Easy Game

We do not always know who is predator, who is prey and how to distinguish the two, or even if we should. It is all a game, we are told, and our chiefs, whether justices or executive officers, can only articulate the corporate good — to maximize profit. Corporations are thus not corporate as bodies, which, show eventually the absorption of excess calories by a plethora of hitherto unknown diseases, ultimately leading to cardiac arrest, particularly when the electric grid shuts off. The corporate magnates who stand above it all will declare the saboteurs murderers and terrorists for disrupting the energy supply, for the only rule of the game is not to disturb the game and the “heads” of the body are not mindful of the health of any other parts, leaving them incapable of responding to even the slightest bit of pressure without immediate and complete shutdown.

We are, thus, unsurprised to find our leading corporate lights in the form of internet companies formed by the well blown bubbles highlighting the American dream of social unity via cybernetic cables, mindspheres losing distinction in democratic bliss, thousands of clicks and “likes” without a single way to dissent from ever loader public opinion, no longer articulated by stump speech or verbal assent, but remote gesture via machine formed API.

It is now well known that growth sectors in the new economy are the continual supply of medicines to those who will never be healthy, the sloshing of capital from shore to shore in the carry and drop trade, virtual instruments of deliberately opaque value, and, now a new type of American casino by pioneered by the sons and daughters of the Alamo, games deliberately engineered to absorb the mental cycles and material wealth of those last sad sons and daughters of the revolutions and all of those forced to embrace their brand of democracy by the sword.

As they will tell you, there is simply too much money to be made to make a maxim of not being evil, or, worse, formulate a positive idea of the good. And the end is what it has always been, the predators gather round while the sick and lame and easily addicted are picked off as easy game.

There are many poker chips already on the table. Those who arrived already made their killing and now sit, cards on the table, eying each other curiously — knowing that the only way the game can continue is if more are convinced to come to the table. But China has already bought in and old Europe injected with a passivity inducing drugs, trading dictators and kings for glib democrats.

Soon the game will be up and, where our executive officers can no longer find fresh meat, they will turn to carrion.

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Peter Saint-Andre on Politics, Technology and Art

(1) Last May in your essay on “the Gathering Storm” you quoted Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” and provided a number of tips for surviving it, including exercising our right to speech, defense, privacy and association. A year has passed. Is there anything you would add or modify today given the possibility that many Americans may not be able to exercise their constitutional rights (not to mention the presumed rights of creditors of the United States) ?

I would add that exercising your rights is not only good for you, it’s fun! This is a time of great uncertainty, and many people are more stressed than ever. But writing blog posts or debating the issues or studying history might help you formulate your thoughts and gain perspective on what’s happening, mastering a martial art or learning to shoot or protecting your privacy might make you feel more secure, associating with likeminded others might give you a stronger sense of community, managing your own investments or growing some of your own food or installing solar panels or whatever might make you more self-sufficient. Many of these activities are quite inexpensive and they give you more power over your life.

Although taking responsibility for your life is rewarding, I’ve discovered that it also takes a lot of time and energy to do things like take charge of your health or your finances, learn various self-defense techniques, and study the past so that you’re not doomed to repeat it.

By the way, I wouldn’t limit individual rights to what’s recognized in the constitution. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution delegates a small number of powers to the central government (Amendment X) and recognizes that individual rights are effectively unlimited (Amendment IX). Over time that founding vision has been almost entirely inverted (government power is unlimited and human rights are limited to what’s in the Bill of Rights), but it is still there for us to rediscover.

(2) You are unusual in combining a technical career with substantial intellectual essays, an online press and various artistic efforts. How did you end up where you are today?

Perhaps I’m unusual not in having diverse interests but in pursuing them so stubbornly.

Since my early teens I’ve been drawn mainly to philosophy, language, music, and technology. After college I bounced around quite a bit, working for business training companies and early website developers. When I started using Linux in the late 1990s I became quite impressed with the fact that so much value had been created for free, so I decided that I want to give back to the open-source community in some way. An opportunity came along in the form of the early Jabber instant messaging project, where my interests in language and technology led me to writing protocol specifications. That’s been my career for the last ten years, but to stay balanced I’ve spent much of my free time writing philosophical essays and books, translating ancient poetry and philosophy, playing guitar, and composing music. More recently, I’ve studied a lot of history, especially the history of civilizations (e.g., Carroll Quigley), the emergence of modernity (e.g., Ernest Gellner), the origins of the industrial revolution (e.g., Jean Gimpel and Robert Lopez), the roots of American exceptionalism (e.g., Alan Macfarlane and David Hackett Fischer), and the impact of deep technological inventions like the printing press (e.g., Elizabeth Eisenstein). There is so much to learn and to do that I like to work on lots of projects in parallel because I find that different disciplines feed into each other in surprising ways. If I didn’t already have too many responsibilities I’d learn a few more languages, become a better coder, immerse myself in a field like evolutionary psychology, or study painting or some another art-form.

(3) In your essay “American Winter” you highlight as problems:

[T]he endless debts incurred over the past twenty to forty years by American businesses, families, and governments alike; the withering away of American productive capacity in favor of mindless consumption; dependence on oil that is produced by sworn enemies of Western civilization; massive fortunes stolen (we cannot say “made”) by those who have been able to manipulate the levers of power, whether Wall Street bankers at the national level (resulting in a reckless debasement of the currency) or real estate developers at the local level (resulting in the subsidized blight of suburban sprawl) or various industries in certain states and especially unions in others (resulting in a complete capture of the political process by government employees in states like California); the never-ending expansion of welfare “entitlements” such as monthly stipends for those who do not work, guaranteed payment of medical care and pharmaceutical products for those who are not healthy, low-priced loans for those who wish to study, grants for those who wish to perform scientific research, and so on; a growing political class whose only means of livelihood is to take more and more from the productive class of those who still create real, independent value; inexorable centralization of national life in the District of Columbia; and a yawning societal and even personal chasm between collectivists and individualists, liberals and conservatives, progressives and traditionalists, secularists and religionists, technologists and environmentalists, rule makers and rule breakers, controllers and rebels — a conflict of visions that goes far beyond Red States vs. Blue States to engulf politically-connected and personally-entitled “haves” against hardworking but unprivileged “have nots”

Yet you end the essay with an optimistic note. What makes you so confident in America and Americans?

