The Barbarians & War With Iran

And: Married Incels; Pothead Nation; Intimacy Deficit; Digital Totalitarianism

Frans Geffels, ‘The Battle of Kahlenberg,’ the 1683 saving of Vienna

Good morning from Vienna, where I overnighted for a Thing. More about that in Monday’s newsletter. I would love to be able to start without reference to the war, but that’s really not possible. I’ll make it quick and easy: read historian Niall Ferguson’s point-by-point analysis of where we are at this moment. Ferguson’s read is mostly through the lens of how the global economy will deal with the loss of Persian Gulf oil for an indeterminate period of time. He doesn’t even bring up the prospects of what could easily happen if Iran descends into ethnic civil war. Conclusion:

Even if there is a swift regime alteration in Iran, the world will not swiftly revert to the status quo ante. Defense expenditures will continue to rise. Investments in the new generation of unmanned weapons systems and drone defenses will grow. There will be more, not less, nuclear proliferation. And the two superpowers will inexorably draw closer to some kind of moment of confrontation.

This year, the war in Iran probably reduces the risk of a new conflict in East Asia. But what happens in 2027 and 2028 will depend on who wins Gulf War III and how quickly they win it. Gulf War I (1990–91) was short. Gulf War II (2003–2011) was not. This isn’t World War III. But if it drags on, Gulf War II is potentially an event as significant as the 1973–74 oil shock. As well as being economically disastrous, that was one of the more dangerous moments in Cold War I. Today is best understood as an equally dangerous moment in Cold War II.

Here in Europe, there’s a deep sense of unease that this one could easily spin out of control, in ways we can scarcely imagine right now. I know, that’s hardly an original insight, but it’s real. My sense, talking to folks, is everybody is just whistling past the graveyard, hoping that combat will end soon, before the global economy is wrecked.

And, of course, Europeans desperately hope that whatever happens in Iran does not set off a new refugee crisis. I was with people last night at an event focused on migration. Attendees are not allowed to talk about it till after Sunday, for (non-sinister) reasons that will become apparent on Monday, when I do. But I can at least say that I came away from it with a deeper historical understanding of why civilizations die from exhaustion.

The people at the event desperately hope that Europe doesn’t die, and many of them are working to resuscitate the patient. After all, this is their home. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot to rouse the wider publics in European countries. Leaving the event last night as the caffeine was wearing off and I was mono-crashing, I thought about Cavafy’s great poem, “Waiting For The Barbarians”:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

I think that for Europeans, certainly the elites in academia, media, the Church, and other institutions, see the migrants as a kind of solution, as an agent that will deliver them from their decadent guilt and self-loathing.

Someone remarked last night that Vienna was the site of the saving of Europe from Ottoman armies in 1683, marking the last time Muslims threatened Europe. The Christian forces, almost miraculously, kept the enemy from breaching the gates of Vienna. Today, thanks to mass migration, 300,000 Muslims live in Vienna, which is 15 percent of the Austrian capital’s population. Last year, it was revealed that 41 percent of the students in Vienna’s schools are Muslim. Wherever the Sultan in 1683, Mehmed IV, is today, he’s laughing.

Correspondence On Married Incels

I heard from some of you yesterday about the problem with people living in marriages where one partner has stopped having sex with the other. I had asked about situations in which the rebuffed partner will not divorce, for the sake of the kids, out of religious motive, or something else. From the mailbag:

The first couple I knew that experienced this was my next door neighbor 30 years ago. They were about 30 and had sex 4 to 5 times a year at best, per the husband. It was all hot and heavy before marriage, but then the wedding night was the beginning. She was “too tired”. It was 7 months before they had sex after getting married.

They eventually divorced after 15 years. She hooked back up with her high school boyfriend.

The next couple was my wife’s coworker around the same time. They had been married about 15 years. The wife was super baby hungry and did IVF 6 times over 6 years, all failures. My wife told me that they had stopped having sex at all for those 6 years. They were divorced a few years later.

