I just discovered a truly great writer named Joe Bageant, a friend of my hero Fred Reed, who unfortunately passed away from cancer last week. Joe was a redneck from rural West Virginia, who grew up to become a cultural commentator who wrote a series of books on what we now call Red State America.
I've been reading his site these last couple days, and am compelled to share an excerpt of this essay he wrote on evangelical fundamentalist eschatology.
Enjoy:
A Whore That Sitteth on Many Waters
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
"The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series
By Joe Bageant
That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go beserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and "the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle." In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses" Even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."
This may be some of the bloodiest hate fiction ever published, but it is also what tens of millions of Americans believe is God’s will. It is approximately what everyone in the congregation sitting around me last Sunday at my brother’s church believes. Or some version of it. How can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family and school and society, but from within a different American caste than the one in which you were raised. And from things stamped deep in childhood -- such as coming home terrified to an empty house.
One September day when I was in the third grade I got off the school bus and walked up the red dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room, and then ran around the outside crying and sobbing in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that The Rapture had come and that all my family had been taken up to heaven leaving me alone on earth to face God’s terrible wrath. As it turned out they were at the neighbor’s house scarcely 300 yards down the road, and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.
Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same childhood experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been "raptured up." The Rapture -- the time when God takes up all saved Christians before he lets loose slaughter, pestilence and torture upon the earth -- is very real to people in whom its glorious and grisly promise was instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism agree its marks are permanent. We may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. There is an apocalyptic starkness that remains somewhere inside us, one that tinges all of our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to you secular humanists. I get mail from hundreds of folks like me, the different ones who fled and became lawyers and teachers and therapists and car mechanics, dope dealers and stockbrokers and waitresses. And every one of them has felt that thing we understand between us, that skulls piled clear to heaven redemption through absolute self worthlessness and you ain’t shit in the eyes of God so go bleed to death in some dark corner stab in the heart at those very moments when we should have been most proud of ourselves. Self-hate. That thing that makes us sabotage our own inner happiness when we are most free and operating as self-realizing individuals. This kind of Christianity is a black thing. It is a blood religion, that willingly gives up sons to America’s campaigns in the Holy Land, hoping they will bring on the much-anticipated war between good and evil in the Middle East that will hasten the End Times. Bring Jesus back to Earth.
Whatever the case, tens of millions of American fundamentalists, despite their claims otherwise, read and absorb the all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophesy and fact. How could they possibly not after being conditioned all their lives to accept the End Times as the ultimate reality? We are talking about a group of Americans 20% of whose children graduate from high school identifying H2O as a cable channel. Children who, like their parents and grandparents, come from that roughly half of all Americans who can approximately read, but are dysfunctionally literate to the extent they cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic content.
Most of my family and their church friends (mainly the women) have read at least some of the Left Behind series and if pressed they will claim they understand that it is fiction. But anyone who has heard fundies around the kitchen table discussing the books knows the claim is pure bullshit. "Well, they do get an awful lot of stuff exactly right," they admit. Beyond that, most fundamentalists delight in seeing their beliefs as "persecuted Christians" become best sellers "under the guise of fiction," as the Pentecostal assistant who used to work with me put it. "They show the triumph of the righteous over those who persecute us for our faith in God." Fer cryin out loud, Christianity is scarcely a persecuted belief system in this country, or in need of a guise to protect itself. Year after year some 60% of Americans surveyed say they believe the Book of Revelations will come true and about 40% believe it will come true in their lifetimes. This from the 50% of Americans who, according to statistics, seldom if ever buy a book.
[...]
Lookie here. If you think I’m overcounting, think one more time about those Left Behind books that have sold over 65 million copies at this writing. Sold to people who do not even like or buy books. Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag never wrote anything that sold 65 million. That lead-footed prose and numbing predictability that Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye grind out in the Left Behind series might not even be called writing. But whatever it is, at least 65 million folks that our nation failed to educate find deep meaning and solace in it. LaHaye has also sold 120 million non-fiction books, which makes him the most successful Christian writer since the Bible.
Sales figures aside, it is entirely possible that the Left Behind series is as important in our time and cultural context as was, say, Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its time, wherein Lincoln called it "the little book that started the big war." The truth is that LaHaye is among the most influential religious writers America ever produced and is the most powerful fundamentalist in America today. He is the founder and first president of the eerily secretive Council for National Policy, which brings together leading evangelicals and other conservatives with right-wing billionaires willing to pay for a conservative religious revolution. He is far more influential than Billy Graham or Pat Robertson and was the man who inspired Jerry Falwell to launch the Moral Majority. He gave millions of dollars to Falwell's Liberty University. He’s the man without whom Ronald Reagan would never have become governor of California and the man who grilled George W. Bush, then wiped the cocaine off George’s nose and gave him the official Christian fundie stamp of approval. He created the American Coalition for Traditional Values that has mobilized evangelical voters, putting neo-conservative wackjobs into political offices across the nation. In short, he is the Godfather of Soul, fundie style. When the man lays it down, his peeps doo dey duty.
Scratch LaHaye and you’ll find an honest-to-god surviving John Bircher. In the 1960s when LaHaye was a young up-and-coming Baptist preacher fresh out of Bob Jones University, he lectured on behalf of Republican Robert Welch’s John Birch Society. We are talking about a man who believed Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party taking orders from his brother, Milt Eisenhower. Along the way LaHaye extended his paranoid list of villains to include secular humanists who "are Satan’s agents hiding behind the Constitution." And the only way to destroy them is to destroy their cover.
[...]
It is a world in which the Secretary General of the United Nations is the anti-Christ (Left Behind) and the "Clinton Crime Family" deals in cocaine and is linked to the Gambino family (Joshua Project, and other sources.) It is one in which abortion doctors are microwaving and eating fetuses according to testimony given by anti-abortionists before a Kansas House subcommittee (WorldNetDaily, of course) and where crowds of good folks get teary-eyed as Rev. Pat Evans, of the NASCAR "Racing for Jesus Ministries’ rumbles onto the track. Evangelical NASCAR? Yup. What ABC called America’s "unapologetically evangelical sport." I can see you dear reader, running and holding your head and screaming at the thought. Yet it’s true. At Bristol and Talladega the earth is shaking for Jaaaayzus! Now that we have Evangelical NASCAR, what, I ask you, can ever go wrong?
"To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of false piety, kitsch." - Trappist monk Thomas Merton
Forty years later Merton is still right. Like most American liberals, not to mention all of Europe and the rest of the world, I learned through education to write the U.S. born-again literature off as kitsch religion, merely bad theology in an unholy marriage to bad writing. Another product of the American Jesus industry. If we liberals can name it, assign it to some appropriately vulgar and sentimental corner of our degraded culture, and then remain tolerant of it, then we feel have dealt with the damned thing. After all, it is the comparative worldview of the teeming red state masses. But there is certain arrogance in such pop cultural erudition and thin worldliness, isn’t there? In itself, our attitude is too flip.
[...]
I am not trying to be smart-assed, but to indicate the fear of what is unfolding around me as a person living in the belly of the beast. The reality gap between fundamentalist and urban liberals is unfathomable. Liberal observers watching from a safe distance in New York or San Francisco conclude it is pure stupidity that caused millions of Americans to continue support of the Bush junta in the face of overwhelming evidence of lies, deceit and contempt for the constitution, even as the fat cats raided their retirements and picked their pockets at every turn. Others think it is just plain meanness that attracted them to Bush. And so do I sometimes, because stupidity (the Jesus stockcar entries should be proof enough) and meanness are surely part of the attraction to a certain type of conservative -- that poisonous toad Karl Rove being their chief deity of meanness for meanness sake.
There remains one nagging problem. Despite their masochistic voting patterns, fundamentalists are very ordinary and normal Americans. People who often as not go out of their way to help others and endorse most American values. So how do we reconcile the warmth and good nature of these hardworking citizens with the repressive politics, intolerance, nationalism and warmaking they support? Why do such ordinary people do such awful things? The Germans have been wrestling with that one for 60 years, and sixty more years from now they still will have not solved the riddle in any meaningful way for the rest of the world. Barring ecological and cultural collapse, historians will say America suffered under the same sort of extraordinary delusion, a national hallucination of God and empire and exceptionalism. The thing about a hallucination -- and take it from a person who has enjoyed many fine ones on various chemicals and herbs -- is that it is a convincing reality in its time. Try talking to a fundamentalist about politics and God for an hour. You will see the spell that holds sway. Let us be thankful for pro sports or we would have nothing whatsoever to talk about on those rare occasions when a fundamentalist and a liberal ever bother to speak to one another.
Allow me to get down to the nub of this and say what urban liberals cannot allow themselves to say out loud: "Christian majority or not, the readers of such apocalyptic books as the Left Behind series are some pretty damned dumb motherfuckers caught up in their own black, vindictive fantasy." There. I said it for you. Let us proceed.
[...]
These people may not be your neighbors or friends, but they are ordinary and typical Americans. If you the reader are a college educated middle class person, then folks like those above outnumber you roughly three to one in this country. If that is not reason enough to drink, then I don’t know what is. No matter what happens, in the next election, we are going to be dealing for a long time to come with millions of voters who think Left Behind is great literature, spiritual guidance and a political primer all in one. Do we really think that cartload of bloated hacks called the Democratic Party knows what to do about this? Do you really think Howard Dean has a clue about how to deal with this entire class of Americans. Hardly. And besides, even if the Dems can get elected again and restored to the impotency they have come to represent, they will have needed these people’s votes to get there. Or they simply will not get there. So let’s not expect the Democratic political elite to save us from watching the fundie takeover attempts escalate in the future (In which case, assuming my book makes some real dough, I will be watching from abroad, thank you.) Essentially it comes down to the fact that a very large portion of Americans are crazier than shithouse rats and are being led by a gang of pathological misfits, most of whom are preachers and politicians. We are not talking about simple religious faith here. There is a world of difference between having religious faith and being a born-again zealot who believes in his heart that he is thumping Darwinian demons out of classrooms and that Ted Kennedy is the anti-Christ. Trading down to the Democratic party of the pussies really will not save us. It will just buy a little time. But we have whipped the hell out of this dead horse before, haven’t we? Forgive me...
---
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
An Open Response to Matt, Concerning the Incoherence of Roman Catholicism as a Belief System
Last Thanksgiving my brother Matt challenged my mother and I about the Pope's then recent comments in which he told a German journalist doing a book length interview with him that he thought that male prostitutes would be wise to use condoms. This comment was an aside, not a main topic of the interview. Characteristically, when the interview was published the secular press here focused on that one comment, ignored all the stuff about Jesus which to them is inside baseball of sole interest to Catholics, and went nuts over the perceived scandal of a pope recommending condom use.
Matt was interested in getting my mother's take on that the first night we were together. I was sitting there as he asked my mother a string of questions about it and she responded, while I kept attempting to interject a few comments.. I was exhausted (long drive, too many long hot months just suffered down in Florida) and was not in the fittest emotional state. They - unusually - were completely ignoring me, and didn't let me "have the conch" to say anything. I think Matt is tired of me talking about religion (even though it's not that common a topic between us, actually, but when it does come up I tend to hold forth) and just wanted to hear what my mother thought.
I normally would have taken that situation in stride, but under the stress I had a mild melt down, and got really annoyed. Conversation immediately ended, because I got upset. Matt profusely apologized, but in a deadpan way that stuck me in the gut.
I never got to say what I was thinking, and I think Matt already thought he knew what I would have said. I'm pretty sure that he didn't though, really.. I've been thinking quite a lot about it since, and want to have my say, now.
Here's what I think:
The basic problem is that the edifice of Roman Catholic doctrine is in many ways sorely stressed and compromised.
