Future Political Trends: A Study

Future Political Trends: A Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

The Troubles of Beautiful Wealthy People: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Last Days of Disco

There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain:
There are souls more sick of pleasure, than you are sick of pain.

There is a stir of unquiet in the air. We have, at last, gotten through an election that is in political terms perhaps the least interesting and impactful of my lifetime--but, in symbolic reality, and, therefore, in real world effects on the psyches and emotional selves and actions of people, among the most extreme. We are living in the greatest Empire the world has ever known; an Empire currently embroiled in two astonishingly bloody proxy wars, wars that our government seems to have little or no interest in controlling or containing or bringing to any kind of conclusion, wars that at this writing continue and escalate and spiral ever downwards, killing thousands of innocents, with no end in sight.

In such a night, what do we dream of? And what troubles our dreams?

I am not going to write, today, about either wars or elections. The suffering and death of the innocent are with God; but if we are to stop the killing, and even the psychological mass-media damage caused by a profoundly silly election, we need to ask ourselves more fundamental questions. We need to ask ourselves, first and foremost, why we are doing what we are doing. For only when we know what we are doing, and why, can we choose to stop doing it.

As I have argued, in recent months, I have seen a vision of the failure of America: a failure born merely of the mainstream, of mass media, of fantasy untethered from reality. The most horrifying thing about present moment is neither Trump nor Kamala's alleged wicked plans to destroy America, but rather their utter lack of any kind of political plans at all; not any particular American hatred or greed or racism or conquest or cowardice manifested in Gaza or Ukraine or Lebanon, but rather our seeming inability to feel anything at all about the wars we pay for and enable, to take any action at all and not contradict it, to take any responsibility at all for the people we have killed and the deeds we ourselves have done: to decide if we are at war with Russia or not, if we want Ukraine to invade Russia or surrender or negotiate or advance or retreat, if we want the government of Israel to keep fighting or stop fighting or expand or retreat, to decide if we want the people of Gaza to live or die or be occupied or be ruled or merely to cease to exist: to have any relationship at all to those who, at least, fight or suffer or hate or fear or die and have some idea why. 

The most troubling thing about the present American moment for me has nothing really to do with the election or our limited choice among media figures; it is simply the inability of our rulers and would-be rulers, of all parties and all groupings and all colors, to do anything, say anything, decided on anything for good or ill. A profound paralysis in fact grips our most powerful men, a profound indecision, an inability to grasp reality, an incapacity to evaluate it on any terms whatsoever: a existential vagueness about law, morality, governance, and life itself.

Anyway, all that is to say that today's post will be about two works of art about bored unhappy wealthy attractive white women living in New York City in the past.

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 09/03/2024: Testament of Belief

Testament of Belief

[I apologize for doing so little writing on here, as I have been both rather busy and also my creative energies have been directed towards (1) fiction, and (2) academic writing, neither of which is yet polished enough to post here. I have several pieces in various stages of construction, however, which should be appearing on here soon enough. This is not really any of those pieces, but an impromptu decision to say something about my belief and its bases, inspired mostly by my thoughts as I was going to bed and written in about an hour and posted in honor of Pope St. Gregory the Great on his feast-day. His writings are much more worth reading than mine.]

Every one, I suppose, has their own function when it comes to the Church and the life of grace; which is another way of saying their own testament, a thing to which they are able to witness. One of mine, I suppose, is to give the lie to the basic idea that faith is essentially a form of wish-fulfillment, that it is bound up with thoughts and emotions and beliefs and doubts and moral hypocrisies, in short something entirely other and opposed to reality in the sense believed in by scientists and engineers and so-called practical mean. 

To that, I can only say, for better or worse, that my belief, in its foundation and inceptions, has nothing really to do with the former, and everything to do with the latter. 

I sometimes envy people with what I would call a natural belief, or even a natural disbelief: people who find it difficult, if not impossible, to see where their own minds end and the reality to which all these things refer begins. Belief is natural to human beings: it is a necessary corollary of having a mind. Believing, and disbelieving, are simply things that people do, all the time, without much in the way of thought or even necessarily interest; and these acts of believing and disbelieving are naturally intertwined with all the other operations of people's minds, emotions and hopes and desires and fears and traumas and loves and hates. Among these beliefs, and disbeliefs, are mental states referring to God, or Christianity, or the Catholic Church--beliefs which may be important, but are not fundamentally different from any other similar mental state. Hence, even the most honest believer or disbeliever may, and should, ask themselves: am I sure that my beliefs (or disbeliefs) are accurate, that they refer to reality, that they are not unduly influenced by my own emotions? After all, it is so tied in with me that it may turn out to be all me after all. 

