The Return of the Strong Gods by R.R. Reno is an author and editor at First Things Magazine. It was on my suggested reading list for 2020, and I think it sets a powerful frame for thinking about the year ahead.
00:09:01.400You know, these loose, contractual, consensual relationships.
00:09:05.900This, guys, is why libertarianism is wrong.
00:09:08.640Me and Dave Smith had to go through this last time.
00:09:11.420I still don't think Dave is convinced, but we'll get him there, that these purely consensual relationships are insufficient to bind a community together.
00:09:22.200These non-chosen bonds are actually the kinds of things that truly create civilization, whether we like them or not.
00:09:28.480That's a scary thing for a lot of people to say, but it is the truth.
00:09:32.320But this was kind of the focus on this from the right.
00:09:35.660He also talks about Bill Buckley and the problems of Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd and kind of why this version of conservatism, which, again, banished many of those old forms of right-wing thought and ushered in much more of this liberal conservatism and that this was kind of going to be the way forward.
00:09:56.520We don't want any of this collectivism, right?
00:09:58.800You hear that from a lot of people today.
00:10:00.680It's all about individualism versus collectivism.
00:10:05.640If you're a right-wing individualist, then you might need to think a little more about the right-wing tradition.
00:10:11.200You might need to read something that was printed before the post-war consensus, before 1945, to get a better understanding of historical, conservative, or traditional thought.
00:10:22.380Because if that's your understanding of it, then you're probably not well-versed in what kind of came before that moment.
00:10:30.560So he looks at both left and right and says there was a birth of both of these ideologies, an ideological commitment rather than commitment to older things, stronger gods.
00:10:45.900We have these weaker gods that came in and attempted to kind of hold society together.
00:10:52.340And I think this is really interesting because I don't know if he knows this.
00:10:57.220I mean, Reno seems a relatively well-read guy, so maybe he's read Carl Schmitt.
00:11:02.940But if he has it, he should because his arguments mirror a lot of what Carl Schmitt says in concept of the political when he talks about the fact that the left, that liberalism in general, rather not just the left, but also what we think of as classical liberalism today, has attempted to put the friend-enemy distinction in the closet.
00:11:23.940He talks about it much more in the political sense.
00:11:27.340Reno talks about it more in the metaphysical and spiritual sense.
00:11:32.480They're both talking about the same phenomenon, that modernity, that especially the liberalism that emerges out of the Enlightenment, is attempting to put away these key aspects of conflict, of identity, of loyalty, of authority, of hierarchy, of meaning and belonging.
00:11:53.020He wants to put them all away and just kind of reduce us to this bare minimum version of morality and identity that allows us to have maximum openness, which means we can have maximum market transactions.
00:12:10.680We can, you know, we can, this is where multiculturalism comes from, is this ability to no longer be bound to what are these concentric circles of identity that every person used to sit into.
00:12:23.680Again, I recently had Jonathan Pajot on, and he talks a lot about, and he talked about in our discussion, those nested identities that really are supposed to make us all up, and how desperately the modern world has attempted to shred those in an attempt to remove all conflict.
00:12:42.000Because as Reno acknowledges, and Schmitt acknowledges, and Pajot acknowledges, and all the classical liberals and progressives who are worried about these identities acknowledge, rightly, is that these identities are the core of conflict.
00:12:56.440The truth is that these identities do create conflict, and they do create violence.
00:13:05.340Because when you no longer have the ability to pretend that you can kind of resolve these identities, you can resolve these metaphysical questions through kind of shared conversation, then often we get these clashes of civilizations.
00:13:21.440I'm going to talk about that, too, in a second.
00:13:23.680That's something that I've also been reading a lot about with Sam Huntington.
00:13:27.960So Reno says that, you know, he's worried about these.
00:13:32.660So this is kind of where Reno, I think, falls a little short.
00:13:36.040He acknowledges, okay, that these strong gods are coming back.
00:13:40.520And he says, look, there's nothing we can do about the strong gods returning.
00:13:45.480He specifically mentions nationalism and populism.
00:13:48.880This is kind of his attempt to explain the rise of Donald Trump and the sweeping, you know, nationalism that's coming through many of these countries.
