France Votes In Fateful Election

And: The Biden Interview; Why We Must Face Dark Enchantment; Yoga Dangers

That’s me at the conservative conference I attended these past few days. I wish I had thought to buy this hat! It was a nice event. Got to spend time with lots of interesting people who do important and upbuilding things. Watch this space — I’ll be writing about them. For example, there’s a move underway now to buy a medieval European monastery whose monks have almost all died out, and establish a Great Books college there. I’ll tell you more about that later.

I want to send you an extra posting now, on the eve of the French election. I will be traveling to Paris on Sunday morning to be there for the vote, and spending part of the day tomorrow gathering as many of the precious French oysters into the safety of my belly, so no rioting Islamo-gauchistes can harm them. Here, in translation, is an important post from Twitter by the young French philosopher Philippe Lemoine. I doubt we will see this kind of analysis in the English-language press. I present it to you here in full; the “RN” is the Rassemblement National, or National Rally — the Le Pen party:

There is no doubt that concern about immigration is a major factor in the RN vote, but a paradox that I think is not given enough thought is that the people who are most exposed to the negative consequences of immigration, namely young graduates in urban areas, are also those who vote the least for the RN.

The left sees this clearly and does not fail to notice it quite regularly, but it is to draw the conclusion that immigration does not really have the harms that RN voters attribute to it, whereas of course that yes. In detail, they undoubtedly have a whole bunch of false beliefs on this subject (especially everything concerning orders of magnitude), but in broad terms they are right.

For example, there is little doubt even on the basis of the very partial data published by the SSMSI that, in the Paris region, the overwhelming majority of crimes against people outside the family are the work of either North African immigrants or Africans or their descendants. Furthermore, the probability of being a victim of such a crime is far from negligible, especially among young people. Yet the people who are most at risk are also those who vote least for the RN.

Once again, the left is wrong to see this as proof that immigration or more precisely North African and unskilled African immigration does not lead to a deterioration in the quality of life of the people it affects, This is completely false, but the right is also in a form of denial when it claims that the vote in favor of the RN can be explained simply by the evils of immigration. Obviously this is not enough and the discourse, very popular on the right, according to which the people who are most in favor of immigration are those who, by virtue of their privileged socio-economic status, are most able to escaping its negative consequences, while not entirely false, is also very simplistic.

But then how can we explain this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon? One could say that, even if immigration is responsible for a deterioration in one's quality of life in certain respects, it does not follow that it is irrational to be in favor of immigration, for example for reasons humanitarian or on the grounds that the negative consequences of this immigration would be more than offset by its positive consequences. This is absolutely correct, whatever one thinks of these arguments on the merits, and when people on the right claim the opposite they are committing a fallacy of the same kind as people on the left when they claim that it is irrational to voting for an anti-immigration party when you live in a place where there is little immigration, but for me that is to miss the real explanation.

Indeed, most people are not ideologues and almost no one chooses who to vote for on the basis of such arguments, neither anti-RN voters nor people who vote for this party, but electoral behavior obeys more to group dynamics in which rational factors do not play the leading role. Being in favor of immigration and voting for the RN is in a way a question of aesthetics, much more than a rational matter.

When you are part of a young, urban and educated environment, you are socialized to see this as an offense to good taste and morality. Being against immigration and voting RN is not what people like us do. The racist and uneducated hillbillies, yes, but not us.

No doubt we can rationalize this if we are pressed, that is to say most often repeating pre-prepared arguments like an automaton, but ultimately we do not vote against the RN any more because of these arguments than a Catholic opposes same-sex marriage because he has read the Fathers of the Church. We do it because, as young urban and educated people, being in favor of immigration and voting against the RN is part of our identity.

Beyond an aesthetic, it is in fact a dogma too, in which normative and empirical questions mingle, hence the almost total confusion between the two in people's minds. I remember that, in the indignant reactions to Marguerite Stern's tweet saying that the men who annoy women in the street are almost systematically people of North African or African origin, we felt that for many people, the fact of whether it was true (which of course it was), was of no importance. Once again, there is a complete confusion between the factual and the normative: since this observation is racist, it cannot be true, no matter what they see. For most people, it doesn't even generate cognitive dissonance. It is only the most intelligent, for whom this is the case, who feel obliged to find statistical or socio-economic explanations.

The absence of cognitive dissonance is also made possible by the incredible ability of normal people, who again are not ideologues, to compartmentalize. The same people who explain to you that they don't want to put their kids in a school where there are a lot of children of immigrants are sincerely shocked that we can judge that immigration has negative effects.

Commentators from the anti-immigration right, being ideologues, conclude that they are intellectually dishonest, but not at all in most cases: that immigration is an “opportunity for France”, it is a dogma which cannot be contested when one is part of the camp of Good, but most people never make the connection in their heads with the type of things that I have just mentioned and therefore do not see any contradiction between the dogma and their behavior in everyday life.

In this regard, the voters of the “Republican front” are not special and we could make very similar remarks, mutatis mutandis, on the determinants of the RN vote. It is only the ideologues, a tiny minority of the population who wrongly assume that everyone is like them, for whom the overall coherence of their beliefs is important and who are tortured by the inadequacy between their political beliefs and their behavior in everyday life. The others have a whole bunch of beliefs in their heads that contradict each other but are not in the least disturbed by this fact since they never make the connection between them.

In short, to return to my initial observation, it is not true that people who vote RN do so because they are the first victims of immigration. The people whose quality of life suffers the most from immigration are, on the contrary, those who vote the most against the RN and, if the right-wing ideologues refuse to see this, it is because like all ideologues they have a vision totally unrealistic electoral behavior.

At the conference, I spoke over coffee to a young French woman from Paris, who told me she recently went to a police station there, to translate for a Ukrainian refugee woman who had just been robbed. The woman had been at a train station, headed off for holiday, when a group of African migrant men set upon her, beat her, and stole all her things. The French woman said to me, dryly, “I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t rape her too.” Such is life in France these days.

The ABC Interview With Biden

Did y’all watch it? Well, it wasn’t a train wreck, but this did nothing to reassure anybody shaken after our mentally diminished president’s debate performance. He’s simply not all there, and is absolutely deluded about himself, and his position in the presidential race now. One analyst I heard said that the ABC interview was the worst thing for the Democrats: not good enough to dispel doubts about Biden’s capabilities, but not bad enough to galvanize Democratic elites behind an effort to force him out. And this prideful old man made it crystal clear in this exchange: he’s not going anywhere.

Why We Must Look At Dark Enchantment

Some of you expressed anger, or at least frustration, that I linked in yesterday’s post to the story told by Chris Koncz, on his Substack, about the struggle he had with a demon, whom he later saw in a mystical state. Chris is not a Christian, and had left his body while meditating. Some of you thought it was wrong for me, as a Christian, to link to Chris’s post, and others expressed the view that we Christians shouldn’t be thinking of these things at all.

I disagree. The reason I linked to Chris’s post is not because I share his views about religion, about meditation, or any of that. I linked to it because even though he is not a follower of Christ, he testified through terrifying experience to the reality of spiritual evil, and demons. I firmly believe that we Christians have to educate ourselves about these realities. We should definitely not go looking for these things out of morbid curiosity, but I think the greater danger to us today is that we dismiss them. In Living In Wonder, which you can pre-order at that link, I feature a lengthy testimony from a scholar who is an ex-occultist and demon worshiper, but now a Christian, who says that when he was embedded deeply into that world, neither he nor his fellow occultists took Christians seriously as opponents. They considered Christians to be dupes who were clueless about spiritual reality.

There’s a chapter in the book highlighting the work of Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, and Jonathan Pageau — all converts to Orthodoxy whose work “re-wilds” Christianity, by re-orienting our approach and understanding to an older Christian metaphysical and spiritual understanding of the cosmos. This passage is from the Pageau part:

The collapse of the WEIRD model, and the breakdown of normative Christianity in the West, is unavoidable, warns Pageau. Therefore, we should not be surprised by the violence breaking out around us, by the radical instability of the self, by the emergence of technological efforts to control a collapsing society, and so forth. Nor, he says, should we be shocked by the normalization of the occult in American popular culture. You can’t have Christian re- enchantment without having a parallel re- enchantment from the dark side.

“Re- enchantment is happening— we’re not making it happen, it’s happening on its own. We’re going to see things that we haven’t seen in a thousand years. We’re already seeing it,” he says. “We see demon- possessed people. They’re coming out in public. They have power. It’s going to become inevitable as things go back to that world.”

Many people today are drawn to the occult because it promises mystery and magic, and also because it is often built around self- gratification. Says Pageau, “It’s Luciferian in its structure because it has to do with myself, in terms of my will, my experience, and it has to do with the sense that I am the highest point of that.”

