Grampa Simpson At The G7

And: Aliens In The Vatican; More On Anti-Semitism; Pay Up, Jeff Bezos!; REM Again

Did y’all see the whole video of President Biden wandering off into the ether while with world leaders yesterday? It’s here. It is an incredible thing. I know we have something like this every other day, but they just seem to get worse and worse. Watch the clip — the president does not know where he is. I’m not exaggerating. There is no way that old man could make another four years in the White House.

He seems like an ambulatory metaphor for the US these days: just stumbling through history, operating on old instincts, not really knowing where it’s going or why. See this example from Bridge Colby, who is a defense analyst (and the grandson of former CIA director William Colby):

Americans like Biden just cannot get it out of their system that Russia Is The Enemy™. I read the introduction last night to a new edition of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, written by Anne Applebaum. Lo, she seems to think that the Arendt book anticipates — wait for it — Vladimir Putin. It’s bonkers, the Western liberal mind. I have no love for Putin, but the idea that he, and what he represents, is our greatest threat is nuts.

Yesterday the European Court of Justice imposed a staggering fine on Hungary, for its refusal to take illegal migrants:

The European Union’s top court ordered Hungary to pay a fine of 200 million euros ($216 million) on Thursday for persistently breaking the bloc’s asylum rules despite a previous European Court of Justice ruling, plus an additional 1 million euros for every day it fails to comply going forward.

Hungary had not implemented a 2020 ruling from top EU judges in Luxembourg, the ECJ wrote in a press release. “That failure, which consists in deliberately avoiding the application of a common EU policy as a whole, constitutes an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán slammed the ruling as “outrageous and unacceptable.”

“It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” he wrote on the social media platform X.

He’s right about that. For some time I’ve been troubled by the Orban government’s opening to China, for obvious reasons. But things like yesterday’s ruling make it clear to me why Orban is doing it. He wants to secure a future for Hungary in which the Hungarians are allowed to be Hungarian. Orban looks at the chaos and criminality in other EU member states, the direct result of their liberal migration policies, and he doesn’t want that in Hungary. For this commonsense attitude, the Eurocrats despise him, and seek to punish Hungary. Eventually the rest of Europe will, on the migration question, arrive at where Hungary has been all along — simply as a matter of survival.

But for now, the Ruling Class is trying to destroy Hungary; a country of only 10 million, if forced to take in a large number of migrants, would be thrown into a huge crisis. Budapest is such a pleasant and crime-free place to live now precisely because the Hungarians have not drunk the liberal poison on migration. Now Brussels (the synedoche for the EU establishment) is holding a gun to Hungary’s head. It’s madness. If you want to understand why the so-called “far right” (meaning: the serious Right) is surging in most of Europe now, there it is.

To give you an idea of how crazy the European (and transatlantic) elites are, the other day Sigmar Gabriel, the former Social Democratic foreign minister of Germany, said that Germany needs to prepare itself to take the fight to Russia over Ukraine, even if it means direct military engagement. Who is he kidding? As I write in this new European Conservative essay, most Western peoples say they wouldn’t fight for their country even if it were invaded! That is real decadence. It makes perfect sense to refuse to fight in one’s government’s foolish wars of choice, but to refuse to fight in the event of invasion? Really?

In the piece, I talk about how Michel Houellebecq really has the West’s number. I quote Louis Betty’s great analysis of Houellebecq’s work, which Betty reads as a literary experiment in what happens to a civilization that has abandoned God. Houellebecq is not a believer, as you may know, but he recognizes the sociological fact that all civilizations need to believe in transcendence. It is not enough to believe in God (or “God”) because it is good for you. You really need to believe in God — and not just believe, but make that belief at the center of the civilization. This is not a theological claim, but rather a sociological one.

From the piece:

The Left is in a full-tilt panic over what this means for the supposed advent of “Christian Nationalism” in America. Yet Justice Alito is right, if only in a sociological sense. Read your Houellebecq.

At the leadership level in Europe, only Viktor Orbán seems to get it. In his 2018 speech at Tusványos, for example, the Hungarian prime minister said that civilizations are spiritual entities.

“They are formed from the spirit of religion, the spirit of creative arts, the spirit of research and the spirit of business enterprise,” he said. Europe has rejected its Christian foundations, and has grown pale and weak in the other spirits.

Orban proposed “Christian democracy” as an alternative to “liberal democracy.” He explained:

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith—in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family, and the nation—because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations. Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities. This—and not the protection of religious articles of faith—is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban’s distinction between the role of politicians and jurists, and the role of priests and pastors, is of central importance. He’s saying that Christian democratic politics must support the social forms that emerge from the Christian faith, but has no business promoting the faith itself. That falls to families, churches, religious schools, and others. Justice Alito would doubtless agree.