Whether fatally so, remains to be seen. To my mind the problems are significant. The Church's grace is that the stances of everyone else - to include that of scientific secularists - are all philosophically much worse. We must have ontological justification for defending the sacredness of the human person, and the Catholic Church still has by far the best guns in town on that score. So, my own money is all on the Church. We'll see how it all shakes out..
I should start by immediately clarifying that I do not call myself a "Roman" Catholic anymore. Since my conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (a conversion which I do not completely abjure) I have fully rejected that title, which is one born of the very flawed (to my mind) Gregorian Reform and utterly misguided Protestant Reformation.
I now consider myself simply Catholic, an adherent of the Latin Rite who critically accepts the authority of the pope. I neither renounce my own full freedom of conscience, nor my right to criticize the Catholic tradition or those in authority, but I embrace both that tradition and that authority freely and submit myself to it and them without substantial spiritual reservation. Still, I think that there are major problems with the current ecclesiology advanced by both of the Vatican Councils, and I believe that ultramontagne "papiolotry" has lead to significant distortions in Catholic practice and culture. Rome needs to make her peace with the Orthodox, and that peace must be one of utter fraternal concord, not in the abject surrender of either side to the other. I think the Orthodox have a compelling case that must be heard and in many ways accepted. Nonetheless, I also believe that the Petrine charism exists and subsists in the Roman see.
I'm sure that the dissonance and contradictions that I see, exist in very small part to humiliate me. I accept that now, and am grateful for them.
So, the tradition and those in authority under it are not beyond criticism, but the Church Universal is still my mother and her hierarchy are still - and I pray forever - my lords spiritual. The resolution of the Schism must come, and I pray soon, but it is of course beyond my powers (way way beyond my wisdom and paygrade) to resolve, and so I accept my own impotence and powerlessness in the conflict, and am resolved make my way as humbly I can.
That said, let me lay out the most significant problems with the Catholic position, as I see them:
First major point: Catholicism is in its essence a pre-modern belief system made in many ways practically - that is to say pastorally - obsolete by modernity.
[Aside: Interestingly though, to my febrile little mind at least, there are many powerfully salient and fecund assonances developing between post modern thought and Catholicism and her traditional scholasticism..]
The two main practical interrelated aspects of this obsolescence are in human sexuality and economics.
Traditional Catholic teaching on these issues - against most specifically contraception and usury - are now materially obsolete, in that both contraception and renting money at interest are imperatives to full and uninhibited participation in mainstream contemporary Western life.
It really is only this last century that sexual issues have become problematic for the Church, pastorally. Until the technological advances of the 20th Century (latex and hormonal treatments, as well as safe and effective abortion techniques) the Catholic teaching on sexual reproduction wasn't problematic, because people had no practical alternative. Contraceptive technology was crude and usually unavailable. Furthermore, following the teaching was not usually economically disadvantageous. Having more children meant having more help on the farm, and the mortality rate was high. The relative costs for raising children were much lower (there were no x-boxes, orthodontics, university educations to pay for).. So having many babies was not a big problem, indeed it was often a benefit.
It was the material change, the technological change, the change in the economic system that has created the dissonance.
Both contraception and usury are seen as fundamentally exploitative of the human person from a traditional Catholic perspective. They instrumentalize and objectivize the human being, and turn him into an utilitarian object in which the end or fruit of his work or sexuality is vacated, and alienated (to echo Marx) from himself.
The two things are also fundamentally linked - bourgeois capitalism demands controlled and limited sexual productivity. As stated, a large family is a boon in a agricultural society with short life spans and high maternal and childhood mortality rates. But to live a normal contemporary middle class life, one must limit family size, and the expectation that they do that through abstinence is in most cases impracticable. This obviously sets people up for revolt and failure in terms of the traditional teaching.
Borrowing and lending money at interest (as well as participating in the economic exploitation of others in a myriad of other ways) is also unavoidable. Catholics would have to behave like the Amish to be faithful to traditional teaching againsty usury.
All of which is merely to say that contrary to what many Catholics today think, capitalism is not Catholic. It - as Marx rightly saw - in many ways "tears asunder" traditional economic relationships like the family, and subordinates and even scorns all values except creation of wealth.
A truly Catholic economic system is one where economic activity is utterly focused on the good of the human person, and fundamentally characterized by personal relationships of reciprocal need and obligation. Which is to say in practice something much like the medieval feudal and guild system. It doesn't need to be necessarily monarchical, or even formally aristocratic (though hierarchy and aristocracy of one form or another are a normal feature of any complex human society) and certainly not communist in the sense of outlawing private ownership (that is what a monastic community does, and monasticism must be freely embraced and never forcibly imposed) but its end is not the creation of wealth, but always the good of the human person.
The economy exists to serve man, not man the economy.
So, that's the problem. Technological and economic "advances" have made traditional Catholic practice and belief practically obsolete.
And that problem has been with us for a long, long while, too. The first major flowering of it was with the rise of incipient capitalism in the late Middle Ages. In my Renaissance art history class in college we studied church after church and masterpiece after masterpiece that was commissioned by a rich merchant or banker who had built the masterpiece in question as a sin offering, in propitiation for having committed the sin of usury. The life of Saint Francis and the rise of his and the other mendicant communities is in direct reaction to this.. As in some ways were the heretical Albigensian as well as the Waldensian and other proto- Protestant movements. The actual Reformation - particularly the Calvinist Reformation - on the other hand was fervently capitalist.
In any case, the original position of the Church was against usury - defined as any charging of interest at all. This situation was a major catalyst to the Reformation as I say, as well as the context in which the major Jewish banking families arose.. A situation that in part catalyzed much antisemitism.
By the 18th Century though, the Church had retreated from that strict position, and then completely collapsed on it. Now Rome requires all religious orders to keep their holdings in banks, and runs its own banking system.. One that has produced a few significant financial scandals, by the way.
So, when it comes to money, the old anti-capitalist paradigm mostly has fallen by the way or been actively suppressed..
I'm going to write more about this later, because it is important, and I think needs to be analyzed and discussed.
The magisterium of the Church has in contrast currently firmly staked its ground on maintaining the traditional teachings of the Church regarding sexuality.
This is just as counter cultural, and as doomed to fail as long as current circumstances prevail.
The traditional teaching has been most famously re-stated by Pope Paul VI's papal letter Humanae Vitae. This of course forbids any deliberate intervention in the human reproductive process that is meant to prevent conception. Thus forbidding technological means of contraception such as hormonal treatments like the Pill, or barrier methods like the condom or diaphragm. Fasting (abstention) from sexual activity during periods of fertility, or sex in situations where individuals have been made sterile by circumstances beyond their control, are of course as they have always been still permitted within the bonds of marriage.
Now, that encyclical letter was issued in 1968, right in the midst of the beginning of the Sexual Revolution sparked by the invention of the Pill that prior decade. This is also the era of deepening concern over population growth and resource depletion.
Humanae Vitae was therefore (no surprise) not well received, and along with all the cultural turmoil of they time, and the major changes wrought in world Catholic culture by Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical and other reforms incited by the council, led to massive resistance and revolt.
I don't have any statistics, but I'd bet less than 5% of Catholic couples keep the traditional teaching. This means that the vast majority of couples are - according to traditional Catholic moral thought - in an objective state of serious (mortal) sin.
The hierarchy and priesthood have reacted to this pastoral meltdown by mostly ignoring it. They've also let confession fall into wide disuse, generally only publicly encouraging confession during Lent. I also have never in 30 something years of regular mass attendance heard a sermon against contraception. Nor for that matter against divorce, fornication, premarital sex, pornography, masturbation, homosexuality or any other sexual matter. Those things get very occasionally mentioned in asides (I've heard the word contraception spoken maybe a half dozen times in maybe three sermons, I remember them all clearly), but are are hardly ever to almost never the focus of a normal Sunday homily.
Abortion is of course another thing. That, the only negative exception, gets preached against often. The theology of the human person gets preached as well, but always positively, and in ways that sexuality is explicitly related, but sexual sin is rarely if ever mentioned.
You don't even get asked about it in the confessional - I go every month or two, and I can tell you I rarely get asked any leading questions at all, and never get criticized. Scenes in movies or on television where that happens are not true to my experience.
You do see lots of writing about sexual issues, everywhere in the Catholic press and internet, of course. And the pope and an occasional bishop will broach those topics in their public discourse. But on the parish level there is silence, with maybe only the occasional poster advertising a Natural Family Planning seminar on a bulletin board in the entryway.
All this, in the middle of the sexual revolution, when all hell is breaking loose.
Basically, on the level of moral theology, they've decided to "let those with ears hear" and then not to bring it up all that often and so burden peoples' consciences.
"Jesus said to them: If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now you say: We see. Your sin remains." John 9:41
This all represents the triumph of "Molinism" - the Jesuitical approach to morality. During the Renaissance the Jesuits and their allies began developing a systematic moral casuistry for use in confession and spiritual direction most famously advanced by Molina and Suarez, their hierarchical allies Bellarmine, De Lugo and the rest of the "Company." They were vociferously opposed by the Jansenists, in a battle that has defined Catholic culture since. Vatican II represents the full triumph of the Jesuit position. The predominate post- Vatican II pastoral approach is also pretty much in keeping with the related counsel of St. Alphonsus, that on difficult issues where people are so weak it is often better not to instruct them, so that their ignorance will be a defense at the judgment.
The upshot of all this is that we have a crisis in authority, in that most Catholics (human beings) reject the Church's traditional teaching, and many as an act of conscience. The hierarchy has basically surrendered pastorally, and does not insist on compliance.
Because if they did, they wouldn't have a church left. And like Cardinal Newman cracked, they'd look kinda funny up there all decked out in dresses and funny hats like they are, without us.. Not that they aren't already pretty funny, anyway. All the people in street clothes acting all straight faced and serious just keeps it on the down-low.
So, that's the deal. The thing is that this story is not over, and things could change.
That's a prospect I will discuss further in later posts.
---
Matt was interested in getting my mother's take on that the first night we were together. I was sitting there as he asked my mother a string of questions about it and she responded, while I kept attempting to interject a few comments.. I was exhausted (long drive, too many long hot months just suffered down in Florida) and was not in the fittest emotional state. They - unusually - were completely ignoring me, and didn't let me "have the conch" to say anything. I think Matt is tired of me talking about religion (even though it's not that common a topic between us, actually, but when it does come up I tend to hold forth) and just wanted to hear what my mother thought.
I normally would have taken that situation in stride, but under the stress I had a mild melt down, and got really annoyed. Conversation immediately ended, because I got upset. Matt profusely apologized, but in a deadpan way that stuck me in the gut.
I never got to say what I was thinking, and I think Matt already thought he knew what I would have said. I'm pretty sure that he didn't though, really.. I've been thinking quite a lot about it since, and want to have my say, now.
Here's what I think:
The basic problem is that the edifice of Roman Catholic doctrine is in many ways sorely stressed and compromised.
Whether fatally so, remains to be seen. To my mind the problems are significant. The Church's grace is that the stances of everyone else - to include that of scientific secularists - are all philosophically much worse. We must have ontological justification for defending the sacredness of the human person, and the Catholic Church still has by far the best guns in town on that score. So, my own money is all on the Church. We'll see how it all shakes out..
I should start by immediately clarifying that I do not call myself a "Roman" Catholic anymore. Since my conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (a conversion which I do not completely abjure) I have fully rejected that title, which is one born of the very flawed (to my mind) Gregorian Reform and utterly misguided Protestant Reformation.
