'America Is Ready For Weirdness'

Matthew B. Crawford Reads 'Living In Wonder'

In Budapest this summer, Matthew B. Crawford sorted Gyula Krudy out

I owe y’all an account of this fantastic weekend in Amsterdam, but before I give it to you, here’s a link to and quotes from a spectacular review of Living In Wonder penned by Matthew B. Crawford in First Things. I have had some stellar reviews — uniformly, except for that one negative Gospel Coalition notice by a Calvinist reviewer— but this one is straight to the top for its deep intellectual engagement with the book. Let’s get started with Crawford:

Like James, Rod Dreher is prone to depression, as he confides at various points in this new book. And like James, he believes the way out of depression is a fuller recovery of the real. “The world is not what we think it is,” Dreher writes. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful.”

In fact, open this book and it gets real weird, real fast. In the first three pages we encounter UFOs, aliens, and exorcisms. One chapter is titled “The Dark Enchantment of the Occult.” Viewing the world as a spiritual battlefield, Dreher is on high alert, vigilant against irruptions of the demonic.

More:

America is ready for weirdness. The commissars of right-thinking have so beclowned themselves over the last eight years, not least as spokespersons for something they call Science, that they have induced a renaissance of curiosity about phenomena long considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion. Moreover, I believe a still more fundamental shift is underway, a resurgence of doubt concerning the adequacy of scientific epistemologies. The still raging “replication crisis” that has swept across so many scientific fields has given respectable people license to entertain a bit of weirdness in their newly expanding pictures of the world.

Dreher does not merely wallow in weirdness, however. He wants to tap into what Charles Taylor calls enchantment, the elusive “sense of fullness” we get once in a while, based on fleeting experiences of life as “fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.” Such moments are difficult to access, but supremely important because they give us indications that there is an objective reality, independent of ourselves, that is morally substantive, in the sense of being shot through with significance. Its significance for me is no idiosyncratic response of my own, nor is it an artifact of some evolutionary process that tricks me into caring about things as a means of propagating the species. Rather, the felt significance of the world is a fitting response to my sense that there is something transcendent into which I fit, or must fit myself—something that makes a claim on me.

In Christian belief, this claim on me grows out of an astonishing fact: The source of this objective moral order cares about me. It gets even more astonishing, as this caring has an emotional register: love. If love is the ontological root of all that is—if, as the Orthodox prayer expresses it, “God is everywhere and fills all things”—then life is most definitely worth living. This is the central point of Living In Wonder.

On the “nothing-buttery” of modern scientific materialism:

Here we begin to see continuities between the project for “artificial intelligence” (the notion that there is no essential difference between man and machine) and the messianic drive of progressives to deny sexual difference. Freedom requires erasing the boundaries between natural kinds. Such erasure, pursued in a debunking spirit, arises from resentment of the given order. It follows easily from reductive materialism, the view that “really” we are “nothing but” protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Reductive materialism is not a scientific method but a posture toward reality. It denies the significance of heterogeneity: Everything is ultimately the same stuff. Applied to human beings, such a metaphysics has a political corollary. It is clearly the tacit foundation of what Renaud Camus calls “replacism,” the tendency to efface all differences (including among peoples) because they impede the substitution of one thing for another. What is wanted is “undifferentiated human matter” that is maximally pliable to the needs of global capital, like the smoothest brand of peanut-flavored sandwich filling.

Sexual difference is one impediment to the spreadability of human matter (not least, across labor markets). As Dreher says, in a fully disenchanted world we become “putty in the hands of the powerful.” The meteoric increase of young people who identify as “non-binary,” neither male nor female, gives us some indication of the success of the HR ideology of sameness, that late fruit of scientific materialism.

Here Crawford grasps what my Orthodoxy means for the re-enchantment project:

For Dreher, as an Orthodox Christian, enchantment is not a trick one plays on oneself to escape ennui, but a fitting response to the nature of things. “Heaven and earth interpenetrate each other, participate in each other’s life. The sacred is not inserted from outside . . . it is already here, waiting to be revealed. For example, when a priest blesses water, turning it into holy water, he is not adding something to it to change it; he is rather making the water more fully what it is: a carrier of God’s grace.”

This doctrine of God’s immanence in the world arguably has a place in the Catholic tradition as well, from Maximus the Confessor to Henri de Lubac, though not in certain strands of Protestant theology, to say nothing of the world-hating heresy of Gnosticism. Notice that the idea of God’s immanence has some kinship with animism, the belief that nature is shot through with spirit, which we associate with primitive religion. All water is holy water, an expression of God’s love for the world.

