Well, at least during this papacy. 

The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it. And therefore seeing the matter is thus begun, and so faintly resisted on our parts, I fear that we be not the men that shall see the end of the misery.

Wherefore, seeing I am an old man and look not long to live, I mind not by the help of God to trouble my conscience in pleasing the king this way whatsoever become of me, but rather here to spend out the remnant of my old days in praying to God for him.

    --St. John Fisher's "reply to Bishops Stokesley, Gardiner and Tunstal, sent to the Tower by Thomas Cromwell to persuade Fisher to submit to the King" (full text at the link)

I do not of course identify myself with St. John Fisher's courage in the face of the immediate and fairly certain prospect of decapitation. I'm not in any personal danger from either secular or religious authorities. I'm not even in danger of financial or social penalties. I suppose I might experience either or both of those if I were in a situation where the opinion of progressives had that kind of power over me, but I'm not. Nor do I mean that the Catholic Church, in my country or universally, has been decisively conquered in the way that Fisher witnessed. 

What I identify with is Fisher's understanding that it was the authorities within the Church who had given it over to its enemies, his resignation in the face of the result, and his certainty that the trouble he sees will long outlast him. 

The turmoil in the Catholic Church, the conflict between the Faith more or less as it has been understood for 2000 years and doctrinal revisions intended to make it acceptable to that godless fool, "modern man," is a grave crisis which is not going to be resolved in my lifetime. The evangelization which Vatican II and other changes were meant to enable is now crippled by that internal conflict (among many other things). And this crisis has mainly been the work of church authorities.

I know I've said things like this before, but not, I think, with quite so much emphasis and finality. The occasion, as you might have guessed, is the issuing of the decree Fiducia supplicans. I don't think I need to say much about it. If you want to dig into what it actually says and what it actually means, there are plenty of opinions out there. (I think Larry Chapp has it right.)

My own view is simple: the decree is the answer to the question "How can we do this while denying that we are doing it?" I know the document is carefully constructed to be technically orthodox, and I recognize the good will of those who argue that it changes nothing. But I think they're mistaken. The homosexual rights activist Fr. James Martin, S.J., thinks so, too, quoted by Chapp: “Be wary of the ‘Nothing has changed’ response to today’s news. It’s a significant change.".

Fisher of course did not live to see the church which replaced his own be surrendered in a similar way, not to a king but to the diffused sovereignty of the spirit of the times, which I think is clearly the spirit of the Antichrist. Many of us who watched, helplessly, the internal apostasy of most of Anglicanism recognize Fiducia supplicans as a maneuver in the struggle which wrecked that communion. Whether that maneuver will be followed successfully by others I won't try to guess. I think the most likely long-term result is a gradual continuation of the hollowing-out process which leaves "official teaching" more or less intact but a dead letter. 

I don't care to speculate about the motives of the pope. I'll just go back to something I've said before, but with more emphasis: Pope Francis is a bad pope in the functional sense that he is bad at his job, like a builder whose buildings fall down. He has  exacerbated--deliberately, it appears--the divisions in the Church and insured that the crisis of which I spoke above will be prolonged for quite some time. It is entirely possible that it will become much, much worse, in part because of his approach to it.

There's something else on this subject that I may or may not have said here before, though I have certainly said it in other places. I'll repeat it as I leave the topic: I had never, as far as I recall, so much as heard the name of Cardinal Bergoglio before his election to the papacy, and therefore had no prejudice against him. But when he stepped out onto that balcony to greet the crowds after his election, I immediately had what I can only describe crudely as a bad feeling. It had no particular content and I wouldn't call it a premonition, just...a bad feeling. I've thought about it often since then, and have spoken to others who had the same experience. It's a small thing which may be significant. Or not.

See this article in the Catholic Herald.

I don't, obviously, try to follow the news here. I didn't even write about the October 7th invasion/massacre in Israel, or anything that's followed it, but I have certainly given it a lot of my attention. But this seems significant in a way not very far distant from some of the things I do write about, e.g. posts in the "Catholic Stuff" category, to warrant mention.

Peterson is an interesting guy. Interesting and smart. I haven't read any of his books but I've seen him in interviews and talks and he has, as you probably know, a great many very sensible things to say, and apparently a strong and healthy respect for the religious traditions of Western civilization. That's enough to make him unusual for someone who has as much popular appeal as he does. I don't think anyone would be surprised if he followed his wife into the Church. 

This one actually appeared on the 15th, so is more than ten days old. But it didn't get any less ridiculous.  

Government Can't Solve the Loneliness Crisis

It appeared in National Review, and, as you might suppose, it's a government-skeptical response to an outlandish idea for a new government project.

I just can't think of anything much to say about the very idea that government could possibly do anything at all about loneliness. I think you have to be...well, I won't say crazy, but definitely somewhat off, to believe that it could. And as for the alleged "loneliness crisis," the term suggests that, as with inflation, there is some acceptable level of loneliness in society, that it can be measured, and that when it exceeds the acceptable level Somebody Ought To Do Something.

That widespread loneliness exists is surely true; that it's worse and more widespread than it used to be is probably true. That the government, which is to say politicians and bureaucrats, can or should try to do something about it is extremely doubtful. George W. Bush once said "When people are hurting, government has to act." In context, which was a natural disaster, the remark made more sense, but still, it struck me as odd.

Ok, that's all pretty goofy. But the NR story is responding to something that strikes me as being out-and-out crazy. It's a press release from the office of the governor of New York:

Governor Hochul Appoints Dr. Ruth Westheimer New York State's Honorary Ambassador to Loneliness

You remember "Dr. Ruth," right? An old bawd--that was always my impression of her--who ran a talk show giving sex advice? She's now 94 years old but is nevertheless ready to "work day and night to help New Yorkers feel less lonely!" Filling in the background, the press release defines the terms for us: "Loneliness is defined as the feeling of being alone, regardless of the amount of social interaction, while social isolation refers to a lack of social connections." 

There's a great deal to mock in that press release, but it's more trouble than it's worth. (Why is it an ambassador to loneliness? How can you have an ambassador to an emotion? Why not to the lonely?) And anyway the word "honorary" suggests that it's only meant as a gesture. I'll just make one broader observation: Dr. Ruth's career (my impression confirmed by Wikipedia) was as a propagandist for the sexual revolution. Like essentially all of that stripe, she apparently has never considered the possibility that the success of that revolution may have contributed to the loneliness and other social ills that she does at least notice. No; the solution is always that the revolution has not gone far enough and must push ever onward. It's as if the successors of Robespierre and Company had concluded that the problem was that too few heads had been separated from bodies, and more must roll.

Some social progressives seem to be very close to proclaiming something which is strongly implied by things like this: that the enemy is the human condition, and that they intend to eliminate it. Which perhaps they are doing, but not exactly in the way they imagine. 

Here's a current ridiculous headline, from the Washington Post:

Antagonisms flare as red states try to dictate how blue cities are run

This is funny because "blue" America is constantly striving to dictate how "red" America is run, and has been doing so for many years. It's a major component of Democratic Party politics now, as well as of the work of many progressive institutions. And it's a major component of the forces dividing the country. (I haven't looked at the story; it's behind a pretty opaque paywall.)

Well, I guess that's not technically accurate. To set a trend, one must not only be enacting the trend, but be seen doing it. Nobody apart from my immediate family and my neighbors know that I'm doing it. And I'm pretty sure that they are themselves not trend-watchers who have noted that I'm doing it and informed the fashionable world. If my obscurity and ignorance don't give me any claim to setting the trend, I can at least truly say that for once I am well out in front of it. 

I'm referring to the trend of "silent walking." I only know about it because Rob G sent me this link: 'Silent walking' is going viral. What is it and what are the benefits?

"Silent walking" is walking without some electronic device piping music or talk into your ears. That it now seems unusual, an exception to a general rule, is amusing. That people feel the need to have it explained, justified and prescribed by experts--psychologists, doctors, the author of a book on "mindfulness"--is very amusing, in a not altogether enjoyable way.

I'm tempted to quote from the article, but it should be read to be fully appreciated.  

As for my own participation: I walk for twenty or thirty minutes several days a week, and have done this off and on for years. I've tried listening to music or spoken word--talk, or audio books--while walking, and I just don't like it. "Distracting" is not an adequate word. It puts me into a sort of foggy confusion, in which I'm attentive neither to my surroundings or to whatever is coming through the headphones. To say that I don't like it is really an understatement--I soon came to hate it, and gave it up entirely a long time ago. 

Everybody knows, though many will perhaps have forgotten fairly quickly, of the insane episode involving the marketers of Bud Light and their decision to enlist a female impersonator named Dylan Mulvaney in its ad campaign, issuing a special can with his image on it, making an ad featuring him, and so forth. I'm not of course supposed to call him a female impersonator, or "him." But even by the standards of those who think he should be referred to as a "trans woman," Mulvaney fails: he shouldn't be considered to be any sort of woman, as it isn't a woman that he impersonates, but a somewhat bizarre version of a teenaged girl.

I really don't think there has ever in real life been a female human who behaved as absurdly as Mulvaney does. I did not realize until a day or two ago, when I finally saw the video of him sipping Bud Light in a bubble bath, just how bizarre he is. I suppose it could be comic, but the fact that we're supposed to take his "girlhood" as real makes it disturbing. (I can't find a video of the commercial itself, but if you look for it on YouTube you can find various news broadcasts that show at least parts of it.) It shouldn't have surprised anybody that Bud Light customers were not pleased, but the marketers were in fact surprised that their effort to "evolve and elevate" the beer, or rather the image of the beer, provoked a negative reaction.

So far, so typical of the stupid times we live in. But I would like to point out a more fundamental problem. Bud Light as a brand is now in trouble because the episode alienated the sort of hard workin' regular guy who is or was a Bud Light drinker. But why was he? How did Bud Light become a sort of emblem of the hard workin' regular guy? Not long ago I heard, in some public place, some pop-country singer describing a wonderful world where the supply of Bud Light would be unlimited--not just beer, not even Budweiser, but Bud Light, by name.

This is disgraceful. The long-standing mainstream American beer brands--Budweiser and the rest--have always been pretty poor beer, but they're recognizable as beer. Light, or "lite," beers, on the other hand, are so watery as to be nearly tasteless. Presumably they were invented and marketed as a way to enable the drinker to get a certain amount of alcohol into his system with roughly two-thirds of the calories that would come along with normal beer. Hard workin' regular guys are suppose to actually like beer and not be overly concerned with watching their weight. And they're not supposed to like wimpy stuff like light beer. Clearly we as a society have failed.

*

I've seen a lot of progressive reaction to this and other similar controversies involving transgenderism, and most of it is disingenous-to-dishonest: "Why are you right-wingers so obsessed with this harmless stuff?" And of course "Why are  you so full of hate?" It's not trivial and harmless fun when the entire establishment, government and corporate, insists that we call Dylan Mulvaney a woman, and brings whatever power it legally can to ostracize anyone who contradicts this dogma. Physical violence is directed by "trans men" against actual women who refuse to go along with the program; Riley Gaines, a female swimmer who was beaten in unfair competition with a man and had the nerve to call it unfair, was attacked at a college campus when she tried to give a speech stating her views there. Dylan Mulvaney was received at the White House and given an interview with the president. 

*

I've always found it hard to believe that anyone actually likes light beer, but I know one person who does, and proved it in a blind test. With some friends she went to a beer sampling where a couple of dozen unidentified beers were offered, Bud Light among them. I think this was at a brewery and suspect the Bud Light was included more or less as a joke. They ranked the ones they liked, and it was only after all had chosen their favorites that the samples were identified. She chose Bud Light. So she can't be accused of pretending or forcing herself to like it, the way people do with low-fat or non-fat foods. 

