How could you, America? Really, how could you? Don't you see what you've done? They’re going to be putting people in camps!
No, no, don’t even start. ... I had a whole course at Wellesley on authoritarianism. I KNOW what fascism looks like. Did you even read that Atlantic article I sent? Admit it, you didn't.
This is the end of our democracy. You people are SO FUCKING BLIND. He’ll use the state to go after his political opponents! You call that democracy? Huh?
And the planet! Oh, I can’t BELIEVE the stupidity. We have only twelve months to turn this around or all our coastal cities will be underwater!
You'd probably like that, wouldn't you? You always talk about “coastal elites” and how out of touch they are. Well now you can watch them all DROWN.
No, I’m NOT hungry. I’m nauseated in fact. I’m not going to be eating for some time. Just leave me alone. Everything is ... over.
I think I'll be moving to Canada. This is not a safe place for me anymore.
So I'm going to leave. You should've thought of that before. Before you DID this. I'll be leaving you, America.
Paul Kingsnorth is right about much. Still, I’ve so far only read him sporadically, mostly his articles. A few years back I was sent the sharp little tale that got many hooked on Kingsnorth, “The Basilisk”, but never went on to the novels.
Kingsnorth has been busy since that tale appeared. His sense of the problem has deepened. His pen gets keener by the year.
Wikipedia describes his work thus:
Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction, notably the Buccmaster Trilogy, tends to be mythological and multi-layered.
Kingsnorth is wrestling with a larger frame than most writers. And he is right, I think, especially regarding what he calls “the Machine", regarding the magnitude of the enace we face. He’s also right about the deep malaise we’ve fallen into, how it has made us vulnerable--a vulnerability that presages … something. But what?
Many sense it, and are leery of the answer. I think really all of us sense it, but most don’t want to look at it.
Go read Kingsnorth’s recent piece, second in a series of three. In it he links two key pieces on the Machine (here and here):
Wings of Desire
* A Film by Wim Wenders
* Produced by Anatole Dauman, Screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
* Bruno Ganz as Damiel, Solveig Dommartin as Marion, Otto Sandler as Cassiel, Curt Bois as Homer, Peter Falk as Himself
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. --Blake
I’d like to get something straight from the start. I’m no great fan of moving pictures. The cinema, for me, has always been suspect. I think of it as a form of diversion that waits round every corner, an escapism we’ll never escape.
The 20th century’s great art form, a totalizing art that’s taken over so much of our lives--to assess its influence is almost impossible for us. We’ve grown up inside it, we live our lives under its spell. Unlike the great art forms of the past, cinema seems mostly a means of avoiding life, or snuffing life out. Its flickering images are too compelling; we’re too easily taken in by such devastating visual powers. And the powers that cinema lends us are nearly always a sham. What are we left with after the credits run? We’ve been “entertained,” and wait for the next fix.
Although the cinema certainly matters to me (my point here, after all, is that it’s impossible for it not to matter) and although I’m often compelled by a particular movie for the two hours I watch it, it’s rare that a film will answer the demands that I bring, say, to reading. It’s rare a film forces me to widen my thoughts the way certain novels do. There are few movies, in other words, that actually thrill me beyond the experience of watching, that make me see something new in relation to spiritual life or think something new in relation to the problem of being human.
Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is the only film of these few that’s made me want to write about it. It’s the only film I return to, and muse over.
For me Wings of Desire is not just Wenders’ masterpiece, but one of the peaks of cinema. If the art of cinema has a Divine Comedy, it must be this single film by Wenders.
Never has a film given such compelling answers to such pressing questions. Not clearcut answers, but paradoxical, ambiguous ones. That a filmmaker can bring such existential problems to such immediate, tangible presence is a thing to wonder over. Wenders makes these questions drive every scene in his film.
Is there a spiritual realm behind the material existence we experience every day? If so, what are the relations between spiritual and material? Is human history a parade of disasters finally leading nowhere (or leading, perhaps, to some terminal disaster)? Does anyone hear our voices? Do our voices resonate with some divine Word or words? Our triumphs and perils--are they connected to some ultimate purpose, part of some cosmic conflict, or are they meaningless? And finally: If a spiritual realm does exist, why would it concern itself with us? Is it in any meaningful way intermingled with us?
Wenders’ film stands apart. It manages to convey the immediacy of such questions to modern life. Wings of Desire is bizarre, in a wry, humorous way, but at the same time utterly serious. Wenders’ genius was to make a film both compellingly realistic, as a documentary of life in modern Berlin, and convincingly metaphysical, as a tale of the angels in charge of watching over the great city.
Wenders collaborated on the film with Austrian novelist Peter Handke, and it’s clear that Handke’s particular genius is behind much of the lyricism. One of Handke’s books I treasure is a collection of his notebook jottings, titled The Weight of the World in English translation. One can hear in his aphorisms the same writerly genius that wrought some of the film’s finest dialogues.
Wings of Desire develops the tension that holds between angels and humans, examining the distance between their separate realms and the yearning that would bridge that distance. The angelic realm is particularly fascinating here because it is one we haven't ever glimpsed in such a tactile way. Wenders’ angelic realm doesn't exactly conform to traditional ideas of angels.
Though his angels hover over Berlin and can move in and around it at will, though they can enter any room or office and observe the people there, they also overhear the thoughts that run through individuals’ heads. The viewer too hears these thoughts as voiceovers.
We learn that the angels have been preparing for this job of overseeing since the beginning of time. The two we meet as characters have in fact been present over this same plot of ground since well before the city arose, even since before human history. At first they merely awaited the arrival of “the one created in our image,” i.e. man. Then, after the earliest humans arrived on the scene, their waiting took on a different character.
