The Little Red Blog

Friday Thoughts

Writing at First Things, Francis Young asks us to consider “the notion that people who experience the impossible might actually be telling the truth.” Young includes a wide range of phenomena beneath the umbrella of "impossible":

People foresee the future in specific detail; UFOs are detected on radar; people interact with giant insects, experience timeslips, and generate thought-forms that take on physical existence.

We are in Philip K. Dick territory here, and I for one could not be happier!

Young’s article is a review of Jeffrey Kripal’s How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. According to Young, Kripal’s view is that “We have chosen to structure our systems of knowledge so as to push such phenomena to the fringe; but they are not really fringe, and they happen to many people who simply lack the vocabulary and conceptual framework to talk about them, and who fear ridicule and disbelief.” It is almost as if “reality” as we "know" it is a construct of sorts, the result of an epistemological hegemony imposed upon us by hard-headed, down-to-earth thinkers with no time for or patience with inexplicable oddities. Can it be the case, however, that there is more to reality than is dreamed of in our philosophies or measured by our instruments?

Kripal, Young concludes, “correctly diagnoses a genuine and pressing problem: the failure of Enlightenment-derived models of what reality is and the sorts of things we are taught to believe can and cannot happen. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand and pretend that fantastical phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and instances of non-linear time do not occur. We should be open to modifying our picture of reality to accommodate such evidence, and open to the possibility that science cannot explain everything.”

“How to Think Impossibly,” writes Young, “is a manifesto for a radical overhaul of our systems of knowledge, in the light of Kripal’s conviction that human existence and reality are not limited to the realm of the physical. It is a call to set aside the tired tropes of constructivism that come from a desire to do anything rather than confront the “impossible” and the questions it raises. It is also a set of proposals about how we could begin to understand reality once the impossible has been accepted into our understanding of the universe.”

Sign me up! Or, better, beam me up!

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Reality Is Strange | Francis Young | First Things

Jeffrey J. Kripal - Wikipedia

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Apropos of nothing in particular: Carl Becker was one of the most influential American historians of the 20^th century. His brief essay, “Everyman His Own Historian,” published in 1932, made the claim that, while it may be historians’ intent “to make the correspondence as exact as possible” between events that actually happened and the narratives about those events, they inevitably fall short. “For all practical purposes history is, for us and for the time being, what we know it to be.”

Why does history even matter? “One of the first duties of man,” wrote Becker, “is not to be duped, to be aware of his world; and to derive the significance of human experience from events that never occurred is surely an enterprise of doubtful value.” Therefore, “To establish the facts is always in order, and is indeed the first duty of the historian; but to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will 'speak for themselves' is an illusion.”

No historian has ever simply recorded the “facts” without some sort of framing and contextualizing; given the plethora of “facts” available for consideration, the very selection of facts is already an act of interpretation. Becker acknowledged this:

“Left to themselves, the facts do not speak; left to themselves they do not exist, not really, since for all practical purposes there is no fact until someone affirms it. The least a historian can do with any historical fact is to select and affirm it. To select and affirm even the simplest complex of facts is to give them a certain place in a certain pattern of ideas, and this alone is sufficient to give them a special meaning. History as written by historians is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as 'fact' and 'interpretation'.”

There are people today who cannot agree on (and who never will agree on) what happened in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. How in the world are we to come to agreement, then, on what happened in the distant past? Is there nothing for it but interpretation and speculation? Wrote Becker:

“Historical facts are not material substances which, like bricks, possess a definite shape and clear, persistent outline. To set forth historical facts is not comparable to dumping a barrow of bricks. A brick retains its form and pressure wherever placed; but the form and substance of historical facts, having a negotiable existence only in literary discourse, vary with the words employed to convey them. Since history is not part of the external material world, but an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, its form and substance are inseparable: in the realm of literary discourse substance, being an idea, is form; and form, conveying the idea, is substance. It is thus not the undiscriminated fact, but the perceiving mind of the historian that speaks: the special meaning which the facts are made to convey emerges from the substance-form which the historian employs to re-create imaginatively a series of events no longer present to perception.”

We cannot relive the past; therefore, we cannot change it. We can, however (and inevitably do), retell the past; and we can, and do, change the retelling. Is the past, then, whatever we make of it? Should we submit our historical narratives to popular vote, or to the discriminate wisdom of our cultural elite? Or should we let the narratives play out in our midst and see what emerges? Becker:

“The history of history is a record of the ‘new history’ that arises in every age to confound and to supplant the old. It should be a relief to us to renounce omniscience, to recognize that every generation must inevitably understand the past and anticipate the future in the light of its own restricted experience, must inevitably play on the dead whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind. The ‘new history’ appropriate for any age is not a malicious invention designed to take anyone in, but an unconscious and necessary effort on the part of 'society' to understand what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do.”

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Everyman His Own Historian (missouri.edu)

Carl L. Becker - Wikipedia

 

 

Saturday Lecture: The Void Disguised as a Man

{Why read about Adolf Hitler? As Hillary Clinton might say, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ However, Konrad Heiden’s 1944 biography (The Fuhrer) is fascinating, not least because of the quality of Heiden’s prose. The following excerpt portrays Hitler circa the early 1920s, after the Great War but before the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Oddly, it turned out that, in 1920s Germany, it was against the law to attempt to overthrow the government!}

“His eyes at night were chilling, and his words were oh so thrilling, and someday soon I fear they’ll sing that song again.” (Elliott Murphy, “Eva Braun”)

Konrad Heiden, from The Fuhrer:

A broken people, broken army, broken men. The [Nazi] movement rose out of the wreckage of the Great War. Ideals had to fall into the mire, destinies to be shattered, characters to sicken, before something new could be born. For this thing was new, and from the very beginning it was frightful.

