The Pornographers and Those who make them Rich

It is a fact universally acknowledged that great evils persist because the good men and women who could stop them do nothing. Laila Mickelwait is not one of those who do nothing, not one to stand by while evil has its way. Instead, armed with her conscience, her compassion for victims, her moral certitude, and an indefatigable fighting spirit, Mickelwait has singlehandedly brought a multi-billion dollar business to its knees under the growing weight of lawsuits, criminal investigations, and the righteous anger of an outraged public.

This is the story told in her new book, Takedown. It is an unflinching (and at times disturbing) tale of the author’s crusade against the execrable PornHub. It reads like a hybrid memoir and crime thriller. The writing is competent for the task at hand, which is telling a story dramatically from the first person perspective. Potential readers should know that Mickelwait doesn’t hold back from describing the criminal videos she discovers in her efforts to hold PornHub accountable, and for this reason the book is harrowing to read (or listen to); it’s not for the faint of heart.

A Distinction

The book, like the law, makes a distinction between ‘regular’ pornography on the one hand and criminal pornography—content involving children or non-consensual acts—on the other. This is an important moral and legal distinction, but it was striking to see just how much and how often the author took pains to assure the reader that she was not against ‘legal’ pornography. What the typical reader might not realize however is that the legality of pornography itself has always been in question, with numerous courts adjudicating the tension between free expression and obscene materials in the US and Canada in recent decades.

This insistence on the part of the author is a strong signal as to what kind of moral compass a mass-market book can assume in its audience. It is taken as a matter of fact that pornography featuring consenting adults is perfectly fine, while the non-consensual variety is a heinous evil that should be tirelessly opposed. I agree of course with the second part of the previous sentence, but what I want to point out is how much moral significance is invested into the rather thin category of consent. Can consent really serve as the north star for our morality? And do we realize just how recently, as a society, we swapped out older and deeper moral foundations for the proverbial duct tape of consent?

My own view of pornography is that it is a poison for all involved, and that this can be established without necessarily drawing on Scripture. For example, consider the words of Roger Scruton from his book, Beauty:

The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height—an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.

Not only is this kind of moral clarity foreign to much of our society, there is even an inversion at work such that people who hold views like mine (and yours?) are discredited from having something worthwhile to say in the public square. Don’t believe me? Consider that the main strategy of PornHub’s apologists to discredit Laila Mickelwait was the claim that she was “one of those anti-pornography crusaders.” And this accusation was countered strategically by Mickelwait listing her pro-porn bona fides.

That is really something, if you stop and think about it.

A Criminal Enterprise

The book makes it abundantly, disturbingly clear that PornHub—and one has to assume there are many websites like it—has been involved in facilitating, profiting from, and committing crimes. For years the site has employed top-shelf PR firms and marketing companies to burnish their image and present themselves in a way not unlike Playboy did in decades past; as sophisticated and a little naughty. A knowing smile and a wink, “Hey, everyone does it, right?“

The dirty little secret was that the site was a rats’ nest of criminal child pornography and video evidence of serious sexual crimes—and that PornHub not only knew this but embraced it as a lucrative aspect of their business. Laila Mickelwait led the charge to uncover this reality, thus taking on one of the biggest and most profitable websites in the world. Unsurprisingly, the men who were comfortable getting rich off the life-destroying trauma of victims had no problem hacking, harassing, doxing, and threatening physical injury to Mickelwait and her family. The reality is that the owners of PornHub, just like its content, were more than just ‘a little naughty’—they were criminal and evil.

The fact that it has taken such a Herculean effort to get the authorities to treat PornHub like a criminal organization is a sad reflection on our culture’s moral confusion. And yet the book focuses in on those people who decided to do something rather than looking away, and that is a heroic act. I wholeheartedly applaud them for that, and hope that many others rise up to join them. People are clearly hungry for moral clarity and a worthy cause to fight for—here is one where even at this point in our divided culture we can still find a general consensus.

The Enablers

But what is also clear from the book is that we cannot expect corporations to do the right thing, no matter how black and white the case looks. Consider the example of the credit card giants, VISA and Mastercard. It was not enough for the VPs of these companies to be given direct evidence that PornHub was hosting illegal content, that the site was knowingly doing this, and that they were prioritizing making money off the illegal content—the traumatic sexual abuse of minors, lest we forget—over the frantic requests of those very same victims to have the videos taken down. No, all of that was not nearly enough, because large corporations tend to function like sociopaths. If there is a good chance they might get away with something immoral, even illegal, they will tend to do it, guided by the profit motive.

Don’t underestimate the almost limitless ability of people in these corporations to rationalize their behaviour away. In order for them to do the right thing, only one thing must be clearly demonstrated: that they will lose far more money or face criminal prosecution if they continue than if they stop. In VISA and Mastercard’s case, they had to be pressured intensely and relentlessly not only by customers through petitions but also by power brokers: billionaire hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman, Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnists like Nicholas Kristoff, and elite lawyers armed with track records of billion-dollar settlements like Michael Bowe. These companies do not deserve any credit for “doing the right thing.”

A Failure of Education

The experience of reading this book got me thinking about what kind of people become pornographers, profiting on the exploitation of vulnerable women and boys. This question is especially poignant because of my geographical proximity to many of the people working at and leading PornHub. I grew up in the English community in the greater Montreal area, and many of my friends (and some family) have studied at Concordia, where two of the founders of PornHub first met and got their start. This reflection has connected in my mind with the larger theme of education and moral formation, which I’ve written about recently. Here is what I mean.

It’s become clear to me that as a society we have lost the ability to educate young people in a way that would have been recognizable to the great thinkers of the past: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, etc. Modern education is focused on pragmatics, utilitarianism, and increasingly aligned with the radically nominalist ideology of the LGBT movement. The goal of the modern educational approach has been: helping students get a good job and succeed in the world. That’s the pragmatic utilitarian side. Increasingly even this has been jettisoned for progressive activism in the classroom. But in contrast to both of these modern approaches, the older approach to education was about the cultivation of the virtues, forming not just the mind but the chest (to borrow from C.S. Lewis); not just right thinking, but right feeling.

Today we have almost totally lost the idea that one’s emotions and affections need to be trained, but this is something the best of our forebears knew. We tell students to look within themselves to discover what great wonderful uniqueness is just waiting to come out. A properly educated person in centuries past was trained to know and to love the good, the true, and the beautiful. We utterly abandoned this approach to education in the late 19th and early 20th century, and I would argue that this goes a long way to explain the moral decrepitude of the obviously intelligent and well-educated (in computer programming or whatever discipline) men and women working at PornHub. But in the deepest sense, these people are not educated, they are not properly formed. There is a corruption deep in the soul that is at odds with the moral fibre of the universe.

I went to school with these guys, and I recognize the type. Cut adrift from a clear moral foundation to build upon, and with all that modern life and the internet makes available within easy reach, it’s not surprising to me that so many today think nothing of consuming violent pornography or working for a company that exists to peddle and get rich off such filth—even if some of it isn’t technically illegal. It’s a toxic cocktail of nihilism, cynicism, and ennui.