00:13:57.100We see the election of stronger leaders in many of these areas.
00:14:02.140We see things like Brexit coming through.
00:14:36.640I kind of want to hold on to many of these aspects of classical liberalism.
00:14:39.980But these are coming back whether we like it or not.
00:14:42.600And so we need to think about what that means.
00:14:46.740I acknowledge, I appreciate him at least being honest about that aspect of reality.
00:14:52.720Because that is hard enough in itself to kind of agree with, right?
00:14:57.220That for someone who's dedicated to many of these ideas and understands how dangerous it is to touch any of these wires.
00:15:02.880I mean, you can feel that these wires are live, just talking about these things, just acknowledging these things, thinking about them.
00:15:10.040You know that these are dangerous subjects, right?
00:15:12.960And so he acknowledges the fact that, look, these things are coming back.
00:15:16.260And so if we don't talk about them, if we don't acknowledge these forces, if the attempts of our leaders to suppress them are going to fail and their attempts are going to be ugly and they're ultimately going to fail.
00:15:30.300And if no one who has a positive vision for what to do with these metaphysical truths, these transcendent and powerful forces, if no one who has a positive vision harnesses these and guides them in a positive direction, they will come in terrible and ugly forms.
00:15:53.140And they will do terrible and ugly things.
00:15:58.220I think that is something that the right needs to think a lot about.
00:16:02.740I know we're never going to get the Republicans to deal with this.
00:16:05.500I know the GOP is never going to deal with this.
00:16:07.660But it's something that those of us who are on the right and attempting to form something new need to think about.
00:16:14.240Because if we don't think about it now, we don't talk about it now, then when it does bubble up, when it does become true, it will become true in the hands of people who have terrible designs for it.
00:16:25.280And so it's very important to think about what the return of the strong gods mean for us in the near future.
00:16:33.600Now, again, for Reno, this is kind of a scary thing.
00:16:39.920And he does what I think a lot of these Catholic writers do.
00:16:44.080And I'm not trying to bag on Catholic writers because at least they're trying to address some of this stuff.
00:16:47.840You don't see a lot of evangelical writers trying to address that, though that's not as true now.
00:16:52.580You see kind of the Christian nationalism movement attempting to address these things.
00:17:36.560But it's very clearly avoiding the most dangerous parts of this topic.
00:17:41.700It's definitely it's definitely a half measure at best at looking about kind of what this means.
00:17:49.860So like I hinted at, I also want to compare this to another book that I have been reading a lot recently, which is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.
00:18:00.600Now, many of you probably already know this, but for those who don't, Samuel Huntington was a professor, I think it was at Harvard, but he was the teacher of many critical people, including Francis Fukuyama, who had kind of the end of history idea.
00:18:18.360So he wrote the book about the end of history, the essay, and then the book.
00:18:20.960And same thing, Sam Huntington wrote an essay of Clash of Civilization, which became a book.
00:18:24.960And these are like two competing novels for Francis Fukuyama was kind of betting on the kind of neoliberal vision that, you know, liberal democracy was going to conquer the world.
00:18:38.620Capitalism is going to conquer the world.
00:18:40.640This is the end of history because we've answered all of the political questions.
00:18:44.440We've answered all the economic questions, all the serious questions about how to organize society and understand social organization have already been answered.
00:19:10.040Francis Fukuyama feels a lot like Marx or Engels.
00:19:14.200You know, it's one of those guys where I'm told, oh, well, no, they don't really, you know, their arguments are much more nuanced.
00:19:20.000You've got to just read the text and someone, you know, will show me quotes of those people and I'll read them and I'll say, no, that's kind of exactly what I expected.
00:19:28.220That's pretty much exactly what I believed.
00:19:40.200But anyway, the point is, Fukuyama had this idea of the end of history.
00:19:46.640And the end of history was, again, the idea that we had solved all of these problems.
00:19:51.700We had arrived at all the logical conclusions when it comes to experimenting with human organization.
00:19:57.380Liberal, Western liberal democracy was going to reign supreme.
00:20:00.560Capitalism was going to reign supreme.
00:20:02.160You know, the kind of global hegemonic empire that was built on top of those things is going to continue to kind of reign in perpetuity.
