Author Archives: Dave Mathwin

Imagined Communities

by Dave Mathwin

Today there is much talk surrounding the idea of the lack of communal identification in America.  We have red states, and blue states, and we bowl alone.  Our kids don’t go outside to play with other neighborhood kids.  We have much to lament.

On the other hand, this social/cultural shift (for our purposes here we’ll assume it’s true) has given us some distance from the whole concept of a “nation.”  Paul Graham has a marvelous post entitled “The Re-fragmentation” in which he discusses the darker side of everyone huddled together around the center.  One could argue that the prime era of nationalism produced an eerie cultural conformity on a scale perhaps not seen since ancient times.

It is this spirit that Benedict Anderson writes Imagined Communities.  The book attempts to tackle how it is that communities71hPv-gXglL called “nations” formed.  At times I thought he drifted into a bit of esotericism, but I found other insights of his incisive and quite helpful.  The first of these insights is in the title itself.  Nations require imagination.  We can understand that those within an immediate geographic proximity could be a community.  We can surmise that those of like-minded belief could find a way to become a community.  But how might I be connected with someone in Oregon with whom I may not share either belief, geography, experience, or culture?  It requires a certain leap of the imagination.

Anderson cites two texts from the fathers of Filipino nationalism to demonstrate how this idea of a national community could be formed.  The first is from Jose Rizal:

Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Capitan Tiago, was giving a dinner party.  Although, contrary to his usual practice, he announced it only that afternoon, it was already the subject of every conversation in Binondo, in other quarters of the city, and even in the city of Intramuros.  In those days Capitan Tiago had the reputation of a lavish host.  It was known that his house, like his country, closed his doors to nothing — except to commerce or any new or daring idea.

So the news coursed like an electric shock through the community of parasites, spongers, and gatecrashers, whom God, in His infinite goodness, created, and so tenderly multiplies in Manila.  Some hunted polish for their boots, others looked for collar buttons and cravats.  But one and all were occupied with the problem of how to greet their host with the familiarity required to create the appearance of long-standing friendship, or if need be, to excuse themselves for not having arrived earlier .
The dinner was being given on a house on Anloague Street.  Since we cannot recall the street number, we shall describe it such a way that it may be recognized — that is, if earthquakes have not yet destroyed it.  We do not believe that its owner will have had it torn down, since such work is usually left to God or Nature, which besides, holds many contracts with our Government.  

The second from Marko Kartikromo

It was 7 o’clock Saturday evening; young people in Semarang never at home Saturday night.  On this night, however, no one was about.  Because the heavy day-long rain had made the roads wet and very slippery, all had stayed at home.  

For the workers in shops and offices Saturday morning was a time of anticipation–anticipating their leisure and the fun of walking around the city in the evening, but on this night they were to be disappointed–because of the lethargy created by the bad weather.  The main roads usually crammed with all sorts of traffic, the footpaths usually teeming with people, all were deserted.  Now and then the crack of horse cab’s whip could be heard spurring a horse on its way.

Samerang was deserted.  The light from the gas lamps shone on the shining asphalt road.

A young man was seated on a long rattan lounge reading a newspaper.  He was totally engrossed.  His occasional anger and smiles showed his deep interest in the stories.  He turned the pages of the newspaper, thinking that he might find something to make him feel less miserable.  Suddenly he came upon an article entitled:

PROSPERITY

A destitute vagrant became ill on the side of the road and died of exposure

The report moved the young man.  He could just conjure up the the suffering of the poor soul as he lay dying on the side of the road.  One moment he felt an explosive anger well-up inside.  Another moment he felt pity, and yet again he felt anger at the social system which made some men poor and others rich.

If we contrast these texts with two other famous opening passages (The Iliad, and Pride and Prejudice) we may begin to see why the above texts could be described as “nationalistic.”

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people, because the son of Atreus had dishonoured Chryses his priest. Now Chryses had come to the ships of the Achaeans to free his daughter, and had brought with him a great ransom: moreover he bore in his hand the sceptre of Apollo wreathed with a suppliant’s wreath and he besought the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, who were their chiefs.

“Sons of Atreus,” he cried, “and all other Achaeans, may the gods who dwell in Olympus grant you to sack the city of Priam, and to reach your homes in safety; but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, son of Jove.”

On this the rest of the Achaeans with one voice were for respecting the priest and taking the ransom that he offered; but not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. “Old man,” said he, “let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you.”

The old man feared him and obeyed. Not a word he spoke, but went by the shore of the sounding sea and prayed apart to King Apollo whom lovely Leto had borne. “Hear me,” he cried, “O god of the silver bow, that protects Chryse and holy Cilla and rulest Tenedos with thy might, hear me oh thou of Sminthe. If I have ever decked your temple with garlands, or burned your thigh-bones in fat of bulls or goats, grant my prayer, and let your arrows avenge these my tears upon the Danaans.”

Thus did he pray, and Apollo heard his prayer. He came down furious from the summits of Olympus, with his bow and his quiver upon his shoulder, and the arrows rattled on his back with the rage that trembled within him. He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them. First he smote their mules and their hounds, but presently he aimed his shafts at the people themselves, and all day long the pyres of the dead were burning.

******

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

If we consider the idea that nations are primarily imagined communities we can examine the texts.

The first two texts . . .

  • Conjure up a sense of belonging to a particular place.  The reader may not know the locations described in experience but can imagine being there.
  • Establish a connection between the large groups of people in the story, despite the fact that these people do not know each other — note that in the second text the man feels a connection to the vagrant though they had never met.
  • Presuppose an almost jocular familiarity with the the concept of a “nation.”

But neither The Illiad or Pride and Prejudice do any of these things.  The reader gets dropped into a world that is not theirs, and neither author shows much concern to make it so.  The reader observes the story, but does not participate in the story.  If we consider Austen one of the primary literary voices of her day, we can surmise that the transition to considering “nations” as communities is quite recent.  C.S. Lewis commented that the world of Austen and Homer had much more in common with each other, despite their 2500 year separation, than his world and Austen’s, despite the mere 150 year time difference.^

Too many causes exist for this momentous shift to consider them here.  Anderson focuses on a couple, however, worth considering.

As mentioned above, one can have a sense of community based on physical proximity.  Anderson’s brilliance is to focus on the idea of “imagination” creating this sense of community.  We must always realize, then, in the essential unreality of nationhood, a subject to which we will return.  But Anderson also shows the concrete foundation for the myth of nationality.

Ideologically the idea of equality had to arise before the idea of nationality had a chance.  But the idea of equality needed fertile soil, and Anderson names “print-capitalism” as one primary ingredient.  With the Enlightenment came the idea of rational standardization of measurement (of distance, time, weight, etc.) and language.

The printed book, kept a permanent form, capable of infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially.  It was no longer subject to the ‘unconsciously modernizing’ habits of monastic scribes.  Thus, while 12th century French differed markedly from that written by Villon in the 15th, the rate of change slowed markedly by the in the 16th.  ‘By the end of the 17th century languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms.’

Capitalism too played its part.  “In the Middle Ages,” commented Umberto Eco, “one did not ‘make money.’  You either had money or you didn’t.”  Today we hear a great deal about the inequalities of capitalism.  But capitalism helped produced a society in which the vast majority of people can share in common experiences though common consumption.*  The mass production made possible by political unification helped create mass consumption, and so one hand washes the other.  Capitalism and print media together created the newspaper, which formed the ‘daily liturgy’ of the national community.

So to what extent can we say that “nations” have value?  One student of mine refused to take the bait and argued bluntly (but effectively) that “they seem to be doing pretty well so far.”  Ross Douthat writes,

The nation-state is real, and (thus far) irreplaceable. Yes, the world of nations is full of arbitrary borders, invented traditions, and convenient mythologies layered atop histories of plunder and pillage. And yes, not every government or polity constitutes a nation (see Iraq, or Belgium, or half of Africa). But as guarantors of public order and personal liberty, as sources of meaning and memory and solidarity, as engines of common purpose in the service of the common good, successful nation-states offer something that few of the transnational institutions or organizations bestriding our globalized world have been able to supply. (The arguable exception of Roman Catholicism is, I fear, only arguable these days.) So amid trends that tend to weaken, balkanize or dissolve nation-states, it should not be assumed that a glorious alternative awaits us if we hurry that dissolution to its end.

I agree that the effectiveness of nations vis a vis other forms of organization is at least arguable.**  I agree with Douthat that the premature burial of  “nations” before their time, with nothing ready to replace it, would be silly at best.  But . . . Anderson’s work reminds us that we live in purely imagined communities.  They exist not in reality, but for expediency, a product of contingent historical circumstances.

The question remains — will their imaginary existence, like that of the zero, prove so valuable that they will last far into the future?  We can see the challenge posed to them already by the internet, globalization, and political polarization.  We shall see how strong our imaginations can be in the next generation or two.

Dave

*I do not suggest that defining ourselves through consumption is a good thing in itself, merely that consumerism has had this particular impact.

**In brief, we might say that the birth of nations was bloody (ca. 1800-1871), with the next generation settling into a relative peace.  But the first half of the 20th century was catastrophically destructive, with a moderately peaceful era to follow.  For whatever it’s worth, the possibly waning age of “nations” — ca. 1970’s – present, has been a period of steadily decreasing world violence.

^M.I. Finley makes an interesting connection between the two eras in his classic, The World of Odysseus.  Finley looks at Achilles’ comment in Hades and draws an unexpected conclusion.  Achilles seems to state that he would rather be a “thes” on earth than king in Hades.  Most translations assume that “thes” means “slave,” but Finley argues that the best translation would mean something like, “unattached free small landholder.”  This, and not slavery, was the worst fate Achilles could imagine.

This reminds me of a part in the Gwyenth Paltrow Emma movie where Emma disdains the independent farmer.  “He has no society, no information.”  We get another confirmation of the role capitalism and the concept of “equality” played in the creation of nations.

The Family and Civilization

by Dave Mathwin

Recently in Government class we briefly discussed Francis Fukuyama’s famous/infamous The End of History and the Last Man, a book often cited but perhaps much less read these days.

I have not read it myself.

Some years ago a student asked in class, “Might monarchy return to western civilization?” Even 30 years ago such a question would be absurd.  But, Plato, Machiavelli, and other thinkers tacitly assume a cycle of governments that repeat themselves over time.  Fukuyama, as best as I understand, challenges this assumption by stating that democracy has proven itself and will now always remain in the conversation.  It will always be “in play” in the world and some type of democracy would become the dominant form of government from here on out.  The cycle of “History” has ended.  Now all that we have left are “events.”

When we discussed this question in class I remained skeptical about monarchy’s return.  But a colleague pointed out that of course it could happen.  The cycle of monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, monarchy (in all but name) played out in Rome.  Rome began as a monarchy, but expanded as a Republic.  If the Republic stood against anything, it was monarchy.  Yet, while monarchs did not return to Rome, Emperors made an appearance for nearly 500 years, a revision to monarchy in all but name.  Furthermore, after Rome’s fall monarchies reappeared even in areas formerly controlled by Rome.

Perhaps, then, monarchies could return even to the West, given several generations.  We tend to believe that history progresses or declines, more or less in a continuous line.  Maybe we should give more credence to a more cyclically influenced theory of events.

I thought of this conversation reading Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization.  He wrote just after W.W. II and foresaw our modern family crisis.  But because he roots his observations in historical observation over many centuries, the book has a timeless quality.  Fundamentally, Zimmerman argues that we should abandon linear evolutionary concepts of the family, not just because he may not agree with evolutionary scientific theory, but primarily because the history of western civilization shows a circle rather than a straight line.

Zimmerman identifies three different basic family models throughout history:

  • The ‘Trustee Family’ resembles something akin to our idea of Scottish clans. Trustee families are so called because each family member acts as a mere caretaker of the bloodline, property, customs, and traditions of the extended family.  Powerful families are a law unto themselves–a kind of miniature state–and stand in active solidarity with other family members in terms of rewards and punishments.
  • The “Domestic Family” has more of a nuclear composition and mentality.  The father heads the family, but women can own property outright.  The domestic family shares corporate blame for minor offenses, but the trend leans toward individual responsibility.  Neither the clan nor the state makes a domestic family or governs it, but the Church (or other religious affiliation).
  • The “Atomistic Family” describes our own age.  In the absence of the state, the Trustee Family assumes significant control over “horizontal” relationships.  The Domestic Family has a sacramental sacredness ordered primarily though religion.  The Atomistic Family is based on the idea of functionality and convenience.  It’s horizontal nature extends only to individual members.  It has no horizontal sacred dimension.  Personal choice determines the shape of individual families.

Few disagree with Zimmerman’s descriptions, but most modern sociologists assume an evolutionary line of change that will eventually dissolve the family as we know it.  Zimmerman shows that each type existed before in Greece and Rome, and that after Rome’s fall, the cycle began again.  He traces all three models this way:

Trustee Family Era’s

  • Homeric Greece–ca. 800 B.C.
  • Early Roman tribal era–12 Tables of Law (ca. 450 B.C.)
  • The post-Roman barbarian Age (ca. 500 A.D.-12th Century)

Domestic Family Era’s

  • 8th-5th century Greece, from Hesiod-Pericles
  • 12 Tables of Roman Law–Dissolution of the Republic
  • 13th Century-18th Century (Aquinas-Enlightenment)

Atomistic Era’s

  • Sophists-End of classical Greece ca. 150 B.C.
  • Augustus-Barbarian Age of Europe
  • Enlightenment Rationalism-Present Day

The main part of the book concerns itself with showing the family transitions from the fall of Rome until today.

The church stood against much of accepted family mores in Rome’s decline.  From an early point the Church declared marriage a sacrament, and worked against the atomistic view of marriage and family in late Rome.  This makes sense.  After Rome’s fall, we they had two polar opposite views of the family to contend with, as the atomistic model lingered alongside of the trustee model brought by barbarian tribes.

The church found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place.  They abhorred the individualism of the atomistic Roman family, but the trustee model led to uncontrolled violence and lack of individual moral responsibility.  Caught between these two, the Church leaned towards working with the trustee model.  Part of this may have had to do with the fact that the collapse of the Roman state made the trustee model almost inevitable.  It also shows, I think, that the values of the early Church do not match our own.  Needing to choose, they preferred unchecked violence to rampant individualism.*

However, the Church quickly worked to transform ideas of the family in small but concrete ways.  They allowed for marriages even in the absence of familial consent.  They insisted that, as marriage was a sacrament, the Church and not the family made a marriage.  Under most barbarian trusteeships, the groom had to provide a financial gift to his father-in-law, as he “took” someone from his family.  The Church transformed this practice into the groom giving a gift of property/cash to his wife.  The practice of writing wills also allowed for a widow to inherit property independent of her husband’s family.

All of these things helped bring about the Domestic Family, though the slow and steady rise of the state also aided in this as well.

Zimmerman sees the Domestic model as the ideal.  Marriage has a sacramental purpose and reality, but the family is not absolute, as many Scriptures attest.  Because the Church creates a new family, the family has a degree of independence from the state.  Civilizations were healthier with these kinds of families.  Greece experienced its explosion of cultural and political growth largely under the Domestic Family.  In Rome the Republic never had healthier days than during the prevalence of the Domestic Family.  In Europe we see the 12th century golden age that experienced innovations in architecture, philosophy, music, etc. etc.

Several things happened over two centuries that eroded the domestic family.

  • Erasmus (Zimmerman calls him a “sophistic playboy”) and other Renaissance humanists began to enamored with classical culture and its attendant individualism.
  • Building on this, the Reformation 1) Removed marriage as a sacrament, giving the Church less power over marriage and giving more to the state, and 2) Marriage had a higher place than celibacy, which lessened marriage’s spiritually symbolic purpose and paved the way for the “contract view of marriage.**
  • Social contract theory put the emphasis of marriage on fulfilling mutual needs of each “party,” and opened the door to different kinds of marriages–all legitimate in theory provided only that both parties freely consented.