The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure. A human nothing, a gray personality even among soldiers, ‘modest and for that very reason inconspicuous,’ as a superior characterized him; not even a German, but a homeless derelict from the Viennese melting-pot. In the army, he descended to the most dubious level, that of agent provocateur; even in that field he was no leader, but an unsavory tool of counterespionage, entrusted with necessary but loathsome tasks; happy when he could obey and, by his own admission, knowing no higher goal than to follow his superior blindly and to contradict no one.

His exterior was without distinguishing marks, his face without radiance; there was nothing unusual in his bearing. He was one of those men without qualities, normal and colorless to the point of invisibility. ¹ In this case, the void, it might be said, had disguised itself as a man.

The leadership of this movement was given over to this human object. They wanted a tool. They sent him through the country on speaking tours, used him in their press bureau to write releases, sent him into political meetings to hear what he could hear. At length, as orator-propagandist for the German Workers’ Party, he seemed to have found his niche in the world. He was a man of the people, at home amid the most sordid poverty, familiar with the heart of the poor. To speak in the language of his employers: That trap of his will come in handy.

For in this unlikely looking creature dwelt a miracle: his voice. It was something unexpected. Between those modest, narrow shoulders, the man had lungs. His voice was the very epitome of power, firmness, command, and will. Even when calm, it was a guttural thunder; when agitated, it howled like a siren betokening inexorable danger. It was the roar of inanimate nature, yet accompanied by flexible human overtones of friendliness, rage, or scorn.

The contradiction between the lamentable appearance and the mighty voice characterizes the man. He is a torn personality; long reaches of his soul are insignificant colored by no noteworthy qualities of intellect or will; but there are corners supercharged with strength. It is this association of inferiority and strength that makes the personality so strange and fascinating.

Adolf Hitler is portrayed here as most of his contemporaries and many of his own supporters saw him in his beginnings; and the picture is basically true. As a human figure, lamentable; as a political mind, one of the most tremendous phenomena of all world history—this is a contradiction which occurs in every man of genius, from stuttering Moses to the strange, unglamorous artillery captain Bonaparte; but few of these historic figures united so many contradictions, such lack of distinction, and such superhuman strength.

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¹ “One of those men without qualities”: Heiden was here implicitly referencing Robert Musil’s classic novel, The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930.

The Russo-German Century

History is endlessly fascinating; if you dig deep enough, it is filled with surprises. For instance, I have just learned that one of Adolph Hitler’s most prominent (and most virulent) ideologists was inspired by a book he found while living and studying in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, a book which would provide, in many ways, a road map to fascism.

In the summer of 1917, writes Konrad Heiden (in The Fuhrer), “The globe was afire. The Tsar’s empire was crumbling. The German-Russian phase of the First World War was drawing to an end in bloody trenches; in the streets of Moscow, the Russian Revolution was ebbing and flowing. Alfred Rosenberg was then twenty-four years old. The son of a shoemaker, he was of German descent, but, as an Estonian, he was a subject of the Russian tsar. He had been raised in the German and Russian languages. He had been studying engineering and architecture at Riga, on the Baltic; when the German army occupied Riga, he had fled. Now he was studying in Moscow.”

Who was Alfred Rosenberg, and why was he important? Wikipedia to the rescue: “The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Alfred Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, its hatred of the Jewish people, the need for ‘Lebensraum,’ abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered ‘degenerate’ modern art.”

Alfred Rosenberg would be hanged as a war criminal in 1946 after being convicted at the postwar Nuremberg trials. According to Konrad Heiden, it was during Rosenberg’s time in Moscow in 1917 that he first stumbled upon a book which immediately seized his imagination and never let go. The book was a blueprint for world domination, an astonishingly explicit threat to existing governments everywhere: “We shall so wear down the nations,” the authors of the book declared, “that they will be forced to offer us world domination. We shall stretch out our arms like pincers in all directions and introduce an order of such violence that all people will bow to us.”

The book that opened Alfred Rosenberg’s eyes to the looming worldwide danger was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it originated, so Rosenberg learned, with “a group of old Jews who met together in a back room in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.”  The book laid out in detail the “accursed wisdom” and “diabolical plans” of Jewish conspirators “aiming to devour the world.” These ‘protocols’ not only alerted Rosenberg to the menace of Jewry; they provided him with insights as to “how to establish dictatorship with the help (and abuse) of democratic methods,” insights he would put to use as a Nazi ideologist and advisor to Adolf Hitler. Konrad Heiden calls this the “true content” of the Protocols: “Democracy, if followed to its logical conclusion, provides a usurper with his best weapons.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were, of course, a hoax. The book had been composed and distributed by agents of the Russian Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police force, who had cobbled it together around the turn of the century. It was based on obscure writings from the French author Maurice Joly (1864) and Hermann Godsche, a German writer (1868); the former’s work was a disguised diatribe directed against Napoleon III of France, and the latter’s was a nightmarish anti-Semitic novel. What was the Okhrana’s motive in forging the Protocols? Writes Heiden, “They wanted to frighten the Tsar and drive him to bloodshed by persuading him that the Jews of the whole world had devised a secret conspiracy to achieve domination, first over Russia, then over the whole world.” Russia’s tsar at the time was Nicholas II, the inept and ill-fated ruler who would be driven from his throne in 1917 and murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918. But his regime had been threatened almost from its beginning (1894) by reformists and radicals of various stripes—liberals, socialists, anarchists, and Marxists. The insecure Nicholas was easy prey for the machinations of the Okhrana.

Konrad Heiden traces the events: once tsarist agents had come upon the older manuscripts, “General Oryevsky of the Okhrana had a pamphlet prepared which served as a frame in which Joly’s and Godsche’s ideas were embroidered in glowing colors.” Oryevsky was aided by General Ratchkovsky of the French division of the Okhrana; “Ratchkovsky,” continues Heiden, “saw the explosive power inherent in these time-worn and seemingly harmless works. The Okhrana men saw the pamphlet as material they could make good use of.”  The Okhrana men, as it happened, were everywhere; the tsar’s intelligence had a global reach. “Everywhere, the Okhrana tracked down the activities of Russian, and not only Russian, revolutionaries. It was a kind of world conspiracy: a net of spies, intriguers, bribe-givers, and political agitators, which Tsarist Russia had cast over the world.”

