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."

The Apotheosis of Hidden Power

The Apotheosis of Hidden Power:

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe; Military, Inc; Absolute Destruction; Stalin as Warlord; Castleview

Why is the United States of America not governed by its military?

This question might appear surprising. Why should the United States of America be ruled by its military?

Yet if we think over the question in the light of history, things get rather murkier. And if we (as is often useful) rub out the lines of our familiarity with America, our unthinking assumptions about what America is and how it is governed, and merely treat it as a distant and foreign historical object, the reasons we might expect America to be a military state multiply rather quickly.

First, America has been since before its founding a remarkably militaristic society engaged in almost constant wars: beginning with the violence of settlement itself, the wars with France that defined the 18th century globally, extending into the Revolutionary War itself, leading into the numerous low-level "frontier wars" with American Indian tribes and tax rebellions and even more colonial conflicts with the British and French and Spanish, and climaxing in less than a century in the enormous, devastating mass-conscript campaigns of the American Civil War. The 20th century saw two back-to-back World Wars followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War, and ended with military interventions in Eastern Europe and Africa, while the 21st century so far has seen campaigns against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, Venezuela, and now Iran, as well as significant proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine. 

For much of that time, America has been governed to a significant degree by military officials and in service of military goals. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington was effectively the dictator of all that existed of the American state--the principal reason why his relinquishing of power after the war was seen as so remarkable not just in America but around the world. Under Lincoln, the United States was a thoroughly military government, though one led by a civilian; and while the Civil War was still within living memory, Woodrow Wilson plunged the country into World War 1, in the process again transforming America into a mass-conscription military regime led by a civilian that reached deep into the most remote parts of the country to find soldiers, train them, equip them, and ship them across the world. 

A mere twenty years after WW1, FDR and Truman again exercised nearly dictatorial powers to build perhaps the greatest military-logistical system in global history, one capable of conscripting men and constructing goods in unthinkable amounts and transporting them rapidly more or less anywhere in the world on extremely short timescales. Of course, the "military-industrial complex" that emerged from this conflict was not an army as anyone before WW2 would have recognized it, but an entire society in itself, a largely self-governing institution capable not just of fighting wars but of organizing and directing entire civilian societies in economic and cultural and scientific production, recruiting and training and incorporating into the populations of entire continents, manufacturing buildings, goods, and equipment in unimaginable quantities, and bringing all of the above to bear in overwhelming force at nearly every point from the Philippines to France to the islands of the Pacific and back again.

Nor did this society go away when WW2 concluded: even as the United States of America gave back most of the territory it had conquered, let go some of its former colonies, and demobilized most of its own population, the basic infrastructure of American global military government, including factories and corporations and stores of munition and recruitment and training centers and ships and planes and military bases scattered across the world and capable of striking more or less every point within it, has continued to the present day, sustained by the Cold War and periodically built back up through the 1950s and '60s for mass-conscription wars in Korea and Vietnam and the more or less continual arming and funding of anti-Communist states and terrorist organizations and militaries throughout the Third World.

We tend to forget, now, that a lot of the fears of the post-Soviet-Union era in America centered around the idea that the end of the Cold War would lead to massive drawbacks in American military spending and competence--drawbacks that would not only prove devastating to the large sectors of America directly or indirectly dependent on the military-industrial complex, but might also leave America vulnerable to new, unimaginable threats. 

Of course, that hidden malevolence soon took the rather strange form of the elegantly-turbaned head and performatively unkempt beard of the heir to a Saudi construction company and founder of a CIA front against the Soviet Union. The transformation of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden into a generalized "War on Terror" provided once again a proper enemy for the American military to build guns and tanks and bombs and develop new technologies and employ security corporations and train and arm and fund terrorist groups to defeat. 

Still, what is by far most striking about the entire era of the "War on Terror" in retrospect is the degree to which, in popular imagination, the "enemy" against whom soldiers and cops and spies and superheroes struggled continued to be entirely amorphous. 

The relatively straightforward Islamist ideology of Sunni mujahideen groups like Al-Quaeda--whose roots rather paradoxically lie both in the Deobandi Pakistani madrasas and in the rival Salafi ideology of the Saudi Arabian state, but more immediately in the American government's anxious interest in sponsoring and funding anti-nationalist and anti-Communist strains of Arab thought during a period when Soviet-inspired Arab Nationalism and Ba'athism were at their height and the Soviet Union was looking to assert itself as a sponsor to the Arab world--was never that I can tell portrayed or addressed in American popular media, or even in middle-brow intellectual discourse. 

The distinguishing claim of 'Islamism' as an ideology is simply that most existing secular and nationalistic Muslim governments are more or less illegitimate insofar as their laws are insufficiently based on Muslim Scripture and traditional Muslim jurisprudence. As it turns out, this belief is shared in some form or fashion by a huge number of Muslims around the world, and almost certainly by a sizeable majority of the citizens of most contemporary Muslim states--and is not easy to disentangle, as I have argued, from the more basic failures of the post-colonial state in general and Islamic Modernism in particular.

An America also facing a legitimacy crisis, with laws and methods and basic ways of life alike all challenged continually by both secular and religious critiques, might well have found in 'Islamism' a profound and perhaps transformative mirror and challenge; but, with a very few exceptions, did not. Instead, what America found in the 'War on Terror' was mostly just a faceless, nameless, utterly mysterious sense of threat--never better embodied than in the Joker as portrayed in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, a man from nowhere, with no face or name and no ideology, driven merely by a desire to 'watch the world burn.'

Of course, the truth is that one cannot understand an organization like Al Qaeda solely or primarily in terms of Islamist ideology any more than one can understand an organization like the United States military sole or primarily in terms of the doctrines of the Founding Fathers. Islamist terror organizations as we know them are more than anything else creatures of the modern, global military-industrial complex. They are hierarchical para-military organizations whose structure and activities are defined at every level by 1) easily-accessible and advanced weapons and explosives, 2) instant and untraceable communication technologies, 3) international financial institutions capable of transferring huge amounts of money instantly around the world, 4) the colonial and post-colonial adoption of modern Western military training methods and hierarchies, and 5) in most cases some form of direct assistance, training, or organization by Western intelligence or government agencies. 

In this way, too, the threat of Islamist terrorism might have been a profound challenge and mirror for America and the West: but also was not. For while American popular art again and again created narratives where the heroes and villains were similar sorts of militarized vigilantes, members of similar trans-national clandestine organizations, or in short more or less the same sort of people wearing similar clothes and wielding similar arms--they never that I can see ever seriously interrogated the reasons behind those similarities, or seriously questioned why one group of para-military vigilantes were the good guys and another the bad-guys.

All of this is not, of course, to deny that there are real and determining differences between Islamic and Christian societies, or even between Islamic and modern secular societies: and that these differences might have been the inspiration for a genuine popular war or even a religious or secular crusade against the Islamic world and/or Islamism. This, too, however, did not happen. 

