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Rod Dreher's Diary
August 29, 2024
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The Weak Gods Of Now

And: Incomplete Religions; Bigfoot; Gangs Of Aurora; Don't Call Germans Fat

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Mr. Wednesday /Odin (Ian McShane) talks with Easter in ‘American Gods’ (Source)

Paul Kingsnorth’s latest essay says that the claim that the post-Christian West is “re-paganizing” is pretty thin. In much contemporary discourse, “pagan” is a synonym for someone who is not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. That’s insufficient, says Kingsnorth. More:

I think there is a lot to this argument [for re-paganizaation]; and yet I don’t think it is quite right, for two reasons.

The first is that there are a lot of people around these days who call themselves ‘pagans’, and they would all reject the values that Perry et al ascribe to them. The reason for this, ironically, is that most of our new ‘pagans’ are in fact Christians in disguise. Their values - human rights, feminism, ecological sensitivity, and broadly liberal views - are derived from Christianity, and the ‘old gods’ they claim to worship often have suspiciously modern attitudes (see, for example, my essay on the reinvention of the ‘goddess Brigid’). It’s true that there is a minority of far-right pagan types who hang around on the fringes, blathering about the volk and the ‘old gods’ of the Aryans, but the fact that they are roundly rejected by the majority of modern pagans just helps to prove my point.

This brings me to my second reason. Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief. Pagans and Christians might tear chunks off each other for all sorts of reasons, but they are essentially fighting over the nature of the divine. They - we - are all religious people.

If we were really ‘re-paganising’, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing with the likes of Bambi Thug, Sam Smith and the rest is not the resurgence of a threatening new (or old) religion. It is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

More:

In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing.

To underscore this point, a reader sent me this excerpt from Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. The reader said:

I don't know if you've read it, but the novel follows Shadow Moon, an ex-convict who becomes the bodyguard for a man calling himself "Mr. Wednesday." Turns out, Wednesday is actually the Norse god Odin, who is gathering old gods from various mythologies to wage a battle against the new gods of modern society, like Media, Technology, and Globalization, who thrive on contemporary obsessions. 

One of the old gods Wednesday tries to recruit is Easter. This scene from the book, which came out in 2001, plays out at a café in San Francisco, and it's right on point:


Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday’s square gray hand. “I’m telling you,” she said, “I’m doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf.”

“And you wax fat and affluent on their worship and their love?” he said, dryly.

“Don’t be an asshole.” Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino.

“Serious question, m’dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss?” This to their waitress.

She said, “You need another espresso?”

“No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word ‘Easter’ means. Would you happen to know?”

The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, “I don’t know about any of that Christian stuff. I’m a pagan.”

The woman behind the counter said, “I think it’s like Latin or something for ‘Christ has risen,’ maybe.”

“Really?” said Wednesday.

“Yeah, sure,” said the woman. “Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know.”

“The risen son. Of course—a most logical supposition.” The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. “I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?”

“Worship?”

“That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?”

Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know?”

“Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?”

“She’s the goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.”

“Ah,” said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, “so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.” She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. “Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, ma’am?” Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered.

They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer.

“There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun,’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passersby know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let’s see—I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don’t know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor here—this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets.”

Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing.

“We could try it,” continued Wednesday. “But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don’t tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all.”

Tears stood out in her eyes. “I know that,” she said, quietly. “I’m not a fool.”

“No,” said Wednesday. “You’re not.”

Larping these people may be, but people who fool around with the occult are getting in touch with real spiritual powers, and they are dark powers. I suspect Paul K. is right that for now, nobody would die for their paganism, but that doesn’t mean that the dark powers they are accessing cannot destroy them and much else besides.

I am reminded of a seminal 2003 essay by the increasingly heterodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart, titled “Christ And Nothing.” In it, Hart says that the true religion of our time is nihilism (Kingsnorth says “the Void” — same thing). Here’s Hart:

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

This may seem a somewhat apocalyptic note to sound, at least without any warning or emollient prelude, but I believe I am saying nothing not almost tediously obvious. We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically “good” because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

As if anticipating Gaiman’s point, and Kingsnorth’s, Hart wrote of contemporary paganism:

It is, rather, a thoroughly modern religion, whose burlesque gods command neither reverence, nor dread, nor love, nor belief; they are no more than the masks worn by that same spontaneity of will that is the one unrivalled demiurge who rules this age and alone bids its spirits come and go.

It is a long and brilliant piece, the basic point of which is that the advent of the Christian era so thoroughly swept away that which came before that when the tide of Christian faith recedes, there is nothing left. Hart writes:

Which is why I repeat that our age is not one in danger of reverting to paganism (would that we were so fortunate). If we turn from Christ today, we turn only towards the god of absolute will, and embrace him under either his most monstrous or his most vapid aspect. A somewhat more ennobling retreat to the old gods is not possible for us; we can find no shelter there, nor can we sink away gently into those old illusions and tragic consolations that Christ has exposed as falsehoods. To love or be nourished by the gods, we would have to fear them; but the ruin of their glory is so complete that they have been reduced—like everything else—to commodities.

Read it all, and ponder it. Hart has a new book out, You Are Gods, which is said to be a long reflection on nature and supernature. I’ll have to read it, I guess, because Hart is undoubtedly a genius. But he is one of the bitterest, nastiest intellectuals around (I speak from personal experience). He carries his immense intelligence as a painful burden, it seems to me. Nevertheless, geniuses are not necessarily saints.

One reason I enjoy reading Houllebecq’s novels, though they can be quite unpleasant, is that he is not fooled by the bullshit lies of modern progressivism — the idea that if we just break free of Christian tradition, and worship human will and desire, we will at last be happy. Houellebecq is no Christian, but he knows we are up to our eyeballs in nihilism, and it it destroying us.

As I said yesterday, if you haven’t read his novel Submission, you might be surprised to learn that the Islamists who peacefully come to power in a future France are not the villains. The villains are the contemporary French, who, in the person of the protagonist, a Sorbonne professor named François, are depicted as too shallow, bored, and decadent to find a reason to live meaningful lives — and too afraid to return to their ancestral Christianity. So they submit to Islam cynically, out of despair. The Muslims seem to believe in something, at least — and that’s better than what the nihilistic French can manage.

The moment in Submission when François is at Rocamadour, the medieval pilgrimage site in France, and at worship, feels the touch of the Holy Spirit. “I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general,” he says. To submit to Christ. But then, four sentences later: “Or maybe I was just hungry.” François loses touch, and returns to Paris, where he later submits to Islam, not out of conviction, but because he is the sort to go with the flow — and to make a profession of the Islamic faith, however phony, comes with all kinds of privileges in the new order.