The fraudulent Protocols would eventually come to have global impact, but their influence was first felt in Russia, as intended: “The Okhrana’s plan was the first great attempt at a mighty counter-revolution against the democratic and social revolutions of the nineteenth century.” At the turn of the century, “Society in Russia was farther advanced in its spiritual disintegration and more prepared for revolution than anywhere else in the world; at the same time, the State power was stronger than anywhere else.” Social conflict was unavoidable, and the Okhrana wanted to force Tsar Nicholas’ hand. “The plan was to fuse the passion of the people and the cold power of the State into a counter-revolutionary force that would shake society to its foundations.” While the Okhrana’s plan did not entirely succeed (though it prompted spasms of violence against Russian Jews by right-wing squads known as “the Black Hundreds”), it at least gave Russia the distinction of being “the spiritual mother country of modern fascism, as it later became the world center of Communism.”   

Notably, the German government, during the Great War, provided financial support to anti-tsarist groups in and out of Russia in an attempt to destabilize Nicholas' regime. In 1917, the Germans arranged for Lenin’s return to Russia; they continued supporting the Bolsheviks until they seized power that November. Within a year, however, despite Russia's surrender, Germany had lost the larger war. Meanwhile, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had fallen into the hands of Alfred Rosenberg, who, after the war, would be instrumental in helping create the agenda for Hitler’s National Socialist Party. ¹ Later, less than a decade after taking power, Germany’s Hitler would sign a pact with Russia’s Joseph Stalin, a pact (which Hitler predictably broke) that cleared the way for Germany to launch World War II.  

Bolshevism and Nazism were intertwined from the beginning. The most cursory look at the 20^th century shows that Russia and Germany were at the forefront of the single bloodiest era in history. ² The Bolsheviks and the Nazis, both of them on the political fringe of their respective countries, came to power at least in part due to the intrigues and machinations of their country’s governments. In attempting to arrange the world to their designs, those governments set the world ablaze. ³

It seems to be the case that “History,” as Edward Gibbon wrote, “is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Aldous Huxley sadly observed, “The most important of all the lessons of history is that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history.” And Ambrose Bierce put his cynical spin on the subject: “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”  

To paraphrase the Roman writer Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it history." God save us from the schemers who believe the world is clay to be molded to their will.

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Konrad Heiden, The Fuhrer (1944) I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Heiden’s narrative, but whatever the book’s merit as history, it boasts literary flair and provides fascinating character studies of the Nazi inner circle—Hitler, Hess, Goering, Rosenberg, et al.

¹ The Protocols would also fall into the hands of Henry Ford, who would then launch scurrilous anti-Semitic attacks in his newspaper. Ford was much admired both in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia.   

² Honorable mention goes to Great Britain. In fairness, Konrad Heiden himself suggests that German's Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may have taken a higher toll, proportionate to the population, than 20th-century mass slaughter. 

³ Honorable mention goes to Great Britain.

Wednesday with Pascal: When Katechons Collide

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has had (he says) an epiphany. It has dawned on him that the continuing enmity between America and Russia is best understood as a case of sibling rivalry on a global scale, a rivalry exacerbated by each nation’s self-righteously sincere conviction that it is God’s chosen instrument.}

Americans have long boasted about their nation’s providential career. John Daniel Davidson’s recent book, Pagan America, chronicles the beginnings of that career in the chapter “City on a Hill,” which tells how “a rag-tag band of religious exiles” who had braved an ocean voyage “not as conquerors or fortune-seekers but as religious refugees,” found themselves “perched on the edge of an immense and unknown continent.” Pluckily, they set to work: “Like the ancient Hebrews, they organized their endeavor by a covenant with God and one another, a covenant both political and religious in nature.” They knew, those plucky pilgrims, that “liberty was inextricably tied to religion.”

“American Exceptionalism” means that we are above and beyond the vagaries of history, because In God We Trust and on us He bestows His bounties. We put him on our money! We put him in our Pledge of Allegiance! According to David Carlin, “George Washington believed, as did many of his compatriots, that the American victory in the Revolutionary War was due to miraculous interventions by Providence.” Carlin goes on to endorse the notion that “we Americans are a chosen people, that God intends us to be a light to the nations.” At the same time, says Carlin, “God will punish us if we push his patience too far. I believe that his patience may be running out. We are worshiping false gods – or rather, we are pursuing a national morality that false gods would recommend. I fear the worst.” God is not mocked (though many who claim to speak for him should be).

Unfortunately for America, Russia has a much longer history of messianic nationalism, having staked its claim to be “the third Rome” five hundred years ago:

“Russian traditions of messianism can be traced to the famous invocation of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ in 1511 by the priest Filofei:

“The Church of old Rome fell because of the impiety of the Apollinarian heresy; the Church of the Second Rome, Constantinople, was smitten under the battle-axes of the Muslims; but this present Church of the Third, New Rome, of Thy sovereign empire, shines in the whole universe more resplendent than the sun. And let it be known to Thy Lordship, O pious Czar, that all the empires of the Orthodox Christian Faith have converged into Thine one empire. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others.” ¹

While America was chosen (supposedly) to be a city on a hill and a light unto the nations, Russia was assigned (supposedly) a different task. Russia was to be the katechon, the famously unidentified biblical “restrainer” who would hold back the eschaton. As katechon, Russia would be “the force that saves the West and all mankind from degradation and from falling under the power of the Antichrist.” Such a task would be an enormous burden for any nation, but Russia is huge, it contains multitudes, and it has gladly shouldered the burden of being “the tragic, long-suffering defender of Europe and Christianity.” As God’s Suffering Servant, Russia has taken up its cross repeatedly: “The Russian victory over Napoleon under Alexander I, the suppression of European revolution after 1848, and victory against Nazi Germany in 1945: in the interpretation of these historical events, the sense of Russian suffering for the good of Christianity, Europe and the world has been central to Russian messianic thinking.” Today, the morally bankrupt and culturally degenerate liberal West poses the eschatological threat; millions of Russian Orthodox Christians, and perhaps even some in the Kremlin, believe that Russia has “a sacral meaning; with its fall, the Christian world would be over because the rule of lawlessness, of Satan, would prevail and there could be no ‘Fourth Rome’ to restrain it.”

