I have read articles and watched YouTube videos (I do not have a television) about the issues and the floods of executive orders coming from the President’s desk. We have notably the burning issues of illegal immigration, insecurity, “woke” ideology combining elements of cultural Marxism and anti-racism, green ideologies involving “Net Zero”, etc. I can understand this euphoria, but quite quickly took a step back to consider the possibility that if something is too “good” to be true, it is not true. The “woke” left will not give us utopia, but something like an Orwellian dystopia if allowed to go to its logical conclusion. Would the opposite extreme be any better? I have my doubts.

I believe it to be appropriate to mention the famous encyclical of Pius XI from 1937, Mit Brennender Sorge. I quote the introductory paragraph:

It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God’s Kingdom.

Pius XI referred specifically to the dark night being brought over Germany and Europe by Nazism and Hitler’s Reich. By extension, we are brought to think of other totalitarian movements in all the other European countries, even the British Isles. This historical period, 1919 to 1945, has particularly fascinated me and I have read some of the standard works like William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The story is long and complex, essentially involving a German nation that was impoverished following its defeat in 1918 and which attributed strength to itself by use of a scapegoat, essentially the Jewish population. The manipulation by the use of propaganda was very clever and highly organised.

Just a couple of days ago, I likened this political mind-virus of both Left and Right to the analogy of the rabbit hole, immortalised by Lewis Carroll’s children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I do believe that history goes round in cycles, one cycle being an analogy or caricature of the previous one. I try to find analogies in the past to give some intelligence to our present situation in 2025. One possibility is the French Revolution that quickly evolved into Robespierre’s Terror. Another is the end of the Weimar Republic founded in 1918, and which ended on the election of Hitler as Chancellor and Reichsführer in 1933. The analogies are not perfect – they never are, but history can give us something to go on even if it is only to avoid getting sucked in and “infected” ourselves.

I have no idea what will happen in the wake of Trump’s election. Perhaps it will all break up through a series of constitutional lawsuits from Congress. A couple of days ago, I watched the Harrison Ford film Clear and Present Danger, in which an American President gave secret and unconstitutional orders for military action against the drug cartels in Colombia. We see a lot of ruthlessness and power seeking on the part of people in the Washington political machine. I felt quite shaken by this film in the knowledge that Trump is going against the cartels. On the other hand, the gangs are groups of very evil people, and they would rule the world if they were left unchecked. What is the solution? Fortunately I am not in the “big game” or in a position to decide these matters. I am just a little guy in a French village writing something for my blog. Perhaps the cartels need to be killed or sent to a modern version of Devil’s Island. Who knows?

Perhaps something I can do, since I am not interested in political activism, is more in line with my calling as a priest. That is education, both of myself and others. I have found a lot of inspiration in the writings of Rob Riemen, the founder of the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands. I have read his Nobility of Spirit several times, which colludes with authors like Nikolai Berdyaev and others who took inspiration from the German Idealists. My own interest in this line of thinking goes back to my university days when I became disenchanted with Catholic integralism and the status quo in the official Church. Feeling very depressed in something like 1989, I consulted a psychologist in Lausanne whose thought and methods were most unconventional. He differed from the usual Freudian materialism and encouraged me to read Jung and some of the Russian philosophers – and perhaps leave Europe for a different way of life. It changed my entire paradigm, even though I still sought to become a Catholic priest with the traditional liturgy. The early Institute of Christ the King (early 1990’s) was a lot more flexible and tolerant than most of the traditionalist communities.

I have not attempted to “plant” a Christian group here in France, because no one is interested unless they belong to something already in existence. Then, they have no need for me! I have found a number of people who write blogs and Substack articles, and have been able to correspond with some of them. Travel is expensive, and I have little contact in visu. Friendships are that much more difficult to keep alive at a distance. Rob Riemen has written to me to express his appreciation of my blog. I really ought to go to the Netherlands to a Nexus conference, and meet him and others. Riemen sings the praise of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a long piece of work that describes the conversations and thoughts of people stricken by terminal illness, tuberculosis in particular and being cared for in a sanatorium high up in the Alpine mountains. Mann escaped the Nazi tyranny to live in the USA and Switzerland.

There is a lot of talk about British values and European values. Do most of those who promote them know what they are? At least at greater depth than courtesy, respect for law, the family, honesty with money and so forth? We need a level of education that is not available to most people unless they become aware of the need to seek it. We need to work on creating small intellectual communities with an interest in the spiritual and mystical side of Christianity. These need to be little groups based on friendship without any need for someone with “leadership” qualities. My experience of life from childhood has guided me to the intuitions of the Romantic movement, its archetypes and continuing influence into our own times. I have found similar penchants to Romanticism in Dr Timothy Graham and Dr Michael Martin and his site The Center for Sophiological Studies. These are really wonderful men and “Inklings” of our times.

