Sofia Jirau

Pure Good can exist in theory, and does exist in practice; pure Evil can't, and doesn't. This is no dogmatic assertion, but a logically self-evident statement. Think it through: what do the words mean? They're harder to define than you might think, but Good must mean something like seeking, or at least desiring, the maximum happiness and fulfillment for all people, including oneself. Evil, then, presumably means seeking and desiring the minimum happiness and fulfillment (i.e., the maximum suffering) for all people. But wait a minute--does that include oneself? If you seek and desire the suffering of every other person, then achieving those goals would by definition bring you happiness and fulfillment--which means that, if only to the extent of a single person, your goals are aligned with those of Good. So once again we see that Evil is ultimately self-defeating.

We tend to envision Good and Evil horizontally, as it were, like the circles of a Venn diagram: there’s some overlap, a sort of grey zone, but Good is pure white and Evil pure black. As we've just seen, however, this is nonsense. A better image is a vertical one--not two circles but a single cone, standing on its tip. At the top of the cone, its widest point, are all the colors of the rainbow, joyful and resplendent. As you go further down and the cone narrows, the colors become drab, drabber--brown and grey and puce. At the bottommost point, the cone is still a circle--thus, in a sense, still infinite--but the most cramped and squalid infinity imaginable, the black of old dried vomit stains, a curled-up maggot stuck in the drain of a latrine. Beyond the top of the cone, all colors burst into radiant white, spreading out forever to the heavens; beyond the bottom is a lone point, infinitely dense, made of nothing more than ancient, ever-reeking filth.

Which brings us to Victoria's Secret. The lingerie juggernaut has (literally) unveiled their first model with Down's Syndrome: Sofia Jirau, innocent spearhead in the next phase of female degradation. Let's not even wade into the issue of what constitutes informed consent; the relevant point is that the self-gnawing serpent of Leftist ideology has once again betrayed the dignity of womanhood under the guise of advancing that very dignity.

Opposites often look identical on the surface. A leper and an emperor are both outside the law, but for antithetical reasons. All rational thought is predicated on a few basic axioms, beginning with the ultimate truth that A is A (a literal paraphrase of the Name of God, I Am Who Am)--and these primary axioms cannot, themselves, be defended by rational thought. They can't be deduced from logic, because they are themselves the foundation of logic. One of these axioms is the dignity of the human person: a super-rational conviction, founded in a moral and spiritual certitude. In a well-ordered soul, that moral certitude proceeds into the mind as a rational premise for further reasoning--and that reasoning, in turn, proceeds into the emotions as a visceral instinct. Now, a soul without a properly formed conscience (and please observe the root meaning of that word: with knowledge) may very well possess a sub-rational, instinctive reverence for the dignity of the human person. But, because that reverence is founded on nothing, it cannot withstand the day-to-day assaults of conflicting emotional imperatives. Even the strongest emotion--even the strongest rational premise!--cannot ultimately stand without being grounded in a moral and spiritual certitude, but will inevitably--inevitably--contradict itself. It has no "A is A." This is why, for instance, the Left is forced to praise Fallon Fox, the (male) mixed martial arts fighter who "switched genders" and went on to use his naturally superior upper body strength to pummel women in the ring.

In his leprous apotheosis of despair, Ivan Karamazov said brilliantly, "If there is no immortality, then everything is lawful." His underlying (and self-evident) error was, of course, the undefended assumption that there is indeed no immortality; but, correctly understood as a counter-factual hypothesis, his statement is absolutely true. If everything disappeared into nothingness, then nothing would matter. Nothing could matter. This is why, in the end, it grows ever clearer that an atheist can't be a good citizen. Atheists, ungrounded in anything, can only bobble and sink to the muddled conviction that allowing a woman with Down's Syndrome to parade herself essentially naked before the male gaze is equivalent to a triumph of women's rights.

Words Change! (A preemptive defense of G.K. Chesterton)

 If you spend much time with Catholics, you've probably heard of G.K. Chesterton. You might even be someone who quotes him compulsively, or someone who's frankly exhausted of hearing about him all the time. I suppose, in principle, a person could be both, but I'll merrily own up to being one of the former myself. Now, by some quirk of Providence, from the time of his death right up to the present moment, that big beardless Santa Claus has been almost entirely overlooked by the intellectual enemies of the Faith--like the tallest, fattest hobbit in history, creeping through the very entrails of Pandemonium while the Lidless Eye is fixed elsewhere. It may even be that the (pseudo-)intellectual arm of the Left is aware of him and desperately trying to ignore him, just as I once heard from a former Jehovah's Witness that their missionaries are explicitly told to stay away from known Catholic households lest they be converted themselves. But if people like Dale Ahlquist, founder of the Chesterton Society, have their way, the mainstream will eventually have to come to grips with Gilbert's massive paws. And when that happens, we already know the first thing they're bloody well going to say. It's about as rare and meaningful as a friendly observation on the weather, these days. Sing it with me, you all know the words: "He's a racist!"

