The Little Red Blog

"Made, Saved, Nearly Destroyed, and Then Redeemed Again"

All the new thinking is about the Middle Ages. In this, it resembles—well, I don’t know what, but it’s certainly a curious phenomenon. First, Michael Warren Davis (The Reactionary Mind) suggested 12^th-century France as a model of the society we should strive to build; now, Chris Stirewalt, writing at The Dispatch, waxes nostalgic over William Manchester’s 1992 A World Lit Only by Fire and over the medieval world it describes.

Stirewalt acknowledges that Manchester’s book was deemed lacking by “the historical academy,” a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals who “sniffed at some conclusions to which Manchester jumped and at some of his license in storytelling.” Stirewalt, however, dismisses such criticism on the grounds that “Medieval and Renaissance historians are few in number and often deep in weirdness”; no wonder, Stirewalt concludes, that they took umbrage with Manchester, “a popular historian and biographer of macho men.” ¹

Stirewalt is primarily impressed by Manchester’s emphasis on the Christian influence on Europe. “The central figure in Manchester’s story isn’t a scientist or an explorer, but a man of faith: Martin Luther. To properly tell the story of the fall of Rome, the devastation of the Dark Ages, the decadence of the Renaissance, and the dawn of the Enlightenment, Manchester had to become a master of church history.
Manchester is certainly no Lutheran, mocking the sage of Wittenburg for his [eccentricities] and generally rolling his eyes at the intense pieties of the reformers. But he [manages to write] a clear-eyed story about how Christianity, made, saved, nearly destroyed, and then redeemed again the Western world.”

If Christians are the heroes of this tale, Stirewalt identifies the necessary villains as well: “the Hunnic hordes”. Stirewalt elaborates:

What was coming from the east at the dawn of Christendom were the Hunnic hordes and the nightmare kind of slaughter that still haunts our collective psyche. The Huns ricocheted off of the Great Wall of China, turned west and laid waste to the Germanic tribes of Europe. In desperation, those tribes became willing to face what had been the apex predator in the world, the Roman legions.

When the Huns crossed the Volga in 375 into what is now Ukraine, they began to slaughter or enslave all of the peoples of Northern and Western Europe, to say nothing of the unspeakable horror suffered by the Slavs. That was just 50 years after the Council of Nicea had set the boundaries for the Christian faith as we still know it.

The children of light and the children of darkness: how tidy a picture Stirewalt (if not Manchester) draws of European history! Christendom overcame the Hunnic hordes, but the triumph was, relatively speaking, short-lived. The Reformation split Christendom asunder, dethroned papal authority and enthroned the individual conscience in its place, and, as Stirewalt tells it, “You all know how it goes from here: The Enlightenment breaks out and people start understanding themselves as individuals with Liberties given to them by God. Liberties that are, one might say, unalienable. It was not a smoothly run thing, but we can draw a pretty clear line from Jesus to Paul to Augustine to the reformers to the Founding Fathers to our own very crazy ideas about what it means to be human today.” ² 

Unlike Michael Warren Davis, Chris Stirewalt does not want us to return to the Middle Ages, only to learn their invaluable lessons. “It is very clear,” he concludes, “that we are living in times very much like those that Manchester wrote about, a time when we step through a door between ages.”  

Talk about excitement--we are boldly going where no person/woman/man/camera/TV has gone before! Ahoy, a new frontier, if not a brave new world! What Stirewalt thinks is on the other side of the “door between ages,” he does not say, but perhaps we should keep in mind what ancient cartographers inscribed at the edges of their maps: Here be dragons. Some doors are better left unopened.  

_____________________

A World of Our Own - by Chris Stirewalt - The Dispatch

¹ What is it with today’s conservatives and their obsession with “manliness”? Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Senator Josh Hawley, and a raft of others on the Right can’t stop promoting it. 

² Pedantry alert: the phrase “draw a line from” is absurdly useless rhetoric. You can draw a line between any two points anywhere; that you can draw such a line does not mean that the points you have arbitrarily selected are connected in any meaningful way, logically or otherwise. It’s like “six degrees of separation,” only not as clever.

Wednesday with Pascal: In Praise of Serfdom?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, still recovering from feline COVID, here offers a brief response to Michael Warren Davis’ ‘The Reactionary Mind,’ a book which advocates for a return to the halcyon days of yore: subsistence living, a code of chivalry, and all the blessings of medieval Christendom.}

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." (Thomas Hobbes, 1651)

Conservatives have warned us for nearly a century now that liberalism is “the road to serfdom” (F.A. Hayek’s famous phrase). Few, if any, have stopped to ask: who says serfdom is a bad thing?  

Not afraid to think outside the box, Michael Warren Davis (The Reactionary Mind) believes that medieval serfs were happier than 21^st-century Americans, even though “the American middle class enjoys prosperity beyond anything the fattest, richest laird in all the Middle Ages could have dreamt of.” Serfs, you see, knew enough to accept their lot in life and to be grateful for what little they had: “Christian serfs were warned against greed and urged to thank God for what they had. Gratitude for the blessings of his life is what made the serf’s lot such a happy one.”

