Author: jwhorton

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CELEBRITIES AND ARISTOCRATS

Perhaps in some ways celebrities are what has replaced aristocrats in a largely republican world (in the non-American sense of the word “republican”).  But celebrity is more cleverly dishonest than is aristocracy.  Aristocrats claim superiority as a function of birth.  This claim is now easy to see through.  But celebrities claim superiority as a function of earned worthiness.  What confounds the rejection of the power of celebrity is that from time to time, unlike in aristocracy, a given celebrity may well have earned some measure of his or her exalted regard.  Aristocrats, conversely, are always aristocrats only because of birth, no matter how worthy some amongst them may be.  Aristocracy can be rejected as nonsense across the board, for no aristocrat is superior by right of birth.  The needed annihilation of celebrity as such is handicapped by the occasional truth of this or that celebrity’s perceived earned superiority.

One can therefor reject aristocracy untainted by one’s own personal envy, self-loathing, or other dubious motive.  To reject celebrity in the same sweeping manner is much more difficult if one is wary of one’s motivations.

This is all the more tragic since the motivations of a given individual hostile to the idea of celebrity as such are not relevant to the overall need to annihilate the deceit and injustice of celebrity.  But we doubt ourselves and hesitate.  And for some, becoming a celebrity may be a genuine (if unlikely to be fulfilled) hope.  The same is not true of aristocracy since it is decided at birth whether one will ever be a member.

What I have said here about celebrity is also similar with regard to plutocracy under capitalism.

Could this be the secret of Donald Trump’s power? the persistence of his fan base and the incredible leniency shown him despite whatever he does?  There are many business people who are not celebrities.  There are many celebrities who are not business people or even particularly rich.  But Trump is a businessman, and a celebrity.  Nobody in the culture is more thoroughly both than he, and nobody more thoroughly combines the most odious capacities of both: the imperious sense of entitlement, of being the special case that the worst celebrities display; the parasitical nature of capitalists at their worst, who produce nothing of value and are instead vampires of money.

The combination of capitalist and celebrity makes for the most dangerous sort of spiritual vampire.

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THE POLITICS OF CHAPTERS BOOKSTORE

I was in a Chapters bookstore not long ago and noticed a problem: no, I am not talking about the fact that what used to be a bookstore with a large number of gift items has now turned into a gift store with a large number of books.

I am talking about an interesting section of books called “Culture and community.”  This was divided into four parts with the following labels: “Black Voices,” “Gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Indigenous.”

It is this sort of thing that makes conservatives bleat that liberals run everything.  But this is like complaining women run the world because there is a preponderance of females leading the feminist movement.

No, the real problem is there is no section on class.  And this, briefly, is the problem with much progressive politics.

The supposed liberal hegemony that conservatives complain about is nothing which in fact threatens them very much.  What is truly thrust into the shadows, as if there is a quiet understanding amongst all good people that the neocons are right in saying Marx and everything connected to him is both outdated and hopelessly wrong, is a class-based understanding of our current situations.

I would not simplify history in the manner of a vulgar Marxism and reduce it to a mere playing out of property relations.  But whereas there is little or no inherent power accruing to race, gender, sex, or sexual orientation, there is power inherent in the control or ownership of the means of production.  In other words, such power as men have had over women, for example, has been based not so much on some inherent power in being a male, as that men have managed to have more property rights than women in many times and places.

It would be a mistake to get into a competition between a class-based analysis and these other types of analysis.  In struggling with each other, advocates of all kinds for oppressed and marginalized people would only weaken each other and strengthen the oppressors.  So my point is not to decrease the attention paid to current ways of understanding injustice.  Rather, I would attach an understanding of class to these issues.

For is not class power central, perhaps even essential, in the oppression of various groups?  Consider some of the following observations.

A key factor in the oppression of women, historically, has been in making it difficult or impossible for them to own property.  Materially, they have been dependent on fathers and husbands.  In societies where they can get the same jobs as men, they often get less pay.  In other words, control of the means of production is restricted in their case.

Indigenous people in North America were opened to oppression largely by losing their land: that is, their means of production.  In the late 19th century the buffalo of Western Canada were opened up to massive over hunting by white people, causing literal starvation amongst the indigenous people of that region.

A common incentive for sexual and gender nonconformists of all types to stay in the closet is fear of job loss or harassment on the job.  Yet again, a threat to one’s means of production (keep in mind that employees do not own the means of production to begin with) is a key factor in maintaining injustice.

African people not only lost control of their means of production when removed from their land and forcibly exiled: they could not own property in North America and became literally the means of production for others in becoming slaves. 