I mention to Pageau that an Orthodox friend at a booming parish in the American South tells me that they are swamped by young converts coming out of neo- paganism— and that this presents a huge challenge to clergy unprepared for it. I also mention two Orthodox priests I know who believe in the demonic but who were either too afraid or too proud to take it seriously when it showed up in their parishes.

“Priests and pastors are going to have to deal with it, because people have been living in that world,” he replies. “You are going to have people come to your church and say that they want to be Christian, and they have been worshiping Odin and sacrificing animals. You are going to have people who have taken massive amounts of psychedelics and had encounters with beings that have ruined them. Those are the kinds of people who are going to be coming to the church— and we aren’t ready for it.”

If you don’t wish to read the things I write about the occult here, I understand, and am not offended. Just skip those parts. But I will keep writing about them, because as a Roman exorcist told me when I interviewed him at the Vatican (this is in the book too), as Christianity recedes in the West, we are going to continue seeing greater and more vivid manifestations of the demonic — and we have to be prepared for this battle.

The Dangers Of Yoga

In the book, I tell the conversion story of Magnus Frangipani, now an Orthodox deacon, who came to faith in Christ through deep and searching involvement in Eastern religions and occult practices. This below is not part of Living In Wonder, but it is from a testimony Deacon Magnus gave once on an Orthodox site. To be clear, some of this is in my book, but in this essay, Deacon Magnus focuses in particular on the dangers from the practice of yoga. He writes, in part:

Then a psychology professor in [my Catholic] high school [in the Pacific Northwest] guided my class through self-hypnosis. My intrigue with meditation followed quickly thereafter. I felt relaxed. I let my guard down to new experiences. I felt as if the back door of my heart opened permanently. I rejected God 'to go it alone on my own.' I experienced, very clearly, a light switching off inside me. The Presence, the Someone Else, the Friend respected this decision. It felt as if He quietly left. He respects freewill. He never forces Himself. He knocks on the door of the heart and waits.

So I started meditating regularly. Initially, especially as a teenager, it was really difficult: sitting for hours with old Tibetan Buddhists, completely still, bringing my thoughts back to the bare wall and bronze statue of the Buddha in front of me. I started studying reincarnation, karma, and samsara.[1] I wasn't yet aware of Tibetan Buddhism's origins in the shamanistic religion called Bon, nor its embrace of astrology, magic, and other occult practices.

I wanted to learn how to calm anxiety and depression, how to sweep scattered thoughts. Visiting Buddhist meditation halls and Hindu ashrams, I was intrigued by the 'spiritual fireworks:' the ecstasies, trances, feelings, and visions. These are associated with all levels of meditation and yoga and increase with practice. These experiences and more are sometimes referred to as siddhis, or powers acquired through sadhana (practice of meditation and yoga). Intrigue became fascination, and the fascinating became familiar. Without my noticing, my initial 'harmless' curiosity of the yoga and meditation hardened into habit. I spent more than a decade immersed in this spiritual sea.

During these years, lots of questions were asked. For instance, do Roman Catholic priests and monks know whether early Christians believed in the pre-existence of souls and reincarnation? They said they didn't know. And besides, they asked, what does it matter? Reading further into the origins and meanings of Far East religions, and eager to experience the bardos—the intermediary dimensions of the material and spiritual worlds—I studied the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I read all the mystical or esoteric literature I could get my hands on and kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita folded in my back pocket and read the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda. I immersed myself in the writings of Osho, read Ram Dass and Ramana Maharshi, convinced there was no being more divine than myself. It was up to me to shatter my illusory self. According to so much of what I read and heard there can be no personal relationship with the Divine and this conflicted me. The calm and peaceful nature of childhood was gone. The more I delved into the meat of meditation and yoga, the more sudden and unexplainable urges I experienced to hurt myself. My soul was under attack. This was a very dark and unfortunate period of my life.

Seeking calm, I took the Bodhisattva vow and sought a contemplative and peaceful lay monastic order within Buddhism in an effort to ground myself somewhere, with something. After an initial period of relative peace, boldness developed, even recklessness, concerning spiritual activities. I was going through a sort of spiritual alcoholism. But I didn’t know it.

The Prodigal Son ate the food of pigs in a far country. But he returned home when he remembered the taste of the Bread of his Father's house. For more than a decade I lived in this far country, eating its food.