00:20:11.420And it's really about working about the kinks here.
00:20:14.180Samuel Huntsman thought something very different.
00:20:16.660He said, actually, what we're looking at, and he wrote this, you know, again, to his credit, and he wrote this in 1995.
00:20:23.680Really very close to the fall of the Soviet Union, only a few years after.
00:20:30.040We don't think about that much anymore.
00:20:31.520But it's a sea change in the way that you understand international relations.
00:20:36.120And this became, this kind of became the way that he saw what the post-Cold War world was going to look like.
00:20:45.420And he said, a lot of people, you know, are doing the Francis Fukuyama thing.
00:20:48.480They think, oh, well, the United States has won, and capitalism now reigns supreme, and democracy reigns supreme.
00:20:54.380But he says, actually, what we're going to see is a shift away from the Western liberal model.
00:21:00.020We're actually going to see a shift away from Western liberal democracy.
00:21:04.320And instead, we're going to see people revert back to civilizational blocks.
00:21:10.060So rather than have this one, this bipolar world turn into this unipolar, hegemonic, America-controlled kind of global state,
00:21:21.020instead, we're going to see a return to these civilizational blocks.
00:21:24.580Now, it looked like for a long time, Francis Fukuyama was going to be right.
00:21:29.040It looked like he was in the lead there, right?
00:21:30.960Kind of the global American empire reigns supreme, and it didn't seem like anyone could kind of destroy this juggernaut.
00:21:38.100However, as we've seen over the last few years, actually, that may not be the case.
00:21:43.120And it's looking more and more like Huntington was right.
00:21:46.620And what we saw was just kind of a decade or two of momentum off the victory over the Soviet Union
00:21:53.080that would eventually lead to this global American empire's decline.
00:21:58.040And as the decline occurs, we start to see those civilizational blocks arise.
00:22:03.120Now, for Huntington, the important part of this was really before it looked like modernization and westernization had to be the same thing.
00:22:15.280In order for a state to move out of the third world and into the first world, for it to kind of modernize it all,
00:22:22.140it had to bring in all of these aspects of Americanism and Western identity.
00:22:27.120Western identity, it had to homogenize, it had to do all that globalization.
00:22:32.940However, he saw the cracks starting to form in that even back in 1995.
00:22:37.160And he said, yes, while many, many of these states are superficially tying themselves to the global American empire,
00:22:44.640you can start to see their desire to modernize, but make their modernization different from America,
00:22:51.740to find a way to kind of bring themselves into the current paradigm technologically.
00:22:57.860And, you know, with all the social advancements in certain areas, but still retain their identity, their culture,
00:23:05.920and specifically, in his mind, religion.
00:23:11.000And that doesn't mean he doesn't acknowledge that, you know, race, ethnos, language, you know, geography,
00:23:17.420all of these things are key to the formation of identity and nation states.
00:23:21.500However, he acknowledges that perhaps the nation state is not going to be the primary thing that's going to define the geopolitical landscape.
00:23:32.760But these collections, the nation state might be too small.
00:23:36.400We're going to have these civilizational blocks and that a nation state will sit at the center of it.
00:23:41.180You might have one or two lead nation states inside the civilizational block,
00:23:45.540but their kind of sphere of influence will be more along religious lines.
00:23:50.740That will be the thing that kind of allows the maximal social organization across national borders,
00:23:57.680but is still smaller than a global control of an area.
00:24:02.520And so he looks at things like kind of the Western block, the Orthodox block, the Muslim block, the cynic, kind of the Chinese block.
00:24:12.320And so like all of these different blocks that are built around kind of religious and cultural identities rather than having kind of this end of history model.
00:24:23.380And during this, he says, okay, the really important thing to understand is that we are going to see the disillusion of these kind of purely ideological identities.
00:24:37.860You know, he said basically in the Cold War area, we have the communist dictator model, right?
00:24:50.820We kind of had that, the Soviet Union model, that ideology, and then we had the capitalist democratic model.
00:25:00.160And those economic ideologies replaced what had been for a very long time the more traditional forms of identity that had existed for human beings.
00:25:11.880We did not align human organization along purely ideological lines until very recently.
