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Show notes
All times are approximate… but better than nothing, maybe?
1:55 | The problem of Islamization/Islamist over-tolerance/denial of problems with unassimilated Muslims in France and Britain:
General overview of Britain (Heretics podcast)
The Islamist roots of French disorder (The New Statesman)
Britons in jail for crimes of “intolerance”/“hate” (The New York Times)
Since we recorded, there’s also trouble in Amsterdam (The Times of Israel)
2:40 | On Haitian immigration to Springfield, OH
Governor Mike DeWine’s editorial (The New York Times)
Local resident opinion (Cincinnati Enquirer)
3:46 | Submission was published in 2015. George is sorry she can’t remember basic facts when recording.
4:10 | Marine Le Pen’s father founded the Front national (National Front) in 1972; she became party leader in 2012. Since 2018, the party has been called Rassemblement national (National Rally).
6:40 | “The corruption of the best is the worst” — Ivan Illich, in reference to the Catholic Church
8:40 | Listening to this summary, it occurs to me [George] now that we missed one of the most salient points of a religious take-over of France — it is an undoing of the French Revolution in its specificity as the separation of Church and State.
15:18 | Jewish emigration from France to Israel
23:30 | “Two-parent privilege,” from the title of this book
28:30 | Alain Tanneur worked for the DGSI, a (real) French state security agency
35:02 | “Render unto Caesar…”
36: 10 | Paul Kingsnorth quote (“The Cross and the Machine” in First Things):
I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. I saw that we had arrived here [the messed up state of the world as it is] because we do not live them.
37:39 | Feminization of institutions (Amy Wax on Louise Perry’s podcast, Maiden Mother Matriarch)
38:10 | Are young men rejecting university because it is “for girls?”
44:15 | We couldn’t find anything about the significance of the number 216 in Christian thought.
44:57 | Charles Péguy
51:41 | The term is SWERF — sex worker exclusionary radical feminist; Julie Bindel on ‘whorephobia’
52:50 | “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” is the famous opening line is from the novel The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley.
55:30 | “A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.” —Neil Postman
1:02:20 | Story of O (This is a summary of the novel and its critical reception; content warning!)
1:03:14 | Our episode on Dworkin
1:12:50 | Christian virtues running amok G.K. Chesterton (from Orthodoxy)
Quotes from Submission
The exhausted patriarchy — women still hate it, but men can’t even be bothered
This is from near the beginning of the book, where François is talking with Myriam, his student-lover who will soon leave for Israel, not to return. (Which by the way, is a real thing — in recent years, Jewish emigration has been increasing out of fear of anti-Semitic terrorism in France.)
[Myriam] turned to face me. “You don't mind me calling you macho, do you?”
“I don't know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now — but was it really a good idea?”
Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realized I had no answer, to this question or any other.
“So you’re for a return to patriarchy?”
“You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.”
[...]
“Let’s say you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable solution. Where does that leave me? I’m studying, I think of myself as an individual person, endowed with the same capacity for reflection and decision-making as a man. Do you really think I’m disposable?”
The right answer was probably yes, but I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I wasn’t as honest as all that...
I still didn't want to give her a child, or help out around the house, or buy a Baby Björn. I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell. I felt a slight wave of nausea. (28, 30)
Conservatism and Catholicism
In this quote, François has gone to dinner with the his friend Alain Tanneur.
The Catholics had all but disappeared in France, [Alain Tanneur] was saying, but they still enjoyed a certain moral authority. In any case, from the beginning, [Mohammed] Ben Abbes done all he could to court them. [...] Unlike his sometime rival Tariq Ramadan, who’d been tainted by his old Trotskyite connections, Ben Abbes had kept his distance from the anti-capitalist left. He understood that the pro-growth right had won the “war of ideas”... But his real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy but about values, and that here, too, the right was about to win the “war of ideas” without a fight. Whereas Ramadan presented sharia as forward-looking, even revolutionary, Ben Abbes restored its reassuring, traditional value — with a perfume of exoticism that made it all the more attractive. When he campaigned on family values, traditional morality, and, by extension, patriarchy, an avenue opened up to him that neither the conservatives nor the National Front could take… Only Ben Abbes was spared. The left, paralyzed by his multi-cultural background, had never been able to fight him, or so much as mention his name. (123-24)
Tanneur goes on to say that Catholics have nothing to worry about from Muslims coming to power:
There’s an idea you hear in far-right circles, that if the Muslims came to power, Christians would be reduced to second-class citizens, or dhimmis. Now, dhimmitude is part of the general principles of Islam, it’s true, but in practice the status of dhimmis is a very flexible thing. Islam exists all over the world. The way it’s practiced in Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the Islam you find in Indonesia or Morocco. In France, I promise you, they won’t interfere with Christian worship — in fact, the government will increase spending for Catholic organizations and the upkeep of churches. [...] For these Muslims, the real enemy — the thing they fear and hate — isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. [...] Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam — that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity. (125)
Positive versus negative ‘feminization’
Tanneur encourages François to go to Rocamadour, a small clifftop village in south-central France. It is known for its complex of religious buildings, accessed via the Grand Escalier staircase of 216 steps. It includes the Chapelle Notre-Dame, with its Black Madonna statue, carved of walnut in the 12th century.
