On a trip to Germany last month, I met a young man who wanted me to understand something important about his country. He said he, like me, is a believing Christian—and this, he did not need to tell me, makes him rare in his generation. He also said he is a conservative, but a conservative under siege in a way that an American like me might not understand.
“You have to realize that in Germany, anything to the right of the liberal conservative party”—he meant the Christian Democrats—“is seen as fascist,” the young man said. Given Germany’s history, this designation demonizes any and all challenges to the current system.
Does this put normie Christian conservatives who dissent from the mainstream in the same category as, for example, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the right-wing party that, to put it charitably, is not oriented around the Christian faith? Yes, the young man conceded. But, he added, what choice do people like him have?
“The current Zeitgeist in Germany is so overwhelmingly materialist, anti-transcendent, and liquidly modern that I have not found people who agree with us in any other sphere of influence,” he said. By “liquidly modern,” the man invoked sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept that in our time, virtually all social relations are fluid and up to negotiation.
What my German interlocutor was trying to tell me was that people like him are being forced to take stands alongside others with whom they don’t agree, necessarily, because the alternative—the only alternative they are given by the powers that govern German society—is to capitulate to the destruction not only of Germany, but of Western civilization. It really is that stark.
That conversation has remained in my mind as I try to understand the civilizational drama playing itself out on the world stage. Living in Europe for most of the past two years has taught me, as an American, how badly people in the U.S. are being gaslighted by American media about the so-called ‘far right’ in Europe. It is a smear term designed not to illuminate Americans about the actual state of non-establishment right-wing political groupings, but rather to discredit them by framing them as fascist.
(A savage irony: by castigating all opposition to mass migration, for example, as ‘far right’ or ‘fascist,’ the left and the center in Europe drives sensible people who prefer not to surrender their nations to migrants right into the hands of the actual far right. Think about it: if the only people willing to stand up and defend the existence of your nation are those willing to bear the term ‘fascist’—fairly or not—then many people who don’t have a fascist bone in their bodies will be tempted to support them, simply as a matter of survival.)
The dynamic the young German man identified is perhaps nowhere more acute than in Germany, but it is present in all, or nearly all, countries of the West. This is a political movement, no doubt, but it is a process much broader and deeper than mere politics. One of the most important public intellectuals analyzing the process for broad audiences is the French Canadian artist and popular YouTuber Jonathan Pageau. Days ago, Pageau hosted a conference in Florida built around his ‘Symbolic World’ concept, which holds that all of reality should be understood as a series of interlocking patterns embodying meaning.
In a remarkable four-part series on the Daily Wire website (alas, for subscribers only), Pageau lays out his general critique of Western culture in crisis, and his prescription for getting through the chaos of the present moment. Pageau recognizes clearly the anxieties the young German man has, and places them in a context of civilizational shattering.
We may or may not be living through the end of the world, says Pageau, but we in the West are undoubtedly living through the end of a world. This is what my German interlocutor perceives. The fact that his own government, and those in power in German civil society, want to frame men and women like him as fearsome freaks for noticing this is part of the process of breakdown.
Consider, says Pageau, that we live in a world in which borders are collapsing. The de facto disintegration of the borders of Europe and the southern United States is an outward manifestation of the dissolution of borders within culture. For example, we have reached a point of cultural decomposition in which in many places in the West, we are not able to say with confidence what is a man, and what is a woman.
All cultures have categories for those they consider to be on the margins. Today, Western cultures have not only brought the formerly marginalized in from the peripheries, but have also enshrined them as the new normal. Look around you, says Pageau: our culture, both popular and elite, celebrates bizarre sexualities, multiple identities, racial difference, and what you might call the “monsterization” of humanity—that is, the valorization of the weird. We have created a society in which we train ourselves to love that which is “not us” more than we love ourselves.
This is why our elites look to the migrant masses for some kind of deliverance. This is why bearers of strange sexual identities and proclivities are treated as prophets. And this is why, increasingly, people are looking to aliens for salvation.
(You think I’m joking? In the United States, one of the most popular apps is one created by Steven Greer, a leading figure in UFO culture, who through it trains people in how to contact “aliens.” From Silicon Valley to the Texas suburbs, more and more Americans are coming together in attempts to channel these entities, in hope of raising consciousness and finding escape from our civilizational crisis. This is what the religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka means when she says that a new religion is emerging out of this culture.)
