Sometimes I just…

Well, despair of my own Church. Recently, in Curaçao, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA Katharine Jefferts Schori delivered a homily on the Acts of the Apostles in which she said (and I am not making this up, though I dearly, dearly, dearly wish I was):

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it. Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison.

I’m sorry, I don’t usually resort to using animated GIFs to express my reactions, but:

Well, yes, the girl had a demon in her which was oppressing her, and two cruel, callous and greedy slave-masters which were using the powers of this demon to make money off of her. St Paul was doing the poor girl a favour setting her free, and the reason the slave-masters complained of St Paul to the authorities was because they lost their exploitable source of money! What, is our Presiding Bishop trying to be an apologist for slavery here? I don’t even--

That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so! The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there – so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

An earthquake opens the doors and sets them free, and now Paul and his friends most definitely discern the presence of God. The jailer doesn’t – he thinks his end is at hand. This time, Paul remembers who he is and that all his neighbors are reflections of God, and he reaches out to his frightened captor. This time Paul acts with compassion rather than annoyance, and as a result the company of Jesus’ friends expands to include a whole new household. It makes me wonder what would have happened to that slave girl if Paul had seen the spirit of God in her.

...

Really, Bishop Katharine? A demon is actually the ‘spirit of God’, St Paul (who apparently doesn’t ‘share in God’s nature’ as much as this demon does) actually got what was coming to him from the Roman authorities, and is actually an amnesiac who forgets the presence of God at the drop of a hat and recovers it again when it suits the Bishop’s pre-read narrative? Right. Keep going, there, Kate, don’t mind me, I just have to drop into the next room to make a call…

Thankfully for my sanity and that of other Episcopalians, the reaction to the homily have been roundly negative. One of the comments on the homily, from Susan Raedeke, sums it up best:

Am I to understand that the PB believes that Paul, in a case of mistaken identity, was able to make the Holy Spirit take a hike? That’s one powerful apostle. Or maybe there are little-bitty good spirits that possess people so that other people can make money off of them? Bizzaro.

Pointless video post – ‘Nocturnal Wings’ by Forever Storm

Serbia’s Forever Storm rank very, very high on my list of favourite power metal bands, even though they are relative newcomers working on their second album. Their debut album, Soul Revolution, definitely struck the ‘sweet spot’ balancing epic melody with sheer crunch and groove, blending traditional, tried-and-true heavy metal structures with progressions which sneak up on you. That said, that album also demonstrated that they have a marked emphasis on slow, mellow, balladic constructions, and if this video is any indication, that emphasis is likely to continue on their forthcoming album Tragedy from which this song comes. I’m greatly looking forward to this album coming out - it should be awesome! Please do enjoy, gentle listeners!

Quotes from two Orthodox ‘social justice’ Christians

For it is lawful to be rich, but without covetousness, without rapine and violence, and an ill report from all men. With these arguments let us first smooth them down, and not as yet discourse of hell. For the sick man endures not yet such sayings. Wherefore let us go to this world for all our arguments upon these matters; and say, Why is it your choice to be rich through covetousness? That the gold and the silver may be laid up for others, but for you, curses and accusations innumerable? That he whom you have defrauded may be stung by want of the very necessaries of life, and bewail himself, and draw down upon you the censure of thousands; and may go at fall of evening about the market place, encountering every one in the alleys, and in utter perplexity, and not knowing what to trust to even for that one night? For how is he to sleep after all, with pangs of the belly, restless famine besetting him, and that often while it is freezing, and the rain coming down on him? And while thou, having washed, returnest home from the bath, in a glow with soft raiment, merry of heart and rejoicing, and hastening unto a banquet prepared and costly: he, driven every where about the market place by cold and hunger, takes his round, stooping low and stretching out his hands; nor has he even spirit without trembling to make his suit for his necessary food to one so full fed and so bent on taking his ease; nay, often he has to retire with insult.

[...]

What wild beast would not be softened by these things? Who is there so savage and inhuman that these things should not make him mild? And yet there are some who are arrived at such a pitch of cruelty as even to say that they deserve what they suffer. Yea, when they ought to pity, and weep, and help to alleviate men's calamities, they on the contrary visit them with savage and inhuman censures. Of these I should be glad to ask, Tell me, why do they deserve what they suffer? Is it because they would be fed and not starve?