Neither Russians nor Americans have thought through the implications of their claims. Russians forget (or never knew) that the katechon is an ambiguous figure; scriptural exegetes dispute whether the katechon serves God or Satan. By restraining lawlessness, it allows history to go on, but it also delays Jesus’ return (Parousia) and the transformation of the world into the kingdom of God. Likewise, Americans fail to see how our claims of being a chosen nation are, first and foremost, evidence of pride, perhaps the pride that goes before a fall. Of all our leaders, only Abraham Lincoln (and, perhaps, Robert F. Kennedy) understood the tragedy of Americans’ smug conviction that we have been favored by a God whose purposes we cannot begin to fathom. Moreover, our self-righteousness leads us as well to assume the role of katechon, holding back the forces of evil (Communism, Islamism, Liberalism, etc.), which means that we must simultaneously take the initiative in promoting good while serving as a staunch bulwark against evil. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it, and God chose the USA!

The co-existence of dueling katechons on the world stage does not augur well for the future. Russia and America are like two scorpions trapped in a bottle, both claiming to be God’s agent when in fact they are both just scorpions in whose fate God has no particular interest at all. ²         

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¹ From Russia’s New Authoritarianism, by David Lewis (2020)

² I'm guessing. Who am I to speak for God? I'm no David Carlin, that's for sure.

 

Today's Musings

I rarely venture into the ideological cesspool that is Christopher Rufo's City Journal, but I do occasionally put on my hip boots, hold my nose, and try to see if I can find anything salvageable in the muck. Today I am pleased to say that Stephen Harrop at City Journal has produced a perfectly reasonable and fair-minded review of Oliver Traldi’s recent book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. Harrop informs his readers that Traldi has articulated at least three essential points about political beliefs:

Traldi, a research fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, enjoins the reader to take a few lessons. The first is that “people’s motivations for developing their political beliefs are often rather obscure.” What someone believes often tells us little about why he believes it. Questioning those beliefs can be little more than self-gratification. Another lesson: exposure to political information is not necessarily a royal road to political knowledge, to knowing what justice is or what the best means to achieve it are. Most important is the “value of independent thought.” Traldi might agree with my summary of this lesson in two Enlightenment slogans, ‘nullius in verba’ (“take no one’s word for it”) and ‘sapere aude’ (“dare to know”).

When a commentator at City Journal approvingly cites two Enlightenment mottoes, we are in uncharted territory.

Harrop has his quarrels with Traldi’s book; he finds it “short on a precise definition” of what ‘political’ means, or of what qualifies a belief as being political. That aside, Harrop concludes that “Our differing beliefs tend to be defined by the insides and outsides of our little bubbles. That might explain which of our debates are political, but on its own it does little to tell us how reliable those beliefs are. To determine that requires plodding, patient hard work. It requires a “daring to know.” As a call to do that, Traldi’s book excels.”

Thank you, Stephen Harrop, for making my excursion into the muck of City Journal worthwhile.

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Review of Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction by Oliver Traldi | City Journal (city-journal.org)

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Amelia Soth’s article “Wild Saints and Holy Fools” is right up my alley, focusing as it does on the eccentric hermits and monks of the early Christian centuries. As she notes, “Early Christian lore is full of accounts of ascetics who sought salvation through a return to wildness. These bestial saints wandered through the desert, eating only raw food and clothed only in their long, unruly hair; their nails grown into claws, and they shied away from people like wild deer.” I said “eccentric,” but I am fairly certain that a non-zero percentage of these saints were deranged.

Soth continues, in an entirely nonjudgmental tone: “The ascetics reportedly lived alongside lions and gazelles, sharing their food and water, forgetting human civilization and all its evils.” The desert was their preferred habitat; after all, as Bruce Springsteen said, “It’s hard to be a saint in the city.” Soth quotes Judith Adler:

“Desert—in the sense of wild and uncultivated rather than specifically sandy or rocky space—became newly valorized as the spiritual/intellectual center of a cosmopolitan monastic movement. Christian ascetic writers cast wasteland, where there is ‘neither perpetrator nor victim of injustice, nor complaint of a tax collector as an earthly ‘paradise of the fathers,’ while market towns and cities that saints were said to ‘flee’ were depicted as a dark, uninhabitable ‘wilderness of this world’.”

But the wild saints did not have a monopoly on unconventional behavior. There were holy fools as well, some of whom chose to terrorize, or at least scandalize, the towns and cities:

According to legend, after thirty years grazing in the wild, St. Simeon felt a divine call to go to the city. He arrived at its gates with a dead dog strapped to his belt, and, oddly enough for a saint, he quickly established himself as a public menace, writes religious studies scholar Jesse Perillo, by blowing out the candles right before Mass, pelting locals with walnuts, overturning market stalls, flagrantly violating rules of fasting, walking around naked, relieving himself in public, and (perhaps worst of all) openly associating with actors. It was a sixth-century version of freaking out the normies.

At the same time, he performed miracles—curing diseases, driving out demons, saving a building from an earthquake—all the while using his constant mischief to distract the public from his holiness. In doing so, he established a lineage of “holy fools.” In his footsteps followed figures such as St. Andreas, who staggered about pretending to be drunk, curled up with the stray dogs to sleep at night, and quenched his thirst from puddles in the road.

You really cannot make this stuff up.

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Wild Saints and Holy Fools - JSTOR Daily

St. Simeon, patron saint of dog catchers...

SCOTUS Redux

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling on presidential immunity, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, has suggested that critics of the ruling “Read Alexander Hamilton's (Federalist essay) No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.”

