Scrooge and Shelley

I revert now to my lymphoma because I've locked horns with a cold virus despite an inappropriate number of white blood cells. (The cell count and the cancer marker have been creeping up for some time.) The family doctor knows about my underlying condition, and the specialist, when apprised of the details, said I should be all right.

Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.

Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.

Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.

The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.

How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that

like mist o'er mountains driven,
        Or music by the night-wind sent
        Through strings of some still instrument,
        Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
    Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
— Note on Queen Mab, published two years after The Necessity of Atheism

There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.

Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:

Thus let thy power, which like the truth
        Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
        Its calm, to one who worships thee,
        And every form containing thee,
        Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.

As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.

It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.

When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.

❖
Reconciled but Hungry
On Bone Marrow Aspirations
Cavorting at Eventide

Savagery

More than 1,300 innocent Israelis killed, including at least thirty-one American citizens, by the terrorist group Hamas. Hundreds — hundreds of young people at a music festival of — the festival was for peace — for peace — gunned down as they ran for their lives. Scores of innocents — from infants to elderly grandparents, Israelis and Americans — taken hostage. Children slaughtered. Babies slaughtered. Entire families massacred. Rape, beheadings, bodies burned alive. Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period.
— President Biden in remarks from Tel Aviv (October 18, 2023)

Here is the last circle of depravity: the slaughter of children. Infants. At this writing, the details of their slaughter are being disputed the way straws are grasped at, but the fact of it remains. Imagine what they must have felt — bewildered innocents in the hands of savage throwbacks. Yet within twenty-four hours, the mentality of the savage throwback had announced itself far and wide across the modern world. In some of the less modern precincts, ill-fitting enlightenment gave way to comfortable darkness. In exceedingly modern precincts, the civilized person's transcendent abhorrence of infanticide was overtopped by political fervor.

Many of our peers worldwide have expressed strong opposition to Hamas's attack and have offered unambiguous support for its victims. Prominent voices in the Arab world, too, have made it clear that there is no justification for sadistic murder of innocent people. However, to our dismay, some elements within the global left, individuals who were, until now, our political partners, have reacted with indifference to these horrific events and sometimes even justified Hamas's actions.
— Statement on Behalf of Israel-based Progressives and Peace Activists Regarding Debates over Recent Events in Our Region (October 16, 2023)

Western civilization has its liberals. It has its progressives, of whom I am one. And then there is the Left, too great of brain for civilization to compass. If you're not of the Left, or if you are of it but still in possession of your humanity, please don't trouble yourself to read on. What follows is addressed to those who carry water for jihadists.

❖

Since October 7, 2023, you've backed up sadistic fiends with the catchphrase, "by any means necessary." A wanton phrase. Before using words like means and necessary in reference to the slaughter of innocents, better call home and consult those who've known you all your life. There must have been a time when you wouldn't have believed you'd ever hear yourself say that killing babies was a necessary means to any end under the sun. This is not a subject on which decent human beings, be they ever so worldly, consider the context. What happened? Let's put our Gentile heads together and go through the explanations and contributing factors that come to mind.

First we need to account for the Left's inordinate interest in Palestinians as compared with Uyghurs or Armenians or the black population in Darfur. Mary Harrington lays her finger on the central piece of the puzzle, a certain blind spot:

And the size and ubiquity of this blind spot on the Left is best explained not by hatred of Jews (or not only by such hatred), but by the outsized symbolic role Israel plays as a proxy for American geopolitical hegemony.

For a Left animated by the old clockwork of Leninist aims and tactics, a focus on the Palestinians has not only the positive virtue of feeding into anti-American agitation, but also the negative virtue of not feeding into agitation against communist China or against the Muslim oppressors of blacks in Darfur (which would disturb the useful illusion of Muslim-black solidarity). That explains the political basis of the Left's absorption in the Palestinian cause, but it leaves us far from explaining how you came to care more about your politics than about the lives of children. For comparison, note that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez instantly knew the order of importance and declared, "I condemn Hamas' attack in the strongest possible terms." We must search on.

Was it runaway allyship? In the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when innocent Muslims in the US suffered acts of violence and bigotry, liberals (including many Jews) stood with them. It was essentially a principled stand, reinforced by compassion, against the particular wrong of blaming people who were innocent of a particular crime. However, those inclined to a reductive worldview for one reason or another chose to cut the Gordian knot of ethics and become unconditionally pro-Muslim. As I've written before, Donald Trump's antipathy to Muslims in later years set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them — in toto.

The potential for doting allyship is strong in people who fancy that creature comforts have drained them of primal virtue (though it was lacking in the first place). The greater the comforts, the stronger the narcissistic sense of moral crisis requiring a baptism at the hands of the less privileged. For Americans, that means people who come from almost anywhere else but especially from places not touched by progress with a heavy hand. And for elite liberal Americans, no penance quite compares to the charade of sitting at the feet of an Old World guru; someone who is supposed to combine the virtue of the noble savage with the wisdom of the ages. One dreamily forgets that Old World people are not better known for timeless wisdom and virtue than for timeless prejudice and habit.

On an American university campus, Palestinian and other Muslim students are relatively likely to be the children of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves. If so, they're entitled to that goodwill which you extend to everyone at first, but not to any special respect or credence or solidarity. You're doing enough when you credit them with being free of Old World hatreds. Should they show that they're not, then don't drink the political brew they offer you. An exotic bigot is as bad as a domestic one.

Are you caught up in the savagery of a really polarized American body politic? Or the savagery of a seemingly polarized one? A recent paper by Rachel Kleinfeld from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports the latest of multiple findings that the general population of the US is not fundamentally polarized, but is beleaguered by politicians who strive to whip up a sense of polarization — and by the media (social and otherwise) to which this fuss is a stock in trade.

American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.

