TradCaths, astrologists, and spiritual bankruptcy

Honor Levy Part 1(b)

Recently I wrote about Honor Levy’s My First Book, which I had less than stellar feelings about. In that post I included some annotations I made, let’s zero in on one:

Natasha Stagg once referred to Levy in a profile she conducted as having opinions which could be described as “adamantly unformed,” which I think says a lot, because I don’t think that Levy’s Catholic faith—something she attributes to her “brilliant” boyfriend—really goes much beyond aesthetics. Stagg goes on to dub Levy, as so many seem to, “the voice of Gen Z.” Eventually I came to realize that what “the voice of Gen Z” means is a rather fetishistic/chauvinistic “what I, someone who is not of Gen Z, imagines Gen Z would read if they could read.” But Gen Z can’t read, so we’re left with someone who exists to be gawked at by millennials curious about “the young folk.” Or “folx” idk.¹

This hipster TradCath thing is fucking asinine. Reactionary hipster TradCaths like Dasha Nekrasova² considers themselves to be sedevacantists (a believer that every pope since Second Vatican is a heretical antipope), which as far as I’m concerned is just neo-protestantism. You might as well just become a fucking Anglican. Of course then you’d be missing out on the most important element, the ᴀ ᴇ s ᴛ ʜ ᴇ ᴛ ɪ ᴄ, because when protestants think you’re Really Cool you get this:

Whereas when Catholics think you’re Really Cool you get this:

Other than that, this whole TradCath thing seems like a long way to go just to get pussy from Rod Dreher. Oh, hold on, is he still Catholic? No, no, right, he left because it was too secretly gay or something. Although I suppose there’s worse secrets to have, like how Dreher’s dad was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

There is a spiritual absence in America. I spoke about this in my piece on Taylor Swift earlier this year:

A friend of mine sent me a deranged post in which a Taylor fan speculated about Taylor’s religious faith, resorting to fantasizing about how incredible it would be to die and be with Taylor Swift in heaven as she leads worship. […] Sincerity, however actually insincere, is Taylor’s whole brand, and this naturally leads, at this apotheosis, to religiosity and pseudo-divine experiences, the ultimate expression of a spiritually-bankrupt culture seeking an outlet, a search for God in a post-megachurch world. Like megachurch Evangelicalism, it is religion without the mystery, it is the sphinx without the riddle, and it is the poverty of the soul in a commercial culture that has, to paraphrase Barthelme, carried out the theft of the worshipper from God himself.

Taylor Swift did not create this environment, she is a product of it […] Our culture is dissolving into an algorithmically-generated slop, predicated on the obsessive mining of every single interaction you have online, the all-consuming soul-suck dilating madly in the heart of a dying empire. Taylor can become God, because we created a wall of feedback so dense it has made hearing God’s voice impossible.

There is a deep and persistent desire for God, but we have less access to God now than ever before. We are going through a spiritual process akin to what Philip K. Dick referred to as “kippleization”:

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more[…] the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Spiritual kipple is proliferating, the refuse that pollutes your consciousness, the erosion of your attention-span, the ads, the memes, the psywars, all of it converting into dead waste, gumming up your soul. To make matters worse, we in the West live in the illusion of a “secular” society, while no one seems to appreciate how fundamentally this “secular” society is predicated on Christian logics (“render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, unto God what is God’s”)—we live in a religious society in denial while hungering for a societally-omnipresent God we can’t even acknowledge.

Everything in our culture is now mediated through cold neoliberal logics. “Spoon theory” turns personal relationships into relationships of equivalent exchange, most “polyamory” discourse presents itself as vacuously “anticapitalist” yet ultimately reveals itself to be couched in a complex that sees love as best dictated by the free market, and the self-branding of social media is so cynically taken for granted that it feels cringe-y to even point it out. We are self-conscious consumers, even our brands have folded into the post-ironic space to mock us with a pantomime of our own cynicism via the hell that is Brand Twitter. The Mystery of the Divine cannot cohabitate here: it does not reward us instantaneously, and it is just too earnest. One cannot simply cry out to God: “why am I here?” because I mean… how would that look?

Post-ironic religion seems like a perfect escape. You can never be embarrassed because no one can tell how much of it is a joke. However, this lack of earnestness winds up being at the expense of true connection to faith.

Compare and contrast: contemporary astrology. Traditionally, astrology is a complex process of contemplation and divination that has found practice throughout the world’s religious systems, even the ones that have specific rules against the practice of divination—there were Muslim astrologers, Jewish astrologers, astrology is immensely important in Hinduism, and so on. What contemporary “secular” followers of astrology practice, however, is spiritually bankrupt by comparison. It is rootless, it has no basis in any specific set of beliefs, and it’s practiced with a large degree of self-consciousness and irony. Look no further than the internet’s overabundance of stupid astrology memes:

I cannot conceive of the spiritual emptiness that would lead someone to make captioned memes to sum up their genuine spiritual beliefs. It is effectively the same impulse as megachurch evangelicals: I want God but I need Him to be digestible. I need references to Star Wars, shitty pop music, and easy answers. The contemporary astrologer (let’s call them “ConAstros” for short) likewise approaches their spiritual beliefs like a disposable mass-market product, the astrology “brand” and its associated memes are the central religious tenet, posting them to your Instagram story is the practice.