In any case, the War on Terror ultimately wore itself out in the failure of America to successfully govern its new colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the failure of the 'Arab Spring,' in the rise and fall of ISIS, and above all in the gradual, creeping realization, driven probably more than anything else by the disaster of the Syrian Civil War and resulting European migration crisis, that the simple narrative of the War on Terror might in fact be a mask for blundering interventions into an extremely complex and many-sided conflict among different Muslim groups, none of which were from an American perspective all that sympathetic--with the brutal secular-cum-military-cum-financial Sunni Muslim governments with which America has generally allied against Shi'ite Iran and various strains of Islamism being perhaps the least likeable faction of them all.

Still, as I write this in 2026, America is of course once again fighting a large-scale war in the Middle East--a war, however, that was launched on something approaching a whim, whose goals and justifications and proposed timelines have constantly changed and contradicted themselves, and where it is clear that not even the highest levels of American leadership, let alone elites or the populace at any large, has any clear idea of why the war is being fought or what for. 

The truth, then, is that for all the destruction and pageantry of the War on Terror, America has never in fact found a meaningful way to justify its conflicts with Muslim states and organizations--at least not one that has ever been acceptable to most of the population or even most elites.

All we have found, in fact, is a series of nameless, faceless, remote, alien enemies--enemies that are acceptable precisely because they are not opposed or understood in any consistent moral terms. And when one understands that, one begins to understand that the underlying reality here has nothing in fact to do with the Muslim world and its continuing and accelerating crisis of legitimacy and religious and political collapse, and everything to do with the American military.

To me, one of the most remarkable things about the United States of America as a society is how popular the American military has been and continues to be with the general public, and this despite the fact that, unlike during WW2 and its aftermath, very few Americans now live their lives in and around the institutions of the military or depend on the it for their livelihood. The total number of people to have ever served in the military at any time is now the lowest it has been since WW2 at around half of one percent--making this in almost an entirely different country from the mass-conscription regimes that defined 20th century American life.

Still, public approbation for the military has if anything only gotten stronger as people's direct attachment to the military has atrophied. As measured by Gallup, public confidence in the US military reached its absolute peak in 2003 and again in 2009 at 82%, and remained with one exception over 70% until 2020 before dipping again. In 2025, it held at 62%, a significant reduction that still leaves the United States military six times more popular than Congress (10%), more than twice as popular as the Office of President (30%) and the Supreme Court (27%), and easily crushing its more distant rivals organized religion (36%) and the police (45%). Indeed, polls show quite consistently that the US Military is the only governmental institution to be reliably trusted by a majority of the US population--a rather remarkable state of affairs.

If, as I argued recently in this space, the United States is in the middle of a basic crisis of legitimacy, then it must be the case that, as the only governmental institution to possess anything approaching public legitimacy, the American military is the governmental institution most capable of exercising public political power. Hence, we would expect prima facie and a priori for the US military to take on more and more public power, and for something resembling a publicly and officially military regime to emerge in America.

Of course, things are not quite that simple. For one thing, it is very likely that a huge portion of the American military's popularity comes from it being the only governmental institution to not yet be drawn into the hyper-partisan symbolic warfare that has come to constitute the bulk of popular and elite political life. The Supreme Court had majority confidence, roughly speaking, until after Bush vs Gore; and the downfall of Congressional legitimacy cannot be disentangled from the constant, bruising public partisan battles and government shutdowns now endemic to the system. The military suffered a precipitous drop in public confidence during the conflicts over the Iraq War (from 82% in 2003 to 69% in 2007), when support or opposition for the war and therefore "the troops" was to a significant degree made into a partisan political issue; and it is difficult to see how a military regime could avoid being drawn into some kind of similar partisanship trap.

Still, even at the height of the Iraq War, the military retained something like 70% public confidence; and if polls are to be believed, it has regained most or all of that public confidence over the last few decades. 

Moreover, it is insufficiently noted that one of the main legitimizing factors for military governments around the world has been precisely their nonpartisanship, their separation from ideological and elite conflicts in the broader society. Not only need military regimes not be partisan, they have in fact normatively posed themselves precisely as unification governments bringing peace to internal quarrels and establishing a new unifying sense of national purpose. And with the continual rise in America both of hyper-partisan polarization at every level of government, and popular hatred of that polarization and of inevitably partisan liberal-democratic politics more basically, we have yet another reason to see a military government as likely.

And, of course, regardless of its popularity or lack thereof, the American military remains an almost unimaginably powerful institution, retaining among other things a status as arguably the primary driver of scientific and technological development in the world, a very effective global transportation and communication infrastructure, a vast surveillance and intelligence apparatus, a powerful industrial base, and, of course, a vast military force and direct control over nuclear weapons capable of killing millions and ending the world. If the US military as a collective force wanted to rule America and the world, they certainly would--though for how long, and how successfully, is quite another matter.

All of the works reviewed below bear directly or indirectly on the theoretical question of the role of the military in American life, as well as the more practical question of whether or if or how the military might come to dominate America and the world. In the process, we will travel very far afield indeed, to Pakistan, Stalinist Russia, Medieval Europe, and Fairyland; the question of the future of America and the American military is not, however, far afield, but present and immediate for every person in the world today. I ask you to remember this in all of what follows.

Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2 Ad Populum

Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2, to the People (355-361 AD)

[As I have posted periodically on this blog, here is a translation of a historical document, in this case a letter written by Eusebius of Vercelli to the people of his diocese from exile c. 355-361 AD. This document provides an important firsthand account of episcopal exile under the Roman Emperor Constantius II, and I am using it as such for a current academic project.

St. Eusebius of Vercelli is one of the more obscure members of the group of exiled Nicene bishop-ascetics from the mid-4th century of the Arian Controversy, but perhaps one of the most important. A prominent Italian bishop and ally of the bishop of Rome Liberius, he was exiled by the Emperor Constantius II at the Council of Milan in 355 AD after refusing to subscribe to the condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandra and the Creed of Sirmium offered by the Emperor. According to our one contemporary narrative, this happened after Eusebius arrived late to the Council and demanded that everyone present sign the Creed of Nicaea before proceeding with any more business. He remained in exile in the East until the death of Constantius in 361 AD, when he played a key role in the Council of Alexandria chaired by Athanasius upon the Emperor's death and attempted without success to resolve the bitter schism in Antioch. He then returned home and died circa 370. He also played an important role, like his close ally Hilary of Poitiers, in establishing early monastic and ascetic institutions in the West, likely inspired by Athanasius' ally Anthony of Egypt.]

To my most beloved brothers, and very much desired priests, but also to the holy peoples of Vercelli, Novarium, Hippo Regius, and also Dertonium who stand firm in the Faith: Eusebius the bishop in the Lord wishes eternal salvation. 

1. Although our Lord comforts us, separated in body from you, with many good things, and shows your presence to us at least through the arrival and visits of very many brothers; nevertheless we were sorrowful and sad and not without tears; because for a long interval of time we did not receive writings from Your Holinesses. Indeed we were afraid that either some diabolical subtlety had taken hold of you, or human power had subjugated the unfaithful.