Human beings in this film come forth as a result of evolution, but they come forth destined to fulfill a spiritual potential. Wenders’ myth of men and angels thus strays from the orthodox religious accounts, but has, to be sure, its parallel with orthodoxy as well.
Having watched human beings from the beginning, the angels in some ways understand us better than we understand ourselves. In particular they understand how we reach for what is spiritual, how we sense but can’t quite enter into the spiritual realm just beyond us. This understanding, however, doesn’t necessarily imply an intellectual superiority. Although their realm overlaps with ours, and although they can read our thoughts, there remains the barrier, a barrier experienced as such by both sides.
We humans cannot see the angels and cannot normally converse with them. We may even doubt their existence. For their part, they cannot know what life really is for us, what it feels like. Wenders gives us their world in black and white and makes it clear that they can never really touch things in a human way. The coldness or warmth, color, taste, texture of things--these remain beyond them. Being that they transcend time, they cannot really know time either. They cannot know its human meaning. Intellectually, they may know that man lives in the present, that man’s present is ever running out, ever dragging him toward death. They know this, as a matter of fact, but they don't know what it feels like to actually live within it.
The angels’ curiosity about the true lives of men leads to desire. Their lack of real life, of the tragic feel of life, eventually leads some of them to want to shake off their eternity and join man in his time-bound state. The desire of the angels to fall is Wenders' most brilliant twist. Not to fall like Lucifer, by a denial of God, but to fall through a need for human warmth, through a curiosity or empathy for human life. The angels, in their perfection, fall in love with man, with his compelling imperfection. One may say the film is a gloss on Blake’s maxim: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Wenders makes of this love a beautiful meditation on the worldly and the divine.
It's through the dialogues of the two angels Damiel and Cassiel (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) that we learn of their long waiting for man’s gestation. We learn also of their current task, their calling: to witness the development in man of “spirit.” Thus Damiel and Cassiel watch over the lives of Berliners and keep note of what they see and hear. Having to testify to man’s spiritual reach, they must gather evidence of it.
One of the most telling dialogues as regards Damiel and Cassiel’s work takes place when they meet to share notes. It’s evident that the two occasionally make reports to each other of their individual observations, things they’ve seen and heard as they each wandered around Berlin. They are seated in a car on display in a car dealer’s showroom, invisible to the mortals around them. Cassiel first takes out a small notebook and begins giving the standard readings:
CASSIEL: Sunrise and 7:22 a.m. Sunset at 4:28 p.m. Moonrise at [. . . .] Twenty years ago today a Soviet jet fighter crashed into the lake at Spandau. Fifty years ago there were the Olympic Games. Two-hundred years ago Blanchard flew over the city in a balloon.
DAMIEL: Like the fugitives the other day.
CASSIEL: And today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man, walking, slowed down, and looked over his shoulder into space. At post office 44, a man who wants to end it all today pasted rare stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each. He spoke English with an American soldier--the first time since his schooldays--and fluently. A prisoner at Plotzenzee, just before ramming his head against the wall, said: 'Now!' At the Zoo U-Bahn station, instead of the station's name, the conductor suddenly shouted: 'Tierra del Fuego!'
DAMIEL: Nice.
CASSIEL: In the hills, an old man read the Odyssey to a child. And the young listener stopped blinking his eyes. . . . And what do you have to tell?
DAMIEL: A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy who described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and the astonished teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence. . . . It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod. . . . Whenever we did participate, it was only a pretense. Wrestling with one of them, we allowed a hip to be dislocated, in pretense only. We pretended to catch a fish. We pretended to be seated at the tables. And to drink and eat. . . . Not that I want to plant a tree or give birth to a child right away. But it would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper. . . . To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'.
This dialogue begins as a lyrical testimony to the ways in which man's spirit seeks to break through the pragmatic weight of everyday life. The train conductor who shouts “Tierra del Fuego!” and the man who sends his farewell letters each with a rare stamp from his collection are both kicking against the limits of the mundane. But by the dialogue’s end the focus has shifted in the other direction. Damiel’s yearning for the weight of the world brings him to make almost equally lyrical evocations of what he imagines human life to be like: “To have a fever. . . . Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all.”
It is in this dialogue, in its contrast between the two kinds of yearning, human and angelic, that the film affirms its theme. It is a heterodox theology of sorts, or at least angelology, that suggests a necessary and permanent tension between beings of pure spirit, on the one hand, and we humans who commingle spirit and matter, on the other. It regards the lack one suffers without the other.
This is not orthodox Christianity, certainly, but it is close. The film offers a far-reaching heuristic that points to certain of the fundamental Christian mysteries.
Wenders further develops the integration of these two sides through the motif of falling. We humans have long imagined that transcending the limits of our earthbound lives meant rising up: if we could only take flight, all that is banal or merely mortal would be left behind. First, we would fly like the birds, escaping the clutches of family and the law, crossing over walls and borders. Who could pursue us? Then, taking this imagined flight further, we might literally succeed in ascending to Heaven, crossing over from time into eternity, leaving death behind on the surface of a fallen, corrupted earth.
The dream of flight and its concomitant fear of falling is incarnated in the figure of Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a once-aspiring trapeze artist about to give her very last performance. The small-time circus Marion works in is going to close down for lack of money. She knows very well she’ll have to return to waitressing: her dream of rising up through her art was a delusion. But there is more that nags her before her last night. Trapeze is a dangerous art, and what if, her very last time above the crowd, she should lose her composure and fall and break her neck? Along with her coming fall from the ideal life as a circus artist, there is also the grim possibility of a literal fall, one that is frighteningly material.