Institutional churches, like political systems and parties, have disenchanted us and left us cynical and emotionally exhausted. It is this disenchantment that provides the rich medium for ideological mind viruses on both extremes, the “far-right” being assimilated with historical fascism or national socialism. This boiling pot of ideologies is typically contrasted with the notion of democracy. However, democracy is not merely freedom of speech and voting rights; it is also based on moral and spiritual values. If we no longer have these values, then we get fear and greed, a kind of “mass democracy”, which develops into lies and hatred, resentment, racism and ultra-nationalism. We will find these symptoms both in the “mainstream” and the fringes. Christianity is not a support for political totalitarianism (both “woke” and the “far-right”) but is our life given to us by Christ that subordinates everything else in our lives.

Personally, I can isolate myself from the world, which seems to be my de facto existence, quite the opposite of Fr Robinson. Otherwise I can observe the state of the political world and be aware of my frustrations with stupidity and mendacity for motivations of which I am ignorant. It is just the same in the UK as in France. In Germany it looks like AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) with or without some measure of coalition with a more moderate right-wing party. I am more than sceptical about mass immigration (especially illegal), the responsibility of Europe for climate change compared with China and India and a need for a Net Zero policy, and especially about singling out various groups in society for “inclusion” rather than a general notion of tolerance and the social contract. How far can I go with right-wing agendas, knowing that left-wing agendas are toxic?

On the other hand, we are running out of money. Growth capitalism seems to have reached the end of its tether. Our dependence on money and rising prices is creating anxiety for us all, unless we are millionaires and billionaires. Both left and right seem to be favouring oligarchies and what looks like a new form of feudalism rather than socialism. Are we to be reduced to living in tents and mud huts, without electricity or means of transport, without even the means to produce food? Would the oligarchs (both left and right) be tempted to send us to concentration camps and kill us – or just leave us to starve where we are? Hitler won in Germany against the sight of people paying for a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of almost worthless banknotes. Even the banks are toppling. Barclays seems to have crashed, if I am not mistaken by fake news.

Some days ago, I watched a Rambo film on my tablet as I lay in bed trying to keep warm. There was a group of Christian missionaries wanting to go into Burma during a reign of terror, and asking Rambo to take them up the river by boat. Rambo showed the most radically nihilist view of humanity in the wake of his having been through the Vietnam war. The killing machine simply expressed the view that humans were barbarians that were hard-wired for competition and dominance. “That is what is”. There is no prospect of redemption or transformation, just a mass of death and damnation. The idea seems to concur with Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination and total depravity, but Calvin believed at least in the salvation of some human souls! I have read about men who have been through warfare and killing on the battlefield. They react like Rambo or cry from the depths of their trauma for God’s light and something to believe in about humanity. We should read poems from the World War I poets, their poignancy and knowledge that only in God could man find peace.

What about the future of politics once the present establishment is toppled like the Weimar Republic in 1933? I have often mentioned the beautiful book by Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943 – Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. We are not at war, at least not yet, but we are living in an age of crisis. Only Christian humanism will bring us out of it. Only Christian humanism can form the basis of a just society. Ideally, we need to return to legitimate Monarchy with a democratically-elected government and parliament. We need to finish with political ideologies that are destructive and poisonous. Not all kings and queens are good, but on the whole, a Monarchy seems better than corrupt politicians who are in it for power and money. When I look at the current situation in the UK and France, the world in which I live and relate, perhaps we need a military regime in the short term – a thorough reform and “draining of the swamp”. I am tempted by Trump’s bombastic promises, but I fear where it could all lead in time.

As Rob Riemen has written, we live in a society of “organised stupidity”. The Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church too, is said to be in a process of “managed decline”. Goebbels expressed the idea that if you persist enough in a lie it becomes truth. It is a notion we find in Orwell’s 1984, hell on earth. These lies are fed by the propaganda machine, conspiracy theories, a total lack of education. This is the danger posed by Trump and AfD, but also by the “wokist” left.

I have also been horrified by the news of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s grave in La Trinité sur Mer having been desecrated. No sooner had Le Pen died, extreme left-wing idiots were partying in Paris and other parts of France. Respect for the dead marks the line between civilisation and barbarianism. My prayers go out to Mme Marine Le Pen and for the whole family still in mourning. Unless the culprits can be brought to justice, I am very afraid of the near future.