Kleinfeld goes on to note the reality of "affective polarization": a dislike of people on the other side of the partisan divide that's grounded in emotion, not ideological incompatibility. This emotion comes as no surprise when people have been taught to believe in underlying incompatibility. The finding that the most politically engaged people, including activists, are the most vulnerable to the misperception may be surprising until we reflect on the human tendency to exalt one's own endeavors. Political struggle is bound to be more satisfying when you think it's a population-wide clash of ideologies than when you don't.

A relentless, apocalyptic polarization scare not only keeps emotions high but also intensifies the "ammunition logic" whereby you anathematize the mention of any inconvenient truth for fear of loading the enemy's cannon. This logic, on a more coldly calculating plane, has a long history. In 1977, Noam Chomsky used his influence among progressives to inhibit early reporting and discussion of the Khmer Rouge genocide in The New York Review of Books. His apparent concern was that such reporting served the interests of the US administration and damaged the socialist cause. The magnitude of the atrocities couldn't be covered up for long; it was monstrous news that would outrage decent people everywhere; but Chomsky and those who followed his lead could, he reasoned, be good progressives by downplaying it. In today's political environment, the numbers of coldly calculating manipulators are augmented by many anxious true believers. Is that where you come in?

The decision to set aside your humanity for the benefit of Hamas may have needed no other driving force, but I suspect there was a big one: the game of progressive advocacy.

The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.

Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.

This competitive game began in earnest during the #MeToo boom, with a bidding-up of support that culminated in the supremely reductive "Believe women." Once that had been said, no one who wished to stay relevant as a pro-feminist progressive could afford to say less. Perhaps you find that, today, one can't say less than "From the river to the sea ... by any means necessary" and stay relevant in certain circles.

There's nothing wrong with becoming irrelevant there. The circles themselves are drawn in shifting sand, but your humanity is forever.

Benighted!

Have you read Dracula three times? I have. It's a quaintly clumsy work, but when it summons me I must go.

Have you watched Bride of Frankenstein (1935) more times than you can remember? I have. It's a wonderful film, an acknowledged classic which many people over the years have probably skipped on account of the title. All silver and shadow, and civilized horrors graced with wit.

I've always felt the pull of the uncanny. A teenage fling with a Ouija board disconcerted my favorite teacher, who apparently had thought I had more sense. About the same time, I took a rapt interest in strange phenomena that "could only be" extraterrestrial spacecraft and acquainted myself with some of the literature on that subject. One or two of the other kids were all-out UFO buffs who talked as though they had special knowledge of alien technology, but I viewed them as poseurs.

Later came a more respectable curiosity about extrasensory perception. In remembrance of the days when I pursued the uncanny outside of books and movies, I've kept a pack of ESP cards developed in the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University. I met J. B. and Louisa Rhine themselves and interviewed them for radio as professionally as can be expected when the interviewer is star-struck.

One summer evening, three young men set out to investigate the paranormal phenomenon of a light that was said to appear over a certain remote stretch of railroad track, the scene of a nineteenth-century train wreck. It did appear. Some light did, at any rate. However, as it seemed to be very far off, and as the only approach was along the dark track with its plague of freight trains, we wrapped up our investigation at the crossing and went home. Our empirical evidence was compromised by the fact that although the pinpoint of light showed up in photographs, nothing else did. Still, I was satisfied that the fun we'd had on that lark was all that anyone could have had.

Now I dimly perceived what I had always felt, that the value of fantastic notions lay in the fun to be had with them. As I lost the capacity for half-belief in the supernatural, I laid hold of something I need never part with: a taste for it. The chill darkness of late October in North America would be the same without the tradition of Halloween, but the tradition fills it with pleasures made possible first by wide-eyed belief, then by furtive half-belief, and at last by the luxurious suspension of disbelief. With that, the Halloween aesthetic carries everything before it.

The atmosphere of Bride of Frankenstein is consistent with the Halloween aesthetic, though it has nothing to do with the celebration. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula partakes of that aesthetic in certain details, but there's something else that lifts it above its defects and higher, to the threshold of literature: the corruption of reality. For example, the diurnal rhythms that lull us in God-governed nature take on alarming significance under the profane influence of the vampire. Then, as Stoker's protagonists make a study of those rhythms and of other unnatural laws governing the vampire's actions, they build up a dark science replete with a typed compilation of notes and transcribed voice memos (using the actual technology of the 1890s) to guide them in destroying him. They learn the secrets of dusk and dawn and the time just before dawn when the vampire is in mental communication with his helpless servant; and they lay a plan to use that knowledge against him. They learn to estimate the time when they're safe and to foresee the time when they must act at the risk of their lives and souls. Stoker has them set the story down by turns in their own words. This peripatetic chronicle — water-lapped and sun-streaked, now calm and now urgent, about a little band of moderns coming to grips with a curse made flesh — is peculiarly hypnotic.

When fiction takes another step back from credulity without escaping it, we get the kind of supernatural fun I like best. A choice example is Dorothy Macardle's The Uninvited (originally Uneasy Freehold). Here, sophistication asserts itself outright.

While the rest danced a foxtrot I stood with her in the door of the greenhouse, telling her the stories of my friends. And, in the telling, what vital, gifted, dramatic individuals they became! And so they were; so were Pamela and I, myself: we were free, clever, friendly, and fortunate people, living changeful, progressive lives....

When strange things begin to happen, and psychology must stand as a barrier against superstition, we find that psychology is itself adrift.

She was obstinate: "I feel that there are spirits in the place, Roddy. I can't put up a case against you, but it is what I believe."

"Well, what I believe is that the place is saturated with passions and emotions, inexpungeable misery and despair, so that no sensitive person can be in it and not be overcome by hallucinations or depression or both."

