continuity and change visible in Christian doctrine over time, its causes, and its results. These theories have spanned the entire range from naive to absurd to self-contradictory to insightful and back again; and to have a real theology, in any sense, it is necessary to operate on the basis of some such schema, if only implicitly: and to have a rational, explicit, truthful theology, it is necessary to have a rational, explicit, truthful theory of development.

However, that is not what I am going to be talking about in this post, at least not directly. Rather, what I have been trying to develop, based on my studies, here and elsewhere, is what I might call a theory of deformation, or perhaps (with a nod to Whip It) a theory of devolution.

This is, however, to put the matter somewhat dramatically, as well as somewhat polemically. The more basic truth is that Christianity as such, not to mention Catholicism, embodies a highly particular metaphysics, ethics, philosophy, ethics, history, and way of living, and that there are few, if any, things in human life that it does not in some way touch on or incorporate into its grand synthesis. 

For precisely this reason, however, Catholicism necessarily overlaps withareas of human life also dealt with by more human and secular and historical sciences and philosophies and cultures and politics. It not only covers the same ground as them, but frequently addresses the same concepts, even uses the same words. It typically does so, however, in very different ways, ways that are opaque, confusing, and often even offensive to many people, and which are therefore highly susceptible to being reinterpreted entirely in light of their more common usages.

To take only one instance, the use of the term nature in Catholic Christology necessarily overlaps to some limited extent with the uses made of this concept in science, philosophy, genetics, ethics, etc, of our own or indeed any historical society--but for all that, the concept of nature used in Catholic Christology is highly different than that used in any contemporary domain. To simply take the Christological sense of nature and insert into a discussion of, say, ecology would produce nonsense; while to take the contemporary ecological sense of nature and insert it into Christology might produce nonsense, but might also produce something a great deal more like a heresy.

This framing, however, is a bit more abstract than is necessary. I do not think, really, that most historical or contemporary heresies arise from mere confusion of the technical language of Catholicism with the technical language of contemporaneous science or philosophy. This has been, in the past, a common way of interpreting historical heresies; and it usually produces historiography (and heresiography) that is overly schematic and conceptually muddled. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases technical domains, so long as they remain technical and specific, remain to that extent open to broader domains of philosophy and metaphysics and theology, or more precisely subordinate to them in the sense that they deal with more particular matters that can and should and to an extent even must be integrated with broader domains: and to the extent this is true, engagements between technical domains and theology, so long as they are done skillfully, can produce positive fruit in both domains. 

Rather, what usually happens in regards to serious deformations of Catholic doctrine, I think, is quite a bit more subtle than this, and much harder to resolve simply with reference to mere definitions.

Most people do not study technical fields; but most people do live in societies, in communities, and in institutions. And these societies, communities, and institutions, explicitly or implicitly, run off of and embed and embody and incarnate particular views of the world, particular anthropologies, particular practical ethical goals and conceptions of the good. And it is these, in particular, that most directly and frequently clash with the overarching, holistic ethics and metaphysics of Catholicism; and which most frequently and impactfully lead to reinterpretations and deformations of Catholic belief and practice.

To take only one example, my scholarly book (AVAILABLE NOW!) focuses in part on the complex conceptual and practical clash between the implicit and explicit views of God, man, person, nature, equality, hierarchy, etc, found in the world of Late Imperial politics and Late Antique Christianity: and the various ways in which this led to radical reinterpretations of Imperial politics in terms of Christianity, and of Christianity in terms of Imperial politics. This is, of course, by no means a simplistic one-way affair, without ambiguity.

Still, if one accepts the basic framework above, it becomes clear that something like this has happened again and again in the history of the Catholic Church; and, considered soberly, to some degree must happen, in every age, place, institution, culture, and time. For, after all, the truth, even considered qua abstract and universal, must be concretely and particularly received and understood in every age, by every person: and for it to be understood, it must be related to existing stores of knowledge, culture, terminology, and so on. And if it is possible for this to be done well, in a way faithful to the essential meaning of Christian revelation, subordinating earthly knowledge to divine revelation, it is also possible, and intrinsically a great deal more likely, to be done badly.