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“HOW CAN UNIVERSALISM BE TRUE IF…?”

Under the breath of many Christians who raise objections to universalism you can hear them say, “but universalism has always been a minority tradition.  How can all the infernalist greats like Augustine and Aquinas be wrong?  How can so many pastors, priests, and ministers—including some who are hardly of the intolerant, fire-breathing sort—be wrong?”  Indeed.  (In fact, according to David Bentley Hart, for the first few hundred years of Christianity universalism just might have been more than a minority position.  But let that go for now.)

Well, we should not forget what a shock it must have been to the Roman Catholic world to be confronted by some obscure German monk in the early 16th century and told that the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ, was wrong, terribly wrong, in a number of very serious ways.  Besides, is Christianity or is it not a revolution?  If it is, (and it is) it should not be too surprising to expect it might change drastically in a number of ways over the years, that it might teach us things that either are in scripture but have never been seen there, or which might not be in scripture at all.  (I am leaving aside for the time being the question of whether universalism is scriptural or not.)  But must the truth of God be small enough that it can be packed in one book and tied up in a bow with no significant, new developments for almost two thousand years?  How were Jews during and shortly after the time of Christ expected to follow Jesus if religion is simply a matter of following extant texts in ways that were already prescribed?  Wasn’t Jewish scriptural tradition always evolving anyway? And were not its ways of reading far more creative than some of the arid Christian fundamentalism one encounters?  And what of the pagans?  Were they not being asked by Christianity to throw over—contemptuously even—certain of their beliefs and practices that had been held dear for countless generations?  If Christianity upset the apple cart of history some two thousand years ago, we should not be too surprised if within Christianity itself old certainties are to be overthrown.

Or are we to believe that it is only the hallowed “us,” the Christian tradition, which has no need of revolution?

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen,” is not a reference to human understanding, even of the most enlightened sort.

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I DON’T GIVE A DAMN IF PEOPLE ARE TIRED OF HITLER/TRUMP COMPARSONS: WHY TRUMP MUST BE PROSECUTED

Go into any well stocked bookstore or library and you are certain to find books about Nazis.  Consider the subject of how these Nazis got into power in Germany, and you will see these books deal with it in varying degrees of competence.  Indeed, the issue of how such terrible people could attain power, apparently with the approval or at least acquiescence of millions of Germans, is one of the topics that fascinates Western culture endlessly.

The reasons usually cited in popular public discourse for the rise of Nazism include such things as Germany’s history of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, bitterness over defeat in WWI and over the terms of the treaty of Versailles, and despair and rage over the economic consequences of the great post-war inflation and the later Great Depression.

But of all the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, there are some that are commonly overlooked.  And the reason they are overlooked is that these reasons threaten our society’s conception of capitalist, so-called “democracy” as the unquestionable apex of what is fair, or at least, of what is possible in the world.  These overlooked reasons are also neglected because they threaten to shine a positive light on the political Left: those people whom we are supposed to assume are at best well-intentioned idiots, or at worst Stalinist monsters–that is, when they are not ignored entirely, which they often are in discussions of how the Nazis gained power.

But let me be more specific about one of these reasons for Hitler’s success: essentially, the radical Right, even before the Nazi party had gained a large following, murdered hundreds of leaders of the Left and got away with it in every case.  The relatively few political murders committed by the Left were punished by heavy sentences, including death.

In 1922 one Emil Julius Gumbel published a book called Vier Jahre politischer Mord (Four Years of Political Murder).  In this book he analyzes the political assassinations committed by the Right and the Left since November 9, 1918, the beginning of the German Revolution.  Keep in mind that at this time the Nazi party was nowhere near as large and powerful as it would become eventually.  However, many of those right-wing people whose essential beliefs and attitudes were those of the Nazis, and who would eventually willingly join them, were already active and violent in other organizations such as the various Freikorps militias.

I can do no better at this point than present some very illuminating quotations from Gumbel himself.

Correspondingly, the right is inclined to hope that it could annihilate the left opposition, which is carried by hopes for a radically different economic order, by defeating its leaders.  And the right has done it: all of the leaders of the left who openly opposed the war and whom the workers trusted–Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Eisner, [Gustav] Landauer, [Leo] Jogisches, et al–are dead.

The effectiveness of this technique is for the moment indisputable.  The left no longer has any significant leaders, no more people toward whom the masses have the feeling: he has suffered so much for us, dared so much for us that we can trust him blindly.  The working-class movement has thereby doubtlessly been set back by years.  This success is all the greater since in no case has punishment occurred.