The pleading of invisible forces just this side of spirits by the novel's voice of reason is not a lapse, but a shift. It marks the permissive intellectual setting in which we're invited to enjoy what we couldn't enjoy in a well-ordered one: a genuine ghost story. Macardle's supernatural fiction is of that genre in which abundantly literate people may speak of "the true medium" as opposed to the many charlatans, or adduce one paranormal claim in support of another with moves like "After all, it's known that...," and always be taken seriously.

A fictional world infused with erudite credulity is a happy place for a lark, I think. However, the reactions of society's gatekeepers to the 1944 film adaptation of Macardle's novel were decidedly mixed on that point. The film was well received as a whole. It's thoroughly civilized entertainment that builds suspense with things like a planchette séance. It gives us just a couple of brief looks (and even those against the director's preference for suggestion) at a nebulously ghostly face in the dark. Nevertheless, in 1944 it provoked questions about the advisability of treating ghosts as real in a basically serious film and of depicting one so convincingly to boot. Among the many critics who found the film genuinely scary was James Agee, who approvingly wrote, "I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts." Most viewers today would be hard pressed to feel anything so rough as a jolt, but the ghost effect was actually excised from the first British release.

Years later our children were exposed to The Uninvited, along with Astaire-Rogers musicals and other old movies, at an early age. They loved it, ghost and all. They were choosing it to re-watch almost before they had mastered the name of Edward Everett Horton (whom they also loved). Now, that's a puzzle. These children didn't bat an eye at things that had once struck sophisticated adults as frightful, but it can't have been due to changing times. After all, babies in every time and place are born into a culture-free personal world and proceed to acquire cultural tastes and tolerances from scratch. It's not as if our children could have become jaded in the modern womb; and they hadn't been immersed in harrowing sights since birth.

It seems that we find a thing shocking in entertainment because we've learned to expect certain circumscriptions, and then something violates them. Our reaction (and mine is intense) against shows of make-believe slaughter is not a reaction against violence, but against the jostling of our long-nurtured sensibilities. Certainly a realistic simulation of violence or pitiless cruelty can be horrifying in any case, but the premise of make-believe makes a crucial qualitative difference in the horror. Our children knew they were watching make-believe and watched it in a largely unconditioned state. A bit of ectoplasm didn't register above the "spooky fun" level on the make-believe scale of horror, though I'm sure it would have given them a nasty turn if they'd run into it on the way to the bathroom. Anyway, they didn't grow up to be callous members of society or disturbed personalities.

I must admit I fled the contemporary horror scene before the children were born, when the scales tipped from gothic to gory. Other moviegoers went on being conditioned, and before long I found that many didn't even get why the term horror was applied to the Universal classics of the 1930s, which I love for their eerie aesthetic and their immanent civility.

For me the silver and shadow. Place me in the company of people who know better than to believe in the supernatural but who come to believe all the same, perhaps led by some sort of professor who understands these matters nearly as well as the hobgoblins themselves. Lower the lights and raise the wind. Then send in the spirits. And, please, let it be fiction.

Breeding Will Out

It would be nice to see the day when the name progressive fits like a pair of old shoes on Americans who just desire things like a robust welfare state, a post-racial society, and various other steps forward without getting into ideology.

Conservatives are not much troubled by ideology, since there can be only so many competing visions among people who wish to keep things as they are. The right, as always, prizes conformity to established values. The left, as never before, prizes conformity to the values of the moment. It rewards people who can bring forth new wisdom to be made conventional, couched in new terms befitting a law unto itself. That is to say, it provides a living to intellectuals. Conservatism has its intellectuals, but they serve mainly as a Greek chorus to the tragedy of change. Conservative-minded Americans know what they like without consuming the punditry of the intellectuals. Together, they constitute the conservative project. Progressivism, however, has become entirely a project of academics and their social peers.

Even in the days when it was not entirely so, there was a Leftist intellectual caste whose thoughts and words working-class leftists found hard to swallow. This was due in part to the tendency of people who conceive of themselves as proletarians to be anti-intellectual snobs. Richard Wright’s sojourn in the Communist Party was blighted when the other rank-and-file comrades heard him "talk like a book." However, it was due also to the inevitably suspect status of people who, unlike Wright, cultivated a revolutionary orchard though they had no need of its fruit themselves: academics and patrons.

Today, the intellectual caste is the Left. Many observers note that this development has brought a shift in the substance of leftist politics from economic concerns to sociocultural ones. They might add that it has brought a rise in the value of language. A prominent linguist of the late twentieth century (I forget who) once remarked that belief in word magic had become mainly a trait of Western intellectuals. By that time, linguistic engineering held a prominent place in the Left’s attempts at social engineering. Educated leftists planted a language tree to supply straight, sturdy timber for this construction project (largely substitutes for words containing man, at first), but then the tree started putting out branches and twigs and leaves and blossoms of great intricacy as if one of its elite cultivators had been shoved inside by a witch. The Left came to talk like an expensive textbook. For purposes of bonding with the masses, that was bad enough; but it was not the worst.

The metamorphosis proceeded through an ever greater obsession with language and an ever greater abundance of words to be affected and words to be abhorred. Anxiety about correctness shaded into preciosity reminiscent of the days when well-bred people substituted limbs for legs. Now the Left talks like one of those little gilt-edged volumes once found in the better sort of home. Now it blushes like the dear reader of such a book. It shrinks from unruly speech, which it equates with violence or menace, while counting on word magic to secure a happy political ending. At last (one hopes), we've reached the point where mindless preciosity doubles back and merges with cynical propaganda to form a nullspeak wherein, for example, -phobe ("one gripped by a categorical fear or aversion") is ripped from its meaning and used as a scarlet suffix with which to mark political sinners. It's a wonder the play doesn't make the players feel too silly to go on with it, unless they calculate that it will influence lesser minds. Their own minds are not quite up to grasping how it undermines their position.