I now consider myself simply Catholic, an adherent of the Latin Rite who critically accepts the authority of the pope. I neither renounce my own full freedom of conscience, nor my right to criticize the Catholic tradition or those in authority, but I embrace both that tradition and that authority freely and submit myself to it and them without substantial spiritual reservation. Still, I think that there are major problems with the current ecclesiology advanced by both of the Vatican Councils, and I believe that ultramontagne "papiolotry" has lead to significant distortions in Catholic practice and culture. Rome needs to make her peace with the Orthodox, and that peace must be one of utter fraternal concord, not in the abject surrender of either side to the other. I think the Orthodox have a compelling case that must be heard and in many ways accepted. Nonetheless, I also believe that the Petrine charism exists and subsists in the Roman see.
I'm sure that the dissonance and contradictions that I see, exist in very small part to humiliate me. I accept that now, and am grateful for them.
So, the tradition and those in authority under it are not beyond criticism, but the Church Universal is still my mother and her hierarchy are still - and I pray forever - my lords spiritual. The resolution of the Schism must come, and I pray soon, but it is of course beyond my powers (way way beyond my wisdom and paygrade) to resolve, and so I accept my own impotence and powerlessness in the conflict, and am resolved make my way as humbly I can.
That said, let me lay out the most significant problems with the Catholic position, as I see them:
First major point: Catholicism is in its essence a pre-modern belief system made in many ways practically - that is to say pastorally - obsolete by modernity.
[Aside: Interestingly though, to my febrile little mind at least, there are many powerfully salient and fecund assonances developing between post modern thought and Catholicism and her traditional scholasticism..]
The two main practical interrelated aspects of this obsolescence are in human sexuality and economics.
Traditional Catholic teaching on these issues - against most specifically contraception and usury - are now materially obsolete, in that both contraception and renting money at interest are imperatives to full and uninhibited participation in mainstream contemporary Western life.
It really is only this last century that sexual issues have become problematic for the Church, pastorally. Until the technological advances of the 20th Century (latex and hormonal treatments, as well as safe and effective abortion techniques) the Catholic teaching on sexual reproduction wasn't problematic, because people had no practical alternative. Contraceptive technology was crude and usually unavailable. Furthermore, following the teaching was not usually economically disadvantageous. Having more children meant having more help on the farm, and the mortality rate was high. The relative costs for raising children were much lower (there were no x-boxes, orthodontics, university educations to pay for).. So having many babies was not a big problem, indeed it was often a benefit.
It was the material change, the technological change, the change in the economic system that has created the dissonance.
Both contraception and usury are seen as fundamentally exploitative of the human person from a traditional Catholic perspective. They instrumentalize and objectivize the human being, and turn him into an utilitarian object in which the end or fruit of his work or sexuality is vacated, and alienated (to echo Marx) from himself.
The two things are also fundamentally linked - bourgeois capitalism demands controlled and limited sexual productivity. As stated, a large family is a boon in a agricultural society with short life spans and high maternal and childhood mortality rates. But to live a normal contemporary middle class life, one must limit family size, and the expectation that they do that through abstinence is in most cases impracticable. This obviously sets people up for revolt and failure in terms of the traditional teaching.
Borrowing and lending money at interest (as well as participating in the economic exploitation of others in a myriad of other ways) is also unavoidable. Catholics would have to behave like the Amish to be faithful to traditional teaching againsty usury.
All of which is merely to say that contrary to what many Catholics today think, capitalism is not Catholic. It - as Marx rightly saw - in many ways "tears asunder" traditional economic relationships like the family, and subordinates and even scorns all values except creation of wealth.
A truly Catholic economic system is one where economic activity is utterly focused on the good of the human person, and fundamentally characterized by personal relationships of reciprocal need and obligation. Which is to say in practice something much like the medieval feudal and guild system. It doesn't need to be necessarily monarchical, or even formally aristocratic (though hierarchy and aristocracy of one form or another are a normal feature of any complex human society) and certainly not communist in the sense of outlawing private ownership (that is what a monastic community does, and monasticism must be freely embraced and never forcibly imposed) but its end is not the creation of wealth, but always the good of the human person.
The economy exists to serve man, not man the economy.
So, that's the problem. Technological and economic "advances" have made traditional Catholic practice and belief practically obsolete.
And that problem has been with us for a long, long while, too. The first major flowering of it was with the rise of incipient capitalism in the late Middle Ages. In my Renaissance art history class in college we studied church after church and masterpiece after masterpiece that was commissioned by a rich merchant or banker who had built the masterpiece in question as a sin offering, in propitiation for having committed the sin of usury. The life of Saint Francis and the rise of his and the other mendicant communities is in direct reaction to this.. As in some ways were the heretical Albigensian as well as the Waldensian and other proto- Protestant movements. The actual Reformation - particularly the Calvinist Reformation - on the other hand was fervently capitalist.
In any case, the original position of the Church was against usury - defined as any charging of interest at all. This situation was a major catalyst to the Reformation as I say, as well as the context in which the major Jewish banking families arose.. A situation that in part catalyzed much antisemitism.
By the 18th Century though, the Church had retreated from that strict position, and then completely collapsed on it. Now Rome requires all religious orders to keep their holdings in banks, and runs its own banking system.. One that has produced a few significant financial scandals, by the way.
So, when it comes to money, the old anti-capitalist paradigm mostly has fallen by the way or been actively suppressed..
I'm going to write more about this later, because it is important, and I think needs to be analyzed and discussed.
The magisterium of the Church has in contrast currently firmly staked its ground on maintaining the traditional teachings of the Church regarding sexuality.
This is just as counter cultural, and as doomed to fail as long as current circumstances prevail.
The traditional teaching has been most famously re-stated by Pope Paul VI's papal letter Humanae Vitae. This of course forbids any deliberate intervention in the human reproductive process that is meant to prevent conception. Thus forbidding technological means of contraception such as hormonal treatments like the Pill, or barrier methods like the condom or diaphragm. Fasting (abstention) from sexual activity during periods of fertility, or sex in situations where individuals have been made sterile by circumstances beyond their control, are of course as they have always been still permitted within the bonds of marriage.
Now, that encyclical letter was issued in 1968, right in the midst of the beginning of the Sexual Revolution sparked by the invention of the Pill that prior decade. This is also the era of deepening concern over population growth and resource depletion.
Humanae Vitae was therefore (no surprise) not well received, and along with all the cultural turmoil of they time, and the major changes wrought in world Catholic culture by Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical and other reforms incited by the council, led to massive resistance and revolt.
I don't have any statistics, but I'd bet less than 5% of Catholic couples keep the traditional teaching. This means that the vast majority of couples are - according to traditional Catholic moral thought - in an objective state of serious (mortal) sin.
The hierarchy and priesthood have reacted to this pastoral meltdown by mostly ignoring it. They've also let confession fall into wide disuse, generally only publicly encouraging confession during Lent. I also have never in 30 something years of regular mass attendance heard a sermon against contraception. Nor for that matter against divorce, fornication, premarital sex, pornography, masturbation, homosexuality or any other sexual matter. Those things get very occasionally mentioned in asides (I've heard the word contraception spoken maybe a half dozen times in maybe three sermons, I remember them all clearly), but are are hardly ever to almost never the focus of a normal Sunday homily.
Abortion is of course another thing. That, the only negative exception, gets preached against often. The theology of the human person gets preached as well, but always positively, and in ways that sexuality is explicitly related, but sexual sin is rarely if ever mentioned.
You don't even get asked about it in the confessional - I go every month or two, and I can tell you I rarely get asked any leading questions at all, and never get criticized. Scenes in movies or on television where that happens are not true to my experience.
You do see lots of writing about sexual issues, everywhere in the Catholic press and internet, of course. And the pope and an occasional bishop will broach those topics in their public discourse. But on the parish level there is silence, with maybe only the occasional poster advertising a Natural Family Planning seminar on a bulletin board in the entryway.
All this, in the middle of the sexual revolution, when all hell is breaking loose.
Basically, on the level of moral theology, they've decided to "let those with ears hear" and then not to bring it up all that often and so burden peoples' consciences.
"Jesus said to them: If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now you say: We see. Your sin remains." John 9:41
This all represents the triumph of "Molinism" - the Jesuitical approach to morality. During the Renaissance the Jesuits and their allies began developing a systematic moral casuistry for use in confession and spiritual direction most famously advanced by Molina and Suarez, their hierarchical allies Bellarmine, De Lugo and the rest of the "Company." They were vociferously opposed by the Jansenists, in a battle that has defined Catholic culture since. Vatican II represents the full triumph of the Jesuit position. The predominate post- Vatican II pastoral approach is also pretty much in keeping with the related counsel of St. Alphonsus, that on difficult issues where people are so weak it is often better not to instruct them, so that their ignorance will be a defense at the judgment.
The upshot of all this is that we have a crisis in authority, in that most Catholics (human beings) reject the Church's traditional teaching, and many as an act of conscience. The hierarchy has basically surrendered pastorally, and does not insist on compliance.
Because if they did, they wouldn't have a church left. And like Cardinal Newman cracked, they'd look kinda funny up there all decked out in dresses and funny hats like they are, without us.. Not that they aren't already pretty funny, anyway. All the people in street clothes acting all straight faced and serious just keeps it on the down-low.
So, that's the deal. The thing is that this story is not over, and things could change.
That's a prospect I will discuss further in later posts.
---
Essential Texts: The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Fredrich Engels (1848) [Redacted]
A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
[...]
The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
[...]
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
[...]
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
[...]
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
[...]
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
[...]
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
FOOTNOTES
[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [Note by Engels - 1888 English edition]
[2] That is, all _written_ history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeaval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in _Der Ursprung der
Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
[4] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels: 1890 German edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
---
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
[...]
The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
[...]
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
[...]
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
[...]
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
[...]
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
[...]
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
FOOTNOTES
[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor.
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [Note by Engels - 1888 English edition]
[2] That is, all _written_ history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeaval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in _Der Ursprung der
Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
[4] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels: 1890 German edition]
"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels: 1888 English edition]
---
Essential Texts: The Original Rule of St. Francis (c.1233)
This is the rule and life of the Minor Brothers, namely, to observe the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ by living in obedience, in poverty, and in chastity. Brother Francis promises obedience and reverence to Pope Honorius and to his successors who shall be canonically elected, and to the Roman Church. The other brothers are bound to obey brother Francis, and his successors.
[...]
I counsel, warn, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ that when they go out into the world they shall not be quarrelsome or contentious, nor judge others. But they shall be gentle, peaceable, and kind, mild and humble, and virtuous in speech, as is becoming to all. They shall not ride on horseback unless compelled by manifest necessity or infirmity to do so. When they enter house they shall say, "Peace be to this house." According to the holy gospel, they may eat of whatever food is set before them.
I strictly forbid all the brothers to accept money or property either in person or through another. Nevertheless, for the needs of the sick, and for clothing the other brothers, the ministers and guardians may, as they see that necessity requires, provide through spiritual friends, according o the locality, season, and the degree of cold which may be expected in the region where hey live. But, as has been said, they shall never receive money or property.
Those brothers to whom the Lord has given the ability to work shall work faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, which is the enemy of the soul, may be excluded and not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion to which all temporal things should be subservient. As the price of their labors they may receive things that are necessary for themselves and the brothers, but not money or property. And they shall humbly receive what is given them, as is becoming to the servants of God and to those who practice the most holy poverty.
The brothers shall have nothing of their own, neither house, nor land, nor anything, but as pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving the Lord in poverty and humility, let them confidently go asking alms. Nor let them be ashamed of this, for the Lord made himself poor for us in this world. This is the highest pitch of poverty which has made you, my dearest brothers, heirs and kings of the kingdom of heaven, which has made you poor in goods, and exalted you in virtues. . . .
I strictly forbid all the brothers to have any association or conversation with women that may cause suspicion. And let them not enter nunneries, except those which the pope has given them special permission to enter. Let them not be intimate friends of men or women, lest on this account scandal arise among the brothers or about brothers.