No, you will reply; but because they would be fed in idleness. And thou, dost not thou wanton in idleness? What say I? Are you not oft-times toiling in an occupation more grievous than any idleness, grasping, and oppressing, and coveting? Better were it if you too were idle after this sort; for it is better to be idle in this way, than to be covetous. But now thou even tramplest on the calamities of others, not only idling, not only pursuing an occupation worse than idleness, but also maligning those who spend their days in misery.

[...]

And these things I say, not because riches are a sin: the sin is in not distributing them to the poor, and in the wrong use of them. For God made nothing evil but all things very good; so that riches too are good; i.e. if they do not master their owners; if the wants of our neighbors be done away by them. For neither is that light good which instead of dissipating darkness rather makes it intense: nor should I call that wealth, which instead of doing away poverty rather increases it.

- St John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians

And therefore, in light of this:

If your earnings are higher, consequently, that increases your moral responsibility to society, too; it follows that you can afford to pay more taxes to help those who can’t earn their own bread.

Society shouldn’t be a place where wolves chase rabbits; even a wolf pack has a certain amount of mutual support. If society refuses to support its weaker members, of necessity, it surrenders to the ‘law of the jungle’. This isn’t vacuous moralising; all of human history validates these things.

- Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, Proshchenoe Voskresen’e, 2011

It should be noted that Fr Chaplin’s policy prescriptions, for a progressive taxation scheme, are quite modest indeed. St John Chrysostom was much more strident. The wealthy people who claim that they are entitled to what they have merely because they have earned it, and who say the poor deserve their lot for being lazy, put themselves in real peril of their souls.

My love-hate thing with anarchy

Cross-posted from Solidarity Hall:

Let me just begin by saying that I love anarchists. Some of my profoundest intellectual influences are anarchistic in their political orientations: Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, Maurin, Day, Hennacy and Cavanaugh. Via folk singer-songwriter and fellow Wendell Berry fan John McCutcheon, Gerrard Winstanley and Joe Hill became big early influences on me, and from there, so did Big Bill Haywood and Mother Jones. I love V for Vendetta – both the comics and the movie. Much of the heavy music (metal, crust punk, grindcore) I listen to – Motörhead, Kreator, TotenmonD, DRI and the Exploited, to name but a few examples – is to a greater or lesser degree politically anarchistic. I share completely the anarchistic distrust of the nation-state, the corporation and the investment bank, particularly in recent years as all three have grown much more powerful at the expense of those of us outside those institutions. So, to any anarchists who happen to read this, please read as it is meant: as admonition from an admiring friend, not as denunciation from a devoted foe.

Anarchism is a political philosophy far too nuanced to reduce to political slogans, naturally, but that is not to say that they do not have them, among which the most popular is ‘question authority’. A common riposte to this slogan, ‘so then, I should question why you tell me to question authority?’, to some degree misses the point, but it strikes at a deeper problem within anarchist theory. It misses the point in that what your average anarchist most often tends to mean when they say ‘authority’ is some position of cultural, political or economic power (within, say, a nation-state, a corporation or a church) maintained by physical force or the threat thereof. But it gets at a deeper problem within anarchist thinking, in that it exposes the conflation of this definition of ‘authority’ with one held by many people unfamiliar with anarchist theory, which is simple ‘authenticity’, or ‘trustworthiness’.

Anarchy is most likely to be wrong precisely where it is the least anarchistic. For beneath the main family tree of anarchist theory (the inheritance of Proudhon, Bakunin and Stirner) there lies at the root the same gnawing serpent of fear, violence and control which undergirds the nation-state. Indeed, the conception of the nation-state by which such anarchists define themselves negatively shapes their thinking at a number of different levels: they cede the nation-state too much power over them from the beginning! Any hierarchies of values articulated by the governing organs of the nation-state are immediately suspect, and very rightly so… but all too many Proudhon-Bakunin school anarchists flee from any and all assertions of one value over another, and adopt as their credo ‘an it harm none, do what ye will’, as though they are already in retreat from their own highly admirable convictions.

The suspicion, arising from the unfortunate conflation of ‘authority’ with ‘authoritarianism’, that behind all articulations of right and wrong lies violence (or the threat thereof) is a fatal one for anarchy, because it upholds the very same reasoning the nation-state uses to justify its own existence. That suspicion relies on the conjecture that there are many modes of being human, which are irreconcilable with each other, or within themselves, without violence. This is ultimately the reasoning which leads many anarchists to reject religion – but, tellingly, it is also the reasoning, beginning with The Prince and finding its full flowering of expression in Leviathan, which the state uses to control public expressions of value which it deems (sometimes rightly, sometimes not) ‘harmful’. After all, the nonsense of the Treaty of Westphalia was that dukes and presidents are more to be trusted with res publica than priests or preachers.