In preemptively defending Chesterton, I must incidentally throw my hat into the ring with Mark Twain. Now, Twain was no champion of the Church (although even he couldn't help admiring St. Joan of Arc); but he was also no racist. In his own time, he was probably one of the more vociferous sympathizers with the plight of Black people in America. But, because the slavering cur of the "intellectual" Left snaps foamily at every available hand, even the ones trying to feed it, there's been a long-standing debate in academic circles about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those boys were far ahead of their time in treating the Black people whom they encountered as--just imagine this!--people who were Black. That is to say, they treated them with the same dignity as any other person, without pretending that they weren't distinguished from one another by unfortunate societal circumstances because of their differing skin colors. But, even more unfortunately (apparently), Tom and Huck happened to use one particular word that has since acquired such loathsome connotations. Hereinafter, so that this post is not banned by Google, I'm going to replace that word with "Ninja."

If you've read this far, you may have also read the title of this article. Everyone remembers the old Christmas carol "Deck the Halls." Everyone knows the line, "Don we now our gay apparel." And everyone is aware that the word "gay" no longer means what it did when that line was written. People with Autism (like this guy) used to be called "idiots." It wasn't an insult. It was just the accepted medical terminology. Over time, it came to be employed as an insult; and for that reason, over time, it fell into disfavor in the medical community. The exact same thing happened with the word "retarded," which used to mean--well--what it actually means, i.e. impeded or slowed down in terms of one's progress. We don't use that term anymore, because it eventually came to be too widely used as an insult; but the entire reason it became an insult in the first place is precisely because it was originally an accepted medical term. My dad raised me to distinguish between the verb "quote" and the noun "quotation," and I still twitch a tiny bit when I see "quote" used as a noun; but, dislike it though I may, I have to acknowledge that the Oxford English Dictionary has now officially accepted "quote" as a noun. It's a noun. Why? Because, in practice, language is determined by usage.

In the time of Mark Twain, the word Ninja simply didn't have the horrible connotations it has today. Tom and Huck used the word innocently, intending no offense, because at that time it wasn't considered offensive. And here comes the gut-punch: occasionally, G.K. Chesterton used the word Ninja as well. He didn't mean it as a slur, and he couldn't have done so, because at that time, it was not a slur. The battle for Twain has already become an irrelevant border skirmish, because the entire Western Canon has been eviscerated by the ludicrously misnomered intelligentsia. (And, as Dr. William Gonch points out in this brilliant article, there's an actual upside to that: now that students are no longer required to read the truly Great Books, they can just read them for fun.) But when they come for Chesterton, who once said of Aquinas that "He had all the unconscious contempt which the really intelligent have for an intelligentsia," I want us to be prepared.

 

Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!

The Long Defeat?

I’m just now hearing about Amazon’s new Rings of Power miniseries, which apparently boils down to a ghastly moral and intellectual abattoir of Woke Faux Tolkien (hereinafter simply Wolkien). In the article linked above, Ben Reinhard draws a shrewd parallel between Jeff Bezos, witch-king of Amazon, and the idiosyncratic manifestation of Pride in Middle Earth: that is, as a specifically Feanorian sin of jealous, overwhelming love for the work of one’s own hands. This (false) love amounts to a sort of self-idolatry, which—like every heresy—is also an obvious fallacy: anything we creatures may create is ultimately just the reassembling of elements already created by our Creator. In the insightful words of physicist Carl Sagan (who remained bafflingly atheistic), To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe. (Or, as God tells the scientist in the old joke, “You get your own dust!”) And after all, the light of Feanor’s Silmarils was not his own, but captured from the Two Trees of Paradise (hence Tolkien’s insistence on the term sub-creation to describe the artistic process).

