Giving thanks today

There is good reason to be thankful, first of all, that a holiday exists in American public life upon which gratitude—not merely a sentiment, but a virtue indeed—can still be, and is expected to be, expressed. Gratitude, which presupposes contentment with the good things one has, and which excludes by its nature expressions of covetousness and of entitlement, is a virtue completely alien to the ideology and the ethos of hyper-capitalism and hyper-individualism which suffuses the vestiges of the American public sphere. If this isn’t good reason to be thankful that Thanksgiving still exists, I quite frankly don’t know what is.

I am grateful, firstly, to God for His manifold blessings, for His creation, for His tireless labour through which creation exists, for His Sabbath rest (undertaken not out of His need but out of ours). I am grateful that God precedes us all and yet still loves us; I am grateful that God chose that we should exist, rather than that we should not. I am grateful to our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, for whatever hope I have left in me. I am grateful to my parents, without whose love and support I would not be here, sustained me when I was hospitalised and still sustain me now. I am grateful to my ancestors of whatever country they come—English, Welsh, German, Jewish, Illyrian and Scythian.

One reason why this Thanksgiving is special, is because my parents-in-law have arrived here from China for an extended visit. Their arrival is timely and deeply appreciated. Because I am their son-in-law and they are my parents-in-law, it’s to be expected that we don’t see eye-to-eye 100% of the time. However, I can already tell that my wife is happier because they’re here. I can already tell that my children are happier because they’re here. And they are already making our home a more complete one while they are present. My parents-in-law have been an inestimable help to my wife and me, in getting us physically and financially established in our living situation here in the Twin Cities metro area, and in assisting us with various aspects of our life here together. I am and will continue to be grateful to them for as long as they live and as long as I live.

This reflection on the Chinese side of my extended family, prompts me to undertake an examination of my own weak spot for the Arab cause. The root of the matter is this: my family would not be here with me in the United States, if it were not for the sustained Herculean efforts of the Arab-American community in Pawtucket, Rhode Island prevailing against the legal inertia of the DHS and immigration services. In particular, I want to give thanks for Fr Elie (Estephan) of St Mary Antiochian Church, whose own efforts in helping Syrian and Lebanese refugees find support and shelter here from war and deprivation at home, equipped him to address my own (much less dire) family situation.

In 2015 and 2016, Fr Elie assisted me with a list of contacts and advisers as well as his own introductions and good words, including with Ms Susan Saliba (an immigration attorney in Massachusetts) and Mr Albert Mokhiber (an immigration lawyer in DC), who afterward assisted me pro bono with completing the paperwork and navigating the ‘grey areas’ necessary for my wife and kids to join me here legally and in a timely way. For this reason, ever since that time I have always felt a need to pay it forward. Those same war refugees, who are the main beneficiaries of this legal and financial and physical assistance, and in much greater need than I am, I have come to see in a very real sense as my own family by virtue of our common situation. This is what underlies, to a significant degree, my sympathy and support for the cause of Syrian peace, and for the cause of Palestinian peace.

I am grateful to St Alexander Nevsky Church in Saimasai, Kazakhstan, for introducing me to the Orthodox Christian faith. I am grateful to Fr Sergey (Voronin), one-time rector of Holy Dormition Church in Beijing, China, for educating me and guiding me gently into that faith, and chrismating me. I am grateful to St Herman’s Orthodox Church, and to all of my friends and fellow-parishioners there, for continuing to assist in my salvation. I am grateful to them for putting up with my eccentricities, and for encouraging me to continue learning the Russian language.

I am grateful to the school I teach at, and to the Saint Paul Federation of Educators for being a source of community belonging and a source of strength for me. (Pray that we get a just contract!) I am also grateful to the students I teach—even the ones who misbehave occasionally!—Hmong, Karen and Vietnamese; White and African-American; Ojibwe and Hispanic. I learn as much from them as they learn from me, and I hope that in my classroom at least, they get as many chances as they can to explore how much they have to offer, and to exercise the reserves of strength and wisdom they possess.

And I am grateful indeed to the Ojibwe and Dakota nations whose guest on this earth I am. I am grateful that the Ojibwe and the Dakota are still here and still speaking and still active, and that they continue to bear witness to the sacredness of things like clean drinking water and healthy land. (And if this sentiment is somewhat subversive of the civic mythology of Thanksgiving: so much the better! I was always a bit of a Mary Dyer at heart; that’s something I come by honestly, and am also grateful for.)

To all I wish a Thanksgiving filled with love and gratitude: for the good things that we have been given, and for the one Good One that is given us to expect at the end of the season, through the prayers and labours and faith of our Lady, the Most Holy and Most Pure Birthgiver of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.

Why does Saint Paul mention the Scythians?

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:11)

In terms of ancestry, I am genetically related to a number of different peoples who lived in Late Antiquity: the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Thuringii, the Langobardi (all Germanic peoples), the Gauls and Britons (both Celts) and the Pannonian Illyrians. One tribe among my ancestors, however, stands out: the Scythians. The Scythians were a nomadic people who lived in the Caucasus Mountains around what is now Georgia and southern Russia; as they expanded, their territory extended across the Pontic Steppe as far as Moldova and Romania to the west, and to the east as far as Kazakhstan. Like most nomadic peoples of the time, they were a motley crew, and probably included diverse elements including Iranian, Turkic, Finnic-Ugric and Caucasian. Their rule extended briefly into Asia Minor; later on, a number of allied tribes emerged from what had been the Scythian Empire: the Sauromatæ, the Massagetæ, the Cimmerians and the Saka, or Sai. The Alans (or Yancai), the nomadic people who invaded Europe along with the Huns and from whom the modern culture of the Ossetians descends, were themselves a scion of the Scythian stem.