Life was so much simpler then:

“The serf lived his whole life in the village where he was born. He began apprenticing for the family business as soon as he was old enough to hold a shovel or carry a hammer. He married some girl he’d known and befriended since childhood. He was baptized, confirmed, married, and buried in the same church he attended every Sunday. In other words, he was blissfully free of all the basically meaningless choices that we moderns spend the first fifty years of our life agonizing over. By the time he was eighteen, the serf could get on with living.”

And a good thing, too, since he was unlikely to live beyond his mid-thirties.

Is Davis romanticizing the enserfed life? He swears he is not. He is aware of the vicious negative caricatures most of us have in mind: “When we picture a serf in our mind’s eye, we see an illiterate, superstitious bigot, his boots caked with manure and his face full of warts. He couldn’t read; he couldn’t vote. If he wanted music, he had to sing it himself. If he wanted art, he had to content himself with the statues in his parish church. He was uncultured and uncouth—trapped in a religious-political system in which he had no say, and which he couldn’t understand even if he did.”

Contrast that caricature with this picture, which Davis says has been only “slightly” airbrushed:

In spring, the men stay up all night drinking craft beer, roasting pigs and lambs for the Easter feast. This they’ll eat with apples and plums and wild strawberries. The boys will crown the girls with garlands of wildflowers and woo them with memorized poetry. Broods of children will chase rabbits through the briar. Someone will play the guitar and the people will dance.

Come autumn, the men will hunt deer and geese. The harvest feast will be marked with hearty vegetable stews, tart cider or warm brandy, and all kinds of homemade cheeses. The men will build a great bonfire; the people will sing and dance; and when the celebration ends, families will walk home to their cottages. There’s perfect silence over the valley. An owl hoots somewhere deep in the forest; a badger chitters in the brush. Once the sun sets, all is dark. Every living thing looks up and sees the same pale moon amid a crowd of stars. The road ahead is lit by these heavenly bodies. How could it be otherwise?

Welcome to the life of a serf, by no means “nasty, brutish, and short,” but in fact quite pleasant. The rain would never fall ‘til after sundown; by eight, the morning fog would disappear. 

Michael Warren Davis knows that “We cannot remake the world as twelfth-century France,” but he insists that “a happy society would look much more like twelfth-century France than like twenty-first century America.” Davis emphasizes that “If we are ever going to re-Christianize the West”—and he thinks we should want to do so—“the result will necessarily look like the Middle Ages. For the reactionary, that is a happy outcome, because he knows, better than anyone, that the worship of progress is the worship of a false god.” If we are to move forward, we must turn our attention “to the ages and the people who have gone before us.”

The obvious question would seem to be, if serfdom was so great, why were people in such a hurry to get rid of it? The same, of course, could be asked about monarchies and established churches; they didn’t disappear of their own accord, but were hastened out of existence (for the most part) by disgruntled populaces. Why abandon such an idyllic way of life?

It is a mystery: who killed the Middle Ages? Did medieval Christendom jump or was it pushed? Further investigation is warranted. Perhaps Professor Arguendo has some thoughts on the matter?

Sunday Sermon: "The Obscenity Prayer"

Rodney Crowell, "The Obscenity Prayer (Give It to Me)":

Give to me my time and money
Give to me my milk and honey
Give to me my self-respect
Golden chains around my neck

Give to me my super model
Corporate jet and champagne bottle
Get me out there on the town
Let me spread my wealth around

I could learn to love this life I lead
But just don't take away the things I need

I feel rosy in the pink
So just don't make me stop and think
All those dark thoughts in my head
Seem like better left unsaid

Give it to me
Give it to me
Give it to me

Give to me my latest fashion
Make my lover burn with passion
Give to me my charm and wit
Keep my body young and fit

Give to me my haute couture
Give the world a cancer cure
Serve my breakfast au frescoe
Let the wine and liquor flow

I can search for truth some other time
But right now I just wanna get what's mine

Let the gangsters rule the street
While teachers try to make ends meet
I despise all bleeding hearts
I don't patronize the arts

Give it to me
Give it to me
Give it to me
Right now

I don't understand what it is you're trying to sell
Or what it is you're trying to tell me
You're tryin' to get me to show some compassion
Man, that's so outta fashion

Give to me my Aspen winter
Sorry 'bout the World Trade Center
I can't help the ones in need
I've got my own mouth to feed

Give to me my Playboy Channel
Killer weed and sheets of flannel
Lay me down upon my bed
With pleasant dreams to fill my head

Just look at what this world is coming to
And there ain't one damn thing that I can do

I don't have a leg to stand on
I don't have a net to land on
I don't have the base of power
I don't have the extra hour

Give it to me
Give it to me
Give it to me right now

Give to me my tax cut outsource
Build me my own private golf course
The Dixie Chicks can kiss my ass
But I still need that backstage pass

Give to me my Nasdaq numbers
Intel shares and E-trade blunders
Soldiers to defend my freedom
And a script for Valium if I need em'

And give it to me
Give it to me
Give it to me right now

Rodney Crowell – The Obscenity Prayer (Give It To Me) Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

(16) The Obscenity Prayer (Give It To Me) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: "The moral aspirations of the modern American Right"

{While Yoram Hazony, in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, traces "Anglo-American" conservative thought back to the 15th century, Alan Lichtman chose to locate the origin of America's "modern right" in the 1920s.} 

Alan Lichtman, from White Protestant Nation (2008):

The modern right arose in the 1920s out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity. Those Americans most inclined to protect what they perceived as embattled traditional values came from all parts of the nation. They lived in every kind of community, worked in numerous occupations, attended many different churches, or even lacked formal affiliation with a church. The vanguard of American conservatism in the 1920s, however, shared a common ethnic identity: they were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.

