- Writers keep puzzling about the idea of transcendence and its association with religion; I’ve proposed an answer;
- Local news about federal agents in Alameda, near me, and how Trump called them off today;
- Heather Cox Richardson about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House; Karoline Leavitt on Trump’s unilateral power;
- Short takes about capitalists, how Democrats should commit to restoring the East Wing, how MAGA thirsts to find evidence of left-wing violence, and Robert Reich on the second gilded age’s billionaire’s ballroom.
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 22 Oct 2025: The lure of the transcendent, subtitled “We need a secular framework for human experiences of awe and deep meaning.”
I’m reading this essay for the first as I post. Going in, I’m puzzled by the premise. Since feelings of awe and deep meaning do exist, they are obviously related to something other that the (non)existence of various supernatural beings. Which came first? Why would feelings of awe have evolved if they weren’t perceptions of the supernatural? (And if the supernatural were real — why the special feelings?) A while back I read a book called AWE (review here), which I was not deeply impressed by, especially since the author didn’t address the science fictional idea of “sense of wonder” (which I do in my essay).
The essay:
Transcendence—basically, the human experience of a higher and deeper reality somehow hidden in our everyday existences, but giving hints of itself in certain circumstances—is a constant phenomenon across time and cultures. Transcendence is at the heart of every religious tradition I know. It is the reason for so much religious artistic expression—beauty is a link to the divine realm.
But transcendence is an issue for a secular society. In materialist terms, it is some kind of illusion—that is, a real experience, of course, but one with false intimations that it grants any form of knowledge. You might as well get high on drugs. Without any form of supernatural existence, what could transcendence be about? Without transcendence, however, secular life seems diminished.
And then he cites examples of other books and various feelings of transcendence. David French. Lord of the Rings. John Gray. What young people are looking for. And concluding,
Where can these things be found? At the moment, the choice for young people is religion or nothing much.
Taylor is looking to a future with a third option—non-religious life infused with beauty and hope. Such a secular life might even be organized in some ways, with its own rituals, community and aesthetics. It would be a secularism quite close to religious traditions, but not religious—literally spiritual but not religious.
But before such a secular option becomes possible, it will have to make an intellectual beachhead in secular thought—in forums like OnlySky. The Taylor-Kirsch disputation is a first step toward that beachhead. We’ll find out soon enough if there is room for such a secular alternative.
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Actually — I have an answer, inspired by science fiction, and evolutionary psychology. It’s a theme of my essay. Essentially it’s this: our intuitions about the world are born of our basic human nature that evolved in an ancestral environment of limited scope, in time and space. We’re comfortable with days and weeks and years and generations of humans… but we’re not intuitive about thousands of years, let alone millions or billions. We’re comfortable with human-sized things, with miles and kilometers and even what we can see to the horizon, but beyond that is speculative; we’re completely mind-boggled by the distances that accurately describe our universe. Transcendence comes when we perceive, convincingly, that there really is more to time and space than what we perceive intuitively. That’s it.
So what is the secular framework the writer needs? Education about reality. And being in awe of that. Where “awe” has its correct meaning.
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Local news.
NY Times, 23 Oct 2025: Trump Calls Off Federal Operation in San Francisco, subtitled “President Trump said he had halted a planned federal deployment of immigration agents to the city. It was not clear what that meant for the rest of the Bay Area.”
This article is actually the end of the story. When I turned on the TV news about 6:30am I saw live coverage of protesters trying to block federal vehicles from driving from Oakland over to Coast Guard Island, the small island between the mainland of Oakland and the island of Alameda, as labeled on this map.
On this map, my house is upper right where the blue ‘house’ symbol stands, while just south of Coast Guard Island, on Alameda itself, is where my partner’s son and his wife live, by the Alameda Harbor.
The article:
President Trump announced on Thursday that he has called off the deployment of federal immigration agents to San Francisco, just as they were beginning to gather at a Coast Guard base in the Bay Area.
Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had stopped the federal action in San Francisco at the request of friends who live in the Bay Area and who vouched for the work of the city’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie.
This says a lot, I think; Trump operates by whim, and can be talked into or out of things by a phone call. Like a Mafia boss.
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Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: October 22, 2025
“It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
Yesterday, former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton cut to the heart of President Donald J. Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House.
Indeed, that might have been the whole point. After saying in July that the ballroom he planned to build would not touch the East Wing, the president tore into the building on Monday, the first workday after about seven million people turned out for the No Kings protests to demonstrate their opposition to his administration.
There are currently no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved. There is only the destruction of the People’s House.
Today, Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that Trump will demolish the entire East Wing. According to a senior administration official, the demolition should be finished by this weekend.
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The New Republic, 23 Oct 2025: Karoline Leavitt Says Trump Can Destroy Entire White House if He Wants, subtitled “Leavitt dodged a key question on the limits to Donald Trump’s abilities to renovate.”
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Why should any president have this unilateral power? No one else got a say about whether demolishing the East Wing of the White House was a good thing or not? Well, no, because Trump is a King.
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Short takes.
- LA Times, Veronique de Rugy, 23 Oct 2025: Did Republicans forget that they’re capitalists? — Considering the investments Trump has made in Intel, and MP Materials.
- The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, 23 Oct 2025: Of Kings and Palaces, subtitled “Why Democrats should commit—right now—to restoring the old East Wing of the White House.”
- The Bulwark, Will Sommer, 23 Oct 2025: MAGA Media Keeps Thirsting for Left-Wing Violence, subtitled “…even if that means they have to invent it.”
- Robert Reich, 23 Oct 2025: The Billionaire’s Ballroom, subtitled “Perfectly Suited to this Second Gilded Age”
