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Rod Dreher on Vance and other things
February 17, 2025
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Vance Speech: A Rhetorical D-Day Landing

And: David Starkey, Unreformed; Letter From An Angry Soldier; Wheaton's Travails

Feb 17
 
 
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The Americans have landed!

Good morning from London, and the first day of the ARC conference. Big opening dinner for speakers and donors last night; as a speaker, I got to go. Was so, so great to see many old friends there, Ran into Jonathan Pageau last night standing around talking to folks after dinner (had to filter the party pic selfie; the original was even more orange, thanks to the lighting):

  

Just now, after breakfast, I walked out of the hotel restaurant, and there sat two of my favorite people in all the world, James Orr and Martin Shaw, kibitizing. Oh happy day! Oh happy next three days!

Everybody from this side of the pond last night was talking about the J.D. Vance speech, I only heard one negative comment, and that was from an eminent writer and speaker who thought Vance said the right thing, but delivered it too bumptiously. (My response: “There is no way to say what needs saying to these European elites without coming upside their collective head with it.”) Everybody else — and I mean everybody — was over the moon with joy. The basic attitude from the Brits and the Europeans I talked to last night was, “Finally, someone is going to shake our ruling class out of its complacency.”

I cannot say it often enough or strongly enough: if you are depending on the mainstream media to give you an accurate impression of how the speech was received in Europe, you are deceived. They will tell you how European officials, policymakers, and talking heads received it — but that’s not at all the same thing as how ordinary Europeans do. Matt Taibbi takes apart the way American elite journalists, and some UK and European ones, characterized the speech. The NYT, in particular, glommed on to the “Vance normalizes Nazis” line. Here’s Taibbi:

  

I watched the damn thing. You can too, right here — and I hope you will, so you can see and hear for yourself the difference between an event that happened, and the same event as filtered through the mainstream media.

More Taibbi:

Others, like Bertelsmann foundation analyst Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, suggested Vance’s speech was not correct. “The first third of the speech was littered with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the demand that these misrepresentations be taken seriously,” she said. You’re going to hear a lot about what the BBC called “dangerous” misinformation, specifically Vance’s suggestion that prayer in one’s own home could violate U.K. “buffer zone” laws about abortion clinics. The Beeb claims it would only impact things that that “could be seen or heard from the zone, such as displaying posters or banners, or protesting in their garden.”

I have many thoughts about Vance’s speech, which I think will be remembered as a moment of grave importance, but the most crucial immediate observation is how it was received by other formerly influential American figures. It’s never been a secret that postwar Europe has a different attitude toward speech and even democracy. But we’ve never seen institutional America so open in its backing of overruled elections, censorship, and the use of intelligence mechanisms to cut off voter decisions. It’s all out in the open now.

These people have no credibility anymore. I don’t think they are intentionally lying at all. This is truly how they see the world. This is why Europe is in the awful state that it is: its ruling class, in country after country, and across borders, lives in a bubble.

I don’t remember if I posted this the other day, but an English expatriate friend and reader of this newsletter sent me this short-ish commentary by an American man, summing up where Britain went wrong. The Englishman said this is the best single explanation for the crisis that has gripped his homeland:

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In it are strong echoes of what the woke in power have done to America too, though the sickness is much further advanced in Britain. Similar stories can be told about the major countries of western Europe. The ARC conference is designed to come up with a better story, a life-giving story, to stimulate cultural and social recovery.

Listening to J.D.’s landmark speech, and assessing the hysterical negative reaction to it from the European leadership, I thought of that famous line by historian Arnold J. Toynbee: “Civilizations die by suicide, not from murder.”

This is what the prophetic French writer Renaud Camus has been trying for many years to say to his fellow Frenchmen. For his trouble, he has been roundly vilified by the ruling class, including the media. But he was right, and he is right, about the Great Replacement. It’s not even mostly about ethnic replacement. It’s about generations of postwar European political and cultural leadership wishing to erase all cultural particulars and cultural memory from the European mind, to replace it with a placeless, progressive, Houellebecqian pudding.

The distinguished German commentator Wolfgang Munchau is one of the few figures of his stature to understand what has happened. Excerpts:

Vance then repeated a threat he’d first made shortly after the American election — that any attempt to censor US-owned social media companies by the EU would lead to US disengagement from Nato. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now… is one of our own making. If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

Europe was at a loss to respond. Its centrist governments are running out of ideas in the fight against the Right. They fear that uncontrolled free speech could turn into an existential threat to European integration. After all, the EU was never a bottom-up democratic project, and support for the euro was feeble from the outset. There was, for example, no majority in Germany in favour of the euro. This lack of popular support is what paralysed the EU during the sovereign debt crisis.