America is full of optimistic, work-focused, religious, sectarian, freedom-loving, immigrant-friendly, patriotic, rebellious, energetic, mobile, adaptable, pragmatic, inventive, individualistic, youth-obsessed, generous, philanthropic, hopeful, innovative, entrepreneurial dreamers. Americans are, essentially, crazy (founded, after all, by crazy Englishmen who crossed the Atlantic in rickety ships to create a new society in a howling wilderness). We don’t always succeed, do the right thing, or live up to our ideals. In fact, we have a lot of problems and we make a lot of mistakes, but we seem to learn from our mistakes better than any other people in history. Although many pundits have forecast American failure, decline, and decay, those who bet instead on England, France, Germany, Japan, or Russia over America were wrong, just I think those now betting on China, India, or Brazil over America will also be wrong.

American exceptionalism is not jingoism, it is an observable reality. The core differences between America and the rest of the world, and even the rest of the Anglosphere, were plain to Tocqueville in the 1830s and to countless observers before and since. Those differences are not uniformly good, but they are deep seated in American culture. That said, in many ways Americans have lost sight of the basic cultural traits I’ve outlined. We face a lot of hard decisions as individuals and as a nation about crony capitalism, centralized power, foreign intervention, mindless consumerism, excessive debt, irresponsible behavior, dependence on the public trough, and much more. In addition, we are often too busy or myopic or anti-intellectual to think deeply and honestly about the mess we’re in and how to move forward. In that sense, I am far from optimistic. But I also wouldn’t count America out just yet.

Notice that I say “America”, not “the United States”. I am much more confident about the long-term prospects of America as a cultural nation than about the United States as a political entity.

(4) In your essay “Secular vs. Sacred” you describe the modern dilemma:

Historically, the modern codification of the soul-body dichotomy goes back to Descartes and his Faustian deal with the Church, in which Descartes won the metaphysical realm of Body for the investigations of the scientists, but abandoned the realm of Soul to the strictures of religion. While this “peace treaty” between reason and faith brought the West undreamt-of material prosperity and scientific progress, it also led to the spiritual stagnation of the modern West.

A major theme of this website and forums is alternatives to Cartesian modernity. In your opinion what would it take to go “beyond Descartes” and who or what is capable of taking us there?

Wow, you dug deep to find that essay — I wrote it when I was in college for a contest held by The Humanist magazine.

Back then I saw most everything through philosophical lenses, but my more recent readings into history have led me to think that modernity is not Cartesian. Facts precede philosophies and tinkers precede thinkers. You couldn’t have Cartesian mechanism about the biological world or Deistic ideas about God as a watchmaker without first experiencing a long tradition of building machines and watches. Yet that more practical tradition started over 500 years before Descartes, with European inventions like the stirrup, the horse collar, the heavy plow, three-field rotation, the waterwheel, the clock, eyeglasses, oceangoing ships, double-entry bookkeeping, guns and gunpowder, the printing press, the compass, and so many more. All that inventiveness got started because Europeans no longer had slavery to prop them up following the collapse of classical civilization — not because some philosopher pontificated about the importance of productivity. The other great stream of modernity came from the culture of early English society, whose individualism, respect for personal rights and private property, entrepreneurialism, and scientific bent also predate Descartes by hundreds of years, as historian Alan Macfarlane has shown. In essence, those two streams produced what Ernest Gellner called “the exit” from agrarian civilizations into modernity.

Furthermore, just as I would argue that modernity is not Cartesian, so I would argue that Descartes is not modern. Have you ever noticed the similarities between his “cogito ergo sum” and Avicenna’s thought experiment of the “flying man”, who is utterly separated from corporeal existence? To my mind there is a religious quality to modern-day mechanism and reductionism, a baseless belief that we could reliably predict the future course of the universe or this planet or a particular creature if only we could know the position of every atom that is relevant to the object of prediction. Yet what factual foundation has ever been offered for the notion that we could gain such physiochemical omniscience? None whatsoever. It’s taken strictly on faith.

As to moving beyond what is taken to be Cartesian modernity, I think that project is being pursued on many fronts within Western society, in everything from practices like yoga and holistic medicine and networked organizations to the theoretical insights of complexity theory and behavioral economics and the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson. Another hopeful sign is the accelerating dissolution of what John Taylor Gatto calls the factory model of education. Unfortunately, I think we are still quite far from a more factual, integrated approach to value-laden fields like ethics and politics. I’m working on aspects of the ethical issues through a book I’m writing entitled “The Tao of Roark”, but it’s slow going in part because I have too much to do in my career but mostly because the problems involved are so thorny.

(5) In that same essay you refer to “people power” and human rights as built on a “universal conception of sacredness.” Do you still hold today to your statement about the potential of sacredness and human rights as a unifying principles which can check unwelcome elements of governmental expansion (i.e. totalitarianism)? Do you have any concomitant critiques of contemporary usage of the term “human rights”?

It seems that I indulged in quite a bit of overblown rhetoric back in college! These days I am much more skeptical about claims of universality, mainly because after the 9/11 attacks I took the time to study both Islam and the Anglosphere, which I see as the two primary cultural visions at work in the world today. The rights that we think of as Jeffersonian or Lockean — life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness — were not imposed by governments or invented by philosophers but emerged over many centuries. As John Hasnas explored in his paper “Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights”, rights are evolved solutions to the problem of minimizing violence in society. The solutions we are most familiar with today were codified in English common law, which has done the best job (although far from a perfect job) of preserving and extending them as the modern world has scaled up beyond the smaller societies of earlier times.

Although in one sense these rights are natural and universal because they are traditionally honored even in the absence of government, that potential universality is overridden and obscured by the actuality of too many philosophies, religions, autocracies, bureaucracies, and systems of government. To my mind, perhaps the greatest corruption has been the inflation of the concept of rights from those solved problems of human interaction to positive dispensations like a comfortable retirement, a convenient commute, pleasant vacations, inexpensive access to medical services and pharmaceutical products, affordable housing, and all the rest. Those things are good, but when the state provides them by taking from some people to give to others, we don’t solve problems, we cause them: tearing apart human goodwill, turning people from peaceful trade and production to legalized plunder, reducing the sense of personal responsibility and increasing the sense of dependence, and piling up debts and obligations that are simply unsustainable. That’s the hole in which many nations find themselves now, and the path forward is made much more difficult by intellectual confusion and false expectations regarding the proper solutions to problems of human interaction.

(6) In your essay “The Individualism of the Poet-Musician” you refer to ancient lyric poetry, the Medieval troubadour ethos and near-contemporaries like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. However, if there is a positive side to the troubadour ethos and nomadic lifestyle which to some degree characterize America do they not also inhibit “greatness” and facilitate other things that you disparage (like Suburban sprawl) ? Is there any way to reconcile these impulses?