How are these bearers of religious meaning doing? Most are failing. As I wrote earlier this year in The European Conservative, this continent’s Catholic bishops act like “hospice chaplains to civilization’s euthanasia.” The liberal leadership class in Western churches too often seeks to bless the spiritually and morally feeble status quo, behaving as therapists, not prophets. 

Meanwhile, the only grassroots sources of vitality come from religious conservatives—those who take the faith seriously enough to live sacrificially for it. In the Catholic Church, in many Protestant churches, and now even in some Orthodox churches in the West, institutional elites have cut themselves off from the source of the faith’s power to change lives and civilizations, and wonder why it’s dying on the vine. As C.S. Lewis once said, “We castrate, and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

A civilizational order that is not worth dying for is likely to be one that is not worth living for either. It is true that in ages past, men of the West marched into pointless wars of aggression, sanctified by sermons and the blessings of divines. As regrettable as that is, it does not obviate the fact that all societies need religion—a liberal society most of all. The German jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde famously said that “the liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself.” Almost 200 years earlier, the American statesman John Adams articulated the same sentiment about his country’s liberal founding: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it.

A military veteran friend read the piece and texted me: “They reduced the ideas of patriotism, nation, and culture to an economic zone and are still in denial that nobody dies for an economic zone.”

We once again return to the Alasdair MacIntyre lines that, when I first read them around 2005, made the crux of our crisis clear to me:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.

It is not enough to say that we have “forgotten God.” There are plenty of signs in our society and culture that say otherwise. These are deceptive. As you know if you read Edward Watts’s The Final Pagan Generation, about Roman elites of the 4th century, the outward signs of traditional paganism were still extant, but the inner light had gone out. Men and women of Rome in that century were losing their old religion, and taking up a new one. We are very, very close to being those people. We might already be them. I think we are, but I could be wrong, and I hope I am wrong.

For now, the image of the American president as a doddering old fool who doesn’t know where he is, and whose Catholic faith is a thin gloss on neoliberalism, strikes me as entirely symbolic of what the West is today. The future is not determined, thank God, but if we don’t change course dramatically, we’re sunk. As the Orban example shows, politics is necessary to this course correction, but not sufficient. If the churches and other meaning-giving institutions in Hungary don’t recover and do what they’re supposed to do, nothing political will matter. And not just in Hungary.

Anti-Semitism And Anne Pasternak

Some of you pointed out that Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum director who was one of the museum’s employees hit by anti-Semitic vandalism this week, has been a fierce and powerful advocate of wokeness in her museum leadership. This interview with her from 2018 (the writer calls her “exceedingly progressive”) shows what they’re talking about.

To be clear: there is NO excuse for what the mob did to Pasternak. None. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe that she and her class of cultural administrators called forth these demons. They just never imagined how the demons would turn on them. That is the reckoning that the cultural Left must have with itself.

I also heard from my Orthodox friend Robin Phillips, who warns about a hateful Orthodox figure called Brother Nathanael, a Jew-hater and all-around despiser. Robin says this freak has a pretty big following among the Very Online. I stay off the Orthoweb (strongly advise same to new converts, and to the Ortho-curious), so this is new to me. It is straight-up evil. Brother Nathanael was born Milton Kapner, a Jew. He is inflamed by Jew-hatred now — which, interestingly, does not redeem him in the eyes of neo-Nazis, who don’t trust him because he’s biologically Jewish. He claims to be part of the Russian Church, but the Russians have made it clear that they expelled him, and he does not speak for them.

Pay Up, Jeff Bezos!

This guy in Slate doesn’t understand why Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, doesn’t just shrug and accept that his newspaper, which lost $77 million last year, is always going to lose money, and let it get on with doing journalism. This is chump change to Bezos. He ought to be willing to lose that kind of money for the sake of his civic duty. Says the article: “The entire point of having someone like Bezos buy and own one of our best newspapers is to save that newspaper from having to sweat so hard in pursuit of agility and profitability.

I’m actually more sympathetic to that argument than you might think. If I were extremely rich, I would be willing to subsidize money-losing projects that I thought added greatly to the civic good. I would even do it for a newspaper, at least in principle. Rich donors subsidizing institutions like the opera guarantee that some things of ultimate value that couldn’t make it if they depended entirely on the market, will still remain. This is called cultural stewardship.

The problem with the Post is that it’s hemorrhaging readership. For a communications medium, not having receivers of your communication is to fail. A symphony orchestra that doesn’t have a lot of audience members is also failing, but its wealthy patrons can have confidence that the preservation of musical tradition is worth taking a market loss, and can hope that future generations will come to love the classics. Newspapers, though, are a different kind of thing. They are all about ephemerality. A newspaper that no one wants to read has no real purpose.