A few things I meant to say about The Dry Wood:

I'm not sure exactly what the title means. It's an allusion to Luke 23:31: 

For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?

That's the Douay-Rheims translation, which is the one Houselander uses, not surprisingly. I admit that I've never been entirely sure what it means. It's part of the warning Jesus gives to the people as he is about to be led away to his crucifixion, a warning that very bad things are coming for everyone. Flammability is one obvious difference between green and dry wood, so maybe "They're trying to burn green wood, so what will they do with dry wood?" is meant.  Anyway the general idea is that bad things are happening now and worse ones are coming. 

Here's what the editors of this edition say about it:

When a perfectly good green tree is burned (that is, when Christ sacrifices himself on the cross), what can the dry wood of fallen and broken humanity expect to find when it meets with fire? Fallen humanity can follow Christ to new life, but only at a price.

Well, that's obviously true, and the novel is very much about suffering, but I'm not totally convinced either that it's the correct interpretation of the words themselves or what Houselander had in mind in using them. I wonder if she meant something a little more specific: that her story describes the kindling of a fire in the dry wood of the people of Riverside. The plot supports that interpretation.

I mentioned the character of Solly Lee, a Jewish businessman who cynically tries to cash in on the popular devotion to Fr. Malone. That is obviously a somewhat stereotypical scenario, though probably, like most stereotypes, having some grounding in reality. But if that sounds like it might be heading toward anti-Semitism, it most definitely is not. The portrait of Solly is rich, sympathetic, and deeply and seriously engaged with his situation as a secularized Jew. To say much more than that I'd have to give away more of the story than I want to.  Suffice to say that it is not a hostile portrait.

*

The Trump indictment is a disaster for the nation. I say that with no sympathy at all for Trump himself. I think I've made my low opinion of him sufficiently clear over the years; search for his name on this blog if you want verification. If this involved a serious crime I would support it. But it's transparently contrived for political purposes, as the basic offenses are not only misdemeanors but misdemeanors for which the statute of limitations has expired, turned into felonies by the charge that they were committed in pursuit of another and so far unspecified crime. Even the vigorously anti-Trump David Frum thinks it's a bad case: 

From the moment rumors swirled that the Manhattan district attorney would move against Trump, many of us felt an inward worry: Did Alvin Bragg have a case that would justify his actions? The early reports were not encouraging. Many Trump-unfriendly commentators published their qualms. Over a week of speculation, though, it seemed wise to withhold judgment until the actual indictment was available to read. Now the document has been published. The worriers were right.

That's from The Atlantic, and I can't read the whole piece because I'm not a subscriber, so I don't know where he goes from there. I am a subscriber to Bari Weiss's Free Press, which has this analysis from Eli Lake; maybe you can read it. After explaining how thin the case is, he says:

All of this raises a question—not just for Bragg, but for the Democratic Party, the online resistance, and the media ecosystem that seems to exist simply to stoke outrage about Donald Trump for its overstimulated, progressive base: Is it worth it? Is the catharsis of seeing Trump indicted worth the damage a politicized prosecution of the former president will do?

Trump is bad, but it's the Democrats' reaction to him that is doing the most to tear this nation apart. Are they willing to do it because they know that Trump's supporters will be enraged enough to make him the Republican nominee next year, and believe they can defeat him? Or is it just the blood lust, the pleasure of humiliating the man they hate so much? (I was very surprised a while back to hear a progressive friend deny that she and others hate Trump. It confirmed my impression that zealous progressives are remarkably unaware of the demeanor which they present to those not of their faith.)

Either way, they are enlarging, possibly beyond repair, the rip in the fabric of our society. They are feeding the divisions that led to Trump's election in the first place. And they don't care. There are tens of millions of decent people who support Trump and believe that the ruling class of this country despises them and wants to render them powerless, or worse. Now you're encouraging them to believe that the law will not protect them if the progressive establishment goes after them. I suppose the Democrats think they can control the outcome, permanently defeating their enemies. And they may be right. But what will be the cost? 

One day, if history is told with any accuracy, they will be held in deserved contempt (along, probably, with Trump himself). But it will be too late to heal the nation. 

On that grim note, I'll sign off till after Easter. 

*

On second thought, I won't leave it on that note. Something reminded me of this picture, taken last fall at a state park in north Alabama. The light was extraordinary and though my phone didn't really capture it, it's still rather pretty.

It was only fairly recently that I became aware of the term "outrage porn," but I just learned from Wikipedia that it's been around since 2009, when a New York Times writer said:

It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.

The Wikipedia article reveals that the phenomenon has been the object of study and analysis, mainly on the question of why and how journalists use it to attract and keep the attention of readers and/or viewers. 

But I didn't need anyone's analysis to recognize the phenomenon as soon as I encountered the term. I recognized it because it obviously referred to a tendency which I long ago noticed in myself: a perverse pleasure in being outraged, normally by someone else's misdeeds. Never mind the whole question of deliberate manipulation; I don't need to be manipulated into it, because I do it to myself. 

I first noticed it many years ago in reading the Catholic press. For as long as I've been a Christian the struggle between orthodox and progressive theology has been a highly visible fact of life in the Christian world. (I'm using "progressive" as a convenient way of referring to the tendency to reduce the faith to a matter of literature and psychology.) Given two items in a Catholic publication, one offering a meditation on some aspect of the faith and the other exposing some cleric or theologian's manifest heresy, it was the latter that I wanted urgently to read. The justification for the impulse--that it was important to know about these malign influences--was pretty thin. How much of my reaction was a genuine desire or need to know, and how much of it was the pleasure of thinking Isn't that awful? Aren't the people doing it terrible? I must read more, so that I can better understand how awful and terrible it all is.

Self-righteousness is certainly part of it, but it's much more than the normal "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as this sinner." It also includes personal anger provoked by a sense of being attacked; the sinner is not just doing something wrong which you, in your righteousness, are not doing, but engaged in something which damages you, or something or someone you love.

I did recognize it as an unhealthy tendency, but I don't know that I resisted it very hard. And that was before the internet, which, as we all know, has given that unhealthy impulse an injection of some kind of growth hormone. Thinking about it now, I see that I've sometimes, or often, forgotten even to recognize that it's unhealthy, or to be restrained by that recognition.

Culturally speaking, it has become a monster. We live in an angry and unhappy culture now, and the impulse that makes us propagate and enjoy--yes, that is the word--outrage porn is making us even more angry and unhappy than we would otherwise be.

This is on my mind because Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative has ended, and I'm trying to decide whether or not to follow him to his Substack site, Rod Dreher's Diary, which requires a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) for much or most of what he posts there. Dreher has a lot of worthwhile things to say, but he also, as I think he admits, has a tendency to revel in outrage porn. And I know that's the reason why a new post from him has always been the first thing I read at TAC. I can afford the subscription, but should I? Shouldn't I perhaps just try to break myself of the outrage porn habit, or at least make a continual effort to suppress it?

Here are two current Dreher stories:

The ‘Idyllically Sex-Positive World’
Crackpot therapist showcased by BBC calls for self-drugging women for fetish freaks

Stanford Law Students Are The Enemy
By humiliating federal judge, ruling class shows contempt for liberal democracy

The second article is available to non-subscribers, so you can read it if you want to. You may have read about the incident he's referring to: the usual shout-down of an unwelcome speaker by our version of the Red Guards. It's alarming and infuriating. Dreher says:

I cannot bear these people, these Stanford Law students and their grotesque Dean Steinbach. These people are the Enemy. I will vote for anybody who will stop them. They are destroying our liberal democracy. Every one of those students are going to go into the ruling class, and will spend their careers in the law trying to oppress the people they have decided don’t have a right to be free, or respected, or anything but crushed as wrongthinkers and Bad People.

And I agree with him, all too vigorously. But is any purpose served by my reading about this? It's not as if I can do anything about it. Is it not better that I tend my own garden, reading good books, listening to music, participating in the world as it presents itself directly to me, in general pursuing the good in the ways that are available to me? Obviously one can do both: tend one's garden and stay informed about what's happening in the world. And if one's culture is collapsing one ought to be aware of it. But where is the right balance? As things are going now, it's more or less impossible to be aware of current events and not be disturbed.

I still haven't made up my mind about Dreher's Substack, but thinking about it has made me realize that I need to resist more strongly the somewhat sick impulse to seek out things that anger and offend me. 

*

I think I would be correct in saying that for most of my adult life Christians have more often than not been the villains in popular culture. I don't have any hard data for that, of course. And it's not uniform; I think immediately of the reasonable and not unsympathetic treatment of the clergyman in Broadchurch. But I watch a lot of (too many) British crime dramas, and generally when an identifiably Christian character appears he or she is probably going to be somewhere between obnoxious and wicked. This may well be worse in American film and television.

Well, okay, as I say it's been that way for decades. Still, I was unprepared for something I ran across the other day. I have a mild taste for certain video games, and was reading this article about indie games (more likely than the big names to interest me) when I encountered a description of a game called The Binding of Isaac Rebirth:

The game follows Isaac through an unknown world, as he makes a quick escape into a trap door hidden in his bedroom to flee his devout Christian mother hellbent on sacrificing him.

That opens a vista of ignorance and malice beyond anything I had imagined.

More and more it seems that a great many people, especially young people, have somehow absorbed a great hostility to Christianity without having any clear idea of what it is. 

I read the other day that Chuck Jackson had died. I recognized the name immediately, though I may not have encountered it since 1962, when his recording of "Any Day Now" was on the charts. I would have been thirteen or fourteen, and was prone to bouts of infatuation which were often called then, and maybe still are, "puppy love." Slight and fleeting though these spells were, the feelings involved were quite intense while they lasted, and I recall the way that song spoke to them. I hadn't heard it for many years, but was pretty sure that it would be one of those whose appeal transcends nostalgia, a genuinely good piece of work. And it is. 

I had no idea that it was written by Burt Bacharach (who as you know also died recently). No wonder it still holds up. Songs like this are as close to immortal as anything produced by the popular music of...I was about to say "our century," but now it's "the last century," a phrase which I associate with writers of roughly a hundred years ago referring to the 19th. 

Surely teenagers still have those experiences, but I wonder whether any pop music expresses and appeals to it in the way that those songs of the last century did, whether that kind of romanticism has been stifled by our culture of crude sex. Apparently some very large percentage of boys get their first exposure to pornography before they're of the age I was when my heartstrings were sounded by "Any Day Now." By "pornography" I mean not mere nudity, as in the Playboy magazines that I sometimes saw when I was growing up (a bit later than thirteen or fourteen, I think), but what used to be called hard-core pornography. And a certain amount of popular music is directly, crudely (and often stupidly) sexual to an extent that would have been considered obscene, far far beyond the bounds of the commercially or even legally acceptable, in 1962, or for that matter in 1992. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let it go; you're better off not knowing.

And I'm informed by a commenter at National Review that many ordinary girls "from good families" are appearing on OnlyFans, a web service where men pay to see women be sexually provocative, a term which is apparently quite broad (see Wikipedia). This, according to the same commenter, is making the young men who know these girls in real life and might want to "date" them pretty unhappy.

No surprise there. It's been some years now since I ran across a pop song called "I Liked You Better Before You Were Naked On the Internet." Wondering if my memory was correct, and if maybe the line was just a joke and not an actual song, I find that it does indeed exist and was released in 2004, by a band called From First to Last. I haven't heard it and don't especially want to. 

And the girls will be totally baffled by the negative reaction, when they were told that such behavior would be "empowering." As if there is anything new or clever in attractive women using their sex appeal to get male attention, and more, including money. They won't be merely baffled; they'll be offended, and complain about sexism and misogyny. 