You are right that historically Americans have been more mobile than people elsewhere, although statistics indicate that the rate of moving has slowed down lately. American mobility is no great surprise when you think about it: almost all of our ancestors moved here from somewhere else, we continue to attract a large number of immigrants, we have a wide range of physical, social, and economic climates to choose from, a relatively small percentage of us have careers that are tied to a particular place, etc. Here again the mere fact that American society is exceptionally mobile and dynamic compared to other societies is not all good or all bad; we can be quick about building new cities and industries and the like, but we also tend to have a disposable attitude toward almost everything.

The kind of nomadism that hurts us more is our lack of focus on the long-term consequences of our policies and decisions. For instance, U.S. politicians regularly send American troops to meddle in foreign nations; the citizenry initially approves of the intention to spread democracy or rid the world of some two-bit dictator, but doesn’t think about the pernicious influence of such interventionism on the national soul, if you will. The same goes for our endless “wars” on drugs, poverty, hunger, crime, obesity, immigration, and so on.

At the individual level, excellence or greatness in any field of endeavor does require diligence, focus, dedication, practice, and countless hours of hard work. However, too often we take that as an excuse for excessive specialization. I suppose that I still admire the ideal of a liberal education and see great value in general knowledge — whether it’s the science of climatology, the economics of national debt, the sociology of immigration, the statistics of demographic change, the psychology of investing, or the history of civilizations. Learning about these topics is not only inherently interesting, but I’ve found that it gives me greater perspective on current controversies, not to mention greater skepticism about our self-appointed elites.

(7) Many of your essays address Objectivist Philosophy as articulated by Ayn Rand, including the chasm between engineers and art (1 2 3). Are there any indications in technical or artistic fields that this gap will be diminished in the future? If so, what stands out as a positive example?

Yes, as a teenager I was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, and it’s taken me a long time to work out my thoughts about her. In fact Rand perceived a great affinity between engineers and artists: she saw engineering as a creative act and recognized the technical discipline necessary to make works of art. For example, the architect Howard Roark in her novel The Fountainhead designed buildings that were not only beautiful but founded in good engineering. In my experience, most scientists and engineers have an aesthetic sense of what makes for an elegant solution to a technical problem in their field, and most artists are deeply immersed in the technical details of their craft.

Despite those similarities, there is an unavoidable gap between art and engineering because they serve different purposes: a product of technology is a practical tool for improving human existence, whereas a work of art organically symbolizes some conception of what’s important in life. The aesthetic aspects of technologies like cars and computers are a matter of good design, not truly artistic creation; similarly, the technical aspects of the arts are a matter of underlying craft and does not imply that art is useful in the sense that technology is. Howard Roark was an anomaly because he worked in the field of architecture, which straddles the fence between art and engineering; her novel would not have worked as well if she had written it about a composer or a sculptor.

I worry less about the chasm between technology and art than about the impact of the digital revolution on the economics of artistic practice. Simply put, the copyright era is coming to an end, first for musicians, next for writers, and eventually for visual artists as well. Anyone who makes art will need to adjust to that new reality. Personally I’ve put all of my writings and music into the public domain, but I can afford to do so because I work full-time as a technologist. Real artists will need to apply even more of their energy to making a living and finding new economic models for creative activity, which means the rest of us might have less new art to experience. Although that sounds pessimistic, humans were creating art for thousands of years before the copyright era and I think they’ll be doing so for thousands of years into the future.

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One Glimpse

Hillel Halkin’s new book, Yehuda Halevi, is an exploration of the life and passions of this important Jewish figure of religious and philosophical significance. What this book tells us about the history of the medieval period in which he lived in Spain, however, is interesting in and of itself, and it is especially provocative in light of all the tortured attempts being made nowadays to cobble tougher a view of amicable Christian – Muslim – Jewish coexistence by referring to the ‘convivencia’ that existed in Spain before 1492. Convivencia means coexistence and the three faiths did indeed coexist in Spain during this period, but the coexistence that they enjoyed, endured, or suffered through, as the case may be, was hardly the Disneyland version of everyone holding hands and singing happy songs, each with his own little colored hat and matching flag.

Halkin explains how the great early 20th century archeological find of documents hidden away in the Cairo Geniza allowed historians to draw a picture of Jewish life in the Muslim world during exactly this period of history. What we know is that the periods of peaceful coexistence among the three faiths were punctuated quite frequently by a conquista or reconquista by either the Christian or Muslim side. The boundaries between the Christian and Muslim parts of Spain were forever shifting north or south depending on who had won the latest round. The Jewish population never took part in these wars, being a pacifistic community occupied with commerce and scholarship, primarily. But the Jews frequently ended up being displaced or slaughtered when the ruler to whom they had accommodated themselves suddenly was overthrown and replaced by the other side, thus exposing them to charges of collaboration.

This was the actual reality of convivencia, according to Halkin, not peaceful coexistence as an end unto itself, but as an interregnum merely until the next battle for territorial expansion. Why this should be so becomes clear if we read Halkin’s description of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims actually viewed themselves during this period. They did not see themselves as Spaniards, for there was no real concept of Spain as a country or nation, at that time. Spain was a geographical, linguistic, and cultural term. The most important reference point for a person’s identity, in fact, was his religion. And members of each religious group dreamed, when amongst themselves, of their group someday being dominant in all of Spain rather than having to rest content with only part of it.

Halevi’s writing makes clear that the Jews in Spain did not waste much energy in dreaming of conquering Spain or any place else they lived, being so down-trodden and defenseless themselves. What they did dream of, in their moments of idle fantasy, was restoring the Land of Israel to its former glory and to its former owners – the people who put that Land on the map, so to speak. It was the revelation at Mount Sinai that made the Jewish people a nation, but it was God’s promise to Abraham to show him the Land of Israel, and give it as a prized possession to his descendents that made that small piece of territory the important place that it has been now for thousands of years.

And it was to this small, but cherished piece of territory that Yehuda Halevi set out to spend his last years, leaving the comforts of Spain during its golden age, and then the comforts of Egypt – another flourishing cultural and economic center – to go to a land being contested by Muslim and Christian, and devoid of all but a small Jewish population.

This beautifully written and scholarly book really leads the reader to two unavoidable conclusions. The first is that the concept of convivencia, as used most commonly today by western liberals looking to promote peaceful coexistence between Muslim and non Muslims, is an illusion. It was coexistence of a sort, to be sure, but it was not peaceful if one takes a historical view of it. Nor was it meant to be. Neither Christians nor Muslims in Spain ever reconciled themselves to ruling over only part of the Iberian peninsula. Each wanted total dominion over the other and planned to achieve this over time, through the ambition of charismatic leaders and ideological factions.