Richard Wright couldn't have foreseen this progression from the liberal to the ridiculous, but he gives us a model for beginning to confront it in his essay "I Tried To Be a Communist" (The Atlantic, August and September 1944). It concerns a zealous comrade called Young, newly arrived from Detroit, who joined the Chicago John Reed Club and soon "became one of the most ardent members of the organization, admired by all." Here are the essential parts of a long account:

At a meeting one night Young asked that his name be placed upon the agenda; when his time came to speak, he rose and launched into one of the most violent and bitter political attacks in the club's history upon Swann, one of the best young artists. We were aghast. Young accused Swann of being a traitor to the worker, an opportunist, a collaborator with the police, and an adherent of Trotsky. Naturally most of the club’s members assumed that Young, a member of the party, was voicing the ideas of the party. Surprised and baffled, I moved that Young's statement be referred to the executive committee for decision.

...

Determined to end the farce, I cornered Young and demanded to know who had given him authority to castigate Swann.

"I've been asked to rid the club of traitors."

"But Swann isn't a traitor," I said.

"We must have a purge," he said, his eyes bulging, his face quivering with passion.

...

One night ten of us met in an office of a leader of the party to hear Young restate his charges against Swann. The party leader, aloof and amused, gave Young the signal to begin. Young unrolled a sheaf of papers and declaimed a list of political charges that excelled in viciousness his previous charges. I stared at Young, feeling that he was making a dreadful mistake, but fearing him because he had, by his own account, the sanction of high political authority.

...

[Some time later, Young vanished without a word.]

One afternoon Comrade Grimm and I sneaked into the club's headquarters and opened Young's luggage. What we saw amazed and puzzled us. First of all, there was a scroll of paper twenty yards long — one page pasted to another — which had drawings depicting the history of the human race from a Marxist point of view. The first page read: A Pictorial Record of Man's Economic Progress.

"This is terribly ambitious," I said.

"He's very studious," Grimm said.

There were long dissertations written in longhand: some were political and others dealt with the history of art. Finally we found a letter with a Detroit return address and I promptly wrote asking news of our esteemed member. A few days later a letter came which said in part: —

Dear Sir:

In reply to your letter, we beg to inform you that Mr. Young, who was a patient in our institution and who escaped from our custody a few months ago, had been apprehended and returned to this institution for mental treatment.

I was thunderstruck. Was this true? Undoubtedly it was. Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it? Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one?

I made a motion that all charges against Swann be dropped, which was done. I offered Swann an apology, but as the leader of the Chicago John Reed Club I was a sobered and chastened Communist.

Let us be sobered and chastened Democrats before it's too late.

We Are Left Alone

The Family Property seldom goes out on a limb, and then only in the most blundering manner. However, the news of the day presents an irresistible temptation to swing out to the end of the limb and hurl down a handful of certitude about something that even now is being veiled in deep (if erratic) secrecy by the US intelligence community and sternly investigated by a congressional committee.

Planet Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space.

Earlier this year, a former US Air Force intelligence officer made a personal report to Congress "about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." His name is David C. Grusch. The article linked and quoted above is the one that broke the story of his whistleblowing after major news outlets demurred. It appeared on a speculative-science website called The Debrief. As it came to be more widely discussed, much was made of the fact that Mr Grusch was an intelligence insider and had been described as "beyond reproach" by a former associate. This was an early warning about the tenor of debate to follow: a willingness to argue from authority. Even "people who should know" are supposed to convince us of what they know about the matter at hand. Even people of certified character have an obligation to deal in demonstrable facts like the dodgiest of us. If Mr Grusch's assertions were supported by solid facts, those facts would be of such enormous news value that he could hardly reveal them fast enough to keep ahead of investigative journalists. In fact, three months have passed without a lead on any substantive evidence from any source. Here, it would be as well to quote from the original article on The Debrief at some length.

Associates who vouched for Grusch said his information was highly sensitive, providing evidence that materials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs. Although locations, program names, and other specific data remain classified, the Inspector General and intelligence committee staff were provided with these details. Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General's office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.

Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness. He remains well-supported within intelligence circles, and numerous sources have vouched for his credibility.

"His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence," said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.

That's a lot of grist for the mill of argument from authority. But even if we take it all at face value, what are we to think? This is highly sensitive information about highly secret black programs — and yet Mr Grusch can divulge it with the cooperation of people involved in the programs, and without any disavowal by their higher-ups. The retired colonel who assures us that Mr Grusch is beyond reproach is himself the source of a declaration that "at least some of these technologies ... derive from non-human intelligence" — and yet his character reference should matter. Meanwhile, most news organizations are just teasing the story along, and the rest of us aren't milling in the streets clamoring to know what sort of threat the extraterrestrials may pose. At some level, nobody is taking this at face value.

Mr Grusch has said that he can't talk openly about specifics because they're classified, and yet it seems that the existence and essence of these "highly secret black programs" is not. He allows that he's not the primary source of any of his information but, rather, has had it confided to him at various removes. His informants have gone so far as to claim — he says — that government investigators possess biological remains of "non-human" beings (a term he prefers to alien or extraterrestrial) found along with crashed flying machines. Keeping all that in mind, let's stop and question whether sophisticated people would entertain his testimony if they weren't looking beyond its face value.

Consider the number six. Without context, it seems small. If we're told it represents a distance of 6,000,000 miles, it becomes staggering. If we're told it represents six light-years (roughly the distance, if memory serves*, between Earth and the nearest potentially earth-like planet), it loses its power to stagger because the string of zeros is replaced by a unit which we can't hope to comprehend. We're not talking about flying saucers nipping over from Mars.

The notion of a spacecraft no bigger than a terrestrial aircraft traveling a light-year while sustaining life within it, even in suspended animation, is a non-starter. Why would a highly advanced civilization even wish to attempt an interstellar probe with a live crew instead of relying on its excellent technologies of automation and artificial intelligence? In planning any space mission, take away the warm bodies and you simplify your task immensely. It's common knowledge that NASA carries on manned space flight mainly because it captures the imagination of taxpayers and politicians.

Now, it's possible to imagine — just idly imagine, without attending to difficulties — some civilization making an exodus from a doomed world in a gigantic artificial habitat, with countless generations embarked on the journey since time out of mind. When such a "mother ship" reached the vicinity of Earth, it might dispatch reconnaissance craft similar to the objects that pilots say they've observed. But in that case, why haven't astronomers detected the mother ship? Why hasn't anyone detected incoming reconnaissance craft, if we can detect them when they're in our atmosphere? And why do they crash at an apparently much higher rate than airliners; more like experimental aircraft being test-flown?

No, it's a safe bet that Earth is not being visited by creatures from outer space. So why is Congress investigating, and why has the Pentagon recently moved toward greater transparency in its handling of aerial phenomena? Two possible explanations come to mind.

One possibility is that the government, with the witting or unwitting cooperation of David Grusch, is acting to soften up public opinion for the revelation that terrestrial actors have been getting away with aggressive spying and probing or, what seems more likely, unregulated testing within US territory. Given the many reports of the strange objects' presence contrasted with few if any reports of their approach, they must be operating from domestic bases on the ground. This would be of interest to a congressional committee. At the same time, a portion of the general public would feel relieved after having been teased with visions of space invaders.

The other possibility, which does not exclude that of unregulated testing, is corruption. Mr Grusch, speaking of programs that deal with unidentified aerial phenomena, has stated, "Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia." Lord Acton would probably be open to the idea that secrecy tends to corrupt and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely. A long-running "black" program with labyrinthine funding could reach such extremes of corruption, autonomy, and the entanglement of "a qualified industrial base and academia" that reining it in must involve public exposure. The essence of the story may turn out to be that somebody has a reverse-engineering budget but no reverse-engineering work to do.

As for those organic remains found with crashed vehicles, the studied use of the term non-human in preference to alien or extraterrestrial may mean we should be thinking of primates used in testing the effects of those sharp turns at high speed that observers often report. Then again, all the sensational details — the organic remains, the astonishing technology, the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" — may be products of an overextended game of telephone.

That is the view from the end of the limb. If it turns out that Earth has in fact been scouted for invasion, the laugh will be on me. In any case, though, it's a mistake to conflate the surmise that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe with the surmise that it sometimes travels from there to here. The two notions are worlds apart.

* Memory did not serve. The distance is 4.5 light years, as noted by Justin E.H. Smith in "Where do aliens come from?"

The Oasis of Principle

Nearly a quarter-century ago, Stanley Fish's book The Trouble with Principle made a stir in literate America. That and his other writings have led academic peers to attack him as a cynically relativist gadfly, but the book in question reads pretty much as if Principle were a fair maiden languishing in partisan captivity. It's her fate to be used, Fish protests, as an unassailable surrogate for people's assailable motives. Joseph Conrad, who had known a politicized home life as the child and eventual orphan of elite young activists, seems to have held a kindred view: that the true motivators of political action are personal interests and impulses, not impersonal ideas.

Observers of political life in America today routinely cite the intensification of partisanship but less often dwell on its correlative: open indifference to principles and, in some cases, scorn for Lady Principle herself.

An extreme example of indifference to principles is the case of evangelical Christians who swear by Donald Trump, an impudently unrepentant sinner oblivious of any higher will than his own. (Seek forgiveness? “I don't bring God into that picture.”) Devoutly religious people ought to have principles, to say the least. Religious faith is, after all, surrender to an elemental principle. Religious practice consists in the observance of attendant principles. Religiosity loses its character when untrammeled by principles. And that's what has happened. The most bumptious of Christian zealots, seeing a political advantage, have turned themselves into pagan idolaters.

Idolatry seems an apt term for any partisan alternative to the work of conserving common reservoirs of good. Idolatry — the worship of an artificial god that's there to dispense favors to the favored. The difference between thoroughgoing partisanship and even faltering service to impartial principles is the difference between the prayer "Make me successful" and the prayer "Make me good."

An idol may take the form of a construct named like a principle but set up for the antithetical purpose of granting its priesthood unspecified latitude. This is the case with equity (the sociopolitical term of art) versus equality. A commitment to equality hems you in with standards and definite tasks. A commitment to equity turns you loose in a political toyshop. Adherents of equality may admit a need for certain pragmatic steps to offset disadvantages, but adherents of equity will admit nothing. Why should they, if they've got one of the gods of social justice on their side? To the principled question, At what point will equity have been attained?, the partisan reply is always going to be, "We’ll let you know."

Two words commonly conjoined with equity — diversity and inclusivity (or inclusion) — take partisan wordplay further. Whereas equity is a usefully vague replacement for another word, diversity and inclusivity are cases of redefinition. Partisan usage narrows the definition of diversity by reducing its referents to mostly biological identity groups and treating any demand for diversity of worldview or political inclination as counter-revolutionary mischief. The redefinition of inclusivity is a bold inversion of the straightforward meaning, openness to all as on a commons where people of every description can mingle on equal terms. Here, inclusivity means partisan displacement; a game of musical chairs managed so as to shunt some participants to the sidelines while seating others in politically secure positions. As to the inversion of anti-racism, plenty has already been written.

The Republican Party once seemed to be all head and no heart. Now it's nothing but viscera. However, to say that Republicans have changed would miss the mark. They haven't changed so much as they’ve undergone a great replacement. The patrician skinflints who long employed the powers of social darkness as electoral muscle are now reduced to dining elbow-to-elbow with those powers, glumly staring into their soup while the rafters ring with indecent banter. By and by they creep away, taking their principles with them. Obstreperous upstarts, bringing only partisan energy, move in. This is how the party changes.