Therefore, while we were afflicted with these thoughts, and I was turning all the consolation of brothers who were coming to us from various provinces more to sorrow at your absence than to joy: the Lord thought it right to bestow this, that I was able to learn the very thing about which I was worried, not only by the letters of your sincerity, but also by the presence of our dear ones Syrus the deacon and Victorinus the exorcist.

And so I have come to know, dearest brothers, that you, as I desired, are unharmed. And, as though I was suddenly snatched up through all the breadth of the earth (as happened to Habakkuk, who was carried by an angel all the way to Daniel [cf. Daniel 14:33-36]), I judged that I had come to you, while I was receiving the letters of each person, while I was racing to your holy friends and the love found in your writings. 

2. Tears were mingling for me with joy: and my mind, eager to read, was constrained by being occupied with tears. And both things were necessary, as each of my senses was desiring to anticipate its duties of loving for this fulfillment of desire. Thus each day while occupied with this I was judging that I was spending time with you, and I was forgetting my past labors: in this way truly joys were encompassing me on every side, offering from here stable faith, from here love, from here fruitfulness; so that in so many and so great established goods, suddenly I was judging, as I said above, that I was not in exile, but with you.

I rejoice therefore, dearest brothers, in your faith: I rejoice in your salvation which follows faith: I rejoice in your fruits, because from this they have not only been established, but also have travelled far. As indeed the farmer has grafted on that good tree, which does not suffer the axe, is not given up to flames, for the sake of its fruits; so also we want and desire not only to show to Your Holinesses service according to the flesh, but also to spend our lives for your salvation.

You have extended, as I said, branches strong with fruit, and you have labored to reach through such long spaces of the earth to touch me. I rejoice as a farmer, and gladly pluck the apples of your labor, because you wanted to do so much: not only I, or those very holy priests and deacons or other brothers who are with me, but also all of us who are longing for you.

For you filled up, as the most blessed Apostle says, my heart when you fulfilled the divine commandments which it is right that Christians fulfill towards a bishop or ecclesiastical men who you know labor in exile because of the Faith. You have fulfilled the things which it is right for brothers to do for brothers, and for sons to show for a father.

But when we were wanting you, according to divine commandments, to produce heavenly fruit from earthly things, stable fruit from fleeting things, eternal fruit from fragile things; in suffering by necessity we began to sow seeds daily. The poor were rejoicing at your fruits: not only were the people of the city itself glorifying God, but also everyone: and these people were able to see from the fruits themselves the love you have for me, and in seeing were glorifying God, and naming us with all honor with your blessing. 

3. The devil seeing this, the enemy of innocence, the rival of justice, the opponent of faith, because God was being blessed in this work, inflamed against us his Ariomaniacs, who now for a long time were raging not only over this work, but also over their own infidelity, to which they were not able to persuade us, so that they violently erupted; in this way that he has always used, those whom he was not able to persuade, he terrified with force and power.

And so he gathered the multitude of his own people, who seize and bring us to the factory of their infidelity and mock us: and they say that all this power has been handed over to them by the Emperor. Therefore when they were saying many things and boasting about their power, in this I wanted to show them that the things they were able to do are nothing, while I handed over in silence as though to executioners my body, which the Lord was saying was able to be handed over in persecutions. How free in mind I was, while I am suffering from these things, and am imprisoned, and am preserved through four days, and hear the insults and persuasions of different kinds of people: in this I have shown that I have not spoken even one word.

They wanted to add to their malice, that my brothers would depart from me, that is, priests and deacons: but also they said they were going to prevent the rest of the people from coming to me. I, in order to not accept food from the hands of unbelievers, or rather of transgressors (which is worse) who are unbelievers, as the Apostle says, made a petition to them in this way. 

‘The Servant of God Eusebius with his fellow servants who labor with me for the Faith, to Patrophilus the prison-guard with his people:

With what violence and rage of many people you carried me off, not only dragged across the ground, but at times even prostrate with a naked body, from this guest-house which you gave to me through your people and agentes in rebus, which I have never left except through your violence, both God knows, and the city knows, nor are you able to deny it now and in the future.

Therefore I reserve my case for God, so that, inasmuch as he himself has ordained it, he may be able to undertake the end. Meanwhile, I want you to know that I have decreed this (so that the reason may be able to stand now and in the future, even here), in the guest-house where you are holding me imprisoned, in which after first carrying me and thrusting me inside very cruelly, you dared to carry me from there in the same way, and to throw me into a single cell, that I will not eat bread nor drink water, until each of you have promised, not only by word, but also by hand, that you will not prevent my brothers who are willingly suffering these things with me from offering me necessary food from the guest-house where they are staying–and also others who have thought it worthy to ask for it.

Indeed, it was right to go out from the body, so that I would not be compelled to often tell those who want to know what a great crime you all have committed against divine and public law. But so that no one from among the unbelievers may call you cruel towards us, and think that we are ignorant of the divine commandments and did not want to avoid confusion more than to obey the Lord, for this reason we wanted to presume this: again I say that unless you make a promise by word and in writing, you will be murderers by preventing [food from being brought to me]. 

5. The omnipotent God knows this: also his Only-Begotten Son, indescribably born from him, knows, who as God of eternal virtue for our salvation put on a perfect man, wanted to suffer, triumphed over death and rose on the third day, sits on the right hand of the Father, is going to come to judge the living and the dead: also the Holy Spirit knows: the Catholic Church is witness, which confesses like this: because I will not be liable in myself, but you all, who have wanted to prevent my fellow-servants from ministering necessary things.

And if you have prepared this, you ought to despise yourselves: not as though I fear death, but so that after my departure you may not say that I wanted to depart by a voluntary death and may not find a certain cloud of accusation for us. Know that I am going to communicate with the Churches which I am able to reach with letters that have been for a time locked up; I am going to communicate also with the servants of God, so that the whole world might be able to recognize, through these persons running together, how the complete faith which has been approved by all the Catholic bishops is suffering from the Ariomaniacs, which it condemned before. I, Eusebius the bishop, have subscribed in the same way [i.e. to the Nicene Creed].

I adjure you who read this letter, through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that you not suppress it but [allow] it to be be read by others.”

6. Therefore these men, softened on barely the fourth day from this letter [libellus] compelled us, hungry, to return to the guest-house in which we had stayed. They saw from within how the people, returning, received us with joy. They surrounded our guest-house with lights.

We begin, with the Lord approving, to again minister to the poor. Their inhumanity did not endure this, and they destroyed our love for their hatred. They were able to tolerate this for around nearly twenty-five days. They break out anew, and with the destroyed hand of many they come to our guest-house armed with clubs, they break the wall through other people’s doors, and they come to us with violence. Again they grab us, and they lock us up in a narrower guard-house with only our dear priest Tegrinus.
Also our brothers, that is all the priests and deacons, they grab and lock up.

After three days by their own power they send them into exile throughout various places. Other brothers who had come to visit us they send in the public jail and hold them locked up through very many days. Rushing again to the guest-house, they destroy everything which had been prepared either for expenses or for the poor.

