Ready for Weirdness

Living in Wonder:
Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age
by rod dreher
zondervan, 288 pages, $29.99

Is life worth living? “It depends on the liver.” Thus did William James pose the question, as well as the “jocose” answer that was currently circulating, when he addressed the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association in 1895. He then immediately put his audience on notice that his treatment of the question would not be jocular. “In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly. . . . I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life.”

A chronic depressive, James applied his suffering to the work of understanding the human condition in its fullness. He was a man of science who refused the artificial restriction of his gaze to questions that were tractable to scientific methods. For him, the surrounding intellectual culture of reticence about the biggest questions, or complacent certainty about their answers, was the cause of the malaise that so many of his contemporaries suffered.

James traced this crisis to a self-inflicted amputation of our faculties of perception, due to the “rationalistic philosophies” of positivism and scientific naturalism. These forms of “half-way empiricism” simply exclude elements of experience that they cannot explain, and proceed to declare them unreal.

Like James, Rod Dreher is prone to depression, as he confides at various points in this new book. And like James, he believes the way out of depression is a fuller recovery of the real. “The world is not what we think it is,” Dreher writes. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful.”

In fact, open this book and it gets real weird, real fast. In the first three pages we encounter UFOs, aliens, and exorcisms. One chapter is titled “The Dark Enchantment of the Occult.” Viewing the world as a spiritual battlefield, Dreher is on high alert, vigilant against irruptions of the demonic.

I do not think Dreher is trolling here, in a spirit of epater les normies, though he is certainly leading with his chin. Whatever you think of Dreher’s rhetorical choices, or how you understand the ontology of the demonic (is it an emergent property of cultural decay, or are there literal demons messing with us?), he is not a prudish writer, or a prudish thinker. Released as he is now from the world of commercial New York publishing (the book is published by Zondervan), why should he dither?

America is ready for weirdness. The commissars of right-thinking have so beclowned themselves over the last eight years, not least as spokespersons for something they call Science, that they have induced a renaissance of curiosity about phenomena long considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion. Moreover, I believe a still more fundamental shift is underway, a resurgence of doubt concerning the adequacy of scientific epistemologies. The still raging “replication crisis” that has swept across so many scientific fields has given respectable people license to entertain a bit of weirdness in their newly expanding pictures of the world.

Dreher does not merely wallow in weirdness, however. He wants to tap into what Charles Taylor calls enchantment, the elusive “sense of fullness” we get once in a while, based on fleeting experiences of life as “fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.” Such moments are difficult to access, but supremely important because they give us indications that there is an objective reality, independent of ourselves, that is morally substantive, in the sense of being shot through with significance. Its significance for me is no idiosyncratic response of my own, nor is it an artifact of some evolutionary process that tricks me into caring about things as a means of propagating the species. Rather, the felt significance of the world is a fitting response to my sense that there is something transcendent into which I fit, or must fit myself—something that makes a claim on me.

In Christian belief, this claim on me grows out of an astonishing fact: The source of this objective moral order cares about me. It gets even more astonishing, as this caring has an emotional register: love. If love is the ontological root of all that is—if, as the Orthodox prayer expresses it, “God is everywhere and fills all things”—then life is most definitely worth living. This is the central point of Living In Wonder.

Dreher wants to recover the metaphysical drama of existence, the sense of adventure and high stakes that comes with enchantment. It is a quest that is friendlier to the Eastern church than to the Roman, in Dreher’s account, given the centrality of mysticism to Orthodox belief and the somewhat inhibiting influence of Thomistic rationalism in the Western church. He doesn’t make too much of this, and the book is ecumenical in intent—to the point that it can speak powerfully to agnostics. Indeed he draws on secular thinkers who offer powerful arguments on behalf of wonder, including the psychological writer Iain McGilchrist and the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. McGilchrist argues that the West has suffered a hypertrophy of the left-hemisphere functions of the brain—our analytical capacities—at the expense of our integrative capacity to see the whole. Rosa makes a complementary argument on behalf of the experience of “resonance”: Feeling attuned to the world is possible only when we relax our compulsion to control it.