According to Pageau, we are living through a moment that can only be called “diabolic.” He means that in the etymological sense; the word we use to refer to things satanic derives from the Greek terms for division. The elite-culture command to ‘celebrate diversity’ is diabolic, not because diversity itself is wrong, but because, as Pageau puts it in his lectures, “diversity without unity is decomposition.”
In fact, diversity is an important fact of life. Difference is normal. The interchange between the normal and the abnormal is even necessary for a society’s health and fruitfulness; a border that is too porous, or not porous enough, will lead to dissolution. Diversity only becomes a problem for a culture and a civilization when the ‘gargoyles,’ so to speak, are moved from the exterior of the cathedral to the altar. A civilization that does this, says Pageau, invites death into itself.
We now live in a popular culture that propagandizes people to despise what was once seen as normal, and to worship what until the day before yesterday was considered strange. There is a word for this in academic discourse: to ‘queer’ something. The verb generally means to identify the subversive—especially sexually subversive—aspects of a phenomenon, to draw them out, and to esteem them as normative.
This has a profound effect. For example, polls consistently show that Americans massively overestimate the number of gay and lesbians among them. For years the actual number held steady at between 3 and 4%, though researchers now consider the number to be closer to 7%. But most Americans estimate the number at 23% or more. And why shouldn’t they? To immerse yourself in American news and entertainment media over the past twenty years is to be catechized to think exactly that!
We have been presented, says Pageau, with an image of reality that is false. We have been taught to disdain the things that bind us together in our diversity, and to lean into the things that separate us. We now live under what he calls “the tyranny of the exception”—meaning that the only things we are allowed to celebrate unproblematically are things that used to be marginal, like homosexuality.
The fact that Pride month is now the most important common holiday in the West—at least in the “official” culture—says Pageau, “is leading to complete breakdown.” To be clear, Pageau, though an Orthodox Christian, is not making a strictly moral point, but a structural one. No society can place the marginal at the apex of its own identity and expect to hold together. If we don’t instead recognize and celebrate the things that bind us, we will disintegrate—and that is exactly what is happening.
Once you grasp what Pageau is talking about, you see it everywhere. In both Europe and America, for example, public systems are more interested in looking after the interests of illegal migrants than citizens, of criminals than the law-abiding. Farmers, those who produce the food on which we all depend, are treated as pariahs. In the US, the military regards the social classes that disproportionately produce soldiers for the all-volunteer army as retrograde and problematic. Pope Francis, faced with the collapse of Catholicism in its European heartland, bangs on endlessly about affirming the marginalized, while he sends the most faithful believers into internal exile. And so forth.
“Heaven and earth are separating,” says Pageau, stating a recurrent theme in world mythology. What will this lead to? An “absolute state” in which the masses live in total fragmentation and isolation, while a disconnected elite controls all. We aren’t necessarily going to arrive at this system, he says, but that is where the logic is leading.
We cannot simply sit back and watch it all fall apart. How can we resist, especially when the people and institutions pushing this disintegrating vision are so powerful? Interestingly, Pageau does not give a political answer. In fact, he recommends strategies that I’ve been writing about for years. If liquid modernity has become a flood and a tempest, says Pageau, then we need to construct arks to carry us above the deluge until dry land reappears.
Pageau doesn’t use my term “Benedict Option,” but that’s what he’s talking about. He says people have to re-order their lives around the worship of God, then re-order their families, and spread outward from there. We cannot satisfy ourselves by being critics of the world beyond our circles, yet remain captive to our own sources of disorder, e.g., slavery to being online.
Under Communist tyranny, the late Catholic intellectual Vaclav Benda recognized that dissidents could not possibly hope to defeat the state. But he also recognized that the state maintained its grip by keeping everyone isolated and afraid of each other. Dr. Benda’s response was to call people out of their homes, and bring them together simply to know each other, and to realize that they weren’t alone. Jonathan Pageau counsels the same thing.
In 2019, Zsofia Romaszewska, a Polish hero of the Solidarity trade union, told me that the most important thing for people to do today is to leave their isolation and come together in person, around common goals. It doesn’t have to be political; it can be around something as simple as playing sports. The point, she said, is to form human bonds, face to face, as opposed to virtual connections online. Pageau emphasizes this point too.
