Miners in the margins

Miners in Donbass, 1990

I recently finished reading Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992. This is a work of modern ethnography by Lewis Siegelbaum and Daniel Walkowitz. Although I take some issue with its postmodernist and constructivist methods and analytical biases, it is an incredibly valuable work, and its value has been amplified by recent events in the region.

The volume is structured around the events of the Donbass miners’ strikes of 1989, which were considered to be one of the factors setting in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that a considerable force of impetus for this study was precisely this anti-Soviet angle. The idea was to showcase a significant social force which opposed Moscow’s dominance in the name of an alternative vision of social justice. The Donbass miners’ unions are thus explicitly placed in the same light as the Solidarność trade-unionist protests in Poland.

But Workers of the Donbass Speak also stands as an open refutation and rebuke to the narrow nationalist ideologues of the western part of Ukraine. By extension, it serves as an open refutation and rebuke to the Western corporate media who uncritically parrot Ukrainian nationalist ideology in service to the Ukrainian cause against Russia. The book shows definitively, from the primary source, that the political situation in the Donbass was not, contrary to Western media narratives, fabricated whole-cloth by Russian propagandists in 2014 in reaction to the Euromaidan.

The people of Donbass, and in particular the miners, struggled against the dominance of the centralising metropole of Soviet Moscow—and at that time were hailed in the West, at least among those who knew of them, as noble truth-tellers and selfless heroes. This volume demonstrates, in their own words, how the very same people broadly continued to struggle against the dominance of the centralising metropole of nationalist Kiev. Even in the early 1990s, they had no desire to serve as the ‘useful idiots’ in building a Ukrainian identity that would split them away definitively from their families and friends in Rostov, Krasnodar or elsewhere. In the end, for their pains, they ended up reviled by the same West in 2014 as terrorists, victims of Russian brainwashing or ‘little green men’.

The volume has some decided weaknesses. The postmodernist blathering of the principal ethnologists in particular is a rather sad feature of the general academic trend of the early 1990s. It showcases, rather than any independent merit of the field, the pitiable overall servility of the anthropological discipline in the West to the ilk of Foucault and Derrida. Ironically, despite the authors’ stated interest in ‘foregrounding dialogue rather than monologue’, we must endure two incredibly tedious and tiresome authorial explanatory essays in the middle of these interviews.

The interviews themselves, however, are very much worth these occasional scholarly irruptions. And Siegelbaum and Walkowitz are deeply to be lauded and thanked for having conducted them in the first place. The miners and their families in the Kuibyshev raion are allowed to speak for themselves without filters. The diversity of their views shows quite readily how they are not monolithic, but still certain common themes appear.

Women colliery workers in Donbass, 1943

For example: there is, at least among the older generations interviewed here, a considerable (but by no means unanimous) soft spot for Stalin, on account of the fact that he won World War II and also managed to keep food prices low after the war was over. At least two of the miners interviewed here, Ivan Kushch and Viktor Ignatov, couched their praise of Stalin in such terms. Several of the older generation also worried, as the Soviet Union disappeared, about the morals and habits of the youth: drugs and loud music in particular.

The people who were young-adults in 1989 had a much more troubled relationship with communism. While still professing many of the ideals and tenets of the Soviet state, they felt a keen sense of betrayal and disillusionment in the entire system. The same ideological and political apparatus that had held up the Donbass miners (beginning with Stakhanov) as essentially worker-saints and paragons of Soviet manhood (and also heavily subsidised their salaries), also unfortunately neglected to maintain the working conditions, expand the living conditions (including housing for families), or upgrade and replace the mining machines that would have made continuing in their profession more tolerable. Face-workers in mines were very much a privileged class within the Soviet system. But that privilege came at a decided cost: one which shortened the average lifespan and decreased the quality of life of a person which engaged in it.

Thus, many of the striking workers began with discrete and achievable material demands—demands for things like soap. Only later did they begin to add in political demands for change and to see themselves as assisting ‘perestroika from below’. Even reading the first-hand accounts of the strikes in this collection, it is deeply unclear the degree to which the miners even desired the collapse of the system they were protesting. Many seem to have felt they were simply ridding the Communist Party and the Soviet Union more generally of its bad actors and corrupt, parasitical political figures. Others clearly began to feel that Soviet bureaucracy created and sustained such parasites by design.

What is striking is how much of a non-event the dissolution of the Soviet Union is, in the lives of the miners. Many of the same problems that they had faced in the final years of the Soviet Union, persisted or deepened into Ukrainian independence. It is immediately clear that a number of miners felt they had merely traded one despotic and domineering metropole (Moscow) for another ‘petty prince or tsar in Kiev’, only that the Kiev metropole did not feel any of the same need that the Soviet state did to fill its obligations to its workers. In the words of Yuri Makarov:

In the past we fought for the existence of Ukraine as an autonomous state, but… we wanted power to be given to the localities, enterprises, cities; we wanted the living standard of the population to improve, but not so that Kiev could concentrate the reins of government in its fist.

What is interesting is that Valery Samofalov—one of the leaders of the mine strikes who ended up championing some very strong liberal beliefs—characterised Donbass’s desires for autonomy in the language of Western federalism and republicanism. The Donbass representatives held up ‘such countries as Switzerland, the USA, Germany, and Austria’ as their models for what they wanted within the Ukrainian state. (I note with some irony that here in fact is the Russia that Sebastian Milbank and the Europhile post-liberals were looking for all along, and they did not recognise it.) Others—including high schoolers in 1992, like Marina Kushch—complain about the problems of forced usage of the Ukrainian language in schools, where the textbooks in math, science and geography are all in Russian.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, a small handful of the striking miners, such as the abovementioned Samofalov, went whole-hog into a fervent belief in by-your-bootstraps individualism, privatisation and entrepreneurialism—but clearly not everybody did. Samofalov is notable in that he is something of a vocal anomaly in the collection: a clear voice of conscientious and idealistic, howbeit rather selective and (in retrospect) naïve, market liberalism. Others were far less sanguine about the transition to a market economy… or at the very least had serious reservations.

Economic, bread-and-butter problems hover over the early interviews. The biggest problems for the miners are housing and working conditions. Political problems are present too—in particular, a kind of straitjacketed language that narrows the possibilities of political discourse. But the miners come to support a ‘perestroika from below’. The collapse of the Soviet Union isn’t sought for.

When the miners find themselves a part of Ukraine, the economic problems persist, but the responsibility for addressing them falls to the mines themselves. With the collapse of the state, the sites of production become also welfare offices and social centres—tasks that they’re not prepared to handle. And then come the threats of downsizing and layoffs, combined with rampant inflation, that come with price liberalisation. The Donbass people who are interviewed here are well aware of these problems, but do not know where the problems are coming from. Soviet bureaucrats and their culture? Corruption in the new government? The ‘mafia’ and its presence in ‘biznes’? In the prophetic words of trade union director Yuri Pivovarov, ‘We feel uneasy, as if we are in a train and do not know where it is headed.’

The problem of nationalism and national identity gets thrown very roughly into the mix, with Kravchuk and organisations like Rukh being singled out as sources of a monistic understanding of Ukrainian identity that (even at this early date) lashes out at Donbass people as ‘Russian separatists’ and ‘communists’, and clashes deeply with Donbass realities. Tatiana Samofalova (Valery’s wife) proudly calls herself Ukrainian, and takes pride in her ability to speak Ukrainian. But then she also says: ‘My relatives, my aunt, my cousin, live in Russia and it has become a problem now to go and see them. We cannot meet with each other very often, and letters don’t get delivered. Why would I want such independence?’

Workers at Gorky Mine, Donbass, 1932

There is an interesting connexion between Donbass and Pittsburgh—that isn’t just a shared history of coal mining and Russian immigration. Donetsk and Pittsburgh were, once upon a time, sister cities. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, many people in Donetsk looked to Pittsburgh and its post-Rust Belt transition as a hopeful potential model for how Donetsk could develop in a humane direction under conditions of capitalism. The principal ethnographers here express doubts about that, pointing to the shortcomings and unevenness of Pittsburgh’s post-Rust Belt development, especially in comparison to the mythology of the same.

And then, toward the end of the volume, we see an actual instance of socialist nostalgia. Valery Zadorozhnyi, an accountant at a local TV station, expresses a desire to restore the ‘basic level of social protection’ that it gave ‘to old people and cripples’, noting that ‘at least they got their piece of bread’. His prognosis for the future of his country (speaking of Ukraine) under capitalism is unsparingly bleak. He doesn’t see any positive values in capitalism that could take the place of this basic principle of fairness.

