Antigone and (P)ignobility
Arindam Banerjee
news:890e65ea.05042...@posting.google.com...
>> The Gods humble those who try to climb too high.
>
> No, they humble those who challenge them, as opposed to emulating
> them. Eg, Arachne the spider-woman.
>
>>Ed
Rather dangerous, is it not, to try to disprove Ed's comment with one
example?
AB: I believe I was completely successful. That example I gave is
only typical, and by no means constrained to Greek mythology. Zeus
was very harsh to the other gods who wanted to overthrow him.
By way of continuity I'll suggest Antigone as an example of someone
who fell foul of the gods without challenging them.
AB: There is no continuity that I can find in the above. My example of
Arachne related to Greek mythology, your example of Antigone related
to popular Greek literature. Two entirely different things *to me*,
though they may not appear so to you and others. If you agree that
Adam and Eve of the Bible has not the same relevance as Mr and Mrs
Micawber in a discussion on migration in Judaic theology, you may
perhaps see my way of thinking.
It wasn't necessary to
challenge the gods or their powers to be 'humbled' by them.
AB: Antigone did not challenge the gods, nor was she humbled by
anyone. She did her burial duty to her rebellious brother, out of
love for him - she did not want his soul to be restless for eternity -
and in defiance of the edict of the cruel and unforgiving king. She
thus challenged the king, not the gods. Rather, her action was
dedicated to the divine, for she was following the rites prescribed by
the gods for the burial of a dead Greek. That she suffered for this
defiance to the king, only shows that the gods do not necessarily
protect those who follow godly ways. Following godly ways is its own
reward. If the following of godly ways inevitably ensured godly
protection and suitable reward, the concept of nobility could not
exist, for it would be merchandised. This I believe is what Sophocles
is trying to tell us, in this play, that has lasted down the ages.
And what this world's ruling or influential atheistic pignobility can
never understand.
Paul McK
smw
The Other wrote:
> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
>
>
>>AB: Antigone did not challenge the gods, nor was she humbled by
>>anyone. She did her burial duty to her rebellious brother, out of
>>love for him - she did not want his soul to be restless for eternity
>>- and in defiance of the edict of the cruel and unforgiving king.
>>She thus challenged the king, not the gods. Rather, her action was
>>dedicated to the divine, for she was following the rites prescribed
>>by the gods for the burial of a dead Greek. That she suffered for
>>this defiance to the king, only shows that the gods do not
>>necessarily protect those who follow godly ways.
>
>
> As others have pointed out, that's an anachronistic way to look at it.
> Challenging one's rightful king and the law of the city *was* challenging the
> gods
What the hell? In 5th century Athens? In a play written by one of the
most belligerent Democrats around?
> she did, Antigone would have been obeying the gods and
> disobeying them at the same time. The conflict was not "laws of god
> against laws of man". I don't remember the play well enough to be
> sure, but it probably wasn't even "higher against lower law".
If anything, it's laws of the polis against laws of the family. The
theme runs throughout 5th century drama and 4th century political thought.
>>Following godly ways is its own reward. If the following of godly
>>ways inevitably ensured godly protection and suitable reward, the
>>concept of nobility could not exist, for it would be merchandised.
>
>
> Nonsense. The gods (usually) protect and reward noble men by granting
> them noble goods: glory in battle, plunder, beautiful and well-born
> women, immortality in the constellations, etc.
The Greeks believed in Werkgerechtigkeit?
Arindam Banerjee
> The Other wrote:
> > adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
> >
> >
> >>AB: Antigone did not challenge the gods, nor was she humbled by
> >>anyone. She did her burial duty to her rebellious brother, out of
> >>love for him - she did not want his soul to be restless for eternity
> >>- and in defiance of the edict of the cruel and unforgiving king.
> >>She thus challenged the king, not the gods. Rather, her action was
> >>dedicated to the divine, for she was following the rites prescribed
> >>by the gods for the burial of a dead Greek. That she suffered for
> >>this defiance to the king, only shows that the gods do not
> >>necessarily protect those who follow godly ways.
> >
> >
> > As others have pointed out, that's an anachronistic way to look at it.
> > Challenging one's rightful king and the law of the city *was* challenging the
> > gods
If the king was widely understood to be the representative of the gods
on earth, then certainly yes in the Indian situation, and maybe yes in
the Greek. But in the play Creon was probably a bad and cruel king,
certainly an unforgiving one; and so, not seen as a representative of
the gods by Antigone's brother, and many others. I do not know what
vows Greek kings had to take at their coronation.
> What the hell? In 5th century Athens? In a play written by one of the
> most belligerent Democrats around?
So Sophocles was a democrat? Then obviously he could not uphold the
idea of the god-king very seriously.
> > she did, Antigone would have been obeying the gods and
> > disobeying them at the same time.
No, she was never disobeying them. She was interested primarily in
the saving the soul of her dead brother, who had been denied a burial
by the unforgiving king. She took the burial issue very seriously,
because she did believe in heaven, will of gods, suspension in
confusion for the soul of her unburied brother, etc. From the modern
viewpoint - which is atheistic and supercilious - she should be seen
as a simple superstitious woman, devoid of "scientific knowledge", who
risked real and awful punishment for some misguided imaginary cause.
That the Western world does not express such an attitude towards
Antigone, while reserving its contempt for similar Indian situations,
is telling. By risking punishment to serve the cause of her brother's
soul, Antigone is expressing her complete belief in the divine
situation, most practically and at great personal cost. Any deity
should be satisfied.
The conflict was not "laws of god
> > against laws of man". I don't remember the play well enough to be
> > sure, but it probably wasn't even "higher against lower law".
The conflict started with the cruel and later unforgiving nature of
the king. Cruelty and vengeance are not the attributes of any deity
worthy of worship. Antigone protested against such low
characteristics of the king, who had lost touch with the divine; and
so Antigone earns our respect as a result.
> If anything, it's laws of the polis against laws of the family. The
> theme runs throughout 5th century drama and 4th century political thought.
The laws of the family are derived directly from the divine, and
carried down the generations via various traditions.
> >>Following godly ways is its own reward. If the following of godly
> >>ways inevitably ensured godly protection and suitable reward, the
> >>concept of nobility could not exist, for it would be merchandised.
> >
> >
> > Nonsense. The gods (usually) protect and reward noble men by granting
> > them noble goods: glory in battle, plunder, beautiful and well-born
> > women, immortality in the constellations, etc.
No. Gods approve or disapprove of human actions, and reward or punish
them suitably at their will. Blessings from the gods and goddesses
come from the noble person's unconditional love and respect for them,
and a desire to be like them as much as possible. Sometimes, a
goddess may hear a wish, and it may please her to grant same. This is
from the ancient Indian situation, but as the Greeks and so many
others originated from India, I don't think their situation 3000 years
ago was much different from the Indian Indian situation (as opposed to
the Westernised Indian situation) now.
> The Greeks believed in Werkgerechtigkeit?
What's that?
smw
The Other wrote:
...>
>
> How about Creon, for finally seeing what he'd done? I said here long
> ago that I was a little bothered by the fact that Germans are reading
> _Antigone_ as sort of a civics lesson (if I remember correctly).
I think the French started that one.
smw
The Other wrote:
> smw <sm...@ameritech.net> writes:
>
>
>>The Other wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Challenging one's rightful king and the law of the city *was*
>>>challenging the gods
>>
>>What the hell? In 5th century Athens? In a play written by one of
>>the most belligerent Democrats around?
>
>
> I deserved to get slapped down for that one. But let me suggest a
> story, not because I think it's right, but because I'd like to know
> where it's wrong (or right): 1) I've read Israel was unique back then,
> in that they had this prophecy institution where a prophet could tell
> a king to go to hell, and the prophet might win; 2) in Athens,
> however, as in most places, an oracle wouldn't go against a king;
What makes you think that?
3)
> (guessing) if someone objected to a king's ruling as being against the
> gods' will, say regarding the burial rites, the issue could reasonably
> get to an oracle or diviner or whatever -- diviners got called in on
> much more mundane issues in the ancient world, like contract disputes;
> 4) therefore, given (2) above, challenging the king on something like
> burial rites would in effect be challenging the gods. Any of these
> right? Note that I'm talking about how the issue would have been
> perceived, not what Sophocles might have thought about it.
The thing to keep in mind is that these plays are written and performed
at a time where the monarchy, esp. hereditary monarchy, is an already
almost ancient past. The question _why_ Athens was so obsessed with
staging these specific stories is an interesting one (Vernant is good on
that, I think). But no, challenging the king never per se means
challenging the gods, as far as I can see (esp. since the gods are
likely to disagree amongst themselves, anyway). Remember the final
scenes of the Oresteia -- even when Apollo comes down himself to tell
the jury what's what, it remains split. You can vote right into the face
of a god there.
