I’ve mentioned in previous essays here that our civilization’s age of reason is ending. That’s a familiar event in history. At a certain point in the life cycle of every civilization—about the time that its artistic traditions are really hitting their stride, and before political and economic centralization sets in—intellectuals become entranced with the idea…
Tag: Donald Trump
Our Werewolves, Ourselves
The muse who inspires these essays is an unruly goddess. I was planning this week on picking up the threads of the sequence of posts I began at the start of this year, summing up what I’ve learned so far in my exploration of enchantment, disenchantment, and the rise and fall of civilizations, and sketching…
A Conversation with the World
Over the last three and a half months, I’ve spent most of my writing time on this blog tracing a series of trajectories that all spiral in toward a common center. Each of those explorations started with some feature of contemporary culture and followed it back to its roots in a very odd set of…
After The Shouting, The Silence
Over the months just past, not counting January’s break, we’ve explored the crisis of our age from various angles, moving in from the discordant jangle of outward symptoms toward the tangled heart of it all. One thing I haven’t really tried to address, though it’s gotten a certain share of discussion in passing, is the…
An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2019
Today is the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring summer to the end of the planet with polar bears and winter to the end with penguins. Nature worshipers of various kinds will be celebrating the equinox today, Druids among them, but this is also a day that matters…
The Twilight of the Intelligentsia
I promise, I didn’t time this sequence of posts so that this one would come out the morning after one of the most bitterly fought midterm elections in memory. Nor, of course, did I have advance notice of the outcome, though it wasn’t a surprise to me that the much-ballyhooed “blue wave” would flop as…
The Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Left, and the Esc-Center
When I predicted back in January of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, I suggested that his candidacy would mark a sea change in American politics and public life. That’s turned out to be even more true than I’d expected. It’s not just that Trump’s presidency challenges the…