Where the Wasteland Ends
An Overview of what this is all about
I realized last night that I started writing articles without ever really laying out what this whole project is about. I have been wanting to start up another blog for some time, but what really caused me to pull the trigger was my lovely wife, Catherine.
In a nutshell, she was tired of getting sent screenshots of posts and comments I’ve made on social media. So, she suggested - in a way that made it seem like it was my idea - that I start a substack. Well, here we are. Thanks honey.
I have a pretty broad set of interests and like to talk/write about all of them. So this substack will be a Smörgåsbord of history, geopolitics, current events, philosophy, theology, literature, and more. What will make Where the Wasteland Ends unique - I hope - will be the narratives and how they all tie together into a coherent whole over time.
It may be helpful to work through my worldview a bit and how that plays into the topics we’ll discuss on Where the Wasteland Ends.
I have always had a pretty broad set of interests. I regularly obsess over a particular topic and dive down rabbit holes for weeks at a time to learn everything I can about a subject. For most of my life all of these subjects remained disconnected as separate disciplines, with separate methods of inquiry and application. It seemed to me, however, that there was something I was missing. I could see the facts and data, but there was a disconnect in that all of these things just existed without recourse to one another.
In our modern, enlightened, scientific age, this is completely normal. Truth is seen as relative - and often conflated with fact - and individualized; knowledge has been fragmented into little compartments for the observation of specialists. Some say that this is because the sheer quantity of information is so immense that no one person can comprehend it all. But if we all focus on a particular subject and master that, then society gains a greater collective knowledge of things.
Or so we are told.
One of the problems with this is that it forces us to accept, as a matter of faith, that the findings and methods of other disciplines impacting our own chosen specialty are legitimate and warranted. Since there is no subject of inquiry which isn’t impacted by a multiplicity of other subjects, this means that the errors of one field inadvertently impact all the others.
This becomes really problematic when we consider that which underpins the study of virtually all subjects in the modern age: modern science - what we often call scientism.
Modern science, in spite of the many good things it has done for the world, is based on a series of patently false suppositions.1
This has been known for well over a century in the scientific community itself, but instead of trying to find viable answers to these foundational issues, the scientific community has adopted a system of “models” in which a supposed best hypothesis is adopted until a better one is thought up. This is just nominalism by another name, an apathetic acceptance of what amounts to a completely illogical system of thought simply because those pushing it refuse to accept that there might be something beyond quantifiable sense data.
Because Scientism underpins not only the study of the natural world, but history, governance and trade, philosophy, history, and, most regrettably theology, our entire view and understanding of reality has been shaped by its errors. This would be problematic even if society at large didn’t take the observations of science to be the ultimate truth; that it does equate modern science with ultimate truth - while simultaneously proclaiming there is no ultimate truth - makes this catastrophic to our ability to know the reality in which we live.
But this contradiction of treating modern science as ultimate truth while simultaneously proclaiming truth to be relative makes perfect sense when we recall that modern science views any recourse to the transcendent as anathema. By cutting off any consideration for that which cannot be quantified, they have cut themselves off from Truth and are incapable of even touching the hem of its garment. This is precisely what has led to the compartmentalization of knowledge in the modern age.
How then do we come to understand the world in a coherent way, and can we connect the dots between the various disciplines of human thought and experience? Certainly we can, it's clear that all of these disciplines exist within a single connected reality - I understand that I’m presupposing a great deal here, but this is not an apology but a brief overview. What unites them is that they have recourse to First Principles, to Truth. If we are to build out an organic, orthodox Weltanschauung, or worldview, we must know Truth in itself.
“Truth is a Person, known by the heart.” - Fr. Seraphim Rose
To have a proper understanding of the created reality in which we live, we must know its Creator; we must know He who is Truth, Life, Goodness, Justice in and of Himself. This doesn’t mean that we can know nothing from the observation of processes in the world, but it doesn't logically follow that because we understand plate tectonics or how hailstorms form, that they aren’t being directed by a vast cosmic intelligence. Behind these material forces are unseen noetic, or spiritual, forces which act upon them. So, while we can say “the moon has no light of its own but reflects the light of the sun” is true, we can say with equal surety that “the moon reflects the light of the sun to remind us that we must reflect the Light of Christ in the world and to guide other to Him.” One of these statements being true does not negate the other.