00:25:21.220And once those two major powers kind of stopped being these two poles in geopolitics, stopping these two poles in international relations,
00:25:31.500it opened up the opportunity for older identities to emerge.
00:25:34.820You could still have certain capitalist frameworks or democratic frameworks.
00:25:39.020Ooh, French lavender soy blend candle.
00:25:44.020I told you HomeSense has good gift options.
00:26:09.920But you would see the emergence of different identities, and those would start to change those frameworks in a very particular way.
00:26:17.080And we can see that, of course, with like the communist adoption of many parts of the market economy or the way that, you know,
00:26:23.840something like Hungary has adopted a far less liberal democratic model, even though it's probably holding on to many of kind of the more capitalist aspects of certain things.
00:26:35.300There's also, you know, they're not afraid of certain social controls.
00:26:38.260And so we're seeing a more hybrid versions of this, and they're focused on what most nations used to be focused on, what peoples and social organizations used to be focused on, which was the betterment of the people under them.
00:26:53.200Rather than saying, our identity is ideological, we are capitalism, or we are democracy, or we are communism, or we are authoritarianism.
00:27:03.240And instead, they said, okay, well, here's a group of people, and here's kind of the way that they live their lives.
00:27:31.780He said, the civilizations that are ready to answer that question are the ones that are kind of going to succeed, are going to be able to move forward into the next century.
00:27:43.900And so, who are we becomes a really important question.
00:27:49.300Now, my buddies Daryl Cooper and Lafayette Lee released a very interesting dialogue on I Am 1776 yesterday.
00:27:58.540And the piece was talking about American ethnogenesis.
00:28:01.520And the fact that America had failed at ethnogenesis multiple times, though it had approached that at several moments until key things like kind of the Hart-Celler Act broke it back apart.
00:28:16.380And they kind of addressed the topic of whether or not America could kind of get into this again, could once again attempt to forge an ethnos.
00:28:28.400Now, people get really weird around that word because most people don't have any understanding of its, you know, historical significance.
00:28:37.360People just think in kind of crude racial terms at the moment, which is not particularly helpful.
00:28:44.480Not that those things don't have a certain level of salience, unfortunately, especially in our current society.
00:28:50.860But, you know, they don't understand kind of what an ethnogenesis would mean for the United States.
00:28:58.960The United States took many different European ethnos, excuse me, during its time and was working to forge them into one particular American version of that.
00:29:12.400And succeeded and succeeded in some ways, but maybe not in others.
00:29:18.040Part of the problem was probably that America grew too quickly, just territorially.
00:29:22.580And so there was never one way of life that bound the country together for very long.
00:29:28.760That's an issue that we might get into.
00:29:31.120I'm going to have Daryl Cooper on next week.
00:29:33.460He's been on the show before he's coming back next week.
00:29:36.560And we're going to talk about that some along with some very other interesting topics.
00:29:41.680So I'm going to get kind of more into that.
00:29:44.100But this is definitely what we talk about when we're talking about the return of the strong gods, because America needs to have something that allows it to understand itself.
00:29:56.220I mean, part of that is simply stopping the flow of new people.
00:29:58.960You can't become one people until you stop the flow of new people.
00:30:03.940That's something that America just has to do.
00:30:05.760But another part of it might just be the size of America.
00:30:08.280And this might be something that occurs regionally.
00:30:11.140It might be America as a civilizational block is better formed out of many culturally Christian sub-ethnos that kind of form inside an America that breaks itself in some certain ways.
00:30:26.460You know, a more extreme version of federalism.
00:30:28.600I'm not sure how that's going to work out.
00:30:30.500But again, we might get into that with Daryl next week.
00:30:33.140The point here is to say that these strong gods are very difficult.
00:30:39.920You know, they are tumultuous for a reason.
00:30:42.560People were scared of them for a reason, rightly so, because they are the things that move men's passions and animate them to kind of give of themselves.
00:30:52.380And this is kind of the reason that you look at the American military and they can't get anyone to recruit anymore because they've gotten rid of all the strong gods, right?
00:31:01.180We kind of coasted by on a certain level of general patriotism for a long time.
00:31:06.920But the American government, the regime has made it very clear that it's not a big fan of many of the people who traditionally signed up for the military.
