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 traditional 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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Peter Leithart on Christ and Constantine

What would have to happen, humanly speaking and “under the sun”, for the Christian Right and the Christian Church in America to recover a clear and present cultural mission? Is there some kind of contemplative vision that could possibly give roots and unity to the furious but desultory evangelical activity in the modern Church?

That’s an interesting way to put the question – “some kind of contemplative vision.” Without denigrating contemplation, I’d say that liturgical action rather than a contemplative vision should be at the heart of the reformation of Christian mission. That distinction is based in part on an anthropological point: We are embodied beings, and so preparation for Christian mission and ministry must not only be contemplative but also a matter of bodily training and discipline. A “vision” of life is worked into bodies and not just into minds and hearts; Christian pedagogy takes form in action, ritual, and gesture as well as in teaching and thought.

So, rephrasing the question more to my tastes: What liturgical reform should give roots to evangelical activity in the modern church? Here, the traditional answers are the obvious and right answers. Liturgy centers on Word and Table, and what the American church needs is a return to those basics. I could elaborate on all the flaws of contemporary evangelicalism – preaching that has minimal connection with Scripture and reduces to self-help and moralistic exhortation; narrow “methods” of biblical interpretation as opposed to the richness of medieval and Reformation exegesis; infrequent or non-existent Eucharist, which means infrequent or non-existent enjoyment of the hospitality of God; etc. I’m heartened by increasing interest in liturgy among evangelicals, but it could degenerate into traditionalism, with people obsessing over the quite secondary ornaments of worship instead of recovering the driving force of Word and Sacrament.

If talking about liturgy in answer to a question about the Christian Right and the church’s “cultural mission” seems odd, well, I see that as part of the problem. Christian mission certainly isn’t exhausted by what we do in liturgy, but the trajectory of mission is set by the liturgy. We are as we worship, and if we never enjoy God’s hospitality at His table, it’s not so surprising if we’re a greedy and grasping people.

In your analysis of Jane Austen’s works in Miniatures and Moral, you defend Austen’s portrayal of real heroism in both male and female characters. In the The Historical Austen by William H. Galperin (by contrast) Galperin attempts to de-code or de-construct Austen’s work by providing secret clues as to Colonel Brandon’s (supposed) active ruination of Willoughby, and Austen’s hidden disapproval. How does one (or should one) go about answering the postmodern anti-narratives that attempt to re-read every canonical author? Can’t every author eventually be de-constructed, given enough objectifying research? What is the salient point to remember when reading such deconstructions?

I’m not familiar with the book, but from your summary I find the thesis implausible. But Austen opened herself up to this sort of reduction, I suppose, since she’s always draping everything with several layers of irony. Poor Jane. She didn’t know what she was setting herself up for.

I find some “deconstructionist” readings revealing and helpful. They point to real tensions within a text that I would have missed. In that sense, deconstruction is an intensified form of New Criticism. But many deconstructive analyses get tedious, boring, and incredibly self-reflexive. When a critic needs a 50-page theoretical introduction before he ever looks at a text, when he can’t look at a text without talking about Bataille and Deleuze, something’s gone awry.

On the more general hermeneutical question: Are there tensions between surface and depth in a text? Yes, just like there are plenty of tensions within the writers who write them. Do silences and gaps speak as loud as words? Yes. Is there slippage between sign and signified, sign and referent? Yes. Communication thus seems impossible. But it only seems impossible if you’re measuring it by a standard of transparent, flawless purity. So, deconstruction is a kind of disappointed idealism: Thought and communication do not have the kind of purity that we think is necessary, and so it becomes impossible. But why should we assume that communication can only take place in that kind of pure form? To put it in more bluntly realist terms (envision Samuel Johnson kicking his rock): Communication happens. Therefore, it is possible. Since it happens through very imperfect means, these are the means by which it happens. Wishing for purity is (as Hamann recognized) the Pharisaism of Enlightenment modernity. I think too of Wittgenstein’s point that perfect clarify in communication would actually inhibit communication. “Bring me the broom” communicates better than “bring me the object with the long, thin rounded handle to which straw bristles are attached,” though it is less “precise.”