It is also interesting to see where the rebirth of a belief in God, and a rediscovery of Orthodox Christianity’s symbols and ethos, creeps in around the edges in the wake of the Soviet Union’s passing. Intriguingly, it’s the Kushches—the family headed by a still unapologetically-Stalinist patriarch, Ivan—that seem to most deeply and authentically embrace belief in God and in Christianity. ‘We weren’t taught to believe in God,’ says Nadezhda Kushch. ‘At present, we’re beginning to do it in our own way… we’re like blind kittens now. In old Russia there used to be the law of God and it was taught in school, but people of our generation didn’t have it.’

Throughout Workers in the Donbass Speak, despite the dizzying multiplicity of perspectives put on display, there is a common thread running throughout them. It is the desire to live like people, to have a normal life. Yuri Makarov describes the aim of the miners’ strikes as ‘to provide normal living and working conditions for workers’. Olga Samofalova (no relation to Valery) puts it, even after independence, they had ‘to fight to achieve a normal human life’. This view is echoed by practically every other person interviewed in the book—and though obviously they have different views on the means necessary to accomplish it, certain basic contours of what is understood by a ‘normal human life’ show themselves: a roof over a family’s heads; dignified and decent-paying jobs; social conditions such that kids aren’t regularly hurt or killed or addicted to drugs.

The tragedy is that Donbass never got that. The Ukrainian government deliberately, and cruelly, denied that basic normality of human life to them after 2014. In 2024, the people of Donbass still have to suffer—not merely neglect or mismanagement as under the Soviets, but shelling and air strikes from the ‘government’ that claims ‘sovereignty’ over their land.

Modern-day Moscow shouldn’t try to find reason to crow too loudly over this interview collection, though. Donbass people clearly did not react kindly to being made socialist icons, hero-workers, mascots of Soviet labour—while being denied basic necessities like housing and bar soap. There should be a cautionary dimension here toward a government like Putin’s, that would turn them into patriotic mascots now, or heroes of all-Russian unity, while not listening to their demands for a normal life. People in Donbass have had to suffer such deprivations at the hands of the Ukrainian military for eight entire years, while the Russian government sat aside and dithered.

Ultimately, the purpose of this volume holds up well even after over three decades. It is to simply let Donbass people speak in their own words. Sadly they are filtered here by translation, but the meaning of their aspirations comes through loud and clear anyway.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart: a review

Fr Paul Abernathy’s new book, The Prayer of a Broken Heart, is a splendidly multifaceted exploration—from a perspective rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition—of the religious history and spiritual character of African slaves in America and their descendants. Speaking as a white American Orthodox Christian, I’m sure that what I got out of it would be very different than what a black American would get out of it. And I’m sure that a ‘cradle’ Orthodox Christian from within one of the traditionally-religious immigrant communities that came here after slavery had been abolished would get something else entirely out of it. However, the fact that The Prayer of a Broken Heart has something to say to each of these groups is a mark of its strengths. Although it is an adaptation of his seminary master’s thesis, precisely as a work of religious history it stands firmly on its own merits.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart may be said to have three strands. The first strand is an apologia of African-American Christianity as an, if not the, authentic and valid expression of African-American culture (as opposed to being a ‘white man’s religion’ or a ‘slaveowner creed’ foisted upon the slaves by their masters). The second strand is a portrait of African-American spirituality as it was formed through and the experiences of slavery, race-based terrorism, segregation and informal discrimination. And the third strand is an exploration of the commonalities between the African-American religious experience and the historical witness of the Orthodox Church. Interspersed through all of these strands are the accounts of pastoral experiences Fr Paul himself has had, working as a priest in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The men and women whom he encounters have lives shaped by profound grief and loss. But that same suffering leads them, just as it has led many generations of their ancestors, before the Cross.

The historical aspect of the book is logically presented and carefully argued from primary source materials—slave narratives in particular. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and others are given space to speak in their own words from their own experiences. If Fr Paul’s authorial voice is somewhat more distant in these passages, that is all to his credit, as these narratives have their own power. The picture he draws out of these narratives is one which complicates and deflates both triumphalist-panglossian white accounts of slavery as a ‘civilising mission’, and anti-Christian tendencies in black-nationalist thought that portray Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’. It becomes quite clear in these accounts that slave-owners had no interest whatsoever in edifying their slaves or leading them to Christianity. Their sole interest in their slaves was as productive property. In fact: slave-owners feared slaves’ expressions of religiosity, as the prayers of slaves were a powerful implicit witness to their spiritual equality before God.

Slave-owners were known to hold dances and parties with music and secular entertainments for their slaves to keep them ‘happy’. But religious gatherings were feared and forbidden. It was common for slave-owners to have slaves beaten cruelly or even killed for praying. Slaves would therefore organise prayer meetings in ‘hush harbours’: backwoods or basement locations hidden from the eyes of masters and overseers. For two hundred years, African-American Christianity was by necessity an ‘invisible institution’—a phrase borrowed from the religious historian Albert J Raboteau, whom Fr Paul Abernathy quotes at length. The message that he draws from this is clear: African-American Christianity, far from being received by slaves from masters, was attained and held in spite of the suppression of Christianity by their masters. Fr Paul tells us outright that the first records we have of slaves converting in any significant number to Christianity occurred during the first Great Awakening, when ‘New Light’ itinerant preachers would draw mixed-race crowds to revival meetings… often over the strenuous objections of the supine ‘Old Light’ pastors who were the representatives of the slave-owners’ religion.

This leads Fr Paul to open a descriptive account of the character of the Christianity of black America. Because it was an ‘invisible institution’—a church of the catacombs, shaped by the ever-present reality of persecution—it quickly became characterised by a radical trust in the will of God; an extended hope of justice however long deferred; a reliance upon the power of prayer; deference to the witness of elders who had experienced God’s action in their own lives; and an emphasis on salvific suffering and the openness of a ‘broken heart’ to God.

This provides an opening for Fr Paul Abernathy to explore the parallels between the African-American religious experience and Orthodox theology. To a certain extent, he counts on the Orthodox Christian section of his audience to have a great enough familiarity with the rudiments of hesychasm and the words of Psalm 50 to make certain connexions on their own. But he deftly illustrates how the sublative, broken-hearted and penitential character of African-American Christianity shares fundamental similarities with Orthodoxy—drawing upon numerous Patristic writings from Saint Isaac of Nineveh through Saint Gregory Palamas to Saints Silouan of Athos and Sophrony of Essex for demonstration.

Here Fr Paul Abernathy has a much clearer and direct case to make for a connexion than does, say, Hieromonk Damascene Christensen in Christ the Eternal Tao. Fr Paul has enough respect for the tradition he examines to acknowledge the clear differences between it and the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, though, he makes an honest appeal for the Orthodox ‘case’ with African-Americans. He notices in the remnants of African religion which were carried over into Christianity still more similarities with Orthodoxy: communality, the person as a web of relationships, the closeness of the human world to the Divine. And he notes in the tradition of African-American Christianity certain unmet needs and expectations in itself, most notably: a desire for self-denial, for discipline (explaining the appeal of the Nation of Islam), for mystical communion with God. And he argues that the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting these needs and expectations, as Protestant churches are quickly finding themselves deficient of these things.

Ultimately, though, this book is a labour of love. I use that term advisedly. Fr Paul Abernathy is not a nationalist of any sort: indeed, he considers pride (including national pride) to be the very source of many of the ills which the love of Christ must heal. For him, the most salient and salvific features of African-American Christianity are its insistence on forgiveness and on love of enemies: both insistences which are shared by the best aspects of Orthodox Christianity. And it is clear that he himself speaks from a position of love, even when he issues criticism.

His analysis is not without its critical dimension. Although he has nothing but words of praise for the musical tradition of the black spiritual (that true cry from the bottom of a broken heart, expressed in a cappella harmony!), he waxes particularly critical of modern African-American culture when it comes to popular music and consumption habits. He considers much of modern black musical and popular culture to be a form of propaganda which weakens the spirit—in much the same way as the secular dances and parties held by the slave-owners kept their slaves docile. I was rather surprised and a bit dismayed to read the harsh words he had even for blues and rock-‘n’-roll music, both of which (instrument-driven, individualistic, disillusioned and worldly) he views as a qualitative falling-away from the otherworldly hope and communal fellow-suffering epitomised by the spirituals.

Many thanks to Fr Paul Abernathy for publishing this work in a form which makes it available to a broad audience outside the academy. The Prayer of a Broken Heart is very much worth the time taken to read. For American Orthodox Christians in particular (and anyone interested in the history of American religion and constructive modern approaches to race relations generally), it is an excellent source to ingest, to ponder, and to begin conversations from.

Hong Kong is an island (and an oligarchy)

I have hesitated a long time before writing or publishing this post. In fact, most of it is roughly two years old, and as old as four, dating back to when I had to go to Canton and Hong Kong on visa-related business to bring my family back here. But certain current events thrusting Hong Kong back into the international spotlight have pushed me to update and complete this piece. To start with, let’s analyse certain gæographical and œcological realities briefly.

