Hello, everybody! It’s been a decent week here, I hope it has been for you, too. I’ve got reviews of two interesting books, some beautiful cat pics, and an update on my fiction writing. Dig in!
CONTENTS
Writing Update
Reviews
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Peters, Detransition, Baby
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Efforts at a Mood
WRITING UPDATE
Work is settling down some, so I’m writing more! I had another look at the beginning of “The Sons,” which I sent out last week. It needs a lot of work. I’m forcing it. There’s good ideas there, I think, but I’m going to put it aside for now.
I am going to concentrate on expanding “War Baby” into a novel. I’ve been producing on that front, and it doesn’t feel at all forced. The bad news is that there won’t be a finished product, even a rough draft I can send out, for a few months, probably.
The good news is I started a short story that I think will actually —stay— short. It’s about an old scifi writer who lives through the Revolution (I know it’s weird how many of my stories either take place during a revolution or after one. If I become a famous writer, critics can argue about what it means!), and his time at a center for old folks. So far it’s called “When I Was Right.” I think I can bang out a draft in the next week, and Citizens will get a link in their inbox. Think about subscribing if that sounds cool!
REVIEWS
Eric Voegelin, “The New Science of Politics” (1952) - When I was a teenager, I sometimes carpooled to school with a boy from the next town over. His father, a minister and learned man with a deep rumbling voice, found out I was interested in politics and asked me questions about it. One was “…do you seek to… immanentize the eschaton?” I did not know what “immanentize” or “eschaton” meant, and the dad informed me it meant something like bringing about the end of time and the kingdom of Heaven on earth. I don’t know what I told him. Eventually, through reading about the history of conservatism, I found out that that “immanentize the eschaton” line, usually preceded by the words “don’t” or “don’t try to,” was a minor slogan of the American conservative movement popularized by William Buckley and adapted from the works of German refugee scholar Eric Voegelin. It was a cutesy way of getting across the point that efforts to bring about utopia lead to worse situations than before (and therefore, don’t inconvenience the wealthy and powerful). Apparently, there were bumper stickers with the slogan on it.
Voegelin may have inspired a bumper sticker slogan but he fell into obscurity after his death in 1985, especially compared to similar figures like his fellow emigre Leo Strauss. Voegelin has a fervent but small cult following, a little think tank somewhere where foundation money keeps a few pedants going, but nothing like what the Straussians had in terms of access to power, or to go a bit further afield in the movement, the Objectivists or even anarcho-capitalists ala Rothbard. He hasn’t become a meme, either, like assorted right-leaning thinkers like Julius Evola or Emil Cioran, unless the boomer, pre-Internet version of a meme — recalled slogans from yesteryear imparted on a captive (but willing enough!) audience of teenagers — counts.
This is too bad, because as far as I’m concerned, Voegelin had more on the ball than any of them, with the possible exception of Strauss- and unlike Strauss, Voegelin did not play. He laid his cards — his erudite, well-written (in a chunky, Teutonic way), deeply whack cards — on the table for all to see. It probably didn’t help his cult grow, compared to Strauss’s self-flattering mystery cult. But it made for an interesting read.
Voegelin was a totalitarianism theorist, but not like Arendt or any of the others I know. For one thing, he was stringent enough to attract gestapo attention even though he wasn’t a Jew or a leftist, which took some doing and promoted his move to the US. You can characterize Arendt and other totalitarianism thinkers by their philosophical reaches, their rummaging in the past for tools, metaphors, and explanatory schema (which all seems a little gratuitous to materialist me, but when done well makes for some toothsome reading). But I can’t think of any who reached as far back, with so rigorous a set of rummaging tactics, brushed up against and sometimes made good use of critical ideas we lose at our peril, and came back from this journey into the past with such a honkingly absurd but internally self-consistent set of schema as Voegelin does in “The New Science of Politics,” a set of lectures meant to be a prologue to the sprawling philosophical history of politics that he never finished.