And more interestingly, all this must happen here and now, and in the future: and must be, to some degree, predictable and understandable, even where said deformations are only implicit or only incipient. 

Here, then, is the ambitious and likely ludicrous "thought experiment" I wish to engage in this post: namely, to see if I can to some extent predict, to some extent extend, and to some extent make explicit the implicit deformations of core Catholic doctrines created by, or likely to be created by, our contemporary institutions and social systems. In so doing, I wish to be clear that I am using the term "heresy" only in a colloquial sense, as a helpful abstraction, and that I am in no way attempting to preempt Church authority, define a canonical crime, and/or accuse anyone of being a formal heretic deprived of divine grace and/or liable to ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, in dealing with the below "heresies," I am in no way predicting, even theoretically, that anyone in particular will ever explicitly argue for the positions laid out below, let alone turn them into widespread theological or popular or religious movements. I am merely postulating that the following deformations of Catholic belief do exist or will exist, explicitly or implicitly, to vastly varying degrees, in the lives and thoughts and arguments of Catholics: and as such, will have, to vastly varying degrees, negative effects.

For my next blog post, most likely, I will be examining what I think are the emerging political principles likely to govern global and American politics over the next several decades. Before doing that, though, I wish to preserve the proper hierarchical order of things, and deal first with the higher domain of theology, before proceeding to lesser matters. 

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

I have recently been reflecting on the overwhelming role that lies play in the contemporary world and contemporary discourse.

When I say this, I do not primarily mean "lies" in a polemical sense, referring to ideas I do not like--though I will, I confess, engage in a great deal of polemics in this essay, in a manner sure to offend nearly everyone. I mean, rather, things that are acknowledged by all, including their creators, to be lies; and, in fact, to a great degree, are valued because they are lies.

In itself, this is not a new phenomenon, but a very basic intellectual and spiritual problem as old as the human race. Lies originate with the human intellect and will; and are therefore often more natively comfortable and congenial to it than truth. Lies provide the illusion of what we want; especially when what we want is merely control, power, freedom, which is to say, escape from the reality and goodness of things and the power they have over us through desire and fear. In its most benign form, this impulse merely leads to fiction; but much more malign forms have been a feature of human culture almost from the beginning. There is a reason why the Scriptures speak of the devil as the "father of lies," and define sin as "loving and making lies." Properly understood, to prefer a lie because it is a lie is only a cogent and philosophical name for Hell. 

Still, there can be little question that, in the year 2025, our cultural fixation with lies has accelerated to a point rarely, if ever, seen before in human civilization. Assorted smart people have, since the year 2016, been talking about our entrance into an allegedly "post-truth" era. In reality, we have been there for a while now, though there is no doubt that the Internet and smart phone proliferation have accelerated the process.

We are a people whose most basic activity, taking up more and more and ever more of our lives, consists in sitting alone and passively absorbing video and text and audio, nearly all of which is false in one sense or another, and nearly all of which we know is false. The characteristic forms of this modern fixation with lies are, as I have said many times before, advertising and pornography, the two (united) pillars of our culture--both of which are valued precisely because they take us into realms where truth simply has no meaning. The supposed "AI revolution" takes this cultural fixation so far that it may actually have permanently broken it, flooding the Internet with lies that are so obvious, so incoherent, and so unattractive that they threaten to undo the system altogether. 

I have more and more begun to suspect, however, that a certain preference for lies over truth is more or less a characteristic feature of modernity as such, going back to its origins. And I think I have perhaps come to understand some of the actual reasons for this preference: the Big Lie, so to speak, behind the lies.

I have put the above in terms of a preference for lies qua lies; and I think this is the most correct and philosophical way to put it. However, what I have called "lies" are a genus that has in the past five hundred years generally gone by other names; and put in its originating philosophical and religious and historical contexts, have very different connotations. To understand the preference, one must understand the context behind it; or, in other words, the Big Lie behind the lies. 

So here is the Big Lie, divided up into its essential nature, is variable embodiments, and various ways to understand and deal with it.

