Creepy development in the continuing aggressive de-humanization of medicine. In the latest issue of JAMA, one of the most prestigious medical journals, a team of doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and NYU warn of the grave dangers patients face in those parts of the country where the only medical care available is provided by religiously affiliated hospitals (Catholic, Baptist, and others). This makes it so much harder for families in those neighborhoods to trans their kids! The authors dub these areas, and I swear I’m not making this up, “religious monopolies,” and brainstorm ways the federal government can destroy them.
It’s so hard to believe that They genuinely think this could be for the general good. Again and again I keep running up against the inescapable conclusion that, via the whole litany of obviously rubbish ideas now being foisted on us, the destruction of our societies is being carried out on purpose. As someone said, It’s too stupid not to be a plan. A malevolent plan. It’s in plain sight now - it’s a war on so many fronts, and the war is being waged on all of us. We will wake up very soon to find that we have sleepwalked into a full-on totalitarian nightmare. They are so close to realising their plans - before 2030, surely. Yet we are nowhere near organised to fight this… lots of people are aware, but they/we have no organisational cohesiveness or power.
I think that the world we are living in looks a lot like the one Jesus lived in, and that a very careful reading of the Gospels allows us to see the similarity between the two worlds. But I also think that one of the reasons that we are here is because we have deserted our individual, daily lives, and the small neighboring communities in our immediate vicinity in order to promote a universal, global agenda. All of us, not just our politicians either. (What are we doing here, by the way, just as an illustration ?...)
The earliest Christians won converts in a society where they were a minority by the example they set before the.... pagans. The way they led their lives was inspiring to others, and made THEM want to belong to a Christian community. So... we need to carefully cultivate living a Christian faith on a day to day basis, in order to make things change. I think that this is what Jesus' preaching was all about.
Yes, agreed Debra, very much so. But, with a major caveat: that was then, this is now. Then, society was far, far simpler, far fewer people, and the message of Jesus was radically new for most people.
Now, society is infinitely more complex, far more people, with all their cultures and ethics in our faces dividing the old West, with tech and AI spreading flatout lies, and an elite carefully cultivating a range of apparently “free” culture war opinion in a hall of mirrors. Some things are the same as ever - divide and rule - but the hall of mirrors is infinitely more complex with less obvious shades of “good” and “evil.” Also, Christianity is no longer new. For a huge % of humanity it’s “oh, that old story. You mean the one with the pedophiles and all that money and corruption and nutcases?” I fear that it will take several decades of the return of the old gods and Roman Empire-style totalitarianism for the Xr message to be cleansed and fresh and attractive again…..
No, Jules, I don't agree. To the people living during those times, society was as confusing, as complex, and why shouldn't it have been ? After all, we think that we are so much more complex and sophisticated basically because of our... "new" technology, but the universal problems of what to do with society's vulnerable members, how to transmit knowledge and craft from one generation to the next, they are TIMELESS and complex.
If you start looking at Roman texts, you will see how incredibly complex the society that Jesus was living in was. The problem of "good" and "evil" has always been a subtle one. I like to say that we don't, and can't know what we are doing when we do it. The Church fathers definitely knew this, and Man himself has known it for a very long time now.
What was totalitarian about the Roman Empire ? Not really very much. Rome laid a very light hand on its... conquests. What you call "totalitarianism" is maybe a new... unimproved ? version of what would like to pass for a universal.. GOOD NEWS ? Greece, Alexander, Rome, they all had universal ambitions that called for spreading... the good news. And the Christian faith capitalized on infrastructure that was already there, in my opinion.
I love the Christian faith. But not to the point of making me blind to what allowed it to emerge on a ..large scale ?
Yes, you’re probably right - I fell into the old trap of “back in the day life was simpler”. Sure, in many ways it was for many people - but in somewhere like Jerusalem in 30 AD, or in other urban centres, esp of Roman power, it wouldn’t have been experienced as simple. It’s true Rome ruled with a light touch (it had to, over such a large expanse!) - till you challenged it.
Very well thought out comment, but I have to disagree about Rome and it’s ‘light touch’, I think we only think that way because most of the surviving texts originated from Rome or it’s successors (like the Roman Catholic Church). .
This is what one of their enemies said of them...
Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace
I think the Romans were particularly good at what we would call coercive control, putting an idea into their subjects heads that Rome was invincible, thus obviating the need for large armies, after all if your enemy is in your head then you don’t need to field an actual army. The British Empire pulled off the same trick, dominating huge swathes of the world through mind control and cultural conditioning.
I would argue that they still do, through their replacements the Americans.
From what I have learned, the Roman army, maybe up to the Dacian conquest, and a little after, was highly disciplined, and could be ruthless in conquest : when laying siege, it offered the choice of submitting or being totally wiped out to those who stood in its way. But this was common practice at the time, and designed to bring foreign peoples into submission without a lot of bloodshed. Rome, in its earlier days, was really quite invincible, and its reputation was well earned. When real decadence set in, and the elites sought to escape military service, and the empire had to resort to more and more foreign mercenaries, then its military standards went down, and things became murkier.