If this idea sounds psychedelic, well, let’s lean into that and see where it leads.

I’ll stop here because there’s so much more to the review, and it’s so very rich. You have to read about Crawford’s experience with psychedelics. I love the way Crawford ends it:

As ever, Dreher writes with passionate investment in the story he has to tell. Readers accustomed to his internet polemics may be surprised to find here a theologically serious, psychologically sophisticated diagnosis of the spiritual condition of the West. More than diagnosis, Dreher gives us wise counsel. His aim is not to divert our gaze to the next world, but to equip us with reasons to throw ourselves more fully into this world, alert to God’s presence.

Read the whole review. If this doesn’t make you want to read Living In Wonder, then it will never be the book for you.

I do wonder how Protestants will grapple with it. A Protestant intellectual friend e-mailed me over the weekend to say she had just finished the book, loved it, was challenged by it, and all the things. She said, “Protestants are not going to know what to do with this book.” She added a smiley emoji, but I do think there’s something serious there. It goes far beyond the conceptual theological and metaphysical boundaries of Protestantism, though I want to point out that one of my favorite theologians, Hans Boersma, is an Anglican who comes out of the Reformed tradition, and wrote one of the very best books on enchantment and related topics, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving Of A Sacramental Tapestry. Enchantment is participation in heaven and eternity while living this mortal life on earth — not just conceptual participation, but actually doing it.

If any of you subscribers are Protestants who have read the book, I’m eager to hear your thoughts in the comments. As you know, I wrote it to be as ecumenical as possible, within the bounds of my own faith commitments, not because I’m trying to be polite, but because I really and truly want to share what I have learned from my own faith journey, especially in Orthodoxy, with all my fellow Christians, of whatever tradition. And I want to learn too. I had a great podcast interview with a charismatic Protestant pastor the other day; he told me he was learning a lot from the book. I thanked him, and told him that I look forward to learning from believers like him too. It’s not just words from me, either.

Funny story: two different people at the conclusion of the Amsterdam conference approached me in the lobby of the opera house, where we had all been on stage debating, to tell me that they are on the political Left, but how much they had appreciated hearing what I had to say, as the only bona fide right-winger in the intellectual scrum. Both said that they had appreciated how civilized and gentle I was, and how “reasonable” in listening to my interlocutors and taking them seriously. I appreciated the compliments, but it was interesting to see that they had simply never heard from a conservative in such a forum, and that they expected one to be feral. Well, I’m not having to work to be on my best behavior. This is just how I am. I don’t know everything. I can defend what I know, and do it well most of the time, but I know that I don’t know everything, and in any case, I want to treat my interlocutors with respect — including the respect of taking their ideas seriously enough to disagree openly with them, but also respecting them as people.

I feel that way about my religious interlocutors, of course. I welcome disagreement, but I don’t think disagreement requires one to be disagreeable. So glad I was raised in the South, in that way. Anyway, I don’t want to be self-congratulatory, and heaven only knows that I can throw sharp elbows in print. But it made me happy to hear from people who disagree with me politically, but who appreciated civil, reasoned discourse. A Dutch person told me that public life, especially on the Dutch media, is ideologically monochromatic, so the Dutch are always surprised to discover that there are intelligent and civilized conservatives in the world.

The Amsterdam Conference

Look at Rob Riemen interviewing an American Fathead! This was at the Nexus Institute ideas festival in Amsterdam. What a great time, in a great city! I had expected to be able to write summaries and analyses of the speeches, but that’s not how it worked. It was actually more fun than that — we had two two-hour roundtable discussions about various aspects of the crisis in the West. (Here’s a list of the attendees and our topics.)

Our discussion ranged widely. I was the only conservative present, I think, but the exchanges were thoughtful and civil. I clashed most vividly with Celeste Wallender, a high defense official in the Biden administration. She defended the Ukraine war, and the usual things, but what struck me is how antiquated her views sounded. They come from another world. I shouldn’t overstate it — Wallender’s point of view is the establishment’s, and they’re not going anywhere soon. Still, it was quite something to be among a mostly liberal group, all quite accomplished in their fields, and to sense that most of them, despite being quite intelligent and successful in their fields, seem out of touch with the world as it is changing.