[Source: Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar H. McNeal, eds., and trans., A Source Book for Medieval History (New York: Scribner's, 1905), pp. 499-507.]
---
[...]
I counsel, warn, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ that when they go out into the world they shall not be quarrelsome or contentious, nor judge others. But they shall be gentle, peaceable, and kind, mild and humble, and virtuous in speech, as is becoming to all. They shall not ride on horseback unless compelled by manifest necessity or infirmity to do so. When they enter house they shall say, "Peace be to this house." According to the holy gospel, they may eat of whatever food is set before them.
I strictly forbid all the brothers to accept money or property either in person or through another. Nevertheless, for the needs of the sick, and for clothing the other brothers, the ministers and guardians may, as they see that necessity requires, provide through spiritual friends, according o the locality, season, and the degree of cold which may be expected in the region where hey live. But, as has been said, they shall never receive money or property.
Those brothers to whom the Lord has given the ability to work shall work faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, which is the enemy of the soul, may be excluded and not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion to which all temporal things should be subservient. As the price of their labors they may receive things that are necessary for themselves and the brothers, but not money or property. And they shall humbly receive what is given them, as is becoming to the servants of God and to those who practice the most holy poverty.
The brothers shall have nothing of their own, neither house, nor land, nor anything, but as pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving the Lord in poverty and humility, let them confidently go asking alms. Nor let them be ashamed of this, for the Lord made himself poor for us in this world. This is the highest pitch of poverty which has made you, my dearest brothers, heirs and kings of the kingdom of heaven, which has made you poor in goods, and exalted you in virtues. . . .
I strictly forbid all the brothers to have any association or conversation with women that may cause suspicion. And let them not enter nunneries, except those which the pope has given them special permission to enter. Let them not be intimate friends of men or women, lest on this account scandal arise among the brothers or about brothers.
[Source: Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar H. McNeal, eds., and trans., A Source Book for Medieval History (New York: Scribner's, 1905), pp. 499-507.]
---
Sunday, March 27, 2011
On the Arab Revolts & Western Hypocrisy
I won't write too much about this. My last post was way too long and self- indulgent. I promised I was going to keep entries here short, because no one should be expected to plow through a post of more than 500 (less than 490 you have to forgive me) words and that last one should have been split into probably three separate ones.
I've noticed some interesting things: First, most commentators here in the Sates are ignorant propagandists who very clearly know next to nothing about what they are talking about. Very rarely do you get anyone willing to speak the truth, apart from all the nonsense about our being interested in Arab freedom, democracy and human rights.
We are - and rationally so - only interested in one thing: defending and advancing our own national interests, as defined by our own power elite. The idealistic yammering is a cloak for that power, that's it. "Our" interests are oil, our economic and political security and international political and economic stability.
That's it, that's all. It's all about maintaining the flow of wealth, and protecting the broad interests of the decision makers in DC and Europe.
All the handwringing about why we are intervening in Libya, while ignoring the revolts in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen drives me nuts.
In Bahrain we and our key allies the Saudis and other Gulf emirates are invested in the status quo. If the protesters were to gain power and overthrow the monarchy there, the 5th Fleet's basing rights would be in question and danger of revocation. Democracy in that island satrap of ours would throw power to the Shiite majority, just as it has in Iraq.
This would further tilt the balance of power in the Gulf toward Persian Shiite Iran.
The Sunni Arab "monarchies" there are deathly afraid of Persians and Shiites. They know that when we leave - and we will, it's only a question of time and how much oil is left - then they will be on their own.
All talk of attacking Iran needs to be taken in that context. It's not primarily about Israel. Iran is only an existential threat to Israel in that it undermines Zionism as an ideology (who wants to move to a place under constant bombardment by Hezb' Allah, and under the eventual slight theoretical threat of a possible nuclear war? Not middle class American Jews, that's for damn sure..) not in the military sense.
As for Yemen, supporting the revolting tribes there against the government is tantamount to supporting "al-Qaeda" in that our only real allies in that hell hole are the rulers. This is true again and again throughout the Middle East and rest of the world - the people who need and want us need and want us for our guns. We prop up their regimes against their own people, they sell us oil cheap (not that Yemen has much oil) and let us do things like base spec ops and attack drones in their countries to hunt terrorists.
As for Syria the government there are Baathist thugs like Saddam, but that ruling clique is made up of Alawite and Druze minorities (whom the French made the military officer class during the colonial era to create a reliable indigenous power base against the Sunni majority - divide and conquer - when they left, those clans, most particularly the Alawites were in control) - any support of Sunni majority rebellion would destabilize the devil we know (who isn't even that devilish, really, a few convenient mass murders of Islamicists and other extremists that we secretly enjoyed like when they killed 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood leveling Hama in 1982 aside) and give us - and our Israeli friends - a new, and potentially much more unpleasant Sunni regime that could seek a renewed alliance with Egypt. Bad scenario for us, not going to encourage that. Note also that Syria has no oil. No oil, you're not that important.
Anyway, the reason we are taking out Qaddafi is that the Europeans and Chinese need his high quality crude. He's a jerk who has alienated and pissed off everyone - even the bankers in Zurich and Geneva hate him, and when you are rich and still have pissed off those mercenaries, you know you really have no friends. So in his case the "rebels" (disempowered tribes) are a positive improvement, hence the bombings.
Italy also has a vested interest in North Africa not descending into utter chaos, since they would prefer to keep the African boat immigration to the current trickle. That's why they volunteered their bases with such alacrity, right off the bat.
One closing observation: I've noticed that Al-Jezeera - which is a consistently more interesting news source than any major American corporate channel - is revealing its biases now. They aren't pro- western corporate, they're Sunni Arab sectarian and in defense of the Gulf Emirates and Saudis.
They refuse to favorably cover (or cover at all, really) the revolts in the Arab Gulf, which I think is highly amusing. It's game on in making everyone else feel uncomfortable (which I love them for) but when it comes to annoying the sheiks paying their bills, they keep their mouths shut.
We all have our sacrosanct loyalties and self interest to defend in the end. That's what makes the world go round.
Enjoy the ride. It's getting interesting.
---
I've noticed some interesting things: First, most commentators here in the Sates are ignorant propagandists who very clearly know next to nothing about what they are talking about. Very rarely do you get anyone willing to speak the truth, apart from all the nonsense about our being interested in Arab freedom, democracy and human rights.
We are - and rationally so - only interested in one thing: defending and advancing our own national interests, as defined by our own power elite. The idealistic yammering is a cloak for that power, that's it. "Our" interests are oil, our economic and political security and international political and economic stability.
That's it, that's all. It's all about maintaining the flow of wealth, and protecting the broad interests of the decision makers in DC and Europe.
All the handwringing about why we are intervening in Libya, while ignoring the revolts in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen drives me nuts.
In Bahrain we and our key allies the Saudis and other Gulf emirates are invested in the status quo. If the protesters were to gain power and overthrow the monarchy there, the 5th Fleet's basing rights would be in question and danger of revocation. Democracy in that island satrap of ours would throw power to the Shiite majority, just as it has in Iraq.
This would further tilt the balance of power in the Gulf toward Persian Shiite Iran.
The Sunni Arab "monarchies" there are deathly afraid of Persians and Shiites. They know that when we leave - and we will, it's only a question of time and how much oil is left - then they will be on their own.
All talk of attacking Iran needs to be taken in that context. It's not primarily about Israel. Iran is only an existential threat to Israel in that it undermines Zionism as an ideology (who wants to move to a place under constant bombardment by Hezb' Allah, and under the eventual slight theoretical threat of a possible nuclear war? Not middle class American Jews, that's for damn sure..) not in the military sense.
As for Yemen, supporting the revolting tribes there against the government is tantamount to supporting "al-Qaeda" in that our only real allies in that hell hole are the rulers. This is true again and again throughout the Middle East and rest of the world - the people who need and want us need and want us for our guns. We prop up their regimes against their own people, they sell us oil cheap (not that Yemen has much oil) and let us do things like base spec ops and attack drones in their countries to hunt terrorists.
As for Syria the government there are Baathist thugs like Saddam, but that ruling clique is made up of Alawite and Druze minorities (whom the French made the military officer class during the colonial era to create a reliable indigenous power base against the Sunni majority - divide and conquer - when they left, those clans, most particularly the Alawites were in control) - any support of Sunni majority rebellion would destabilize the devil we know (who isn't even that devilish, really, a few convenient mass murders of Islamicists and other extremists that we secretly enjoyed like when they killed 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood leveling Hama in 1982 aside) and give us - and our Israeli friends - a new, and potentially much more unpleasant Sunni regime that could seek a renewed alliance with Egypt. Bad scenario for us, not going to encourage that. Note also that Syria has no oil. No oil, you're not that important.
Anyway, the reason we are taking out Qaddafi is that the Europeans and Chinese need his high quality crude. He's a jerk who has alienated and pissed off everyone - even the bankers in Zurich and Geneva hate him, and when you are rich and still have pissed off those mercenaries, you know you really have no friends. So in his case the "rebels" (disempowered tribes) are a positive improvement, hence the bombings.
Italy also has a vested interest in North Africa not descending into utter chaos, since they would prefer to keep the African boat immigration to the current trickle. That's why they volunteered their bases with such alacrity, right off the bat.
One closing observation: I've noticed that Al-Jezeera - which is a consistently more interesting news source than any major American corporate channel - is revealing its biases now. They aren't pro- western corporate, they're Sunni Arab sectarian and in defense of the Gulf Emirates and Saudis.
They refuse to favorably cover (or cover at all, really) the revolts in the Arab Gulf, which I think is highly amusing. It's game on in making everyone else feel uncomfortable (which I love them for) but when it comes to annoying the sheiks paying their bills, they keep their mouths shut.
We all have our sacrosanct loyalties and self interest to defend in the end. That's what makes the world go round.
Enjoy the ride. It's getting interesting.
---
America, A Love Story - Part 1: The Silence of Gomorrah [revised]
I returned this weekend from a week and a half sojourn in Florida. While there I was working on moving my stuff - of which I still have far too much, despite already having given half of it away to goodwill - up to my new home here in Vermont. I also naturally spent quite a bit of time with family and friends, and so had no time for writing.
The trip was interesting though, in many ways. I thought many deep, scintillating thoughts. So many, and so scintillating, that I immediately began to feel for you, my public. So much beauty and truth, but no means to record it. Two thirds my way down the East Coast I was resolved: I here, hither, thither, withersoever and forthwith, shall always carry upon my person a dictaphone by which to trap all my diaphanous interior poetic magic, to then write it all down and out, and so bestow my genius more fully upon humanity.
I'm honing my creative process, is what I mean. I realized that as I write more that I need to become more mindful of process, and brainstorming and organizing thought is the most important step.
Anyway, the trip, as I say, was a good one.
I realized in the trip's shifting context that I've re-gained my clarity and sense of humor that I'd lost after baking away last summer in that tropical golfing paradise known as Florida.. Weather down there now is really nice - too nice, really.. Every day in March there is like a totally sunny Maine summer day, something that in Maine actually nearly never occurs, because every day Downeast is normally a stark climatic succession, with weather dramatically changing every 5 minutes. So I was briefly re-seduced, and wondered if I could arrange my life so that I could live winters there, summers elsewhere.. But then the last two days got insufferably hot around midday, and I snapped out of that reverie. No, I am meant for where there is snow and dry winter air. After a week it was very clear that I needed to come home..
Here.
I take three days to drive the route, taking my time and visiting with people on the way, so I had a long spell of listening to NPR and CBC talk on my satellite radio (which came 6 months free with the car, but because the talk - in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, no less - is too good to let lapse, I'm now subscribing and even listening to it in the house while working) and plenty of time to think.