I had that very scene in mind when I conceived Living In Wonder. Why did François turn away from the call of Christ in that mystical moment? Houellebecq doesn’t tell us directly, but I think he does. It’s about an impoverished imagination, as well as moral cowardice. A true god is one for whom you will sacrifice. François doesn’t want sacrifice. The god of Islam that he is offered by the new regime is not the god that pious Muslims follow, not really. François is offered a deal in which if he converts publicly, he will have a secure job, and be allowed to have several young wives. All he believes in is himself, and pleasure, so why not?

There’s a much softer and far more sympathetic American version of François, I think: Naomi Wolf, the squirrelly feminist public intellectual who is stumbling towards enchantment. In her latest Substack, Wolf writes of how the numinous keeps bumping into her, and she’s finally starting to think that Something May Be Up. Excerpt:

My dread of writing these essays to follow, is due to many reasons that you can imagine.

It is so safe to stay on the solid, credentialed, post-Enlightenment bus. I am a CEO of a growing company. I am helping to bring out a book that incorporates important science about a public health catastrophe. I have a lot of degrees. There is a great deal to risk reputationally from my stepping off, even in just some essays, from the post-enlightenment-hermeneutics bus (though I should know by now that reputations can be killed off and yet still not die).

But does that well-travelled bus even have a destination any longer? Does the world in which that destination was once familiar, even exist any more?

Even as we are looking at what seem to be materially-explained, post-Enlightenment news events and cultural situations, are we not also looking at events that are spinning like meteors from somewhere else; that is, from some more clearly moral or archetypal universe, into our lowly, more chaotic dimension; events that look like naked Fate and sometimes like sheer Karma, and at other times, like pure miracles?

As much as we think we are just scrolling through X and Substack, and touching base with friends, and watching the news, picking up groceries, getting on and off subways, and gazing with sadness at loved ones after having had useless conversations, are we not also witnesses to and often participants in what has now become an obvious, massive battle between meta-dimensional Good and Evil?

If you read the whole essay, it may seem to you, as it does to me, that she has a hunger to commit herself to Christianity, but can’t allow herself to make the leap. It doesn’t seem that she is afraid of abandoning secular materialism. It seems instead that she fears Christian particularity — that is, she’s too anxious to let go of liberalish universalism. What do you think?

Anyway, we are at the start of a wave of re-enchantment, it seems to me. But what kind of re-enchantment will it be? Christians have a POWERFUL story to tell here — if we find the courage to do it. But more than that, we have to live it.

(I’m sending this top part to the whole list today, so you who subscribe — if you haven’t been getting your daily dose, as some say they haven’t been — can know that a) you can fix it by going to Substack help and fiddling with your settings, and b) you can still read the daily dispatches on roddreher.substack.com)

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September 09, 2024
How to drive back doubt and dark
Rod Dreher Diary
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How To Drive Back Doubt And Darkness

Thoughts For Christians Who Are Struggling With Scandal And Defeat

Sep 8
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Me in Jerusalem, at the Holy Fire ceremony in 2022, one week after learning that my marriage was over. Why am I so joyful? Read on…

Another weekend post from me! I have some things I want to say that I don’t want to get lost in the more news-oriented posts I make during the week. Thanks for your indulgence.

I just returned from church, where I spent some time praying for friends and others who are scandalized by the failure of churches and Christian institutions. The big news in Hungary this weekend is that a 38-year-old Catholic priest who made a name for himself as a right-wing culture warrior, and who had even been invited to bless Prime Minister Orban’s office, was suspended by his bishop. Why? It is reported that he had multiple gay lovers, and even that gay porn videos featuring him performing are available online. This priest had even in the past denounced homosexuality and liberalism. If the charges are true, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough hypocrite.

Naturally Orban’s political enemies are seizing on this to attack him, but it’s hard to see how the government should have known this about the priest, when his own bishop apparently did not. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that at a time when Christianity is fast-shrinking in Hungary, the churches are often their own enemy. The country’s president, a Calvinist, was forced to resign earlier this year because she pardoned a well-connected Calvinist imprisoned for aiding and abetting a pedophile. She pardoned him at the request of the country’s Reformed bishop, who also suffered disgrace from it. And now this big Catholic scandal.

From America magazine:

Hungary is a Catholic country with a strong Protestant presence, but in its latest census, published late last year, a majority of Hungarians, 57 percent, failed to declare an affiliation in any faith tradition: Forty percent did not answer the question about affiliation at all, and 17 percent declared “no religion” after being asked which church they belonged to. The census outcome marks the first time that religious identity has fallen below 50 percent in Hungary.

The Catholic Church in Hungary saw the steepest loss of membership, dropping 30 percent since the last census in 2011. Now 1.1 million fewer Hungarians identify as Catholics than 10 years ago. The contemporary decline reflects a long-term trend. Two decades ago, over half of Hungarians identified as Catholic; today only 28 percent do.

I passed on the gay porn priest news to a devoutly Catholic friend here yesterday. Her response: “Our church is a corpse.” She explained that she meant in Hungary, and in much of Europe.

I prayed for her this morning at liturgy, and for brothers and sisters in Christ like her. And I prayed for a close Orthodox friend who has ceased attending the liturgy out of anger at certain gross and undeniable failures of the Orthodox clergy in his life. When this guy told me that this summer, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go to liturgy anymore, I responded with the usual arguments about how the sins of the priests do not negate the truths proclaimed by the Church. And then I realized that these were exactly the same things that Catholics trying to keep me from leaving the Catholic Church said in my great crisis almost twenty years ago.

I realized in that moment that these logical arguments are as useless to my Orthodox friend in his suffering as they had been to me as a Catholic in crisis. This is a matter of the heart, not the head. The rage and the pain I suffered those many years ago from the corruption in the Catholic institution made it emotionally and psychologically impossible even to deal with those arguments.

Though the failures of the priests in my friend’s case are objectively speaking not nearly as serious as the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy that drove me from Catholicism, that’s not how it feels to him. I know a lot about what he’s been through in recent years, and the idea of saying, “Cheer up! At least our priests aren’t molesting kids!” is insulting. My friend really was failed in a very, very painful way, and tells me that he simply can’t bear standing in church on Sunday with all this weighing on him.

So I pray, and listen, and help as much as he will let me. What else can I do, or any of us do? I did tell him that I came out of the crisis of faith that cost me my Catholicism with the conviction that I should never, ever put the institutional Church and its clergy on a pedestal. What that has meant in practice is that I have learned not to expect anything from the Orthodox clergy, or any clergy. I hate it. It should not be that way. But having been severely burned once by my trust, I can’t let that happen again. So when I hear of corruption in the Orthodox Church — in the news, or in the lives of individual believers — of course I hate it, but it does not shake my faith. I learned that the sins of the priests don’t negate the truths of the faith, just like my Catholic friends back in the day said.