Ultimately, the so-called “Catholic monarchs” of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella achieved the Catholic dream of uniting all of Spain’s regions under one monarchy and one universal church. The Jews and Muslims were expelled.
It was this emerging situation in Spain that most likely led Yehuda Halevi to the conclusion that the only solution to the fragility of Jewish existence was restoring the old homeland to Jewish sovereignty, starting by settling in it. This seemed so farfetched at that time when Jewish fortunes in Spain, Central Europe, and Crusader Palestine had declined to such a low ebb. However, one can easily see why Hillel Halkin identifies so much with Halevi, having – like him – abandoned the easy life in America for the struggles of living in a developing country like Israel of the 1970’s, that was also stuck in a permanent war zone.

This book also has a positive Zionist message to it, and one comes to the conclusion that this is probably why Halkin wrote it, thirty-three years after publishing his Zionist polemic, “Letters to an American Jewish Friend”. That book made the case for a Zionist-motivated immigration to Israel at a time when that message was doomed to fall on mostly deaf ears in the American Jewish community. However, this book has a more fateful and also more negative but realistic message to it, as its subtext, whether Halkin intended this or not (perhaps he didn’t).

Halkin is no right wing Likudnik, but neither is he the sort of person who was seduced by the fantasies of the Oslo peace process that led to the current situation of managed hostility that exists between the Israelis and Palestinians. The convivencia that existed in Spain was in no way a permanent peace between the contending religiously-motivated powers in Europe’s most important country, at that time. It was the temporary adjustment of permanent enemies to each other’s civilian populations, while the respective armies waged sporadic battles against each other for control of Iberia. The Christians ended up winning this long-term war of attrition, although the Muslims, initially at least, clearly had the more sophisticated civilization. The Christians won because they were more determined and more united, had better leaders, and because Islam simply went into long-term decline and could not sustain itself as an advanced civilization. The Jewish Golden Age in Spain was long-over by the time the expulsion edicts were finally signed in 1492, and Islam was well on its way to the state of decrepitude that still encumbers it today, while Christian Europe forged ahead on a path of development and conquest which didn’t groan its last sighs until the late 20th century.

This story may well have its mirror image in the Middle East today, with Israel as its new focus. A small but developing Jewish state surrounded by larger but fragmented, demoralized and decrepit Muslim powers has created a beachhead for itself by winning wars, and driving Arab populations away from its borders. Israel right now has no motivation to make any real concessions to two dysfunctional Palestinian polities ruled by corrupt and incompetent administrations. It should and probably will wait them out, until a major war eventually erupts and the Arabs flee in large numbers as happened in 1948 and 1967. The days of Islamic glory in el Andalus are gone and will never come back, while Yehuda Halevi’s dream of Jewish sovereignty has come true one thousand years after he wrote his love poems to Zion.

To end with Halkin’s rendering of Halevi’s famous poem:

My heart in the East
But the rest of me far in the West
How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?
How, in the chains of the Moor,
Zion bound to the Cross,
Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?
Gladly I’d leave
All the best of grand Spain
For one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust

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Definitions of Terms Political

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A Weak People

Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal. Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would lead to a dystopian world state — a system in which a people might be legitimately, according to this emerging economic order, be exterminated merely for being unable to pay their debts.

As Leo Strauss commented in response, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political “is nothing more than the affirmation of the moral” which is necessarily undermined by purely technological culture, such as that provided the anti-narrative mentioned in a previous essay (and also described by Strauss). While Schmitt ultimately falls back on a weak moral category, resistance, Strauss dissolves the possibility of the moral — there is no imperative.

Thus, we witness this dystopia emerging, not only in that the legitimacy of states is articulated by their ability to maximize the participation of their citizens in markets, as with Philip Bobbitt’s work, but where not only the default but also primary evaluative mechanism for the value of any thing, including human relationships, is in reference to personal (or corporate) utility.

Thus, in a world in which numbers, especially when cast as “science” in the field of economics, are the primary evaluative method, the default mechanism for evaluating the value of any relationship must accord with personal utility.  The same is true for all functions related to relationships (e.g. sex). Accumulation of partners may not be the goal, but, as specified by economic science, accumulation of ‘good moments’ likely will be, often taking the primacy of ‘fun’ (see our discussion of the fall of Batman).

This means that no-fault, previously the exception, becomes the norm. Every contract should be able to be broken by any party when the exchange of words/fluids leading to any other exchange is not kept. Which is to say, any purely quantitative system tends towards complete fungiblity as a ‘perfect’ state. Descriptions here serve a purely cosmetic function.  Any usage of word ‘marriage’ approaches a lie, as its origin and intention are not in keeping with the purely cosmetic function which it now serves. ‘Relationship’ would be closer to the truth, but really, any words are acceptable as the fundamental nature of the transaction and conceptions remains unquestioned.

Thus, each sphere of action becomes little more than a game, one should/must play to win in order to maximize. Is it permissible to use words with purely cosmetic function, allowing the other party to think according to old structures, while one embraces personally the new, the entirely economic? Certainly it does not make sense to be in the middle, embracing both new and old paradigm, neither fully. The probable answer within the means presented is, it does not matter — do what you need to succeed. Thus, not only do relationships and marriage cease to exist in any meaningful way, so also does the concept of a truth and a lie. There is only utility, which is frequently reducible to pleasure.

We will not comment at length on the moral salves available to those who wish to utilize them. Nicholas Kristof compares the estimated 800,000 trafficked each year with the 80,000 at the peak of the American slave trade, but advocates neither starting at home nor fundamentally rethinking, but more overseas initiatives (and lobbying!) for the globally connected. Anthony Daniels looks closer to home:

A hundred yards from where I write this, twelve-year-old prostitutes often stand under streetlamps on the corner at night, waiting for customers. The chief of the local police has said that he will not remove them because he considers that they are sufficiently victimized already, and he is not prepared to victimize them further (his job, apparently, being to empathize rather than to enforce the law). The local health authorities send a van round several times at night to distribute condoms to the girls, the main official concern being to ensure that the sex in which the girls take part is safe, from the bacteriological and virological point of view. It is the authorities’ proud boast that 100 percent of local prostitutes now routinely use condoms, at a cost to the city’s taxpayers of $135,000 a year, soon to be increased by the employment of a further outreach worker, whose main qualification, according to the recent job advertisement in the local press, will be “an ability to work non-judgmentally”—that is, to have no moral qualms about aiding and abetting child prostitution. Meanwhile, local residents (such as my neighbors, a banker, a lawyer, an antiquarian bookseller, and two university professors) who object to the presence of discarded condoms in their gardens and in the street outside their homes have been offered a special instrument with which to pick them up, in lieu of any attempt to prevent them from arriving there in the first place. And at the same time, the overwhelming majority of the work done by the social workers of the city concerns the sexual abuse of children, principally by stepfathers and mothers’ boyfriends who move in after biological fathers move out. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses)

In this arena one observes the previously ‘free-range’ people, the American homesteaders, struggling to adapt to their life gravitating in the same direction as the mechanized cattle industry, not realizing that the dictum “do unto others” has always related also to the animals around them. Neither die with or from a surfeit of artificial hormones, they simply cease to live in a meaningful way. Moreover, “resistance” is primarily a function of debates over cosmetics. Given this context, it is surprising they fight for the word or even discuss fighting for ‘marriage,’ a concept they have abandoned in every meaningful sense, just as they fight for “life” for those who, by virtue of physical infirmity or terrible situation will never have a “life” in any sense more than a simple binary assertion.