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election (Or Any Other Election)

I recently posted an essay declaring (somewhat exaggeratively) that there are no politics anymore in 2024. I did this by taking a rather harsh look at the current events and activities of mainstream, mass-media based politics, as exemplified by the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties. 

But of course, there is a lot more to politics in 2024 than Trump and Kamala. There is even more to national electoral politics than Trump and Kamala: personally, I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party for President this November. Neither Trump or Kamala, though, has actually done any governing in the last four years, in a nation with massive ongoing social and economic crises and a world with numerous ongoing, extremely bloody wars. These ongoing crises and wars are still in the care of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and (more hopefully) numerous governors, mayors, city councilors, and local school board members throughout the world. When we think of politics in 2024, we should think, first and foremost, of these people: and, speaking ideally, not think of Trump and Kamala at all.

Still, as I argued in the preceding essay, there is certainly less to politics in 2024 America than there has ever been before, as polling and television and the Internet alike all show very clearly: more people than there have ever been before paying rapt attention to only the latest news on the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties, and otherwise not engaging with any political issue or candidate or official at any level at all. And of course, the two trends are nearly correlatives, since the more the mass media is full of stories about Trump and Kamala, the less room there is for anything else: even discussion of the actual laws and officials doing most of the governing for most Americans.

Still, when all is said and done, I feel the need to justify myself from the charge of merely being a political opportunist declaring a plague on both the two largest houses while ignoring the rest of the village entirely--or worse, a centrist. Someone might well say to me what a critic said of Chesterton's Heretics when it was published, that he will defend his own beliefs when he has seen me defend mine. Chesterton responded to this challenge by writing probably the most widely read work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, Orthodoxy. I can only respond by writing this blog post. 

At the outset I should say that this will not be an attempt to defend the broader, theoretical bases of my own approach to politics. I have done some of that otherwise in this blog, on many occasions and in tedious length and yet without giving what most would regard as a proper exposition of what I think and why. Perhaps I will get to that theoretical exposition one day.

Instead, this essay/blog post/manifesto will be something closer to what I would, ideally, like to see from political candidates in the 2024 election: a list of issues and broad programmes to address them that could actually be implemented politically in America today. As I declared not too long ago, I think that in a democracy political candidates ought to largely be engaged in acknowledging the pressing problems of the citizenry at large and trying to fix them. I firmly believe that all of the below issues are real, pressing issues in American life which ought to be dealt with politically--and which could in fact be meaningfully addressed by the actual American political system in 2024--and which, furthermore, are not issues that are constructed according to the symbolic binaries that presently define American political life, or which would necessarily and intrinsically appeal to only one side of the American political spectrum and alienate the other. Of course, if and when these issues became mainstream political issues, they could and would no doubt be processed in these terms, for basic structural reasons if nothing else.

Please note that the below proposals do not really cover foreign policy, which is not only arguably the most important impact America has on the world, but also is the issue that is most determined by actual Presidential elections. Foreign policy, though, is one of the issues least addressable via democratic means, which is why, even in America, it is run on a basically monarchical model; and, in any case, I have covered the basic issues of present-day American foreign policy elsewhere in this space. The below proposals also do not directly cover immigration policy, which, at least as currently debated, most boils down to more fundamental debates and structural issues with American foreign policy and economic policy. To deal with its complexities fully would take an essay of its own, however.

My own politics are radical enough that the below proposals--though far more radical than anything a major American party has proposed since the New Deal--are actually far less radical than I would ideally aim to achieve if there were no constraints at all on my decision-making (which is of course absurd). I do, however, genuinely want to implement all of the below proposals; and so might you.

Take what you can get; and what you can get here, from me, should not be taken for more than it is worth.

Column 09/07/2024: The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream & the Decline of the American Empire

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream and The Decline of the American Empire 

Here's a "personality quiz" of sorts for you:

(1) Which film released in 2010 did you enjoy more: (1) Unstoppable or (2) Alice in Wonderland? Or if you didn't see either, which do you think (based on Wikipedia descriptions and posters) you would enjoy more?