What changed in me? Aside from having thrown down the idolization of the institutional church, that is? Simply this: I had to learn to be enchanted as a Christian. I wouldn’t have put it that way before this morning, but that is the secret to keeping the faith in a time of radical disillusionment with our religious institutions. (I bold printed it)

I don’t bring that angle into my forthcoming book Living In Wonder, because frankly, it hadn’t really occurred to me. But boy, did it make itself clear today in prayer.

I had been thinking this morning, as I stood in church praying, that the Benedict Option is looking better and better as a strategy for coping amid the collapse of church authority. That is, if we Christians, whatever our confession, are going to keep the faith through this long dark winter, we are going to have to take more responsibility in our personal lives, our family lives, and in our local church community. When church leaders fail, we have to disciple ourselves. For that matter, when they succeed, we still have to disciple ourselves, because the pressures from post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture are immense. If you read The Benedict Option, you will see that it’s about building resilience where you are, not escaping; I say in the opening chapter that there is no escape anymore. We are simply going to have to get through this. We cannot wait to be rescued. We have to build the arks, and start rowing.

Standing in church this morning in prayer, I reflected on how much I had learned over the years of living as an Orthodox Christian, about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean becoming aware, not just as a matter of an idea in your head, but in your heart and in your bones, that God is, as we Orthodox pray, “everywhere present, and filling all things.” Here we are all standing around in this hot, humid church this morning in prayer, while all around us, angels have gathered — really and truly gathered. That awareness changes everything.

It’s not just an Orthodox thing. You longtime readers might recall my story about going to Catholic mass in Dallas when my son Lucas was a young toddler. He hadn’t yet learned how to talk. He was being squirmy, so I took him into the church foyer, separated from the nave by large panes of glass. I held Lucas while mass was going on. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in my arms, pointed his right finger at a space to the side of the altar, and said, “Angel!” His finger tracked whatever he was seeing, and he kept saying, “Angel! Angel!” Then he put his head back on my shoulder, and tried to sleep.

I believe that little boy saw an angel.

I also believe now that if I had spent more time cultivating my awareness of angels (which I used as a symbol for the general mystical awareness of the presence of God), my faith would have been stronger as a Catholic. But I didn’t: I thought it was sufficient to have mastered the propositional arguments for the faith. I’m not sure why my Orthodox friend is having the crisis that he is, given how much Orthodoxy stresses conversion of the heart, and mystical awareness, but I suspect it’s because his faith is mostly a cerebral thing for him (he is very intellectual, and has more of an engineer’s mindset than an artist’s). As I try to bring him back to liturgical worship, I’m going to need to think and pray hard about how to reach him where he is.

After church, I met a new friend, an American who just moved to Budapest with her family for a temporary job assignment. She is a churchgoing Catholic and a conservative, younger than I am (but aren’t they all these days?), and we got to talking about the situation in our home country, and in the world. As we traded stories about our lives, and shared our deep concerns about the civilizational crisis of the West — it always does me good to meet new people and to be able to say, “You see it too, huh?” — I told her about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. She hadn’t heard about the books or their arguments, but as I laid them out briefly, she nodded along, and added occasions when she had seen the same things I talk about in the books.

She also said that she is only a Catholic now by the grace of God, because her parents had been so demoralized by church scandals that they didn’t raise her in the Church. She had a strong re-conversion in adulthood. We talked about the complacency among American Christians. She said, “I think a lot of us don’t understand how fast everything can change.”

I told her the story of Father Kolakovic, and how he had to battle the same thing among Slovak Catholics in the 1940s. So many of the older ones did not want to see what was coming, and were not prepared for the advent of Communism, and its persecution of the Church.

Walking home a few minutes ago from our conversation, thinking about it and about my experience in church this morning, I felt more convinced than ever that Living In Wonder, though I didn’t intend it as the final part of a trilogy on how to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world, that’s exactly what it is. In the end, re-enchanting ourselves as Christians — that is, adopting the mindset and the practices that help us to see and feel the presence of God, his saints, and his angels — is the bottom line of holding on through hard times. Even when the clergy and the institutions fail, and fail badly, if we not only know in our heads, but feel in our bones, the truths of our faith, we can hold on. But if not, well, it’s going to be very hard. In my own life, I have lived this out, and I hope that I can convey that in the book to readers.

Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Exorcist Files, the excellent podcast featuring Father Carlos Martins, an American Catholic exorcist. It’s pretty scary, but what I like about it is that Father Carlos uses these real-life stories from his experiences to educate listeners about the realities of spiritual warfare. One thing he talked about in the episode I listened to is why the demons have special hatred for the Virgin Mary. This is something my own confessor, Father Nectarios, an Orthodox exorcist, has discussed with me as well. There is something about Mary (sorry) that riles the demons up. It seems clear that because she, in her humility and purity, is the absolute opposite of the demons, in their filth and their pride. Plus, she is not a goddess, but was and is one of us: a non-divine human being who epitomizes the pinnacle of what human beings who surrender radically to God can become. Listening to these stories, in both the podcast and in conversations with my confessor, teaches me something about the realities of the world of the spirit. I gained some new insights into why Catholics and Orthodox regard Mary with such honor. Even the demons, who hate God, know that she is special among God’s creatures.

See, this is the kind of everyday knowledge that we Christians, whatever our confession, need to be building into our faith. You might not be able, because of your Protestant convictions, to regard Mary as we from the older traditions do, but it is still valuable to ponder why exorcists report that demons despise her with special hatred. What does that tell us about the role of humility and purity in the Christian life? We have so much to learn, and so many opportunities to learn. But we cannot be deceived by thinking that this is a matter of mastering our catechism. We have to open ourselves up to the power of God in everyday life.

In Living In Wonder, I end by talking about how, the day before Palm Sunday in 2022, on the eve of traveling from Budapest to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week, I learned via an email from my wife that she had filed for divorce, bringing the ten-year painful struggle to keep our marriage together to an end. We had never spoken of divorce before. I got on the plane for Jerusalem the next morning a total wreck. Arriving in the Old City, I dropped my bags in my hotel, made my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and up the stairs into the chapel built over Golgotha (really), fell on my face, and begged Jesus for His mercy. That’s how the most extraordinary week of my life began — a week full of signs and wonders.

That photo up above was taken at the ceremony of the miracle of the Holy Fire, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday afternoon. I went to it skeptical that the miracle was real. I found out it was! That joy you see on my face is the joy of a man who only one week earlier had learned that life as he knew it had been destroyed — but he had literally just put his hand through the fire, over and over, and had not been burned. Our God is an awesome God! He would take care of me, and see me through this. I returned to Budapest so filled with joy, even though the worst was yet to come.

Here’s where the Living In Wonder narrative picks up from that point:

After that Easter journey, I began to look even more intently for signs of God’s presence and love everywhere. When I would experience hardship—something serious or something trivial—I now framed it as an opportunity to grow closer to him. And I practiced the presence of God by talking to him throughout the day more often than before.