In fact, whether or not a copy of the Ten Commandments hangs in a courtroom matters not at all. What matters is the concept of jurisprudence applied within that courtroom, the basis of which has been abandoned for multimedia spectacles and megachurchs.  Should we be surprised when the spectacle ends and the citizens involved return to speculating on current and afterlife fortunes, rendering all attempts at “change” null and void? Or that the book supposedly at the center of their religious practice is primarily presented as tool to help them achieve this maximization?  Or that end times prophesies, the rapture, or the Jewish people are going to help them achieve this mystical jackpot?

While cattle ‘moo’ in their mechanized pens, Schmitt offers us this chilling reminder of the nature of the existential struggle which remains, even if covered in the shadows:

“If a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”

As Clausewitz notes, it is the defender of the city who will and must be the first express violence if he wishes to be successful in his defense.  The arsonist with the torch can burn down an entire village if he is not first apprehended, and this apprehension will likely require an act of violence. But as Strauss also realizes, it is exceedingly easy to go from to this point to advocacy for “dangerousness” for its own sake.

Thus, the question is not simply what constitutes a weak people, but what constitutes a people, and the failure to ask the question and, perhaps, define what constitutes a people (or race) worth preserving ultimately undermines the strength of the people in question. Consequently, the quest for the definition of the political is necessarily a question of an ideal sense. Thus, we cannot reach it simply at the extremes, and to focus solely on the extreme case is to abandon the search for the political for politics.

Knowledgeable readers will know where this took Schmitt, and, indeed, it is emblematic of the whole struggle. Liberalism, as defined by Schmitt, must be separated from modernity, which is simply the necessary multiplication of loyalties on the basis of multiplicity of communities based on new forms of connectivity provided by technology. Which is to say, it is not necessarily an ideal, it is simply fiberoptic cables lying across the ocean floor and politicians suddenly able to talk on the phone.

Indeed, if merchants pursued this connectivity for its own sake, or for their sake, does this invalidate the connectivity? It is neither a barrier nor a help towards awareness; a multiplication of contingent loyalties is not necessarily an abrogation of a single essential one.

We then affirm the importance of the search for the essence of the political, and find that we must first, in the words of Rosenstock-Huessy, go back to Descartes, hoping that we may find a new order along the way.

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“Black Mass” Book Review

John Gray is a former professor of philosophy at Oxford and the LSE, and not to be confused with the pop psychology author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In 2007 he published one of the most thought provoking intellectual works of the past decade. The title derives from the fact that a Satanic Mass takes Christian forms and inverts them – but, like Satan himself, the process takes its substance from Christianity. Gray’s thesis is that modern life is a Black Mass, and that the roots lie deep within Christianity itself. The latter, right from its origins, was apocalyptic and utopian. Most religions lack a linear sense of history, or indeed any conception of a beginning and end time. Salvation, if perceived at all, is largely seen as as release from an unending worldly round. Christianity injected teleology- history has a purpose and an end time, when its purpose will be fulfilled. This to some extent predates Christianity, with Jewish and Iranian roots, but Christianity is the vehicle by which such thinking was spread to the wider world.

This is familiar stuff, but Gray’s contribution is to examine at length the pervasiveness of the apocalyptic utopianism. Millenarian movements recurred from time to time in medieval history, but were constrained by the institutions of the Church (notably the Inquisition) and by Augustinian original sin, which precluded or at least limited the belief that life on this earth could be perfected.

In modern times, these constraints were loosened by two developments. The first was Protestantism, which never had as effective a machine to define or constrain “heresy” as the Catholics. Thus it spawned milleniarist movements by the score, who sought to build the City of God upon the Hill – including, tellingly, a key strain in American culture. Europe chose other forms of Christian heresy, secularism (the term has no meaning outside of monotheism, until the City of God was separated from the City of Man). If so far you have thought that this is yet another anti-religious tirade, then Gray is at his most venomous when discussing the secularist heresies. The totalitarianism of the Left, from the Jacobins to Stalin, makes an easy and familiar target, the apocalyptic myth a crude parody of Christianity. Nazism is often seen (notably by Isaiah Berlin, Gray’s erstwhile mentor), with its emphasis on Kultur , as a lineal descendant of the (largely German) Counter Enlightenment. In fact Gray makes a good case that it was another Enlightenment –influenced apocalyptic heresy, if a somewhat bizarre one (salvation only for Germans); certainly Hitler would not have been possible without Lenin.

Gray, however, implicates as well the most benign and successful Enlightenment belief system, liberal democracy. Though apparently tolerant, it still seeks to convert everyone on the planet – at gunpoint if necessary; there follows a lengthy section on the Iraqi tragi-comedy and the “War on Terror”, where ex-Marxist neocons formed an unholy alliance with the American Christian right. The other unexpected target is Islamism. Sayyid Qutb, the Karl Marx of the movement, was well versed in Western philosophy and impressed by Nietzsche it seems – hardly the traditional Muslim by any means. The latter would accede to Allah’s will, not actively seek to build the perfect Caliphate in an all-too-Western mimicry of the Christian reformation. No wonder it all appeals to disaffected educated Muslims in the diaspora, and spoilt rich kids from Saudi construction magnates.

Demolition is easy, but what to do? Turning one’s back on religion is not the answer: Gray believes that it is innate in humans, and if thwarted simply finds unconscious paths, as described above; indeed he feels that Dawkin’s style atheism is distinguished by its intellectual crudity. Christianity and Islam, historically the two most aggressive and intolerant faiths, demand belief – while others are content to stand in awe before mystery, and perhaps to commune mystically with it. Meanwhile, realism rather than idealism can rule the everyday world.

All very sensible, but the objection is: who wants to live in a sensible world? It would be uncreative and rather dull. The Western world (which has now infected the rest) is like a manic depressive, whose creative highs justify the depressive and destructive lows. Fine until the depression verges on suicide: Gray clearly feels that we are near the latter, as the book ends with an environmentalist tirade. Perhaps,or else he is no more immune to apocalyptic religion than others: or else, with no utopias left to believe in, it is time for Western(ised) man to grow up.