The angel Damiel, in his growing desire to fall into humanity, grows increasingly fascinated with Marion. We see her through his eyes and hear her thoughts through his ears. Eventually Damiel will truly fall from his angelic state and come together with her.
What does it mean that the film’s last scene shows Marion again practicing trapeze while Damiel, erstwhile angel, holds the rope that anchors her to earth? She didn’t need to renounce her art after all. A new balance between heaven and earth is established, a balance this time effected through the love between man and woman.
Wenders charges theological speculation with romance, with Eros, and vice versa. He gives us a love story with a subtle cosmic significance. There’s no love story like it, in film or modern literature, that I know of.
Falling. Scenes of falling are everywhere in this movie, but it is only Damiel’s falling for Marion that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The other cases of falling include auto accident, film stunt (a fake sort of falling), suicide (a young man leaps from a building) and the angel Cassiel’s pathetic attempt to experience what that suicide must have felt like. Having been unable to prevent it, he’s led to a confused empathy: he will repeat the young man’s suicide by himself falling from Golden Else’s shoulder atop the Victory Column. But since Cassiel is both immortal and weightless, his fall can be nothing like true suicide.
Cassiel, in fact, offers the all-around professional angel: the angel as mid-level management. In each instance he lacks Damiel’s grace and sympathy. He’s closer to abstract intelligence and further from creative, living being. In the same meeting with Damiel quoted above, we learn that what most attracts Cassiel to the idea of falling is the possibility of experiencing evil. Cassiel, as angels go, is in a more Luciferian mode, more in the mode of the angel classically understood. Is Damiel, then, in a mode closer to Christ?
Wenders doesn’t stress the notion that Damiel might be somehow Christlike, unless it is in his interactions with children. One way we may think of him as Christlike is in the sense rendered by a rewritten, pared down John 3:16: “For Damiel so loved the world that he gave his eternity in order to be with man.” Which is quite pared down indeed, though the parallel is strong enough that one cannot neglect it. Damiel, in any case, is more Christlike than Cassiel, if only because he is more human; he is animated more by love than by whatever it is that animates Cassiel.
Love, transcendence, human history, mortality: these themes taken up by Wenders give his film a potentially epic character. Not epic in the Hollywood sense, but epic in the traditional sense of a story of foundations: the story of the heroic struggles that defined us.
The theme of epic story is made explicit through the character of the despairing old storyteller (Curt Bois), the old Berliner who is at the same time a kind of would-be Homer. His criticism of the world around him is familiar. According to him, the possibilities of wonder, of storytelling, are finished: men have become both too sophisticated and too impoverished through their scientific knowledge; they’ve lost the world through their destructive know-how. Many of us will sympathize with this Homer.
Where are my heroes? Where are you, my children? Where are my own, the dull-witted, the first, the original ones? . . . Name me, Muse, the immortal singer. Who, abandoned by his mortal listeners, lost his voice. How, from being an angel of storytelling, he became an organ-grinder, ignored or mocked. Outside, on the threshold of no-man's land.
The no-man’s land he wanders are the dead zones and nearly dead zones bordering the (still standing) Berlin Wall. He is looking for the location of Potsdammer Platz, which has been effaced by the changes brought about by the war and then the division of the city between East and West.
Wenders’ lamenting Homer is a figure for those among us who see our advancements as only alienating us further from the authentically human. Our lament is implicitly criticized by Wenders. For in the very same city where the old storyteller wanders distraught there is occurring “a story of new ancestors”--namely the story of the fall of Damiel and his love for Marion. And if I love this film so much it’s because Wenders, in his magnificent artistry, is nearly convincing. One is nearly brought round to believing that, yes, it is possible to tell stories about our world that might matter to us as much as the ancient stories mattered: those, say, of Adam and Eve, or Odysseus.
Marion had dreamed of a man in her sleep, a man who came to her. In fact it was Damiel who, in his angelic form, was lying in her bed by her side. When Damiel finally falls, a day or two later, he comes to the pub where Marion goes to dance. He comes to find her, only her. But it is she who approaches the bar where he's waiting. The two turn to each other and Marion, recognizing the face from the dream, begins her monologue about how, finally, things are getting “serious.” Following the drama of Damiel and Cassiel, Marion’s monologue is the lyrical high point of the film. She speaks it just inches from Damiel, a man she’d never before seen in the flesh; she speaks it with halting confidence, a frankness and softness that mean he is only to listen, to hear from her mouth the meaning of their new love. I’ll finish by quoting her monologue in full:
It's time to get serious. . . . I was often alone, but I never lived alone. When I was with someone I was often happy. But I also felt it's all a matter of chance. These people are my parents, but it could have been others. Why was that brown-eyed boy my brother, and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform? The taxi driver's daughter was my friend, but I could just as well have embraced a horse's head. I was with a man. I was in love. But I could just as well have left him there, and continued on with the stranger who came toward us. . . . Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No, don't give me your hand, and look the other way. . . . I think there's a new moon tonight. No night is more peaceful. No blood will be shed in the whole city. . . . I never toyed with anyone. And yet, I never opened my eyes and thought: 'This is it.' . . . It's finally getting serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely. Neither when I was alone, nor with others. I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means at last I am whole. Now I can say it because today I am finally lonely. No more coincidence. . . . The new moon of decision. I don't know if destiny exists, but decision does exist. Decide. Now we are the times. Not only the whole city, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are more than just two. We personify something. We are sitting in the People's Plaza, and the whole plaza is filled with people, who all wish for what we wish for. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You're holding the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours. That of man and woman. It will be a story of giants. Invisible, transposable. A story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone on the plaza. Last night I dreamt of a stranger. Of my man. Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.