While children are not morally pure, they have a beautiful innocence that can mature into a love for what is good and a hatred for evil. But the appetites are malleable, and our hearts can be drawn away towards evil in all kinds of directions, not only from outside influences, but by the evil that grows naturally in every fallen human heart. And let’s not forget the Biblical testimony about the spiritual beings who prey on the sinful human heart and lead it to ever darker domains of depravity; indeed the depth of evil and cruelty one encounters in this realm is difficult to explain without reference to the demonic.

The Troubled Conscience

One interesting theme in the book is the role of the whistleblowers and insiders, former and current PornHub employees who reach out to Mickelwait to help her. When some of the early stories about PornHub came out a few years ago, I went to a popular employer-rating website and looked up what employees were saying about PornHub. I was fascinated by the people who would admit to working there. I remember reading many complaints about the management, but the most fascinating were those who were complaining about the soul-crushing nature of the work, especially content moderation (which involves watching the worst flagged videos for 8 hours a day).

One has to wonder what kind of person agrees to this work in the first place, and then what kind of reflection takes place—some flowering sense of morality, guilt, and shame—such that they turn against their employer and partner with Mickelwait in her efforts to take it down. This offers us a lens into the human conscience. Even after it has been seared and suppressed for years, it can be awakened by the suffering of innocent people and by the proper human response: righteous moral outrage. We might even say such people are taking their first steps in their true education.

Something Dark was Let Loose

As encouraging as it is to see these criminals get their comeuppance as the lawsuits and investigations pile up, I confess this book has left me with gloomy thoughts. Why? Because by all available evidence the problems of child sexual abuse and the prevalence of pornography, especially of a violent nature, are getting worse, not better. The reason we’re talking about this is because there is an endless and insatiable market for this material, a black teeming mass of abusing and abused souls, perpetrators and victims—the pornographers and those who make them rich.

The sexual revolution promised to set free the repressed love and desire that was making unfulfilled people miserable, but considered from this vantage point, it delivered instead a spirit of unbridled desire that commodified and objectified the human person, a spirit which too often revealed itself as desiring not just the bodies of others but the suffering of others. And once set free, it has proven impossible to bind that spirit of lust and destruction. PornHub’s empire was but one large and visible manifestation of what is a far more pervasive and profound moral rot.

When the only forbidden thing is to forbid, it is the weakest, the women and children, who inevitably suffer the most. One can be forgiven for wondering if the sexual revolution was such a good idea after all, whether consent can really be the guide for our morality, and whether that older morality was not altogether better than what we’ve got now.

_{As an Amazon Affiliate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases of books purchased through links on my website, while customers do not pay anything extra.}

Imminent: Thoughts on Luis Elizondo’s Book and the UFO/UAP Topic

Among my many interests are a number of fringe topics, those weird subjects that exist on the edges of respectable discussion. One such topic is psychedelics, which I’ve written about quite a bit. Another one, which I have not written about much, is the whole topic of UFOs, now rebranded as UAPs (Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomenon). I’ve been quietly studying the subject for a number of years, pondering just what is going on with it, and seeing a real change in the public consciousness with regard to it. The topic has steadily been emerging from the shadows of ridiculous TV shows and late night talk radio to Senate hearings, highly decorated and credible whistleblowers from inside the military, and serious engagement by eminent scientific figures.

One of the people at the center of this shift has been Luis Elizondo, a former counter-intelligence officer who went public in December 2017 and helped release three now-infamous videos from the Pentagon that were featured in a controversial and viral New York Times front-page story. Now, seven years after that story was released and ushered in a new era of public conversation about this topic, Elizondo has just published his highly anticipated memoir called Imminent, which I listened to on audiobook. The book was standard memoir fare, competently written, and fast-paced. I won’t summarize the book’s narrative here, you’ll be able to find that elsewhere easily enough. What I’d like to do in this post is reflect on how this topic interfaces with other areas of interest, such as the metaphysical shift taking place in the West.

Imminent traces both Elizondo’s life and his efforts to bring the UFO and UAP topic to the public, out of the confines of Pentagon halls. Much of the material was familiar to me from following this topic, but there were a few surprises, such as Elizondo’s direct involvement and study of ‘Remote Viewing’—a phenomenon I have read about in David Morehouse’s book, ‘Psychic Warrior‘ and in other places. The connection between the UAP topic and Remote Viewing is the notion that reality is not reducible to material, as well as both containing within their orbits various phenomena and behaviors that is usually considered occult.

Elizondo holds the view that UAPs pose a potential threat to national security. I grant that from an intelligence and military point of view, this is the inescapable assessment. And yet Elizondo seems to dismiss out of hand those Christians within the upper levels of our intelligence and security agencies who think that there are some malevolent entities behind much of this. Those people can be ignored, in the view of Elizondo and many others, since they are only “closed-minded fundamentalists.” Maybe. Or maybe they are right—or partially right. The knee-jerk response of dismissing such convictions is interesting to me.

Christians have an intellectual inheritance, a deposit of knowledge handed down across generations that is based on the Bible, yes, but also on the collective wisdom and experience of many of the best thinkers in the past. (If your reaction to that statement is to regurgitate some New Atheist blather about superstition, dark ages, and anti-scientific religious dogma, I don’t know what to say except you haven’t done the reading and you’ve bought into a convenient narrative that ignores the actual history).

Jacques Vallée, one of the foremost experts on UFOs, understood early on that the number of parallels between UAP experiences in the modern age and demonological experiences in the medieval age—before our epistemology was artificially restrained by the enlightenment assumptions—was more than could be explained by mere coincidence. His groundbreaking book ‘Passport to Magonia‘ made this argument all the way back in 1969. He saw that there was some undeniable continuity between those strange and mystifying stories from before the scientific revolution (that the modern mind collectively relegated to the proverbial closet, out of sight) and the similarly strange, mystifying, and sometimes hellish experiences endured by members of the public and the military in the modern era.

One way of seeing the disclosure movement is as the inability of our modern culture, with its strictly materialist metaphysics, to explain or deny these paradigm-busting testimonies any longer. If you spend any time looking into this topic, you’ll find that everyone deeply steeped in it has some other worldview than reductive physicalism. It is usually some variation of Eastern mysticism, New Age, occult, panpsychism, or a ‘materialism’ that is so expansive as to be unrecognizable to someone like Dawkins.

From my perspective, the unwillingness of folks like Elizondo to take seriously the concerns of Christians who have this historically-informed perspective is a blind spot. Whether the Christians he encountered expressed their views intelligently and respectfully is impossible to know—though from his telling it doesn’t seem so. This highlights the reality that within the labyrinth of the US government are numerous factions, including at least one that has been directly involved in trying to study and weaponize occult abilities and the powers of non-human entities (the claim is that our adversaries are doing the same, which I suppose is likely true).