Dreher is superb in showing that the gathering clouds of “technology-driven totalitarianism” have an animating principle, one that itself amounts to an unacknowledged metaphysics. “If matter doesn’t matter, so to speak—if there is no meaning inherent to our bodies and all other forms of matter—then all we are is putty in the hands of the powerful.”

Modernity progresses from disenchantment to disenchantment, advanced under the banner of liberation (whether from superstition, from ecclesiastical authorities, or from childish hopes). And once man’s connection to the divine is severed, he takes himself to be free for self-making. Like Dreher, C. S. Lewis saw where this freedom leads: “The power of Man to make himself what he pleases” really means “the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

The most reliable bulwarks against such manipulation are, first, the revelation that man is made in the image of God; and second, that “male and female He created them.” Dreher quotes at length from his conversations with a man he calls Jonah, who once was deep into occult practices but later converted to Orthodox Christianity. Jonah suggests to Dreher that

transgender ideology is an attempt to destroy the image of God within us. The distinction between men and women, and the metaphysical implications of correct relationship between masculinity and femininity, are key to correct theological understanding. Destroy this boundary and many others will follow, such as the boundaries between human and animal, and human and technology. If one of these foundational distinctions can be made to seem arbitrary, do we expect the others to hold?

Here we begin to see continuities between the project for “artificial intelligence” (the notion that there is no essential difference between man and machine) and the messianic drive of progressives to deny sexual difference. Freedom requires erasing the boundaries between natural kinds. Such erasure, pursued in a debunking spirit, arises from resentment of the given order. It follows easily from reductive materialism, the view that “really” we are “nothing but” protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Reductive materialism is not a scientific method but a posture toward reality. It denies the significance of heterogeneity: Everything is ultimately the same stuff. Applied to human beings, such a metaphysics has a political corollary. It is clearly the tacit foundation of what Renaud Camus calls “replacism,” the tendency to efface all differences (including among peoples) because they impede the substitution of one thing for another. What is wanted is “undifferentiated human matter” that is maximally pliable to the needs of global capital, like the smoothest brand of peanut-flavored sandwich filling.

Sexual difference is one impediment to the spreadability of human matter (not least, across labor markets). As Dreher says, in a fully disenchanted world we become “putty in the hands of the powerful.” The meteoric increase of young people who identify as “non-binary,” neither male nor female, gives us some indication of the success of the HR ideology of sameness, that late fruit of scientific materialism.

Once again, a parallel with William James may be interesting. James lived at a time when positivism and scientific materialism were flush with confidence. We had it all figured out. At least, the boosters and propagandists of science did. But already there were signs of trouble on the horizon of the Newtonian world-picture—for example, the appearance in the late nineteenth century of unsolvable equations, and the explosion of descriptive complexity that emerged from the mere addition of a third body to the gravitational interaction of two bodies. The strictly mechanistic and deterministic worldview would soon collapse, with the arrival of quantum mechanics; the monistic or observer-independent status of space and time would be modified in Einstein’s theory of relativity; and the distinction between matter and energy would be elided under E=mc² and all that. But when James wrote, the publicly respectable view of the universe was still roughly the one articulated by Laplace: The universe is a vast deterministic machine, and if one knew all its forces and parts at any given moment, one could know everything about the future. A complementary teaching, dressed up in neuro-talk, is audible today in such pronouncements as those of Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford science-explainer who recently came to the conclusion that there is no free will.

In the world of Laplace and of his less brilliant epigones, there is no chance, no uncertainty, and ultimately no choice. This, James thought, was a counsel of despair:

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will [the withdrawal of the depressive, we might say]. But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we . . . are needed to redeem.

For Dreher, as an Orthodox Christian, enchantment is not a trick one plays on oneself to escape ennui, but a fitting response to the nature of things. “Heaven and earth interpenetrate each other, participate in each other’s life. The sacred is not inserted from outside . . . it is already here, waiting to be revealed. For example, when a priest blesses water, turning it into holy water, he is not adding something to it to change it; he is rather making the water more fully what it is: a carrier of God’s grace.”