But we have simplistic ideas about empire. Here where I'm living, in a non English speaking country, you can see how eager the foreign people is to be colonized by the English language, American companies and technologies. You can see how much the colonized benefit from being colonized in many respects, and especially.. IN THEIR MINDS. Where is the coercion there ? I don't see it well.
Rome through its construction, its roads, its acqueducts gave a sophisticated infrastructure to the... barbarian peoples and they were happy to have it. In France/Gaul they were very very happy to have it.
Maybe not so much in Scotland, but then the Romans didn't manage to hang on to Scotland for very long for good reasons.
My source : "Ancient Rome" by Nigel Rodgers. Highly recommended as very readable.
Love the title of your Substack article: "When the Job Descriptions for Doctors and Madmen Converge".....I suppose this insanity is all part of Obama's 2008 'fundamental transformation' of the political, philosophical underpinning of our country, but then, really, it's about the fundamental transformation of Western Civilization period......
Read your substack piece, thanks. The trans agenda has multiple aims:
- to destroy God's creation;
- to reduce fertility;
- to destroy the family;
- to destroy the mental health of younger generations;
- to confuse the gullible;
- to aid the pursuit of transhumanism (part of the 4th Industrial Revolution);
- to make people formerly known as citizens undertake humiliation rituals.
The last one is a favourite of totalitarian regimes - making people accept and parrot patent falsehoods (and you force them with 'hate crime' legislation, as well as encouraging self-censorship among their peers) is a humiliation ritual that makes them aware of their powerlessness against the regime. Same as observing 13 o'clock, as in 1984.
Jennifer Bilek is very good on the top-down nature of the imposition of trans ideology, who's behind it (billionaires, surprise, surprise) and who's funding it (same).
I'm going to relativize this comment for an historical perspective. Almost 70 years ago I was born in a southern Californian Catholic hospital to a woman who had converted to Presbyterian Protestantism, and she was terribly worried that the hospital/doctors would save the baby and not her in case there was a problem at delivery. As it turns out, there was a problem at delivery, but both of us survived. I have this vision of arriving in the world by Caesarian into the hands of a Catholic obstetrician in a Catholic hospital while both my parents were k.o. : my mother hemorraging, and my doctor father having fainted from the shock. It is not a vision that makes me very comfortable, but it puts the issues at stake on the table in a stark manner : who comes first, the (future) mother or the baby in the case that a choice has to be made ? It is unfortunate to have to frame the problem this way, but maybe at some level, it is inevitable, no ? And does society have to face the music on this one ?
I do not think that it was pure chance that led my mother to hemorrage in the hospital either. I think that, unbeknownst to her conscious self, she was the seat ? of powerful and conflicting forces (and emotions) expressing themselves at a momentous moment in her life, the moment she gave birth. And as human beings we are all forced to reckon with these forces and emotions that are not comfortable or reassuring to us at all.
My father, born in the 1920's was a Christian, church going believer and a top notch, highly respected medical scientist. He did not live in a world in which belonging to the Christian community necessarily excluded belonging to the scientific one, or vice versa. His world was much more... tolerant, as mine WAS, too.
I wouldn't call it "holy..." Used to think it was, then I went to a concert and found out that no, lots of voices together sound good even if you're singing Weird Al.
Well, it’s not exactly an Indian summer because it’s always this hot here in Saudi Arabia, but the weather is finally beginning to abate. I think it might even finally drop into double digits this week - here’s hoping.
And in some happy news to share, my second book was just published! It’s a metaphysical mystery set in the Arabian Gulf and I’ve been celebrating the launch this week!
I just read your article at FPR - wonderful! Brought me right back to discovering the Narnia series at the library as a 12-year-old. And then reading the books to my children! Thanks!
You may have to call and ask for a morning visit. I think they'd go out of their way to welcome you as you have drawn attention to Roerich. Hope it works out!
You’ve sent me deliciously on a side track to look up Roerich ….. what an amazingman and his wife Helena sounds equally interesting …… wish I was in New York . Going to order her letters from the library …. Such a successful relationship and such inspiring lives
I've really been enjoying Ted Gioia's work of late, particularly some of his posts about AI. Worth checking out "The Honest Broker" on Substack if any of you haven't yet. Paul, I imagine you already read him, but if not, I highly recommend.
Separately, I went to a concert (more like a small show, the venue was in a little theater in Evanston, IL and held maybe 100 people) last Tuesday, and it's the first time I've seen live music in a little while. It was incredibly refreshing, and in the time of algorithm-driven, curated music, it felt a little countercultural to watch someone create and perform on stage with just a guitar.
Thanks for the recommendation! It took me a second to remember where I had seen the name Ted Gioia. I read his book Healing Songs in preparation for a presentation I gave during Lent at my parish. Didn't know he had a substack
“An exorcist in Rome told me that Europe and North America have been protected for a long time, even amid our de-Christianization, because of the longtime presence of Christian belief and worship among us. But, he said, supernature abhors a vacuum, and where the true God is not honored and worshiped, the evil one will move in to reclaim territory. We are seeing that accelerate now. Imagine: a small city in Texas has a popular altar consecrated to a demon, in the middle of a market. This would have once been unthinkable. No longer.”