Alas, this is not how I relate, or have ever related, to God or the Catholic Faith. My relationship with God is in this sense based more on experience than belief: and it is not an experience, even, of having an idea confirmed by observation, or a hypothesis advanced by testing, or even a desire fulfilled by fruition. To the extent the experience may be analogized to other types of experience, it may be compared to any sudden, unanticipated physical reality: the step you miss while walking and thinking of other things, the car you collide with while listening to music, the pain you feel suddenly from the beam you did not see. It simply and undeniably asserts its reality precisely by its utter heedlessness, its utter lack of relation, to everything in your head and your heart. 

There was, and is, simply no proportion, no real relation, between my ideas and beliefs and hopes and fears and desires about God, and the experience of God I came to in and through my entrance into the Catholic Church. I did not anticipate it; I did not in any straightforward sense seek it out or ask for it or desire it. It was simply there. 

To the extent beliefs about God or Catholicism emerged from this experience, they are in no sense, really, beliefs about me. I do not believe that I believe in God; I do not believe that I experience God. I believe in God. God is; and the interesting (psychological) truth is that since that time period I have not really been capable of doubting the existence of God. That God exists is simply not something that is in any sense dependent on me, and so it is not something I have any straightforward capacity to challenge or occlude or disbelieve. 

Of course, to say this is not to make any particular claim about my own positive virtue or fidelity or indestructibility. Psychologically and physically speaking, I am certainly capable of denying that God exists, or even coming in some sense to believe it; as I am capable of being lobotomized, or decapitated, or losing all my memories, or coming through some strange series of freakish accidents to believe that I am a shoe. But as I said, this is not really something that has anything in particular to do with the fact of God's existence or my belief in it.

Or rather, if I am being completely honest, the truth is that not only does my belief in God, or in the Catholic Faith, not have anything in particular to do with any belief in my own intelligence or virtue or correctness; it is positively correlated with the opposite, which is to say, with my stupidity and sinfulness and incorrectnesss and lack of existence. This is, I suppose, something in the same sense in which the strength of a hammer striking my skull is positively correlated with the weakness of my skull, or the strength of gravity and a gravel road is positively correlated with the weakness of the small hay wagon out of which I was flung when I was ten years old, and of the skin of my leg as it was dragged across said gravel at high velocity. I have generally become aware of God's reality precisely through my own lack of reality, so closely that they could be said to be nearly one and the same reality.

All this may well seem extremely negative, if not cold and unfeeling. I cannot help that, I suppose. Yet it is worth saying that by no means was my experience of God solely or primarily an experience of divine wrath or power or judgment or any of those things--that it was, emphatically and overwhelming and in its totality an experience of divine mercy, benevolence, and indeed love. 

Yet if it is true that our lack and nothingness may be demonstrated to us by something opposing or overpowering us, it is no less true that our lack and nothingness can equally be demonstrated to us by something giving to and loving us. Perhaps a metaphor would help here. The more water is poured into a cup, the higher the proportion of the cup that is filled, the more the cup's prior emptiness is necessitated and demonstrated. The more that is given, the less that there could have been before the gift.

There were in fact dimensions in which my experience of God was one of my own will, my own self, being checked and overruled from without. Yet the more fundamental experience even in these instances was of something giving to me, giving to me so much of my self that it necessitated and demonstrated that before that gift I could not have had a self at all. I experienced being given everything that I was and had and have and will have--will, thoughts, desires, fears, emotions, losses, victories, defeats, doubts, acceptance, resistance, sins, life, death, moment to moment existence--and even more; much more; infinitely more. This was at one and the same time and for the same reason and in the same degree an experience of divine love and of my own nonexistence.

For this reason, I find it impossible, generally speaking, to doubt not only that God exists, but also that he loves me. After all, my own moment-to-moment experience of my own existence is, quite simply, the experience of divine love. Yet as with God's existence, so too with God's love; my belief is not really, for better or worse, a belief about me. For whatever it may mean, there is a real sense in which I find it habitually easier to doubt and deny my own existence than to doubt that God loves me; or at least that God loves.

Before I close this odd rambling, I should also add, briefly, what all this has to do, for me, with the question of belief in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as opposed to other religious bodies or beliefs Christian and non-Christian, a question that preoccupied me a great deal when I was younger. I am, or have become, very familiar with the bases for intellectual belief in all the above, and do my best to communicate them and live them out. 

Yet the simple truth is that my belief in Catholicism, and my entrance into the Faith, is not ultimately based on any of those things, but again on an experience of what appeared to me, and appears to me still, simply as reality: indeed, precisely that same heedless, overpowering, proportionless reality spoken of above. My experiences of the Catholic Church have, without exception, been simply experiences of God. Hence, in the most immediate sense, my experience and principal belief about the Catholic Church is simply that it is God; or rather, to weaken and perhaps make comprehensible the claim, that the experience of God I discussed above came and comes entirely and solely in and through and with reference to the Catholic Church, her words and deeds and saints and clergy and monks and laypeople and liturgy and Sacraments. The latter statement, though, is a rationalization of my actual experience: which is, as I said, simply that God and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing. 

