I once taught his first big book Creation of the American Republic in a class cover to cover. Even if you disagreed with how far he tried to argue the "republican thesis" in that book (which I and others would), every student of the American founding ought to read it for all of the the citations in his footnotes. He found masses of valuable quotes in those old pamphlets and manuscripts, following his teacher Bernard Bailyn.

Wood took ideas like the public good seriously, and acknowledged that the Founders took them seriously. I especially appreciate how he defended the study of the American founding in the face of the woke, ideological 1619 project bunch.

And for whatever stupid reason, Wood during his life was most known as a name dropped in this scene in a movie… in a scene about name dropping. God bless America

And God bless Gordon Wood- may he rest in the peace of God.

Gross humor for kids is the new anti-totalitarianism, don’t worry about Stalin! Yet another surprise—the distributor is Angel Studios, supposedly a Christian conservative business!

Read the essay—I talk about the three adaptations of the story, from 1954 to 1999 to 2025!

The Milius Film Institute would have to have three constitutional rules following in the steps of John Milius.

1. Make movies about men!
Nothing is more censored or more transgressive now, & therefore nothing is more promising--a connection to our tradition going back to Homer, but also a step into the future, over the carcass of leftwing nihilism!

2. Make movies that bring out human greatness, especially in great conflicts.
Over against an elite feminized to previously unimaginable levels, where pacifism & suicide are the ruling ideology, daring to face conflict is the most obvious way to return to understanding our own nature, not to say being proud of ourselves.

3. Favor those few who can speak up for themselves against the fashionable or the popular.
No more mediocrities, however polished or even decent. Voices, not echoes.

Four rules, actually

4. Focus on America!
It will takes us a generation to wash away the shame of wasting the 250th an.

Amanda also has a remarkable point never before proposed: Start with the Milius scripts themselves! You can teach writers, you can recruit directors, you can make actors by giving them grand storytelling to inhabit. Love of beauty can be inspired & it will inspire artists in turn.

My partial criticism of Amanda is the “make it good first, conservative or whatever second.” Art is guided by civilizational responsibility. If you’re a feminist, John Milius makes no sense to you (i.e. if you’re a feminist, John Milius is your dark fantasy). All of the American elite is now feminist. You cannot avoid the polemical situation & you cannot be neutral. Contrariwise, if you’re John Milius, feminism is the death cult in Conan. You cannot not fight it—it’s your destiny!

So it’s harder & it’s easier than Amanda suggests. It’s harder because you can’t go back to some “free speech” defensive position that nobody will pay for, much less defend. But it’s much easier, because you can finally admit how many great artists of the past were rightwing, especially the modernists, & therefore that we have a lot to work with, draw from, compete against. No more playing coy. We have a lifeline to our civilizational inheritance, we can assume responsibility, we can correct for the most obvious, most art-killing defects of the time.

This is good PR for AI, "you're not going to lose your job, calm down, you don't want to sound like a loser, just go with it." It's not what Cowen believes, it's what he'll say publicly. What he believes is that techno-lords are going to transform parts of the world: AI is already creating a new society. (Think about Average is over & The great stagnation put together.) Now, Cowen is famously a very nice guy who thinks there should be more niceness. I respectfully disagree. More clarity is needful now. So here’s my not-nice revealing of the more obvious secrets:

1. Education & healthcare Cowen gives up on, they are lost to gov't regulation & popular hysteria, dragging economic growth tremendously, but—Cowen's only talking about the state. Everyone with some awareness of tech & money will opt into ed (which converges on work) & healthcare (which converges on lifestyle) so that they will literally live in a world apart from you & from 80% of people. This is what Cowen means when he complains about the FDA, this is what he means when he says, far from college judging AI, AI is judging college. Today, there is Ozempic for the body; AI is Ozempic for your life.

2. Morality is going to be reversed in some important ways. If AI is the difference between people, we have arrived at trans-humanism for practical purposes; it's beyond trans-gender, it's beyond euthanasia. We're talking about a situation where AI-people would not listen to anything non-AI-people have to say. So it's goodby to democracy, but so also to sincerity or compassion. People already freak out about it when it comes to AI fakes. The real AI is much more important here. If you can't figure out what this means, you're on the other side of the issue, good luck to you!