What a sad mess our culture has made of love, sex, and marriage. 

It's almost always and almost necessarily true that old people feel some sadness that the world they knew in their youth is passing away, though I guess that's been exacerbated by the rapid changes in the world which have been the norm since roughly 1800, and especially since 1900. I often think of my grandfather, 1978-1973, who came of age before the automobile was anything more than a curiosity, and lived to see men on the moon. No one since has seen quite that magnitude of change. And though the technological changes since roughly 1970 have not been as dramatic and transformational as those he saw, the cultural change may be just as great. 

In any case, I certainly find myself today feeling that I'm not living in the same country I grew up in.  It's a common complaint. And I don't mean just the obvious cultural changes relating to sex and so forth, still less the technological changes. It's not even the political shifts and conflicts, in any direct and clear sense. I mean a sense that the basic idea of what this country is, how it is governed, what our responsibilities to it and each other are.... It's hard to articulate, and I think for now I'll just leave it with the thought that large numbers of our citizens, or "citizens," no longer see the nation in anything at all like the way the constitution describes it. I wonder if they even share with the men who wrote the constitution anything resembling the same idea of what a human being is, much less what a good system of government ought to be.

I keep hearing from a number of people that they feel like something really, really fundamental has changed over the past few years. Sometimes they describe it as a sense that something has broken. Often they mean the pandemic, and the extent to which we were misled and abused by authorities we really need to trust if our system is to function, and the way anyone who dissented was shut down, if possible, and ostracized by the alliance of government, media, and big technology--though it's cause for a little hope that much of that misbehavior has been exposed. 

I wouldn't argue with that, but it seems to me that if there was any single thing that broke the already very strained mental fabric of the country, it was Donald Trump's election. Trump was and is a fairly terrible man, but he himself didn't do most of the damage; rather, the reaction to him did. His success was in great part due to pent-up frustration on the part of millions who felt, quite correctly, that the people running the country not only did not care about them but were actively hostile to them.

People went crazy both for and against him, and those against him were the ones I just named: government, media, big technology, the most powerful people and institutions in the country. For them, Trump and his followers were and are an abomination which must be destroyed at all costs in order to save "our democracy," a term which they all seemed to latch onto simultaneously as if they'd received instructions, and which, after I had heard it a dozen or so times, I began to understand to mean "rule by Democrats." So they made things worse by a dishonest attempt to depose him, which further inflamed his supporters. Then came Biden, who might have had a shot at calming things but chose instead to be as divisive as Trump. 

Anyway, I don't think most people can sincerely say "We're all in this together" about the country as a whole anymore. The reds are red together and the blues are blue together, and each views the other as a mortal enemy. What can change that? 

Anyway, I don't think this country, the one in which we now live, can produce music like "Any Day Now."  And I miss the country that did. 

Somehow Animal Farm escaped from the boxes where most of my books still reside, and I picked it up and started reading it on a whim. I had read it in high school and not since. I don't recall having a very strong opinion or impression of it, beyond the obvious satirical-polemical intent. And it's referred to often enough in political discussions that I didn't feel like I needed to re-read it. After all, it's a pretty slight book, once and maybe still favored for book reports by un-bookish students. How much more can there be to it than the grim news that revolutions, in this case a clearly left-wing revolution, can turn repressive? (I imagine everyone knows this, even if they haven't read the book, but just in case you haven't: it's a sort of allegory in which farm animals stage a revolution, drive out the human farmer, and set up a regime which quickly turns into a new form of oppression in a very Soviet style.)

It's better, both funnier and sadder than I expected. The justification for the revolution, the genuine oppression to which it's a response, is made clear. The rebellion begins with a stirring--really--and presumably sincere speech from an old pig, but he dies soon afterwards, and the revolution is made by others. The animals, both as species and as individuals, are sketched in a way that makes me think Orwell had a fair amount of knowledge of and sympathy for them, especially the horses.

Several pigs--Snowball, Squealer, and Napoleon--are the clever scoundrels who take advantage of the revolution to rule others for their own benefit, though Snowball is subject to a Trotsky-style expulsion and thereafter blamed for everything that goes wrong. I don't know whether it's true or not that pigs are actually quite intelligent--what little contact I've had with them argues against it--but that of course does not in the least prevent them from acting in the way that has caused us to make "pig" an insult. 

The dogs are loyal but malleable, and loyal to the wrong person, soon becoming Napoleon's bodyguards, enforcers, and executioners. The cat (singular) looks out for number one. There are three horses, two big draft horses named Boxer (male) and Clover (female), and Molly, "the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones's trap." Boxer is pure nobility, "as strong as any two ordinary horses put together," and not only a more productive worker than anyone else, because of his strength, but more diligent as well. But he's not very smart. He believes everything the pigs tell him, even when he thinks it doesn't really sound quite right, and his response is always a resolution to work harder. So he works himself nearly to death, and then is despicably betrayed. Molly only cares about sugar and ribbons for her mane, and is soon lured back to human service. 

The hens and cows mostly do as they're told, most of their attention absorbed by the production of  eggs and milk, and aroused to anger only when that is interfered with. One rooster becomes a gaudy sort of mascot for the pigs, marching at the head of parades. An old donkey named Benjamin is the only one who seems to see what's happening, but he's a cynic and doesn't do anything about it. 

And then there are the sheep. Next to the pigs, the sheep are the worst. They are fools, the useful idiots once praised by Lenin (or one of those guys). Having reached the limits of their intelligence in learning to repeat "Four legs good, two legs bad," they bring to an end any meeting of the community in which disagreement with Napoleon is expressed, or seems about to be expressed, by drowning out with their chanting of their six words the voice of anyone whose speech threatens to be "problematic," to use a word favored by our own sheep. I never have thought very highly of protests that involve marching and chanting simple slogans. And now whenever I see a crowd of students shouting down a speaker I'll think of those sheep.

It's really quite brilliantly done, and might have remained popular even if it had not remained relevant. The probably-most-quoted bit from the book has been on my mind lately: "All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others." Examples of this syndrome appear in the news every day. There are the many politicians and officials who, during the COVID pandemic, laid stringent restrictions on the rest of us which they felt free to ignore.  There are the wealthy climate activists who demand sacrifices of us while showing no inclination whatsoever to stop flying around in private jets and in general living at the upper end of wealth and privilege. And there is the current flap over the illicit possession of classified documents by important politicians: from what I've read, immediate dismissal and loss of security clearance is the least that would happen to an ordinary government employee who so much as leaves the building with classified documents, and jail would be a definite possibility. (Maybe you remember the case of Sandy Berger, who just flat-out stole classified documents, for reasons which as far as I know have never been definitively revealed, and who actually had his security clearance restored after a three-year suspension.)

But these are just more or less typical human behavior: one set of rules for the rich and powerful, another for the masses; business as usual. So comparisons to what's happening today are loose. Certain parallels are clear, but we've had no revolution, and comparatively little physical violence. What strikes me most in the way of resemblance to our own situation is the conversion of falsehood into truth. I say "conversion" instead of "substitution" because that's the real difference between totalitarianism and ordinary lying. I said many times during the Trump administration that those who took his blatant falsehoods as a sign that we had entered 1984 territory had either not read the book or did not understand it.

What makes the regime of 1984 so powerful and frightening is that it has the power to make you acquiesce in its lies. The pigs rewrite their own history, and punish anyone who tries to point out the change. If someone tells you an obvious transparent lie, and you know it's a lie, you can ignore him or scoff at him or point out the lie or whatever else suits you. But if he has the power to destroy evidence of the truth, and not only to punish you for contradicting him, but to force you to say you believe him on pain of losing your livelihood, or worse, you are in a very tough position. Today's progressives are much more willing and able to do this than Trump ever was or could dream of being, given the forces opposing him. The offense, which would be a crime if the progressives had their way, of "misgendering" is maybe the best example, but there are many others.

*

The adventure of the Chinese ballon (sounds like a Hardy Boys title) made me think of this song.

The collection of writings by Alfred Delp, S.J. which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has a long introduction by Thomas Merton. I'm not a Merton enthusiast, having found what I've read of his work (not all that much) a somewhat mixed bag, but this essay, dated October 1962, is excellent.

Fr. Delp reminds us that somewhere in the last fifty years we have entered a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live in the nineteenth century.... [T]here has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.

Now, sixty years after Merton wrote this, roughly eighty years since Delp wrote, the truth of these words is hardly arguable. The end of the Christian era and its impending replacement by something yet to be known had already been a frequent topic of notice and speculation since sometime in the 19th century and has continued ever since, so neither Delp nor Merton can be credited with any unusual insight on that point alone. The difference between them and, say, Matthew Arnold ("two worlds, one dead") or Yeats ("what rough beast") was that they were seeing the likely shape of the new age: violent totalitarianism.

Delp was, naturally, speaking mostly, and with the utmost personal concern, of Nazism and the devastating war it had brought upon the world. And much of Merton's essay takes up a similar theme. After quoting Delp that "Modern man is not even capable of knowing God," Merton says:

In order to  understand these harsh assertions by Fr. Delp we must remember they were written by a man in prison, surrounded by Nazi guards. When he speaks of "modern man," he is in fact speaking of the Nazis or of their accomplices and counterparts.

Delp and Merton both feared that violent totalitarianism might be the most characteristic face of the new age, though both were wise enough to see that it was only the face, and that the inner nature of the thing involved, in fact required, a revolution in the idea of what human life is, what it is for, and what it can be. 

The Soviet Union continued to carry the totalitarian banner until 1990. And when it fell there was a sigh of relief: that danger had been quashed, maybe or even probably forever, and modernity, understood as a general application of classical liberalism, was free to continue on the wide bright road illuminated by the twin beacons of Science and Freedom. But liberalism had either turned into or been replaced by something else: the same philosophical or religious disease that had produced fascism and communism, the faith and hope that mankind (or, in the case of fascism, a certain subset thereof) can achieve self-salvation by transforming the immanent world.

This involves the liberation of mankind, either collectively or individually or both, from the limitations which thwart us. It requires, first, liberation from God, who always in one way or another says "Thou shalt not" to something that man deeply wants to do. And then it involves all other constraints once thought (still thought by many) to be an essential part of the way things are, not subject to removal. These include, especially include, physical reality. As for moral reality--well, is there any morality apart from that which produces a result which makes us happy? And don't trouble yourself too much about analyzing the nature of happiness: how can it be anything but a condition of comfort in both mind and body? And every person will have his own view of what that entails.

In apparent, but not actual, contradiction, this total liberation requires molding and controlling people to make them fit inhabitants of the new age. If it doesn't begin with explicit totalitarianism, it eventually arrives there, because people won't naturally become what the ideology requires that they become. The fanatical progressivism that has seized so much of our culture is of this cloth. At bottom it's of a piece with fascism and communism, in that it is an attempt to create a new humanity. It isn't very violent now and may never be, because it exercises so much power without violence, and is steadily gaining more. If it can, for instance, close off certain important lines of work to anyone who dissents from its program, or shut down the public expression of dissenting views, it doesn't need violence. (If you think it isn't working on those and achieving some results, you aren't paying attention.)

I'm hardly the first or only person to make these basic observations. I'm working up to saying two things:

1) We can now see pretty clearly the shape of the new ideal of civilization that is replacing the Christian one. And we can see that it is in essence a product of the same force that produced fascism and communism, even though progressivism, loathes the former and doesn't take the crimes of the latter very seriously, and in principle abhors violence. But compulsion may be exercised without violence. Relatively non-violent totalitarianism--"soft totalitarianism," as some have called it--may succeed where violent hard totalitarianism failed.

