Still, I think I was getting at something real, here, and I hope to have an opportunity to follow up on it.  Here, then, my rough-and-ready speaking text of my 2010 ETS submission:

The Time of God’s Long Suffering:
Reading the New Testament in Response to a Buddhist Problem
Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society
Atlanta, Georgia
November 17, 2010

Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation[.]
1 Peter 3:8-15

Most of you will, as I do, tend to immediately read this passage with attention to two key contexts: the context of individual reassurance or exhortation, and the context of discussions among various eschatological systems. Obviously, the passage should be read in these ways. Let me ask you, though, to set those aside for a moment, and look more directly at the language of time itself, here. The “thousand years” and “one day” paradox suggests that God’s interactions with time are subject to compression and dilation relative to His concerns. The time frame of calendars and clocks, though part of the order of Creation, is not absolute. Instead, the Epistle’s readers are oriented to a time frame in which “the Lord is not slow […] but patient”; in which God’s reluctance to end the age before “all should reach repentance” will give way very unexpectedly, “like a thief,” and violently, even to the point of a distillation of the material cosmos to its personal, spiritual quintessence.

Perhaps most strikingly, the reader so oriented becomes a participant in this timing, “waiting for and hastening” the end while simultaneously able to “count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” From this brief reading, permit me to extract a framework of four assertions for later use:

• The time of Creation (world history, the history of the cosmos) is contingent, not ultimate or definitive even for the cosmos.
• Events within Creation time are more significantly ordered by God’s concern than by clock-and-calendar chronology.
• God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons.
• Because of God’s concern, humans also participate in changing significance of Creation time.

I believe a framework like this should permit us to address Buddhist thought on its own terms, while still reasoning consistently from the language of Scripture.
Now, before I proceed, let me hasten to offer three disclaimers—yea, I will give four qualifications. First, I know that just “one small step for a man” from what I’ve just said lies a fruitful and ancient discussion of chronos and kairos in rhetoric and history. I would love to hear from some of you who are more deeply involved in that conversation than I am; I am sidestepping that discussion. Second, I am keenly aware that the readings from 1 Peter, Luke, Romans, and 1 Corinthians that I hope to offer, today, will hardly be groundbreaking—indeed, I hope that I will say nothing absolutely new. I hope only to emphasize certain elements of these texts that speak to a certain juncture in a certain discussion.

Third, when I turn to face Buddhism, I am aware of a double criticism that can be made against my main sources, which are Japanese Buddhists from the Kyoto School. Scholarly Buddhism is not folk Buddhism; and Japan’s uptake of Buddhism is idiosyncratic within East Asian context, even before we turn to Southeast Asia and the Subcontinent. I have done what I may within my background reading and selection of sources to deal with these known issues by using sources from both main traditions of Japanese Buddhism, privileging their direct interactions with Pali source texts, and staying as near as I may to “mainstream” collections of the teachings of the Buddha.

Beyond that, and fourth, I say to you that I very humbly offer these comments as an attempt to mark some clear connections within a Christian conversation that answers to a Buddhist conversation. When I say that these passages provide us with answers, I definitely have in mind neither the insistence of fact against the question, nor the reduction of the question to the scaffolding used to renovate it, but the apologia of a faithful response in another’s conversation, and a hope that can bear questioning.

While my personal hopes definitely have to do with the interaction of committed Christians with East Asian culture, I have also developed a keen interest in the convergence of Continental philosophy with Buddhism. There has been a steadily growing (though very uneven) interaction of Western philosophy with Buddhism throughout the past two centuries, correlating very precisely to the growth of a post-Christian consensus in the societies once comprised as Christendom. Nietzsche’s Antichrist at one point addresses the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity under the very late Nietzsche’s abrasive criticism of both religions. Significantly, Nietzsche compares the two in terms of the theology of sin: “Buddhism is the only really positive religion to be found in history, even in its epistemology (which is strict phenomenalism)—it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but fully recognising the true nature of reality it speaks of the ‘struggle with pain’” (17). Nietzsche does not have a particularly close understanding of Buddhism, but he does identify the difference in emphasis between Western philosophy and Buddhism reasonably well.

Equally imprecise, and apparently contradicting Nietzsche, J. Estlin Carpenter’s 1923 Buddhism and Christianity differentiates the Christian response to suffering from Buddhism as follows:

The revelation of the Rule of God instead of ending “the age that now is” has indefinitely prolonged it. And it has not altered its external conditions. The world is as full of the pains of sickness, the decrepitude of age and the sorrows of death, as it was when the son of Suddhodana first learned of them on his pleasure-drives. […] And we have not the insight claimed by the Buddha to relate each smart to some incident of wrong in a distant life. Christianity can never explain suffering. In the mingled web of pain and joy which is woven into every lot, it can lay no hand upon the ill and say “This is thy desert.” Under the Rule of God it has another word, “This is thy service.” (62)

Of course, from Carpenter’s later and fairly liberal standpoint, Nietzsche’s distinction between “struggle with sin” and “struggle with pain” has fallen into disuse; “sin” is simply one of the “external conditions” in the “mingled web.” What is interesting, however, is that Carpenter appears to believe that the Buddhist idea of karma definitely calls for one-to-one consequences for acts, while Christianity does not do so. Carpenter’s view seems to accord well with Christ’s rebukes concerning the man born blind or the sacrilegious murder of some Galileans, but also seems to ignore the principle of sowing and reaping, as well as the trial by works of Romans 2.

Both Nietzsche and Carpenter have tapped something, though, which is of crucial importance when trying to bring the Buddhist understanding of suffering into contact with the New Testament. As Carpenter’s assertion “Christianity can never explain suffering” suggests, Buddhism regards suffering as the trace, and also the essential determination, of being sentient. Suffering both marks and is the fact which consciousness explains. Christianity, however, has typically taken suffering as indicative, not of the nature of being, but of a defect within a goodness either remembered or anticipated. Christianity typically tries to account for the defect so as to distinguish the ill and its causes from the creature and its goodness (hence the perennial “problem of evil” is accompanied by the “problem of pain”). Buddhism, on the other hand, typically tries to account for sentient being’s apparently intrinsic capacity for suffering.

For Takeuchi Yoshinori, both religious and philosophical efforts have as their focus a “conversion,” the core of which is a shift from thinking of suffering as an individual experience to thinking of the individual consciousness a form of suffering. Takeuchi proposes in The Heart of Buddhism that “conversion is said to begin with self-purification, with a catharsis of soul” for “mystical traditions of all times and places.” He further differentiates “mere morality or ethics” from “purification that follows on conversion” in such traditions, for the latter “stands on a higher plane.” Takeuchi suggests that “such purification is permeated throughout by the problem of the impermanence of all things, by the problem of life and death,” but this problem is not merely a matter of finite lifespan. For this reason, Takeuchi criticizes “neo-Kantianism—along with the liberal theology based on it” for being “fettered to the immanentism of human reason and hence [. . .] only impeding our view of that abyss of death and sin and nihility that opens up under our very feet as the fate of being human” (72-3). Like the Curse of Genesis 3, the problem as Takeuchi takes it up is bound up with all of the joy and suffering of mortal life. For Takeuchi, this understanding of human moribundity tightly links traditions as varied as yogic Hinduism, various Buddhisms, medieval Christian mysticism, and post-Christian existentialisms. The crucial insight, he suggests, is a universalizing of the confrontation with suffering: “Without the memento mori, without an accompanying awareness and appropriation of death in the depths of one’s own being, those reflections become nothing more than pathological abnormalities.” Reflection on suffering which leads one to relate to such suffering as a defining feature of sentient being, rather than merely an unpleasant experience for such a being, is the essence of the “conversion” Takeuchi has in view.

In Takeuchi’s writing, the “turn” involved in this “conversion” hinges on the subject’s becoming conscious of what Buddhists term “dependent origination.” Takeuchi suggests that this conversion is often described in the “fundamental experience of artists and poets,” who in their self-conscious acts of representation may “experience an immediate embodiment of the dynamism of world and body, other, and life prior to the distinction of subject and object” (74). The writer whose characters “take over” the work, the carpenter who sees what the wood “wants to be,” the painter who realizes that he and his painting are illuminated by the sun no differently than the things he paints, are all having experiences that hint at the principle of “dependent origination.” Takeuchi describes “dependent origination” as follows:

the subject that, seen from the world, is part of the world, constructs its own being-in-the-world co-dependently and correlatively with the world, and yet does so as its own activity. [. . .] We may liken it to dreaming: when we dream, we live in correlatedness with the world of the dream and, through the phenomenal identity of dreamer and dream, keep the dream alive; but as soon as we become aware of this correlatedness, we have already awoken. (80-1)

Takeuchi extends this similitude of “dreaming” when discussing the consequences of a developed consciousness of “dependent origination”: “at the moment one awakens, the various sufferings that troubled the world of sleep are awakened to in the realization, ‘it was only a dream; I was sleeping’” (91). He proposes that the conditions for the construction of world and self “are only grasped in their primary sense when their essential determination is sought in terms of their extinction, when they are seen as past essences, as things that were.” The subject having awakened to the understanding that something which suffers—the subject, the self, personally and globally, as self or as deity—has originated through moribund desire, the practice of disassociation from such desire should cause, not a turn within that self, but a return to the world precisely as a universal suffering within which one need not be perturbed.

For Keiji Nishitani, this form of “conversion” is a key distinction between Buddhist and Christian responses to the nihility of secular life (its ultimate negation of its own ground for significance). Nishitani contrasts the Western responses of post-Christian figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, in which “nihilism is dealt with on the horizon of the so-called ‘history of being,’” with the Eastern response, in which a nihilistic crisis has not occurred (168). He argues that “the East has achieved a conversion from the standpoint of nihility to the standpoint of sunyata [or Emptiness, No-Thingness].” Rather than picture suffering as a disease or disorder within the individual, Nishitani’s Buddhism describes “the ‘sea of samsaric suffering,’ likening the world, with all its six ways and its unending turnover from one form of existence to another, to an unfathomable sea and identifying the essential Form of beings made to roll with its restless motion as suffering” (169). Thus, although “the nihilism of modern Europe […] could not help but awaken to itself as something pervaded by a Great Suffering,” Nishitani praises the Buddhist response which “goes a step beyond the existential self-awareness of suffering to speak of a ‘universal suffering’ where ‘All is suffering,’ and to recognize in suffering a basic principle.” In fact, Nishitani measures the post-Christian Western response to suffering in the person against Buddhist principles and suggests that “It might not be wide of the mark to suggest that Buddhism’s explanation of suffering as one of its Four Noble Truths—the ‘Truth about Suffering’—be regarded as an advance beyond the existential awareness of suffering to an existential interpretation […] of being-in-the-world.”

In other words, the Buddhism represented by Nishitani and Takeuchi affirms that suffering seen or experienced by the individual provides a hint toward a higher understanding, a re-interpretation of the cosmos from the standpoint of suffering. If suffering, whether by undesireable inflictions or unsatisfied desires, affects all things—and if death bounds every individual life within suffering—then suffering must be a more fundamental principle of sentient being than the pain and disease that bring it into consciousness. From this standpoint, the enlightenment for which the Buddha received that name is the belief, psychologically necessary and consistent with our humanity, that suffering is the reality of which particular individual thoughts, desires, concerns, lives, deaths, and discontents are the shadows. To perceive the world from the standpoint of all suffering would be, ironically, to cease to suffer any particular pains as any particular person. As a common Zen-inspired tea scroll says, “Nothing happens”; or rather, as the implied commentary says, “Things happen, but they happen to no one.”

One key problem for the Christian, of course, is that this brilliant psychological strategy seems to amount to an evacuation of Creation—if all sentient beings were to achieve this enlightenment, then the world as we know it would cease to be full of people. If we remember the four tentative principles we extracted from the language of time and suffering in 1 Peter 2, though, I believe we can speak to the necessity which inspires the Buddhist to seek the life of a Buddha precisely by affirming the nature of our suffering as such. Let me review those assertions, briefly:

• The time of Creation (world history, the history of the cosmos) is contingent, not ultimate or definitive even for the cosmos.
• Events within Creation time are more significantly ordered by God’s concern than by clock-and-calendar chronology.
• God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons.
• Because of God’s concern, humans also participate in changing significance of Creation time.

I believe these can be proposed to the Buddhist as an alternative response to the understanding of the universality of suffering. We may, for starters, accept the standpoint of all suffering as a profound expression of the reality of a fallen world, in which every sentient being suffers and is both actively (in actual sin) and complicitly (in original sin) a contributor to the suffering, even noting the very close correspondence of key Buddhist texts to the truth expressed in James 1:2-21. Verses 14-15 are especially on point: “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (The language in James 4 about the origin of social conflict in spiritual conflict is also very helpful, here.)

We will not, however, propose a practice aimed at assuming the standpoint of all suffering, a “conversion” in which all things personal are taken to be shadows obliterated by one’s turning to see them. We know that, in the process of repentance and mortification by which we are conformed to Christ, we will come to exclaim with Paul that “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ lives within me” (Gal 2:20). Yet we will find ourselves compelled to confess that God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons. Suffering, especially unjust suffering, not only stresses our sense of God’s justice and goodness; it also reinforces our understanding that, in giving good gifts, God is never concerned merely with our separate, inner, immanent happinesses. In Luke 18:1-8, in fact, Christ’s teaching that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” deals not only with the participation of believers waiting for vindication in the divine economy of justice, but specifically affirms God’s own impatience on the subject: “will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.” This impatience to vindicate Himself and His people over against the violence of human sinfulness, and to bring an end to suffering, is also the proper theme of the language in Romans 9 concerning the “vessels of wrath, doomed to destruction,” which God “endured with much patience.” We are, as Peter says in his Epistle, to “count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” Vindication—itself the urgently personal defense of those who cry out for deliverance from suffering and injustice—waits because of the similarly urgent and personal desire of a God who is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”

Because God is concerned with relationships among divine and human persons, the “turn” for the Christian believer is not from a world of personal suffering to a world of suffering impersonally, but from a world of personal suffering to a world of suffering with Christ for others. This is the lesson of 2 Corinthians 1:3-11, especially “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. […] Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” The historic Christian affirmation of the communion of the saints reflects exactly this economy of suffering, proclamation, and intercession, which is also enacted in “the communion of the body of Christ.” As many other texts in Scripture teach, particularly those most concerned with communion (both as a sacrament and as koinonea in its manifold meanings in the Body Life), to become a believer in Christ and a follower of Christ is not to become merely a member of a voluntary organization for the promotion of common goals; it is to become part of a divinely managed historical order whose interrelations—like they myriad interrelations of your body and mine—are real in complex ways which defy our efforts to reduce them to manageable lists of principles, visions, or sociological constructs.
There is urgency to this understanding, however. For just as the Buddhist who realizes that laughter makes no sense when the whole world is burning must proceed to enlightenment or live in madness and misery, we must not leave our friend in possession of our understanding without awakening him to the whole timetable; the insistency of an divine and human interpersonal norm on an eventual righting and reckoning of things, and the choice that requires of those who realize it. In Romans 2:1-8, Paul reminds us of the right ordering of time once more, most pointedly when he asks, “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”

As I have said, these are not the final thoughts, nor the answers which make the questions stop, in this conversation. I do believe, though, that by focussing on the language concerning our participation with God in God’s long suffering as constitutive of the time during which we live, we will make ourselves available to Buddhist thinkers as interlocutors who—unlike the god-talking atheists who primarily represent Western and even “Christian” thought to East Asian intellectual historians—believe the language of the New Testament itself speaks directly to the concerns Buddhist teaching seeks to respond to. And that, at least, must be an enriching of our discourse with the very words of truth.