Worst, at the bar of history, is the fate of those old-school politicians who've acquired more power than they can walk away from. Consider the case of Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader during the presidency of Donald Trump, who nearly distinguished himself at the end of that sordid chapter by orating against Trump’s insurrectionist offenses from the Senate floor, first on January 18, 2021, and again, even more forcefully, on February 13. In the meantime, however, he had found a rationale for saying "not guilty" in the selfsame voice and leading his Republican majority to acquit Trump of those offenses in an impeachment trial. If there's anything more ignominious than to surrender your principles outright, it's to make a stirring show of them while surrendering them as an aside.

Such is the open indifference to principles in American political life today. It exists on both sides of the left-right divide, much to the disgust of the middle. However, scorn for the very principle of bowing to principle is especially an ace in the hole of activists on the cultural left.

People who wish to re-order society (or who wish to sweep away the competition in their own careers) have an interest in overthrowing impersonal principles; not only common standards, blindfold assessments, and impartial procedures, but also those principles of individual conduct that regulate esteem.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture recently [as of July, 2020] unveiled guidelines for talking about race. A graphic displayed in the guidelines, entitled "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States," declares that rational thinking and hard work, among others, are white values.

In the section, Smithsonian declares that "objective, rational, linear thinking," "quantitative emphasis," "hard work before play," and various other values are aspects and assumptions of whiteness.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture had no comment for Newsweek. They referred to the website's page titled "Whiteness" when asked for additional comment. The graphic was later removed from the page.

—Marina Watts in Newsweek (July 17, 2020)

It's often impossible to know when the anarchic impetus is actually coming from a member of the minority that's supposed to profit by it and when it's coming from a majority-group ally, but it's telling that the rationale may spill over into "the soft bigotry of low expectations" without being caught until complaints lead to a retraction and apology. Profoundly telling. The image of the white savior reaching down to join hands with children of nature could hardly find a more appropriate application. It makes no difference whether the authors of patronizing declarations like the Smithsonian's are themselves white or not. The mentality is of privileged-white origin.

This is one of the pitfalls in the anti-principle path. It's the summer of 2020. Some politically acute person encounters the new whipping-boy of "whiteness" and wishes to take part in the whipping. The word suggests Northern European colonizers and their culture, so — Puritanism, Protestant work ethic, Age of Reason, etc. Yes, that’s the ticket. Deprecate hard work and analytical thought, and you strike a blow against whiteness. It's just that with this narrow focus on discrediting a particular political object, you fail to notice ramifications and contradictions. After all, the world is home to work ethics that owe nothing to Protestantism, and analytical thought that owes nothing to a certain phase of European history. Throughout American society and elsewhere, such wellheads of principle are valuable resources. People whose acuteness is of the non-political kind understand that this is so. If they know they belong in the company of capable people, they won't take kindly to being cast as outsiders.

Before that summer, a certain principle held a prominent place among black commentators: the principle of black agency. Racial justice, to be genuine and honorable, must be won by black people and not dispensed by white ones. Then came the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the racial reckoning that ensued, and suddenly the good offices of whites were available in superabundance. When such a host of well-connected white allies had mustered for the fight against racism, it was hardly possible to deny them leading roles even if that wouldn't have been terribly self-defeating in practical terms. Thus black activists found themselves employing the powers of whiteness as muscle and more. At the same time, it was to be understood that black people — that is, some incorporeal black authority with the power of speaking through individuals — would preside as arbiter of racial truth. This was the way forward: black agency brought to you by white agents.

We'll never know, or won't till times have changed again, what results the uncompromised principle of black agency would have achieved. It was hard but not impossible to foresee the jumble of good intentions and wanton impulses, of productive work and destructive play, that resulted from the compromise. At a minimum, a worthy cause might have been spared association with schoolteachers' fevered takeaways from critical race theory and minor bureaucrats' inability to do a number on whiteness without insulting blacks.

The path of principle is not magical in the sense that it necessarily leads to the success of any project. However, it is magical in that it starts from every point on the compass and leads to a common reservoir of good. It's like the path of unbiased reporting in journalism. Freedom from bias may be unattainable, but it makes a world of difference whether journalists strive toward it or not. Their striving leads to the place of best conditions for accurate understanding. Principled effort by people engaged in politics, or at least by their audience, would lead to the place of best conditions for wise political behavior. Principles may be mirages, but the principle of Principle is a true oasis.

Card Game

At the point where youth catches sight of adulthood, you feel that your own time in history is destined to be a watershed. You retain the vanity of the child who says, "When I grow up, I'll (be everything good and get everything right)," while gaining an adult's knowledge of the world. You and your cohort will set the world straight. You, with your fresh eyes, see clearly what past generations have seen dimly if at all: that war is folly, that love is the answer, that we're all brothers and sisters.

Until now, that is; until this phase of American history that has more of the maelstrom than the watershed about it. War is folly? Many Baby Boomers thought so in their youth, before some wave of feminism came along and diverted them to the cause of getting women involved in the bombing and strafing. Today, the hill of equal opportunity having been taken, war itself is in vogue with the youthful Left. One factor is that Ukraine, with the West at its back, is now fighting a war for national survival against a rapacious Vladimir V. Putin. Another is that Putin shares a space in many American minds with Donald Trump. Yet another is that the working-class segment of Trump’s base, grievously versed in the concept of a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, has already made the anti-war position its own. To adopt a sanguine view of war, then, is to join in the great struggle against a Trumpist-Putinist Axis. The justice of Ukraine's particular struggle provides moral cover for doing what one wants to do anyway. Support for that struggle and for America's part in it, which ought to be arrived at after a journey of sorrow, becomes a snap. Look at the reader comments in The New York Times during 2022 and see all the heroes jumping aboard polemical trains to the front.