(I may also say parenthetically that in about the same way, my experience is that God and the poor and suffering people are one and the same thing.)

I have now spent many years of my life reading and writing theology in an attempt to work out what I believe that experience reflects; which is, put in correct theological language, the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become man, tangible and material and natural and historical, and of his union with the Church his inseparable Body and Bride, and his consequent presence and activity in the authority of the clergy and the Sacraments and above all the Eucharist. This theological thinking-out is much more mixed with my own thoughts, has proceeded much more naturally, by hypothesis, thought, trial and error; and I consequently believe it in a different sense from the above. But that God is in the Church, in the Eucharist, in Catholic words and deeds and saints and doctrines, I believe not for these reasons, but because I have experienced it--like a blow to the head.

I am quite conscious that all this may well seem insane, incomprehensible, fanatical, or what is worse, fundamentally unappealing and even frightening to people. As I said, I cannot really help that; at least without dishonesty. From this basic set of experiences, I have striven very hard to understand and to integrate the various aspects and dimensions of earthly faith, including personal piety and religious emotion and social and communal life and institutional functioning and historical tradition and all the complex and amusing byplay of belief and doubt, proof and evidence and argument, thought and claim and counterclaim, so necessary for the life of the human beings and the Church on earth: and I have come to love and appreciate them all. 

Yet for all that, I have no choice but to finally acknowledge that the fundamental thing that is the basis of my faith, the fundamental thing that I have, I suppose, to testify to, is different from all this. 

This is my (very poor) attempt to express a little of that.

Column 05/25/2024: The Millennial Sovereign, The Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

The Millennial Sovereign, the Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

What is it that makes a human person more than just another human person?

This is a rather important question, to which many highly conflicting answers have been given. 

We are, most of us, surrounded by people day in and day out, both in person and through media and social and political structures. Most of these people we do not, really, know particularly well. Some of these people want things from us; from some we want things; and some of these people will not just want something from us: they will want us. So how do we decide, among all these people, who we will pay attention to or not pay attention to, trust or not trust, listen to or not listen to, obey or not obey? How do we decide who we give ourselves to, as friends, lovers, helpers, leaders, followers, servants? 

This is a crucial question when it comes to individual relationships and individual lives; but it is in many ways even more crucial when it comes to the lives and destinies of whole groups and peoples and nations and Empires. In our personal lives, we can (if we choose) exercise prudence and wisdom and take our time and think our way through who we trust and who we give to and who we give ourselves to. When it comes to the realms of public culture, political culture, especially mass-media culture, we frequently are under far more pressure, and have far less to go on. How do we decide who is telling the truth in a public war of words between two politicians or influencers or apologists or academics talking about something we know nothing about? How do we decide who to trust, to whom to give our money, our time, our attention, our vote, our obedience, our trust and love and devotion, when our choice actually matters, for ourselves and others?

There are many answers to this basic question, ranging from the rational to the romantic to the utterly insane. One common answer throughout history is charisma. 

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

"I left a woman waiting:
I met her sometime later.
She said: 'I see your eyes are dead.
What happened to you, lover?'"

"I'm fucking nothing. I'm not even a person."

The above quotes come from two extraordinarily different works of art, created by two extraordinarily different artists more than thirty years apart. They are, nonetheless, about precisely the same thing.

Let me start over. One of the primary purposes of art is to aid in the extraordinarily important process of reflection and processing of our lives and selves and experiences. We all live out of and based on what we receive of the world; yet before we can act truthfully, we must first understand truthfully what we have received. And this is by no means easy.

One of the greatest problems with the contemporary regime of mass-media in American life is that it renders this process all but impossible. It does so in the first place by simply deafening and overwhelming people with narratives and experiences that are totally foreign to their own lives, which they have no ability even to begin to process, and which thus leave them no space and time to process their own lives and selves and the world itself. It does so in the second place by giving them narratives of the world that falsify their own experiences, causing them to understand their own lives in ways that are false and harmful, and hence, inevitably, to act in ways that are false and harmful.

One of the primary realms where this is true is, of course, the domain of human relationships and desire, insofar as, as I have argued in this space, the primary form of artistic production of our civilization consists of the manipulation of human desires for the purposes of pornography and advertising. For this to be effective, people have to absorb and internalize a sense of their own persons and identities and desires that is maximally manipulable by media. This, while existing in different ways in different areas, is fundamentally a mode that is de-personalized, de-relationalized, momentary, intense, atomized, repeatable, interchangeable, quantifiable, and totally separated from any sense of truth or reality. The ideal subject of this type of desire is someone who responds with maximal intensity to any given stimulus, at whatever time, whoever it involves, whether it is in reality or only via media, does whatever that stimuli tells him or her to do (such as buy a product), and then is ready to respond in the same way a moment later to a totally unrelated stimulus.