Then there is my marriage. We went from 3/4 times a day to a couples a week. To a few times a month. We then adopted 2 preemie twins with lots of health issues (and later found to be autistic). They were so demanding that my wife was always “too tired”, so it became once every other month or two. I was 33 at the time.

Around 36, I was ready to give up. I prayed a lot and just tried to figure anything out. We had sex about 6 times in a year, mostly because my wife still wanted to try to get pregnant. We had been told it would be a 1 in a billion chance. And she got pregnant giving birth at 40.

A few years later she wanted to try again, so we had sex about 6 times over a year and she gave birth again at 43.

Over the last 8 years we might have had sex 10 times, and not once in the last 4 years. She often says things like, “I can’t wait until I never have sex again.”

A sexless marriage is defined as ten times or less per year. By that standard I have been in a sexless marriage for 20 years.

Meanwhile I have been regularly hit on my beautiful and younger women. It has often been extremely difficult to remain faithful.

About 10 years ago, I was ready to give up. The sexless marriage was only a small portion of how bad my marriage has been, as my wife has severe mental illness and has engaged in all manner of hateful behavior. My wife was sexual molested by her father as a girl and young teen, then supressed that, so as to maintain her relationship with her dad, who she worshipped. As I got older and closer to the age her dad was when he molested her, she treated me worse. Whenever her dad did something to annoy her, she got angry at me.

I went to a therapist and when she asked what my goal was, it was to help me leave my wife. I realized through therapy that I really needed to work on myself first. I didn’t leave my wife because I love my kids and sacrificed my personal happiness for them. I became emotionally healthier, which did result in some positive changes in my wife.

Overall, I am glad I didn’t divorce my wife. I have grown tremendously the last 10 years. My kids have been blessed. My career is better than ever. My marriage is slightly better but I can’t talk to my wife about our marriage because she gets angry and lashes out, then shuts down.

At this point, I don’t have much hope anything changes. She will never get help because she won’t admit anything is wrong and she also still wants to protect get dad, who has been dead for over a decade.

I won’t divorce my wife because I know the impact it has on kids, even adult kids, as my parents divorced less than 2 years after the youngest graduated high school. I do love my wife. I just wish she would get help.

She even lies to herself and claims she isn’t the one stopping from having sex, and instead has told me that I was the one who stopped wanting sex, no matter that she rejected me thousands of times over the last 25 years.

Another:

I may not quite fit the profile you’re asking for, because my incel experience took place during my Forty Years in the Wilderness, before I returned to faith. Still, the psychological mechanisms are the same.

At 27 I got married. I loved my wife, though not extremely passionately. I had just had a relationship with a femme fatale who among other things wrecked my car, and who was a substantial drug user. And the sex was great.

The woman I married was very different. She was neat and organized and in many ways a good partner and a good person. I joked to myself that she was the best executive officer that my starship could have.

We didn’t have a great sex life, but it was good enough. We had a good marriage, affectionate and cooperative, for seven years.

Then our daughter came. The great love of my life. We were both devoted to her.

After the child, my wife started refusing sex. I didn’t want to demand anything of her. And without getting into TMI, I didn’t expect activity that could be regarded as degrading, painful, or especially odd.

This led to fourteen years of an essentially sexless marriage. She couldn’t, it seems, devote herself to our child and to me. Actually, in some ways I could understand. Our daughter is immeasurably precious. I endured.

But it led to a whole lot of pain and anxiety for me. Lying next to your wife and wanting sex, but not wanting to have sex that she didn’t want, you hurt.

I never had any affairs. There was one woman I kissed sometimes and would have probably gone for it, but the relationship was emotional but not physical. I also had several woman friends in epistolary relationships through email. I made the mistake of falling for the 22 year old babysitter, but that was not a physical relationship either. And it came to a head, scaring her away and causing a lot of hurt.