The great question is: why did Saint Paul include the Scythians in this passage in Colossians?

To answer that question, we need to understand first the connotation that term Σκυθης had to the Greek-speaking audience that Saint Paul was addressing. To the Greeks, and to the entirety of the Roman Empire in fact, the Scythians were the penultimate barbarians. From the Greek perspective, the Scythians were seen as savages: ruthless, cruel, inebriated, undisciplined, lacking in restraint. They were purported to drink the blood of their enemies and fashion the skulls of those they killed into drinking-vessels. The Greeks often used the imagery of wild animals to describe the Scythians.

But the relationship of the Greeks to the Scythians was more complex than this. Scythian culture was as often an object of desire or wistful longing. For example, the Greek myth of the Amazons was probably derived from the way Scythian (specifically Sauromatae) women would wear weapons and armour and participate in war. There was thus an element of sexual exoticism that accompanied the Scythians. In other places, Scythians were often cast in the role of the ‘noble savage’: free from the constraints of civilisation and thus in a permanent state of childlike innocence. In a word, the Greek attitude toward the Scythians may be described as a progenitor or as an early example of orientalism.

As Saint Paul was both an educated Jew and a Roman citizen, we should not imagine that he was ignorant of any portion of this context, or that his choice of the word Σκυθης in this list was accidental. On one level, we may take it as read that there were Scythians among the members of the Early Church; there’s not really any reason to doubt, given the presence of Scythians in Asia Minor, that Saint Paul was not speaking literally here. But on another level, the inclusion of Σκυθης points to a much deeper element in the Pauline discourse. Given what the Scythians represented to the Greek audience he was addressing, Paul’s explicit inclusion of them in his description of the Church and its members is an implicit rebuke of these orientalist or proto-orientalist attitudes among them. Just as Greeks did not have to undergo circumcision to be included in the ἐκκλησία, so Paul is saying, nor did Jews have to give up their identities as Jews to be included in the ἐκκλησία, so too were barbarians welcome as long as they were sincere in following Christ. Even Scythians were welcome in the ἐκκλησία, without having to be Hellenised first!

Does any of this sound familiar?

These days there is a marked increase in orientalist discourse on account of the world organising itself into a ‘harder’ NATO bloc, the ‘West’, aligned firmly against ‘the rest’, most notably against Russia and against China. It is disingenuous to pretend that the facts are otherwise. It is also disingenuous to pretend that Russian and Chinese people are not the objects of orientalist fantasising on the part of the West, even in the present day, or that Ukrainian nationalist discourse (fervently stoked by NATO actors) isn’t deliberately invoking these orientalist tropes as part-and-parcel of its anti-Russian pathos.

Saint Paul would reject all of this, utterly. He would reject out-of-hand the a priori assumptions of both Ukrainian nationalism and the aggressive Western, particularly American and British, chauvinism against Russia and China. He rejected them in his own day, as Colossians 3:11 makes plain. Saint Paul was neither in the business of ‘defending the West’, nor of ‘defending democracy’. He was not in the business of defeating the enemies of Rome by force, no matter how ‘barbaric’ they were. Nor was he even in the business of converting the ‘barbarians’ to either a Greek or a Jewish civilisational standard. He was in the business of bringing the good news of Christ—who was both Jewish and Roman, as well as being an outlaw to both worlds when He was put to death on the Cross—to the world, barbarians, even Scythians, and by extension those even further east, very much included.

Saint Ilya Fondaminskii-Bunakov, himself a Jew by ancestry, provocatively suggested that Christianity was the spiritual response, even the ‘revenge’, of the awakened East against the false, pretentious, homogenising universalisms of Greek and Roman civilisation. Intriguingly, he even referred specifically to the Scythians as a formative ‘Eastern’ influence on the Russian state. In our own day, we need to recover this insight with regard to the false, pretentious, homogenising universalism of the American imperium. Our own imperium elevates to godhead not necessarily a Cæsar or a god-emperor (though we do have people with such pretensions, for which irony is but a flimsy excuse). Instead we promote a set of falsely-universal ideals (whether bourgeois democracy, capitalism, industrialism, even shallow identitarian ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity-equity-inclusion’) in whose name that imperium is enforced through economic, political and military violence. If we are to take Saint Paul’s admonition to the Colossians seriously, then we should prepare a world, at the very least an ἐκκλησία in which Russians are free to be Russians, Chinese are free to be Chinese, Iranians are free to be Iranians, Syrians to be Syrians, Vietnamese to be Vietnamese, Indigenous to be Indigenous—not with any chauvinism or pretensions to grandeur attached, for in Christ and His kingdom such worldly distinctions are devoid of importance, but in the full depth of their cultural belonging.

Happy Spring Festival 2022, and Happy Year of the Tiger!

Well, here it is. The big three times twelve approaches. For those of you who, like me, are also tigers, make sure to wear red this year. I already got my red boxers and red bracelet on, courtesy of my thoughtful and caring wife. Given how poor my luck has been these past few years in terms of my career and just generally keeping my life together, I really am hoping there’s something to the traditional Chinese wisdom on this.

That having been said, 祝大家：新年快乐、恭喜发财、虎虎生威、虎运连年、年年有余、万事如意、大吉大利！To all I wish a happy Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year or whatever you want to call it. And please don’t indulge in any PC culture-warrior shenanigans on my blog. Taking offence at what you call Spring Festival is every bit as much bad-faith snowflakiness as the so-called War on Christmas is.