Powerful in the context of Paul’s point that something has to sit on the throne of any given culture…. This seems to be the way deeply foolish people seem to want to push it. Dreher’s whole piece is fascinating and well worth reading.
"And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed ..." see 2 Thessalonians 2:7-10. I have heard this "restraining" (or impediment) understood this way from an Orthodox Biblical scholar I respect
Thank you. I see that I will need to look this up and pore over it...
I have come to understand that the Eucharist is a restraining force, basically because it is 1) authorized Christian SACRIFICE and 2) it brings THE PEOPLE TOGETHER into a community. Much lawlessness arrives because people are not BOUND TOGETHER into a community which gives them limits, and the strength to control/restrain themselves.
I was thinking is the machine trying to control us or make us uncontrollable. If it's a power and principality, some sort of demonic manifestation of antichrist then does it really care? If we are subjugated by it or are at war against it, does it lead to the same place? I guess that would depend on how we fight that war. So In the end, is it only seeking human destruction in whatever maniacal form it can achieve it? If one's purpose is only destruction then there really doesn't need to be a sophisticated plan.
Behind every great man is a great woman! Sending my respect to your wife on her lovely and very productive looking garden; from another woman whose nails are dirty and root cellar is getting fuller!
We're just having a perpetual August here in the US midwest. It has become like a malingering guest at a dinner party where the hosts are doing everything they can to usher everyone out and go to bed.
We've not a decent rain (save for the odd passing storm that rains buckets for 10 minutes over a 1/2 square mile then disappears) since July, and are now (at least in the Ohio valley) in our worst drought since 1988 (one I remember well). The long term forecast shows not even a slight prospect for rain for at least the next 10 days. It is still far too hot for September too, even as the days are shortening. Dust and goldenrod pollen are everywhere, with nothing to rinse them away.
It is a summer that simply will not take a hint and head for the door.
Same here in Ohio, selling off a few cows, already feeding hay, buying hay and making bigger holes in the creek for them to drink. My pepper plants are living their best life, crazy amounts and I am running out of canning jars!
Last week, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky opened an exhibit on Harlan Hubbard -- painter, writer, and creator of a life very much outside the bounds of normal Western industrial society. He and his wife lived aboard a shantyboat on the Ohio River for a few years. They then settled down in Payne Hollow, in Trimble County, Kentucky, into a life of farming, painting, music, and, by our view, simple living. Largely outside what Paul calls The Machine.
He seems like someone readers of The Abbey of Misrule would vibe with. The exhibit is excellent. The curator, Jessica Whitehead, has a biography of Hubbard coming out in February, called Driftwood. Years ago, Wendell Berry wrote an excellent biography of him.
If you happen to be in Louisville, check out the exhibit. If not, Hubbard's books, or Berry's biography, are excellent reads. I'm sure Whitehead's book will be superb too.
Hi, Paul and family! Just wanted you to know how much we appreciate your substack. We also track down any videos we can find of your appearances. We got a laugh about one of them when you mentioned watching Tremors. That is one we dig out every now and then. We will be interested to see your conversation with Rod Dreher. We read his articles and just finished the one about demon worship at the flea market. We also read your article about The Void, wow! Things in the world are heating up, wherever you look you can see the meltdown of our culture. The spiritual void really is like a vacuum. In Colossians 3:1-4 the Apostle Paul exhorts us to set our minds on things above. And pray for wisdom from above as James tell us. Keep up with your writings and appearances, we do like the videos you post from your home. Or place has a very similar look to yours, cosmos, foxgloves, sunflowers, a poly tunnel and some woods areas, what a blessing! Yours in Christ, Brian and Cathy
What's on my mind? Besides the fact that I benefit so much from you, Paul, and thank. you. Your example as a writer and as an Orthodox thinker encourages me.
This poem by Yeats, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
We’ve had the higher than usual temperatures here in England too, but also some much lower than usual. The weather is all over the place these days. I miss the predictably of the seasons, or even having proper seasons. Every season now seems to have a fair amount of just ‘wet and windy’.
I have a question which is this: what’s the harm in a little AI?
I’d love to know your answers as I navigate this brave new world. Several of my friends are starting to embrace it and recommend I implement it into my life. It’s challenging to tell rationalists that I follow my intuition (which screams at me to not give chatgpt my info or use AI by choice) because the rationalists don’t know what intuition is anymore.
I feel strongly averse to AI, even when used in seemingly innocuous ways, like to to generate coloring pages for the kids, or tell me what to cook with ingredients I already have on hand, or make a workout schedule.
Is it unwise to use AI even in those little situations? Or am I just backwards?