My ex-wife refused to see any connection with my emotional infidelity and her sexual coldness. We sought counseling separately. We stayed married for another seven years. We seldom fought or were deliberately unkind to each other. In fact, both of us avoided conflicts that should have been addressed.

Then, on Christmas Eve, 2001, she said she wanted a divorce. I was shocked but not totally surprised. In a way I was grateful that she had set me free. Our daughter was 14, and I would not have considered divorce until she was launched as an adult.

Well, I spent a decade as a bachelor, got engaged, which was broken off leading to heartbreak lasting for years, dated other women, and eventually married the woman I first started dating after the divorce, ten years on.

I am very happily married. I’m 73, she’s 59, and our libidos have declined. But we still have sex, and my love for her just keeps growing.

I returned to church a couple of years into the marriage. She will occasionally accompany me if I ask her, but she’s not really a believer. My Forty Years in the Wilderness has affected my own faith, but that’s a story for another time.

Another:

My wife and I have not had sex in 5+ years. Prior to that we had had a fantastic sex life for years; right up to the end, we were together 1-2 times per week, sometimes more.

Then menopause hit. That may be a major factor in this phenomenon. In my wife’s case, she retreated to the bedroom and her cell phone, retiring around 8 pm every night, pulling the covers up around her neck, never saying anything about it to me or explaining what was happening. I was just expected to know. She dealt with major hot flashes, mood swings, the whole bit — I knew some of it was happening but, in her defense, I never pushed, never said “What’s really going on?” That failure on my part led her to conclude that I didn’t care, that I only cared about myself. I have since apologized profusely, but my wife is not a forgiving person.

Sex ended as menopause began ended. I felt frozen out — how did we go from blazing hot to sub-zero cold so quickly? I felt rejected. And I was angry about it, to the extent that one night - after a few too many drinks - I exploded about it. That didn’t help; she didn’t forgive that outburst, either.

Bottom line, the youngest of our 3 kids is still at home, a high-school sophomore involved in band, track & field, ROTC and many other activities - logistically, he requires two parents. But once he goes away to college we are almost certain to divorce. I don’t want that - we’ve been together 36 years, married for 34 - how can you throw all that away, all that history, the life we’ve built together. But all the love - even cordiality - has gone out of this relationship. The end began with menopause. I would bet that’s the case with a lot of men you’ll hear from.

Luckily I have a colleague at work who’s my age (58) and recently divorced, with a similar dynamic, whom I can talk about this with. Same with my oldest friend - I learned of his divorce via Facebook. It’s happening - this is a bona fide societal phenomenon, I think. And it sucks.

A pastor writes:

Just a quick note about wives who don’t want to have sex. In the literature about sexual abuse, childhood sexual abuse usually gets processed by the adult brain at about 30-35 years old. The woman who had an uncle or childhood “friend” violate her can suppress it only for so long. When the memories start to come up, it leads to the two very things you describe. 1. They don’t want to talk about it. Who does want to talk about a confusing and terrible event? Maybe she has tried to talk about it and no one believed her, so she is left with the cognitive dissonance of wondering if she is wrong for thinking that what happened was wrong. 2. They don’t want to have sex because that makes the painful memories surface.

The common number in the literature is about 1/3 of women have experienced sexual abuse at some point. So it is likely that this is what is going on. Compassion is the first step. Counselling can help, but it is very difficult because the woman has to talk about what she does not ever want to even remember.

I am not sure what a man can do. He can wait it out. Live like a monk in his own house. There is a lot of literature out there.

Obviously you don’t know what you don’t know, so one cannot assume in a particular case that child sexual abuse is the cause of a sexless marriage. However the possibility that this is true can give a man both hope and compassion for his wife. At the very least, especially if the couple had premarital sex and didn’t use that time of courtship to really get to know and understand each other, this time without sex can become an opportunity to build trust and all the other Christian virtues.

A reader suspects digital culture has something to do with it:

I’m a 72-year-old man living in Northern California in a loving relationship with my female partner of 22 years (she is 48). While we still have a deep love for each other, the physical side of our relationship has been missing for some time. I originally thought the issue was with me, or perhaps menopause on her side.