The fam and I enjoyed a very nice traditional New Year’s Eve meal consisting of chicken jiaozi with vinegar and soy sauce, spring rolls, sausages, cashews and almonds, sunflower seeds, a nice white wine (for the adults; hot cocoa for the kids), fresh fruits, pineapple cakes and other desserts. Wishing all of my gentle readers a similarly pleasant and cosy celebration today!

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!

The hardest battle

The hardest battle is always the one that you face alone. Or, rather, seemingly so.

Being a political pugilist or a culture-warrior on the left or on the right can seem exhausting work when viewed from outside. But in terms of the internal effort, it’s very easy to orient yourself toward an ideology, and then judge your own moral standing in the light of that ideology. It’s easy to take on public battles, to defend political positions, because these demand nothing of you but a relatively simple sort of intellectual consent. It is in fact far, far harder to face the world within than the world without. Doing battle with the darkest and ugliest parts of myself, the Pauline ‘old man’ within me, has been the hardest I have ever faced, and I’m still trying to do it honestly.

For a long time, the demand that the Orthodox Liturgics place on me that I consider myself the chief of sinners, the only sinner, seemed to me to be an imposition, even a kind of arrogance. And indeed, if approached on a purely intellectual level, it can become that way. There is a certain ‘style’ of convertodox or hyperdox feigned-humility which is grating – even if, generously speaking, it can be kind of a necessary ‘baby step’, if one doesn’t grow out of it, it can harden into a kind of delusion or a pose.

This pose often goes hand-in-hand with an idea, or may be seen to lead to a temptation, often implicit or half-articulated, that somehow things would be better if I was ‘over there’ rather than here. But that’s the thing: Orthodoxy is not ‘over there’ (a point which Mr Padusniak makes quite effectively in regard to a certain type of Orthodox convert), it is instead right here. And in my own case I literally do mean right here. (As an Orthodox Christian in Minneapolis I cannot at all ignore the threats to the safety of my neighbours or the quality of our drinking water, for example. But I digress from my main point.)

The main point of this insistence on seeing myself as the sinner, the chief of sinners, is to make me recognise, not that my sins are in degree or in number worse than those of other people, or that my nature is somehow more thoroughly base or corrupted than others’. The human being is an icon of God, after all, and I too am a human being. This insistence on myself as ‘chief of sinners’ is instead to make me understand that my own sin is what, with God’s help, I can begin to fix. As St Andrew of Crete said in his Lenten Penitential Canon, each one sins ‘like no other man’. Who else is fragmented in the same way? So when I say ‘of whom I am first’ or ‘of whom I am chief’ in reference to myself-as-sinner, it is an acknowledgement, fundamental to any spiritual progress, that I cannot hope to fix anyone else before Christ helps me to fix myself. My job is not to pull the speck out of my neighbour’s eye, but to pull the log out of my own.

And with that acknowledgement vanishes any illusion that fleeing somewhere else, moving to a country that I believe better aligns with my values, altering my environment or my social life without changing my own orientation to it, is going to fix my problems. I carry all my own sins upon my back and they are leaking out behind me wherever I go, so that I cannot see them. So, always, the best place to fix them is always here. In my own house, in my own family circle, in my own neighbourhood – and in the darkness that is the tomb of my own heart. As Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk put it in his own Canon of Repentance, in a paraphrase of Jeremiah 17 as read through Saint Maximos the Confessor’s texts on love: ‘The heart is deep beyond all things, and it is man, and who can know him?’

But although the battle is one that is mine and only mine, and although it often seems like a hopeless battle: I am not without help, not without an ally. Partaking of Christ in the Eucharist means – in a material way, not in the semiotic-idealist or sentimental way meant by most Protestants when they say this – that Christ lives in me, and that Christ works on me from within. This doesn’t mean that Christ imposes Himself upon me without my consent, or that He forces me to take a particular path. It also doesn’t mean that He takes away my troubles, my hardships, my arena. It means only that if I call upon Him for help in my struggles – as I inevitably need – He will help and heal me as I ask, and then more.

In focussing here on the existential-psychological aspect of Christian praxis, I am emphatically not engaging in a call for political quiescence or apathy. Both the vertical bar of the Cross ascending from earth to heaven, and the horizontal bar of the Cross embracing all of humanity with love, are needed. You cannot have only one; or else the other will be merely a false gesture. As I said above: caring about my neighbour’s physical safety, health, clean air, clean drinking water, social circumstances and dignified existence are all indispensable elements of the truth taught by Christ when He walked the earth. Any Christianity which ignores or downplays or dismisses these things is not a Christianity worthy of the name. But it is equally impossible to focus only on the social-activist or culture-warrior dimension of the faith, without doing the much more difficult work of prayer, fasting, reflection and repentance.

A look back at Hegel

For various reasons, I’ve been seeing if I can take stock of certain of my intellectual formations and habits of mind. One of the biggest ones is the impact reading GWF Hegel – who I idol-worshipped as a college student, and later rebelled against – had on me, and what stuck with me from him. Going back and reading some of my old textbooks and articles from my college days has been interesting, if a bit wince-inducing considering my immaturity. My college philosophy professor, Dr Chris Latiolais, correctly diagnosed – when I reacted with a kind of overbearing disgust to some of the ideas that I encountered in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – that a lot of what drove my philosophical inquiry was a political anger against George W Bush and Dick Cheney. I had been looking for, and thought I had found in Hegel’s thinking, something of a radical answer to the ills of an American culture that had produced neoconservatism… and something of a way out. Of course, had I been a bit more astute as a college student, I might have noticed that the neoconservatives themselves had onboarded more than a few of Hegel’s conceits – but when one is younger and more self-assured of one’s own rightness, such delicious ironies are rather lost.