Now, discretion is fine, but there is one thing Cowen suggests that is an unbelievable lie: That you can get a bit more economic growth without it being swallowed up in redistribution, corruption, &c., continuing the path to bankruptcy & thus the end of the democracy. Of course, he's a liberal, he cannot admit that his party & class are "the human bottleneck" he's talking about. He suggests it, for the careful listeners, when he points out who's going to be losing status. But status doesn't matter compared to other things like office, influence, wealth. Educated people are screaming communism. Cowen is talking about being demoted from Manhattan to Houston.

The best PR for AI is to tell more of the truth & to think through things harder. Once the AI CEOs face massive political attacks, we'll have some opportunity to state these things in public. For now, think about life until the 2028 elections, at least. The only interesting observation Cowen made is, people with initiative can now use AI. Even there, like a good lib, he gave some stupid self-defeating example about some people in Africa. (Again, very defensive guy.) But this is incredibly important, we're talking about generational change. It's also noticeable that five years into the AI era, no one with initiative has stepped up to defend AI. That's because there's nothing in it for those who are smart enough to do it. When that changes, when the politics changes, then we'll have better PR &, I suspect, better AI.

Meanwhile we have delusions. To some extent, this proves Cowen’s point: Faced with reality, people turn to fantasy, change is very difficult… But it may also prove him wrong in more fundamental ways. But he’s not blind: Cowen did a longer chat where he was more open about the real risks, but without any fundamental changes. He very decently lets his partner Tabarrok tell stupid lies like “wealthy people don’t have access to better medicine than you do, or better AI than you do.” Public speech, I suppose, is mostly lies, so I’m not sure how much to blame this stuff. Also, if you have sense, it’s of some importance to understand what’s happening & Cowen is a better help, if not a guide, than anyone else I can recommend. He writes a lot, talks a lot, has been successful for decades—you can easily understand his reputation.

What are the techniques the coming together of which you could call your articulation of mortality, how does your soul move when you become aware?

Likeness & metaphor are the first, because that's how you become aware of your awareness of the world around you. The trees are alive, they grow, that’s their major motion, the way in which they change yet become more themselves. You compare yourself to them. But life as such can be understood as that which is greater than speech & prompts speech. Every beautiful achievement in that sense is less impressive than its occasion. What is missing here is completion. Too soon & too late circumscribe it, however. Likeness & metaphor are ways of pointing to being, too.

Questions & answers are next, because they bring you to face yourself on that basis. Now, we get two sentences instead of just one. There is such a thing as cyclical time, as with the seasons, & then there is linear time, as with mortality. Both are true, but they are not apart from each other. Trees, spring are metaphors for life; but they could not be such if they were not mortal, too. Reason, indeed, science, shows itself here directly, since trees are obviously connected to nature. What an ugly thing! Tree rings. A tree cut. Dissected, if you will. Death. The illusions of beauty are dispelled by this ugly truth we cannot help learning, being what we are; yet there is something to be said also for the good it reveals—life, while it is life, overgrowing its limits.

Then we go back to metaphor & likeness (onomatopoeia) on a different level, having learned what it is to have an intimation of mortality. Some things are said, some things are suggested: The movement & sound of the trees point to the air, i.e. to that which is invisible, but which suggests & also commands life.

I’m also doing my part in this regard: My latest essay on Wilson is available at Civitas Outlook! To lead you in:

2. Tocqueville argued that democratic peoples, having lost the poetry of heroes and gods, would find poetry in technology. Does AI vindicate this account of the democratic soul, or does it reveal its limits?