Why don’t people want to read the Post? Well, I subscribed to its digital edition until recently, and I can tell you why I didn’t read it: I also subscribe to The New York Times, which generally does a more thorough job of reporting the news, or at least an equally good job, while at the same time avoiding being so damned woke. Oh, the Times certainly is woke, but not as obnoxiously so as the Post. If I’m going to subsidize by my patronage one major metropolitan newspaper that hates people like me, it’s going to be the one that gives me better value without insulting my intelligence as often.

I learned about the Slate piece via Nellie Bowles at TGIF, who snarks:

Yes, of all the ways to give away $100 million a year, the best way is through paying those salaries, lest a Washington Post reporter have to sweat. Certainly that is the point of a newspaper. 

Though there are many hardworking and worthy journalists in this world, again and again I say unto you: you cannot overestimate the sense of entitlement that many journalists have about their work, in that they believe that the right order of the cosmos is that the world should sit back and receive the Narrative served to them, and be nothing but thankful. Humility? What’s that? We Have The Truth! Democracy Dies In Darkness!

What we are dealing with is a breakdown of communication in two senses. One is people — you, me, the lot — who are less interested in learning things we don’t know, or thinking about things in new and challenging ways. The other is communicators who only want to tell the story they know, or believe. Remember my writing about Hartmut Rosa’s theory of “resonance”? According to the German sociologist, things only “resonate” with us in the space where we apprehend it, but don’t control it. Once we control a thing, it dies, it loses its mystery, its resonance. I think this is true about journalism. It’s suffering from a control problem — namely, people who only want to read/hear/see things that confirm what they already believe are afraid to confront narratives that make them feel like they’re losing control; and journalists who only want to report things that confirm what they already believe are guilty of the same thing. Result: dead or dying newspapers.

One of the reasons I’m so grateful to you Substack subscribers is that you invest in a daily report from me, in which I try to give you something to think about, and try to show that I’m willing to challenge myself to go deeper. Yes, a lot of what I post here is, “Can you believe these idiots?!” — which I do not for the gawking, but because I believe that the follies of our time really do matter. I mean, yeah, it’s appalling and darkly funny that POTUS wanders off at the G7 … but it has a deeper meaning too. I know most of you don’t agree with me on everything, but I hope you at least find what I post here interesting enough to stick with me. If I ever started losing lots of subscribers, I would have to think hard about what I write about, and how I write about it. That’s called “market discipline,” and it’s something that every writer has to think about. This is not a bad thing. I hope the Post journalists can stop feeling sorry for themselves, and humble themselves to think creatively about how they could improve the paper. Readers don’t need the Post … but the Post needs readers. They might get them if they convince readers that they actually do need the Post after all.

Aliens In The Vatican?

Robert Duncan has an interesting report about researchers who suspect the fifty miles of documents that are the Vatican Archives hold information that could shed light on the existence of extraterrestrial, or at least intelligent non-human, life. There’s sort of big news in the lede: a Vatican Library spokesman denies whistleblower David Grusch’s claims in Congressional testimony that the Holy See is part of an international cover-up of UFO secrets.

I don’t believe the Vatican spokesman. I’m not saying he’s lying — how could I know? — but it would appear to contradict the reporting in Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic, in which the scholar and Tim Taylor, a top former NASA scientist, went into the archives themselves on a search. It could be that Grusch exaggerated, or got something wrong. But I don’t believe the claim that nothing is there. I know from experience that Church officials think nothing of lying or misdirecting to protect what they perceive as their own interests. This man might be telling the truth, but I’m skeptical.

This is important, not because aliens exist — though I believe the UFO phenomenon is real, I don’t think they are creatures from far planets — but for a reason Pasulka says in the Duncan story:

What is the difference between “UFO-type occurrences” and “miracles as Catholics traditionally understand them”? If the former, then they would be part of the natural realm, however rare, and would not imply a direct intervention by God to suspend the laws of physics. This could imply, it seems to me, demonic activity, though I guess that means that I don’t accept the natural/supernatural distinction (I don’t, but Catholics do). I think it’s all porous. Seems to me that Pasulka could be saying that there are entities and processes that occur, but that our standard theological and scientific-materialist theories cannot account for.

For example, could it be that there are more intelligent beings in the cosmos than the Bible says? Or maybe, if the late Biblical scholar Michael Heiser is correct, the Bible does hint at the existence of these things — and perhaps there is evidence in the Vatican Archives that could bolster belief in their existence. At the end of the Duncan piece, the Vatican source denies that the archive contains any reference to “extraterrestrial life,” and that searching for that would be a waste of time. Well, how would he know? There are FIFTY MILES OF SHELVES full of documents in the Vatican Archives. Moreover, the point, I think, is not that they are looking for evidence of visitors from Planet Zork, but for records of extraordinary paranormal visitations, and what light that might shed on reality.