Hong Kong imports over 90% of its food – and at that, the vast, vast bulk comes from the mainland, including 94% of the city’s fresh pork, 100% of its fresh beef, 92% of its fresh vegetables and 97% of its freshwater fish. It imports between 70% and 80% by volume of its fresh water from the East River in Guangdong. Hong Kong’s electricity grid is interconnected with that on the mainland, and 23% of its total electricity is supplied directly from the mainland, much of that through the nuclear power plant in Shenzhen. For the remainder of its electricity, Hong Kong relies on coal and natural gas (also significantly imported from the mainland, though also from Indonesia and Singapore), with only 2% of its total consumption originating with renewable sources. In addition, tourism remains a vital œconomic sector for Hong Kong and accounts for five per cent of its GDP and over seven per cent of its employment, and mainland visitors account for nearly 80% of this sector’s custom.

Hong Kong also produces a vast amount of solid waste (to the tune of 6.4 million tonnes a year), has been running out of landfill space for a long time, and outsources the bulk of its recycling to – you guessed it! – the mainland. Hong Kong is notorious for its e-waste production (and the big HK shipping concerns also trade in e-waste from other countries), and much of this e-waste ends up in Guangdong, in poor villages like Guiyu. This is a question I should know a thing or two about – analysing e-waste flows, including destinations for international shipment, was part of my group’s research project on the 2010 Covered Device Recycling Act for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Suffice it to say, Hong Kong as a municipality has basically built itself up, since the late 1970’s, on a finance-led œconomic structure in ways which render it not only almost entirely dependent on the mainland for basic sustenance and support of a high-modern / high-tech / high-rise living standard. That said, Hong Kong happens to have one of the world’s highest urban income gaps, a legacy which significantly predates the 1997 handover (with 1971 being cited as the last year in which income disparity was this high).

So how did this financial-services led local œconomy play itself out? Hong Kong was flooded with wealth, but that wealth was largely in the hands of the same four families (Li, Ho, Hui and Lo). But instead of investing some of that wealth into, say, microchip or biotech or medical services development – all of which would have kept Hong Kong at the vanguard of the Chinese œconomy – instead they chose to sink that wealth back into real estate, fuelling speculation on an already-overpriced housing market. That was the quickest way to earn money, but not the wisest. Now, places like Shanghai and Chongqing are outstripping Hong Kong as preferred places of investment, and Hong Kong is no longer ‘top dog’ in China. That loss of internal status, along with the massive wealth gap, housing crisis and environmental crisis, seem to be what is driving a lot of the anxiety and anger that these middle and upper-middle class young people are experiencing now. It’s leading them to lash out at mainlanders as well as other foreign residents of the city. It strikes me that the defensiveness around the status of the Cantonese language (which is not dead and will never die so long as karaoke is a thing) stems from the same set of anxieties.

Some personal background here. I visited Hong Kong myself in 2005 on a seminar, and again went to the Delta in 2015 on visa-related business. During the first trip, I stayed at Hong Kong Baptist University during the week of 1 July, which coincided with the pro-democracy protests. Even though I was a visiting student, I did get the full tourist treatment. I got handed protest literature. I ate durian-flavoured ice cream. I visited the big malls, the schmancy restaurants (that’s the technical term) featuring dishes from any part of any animal you can think of, the Buddhist temples, the painfully-authentic British-style pubs.

But my strongest impressions of the place were Dickensian. You could see high-flyers driving Lamborghinis, Maseratis or Bentleys around in the nice mall districts, and then turn around to see old people of retirement age picking up litter for change, having no other way to supplement their meagre-to-non-existent pensions. You could go out to sea and visit the places where people rented out rooms on rusty decades-old boats floating on garbage-littered water because they couldn’t afford to live on land – and from the deck you might have a perfect view of the glittering glass-and-steel skyline. (The boat-dwelling practice is actually, in part, one remnant of a cruel Song-era ethnic caste system which was done away with by the Qing Dynasty’s heroic Yongzheng Emperor, only to be reintroduced informally by the British.) The sight of five-star hotels in spitting distance (figuratively speaking) from overcrowded public housing projects still remains somewhat disconcerting to me, and looms quite large in my memory of the place.

The point here, though, is not to bash Hong Kong as a place, or Hongkongers in general as people – the great majority of whom are victims, not perpetrators, of these circumstances. The point is to provide a certain degree of perspective. Hong Kong faces an unfavourable situation, and a broad array of thus-far intractable environmental, social and œconomic problems. The net effect of these problems is to reduce many of the island’s inhabitants to a state of path-dependence on the well-entrenched oligarchical system of rule which goes back over a century. It is this oligarchical system of native tycoons, and the colonial-legacy civil service system which supports it, which currently underwrites the vast majority of Hong Kong’s œconomic and political woes – not Beijing.

It is unclear to me how, if at all, the current protest movement in Hong Kong is liable to change anything for the better about this basic state-of-affairs, particularly when the movement itself tends to be pro-oligarch and pro-big business after the fashion of the Western liberal politics it emulates, or else ressentiment-filled, nativist and xenophobic after the fashion of those same Western countries’ current backlash politics. Does attacking government buildings with black paint and racist anti-Chinese slogans, harassing random old men in airports or kidnapping journalists, beating them up and denying them medical attention, get the great majority of Hongkongers any closer to a semblance of œconomic dignity, fair rents and land prices – or a better and more sustainable environmental model, which would seem to be a prerequisite for any meaningful sort of independence? It’s very telling that these protests, like the 2014 ones, are not driven by the working class, but by the relatively-privileged middle class. Poorer, more conservative neighbourhoods like Yuen Long and North Point have been decidedly unsympathetic to the protests.

It’s quite true that I used to be far more sympathetic to the Umbrella Movement than I am now. And I still hold to the view that Hongkongers – particularly working-class Hongkongers – have very good reason to be upset, about the income inequality and œcological problems in particular! But, at the risk of being one of those pesky Western types who refuses to fall in line behind Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, these current protesters haven’t learned anything from the Umbrella Movement’s failure, and they haven’t addressed the real agents of their island’s immiseration. More than that, much of their resentment against the mainland and mainlanders seems psychologically-driven by a loss of their uniquely-privileged status in the broader Chinese world. Hong Kong is still an island, but no longer uniquely wealthy or glamorous. That’s been a long time in coming. But because it’s not solely Beijing’s fault, it’s a lot harder to protest against.

Paradoxes of an assimilated Americanised quarter-Jew

My ambivalent, attenuated Jewishness often feels like a catch-22, as I’ve said before. On the one hand, even indicating it or pointing it out makes me feel fraudulent. A friend of mine, actually a former roommate of mine from college, posted this comment on Facebook:

Truth be told most Jews are not Jewish in any meaningful sense. They don’t go to Temple, don’t know their aleph beys, don’t keep the Sabbath, don’t keep kosher or observe Jewish law. They don’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew. They don’t marry within the faith and they don’t raise their kids Jewish.

I hasten to note that he wasn’t singling me out, or intending to single me out, with this comment. He was speaking to the state of American Jewishness generally. But I have to admit, that’s me all over, guilty as charged. I don’t keep kosher and don’t go to Temple because that’s not my religious tradition. I learned how to say the Sh’ma Yisroel, but don’t know any more Hebrew than that, and my Yiddish is limited to a couple of phrases my parents use. At best, I belong to the beta Gershom. My Jewish grandmother, halakhically speaking on the ‘wrong side’ of the family (my dad’s), married outside the faith and died young, never getting the chance to raise her children as Jews. So what the hell am I doing even calling attention? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t that theft? Isn’t that appropriating something that isn’t rightfully mine? I am not and never have been a member of this community. Isn’t it presumptuous and officious to assume any kind of responsibility for it? I can’t stand it when American evangelicals, Messianics and the like put on cosplay as Jews, like Jewishness is their toy-box, to use Dr Weiss’s phrase. But when I talk about my family history, given the degree to which the Jewishness of that history has been watered-down in precisely the way that my former roomie describes, is what I do any better at all?

At the same time, pointedly not speaking about my immigrant Jewish grandmother, not saying anything about what this beautiful Wisconsin girl with my sister’s face in black-and-white photos has meant to me, also seems not only like a cop-out, but also like a kind of historical denial. It feels like participating in some kind of cover-up: like soaking a library in gasoline, dropping a lit match and walking away. History matters a great deal, even and especially if it’s the kind of history that might give you neuroses. It took me a very long time to realise and to process that when my Dad told me he ‘doesn’t have a Zionist bone’ in his body, he was giving voice to far more than just his politics. He was indicating, perhaps indirectly, an entire family history of doyikayt. Whether Bundism was their explicit politics or not, my foremothers and forefathers lived an entire way of being Jewish that was Yiddish, non-Zionist, localist and leftist - that I had no idea about prior to my high school years.