I noticed, too, that the things I had learned about focused attention, particularly the strategies from Orthodox priests about refusing logismoi, any bad or distracting thoughts, helped me avoid being drawn again into the trap of nostalgia for a lost golden past. Whenever I was tempted to feel anger or self-pity, I thought about Saint Galgano in Luca Daum’s drawing and compelled myself to stay focused on Christ. God has not abandoned me, I would tell myself. This is all happening as a test of faith.

There are people who would say, “If God is real, why didn’t he save your marriage? Why does he let children die? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?” This is the wrong approach. My friend Marco Sermarini, whose bereavement of his wife did nothing to dim his bright shining joy, says that the existence of suffering in the world calls us to perform “the spiritual exercise of wonder.”

“If you read the book of Job, there is a question recurring, ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?’ and so forth,” says Marco. “I think this is a program, not just something random.”

This is an important point. It is true that we can’t force the awesome and wonderful to manifest themselves to us; the best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting. But it is also true that we can practice wonder, in the sense that we can meet our doubts with an exercise of faith in the unfathomable mysteries of God, who is all good. When the tide of the Holy Spirit seems to have gone out, we have a responsibility to trust that it will return in time. Having seen the wonder of God once, we practice it in our prayers, our prostrations, and our liturgies of the everyday. That’s how we make it real and ever present.

How do we begin to live out Christian enchantment? If you are not a believer, or if you are a weak one, start by accepting that the contemporary story about how Christianity is a thing of the past, whose claims cannot be believed by modern people, is just one take among many. If you believe the secular materialist narrative, you are saying that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, and the majority of people alive today, are wrong. It is possible that you are right—but the odds are not in your favor. Shouldn’t you at least consider that you are wrong?

Then you can face seriously the task of changing your mind to become more open to the reality of God and the presence of mystery, meaning, and miracle in this world. True, God cannot be commanded to show himself, but that does not relieve us from the responsibility to open ourselves to him. After all, you will never find if you don’t first seek. You will never experience re-enchantment without metanoia—a radical change of mind. Iain McGilchrist explains how and why the left-brain vision that made the modern world is a distortion of the truth—and why those who seek the truth must not abandon it but rather should balance it with the intuitive way of knowing from the brain’s right hemisphere.

This is not a matter of accepting an illusion because it might make you feel better. This is about learning to see the truth, to access the really real, which has been denied to you by the flawed way of perception the modern world has falsely claimed is the whole truth. The harder we cling to the modern idea that the material world is nothing more than stuff that we are free to manipulate, the more difficult it will be to experience a resonant sense of connection with it.

Because the way we pay attention to the world has a lot to do with what we perceive, you can endeavor to shed distractions in life that get in the way of focus. And you can take on prayer disciplines that help still the mind, cleanse the nous, and repair the fragmented attention that makes it hard to relate to God.

Then lean, and lean hard, into beauty. Beauty—the moral beauty of good and holy people and the aesthetic beauty of art, music, and architecture, as well as the natural world—is a portal through which enchantment passes to us. Stop thinking of it as merely something admirable or decorative. True beauty reveals to us something of God’s nature, and truth. It shows us that the world has meaning and that we are part of that world. Beauty offers us those moments of epiphany in which the fundamental unity and purpose of the world appear to us. It is also a bridge to the world of the transcendent and ultimately to God.

Cultivate a real appreciation for beauty by reading, listening to, and looking at works of art, music, and architecture that have stood the test of time. Go out into nature and see and feel it for meaning. Read the lives of the saints and meditate on the lives of holy people in our world today. The beauty present in all of these people, places, and things is a sign telling us all where we need to go if we want to live.

Take stories of miracles and encounters with the numinous seriously. Don’t be credulous; not every miracle story is true. But many of them are. You might not experience one, and if not, that doesn’t mean you are unworthy. Still, they really do happen to people, even today. This fact should humble us all and remind us that anything is possible. None of us knows if a miracle awaits us, but we have the responsibility to prepare ourselves for that possibility. We don’t want to be the kind of people who, when confronted by a miracle, react with fear or reflexive disbelief because we don’t want to change our lives.

You can also educate yourself about the realities of the dark side—of black magic and the occult. Modern secularists and rationalist Christians laugh, but demonic possession is real. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need convincing. Demons can work apparent miracles, too, for the sake of deceiving us. Remember that occultists want false enchantment—that is, to experience and access the power of the spirit world—but only for the sake of learning to control it, to compel demons to do things for them. This is the way of destruction. More and more people are choosing it. You must learn why it is evil and turn away from it in all its forms—psychedelics, occult practices, all of it.

It is frankly depressing to look at the state of the churches today and to take stock of the overall quality of leadership, both clerical and lay. Don’t despair! God is raising up new voices to show his people the way forward. It will not do to complain about the very real failures of religious leaders and claim that as an excuse to abandon the faith. This is cowardice. How can you be sure that God won’t use you to rally believers to repentance and return to a true and living faith, as he has done so often in ages past with other ordinary men and women?

To summarize: We Christians have a mission to focus our attention on Christ and to create the conditions for the flow of divine energy—of grace—to purify the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the holiness all around us and share in the life of God. To accomplish this, we have to learn how to sacrifice, die to ourselves, and fix our personal swords, as symbols of our will, into the stone of God as an act of faithful obedience.

We have to learn how to direct our attention rightly, pray more effectively, and reestablish resonance with the world beyond our heads. We have to discover how to open our eyes to beauty and allow it to work its magic on us, drawing us into a deeper relationship with reality.

We have to learn about the frightening facts of spiritual warfare and dark enchantment and turn from its enticements. And we have to seek out the community of wise and faithful men and women with whom to share the pilgrim’s journey.

We can’t force enchantment to happen, but we can certainly do all of these things to prepare ourselves for it—even in the face of a world that says they are impossible and that offers us instead the false enchantments of sex, money, fame, technology, and even the occult. The means to do this are part of our past and part of our present. They can be part of our future, if we want them enough to make life-changing sacrifices. There is no other way. The more control you want to have over your life, the less enchantment you will experience. As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

That is a summary of Living In Wonder, but the whole book is full of stories and details and practical advice for how to do this. I needed today — praying for my scandalized friends in church, and that conversation over coffee — to get myself into the headspace of talking about Christian re-enchantment as a survival skill for believers trying to hold on through this civilizational crisis. I’m going to be giving a speech on this topic at the upcoming Touchstone conference in Chicago later this month. But you’d better believe that when the book comes out on October 22, I’m going to be preaching this gospel of joy.

I told my coffee conversation partner this morning the amazing story of how the Lord sent angels to revive the flagging faith of prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov. God is doing things like this for us all the time, but often we don’t have eyes to see it. I look at that image of my face above, filled with grace and awe at the goodness of the Lord, and I realize that the darkness of the loss of my marriage could not extinguish the holy fire in my hand, and the light that Holy Week had rekindled in my heart. The miserable failures of the clergy cannot touch you if you are enchanted, in a Christian way. Let’s go! Christ has overcome the world!