The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland, yes… all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more. [N]o one grasped the soul of medieval Christianity as deeply as Péguy—for all his republicanism, his secularism, his support of Dreyfus. And he understood that the true divinity of the Middle Ages, the beating heart of its devotion, wasn’t God the Father, wasn’t even Jesus Christ. It was the Virgin Mary. That, too, you can feel at Rocamadour. (130-1)
And so he goes, and falls into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady.
Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin — the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. [...] I remembered a conversation I’d had, years before, with a history professor at the Sorbonne. In the early Middle Ages, he’d explained, the question of individual judgment barely came up. Only much later, with Hieronymus Bosch, for example, do we see those terrifying images in which Christ separates the cohort of the chosen from the legion of the damned… The Romanesque vision was much more communal: at his death the believer fell into a deep sleep and was laid in the earth. When all the prophecies had been fulfilled and Christ came again, it was the entire Christian people who rose together from the tomb, resurrected in one glorious body, to make their way to paradise. Moral judgment, individual judgment, individuality itself, were not clear ideas in the mind of the Romanesque man, and I felt my own individuality dissolving the longer I sat in my reverie before the Virgin of Rocamadour. (134)
And he almost has a deeply religious experience — he happens on the Chapel during a reading of Péguy, and is nearly moved.
The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and it seemed to me that all he had to do was raise his right hand and the pagans and idolaters would be destroyed, and the keys to the world restored to him, “as its lord, its possessor, and its master.” (136)
Porn is the new iconography of the normal
Had I fallen prey, in middle age, to a kind of andropause? It wouldn't have surprised me. To find out for sure I decided to spend my evenings on YouPorn, which over the years had grown into a sort of porn encyclopedia. The results were immediate and extremely reassuring. YouPorn catered to the fantasies of normal men all over the world, and within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man. I knew not to take this for granted. (15)
Islam, the refuge of the libertine
Francois is at Rediger’s house: they are discussing his conversion to Islam, and he mentions The Story of O, which is about a woman’s degradation into a BDSM sex slave for an elite club of men — about as sick as you can imagine (I haven’t read it). It’s worth noting as well that Rediger has a 40 year old wife to be his “good little cook” as a 15 year old “wife” for “whatever else.”
Rediger compares The Story of O with Islam:
“It's submission," Rediger murmured. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God. You see,” he went on, “Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha — unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to his laws.” (212-213)
Other longer quotes
Marc Barnes
For there are two ways of making a free man give up his space: enslave him or introduce a mother into it. In this distinction is all of political philosophy, but let us stick with the obvious: Human custom dictates that the presence of pregnancy and motherhood shall motivate and coerce the male frame into opening doors, moving chairs, giving up space, giving more money, excusing mistakes, dispensing with laws, suppressing comments, driving absurd distances to procure cheeseburgers, and otherwise working — however poorly and begrudgingly — to reshape his existence into one of service and self-gift rather than accumulation and self-interest. Men who don’t do this suck, and suck obviously. They are cowards.
[…]
In the real world, women bend male strength towards their needs, even as the child bends female strength towards its own. This is why men are so awkward around pregnant women; why they feel the need to assert themselves with some horrible cliché: “should you be doing that?” “You must be due any time now!” etc. Forgive them — they are coping with their own undoing. This transformation of strength into service is the secret of the family, a secret the Church would tell to the whole world, if they ever had the ears to hear it. Within the family, weakness is strength.
[…]
The scandal of the family is that the rear-end of the child has more de facto power to coerce the bodies of the strong than the supreme reason of the father. All philosophies of strength (be they Greek, Nietzschean, or merely liberal) [and here I would add, or Muslim] can be explained by the effort to avoid the diaper. But that we are yet Christian is evident in this: the weight of social opprobrium still falls heaviest on those who would accumulate strength rather than serve weakness. Let adults serve each other instead of children, there you will find, called down like an avenging angel, the full force of the law — of positive statutes here and there, but more importantly, the constraining and coercing law of shame. For what scumbag hurts children? What bastard leaves them? What monster neglects to use what strength he has for their sake?
[…]
Within Christian societies, weakness is strength, for it demands and obliges the strength of the strong to move on its behalf. Once Christianity is stubbed out like the West’s last cigarette, then weakness will be weakness, and life as a woman will be precisely what the Greek philosophers believed it to be — passive, apolitical, deficient, and worthy of being classified alongside the life of children and slaves.
Litany of Loreto
See full version
Holy Mother of God, Holy Virgin of virgins, Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church, Mother of Mercy, Mother undefiled, Mother most amiable, Mother admirable, Mother of good counsel, Mother of our Creator, Mother of our Savior, Virgin most prudent, Virgin most venerable, Virgin most renowned, Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, Virgin most faithful, Mirror of justice, Seat of wisdom, Cause of our joy, Spiritual vessel, Vessel of honor, Singular vessel of devotion, Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Ark of the covenant, Gate of heaven, Morning star, Health of the sick, Refuge of sinners, Solace of Migrants, Comfort of the afflicted, Help of Christians, Queen of Angels, Queen of Patriarchs, Queen of Prophets, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs, Queen of Confessors, Queen of Virgins, Queen of all Saints…
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