2) The thing that I refer to as a "force" is the spirit of Antichrist. I've never been one, and still am not one, to make judgments about whether we are or are not in the end times. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. And I don't claim that we are now or soon will be under the rule of the Antichrist. What I think is pretty clear is that the spiritual driving force of the current effort to remake humanity is the same one that will become or will produce, if it hasn't already, the Antichrist. "You will become as gods." It may not be the regime of the actual Antichrist, but it is of the Antichrist.

Rod Dreher recently quoted a letter of Pope Benedict: 

We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.

In short, this is What Is Actually Happening, and it's important that Christians recognize it and have no illusions about it, especially as the humanitarian aspects of the Antichristic spirit are often superficially similar to Christian ethics. The essential difference is that the former always points and leads away from God, where the latter always points and leads toward him.

*

These thoughts were provoked not only by Delp and Merton, but by a remark in a fascinating book which I recently began to read: Jacques Barzun's history of the modern world, From Dawn to Decadence. This was another case when I picked up a book from the library discard shelf, let it sit around for a couple of years, and then, when I moved recently and had to pack up the books, considered giving it back to the library. But I leafed through it, read the opening pages, and decided to keep it.

The book begins with the Protestant revolution. In discussing Puritanism, Barzun says this:

Revolutions paradoxically begin by promising freedom and then turn coercive and "puritanical," to save themselves from both discredit and reaction.

Is that the meaning of the frenzied efforts by fanatical progressives to restrict any and all speech that contradicts their views or even causes them distress? Many institutions and areas of life are now well under their control, but there is certainly reaction. Maybe the intensity of the effort to suppress it is indicative of a grip not yet as tight as it wishes to be.

Subtitle: "Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution"

It's always true of human societies that serious and seemingly, perhaps actually, insoluble problems exist, but there are degrees, and it's more the case now than ordinarily. It's not always the case that an entire civilization plunges, as ours has done, into ideas and behavior that are obviously self-destructive and can only result in decline, possibly collapse. In some ways these are even manifestly crazy, in the sense of being fundamentally at odds with reality.

Those who recognize and are properly alarmed by this are frequently engaged in a somewhat desperate search for a solution, usually at least partly political, because our culture is now very heavily politicized. But I don't think our problems can be solved in any decisive way. I don't see how the plunge can be stopped, because the most powerful elements of society are passionately committed to it. We'll just have to ride it out and hope that it won't be fatal (whatever that might mean).

Obviously there is much that can be done here and now to slow it down, at least, and to ameliorate the harm being done. And I admire those doing the difficult work of--to choose one example--resisting the teaching of sick ideologies to school children. Nor is the organized political opposition insignificant or (entirely) ineffective, flawed though much of it is. More power to all of them.

But I've lost much if not all of my interest in talking about solutions. What interests me more now is the question of how we got here. Or, more accurately and importantly: where the hell are we? What exactly is going on? Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic shed a great deal of light on those questions. In this book, Carl Trueman brings Rieff's insights, published almost sixty years ago, and those of others into the present. The others are, principally, Alisdair Macintyre and Charles Taylor. And now I'm going to have to read them, too.

If you want to understand why this thing that we call the culture war is so intractable, you might read part 1 of Trueman's book. (It's probably in your local library, as it's in mine and I live in a fairly small town.) There he lays out the situation: the fundamental difference is between those who view the human situation as fundamentally a matter of finding and accepting one's place in an objective external order, usually (maybe necessarily?) a sacred order, and those--the more representatively modern school--who see the individual as more or less creating or inventing himself, and, as a natural corollary, wishing or demanding that the world accommodate, or be subjected to, the self. When the two parties disagree, as they now do

...there is no real argument taking place. There is no common authority on which they might agree to the terms of debate in order to determine exactly what it is they are debating. The one looks to a sacred order, the other to matters that do not rise above the concerns of the immanent order.

If there is no reasoned debate, there can be no reasoned compromise, only a stalemate of warring armies. And that's probably the best we can hope for in the near future.

The rest of the book traces the development of this contemporary concept of the self, and the social and political implications of it. First came Rousseau's assertion that man is "born free but everywhere in chains," the chains being or at least beginning with the degrading and corruption influence of Society. From there to the sexual revolution and its current phase is a grimly fascinating story, running through Freud, Marx, and 20th century figures such as William Reich and Herbert Marcuse, and summarized in these two passages:

...the rise of the sexual revolution was predicated on fundamental changes in how the self is understood. The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.

To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological. to follow Freud is to make psychology, and thus identity, sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity--and therefore sex--political.... To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically....

"The personal is the political," said the feminists. I always took this to mean that, for instance, when a husband leaves his socks on the floor, and his wife picks them up, a significant political event has occurred. And I think they did mean that. But Trueman demonstrates that it also means something much larger, something absolute, something bigger than anything else in the minds of the sexual revolutionaries (a category which includes a large subset of progressives but not all). This is the long-developing revolution which became a truly mass movement in the late 1960s, and is now, as is often observed, in effect a militant religion. Its strictures were foreshadowed by Reich, who believed

...that the state must be used to coerce families and, where necessary, actively punish those who dissent from the sexual liberation being proposed. In short, the state has the right to intervene in family matters because the family is potentially the primary opponent of political liberation through its cultivation and policing of traditional sexual codes.

All this seems to me essential for understanding what's happening, which is to say that this is an essential book if you want that understanding. It is not the only pathology at work, though. Trueman does not deal with directly political problems, chief of which in my opinion is the mysterious apparent death wish of a large segment of Western culture, the hatred and repudiation of its own past and ferocious denunciation of those who persist in valuing its traditions, especially of course its religious tradition, and who refuse to make the expected acts of repudiation. There is probably a connection between this and the hypertrophied narcissism described by Truman, but I'm not sure what it is.

*

I was going to say more about Vatican II and the article by Larry Chapp to which Marianne linked in the comments on the previous post, but I'm in the process of moving (not far, still same locale) and both time and internet access are limited. Next week....

One of the blog-related matters I've been wrestling with is that I've gotten way behind on discussing recently-read books. Part of the reason for that is plain old procrastination, with my own personal twist: anything, especially a writing task, that seems likely to take more than, say, fifteen or twenty minutes keeps getting put off: I don't have time to do that right now, I'll do it later. I'll have more time after I get [random thing] out of the way. And pretty soon half a dozen or so such tasks have piled up, while I attend to a series of things that at least in theory should only have taken a few minutes each. Here, I think, is the one that's been in that backlog the longest.

I finished The Son Avenger, the fourth book in Sigrid Undset's Olav Audunsson tetralogy, several months ago. It is very much a worthy finale to Olav's biography. The title I'm using is the one chosen for the Chater translation, which is the one I read, and I don't know whether it originated with Undset or was approved by her. In any case, it (the title) is very apt. I'm not giving away very much if I say that the heart of the story is a murder committed by Olav early in his life, kept secret and unconfessed out of concern for the effect its revelation would have on those whom he loves and for whom he feels responsible. The title suggests the way that dilemma is finally resolved, and what I think of as the holy irony of it.

I'll repeat what I've said before: this is a great novel, and Undset is a great novelist. I don't use the word "great" in the casual sense in which I would say, for example, that Revolver is a great album. I mean a kind of greatness that should stand for centuries, and probably will.

I don't now what the title of this volume will be in the Nunnally translation. It appears that the third volume was (or is to be) released only this month, and I can't find any mention of the fourth on the publisher's web site. It will probably be a single word, in line with the titles of the other three: Vows; Providence; Crossroads. These are defensible titles, but I prefer those of the old translation: The Axe; The Snake Pit; In the Wilderness. The difference is a good instance of my reasons for preferring the older translation: to my taste it is, to pick one of several possible words, richer. A post from November of last year, "Olav Audunsson and Undset Translations," goes into more detail on that question. 

Still, I don't think the new translation (or that of Kristin) is bad, and it seems to have brought new readers to Undset's work, which is a very good thing. And what very great deal of hard labor it must involve.

(Yet I cringe when I recall Nunnally's use of "fetus" when a character feels an unborn child kicking in her womb. There is a phrase used by people in the book to refer to the unborn, presumably an idiom of the time or at least appropriate to it, which a translator can hardly avoid: "the one under my [or her] heart." Or, when a character is suspected but not known to be pregnant, someone says that "she does not go alone." I'm not mentioning this as a political complaint; it's a literary one. "Fetus" jars. It's out of place. It would be like Olav riding off to a council of landholders saying that he's going to "network" with others.)

Here are links to posts about the second and third books: The Snake Pit; In the Wilderness. If I wrote about the first one, I can't locate the post now.

*

I promise I am not going to give in to the temptation to talk about politics regularly, but I am getting this off my chest:

Let's stipulate that Donald Trump is a bad man and was a bad president. I think the opposition to him, which has aptly been called deranged, and the four-year-long refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election did more harm to the country than Trump himself did. Still, I believe what I said in 2015: I think he has a screw loose. And I think that without all the frenzy on the part of the opposition his presidency would still have been, overall, a mess. 

Granting that, I cannot take seriously the political judgment of anyone who doesn't see that Biden is at least as bad, as a man and as president. The blogger Neoneocon summed him up some time ago: not very smart, not very honest, not very nice. That's clear, has been for most of his career, and continues to be demonstrated at least once a week. 

I'm not going to bother laying out the evidence. I've pretty much given up trying to argue about things that are a matter of simple observation. From the moment he took office, Biden has been maliciously, dishonestly, divisive, slandering the very large number of Americans who don't support him, and engaging in the most inflammatory rhetoric of racial hostility since George Wallace. And unlike Trump, who had most of the ruling class and the federal government in particular against him, Biden has them on his side, giving him a degree of power, official and unofficial, that Trump never came close to possessing. 

At this point, anyone who doesn't see this is either a very partisan Democrat or just not looking, perhaps too embubbled in the media environment designed and maintained to suppress everything that doesn't serve the progressive cause, or maybe just too appalled by Trump to see things clearly. I have a certain amount of sympathy for that last one--Trump often was and is, so to speak objectively appalling. But it still constitutes a failure of judgment. 

Just this past week Biden was caught, when he didn't know he was near an active microphone, saying "Nobody f***s with a Biden." That sounds like the voice of a long-successful criminal, suggesting a long history of misdeeds. That's the real Joe Biden. Kindly old Uncle Joe is as much a public relations creation as Ronald McDonald. 

And what did he, and/or the staffers who set it up, believe his Sith Lord speech would accomplish? If Trump had engaged in this kind of authoritarian theater the shock and horror might have produced actual fatalities among those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

This complaint is prompted in part by the evidence of serious corruption involving the Biden family, and the almost complete ignoring of it by the mainstream press. See this National Review story, which ends:

The evidence is that we’re living in an age of deep, dangerous, and pervasive corruption, and most of our institutions are either silent, indifferent, or complicit. This cannot end well.

*

I don't have to say which queen. I'm tempted to say, very unoriginally, that her death is the the end of an era. But it really isn't. The era had already ended, and she was one of the last remnants of it. Removing most of the power from the monarchy had the effect of emphasizing its value as the symbol of an ideal, and she was a worthy representative. 

As someone said elsewhere, she knew what it meant to do one's duty, no matter what. That's not much understood now, though I think, or hope, that when it is understood it's still admired. 

Most deaths are personal. They involve the deceased and those who knew him or her. Even when it's a public figure, most of us generally note it with only mild interest, perhaps wonder in some cases how it will affect this or that thing in which the person was involved. Politician: who will succeed him or her? Artist: either "well, his best work was in the past" or "there might have been great work yet to come." Rarely do we feel that the whole world has somehow changed. I felt a bit that way when Johnny Cash died, not because he was such an important artist but because he had always somehow been a significant part of the world, and that the world was changed by his absence. I feel much more that way about Elizabeth's passing, because she represents much more. 