Real spiritual contemplation takes too long, is not immediately rewarding, can at times even be frightening, and is serious to the point that the postmodern subject can’t help but feel uncomfortably self-conscious. The memes themselves display a kind of cautious humour, to show that the poster doesn’t take it that seriously (in spite of their obviously genuine beliefs), like with the TradCaths. The major difference here is that what the ConAstros are posting are insipid normie memes, whereas TradCaths practice a more esoteric and more hip form of post-irony that emphasizes their cool detachment, so when they meme it instead looks more like this:

But it is just as empty. In David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram,” he got at the heart of the matter like this:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

What Wallace identified correctly about television—its reliance on and thus proliferation of a particular kind of irony; “irony is important for understanding TV because ‘TV,’ now that it’s gotten powerful enough to move from acronym to way of life, revolves off just the sorts of absurd contradictions irony’s all about exposing”—is 10x truer of the internet. Case in point: I’m feeling self-conscious right now simply quoting David Foster Wallace, because his popularity has brought with it a lot of preconceptions about quoting/reading/liking David Foster Wallace that feel overwhelming to deal with. I am inviting preconceptions of myself by citing his work seriously, where what I really ought to be doing is something obscure and ironic and irreverent, something like smoking Infinite Jest like a bong like Mira Gonzales did. Or maybe not, because Mira Gonzales is also no longer cool. Of course, by saying that, I am claiming that she was once cool, which leads me to want to clarify that I personally never found her cool, she was always insufferably stupid, but I am merely remarking on how some people did think she was cool—do you see how annoying this gets?

Lewis Hyde, in a phrasing popularized later by Wallace, once called irony the song of a bird that loves its cage. What, then, is post-irony? A cage in prolapse, its innards and its outards confused, unclear. The bird, as a result, in a quantum state of containment. This is what makes post-irony so seductive as a place to live inside in general. The casual memes of the ConAstros are a layer of ironic separation from their own sincere beliefs, but it’s simply not good enough, it lacks guile, it lacks savoir faire, it’s still too earnest, it’s cringe, it is an admission that they are not cool enough to understand the deeper layers of detachment. One can still pin down the simple ironist, but one cannot pin down the post-ironist, they can endlessly evade scrutiny and mockery, because anything you can say to scrutinize or mock them all just becomes recouped as a part of the act itself. You think I didn’t already know you’d think that? suggests the post-ironist, knowing you’d think that was part of the game to begin with.

For what it is worth: I am a Catholic, but I am a Catholic because I come from a Catholic family. When I seek to ponder the Great Mysteries, I turn to either the Catholicism of my mother’s heritage or the Anishinaabe practices of my father’s heritage, because these are the idioms I have been provided by way of familial tradition that I am comfortable with, and I care about upkeeping the traditions of my family because my family is important to me and these traditions are important to them. I’m not saying people shouldn’t convert to this or that religion if they feel moved to do so, but it feels very weird when it begins to become a “trend,” when religion becomes a display of ephemeral cultural capital. It is the reducing of religion to “stuff,” the turning of lent ash into makeup, the damning of God to become just more kipple.

TradCaths are obviously not the first religious “trend.” The Gen Xers had Kabbalah, the Boomers had Buddhism, and so on. Sometimes it even exists for psywar reasons—the Boomers were sold Buddhism as a way of getting them to criticize China re: Tibet, for instance, and the overwhelming rhetoric in the West surrounding Buddhism was deeply (and successfully) manipulative. It’s why so many people still think Buddhists are incapable of violence in spite of the slaughter that some Buddhists perpetrate of Hindus in Sri Lanka and Muslims in Myanmar, and it’s why so many self-perceived “secular” people seem to uncritically believe the best thing for Tibetans would be to reinstate a Dalai-Lama-led theocracy. TradCaths, too, will wind up serving political interests. They will probably wind up being slavish devotees of Cardinal Burke (that’s if they aren’t already) and form some sort of fascist TradCath “bedazzled shirt” paramilitary.

I cannot for the life of me imagine these people seriously considering De Imitatione Christi and all that—or, as the spiritually-empty and incurious American evangelicals would say with infinitely less mystique (exacerbated sigh) “what would Jesus do?” Perhaps these people simply long for the tried and true Catholic permission to feel good about feeling bad. The secularized cheugy obsession with “mindfulness” as therapy-speak just isn’t enough. But spirituality as a “trend” cancels out the “spirituality” part. This is a waste of time. Just go to the Gathering of the Juggalos.

1. That, and the obvious actual voice of Gen Z was Lil’ Peep (RIP, my baby boy).

2. This piece is specifically about this specific cadre of TradCaths. For a broader examination, you can see my piece in Canadian Dimension.