The Haunting of Logres

We are haunted by the unseen, but there are times that are "thin" and the darker spirits reveal themselves, often in the cover of liberation, bent on destruction

I am, to put it indelicately, a “mutt”. I am a practicing Catholic who has a Jewish last name and a made up first name. I possess ancestral genetics from divers populations and locales. Additionally, I am an American, from the South, currently in exile in New England.

But in my heart I am an Anglophile. I have been fortunate to live in a number of places, and visit even more. My trip to Rome as a college sophomore was truly life-changing, expanding my appreciation of time and place in radical ways. Paris, too, was stunning and almost overwhelming.

But three summers ago, thanks to an invite from my good friend and co-conspirator Chris Fisher, I went to England for the first time with a group of high school students. It’s hard to explain the feelings I had when we pulled into Oxford. It wasn’t unusual that I was just happy to be there, as I tend to enjoy new places, new food, new styles, new architecture. But this felt different.

Upon walking past University Parks from our home base in Norham Gardens, it just felt immediately familiar. Hiking up to Broad Street, seeing “the Heads” in front of the Sheldonian, and then walking past the Radcliffe Camera and up to High Street invoked in me a strange always-having-been-there sense. After lunch we toured Christ Church, walked through the Meadow and on over to Magdalen and the famed Addison’s Walk…well, it was not only magnificent, but really it just felt like home. England runs in my blood somehow, or maybe it somehow animates my spirit. But in a strange way, it always feels RE-animating, like I’ve always been from here. I’ve been back the last two summers, and will return at the end of July. I can’t wait.

So when I read

Mary Harrington

’s cri de cœur over her country’s unmasking the past two weeks, I felt it. Even as a remote former colonist, I felt her cry, her lament over a decadent leadership class hellbent on driving them over the white cliffs, legion-like into the rocky surf below. In the span of only a few days, Parliament made abortion until the point of birth legal, then pushed through an assisted suicide bill with dubious guardrails.

It’s a suicide, of sorts, or maybe better yet, a Nationcide. Interesting, insofar as the word “nation” comes from the Latin “natus”, “having been born”. She calls this impulse “bio-libertarianism”, saying:

It’s a worldview that rejects out of hand the idea that anything about our embodied life as human beings should be regarded as given, from our form, our development, our natural history, or our relations to others. For bio-libertarians, every means possible should be used, whether financial, political, judicial, or technological, to liberate us from anything that might be experienced, residually, as beyond our individual choice and control.

The continuing promise of and impulse for liberation is a powerful spell. So much of our incoherence rests in NOT signifying the “for what” question. “Liberate us FOR what?” is the unnamed, unspecified telos. There is no answer for our tired Liberal world order. That is a “strong god” in the schema of R.R. Reno. We are not allowed to provide an answer. So instead, we default to process, and hope that no one will notice the grim confusion and the dark charnel-churn. The only thing that matters is individual choice and control. Is ANYTHING given?

Mary continues by pushing further, noticing more and more:

Full term abortion and euthanasia on demand don’t just demand to control the stuff of life itself. Such measures also attack the presumption that we are directed toward one another: that humans are relational beings. If you begin from the assumption that everyone is a solitary monad, and all relationships are opt-in, the idea that we should be free to end our lives whenever we choose makes perfect sense. The notion that others might have a stake in that decision simply never arises, and if it does may be shrugged off as others imposing their values.

The incoherence of the isolated, liberated, liberal self with no necessary referent to a body corrodes the very foundations of a person, a people, a nation. This myth of liberation unmasks itself, showing forth as a kind of dressed-up death cult, and unnoticed by most. We are not mere “monads”, nor are we merely autonomous consumers, purchasing a perfect existence. We are embedded and embodied, warts and all. If a government is animated by a force that would dissolve any and all givens, what good is it? We can all feel this disconnect because our governments are actively attempting to disconnect each of us from each other.