This may be expressed as a paradox: I am just enough of a Jew to be neurotic about not being one. Another paradox is that it is my Tory sensibility that militates in me that, whether I like it or not, I’m part of this localist-leftist Yiddish history. I don’t get to choose that, just like I don’t get to choose who my grandparents are. Given that, the least-bad option as far as I can tell, as it were my best plea for clemency, is to simply be humble and be honest about all of the foregoing, and allow others - Jewish and not - to come to their own determinations.

In fact, whatever falsity may be hidden in it, such honest, humble remembrance is all the more important now. The politics of the (Eastern) European far-right resurgence, its echoes on these shores, the violent Ukrainian, Polish and Hungarian nationalisms that have begun their steady creep out of the shadows of history, render this remembrance necessary and urgent. The far-right resurgence on both sides of the Atlantic not only summons old ideological ghosts, but it rhymes and pairs off all too neatly with the historic and resurgent nationalist pretensions of Israel as the only territorial safe haven for Jews, which must therefore be accomplished even if it means depriving Palestinian Arabs in perpetuity. These triple lies have to be confronted as one if the Jewish people will live in peace, either with their neighbours, their histories or, ultimately, their consciences. Historically, the group which confronted them the most convincingly were the Jewish localists.

I am not Jewish in a religious sense: whatever I have is only the assimilated-apostate Jewishness of Saint Constantine and Saint Bunakov. But I can remember those in my family who were Jewish, and I can remember the way that they were. It may be a vain and pretentious hope, but if there is even a chance that such an anamnesis can, even in some small and yet-unseen way, cut short a cycle of tragœdy that seems to be repeating itself, it should be made.

The inconvenient politics of everyday acts of decency

I have only ever met His Beatitude Vladyka Tikhon (Mollard) once; and that was at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. My first impression (and at that, the all-too-brief impression of a lay parishioner of a visiting bishop) was that of a calm, genteel and well-educated man, not overbearing in his intellect but demure and irenic in his demeanour: in other words, a temperamental conservative. That impression has been expanded upon and deepened by several things I have read about him recently: not only his pastoral letters on various topics of importance, but his actions, like condoling with the victims of the horrific tragedy in Pittsburgh, or sending birthday greetings to the sole canonical Orthodox bishop in Kiev.

Let me assure you, gentle readers, of my awareness that by remarking on these acts by our Metropolitan myself, I am contributing somewhat to the sense that these things are not simply what a bishop, or indeed what a human being, ought to do at such times. Of course we ought to comfort the bereaved! Of course we ought to celebrate our friends’ birthdays! And, in a less politically-fraught time, perhaps, these little and unobtrusive acts of simple neighbourly and friendly decency would pass as unremarkable. But now they have a deeper significance, as Vladyka Tikhon himself alludes in his letters.

As I have said before, one condoles with the Jews of Squirrel Hill by condoling with the Jews of Squirrel Hill. As Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein puts it: ‘showing support for Israel does nothing to combat anti-Semitism or bolster the safety of Jews in the United States’. One should think that this is a fairly obvious thing. But Orthodox and Catholic priests showed greater common sense, greater grace and greater humanity in this instance than did Israeli leaders like Naftali Bennett. How is this so? It is not the show of solidarity itself that is political, but instead an environment of strategic calculation which lends it a political ‘look’. It may look naïve, but the true and unmediated love of neighbour comes only from a certain (implicit or explicit) trust in the Most High, the ‘source of mercy, consolation and hope’, who can ‘free’ us ‘from the assault of attitudes and ideologies of prejudice and hatred, fear and anxiety about those who are indeed our neighbours’. And that was true of the Tree of Life congregation themselves, who reached out to help Honduran refugees without pausing to consider that they were not Jews or white Americans, but (largely) Catholic Hispanics and mestizos. They did a right and decent thing, even though this right and decent thing was seen as inconveniently radical.

A similar trust pervades likewise with the birthday wishes of Metropolitan Tikhon to his brother Metropolitan Onufriy. It is a simple letter (but not a simple-minded one), expressing simple but heartfelt sentiments. Some observers might even call it naïve, in a political environment fraught with questions of imperial legacies and ideological constructs like New Rome, Third Rome, Hellenism and the ‘Russian World’. But who is to say that the simpler approach isn’t the correct one here? Has Metropolitan Onufriy ever once alluded to a ‘Russian World’ or proclaimed a Third Rome? Even these concepts are broadly (and in some cases wilfully) misunderstood, both by their supporters and by their detractors, and I will get to that at a later post. For now, though, it is worth dwelling on the position of Metropolitan Onufriy himself.

Metropolitan Onufriy is a man of deep faith, whose guilt and transgression in the eyes of the state he lives in, is that he sat in silent protest at a state event commemorating the Ukrainian armed forces, when doing so would mean taking a side in a civil conflict in which members of his flock were murdering each other. (Sound familiar?) Indeed, he was doing the only right and honourable pastoral thing in refusing to stand, even though it brought down a charge that he was taking sides. He was saying, in effect, that ‘East Ukrainian Lives Matter’ (and Russian, American, Black and Asian lives) and refusing to assent to a lie that would erase them from the picture. Of course, the nativist right-wing over there could no more tolerate such a protest, however civil, than the one over here could. They had to find a way to punish the good Metropolitan for his protest, and they did so by attacking his Church and by branding him an enemy of the state. Note that all of the ideological miasma, the talk about duelling Romes and Greek vs Slavic Orthodoxy, arose in the aftermath, when the Œcumenical Patriarchate chose to intervene on Poroshenko’s side. Again, we see that the simple, decent thing which Metropolitan Onufriy did in virtue of his office, is inconveniently radical in the eyes of those with an agenda.

There is the risk of engaging in something of a tautology, pointing out that even small everyday actions toward our neighbours are political. (After all, what is politics but the question of how to treat our neighbours?) But that is the thing about tautologies; they happen to be true. The recent actions and words of Metropolitan Tikhon show clearly that even these small gestures can have important political ramifications in a world awash in what Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov would call ‘post-digital idols’. It can be difficult to rid oneself of the imperialist hangover (doubly so for those of us living in the sole post-Cold War empire left standing) and start seeing clearly again with eyes of faith, but it can be done.

The heartrending news from Pittsburgh

Both as an American of European Jewish ancestry, and as a one-time citizen of Pittsburgh (a city of which I still have done memories and to which I still have profound cultural attachments), I feel compelled to write publicly about the recent mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill. My heart is broken for the eleven Pittsburgh men and women who died, and grieves with their families: my neighbours and my kin by blood. I have been moved to write by grief, yes, but also by outrage. Thankfully, most of the reactions I have seen to this tragedy coming out of Pittsburgh itself have likewise been unconditionally ones of sympathy and compassion, and that is some consolation.

But this was indeed an attack motivated wholly by anti-Semitic bigotry. That requires particular attention. Firstly, this was undisguisedly an attack on American Jews qua Jews. It was not an attack on a political ideology - it was not anti-Zionism. It was not even an attack on a set of religious doctrines and observances, despite the attack happening at a place of worship - it was not anti-Judaïsm. It was an attack on a people (and particularly because neither nationalism nor religion were the targets, I feel I must say my people) both because of our immigrant heritage and because of our real or imagined place in as aliens in American society. That is to say: it was an attack on an American Jewry that exists in the anti-Semitic imagination as a fifth column. We occupy, in this imagination, the rôle of the instigator and the manipulator in the mythical narrative of white genocide. Which is indeed as much as to say that our purported whiteness is negotiable and revocable, particularly if we associate ourselves in sympathy with non-whites.

Just before this atrocity, the shooter made reference to the ‘caravan’ of desperately deprived people coming northward from Honduras, fleeing climate and political conditions there that have made life intolerable, and the ways in which American Jews (specifically, the historically Russian-Jewish Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) were mobilising to help them enter the country. This, to his depraved mind, was proof of our criminal disloyalty and genocidal intentions against whites - both long-standing anti-Semitic canards.

Let us note well: this is the single worst incident of anti-Semitic violence in American history. It was also directed, not at the Zionist lobby (AIPAC or ADL), not at the ultra-Orthodox who are the most visible representatives of the Jewish religion (and who, I note, have a sizeable presence in Squirrel Hill), but at a socially-oriented synagogue whose activity was not Zionist or apologetic, but instead humanitarian. Tikkun olam, the Old Testament mandate to repair the fallen world which is parallel to and sympathetic with Fr Sergei Bulgakov’s participatory sophic ethics, was the specific tendency in American Judaïsm to come under literal fire.