One of the drawbacks of putting my philosophical and religious ideas onto a blog like The Heavy Anglo Orthodox, is that it’s necessarily fragmentary, and I often have to go haring back to fetch one or other particular fragment and hold it up to the light to determine its worth. Hegel was a systemic thinker – which I very much am not. This blog post does not purport to be a full and exhaustive treatment of that system, or of its impact on the way I think or act; it’s more than anything a bit of a retrospective on the ways in which some of the more salient points of Hegel’s thinking have guided me to where I am now.

So, in that spirit, looking back at what Hegel was doing, I can certainly see how deep the impressions of certain elements of his thinking on my intellectual development have been (and still are)! For one thing, even though Dr Latiolais tried to steer me in a direction he thought I was headed anyway – into the Marxist ideas of the New Left – my basic philosophical instincts have nonetheless remained ‘right’-Hegelian. The conceit that most drew me back ad fontes to Plato a couple of years ago, for example, was completely Hegelian. I had been convinced of two things: firstly, that we had arrived at a disastrous, civilisation-breaking moment in our history; and secondly, that we weren’t going to politicise our way out of it without some kind of grounding in metaphysics. I realise now that I was simply slipping, again, into a well-travelled wake that my Swabian shangbei had ridden long before me, writing as he was from a vantage-point in which the European ancien regime was breaking apart and in which forms of scepticism like those of Hume and Kant were ruling the day in intellectual venues.

Like Hegel, I desired a rational understanding (or Begriff) of my world and of my cultural moment – the failures of liberalism in particular. And like Hegel, I felt sure that there needed to be a metaphysical grounding for that understanding. And so, just as Hegel seems to have set out to redeem the metaphysical neo-Platonist and Christoplatonist tradition from Kant’s wicked sceptical clutches (and as Marx later set out to redeem Aristotle from Hegel’s idealist clutches!), so too I was setting out to redeem Plato from those who were reading him as an apologist for obscurantism, tyranny and unfreedom – and possibly in the process finding within Plato a kind of key for ‘discerning the times’. As I said after my year of reading Plato, I found much, much more than that: I found a questioner and a doctor for some of my own intellectual and personal vices and hang-ups. In this way the broad outlines of my philosophical process still seem to have some resemblance to Hegel’s.

Other aspects of Hegelian thinking have always been kept near the forefront for me. The rather messy idea of Sittlichkeit (the situated ethical life), articulated both in Hegel’s Phänomenologie and in his Philosophie des Rechts, has always been close to the surface of my embrace of both epistemological and ethical communitarianism: our awareness of moral commitments in fact stems from, and depends on, the concrete, down-and-dirty exigencies of lived customs, traditions and habits. It is, in fact, the single most charming point of his philosophical system for me, and it reflects what is most beautiful in Hegel’s southern German upbringing: I cannot help but feel that Hegel must have had something in mind, of the hospitality and warm-heartedness of the old Swabian Sitten when he came up with this term. Hegel propounded his Sittlichkeit, in part, as a response to the categorical imperative, the absolute Kantian Moralität which was to be fully derived from the powers of reasoning. I was not slow – growing as I had been in awareness of Chinese philosophy – to connect the Hegelian Sittlichkeit in my thinking with the Confucian concern for liyue 禮樂 or ‘rites and music’, which Confucius held to be the intermediating force by which the self’s sense of right and wrong was to be tutored.

For Hegel, as for Confucius, a person’s sense of right and wrong is conditioned first by her contact with her family, and the concrete habits they build together. Thereafter, ethical behaviour is conditioned by a broader circle of neighbours and contacts, the Gesellschaft or ‘civil society’. Only thereafter, when differing neighbourhoods and bodies of civil custom come into contact with each other and have to deal with each other do common ethical guidelines become codified in the field of law – under a state. Hegel’s concentric circles of ethical development share something very much in common with Zengzi’s Doctrine of the Mean, which places the primary burden for moral development upon the family.

But it was precisely this awareness of similarity and overlap between Hegelian ethics and Confucian ethics – though not an identification of the two with each other – that made me begin to rebel against Hegel on certain points. Hegel himself had a certain patronising and belittling attitude toward Asia and its civilisational potentials (a belittling attitude which sadly extended to the Eastern Roman Empire), which he inherited (I believe) from his French tutors and which he bequeathed to his pupil Marx – who himself would come back to revise that belief. I could begin to see his shamelessly-triumphal attitude toward history, and his arrogant attitude that it was the German worldview and German values that should and must prevail in the teleological process of history. In fact, a more careful study of history itself in various places of the world led me to doubt the idea – which I attributed to Hegel, but on which point Hegel was in fact much more subtle than I previously gave him credit – that the teleological outcome of human history had been foreordained and we were all being inexorably swept toward it. I rebelled particularly against the idea that reason – Vernunft – was something which consisted in itself without being attached to a personal, sittlich agent. Here, I suspect I may have been guided by a naïve or simplistic reading of Hegelian ideas. At the same time, I could not deny the justice of the Slavophils’ semi-Schellingian critique of Hegel, that he did more than a little indulge a certain sense of German chauvinism, and that he was indeed carried away by the self-evident perfection of his own rationality. To him, the future of humankind did belong to German state and the German idea, just as for the neoconservative readers of his pupil Fukuyama, the future did and must belong to the American state and the American idea.