This may not be widely known but the evidence is frankly superabundant. The pragmatic utilitarian “if it works” argument is hard to refute within such circles where results are all that matter and where a “flexible moral framework” (read: willing to do evil that good may come) is a career asset. Another faction clearly has deep moral and spiritual misgivings about all such involvement, as can be seen in the work of Ray Boeche and Nick Redfern about the so-called ‘Collins Elite’. (You can find a lengthy critical interaction with that topic by the late Dr. Michael Heiser here.) What the public sees in the media are the faint contours of a mostly-hidden struggle between such factions, and perhaps others.

What do I think about all this? Well, it’s complex. My working thesis is that we are seeing at least two separate things. First, there are deep-black projects and technologies that are tested, witnessed, and interpreted as non-human but are just exotic and advanced. Second, there is a whole other side which is irreducibly spiritual / occult. And then there is some blurry crossover between the two that doesn’t fit neatly into either category.

One thing is for sure, this strange topic is not going away. Too much of the cat is already out of the bag, and our civilizational moment of tumult and crisis has many people re-examining their most basic assumptions about reality. That, combined with historically-low levels of trust in government and other institutions, means we are primed for momentous revelations and paradigm shifts. And perhaps, as Diana Pasulka has argued in her books ‘American Cosmic‘ and ‘Encounters‘, we are seeing the contours of an emerging religious belief system.

Resisting the Rainbow Mafia (with Philosophy)

The opening illustration is unforgettable. I speak of Vaclav Havel’s essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ which opens with an examination of a typical small shop owner living in communist Romania. He puts a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the world, unite!” But does he really believe this? Does he believe it so much that he feels an urge to inform his customers of this ideal? Or is something else going on? Havel explains: “The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message.” And what is that message? “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” Or in other words:

“I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

Is something similar going on in the West in our own day? It sure feels like it. In my travels through quaint and quiet Ontario towns, it seems like every shop feels the need to advertise its most excellent moral qualities by having a rainbow flag in the window. Some even boast of being “Rainbow Registered,” which refers to the “Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC)” Accreditation program for “2SLGBTQI+ Friendly Spaces,” a program that is generously funded by the Government of Canada.

In our day, there is no shortage of breathless outrage over every aspect of the culture war. I really have no interest in joining the chorus of baying dogs barking at each other incessantly across the fence. If you’re looking for that, the good news is there is plenty to be found — just find yourself some social media influencer who agrees with you and go from there.

I am more interested in digging down beneath the surface in a calm and irenic way to understand what is going on. What is animating this froth on the surface? What really divides us? Is it really the case that “they are evil” as so many on both sides claim? That is too easy, too convenient, and too dangerous a notion to embrace, as Solzhenitsyn taught us:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

So this isn’t about getting worked up in fiery indignation at the latest provocation of the other side. Instead, let’s ask the question: what does it mean to have a flag in one’s window, or flying over one’s house, or — more significantly still — over our municipal or church buildings? To answer that question, we need to back up a bit and consider what a flag signifies.

In the last episode of the Masters of the Air series, documenting the story of the 100th Bomber wing of the American forces, captured airmen in a Nazi POW camp rise up against their captors as the allied forces close in. As the fighting subsides, one of the main characters of the show decides to make a bold and symbolic move. He finds himself a contraband American flag, climbs up a wooden structure, tears down the Nazi swastika that had been flying over the camp and raises the stars and stripes amid triumphant shouts and swelling orchestral music. It’s a moving scene (viewer discretion: Violence).

Flags have always carried symbolic weight, not only in their visual designs but also in their usage. To raise a flag over a place is to claim it, and to declare that place’s submission to the authority to which the flag points. To choose to display a flag is an inherently powerful statement of allegiance.

So what does the rainbow flag signify? That question could be answered in a number of different ways. Some would say it means equality and the freedom to love whomever one wants, and to be whoever one feels he or she (or they?) is inside. Others would say it means sexual perversion and the wholesale rejection of both traditional morality and even more fundamentally the binary of male and female.

But I would like to argue that at a deeper level, the flag really represents a rejection of classical metaphysics, the belief that nature has a given shape and order which must be discovered and honoured. Trying to engage this topic on the level of sexual morality is a dead end. The differences are too fundamental. Instead, I’ve found that tackling the topic from the lens of philosophy is less personal and heated.

This is street-level philosophy to be sure. I’m not qualified to debate academic philosophy, nor do I have any desire to. But philosophy at a more basic level is thinking carefully about the nature of the world, knowledge, and reality. One of the major fault lines we find in philosophy is that between nominalism and realism.

In short, nominalism argues that the material world takes the shape it does rather accidentally, and that the names (nomen in the Latin) we give things are arbitrary. There is therefore no reason why trees shouldn’t be boiled down to green soup and no reason why we cannot take it upon ourselves to reshape and reconfigure ourselves and our world to suit the desires we find within.

Realism, on the other hand, believes that the shape of the world and everything in it is purposeful — has telos. Therefore everything has a nature that informs its shape, function, and proper purpose. In this view, there is a moral imperative attached to the world, which is to honour the design and purpose of the world.

These ways of thinking are rarely discussed but they nevertheless function as deeply-held assumptions about the world that shape our moral intuitions. Returning to the LGBT Rainbow flag discussion, I would argue that to embrace the ideology of that flag is to embrace a radical form of nominalism.

Framing this discussion along the lines of philosophy has at least two positives that I can see. First, it gets away from arguing about morality and religion, which is often a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking about religion and morality, but when engaging someone on the other side of this issue, it’s been my experience that we get nowhere at all. Second, it draws a distinction that doesn’t run cleanly along religious lines. What I mean is that some Christians are clearly nominalists, like progressive Christians who find ways to embrace the LGBT movement while holding on to some semblance of belief in Christ, while many secular atheists, Muslims, or non-religious types have a deeply held belief in realism which makes it impossible for them to get on board with the idea that a man can become a woman.

So what about those small-shop owners with the Rainbow flags in their windows? Perhaps some of them are true believers in the LGBT revolution, but many of them are probably just trying to run a small business and be left alone. The rainbow mafia, as some have called it, has all kinds of ways to pressure people to get on the ‘right side’ of this issue. Add to that the social dynamics of small towns, where everyone knows everyone, and also the Canadian temperament to be polite and avoid direct conflicts when possible, and you get many people saying, just like the Romanian greengrocers:

“I, the small business owner, live here and I know what I must do. I won’t be any trouble. I behave in the manner expected of me and put up the Rainbow flag. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace to sell my wares to townsfolk and tourists.“

But just like those suffering under communism, choosing to live by lies is a tragic mistake. It weakens and demoralizes the one who does it. It reinforces the power of the totalitarians, or in our case the soft totalitarians. I believe the flag represents a metaphysical lie, an incredibly damaging lie, and that it is good and right to resist the ideology which animates the LGBT movement, for the sake of our society, for the sake of those caught up in that ideology, and for the sake of the Truth. For Christians, that opposition ought to be both courageous and virtuous, which is not an easy balance to find. But hopefully a deeper understanding of the philosophical questions embedded in this front of the culture war can help us find that balance.