This is noteworthy, because I have seen preëmptive attempts to exculpate the administration by pointing out its Zionist policies (like relocating the American embassy to Jerusalem), or by pointing out the conversions to Judaïsm within the family. In light of the nature of American anti-Semitism and the threats that American Jews now demonstrably face, these kinds of exculpations are not only irrelevant, they are also insulting, patronising, cynical and dangerous.

The kind of political grandstanding so common among Republicans (but not unknown among Democrats) that seeks to curry our favour in such moments as these by ‘standing with Israel’ is particularly egregious in this regard. Pardon the tautology, but you do not comfort the Jews of Squirrel Hill by standing with Israel. You comfort the Jews of Squirrel Hill by comforting the Jews of Squirrel Hill. It is bad enough that these statements are made cynically with an eye to political fundraising. But it is also dangerous because it lends implicit credence to the same canard that motivated the shooter; to wit, that our loyalties are, in fact, dual: that our civic consciences are collectively motivated by a cabalistic ethnic self-interest. (And obviously, to judge by the mission and activities of the Tree of Life Synagogue, this simply is not true.)

‘Standing with Israel’ is also a cheap way for far-right nativists both here and in Europe to buy themselves some semblance of plausible deniability. Iowa congressman Steve King, to give a recent domestic example: his loud pro-Zionism serves as a useful fig-leaf for a history of supporting white nationalist rhetoric which is now a manifest danger to American Jews. This is common on the American far right: Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon both do the same song-and-dance. Or, in Europe: Mateusz Morawiecki (in Zionist mode and anti-Semitic mode), Orbán Viktor (in Zionist mode and anti-Semitic mode) and Petro Poroshenko (in Zionist mode and anti-Semitic mode). This kind of obscene charade needs to be axed.

And that isn’t even because most American Jews, particularly us younger folks, have a declining attachment to Zionism. This is because our security, indeed our lives, are at stake. We are under attack here; the response, therefore, must also be here; and we must bear in mind that we are not the only ones under attack. This localism and this neighbourly fellow-suffering is the only way our corner of the fallen world might indeed be healed.

My prayers and deepest condolences are with the souls and with the families of Rose Malinger, Melvin Wax, Sylvan and Bernice Simon, Joyce Feinberg, Daniel Stein, Irving Younger, Rich Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal and David Rosenthal. May the God who knows all things and cares for all things grant them eternal rest and keep them in His remembrance.

All Brides Are Beautiful

Peter Cummings and Susan Allis, portrayed by Mark Stevens and Joan Fontaine in 1946 movie adaptation From This Day Forward

At the beginning of this year I expressed my reluctance to post personal things related to my ‘spiritual journey’, on account of the fact that my life has been so heavily fragmented. It took me only half a year to overcome this reluctance and thus ‘out’ myself as a total hypocrite, but I would like to hope that my original essay on fragmentation still has some value. I lived in Pittsburgh as a grad student for two years, but being an Episcopalian at the time, I didn’t start making connexions with the working-class Orthodox history of the city until well after I left. And it was only after I came back to the United States from China that I happened to pick up All Brides Are Beautiful, a novel by first-generation Rusin-American and Braddock, PA native Adalbert Thomas Belejcak – better known by his nom de plume, Thomas Bell. This novel turned out to be a guiding star in more ways than one. I can literally say that it kept me sane in a difficult time of my life.

Set in New York City, All Brides Are Beautiful is a slice-of-life story about a down-on-his-luck machinist, Peter Cummings, and his girlfriend – later wife – Susan Allis, who works as a clerk in an ‘independent’ bookshop. I call it a ‘realist romance’: it follows their courtship and marriage, and contrasts their life with those of their neighbours, the Beasleys, and landlady. It doesn’t shy away from the homely and even ugly details of working-class life in New York City at the tail end of the Great Depression, particularly in its description of their apartment building or the various difficult financial and social circumstances they have to deal with. The realities of debt, rent hikes, quarrels with managers, quarrels with bosses, and most of all unemployment: the challenges facing Peter were in many cases all too real for me – particularly since I was reading this novel when I myself was unemployed. In this passage in particular, Bell spoke both to and for me, with a humble eloquence:

[Peter] learned that to give is not only better than to receive but infinitely easier; and that is bitter knowledge, hardly learned. Against circumstances which made it impossible for him to find work, feel himself a whole man, mere rage was futile; nevertheless he raged. Hunger, even injustice, one could endure, but this piecemeal disintegration of one’s pride, one’s self-assurance, was a slow death. There were times when he found it hard to meet Susan’s eyes.

This book reveals a feminist attitude towards work – somewhat autobiographically (Bell relied on his wife’s work and money and stayed at home while he was unemployed and while he wrote), Peter relies on Susan’s work as a clerk just to (never quite) make ends meet, at least until he lands a job working as a machinist outside the city. The relationship between Peter and Susan itself is playful and teasing and occasionally raunchy, even when the two of them are stressed or angry – but one sees very quickly that a factor that separates Peter from his immediate Beasley neighbours is that he respects Susan. Much of the backdrop which serves to highlight Peter and Susan’s kinda-sorta-functional relationship pertains to the ways in which the Beasleys’ relationships are for the most part falling apart. On the other hand, one of the major plot points involves Susan’s friend Victoria, whose first husband left her alone and pregnant, and who faces a similar situation with her current boyfriend Dan. All the time the reader is led to assume this relationship too will end up badly for Victoria, particularly when she ends up pregnant and seemingly abandoned again, but Bell manages to subvert our expectations with Dan by giving him something of a tragicomic moment toward the end of the book.

Unions and organising are foregrounded as well, and one of the plot points involves Susan’s brother-in-law Hank – who has long been unemployed himself – being offered work crossing picket lines as a scab. Bell portrays Hank’s plight with sympathy, but makes it clear what he believes is the right thing to do: he has Hank come down at last on the side of the striking workers, even though it means staying unemployed and continuing hardships for himself, his wife and his children. Peter (also probably semi-autobiographically on Bell’s part) is also a member of the CPUSA and a subscriber to the Workers’ Daily. American involvement in World War II is looming, which is one of the reasons Peter is able at last to find work. But as he returns from work, he gives internal voice to the following reflections:

To work, to breed, to die; to have in the work little pride, in the breeding little reason for joy, and to die at last like an animal broken with hardship—that was his future, and Susan’s and Martha’s and Hank’s and Victoria’s and Dan’s, the future of the men in this shop and the ordinary men and women of the world. That was their future, for all their dreams. And if they got no worse than a lifetime of labour and insecurity they would be the luckier ones of their kind, for others would starve to death, see their children bloated with malnutrition, made aged dwarfs in mills and factories; work and poverty would rot them with disease, they would be mangled in machines or clubbed and shot on picket-lines; and many would be blown to bits on capitalist battle-fields while safely behind the lines their wives and children had their eyes burned out, their lungs chewed bloody, by the most modern and efficient of poison gasses. For money, for profit and power.

That was their future.

That was what they could expect unless they themselves, the workers, the ordinary men and women of America, ordered it otherwise. Would they realise their own terrible danger, learn to recognise their enemies and their friends, before it was too late? Would they listen, would they believe?

The politics only form a part of this novel’s world, though, which is intensely local. It is a story that seemingly could only take place in New York; the forms of alienation, the openness about sex, the backgrounded racial tensions and portrayals of the wealth gap (the Wall Street set appear briefly and are immediately contrasted with everyone else) would seem wrong set anywhere else. Having been written in the 1940’s, the vernacular feels dated as well as heavily-localised, but it is not inaccessible. Apart from the broader working-class themes and a couple of brief intimations that Peter hails from a recent immigrant family in Appalachia, Bell’s Rusin roots make no appearance at all in this book – those are apparently featured more prominently in his more famous novel (which I haven’t read yet), Out of This Furnace. I still consider this Rusin literature, however, both on account of the fact that it pays such great attention to locality and on account of its stress on class.

Speaking for myself, though, it turned out to be something of an accident that I found work as a machinist (following the family tradition, so to speak) just as I was finishing this book. But somehow I keep finding that these accidents – like my brief career in Pittsburgh and then becoming Orthodox several years later – are never really so accidental as they first appear. Along with the miraculously-sympathetic and -supportive folks at Saint Herman’s, Thomas Bell’s book did help me through a hard time in my career, and for that – even though it is by no means highbrow fiction – it will always have an honoured place on my bookshelf.

Red Ruthenia

First, gentle readers, allow me to share a handful of maps. (I like maps. My favourite class in grad school was GIS.) Here is the first one, showing the ethnic make-up of Slovakia. The yellow municipalities are majority-Hungarian; the blue majority-Slovak; the brown majority-Roma and the bright red majority-Rusin. Rusins form significant majorities or pluralities in certain municipalities stretching from the district of Stará Ĺubovňa, to parts of the three districts of Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina in the east, in a stretch across Slovakia’s northeast.