Here, then, my paper prepared for a panel I shared with Geoffrey Reiter at a Science & Science Fiction conference held at ORU in Tulsa:

ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction
April 12 & 13, 2012

When East and West Collide:
Hope and Imaginary Bodies in Mishima and Lovecraft

Absolute selfhood opens up as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality.  Through that conversion every bodily, mental, and spiritual activity that belongs to person displays itself as a play of shadows moving across the stage of nothingness.  [. . .]  It is the field commonly seen as “outermost” by the personal self and referred to as the external world actually present in the here and now, ever changing.  [. . .]  The “outer world” emerges here as a self-realization of nonobjectifiable nothingness, or, rather, makes itself present such as it is, in oneness with nothingness.

The field of true human existence opens up beyond the outer and the inner, at a point where the “shadowy man” is in oneness with absolute selfhood.  We have here an absolute self-identity.  Thinking, feeling, and action are, on every occasion, entirely illusory appearances with nothing behind them, the shadowy heart and mind of the shadowy man. 

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness

Introduction

There are few obvious similarities between Yukio Mishima and H. P. Lovecraft, but at first glance many readers will be hard put to tell which author penned the following lines:  “It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. ”  These words from Mishima’s Sun and Steel describe a phase of his development as man and writer in which his “stubborn refusal to perceive [his] body” could be accounted for by his longing for “the ideal body” that would “be absolutely free from any interference by words.”  Mishima’s idealization of what Shu Kuge calls “‘existence’ not yet translated into discursive language” could bear comparison to Lovecraft’s dream fantasies, his life-long memory of his childhood terror of “Night-gaunts,” and his fascination with things we cannot conceive before, beneath, and beyond our individual and collective consciousness, things that might turn out to be (literally) unutterably significant.  Focussing on Lovecraft’s story “The Outsider” and selections from Mishima’s Sun and Steel, I want to look at the ways that bodily experience of consciousness expresses nihility in both.

In bringing these two writers together, I am not only bringing an American and a Japanese writer onto the same stage, but attempting to build a bridge between various elements of my own research and teaching.  (In keeping with that goal, let me point out that significant portions of this paper are derived from earlier works whose arguments I am here advancing.)  In Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” then, we are looking at a quasi-autobiographical work from the Coleridge-Poe-Lovecraft tradition which has helped to invest much of the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror with significance.  In Mishima’s Sun and Steel, we are looking at a quasi-autobiographical work situated squarely at the confluence of Romantic and existential “Western” thought with the “Eastern” though of Japanese Shinto-Buddhist culture.  As with the works of Coleridge, or of Friedrich Nietzsche or Antonin Artaud, these radically global and personal works of Lovecraft and Mishima both assert and reject a radical opposition between life as articulated in significant actions and utterances and life idealized as an inarticulate, pre-discursive unity.  Like Mishima’s “I,” the first-person speaker of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” finds his whole body of experience nauseating when he finally perceives his body.  We will begin by looking at how Lovecraft’s “Outsider” responds to such self-knowledge, then proceed to draw the parallel to the response Kuge reports from Mishima:  “The surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath.  The surface is everything.”

“The Outsider”

The foremost editor and promoter of Lovecraft’s work, S. T. Joshi, characterizes Lovecraft’s 1921 story “The Outsider” as “haunting and inexhaustibly interpretable” (85).  Yet Joshi seems to find the story difficult to interpret, saying that “on the face of it, the tale makes little sense” and that “it is still hampered by conceptual difficulties, excessive derivativeness, an unfortunate reliance on overheated prose, and a ‘surprise’ ending that cannot be much of a surprise to many readers” (87).  It seems odd, though, to single out “The Outsider” as an example of “overheated prose,” as Lovecraft’s penchant for overwriting persists throughout his career.  Lovecraft did acknowledge that the story “represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its height” (qtd. in Joshi 86), and this accounts for much of its difference from Lovecraft’s later work.

More importantly, though, this dependence on Poe answers Joshi’s protest that “The Outsider” elicits no surprise at the end.  On this point, Joshi seems inexplicably insensitive to the conventions of the genre.  Both Poe and Lovecraft would tell him, in their critical writings, that the effect of such tales as “The Outsider,” in the tradition of Poe’s “William Wilson” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” is not surprise at all, but dawning awareness.  The reader does not experience a sudden and unexpected reversal of expectations; rather, the reader experiences a sudden confirmation of a pattern suggested but not proven by the events of the tale.  The mind, sensing the pattern, is drawn to look for confirming evidence, always suspecting the possibility of a reversal; as the evidence mounts, the conclusion begins to seem inevitable and the progress of the narrative at once inexorable and seemingly interminable.  When the sudden confirmation comes, all the evidence and suspicion–and the terror of the imagined possibilities which are not confirmed–is allowed to fall into place, effecting a sudden transformation in the reader’s perspective on the story.  Careful reading of such a story, then, should pay careful attention to problems of memory and perception that might appear as “conceptual difficulties” upon a first reading.

In reading “The Outsider,” the most significant such memory problem concerns the status of the narrator.  The story’s first-person narrator repeatedly speaks of the oblivion-inducing “nepenthe” which comforts him; he says of the climactic moment of the tale that “in the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me” (5); and the opening line of the final paragraph says that “nepenthe has calmed me.”  It is strange, then, that the very same paragraph closes with the narrator’s description of the “supreme horror” of the tale’s climax.  Upon a first reading, it seems impossible to explain the narrator’s ability to tell the story of an experience which he claims, while telling it, to have forgotten.

The speaker in “The Outsider” begins with a melodramatic pronouncement bewailing his memories:

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.  Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. (1)

From the very beginning, the typical Lovecraftian disposition toward memory is established:  it is a burden, even a curse, that the speaker would escape if he could.  Other examples abound:  the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time” finds it a source of hope that “my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination” (275).  The narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” opens his account by saying, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity” (52).

“The Outsider” intensifies this horror of memory by passing from the “fear and sadness” of “memories of childhood” to a horror even deeper:  “And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other” (1).  The main tension of the story unfolds in the space created by these two statements about memory:  no matter how unhappy the slice of reality depicted by his conscious memories may be, the speaker would rather “cling desperately” to those memories than allow his “mind […] to reach beyond to the other.”  The speaker then describes the tale of his own growth and exploration of his surroundings, his descriptions giving the reader a clear understanding of what the speaker refuses to clearly acknowledge: 

I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible […].  The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. (1)

The narrator clearly signals his unreliability when he follows a statement about selective memory with a description beginning “I know not.”  In fact, the speaker’s memory is to be doubted at every turn, with the “smell […] as of the piled up corpses” being, in fact, a literal description rather than the metaphor intended by the speaker.  That the speaker found “nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strowed some of the stone crypts” reinforces the reader’s impression that the speaker has, himself, grown up in the crypts or catacombs beneath an ancient castle.  That the speaker considers these things normal clearly flags the distance between his perceptions and those of his audience.

The narrator’s circumlocutions leave the reader to piece together the significance of “the other” which the narrator is so eager to forget.  Progressively revealing elements of the unsurprising “surprise ending,” the narrator prepares his audience for a sudden transformation from suggestive uncertainty to confirmation.  In keeping with the genre and Poe’s example, the confirmation is delayed until the very end, even at the cost of some awkwardness.  The reader finds the narrator in a place so dark “that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief” (1) and follows his ascent, beginning when

in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky.  And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. (2)

Having never seen the light, except that of candles and the gradations of twilight that exist even in the darkness of his world, the speaker nevertheless hungers for light; in this he echoes Poe’s critical appeals to a “thirst unquenchable” based on a “prescience of glories beyond the grave” which underlies all aesthetic appeals.  (Both of them, of course, are also refracting Plato’s parable of the cave through a lens of Christian apocalypticism.)  “The Outsider,” of course, is himself in the grave.  For the narrator in the story, the search for light will take him back up out of his grave, emerging into the world of the living in the first of the revelations for which the reader has long been prepared by the hints of the narrator:  “The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying [. . .] there stretched around me [. . .] nothing less than the solid ground” (3).  In climbing the long tower up from his “castle,” the speaker has reached, not “a lofty eminence,” but the surface of the earth.  He emerges through a church, finding that “my mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light” (3).

As he emerges, the speaker becomes “conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous” (4).  Here the narrator’s and the reader’s journey coincide:  both are becoming aware that this is not a quest after knowledge, but after memory; something has been forgotten which will be recalled.  As the speaker continues, he arrives at a “castle [. . .] maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me.”  Approaching the castle, he sees “open windows–gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry [. . .] an oddly dressed company, indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly” (4).  Here, it seems, is what he has been longing for; yet the reader is already prepared to ask whether this is “the other” to which the speaker referred; the audience is invited to wonder why the “latent memory” which guided him to this sight, the light for which he longed, was termed “fearsome.”

The answer is not long in coming:

I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation.  The nightmare was quick to come; for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. (4)

“The nightmare” begins with all of the revelers fleeing in “clamour and panic” as the speaker enters the room (4).  Afraid of whatever could cause such a disturbance, the narrator looks around and approaches an archway, screaming “the first and last sound I ever uttered” as he sees “in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives” (5).  The speaker “cannot even hint what it was like,” but calls it “the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.  God knows it was not of this world–or no longer of this world.”  Of course, the reader familiar with the genre will have predicted what the story reveals in its last sentence:  the speaker “stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame [. . .] and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass” (6).

“The other,” then, is himself–is a view of himself in a mirror.  The usage of the phrase at the beginning of the tale, though, implies more.  “The other” is a thing “my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to,” analogous with but not identical to the physical reaching of his hand to the monster.  Hence, also, the speaker’s plunge is “from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation.”  “The other” represents a whole scheme of repressed knowledge.  As the speaker says at the moment,

In that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.  I knew in that second all that had been.  I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own. (5)

The speaker, having been dead, has returned, less than human but still animated, to his home; his memories are dim and antiquated, but very much his.  Having once been a member of the “merry company” of the living, he has fallen into decay.  He cannot help but look at the brightly-lit revel, and risks everything all he knows to see its beauty; but he cannot see the beauty without being shown, immediately and drastically, his unfitness to participate in that beauty.

Elsewhere I have traced the relationship between Lovecraft’s horror fiction and the aesthetics of apocalypse in the Christian tradition that Lovecraft energetically defined himself against.  We may note one simple distinction between the Lovecraftian protagonist and the response of prophets in the Judeo-Christian tradition at this point.  A prophet would follow this horror with a promise of restoration, a message of hope centered in the apocalyptic transformation of the believer into a being fit to behold God with loving desire.  In Lovecraft’s mechanistic materialism, however, there is no place for hope and no grounds for such a transformation.  The only fit solution for “realisation,” then, is unreality.  Immediately following the moment of “soul-annihilating memory,” the speaker continues by saying,

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe.  In the supreme horror of that moment I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images.  In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. (5)

The “chaos of echoing images” could itself be a description of Lovecraft’s fiction, works which attempt to perform the sleight-of-hand whereby a culture which seeks to repress the irrepressible may both look on the “merry company” and forget the horror of its own unfitness.  Hence the central image, the all-important “realisation,” is always “inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable”; the speaker “cannot even hint” at it, but knows it for “a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny [cf. unheimlich], unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable,” a “nameless, voiceless monster” which earns “the first and last sound” of the speaker:  “a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause” (4-5).  The expression must be inarticulate because to articulate the “realisation,” to provide details of the life which the speaker remembers and then represses, would be to defeat the repression.  With no hope of transformation, Lovecraft’s narrator finds the only adequate response:  “In a dream I fled.”

Cosmicism

Lovecraft’s 1926 essay “The Materialist Today” helps to generalize the significance of the narrator’s responses in “The Outsider.”  Ironically, the passage is bracketed with statements which, taken alone, would seem to run exactly counter to the fictional narrator’s flight into dreams:  “It is most sensible just to accept the universe as it is, and be done with it. [. . .] He will get most satisfaction in the end by keeping faithful to these things.”  The sentences between, though, tell the story:

All is illusion, hollowness and nothingness–but what does that matter?  Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them; they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless and purposeless.  All one can logically do is jog placidly and cynically on, according to the artificial standards and traditions with which heredity and environment have endowed him.

Lovecraft here recommends to his reader precisely the course of action taken by the narrator of “The Outsider”:  the reader should “pretend to cling to [illusions]” just as the speaker escaped “in a dream.”

Such efforts to avoid certain kinds of knowledge at any cost are typical of Lovecraft’s “cosmicist” philosophy.  The universe, he claims, is purposeless; but the illusion of purpose is necessary for human conduct and emotional stability.  In a 1927 letter to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales magazine, Lovecraft defines “cosmicism” when he says

all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. […] one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. […] when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown–the shadow-haunted Outside–we must remember to leave our humanity–and terrestrialism at the threshold. (209)

Ultimately, the nihilism from which some of his characters wish to protect the world is precisely what Lovecraft seeks to inculcate.  Lovecraft believes that, by facing the horror of a universe in which man does not matter at all, the reader will be forced to discard his illusions (among which, of course, Lovecraft would place religion) and to “jog placidly and cynically on.”  In Lovecraft’s materialistic universe, hope of the sort described by the Christian tradition is ridiculous; instead, as he wrote to Helen Sully in 1935,

What most persons can rationally expect is a kind of working adjustment or resignation in which active pain is cut down to a minimum. . . . This, therefore, should be the only norm in matters of expectation and endeavor (304). 

The experience of Mishima, and the troubling abandonment to dark fantasy of the living-dead narrator in “The Outsider,” suggest that this resolution is fraught with moral and bodily hazards.

The speaker’s flight is, indeed, an escape into a dream-world:  he joins “the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind”; but, after his “burst of black memory” has “vanished,” they are “the mocking and friendly ghouls” who “play by day” in exotic, faraway places (5).  Readers of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian fiction, the dream-fantasies which revolve around his story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” will recognize the ghouls and their typical haunts.  While Lovecraftian ghouls may live in the subterranean reaches of the waking world, as in “Pickman’s Model,” and often haunt places where Lovecraft is wont to find stairways and gates between waking and dreaming, they are primarily creatures of the dream-world; only in a dream can the speaker “ride the night-wind” (5).  When we have taken a look at the parallel between this part of Lovecraft’s work and some elements in the work of Yukio Mishima, we will return to Lovecraft to build on this analysis, and hint toward a more general approach that will reach beyond the strictly post-Christian and Western horror fictions of Lovecraft.

Mishima

As also happens in quasi-autobiographical works from Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Artaud, Mishima’s works foreground a struggle between the self of utterable, lived experience and the self idealized as prior to that discursive being.  In Sun & Steel, Mishima seems to echo Lovecraft’s “Outsider” in what we are meant to take as a critical commentary on Mishima’s own development:

Interestingly enough, my stubborn refusal to perceive my body was itself due to a beautiful misconception in my idea of what the body was.  I did not know that a man’s body never shows itself as “existence.”  But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence.  It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly.  It never occurred to me that other men—all men without exception—were the same.