Tocqueville argued that democratic souls like those of Americans in 1840 had indeed lost the poetry of heroes and the gods that we might read about in Homer. But that was not necessarily a problem. He also claimed that there remained great topics for American poets to think and write about. To quote Tocqueville:

“Human destinies, man, taken apart from his time and his country and placed before nature and God with his passions, his doubts, his unheard-of prosperity, and his incomparable miseries, will become the principal and almost unique object of poetry for these peoples; one can be already assured of this if one considers what the principle and almost unique object of poetry for these principles; and one can already be assured of this if one considers what the greatest poets have written who have appeared as the world succeeds in turning to democracy.”
(Democracy in America, Volume II, Part 1, Chapter 17)

It took another century before America produced a Faulkner or a Flannery, but Tocqueville was right: there was grist for great American novels. Some amount of loneliness is part of the human condition. Extreme forms of isolation are of course not healthy psychologically- as Aristotle said, a human who is not in some way social is a beast or a god. However, we are all lonely in this life because we’re not fully united with our Creator. This Pascalian perspective was one of Tocqueville’s foremost influences and can be found in crucial passages of Democracy in America and Souvenirs.

Tocqueville thought loneliness was accentuated in America by one of our habits of mind: individualism. Individualism stems from Americans’ love of equality, since intellectual authorities are levelled by it. But that in turn opens new avenues for greatness of spirit- the truly extraordinary and divine acts and qualities which we can discover even in the seemingly mundane, ugly, and impoverished parts of American life. And it is our loneliness that has spurred Americans to be a “nation of joiners”: the remarkable proliferation of clubs, churches, businesses, and other intermediary institutions which in turn help our democracy work.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence technology will not eliminate the possibility of poetry or greatness in America since it cannot eliminate the classic American experience of restlessness. AI has been employed to solve the “American loneliness epidemic” (as Senator Ben Sasse has called it), treating loneliness as a problem to be fixed. During the pandemic, algorithms fed us Neflix episode after Netflix episode, catering to our tastes. But eventually that got old and we went outside for a walk. Similarly with the AI dating avatars of Blade Runner and the AI companions that nursing homes are employing to fool the elderly into thinking they are not alone: these “solutions” get old.

We are more and more discovering the limits of AI in curing loneliness, rather than the limits of the democratic soul. And some of that American restlessness- we should not even want to be rid of.

The early Ritchie films are unique in their English humor & a flair for the dramatic. All three use a tangle of plotlines to bring a colorful cast of characters to face off within the deadly labyrinth of the British underworld. The plots are somewhat convoluted, they suffer from certain weaknesses—like a reliance on deus ex machina resolutions & happenstance inciting incidents. But on the whole, the early triad is immensely entertaining because the somewhat forced narratives are populated by captivating characters, either hilarious in an almost slapstick ineptitude, terrifying with a sociopathic cruelty, or imposing with a suave or posh dignity—they’re always caricatures, yet also somehow escape caricature at the last moment, en route to a happy ending. These are stories of male ambition, friendship, rivalry, humor, & suffering—all in a nostalgic video-clip aesthetic more reminiscent of the 1960s than the contemporary world.

In the Gray is the latest iteration of the same old formula but fails to capture Ritchie’s earlier lightning in a bottle. Eiza González is poorly cast as the protagonist, Sophia. She certainly looks the part of a gun moll-cum-instagram model, but lacks the charm & stage presence Ritchie’s roles demand. Not only has the magician’s lovely assistant taken over his role (these are the times), but the role has changed to girlboss. Ritchie relies on gravitas, on his protagonists’ integrity, that is, a willingness to risk their lives, even on a bet, & on dramatization of such once-in-a-lifetime attempts to make something of themselves, despite all their hardship—that’s how he makes his colorful characters come to life. Indeed, that’s why English actors are so conducive to Ritchie’s style; we Americans still associate the accent & mannerisms with the aristocracy—the nobility, erudition, or statesmanship… & then there are the Cockney clowns, fast on their feet, always pulling something over on you…

Matthew McConaughey got away without such an accent in Ritchie’s The Gentlemen (2019), making it fun with sheer intensity & incredible charm, showing that American authenticity can hold its own. Despite The Gentlemen’s inferior plot, watching McConaughey rage was immensely entertaining—a show of manliness, the trademark Ritchie touch. González, by contrast, is typically wooden & occasionally strained, trying to look young & unimpressed. She clutters the run time, failing to provide a compelling emotional motivation for the film. She is not assisted by the fact that the script kills of her character’s mentor to incite the plot, then never revisits the issue. But I’m afraid even a superior script would not have saved González, who has no idea how to act her way out of the trap of Hollywood & instagram. Her only compelling scene last three seconds—she’s convincingly terrified. Her hard-ass lawyering, arrogance, & threats are all comparatively implausible, forced, like watching a toddler threaten to beat you if you deny him a lollipop.