It’s like this: forget power conflicts, or rather, forget their material dimensions, Voegelin tells us. All that does — Voegelin doesn’t say it but it’s what happens, in this and in idealist political thought more generally — is separate the wheat from the chaff, the rich powerful activist countries that matter and the rest who don’t (you gotta figure one of the reasons “traditionalists” — and Voegelin is related to big-T Traditionalism in some important ways — hate contemporary life is because a lot of rich countries can’t be bothered to play classical power politics anymore… though post-Ukraine invasion, who knows?). Politics is actually about representation. He doesn’t mean that as in “what should go along with taxation” or “brown faces in high places,” but an altogether more metaphysical representation, the instantiation of capital-T Truth, in some vaguely Platonist way, on earth. Representation, undertaken correctly, assures order, which in this sense basically means an alignment of the human and something like the divine. Voegelin doesn’t insist, explicitly, on a Catholic reading of the universe to agree with his system, but does see the Christian-classical synthesis of the high Middle Ages as the height of “philosophical anthropology,” the proper understanding of man in the cosmos.
“Order” is an interesting and fraught problem. I organize- I know getting people to do stuff, even stuff they want to do, in an efficient manner, takes coordination. But even a relatively type-A type like me gets that some kind of order generates itself without some mandate from the nous if there’s enough earthly motivation. Why isn’t that good enough, at least as a basis upon which to improve? Especially for self-proclaimed “conservatives”? (It clearly is for many!)
For conservative politicians, “order” generally means keeping the poor and whoever the local downtrodden ethnicities are around in a subordinate place. Simple! It becomes complicated when someone tries to make a transcendent order of that, which right-leaning intellectuals seemingly can’t stop themselves from attempting. I run into this with the fashy teens I try to get information out of after they ineptly troll some of my goodreads reviews. No matter how much they claim to venerate the pre-modern past, they always punt to evo-psych explanations: “traditional” oppressive order is good because we evolved with it, it’s old (it’s usually not that old but w/e) so that proves it’s stability, and with the era of accelerating disaster in which we live… it runs into the usual problems even taking as read the anachronism and factual errors involved. If it’s so natural and self-evidently good, why do you need oppressive structures to instantiate and maintain it? And you get the usual answer- because Those People are evil and want to destroy it, and we all know who Those People turn out to be.
Well, if Voegelin was an anti-semite, it doesn’t turn up here, though he’s notably uninterested in Jewish concepts of the relationship between divine mandate and worldly order, to which I understand Jewish thinkers have given a lot of sophisticated thought. Voegelin makes throwaway references to Jewish and Islamic ideas of representation to prove his concept is global and perennial, but the big show goes from Athens to Augustus to Augustine to Aquinas. They didn’t get it right right away. That’s one of the interesting things about Voegelin- his Truth is transcendent, but the ways people interact with it change according to circumstance, and he understands some of those changes as valid, necessary even. Let’s not make too much of it — they’re necessary to unfold god’s plan or something — but still. You got to something like an ideal representation of a divine order that is the most important fact of the universe, a critical element of which was that unknowability-but-demand-making combo that makes monotheism so spicy, in the Middle Ages, where Emperor represented political order and Pope represented spiritual order.
I didn’t agree with Voegelin by the point, maybe three fifths into the lectures, where he was making this point, but I was impressed with his erudition, his writing, and the sophisticated way he laid out the various elements of the system of order as he understood it. There were some farrago elements from the beginning, the nose-in-the-air way intellectuals of his kind, like his friend (and to my mind, substantial intellectual inferior) von Hayek, dismissed materialism based on straw-manning no one would accept for their own beliefs. More than — or along with being — a farrago, a dodge away from unacceptable ideas, it also got deeply derpy with Voegelin’s — and here, it’s good to GIS him, his beady eyes and big forehead behind his spectacles — insistence that all social science, including any history that partook of positivism, is wrong on its face because of its lack of “theory” i.e. value statements… but I’m used to that. And then came the turn. The turn wasn’t enough to ruin the experience of the book, not hardly. But it was enough to transform my enjoyment of it from intellectual appreciation to something like high camp.