[. . .]  Never dreaming that the body existing in a form that rejected existence was universal in the male, I set about constructing my ideal hypothetical physical existence by investing it with all the opposite characteristics.  And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words.  (Mishima 11)

The “ideal body” in this passage represents the hoped-for unity prior to the discursive formation of the self.  The effort to construe the human subject in this way, in Mishima as in Lovecraft or modern Western metaphysics, leads to “a terrifying paradox of existence” which leaves him “panic-stricken” before a global problem:  “other men—all men without exception—were the same.”  Mishima’s response to this is helpfully summarized by Shu Kuge:

The “body” in Mishima’s thought is a metonymy for “experience” that is not yet translated into discursive language.  Mishima once clamored:  Why don’t people realize the importance of the depth of the surface?  The surface is the depth; in other words, the surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath.  The surface is everything.  (Kuge 66)

For Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” of “the body existing in a form that rejected existence” (the very crux of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity, and his critique of Buddhism, in The Antichrist) is ultimately resolved, beyond the naïveté of simple oppositions, by an insistence on the surface—on the very skin itself—as the phenomenal being, here, now, than which nothing else can be meaningfully represented.  This ultimately meant, for Mishima, that only the act of ritual suicide by cutting into the skin with a sharp blade, only at the peak of physical perfection, and only at the historical moment when he (vainly) hoped his public political act would lead to revolution, could be meaningful.

The example of Mishima thus presses the urgency of the problems from which Lovecraft’s “Outsider” flees into narrative oblivion.  As Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel points out, drawing a parallel between the bodily experiences of Pier Paulo Paolini, Michel Foucault, and Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” passage marks a “horror of incarnation” in response to which “the author undertakes a quest for an incorruptible ‘ideal body’” (218).  The metal of weights that Mishima uses in body-building transform him so that “his muscles” can be seen as “the steel that becomes the sword for his disembowelment.”  As Chasseguet-Smirgel describes it, such extremes as Mishima’s may “constitute the culmination of mute unconscious gnostic ideas” which “is often allied with an unleashed eroticism that does not accommodate itself to the limits of the body” or to any of the differences which mark bodily experience and ground discourse in living bodies.  Like the problematizing move which authorizes the dead narrator of “The Outsider” to repeat for us a tale which denies his memory and his death, such radical experimentation attempts to realize the unthinkable, to experience that which is inconsistent with the conditions of bodily life.

As a result, this radical experimentation (whether sexual, political, literary, or religious) repeats the moribundity of the desire which founds the discursive being in more radical fashion:  such radical experimentation “can lead not only to murder—an absolute possession of the object—but also to suicide—an absolute dissolution of the subject” (219).  If “the surface is everything,” then fatally piercing the surface, in a final physical refutation of discursive being, appears as a conclusion which is not only logical, but emphatically actual.  Thus suicide comes to be, as it is represented repeatedly in Mishima, something akin to “apotheosis” (220), at least in some wish-fulfillment fantasies.  Chasseguet-Smirgel concludes that such a “Foucauldian body” provides us with “a particularly striking example of the wish for a body that is disorganized, without hierarchy, and with perfectly interchangeable parts.”  Such a body is not merely local in its conception and representation; the rupture of the body, which in lived experience never achieves or recovers this idealized inarticulate state, seems to achieve what it represents, the “dismembered body” that “is projected upon society or even onto the cosmos, so that the frame of the world collapses and the heavens are disemboweled.”

Lovecraft’s “Outsider,” who is already dead, flees his unfitness for the beauty of life in a life-rejecting oblivion of abandoned fantasy; Mishima’s “I” in Sun and Steel flees his own discursive being, his life as a particular body situated within the world, through a program of intentional idealization by which body and words were whetted for their own extinction.  Confronting the bodily experience of consciousness with any degree of artistic and intellectual honesty within a framework that insists on a reductive solution to the mind/body problem, that is, poses both moral and physical hazards of the first order.  Under such a schema, the bodily experience of consciousness must be treated as an illusion or error, rather than (as the Christian tradition would suggest) a flawed experience of a really present unity.  Under the reductive schema, this illusion or error must be corrected by efforts to achieve or recover an inarticulate unity of thought and sensation, a wholeness without difference.  Lovecraft’s “Outsider” mimics the hero of a Platonic allegory in his ascent to enlightenment, but finds “soul-annihilating memory”; Mishima’s words describe the hardening of his body which prepared him to protest his integrity with his life, leaving us with the dilemma of an entire discourse reduced to a single term—its last, the gesture futile in its political meaning and abortive in its self-rejecting personal and literary significance.

We may return to Lovecraft, then, to see once again that this is not a condition unique to Mishima’s personality or culture.  I apologize slightly for deviating from my proposal to discuss “The Dunwich Horror,” which would have provided me with a more obvious alien-monster hook for a sci-fi conference.  I think the significance of the parallel between “The Outsider” and Mishima’s work is elaborated much more clearly by revisiting Lovecraft’s Dunsanian fiction, writings about outlandish worlds of outer and inner space which have a very different flavor than Lovecraft’s very late stories of interplanetary aliens and advanced pre-human civilizations.  In particular, the somewhat obscure story “Celephais” and the prose poem “Ex Oblivione” rather neatly connect the ambivalence of Lovecraft’s “Outsider” to the decisive rupture of bodily and discursive being in Mishima.

“Celephais” and “Ex Oblivione”

Given Mishima’s example, we need not be surprised to discover that the escape into illusion is represented as a suicidal journey in Lovecraft’s fiction, as well.  “Celephais” and “Ex Oblivione,” both written within a year of “The Outsider,” show clearly the relation between death and dream in Lovecraft’s tales.  “Celephais” begins with the following evocative passage:

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley […].  In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. […] he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. […] he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams.  What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. […] Kuranes sought for beauty alone.  When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams. (26)

Like the narrator of “The Outsider” or Mishima’s “I,” Kuranes is fixated on a solitary pursuit of beauty.  Both are repulsed by society, and both turn to illusion instead of truth, leaving behind articulation.  Whereas the already-dead narrator of “The Outsider” has no real options, though, Kuranes is very much living; his escape into dreams is, like that recommended by Lovecraft in “The Materialist Today,” a deliberate choice based on what he takes to be a failure of revelation.  That “truth and experience” do not disclose beauty to Kuranes begs the question whether they “failed to reveal it” or whether he, like “The Outsider,” found it intolerable, repressed it, and escaped into dreams.  On Lovecraft’s view, of course, the question does not arise; revelation will fail, and the escape into illusion is “all one can logically do.”

Kuranes finds himself increasingly drawn into his dreams, so that “the more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to describe them on paper” (26).  Indeed, so fully does he escape into illusion that “he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep” (31).  The drug element, somewhat unusual in Lovecraft (though not unique), is strictly instrumental to the process of withdrawing from the world into dreams.  Kuranes, having reached the point where he no longer functions in the real world, eventually walks out of it:

Then one summer day he was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner.  And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from Celephais, to bear him thither forever. (31)

“Fulfillment,” of course, is a word which, like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” makes a teleological claim; and in the texture of the work, this suggests the ascent to paradise of a spiritual seeker.  Only by understanding that the dream-world is in no way susceptible of articulation in the world of “truth and experience,” by noticing that it is utterly neglectful of body and the realm of embodiment, can the reader discern between the poetic fantasy of the tale and the horror which lies beneath its surface.

“Celephais” does not follow any of the conventions typical of a horror tale; but it is precisely this absence of horror elements that makes the fantasy’s completion of the dream-escape trajectory begun in “The Outsider” so dark.  The language is beautiful, the images rich and exotic, and the story richly communicates a longing for transformation, the desire to gaze on sublime beauty.  The dream, though, is death itself.  The story ends by saying,

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regions of dream, […] and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility. (32)

It is possible to conceive of this as a sort of afterlife, and indeed in Lovecraft’s later story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Kuranes re-appears and interacts with the protagonist.  At the same time, this afterlife is in the “regions of dream,” places of very questionable metaphysical status.

Like “The Outsider,” though, “Celephais” explicitly enacts its central illusion; for the reader is given fair warning that “it would have been quite futile to describe [the dreams] on paper” (26).  Whatever reality the dreams have is strictly the product of the reader’s willingness to suspend not only disbelief but memory itself; to leave behind even the demand for verisimilitude in order to gain a series of verbal impressions, beautiful enough in their way but deriving their true power only from what they conceal.  On the story’s own terms, the only communicable details of the protagonist’s experience are these:  a lonely, nameless dreamer quit working, quit writing, spent more and more time escaping into dreams, took drugs to enhance the dreams, and eventually walked off a cliff and died.

In his prose-poem “Ex Oblivione,” Lovecraft puts the same elements in simpler, more direct form.  In the middle of his troubled life, the poetic speaker seeks “the irradiate refuge of sleep” and finds in dreams “a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life” (2).  As the dreams grow more vivid, “the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness” (3).  Eventually, he learns of a drug which will enable him to pass the gates of sleep permanently, becoming forever a resident of the dream-world.  The drug must be taken while awake, of course, which means it affects the body; and the speaker, upon having taken it “last night,” now tells the reader,

I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space.  So happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity and crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour. (4)

As with “Celephais,” the words sound beautiful; the desire to gaze on beauty is aroused.  The arousal, however, is strictly pornographic; this false beauty can never be revealed in the realm of “truth and experience.”  If the reader wishes to be rapt by the beauty of the text, he can do so only by repressing several key truths:  that it is impossible for the speaker to be telling the tale if he has merged with infinity; that the text plainly despairs of all joy in bodily life, as the speaker claims that “oblivion” makes him “happier than I had ever dared hope to be”; that, at its most prosaic level, the entire piece is no more than a suicide note.

Conclusions

Given human mortality, a life of illusion and a suicide amount to the same thing.  Kuranes, who lives in his dreams only to die in reality, and the speaker in “Ex Oblivione,” who commits suicide in order to live in his dreams, in the end achieve nothing which the “notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer” of the last sentence of “Celephais” does not also achieve.  Lovecraft’s fictional speakers may dislike the secular illusion, may be dissatisfied or even tormented by the mundane, but they do not improve on it.  Seeking sublime beauty, “The Outsider” finds only his unfitness to participate in that beauty, represses the memory, and escapes into illusion.  The significance of the ambivalent dark fantasy of “The Outsider” is clarified when Kuranes’ body washes up on the shore, or when we realize that the body of the speaker from “Ex Oblivione” was eventually found lying in his bed.  Similarly, the idealization of the “surface” that led Mishima to hone his body and his words into razor-sharp instruments for destroying his bodily and discursive being did not survive his death; not even in the form of literary immortality, for the literary specimens we call “Mishima’s corpus” are only the preparatory strokes, the hesitation marks, before the act which those words declared significant.  Immortality for Mishima’s corpus would refute the violence with which he rejected bodily and discursive being in favor of the razor-sharp, honed surface tested to destruction by his final act.

Despite the intentions of their authors, these texts amply warn us of the nihilating tendency inherent in confronting the bodily experience of consciousness from a reductively idealist or physicalist perspective.  Having rejected any possibility that the significance the bodily experience of consciousness calls for is determined in a way that makes human acts and words participate in a personally significant, globally relevant enacting of history, and confronted with the incoherence of efforts to reduce the bodily experience of human consciousness within the scope of mere bodies or mere words, one risks being faced with a choice between mere illusion and frank suicide—a choice frequently offered, for example, in TV shows like House.  The nihility which grounds all uncreated being, if there be any such thing, can take place in history only as fictional rationales for postponing or hastening death; the works of Lovecraft and Mishima stand together in asserting that it lacks by definition the potential to create life.

And, in all sincerity, can anything more than the absence of plunder be required of the law? Can the law — which necessarily requires the use of force — rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it and, consequently, turning might against right. This is the most fatal and most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined. It must be admitted that the true solution — so long searched for in the area of social relationships — is contained in these simple words: Law is organized justice.

Now this must be said: When justice is organized by law — that is, by force — this excludes the idea of using law (force) to organize any human activity whatever, whether it be labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, art, or religion. The organizing by law of any one of these would inevitably destroy the essential organization — justice. For truly, how can we imagine force being used against the liberty of citizens without it also being used against justice, and thus acting against its proper purpose?

(source: The Law, by Frederic Bastiat)

I re-read The Law at least three times between the ages of 16 and 21–and probably more than half-a-dozen times.  In this it outranks Locke’s Second Treatise, which I read either two or three times; the First Treatise, which I read only once; the extensive discussion of praxeology in von Mises’ Human Action, the work that was the pinnacle of my early inquiry into political economics (and that occasioned my last profound struggle with doubt in the existence of God).  I think Hayek is an essential modern thinker.  Milton and Rose Friedman were probably the strongest influence on my interpretations of contemporary political economy through the middle ’90s (along with William E. Simon).  I followed the Cato Institute in arguing that even “Who will build the roads?” was not necessarily a call for government intervention (which, actually, I really do think remains arguable).

And if I didn’t really extend “Mark from Michigan” much credit, even as a teenager in the early ’90s, I was sufficiently inclined to be vigilant about threats to the liberties of Americans that friends of mine were passing me his “briefings” on the “black helicopters” with conspiratorial whispers.  (I was just joking to my wife how easy it would be to take some snaps of some 727s being repainted at our local airport and start a conspiracy theory about “black airliners” and some sort of resettlement plan or other.  Circa 1992, a couple grainy, photocopied photos would pass for “evidence” pretty easily.)

So I’m really serious when I say that I wanted badly to be libertarian, and that in many respects my default frame of reference for interpreting American politics is still libertarian–for better and for worse–and that it’s not an accident that, when pressed, I described myself as “civil libertarian” during the decade or so when my only professed politics were a satirical “Vote for me when I run for Emperor” and an avoidance of entanglement with government that came near to Quietism.

(If you can check on Facebook, I currently have “Feudalism” for my political views.)

And I do not like ill-aimed attacks on various things under the name “libertarian,” including some actual libertarian and Libertarian-Party ideals, from Catholic thinkers who often seem to have a confused understanding of the relationship between Catholic social teaching, American political liberalism, Fabian socialism, and real political economy.  Some of the points in these critiques are good, and I have some sympathy with many of the ideas loosely grouped under the heading “Distributism”; but the Distributist Review has a terrible habit of just using “libertarian” as its bete noir in a misguided effort to define Distributism as a functioning American political movement.

But as I said in a recent post, I find it impossible to support the Libertarian Party–even at my most professedly libertarian, even in years when I have chosen to vote for the Taxpayer’s Party or Constitution Party to register dissatisfaction with the donkeys and elephants.  In that post, I did my best to explain the principles I’ve evolved for dealing with political decisions, principles which lead me to conclude that I cannot vote for the Libertarian Party’s current leaders and platform:

1. Always advocate the top-shelf good, that is, call for and demand just action on the highest priority issue for which you are able to articulate some proximate just action, some corrective to evil that promotes the common good, in the near term.
2. When apparently stymied on top-shelf issues, then advocate a temporary and tentative settlement for a “least-worst” if and only if the approach, person, or party you settle for does not advocate against the top-shelf good (or for intrinsic evil).

And given that approach, it is simply not possible for me to imagine supporting, in good conscience, a Libertarian Party that directly backs the legal protection of the slaughter of unborn innocent children.

But let me get down into specifics a little bit.  I can imagine three basic reasons to actually support the Libertarian Party, rather than merely use them as a vehicle to register a protest (something I can imagine doing precisely insofar as they are unlikely to win, and my protest unlikely to be registered as durable support).