A great deal of American mass-media, consequently, is dedicated to portraying this type of desire as supremely positive and affirmed and fulfilling, and the type of person who is defined by such desires as supremely affirmed and fulfilled and happy. 

And yet the reality, which we have all at some point in our lives seen plainly either in others or in ourselves or both, is that this person is definitionally and maximally unfulfilled and lonely and miserable and unhappy. Since most people in America process their own experiences of themselves and others largely or entirely through mass media, though, many people are entirely unable to grasp this obvious reality or acknowledge it or process it or derive any conclusions from it or take any actions based on it. Indeed, even people who are obviously and enormously unhappy for precisely this reason are, in my experience, almost totally incapable of actually seeing themselves as unhappy and hence of taking any steps, large or small, to remedy their situation.

The first step to ceasing to be unhappy is to recognize that one is in fact unhappy. This is trivially true, but in fact, in practical terms, is one of the most common obstacles to personal happiness in many contemporary American's lives. People are frequently driven to go very far into the depths of personal dysfunction and the Internet alike before they can find media that allows them to reflect on themselves to even this very minimal degree--and then frequently the sectarian or conspiracist or victimizing or pseudo-psychologizing Internet narratives they end up consuming about their own unhappiness are just as false and destructive and conducive to further unhappiness. 

Even more cruelly, perhaps, the reality of contemporary American life is that many, many, many people do in fact have the materials of fulfilling, meaningful, even happy lives, but live their entire lives in the shadows, ashamed, and made unhappy precisely because their lives do not measure up to mass-media fantasies of people who are in fact profoundly, deeply miserable themselves.

It is precisely because of that that there is an enormous need for works of art that clearly and effectively and truthfully portray the unhappiness of people who are in fact unhappy, in such a way that people who are not like these people can recognize them as unhappy and not try to emulate them or be ashamed they are not like them, and so people who are in fact like these people can come to see their own unhappiness and act on it.

This is yet another unnecessarily long-winded and philosophical proem to two works of art that I like very much, both of which center on the utter misery and loneliness of famous, attractive, successful, promiscuous men. So here goes.

Column 03/13/2024: Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

 Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

In art and life alike, it is important not to confuse the supernatural with the preternatural.

The supernatural, what is super naturam, "above nature," refers, properly speaking, to the genuinely transcendent--that is, what it is distinguished from the natural not by a straightforward conflict or addition, but by totally superseding it, nullifying it, prefiguring it in its totality, and/or drawing it up whole into itself. The genuinely supernatural cannot be anticipated by the natural, or portrayed in terms of it: it can only, to a limited extent, be conveyed by its action on and through the natural. Hence the proper mode(s) of the Sacred Scriptures and other theological and mystical writings.

The preternatural, what is praeter naturam, "next to nature" or "outside" it, is not like this: most properly, it refers to those things that do not transcend the natural, but rather exist alongside it, adding something to it or in some way operating outside its normal bounds. It is the preternatural that is the more common purview of human art and literature. 

Even here, one can distinguish two senses of the preternatural, one of which is more proper than the other. In the first place, the term preternatural is often used for entities that, while not properly supernatural, are nonetheless more spiritual or powerful or higher in some sense, and thus have greater power to act on and even against nature: demons and angels and ghosts and human persons. 

In itself, though, there is nothing unnatural about these entities, which are in the most immediate sense simply one group of created natures among others. I have never seen a ghost, but I have had a few encounters with demons--and I can assure my readers that there is nothing particularly exciting or artistic about such experiences. The existence of an entity that is strong or difficult to detect or even very intelligent and who wishes to harm you may be frightening, but there is nothing intrinsically interesting about it, any more than about a cockroach or charging rhinoceros or human murderer. 

Still, while these entities are not beyond nature in a strong sense, the reality is that if we examine the bulk of art about spiritual beings, indeed the bulk of art about even threatening human beings or animals, we find that it is layered with a great deal of strange, eerie "preternatural" effects. The reason for this, though, is found in the relationship between such entities and the preternatural in the proper sense. 

Hence the central thesis of this essay, namely that the "preternatural" in human and artistic terms refers precisely to the interiority of human experience and action, and in particular to two troubling features of this interiority: (1) its frequent opacity, and (2) its susceptibility to being acted upon and affected.

A human person does not merely exist as an entity in the world, one object among other objects acting and being acted upon: they exist, rather, by receiving and interiorizing the world, and then communicating what they have received.