At the Mercy of Narcissists

I reluctantly read Mary Harrington’s recent article about Lauren Southern and the “tradwife” movement. It’s not a happy tale. I won’t blame you for being unaware of Southern—she was a Canadian “media personality” on the alt-right, working at times with Rebel news and featured on various conservative shows as she pursued activism and controversy. She left the media world and sort of disappeared when she got married at the age of 22, around 2017. Her dreams of being a traditional, stay-at-home wife—the ultimate rejection of feminism—had come true.

But those dreams turned into a nightmare. Her husband, it seems, turned out to be a harsh, cruel, selfish man. The marriage eventually fell apart, and she fled back to Canada with her child, where she had to rebuild a life from the ruins. The article goes into a lot more detail, if you’re interested. Harrington’s angle on the story is that these internet-generated ideologies, whether it be transgenderism or tradwifery, are disconnected from reality. The web, she writes, allows these “viral and overly simplistic ideas [to] replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is.” As far as that goes, I agree with her. Mary Harrington is always a perceptive writer, but especially on the subject of technology. See here for my review of her book, Feminism Against Progress.

My interest, and the main point I’d like to make, takes a different angle on the sad story of Lauren Southern’s marriage. Simply put, it’s that shared values are not enough to build a loving marriage; for that, you need godly character, or what we might call true virtue. Harrington tells the story: “By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into ‘listicle’ form as a media influencer for some years.” (A listicle is an online article that is really just a slightly-expanded list, usually of the ‘how-to’ kind). The man she met obviously agreed with her “conservative values,” which formed the basis for their shared value commitments and future plans together. But when I was retelling this story to my wife, she immediately spotted a problem: Southern had been publicly arguing for a strongly anti-feminist, pro-traditional lifestyle as a single woman. “That’s sure to attract narcissists,” she said. And why not? Any selfish man would want to find himself a woman who believed it was her duty to submit and obey and smile and keep a happy home.

Narcissists are very good at pretending to be something they are not. It’s easy to espouse agreement about values, but the proof is in the track record of relationships past and present. There are so many things I don’t know about this situation, so I can’t speak with any authority on the specifics, but my sense is that we are living through a time when men and women are having a lot of trouble finding one another, falling in love, and forming stable families. This seems to be the case regardless of political persuasion. On the Left, there is a wholesale breakdown of the family, or even gender, as stable categories. As women trend more progressive as a whole, we are seeing a lot of feminine-driven pathologies crop up across our culture, including the fact that women initiate the majority of divorces. But on the Right—where I would find myself (to some degree) politically—I also see all kinds of problems, some of which are illustrated all too well by this emblematic story.

Without virtue, no healthy relationship can grow. Without character, integrity, and humility, no flourishing marriage can form. Shared values are not nearly enough; shared dislikes and hatreds even less so. Have we lost sight of this basic kind of wisdom in our internet age? Are we so entrenched and caught up in culture wars that we think someone on the same side as us is sure to be a good spouse? There is a profoundly ugly misogyny that does exist and spread in some red-pilled, anti-feminist corners of the web. It’s not as widespread as the cultural left would like to claim; they really cannot tell the difference between a godly conservative man and a moral monster. But it’s widespread enough to be an issue that needs to be addressed.

If the women in these kinds of spaces don’t have wisdom, discernment, and good community around them, they are simply at the mercy of narcissists. What about that good community? As I read the article a part of me was thinking that this terrible state of affairs could have been helped so much by a healthy local church community. Such a church could have stepped in and advised against the marriage beforehand, or supported her once the issues arose. Good elders could have confronted the husband. But it doesn’t sound like such a church was ever a part of their lives. And with our increasingly fragmented, individualistic communities, nothing else was there to take its place.

Here is another lesson that returns to the theme of technology. Online communities can be great in some ways, but they cannot replace the embedded, embodied communities that once formed the fabric of our societies. When the marriage is really a nightmare, a friend at the front door or a place to stay is what you need, not an avatar or emojis on a messaging platform. A healthy local church is the last best remnant of this kind of community.

But for those of us with daughters, there is one more lesson to draw: we must model for them what good men are like and teach them to spot bad men. And then let’s embed our families in thick communities that look out for one another and take care of each other.

To be clear, I am not blaming Lauren Southern for the situation she found herself in. As I said above, I really don’t know the details and it’s not my place to render that kind of judgment. I do think the situation, public as it is, can be instructive for us. The article includes an unexpectedly positive note, telling how Southern found healing as she lived with her child in a small cabin in the woods, connecting with working class people living in trailers nearby. She described it as “unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.”

In the Valley of the Shadow of Ego Death

That was the proposed title for my newest article, but I can understand why the editor opted to go with something a little more accessible: The Coming Psychedelic Moment. You can find it over at Mere Orthodoxy, an online and print publication that regularly features very thoughtful engagement with the culture from a broadly Protestant perspective. It’s my first piece there, and I’m thankful for the editor, Jake Meador, showing interest in my work and giving me an opportunity to contribute to the intelligent conversation which takes place in their pages.

The idea for this piece came to me one random morning while driving to work. I remember dictating some scattered thoughts and big ideas to my phone and texting it to myself. I saw in a moment of clarity that there was a collision coming our way as two speeding trains were heading for one another.

The first was the downward spiral of worsening mental health among young people. Too complex in its variegated causes to be parsed by me, it could still be presented as a fact. And a fact that meant a growing market demand for answers and solutions.

The second speeding train was the fast-growing level of interest in psychedelics for its medical, therapeutic, and spiritual benefits. With unprecedented institutional support, medical research, and breathless endorsements from celebrities, this train has been gaining steam for quite some time now.

Without some unforeseen intervention, I cannot see what would prevent the popularity of psychedelics from continuing to rise as a primary vehicle for meeting the demands of the mental sufferers that our nihilistic and digitally-addicted age produces. But what will be the result of this collision?

The article is my attempt to answer that question, and to frame all this as part of the broader re-enchantment overtaking the West in our time. The tide of atheism is receding, and the fringes are washing in towards the center again. The world will get weirder and weirder as our overdue payments to reality, which is endlessly weird, come due after deferring them under the pleasant illusions of materialistic naturalism.

This was one of those articles that took a few months to write, bit by bit. I find these the most demanding and most rewarding. I hope you’ll click over and give it a read and share it with someone who might be helped by it. You know, “like and subscribe” and all that self-serving nonsense that is part and parcel of the digital content-creation game.

One of the joys of writing and reading online is stumbling upon hidden gems, and that happened to me shortly after the article above went live. It was linked and suggested to a certain Ashley Lande, who it turns out is one of these New-Age-to-Jesus converts and the author of a fantastic essay, The Self Destroyed, about that journey. It was published at Ekstasis Magazine, an artistic offshoot of Christianity Today. It is a beautifully-written account of her journey through psychedelics and New Age practices (read: endless wheel of religious works) to Christ. You can find it here: Link.

One of the aspects of her story which struck me was how the experience of having a baby helped to deconstruct her false belief system. This was uncannily similar to the testimony of the brilliant and contrarian writer Mary Harrington, whose book I reviewed here a while ago. It has often been remarked that the idealism and ideologies of youth do not always survive the transition to family life, and perhaps these are two more examples of that. But for women there seems to be something particularly powerful about the process of growing a life, a soul, inside one’s body, and then getting to hold and behold that little person in one’s arms.