At the core of right-wing politics in the 1920s and beyond was an anti-pluralistic ideal of America as a unified, white Protestant nation. Many factors, including race, religion, gender, nationality, and class, shaped America’s anti-pluralist tradition. But the vitality of that tradition flows from an evolving cultural nationalism that combined these factors in different ways at different times.

Positively, conservatives have insisted on upholding the values of America’s Anglo-Saxon pioneers. Negatively, they have kept the country on edge with Cassandra’s warning that pluralism would destroy the civilization that the pioneers had built. Virtually every dispute over radicalism, loyalty, reproduction, race, immigration, sexuality, crime, permissiveness, creationism, and school prayer had its forerunner in the ’20’s. So too did forms of right-wing political mobilization. These included the grassroots organizing of the Ku Klux Klan, the lobbying of patriotic and business associations, the defense of traditional womanhood by the DAR, the ‘scientific’ case for white Anglo-Saxon superiority, and the radio evangelizing of fundamentalist preachers. Support for private enterprise complemented the anti-pluralist tradition in debates during the era over taxation, regulation, welfare, anticommunism, and labor relations.

The Right has held together as a political movement since World War I through its core commitment to preserving white Protestant values and private enterprise (not ‘free’ enterprise). American conservative politics is not about limited government, states’ rights, individual freedom, or free markets. These are all dispensable ideas that the right has adjusted and readjusted to protect core principles. Conservatives have built their own versions of big government, carved out innumerable exceptions to free markets for business subsidies and friendly regulations, and restricted freedom in the interest of security. They have backed states’ rights, for example, on racial issues, but not on alcohol and drug use, pornography, abortion, and gay marriage. In defense of core values, conservatives shifted from isolationists before Pearl Harbor to aggressive warriors against communism and terrorism. They have abandoned protectionism for free trade, public education for private school vouchers, and deficit control for ‘supply-side’ tax cuts.

The moral aspirations of the modern American right have focused on the family. Control over women’s allegedly dangerous sexuality and autonomy is at the center of conservative politics. In this view, a morally ordered society requires a morally ordered family, with clear lines of divinely ordained masculine authority and the containment within it of women’s erotic allure. Salacious, non-motherly displays of female bodies, sex education in schools, abortion rights, easy divorces, and the tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of deviance undercut the reproduction and orderly progress of civilization. Feminist demands since the 1920s have upset manly and womanly distinctions and eroded patriarchy, de-feminizing women and feminizing men, and opening the nation and the family to conquest (rape) and subversion (seduction). The history of failed civilizations, conservative physician Arabella Kenealy wrote in 1922, “shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences; in nearly every case, the dominance and sexual license of their women were conspicuous.” 

Both religion and race have also mattered for conservatives who view nationhood as anchored in white, native-stock peoples and their distinctive culture. Since World War I, conservatives have been cultural, religious, and at times racial nationalists, dedicated to protecting America’s superior civilization from racially or culturally inferior peoples, foreign ideologies, sexual deviance, ecumenical religion, or the encroachment of so-called one-world government.

In the late twentieth century, white Protestants achieved a partial and uneasy rapprochement with white Catholics, with whom they found common ground on pro-family issues, communism, and militant Islam. This reflected both a decline of anti-Catholicism among white Protestant and the rise of a theologically and politically conservative Catholicism that put sexual morality, traditional gender roles, biblical truth, and the protection of Christianity above church teachings on labor, the death penalty, and social welfare.

Conservatism, like liberalism, resides not only in the electorate, political parties, and government, but also in the schools and churches, mass media and the high arts, fraternal groups and corporations, and civic and trade associations. Conservative politics has had an enduring appeal to Americans seeking the clarity and comfort of absolute moral codes, clear standards of right and wrong, swift and certain penalties for transgressors, and established lines of authority in public and family life.

In recent years, conservatives have framed the language of politics to dictate terms of the national debates and to put liberals on the defensive. Ultimately, conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they see as not just wrong on issues but sinful, un-American, and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great. To achieve their ambitious aims, conservatives have had to stay disciplined, mobilize their resources, and wage total war against liberals, with unconditional surrender as the only acceptable result.

____________________________________________ 

Allan Lichtman - Wikipedia 

Book Preview: "Conservatism: A Rediscovery"

{A book preview is what you write when you haven’t read the book in question but would like to express an opinion about it anyway. Since I’m not shelling out $14.99 (for the Kindle edition) for Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, I will have to make my best guess, based on a brief excerpt and my powers of deduction, as to what it’s about.}

I have lost track of how many times, just in my own lifetime, American conservatism has been revived, restored, renewed, rediscovered, rehabilitated, and--mainly--relabeled. George W. Bush's ill-fated "compassionate conservatism" was hardly the first attempt to put lipstick on right-wing ideology. Decades before that, we had Frank Meyer's Cold War "Conservative fusionism," which was followed by "Neo-conservatism," the disillusionment with which led to the likes of Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," which featured granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing conservatives. There was (and is) Patrick Buchanan's holy war "cultural conservatism," with its "America First" motto. There are also post-liberals, integralists, paleoconservatives, constitutional conservatives, religious conservatives, free-market conservatives, traditionalist conservatives, Straussians, followers of Hayek, followers of Voegelin, die-hard fans of Joseph de Maistre, stubborn believers in Carl Schmitt, etc.      