Having some time on my hands (it’s a holiday!), I have taken Mr. Roberts’ advice and read Federalist No. 70, and I have confirmed that he is correct on this narrow point: Alexander Hamilton, a leader of the Federalist faction in 1787-88 when our Constitution was written and then ratified, wanted a vigorous executive (President) as head of an active federal government. (He also wanted the President to serve for life, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were not disposed to have a king.)

The context of Hamilton’s argument, however, and the reasoning behind it, is a bit more complicated than Kevin Roberts lets on. Federalist No. 70 was written to defend Hamilton’s proposal that the new federal government be led by a single chief executive (President) rather than, as some preferred, an executive council or a dual executive of some kind. Hamilton argued that an individual President could act more boldly and decisively than could a council or a team. Whereas the legislative branches (Congress) were designed to be deliberative, Hamilton wrote, the President should have the power to act quickly when circumstances required—especially, he emphasized, in the area of foreign affairs or military engagements.

Nowhere in Federalist 70, or anywhere else that I know of, did Hamilton argue that a President should be immune from legal consequences for his “bold and decisive” actions. In fact, he stressed that an individual President, rather than a council or a team, could more easily be assigned responsibility and accountability, either in the court of public opinion or elsewhere.  

In Hamilton’s own words:

“One of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive is that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility. Responsibility is of two kinds: to censure, and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case.”

The existence of plural executive officers would potentially muddy the waters as to who had been at fault. With just one individual as President, Hamilton concluded, the public would have “the opportunity of discovering with facility and clearness the misconduct of the persons they [entrusted], in order either to their removal from office or to their actual punishment in cases which admit of it.” The phrase “actual punishment” is at odds both with Kevin Roberts’ view and with the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity for “official acts”. Given the sensitivity of the Founders to abuses of power, and given their antipathy to monarchical authority, it defies common sense, as well as historical analysis, to believe they intended that a President should have such immunity.

Alexander Hamilton and his ‘big government’ ideas—including a vigorous and energetic presidency--have always been anathema to American conservatives.  Hamilton’s opponents, the Antifederalists, wanted a smaller, weaker federal government, one with drastically limited and strictly delineated powers, so that the thirteen original states would retain, for the most part, their sovereignty (which is to say, for Southern states, the ability to protect the institution of slavery). The Antifederalists also objected to Hamilton’s “vigorous executive” on the grounds that a President with that much power would quickly become a king in all but name. George Washington’s rejection of pomp, ceremony, and more than two terms in office was, among other things, a nod to that Antifederalist concern, a concern widely shared in the populace at large.

Over the years, American conservatives have identified with the Antifederalists. They have showered so-called “activist” Presidents with abuse, from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, from Wilson to FDR, from LBJ to Biden, all of whom violated conservatives’ understanding of federalism and of the Constitution. Conservatives’ Antifederalist lineage can be difficult to remember, given the existence of right-wing groups like Leonard Leo’s “Federalist Society” and right-wing publications like The Federalist, but American conservatism has never been receptive to the Hamiltonian Federalist perspective.

Until now, and it is not difficult to figure out what has precipitated the shift: you can’t Make America Great Again without perpetrating a few ideological hypocrisies, such as suddenly preferring a “bold, decisive” presidency to one constrained both by tradition and by law). If Kevin Roberts is delighted with the Supreme Court’s grant of near-absolute immunity to the American president, it is not because he hopes that a President Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will someday impose her Green New Deal with a stroke of her presidential pen, or that a President Elizabeth Warren will vigorously impose a wealth tax on the uber-rich, or that a bold and decisive President Bernie Sanders will make the collected works of Herbert Marcuse mandatory reading in high schools.

Roberts’ approval of this SCOTUS decision is based on one thing and one thing only: he believes Donald Trump is going to win election this fall, which will then pave the way for Roberts’ beloved “Project 2025” to be put in place. The goal of Project 2025 is to begin “dismantling the administrative state” (Steve Bannon’s dream!) and to shrink the size of the federal government until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub (Grover Norquist’s wet dream!); the operating strategy is to hand as much power as possible to a promethean MAGA President who, unbound, will cooperate with the dismantling.  

Beginning with Barry Goldwater in 1964, conservative Republicans have consistently run against what they see as the federal “behemoth,” paradoxically seeking to be put in charge of the very institutions they wanted to destroy. They are (perhaps) one election away from getting what they have long wanted, i.e., the downsizing of the federal government and the emasculating of federal agencies. Don’t mistake the American Right for Nazis or Fascists; such hyperbole misses the point and puts us on guard against a non-existent threat. The MAGA/Project 2025 vision is dangerous enough as it is, homegrown and as American as apple pie, with a crust of states’ rights and a sprinkling of Christian nationalism on top of a federal government that amounts to little more than a presidential errand boy.

We may be about to witness the unlikely coupling of the Hamiltonian presidency with the Antifederalists’ suspicion of centralized government. I don’t know what rough beast might be born from such a union; quite frankly, I would rather not find out.

Which way to Bethlehem?       

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part One)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat may have bitten off more than he can chew with his excursion into Christian nihilism. To be honest, he is less than convinced of his own thesis, thus the question mark in the title. In any case, he will post Part One today and Part Two next week, once he’s had time to finish digesting the sources.}

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?” (Jesus)

David Bentley Hart believed that modern nihilism resulted from Christianity’s failure to hold the cultural ground it had seized, fifteen hundred years ago, from pagan antiquity, leaving in its stead a spiritual vacuum. Other observers, though, have asserted a much more fundamental connection between Christianity and nihilism; some have gone so far as to claim that nihilism is at the very heart of Christianity. How in the world, most of us would ask, could anyone make such an absurd claim?