Is there anything more undeniably real and powerful than this miraculous experience? How can it not slip a few shafts of light through whatever umbrella of protective beliefs we have collected around ourselves? And I think there is another level of meaning here, for in the Christian story the salvation of the world is wrapped up in this very thing: the birth of a baby. We glimpse the first echoes of this in Genesis 3, when we read that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the offspring of the serpent. And you might have heard of this thing called Christmas, or the Incarnation.

The experiences of our lives connect us to these biggest-of-all themes in ways that our modern, truncated, and flattened mindset cannot easily grasp. But at a deeper level—on the mythic, symbolic level where most humans have lived throughout history—these experiences have purchase and weight enough to move the unseen things.

One of the great joys of the Christian life is making those connections at this deeper level; to recognize that we all participate in the patterns that govern all of reality, and that these patterns exist and extend fractally from the heavenly host around the throne to the church gathered in worship to the children sitting around my table – He upholds “all things by the word of his power.”

Pornography and Our Anthropological Crisis

I recently had a piece published over at The Gospel Coalition Canada called Pornogaphy Poisons Everything.

I like the image of the bright green snake picked out by the editor, but the title I proposed fell a bit flat. I’m no expert in marketing or anything, but it seems there should be a little twist of intrigue in the title of a piece that piques the interest of the prospective reader. In my case, I just bluntly stated the thesis of my piece in three words and left it at that. No mystery. Upon further reflection, even adding a single word would have helped: How Pornography Poisons Everything. Ah, that’s better. Well, lesson learned.

Despite the title I’ve been very pleased with the engagement the piece has received, as it was linked to by the main TGC website and Twitter account as well as Tim Challies – major boosters of traffic! Such was their reach that I’ve now got a little radio interview scheduled to discuss the topic further with the fine folks at Moody Radio Florida. I expect this will consist of me trying hard not to say anything spectacularly stupid and my wife trying to keep the kids quiet while I talk into my computer.

I have been reflecting on the themes in the article for a number of years, so I am grateful that people seem to find it helpful, or at least confirming of some intuitions they held. What I tried to make clear is some of the subtle ways pornography influences individuals, families, churches, communities, and societies. I found it helpful to use a combination of Scripture and Natural Law reasoning (also known as common sense) to make this case.

I noted in the piece a shifting tide of opinion in some quarters on the question of pornography. The libertarian laissez-faire approach of “do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt me” has proven disastrously inadequate for helping our society, and especially impressionable youth, deal with the wave of pornography that has multiplied proportionally with the spread of Wi-Fi and high-speed data-enabled cellphones with HD screens. And this all the more given the fact that foolish parents anxious to be liked by their teens are pushovers and give them these devices with absolutely no guardrails. Disaster.

So thoughtful people are waking up to the fact that this is noxious and dangerous stuff which is harming a whole generation recently come of age, and that wise leaders will no more allow this to go unrestricted and unregulated as they would let drug dealers open up booths in our community high schools and at local parks. Why? Because young people do not have the moral or even biological resources to muster up a strong defense against the open availability of such powerful stimulants. It’s been interesting to see secular people coming around to this realization and starting to make moral cases against not only open access to pornography for minors but the industry itself.

Another fascinating angle is the growing activism and legal challenge to the frankly criminal behavior of PornHub, the world’s biggest porn site. The lawsuits are huge, and well, money talks. It’s no exaggeration to say that there is a large amount of content on that site which not only depicts heinous crimes but is criminal itself; freely available images and videos that may someday soon be entered as incriminating evidence in a trial. Outrage over that fact should be widespread and non-political, and I have hope that awareness is growing. While we’re on the subject, perhaps you want to sign the online petition over at Traffickinghub.com.

I hope to write more about this in the future, but in the meantime I need to write the promised Part 2 where I try to offer some help for those still ensnared and enslaved to porn. Stay tuned for that in coming weeks.

This brings me to a related topic: anthropology. I know, I know – another big word which we’ve all heard before but aren’t really sure what it means.

“What is man? What is anthropology?”
*Photo by Max Duzij on Unsplash*

And for my most faithful readers, this will feel like a re-run of a previous post, but I’m firmly convinced that it is a necessary word to understand the nature of the rapid transformations taking place in our time. One of the most helpful thinkers in this regard is Carl Trueman, who has made the transition from church historian to cultural critic with great success. And boy can he write. Consider for example this article just published today over at First Things, where he responds to the same controversy I alluded to in my piece, namely the statement made by Dennis Prager that pornography use and lust are not necessarily morally wrong.

Prager’s statement reveals that he lacks a real grasp of what is causing the social and political problems that he claims to abhor: We live in a time of anthropological chaos, where the very notion of what it means to be human is no longer a matter of broad social and political consensus.

Pornography is a great example of this. Behind the problems that should have been obvious to Prager—the objectification of other people, the human trafficking, the transformation of sex into something that is self- rather than other-directed, the reduction of the participants to instruments of pleasure for the spectators—lies a basic philosophy of life that sees me, my desires, and my fulfillment at the core of what it means to be human. Pornography is thus part of an anthropological shift that manifests itself most obviously in sexual mores but is far more comprehensive in its significance.

Later, he adds:

Now, sex and pornography are the most dramatic examples of where this plays out, but they do not exist in isolation from broader considerations of what it means to be a human person. Therefore those, like Prager, who see pornography as having a legitimate function are complicit in this shift. And this change underlies no-fault divorce, gay marriage, and (in its subordination of the body and its functions to the individual’s sense of well-being) even transgenderism. It is foundational to the progressive cause. To concede here is to concede everywhere.

I do encourage you to read the whole thing. This analysis goes much deeper than the moral outrage of an offended conscience and gets at the roots of what is driving a multitude of bewildering cultural phenomena. We do not need the momentary heat of Twitter-depth indignation which tempts us to feel morally self-righteous. That is cheap. But we do need the light of historically-informed thinking that sees through the chaos and confusion of the day and makes clear the deep tectonic shifts happening in our culture. That is “men of Issachar” type stuff.

I hope, in some small way, to continue making contributions to that good work. As always, thanks for reading.

Ah, America

Our family was recently in the US for a week and a half of vacation. I love America: I have equal parts fascination and affection for that inimitable nation, and I follow its happenings more closely than is probably healthy. I feel much like Os Guinness, the English social critic and apologist who describes himself as an interested outsider peering in, inspired and at times horrified by what transpires in the world’s premier superpower. I agree with him that as the leading nation, it has outsized influence upon the West (and indeed the entire globe). Therefore anyone concerned with the present and future state of the world will pay close attention to the trends at work in the US of A.

But my purpose in writing today is not to tease out any of those world-shaping trends or big ideas. Rather, I just want to make some whimsical observations about the quirks and idiosyncrasies of America, something only an outsider can do. What follows is a series of scattered observations by a Canadian travelling through America.