What sustains the EU is not a democratic mandate, but the mainstream media, academia, and think tanks — a blob of organisations that together exert indirect control over what gets discussed and published. You will not find editorials in German newspapers in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite the fact that this party now accounts for approximately 20% of popular support. The new Right-wing parties communicate through social media instead. This is why the EU is so focused on content moderation for social media, and it’s why we have seen a recent explosion of fact-checking units in broadcasting companies and media organisations.

But the Left is rarely subjected to such fact-checking. Quite a few members of the blob have abandoned X for the alternative Bluesky, which resembles the old Twitter. There, on a much smaller scale, the old echo chamber still works. There, users describe the Trump presidency as a coup d’état, and still think that Ukraine is winning the war. No one interrupts them — or checks any facts.

More:

The BBC described Vance’s speech “extraordinarily poorly judged”. And yet the intelligent way for the Brits and Europeans to respond to America’s new regime would be to stop hyperventilating and take matters into their own hands. …

There’s no denying that Trump is throwing Europe under the bus. Angela Merkel predicted this in 2018, when she gave an agitated speech in a Bavarian beer tent shortly after meeting with Trump. She said then that Europe needed to become less dependent on the US. But then she did nothing, as did everyone else. And so here we are, with EU leaders meeting to sit around yet another table. They are the Norma Desmonds of geopolitics — convinced that they are still the stars.

As I wrote the other day — and as many European fans of the Vance speech with whom I spoke last night agreed — the philosophical core of the vice president’s address was in these lines:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

That’s exactly right! Europe doesn’t know what it’s for, only what it’s against (namely, everything that came before, everything that is not progressive, that is not an expression of managerial liberalism. Along those lines, here is an interesting Free Press essay from the retired CIA analyst Martin Gurri, writing about masculinity. Excerpts:

Since the species climbed down from the trees, ideals of manhood, always and everywhere, have been bound up with physicality and struggle. Each man has been expected to be a protector—or provider, which amounts to the same thing. He is the defender of all that is sacred and good, the bearer of virile virtues—courage, strength, loyalty. Thus, the soldier protects the nation. The husband protects the wife; the father, his children.

In the end, physicality prevails.

In modern times, the question arises: What are men supposed to protect against? …

Sure — but another way of saying this is: what are men supposed to protect?

Gurri meditates on unfiltered masculinity, and the figure of the Hero. The Hero is messy. It is he who confronts the “Man-Beast,” the nihilistic and violent figure that is masculine energy unbound. Gurri:

The hero slays the monster and so restores the moral balance of society, but he is rarely a bringer of harmony or domesticity. He smolders with an excess of the manly virtues, which he must constantly put to the test. He runs into the burning tower, not away from it. He leaps on the live grenade rather than seek cover. In him, the urge to protect is an almost pathological condition, leading in some circumstances to terrible crimes. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter so that the Achaean fleet could sail to conquer Troy. Romulus murdered his brother to ensure the foundation of Rome. James Bond leaves behind him a trail of corpses and forsaken beauties.

But the hero is indispensable. Let there be no question about that. A society deprived of heroic energy would lack the power of redemption and would soon be overrun by the Man-Beast. But the hero, by definition, is an exceptional man. He is the refutation of the democratic principle. He might be a model of certain virtues for all men to aspire to, but he is also a warning: Even the instinct to protect, central to manhood, can be deformed by a lack of conviviality.

The Hero became domesticated into the Gentleman — and this, says Gurri, was a good thing. More:

His ideal of manhood is to reduce, by personal effort, the wretchedness and cruelty of life—to push against the weight and wildness of nature until decency appears to be the default condition of the human race. He alone, the silent protector of civilization, stands between the Man-Beast and his prey.

Yet since mid-century, the Gentleman has become an object of contempt. Our culture has lost sight of the important distinction between the Gentleman — the civilized form of the Hero — and the Man-Beast. The Gentleman stood condemned as an archaism. Daniel Penny was a New York hero and gentleman who protected fellow subway riders by restraining a violent and insane black predator. Yet the state put him on trial, and the progressive cretins of Black Lives Matter turned him into a villain.