The second map shows the religious demographics of Slovakia. Here the colour schema is reversed somewhat, sadly. The red is for Latin Rite Roman Catholics; the yellow is for Byzantine Rite Catholics; the purple is for Lutherans; the green is for Calvinists; the blue is for Orthodox Christians. Again – outside little Orthodox municipal enclaves in Brezno, Michalovce and Sobrance – the major areas in which Orthodox believers form a majority are: Stará Ĺubovňa, Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina.

Now, let’s look at this map, which shows how well the post-communist left Direction Party in Slovakia, led by the controversial and now somewhat-disgraced Róbert Fico, did in each district. As we can see, Direction turned out the heaviest majorities in the districts of – you guessed it! – Stará Ĺubovňa, Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina. (Also Sobrance in the southeast, Čadca in the far north, and Topoľčany in the centre-west of the country.)

As Michal Pink, writing for the Central European Political Studies Review, puts it: ‘In three elections in a row, SMER [Direction] has found its greatest voter support outside of urban areas in the eastern Slovakia periphery. There is also pronounced voter support for the party in Central Slovakia, particularly in non-urban areas once again.’ It’s uncanny how closely these three – religious, ethnic and political preferences – coincide. Though Fico is a left-wing Slovak civic nationalist, his true blue – uh, make that red – political base lies in the areas of the country which have significant Rusin, Orthodox minorities. (They didn’t call it ‘Chervonnaya Rus’’ – ‘Red Ruthenia’ – fer nuttin’, I guess.)

This trend has been noted in the Slovak press with some degree of irony – take, for example, this piece in Týždeň magazine. In it, Jozef Majchrák notes that the Rusins in Slovakia consistently turn out to vote for Direction, despite the party’s leader complaining a bit about ‘minorities’ in Slovakia. The author makes due note of the Stalinist resettlement of the Rusins into Ukraine, and the subsequent violent attempts to change their culture, language and religion – a campaign, by the way, which is still ongoing in Slovakia’s eastern neighbour. The Rusins certainly have reason to be worried about the loss of their cultural and linguistic distinction; and this has been the cause of the rise of a local ethnic party, Our Region or Náš Kraj, which is dedicated to preserving precisely these cultural and linguistic distinctions. Majchrák speculates, slightly disparagingly, on the reasons why the Rusins continue to flock to the ‘red’ team despite this other option being available to them: ‘vysoká nezamesnanosť, nostalgia za rokmi socialistického rozvoja a istôt či migrácia mladých do iných kútov Slovenska a do zahraničia’ – ‘high indifference, nostalgia for the years of socialist development and security, and migration of the youth to other parts of Slovakia and abroad’.

There probably is significant ‘nostalgia’ for an era in which most Rusins did well (or at least better than they did under the Austrians). The Pink study further says, in agreement with Majchrák: ‘SMER [Direction] voters were repeatedly located primarily in areas with higher unemployment and lower incomes, along with a lower proportion of Catholic adherents’, and further: ‘SMER voters are very likely recruited from socially excluded areas characterized by a higher level of unemployment and lower incomes in smaller municipalities and towns.’ But again, I feel like this only gets at part of the picture.

The Rusin people, whether on these shores or back in the ‘old country’, have long flocked to the left for various historical reasons, which are more genuine – not merely ‘nostalgic’ – than I believe Majchrák will allow. Œconomic marginalisation and direct oppression by landlords (including clerical ones) was one such reason. Their deliberate exclusion by right-wing ‘national democrats’ and fascists on all sides would be another such reason. Many of them – particularly the Lemko branch – became Soviet or Czechoslovak partizans against Nazi domination, and the Rusin civic organisations of the diaspora long supported anti-fascist action on both sides of the Atlantic. And still another reason would be a certain solidarity with unionising mine workers in the diaspora. It is particularly worthy of note that Thomas Bell, a Rusin-American immigrant author of realist novels depicting the lives of the working class, has enjoyed greater popularity in Slovakia than here in his adoptive country, despite one of his books being adapted into a classic Hollywood film starring Joan Fontaine and Mark Stevens. One of these days I’m going to have to elaborate further on the effect reading All Brides Are Beautiful had on me when I was unemployed. But Thomas Bell’s literary support for localist Jewish political activism lends further credence to my suspicion that the civic ‘doyikayt’ of the Jewish diaspora is in some measure equivalent to and sympathetic with the ‘tutešni’ self-awareness of the Rusins.

That same self-awareness may be part of why Rusins do not flock easily to the politics of ethno-nationalism in the same way as their oppressors over the centuries have; why, in the words of Majchrák, they appear to be so ‘modest’ and ‘uncaring’ in their cultural demands. Their national awareness is civic and realist, not racial or linguistic. The Rusins of Slovakia do not shy away from Fico’s expressions of Slovak patriotism even if it isn’t pandering to them; on the other hand, they are still possessed of a remarkable sense of œconomic fairness and solidarity. Red Ruthenia is alive and well; long may it endure.

And: for lately-departed harbingers of truth and beauty Aretha and Samîr, večná pamäť; may God make their memories to be eternal!

A prayer for justice long due

The following began as a post on Facebook; it has since been slightly expanded.

Most all of my gentle readers are surely aware by now of the clerical sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church which has been going on for decades and which has implicated 300 priests, victimised over 1000 children, and brought grief to thousands more Pennsylvanians. This horrific pattern of behaviour, moreover, was deliberately and systematically covered up by the Catholic bishops, and even the Vatican has not escaped criticism in this regard.

It has been grievous, shocking, sickening and outrageous to read. It ought to be so for anyone, Catholic or not, and yet - after a warranted fashion or not - I feel rather ‘close’ to this as an Orthodox Christian. However, I have thus far avoided discussing it here for two reasons; you may judge them as you will, be they noble and appropriate or not.

Firstly, I am convinced that there is a right way for us ‘Easterners’ to discuss these abuses, and a wrong way. The wrong way, in my own view, would be anything that even remotely smacks of gloating, of triumphalism, of pharisaical pride, of ‘I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like this Papist’. We Orthodox Christians do have plenty of beams in our eyes, both personally and collectively, and we do no one any good by reaching for motes. We may lack the institutional structure that allows for a cover-up the size and scale of what was seen in Pennsylvania, but that says nothing about the state of our own parishes. The clerical celibacy question is probably more relevant, but we of all people should be able to understand that temptation visits celibates and monks more strongly than it does laypeople, whether Catholic or Orthodox.

Second, this simply isn’t the time to argue the superiority or inferiority of one or the other church’s praxis or ecclesiology. However ‘justified’ such argument may seem, it’s profoundly insensitive and unjust to the victims of clerical abuse and cover-up, to use them as props in a sectional battle.

Make no mistake. This scandal will be a stumbling block to the faith of many Americans. If Ivan Karamazov would turn in his ticket to the Kingdom of God over the unavenged tears of only one small innocent child, how many more will hurl back their tickets in spite at God, spitting curses, as they behold the unavenged tears of a thousand small innocent children, the victims of those same depraved men whose job it is to divide the word of truth and proclaim the Kingdom of God, to proclaim Christ? You murderer-priests, you vipers, you wicked tenants! Not one, but many more Ivan Karamazovs will come of this scandal. A great nihilism will be the bitter fruit reaped by the church, and the harvest will be entirely deserved.

What is asked for now? Fr Steve Clark puts it simply: ‘We need to stand with the victims. That's all we need to do.’ I couldn’t agree more. We must not turn our faces away from the innocents. We need to demand justice – a justice that will be to their good first and foremost, but also to the good, ultimately, of our Latin brothers and sisters generally. Let justice be done for the victims first, and let us hope and pray and demand that the Vatican start doing the right thing by them now.

All the foregoing is really just a long-winded way of saying that all I pray now is that the victims receive closure and recompense both from the ecclesiastic and from secular authorities, sooner rather than later. May such a prayer fall from my lips without malice; may no malice befall by this prayer, but let justice be done.

Memories of a duck hawk

Nine years ago I started this blog specifically as a Peace Corps journal named Matt’s Existential Musings, and it’s kept me company in various forms throughout the years long after I left Peace Corps. Going back and reading my first entries from the MEM days, some of them strike me as painfully naïve. I’m not entirely sure that the ‘me’ of nine years ago would recognise the Matt Cooper writing these reflections now. Of course, there are some threads of commonality and some repeated themes that run through my writing even from then to the present time; and these have been refined and honed with deeper reading and learning, but more importantly through experience.