Many in the west today see the rise of the atomistic model concomitant with the rise of political and social freedom.  This view has some merit.  The Reformation and Enlightenment democracies broke down nearly all traditions, which led to a focus on the individual.  The individual rights we enjoy likely would not have come without a breakdown in the “Domestic Family.”

But Zimmerman has an apt word of caution–society cannot exist without some method of organization and accountability.  The family has long served as the repository for moral training, education, preparation for life, and so on.  If the family can no longer perform these functions, the state will have to step in, making the state itself our de-facto family.  This happened in Rome.  When social order decayed, the state had to take up the mantle, and they proved in their laws and actions much more stern than the typical pater-familias.  The history of the west, at least, shows us no more than three mechanisms of control: the clan, religion, and the state.  We must choose.  But the state, due to the variable nature of law, and with no particular method or goal, has shown itself the most unpredictable of the three.

We should not assume that the family has disappeared.  It may have gone underground for now but remains the key element of society.  It will return.^  Zimmermann is not a historical determinist or a pessimist.  In his reflections on the history of the family Zimmermann believes that had a few things happened here and there at the top of each society, the history of the family could have gone much differently and better.  He believes that societal elites have been largely responsible for inculcating anti-family policies into society.  If they can be converted we might turn the tide.

I wish it would be so simple.  Today it seems that much of the flow of modern life in its labor, technology, habits, etc. exert great pressure on the family.  Our recent election suggests that our cultural elites have less influence than ever before.  Then again, I believe in the witness of history, and believe that no one period of time is so starkly different from another.  This era then, might have more in common with Imperial Rome than otherwise.  That might sound like bad news, but from the perspective of the family, it isn’t.  It would mean that turning the heads of a few elites could dramatically improve our situation.  This would be vastly easier than a total societal breakdown that occurred during the last major family crisis.

Dave

*We see this in other areas as well.  The medievals viewed Saturn (which makes melancholy isolationists) as the Infortuna Major, while Mars, (which brought war–but war at least brings some groups together) as the Infortuna Minor.

**In an interesting aside, Zimmerman points out how the influence of the primacy of the text over tradition in the Reformation helped aid this transition.  Nothing in the history of the Church supported this shift to de-sacralize marriage, but a) Reformers had a hard time finding a text in the NT saying exactly that marriage was a sacrament (although Ephesians 5 certainly fits)–what text is supposed to say exactly that anything is a sacrament?  The undue influence of the bare text quickly gave Protestant denominations doctrinal confusion with the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other areas–and b) They found a couple of OT texts that they used to support this lessened view of marriage.

However, Zimmerman also argues that most of the Reformers were strongly traditional pro-family in many other ways.  It was not so much the Protestant preacher in the pulpit that eroded the family, but instead the humanist scholars who influenced the Reformation.  The influence of the Reformation on the family, then, is mixed.

^Zimmerman sees the rise of divorce, homosexuality, youth crime, etc. as the symptom of family breakdown, not its cause.

A National Man of Mystery

by Dave Mathwin

Anyone who knows anything about the first half of the 20th century knows that the concept of “nation” has a lot to answer for. We have such familiarity with it that we need not rehash the sins of “nationality” here. Slightly less obvious might be the impact, or pendulum swing we experienced in the second half of the 20th century towards the individual related to the state, or the community. This manifested itself in a variety of ways:

  • The proliferation of international bodies like the EU, G-8, World Bank, IMF, etc.
  • Expansion of global markets, facilitated by the internet and the removal of boundaries on communication and information
  • Significant expansion of media technologies that allow us to radically personalize our world everywhere we go, like Facebook, iTunes, Netflix, etc.
  • Removal of barriers to self-expression, encapsulated in the hey-day of free speech in the 1960’s, and now, with the end of traditional beliefs and social norms about gender and sexuality.*

But, if the pendulum swung too far in one direction from 1900-1960, many think that it has gone too far in the other direction (i.e., Bowling Alone, Why Liberalism Failed, etc.). Some form of such swings might be inevitable from a historical perspective, and might even be healthy when mild, as it might prevent stagnation. But dramatic swings destabilize societies and make it harder to get our bearings. At such times, terrible mistakes can occur.

Over the past 5-10 years we have witnessed the reemergence of national populism. In America, the phenomena manifested itself with Trump’s election, but almost every democracy in the western world has dealt with this, both in old and established democracies (Brexit, Marie le Pen), and relatively new ones (Poland, Hungary, etc.). Some see in national populism the dreaded extreme pendulum swing, but authors Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin disagree. In their book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, they seek not to praise or bury the phenomena, but to understand its reasons for being and the nuances of the movement. Some critics of the book see it as a sympathetic defense of right-leaning populism, a Marc Antony style bait and switch. Instead, I view the book as a careful delineation of the nuances of the movement. Above all, we must resist the urge to cast the label “Fascist,” to all or even most manifestations of national populism. Yes, the authors believe that certain populist leaders have dangerous leanings, but others simply seek to stand against real/perceived excesses of progressive ideology. We must exercise caution in our examination.

The authors first remind readers that populist movements have always existed within democratic governments. Greece had so much direct participation that it scared off our own founders. Rome’s Republic often existed in uneasy tension with more populist strains. More recently, America has seen populist presidents like Andrew Jackson, and to some extent, Teddy Roosevelt, in addition to various populist governors like Huey Long. Some may dislike all of these leaders on balance, but even if one did, democracy survived, and the country stayed far away from “fascism” or even overt nationalism. Of course, we could arguethat, given the horrors of how national populism operated in Germany from 1933-45, we should avoid even minute drops of it.

Eatwell and Goodwin think that this both unfair and unrealistic. They distinguish between fascism and populism in a variety of ways. Fascist regimes have a strong racial ideology, they often wish to expand territorially, and they often have apocalyptic goals. But even if the similarities were more acute, we simply cannot avoid populism if we wish to remain democratic–we cannot ignore the “voice of the people” in a democracy.

I have sympathy for Eatwell and Goodwin’s presentation of their ideas, though I have written before that I think that democratic societies need “elites.” The question comes to, “What kind of elites?” It seems too easy to say that we need elites with connections to the “common man,” “on the ground,” but so it goes. The “elite” culture of Periclean Athens was a very public culture, accessible to the people (recall the free theater performances of plays). Their leaders often competed with one another as to who served in office, who led armies, and so on. Roman elites were likewise quite civically minded, and for much of the Republic’s history patricians did not greatly exceed the wealth of the plebs–and when this gap widened tremendously after the 3rd Punic War so began the breakdown of the Republic (one factor among many, to be sure). Medieval elites lived in castles, but defended the realm, and were obliged to host a variety of festivals and parties for their tenants. They socially mixed frequently with peasants. Our own founding fathers took great risks and served in the army. Some of them had farms or worked as ordinary town lawyers, again, with strong connections to the “common man.”

Perhaps the chicken of the Republican right in the 1990’s, starting perhaps with Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, pushed the left farther from the center. Or perhaps the egg of the radical progressive ideologies about immigration, abortion, sexuality, etc. have made it hard to maintain something of a traditional conservatism. Or possibly grander historical forces play upon us, or maybe still, we are now experiencing something cyclical akin to the changing of seasons. Whatever the cause, we now have elites at universities, in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, and in certain segments of the media (a short list that I know does not apply equally everyehere) that drive the agenda of much of the left throughout the democratic world, and I think this is the main cause for the rise of populism.

For example . . .

  • We “know” that “Empire” is a bad word
  • “Nation” is increasingly becoming a bad word in certain circles
  • In the U.S. at least, we don’t want to give much autonomy to states or local communities to decide things, to have any variance on issues that divide us like abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, etc.

So, all that certain segments of the political spectrum will leave us with is a stateless individualism with no unifying theme, culture, or nod to tradition. Very few can live in such a way or have ever lived in such a way. Older, more personal and familial conceptions of political realities, such as the “realms” of medieval kings, will not return any time soon.

So it appears that, unless we want civil wars across the western world**, we are stuck with the political entity of nations.

I concede, with Benedict Anderson, that there is something mysterious and imaginary about nations, but they undeniably exist, and people want some sense of identity within them. For that to happen, they need to take their bearings and locate themselves within the culture. The ancients often equated the formless and boundless ocean with chaos. We moderns usually associate the sea with freedom, and this might hint at the differences in how we interpret the meaning of our communities then and now. Nations may have less of a concrete reality than a particular individual, but for people to be truly human we need connections with others. These connections can only come with the presence of trust and familiarity. Dramatic change in law, demographics, and ideology make this hard to come by.

One reviewer rightly pointed out that whereas Eatwell and Goodwin take pains to point out the complexity and nuances of populist movements, populist movements themselves reject complexity–the problems we face have self-evident solutions. Maybe so, but I think that, as academic “elites,” Eatwell and Goodwin do one good turn towards rectifying the gap between elites and the common man. They have at least written a serious book about the “average Joe.”

For those who fear this movement on the right and the left, I would suggest them giving us something for us to feel tangible pride in as a nation. The right too often resorts to our expanded freedom to consume, but this comes from the nameless, faceless market–a stark contrast to what “going to market” meant in bygone eras. Many on the left constantly undermine our cultural inheritance and see the past and present as nothing but evil. They would offer instead foolish fantasies of a future that will always reside outside of our grasp. Neither approach will help us build a reasonable national identity and pride, and so neither approach will prevent the global rise of national populism.

Dave

*Free speech today is under attack on campus’ especially, which is ironic considering the modern free speech movement had its birth at the university. Perhaps this means that free speech is at its most vibrant when a) People wish to challenge the existing order, and b) The existing order is at least partially out of alignment with the rest of the culture, and thus ripe for a “fall” of sorts. Free speech in those contexts might just look like “saying what everyone is thinking (or at least the “right” “everyone”). Today there are plenty of people who fit into the first category, but perhaps the prevailing orthodoxy is not yet ready to fall, backed as it is not just by cultural elites but also most businesses. In the 60’s, the main forms of national culture sided with those challenging the existing moral and political order.

Also, free speech can never be an absolute value even in the context of academic freedom. For example, one might imagine a hypothetical Professor Smith, who advocates with extended argument an absurd defense of Jim Crow laws. Whether public or private, no college should allow his continued employment. The problems today are that 1) Such standards are very unevenly applied, with very slippery standards used to decide what is racist and what is not, and 2) Standards get formed very quickly that alienate, at minimum, very large numbers of people with different opinions that until quite recently were quite acceptable–one recalls President Obama’s support for traditional marriage in 2008, and 3) One can get “mobbed” for things far less than careful, systematically expressed thoughts.

**I dread the possibility, but could the U.S. separate into “Red” and “Blue” nations peacefully? One thinks of the famous dictum from the Chinese epic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which states, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” Maybe, possibly, we should not view the political union of the states as an absolutely fixed good. New York and Texas could easily go their separate ways, but what about the swing states, like Ohio and Florida? Like Kansas in 1854, one can imagine the frightful spectacle of their destiny decided by a few thousand votes one way or the other.

The lack of geographic contiguity would make the prospect difficult even with no violence, and so we would have the problem of 4-5 separate nations, new constitutions, etc. While nodding to the hypothetical possibly, we should do all we can to avoid it.

Meandering Thoughts on Equality

by Dave Mathwin

For the past several years now we have seen a fair amount of thought on the idea of economic inequality. Some see it as a serious problem, others perhaps as a temporary byproduct of the switch from a production economy to one rooted in service.  I suppose a very few might celebrate the possibilities free market economies in the fact of inequality.

I had a chance to think about this a bit recently, and attempt to bring some historical perspective.

It is hard to imagine this issue being resolved more successfully than the Athenians under Solon, ca. 590-570 B.C.  There were the aristocrats and the commoners, with law and wealth heavily sided in favor of the aristocratic class (the ‘Code of Draco’).  Debt spiraled out of control, society was coming apart.

Enter Solon.  He was given full powers to resolve this crisis. He did not need to curry votes or constituents. He was not an aristocrat, but he was rich.  He could appeal to both sides and be trusted by both sides.  He believed that Athens needed its rich citizens, as we might expect.  More crucially, he knew how to motivate reform by appealing to the aristocratic ‘need’ for glory, or arete.  One can’t just dismiss this, as it was part of the Greek mindset for centuries.

He made paying high taxes a sign of arete. You could pay your high taxes not in terms of a fixed percentage, but in terms of

  • Pay for this religious festival, and we’ll say loud and long that you paid for it
  • Build a trireme and pay the crew, but you get to command the ship
  • Build this bridge and we’ll name it after you
  • Etc.  You get the idea.

By some accounts aristocrats paid a percentage 12x higher than the poor, but they got ‘arete’ for those taxes, and they had a direct hand in how they were spent.  

He did other things, like expanding the merchant fleet and encouraging trade, which put a lot of people to work.  This sounds easy but must have been politically difficult, given the role of farming in almost every ancient civilization.

He canceled all debts, but he refused to redistribute property.  

In the end

  • Athens had a stronger middle class
  • Athens had relative social stability
  • Many believe that this helped lead to the cultural/political explosion in their ‘golden age’ a century later.  They  create modern science, literature, democracy, etc.)

Alas, many things about Solon are not replicable for us.  For one thing, change did not come from a democratic process.  He was a ‘tyrant’ (a technical description and not a bad word).  C.S. Lewis commented a few times that to get good results for democracies often you have to achieve them in non-democratic ways.  We are locked into our one democratic tradition, and have not nearly the flexibility the Athenians had.

I love his taxes idea, but we just too big and bureaucratic to copy it.  Could we do something like it–give the rich the privilege of naming how they contribute if they willingly contribute more, and giving them public recognition for this (i.e. naming a bridge after them, getting their name on a fighter jet’s wings, I don’t know)?

The idea of a ‘bridge-builder’ politician we can do, and have done successfully before.  But we lack the civic-mindedness of the Athenians.  For better or worse we are more individualistic.  The ancient world would find our attitude towards the state unfathomable.  

Unfathomable, yes, but their conception of rule, society, etc. was far more personal, far more uniform, and far more religious than ours.  Ancient Persia could be an exception.  The Roman Republic could also serve as an exception.  They did integration and pluralism quite well until they ventured beyond Italy and the Alps and into the Mediterranean.  It proved too much for them to swallow. Most Italians had similar cultures.  But in North Africa, Spain, etc., . . . they were different, and no one wanted to try integrating them into the Republic, and no one thought of not ruling over them in some way.  This is another factor, I’m sure, in the collapse of the Republic.  It may be that societies with higher ethnic diversity have a harder time with equality.  If so, this makes America’s relative equality all the more impressive.*

The trade-offs are huge.  You can get more civic buy-in, in theory, in America, but you would probably have to sacrifice some sense of personal rights, and you would definitely have to ditch pluralism and relatively open immigration.  The first is highly unlikely, the second probably impossible.  Even if we could do those things, it is debatable that we should.

Anyway, we can’t dismiss the rugged individualism out of our national DNA, nor should we want to. Solon could not dismiss arete.  But . . . he found a way to work with it.  

Can we create low-skilled jobs from the digital revolution and keep them in America?  If we did so, would it make things worse for workers in Asia?  Would we want the flag-waving and possible economic confrontations that would come from a more nationalistic America?  Would the world be safer?  I don’t know the answers to these questions.

We are such a big nation (like almost every other one) that our problems become abstract and impersonal.  In Athens more or less everyone knew everyone in some way.  Dealing with inequality has much more meaning when we have a personal connection to the problem.

Rome faced a similar problem ca. 150 B.C. that Athens faced in 600 B.C.  They never found a way out, and the Republic collapsed.  All agree this period has many complexities, and historians hotly debate why the collapse happened, but I think most agree that

  • Both sides used violence to settle issues
  • Both sides tended to view politics as a zero-sum game, very much an ‘us vs. them.’  They destroyed each other with a century of intermittent civil war.