 

The arrogance of the Wolkien portrayal is that it presumes to improve upon the very material it is founded on, with the explicit intention of refuting (one might even say defiling) the moral and intellectual underpinnings of that work. As Chesterton once said in a different context, “It is like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch on which he is sitting.” Yes, Galadriel made vain and foolish choices long ago in her youth (unlike the rest of us, I suppose?), but the mature Lady we meet in The Lord of the Rings is expressly based on the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Tolkien s own statement. She is certainly not Woke in any comprehensible sense (insofar as Woke ideology is comprehensible to anyone, anyhow), and a very obvious example of this is the grave and conscious deference which she pays to her husband Celeborn despite her clearly having the final say on the governing of Lothlorien. Even when she corrects him (“Do not repent of your welcome to the Dwarf”), it is quite distinctly done in a wifely capacity of encouraging his practice of Charity. In the same way, the Blessed Virgin certainly deferred to St. Joseph as the spiritual head of their household despite “outranking” him in the hierarchy of Saints—just as Jesus Himself, in turn, was “subject unto” His mother and foster father (Luke 2:51). Call it toxic patriarchy if you must, but it’s still an ordered and dynamic dance of loving, logical subordinacies which fall neatly into their place when rightly ordered under the Kingship of God; and it contrasts cataclysmically with the ugly, sloppy chaos of Wolkienian solipsism.

 

But as I’ve hinted, we all perpetrate/suffer from the same species of arrogance. Honestly, by what audacity do I criticize Jeff Bezos? As gratifying as it is to conflate Amazon with Angmar, for Pete’s sake, I’ve got orders coming to me in the mail from Amazon right now. It just underscores the horribly inevitable hypocrisy of admonishing any sinner, a Spiritual Work of Mercy which must be moderated by Our Lord’s admonition to us all: “First remove the beam from your own eye, that you may see more clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye!” (Matthew 7:5).

 

In truth, I must confess to a deeper hypocrisy than merely using Amazon while criticizing it. Not unlike the Wolkien writers, I may have used my knowledge of the Faith to undermine that very Faith in my own writing. Not on purpose—not consciously, at least—but, well, judge for yourself. Last year, I wrote an article arguing that the duty of a writer (as distinct from that same person in the other parts of his or her life) is strictly to the work itself, irrespective of any potential harm to the souls of readers. In my defense, I did attempt to clarify that another part of the writer’s life is his or her role as self-editor: that, having finished a piece of writing, a wise writer will sleep on it, switch hats, and come back to it with a sternly critical eye (“murder your darlings,” they say). But in the time since writing that article, I have come to fear that I leaned far too heavily into the Devil’s Advocacy, as it were. Our Lord once said, “If anyone causes these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it were better for him to have a millstone hung about his neck and be cast into the sea” (Matthew 18:6). I can’t seem to find a footnote where He added, “unless, of course, you’re a novelist.”

 

I love the things I write. I love them so much that, as my own wife once pointed out in her capacity of encouraging my practice of Charity, I have sometimes been guilty of making an idol out of my own work. And I suffer the same paradoxical bifurcation that tormented Feanor, of craving adulation for that work while at the same time wanting to keep it under lock and key. I cherish those readers who praise it; snarl at those readers who offer critique. At least, part of me does these things—thank God (non nobis, Domine), I’m now aware enough of this poisonous tendency in myself that I can begin to attempt to correct it.

 

The good news, in a certain sense, is that the Wolkien stranglehold on our media actually provides me with a kind of spiritual safety net, as I am unlikely to become exposed to the hazards of vanity which accrue to success and celebrity. I’m an openly Catholic writer in Woke America; am I in any grave danger of becoming famous? If I can keep a low enough profile to stay off Google’s “unsearchables” list (yes, it's a real thing), I’ll consider myself as fortunate as Meriadoc in the mud, overlooked by the chieftain of the Nazgul (at least until I can creep up and hamstring the son of a so-and-so).

 

Lady Galadriel once remarked that, together with her husband, “through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” It’s a sad, grim view of the never-ending (until He comes again!) struggle against Evil, and it’s naturally bleaker than our own perspective because Galadriel existed in a world before Christ; as such, her remark contrasts reassuringly with St. Paul’s infinitely hopeful “I have fought the good fight” (2 Timothy 4:7). My final confession (for today) is that I personally identify far more with her perspective than with his. I realize I’ve been including a ridiculous number of links in these posts; but if you click on only one of them, may it be this one to a beautiful and brilliant reflection on the Love that casts out fear. God bless you.

 

A is A. QED.

God bless you. I’d like to begin by apologizing for the absurd number of hyperlinks in this article; it’s become almost a Choose Your Own Adventure book of ramifying tangents, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped. And now I’d like to apologize in a different sense: that of apologetics, or arguing in favor of a strongly held belief. (The relevant verb might actually be apologeticize, but that just sounds silly.) What I am arguing in favor of is my personal belief that very small and seemingly insignificant—or, yes, even ridiculous—bubbles on the frothy surface of pop culture can be objectively true and meaningful indicators of larger and even largest movements within the depths of the Zeitgeist, the Collective Unconscious, the psychospiritual Internet into which our species has been plugged since before the recording of history.