How does communication happen? How is it possible? I think that’s a theological question. Communication happens because God is the Word, and the Word is God, and the Word that is God is the condition of the possibility of inter-human communication. That means that the possibility of communication isn’t grounded in the text; deconstructionists are kind of inverted creationists, showing that, at base and in itself, the text is nothing. Communication isn’t grounded in the author either, because on overtly creationist terms, the author is made from nothing. The nihilism of deconstruction confirms a Christian insight into creation. It is perfectly consistent and logical, unless God is and is Word. Which He is.

You are a Rosentock-Huessy reader and admirer. What do you regard as his most fundamental and valuable insights for modern times?

Rosenstock-Huessy’s work is impossible to summarize simply. He said it himself in the title of one of his collections of essays: He was an “impure thinker.” But there are recurring themes that I think are important for Christians in our time. He had uncanny prophetic insight, largely because of his profound understanding of history. Long before “globalization” became a buzzword, he noticed that it was happening, and also recognized that the next thing would be a renewed tribalism. So, he gives us a good bit of insight into the dynamics of international politics and culture. More abstractly and theoretically, he was a fundamentally temporal thinker; he saw time as a more fundamental human category than space. Catherine Pickstock has pointed out that modernity is a “spatializing” culture, and Rosenstock-Huessy helps us break out of that. I’ve found his work on language to be very useful in thinking about sacraments and signs, and his concept of “bodies of time” is, I think, a profound insight into the human experience and shaping of time.

I’ve found his paradigm of the “cross of reality” immensely helpful in thinking through all sorts of issues, including pastoral issues. I serve as co-pastor of a church, for instance, that is made up of 20-somethings. I’m not a 20-something, and Rosenstock-Huessy reminds me that there is potential for clash in that generational divide. If I don’t watch myself, I could slip into nostalgia and decadence, maintaining the past for the sake of the past, saying, repeatedly, “this is the way we’ve always done it”; if the younger members of the church don’t watch themselves, they could become revolutionaries who close their ears to the wisdom that their elders bring. Both sides are tempted to hunker down on one pole of the cross of reality, but the health of the church depends on both sides staying at the center of the cross – enduring and suffering the clash of past and future, listening to each other in love and patience, and forming a dynamic present out of that clash.

In Against Christianity, you argue for a restoration of Christendom and a Reformation of Christianity, “For all its animus to modernity, the Christian Right made one of the most characteristic of modern political beliefs the foundation of its entire agenda: the assumption that the state has the jurisdiction of morals”.

You also suggest, with NT Wright, that the Church is called to be “Israel in a new way.” In Paul’s words, “Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” If Revelation is the story of the unholy alliance between Rome and Jerusalem, with the Ekklesia called upon to become a Church militant and polis that challenges this alliance, and if “political liberalism and political conservatism are variations of one outlook (the modern liberal one)”, with a divine call to resist the “ethos of Americanism and the culture of globalization”, what practical advice would you give to the conservative movement in avoiding the dangers of (real or imagined) Constantianism as against (also) the perils of a withering cultural retreat?

That’s a complicated question, but I’ll venture some incomplete and inadequate thoughts in response. My argument in Against Christianity is that Christians have become so deeply accommodated to modernity that the difference between church and world has been blurred. America is a particularly obvious case of this. Because of our deeply Christian history, and for other reasons as well, American Christians are particularly apt to mistake the kingdom for the country. We are, as Sidney Mead famously said (quoting Chesterton, I think), a “nation with the soul of a church.” That brings some important benefits, but it’s also a dangerous temptation. For the last century or so, however, that alliance has been cracking up. Christians just haven’t caught up with reality yet. We’re stuck in the 19th century in many ways, and that’s particularly true of conservative evangelicals, The breakup of this alliance is like the breakup of the alliance of Rome and Christianity that occurred at the beginning of the Middle Ages, which was given intellectual form by Augustine in the City of God. I think we need an American City of God, one that gives due appreciation to the American achievement but also carefully disentangles the American story from the Christian story. That would be the intellectual side of the problem you state.

