I had thought of that a lot in the intervening time. It made more and more sense to me as the days passed.
I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.
I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of "principalities and powers" almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children's joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President's own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.
I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.
In short, I don't think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.
So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.
And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world, to say these things out loud.
Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and are certainly are not supposed to talk about evil or the forces of darkness.
As a Jew I come from a tradition in which Hell (or "Gehenom") is not the Miltonic Hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quieter interim spiritual place (See this). "The Satan" exists in our literature (in Job for example) but neither is this the Miltonic Satan, that rock star, but a figure more modestly known as "the accuser."
We who are Jews, though, do have a history and literature that lets us talk about spiritual battle between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago; about eighty years ago.
Other faith traditions of course also have ways to discuss and understand spiritual battle taking place through humans, and through human leaders, and here on earth.
It was not always the case that Western intellectuals were supposed to keep quiet in public about spiritual wrestling, fears and questions. Indeed in the West, poets and musicians, dramatists and essayists and philosophers, talked about God, and even about evil, for millennia, as being at the core of their understanding of the world and as forming the basis of their art forms and of their intellectual missions. This was the case right through the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the 20th, a period when some of our greatest intellectuals from Darwin to Freud to Jung wrestled often and in public with questions of how the Divine, or its counterpart, manifested in the subjects they examined.
It was not until after World War Two and then the rise of Existentialism the glorification of a world view in which the true intellectual showed his or her mettle by facing the absence of God and our essential aloneness that smart people were expected to shut up in public about God.
So - it's not wacky or eccentric, if you know intellectual history, for intellectuals to talk in public about God, and even about God's adversary, and to worry about the fate of human souls. Mind and soul are not in fact at odds; and the body is not in fact at odds with either of these. And this acceptance of our three-part, integrated nature is part of our Western heritage. This is a truth only recently obscured or forgotten; a memory of our integrity as human beings that had been, only for the last seventy years or so, under attack.
So I am going to start talking about God, when I need to do so, and about my spiritual questions in this dark time, along with continuing all of the other reporting and nonfiction analysis I always do. Because I have always told my readers the truth of what I felt and saw. This may be why they have come with me on a journey now of almost forty-three years and why they keep seeking me out though I have in the last couple of years after I wrote a book that described how 19th century pandemics were exploited by the British State to take away everyone's liberty, been pulped, deplatformed, cancelled, re-cancelled, deplatformed again, and called insane by dozens of the same news outlets that had commissioned me religiously for decades.
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