In a recent article, I made as cool and rational a defense as I could of my—well, not quite my logical conviction, but my extremely strong hunch—that some of the things happening in Woke culture, and specifically its insidious assimilation of beloved intellectual properties like Star Wars, Dr. Who, and He-Man, are directly connected to the bizarre and troublesome things happening in the Vatican these days (and specifically the apparent assault upon the Traditional Latin Mass). Why do I keep harping on this He-Man/Motu Proprio connection? Well, for me, autism does not manifest in so useful a form as understanding basic math, or knowing what to do with money other than buying Twix bars. But it does (apparently) give me a weird insight into some of the labyrinthine twists of popular culture. After all, there is some precedent for serious thinkers reading the entrails of pop culture to augur the movements of larger intellectual trends; philosopher and historian Remi Brogue, for example, draws a direct parallel from the morality of the TV show Sex in the City to the destructive forces unleashed by science in the Manhattan Project, as Robert Royal discusses in this article. And my one absolutely unerring, indispensable tool in ferreting out skulduggery is this: A = A.

Pretty basic, you might well say. I’ll do you one better: it’s not merely basic, but the fundamental base, the ultimate rock-bottom firmament, of all reason, wisdom, and imagination. When you state the Law of Identity, you literally speak the Name of God. How does He identify Himself to Moses? “I Am Who Am” (Exodus 3:14). We’re all here—existence itself is able to exist—because, at the end of the day, God is God.

And, as I’ve argued before, the number one dead giveaway that any given thinker is (openly or implicitly) anti-Catholic is this: their logic will always turn out to be based on the premise that A does not equal A. Let me give an example. Perhaps the one and only good thing accomplished by the Third Reich is that, ever since the 1940s, all humankind has been able to agree on one standard of evil. We sure as heck quibble over what might be good, and how to attain it, but everyone from the Bible-thumpingest right-wing arch-conservative to the most ultra-liberal lunatic in California can at least agree that the Nazis Were Bad. Right?

Well. Stay with me, because this is a deep dive into a rabbit hole. Remember I mentioned the assimilation of Dr. Who by Woke culture? Catholics aren’t the only people who dislike it, and that’s for a perfectly simple and obvious reason: Woke ideology produces crap art. A fellow on YouTube called Jay Exci made a five-hour video (which I won’t provide a link to because I don’t want to consume over half your working day) analyzing the New Who’s artistic failures in extreme detail, and one of the many points he touched on was a moment in the episode “Spyfall,” when the new female Doctor finds his/her old nemesis the Master working with Nazis during the Third Reich. Jay Exci (along with many others, including The Guardian in this article) points out that the Doctor’s defeat of the Master in this episode is ethically problematic. You see, the current incarnation of the Master happens to be a person of color, but the Nazis perceive him as a perfect Aryan because of a Time Lord gadget called a perception filter, which—well, does what its name says. But after the Doctor has already defeated the Master, as a parting shot, she disables his perception filter and says, “Now they’ll see the real you,” quite clearly implying that the Nazis, being Nazis and all, will probably punish the Master even more severely because he’s a person of color. This has been called Dr. Who’s “weaponizing” the Master’s own race against him. Kind of the opposite of politically correct, you might think.

But! Because, in attacking (or, at any rate, critiquing) Woke-era Dr. Who, Jay Exci appeared to have allied himself too overtly with suspiciously conservative ideology, many scions of the Left rallied to defend New Who by attacking Jay Exci in turn. One fellow, for example, argues that because there was an “Indian Legion” within the Waffen-SS, comprised mainly of Indian servicemen taken as POWs, it is therefore absurd to think that the Nazis would treat a dark-skinned prisoner more harshly than any other. Peter Lewerin, the author of this article, concludes, “There has been some outrage over this episode: it would seem that [Dr. Who writer] Chris Chibnall overestimated the audience’s education here.” By Jove, the Nazis weren’t racist after all!

Oh yes, and “overestimated the audience’s education”?! I spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grade obsessed with World War II, reading absolute scads of books that were (though I say it who shouldn’t—see again, autism) well above my grade level, and I had never in my life heard of the Indian Legion until I stumbled across this particular Internet debate two days ago. Even if it were remotely reasonable to assume that the average viewer would immediately know such a specific piece of WWII history (and I’d love to know if Chris Chibnall had ever heard of the Indian Legion before Leweris’ article came along), that still doesn’t translate to a safe assumption that any given German soldier would automatically treat a dark-skinned prisoner with respect.