But that is all in the past, as they say. What does it matter now? Now here is where we get to the interesting part. Nation-states are inherently ‘progressive’ entities, and are structured in such a way that they are always seeking growth for growth’s sake, always seeking power for power’s sake, always seeking technical mastery for technical mastery’s sake. Proudhon-Bakunin school anarchists, even if they do not call themselves ‘progressive’, are nonetheless motivated by the same sort of assumptions which undergird the actions of the state: stagnation is an evil which must be overcome, and tradition and custom per se are to be subsumed in some greater and more glorious end. (As an aside, there are some highly interesting exceptions to the rule, like anarcho-primitivism.)

In this it must be seen that the most steadfast bulwark against an overreaching nation-state is the miniature voluntary society of the nuclear family. The nuclear family’s native priority and orientation is its own continuance and stability, rather than power or wealth for its own sake. It is the transmitter of narratives and the caretaker of each new generation. Construed rightly, it is perhaps the greatest force for social equality between men and women, and the greatest crucible for raising children into complete and competent human beings fully able to examine themselves and question their social contexts. Construed rightly, it has also been among the longest-lasting and thus most successful experiments in communal property.

Thus, it always puzzles me why many such anarchists, beginning with Bakunin, seem hell-bent on compromising this institution most favourable to their purposes – to wit, the critique and ultimate transformation of the nation-state into something more humane and egalitarian. The mushy amorphous idealism which informs all too many of Bakunin’s intellectual heirs with regard to their critiques of love and marriage is all too useful to the purposes of corporation and state. After all, the current state of affairs stands thus: no longer is the decision to have a child an (ideally) equal accord between a woman and a man; it is an increasingly unequal agreement between a woman and Pfizer or Merck or Johnson and Johnson (one of which makes a nifty profit off her and her partner, or off the state-mandated insurance plan which foots her bill, and allows her to feel ‘free’, within the context of employer and government, in the meanwhile).

Think of it this way. We’re not at the point of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World quite yet. But note that in Huxley’s fictional-but-penetrating critique of modernity, the World State maintains effective control over every aspect of human life – economic, personal, spiritual – by severing love from sex, by severing sex from procreation and by severing procreation from parenting. These breaking points are where a truly intrusive nation-state and the truly intrusive corporate manager can put down the deepest roots in the lives of their ‘citizens’ and their employees.

Coincidentally, these are the breaking points where Proudhon-Bakunin school anarchism seems to forge ahead with the most gusto: behind the endurance of eros they fear there lurks a patriarchal desire for possession and oppression; behind procreation they fear lurks the enslavement of women; behind parenting they fear lurks the continuation of the norms of violence they reject. The nation-state is much more clear-eyed about the direct threats it faces from each link: eros is a distraction from loyalty to the nation-state; procreation is to be trusted only insofar as the nation-state can control it (as through birth-control technologies); and parenting is to be discouraged where it gets in the way of the nation-state’s enculturation and indoctrination of its young.

Simply put, anarchism likes to posit itself as the implacable adversary of the hierarchical, technocratic and managerial nation-state, but in the realm of the social, in spite of their wildly divergent purposes, anarchism and the hierarchical, technocratic and managerial nation-state find themselves working toward the same ends. In rejecting the persuasive sense of authority, they leave the field open for the unchecked authoritarian exercise of power.

Anarchism has very much to recommend it, not least in its deep critiques of capitalism’s excesses and its willingness to explore theoretically political, smaller-scale alternatives to the nation-state. But it needs to be tempered with a high- or red-Tory suspicion of institutional change and its effects, some of which, rather than being easily predictable, may in actuality be detrimental to the cultural, political and economic equality they desire. Relatedly, Proudhon-Bakunin school anarchism requires a deeper critique of authority which distinguishes between the exercise of power and the pursuit of truth.

I love Pope Francis!