Unless you have some practical need it use it, I'd say leave it alone. I teach in a university and more or less have to be familiar with how the main models work and how to work with them. I hadn't seen wide use of them by students until this year, but they now look well entrenched, and they aren't advancing learning. The solution most of my colleagues propose for this is avoiding misuse by actively teaching proper use--strategic, sophisticated prompting, relying on them for research and support but not writing, productivity tweaks, and such. While there is some value in that, a lot of students just ignore that and use them in really basic ways that lead to really shoddy work. I try to AI-proof most writing assignments, but that keeps getting more difficult. And in the course of doing this...yeah, I've used it myself. I've gotten some good ideas for class activities from it. It's helped me refine some assignments I wasn't happy with. But that's a pretty small return for all we stand to lose by turning over our thinking to robots. I hate that this takes up so much of my attention these days but if I just tune it out, I risk losing any kind of shared frame of reference with my students. And that framework feels limited enough already.
I think that you have put this very well, particularly the last part about the risks of tuning it out, in losing any kind of shared frame of reference with students. There seems to be a widening gulf between the generations, and as technological development seems to accelerate, an age difference of even 5 years leads to quite a gulf. I have been listening to my 30 year old kids talk about their perceptions, and they are feeling the gulf, too. Do we have to take the risk of tuning it out, and dealing with the gulf ? Maybe that could have positive effects, too ?
As someone who does not have a cell phone or smart phone, I get along in the world, and the simple fact of not having one seems to intrigue many people. Why not ?
I wonder what you would have come up with on your own for those ingredients on hand. AI may have helped but it took away a moment of creativity from you, in some sense. Even if the outcome had been less interesting (tasty?) it could have been a family collaboration or something you discussed with a friend/neighbor, which could have been enriching for you and them at the time, maybe even more memorable, who knows. Just a thought...
Personally, I won't touch it. I think there is something inherently evil in it. This may be a fringe position, but I can't help that. I have a very strong intuition that it is the next stage in the takeover of our minds by machine thinking. It is ruining art ( I can't stand AI 'art' which all looks fake and dead-eyed) and soon enough it will wreck writing too. No part of the world will be real. And of course, it is so easy, so useful, so tempting ...
If I were you, I would trust your gut. I have decided to trust mine.
I don't think LLMs (there is no artificial intelligence) are necessarily bad; they can be useful tools. The problem is natural UNintelligence; the legions of gullible people who think "if the computer says so, it must be true." And the capitalists see a chance to save themselves 5 cents and real people lose jobs while we get auto-generated crap. It's a giant "garbage in, garbage out" machine with no Deus coming out.
Hi Paul, Looking forward to your Erasmus Lecture! I'm just close enough to make the trip. Can't wait. Has anyone recommended this artist to you?: https://owencyclops.com/about/ . His journey to the Christian Faith sounds very similar to yours - may be a kindred spirit, working in another medium. He was into Wicca, Buddhism, esoterica, occult. Did a significant amount of mushrooms, ayahuasca, and then felt himself dragged out of that world, into the Christian Faith.
What caught my eye in your picture is the line of trees planted, I would guess, as a wind break. Strangely, I've always liked this feature on farms and ranches. They break up the landscape, making it more interesting to look at, and are imminently practical. Sometimes I would see a line of trees like this as we drove up the Central Valley in California, where I was raised. More commonly, what would catch my eye was a farmhouse sitting at the end of a long road in the middle of a field with large trees, perhaps oak, planted all around it for shade. This sight always reminded me of an oasis, or what I imagined an oasis to be, and as it was usually 100 degrees outside, and we were traveling in a car with no air conditioning, the appeal of the sight was greatly enhanced. Taking long boring rides with my parents on blazingly hot days was a major component of my childhood, and whatever their downsides, these journeys were a powerful stimulant for my imagination. Also, they were a nice break from my usual activities of fighting with siblings and looking for bottles to turn in for the deposit. Ah, the blue remembered hills!
Wonderful reminder of our family's summer drives up to Merced from LA in the 60s. We used to kill time identifying the different fruit trees and crops. Hot as blazes but those night time breezes blowing down from Yosemite as we slept in our great-grandparents' house....
Creepy development in the continuing aggressive de-humanization of medicine. In the latest issue of JAMA, one of the most prestigious medical journals, a team of doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and NYU warn of the grave dangers patients face in those parts of the country where the only medical care available is provided by religiously affiliated hospitals (Catholic, Baptist, and others). This makes it so much harder for families in those neighborhoods to trans their kids! The authors dub these areas, and I swear I’m not making this up, “religious monopolies,” and brainstorm ways the federal government can destroy them.
More here:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/when-the-job-descriptions-for-doctors
It’s so hard to believe that They genuinely think this could be for the general good. Again and again I keep running up against the inescapable conclusion that, via the whole litany of obviously rubbish ideas now being foisted on us, the destruction of our societies is being carried out on purpose. As someone said, It’s too stupid not to be a plan. A malevolent plan. It’s in plain sight now - it’s a war on so many fronts, and the war is being waged on all of us. We will wake up very soon to find that we have sleepwalked into a full-on totalitarian nightmare. They are so close to realising their plans - before 2030, surely. Yet we are nowhere near organised to fight this… lots of people are aware, but they/we have no organisational cohesiveness or power.
