Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 01 • Wednesday

Happy anniversary, darling!

The May 2, 2025, Times Literary Supplement has a long review of two books, Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age and Abi Millar's The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age.

Is it really a secular age? I would find that to be a relief, if true. Maybe it depends on how you define "secular" and other such words that tend to pop up around it.

And both of these books seem to me to be starting with a false or at least wholly unsubstantiated premise and then galloping off in several wrong directions with it. But of course that's normal.

The Dreher book, however, appears to have some especially abnormal things going on in it.

I never heard of Dreher before, partly because these days information tends to come to us already pre-sorted to comfort the recipient and confirm our biases, so we'll be inclined to keep consuming more of it.

One of the reasons the TLS is compelling and perhaps even essential is that it is admirably wide-ranging and apparently hopes to appeal to those who are just generally curious.

Dreher is an influential conservative and Orthodox Christian and friend of J. D. Vance, all things that make it extremely unlikely that he would ever be friends with me.

His book appears to have the usual moaning about not enough people being Christian or those who are not being Christian enough and so on.

The interesting part of the review is this:

Technology, [Dreher] contends, is one of the main fronts in the campaign [by diabolical forces to frustrate humans' attempts to do whatever it is Dreher's Christianity thinks we're supposed to do]. The Tower of Babel warns of the risks of using technology (in that case, the building technology of Mesopotamia) to achieve human parity with God. The modern equivalent is Silicon Valley transhumanism – a project that, says Dreher, sometimes appeals explicitly to gods and other higher intelligences. A “California venture capitalist friend” told Dreher that “everyone he knows in Silicon Valley holds regular rituals to summon ‘the aliens’ to give them technological wisdom”. Dreher quotes a Google whistleblower, Blake Lemoine, who was fired for going public with his belief that LaMDA, Google’s AI programme, had achieved consciousness, and who said the programme had been ritually committed to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. This wasn’t a big secret, said Lemoine: “it’s just that journalists never ask about it”. AI itself, according to Dreher, is “a kind of high-tech Ouija board”, and we genuflect before what we have summoned. “We laugh at the primitive Semitic tribe dancing around [the golden calf], but many of us would have little trouble doing the equivalent around AI entities.” Whether or not you can agree with Dreher, the equation of ultimate efficiency with ultimate moral good (a blindly accepted axiom of technocratic postmodernity) is troubling.

Rather apologetically, he seeks to convince us that UFOs are the vehicles of resident malign intelligences that have always shared our planet, but are becoming more aggressive and brazen, using AI as their tool for preparing the world for a false religion. “It’s not hard to imagine that readers who have followed me up to now will conclude that this is where the story I tell of modern mysticism shipwrecks itself on the shoals of crackpottery”, he concedes. “I get it. I would have thought the same thing not long ago.” But Dreher’s conviction is unshakeable, and his treatment of UFOs long, detailed and earnest. “[The] most intelligent and highly placed people who investigated the [UFO] phenomenon do not believe that they are aliens from other planets”, he writes. “Rather, most appear to think that they are discarnate higher intelligences from other dimensions of reality.”

The devil, according to Dreher, doesn’t only infiltrate programmes, ideas and institutions. He is personal. His friend Emma was possessed. She was possessed, he suggests, because her dead grandfather back in Europe “had been a high-level occultist who brought a curse onto the family”. An exorcist was called (apparently there are quite a few in the Catholic church), but the demons made Emma fall asleep as she was saying the prayers that would have expelled them.

Dreher went to visit Emma and her husband in their high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Her husband, Nathan, told Dreher that, unbeknown to Emma, he was hiding in his pocket a relic of the True Cross. We’re not told where he got the relic, but, says Dreher, “the demonically possessed react negatively to such things: awareness of blessed objects hidden from view is one basic test of possession.” Dreher and Emma were talking on the balcony. When Nathan sat down at their table, Emma’s face transformed. “She looked at her husband and snarled, in a deep voice, ‘F—k you, bitch! Get that thing away from me!’ Then her head dropped down.” When Emma’s head rose again, Dreher continues, she gave him a pitiful look. “I’m sorry”, she said. “That wasn’t me.”

As Nathan walked Dreher back to his hotel, Dreher asked how the experience of Emma’s possession had changed him. “Now when I walk down the street”, replied Nathan, “I know that there is a spiritual battle going on all around me … It’s everywhere.”

The anecdotal story of possession will most likely confirm the appropriate biases. Last year Tucker Carlson claimed to have been attacked in bed at night by a demon who left visible claw marks. Also in bed with him at the time were four (4) dogs but that's just a coincidence.

More interesting is the reports of the silliness going on in Silicon Valley. I had no idea the tech bros were so goofy. AI as Ouija board is a persuasive analogy, though. I've been referring to Google as The Oracle for years.

And then there are the UFOs. I've been interested in this subject for a little while and while Dreher's take doesn't, on the basis of this review, have much of anything going for it, it does tie in to something Luis Elizondo, who worked in the Department of Defense and was officially involved with US UFO (or UAP) programs, says in his book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this book and Elizondo is a phlegmatic, unexcitable guide, a career soldier with no discernible traces of wackiness. He seems to hold conventional views on just about anything and his politics appear to be centerish but right-leaning enough to be against Edward Snowden's actions.

He shares his experiences with unexplained and paranormal phenomena, not just UFOs but also extra- or super-sensory abilities such as remote viewing—which he claims he learned how to do and could write a whole book about it. Which I wish he would.

He doesn't seem to have come to the table with any sort of bias in favor of UFOs or anything else but to have been educated and persuaded by his own observations.

As such, his should be a persuasive voice for most readers. Of course, nothing he says is verifiable and much of it isn't even backed up by anything. When he reports seeing glowing orbs in his own backyard, you have to wonder why nobody there grabbed a photo with their cell phone.

But Elizondo does name names when it comes to a cabal of Christians who have infiltrated the government and its agencies and see everything through the same kind of filter as Dreher and perhaps Carlson do.

At one point Elizondo is approached by Devon Woods, "who had assumed a senior role" at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Woods says, about UAPs/UFOs, "'you know we already know what these things are, right?'"

Elizondo isn't sure what he's talking about and is further confused when Woods continues, "'Have you read your Bible lately, Lue? … It's demonic,' he said to me. "'There is no reason we should be looking into this. We already know what they are and where they come from. They are deceivers. Demons.'"

This is actually the most alarming part of the book. This is a real person with a real name, one of several such people in our own government's agencies, manipulating other people and information behind the scenes according to religious beliefs that most people would find to be at least unconvincing if not totally bizarre.

And this part of the story, which should be verifiable as well as believable, seems to get overlooked, despite its very real significance. The New York Times review of Immimenet, for example, doesn't mention it.

Interesting times, I guess.

The first line is "In late 2008, I began a new job at the Pentagon after several tours with other US intelligence agencies".