>>>>Following godly ways is its own reward. If the following of godly
>>>>ways inevitably ensured godly protection and suitable reward, the
>>>>concept of nobility could not exist, for it would be merchandised.
>
>
>>>Nonsense. The gods (usually) protect and reward noble men by
>>>granting them noble goods: glory in battle, plunder, beautiful and
>>>well-born women, immortality in the constellations, etc.
>>
>>The Greeks believed in Werkgerechtigkeit?
>
>
> I'll guess that means "justification by works"; if so, then hah hah.
It's a pretty famous Lutheran term, I thought it had entered English as
a loan word -- sorry if that seemed pretentious. Yes, it's the idea that
grace can be earned by good works etc.
> But on the other hand, why perform sacrifices if you don't get
> anything for it?
The gods are capricious. And, again, remember: polytheism. You can piss
one god off simply by sucking up to another one.
...
> Of course I emphasized the carnal and violent rewards above, because I
> was replying to the spiritual Mr. Banerjee. Again, I'm not talking
> about Sophocles himself or his plays, but of how his audience thought.
> Wasn't _The Iliad_ still taken more or less as when it was written
> (i.e., unsanitized)? Brave warriors are, because of their noble
> character, given courage by the gods, etc. Not all the time of
> course, and the gods have their own agendas, but the theme is there.
And see how that works for Hector, about the nicest guy around. Justice
is very much a concern of the polis. The gods are after entertainment.
Arindam Banerjee
"The Other" <ot...@other.invalid> wrote in message
news:lybr86w...@circe.aeaea...
> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
>
> > From the modern viewpoint - which is atheistic and supercilious -
> > she should be seen as a simple superstitious woman, devoid of
> > "scientific knowledge", who risked real and awful punishment for
> > some misguided imaginary cause. That the Western world does not
> > express such an attitude towards Antigone, while reserving its
> > contempt for similar Indian situations, is telling.
>
The entire atheistic or monotheistic Western and pseudo-Indian scholarship
on Indian mythology is not an example, but a policy. If paid adequately, I
might perhaps recollect to the world how I saved myself by remembering what
I could about my great-grandparents.
>
> > The conflict started with the cruel and later unforgiving nature of
> > the king. Cruelty and vengeance are not the attributes of any deity
> > worthy of worship. Antigone protested against such low
> > characteristics of the king, who had lost touch with the divine; and
> > so Antigone earns our respect as a result.
>
> How about Creon, for finally seeing what he'd done?
He comes across more as a repentant fool than anything truly noble.
Arindam Banerjee
> one god off simply by sucking up to another one.
In Greek polytheism, not Indian. Indian gods and goddesses are not jealous.
Arindam Banerjee
> Mr. Banerjee.) Noblemen get noble stuff, commoners get common stuff.
> Or at least they don't get what they have ruined because some god is
> pissed off at them.
That's business, not religion. For those who think religion is nothing but
a business, this approach is merely sensible. But for the truly spiritual
person, religion is not business. And sacrifice is not of goods, but of the
complete self to the higher cause represented and fulfilled by the divine.
Sacrifice is thus symbolic; to think one will gain more by sacrificing more
valuable material stuff is folly. So, many Hindus as a sacrifice shave off
their hair, that is a symbolic sacrifice costing little money (to the
barber) but hurting one's appearance instead. I can understand that this is
the way religion works in practice, people make private deals with gods or
the One True God. But I don't think this dealing stuff works, really;
instead it paves the way to even more disgusting atheism.
> Of course I emphasized the carnal and violent rewards above, because I
> was replying to the spiritual Mr. Banerjee.
Look here, unless I hear Lamborghinis etc. growling up my driveway and
totally at my disposal I cannot accept any recognition of spirituality from
anyone. My spiritual status is not cheap.
Again, I'm not talking
> about Sophocles himself or his plays, but of how his audience thought.
> Wasn't _The Iliad_ still taken more or less as when it was written
> (i.e., unsanitized)? Brave warriors are, because of their noble
> character, given courage by the gods, etc.
True, but they must always ask for courage and other boons by constant
devotion.
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 23rd of April, 2005
Aaron:
I deserved to get slapped down for that one. But let me suggest a
story, not because I think it's right, but because I'd like to know
where it's wrong (or right): 1) I've read Israel was unique back then,
in that they had this prophecy institution where a prophet could tell
a king to go to hell, and the prophet might win; 2) in Athens,
however, as in most places, an oracle wouldn't go against a king; 3)
(guessing) if someone objected to a king's ruling as being against the
gods' will, say regarding the burial rites, the issue could reasonably
get to an oracle or diviner or whatever -- diviners got called in on
much more mundane issues in the ancient world, like contract disputes;
4) therefore, given (2) above, challenging the king on something like
burial rites would in effect be challenging the gods. Any of these
right? Note that I'm talking about how the issue would have been
perceived, not what Sophocles might have thought about it.
This seems bizarrely ignorant, Aaron. Maybe because I
expect you almost always to know well into what you are
talking about. Umm, we are talking the time of Sophocles
in Athens, right? So, checking google, I get twiddles 495 BC
to 406 BC. And, off the top of my head, umm Marathon 490 BC,
Salamis 480 BC, Plataea 479 BC, Peloponnesian War 431-404 BC,
Death of Socrates 399 BC, Chaeronea 338 BC. OK, so I have to go look
up the overthrow of the Peisistratids:
<http://www.brynmawr.edu/archaeology/guesswho/webb.html>
So, by about 510 BC (four years after Harmodius and Aristogeiton,*)
we have no *ruler*, other than "the people" (not very broadly
defined, but there you have it) and the people's officeholders
in Athens (I know, I'm glossing over things like "the tyranny
of the Thirty"), and, if we count 338 BC as
the conquest of Greece by Macedon, then no kings in sight
from 510 BC to 338 BC. Well, except for Darius I and Xerxes
in 490 BC and 480-479 BC, and Xerxes actually had control of
the city and burned it in 480 BC.
So, kingship in the Hebrew (oriental) sense to Sophocles'
contemporaries would have been anathema, and would have symbolized
the slavery that they gloriously fought against and defeated
as a fledgling democracy at Marathon and Salamis.
It also seems to me that the historical record of the oracle
at Delphi is all about it "going against the king". I don't get
any sense in ancient Greece that opposing one's ruler is
"opposing the gods", it's more that the gods themselves are
variously arranged on the issues and make it such that, whatever
you do, the stars will cross you somehow.
(*) I'll swear that this BCE thing (encountered on that website)
strikes me as the stupidest academic affectation I have ever
run across. Even stupider than the pose that "his" and "man"
and "mankind" can't possibly have other than sexist meanings.
Who are we trying to kid by changing "before Christ" to "before
the common era"?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael
I'll swear that this BCE thing (encountered on that website)
strikes me as the stupidest academic affectation I have ever
run across. Even stupider than the pose that "his" and "man"
and "mankind" can't possibly have other than sexist meanings.
Who are we trying to kid by changing "before Christ" to "before
the common era"?
*************
Ah! So that's what it means! Thanks. I have encountered it
a few times here recently and was wondering how it varied
from B.C. As far as the "his" goes, I saw a reference to God
yesterday in the bookstore as "it." Haha. Gotta love it.
Michael
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 25th of April, 2005
I said:
This seems bizarrely ignorant, Aaron.
Aaron:
That's the first time we've agreed lately.
See my follow-up to Silke.
Yep. Though, a better adverb than "bizarrely" would
have been "uncharacteristically".
I said:
(*) I'll swear that this BCE thing (encountered on that website)
strikes me as the stupidest academic affectation I have ever run
across. Even stupider than the pose that "his" and "man" and
"mankind" can't possibly have other than sexist meanings. Who are
we trying to kid by changing "before Christ" to "before the common
era"?
Aaron:
I don't think it's originally academic, I think it's originally a
Jewish thing, or Jewish-academic if that's not redundant.
I'm not so sure about that. I first encountered it in the Middle-East
on a student backpacking tour in 1981. It was the common system for
dating pieces in museums in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in Israel.
"Cool, a different way of writing dates," was my first thought on
first encounter, but that lasted me all of about five minutes, when
I came around to the "But, who are we trying to kid?" conclusion.
The thing that especially jars is seeing a modern academic, writing
in English, using it. It comes across as an affected correctness.
Aaron:
But the "BCE" thing is really different from the "humankind" thing.
Actually, as I think about it, I think it's the same. It's
an artificially contructed usage that is perpetrated to
get around an ideological objection. I guess one sense of why
*I* object to that is that, as a nonbeliever in Christianity
myself, I nevertheless do not want the specific and contingent
history, in which Christianity has played a dominant role in
western civ, erased.