I think that the world we are living in looks a lot like the one Jesus lived in, and that a very careful reading of the Gospels allows us to see the similarity between the two worlds. But I also think that one of the reasons that we are here is because we have deserted our individual, daily lives, and the small neighboring communities in our immediate vicinity in order to promote a universal, global agenda. All of us, not just our politicians either. (What are we doing here, by the way, just as an illustration ?...)
The earliest Christians won converts in a society where they were a minority by the example they set before the.... pagans. The way they led their lives was inspiring to others, and made THEM want to belong to a Christian community. So... we need to carefully cultivate living a Christian faith on a day to day basis, in order to make things change. I think that this is what Jesus' preaching was all about.
Yes, agreed Debra, very much so. But, with a major caveat: that was then, this is now. Then, society was far, far simpler, far fewer people, and the message of Jesus was radically new for most people.
Now, society is infinitely more complex, far more people, with all their cultures and ethics in our faces dividing the old West, with tech and AI spreading flatout lies, and an elite carefully cultivating a range of apparently “free” culture war opinion in a hall of mirrors. Some things are the same as ever - divide and rule - but the hall of mirrors is infinitely more complex with less obvious shades of “good” and “evil.” Also, Christianity is no longer new. For a huge % of humanity it’s “oh, that old story. You mean the one with the pedophiles and all that money and corruption and nutcases?” I fear that it will take several decades of the return of the old gods and Roman Empire-style totalitarianism for the Xr message to be cleansed and fresh and attractive again…..
No, Jules, I don't agree. To the people living during those times, society was as confusing, as complex, and why shouldn't it have been ? After all, we think that we are so much more complex and sophisticated basically because of our... "new" technology, but the universal problems of what to do with society's vulnerable members, how to transmit knowledge and craft from one generation to the next, they are TIMELESS and complex.
If you start looking at Roman texts, you will see how incredibly complex the society that Jesus was living in was. The problem of "good" and "evil" has always been a subtle one. I like to say that we don't, and can't know what we are doing when we do it. The Church fathers definitely knew this, and Man himself has known it for a very long time now.
What was totalitarian about the Roman Empire ? Not really very much. Rome laid a very light hand on its... conquests. What you call "totalitarianism" is maybe a new... unimproved ? version of what would like to pass for a universal.. GOOD NEWS ? Greece, Alexander, Rome, they all had universal ambitions that called for spreading... the good news. And the Christian faith capitalized on infrastructure that was already there, in my opinion.
I love the Christian faith. But not to the point of making me blind to what allowed it to emerge on a ..large scale ?
Yes, you’re probably right - I fell into the old trap of “back in the day life was simpler”. Sure, in many ways it was for many people - but in somewhere like Jerusalem in 30 AD, or in other urban centres, esp of Roman power, it wouldn’t have been experienced as simple. It’s true Rome ruled with a light touch (it had to, over such a large expanse!) - till you challenged it.
Very well thought out comment, but I have to disagree about Rome and it’s ‘light touch’, I think we only think that way because most of the surviving texts originated from Rome or it’s successors (like the Roman Catholic Church). .
This is what one of their enemies said of them...
Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace
I think the Romans were particularly good at what we would call coercive control, putting an idea into their subjects heads that Rome was invincible, thus obviating the need for large armies, after all if your enemy is in your head then you don’t need to field an actual army. The British Empire pulled off the same trick, dominating huge swathes of the world through mind control and cultural conditioning.
I would argue that they still do, through their replacements the Americans.
From what I have learned, the Roman army, maybe up to the Dacian conquest, and a little after, was highly disciplined, and could be ruthless in conquest : when laying siege, it offered the choice of submitting or being totally wiped out to those who stood in its way. But this was common practice at the time, and designed to bring foreign peoples into submission without a lot of bloodshed. Rome, in its earlier days, was really quite invincible, and its reputation was well earned. When real decadence set in, and the elites sought to escape military service, and the empire had to resort to more and more foreign mercenaries, then its military standards went down, and things became murkier.
But we have simplistic ideas about empire. Here where I'm living, in a non English speaking country, you can see how eager the foreign people is to be colonized by the English language, American companies and technologies. You can see how much the colonized benefit from being colonized in many respects, and especially.. IN THEIR MINDS. Where is the coercion there ? I don't see it well.
Rome through its construction, its roads, its acqueducts gave a sophisticated infrastructure to the... barbarian peoples and they were happy to have it. In France/Gaul they were very very happy to have it.
Maybe not so much in Scotland, but then the Romans didn't manage to hang on to Scotland for very long for good reasons.
My source : "Ancient Rome" by Nigel Rodgers. Highly recommended as very readable.
Love the title of your Substack article: "When the Job Descriptions for Doctors and Madmen Converge".....I suppose this insanity is all part of Obama's 2008 'fundamental transformation' of the political, philosophical underpinning of our country, but then, really, it's about the fundamental transformation of Western Civilization period......
Thank you!
How dare the people who founded hospitals continue to do so?
Read your substack piece, thanks. The trans agenda has multiple aims:
- to destroy God's creation;
- to reduce fertility;
- to destroy the family;
- to destroy the mental health of younger generations;
- to confuse the gullible;
- to aid the pursuit of transhumanism (part of the 4th Industrial Revolution);
- to make people formerly known as citizens undertake humiliation rituals.