It’s the gnostics, folks! It’s not the Jews, or whoever else, who brought the snake into the garden of the high Middle Ages, who play that role that all conservative world-building needs, but the ding-dang gnostics! Just when you thought it was safe, that pesky Joachim of Fiore has his vision and all of a sudden they’re immanentizing the eschaton all over the place! All modern political philosophy other than reactionary conservatism and, Voegelin grudgingly allows, some forms of very conservative classical liberalism, are just Gnosticism warmed over. Communism, socialism, most types of liberalism, fascism, nazism- all just Gnosticism, and all lead inevitably to totalitarianism, the erasure of all individuality and freedom in the great blaze of that immenatinized eschaton.
You can see it coming, if you read the text. For someone breezing over hundreds of years of history in a set of lectures for an American collegiate audience, Voegelin writes carefully, but not ploddingly, covering his bases, when he talks about ancient and medieval philosophy. But things get awful hurried and poorly-documented when he gets to his gnostic conspiracy theory. He can’t help it (well, maybe he could, if he threw his thesis overboard). There aren’t a lot of actual records of what the gnostics — and contemporary scholars often hate the word, because it implies a much more unitary movement than what record there is would suggest — actually believed or did. Most of what we “know” about Gnosticism comes from the records of the inquisitors who hounded them to destruction and burned their texts. Poor Voegelin- at the time he was writing in the early fifties, archaeologists were just piecing together the Nag Hammadi archive, the major source of stuff actually written by gnostics — about fifty texts in all — that we have. Voegelin wasn’t in the archaeology mafia, and translations wouldn’t appear until the sixties. Another way Strauss was lucky- he stuck to canon. Voegelin was more adventurous and it cost him.
But he did it to himself. Stuck-up German that he was, he should’ve known better than to just sort of slide a few half-apocryphal historical guesswork suggestions of gnostic transmission from their utter destruction before the Late Antique period was out and into the 1200s, when Joachim of Fiore was doing his thing, let alone to Voltaire, Marx, and Hitler, into such a key place in his edifice. Amateur hour! The stupid thing is, he probably could have had his cake if he didn’t insist on eating it. He could’ve said the Enlightenment thinkers walked backwards into Gnosticism, reconstructing the creed (or Voegelin’s version of it) out of their interests, desires, and found intellectual parts. I’ve seen other right-wing theoreticians of history, lesser lights than Voegelin but perhaps more savvy, do stuff like that. The gnostics make great villains. You can argue that the Church instantiated their version of who the gnostics were, complete with weird rituals and underground dwellings, quite deep into the western idea of villainy, nestled comfortably next to stereotypes about Jews. John Whitbourn, who I’ve owned an email to for about eighteen months, made good use of gnostic villains in his anarcho-Jacobite fantasy stories. They’re a chestnut, and it’s easy enough to grow their ideas out of whatever soil you want to use for planting- intellectual pride, depression, decadence, neuroticism, whatever.
But no, that won’t do, not for Voegelin. Because ideas matter, dammit! And not in some positivist, pragmatic sense, some John Dewey feel-goodery where you pick what ideas “work!” They matter because they’re metaphysical concepts that we need to instantiate on earth to keep the darkness at bay, to make the world make sense. It’s touching, really, that Voegelin would want to extend this metaphysicality to his enemies, who he also regards as intellectually inferior (well, until you realize there’s really only one solution for dealing with them…). But it leads him to some excruciating readings of history and theory. I’m a lumper, rather than a splitter, in history- I like bigger categories than some people find legitimate. But everything from this Joachim guy to Keynes being a gnostic… when we barely know what they actually believed… and that it’s an actual intellectual lineage, a conscious project, like Catholic scholasticism! And he means it! That’s too much, man. He just gets himself deeper in the mire the further he goes until he sounds like Glenn Beck with a thesaurus.