This Newsweek story says that multiple rainbows appeared in England today.

This is a little long for a blog post. It wasn't originally intended to be one. It was written almost six months ago and over that time was submitted, in various revisions, to four conservative/Catholic online publications. None of them wanted it (actually, none of them even acknowledged it with a rejection, which I guess is the state of online publication these days). So I'm posting it here, where at least a few people will see it. It was written before the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which has brought out more explicit and fervent rejection of the constitution on the left. I saw a link to a story at The Atlantic, a magazine I was once willing to pay to read, called The Constitution Isn't Working. I only saw the headline, but that seems enough.

A REPUBLIC, IF WE WANT IT

"A republic, if you can keep it." I suppose everyone knows that famous remark, said to have been made by Benjamin Franklin to a woman who asked whether the Constitutional Convention had created a republic or a monarchy. (The details of the story vary, but that seems to be a common version). The remark gets a lot of exercise, generally as a scolding of political opponents charged with being the menace against which Franklin warned. But there are good grounds for wondering now if the more pertinent question is not whether we can keep Franklin’s republic, but whether we want to.

I don’t know what potential failures Franklin had in mind, but for some time now one very clear possibility has been the reduction of the constitution to an empty set of words that mean whatever the Supreme Court says they mean. That possibility has long been foreseen by at least one side of the long-running argument between those who believe that the constitution should be interpreted straightforwardly as written, and those who believe that changing times warrant very loose interpretation.

Conservatives have naturally, almost by definition, been in the former camp, liberals or progressives in the latter. Many years ago when I was in high school I had a conservative civics teacher who truly valued free discussion and organized a formal debate on this question. As a teenager with leftward inclinations, I instinctively took the progressive side: conditions in the second half of the 20^th century required creative new (or new, at least) interpretations of laws written two hundred years earlier, and so forth. “Spoken like a true liberal!” I recall my teacher saying triumphantly, and I was mildly pleased. But even as I made my argument I was troubled by the challenge posed by my opponents: what would or could be the limits of this flexibility? How and by whom might they be set?

It often seems that progressives do not in fact recognize any real limits on the license to interpret, and in effect redefine, the constitution's written words. They tend to see concern for the mere letter of that document as a small-minded obstacle to the implementation of their beautiful vision. They seem to believe that the intent of the constitution is simply the promotion of the good, and that therefore what is good (i.e. what is at the moment desirable to them) is necessarily constitutional, and what is not good is unconstitutional. Lately the progressive vanguard hardly even bothers with that argument, denouncing the constitution itself as being at best obsolete, at worst an actively harmful instrument of oppression, etc., etc.

Recently (and I suppose inevitably) a similar impatience has appeared on the right, in two forms. On the populist right, many Trump enthusiasts feel frustrated by institutions and politicians that seem forever retreating under progressive pressure. The idea that Donald Trump is in any serious sense "literally a fascist" is pretty ridiculous, but he does seem to have the temperament of an autocrat (not every autocrat is a fascist). And his most zealous followers don't seem to mind. They just want him to deliver a blow to a ruling class which no longer bothers to hide its contempt for them. That “he fights” is more important to them than his fidelity to the principles of the republic. It isn’t so much that they disregard, much less reject, the constitution as that they don’t think in those terms.

And on the more sophisticated right are those described, by themselves and others, as post-liberal: academics and pundits, many of them Catholic, who believe that the classical liberal foundation of the American system is intrinsically and fatally flawed, its metaphysical agnosticism making it unable to resist moral and cultural pathogens that are killing liberalism itself and becoming repressive in its name. I’m sympathetic to this position, and in fact said similar things more than twenty-five years ago in the pages of the little-known and short-lived Catholic magazine Caelum et Terra. I referred there to the Supreme Court as “nine popes without a God,” and I did not intend it as a compliment. But I am cynical and pessimistic by nature and figure that any replacement of the liberal order is likely to be worse, at least in its first century or two. I would rather see the liberal constitutional order revivified than abandoned, though cool reason gives me little hope that it will be.

Through the rhetorical mists we can discern on both sides a drift toward two types, maybe archetypes, of non-democratic government: the benevolent monarchy, and the council of the wise. As to the first: in every presidential election we hear people talk as if the president were a national father figure whose wisdom and power can, should, and will make everything all right, if only we will do as he says. Obama's more fervent supporters went wildly in this direction, and so have Trump's. Both tend to make striking—and to my eyes embarrassing—emotional displays of their devotion to the leader and willingness to serve him.

And as to the second: people now commonly talk of the Supreme Court as if it were a council of tribal elders endowed with a fundamentally unrestricted power to decide, on the basis of its own wisdom, what is best for the whole tribe. Progressives especially, but not only, tend to speak of the Court as if its job is to consider present circumstances, needs, and wishes, and to issue commands based on their judgment of those rather than on the constitution, closing the question with "we have spoken": in short, to make law, not to apply it.

And maybe we are indeed drifting toward one of these types, or a combination of them, adding our own technocratic touch in the form of advice and consent from “experts” whose acquisition of expertise clearly does not provide them with good judgment. And maybe that's because they are natural, and self-government is not. For years now I have had an unwelcome but persistent suspicion that self-government is an unnatural thing, something of a fluke when achieved, difficult to preserve, and probably short-lived. If that's true, then the U.S. has done very well to have lasted as long as it has. And it's no surprise that the machinery is now deteriorating, possibly beyond repair.

My use of the word "machinery" is significant. Our constitution and our system are rationalistic and somewhat mechanistic, with many moving parts driven by forces which are often in opposition, but harnessed and balanced to do the work of governance. Two gears do not turn together freely in a spirit of mutual support: one forces the other to turn, and without the resistance of the second the first would spin freely and uselessly. There is wear and tear on the parts, and like all machines this one will eventually fail without proper maintenance. I don’t think anyone would seriously claim that ours is now well-maintained.

Possibly the most significant aspect of this neglect is the indifference and ignorance of the putative citizenry, many or most of whom can hardly now be called "citizen" in any sense of the word richer than "resident." (That this is not altogether an accident is another and important topic, too large for this little essay.)

Maybe this is just a matter of the peoples of the modern democratic republics settling back into the normal human modes of organization. Maybe these modes are, so to speak, organic, developing naturally out of the nature of the human, in a way that our republican machinery, based on abstract principles, does not. Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches have always had some sort of part-monarchical, part-conciliar organization, and have lasted quite a bit longer than any republic.

I return to the question: do the American people of the twenty-first century A.D. want to keep their republic? And if they do not want it, what do they want in its place? Do they yearn in their hearts for one of those more ancient, perhaps more human, modes of governance? Is this the turn of events that Walker Percy describes in the opening pages of Love In the Ruins as a stalled roller-coaster starting to move again, with “...the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes….”?

Do these tendencies, so puzzlingly atavistic to those who believe in the inevitability of rational progress and in “history” as a deity on whose right hand they sit, suggest that our system is in some degree contrary to human nature? The Israelites asked for a king, and the prophet Samuel explained in the most definite and vivid terms why this would be a bad idea: see 1 Samuel 8:10-18. The warning was dire. But they insisted, and got their way. And Samuel was right, and it turned out badly for them.

Well, maybe not never. But I didn't think it was very likely. And the fact that it has happened makes me think that it's at least possible that this country, which is in imminent danger of capsizing, might yet right itself. I've thought for many years that Roe v. Wade has been a terrible toxin in our body politic, rivaled only by our racial problem as a source of possibly fatal division. If it is indeed possible for the republic to function again more or less as designed and as specified in the constitution, it's a necessary condition that there be some return of independence to the states on matters where there is no national consensus.

A major part of our problem is that we have irreconcilable differences, and the overextension of the national government's reach and power has created a situation in which each side of that division believes that its only hope of survival is to once and for all defeat and subjugate the opposition. This decision is a major step toward defusing that situation. Or at least it should be; in the short run it will make it worse.

Naturally abortion proponents aren't going to accept anything less than total nation-wide elimination of restrictions. And a lot of anti-abortion people are now calling for a national ban, which I think is a bad idea, almost certain to fail and certain to make divisions worse. (A bad idea under present conditions, I mean--possibly a good one at some time in the future if more people come over to the anti-abortion side.)

Some might reply to that by saying that if a national ban would save lives then it's worth tearing the country apart. After all, that's what it took to end slavery. But the two things in themselves, and the situations surrounding them, are very, very different, in ways which ought to be obvious to anyone, and I don't see how the question could be resolved by any violent means short of near-extermination of its enemies by one side or the other, followed by the establishment of an extremely authoritarian regime. That can hardly be "worth it."

A lot of people are feeling joyful. My own feeling is a sort of somber satisfaction. This was the right decision. But, as has always been insisted upon by those paying attention, it's only one battle in a war: a major battle to be sure, but still only one battle. And I'm braced for a frenzy of hatred, lies, and attempts at political destruction from the pro-abortionists. By "political destruction" I mean, for instance, calls for the Supreme Court to be ignored and in general for the substitution of mob-like demands, perhaps of actual mobs, for law. Significant violence is certainly possible; that's hardly an unreasonable concern, since some leftists have already promised and begun it. 

In other words, the left in general, including the Democratic party, will engage in exactly the same attacks on "our democracy" that they accuse the right of. They may not do anything as dramatic as invading the Capitol--after all, they are the party which controls the presidency and Congress as well as the education and journalistic establishments, so they have many more avenues of action. But they may be more effective. I think it's been pretty clear that when they say "our democracy" they mean "that system of government in which we rule." The "our" is proprietary.

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, it seems beyond question that his presidency is directly responsible for this victory. Obviously a victory by any Democrat, and especially the one actually running in 2016, would have prevented it for another few decades. I don't think highly of Trump and didn't vote for him in 2016, because I live in the reddest of red states and availed myself of the permission, so to speak, to make a third-party protest vote. But this is his doing. You can argue that any Republican would have done the same, though that's debatable, but the fact is that he was there and he did it--with, of course, a lot of help and cooperation from those establishment Republicans whom many conservatives despise (not entirely without reason, but excessively). I think, in retrospect, that more harm was done to the country by "the Resistance" (the disgustingly appropriated title awarded to themselves by many of his enemies) than by Trump himself. But in any case: credit where credit is due. 

Just in passing, and mentioned only because I've already read it a dozen times today: the abortion-rights people have never stopped bringing up rape and incest as reasons to keep it legal. This is not a good-faith argument, because they would never support a law that banned abortion in every case except those. It's just a tactically useful appeal to natural emotions.

We can't lose sight of the fact that the desperation to hang on to the more or less unrestricted right to abortion gets its passion from the sexual revolution, from the need to preserve it at all costs, and, more fundamentally, to uphold the quasi-religious doctrine of the separation of sex and reproduction. That physical, spiritual, and cultural lie can't be defeated by law, in fact can never be entirely defeated. But it can be dethroned from its all-but-omnipotent position of power in our culture. Apart from the obvious duty of Christians to help women with unwanted pregnancies, we should also make some effort to empathize with people who have grown up believing that sexual expression does not and should not have any restrictions, that from some time in adolescence on everyone can and should engage in whatever sexual activity strikes his or her fancy, with no adverse consequences. A young woman growing up with those assumptions might well be terrified--I mean, really and sincerely terrified--by anything which promises to cut off her escape in the event that her sexual activity has what was once considered its natural result.

For Catholics, the timing of this announcement is providential: the feast of the Sacred Heart. That's a devotion which I've never been attracted to, not because I think there's anything wrong with it but because it just doesn't appeal to me. Perhaps I should give it another look. Also, in normal years (see this) June 24 is the feast of St. John the Baptist, which is, you might say, even more providential.

