Closed System

 The other day, I found myself in a conversation with a very conservative Catholic. I kept worrying I would out myself somehow as a secular liberal. But somehow instead I kept being taken for a Protestant. 

In reality, I don't consider myself as a member of either camp. If anything, I aspire to live up to Graham Greene's dictum to be a Catholic in a Protestant country and a Protestant in a Catholic one. But I guess in this conversation, I was in Catholic country, and so I kept finding myself putting a gentle word in for Luther. 

Pudd'nhead Wilson

 The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson gives voice to the widespread perception that the novel is in some ways a stunted classic—a book that fails to carry through its own profound and intriguing themes to their logical conclusion; preferring instead to accept the cheap victory of becoming a merely mechanical—if satisfying and gripping—detective story. 

But if true, this is precisely part of the genius and power of the novel: because one of its great themes is precisely the stunting of personality under the force of social convention—something Twain himself knew intimately. 

Trump's Vision of Judgment

 A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."

The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."

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. 

The Well of Saint Clare

 Anatole France is well known as an anticlerical writer of the Left. But it is intriguing to see what a nuanced attitude to religion he takes in his largely forgotten and seldom-read 1895 work, The Well of Saint Clare—a book plainly inspired by the medieval Golden Legend (a work that held great personal meaning for France). 

To be sure, there are many traces in the volume of France's skepticism. His attitudes to religion range from the Epicurean and Lucretian (characters repeatedly denounce the fear of death as a delusion brought about by the false belief in personal immortality) to the Swinburnean. 

Strafordians

 Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? opens with an autobiographical confession. He says that he first came to question Shakespeare's authorship of his plays in a spirit of playful controversy. He took the part of the devil's advocate mostly to keep his Stratfordian riverboat captain entertained: it gave him someone to argue with. But once he had defended the Baconian position often enough, the habit grew into real conviction, in an almost Pascalian manner. He writes:

Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine. 

Clash of Messianisms

 The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about how the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran's senior leadership appear to have succeeded only in bringing a more hardline, fundamentalist faction to power. 

Specifically, the new generation of Iran's leadership—left behind from the first wave of the illegal U.S.-Israeli bombings and assassinations—subscribes to a belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: a Messiah-like figure in Shia Islam. Believers in this theological doctrine apparently welcome the present war with the U.S. as the beginning of an apocalyptic scenario that will bring about the end of the world. 

The Massive Fact

 At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended. 

After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)

Whence Kindness and Gentleness Come

 I woke up shivering this morning with the weight and misery of my dad's deteriorating health condition seemingly concentrated into a little ball in the center of my gut. I curled up into a fetal position and wrapped myself more tightly in the down comforter to feel better and get more warmth. But it didn't do much good. 

"Comforter," I apostrophized to myself, "where, where is your comforting?" 

I get that G.M. Hopkins wasn't talking about bedclothes when he wrote that line. He was talking about Jesus, or God, or whatever. But I never believed in any of those characters. I know I have not been abandoned or forsaken—because there was no one to do the abandoning and forsaking. 

Ministerial vs. Radical Evils

 There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge. 

Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism." 

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. 

The Weirdest Psychoanalyst

 Wilhelm Reich is surely one of the nuttiest figures ever to achieve a degree of mainstream respectability in psychiatry. I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that the entire field of Freudian psychoanalysis always lent itself to a certain degree of madness—particularly in the form of delusions of grandeur—with its arrogant reductionism—its conviction that it had found a single key to unlock all human mysteries. And so, a genuine monomaniac could easily find shelter in its ranks for decades before pushing his theories to such extremes that even his colleagues started to raise an eyebrow. 

Many of Reich's weirdest traits, after all, seem like mere amplifications and magnifications of the worst aspects of Freud. If you thought Freud had a one-track mind, after all—wait until you get a load of his wayward disciple Reich. The Viennese master may have reduced all of dream symbolism to sexuality. It was left to Reich to do him one better, and reduce all of matter and the universe to the same subject. 

The Big Bubble Debate

 In his Short History of Financial Euphoria, John Kenneth Galbraith offers a list of tell-tale signs of a speculative mania: 1) leverage—too much debt backed by too few solid assets; 2) reinventing the wheel—fundamentally old financial ideas (usually leverage again) repackaged as bold new innovations; and 3) a younger, "supremely self-confident" generation on the financial scene that is smitten with a new technology. 

This new technology is generally proclaimed  to be a game-changer that will reset all the rules of economic life. (Galbraith describes the mood as one in which "[s]omething seemingly exciting and innovative [has] captured the public imagination," creating a belief in "an investment opportunity rich in imagined prospects but negligible in any calm view of reality.")

The Uncanny

 The other day, I was listening to a podcast revisiting the history of the "Slenderman" moral panic—from the earlier days of the internet. One of the hosts of the episode observed in passing that one of the reasons why this fictional character was so effectively creepy was that there was something instantly "familiar" about him, as soon as you saw him. 

This reminded me of a stray observation Freud makes in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—namely, that the essence of the "uncanny" is always both to be at once strange—yet strangely familiar. "[T]he characteristic of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression," as Freud puts it. (Strachey trans.)

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? 

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. 

Weather Machines

 In his 1941 memoir of wartime France, Scum of the Earth (a book that seeks to trace the psychological and historical roots of France's ignominious capitulation in the face of Nazi aggression)—Arthur Koestler at one point shares a particularly instructive episode of political history. 

He notes that Leon Blum's left-wing Popular Front government in the 1930s at one point undertook a program for the relief of French farmers. Having noticed that the farmers were getting shafted on payments to a retail monopoly, the Blum administration stepped in to buy produce from the farmers directly. As a result, payments to farmers increased several times over. 

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.)