Who Names the Demon.

Carl Sagan called it the demon-haunted world. He did not mean this as a compliment.

His point, in the book of that name, was not merely that pre-scientific people got things wrong. It was that once you stop insisting on natural explanations for natural events, you become available, gullible in a specific direction. Vulnerable not to demons, as it turns out, but to the people who find it useful to tell you where the demons are.

This came back into focus when JD Vance, currently the Vice President of the United States, and by some actuarial logic a plausible future occupant of the top job, said, in what appeared to be a relaxed and cheerful tone, that he does not think UFOs are aliens. He thinks they are demons. He said it. We can take him at his word.

Worth sitting with that for a moment.

The interesting question is never whether the claim is true. It is what the claim does. And this one does quite a lot.

If unexplained aerial phenomena are merely unexplained, you need investigators - Scientists. People who are methodical and willing to be wrong. If they are demons, capital-E evil, active in the physical world, aligned against the good, then you need something else entirely. Someone who can identify which side is which. Someone with the spiritual standing to name the threat. Investigators need not apply; their instruments measure the wrong thing.

This is the technology of the demon, and it is very old, and it works. When the problem is supernatural, so is the solution. Expertise becomes irrelevant. Evidence becomes beside the point. The only currency that matters is moral authority, and moral authority is not distributed by election or examination, it is claimed. And the people best positioned to claim it are, by remarkable coincidence, the people who most want to be in charge.

Which raises a question worth leaving in the room: if the Vice President of the United States is the one explaining what is demonic and what is not, what is good and what is evil, then who exactly is being guided, and toward what?

Misidentifying the pest is the whole problem. Spray for the wrong thing and the crop keeps going. What Vance is offering, and taking him at his word that he believes it, because the alternative is somehow worse, is a pesticide for an infestation that does not exist, while the actual damage continues underneath.

Policy failures are not demons. Greed is not demonic in origin. The systems we built, we built, and we could build differently if we chose to. None of that is comforting, exactly, but it is tractable. You can regulate greed. You can reform a system. You cannot vote out a demon, and you cannot audit one, and that is precisely the point.

To be fair, and fairness requires noting this, Vance did not stay on the strong version of the claim for long. What started as UFOs are demons softened quickly into something hazier: all religions have sensed that there is more to reality than secularism admits, unexplained phenomena gesture at hidden truths, and so forth. Vague, comparative, impossible to pin down.

It is a known move. Make the dramatic claim, the one that spreads, the one people talk about, and when challenged, retreat to the defensible fog. The specific claim excites and the vague one protects. He gets to sound like a man who believes the world is haunted and also like a thoughtful Christian intellectual simply observing that mystery is real. Both audiences leave satisfied. Only the claims themselves were, in any strict sense, entirely different claims.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Vance is a Catholic convert who received private instruction rather than the standard formation the Church normally requires: one-on-one sessions with a Dominican friar, reading theology over coffee, bespoke rather than communal. He chose St Augustine as his patron saint, drawn to Augustine's fifth-century critique of Roman decadence as, in Vance's own words, the best criticism of the modern age he had ever read. This has not, apparently, discouraged him from offering theological correction upward. Earlier this month he informed Pope Leo XIV that his theology needed to be more carefully anchored in the truth, and that if the pontiff was going to opine on matters of theology, he should be careful. Pope Leo, for context, is a credentialled Augustinian scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Augustine's understanding of authority, leads the global Augustinian religious order, and Vance made this particular theological misstep on the same day the Pope was in Algeria honouring Augustine, the very thinker who gave the world just war theory, the doctrine Vance was invoking, and the patron saint Vance chose as his own. One need not be a canon lawyer to find this a suggestive combination. A man unbothered by institutional religious authority is presumably also unbothered by the idea of substituting his own.

But the rhetoric is almost beside the point now. The position is what matters. This is not a man at a dinner party. This is a man who may soon hold the codes. And he has told us, in a relaxed and cheerful tone, that when he encounters unexplained phenomena, he turns to his Christian understanding of good and evil. That there are forces moving through the world that are beyond ordinary understanding.

Sagan's demon-haunted world is not a relic. We did not fully leave it. The tools built to resist it, evidence, the slow discipline of letting reality correct us, are inconvenient for the powerful precisely because they cannot be directed. A demon, on the other hand, can be pointed.

It wold appear that the invisible war does not end. It just acquires new enemies.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.