Our trip to and from South Carolina included stops in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) and Washington DC, including many hours on the I-81 and I-95. After so many hours on the interstate system, the whole thing blurs together into a kind of American highway casserole. The McDonalds, Cracker Barrels, and Sheetz gas stations; the rest stops and truck stops; the vehicles abandoned on the side of the road with a shirt fluttering out of the window; and most of all: the billboards. Compared to Canada, America has really turned billboards into its own art form. One might say that first America managed to transform every message it values into billboards, and then the billboard reshaped American culture into its own image.

Where else can you see billboards fighting for the very souls of motorists? Where else are ultimate matters routinely addressed on giant wooden placards as one races down the road towards the dentist, groceries, or vacation? In Canada, motorists are mostly left to decide ultimate matters for themselves, and are instead presented with products to buy or, at times, public announcements. Here are a few examples of the messages presented to motorists in America. “Jesus is the Answer. John 3:16.” “After you die, You will meet God.” And then there are some that are even a little more blunt, if that is possible. One of them features bold red block letters on a plain yellowy-beige background and says, “FORGIVE MY SINS, JESUS, SAVE MY SOUL.”

And then come the counter-billboards, here to set people free from the benighted ignorance of these silly fundamentalists. “Don’t believe in God? Join the club.” “Just skip church. It’s all FAKE NEWS!” Along similar lines are the billboards appealing to our vices. “Adult Fantasy Store, Exit 100!” And when we finally arrived to Exit 100, where the billboards had promised fulfilled fantasies and illicit pleasures, someone had put up a big billboard: “Life is short. Eternity isn’t. – God.”

Only in America.

The billboards waging spiritual war capture something about America: the reign of marketing. Of course we have marketing in Canada too, but in America it feels like everything is marketed. The essence of marketing is the marriage of image and slogan, logo and tagline, meme and hashtag. To market something means to commodify it, to sell it. And some things, sacred things, ought not be treated this way. Am I saying I wish there weren’t billboards calling on people to consider the truths of the Scriptures and trust in Christ? Not quite. I’m not sure how I feel about it. But something about it does make me uneasy. To boil down the message of Christianity to 6 or 8 words on a billboard is to do something to that message, even if I’m not sure how to express the nature of that something. McLuhan’s insight was that the medium is the message. So part of my uneasiness about the Christian billboards is the implication that Christ for your soul is the same kind of thing as Chick-Fil-A for your stomach or the University of Pennsylvania for your education. But one of these things is not like the others, and to treat them more or less the same seems to me a uniquely American phenomenon.

Speaking of billboards, what is the deal with lawyers and billboards? Do the billboard salespeople give lawyers a 50% discount? Are all these lawyers really getting lucrative lawsuits from these kinds of billboards? “Motorcycle Accident? Call FRED!” “Injured in a CAR WRECK? 1-800-GET-PAID.” I even saw one that said “BIRTH DEFECT? AGE 0-21. CALL ME!” This whole idea is foreign to me. I’ve been in a couple of car accidents, one of which was my fault; the other which was not. But never once did it cross my mind that there was anyone to sue. I’m left with myriad questions: Just who is being sued here? The other driver? The car-marker? The transport authority? I haven’t the foggiest. And what kind of accident would warrant a lawsuit? Do people rub their hands together with glee when they get rear-ended in traffic? Maybe if you were driving down the road and the steering wheel suddenly popped off in your hands you could sue your carmaker. Or what if I was driving down the road and was distracted by all the lawyer billboards and went into the ditch, could I sue the lawyers? Is there a lawyer somewhere specializing in suing other lawyers who put up distracting billboards?

On a slightly more serious note, this idea that I might be able to blame someone for an event and then receive significant financial recompense seems subtly insidious. It encourages the weaponization of victimhood. When bad things happen, as a general principle it is not good to fixate on the past and embrace the role of the innocent injured party who is crusading for justice. Of course in egregious cases this is precisely the thing to do, but I’m speaking of your typical accident. It seems to me that the promise of financial reward for being a victim creates incentives to twist the truth, leave out inconvenient facts, and generally misrepresent the case – probably in ways that may not even be obvious to the person doing it. That’s how incentives often work, on a subconscious level.

Speaking of the subconscious, it seems to me that Americans really do love everything to be bigger, especially vehicles. I have been a careful observer of what vehicles are on the road since I was a young teenager obsessed with cars. I worked to memorize every make and model, and thus I have a good sense of what is driving around. My son seems to have caught this bug, and he happily spent much of the drive looking to spot one of the hundred vehicles I put on a list for him (we found all but seven). Car companies typically offer a range of vehicles from most affordable and smallest to most expensive and large. So we have the Toyota Yaris or Corolla at one end and the Avalon or fully loaded Camry at the other; the Hyundai Accent and the Genesis G90; the GMC Terrain and the Yukon. In Canada the ratio is typically something like 15 or 20 most affordable vehicles for every most expensive one. In America, the ratio is more like 5 to 1 – a massive difference. Everyone seems to want the biggest thing available, whatever is on the last page of the brochure. “Fully loaded, top of the line.” “Super size it.” And inevitably the vast majority of the largest SUVs – the Escalades, Range Rovers, Suburbans – are driven by petite women with large sunglasses.

Herein lies another facet of that mysterious American temperament.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our vacation was visiting the epic architecture of both the Pennsylvania State Capitol as well as DC landmarks, specifically the Capitol building, Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court. My appreciation for architecture has been growing exponentially over the last few years as I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of how our architecture is vitally connected to our ultimate beliefs. So it was with a kind of awestruck stupor that I gazed up at the majestic scope and ornate designs of these buildings. They are beautiful. And more striking still, they explicitly connect their own grandeur and beauty to the loftiness of the ideals which inspired them. Inscribed in marble and written in tiled mosaics were Bible verses and quotes from past luminaries who spoke of the essential natures of justice, liberty, goodness, and truth. Enduring truths etched into stone.

*Pennsylvania State Capitol complex.*
*Photo by Andre Frueh on Unsplash*

*Inside the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Photo by author.*

I know that America has never lived up to its ideals, but it must be said that America, more than any other nation I know of, has most clearly and elegantly elucidated its ideals in its founding documents and core institutions. As my gaze moved from the permanent truths which were encoded into the very beams of those buildings to the politicized bumper stickers adorning some of the congressional offices, and as I thought of the raw partisanship and frothing polemics used by both American political parties, the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy on display among the ranks of each, and the general small-mindedness and incoherence of their political visions, I was left feeling that we are not worthy of this inheritance.

At the back of the Supreme Court building is written, “Justice the Guardian of Liberty.” The front of the building proclaims “Equal Justice Under Law.”

*The Supreme Court building on a clear March day. Photo by author.*

These buildings, these institutions and ideals, they aspired to something truly noble. Like I said, they never achieved it in full measure, but just like hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, so our failure to live up to the ideals we embrace as a culture are a tribute to the fact that we have set our sights on something lofty. Increasingly it seems like we aren’t sure we have ideals, or if we should even have any. Instead of choosing something to define us, we avoid choosing by choosing to be defined by a hollow diversity. The West has by and large decided that the way to deal with its failure to live up to its ideals is to reject those ideals as well as the Christianity from which those ideals grew.