Fortunately, someone has come along to sort out this endless profusion of heterodoxy and heresy, to correct the erring sectarians, and to put true-blue American conservatism back on its feet. Yoram Hazony has written what Rod Dreher calls "an astonishing book," making its author, according to Dreher, “not only [conservatism’s] most important public intellectual, but also its passionate prophet.” Dreher’s fulsome praise comes in response to the publication of   Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Dreher is by no means alone in being astonished; other conservative thought-leaders have joined in the chorus. Ben Shapiro calls the book “fascinating, erudite, and mind-opening,” and R.R. Reno says that “Hazony’s powerful vision of conservatism for the twenty-first century is capable of steering the ship of state out of our present perils.” Even Peter Thiel, whose opinion counts because he is wealthy, is on board with Hazony’s “lucid exposition of a tradition of conservative nationalism that begins in the Old Testament and [continues] to our own moment.”

That is all, and I do not say this lightly, very exciting; or it would be if it were true. However, from what I can tell, and for all his obvious erudition, Hazony's premise would be at home on Fox News; contemporary America, he writes, is in a state of “permanent revolution and cultural devastation” beset by “an updated Marxism (calling itself ‘Progressivism,’ ‘Anti-Racism,’ or ‘Woke’) which has, in short order, “seized control of the institutions that had been, until only recently, responsible for the development and circulation of liberal ideas in America, Britain, and beyond.” Greg Gutfeld could not say it as well, but he would nod in agreement.

It is difficult to take seriously an author who insists that “By the summer of 2020, most of the important news media, universities and schools, big tech and other major corporations, and even the government bureaucracy and the military had adopted a policy of accommodating the new Marxism and advancing its agenda.”  Apparently, we are all Marxists now, what with our identity politics, our pronouns, our Green New Deal, our deconstructionism, and our hegemonic intersectionality: all of it straight out of the Communist Manifesto/Port Huron Statement/Herbert Marcuse's posterior!

All of which is to say, if Hazony does yeoman work in tracing the lineage, intellectual and historical, of the kind of conservatism of which he approves, he does nothing at all to temper the hyperbolic rhetoric which modern "conservatives" have long been fond of wielding. Nor does he do anything to defuse right-wing tropes about the Sixties; not unlike every pre-1980 issue of National Review, Hazony expressly challenges the post-World War II liberal consensus, which led, by the 1960s, to “a new liberal constitution that guaranteed the civil liberties of blacks and other minorities, but also banned prayer and Bible-reading from the schools and lifted earlier restrictions on divorce, pornography, immigration, and abortion.”

What, Hazony implicitly asks, hath liberalism wrought? Nothing short of “the shocking destruction of the Anglo-American cultural inheritance [and] the suppression or stigmatization of many of the most important ideas and institutions around which life in Britain and America had been built, including God and scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred, among others.”

Look upon your works, Enlightenment liberals, and despair! At the same time, Hazony says, “In our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.” Conservatives didn’t start the fire, of course; but, according to Hazony, they haven’t done much to stop it, either. How in the world are we to survive this cultural and societal conflagration?

By returning to the past, says Hazony; that is, by “rediscovering the history and philosophy of conservatism, both of which by now have been largely forgotten.” This is in keeping with “an important principle of Anglo-American conservative thought: When faced with the disastrous consequences of a particular course of action, we must retrace our steps and restore, as much as possible, the conditions that existed prior to setting out on this course.” Onward we go to the past, before “the sudden rise of the new Marxists” spoiled everything that was good and decent about America.

I want to be clear: Conservatism: A Rediscovery seems well worth reading. You will learn much about the likes of John Fortescue, the 15^th-century author of In Praise of the Laws of England, and John Selden, a 17^th-century polymath ¹ acclaimed by Hazony as “perhaps the most important figure in Anglo-American conservatism.” You will learn Hazony’s “nine principles” that explain “what government is for and what it should do.” ² You will learn who and what imperils us and what to do about them. And you will learn something about living a "conservative life," as exemplified by Hazony, his wife, and their nine children. ³

You may even learn what all the fuss over the book is about, a fuss comparable to, say, the fuss over Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, or over J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, or over Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Conservatives seem to need to give each other pep talks from time to time to face the dreaded nihilistic abyss that is the secular modern West; and each pep talk is delivered by someone who is immediately declared the new spokesperson for conservatism. Today it's Yoram Hazony's turn; I can't wait to see whose turn it will be tomorrow. 

___________________________________________

Yoram Hazony - Wikipedia

John Selden - Wikipedia   

John Fortescue (judge) - Wikipedia

¹ Shame!

² I am pledged to secrecy, having signed an NDA. Also, as I mentioned, my free Kindle preview of Hazony’s book ended abruptly partway through Chapter One.