On the way, I realized with sudden forceful lucidity that I really do not like the United States. I realized, consciously articulated this last trip what has been inchoately felt and repressed since high school: I am nearly always discontented here.
It must be the fluoride in the water or something.
I mean, I still from force of childhood habit love my country, my home. I am a patriot in that fundamental (and to me only authentic) sense.
But this collective relationship is just not working for me, practically. It's like I am married to my high school sweetheart, whom I've known and loved since childhood, and have this deep intimate history with, but now I realize has never been faithful to me, is a sociopathic and compulsive liar, and whose behavior and attitude these last ten years has suddenly become repulsive to me..
Just bombing them all in friendly fashion for the sake of Truth, Justice and the American Way..
America & Me: it's become one of those "dysfunctional" relationships where the other party is constantly ravaging you emotionally, never caring how it effects you.
I'm beginning to feel a bit like I did when I was in high school, minus insecurity and self esteem issues.. Paying attention to the media - either "entertainment" or "news" - almost instantly makes me feel trapped and powerless, jaded, either constantly annoyed, or bored or emotionally spent. Even the few things I enjoy and do watch when there's a television around (I refuse to own one) like Stephen Colbert or John Stewart end up curdling me..
I think it's being in close psychological contact with large undifferentiated numbers my fellow Americans.. Being forced to inhabit their common psychic space (Snooki! Bankers need bonuses! Hey, you catch ball good, we earn you billion dollars! Bomb sandniggers!) in mass aggregate is for me something like being caught and repeatedly trod underpaw by a lemming herd of gigantic diabolically retarded muppets.
Bruising, scary, and in a demented way, funny.
That's the one saving grace in it all, that people like Glenn Beck are so absurd that they make me laugh. For about five minutes, then I start clawing my ears and eyes out.
A party of Villagers is almost as bad.. No talk of substance, mostly prattle about sports or something equally mindless.. If politics do come up, it's almost always the same regurgitation of libertarian boilerplate followed by an excoriation of Obama, maybe Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi thrown in for sophistication's sake.
The only year that I've had since high school that was in any way as unpleasant as last year in Florida was when I unwisely decided to take a French teaching job at another American high school.
The first trauma was when I was a child and could not choose. The second was due to my own naivete and lack of sense that put me in harm's way. The third was the consequence of my not making good choices, and being trapped by circumstance.
Never again. Thrice abused has been well and more than enough.
I want out of here. This culture is fatal for my sanity. I've been getting out, again and again, in one way or another, ever since high school, never fully articulating my motives to myself. It's now become clear to me that I need to make a final departure, and stop screwing around.
There's two ways to do it: I can either become a monastic, probably a hermit, or a perpetual exile. I'm going, one way or the other, soon.
When I figure it out, you my public will be among the first to know.
So, as I say, when I hit the Carolina border I realized that the South is especially noxious and toxic.. It's like the rest of the country on a redneck meth and acid bender.
I gotta qualify that: I do still somehow like rural Northern Virginia and Maryland. The land that is still touched by the traces of colonial culture, like my own dear Vermont, Boston and Massachusetts are.. Those places along with the non-suburban Mid-Atlantic - and oddly enough, given my country upbringing, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Providence - are the only ones in these United Sates where I feel well these days. Their history and ghosts speak to me, the landscape soothes me, and the North Eastern weather (cool mist and drizzle, warm muggy summer idles - rarely too hot, never too cold - distinct seasons, with turning leaves and occasional snow) calms me, and all makes me feel at home.
I also have this love of certain aspects of and things from the South - some of the music, the moonshine (real moonshine is divine dew, something out of this world), some of the food and literature..
To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. That tale - a "kid's book" - is one of the greatest stories in the English language. Atticus Finch is an archetype of the best in humanity - dignified, wise, kind, humble, generous. When I think of the South with love, my imagined transcendent South, I think of him.. And Boo Radley, Mr. Dolphus Raymond (who pretends to be a drunk, just so he can escape the hypocrisy and hatred of the community - he lives with blacks, and the only way they forgive him for that is by dismissing him as a drunk..) and Calpurnia, the servant who in her charity and humility is masterful.
They are the ones I love, my true beloved. My imagined friends. But they are only an poetic figment of the past. When I think of the South with fondness, I edit out the inevitable interaction with the rest of the characters in that story.. The actual contemporary South is overrun with the likes Bob Ewell maliciously accusing "the nigger" (the other, black venal eroticized) of a crime he himself had committed. Southerners are still more the poor ignorant lynch mob that came to the county jail to face down Atticus and kill that "nigger," only turned aside in being shown up by the innocence of a little girl .. (How often that still happens, even still.. Where would we be without her?) ..
I'd far rather live in Cairo (the only place of the half dozen places outside the U.S. that I've lived that I have no desire to live in again) than the Deep American South, is what I'm saying.
I'll take me some crazy assed Muslims over all those crazy assed evangelical protestants any day, in a heartbeat. No question or hesitation.
I mean what the heck is stuff like this all about? Yellow tiger striped spandex?
Really? I still can't believe it.
So when I get into the cracker country, then hit that North Carolina border, I become gradually repulsed. It's the bible belt, and all that evangelical bible thumping is immediately felt throbbing, vibrating like scent of violence in the air.
This time it struck me forcibly: from North Carolina all the way to mid- Florida there suddenly are everywhere billboards advertising for strip clubs and porn emporia seemingly just off every third exit. These are interspaced with billboards exhorting passersby to keep their babies if single and pregnant, and others bearing bible verses.
Full-blown roadside culture "war," one marked by imbecilic incoherence. This is a phenomenon I've not seen in Communist New England. The South has apparently risen again in more ways than one.
Sodom in the South. Only I'm not sure the likes of Lot are amongst them.
There's a chain of titty bars advertising with locations in North Carolina and Florida that specializes in drawing in truckers and other travelers - "showers, good food, sex toys and paraphernalia, DVD's and magazines, WE BARE ALL!" on dozens of roadside billboards.. Like South of the Border, only with naked girls. There's even a porn store conveniently located on the Wildwood exit, which is the one I take to the Villages, usually. Very thoughtful of them. If I ever say, were hypothetically (here's a philosophical paradox much like that of Epimenides, a true Cretan..) to run out of free porn on the internet at home, or am seized with an urge to masturbate in my car 15 minutes before I get to my parents' house, I can stop in just after stopping next door and picking up my last Big Mac™ along the route.
The porn industry has my interests at heart and always in mind, see. Everything's for sale, and modesty's cheap. God bless capitalism and Amereeka.
There were other billboards of note, such as this one:
Now, for those of you amongst my dozen or so readers who do not know, John Galt is a character in Atlas Shrugged, a novel by the sociopathic libertarian-bourgeois dime-store Nietzschean Ayn Rand. You see people carrying placards with that question on it at "tea party" rallies all the time.
Here's an interview with Mike Wallace where she tells us what she is about herself:
From her own lips to your soul.
This, her "philosophy" has more or less become the predominant American Creed. I'll give you some of the words she puts in John Galt's mouth in her loathsome book. His most famous soliloquy:
Watching that video just stuns me. It's pure twisted comedy. The guy who created it is apparently a fan of Ayn. But the images he juxtaposes against his histrionic reading,
"I ask for nothing less and nothing more than what I earn. That is justice!" over film of an atomic bomb exploding..
"Why is it moral to produce something of value and then keep it for yourself? When it is moral for others who haven't earned to accept it?" over video of Bush standing in the post 9/11 ruins of the usurers' financial district in New York ..
"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.." over video from Columbine..
All just leave me mute.
Absolutely insane, so mindlessly ironic that it staggers. I don't think reasonable conversation is possible with someone so stupid, so clearly conscienceless and amoral.
This is the whole text read in that video:
For twelve years you've been asking "Who is John Galt?" This is John Galt speaking. I'm the man who's taken away your victims and thus destroyed your world. You've heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis and that Man's sins are destroying the world. But your chief virtue has been sacrifice, and you've demanded more sacrifices at every disaster. You've sacrificed justice to mercy and happiness to duty. So why should you be afraid of the world around you?
Your world is only the product of your sacrifices. While you were dragging the men who made your happiness possible to your sacrificial altars, I beat you to it. I reached them first and told them about the game you were playing and where it would take them. I explained the consequences of your 'brother-love' morality, which they had been too innocently generous to understand. You won't find them now, when you need them more than ever.
We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made them quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life.
I am a trader [editorial aside - I take this a pun. Yeah, John/Ayn that you are. A traitor to human kindness]. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.
You've allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they're born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please. The name of this absurdity is 'original sin'. That's impossible. That which is outside the possibility of choice is also outside the province of morality. To call sin that which is outside man's choice is a mockery of justice. To say that men are born with a free will but with a tendency toward evil is ridiculous. If the tendency is one of choice, it doesn't come at birth. If it is not a tendency of choice, then man's will is not free.
And then there's your 'brother-love' morality. Why is it moral to serve others, but not yourself? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but not by you? Why is it immoral to produce something of value and keep it for yourself, when it is moral for others who haven't earned it to accept it? If it's virtuous to give, isn't it then selfish to take?
Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.
You know that you can't give away everything and starve yourself. You've forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it's your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.
Then it began apologizing for its greatness and began giving away its wealth, feeling guilty for having produced more than its neighbors. Twelve years ago [editorial aside: interesting numeric there, Ayn], I saw what was wrong with the world and where the battle for Life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my acceptance of that morality was its only power. I was the first of the men who refused to give up the pursuit of his own happiness in order to serve others.
To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.
If you've understood what I've said, stop supporting your destroyers. Don't accept their philosophy. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, and your love. Don't exhaust yourself to help build the kind of world that you see around you now. In the name of the best within you, don't sacrifice the world to those who will take away your happiness for it.
The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.
The world according to John Galt, spoken like a a true Cretin.
It's the Will to Power, dumbed down for Glenn Beck's audience. Deep thoughts for the likes of Jared Loughner, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold.
Like I say, Nietzsche himself was bad enough. Rand is even more spiritually idiotic than poor crazy Fred.
Last fall I was at the Gainesville VA to pick up a prescription, and had to talk to the pharmacist. I went in, sat down, and noticed a little card with "Who is John Galt?" on it, taped to the side of his desk. I was mildly shocked, and perplexed. I asked him what it meant (innocent as a serpent, wise as a dove.. or something like that) curious as to why a government employee would be displaying something so politically charged at his place of work for all to see.. He smiled and brushed the question off, and I did not press him.
This is the absurdity we've come to. Espousing crypto-fascistic individualism while working for one of the best run health-care systems in the world - that is also perplexingly enough from a retarded libertarian point of view, government run - is now accepted as somehow sane, coherent and kosher. That dude's probably got lurid dreams of going to work for big pharma and making a million bucks discovering a new priapic elixir in the deepest Amazon someday. The VA is just to be a jumping off point for his coming world conquest.
I thought he looked like a impotent dweeb, so I hope for his sake that that elixir of his really pays off.
Every time I hear or see someone ask "Who is John Galt?" I want to counter "Quienes somos José y Maria, pendejo?"
See, the conceit behind the entire Galt fantasy is that if the entrepreneurial class - businessmen with capital - were hypothetically all to walk suddenly away from the table at once in a general strike, the entire economy would be instantly paralyzed.
They are supposedly the sole creative force driving our economy, see.
They make money the old fashioned way: They Earn It. By watching a stock ticker through beer goggles on Bloomberg in between rounds at the country club.
