The Tail of Antichrist

 Since many far-right influencers have recently gone from viewing Trump as God's anointed on Earth to the literal Antichrist (viz. Tucker's recent musings on the subject)—and meanwhile, Peter Thiel is purporting to lecture on the subject in Rome—I thought it might be a good time to read up on the vicissitudes of the early modern Antichrist, as told by Christopher Hill. 

And it turns out that Hill's book on the subject, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, explains even more about the fate of Trump's MAGA movement than I thought. Indeed, the book offers a window into the sort of archetypical progression (or retrogression) that every revolutionary movement undergoes once it obtains power.

Peasant Theology

 In the first chapter of his classic book of cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton studies a handful of folk tales in their earlier renditions, in order to get a glimpse into peasant mentalités under the Old Regime. 

He takes from these stories the conclusion that peasant life in the seventeenth century was brutish and short—that the world for these men and women was unforgiving and remorseless, and so the tales serve primarily to warn against the dangers of naively trusting one's fellow people. The only virtues they applaud—in Darnton's telling—are those of low cunning; a sort of hostile pawkiness in the presence of one's neighbors. 

Antisemitism

 Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas. 

She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on. 

This Guelph

 One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death. 

"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole." 

Copernican Revolutions

 A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution." 

He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce. 

Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications. 

Daddy Issues

 In his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud writes at one point that many people "have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them." (Jones trans.) 

He goes on to argue that this desire comes down to us in adulthood from the ambivalence many people feel in childhood toward their fathers: at once idealized and feared, the father inspires in many children a mixture of dread—Freud's castration anxiety—as well as a desire to win his approval. And thus, in adulthood, the neurotic individual goes seeking in modern society for a substitute father who will embody these principles—cruel, authoritarian, yet capable of bestowing his mercies on those he deems suitable. 

Malodorous Brain

 Trump's obscene statement last weekend about the death of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner was generally regarded as a new moral low—even for him. In his rambling social media remarks, Trump not only cruelly mocked the murder victims, he also insinuated (baselessly) that Reiner had been killed by an angry Trump supporter for daring to criticize the president. 

Usually—in the wake of a killing or act of mass violence—political leaders try to distance themselves and their supporters from the crime. They say: "oh no, our side is never violent; only the other side is violent."

Other People

 Shelley once wrote (in his "Peter Bell the Third") that "Hell is a city much like London." (Bertolt Brecht replied that, with all respect, Hell must be even more like Los Angeles.)

It has also been said—most quotably of all—that Hell is other people. 

Martin Amis wrote a novel called Other People, set in the city of London. And its conclusion appears to be that Hell is not only a city like London, and other people, but also is life itself. 

A Living Hell

 In his last days in office, Joe Biden commuted the capital sentences of 37 people on death row. It was an admirable act of mercy (though one that regrettably stopped short of halting all scheduled federal executions). 

Trump of course hated this decision. But when the president commutes your sentence for a federal crime, that's pretty much a done deal. Even Trump's team of lawless goons haven't found a way around it yet. 

Anxiety of Influence

 George Lucas in interviews—when he is asked what influenced him to create Star Wars—will always cite spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon film serials, etc. All of which makes him come across as very humble and credible and self-disclosing. He is duly acknowledging the creators who inspired him. He is properly attributing his sources. He is giving credit where credit is due. 

But a knowledge of psychoanalysis tells us that people often reveal in order to conceal—they tell us everything they can possibly think to divulge about themselves—except for the one, big, hairy truth. 

The World's First Fan Fiction

 Samuel Butler—though he is mostly known now for the immortal, posthumously-published satirical bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh—spent much of his life as an author producing works of nonfiction—specifically, speculative scholarship (let us call it), on such diverse topics as evolutionary biology and the authorship of the Odyssey. 

I turned to these books initially for their entertainment value; rather than in the belief that they would carry scholarly conviction. After all—Butler's hypotheses—when stated baldly—have a way of sounding ludicrous and needlessly contrarian.* 

An Ignoble Lie

 The New York Times ran a gooseflesh-inducing article earlier this week about a group of racists in Arkansas who are trying to establish a "whites only" housing development. Obviously, such a complex would be a straightforward violation of the federal fair housing law and ought not to be allowed. But some proponents of the development are convinced that the deterioration of law and morals has already proceeded so far in Trump's America that they might be able to get away with it. 

One of the creeps behind this idea apparently moonlights as a "Plato scholar" on YouTube. To prove his bona fides, he is pictured in front of a bookcase stocked with English translations of famous Neoplatonists and ancient commentators on the Greek philosopher (Proclus, etc.). (The Times reporter notes that the shelf behind him also prominently displayed a copy of Mein Kampf—but he strategically turned this one around, with the spine facing in, before proceeding with the photo shoot.) 

Heaven and Hell

 Yesterday, in an interview, Donald Trump was asked about his goals in ending the Ukraine war. His response was uncharacteristically self-critical and disarming (though quite characteristically weird and unexpected). He said that he was trying to end the conflict so that he could "get into heaven." 