But because this their public crime was known by all the citizens, they used this argument, that they were returning some less important things, and were trying to return to us our own property. But they kept the expenses in their own possession: and after so great a crime they were seeking, if it was possible, to deny this, that they had permitted nothing from my property to come to me, I who was trying to bring necessary food to my body. Barely on the sixth day, with people everywhere shouting against them, they permitted one to come. In all that pertained to them, they showed that they had the minds of murderers. At first, they sent away this person, so as not to cease from their malice: afterwards, barely on the sixth day, when we were failing, they allowed him to come once with some food. And so these are the works of the Ariomaniacs. 

7. See, most holy brothers, if this is not persecution, when we who keep the Catholic Faith suffer these things: and think more deeply whether this persecution is not very much even worse than that one which happened through the ones who serve idols. Those men were sending people into prison: nevertheless they were not preventing their own from coming to them.

How much, therefore, has Satan wounded the Churches through the cruelty of the Ariomaniacs! People who are obliged to free men send into public guard-houses. People who are taught to suffer for the sake of justice commit violence. People who are taught by the divine law not to demand back their own property when it is stolen steal others’ property. I pass over how much cruelty has invaded them, while they rejoice in their temporal ease. The ability to see their own people is not denied by torturers or judges to bandits shut up in prison: our people are kept from us: and not only are they forbidden from the guest house in which we are held, but they are terrified by threats so that they will not approach the prison. In this way they have subjugated everyone, as I have very plainly known.

I will begin from the bishops: while certain of them fear to lose their office, they themselves have lost the Faith; while they do not not want to lose their earthly faculties and immunities, they have judged the heavenly treasuries and true security to be nothing. In the same way also the rest have been led astray, while they see the bishops fearing these things perish, and have begun to love the things which they cannot have forever.

8. In this way the Ariomaniacs frighten the rich, since they threaten them with proscription: in this way they frighten the poor, since they have the power to shut them up in prison. And how great this insanity is! In the place in which we are held, they not only send the men who serve us into prison, but also they shut up the holy girls [sanctiominales=consecrated religious] in the public guard-houses without any fear of God. But as the the evil old men who sought to violate the chastity of Susanna did not rejoice: so neither will these rejoice always, who try to subject the Church to their infidelity with various persecutions and excessive oppressions. For the holy Daniel said to those men: ‘In this way, because they were afraid, the daughters of Israel slept with you’ [Daniel 13:57].

But let human fear, Most Holy ones, depart from your minds, since you have the consolation of the Lord, who says: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul’ [Matthew 10:18]. This is the time of testing: the time exists so that those who have been tested and proved may be made known and manifest. Therefore they have received human help, because they do not have divine help: because if they did have it, they would never subjugate innocent souls to themselves with earthly power.

9. We were obliged to write many things about those men’s evil deeds, by which not I alone, but very many are oppressed: but it is so that we might not be able to do this, and communicate their cruelty by letters, that we are kept in this very confined guard-house by them. For this reason also our other people and friends are kept from approaching us.

But the Lord has granted to me to send this letter to you through our most dear deacon Syrus, whom we have in our power to send; because by the providence of our Lord at that time he approached to see the holy places and was not discovered with the rest of the brothers. 

10. As for the rest, we have with difficulty written this letter in whatever way we could, always begging God that he would restrain our guards for a time, and grant that the deacon might bear more the announcement of our labors than what letters of greetings are usually like.

For this reason I beg you all sufficiently that you keep the Faith with all vigilance, that preserve harmony, that you lean on prayers, that you remember us without ceasing: so that the Lord might think it worthy to free his church which labors over the whole earth, and so that we who are oppressed might be able to be freed to rejoice with you: the Lord will think it worthy to grant this since you ask for it through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with him is blessed from the ages and into all the ages of ages. Amen.

The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

 The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

This year is, among other things, the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Ecumenical commemorations have already begun, focusing for the most part on the dual institutions of the Papacy and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople--institutions both deeply entwined, though in different and somewhat ironic ways, with the event. 

Later this year, two men will meet in Nicaea: Pope Leo XIV-- an American born in Chicago who spent his ministry in Peru, places that none of the bishops at Nicaea had ever heard of, but the latest sitter on what was already in the fourth century the ancient and venerable seat of the bishop of the Church of Rome, and Patriarch Bartholomew--an ethnic Greek whose see was, at the time of Nicaea, a minor suffragan of Heraclea, who today presides over a tiny, purely vestigial Christian flock in what was, in the 4th century, the population heartland of Christianity, but which now resides within the borders of an ethnic nation-state named after Central Asian nomads and populated by the largely secularized followers of Islam, a Christian offshoot that would emerge centuries later from a portion of the world that nearly all the bishops of Nicaea would have regarded as a minor scrap of territory stuck rather awkwardly between two great Empires. These two men will no doubt issue appropriate statements of fraternity and commemoration for what both traditions they represent regard as the first Ecumenical Council of the undivided Christian Church of the first millennium. 

Accompanying these commemorations will come many, many explanations by the popular press the world around, designed to communicate to ordinary folks from America to Siberia to India and back again just what the Council of Nicaea is, anyway, and why it's important enough to make the Chicagoan Pope go all the way to Turkey. Alas, the popular press being what it is, the vast majority of these explanations will be wrong. This event will also be accompanied, no doubt, by many intelligent and intellectual explanations of just what the Council of Nicaea is, in podcasts, tweets, blueskys and the like: and as is frequently the case, these will be even more wrong. 

Hence, to get out ahead of these takes, I wanted to issue, as a scholar who has published an academic volume among other things on Nicaea and its context and legacy, a brief explainer on the historical event of the Council of Nicaea. This will be a deliberately broad take, deliberately designed to skirt most controversial scholarly questions; but nevertheless unavoidably based on my own opinions and scholarly judgments. 

As such, I am confident it will contain a great deal of information that will come as a surprise to most moderately-informed people, and an even higher percentage of information that both ordinary, good people and wicked take-having intellectuals have never heard of. I hope it will prove both informative and reasonably diverting.

Death of the Son, Episode VIII: In the Assembly of the Great King

Death of the Son, Episode VIII

In the Assembly of the Great King 

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five; Episode Six; Episode Seven]

Theodotus and Apollon slept, again, in their quarters--but only after Theodotus had made something of a show of locking all the doors, propping furniture carefully against them as the old priest watched nervously. It was all so much theater: if the Emperor's slaves wish to take us, they will do so. Otherwise, I am more than a match for any lone assailant. A locked door will not hold anyone determined. Yet Apollon seemed truly reassured, and after only a few minutes Theodotus had the satisfaction of hearing, through his own door, the old man's snores.

He himself, though, stayed awake a great deal longer, lying in his bed, his head propped up on his hands, considering the events of the previous day, and those about to come. 

There must, he was sure, be some way to make sense of this tale...to wrest some victory from the jaws of apparent defeat. If he could only understand the players involved...deduce the secret both Crispus and Fausta had known, which Apollon had almost heard...the secret that had somehow involved the dead Emperor Licinius...the secret which he must know, when at last he spoke with Constantine...the secret that might save Eustathius' life...