I’m making this post free to the whole list today. Please share it with anyone you know who is struggling in the faith, and who needs encouragement. I can barely wait for the book to come out, so we can talk more in depth in this space about signs, wonders, miracles, and the light that cannot be comprehended or snuffed out by the darkness visible. In the book, I tell a story about a New York Catholic businessman whose wife was possessed; an ancestor had made a pact with the devil, which brought the evil onto her. She was eventually delivered after much prayer, thanks to the help of an exorcist. The struggle brought both of them much closer to God. The businessman told me that he and his wife had been ordinary mass-going conservative Catholics prior to this horrific experience, but this taught them both that there is another dimension of reality. He said that now when he walks down the streets of Manhattan, he realizes that there are intense spiritual battles going on unseen all around him.

But he also knows how to achieve victory. That’s what I want to share with readers in this new book. We are like the great French general Marshal Foch in World War I. He sent this message back to headquarters: “My center is giving way, my right flank is retreating, situation excellent, I attack!”

  

Don’t forget to pre-order the book; the new Living In Wonder website Zondervan has created for the book has lots of links to book dealers. If you would like to pre-order a copy signed by me, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books.

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September 05, 2024
From Peachy Keenan
"Kamala Harris a walking, cackling Zoloft pill and they all want to take a bite."
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The Big Split

Gen Z Females Conure Up a Daunting Political Gender Divide

Sep 4
 
 
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For decades, race was the main political divide in America. To this day, black Americans inexplicably persist in voting against their self-interests by supporting craven Democrat politician in massive numbers despite the abject failure of any Democrat to improve their lives. Not even the collapse of the black family, rampant crime in their neighborhoods, and the lack of improvement in economic and educational prospects can shake them from their loyalty. All they’ve gotten for their trouble are more DEI programs and more shipments of new arrival from the border.

Now Gen Z women (ages 18-29) are following in this well-worn path over the cliff. According to a new NYT poll, the political gender divide among Gen Z is increasing and is now at an all-time high.

There is a now a shocking, incredible 51% political split between Gen Z men and Gen Z women. It’s “larger than in any other generation.”

“A recent New York Times/Siena College poll finds young voters have the greatest gender divide compared to every other age group by 51 points. Men between the ages of 18 to 29 favor former President Trump over Vice-President Harris by 13 points. While women in the same age group are choosing Harris over Trump by 38 points.”

  

Frankly, we should have known. They’re first generation of screenagers raised by TikTok and YouTube shorts and Taylor Swift-style vapid feminism.

They’re ahistoric and functionally illiterate. World history started in 2012 or something.

They’re also extremely susceptible to peer influence (see the epidemic of ROGD in this group of women) and brainwashing them digitally is almost too easy.

They are trend maximalists, doing all the trends all the time all at once.

  
Free Palestine! But first, free abortions.

Sinking your own lifeboat while you are still sitting in it—that’s so BRAT!

This year the big trend is emotionless man-hating and burn-it-all-down nihilism, with some spicy Jew-hating throw in. Did you happen to notice that every Hamas camp on college campuses last spring was run by Gen Z females?

Gen Z is so big that it “already represents $420 billion in yearly spending power. Experts estimate Gen Z will become the world’s largest demographic by 2026.”

And overwhelmingly, Gen Z girls are turning to the far left to deliver the goods they demand.

  

This is a fire alarm. This is the iceberg that sank Titanic. This is an epitaph-worthy development. Tattoo it on your forehead!

Men and women didn’t use to diverge so wildly. Once abortion became a political issue, women have tended to vote more for Democrats and men more for Republicans. The only women who vote like men are married Republican women these days.

I guess that’s because they don’t want their abusive Republican husbands to beat them if he sees them filling out the bubble for Kamala. You know how Republican men are! Frankly, I’m surprised these women vote at all—don’t their husbands keep them chained to the stove anymore? Sad!

The Lost Boys

Claire Cain Miller, the reported who worked on the gender-gap poll, called eight of the young Trump-supporting guys back to find out why they felt the way they did. They explained to her why they like Trump:

“Their concerns were mostly economic, like whether they could fulfill the traditionally masculine role of supporting a family.

In recent years, the two parties have been seen as offering men different visions of their place in American society, researchers said. While the right has embraced conventional masculinity, the left has seemed to shun it, leaving many young men looking for an alternative.

“I’m going to talk as a feminist: We do it, when we try to suggest women are brilliant and men are the problem,” said Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology at N.Y.U. who has studied boys and men for four decades and in July published “Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture.”

Conversely, she said, “Trump is definitely saying, ‘I see you, I value you, I see your masculinity.’”

Ranger Irwin, a 20-year-old Trump voter who works at a Discount Tire in North Las Vegas, Nev., said American society no longer “lets boys be boys.”

“Men my age, from a very young age we were told, ‘You’re not supposed to do this, you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to sit here and be quiet,’” he said. It’s made being a man “a little bit harder than it used to be.”

And then Ms. Miller actually said it out loud—I almost felt like I was reading a quote from my book!

“In recent years, as social progress has helped women chip away at centuries of sexism, parts of the movement have seemed to dismiss or even demonize men, with phrases like “the future is female” and “toxic masculinity” and books with titles like “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.” As Mr. Cox noted, a page titled “Who We Serve” on the Democratic Party’s website lists 16 demographic groups, including “women” — but not men.

The ideas show up in broader society, too. American parents, who have long preferred sons, may no longer favor boys, data shows, perhaps because of a sense that boys cause more trouble. The jobs that have been increasing, like those involving caregiving, have traditionally been considered women’s work.

The shifts have left some young men feeling attacked.”

Feminists demean and attack men for being male? Why, you just might be on to something, Ms. Miller!

But the fact that young men are suffering—as young women thrive and live, laugh, love their best lives, crowding them out of the university admissions and out of their jobs—is a feature and not a bug of feminism. Slaying the patriarchy is good, period, and that requires pushing men down the ladder—and away from their natural role as husband and father. The end of men is coming and they know it.

Unfortunately It Be Looking Like Girls Do In Fact Rule the World

  

But the women are gleeful about the end of men. To them it is a zero sum game and if men are down, they’re going up. They’re having a Brat summer and crushing men underfoot is giving joy.

Ms. Miller also interviewed some of the female Harris supporters she polled. Their reasons for supporting Kamala are basically: she’s brat. 

  

I can’t tell if this chick is Gen Z or millennial but this is basically the type of female we are dealing with.

Gen Z women score highest on the PRRI “negative emotion score,” which rates depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

  

Gen Z women seem to see Kamala as a momentary reprieve in their daily darkness. She is a glimmer of hope that naturally appeals to a sad, lonely young woman who can’t find a date but has taught herself to shun companionship and family formation. Even Kamala’s annoying laugh is a plus: at least someone’s having fun, and they can live vicariously through her “joy” and her success.