So, the Gentleman was sent away. Then, says Gurri:

In his place stood a slippery character, the technocrat, morally and sexually neutral but ready to rebuild society on a new basis. Instead of personal decency, we would get state-ordained welfare.

If you won’t have the Gentleman, you will get eventually the Man-Beast. And in that case, only the Hero will save you.

The core problem of contemporary Europe is that it rejected both the Hero and the Gentleman, and has accommodated itself to the welfare state and managed therapeutic liberalism. Result: No young man in Europe will fight for Brussels, or for a social and political order that believes in nothing higher than shopping, screwing, and DEI. It was possible for Europeans to live in denial about this as long as the United States military was willing to play the Heroes manning the front lines against the Soviet Man-Beast. In its long descent into decadence, Europe became entirely feminized, in the sense of preferring safety, care, and its own idea of compassion over all.

And it won’t even stand up for itself against the Man-Beasts it has invited to live within its borders: Muslim male fanatics who stab people in the UK and across Europe almost every day now. Its decadent leaders — Viktor Orban an honorable exception — won’t lift a finger to stop the madness (this happened over the weekend in Austria). When figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy try to do something meaningful, the ideologically charged courts stop them on “human rights” grounds. Pope Francis is eager for Europe to roll over and die for the sake of “compassion”. Doing something meaningful about this crisis would force Europe to reckon with the bankruptcy of its own progressivism. One gets the idea that most of its leadership class would sooner die than abandon its ideology and fight for the survival of its own civilization. The chairman of the Munich Security Conference cried like a baby over Vance’s speech!

C.S. Lewis saw it all coming many decades ago. In The Abolition Of Man, he wrote:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Europe is now a Man Without A Chest. And the new government in Washington is telling the Continent: Man up, become the heroes of your own story. J.D. Vance’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of the D-Day landing. Now European patriots are preparing to fight to save their civilization from the enemies within.

David Starkey, Irrepressible As Ever

  
David Starkey (photo quote Jeff Gilbert/Telegraph)

Here’s how Tim Stanley’s wonderful Telegraph interview with the irascible historian David Starkey begins:

“I am an impertinent old bugger,” says Dr David Starkey, “and I refuse to be shut up.” I meet him at his London flat, sit and brace myself for a delicious, dizzying chat with the historian once dubbed “the rudest man in Britain”. He speaks energetically and clearly, as if to the back of the class, in that “you need to know this” style he perfected on television.

The monarchy is “fading into irrelevance”, he discloses. The King is woke. William is “hopeless... Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team.” (And he’d be “rather stretched at that”.) Much blame lies with the late Queen, who was “obsessed about the Commonwealth” and spent too much time “sucking up to African dictators”.

Between the gasps and laughs of every Starkey lecture shines a pertinent point. Britain was ruined by its elite; he thinks we need to undergo a “cultural restoration”. The theme has resonance in his own life.

“Impertinent old bugger” is funny because Starkey is gay. He is also infamously politically incorrect, which got him massively cancelled a few years ago for an unwise racist remark.

That happened in June 2020, during a silly podcast interview with pundit Darren Grimes; Starkey was asked about slavery and proactively – lazily – said that had it been as genocidal as some claim, the world wouldn’t be full of “so many damn blacks”. The slip was condemned. Organisations he’d worked with for years telephoned to give him five minutes to resign or be pushed.

He lost friends, his fellowship, his publisher, various honours and positions, and his literary agent, who, as fate would have it, was named Fairweather. The police opened an investigation, which they later dropped (Priti Patel, the home secretary at the time, advised the police to respect “freedom of speech”). It was “profoundly hurtful”, yet “mixed with the most wonderful farce. Three guesses what was happening on that day? I was having a new fridge-freezer delivered. My universe collapsed and I was surrounded by decaying piles of frozen food.”

He’d said such things before, so why on this occasion did he get the full Gulag treatment? He offers historical context: “This is 2020, the year of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter... George Floyd... The world went mad, and I was a very peripheral victim of it.” I sense we’re building up to the big question of what’s going wrong with Britain and how he proposes to fix it.

Well, it was an obnoxious remark — but then, as Stanley avers, this is how Starkey always rolled. His acidic judgments are part of what made him such a provocative and popular broadcaster and public intellectual. As I see it, this is why it was so great to see J.D. Vance push back hard at Rep. Ro Khanna a couple of weeks ago, when Khanna demanded that Vance seek the firing of a young DOGE Wunderkind who was discovered in the past to have made a racist remark about Indians (Vance’s wife Usha is Indian, and, of course, their children are half-Indian.) Vance obviously didn’t like what the kid had tweeted, but he said we have to quit driving otherwise talented people out of public life for stupid and ugly things they might have said.