In fact, listening to Pageau’s advice, I thought of the counsel that Marco the Lombard gives to the pilgrim Dante in Canto XVI of Purgatorio. The pilgrim asks Marco, being purged of the sin of Wrath, for a good word he can take back to Tuscany, which has been torn apart by communal and even family violence. Marco tells him that everyone has within them the capacity to repair the world, and indeed the responsibility to do so. They should start with their own hearts, and work outward from there.
“The scale of it is so large that people fall into despair,” Pageau says, of the challenge—but it is also an opportunity. “If you light a candle in the darkness, it shines much brighter than a million candles lighting up.”
The ark of our rescue is not something that is going to emerge on its own. Neither political leaders nor church officials are going to build it for us. We have to do it ourselves, in the face of radical opposition. This will be hard going, because “everything about the world is pulling us apart,” Pageau says—but what else is there?
Core questions that all conservatives and people of the cultural right need to ask ourselves: Can this system be saved? Should it be? If so, how? And if not, what then?
Or, to rephrase as questions the provocative point raised forty years ago by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre:
Should men and women of good will turn aside from the task of shoring up the Greater American Empire (which includes Europe)? Should they cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium? Instead, should they turn to building communities within which the virtues can survive the present and coming chaos and long night?
It is not necessarily a counsel of despair to choose to let the seemingly unstoppable forces of cultural disintegration play themselves out. It could be the case that to try to hold back the flood will only result in being crushed by the wave—but learning how to ride the wave will ensure that you, your community, and your traditions survive the catastrophe.
Maybe. At some point in the future, perhaps long after we today have passed into eternity, the world will right itself again. Pageau leaves us with this challenging question: “Can we be the seed for the next world?”
It’s a question raised by the life of St. Benedict of Nursia, a patron saint of Europe, who planted himself in a hole in the side of a cliff in Subiaco in the early sixth century, and germinated a plan that, in ways he could not possibly have anticipated, led to the rebirth of European civilization out of the ruins of Rome’s collapse. Seven years ago this month, The Benedict Option appeared, holding up the saint of late antiquity as a hero for such a time as this.
We have been here before. There is no way out, and no way around our crisis—there is only a way through. Paradoxically, that way might require us to take temporary refuge in the high places, nurturing the truth in tradition while the raging floodwaters pass violently through the valley below.
Jonathan Pageau: A Prophet Rises From Quebec and YouTube
Still from the Monasteries of Meteora episode on Jonathan Pageau’s YouTube channel.
On a trip to Germany last month, I met a young man who wanted me to understand something important about his country. He said he, like me, is a believing Christian—and this, he did not need to tell me, makes him rare in his generation. He also said he is a conservative, but a conservative under siege in a way that an American like me might not understand.
“You have to realize that in Germany, anything to the right of the liberal conservative party”—he meant the Christian Democrats—“is seen as fascist,” the young man said. Given Germany’s history, this designation demonizes any and all challenges to the current system.
Does this put normie Christian conservatives who dissent from the mainstream in the same category as, for example, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the right-wing party that, to put it charitably, is not oriented around the Christian faith? Yes, the young man conceded. But, he added, what choice do people like him have?
“The current Zeitgeist in Germany is so overwhelmingly materialist, anti-transcendent, and liquidly modern that I have not found people who agree with us in any other sphere of influence,” he said. By “liquidly modern,” the man invoked sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept that in our time, virtually all social relations are fluid and up to negotiation.
What my German interlocutor was trying to tell me was that people like him are being forced to take stands alongside others with whom they don’t agree, necessarily, because the alternative—the only alternative they are given by the powers that govern German society—is to capitulate to the destruction not only of Germany, but of Western civilization. It really is that stark.
That conversation has remained in my mind as I try to understand the civilizational drama playing itself out on the world stage. Living in Europe for most of the past two years has taught me, as an American, how badly people in the U.S. are being gaslighted by American media about the so-called ‘far right’ in Europe. It is a smear term designed not to illuminate Americans about the actual state of non-establishment right-wing political groupings, but rather to discredit them by framing them as fascist.
(A savage irony: by castigating all opposition to mass migration, for example, as ‘far right’ or ‘fascist,’ the left and the center in Europe drives sensible people who prefer not to surrender their nations to migrants right into the hands of the actual far right. Think about it: if the only people willing to stand up and defend the existence of your nation are those willing to bear the term ‘fascist’—fairly or not—then many people who don’t have a fascist bone in their bodies will be tempted to support them, simply as a matter of survival.)