Still, I think Hegel may have been far more cautious on the historiosophical point than his critics – particularly those in the vein of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, whom I also consider to be influential on me – have given him credit for. Hegel did believe that there was a telos to human endeavour. He was a firm believer in the Absolute, in the Logos, just as his classical masters were. Here I can hardly blame him. And he did have a firm, postmillennarian belief in reason and believed reason to be the impelling force driving us toward that telos. I do demur from Hegel here on Orthodox Christian, personalist grounds, but let’s give him his due and consider his position honestly. I suspect that it’s a caricature, driven by careless readers approaching him from a hermeneutic of suspicion, that he subscribed to an idea that the final triumph of reason was something that would be circumscribed within history and fully accessible to (German) knowledge. For Hegel, situated customs, traditions and habits were the place from which all moral progress had to start – and these things did limit the knowledge available even to rational, deliberative states like Germany. Hegel was, on this point, neither the monstrous totalitarian nor nearly the hyper-modernist archapostle of Progress with a capital ‘P’ that some of his critics make him out to be.

Even in this discussion, though, I’m inadvertently showing additional layers to my Hegelian philosophical upbringing in the sense that I have long had this interest in the inner workings of history and the social-historical ways which impel human movement on the scale of societies and nations. Hegel’s style of thinking has guided me in these directions, more so than his stated philosophy of history, or his concrete commitments to particular political forms. Here too, though, Hegel’s socially-minded constitutional monarchism is something with which I still tend to sympathise… for similar reasons, I confess, to those on which I still find his concept of Sittlichkeit to be beautiful and right and good.

So… even if I tend toward the older Christian belief, that history is in fact a ‘long defeat’ to use Tolkien’s wording, and that the final victory of the Logos is something ever only glimpsed ‘in a mirror darkly’ within history, it is still worth taking stock of Hegel’s system and some of the good points which can be salvaged from it. Hegel’s intimations about the sittlich nature of human ethics actually point to an area in which his belief in Vernunft and Kantian Moralität are conditioned and almost humble! And his unwillingness to ascribe rationality to anything above the state – and indeed, even that rationality only ever imperfectly, because no state was capable of correctly predicting the whole future on its own terms – actually tends to undercut the common caricature of Hegel as being the overbearing chauvinistic triumphalist and determinist par excellence. Hegel is still worth being read seriously, even if reading him is more than occasionally like trying to scale a mountain.

Holy Hieromartyr Babylas, Archbishop of Antioch, and those with him

Saint Babylas of Antioch, along with Saints Ourbanos, Prilidianos and Apollonios

Today is the fourth of September, which is the feast day of the holy anti-Nazi martyr Bishop Saint Gorazd of Prague, who sheltered the Czech insurgents who carried out Operation Anthropoid in 1942. It is also, coincidentally, my daughter Eleanore’s birthday, who was born 70 years, to the day, after Saint Gorazd’s martyrdom. It is also the feast day of Saint Babylas, the twelfth (or thirteenth, if you count Saint Peter) Archbishop of Antioch, and a particular favourite of Saint John Chrysostom, who gave a touching homily in his memory. Saint Babylas was, like his Czech fellow hieromartyr with whom he shares a feast, a speaker of truth to power. He is commemorated alongside the young brothers Ourbanos, Prilidianos and Apollonios, and their mother Saint Christodoula, who were martyred alongside their bishop.

Saint Babylas [Gk. Βαβύλας, Ar. Bâbîlâ بابيلا] was born probably in the late second century, and was a native of Antioch. We may assume that he became a monk at some point. We also know that he succeeded Zebinas (Ozniophios) as the Archbishop of Antioch in the year 237. He continued as the Archbishop of Antioch through the reign of the Emperor Trajan Decius, who ruled from 249 to 251 – though the name of the emperor who executed Saint Babylas is not named by Chrysostom. Decius visited Antioch toward the end of his reign and held a huge festival in honour of the pagan gods. At that time, Saint Babylas held the Divine Liturgy in the great Church in Antioch, during the homily giving comfort and strength to his flock and admonishing them to stay steadfast through all trials. It so happened that the Emperor sought admission to the Church, for he was curious about the rites of the Christians – or so he claimed. However, when the Archbishop heard this, he went out of the church and blocked the path of the Emperor, refusing the Emperor admittance on account of his impiety, which he would not sanction within the house of God.

To save face – and because the Christians would have started a riot had he proceeded – Trajan Decius had no choice but to withdraw. But his heart was poisoned against Saint Babylas, and he sought revenge against the Archbishop for the slight to his imperial dignity. On the following day the troops of Decius set fire to the church, seized the Archbishop, and led him before the emperor. The emperor demanded to know the reason for Saint Babylas’s act of lèse-majesté, and the saint offered this reply: ‘Anyone who would rise up against God and want to desecrate His sanctuary, is not worthy of respect, but has become the enemy of the Lord.’

Trajan Decius then ordered Babylas to bow before the idols and make offerings to them, to expunge his crime against the Emperor, but no matter how he was cajoled or threatened he would do no such thing. Then the angry emperor ordered Saint Babylas to be bound in heavy chains and led through the streets in public disgrace. To this the saint replied: ‘Emperor, for me these chains be as venerable, as for thee is thine imperial crown; and the suffering for Christ for me is as acceptable, as is the imperial power for thee; death for the Immortal King for me is as desirable, as thine life be for thee.’