America used to be the example of the ideal New World. They had Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roosevelt and so many others with high ideals of democracy, freedom and opportunities to all for a rewarding life. The American Constitution and its many Amendments has been the basis of something great. I hope this is Trump’s ideal in the knowledge that he has had to make some very hard decisions in its pursuit. I remain sceptical, but I know that the Biden administration was rotten to the core.

People will continue to engage in politics. I don’t have the strength or alpha masculinity for it. I have learned much about my own person, what psychiatrists call Aspergers autism or other combinations of words. I think that my Archbishop can be sure that I will not be seen in extroverted behaviour, trolling people for political issues and making scandalous gestures (even in jest) in public! Someone has to do the politics for the sake of the order of society, but it is not my vocation. Alan Jacobs’ book has inspired me about preparing the ground for a post-war world, not as a soldier or a politician, but as a priest and someone with some intellectual culture.

Men like Rob Riemen and Novalis advocated Bildung, a complete education in human culture as well as literary, scientific and mathematical skills. We need a true enlightenment, not the hypocritical caricature of the eighteenth century. Kitsch is a problem when the most noble ideas are banalised and caricatured. We can have no democracy without education, but education is not merely factual knowledge. Schools and universities in our times inspire stupidity and lies. Someone with an advanced degree can still be a stupid person. Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis:

Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God’s Kingdom.

The French call narcotic drugs stupéfiants. Taking cocaine or whatever makes you stupid or partially unconscious. Stupidity is essentially a lack of judgement or thought in the application of knowledge and skill. I think that very few of us have never done or said things we regretted as stupid. It is a complex subject. One thing that can make us stupid is groupthink rather than thinking things out for ourselves and out of the box. Real education is imparting a notion of truth, beauty and goodness through the arts and culture, opening the imagination to complement logical reasoning and acquiring an understanding of other human beings.

Our combat is not only against murderous totalitarianism and dystopia, against surviving or revived forms of Nazism or Fascism, but also against the kind of critical theory from the Frankfurt School and French Existentialism (Sartre in particular) that wants to “cancel culture”, destroy beauty in the name of decolonisation. Sartre embraced Soviet totalitarianism, but Camus is much more interesting in another vision of Existentialism.

I quote from Riemen:

Look, Europe has been guilty of many crimes. We can refer to colonialism, we have invented totalitarianism, and the Holocaust happened here in Europe, and not in Africa or elsewhere. But I want to believe in the idea of human dignity. For me, the quintessence of the whole mindset of European humanism is that our identity is not based on what makes me different from you in terms of gender or social background of beliefs, or lack thereof. The idea of identity in European humanism is what we all have in common. And because of that, we can also have faith in the unity of mankind — in the notion that we are all human beings. And so, what is it that we have in common? The fact that we all can live in truth. We all can have compassion. We all can do justice. We all can create beauty. And we should be aware, as Freud reminded us, that we are also human beings full of our instincts and fears and frustrations and hatred and aggression. The only way to handle the animal side of our nature is to develop our spiritual nature.

Wow! The world could become something that does not need to be machine-gunned by Rambo the nihilist. However unfaithful we have been to the ideal of European humanism, the Gospel message of Christ, the ideals remain valid. It is for us to repent of our evil and return to the source of life. We can each begin by examining our own consciences, confessing our sins and returning to the right way. Then there is hope that it will spread. There is the old Chinese proverb (Lao-tse):

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbours.
If there is to be peace between neighbours,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

Don’t ask me if it is well translated from Chinese!

Nietzsche in an 1874 lecture said something along the lines of, “Well, the time of the School of Education and the School of Civilization is over. Your education will be reduced to what is good for the economy and good for the state, and nothing more than that“. That seems to have happened. I don’t have qualifications to be a teacher or a professor, but I can encourage others to learn – and myself to learn in my turn. We have to do outside schools, but we must be careful about absorbing the wrong things from the internet and social media. These things are tools, not our masters! If we can form little discussion groups, that is a great thing, make friends and make everything genuine. It is not easy when we live far from cities.

I am intrigued by Russia, by its philosophy and above all by the revival or Orthodoxy. Before the Ukraine war, I suspected that Vladimir Putin and Aleksander Dugin would really contribute something to our world. Perhaps Russia could have had a great influence with the European Union and help to bring back the Christianity. I have read so many contradicting stories about both sides in this war to know what to believe. Trump is going to get his paws in there, and it will end up with a nuclear war – or perhaps something that might surprise us all.

The important thing is to read, to learn, to discuss with like minds – bring about a vision of Christian humanism on a small scale. I end this posting with the famous prayer of St Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.