Looking the Beast in the Eye

Coming to Terms with the Cause of the Collapse

I have not written a post here in many months.

For one thing, I don’t see our current civilizational collapse as cute, or even as something to inspire digital “content”.

For another, I have been busy readjusting my orientation toward reality (so to speak; I don’t know what else to call it). If half of America chose this, knowing full well who and what they were choosing - if we chose and continue to choose racism, concentration camps, the end of the rule of law, and brute and boorish bullying - if this is what we said yes to, with our eyes wide open, then we’re far more contemptible than I had imagined.

The other thing, as those of you who are regular readers know, is that I was once a True Believer in the Revivalist Cult, the suburban American Catholicism of EWTN, Scott Hahn, Peter Kreeft, and all the rest, with all its apparent earnestness and intellectual mediocrity. I was in the belly of the beast. I hosted my own show on EWTN, for crying out loud! I was, in some ways, the “mascot” of the Chesterton Society. I wrote, for free, a monthly column for 14 years for a Super Catholic magazine whose purpose was to "reclaim the culture”.

Then Trump happened.

Then COVID, the refusal to mask, to vaccinate or to care for our neighbor happened.

Then the endorsement of the Big Lie happened.

Then the attempted coup of January 6 happened.

Then the coup was finalized and endorsed by the vast majority of Evangelical Protestants and Evangelicals-with-Rosaries, these same Revivalist Catholics that I had so loyally served, believing (naively, as it turns out) that they meant what they said, and not suspecting that once they “reclaimed the culture”, they would destroy it.

All of that happened.

I believed them when they said that they wanted to serve God through Truth, Beauty and Goodness. They said that all the time, and I agreed with them every time they said it; I wanted that too. I wanted to serve God and my neighbor through Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

• But they have shown that they have contempt for Truth (worshipping one who quite literally has “no truth in him”, as Jesus said of Satan; one who always lies and who is almost the Father of Lies);

• They ridicule Beauty and idolize a movement of appalling Ugliness;

• And they renounce Goodness for the sake of Power, heedless and perhaps eager for the suffering and death of millions of people of color.

And the bishops not only enable this (as they enabled child rape), they abet it and encourage it, so that the people who most believe in this monstrous orange antichrist are convinced that THEY are the righteous ones.

Anyhow, why write about this stuff? Most people on Substack and elsewhere who oppose this collapse still approach things as if this is all a form of politics, or as if the Great Unmasking never happened. We have a strange unwillingness to look this beast in the eye.

By the way, this is largely the theme of Slaughterhouse Five. Humans cannot imagine the reality of evil - either in its “banality” or in its depravity. We somehow make silly little stories about it all. And the horrors of war are turned into a heroic movie starring matinee idols.

And yet, I still pray … and I pray by reading the man who connects me most directly with God, with the Great Mystery, with the “Divine Ground of our Being” - Eric Voegelin.

There are two things of Eric Voegelin’s that I recently read that I want to share with you because they give me hope.

This is the first.

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was motivated by the antiphilosophical, and generally anticivilizational, aggressiveness of his Puritan contemporaries.

I may not be Richard Hooker, and this Substack is not Ecclesiastical Polity, but I am writing this because I am “motivated by the antiphilosophical, and generally anticivilizational, aggressiveness of my Trumpist contemporaries.”

And this is the second.

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is a man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being.

“Gnosis” is Voegelin’s shorthand for our lust for the One Ring of Power.

And, for me, as confused as I get, as regretful as I am for serving a movement in the Church that turned out to be so spiritually onanistic and so self-righteous and hypocritical - despite all this, I have to remind myself that I became Catholic and threw myself into this Super Catholic Cult because of my “love of being” (and for the mysterious source of our being); and my life is, for all my faults and misjudgments, a “loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune myself to it.”

Are you into that too? Well, then, join me in this endeavor.

And let me know if you’d like me to write more.