Response to a letter speculating on America’s drift from Christian faith
Dear … :
I agree with some of your analysis of the why here. At least in immediate terms. You evoke a shift away from the faith that’s occurred over the past couple generations--reaching, say, back to the 1980s. And it works. But only to a degree.
My own framework is different. For me the shift not so much a matter of the choices of younger Americans against older, recently dominant generations.
Yes, it sure looks like what we have in America is the mass of the population making a conscious, informed choice for freedom and self-determination against the religious strictures and judgmentalism of the 1950s. But I don’t think masses in general make really “conscious, informed choices.” I think rather they are molded by the Zeitgeist, which gives them justifications for the worldview they adopt. This is true in every culture, and it’s true for ours. It’s true for both educated and uneducated. Among the highly educated only a very small minority will ever challenge currently fashionable thinking.
So we in America assume we are following our desires and that those desires are self-chosen, but the truth is we’ve absorbed most of our desires from others. In this respect consumer behavior (the burning desire for some new fashion or product for example) is a microcosm of human behavior in general. Even including our choice of “beliefs” or ideological positions. For most of us, we don't so much choose our beliefs as mimic the beliefs of people we admire. We are monkeys.
The question for me, then, is somewhat different. What social forces led younger generations to "choose" as they did? The answer to that is complicated, and I'll hardly be able to address it in one email. But I can give some hints as to how I see this "choice."
When the writers cited in that Substack post underline that the West has replaced Christianity with a Void, what they mean is that our culture has made the Desiring Self the origin of all values. “Woe to you if you offend my Desiring Self!” This may well stand as one of the Ten Commandments of our new national religion.
You point out that "everyone worships something," but the problem with the Desiring Self is that it can’t be a sane object of worship--or rather, the circularity of such worship means the culture is bowing down to a Void. Worshipping oneself is an illness, not a civilizational model.
We Americans believe we champion freedom, and we do, but what has happened beginning in the last century is that our concept of freedom has shifted radically. The Founders of the 18th century, and really all of the historical West, would look at our way of talking about freedom and immediately see a glaring problem.
Notice that we don’t use the word “liberty” so much anymore. We use “freedom” to mean the same thing. But what we mean is something different. The shift in terminology here is a tell.
Most ancient philosophers and most thinkers up through yesterday would look at our contemporary, “supremely free” Americans and insist: “No, you are not free.”
Why not? Because almost all thinkers from the western past recognized that one can be enslaved in multiple ways. One particularly destructive kind of enslavement was to be slave to one’s own desires. Thus liberty, in the original formulation, includes freedom from being led around by the nose by one’s own urges and whims. An adult who self-defines by what he desires or what gives him kicks (whether money, or sexual behavior, or fame) is not free.
Yes, the mid-20th century largely invented “the teenage years,” or rather made a big thing of them. It then immediately proceeded to extended them. I’d say, more or less, that our invention of the teenager ended by extending adolescence first to age 22, then to age 26, and now indefinitely. Why not be a 30-something teenager? It’s called Sex and the City. Why not be a 60-something teenager? Who can criticize you? “I have a right to fulfill my desires. If you say otherwise, you are OPPRESSIVE. You are HARMING me.”
Our culture is everywhere therapeutic in orientation, much of this arising in the wake of Freud. We equate health with being liberated from the harmful “repression” that civilization imposed on us. Civilization is the problem we must be cured of. We believe this without being really conscious of it, which is to say that it's an axiomatic belief inculcated in us through education, film and music, pop psychology--it underpins everything.
What nobody seems to notice here is that this Freudian axiom ultimately means that barbarism is identical to health. And since we can't avoid enculturation, i.e. civilization, we are in a double bind that is now making our whole culture ill.
Although most people now reject Freud on most things, and don't read him anymore, we still live in the house he built. We're haunted by a grandfather of sorts, who's set us walking in therapeutic circles.
Of course our invention and then extension of the teenage years is also a luxury, possible only because of our stellar economic power following WW II. But if you look back at my point about freedom vs. liberty, you will see the cost. There is everywhere a kind of enslavement. To what? Not to the Christian God, not to the Nation, not to the Family Clan, but to one’s own circular round of frantic desiring.
This is the Void they are writing about. And if it's dangerous for us as individuals, it's also dangerous for us as a civilization.
Our cultural industries are happy to keep dangling ersatz fulfilments in front of this Void, whether in the form of lifestyle upgrades, sexual identities, political posturing, etc. From The New Yorker to pop music trends to vibes-based campaigns for the presidency, all of it has the same tedious character.
Some of it is sophisticated. Certainly many of the cultural producers in question have high levels of “education.” But to the extent they continue to believe in ever-expanding self-definition and freedom, they’re shallow. They’re not asking the meaning of human being, the meaning of our being here, but rather planning the Next Thing. Because they take it for granted that we are actually heading somewhere, toward greater self-autonomy and justice and “liberation.” It’s a hollow utopianism too frantically busy to question itself. A narcissist on a merry-go-round flanked by mirrors.
These points might clarify what I meant at the beginning by my different framework. I’m not looking at a shift of generations that have made "choices" so much as a wider historical malaise that's resulted from dominant cultural trends. What I see is the unfolding of a certain perversion in western ideas of what our liberty is, or what it’s for.
Some argue that this perversion was already baked into the cake of our 18th century Enlightenment project, i.e. it’s already there in our Founding. I’m not so sure of that. I think most of the problem stems from a warping of what used to be the western left, and the rise of this new warped leftism to the status of dominant faith. But these are complicated questions.
You ask what Christianity has to offer young people facing these major shifts. I’d say what it offers is what it has always offered. I notice that you mostly seem to define Christianity in terms of those things in the sexual revolution to which it said No. This makes sense, but then again, you will understand that this only makes sense in the present, a present that lives under a different religious dispensation, the religion of the Desiring Self. Of course the thing we will first notice about Christianity is that it says No to some key part of this new religion.
