The Druid Stares Back

The Sophiologist acquiesces

The Druid Stares Back

So I’m taking the plunge and starting a Substack. And I’m doing so for at least a couple of reasons.

For one, the blog platform seems to have gotten very cumbersome and clunky, antiquated in a way. This, of course, is to be expected with the rapid fire pace at which information technology changes. Not that I’m a huge fan of the whole information technology industrial complex, as anyone even vaguely familiar with my work would know. To paraphrase British Invasion band The Kinks, “I’m a twenty-first century man—but I don’t want to live here.” But I do.

Another reason I decided to switch things up is that I suspect my blog’s reach has been compromised by the guys and dolls at BigTech due to my regular criticisms (“harangues” is not too strong a word) leveled at themselves and their pals in BigPharma, the media, government, and the entire transhumanist project they are all now not only endorsing but implementing. To be sure, I may be entirely wrong about my suspected censorship (or de-amplification, as they call it) and that the kinds of people who might be attracted to Sophiology find my positions on these points distasteful—which is clearly the case in some instances—but I didn’t become a philosopher (and all the rest of the labels I might claim) in order to offer a palliative so people can feel better about their reluctance to ask some very serious questions about ourselves and the culture that surrounds us. Not to compare myself to Socrates, but his playful though perspicacious interrogation of assumptions is the most healthy of intellectual approaches to things. Not consciously, necessarily, but by instinct this is the kind of person I’ve been since at least when I was a teenager—as any of my friends from that time could avouch. But look where it got him? I’ve lost some friends over the past few years because of this personality trait (some would say “disorder”), but I guess they weren’t really friends. But I’m not trying to be the most popular kid at Social Media High School (and what is social media much of the time but a return to the adolescent psychological nexus?). Here I stand. I can do no other.

I’m naming this Substack “The Druid Stares Back,” not because I think of myself as a druid, at least not in the way that my honored comrade-in-arms John Michael Greer is, but because I think someone grounded in nature and tradition, in folk religion and mysticism is by definition a kind of postmodern druid standing in opposition to what some have called the technostructure or the technocracy, or others have called the Machine or Ahriman. The title is also a pun on the title of a recent piece I wrote for The American Mind on transhumanism: The Droid Stares Back. Actually, I was searching for the article recently and mistakenly typed in “druid” for “droid.” I found it highly amusing and the phrase has been, to crib from Shakespeare, hanging around like a newly married woman around her husband’s neck ever since. So I decided to use it. And, certainly, a guy with Christian anarchist tendencies colored by folk religion who also happens to be a musician, poet, and biodynamic farmer is more than dripping with druid vibes. I ain’t apologizing.

On this Substack, I will continue to share my thoughts on Sophiology, philosophy and theology, literature and music, as well as biodynamic farming, alternative Christianity, Distributism, mysticism, Romanticism, and all the other things I’ve been writing about for the past twenty years or so.

So please subscribe.

You can also follow me on Twitter or my website.