Hence the essential paradox of human life and personhood as such: every human being lives in the same objective world, yet every human being exists in a sense in their own world, which is not merely a "subjective" as opposed to "objective" world, or a false as opposed to a true world, but which is precisely the world as received and related to by themselves. As both Trinitarian theology and Christology in their several ways show, the person in its actual, particular existence and relationality is precisely what cannot be comprehended within nature, but exists "outside of" it, "alongside" it. As an intellectual entity, an entity that fundamentally is intellect--that is to say, a pure receptivity that is actualized and exists only in its receiving and relating to and even becoming what is other as other--every human being simply is the whole world received according to a particular relation. 

In theory, there is nothing dangerous, nothing even false or non-objective, about this state of affairs. Each person receives the world according to their particular, truthful relation to it, characterizes that world comprehensively according to that relation, and then gives that world back as their own to other persons. In this giving and receiving of the content of the world and all things according to real and true relation, this essentially Trinitarian dynamic, is the whole glory and beauty of intellect and personhood and, in its most perfect and transcendent form, the very life of God himself. 

Yet in the world as we find it, this reality of personhood can go very badly wrong. Each person lives in, lives as, a world: but these worlds are frequently constituted as much by falsehood, disconnection, privation, and malicious intention as by true and objective relation. When we encounter people, when we start to understand them, we get not so much a sense of their psychology or their identity in a straightforward sense: we get, rather, a glimpse of the world in which they exist, the world as which they exist. Without a doubt we have all had the experience of encountering someone (perhaps even ourselves) and getting a glimpse of the world in which they lived--and finding it a hellish, illusive wasteland.

At the same time, the worlds we construct or exist in are never merely our own creations, based merely on our own relations. As persons, starting from the time we are infants, we all form our senses of the world and our personalities through receiving from and relating to others. Without this, no true relationships among people are possible, and indeed we cannot really function as rational beings, cannot really live in the world or form our own sense of it. We are beings that by our very nature and inmost operation are aimed at receiving other peoples' worlds, other peoples' interiorities, and reconciling and uniting them to our own. 

At its best, this process of communication is a constant ongoing process, a constant reception and correction and expansion and integration of our sense of the world that brings us deeper and deeper into relation with each other and the depths of being. At worst, though, this process of receiving our worlds from without can become the most brutal type of violence, a violence that threatens to efface our inmost selves. We have all almost certainly had the experience of being overwhelmed, deafened, deadened, perhaps even totally annihilated by someone else's hellish interiority, someone else's false sense of the world and their and our place in it. 

It is here that the less proper sense of the preternatural relates directly to, and is only comprehensible in terms of, the proper sense of the term.  In principle, everything in the world has some power over our interiority, some place in the worlds we form. The more something--a time, a place, an object, a melody, a work of art, a relationship--directly impacts our interiority, shapes and characterizes and constitutes it, the more we perceive that thing as somehow "beyond nature," strange, wonderful, luminous, eerie. 

"Spirits" and human persons alike are not preternatural in any sense that transcends this--they are simply entities in the world with the capacity to impact our interior lives. Yet as intellectual beings with interior lives, thoughts and intentions and designs and worlds of their own, they are entities who have a great deal more power to shape and even dominate our interiorities than any other. In the final sense, indeed, only other persons, other intellectual entities, are or can be preternatural. Only they can give us our senses of the world, alter them, or destroy them. 

Hence, it is quite true and even quite literal to say that for the saint the world is heaven, and that for the evil man one and the same world is hell. Indeed, the saint in a real sense is heaven; his whole existence and personality is found in the communication of the world as given and received and lived in beatitude; and as evil men grow more evil, they in a real sense become Hell, their existence consisting in little more than the communication of their own misery and damnation to others. It is this interplay and drama of personality, of the communication of whole cosmoses, that constitutes most of the actual substance of our lives in this world.

To illustrate the point, I will now turn to examining a few works of art that bear on this question, and show how they all reflect, to varying degrees, this fundamental reality of human life: and how their use of "preternatural" elements in the exterior sense is ultimately a mask and means for examining the ways in which people's interior lives are impacted, illuminated, deformed, or destroyed by the world and other persons. In these stories, ghosts and demons and other people alike are ghostly, not because they threaten us without, but because they threaten us within.

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 1/09/2023: Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Cur Deus homo? 

"Why is God a man?"

So asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, long ago; and so many us are hopefully compelled to ask, for the first or the hundredth or the thousandth time, by the Christmas season. Or perhaps not; perhaps, after a dozen or two or three or five or seven dozen Christmases, perhaps we simply take the angels and the Mother and Child and Wise Men and Shepherds all as givens. Perhaps we have never questioned them at all. Perhaps all our knowledge of Christmas comes from Hallmark Christmas movies. Perhaps we always thought that Christmas was a fictional holiday invented for Jim Carry's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Why is God a man? Why is God a human being? Why is God a child, an infant, held in the arms of his mother, watched over by a stepfather, surrounded by animals and poor shepherds and exotic magicians? Why is God nursing, why is he crying, why is he sleeping? Why is God the descendant of the founding king of a minor Near Eastern dynasty? Why is God a political subject of Gaius Iulius Caesar Augustus? Why does God need a blanket?

Why is God something?

Of course, to even begin to answer the question posed above, we have to have some understanding of what God is; and also (a much harder question) what man is. Anselm had one very good answer to these questions; and I invite you to consider this answer at your leisure. For now, I will merely suggest some thoughts that came to me recently, and which were for me wrapped together inextricably with the event of Christmas. 

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. 

Poem: Blood

Blood 

The leaves on the trees are wet with blood

From the heart of the dying sun.

***********************************************************************

Jesu, do you really know what it is like

To be created?

To be nothing?

How could you have done this to us?

How could you have created us, and left us alone

In this dark of which you made us

With only each other’s faces

To reflect the light from heaven

And make us be a little while?

In the end, we are thrown on the garbage dump

In Gehenna, where the worm does not die

Nor is the fire quenched:

Darkness devoured into light

And life

And feeling

It is better to be damned

Than not to exist

Than never to have existed.

But oh, what sorrow, whether in hell

Or in heaven

To be only darkness

Forever

Are you really inside of me?

No, I don’t care about that now:

Are you really with me?

Do I face you, exist to you,

And you to me?

Do I have a face?

I know that you have a face,

And that your Father is with you,

And that you face him for all eternity,

And for all eternity he is with you

And you with him.

How happy you must be!

To never be alone.

To be all light

With no darkness at all.

But Lord, do you really know

What it is like to be created?

Column 05/03/2023: Birthday Reflections on Identity, Time, and God

Birthday Reflections on Identity, Time, and God

[My birthday was this past weekend. This got me thinking about life, time, God, identity, and other such things, which I have often thought about in the past. Here is a crystallization of those thoughts.] 

We live in an age when "identity" has become a sort of universal watchword. It has become so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. 

As with all terms that define an era, everyone uses it, and what is more, everyone uses it in the same way. It would be tempting to see the term as essentially defining a polarity or difference or societal conflict based on whether it is used positively or negatively. This is incorrect, however. Both the American Left and the American Right attack their enemies as promoting illegitimate "identity politics" or "identitarianism"; both the American Left and the American Right then turn on a dime to asserting the sacred nature of their own and their allies' "identity." For every left-wing institution emphasizing racial or sexual identity, there is a right-wing institution promoting cultural or national or religious identity. There are even entire media operations dedicated to promoting something called (shudder) "Catholic identity." 

Identity is certainly a fascinating and fundamental concept, and one I've spent a lot of my life grappling with. Yet it strikes me that contemporary rarely touch on the questions of identity that are to me most interesting, or even really most challenging in themselves. 

Lurking behind most modern uses of the term is a concept of identity that I would call "voluntarist" "atomist" and/or "political-social-conflictual." Identity in this sense is most basically self-chosen or at least self-discovered, an essentially internal relationship with oneself that in some mysterious way constitutes that self. It is for this reason above all else that identity is normatively treated as beyond rational or moral criticism or analysis. 

While in itself unchallengeable, however, identity is seen as something that is necessarily asserted outwards towards others and society and the political realm, coming through will to constitute and determine all external relationships of the individual. In this act of assertion, identity is treated as static, pervasive, and absolute (in the sense of incapable of being resolved or analyzed), and is represented through symbols and images that in some mysterious way express or embody it. Given that such identities must be asserted but cannot be questioned or engaged with, people and society and the state are left with the urgent, binary moral choice of either accepting and affirming a particular identity of a particular person or group in its totality, or rejecting and disaffirming it. 

Despite common notions, this model is not necessarily "identitarian" in a positive sense: because it conceives of identity as individual and internal and beyond rational and moral critique, it can just as easily lead to a logic of rejection and disaffirmation as to one of acceptance and affirmation. Indeed, it is doing so now, as we speak.

In its early stages, there can be no doubt that this concept of identity did arise in large part out of a desire for social acceptance, peace, and harmony, and did lead in practice to growth in attitudes of acceptance and affirmation--at least among the relatively comfortable Americans and similar people at whom it was aimed. As always with aristocratic systems, the existentially and materially comfortable correctly perceived the practical impositions of reason and morality, and in particular the moral and practical demands and challenges of other people and other groups, as the main potential threat to their status and way of life. By entirely removing all moral and rational logics of all identity groups "off-stage" into a hermetically sealed internal-individual space, however, the new identitarian system was able to defuse all such challenges in utero. 

In this, it was very much an offspring of the liberal-secular treatments of religion and economics, two areas of apparent conflict similarly "defused" by shoving all related topics helpfully off-stage into the merely "private" or "individual" realm. And once again, in the short term, it appears to have worked: unable to perceive the moral and rational or even historical or cultural challenges of other identity groups, comfortable Americans relapsed to their natural state of ease, in the process accepting these groups in at least a minimum, largely indifferentist way.

