I have some advice for people who have decided to go back to religion after years or a lifetime of not practicing. Or after several generations, as in my case. This is based completely on my personal experience, and it worked for me.

The advice is: don’t try to understand everything. There’s no need. Don’t intellectualize or rationalize. There’s an enormous comfort in just letting it go for a bit and simply being in the moment. Remember that many, many generations of people before you worked, thought, and prayed to make these rituals as effective as possible. Trust them and simply relax. Yes, there’s a lot you won’t understand. And you might not feel it in the way people who never got interrupted in their religious practice do. But that’s OK. Just go and be there. Follow other people’s lead. There is no harm, to put it mildly, in stepping out of the hubristic belief that it’s up to you to understand and decide everything.

In other words, you don’t need to get it. You simply need to be there.

In the summer of AD 64, Emperor Nero threw a gigantic street party in Rome:

In the very heart of the city, a lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Yes, we all know that Nero was particularly vile and a first-rate pervert. But what he did was actually very representative of what women were at that time:

In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet. In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both ejaculate and urinate.

Women were toilets. It’s not too shocking, then, that the ultimate product of that human toilet, a baby, was treated like refuse.

This is why the apostles put in so much work to explain the Christian philosophy of sex to the stunned new converts. One man and one woman together, forever, completely faithful to each other, loving each other as God and his church do, respecting their own and each other’s bodies… wait, what? Imagine what it took to convince men to stop seeing women as human toilets. But the message spoke to something, a spark inside these confused people from 2,000 years ago. That is when women were created in the way that we understand women today.

When Spaniards came to the Aztec Empire, their leader Hernán Cortés received as a gift from indigenous allies a young woman called Malintzin. This wasn’t the first time she’d been gifted or sold, having passed through many hands since her family had sold her in childhood. We can all imagine what this meant to a little girl, the horrors she experienced. Cortés, however, turned this young human toilet into a respectable lady, doña Marina. She was his translator and the mother of a son whom Cortés worshipped. Cortés couldn’t marry Marina because he was already married in the church, so she found a husband among the Spaniards. They spend their married life working together on their intellectual pursuits. What a change in status! From an object passed around for fun, she became a respected person and an intellectual. The really funny part is that the official narrative in Mexico is that horrible, evil Spaniards brutally raped women like Marina, engendering the Mexican people in violence and horror. Why people would choose to adopt this utterly stupid story of fake victimhood instead of what actually happened is a whole other question. But the life of doña Marina is a perfect illustration of the revolutionary nature of the Christian concept of a woman.

The natural state of humanity, unlike what French philosophers of the Enlightenment believed, is actually quite crap. Here’s one example:

Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in the hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state… Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents… Only a few peoples—the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews—had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Even to read this is painful, eh? The horror we feel when contemplating these scenes is the measure of how far we have been carried away from our natural state.

Christians were told by their Savior that every life is priceless, so they stunned contemporaries by trawling these garbage heaps, rescuing the babies, and raising them with care and dignity. Our attitude towards children today was born back then. Not immediately, of course. Such an enormous change cannot be instant but we are treasuring our babies and dedicating ourselves to raising them because we were set on this path by those early Christians.

I read a book a few years ago, and I wish I remembered the title, by a woman who escaped from a fundamentalist Muslim country. Recently escaped, not a millennium ago. She told how when a baby was born to a woman in her family, the mother, feeling that she had enough children already, drowned the baby in a bucket and sat down to her sewing in unperturbed calmness. This is the natural state of humanity. Aztecs ate their surplus babies. Developed sophisticated recipes, and all. The Incas drugged small children for months while fattening them up to guarantee a beautifully looking sacrifice.

Our attitude towards children is a civilizational achievement of the highest caliber. We are like aliens from another galaxy compared to where humanity initially was on the issue of babies.

Every single society in human history has a form of "cancel culture." Stigmas—and social consequences for violating them—are the basis of civilization itself.

The debate isn't over whether "cancel culture" should exist. (It should). It's over which things should be cancelled. https://t.co/UUUgnoEUXy

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) July 17, 2024

This dude is either a world-class hypocrite or is suffering from anacephaly. Hounding people like a pack of rabid dogs for making a clumsy online joke or expressing an opinion that was OK until three seconds ago is not “the basis of civilization.” It’s terrible, disgraceful behavior.

According to this definition of civilization, Stalinism was the most civilized society of all.

It is quite curious to observe how everybody who supports cancel culture has completely absorbed the far-left belief that words matter more than actions. It’s all about what somebody said. As a society, we tolerate all kinds of exceptionally bizarre and even anti-social actions. Words, though, are sacred. Saying the wrong words and not saying the right words scandalizes us like almost no form of behavior does.