And it came to pass that when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb.

I can't say I've paid close attention to the Diamond Jubilee celebration. I guess I'm not much for lavish public celebrations of anything. I certainly never would have come up with the idea of parades or processions. If I'd been the mayor of some medieval town and citizens had come to me with a proposal for an elaborate procession honoring the town's patron saint, I would have said something like "But what's the point?" I don't get it. I'm certainly not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I just don't get it.

I'm also not really, truly, an Anglophile. Or maybe I am, but if so it's in a mild way. I do love English literature and English folk music and generally enjoy things British. I watch too many British crime dramas. But I don't claim any great knowledge of the country, or its history, or its ways, or attempt in any way to adopt those ways. 

(Well, except maybe for Marmite. A few years ago, out of sheer curiosity, I went to some trouble to obtain a jar of Marmite, and soon discovered that I rather like it. A piece of bread, buttered, toasted, and then spread with a very thin layer of Marmite, topped with a slice of cheddar cheese, is quite a tasty breakfast. My local grocery store now carries it, in the section labelled "International," since "Foreign" would no doubt be in bad taste now, so I can't be the only one, even in Alabama. 

And as far as I know my ancestry for at least the past few centuries is English and Scottish--a bit of Ulster, but that's effectively also Scottish and English, probably in that order. And I feel that there is something in my blood, to use the old-fashioned term, that responds to many things in that culture. Or perhaps I should say those cultures. I don't usually use the phrase "I feel"--it suggests a sloppy and subjective quality to whatever follows, and if whatever follows is meant to have objective validity then it's not the appropriate term. But in this case it is. I can't provide any justification for this feeling, apart from the facts of my ancestry, beyond the fact that I feel it. I also suspect, for similar reasons, that if I were to delve further into my ancestry there would be a Scandinavian connection. The Vikings had a considerable impact, genetic as well as cultural, on the British Isles.)

And yet. The witness of Queen Elizabeth somehow speaks deeply to me, and the fact of the Jubilee touches me. Maybe it's nothing to do with ancestry or Anglophilia. Maybe it's the fact that my life is roughly contemporaneous with her reign. She was crowned in June 1953, when I was a few months away from being five years old. I have a scrap of memory of the event, though I can't figure out how I came by it. I want to say I may have seen it on television, but I don't think my family had one then, so it's more likely that I saw something in a magazine. But then I did not yet know how to read. The memory remains a little mysterious. 

Perhaps it was not at the time of the coronation but a couple of years later, when I could read, that I became aware of it. Somehow I also knew of Prince Charles. There the timelines run very close together: he and I were born approximately six weeks apart (I'm the elder). I was aware of his existence and felt a certain kinship with him. This seems rather odd to me now, considering that I couldn't have been more than six or seven years old, maybe younger, when I learned of him. What could I have known or cared? But I do remember that knowledge and that feeling.

Now we, Charles and I, are seventy-three years old, and the Queen is in her last years. And I don't know about him--maybe he's been fuming for the past forty years or so that he isn't king--but it feels to me that she is the last remnant, soon to vanish, of something which is not much found in our oh-so-proud-of-itself contemporary world. 

Many things have changed for the better in my lifetime. For an American, the end of legally enforced racial oppression is high on that list--on the top of it for me, in fact. But much has deteriorated. Qualities which we used to include in the word "character" have become less valued and accordingly more rare: a strong sense of duty; loyalty; self-restraint; dignity; integrity; simple love of country. We, or at least I, associate these with the British at their best. Perhaps Elizabeth does not in fact embody them as much as I, and apparently many others, want to believe, but at any rate she is a powerful symbol of them.

I don't much associate them with the British at present. Well, in fact, my impression is that the British now rival us in developing a culture which favors and encourages their opposites. The culture of narcissism has gone far beyond anything that Christopher Lasch witnessed. And that makes this Jubilee, and the passing of the Queen which can't be very far in the future, poignant, especially to those of us old enough to recall that not so very long ago her virtues were more valued than they are now.

Finland's Greens Now Fully Behind Nuclear Power

I don't think I've ever written a post about climate change here. I don't post all that much about political and social issues anyway, but still, it's mildly surprising that in all the years (eighteen!) I've had this blog  I've never written a post specifically about it, considering how much attention it gets. I've mentioned it here and there, but as far as I can tell only in passing. Part of the reason, the major part I guess, is that I don't take it all that seriously.

As a threat, I mean. I'm willing to believe that it's happening, and to believe that industrialism, the automobile, and so forth are causing it, or at least contributing to it. I'm willing to believe it because many people who know a lot about the climate tell me so. And I'm willing to believe that the rising temperature will or at least may cause problems. I say "may" because there is such a blatantly tendentious (to put it mildly) effort to link any problem, especially but not necessarily if it includes weather or any aspect of the natural world, to climate change. Maybe some of those are valid, maybe not, but the political intention is so obvious that it invites skepticism--practically requires it.

But I'm unwilling to believe that climate change is going to make the planet uninhabitable, or result in the deaths of some large percentage of the human population with the survivors becoming hunter-gatherers, or have any of the other world-ending or otherwise massively catastrophic consequences that are predicted. 

I don't mean just that I reserve judgment, or am somewhat skeptical, but that I actively disbelieve it. One reason is that these predictions, like the attribution of existing phenomena, have an obvious political motivation. Another is that many of them seem implausible, predicting consequences that seem far in excess of the predicted rises in temperature. But the biggest reason is that the environmentalists and others who are loudest in their alarms do not appear to truly believe what they are saying. Maybe they're purposely exaggerating for effect, as political crusaders generally do, not apparently having absorbed the lesson of the boy who cried wolf. 

It's not only because so many of the crusaders are hypocritical--owning multiple enormous homes, jetting to climate conferences, and all that. Yes, it's hypocritical, but hypocrites we will always have with us. The biggest reason is that for the most part they don't allow a place for nuclear power in mitigating the problem. Compared to fossil fuels, especially from the point of view of climate change concerns, nuclear power has some major benefits. I won't bother reproducing the arguments on that score, as they are easily found all over the net. 

Obviously it has significant dangers, too. But to rule it out entirely, and put all your hope on the unlikely prospect that wind and solar power can replace fossil fuels anytime soon, only indicates that you don't really believe that the danger is as great as you are saying. If there's an 18-wheeler coming straight at you, and your only alternatives are to go into the ditch or have a head-on collision which will certainly kill you, you don't say "The ditch is not an option. Much too dangerous."

It's good to see at least one environmentalist group be realistic on this point. I get the impression that a not-insignificant number of young people are being driven into terrified despair by the wild alarmism of many. Poor Greta Thunberg is blaming the wrong people for stealing her childhood. 

I was discussing C.S. Lewis's Perelandra the other day with someone who considers it the weakest of Lewis's science fiction trilogy, in fact pretty much forgettable. I disagree, and find it eminently memorable. And one thing I always recall vividly is the opening, in which the narrator takes a twilight walk from a railway station to Ransom's cottage three miles away. I've always thought that scene, and the narrator's steadily increasing sense of dread, one of the most effective openings of a novel I've ever read. 

Thinking of it, I picked up the book and read that opening scene again. It really is quite good, as good as I remembered. But one thing jumped out at me, not necessarily part of that incident proper but a bit of explication by the narrator as he thinks about Ransom's revelation that our world is ruled by evil angels who

...are the real explanation of that fatal bent which is the main lesson of history.

That does seem to be the general drift of history, and I'm afraid we're seeing that fatal bent in operation again. Those who've been reading this blog for a while know that I've been concerned for many years about whether the United States can survive the cold civil war that's been in progress since the '60s, if not longer. We call it "cold" in the sense that the Cold War was cold--that it did not involve physical violence. But the emotions involved are very hot and getting hotter. I hope I'm wrong, but I find it difficult to imagine our ever being truly one nation again. Each side of the culture war now believes that compromise is a lost cause, and that its survival or at least its well-being can only be achieved by the decisive defeat of the other.

Few nations can match the combination of material prosperity, personal freedom, and stable, reasonably democratic government that we have achieved. Setting aside all the valid criticisms of the thinking and practices that brought about these things, and of the injustices and other defects that were and are part of it, the achievement remains astonishing in the broad context of human history. And few serious people seriously want to give up all its benefits.

Yet here we are: rich, angry, ungrateful, stupid, ignorant, as impassioned as we are irrational, indifferent if not hostile to the foundations on which the achievement rests. The most egregious and fundamental of these is the attack on the constitution, which amounts to a rejection of the rule of law, of the whole concept of a government of laws and not of men, upon which rests the structure of representative government.

Most often the attack is implicit, but sometimes it's explicit. I'd be willing to bet that no more than one out of ten of the people currently protesting the possible reversal of Roe v. Wade understand the constitutional question, or even in general the way the whole system works, with its complex balancing of power. And, worse, I'd bet that zero out of ten care. And, to be fair, there's a similar indifference in some quarters of the right.

What went wrong? Well, I could go on at length about that, and have done. And I certainly have strong ideas about which side is more at fault. But beneath those details I see the fatal bent in action, the universal tendency which is independent of places and times. There's still room for hope that it won't accomplish the ruin toward which it tends, but that probably requires a level of awareness of what's happening that doesn't seem to be very widespread at all. 

"Post-liberal," in case you've missed it, is the tag now being applied to people, mostly on the right, who are more or less giving up on the classical liberalism which is the foundation of our republic. Or, if they haven't given up on it completely, have come to the conclusion that liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, which is now playing out in various political and cultural crises. A new publication called Compact, subtitled "A Radical American Journal," is the voice of some of them, though their masthead is by no means limited to conservatives: it includes Glenn Greenwald and some others who seem to be on the left (no "seem" about Greenwald, unless he's changed his mind about a lot of things). I believe the editor, Sohrab Ahmari, considers himself a Catholic integralist, and I see the names of one or two others who might accept that label for themselves. Matthew Schmitz, formerly of First Things is there.

I don't consider myself to be a post-liberal, but I do understand and sympathize with their pessimism about liberalism. My own basic view is expressed in the title of this post: "You're Gonna Miss Your Classical Liberalism When It's Gone." But I recognize the problems that are pretty much intrinsic to liberalism and certainly look as if they might destroy it. Here is a long post from 2017 about Ryszard Legutko's The Demon in Democracy, which discusses some of these ideas. I thought I had written a post about Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, but if I did I can't find it at the moment. 

And I don't think it's too egotistical of me to point out that I reached the same basic conclusion as the post-liberals over twenty-five years ago, and wrote about it in Caelum et Terra. You can read the whole somewhat lengthy essay here, but a few excerpts, from a section titled "Nine Popes Without A God," will do to as my assessment of the (possibly? probably?) fatal flaw(s) in our constitutional system:

It has frequently been observed that American institutions presume the existence of a coherent, more or less univer­sal, more or less Christian, ethic. It has been pointed out that the collapse of this consensus will lead, is leading, has led to the collapse of society. Both these statements are true. And nothing confirms them more clearly than the present condi­tion of the Supreme Court....

The law of the land, the law which really must be obeyed on pain of punishment, is the Constitution....

It would be unwise to try to make Scripture serve as the constitution of a civil government; Scripture is not meant for that purpose and can reasonably be invoked as sanction for a number of different forms of government. But it is equally unwise to make the Constitution into a scripture. And that is what America has done, or at least tried to do, because there is no other place than the Constitution to look for the establishment of fundamentals upon which all Americans must agree.