“Christianity is obsessed with sex!” we say.
Imagine a tribe that lives by pig farming coming to a Jewish village. “These people--their religion is all about pork! They’re obsessed with it!”
That’s what the accusation looks like to me. A culture that worships the Desiring Self and generates constant new niche sexual identities, making these identities the center of individual meaning--this culture accuses Christians of being obsessed with sex?
I must admit, however, that if Christianity is viewed this way by current generations, it likely isn’t only because of their new religion. The particular kind of Protestantism that dominated mid-20th century America shares some of the blame. That Protestantism had jettisoned much in Christianity and ended up with an easy-peasy bourgeois version of the faith that managed to make sexual sins the only sins one should condemn. This was not all American Protestants, of course, but was a defining tendency of the national faith.
Perhaps there’s little surprise in such a development. Though pride is the primal Christian sin, pride and greed were endemic to America during those years of expansion. In our capitalist culture, they were even touted as virtues.
But that American Protestantism was only one iteration of Christianity. It was recognizably Christian, yes, but rather hypocritical, no? The tragedy is that because of the flaws and manias of that version, the whole has been rejected. Baby thrown out with bathwater.
I have much more I could write about, sure. But I hope this gets at some of how I see the new American religion vs. what came before. I don’t at all think we’re getting closer to the truth, nor do I think we’re flourishing as a culture. Quite the contrary. We are sick. We are lost and groping in a Void. Because the Desiring Self is not the meaning of the universe.
"And the Sons of God Saw the Daughers of Men That They Were Fair," Daniel Chester French, 1923
In 1950, faced with the odd fact that we still had no solid evidence of alien life, physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked: “Where is everybody?” His question became the basis of “the Fermi paradox”. In brief: Given the size and age of the universe, there should be intelligent life out there, yet we’d found not a trace. Why not?
Belatedly responding to Fermi’s question, Mary Harrington writes in UnHerd that we’ve likely been having encounters with intelligent alien life all along. Her reading is that many encounters which in other cultures have been interpreted as religious experiences were likely examples of what we moderns would call “alien encounters”. So were the beings in question spirits, gods, or aliens? Harrington doesn’t come down on one side or another. How to define beings that seem to come from another dimension is for Harrington largely a matter of semantics.
Harrington here engages in a brand of conjecture now common among writers. After former intelligence official and “whistleblower” David Grusch last year claimed the US possesses partially intact alien craft, there’s been an explosion of such online speculation.
Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher has taken up studying these questions, and points out repeatedly in his recent posts that some of the most sophisticated tech specialists in the US now consider UAP/UFO phenomena to be evidence not of physical aliens, but of spiritual beings of some sort. Dreher thinks they may be onto something. In a Substack post last week he addresses the now nagging frequency of alien abduction reports, quoting one researcher's thoughts on victim reports of alien/human hybrids. He hints that the famously troubling Nephilim verses in the biblical book of Genesis may be recording similar phenomena, taking the "sons of God" in that passage to be fallen angels.
A few questions immediately arise: Is there any orthodox Christian tradition that would assert that angels, fallen or not, can physically interbreed with humans? Are angels physical creatures? On the other hand, thinking of Grusch's claims on the US possessing debris of alien craft, do fallen angels require physical vehicles to move about? Is this perhaps part of their punishment?
These are just a few of the hurdles that arise when one seeks to read contemporary alien reports through a Christian lens, or when one applies the alien lens to biblical texts.
I respect both these writers, especially Dreher, whose books have helped us Christians navigate the postmodern Flood. But in my view Dreher’s new speculations go overboard in a way that isn’t helpful. The real problem is not that stories of alien encounters are somehow pulpy or low brow, but that there are much more plausible ways to interpret the Nephilim verses in Genesis. There’s simply no need for recourse to this kind of “interbreeding” with current cultural fixations. It ultimately does damage to the integrity of Scripture.
Before getting to the Nephilim verses, I should indicate where I’m coming from. I’m Catholic. I recognize Scripture as the inspired word of God. I believe it contains revealed truths, the essentials of our relations to God. Nonetheless I also recognize that all the biblical texts were written by humans, in human languages, and that one can trace from the Old to the New Testament an unfolding and developing understanding as regards what it means to believe in one God. I consider this theological unfolding to be part and parcel of revelation. It is not in my mind at all problematic.
On the question of intelligent alien life, I’m agnostic. I understand that, statistically speaking and according to current scientific understanding, life elsewhere in the universe is extremely likely. The search for evidence of such life is a valid scientific endeavor. That said, our culture’s framing of this endeavor, the mass enthusiasm, doesn’t inspire confidence. Such mass enthusiam can be exploited. Smart observers will thus remain skeptical of revelations or leaks from the US government, especially in the current political climate.
But that's a matter for a different time. We’ve already one thorny problem to wrestle with.
The key Nephilim verses appear in Genesis chapter 6:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. … The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
The Hebrew term Nephilim itself is a matter of debate among scholars. It's often been translated “giants”, though the word contains a suggestion of fallenness. The immediate theological problem posed by the verses, however, should be obvious to any Christian or indeed any believing Jew. As follows: If there is one God, who are the “sons of God”? Are they in fact gods? If so, there isn't only one God. So what, finally, can the verses refer to?
The Nephilim verses are mysterious, but not all that mysterious. There’s a very plausible interpretation, one that poses no threat to revealed Christian dogma or lessens the sacred character of Scripture. Still, in order to understand this interpretation, we need to put ourselves outside the modern western frame of mind.