The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the revolutions in China, SE Asia, Cuba, and even arguably the American Revolution created far worse tyrannies than those they replaced (this is a stretch in the U.S.– the British weren’t tyrants, and neither were the victors, but the victors did exile many loyalists, slavery expanded, Indians fared far worse than under the British, etc.).  The Roman civil wars over the political questions of the day gave them the emperors.  

We need a political genius of sorts, who can find a synthesis between liberty and equality, between civic responsibility and rugged individualism. He/she would need to be trusted by the common man in Iowa and in Silicon Valley.  He/she would have to, perhaps, give huge tax breaks to corporations who did not outsource jobs–a pro-nationalist low taxes weird hybrid.  If we find him (and I don’t see him/her around), he would not have nearly the power Solon had, at least by the letter of the law.  

None of these mostly unoriginal thoughts get to the unspoken root issue.  Why is inequality a problem in the first place?  By “problem” I don’t mean whether or not inequality exists, but whether or not people perceive it as an issue worthy of much attention.

We might think that inequality is problem in every society but, not so.  For example, monastics renounce property and have all things in common.  We say that communism has never worked, but it works in monastic societies, though of course on a small scale and with everyone present strongly and voluntarily committed to that idea.

Other societies experience inequality, but seem not to think much of it. Neither Homer, Plato, Augustine, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Austen ever made it a burning issue.  But we do see the issue move right to the front of political thinking just after Austen in the mid-19th century.**  We see it in Marx as well as Dickens, and thereafter inequality could be a rallying cry for political revolution.

Surely the Industrial Revolution has something to do with this, for it created a society where, having mastered the elements of nature, one could quickly have great material success.  The first two generations of factory workers at least likely lived at lower standard of living than previously.  Vast gaps between classes opened up.

Vast gaps existed in ancient Egypt as well between the pharaoh and the peasants, for example, but these gaps made sense to their society historically and theologically.  In a society where “all men are created equal” inequality hits with much greater force.

Marx thought that in the first 50 years or so of Industrialism some of these “non-sensical” gaps would certainly destroy the capitalistic state.  Marx had many things wrong.  But on this, I can’t blame him for his guess.  Why did the capitalist state survive?  Marx, the great materialist, had ironically underestimated our materialism as a society.  Its reasonable to assume that the social gaps created by the industrial revolution, coupled with our ideology of equality, would end the industrial-capitalist society.

The “cause” of the problem of inequality perhaps lies in solving this riddle.  It seems that the poor want what the rich have. Both rich and poor want the same thing, and the values of western society tell them they should have the same thing.  I don’t mean to say that inequality is not a problem or no such problem of economic injustice exists, or that the poor should rest content with the rich as mortal gods on earth.  I am not advocating a revival of ancient Egypt.  I merely point out that our society as a whole has surrendered to the materialist impulse which makes easing the problem that much harder.

Of course this parallels the rise of the issue in the mid-19th century just as social Darwinism, textual biblical criticism, and other de-mythologizers of life gained pride of place.  All that we left ourselves had to do with the here and now, i.e. applied science to increase our standard of living, and our various abstractions to make these things real.

All this to say, dealing with crippling inequality in society will involve a spiritual solution.  The monastics show us that it is possible.

Dave

*If this is true, we are faced with choosing between the competing goods of liberty and equality.  Would we prefer economic peace between our citizens or freedom of movement for all?

**Others I’m sure would disagree, but I don’t see the French Revolution being driven primarily by inequality.

A Pattern Language

by Dave Mathwin

Many years ago I witnessed a debate between the Christian William Lane Craig, an atheist, and a Buddhist. Naturally I “rooted” for Craig, but also hoped for an interesting discussion. The atheist cut a poor figure. Craig possesses an enormous intellect and made quick and brutal work of the scientific materialist. In so doing, however, he neglected the Buddhist, who had a much more interesting argument, Though I disagreed with the Buddhist, I wished Craig had stopped shooting fish in the barrel and paid more attention to him. The Buddhist basically argued that values certainly exist in the world, contra the strict materialist. But he thought Christians too interested in the explanation for the values in the world–why not simply live in light of them? Craig never dealt with this enigmatic assertion.

Everyone should read Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, or at least glance through it as I did. 🙂 On its surface the book is about architecture, and he provides much directly for the professional builder. What makes the book remarkable, however, is how easily Alexander connects architecture to everyday life, and orients it not around outsized auteur individual creation, but making spaces for people to live communally and “normally.” To do so, one must tap into the “patterns” in everyday living. Though I know very, very little about Asian religious philosophy, I sensed something of the Buddhist or Taoist in Alexander. He felt no need to justify these patterns or explain their meaning. As far as I could tell he called mainly upon the intuition of our experience in presenting his ideas. Many have written about the increasing privatization of our culture, and no doubt this reflects itself in the buildings we create. Alexander injects a comforting warmth into our sterile sense of the meaning of a building, something quite needed given the state of modern architecture.

I agree that values present themselves in the world as real entities. I disagree that the origin of these values is a red herring–I think that it matters very much. But I agree again that the experience of such values matters much more than debating or discussing them. To understand the reality of symbols we have to enact them, to incarnate them, in our daily lives. The argument over when we started living in our modern linear, factual. and personalized way has a different contenders–some say the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution. Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women work hints that this process began in the late Middle Ages-early Renaissance, though answering this question was not the intent of her work.

Bynum won me over immediately in her introduction. She makes it clear that we have to understand medievals on their own terms. She quotes John Tauler of the 14th century, who writes,

St. Bernard compared this Sacrament [the eucharist] with the human processes of eating when he used the similes of chewing, swallowing, assimilation, and digestion. To some this will seem crude, but let such refined persons be aware of pride, which comes from the devil; a humble spirit will not take offense at simple things.

The words form an introduction to the subject of her book, and indeed–unlike Henry Charles Lea–Bynum knows that to understand medieval ideas of food (or almost anything) means understanding the eucharist first and foremost. The words also bracket ones whole approach to any part of the past–humility usually triumphs over judgment.*

The humble everyday nature of food is a great place to start understanding the nature of things.

The remarkable Alexander Schemmen began his classic For the Life of the World with these words:

“Man is what he eats.”  With this statement the German materialistic philosopher Feurbach thought he had put to an end all “idealistic” speculations about human nature.  In fact, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man.  For long before the same definition of man was given in Genesis.  The biblical story of creation man is presented, first of all, as a hungry being, and the whole world as his food.  . . . Man must eat in order to live; he must take into the world his body and transform into himself.  He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one banquet table for man.  It is the image of life at its creation and at its fulfillment at the end of time . . . “that you eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom” (Lk. 22:30).

We remember too, that just as, “the whole world is one banquet table” so too, the first sin involved breaking the fast. How and when we eat matters as to how we understand the world.**

Individually, food involves taking the life of something else and making it part of ones own life. Even a stalk of wheat or an apple must be plucked from its source of life and ‘die’ so that we may live. So eating mirrors Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. I talked in a recent post about adopting a theopomorphic view of our experience with the concept of bodies, and we should understanding eating as part of our joining our life to Christ’s life. He offered himself as food for us (John 6:56).

In addition, eating joins us to creation’s pattern. The earth receives water and bears fruit. The earth receives death and decay–think compost or manure–and turns it into life. The church in the early west established “ember” days of fasting to mirror changes in seasons, and the longest fasts of the church year (Advent and Lent) occur during times of year when the ground lies essentially inactive.

Establishing this pattern, Bynum then leads into understanding medieval women and their relationship to food. Creation has always been associated with the feminine, i.e., “Mother Earth.” We know too the trope of the mother who “sacrifices herself,” who will eat less, eat last, or . . . not eat at all. She “dies” so that she can provide.

Bynum frames the context of medieval female religious experience through this lens. Bynum looks at the fasting and eucharistic devotion of certain medieval women, including a long discourse on the whether or not such women suffered from anorexia that is tedious in a scholarly way, but fair and sympathetic nonetheless.

But this intense personal piety as it related to food has a problematic endgame. Connecting fasting and feasting to the patterns in creation meant that communities could experience it together in the same way, with the same meaning. The physicality of things makes itself obvious to all, from the saint, to the scholar, to the ploughman. By separating the practice from “normal” rhythms, the experience became intensely personal, and less communal. This is not to say absolutely that no variance can exist in a community, and the late medievals never normalized the experience of these unusual women. But a decisive shift happened. Fasting meant no longer primarily a communal experience linked with the pattern of the life of Christ and creation, but a vehicle for personal, and possibly idiosyncratic, devotion.

From here dominos start to fall. Without the connection to creation, the common language of food might disappear. In time, one could fast from Netflix or shopping instead of certain foods. Maybe such things have their place for individuals, but the reduction of fasting to individual experience and individual authority robs us of meaning and identity (something Mary Douglas pointed out in her excellent work).

This same radical personalization and consequent loss of meaning have done similar work in the realm of sexuality. In ye olden days marriages happened not primarily because people were “in love,” but rather as a vehicle whereby people could participate in what it means to be human and the drama of salvation. If we think of our humanity and the humanity of Christ as one–before the foundation of the world–we see this clearly especially as it relates to women who get married:

  • The woman is led to the altar by her father
  • She “dies” at the altar–Miss Jane Smith is no more
  • She is “reborn”–meet Mrs. Jane Johnson
  • After marriage comes the “fruit” of the marriage, say hello to little baby Jack Johnson

The meaning of sexuality comes from this mirroring of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension. And here we see why we need “Heaven,” and “Earth,” man, and woman, for our sexuality to make any sense at all. We have divorced this aspect of our being from all such patterns, and made it purely personal inside the chaotic variability of our minds. It appears the end of this rope has come, when some experts tell us that not only is the created order not a model for sexuality, but our very bodies should be discarded to achieve our purely personal goals.

Many today focus on our political confusion, and we should lament this. But these political issues have far deeper roots which we cannot see. Not only do we not see a pattern, we don’t expect to see a pattern. We won’t be able to solve these problems until we start looking.

Dave

*Another aspect of her writing that I appreciated . . . She delineated in the introduction chapters geared more towards layman like myself, and those written more with the professional scholar in mind. I personally have no taste for the hemming and hawing of scholar-speak, but I understand it has its place. It was kind of her to let me know what to avoid and where to focus my attention.

**This may seem a crazy assertion, but if we think of our lived experience we begin to understand. Let’s take drinking alcohol as an example. We instinctively recognize that someone who drinks scotch at 10 am has a problem, but if they did so at 10 pm, no problem. But why? What is the difference between drinking in the morning or at night?

Life is full of “inhaling” and “exhaling.” At night we begin to “exhale,” we reach the “fringe” of our being for the day. As we move through the “fringe” of the day we begin to approach the “chaos” of the unconscious. It intuitively makes sense, then, for us to match drinking something that relaxes us, that moves us toward the “fringe” of our being, at night rather than during the day. If we move towards the “fringe” in the morning when we should be “inhaling”–focusing and getting active–we create personal and societal dissonance. Our distinctions are not arbitrary.

Likewise, we understand that drinking socially is better than drinking alone. A person who drinks too much socially we might perceive as having a minor problem. A person who drinks too much alone we perceive as being in grave danger. But why? The pattern tells us, and again, we understand not so much logically but in our lived experience. Social groups exist for people to blend and mix together. Alcohol can bring us to the fringe of our being, we can “extend” the self in some respects through alcohol. Hence, “Can I buy you a drink?” can be a means of introduction in ways that, “Can I buy you some carrots?” would not. Someone who drank too much alone would extend themselves and connect with no one–it would be an intentionally fruitless action, in which we rightly recognize despair and nihilism.

God’s Legs

by Dave Mathwin

Translation will always be a tricky business, but two rules of thumb remain: 1) Make it readable for modern audiences, without 2) Losing the flavor of the original. Nigel Bryant’s The History of William Marshal hits this mark admirably. He translates the original poem into prose, but preserves the period’s idiomatic way of speaking. I confess a great fondness for medieval diction which perhaps runs in literature from Beowulf through Shakespeare. Part of this comes simply from seeing new phrases that inject life into staid platitudes. So, one can smile at the fact that they use the word “nanny-goat” in place of “chicken” for a coward. But more to the point–the medievals combined high-flown sentiment with an earthy directness that we lack today.

A few examples . . .

  • “Sir Thomas Coulances added his two ounces of salt. Making sauces was all he was good for. In sum, five got involved in this mustard” [i.e., they ‘stirred up trouble’].
  • “The Marshall grabbed a stick and gave him such a whack across the brow that the rogue had made his last blink with that eye–it went flying from his head. Well, they do say, ‘an appropriate feast day for such a saint'” [said ironically–the ‘rogue’ in question had stolen a horse. Normally the feast day of a saint would occur on the day of his martyrdom/death, though in this case the Marshall actually prevented the thief’s death by hanging and let him go–missing an eye].

And my favorite:

  • Sir Richard foolishly inserted himself–he should never have goaded the ass [i.e., he should have “let sleeping dogs lie”–“ass” here refers to a donkey and not the grumpy personage].

My admiration for Bryant increased as I read the introduction. The History of William Marshall author remains unknown but may have been his son. Some treat the book as pure literature and leave aside any historical value, thinking it an “obvious panegyric” to Marshall and not to be trusted. Bryant affirms the historical value of the work, pointing out that most of the books’s audience knew the famous man in England and France. Perhaps it contains exaggerations in places but its basic foundation remains, like stories you might tell about a relative at Thanksgiving dinner. Change the tale too much and you get called out.

Primary sources, if one willingly dives in, can give great insight into how those at the time viewed the world. In other medieval or Elizabethan texts one readily comes across such phrases as “God’s eyes!” or “God’s blood!” as vows or mark’s of irritation and (righteous?) anger, i.e., “By God’s blood I’ll do no such thing,” or, “God’s eyes, I’ll have him out!” upon hearing that some dastardly earl has seized a castle of the king. Never before have I seen the phrase “God’s legs!” as it used in The History of William Marshall, though the author uses it in a similar manner as the above phrases. Seeing this new idiom helped me think about this whole phenomena anew. What could they have meant by such expressions? We do have phrases for “stirring up trouble,” for example, but not anything like “God’s teeth!”

An easy explanation might sound like

  • This shows the “top-heavy” nature of medieval society. Sure, you have some brilliant theologians and marvelous architecture, but the bulk of the masses were ignorant of such things and descended into blasphemous superstition at the drop of a hat.

This view, however, violates one of my cardinal rules: we should never assume the ignorance of others in the past. People might be wrong about things, but that doesn’t mean they lack good reasons for being wrong. A better explanation might sound like,

  • These phrases show the “low” of the “high” and “low” dichotomy in the medieval period, ably expounded by brilliant commentators such as the author of the blog “astickinthemud.com.” Phrases such as “God’s legs!” simply give evidence that this tension could not always be maintained coherently–i.e., sometimes the “low” went a bit too low.

Still, I don’t buy it. Numerous examples exist of the “high” and “low” existing in the same person throughout the medieval period, such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, Marguerite of Navarre, etc. So, we should entertain the idea that such phrases do not betray the medieval synthesis but rather give witness to it.*

Does God have a body?

In one very important sense obviously of course He does. In the incarnation Christ assumed the fullness of human nature. He did not simply “appear” as a man, He was a fully human man with a real human body. Christ remains both God and glorified Man. And being Man, this means that He has arms, legs, etc. just as we do, or if you prefer–just as we will in the resurrection.

In another sense God has no body. All orthodox theologians tell us that He is “simple” and not composed of parts. Having arms, legs, etc. seems to imply parts to God. But we must be careful with the meaning of “parts.” Divine simplicity at its root might mean something along the lines of, “God is not divided from Himself,” or perhaps that no separation exists between God and His attributes. The “justice” or “mercy” of God is simply God Himself. But I am no theologian and will leave off the exact meaning of “divine simplicity.”