The unbelievable leniency of the court is also quite well known to the perpetrators. . . . Today the [right wing] perpetrator risks nothing at all.  Powerful organizations with an extensive network of confidantes over the whole country provide him with shelter, protection, and material sustenance.  “Right-minded” bureaucrats and police chiefs supply falsified papers for potentially necessary trips abroad. . . .  The beneficiaries live magnificently and happily in the best hotels.

Here is a summary of some of the statistics Gumbel collected on these events:

Political Killings Committed

                                                        Political killings                Political killings

.                                                              by the Left                   by the Right

Total number of murders                         22                                354

Number of convictions                             38                                  24

Duration of incarceration per murder    15 years                           4 months

Number of executions                              10                                   0

Gumbel also states,

Virtually all of the relatively small number of assassinations of reactionaries have been atoned for through severe penalties; of the very numerous assassinations of men of the left, on the other hand, not one has been atoned.  Credulousness, wrongly understood orders, or actual or purported insanity were always the bases of the defense to the extent that trials even took place.  Most of the proceedings were quashed either by the prosecutor’s office or the criminal court.

Gumbel also discusses how newspapers could call for the murder of specific individuals and be punished only by small fines.

Gumbel also relates how his earlier work, Two Years of Political Murder, which analyzed the earlier years of these same incidents, was received by the establishment.  He had thought that either this work would be believed by the judicial system, which would then punish the murderers, or that he would be accused of slander and be punished himself.  But neither happened.

Although the brochure in no way went without notice, there has not been a single effort on the part of the authorities to dispute the correctness of my contentions.  On the contrary, the highest responsible authority, the Reich minister of justice, expressly confirmed my contentions on more than one occasion.  Nevertheless, not a single [right wing] murderer has been punished.

So people always ask, why is it everyone in Germany was apparantly a Nazi, or a least a person who did not care enough to oppose them?  The answer, in part, is this:  there were anti-fascists in Germany (especially in the working class) who were numerous, active, and brave, and their leaders were murdered with impunity when Hitler was still in his political infancy.  This was one of the ways in which the capitalist structure of Germany (which had been shaken but not overthrown by revolution) paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.  To ignore this fact is to slander the better elements of German society by ignoring them, and even more significantly, to slander the Left and the realistic hope it has always offered.

Gumbel also adds sobering words on how much of the public was suckered into accepting this murderous situation:

Public opinion in general approves of this procedure.  For clever propaganda has taught it that every enemy of militarism is a Spartacist, therefore an enemy of humanity, therefore open game.

Keep in mind that such propaganda was well underway when Hitler was no more than a gleam in Hindenburg’s eye.

Please keep in mind also that Gumbel’s work discusses only cases of premeditated, illegal killing of a well-known German by another German for domestic political motives, whereby the incident is characterized not as mass action but as an individual deed.  Four Years of Political Murder is not about deaths due to armed battles in the streets.  In these conflicts as well, however, killing by the Right far exceeded killing by the Left, and the violence of the Left was far more often used in self-defence than was the violence of the Right.  In other words, the German revolution was far less violent than the counter-revolution.  One could actually make a very strong case that the Left should have used a great deal more violence than it did.

Germany’s population in Gumbel’s time was approximately twice what Canada’s is now.  Were we to transpose Gumbel’s work to a fictional scenario set in Canada at the present time, we would be faced with a situation where, in four years, left wingers killed 11 people and were heavily punished in each case, and wherein right wingers killed 177 prominent, left-wing Canadians without one individual doing any serious time for this.

For anyone with their eyes open, the implications for America are even more alarming.  The tepid response of the Democrats to Donald Trump’s violent insurrection attempt sends the same message to the American Right what the German judiciary sent to the Nazis: do whatever you want; we will never get in your way.

Donald Trump must be prosecuted: yes, even if it means violence from his supporters.  For if the threat of that violence succeeds, it will be followed by far greater violence, just as the violence in the four years after the German revolution, horrible as it was, was dwarfed by the violence that followed when it helped to put Hitler into power.

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ON THE RHETORIC OF “PRIVILEGE”

Before the word “privilege” was recently coined as the prefix to words like “white,” “male,” or “able-bodied,” before the word “privilege” had any political connotation, there was already a whispering of the word “undeserved” as privilege’s prefix.  There was already a simpering attached to “privilege,” such that whenever anyone claimed to have a privilege, he or she was bowing the head just a bit, acknowledging, even if not explicitly or consciously, a kind of shameful failure: one had received what one had not earned.  One was therefor on the spot, to be watched closely: would the privilege be sufficiently appreciated?  Would enough gratitude be shown?  Would the gift be misused in any way?

