May Day, May Day
Naturally, comedian turned political pundit Russell Brand is converting to Christianity. I don’t condone the existence of religion or government, but I’m fond of converts, having known many of one kind or another and dated a few. At least converts had the courage to rethink their beliefs.
The downside is that converts are sometimes exhibiting manic instability. I’m sure less-than-rational forces had something to do with the old pagan May Day—with its May poles, real or symbolic May Queen sacrifices, and spring fertility—being so easily replaced during the nominally Progressive past century-and-a-half by leftist, labor-themed, ostensibly secular May Day rallies. “Let us dance, fellow peasants” becomes “Rise up, workers,” etc.
We rationalists, by contrast, simply change our minds. No crisis, usually.
The downside of rationalism is that you don’t always realize what primitive undercurrents are at work in other people’s philosophical meanderings. I mentioned briefly meeting quasi-ex-leftist Dasha Nekrasova in a recent column, and while I knew she was an actress and political podcaster, I didn’t realize she has also described herself as a tentative, ironic Catholic—and at the Yale Political Union, she sympathetically debated the benefits of deliberate political polarization. That’s how it starts sometimes: toying with tribal, non-rational influences at Yale.
Later this week I’ll talk to a friend of mine who went from teenage communism to Yale Divinity School with a stop at libertarianism in between, and just a few days ago with a totally different Yale alum, I saw a Broadway dance performance built around the album Illinoise by musician Sufjan Stevens, who I’d thought of merely as indie like the Decemberists but has apparently come out as both gay and Christian in the past few years.
These crosscurrents and metamorphoses still aren’t really my specialty—I’m more of a slow and steady, econ-admiring sci-fi nerd (and didn’t go to Yale)—but I can sympathize with all the conversions and bouts of lurching transformation more if I think of them as various methods of coping with uncertainty. Again, like a philosopher or scientist, I think one should be able to keep sorting ideas calmly as new data come in, rejecting disproven or irrational hypotheses. But I have by now reluctantly accepted that for most “intellectuals” change happens in impassioned, Hulk-like bursts.
Someone’s philosophy might change on a drug trip, during an emotional crisis—or maybe after a combination of high-energy evenings in the mosh pit and glum nights watching TV news in the case of Joan Jett’s fellow Runaways member Cherie Currie, now an ex-Democrat. Perhaps I should say #RunawayDemocrat. (Can we popularize that? An acquaintance of mine helped start the similar #Walkaway campaign.) Currie’s change doesn’t shock me, since I contributed the essay “Conservatism for Punks” to this book.
While philosophers and scientists expect uncertainty, most people experience it as great anxiety and want some way out of it, or some means of coping. I think we can see relativism, agnosticism, throwing yourself unquestioningly into the arms of orthodoxy, remaining distracted to keep your mind off it, being drunk to the point of oblivion, or just trying to put everything up to a vote all as different methods of coping with the repressed but permanent dilemma of uncertainty. When the juggling can no longer be maintained, people tumble down (either side, left or right, as Peter Murphy might say) into some position or other.
Irony, of both the detached-leftist-intellectual and the obnoxious-obfuscating-right-wing-troll varieties, is a very popular coping mechanism for many young intellectuals in recent years, so it’ll be no surprise if Nekrasova settles there. Or at Catholicism, where many repeat-converts traditionally end up.
It could be worse. I’ve mentioned the eclectic bookshelves of the paleo-leaning, Nekrasova-adjacent Dimes Square performance space Sovereign House here in Manhattan. Eclecticism with enough fringe politics thrown in can verge on occultism: some esoteric religious volumes here, some Jungian-sounding UFO theories there, and the next thing you know you sound a bit like those Nazis who were obsessed with exploring the Antarctic for possible lost civilizations.
Limbering for the mind, perhaps, not to mention for a surprisingly calcified liberal big-city culture, but still wrong and dangerous if it gets too literally translated into public policy or private fistfights. Some horribly, destructively amoral people have claimed they were just experimenting with an open mind.
Some relatively mellow people have at times described their mainstream political beliefs as a faith, too, though. Yet another Yale alum told me he talked to a prominent left-liberal pundit who admitted that he maintains his confidence in centralized economic planning no matter how many setbacks, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, that approach suffers because, in the end, his politics is a faith in an unseen future world he finds beautiful.
That approach to sorting ideas still seems to me fraught with random dangers and the potential for terrible self-delusion—give me logical deductions buttressed by clear graphs and abundant agreed-upon historical examples—but I’m grateful to those I’ve encountered who afforded me opportunities to glimpse other, more syncretic or traditionalistic approaches to knowledge.
In particular, circa the millennium, I was fond of the so-called fusionists, who tried to cobble together and maintain a relatively sane coalition on the right by encouraging both free-market economic analysis and conservative morals. So, I should note the passing in mid-April of Tom Phillips, who started a grant program for young writers (now run by The Fund for American Studies) that helped me out early on, as it did many others.
The program was re-named after libertarianish conservative writer Robert Novak, who claimed in his excellent book Prince of Darkness that he was converted from mild Judaism and longtime agnosticism to intense Catholicism late in life when he heard the voice of God waft across the table during an otherwise mundane meeting. A few years later, he died of a brain tumor—but I wouldn’t let that unfortunate ending incline me to excise one minute of my intellectually formative memories of him sparring on The McLaughlin Group or Crossfire, where he spent little time talking about theology and a great deal illuminating the workings of Washington with exhilarating skepticism and much-warranted cynicism.
Humans are weak, fallible, irrational, subject to strange crises and shifting passions, and in the end mortal, but sometimes they have amazing insights along the way.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey