Yinxu on the Mississippi——密西西比河边殷墟

As mentioned in my blog post about Ulysses S Grant yesterday, I got to visit Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site together with my in-laws. Cahokia. Immense, monumental ancient step-pyramids and earthen mounds that date back a thousand years… right at the southern tip of the American Midwest.

Cahokia, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St Louis, in Illinois, is a thousand-year-old archaeological site consisting of a number of large raised earthen structures, as well as the remnants of a wooden stockade and a ‘Woodhenge’—a now-reconstructed ring of 49 wooden posts which archaeologists believe to have functioned as an immense solar calendar, used to calculate the equinoxes. Monks Mound is the largest pyramid north of the Mexican border, with a base measuring 13 acres in area (equal to the Great Pyramid at Giza), 955 feet across and 775 feet wide, and currently reaching a height of 100 feet.

The Cahokia Mounds were the site of a massive urban settlement between the years 900 and 1350 AD. From the archaeological evidence it can clearly be seen to have been a thriving centre of trade, with a distinct social hierarchy, metalworking and sophisticated astronomical and agricultural methods. (Woodhenge attests to the astronomical sophistication, as does the fact that the mounds and the plaza are constructed in an ‘hourglass’ shape bounded by two strict east-west lines of construction.) It could thus be said with ease, that the middle Mississippian polity which built and lived among the mounds was a civilisation in the true sense of the word.

It was a fascinating experience to walk in the shadows of the mounds… and then to climb Monks Mound with its sweeping vistas. There is something truly numinous about standing in Cahokia, a kind of awe that I have only twice or thrice felt before in my life: at the Yinxu Archaeological Site in Anyang; at Tianzi Jia Liu in Luoyang; and standing inside the old city walls in Luoyang and Xi’an. This is not the same as religious awe, the sense of standing in the presence of the Divine. For that, I go to Divine Liturgy, or pray before icons of Christ and His Mother. It is a very different, very human and this-worldly sort of awe—the sense of standing on a spot that you knew (not just felt, or fancied, but knew) that others had stood, three, five, ten thousand years before you. Call it civilisational awe.

It is standing in just such places—yea, even in places where mass human sacrifice was conducted—that one begins to understand what Konstantin Leont’ev understood in between the lines of his philosophical and medical writings. Cultures are alive; they have life-cycles. And even when they pass out of earthly existence and memory, they leave traces behind them that one can’t help but feel. However much our modern sensibilities, our religious and humanitarian scruples (which have been not so much earned on our own merits as entailed upon us by bitter experience of past ages), might turn back upon us at the contemplation of a civilisation perpetuating itself through the infliction of violent ritual death upon its own… there is nonetheless something truly splendid and grandiose about it, a kind of stoic and sanguine beauty which pervades the remains.

It was fascinating to walk amid this ancient monument, this millennium-old testament left by a pre-contact Indigenous civilisation, together with three Chinese people who are very near and dear to me. What was interesting in particular to me was how close the ancient sites of their own intimate knowledge were to the fore of their minds as we walked together.

Their first thought, also, was to liken the place to Yinxu, and also to the Bingmayong. The cruelty—the picturesque cruelty, the cruelty of fell beauty—of a Shang state perpetuated by mass human sacrifice, or of the First Qin Emperor who built a great Wall partly with the blood and bones of the men that he ruled, posed a ready parallel to what one might see at Mound 72. Hundreds of virgin maidens, exquisitely arrayed in marine shells, and then slain and arrayed at the southernmost point of the complex, their remains aligned in perfect reverence with the cardinal directions, the eternal tracks of sun and moon and season, giving life and death in their turn…

And what right have we, we shallow and arrogant children, we neonates in the grand scheme, to pass judgement upon this civilisation or those who inherited it? What do we know of what is sacred, or of what is true or what is correct? What price have we paid for that knowledge? Let’s give Nietzsche his due and acknowledge it: nowhere close to a price high enough, assuredly. Today we palefaces wax sentimental and lachrymose over the fate of the idealised Native American, with his fading ethic of spiritual and environmental harmony… yet we have no deep understanding by what route, by what autochthonous root in fact, the Indigenous peoples of this continent have come to such an ethic.

The stately, bloody grandeur of the Cahokia Mounds, even in its ruined current state, speaks still in resounding echoes of its former colossal resplendence, followed by its equally titanic collapse… this was the price, these were the conditions under which the Dakota and their cousin-nations learned what wisdom they still hold about the necessity of humility in the face of nature, about the need to honour one’s connectedness to others before the Creator. And the ancestors of the Lakota and Dakota, of the Kansa and Ponca, of the Ho-Chunk, the Choctaw and the Creek—they earned that wisdom, and carefully tended it down the generations, easily over 150 years before the white man ever laid eyes on the silver banks of the Mississippi.

The posited prehistoric connexions between the Han Chinese and the Indigenous peoples of this continent may be vastly overstated. But what is true, is that the Chinese civilisation and the heirs to the Cahokian civilisation (let’s not be coy and pretend that we don’t know who they are, or that they aren’t still with us today), share a great deal in common, when it comes to having dealt with the life-cycle of their civilisations. Let’s not whitewash those similarities, and still less downplay them or sentimentalise them or moralise them. Let us face them as they are.

If these ruminations on Cahokia strike one as too pre-Christian, too radical-reactionary, too culturally-maximalist, too elegiac of premodern brutality—in short, too Leont’evian—good. I want people to feel at least a glimmer of the mingled discomfort and awe that I felt as I led my feet and legs carefully along the tended paths, between and among the mortuary grounds and the hallowed heights of those ancient mounds.

Ulysses S Grant: fighter, lover, honourable profligate

I am currently writing this blog post from the great south Midwestern town of St Louis, Missouri, where my family and I are planning to bring in the New Year. It had been our hope—to this point, not a disappointed one—that the stratospheric conditions would be amenable to a mild and restful holiday. Today, we visited (a safe distance after the winter solstice) the Mississippian holy site of the Cahokia Mounds—which may be the subject of a blog post in the near future. We also visited the farm which belonged to Civil War hero and former US President Ulysses S Grant.

I am prompted to write this post on account of the fluctuating posthumous historical fortunes of a number of American figures in public life. It’s a foregone conclusion, for example, that the reputation of Alexander Hamilton is far more positive in the present day, on account of a certain neoliberal Broadway non-talent, than it was thirty or even twenty years ago. (And this: for one of the right reasons and a hell of a lot of wrong ones.) It strikes me that Grant is another, similar victim of the historiographical ‘swing’ which began in earnest in the Obama era. And the national monument dedicated to his memory seems fully committed to this ‘swing’ and a revisionist view of its subject… for better and for worse.

It has been customary to view Grant, possibly under the influence of the Dunning school of American historiography, as a drunkard, a butcher, a fool and a failure. To its great credit, the Ulysses S Grant National Historical Site here in St Louis does a thorough and creditable job, drawing from primary sources, to deflate some of these caricatured assessments.

Apart from one unfortunate bout in his younger years as a distinctly-unhappy minor officer stationed far away from his beloved family at Fort Humboldt, Grant’s relationship with alcohol was a distinctly moderate and temperate one. Far from being a fool, Grant had a natural cunning and understanding of military strategy, as well as a distinct streak of stubborn tenacity, which manifested itself in his victorious career during the Civil War. And as for being a failure… that is a distinct matter of perspective. Certainly Grant’s efforts to manage Southern Reconstruction met with less than stellar results. And as for economic policy… well, we’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say for now, that I do not share the National Park Service’s rosy view of Grant in that regard. However, he did manage to bring the American military campaigns against the Plains Indians to a satisfactory close, and began the slow, fitful, rocky and still-incomplete process of finding a tolerable place for the Indigenous peoples in postbellum American society that did not involve genocide.

But the National Park Service, aussi dans l’air du temps, swings far, far too hard in the opposite direction. They portray Grant in what I would consider to be nigh-hagiographical terms, according to a certain civic-religious sensibility. A saint—yea, a racial visionary far ‘ahead of his time’ in terms of his treatment of the African-American, a stoic patriot of monumental proportions, a military genius, an even-handed diplomat of a distinctly liberal temper, and a devoted gallant and family man whose final and overriding concern was for his beloved wife and children. If he had certain flaws, they are incidental failings, ones which can be explained by temporary quirks or established habits of the culture he grew up in… or else they are endearing, mild faults, like being too trusting of political allies and business partners too eager to take advantage of his largesse for their own ends. The picture which the National Parks Service paints of the man begins with his manumission of William Jones, and ends with his deathbed bequest of the proceeds of his dictated memoirs to his faithful Julia and their four precious children.

Insofar as one can draw something like this picture from the primary sources… well and good. And I certainly understand the desire to portray a beloved native son in his very best possible light. But bringing my own ‘lens’ and background knowledge of Grant and his times to bear, I came away from his monument with a rather different picture of man and legacy than the one which the National Park Service sought to impress upon me. For me, President Grant is neither blackguard nor saint, neither bleary-eyed dullard nor Moses on the interracial mountaintop, but indeed precisely a man of his time and his culture—with some very distinct and (again, to my own view) highly blameworthy and inexcusable flaws.

What is interesting to me is how, culturally, Grant comes off very much so as a man of the backcountry South. More specifically, he comes off as an Appalachian—a ‘born fighter’ after the ethnographic portrait of his tribe painted by former US Senator Jim Webb. Grant’s father Jesse Root was born in the solidly-Appalachian Pennsylvania hinterland, and he married and sired Hiram Ulysses by a Scots-Irish Presbyterian girl, Hannah Simpson. Grant himself was born in Point Pleasant, which belongs solidly in the Cincinnati foothill zone of southern Ohio and is probably best considered a part of the American South in its own right.

In his early life especially—though his early habits foreshadow in many respects his behaviour in later life—Hiram Ulysses talks, behaves and reacts like a hillbilly (in the very best and noblest of senses). Our young Ulysses demonstrates many of the best characteristic features of Appalachian culture: aggressively independent; highly opinionated; dedicated to a deep individual internal sense of right; fiercely and even fanatically devoted to his friends, family, faith and flag. One sees this intriguing mix of traits particularly in his relationship with the (Deep Southern) Dents. Ulysses was deeply committed to his friendship to Fred Dent, enough to stay for extended periods of time with Dent’s family and work there. He grew even more closely, and touchingly, devoted to Fred’s younger sister Julia—whom he later married. Yet he often got into heated, even explosive, arguments over the subject of slavery with his host (later father-in-law). Ulysses had inherited both his father Jesse Root’s abolitionist convictions and a particularly hotheaded way of expressing them: for both of which Dent, slave-owning plantation patriarch that he was, had no use whatsoever. Very often young Julia was the one left mediating these arguments and preventing them from coming to blows.

Ulysses and Julia Grant enjoyed probably one of the most touchingly tender and enduring romances ever to grace the White House. Their initial attraction was probably born out of common interests: Ulysses Grant had a deep and abiding love for horses, and Julia Dent was an avid equestrian in her youth. But—‘for ought that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth’—and this of old Bill’s observations certainly held in regard to these two. First of all there was the age gap: when they met, Ulysses was 20 and Julia 16; at his first proposal Julia turned him down because she felt she wasn’t mature enough to reciprocate his feelings. Then there was the problem of their families. Initially neither the Dents nor the Grants gave the union their approval—owing largely to the differences in class and political convictions between the two fathers. Grant’s failures in business placed the young family under considerable financial strain, and later his placement at various military postings often drew him away from Julia. But their bond was strengthened by the fact that they carried on regular and frequent correspondence, of which many of the letters from Grant’s side survive.

Ulysses took the characteristically Appalachian career choice of joining the military in his youth, graduating from West Point with no particular academic distinction, though he did devoted and admirable service in the Mexican War (which he later recalled with some chagrin as a pointless imperialistic adventure). Yet being posted far from his beloved Julia took a toll on him—prompting his one youthful alcoholic bout which sadly dogged his later career. It was in his military career, in the Mexican War as well as later in the Civil War, where he displayed yet another pair of typically-Appalachian traits: tenacity and vengefulness.

Grant had written on his bones the law of the feudal Scots, which dictates that if someone hits you, you hit them back harder so they can’t do it again. He lived his military (and, in some instances, later political) career by this principle. He distinguished himself at Fort Donelson by staging a ruthless and unrelenting counterattack against a Confederate sortie, against his superior officer’s orders, and would not be satisfied with anything less than an unconditional surrender of the fort by its Confederate commander. His performance in the Battle of Shiloh also followed this pattern. The first day of the battle, on 6 April, commanded on the Union side by Sherman and Prentiss and McClernand, was an utter débâcle and a total human waste: the single bloodiest battle, in terms of American lives, of this or any other American war. Grant noted in his writings that one could walk across the clearing from one end to the other treading only on fallen bodies, with one’s feet never touching the ground. Yet, in Grant’s typical style, his order for Buell and Wallace the following morning was: to hit the Confederates back at once, and hit them hard. And early in the morning on 7 April, that is exactly what the Union troops did: surprising the Confederates at the captured Union camp before breakfast, and fighting them to a bloody rout throughout the afternoon. At the end of the day, over 23,000 soldiers lay dead at Shiloh.

Ironically, it was precisely for this archetypically Southern personality trait in Grant, that later Southern historians would revile him as a ‘butcher’. Yet I do not count this as sin on his part. Grant fought his fights with honour and tenacity. Intriguingly, particularly from a monument in Missouri, it is not for these traits that he is chiefly remembered now, but instead for his (equally-controversial) policy of accepting African-American recruits under his command. The National Park Service credits this to Grant’s racial egalitarianism, and there is indeed a good case to be made there from Grant’s letters. Yet it needs to be remembered also that Greater Appalachian culture was broadly (if imperfectly) equalitarian in this respect—if one could handle a gun, black or white, he was welcome to join a fight.

From the other side, I think, certain assertions of Grant’s ‘bigotry’ against various groups—Irish and German Catholics, for example, and Jews—fail to take this aspect of his personality into account. Grant was liable to lash out, often unfairly and in sweeping terms, against people whom he thought had wronged him. He joined (for the length of a single week, before walking out in disgust) the ‘American Party’, better known as the Know-Nothings. This happened after, and because, he was precipitously rejected from a civil service vacancy in St Louis, which Grant attributed to a conspiracy on the part of the Irish and German Catholic residents of the town. And his indefensibly antisemitic General Order 11 during the War, expelling all Jews from the states under his military command, was issued in response to certain specific unscrupulous Jews like the Mack brothers who, unfortunately, actually were in the business of smuggling Confederate cotton into the North and undermining the war effort. Adding a personal angle to this order, Grant may have been particularly incensed that the Mack brothers had inveigled his own father, Jesse Root Grant, in their shady business.

What fascinates me, rather, is Grant’s magnanimous posture toward Lee and toward the Confederate armies, after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. His terms were more than generous. If there was any basis for considering Grant a saint, that basis would be best in evidence here: his offer to the Confederate soldiery to keep their horses, their arms and their freedom after their surrender and demobilisation was practically unprecedented anywhere. Grant’s offer of peace to Lee was a gesture of noblesse oblige more easily credited to a medieval chevalier, or a particularly-saintly Kievan Rus’ boyar. One is tempted to think that Lincoln’s vision of a lasting peace without rancour between the North and the South reintegrated under the same Union made a deep impression on Grant.

Grant’s overall plan for Southern Reconstruction was, in my view, also saintly—though that plan’s actual implementation considerably less so. It’s true that this vision was considerably hampered by Andrew Johnson’s far less-egalitarian model for Reconstruction, and later by the politics of racial backlash and domestic terrorism which undid much of Grant’s work. But it’s generally true that Grant’s continuous desire was to lift up the South in an image of reconciliation and racial equality-of-opportunity, coordinate with Lincoln’s direction indicated in the Second Inaugural. This high value that he set on reconciliation and peace is one which followed him into his negotiations with the Plains Indians and the wise (if belated) halt he put on the extermination campaign the US Army was waging on them in the American West; and into his foreign policy endeavours elsewhere in the world. His attempt to resolve the standoff between Qing China and Meiji Japan over the Ryûkyû Islands, though ultimately unsuccessful (much to the sad fate of the Ryûkyûan people themselves), was nonetheless guided by the high value he set on peace and mediated agreement.

Now… up to this point my interpretation of Grant’s cultural background and its influence on his decisions sits together fairly comfortably with the National Park Service’s view of him, though it offers a somewhat different colour to the Union general’s rationality and decision-making process. When it comes to Grant’s presidency, my assessment of him notably diverges from that which the National Park Service provides. I do not view Grant as a particularly successful or praiseworthy president.

My assessment rests primarily on account of his stubborn attachment to the gold standard, and his concurrent hostility to the greenback movement. What is true is that the popular perception of Grant as personally corrupt simply does not stand up to scrutiny. On the other hand, it is undeniable that as president, his policies viciously squandered the brief window for a truly democratic economy which President Lincoln’s far-sighted soft-money policies opened, rendered the Panic of 1873 inevitable… and inescapably favoured corrupt interests, plutocracy and the concentration of Money Power in the United States. Both the right-wing racist Democratic backlash in the Deep South, and the left-wing Populist insurgency in the Midwest and Upper South, can in some measure be attributed to Grant’s blockhead approach to economics. What’s more, Grant’s late-life personal financial misfortunes, which the National Park Service presents tragically as the result of Grant’s trusting nature, mirror precisely his poor management of the national economy.

Grant simply did not have the same experimental temperament that Lincoln did, a willingness to play with new ideas. Lincoln was open and welcoming, for example, to the advice of Illinois Col. Dick Taylor in 1862 when it came to financing the war effort with greenbacks (government-issued promissory notes not backed by specie in precious metals), in a way that Grant evidently had not been the year before. What Abraham Lincoln, along with his ingenious Treasury secretary Salmon Portland Chase, handed to the American people, was a currency system that could be responsive to their own growing productive capacity, rather than hitched to a commodity medium that fluctuated in value, and whose price fluctuations stood to benefit primarily the (wealthy) holders of the medium. Sadly, the holders of specie—and the industrial and usury-financial caste they represented—militated against this pro-producer, pro-farmer, pro-labour currency system from the very beginning.

Grant’s understanding of economic and monetary policy, unfortunately, was always fairly shallow. He understood it in the same moralistic terms that many other ordinary people, both North and South, did. Gold was gold, and had to be honoured as such anywhere, whereas the promises of a government printed on a piece of paper were considered to be somehow dishonourable. When considering his Appalachian cultural proclivity toward a certain valence of honour, in timocratic terms, this interpretation of specie-versus-greenbacks gains further force. Just as with General Order 11, this explanation is not meant to stand in as excuse, but perhaps to shed some light on its psychological meaning for him.

Unfortunately, this attitude toward gold as the only acceptable basis for an American monetary policy created a series of escalating problems for Grant that only worsened as he tried to correct course. His attempts to break the Johnsonian gridlock over the greenback question and steer the American economy back toward a ‘sound-money’ basis, resulted directly in a legislative demonetarisation of silver in 1873, which later produced a bank run that same year. This ‘Crime of ‘73’ was seized on by advocates of silver currency (themselves no better on this question than the goldbugs, largely being silver mine owners in the far West and other middle- to upper-middle-class holders of silver specie) as proof of Grant’s economic incompetence. Several subsequent legislative ‘fixes’ meant to ease the nation into a ‘resumption’ of payments in gold specie, served only to kick the can down the road, and send the nation into a prolonged economic slump… despite several (vetoed) attempts by soft-money advocates and their sympathisers (dismissed and derided as ‘inflationists’) to jumpstart the national economy by tabling the specie question and queueing a fresh legislative injection of greenback currency into the system.

One can easily imagine from this how people reacted. Grant’s Reconstruction policies, however well-intentioned, were viciously attacked by racist demagogues in the South who seized on the worsening plight of poor farmers with nothing but greenbacks to their name. They scapegoated blacks and Northern educators as agents of Grantian corruption, and these foul parasitic ‘Redeemer’ Democrats waged an unremitting campaign of beatings, rapes, murders and organised domestic terror against them, destroying the Reconstruction governments of their respective states through brute violence.

Elsewhere in the nation, third-party advocates of the greenback and the democratic promise behind it struggled to get their message out regarding the causes of the economic slump… with limited electoral success largely confined to the Midwest American states. But a consistent pro-greenback message would be sent only in the 1880s with the rise of the People’s Party (which enjoyed considerable popularity in the American South when plain people started to realise that the race-baiting Democratic promises of ‘redemption’ were no better than Republican ones).

Grant’s reputation suffered in his second term, not on account of any corruption on his part (the accusations of corruption were always only a politically-convenient distraction), but rather on account of his invincibly-clueless approach to the monetary question. The golden bullet-wound to the leg with which Grant was determined to hobble the American economy continued to bleed through the rest of his term and into that of Hayes. Yet, stunningly, and continuing in the same vein of economic illiteracy and idiocy that Grant was mired in, the National Park Service lauds him for having ‘paved the way for the resumption of specie payment, reestablished a sound currency, and provided the basis for the orderly growth of the American economy’! Yikes. I suppose this is one way to sidestep the problem of America’s lost decade, especially if you’re out to determine that Grant was a man ‘ahead of his time’.

In his private life, too, Grant’s gormless but ‘honourable’ approach to questions of finance left him an easy mark for dishonourable men to come and cheat him. Grant’s son Buck introduced his father to a certain Wall Street broker (and, as it would turn out, notorious con man) Ferdinand Ward, along with a certain banker who underwrote his schemes named James Fish. Grant was convinced to lay out most of his personal fortunes in Ward’s shell game, and even used a personal loan from Vanderbilt to keep Ward’s firm afloat when it was clear it was going belly-up. Ward absconded with all of Grant’s money and left him penniless and in deep debt at the very end of his life. The only way that Grant, dying of throat cancer, could manage to keep his family solvent and out of penury, was to sell his memoirs (a task with which he received significant help from a certain modestly-successful author and satirist by the name of Sam Clemens).

There is much in Grant’s biography for one to admire. One may, and should, point to his ability to take principled stands even when doing so affected him adversely, as a mark of his high character. One may also point to his tenacity and cunning as a strategist and a fighting man, a true son of Appalachia. And one may justly point to his tender relationship with Julia Dent and his manifest devotion to his children. But the man was not without certain critical blind spots and flaws particularly on economic matters: flaws for which his presidential reputation has, to a certain degree deservedly, suffered.

Book review: John Maynard Keynes by Hyman Minsky

The following is my review (a rather glowing one) of Dr Hyman Philip Minsky’s book on John Maynard Keynes, from Goodreads. I had posted an excerpt from this book, a quote from some of its source material, and another from one of its present-day heterodox disciples yesterday. I hope the following review may go some way toward explaining and perhaps even excusing some of my recent enthusiasm.

This book is simply, utterly, devastatingly hands-down brilliant.

Hyman Minsky, in undertaking this overview of the thought and intellectual legacy of John Maynard, Baron Keynes, asks us no less than to consider the following. He asks us to consider that the shape of the modern economy—with its treadmill of conspicuous consumption, environmental destruction, runaway military-industrial spending and intensifying bubbles of speculation disconnected from any real source of value—essentially takes Keynes’s name in vain. Although Keynes is in many respects considered the author of this economic order via the so-called ‘neoclassical synthesis’, Minsky argues persuasively that, given the direction of his theorising toward the end of his life, Keynes would have regarded our present economy with horror and alarm.

Minsky argues that the several attempts by various of Keynes’s disciples in the postwar Anglo-American sphere to reconcile his thinking with the ‘classical’ view of economy that prevailed among the liberal circles of his day, have the effect of watering down or even obviating the observations that Keynes was attempting to make about the operation of capitalism in his General Theory of Employment. The attempts to synthesise Keynes’s insights with the classicalist objects of his critiques have resulted in a ‘Keynesianism’ which undertheorises investment, removes his central thesis about the uncertainty of the future, and obscures his concerns about the foundations of financial markets being based on processes and moods (the infamous ‘animal spirits’) which are essentially irrational.

Minsky attempts to retrieve from the General Theory, a view--one imperfectly realised by Baron Keynes within his own corpus—of Keynes’s key concerns and the direction of his theory toward the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. Minsky presents us with a Keynes who, for genuinely humane and altruistic reasons against the interests of his class, truly desired an economy where the working class could enjoy some degree of leisure and higher culture; and one in which the incomes earned from rents or quasi-rents would be gradually starved off.

Unfortunately, the usage of the tools of regulation and government intervention in the economy which were undertaken in his name had the exact opposite effect of the one he seems to have intended to bring about. The modern ‘Keynesian’ economy is one in which inequality has ballooned, the working class is burdened with greater stress and lower pay and harsher workloads, and the capital gains of the wealthy are protected and even subsidised in law (through, among other things, the military-industrial complex).

The entire book is excellent. My one nit-pick is that the middle chapters do get pretty far into the weeds with their explorations of the various mathematical models which comprise both the neoclassical synthesis and Minsky’s heterodox interpretation of Keynes. For patient readers who are not econometricians or economic specialists, however, the conclusions of each chapter do a satisfactory job of recapitulating the core concerns in plain language. This book is more than worth your time to read.

Minsky contra the military-industrial complex

Okay, last one of these for now. In my defence, this one was just too good not to share. Here we have St Louis post-Keynesian leading light Hyman Minsky laying straight into the American military-industrial complex as a key driver of hypercapitalist accumulation and the acceleration of inequality:

Another reason why capital income has not withered away in the post-war period may lie in the structure of the government programmes that have been developed to maintain full employment. In the pre-World War II emergency of the Great Depression, government programmes designed to increase employment were heavily weighted toward the direct employment of labour. During World War II, a series of contractual devices for war production were developed which used private facilities for the manufacture of war materiel. In the postwar period, this contract system has been continued, both for the production of military equipment and in the production of more civilian-oriented goods. These contracts always provide for a substantial profit margin for the contractors. Not only has the postwar structure of policy designed to maintain income been heavily weighted toward the capital-consuming military needs, but the social structure of these policies has tended to subsidise capital income. Furthermore, inasmuch as the combination of military demand and the much larger schemes of transfer payments (social security, etc.) requires a heavy tax load, tax measures designed to aid capital income at the expense of consumers’ income are available…

It might well be that the euthanasia of the rentier in the form Keynes envisaged it requires prior constraints on the growth of relative needs, and the constrained growth of relative needs requires an income distribution based on low or no income from capital ownership. Underlying Keynes’ vision of a world in which capital is no longer scarce [to the majority of people] is a world in which income distribution is such as to avoid encouraging ever more extravagant consumption, and in which ‘civilised’ standards discipline and control relative needs and move consumption away from capital-intensive patterns.

Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong

Chinese language class at Westminster Presbyterian Church
Minnie Wong is seated third from the left in the back row

This past Wednesday, I went with Fr John Schroedel to the Lakewood Cemetery, where several members of his extended family are buried, as well as the remarkable Father Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, who founded Light & Life Publishing and was responsible for the translation and publication of some of the first Orthodox theological materials in English on the continent of North America. Orthodoxy in this country owes a great debt to Father Anthony. Although I never made his acquaintance in life, I am happy to have been given the privilege to visit his grave and offer prayers there.