Kamala Harris a walking, cackling Zoloft pill and they all want to take a bite.

No wonder boys can’t find girlfriends. No wonder these girls are lonely. My theory is that in the absence of any guardrails, best practices, and age-old, time-honored goals, they have been left with only one: do a career and live your best life! And because very few people in their twenties make it big or hit it rich and mostly life is a struggle just to afford a studio apartment with your soul-sucking job, and you’ve been told that’s as good as it’s going to get (since God forbid you find a husband and pool your resources), they are turning to Kamala and progressive politics to deliver meaning in their lives.

These women are making a mistake and will not realize it until much later, if ever. No politician can reach them. No speech can sway them.

The only way to their hearts is to convert some of their favorite influencers, or to get them a man who can romance the shallow leftwing ideas out of their heads.

Barring that, prepare for more electoral chaos and candidates even worse than Kamala.

Girls, I beg you: do not do us like this. It’s going to be bad for all of us in the Kamalapocalypse—and I promise you, once the election night high wears off and the depression creeps back in, you are not going to enjoy the bad times headed our way.

—Peachy

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Tommy the Savage
From Rod Dreher's Diary

Tommy The Savage

When Speaking Common Sense Is Outlawed, Only 'Outlaws' Will Dare To Speak It

 
 
Tommy Robinson from documentary ‘Silenced’

Last night I had dinner with a middle-class English couple who are in Budapest for a visit. Friends of a friend. Naturally the conversation quickly turned to the riots in their home country. At one point, I said that I had recently started listening to Tommy Robinson, someone whom I had dismissed earlier as a thug, based on his extensive history of what you might gently call “dodgy behavior.” (Seriously, look it up.)

“Did you watch the Jordan Peterson interview with him?” asked the woman.

“I saw half of it this afternoon,” I replied. “It’s shocking.”

“It is,” she said. Then she went on to say that despite the messiness of Tommy Robinson’s life and record, she supports him because he is more or less the only prominent person who is willing to stand up and say what’s happening in Britain is wrong.

“I am friends with a couple who lost their daughter for a while to a grooming gang,” the woman began. Then she told the story. I noticed that she fought back tears as she gave me the details. At one point, she struggled for words to describe what the Pakistani men had done to this 14 year old girl. The details of the deeds were too much for her to articulate. She stammered finally, “The police had to collect DNA from the child. I hope you understand what I mean.”

I did.

“In the end, the police did nothing,” the woman continued. “The poor parents, my friends, had no idea what to do. There was nowhere to turn, not if the police don’t care.”

By the end of her story, this gentle woman in her late fifties was visibly suppressing rage. I could tell that she is not the sort of person to whom rage comes easily. But there it was, and it was entirely justified by the story she had just told me. I understood perfectly well why a nice, educated, middle-class lady like her would have become a partisan of the rough working-class bruiser from Luton: because all the nice, educated, middle-class people have surrendered to the violent dispossession of the British in their own land.

It turns out that she and her husband are in Budapest looking for ways to migrate here. One of them has Hungarian ancestry, and therefore a way in. I mentioned to them that in his recent Tusvanyos address, PM Viktor Orban said that Hungary can expect a rising inflow of Europeans who want to live in a “Christian national country.”

“That’s us,” said the man.

Yesterday at The European Conservative, I published an interview with my Budapest friend Mark Bollobas, the UK-born son of two refugees from Communism, who in 2010 moved to his parents’ homeland because he saw no prospects for himself in Britain, the country of his birth. Excerpt:

[Mark Bollobas:] … I had enough of an experience in London from before, from the years I spent there studying and working, to know that it’s again a place I really probably couldn’t live as good a life as I can live here in Budapest. That includes everything: safety, public transport, religion, the feeling of culture, a sense of pride in your nation, these are things that have been eroded. So if we look now at the United States, people are not happy with the way America is. If we look at how things are in the UK, there is massive disillusionment, especially among the youth, people looking towards the future going, “Well, how am I going to survive? I just don’t know how to.”

When I was looking, more and more I began to think of Hungary. I thought of Hungary not only because I could go there, as the son of Hungarian immigrants, but also because it’s a nice place, it’s a beautiful place, it’s a kind place. And there are values there that are still important—family values. It was 2010 [the year Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister], and I knew a huge change was coming to Hungary. And I got here before it arrived. For me most of all it was a feeling of coming home, which is strange because I wasn’t born here.

It’s difficult to describe because I wasn’t brought up here, but I always felt at home here. And here, unlike in the UK, where I was always asked where I was from, here in Hungary—well, I’m obviously not from here, and I have a thick accent in Hungarian, but I’m Hungarian. I fit in and I’ve been accepted. I felt then that the U.S. was burning out while I knew in Hungary the best years were ahead of us.

Last but not least, I wanted to get married and start a family, a family based of the values and traditions I hold dear. And for that I knew I needed a Hungarian woman, whom I’m lucky enough to have found.

It is striking to me that you migrated to your ancestral homeland not looking for economic opportunity, but rather for a place that felt like home. This seems to be something that both liberal and conservative elites all over the West cannot comprehend. Why not?

Most people don’t agree with my decision because they are wearing blinders. These blinders, made in the Cold War, tell them that everything east of the former Iron Curtain is terrible, and everything west of it is wonderful. The world is nowhere near like that anymore.

I still find it strange that is a white Christian male who speaks English with a British accent that I was not welcomed into UK society. But now, having lived outside of the borders for a few years, I realize that this is the case with everyone. Either you’re a white European and you go there as a guest worker, or you go there as a person of color from a Middle Eastern country or African country, and you end up living in an atomized community or a ghetto made up of only your countrymen, paid for by the state. 

I think when it comes to the sense of home and how important it is, the West has forgotten that what made the West great was its culture and its traditions. And they came to this from a position of power and wealth and success. They didn’t really need to fight to protect any of these things, because the power that came from economic power did it for them.

But as the world changed and other countries became more wealthy, and in many ways England became more poor, the UK became more poor, this skill of protecting your nation, your culture, your history, taking pride in yourself, it never came back. It never came back. I don’t know whether it’s from the schools, or whether it’s definitely in colleges, because academia is—well, it’s not very pro-British culture in any way. But even among the people it sort of disappeared. The sense of community sort of disappeared. It became much more important to make money, to be a success, to be the person you want to be. To be an individual.

Those are very, very important things to do when you’re in your twenties and thirties. But then you get to a point where you have your career, but you need a family, because family is what life is all about. After you have children, that is your droving force. And we’re now at this appalling stage where we have lots of individual success stories of people who’ve forgotten, and don’t know how, to make time for having a family. Worse yet, they’ve been educated to believe that having a family isn’t important, that you can get as much joy out of work. And that’s just not the case.