This is precisely why cancel culture is bad, no matter who does the cancelling. It reinforces the noxious belief that words can harm. There’s one step from this very erroneous and dangerous conviction to hate speech laws and “silence is violence.”

Now that the cultural tide is turning and everybody is getting tired of left-wing sloganeering, we have the perfect opportunity to examine the underlying principles of this pernicious mentality. It’s not bad because it was wielded by bad people. It’s bad because its foundational beliefs are untrue. Men are not women. Words do not kill. Objective reality exists. It’s OK to say what you think even if it makes somebody uncomfortable. What the flying butter dish are we conserving here if we can’t even conserve the right to speak, joke and think for ourselves?

To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. . . So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.

Tom Holland, Dominion

In the USSR, members of the intelligentsia held all sorts of fascinating conversations. The world was closed off from us. Books worth reading were next to impossible to get. We wanted to know but it was very hard to find sources of knowledge. So we educated each other, shared (in great secrecy, of course) the crumbs of learning that we managed to come across. Truly, you only value knowledge and books as they deserve if you have known or have imagined life where they are not allowed to exist.

I was a child back then but I remember these conversations, always held in tiny Soviet kitchens, well. One that stuck in my memory the most was when a group of my father’s friends were discussing Christianity. My father was a crypto-Christian but his best friend, a well-known academic, didn’t get it.

“What I will never understand,” he said, “is why Christians wear on their necks the symbol of torture and degradation of the founder of their religion.”

Nobody in the group could answer that question but it’s a crucial one. It’s so important that Tom Holland starts his magnificent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World with a discussion of precisely this issue. Why was Jesus crucified? Whether you believe Jesus was the son of God or that he was a character invented by a literary genius of 2,000 years ago doesn’t detract from the importance of this question. Why is crucifixion the form of death that was chosen for him? And why is it the cross that we still wear and not the tomb where the resurrection took place or the dove or anything symbolizing what we believe is Jesus’s greatest gift, the victory over death?

Tom Holland explains in Dominion that crucifixion was the most humiliating, horrific, and abject death known to ancient Romans. It was reserved for rebellious slaves, and a decent person would feel tainted even by knowing about it. This is why, says Holland, almost no descriptions of crucifixions have been preserved. Romans were very gabby about their lives and achievements but this is one thing they clearly hated to talk about.

Back in the day, the weirdest thing for people about Jesus’s death and resurrection wasn’t the resurrection. To us today it’s a mega big deal but ancient Romans lived in a reality where the borders between the worlds of humans and spirits were porous. A veritable procession of caesars and great warriors routinely became divinities after their deaths with all sorts of majestic portents and such. It’s not that Jesus came back to life after death and ascended into heaven that was unusual. Rather, what blew people’s minds was that he did all that after being subjected to the most abject and degrading death imaginable that was reserved to the absolute dregs of society. And also that he actually chose to die in that way. People couldn’t get over it. He’s the Son of God, he’s got options, and that’s what he chooses? This absolutely blew up their understanding of the world.

Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.

This extraordinary, shocking, unimaginable event laid the foundation of what today we call the Western civilization and made all of us – utterly irrespective of what we profess to believe – profoundly and inescapably Christian. If you don’t believe me, here’s a test. You hear a story about Nazis torturing the heroes of the French Resistance. Whose side are you on? The torturer or the tortured?  You know the answer. The tortured, of course. But why? The torturer is strong, potent, mighty. Why wouldn’t you want to ally yourself with him instead of the miserable, pathetic victim? Why are you disgusted not with the bleeding, maimed and wailing victim but with the victimizer? Ancient Romans would think you are nuts.

The cross that Christians wear around their necks and worship in churches is a reminder that abjection is always there. It’s an inevitable result of our physicality. As long as we are physical beings, we will know suffering and abjection. But we do not defeat suffering by inflicting it. It is only by bearing it with dignity and helping others bear it that we rise above it. This idea seems so natural to us today precisely because the Christian revolution of 2,000 years ago remade the world to reflect it.

Tonight was WAY better for the #RNCConvetion2024 than abortion Satan and union boss night. Human stories from Real families hurt by #Biden and former rivals #NikkiHaley and #DeSantis (among others) making a case based on policy.

— ClassicConservative#NeverAgainTrump🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲 (@ReturnToReagan) July 17, 2024

Definitely enormously better today. Many very recognizable speakers, a lot of valuable points made. Impactful real-life stories. Altogether, there was a clear narrative that brought the speeches together.

