As a trad-adjacent Catholic I believe in spirits, but I am a man of my time, and downplay or ignore them. Seeing what's going on, and reading your tweets, I've been thinking of the Girl Fixer (if you've ever read Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil" - not that I really believe MM).
I have to look for hope in fiction - Tolkien's description of Olorin - ". . . though he loved the Elves, he walked among them unseen, or in form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts. In later days he was the friend of all the Children of Ilúvatar, and took pity on their sorrows; and those who listened to him awoke from despair and put away the imaginations of darkness"
I've observed what feels like an attempt in our modern age to wipe away all spirits from life. I don't know if this is what you mean but it's been on my mind a lot lately. I sense an extreme bias toward a left-brained way of seeing the world. Emphasis is on optimization, quantification, efficiency, and productivity. People proudly declare, "I don't read fiction." Instead, they read books about self-improvement, building habits, and "Not giving a f*ck." Baseball is obsessed with pace of play, spin rate, launch angle, and instant replay. It's the quantification or everything. Out with the spirit of finesse, it's the spirit of geometry all the way down.
Are you familiar with the latest attempt in English departments to look at literature "more quantitatively" in and effort to legitimize themselves relative to the hard sciences? The worst book I had to read in graduate school was Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. It felt like an attempt to suck the last remaining joy out of literature.
I don't know what all this portends for our future but I used to feel moved by ideas and possibilities. Recent events have left me feeling quite unmoved and nihilistic about the future. Or perhaps that's just being moved in a different direction.
I learned about your Substack page via your recent interview with Larry Chapp.
I am interested in seeing the dovetailing of interests between you and Paul Vanderklay, who I know you've had on your podcast. You may already be aware of this, but Paul has done a number of episodes exploring this very topic of spirits (egregores), and Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke also had a nice discussion recently on consciousness and agency above the human level.
As Paul has said, the winter of modernity is ending and intellectual horizons are opening up again.
As a trad-adjacent Catholic I believe in spirits, but I am a man of my time, and downplay or ignore them. Seeing what's going on, and reading your tweets, I've been thinking of the Girl Fixer (if you've ever read Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil" - not that I really believe MM).
I have to look for hope in fiction - Tolkien's description of Olorin - ". . . though he loved the Elves, he walked among them unseen, or in form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts. In later days he was the friend of all the Children of Ilúvatar, and took pity on their sorrows; and those who listened to him awoke from despair and put away the imaginations of darkness"
I've observed what feels like an attempt in our modern age to wipe away all spirits from life. I don't know if this is what you mean but it's been on my mind a lot lately. I sense an extreme bias toward a left-brained way of seeing the world. Emphasis is on optimization, quantification, efficiency, and productivity. People proudly declare, "I don't read fiction." Instead, they read books about self-improvement, building habits, and "Not giving a f*ck." Baseball is obsessed with pace of play, spin rate, launch angle, and instant replay. It's the quantification or everything. Out with the spirit of finesse, it's the spirit of geometry all the way down.
Are you familiar with the latest attempt in English departments to look at literature "more quantitatively" in and effort to legitimize themselves relative to the hard sciences? The worst book I had to read in graduate school was Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. It felt like an attempt to suck the last remaining joy out of literature.
I don't know what all this portends for our future but I used to feel moved by ideas and possibilities. Recent events have left me feeling quite unmoved and nihilistic about the future. Or perhaps that's just being moved in a different direction.
Hi Kale,
I learned about your Substack page via your recent interview with Larry Chapp.
I am interested in seeing the dovetailing of interests between you and Paul Vanderklay, who I know you've had on your podcast. You may already be aware of this, but Paul has done a number of episodes exploring this very topic of spirits (egregores), and Jonathan Pageau and John Vervaeke also had a nice discussion recently on consciousness and agency above the human level.
As Paul has said, the winter of modernity is ending and intellectual horizons are opening up again.
Regards
David C.