(2) Which song released in 2023 did you enjoy more: (1) Last Night by Morgan Wallern or (2) anti-hero by Taylor Swift?  

(3) Which television show released in 2015 did you enjoy more: (1) The Big Bang Theory or (2) NCIS? 

(4) Knowing nothing more, you are asked to choose between watching either (1) a new Adam Sandler film, or (2) a new Lin-Manual Miranda musical. Which do you pick?

(5) You can choose between watching two shows tonight, (1) a Law & Order series featuring a tough-as-nails black woman as lead prosecutor, or (2) an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. Which would you enjoy more?

Congratulations: if you can answer these questions, you now know whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Column 06/13/2024: Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity

"He's dead, Jim."

Star Trek: Discovery is over. Somehow, some way, it ended, lurched to a stop, was euthanized, put out of its misery, executed by firing squad, shot out of an airlock by a vengeful Admiral Adama, kicked over a cliff into erupting lava by Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. You pick your metaphor.

It seems, almost, beyond belief. How could Star Trek: Discovery end? 

A better question: how or when did Star Trek: Discovery begin? Did Star Trek: Discovery in fact take place? Jean Baudrillard, please answer your pager.

Here is a strong claim that I completely stand behind: watching Star Trek: Discovery for five (okay, four and a half) seasons has challenged me intellectually and personally as no other work of art has ever done before. It has tormented me, infuriated me, angered me, disgusted me, dispirited me, inspired me, filled me with joy and hatred and loathing and annoyance and, ultimately, love.

Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not someone who dislikes bad art; I am not someone who dislikes stupid art. I have long had a profound fondness for the unintentional humor and joyful creativity of many works of art that are, on the face of it, badly put together by artists in profoundly imperfect control of their artistic elements. 

Discovery is different, though.

To explain how, let me offer a strong claim: it is nearly impossible to comprehend Star Trek: Discovery as a work of art, the result of human intelligence and creativity and intentionality, at all. Star Trek: Discovery is not a substance, not even an artificial substance-by-analogy, the work of a demiurge human or divine. It is not an essence unfolding teleologically through time; it is not a story, a narrative with a beginning and an end; it is not even an event, an assemblage of elements held together by loose networks of simultaneity and cause-and-effect; it is not even  a Gnostic emanation, a failed attempt at conceptual realization birthing other abominations in turn. Star Trek: Discovery is, rather, most fittingly likened to the unintelligible forces of time and chance and matter themselves, contrary elements devouring one another in the dark, splitting and dividing without end in a chaos of Ovidian language, Plutarch's dark Typhon, Aristotle's potentiality awaiting act, the waters over which the spirit hovered before the beginning of creation.

It is, in other words, a really, really, really stupid television show.

As an obnoxious intellectual man, I have all my life believed strongly that intelligence--or rather, what intellectuals call intelligence, mental facility and speed in processing information and analysizing it and commenting on it and performing simple problem-solving tasks--is, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. Intellectuals are, by and large, self-deluding, self-aggrandizing bastards unable to see out of the boring detritus of their own minds and into the real world, even when it surrounds them and pounds them repeatedly into the metaphorical sand of reality like waves on a beach. In contrast, people colloquially described as stupid are usually prime exemplars of humanity, with their lack of internal preoccupations allowing them to simply accept and take stock of reality and respond to it in ways that are uniquely personal and so, by and large, both interesting and delightful, people adept at understanding and therefore intelligence in the true sense. In my experience, in this proper sense, stupid people are generally much more intelligent than smart people.

Nonetheless, stupidity is, as they say, said in many ways--and stupidity as a (relative) personal quality defined by intellectual receptivity and lack of speed in information-processing and verbal creation is quite distinct from stupidity in the sense of the total rational incoherency often found in intellectual objects and artifacts and beliefs. Human persons are always rational, even when they are unconscious, dreaming, or dead; receiving the world via the intellect is simply what they do. Concepts, ideas, and stories, however, are rational only by participation in human reason and its objects; and they can, to quite a large extent, fail to participate in that reason at all. Insofar as they fail to do so even minimally, they fail to exist.