Thing is, I think that if all the people picking our fruit and vegetables, washing the shit out of our toilets, taking care of our laundry and watching our children were to walk away in a general strike those pussies would be so undone - "Clean my own toilet? Build my own summer home? Pick my own food? Mow and landscape my own lawn? Slaughter my own animals? With my own hands?" - there'd be an immediate collapse on the minimum and even the living wage issue.
"Please come back and wipe my baby's ass for me! Please! My wife is about to beat me to death with her Jimmy Choos!"
Whereas if the conniving investors who deliberately and recklessly speculated us into the current market collapse were to walk away, they would be doing all the rest of us a favor.
Please, sail your 100 million dollar yacht to Somalia! I hear the beaches are awesome there. Bunch of sheiks and warlords hang there, like Monaco.. just your type of people..
Note, and this is really important, that this "ethical thought" of Ayn Rand's has been publicly embraced by Alan Greenspan. He doesn't even try to hide his amoral power worship. He's openly warned us where he's coming from.
She called her philosophy "objectivism" - accept only what is objectively true. No faith, only rational calculation. Admire and love only what is "objectively" admirable and loveable. Love people who are beautiful and strong, those who "win" and "succeed" have virtue, which is material power. Do not love people for what they do for you - they only act of self interest and weakness.
The lines about in Galt's speech about use of force being illegitimate are either disingenuous and cynical or idiotically stupid. We all use force, whether physical or metaphysical, to influence reality and others. It is unavoidable. The only issue is the end to which we will use the power (no matter how slight - getting out of bed or opening your mouth effect things) we have.
Ayn Rand is, to put it square and blunt, a moral idiot. Her work is both utterly and howlingly stupid, as well as pretty much a crib of Mein Kampf.
Stupid isn't always evil, but evil is always stupid.
One thing for sure: none of it is Christian. The stale irony though is that so many so-called Christians think that Ayn Rand is an ethical genius.
"You've Sacrificed Justice to Mercy.. Let me Explain to You the Consequences of your brother-love morality.. We are on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unearned duties."
"I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."
No better articulation of the mind of anti-christ than that.
It is, not at all incidentally, also pretty much a summary of radical (i.e., libertarian) feminist ethics. Take care of little kids and old people? Be subservient to the needs of others without reward? Hell no, neuter me with hormones, and show me the cash baby! Sex and monay, powah and freedam!
"I will never live for the sake of another man."
Non serviam. I will not serve. To hell with you.
The stupidity or cynical disingenuousness of the anti- government libertarian is that their philosophy if triumphant will demand the reversal of feminism and the restoration of traditional anti-libertarian institutions (with all their attendant hierarchies and repressive social norms) such as the patriarchal family and culturally and politically dominant churches. If the government does not provide social democratic alternatives that supply basic human needs like child care and elder care (such as the public schools or social security and medicare - all of which are sneered at by Ayn Rand, notice) then the family - read women - will have to again take up that charge. And that work will not be remunerated with cash, believe me you.
Anyway, our culture won't go back there unless forced by catastrophe, but we'll still have to put up with libertarian idiocy and nonsense until then, anyhow..
Feed your head, and live for your pleasure and greed.
Welcome to the United Sates of America, 2011.
Anyway, to draw this little screed to a close, I have another little story to tell you all.
Last fall I got a circular in the mail:
A glossy mass mailing circular to every PO Box in Lady Lake, FL advertising a series of free talks - "come as you are," "free bible," "free nightly handouts," "free children's program.." - by a speaker named Scott Moore. He makes three promises: 1. The Bible alone will be your textbook. 2. We will not beg you for money. 3. You will be inspired as you attend nightly.
There are cheesy garish graphics illustrating motifs from the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation that so many evangelical protestants go all jiggaboo over. The statue in four types of metal from Daniel 2, the whore on the dragon.. The beasts of Revelation..
The only identifying information on the thing as to who these people are, other than the name Scott Moore, is the address of the American Legion hall where the event was to be held.
Nice detail, the Legion is renting space to an apocalyptic preacher.
This last week, I remembered this circular, and pulled it out of the little scrapbook where I keep such curios. I googled the name Scott Moore.
That name is worn by a major league baseball player, an English rugby player, one of Elvis's guitarists, a screenwriter who worked on the films Wedding Crashers and the Hangover and..
This guy:
The second "man" ever to become pregnant. He's not really a man, actually. She's a transgendered woman who decided to keep her uterus and get artificially inseminated with her partner's sperm.
I thought this was really amusing, in that sick way that I've taken up as a defense against misanthropy.
I got a little more sophisticated in my search, and found old Scott's site.
It turns out that our Scott Moore is a preacher on the staff of Hope Media Ministries, a Seventh Day Adventist group.. He was "born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. He was raised in a Christian home, but did not dedicate his life to Christ until the age of 27. Shortly after his conversion, Scott left his job as a truck driver to attend the Mission College of Evangelism. It was here that he developed his passion of getting all members of the church to be on fire and involved in doing evangelistic ministry inside and outside of the church. Scott joined the ARISE team two years ago, and now functions as the Director of ARISE."
The Adventists are of course a Millerite apocalyptic church born of the early to mid 19th Century Second Great American Awakening that also gave rise to the Shakers, the Mormons and then later in echoes the Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses and eventually the modern Pentecostal movement. All of which also deeply influenced rise to the Abolitionist, the Suffragist, the Prohibitionist and Progressive movements. A very fecund and important period in world religious history, to say the least.
Note that none of that was on the flyer. No denomination (trying to be "post denominational" and appeal to the chronically unchurched, I think), no accreditation. I notice that Hope Ministries has some luminaries with guns, though: One "Barry Black.. the first African-American chaplain to hold the office of chaplain to the United States Senate. Black was best known in the United States as historically becoming the first African-American chief of naval chaplains in August 2000.."
Impressive, and curious..
There are quite a few links to all sorts of interesting stuff on that site. I listened to a couple hours of preaching, because I'm a freak and enjoy such things..
Check out this one series of sermons, for example. I especially dug the graphic at the head of the page:
Scary bible monsters, and a nice happy non- threatening cool dude Christ. Sporting a mullet, no less.
Perfect pitch. Love it. Lots of blather about how prophecy is not mysterious. The scriptures interpret themselves, anyone can do it! It's relevant and fun!
No mention of this:
36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
Or this:
18 Woe to you who long
for the day of the LORD!
Why do you long for the day of the LORD?
That day will be darkness, not light.
19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.
20 Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?
21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
25 “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
26 You have lifted up the shrine of your king,
the pedestal of your idols,
the star of your god[b]—
which you made for yourselves.
27 Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,”
says the LORD, whose name is God Almighty.
Though.
In three sermons and several hours I heard a few biblical quotes
(very few - ironic how these "Bible believing" Christians carry on for hours while citing only a few verses in all that time - that's why I hate most extended sermons because most preachers babble and simper and try to amuse - and long for the apostolic liturgy - for oh so "ironically" it in all of its forms, the Rite of Paul VI included, are almost entirely direct quotes or paraphrases of scripture),
and those were all from Daniel, Revelation or occasionally the Gospels or Isaiah.
Nothing at all from my favorite books in the Old Testament apart from what protestants call the Apocrypha, those beautiful little poems from the minor prophets..
They're at the end of the text, right before Maccabees in the Vulgate. The first is Jonah, which is a beautiful antetype for Christ ("I give them the sign of Jonas") as well as a charming and funny parody expressing the profundity of divine mercy. Then there is the wonderful righteous anger and profound theology of Amos and Malachi (inspirations for the "I have a Dream" speech of MLK) and all the others..
Ah yes.. Why am I typing all this? What's my deal?
Well, I've been thinking quite a lot about the apocalypse these days.
Of how the end will come in all things revealed, the hearts and deeds of men laid bare.
I've been thinking about all these sacred myths in the Bible that so capture our minds and undergird our history, our discourse and politics.
So many people are fixated with sexual sin, and so with stories such as Abraham's hospitality to the three men in Genesis 18.
Two of them depart for Sodom and the third - identified as the Lord - remains with Abraham, who then pleads with the Lord for the righteous men living in the cities about to be destroyed.
The two men, now called angels, in the next chapter arrive to stay at Lot's house in Sodom, and the debauched population of the place comes to demand that Lot turn them over so they can get to "know" them..
Lot refuses, and offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead.
Then they flee, having been warned that God was about to reign brimstone and fire on the city. Lot's wife turns back to look at the inferno against the angels' instructions, and is turned to the famous pillar of salt.
Then, at the end of the chapter Lot's virgin daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, getting pregnant.
Like so much of the Bible, all truly amazing and very subversive (no matter what your prejudices or point of view) stuff.
This story, and not (as is so often asserted by people attacking the Catholic tradition on sexual issues) the prohibitions against man laying with another man in Leviticus is the deepest Biblical root of all subsequent Jewish and Christian - as well as (need it be said) Islamic thought - against what we today call homosexual acts.
But to me, this story is much broader in its implications than just that.
The Church Fathers saw this story as revealing the Triune nature of God, and call the three visitors the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
One of my favorite icons is the Hospitality of Abraham by Andre Rublev, a depiction of the angelic visitors as images of the Triune God as the Fathers attest:
This iconic truth seems to imply many several things.
One of them is that God is not bound by our consciences or ideas of good and evil. We in a atavistic way are, of course. But he is emphatically not. The bourgeois moral universe is not that of God.
His mercy is not our mercy, our justice is not his justice.
Another is that the inherent sacredness of the human person as a living icon of God is what gives us our profound value.
This means that desecrating ourselves and others for the sole sake of pleasure and gratification of lust and violent impulses is not good, of course.
But it also means that the weak, the poor, the stupid..
And even the evil..
Even fools who embrace sadistic ideologies like that of Ayn Rand..
Must be treated with reverence and respect. We must love our enemies. Love those who are useless and economically stressed.
A true Christian society is ordered toward the good of all human persons.
We must treat others as we would be treated ourselves. This is a duty owed our God.
For he loves all of us, even in our sin. All of us are evil in our wills. All of us are thus, in this limited but profound sense enemies of God who is good beyond all words and human understanding.
He loves us his enemies, so must we then love our enemies.
That's my sermon for the morning.
So, to finally wrap this back on my juicy post title: I've been wondering these days about the sin of Gomorrah.
The Biblical narrative never tells us what they were doing there. The place is silent to myth and history.
That silence intrigues me. The sexual nature of the Sodomite's sin is what most often captures and titillates our imaginations.
So many of us revolt in pleasure against that, and so many of us rise up in judgment against those we see as transgressing - while probably none apart from Christ (and of course one other) among us are truly pure of heart in these matters.
That's obvious, and I'm weary of all the juvenile hullabaloo about the titillating supposed taboo.
I'm more concerned with the silent sins these days. What goes on in the halls of power, the money changers' gilt backrooms, the hearts of every one of us? Those cryptic acts of the powerful, the whispers of the gnostics at their occult altars?
To me, this country is rife with that sort of sin.
The god of the dollar bill is not my God.
Of that I am sure, even in my sin.
I'll leave the last word to the prophet Malachi, to tie (I hope) this all together:
I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the LORD Almighty.
The Word of the LORD. Wisdom attend.
---
The trip was interesting though, in many ways. I thought many deep, scintillating thoughts. So many, and so scintillating, that I immediately began to feel for you, my public. So much beauty and truth, but no means to record it. Two thirds my way down the East Coast I was resolved: I here, hither, thither, withersoever and forthwith, shall always carry upon my person a dictaphone by which to trap all my diaphanous interior poetic magic, to then write it all down and out, and so bestow my genius more fully upon humanity.
I'm honing my creative process, is what I mean. I realized that as I write more that I need to become more mindful of process, and brainstorming and organizing thought is the most important step.
Anyway, the trip, as I say, was a good one.