But what could the secret be? So far as he and everyone else know, Licinius' tale was straightforward, if twisted in a way not uncommon for Emperors in time of civil war. A Dacian, friend of Galerius, appointed Augustus of the West to contain the usurpers Constantine and Maxentius...but unlike his fellow Tetrarchs, wise enough to see Constantine's potential, and first tolerate him, then ally with him against Maximinus Daza. Then for nearly ten years, Augustus of the East, ruling from Nicomedia, in partnership with Constantine. 

In his mind's eye, Theodotus saw the statue he had passed every day, along his route from apartment to the chancery, for nearly a decade: the heavy body, the long head, the staring eyes gazing upwards, the small, confident smile. Licinius had been the Emperor he, and everyone in the East, had looked up to, appealed to, praised and thanked for defeating the cruel pagan, the arch-persecutor Daza, and bringing the Persecution to a close. Like most, Theodotus had payed little attention to the second, smaller statue set up beside Licinius', with its sharp nose and broad face and grave expression: Licinius' Western colleague Constantine. It was only when that second statue abruptly disappeared, one morning, from its place at Licinius' side that he, and everyone else, realized that civil war had begun. 

The rest had been only rumors, let slip by tired soldiers in the taverns, or boasted of by confident, well-fed men in the market-places. Again and again, Theodotus had come into the room where his fellow court deacons worked to find them all huddled together, faces grave, discussing the latest news. Incursions, troop movements, raids, persecutions...

As the weeks went by, the talk turned more and more to this latter category. Licinius, it was said, had begun to fear the Christian clergy of his domain, seeing in them advocates and supporters of Constantine: spies, or worse. Bishops, it was said, had been arrested and put on trial before the Emperor for treason, priests expelled from the palace as spies. On every face, Theodotus saw the same fearful, enclosed expression, the same stirring memories, though no one ever actually spoke the words flicking through their mins: it is happening again...

As during the persecution, the people of Antioch began withdrawing. The crowds in the cathedral thinned by nearly a third; people began giving clerics a wide berth in the marketplace; and even the shopkeepers and slaves in the cookshops avoided Theodotus' eyes as they took his coins. Everywhere, there was a tense expectancy, like a storm about to break. 

Theodotus had not known the previous bishop, Philogonius, at all well; apart from brief meetings where he and the other deacons explained the cases and proposed judgments of the court for his approval, the two men had never spoken. Yet he remembered well the sermon Philogonius had given barely two years before, at the height of the war. 

The old bishop, like them all, had lived through the Persecution; barely ten years had passed since Daza's famous indulgences in the arena of Antioch. His thin, grizzled face had been pale even next to his white robe, and his hand had shaken as he had delivered his discourse. 

He had exhorted them, obliquely and carefully, saying nothing that might call down Licinius' wrath or those of officials, to endurance. He called to their minds the sufferings of the martyrs; and his frozen face and unblinking eyes showed clearly that he was remembering even as he spoke. The martyrs, he had reminded them, had considered the loss of their earthly possessions, even the loss of their hands and eyes (everyone's faces involuntarily turning toward the old bishop's empty socket), as nothing in comparison to the gain of heaven. It made no sense, the bishop insisted, to save perishing trifles and in so doing lose imperishable treasure. Still, he insisted, those who had left the Church and returned to their former ways of life out of fear would be welcomed back upon their return. But those who fled from Christ would never receive his rewards.

The display had been effective; the crowds of departing Christians slowed to a trickle, and many returned, shame-faced, to receive the bishop's forgiveness. Among the clergy of Antioch, though, Philogonius' courage had caused a panic. The deacons abandoned their work entirely, and instead spent all their time discussing when the hammer would fall, when and where and how Licinius would take his revenge against their bishop for speaking so openly. 

Abruptly, discussion of the Persecution ceased being taboo among the clergy of Antioch. Stories were swapped, in low tones, of brave men and women, and weak men and women, and their individual fates; of creative punishments administered to bishops by Daza, by local governors, in arenas and palace chambers and prisons. The implications, though never stated openly, were always the same: this is what will happen to Philogonius. Theodotus had taken no part in these discussions, but had wondered, idly, as he continued with his own work, if any of these discussions came to Philogonius' ears, and what the old man thought of it. He suspected the bishop had plenty of memories of his own to occupy him.

At last, it had, apparently, happened. A young priest, Eukalion, burst into the court office, just as the deacons were gathering to leave for the day, to tell them that a messenger had arrived for the bishop from Licinius. Though Eukalion had not heard the message himself, rumors had it that Philogonius had been summoned to Byzantium, where Licinius was currently holed up. Licinius, Eukalion speculated, must be furious; his rages, it was said, had grown worse and worse, and it was said he had had clerics killed in front of him, just like Daza. Even an invitation to court, Eukalion declaimed, his cheeks pale, was as good as a death sentence.

In the end, of course, nothing had happened. Whether or not Philogonius had been summoned to Byzantium, he did not go; nor was Licinius in Byzantium much longer. Within a matter of months, the old bishop was dead; a development not, Theodotus suspected, at all unrelated to the strain of those feverish months. This development seemed to sap the courage of the clergy of Antioch entirely; though month after month discussions were raised over electing a new bishop, nothing was done. There was no point, his fellow deacon Martinus had whispered, shrugging his shoulders, in electing someone who would go straight into the arena.  

As the months passed by without incident, however, the specter of persecution did not dissipate; it seemed rather, to hang in the air over the city, dimming the sunlight. People went about their business with heads bowed, shooting resentful glances at the cathedral, treating it like a bad omen. After the initial flurry of activity, the civil war seemed to have stalled; though there were still rumors of battles, they were less plausible and more fanciful, and the people stopped discussing them. The cookshop Theodotus visited every evening for his dinner was now nearly silent, with people standing quietly in line and even the slave at the counter sullen.

Without a bishop, though, the work of the episcopal court ground to a halt; and Theodotus and his fellow deacons were reassigned to delivering food for the poor. This meant a great deal of traipsing through the streets, day and night, which allowed Theodotus an even better sense of the city's mood. It had soured, and it was clear the souring was against Licinius. People stopped paying respect to his statues as they passed, and a few even spit; graffiti calling for Constantine's victory appeared throughout the city, and after a few months the local Imperial administration gave up on removing it. A statue of Licinius, it was said, had been torn down in the night; and though it was set up and shining again when Theodotus saw it the next morning, soldiers with round shields slung on their backs now watched it, sweating under their armor and shooting suspicious glances at passersby.

Again, the crowds in the cathedral dwindled, though this time it was likely as much due to lack of a preacher than fear of persecution. The smaller chapels throughout the city, when Theodotus passed by them, seemed fuller than ever, people unable to fit inside down on their knees praying for deliverance and, increasingly, for Constantine's victory. Persecutor or not, Licinius had lost the confidence of his people.  Living under Galerius and Daza had been frightening, but living under a possible persecutor was an intolerable strain, from which only the Christian Emperor could deliver them.

