Letter #120: We're Not Going Back
If only we could!
Klavan 2024,
This has been, I have to say, my favorite month yet of our conversation. We really should post these letters and essays somewhere so people can read them!
I’m looking forward to your September essay on Tuesday, after a break for Labor Day so we can celebrate…labor. Or something. Any excuse to smoke a cigar.
If I had to sum up where the exchange has taken us this month, I’d say this: the Harris/Walz campaign has dug out a favorite mantra from the vast Library of Anodyne Progressive Falderal (archived in Zurich): “We’re Not Going Back.” Our response based on the letters this month might be: “If Only We Could!”
But we can’t go back, which is why anyone warning that we might has probably got a trunk full of snake oil to sell. We can never go back—not to the ’90s, not to pre-Christian paganism, not to Eden. Time’s reverse is blocked by a sword of flame, hard as we always try to recover the spirit of lost moments by clothing ourselves in their tattered remains.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who just barely lived to watch his cultured nation devour itself in the name of Hitler’s barbarism, realized that the Angel of History is an angel of destruction:
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
This week on my podcast a listener asked, a little sadly I thought, why we can’t seem to write Arthurian legends and fairytales in the innocent primary colors of Medieval Christendom. My answer was the one we’ve been moving toward: humanity has grown and changed over centuries, until the spiky particulars of our individuality no longer fit so perfectly into the smooth molds cast for us by our heroic ancestors.
We are emerging as fully realized individuals, crafted each anew. Our task now is to revive the old glories with the rough material of the modern world: there are knights out there these days, but they’re the knights of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories, drawing the grit of the mean streets into the old chivalric pattern by sheer force of will.
And if that’s our assignment, then no merely abstract God will do. The coolly rational mind of the Stoic cosmos can’t grow and move with us; the static eternity of the silent East can never bleed or die with us. Only a living God, incarnate with face of Turin and Calvary, can hope to rise with us from history’s debris.
Love,
Spencer
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Awesome essay. I was moved by your reference to the flaming sword propelling us forward, not our individual plans or desires. Isn't it remarkable that the promise of faith is found in both Deuteronomy 31:8 and Mark 16:7-8? It is the Lord who goes before us; thus, life is the call to discipleship. It is no longer a sword forcing us forward (which is really what progressivism offers: a relentless goading into the future), but the loving Savior inviting us. We don't know where we are going, and yet, in spite of that, He invites us to follow Him. Thank you for this great work.
“Knights of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories.”—Spencer
But if you want the best dialog of those knightly—er, detective—virtues, it has to be Elmore Leonard. 🤔
I’ve seen Crusaders, as well, but they’re really just knights with a holy purpose. Every SEAL I’ve listened to has either gone into war with Christ, or found Him.
Eddie Penney, perhaps the meanest, toughest SEAL from Gold Squadron (commonly called Team 6), the Navy’s most elite unit among the already-elite SEALs, loved killing bad guys. He LOVED it. He called himself, and his comrades, Crusaders, because of the evil he saw in the culture he fought, the things they did to their enemies, to their own boys. But after many events—too many to all be coincidences—he let Christ lead him and started writing about his experiences. And when he heard from a vet, who had been about to take his own life, only to be stopped by the word he’d read, Eddie found he loved saving lives even more than taking them.