³ You might then read the essays at the online Law and Liberty symposium devoted to Hazony’s book, essays which take a somewhat more critical view of Conservatism than do Rod Dreher or Ben Shapiro.  Toward a New Traditionalism? – (lawliberty.org)

Wednesday with Pascal: Critical Pedagogy--Threat or Menace?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is currently in isolation after testing positive for COVID. In his absence—and rather than let Professor Arguendo continue his recent tirade—I offer the following.}

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education functions as an instrument to bring about either conformity or freedom.” (Paulo Freire)

“Is our children learning?” (George W. Bush)

Watch out, liberal elites: first, Christopher Rufo exposed your CRT and your grooming behaviors, and now Alexander Zubatov is spilling the beans on your “critical pedagogy”. “Left-wing elites,” he writes, “have every interest in concealing from the populace the content of many of the core texts constituting the kind of education they champion. Critical race theory is only a part of that picture. The far bigger fish that needs to be thrown back into the polluted stream from which it came is known as “critical pedagogy.”

Zubatov provides a quick primer on “critical theory” in general (hint: it’s “cultural Marxism” and it hates you) before tackling the pedagogical issue, which he does with evident gusto:

The explicitly educational branch of the “critical theory” movement, known as “critical pedagogy,” “views teaching,” in the words of Henry A. Giroux, one of its leading lights, “as an inherently political act,” that “reject[s] the neutrality of knowledge, and insist[s] that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning.” As Wikipedia, echoing Giroux himself, tells us, critical pedagogy was “founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” 

One is not surprised to learn that Freire was a Marxist whose seminal book was laced with citations from “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.” ¹

Zubatov is surely correct when he says that Freire occupies a “canonical place within the American academic canon.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic, and it has indeed been highly influential, as Zubatov disapprovingly confirms:

In 2016, a Google Scholar analysis found Freire’s book to be the third most-widely cited publication within the social sciences. Just last year, Columbia University, home to Teachers College, one of the nation’s top schools of education, celebrated Freire’s centenary on September 19, 2021 by creating the Paolo Freire Initiative at Columbia University, with an annual birthday event open to the public, a “Freire Scholars program” to fund research into his work, a year-long series of lectures, an announcement describing Freire's work as "foundational" and "closely aligned to the mission of Columbia University and Teachers College”.

Theories of pedagogy aside—should we think of students as empty vessels to be filled or should we encourage them to be active participants in the pursuit of, and creation of, knowledge—Zubatov insists that “Freire’s true goal is not education at all; it is, rather, revolution. The ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ is no mere monkish exercise in the pursuit of erudition and the contemplation of higher things. Liberation is ‘the objective to be achieved.’ The student learns through ‘participation in the revolutionary process,’ as ‘the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character.’ What starts as dialogue with the oppressed transforms, before long, into ‘cultural revolution’ as ‘a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches power.’  

It never ceases to amaze me how frightened conservatives are of texts written by revolutionaries (or would-be revolutionaries) during revolutionary (or faux-revolutionary) times, as if such texts might not contain useful observations or ideas apart from their revolutionary fervor; or as if mere exposure to them guaranteed that the ideas they contain would be unquestioningly assimilated by students, taken as gospel, and pursued to their logical conclusion(s).

Whatever his intentions, Paulo Freire did not start a revolution with Pedagogy of the Oppressed or in the course of his subsequent (and distinguished) career. ² He did, however, give people a lot to think about; and Zubatov surely understands the danger of that. Once people start thinking for themselves, who knows what they'll come up with?

As is the norm for today’s political/ideological Right, Zubatov waxes hyberbolic, declaring America’s education situation “an emergency”.  He is exceptionally candid in his recommended response:

Whether masquerading under names like “social justice teaching,” “antiracist teaching,” “culturally responsive education” or “promoting diversity, equity and inclusion,” critical pedagogy, wheeling along its Trojan horse of Marxist revolution, has infiltrated our schools and our minds. Purging it and its practitioners from our midst is not an option; it is an emergency. ³

I am not sure why critical theory and critical pedagogy, pernicious as they may be, constitute an emergency right now; if Zubatov is correct, those doctrines have been force-fed to Americans since 1968. We have had, that is, over fifty years of Marxist indoctrination in our schools, and yet we are still not living either in a gulag or in a workers’ paradise.

_________________________________

Pedagogy of the Oppressors - The American Conservative

¹ I would not be surprised if Freire had also snuck in a reference or two to John Dewey and A.S. Neill.

² Paulo Freire - Wikipedia It is remarkable that Freire, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist revolutionary and a clear and present danger to our way of life, received honors from such unlikely places as the University of Nebraska (Omaha), Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Illinois (Chicago); and that he and his wife were also formally recognized as “Outstanding Christian Educators”.

³ “Purging it and its practitioners from our midst”: this is cancel-culture on steroids.  