What Vance did not say, but could have, is that for many years now the Left has not only tolerated figures from its side who say extremely bigoted things, but even valorized that bigotry. Seems to me Vance was simply arguing for common-sense tolerance: yes, when someone says something ugly, call them out on it — but don’t demonize them and make them unemployable. If we do that, we will deprive ourselves of the wisdom and talent of worthy people who are, like everybody else, flawed, but still worth having around.

Letter From A Fed-Up Soldier

A reader who is active duty in the US military, and who comes from a “very blue milieu,” socially and intellectually, writes to say that watching what wokeness has done to so many institutions of American life — including the armed forces — has driven him rightward.

“I am just at the absolute end of my patience with what the left has done to once-vital institutions that may or may not retain the capacity to sustain and transmit civilization,” he e-mails me. “I'm still center-left on some social issues, but my 'lived experience' has caused the scales to fall from my eyes regarding the postmodern, identitarian left.”

He gave me permission to share this with you, on the condition that I obscure certain identifying details, which I have done (I shared this with him first, to make sure it passed muster for protecting his identity. I know his name.)

Take the matter of women in combat.

Much of what I have to say here will be pretty familiar. A lot of it has simply been unsayable for the past decade or so, but that does not change the fact that it is true. Full gender integration only works if you accept the claim that men and women are completely interchangeable and that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes.

N. says that most people outside the military have no real idea of how physically intense the infantry is. The women he observes in his military life “get injured at much higher rates and are in an impossible situation because they do not want to draw attention to themselves but simply can't keep up.”

He goes on: “The cost of gender integration is not worth any benefit, and any benefit is entirely ideological.”

N. mentions that men in the military skew more conservative, the opposite is true for women, especially female officers. He mentions one unit that he knows in which a female was given the top NCO position. This person leapfrogged over more competent males, and has proven to be grossly incompetent. Her continued presence — she apparently is not being allowed to fail — is causing tremendous moral problems. “It’s terrible for morale and, frankly, the legitimacy of the command's authority,” N. says.

More broadly, says N., every time women are moved into combat infantry, “the level of drama and interpersonal conflict ramps up and creates distractions.” It is especially difficult for infantry members who are mothers.

Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. When we are on deployment and doing lengthy field exercises, family and relationship issues back home are the single greatest drag on morale and focus. It's hard enough for guys, but it comes close to impossible for mothers with young children.

N. says you will hear from progressives that this is just the natural extension of the principle that led to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the subsequent normalization of gays in the military. N. believes that was the right thing to do.

There were all kinds of reasons why that was a bad law in terms of defense policy, but the biggest issue was that it didn't reflect reality. There were plenty of gay people already serving throughout the military without issue. To have the threat of career destruction hanging over them at all times wasn't fair or helpful. Repealing DADT did not force any kind of radical social change or reordering of things. It was a non-issue. If people have a problem with their gay colleagues, they usually just see past it and the whole thing is just a big whatever.

As N. sees it, the US armed forces have traditionally been a “true meritocracy.” In his part of the infantry, a large number of soldiers, even in leadership positions, are non-white — and are entirely deserving of their positions, because they are good at what they do. But now that the social engineers have gained control of the Pentagon, that’s all changed.

Mandating dishonesty is anathema to our culture. That was the problem with DADT. This brave new world of co-ed infantry units mandates dishonesty because we can't say what is obviously true: it doesn't work. The military has funded quite a bit of research into this, and every time the data come back to show that all-male infantry units are more effective and score better on every metric. For female inclusion, the best model would be all-female units (as the Israelis have in the IDF). Democrats will absolutely not allow that to happen. I have some thoughts on why that might be. It has something to do with the idea that anything with men alone is automatically suspect and by definition problematic. Women must be present to monitor, police, and change male culture.

This might be the most obvious, unsayable thing. Young men need challenging male environments to form them as strong, healthy men. There need to be spheres of life where women drill instructors are not yelling at young men to shape and form them. A great many young men join the Marine Corps, for example, specifically to find the one place left in society where they won't have to deal with that stuff. And there is nothing in the world wrong with that. How more obvious could it be that what American society is offering young men today simply is not working? The young men most at risk of deaths of despair need the Marine Corps a whole lot more than they need more sensitivity training or hectoring about toxic masculinity. The beauty of it is that this approach perfectly compliments war-fighting effectiveness. There's a good reason things have always been done this way and no good reason to radically change course.