The dynamic the young German man identified is perhaps nowhere more acute than in Germany, but it is present in all, or nearly all, countries of the West. This is a political movement, no doubt, but it is a process much broader and deeper than mere politics. One of the most important public intellectuals analyzing the process for broad audiences is the French Canadian artist and popular YouTuber Jonathan Pageau. Days ago, Pageau hosted a conference in Florida built around his ‘Symbolic World’ concept, which holds that all of reality should be understood as a series of interlocking patterns embodying meaning.
In a remarkable four-part series on the Daily Wire website (alas, for subscribers only), Pageau lays out his general critique of Western culture in crisis, and his prescription for getting through the chaos of the present moment. Pageau recognizes clearly the anxieties the young German man has, and places them in a context of civilizational shattering.
We may or may not be living through the end of the world, says Pageau, but we in the West are undoubtedly living through the end of a world. This is what my German interlocutor perceives. The fact that his own government, and those in power in German civil society, want to frame men and women like him as fearsome freaks for noticing this is part of the process of breakdown.
Consider, says Pageau, that we live in a world in which borders are collapsing. The de facto disintegration of the borders of Europe and the southern United States is an outward manifestation of the dissolution of borders within culture. For example, we have reached a point of cultural decomposition in which in many places in the West, we are not able to say with confidence what is a man, and what is a woman.
All cultures have categories for those they consider to be on the margins. Today, Western cultures have not only brought the formerly marginalized in from the peripheries, but have also enshrined them as the new normal. Look around you, says Pageau: our culture, both popular and elite, celebrates bizarre sexualities, multiple identities, racial difference, and what you might call the “monsterization” of humanity—that is, the valorization of the weird. We have created a society in which we train ourselves to love that which is “not us” more than we love ourselves.
This is why our elites look to the migrant masses for some kind of deliverance. This is why bearers of strange sexual identities and proclivities are treated as prophets. And this is why, increasingly, people are looking to aliens for salvation.
(You think I’m joking? In the United States, one of the most popular apps is one created by Steven Greer, a leading figure in UFO culture, who through it trains people in how to contact “aliens.” From Silicon Valley to the Texas suburbs, more and more Americans are coming together in attempts to channel these entities, in hope of raising consciousness and finding escape from our civilizational crisis. This is what the religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka means when she says that a new religion is emerging out of this culture.)
According to Pageau, we are living through a moment that can only be called “diabolic.” He means that in the etymological sense; the word we use to refer to things satanic derives from the Greek terms for division. The elite-culture command to ‘celebrate diversity’ is diabolic, not because diversity itself is wrong, but because, as Pageau puts it in his lectures, “diversity without unity is decomposition.”
In fact, diversity is an important fact of life. Difference is normal. The interchange between the normal and the abnormal is even necessary for a society’s health and fruitfulness; a border that is too porous, or not porous enough, will lead to dissolution. Diversity only becomes a problem for a culture and a civilization when the ‘gargoyles,’ so to speak, are moved from the exterior of the cathedral to the altar. A civilization that does this, says Pageau, invites death into itself.
We now live in a popular culture that propagandizes people to despise what was once seen as normal, and to worship what until the day before yesterday was considered strange. There is a word for this in academic discourse: to ‘queer’ something. The verb generally means to identify the subversive—especially sexually subversive—aspects of a phenomenon, to draw them out, and to esteem them as normative.
This has a profound effect. For example, polls consistently show that Americans massively overestimate the number of gay and lesbians among them. For years the actual number held steady at between 3 and 4%, though researchers now consider the number to be closer to 7%. But most Americans estimate the number at 23% or more. And why shouldn’t they? To immerse yourself in American news and entertainment media over the past twenty years is to be catechized to think exactly that!
We have been presented, says Pageau, with an image of reality that is false. We have been taught to disdain the things that bind us together in our diversity, and to lean into the things that separate us. We now live under what he calls “the tyranny of the exception”—meaning that the only things we are allowed to celebrate unproblematically are things that used to be marginal, like homosexuality.
The fact that Pride month is now the most important common holiday in the West—at least in the “official” culture—says Pageau, “is leading to complete breakdown.” To be clear, Pageau, though an Orthodox Christian, is not making a strictly moral point, but a structural one. No society can place the marginal at the apex of its own identity and expect to hold together. If we don’t instead recognize and celebrate the things that bind us, we will disintegrate—and that is exactly what is happening.
Once you grasp what Pageau is talking about, you see it everywhere. In both Europe and America, for example, public systems are more interested in looking after the interests of illegal migrants than citizens, of criminals than the law-abiding. Farmers, those who produce the food on which we all depend, are treated as pariahs. In the US, the military regards the social classes that disproportionately produce soldiers for the all-volunteer army as retrograde and problematic. Pope Francis, faced with the collapse of Catholicism in its European heartland, bangs on endlessly about affirming the marginalized, while he sends the most faithful believers into internal exile. And so forth.
“Heaven and earth are separating,” says Pageau, stating a recurrent theme in world mythology. What will this lead to? An “absolute state” in which the masses live in total fragmentation and isolation, while a disconnected elite controls all. We aren’t necessarily going to arrive at this system, he says, but that is where the logic is leading.
We cannot simply sit back and watch it all fall apart. How can we resist, especially when the people and institutions pushing this disintegrating vision are so powerful? Interestingly, Pageau does not give a political answer. In fact, he recommends strategies that I’ve been writing about for years. If liquid modernity has become a flood and a tempest, says Pageau, then we need to construct arks to carry us above the deluge until dry land reappears.
Pageau doesn’t use my term “Benedict Option,” but that’s what he’s talking about. He says people have to re-order their lives around the worship of God, then re-order their families, and spread outward from there. We cannot satisfy ourselves by being critics of the world beyond our circles, yet remain captive to our own sources of disorder, e.g., slavery to being online.
Under Communist tyranny, the late Catholic intellectual Vaclav Benda recognized that dissidents could not possibly hope to defeat the state. But he also recognized that the state maintained its grip by keeping everyone isolated and afraid of each other. Dr. Benda’s response was to call people out of their homes, and bring them together simply to know each other, and to realize that they weren’t alone. Jonathan Pageau counsels the same thing.
In 2019, Zsofia Romaszewska, a Polish hero of the Solidarity trade union, told me that the most important thing for people to do today is to leave their isolation and come together in person, around common goals. It doesn’t have to be political; it can be around something as simple as playing sports. The point, she said, is to form human bonds, face to face, as opposed to virtual connections online. Pageau emphasizes this point too.
In fact, listening to Pageau’s advice, I thought of the counsel that Marco the Lombard gives to the pilgrim Dante in Canto XVI of Purgatorio. The pilgrim asks Marco, being purged of the sin of Wrath, for a good word he can take back to Tuscany, which has been torn apart by communal and even family violence. Marco tells him that everyone has within them the capacity to repair the world, and indeed the responsibility to do so. They should start with their own hearts, and work outward from there.
“The scale of it is so large that people fall into despair,” Pageau says, of the challenge—but it is also an opportunity. “If you light a candle in the darkness, it shines much brighter than a million candles lighting up.”
The ark of our rescue is not something that is going to emerge on its own. Neither political leaders nor church officials are going to build it for us. We have to do it ourselves, in the face of radical opposition. This will be hard going, because “everything about the world is pulling us apart,” Pageau says—but what else is there?
Core questions that all conservatives and people of the cultural right need to ask ourselves: Can this system be saved? Should it be? If so, how? And if not, what then?
Or, to rephrase as questions the provocative point raised forty years ago by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre:
It is not necessarily a counsel of despair to choose to let the seemingly unstoppable forces of cultural disintegration play themselves out. It could be the case that to try to hold back the flood will only result in being crushed by the wave—but learning how to ride the wave will ensure that you, your community, and your traditions survive the catastrophe.
Maybe. At some point in the future, perhaps long after we today have passed into eternity, the world will right itself again. Pageau leaves us with this challenging question: “Can we be the seed for the next world?”
It’s a question raised by the life of St. Benedict of Nursia, a patron saint of Europe, who planted himself in a hole in the side of a cliff in Subiaco in the early sixth century, and germinated a plan that, in ways he could not possibly have anticipated, led to the rebirth of European civilization out of the ruins of Rome’s collapse. Seven years ago this month, The Benedict Option appeared, holding up the saint of late antiquity as a hero for such a time as this.
We have been here before. There is no way out, and no way around our crisis—there is only a way through. Paradoxically, that way might require us to take temporary refuge in the high places, nurturing the truth in tradition while the raging floodwaters pass violently through the valley below.
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End Scene