Well, there’s this: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.” And there’s also this: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” And, you know, this: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

The New Testament yields numerous such quotes that seem, at least rhetorically, to set Christians against the world and any of its purported meanings. Christian nihilism, if such it could be called, was not complete nihilism; Christians didn’t believe that nothing mattered. They only believed, or were encouraged to believe, that nothing in this life mattered; mortal existence was merely a passage to eternity (if you were lucky) and Christians were therefore taught to avoid worldly attachments. Paul used himself as an example: “For the Lord’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, but I count them as rubbish if I gain Christ and am found in him.” He advised his followers not to have children—hostages to fortune, as they say, and distractions from the heavenly prize upon which Christians were to keep their eyes. Jesus had given similar counsel; leave family behind and let the dead bury their dead. Time was short, said Paul, and the world was on borrowed time; you could not invest your hopes in it. Moreover, this world was the realm of Satan, its acknowledged prince; for a Christian, the best counsel, as Paul (or Bob Dylan?) said, was, “Keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes.” Neither Jesus, Paul, nor their followers needed a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

Again, and in fairness, Christians were not “world-haters,” the epithet famously (and accurately) applied to ancient Gnostics. Christians believed that creation was the work of a loving God, but it had been corrupted by man’s sins; still, they believed that mortal life had value simply because it had been given to us by God. Moreover, most Christians held that the way we live determines our immortal fate; life was an ordeal that tested our faith and our spiritual strength. That notion, however, was put to theological rest in the 4^th century by St. Augustine in his polemics against the Pelagian heresy. Man could not “earn” salvation, said Augustine; salvation could only be a gift of God graciously bestowed on undeserving sinners. Augustine cut the ground out from those who thought that “right” living (moral purity, loving one’s neighbor, keeping the commandments, etc.) and faith in Christ would enable believers to pass through the narrow gate to heaven; as he explained (and as Luther and Calvin reiterated), nothing a man does in this life has any effect at all on God’s judgment—no one deserves to be saved from hellfire, and God’s decisions are both mysterious and irrevocable.

Christianity’s ambiguous stance towards the world could be seen by contrasting the fanatical ascetism of the “Desert Fathers” (e.g., St. Anthony the Great), which morphed into Christian monasticism, with the worldliness of the post-Constantine Church. On the one hand, “The model of Anthony and other hermits attracted many followers, who lived alone in the desert or in small groups. They chose a life of extreme asceticism, renouncing all the pleasures of the senses, rich food, baths, rest, and anything that made them comfortable. They instead focused their energies on praying, singing psalms, fasting, giving alms to the needy, and preserving love and harmony with one another while keeping their thoughts and desires for God alone.” They may not have hated the world, but neither did they embrace it; it offered nothing but snares and delusions.

On the other hand, following Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Christian leaders gained unprecedented status and authority. Christianity became the beneficiary of the emperors’ largesse; it became, in the words of Robert Markus, “increasingly wealthy, prestigious, and privileged.” ¹ Less than a century after Constantine, Christianity was made the official religion of Rome; pagan practices were outlawed. To its credit, Christianity played a crucial role in preserving the legacy of Rome, but it did so in part by taking on some of Rome’s imperial characteristics; the Church could not very well renounce a world in which it played such a prominent role.

Even with the Church triumphant, the strain of nihilism remained, preserved in New Testament texts; for centuries, it would lead periodically to sectarian outbreaks, Gnostic heresies, millennial cults, etc. Jesus’ admonition against trying to serve “two masters” (e.g., God and Mammon) made ordinary Christians wary of earthly ambition, a wariness reinforced by the fact that wealth and power were for the most part out of reach anyway. If Christianity did not deter worldly progress, neither did it encourage it, much less inspire it. In all, Christendom viewed the material world, for all practical purposes, as a crime scene—the crime of Adam, of course, reenacted in perpetuity by all his progeny. Ecclesiastical authorities shepherded their flocks through life, incessantly cautioning them, “Move along, folks; there’s nothing to see here.” For Christians, it wasn’t life's journey that mattered; it was the destination.

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Re St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers:  Desert Fathers - Wikipedia

¹ Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity. Markus, for what it’s worth, would likely disagree with my thesis of ‘Christian nihilism’ and my claims about the ‘world-denying’ aspect of early Christianity; “From the later second century,” he wrote, “Christians had been moving fast towards an assimilation of secular culture.” The spread of Christianity could not have happened if the faith had required of believers an explicit rejection of, or distancing from, ‘ordinary’ life, customs, and habits. “Since that time,” Markus continued, “Christians had begun to penetrate every level of Roman society and had moved even further towards accepting the values and the culture of their pagan contemporaries.”   

Nihilism: when you've got nihil, you've got nihil to lose.

Saturday Lecture: Strong Gods

{R.R. Reno (who is known, I am told, as ‘Rusty’ to his friends) is a former Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He has been the editor of ‘First Things’ for the past decade; he drew attention in 2020 for a series of articles and tweets in which he said that people wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID were ‘cowards.’ He added that our society was obsessed with human longevity and had an unnatural aversion to death. I should add that Mr. Reno, like everyone associated with ‘First Things,’ is fiercely ‘pro-life.’} 

R.R. Reno (from Return of the Strong Gods):

Social convulsions and mass mobilizations dominated the lives of those born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World War I mustered millions of young men into armies of unprecedented size and marched them into inconclusive battles producing casualties on a shocking scale. No European country emerged from the conflict unchanged.

[In the years that followed], the streets rang with declarations: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Triumph of the Will, Blood and Soil. In those years, fierce gods trampled the benign managerial habits of commerce and the liberal norms of free consent and democratic deliberation. Strong and dark gods stormed through Europe, eventually setting aflame most of the world and bringing death to millions.

The years from 1914 through 1945 were dark with calamity. Almost all our intuitions about how to promote justice and serve the common good have been formed by this civilizational Shoah. We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the “postwar consensus.” Although there has been political contention between the left and the right, it has been a sibling rivalry. The postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons.

As the long twentieth century ends, this unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment Left and Right are closing ranks to denounce populism. The postwar consensus is more than political. Its powerful cultural influence is evident in the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders. Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods.

Anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society. That theory has many forms, some explicit, others tacit. But it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong—strong loves and strong truths—leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths. In the shadow of Auschwitz, this general theory has encouraged the development of a variety of anti-metaphysical philosophies and critical therapies. The postwar era saw a shift in our metaphysical dreams to openness and a lightness of being in response to the decades of catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century.

In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries—opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center. Denigrating populist challenges to the political establishment as spasms of a “tribal mind” is a reductive critique that disenchants.

We must stop acting as if it were 1945. The postwar consensus, however fitting in its earlier stages, is decadent. It is high time that we recognize our intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom from the traumas that so affected our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth. This will not be easy. Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the ‘res’ in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

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R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Skyhorse Publishing)

R. Reno - Wikipedia

R.R. Reno: Self-Portrait

Human, All Too Human

{David Bentley Hart’s critique of modernity (“Christ and Nothing”), featured in Pascal’s latest post, seems to have struck a nerve with Professor Arguendo, who believes Hart’s views to be hyperbolic, if not risible. The Professor has requested an opportunity to state his case, which follows}

“The problems of human life have not altered very much over the centuries.” (Martha Nussbaum)

“The moral world of moderns is significantly different from that of previous civilizations.” (Charles Taylor)

Arguendo:

The estimable David Bentley Hart disapproves of us, the wretched denizens of modernity. He wrote, in 2003, that the modern West, demoralized and in cultural free fall, suffers from a kind of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual anosognosia, a condition in which the afflicted patients cannot recognize that they are afflicted. Like the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross, the decadent men and women of our age can only be pitied, and possibly forgiven, because they (we) know not what they (we) do. To borrow Richard Farina’s phrase, we in the post-Christian West have been down so long, it looks like up to us. We are, Hart says, worse than pagans in our “comfortable nihilism”. The unspoken assumption of our time, according to Hart—I am paraphrasing, of course—is that nothing matters, and what if it did?

At the bottom of Hart’s displeasure is modern freedom. Like any Orthodox theologian, he would acknowledge that freedom was given to us by God, to be used in God’s service, a gift that promptly backfired and has continued backfiring ever since. From Hart’s perspective, however, the basic problem of modern man is not that we misuse our freedom but that we worship it, rather than the God who graciously granted it to us in the first place.

On the other hand, Louis Ruprecht, writing in 1996, suggested a different diagnosis, which was that American philosophical and political thought had been infected with the dread (and highly contagious) virus nostalgia, which, Ruprecht said, “grounded in a misplaced myth of origins and a perverse theory of decadence, is both deeply tempting and greatly misleading. It leads us,” he continued, “to waste our better energies vainly tilting after windmills of our own imagining. By misnaming our problems and by grounding them in a wrong-headed notion of ‘the glory that was,’ we are invited to look for curatives in the wrong places.” An inaccurate diagnosis, in other words, is unlikely to result in effective treatment, much less a cure.

Ruprecht’s book, Afterwords, was an extended meditation on “Hellenism, modernism, and the myth of decadence.” He turned his analytic sights on several prominent anti-modern figures—Nietzsche, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, in particular—in whose company David Bentley Hart would be right at home. Ruprecht began by noting a “curious paradox: Modern people are, almost by definition, antimodern. They pose the ‘here and now’ as a problem to be solved.” Much antimodern sentiment is motivated by the notion that modernity is “unique” and that it constitutes an unprecedentedly “disenchanted” and “godless” “wasteland”. Sadly, the denizens of modernity are uniquely incapable of coping with or even recognizing the threats: they (we) are “hollow men” (T.S. Eliot), “men without chests” (C.S. Lewis), or men like Walker Percy’s “Lancelot” and “Thomas More,” raging impotently against the dying of the pre-modern light.

This jaundiced view of our modern situation is exacerbated by our rose-colored ignorance about what Peter Laslett called “the world we have lost.” It is not just that we judge our contemporaries too harshly; “Our failure,” according to Ruprecht, “is a failure of historical understanding.” Our complaints about modernity lament our experiences of “fragmentation and confusion,” while our paeans to the pre-modern world assume it possessed a wholeness, a solidarity, and an integrity which never existed; human life has always been fragmented and confused.

Ruprecht cited Charles Taylor’s assertion (in Sources of the Self) that there is a kind of “moral incoherence” about our modern lives; not that we are not moral, but that we can no longer explain why we are. This is the oft-proffered notion that we live today on the “moral capital” of the past, which we appreciate neither for the treasure it is nor for the effort expended by previous generations to accumulate it; we simply spend it. Taylor identified what he called “our ethics of inarticulacy,” which Ruprecht explained: “When asked about our ‘selves,’ when asked about our ‘vision,’ when asked about the ‘good,’ we fall strangely and paralytically silent. We no longer know what to say.” Pre-modern European Christians could fall back on reciting a common creed or the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ whether they understood the meanings or not; today, wanting both to speak for ourselves and to avoid giving offense, we are at a loss.

Modernity, in Taylor’s view, is no more morally corrupt than previous ages; we are simply lost, with no map or guidebook to follow. As Ruprecht paraphrased, “We as a culture are experiencing an identity crisis writ large. Modern culture has taken to the road, looking for we know not what.” While disagreeing with the substance, Ruprecht favorably contrasted Taylor’s sympathetic appraisal of modernity with the acerbic scolding of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). “MacIntyre’s,” wrote Ruprecht, “is a far more despairing, and far less kind, account of our modernness, an apocalyptic portrait of our perplexity.” Such a portrait relies for its effect on an imagined past which can be contrasted with the sordid present age; in MacIntyre’s case, he compared us unfavorably to an idealized ancient Greece, the Greece of the Homeric heroes (real or fictional) like Achilles, Ulysses, and Hector. Similarly, he set the chaos of our modern world against the “seamless social world” described (or prescribed) by Aristotle.