This raises the interesting (to me, at least) question of what exactly is Trump's cosmology. He seemed to be gesturing somewhat facetiously to the kind of pop culture version of Christian mythology we all have in our heads from movies like It's a Wonderful Life. But does he literally believe in it? 

Prometheus

 The Trump administration is turning out martyrs to science these days at a near-daily clip. Many of them will forever remain nameless in the media coverage—the countless people who developed the mRNA vaccine, for instance—the victims of the most recent episode in Trump's war on science. 

The work of these researchers saved millions of lives around the world; and spared countless Americans from being hooked to a ventilator in an emergency room—but for their efforts they are now being punished with funding cuts, and their work is to be undone for the crudest culture war reasons. 

The Anthropocene

 Another disturbing fact reported in that David Wallace-Wells essay I was just writing about in the previous post: there is essentially no such thing anymore as wildlife. At least not as we tend to think of it. 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet—he notes—is now made up of humans and livestock. The animal kingdom, in short, is increasingly composed only of our species—and the animals we farm in order to feed ourselves. Everything else—that flaps or swims or crawls upon the earth—we have destroyed. 

Wallace-Wells uses this statistic—that haunting "96%" datum—as one more reason to think that the "natural world" as such no longer exists. We are living "after nature"—to borrow the name of a poem by W.G. Sebald. One section of Sebald's poem tells the story of Georg Steller, for instance—a hero to science, who brought back some of the first reports from the Russian far east about the previously unknown sea mammals who lived there. 

Byron Among the Megafauna

 Lord Byron in his Cain: A Mystery puzzles through many of the classic moral and theological problems of the Book of Genesis. Why was it fair—for instance—for Yahweh to plant the Tree of Knowledge within easy grasp of Eve and Adam, if he never intended for them to eat of it? 

In the classic version of the theological problem: if Adam and Eve were tempted to sin by eating of the tree—why then did God create in them a proclivity to temptation? And if they were not tempted to sin, then they acted out of mere randomness or curiosity—so it cannot have been a guilty act. 

The Flood

 The nation as a whole this week has been gripped by the horrifying scenes at a Texas summer camp inundated by floodwaters. Even Ted Cruz—not someone known for great empathy or moral imagination—seems to have been touched in his humanity during his visit to the disaster scene.

He described what it meant to behold one of the destroyed campers' cabins—and to realize that children had been swept out of their beds in the middle of the night into a raging river. The human brain recoils from contemplating such a tragedy. Cruz himself was overcome with tears. 

The Post-Human Future

 The economist and Substack blogger Noah Smith penned a disturbing piece the other week declaring the dawn of the "post-human age." He suggests that the combination of generative AI (able to mimic convincingly the various outputs of human intelligence), declining birthrates, and our increasing immersion in digital worlds—in preference to real-life human relationships and communication—seems to be paving the way for a future in which flesh and blood human beings are ever less needed and ever more redundant. 

So far, of course, we have merely a recapitulation of the kind of techno-pessimism that we've been hearing for decades—if not centuries. We are all disturbed by the ways in which our species' technological achievements both underline our power and yet increasingly render us otiose and unnecessary. It's the fundamental paradox of the industrial age—the age of the "demon of Mechanism," as Carlyle once called it—in which a growing set of human tasks have been automated—and we begin to fear that a future may come in which the machines' own creators are no longer needed. 

Nearest to God

 Since our country seems to be drawing ever closer to the brink of another war in the Middle East—a war that bears an uncanny resemblance to our last great misadventure in the region (save one letter in the country's name)—I thought it would be a good time to take down a short book that has sat on my shelf unread for years: Norman Mailer's Why Are We At War?—a brief collection of reflections and interviews he wrote on the eve of the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq. 

Mailer—along with Harold Pinter (whom he quotes in the volume)—has the distinction of being one of the few literary intellectuals who called the Iraq War right from the outset. He wasn't beguiled by the strange fairy lights of a worldwide Jacobin revolution or neo-Trotskyite transformation that seduced so many people on the Left. He saw Bush's war for what it was: a great, big, murderous, atrocious, hubristic, imperialistic boondoggle. (And criminal war of aggression to boot.)

Deathbed Conversions

 In 1852, decades after he wrote it, a sick and dying Heinrich Heine attached a preface to his own Religion and Philosophy in Germany that—strangely—rejected many of the arguments of the book he was now laying back before the public. He now regretted—he wrote on his deathbed—having spoken so mockingly years ago about "sacred things." He had rediscovered the wisdom of the Bible, he claimed. 

He now rejected the insolence of the German Left Hegelians, whom he accused of having the hubris of humanity's first parents in the Garden of Eden—that is, of daring to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He accused Hegel and the other philosophers he had celebrated in the original work of being like the Serpent who tempted them, offering the promise that they "shall be as gods."