Lately, though, I keep seeing this exact topic come up online. I understand how algorithms work and why it keeps appearing, but when you brought it up today it really struck a chord. I’m wondering whether you might be willing to explain or explore this subject further over time. It would help bring clarity for me personally, and it sounds like it could be helpful for many others as well.

A woman writes:

Interesting post. Boomer here; married 51 years to the same lovely man (I was 19, he was 20). We both have less energy and more aches and pain than we did have at 31, but we still love each other. Sex happens every 10-14 days maybe instead of every 2-3 days now. And we even talk about it when we have any problems about it. Part of the problem you are hearing about is because the men are not standing up and being real men. Why don't they initiate the conversation - are they so afraid of their wives? She is already withholding sex; what else can she threaten a man with? Get the men to say, I need to talk to you about this, and how do we satisfy both our needs, and I still want to be loved by you... Get the men to be real, not limp wimps.

Obviously I can’t answer for the men who have spoken to me about this over the years, but I recall that in most cases, their wives get very upset when the topic has been raised, and refuse to engage. The men concluded, after several attempts, that discussion is impossible, and the only choice left to them is to leave, or to accept suffering for what they consider a greater good (e.g., protecting the children from divorce, or avoiding divorce out of fidelity to what they believe is God’s law).

If you have something to add to the conversation, and don’t want to use the comments section for the sake of anonymity, email me at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.

Pothead Nation

A reader told me the other day that his teenage daughter complained that two of her friends, brothers, are “total potheads.” This was a surprise to him because he is acquainted with the parents, and knows them to be conservative, churchgoing Christians. His daughter responded, “Yeah, but they told me that their dad is a pothead too.”

The Wall Street Journal writes about what pot legalization and normalization is doing to American schools. Excerpts:

“It’s just everywhere in the community. That’s really, really hard for schools,” said Chris Young, principal at North Country Union High School in Newport, Vt. Marijuana, he said, used to be something that kids did at parties on the weekend, but that changed after recreational sales began in Vermont in 2022.

The schools’ battle against cannabis is happening as a growing body of scientific research reveals how dangerous THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, can be for the teenage brain. Studies have found that the regular use of marijuana by teens is linked to poor performance in school and deficits in attention and memory. The commercial products now sold in states that have legalized cannabis are much stronger than the marijuana commonly used in decades past, researchers said.

More:

Research is finding that THC appears to affect the development and function of the hippocampus, which is involved in memory; the amygdala, which helps process emotion; and the cerebellum, which is involved in motor coordination and the perception of time.

Starting to use marijuana before age 18 significantly increases the odds of developing cannabis-use disorder, said Dr. Jonathan Avery, vice chair for addiction psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. The disorder is characterized by craving cannabis and an inability to cut down on use, among other issues. Some research has found a link between teens’ marijuana consumption and the development of depression and suicidal thoughts.

Somebody told me the other day that our society is going to become a feudalistic one in which people raised with limited or no exposure to screens in childhood are going to rule over the dumbed-down masses. If true, I bet part of that future scenario will be the kids who didn’t stunt their developing brains by using pot heavily in high school will be ruling over those who did.

Losing Our Capacity For Intimacy

Writing in The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid ponders the “dating crisis” in America. He’s not wrong to call it a crisis. Excerpts:

It’s a moral panic but perhaps one that’s wholly justified. In recent weeks, more data has emerged on how young people are struggling to find love and don’t know where to find it in the first place. Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex, according to a report on America’s “dating recession” from the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies.

If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids. Some cities are worse than others. In San Francisco, half of all men remain unmarried by age 40. As sociologist Brad Wilcox told me, “We’ve never been in a cultural moment where so many young adults are headed toward a life without immediate kin.” The implications are staggering: a generation of permanent bachelors — and bachelorettes — untethered from the bonds that have given life its deepest meaning.