1. Libertarianism has very real philosophical appeal, as I noted above, because it enunciates a clear vision of the limitations natural law imposes on the use of force by those with political power or authority, something that modern absolutists and modern totalitarians–the polarity of statism–consistently fail to take seriously.
2. Libertarianism has appeal as an alternative to typical partisan politics, and in fact positions itself precisely as the refutation to the nonsensical “If you don’t vote for Donkey One you support Elephant Two” zero-sum game.
3. Libertarianism also appeals to our desire for a pragmatic response to a rapid and disastrous slide into fascism into our society, to an ideological and bureaucratic focus on the utterly isolated and atomized individual made naked in every department of life to the unrestricted surveilling and intervening regime.

So let me take a look at all three of these appeals.  Again, I feel each of these strongly, myself–but when I weigh it out, the answer never comes up in favor of the Libertarian Party.

Philosophical

This could get deep, but let’s keep it simple.  The Libertarian Party is one claimant to the heritage of “classical liberalism,” which leads to passages that make my heart sing, like this one:

The prescribed role of government is to protect the rights of every individual including the right to life, liberty and property. Criminal laws should be limited in their application to violations of the rights of others through force or fraud, or to deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm. Therefore, we favor the repeal of all laws creating “crimes” without victims, such as the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes. We support restitution to the victim to the fullest degree possible at the expense of the criminal or the negligent wrongdoer. The constitutional rights of the criminally accused, including due process, a speedy trial, legal counsel, trial by jury, and the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty, must be preserved.

(source: Platform | Libertarian Party)

(I omit the jury-nullification plank, because that’s an issue with too many layers of back-and-forth.)

The challenge, of course, is that every claim of “force or fraud,” and every judgment of what “application” is appropriate or necessary, and every claim about what are the “rights of every individual,” and every attempt to enumerate in constitution or statute what is entailed by “life, liberty[,] and property,” rests on some understanding of these essential realities:  what is “property”?  what is the distinction between “fraud” and “privilege”?

That is why efforts to delineate a consistent libertarianism always end up renegotiating the metaphysical boundaries of an ideological commitment to an anti-metaphysical stance:

the libertarian will usually reply: “Well, I believe in a limited government, the government being limited to the defense of the person or property or the individual against invasion by force or fraud.” I have tried to show in my article, “The Real Aggressor” in the April 1954 Faith and Freedom that this leaves the conservative helpless before the argument “necessary for defense,” when it is used for gigantic measures of statism and bloodshed. There are other consequences equally or more grave. The statist can pursue the matter further: “If you grant that it is legitimate for people to band together and allow the State to coerce individuals to pay taxes for a certain service — “defense” — why is it not equally moral and legitimate for people to join in a similar way and allow the State the right to provide other services — such as post offices, “welfare,” steel, power, etc.? If a State supported by a majority can morally do one, why not morally do the others?” I confess that I see no answer to this question. If it is proper and legitimate to coerce an unwilling Henry Thoreau into paying taxes for his own “protection” to a coercive state monopoly, I see no reason why it should not be equally proper to force him to pay the State for any other services, whether they be groceries, charity, newspapers, or steel. We are left to conclude that the pure libertarian must advocate a society where an individual may voluntarily support none or any police or judicial agency that he deems to be efficient and worthy of his custom.

(source: Are Libertarians “Anarchists”? | Mises Institute)

One always needs to find the boundary, or the grounding; for the very limiting principles that make libertarian thought truly itself need justifying in order to actually limit anything. And so we find broad claims like this in the Libertarian Party platform:

Individuals should be free to make choices for themselves and must accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make…No individual, group, or government may initiate force against any other individual, group, or government….  Individuals own their bodies and have rights over them that other individuals, groups, and governments may not violate. Individuals have the freedom and responsibility to decide what they knowingly and voluntarily consume, and what risks they accept to their own health, finances, safety, or life….  We oppose government actions which either aid or attack any religion.

(source: Platform | Libertarian Party, emphasis added)

Now, I’ll mention without nit-picking the confusion over whether “individuals” already “have the freedom” or “should be free,” one that speaks to a deeper question of the relation of “freedom” in fact, “liberty” at law, and the proper nature of freedom.  But in the passage from the platform above, I’ve emphasized the serious philosophical incoherence at the heart of Libertarian Party expressions of libertarian political philosophy:  the notion that “individuals” are somehow proper subjects of law apart from “their bodies,” such that “their bodies” can be regarded as objects they “own,” is a metaphysical belief about the nature of human creatures, the nature of property, and the foundations of justice–and it is one that simply cannot be true.  In fact, the idea that a human creature’s proper subjectivity is radically distinct from bodily existence is a constant threat to the possibility of a binding natural law that addresses humans as they actually are.

All human creatures are embodied before they become capable of responsibly exercising their freedom, and live their whole lives in relationships, in varying degrees of dependency, which condition their freedom; no responsible law or standard of justice can possibly address humans as though they existed in a state of radical or unbridled subjectivity, or as though the human body was a negotiable economic instrument.

In fact, this denigration of the body to a merely instrumental role in human existence, and the concomitant treatment of a disembodied will as the proper subject of the laws, reverses the Lockean derivation of property rights from which it–especially the peculiarly American treatment of private property–nominally descends.  Rather than “property” being a necessary condition for each human creature’s freedom to live securely in society with other free creatures, and hence a moral imperative intrinsically related to each one’s basic needs and flourishing in society, “property” becomes a hypothetically natural and absolute responsiveness of the real to each individual’s subjective inclination.

If one contemplates the situation, it will be seen that the slave relationship is wholly improper for it presumes to transfer the control of one living man into the hands of a second living man. The condition is contrary to nature and can only be maintained if both play their specific assigned roles. The slave must act as though he did not control himself, as though, indeed, the slave-master did control him. The slave-master must act as though he really could and did control the slave. But the slave always controls himself, even though he may do so in harmony with his owner’s wishes. It is simply impossible for the owner to exert control.

By no process of the mind can the owner of the slave cause the slave to flex a single muscle. The only process open to the slave owner is to impose force or the threat of force. If obedience is obtained, it is because the slave elects to do as he is told. But he must be the actor in respect to his own energy. His owner cannot generate or control the slave’s energy. A condition of slavery must be classified as one instance of incorrect ownership. In this condition, a man seeks to control another man as though he were a property and not a man.

(source: Self-Ownership | Mises Institute)

But this reasoning simply will not do; it does not help us to distinguish one real condition from another, but simply declares that one real condition differs from another real condition–“real” insofar as they express intelligible relations of intelligible bodies that condition intentional behaviors of human creatures–in that one is a fiction because it cannot express the purely hypothetical unfettered subjectivity of each individual.  In fact, however, nothing can:  to deny that a slave has really lost freedom, and that the justice or injustice of that loss is a proper subject of inquiry, is to respond to social conditions like the Christian Scientist or Scientologist responds to physical or mental conditons; it is to attempt to live in denial.

Taken to an unhealthy extreme, the libertarian position ends up with slogans like “taxation is theft” which can justify any government action only as a pragmatic “lesser evil” that assumes an ultimate nihilism in which the regime can never be anything but the best deal negotiated among conflicting interests, each using force or threat of force to achieve their ends.  It is not hard to trace the relationship between “taxation is theft” and Proudhon’s “property is theft,” even when a sincere effort to distinguish the two is made.

Must we then convince ourselves, and each other, that the only authentic regime is a proceduralized Bellum omnium contra omnes, in which every individual is regarded by the regime as a social atom bound to other social atoms by the weak force of contracts enforceable only insofar as they implicate only the potential concerns of a social atom that have been made intelligible to the regime?  If so, then I am at a loss to see how libertarianism differs except in its moment on the trajectory of practical politics from the Romanticism that gives us Progressivism and American liberalism–these are, after all, logically indistinguishable offshoots of the Enlightenment reasoning that gave us not only the best of Locke but also the worst of Comte….

Because I believe that humans must be governed according to their natures, I cannot subscribe to the metaphysical nonsense that is adduced to justify Libertarian Party libertarianism.

I will continue with parts 2 and 3–the appeal of the Libertarian Party as an alternative to donkeys and elephants in our party politics, and the pragmatic use of libertarian policies by those not philosophically aligned with them, in another post soon.

I’ve had a lot to say about that, actually, and could say a lot more:

• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2014/10/03/rehabilitation
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/01/22/this-exam-only-needs-one-question
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/01/28/courts-pretty-definitely-right-bigots-quite-certainly-disgusting
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/04/01/torches-and-pitchforks
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/04/02/on-not-being-base-vile-or-poltroonish
• www.hangtogetherblog.com/2015/12/17/perverse-vindication-is-vindication-still
• inkan.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/fruits-which-the-good-and-wise-bitterly-deplore
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/dont-use-exclamation-points
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/kulturkampf-is-just-what-it-says
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/dont-expect-torch-and-pitchfork-crowds-to-behave-consistently
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/the-banality-of-nihilism
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/there-are-nerds-and-then-there-are-bigots
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/christian-resistance-to-unlawful-authority-a-brief-sourcebook-with-pictures
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/on-resistance
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/you-cant-sleep-with-dignity-on-procrustes-bed
• inkan.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/love-among-slaves
• inkan.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/unjust-discrimination-must-be-avoided
• inkanblot.com/blog/public-personal/brilliantly-spoken-and-true
• inkanblot.com/blog/public-personal/defenestrating-institutionalized-evil-one-clever-devil-at-a-time
• inkanblot.com/blog/reflections/on-theology/why-you-must-understand-analogy-or-the-misrule-of-bad-metaphors

We are not wrong to recognize our frustration–literally, the lack of efficacy or support for our intentions, their failure to achieve fruition, and our sense that the indifference of some, the excuse-making of others, the fecklessness of many, and our own lack of resolve are all part of the problem.

It is very important to take the measure of the situation.  I think we all need a much heavier dose of sobriety than we are usually given, in popular culture or even at church:  [see “The Problem of Nihilism in Public Discourse” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and “The Banality of Nihilism” for more.]

But at some point, some good person always asks the right question:  what, then, are we to do?  The question is perennial, and gets asked from many angles.  There are plenty of resources to suggest a direction for tackling this question.

Still, This “what to do” question is harder to answer that than to be dismayed at the difficulty of answering.  It takes time to dig down into the faith, into the hope we really do have, to find its subtler connections to our everyday situation–the options between martyrdom proper and practical-atheist complacency that we navigate creatively together in pursuit of our holy calling.

Herewith, then, a few steps.

1. Sober up

“Realism” should not make you ignore the big picture–the really big picture, the one with God in it and your responsibilities to your family and your neighbors in it, the one where your prayers matter but cannot be unmoored from your concrete obligations, the one that is true even if the statistics and the promises and the conjectures of the chatterers and the pitchers and the candidates, Hucksters and Trumperies and all, prove as false as their all-too-human (and often corrupt and criminal) opposition claims.  You are not choosing between options presented you on TV, unless you have succumbed to the mistaken notion that TV is a window on reality, forgetting that TV news exists to sell your attention span to advertisers.  That’s right, folks.  The mass media buy and sell your attention spans as surely as markets for the securitization of debt buy and sell the poor.

So stop believing them.  Stop judging things in their terms.  Find out who makes the real decisions, and focus your attention and advocacy on their reasoning and actions.

Do not believe that you know something about reality when you know what “wins the game” in horse-race handicapping of campaigns, or in hypothetical vote counting and prediction, or in staging the confrontations and feeding the “narratives” that make for good attention-span sales and bolster the self-importance and saleability of those with the media muscle to make or break celebrity brands.  What you know is how to manipulate the delusions of others.  If you need to do that, then do it knowing that is what you are doing; do it effectively and ruthlessly, all the while *also* being sure that you are honest with yourself and about yourself.  This is light years away from what happens when most people enter politics, or from what we naively assume in typical news-driven political conversation.

Quit thinking in cliches, even if you have to spout a slogan here and there to rally the troops.

2. Think your way in from the edges

We don’t want, and shouldn’t want, to live in fantasies of “what might be” or to spend too much time on our pipe dreams.  (Much as I love pipe dreams and Modest Proposals, and wish I had time to flesh them out more.)

But we also cannot make realistic judgments if we do not understand the parameters of the situation.  For this reason, reframing the question is a basic move in political debate, and the frame of various mass media (and social media) conversations ends up seeming more important than any of the actual decisions or the relevant data.  Not a few problems are much simpler than anyone involved has any interest in allowing them to be, sadly (e.g., bathrooms).  And some problems are constantly reframed as a debate over “solutions” when in fact nobody involved seems to have any serious idea what is to be done (e.g., entitlement reform).

Reframing isn’t bad, any more than any other rhetorical gesture is; the problem with this, as with any move from “slippery slope” to “appeal to authority,” has to do with the substantive question at hand and the effects of the gesture on our habits of thought.  When you can show us that beyond a certain threshold there is nothing that will prevent a predictable bad result, you are quite right to make a “slippery slope” argument–and that does not protect you in the least from being wrong about any particular one.  Rhetorical gestures are not magically “true” or “false”; they are honest/dishonest and apt/inapt, and always entirely contingent upon our knowledge of reality.

So in keeping with “Sober up,” we need to be ready to engage in proper reframing of our own.  When someone comes at you with a false choice, or assumes that X is inevitable unless you do Y that seems unacceptable, then you need to stop and analyze the total set of knowns, unknowns, and possibilities more carefully.  Has X really been decided, or can you reasonably advocate for Z (even if Z is unlikely) when you find Y unacceptable?  If so, you ought to do so.

And that means that you must become accustomed to doing something that is not acceptable in formal logic and academic debate, but essential in public discourse:  you must regularly, even habitually, reject the premise of arguments presented to you.

When people try to logic you into a corner, you must always suspect a false choice, interrogate them to understand the nature of the enthymeme, and search for an alternative that enables you to reject the (usually suppressed, because often implausible if stated) premise.

Therefore, a dialogue:

Jimmy:  We have to unite around Trump, because otherwise Hillary will get to pick the next Supreme Court Justices!
Jerry:  Do you think Trump can really beat Hillary?
Jimmy:  Well, not if we don’t unite around him!
Jerry:  Why don’t we reject him and pick someone else?
Jimmy:  But a convention fight would only weaken the GOP!
Jerry:  But wouldn’t Trump weaken the GOP?
Jimmy:  But Trump is our best chance for beating Hillary!
Jerry:  But will Trump actually be any better than Hillary?
Jimmy:  But he’ll have to rely on the GOP to win!
Jerry:  Why don’t we reject him and pick someone else?
Jimmy:  But whatever we do that weakens Trump helps Hillary!
Jerry:  How so?
Jimmy:  Well, you have to vote, don’t you?
Jerry:  Uh, no….
Jimmy:  But if you don’t vote, your vote gets wasted!
Jerry:  And if I vote for someone I think is bad for the country, my vote gets perverted, right?
Jimmy:  But not voting for Trump is the same as voting for Hillary!
Jerry:  Oh, really, how’s that work out mathematically?
Jimmy:  Well, if 100 people vote, and each side would have 50/50, and you take away two votes from one side, that make it 51/49 percent against that side!
Jerry:  Hmmm.  I’m not saying I would think it made sense substantively or morally even if those numbers were right, but…how are you getting your 100 people voting?  I mean, it’s not like we select exactly 100 voters per district or something…right?
Jimmy:  But however many people live in that place, that’s the total, and whoever doesn’t vote for one side is helping the other.
Jerry:  What if most of the people, or even a sizeable plurality of the people, don’t vote?
Jimmy:  Well, then we just count the ones who are voting.
Jerry:  But if we only count after the vote, and only count the ones who voted, then how does your “take away” work?
Jimmy:  No, see, you start with the polls of likely voters, then you move from there to what actually happened, and your decision not to vote changed that “likely voter” poll outcome to be what really happened.  Your not-voting is like a vote for Hillary!
Jerry:  I’m pretty sure you just conflated fiction with reality, there.  Who’s buying the next round?