Even before the Incarnation it seems that God has a “body.” He walks in the Garden, He has “eyes” (Ps. 119:18, etc.), and a “right hand” (Is. 41:10, etc.). “Ahh,” we say, “but that is anthropomorphic language.” Well, maybe not.**

We assume that the Bible speaks of God as having arms, eyes, etc. as a concession to our understanding and language. God obviously has no physical body of flesh and bone. In this sense certainly God is bodiless as are the angels. Orthodox testimony unanimously speaks to the immaterial nature of God, and the “simplicity” of God. God has no parts:

Far removed is the Father of all from those things which operate among men, the affections and passions. He is simple, not composed of parts, without structure, altogether like and equal to himself alone. He is all mind, all spirit, all thought, all intelligence, all reason.

St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.13.3

God, however, being without parts, is Father of the Son without division and without being acted upon. For neither is there an effluence from that which is incorporeal, nor is there anything flowering into him from without, as in the case of men. Being simple in nature, he is the Father of one only Son.

St. Athanasius, Letter on the Council of Nicea, 11

These are just two examples. Nothing in what follows is meant to contradict this in any way. But we should understand that God the Father begets a Son (eternally), and that our begetting is a shadow of His begetting, and not vice-versa. We are made in His image, not vice-versa. God’s eyes do not see like our eyes, our eyes see, however dimly, like His. But of course, God does not have squishy white things just below His forehead, rods, cones, and so on.

Perhaps, then, we can understand that the concept of “body” should not be understood in an anthropocentric way. We have, unfortunately, significantly bought into anthropocentric thought when it comes to the ancient and medieval world. The Greeks thought Zeus threw thunderbolts because they did not know about electricity, or Poseidon caused earthquakes because they had no knowledge of tectonic plates. We really should give the Greeks–and others in the past–more credit than that. So with bodies–maybe we should not think of bodies as an assemblage of physically moving parts, but as a “nexus of potentiality,” to quote Father Stephen de Young. God’s being contains all true potential. He sees but needs no organ called “eyes” to do so. He moves but has no need of physical legs to make that happen. We lack the “simplicity” of God and so we need bones, tissue, etc. to enact such impulses as the desire to move or perceive.

It seems to me that the medievals nearly always tended to think in a top-down manner. One sees this in their bestiary’s, where it is not so much the physical lion that is seen, but a kingly symbol. Their desire to know particulars of the lion were not as strong as their desire to “scale up” the lion and integrate with God’s existence. Perhaps they thought similarly about the body itself. In the 3rd century AD Origen wrote,

The apostle Paul teaches us that the invisible things of God may be known through the visible, and that which is not seen may be known by what is seen. The Earth contains patterns of the heavenly, so that we may rise from lower to higher things.

As a certain likeness of these, the Creator has given us a likeness of creatures on earth, by which the differences might be gathered and perceived. And perhaps just as God made man in His own image and likeness, so also did He make remaining creatures after certain other heavenly images as a likeness. And perhaps every single thing on earth has something of an image or likeness to heavenly things, to such a degree that even the grain of mustard, which is the smallest of seeds, may have something of an image and likeness in heaven.

Perhaps this can explain medieval explications such as “God’s legs!” I say perhaps–it may be that I read too much into this and have strayed too near the wind. But I will stretch things a bit and declare that rather than see such statements as departures from the piety of the age, we should see them as part of their intertwined view of the world that saw all categories of being flowing down from Heaven to Earth.

Dave

*I leave off the question of whether or not acclamations of this sort violate Christ’s words in Matthew 5 about oaths, etc. My answer is “no” or at least “not necessarily” but I give no defense for that here.

**In what follows I am enormously indebted to the 1/15/21 episode of the “Lord of Spirits” podcast from Ancient Faith Radio.

If you like it, why don’t you marry it?

by Dave Mathwin

Many of us I’m sure remember this elementary school taunt. Often you would be unknowingly baited in some way, i.e., “What do you think of Cheetos?” and then declare that you thoughts Cheetos were pretty great. The “Then why don’t you marry it?!” response is of course colossally dumb, but I admit that it often had its intended unsettling effect on me. Be careful of declaring that you liked something! I believe C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Four Loves that loving anything at all, even a plant or a sunset, opens oneself up to pain and loss.

Historians of a traditional mindset such as myself often express admiration for the past. We may even pine for a return of the past in some way, and this naturally opens us up to the old school taunt: if you like knights and cathedrals and gilds so much, why don’t you marry medieval society? It is easy to “date” any civilization and pick out just the things you like. But all of what you like, about medieval civilization, for example, also came with a near total lack of indoor plumbing, and no mouth wash either. You have to accept everything, and if you are not willing to do so, one’s admiration is stupid fancy at best, dangerous idealism at worst.

This charge has some of the same flaws as the old schoolyard taunt. The past surely can offer some salutary guidance even if reliving it remains obviously impossible. Aren’t we allowed to like things? But I acknowledge that one must not selectively pick, choose, and romanticize. One must “marry” the civilizations we study.

Books on the Middle Ages almost always fall into one of three camps:

  • Look at how dumb, superstitious, and oppressive they were. Aren’t you glad you didn’t live then?*
  • Look at how smart, chivalrous, beautiful they were. Don’t you wish you lived then?
  • Look at this culture. I examine it thoroughly, and discover that they did things, upon which I pronounce no judgments whatsoever.

Of the three, most fall into the first two, but I like the last the least. The first two types of authors at least strike me as human beings with something to say. Henry Charles Lea’s The Ordeal, written in an era when the progressive ascent of democratic modernism seemed the only future, falls into the first camp. He examines the medieval practice of trial by various ordeals to illuminate the progress we have made since then. He comes not to praise, but bury.

We can admire much about this book. It is not an uninformed screed, nor is it a hit-piece on the Middle Ages itself, for he mentions that trial by ordeal happened in many other ancient cultures. He has a lot of primary source texts and reports things with some air of detachment. If his overall point is clear, as I said earlier, at least he has a point. Like Chesterton, Lewis, and other of my literary heroes, I like the Middle Ages but need to contend with the fact that they did have trials by ordeal, and do I really want to substitute a jury for a hot piece of iron?

In what follows, then, I hope to fall into neither of the three aforementioned camps.

I appreciated that Lea took time to show that other cultures also used trial by ordeal, such as Hindu and Islamic civilizations, as well as many ancient cultures. Lea also used a lot of primary sources–indeed most of his book involves simply recounting the sources and commenting on them briefly. I also admired the fact that he included a section on the eucharist as an ordeal, for every other treatment I have seen ignores this aspect of medieval life, focusing on the more sensational ordeals by fire, water, and so on. Lea buries his treatment of this towards the back, but I feel this is where one should start if we want to have some understanding of the practices of ordeal in general.

If the central aspect of medieval life was the church, then the pearl within the oyster was the eucharist, where the faithful feed upon God Himself. Certainly I make no attempt here to develop any theology of the eucharist. But we may gain more insight if we pan out further to the last judgment. Many today have the idea that God’s final judgment involves Him declaring some fit and others unfit, and then banishing the unfit. Rather, the picture the early church gives us is that God’s love (and the presence of God is the love of God) both saves and condemns. God’s showers His love upon all, but His love is so strong that it resembles a refining fire. For some made strong, made holy, the love of God warms and comforts. For others who reject the love of God, God’s love leads to their further destruction, for the hate the love of God, and it burns them. As St. Isaac the Syrian stated,

. . .those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. It is not right to say that sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God . . . But love acts in two different ways, as suffering in the reproved, and as joy in the blessed.

An icon of the Last Judgment shows forth this same idea:

Salvation in a Christian context means that one is not so much declared righteous but made righteous through the grace of God–made able to receive the love of God as blessing and not as curse (I acknowledge that both terms have their place, however, in discussing the meaning of salvation).

So too communion, when even thought about for a moment, takes on monumental proportions. As Fr. Schmemman stated in his classic For the Life of the World, Fuerbach’s “you are what you eat,” quip, meant as a materialistic taunt, actually expresses a profound religious truth. To eat anything means to take the life of the fruit, meat, etc. into oneself. So too, in the eucharist God offers us the chance to take His life into our own. But this free gift does not come cheap. Scripture warns us about taking communion unworthily. We must realize that the presence of God can heal and transform or destroy us. As one prayer from perhaps the 8th century states,

Though I am hindered by so many and such great evils, I now add to them by approaching holy mysteries so heavenly and divine that even the angels desire to understand them. . . . Because of my unworthiness, I fear that, rather than receive divine enlightenment and a share of grace, I will be condemned . . . What am I to do? By partaking of the awesome mysteries, I subject myself to these and greater punishments. By abstaining from them, I shall fall into greater evils . . .

Lea’s work has many merits, but his leaving this background out of the discussion can lead one to a more superstitious understanding of the practice then is warranted. As an example we can take the ordeal of boiling water. Before the ordeal the water would be prayed over by a priest:

O creature of water, I adjure thee by the living God, by the holy God, who in the beginning separated thee from the dry land; I adjure thee by the living God who led thee from the fountain of Paradise, and in four rivers commanded thee to encompass the world; I adjure thee by Him who in Cana of Galilee by His will changed thee to wine, who trod on thee with His holy feet . . . water which washes away the dust and sins of the world, I adjure thee . . . to make manifest and bring to light all truth . . .

This prayer, quite similar to the prayers said for baptism, ask that God make the water a revealer of truth in the same way that water is used to fashion the world. That is–water must serve truth, which is a manifestation of God Himself, who is Truth.** The 3rd century bishop St. Gregory the Wonderworker stated, “The Lord, Who has come upon the Jordan River, through its streams transmitted sanctification to all streams (of water),” with Christ imparting to all water, “a sign of heavenly streams” of grace.”

For the early medievals, the same held true for the ordeal of fire/the hot iron. Prayers recalled how fire revealed much in Scripture–Fire found Sodom guilty but Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego innocent, and the burning bush of Horeb reveals God Himself. Again, I don’t think we should see the verdict’s rendered by the fire ordeal as merely forensic. The fire, the water (and other types of ordeals) manifest God to men. Some by their holiness and innocence are able to stand, some by their sin cannot. Lea writes with a seemingly exclusive legal bent, and so misses the theological import.

Lea stated that, “The History of Jurisprudence is the History of Civilization.” The sentiment has nobility but is misplaced. One must go deeper at least to culture, and preferably to religion, to see its influence on jurisprudence. This too means that he overemphasizes looking at the technical matters of the law and misses some important caveats to the use of ordeals, two of which are worth noting.

First–Lea gives the impression that the medievals used ordeals willy-nilly at the drop of a hat. Rather, I believe they used ordeals usually as a last resort when they exhausted other means of determining the truth of the matter. Perhaps it is easier for modern, depersonalized society to let matters such as hung-juries or mistrials stand. For those in a pre-modern, more personal and local context, having a unresolved verdict on a matter of great importance might put an unbearable strain on the community.

Second–Lea misses something of the “objectivity” of the ordeal. With no such measure justice might tend toward the “justice” of the strong and powerful. It was not always the case that ordeals vindicated the weak against the strong, but it seems to me that it happened much more often than Lea cared to admit or notice.^

Lea’s anti-religious cards come into full display with certain choice vocabulary words like “superstition,” and “fetish.” Indeed, when the Catholic church issued a general condemnation of ordeals in 1215, Lea does not see the triumph of a more reasonable religion, but a political power play. So Lea blames the church for fostering and encouraging ordeals (including a quip about how they preferred the ordeal of fire, no doubt for its impressive aesthetic qualities), then fails to credit them for dramatically curtailing the practice.

By now the reader may assume that in seeking to explain ordeals more fully and expressing guarded appreciation, I now should “marry” them. I object to such a burden placed on the historian. A practice may have been less onerous than some suppose, but that wouldn’t mean that the practice has no issues. No Church today (with the exception of the snake-handler cult), indeed no churchman I am aware of for basically the last 500 years has recommended the practice. I don’t feel the need to do so either.

Historians usually come in absolutist or relativist garb. The absolutist would say that, “If ordeals are wrong now, it was wrong then. The stories of people emerging unscathed from ordeals are either lies, exaggerations, or works of the devil, for no good can come from such an unjust practice.” A relativist might tell us that we should not judge the past–and indeed cannot judge anyone ever for anything. The historian should work for “understanding” and should avoid “judgment.”

One should use from both perspectives to a degree, but embracing either one in its totality leads to incoherence. Will Durant posed a generous means of interpreting people and cultures from the past. If a man shares the vices of the past, that was unfortunate, but does he have virtues that cut against the grain of his society? How does a culture compare relatively to other cultures of its time? I find the medievals did not so badly on the relative scale, but on the absolute scale, I would not want to bring them back.

I have the feeling that Lea would dismiss all of the accounts of God working through the ordeals as fabrications and propaganda. I will not so glibly dismiss numerous testimonies, and so that leaves me the position of believing that God used an imperfect and “arbitrary” means to achieve His ends. But this is hardly a problem–He has done this since the beginning of time.

The Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which attempted to ban trial by ordeal, gave as one reason the fact that ordeals “tested God.” That is, God pledges Himself to act in certain ways in the sacraments of the Church, but we cannot take this pledge and extrapolate it to any sticky situation we face. We have not the power to call God down and demand He reveal Himself when we are stuck. As C.S. Lewis famously noted regarding Aslan–“He is not a tame Lion.” It may be, then, that the story of trial by ordeal involves not so much the folly of men, but the humility of God, who accommodated Himself to our weakness patiently for a time.

Dave

*It is interesting that no one really writes about the ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Mayans, etc. in the way that we write about the Middle Ages.

**To his credit Lea cites several instances from saints lives of people putting their arms in boiling cauldrons, either to test obedience or another point of dispute, and emerging unscathed.

^As an example, see Eric Jager’s book The Last Duel, which chronicled the plight of a woman who accused another prominent nobleman of raping her. The issue could not be definitively resolved at trial, and her husband agreed to fight the accused to the death to determine the verdict. He won, and the accused was pronounced guilty.

We should pause for a moment and flip the script, putting jury trials under a touch of scrutiny. One can read online a plethora of articles about the fairness of juries, the random nature of verdicts, and so forth. Again, I would not suggest replacing jury trials with medieval ordeals, but for someone like Lea, who believed that ordeals were entirely arbitrary, modern evidence about juries does not give us as much separation from the past as we might wish. And yet, we too have to invest the jury trial with a kind of sacredness if we are to have any kind of society at all.

Most of the Time, the World is Flat

by Dave Mathwin

Our struggle with economic equality has many roots.  For starters, we have the dual affirmation of the values of liberty and equality, something Tocqueville noted as perhaps the key tension in modern democracies.  Modern democracies also elevate the status of the individual choice much more highly than traditional societies.   This honoring of the individual adds fuel to the free market, which ultimately seeks to commodify our choices.  We will likely see laws supporting “traditional” morality, such as those against gambling and certain kinds of drug use, get removed from the books.   I read with dismay this article, which indicates that Washington state now allows one to commodify the womb.

The multiplication of choices in the market dovetails with additional freedoms for the individual, and of course we generally want and desire such freedoms.  But we cannot have such freedoms and have economic equality at the same time.

The roots of this trend towards an absolute market of things, and even using oneself as an economic object, has origins that predate modern democracies.  To have an unending market of things we need to first have control over things, and to establish control the thing must be emptied of its own significance that we might fill it.  In his A Secular Age, Charles Taylor observes that it is the homogenization of time and space that makes the modern era (ca. 18th century-today) possible, for it allows us to give our own meanings to our experiences.  We can add that our perception of things as mere objects contributes to this trend.

Marcel Mauss’ book The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies poses many questions, such as, “Do books with absurdly boring titles, written by French sociologists, have an inverse or complimentary relationship with the inevitable nerdiness and pomposity of those that read such books?”  Sure, having this book in front of you at your local Starbucks will likely make you look like a prig, but for those willing to assume the risk, Mauss has some interesting nuggets to reveal about the economies of the ancient world.