However, for non-aristocratic groups more threatened or more needy, this system presaged, as it usually does, not peace, but conflict. If the highest goal is merely indifferent affirmation, all is well and good; but if you require or desire more than that, competition and conflict sets in quite quickly, and in a manner even more difficult to deal with or defuse than before. Identity groups, after all, as Marx would have it, simply possess different interests. They also possess different desires and goals in the external world, and operate according to extremely different internal moral and rational logics. This naturally leads to conflicts of varying degrees of intrinsic or extrinsic irreconcilability, which have to be resolved or at least dealt with according to some logic or diplomacy or strategy or social or political structure. Identitarianism, however, by its very nature entirely forbids all such attempts to deal with difference and conflict.

While for comfortable Americans pushing identity into a purely internal realm free from reason and calculation served to defuse conflict, for virtually everyone else it has served rather to increase conflict: since by this logic there is little or no common ground of justice or reason or morality by which groups can be reconciled with each other or even practically ally with each other or even practically co-exist. Indeed, even to negotiate over matters of external desires and interests virtually always in practice involves intruding on the sacred internal realm of the identity itself--and hence provoking violent conflict. 

And then, of course, the oasis of ordinary, comfortable middle- and upper-class Americans has itself been nearly entirely transformed by the events of the past ten years, and in particular by the pandemic, into a world not of material and existential comfort, but of existential and moral panic.

Hence, in the last few years one might argue that we have reached a new stage in the identitarian system, or at least added a new dogma to it. This dictum is that certain identities are by their very nature opposed to each other, not only in practical interests or external relations, but in fundamental, internal essence. Hence, each act of affirmation of a particular identity becomes at the same time and necessarily also a rejection and disaffirmation of all opposed identities. 

Indeed, in the last few years, and especially in the context of the Internet and social media, it is quite clear that a societal ethos and logic of affirmation and acceptance has been largely replaced by one of disaffirmation and rejection--not only for the reasons discussed above, but also because of the basic nature of the Internet as a chaotic homogenized realm of symbols where in practice nearly everything is defined through symbolic opposition or negation. In such a realm affirmation of or membership in a particular identity category is practically expressed largely through acts of rejection or disaffirmation of that group's enemies.

As I said, though, this is not really what I wanted to talk about in this post--because it does not really, for me at least, have very much to do with the problem of human and personal identity. I want to talk about it in more fundamental terms.

Column 04/25/2023: Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Once upon a time, there was a bottomless abyss of unformed, undefined, unrelated infinity.

Once upon a time, there was a single, absolutely solitary, absolutely unrelated, and so absolutely sovereign will.

Once upon a time, there was a Father and his Son.

What is God? 

Is God something?

Is God nothing?

An acquaintance of mine, Timothy Troutner, a theology graduate student at Notre Dame, has recently published "Five Theses on Apophaticism," a distillation of his dissertation in which he issues a public challenge to what he sees as a troubling trend in modern theology by which a kind of apophaticism has come to assume a "systematic, total, and regulative" governance of Christian theological doctrine. I could not possibly hope to do justice to his overall thesis, particularly in its treatment of various specific modern academic-theological trends and actors. I am not familiar with or embedded in the world of modern academic theology; I am, I think, quite familiar with the world of ancient philosophy and theology in general and Trinitarian controversy in particular, about which I am in the process of publishing a monograph. It is from this perspective, then, that I write, and which will shape my focus in responding to Troutner's theses.

Before I begin, I would direct my readers to two recent pieces I have written that lay some of the foundations for this discussion: my argument about Trinitarian theology and its relationship with ancient Platonic debates, and my attempt to summarize Hilary of Poitier's doctrine of divine equality. As will become clear, I think these articles are related to Troutner's points in several ways. For the broader points made here, I would ask readers to consult Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Zlatko Plese's excellent scholarship on Gnosticism, and eventually my forthcoming monograph.

To quickly sum up my responses to Troutner below: while Troutner does appear to be in certain ways unfair to Patristic and Scholastic treatments of apophaticism, I think his argument does highlight a perennial danger for Christian theology, which to a large extent modern academic theology has not avoided, and helps us in setting some limits for apophaticism as a concept. My main critique, as will become clear, is that he seems to concede far too much to his modern apophaticists even in conceptualizing an escape from them, and thus produces a construal of the Trinity that I find very hard to accept.

Column 03/25/2023: The Trouble with (Modern) Physics: Lee Smolin's Time Reborn

In my last essay, I decided that I understood ancient Platonism. In this post, though, I will not pretend to understand modern physics. I will, however, say some things about a recent book from an eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lee Smolin (who also happens to be my uncle), that I recently read: Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. 

Many of my posts on here are notable for their sheer cheek in tackling topics, but this one, as they say, takes the cake. If you happen to know about this topic, then please accept this humble disclaimer that I emphatically not a physicist, and take this as what it is: some hopefully interesting comments from a non-expert.