"Love is the answer" and "We're all brothers and sisters" have gone the same way in related handbaskets. Maniacal partisanship has put agape out of mortal reach for those concerned, while the biological essentialism of current leftist thought (barely matched by right-wing bigotry) has made the notion of "all brothers and sisters" downright heretical.

Biological essentialism, in turn, is teetering on the brink of its own sub-maelstrom. Only a few years ago, "toxic masculinity" was a veritable Homeric epithet in progressive discourse, so well was it understood that the human race consisted of good, wise, cooperative females and bad, doltish, self-seeking males. But even as hard-core feminist writers were busily turning the adjectives into money, someone was making off with the nouns. It seems in retrospect as if there had been one morning when they awoke to find their cash cows and bulls gone, but of course it didn't really happen overnight. It happened just slowly enough for some feminists to remark that a transsexual (hereinafter transgender) person who had changed from male to female was not a real woman; but those feminists were already on the wrong side of history. Before much longer, room will have to be found on the wrong side of history for those who assert that a transgender woman is, too, a real woman. Though their time has not yet passed, it has entered a state of incoherence as radical progressives call upon each other to deny that binary sexuality has any basis in fact. It's impossible to be a real woman if womanhood is make-believe.

That's where matters stand, in a snapshot taken at this moment. The vanishing of nouns has of course sparked a riot among the pronouns, but it's really the noun situation that's leading people and organizations into madness. We can skip over most of the contrivances by which men and, especially, women have been banished from the public lexicon out of regard for incomparably smaller portions of the human race. However, there is one example among the latest that demands attention.

Sometime in the first half of last month (apparently), the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) updated its online LGBTQ Glossary to amend the definition of lesbian from "a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women" to "a non-man attracted to non-men." As one can infer from that amendment, the term "gay man" remained unmolested: "a man who is ... attracted to other men." Yes, really. In one stroke, Johns Hopkins justified the darkest paranoia of the fiercest feminist. The vision of "erasing women" became literal truth. Men could appear as themselves. Women must appear as Adam's phantom ribs: non-men.

The reaction was intense. The glossary was taken down for review. But consider: the author of the amendment was some person with a conscious care for representation; they must have discussed it with some other such person, if not a committee (though Johns Hopkins had the brass to assert -- defensively assert, not apologetically admit -- that the misogynistic content was "not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership"); and yet it went out to the world. What this is an example of, surely, is not a positive wish to erase women, but the lunatic confusion in store for minds that get drawn into the game of improvising fundamental change. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive a new reality instead of improving the one we've got. The glossary people could have solved their representation problem with a footnote, but no. They had to dabble in creative decentering.

This essay began with a remark on the sense that one's own time in history is destined to be a watershed. It then drew some specific contrasts between earlier times and the present while straying from the metaphor of a watershed to those of a maelstrom and a trip to somewhere in a handbasket. However, there's a more fundamental difference between today's movements to change the world and past ones. The very word today's in that last sentence is "dead when it is said" for many of the activists who are now active. Their twentieth-century counterparts identified certain great wrongs, such as racial discrimination or the denial of women's rights or wars of choice, and worked to interest others in righting them. Their social vision was genuinely inclusive, not displacive. Their procedures weren't always realistic or free of hypocrisy, but the faults and the virtues converged on some constant idea. True, political engagement could bring social cachet. It could be an end in itself for some. But it was not then chiefly a pursuit of sociopolitical points carried on for the thrill of scoring or the comfort of garnering credit or the distinction of rule-changing. Now it is. It's that game of improvising fundamental change.

The game-playing character of political engagement shows itself both in the details and in a single unifying pattern. In the politics of race, there's the detail of standing the term anti-racism on its head. There's the detail of commanding attention for a while with a proposal to abolish police departments. (It was a predictably short while, now declared past by The New York Times.) In the politics of sex and gender, there's the cascade of details that leaves women's rights behind, returns sexual orientation to the midst of controversy, and subjects society to an endless bed of coals as new articles of faith are brought to white heat and thrown on: trans women are real women; wait, there are no "real" women; wait, sex is not even binary; wait, sex is nothing more than a construct; wait, we shouldn't be talking about sex when gender is the thing -- well, not the thing, but a limitless variety of things defined by individuals. As to the initial surge of transgender politics and the onset of partisan contention on this head, the freelance journalist Meghan Murphy offers a shrewd insight:

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, "the culmination of decades of litigation and activism." This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d'etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.

Gluing the "T" to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of "born this way" and "accepting people as they are," as well as a need to fight for "equal rights" on this basis.

Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.

Such are the details. The single unifying pattern by which the game-playing character of political engagement manifests itself is the competitive spirit of individual players. Imagine being the first to notice that the term pro-choice can be construed as an affront to those women who are economically compelled to seek an abortion and boldly putting forth pro-abortion as the best term after all. This may be a sucker punch to other progressives, but it makes a splendid breakout for oneself. The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.

Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.

Andrew Sullivan, an early advocate of legalizing same-sex marriage, maintained a steady, influential focus on that goal. The outcome he helped attain reached beyond a judicial ruling to broad social acceptance of homosexuality. Now he sees that acceptance under threat -- actually declining in a recent Gallup poll -- by association with manic sex-and-gender activism and its more appalling consequences. Manic activism across the spectrum of progressive interests is like a compulsive card game. It undermines lives and corrodes society as the players throw in stakes that don't even belong to them, looking to win the next trick; or the next; or the next.

But history, though stingy with watersheds, is generous with tides. As the night the day, an ebb tide must follow the flood. This is most definitely true of latter-day American manias. The players in the game of improvising fundamental change will lose interest, their passion spent and the surrounding disarray having grown too uncomfortable. When they turn away from the table, it will transpire that all they've really done with their cards is to build a house of them. The first breeze of the morning after will take care of that.

This Much Is Certain

It is now three weeks since the thing first came tapping at our chamber window. To be precise (for strange reports must be set down with precision), the sound was not so much a tapping as a fitful going-bump in the night. In the morning twilight, to be precise.