The last one is a favourite of totalitarian regimes - making people accept and parrot patent falsehoods (and you force them with 'hate crime' legislation, as well as encouraging self-censorship among their peers) is a humiliation ritual that makes them aware of their powerlessness against the regime. Same as observing 13 o'clock, as in 1984.
Jennifer Bilek is very good on the top-down nature of the imposition of trans ideology, who's behind it (billionaires, surprise, surprise) and who's funding it (same).
https://odysee.com/@PlanetLockdown:6/Jennifer-Bilek-TRANS-Agenda:b
Next they’ll be telling you can’t abort that “lump of cells” after some random date, such as the toddler’s second birthday.
I'm going to relativize this comment for an historical perspective. Almost 70 years ago I was born in a southern Californian Catholic hospital to a woman who had converted to Presbyterian Protestantism, and she was terribly worried that the hospital/doctors would save the baby and not her in case there was a problem at delivery. As it turns out, there was a problem at delivery, but both of us survived. I have this vision of arriving in the world by Caesarian into the hands of a Catholic obstetrician in a Catholic hospital while both my parents were k.o. : my mother hemorraging, and my doctor father having fainted from the shock. It is not a vision that makes me very comfortable, but it puts the issues at stake on the table in a stark manner : who comes first, the (future) mother or the baby in the case that a choice has to be made ? It is unfortunate to have to frame the problem this way, but maybe at some level, it is inevitable, no ? And does society have to face the music on this one ?
I do not think that it was pure chance that led my mother to hemorrage in the hospital either. I think that, unbeknownst to her conscious self, she was the seat ? of powerful and conflicting forces (and emotions) expressing themselves at a momentous moment in her life, the moment she gave birth. And as human beings we are all forced to reckon with these forces and emotions that are not comfortable or reassuring to us at all.
My father, born in the 1920's was a Christian, church going believer and a top notch, highly respected medical scientist. He did not live in a world in which belonging to the Christian community necessarily excluded belonging to the scientific one, or vice versa. His world was much more... tolerant, as mine WAS, too.
Is there anything more holy than people coming together to sing?
Possibly. But not many things that happen as reliably.
People coming together to eat. But maybe not more, just equal to.
Yes. With certain restrictions, though...
Thank you. Singing is so uplifting ! For everybody !
I wouldn't call it "holy..." Used to think it was, then I went to a concert and found out that no, lots of voices together sound good even if you're singing Weird Al.
Well, it’s not exactly an Indian summer because it’s always this hot here in Saudi Arabia, but the weather is finally beginning to abate. I think it might even finally drop into double digits this week - here’s hoping.
And in some happy news to share, my second book was just published! It’s a metaphysical mystery set in the Arabian Gulf and I’ve been celebrating the launch this week!
Sounds intriguing. Congratulations!
I just read your article at FPR - wonderful! Brought me right back to discovering the Narnia series at the library as a 12-year-old. And then reading the books to my children! Thanks!
(Link for readers here: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/narnia-against-the-machine-deep-magic-for-the-modern-age/ )
Wow, that’s very kind, thank you!
I'll see you at the Erasmus Lecture. Don't forget that there's a Nicholas Roerich museum in NYC. https://www.roerich.org/
Ooh, I didn't know that! And I have a free morning ...
You may have to call and ask for a morning visit. I think they'd go out of their way to welcome you as you have drawn attention to Roerich. Hope it works out!
You’ve sent me deliciously on a side track to look up Roerich ….. what an amazingman and his wife Helena sounds equally interesting …… wish I was in New York . Going to order her letters from the library …. Such a successful relationship and such inspiring lives
I've really been enjoying Ted Gioia's work of late, particularly some of his posts about AI. Worth checking out "The Honest Broker" on Substack if any of you haven't yet. Paul, I imagine you already read him, but if not, I highly recommend.
Separately, I went to a concert (more like a small show, the venue was in a little theater in Evanston, IL and held maybe 100 people) last Tuesday, and it's the first time I've seen live music in a little while. It was incredibly refreshing, and in the time of algorithm-driven, curated music, it felt a little countercultural to watch someone create and perform on stage with just a guitar.
Thanks for the recommendation! It took me a second to remember where I had seen the name Ted Gioia. I read his book Healing Songs in preparation for a presentation I gave during Lent at my parish. Didn't know he had a substack
I love Ted Gioia!!! Paul + Ted = a balanced substack diet.
From Rod Dreher’s Substack piece published today:
“An exorcist in Rome told me that Europe and North America have been protected for a long time, even amid our de-Christianization, because of the longtime presence of Christian belief and worship among us. But, he said, supernature abhors a vacuum, and where the true God is not honored and worshiped, the evil one will move in to reclaim territory. We are seeing that accelerate now. Imagine: a small city in Texas has a popular altar consecrated to a demon, in the middle of a market. This would have once been unthinkable. No longer.”
Powerful in the context of Paul’s point that something has to sit on the throne of any given culture…. This seems to be the way deeply foolish people seem to want to push it. Dreher’s whole piece is fascinating and well worth reading.