There is nothing “unrealistic” about insisting that we make the actual decision in front of us without conflating it with mass-media driven narratives about the meaning of polls and the relationship between various blips of reportage and the real decision-making.  Those stories are always going to inflate the importance of whatever aggrandizes the national news media and their corporate overlords, and will do so in a manner that promotes the celebrity brands (and not necessarily the principles or the interests) of those politicians and others who abet them in that highly profitable trade in human attention spans.

So that’s a start:  replace fiction with substance in your discourse and decision-making.  I’ll be back soon with more steps to take.

This reminds me of one of the footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s “Datum Centurio,” a short story in the form of an imaginary dictionary entry (for the word “date”) from the future: “Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.”

(source: Surrogate mother pressured to abort triplets)

I have long been aware of the way that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction tends, whatever effort to the contrary folks tend to exert, to reinforce the stable understanding of humanity that has remained largely unchanged, fads and fictions in popular philosophy notwithstanding, as long as humans have had leisure to reflect on their nature.  It is no accident that Aristotle and Aquinas largely agree on what humans are, or that they agree with Augustine and Avicenna, or again with Anselm–and on and on, and A to Z of the epochal thinkers of human nature come down to certain basics.

Those who try to re-invent humanity invariably have to re-invent the same features of humanity with different names, under some preferred mode of control that “fixes” their preferred distortions in place.  These built-in features, whose relationship to our biological existence and spiritual significance I describe as “thinking in brains,” mean that we have definite capacities and limitations, definite possibilities of thought and existence and definite boundaries to what conceivable things we can realize.  We can often strike a pose, in our minds or in our most ephemeral fictions, that nobody could possibly hold while actively working and living in the complex web of relationships that define our actual existence, the creaturely being of humans.

And because we are often trying to hold a pose that is not well-fitted to our creaturely being, we find ourselves exposed to certain threats, certain horrors, that we must keep at bay in controllable fictions and in “morality plays” whose theme is our power to finally change humanity, to force all our neighbors into the mold that makes us happiest.  And these fictions, when they are compelling, spell out our fear of what we cannot actually redesign, our fear of what is too real for us to control leaks out in the nervous laughter that turns into farce whenever we try to “repeat an act” of horror.  Horror, it turns out, is “conservative” in its essential underpinnings:  It reflects human nature’s reality beneath the level of our social and technological manipulation, the reality that doesn’t go away when we tell civil lies about it.

This idea, both in my days as a radical occasionalist, voluntarist species of nominalist who believed that post-structuralism offered me the best textual strategy for radically relativizing all human authority to the divine Author’s written Word, and in my recovering sanity as a metaphysical realist who believes that only a concretely realized coordination of the Word written and the sacramental Real Presence of the Word Incarnate suffices to ground us in Creation and nourish us in the grace of Redemption, animates my interest in the way that culture changes, often without regard to our stated intentions, as we compete in our efforts to defend and institutionalize our preferred lies and popular errors.

And so I have been interested to watch the following exchange unfold.  First, Jeremy Neill with an article that I commented on casually when it came out, arguing that eventually the self-destructive forces of inhumane ideology must give way to a consensus on what humanity actually is, but doing so with some assumptions many of us will find ill-considered:

Karl Marx once asserted that life determines consciousness, and that consciousness does not determine life. He meant that underlying technologies and infrastructures produce corresponding worldviews, at a conscious level, in the minds of people. People might think that they are the ones who are forming their opinions. But, for Marx, the stories that people tell themselves about how they are directing their lives at a conscious level are just-so stories. In fact, people’s conscious opinions are being determined—inexorably and subconsciously—by the deep social infrastructure.

I am not a Marxist. But when it comes to the sexuality wars, I think Marx might have been on to something. It probably was, more than anything else, these mid-twentieth-century technology and infrastructure shifts—that “life” that determines consciousness—that produced the rapid and dramatic opinion shifts we have seen in the last decade.

We humans were the ones who created these changes in technology and infrastructure. But once created they took on a life of their own, with massive and unintended opinion-formation consequences.

(source: On Human Sexuality, Conservative Victory is Inevitable)

I agree that our development and use of various technological means to manage reproduction–and to truncate ourselves sexually, even to the point of surgically mutilating ourselves and slaughtering children–has far-reaching consequences.  I do not, however, think that it makes sense to treat ideology as an epiphenomenon of technology; I suspect Neill does this largely to sublimate the natural-law moral argument he might be making to a more “neutral” argument about political economy, and I actually agree that Marx is the right thinker to go to in such a gesture.  I disagree, however, that such a gesture is likely to be useful in any but an “Even Marx, who you might not expect me to cite, happens to agree with me here” manner.

Carl Trueman then weighed in with a gloomier, and I think more clear-eyed, perspective.  As one might expect from a historian in a confessional evangelical tradition, it mixes a strong thread of realism with a nominalist conclusion:

I agree with Neill that the sexual revolution is ultimately doomed, simply because it will be impossible to deny the given realities of human nature indefinitely with any degree of impunity. Transgenderism is both a specific example of this and emblematic of the whole. A man who believes he is a woman can have his body mutilated and pumped full of chemicals as much as he wants. Yet he remains only a mutilated, chemically distorted man, however much others might encourage him in his delusion. But it is also true that in his fight against reality, such a man has wreaked irreparable and irreversible damage on himself. Thus, in the grand scheme we cannot ultimately deny human nature; But we can do a whole of lot of damage in the attempt.

The fact that the sexual revolution is doomed does not mean that it will give way to older, more traditional patterns, however many alternative communities, Benedictine and otherwise, might continue to resist. Human beings are doing, and will continue to do, incalculable and quite possibly irreversible harm to themselves in their attempts at pretending to be their own little gods. And I believe that we are just insane enough to destroy ourselves rather than accept the obvious fact, that we are not free to be and do whatever we want.

(source: Not So Sanguine)

I basically agree with Trueman that Neill’s “silver lining” to what may be generations of grinding, self-destructive delusion on a colossal and legally-enforced scale is small consolation, and does not account for the possibilities of institutionalized evil and thoroughly pagan ideology and civic religion.  The United States of the Blaine Amendments, of evangelicals who “sowed the wind” of public schools designed to breed an Americanist religiosity (and suppress the Catholicism of “those foreigners”) and “reaped the whirlwind” of schools where prayer is banned (increasingly without regard for the caveats that many of us have long exploited), is no stranger to civic religion exalted against authentic Christianity.

Christendom always was a tenuous balance of forces, rarely thoroughly good; and the classical liberal consensus which emerged from Christendom has kept much of the best and the worst in a dynamic tension which has allowed some of each to flourish, and some of each to be forgotten, in fairly radical ways while granting historically unusual peace and prosperity in some corners of the world.  But civilizations have been built on paganism before, and I would be reverting to millennarianism if I were to assert as historically certain that the remains of Christendom would never be built over with a pagan civilization again.

(I would also be lying if I did not assert that even a hostile paganism might be preferable to a triumphant secularism!)

Yet Trueman seems to make two incompatible claims concerning the dominant reality in history:  the reality of human creatures as such, and the reality of human efforts to rationalize and institutionalize lies and errors.  If the former is the dominant reality, then Trueman should be able to provide more hope to those who struggle to systematically reinforce whatever contact with reality our culture will allow; if the latter is the dominant reality, then Trueman’s gloom is not only accurate, but renders his realist assertion meaningless.

And it is with these things in mind that I discover my friend and co-blogger Greg Forster’s effort to find another “way forward” that is neither so mercilessly happy nor so self-defeatingly tragic as these:

As for tradition, we cannot order our lives without it, but it too has never been sufficient for social order – particularly since the Reformation, which rendered all appeals to “tradition” permanently controversial. Religious freedom is flatly incompatible with treating tradition as a source of public authority. If tradition is the basis on which we resolve our public disputes, then disputes between traditions are irresolvable.

All this is to say that neither “conservatism” nor “tradition” is what we’re most interested in. What we really want is justice, mercy and love of neighbor. And those things can be built in ways that are not “conservative” or “traditional.” After the collapse of the sexual revolution, the world will have been remade. Carl is right that there will not be much hope for justice, mercy and love of neighbor if achieving those goals depends upon the reconstruction of an older, pre-sexual-revolution social world.

But why must that be the case? Wherever people are people, human beings made in the image of God, there is hope for justice, mercy and love of neighbor.

(source: Neither Sanguine Nor Resigned)

Now, I am happy to agree that if we define “conservatism” as strictly an American Republican “tapping the brakes on the railroad of Progress” phenomenon, and make no further effort to deal with a Burkean (or Hayekian) preservation of cultural institutions because of their embedded lore, or a Kirkian belief in durable wisdom, or a Catholic view of natural law as always essentially realized in certain human and social principles–that is, if we first assert Progress as the normative myth of our civic religion, and then offer “conservatism” only as a mechanism for adjusting it, then of course we will find it of little value.  For much this reason, I rarely bother to publicly identify as “conservative” or debate the nature of “true” conservatism, anymore (if I were to be a merely American ideologue, I would be a libertarian, anyway).

Likewise, if we take “tradition” to be the sort of thing that can be “rendered…permanently controversial,” then we have already foreclosed the discussion:  such a tradition lacks potential as a formative social reality.  If, however, we believe “tradition” has more senses than this–if there are human possibilities not subject to this deterministic schematization of history–then we would have to question Greg’s formulation.

And I think we do need to question Greg’s formulation, because he seems to be at once resisting historical determinism–Neill’s appeal to Marx, and Trueman’s narrative of ruin–and asserting it.  Not only is “tradition…permanently controversial,” but “after the collapse of the sexual revolution, the world will have been remade.”  Greg does not seem to be permitting “tradition” to operate unless it operates at the scale of global history, and according to a philosophy of history that imagines Progress as unfolding through successive revolutions.  Accordingly, Greg must locate the permanent features of humanity–which, being a Christian, he knows must exist–in areas which he hopes to conceive as untouched by “tradition” or “conservatism” and not “controversial” even in a “world…remade.”  He calls these, in a fitting reference to the prophets, “justice, mercy and love of neighbor.”

Now, in one sense, I am happy to agree that we can practice these things in some measure, no matter how totalitarian and secularist, or how pagan, the world becomes.  But “in some measure” is not a worthy or sufficient goal for public discourse and public action.  The more institutionalized evil is, the harder a culture works to enforce its distortions and silence those who speak truth about reality, the less likely it is that justice will actually be done in a way that can be seen to be such publicly, that mercy can actually be shown in effective and durable ways, that “love of neighbor” will show up as a shared life more often than a prudent silence about the neighbor’s conformity or nonconformity to the prevailing ideological imperatives.  If the Obama administration’s entire conduct had been a political cartoon designed to illustrate this truth, it could not have done so more aptly (short of directly re-enacting a dystopian fiction).

To do justice, one needs to know what sort of beings one is dealing with; one must believe that it matters that justice is seen to be done, and not that mere conditioning to deliberately silence reflection with consumerist excess is “justice” if it involves relatively few public acts of physical violence.  To have mercy, one must have a conception of “covenant” or solidarity that makes it possible to judge when reconciliation achieves the end of justice–to enable the practice of charity, rather than seizure of the other as an object of desire–better than enforcement of laws, better than a rigid insistence on individual autonomy and self-determination.  One must know when a contract is an unconscionable bargain, even if “freely” entered into, to have justice or show mercy; and that requires a frame of reference outside that of nominally free individuals voluntarily entering into agreements.  And one must have a sense of what a “neighbor” is–a human creature, like me–and how a human creature can actually be an object and subject of “love,” if one is to practice “love of neighbor.”

And how will anyone learn these things, without a teacher?  For there is plenty of law, especially in regimes built on anti-human ideology, that is not “justice”; plenty of happy-faced action, of pleasant bureaucratic intervention, that is in no sense “mercy”; plenty of niceness or amorous activity that is not “love” of someone whose humanity is too ignored or obscured to be considered a “neighbor.”  If there is no one to hand on–traditio–the understanding of humanity, and human society, that makes it possible to practice justice and mercy meaningfully, and no scope for their significant public exercise, then what could be the point of asserting the permanent possibility of “justice, mercy, and love of neighbor”?  And how could it be “love of neighbor” to fail to advocate for the neighbor’s self-understanding of himself as a proper subject and object of justice and mercy, a potential recipient and practitioner of the theological virtue of love?

And this is why I think it is useful to go back to the prophets:

He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

(source: Micah 6 RSVCE)

Not accidentally, nor at all unusually in the prophets, this passage immediately follows a reminder (one might call it “conservative” to reach back into the past, this way) of God’s historical work in shaping His People, a model of what happens when the powerful suborn convenient lies rather than truth.  And not accidentally, the “reproach” of the prophet, here, is taken up in the liturgy in the Impropreria, or Reproaches, of the Good Friday service.  The People of God are, after all, in the first instance those who learn that we must “walk humbly with [our] God” because we have abandoned Him, turned away from His justice and spurned His love, and even treated His mercy as an excuse rather than a costly forgiveness and an opportunity to reconciliation with His justice.  Only in our self-understanding as the forgiven and Beloved do we become, by the infusion of the theological virtue of charity, capable of “love of neighbor” in a durable sense; only then do we find ourselves participating in the suffering of Christ, who in His suffering turns to those who abandon Him and who scorn Him, crying,

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

(source: Matthew 23:37 RSVCE)

And so I contend that lament is justified, not least because the “perverse vindication” of truth happens–as Trueman points out–at a constant and damning price in human lives, human beings shattered, human souls lost to Hell without our best efforts to rescue them.

Joy comes in the morning, but weeping does endure for the night.  They do come in rejoicing with their sheaves, but they went forth with weeping.  However much the misguided press strategies common in my own tradition may seem to mandate a habit of grinning like a jackanapes, the simple truth is that Jesus Christ and his Apostles and the prophets before them knew joy as a present hope of a future reality that granted them a strong reason and desire to continue in their suffering service, not as a complacent cheer or constant projection of smiling unctuosity!

Rather, it is vital that we cultivate our resources for human self-understanding, shore up our institutions on whatever scale we are able, fight rear-guard actions in terms of the prevailing ideology wherever those actually do serve our institutions (without regard for foolish consistency), and never neglect to actually do good and to repudiate every kind of bigotry.

And it is for this reason that I think it is important to notice that, human nature being in fact invariant, efforts to distort it have predictable patterns and consequences.

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions–limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions.

(source: Humanae Vitae, emphasis added)

And, as I have pointed out before, this is in fact what we find.  Human nature does not actually change; we merely reflect its realities well or badly in our popular discourse and our laws.  And, having decided to do exactly what Humanae Vitae predicted, our society does so quite badly indeed.  We have radically subverted the meaning of marital consent, which is precisely the one kind of consent to a sexual bond that it is possible for humans to actually give, and so we are increasingly reliant on absurd and self-defeating simulacra of marriage to restrain every kind of rape, abuse, and false accusation about sexual behavior; our laws are radically subverted by the lies we tell ourselves; our capacity to educate, to form human beings in an intergenerational wisdom that exceeds their commercially useful impulses, is crippled; and in these conditions, does anyone expect “justice, mercy, and love of neighbor” to flourish in any meaningful degree?