Would the freely given gift be paid back?

Of course, “privilege,” by definition, is undeserved.  As is a gift.  If a so-called privilege is deserved or earned, it cannot be a privilege.  But the context, style, and attitude with which the word has been so often expressed connoted (and still connotes) however subtly, a significant but unvoiced disapproval, disappointment at the recipient of said privilege.  (I am still speaking here, of the word’s use in a non-political context).

When the word “privilege” is deployed, what would otherwise be the gifts of love are tainted with accusation, a lack of confidence in the receiver.

With this taint comes the ruination of gratitude.  For “gratitude,” even though there is nothing wrong with the word, and at its basic level it connotes only positive things, is, by its popular usage, another of those simpering words.  “We should be truly grateful” is so often delivered with a tone of “we don’t deserve this; it should not have been given to us.  How worthy the giver therefor, and unworthy are we.  Rejoice now, in your gift!”  The message may even be, “I give you this from sheer love and/or generosity.  But to whom much is given, much will be expected.  And you have probably gotten more than you can live up to.  I have bestowed failure upon you, and debt.  And it is all your fault.”

Such is the way adults often teach children to be grateful, and provoke instead ingratitude.  For how much of a gift or a privilege is that thing which is immediately a reminder of one’s unworthiness? 

Now to the more recent, political meanings of “privilege.”

Privilege, in one sense, is quite real.  Certain dominant groups have things in part or in whole because they were stolen from others.  For example, white people in North America stole massive amounts of land from Indigenous people.  A man in a corporation may get a promotion he is worthy of, but which a female colleague was more worthy of, and was passed over for sexist reasons.

But I often hear certain things described as “privileges” which are actually rights.  For example, take the fact that people who are white will not be pulled over by the police simply because they are white.  Things like this are sometimes referred to as “white privilege,” as if not being harassed by cops was some kind of gift one was not worthy of, as if a truly responsible white person would contrive somehow to be abused by the cops.  Isn’t not being harassed by the police a right?  The injustice in this example is not that white people are not going to be harassed on the basis of their race, but that people of colour are harassed on a racial basis.  The issue is not white privilege, but white supremacy.  If a white person takes the rhetoric of privilege to heart, he or she will feel guilty simply for not being victimized.

Does the rhetoric of privilege make any sense?  I don’t think so.  With this mentality, any good thing you have (such as your rights being respected) that somebody somewhere does not have becomes of itself a moral failure.  No wonder, then, that some people are eager to claim the status of victim for themselves whether they are victims or not.  No, if there is any guilt to be felt in the example of racially motivated police harassment, it is in the performance of the white supremacy, or the failure to oppose it.  I suspect those who use the rhetoric of privilege would agree with this, but the rhetoric itself implies a subtle shift: it broadens the scope of accusation to include things which simply are not moral failures.

There are psychological machinations at work here, and rather than simply disapprove of this rhetoric of privilege, perhaps we need to understand where it comes from.  A capitalist culture prioritizes property rights (first and foremost, of those with the most property) more than any other.  Along with this comes the old work ethic of personal worthiness: I am wealthy because I earned it.  You, on the other hand, deserve your poverty.  A person who may be unmoved by protestations of human rights violations (such as police harassment) either denying they exist or being unconcerned enough to do anything about them, might have a bit of a fire set under his or her ass if, on the other hand, someone says, “you have something you haven’t earned.”  The accusation of “white privilege” is very effective at this.  The rhetoric of privilege has an emotional force to it.  The person who does not feel responsible for the police harassment, or who may be unmoved by the statement, “it is your responsibility to help me defend my rights” may well be galled and/or morally intimidated by language which says, “you are a freeloader, one who reaps where he has not sown.  You are, in the moral sphere, a thief, a bum.”  Whether this person is then wracked by guilt and becomes an ally, or defiantly berates “woke culture,” he or she has at least been forced into some attempt at self-justification.

And the accusation of “Privilege” is a secular equivalent to some conceptions of original sin.  You needn’t actually sin through your own choices to be guilty—neither a sin of omission, nor commission.  You need only to belong to a privileged group, one which you may never have had any choice about belonging to.  The problem with certain kinds of privilege is that one is born to them—given what the historical and cultural context is–and cannot give them away.  The accuser is smug in the knowledge of pinning on you a crime you are surely guilty of but did not commit.  One can decide not to engage in racism, one can decide to fight it, and one can be justly judged on the basis of whether one does or not.  But one cannot give up “white privilege.”