I'm going to have to check that out, thanks for sharing.
The "impediment" is the Eucharist. Where it declines, we do see effects in many levels
Very interesting. Could you give a little more detail on this comment, please ? Thank you.
"And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed ..." see 2 Thessalonians 2:7-10. I have heard this "restraining" (or impediment) understood this way from an Orthodox Biblical scholar I respect
Sorry, first verse is 2 Thessalonians 2:6
Thank you. I see that I will need to look this up and pore over it...
I have come to understand that the Eucharist is a restraining force, basically because it is 1) authorized Christian SACRIFICE and 2) it brings THE PEOPLE TOGETHER into a community. Much lawlessness arrives because people are not BOUND TOGETHER into a community which gives them limits, and the strength to control/restrain themselves.
And according to Christ, if the demon returns he will bring more with him! (Assuming there were demons here before Christianity arrived.) :-/
I think the religious rites of the Aztec fit the bill of demonic. They were definitely here.
An exorcist? Were the witch doctors busy? Thought that whole "blame demons for everything badwrongful" went away in the 80s.
I was thinking is the machine trying to control us or make us uncontrollable. If it's a power and principality, some sort of demonic manifestation of antichrist then does it really care? If we are subjugated by it or are at war against it, does it lead to the same place? I guess that would depend on how we fight that war. So In the end, is it only seeking human destruction in whatever maniacal form it can achieve it? If one's purpose is only destruction then there really doesn't need to be a sophisticated plan.
Behind every great man is a great woman! Sending my respect to your wife on her lovely and very productive looking garden; from another woman whose nails are dirty and root cellar is getting fuller!
Yes !
I'm usually behind her ;-)
We're just having a perpetual August here in the US midwest. It has become like a malingering guest at a dinner party where the hosts are doing everything they can to usher everyone out and go to bed.
We've not a decent rain (save for the odd passing storm that rains buckets for 10 minutes over a 1/2 square mile then disappears) since July, and are now (at least in the Ohio valley) in our worst drought since 1988 (one I remember well). The long term forecast shows not even a slight prospect for rain for at least the next 10 days. It is still far too hot for September too, even as the days are shortening. Dust and goldenrod pollen are everywhere, with nothing to rinse them away.
It is a summer that simply will not take a hint and head for the door.
I've been feeling the same! Bone dry and perpetually in the upper 80s in my neck of the woods. Ready for things to shift.
Same here in Ohio, selling off a few cows, already feeding hay, buying hay and making bigger holes in the creek for them to drink. My pepper plants are living their best life, crazy amounts and I am running out of canning jars!
Last week, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky opened an exhibit on Harlan Hubbard -- painter, writer, and creator of a life very much outside the bounds of normal Western industrial society. He and his wife lived aboard a shantyboat on the Ohio River for a few years. They then settled down in Payne Hollow, in Trimble County, Kentucky, into a life of farming, painting, music, and, by our view, simple living. Largely outside what Paul calls The Machine.
He seems like someone readers of The Abbey of Misrule would vibe with. The exhibit is excellent. The curator, Jessica Whitehead, has a biography of Hubbard coming out in February, called Driftwood. Years ago, Wendell Berry wrote an excellent biography of him.
If you happen to be in Louisville, check out the exhibit. If not, Hubbard's books, or Berry's biography, are excellent reads. I'm sure Whitehead's book will be superb too.
https://filsonhistorical.org/event/exhibit-opening-driftwood-the-life-of-harlan-hubbard/
https://www.paynehollowontheohio.org/
What I would give to see that exhibit. Harlan’s life is an inspiration.
Also, intrigued about the new biography. Berry’s was excellent and I’ve revisited it many times
Hi, Paul and family! Just wanted you to know how much we appreciate your substack. We also track down any videos we can find of your appearances. We got a laugh about one of them when you mentioned watching Tremors. That is one we dig out every now and then. We will be interested to see your conversation with Rod Dreher. We read his articles and just finished the one about demon worship at the flea market. We also read your article about The Void, wow! Things in the world are heating up, wherever you look you can see the meltdown of our culture. The spiritual void really is like a vacuum. In Colossians 3:1-4 the Apostle Paul exhorts us to set our minds on things above. And pray for wisdom from above as James tell us. Keep up with your writings and appearances, we do like the videos you post from your home. Or place has a very similar look to yours, cosmos, foxgloves, sunflowers, a poly tunnel and some woods areas, what a blessing! Yours in Christ, Brian and Cathy
What's on my mind? Besides the fact that I benefit so much from you, Paul, and thank. you. Your example as a writer and as an Orthodox thinker encourages me.
This poem by Yeats, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Poem of the times!
We’ve had the higher than usual temperatures here in England too, but also some much lower than usual. The weather is all over the place these days. I miss the predictably of the seasons, or even having proper seasons. Every season now seems to have a fair amount of just ‘wet and windy’.
I have a question which is this: what’s the harm in a little AI?