00:31:16.200A lot of the guys from Texas and Appalachia who made up the kind of front line, the combat readiness of the United States are no longer welcome.
00:31:24.700And they can't get those guys to come back after kind of ripping that mask off and showing their face.
00:32:39.040And like I said, we're going to talk a little more, a little bit more about it next week with Daryl Cooper.
00:32:45.500But I just wanted to bring these ideas forward because I think, like I said, R.R. Reno, while the book does not really take us to solutions.
00:32:55.980Again, I feel like books like his and Patrick Deneen's newest one, Regime Change, both of them have a similar problem in that their frames address serious problems and they bring important insights.
00:33:08.780But they're not willing to really look at anything that is a significant change.
00:33:13.920There's no real change in any of these books.
00:33:16.600There's no real attempt to address the strong gods return in any of these books.
00:33:20.520It's simply acknowledgment that these forces are kind of sitting at the edge of what's going on, of the popular consciousness right now, and that they will reenter at some point.
00:33:31.440And really, they're books that are just acknowledgments that we're just not going to talk about them, I fear.
00:33:37.180This is, again, the problem of a civilization that is terrified of truth, is so dedicated to the removal of truth that it can't discuss anything of value because that means those things will simply reenter the public consciousness with no readiness, with no preparation, with no understanding.
00:33:59.820And when those forces are truly unleashed, things will get wild.
00:34:04.680Now, I understand why the left can't interact with these things, because the left's entire existence, I mean, the entire program of the left at this point is destroying every aspect of the strong gods, right?
00:34:14.860The gods must be so weak, the forces that compel men, that give people their identity, must be so weak that you can change it at a moment's notice.
00:34:24.140You can go from a man to a woman, you know, you can dye your hair and get a haircut and become polyamorous and kind of completely divest yourself from any strong ties, any real notion of who you are and what you should fight for and what you should be constrained by.
00:34:42.280And what has a call to be, you know, to make you kind of compel you to certain behaviors.
00:34:49.260Now, what's interesting, and Reno points this out, and he's right to do so, is that even though the left have worked really hard to create these weak gods, of course, they still have gods, right?
00:35:00.880And guys, obviously, Christ is king, you know, understand the metaphor here.
00:35:04.600But these, you know, these different forces still exist for the left, and they still demand kind of sacrifice on their behalf.
00:35:15.620And so while the left has attempted to make these gods weak, in many ways, they still made themselves subject to them and completely with a great lack of awareness on kind of what's happening there.
00:35:27.860And so I guess I want to wrap this up by saying, we're going to need to talk about this stuff.
00:37:38.740So that's kind of what I had to say about that.
00:37:40.700But, again, if you want to go ahead and check out R.R. Reno's book, I do recommend it, even though, like I said, it does come up short a little bit.
00:37:49.880It was on my recommended reading list.
00:37:51.600And I certainly recommend Samuel Humphrey's Clash of Civilizations.
00:37:56.640It's always interesting when you read two books really close to each other and you find kind of that shared overlap, lapping language and understanding of a problem.
00:38:04.880Even though they were written several decades apart, I always find that interesting.
00:38:09.640I think that that gives you a look at things from different angles.
00:38:13.720Again, if you kind of read this in tandem also with Carl Schmitt, you get the metaphysical and the political next to each other, which I think is a really interesting way to view this.
00:39:26.280What I'm pointing out when I point that out to people is actually I'm actually attempting to break that frame because what I'm trying to say is obviously the word we're using here has lost all meaning.
00:40:11.300Different peoples have different social organizations and forms of government for a reason.
00:40:15.720I agree with Joseph de Maester about this, that there is a correct form of government, but it is for each people.
00:40:22.720That's a question that's specific to the people, not to humanity as a whole.
00:40:27.040And so the question is really just there to mainly break people out of this frame of thinking that democracy is this universal good and this universal word that applies to everyone and instead make it clear that different people actually do want different ways of organizing.
00:41:04.440So the concept of the political, you know, the point of the friend enemy distinction is the ability to declare that which is outside other, that which the body politic can be unified against.
00:41:18.840And so every civilization, whether we like it or not, does need an external common enemy.