One of the other grave markers that I saw in the cemetery, not that far away from the Greek section where Father Anthony is buried, belonged to a certain Minnie Wong. Minnie Wong is a name which deserves to be better-known in the Twin Cities. She was as important in her way for the Chinese community here as Father Anthony was for the Greek community. It is only on account of my work for Global Learning Alliance and Minghua Chinese School that I became aware of her in the first place. However, Minnie Wong’s history is closely intertwined with that of another outstanding Chinese woman here, Liang May Seen.

Chinese people have been coming to North America for a long time. Many Chinese folks worked as ship-hands on Spanish galleons operating out of Manila during the Age of Sail, and some of them ended up in Mexico and California in the 1500s and 1600s, where they worked primarily as hairdressers for the Spanish. These Chinese communities ended up as a part of the United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. But there are interesting archaeological finds indicating that Chinese trade goods—belt buckles and beads made out of bronze—ended up in the hands of Alaska natives long before contact with the Europeans. (This doesn’t exactly prove the wilder theories of Gavin Menzies, but it is tantalising, and should force a massive rethink of the way archaeologists think about the region.)

The first Chinese woman in Minnesota, though, came here a different way. Born in Kaiping in Guangdong Province, Liang May Seen was essentially lured onto an America-bound ship by a human trafficker, who promised her a wealthy marriage to a Chinese-American businessman but sold her into a brothel instead. This happened in 1885. She managed to escape the brothel in 1889 and took refuge at the Presbyterian mission in San Francisco, where she availed herself of the opportunities to learn English, housekeeping and mathematics.

There she was introduced to Woo Yee Sing. Woo Yee Sing, originally a laundryman, had come to Minneapolis in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act in order to escape the persecution, harassment and violence that Chinese people faced in San Francisco. Together with his brother Woo Du Sing, he opened the first Chinese restaurant here, the Canton Café, in 1883. Woo Yee Sing had come back to San Francisco in 1892 to look for a bride, which is how he met Liang May Seen.

Liang May Seen and Woo Yee Sing

Liang May Seen took an active role in building relationships in her new town. Thanks to her excellent study of English, she befriended many white women through the Presbyterian Church—among whom was women’s suffrage activist, Urban League director and state congresswoman Mabeth Hurd Paige—and opened a curio shop in 1904 to bolster her family’s income and to broaden her network of friends. More importantly, though, she took the lead in welcoming other newcomers of Chinese descent to Minneapolis. Through the Presbyterian Church she established a Chinese Sunday school and an afterschool programme for English language learners to help recent Chinese immigrants acculturate to their new home.

It was in this capacity that she met and befriended Minnie Wong, the wife of George Wong Gee. Minnie Wong was also from Kaiping, and evidently hit it off immediately with Liang May Seen. She excelled in her own English studies. The two women’s shared interest in promoting the welfare and advancement of Chinese women in Minneapolis led them to found and co-teach the first ELL classes specifically for Chinese women in the state. The two of them collaborated on a number of charitable and advocacy projects together.

Unfortunately, Liang May Seen was unable to have children of her own with her husband. (This isn’t attested in the actual history, but reading between the lines, her infertility is likely on account of the sexual violence she experienced during her involuntary servitude at the San Francisco brothel.) She and her husband adopted a young boy from San Francisco, named Howard.

Even though they had come eastward to escape the organised anti-Chinese violence and racism that characterised life on the West Coast, life here in the Twin Cities was still hard. Canton Café changed its name to Yuen Faung Low (遠芳樓) or ‘John’s Place’, and it became famous as a restaurant which was open to everyone regardless of race. As Woo Yee Sing put it in an interview with the Minneapolis Journal: ‘They are men like you or me. They have got to eat and there must be some place for them to do so… They are all brothers, and there is no room for race prejudice.’ (It is worth remembering that at this time, even though Jim Crow didn’t exist de jure in Minnesota, segregation was still the de facto norm and was enforced extralegally.) Despite this, in 1912 Yuen Faung Low fell victim to a bomb attack, probably motivated by race prejudice. Woo and Liang’s foster son Howard, in another interview, also recalls being attacked and taunted with anti-Chinese slurs on the street when growing up.

Yuen Faung Low, however, expanded—a second-floor tearoom was built to accommodate more upscale clients, and the restaurant continued to operate until the 1960s. Woo Yee Sing passed away in 1925, and Liang May Seen twenty years later in 1946—by the end of her life she was able to see the end of Chinese exclusion.

Things have certainly improved for AAPI people in the United States since the days of Woo Yee Sing, Liang May Seen and Minnie Wong—and these improvements are largely the efforts of precisely such people who were active in their own communities. It is with gratitude, then, that we should remember these three people and their contributions, and continue working to ensure that the current atmosphere of anti-Chinese bigotry in the United States is dispelled. For this I ask the added prayers and intercessions of Fr Anthony Coniaris of blessed memory, whose own experiences as the son of Greek immigrants assuredly parallel those of Howard Woo.

Neither Fordham nor Montanica!

Christ confronts the pride of the disciples, Russian icon

Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you.

Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

- 1 Corinthians 1:10-15, 21-25

The divisions currently evident in American Orthodoxy are entirely American in character, and not one whit Orthodox. They are reflective of the culture war priorities in American politics and, as such, represent parochially American concerns. The Fordham and Butte sects in American Orthodoxy represent a ‘liberal’ and a ‘conservative’ pose within American culture, respectively, which neither liberates, nor conserves. They are, in fact, like most heresies which come in pairs, both heretical.

By the Fordham Sect, I mean the culture-war liberals which centre on the so-called ‘Orthodox Christian Studies Centre’ at Fordham University. This ‘Centre’ is squarely under the thumb of the Catholic Jesuits, share entirely the Jesuitical cultural-political priorities, and are entirely adept at performing an Orthodox step-‘n’-fetchit ‘minstrel show’ for the sake of the grant money their Ignatian ‘Massa’ provides. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, the elders of this ‘house-Ortho’ greekface minstrel-show act (along with First Things contributor, Michael Novak apostle and all-around pretentious popinjay David Bentley Hart, Notre Dame-based scion of effete Tidewater plantation-gentry, replete with a ready arsenal of affected transatlanticisms and sesquipedalian highfalutin puffery which he, his indefatigably-miserable elder brothers, and his sycophantic clique of pseudointellectual toadies routinely mistake for wit), have assembled around themselves a veritable rogues’ gallery—Nathaniel Wood, Nicholas Denysenko, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Paul Ladouceur, Cyril Hovorun, Paul Gavrilyuk, Sr Vassa Larin, Antoine Arjakovsky, Inga Leonova, the defrocked Giacomo Sanfilippo—of well-manicured academics and experts whose sole purpose in life seems to be to mock and denigrate the hoi polloi of Orthodox believers both here and abroad; to pay a crescendo of degrading obsequies to the American war machine; and to ‘push the envelope’ of acceptable practice, particularly with regard to sexual ethics, in directions which have never been acceptable at any other time in Church history.