What Is Wheaton College For?

Some of you will have heard of the controversy raging around Wheaton College, long the standard-bearer of Evangelical higher education. Recently the college issued an anodyne congratulation to Russ Vought, a Wheaton alumnus who just rose to a prominent position in the Trump administration. When progressive alumni screamed bloody murder, the school backed down. Daniel Davis writes in First Things:

The message to alumni in conservative politics could not have been more alienating. It also backfired. Within hours, U.S. senators and even Elon Musk were weighing in on X, expressing dismay at the school’s moral cowardice. Indeed, Wheaton’s actions revealed a moral sickness at the heart of how it makes decisions. Faced with a mob, Wheaton showed that it will quickly bow the knee and take the path of least resistance. As Mollie Hemingway aptly put it: If Wheaton folds this easily, “you have to wonder how well they’re preparing students for a hostile world that hates the Gospel.”

This lack of convictional courage explains much of Wheaton’s drift in recent years. While it is true that many faithful professors remain on campus—some of whom I cherish to this day—Wheaton as an institution has become unmoored. Its drift is twofold: The administration allows itself to be emotionally blackmailed by activists, and it refuses to explicitly orient the college against the most toxic ideologies of our time.

Davis goes on to cite several examples, concluding:

There’s much more. Yet beneath all of these trends is a sad undercurrent, described to me by one local pastor in the following way: Wheaton is not articulating the gospel. Instead, it is assuming the gospel, which always precedes losing the gospel.

When Billy Graham spoke at the dedication of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center in 1980, he charged its leaders to maintain a zeal for the biblical gospel and a commitment to world evangelism. “If the leaders of a future generation take any other path,” he warned, “may they be, as the Apostle Paul said to the Galatians, accursed, because Ichabod [“without glory”] will be written on this place.”

Has the glory of God departed from Wheaton? Through weak and docile leadership, regrettably, it has.

Well, a group of alumni have launched For Wheaton, an initiative calling on the trustees of their alma mater to repent.

God has poured out tremendous blessings on many schools that have chosen a path of bold, broad-shouldered Christianity in this moment, regardless of where it places them on a political spectrum. In our time, the Gospel may be viewed as “conservative"; in other times, it has been “progressive.” So be it. Our world’s categories should be irrelevant to how we carry out our mission. Christian students and parents want a college that will shape them into the kinds of countercultural people who will walk boldly into the wind in the strength of Christ, wherever He leads them.

We, the undersigned, compelled by our love for Wheaton College, humbly ask that you take immediate action regarding (1) the state of the college, including the need for new leadership, (2) putting an end to the current DEI regime, (3) conducting an audit of every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, (4) evaluating the process for adjudicating claims of racism, sexism, and other forms of harassment, (5) affirming free speech and the importance of a vibrant competition of ideas on campus, and whatever else is necessary to ensure the drift toward worldliness is ended and replaced with a vigorous, fearless, joyful pursuit of the Lord.

Until such a time as significant changes have been made on these priorities, we are committed to one or more of the following actions:

  • Ceasing all financial support to the college.

  • Declining to recommend Wheaton to prospective students and their parents.

  • Sharing examples of institutional drift with friends, fellow parishioners, online audiences, or the press to ensure students and parents who are considering Wheaton are aware of the disconnect between what is advertised in the Statement of Faith and what is really happening on campus.

If you are a Wheaton alumnus or parent of a Wheaton student, I encourage you to read and sign the open letter.

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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

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Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century” @ The HuntingtonLibrary - Alain.R.Truong
 

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

 

Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

A chart showing the PISA results
 

And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.

 

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacycertain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

 

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

The Books Beloved by David Bowie | Internet Archive Blogs
 

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.

 

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV by MIGNARD, Pierre
 

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.

 

Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

The Course of Empire (paintings) - Wikipedia
 

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

File:The cow pock.jpg - Wikipedia
 

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society.

1

When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”.

2

I protest that I read my Peter Brown and accept this is a simplistic (though I hope rhetorically forceful) characterisation of late antiquity. But I also think recent fashionable attempts to rebrand the “dark ages” as the “light ages” can be a bit overdone. Literacy rates did decline in late antiquity.