Worse, Gonzales is also supposed to be a narrator. Comparatively, Mark Strong’s narration in RocknRolla is posh & authoritative, a no nonsense enforcer who has beat people down, who comes across as humane because of his rich baritone; Jason Statham’s in Snatch is gritty, raw, a thief & illegal boxing promoter who knows the streets, but who hasn’t lost his sense of the comic, not to say absurd; Alan Ford’s in Lock, Stock is cut-the-shit honest, an older bartender who has seen the worst of the worst in his day; & even Hugh Grant in The Gentlemen manages to bring an animal spirit, a kind of sleazy tell-all investigative reporter who has got the dirt. All four give their films an air of authenticity because they give versions of dealing with the ugly truth, mixing the typically manly qualities of attraction & menace; the viewer is invited into a secret, harsh world in which the narrator is a trusted & benevolent, if cold & cynical, guide. Compare this to González, a real downgrade, whose accent & tenor offer no character at all, certainly no suggestion of familiarity with a life less ordinary.

RocknRolla employed Thandie Newton’s ice queen character to great effect, but she took a back seat to Gerard Butler & Idris Elba, who drove that film. In the Grey’s González completely overshadows Henry Cavill & Jake Gyllenhaal, both in terms of screen time & in the supposed authority that the script ascribes to her. The problem is that both men dominate the screen whether they want to or not, by sheer presence as much as by reputation, & González doesn’t. So either they steal the scene or we get nothing—lost minutes, scenes that feel empty, lest they overshadow her. Cavill & Gyllenhaal do well enough as actors, but the corporate girl boss office politics plot gives their characters no motivation. Even their latent homoerotic tension was done better by Gerard Butler & Tom Hardy in RocknRolla. They’re fun to watch, sure, but you won’t remember why. In the Grey could have been a good film, just Cavill & Gyllenhaal outcompeting a Latino caudillo & winning in style—but that story is impossible even in an extravaganza: Stories are supposed to be about women now.

For example, the weak plot is certainly not aided by starting off with 20 minutes of narration & girlbossing, starring González & Rosamund Pike in a feminist standoff for no reason & with no payoff, attempting to add glamour & sex appeal to corporate lawyering. The Gentlemen started similarly with Grant & Charlie Hunnam. But the difference is that in The Gentlemen, the narrative returns to the standoff between Grant & Hunnam over & over, adding typical Ritchie plot twists like one maneuver after another eventually solving the Rubik cube or untying a complex sailing knot, pick your metaphor. Besides, Grant is incredibly entertaining, if sleazy & gross, so that when he receives his final comeuppance, there is a real catharsis the viewer experiences: Impressive men survive & good-for-nothing sleazeballs get theirs at the end of the day—in a beautiful way, that’s justice. Not so, In the Grey, in which Pike’s frigid, stoney demeanor is the farthest thing from entertaining. There’s such a thing as a comedy of errors—there’s no comedy of botox. The film correctly does not want to return to her because she’s no fun on screen, & therefore, when karma comes knocking on her door, we could hardly remember why we should care.

Pike is even further abused by the plot when she’s used to shoehorn conflict into the coda of the movie, which is bizarrely (& unnecessarily!) appended to the movie, three months after the climactic escape scene, which entirely wastes the tension of the action sequence, which depends on being trapped on a small island with only a few days to do or die. So the structure ends making no sense emotionally, but I’ll leave it aside, since Ritchie has stronger virtues than plotting: Indeed, the color palette & camera work are all great, the spectacle is up to Ritchie’s standards, even the international mercenary style of dress & the patter that goes with it.