00:41:27.320That's something that people aren't going to like to hear, but tough.
00:41:30.000We're not here to tell people what they want to hear.
00:41:31.960We're just going to tell them the truth.
00:42:04.860You cannot become more virtuous until you have a shared language and understanding of what is best inside your community and what that community is and how you can work towards the betterment of it.
00:42:15.280And so that will naturally bring you to conclude that certain kind of external common enemies exist.
00:42:24.200But I think you first need a vision of who you are.
00:42:27.300I don't think that a common enemy is enough.
00:42:29.900And if you have any doubt about that, look at the right now.
00:42:51.960And so I think that you do need a more substantive version of that if you're going to stand together and have a coherent society.
00:42:59.940But the answer is you certainly need both if, you know, you're going to have one.
00:43:03.600But I think that the former will arise very easily, especially after you have the latter.
00:43:13.820Templer, sorry, I know there's some way to pronounce that and I'll get it wrong probably forever.
00:43:18.700But he says, personally, I think that I think connecting the atomized sensitive young man to their heritage,
00:43:24.640even so far as to look at the pagan gods as real, really ancestor kings whose blood is yours and whose deeds are yours to repeat is a route.
00:43:33.920I mean, you certainly need to connect people to their history, to their shared values, the shared traditions, folkways, understandings.
00:43:42.100Religion, of course, is critical to that.
00:43:44.760It's probably the most critical portion of that.
00:43:47.540Again, if you want to understand that, I would encourage people to read The Ancient City.
00:43:52.320It's an amazing book for a lot of reasons.
00:44:35.520And progressivism is absolutely one of them.
00:44:38.040But as I think, you know, Spengler correctly pointed out, each civilization has its atheistic mirror to its religion.
00:44:45.240And he did not exempt pagan religions from this.
00:44:48.940He said that they enter into these phases just as regularly as Christianity does.
00:44:53.640I think it's easy to stare at the current Christian version of that and say, therefore, Christianity is bad or wrong or the problem.
00:45:01.120But no, that's just it's inverse reflection to your society.
00:45:05.380I think you've misdiagnosed the problem with your society.
00:45:07.680If you feel like Christianity is the problem with your society, I think you don't understand cyclical history properly.
00:45:13.720And I would just encourage you to think on that some more.
00:45:17.220However, it is certainly true that there are stories from pagan societies or, you know, from ancient societies that are in ways part of our heritage.
00:45:28.400And there is a lot of value looking at them, understanding that they're not valuable because they're pagan necessarily, but their value because they're part of our heritage.
00:45:35.180And if that does, you know, if that is part of your tradition, that does draw you towards virtue, that's good.
00:45:42.120But remember that religion and virtue are lived thing.
00:45:47.560And unless you're in a community where you can practice these things, they don't that they don't really persist.
00:45:55.160And so it's nice if you manage to get together and like have that by yourself or something.
00:46:01.280But but you're not really in a situation where you can build that and turn it into something that you can pass on without that community.
00:46:10.420And so I would encourage you to find that in your most recent traditions, if possible.
00:46:17.180So that doesn't mean that there isn't, of course, powerful figures from our past that can inform that as well.
00:47:37.920We have to start thinking about ways of being right.
00:47:41.320We have to start understanding that our epistemology cannot simply be reason.
00:47:46.920It cannot simply we cannot simply plan everything out in advance.
00:47:51.980We can't simply quantify everything and chart it out in the way it would go and then and then follow that plan.
00:47:59.660Instead, we have to understand that our knowledge, our traditions, these things will be built in the way that we live our lives, in our ways of being.
00:48:08.500And we have to find more meaningful ways of being.
00:48:10.980I know that sounds kind of woo woo, but the point is here that there is just a lot of truth to the fact that that there is knowledge and history and tradition wrapped up in the way that you live life.
00:48:27.140And so these things will arise because we think about them and we reason about them and we we talk about them and share about them.
00:48:33.160But they'll also be true because we live them out in patterns and those patterns build on each other and they build our identities and they build our traditions and they connect us to the transcendent.
00:48:45.340And once that kind of right ordered being is created, then I think a lot of the stuff flows far more easily.
00:48:52.820The problem right now is we are so disaffected.