The societies Mauss surveys have an economy, but not ones we might expect.  Some minor differences exist between the societies he examines across time and space, but in the main we can say that:

  • One can never truly own a thing, because the thing (be it a gold coin, a chair, a paddle) has an identity all its own.  It is its “own” (ha!) thing before it ever was “your” thing.
  • One should not keep anything for too long.  To do so would risk courting vengeance of a sort from thing itself (some societies had a more magical view of this, some abstracted it a bit more), which “longs” to go to someone else.  Our stuff wants to roam wild and free.
  • One could potentially amass even a great surplus of things, but in end, everyone needed to give things to others and keep the cycle of exchange moving.* This was not mere self-emptying or even generosity per se, because all acknowledged that receiving a gift came with reciprocal responsibilities and burdens.**  Failure to reciprocate courted disaster.

Of course these societies had a hierarchy, determined by birth or honorific achievements, or something else, but material wealth got passed around with much more fluidity in the ancient world than today.  We may admire this, but quite frankly, we could never replicate it.  For starters, we no longer see the world of things as full of meaning.  As Taylor observed, in a world of homogeneity only we ourselves can transmit this meaning to things.  Again, the concept of magic enters in with some of the early societies, but Mauss delineates between magic and some form of “embodied meaning.”  I did not find him terribly clear on this point, but it is a hard concept to describe (and for me to understand).  Something has to do with the idea that in the societies Mauss describes one more directly experiences the world.  This too is hard to describe, but I would venture that

  • Today we assume that a thing has no meaning in itself.  So its meaning must be mediated or transmitted by layers of society and the self.
  • Whereas “back then,” our experience of the world and the meaning of the world were one and the same.

We might catch a glimpse of this difference by looking a a different issue.

About four years ago Jonathan Pageau wrote a series of articles about ancient cosmology, and gave his first post the intriguing title, “Most of the Time the World is Flat.”  Pageau obviously does not mean to imply that the Earth is not really round, and of course the earth does not change its shape. Rather, he postulates a significant disconnect between what we believe the world/cosmos to actually be like and our everyday experience of it.  Science has not given us, and perhaps cannot give us, a workable, experiential model of the world.  So we live divided, having to import a meaning to our experience that has no solid reality behind it.  He writes,

I would like to propose something that might seem provocative at first, but will hopefully help people see the world with different eyes. There is a growing image on the recent horizon of human experience, it is an image of a family or a group of friends all next to each other at a table or in some other intimate setting, yet all interacting with tablets, ipods and smartphones as if the people around them didn’t exist. I would like to propose that this image, this reality is the final result of Galileo’s cosmological model. Some of you might think I am exaggerating, so I will need to explain.

The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses. Because technology is a supplementary thing, a garment of skin, something which we add to our natures in order to physically bolster them toward the material world, it therefore also leads further into the material world itself. (emphasis mine).

. . . modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in. When at the very core of vision, the shape of your cosmos leads you to believe that technology provides a perception which is more true, more real than your experience, more real than walking out of your house and looking at the sky, then the telescope and the microscope will soon be side by side with the camera, the screen and the accelerated time and space of the car window. The metal and glass frame will swallow us and human beings will lose themselves for their incapacity to fully inhabit the world.

Pageau knows that his desired task of reorienting our perspective will likely fail, with a gulf too broad for us to comprehend.  Still, I encourage you to read the whole article here and try for yourself.

It is the strict materialization of our things that creates the gulf between us and our things, which then means we cannot access the economies of the past.

If we wish to regain access to this world, we need a different conception of reality itself.  We should take care and not romanticize this version of society.  Mauss points out that violence existed in these societies–though probably not because of stark material inequality.  The societies he describes sometimes had huge surpluses, which they then sometimes consumed in spectacular fashion.  On the other hand, rarely did these societies have much of the technological innovation that we would appreciate.  But, if we wish to access this way of life, we need to stop treating the inanimate things we create and consume as mere means to an end.  Indeed, we often treat others as a means to an end as part of our contribution to a fallen world.  Unfortunately, as the new surrogacy law in Washington state reveals, we are now so completely alienated even from our selves that we will cannibalize our own bodies as a means to an end for ourselves–a bifurcation that puts us far from the world Mauss describes.

“Man is what he eats.”  Alexander Schemmann began his classic For the Life of the World quoting this epigram of Fuerbach.  One might assume that an Orthodox priest would disagree with this radically materialist statement, but Schemmann turns the quote on its head and argues that with this quote Fuerbach, “expressed the most religious idea of man.”  Mere matter does not exist, at least in the way we usually think.  Perhaps the place to begin is with the eucharist, for it is here that symbol and reality fuse together most profoundly, and it is here that the world’s transformation begins anew.

Dave

*This reminds a bit of the modern economic idea that money must circulate through society like blood must circulate through the body.  Was this Ricardo’s idea originally?

**Norbert Elias talks about aristocrats even as late as the 17th century in Spain who were expected to beggar themselves once every 10-15 years or so by hosting grand feasts for entire villages.  After which, the cycle would begin again.  This hosting/feasting was a crucial basis of their authority.

What comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him ‘unclean.'”

by Dave Mathwin

I am republishing this post as a companion piece to the review of Michael Psellus’ Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. The original post begins below . . .

*******

Proximate causes to events are always easier to see, and depending on one’s role in the sweep of history, more satisfying to the ego.  The rise of Nazism in Germany horrified the civilized world of Europe. “Sore losers after W.W. I,” many no doubt thought. But the Nazi’s drew strength in part from the centuries old feeling that they (Germany) were no longer going to be the doormat of Europe.  After all, from the time of the 30 Years War (1618-1648) most of Europe’s conflicts played themselves out on German soil.  England, France, and Russia had a part in creating the monster that nearly destroyed them. The Jews of Jesus’ day faced a variety of problems, and the Romans could hypothetically be blamed for nearly all of them.  “It’s their fault that we have no nation, freedom, etc. etc.”  But Jesus never let His fellow Jews sink to this attitude.  His famous words in Matthew 15:11,

It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.

applied directly to the spiritual leaders of the time, but have broader application.  Speaking as one of God’s prophets, he speaks as the prophets do.  “Your problems are your own faults.  Don’t project blame elsewhere.” In the fourth volume of his A Study of History Toynbee applies this principle in a fascinating way regarding the Byzantine Empire. A look at Byzantium’s history that hit only the highlights would likely make a long jump from Justinian over to the Crusades, which would give the impression of an embattled area of Christendom making a desperate stand against the rise of Islam.  The political and military failure of the Crusades (to say nothing of the moral failures on all sides) end up sealing their fate, and the Moslems finish them off in 1453 when Constantinople falls.  Thus, they could easily say that the fell due to Islamic aggression.  It’s “their” fault. But this perspective ignores what happened in the intermittent period between these bookmark events, and especially ignores the Byzantine’s war with Bulgaria from A.D. 977-1018, which took place long before the Seljuk Turks posed any real threat to the Byzantines (those who read the review of “Fourteen Byzantine Rulers will note that this was during the reign of Basil II). A look at the map just before the conflict reveals the situation, with the Byzantines in Pink and Bulgaria in green. Byzantium ca. 950 ADIn fairness to the Byzantines, the Kingdom of Bulgaria represented a political division from the old Roman empire, and since the Byzantines had always seen themselves as “Roman,” they likely felt the duty of reclaiming lost territory.  It also appears that the Bulgarians may have initiated conflict in 700’s-800’s A.D., and perhaps the Byzantines this time thought of payback. But this political division ran only skin deep.  Both kingdoms had unity on a deeper level, as both committed themselves to Christianity, but more specifically, to the distinctive “Eastern Orthodox” brand of Christianity prevalent in Eastern Europe at the time.  Whatever the Byzantines might gain from such a conflict, an inevitable cost on the “back end” would wait them for them as in all civil wars.  If they could forego the political division, they would still likely have had unity against a common foe. Still, as a result of the war, the map changed and their territory increased. . . Byzantine Empire 1000-1100 The map also shows, however, that their gains in a long, desperate conflict between evenly matched foes came in part by ignoring the growing threat to the east.  By gaining in the west they ignored Anatolia and the growing power of an enemy with whom their differences were more fundamental. The map doesn’t show the social strain placed on Byzantium as a result of the war.  Emperor Basil the Bulgar Killer gained glory in war, but ignored the growing strife of his subjects in agricultural areas of Anatolia, a product of what  Toynbee calls, “their profound political distress and economic discontent, too frequent to be dismissed as the work of ambitious or unruly individuals.”  What should have been the core of Byzantium’s strength was in fact rotten with decay, ready to fall away at a mere touch to the Turks. Though their territory had increased since the 700’s, their burden of defense had increased, and not just in terms of territory.  They also had to care for more people, and thus had even reason to distract themselves from the social problems in Anatolia. The maps tell the rest of the story. . . 1025 A.D. Byzantium 1355 A.D.: Bulgaria is back, showing that their previous conquest could not hold amidst growing internal social strife.  All of that effort did nothing for them in the long run. And then, the end of it all, proving Matthew 15:11 true, though it took centuries for it to apply in the Byzantine case. Ottoman Empire

A Flip of the Script

by Dave Mathwin

A few days ago I came across the trailer for a mini-series on Amazon called Redbad, a harbinger of Europe’s (and perhaps ours as well) cultural moment. The movie involves the advancement of Christianity into a pagan land. The story proceeds from the pagans’ perspective. A few things immediately stand out:

  • The cross is associated not with sacrificial love, but with a ‘dark god’ who presumably loves punishment, an enormous ‘flip’ of its symbolic meaning for the last two millennia.
  • The series depicts Christians as intolerant bigots, the pagans as allowing something akin to freedom of conscience.
  • The Christians are usually filmed amidst darkness and smoke. Scenes with pagans alone seem to give them brighter light.

A few comments . . .

  • I would not say that Charlemagne allowed for freedom of conscience, but the idea that the pagans did . . . well–no one practiced this in the 8th century.
  • Charlemagne’s reign had plenty of messiness. But ‘messiness’ reigned in the West politically more or less since the time of Roman emperor Septimus Severus ca. 200 A.D. What historians should look for, as Will Durant suggested, was not how particular people shared in the vices of their time, but whether or not they swam against the current in any way with their virtues. With this standard, the cultural impact of the “Carolingian Renaissance” gleams brightly. As Kenneth Clark stated, paraphrasing Ruskin, “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their words, the book of their deeds, and the book of their art.” If we think, like Clark, that the last is the most trustworthy, Charlemagne’s reign comes off rather well.

A few examples:

  • The invention of a beautiful script (the Carolingian).
  • The creation of books, and the elevation of books as highly prized articles (studding the cover with jewels couldn’t make their value more obvious to their contemporaries).
  • Architectural innovations. Charlemagne put of the building talent of his empire not into palaces and castles, but the church at Aachen:

None of these things belong to pagan achievement.

One should not criticize Redbad for ‘historical inaccuracy’ per se. The medium of film works differently and tells stories differently. “Accuracy” is not my real concern. The mythos surrounding Charlemagne in the centuries after his death lacked “accuracy” in the strict sense of the word, just as any reporting or retelling of any event lacks “accuracy.” We edit and shape all the time, this is how our brain works as well as our souls. The problem with Redbad comes from the replacement of the standard Christian mythos entirely, and inventing another out of whole cloth, a perverse parody of creation ‘ex nihilo.’ As we see from the “book of their art,” the mythos surrounding Charlemagne has basis in fact.

Per Fexneld

When seeing a book titled, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in the 19th Century, one should proceed with caution. The book could be written by a crazy feminist, or a crazy anti-feminist. The book could hardly be a book at all, and instead a mere rant. But this book stands as a work of scholarship, carefully (mostly too carefully) written with extensive bibliography and footnotes. The author, Per Fexneld, teaches at the University of Stockholm and seems an ordinary professorial sort, with perhaps a small chip on his shoulder. Digging a bit further, you see that he intends not necessarily to praise or condemn with what he finds, but merely to put the facts before the dear reader. I will usually at least pick up books with bold titles like these, merely out of curiosity and admiration for the sense of dash the writer displays.*

I kept reading the book because Fexneld faithfully executes his task of providing copious information, albeit at arms length from the material. But his perspective seems trustworthy because of this distance. He clearly has no love for Christianity and has much sympathy with women of the 19th century. He never identifies as a “Satanist” himself but seems to value, or at least understand, the role the idea of Satan plays in transgressing norms for the sake of liberation as it relates to feminism.

A few things I did not like:

  • As an Orthodox Christian, naturally I would be sensitive as to how Fexneld uses ancient Christian sources. I found to my chagrin that when discussing them, he uses secondary sources rather than direct quotes from the primary texts. I sense that these secondary sources shaped his opinions of the early fathers, not reading the primary texts directly. Despite this, he treats early Christian commentators mostly with fairness, but he could have done much better than this for what aims to be a serious scholarly study. My sense is that he cherrypicked what early Christian witnesses said about women, and to his credit, he partially admits this at least one point.
  • Fexneld takes his place among the many (mostly European? it seems to me) “historians” that don’t write history at all, but reference books. He has good information, but writes with such obviously posed dry detachment that his style could light a fire on a wet day. Where are the Abbot Suger’s, the Thomas Carlyle’s? Alas, gone are the poet historians from the world.
  • The “reference book” feel means that he tries hard not let the reader in on how one should interpret his information. Should we denounce the “satanic” feminists? Should we praise them? Or should we merely observe and think nothing about these feminists, besides concluding that a=a?

But in the end I have to confess that he created an effective and interesting reference book. My frustration above stems from the fact that he has talent that he holds back through fear or misperceptions regarding his chosen profession. If you want to do research, well and good. If you want to write, at least make an attempt at poetry that seeks meaning and synthesis.

To the thrust of his work, then . . .

With copious notes and numerous examples, Fexneld amply shows a “Satanic” strain that ran through many early feminists. He distinguishes full blown “Satanists” (of which there were a few) from those that merely used Satanic tropes (the majority of his examples). With different particular manifestations, these women

  • Built upon Romantic ideas from Byron and Shelley that recast Satan as a tragic hero of the Biblical narrative. He attempted to bring knowledge and liberation, and so on.
  • Recast Eve as the mankind’s savior, of sorts, a figure akin to Prometheus. She boldly went where Adam refused to go and paid the price, but she gave mankind knowledge and self-awareness.
  • Thus, for these women, feminism represented a real social and theological revolution, not just icing on a semi-Christian foundation. They wanted an overthrow of the Christian narrative and the patriarchy which it established. To do so, it simultaneously exalted Eve, Satan, and the fall itself.

The multitude of examples is the strength of the book, but Fexneld throws them together in ‘one after another’ fashion. Worse, one cannot sense if any one example or group of examples accurately embodies or represents the whole. He very carefully hedges many of his statements. This caution has its place in parts, but not for the whole. When writing a book like this you have to actually say something. To mitigate this, the breadth of his treatment touches on

  • The rise of the occult in the period
  • The focus from the pre-Raphaelites on feminine figures from classical cultures, “strange” women, and even Lillith, Adam’s first wife in certain Jewish texts.
  • How popular literature and art veered into occult themes with the thinnest Christian veneer, with significant attacks on “Christian patriarchy” hidden below the surface.
  • The popularity of certain occult female writers like Mary McClane and Sylvia Townsend
  • The connection of feminist social inversion to sexual inversion (lesbianism).
  • The rise of women depicted as Satan (in a positive sense) or at least, womanly figures depicted as Satan.
  • The publication of The Woman’s Bible which inverted the basic biblical narrative, praising Eve, etc.