One thing that always entertains me is when people say, “but how can he (or she) endorse the frontrunner after the horrible things they said about each other in the primaries!” The complexity of adult lives is difficult for them to accept.

The director of the Secret Service explains the failure of her agency that led to the assassination attempt on Trump as follows:

That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-biden-election-2024-rnc/card/secret-service-chief-trump-shooter-s-sloped-roof-left-unmanned-due-to-safety-concerns

There are truly no words to describe this level of lisping, shameless childishness. A country whose secret service agents are afraid of sloped roofs. We have arrived, America. The home of the brave whose bravery stops at a moderately inconvenient roof.

Do you know how you car works? When you get into it in the morning, do you give a thought to how much work of many different people went into making sure that it starts moving whenever you want it to?

The oven, the AC, the phone, the washer and dryer, the microwave. You push a button, and it works. Everything works. Very complicated things that were created by veritable feats of human intelligence and the labor of many just work at a push of a button.

And that’s great. We want things to work. Not just objects but institutions, organizations, and systems. I always wonder when I see my university awaken from its summer torpor and roll into action smoothly each August 16. Thousands of people begin simultaneously to do what they must. They know what they should do and they all do it. And the place springs to life. It’s extraordinary.

We live in complicated societies and we are surrounded by complicated objects, is what I’m saying. And it all works. Sometimes something malfunctions but we notice the malfunction precisely because it’s so rare. My memory will retain that one time this month when we didn’t have electricity for a few hours precisely because the rest of the time we did have it.

As everything in life, this has a huge downside. We get so used to things just working that we lose sight of the complexity of things. Whenever something is uncomfortable, we start looking for a magic button to push or a magic pill to swallow. The need to plod along little by little is perceived as an insult. Aren’t things supposed to just work? Give me my magic button to press right now! As Michel Clouscard used to say, “the hard work of some guarantees the eternal adolescence of others.”

Why is this bad? Because when we start demanding magic buttons and easy solutions, things tend to stop working. Our political space has been completely conquered with appeals to eternal – I wouldn’t even say adolescents, but rather, infants – who jump up with joy at promises of magical handouts in the form of college debt forgiveness or untaxed tips.

Everybody has sat in a meeting or with a group of friends or family members and knows how hard it is to arrive at a group decision. How hard it is to make anything happen. How everybody gets distracted, everybody has their own interests, emotions, physical states. But even that personal experience is easily defeated by the belief that everything must be as easy as pressing a button and having the lights go on.

[As always in these posts, these are my thoughts inspired by my reading. I hate retelling what other people said. Instead, I talk about what their ideas suggested to me. Michel Clouscard didn’t say any of this except for the quote I gave in inverted commas.]

The best 21st-century thinkers I read – Bauman (RIP), Byung-Chul Han, Clouscard, Fusaro, Rendueles – are all European. Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

In the Americas, there are people who describe what’s wrong in very talented, engaging ways. Shoshana Zuboff, Joe Allen, Miklos Lukacs de Pereny, Gullo Omodeo. Or even JD Vance in his fine autobiography. As I explained before, this is a very important task. But I haven’t seen anything like original ideas, theory, philosophy come out of the Americas this century. This is new and not great. We had a lot going on in this hemisphere in what concerns generating ideas all the way until the 1990s. But since then, bupkes.

This lack of ideas, this deadlock in the understanding of the world is reflected in our politics. It’s all connected, people. Ideas, art, politics. The place where ideas are created has become shallow and geriatric, and everything else is following suit.

This is very strange given that the US has the money and the structure to bring over the best brains from anywhere in the world. We should have our own Fusaros and Hans by the bucketful but somehow it’s not working out.

What we have instead of ideas is a struggle between lunatic proposals (“let’s cut off the breasts of unhappy 14-year-olds”) and the reaction to these lunatic proposals (“no, let’s not do that, you absolute creep”). We are locked in the lunacy/reaction cycle which is, by nature, repetitive and stagnant. If all you do is say no to XYZ, you are XYZ’s slave. XYZ owns you because your existence is dominated by XYZ’s every whim.

The lunatic proposals in question do not come out of a wealth of ideas, either. Their root is the belief that there should be no limitations on human desires. Biology, society, tradition, religion, law – they all should fall away and not constrain human freedom to refashion oneself and the world in an endless act of re-creation. This fanatical dedication to the philosophy of “be ye as gods” is hardly a new and interesting idea. Rather, it’s hubris adopted in lieu of philosophy.

Europe is actually doing really well in what concerns producing ideas. Europe is on a good path. We need to get ourselves unstuck here in the Americas and start churning out fresh, interesting thought, too.