The most dangerous man in the world, next to Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse

The War in Heaven

{I may have made a mistake giving Professor Arguendo the password to my blog. He appears to be bound and determined to impress upon one and all the connection between early Christianity and the myth-laden cosmos of the ancient Near East. Why he believes that issue to be important remains unclear; it’s almost as if something has possessed him.}

Arguendo: "Both Christ and Satan are necessary for salvation. 'No Devil, no God,' was John Wesley's way of putting it." (Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic)

After his uncredited cameo in Genesis, Satan received scant attention in the Hebrew scriptures until the Book of Job, when he unexpectedly was awarded a co-starring role. After a brief prologue praising Job’s piety, the author commences the plot:

“One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’  Satan answered the LORD, ‘From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.’ Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’ ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ Satan replied. ‘Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has. You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’”

Unable to resist the challenge, God first allows Satan to inflict calamities upon Job’s properties, his animals, and his family, culminating with the tragic death of Job’s children, to which loss Job responded with, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” “In all this,” the author insists, “Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” We then witness round two: Satan returns for another chat with God, who smugly brags of Job, “He still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him without any reason.” Satan has a ready answer: “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. ‘A man will give all he has for his own life. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.’” God, who seems surprisingly accepting of torture, agrees: “Very well, then,” he tells Satan; “He is in your hands, but you must spare his life.” The rest of the story is too well known to need repeating, though it is worth noting that God never admits that Job’s troubles stemmed from a wager with Satan; likewise, Job never suspects that anyone other than God could be responsible for his miseries.

The point is, YHWH (the God of Israel) and Satan had a long and complicated history. As Israel’s fortunes declined, its anguished prophets developed a new understanding of the balance of powers in the cosmos. As Norman Cohn explains:

From the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE, the Jews produced a new, complex, and comprehensive demonology. There grew up a body of literature commonly known as ‘apocalyptic,’ full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world. Evil spirits ‘rise up against the children of men and against the women’; they are demons who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods. Within limits prescribed by God, evil spirits or demons wreak destruction on the earth; they are also seducers, tempting human beings to every kind of sin. The chief of the fallen angels, Belial (or Satan), emerges as the antagonist or rival of God. His subordinates tempt men to fornication, jealousy, envy, anger, murder, and idolatry. Ultimately, the Devil and his servants, human and demonic, form a single host and are all alike doomed and destined to be overthrown and annihilated.

Such apocalyptic dualism—Good pitted against Evil—was late in coming to Judaism, but its antecedents were ancient and can be found in mythologies from numerous cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Persia, India, etc.). Neil Forsyth (The Old Enemy) links the Jewish and Christian narratives to ancient dualistic myths in which the world, along with its human inhabitants, was the scene of divine combat. “The Christian version of the plot,” he writes, “is something like this: A rebel god challenges the power of Yahweh, takes over the whole earth as an extension of his empire, and rules it through the power of sin and death. He is the typical death-dealing villain who causes consternation among his subjects, and his depredations and cruelty make them long for a liberator. This dark tyrant, ‘the god of this world,’ as Paul called him, is eventually thwarted by the Son of God (or man) in the most mysterious episode of the Christian story, the crucifixion, which oddly combines both defeat and victory. The struggle with Satan continues, however, and we wait still for the end of his story in the end of history. The function of Christ is to be the potential liberator of mankind from this tyranny, while the function of Satan is to be the Adversary in this Christian variant of the ancient combat narrative.”

“This bald and inadequate summary of the story,” Forsyth admits, “is nowhere contained in the scriptures. Versions of it are implicit in the New Testament, but its obscurity and fragmentation there, its presence as an assumed truth rather than a revealed truth, has made it possible for centuries of rationalizers, from the earliest allegorists to the latest liberal or humanist Christians, to ignore or avoid the devil’s role in the Christian system. The Bible says very little about the devil, and that mostly obscure and allusive; furthermore, texts which did apparently mention the devil seemed to give contradictory information about him.” 

Forsyth insists that “A shift of focus from God to Satan helps to clarify the mythological foundations of the whole Christian system. ‘No Devil, no God,’ as John Wesley put it, but this idea is not a peculiarity of the devil-soaked Protestant imagination; it is basic to the Christian story. It is mainly Satan, in fact, who gives to Christianity its mythological dimension. The depredations and tyranny of Satan are what motivate the incarnation story and that against which the activities of Christ are directed. The myth is most evident in those parts of the Christian testament which are explicitly apocalyptic, but it is present wherever the Satan figure or his demonic allies appear. In Luke, Christ sees Satan fall like lightning from heaven; the implication is that the struggle of the disciples with demon opponents is an episode or manifestation of the larger myth. Similarly, when we are told that Satan enters into Judas, the human tale of treachery is transformed into another stage of the cosmic battle being waged between Christ and his adversary; such battles are the stuff of myths.”

Christianity insisted that its salvific events had taken place in history rather than in the realm of myth, but the inclusion of Satan in the narrative created problems: 

The mythological mode ascribed evil to the activities of an independent cosmic principle loose in creation—Satan or the devil. If human life is seriously viewed as conditioned by a struggle between divine forces, it becomes difficult to insist on human responsibility; yet human responsibility was essential to both Judaism and Christianity. The notorious difficulties of Paul’s theology may be seen as his efforts to construct a version of the narrative that would allow for a separate principle of evil but would confine its power. A cosmic evil, beyond human control, raised the difficult problem of the relationship between evil and sin. 

The cosmic struggle could not absolve the humans caught up in it; a vestige, at least, of human responsibility had to be preserved. According to Paul, humans were tainted by Adam’s original sin; they were enslaved by Satan, by Sin, and by Death; their will was conflicted, and their flesh was weak; they could do nothing at all to save themselves; yet, as the Book of Job had emphasized, humans had no more right to lament their condition than clay had to complain to the potter. Humans had been given “free will” and sufficient knowledge of God; they had no excuse for their idolatry or their other sins, for which they would be judged accordingly. They could not be neutral regarding the spiritual war; they had to choose a side.

