Understand the thoughts that a person or a nation won’t allow itself to think and you grasp something crucial about that person or nation. Find the source of the barrier that keeps either one from entertaining those forbidden thoughts and you know something even more important. As America stumbles blindly forward into an unwelcome future,…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
The Return of Religion
Somalian-born author and erstwhile New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali caused quite a flutter in several dovecotes the other day when she published an essay announcing that she had given up atheism and converted to Christianity. The Christian writers I’ve read who discussed her essay were of course pleased by it, while most of the others…
The Relevance of Tentacles
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,…
A Primer of Magical Combat
I’ve mentioned in previous essays here that our civilization’s age of reason is ending. That’s a familiar event in history. At a certain point in the life cycle of every civilization—about the time that its artistic traditions are really hitting their stride, and before political and economic centralization sets in—intellectuals become entranced with the idea…
Riding the Climate Toboggan
Every year or two on this blog I post an update on the global climate. Now and then I wonder if this is a futile effort. Outside the four notional walls of this one little blog on the fringe, and a few other equally marginal venues, the rest of the world seems to be caught…
Notes on Stormtrooper Syndrome
For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many…
Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason
Over the last month, in the course of these biweekly essays, I’ve been exploring the fear of the metaphysical realm well expressed by Naomi Wolf in one of her recent Substack posts. A more recent post by her on the same theme takes the same discussion further, in a way that deserves respect. She took…
Beyond Thaumatophobia 2: The Night Forest
Two weeks ago we explored an intriguing essay by Naomi Wolf, which pointed out that it’s no longer possible to discuss our current collective situation without saying something about metaphysical issues. That’s a gutsy thing to say these days; it’s also true. These two points are closely related. In an era where the most important…
The Myth of Modernity
A few weeks ago I took the time to reread the book that launched my current sequence of posts about enchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm’s intriguing study The Myth of Disenchantment. One test of a book’s value is whether it can handle being read more than once. Josephson-Storm’s book stands up well to that test. Each time…
Our Werewolves, Ourselves
The muse who inspires these essays is an unruly goddess. I was planning this week on picking up the threads of the sequence of posts I began at the start of this year, summing up what I’ve learned so far in my exploration of enchantment, disenchantment, and the rise and fall of civilizations, and sketching…