And by the Butte Sect, I mean the opposing culture-war conservatives and reactionaries which have nucleated in several places around several increasingly-radical Montagnard cults of personality. Fr Josiah Trenham seems to be the (ahem) ‘Tren-setter’ in this regard along with Fr Johannes Jacobse, though he has of course been joined by the increasingly-unhinged political pugilist Abbot Tryphon, the disgraced former metropolitan of the OCA Archbishop Jonah Paffhausen, YouTube chuds and social-media gadflies like Jay Dyer and (at the fringes) ‘Brother’ Nathanael, and bloggers like George Michalopulos and the cartoonishly-camp Rod Dreher. They claim to be the true defenders of Orthodoxy in America, and yet they rally around open heretics and political lightning-rods like pill-popping kvetch and Pelagian pedlar of penny-ante Jungianism Dr Jordan Peterson in their misguided pursuit of purity-through-far-right-political-action. I call them the Butte Sect because several of these figures are planning to meet later this month in Butte, Montana at something of a ‘constituent assembly’, if you will: the so-called ‘Patristic Faith Conference’.

It may seem strange to you, readers, that I take such pains to describe the ‘liberal’ side of this cultural divide using descriptors which would seem to belong to the ‘right wing’, and that I take such pains to describe the ‘conservative’ side of this cultural divide using those which belong to the ‘left wing’. But there is a reason for this.

~~~

The Fordhamites fancy themselves to be ‘open-minded’ and ‘tolerant’, but in reality their cultural attitudes give inadvertent voice to forms of white supremacy and Eurocentrism that should have been left behind with the death of Jim Crow. One example may suffice here as an archetype. Hovorun, writing for Fordham’s blog Public Orthodoxy, speaks of Africa like a latter-day apostle of Cecil Rhodes and Leopold II of Belgium would. Lamenting the departure of ‘the Western democracies’ (by which, one presumes, he can only mean Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium) from their putatively-benevolent colonial overlordship of the African continent, he points the finger at Russia and China—the ‘Eastern authoritarian regimes’—for a ‘recolonisation’, a ‘second Scramble of [sic] Africa’ which depends on infrastructure and investment on the Chinese side, and patronage of ‘murderous regimes’ on the Russian.

Never mind that the typical characterisation of Russia as an ‘Eastern’ dictatorship falls right in line with a long litany of tired Orientalist tropes (many perpetrated by the Jesuits), or that the characterisation of China in equally insidious terms is meant to recall the Yellow Peril. Never mind that the attempt to ascribe demonic motives to China falls particularly flat given Debt Justice UK’s explanation that China is emphatically not to blame for the current debt crisis on the African continent—private Western concerns hold three times more African debt than China does. The true point here is that one searches in vain to find anywhere in Hovorun’s essay, any attempt either to ascertain or place value upon the inherent well-being and dignity of the peoples of Africa. For him, Africans are relegated to the status of pawns, and his preference is merely for a (presumably benevolent) Western colonialism over an (evil and insidious) Eastern one.

This is not a one-off phenomenon for Fordham, nor is it indicative only of the usual bigotry with which Ukrainian nationalists routinely discriminate against and attack Africans and Asians. I have mentioned before how there is more than a germ of genteel liberal cultural discrimination against Middle Easterners by the contributors to Public Orthodoxy, such as Katie Kelaidis. And, of course, more recent essays by different PO contributors have doubled down on Orientalist and Yellow Peril scaremongering, in service of the foreign policy goals of the American military-industrial complex.

Which brings me to Fordham University’s current toast of the New York Times booklist, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz. It is a truism in the Orthodox deposit of spiritual wisdom that accusation is a kind of confession: as Saint Jerome said in his epistles, ‘When you believe you are excusing yourself, you are accusing yourself.’ So when Riccardi-Swartz goes around ROCOR parishes in West Virginia and sees there only white supremacism and fascism and Lost Cause mythology, one ought to suspect that she is merely confessing, in bad conscience, to the faults of which she and her own academic peer group are already guilty. One can hardly blame ROCOR for the widespread nature of the veneration of Tsar Nicholas II, for example—whose blessed feast is upcoming. On balance, given that he is perhaps (from a more objective standpoint) one of the more humane and forward-thinking figures in modern Russian history (or of his era in general!), attributing nothing but the darkest motives to such veneration appears to be a classic case of Freudian projection. The academics at Fordham and their associates are quick to signal their alliance with sexual minorities to burnish their liberal bona fides, and then promote and join witch-hunts against what they view as openly racist elements in the Orthodox Church—so that no one will think to scrutinise their own discriminatory tendencies, their own Eurocentric lenses of interpretation, their own enthusiasm for America’s wars of choice on the other side of the globe.

~~~

Now let’s talk about the other side of the coin: the Butte side. Even if ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’, Riccardi-Swartz isn’t wholly wrong in her diagnosis of a certain subset of ‘vocal’, ‘digitally-savvy’ Orthodox converts who flock to far-right political causes. The effect of these digital communities, which tend to propagate themselves around self-promoters like Jay Dyer and Rod Dreher, can be felt even within fairly ‘normal’ Orthodox parishes. Ironically, given how much they like to inveigh against ‘the Left’ (which is to blame for every manner of social ill from mass shooting to pornography to transsexualism), in truth their programmatic tactics resemble nothing so much as those of a revolutionary vanguard party in a Montagnard or Trotskyist vein.

There is an irreducible germ of Gnosticism or Kabbalah in the œuvre to which Dyer, Dreher and (sadly, increasingly so) Abbot Tryphon belong. The entire conceit of this œuvre is that an occult They (Hollywood, the ‘Cultural Left’, the Jews) are seeking to control society and control the spirits of the people through esoteric-occult means, and only by knowing the code can one hope to defeat them. This promise of a key to hidden knowledge, of initiation into mysteries, acts as the lure by which people gain entrance to the ‘inner circle’. This is analogous in many ways—and follows from—the phenomenon of being ‘redpilled’ or ‘blackpilled’ on online message boards. And of course, once one is gifted with this initiation, this occult hermeneutical ‘key’ to the inner workings of the hidden Them, one is essentially primed to be handed the Programme. And it is similar in many ways to the initiation practices of many secret societies and revolutionary cadres throughout history; the irony is that many of those thus initiated do not see it—they believe instead that they are counter-revolutionaries.

It is not, therefore, an accident that classic fascism and other far-right ideologies have a draw on such people. Fascism has historically held great appeal for those who believe themselves privileged with a degree of superior knowledge into a mythopoeic-symbolic order, to combat the degeneracy of their surroundings. It is well-known—and one can cite authors like Goodrich-Clarke on this—that fascist movements drew heavily on and even grew out of an idle middle-class fascination with esotericist movements such as Theosophy and the Thule Society.