^{_________________________________}

 

Arguendo: The Devil Is in the Details (and the gospels)

{Apparently, I recently interrupted Professor Arguendo’s ongoing tirade about things biblical and things demonic. I have been asked to step aside and allow him to finish— as if the good Professor is ever finished.}

“If one believes in the truth of the Bible, it is impossible to doubt the reality of the Devil for a single moment. But who, in a world where people believe what they read in newspapers, still seriously believes in the Bible?” (Denis de Rougemont)

Arguendo: “The New Testament is not really intelligible apart from its demonic presuppositions.” (Vernon Mallow)

If asked what the New Testament gospels are about, most Christians would say something along the lines of: The gospels tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth, who preached about the kingdom of God. He taught a new way of life based on love (even for enemies!), compassion, and forgiveness. He emphasized taking care of the poor and the sick, and he preached against wealth and material possessions. He allowed himself to be crucified so that he could then be raised from the dead and demonstrate that he was truly the Son of God. His death atoned for the sins of all mankind and reconciled mankind to God. 

This summary, while not entirely inaccurate, is crucially incomplete. It omits the basic premise of the mission of Jesus, whose public ministry was conceived, in the words of James Kallas, as “an attack on Satan. The thought of Jesus,” according to Kallas, “grows directly out of apocalyptic and is based upon the conviction that the entire world is under Satanic domination. Demonology—the conviction that this world was evil—produced eschatology, the hope for a new, cleansed cosmos.” ¹

The popular 20^th-century Christian apologist C.S. Lewis rightly perceived Jesus’ ministry as being, in effect, a war on Satan. In his best-selling Mere Christianity, Mr. Lewis explained:

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with [dualistic religions] that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

Despite Lewis’ influence, most contemporary Christians (at least in the Western world) do not take literally the idea that we are combatants, like it or not, in a spiritual cosmic conflict; nor do they take literally “our old friend the devil”. Yet it is undeniable that early Christians embraced that narrative and identified Satan as the supernatural antagonist. Norman Cohn, in substantial agreement with Lewis, says that, for the early Christians, “the existing world was thoroughly evil, the realm of the Devil; it was about to go under in a sea of fire; and it would be replaced by a perfected world, in which all power and glory would belong to the returning Christ and his saints. The Roman Empire was the representative, for the time being, of the Devil; in opposing it, the Christians were carrying on not a political but an eschatological struggle.”

Another contemporary theologian who does not shrink from the obvious is Gregory Boyd, who writes: “Though the motif of spiritual warfare is rarely given its full du i, the biblical narrative could in fact be accurately described as a story of God’s ongoing conflict with, and ultimate victory over, cosmic and human agents who oppose him and who threaten his creation.” Boyd finds in the Christian scriptures a continuation of a cosmic struggle depicted in ancient Hebraic texts:

In the Old Testament, this warfare is usually depicted in terms of God’s battle with hostile waters and vicious sea monsters that were believed to surround and threaten the earth. The Hebrews declared that it was Yahweh alone who warred against, rebuked, guarded, and trampled on the malevolent waters and who vanquished the cosmic monsters. We also read a good deal about rebel gods with whom God and his heavenly host must do battle. As is the case with the hostile waters and cosmic monsters, ancient Israelites never separated battles that took place on earth from battles that took place among the gods.

These depictions powerfully communicate the understanding that the earth and its inhabitants exist in a cosmic war zone. Order in the cosmos and the preservation of Israel depend on God continually fighting against these evil cosmic forces. It is clear biblical authors understood Yahweh’s victory over these forces to be praiseworthy precisely because they believed these opposing cosmic forces were formidable and that the battles in the spiritual realm were real.

Focusing on the New Testament, Boyd explains:

The understanding that the earth is a war zone between good and evil cosmic forces intensified significantly among Jews in the two centuries leading up to Christ, commonly referred to as the apocalyptic period. All indications are that Jesus and his earliest followers shared, and in some respects even intensified, this worldview.

For example, the role given to Satan by Jesus and his followers is without precedent in previous apocalyptic writings. According to John, Jesus believed that Satan was “the prince of this world”. While Jesus and his followers of course believed that God was the ultimate Lord over all creation, they clearly viewed Satan as the functional lord of the earth at the present time.

Along the same lines, Satan is depicted as possessing “all the kingdoms of the world” — to the point where he gives authority to rule these kingdoms to anyone he pleases. In fact, the various kingdoms of the world can be described as a single kingdom under Satan’s rule. John goes so far as to claim that the entire world is “under the power of the evil one,” while Paul doesn’t shy away from labeling Satan “the god of this world” and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air”. It is because of this pervasive and oppressive diabolic influence that Paul, in typical apocalyptic fashion, depicts this present world system as fundamentally evil.

Everything Jesus was about was centered on vanquishing this empire, taking back the world that Satan had seized, and restoring its rightful viceroys – humans – to their position of guardians of the earth. Each one of Jesus’ many healings and deliverances were understood to diminish Satan’s hold on the world and to liberate people, to whatever degree, from his stronghold. Gustaf Wingren captures the point well when he writes: ‘When Jesus heals the sick and drives out evil spirits, Satan’s dominion is departing and God’s kingdom is coming. All Christ’s activity is therefore a conflict with the Devil. God’s Son took flesh and became man that he might overthrow the power of the Devil and bring an end to his works.’