Ruprecht, however, rejected both the glorification of the past and the impugning of the present. “MacIntyre’s symptomatology of modern culture is too severe,” he wrote. “There are rich moral resources evident in the topography of the modern self. Life in the post-Enlightenment world, with all its own attendant problems, is free (if not yet free enough) of many of the errors and extremes of antiquity, e.g., religious wars, inquisitions, and intolerance. We are committed to the elimination of human suffering, committed to the ideals of universal human rights—all of which provide tremendous critical leverage against oppression, and all of which were unavailable to the ancient Greeks.”

For Ruprecht, correcting our view of the present is necessary but not sufficient to answer the anti-modern voices. If we misunderstand and romanticize the past, we inevitably fall prey to claims about the “decadence” of modern thought, modern art, and modern behavior. The flawed reality we inhabit will never be able to compete with a whitewashed, airbrushed past. We need, said Ruprecht, “to apply our critical powers to analyzing our prejudices about the past,” and perhaps to be more forgiving towards ourselves and our contemporaries.

Arguendo, and contra David Bentley Hart, there never was a Golden Age from which we have declined; there never was a Garden from which we were banished; there never was anything in our history except what there is now, an uncertain play of forces for good and for evil, and human beings trying their best to keep their difficult balance against the winds and currents they have no choice but to navigate.

That is all we know, and all we need to know.

Decadence in 1907. It's only gotten worse...

My Fair Share

{I confess I have increasingly burdened Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with writing the lion’s share of The Little Red Blog’s posts. That is a lot to ask of a cat, even one as gifted as Pascal. I promise to do better; to begin with, here is my fair share for today.}

Oh, no: Victor Davis Hanson is upset about a thing—I mean, about another thing—I mean—oh, let’s face it, Victor Davis Hanson is, as always, upset about everything.

Why won’t the Baby Boomers, “the generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited,” get off the nation’s lawn?

The Sixties generation’s new normal is to impeach a president twice, to try him as a private citizen, and to seek to remove him from state ballots.

All that was now characteristic of a generation that learned in the 1960s that if it did not get its way, it would wreck what it could not control. So, it was logical that it sought to pack the court, to end the filibuster, to destroy the Electoral College—and to corrupt the law to achieve political ends. Or as the Sixties generation taught us, “by any means necessary”—an arrogant affirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum that “the ends justify the means.”

Now we are left with a final toxic gift from this generation: the destruction of jurisprudence, a system designed not to easily protect the popular and admired but those often pilloried in the public square, the unorthodox, eccentric, and unliked.

Also, much to their discredit, the Baby Boomers, as Hanson notes, failed to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Where were all the hippies at Normandy, Boomer?

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The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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I am guessing that Pavlos Papadopoulos, who teaches at Wyoming Catholic College, has no idea that parts, at least, of his tirade against American higher education are reminiscent of the 1962 “Port Huron Statement” that helped jump-start the Sixties’ counterculture mentality:

The last century has seen our constitutional republic largely replaced by a new administrative state. This replacement mirrored, and was midwifed by, a transformation in our dominant institutions of education. The sprawling modern research universities that, since the turn of the 20th century, have created an administrative state at home, sustained an American Empire abroad, and continue to dominate higher education today, were built on radically different foundations than the humble classical liberal arts colleges that taught the citizens and statesmen of the early centuries of American history, through our colonial, founding, and early-republican periods.

The regime-level function of the contemporary university is to catechize and credential managers whose expertise will legitimate their rule of the American people, and the wider world, via the federal bureaucracy and a suite of mega-corporations and non-governmental organizations. The regime-level function of our old classical colleges had been to train elites whose wisdom would prepare them to serve the material and spiritual needs of their communities. Today’s university presupposes, and reinforces, the bureaucracy of an empire and the careful management of subject peoples. Our older colleges presupposed, and reinforced, the civil society and structures of a republic and the moral and political self-government of its citizens.

I commend to Mr. Papadopoulos’ attention this link: The Port Huron Statement (1962) | The American Yawp Reader He might learn that the bureaucratic, research-driven academic “regime” he opposes today is the same “regime” we opposed in the Sixties, before we started camping out on Victor Davis Hanson’s lawn.

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As the Schools Go, So Goes the Nation - TomKlingenstein.com

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Christoph Blumhardt:

Our work must follow two laws. We may not bear grudges against anyone, for the kingdom of God is God’s love for all people. And we must not annoy, scorn, or despise any of the poor as of less value than ourselves. You are yourself a miserable wretch if you treat them as though they were of no value. We must always have God’s values before our eyes. God’s treasure lies within each person, not with the great and powerful of this earth. The divine worth in any despised person must be recognized, and we must protect and cherish it. Whenever we get together with people, we need to consider their value for the kingdom of God.

When history, which confuses us and creates enemies, comes to an end and deception has been driven out of the world, we might see this kingdom, this treasure, shining clearly. In the meantime, I must see it in my enemy as a mustard seed and forgive again and again. If someone should insult me a hundred times, I must still see in him value for God.

This is what people have not yet learned, and I believe that this is why the kingdom of God has not yet come. People bite and scratch, warring against each other, despising and scorning one another. Even the finest people are ready, for the sake of their beliefs and convictions, to judge and condemn others – they have thoroughly learned that! But to discern what is of God in the enemy, to grasp God’s worth in those who insult us, in foreigners, in those far from us who think differently, in the poor just as much as in the noble – this they have not learned.

The above is from a sermon preached by Christoph Blumhardt in 1899. The congregation listened attentively, then went out into the world and, following Blumhardt’s advice, loved their enemies, turned the other cheek, and went out of their way to see the value in everyone. Their efforts were contagious, and, within a miraculously short time, the mustard seed of love had become an entire kingdom. Nations did not make war no more, swords were turned into ploughshares, and everyone got a pony. Honest—that’s what happened; I mean, proleptically.

Fun fact: Blumhardt, a respected Lutheran theologian, declared his support for socialism in 1899, and announced that he had joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was promptly fired from his position as a Lutheran minister.

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How God Sees Us by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (plough.com)