Aaron:
As I understand it, there'd be no objection to "before
Jesus" and "after Jesus", at least in writings for a
general audience. The objection is to "before CHRIST"
(who sez Jesus was Christ?) and "in the year of our
LORD" (who sez Jesus was Lord?).
Well, to answer your parenthetical questions, the Christian
believers who established the AD and BC conventions.
One doesn't "buy into" those beliefs by utilizing the convention,
is the point.
Aaron:
I agree it's silly, though; I'll
stick with BC and AD.
In Israel it's pretty conventional to write the plus sign "+" as an
upside-down "T", i.e., like a "perpendicular" sign. There might be a
religious reason, but I'd guess it's more just custom. Now that I
think about it, it's surprising you don't hear about that on the
anti-semitic websites.
"Plus"="cross"? I never considered that one before, although,
now that you mention it, some eastern crosses are more
symmetrical. I wonder if "plus" ="perp sign" is a convention
that arose out of any particular persecution? I mean, if
Jews were ever once persecuted for writing "crosses", then
it could well be it became a custom to write it that way.
Oh well, I can guess at origin stories all you like, but
I have nothing to go on.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Aaron:
> But the "BCE" thing is really different from the "humankind" thing.
>
> Actually, as I think about it, I think it's the same. It's
> an artificially contructed usage that is perpetrated to
> get around an ideological objection. I guess one sense of why
> *I* object to that is that, as a nonbeliever in Christianity
> myself, I nevertheless do not want the specific and contingent
> history, in which Christianity has played a dominant role in
> western civ, erased.
Well, lots of the research concerned really crosses major borders into
non-Western territory, esp. archeology. This looks like a workable
compromise to me -- you have a global language that allows people to
have the same dating system, but you lose the religious baggage. After
all, "common era" rather stresses the "dominant role" of Christian
dating, wouldn't you say?
>
> One doesn't "buy into" those beliefs by utilizing the convention,
> is the point.
True enough, but "one" also shouldn't be obliged to use them. Like you,
I have no problem with AD, but I also have no problem understanding why
Muslims or Jews would prefer something else, and in those days of both
global scholarship and religious strife, it seems reasonable enough to
neutralize those things as far as possible.
Richard Harter
wrote:
Yes you do. It says so.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Save the Earth now!!
It's the only planet with chocolate.
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 25th of April, 2005
Silke:
Well, lots of the research concerned really
crosses major borders into non-Western territory,
esp. archeology.
Of course. But, we aren't using some ancient Roman
calendar, either, or the Hebrew or Chinese calendar.
The fact remains that BCE and CE represent an adoption
of the Christian thingie.
Silke:
This looks like a workable
compromise to me -- you have a global language that allows people to
have the same dating system, but you lose the religious baggage. After
all, "common era" rather stresses the "dominant role" of Christian
dating, wouldn't you say?
Seems to me that it's not the *religious* baggage that is
being lost, but the *historically specific* that is being
deleted.
I said:
One doesn't "buy into" those beliefs by utilizing the convention,
is the point.
Silke:
True enough, but "one" also shouldn't be obliged to use them.
I don't see why not. Like any other lexical convention,
one doesn't have a gun to one's head, but one is obliged insofar
as one wants to be understood.
Silke:
Like you, I have no problem with AD, but I also have
no problem understanding why Muslims or Jews would prefer
something else,
I have no problem either with understanding why they
would prefer all kinds of things that I would
not support giving them.
Silke:
and in those days of both global scholarship and
religious strife, it seems reasonable enough to
neutralize those things as far as possible.
Nah, I'd muchly prefer to inflame things as far
as possible.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> Monday, the 25th of April, 2005
>
> Silke:
> Well, lots of the research concerned really
> crosses major borders into non-Western territory,
> esp. archeology.
>
> Of course. But, we aren't using some ancient Roman
> calendar, either, or the Hebrew or Chinese calendar.
> The fact remains that BCE and CE represent an adoption
> of the Christian thingie.
>
> Silke:
> This looks like a workable
> compromise to me -- you have a global language that allows people to
> have the same dating system, but you lose the religious baggage. After
> all, "common era" rather stresses the "dominant role" of Christian
> dating, wouldn't you say?
>
> Seems to me that it's not the *religious* baggage that is
> being lost, but the *historically specific* that is being
> deleted.
Well, as you say yourself, BCE/CE do retain "the Christian thingee," and
surely, you're not suggesting that nobody knows why the divide is there?
hence, lost is exactly the religious baggage, i.e. "dominum" and "Christ."
>
> I said:
> One doesn't "buy into" those beliefs by utilizing the convention,
> is the point.
> Silke:
> True enough, but "one" also shouldn't be obliged to use them.
>
> I don't see why not. Like any other lexical convention,
> one doesn't have a gun to one's head, but one is obliged insofar
> as one wants to be understood.
Seems to me people understand CE/BCE well enough, so that can't be the
problem.
>
> Silke:
> Like you, I have no problem with AD, but I also have
> no problem understanding why Muslims or Jews would prefer
> something else,
>
> I have no problem either with understanding why they
> would prefer all kinds of things that I would
> not support giving them.
Well, you're not an international researcher in things historic, and you
don't publish academic journals, so no need for you to grant anything to
anyone, and no need for you not to use AD or BC. But why get pissed when
other people's lives get easier? Do you really feel some keen sense of
loss here? I guess it just doesn't offend me, neither does it pose the
slightest inconvenience. I just don't see any reasonable objection
except nostalgia (if we count that as reasonable).
>
> Silke:
> and in those days of both global scholarship and
> religious strife, it seems reasonable enough to
> neutralize those things as far as possible.
>
> Nah, I'd muchly prefer to inflame things as far
> as possible.
Don't you think that's be more fun if you could find something people
actually give a damn about?
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 25th of April, 2005
Silke:
and in those days of both global scholarship and
religious strife, it seems reasonable enough to
neutralize those things as far as possible.
I said:
Nah, I'd muchly prefer to inflame things as far
as possible.
Silke:
Don't you think that's be more fun if you could
find something people actually give a damn about?
Nah. After studiously avoiding anything to do with
the subject, I finally got shoved under my nose and
read Ruth R. Wisse's open letter on the Summers brouhaha.
It seems to me she has the situation dead to rights,
and that, basically, the radical feminist faculty
at Harvard has been permitted to institute a reign
of intellectual terror, and that Larry Summers is in
fact fully guilty as charged ---not for his saying
in academicese that to which the good folks of Martinsville,
Indiana, were his paragraph translated for them,
would respond, "Well, duh." But for making craven
public confession after craven public capitulation
after craven public penance ever since.
Seems to me the take-home lesson is simple:
Bush was right to say "crusade"---it's simply
stupid to try and use language to mollify or
to soften differences. It leads to worse
intolerance in the long run.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
Nah -- he's guilty of abominable naivete which disqualifies him as
chancellor. He doesn't understand his function -- which is not to repeat
some interesting stuff he heard over dinner the other night. Were his
intentions pure? Sure, as far as I can tell. But it was an idiotic thing
to do and say in front of that audience, and the very fact that he
didn't see the reaction coming means he's in the wrong place. He hurt
Harvard rather badly, and as far as I can see, it's only backlash that
kept him his job. Rather ironically.
> Seems to me the take-home lesson is simple:
> Bush was right to say "crusade"---it's simply
> stupid to try and use language to mollify or
> to soften differences. It leads to worse
> intolerance in the long run.
You mean, he DOES want to retake Jerusalem?
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 25th of April, 2005
Silke:
You mean, he DOES want to retake Jerusalem?
We all do.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
marko_...@hotmail.com
The Other wrote:
> In Israel it's pretty conventional to write the plus sign "+" as an
> upside-down "T", i.e., like a "perpendicular" sign.
It's \perp in Latex. But maybe you already knew that.
We also have \aleph, \beth, \daleth and \gimel.
Does Latex have more Hebrew letters beyond that?
George Grätzer doesn't say in MATH INTO LATEX.
Anyone know?
ven....@gmail.com
The Other wrote:
> beside the point. I meant that he "earns our respect as a result" of
> his finally understanding what he'd done. But don't mind me, I'm
just
> some Westerner whose mind has been poisoned by the parable of the
> Prodigal Son.
Having seen the Video version of Jean Anouilh's "Antigone", starring
Genevieve Bujold and Fritz Weaver, my impression of Creon was that he
was a basically decent man who made a horrendous mistake, with equally
horrendous results...
But that's what tragedy is all about. When basically decent people get
bound up into things like that, our sympathy is engaged; which would
not happen if Creon were a true villian...
Vandevere
jadel
ven....@gmail.com wrote:
> The Other wrote:
> > "Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> writes:
> >
> > > "The Other" <ot...@other.invalid> wrote in message
> > > news:lybr86w...@circe.aeaea...
> > > > adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
> > > >
> > > > > The conflict started with the cruel and later unforgiving
> nature
> > > > > of the king. Cruelty and vengeance are not the attributes of
> > > > > any deity worthy of worship. Antigone protested against such
> > > > > low characteristics of the king, who had lost touch with the
> > > > > divine; and so Antigone earns our respect as a result.
> > > >
> > > > How about Creon, for finally seeing what he'd done?
> > >
> > > He comes across more as a repentant fool than anything truly
noble.
> >
> > He's what I'd call noble, even when he's being foolish, but that's
> > beside the point. I meant that he "earns our respect as a result"
of
> > his finally understanding what he'd done. But don't mind me, I'm
> just
> > some Westerner whose mind has been poisoned by the parable of the
> > Prodigal Son.
>
Anouilh ain't Sophocles.
J. Del Col
ven....@gmail.com
But the same laws of Drama and Tragedy that apply to Anouilh also apply
to Sophocles.
If Creon, Antigone, or even Oedipus, were pure qualities of good, of
evil, then their misfortunes wouldn't mean as much to us. that all
these people come with feet of clay, and human pride, is what makes us
feel so much for them...
Vandevere
Katie
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
> > Seems to me the take-home lesson is simple:
> > Bush was right to say "crusade"---it's simply
> > stupid to try and use language to mollify or
> > to soften differences. It leads to worse
> > intolerance in the long run.
>
> You mean, he DOES want to retake Jerusalem?
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=451#_ednref10
Born Again Ideology
Arthur Kroker
The New Protestant Ethic
One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber's classic text,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the fateful
relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in
American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the
original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of
Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was destined
to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical project of
capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political climate
marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based politics,
capitalism and its historical correlate -- modernism -- have actually
folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist codes of
economic secularism and political pluralism, in the interests of being
reanimated with the evangelical spirit of religious fundamentalism.
What Weber foresaw as a primal compact between Calvinism and
acquisitive capitalism -- this migration, first in Europe and then in
Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards personal salvation based
on giving witness by habits of frugality, hard work, and discipline
into the essentially acquisitive spirit of capitalism -- has been
renewed in new key. On the centennial of The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, the political universe is suddenly dominated by
the spirit of what might be called the New Protestant Ethic as the
ideological reflex of the age of networked capitalism and empire
politics.
Animated by apocalyptic visions of the days of wrath announcing the
Second Coming of Christ, motivated by feverish aspirations to be
counted among the spiritually elect in the coming age of division
between the Predestined and the Left Behind, witness to the vengeful
spirit of the Old Testament, literal in its biblical interpretations,
monistic in its drive to hegemony among the world religions, in active
revolt against secularism, in bitter rebellion against pluralism, the
New Protestant Ethic is the foundational creed of contemporary
American politics.
We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought
that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles
between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out
that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of
Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every
political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public
life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life"
movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of
"same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem
cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of
American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with faith-based
cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily sweeps aside
secular discourses in the interests of a vision of culture, society
and politics which is as cosmological in its theological sweep as it
is eschatological in its historical ambitions.
Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency
represented by faith-based politics is the representative
politicalform of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of
"completed nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature
(nihilistic) phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal,
exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will,
always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less
will -- desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal,
a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing
center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the New
Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty
formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective
proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in
violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New
Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the
crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is
reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the
semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To
those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent
instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted that
this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of (fundamentalist)
religion and (imperial) war technologies in the American mind may well
be in the order of a great overturning. With faith-based politics, we
are witness to something entirely unexpected, and for that reason,
deeply ominous -- an ethical reconciliation between religion and
technology in which the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will
be future-coded in the power languages of empire politics and
networked capitalism. What is now only in its preparatory rhetorical
stages as the "culture of life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as
the essential life-principle of American, and by imperialist
extension, world culture.
Consequently, it may no longer be The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism in its original Calvinist evocation of ascetic propriety
and regularity, nor capitalism any longer in its first pioneering
acquisitive expression. However, it appears to most definitely be the
New Protestant Ethic as the moral vision of American politics in the
21st century -- intolerant, charismatic, crusading. Breaking beyond
the boundaries of private religious belief, this fusion of religious
fundamentalism and the instrumentalities of increasingly
cyberneticized imperial forms of global warfare is, for example, the
moral essence of the Bush administration's political vision of
"redemptive empire." Here, "Reconstructionist" Christianity --
aggressive, projective, fundamentalist -- is streamed instantly across
the spacetime fabric of American empire by a military intent both on
"full-spectrum domination of space" and, as recently announced, on
"metabolic domination" of the bodies of its global subjects . A
dangerous fusion then of fundamentalist Protestantism and cyber-war.
In his first press conference after the last American presidential
election, George W. Bush said: "I have earned political capital and I
intend to spend it."
There are intimations here: some known -- the sacrificial violence
directed against the cities of Iraq, recent reports of new versions of
experimental weapons -- poison gas and napalm -- used against the
citizens of Falluja, ominous warnings of adventurism to come in Iran;
and some stories unknown, unreported, already forgotten at the dark
edges of the real politics of empire -- the probable murder in a
southern motel room in December of Ray C. Lemme, a private
investigator, who it is reported was following the trail of The Five
Star Trust -- a secret fund out of Texas, Saudi Arabia, the
Phillipines -- which may have financed the widespread computer
manipulation of the last American election.[1] Thinking of these
events, I again allow those chilling words of George W. Bush to brush
against my thought: "I have earned political capital and I intend to
spend it."
Inauguration Day Blues & the Messianic Rapture of End Times
History calls us.
-- Condoleeza Rice, American Secretary of State
On Inauguration day, with the streets of Washington locked down tight
with security, paranoia in the fearful air, ABC television
commentators, probably trying to pass the time, remix visuals of John
Kerry with the laconic words: "At least in this country, we don't line
up losers against the wall and shoot them." The messianic text of the
inaugural speech proclaims America to be the moral tutelary of global
politics, self-appointed in a journey to bring "freedom and democracy"
to the world that may take many "generations to come." President
Bush's fateful political rhetoric -- "America's vital interests and
deepest beliefs are now one" -- carry with them a sense of deep
foreboding: intimations of future aggressions by a rogue (imperial)
state in the "name of liberty" and in the "image of the maker of
heaven and earth." God Bless America. God Bless the American People.
Accordingly, the question: What would it mean to think American
politics from the perspective of Born Again Ideology? What new forms
of political interpretation would result from critical reflection upon
that strange, but very real, very intense relationship between the
resurfacing of religious fundamentalism in contemporary American
politics and cyber-warfare by which America projects its imperial
ambitions across the planet -- this epochal meeting in the American
political mind of its Puritan religious past and its increasingly
militarized version of the posthuman future? In a way that Weber could
only intimate we may well be already living in the ashes of The
Protestant Ethic: a supposedly dead resurrection-effect -- the
Protestant ethic -- hyper-moral, hyper-monistic, hyper-charismatic,
hyper-fundamentalist -- has suddenly come alive in the imperial
language of redemptive empire. Little wonder then that Frank Rich, in
a recent op-ed for The New York Times, can write of the cultural
morbidity associated with "A Culture of Death, Not Life."
Mortality -- the more graphic, the merrier -- is the biggest thing
going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on
decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited,
three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as
medical evidence, but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of
TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time
"CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star,
Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to-cadaver expert
from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons,
to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.
-- Frank Rich, The New York Times, April 10, 2005
As Rich concludes: "Once the culture of death at its most virulent
interests with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on
the living."
Accordingly, is the "culture of death" a symptomatic sign of the
psycho-geography of the American mind, or does the scent of death
attract such intense media fascination because it evokes a more
fundamental turn in political culture, namely that (terminal) point
when life itself gave up on the future, becoming born again in the
ecstatic (media) signs of its own death. Understood as the cultural
capstone of the New Protestant Ethic, this searing image of the
"culture of death" is perhaps less an exclusively media phenomenon
than a return to something autochthonous in American culture -- the
recurrence of 21st century America to the ruling passions of its 17th
century Puritan origins. Obsessive, judgmental, moralistic, hard
willed, messianic, intent on penalizing the signs of (earthly) life in
the name of eternal life: Calvinism, like Christianity in general,
always had about it a doubled fascination -- certainly with the
prospect of death as resurrection of the soul from the flesh of the
sinful body; but also the strict disciplining of Christian life as a
signifier of religious election. Propelled at the speed of (mass
media) light into popular culture, the spirit of Calvinism is
resurrected now as the scent of death which is the real attraction and
psychological driver of the "culture of life."