. . . and other things. One gets the sense of a tidal wave of either direct, or mostly indirect, Satanism flooding the feminist movement from 1880-1920. But the central question–was 1st wave feminism driven primarily by “Satanism” or not? I have the feeling Fexneld would recoil at the thought of the volumes of his research intended to answer that question one way or the other. No doubt he would see such a commitment as a grave faux pas.

Let us deal with this crucial question which Fexneld leaves untouched.

First, the feminist movement obviously challenged and successfully upended certain elements of society. Certainly Satan, among other things, sought to upend the order God established in creation. So perhaps feminist women found themselves naturally drawn to satanic symbols or Satan himself. But, not all orders should stay in place. Scripture has numerous examples of the established order needing “flipped” or inverted to attain proper wholeness again. David, the youngest son of Jesse and a shepherd, will overthrow Saul, the “demonic” king who consulted with witches. Herod, for example, rightly feared that Christ would give him a run for his money.

So, second . . . was the feminist movement a proper or improper inversion? I don’t think we should answer this question based on the rote numbers of “satanic” vs. non-satanic feminists. I think the question has its roots in the nature of the inversion. If the inversion was proper, then we can relegate the trends Fexneld observes to the fringe. If improper, then we can say that even the “good” feminists participated in something wrong.

This is a very tricky question, and I can see why Fexneld failed to tackle it. But how can we truly avoid it? I’m sure that Fexneld has an answer for this conundrum somewhere in his own mind, or at least I hope he has answered it. I cannot claim to know enough to answer it definitively. I will try a pass at it, however–why not?

I begin with the obvious statement that calling upon Satan in reality or in tropes, for any cause, will ultimately destroy you, just as the flood and chaos will destroy anyone.

Not surprisingly, the feminist movements occurred within democratic societies. One can see democracy itself as a kind of inversion against traditional monarchy, replacing a “top down” political order with one from the “bottom up.” Just like Saturn eating his children in a fruitless attempt to stop the slippery slope of revolution, so too the feminist movement seems like an inevitable byproduct of democracy itself–the revolt of “Earth” against “Heaven.” Feminist detractors could not prevent this ‘revolt’ even as they might praise and affirm a democratic way of life.

Were Victorian era women “oppressed” in some sense of the word? If we look at women’s fashion as a piece of evidence, we see that–whether or not women created/embraced these fashions, their movement, the way for them to show themselves to the world, was certainly restricted–especially if we accept Fexneld’s “proto-feminists” from the mid-19th century starting the modern feminist movement. This may shed light on their overall place in society. But the place of women in Victorian society is something which I know too little about to comment on.

I suspect that the “oppression” of women lacked the severity that some claimed, but disconnects from equality are hard to bear within a democracy. I withhold sympathy from many of Fexneld’s female examples, but would extend it to more moderate feminists.

The age old problem of revolutions has always been, however, where and when do they stop?

Obviously, I oppose the rebellion against Christianity that at least some feminists then and now espouse, on historical as well as religious grounds. I trust my religious objections are obvious. As to the historical, we can briefly consider Regine Pernoud’s Women in the Days of Cathedrals, which shows us an era where

  • The earliest medieval treatise on education was written by a woman
  • We see the invention of romantic love (at least as an accepted part of general society)
  • Women regularly practiced medicine
  • Women in monastic orders could get more or less the same education men in the church received

In short, the status of women at the height of medievalism–a patriarchal society in most respects–far surpassed that of any pagan society. Pernoud suggests, however, that the Renaissance and subsequent ages introduced more Roman and classical pagan concepts of property and ownership. Possibly this did have an impact on women’s status in the Renaissance and future centuries.

Of course, one cannot construct a society entirely of “Heaven” anymore than entirely out of “Earth.” Mankind itself is both “heavenly” and “earthly,” (just as mankind is not just men or just women) made from the dust of the earth and the spirit from above. Strikingly, many of the cathedrals in the “Age of Cathedrals” reference by Pernoud were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, including Chartes, Notre Dame, Burgos, and Cologne, just to name a few. Here, I am convinced, lies the heart of the matter Fexneld misses entirely. Yes, Christianity is obviously patriarchal. We pray to our Father in Heaven. But Christians made the “Woman” (John 2:24, 19:26) the representative of Creation itself. On the one hand, Mary flips the hierarchy. As a young girl, she resided in the Holy of Holies–unheard of within Judaism. This seems a radical inversion. But it is her assent to God “flips” everything– she sets what was askew right again, the harm of Eve healed.** But what Mary put back in place is not a revolutionary society but a the right hierarchy, the reign of the true king–the subject of her Magnificat.

A blessed Advent to all.

*Some of Fexneld’s other work includes a published article: “Bleed for the Devil: Self-injury as Transgressive Practice in Contemporary Satanism, and the Re-enchantment of Late Modernity.” Clearly he has Satan on the brain. As an aside, should I ever become President my first executive order would ban all titles that that have something short and arresting to start, and then ruin it with a long and boring subtitle.

**Many of the fathers from St. Justin Martyr (ca. AD 150) onward develop the Eve-Mary parallel. Both are approached by an angel, and both assent to the angel, but it is Mary who in questioning Gabriel shows wisdom–Eve should have questioned the serpent. Eve’s pride humbles her, whereas Mary’s humility exalts her to the highest place.

9th/10th Grade: Matter and Spirit in the Dark Ages

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

After our Rome unit we transition out of Roman civilization into the medieval world.  This transition will involve rebuilding civilization along a whole new foundation with a different view of reality and consequently, society.  Early next week we will examine the question of the relationship between the physical and spiritual reality, and to what extent (if any) they can be separated.

Can a physical thing be a spiritual thing at the same time?  Or vice-versa?

The modern west tends to view reality in binary form.  We have a spiritual world and a physical world and for the most part the two live separately and do not mingle.  But the medievals would answer the above question affirmatively, and for them the divide between the physical and spiritual had much less rigid separation.

As an entry point into their mindset, we might think of mankind itself.  We are physical and spiritual beings.  Our bodies and souls have a mutual relationship.  We cannot separate them, just as we cannot extract the sugar from the eggs in a cake mix once we mix them together.  We exist as physical and spiritual beings simultaneously.

Medieval people applied this concept to many other areas of theology and life in general.  The elements in the eucharist can be both the body and blood of Christ and bread and wine at the same time.  Certain physical places were holy and important to see on pilgrimages, which were spiritual journeys often undertaken barefoot.  God’s presence hallowed certain physical objects, and God used them in various ways.  The medievals called them relics, and some Biblical examples of this might be Moses’ staff, the cloaks of Elijah and Jesus, and Paul’s handkerchief (Acts 19:12).  The saints don’t reside “out there” so much as they dwell in the here and now as a cloud of witnesses.  The presence of God and the saints link Heaven and Earth and we should (according to early Church doctrine and practice) ask the saints to intercede for us in prayer, just as we ask those on Earth to pray for us.

These theological ideas did not stay purely in the spiritual life of Christians, but impacted the values and shape of society in unique ways.  As we might expect these theological ideas took some time to trickle down into society itself, but eventually we will see their impact when we examine feudalism.

This week we also looked at the chaos in Europe after Rome’s fall.  As the only transnational organized group, the Church inevitably ended up bearing the brunt of the load in bringing about the return of civilization.  At first glance, the proliferation of monasteries has little to do with the recovery of civilization.  But monasteries performed at least 3 crucial functions to aid civilization:

1. Geographical Stability

As this map indicates,

the 5th and 6th centuries saw a great deal of chaos.  Semi-nomadic barbarian tribes wandered and fought as they went.  At bare minimum, civilization needs a defined location upon which to build.  Monasteries provided that, not only be dedicating themselves to prayer, but also to agriculture.  Farmers have to stay put and establish roots to successfully grow crops.

2. Refugees

With barbarians on the move many lost their homes and families.  Monasteries often served as places of refuge to care for, or possibly even educate, thousands of unfortunates.

3. Manuscripts

Many of you, like me, grew up in a time when parents said something akin to, “If we ever have a fire the house, the first and only thing to grab is the photo album.”  As a kid, this never made sense to me.  How about grabbing the tv?  But my parents had the right idea.  Part of our identity means having a connection to the past and those around us.  We don’t just exist as individuals in the ‘now,’ we know who we are based at least in part on our connection to others.

Monks copied many manuscripts such as the Bible and Church fathers, but also other Latin texts from Rome’s past.  We owe a great deal of our ancient Latin literature today to monks from the 6th-10th centuries preserving and copying them.  These books, I think, helped enhance their collective cultural memories.  It helped them connect to a past, reminding them that not all was lost.

The prevalence of monasteries raises the question of what exactly civilizations build upon.  Many critics of the Church accused Christians of “dropping out” by going to monasteries.  This withdrawal showed a heart that did not care.

In his monumental work, The City of God, St. Augustine asks his audience what exactly makes civilization work (among other topics).  It is not, he argues, a good economy, a powerful military, or even a workable political system.  What makes civilization tick is an established pattern of interacting with others both within and without one’s borders.  These interactions get formed from our values, and our values come from what we worship.

Perhaps monasteries can be viewed as a civilizational act of faith, akin to tithing.  They declare that we put our roots in the worship of God, in prayer and in praise, and not in our economy, our military, etc.  Only after recognizing the source of all things can things be properly enjoyed and properly used.  Rome, like nearly every other civilization, mistakenly believed that enough power, enough effort, enough careful application of resources, could hold things together.  They put the cart before the horse.

Command Performance

by Dave Mathwin

The poor often are more conservative than the rich, at least in certain respects. If we define “conservative” only in terms of policy, this distinction won’t apply. But, if we think of “conservative” in the traditional sense of opposition to change, the label fits more aptly. Perhaps this is because the rich can navigate change much more easily than others. The wealthy can create their place in society, but the poor rely on tradition, for lack of a better word, to give them a coherent identity.

Those “higher” than the lower classes have always exercised authority in every age, and this in itself I have no problem with. If one believes, as I do, that the world manifests itself in a hierarchical way, then we should adapt ourselves into this pattern. But how one exercises authority proves one’s fitness to rule. The patterns in creation reveal a liturgy, of sorts, of experience, and those who rule should abide by this pattern.

All of this may sound rather esoteric, and indeed I lack the language for a full and general explanation. But I found a fascinating and provoking example of this principle in Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, by Greg Dening. The mutiny on the “Bounty” has inspired at least 3 movies and a variety of interpretations as to why it happened. Analysis of the event often focus on the strictly legal aspects of the case–was Captain Bligh too severe or not, and so on. Others focus on the psychological aspects of Bligh and Fletcher Christian, the first-mate who led the mutiny. Dening examines another field of inquiry entirely. He looks beyond the strictly legal and and avoids undue psychological guesswork, focusing not on the technical limits of Bligh’s authority, but how he used his authority.

Some look for the cause of mutiny in leaving the pleasurable confines of Tahiti for a long voyage home. We all have experienced relaxing after a strain, and how hard it can be to resume the task. But extant diaries and testimony shows that the sailors had no deep objections to leaving Tahiti. Many talked of looking forward to getting back home to England.

Other theories (and movies) imagine Bligh a harsh commander, a severe disciplinarian. Sailing into the Pacific meant a very long journey into hostile territory. We need no imagination to understand the need for order, though we may blanch at flogging as the most typical punishment.* But of the captains who sailed into the Pacific in Bligh’s era, Bligh punished less than most other captains, and far less than some. From ca. 1760-1800 on Pacific voyages, Dening estimates that all told, about 21% of sailors received flogging punishments.* Captain Vancouver flogged about 45% of his sailors during his time in command and never faced mutiny. Bligh, on the Bounty voyage and other subsequent journeys, flogged between 8-9% of his men. We must throw out the idea of tyranny and severity as the explanation of the mutiny.

Flogging seems unnaturally harsh to us for minor offenses, yet Dening points out the sailors accepted it without much fuss. This can be ascribed to their innate conservatism, but also to other factors. Flogging was short in duration and then the matter was over and settled. Flogging was the common lot of sailors, something they could bond over. Thus, flogging did not single anyone out or humiliate them. Legal formality, and especially tradition, gave sailors very clear boundaries with how and when they could face the punishment. Dening writes, “Sailors liked that flogging left no debt. Those punishments that sought to leave a mark on the sailors soul rather than his body–leg irons, mockery, badges of guilt–required a dangerous sort of theater.”

It is in this concept of “Theater” that Dening finds his thesis.

A kind of “Theater” exists in teaching, somewhat akin to stand-up comedy. In a sense the teacher puts on a performance–think of a 1st grade teacher doing different voices in a story they read. But it also holds true for teaching older students. The way one presents their material, their voice inflections, their pauses, etc., and then the punchline, i.e., the king died, or the molecules fizzle in the cup, and so on. A classroom, like a theater or a ship at sea, functions as a separate kind of liturgical space. Good teachers know how to use that space well for their purposes.

Dening points out that the very design of the Bounty meant that navigating the space of the ship presented challenges to Bligh, to which he seemed wholly unaware. The main purpose of the Bounty’s voyage involved transplanting breadfruit from Tahiti, which the British navy wanted to transplant to the Caribbean as food for native/slave workers. Bringing back cargo that would need space, light, and water meant redesigning the ship to accommodate their presence. That in turn meant less space for the crew. Bligh himself accepted less space than a captain would normally have for his cabin. That likely was a good move on his part, but the meaning of space in cabins and the all important quarterdeck (the ship’s “throne” so to speak) was altered, which altered the meaning of his command. Bligh saw himself as a captain imbued with Enlightenment values. He saw great scientific purpose in the voyage. He envisioned the Bounty “making history” and made various speeches to the crew to that effect. One can imagine that the average “salty” sailor would hardly see things that way. The breadfruits, “stupid plants,” of all things, stole their space, their water, and their captain’s kind attention. They would have probably preferred Bligh’s attention directed towards a mistress from Tahiti. It would have been more relatable, more human, and made him seem less of a calculator.

Bligh also acted as his own Purser for the voyage (a Purser kept charge of accounts for the Navy). This meant he oversaw the profitability of the voyage. Nobody on board likes the inevitably penny-pinching purser, and the Captain might at times play against the purser to boost his standing with the crew, an important fact if we realize that the crew would care little for how much money the voyage made. Every time that Bligh cut rations or cut corners, no matter his real intent, meant that the crew could suspect that he was shorting them to fill his own pockets. Indeed, Bligh had taken much less than his usual fee to captain the voyage, believing in the trip’s historic importance and opportunities it would afford him in the future. The fact that none of the rest of the crew shared in his convictions or cared about his “sacrifices” alienated Bligh psychologically from his men. Bligh in turn took their lack of zeal personally.

Taking things personally is one of the cardinal sins a teacher can commit. As for myself, I liked history classes in high school and college but not the science, math, or Spanish classes, and it was nothing personal. Every teacher thinks their subject the most important and wants everyone should love it as they do. Those that verbalize this thought out loud will sound bonkers to students. Students just want to get through the day–they owe you nothing, they owe “history” nothing. Likewise the best classroom discipline involves minimal talking and no lectures, i.e., “You did ‘x,’ the consequence is ‘y,'” end of story. Bligh had the habit of haranguing the crew for their lack of appreciation of his efforts on their behalf, delivering maudlin sermons instead of direct, quick punishments. In an illuminating section, Dening compares the discipline of harsher captains who flogged more than Bligh. “Harsher” captains speechified much less, and this made their discipline much less personal.

Dening sees Bligh making mistakes even when sincerely trying to be good to the crew. The sailors had a hazing ritual of sorts known as “Dunking,” which involved having a rope tied to your leg and being lowered overboard under the water. Many sailors could not swim, but even so, if the rope ever came loose, even a swimmer might drown, for the boat might not be able to turn around in time. Bligh saw this ritual as exploitative and put a stop to it, even increasing the rations of rum to make up the loss of dunking. Bligh no doubt saw himself as stamping out barbarism on behalf of the “little guy” below deck. Dening hints strongly that the men would have seen it very differently:**

  • To start, “dunking” was the province of the men below deck. In stopping the ritual, Bligh intruded on their space. In fact, the sailors had their own economy regarding the practice, with grog rations as the currency.
  • On every voyage, the officers had a chance to further their careers and gain honor. This ritual, though dangerous, was how ‘enlisted men’ could obtain honor among each other. Bligh thus appeared no doubt to steal honor from them, possibly so he could monopolize it for himself–akin perhaps to Achilles’ reaction to Agamemnon’s actions at the beginning of The Iliad.