Anglican hatchery; German flight

When I started off out of college, I was primarily influenced by the works of liberal, latitudinarian Anglican and Episcopalian divines like Charles Gore and Frederick Denison Maurice who contributed to Social Gospel Protestantism. This was a result of having studied religion under Dr Gary Dorrien in college. After Dorrien left Kalamazoo for Columbia, I transferred to the philosophy department and began studying continental philosophy under Dr Chris Latiolais. The thinkers that I latched onto most heavily during this time were, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, although my senior thesis was essentially a Hegelian / Marxist defence of the communitarian ideas of Dr Michael Sandel, whose work on justice continued to be influential on me after college.

Again, I look back now and I view my collegiate work as hopelessly naïve, incomplete, one-sided, detached from lived reality in a way which makes that same work’s fixation on lived realities seem all the more ironic and existentially-pathetic. But the same drive, the same desire to understand justice at a deeper level than that offered by the ubiquitous Lockean liberalism that makes up so much of American political discourse – that has never left me. Part of the reason I ended up joining Peace Corps was to make real those values which I had given voice to – but life hits you harder than you first expect.

A strong Eastern wind

Studying at Kalamazoo College, I took full advantage of the study abroad programme they offered there. The Chinese language very quickly became a passion of mine, thanks to the now semi-retired Dr Madeline Chu, though I had taken an interest in Chinese history since my high school area studies class on the subject, and also through the novels of Pearl S Buck and RH van Gulik. I decided to take a year abroad in Beijing, studying at Capital Normal University.

Once there, through Dr An Yanming, I encountered the philosophical traditions of Buddhism, the Zhuzi Baijia and – most importantly – Confucius. The ideas of Confucius as presented to me in the Analects appealed deeply to me – here was a man for whom justice (yi 義) in its full depth, was everything, and for whom the question of justice could not be detached from its social moorings – particularly ritual (li 禮). Only through ritual could justice be attained, with the final flower of that justice being love (ren 仁). Even though I understood that Confucianism and the Social Gospel Christianity in which I’d been brought up were two very different worldviews and religions, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their similarities and potential synergies. In one way or another, I have been approaching and grappling with these synergies throughout my entire intellectual life.

It pains me somewhat to own that for all its advantages, Kalamazoo College was only of limited help to me in pursuing these synergies. Even though the study abroad programme was truly a blessing and even though my professors did encourage me to take full advantage of it, when I came back it became clear that there was no space for Eastern philosophy to be had on campus. I had to go back to the religion department if I wanted to continue studying Confucianism and Buddhism with any degree of seriousness (which I did). I have never, however, stopped taking Confucius seriously on his own merits rather than filtering him through the lens of the German-idealist canon.

By the Silk Road back to a green England

Again, when I left college I sought after some form of real-life service, and I found it in AmeriCorps and Peace Corps. It was in preparation for Peace Corps that I first discovered the Orthodox Church – in fact, the same church in which I would become a member after coming back from China the third time: Saint Mary’s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I also picked up a thin old cloth-bound volume at the Providence Athenæum, by a man who would come to be one of my foremost intellectual influences in life ever since. The book was The Russian Revolution. The man was Nikolai Berdyaev. His religious, personalist approach to the continental tradition of philosophy blew my mind: it was only on reading him that I came to understand Marxism as a religious heresy; through him and only through him, my rarefied undergraduate Marxism was transformed into something more clearly, self-awarely and cogently Christian again, something more human. He impressed me with the importance of the creative impulse even in considerations of the grand scale. He started me on the long and arduous process of holding my philosophical convictions up to life as a whole and seeing if they worked – a process I’m still on, by the way. Poets began having importance for me, too. Particularly the Qazaq Muslim poet Abai Qunanbaiuly, whose open and creative spirit in the Book of Words seemed to rhyme with what Berdyaev was saying philosophically.

I washed out of Peace Corps; partly a victim of my own bad habits, and partly a victim of bureaucratic CYA on Peace Corps’s part. I’ve got enough distance on it now where I can keep from beating myself up about it, and where I can acknowledge both my own failures and points at which the American government could have done more to help me succeed. Still – failure kicked my arse hard, sent me into a downward spiral. Reading Kurt Vonnegut helped. I didn’t do much intellectual work at all in the years to follow, even though I went back to school and took a few courses in œconomics and mathematics. I continued to delve into the moralistic Anglicanism of yore: I read William Laud and Richard Hooker and Hugh Latimer and Samuel Johnson and Ken Leach. I continued to be shaped by Gore and Maurice. I became an admirer of Newman and Pusey and the Oxford Movement. It was a beautiful socialism I wanted, a socialism fragrant with red roses and incense, a workers’ and families’ movement that bowed only before Christ the True King, and which would leave no man or woman behind, no matter how unfortunate – and sweep them all up into a glorious Renaissance polyphony of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator of All. I confess: that’s still a winged vision that I cherish.

Rebel without a class

My faith in that socialism would be deeply shaken by graduate school. I was still very much a do-gooder at heart, and I longed to be in a place where other do-gooders planned to do their good. And that place, as it turned out, was the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. (Yes, they encourage you to spell it all out that way on your résumé. I should have known then what I was getting into.)

I made close friends with the international students – the Chinese students, yes, of course, first and foremost, because I spoke Mandarin. But I also got close to Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Bengali, Senegalese, Kirghiz and Nepalese folk in Pittsburgh – mostly grad students like myself and, to top it off, mostly fish out of water themselves. But for the most part I was withdrawn into my own shell. I studied hard. I began reading George Grant, John Ruskin, Wang Hui, Jiang Qing and Peter Viereck, and my socialism began taking a hard consciously-conservative turn. I began to distrust the élites with whom I went to school, not least because I couldn’t start to tell with most of them where the self-promotion ended and where the actual work began. My rebellion was unconscious at first, and only became conscious when I started to realise that I was basically training to become my own public relations agent. I threw myself instead into the academic side of things – like a crazy man, I undertook both a capstone project and a senior thesis (even though GSPIA only required one of the two from me). The senior thesis marked a kind of distributist turn: I wanted to turn political and social power back to the neighbourhoods, back to the black communities that the ‘big planners’ and ‘urban renewal’ types had taken so much from, and I wanted them to do it using public, common spaces.

Problem was, I was turning out to be a ‘big planner’ myself. I couldn’t help it. I had an inkling of it while I was there, but the school was essentially designed to crank out three types of people: spooks, sophisters and superintending fussbudgets. I certainly wasn’t going to be a hitman for the CIA; I’d be damned before I became a promoter of laisser-faire and ‘markets cure all’. And as for the fussbudgets, well… I almost became one. It was only Viereck and his suspicions of the bourgeois bureaucracy who largely held me back from it. As grad school ended, I had a pregnant girlfriend on an expired student visa and no medical insurance. I did the only decent thing: I married her, and I followed her back.

The perpendicularised expatriate

So, there I was. In the birthplace of Lü Bu.

Teaching English to the students of farmers, living in a Soviet-era brutalist apartment complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert in hands-down the strangest boom town I’ve ever experienced, fuelled by a heady mix of rare earths processing and consumer electronics. Listen: it was a place that, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, had come unstuck in time.

Sinicised ethnic Mongolians from Yuan-era families answered to English names in my classroom as they followed the soap-operatic lives of Korean comic-book characters in their textbooks. Cafeteria-quality pizza and fried chicken were served at fancy cafés with red curtains and lacquer tables, but the good food was served at the street stalls run by people from every other possible part of China. Brand spanking-new hospitals built like skyscrapers dispensed prescriptions for traditional Chinese herbs which, as often as not, worked better than the ‘scientific’ Western remedies. My daughter was happy, bless her. My wife wasn’t, bless her too. We survived mostly because we didn’t drink the damn tap water. I still get otorhinolaryngological infections from my bout with pneumonia there. But China changed me. It’s probably better to say that life changed me, because it kicked my arse. No wonder I turned into a metalhead.

China was a different country where the politics and the philosophies and the assumptions that I’d been raised with didn’t seem to apply in the same ways. I suddenly found myself with this very odd, very fierce conviction that China was screwing up, but she should be allowed to screw up in her own way. She shouldn’t have to take dictation from us, we clueless Americans and expats, who didn’t know up from down or left from right, but had still managed to delude ourselves that we knew best. Partly because I myself was so disoriented, and partly because I’m a contrarian and wanted to show myself off as clever, I began defending all of my egalitarian convictions in the language of reactionary high tradition; and my distrust of democratic liberalism with all the revolutionary stridency of Mao Zedong. How was all that supposed to work? Damn if I knew.

The people who made the most sense to me were the ordinary people. My in-laws. My students and their parents. My co-teachers, especially Vivian, whom I’ve mentioned before. China was upside-down, jumbled-up, mish-mashing its most venerable of traditions with the crassest and most gaudy possible approach to development. And yet somehow the people I worked and interacted with at the face-to-face level were sane; they were human, even in the face of these things that should not be. How? Dare I say it? Was this beauty? Was this… hope?