No, we can expect to see confusion flourish, at best.  And conflict, more likely.  And that means that we will have to decide to live as a Resistance, or we will actually be forced to redefine ourselves endlessly to pretend we are “conservative,” or to resign ourselves to irrelevance if we accept that “traditional” is now “rendered…permanently controversial.”

But this is not defeatism.  It is what happens when, despite our deep, even almost desperate, grief and sadness–and frustration in our love, and fury at the harm human creatures do to each other in the name of being uncreated–we know that we are triumphant.

Because we have always known what our victory looked like.

There are several word/thing relationships that we really MUST distinguish (not sever, sunder, separate, or believe to be exclusive–but observe that the terms do not refer to precisely the same thing in precisely the same way). Let me just enumerate as briefly as I can manage:

1. marriage per se, or “natural marriage”
2. marriage of the baptized, or “sacramental marriage”
3. civil recognition of marriage
4. ecclesial recognition of marriage

Each of these deals with either a state of affairs (1 & 2, a describable, observable, intelligible, verifiable condition) or an official notice that such a state of affairs exists, needed in order to adjudicate its consequents (3 & 4, instruments whose meaning is wholly contingent on acknowledgement of a state of affairs).

In dealing with these, we potentially encounter a whole realm of “other” terms, as well, terms which describe states of notification or transition or discovery with regard to #1-4: attempted marriage, putative marriage, nullity, “annulment,” marriage license, divorce, “remarriage,” etc.

What happens to people deeply confused by the radical nominalism that undergirds our entire system of Constitutional laws and classical liberal presuppositions about politics–that is, my fellow children of the Enlightenment (made children of dubious legitimacy by the discovery that we are also Heirs of God in Christ Jesus)–is that we confuse arguing about how to settle arguments about words about things with the actual constitution of things. We barely even notice that we have quit believing we can know things, know them good and well, without our knowing being subject to renegotiation by clever wordsmiths.

I spent over a decade of my life working hard to be a card-carrying post-structuralist literary critic/theorist while also arguing that «il n’y a pas de hors-texte» opened modernity to Biblicist interpretation of divine revelation. I do know well how profoundly we are ensorcelled by our own spelling of words, friends.

But it is quite impossible that any real state of affairs–in a community, in a family, in a nation-state, in a communion–should meaningfully persist across generations merely by continuous renegotiation of words.

We must–it is utterly essential that we do this–return to an understanding in which our language (including our legal language, and especially including our “science” of humanity, which has been so badly vitiated by the separation of the reality from the data) is subordinate to reality, serves our understanding of reality, and therefore can only carry authority to the extent that its claims are demonstrably about reality.

In such an understanding of reality, a cleverly construed counterexample to one register of a word’s meaning would not justify erasure of that word’s connection to the reality which is always, intrinsically, greater than the word. Where such an understanding of reality is institutionalized, nihilism is not permitted to win; it is prevented, with authority backed by power, from doing so. Only such an understanding preserves human life and provides for the flourishing of those who, body and breath, have “become a living soul” and may, by becoming “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” cause others to do the same.

And so, I apologize to those whose critiques of post-structuralist hermeneutics I scoffed at when I, like some who read me now, mistakenly believed that I could see the trajectory better than they. Their vantage was superior, and what I have said above is deeply dependent on the words of others.

But it really does come to this: a state of affairs exists; that state of affairs has consequences; those consequences implicate civil society and ecclesial communion; and the only just way to acknowledge that state of affairs and adjudicate those consequences is one which preserves the essential distinctions between one sort of thing–a marriage, that is, a potentially fecund, indissoluble, voluntary bond between a man and a woman–and whatever other sorts of things you might like to arrange.

It is this distinction, and not any larger “religious” versus “secular” distinction, which is really at issue, here. It is not a question of whose will is to be imposed, though our incoherent politics makes it so, but of what really *is* and whether we plan to compel each other to lie about it.

And it is the situation of this question at present as “you must all lie, or you will be treated as beyond-the-pale, as those who have no claim on justice while you persist in these views” to which the faithful have no choice but to vigorously and vehemently object, and which we are obligated to use all just means to resist, reverse, undermine, and nullify.

Or, as I said in the linked post:  

A man and a woman inclined to marriage—or a man seeking a woman, or a woman seeking a man, desiring marriage—have begun to receive the seed of marriage, in their desire for permanence and their inclination to exclusivity, especially as those two are linked to their sexual behavior. However, the planting of this seed remains uncertain until all of the elements that determine marriage—the elements the Church has recognized in the dominical sayings, as well as the rest of revelation—are manifested in the marriage.

Thus the divine pedagogy, and the Church’s Magisterium as its submissive agent and authoritative recognition, require of all responsible people an earnest teaching that marriage must be an indissoluble, exclusive union of a man and a woman ordered to the engendering and education of their children. That is, the divine pedagogy through both nature and dominical teaching establishes this meaning, and this responsibility for teachers, with regard to natural marriage. (We must at all times avoid confusing “natural marriage” with “civil [recognition of] marriage,” which is related to but not constitutive of “marriage” per se.)

In the Sacrament of Matrimony, Christ and His Church bless, witness, and enlarge the spiritual and practical benefits of marriage. In the order of generation, the family—the society formed by natural marriage—stands prior to the Church, and is not constituted by her. However, the action of Christ in determining within history what might have been obscured by human sinfulness also teaches us to recognize a special grace, and a special obligation, that a man and a woman may minister to the Church who witnesses their marriage. The Church has clearly recognized that the man and the woman together are the ministers of matrimony, and as ministers of grace for the whole Church, the man and the woman have both a privilege and an obligation which honors their calling and holds them responsible, not alone to themselves, but to a whole community.

The Church’s “pastoral activity,” therefore, must continually work to annex to the desires of man of woman, and woman for man, the ideas of fruitfulness and permanence; to annex to the desires of man and woman for permanent, fruitful union the ideas of responsible and blessed service, in rearing children and in sharing the blessings of holy matrimony with the whole Church; and to clarify that there is not, and cannot be, any other “marriage” but that which by nature has been clearly set forth, but revelation underscored, and by dominical saying determined beyond all contingency.

To that end, the Church must clearly state the distinctions between marriage and “civil [recognition of] marriage,” which is valid when there is a natural marriage actually recognized by a civil document, and a dead letter (or perverse folly!) when there is no such natural marriage. Two men, or two women, or whatever else is not one man and one woman mutually consenting to indissoluble, exclusive union ordered to fecundity, cannot be the subjects of marriage, and no regime can cause them to be so. Nor, indeed, can the Church; the Church can no more make a “marriage” of a same-sex union than she can make Aphrodite a member of the Holy Trinity.

It is therefore urgent that the Church clearly define her own deference to the authentic definition of “natural marriage,” so as to distinguish both the “ecclesial [recognition of] marriage” that is part of the discipline of the Sacrament of Matrimony and the “civil [recognition of] marriage” that is part of a just civil order’s response to the realities of marriage and family life, without appearing to muddle categories or to speak in Gnostic fashion of a secret “sacramental marriage” invisibly exalted above mundane “civil marriage.” These incoherent terms must be abandoned at all costs, lest we add confusion to a disordered world, rather than speaking as the “experts on humanity” we once claimed we could be.

(source: Survey 2015 | Inkandescence)

I hasten to say that in a technical sense, that deference is not only abundantly defined but loudly trumpeted–yet it would be good to hear the Church dictate to the world the terms in which marriage is understood, and let the world strive against reality with no shade of confusion to hide from conscience in.

Forty-four percent of the respondents to a 2011 Baylor University study reported spending no time whatsoever seeking “eternal wisdom,” and 19 percent replied that “it’s useless to search for purpose.” In the same year, Lifeway, an evangelical research agency, found that 46 percent of those it surveyed never wondered whether or not they will go to heaven, and 28 percent reported that finding a deeper purpose in life wasn’t a priority for them.

This variety of “none” is more confounding and dismaying. It’s one thing to respond to atheists who think you have the wrong answers or seekers who think you might have part of a bigger answer, but what of those who think you are answering questions that don’t even need to be asked? Higher purpose? Eternal joy? Meh.

(source: From “Meh” to “Amen” | Molly Oshatz | First Things)

Perhaps I can use this research to point out a truth which, though it cuts both ways, still cuts true:

One way this cuts is that there is nothing absolutely new in this situation.  Our moment in history is unique and nonrepeatable, but so are all the others, and it shares with many of those others almost all the essential features of this situation.  “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.”

But the other thing to notice here is that it is essentially this finity of mortal possibilities which leads us to anticipate an illimitable God’s action to radically and finally alter the situation; and when we live with the illusion of mass-produced “personal experiences” and a notionally illimitable right to choose every feature of our being–an illimitable right which must nevertheless be constantly monitored for compliance with the totally illimitable rights of every other being–we are being distracted from that boundary.  We will constantly need to rationalize, regulate, and revolutionize our “personal experiences” to keep them in line with the latest popular notions, or find ourselves constantly standing athwart the totally illimitable rights of our neighbors to choose every feature of their beings.

We live, that is, in a society rapidly deconstructing itself into the Dark Ages, into the era when Christendom had not yet emerged and the barbarians lived by their interpretations of the ruins they lived among–ruins of a paganism that built highways and fora and galleys manned by slaves, that exposed inconvenient infants to death and conducted transcontinental trade negotiations–the paganism that worked out definitions of justice we have long abandoned, while we cling to their habit of treating all decisions of the few whose socioeconomic status granted them freedom of the city as prototypically human, and defining as defectively human more and more of those who will not accept the literally patronizing representation of their class among the dominant elite classes.

If you do not believe me, try to walk through an airport like a free human being and a citizen, without submitting to the useless ritual humiliation demanded of you; try to pay a reasonable share of taxes without providing every detail of your household to a “real” citizen–a member of the DMV class–for their patronizing approval of your claims.  Try being heard, even on a parking ticket, without having a “real” citizen–a lawyer–to patronize you at court.  Try even speaking to a doctor without being patronized by a “real” citizen–a member of the DMV class, whether notionally “private sector” or notionally your “civil servant.”  Explain your rights, and see if the derivative sense of “patronizing” does not describe the kindest reactions you get.

And try even making it to birth, if your mother’s OB-GYN detects trisomy 21 in your genetic makeup.  Exposure of infants returns whenever humans revert to unrestrained paganism–count on it.

But we live there precisely because there really is no new thing under the sun; because God has made our universe less than the total of our capacity for experience, for desire, for love; because we are not designed to find our institutionalized lies fulfilling.

I could go with the famous Augustine line, here.  I could go with more Ecclesiastes.

But let us hear it from “a prophet, and one of their own”–not a Cretan, this time, but a German:

It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow there.
Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man–and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whiz!
I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star.
Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small.
His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
“We have discovered happiness” — say the Last Men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth.
One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome.
Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd, and one herd!
Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision.
People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled — otherwise it upsets their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

(source: Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (excerpts))

And a source still closer to home:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
Alas! Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form,
shade without colour,
Paralysed force,
gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes,
to death’s other kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

(source: The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot)

And do please note that each of these writers lived at a different moment on the same arc that bends toward eternity–and therefore certainly beckons past our falsely secure reckoning of history.

There is a specific for these maladies.  To start gently, try these.

.

.

.

The nones need messengers whose presence makes it impossible to say “meh”—in other words, saints.

(source: From “Meh” to “Amen” | Molly Oshatz | First Things)

It’s a long way to Tipperary, and it’s a long way from here to charitable, hospitable Toleration.

Here’s your reference frame:

Last month, as Indiana’s rather tame religious-freedom legislation was being torched by the mob, America’s more devout dissenters were informed that the price of participation in the marketplace was the subjugation of one’s conscience to one’s Caesar. “You can’t opt out of the law,” the agitators explained. “This isn’t the Jim Crow South!” Their core message? That if we all keep quiet about our views — and if we treat commercial transactions as commercial transactions — nobody will end up getting hurt. Or, put another way: “Cater my wedding, you bigot.”

(source: The Tolerant Jeweler Who Harbored an Impure Opinion of Same-Sex Marriage)

So at the time, the range of responses that didn’t require an immediate change of laws (which I think is strongly warranted) and didn’t insist that only bigots could oppose gay marriage described an arc from “go along to get along” to “deal with the problem when it comes to you” to “do business with absolutely anyone, but do it in a noisily Christian way.”

(Actual bigots just don’t get a voice in this conversation, as far as I’m concerned.  But people who treat others according to their real human dignity and yet decline to participate in their delusions and promote their self-destruction need a sensible, lawful, just way to do what’s right.)

All three of the above strategies were recommended by those (including me) who thought that pre-emptively declaring “won’t serve pizza at gay weddings” was unwise.  My favorite is the last, actually.

This case suggests the limitations of such strategies, and what you must anticipate if you adopt it:

a Canadian Christian jeweler custom-made a pair of engagement rings for a lesbian couple, Nicole White and Pam Renouf, at their request. Later, when they found out that the jeweler personally opposes same-sex marriage, they went to pieces and demanded their money back.
…
Let’s understand what happened here. This Christian jeweler agreed to custom-make engagement rings for a lesbian couple, knowing that they were a couple, and treated them politely. But when they found out what he really believed about same-sex marriage, even though the man gave them polite service, and agreed to sell them what they asked for, the lesbian couple balked, and demanded their money back — and the mob threatened the business if they didn’t yield. Which, of course, he did.

(source: Heads LGBTs Win, Tails Christians Lose)

As Cooke ties it up:

“We can’t be expected to honor our contracts with companies that disagree with us,” the outraged couple is arguing, “for that might taint our nuptials.” The new message? That we can’t all get along by keeping quiet, but instead need to positively affirm one another or face the consequences. Or, put another way: “Even if I ask you to, don’t cater my wedding, you bigot.”

Would that the agitators could settle on a strategy.

(source: The Tolerant Jeweler Who Harbored an Impure Opinion of Same-Sex Marriage)

That is the thing, though.  You can’t expect the torch-and-pitchfork crowd to behave consistently.  And you cannot delude yourself that their manipulators intend them to do so.  When one sets mindless mobs to work, one does not do so in order to achieve sensible agreement with reasonable people.

One does it to rend and destroy, to express the will to deny anyone what we wish for but cannot have.

The challenge is to find peace in the face of such things.

The challenge is to embrace the reasonableness of truth, goodness, and beauty, and to realize the facticity of irrational evil, and the futility of reasoning with it.  To love people in spite of it.  And to be willing to die before lying to them.

And then, it is possible, you may find the daylight and the freedom and the creativity in which to speak truth winningly.

And if not, you can only hope to see the Resurrection sooner.

Nothing can go wrong, then:  only do not be drawn into the half-light, then the darkness, in your urge to fight–or your urge to flee–or your urge to be nice.  Walk in the light.

Tell truth, and shame the devil.

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte thinks it’s absolutely hilarious that Satanists are challenging abortion restrictions on religious liberty grounds, seeking to expand abortion access. She argues this somehow makes conservative use of religious liberty laws “a little more complicated.” […] I suspect this effort — if it ever gets to court – would stumble on the state’s acknowledged interest in protecting what the Supreme Court has called the “potential life” of even non-viable unborn children. Yet even if the Satanists win, there would be something . . . incredibly appropriate about the pro-abortion Left wrapping its arms around Satan in the quest to preserve abortion on demand.

(source: Of Course the Satanic Temple Embraces Abortion, and Of Course the Left Applauds)

Not pleasing at all, but hardly surprising.  When a faction cheers the willful destruction of the innocent, you can guess what spirit animates their assemblies.

But this is not a winning choice.