3

People sometimes object that Socrates bemoaned the death of writing. Havelock’s detailed argument as set out in his book Preface to Plato is worth reading in full. One point he makes is that Socrates himself was the product of an intellectual climate already being profoundly influenced by writing. Plato, according to Havelock, was an active campaigner against pre-literate modes of thinking.

4

This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in.

 

 

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October 04, 2025
Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence
From Konstantin Kisin's Sub Stack

Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence

 
Oct 04, 2025
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Have you ever wondered why in the wake of every Islamist terrorist attack, our media and politicians bend over backwards to make the extraordinary claim that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam? The answer is a mixture of things, but the central reason is easy to understand if you think about it logically.

To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead. As you know, there are red apples, green apples and yellow apples. Let’s imagine for a second that a small percentage of green apples are poisonous and can injure and kill people. It is difficult to distinguish the toxic green apples from the other green apples which are perfectly “peaceful”, “law-abiding” and so forth.

Now imagine that you are the public health authority whose job it is to protect the public. If your concern is solving the problem of the small minority of toxic green apples, you would immediately do a number of things.

You might devote significant resources to identifying the toxic green apples and removing them from the supermarket shelves. You might commission thorough research into how and where the toxic green apples are grown. You might crack down very, very hard on anyone who knowingly participates in growing or distributing such apples. You might even say that while you are dealing with the problem of deaths caused by toxic green apples, bringing more green apples into the country is liable to worsen the public health crisis until suitable measures are identified which allow you to separate the bad green apples from the good ones.

This is how you would act if your primary concern was the safety of the public. But what if you, as the public health authority, had spent the preceding decades claiming that all apples are the same? That to suggest that a small minority of green apples are potentially toxic is fear-mongering and green-o-phobic? What if you had been openly encouraging unfiltered importation of green apples and actively resisted calls to thoroughly check whether such apples are in fact, digestible for your citizens? What if your mantra for the last 20 years has been that anyone who believes there may be significant variations between the toxicity of different types of apples is a bigot who must be suppressed for fear of emboldening the “far right”?

If you were, in fact, responsible for the fact that people were now being killed on the streets of your country by the small minority of toxic green apples, would you not do everything in your power to explain that the diversity of apples is our greatest strength? That the toxicity of green apples is nothing to do with them being green? That any doctor who suggests that the government should carefully regulate the importation of green apples specifically is a racist?

The central premise of our elite consensus is that we must continue to pretend that all apples are the same. No matter how many people pay for this lie with their lives.

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September 27, 2025
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More thoughts on Forgiveness
Thoughts from 2022 with a new addendum for 2025

Thoughts on Forgiveness from April of 2022 with a 2025 Addendum

In Cath-O-Land we are celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday. Be you a believer or not, do you think that people are defined by their worst traits or decisions and thereafter imprisoned by them? Once a murderer, always a murderer? Is there a path of redemption, rehabilitation or restitution for that person, or are those dark choices and acts irrevocable? For the victims of vile crimes, they are unforgettable, they can be experiences that are life changing or life ending.

I guess it depends on the circumstances. I am not a fan of letting criminals skate free. If you commit the crime, do the time. I know it sounds simple, and we live in a world of decaying justice and manipulations of the courts that can prompt all of us to be cynics about justice. Dial back the clocks just a century and domestic violence and abuse was often ignored unless it erupted into murder. If you saw your neighbors beating their children or a husband beating a spouse, it was often ignored unless dealt with specifically within the family. I am not even sure that was the case, but that certainly is the impression I got from listening to my parents and grandparents talk about abusive neighbors by today's standard.

 

Justice - Mercy - Forgiveness – Contrition - Reconciliation - Healing

Justice - everyone has to face their choices, good & bad. If you believe in a Divine Judge who knows all, no one skates free. Everyone must face their story and how they wrote it by their actions.

Mercy - One can find forgiveness of sins, make restitution for their crimes. In this life, or the next. No one is a prisoner to their past, but no one gets to ignore it either. Mercy is meant to lift us above our past, pull us back on the path, reset the world we live in even if our acts have shrunk that world by our choices. Some may only fine mercy by a life in prison because their acts make them unworthy of living among us. While not a fan of the death penalty, finality of life often opens the door to reflection. The mask comes off when you are going to die, are you a harden & hateful soul, or can you in your final moments have contrition for your acts? In my world, mercy is only going to be received when I am willing to provide it. Mercy flows through me, or it bypasses me. My choice.