What is the Trouble?

Lee Smolin's task over the last decade or so has been to argue that (1) modern physics and cosmology has reached a crisis point that threatens the bases of the entire field, and (2) only a radical paradigm shift can save it. The former point was argued at most length in his previous book The Trouble with Physics, while Time Reborn attempts to provide a way forward and a sketch of the necessary paradigm shift: an effort that he has more recently followed up on with several other volumes along the same lines. 

This, I think, is the best sort of book to gain some measure of understanding of a field: not a textbook or popularization, both of which typically present caricatured versions of research from decades ago without interpretation or explanation, but a interpretation of a field by an acknowledged master with a clear and obvious angle. 

Of course, such interpretation of a whole field, especially a field as abstract and analytical as theoretical cosmology, cannot help but be philosophy.

I won't defend this claim, which would drive many physicists crazy, but I will, as stated above, comment on the book's conclusions and arguments from the perspective of someone well-versed in ancient and medieval philosophy.

Column 03/11/2023: The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

The Trinitarian Controversy as the Culmination of Ancient Platonism

Recently, while engaged in scholarly work, I suddenly had a moment of revelation where I felt, for the first time, that I understood ancient Platonism and how Christian Trinitarianism both arose out of and resolved the conflicts within it. It was frankly an incredible high, which has since faded into the common light of day, but I am now attempting to relive it by trying in labored fashion to express what I saw then.

What follows is best understood as "pseudo-scholarship": arising out of my academic research, but written quickly in a slapdash fashion without references, to sum up my own reflections on many, many hours of reading and research on these topics.

So: here goes.

Column 03/08/2023: Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day

[In this column, I will again return to the mini-art-criticism format by discussing three works of art which I have read/watched over the last several months, which I believe are extremely connected to each other. Obviously there are lots of spoilers.]

American Psycho (2000)

"I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine..."

My story parallels those of many other men of my generation. I finally watched American Psycho recently after years of seeing business card memes on the Internet. 

American Psycho is what is known as a "cult classic."

Like many other critics to write about American Psycho, I am haunted by the fear that I may sound as nonsensically bullshitting as its protagonist, stereo aficionado Patrick Bateman, does in the key scene in which he energetically monologues meaningless critical jargon about Huey Lewis and the News while dancing around with an ax. 

This cult-classic critical indie darling...*axe noises*

Column 11/04/22: Technological Criticism

Technological Criticism

To be unable to criticize technology is to be insane. This particular kind of insanity is the hallmark of modern society.

Allow me to justify the preceding statements. 

The Logos of Techne

It is difficult to think of a word for what we call "technology" in any ancient tongue or culture. In fact, it occurred to me recently that the word is rather bizarre in itself--something approaching a contradiction in terms. Logos and techne were fundamental categories to the Greeks and especially the Greek philosophers, but they existed in strong contradistinction to each other. Logos is the realm of knowledge, of discourse, of accounting for a particular reality, whether by means of abstract philosophy, mathematical calculation, or narrative. Techne, in contrast, is the realm of craft, of skilled practice aimed at creation and action.

It is by this time a very old intellectual-history commonplace to point to the connections between magic and technology, even to say, as C.S. Lewis did, that the main or only distinction between magic and technology is that one worked, and the other did not. There is truth in this, but it is nonetheless somewhat deceptive. Techne or craft in the pre-modern sense is in fact closely allied to magic, precisely because by its very nature it defies logos in the sense of pre-determined abstraction and calculation. The magician is a practitioner of a craft, but like many pre-modern craftsman, his craft cannot be neatly set out in a mathematical simulation or technical manual; he operates on a mixture of innate skill, honed practice, habit, planning, improvisation, and technique. Wizardry operates on the guild system, with masters and apprentices; there is no magical proletariat. Books of spells or alchemical texts read much like the Byzantine recipes for paints and metal alloys that I translated earlier this year: succinct sets of directions for already skilled and practiced craftsmen to achieve practical ends, given in imprecise proportions, with many options and lots of freedom to alter and experiment baked in.

Technology, though, is not techne. It is not a skill inhering in a skilled laborer operating on technique and instinct beyond the realms of abstract knowledge and calculation. It is, by its very nature, totally calculated and determined in advance, through the distinctively modern and scientific obsession with applied mathematics. 

Neither, though, is technology logos in the general sense of that word. Plato in many of his dialogues provides what could be rather more fittingly described as technologies: that is, rational accounts of techne in general and its particular species, describing their rational ends, the skills involved, and how to become a better practitioner. Technology, while totally calculated, is aimed emphatically at merely practical and immediate ends; it is rarely analyzed in philosophical or moral terms, and no practitioner of technology would regard such analysis as essential to its nature or operation.