Some measure of so-called “white fragility” (though I think not most of it) can be explained by this mind-fucking rhetoric: few things are more exasperating than an accusation that in one sense is irrefutable, but which points to an offense that is either not a real offense, or one that one could not help committing.  How many preachers over the centuries, for example, have angrily furrowed their brows at their congregations and accused them in effect of not being pre-lapsarian?  People have enough to feel genuinely guilty about without the volume being turned up on the survivor’s guilt, which is a psychological, not a moral category.

So you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.  Those who put you in this rhetorical bind are probably trying to replicate for you in a small way their own experiences as members of marginalized groups.  Now, one may choose to commend this action as morally salutary or deplore it as small minded and dishonest.  But let us at least see clearly how the mechanism works.

A focus on “privilege” in its political context takes righteous anger and undercuts it by resentment; the legitimate and righteous complaint made by a genuine victim is twisted into sounding like the whining of a failure.  “You have stolen from me” becomes the voice of Envy as in Marlowe’s Faustus: “I am lean with watching others eat.”

In response, the victimizer (for example, white supremacy again) rubs his hands with glee: “Oh look!  Resentment!  Didn’t Nietzsche speak of this?  For shame!”  This development parallels on a cultural level what often happens on a political one: a violent and oppressive group fails to respond to peaceful demands for change; some of the oppressed eventually take up violence against the oppressor, and the latter in a fit of moral ecstasy decries the heavily provoked violence which is actually much smaller than the unprovoked violence of the oppressive group itself.  Thus do the champions of the “anti-woke” make full use of the small-mindedness of privilege rhetoric to once again make the relatively innocent David look like the wicked Goliath.  We have seen the term “politically correct” deployed for the last thirty years to make any attempt at equality and justice for the marginalized look like some kind of tyranny on the part of a terrifying liberalism that has had everything its own way.  But nothing has been more politically correct than not being politically correct.

The reader will have concluded that I do not at all care for the rhetoric of “privilege.”  It muddies the waters.  It makes silly accusations while overlooking very clear and serious ones which the accusers must understand better than anyone.  But I suspect much of the root of this rhetoric is the persistent and truculent attitudes of dominant and exploitative groups resisting change.  So much injustice has not been properly addressed or resolved, or in many cases admitted.  By and large the rhetoric of privilege is an angry attempt, made by thwarted and abused people, to get a little revenge against systems far too slow to stop their own much larger injustices.

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KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL; FRANCOIS JULLIEN

“Knowledge of good and evil” in the book of Genesis may not mean realizing the truth that good and evil already exist.  Knowledge of good and evil is not a “fall from innocence” in the sense that one had not heard of or even imagined evil but then comes to know of it.  The knowledge of good and evil comes about in the context of a non-dualistic universe where there is only good, and it needs no evil to set it off, to be its foil.  But to know good and evil is to fracture good into both, to create evil, unnecessarily.

The “knowledge” of good and evil here is not only an abstract knowledge, but more like “cleaving unto,” a knowledge in the erotic sense.  One emerges in a fallen world where good seems to need evil (even in the imagination) to exist as good.  This may well be the greatest evil of the situation.  (See also Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a marvellous exploration of this idea of “necessary evil.”)  One is leaving behind the knowledge (in both senses of that word) of an entirely good world, to a world where this pure good cannot be imagined, cannot be made workable, even as a theory.  To the fallen world, the world where good and evil are known, a world of pure good seems an absurdity.

It is in this context then, that in order to save us from this situation, to restore us to a world without evil, Christianity offers the solution of belief in Christ.  At this point the words of Francois Jullien become illuminating:

“Because it involves ipseity—selfness in itself—believe takes on a whole other meaning.  ‘Believe in’ (pisteúein eis, πιστευειν είζ), John often writes.  And, in fact, everything rides on the shift from ‘believing that’ [croire à] to ‘believing in’ [croire en].  What we believe when we believe that is from the start limited, constrained, objectivized (even when the belief is that God exists).  But believing in—i.e., in a self, in an ipseity—is not undefined but infinite.  When I say ‘I believe in you’ I have no limit in view.  Moreover, believing that can be detailed and itemized: I can believe that X is and not that Y is, and thus make a selection.  But belief in is by necessity whole; it calls for an absolute.  When I say that I believe in you I no longer wonder “what” in you I believe in.  To put things differently, believing that entails a necessary measure of credulity, even if I have good reason to believe, because I might just as easily not believe what I believe.  I recognize its hypothetical character (e.g., belief that Santa Claus exists).  Whereas belief in is not credulous but trusting.  By the phrase ‘believe in yourself’—one that a parent might say to a child, or vice versa, or that one lover might tell another—I mean that I am counting on you, that I am expecting something of you, that I am placing my hopes in you, in you as yourself, in your ipseity, or that I am expecting everything of you.  Thus belief in entails a self, an ipseity, on both sides.  When I believe in someone I involve the entirety of myself.  What I believe in in the person in whom I believe is what he himself reveals of himself, but also what he conceals within.  Belief that might be open to convincing, but its truth will still rest on insufficient grounds; I would prefer knowledge that was certain.  But the truth of belief in, precisely because it entails an as-in-oneself, will not be measured by a truth subject to proof; it is its own guarantee and can claim no other.  You must believe in me, says Christ, and not believe what they say of me.  But hasn’t the Church, with its dogma, been compelled to shift from belief in (ipseity) to belief that (identity)—and made the latter into the ‘faith’ that tempers its armor?” 