It’s funny but it’s also sad, and gets crooked as you figure it would. Voegelin was giving these talks at the behest of some conservative foundation trying to bolster the Cold War on campuses. John Whitbourn, the anarcho-Jacobite Catholic fantasist, would probably agree with Voegelin’s condemnation of the Puritans as the first truly modern gnostic totalitarian movement. But Whitbourn had the balls to include all of Protestantism in the condemnation, Luther right next to Cotton Mather. If Puritanism was a rebellion against the divine settlement of Catholicism, it had a starting point: the Reformation, on which good Catholic traditionalist, but better Americanized Cold War conservative Voegelin, does not lay a glove, and doesn’t even mention. Shameful! If you’re going to go down this crazy road, go all the way! Similarly, at the very end, Voegelin cops out when granting that the American Revolution and even the English Civil War — where, mind you, the Puritans executed a sitting king! — were ok, for reasons too boring to get into but translate to “conservative cold warrior Americans sign my checks, and while they’re fine digging at Puritans — Mencken did that after all — they won’t tolerate smacking down the founding fathers or parliamentarian oligarchy.” Lame.
Well, campy conspiracy and lame-outs towards the end and all, I got a lot more enjoyment out of this than any right-wing material I’ve read recently. I don’t plan on chasing down any more Voegelin, and certainly not his little cadre of sad followers trying to pipe up with their imitation of the master’s erudition in the sea of bullshit on the right-wing internet. But this one was definitely well worth reading, in many of the veins in which my readings on the right work. *****
Torrey Peters, “Detransition, Baby” (2021) (read by Renata Friedman) - Torrey Peters has said in interviews that she has structured this, one of the major contemporary trans novels that I know about, like a soap opera, with twists and turns and reveals paced for the sort of drama marketed towards the women to whom Peters dedicated this book: divorced cis women. It’s an interesting gambit, and echoes something that comes up a lot in this book and that I’ve thought a certain amount about.
Peters has virtually all of her characters, most notably trans woman Reese, detransitioned Ames (he lived as a trans woman for some number of years, in a relationship with Reese for most of that, before deciding to live as a man), most of their trans friends, and most cis people in the book, refer to trans people by a term I have had numerous trans and non-binary people inform me, mostly via social media, is a slur. No, not the short nasty t-word, but an earlier and vaguely medical-sounding term that most of my trans friends and associates have overthrown in favor of “transgender.” When I’ve discussed this book with people more knowledgeable about this stuff than me, they have told me this is reflective of a generational divide. Trans people roughly my age or younger are more likely ok with the word; younger trans people (and most of the trans people I know are younger than me, typically by ten years or more) are more likely to insist it’s a slur and use “transgender.”
I say all that to say this: Torrey Peters is doing a bunch of stuff in this novel, and one of them is at least somewhat ironically overdone but also sincerely meant generational war. Reese, in particular — and there are three people who could be called main characters in Detransition, Baby, but as the omniscient third person narrator would probably agree, Reese is the star — has no patience for what she refers to as “Twitter girls,” women, almost always trans women, who promulgate ideas and/or exhibit cultural styles associated with online social justice stuff. Reese, and that omniscient narrator when she weighs in doesn’t really disagree with them on the points, but she just has another way of being who she is that she feels cramped by their indignation. Reese doesn’t want to lead a revolution. She doesn’t want to assimilate, either, like the assimilé cis gay men and lesbians we see in the book. What does she want, then?
Well, it seems, mostly she wants to be a woman. This might sound trite, but I think is quite in keeping with how Peters describes Reese’s mental state, to say she wants to achieve the high scores in the most conventional, one might even say stereotyped, versions of womanly achievement. This gets into some questions I’ve never fully understood — that I generally haven’t pursued that much, because they’re delicate topics and I don’t want to hurt anyone with my critical poking and prodding — related to gender as performance. Arguably, some of what Reese gets into is reflective of another generational divide- Reese understands trans womanhood as a reflection, or an apotheosis even, of womanhood as established by normative cis culture. A lot of the trans people I know — and here it is worth noting I know a high portion of these friends and acquaintances from radical left-wing politics — are often defiantly uninterested in conforming to cis ideas of what gender looks or acts like.
That is not Reese’s way. Reese wants to own womanhood, wants to experience it as it has been sold to her on tv, though given some spins by trans experience and consciousness. Often, this takes the form of a competitiveness with the cis womanhood she looks to as a model, as in, “see how many of your alpha cis straight dude bros want to sleep with me, as opposed to you, cis lady.”
