A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…
Tag: politics
The Fall of the Chosen Ones
I’ve long since stopped trying to second-guess where to look for insights into the crisis of our time and the first stirrings of the future ahead. I read a lot of news and a lot of blogs, covering a non-Euclidean landscape in which the conventional categories of Right and Left are temporary agglomerations at most,…
The Dream of a Managed Society
My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…
The Next Twilight of Environmentalism
Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not…
The Flight To The Fringes, And What Waits There
Several of my readers alerted me over the last week to an online essay by Christian writer Rod Dreher on the rising popularity of malevolent magic and demonolatry (the worship of malign spirits) on the leftward end of the US political scene. For so loaded a topic, Dreher’s essay is thoughtful and admirably measured; what’s…
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…
Present at the Death
Well, the penny finally dropped. I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize that the collective tantrum that’s seized America’s mass media, intelligentsia, and privileged classes generally for the last two and a half years, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was described right down to the small details…
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…
Adrift In An Airship
The collective confusions we’ve been exploring since I returned from January’s break form a tangled web, and no one loose end leads straight to the heart of it. It so happens that in recent months I’ve had the chance to explore it from yet another angle, by way of the research I’ve been doing for…
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…