But the minor characters are another matter. They are basically forgettable, cardboard cutouts. The early triad of heist films is chock-full of memorable, unique, terrifying, or hilarious side characters. Boris the Blade in Snatch, Colin Farrell’s Coach in The Gentlemen, Matt King’s Cookie & the two Chechens from RocknRolla. These characters all managed to be either bloodcurdling, sidesplitting, or both. In the Grey’s team of heavies has no personality—no identity whatsoever. Carlos Bardem does fine as the macho antagonist, but his performance is nowhere near as terrifying as the Russian oligarch in RocknRolla, nor as moving, for that matter.

In general, Ritchie’s early films brought the viewer into the underworld of English urban crime. Gypsies, Jews, gangsters, yes, the characters were diverse, but they were a patchwork of English urban life. Lock, Stock subtly plays on northern vs southern animosities. RocknRolla weaves in anti-immigrant sentiment seamlessly. Snatch reflects on people’s perception of “pikeys” which would probably not be possible today. It’s the moviemaking version of gonzo journalism. It’s Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe brought to the MTV audience. Together, these all telegraph a rich tapestry of social life. Even The Gentlemen explores the decayed reality of old aristocratic families gone broke. The extreme stylization, the surreality of the stories allows Ritchie to return to the origin of the novel in the picaresque—but it only works because he knows the society he’s dramatizing & he he’s found out what’s interesting about it.

In the Grey, on the other hand, is international, & the cast is a random hodgepodge of individuals & nationalities who have nothing in common of any importance & who are arranged randomly. The film doesn’t actually take place in any real place, so you don’t get any sense of deepening familiarity or alienation; worse, instead of feeling like a global adventure, it feels like a series of movie sets. Think Men in Black: International, a movie that shares many of the shortcomings noted here. The result is not an unbelievable fantasy world, it’s not even comedy for the TikTok shorts era—if anything, the frantic pace of the movie, the change of scenery seems to follow from shallowness: There’s nothing else to see here, there’s no underlying reality. Whereas Ritchie’s English underground movies intimated glimpses of a real world the middle classes have no access to, but which arouses passion & curiosity, In the Grey takes place on a dry papier-mâché screen which the viewer is invited to politely ogle, briefly, before moving on. Ritchie’s movies used to be cool. You could say, cool is trying too hard. But it’s still something & it’s been replaced by nothing.

Thankfully, In The Grey is a tight 90 minutes—if you can’t make it good, make it short. Ritchie still makes better films than most of the garbage out of Hollywood. In the Grey is a fun time. But I’ve waited almost twenty years for a sequel to RocknRolla, & it seems I’ll have to wait some more before Ritchie decides to make something really great again.

We took the opportunity to talk about children’s books, about stories more broadly, about fantasy, about the part beauty plays in education. Enjoy the conversation!

It should have been simply a top made up of English-language novels—that’s a very limited view of the novel, but it’s defensible & it can barely be covered properly in 100 titles, since you’d have to go through about four centuries… Doing something else is impossible, because novels are written in languages, & the best ones not in English, so there is not enough access to them. If you read six European languages, you’re fine. Liberal journalists or academics don’t—they’re incompetent judges by definition. But of course, it’s not just the language, you need to know Russian history for Tolstoy to be able to teach you Russian history properly. But it’s also a question of educating taste. Stendhal, Flaubert, & Proust do not have the delicacies of Austen or Dickens, so you have to think rather differently about style & moral matters… & then there is the civilizational question—who today is capable of understanding what a republic or an aristocracy or a monarchy once was? Most readers can enjoy great novels, but not understand them, since all of these things are involved. Why would an adulteress have to kill herself as Emma Bovary & Anna Karenina do? This makes no sense to people today, so all that’s available is mutilating the work of art to suit current prejudices…

So we’re surrounded by nonsense on all sides. But the very noticeable thing is that this is the nonsense of 20 years back. As my friend Steve Sailer says, it’s not a woke top! There’s no hatred of dead white men involved here! This is not to say that woke is over or that the left has stopped trying to destroy our civilizational heritage; far from it, the horrors continue. But this top is not adding to the onslaught. It’s remarkably nostalgic; at best, it suggests that the woke propaganda has had only limited success. Everyone in the collegiate class is publicly brainwashed, but not entirely brainwashed privately.