Finally, the war broke out again in earnest; not mere rumors, but detailed reports soon began pouring into the city, passed eagerly from well-dressed Imperial messengers in tabernae or soldiers in the town squares or slaves from the Palace; they spoke of battle after battle, all, it seemed, lost by Licinius and won by Constantine. Licinius' army of 150,000, it was said, had been routed by Constantine's much smaller force, bearing the sign of the chi-rho on their shields and with the Emperor's divine totem, the labarum (the design of which, it was said, had been given to him in a dream) borne before them. Licinius too, it was whispered, had dreamed of Christ taking the diadem from his head and placing it on a statue of Constantine. Bodies of martyrs, fresh from the slaughter, had spoken, telling of Licinius' defeat, and predicting his imminent demise. 

Most trumpeted of all, however, was the news of the total defeat of the Eastern Emperor's fleet, the ships taken or burned off the Hellespont after a bold tactical maneuver had encircled them. The commander who had originated this strategy, and bravely led his men in boarding Licinius' ships, was not Constantine, though, but a heretofore unknown figure in the East: the Emperor's brilliant, dashing son, a great strategist, and equally brave, a pious Christian like his father, who had prayed on bended knee before a cross just before the battle: a worthy heir to the throne, a new Christian Emperor, a guarantee against any future persecution. His name, it seemed, was Crispus.

At that, Theodotus' thoughts were brought back, with a jolt, to the present. He sat up in bed, and silently mouthed the words: Constantine murdered Crispus. The Emperor killed his son.

Almost angrily, he lay back down again, and tried to force his mind to consider, once again, what the secret might be. 

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.

Poem: Holodomor

 [I wrote this poem many years ago after reading through a large number of oral-tradition accounts from survivors of the Holodomor, as well as a more abstract book on the same topic. 

The word Holodomor in Ukrainian means "death by starvation." This event, for those who have forgotten or never heard, took place in 1930-1933, when about eight million people starved to death, in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union, due to entirely man-made famines. These events took place as the result of Stalin's five-year plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. They were entirely caused by Soviet authorities and to an extent weaponized by those same authorities to break the traditional peasantry and nascent resistance and independence movements. The primary cause of starvation was not an absolute lack of food, but the mass collectivization of agriculture (designed to transfer labor to industry) and the forcible mass requisition of grain by Soviet authorities. This grain and other agricultural products was then exported overseas to earn the money and parts and expertise desperately desired to fund new, ambitious industrial projects.

In these events, the Western world played an absolutely necessary role, including the United States, which incredibly chose the year 1933 to recognize the Soviet Union and open trade with it. This rapprochement between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the West was made possible largely by the efforts of (ironically) Western capitalists eager for trade opportunities, as well as numerous writers and journalists producing pro-Soviet propaganda from Moscow and elsewhere and who denied either the existence or extent of the famine or explicitly justified it in the broader interests of Russia's progressive advancement and modernization. The most famous of these journalists was Walter Duranty, whose dismissive quote about breaking eggs opens the poem below. The poem also features numerous other paraphrased quotes from Duranty, contemporary sources, and above all survivors of the famine. 

In the first instance, I offer this poem today as a statement on the present state of the world, and in particular in the face of the unconscionable violence against innocents being carried out throughout the world today: among others in Ukraine by the Russian military, and in Gaza by the Israeli military. In particular, it is offered in response to Western apologists for Israeli war crimes, who in their mix of indifference to suffering innocents, moral cowardice, perverted ideology, and brute self-interest eerily echo their predecessors of the 1930s. In all candor this poem was forcefully brought back to my mind by the remarkable experience of watching Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress.

Regardless of the particular details, and regardless of all copy-book debates over politics, propaganda, fact-checking, geopolitical alliances, nationalism, racism, colonialism, self-determination, self-defense, military policy, international law, existential threats, and/or "moral equivalency," the overall point made by the poem is a deliberately universal and theological one: that every murdered, brutalized, or starved innocent is Christ; and that to be ultimately indifferent to his death is as much as to kill him yourself.]

Holodomor

Murder by starvation

a simple phrase,

a simple tune,

to be glossed over and forgotten.

Making an omelet

takes breaking a few eggs—

so a man said

once upon a time.

The well-coiffed, comfortable people

with their dreams of tolerance and salvation

their love of expediency

their adulations and their triumphs

they have seen You dying on the streets,

your body swollen, your fists clenched,

your eyes glazed over like an animal's,

they saw you, my Lord, and they did not do you the honor

of turning away, denying, or condemning.

They did not say

that you were guilty.

They did not say

that you were not there.

They just said

you were a broken egg

to be spoken of

glossed over

and forgotten

forever.

Death of the Son, Episode Six: Interview with an Empress

Death of the Son, Episode Six: 

Interview with an Empress

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five]

"Is he awake?"

In his memory, the old woman approached the couch slowly, her hands trembling. The soldier, however, did not tremble, but stayed perfectly still, his eyes open, but hoping--somehow--that she would not notice. 

But the old man's strong hands gripped him suddenly by the shoulders--those gnarled hands somehow so much stronger than those of his trainer or the optio of his century or the other soldiers who grappled with him each morning; with them all, he had fought and struggled and often thrown off their arms, but with the old man, the very idea of resistance seemed absurd--and rolled him in a moment over onto his back, exposed, his eyes suspended without recourse beneath the great, dark ones of the old woman. 

But the hand on his shoulder now was not that of the old deacon, but of the bishop Hosius--and Theodotus shook himself out of his reverie to find that it was Hosius' brown eyes, many shades brighter than those of the old woman, that now looked intently into his own.

How long, oh Lord? When will my penance be complete?

"Are you ready?" Theodotus felt, unexpectedly, a flash of anger, though whether at Hosius or Christ he could not be sure. Must everything be a test?

But he was coming out of his reverie now, and the anger was quickly lost, as it always was, in a rush of understanding. Hosius is no longer trying to test me; he is afraid, and looking for reassurance.

After a moment, then, he put his hand awkwardly on the older man's shoulder--just as the old man would have done. "Don't worry: we are carrying out our Lord's business, and he will help us," he said--just as the old man would have said. He wondered if the words sounded as awkward and hesitant to Hosius as they did to him.

But Hosius seemed satisfied. He turned rapidly back to the little, black-haired slave-woman who had been watching them, not without amusement, from behind her strange blue eyes. "Take us to the Empress." She bowed, stiffly, and led the way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Empress' Palace. 

As they walked, Theodotus again found himself studying the decor carefully--and was again struck both by what he saw, and what he did not. He had only recently been in the Imperial Palace, decorated and prepared for the Emperor's residence--before that he had on a number of occasions set foot in the palaces and mansions of the Antiochene rich, investigating a crime or bearing some message from the Episcopal Court. Only once, early in his tenure as a deacon, he had visited the Widow's House, where those holy women prayed and contemplated and fed themselves and the poor at the bishop's expense. That had been a sizeable dwelling for its place in the city, a donation from some local grandee, but cramped and austere, like a military barracks, narrow corridors and innumerable small bedrooms bearing little decoration but the occasional gilded image of Christ or the Virgin. He understood that Eustathius had since built a new, larger residence for them, using the funds that Constantine so beneficently showered down upon the dioceses--but he could not imagine it differing overmuch from its original. 