Bligh’s attempts to appear benevolent surely fell flat. Sailors would have resented his intrusion into space generally reserved for them alone. A man who punished mercilessly might guess that he risked the affections of his men. Bligh’s problem involved him trampling on his men’s good will while deluding himself that he acted as their benefactor. No wonder the mutiny struck him with complete surprise.

Some might to compare Bligh to President Trump, but that comparison fails–except perhaps that neither one seemed to understand that the main objection to their power came not from what they did but how and when they did it.

Bligh represents the Enlightenment intellectual entrepreneur type. He had outstanding personal ability in navigation, and was a self-made man in many ways. One might have thought the common sailor would take to him.

Not so. Interestingly enough, Dening cites data that shows that sailors in fact preferred officers from the officer class and not those that rose through the ranks. Again, this hints at the need in such close personal quarters aboard ship to respect liturgical boundaries.

Not being from the traditional officer class, and as a man of the Enlightenment, Bligh would naturally have aversion to the varieties of arcane naval tradition. But on a long and dangerous voyage, the only shelter from chaos would be the ship itself and the world it represented. As such, the routine, the manners, etc. would have to be ironclad to give a sense of safety and permanence. When Bligh messed with that, he altered the sailors sense of place, stability and security. He messed with their bearings, so to speak. The strain would be psychological, not physical. Perhaps this accounts for 1st Officer Fletcher Christian’s comment to Bligh during the mutiny: “I am in hell.”

Good teachers, like good statesman (or sea captains) understand that the world reveals itself not fundamentally in laws but in relationships. The longer the friendship, the greater the liturgy of that relationship, due to all of the accumulated experiences. Bligh’s “bad language” to which the title alludes were not the actual words he spoke. He used words that any other sea captain would have spoken, but used them in the wrong way at the wrong time and place. The weirder the situation, such as being on wooden boards in the middle of the largest ocean on Earth, the tighter the reins we need on the liturgy of the existing relationships. Such mysteries are felt more than explained. Dening might not have pure logic on the side of his argument, but he does call to mind something we’ve all experienced, and that makes his book a delight.

Dave

*I should note that Dening cites another study that puts the average much lower–at around 10% instead of 21%. The two studies count differently, but even this alternate view does no damage to understanding Bligh’s so-called ‘severity.’

**I have seen two movie versions of the Bounty mutiny, the version from the 1960’s with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando, and the one from the 1980’s with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. The Hopkins/Gibson version comes closer in most respects to what Dening presents. It includes a dunking scene and Hopkins does very well in expressing barely restrained disapproval.

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

by Dave Mathwin

Some paint the Middle Ages as a period of narrow intolerance.  I’ve said enough in other posts not to address that directly here, but in short, that view has little support in the lives or sources of the time.  We see in Beowulf, for example an appreciation for the pagan past and an understanding of the difficulties in trying to make sense of the Christian faith in light of their past, not a “narrow intolerance.”

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki can’t quite equal the power and style of Beowulf, but it has many of its outstanding 71ebyqgznclqualities, as well as a similar task.  The author retells a famous Norse story to a newly Christian Norse audience.  At various points he likely altered the story slightly to make certain theological points.  One such instance caught my attention.

At the end of the story our hero returns triumphant from defeating the villain.  Before setting out on his expedition, he took advice from a seemingly simple farmer and reduced his army (in similar fashion to Gideon in the book of Judges).  After victory he marches back and sees the same farmer again.  They greet each other warmly, after which the farmer offers more help.

This time King Hrolf refuses.  It’s not immediately clear why.

As they take their leave Hrolf declares that the farmer was none other than the Norse god Odin in disguise.  He had to refuse his help.  He would not take advice from a pagan god though all knew that Odin brought success to those who honored him.

In refusing Odin’s help, he refused “Victory.”  The consequences of this decision for him and his kingdom follow predictably.  Hrolf Kraki loses everything by the end.  But the author clearly believes he should indeed have preferred failure to success at the price of aid from a pagan god.

In an article entitled “No Enduring City,” author David Bentley Hart muses on the success of Christians and their involvement in politics.  He begins citing two events in medieval Europe.  He writes,

The first occurred on August 25, 1256, when the  podest  and  capitano del popolo of ­Bologna summoned the citizens of the  comune to the Piazza Maggiore in order to announce the abolition of all bonded servitude within the city’s civil and ­diocesan jurisdictions. Some 5,855 serfs were redeemed from their  signori—who were remunerated out of the communal treasury at a total price of 54,014 lire—then placed under ecclesiastical authority, and then granted their liberty.

An irrevocable abolition of serfdom in Bologna was then issued in a short text known as the  Liber Paradisus, in which was indited the name of every emancipated serf. Historians have occasionally ­spe­culated on the economic benefits that Bologna may have reaped from this decision—for one thing, freedmen were eligible to pay taxes—but the actual cost of the manumission, immediate and deferred, was so exorbitant that it is rather difficult to see how the municipal administration could have calculated any plausible profit from its actions.

Perhaps, then, one should take seriously the motives the  Liber Paradisus itself actually adduces: “Paradisum voluptatis plantavit dominus Deus omnipotens a principio,” it begins,“in quo posuit hominem, quem formaverat, et ipsius corpus ornavit veste candenti, sibi donans perfectissimam et perpetuam libertatem”: “In the beginning, the Lord God Almighty planted a paradise of delight, in which he placed man, whom he had formed, and whose body he had adorned with the garb of radiance [a shining raiment], endowing him with perfect and perpetual freedom.” It was only by sinning, the argument proceeds, that humanity bound itself in servitude to corruption; God in his mercy, however, sent his Son into the world to break the bonds that hold humanity in thrall, that by Christ’s own dignity all of us should have our natural liberty restored. Thus all persons currently bound in servitude by human law should have their proper freedom granted them, for they along with all the rest of us belong to a single  massa libertatis wherein now not so much as a single  modicum fermentum of servitude can be tolerated, lest it corrupt the whole.

Hart continues . . .

The second episode, however, which to our sensibilities might seem the more outlandish of the two, was for its time far and away the more ordinary. Some twelve to fifteen years after the promulgation of the  Liber Paradisus (the date cannot be more precisely determined than that), Thomas Aquinas put the finishing touches on that famous (or infamous) passage in the  Summa Theologiae  where he defends the practice of executing heretics. The argument he laid out there was quite a simple one, consisting of only two points, both of which he considered more or less incontestable. First, as regards the heretics themselves, their sin by itself warrants both excommunication and death. Second, as regards the Church, the graver evil of heresy is that it corrupts the faith, which gives life to the soul; and so, if we execute forgers for merely corrupting our currency, which can sustain only temporal life, how much more justly may we deal with convicted heretics not only by excommunicating them, but by putting them to death as well.

Of course, Thomas adds, out of her mercy towards each man who has strayed, the Church hesitates to pronounce a final condemnation until “the first and second admonition” have both failed; but then, if the heretic remains obstinate, “the Church, no longer hoping for his conversion, turns itself to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him over to the secular tribunal so that the latter might remove him from the world by death.” Nor can ecclesial compassion extend any further than this. Recidivism, for instance, even of the most transient kind, is unpardonable. Says Thomas, “At God’s tribunal, all who return are always received, because God is a searcher of hearts, and knows those who return in sincerity. But the Church cannot imitate God in this, for she presumes that those who relapse after being once received are insincere when they return; so she does not obstruct their path to salvation, but neither does she shield them from the sentence of death.”

Both examples have their counterpoints.  Some rather cynically suggest that the economic motive of creating more taxpayers formed the real motivation behind freeing the serfs.  Others point out, that, whatever we may think of Thomas’ counsel, he sought to save souls and not to kill people.  It is easy to cherry-pick the weaknesses of any man or any civilization.

Still, however we slice it, we cannot avoid a contradiction.

Hart suggests that Christian involvement in politics always seems to go south at some point.  On the one hand, when Christians have the power to do good, they can accomplish good things in a unique and lasting way.  On the other, such power either corrupts or puts one in an awkward enough position where a compromise of gospel ethics becomes inevitable.  We can cite numerous examples of the good and the bad.  Betrayals of the gospel ethic may not even be anyone’s “fault,” per se–it could be the nature of the beast.  He draws no firm conclusions, but asks us to consider how we should deal with this problem.

I admire Hart a great deal.  He has a powerful mind and thinks deeply.  His The Doors of the Sea is the best book I have read on the problem of evil.  But I found myself a bit frustrated with “No Enduring City.”  He has the intellectual capital to spend, but plays the miser. He holds too much back. I wanted more from him to try and settle this conundrum.

When surveying the history of Christian involvement in politics, I think we have the following options:

  • Christians should never be involved in politics.  Whatever good they will do will be outweighed by the inevitable corruption of their witness to the gospel.
  • Christians will likely fail in some way in the political realm.  But, we should expect that their failures will be less damaging, and they will accomplish more good in their time in power.  Thus, Christians should be involved in politics as much as they can.
  • Compromising one’s Christian witness may likely happen in the political realm, but it is not inevitable.  Thus, the potential good from Christians involvement in politics is worth the risk, with the right people.
  • Compromising our witness to Christ is indeed quite likely in the political realm. Christians should avoid political office. However, Christians should do what they can to influence those in power.  In this way they can hopefully create some good for society and escape direct blame for the bad in politics.

Other options likely exist.

In his article Hart hints (but not outright declares) that the continual cycle of success/failure might serve the good purpose of continual renewal, keeping the Church on its toes and supplied with fresh blood.  This parallels in some ways Toynbee’s creative/dominant minorities in society.  A particular system gets stale and rigid.  A ‘creative minority’ finds a way to challenge this system successfully, which brings them into power.  Eventually, however, this ‘creative minority’ succumbs to temptation and morphs into its own ‘dominant minority,’ starting the cycle over again.

But Hart will not outright declare one way or the other, because the mere fact of such a cycle doesn’t mean that the good of the creative minority outweighs the bad of dominant minority.

If such a man as Hart cannot decide, I will not either.  Perhaps historical analysis is not our best servant for this question.  Perhaps we need epic poetry to instruct us.

King Hrolf Kraki ultimately fails.  His realm grows a bit soft and corrupt.  Yet before that happened he managed to defeat a wicked and truly evil king who had wrought chaos throughout the land for years.  He fails, but the good outweighed the bad.  So too king Arthur fails.  His sins, and the sins of others catch up with them.  Yet, the good that came from the golden age of Camelot inspired the very idea of chivalry, which formed the ethic of the west for 500 years at least.  When Roland receives the assignment of the rear guard, he suspects treachery, but turns to his stepfather and says,

Ah, slave and coward, malicious heir of dishonored ancestors, did you think I would let the glove fall to the ground as you did the staff when you stood before Charles?

The rearguard is destroyed under Roland’s command, but Charlemagne returns just in time. Beowulf defeats the dragon but could not establish the kind of kingdom that meant that others took up similar fights as he.  But . . . who doesn’t love the character of Beowulf?

The attempts referenced above, however, were all “grand gestures” involving personal risk.  Epic literature is of course literature and not history.  But they give some historical insights.  The politicking of the religious right involved no grand gesture, no personal risk for anyone.  Christian involvement in the political realm will likely fail in some way, no matter how great the sacrifice.  But the utterly mundane garnering of power through votes not only failed in the U.S., it engendered resentment against the religious right.  The relative political disengagement of most younger Christians today testifies to the insipid nature of such action.

At the end of The Song of Roland Charlemagne cries out, “O God, my life is a burden!”  He knows that all of his fighting and all of the sacrifice will not bring about a heaven on earth.  But, he smashed the pagans, avenged treachery, and Julienne was led triumphantly to the baptismal font.

Truly sacrificial action, whether political or otherwise, has a lasting impact despite our sins and limitations.

Perhaps herein lies the answer Hart seeks.

The Prophet or the Madman

by Dave Mathwin

A good education should prepare one to see many sides of an issue and to see the complex nature of problems. Solutions, should they exist, come from seeing the good in things and building upon that, along with balance, patience, and so on.

It seems to me that about 95% of problems or questions should get handled in this fashion.

But the remaining 5% probably require none of the aforementioned qualities, but instead call for a prophet.  Some problems have such deep and destructive roots in society that only radical solutions suffice, and coming to these conclusions require a complete change of perspective not unlike repentance.  In such cases balance and moderation hurt more than help.

The problem with prophets is that they usually sound crazy.  They are entirely “unreasonable” and see nothing among us to build on.  They abhor compromise.  No doubt this explains why most of Israel’s prophets were dismissed as lunatics or dangerous subversives.

The fact that not all prophets deserve the title of “Prophet” adds to the dilemma.  God mandated harsh punishments for false prophets, who unnecessarily rile up/provide false comfort in addition to the far worse consequence of giving us the wrong view of God and our place in the universe.

If we took the Industrial Revolution as an example, we might expect a “reasonable” historian to take a standard cost/benefit approach.  On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution eventually ushered in higher wages and higher standards of living.  Medical technology improved and helped us lead healthier lives.  Mass production led to greater social and political equality.  On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution also disconnected us from nature and allowed us to mass produce destructive things like weapons and pollutants.  The regimentation of the factory led to regimentation of other areas of life.  Modern conveniences also facilitated longer working hours, which helped erode the family.  Some good, some bad, and the trick lies in deciding how to weigh the importance of each category.

Enter Ivan Illich.

Illich (a one time Catholic priest turned social critic) wants nothing to do with the above paragraph.  The Industrial Revolution, or in his phrase, “hygenic progress” has led to continuing impoverishment of all who drink from its waters.

Perhaps you think he means impoverishment of the soul, and then we can still perhaps argue that certain economic benefits outweigh that at least in some circumstances.

But no — he means impoverishment of the soul and economic impoverishment. Industrial society has made us poorer in every sense, which on the surface seems demonstrably untrue.  But nevertheless, he wants to burn it all down, if not physically, then at least in our whole approach to what lies around us.

Do we have a madman or a prophet?

I will say that having read his book Toward a History of Needs I’m not quite sure myself. He fits one criteria for having a prophetic voice — neither the political right or left knew what to do with him in his day.  On the imgresone hand, Illich heavily criticized market-based solutions as essentially imperialistic projects that in the end only benefitted producers.  On the other hand, he spoke just as harshly against the industrialized “do-gooders” of the left and their projects like the Peace Corp and The Alliance for Progress.  He saw both sides as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum — the same person with a different face, sharing essentially the same destructive perspective.

Illich’s main idea is that the “hygenic progress” of the last two centuries has not solved any problem mankind faces so much as it has created needs that have become mandatory for civilization. These “mandatory needs” continue to increase and drain both soul and wallet.  This favors not only producers but also, “anyone in the driver seat” (government bureaucracy). He cites many examples to prove his point, and we can add to those examples today.

Some of his examples (with hardly an exhaustive list) . . .

Medicine has become vastly more expensive over the last few decades without necessarily making us healthier. Pregnant women, for example, now have seemingly dozens of “mandatory” checkups involving expensive lab work to check on her health.  But babies are not measurably more healthy than they were 20-30 years ago.  These checkups did not come in response to a severe crisis, but as part of the logic of the “producers of health.”  Ilich also argues that most of the vast costs involving medical care for the elderly go more towards prolonging suffering than actually making us healthier.  Of course, this suffering in turn drives us back to the health producers.