Some, but not all, were obsessed with Donald Trump as a kind of walking apocalypse. They’re not wrong to see him as a threat to their established order, but what interested me was how few seemed willing or able to confront in a real and direct way the failures of their ruling class and its ideas brought Trump to power. There was a really interesting figure present, Victor Gao, a Yale Law school-educated Chinese academic who is very close to the Chinese Communist Party. Gao is extremely sophisticated, and a true believer in the Party and his country. Some of what he had to say was laughable — that China is a democracy, for example — but he is a truly formidable figure. If these are the people who are to be America’s greatest challengers on the world stage, we are in real trouble. Well, maybe not “trouble,” but we definitely have to be producing our very best. It is hard to have confidence that our institutions are.

It was funny to observe how many people sidled up to me at some point over the two days and asked me to send a message to J.D. Vance. Rob Riemen told them that I am a friend of J.D.’s, and that changed my status in the eyes of at least some of these folks. I’ve been getting bombarded by emails and text messages from friends, acquaintances, and strangers, all of whom want to be in touch with Vance, to get a job with the administration, and so forth. I laugh, because first of all, J.D. doesn’t have time to answer my texts, and second of all, I will never instrumentalize our friendship. Still, it’s amusing as hell to see my goofy self raised to the level of Somebody Important, all because I’m pals with a man who is headed into power.

Maybe the most pleasant surprise was becoming friends with Damien Chazelle and his wife Olivia Hamilton. Chazelle is the genius who made La La Land, one of the greatest movie musicals ever, and probably the most romantic movie of this century so far. He became the youngest-ever winner of the Best Director Oscar for it. He and his wife are amazingly down to earth and fun to talk to. A friend and I joined them for drinks in the elegant hotel bar after the final dinner, and had a fine time. Damien is coming to Budapest soon to film a commercial, and we made plans to meet up. We had fallen into an intense but all too brief discussion of Tarkovsky at the first night’s dinner; I look forward to resuming it.

Because my daughter back in the US’s favorite movie of all time is La La Land, I asked Damien to record a short video greeting for her. He obliged, sending her a sweet, humble message telling her he can’t wait to meet her. I sent it on. She texted back: “INTERNALLY SCREAMING!!!!” Always good to win dad points.

All in all, it’s a remarkable thing Rob and Eveline Riemen have with their Nexus Institute. This is the first time I’ve been to it, but I can say the idea of bringing together such a wide range of people from so many different worlds, for an extended roundtable discussion — versus one speech after another — was truly inspired. I’m going to suggest to my colleagues at the Danube Institute that we try out the roundtable model, which was to my mind far more interesting than the usual set speeches you get at conferences like this, if only because it allows for real spontaneity and freewheeling discussion.

After drinks with the Chazelles, my friend from overseas who flew in for the conference and I headed back up to our respective rooms. She confessed that she had never seen La La Land. Oh no, that cannot be! Come by my room in a few, I said. I ordered it on Amazon streaming, and sent out for Champagne. We sat there drinking bubbly and immersing ourselves in Chazelle’s magical world for the next two hours. Can you imagine? We had cocktails with the director of this masterpiece, then went upstairs to watch the movie while drinking Champagne. Now that, my dears, is the way to end a conference!

By the way, if you haven’t seen La La Land in a while, you really should watch it again. It really holds up! Here’s the trailer:

One more thing: the next morning, after everyone had departed, I had to wait for a bit for my car back to the airport. I was alone in a cafe down the street, thinking about the movie, with its sweet, sad “City Of Stars” theme going through my head, and pondering my own romantic melancholy (which is my default setting, seems like), when I looked up and saw this guy sitting across from me:

I nearly did a spit take! I was afraid he caught me staring at him, so I apologized and said that I had been drinking with the director of La La Land down the street last night, and had gone up to watch the movie again. Here I was brooding like Ryan Gosling’s character over disappointments in love, and I looked up to see a guy that looks for all the world like Ryan Gosling! He smiled politely and said that’s not the first time someone has made that comparison.

One more thing: the conference hotel was the Hotel de l’Europe. I raved about it in this space the other day, and let me do so again. I’ve stayed in some pretty nice hotels in my travels, but this one was the best. It was the luxury facility, yes, but more than that it was the staff. I’ve never encountered a warmer and more friendly hotel staff. They made one feel right at home. It’s not cheap to stay there (thank you, Nexus Institute, for your hospitality), but boy, if you can manage it, what a destination! I sat in the lobby lounge on Sunday, wishing I had the imaginative capacity to write a romantic novel set in the de l’Europe. Since watching The Grand Budapest Hotel, one of my favorite movies, and reading A Gentleman In Moscow, which takes place entirely inside the Hotel Metropol, I swoon over the idea of grand hotels. This one is a beaut.