And were this world all devils o’er,
and watching to devour us,
we lay it not to heart so sore;
they cannot overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
look grim as e’er he will,
he harms us not a whit;
for why? his doom is writ;
a word shall quickly slay him.

(source: A safe stronghold our God is still)

When we think we can achieve security and prosperity by making life thinner and less precious, we find that wrath and envy thrive, that life is cheap.

When we tolerate and promote a society whose “common good” is the endless warfare of all against all, where each individual must shout in a unique voice and never sacrifice any desire, yet where race and class and sex can never be eclipsed as social and political forces, then how can we be surprised that we get such incoherent results?

Their very incoherence is their coherence.

(Seattle)

Their logic is the logic of nihility.

(Portland)

Their spirit is the spirit of the age.

(San Francisco)

It is the spirit of abortion.

(Baltimore)

It is the spirit of usury.

(Berkeley)

It is the spirit of a nation which doubts its right to exist.

(St. Louis)

It is the spirit of a people with reason for their doubts.

It is the spirit of a people who have lost the will to reason.

Robert George has a trenchant call for the unity of reasonable people in the face of the torch-and-pitchfork crowd’s endless and irrational animus:

The lynch mob came for the brilliant mild-mannered techie Brendan Eich.
The lynch mob came for the elderly florist Barronelle Stutzman.
The lynch mob came for Eastern Michigan University counseling student Julea Ward.
The lynch mob came for the African-American Fire Chief of once segregated Atlanta Kelvin Cochran.
The lynch mob came for the owners of a local pizza shop the O’Connor family.
[…]
[W]ho if anyone will courageously stand up to the mob? Who will resist? Who will speak truth to its raw and frightening power? Who will refuse to be bullied into submission or intimidated into silence?

(source: Who Will Stand? | Robert P. George | First Things — links added, PGE)

Of course, George knows that shouting futilely at the darkness is not half as effective as shaming the mob.  Nonetheless, it is important to remember that one of the basic features of mob action, of hateful incitement, is the disinhibiting effect–the intoxication–of being one of the crowd, of yielding to passions without restraint or consideration.  This is most intense among mindless people caught up in a stampede of violence, but it is easier when the disinhibiting effect of pleasing the herd is multiplied by the disinhibiting effect of pseudo-anonymous online interaction.

It is also important to understand that nothing about the way the torch-and-pitchfork crowd operates—at every level–suggests any limiting principle to their lawlessness; its only consistent principle is opportunistic nihilism.  As George says:  

Oh yes, the mob came first for the Evangelicals and the Catholics and the Latter-Day Saints; but do not be deceived: it will not stop with them. It’s true that many in the mob have a particular animus against Christians, but the point of destroying the reputations and livelihoods of the initial victims is pour encourager les autres. If you believe you belong to a group that will be given a special exemption or dispensation from the enforcement of the new orthodoxy—by any means necessary—you will soon learn that you are tragically mistaken. No one who dissents will be given a pass.

We have seen how swiftly the demands have moved from tolerance to compulsory approbation of behavior historically rejected as contrary to morality and faith by virtually all the great religious traditions of the world. And now it is not only approbation that is demanded, but active participation. And do you honestly think that we have now reached the endpoint of what will be demanded?

(source: Who Will Stand? | Robert P. George | First Things)

Now and then–now, as then–it falls to each of us to stare down our own worst instincts, to put a moment of reason between our situation and our reaction, to be correctible in conscience rather than subject to destructive passions in our mob-made “self-expression” whose intoxicating “liberation” binds us ever deeper in our slavery.

Slavery to ourselves; slavery to our milieu; slavery to the idols of the tribe; slavery to our masters, our manipulators, our devices, even our own most contemptible trolls.

As an educator in the liberal arts, it is my life’s work to compel students to face this need:  the need for reasonable people to work hard to be in touch with reality, not to be driven about by inattention, ill-considered habit, and passionate fancy.  It is why I write poetry; it is why I teach rhetoric.

God help us, perhaps some day it may be enough.  God help us.

Sometimes Prudentia must speak more firmly, just to be considered.

Does not wisdom call, does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights beside the way,
in the paths she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:

To you, O men, I call,
and my cry is to the sons of men.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
O foolish men, pay attention.

(source: Proverbs 8 RSVCE – The Gifts of Wisdom – Does not wisdom – Bible Gateway)

Let the reader be prudent before going on. I am going to simply comment on a few passages from Bakunin that help us to see the nature of the trap, here; then I hope to move on to a few conclusions.

Jehovah, […] expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

[…] God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

I cite this–the full passage is nauseating in its wrathful calumny–only to note two things. The first is the direct misrepresentation at the base of this retelling of the story: the “tree of knowledge” is not a tree of access to information, but precisely a marker of moral freedom. The misrepresentation is literal, in that “tree of knowledge of good and evil” becomes “tree of knowledge” in Bakunin’s revision.

The other–and this is crucial to grasp–is that Bakunin’s reading is not alien to the text, not a modern and secular questioning of a traditional text.  No, Bakunin is asserting that one position was always already embedded in the text, and that he and all right-thinking people have at last realized the correct perspective within the text.  That is to say, Bakunin has adopted Satan’s logic before he even introduces the name of Satan, just as the Hebrew Scriptures have always already known that God was present and active in the world, before proceeding to name Him and tell of His deeds.

Compare Bakunin’s language above with Satan’s language in the Hebrew Scriptures:  “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The text presents this as a lie constructed of apparently true words, as God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”  Bakunin assumes from the first the Satanic construction of this passage, that God has attempted to deprive Adam and Eve of some “knowledge” by forbidding them to eat the fruit.

It is important to realize this, because the interpenetration of secular nihilism, religious Satanism, anarchism, and other explicit philosophies of negation is easy to miss behind the camouflage; the Satanist will deny Satan’s existence, then hail him, while the secular nihilist will deny real human and religious foundations of authority, while insisting on the power of regimes to do good in the world; and the anarchist will die proclaiming the inappellable authority of his own rage.  At root, though, each has accepted the conflation of “to know authentically” with “to grasp, to keep and control.”  One cannot therefore have self-understanding without self-destruction, because only by “testing to destruction” can one be sure one has comprehensive and perpetual control of one’s potential being.  Bakunin explicitly acknowledges the link, and this is important.

The metaphysical realist offers the Satanist, the nihilist, the anarchist, and the devil himself a simple question.  

“What,” asks this most naive soul (ut ita dicam), “was the object of knowing in the ‘knowledge of good and evil’?  What good, true, beautiful being was there which was not named by, given to, and entrusted to the care of Adam and Eve?  Was there any res behind the hypothetical counterfactual of freedom to embrace the good as given–and if so, what was it?”  

Because in the narrative, everything except the merely nominal “evil” has been created and entrusted to humanity; nothing except the illusion of comprehensive and perpetual control remains to be grasped.

Even those who some trust to know better sometimes take Satan’s side in this way.

And how are we to believe we have succeeded in grasping the illusion?  (doesn’t seem right?  it’s your conscience, joker!)

Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science – that is, by rebellion and by thought.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Again, it is worthwhile to note that the diabolical logic here is not a transient literary gesture or an ambiguous expression borne of narrow circumstances, like Milton’s conflicted representation of Satan (the regicide rebel‘s depiction of the ultimate rebel marking the difficulty with which any of us, even the most devout, struggle to reconcile our rebellious hearts to our duty).  

At the very foundation of Bakunin’s position is the understanding that humans are essentially animals except for a capacity to rebel–to assert the negation of whatever already seems to be true–and to describe this negation as “thought.”  It is vital to see that, in the final analysis, only this rebellion differentiates what Bakunin acknowledges as “thought” from what he calls “bestiality.”  As he puts it, the enlightened enshrine “conscience” and “love of truth at all hazards” and “that passion for logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of which there is no thought.”  

This rebellious “passion” thus acquires a transcendent character that goes beyond the capacity for inference, a character it acquires by treating all prior thought as “theoretical and practical bestialities” to be run down by the “unshakeable faith” of those who conjure from inference and rebellion “a social law as natural, as necessary, and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world.”  This “passion” that is also a “faith” gives the enlightened a fanatical “confidence” because, notionally rejecting all prior thought, it treats its hypotheses as fatalistic necessities.  Rebellion, passion, and faith thus conjure an absolute authority parasitic upon the images of fidelity and charity which the enlightened rebels inherit, selectively discovering for themselves (so to speak) whatever their gurus do not designate as objects of “rebellion.”

This triangulation becomes clear when Bakunin misrepresents Christianity in order to mythologize materialism:

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rules, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Of course, it would be not Christianity but a fairly radical dualism (call it Manichaean, Paulician, Marcionite, Cathar, neo-Platonic, or just plain Gnostic) that Bakunin–like other disaffected Young Hegelians–is here rejecting (and which Madame Blavatsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, and plenty of colorful characters continue to embrace).  

More important, though, Bakunin here exemplifies his own method–and that of many another such parasite–when he generates a positive mythology in which substance itself is “spontaneously and eternally” creative, susceptible of “intelligent” expression yet “chemically or organically determined,” solely by baldly asserting that both the dualist’s account of matter and the idea of God are strictly “fancy.”

Thought, for the nihilist, is whatever “intelligent” expression he is not currently rebelling against; whatever he attacks becomes, simply because he is attacking it, an “imaginary being” of “abstract fancy.”

Bakunin also helpfully pushes off against various merely tactical nihilisms–the dominant kind found in popular thought and philosophy, like the humane reasoning which characterizes existentialism and even Nietzsche–and the purer form of Satanic, anarchic rebellion he advocates:

There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs; that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as bourgeois Socialists.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

And, in doing so, Bakunin also identifies why the pure nihilist is never content with a liberal social order, whether classical liberalism or later democratic socialism, so long as these permit Christianity full expression in the public sphere:

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so Bakunin’s lofty rhetoric about human thought, evolution, science, psychology, materialism, or whatever else you have derives its passion and force, not from logic, but from a conception of liberty that turns on an axiom that is as simple as it is Satanic:

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Therefore there can be no liberalization of Christianity (or any theistic religion) which is acceptable to the true nihilist:

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men” – regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty – by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And there is one reason for this; one reason that goes to the heart of the matter:

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

…notice the recurrent insistence on the passionate character of a rebellion which nonetheless relentlessly declares itself to be about “logic.”  (Anyone who has ever debated a 14-year-old cut-and-paste skeptic online knows that there is no merely intellectual cure for this disease.)

But understand that there is no body of knowledge, however formed, that is immune to this intrinsically pointless strategy of self-assertion by parasitic negation.  No form of science can arrive at knowledge that must be believed by enlightened rebels:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science. The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending – such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy. But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible – namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But as long as the enlightened rebels can pick and choose their experts to suit their passions, they are all about science:

But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we willingly bow before the respectable, although relative, quite temporary, and very restricted authority of the representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to consult them by turns, and very grateful for such precious information as they may extend to us, on condition of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which, we are more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.

This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And nothing is worse than idealists, crusaders, religious do-gooders:

This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of human liberty, dignity and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth. They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked, the grandest, finest and noblest of humanity’s possessions. It is now the freethinker’s turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and scientific analysis.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so there must be a mythic history of anti-Christianity and irreligion to nourish the enlightened rebels in their faith:

In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant and privileged classes have been only temporal branches of these various Churches have likewise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But, again, any effort to translate learning–however irreligious, however materialist, however secular and radical–any such effort must fall short of the pure nihilist’s dream of unfettered rebellion:

Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever, through its official licensed representatives, it arrogantly claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the unchangeable landmarks of humanity’s progressive march by indicating the general conditions which it is necessary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass of life; but it is not life itself. Science is unchangeable, impersonal, general, abstract, insensible, like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction, reflected or mental – that is cerebral (using this word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a material organ, the brain). Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real things and; beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognises only the creations of life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.

The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Because in the end, Bakunin knows, any regime ultimately depends on a cultural and religious consensus (and here Bakunin seems to channel de Tocqueville):

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world – the United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance – and see what an important part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.

(source: God and the State – Chapter IV)

And thus we find, in the word of actual Satanists discussing Bakunin’s polemic, that Bakunin’s message has continued to resonate with enlightened rebels down to this day: 

Satan – whether defined as a symbol, an archetype or a literal
entity – is not God, but Anti-God.

What did Bakunin mean, with his allusion to the freeing of Adam
through disobedience? Turning to the Judaeo-Christians’ own
scriptures we find that it was Satan who offered humankind the choice
of free-will, or continued enslavement to the tyrant-god. The first
archetypical human couple chose freedom, and willfully disobeying the
godly-tyrant partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, gaining
self-consciousness and the ability for independent thought.
(Genesis 2-3).

Satan is representative of freedom from godly-tyranny and the worship
of ignorant superstition. Satanism and ‘devil worship’ are antithetical
rather than synonymous, for the latter simply substitutes Satan for
Jehovah/Jesus; the devil-worshipper is an inverse-Christian.

………………………………..

Satan is the embodiment of those forces which lead to progress and
human ascent by upsetting the static order. Thus we see the
rationale for Bakunin’s championing of Satan, for he is the
proto-Anarchist.

(source intentionally suppressed)

How, then, should we respond?

[ tune in next time…. ]

Note the essential similarity between the logic of Sartre (as discussed in a previous post) and the logic of Chesterton in the following two passages.

Sartre:

when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. [… I]n choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be.

(source: Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarte 1946)

Chesterton:

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. And that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. Now of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom I have briefly studied in this book, this is especially and pleasingly true, that they do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. There is nothing merely sceptically progressive about Mr. Rudyard Kipling. There is nothing in the least broad minded about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The paganism of Mr. Lowes Dickinson is more grave than any Christianity. Even the opportunism of Mr. H.G. Wells is more dogmatic than the idealism of anybody else. Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, “That may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong.” The strong humour of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error. In similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong. But my main point, at present, is to notice that the chief among these writers I have discussed do most sanely and courageously offer themselves as dogmatists, as founders of a system. It may be true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to me, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is wrong. But it is equally true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is right. Mr. Shaw may have none with him but himself; but it is not for himself he cares. It is for the vast and universal church, of which he is the only member.

(source: Heretics – Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

I suggest that it is worth meditating on how such a similarity comes to be.

As some readers will doubtless know, the last week has been eventful in the Oklahoma City area.  Not, I urge, eventful in the same register as Ferguson, Missouri, or the ever-churning region from the border of Egypt to the edges of Turkey and the foothills of the Hindu Kush range.  In a manner not one whit less real, though, there has been an important conflict playing out.

I will continue my Nihilism case study series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), which I think was made exigent by these circumstances, and in that I will explain the responses I could see as justified, and why, including the genius of this legal response.

For now, though, I want to provide some links to give fuller understanding and background information to those who may be interested.  I am, of course, a committed partisan in this matter–but I hope that all people of good will can see something of interest and of use in this confrontation with reality.

Let there be peace.  Let us make peace.  Let us understand what makes peace possible.

• Archbishop Coakley’s initial response to the civic assent to a sacrilegious outburst.
• Archbishop Coakley’s call for a united response of prayer, penance, and reparation.
• The lawsuit to recover the stolen Host (read the pleading for yourself–it’s worth while!)
• The shockingly quick response.
• Archbishop Coakley’s continuing call for prayer, penance, and reparation.

All in all, a most instructive episode.  Thanks be to God that the worst seems to have been averted!  And let us be concerned that it can so easily come to this, these days.

(continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

Bakunin’s most notable freethought essay is “God and the State” (1883). In it, Bakunin called Jehovah, of all gods, “certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.” In this article, later published in English by Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth Publishing (1916), Bakunin wrote: “All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.” Bakunin called the concept of Satan “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.”