Despite the Christian claim that Easter marked the termination of Satan’s reign, the emphasis on demonic enemies would not end with Jesus’ resurrection. Early Christians, believing in the continued existence of demons, concocted theories on the origin of the cosmic conflict and on the nature of the enemy. Here, for instance, is how Justin Martyr, a second-century apologist, described the Christian view:

“God committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom he appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this appointment and were captivated by love of women and begat children, who are those that are called demons; they afterwards subdued the human race to themselves, and among men they sowed murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness. In time, the Son was made man, having been conceived according to the will of the Father, for the sake of believers and for the destruction of the demons. Numberless demoniacs throughout the world have been exorcised and healed by Christians in the name of Jesus Christ, rendering helpless and driving the possessing demons out of the afflicted, who could not be cured by all the other exorcists, including those who used incantations and drugs.”

Justin’s account was based on a peculiar passage in chapter six of Genesis: “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” Some Biblical exegetes have traced demonic activity even further into the past, finding it in the scriptural account of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, which account also introduced readers to a character eventually known as “the Adversary” or, colloquially, Satan. Genesis 3 tells us: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the animals the LORD God had made.” What follows is the well-known story of Eve’s and Adam’s temptation, guilt, and confrontation with God, who punishes them by making them mortal. As for the serpent, he is made to crawl on his belly and to “eat dust all the days of [his] life.” Also, serpents and humans would henceforth be at odds: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

It might have been better for everyone if God Himself had simply crushed the serpent right then and there, but who are we to question the wisdom of the Lord?

______________

Sunday Sermon: The Calvinists

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.” (John Calvin)

The Calvinists:

(9) The Calvinists - "Total Depravity" (Lyric Video) - YouTube

(14) The Calvinists - "Limited Atonement" (Lyric Video) - YouTube

(14) The Calvinists - "Unconditional Election" - YouTube

decapolis records » The Calvinists

Lyrics are embedded in the videos, saving me the trouble. To anyone who objects that these are all basically the same song: your point is?

  Enjoyest thou thy journey, for the Lord hath already determined thy destination.

 

Saturday Lecture: Is Anybody Happy?

{The following text is from Leszek Kolakowski. I have added the epigram, and the footnotes are also mine.}

“The life of God, like the life of man, is a tragedy.” (Giovanni Papini, The Devil)

Leszek Kolakowski, from “Is God Happy?” (2006):

Is God happy?

The question is not absurd. Our conventional view of happiness is as an emotional state of mind. But is God subject to emotion? Certainly, we are told that God loves his creatures, and love, at least in the human world, is an emotion. ¹ But love is a source of happiness only when it is reciprocated, and God’s love is reciprocated only by some of His subjects, by no means all; some do not believe that He exists, some do not care whether He exists or not, and others hate Him, accusing Him of indifference in the face of human pain and misery. If He is not indifferent, but subject to emotion like us, He must live in a constant state of sorrow when He witnesses human suffering. He did not cause it or want it, but He is helpless in the face of all the misery, the horrors and atrocities that nature brings down on people or people inflict on each other.

If, on the other hand, He is perfectly immutable, He cannot be perturbed by our misery; He must therefore be indifferent. But if He is indifferent, how can He be a loving father? And if He is not immutable, then He takes part in our suffering, and feels sorrow. In either case, God is not happy in any sense we can understand.

We are forced to admit that we cannot understand the divine being—omnipotent, omniscient, knowing everything in Himself and through Himself, not as something external to Him, and unaffected by pain and evil.

The God of the Christians, Jesus Christ, was not happy in any recognizable sense. He was embodied and suffered pain, he shared the suffering of his fellow men, and he died on the cross. ²  

In short, the word ‘happiness’ does not seem applicable to divine life. But nor is it applicable to human beings. This is not just because we experience suffering. It is also because, even if we are not suffering at a given moment, even if we are able to experience physical and spiritual pleasure and moments beyond time in the ‘eternal present’ of love, we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition. We participate in the suffering of others; we cannot eliminate the anticipation of death or the sorrows of life.

There are, of course, people who consider themselves happy because they are successful: healthy and rich, lacking nothing, respected (or feared) by their neighbors. Such people may believe that their life is what happiness is. But this is merely self-deception; and even they, from time to time at least, realize the truth. And the truth is that they are failures like the rest of us.

Happiness is something we can imagine but never experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and suffering of their past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but it has never been seen.

It has never been seen.

__________________________________________

Leszek Kołakowski - Wikipedia

Leszek Kolakowski was one of the most important voices of the latter half of the twentieth century. His journey from Communism to Christianity was at least as remarkable as that of, say, the much better-known Whittaker Chambers—which is, in my estimation, a shame.

¹ The assumption that “love is an emotion” is questionable, at least for those who believe “love” is better understood as a verb, i.e., as expressed only in action rather than in feelings or verbal declarations.

² For what it may be worth, the Christian gospels record not a single instance of Jesus either laughing or smiling. Redeeming the human race, and atoning for its sins, is a serious business.