Me On UnHerd

The podcast rush is coming to an end, seems like. Here’s a fun interview I did with Emily Jashinsky of UnHerd:

Trump: This Time, It’s For Real

Here, have a free, unlocked look at Ross Douthat’s great column from yesterday about how Trump 2024 changes everything. It’s really good (I have some gift links, so if you don’t subscribe, you can still read it). He says that Trump’s 2016 win might have been interpreted as a fluke. But you can’t see this year’s victory like that. Excerpts:

The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.

This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.

But the new future is much more open and uncertain than that dark vision. While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.

We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated. All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.

All this indicates the first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.

Douthat goes on to talk about how all the old certainties are now gone or nearly gone. For example, it is impossible to contain the information environment now (at least as long as we remain free; totalitarian China seems to have mastered this). All kinds of things that were once unthinkable, or that existed on the margins, are rushing to the center of discourse. More:

In the steep decline of birthrates, linked somehow to the experience of digital life and downstream from a decline in marriages, relationships and sex, you can see one grim terminus of the modern trend toward consumerist individualism. And this is the final pattern of the post-Cold War era to which we are not going back: We are leaving behind a world where social liberalism is always at the vanguard, where the expansion of cultural individualism is assumed to be identical with human progress.

Again, this doesn’t mean that social liberalism or individualism are about to disappear. But when birthrates fall toward half of replacement level, when some of the most advanced societies on earth face demographic collapse within a couple of generations, there is going to be a strong demand for alternative visions and strong selection pressure favoring communities that figure out some kind of hack or adaptation or escape from the individualist cul-de-sac.

These hacks will include a turn to some form of religious tradition: The dynamics of the 21st century will favor belief over secularism, Orthodox Jews over their modernized coreligionists, the Amish over their modern neighbors, “trads” of all kinds over more lukewarm kinds of spirituality.

But the search for adaptation will take other forms as well, depending on technological possibilities and political pressures. For instance, one can imagine new forms of authoritarian bio-politics, the inverse of the 20th-century antecedents that sought to control population growth, which attempt to enforce reproduction or achieve through biotechnology what Aldous Huxley prophesied in “Brave New World” — lab-grown human beings, repopulation via artificial wombs.

In freer societies, you should expect traditionalism to be in competition with transhumanism — the quest for radical life extension as an answer to societal aging; the escape into virtual reality as a substitute for lost possibilities of sex, love and family; a world of eternally youthful A.I. companions as an alternative to an aging world of flesh and blood.

Read it all. Let’s talk about it. Douthat’s basic point is that the 20th century is over, really over. A sufficiently large number of people have lost confidence in the institutions and ways of thinking that dominated societies back then. If the 20th century can be said to have started in 1914, with Europe’s guns of August, Douthat makes a case that it ended decisively in 2024, with Trump’s restoration.

I used to think it ended short, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But that would only have been so had the new era of globalization and American hyperpower been a lasting geopolitical and cultural paradigm. Well, the Internet, 9/11, America’s wars, the 2008 economic crash, the Great Awokening, and Covid — all pretty much put an end to that, to say nothing of China’s breathtaking rise. The point is not that we thought History would stop, as Fukuyama said; of course it never would have done. The point, rather, is that we thought we had it figured out where History was headed, and how we could get it to go where we wanted it to.

Now it’s all up for grabs. Did you know that the long, steady decline of American religion began in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was closing up shop? Look:

As Aaron Renn recently pointed out, the election of a president like Donald Trump would have been impossible in a country that was meaningfully Christian. Before you get your back up, read his argument. I think he’s right — and I’m a conservative Christian who supports Trump. Big Orange only became possible as president because some pretty crucial old verities had collapsed. He didn’t make them fall; he only recognized them and exploited them. As Tucker Carlson said in a sub-headline of a landmark early 2016 Politico piece, aimed at the GOP elites: “[Donald Trump] Exists Because You Failed.” I think it’s going to take a long, long time for the discredited elites to accept this. In a new essay, the liberal Atlantic writer George Packer casts his gaze down from the heights of his own personal Magic Mountain and furrows his brow “when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud.” Who’s gonna tell him?