Here’s the top of the list:

It’s a feminist top. Toni Morrison & Virginia Woolf occupy three of the top 15 slots—this is nonsense; it’s hilarious, too, Woolf is the most heavily voted author, with five novels, & Morrison has three! You get Jane Eyre, too, at the top. But we live in a world where college is dominated by women, publishing is dominated by women, & endless mediocrity issues forth. The gynaikocracy is dehumanizing, but we should also note how mild it still is. Granted, five of the top ten novels are by women & four of the next ten, but it’s only 36 of the 100 overall, so it seems that there is some taste & some testosterone left even among the collegiate class. In our catastrophic situation, this is good news.

The worse news is that the feminism cannot but aggravate the ignorance & increasing loathing or even hatred of our civilization—the past is forgotten. Only 30 of the novels are older than 1900. A full ten are more recent than the year 2000! The midpoint in the chronology would be around the year 1940. Nevermind expecting such people to understand of Tolstoy’s Russia or for that matter of Cervantes’ Spain—what can you expect these people to understand of Edwardian England or WWI!

A few examples: There are three Italian novels, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Lampedusa’s Leopard, & Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The latter was included because it’s recent & the unknown author uses a female pseudonym. But it also means people who vote on these lists have no taste: Manzoni’s Betrothed is the consensus choice for great Italian novel & it’s not there.

Then there is not one single novel by Goethe. I imagine this is much more the fault of ignorance than anything else, but the novel is European somehow & no one was more European than Goethe.

The French novelists on the list: Flaubert & Proust. Nothing else from Stendhal to Houellebecq. Obviously, that’s because the French novel is potentially superior to the English. Would it not have been better than to just have English-language novels? This way, we get a gesture: Four of the top ten novels are French & Russian.

But if we turn to English writers, we run into the same problem. From Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones to Evelyn Waugh (pick your favorite, I’d say A Handful of Dust!), major artists are entirely missing, whether they’re 18th or 20th c.! Trollope is missing, but so is Walter Scott. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is missing. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is missing! Kindly Amis is missing. Recent novelists you haven’t heard of & which only a few critics like crowd the list but you can’t find Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson, who are still immensely popular & whose merits certainly compare favorably with most of the authors on the list after 1940.

Then the same problem again on the other side of the Atlantic: Melville & Henry James are the only 19th c. American writers. Mark Twain is not on the list. Nor is Hawthorne. As for the 20th c., great novelists like Saul Bellow & Robert Penn Warren are missing. (In passing, I note the disdain of the English for American novelists since the ‘60s: Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Bret Easton Ellis—all missing. Only Cormac McCarthy made the list. In fact, since the mid-c., black authors replace the white—very much the “civil rights” ethos.)

Novels might be the only way to teach kids history nowadays, to preserve a memory of the variety of important human experiences & impressive human types. Modern civilization depends on the novel, in fact, because it depends on a way to connect interiority, privacy, that which liberalism installs & protects, to public life, which is partly the state, partly science. One wonders where religion fits in this schema—somehow, weakening the power of religion was necessary for the arrival of the novel—yet if the novel becomes atheism, it also become purposeless, it turns out! (Another great omission, a necessity for a French list: Celine.)

Now, this said, my major complaint against feminism is the bad taste. The most noticeable thing about novels outside of America is that they favor women. It’s obvious with Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, or with Henry James novels, but it goes well beyond that: Modernity favors women over men. The novel is naturally closer to love than to law, more interested in men who are potential lovers than in politicians. In short, the novel judges protagonists by their understanding of women. To a considerable extent, the novel is a necessary education for women: The failure of this education has led to the crass feminists of the world, which in turn led to public figures one could not really call women. We would have to talk at great length to elucidate what happened, but the simplest way to begin is to notice that novels became increasingly “cynical,” to use the vulgar expression: The advance of modern political & natural science, of revolution & laboratories, made it impossible to keep the novel connected to beauty & morality.

Of course, the last word in all such discussions is—James Joyce, I don’t like that fellow!