You see what I mean about pulling that thread? I just can’t help it. I follow the trail of logic and it leads in a loop, a self-devouring circumnavigation of the globe, like the Midgard Serpent of Nordic myth. The liberal mindset is ultimately willing to defend even the bloody Nazis in order to attack its enemy. And who, when all is said and done, is that enemy?

If you take the reality of Spiritual Warfare seriously, you may well have heard of Fr. Chad Ripperger. He’s a devout priest, theologian, and apologist for the Faith—and he is also a practicing exorcist. According to Fr. Ripperger, based on encounters with victims of demonic attack from every walk of life, the deceptions of the Devil always boil down to one thing in the end: anything but God. The enemies of the Faith will endorse unfettered transgendered multi-generational pansexuality at one moment, and fall back on defending Nazism the next, if that is what it takes to make God look bad. And as usual, Chesterton already said all this a long time ago, if we’d only been listening:

“There are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world; and there are its enemies. Its enemies are ready to be for violence or against violence, for liberty or against liberty, for representation or against representation; and even for peace or against peace.” - The Well and the Shallows, G.K. Chesterton (God rest his soul, and may he pray for us all!).

So there you have it. Do I seriously, intelligently believe that the subversion of a children’s cartoon show is directly connected to the current (apparent) Papal assault on the Traditional Latin Mass? Well—yeah. I do. We’ve all heard of the Butterfly Effect. It’s really true: everything is connected, everything eventually touches everything else. And as I’ve also said before, if there is any such thing as Providence at all, then by definition, ultimately, there can’t be such a thing as coincidence. Either nothing matters, or absolutely everything does.

A Ram in a Thicket

Once Abraham had proven his faith by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his son, the Lord spared him the necessity of actually doing so. The father and son found a ram in a thicket nearby, and they sacrificed the ram instead: the ram provided to them by, well, Providence. So God gave them a ram, and they turned around and offered the ram right back.

 

St. Augustine said, “Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.” When we pray successfully, it’s because the Holy Spirit is praying within us, “with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26). We need grace even to accept grace, and whatever we offer to God is already His anyway. “What do you have that has not been given to you?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Sometimes I want to throw my hands up and say, “Is God like one of those obnoxious project partners who insist on doing all your work as well as their own because their way is just so much better? What is the point of my even being here?”

 

Or rather, I used to feel that way. Since having kids, I think I’ve begun to get it—at least a little bit. Both of our girls are extremely strong-willed, to the point of being bull-headed (wonder where they got that from?), and they both hated accepting help when they were learning to walk. Wanted to do the whole thing themselves—pratfalls, nosebleeds, and all. Yet, at the same time, their frustration at their own endlessly repeated failure was so evident that it was never a surprise when they finally let go of their tiny, adorable egos and reached out for help.

 

Now, I don’t want to belabor the obvious God-as-parent analogy, but there’s also a slightly darker side to this parallel. Another thing that strikes me almost every day of being around small children is just how nakedly, hopelessly childish we all remain. A boy grows to manhood and takes the reins of a great empire. He sees a smaller nation that has (say) a wealth of finely crafted jewels, and he wants them. He goes with his army and he takes them. How, exactly, does this differ from my elder daughter snatching a toy train away from her little sister? Only in scale. The same holds true with jealousy, with outbursts of temper, with any objectionable trait which, grown to its logical conclusion, becomes torture and theft and genocide. I won’t speak for any other small children, but I know full well—I remember with perfect clarity—that when I was five years old, there were days when I would have smashed all life on Earth if I’d had the power. The bigger the ego gets, the less adorable it becomes.

 

This world, this life, is our infancy. The vale of tears, it’s a training ground for saints. Most of us won’t even make it to sainthood in this world, and will need Lord knows how many centuries of remedial work in Purgatory. Once we finally (God willing) get to Heaven, once we can stand with Him as saints, once we see Him as He is and thus become like Him (1 John 3:2), then He’ll be able to start trusting us with real responsibilities. We shall judge angels (1 Cor 6:3). But we must prove reliable in small matters before He will rely on us for great ones (Luke 16:10). We have to learn that we can’t stand on our own.