More:

The dating recession is a crisis of mimetic desire in reverse. We have stopped socializing young people toward marriage and family so fewer of them pursue it — not because they’ve arrived at some principled rejection of the institution but because few people around them are modeling it. The culture says: focus on yourself, build your brand, keep your options open. And so they do, until they look up at 35 or 40 and realize they’ve optimized everything except the thing that might actually make them happy. I know this because I’ve lived it.

Yesterday I had lunch in Vienna with my older son, who is 26. He and his girlfriend of two years are planning to marry. His younger brother back in the US is 22; he and his girlfriend of two years (they met in church camp as older teenagers) are also making marriage plans. I told my son over lunch that I’m really happy that he and his brother are on this track, which is very much against the trend in their generation. When I asked him why this is happening to his generation, he pretty much said exactly what Shadi Hamid said: that so many of them believe that they have to have everything figured out professionally and otherwise before they can consider marriage.

I thought back to something I observed in the mid-1980s, when I was in college. On Christmas break one year, I got together with a high school friend who was studying at Yale. She gave a harrowing account of the dating scene there: there wasn’t one. The psychological pressure Yalies put on themselves to Choose The Right Person — meaning, a partner who made sense within the picture they all had of their professional futures — that they ended up not making a choice at all. It struck me as very strange forty years ago, but now, that mentality seems to be everywhere.

Yesterday, on the train to Vienna, I was working on a chapter on decadence, chiefly sexual decadence, for my upcoming book comparing Weimar Germany to contemporary America. America today has pretty much the same liberationist attitudes towards sex and sexuality that prevailed in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, except there’s a major difference: Americans are not actually having sex. Yes, Weimar Germany might have been debauched, but at least it was debauched in a human way. People today hold the theories and moral beliefs that permit debauchery, but they are instead stuck at home, watching porn, or just being all alone and lonely.

As a Christian, I should be happy that sex is declining among unmarried young people. It would be an occasion of celebration, if this were a victory for virtue. But it’s not. Religious belief and practice continues to decline steeply among the Zoomers, despite anecdotal evidence of a return to religious practice. This decline in sex is happening for other reasons. And look at this graph from Ryan Burge. Even married people are having a lot less sex:

We are losing our capacity for physical intimacy. How can this be good, at all?

The Totalitarianism Of The Future

Back to the Weimar book project. What I’m doing this for is a kind of re-visitation of the Live Not By Lies thesis — about the totalitarian aspects of wokeness — but much expanded. It is truly remarkable how much alike contemporary Western societies — well, Anglosphere societies, which is all I know about — are to the psychosocial conditions in Weimar Germany. As we all know, these conditions gave Hitler a way to win the confidence of the German people.

I don’t really think a new Hitler (or a new Stalin) is coming our way, but I could be wrong. What I think is more likely to happen is a different form of totalitarianism, one that address and relieves, or seems to relieve, the immense psychosocial anxiety of the masses, but at the expense of their liberty and humanity.

This piece in The Spectator, about the rise of the Greens party in Britain, gets to what I’m thinking about. Despite its name, the Greens aren’t really about the environment anymore. Rather, they have become the party of the woke young, and Muslims — Islamo-leftism, the French call it. It turns out that the Greens are by far the most popular party among Zoomer females in the UK. Excerpts:

It was only a matter of time before an ultra-progressive, hard-left party with a fondness for voguish identity politics, enthusiasm for multiculturalism and morbid obsession with Israel came to preeminence in this country. This inevitability is the consequence of a demographic time-bomb just waiting to make its effects known.

As a YouGov survey has revealed this week, the Green Party has now overtaken both Labour and the Conservatives to take second place in the polls, two points behind Reform UK. Their support now stands at 21 per cent, up four points in the week since their historic win in the Gorton and Denton by-election. The polls also show that the Greens are the most popular party among voters under 50, especially those aged between 18 and 24. It was also the most popular among women, backed by 23 per cent of female voters.