I love America, that land of searing contrasts, that paragon of both freedom and folly, liberty and license, virtue and vice.

Wild Mountain Thyme

“Do you still hear the voice in the fields?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not a modern idea,” she says.

“I’m not a modern man.”

*Photo by Stephanie Guarini on Unsplash*

Bewildered, then intrigued, then charmed. This has been the trajectory of my feelings for this movie, Wild Mountain Thyme, which I first watched for no other reason than I recognized the title of it as the name of a song on James Taylor’s recent album, Before This World. I liked the song, with its folk melody that has the peculiar flavor of being non-modern. It’s not a melody that would be written today, nor the words. Something about it calls to the modern ear, a memory echoing from a happy heart among green hills, from before the world grew so complicated and fraught.

So I put the movie on and sat down with my wife on the couch. As the movie started we were caught up into the beautiful cinematography. So far so good. But as the story begun to unfold, and the characters revealed, we were a bit confused. Christopher Walken as an Irish farmer? A man who shoots his shotgun at the crows? A girl who thinks she’s a white swan? The dialogue was both funny and strange, witty and unrealistic. By the end of the movie I was left thinking, what was that?! And it might have been left there, forgotten, but for a nagging sense that there was something rather worthwhile in amongst the odd dialogue and narrow scope of the story.

The story may be summarized thus. Two farms next to each other; two families – the Reillys and the Muldoons. Tony Reilly (Walken) is old, but has doubts about passing the farm on to his bachelor son, Anthony (Jamie Dornan), who has some unknown mental issue which makes him a bit off. He thinks of selling to his American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm) instead. Mr. Muldoon, on the other hand, has passed away. His widow, Aoife, is growing older and will pass the farm down to her daughter Rosemarie (Emily Blunt). Rosemarie and Anthony have known each other since childhood, and are in love with each other, but Rosemarie is waiting for Anthony, who can’t bring himself to act on his feelings because of his mental oddity and his shyness.

My wife and I found ourselves quoting some of the more memorable lines over the next few weeks.

“That horse is Satan on four feet.”

“There’s no answer to blather like that.”

“I can’t stand a man with feelings.”

“A man with feelings should be put down!”

And so we found ourselves putting it on again, but only the scenes that we had thought amusing. We did this repeatedly – which is not normal for us – until we put the whole movie on again one night when the despair of scrolling through the nihilistic offerings of Netflix and Prime were too much.

When I realized the movie was based on a play, it started to make much more sense. The strength of the dialogue, the way the scenes were organized, the way the ending wrapped it all up and brought the whole cast – deceased or not – back on ‘stage.’ With repeated viewing came a richer appreciation for the layers folded into the story. Behind the witty repartees emerged some rather beautiful moments. In fact, the entire ethos of the movie emerged as pre-modern and redemptive, shining all the brighter for the rarity of this quality in all modern movies and shows. It lacked that ubiquitous characteristic of modern cinema: cynicism. Aside from a rather forgettable scene where a character unconnected to the rest of the story tells of having slept with a priest, there is a refreshing innocence to the sexual tension of the movie – which is a romance after all.

Perhaps this is best seen when Rosemarie visits New York city for a day and goes on a date with Adam, the American banker. At the end of the date he kisses her unexpectedly. “Oh my God,” she responds, “What did you do?“

“You know exactly what I did. And now being the gentleman that I am, I’m going to walk you back to your hotel.“

The scene then cuts to her traveling back to Ireland in a shocked stupor from that unexpected kiss, repeating “Oh my God” to herself as if she can’t quite believe it. (The movie, set in Catholic Ireland, has a lot of taking the Lord’s name in vain.) The audience is left with the impression that this was perhaps her very first kiss. But this seems unbelievable to a modern audience. A woman in her late 30’s with no previous sexual experience? The only time we are treated to such characters is to mock them, as in The 40-Year Old Virgin (which I have not seen). Innocence is a rare commodity in Hollywood, something which they seem to be incapable of imagining (which is also why Elf was so charming).

Rural life is presented as simple, difficult, and good. Natural beauty and the order of creation is both shown and described, as in this memorable line: “There’s these green fields… and the animals living off them. And over that there’s us… living off the animals. And over that there’s that which tends to us… and lives off us maybe. Whatever that is… it holds me here.“

Even the American banker dreams of becoming an Irish farmer, as a kind of stand-in for all of us moderns who find ourselves longing for that simpler life and deeper connection to creation. But he can’t help importing his modern mindset, asking Rosemarie how many acres she has.

“I don’t know,” she replies with a shrug.

“How do you not know how many acres of land you own?” he asks, bewildered.

“Because it’s just a number.”

“I’m all about numbers. I manage money for a living.”

“Oh, does money need you to manage it?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” he answers, after a thoughtful pause.

Lastly, there is a scene of reconciliation and redemption which has grown on me with each viewing. It happens as Tony is dying. He calls Anthony to him and they have a remarkable conversation the effect of which no description here will adequately reproduce. But one part of it speaks of Tony’s… conversion? It’s a kind of watershed moment in his life and marriage that he describes this way:

“Till one day… something gave way. Out in the fields in the wet grass the quiet hand of God touched me. Something came to save me. And it’ll come for you too. I can’t name the day the rain let up. The sun shone on me. And I started in singing. Just like that. That old song. Singing! In the field. Me.“

Well, just imagine Christopher Walken saying that with an attempt at an Irish accent. Like I said, it’s definitely a strange movie. But for a strange duck like me who despairs of Hollywood’s ability to capture the good, the true, and the beautiful, it has been a welcome surprise.

Anthropology – A Vital Question for the Church

Consider these words from Carl Trueman’s recent essay at Public Discourse:

The breakdown of political discourse and the crisis of legitimacy that traditional democratic institutions now face is therefore apocalyptic, in that it has unveiled this underlying, technologically fueled anthropological chaos. The “who are we?” question—always important, given that we are intentional, not merely instinctive creatures—has become the only question, no longer anchored in commitment to a notion of universal human nature, with limitations, a moral structure, and some common goal or range of common goals. Without such a foundation, without answering the “what are we” question, how can we answer the “who” question in any stable or meaningful way? How can we build any stable or coherent society?

Covid restrictions highlighted this in a painful way. Virtual Man, who works through his laptop and can thus work anywhere in general and nowhere in particular, found such restrictions to be far more reasonable than Real Man, who has to go to work in a particular time and particular place because he works with material, not virtual, reality. That is not simply a vocational divide. I would suggest it is an anthropological divide. Real Man experiences the world—and his own sense of self—in a fundamentally different way from Virtual Man. This is reflected in so many of the conflicts now straining western democracy, from the French Yellow Jackets to the rise of working-class nationalism to the Canadian truck protests. In each case, we see what Mary Harrington has dubbed the clash of the Virtuals versus the Reals. Underneath that divide lies a conflict of anthropologies between a technologically liberated view of human beings as disembodied wills who can transcend the limitations of the materiality of the world and a belief that embodiment and place are critical to survival.

This line of thinking has been explored also by online writer N.S. Lyons in his viral piece on the Canadian Trucker protests.