Together with Saint Babylas, three children were brought before the Emperor – these were the aforementioned Ourbanos, Prilidianos and Apollonios. The three of them refused to abandon their archbishop, and stood together with him. When the Emperor demanded to know who they were, the saint replied that they were his spiritual children, and that they had attained to a high degree of spiritual and moral perfection. With that, the Emperor turned his blandishments and threats upon the children and upon their mother Christodoula, and when none of them would submit to worship the idols, he ordered them to be whipped heavily according to their ages: the eldest received twelve blows; the second, ten; and the youngest, seven. The executioner then led the children and their mother away, and later the Emperor told Saint Babylas that they had renounced Christ – however, Saint Babylas was given to know that what the Emperor told him was a lie.

The children, their mother, and Archbishop Babylas were then all sentenced to be tied to a tree-trunk, their flesh burned, and finally beheaded, and thus they all received the crown of martyrdom for Christ Jesus.

Saint Babylas, Saint Christodoula and the three youths martyred with them very quickly became the objects of fervent and heartfelt veneration among the Christians of Antioch, who offered prayers over their dear relics at the site of their burial. In the 350s, however, the relics were translated from their original resting-place into a shrine in the district of Daphnē, which for the pagans was sacred to Apollo. It was also renowned as something of a ‘red-light district’ in Classical Antioch, and its cypress grove was the site of trysts and prostitution both sæcular and otherwise. The relics of Babylas and those martyred with him were moved there in part to counteract the reputation of this district – as Chrysostom would say, ‘a physician to the sick’.

Chrysostom recounts that Julian the Apostate, when he visited Antioch, sought advice from the Oracle of Apollo in Daphnē, but the oracle gave no answer – and this was determined to be on account of the propinquity of the saint’s relics. As a result, Julian had the martyrs’ relics exhumed and moved back to their original resting-place. A few days later, however, on the twenty-second of October, the roof of the Temple of Apollo in Daphnē caught fire, destroying the statue of the god within. Julian, suspecting that Christians had been behind an act of arson, closed the Cathedral at Antioch while he ordered an investigation that turned up very little of use – though some spurious charges were laid at the feet of a lax worshipper who was careless with a candle. Saint John Chrysostom claims that the fire was caused by a bolt of lightning from heaven.

Saint John Chrysostom also alludes in his homily that a new church for Saint Babylas was constructed, the Kaoussie Church, on the order of his successor Saint Meletios, who took part in the construction with the work of his own hands. This church was built on the banks of the Nahr al-‘Âṣî (that is, the Orontes) specifically to house the relics of the saint. However, in the Middle Ages, the relics of Saint Babylas were said to have been removed from Antioch and installed in Cremona, Italy. Holy Saint Babylas, speaker of Christ’s Truth even before emperors, pray unto Christ our God for our salvation!

Apolytikion for Saint Babylas, Tone 4:

By sharing in the ways of the Apostles,
You became a successor to their throne.
Through the practice of virtue,
You found the way to divine contemplation, O inspired one of God;
By teaching the word of truth without error,
You defended the Faith, even to the shedding of your blood.
Hieromartyr Babylas, entreat Christ God to save our souls.

Kaoussie Church (or Martyrion of Saint Babylas), Antioch

Thoughts on the Hagia Sophia

The reactions from the Orthodox world on the recent move by Turkey’s President Erdoğan to turn the greatest Orthodox cathedral in the world, the Hagia Sophia, from a museum back into a mosque, are worthy of some comment. The first and most palpable reaction was one of naked outrage, which is not surprising. Indeed, I was outraged myself. The Minister of Culture in Greece, Lina Mendoni, had this to say in a written statement:

Today’s decision, which came as a result of the political will of President (Tayyip) Erdogan, is an open provocation to the civilised world which recognises the unique value and œcumenical nature of the monument.

UNESCO, the UN-affiliated international organisation dedicated to the preservation of culturally-significant monuments and the material culture of humanity, also reacted to Erdoğan’s decision with profound regret and censure. The Hagia Sophia is part of the Historic Areas of Istanbul which are part of UNESCO’s World Heritage List. UNESCO decried the unilateral and precipitous nature of the cathedral’s conversion into exclusive use as a mosque, which it calls a breach of the 1972 convention on the preservation of such sites of outstanding universal value and historical importance, and called upon the Turkish government to reconsider its decision and open a dialogue.

Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece and a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries. Its status as a museum reflects the universal nature of its heritage, and makes it a powerful symbol for dialogue… It is important to avoid any implementing measure, without prior discussion with UNESCO, that would affect physical access to the site, the structure of the buildings, the site’s moveable property, or the site’s management.

Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department of External Church Relations, said this on behalf of the Moscow Patriarchate:

We regret, with great pain, that this decision was made today. This is a blow to the whole world of Orthodoxy, because for all Orthodox Christians around the world, the Hagia Sophia is a symbol with the same [value] as the Roman Catholic Basilica of St Peter in Rome. It has been repeatedly stated that the status of the Hagia Sophia is Turkey’s internal affair; Turkey decides what to do with this temple. Therefore, it is now obvious that Turkey did not want to compromise, and Turkey did not want to hear the voices of those Christian leaders and those of those political leaders who urged this decision not to be taken.

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America also released a statement on the Hagia Sophia:

We protest the decision of the civil courts in Turkey, as well as the clear direction of their government, to re-convert Hagia Sophia into a mosque. As citizens of the United States of America, we implore our government to intervene for the reversal of this decision. Furthermore, we urge the Turkish government to return to the status quo whereby Hagia Sophia remains a museum, respecting both its origins and history.