Forgiveness - It does not ever mean that the wrong someone has committed against us is acceptable. Forgiveness is not asking us to close our eyes and pretend everything is ok. Forgiveness is the ability to see beyond the wound, to emancipate oneself from the memory that has become our mental prison, to let justice be in the hands of another when we cannot obtain it for ourselves. Forgiveness is a choice - we can decide to offer it or withhold it. few things are worse than letting someone who injured us live rent-free in our heads for a life, imprisoning us in an inescapable memory when we have the keys of our freedom in our own possession.

Contrition – You are sorry for your offense and take accountability for it and are willing to live with the consequences of it and the possible need to make amends for it. Contrition belongs to the perpetrator of the act, and the victim may freely tell them to the go to Hell if they please.  Your sorrow for your acts does not depend upon their recognition or reception of your repentance.  

Reconciliation - It takes two, and it is not always achievable. When forgiveness and contrition are experienced, there is the possibility of reconciliation. You can't be reconciled with someone with someone who fails to take account of their own actions. In a more perfect world, reconciliation is always the goal. You can't be reconciled with a person who is a slave to addiction, especially if that addiction is behavioral altering. The addiction will always come first until they leave it behind. If someone says they are sorry and they alter their acts, reconciliation is possible. But contrition without change is empty. Few things can heal our hearts more than real reconciliation, but it is something not entirely in our control, as all the best things in life are, others have to meet us on the path of their reconciliation and work through the mess and injury however great or small it might be.

Healing - Be it victim or perpetrator - there is healing. If you have a healthy mind & heart, you choose the acts that define you. You choose the emotional weight to give to those acts and how they roam about in your thoughts and feelings. No victim need be a prisoner to the worst crime committed against them. *Victimhood is the surest path to an unhappy life.* Perhaps for some it is inescapable because they have developed a mental illness that will ever prevent they from rising above the pain. But if you are not mentally ill, defining your life as a victim may be one of your worst choices. Healing for the perpetrator can only come when they face their acts and do what they can to make amends.

Well, that is a lot. If you read it all, you probably need another cup of coffee. As always comments are welcome, even if you disagree with me on some of the points. It is after all just my ramblings about it. I hope you have a great day my friend, fellow pilgrim and one willing to lead me some minutes to read this. Peace.

*2025 Addendum for the Coffee Talk Crew 

I couldn’t agree with Fred more than recklessly inviting evil into your life is stupid. Nothing could be more stupid than knowing beforehand that someone is going to do evil and you welcome it pretending that it somehow won’t take place.   I can agree that that type of naive wishful thinking is profoundly stupid.  Europe is doing that with Islamists and the Center & Right of American culture & politics does that too often with the LEFT. There is no such thing as pre-forgiveness. If you come to commit evil, I pray you are stopped.  If it takes you leaving life to protect those I love, I vote you go home to God first rather than my loved ones. I am not happy about not having a choice but violence, but violent men/women have to be stopped with violence, not nice words or hopeful prayers.  Pray for their souls, stop their actions. Contain their evil. Predatory evil needs to be identified and ended. 

I don’t think Charlie Kirk’s wife is stupid for forgiving the murderer of her husband.  She still wants him to face justice and punishment for his crimes, but she is not going to live in the wound created in her life by his vile act. She did not have to forgive; she could have chosen to wait on it or never offer it to the murderer. She made a choice, and one that happened early on because she is serious (not perfect) about her faith.  I admire hr for her seriouness, I don't think I could arrive at forgiveness that quickly. 

At the core of Christian Discipleship is the dynamic of forgiveness – contrition and reconciliation.  Disciples are aware of how much they have been forgiven by God. Disciples know that if they want to seek God’s mercy, they must offer it to others.  I don’t think it has to be an immediate thing, massive wounds of hatred, violence and evil take equally massive amounts of time, grace and healing to mend.  The wounded will know their scars forever, how they chose to think about them is a choice.

Most Christians, and all Disciples should know that forgiveness is essential if they pay any attention to the Our Father.  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I can’t imagine praying those words and not trying to live by them. Again, I don’t think it means forgiveness has to be immediate, thoughtless and a given, but it should be something or somewhere I hope to arrive in life.  I should want to forgive eventually even if the pain of the offense at the moment is too fresh, deep and crushing.

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