Star Trek: Discovery is, in my limited experience, the work of art that most fails to participate in any form of human reason. Hence, it is, I would argue, impossible to analyze Star Trek: Discovery in any of the terms typically applied to human artifacts and narratives. 

Because of this, I aim to discuss Star Trek: Discovery not in terms of a unified work of art, a narrative, a set of characters, a plot, a set of themes. I will discuss it, rather, precisely in terms of stupidity, incoherence, and the roots of these stupidities and incoherences in the world around us--first in the stupid, incoherent shadow world of pop-cultural trends, then in the broader, incoherent world of American society itself, and finally in the real world as it actually exists. 

In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that Star Trek: Discovery's stupidity and incoherency is not, in fact, a bizarre, unique aberration in an otherwise pristine media landscape. In fact, the main note of popular culture in recent years has been precisely the same sense of fundamental incoherency found in a more extreme form in Discovery. Understanding where this incoherency comes from, is, I think, somewhat important for understanding where we are as a society, and for understanding how to prevent things from getting much, much worse.

For the very fact that Star Trek: Discovery exists at all, that it ever existed in even the most minimal sense, that it persisted, and that it ended tells us a great deal indeed about the world we live: and hopefully, what to do about it. 

To sum up Star Trek: Discovery, the stupidest work of art I have ever seen, I will make use of the stupidest format I know of. Here, then, in listicle format, proceeding from the most obvious to the most profound, are Ten Ways in Which Star Trek Discovery Illuminates the Profundity of Stupidity. 

Column 1/30/2024: 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.

Column 12/02/2023: Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Disturbing Affirmation of Humanity

Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Disturbing Affirmation of Humanity

What do we want, and why do we want it? And what would happen if we got what we want?

These questions are, in one way or another, the heart of all of Sofia Coppola's films--as, indeed, of many films. What sets Sofia Coppola apart from practically all filmmakers of her (or any) generation is two things: (1) her almost exclusive focus on female desire and perspective, and (2) the honesty and empathy of her portrayal of desire and of the people caught in its spell.

From this perspective, Priscilla represents the peak of her career. This is, paradoxically, because it is by far her most restrained film, the film where she most lets go of typical auteur control and its accompanying obsessions and allows another person's perspective to fully take center stage. To take a small, but telling example, Sofia Coppola, like other auteur directors, has a stable of actors and actresses she uses repeatedly in her films; and Priscilla contains none of them. Yet Priscilla is at the same time a film that profoundly reflects, and fulfills, Sofia Coppola's prevailing style, aesthetics, and overriding obsessions. I honestly cannot think of any other director, any other artist, even, who could have created anything remotely like this film. And that is no small praise.

Column 09/25/2023: Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

I am going to attempt what I fully understand is both a very difficult and very presumptuous task: that is, to summarize what I see as a centrally important concept to ancient philosophical and Catholic ethical theories, and to indicate why lack of proper understanding of this concept wreaks havoc with attempts to understand and apply these concepts in the modern world. This is quite an obnoxious thing to do; if you are annoyed by it, please pray for me. If you like it, pray for me anyway. 

In contemporary Catholic ethical discourses and debates, especially on a popular level, but increasingly also in academic and even clerical circles, there are two terms that are thrown around more than any others. These terms, in fact, are thrown around with such frequency that one would think that there were more or less no other issues in Catholic ethics at all; and what is perhaps oddest of all, they are thrown around by both sides of virtually all contemporary Catholic ethical debates, and in highly similar terms.

In watching these debates unfold, I have grown more and more and more certain that, put simply, these terms are being used all wrong--not just trivially or technically wrong, but in ways that, frankly, I can find no parallel in the tradition prior to the 20th century, and which taken together threaten the very edifice of Catholic ethics. This is a strong claim; but it is strong precisely because these terms refer, however increasingly remotely, to base assumptions of Catholic and ancient philosophical ethics without which the whole edifice of Catholic ethics simply makes no sense, and simply cannot be lived out or applied.

I refer, of course, to the two terms intrinsically wrong and prudential.