The college itself is a creature of the 21st c., however, indeed, of our moment—part of the attempt to find older, more fundamentally human ways of educating people, preserving our civilizational legacy—therefore trying to understand it, to bring it back to life. (You can learn & see more at the KAN website.) It’s unique in its focus on great books in Slovakia, but it also is attempting to help the educational system by producing courses & curricula for letters & arts, to elevate the offering in high schools. If this sounds quite American to you, you’re on to something. Dr. Luteran in fact got some of his ideas, inspiration, & support from his time in D.C. as a Witherspoon Fellow, first started a fellowship, then, building on its success, in 2009 started the college. The institution has since expanded to include a primary school & looks to expand further into a complete educational system. It’s an ambitious & impressive enterprise, a rare thing in Europe, so I was very pleased to visit. My expectation was fulfilled, Dr. Luteran as a founder is as impressive as his work suggests, & it in turn gives a good measure of his ability.

You can see Dr. Luteran below, under a portrait of the patron of the college, Anton Neuwirth, one of the major anti-Communist dissidents in Slovakia, who was thrown in jail by Communists in 1953, survived the ordeal, then participated in the Velvet Revolution in 1989 & became an important politician in the process of democratization in the 1990s. Neuwirth was still active in his 80s, helping Dr. Luteran start his fellowship & college, which in turn will preserve Neuwirth’s legacy. The college has also obtained a papal blessing in the Jubilee year, so it should do just fine!

Now, my day at Kolegium Antona Neuwirtha is no basis for judgment of anything, the institution stands rather on its remarkable success over these 17 years—but it was very pleasant for me. The staff & faculty seemed at home with each other, friendly, involved in a common life as much as a common project; the students had a similar quality; all were very welcoming, quite a few had questions & we discussed things at length, schedule permitting.

My business was fairly simple, I gave a talk on the crisis of Enlightenment education & the classical alternative, part of a book I’m working on—this was addressed to faculty & staff, on the character of the work of the educator, on the dependence of our work on philosophy. I touched on Socrates. Then we had a discussion about the dramatic situation in which we find ourselves & how we might make our way out. I’m grateful for it—such lectures & discussions help quite a bit with the formulation of my thoughts for educators.

Aside from that, I led an evening seminar with the students, reflecting on the problem of patriotism in light of the writing of Pope John Paul II, especially Memory & Identity. As it turns out, this was the concluding seminar of the year, so we had the opportunity in a way to celebrate the accomplishments of the college & students together, thinking through what they are attempting to achieve. I tried to outline the opposition between state & culture, the Catholic dilemma in the modern world, & the character of the typical Catholic efforts at restoration. I’m not Catholic, so I judge in light of history & the speeches of the major figures, but I’m a great admirer of the late pope & think that much could be said on the basis of his teaching & his example about what there is to do today. All in all, the students were interested enough that we continued the conversation over a very pleasant dinner—which the students cooked, since they’re in residence at the palace.

Perhaps I should leave you with the thoughts of a more impressive figure than myself—Fr. Robert Sirico, the founder of the Acton Institute, is a friend of the college & has recently lectured there, a few weeks before me, in fact:

This is music from 2017, back before COVID, when some of us thought there might be new art & culture & venues…

Then this is the song I’ll talk about in my piece below:

You can also find Vast Asteroid on Spotify.

This is an old piece I wrote about the song: So listen to Encrypted & watch the video. It’s the band in a bar, Vast Asteroid themselves! Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be with popular music? You hang out somewhere, you might discover something. Those guys at that table might have a great story to tell you. At some point, they might just get up, don the gear they set up, & start playing something that can speak to your soul. They’re still strangers, but you’ve got something in common that makes you human.

But it’s also just another evening. You’re supposed to spend some time with your friends, to remember who you are & to be who you are—it’s not like your memories, because your past doesn’t have to come alive—it really is alive among them, as are you. The long intro gives you the busy energy of electric sound, the sound of our restless modernity, never quite acting on purpose, picking out the notes of our melodies or predicting our future. But then the guitar brings in music & the bass does something very strange to soothe & reassure: All will be well while it carries you.