Maybe a point of convergence, though- motherhood. Above all Reese wants to be a mother, which she sees as the ultimate in womanhood. I could see younger trans people less invested in binary understandings of gender getting that, even if the concept they’d more immediately grasp for might be “parenthood,” which is not quite good enough for Reese. Reese would like (unaffordable) bottom surgery. Reese needs to be a mother, and has screwed up chances to be one with other selfish behaviors (seemingly driven by her need to prove her womanliness by having affairs with bad men? Or is that a bad read? You gotta understand my understanding of romantic relationships is pretty minimal).
She gets her chance! Sort of. In a miracle of unlikelihood, her ex-lover, Ames — who she knew as Amy — despite having his hormones and sperm count messed with by transitioning and detransitioning — manages to impregnate his boss, Katrina, a cis lady with whom he was having an affair. Katrina’s a divorced lady who has had a miscarriage, and she wants to be a mom but questions the conditions. She questions them even more when she finds out Ames had a past as a trans woman, and drunkenly outs him to coworkers, which leads to some grimly amusing scenes of HR managers at their ad firm trying to figure out whether they need to retool their bathrooms, etc. Ames, for his part, has been borderline crippled by his ambivalence towards his several dilemmas: “live his truth” as a woman despite the terrors of his trans life versus an easier life as a man, raise a child he’d maybe only stay with out of duty and loneliness, etc.
Ames comes up with a plan! Bring in Reese as a co-mother! By the time the plot unfolds, Reese and Ames had been broken up for years, the arc of their relationship told in flashbacks. Everyone involved with this scheme is skeptical. Katrina is thrown by this sudden prominence of trans-ness in her life, and takes it with what strikes me as a realistic mixture of efforts at understanding and bad mistakes. Reese doesn’t trust Ames or Katrina at first, and figures she’d just be some weird add-on to their ménage, not a “real” mother, and that this is some bass-ackwards scheme for Ames to both get her back and continue to deny his trans-ness.
After some ups and downs, the three come to some understandings. If nothing else, Reese and Katrina have a shared hobby of owning the hapless Ames (non-sexually, in Reese’s case, at least at that point in the narrative). Katrina learns some about trans and queer culture. Reese patrols the boundaries, attempting to keep Katrina from merely appropriating queer culture (the sort of phrase, if uttered by a “Twitter girl,” would probably make Reese scoff, but she does not enchain the hobgoblins of foolish consistency, Reese) and making Reese into a kind of prop.
Ultimately, it’s that dynamic that proves to be their undoing in the last part of the book, which has some strong points and some less strong points. Reese’s past experiments in hyper-womanhood come back to haunt her in the form of a bad man at the wrong place at the worst time. Katrina judges Reese’s behavior for both sensible reasons (facilitating cheating) and bad (AIDS panic). People make various dramatic choices. One of the key images of the novel comes when Reese adopts a method she finds on YouTube for dealing with grief, that gets confused for suicide (a tragically common fate for trans people). That her most dramatic moment comes via a YouTube video she watched with a mediocre cis dude hookup is pretty funny and poignant and feels real. Given the centrality it takes on, it feels like it would have been better introduced a little earlier? Workshop criticism, I know, but there it is. Katrina, Ames, and Reese all wind up together, in some sense, in the end, but in a deeply ambiguous and ambivalent manner.
This was good! It has sound story-telling fundamentals, a story worth telling, a sense of humor, a definite perspective. There’s real limits to how much I can say in terms of how it depicts trans life. I can say more about how it depicts millennial life, I think, even if it’s millennial life socially proximate but… ontologically distant from my own. It does that quite well, I think. I can recommend it pretty highly for people who want to read contemporary literature. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Effort at a Mood
These days at breakfast, Mithra is really into getting scritches at this one point on her neck, behind her left ear. Sometimes she gets so into it that she rears onto her rear legs and her front paws float a little above the table. But as soon as I try to position my phone to capture this, her position changes. Just know she REALLY likes these scritches.