More:

That last statistic is telling. It’s well attested that young, middle-class women are the section of society most inclined to hold hyper-liberal opinions, while generations Y and Z are overall more likely to support trans rights, display allyship with immigrants and refugees, and voice solidarity with the people of Palestine and Gaza.

Ten years ago, this was the demographic who were being instructed in ultra-progressive dogma at school, or who were entering academia, where their skewered view of the world and fantastical take on the human condition became further entrenched. It was at university where they learnt about the evils of Western ‘civilisation’ – those contemptuous inverted commas being mandatory – the unconscious racism built into the minds of white people, and the unique European crime of colonisation, with Israel now standing as the epitome of that villainy.

Those school children and students of ten years ago, with their highly moralistic, Manichean politics and otherworldly theories on gender and race, are now the voters of today. They are also our first post-literate generation, a demographic which doesn’t read newspapers, which doesn’t read books willingly, who instead get their politics on their smartphones from emotive TikTok videos devoid of nuance, depth and context. This is the demographic with a reduced attention span that doesn’t even listen to radio bulletins or watch the news from reputed broadcasting organisations.

This is a demographic that interprets the world entirely on the basis of emotion. They have a compelling desire to be On The Right Side, morally — and that means they want to feel that they are on the Right Side. As the writer points out, this generation is the fruit of both leftist ideology in education, and the outsourcing of their brains to digital culture.

The new totalitarianism will be digitally based, I think — and not simply a matter of CCTV cameras, facial recognition software, and AI-powered surveillance. It will come through the manipulation of thought and sentiment via algorithm. Dr. Goebbels was an amateur compared to what would-be controllers have to work with today.

You know, as destructive and as irritating as the Boomers have been, once they die off, we are going to be in a much different world, and not a better one. Father Matt Venuti, a regular commenter here, texted overnight to say he had seen The Northman, the Robert Eggers film set among pagan Vikings. It’s extremely violent, and has a strong (pagan) religious component. It shook him up. I told him that the first thought I had after screening it was, “So this is what Christianity delivered Scandinavians from.”

He agreed, adding the point made so brilliantly by the historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion: that almost nobody today understands how radically Christianity changed society for the better. When all memory of it disappears, we are going to be back in a situation like in The Northman, only different, because we are rich and modern and technologically far advanced. In fact, we are well on our way there.

The Archbishop Of Lancaster

Finally finished Ryan McCullough’s short, dense, difficult but rewarding epistolary novel, The Body Of This Death: Letters From The Last Archbishop Of Lancaster. I want to share with you some passages from the fictional archbishop’s letters. The novel is set at some indeterminate point in the future, where society is ruled by digital culture and its incorporeal values:

Think only of how much more control the government has over us on these platforms. Think only of those who control the platforms themselves. This is the problem when reality itself goes up for sale, when we place ourselves in a marketplace of realities.

For we are not the hunters in the marketplace but the hunted. We do not just choose our reality, as bad as that is for us. We are induced into choosing a reality. Once it is reality that is for sale, then our very ability to choose is subject to the manipulation of the vendor. To enter the marketplace at all in the hope that it will give us what we want is to cede control over what we want. They are not selling you the reality that you want; they are selling you the reality that will get you to keep buying their realities.

Here “the previous age” refers to the era in which we live now, and have been living since at least the 1960s:

All the laws and prophets of the previous age come to these two commandments: deny God and unsettle your neighbor. But they never quite managed to figure out how. Their great offensive against the self could not unseat its sacredness, even in their own minds—they still held on to desires that must be liberated, desires that must be obeyed. And for all the manifest distortions of our desires and of our consciences, for all the deconstruction of every source of authority within or without us into its component parts, for all the desecration of churchyards and stripping of altars, still they longed for holy ground and left us mourning their inability to hallow.