Specifically, virulent as only a resurrection-effect can be, the
Calvinist origins of the Protestant ethic have now successfully
mutated into the redemptive fundamentalist language of Born Again
Christianity. In contemporary political cartography, this is perfectly
symbolized as the division of America into the chromatics of blue and
red states. With this addition. Perhaps the red states symbolize a
certain psycho-geography in the American mind -- a massive
psychological reaction-formation -- imminent, subjective, populist,
faith-based -- which once linked with the instrumentalities of power
-- cyber-warfare, militarized globalization, elite-driven,
neo-conservative -- constitutes what we mean now by cultural fascism.
In the 20th century, the power libido of capitalist excess was
politically constrained by the bi-polar opposition of the Communist
Bloc. In the 21st century, the epoch initiated symbolically by the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the politics of empire -- capitalism
triumphant -- has no effective political check.
American empire, this spearhead of increasingly militarized
capitalism, is free at last to be the universal sign -- unipolar,
unchallenged, self-directing. It is finally at liberty to stamp the
political formula inscribed on American coins -- E Pluribus Unum (Out
of Many, One) -- onto global culture. Without its Communist binary,
without the necessity to maintain at least the rhetorical illusion of
political commitment to the ideals of democratic rights and economic
egalitarianism, empire capitalism swiftly backslides into the specter
of cultural fascism as its chosen future. Again, the political formula
is this: an imminent, populist reaction-formation -- Born Again
fundamentalism -- sweeping from the southern states to the heart of
the heartland of the industrial Midwest and west -- combines with a
right-wing elitist agenda of imperial politics -- the logic of
cyber-warfare, "The American Project for the 21st Century," "full
spectrum domination" -- to produce a politics of empire which is
incipiently authoritarian. Domestically, politically threatened by the
human rights struggles of gays and lesbians, this psychological
reaction-formation -- this virulent political backlash against the
politics of difference -- fuses emotionally around issues of same-sex
marriage, pro-choice, immigration, the restriction of welfare rights
and the weakening of gun control. Globally, it projects itself outward
in the language of ressentiment and sacrificial violence -- a Born
Again Ideology as the moral energy of American empire -- what the
American rhetorician and New England politician, Daniel Webster, long
ago called "Our Moral Republic." Herewith, the language of religious
fundamentalism merges with the logistics of cyber-empire. Weber's dark
prophecy concerning a bleak future of "specialists without spirit
midst this nullity which calls itself a civilization" is not
apparently our past, but the future.
Redemptive Violence and Panic Insecurity
This year, 2005, is a double anniversary. Not only the publication of
Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but also the
centennial of Albert Einstein's first publication of his special
theory of relativity. These events are not unrelated. It's my thesis
that Weber's grim vision of the "iron cage" has been projected into
history at Einstein's "speed of light." Today, the spirit of
capitalism in networked culture moves literally at the speed of life.
The Protestant Ethic has been renewed in the redemptive, passionate
language of Born Again Christianity. What has happened this year, this
time, this day, is that we are witness now to a fateful crossing-over
of Born Again Christianity with the power of American empire moving at
the speed of Born Again light. That's Born Again Ideology: networked
imperial power animated by the disciplinary energies of a now
resurrected, redemptive Christianity moving at the speed of darkness.
Long before Einstein's scientific vision of relativity theory, America
always was a quantum country. A culture of communication, it has
always privileged the speed of light as the emblematic sign of its
technological omnipotence. A culture of relativity, American political
economy could gain a global empire because it learned how to transform
the purely theoretical principle of instrumental activism into the
pragmatic business methods associated with the "enhancement of
adaptive capacity." A culture of violence, American militarism split
open the atom of colonizing power with the reactor of crusading,
missionary consciousness. A culture of foundational political
narratives, America's ruling rhetoric was never based upon the
modernist logic of binaries, the logic of either/or. Politically,
America is a quantum culture because it has always only been an energy
field simultaneously combining opposite changes of state. In its
rhetoric as much as in its politics, culture and economy, America has
always been both wave-form and particle. That is America's secret, its
seduction, its curse.
The signs of (quantum) America as simultaneously wave-form and
particle -- opposite changes of (cultural) state simultaneously -- are
everywhere. Symbolically, it's the split visual energy field of the
American flag with its stars and stripes. Historically, it's the
received interpretation of the Civil War as a redemptive moral
struggle fusing opposing violent energy states -- Confederates and
Unionists -- in the continuing story of the American Republic.
Legislatively, it's the Federalist Papers proclaiming an impossible
(quantum) political theory with its vision of unequivocal
states-rights and strong central government. Culturally, it's the
governing contradiction of faith-based political populism and rule by
political elites. In the American official song-line, it's the
unspoken contradiction of a national anthem with inspiring republican
political rhetoric and impossibility of popular participation.
Einsteinian before Einstein, American exceptionalism has everything to
do with the fact that it is the political precursor of quantum reality
-- a contested style of government, a warring field of religion and
technology, a violent energy field of individual subjectivity -- which
anticipates by several centuries the great scientific discoveries of
modern times.
A nation of possibilities ("the American dream"), a country of
probabilities which absorbs the difference, America is and has always
been a historical singularity, a quantum culture, a spacetime fabric.
Breaking with European (binary) discourse, America has always
represented a fusion of pre-Enlightenment subjectivity and posthuman
technology, just waiting to happen. Consequently, if Einstein's
special theory of relativity could speculate that light is both
wave-form and particle simultaneously, that light is both/and,
opposite states simultaneously; that is only to repeat the political
formula that has animated American political culture from its Puritan
beginnings, namely that this would be a culture simultaneously of
redemptive violence and panic insecurity. And if Einstein could
theorize against and beyond Newton's modernist vision of an entitative
universe (where discrete objects interact at a distance) that we live
in a spacetime fabric moving at the speed of light, this was only to
repeat what had long been established in the founding covenant of the
United States. Namely, that this "good land" (in the words of the
Mayflower Compact) was visualized from its historical inception as an
imminently religious, imminently unified fabric of spacetime moving
literally at the transcendental speed of (theological) light. And if
quantum theorists after Einstein could theorize that implosive change
occurs in quantum culture by virtue of a "tunneling effect" whereby
warp holes suddenly and unpredictably open up in the spacetime fabric,
linking singularities from the past and the future, that is exactly
what is occurring in the politics of American empire today. Here, a
(religious) singularity from the past (the Puritan origins of
faith-based politics) has now literally tunneled its way into the
future. Fueled by the Born Again emotions of religious premodernity,
the American (cybernetic) posthuman opens onto a future in which
atavistic religious impulses stream across the spacetime fabric of a
technoculture moving at the speed of (digital) light. If this appears
contradictory, paradoxical, indeterminate, that is probably because
America is the first, and definitely most singular, expression of the
"quantum idea" politically realized.
Precipitated by the (symbolically) cataclysmic events of 9/11, by
waves of panic fear and calls for redemptive violence unleashed by
this sudden dissolution, this breaching, of the boundaries of the
sovereign body politic, a warp hole has opened up in the spacetime
fabric of American empire linking two singularities -- religious
fundamentalism and cybernetized global militarism -- into what quantum
physicists call a "common world-line." Literally, the psychic shock of
9/11 -- aided and abetted by a neoconservative regime with a
preemptive plan of strategic military action already in place --
ripped wide open the unitary spacetime fabric of the American mind,
providing for a momentous fusion of two seemingly opposite ideas --
technological futurism and religious prophecy -- which, until that
moment, had maintained their solitude according to the rituals of
modernity. Instantly, the vengeance-seeking energies of the
(religious) past poured through the psychic fissure of 9/11 to take
flesh in the materiality of cybernetic warfare and crusading
empire-consciousness.
We all know the enlightenment fable of the supposed death of god. But
that story, the Nietzschean myth of the death of the sacred in our
(enlightenment) minds and with it the supposed triumph of the rights
of reason over religious sectarianism, is, it must be admitted,
increasingly specific to the particularities of European late
modernist experience. Like Hegel's vision of the owl of Minerva which
takes flight at dusk, the God of the New Testament may have died in
European consciousness in the age of progress precisely because a new
incarnation of God, the God of the Old Testament, fusing a crusading
politics of redemptive violence and a domestic tutelary of panic
insecurity, was being born by way of the American political covenant.
The second coming of god then as the real politics of American empire:
a fateful meeting of the ancient prophecies of the Old Testament with
full-spectrum futurism of cyber-warfare. That's Born Again Ideology,
and this time, the rulers of the American covenant intend to get it
right, far right, with a style of political action -- an unyielding
politics based on preemptive action, a politics of hand to mouth
existence, constant military interventions, ceaselessly stirring up
turbulence, media provocations intended to provoke panic fear among
the domestic population for which redemptive violence is the only
recourse -- a style of political action which, with its scapegoating
and appeals to intolerant, charismatic leadership is hauntingly
reminiscent of what Leo Lowenthal, the Frankfurt School theorist
writing in exile during the 1940s, described as the imminent strategy
of authoritian ideologies.