Practically, pastorally, the issue is delicate and difficult. There’s always the danger that Christians create artificial differences with the world around them, difference for the sake of difference. That’s a recurring problem in pietist evangelicalism – card-playing, dancing, drinking, smoking become taboos, markers that bound off Christians from non-Christians. But those are not biblical standards. So, how does the difference become palpable, but organically and not artificially so? Sexual ethics is crucial here. Nothing displays the confusions of our culture like our sexual confusions; nothing is so offensive to our culture as saying that there are absolute and inviolable sexual standards. Christians need to defend, and live, biblical sexual morality. Another crucial area, I think, is that of charity and mercy. Since the rise of the religious right, Christians have become known by their anger, often by their fear. That’s not what should mark us. Love, expressed concretely in sacrificial ministry to the world, should mark Christian churches.

You bounce off of Stanley Hauerwas, Rodney Stark, and John Yoder, as well as Phillip Rieff and John Millbank in this book. What other thinkers have influenced you since on these topics, and which ones could you recommend for further study?

When I first started reading theology seriously, I read a good bit of Reformed literature, and especially those dreaded reconstructionists – RJ Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen. I learned a great deal from them, and I owe many of my interests in the theology of culture and political theology to them. Cornelius Van Til’s work, especially as it was mediated to me through the work of John Frame, provided the foundations of my thinking on all sorts of topics. Seminary professors were key, especially Vern Poythress and Richard Gaffin. Behind nearly everything I do is the work of James Jordan and the “Biblical Horizons” circle that he’s formed. Jim’s biblical work is unsurpassed, but Jim has also had a long interest in cultural and political issues, and always throws fresh, biblical, light on those questions. Liturgical scholars have also been hugely important. Through Jordan’s encouragement, I started reading Alexander Schmemann, whose little book *For the Life of the World* has been seminal. I think I’ve learned a lot about politics from Shakespeare as well.

Do you essentially accept Phillip Rieff’s definition of culture as interdict (or “No”), in which outside behaviour becomes unthinkable, and individuals are “in culture” precisely as “culture is in them”? Are there any other real competitors to this kind of definition of what constitutes genuine personhood? How does a Christian go about presenting such an “Old Testament” view to the modern, Hegelian or proto-scientific outlook?

I accept Rieff’s definition, but I wouldn’t say it stands alone as the final definition of culture. I don’t think there is, or ever will be, a final comprehensive definition of culture. I like Rieff partly because it resonates with so much of the Bible, and also because it is so thoroughly counter-cultural. It’s a rather arresting and simple way to get at a lot of cultural pathologies. But I’d accept a Milbankian criticism that making Rieff’s definition primary or foundational would mean making “negativity” prior to positivity. So, again, Rieff gets it right, but he doesn’t say everything that needs to be said.

Your last question is the crucial one: How can “No” become a plausible response to anything? One answer is that we can see the damage done by a refusal to say No. That’s only a partial answer, though; we’ve seen abortion, assisted suicide, “partial-birth” infanticide, and few seem ready to say Stop. What does it take? The other, and more basic answer, is that the biblical “No” become plausible when the gospel takes hold. So, again, the positivity of the good news is prior to the embrace of interdiction.

In your Against Christianity, you suggest that a prophet is someone who tells a king, “You can’t do this stupid shit. If you do, your people will hate you, and you will wind up in f—–g hell.” You openly wonder about the possibilities of an “imperial conversion” at the top, and (rightly) ask why an emperor with actual power wouldn’t be obligated to make his Empire more Christian. However, in an age dominated by a massive Demos, how does one go about making the same point, even at all? Can the point even be made apart from a hierarchy or an Imperial head? If not, is this an argument for monarchy? What other polity might America consider, re-consider? Or is democracy so deeply imbedded, and so identified with the masses, that any alternative is inconceivable?