 

 

“Abraham took the wood for the offering and laid it on his son Isaac, while he himself carried the fire and the knife” (Genesis 22:6). When Abraham put Isaac on the altar, he was spared—or rather, they were both spared. But when God’s Son carried the wood for the offering—when the carpenter’s boy took the heavy cross on his shoulders—neither He nor His Father was spared. God the Son suffered death and God the Father suffered watching His Son suffer death. I know which place I would rather be in, if I could choose between dying and watching one of my daughters die.

 

So when I feel tempted to throw my hands up and complain, I try to remember my beautiful, beautiful girls struggling to rise to their feet. They can do it, they can do it! But just not—quite—yet. First, they need to reach out their hands.

 

But I Wore the Juice!

On 19 April 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks at gunpoint, making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his face from the security feed; and when the police came to his door, scant hours later, he said incredulously, “But I wore the juice!” As it transpires, Mr. Wheeler had discovered that lemon juice renders ink invisible—and, working from this premise, had attained the conclusion that a man doused in lemon juice must therefore be invisible to cameras. A Cornell professor, David Dunning, was so struck by Wheeler’s confidence in his own magnificently imbecilic stratagem that he and his assistant Justin Kruger went on to conduct a major psychological study of the interplay between knowledge and self-assuredness, ultimately concluding that the less one knows about a given subject, the likelier one is to think that one knows all about it.

 

Theology, experience, and common sense all attest that the same inverse proportion holds true in the moral sphere. Not only does sin darken the intellect and deaden the conscience, but the Thomistic principle of connexio virtutum (ST I-II q. 66 a. 2) means that a deficit in any one virtue diminishes our capacity for all the others as well—and, of course, the more we sin, the less receptive we become to transformative grace, hence the likelier to sin again. “To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matt. 25:29).

 

This accelerating descent from cesspool to whirlpool would be a deadly peril even if human nature were left to its own devices; but in the supernatural warzone of daily life, the danger is exponentiated by invisible leviathans seeking to hasten our downward spiral to oblivion. We ought to be able to recognize these spirits as deceivers; unfortunately, “discernment of spirits” (1 Cor. 12:10) is a gift of the very Spirit from Whose grace the man in the maelstrom has removed himself. In other words, the more we morally blind ourselves through sin, the easier it becomes for agents of darkness to blind us even further.

 

Only Socrates, the wisest man in Athens, knew that he knew nothing: the less we know, the more we’re apt to think we know. Glimpsing only the very topmost tip of the titanic submarine monolith of ice that is the global skein of religious, political, economic, and cultural machinations at work behind every well-lit snapshot we see in the news, we’re hardly in a position to guess which surfacing bubble is the result of vast, chthonic forces moving in the deep, and which is the result of a nearby guppy’s hiccup.

 

I recently wrote a post arguing that immortal deceivers, if they exist, might very well act irrationally—either because they want throw us off their scent, or because existing in Hell has literally driven them insane. (Think of the Devil encountered by Ivan Karamazov, who swears his only desire is to be a 300-pound peasant woman and light a Christian prayer candle in simple faith!) For this reason, I believe the distinction we naturally tend to draw between “a crazy conspiracy theory” and “a theory” is less useful than we think.

 

To recapitulate: you can’t get smarter if you’re too dumb to know you’re dumb, and a bad person left to himself will do bad things and thus get worse. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that moral badness retards the intelligence and opens one’s soul to demonic influence—which in turn leads to accelerating worsening, thus opening one’s soul all the more, and so on, in a downward spiral that only leads to one place. With our flawed finite intelligence and flawed concupiscent consciences, we aren’t able to see the “big picture” and comprehend how every minuscule happenstance of ordinary life slots together to fabricate the giant stage of worldly affairs; but one thing we do know is that it’s bound to be stranger than we can possibly imagine. No fictional character would rob a bank while covered in lemon juice.

 

 

Now, with all that being said, I would like to direct your attention to the following: He-Man and the MOTU Proprio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Drinking, Part 2 (or, Escaping the Silver Chair)

I am a sinner. I’m also a Catholic, and one of my duties (or more specifically, one of the seven spiritual works of mercy) is to admonish my fellow sinners, to warn them away from their own sins. Now, Our Lord sternly cautions us against denouncing a sin of which we ourselves are guilty: “You hypocrite, first remove the beam from your own eye; then you will see more clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5)—but my understanding of this remark is that, in pointing out the sins of others, we must never become self-righteous. We mustn’t denounce the person committing the sin (as distinct from the sin itself), as though we were in a position of guiltlessness. But Jesus isn’t saying that, if you are (for instance) a heroin addict, it would be wrong of you to encourage other addicts to quit.