It is no one’s Bible, no one’s Magisterium, to which Americans may, in the end, legitimately appeal on public matters. There is, literally, no higher law in the United States of America than the Constitution..... As far as the law and customs of the nation are concerned it is the Constitution which judges religion; it is the Constitution which says what really matters, what is right and wrong. This is quite a burden to place upon a thoroughly pragmatic document written one summer in Philadelphia by a group of men trying to organize a government. And of course now that the ethical consensus which underlay that document has cracked, the inadequacy of the document alone is obvious. If the people cannot agree about what a human being is or what its purpose might be, what a family is, what a right is, what liberty is, then the Constitution is utterly impotent to guide them...

Even those who approach the Constitution as a fundamentalist approaches Scripture accept the fact the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means.

It is in many circles somewhere between bad manners and villainy to admit to having fixed beliefs on most moral and philosophical questions. Yet it is clear that the human mind requires such points of fixity, and so we find the most skeptical intellectuals placing the most naive trust in the judgment of the Supreme Court. It is not just that they acknowledge the fact that the Court has the last word; there is almost a sense that they believe that the Court’s decisions constitute what is right and true, at least for the moment.

Things have gone a good deal further now, of course. There are significant numbers of people with significant levels of influence who don't even pay much lip service to the written text of the constitution, but simply look on the Supreme Court as a sort of wise tribal council with the power to decide matters as they see fit. The same people are likely to have quite definite and fixed beliefs on certain moral and philosophical questions. A few of those beliefs are, to be blunt, insane, and many are toxic.

And so the sense of despair about the possibility of salvaging liberalism has set some people to figuring out what comes next. Here's how the founders of Compact describe their project:

Every new magazine should be an intimation of a possible future, a glimpse of how the world might be. Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right....

We believe that the ideology of liberalism is at odds with the virtue of liberality. We oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty. That is why, though we have definite opinions, we publish writers with whom we disagree.

Compact will challenge the overclass that controls government, culture, and capital.

I'm not endorsing the magazine. In fact I've only read a couple of pieces from it. But it's interesting, in itself and for what it represents. At the moment you can read it without paying, but that's meant to change soon, and I doubt that I'll be subscribing, as the price is a little high for my level of interest: after the first year it will be $90 per year. But then again I may change my mind when I've read more of it.

I suppose it's just a feature of my advanced age, but often when I find myself thinking "I've never seen anything like this before," it only takes a moment for me to realize that I have, actually, seen something very much like it. The current round of anti-Russian fever has produced exactly that train of thought. Twenty years ago there was a similar fervor in favor of invading Afghanistan and Iraq; thirty years ago for going to war with Iraq over Kuwait; when I was young the necessity of fighting communism in Vietnam. None of those ventures turned out very well, and I suppose it's at least a sliver of silver in the dark cloud that Russia's possession of nuclear weapons is probably the only reason that American soldiers are not now dying in Ukraine. Which, it should be obvious, is not to say that Ukraine does not deserve our help: Russia's invasion is an abominable crime, for which Vladimir Putin will probably pay dearly, in the next life if not this one. And the Russian people have already begun to suffer for it.

This fever is much like that which took hold of much of this nation after 9/11. That, too, was understandable and to some degree justified. But it led to a series of military ventures in the Middle East that almost everyone now sees as having been anywhere from mistaken and misguided to disastrous to criminal. Physical warfare being off the table for the U.S., the fever now expresses itself mostly in talk and gestures.

By "the fever" I don't mean the impulse that drives the many admirable humanitarian impulses, from the special collection at my parish to those who actually go to the war zone and care for the wounded and assist the refugees, and whom I regard with respect bordering on awe. I don't even mean the hardly helpful symbolic gestures, like putting the Ukrainian flag on your social media profile. I don't go in for that sort of thing myself, partly out of a constitutional aversion to hopping on bandwagons, but they're well-intentioned and harmless, at worst a form of virtue signaling. Well, mostly harmless, as the aliens in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy concluded about our planet and species--because the fever is not harmless.

By "the fever" I do mean the fiery passions of hatred for the enemy and of certainty that one's own cause is absolutely good and the other absolutely evil, passions which incinerate good sense and prudence, cause one to actively desire war, and make any contrary view, any awareness of ambiguity, any reservation about the purity of the cause, seem an act of disloyalty if not treason, and evidence of sympathy for evil.

What's strikingly different about the current fever is that so many on the left have it. Some on the right are caught up in it, as they were about the Iraq war, but these seem to be mostly in the Republican establishment, which is by no stretch identifiable with "the right" at large. Mitt Romney, for instance, denounced former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as speaking "treasonous lies" because she pointed out, truthfully as far as I know, the existence of biological research labs in Ukraine and the possible danger posed by them.

And the neoconservative hawks of twenty years ago, propelled by detestation of Trump, have either distanced themselves from the rest of the right or gone over more or less completely to the other side of the great political divide. They never much liked religious conservatives anyway, and they hated the Pat Buchanan school of anti-interventionist conservatism (see that infamous National Review piece by David Frum).

Many on the right have grown disenchanted, to say the least, with our government's willingness to use military power for ill-defined, arrogant, and generally futile efforts to bring democracy and freedom to the rest of the world. I include myself among these. I was never willing either to defend entirely or to denounce entirely the Iraq war and our long engagement in Afghanistan. I hoped they would succeed, and that peace and freedom would flower in the Middle East. But after enormous levels of destruction and death, the region remains an unstable mess. Our wars were clearly not just a failure but a disastrous, destructive failure. I'm now of more or less of the same mind as those who describe their position with the phrase used by The American Conservative: realism and restraint. In practical terms that means a view which has something in common with that of the anti-war left. Now, strangely, it is the object of fury on the part of much of the left. 

The upper-class left, the gentry left, whatever it should be called--the leftism of the Democratic Party, the dominant media, academia, the entertainment industry--has contracted the fever in a big way. (From what I can see, the old school, hardcore, actually communist left has not.) Like almost everything, the Ukraine war has been made an issue in the culture war. Perhaps the fever is even in part produced by the culture war. Peter Savodnick, writing at Bari Weiss's Substack site, makes a case for that. He describes a 2019 gathering of Democratic congressmen and wealthy Hollywood donors. The congressmen wanted to talk about issues, but the Hollywood people, believing that Russia was responsible for Trump's presidency, wanted to talk about 

...trans rights and the climate apocalypse. And Russia. There was a lot of talk about Russia.....

Then came February 2022. The Russia haters claimed that they hated Russia because Russia had attacked Ukraine, but that was incorrect. In 2014, the last time Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russia haters were silent. In 2004, during the Orange Revolution, when Ukrainians revolted against the Russian-backed puppet regime in Kyiv—same thing. The important thing was what came in between now and eight years ago: the 2016 election. The Russophobia was an extension of our domestic politics. It was not a thoughtful hate but an automatic reaction to whatever one’s political foe said or did.

In early 2022, hating Russia, which is the flip side of loving Ukraine, is like brandishing one’s pronouns and triple-masking: it has become a way of signaling that one believed whatever one was supposed to believe right now.

The gentry left has made Russia the object of a campaign of absolute unqualified vilification, the sort of thing which they called xenophobia and Islamophobia when it was directed against Islamic countries and cultures. Strangely excessive anti-Russian reactions are happening, like the dismissal of Russian musicians from orchestras and theaters. An acquaintance of mine, a musician and academic of more or less progressive political views, was called a "fascist stooge" for questioning the firing of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko by the Metropolitan Opera.

Totally forgotten are the many instances of cooperation with Russia by Democrats: Hillary Clinton's absurd "reset" button, Obama's juvenile "the 1980s called" mockery of Mitt Romney's warning that Russia is not our friend, his sneaky "I'll have more flexibility after the election," the Clinton Foundation's financial connections to Russia, and so on. And if you search for something like "Ukraine far right 2014" you'll find a great many articles from the left-leaning press warning about the influence of the far right on the Ukrainian government. All that might as well be down the memory hole as far as current rhetoric is concerned.

Since the R&R conservatives have not contracted the fever, and because they are the enemy in the culture war, their questioning of the straightforward good vs. evil narrative is vigorously attacked. They are asking questions that in previous situations have been considered important, even essential, but now are forbidden. To ask them, to say that our policies and actions probably helped to create the situation, to question the purity of the Ukrainian government's aims and actions, to attempt to grasp the Russian point of view, to say that Putin has ever been right about anything whatsoever, is to be called a "Putin shill." 

I keep seeing the claim that "the right" is pro-Putin, pro-Russia, etc. Those voices may exist, but I read a lot of conservative journalism and have never encountered anything that could reasonably be described that way. The qualifier "reasonably" is necessary, of course. (Tucker Carlson is frequently mentioned in this respect, but as I don't watch television news I don't know whether that's fair or not.) There is certainly some partisan equal-and-opposite-reaction, but I suppose the invasion is too self-evidently wrong to support much active favor toward Russia.

The culture war has done what modern wars do: reduced the battleground to a shattered ruin. One thing we should have learned from our recent attempts to export democracy is that democracy is far more than rules and institutions. It's a whole culture, and our rules and institutions can't survive the descent of our culture into tribal hatreds. What is happening in Ukraine is terrible but it is not a direct threat to us. But Biden, along with many, is engaging in the sort of rhetoric used by the proponents of the "Global War On Terror": "We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom."

No, we aren't. We're helping a small nation resist conquest by an aggressor. Isn't that a noble enough cause? The American propensity to cast every conflict as a quasi-divinely mandated crusade is unhealthy, to say the least. It is not our job to maintain and advance democracy anywhere and everywhere, or to expect, much less to demand, that the whole world implement our idea of freedom. We don't even agree on what those words mean anymore. The threat to us comes from within. And it is dire.

It was absurd for Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) to ask Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to give her a definition of "woman." It was even more absurd for the nominee to say that she could not do so because she is not a biologist. 

A few more questions:

1. If the definition of "woman" is not what we generally assume it to be, what could Biden have meant in saying that he would nominate a woman?
2. Did the eventual nominee undergo testing or inspection by qualified biologists which determined that she met the criterion?
3. If not, how do we know whether Biden kept his promise?
4. Does not the assumption, revealed in Brown's answer, that being a woman is a biological condition show that she is what the gender activists would call "transphobic"?

These are also stupid questions, but logical, based on Brown's response. As Kevin Williamson of National Review is fond of saying, we live in stupid times.

Corrections: Blackburn is a senator, not a representative, as I originally had it. And I changed question 4 to make it clear that "transphobic" is a word used by others, not by me.

I've been occupied with various immediate matters (nothing bad, just normal things) for the past few days and have not been able to get to writing about several books that I've read recently. Also pulling me away from those are the events of the past few days. And now I'm about to be away from my computer for a couple of days. So I'll just offer a couple of remarks on the Ukraine war (I guess it has to be called that now.)

I have read several things suggesting that Putin is finding that his intended conquest of Ukraine is not proceeding as quickly and smoothly as he expected. Also that the negative reaction by the rest of Europe and the U.S. has been greater than he expected. I expected Germany, France, and others to make only token objections, but what I've read--and I emphasize that it isn't all that much--suggests that they are seriously alarmed and are taking more-than-token steps. Some also speculate/hope that Putin may be willing to settle for less than the total conquest he wanted. I hope that's true.

Now I read that Putin is rattling the nuclear saber, and I think "he's not that crazy." But maybe he is. Or maybe he is resorting to the tactic of making his enemies think that he's crazy and they'd better not upset him too much. I have no idea, of course. But I hope he's not that crazy.

Also, I'm not hearing the chorus of demands that we go to war, George W. Bush style, on behalf of Freedom that I half-expected to hear from the neo-conservative/neo-liberal/whatever voices that were urging us to invade Iraq twenty years ago (not to mention various other interventions). Whether I'm just not in the way of their conversations or they're not blowing the trumpets (for others to follow), I don't know. Maybe they learned their lesson.