(Francois Jullien, Resources of Christianity English edition, 2021, Polity Press, pp. 82-84)

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UNIVERSALISM AND A CHRISTIAN LEFT

In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,

“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)

It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children.  Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.

But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?

What does it mean politically?

I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves.  As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.

But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church?  Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved?  I believe so.  The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable.  This cannot be stressed enough.  It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply.  But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him?  We cannot.  We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.

If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how.  But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.

And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other.  This is true in both the personal and political spheres.

So what is going on?

Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?

Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything.  If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted?  Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.

In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart.  It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots.  It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it.  The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.

It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it.  Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies?  By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.

(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse.  Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)

Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).

It is time for this Christian Left to arise.  We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.

Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism.  What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.

At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church.  I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with.  Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism?  Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors?  I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts.  One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant.  But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.

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DOES UNIVERSALISM VIOLATE FREE WILL?

One of the defenses of infernalism is that in order for human beings to be human, to be worth something as opposed to being simply robots, we must have free will.  We cannot truly be with God unless we freely accept him.  And if our will is truly free, then it must be possible for us to reject God.  And the rejection of God must necessarily lead to damnation.  Therefore, we are told, universalism must violate free will, since it states that all shall be saved and this seems impossible if everyone is free to reject God.

Let me deal with just one element of this whole argument here.  According to the standard Christian view, we are all fit for hell to begin with.  Our own sins, or original sin inherited from Adam and Eve or something of the sort, has made it just and fitting that we be damned.

No exceptions are acknowledged here.  Simple justice, we are told, means that of all the billions of human beings existing or who ever existed they all deserve to be damned, and would be damned but for the mercy of Christ.

It seems peculiar that of the billions of humans who lived or ever will live, they all chose or will choose to sin badly enough to be damned.  For surely, to deserve such a horrible fate one must have at least freely chosen the wickedness one is damned for.

Now this is a very strange free will indeed.  Apparently, without exception, we have all freely chosen a path of sin bad enough to deserve hell.  You would think that at least a handfull would have chosen to be sinless.

But one laughs at this of course.  Sinless?  Impossible.  Even the greatest saints sin and sin seriously, as they are the first to admit.

So where is that famous free will then?  How is it that when universalism wishes to storm the gates of hell and liberate all, we are told this violates free will; but when each and every one of us is born in a world where we are inevitably doomed to freely merit damnation one hears not a peep about how our free will is violated, and that therefor God cannot tolerate the situation to exist?

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AGAINST “REALISM”

“Realism” is one of those intractably ideological words that have a tendency to speak the speaker rather than being spoken by him or her.  People have a tendency to use this word with a lot of swagger, little realizing they are sitting on the ventriloquist’s knees, speaking his words, without even knowing he exists.  This has happened so often that the swagger is actually built in now.  You cannot say “be realistic” without swaggering any more than you can say “fuck off” politely.

In short, “realistic” and “realism” are ideological words.

One usually says, “be realistic” to people whose perceptions of a situation are seen as too optimistic.  Very seldom is exaggerated pessimism told to “be realistic.”  Why is this?  Isn’t exaggerated fearfulness as far from reality as exaggerated hope?  Somehow the word “realism” has become loaded with pessimism, with a belief that what is most real is somehow necessarily not how we would like it to be.  In other words, the good can never be as “real” as the bad.  A bad situation is very real, but a good one is somehow imaginary, ephemeral, wishful thinking.  We are going beyond the statement that there is more bad than good in life, and towards a view that says the good can only ever be, in some vague sense, ghostly—unreal.  Something like an inverted Platonism has crept into our language and thought.