Rapture and the American Mind
To interpret the evangelical religious vision in American politics as
only a useful addendum to America's political/military ambitions is, I
believe, to miss to the point. The animating energy of the American
imperial project is essentially religious, not political. The ruling
American mythopoetic is eschatological. It is about 'end times.' It is
animated by a strictly religious vision of 'end times,' spellbound by
the imminence of the moment of 'rapture,' that moment when political
crisis unleashes the violence, desolation and destruction of
Armaggedon prophesied by the Book of Revelation, enthusiastically
reconstructionist, with the language of the Old Testament as its
psychological horizon, the emotional horizon, of American imperialism.
This is why it is of more than anecdotal interest that a recent Marine
assault operation south of Baghdad was code-named "Operation Plymouth
Rock," why American soldiers go into battle with camouflage bibles,
and why the poignancy of that recent television image of Marines
creating an impromtu baptismal fount out of spent artillery shells in
order to be anointed in their terms "in the spirit of the Lord" during
the fighting for Falluja.
When the first Pilgrims -- the Massachusetts Bay Colony -- crossed the
waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, their historical
self-consciousness was truly ancient, not modern; informed less by the
constraints of economic necessity than by biblical scripture: Matthew
5:14 to be exact which provided the scriptural basis for John
Winthrop's famous shipboard declaration of the Mayflower Compact
during that "great migration' wherein he spoke of the colony's
collective destiny as the creation of a 'City upon a Hill.' These were
a people of a biblical migration whose psycho-geography was a
fourth-order simulacra: a virtual symbolic reality which had no
reality referent other than its own closed scriptural tautology --
literally a universal sign populated most deeply with the voices of
Daniel and Matthew, the seven-headed beasts of the Book of Revelation
and the four beasts rising from the ocean of Daniel.
Listen anew to the Mayflower Compact, this early rhetoric of empire
which is literally burned into American governing political rhetoric,
from Daniel Webster's reinvocation of the spirit of Puritanism as the
essence of the American "Moral Republic" on the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of the "first encounter" at Plymouth Rock,[2] to Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address to John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech to the
political rhetoric of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, father and son and
probably the next son too.
For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the
eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with
our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw
his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword
through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil
of the ways of god all profess for God's sake; we shall shame the
faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be
turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land
whether we are going.[3]
Not just the yearning to be a City Upon a Hill, but something else
too, something little remarked in the inspiring glow surrounding the
phrase a "City Upon a Hill." Consider again that ominous sentence: "If
we deal falsely with our god ... we shall be made a story and a byword
through the world" -- a fear of failure, an imminent self-doubt, a
sub-text of potential shame and evil and potential curses.
There are two America's present in the rhetoric of the Mayflower
Compact: the much-remarked utopia of the rise of the American
Republic, but also the hard-scrabble, bible-belt, unforgiving
psychological territory of the fall -- a feared world of shame and
curses, an apocalyptic vision of desolation accompanying the
withdrawal of God from this "good land." With this, the familiar story
of the America Eden -- America as a religious covenant signified by
the image of itself as a "City Upon as Hill" -- flips in the first
instance into the cruel, imaginary country of the American Gothic.
Tainted from the very first moment of its articulation with just the
barest hint of panic insecurity, the political rhetoric surrounding
America as a "City Upon a Hill" has an undetectable crack just beneath
its psychic surface, namely, an imminent fear of the catastrophe
awaiting a "chosen people" unfaithful to the terms of the religious
covenant.
Consequently, even before the Puritans came out of the sea at Plymouth
Rock, the American political code was firmly set in place. This would
be a political culture dialectically bound by the rhythms and tensions
of the master codes of the rise and fall, redemptive violence and
panic insecurity, spasms of the "war spirit" and inertia tinged by a
melancholic sense of fatalism.[4] But if this is the case, isn't the
story of the American covenant a continuation of the much older story
of the rise and fall of cosmological experience? Doesn't the Puritan
invocation of the Mayflower Compact signify that the real historical
project of America would rise and fall with the adequacy of its
response to the problem of salvation? In this case, the resurgence of
faith-based politics in the 21st century would represent less a moment
of rupture with America's self-conception as a secular technoculture
driven by the speed of business than a faithful return to the
generative political problematic underlying the American dream -- the
more ancient dream of the desire for salvation leavened by fear of
banishment. And if the United States has never managed to escape its
genealogical roots in the salvation myths of cosmology, this would
indicate that its political future may well unfold in accordance with
the more enduring metaphysics of cosmological experience, mediated
through the specificities of contemporary American culture: its
ontology(salvational), its epistemology (faith-based), its political
organization (theocratic), its aesthetic (the "culture of life"). In
current American political vernacular, issues of globalization and its
consequences for a multinational world are eclipsed by the specter of
cosmology.
Curiously, the United States, this self-proclaimed, immensely
confident spearhead of technological modernity supposedly born as the
Canadian philosopher George Grant said in the age of progress, has its
mythic roots in a form of consciousness that is biblical, intensely
spiritual, disciplined, given over in the first instance to frugality,
moral uprightness, disciplined labor, and later to all the excesses of
redemptive violence and panic insecurity, consumer ecstasy and bouts
of economic over-indebtedness. Perhaps like Foucault's theorization of
the death of representation in Ceci n'est pas une pipe, the Puritan
Pilgrims never really crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps in their minds,
they were always one with the children of Israel fleeing the evil
Pharaoh: not the Egyptian Pharaoh, but the royalist restoration in
England and with it the collapse of the Anglican Church into the
apostasy of ceremony and the reinstallation of religious hierarchy.
These were refugees from Babylon intent on reenacting in the New World
what the historian, Barbara Tuchman, has described as the essence of
English Cromwellian religious enthusiasm -- the power of the "bible
and sword".[5] What came ashore at Plymouth Rock was, I believe, the
premonitory shadow of the "last man" of Nietzsche's Zarathustra -- a
fully armed spirit of Nietzschean ressentiment: an exiled religious
community fleeing persecution in England and indifference in Holland,
separatist, infused with the crusading spirit of the religiously
elect, and most of all sexually perverse in its relationship to the
body. The founding of America never really was (exclusively) about
capitalist political economy, but about libidinal religious economy:
an obsessive, disciplinarian attitude to the body which read Old
Testament phantasmagoria into the body's desire, aggressively policing
the bodies of women, parishioners, indigenous people. Separatist,
resentful, hardened in the bitter anvil of European religious
struggles, filled with the spirit of the spiritually elect, obsessed
to the point of sexual perversity with suppressing the body's libido,
the Puritans came ashore as an eschatology -- a hard, cold vision of
end times -- just waiting its chance for full historical expression.
Now much has been made of the capitalist origins of the American
experiment, but less so of the origins of American exceptionalism in
the psycho-geography of the Old Testament. The very terms which trace
the horizon of the so-called American dream -- the 'American
covenant,' 'City Upon the Hill' -- indicate that governing American
rhetoric is steeped in the ancient binaries of the Old Testament.
Everything else is, I believe, at present derivative: blasted away in
the contemporary fundamentalist turn to that primitive vision of the
spirit of Puritan nihilism which came out of the sea at Plymouth.
George W. Bush's appeal for the "expansion of freedom in all the
world" is the emblematic rhetoric of missionary consciousness, just as
much as the "culture of life" movement awakens in the American mind a
Puritan habit of mind which is intolerant and disciplinarian in equal
measure.
It is as if for one brief historical moment which has now been
effectively eclipsed, the light of political reason, hard won from
religious persecution and the exhaustion of Europe's unending
religious wars, dims again as the apocalyptic language of religious
eschatology asserts itself anew. Thought from a critical, liberal
perspective, the Puritan tradition represents that continuous, but
episodic moment, in the American mind wherein the forces of reaction
break out from the silence of many hearts fueled by ressentiment into
the public passions of zealotry and scapegoating -- witness the deep
continuity of America's historical experience of "culture of backlash"
politics -- the ideological specter of McCarthyism, the politics of
race-baiting, union-baiting, sex-baiting, or the recent anti-terrorist
campaigns codified into law by the US Patriot Act. Understood from the
liberal side of the dialectic of reason, this may well be the case,
but in terms of diagnosing the genealogy of the politics of American
empire, I do not believe this to be an adequate theorization of the
times in which we live.
We should listen anew, listen intently, to what the Puritans had to
say, for theirs is, I believe, the foundational creed of contemporary
American politics. Not in its specifics -- their calls for frugality
and self-discipline and bodily sequestration have disappeared under
the surface of consumer capitalism and the society of the spectacle.
Today, Nietzsche's "last man" runs on digital empty: electronically
interfaced by iPods, IM, and consumer prosthetics; hooked on porn,
soaps, cosmetic surgery, and Fox TV; bunkered down in front of plasma
TV, surround sound pumped up full; silently fascinated by media
reports of terrorists hunted down, captured, and imprisoned, perhaps
tortured; and morally gratified with scenes of military violence
visited upon an always accidental enemy.