For the Virtual elite, the most unforgiveable thing about the Physicals, and the physical world in general, is that they stubbornly refuse to yield to full, frictionless control. There is a reason the dominant informational class is today most comfortable in a purely virtual environment – it’s one where they can have direct, instantaneous control over (virtual) matter. Real matter is stubbornly resistant, a reminder that the self doesn’t control the universe. It’s dirty, polluting, a reminder of one’s vulnerability, even mortality. And the need to rely on other humans to deal with it is super awkward.

So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.

Finally, I wrote along similar lines a little while back, arguing that Farmers Make the Best Intellectuals.

So the farmer and the trucker get discipled into a kind of humility with regard to nature. Their relationship to the nature of the cosmos and of human behavior is such that they must adjust themselves, like a partner in a waltz, to the larger forces they reckon with and harness. The best farmers, or plumbers, or electricians, or woodworkers — all those hands-on trades — are those who best discern and adjust themselves to the raw material they handle, and the natural forces which act on that material. This willingness and ability to adjust to nature as we find it is a kind of humility which is absent from those who aim to remake the world.

Trueman’s piece is important and helpful because he focuses in on anthropology. Anthropology is the study of man – what is man? What is human nature? He traces the loss of broad agreement on the answer to those questions from the Reformation to today. He makes an important point that I am not at all convinced most Christians are clear on:

Christianity takes the material world very seriously and sees it as having an authoritative moral structure that limits how we should act. Most obviously, it sees human nature as a real, universal thing, inextricably connected to our embodiment. From identity and sex to family and community, from the private sphere to the public square, this is foundational to Christian thinking. And in a world that wishes to assert the opposite, this means that the emerging terms of membership in civil society are increasingly those that will deny Christianity and Christians the possibility of full membership.

When I was growing up, I saw the conflict between orthodox belief and the unbelieving culture in the issues of exclusivity (Jesus as the only way to salvation) and sexual morality. But then over the course of my 20’s and early 30’s it dawned on me that a more fundamental divide was emerging, that of anthropology. Trueman does a good job making that divide clear in his piece.

What first alerted me to the deep significance of one’s anthropology was the difference I observed between the ‘Christian counseling’ content I read in popular books and through some teachers at my Bible College and the ‘Biblical counseling’ content I was starting to come across from David Powlison, Paul Tripp and others at CCEF. Much of that difference boiled down to two very different ways of seeing the human person. The former approach adopted rather uncritically the concepts of secular psychology and tweaked the therapeutic advice to accord with Biblical statements. But the latter approach questioned the premises of secular psychology and sought to arrive at an understanding of human nature that was deeply informed by the Scriptures. This approach led to a deeper appreciation of the multifaceted effects of indwelling sin and of life lived in a broken world.

The writing and teaching of the folks at CCEF struck me as qualitatively different from what I had encountered in the popular Christian psychologists like Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. Larry Crabb, though their work was still very helpful in some ways. Nevertheless, this experience settled a conviction for me that a thoroughly Biblical anthropology was crucial for building on. Simply put, it serves as the substructure for your view of sanctification and human flourishing. This experience also convinced me that this was one of the areas where regular church folks and ministry leaders had imbibed an awful lot of unbiblical assumptions from the world around them.

Fast forward to today and we find that many of the most pressing moral issues of our time are directly related to the question of human nature: transgender ideology, the dystopian dreams of the transhumanists, and the advances of AI.

Now, more than ever, the church needs to search the Scriptures diligently and gain a new level of clarity and conviction on what human nature is, what God’s intent for humanity is, and how this informs our response to the challenges that are coming at us with increasing complexity and velocity day by day.

While Trueman closes his piece with a glimmer of hope, his overall analysis is very sobering. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Here is how he wraps it up:

Yet here, perhaps, is a glimmer of hope. The reason for this is something we all intuitively know: we human beings are not simply whoever we wish to be; we are not simply disembodied wills; on the contrary, we do have a nature—a “whatness”—that cannot be indefinitely denied with impunity. We are embodied, and those bodies involve biological limits (we all die, even if we choose to self-identify as immortal) and a moral framework—we never exist in isolation but always within a network of dependence and obligation. If the time of Covid revealed anything, it revealed that most human beings still have some intuition that embodiment, and the communities of obligation and dependence that are intrinsic to our embodiment, are of critical importance to what it means to be human.

The challenge for the church, embedded as she is in this technological age, is to embody that reality in her life. The path forward is to take our coming marginalization seriously, as an opportunity, not merely a setback: an opportunity to embody in our own lives and congregations what it means to be truly human.

Why Farmers make the Best Intellectuals

There is a good reason why not many truck drivers and farmers are progressive utopians with dreams of revolutionizing society. A farmer who doesn’t learn to work with the grain of reality is going to have silos with no grain. A trucker who doesn’t learn that the wrong air pressure in his tires will lead to blowouts, or in other words, that he must conform to the rules of physics and not the other way around, is not going to be on the road very long before disaster strikes. In these professions, with their close proximity to grounded reality, error leads quickly to correction and discipline in the most obvious and painful of ways.

Discovering the inflexible laws of physics

But in the softer sciences, conceits and abstract theories can float around and spread like a mind-virus long before their incarnated effects reveal how disastrously mistaken their assumptions were. The long delay is a key and critical difference. The correction and discipline do come, but just like sending a child to time-out 3 hours after they hit their sibling is sure to teach them nothing, so the delayed correction to the wrong-headed theories rarely seem to change the minds of those who adopted them. And by then the damage has been done.

So the farmer and the trucker get discipled into a kind of humility with regard to nature. Their relationship to the nature of the cosmos and of human behavior is such that they must adjust themselves, like a partner in a waltz, to the larger forces they reckon with and harness. The best farmers, or plumbers, or electricians, or woodworkers — all those hands-on trades — are those who best discern and adjust themselves to the raw material they handle, and the natural forces which act on that material. This willingness and ability to adjust to nature as we find it is a kind of humility which is absent from those who aim to remake the world.

Working with the grain of the created order – and the wood.

Beyond the forces of nature, there are certain universal human elements that must be accounted for as well. For example, being punctual, truthful, and trustworthy will lead to repeat business and recommendations – in short, flourishing. So a brilliant plumber who cheats his customers will not get far, but a personable and honest electrician who burns a house down through shoddy work will do no better. One needs a measure of both practical and interpersonal skills.

If only the work of intellectuals had such tight feedback loops, we could save ourselves so much pain and misery. Unfortunately, the work of the intellectual allows him to entertain ideas which are manifest nonsense, but which sound good and appeal to a great many people for one reason or another. And the more wealthy and decadent a society becomes, where the educated classes are further and further insulated from the harsh realities of the created order — and its humbling lack of flexibility on many points — the more they have the illusion that everything is malleable and plastic. Yes, everything can be re-imagined! And then our perfect utopian vision can be brought to pass!

But God will not be mocked, and the particular shape he gave to the world we inhabit will only be thwarted for so long.

For this reason, I prefer my intellectuals and thought-leaders to also be farmers.