I’d love to know your answers as I navigate this brave new world. Several of my friends are starting to embrace it and recommend I implement it into my life. It’s challenging to tell rationalists that I follow my intuition (which screams at me to not give chatgpt my info or use AI by choice) because the rationalists don’t know what intuition is anymore.
I feel strongly averse to AI, even when used in seemingly innocuous ways, like to to generate coloring pages for the kids, or tell me what to cook with ingredients I already have on hand, or make a workout schedule.
Is it unwise to use AI even in those little situations? Or am I just backwards?
Love to read your insights.
I agree with you 100% Don't let the camel get his nose through the tent flap!
My thoughts on this issue, published in the current number of Modern Age.
https://modernagejournal.com/accept-all-terms-and-conditions/243857/
Unless you have some practical need it use it, I'd say leave it alone. I teach in a university and more or less have to be familiar with how the main models work and how to work with them. I hadn't seen wide use of them by students until this year, but they now look well entrenched, and they aren't advancing learning. The solution most of my colleagues propose for this is avoiding misuse by actively teaching proper use--strategic, sophisticated prompting, relying on them for research and support but not writing, productivity tweaks, and such. While there is some value in that, a lot of students just ignore that and use them in really basic ways that lead to really shoddy work. I try to AI-proof most writing assignments, but that keeps getting more difficult. And in the course of doing this...yeah, I've used it myself. I've gotten some good ideas for class activities from it. It's helped me refine some assignments I wasn't happy with. But that's a pretty small return for all we stand to lose by turning over our thinking to robots. I hate that this takes up so much of my attention these days but if I just tune it out, I risk losing any kind of shared frame of reference with my students. And that framework feels limited enough already.
I think that you have put this very well, particularly the last part about the risks of tuning it out, in losing any kind of shared frame of reference with students. There seems to be a widening gulf between the generations, and as technological development seems to accelerate, an age difference of even 5 years leads to quite a gulf. I have been listening to my 30 year old kids talk about their perceptions, and they are feeling the gulf, too. Do we have to take the risk of tuning it out, and dealing with the gulf ? Maybe that could have positive effects, too ?
As someone who does not have a cell phone or smart phone, I get along in the world, and the simple fact of not having one seems to intrigue many people. Why not ?
Any technology can be beneficially or less than beneficially applied. Example of bad:
https://forestpolicypub.com/2024/09/18/beware-of-fact-checking-especially-when-ai-is-involved-the-case-of-aspen-clones/
I think for those of us involved in words and writing, randomly redefining things is a problem.
I wonder what you would have come up with on your own for those ingredients on hand. AI may have helped but it took away a moment of creativity from you, in some sense. Even if the outcome had been less interesting (tasty?) it could have been a family collaboration or something you discussed with a friend/neighbor, which could have been enriching for you and them at the time, maybe even more memorable, who knows. Just a thought...
Personally, I won't touch it. I think there is something inherently evil in it. This may be a fringe position, but I can't help that. I have a very strong intuition that it is the next stage in the takeover of our minds by machine thinking. It is ruining art ( I can't stand AI 'art' which all looks fake and dead-eyed) and soon enough it will wreck writing too. No part of the world will be real. And of course, it is so easy, so useful, so tempting ...
If I were you, I would trust your gut. I have decided to trust mine.
I don't think LLMs (there is no artificial intelligence) are necessarily bad; they can be useful tools. The problem is natural UNintelligence; the legions of gullible people who think "if the computer says so, it must be true." And the capitalists see a chance to save themselves 5 cents and real people lose jobs while we get auto-generated crap. It's a giant "garbage in, garbage out" machine with no Deus coming out.
Hi Paul, Looking forward to your Erasmus Lecture! I'm just close enough to make the trip. Can't wait. Has anyone recommended this artist to you?: https://owencyclops.com/about/ . His journey to the Christian Faith sounds very similar to yours - may be a kindred spirit, working in another medium. He was into Wicca, Buddhism, esoterica, occult. Did a significant amount of mushrooms, ayahuasca, and then felt himself dragged out of that world, into the Christian Faith.
What caught my eye in your picture is the line of trees planted, I would guess, as a wind break. Strangely, I've always liked this feature on farms and ranches. They break up the landscape, making it more interesting to look at, and are imminently practical. Sometimes I would see a line of trees like this as we drove up the Central Valley in California, where I was raised. More commonly, what would catch my eye was a farmhouse sitting at the end of a long road in the middle of a field with large trees, perhaps oak, planted all around it for shade. This sight always reminded me of an oasis, or what I imagined an oasis to be, and as it was usually 100 degrees outside, and we were traveling in a car with no air conditioning, the appeal of the sight was greatly enhanced. Taking long boring rides with my parents on blazingly hot days was a major component of my childhood, and whatever their downsides, these journeys were a powerful stimulant for my imagination. Also, they were a nice break from my usual activities of fighting with siblings and looking for bottles to turn in for the deposit. Ah, the blue remembered hills!
Wonderful reminder of our family's summer drives up to Merced from LA in the 60s. We used to kill time identifying the different fruit trees and crops. Hot as blazes but those night time breezes blowing down from Yosemite as we slept in our great-grandparents' house....