But for all of this, the founding codes run deep: the spirit of
Puritanism has not disappeared. Provoked by the classic psychic
symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment -- "someone has to pay for my
feeling ill" -- the spirit of Puritanism may even have intensified.
The rhetoric of exceptionalism -- America as a City upon a Hill,
bonded in the beginning as in the present with a predestined religious
covenant with God -- is the essence of American political
self-consciousness. Call it what you will -- the American Dream, the
Founding Covenant, the "Redemptive Empire" -- this is an animating
rhetoric of moral exceptionalism which if it does provide (faithful in
advance to the later political theories of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio
Agamben) [6] a justification for the moral rightness of the cold power
of the executive imperial state in determining who is and is not
subject to the language of the exception, this should not distract our
vision from the essentially religious nature of the American calling,
nor from its uniqueness in linking together in the experiment of a
"Moral Republic" an essentially Old Testament version of Christianity
with a New Republican version of neo-conservative politics. Appeals
now for faith-based politics, faith-based public policy, faith-based
governance, commerce, science, and education do not represent
something strikingly new in American political discourse, but
constitute a return to an original unity of essentially missionary
discourses -- science and religious belief, governance and faith --
which is the very essence of the new Covenant that is America. In
American discourse, there are no real opposites, only clashing
patterns in creative tension.
With the re-election of George W. Bush, the Puritan vision of America
as a City Upon a Hill finds its articulation in a renewed interest in
the language of a morally recharged, historically projective,
militarily crusading Christianity. For example, in the American
(electronic) homeland, theological visions of "Reconstructionist
Christianity" [7] suddenly proliferate with endless salvational
spin-offs, from specific religious theorizations of "theonomy" [8] and
"denominationalism" [9]to the apocalyptic vision of the Left Behind
armaggedon. Politicians, most of all, get into the (theological) act.
Literally. With Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, President Bush is said
to be a self-proclaimed 'premillenial dispensionalist.'[10] As opposed
to other warring camps in what is described as "Reconstructionist
Christiantity," (reconstructionist because it believes in the power of
Christian belief and action to dramatically transform both personal
identity and the course of history itself by imposing the biblical
strictures of the Old Testament upon American society) President Bush
is held to believe that the moment of Rapture -- the 2nd advent of
Christ will be brought about by a certain constellation of political
events prophesied in the Old Testament, most famously the
reunification of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon on
the Temple Mount. In combination with his closest White House
advisors, he is held to affirm his unique executive historical
position to realize in present-time the long-prophesied history of the
2nd advent. President Bush is, in fact, viewed by some Born Again
Christians as God's chosen sign of the elect, the long-anticipated
sign of the coming of moment of Rapture, with its prophesied division
of the transcendent Christian elect from the vast multitude that will
be "left behind." The psychosis of these new pagans occupies the
highest offices of the politics of empire.
Which is why, I believe, in the present circumstance there can be so
little public protest at the suppression of traditional constitutional
guarantees of civil rights in favor of faith-based politics and
disciplinary power. With Born Again Ideology, the secular rhetoric of
American exceptionalism has been disappeared as something superfluous
to the essentially religious essence of the American mind. Here, the
Kantian project of universal freedom is displaced in American
political discourse by a vision of salvation which, refusing to
express itself in strictly religious terms, merges perfectly with the
political vocabulary necessary to the extension of empire.
If it be objected that this is a temporary phenomenon, I would note
that the spirit of Rapture has always been the enduring song of the
American homeland. Call it what you will -- the steely belief of the
original Puritans that they were less founders of a new political
colony than a moment of redemptive renewal, a reinvocation in the
wilderness, of an ancient religious compact (America literally as the
new Jerusalem); evangelical revivalism in the backwoods religious
tents of 18th and 19th century America; or those appeals to empire
from the litany of Manifest Destiny to contemporary visions of
Redemptive Empire; America has always been an essentially religious
cosmology, wrapped in the shell of technology. Consequently, could it
be that in the contemporary political juncture, American
exceptionalism is less understandable in terms of traditional
political imperialism than a violent effort to breed the objective
worldwide crisis necessary to biblical revelation, to the Moment of
Rapture?
Vampire Puritans
In his brilliant study of American classical philosophy as a moral
quest, The Wilderness and the City,[11] the political theorist,
Michael A. Weinstein, proposed this discerning thesis about the
foundational logic of American society. For Weinstein, the American
mind has always oscillated between two extremes -- between the "war
spirit" and spirit of "acedia." Here, American exceptionalism is
rooted in classically split consciousness veering between a raging
"war spirit" (which, as de Toqueville noted set out to conquer the
continental wilderness with a bible in one hand and an axe in the
other); and panic fear (tempered by melancholic self-doubt) concerning
the imminent dissolution of the boundaries of the self. Exploring the
fundamental tension between American naturalists -- John Dewey and
George Santayana -- and American vitalists -- Josiah Royce and C.S.
Peirce -- with William James' will to pragmatism as their
philosophical mediation, Weinstein asks whether the essence of
American experience is not an ontology of "hatred of existence" --
covered up by aggressive displays of a veneer of frenzied activism
over the reality of panic fear. As Weinstein states:
The challenge for the modern spirit today is to pass through
Nietzsche's trial of world-sickness. American culture, which is the
last outpost of Western individualism, has evaded Nietzsche's insight
into the hatred for their own existence when the veils of piety have
been lifted from their awareness. Among the American classical
philosophers only William James came close to the Nietzschean
phenomenology of the spirit, but he drew back in horror from
reflection of his panic fear and chose to stimulate in other people a
will to believe. [12]
The gravest of ills today is the massive aggregation of the weak
into organized complexes that trample on the disorganized weak...
There is a near universal sense of injury in America today, a will on
the part of many to "get even." This sense of declining life, as
Nietzsche's analysis predicts, a bitterness that is often overt but
that even more frequently hides a brittle piety. [13]
Reflecting upon Weinstein's understanding of the moral basis of
American exceptionalism as "brittle piety" and 'hatred of existence,"
could it be that the Puritans of the Mayflower Compact with their
intense self-consciousness as Old Testament prophets, engaged in their
own terms in a "Great Migration" across the waters of the new Red Sea
-- the Atlantic -- fleeing an evil Pharaoh (the royalist restoration
in England) brought to the shores of Plymouth Rock something very
different, more chilling in its implications for its vision of "end
times?" Before the "bitterness" and "brittle piety" that have come to
typify Nietzsche's last man in the contemporary age of "declining
life," I wonder if the Mayflower Compact was not the language of
vampire-speak, spirit possession, a strange extra-terrestrial,
extra-historical, extra-juridical language of the Old Testament,
steeped in strong emotions of exile, resentment, vengeance, and
optimism. Did the Puritans cross the Atlantic Ocean or the Red Sea?
What was the Great Migration? Did they ever really settle America the
land, or was America for them always something intermediary, spectral,
a material instrument, a Great Migration, on the way to a final
homecoming with the righteous god. With the Puritans, are not we
suddenly time-warped to the psycho-geography of strange aliens?
We do know this. Social theorists such as Max Weber might later speak
of the convenient convergence of Puritan habits of work --
self-discipline, frugality, hard work -- with the moral qualities
necessary to support capitalism as a historical project, once the
latter was liberated from the ethical constraints of religious
worship. This is most certainly the religio-capitalist territory of
Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
However, with the advantage of 21st century cultural hindsight,
perhaps we can now add a small, but important, vampire modification to
Weber's famous thesis. Could it be that American capitalism is a
direct extension of an earlier religious impulse, namely the double
necessity of first making of everything a 'great migration' (what
Nietzsche would later call a 'crossing-over, a gamble, a passage over
the abyss); and a will to nihilation energized by the 'hatred of
existence' which was the essence of Puritan psycho-geography -- hatred
of the body, hatred of nature, hatred of Europe, hatred of the
reinstallation of Catholic ceremonial rituals in Anglicanism, hatred
of life itself. Long before the post-structural reflections of
Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray and Lyotard, the Puritans of the Mayflower
Compact were the first semioticians of American experience, prophetic
embodiment of what is meant by a society of the "universal sign." The
collective identity of Puritanism was so fused, closed,
self-reinforcing, tautological, so circular in its symbolic exchange,
so sexually perverted in its disciplinary obsessions, so fetishistic
and cosmological that it could have only one possible result -- expand
to fill the fabric of spacetime, or perish from this earth. In the
imaginary of Puritan eschatology, there is to be discovered the
fundamental grammar of the American way -- either succeed in the will
to empire, whether the sacred empire defined by the religious compact
or the "Redemptive Empire" of decidedly more recent imperialist
ambitions; or suffer the catastrophe of vanishing from the face of the
earth. No mediation is possible between redemptive violence and panic
fear. In Puritan futurism, America would either subordinate the
recalcitrant matter of earthly space and bodily flesh to the
eschatological language of end times or it would disappear.