Duncan also reveals something fascinating:

Jeffrey Kripal, the well-known religious studies professor who has been for many years after the scientific and academic communities to expand their minds with regard to the paranormal, penned this Daily Beast essay about Esalen a while back. Kripal calls Esalen an “intellectual ashram.” The key excerpt:

Spiegelberg's religion of no religion is profoundly resonant with Emerson's insistence on the individual's ability to experience the divine directly, "without mediator or veil." Spiegelberg's religion of no religion, along with Murphy and Price's own experiences of a reality that seemed to transcend what their normal senses could perceive, provoked them to create a place they hoped could change the rules of the religious game. Essentially, they wanted to reject the dogmas and literalisms of all religious systems and replace them with a deeper spirituality of transcendent consciousness and transformed flesh—an enlightenment of the body—that, like Spiegelberg's walk through the wheat, could unite God, humanity, and the natural world in a single integral vision.

The natural world was central to this vision, and Esalen fervently embraced matter and the human body as the most potent sites of mystical experience. No churches or priests are required for this democracy of the soul. This is a secular mysticism that is distinctly American because it encodes in theological form one of the core principles of the American Constitution—the separation of church and state. In America, anyone can be religious precisely because there is no official religion. The religion of no religion is not just a theological expression of one man's mystical experience, then. It is also the metaphysical ground of our constitutional and legal polity with respect to religion.

Seen in this light, "America" becomes a truly subversive mystical ideal, and thus not a surprising foundation for Esalen's iconoclastic vision.

America as “truly subversive mystical ideal.” That line gives me shivers, contemplating how much cultural destruction the US exports today. Anyway, I think the Esalen people are interested in the Vatican for Faustian reasons. From what I’ve read about the intersection between tech and religion, for my book Living In Wonder, these people want to know about paranormal entities and processes for the sake of harnessing them to human will. Here’s Norman Bailey on “Faustian Man”:

In Oswald Spengler’s narrative The Decline of the West, Faustian man, representative product of the current dominant world civilization, sold his collective soul to the Devil in return for knowledge. The Devil is now collecting his promised souls and replacing them with mathematical, and therefore, mechanical, algorithms. 

What is a “soul” after all? It is the divine spark that ignites love and empathy for all creatures. What is an “algorithm”? It is a mathematical model. A model is an answer to the question “how?”, just as a theory is an answer to the question “why?”

The merging of Man with the Machine — this is where we are headed. It’s going to mean the abolition of man. Read Lewis’s Space Trilogy — especially That Hideous Strength. We are now living through That Hideous Strength. These people, from Esalen, from Washington, and elsewhere, want to mine the secrets of mystical Christianity for the sake of instrumentalizing them, to extend human power. This is the stuff myths are made of — but it’s really happening, and we had better get wise to what’s going on.

REM: First Ensemble Interview In 30 Years

CBS’s Anthony Mason sat down with the four members of REM — Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Bill Berry, and Mike Mills — for their first interview together in three decades. The band broke up over a decade ago. The occasion for the interview was their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame:

There’s not a lot of compelling stuff in the interview, but it’s so good to see them. Bill Berry breaks down when Mason asks him if he regrets having left the band in the late 1990s, after having two brain aneurysms onstage. Dang, they’re old. We all are, I guess. REM was my favorite band of my college years. Their work, up to and including their greatest album, 1992’s “Automatic For The People,” is what I consider to be the soundtrack of my youth. I’m listening now to their catalog on Spotify, and it’s got me right back to hot summer nights on Chimes Street in Baton Rouge. Lord, I love that band. They gave me so many happy memories.

The only song I had to pass over this morning was “Nightswimming.” It was our song — mine and my ex-wife’s. I’ll never be able to hear it again. Cannot bear it. But what if there were two/Side by side in orbit/Around the fairest sun? I have only wept once, I think, over the end of my marriage. By the time she filed for divorce, I was so exhausted from the ten-year struggle that it felt like relief. I cried for the pity of it all, for the tragedy, for the children, for “the fact that God did not save us” … and then I didn’t cry at all again. It’s not that I don’t hurt; it’s that I’m too worn out for weeping.

Just now, I heard the first few notes of “Nightswimming,” and almost dissolved into heaving sobs before I hit “forward” on the smartphone. Music, man. There is no defense against it. I soaked those notes and syllables with my dreams, my longings, and all my hopes for love eternal. They are preserved there for all time. I can’t bear to face them, not now. Maybe one day.

Here are the reunited boys playing an acoustic version of “Losing My Religion” at last night’s awards ceremony.

I wish you all a happy weekend, full of music and cold wine.