This doctrine of God’s immanence in the world arguably has a place in the Catholic tradition as well, from Maximus the Confessor to Henri de Lubac, though not in certain strands of Protestant theology, to say nothing of the world-hating heresy of Gnosticism. Notice that the idea of God’s immanence has some kinship with animism, the belief that nature is shot through with spirit, which we associate with primitive religion. All water is holy water, an expression of God’s love for the world.

If this idea sounds psychedelic, well, let’s lean into that and see where it leads.

My own conversion had something of the psychedelic to it, in the literal sense of the Greek roots of the word: mind-revealing or life-revealing. Delos: visible, conspicuous, manifest. Psyche: breath (as the sign of life), spirit; soul; mind or understanding. The mind revealed to me on that day was not my own; the experience was as far from introspection as it is possible to get. In the following days I felt I had gained perceptual access to a layer of reality that was always there, but previously beneath my notice, just as people report the opening of the doors of perception in an acid trip. Most powerfully, I felt the presence of a person, one who had the specific quality of a father.

Dreher mentions psychedelic drugs in order to warn us against them. The problem with psychedelics, he tells us, is that they are a shortcut, making the numinous available to us without the spiritual discipline of the religious life. More disturbingly—once again, Dreher has a keen sense of the demonic, of spiritual warfare—when they open the doors of perception, one can’t be sure what will walk through. Because there are unseen, malevolent entities in our world, one shouldn’t fool around with mind-altering drugs that make the self “more porous.” I cannot gainsay this warning; it is supported by the accounts of bad trips (or worse) we have all heard. Dreher is not censorious on this point, and he confesses that it was an acid trip he took as a young man that first opened him to the experience of God. Rather, he takes seriously the existence of the unseen, for better and for worse.

For whatever it’s worth, I will confess that my own conversion to Christianity, though it followed a slow process of being rationally compelled to it, was sudden, and it occurred about six months after my experience with an “empathogen” drug, sometimes loosely classified as a psychedelic. It is said that psychedelics work by turning off certain pathways in the brain that are tasked with filtering reality. Presumably such filtering is adaptive and necessary—it makes life less weird so that you can do the things you need to do. But the ossified patterns of reality-filtering that build up in a brain over the course of a life would seem to make it harder to experience the wonder of a child.

As Dreher writes in Wonder, riffing on an Orthodox idea, “perichoresis [coming-around-to] describes the flow of transforming grace from God to individuals, which is returned to God as love. The degree to which we can receive God’s grace is governed by the transparency of one’s nous [mind].” Could we say that a transparent nous is one in which the reality-filtering function has been attenuated? One’s nous becomes clear “through prayer, fasting, obedience and works of love.” The hoped-for state is never a secure accomplishment or possession. The life of faith is a turning-toward that is never finished. And this is where the difference between the psychedelia of drugs and the psychedelia of religion becomes significant.

Most of the time enchantment is in eclipse. Therefore, Dreher writes, “the best we can do is live within a framework—mental and spiritual, and within the home we build for ourselves—that keeps us open to it and also sustains us in stability until the comet returns, so to speak.” If you aren’t able to live through times of eclipse, “You will be no better than a shallow aesthete, chasing thrills but remaining spiritually immature.”

The discipline that is hardest of all is prayer, which means turning one’s attention to God. Dreher writes that faith is “primarily a matter of perception, not conception.” Prayerful attention is hard because it requires quieting the mind; it is important because our attention determines how the world shows up for us. Our attention is a limited resource, so the question of what to attend to is really the question of what to value. Ultimately, attention is a form of love. Dreher invokes Augustine’s dictum: What we love, we will become.

As ever, Dreher writes with passionate investment in the story he has to tell. Readers accustomed to his internet polemics may be surprised to find here a theologically serious, psychologically sophisticated diagnosis of the spiritual condition of the West. More than diagnosis, Dreher gives us wise counsel. His aim is not to divert our gaze to the next world, but to equip us with reasons to throw ourselves more fully into this world, alert to God’s presence.

Matthew B. Crawford is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Image by Einblattdr, public domain. Image cropped.