Indeed, it was with good evangelical conscience that Puritan morality
justified the extermination of indigenous peoples and the
appropriation of their ancestral lands. As self-proclaimed founders of
the New Jerusalem, Puritans established what would quickly become the
American colonial pattern of demonizing indigenous peoples as radical
negation itself -- nothingness -- before relieving them, first of
their territories, then of their lives. While the Wampanoag Nation in
Massachusetts was the first victim of the Puritan crusade, what might
be called the Puritan model would soon be applied with clinical
savagery by the American military ag ainst all indigenous inhabitants
of Turtle Island. Ironically, redemptive violence and panic fear may
have bred that most European of all nihilisms -- Blake's "monstrous
consciousness" -- in the Puritan mind and heart. With the Puritans,
what Nietzsche would later diagnose as the distinctly European disease
-- "Man" -- crossed the Atlantic to take its revenge on the New Canaan
of the America's. On that day in 1620 when the Puritan spirit rose
from the sea at Plymouth Rock, something very ancient in the story of
human rage, something very bitter, recalcitrant and viral, just aching
for revenge, forced itself upon the unsuspecting peoples, animals and
land of Turtle Island. Beyond their specific religious cosmology,
Puritans were also, I would claim, the unwitting carriers of an
important particle of European metaphysics -- the spirit of
vengeance-seeking nihilism -- which, in the crusading, salvational
language of evangelical missionary consciousness, they injected
directly into "this good land" of America.
Consequently, John Winthrop's vision of America as a "City upon a
Hill" may well be viewed as comprising the very essence of the
American dialectic -- a metaphysics of the war spirit and panic
insecurity -- conquer or perish. Here at last was a migrant people in
flight willing to stake their existence on a metaphysical gesture --
the spirit of the Puritan vampire -- who were not European, decidedly
not wholly human, never feudal nor modernist, strangely posthuman
perhaps. Similar to Augustine's Confessions in the garden at
Cassiacium where the will to believe finally fused the Christian
trinity of will, emotion and intellect in the flesh of his own
subjectivity, the Puritan confession has burned its way into the
American personality: life itself as a 'great migration' -- a "going
across" the natural body to the biogenetic body, but also crossing the
bodies of economy, nature, society, politics, these libidinal
territories of an expanding empire, in pursuit of the saving grace of
redemptive violence. What came out of the ocean at Plymouth Rock was a
psychic precursor of faith-based American political culture: a
biblical spirit infused with feelings of discipline and revenge, as
implacable in its hatred of existence as it was motivated by yearning
for salvation from a sinful world.
It is, I believe, the primal spirit of the Puritan Vampire --
redemptive, violent, extra-terrestrial in its spiritual ambitions,
steeped in the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament -- it this spirit
of the Puritan Vampire which issues again through the political
rhetoric of faith-based politics. Here, "brittle piety" is swept away
by feverish faith. Individual "bitterness" is collectively masked as
the "culture of life" movement. "Hatred of existence" is transformed
into the missionary consciousness of the "redemptive empire." Signs of
the Puritan vampire are legion: from fundamentalist faith in the
vision of "premillenial dispensationalism" to the new Covenant of the
Mayflower Compact; from the current language of crusading imperialism
to Puritan beliefs in the necessary application of redemptive violence
against the body, particularly the unruly bodies of outlaw women,
witches, and sorcerers. Signs of the ecstatic spirit of disciplinary
Puritanism are everywhere: from the military's obsession with sexual
perversion -- Abu Ghreib rethought now in the words of a Texas defense
lawyer as normal "cheerleader sports" to an almost fetishistic
obsession among the "organized weak" with purifying "traditional
marriage" of the perceived "social contamination" of gay and lesbian
love. From delirious White House ecstasy with visions of Armaggedon to
the Puritan rapture of the New Protestant Ethic, public life embodies
a sense of time curving backwards, with the spirit of the Puritan
Vampire as the future of faith-based politics.
Here is the moral essence of American triumphalism. Here is why
American empire, which may objectively -- strategically -- already in
rapid decline from economic over-indebtedness, military
over-expansion, media hubris, could also only be in its infancy.
Nietzsche once remarked of that strange creature we call a human being
that for all its resentment, cruelty, paranoia and fetishes, for all
of its panic fear of the inner abyss and desperate struggles against
the cage of its own moral conscience, it was a will, it was a going
forth, and "nothing besides." Stopping for a moment from their game of
wagers, the pantheon of gods took notice that with this birth of the
"human, all-too-human," something fundamentally new was happening. But
then Nietzsche was always the first philosopher of the American mind.
If he could prophecize that he would only be understood posthumously,
perhaps it was because his reflections on the "last man" as the final
outcome of the will to power would only really take hold in the
shadows of American empire in the 21st century. Equally, Nietzsche's
philosophical twin, René Girard, could write so eloquently and
truthfully about "sacrificial violence" [15] because he too sensed the
advent of the desolation of redemptive violence with its cruel
episodes of "scapegoating" and "sacrificial violence" as the "end
times" of Armaggedon. Strangers in their own times, migrants of the
darkness of intellectual imagination, Nietzche's "last man" and
Girard's "sacrificial violence" remain strong psychic pulsars,
pointing the way to the social apocalypse of Puritan eschatology once
resurrected in the form of faith-based politics.
Notes
---------------
[1] Wayne Madsen, "Texas to Florida: White House-linked Software
Operation Paid for "Vote Switching" Software
(http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/
120604madsen.html)
[2] Daniel Webster's Plymouth Oration
(http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dwebster/speeches/plymouth-oration.html)
[3] John Winthrop's City Upon a Hill, 1630
(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm)
[4] For a brilliant account of the migration of American political
thought between the war spirit and acedia, see Michael A. Weinstein,
The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a Moral
Quest, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
[5] Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from
the Bronze Age to Balfour, New York: Ballantine Books, 1984.
[6] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translation,
introduction and notes by George Schwab, New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press,1976. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1998.
[7] For an excellent account of the vision of Reconstructionist
Christianity, see: Robert Parsons, "Christian Reconstruction: A Call
for Reformation and Renewal,"
http://atheism.about.com/od/reconstructionist/
[8] For an affirmative account of the religious tenets of theonomy,
see: Jay Rogers, "What is Theonomy?
(http://www.forerunner.com/theofaq.html). For a critical account of
the politics of theonomy, see: "What is Theonomy?
(http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/2850/Theonomy.html).
[9] D.G. Tinder, "Denominationalism,"
(http://mb-soft.com/believe/text/denomina.htm).
[10] For a critical reflection on the political implications of
premillenial dispensationalism, see:
http://www.gsenet.org/newsstnd/rch.php
[11] Ibid; Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City. For a compelling
account of American classical philosophy as a continuing response to
the "death of God in the West," see Chapter 7, "American Philosophy
and Modern Individualism," (pp.129-156) where Weinstein argues that
American thought, substituting the collective ideal of 'society' for
God, is expressed in "successive appeals for deliverance to the
community and ... parallel critiques of the war-spirit," (p. 136).
[12] Weinstein, p. 154.
[13] Weinstein, p. 155.
[14] For a contemporary account of the Wampanoag struggle which
continues to this day and which most recently involved a majority US
court decision that the Wampanoag were "not a tribe" for land
repatriation purposes see: (http://www.inphone.com/seahome.html)
[15] For his theorization of sacrificial violence under the sign of
the "scapegoat," see: René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne
Freccaro, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
marko_...@hotmail.com
Katie wrote:
> smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
news:<C7abe.339$Eq3...@newssvr31.news.prodigy.com>...
> > Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> > > Seems to me the take-home lesson is simple:
> > > Bush was right to say "crusade"---it's simply
> > > stupid to try and use language to mollify or
> > > to soften differences. It leads to worse
> > > intolerance in the long run.
> >
> > You mean, he DOES want to retake Jerusalem?
>
> http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=451#_ednref10
>
> Born Again Ideology
>
>
> Arthur Kroker
>
>
> The New Protestant Ethic
> This year, 2005, is a double anniversary. Not only
> the publication of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the
> Spirit of Capitalism but also the centennial of Albert
> Einstein's first publication of his special theory of
> relativity. These events are not unrelated. It's my thesis
> that Weber's grim vision of the "iron cage" has been
> projected into history at Einstein's "speed of light."
"there are no coincidences" - freud
marko_...@hotmail.com
Kroker is mildly funny in parts of this essay, but
the sad thing is I'm getting so old I can remember
when his book co-authored with David Cook came out
in the late '80s about "excremental culture and
hyper-aesthetics".