I realized in the trip's shifting context that I've re-gained my clarity and sense of humor that I'd lost after baking away last summer in that tropical golfing paradise known as Florida.. Weather down there now is really nice - too nice, really.. Every day in March there is like a totally sunny Maine summer day, something that in Maine actually nearly never occurs, because every day Downeast is normally a stark climatic succession, with weather dramatically changing every 5 minutes. So I was briefly re-seduced, and wondered if I could arrange my life so that I could live winters there, summers elsewhere.. But then the last two days got insufferably hot around midday, and I snapped out of that reverie. No, I am meant for where there is snow and dry winter air. After a week it was very clear that I needed to come home..
Here.
I take three days to drive the route, taking my time and visiting with people on the way, so I had a long spell of listening to NPR and CBC talk on my satellite radio (which came 6 months free with the car, but because the talk - in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, no less - is too good to let lapse, I'm now subscribing and even listening to it in the house while working) and plenty of time to think.
On the way, I realized with sudden forceful lucidity that I really do not like the United States. I realized, consciously articulated this last trip what has been inchoately felt and repressed since high school: I am nearly always discontented here.
It must be the fluoride in the water or something.
I mean, I still from force of childhood habit love my country, my home. I am a patriot in that fundamental (and to me only authentic) sense.
But this collective relationship is just not working for me, practically. It's like I am married to my high school sweetheart, whom I've known and loved since childhood, and have this deep intimate history with, but now I realize has never been faithful to me, is a sociopathic and compulsive liar, and whose behavior and attitude these last ten years has suddenly become repulsive to me..
America & Me: it's become one of those "dysfunctional" relationships where the other party is constantly ravaging you emotionally, never caring how it effects you.
I'm beginning to feel a bit like I did when I was in high school, minus insecurity and self esteem issues.. Paying attention to the media - either "entertainment" or "news" - almost instantly makes me feel trapped and powerless, jaded, either constantly annoyed, or bored or emotionally spent. Even the few things I enjoy and do watch when there's a television around (I refuse to own one) like Stephen Colbert or John Stewart end up curdling me..
I think it's being in close psychological contact with large undifferentiated numbers my fellow Americans.. Being forced to inhabit their common psychic space (Snooki! Bankers need bonuses! Hey, you catch ball good, we earn you billion dollars! Bomb sandniggers!) in mass aggregate is for me something like being caught and repeatedly trod underpaw by a lemming herd of gigantic diabolically retarded muppets.
Bruising, scary, and in a demented way, funny.
That's the one saving grace in it all, that people like Glenn Beck are so absurd that they make me laugh. For about five minutes, then I start clawing my ears and eyes out.
A party of Villagers is almost as bad.. No talk of substance, mostly prattle about sports or something equally mindless.. If politics do come up, it's almost always the same regurgitation of libertarian boilerplate followed by an excoriation of Obama, maybe Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi thrown in for sophistication's sake.
The only year that I've had since high school that was in any way as unpleasant as last year in Florida was when I unwisely decided to take a French teaching job at another American high school.
The first trauma was when I was a child and could not choose. The second was due to my own naivete and lack of sense that put me in harm's way. The third was the consequence of my not making good choices, and being trapped by circumstance.
Never again. Thrice abused has been well and more than enough.
I want out of here. This culture is fatal for my sanity. I've been getting out, again and again, in one way or another, ever since high school, never fully articulating my motives to myself. It's now become clear to me that I need to make a final departure, and stop screwing around.
There's two ways to do it: I can either become a monastic, probably a hermit, or a perpetual exile. I'm going, one way or the other, soon.
When I figure it out, you my public will be among the first to know.
So, as I say, when I hit the Carolina border I realized that the South is especially noxious and toxic.. It's like the rest of the country on a redneck meth and acid bender.
I gotta qualify that: I do still somehow like rural Northern Virginia and Maryland. The land that is still touched by the traces of colonial culture, like my own dear Vermont, Boston and Massachusetts are.. Those places along with the non-suburban Mid-Atlantic - and oddly enough, given my country upbringing, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Providence - are the only ones in these United Sates where I feel well these days. Their history and ghosts speak to me, the landscape soothes me, and the North Eastern weather (cool mist and drizzle, warm muggy summer idles - rarely too hot, never too cold - distinct seasons, with turning leaves and occasional snow) calms me, and all makes me feel at home.
I also have this love of certain aspects of and things from the South - some of the music, the moonshine (real moonshine is divine dew, something out of this world), some of the food and literature..
To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. That tale - a "kid's book" - is one of the greatest stories in the English language. Atticus Finch is an archetype of the best in humanity - dignified, wise, kind, humble, generous. When I think of the South with love, my imagined transcendent South, I think of him.. And Boo Radley, Mr. Dolphus Raymond (who pretends to be a drunk, just so he can escape the hypocrisy and hatred of the community - he lives with blacks, and the only way they forgive him for that is by dismissing him as a drunk..) and Calpurnia, the servant who in her charity and humility is masterful.
They are the ones I love, my true beloved. My imagined friends. But they are only an poetic figment of the past. When I think of the South with fondness, I edit out the inevitable interaction with the rest of the characters in that story.. The actual contemporary South is overrun with the likes Bob Ewell maliciously accusing "the nigger" (the other, black venal eroticized) of a crime he himself had committed. Southerners are still more the poor ignorant lynch mob that came to the county jail to face down Atticus and kill that "nigger," only turned aside in being shown up by the innocence of a little girl .. (How often that still happens, even still.. Where would we be without her?) ..
I'd far rather live in Cairo (the only place of the half dozen places outside the U.S. that I've lived that I have no desire to live in again) than the Deep American South, is what I'm saying.
I'll take me some crazy assed Muslims over all those crazy assed evangelical protestants any day, in a heartbeat. No question or hesitation.
I mean what the heck is stuff like this all about? Yellow tiger striped spandex?
Really? I still can't believe it.
So when I get into the cracker country, then hit that North Carolina border, I become gradually repulsed. It's the bible belt, and all that evangelical bible thumping is immediately felt throbbing, vibrating like scent of violence in the air.
This time it struck me forcibly: from North Carolina all the way to mid- Florida there suddenly are everywhere billboards advertising for strip clubs and porn emporia seemingly just off every third exit. These are interspaced with billboards exhorting passersby to keep their babies if single and pregnant, and others bearing bible verses.
Full-blown roadside culture "war," one marked by imbecilic incoherence. This is a phenomenon I've not seen in Communist New England. The South has apparently risen again in more ways than one.
Sodom in the South. Only I'm not sure the likes of Lot are amongst them.
There's a chain of titty bars advertising with locations in North Carolina and Florida that specializes in drawing in truckers and other travelers - "showers, good food, sex toys and paraphernalia, DVD's and magazines, WE BARE ALL!" on dozens of roadside billboards.. Like South of the Border, only with naked girls. There's even a porn store conveniently located on the Wildwood exit, which is the one I take to the Villages, usually. Very thoughtful of them. If I ever say, were hypothetically (here's a philosophical paradox much like that of Epimenides, a true Cretan..) to run out of free porn on the internet at home, or am seized with an urge to masturbate in my car 15 minutes before I get to my parents' house, I can stop in just after stopping next door and picking up my last Big Mac™ along the route.
The porn industry has my interests at heart and always in mind, see. Everything's for sale, and modesty's cheap. God bless capitalism and Amereeka.
There were other billboards of note, such as this one:
Now, for those of you amongst my dozen or so readers who do not know, John Galt is a character in Atlas Shrugged, a novel by the sociopathic libertarian-bourgeois dime-store Nietzschean Ayn Rand. You see people carrying placards with that question on it at "tea party" rallies all the time.
Here's an interview with Mike Wallace where she tells us what she is about herself:
From her own lips to your soul.
This, her "philosophy" has more or less become the predominant American Creed. I'll give you some of the words she puts in John Galt's mouth in her loathsome book. His most famous soliloquy:
Watching that video just stuns me. It's pure twisted comedy. The guy who created it is apparently a fan of Ayn. But the images he juxtaposes against his histrionic reading,
"I ask for nothing less and nothing more than what I earn. That is justice!" over film of an atomic bomb exploding..
"Why is it moral to produce something of value and then keep it for yourself? When it is moral for others who haven't earned to accept it?" over video of Bush standing in the post 9/11 ruins of the usurers' financial district in New York ..
"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.." over video from Columbine..
All just leave me mute.
Absolutely insane, so mindlessly ironic that it staggers. I don't think reasonable conversation is possible with someone so stupid, so clearly conscienceless and amoral.
This is the whole text read in that video:
For twelve years you've been asking "Who is John Galt?" This is John Galt speaking. I'm the man who's taken away your victims and thus destroyed your world. You've heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis and that Man's sins are destroying the world. But your chief virtue has been sacrifice, and you've demanded more sacrifices at every disaster. You've sacrificed justice to mercy and happiness to duty. So why should you be afraid of the world around you?
Your world is only the product of your sacrifices. While you were dragging the men who made your happiness possible to your sacrificial altars, I beat you to it. I reached them first and told them about the game you were playing and where it would take them. I explained the consequences of your 'brother-love' morality, which they had been too innocently generous to understand. You won't find them now, when you need them more than ever.
We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made them quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life.
I am a trader [editorial aside - I take this a pun. Yeah, John/Ayn that you are. A traitor to human kindness]. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.
You've allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they're born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please. The name of this absurdity is 'original sin'. That's impossible. That which is outside the possibility of choice is also outside the province of morality. To call sin that which is outside man's choice is a mockery of justice. To say that men are born with a free will but with a tendency toward evil is ridiculous. If the tendency is one of choice, it doesn't come at birth. If it is not a tendency of choice, then man's will is not free.
And then there's your 'brother-love' morality. Why is it moral to serve others, but not yourself? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but not by you? Why is it immoral to produce something of value and keep it for yourself, when it is moral for others who haven't earned it to accept it? If it's virtuous to give, isn't it then selfish to take?
Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.
You know that you can't give away everything and starve yourself. You've forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it's your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.
Then it began apologizing for its greatness and began giving away its wealth, feeling guilty for having produced more than its neighbors. Twelve years ago [editorial aside: interesting numeric there, Ayn], I saw what was wrong with the world and where the battle for Life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my acceptance of that morality was its only power. I was the first of the men who refused to give up the pursuit of his own happiness in order to serve others.
To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.
If you've understood what I've said, stop supporting your destroyers. Don't accept their philosophy. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, and your love. Don't exhaust yourself to help build the kind of world that you see around you now. In the name of the best within you, don't sacrifice the world to those who will take away your happiness for it.
The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.
The world according to John Galt, spoken like a a true Cretin.
It's the Will to Power, dumbed down for Glenn Beck's audience. Deep thoughts for the likes of Jared Loughner, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold.
Like I say, Nietzsche himself was bad enough. Rand is even more spiritually idiotic than poor crazy Fred.
Last fall I was at the Gainesville VA to pick up a prescription, and had to talk to the pharmacist. I went in, sat down, and noticed a little card with "Who is John Galt?" on it, taped to the side of his desk. I was mildly shocked, and perplexed. I asked him what it meant (innocent as a serpent, wise as a dove.. or something like that) curious as to why a government employee would be displaying something so politically charged at his place of work for all to see.. He smiled and brushed the question off, and I did not press him.
This is the absurdity we've come to. Espousing crypto-fascistic individualism while working for one of the best run health-care systems in the world - that is also perplexingly enough from a retarded libertarian point of view, government run - is now accepted as somehow sane, coherent and kosher. That dude's probably got lurid dreams of going to work for big pharma and making a million bucks discovering a new priapic elixir in the deepest Amazon someday. The VA is just to be a jumping off point for his coming world conquest.
I thought he looked like a impotent dweeb, so I hope for his sake that that elixir of his really pays off.