Anyway, you don't need me to summarize the news, but here are a couple of things you might find interesting:

This podcast, which is an interview with an emigre from the Soviet Union who worked for some time in our Defense Intelligence Agency. She thinks that our government still doesn't have the ability to understand what makes Putin and others like him do what they do.

And this Rod Dreher post, which includes an interview with a Scottish journalist, Neil Oliver, who makes a point I made in comments on the earlier post--that the most immediate threat to those of us who are not Russia's neighbors is the breakdown of our own internal liberal order. The video itself is more than an hour long, but when I clicked on it it began with Oliver's monologue. If that doesn't happen for you, skip forward to about the 5:30 mark. 

I hardly ever post about this sort of thing, and in most cases don't even have an informed opinion (which doesn't necessarily stop me from having an opinion, but I try to keep it to myself). That's true in this case, too. But I think this article by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review is an opinion worth a hearing. He argues that we have made a big mistake in expanding NATO after the end of the Cold War:

Not just predictable, but predicted. Twenty-five years ago, not long before his death, the man who pioneered the policy of containing the USSR throughout the Cold War emerged from his retirement as a cragged old man with a warning:

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

He would predict to Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong."

The old man referred to is George F. Kennan. Here's a link to the whole thing, but it may not work because the article is subscriber-only. Dougherty goes on to say that those who agreed with Kennan lost the post-Cold-War argument, and that those who won it have produced the current situation.

Two assertions that I think are justified even in absence of foreign policy expertise:

1) After Vietnam and all our disastrous war-making in the Middle East, the argument from Neville Chamberlain does not automatically win.

2) If there is any question of actually sending in our military, no one who is unwilling to go, or to send a child of his own, is worth listening to.

There was a time when I enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics. I found them more interesting than the summer games, and I think the reason for that was that they were more exotic. Having lived all my life in the deep south, I had never engaged in any of those sports and never would (except once--see below). Snow has always been a very rare thing for me, and mostly enjoyable, which I understand is not necessarily the case for those who deal with it all winter. Sliding down a snowy hill on a pair of skis looked like a lot more fun than plain old running and jumping. And it was certainly more interesting to watch.

My one experience of skiing, on a work-related trip to Utah with an avid and capable skier who talked me into giving it a try, showed me that, like pretty much everything that isn't bad for you, skiing was not nearly as easy as it looked.  My co-worker got me into a pair of skis and to the top of a short slope which I later learned was not for beginners but rather for those who had already learned the basics. With a casual "All you need to do is..." he zipped off down the hill and I didn't see him again until it was time for us to go. By then I had begun to get the knack of staying upright, but I couldn't figure out how to turn or slow down, so when I was heading for a tree or felt like I was getting too fast, I just fell over.

Getting upright again took some time, so since I did this every fifty feet or so I only traversed the slope three or four times while we were there. But by the time we left I was at a point where I could say "I can see how this might be fun."

That was something close to forty years ago, and it did not destroy the mild fascination that winter sports held for me. But the fascination has been dying for a while, and has now been completely extinguished. The bizarrely grandiose hype and spectacle, the breathless reporting, the manipulative shaping of some chosen competitors' backgrounds into grand heroic-sentimental narratives, the corruption that apparently goes on behind the scenes--all of that had been turning me off for a while.

The fact that China is hosting this one while engaging in terrible crimes and belligerently denouncing--or worse, if it can get hold of them--anyone who points it out only turned indifference into outright hostility. Saturday night I was in a restaurant that was showing the opening ceremony and I found myself thinking of The Triumph of the Will and other self-glorifying events staged by oppressive regimes.

This is very unfair to the athletes, I know. But blame the Chinese government and the American TV industry. 

At this point in my life I find myself sometimes mentally compiling, not a desert island list of books and music, but a nursing home (or, preferably, assisted living) list: the books I would take with me if I had to go live in a very small place with one very small bookshelf. I've actually only read three or four of Joan Didion's books, but The White Album would make the list. Maybe also Slouching Toward Bethlehem. She saw some things that nobody else was seeing in the '60s. And mostly still don't. RIP

In her early years she wrote for National Review, and they've put those contributions online. You can read them here. I haven't read these particular essays, and probably won't get a chance to do so till after Christmas. But if you haven't read anything by her they might be a good place to start. Although I see they are PDFs of scanned copies of old magazine pages, and not all that comfortable to read. 

And they've invited me to contribute a monthly post. I'm extremely flattered, and a bit intimidated, as it puts me alongside Peter Hitchens and probably some other people who are better writers than I am. 

My first post appeared yesterday. It's called "Being Honour Bred," a phrase from a Yeats poem which mentions people who lie without shame. It's a pretty grumpy post, which was not really the way I wanted to start out, but the poem has been very much on my mind. The next post should appear in late December and will be about Christmas.

Peter Hitchens's first post is here, and it's a jewel.

...it probably should. This of course is from the Department of Homeland Security.

I cringed when the Bush administration created DHS. Apart from its ominous name, it seemed an admission that the Department of Defense is not primarily about defense, and that the existing law enforcement and intelligence agencies weren't up to the job. Now that the Washington establishment, with help from some Trump followers, is trying to make the case that right-wing "extremists" pose a major threat to the nation, this kind of thing is more unsettling than ever. Even parents yelling at school boards, when the complainers are on the wrong political side, are now open to some very unwelcome attention from the FBI.

I'm sure there are some violent right-wingers out there, but the FBI and others managed to keep the Klan, the Weathermen, and other domestic outlaws in check back in the '60s and '70s. More, and more politicized, federal surveillance and policing are not comforting thoughts now. You could hardly ask for a better definition of mission creep, or a better example of the tendency of any government department to expand indefinitely, than the DHS Focus page, which lists climate change and COVID-19 as "part of the department's mission." Meanwhile, the southern border is porous, to say the least. 

I hope that guy doesn't live in my neighborhood. If I see him I'm going to report him. He makes me feel unsafe. 

I don't really have anything interesting to add to the reminiscences that are appearing everywhere. I wrote about the event fifteen years ago, in a Sunday Night Journal post called "Eventually, Like Napoleon: My 9/11 Column." On re-reading it, I see a sentiment that would get me labelled as a xenophobe now, and probably would have then if the people who like to use the word had happened to read the piece: I proposed as one possible response that we (the country) could begin being really, really careful about immigration from mostly or officially Muslim countries.

But on this anniversary I'm aware of one element of some of these reminiscences that I don't recall seeing before: prefatory remarks along the lines of "For those old enough to remember..." That was startling to me. Can it really have been long enough since September 2001 that there are people young enough not to remember it?

Well, yes, of course, it can and it is. Most people under twenty-five or so will have little or no memory, and since we persist, in spite of evidence to the contrary, in treating anyone over twenty-one as an adult, this comes to a fair number of adults. And what memory they do have will be those of a child who had no idea what was really going on. And many of those under thirty won't have a great deal more than that. 

This reminds me of a similarly startling realization that hit me some thirty years ago. At work one day several of us were standing around talking, the way people do in offices (unless someone prevents them), and the question came up, as it sometimes does among people old enough to remember it: where were you when you heard that JFK had been shot? A couple of people gave their answers (I was in 10th grade biology class). Then one young woman, having heard these, piped up: "I don't have any idea where I was because I was only two years old." And yet there she was, one of us, the grown-up people doing grown-up jobs. I think the rest of us were a bit stunned; I know I was. How could there be a functioning adult who did not remember the Kennedy assassination? (The first one, I mean. The second one never had the same effect.)

I just can't get used to this time thing. 

I'm reading The Portrait of a Lady (for the first time, and have no idea what is going to become of the heroine, so please don't put spoilers in the comments) and very much enjoying it. This passage has a striking contemporary relevance. Isabel Archer, the lady of the title, has come from America to visit her uncle, Mr. Touchett, an American who has spent much of his life acquiring a fortune in England. Since Mr. Touchett is portrayed as a pretty wise old fellow, I don't think it's too much to suppose that James agrees with him here. He's speaking to Isabel about the professed radical political views of a local aristocrat, Lord Warburton, and others like him.

"You see, when you come to the point it wouldn’t suit them to be taken at their word.”

“Of whom are you speaking?”

“Well, I mean Lord Warburton and his friends—the radicals of the upper class. Of course I only know the way it strikes me. They talk about the changes, but I don’t think they quite realise. You and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first. And then I ain’t a lord; you’re a lady, my dear, but I ain’t a lord. Now over here I don’t think it quite comes home to them. It’s a matter of every day and every hour, and I don’t think many of them would find it as pleasant as what they’ve got. Of course if they want to try, it’s their own business; but I expect they won’t try very hard.”

“Don’t you think they’re sincere?” Isabel asked.

“Well, they want to feel earnest,” Mr. Touchett allowed; “but it seems as if they took it out in theories mostly. Their radical views are a kind of amusement; they’ve got to have some amusement, and they might have coarser tastes than that. You see they’re very luxurious, and these progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel moral and yet don’t damage their position. They think a great deal of their position; don’t let one of them ever persuade you he doesn’t, for if you were to proceed on that basis you’d be pulled up very short.”

I've forgotten how I wound up reading something at onepeterfive.com earlier today. It's not a site I normally visit. What I've seen and heard of it indicates that it focuses very much on the crisis of the Church, and I decided a few years ago that I just wasn't going to pay much attention to that anymore. I can say that it was a rational decision based on the fact that there's nothing I can do about this or that bad thing coming out of the Vatican or the USCCB. But the strongest reason was more elemental: I was sick of it.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this piece by Hilary White, which discusses our response not so much to the crisis of the Church as to that of the world. You don't have to go quite as far as she does in believing that the pandemic is being manipulated. I mean, you don't have to agree that the manipulation is as extensive and focused as it is, but I don't think there's any question that the situation has been successfully manipulated for purposes which were not in the general interest. I am not suggesting that the disease is not real and really dangerous, only that it has been exploited. 

No, you don't have to go very far at all in doom-and-gloom and paranoia to see that there is something really bad going on in the world, and that Christians in particular may in the not-too-distant future have a really bad time of it. At the very least, we're going to be marginalized and despised by the people who hold most of the power and influence, and by those who support them.

I've never been one to engage in end-of-the-world speculation. Every period in history has been more or less disastrous. And I don't like the kind of paranoia that sees the active hand of Satan in every bad idea or trend. I don't look for signs of the end, or of the Antichrist. Nevertheless, whether or not the prophesied individual by that name is among us or soon to be among us, there is such a thing, a vaguer thing, as the spirit of Antichrist. And it's here, right now. It is the spirit that teaches that there is no God, that any "salvation" available to us is of this world only, and that we can achieve it by our own efforts. I think it's fair to say that that spirit is more widespread and powerful than it ever has been, for the very straightforward reason that over the past century and a half or so we have in fact done astonishing things to improve the material lot of mankind, things never before seen in human history. To many, the attainment of some sort of earthly paradise seems possible, maybe even imminent: if only those who refuse to join in the effort would cooperate.

What to do? Well, these words from Hilary White's piece seem to be where we should start. They're especially appropriate for Lent.

The last year – with much of our time spent restricted in space and greatly reduced in powers – has taught us, perhaps, to look to the interior for the things we really can affect to the good [emphasis in the original]. We still have the power to create a change in ourselves. I want the world to be different, but I’m lazy and selfish and I want other people to make it better so I can have an easier time. I don’t want to change myself to want material security less. I don’t want to increase my courage or my trust in God. That’s all difficult work that requires efforts that won’t produce immediate material results – or any material results at all. But these are the concerns of children, and of people who are determined to stay children forever.

What if, letting go of that hope that someone else will fix things to make it so I don’t have to change myself, I did the much, much harder thing and made the effort to change myself?