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Finding Freedom

Danny Suarez’s second novel is a blood and guts laced techno-thriller that will probably not make much sense without knowledge of his earlier book, Daemon, in which he outlines his vision of a “botnet” powered by a potentially benevolent AI. If this doesn’t already make sense to you, you might want to stop here. In Freedom, this AI has designed an online game in which accrued in-game status points somehow allow real word powers; this game is extended towards creating real world self-sufficient sustainable communities, which thus end up in a defensive war against the evil overlords of capital.

As with many of the described possibilities in the book, though many are permutations of existing or soon to exist technologies, Suarez’s descriptions range from fanciful and interesting to completely ludicrous — largely because of his purposeful blending of virtual and real worlds.

This blending, however, and his description of the world as blending has merit. “The core of our civilization” is capital, commerce, states one of the antagonists, “That no longer means gold bars in a vault; it means ones and zeros in a database.”

As real and virtual have mixed, so have spirit and real worlds. What is the the solution? Not a transcendent God, rather a new god created “out of the popular will of millions of people” — itself a machine. We need to be ruled, the author indicates, but we can create our own god, or will it into existence, thus mobilizing the masses and putting an end to the “corporate domination of culture and media.”

Thus, we are saved from potential dystopia by embracing tech-laden fantasy, one which goes far beyond the possibility of the real in search of a god that can save us from the disaster which, as the traditional accounts would have it, we have wrought with our own hands. Freedom is a very valuable thing, but it has not been stolen and trademarked without our consent — we have sold it for a few baubles and no new tech trinkets will bring it back.

Moreover, the baubles exchanged for are much what the author offers us, more or less constant titillation in the form of graphic descriptions of what happens when the various spinning blades attached to various combat robots meet human flesh, an event which happens quite frequently, or technological wet dreams, including, at its root, the fantasy that a new “spiritual” machine can somehow liberate us from the corporate one.

Technology, in the end, is nothing but levers and cranks, hanging chads, ones and zeros — nothing to build a society off of. The more we use it to also fulfill spiritual needs, the more likely we will be bound by fantasy.

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The Anti-Narrative

Sexism, racism, homophobia, culturism. All of these -isms take part in the grand narrative of oppressed peoples, tied together and advanced against conservative elements of society, usually without any understanding of the elements they criticize. That is, to say, this grand narrative is essentially an anti-narrative, possessing no positive element, and ironically performing the same function Schenker accuses Wagner of musically — playing on the expectations of persons influenced by prior traditional concepts to destroy those concepts.

This is not to say that in any of these cases (women, Jews and other non-European races, homosexuals) there are not legitimate grievances against the power structures that preceded and oppressed them. It is to say that the narrative that has accompanied their attainment of greater political power has not provided any significant formative or positive aspects to replace the structures which preceded their ascent.

However, conservative values and power structures having totally eroded (America possesses the last ebb, but it is a weak and pitiful ebb), the world seems set for completely anarchy, or rather, the rule of the machine and purely quantitative apparatus which is the last bastion of competence.

What is ‘racism’ according to this anti-narrative? By definition, it is simply anything that denies the oppressed race’s journey to liberation. What is ‘liberation’ ? It is simply an increase in power relative to whomever previously possessed it. According to the narrative, a decrease of power and other social goods is acceptable so long as the oppressor ends up the relative loser. See for example, the state of Zimbabwe. Consequently, the purveyors of this anti-narrative do not care so much about the people (who have suffered far worse under Mugabe than Ian Smith) but about the emotive high felt by participation in the mass movements which accompany the spread of the anti-narrative, not dissimilar to frequent African genocides.

Consequently, it is common to accuse anyone who opposes third world dicators, even Obama, as racists, simply on the basis of the anti-narrative’s endorsement of oppressed third world peoples and sympathizer. Is this simply a yielding to the definition of the anti-narrative? Certainly, but the fact remains that for this word, as with ‘sexism,’ anti-semitism,’ ‘Islamophobia,’ there simply are no other definitions. The result is when one uses provided words or is forced to make the denial, ‘I am not a racist,’ one essentially yields all non-quantitative discourse to the violence of purveyors of this mode of discourse. One has, ipso facto, become a slave.

Why does one instinctively react with the phrase, ‘I am not a racist’ ? The reason is essentially fear. The grand narrative of oppressed peoples has achieved such cachet that not to immediately voice assent is to risk violence upon your person. Usually threat of social ostracization is sufficient. Human beings, especially when deprived of close knit communities of persons with similar cultural presuppositions (as is especially the case with the current phase of global capitalism), are unable to voice an opinion which counters such a narrative and will immediately fall back into the societal line. At a higher level, various interest groups exist in America which attempt to destroy the careers of persons who threaten this narrative.

American religion possesses two layers. The first layer is America’s civil-religion, with its own telos and pattern of ritual and law which govern the state. Accompanying priests and teachers of the law perform essentially the same function as earlier state-religions. In Catholic Spain shared holidays focus on the liturgical calendar. In the American civil-religion shared holidays are those of the civil-religion, celebrating wars and saluting past heroes for their function with the civil-religion. What is the function of a theologian in a Catholic state? Generally to determine what is and is not permitted within the context of the received tradition. What is the function of a lawyer in the American state? To discuss the permissible within the context of the more recent traditions of the American state. In the Protestant-derived tradition the code of law takes primacy. Sola Scriptura.

The second layer are the various actively religious sects which complement America’s civil-religion. Christian sects catering to the upper classes have always been well integrated into the civil-religion and have tacitly endorsed the norms of the civil-religion even when this runs against the stated traditions of their own sect. The rest participate in what essentially is revivalist religion, the focus of which is the production of an experience of God’s love. In traditional revivalist sects there is also reorientation towards telos called salvation. In American revivalist sects this telos is often subordinated to the telos for individuals in the civil-religion, namely the pursuit of happiness.

The traditional American civil-religion possessed as its starting point various philosophical principles current among Anglo and French philosophies. Because the state was founded by consensus, there was no well-defined telos. To the extent there was definition, it was found in Jefferson’s writings, which never made their way in law. Nonetheless, there remained in many sectors an active devotion to the principle of ‘liberty,’ the subject of a very large statue in the harbor of America’s largest city.

What did ‘liberty’ mean? It meant the greater extension of the American civil-religion by missionary effort. The primary selling point was that individuals insofar as they wished to follow the American telos of pursuing their own happiness they could do so better within the context of the American civil-religion. Native peoples who preferred their own traditions to the American civil-religion were not permitted to maintain them.