The musical past is there, too. The shoe gaze mumble music that turned into space gaze also recalls to me my past, goth music: I hear The Cure, circa Wish, or Jesus & Mary Chain echoed in the song, repurposed in an amazing way I’ll tell you about below. I can get very specific—the guitar line in the intro recalls the intro to “From the edge of the deep green sea“; or the vocal melody on the verse, it recalls the vocal melody of the J&MC song “Head on” as covered by the Pixies. Maybe this is music you loved, too, or music you could learn to love.

Before we get to what’s unique, we should start with what’s mundane. That’s where we see who we really are. I love music that brings back the music I love. If people are still inspired by this, if it’s refined, in a way, in their souls, then what we’ve grown up will have helped us grow up. With good music, you’re better for being older & you’re better because of love. It’s the quickest way to remember we’re human—having our feelings stirred. You & I will recall the longings & the music will evoke the secrets that make up our separate but similar inwardness. When you stir to music, you know you have a soul—you can feel the reaching out of soul to something beautiful. You long for something, therefore you’re human.

Now, to the song sung. You can find the lyrics in the youtube description & you’ll see what a poem of devotion this turns out to be. But you first hear the soothing voice, a softness that seems at home in the growl of distorted guitars, which is how life is these days. The words, however, are not soothing—they talk about our being wounded, by the catastrophic consequences of our mistakes—about the suffering that is our bodily life when we discover just how intensely we love.

It’s not happiness that turns us to poetry & music, but our suffering, & here is a song that speaks to that suffering to soothe it even as it shows an understanding of it that does not flinch. What we learn in shock, in surprise, is that we’re mortal & our inability to fix ourselves & make ourselves happy or control the future to avoid nasty surprises means our freedom begins to look like a trap—a doom. This is not the opposite of love or the end of love, it’s just the necessary suffering & sacrifice that attends on it.

Then we get to a profession of faith. If music soothes, it is because it corresponds to the dearest wish that we be loved in return. Read the lyrics & notice how naturally we come to the most shocking thing in our popular music, the surrender of faith & the happy knowledge that we are in one sense authors of ourselves & in another sense authored, but not alone. In the mystery of our future, somewhere, lies the possibility of salvation.

This is a song that’s easy to listen to & to start whistling, but you have to read the lyrics to have any chance to understand what the man is saying, & it’s worth making the effort of reading & trying to fit the feelings with this statement. We don’t put much faith in our popular music, but we put so much faith in its power to transform our lives or protect us from the troubles of the times. This song works the other way around—it’s a song of faith, but it does not go forth to conquer the world, to enslave fans & enlist them into what would ultimately be idolatry. Our celebrity-gods are pretty paltry anyway. But for the ones wounded by love looking for a way to understand what love corresponds to the innocence in our hearts—this would be a great song.

We need more of this, I think, & I think I understand what I’ve heard, but I want to share this with you. An evening in a bar could hardly get better than a chance to come across something like this & be surprised & accept the blessings & gifts music still makes possible for us. Encrypted is a small revelation gesturing toward revelation as such. If you can love it, you can learn more about love.

I grew up in the 90s, so I remember, barely, what it’s like to feel pride of ownership or joy in buying an album. I won’t try to explain it to younger people, but I can tell you that I feel the music haunting the internet is less real than the one I own & have made my own. I’ve lived with it, it’s not just something that happens online & sweeps me up. I was happy to experience that again buying the Vast Asteroid album. I’ll tell you, I understand the new world where everything on the internet is supposed to be free—but can this new world understand that I felt gratitude in paying for this thing? I think it’s got to be tied up with the sense of loyalty involved in ownership. It makes me think about whether the next Vast Asteroid album will be a like joy.

The evidence for…

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Let me recommend both the podcast & the essay, which of course is much shorter, but beautifully written.

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Let me send you to Amazon to buy it—Amazon banned the book last week, creating scandal, & then unbanned it because of the scandal. Sales are going through the roof—get in on the action.

I hope you enjoy the show & are inspired not only to read it & share with your friends, but even start book clubs. This post will also function as an open thread discussion of the novel.

Of course, we at Smug Europeans are also looking forward to suggestions for cultural topics to discuss in future episodes, so don’t hesitate to write.

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Melville was America’s first great novelist. There are things to be said for earlier writers like Washington Irving …

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