Likewise, this preference for ‘keys’ that break into a mythopoeic-symbolic order creates synergies with the half-baked pseudo-Jungian pop-psych claptrap bandied about by Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson and the like. Of course, there is nothing particularly Christian about any of this, as evidenced by Peterson’s completely Pelagian understanding of Christianity – or, as my friend Dan DeCarlo aptly described him, ‘[an] anti-Tolstoy who has rewritten “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” but changed the ending’. That doesn’t prevent it, however, from being alluring. As St Paul warned us, false teachers will never go wanting for itching ears. And some of those itching ears, sadly, claim for themselves the mantle of Orthodoxy.

~~~

I must beg the pardon of friend and kinsman Luke L—, who coined the slogan ‘Neither Fordham nor Montanica’ for precisely this purpose. I must also beg your pardon, readers, if my wording here seems a bit eristic, in the tradition of the aforementioned Saint Jerome and the more recent Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre. I have always held to this point. Also, I have long since run out of patience with both sides, and in this case, proper Christian love for adherents of these twin, very public, errors requires a certain public sharpness. Indeed, as far as I can tell, this split in Orthodoxy between Fordham and Montanica seems to be a repetition-as-farce of the errors of the Hellenisers and the Judaisers, respectively. The pride of Fordham’s scholarly sect is in its philosophical erudition, its professed adherence to the norms of modern academia, and its greed for the simulacrum of virtue which passes for currency in elite circles. And the pride of the Butte sect is in its purity and holiness as those possessing the true revelation, fancying themselves its sole inheritors and upholders, through initiation into its secrets. Yet the fullness of truth rests with neither of them.

Culture wars are not spiritual wars, despite what the combatants themselves might think. Culture wars by definition divide humanity into warring camps. These camps then fight over things which are decidedly not spiritual: wealth, power, prestige, glory, conquest, the adulation of men, the warm fuzzy feelings of being on the ‘right side of history’, the thrill and passion of being a ‘chosen one’ in a cataclysmic battle between light and darkness. Academics are jealous of their ‘seats of honour’. YouTubers and social media personalities are driven by the cash generated by ‘likes’. There is no room for the great mass of humanity in either of these formations (the great majority of whom are geopolitically non-aligned). And it goes without saying that there is no room for Jesus Christ in either of these formations. Orthodox Christianity as a whole must therefore stand up and cast aside such divisions within itself, because they are not of Christ.

Blog name change

So, over the past several months, I have had the fortune (whether for good or ill, or simply funny) to be mistaken for a British person based on the title of my blog. This being in spite of the explanation I have had linked in the sidebar for the past several years. I am not, in fact, British and have no intention of being so. I do have British ancestry. I also have been a member of the Episcopal Church in the past and still feel a sense of fondness and warmth toward that faith and toward English culture generally. Yet, it still seems a bit misleading, even sinful, to encourage my readers or visitors to persist in a misconception about who I am and where I come from, especially given the importance I place on doyikayt. As such, I am renaming the blog The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox, which should hopefully place me in the minds of my readers on the correct side of the pond. In the meantime, I can only apologise for the confusion I have already caused!

Stop Line 3 and demand just policing

I took my kids with me to join the Climate Justice Initiative’s protest at the State Capitol building this weekend. I joined my well-known Twin Cities activist friends at the Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness and Veterans for Peace. And we were also joined by AFSCME Council 5, Interfaith Power and Light and the Civilian Police Accountability Commission. It was unfortunately not a very large turnout, but we made our presence known and felt. Why did we attend, though?

Because we need accountability. The climate crisis and the more immediate threat that Line 3 poses to drinking water, animal habitats and tribal lands not only in Minnesota but through the entire Mississippi Basin are bad enough. But they cannot be disentangled easily from a host of other issues. The fact that Twin Cities area police feel they are obligated to defend the corporate profits of a Canadian energy company over the literal lives and livelihoods of Twin Cities residents – particularly those with brown or red or yellow skin – tells us something none too complimentary about their priorities and lack of accountability. The fact that said Canadian energy company feels empowered to cynically mobilise liberal distrust of Russia against environmentalists here at home tells us something about our culture’s messed-up priorities and imperialistic hubris. And the fact that again the indigenous Dakota and Ojibwe peoples are not being heard and that the treaties that give them rights to the land are still being violated by state and federal governments tells us that we are still dealing with entrenched disparities of power that completely override substantive considerations of justice.

I would also say, as a religious conservative – though I understand full well that this may not be a popular position among the people I attended the protest with – that these issues are also tied to life issues. The collapse of time horizons that accompanies the sorts of short-sighted actions like building a tar sands pipeline under the Mississippi headwaters, is related to and indeed is a function of our cultural disrespect of and inconsideration of the future generations: the human children who are as yet unborn. Yes: I consider the unborn to be human, with the right to life. And water is life. I went to that protest because I don’t only want my daughter and my son to have clean fresh water to drink and clean air to breathe, but because I want the children that they will have someday to enjoy the same things. Even if, as Enbridge’s mendacious public relations and advertising campaign threatens, that means less energy for me now, or higher prices at the pump for me now, so be it. I can bear such a deprivation. I dare not presume that they can bear theirs, inflicted by my (and my parents’) generation’s short-sightedness.

So yes. As an Orthodox Christian in the city of St Alexis, I say it aloud: Stop Line 3. Protect our water. Honour our treaties. End Russophobia and the New Cold War. End the wars – full stop. No more stolen sisters. Justice for Jamar, for Philando, for George, for Daunte. End the killings in the womb. All of these things are connected, and we cannot fix a culture of death selectively.

How capital mobilises Russophobia against conservation

I recently saw a sponsored advertisement on Facebook from a group called Consumer Energy Alliance. It was an ad that was designed to be structured like a meme, as many ads on Facebook are, in order to draw one’s attention in the news feed. On the one side it had a happy flag-emblazoned map of Canada saying ‘Eh’ and on the other side it had a flag map of Russia with a caption of ‘Nyet’. The fine print beneath the meme was describing why Canadian oil was valuable to American consumers, saying why Minnesotans need the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline which is slated to run underneath the Mississippi headwaters, and threatening us that if we didn’t support Line 3, we would run the risk of America becoming dependent on those damn dirty Russkies and their damn dirty oil. The subtext of the ad was clear: good liberal Minnesotans, like all good liberal Americans, ought to support Canadian tar sands pipelines running through our drinking water. Otherwise, we’re siding with Eevul Pootin, his reactionary war machine and his filthy semi-Asiatic hordes.

Now, it’s important to be aware of what Consumer Energy Alliance is. The name might ring as being suggestive of a consumer protection watchdog, and indeed, if you visit the website, the group does portray itself as a concerned citizens’ group. However, they are essentially a sockpuppet of the energy industry. Their staff consists almost entirely of employees of the corporate PR firm HBW Resources. And they were founded by the chair of the North Carolina state GOP, Michael Whatley, with ties to the Alberta tar sands industry. Their principal modus operandi is essentially to work as an astroturf concern-trolling group against environmental and conservationist concerns. Their talking points are explicitly designed to appeal to left-leaning and liberal voters: by portraying the energy industry as diverse and equitable, friendly to families and small businesses, concerned about local communities and vulnerable jobs.