Helena's Palace, though, resembled none of these models, but rather a strange melding of them all, a material imprinted indelibly with something that he gradually came to perceive as the personality of the woman who reigned within it. At first glance, the religious house loomed largest--in the darkness and austerity of the corridors, the gilded mosaics and paintings of Christ and martyrs prominently displayed in every room, and most of all in the women moving here and there dressed in the rough, dark cloth, sewn with crosses, that served nearly everywhere in the Empire as the badge of consecrated widows and virgins. A minute later, though, and the signs of prosperity began to assert themselves--in the size of the rooms and corridors, the colored marble floors, the impressionistic paintings, false windows and doors and gardens, covering every wall, behind and above and around the religious images, and the occasional niches bearing draped or missing pagan statuettes. 

So far, though, it might be any wealthy woman's house recently converted into an impromptu haven for ascetics--of which many had sprung up throughout the Empire, even in Antioch. It was only when he passed into a sitting room and found himself confronted with a life-size porphyry image of Constantine and Helena, both reclining on couches with their hands joined, that he found himself suddenly confronted with the fact that he was in a house of royalty. After that, though, he began to find the signs everywhere--in the labyrinthine size and extent of the palace itself, the verdant pleasure gardens, trees and vines and flowers in abundance, glimpsed through real windows and doors, and most of all in the images of the Imperial family found in nearly every room, carved into statue groupings or painted onto the walls. 

It was with an even greater shock, though, that he found himself, turning another corner, suddenly staring into the face of the woman he had seen in his dream--Fausta herself, the Emperor's recently-deceased wife, seated in arrogant, beauteous splendor above the doorway, next to Helena, and with another young woman on her mother-in-law's other side, black hair elegantly curled and a broad face drawn in a wide smile. 

He glanced at Hosius. "Crispus' wife? ...she...?" 

The old bishop's brows tightened; but a shake of the head was his only response.

This encounter soured Theodotus' already shaken mood. For the first time, his intellectual interest gave away to a sense of the uncanny about this strange house, an Imperial Palace filled with images of living Christs and dead women. Even the living women...further glances dispelled his initial sense of familiarity in the figures that inhabited this strange landscape. That young woman in the simple brown dress...was she in fact a consecrated virgin? Or was she, perhaps, merely a fashionable young women, of some wealthy family, playing the devotee for a day, or merely there to gossip and enjoy the Empress' pleasure gardens? That older woman in richer garb, busied with clearing a table...was she a widow? Or was she merely a slave, the well-dressed servant of a great lady? Even those two women with crosses sewn on their dresses...were they officially sanctioned ascetics, their vows received by the bishop, or were they merely pious, wealthy laywomen dressed as them: or were they some third thing, outside of his current conception of the Church? 

And of course, the central question itself: what was Helena herself? Was she a widow of the Church, or an ordinary great lady of Rome: or was she simply the Empress, infinitely exalted above all others by the wealth of the Empire and the devotion of her son? What was Helena?

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.

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.

American Ghost Story: The Shining, The Jazz Singer, Invisible Man

American Ghost Story: 

The Shining, The Jazz Singer, Invisible Man 

I've been sick recently, and have thus had the time and lack of energy to do two things I rarely do: not think and watch movies. 

However, being me, and feeling better, these movies (and a novel I read at the same time) have inevitably sparked an enormous number of thoughts in me, which I will now inflict on you, dear reader. 

To be a Ghost

The Shining (1980) is a great horror movie that is centered on the rejection of almost everything that has made horror a popular genre. There are no jump scares in the movie--there is precious little gore--there is even little or no psychological horror in the conventional sense. And yet it is precisely when Kubrick does deploy such elements that the uniqueness of the film becomes most striking.

Pope Francis and the Third World War

Pope Francis and the Third World War

In the far-off year 2014, the sun shone, Barack Obama was President of the United States, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was released, and the top-selling song of the year was named "Happy." And the Pope of the Catholic Church announced the beginning of the Third World War. 

Amid the ever-repeated excitement of such scintillating mass-media events that year, few people in America noted or marked the centenary of World War I. While in Britain and France, this war is still clearly remembered--if nothing else for its devastating toll on the population and landscape--in America it has always been a forgotten war, a mere footnote on the path to World War II and global dominance. Still, events were held, here and there, most in Europe and a few in America, and to one of them the recently-elected Pope Francis came. While a South American by birth, he is also the descendant of Italian immigrants, who no doubt passed on some of the legacy and legend of the Great War to him. And so, in September, he visited a cemetery where soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that great rival of united Italy, were buried, and mourned the dead, and prayed for them, and said a few words in reflection on the conflict in which they died, as Popes have done for many decades now in regular succession.

In doing so, however, Francis, as he so often does, went off script, and began reflecting on contemporary events. "Perhaps," he mused, "one can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal."

This is, so far as can be told, the first time Francis mentioned the concept, only a little over a year after his election. He has since used the phrase and concept of "a third world war fought piecemeal" over and over again, dozens if not hundreds of times, mentioning it with greater and greater frequency as time has gone on and the world has grown more unstable.

Many things could be said about Pope Francis, for good and for ill, in many different dimensions. I hope to eventually write more about him and his significance.

The point of this essay, however, is to say that about this, at least, he is right, and has been since 2014. Something fundamental has changed, and the world has begun to look back to and recapitulate the horrors of the 20th century. And this must be understood, and stopped, while there is still time.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity 

Movies are back.

This, it seems, is what everyone is taking away from the unprecedented Barbenheimer phenomenon, which out of nowhere rocketed ticket sales from post-pandemic lows back to blockbuster levels. Two bizarre and bizarrely ill-matched movies released on the same weekend that somehow, instead of undercutting each other, ended up boosting each other, entirely through the power of Internet memes. 

What a strange time to be alive.

There is, really, nothing quite like modern Internet culture, a culture where incongruity and bizarreness and the power of a single ephemeral joke are valued, literally, above all else--and are powerful enough to get millions of Americans out of their homes and into movie theaters. Chesterton in the 1910s said that there had never been a power like the modern press: and he was right. But he hadn't seen nothing yet.

This is supposed to be an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, but discussing Internet memes is not a bad place to start. For what makes Oppenheimer so horrifying, at least for me, is the degree to which it associates and intertwines and simply and precisely treats as the same thing the power of mass media and the power of mass destruction.

Let me start over. I saw the movie Oppenheimer recently, and hated it as I have never hated any work of art produced by human persons before. It is the only film I have ever watched that made me absolutely livid with rage and sick to my stomach and unable to speak coherently for hours thereafter. I am still mad about it.

This is not precisely because it is a bad movie. In matter of fact, it is a clumsily made movie in many obvious repects--but rehearsing these would be largely besides the point. This is very much a film that does what it sets out to do, that makes the point it wants to make, that conveys what it wants to convey, to such a degree as to almost qualify as a genuine revelation. 