I think of the poor woman Lauren Kessler, about whom I wrote yesterday, who went on the Camino de Santiago to mourn the passing of her husband and her adult daughter, and who arrived at the end of the pilgrimage unsatisfied. She longs for holy ground, yet has not the ability to hallow. She is a very contemporary type.

Here is from advice he gives to a man who is suffering, but can’t find his way to faith:

You want to be convinced by reasons, but I can only give reasons why reasons will not convince you. Not that there are no reasons, but we by wickedness suppress the truth. This is all I will say. There are things we must believe to make our life livable—that there is love in the world, and justice, and ground for hope. And there is a way we must live in order to make those beliefs credible. Only by loving others more deeply will you convince yourself that you might be loved in that way as well.

The Archbishop says elsewhere that Christianity has endured because “it is a religion of suffering well.” To that point:

Gómez Dávila says—and it is a hard teaching—that faith in God does not solve problems, it allows us to laugh at them.

One more quote, one full of aphoristic insight:

One way liturgical reforms fail is by attempting to explain the joke of the mass so that everyone will find it funny.

Yes! If you make the implicit explicit, it loses its power to enchant. This is a point I make in Living In Wonder, in this discussion of sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of “resonance”:

For Rosa, the most important cultural force in the modern world is “the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable.”[i] Indeed, modern thinkers have linked the cause of human freedom to the world’s controllability—which entails the ability to prevent bad things from happening. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World presents a technocratic dystopia in which no one ever has to worry about boredom, discomfort, or unpredictability. Yet the price for achieving this state is one’s own humanity.

We crave control, says Rosa, “yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.”[ii] In our relentless desire to control our experience, we diminish the aspects of the world that give us meaning, joy, resonance—and enchantment. We WEIRDos are proud of our mastery of the material world, but it has made us miserable, because we no longer feel at home here.

Rosa says there is a four-part process to losing resonance:

· Make the world visible. Identify a thing that interests you.

· Make the visible world accessible. Establish a relationship to it.

So far, so good. But then modern man makes a wrong turn.

· Make the visible, accessible world manageable. Act in ways that stand to increase your control over it.

· Make the visible, accessible, manageable world do what you want it to do.

Nihilism—the belief that there are no truths and that nothing ultimately matters—is inevitable for those who lose their sense of resonance. Worse, our secular materialistic culture has formed us—or, rather, deformed us—so that, in Rosa’s estimation, “modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached.”[iii] To restore resonance—or, I would say, enchantment—one has to open oneself to the call. One has to be willing to be surprised by mystery—and be prepared to respond to it.

This requires a renunciation of the compulsion to control everything. There is no five-step formula to create resonance between oneself and the world. It requires simply cultivating a disposition to be called—to be reached by something outside oneself. To learn how to read signs and to respond to them. Once again, it’s a question of mental framing: if you do not believe there is a world beyond your head, you will not be able to be called. To bring the world inside your head, so to speak, is to render it fully controllable. But that guarantees disenchantment, a loss of resonance.

“My argument is that, if I could make it snow at will, then I could never experience being called by the falling snow,” writes Rosa. “If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.”

In other words, if you don’t believe that there is a fundamentally mysterious dimension to existence—one that you can never fully know in the intellectual sense but that you can know in the relational sense—you will never know enchantment. You must begin from a position of faith, of openness to the possibility that there is God, or at least there is meaning, beyond your head.

It disappoints me that Living In Wonder hasn’t sold nearly as well as my previous two books. I think its message is more important than either Live Not By Lies or The Benedict Option. I guess because it doesn’t have a political message, even implicitly (as the Ben Op book does), it just doesn’t appeal. Too bad. But if you haven’t read it, I hope you will give it a chance. It’s about how to learn hallowing in a world that has forgotten.

Good weekend, everybody. Please pray. I’m headed back to Budapest this afternoon, but I’m going to dash over to the Kunsthistorisches Museum right now, before my time and energy expire, to visit the Brueghels once again. Now that is an enchanting experience! I tell everybody coming to Vienna for the first time to make doing that the first thing on your list.