Yes, I instinctively still think in rather medieval terms about political life – kings and subordinate powers and all that. Partly that’s because those are largely the terms of biblical political discourse. That’s no accident, I expect. For all the populism of American life, there are still elites who shape public discourse, moral expectations, political action. There are still “rulers,” and radical conversion of those rulers would have a profound effect on American “democracy.” That would obviously take a different form than it did in the early middle ages, when a king’s conversion led to mass baptisms.

Tocqueville already commented on how uniform American opinion tended to be, far more so than in European countries. The diversity of our democracy is partly a myth. There’s a recurring current of messianism in American political history, a yearning for a savior. That could take an ugly fascist turn at some point. So, I don’t think that the current “democratic” form of American politics is necessarily permanent.

I am not arguing for monarchy. I think monarchy is a perfectly legitimate form of government, but not the only or necessarily the best. Israel had several different political systems during her history, all of them established by God, so I don’t think Scripture endorses any particular order.

From your blog:

“Published in 1992, The Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science by James Loder and W. Jim Neidhardt is not widely discussed or read, so far as I have seen. It deserves better. It suggests a new grammar and logic for the dialogue science and theology under the connected categories of “relationality” and “spirit.” Drawing from Kierkegaard, mediated through Niels Bohr, the authors highlight the principle of ”complementarity,” or the coherence of contradictories,which for them is ultimately a Christological category. The idea is that two mutually exclusive and exhaustive explanations are necessary to make sense of some reality: Simply, 100% God and 100% man of the incarnation. This provides them with a model to explore knowledge, human development, discovery, and the strange loops of human thought and of corporate life. A bit of a Kierkegaard overload, but it’s well worth some time.”

What kind of hope do books like these have of reconciling the modern scientific temperament with anything approaching radical Christian orthodoxy? Is there a good definition of what constitutes the scientific temperament? Is it fated to grow without limit? What possible limits, at least in a democracy, could it have? What possible religious implications/limits does it have? Are we (practically) even able to conceive anything, intellectually, outside its limits?

My scientific knowledge is pretty abysmal, so take what I say on this point with more than the usual grain of salt. Loder and Neidhardt, however, are not the first or only writers to note a “spiritual” turn within science. It’s as if we’ve pushed the scientific approach to reality to the point where it inverts and turns into something else. Already in the 19th century, the Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck pointed out that materialism naturally turns into spiritualism. Atomistic materialism attributes spiritual, divine properties to the basic components of the material world – atoms are indivisible (they were in the 19th century!), indestructible, etc. At the most basic level of material reality, matter doesn’t act like matter anymore. Insofar as I understand things, it seems that the physics of the last century has confirmed Bavinck’s point in spades.

But you’re talking about the limits of the enterprise of science as well. There, I guess I’d have to go back to my comments on Rieff. Modernity is the primacy of possibility, the refusal of interdict, the refusal to say No. So long as every possibility remains an open possibility, there won’t be the political will to shut down certain lines of scientific inquiry that are dehumanizing. Again, the success of the gospel seems to me the only thing that will re-establish even the possibility, much less the primacy, of interdict.

Are you familiar with the writings of Alain de Benoist, George Parkin Grant, or any other modern political theorists who are working with concepts of federalism and local sovereignty? Does partition, decentralization, and localism have any prominent theorists you can recommend, or hold any promise for solving the magnitude of problems connected with the US Empire in decline?

I don’t know Benoist at all, and know too little about Grant to comment.

What non-Christian thinker do you owe the greatest debt to?

That’s a very interesting question. I’m afraid my list is fairly short. There are a number of Jewish biblical scholars who have deeply affected by work – especially Jacob Milgrom on Leviticus and Robert Alter on the literary features of the Old Testament. I’ve found Derrida very challenging, and I think of him as a kind of proto-Trinitarian thinker, uncovering all sorts of evidence for vestigia Trinitatis. In my work on sacramental theology, I made use of cultural anthropologists working in the area of ritual studies whose religious commitments are uncertain – Victor Turner, van Gennep, and others. I’ve read in the Western philosophical tradition, and in Western political and social thought, though I’m very far from mastering any of it. Much of the effect of that reading has been mediated through Christian thinkers like van Til, Rushdoony, Milbank and David Hart.

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