This is a really, really, really big problem. I have too many friends aged 35 to 45 who are single and lonely, who want a family, yet don’t have the skills needed to create one. Yet professionally they are all success stories. Worse yet, so many people tie materialism to happiness that when the money gets low—and globally we are all about to experience a recession—this means more and more people will become desperately unhappy as their wallets become lighter, and life becomes harder.

I’m not sure whether Hungarians know something different, I think they didn’t twenty years ago. But through a combination of luck, as well as solid political leadership, we have kept family as the most important goal in life. That’s a huge plus for us. In the early Eighties, Hungary led the world in suicides and alcoholism. And although there was Communism, almost everyone had a side hustle. Or two or three. But that has changed, those times are behind us. Now when I think of the nation that is doing terribly in similar categories, namely drug overdoses and suicides, while pushing a culture of relentless side hustles, the U.S. comes to mind.

I hasten to say that this has nothing to do with why I moved to Hungary. As you’ll recall, it had to do with personal circumstances of my divorce. I also was thrilled to move here because I think what is going on in Hungary politically and intellectually is fascinating, and important to the survival of the West. But I was not and am not alienated from America the way Mark is from Britain, in part because the ideological and cultural situation in the US, for all its problems, is not nearly as dire as in Britain.

Over the course of the evening, we talked about all kinds of things. The woman told wonderful stories about one of her ancestors, a celebrated historian remembered now for work he did to preserve a particular cultural tradition that was fading away (I’m speaking vaguely because I want to protect this couple’s privacy). On the way home last night, I thought about how she spoke with such affectionate pride in her country, and her ancestors, and what they accomplished. This I contrasted with the high emotion she had expressed earlier in the evening, thinking about the suffering of her friends whose daughter was turned for a while into a sex slave of Pakistani men, and how the police did not care to help, and how the British establishment doesn’t care either.

Then it hit me: this woman has been humiliated. Deeply humiliated. She has been humiliated by mass migration. She has been humiliated by the violence some of these migrants bring with them. She has been humiliated by the authorities, who expect people like her simply to suck it up. And she has been humiliated by a ruling class that has for some time been teaching young Britons to hate their country and their people, and to accept that their rightful place in the world is to live as second-class citizens in the land of their ancestors.

If I were her, Tommy Robinson would be my hero.

What a terrible thing, to come to late middle age, and to face the prospect that leaving your home country for a land where you don’t speak the language is possibly the most sensible thing you can do to protect yourself in old age. I mentioned to this couple the interview with Mark Bollobas, the part where Mark said that raising kids in Hungary, it is a blessing not to have to worry that his boys will be taught in school to hate their country and its people, and to think that they (the boys) might actually be girls.

She shot a glance at her husband, whom I had met on his last trip to Hungary. “It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s safe.”

It turns out she is a practicing Christian. She said she can’t understand how it is that even many of her Christian friends now accept transgenderism, not as an allowance society should make out of compassion for people who have gender dysphoria, but as a positive good that should be celebrated. The subtext of her quiet commentary was: so many of my countrymen have lost their minds, and I don’t understand what has happened to us all. That she needed assurance from her husband that it was okay to express skepticism of the trans revolution in private conversation told me something important about what it must be like to be a middle-class Briton today.

I tell you, living in Europe, and seeing more closely what mass migration has done to its countries, and also seeing the flat-out lying (either by commission or omission) done by the ruling classes of these countries (in government, media, academia, and so on), has really opened my eyes. As I’ve told you, over and over I meet people from the UK or western Europe who come to Budapest for a conference or a holiday, and hear them inevitably remark that being here reminds them of their own cities twenty or thirty years ago — before mass migration and the crime and disorder it brings had shredded the fabric of public life.

Last night I told the visiting British couple about a conversation I’d had over wine recently with a young American who had just moved here from Germany for language instruction. He told me that the difference between German cities and Budapest is striking to him. Having lived in Germany for the past two years, he said you just don’t see easygoing life on the streets like you do in Budapest. He marveled at how many people in the Hungarian capital are out and about, sitting (as we were) in a street cafe, or late at night, even young women walking to and from the clubs, not having to worry for their safety. In Germany, by contrast, he said Germans seem to have withdrawn from the public space into private life, to avoid the risk of criminal encounters with migrants or their adult children. This is especially true with German women, who run real risks just living their lives in cities where migrant men are a significant presence. And yet, he said, the Germans have neutered their own sense of self-worth, such that they seem to be under a spell that tells them they deserve what they get. How refreshing it is to be in Budapest, he said.

If you move here, I said to the couple, you will be astonished by how overwhelming, and how effective, the media propaganda is that causes people back home to think of Hungary as some kind of quasi-fascist hellhole. They laughed. The woman said that one of her relatives, hearing that they were off to Hungary for a holiday, said, “Are you going to be okay? That Orban is something of a dictator, isn’t he?”

In the future, historians may look back on this era in Western history and marvel at the psyop the ruling classes used on their nations to render peoples incapable of defending themselves and their own interests. People become self-policing, too, afraid to say commonsense things out of fear of being called evil. Are there any peoples on this earth, outside of the West, who loathe themselves as a people as much as Western liberals and progressives do?

The philosopher Matthew Crawford has a great Substack piece today in which he reveals that the UK government has long employed a psyop strategy to keep the public quiet in the face of violence that could cause them to question the dogma that Diversity Is Our Strength™. Excerpt:

One is not supposed to notice the downsides of mass immigration. In fact, such noticing has to be actively suppressed, and the present civil disorder in Britain reveals a breakdown of the UK government’s longstanding program to psychologically manage its own peoples’ response to demographic upheaval, ethnic conflict and violence.

As it happens, it was at the 2012 Olympics that these techniques were first put in place, in anticipation of a possible terrorist attack. The summer before, there had been riots across the UK that badly spooked the government, and Western leaders were watching the Arab Spring with a view to both the hazards and the opportunities for population control presented by social media. By 2019, the publication Middle East Eye was able to report that the British Home Office prepares for terrorist incidents “by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks.” The point, of course, is to have candlelit vigils, flowers and impromptu expressions of mutual love between “communities”, rather than riots. This story is worth telling, as it parallels the US government’s re-purposing of information warfare techniques, developed in the War in Terror, for managing internal political dissent.

Read the Crawford piece for details about this operation. He continues:

All this unrest comes in the wake of the Olympic games’ opening ceremony, in which Da Vinci’s Last Supper was repurposed as a grotesquerie of sexual unfortunates, expressing hatred of the normal and healthy disguised as defiant self-love. That is what it means to “queer” this or “queer” that (in the sense made popular by Judith Butler); it is an instinct to attack all that is settled; anything that makes feel people at home in the world. Any sense of a common culture or owned space.