We modern Christians are monotheists, and when we begin to do theology, we are inevitably philosophical monotheists, which means that our understanding of God comes down to us inflected through a particular philosophical tradition, the Greek metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. This is true for all of us, whether we know it or not.
And the ancient Israelites, those who wrote the Hebrew scriptures? They wrote well before any such philosophical monotheism had developed. Further, it is clear to anyone who studies the texts carefully that rigorous monotheism, as a belief, was rather late among them.
Yes, I do mean the Israelite scribes and inspired men who wrote the texts of our Bible. Many of the earliest texts indicate monolatry (a stress on the worship of one God) rather than strict monotheism in anything like our sense.
So for these ancient Israelites, what was the status of other gods? It was in fact unclear. It was only later, among the prophets, that the assertion appears: "These gods don't exist in any sense." We first find this assertion in the prophetic critique of idolatry: the claim that those worshiping Canaanite or other deities (which was, uh, disastrously common among the Israelites) were worshiping mere objects of wood or stone. But this assertion--that the other gods have no existence at all--is not there from the beginning.
Now consider these writers of the text of Genesis. They are culturally surrounded by various polytheisms, they are in fact culturally intermingled with these polytheisms, to the extent that their extended families include those who worship these gods. And consider that in documented polytheistic religions from Sumer to the Levant and into the Mediterranean, the belief in demigods is integral to tribal history. Certain of the ancient heroes of the people were considered the offspring of gods. Among the Greeks, who left us a more complete textual record, we have Heracles, Minos, Achilles, many others. The ancient Israelites all knew similar tales of epic heroes or founders who were demigods, and these tales were the sacred history of the peoples the Israelites regularly interacted with.
So in the earliest stages, for an Israelite committed to the worship of God, what was the status of these other gods and their offspring? The Nephilim tale presents one possible answer, a way for the Israelite to both assert the greatness and centrality of God while explaining the fact of all these violent heroes of old, descended from divine/human intercourse. Quite simply: "These gods were somehow sons of the True God, the Creator, but they were wayward sons. They were seduced by women, and their offspring were violent and destructive. Which is why the True God put an end to it."
Yes, the claim that these gods existed at all, that they were somehow "sons of God", that's heretical nonsense according to philosophical monotheism. But like it or not, it's there in the text, a text that is easily explained by cultural context: first, that the Israelites were much more monolatrous than truly monotheistic; second, that they were in conflict and perilously intermingled with polytheists that believed in demigods.
The evidence of Scripture is clear enough on this point. Monotheism developed slowly and against much opposition from all classes of God's chosen people. Up through the divided monarchy and the fall of Judah in 587 BC, those loyal to Israel's God struggled to establish a more rigorous monolatry in the face of a generalized polytheistic practice. This was struggle enough. Scriptural texts record a wide range of positions on what Canaanite and other gods were: whether they were nonexistent, some kind of demonic beings, or simply gods that Israel's God would defeat, one finds texts backing up each of these interpretations.
Scandalized by the mention of "sons of God" as potentially divine beings, certain Church Fathers offered an alternative reading of the Nephilim verses. They insisted that "sons of God" referred to the Sethites (the good descendants of Seth) who were seduced by the daughters of the Cainites, thus begetting evil offspring of great power. But in my view, we have no reason not to face what is a more persuasive reading of what the Nephilim verses actually say. I accept that Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, but also can see that human understanding (and lack of understanding) shows itself. How could it be otherwise? Scripture is not a .PDF downloaded directly from the Divine Mind. It is the result of an unfolding revelation and slowly developing relationship between God and humanity. Again, this aspect of a slow unfolding, of things seen "in a glass darkly", is an integral part of the meaning of revelation. It's part of what makes the Old Testament crucial.
This is why I see no reason for recourse to the Nephilim verses when looking at alien abduction reports. These are modern cultural phenomena, and don't relate to my religious understanding as a Christian. More, I don’t think they relate to any sensible scholarly approach to Genesis. On both counts, to read biblical texts in this direction is an affront to the integrity of the Bible.
This integrity should be seen in two complementary registers. Scriptural texts are to be respected beyond all others because they contain divine relevation, but they also are to be respected because they trace the fits and starts of our human understanding of the one God who reveals himself to us.
Regarding the Nephilim verses, a grasp of the cultural context and the difference between early Israelite monolatry and our later monotheism are enough to make sense of the evidence. The writers of Genesis were certainly not recording reports of abduction or attempts at interbreeding. They were responding polemically to the religious and historical claims of the peoples around them, recasting their pagan demigod founders as misbegotten offspring and an offense against the one true God.
Conclusion: Why did I post this?
Mary Harrington and Rod Dreher are both supremely sharp readers of the contemporary mess. Harrington is a Christian, though I believe her commitment as Christian is relatively new. She calls herself a “mildly heretical Anglican”. Dreher is not a new convert by any means. I’m mostly concerned here with Dreher’s work, as it’s his sense of the cultural stakes of emerging movements that’s proved so keen for so long. He’s finishing a new book, and I know he intends a chapter on what he predicts is a rising new religion of sorts, one deeply informed by developments in AI and hopes of contact with superior intelligences. I think he may well be right about this emergent religious movement in our tech-heavy, transhumanist West. But the risk I see this time is that some of Dreher’s own formulations begin to overlap with claims being made by the very techie cultists he hopes to warn against. Thus indirectly validating the cult. To the point that myself and at least a few other readers have been near gobsmacked.
This risk is again clear in Dreher’s speculative take on the Nephilim verses. The cultist can read it and say: “See? Even important Christian writers acknowledge these aliens may be divine beings. Even Christians finally recognize they've always been making contact with us!” Which to me is a regrettable outcome because 1) it isn’t a sensible reading of the scriptural text, and 2) the alien worshippers are only encouraged.