And here’s the thing: ads like this show how they clearly understand that liberals react to global news and gæopolitics. Even if, being Trump supporters, the grifters at CEA clearly know that Russiagate is a sham, they also understand that hate is a powerful emotion and can be cynically leveraged. They understand that the manufactured anti-Russia messaging can key into the stronger emotions in the average MSNBC-watcher’s lizard-brain, in ways that concern for things like indigenous communities and clean drinking water at home simply can’t. And CEA would not pay Mark Zuckerberg money to run this sponsored message, if they didn’t think it would be effective.

So here we have it, folks. We have energy industry operatives trying to fool us into running heavy risks of contaminating our own drinking water with a tar sands pipeline. And they’re using the Russiagate madness and the careful acceleration of anti-Russia messaging in order to sell Line 3 to liberals in the Twin Cities. That is, firstly, good enough reason to be vigilant and follow the money, particularly when ads like this show up in your social media news feed. Secondly, that’s good enough reason to throw out the anti-Russia narrative in its entirety.

There’s an old dictum: Think globally, act locally. The big problem we face now is that even local actors are being gobbled up by global concerns, and we tend to see big, far-off problems of gæopolitics as somehow more relevant to our lives than the stuff that comes out of our tap every day, that we drink and bathe and wash our hands in. (I’m as guilty of this as anyone else, by the way – possibly more so.) And the global actors – the neoconservatives, the multinational conglomerates – are constantly learning new ways to stifle and stymie local actions that, if they ever gained significant enough traction, might threaten them. And both Russia and China continue to be convenient boogeymen which these bad corporate actors can trot out, either to bolster their own moral credibility when defending ‘democracy’ or ‘religious freedom’, or else to scare people on either side of the political aisle into giving them what they want – our natural resources, our clean water and air, our health and safety, which they can sell away to line their own pockets.

Don’t let them do it. Don’t let these corporate fat cats and their sockpuppets cynically use hatred of Putin to manipulate you into mortgaging the Mississippi headwaters to the oil industry. Putin isn’t your enemy anyway! The Russians can’t sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids, but Canadian and American energy conglomerates will certainly try to befoul our drinking water… using the Russians as an excuse.

Congress as ‘sacred ground’?

Cross-posted from Every Thought Captive at Ancient Faith Radio:

To listen to the New York Times and the Washington Post tell it, the events of 6 January were nothing less than an unforgivable act of sacrilege and blasphemy. ‘Inside the most sacred spaces of American democracy,’ went the New York Times report by Grynbaum, Koblin and Hsu, unfolded an abomination of desolation worthy of the breaking news format ‘reserved for foreign wars, natural disasters or terrorist attacks’.

Now, I am someone who likes public order and stability as public goods. Order and stability are valuable no matter where they happen to be. So yes, I was naturally upset by what was essentially a riot aimed at overturning an election result in contravention of the established law of the land. I firmly believe that the rioters in DC were in the wrong, for the same reasons I believe that the looters and shooters here in Minneapolis over the summer were in the wrong. I also believe it is a very bleak indicator of the direction that our country is, in general, headed. But is it not intriguing that these established organs of the national news media would be so insistent on the sacrality of the buildings of the national government, when they have shown so little respect to public monuments elsewhere in the country? Is not the New York Times in its insistence on this public sacrality not being monumentally hypocritical, after having given space to a project – to wit, the 1619 Project – that was meant specifically to axe the root of American civil religion in the first place?

Of course, one can look at this in a cynical way. The New York Times arrogates to itself the right to attack national institutions, national statuary and national history, which it then denies to those who are not in the clique. We can look at this as a simple demarcation on the New York Times’s part between ‘friends’ (woke liberals, whose attacks on American civil religion are humane and righteous) and ‘enemies’ (conservative deplorables, whose attacks on the same are treasonous and wicked). But I think the actual stakes run quite a bit deeper than that. The riots that happened last week in DC, and the heated language around them in the press, are indicative of what is essentially a religious conflict, a contest of political myths, that attempt to orient the body politic toward very different objects of public veneration.

The 1619 Project’s actual aim from the beginning was to ‘reframe’ American history to centre the narrative around the oppressed. Unfortunately Nikole Hannah-Jones has been remarkably coy about her overall purpose (not to mention her corporate sponsors). However, I think it is reasonable to say that it attempts to create and promote an alternative revisionist history of the United States from its roots in British colonialism. The objects of veneration that can be seen most clearly in the 1619 Project are the individuals in American history, who: (a) belonged to groups seen to be historically oppressed, and (b) are seen to have worked toward ends of political or sexual liberation for their oppressed group.

On the other hand, we now also have a 1776 Project, supported by – for example – The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, as well as a broad array of historical scholars from the (Trotskyist) left, the liberal centre and the conservative right. These scholars rightly point out that the 1619 Project is ideologically motivated. However, the aim of the 1776 Project goes further than simply debunking the factual or interpretive missteps of Hannah-Jones and her fellow contributors to the New York Times. Their aim is instead to preserve and expand an ideological reading of history that places the fundamentally deistic and nominalist ideas of the American experiment at the centre of the same world-historical struggle for liberation. The aim is to preserve the Founding Fathers, the ideological principles of the founding documents, and an abstract concept of liberty as the objects of public veneration.

As Orthodox Christians, the first thing we need to understand is that these duelling myths are not our myths. Both myths are grounded in a historical naïveté about human nature and the potential for human perfection apart from God’s grace. We do not and cannot recognise a salvation of the world through abstract ideas like representative government, or through pieces of paper like the Constitution of the United States. We do not hold any truth to be ‘self-evident’ other than the Living Truth, which is the truth of one Essence in three Persons that is rendered visible and intelligible to us in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. I stand in full agreement with Orthodox theologians like Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian – and, for that matter, non-Orthodox theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank – when they voice their doubts about the fundamental soundness of America’s founding ideology and its commensurability with the revealed truth of Christ’s Person.

However, we can and should recognise that governments – even governments that are held captive to wicked men or to erroneous ideas – are nevertheless given their authority and legitimacy by God. Christians in America should still give due gratitude and respect to the establishment of justice and the insurance of domestic tranquillity – to borrow the language of the Constitutional Preamble – that the American state has (at its best) been able to provide to most of its citizens, including us. These public goods are precious and desirable, and we recognise them in every Divine Liturgy – when we pray to the Lord ‘for our country, for the president, and for all in public service… For this city, and for every city and land, and for the faithful who live in them… For favorable weather, for an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times’.

We are compelled to pray for the country, for our cities, and for those in public service. This means that we are also compelled to seek their good. It is therefore wrong to support an unlawful riot in our nation’s capital, which seeks to maintain the President in contravention of our established Constitutional order. On the other hand, however, we must be careful not to indulge in the sorts of sentimentality that the President’s most vocal critics indulge in, when they describe the halls of our government as ‘sacred’. This is a form of idolatry, and we must oppose this as well.