The ‘rights’ dialogue from the beginning (see Alasdair Macintyre) was an attempt to separate ethics from the religious tradition and present them as derived by reason alone, never philosophically sound but with other reasons for appeal. During the twentieth century, the predominant stream of effort within the American civil-religion was the greater extension of these rights, predictably resisted by the American South.

Along the way two interesting things happened. First, the influx of self-described oppressed immigrants from Europe led also to the introduction of the anti-narrative, which upon arrival was immediately directed against the oppressive ethics and rule of those of Northern European descent. The second was the increased integration between the lower layer (revivalistic religion) with the American civil-religion. The argument made was that the ethics of the New Testament are not about apolitical worship, but the love of the New Testament requires action. The direction of implied action was of course the ‘rights’ already existing as an implied good within the American civil religion.

Having essentially completed its triumph horizontally, also extending in part into Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the American civil-religion now attempted to complete its triumph by extending its reach vertically into the lower layer of American revivalistic religion. MLKjr represents this clearly, but the key thinker is Reinhold Niebuhr, who picks up the disorganized fragments of neo-Orthodoxy and reformulates it with respect to participation in the American civil-religion, particularly an endorsement of what one might call ‘welfare capitalism.’ The liberation theologians attempted to discount revivalistic religion; Niebuhr and MLKjr attempted to integrate it with the state-religion.

Because of the pragmatism of the American populace and their detachment from the events and history on the European continent, the propagation of the anti-narrative (initially targeted specifically toward Europeans) had limited success; Marxist liberation theologians retreated to the academy or media institutions and focused on the de-education of the youth by overthrowing oppressive traditional ethical values. The language was that of violence and intimidation, especially relying on extending universally accepted wrongs within the American populace. For instance, any use of power to suppress destructive speech was labeled with Nazi similitude. If the purveyor was ethnically Jewish, certainly also ‘anti-semitism.’ Through such means the purveyors of the anti-narrative were able to extend this cachet to other subjects, including all discussion of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexual practices. Moreover, as typical with this approach, it was to do the opposite of the traditional ethical notion that was especially lauded and seen as admirable.

By the time of Obama’s youth certain sectors of the American academy were so overrun with purveyors of the anti-narrative (anthropology especially, as it had always distinguished itself from ‘missionary’ work) that his mother could say of her fellow countrymen while traveling that they were ‘not my people.’ In other words, the Marxist justification of violence toward the oppressors was being taught to the younger generation at almost all top-tier universities outside of quantitative fields.

Another interesting shift happened after the second World War. This was the increasing feeling of American triumphalism on the basis of the self-destruction of Europe, the American-led rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the creation of a ‘universal’ human-rights platform, and military preeminence enjoyed. Consequently (and despite the obvious derivative nature of America’s founding ideas from Occidental precedents) Americans developed a strident belief in the possibilities of the ‘new,’ complementing and providing ease to the spread of the anti-narrative even during the Cold War period. The historical account taught in American schools shifted to an exaltation of this cult of the ‘new,’ complemented by the anti-narrative wherever possible — by definition destroying the very concept of history.

Another interesting trend was the movement of purveyors of the anti-narrative under the umbrella of religion, which always enjoyed an protected status in the American state. Most recently, adherents to black nationalism realized they could more successfully prosecute their claims within Christianity; many Marxist activists also claimed Christianity and became liberation theologians. Because of a lack of centralized authority in such traditions or American academia generally, there was no way for persons of a tradition orientation to prevent the appropriation of their tradition for political means, especially under the constant threats of violence internal to these various institutions.

The political alliances later formed were a logical extension of the essential triumph of the aforementioned ideas. At the beginning of the twentieth century the American right remained populated by persons claiming the essentially negative definition of ”freedom from,’ instead of the downward extension of the American civil-religion. For instance, the civil-religion enjoyed little power over ‘marriage,’ which was essentially a stamp on the basis of the traditional religious definition. The expansion of ‘rights’ complemented by the anti-narrative led to the gradually successful establishment of a broader definition of marriage in the minds of the younger generation which has yet to be complemented by complete recognition by law (but certainly will within 20 years). Another current example is the faith based programs. Under the Obama institution, faith-based organizations receiving federal funding are to adjust their hiring practices based on the norms of the civil-religion, effectively destroying the particularity of any religious sects seeking still to provide social services as a distinct second layer.

Adherents to traditional religions generally are ignorant of these larger trends, typically working through the political/legal system and attempting create little geographical bubbles in which they can oppose the norms of the civil-religion (for instance the debate over evolution education in Kansas). In general, Catholics are less inclined to accept the American multi-layered solution. In general as immigrants from oppressed peoples, they trend towards wholesale support of the anti-narrative, although there is also a conservative faction which is essentially Constitutionalist and unsurprisingly seeks to maintain a traditionalist approach towards America’s founding documents. One especially interesting segment are the Catholic converts, many of whom support the primacy and extension of the American civil-religion but because of pessimism regarding current trends wish to extend its lifetime by the adoption of conservative Catholic principles, especially within the field of ethics.

In early first century Christian documents, ‘true religion’ is defined with respect to action on the behalf of disadvantaged persons. Although the American civil-religion has similarly always placed emphasis on action with respect to ethics, the source for these ethics has always been problematic. Figures like Lincoln grounded their actions on some combination of moral intuition and biblical sources. Obama claims to do the same, especially clear allegiance to Niebuhr’s project.

The problem with moral intuition or passion as a grounding mechanism is that there is no measurable element and it can easily become tied together with other sources for passion, especially one’s greed or self-interest. To the extent that one expresses admiration for Lincoln (as I have on various occasions), it nonetheless seems that the positive elements he hoped to foster in the American republic have been, in many respects, displaced by the triumphalism and greed of the Northeastern establishment. This pattern has continued to the present day, despite the many positive contributions made in other sectors.

It is frequently claimed that the string of conservative Catholics, bible-believing evangelicals, and Jews who support Israel for religious reasons represent a threat to the extension of the professedly secular American civil-religion, as they support what is essentially a national narrative on the old twentieth century model, which was supposed to be replaced by the ‘new’ combination of the American civil-religion and anti-narrative. This is essentially correct. Despite some who have attempted to articulate a Jewish universalism (Rav Kook) the foundation of the Jewish state in many respects no different from the blood-and-soil nationalism which preceded it, simply a substitution of ethnicities, and has not yet made a full transition to Jeffersonian democracy.

The irony is that many of the more intelligent expositors of support for this state within America do so in opposition to similar governing structures, even those with a religious basis which effectively resisted the Marxist influx. They depend on the anti-narrative in their discussion of destruction of previous models, yet without offering anything genuinely new. The interpretation of capitalism is as the great destroyer, that destroys communities and creates individuals, and then as Schumpeter predicted, leaves them unable to mount any coherent resistance to the triumph of this anti-narrative.

