I’ve long been moved by the brief passage in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 masterpiece “Brideshead Revisited” in which poor Sebastian, who is sliding into alcoholism, seeks common cause with his friend Charles against his family and the world that would seek to control him.
Sebastian: “Shall we get really drunk tonight?” Charles: “It’s the one time it could do no conceivable harm.” Sebastian: “Contra mundum?” Charles: “Contra mundum.”
In this bittersweet context, the phrase—“against the world” in Latin–is as much a call to friendship and brotherhood as it is a declaration of resistance to social forces, however well intentioned, that would have us submit to them.
It’s in that dual spirit that I launch this website on which I will share my thinking on a variety of things that spin inside my head. Inevitably, some of the items will be inspired by the thoughts I had the good sense never to share in a commercial publication. Ideally, however, most posts will be driven by my desire to figure things out, a practice I still find makes the ways of the world seem a little less arbitrary and ridiculous. Plus it’s fun.
Gregory Rodriguez has been a book author, newspaper columnist, television political pundit, independent scholar, think tank fellow, iconoclastic intellectual entrepreneur, publisher, and editor. He’s survived a grilling by Stephen Colbert and predicted the rise of the white grievance politics of Donald Trump in the pages of Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,The Economist, and The (Singapore) Straits Times. His essay “Mongrel America,” which first appeared in The Atlantic, was included in The Best American Political Writing series. Contra Mundum is where he publishes essays and notes on the things that matter to him most—including American identity and history, the idea of home, the use of public space, the mechanics of white supremacy, encounters with total strangers, the tension between law and grace, the collisions and convergences born of migration, and the secrets to squeezing some joy out of what we may all agree is a pretty wretched world. Foreign Affairs called his book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, “required reading for anyone interested in the future of the United States.” In 2023, he published a collection of essays entitled Whiteness: An American Tragedy and Other Essays. He is currently working on two new books. The first, “The Pope of Wilshire Boulevard,” is about minority strategies for maintaining dignity in U.S. society, and the second is on the coming collapse of the civil rights revolution.