By contrast, this unilateral action denies the universal vocation of this holy and sacred place. Hagia Sophia belongs to the whole of humanity as a World Heritage Site. Built in 537 AD during the reign of Emperor Justinian, it has been, for more than a millennium, a place of rich cultural and spiritual inspiration for all.

We are particularly concerned about the negative effects such a change will have on religious pluralism in Turkey, as well as on the relations among nations and between faith-based organizations. We call on the international community to invite the Turkish authorities to revise their decision, affording all people the opportunity to continue enjoying the full and rich history and beauty of this outstanding landmark. This unique Christian monument should remain open to all as a sign of co-existence and peace among all peoples of good will.

Suffice it to say, the Orthodox Christians of the world are not happy about this, and they have good reasons not to be. The Hagia Sophia is a powerful symbol of the great and sublime architectural beauty which the Eastern Roman state was capable of creating, and which the Orthodox Church still is capable of creating. But more than this, the conversion of one of the great holy sites of Orthodox Christianity into a Muslim mosque was a deliberate and præmeditated insult by the Turkish government against the religious and ethnic minorities within its borders. The Orthodox bishops may be constrained to express their dismay at this in diplomatic terms; I am under no such restriction. Therefore I will say it out loud:

If there was ever any doubt that Erdoğan is a petty, vindictive, opportunistic, five-and-dime tin-pot tyrant whose regional ambitions far outreach his modicum of political skill, and that his Ikhwân-flavoured intégrisme is nothing more than politics of ressentiment writ large - which there never should have been – let this story put them to rest at last.

This should not be the last word on the subject, however. I have also seen some rather unconscionable venting against Turks qua Turks over this, which is not going to be useful going forward if we Orthodox Christians are ever to get serious about carrying forward the message of Christ to the world which inspired the heights of creative endeavour represented by the Hagia Sophia in the first place. The beauty which the church offers is not for Greeks alone, any more than it is for Slavs or Arabs alone. If even a descendant of Gothic barbarians like yours truly can be drawn to the light, why should it be any less the case for a man or woman of Turkish descent?

The Orthodox Church’s hagiographical tradition is replete with Turkic and Tatar people who became, not only Orthodox, but Orthodox saints, who were glorified and deified, bathed in the uncreated light and everlastingly regenerated in the energies of Christ God. Many of these converted from Islâm and paid the ultimate price for their conversion. These include: the martyr Abraham of Bolgar (1229), the righteous prince Peter of the Golden Horde (1290), the holy abbot Pafnutii of Borovsk (1475), the martyrs Peter and Stephen of Kazan (1553), the holy abbot Serapion of Kozheozersk (1611), the hieromartyr Misail of Ryazan (1654), the martyr ’Ahmad the Calligrapher (1682) and the martyr Constantine of Smyrna (1819). Entire Turkic nations have converted en masse from Sunnî Islâm to Orthodox Christianity, including the Chuvash people of the Volga Basin after 1552, and the Gagauz people of Moldova at some point before 1812.

This is Orthodox history. These are the Lives of the Saints whom we venerate. This history judges and convicts the contemporary Orthodox obsessions with ethnic purism and nationalist mythmaking. These are themselves the result of the importation of nationalist ideology during the struggles for independence by the various peoples of the Balkans in the late nineteenth century. As Orthodox Christians we must actively make ourselves aware, at the level of practical politics and at the level of our face-to-face interactions, that these nationalist obsessions are fundamentally at odds with the deep convictions of the Church that nation and state are fundamentally separate.

None of this, of course, condones or excuses the unconscionably petty behaviour of Turkey’s president toward an important piece of the Byzantine cultural heritage. But: I speak this as a barbarian. Personally, my entry into the Orthodox Church was blessed by priests, like the late Fr Isaac Crow and Fr Elie Estephan of the Antiochian Church, and like Fr Valery Shurkin and Fr Sergiy Voronin of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose first and only words to me were those of love and welcome – not of condemnation or judgement. What comment they made upon the state of my mental health, the fallenness and brokenness which I brought with me into the Church, or the tyro enthusiasm which I occasionally demonstrated in my convert zeal – was all done in a spirit of gentle correction and reconciliation; they understood that repentance cannot be forced. Any missiology among the peoples who have been ‘our’ enemies in ages past must be undertaken in a similar spirit.

Famously, the beauty of the Hagia Sophia, when it was related back to Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus’ by heralds who ‘knew not whether [they] were in heaven or on earth’, was the deciding factor in the baptism of the Rus’. The loss of a thing of beauty is absolutely something to be lamented. But is this beauty something which may be bound inside a building? Is this beauty something which may never be repeated? Is this beauty something which can be destroyed or disfigured permanently by those enemies which can destroy the body? I would answer that, emphatically, no. That beauty consists in Christ, Who could not be defeated even by Death, but Who by His death trampled down Death. We may justly lament this abuse of the Hagia Sophia; we may not forget that Love which inspired the Hagia Sophia’s construction in the first place. We may justly consider the ideology which prompted this abuse to be at enmity with God; but we may not allow ourselves to believe that this ideology is solely the property of ‘those wicked people over there’ – as though I, a sinner, am any better! We may justly condemn, and resist, and even fight the decision of the Turkish president to turn it into a mosque; we must not allow ourselves to believe – even passively – that the Turks are somehow beyond the reach of Christ.