That this is the case implies that just as there is a hierarchy of being in the world there is also a hierarchy of knowledge in the world. Our observations of the world, our quantification of sense data inputs, are on this hierarchy, and are of a lower order than that of noetic knowledge.
Therefore, to build out a worldview based in Truth we must keep certain suppositions in mind:
The observation of material things and how they function is of a lower order of knowledge than that which has been revealed to us. That doesn’t make them unimportant, but that they are not absolute.
Being that behind material forces, historical events, sociological trends, etc… are noetic realities and forces the moral health of rulers and society is an important consideration to our understanding of the world.
Christ is Truth. All facts, all conclusions we draw from observation and experience of material phenomenon, in order to be true, must come down from or participate in that Truth. This means, as the early church understood, that understanding Who Christ is is of utmost importance to our collective knowledge and experience.
We must acknowledge that there can be no discipline or subject of inquiry completely separated from the rest, they must fit into a complete understanding of the singular reality in which we live.
All knowledge of God is partial, limited by our limited nature and the complete otherness of God. We must be careful not to overly anthropomorphize God or absolutize human conceptions of God. God is Justice, Righteousness, Goodness, Love, etc… But He also transcends them, not just our human conception of them, but them in their highest sense. When we try to determine what God “must do” based on these conceptions, we place God in a man-made box, we make Him into an idol to whom we wish to dictate our own desires. We must remember that we are bound by these conceptions, we are bound by God's rules; God is not bound by anything.
This isn’t an absolute summary or totality of suppositions and considerations, but it's a decent start. We can think of this as a structure, or frame on which to build an orthodox worldview, which is part of the renewing of [our] minds as St. Paul says. We can bring our knowledge of history, mythology and literature, natural sciences, etc… to this frame and fasten them to it. To accomplish this, we must find how they fit in, making the appropriate adjustments before doing so.
The Wasteland is the Modern Age we live in. It is one of ever-present anxiety, addiction, depression and despair. It is an age where we leave the poor, the orphans and widows to fend for themselves on the street. Where we consider poverty to be a moral failure, and the murder of infants a virtue. It is an age of gaslighting in which state atheism murders 100,000,000 people while calling Christianity evil. The spirit of the age - the presuppositions and normative way of viewing the world which animates our culture - considers all of these things to be normal, even enlightened and good.
This is what we must fight against. This modern worldview is a sort of brutalist mental architecture which has been imposed on us and must be torn down and rebuilt.
That doesn’t mean that I’m going to post a bunch of profound, mind-bending articles to change the worldviews of everyone who reads them. I assure you I’m not that impressive. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that everything we believe is wrong and thrown out the window. It means we must throw out the presentism by which we assume that we stand at the pinnacle of human history and society and all that came before us is ignorance.
To break free of Modernism we must question our most basic presuppositions. For example, this notion that democratic governance is inherently moral, just, good, and fit for every civilization. Any nation or regime deviating from that model is inherently evil. We have to stop defending our politicians, government, and allies when they commit heinous acts.
We must place first principles, first. We must interpret the world around us based on how they measure up to the ultimate notion of Goodness, Justice, Love, Truth, etc…
We look beyond what is clearly visible with humility and wonder to uncover a deeper truth of things. That is what I am attempting to do with this substack.
So, where does the Wasteland end?
It ends when we begin to see the world as it really is, not only as it appears to be. When we hate lies so much that we refuse to participate in them any longer. In time this radically transforms the way we view and interact with the world around us.
Below are articles planned or currently in the works which you can look forward to being released over the next 2 months. This doesn’t negate the posting of other articles written in response to things which unfold over that period of time.
The Trail of Fud: Debunking the Baptist “Trail of Blood.”
The Rest of Brest: An Orthodox Analysis of the Uniate Schism
True sons of the South: Lee, Jackson, and the Southern Ethos
Orthodoxy, the South, and the Age of Nihilism.
Exodus… But in Reverse: Israel in Gaza and the West Bank
Sola Divisio: The Reformation as the root of Wokeness.