On that first occasion, I lay starkly awake trying to reconcile the evidence of my senses with some rational explanation. One that soon occurred to me was that my wife was kicking the furniture in her sleep. In a place the size of ours, furniture is seldom out of leg's reach. However, I found that she wasn't moving. I would presently learn that she wasn't asleep, either, but was simply keeping her head when all about her were losing theirs.

No, this was something outside the house hitting the window beyond the foot of our bed. Something or someone. But surely no burglar would adopt such a modus operandi: coming at dawn and intermittently messing with the window till we woke up. How about a wayfarer lost in the snow who had spied a light in our window? But there was no snow and no light. For that matter, the curtains were drawn.

Now, birds occasionally dash themselves against windowpanes by mistake, but they either break their necks or repair to the woods thoroughly chastened. When a crow came a cropper against one of our windows last year, it dropped all of a heap and lay there awed by its encounter with the supernatural till it was strong enough to totter off. It didn't try, try again. Birds are no gluttons for punishment.

What, then, was it? Far from hopping up to investigate like some impetuous youth, I continued to take the thinking man's approach. I may have placed my fingertips together under the covers. Wisps of rational explanation swirled around and yet failed to coalesce. When that sort of thing goes on for a while, bafflement begets a sense of the uncanny. If the thinking man's approach yields no rational explanation, mightn't it be time to venture beyond reason? In short, might not this thing that comes bumping at our chamber window be — I know this will seem abrupt — the ghost of some miner doomed to wander the old trolley tunnels that are said to honeycomb this area? To put the case on a sounder footing scientifically, might not this phenomenon be due to the venting of subterranean ectoplasm? That would be fun. Our little cottage would go viral.

I didn't really entertain such a thought at the time. I made it up just now for the sake of argument, though some will say that the scope of admissible arguments ought to be narrower. Anyway, we know for a fact what it is that makes our bumping sound. When we finally peeked between the curtains on that first morning, we found that it was a bird after all. We haven't identified the species. This bird perches on the nearest branch of a peach tree and suddenly flutters up against the window just long enough to make a single light bump. Then it returns to the branch. It does this off and on every day, weather permitting, not only at daybreak but at various times during the daylight hours.

Its motive remains a mystery. In February there's no fermenting fruit (which can actually intoxicate birds) anywhere to be found. I've examined the outside of the window and the surrounding wall but can find no trace of anything edible or otherwise attractive. If this bird is excited by its own reflection, it's unique among all those that have ever stopped by our garden. That and its being a glutton for punishment suggest nothing so much as a reincarnated human being, but I'm setting any such thesis aside in obedience to the voice of reason. It's good to have an inner voice telling you that everything must be due to some natural cause, since -- this much is certain -- there's no such thing as the supernatural.

However, peremptory inner voices abound in today's world. Some people are immured against epistemic inconvenience by the precept that everything is due to God's will, since there's no such thing as a world beyond God's control. Does geological evidence confute a literal reading of Genesis? Well, God made it look that way to test our faith, or else Satan made it look that way to trick us; and Satan's ability to do so is willed by God. Some people who believe themselves free of religious faith argue in the same way, though perhaps not with quite the same absence of guile. Given the cookie cutter of Marxist critique, they spend their intellectual lives cutting Marxist cookies from every kind of material. Leninist critique takes care of international affairs (imperialism not being part of the Marxist lexicon). Does human history show us a world already beset with decadence and exploitation when Europeans were living in huts? Well, European colonialism severed the historical thread two or three hundred years ago, so never mind the ancient part. All the evils of our time are due to colonialism and capitalism: the very things that Marxists and Leninists want them to be due to. More recently, some people have adopted the precept that all violence and social injustice in America are due to white racism. Do the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021 defy analysis as a white-racist hate crime? Does the fatal beating of a black man by black police officers in Memphis last month tend to complicate the race-based view of police brutality? Not for a moment. All social evils in America rest ultimately on white racism, since — since white racism underlies everything in America.

That list of examples brings us a long way from the mentality that attributes a strange noise to a ghost. However, it doesn't leap any great divides. It just traces, in a hopscotch manner, the development of confirmation bias from a blunt instrument to a scalpel. In modern society, a priori precepts are constantly slicing up the collective brain, and the scope of admissible ones is no more governed by reason than by religion. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, in his "Up for Debate" newsletter of February 22, 2023, calls attention to a valuable commentary on this state of affairs. It comes from Brink Lindsey, author of The Permanent Problem on Substack, who perceives the negative consequences of abandoning organized religions although he has never subscribed to one himself. After noting how religious observance is declining across the Western world, Lindsey writes,

Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.

So the sunny view of organized religion's retreat as humanity's intellectual advance really can't be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one's personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the "sacred canopy" has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.

Lindsey's focus is on patent superstition, but the procrustean beds of ideology serve the same purpose for intellectuals. Though dogmatically anti-religious people hate hearing their organized materialism referred to as a form of religion, let alone "the superstition of the 20th century," as Octavio Paz felt compelled to describe what Marxism had become, the characteristics are present there and in political orthodoxies more generally: revealed truth, unimpeachable authority, doctrine and heresy, insiders who have seen the light and outsiders who have not. Whether one tends to adhere to a traditional religion or to a modern substitute, there's a certain level at which one must either reserve the right to do some free thinking or settle down to a life of docile credulity.

Our bird continues to puzzle us. It sometimes moves around the corner of the house to a rose bush in front, from which it can watch us eat while it makes its ascents against the nearest window. Strange. When we're in the bedroom, it comes to the peach tree and jumps up and down. When we're in the living-dining-kitchen space, it comes to the rose bush and jumps up and down. You'd almost think it was trying to tell us something. Mind you, if I could find a rational alternative to the reincarnation thesis, I'd prefer it.