Every time I hear or see someone ask "Who is John Galt?" I want to counter "Quienes somos José y Maria, pendejo?"
See, the conceit behind the entire Galt fantasy is that if the entrepreneurial class - businessmen with capital - were hypothetically all to walk suddenly away from the table at once in a general strike, the entire economy would be instantly paralyzed.
They are supposedly the sole creative force driving our economy, see.
They make money the old fashioned way: They Earn It. By watching a stock ticker through beer goggles on Bloomberg in between rounds at the country club.
Thing is, I think that if all the people picking our fruit and vegetables, washing the shit out of our toilets, taking care of our laundry and watching our children were to walk away in a general strike those pussies would be so undone - "Clean my own toilet? Build my own summer home? Pick my own food? Mow and landscape my own lawn? Slaughter my own animals? With my own hands?" - there'd be an immediate collapse on the minimum and even the living wage issue.
"Please come back and wipe my baby's ass for me! Please! My wife is about to beat me to death with her Jimmy Choos!"
Whereas if the conniving investors who deliberately and recklessly speculated us into the current market collapse were to walk away, they would be doing all the rest of us a favor.
Please, sail your 100 million dollar yacht to Somalia! I hear the beaches are awesome there. Bunch of sheiks and warlords hang there, like Monaco.. just your type of people..
Note, and this is really important, that this "ethical thought" of Ayn Rand's has been publicly embraced by Alan Greenspan. He doesn't even try to hide his amoral power worship. He's openly warned us where he's coming from.
She called her philosophy "objectivism" - accept only what is objectively true. No faith, only rational calculation. Admire and love only what is "objectively" admirable and loveable. Love people who are beautiful and strong, those who "win" and "succeed" have virtue, which is material power. Do not love people for what they do for you - they only act of self interest and weakness.
The lines about in Galt's speech about use of force being illegitimate are either disingenuous and cynical or idiotically stupid. We all use force, whether physical or metaphysical, to influence reality and others. It is unavoidable. The only issue is the end to which we will use the power (no matter how slight - getting out of bed or opening your mouth effect things) we have.
Ayn Rand is, to put it square and blunt, a moral idiot. Her work is both utterly and howlingly stupid, as well as pretty much a crib of Mein Kampf.
Stupid isn't always evil, but evil is always stupid.
One thing for sure: none of it is Christian. The stale irony though is that so many so-called Christians think that Ayn Rand is an ethical genius.
"You've Sacrificed Justice to Mercy.. Let me Explain to You the Consequences of your brother-love morality.. We are on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unearned duties."
"I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."
No better articulation of the mind of anti-christ than that.
It is, not at all incidentally, also pretty much a summary of radical (i.e., libertarian) feminist ethics. Take care of little kids and old people? Be subservient to the needs of others without reward? Hell no, neuter me with hormones, and show me the cash baby! Sex and monay, powah and freedam!
"I will never live for the sake of another man."
Non serviam. I will not serve. To hell with you.
The stupidity or cynical disingenuousness of the anti- government libertarian is that their philosophy if triumphant will demand the reversal of feminism and the restoration of traditional anti-libertarian institutions (with all their attendant hierarchies and repressive social norms) such as the patriarchal family and culturally and politically dominant churches. If the government does not provide social democratic alternatives that supply basic human needs like child care and elder care (such as the public schools or social security and medicare - all of which are sneered at by Ayn Rand, notice) then the family - read women - will have to again take up that charge. And that work will not be remunerated with cash, believe me you.
Anyway, our culture won't go back there unless forced by catastrophe, but we'll still have to put up with libertarian idiocy and nonsense until then, anyhow..
Feed your head, and live for your pleasure and greed.
Welcome to the United Sates of America, 2011.
Anyway, to draw this little screed to a close, I have another little story to tell you all.
Last fall I got a circular in the mail:
A glossy mass mailing circular to every PO Box in Lady Lake, FL advertising a series of free talks - "come as you are," "free bible," "free nightly handouts," "free children's program.." - by a speaker named Scott Moore. He makes three promises: 1. The Bible alone will be your textbook. 2. We will not beg you for money. 3. You will be inspired as you attend nightly.
There are cheesy garish graphics illustrating motifs from the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation that so many evangelical protestants go all jiggaboo over. The statue in four types of metal from Daniel 2, the whore on the dragon.. The beasts of Revelation..
The only identifying information on the thing as to who these people are, other than the name Scott Moore, is the address of the American Legion hall where the event was to be held.
Nice detail, the Legion is renting space to an apocalyptic preacher.
This last week, I remembered this circular, and pulled it out of the little scrapbook where I keep such curios. I googled the name Scott Moore.
That name is worn by a major league baseball player, an English rugby player, one of Elvis's guitarists, a screenwriter who worked on the films Wedding Crashers and the Hangover and..
This guy:
The second "man" ever to become pregnant. He's not really a man, actually. She's a transgendered woman who decided to keep her uterus and get artificially inseminated with her partner's sperm.
I thought this was really amusing, in that sick way that I've taken up as a defense against misanthropy.
I got a little more sophisticated in my search, and found old Scott's site.
It turns out that our Scott Moore is a preacher on the staff of Hope Media Ministries, a Seventh Day Adventist group.. He was "born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. He was raised in a Christian home, but did not dedicate his life to Christ until the age of 27. Shortly after his conversion, Scott left his job as a truck driver to attend the Mission College of Evangelism. It was here that he developed his passion of getting all members of the church to be on fire and involved in doing evangelistic ministry inside and outside of the church. Scott joined the ARISE team two years ago, and now functions as the Director of ARISE."
The Adventists are of course a Millerite apocalyptic church born of the early to mid 19th Century Second Great American Awakening that also gave rise to the Shakers, the Mormons and then later in echoes the Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses and eventually the modern Pentecostal movement. All of which also deeply influenced rise to the Abolitionist, the Suffragist, the Prohibitionist and Progressive movements. A very fecund and important period in world religious history, to say the least.
Note that none of that was on the flyer. No denomination (trying to be "post denominational" and appeal to the chronically unchurched, I think), no accreditation. I notice that Hope Ministries has some luminaries with guns, though: One "Barry Black.. the first African-American chaplain to hold the office of chaplain to the United States Senate. Black was best known in the United States as historically becoming the first African-American chief of naval chaplains in August 2000.."
Impressive, and curious..
There are quite a few links to all sorts of interesting stuff on that site. I listened to a couple hours of preaching, because I'm a freak and enjoy such things..
Check out this one series of sermons, for example. I especially dug the graphic at the head of the page:
Scary bible monsters, and a nice happy non- threatening cool dude Christ. Sporting a mullet, no less.
Perfect pitch. Love it. Lots of blather about how prophecy is not mysterious. The scriptures interpret themselves, anyone can do it! It's relevant and fun!
No mention of this:
36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
Or this:
18 Woe to you who long
for the day of the LORD!
Why do you long for the day of the LORD?
That day will be darkness, not light.
19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.
20 Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?
21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
25 “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
26 You have lifted up the shrine of your king,
the pedestal of your idols,
the star of your god[b]—
which you made for yourselves.
27 Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,”
says the LORD, whose name is God Almighty.
Though.
In three sermons and several hours I heard a few biblical quotes
(very few - ironic how these "Bible believing" Christians carry on for hours while citing only a few verses in all that time - that's why I hate most extended sermons because most preachers babble and simper and try to amuse - and long for the apostolic liturgy - for oh so "ironically" it in all of its forms, the Rite of Paul VI included, are almost entirely direct quotes or paraphrases of scripture),
and those were all from Daniel, Revelation or occasionally the Gospels or Isaiah.
Nothing at all from my favorite books in the Old Testament apart from what protestants call the Apocrypha, those beautiful little poems from the minor prophets..
They're at the end of the text, right before Maccabees in the Vulgate. The first is Jonah, which is a beautiful antetype for Christ ("I give them the sign of Jonas") as well as a charming and funny parody expressing the profundity of divine mercy. Then there is the wonderful righteous anger and profound theology of Amos and Malachi (inspirations for the "I have a Dream" speech of MLK) and all the others..
Ah yes.. Why am I typing all this? What's my deal?
Well, I've been thinking quite a lot about the apocalypse these days.
Of how the end will come in all things revealed, the hearts and deeds of men laid bare.
I've been thinking about all these sacred myths in the Bible that so capture our minds and undergird our history, our discourse and politics.
So many people are fixated with sexual sin, and so with stories such as Abraham's hospitality to the three men in Genesis 18.
Two of them depart for Sodom and the third - identified as the Lord - remains with Abraham, who then pleads with the Lord for the righteous men living in the cities about to be destroyed.
The two men, now called angels, in the next chapter arrive to stay at Lot's house in Sodom, and the debauched population of the place comes to demand that Lot turn them over so they can get to "know" them..
Lot refuses, and offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead.
Then they flee, having been warned that God was about to reign brimstone and fire on the city. Lot's wife turns back to look at the inferno against the angels' instructions, and is turned to the famous pillar of salt.
Then, at the end of the chapter Lot's virgin daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, getting pregnant.
Like so much of the Bible, all truly amazing and very subversive (no matter what your prejudices or point of view) stuff.
This story, and not (as is so often asserted by people attacking the Catholic tradition on sexual issues) the prohibitions against man laying with another man in Leviticus is the deepest Biblical root of all subsequent Jewish and Christian - as well as (need it be said) Islamic thought - against what we today call homosexual acts.
But to me, this story is much broader in its implications than just that.
The Church Fathers saw this story as revealing the Triune nature of God, and call the three visitors the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
One of my favorite icons is the Hospitality of Abraham by Andre Rublev, a depiction of the angelic visitors as images of the Triune God as the Fathers attest:
This iconic truth seems to imply many several things.
One of them is that God is not bound by our consciences or ideas of good and evil. We in a atavistic way are, of course. But he is emphatically not. The bourgeois moral universe is not that of God.
His mercy is not our mercy, our justice is not his justice.
Another is that the inherent sacredness of the human person as a living icon of God is what gives us our profound value.
This means that desecrating ourselves and others for the sole sake of pleasure and gratification of lust and violent impulses is not good, of course.
But it also means that the weak, the poor, the stupid..
And even the evil..
Even fools who embrace sadistic ideologies like that of Ayn Rand..
Must be treated with reverence and respect. We must love our enemies. Love those who are useless and economically stressed.
A true Christian society is ordered toward the good of all human persons.
We must treat others as we would be treated ourselves. This is a duty owed our God.
For he loves all of us, even in our sin. All of us are evil in our wills. All of us are thus, in this limited but profound sense enemies of God who is good beyond all words and human understanding.
He loves us his enemies, so must we then love our enemies.
That's my sermon for the morning.
So, to finally wrap this back on my juicy post title: I've been wondering these days about the sin of Gomorrah.
The Biblical narrative never tells us what they were doing there. The place is silent to myth and history.
That silence intrigues me. The sexual nature of the Sodomite's sin is what most often captures and titillates our imaginations.
So many of us revolt in pleasure against that, and so many of us rise up in judgment against those we see as transgressing - while probably none apart from Christ (and of course one other) among us are truly pure of heart in these matters.
That's obvious, and I'm weary of all the juvenile hullabaloo about the titillating supposed taboo.
I'm more concerned with the silent sins these days. What goes on in the halls of power, the money changers' gilt backrooms, the hearts of every one of us? Those cryptic acts of the powerful, the whispers of the gnostics at their occult altars?
To me, this country is rife with that sort of sin.
The god of the dollar bill is not my God.
Of that I am sure, even in my sin.
I'll leave the last word to the prophet Malachi, to tie (I hope) this all together:
I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the LORD Almighty.
The Word of the LORD. Wisdom attend.
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