It may seem strange, then, but it really makes a kind of sense to me, that somehow Berdyaev should come back to me in China, smiling wryly beneath his moustache and bringing under his arm copies of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, War, Progress and the End of History and On Spiritual Unity. Vladimir Solovyov and Aleksei Khomyakov soon joined my list of philosophical influences, and all because of what I beheld in Baotou. Somehow the apophatic spiritual politics of the Slavophils and the apocalyptically-inflected Platonism of Solovyov were able to speak wisdom to me about this perpendicularised public sphere, this orchestrated chaos that was my life – but it was a wisdom that wasn’t their own. And that was how I sought out and found Mitrophan Chin in Boston, who introduced me to Fr Sergiy Voronin at the Russian Embassy in Beijing and… well…

The Heavy Anglo-Orthodox was born out of the chaos. Queue the theme of Lü Bu.

Old faith in the old capital

I moved schools, largely for personal reasons. I became a schoolteacher at a public middle school in Luoyang. My wife was happier: we were within daily reach of her parents, and they helped us so much in raising Ellie I can’t possibly thank them enough. (The elder Chinese wisdom of the multi-generational household is old, and wisdom, for a reason – though I have to admit, at the time I was more than a bit of a freeloader.)

I was left quite a bit to my own devices in following the dictates of my conscience and adapting myself to the faith that had suddenly visited me. Mostly, those dictates involved watching terrible B-movies and playing Smash Bros. with my next-door neighbour and best friend in Luoyang. I got good at playing several characters, but was still most comfortable with Marth. I took on a prayer rule. I fasted. And I read Russian Orthodox authors. Saint Filaret of Moscow; Saint John of Kronstadt; Konstantin Pobedonostsev. I became an insufferable traddie for a little while, and annoyed everyone with the fasting rules I tried so hard to keep. It was not the best of foundations to build on, but I tried my hardest to build on it with what tools I had to hand.

For the time being, I was philosophically stagnant. Philosophy wouldn’t save me; I had to put it aside. I didn’t cease being interested in œconomic or political questions, though – I read some works by Fr Sergey Bulgakov, and also some by my father’s old friend and colleague, the late Dr Jaroslav Vaněk, about the heterodox political œconomy of Yugoslavia, and came away with a newfound interest in gæopolitics wherein I found myself more and more often taking the side of the victims of empire and the resisters of neoliberalism, wherever they happened to be. A rather ironic position to be in, for a Henan nüxu 河南女婿 living in a city of peonies, the very heart of what was for much of human history the most powerful empire in the world. But neoliberal – Henan is not. My father-in-law is a businessman and entrepreneur, but (as I came to learn during my time living with him) he’s got opinions which occasionally range well to the left of my own on questions of œconomy and gæopolitics.

My son Albert was born in Henan, same as his sister Ellie. I got to see him and hold him for a couple of weeks before I had to return to the United States, which I did in advance of my wife.

Homeward bound

I returned home in the middle of 2015 and began looking for work. This would begin one of my long stretches of unemployment where it was pressed firmly home to me, just how little I’d learnt from graduate school these seemingly all-important lessons about being a self-promoter. (I’m not one.) I attended Saint Mary’s Antiochian, and befriended several people there – one of whom hooked me up with an internship at a policy research group: the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council; later I would get a job at EAB, which is how I ended up in the Twin Cities. I gush about Arabic hospitality, but I really could stand to gush quite a bit more than I do. It is really only owing to the efforts of the wonderful, caring people who worship at Saint Mary’s Antiochian – particularly Fr Elie Estephan and his contacts in the legal world – that my wife is living with me in the United States now, and that we are once again a united family. To him and to the Saint Mary’s family as they prayed for me and supported me both spiritually and materially, I truly owe a lifelong debt.

Intellectually, I sustained myself on history: the history of agrarian movements in Eastern Europe; the history of third-party politics at home. Movements of language, cultures and peoples fascinated me. I became consciously interested in the people living in the margins, at the crossroads, on the borders, between the cracks. The crucified peoples of the world. It became a desire of mine to stand with them and to share their suffering, in however small a degree. I got my wish. Not in the way I would have hoped, but I got it all the same. I was fired. Some bare six months after my family had come here.

Unemployment sucks. Even for someone like me, who understands all the pitfalls of our meritocratic mythology and of Lockean contractarianism, being unemployed feels like a failure of manhood. The literature which could best give voice to my pain was proletarian and immigrant: the novels of Carpatho-Rusin immigrant Thomas Bell, who understood all too well the slow dehumanisation that takes place for the unemployed. The consciousness of being an object of pity. It was through this unemployment period that I came to sympathise far more strongly and in a far more visceral way with the plight of workers. Before, in my Marxist phase, I had considered them only in abstraction. Now I was among them, one of them. Material conditions suddenly mattered a great deal more; when you don’t have money, worrying about anything else seems like a luxury. The working-class Rusins who had come here from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a people truly marginalised and between the cracks, had understood this. They found strength in their faith, but they still organised and fought. And suffered. And died. And those who lived, and were literate, wrote through their suffering. In this writing I found consolation, and a will to fight.

The Platonic machinist

I’m still processing from my year of reading Plato, which began when I was still employed at EAB. Actually, I began reading Plato in part because I felt it necessary to understand the historical reasons behind the rise of a certain political figure. But I found that Plato wasn’t necessarily as interested in history as he was in the same questions that drove Confucius: what is justice? What is the Good? What do these things look like (and act like) in the human being? And he had a way of approaching the question which shook all my certainties and made me feel completely, philosophically inadequate to the task.

I also found that the Plato who wrote and left his Dialogues was a very different Plato than the Plato of the public imagination. The Plato of the public imagination is a great abstracter, a kind of proto-Gnostic – someone more concerned with the realm of the ideal than with the demands of life here and now. But the Plato of the Dialogues was very much this-earthly; he was very much concerned with how we are to behave in the here-and-now, with how we justify ourselves and our actions, with how we deceive ourselves with various approximations of the truth which are not actually the truth. For Plato the Forms are not their own end, but a practical exercise which we use to approach and measure ourselves against the Good. He used a gæometric exercise – that is, he used Forms – to convince Meno’s slave that what he thought he knew wasn’t actually true, and to prompt Meno’s slave to figure out for himself (or rather, to ‘remember’) how to reason for himself toward the truth. Though Plato may have been an élitist, his emphasis on knowing led me to a new appreciation for manual labour. There is no shame in it when I became an hourly wage-earning machine operator here.

I didn’t abandon interest in history, though. In our current gæopolitical mess, I found I had to become interested in China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, in which Chinese thinkers had to grapple with the behaviours and problems of states in an environment of international anarchy. It’s not surprising, given my reading of Jiang Qing, that I would turn to the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals; what did surprise me was how realist it was, in spite of (or maybe because of) its eschatological fixations. It charted a kind of grand-historical ‘fall from grace’, and it drew careful distinctions between what was laudable, what was acceptable, what was possible and what was outright wrong. Only suddenly, at the end, are we treated to a kind of flashing eschatological hope – the arrival of the qilin, a prefiguration of the intrusion of Christ into history.

Dong Zhongshu, the great interpreter of the Gongyang Commentary and the father of an entire philological-hermeneutic tradition that would include He Xiu, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, Lin Zexu, Kang Youwei and Jiang Qing, became another great philosophical influence on me. He took the philosophy of Confucius, and – applying it to history, seeing the outworkings of Tian in the historical records – transmogrified it into an intense, demanding form of personalism, a witness to the Heavenly personality of persons, a personalism which had definite political ramifications. This again brought me back to the personalism of Berdyaev.

The unlikely places

Alien Qazaqs were my dear friends;
Chaotic China my sanity;
Wise Greeks my cloud of unknowing;
New England Arab refugees my anchor;
Stateless Rusins my consolation.

Hatched east of the Mississippi,
Migrant to the seaboard,
My whole life I looked east.
Further and further thence I flew in my search,
Only to roost on the western bank.

I think I’ve done a fairly good run-down here, of where I’ve been the past nine years – and, incidentally, drawn up a decent list of my more important intellectual influences and guiding spirits along the way: Plato, Confucius, Dong Zhongshu, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Aleksei Khomyakov, Abai Qunanbayuli, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, George Grant, Wang Hui and Jiang Qing. Gathering up all the fragments, perhaps there is a pattern to be seen there. Or perhaps not. Even if there isn’t a pattern (or rather, better to say, there is a pattern but it is for God’s eyes and not for mine except in the fullness of time), what I’ve seen of life, even the ugliest and hardest parts of it, is still beautiful and still to be cherished.