Strictly speaking, “real” simply means that which is–good, bad, or indifferent.  So linking this neutral word with connotations of a darker, more pessimistic (even cynical) sort implies a darker and cynical approach to the world generally: an approach that says that which is not the way we want it to be is somehow more “real” than things we like or love.  All that is good or deeply desirable is looked upon in a patronizing manner.  To be “realistic,” therefor, is to pretend to be neutral while promoting a very non-neutral view about the nature of reality.

From a Christian perspective (but not only from that perspective) “realism” is not pessimism, but defeatism, even collaboration with the darker angels of the world.  (Simple pessimism is more honest, and even justifiable at times.  It does not amount to a sneaky, cosmological/ideological move like “realism” does.)  The news, after all, is good, according to the gospels.  If there is anything that is less than real, it is evil, not good, despite the power and pervasiveness of the former.  In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis, hardly a man to underestimate the power and extent of evil, likens heaven to a kind of hyper-reality where waterfalls are too loud for ordinary human ears, and the grass is too hard to walk on comfortably until one gets used to it.  Those in hell (or maybe it was purgatory?  I do not remember) when given a holiday in heaven, find the light hurts their eyes and themselves to be barely visible, like shadows or heat waves on the horizon.

Pilate was a “realist” when he murdered Jesus.  “What is truth?” he asks.  This might seem like a fine and thoughtful philosophical question, one which comes to mind only for sensitive and thoughtful souls, or tragic figures trying to understand their fate: the faithful servants of emperors “only trying to do their job” and trapped in unpalatable situations that “unrealistic” people do not understand.  Some commentators have seen the Bible’s portrayal of Pilate here as antisemitic in its attempt to show Pilate in as positive a light as possible, thereby blaming the death of Christ as much as possible on the Jews.  I do not know if this criticism of the Bible is true or not, but I do remember years ago seeing Pilate in this same light: that is, as a man trying to do the right thing, but somehow “tragically flawed”: less a sinner than his reputation paints him.

But now I see him, in his question about truth, as performing a standard politician’s gambit:  when you are about to do a rotten and clearly unjustifiable thing, a thing you haven’t been forced to do either, play the role of the figure so exalted and wise that he sees reasons for his misdeeds that are beyond the comprehension of the vulgar and judgemental masses.  “What is truth?” asks Pilate, as if he has an excuse for crucifying the truth because of his rectitude in admitting he is too scrupulous to pretend he knows it.  The irony of Pilate’s “what is truth” is not that a sensitive and thoughtful man will now do a bad thing quite contrary to his noble intentions, but that the truth he is asking for is standing before him, about to be crucified by him, and he cannot or will not see him.

Maybe Pilate was putting truth on hold because he was a man of “reality.”  There is a profound difference in having “reality” as the master referent, as opposed to “truth.”  For reality is simply about what IS.  Truth includes that, but is also about what OUGHT to be.  In that sense, reality is only a subset of truth.  Those who swagger and tell us to “get back to reality” are really trying to blind us to truth.

Perhaps the difference between a religious and a secular view is this: in the former, what OUGHT to be is as much a reality as what IS, however much painfully unmanifested in the realm of IS.  For secularity, there is only what is.

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BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE “SOCIALISM,” KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS

Christopher Hitchens, a hater of religion, once said of Martin Luther King that he was not a Christian.

To which I reply, so much for Christopher Hitchens.

One can pretty much say anything about anything, if one is redefining words to suit one’s own interests, treating them as private property instead of public property.  I can truly say that an apple is a potato if, by “apple,” I mean an irregularly shaped brown or reddish vegetable that grows in the ground.

And if one man like Hitchens can get away with this narcissistic nonsense through sheer bluff and swagger, what can not a whole class of people get away with generation after generation?

In effect, generations of anti-socialists have been telling us that an apple is a potato.

And it has not helped one bit that at the same time many potatoes have been calling themselves apples.  In other words, just as many people violate the teachings of Christ in word and deed and call themselves Christians (Hitchens doing a variation on the theme by labelling a man who followed Christ as a non-Christian) many people have discredited socialism by falsely claiming to practice socialism when they were doing no such thing.  In the one instance, Christ is slandered; in the other instance, it is socialism which is slandered.  Most of us seem to understand, whether we are religious or not, that there is such a thing as genuine Christian practice; there are people we would call real Christians, and others we would call hypocrites.  Socialism, however, is not granted the benefit of these kinds of distinctions: if some regime committing genocide, for example, calls itself or is called socialist, why then it must be socialist, and that is the end of the matter.

What, then, is socialism?  Simply put, there are two basic principles running throughout socialist thought since its beginnings:

1) a socialist society is one where those who do the work own and control the means of production

2) a socialist society runs fundamentally on cooperation, not competition or domination.  Brotherhood and sisterhood are the reigning context, not “the struggle of all against all.”