Simple things like driving also fall prey to this logic.  In days of yore, you acquired driving skills more or less by osmosis and guided practice from parents.  Now prospective drivers need a certification from driving schools to prove their merit.  The fact that many who take courses from “driving schools” spend their time doing errands for the producer of the certificates should call for us to abolish the criteria altogether.  Instead, because we are a society of “hygenic progress,” we call for reform, not abolition, of such institutions, which bring in government bureaucrats once again.  The system continually empowers “those in the driver’s seat” literally and figuratively.

This dynamic impoverishes us financially by forcing us to pay for the certification and government authentication of our lives, and it also steals away time and personal initiative.  Citizens of “hygenic progress” societies will get boxed in continually.  We realize that one “must” have a car to survive in modern society (with the rare exception of a few cities), and the logic of car ownership has followed suit. No layman can repair their car anymore, which drives us toward complete reliance on the producers of car health.  Writing in the early 1970’s, Illich did not foresee the rise of digital technology.  Now, we “need” not just computers and internet, but cell phones and the like to “survive” the modern world.  Failure to keep up brings nebulous social penalties, along with more realistic drawbacks.  Who communicates by phone anymore?**

Education has gone through the same process.  Public education once was conceived as a free gift.  Now this gift is mandatory, with a mandated curriculum.  Initially the system called for you to stay through 8th grade, now one must stay until 16.  Of course, society’s demands for more pieces of paper to certify one as “educated” has increased. Now everyone “must” graduate high school to have any chance in society, and to get a “real job” everyone must go to college — though we know that many high school and college educations hardly dignify the name.  Now Master’s Degrees have become “required” in many professions.  Some of this might be acceptable if the certificates proved that you actually had a good education, when what it really proves it that you jumped through the required hoops.  The role of government oversight and financial enrichment of the producers of certificates (think of the growth of private companies in the standardized testing industry) again go hand in hand.

Of course not all want this outcome, but that’s just “the way it goes.”  I have an autistic son, and from time to time speculate on why autism diagnoses have dramatically increased over the last 20-odd years.  With the caveat that the question is complex and mysterious, part of me wonders if the increased regimentation in education makes those who lack the social skills necessary to navigate that world stand out in much bolder relief than previously.

Illich uses many more examples which I will pass over.  He astutely references the classical concept of “nemesis” from Greek mythology.  Nemesis served justice and punished hubris.  In the modern sense, nemesis stood for the punishment of a rash abuse of privilege.  In heroic literature the truly elite of society experience “nemesis” by going too far beyond the lot of mortals.  Now, Illich comments that nemesis has been democratized and no longer is reserved for rash abuse of a privilege.  Rather, “Industrialized nemesis is retribution for dutiful participation in society.”

At this point we may want to push back a bit.  Maybe the benefits of industrial society have plateaued somewhat, but if we do a before/after look since the start of industrialization, we see that life expectancy has gone up, and more people have access to more conveniences of life.  Who would want to return to pre-industrial living?  And while we can’t repair our cars, they do last a lot longer than they used to, which puts us back to the +/- calculus of the “reasonable” historian.  Some products over time became ubiquitous, but also cheap.  A perfectly good land-line phone, for example, costs no more than $15.  DVD players began by costing a few hundred bucks and now come at 1/10 of that price.  These examples seem to go against the idea that producers will get continually enriched at consumer expense.

I’m not sure how Illich would respond to these arguments, but I would guess that he would say that producers will continue to turn today’s luxuries into tomorrow’s “needs.”  And — they will continue to partner with government to make the needs mandatory — hence, good bye rabbit ears, hello to required conversion to digital.  DVD players are cheap, but look out for Blue-Ray, which will likely supplant DVD’s soon enough and start the cycle over again.

Of course prophets don’t just critique, they also offer hope and a way forward.  For Illich that means more creative and especially, autonomous action on the part of individuals.  We must escape the professionalization, the certificates of approval, and the commodification that governs modern lives.  We no longer make decisions — we have algorithms or rubrics to that for us.

However, a question remains — do we wish to be free? Do we even know what that means?  Would it matter if we did?  I am reminded of a passage in Machiavelli’s Discourses which captures the essence of the issue.  Are we a healthy body with a corrupt head, i.e. Rome at the time of the latter Tarquin kings? After the expulsion of Tarquin Superbus the Romans immediately had the ability to form a stable, successful, alternative government.  Or, has the whole body been infected, and cutting off the head will produce only more problems?  Much later in Rome’s history a new “Tarquin” arose in the form of Julius Caesar, but his death only made things worse for Rome — the whole body had become corrupt.

Illich also fails to discuss another question — is the situation he describes (if he correctly describes it — I am at least partially persuaded) a necessary or contingent consequence of industrialization?  If the latter, then we can work to change things.  If the former is true, then we need to pattern ourselves after the characters in many of Phillip K. Dick’s stories and go “through” the situation rather than running away from it, and find a spot of peace therein.

I suspect, however, that if Illich is correct, then we are living with contingent consequences of industrialization.  We can get pushed in certain directions but never off the road entirely.  While I would not call him a madman, nor would I yet call him a prophet.  He describes some of the technical reasons for our situation, but he fails to unmask the religious devotion that created this situation.  The key question, “What does industrial bureaucratic capitalism truly worship?” has yet to receive an answer.  Until we understand this, we will have no power to change our circumstances.  We need also to see that the situation Illich describes results not just from the confluence of bureaucrats and producers, but from everyone.  We “the people” cannot be part of whatever path forward may exist without acknowledging our own complicity.

Dave

*Hence his book Deschooling Society on the surface seems like a call to dismantle public education in favor of more market based approaches (the “Right” cheers).  But what Illich really calls for is that society “de-school” itself and fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between “school” and “society” (the Right and the Left look at each other quizzically).

**The confluence of the producers of society’s digital “needs” and government oversight continues with a vengeance with the rise of technology in education.  Now curricula get planned around the assumption that students have technology in the classroom.  Those who don’t will be given access.  The option to “drop out” — i.e., “I don’t want my child to have access to a tablet, phone, etc.” — doesn’t really exist.  Most teacher training now gets geared towards showing teachers how to better serve the god “Technology in the Classroom.”  All of this of course is “necessary” because we must “prepare students for the modern world.”  Meanwhile of course, we create the “modern world” via the use of technology in the classroom.  One hand washes the other.  This seems a similar argument to Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State.

“. . . And in the End”

by Dave Mathwin

My dad has a large record collection, and growing up I heard a lot of different music. One of my earliest memories involves me asking him to, “Put the Apple record on,” by which I meant, “Put on Abbey Road by the Beatles, side two, “The End.” There I would hear the vastly underrated (by the general public) Ringo Starr play his one and only drum solo. I grabbed Tinker Toys, made two mallets, and attempted to play along with the music on the sofa.

Years later when I started playing the drums myself, I sometimes tried to replicate the sound Starr got out of his kit on that album, with no success. Reading And in the End: The Last Days of the Beatles, I discovered the secret–a new way of mic’ing the drums was employed, but the real trick may have been his switch to calfskin drum heads on his tom-toms. Ringo loved the new sound and feel, and credited the heads for giving him some newfound excitement on the kit. With the drum heads sounding so good, it inspired him to integrate his toms more than he had on previous albums–the result can be heard especially on “Come Together,” and “Something,” to say nothing of his famous aforementioned solo.

This little nugget may not be of much interest to anyone but myself, but And in the End gives everyone lots to chew on about the decline and final fall of the Beatles. I have skimmed through biographies of Lennon and McCartney and seen a few documentaries about them, which prepped me for this book. Author Ken McNab gives little background information, which suited me just fine. For anyone with an interest in The Beatles and a passing familiarity with their dynamics, this book will do nicely in filling out some unexplored corners of Beatles lore.

Most of us know about Lennon and McCartney’s personality feuds, the presence of Yoko Ono, and Harrison’s rise in prominence. And in the End mentions this but knows that we have heard about it before. Instead McNab spends a lot of time talking about the business side of The Beatles and how that, perhaps even more than personality differences, contributed heavily to their demise as a group.

The Beatles faced in formidable challenges to their cohesion in 1969:

  • John married Yoko, and Paul married Linda. Again, we are aware of the challenges Yoko brought to the table. Many have well documented the unnerving effects of her awkward presence during rehearsals. But McNab puts a different focus on Paul’s marriage to Linda Eastman as a major contributor to the widening John-Paul divide. Eastman came from New York high society money. Paul’s marriage, then, confirmed and deepened every suspicion John had about Paul–his social striving, his “bourgeoise” aspirations, etc.
  • At the same time, George Harrison began to assert himself much more aggressively in the group. John and Paul had previously worked out truces and trades in sharing the spotlight and wrote “together” at least officially. Now they would have share even more than they had before at a time of much higher tension.
  • At the same time, the “Apple” company they founded floundered badly, obviously bleeding cash. Their image and their pocketbooks would take a big wallop.
  • At the same time, The Beatles attempted to rework their financial arrangements, with John, George, and Ringo favoring one company, and Paul favoring another company–which happened to be run by his new brother-in-law (this did not go over well with the other three. John especially tore into the fact that the Eastman’s had changed their name from Epstein to Eastman, a sign of “inauthenticity”).
  • At the same time, Lennon–who had smoked plenty of weed and experimented with psychedelics in the past, now began a much more problematic heroin habit.

In other words, to paraphrase Fletch in his visit to Dr. Dolan, the Beatles may have been dying for years, but the end was very sudden.

A few bands have lasted more than a few decades, and fewer still have stayed productive during their span instead of merely rehashing older hits on tour. So on the one hand, the demise of The Beatles should not surprise anyone. But McNab’s treatment of the band’s final year made me realize that the main failure of the Beatles involved their failure to “institutionalize” themselves in some respect–a failure to scale up their issues to a point where the issues were “solved” by the institution known as “The Beatles.”

I can think of only two other bands that managed to last long and stay reasonably productive: Kiss and Rush (who actually toured together in 1975). In the case of Rush, they perhaps solved their problem by always having two guys write the songs and one guy write the lyrics. Harmony could be maintained as long as they stuck with this formula, and they did so right until the end. This very stark division of labor will be exceedingly rare in any collaborative group.

The more typical path is that of KISS, who had two strong frontmen with strong personalities. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons certainly feuded over the years. But the outfits–Starman, Catman, Spaceman, etc.–gave them an identity outside themselves. This allowed them to replace particular musicians when needed (such as Peter Criss, Ace Frehly) while still maintaining their individual identity. They could do a solo album or a solo project as “Paul Stanley”–who is not KISS, then put on the makeup and become KISS again.

Not having Rush’s division of labor, the Beatles needed something of the KISS formula to work, but they could not create it in time. Given the challenges they faced along with their particular personalities, this was not likely to happen, but perhaps the possibility existed.

As I finished the book it appeared that Trump will not have a second term, and this spurred some reflection on the purpose of institutions, and their role in our culture at the moment.

In the Democratic primaries many lamented that anti-establishment figures like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang got the freeze-out from mainstream media and the party establishment. In the end, the Democratic base chose the most “establishment” figure possible in Biden. On the one hand, Trump vs. Biden at first glance appears to boil down to “Anti-Establishment v. Establishment. That is short-sighted view of the situation–just as seeing the Beatles conflict as purely Lennon v. McCartney–Anti-Establishment v. Establishment–also interprets a lot of the signal as noise.

First we can see Trump akin to John Lennon. Both despised or could not work within institutions. Both always had/have the most gravity in the room. Those freed from an institutional ‘gloss’ or ‘crust’ can shine forth with a particularly concentrated vitality. Lennon would at times impress everyone with his clarity and intelligence, and at other times embarrass everyone with his rash anger and insane narcissism. His partnership with McCartney worked so well because he needed someone to ground him, someone to “land” his ideas, which Paul did with some of John’s best songs*

The Trump-Lennon connection is easy . . . making McCartney into Biden stretches things a bit. Well–it works in some ways. Lennon always hated the “grandma” tunes that McCartney loved, the sweetly melodic semi-vaudeville stuff that Paul dipped into now and then. Paul always believed that the Beatles had to be a “band,” which meant recording and then touring. “Back to basics,” and so on. So we can see the election of Biden as a vindication of our institutions, and at least the perception of “normalcy.”

Certainly Trump is “anti-establishment”–but particularly in his personal behavior. He cared nothing for the niceties, decorum, and customs of acting “presidential.” Some of his political agenda, however, had roots in old Pat Buchanan Republicanism. He had broad support for his judicial nominees and support for pro-life policies, all of which would fit within the Reagan heyday.

Biden on the one hand is quintessential “Establishment,” having served in the Senate for who knows how long. He is nothing if not boring in his personal behavior–which at times can be a strength. He will uphold presidential cultural and political norms.

But he also brings with him a long trail of supporters who also wish to dismantle certain aspects of the Establishment and its norms. It wasn’t too long ago that we heard chants of “Defund the Police.” Biden’s supporters have already created an “enemies list” of Trump staffers and “enablers” that may be used to exclude them from various aspects of public life. No such acts have ever been perpetrated so openly before, at least that I am aware of.** We shall see to what degree Biden takes the Democratic party into more anti-institutional waters. Note that some Democratic supporters have called for the abolition of the Electoral College, a dismantling of certain powers of the Senate, and so on. To alter the Constitution is to dismantle the American institution.

But just as Biden may have a slightly jaded take on institutions, so perhaps did McCartney.

As mentioned above, the problems faced by The Beatles were legion–too much to handle all at once. But–had it boiled down to Lennon’s ‘anti-establishment’ and Paul’s ‘establishment’ they could have compromised here and there, just as they did with their songwriting. In reality, they represented two different mixes of both ‘establishment’ and ‘anti-establishment,’ the combinations of which could not compromise.

John as “Anti-Establishment” (this is rather obvious)

  • The drugs, the weird behavior, founding “Bagism,” the marriage to an avant-garde artist who would lay down inside a bag and scream during performances
  • Etc.

Paul as “Anti-Establishment”

  • Paul was a rock star who did not fit a conventional rock star mold. He was much more fruitfully experimental than John
  • Paul utilized orchestras, audio experimenting, etc.
  • He did the India thing just as the others did

John as “Establishment”

  • The counter-culture is admittedly not the Culture, but the counterculture had enormous power in the late 60’s and John was at the crest of that wave.
  • John wanted to be seen as a rock star who played rock music, and who at times loathed Paul’s “sissified” experimentation.

Paul as “Establishment”

  • He marries into wealthy NYC society
  • He appeals to a much broader cross section of the population than John. He is “the cute one”–certainly much “safer” than John.

A big part of the problem for the Beatles lay here–two different blends of establishment/anti-establishment that allowed both to call the other “squares” on the one hand and feel good personally about stretching boundaries on the other. This dynamic makes compromise a lot harder, because you see the other side as lacking everything while you already “have it all.” When at their best, for example, Paul saw that he needed John to get him to take more risks, and John saw that he needed Paul to “ground him” and give his ideas shape. But as they both grew, Paul found a way to experiment without John, and John found a “grounding” in the counter-culture. Then–they perceived no need for each other.

The right and the left in the U.S. have good and bad things about them and always have. When both sides can even just occasionally see how they need each other, our democracy will be healthy. But now that both sides have both Anti-Institutional and Institutional impulses within them, they will feel this need for each other much less. This, perhaps more than any particular policy change, may be our most significant political challenge.

Dave

*If anyone argues that “Imagine” or “Instant Karma” is as good as “In My Life,” or even “Come Together,” they are just being plain silly or purely ideological. Neither Lennon or McCartney ever topped solo what they did with each other.

**Trump said dangerous things like, “Lock her up,” but never acted on anything. Again–he had a hard time acting on his various statements (look at how little he accomplished when Republicans controlled House and Senate from 2016-18) which we can be thankful for in part.

The ideological left, on the other hand, is much more connected to institutions in media, academia, and increasingly, in the corporate world as well. We shall see whether or not this threat of a “list” becomes reality.