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Clausewitz and the End of Europe

A review of Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre by René Girard.

As stated at the outset, this book is focused on mimetic rivalry in French-German relations, leading to a total war largely already completed, and the apocalypse described as more or less already with us, including the vapidity of contemporary American culture, a vast ecological crisis, and a necessarily ensuing conflict between the United States and China. Substantial principles relative to this are that political dynamics of the past two centuries, including both French and Prussian nationalisms which he claims were largely defined implicitly against the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic church – which, perhaps together, present the only possibility of resolving this mimetic tension (the ‘how’ is never elucidated).

Clausewitz, then, is a productive illustration of this dynamic, largely because his entire venture is defined implicitly against Napoleon — his drive towards the apex of enlightenment thinking, including a rational exposition of all elements of war reveals, in its shadow, the utter irrational, passionate, and mimetic aspect of warfare, including those which, despite his ostensibly rational intentions, persist in Clausewitz’s actions and private statements. This is most clearly revealed in the double metaphor offered in the opening statements of his masterpiece, in which Clausewitz refers to war as a duel, then qualifies and describes wrestling as a better metaphor. The duel, as Girard correctly observes, inevitably escalates on the basis of mimetic violence and passion, whereas the wresting match is over when the rational objectives of one party have been attained and the other is reduced to submission.

As stated above, this irrational, mimetic aspect of violence necessarily leads to an escalation in violence leading to total war, in which there are ultimately no victors. The Christian response, as exposited by Girard, is necessarily withdrawal and complete abstention from violence. The mimetic mode for the Christian is to follow the Christ in his withdrawal from society, rather than the pagan, which imitates other men (“vengeance”), but contains no means for approaching God. In this sense, it is Hölderlin who best typifies the appropriate response within the context of European of the past two centuries — especially his late Christian phase (e.g. Patmos) passed over by many commentators. Consistent with this point, Girard criticizes violent acts by Christians, such as the crusades, as a reversion to archaic elements of religion, and sees the previous pope’s public acts of repentance as figurative of a new more Christian era.

Along the same lines, all statements of heroism post-Napoleon are corrupted by their assessment of the potential “fecundity of violence,” which is expressed as potentially redemptive because of the prospect of recapturing the hallowed State, as found in Hegel, Schmitt, and also Nolte. His critique of Levinas is that, while he successfully describes the violent nature of all ontology, he thought we could escape with recourse to “the pure experience of pure being” which fails to address or confront the essential and necessarily mimetic nature of rivalry — this is to say that he attempts to construct a harmonious community without first addressing the fundamental human aspects of the participants in this community, ultimately a “dried up humanism” without humans.

Despite Girard’s promise at the outset, he never properly addresses apocalyptic texts, or, at least, those foundational to the Christian tradition. His pro-Catholic polemics, especially in favor of papal infallibility are unlikely to be convincing to those not already convinced, and his scapegoat theory remains in certain respects somewhat dubious and incomprehensible. These criticisms aside, Girard articulates, perhaps better than any since Clausewitz, the essential elements of war, and exposition of French-German relations, including the potentiality that currently hangs over Europe is generally correct, if ultimately failed since, as Plato expounds, all political unions rest necessarily on their ability to commit acts of violence — something Girard denies to the Christian.

The author recently returned to the United States from Israel where he was studying theories of war.

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Tradition and T.S. Eliot: A Journey to the East?

We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

What is tradition? What is orthodoxy? Wherein lies the greatness of poetry? These questions not answered, Eliot moves forward in time to new formulations, new questions. Why tradition? Why orthodoxy? Why “great” poetry? These questions easier to answer, yes, though answers no less convincing.

Why not? T.S. Eliot believes in tradition but not Tradition. He selects what is appropriate for today on the basis of his historical sense, his sense of connectivity to that which preceded him, which ultimately prevents him from reaching the beyond — Tradition as a living concept. The tension in his mind, appropriate, is between religious form and dogma and poetry, which must extend beyond it. There is very little great religious poetry, he avers, because the gifting of the poet and religious sentiment are different. This true, but what he fails to recognize is that his connection is nothing but a broader set of forms, not amounting to Orthodoxy in a sense distinct from orthodoxy, because the impulse for them is different from either truth or beauty. Community remains preeminent; poetic feeling he describes is a method of forging and maintaining such. The fire and the rose never appear in their full luminosity.

Eliot protests at the ascription that he is describing the feeling of a defeated generation in the Wasteland, but the critics are right. His orthodoxy is the remnants of religious feeling found in the neglected wainscot, in an country church, barely attended and in disrepair, not missionary monks or warriors ready to fall under the sign of the cross. It is a quaint clutching feeling, and, when it attempts to be more, fails except when in defensive posture (“gun rather loose in the holster”), or stating the problem (“farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust”).

Nowhere is this failure more apparent than in Eliot’s colossal contradiction in “Goethe as Sage” — European poetry is great because it is universal. But how can Europe, or America for that matter “invaded by foreign races,” or with its native culture “effaced,” be a representative of a universal culture? Eliot falls into a quantitative assessment. Greatness is a matter of numbers, not of the mass of men, but of the elite: scholars and men of culture. They have told me Goethe is great, the last great representative European poet, and thus I must grapple with this at, perhaps, the expense of my “orthodoxy” and Puritan sentiment.

Both are thusly abandoned as despair gives way to sentimentality and a new category, “wisdom,” that supersedes orthodoxy and does not correspond to truth, the embrace of quantity of cultured opinion, and the death of that which Eliot claims to love, Europe.

Perhaps Eliot’s failure comes early as he attempts to “confine [himself] to such practical conclusions” as are immediately ascertainable and applicable (TatIT) — this wonderful American pragmatism, which forces him ultimately to a shallow conception of greatness, consisting of nothing but abundance, amplitude, unity — and an abundantly shallow “universality” (GaS).

Did not Eliot already say on such:

“The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel toward God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can understand, but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it becomes meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death. It is equally possible that the feeling for poetry, and the feelings for poetry and the feeling which are the material of poetry, may disappear everywhere, which might perhaps help to facilitate that unification of the world which some people consider desirable for its own sake.” (oPaP)

Thus Eliot condemns himself and his own unified conception of wisdom — the modern age began a long time ago. We are not apprehensive of death. Death is the beginning. Seeking has no limitations, backwards, outwards, and ultimately forwards, through our abandonment of our shallow sentiment and necessary deaths. Our battle not to save the Europe of Goethe, but to find what jade remains in the ash and use it to forge new parapets — the question not whither, but whether and how to use found jade in this divinely sanctioned task.

______

T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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