And here’s why:

Ladies and Gentlemen, our human family is presently experiencing something of a turning point in its own history, if we consider the advances made in various areas. We can only praise the positive achievements which contribute to the authentic welfare of mankind, in fields such as those of health, education and communications. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that the majority of the men and women of our time continue to live daily in situations of insecurity, with dire consequences. Certain pathologies are increasing, with their psychological consequences; fear and desperation grip the hearts of many people, even in the so-called rich countries; the joy of life is diminishing; indecency and violence are on the rise; poverty is becoming more and more evident. People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in the our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society. Consequently the financial crisis which we are experiencing makes us forget that its ultimate origin is to be found in a profound human crisis. In the denial of the primacy of human beings! We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have started a throw-away culture. This tendency is seen on the level of individuals and whole societies; and it is being promoted! In circumstances like these, solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy. While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules. Moreover, indebtedness and credit distance countries from their real economy and citizens from their real buying power. Added to this, as if it were needed, is widespread corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The will to power and of possession has become limitless.

Concealed behind this attitude is a rejection of ethics, a rejection of God. Ethics, like solidarity, is a nuisance! It is regarded as counterproductive: as something too human, because it relativizes money and power; as a threat, because it rejects manipulation and subjection of people: because ethics leads to God, who is situated outside the categories of the market. God is thought to be unmanageable by these financiers, economists and politicians, God is unmanageable, even dangerous, because he calls man to his full realization and to independence from any kind of slavery. Ethics – naturally, not the ethics of ideology – makes it possible, in my view, to create a balanced social order that is more humane. In this sense, I encourage the financial experts and the political leaders of your countries to consider the words of Saint John Chrysostom: "Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs".

Perfect. Simply perfect. The Holy Father is, much as his predecessor in that office was, a voice of sanity and good sense in a truly insane world. Please do share his full speech; it is being heavily and wilfully misinterpreted already by those who say that simply because the Holy Father does not use the words ‘capitalism’ or ‘the free market’, he is not critiquing either (even though he does directly critique market logic and the modern economy). But more than that, please do share it simply because it is a brilliant piece of Catholic social thinking in its own right.

Pointless video post – ‘From Outer Space’ by Alpha Tiger

Meet Alpha Tiger, a German traditional heavy metal band which apparently enjoys nothing so much as rocking out like it’s the ‘80’s all over again. (And given the kudzu-like proliferation of re-thrash, a subgenre which I also listen to as something of a guilty pleasure, who can blame them?) They are unashamed of flaunting their NWoBHM, glam and power-metal influences, the most prominent amongst which are Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Riot, Loudness and (particularly) Fates Warning. They play with speed, but more importantly, they play with conviction. That said, they are not just another covers band (or a band which brings nothing new to the genre): their musicianship is excellent, and they have a je ne sais quoi which makes their music both enjoyable and relistenable. ‘From Outer Space’ is from this year’s album Beneath the Surface; please do enjoy, gentle listeners!

Mencius on neoconservatism

Dr Sam Crane and I have had our disagreements in the past, but I am in total, unreserved agreement with him on this point in particular (and my apologies for having had to play catch-up with his posts at this late date; it originally came out two months ago):

From a Confucian perspective, “carelessness and callowness” can be taken as expressions of inhumanity: a lack of concern for the human toll of war. Mencius tells us:

“You defy Humanity if you cause the death of a single innocent person, and you defy Duty if you take what is not yours.” (Hinton, 13.33)

That pretty much sums up the Iraq War: killing innocents and taking what is not yours. But Wolfowitz compounds the inhumanity through his denial, as Mencius further suggests:

“But in ancient times, when the noble-minded made mistakes, they knew how to change. These days, when the noble-minded make mistakes, they persevere to the bitter end. In ancient times, mistakes of the noble-minded were like eclipses of the sun and moon: there for all the people to see. And when a mistake was made right, the people all looked up in awe. But these days, the noble-minded just persevere to the bitter end, and then they invent all kinds of explanations.” (Hinton, 4.9).

Of course, in acting that way, in dissembling and denying, the so-called “noble-minded” of today are not really noble-minded at all. They are reproducing the original inhumantiiy that caused so much suffering to begin with.

Stop inventing “all kinds of explanations,” Mr. Wolfowitz, and just accept responsibility for an avoidable strategic error and a terrible human tragedy.

The Confucian-Mencian political philosophy may or may not have a more expansive notion of ‘just war’ than the Pauline-Augustinian one, but by any reckoning which relies as a first rule upon classical virtue ethics, the Iraq War (to reverse Talleyrand’s indictment of Napoleon, with all due credit to Mr Mehdi Hasan) was worse than a blunder; it was a crime. Many thanks for this, Dr Crane.