I saw so many people—some friends, many strangers—seeking the dissolution of self. They had an insatiable desire to lose themselves, not in the life and light of God but in the darkness of the void, in a separation from the Love Who Transcends Everything. This separation is hell. Many men, women and children seek this hell, spinning through promiscuous relationships and leaping out of the windows of drugs, through which so many fall.

But I studied and practiced Kundalini Yoga and shamanism, learning the presence of fear and coldness.

I grew a reputation for reading the tarot, an occult method of divination. I taught yoga and instructed groups through guided meditations and chanting in sage deserts. We experimented with astral projection – guided out-of-body experiences through the bardos described in the Tibetan books. I carried not only underlined copies of the Bhagavad Gita, but of the Upanishads and sutras of the buddhas everywhere I went.[4] Every one of these pursuits was a swim stroke away from the holy mountain of Christ. Drop water on stone long enough and you'll whither it away. Swabbing orange paste across my forehead, I rang bells offering fruit and fire while worshipping Krishna, wandering barefoot the streets of Eugene, Portland, Seattle and finally Rishikesh, Haridwar and Dharamsala in north India.

He goes on:

To think of yoga as a mere physical movement is tantamount to “saying that baptism is just an underwater exercise.” writes Swami Param of the Classical Yoga Hindu Academy and Dharma Yoga ashram in Manahawkin, N.J.

It is the goddess Kali who attempts to unite practitioners through shakti with Shiva by means of yoga. At her temple just outside New Delhi, I saw the hideous 'self-manifested' idol: a rock with strange, beady eyes, beaked and covered in yellowy slime and curdled food. In Hinduism, idols are 'woken up.' They are dressed. They are fed. They are sung to. And they are put to sleep. I've been part of hundreds of these ceremonies.

And:

Furthermore, something should be said in relation to the claim that ‘pop’ forms of gym yoga carry no danger or threat to a practitioner. Someone who holds such an opinion is either ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, the many warnings that appear in the eastern yoga manuals concerning the Hatha yoga that is practiced in such classes. Is the instructor aware of these warnings and able to guarantee that no harm will come to the student?

Frangipani goes on to quote yoga manuals — not Christian texts, but books by yoga practitioners, for yoga practitioners — that warn of the physical and spiritual dangers that accompany these practices.

The story he tells in Living In Wonder is very, very powerful. Here’s a photo of him in India, on his quest, before he found Christ in a remote Himalayan cave:

His testimony reminds me of what the Greek Cypriot sociologist Kyriacos Markides says at the beginning of his great introduction to Orthodox spirituality, The Mountain Of Silence: if more Westerners weary of the spiritual dryness of contemporary Western Christianity only knew of the mystical and spiritual depths of Eastern Christianity, and learned that they could experience these things within the ancient Christian tradition, they would never turn to Eastern religions.

Finally for tonight — it’s late here in my airport hotel in Warsaw — I want to reiterate that one of the things I enjoy about hosting this newsletter is that we have a diverse and vibrant discussion forum in the comments section, one that is largely free of the kind of rancorous insults that make so many other comments forums miserable to read and to participate in. I almost never have to moderate, because y’all are so good at treating each other with respect, even when you disagree. But sometimes, some of you forget how to behave. I had to take down a number of comments, mostly from one commenter, because he spoke insultingly to someone with whom he disagreed.

Please don’t do that. If one persists, I will end your subscription. I can’t let that kind of thing spoil the comments section. Yes, I know we can all get on each other’s nerves from time to time, but let’s remember this maxim: if you wouldn’t say it to somebody’s face at a party, you shouldn’t say it at all — or, if you really feel that you must say it, take special care to phrase your words with care, not only out of basic respect for your opponent, but also for the community of which you are a part. For example, I imagine that Chris Koncz will take issue with at least some of what I’ve posted approvingly from Deacon Magnus’s account of his time practicing yoga and Eastern spiritual disciplines. I’m fine with that, because I know Chris can and does argue with respect for everyone else.

By the way, I’ve sent this dispatch out to the entire subscriber list, not just the paid subscribers. Only paid subscribers can comment, though. Won’t you consider becoming one? I write every weekday, and sometimes on weekends too. It only costs six dollars per month, or $1.50 per week. Seems like a bargain to me, but you knew I’d say that.

If you are a paid subscriber and have not been receiving your daily mailing, please know that it’s not because I haven’t been writing. Go to Substack Help for suggestions for how to fix what’s wrong. I can’t do anything from this end. Otherwise, you can always check out the online version: roddreher.substack.com, where you’ll be able to read what you’ve missed.