That being said, what it aims at, what it reveals, what it piously and intently worships, is, in my humble opinion, evil--and not just any evil, but precisely the evil of our time and place and society, the underlying belief and devotion and preoccupation behind all the most central and mainstream trends and all the most wasting moral and intellectual and social and political diseases of the world since 1945. And the movie loves this, and wants us to love it, too. And that is why I hate the movie.

The AI Revolution Already Took Place

 The AI Revolution Already Took Place

The most interesting thing about modernity is the degree to which it depends, for its basic functioning, on generating a constant sense of novelty. 

On such novelty depends not only such trifles as human life and livelihood, but also "the economy," "politics," and, perhaps most importantly of all, the ever-growing Internet-conspiracist-Take-Worker sector of the global economy.

To easily grasp what defines "modernity," I often point out to students that in Latin, as in most ancient languages, the term "new" normally has negative connotations--and can be otherwise translated as "strange" "rash" and even "revolutionary." In itself, this is far closer to a sort of human baseline response to novelty as such. Most ancient societies realized that "new things" were almost by definition disruptive things, things that created complications for the social networks and institutions they valued so highly and thus hardship and suffering and conflict. Families and institutions and Empires alike run on the old, and are thus largely and inevitably run by the old--especially in Rome, but increasingly in America as well. And as the recent disgusting wall-to-wall press coverage of the anniversary of overturning Roe v Wade reminds us, for institutions and established powers of all kinds, new things, and new people, always cause problems.

Merely saying that contemporary societies are the opposite of this, and regard novelty and the new as positive, though, is insufficient and somewhat deceptive. Certainly, modernity features any number of "progressive" narratives and theories and philosophies and theologies whereby what is new is always and by definition good, no matter what. Many popular works of progressive narrative and theory are, in fact, nearly comical in the degree of religious and moral fervor which they openly show and glory in the enormous conflict, social and familial disruption, and even violence that result from a given new trend, while still dogmatically insisting on that trend's goodness and the absolute moral necessity of embracing it and encouraging it and never questioning it at all. Yet even here, it would be easy to misunderstand the actual content and basis of the belief. 

To understand the history of the last few hundred years, one has to understand, first and foremost, that the negativity and conflict generated by modernity and modern trends is, in practically every case, not the result of "anti-modern" or "reactionary" or even "conservative" forces, but merely the inseparable twin and means of modernity itself. It is not, as one might expect, consistently and inevitably the progressive forces that advocate for novelty and portray it in positive terms, and the anti-progressive forces that portray it in negative terms. Rather, in almost every case, the novelty and its reaction are simultaneous and inseparable.

To give an obvious example, science-fiction taken as a whole is without a doubt a "progressive" and "modern" genre, yet the bread-and-butter of science fiction since its first days has been horror stories about technology and its negative consequences, demons and mad clones and evil androids and nuclear apocalypse and genetic engineering and Morlocks and erasing your family from the timeline. Frankenstein is the first modern science fiction novel precisely because it is nearly the first work of art to make extensive use of the terminology and concepts of modern science for primarily aesthetic purposes: and the aesthetic purposes to which it puts science are silence, distance, isolation, fear, and incalculable moral horror. 

Dystopia is not an opposite narrative mode to utopia, composed by different authors for contrary purposes. Nor is science horror opposite to science excitement. The Twilight Zone and Flash Gordon, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and L. Ron Hubbard, Gene Wolfe and Gene Wolfe, Star Trek and Black Mirror...all accept the radically new in science and technology as powerful and inevitable and beyond any rational control or regulation; all use this assumed reality both for aesthetic strangeness and horror and for aesthetic excitement and novelty and positivity. The same society, the same genre, even the same people produce both modes.

And in just the same way, a conspiracist or alarmist narrative about how a new technology or social trend will destroy the world is not, in practice, the opposite of a progressive or "pro-science" narrative about how a technology or social trend is "cool," must be embraced at all costs, and/or will save us all. The two are in most cases sponsored and paid for by the same tech companies, run in the same outlets, consumed by the same people, even at times created by the same people.

Again, there is a sense in which all this is distinctively modern, but also a sense in which it represents simply a universal human reaction to the truly and radically new, which always offers powers and possibilities and experiences and threats we have no prior experience with and so do not understand and so are not morally and intellectually equipped to handle, and so always to some extent moves us into an aesthetic space of excitement and horror and distance and alienation and strangeness. 

This is not in itself what makes modernity modern. What makes modernity modern is that both the "goodness" or "positivity" assigned to new things, and the "badness" or "negativity" assigned to new things, do not follow the typical senses of those words, which in most human languages and contexts emerge from morality and/or human comfort and/or prosperity and/or health and/or happiness and/or aesthetic preference. What defines modernity, rather, is precisely the sense that these novelties have truly and permanently and almost definitionally eluded the grasp of any human understanding or reason, and so cannot be properly categorized in terms of goodness or badness at all.

Hence, the concepts of goodness and badness applicable to these novelties end up representing something much closer to a metaphysical or definitional claim. What is new is good not in the sense in which, say, food or drink or shelter are good, or Star Trek Generations is good, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle or a law of physics or an ancient Mesopotamian god is good. Likewise, what is new is bad not in the sense in which, say, being mean to your sister is bad, or Marvel Avengers Infinity War Endgame is bad, but more in the sense in which a metaphysical principle may be bad in its implications for your own life, or a law of physics may cause you to fall unexpectedly off a cliff, or an ancient Mesopotamian god may wipe out your city and your family in an excess of spleen. Or, in other words, and in both cases, because it is fundamental, because it is inevitable, and/or because it is powerful. 

At the heart of modernity, then, is a kind of worship of inevitability and power as such, derived ultimately from a sort of immanentization into history of a metaphysical divinity transcending human reason and morality and identified with novelties good and bad. 

Here, though, is the problem with the worship of novelty, power, and/or inevitability as such. Metaphysical principles and laws of nature and even Mesopotamian deities are things that, by their nature, tend to be transcendent, not just temporarily but permanently beyond our reach and comprehension. Novelty, power, and inevitability, on the other hand, are things that can inhere in anything and everything, and things that by their inmost nature do not have much of a shelf-life. Something is divine forever; it can only be novel for a few minutes or a few days or perhaps a few years at best.

Most new things are only new in one respect, and then not new for very long; most inevitable things are not really inevitable at all, only very probable, and in constant danger of becoming un-inevitable; powerful things are only powerful to some limited degree, and usually only from one angle or one context. As fundamentally aesthetic phenomena, all suffer enormously from the basic hedonic treadmill effect. Maintaining a sense of novelty or power or inevitability at the center of a personality or a culture, then, requires an enormous and constant expenditure of time and attention and resources to find these qualities, demonstrate them, and finally give up on the current entity and start the process all over again.

And then, of course, even then most of the time finding actual genuine novelty power or inevitability is too hard, and in practice people simply settle for the aesthetic effects that suggest it.