In 2024, the Olympics feel like a “survival” (as the anthropologists would say) that has been turned to the purposes of what right-wingers like to call GloboHomo, that confluence of corporate-state liberationism and replacism. As Machiavelli said, a wise founder-prince will keep up the old forms, emptied of content, to make his “new modes and orders” go down more easily. As my friend Ethan put it to me, the Olympics now serve as “a remnant vector of legitimation to be exploited until it no longer means anything to anyone, just one more instance of the strip-mining of our material and symbolic order for the benefit of whatever higher interests profit, however ephemerally, from the operation.”

I believe some intuition like this, and not just the immediate issue of immigration, lies behind the rage of the Brits.

Yes, this is exactly what I encountered last night in that quiet dinner with the English couple. Migration, Islamic violence, and the hatred the British state has for its own people, dominated the conversation early on, but the bafflement the woman had over how the moral order in which she had been raised had been overthrown, and the new order accepted without protest by otherwise sensible people — this left her angry, confused, and … thinking about leaving her native land, which doesn’t feel like hers anymore.

Here is a 2022 essay that Crawford has ungated, about love of one’s own people. Excerpts:

National character grows among a people from shared experience. They speak the same language and pray to the same gods; their fathers fought in the same wars; their grandmothers tell stories that convey how one ought to feel about familiar things. They are likely to have a persistent stock of nursery rhymes and drinking songs; a repertoire of gestures, subtle facial inflections and emotional tones peculiar to them. Mutually recognizable to one another, they enjoy a form of social wealth that accumulates among inhabitants of some bounded territory that has been inhabited continuously for generations by the same people. Such an inheritance is far from universal; it is enjoyed by peoples who, often for reasons of geographical accident, have been spared conquest, colonization and dispersal long enough to form a nation, for example the “First Nations” of North America (as the indigenous tribes are called in Canada). The word “nation” shares its root with “native” and “natural”, and indeed a nation may claim an autochthonous origin for its ancestors — as though the earth itself, or rather their small part of it, were the original mother or father of their common lineage.

Crawford goes on to talk about how nationalism — political consciousness of oneself as a member of a nation, of a distinct people — is, to modern liberals, the source of all our problems. He quotes here the French political philosopher Pierre Manent describing “humanitarianism” as the successor ideology to Christianity. According to Manent, the cosmopolitan ruling class thinks that:

Peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind; its fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence is the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances. Thus the right thing to do, the worthy enterprise, is to bring about the pacification and unification of humanity through the erasing or weakening of borders, the acceleration of the circulation of goods, services, information, and human beings, the fostering of an ever stronger and wider fellow-feeling among countries and peoples. Accordingly, looking at human things from the perspective of one’s own community — its common good and the peculiar content and quality of its education and way of life — is intrinsically wrong because it amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. Looking at human things … without the least preference (and even with a tad of healthy dislike) for what is ours — is intrinsically right and “progressive.” [Italics added]

And, conversely, to think and act with preference towards one’s own — that is wrong and regressive. This political psychodrama is why for some time now, the UK’s ruling-class institutions have been psyopping the British people into accepting their own displacement. This is exactly what Renaud Camus means by “the Great Replacement” — not only the replacement by foreign peoples, but the erasure of one’s own culture and history.

One more bit from Crawford:

The rise of populist movements has been fueled by a spreading recognition that this diversitarian turn, both in its moralistic expressions (humanitarianism as described by Manent) and in its material facts (mass immigration above all), is inextricably linked to an oligarchical development. Diversity is Our Strength, yes, but whose exactly? The political economy corresponding to humanitarian moralism and mass immigration is neoliberalism, an explicitly anti-national agenda for the globalization of labor markets, whether by the relocation of jobs to foreign shores or the opening of borders to foreign workers. Humanitarianism has been called “the sentimental justification of inhuman scale.”

Ethnomasochism is no psychological mystery, then. It serves a function among Western peoples as they adjust themselves -- or get adjusted -- to a post-national framework of government and economy. In such a framework, the proprietary pride of the citizen can only interfere. There are to be no citizens, only an undifferentiated mass of “human resources.”

I am reminded of Chapter 17 of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you’ve read my book Live Not By Lies, you know that I believe we have largely missed the totalitarian aspects of contemporary culture because our idea of totalitarianism has been formed by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, Huxley’s model of a totalitarian dystopia is closer to what we have. It’s a dystopia that achieves total peace not through violent coercion, as in Orwell, but rather by lulling everyone to sleep, symbolically, by promising them a life of constant pleasure and entertainment to drive away anxiety.

You can read the entire text of Brave New World online. Chapter 17 begins on page 99. Here is an excerpt from the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Europe, and “John the Savage,” a dissident who has been raised outside the system, on an Indian reservation, reading nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare:

[Mond:] "But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning." "You'd have a reason for chastity!" said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words. "But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."

"But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …"

"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears — that's what soma is."

The oligarchic Davos class wishes to create a utopia in which there are no nations, no borders, and the frictionless movement of people and capital. George Soros is one of the prime supporters of this vision, but by no means the only one. This is the World Economic Forum’s general view. Recall that at the WEF meeting in January, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said that the No. 1 challenge facing Europe is “disinformation” — which I take her to mean in large part publicizing facts and opinions that challenge the elite worldview.

Viktor Orban has made himself hated by these elites because he has dared to notice what they’re doing, and to oppose it intelligently and effectively. Tommy Robinson is no Viktor Orban for a variety of reasons, but I see in him something similar: that the kind of courage it takes to stand against these powerful consensus-enforcers in the national and international ruling class requires a character that doesn’t always play well with others.

Why does it fall to rough men like Tommy Robinson to say the things that ordinary Britons ought to have been saying in defense of their communities? Answer: because when speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will speak common sense.

Here is a link to the X page where you can watch the Robinson documentary Silenced.

 

It’s well worth seeing. It details a famous case from 2021 in which Jamal, a Syrian refugee teenager, had water poured on his head in a playground incident. It got puffed up into “waterboarding,” and went viral internationally as an example of racist abuse. But it was a sham story. This kid, in fact, was a violent bully. Robinson shows how local authorities compelled teachers and others who knew what happened to sign non-disclosure agreements, and how the media, the judiciary, and the government conspired to silence the truth about the case, even though it destroyed the life of the kid falsely accused of “waterboarding” Jamal.

I think you’d have to have a heart of stone and a head of cheese not to sympathize with Tommy Robinson in all this. Is he a hot mess? You bet. Rough working-class lad. But at least in these matters of urgent justice, in which British people are being made to suffer, are being humiliated, are being dispossessed by foreigners and the actions of their own ruling class, which hates them — well, Robinson is one of the few prominent people in Britain who lives not by lies. You don’t have to agree with his politics, or make him into some kind of saint, in order to respect the hell out of him for speaking what millions know is true, but are too afraid to say.

Remember: When speaking common sense is outlawed, only outlaws will dare to speak common sense.

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