Living in Wonder

A review of Rod Dreher's new book

Is life worth living? “It depends on the liver.” Thus did William James pose the question, as well as the “jocose” answer that was currently circulating, when he addressed the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association in 1895. He then immediately put his audience on notice that his would not be a jocular treatment of the question. “In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly…. I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life.”

A chronic depressive, James turned his suffering to the work of understanding the human condition in its fullness. He was a man of science who refused the artificial restriction of his gaze to questions that were tractable to scientific methods. For him, the surrounding culture of intellectual prudishness about the biggest questions, or complacent certainty about their answers, was the cause of the malaise that so many of his contemporaries suffered.

James traced this to a self-inflicted amputation of our faculties of perception, due to the “rationalistic philosophies” of positivism and scientific naturalism. These forms of “half-way empiricism” simply exclude elements of experience that they cannot explain, and proceed to declare them unreal.

Like James, Rod Dreher is prone to depression, as he confides at various points in this new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. And like James, he finds the way out of depression to lie with a fuller recovery of the real. “The world is not what we think it is,” Dreher writes. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful.”

In fact, open this book and it gets real weird, real fast. In the first three pages we encounter UFOs, aliens, and exorcisms. There is a chapter titled “The Dark Enchantment of the Occult.” Viewing the world as a spiritual battlefield, Dreher is on high alert, vigilant against irruptions of the demonic.

I do not think Dreher is trolling here, in a spirit of epater les normies, though he is certainly leading with his chin. Whatever you think of Dreher’s rhetorical choices, or how you understand the ontology of the demonic (is it an emergent property of cultural decay, or are there literal demons messing with us?), he is not a prudish writer, nor a prudish thinker. Released as he is now from the world of normie New York publishing (the book is published by Zondervan), why would he dither?

America is ready for weirdness. The commissars of right-thinking have so beclowned themselves over the last eight years, not least as spokespersons for something they call Science, that they have induced a renaissance of curiosity about phenomena long considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion. Beyond the obvious damage done to the reputation (and indeed the practice) of science by scientific bodies that acquiesced to the demands of the party-state, I believe a more fundamental shift is underway, a bit of doubt about the adequacy of scientific epistemologies even in the absence of political pressure. The still-raging “replication crisis” that has swept across so many scientific fields has given respectable people license to entertain a bit of weirdness in their newly expanding picture of the world.

Dreher does not just wallow in weirdness, however. He wants to tap into what Charles Taylor, quoted in this book, calls enchantment, an elusive “sense of fullness” we get once in a while, based on fleeting experiences of life as “fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.” Such moments are difficult to access, but supremely important because they give us indications that there is an objective reality, independent of ourselves, that is morally substantive in the sense that is shot through with significance. Its significance for me is no merely idiosyncratic response of my own, nor is it an artefact of some evolutionary process that tricks me into caring about things as a device for propagating the species. Rather, the felt significance of the world is an apt and appropriate response to the fact that there is something transcendent into which I fit, or must fit myself. It makes a claim upon me.