So aside from the problem of integrity of Scripture, there's this other, more immediate problem of how one may end up indirectly feeding a movement one set out to starve.
On both the uncanny phenomena we’re already seeing from AI and the new “revelations” we’re likely to get on the alien intelligence front, it is crucial to tread very very carefully. Whenever there are plausible explanations for A, B, or C, there’s no reason to feed spiritual cocaine to kids who are already lost in addiction. And yes, by “kids” I mean everyone from billionaire Silicon Valley gurus down to … the teenager next door. Our prominent techies have precisely ZERO to teach us on spiritual realities. Their backgrounds, their techno-gnosticism, their transhumanist principles confirm their irrelevance.
Rod Dreher’s speculations on Substack are one thing, I know, and his published work another. So perhaps some of my dismay is overdone. But the issues are serious, and his work is important. If he reads this post, I’m hoping he takes it in the spirit offered.
[NB: The interpretation of the Nephilim verses I sketch out above (i.e. that they represent an Israelite polemic against polytheistic hero/demigod beliefs) is largely my own, based on study of Scripture and ancient Near-Eastern religion and literature. The polemical force of the Genesis passage has long seemed obvious to me. Still, I'm glad to find my reading buttressed by Prof. Brian R. Doak's arguments in his 2011 dissertation "The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel". Downloadable as dissertation and also published as a book.]
Most of the best writing now being done is on Substack, and one of the most astute Substack writers is NS Lyons. If you aren't reading him, you are missing out.
I’d say Lyons again scores a slam dunk with his coinage this week of “Right-Wing Progressive” (RWP). It's a spot-on designation for figures like Marc Andreesen and Elon Musk. Lyons’ analysis of the role they play, and his slight ambivalence toward them, also seem wise. Though if pressed, I'd have to say I see more danger in RWPs than any sort of ally.
I do admire Musk for many things. But Andreesen? His widely commented “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is a horror show, demonstrating the usual fatal combination. Add high IQ to philosophical shallowness to a fanatical concern with “transforming society”, and you have in by book a VDC (Verified Dangerous Crank). Now seeking investors.
Problem is, Andreeson, co-founder and partner in Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz, will have no problem getting the funds he needs for boosting whatever he sees as “transformative”. Like many in his wide-eyed tribe, this crank is gonna crank.
Amazing world the Enlightenment has put us in, no? A mad-house of fanatical busybodies. We’re stuck with them. We live in a social order where the most engaged are woke authoritarians, RWP techies, and WEF “Great Resetters”. Meanwhile, on the other side of us, the mass of normal citizens wander in a kind of frozen shock: partly dazed by entertainment and all the shiny new tech, partly dazed by the new political reality they still haven’t quite processed--i.e. their rulers in Washington and Brussels really really really don’t give a damn what they think. Or even that they exist.
“The March will Go On! Plebs stay in your lane! It won’t be yours for long!”
We faithful are stuck between fanatical activists on one side, and this mass of exhausted, titillated, angry consumer-citizens on the other.
Rod Dreher, who yesterday featured Lyons’ piece, offers a telling anecdote about his encounter with one of Lyons’ RWP types.
A few years back, I spent a couple of hours on the phone with one of the leading lights of this movement (if you can call it that), a billionaire who reached out to me (identifying me correctly as an anti-woke Christian of the Right), trying to get me on board the transhumanist project. He honestly did not understand why Christians would find transhumanism problematic. Why wouldn’t I want to improve the species? Why wouldn’t I be in favor of applying technology to breeding out flaws that lead us to sin? This man is extremely smart, very personable, and completely baffled by the things I was saying.
Isn’t that just it? We Christians are now oddballs to the extent that educated fellow westerners can’t comprehend how we view humanity. Given this is so, are these “extremely smart” people really educated? No, they are not.
All these zealots (from wokester to RWP to transhumanist) sacralize secular stuff. It’s Eric Voegelin’s “immanentize the eschaton” across the board. Yuval Noah Harari claims tech will render us “godlike” because at some level he still believes in the divine, but can’t believe in any divinity.
We Christians are lucky by comparison, but it’s going to grow ever more difficult for us in a social order full of religious zealots whose religion is their own Newest Updated Manifesto for social salvation.
Still, we’re lucky. Holding to the true faith, we needn’t sacralize politics or technology. Believing in God and the redemption promised through His Son, we emphatically do not believe in salvation through Progress. We know humanity is fallen, that evil will rear its head no matter what political arrangement is tried or what technology is developed. We know sin cannot be legislated or reformed away. Thus we do not believe in promises of utopia or transcendence here on earth. Whether through political revolution, tech, psychedelics, or sexual abandon--we are the permanent wary shoppers who aren’t buying it.
I think that is a blessing.
These others, they are not content with human reality as it is. They cannot let human reality alone, because they can do better. This is what makes them toxic. Toxic to liberty and to all that is natural in humanity.
G.K. Chesterton put it like this: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Politically and socially, we are now at the mercy of those who believe in anything. But ultimately that is not the mercy that matters.
Rod Dreher, now busy finishing his book on re-enchantment, mentioned at his Substack blog that his editor wants one strong chapter on why the fact of disenchantment is important. He asked readers for their ideas. As I consider it a crucial question, and often find myself thinking through aspects of what the West’s disenchantment means, I wrote in reply. Rod graciously posted my comments. Here I post a slightly edited version.
Disenchantment and Human Being
First, disenchantment matters because being both human and fallen, we are at risk of losing our humanity. In a high-tech, hyper-managed order like ours this risk continues to grow. I may be accused of essentialism for this claim (“You’re just assuming an ideology of the human in order to impose it”) but that doesn’t trouble me. I believe there is a created human nature, and sin means that it may be obscured or effaced to such a degree that it is practically annihilated. In not just an individual, but a whole society. We haven’t yet seen such a society, but the totalitarian systems we know of were perhaps only practice runs for what is possible. Disenchantment is the necessary first step to such annihilation of human nature.
Why is it the first step? First, because human being is a reality that is established interpersonally, a reality in relation to others and an Other. Enchantment is itself a sense of a mysterious Other that has a hand in the order of things. Disenchantment entails the breaking of that perception, or the possibility of such perception. It breaks an established relationship, our relationship with the divine. Which relationship is constitutive of the human. Thus disenchantment, as it advances, effaces the authentically human.
Though I’m Christian, I wouldn’t at all claim that Hindus or pagan Greeks or ancient Chinese, by the mere fact of their separation from the Christian faith, were in a state of effacement of human nature that approached something like annihilation. No. They were, like all of us, in sin and thus partially effaced as humans, but a relationality with the divine was maintained in each case. Not the relationality I believe to be the full and true one, but a human one even so.
We in the modern West are likely the first culture to experience the threat of a more radical effacement. And I think we now recognize it, even the non-religious among us. We sense that we may continue here as a population on the surface of the earth, yet the human will somehow be effaced among us.
This explains much of the horror of dystopian science fiction and phenomena like zombie apocalypse films. Such genres arise because of a widespread sense that we are being effaced without being actually killed.
So yes indeed, it is not true that “Life has always been like this.” That's a cope on the part of those who claim a disenchanted society like ours has a human future. Myself I’m guessing this society does not have a long-term, actually human future. Either another human order of relationality will take over (as Houellebecq imagines for Islam in Europe) or we will be effaced to the point of no longer being really human (as I think many of our transhumanists accept, or even cheer).
Western disenchantment has now spread globally. But why did the West suffer this malady first? One could answer the question in different ways (the rise of early modern science, with its attendant left-brain hypertrophy, for instance) but a glimpse of the problem in human terms is gained when we look at our founding modern myths, our liberal anthropology, in Hobbes especially. Hobbes and Locke needed to theorize man in nature, in order to explain how politics arose. Thus the myth of the “natural man” and social-contract theory. (Patrick Deneen wrote on this in his 2018 Why Liberalism Failed, but I’m not convinced by his full thesis, and in any case I’m putting the stress elsewhere.)
Absurdly, and against what we all know to be true about humans and even all primates, Hobbes claimed that man in the state of nature was … an individual man, alone against the elements and all other men. Society was founded with the first pact, an agreement among these free “natural men” not to commit violence against each other.
For Hobbes, then, society appeared among us as if among a population of bears intent on preventing mutual mauling. But the truth is quite otherwise: we humans have always been social creatures. Hobbes’ influence on modern western political thinking is enormous, but his projection of “natural man” is ill-considered nonsense. Millennia earlier Aristotle already knew: Man is a political animal. By nature.
Our liberal anthropology thus, at its roots, largely ignores family and clan. Both of which are human per se. Hobbes and other early modern thinkers did not create our disenchantment, but the myth of natural man shows it already taking root. Our liberal political orders absorbed this myth in their stress on innate individual freedom, which has brought us much good, but at great cost. We’re theorized as fundamentally unfettered individuals hoping to get as much as we can out of a recalcitrant nature before we die.
As backdrop to social contract theory of government, the "natural man" myth has had a larger impact on how westerners think of themselves than most would suspect. There’s no relationality with the divine in the myth, and part of the reason for this is that there is no relationality at all. Not even with the family or clan that every human individual in history has grown up with.
Yet strong relationships with family continued in the West after the 17th century, and a relationality with God continued for most people. Until both relationships grew more attenuated, and first we killed God (as per Nietzsche), and now we are killing the family, through an ever-growing dependence on the state.
Our relationality with the divine is akin to our relationality to others, and both are innately human. This is not merely a matter of “how to be happy”. No, even in order to “be” in any authentic human sense, we must have both kinds of relationship. Once both are lost, the human itself is increasingly lost. If disenchantment is the breaking of real human relationality, it also effects the first steps on the slippery slope to non-humanity.
OF COURSE we are experiencing existential despair and mental disorder and all manner of addictive behavior at rates that only increase the more “advanced” we become in the progressive, secular direction. Our growing alienation is baked into the cake because, seduced by the toys and the lies on offer, we also sense our humanity slipping away.
Christian re-enchantment is the necessary medicine because the God who created us is also the God who became one of us in order to redeem us from the effacement that is sin. But to take the Gospel seriously entails looking hard at our sin and facing the burden of our real relationality, then humbly accepting the gift that we certainly don’t deserve. The postmodern order loathes such seriousness and such a notion of indebtedness, whether to God or others. “My yoke is light” is not a lie--but hey, lighter still is the negative freedom of radical individual autonomy, endless diversions, and the glorious “progress” now on offer.
This is my thumbnail sense of the crisis, at least if looked at in terms of disenchantment. The mention of Hobbes and Locke is not meant to suggest that I believe the liberal political order is itself entirely to blame for this crisis. No, I think if the liberal order has wrought such havoc, it’s because we’ve allowed the negative potentials in it too much sway. We somehow came to believe it was a tool that could manage itself. The Founders knew better.
To sum up: Disenchantment is a matter of broken relationship. Since we as humans come to existence and awareness in relationship, grasping what disenchantment has done to us is also to grasp 1) what we are by nature, 2) where we’re at right now, and 3) where we’re going if we don’t soon recognize the scam.