(source: Mikhail Bakunin – Freedom From Religion Foundation)

Neutral Is Not A Thing

When spiritually and metaphysically real conflict erupts in our community, many people persuade themselves that they can retreat into their private lives, distinguish their profession from their person, and appeal to only secular standards in public discourse. Provided that they don’t see any violence that affects them, many people–public officials especially–consider the situation on par with a dispute over the bar tab or an academic debate.

And, of course, when specific criminal acts–or conspiracies to commit criminal acts–or collusion with terrorism or espionage or racketeering–when something that registers with us as a breach of the peace or an actionable injury emerges, it is perfectly natural for us to see that situation as more immediate and urgent. Were I in Ferguson, Missouri, right now, I would likely not be writing this.

But failing to take the measure of a threat because it does not seem immediate does not protect us. Believing that Islamic terrorism was a fading problem did not protect the Twin Towers in 2001 or the Benghazi consulate in 2008; knowing that Titanic‘s compartmentalized hull made her harder to sink did not protect her officers from bad judgment about speed and icebergs. Moreover, in many cases, the threat is designed to set a trap for us.

[Take, for example, policies requiring “non-discrimination” in membership and leadership of student organizations. Such policies do not allow any group to thrive or fail based on its own organizing principles and their capacity to attract at least some number of people to make common cause on those principles, whatever their other differences may be. No, such policies ensure that a group’s very survival is wholly dependent on its most aggressive opponent’s whim. The second someone determined to eradicate any group’s principles can force the choice between abandoning those principles (and continuing to exist as a group) and disbanding the group (and continuing to hold those principles in isolation), the integrity of all groups and the legitimacy of the system that encourages or subsidizes their existence is seriously undermined. At this point, the conscientious participant in public discourse is placed in a dilemma that leaves no principled option except defiance or defeat. To make it worse, the exemption of certain egregiously arbitrary and exclusive groups makes it quite clear that many administrators are not compelled to adopt these policies, nor eager to ameliorate their impact.]

The case of nihilism is both more and less subtle than such blatant yet banal acts. As a corrosive subtext, the nihilism that operates in popular culture as well as some philosophy has the problem we saw in Part 2. It is trapped in a historicism it imagines itself free from, and therefore fatalistic in metaphysics; it continually “lapses” into humane ideals that, nonetheless, have their underpinnings in ways of thought and life which nihilism declares “unbelievable.” Moreover, even those who reluctantly assent to nihilism (even those who assent to its premises while attempting to resist its conclusions!) are transformed by their assent into vectors for infection; the meme goes on.

But nihilism breaks out in violence against civil society, as well. Often, of course, this is simply mindless violence that almost everyone intuitively reprehends; still other times, it is a distressing moment when an unknown evil and a poorly-governed mob meander into lawlessness and the circle of pointless violence that comes with lawlessness. And it is a trivial work of cultural criticism to link these mindless and mob-mentality acts to an obvious and repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the rule of law and the dignity of humanity at the highest levels of authority. When lawlessness rules over feeble opposition, and especially when nihilistic acts of provocation designed to delegitimize authority in favor of mere force of personality become commonplace, it is not at all surprising to see both overbearing abuse of power and pointless violence becoming common as well.

All of this, however, is simply pointing out the web of cultural decay that makes assent to nihilism thinkable, that lends it a plausibility it cannot intrinsically possess.

At Bakunin, however, it is surely possible to see more explicitly the character of the matter. Bakunin, at confluence of the many streams of Russian, Prussian, and English Romantic and post-Romantic thought, ties together a rejection of traditional accounts of authority with a rejection of emerging modernist and Marxist accounts. Associated with the Young Hegelians, he rejected Hegelianism (without losing his historicist assumptions); he rejected Marxist materialism as an inverted Hegelian Idealism, and Hegelian and other Romantic Idealism as simply denatured religion. In doing so, however, he embraced something that goes far beyond even radical individualism. His nihilism is explicitly tied to the “Satanic School” of Godwin and Shelley whose experiments in infernal and Promethean mythologizing take inspiration from Blake‘s assertion that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it!” Bakunin’s reasoning, and his life, is of a piece with that which inspired Dostoevsky’s portraits of Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov. And, of course, this is also what Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday pushed off against.

This post is getting quite long, so I am going to end for now with a couple of representative quotations from Bakunin, about which I shall have much more to say in a future post.

Let the reader be prudent before going on:

Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty – Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men” – regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty – by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’

“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—”

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

(source: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton)

You Become What You Assent To

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

(source: Nihilism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy])

Of course, I had to cut my letter about the planned sacrilege at the Oklahoma City Civic Center to the bone to get it under the Letters to the Editor word count (any shorter and you’d have to chirp, er, whistle, er, tweet it). The original version, still only about 400 words, had a slightly clearer explanation of my objection to civic facilitation of this particular class of sacrilegious acts. In addition to the obvious spiritual consequences, there were important civic considerations that should concern even those who are not yet persuaded of the religious facts in the matter:

We understand, as all civic-minded people should, that public life involves a give-and-take of constructive and corrective expressions. This act, however, is an act of sheer nihilism, at best, and demonism, at worst.

Whether you believe it or deny it, there really are powers of good and evil that go far beyond human imagination and will. Even those who do not accept this reality, however, live in a world whose understanding of good and evil is wholly conditioned on this understanding. Civil society can profit by lively debate among different ways of accounting for these basic understandings; as an English professor, this lively exchange is precisely what I promote in the classroom daily. Civil society cannot, however, thrive in an environment where mere destruction of meaningful distinctions and cultural institutions becomes mainstream.

Nihilistic outbursts and sacrilegious demonstrations are not part of civic discussion; they are an assault on the very possibility of civil society. They intend to exclude the faithful from public life without offering any social benefit in return.

If this event takes place, it will mar this wonderful city; and it will damage the souls of all who facilitate it.

To understand the difference between the “sheer nihilism” which is, in the best case, what civic officials are facilitating here and the general give-and-take of culture-making social behavior and discourse, we will first need to understand nihilism a bit better.

As the IEP article cited above suggests, the “true nihilist” is a rare bird. Generally, discussions of nihilism quickly turn (as IEP does) to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.  Krzysztof Michalski helpfully distinguishes in what sense we might call Nietzsche a nihilist:  [.PDF]

what Nietzsche calls nihilism is not an outlook, or at least it is not principally an outlook. Specifically, the nihilism he speaks of is not the view that everything is meaningless, that there’s not really any point to anything we do, that what seems to us to be “every-thing” is really “nothing.” The nihilism that Nietzsche has in mind is first of all something that happens and not something that we, correctly or in-correctly, think about reality. Nihilism is therefore an event, or a chain of events, a historical process—and only secondarily, if at all, an attitude, outlook, or position.

Nietzsche’s view is that nihilism, as “a historical process,” is an inevitability that we must embrace. He takes it as granted that what previously made the world intelligible to us no longer makes sense to us, and that this is an inescapable fact of world history (not merely some variation in certain individuals or groups). As Michalski puts it, “the basic principles organizing our reality no longer organize or order our lives.” It is this same apparent condition which spurred Rudolf Bultmann to write that

It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. … We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

(It is the word “irrevocably” that gives away the game, by the way.) Heidegger speaks of the “destitute time” that “does not know its own destitution,” in which “there fails to appear to the world the ground that grounds it” (handy reference here). H.P. Lovecraft, who devoted much of his career to inculcating a “cosmicist” viewpoint that rejected the notion that human concerns were of any significance in the cosmos at large, reflects the same view when he exclaims in a letter,

No level-headed modern either wants to be “immortal” himself (gawd, what boredom!) or to have his favourite characters immortal. Each appears for a second in the pattern and then disappears . . . . . and what of it? What more could anybody not filled up with infantile myth expect or even dream of? It is overwhelmingly true that no sane adult, confronted with the information of today, could possibly think up anything as grotesque, gratuitous, irrelevant, chimerical, and unmotivated as “immortality” unless bludgeoned into the ancient phantasy by the stultifying crime of childhood orthodox training.

If Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lovecraft, and Bultmann are reading history correctly–if their allegoresis of their own ideological journeys and recent cultural history proves to be the most accurate, useful, and compelling reading available–then some process not strictly subject to any particular human’s conscious control has made us unable to trust the evidences, employ the categories, or feel compunction about the obligations that moved our forebears. (One should always be suspicious of the necessitarian and historicist strains that underpin much modern thought; they may have rejected the idealism that Hegel perfected, but almost without exception they seem to have retained the historicism by which Hegel achieves his most profound effects.)

Heidegger provides some of the most powerful language for identifying the lack, what makes “the destitute time” a time during which many organizing ideas and inspiring goals seem irrelevant to daily life:

The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.

(clipped from a convenient blog post: The lack of god in the destitute times | thinking and thoughtlessness)

Of course, we must not miss the fact that these philosophers are making falsifiable claims of at least two kinds: claims about belief, and claims about historical fact. Moreover, it cannot wholly escape us that to some extent the matter of belief determines the matter of fact, here; for unless “gathers … visibly and unequivocally” means to gather with immediate, total, and irresistible force, then what we believe may well have everything to do with whether we see the gathering “visibly and unequivocally” taking place. There is also an interesting challenge where this interacts with Christian belief, insofar as even the period of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion was not possessed of the clarity and distinctness of the Parousia: that is, when Jesus preached the Kingdom, He preached it as something not yet “visibly and unequivocally” present in every respect:

“The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder came to him and said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

(source: Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Nonetheless, if the era of the shopping mall could hardly have been better described than in George Romero’s brilliant depiction (which nonetheless oddly imbued it with a mysterious radiance that was “probably nuclear” so they could talk in hushed tones about an “important place for them”), then the era of Reality TV and the Like button is surely easy to recognize in the pages of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Lo! I show you the last man.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”- so asketh the last man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.
“We have discovered happiness”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
One still worketh, for work is a pastime.
…………………………………
People still fall out, but are soon reconciled- otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

(source: Internet History Sourcebooks)

All of these thinkers, of course, fall into one and the same trap: although they think of nihilism as a condition that requires a response, their conviction that anyone who does not agree with their diagnosis is confused about reality means that they must also become advocates of a nihilist view, as must their disciples. They must convince others (for their own good) to embrace the unbelievability of inherited understandings and to help them disrupt institutions that tend to make those understandings plausible. Like a virus–a true meme–the nihilistic vision remakes those who reluctantly assent to it into vectors for its propagation.

Therefore, we should carefully note that every one of the serious thinkers we have looked at (and here we must leave out Lovecraft), whatever their approach, have viewed this condition as cause for concern. All the most serious thought about nihilism views it as a problem.

Bultmann, as the marker of the radical edge of Christian liberalism, believed something important for human self-understanding was being lost if we could not find some essential, believable understanding in an otherwise unbelievable Christianity. Heidegger and Nietzsche, both atheists with religious training, took somewhat different tacks; Nietzsche basically urged humans to accelerate the evolution of the species, while Heidegger tried to conceive of life during this “default” in a way less determined by Hegel’s ideas of historical progression.

Following Heidegger, Sartre’s important essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” explains why even the thought of what he calls “atheistic existentialists” is not mere nihilism, even though it begins with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism as the modern condition (a diagnosis repeated in different forms throughout the past 150+ years–see, for example, Lyotard’s “The Post-Modern Condition,” which acknowledges what Sartre also acknowledges, that Marxism cannot be the replacement for orders which now seem unbelievable, any more than Hegelian historicism could).  Sartre defends existentialism from the charge that their subjectivism is so radical that it amounts to mere nihilism:

Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

(source: Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarte 1946)

Sartre steals a lot of bases, here, but his concern is obvious: A school of thought which begins with the nihilist assessment of history and the believability of inherited understandings, and cannot then account for the responsibility each person bears for others, has essentially failed. More than that, it is actually destructive; it eliminates any basis, even of mere social convention or Rousseauian “social contract,” for peaceful social order.

In its pure form, which none of these thinkers dared embrace, mere nihilism is a declaration of war on humanity.

Next, then: Bakunin!

I am glad Volokh weighed in because I know his history of carefully considering the legal principles surrounding First Amendment issues–and because I think, at least up until The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post website and became harder to follow, I had read pretty much every post he’d written on any related subject since about 2003. I am also pleased because I think that, as regards only the specific point of legal understanding he comments on, he is probably correct.  That correction will help us all to clarify the situation considerably.

In fact, when I wrote my letter, I imagined Volokh and his confreres in order to test my words–not because I expected Volokh to be wholly sympathetic to Archbishop Coakley’s objections, but because I was confident that Volokh’s response would be accurate, to-the-point, and respectful.  Here is his post, shortening his extract from the Archbishop’s remarks:

“I’m disappointed by their response,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City told FoxNews.com Friday. “If someone had come to them to rent the Civic Center to stage a burning of the Koran or to hold an event that was blatantly and clearly anti-Semitic, I think they might find a way to prevent it.

“Not all speech is protected if there is hate speech and it is intended to ridicule another religion,” he said. “I don’t believe it is a free speech matter.”

No, speech intended to ridicule or insult another religion is entirely constitutionally protected, as the Court has held since 1940. Under the First Amendment, people are free to criticize, ridicule, parody, and insult religious belief systems, no less than other belief systems — whether they are Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Satanism, atheism, capitalism, Communism, feminism, or fascism.

And this remains true even as to government-owned auditoriums that have been generally open for public rental. The government may not exclude speech from such places, whether they are called “designated public fora” or “limited public fora,” on the grounds that it’s blasphemous or “hateful” or “intended to ridicule another religion.” (It’s an open question whether the government may sometimes exclude all religious worship services from particular kinds of government property, but I’m unaware of any such across-the-board exclusion as to the Civic Center Music Hall, and indeed at least one church apparently regularly conducts services there.)

(source: The Volokh Conspiracy)

I want to take the opportunity presented by Volokh’s comment to expand on the very brief suggestion of an argument I made in my own letter, take up a few concerns I’ve seen in comments, disagree a tiny bit with some of my friends, and to also look at the very real problem–one that gets at metaphysical reality and points out the limits of our constitutional framework, at least as currently understood–in a few posts to follow this one.

For now, let me simply hint that my line of argument, where it touches on the laws, appeals to one of those principles that comes up from time to time when constitutional limitations require a change to standing precedents.  I’ll quote it in its native form:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

(source: TERMINIELLO v. CITY OF CHICAGO. | LII / Legal Information Institute)

That, of course, and the Miller test.

(Some may not know:  a small group of agitators led by a registered sex offender has, by means of carefully crafted equivocations, managed to arrange for the Oklahoma City Civic Center to not only rent space but also sell tickets for a “performance” which either is not the “religious” ritual it pretends to be or is obscene and criminal by any reasonable community standards. Archbishop Coakley made a point of speaking out about this escalation from past agitations that had flown under the radar.  Several sources immediately spoke out, including friends from the parish; I sent a letter, myself, to the newspapers and the Civic Centre.  The Archbishop issued another, more specific statement calling on all people of good will to stand together against this manifestation of ill-will, then with a letter to the Archdiocese instructing us to take appropriate countermeasures.  The Archdiocese has posted contact information for those who bear moral and civic responsibility for this abuse of the community’s trust; efforts have also been made to ascertain whether this will actually be the criminal and obscene act that the title advertises, or whether this is just a few maladjusted poseurs seeking attention.)

(For more on the criminality involved, start with incidents like this attempted theft and this crime wave.)