Basically, they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence

The pundits emphasized the extreme fragility of the democratic process: as a matter of electoral law, if even one polling station failed to report its results, anywhere in France, that invalidated the entire election. It was also emphasized that, until now, no group had ever thought of exploiting this weakness.

But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

Highways are never crowded on Sunday morning. That’s the moment when society takes a deep breath and decongests, when its members give themselves the brief illusion of an individual existence.

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

And the existence of political debate, however factitious, is necessary to the smooth functioning of the media—and, perhaps also, to keep people feeling that they live, at least technically, in a democracy.

“It’s submission,” Rediger murmured. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.

One pillar of Chesterton and Belloc’s philosophy was the principle of subsidiarity: that no entity (social, financial, or political) could take charge of any function if it could be handled by a smaller entity. Pope Pius XI defined the principle in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and to commit

The woman Huysmans looked for all his life he had already described when he was twenty-seven or -eight, in Marthe, his first novel, published in Brussels in 1876. He wanted a good little cook who could also turn herself into a whore, and he wanted this on a fixed schedule.