Let’s follow that example. If one addict encourages another addict to quit, what is the second addict quite likely to say? It’s a rhetorical question we’ve probably all asked: “Who are you to tell me that?”

Well—the question doesn’t really make any sense. Who am I? I’m a rational human being. But you must know that already, or you wouldn’t be trying to reason with me. Yes, I’m a sinner like you, but how does that disallow me from warning you against sin? If a heroin addict says that heroin is bad for you, does it cease to be bad? If a murderer tells you that murder is evil, does it become good? Reductio ad absurdum.

But the point goes even deeper than that, because not only can any rational person give moral counsel, but a practitioner of a particular sin can often give particular counsel about that sin. In some ways, even if he’s not (for example) a cop or a doctor, a heroin addict is uniquely qualified to explain just how bad for you heroin can be. The murderer, in some ways, is in a uniquely knowledgeable position to explain the evil of murder. And yes, of course we already know that murder is evil; but the habit of virtue is, precisely, the practice of constantly reminding ourselves of what we already know. That’s why we need to say the Our Father not once a lifetime but once a day (at the absolute least). That’s why we need to go to Mass not every time someone dies or gets married, but every single week. That’s why, in C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Puddleglum and the children repeat Aslan’s instructions every night before they go to sleep.

And speaking of The Silver Chair—the titular furniture is quite simply the most brilliant metaphor for addiction I’ve ever seen in a story. In case you don’t remember or (gasp!) haven’t read it, let me give a very brief summary. Jill and Eustace, a girl and boy from our world, are summoned to Narnia and charged by Aslan to rescue Prince Rilian, who is under a witch’s spell. Aided by Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle (a sort of demi-frog), they find the witch’s lair and try to rescue the prince, but he turns out to be a horrendous fop who kowtows to the witch’s every command—except at night. At night, his true self is able to emerge from the quicksand of her sorcery and call out for help; but he can’t escape because his false self, the person that the witch has turned him into, willingly locks himself into a silver chair every evening. When the true Rilian awakens, he thrashes and fights to break free until finally, exhausted, he slumps back down into the witch’s power, and in the morning she releases him from the chair once again. And every night, the duration of true Rilian’s resurfacing grows shorter.

That is exactly, exactly, the experience of an addiction. Countless stories try to encapsulate this theme—Jekyll and Hyde, the Incredible Hulk, the legend of the werewolf—but none of them (to my mind) capture it as well as Lewis. The image of a man’s true soul writhing and shrieking in a trap that he voluntarily put himself in!—while his false self slowly takes possession of more and more hours of his day—it is hauntingly accurate. And Rilian cannot get himself out of the chair. He needs the children. He needs Aslan.

I’m an alcoholic. (Hi, Jamey!) It has taken me forty-four years to acknowledge that fact. I brought great pain to my wife and my children. But now, praise God, I am out of my silver chair. Of course, many alcoholics occasionally swear never to drink again; I don’t entertain the fantasy that it will be easy to quit. But I have finally taken the first step, and I was made able to do so because Aslan sent me two beautiful children and a startlingly wise and intelligent wife.

(Wait. In this scenario, Ellen equates to the Marsh-wiggle? Not an ideal analogy. Sorry, babe. I love you.)

But that’s off-topic. Forgive me. The point is, the witch is not truly a witch, in the sense of a mortal woman fiddling about with hexes. She—it—is a devouring serpent in human form, and we know whom she represents. Her magic, the spell that she casts over men, can be almost anything: for me, alcohol; for another man, gambling; for another, social media. And obviously, not all these things are bad in and of themselves—the name of the wicked enchantment is, simply, immoderation.

Now here’s the key part. To break an addiction, it takes more than mere non-action. It takes positive activity of a counter-balancing kind. Every vice is the perversion of a particular virtue; to thwart the vice, we need to practice the virtue. Chastity does not mean “no sex before marriage”—that is simply one of the fruits of the active pursuit of the virtue of chastity. (Remember Lewis’ description of the Green Lady lying down to sleep in Perelandra: “Sleep was not something that happened to her but an action she performed.”) If I truly want to quit drinking, it’s not enough for me to sit down and say, “I’m not going to have a drink.” I need to get up and go do something else. Go for a jog, say my rosary, read a book, write a book, play with my kids, go swimming. Anything but alcohol.

And as for the question of “Who are you to tell me?”—well, I’m an alcoholic. This is why, in AA, we have sponsors. I can tell you that you need to quit drinking, because I need to quit drinking too. Let’s tell each other, and keep telling each other every day. In the words of St. Francis of Assisi, “Let us begin again, brothers, for up to now we have done little or nothing.”