Whatever disagreements (and there are many) socialists have had amongst themselves, these are the two golden threads running through the history of socialist thought.  A genuine critique of socialism, whatever else it does, must say that these goals are not desirable.  For obvious reasons, this is very seldom done.

Much of the confusion in arguments over socialism is that they confound arguments over whether socialism is possible with arguments over whether socialism is desirable.  If it can be made clear that socialism is what is broadly but accurately defined in the two points above, these two issues can be separated from each other and clarified; then an informed, intelligent discussion can take place.  Likewise, two kinds of anti-socialist will be distinguished from each other, with the nature of both being made clearer.

The first kind of anti-socialist is simply ignorant of the meaning of the word we are discussing.  He or she has been told that the depravities of Stalin or North Korea etc. are manifestations of socialism.  It does not help that historically, many of those spreading these lies have called themselves socialists and have even believed their own propaganda.  Naturally, the person who has been misinformed by all this will become an anti-socialist, and with good reason.  (See, by the way, Noam Chomsky’s highly illuminating “the Soviet Union Versus Socialism” on why both the Soviet and capitalist empires falsely claimed the label of socialism for the U.S.S.R.).

The second kind of anti-socialist may or may not be ignorant of the true meaning of the word “socialism” but at heart, wittingly or not, hates the ideal outlined in the two points.  She does not want it to be possible.

To know that “socialism” means the two-point socialism above and to insist doggedly on this fact is to found the whole debate about socialism not on the interpretation of history but in the realm of the desirable or normative.  Let us establish what it is we should want before we look at how it has not been reached historically.  The leftist who refuses the label “socialist” to the old Soviet Union refuses to be backed into a corner where he must either deceitfully justify the crimes of that regime or surrender the dream of socialism altogether.  Why does Stalin get to decide what is and is not possible?

And of course, “socialism can only ever be a dream” is the next line of defense, usually presented in a tone of impatience and contempt.  The allegation that socialism is not possible is one that must be taken seriously.  However, this impatient reaction is not just a matter of a sensible person rejecting hopelessly utopian fantasies.  The type one anti-socialist resists the two-point definition of socialism because she will have to admit she has been fooled by lying definitions.  Nobody likes to admit they have been fooled, that sources they thought reliable turn out to be biased or ignorant.  But it is worse for the type two anti-socialist: when the historical monstrosities he has been criticizing turn out not to be socialism, he has lost the rhetorical advantage of socialism being evil practically by definition.

Of course, the type two anti-socialist can and most assuredly will switch gears and claim it was the two-point socialist dream which caused the reality of what is falsely called socialism.  But one can argue against this point far more honestly and effectively than if one decides to justify Pol Pot.  (The point that the socialist dream is itself the cause of a nightmare, by the way, has a great many holes in it.  It seems to be a convenient theory which its perpetrators seldom analyze in any historical context.  People who advance this theory do not seem to have actually looked at revolutionary processes, what causes them, what makes them go well or badly.)  Those who say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” do not seem prepared to tell us straight up what kinds of intentions we should have.

Note therefor, that the type two anti-socialist needs to keep “socialism” in the two-point sense off the table.  The idea or ideal of socialism, much as its enemies disparage it as a fairy tale, is quite dangerous to anti-socialism.  When socialism steps in and claims its right to judge any government or movement calling itself socialist or claiming to move towards socialism, the terms of the debate are no longer the property of socialism’s enemies.

The fight over the word “socialism,” therefore is not simply about what the anti-socialist, in his ignorance, thinks the word means, but what he wants the word to mean, what he even needs the word to mean in order to defend his own ideology.  Hitchens’ seems to have decided that Christianity is evil by definition.  Ipso facto a good man like Martin Luther King cannot possibly be a Christian.  We learn nothing about religion or King by this blarney.  We do learn something about Christopher Hitchens.

Capitalism’s first line of defence is to make sure alternatives to it do not enter even the imagination, let alone the concrete political or economic sphere.  As long as “socialism” is merely a word for some kind of monstrosity, two-point socialism can not be talked about.  And what cannot even be talked about becomes even harder to imagine and nigh impossible to share.  The socialist movement, on the other hand, needs “socialism” in its basic sense to mean the two-point variety, or there is no way we can even talk about what we want or how to get it.  That kind of silence, of course, is what anti-socialism wants, and thinks it has a right to, so spoiled has it been by an unfair cultural struggle which confuses and silences any language with which the Left might express itself intelligibly.