Praise God! And let us begin again.

 

Kermit, Mulan, Pancakes, Flying Saucers, Perelandra, Goethe, Simulations. . . dogs and cats. . . living together. . .

About twenty years ago, at a family gathering, my cousin Jesse and I discovered that the Chinese-made Kermit the Frog doll recently given to one of our younger cousins had two left hands. We amused ourselves by spinning a tale in which “Commie Kermie” was the first probing tentacle of a plot to weaken America by disordering our children’s comprehension of reality. Sheer silliness, of course.

 

In 2020's live-action Mulan remake, Disney officially praised the government of Xinjiang Province, home to 60,000 Uighur women forcibly sterilized by that same government—home to well over a million detainees in “political re-education” camps where Muslims and other religious minorities are forcibly indoctrinated with government ideology—home to Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, placed in control of Xinjiang in 2016 after his highly successful tenure in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where the nightmarish practice of political protest via self-immolation went from a single incident in 2009-2010 to eighty-six incidents in 2011, the year Chen assumed power there. Such is the government which receives two sinister thumbs up from Walt Disney & Co.

In ages when the rational principle is, if not ascendant, at least extant, a useful distinction can be drawn between a crazy conspiracy theory and, simply, a theory. I propose to take it as axiomatic that ours is not such an age, and please note the reason for this: because that very axiom could itself be labeled a crazy conspiracy theory, meaning any defense of it would automatically beg the question. There is certainly a mordant irony there, but I don’t say it as a joke; I say it to illustrate the immediacy with which logic is flipped against itself when confronting, not the non-, but the anti-rational. It’s like a baseball game where the umpire is openly batting for the other team.

 

In his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Russian priest Fr. Seraphim Rose examines a number of spiritual deceptions that have planted deep roots in modern culture. One such phenomenon is the ever-prevalent, ever-persistent narrative of the Close Encounter—a definitive go-to topic for those who yearn to be dismissed as psychotics or charlatans—but Fr. Rose revivifies this subject with the fascinating theory that the putative extraterrestrials encountered by otherwise ordinary folk are in fact nothing other than demons, adapting to the “scientific” superstitions of our age. (Consider, for instance, the ostensible materialist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s oddly strident insistence that we’re all living in a simulation, or the late Carl Sagan’s desperate search for alien life. Any potential transcendence will do, as long as it can still scoff at Christianity.) Fr. Rose analyzes multiple accounts of ETs and UFOs, isolating a key commonality: the bizarre and nonsensical behavior of the “aliens.” In 1961, for example, a Wisconsin farmer reported being approached by small, floating humanoid entities who handed him four pancakes.

Fr. Rose suggests three reasons for this type of behavior. 1: Even the most credible witness will inevitably meet skepticism when reporting an event that seems whimsical and absurd. If the “aliens” wish to sow harmful uncertainty, then it makes perfect sense to be nonsensical. 2: Sudden exposure to extreme irrationality or strangeness can temporarily disorder the victim’s sense of reality, thus rendering a subject more susceptible to various forms of hypnotic suggestion. This kind of behavior could therefore be a precursor to attempted mental conditioning, brainwashing, or even possession. And 3: Such entities, supposing they exist, might not be feigning the lunacy they exhibit. Perhaps whatever mode of existence they now endure has quite simply shattered whatever mode of intellect they once enjoyed. Remember the Un-man from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. And if that seems implausible, consider that German euthanasia clinics are now denying “service” to suicidal would-be Werthers who test positive for COVID-19 ("Come back when you are healthy and we kill you then, guten tag!”): is that sane?

 

Now let’s revisit Commie Kermie in the light of this third conjecture from Fr. Rose. Is it so far-fetched that a global heathen empire might have demonic intelligences sitting in key positions? Is it far-fetched that such creatures might hatch plans which appear neither good nor evil but simply nuts, at right angles to all coherent goal-seeking comportment? I really don't think so. In short, just because a theory is insane, that doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

From all this, I take away two things. Firstly, we are in danger from even more directions than we expect: when your enemy is genuinely mad, there’s no way to predict his movements logically. We have to lose the tendency to scoff at potential attacks that might seem utterly ludicrous. Vigilance is key. But, secondly, we are also protected by the fact that when the enemy’s plan is truly mad, then—well—it’s probably not going to work. Consider once again the German euthanasia clinics: two insanities, colliding, produce an actual good! We can’t merely sit back and wait for evil to destroy itself, because it would unfortunately devour many good things along the way; but it’s good to be reminded that, one way or another, it will be destroyed in the end.