Minneapolis on fire

Yesterday and today my hometown has been on fire. Protesters have taken the Third Precinct police building. Riot police lines have used tear gas and rubber bullets on the protesters. Our mayor Jacob Frey has expressed his understanding of the emotions of the protesters but has said in no uncertain terms that property destruction and ‘looting’ are unacceptable and will be countered. The president has weighed in on Twitter with his usual subtlety and compassion.

This is all in response to the needless killing in cold blood of a good man, George Floyd, at the hands of a wretch in blue uniform – who still for some inexplicable reason has not yet been arrested, and whom county attorney Mike Freeman as yet refuses to indict. This death, by the way, is largely the result of our city’s indifference and inability to adopt common-sense reforms to our municipal police force.

Here is what I said on Facebook after the protests escalated yesterday:

If you’re the praying sort, please spare one first for the soul of George Floyd, unjustly killed. And a second for his city and mine. I truly hope that something more just for black and brown folks, and something better ordered for all of us such that law is not enforced by the lawless, comes out of all this…

Many of my fellow Minneapolitans have registered that they’ve stayed silent on this - not because we have nothing to say, and not because we do not feel anything, but because we feel any words we have are inadequate. This describes me as well. I am shocked and dismayed out of words.

What truly bothered me was not the force itself – though that was heinous enough – but the casual, callous indifference of both policemen involved to the suffering that they were causing. Rage and fear – those I can understand, even if I don't condone them. I get that being a policeman is a dangerous job. But neither of those men were under threat. They crushed the life out of George Floyd, with all the emotion they would have used to write a parking ticket. It’s hard for me to even process the kind of mentality that would do that.

I thought I would actually have a lot more to add to this, but I don’t. For a little while I toyed with the idea of bringing the writings of Georges Sorel (a French philosopher and activist of both the far-left and the far-right) to bear on this situation. He does have some relevant things to say on the subjects of violence and force, and the moral psychologies of each. But ultimately I thought better of it. There is a time and a place for such reflections – and that time is soon, but not now. Right now it is time for others to speak, and they are doing so. At the moment all I can truly feel is grief and rage for the death of George Floyd, sorrow on behalf of my city, and a desire to support and comfort those around me who need both – coupled with a frustration that at the moment in-person support and comfort might do the opposite of what it intends. But: George Floyd matters. Black life matters. And my city, my neighbourhood, even my self – need to repent. May God grant rest unto George Floyd, and may He have mercy upon us.

I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

EDIT: It looks like the policeman who killed George Floyd has been taken into custody on a charge of third-degree murder as of this afternoon.

Anti-Asian violence spiking amid top-down racist panic

The corporate media are not the only ones using the coronavirus outbreak to foment xenophobia and racist attacks against Asians, which are escalating now. The Republicans are eagerly following the Democrats’ lead on this, as they did with Yemen. The President has doubled down on calling COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus’, as well as some of his staff like Mike Pompeo. Republican lawmakers like Kevin McCarthy, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, John Cornyn and Paul Gosar are all trying to pin blame on China, per se (the population as well as the government) for the outbreak of the virus. They are being led in this endeavour by the out-and-out racist bloviating of noted not-so-reformed neocon and general television clown Tucker Carlson.

The people most likely to suffer from this secondary outbreak of race panic are not, of course, the Chinese people living in China. In general, they will be fine – outside a few places like Hong Kong where classism and anti-mainlander discrimination are the new post-Umbrella norm. But the most vulnerable people here will be Asian-Americans, including those in the Chinese diaspora. The beatings and the verbal abuse have spiked, even in the White House in one case.

This is not a partisan complaint, I hasten to note. I am as critical of CIA-aligned corporate Democrats like Dana Bash, who use dog-whistles and collective defamation in order to stir up this kind of racism against Asians. That does not, however, excuse the deliberate use of such a dog-whistle among Republicans to foment a race panic. The corporate Democrats are practised in disguising their hatred of the Chinese people (among others) behind liberal pieties, which is bad enough. But the Republicans weaponise it in order to deflect blame from their own hideous mismanagement and misgovernment of the American people during a time of crisis.

There will be an increase of pressure on Asian-Americans – particularly those in positions of prominence – to vocally decry and denounce the Chinese government in order to prove their ‘loyalty’. I fear that many of them will not be able to resist that pressure, with middle-class Asian-American respectability politics being what they are. Furthermore, it is clear that the Beltway think-tank Republicans (like those in the Hoover Institute) who have been targeting the Chinese-American community for such pressure since at least 2018, are also looking for ways to shift the blame away from themselves and toward the People’s Republic for the bigotry that they face at home. For now at least, Asian-American lawmakers, notably including the redoubtable Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have not been silent, and kudos to them. But Asian-Americans in general need to wise up to this playbook, and fast. They also need to understand that this campaign against them has been percolating for a long time in a very deliberate fashion: COVID-19 is only a convenient cover.

Yes: I am very, very angry about this. And I won’t pretend to be a disinterested party, either. I’m a husband and a father who is very intimately involved in the concerns of at least one immigrant and two Chinese-born mixed-race children. There needs to be a reckoning for the way in which these high-up Republicans have abused this crisis.

EDIT (18 March): If you or someone you know experiences a racially-motivated attack, I have been informed that OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates has a link that can be used to report it; just scroll to the bottom of the page. I would encourage the use of this resource if my gentle readers happen to come across a genuine incident against an Asian or an Asian-American here.

The Throne of Saint Peter at Antioch

Saint Peter

Today is, oddly enough, not only the feast-day of three great Syrian Orthodox ascetics in the Holy Orthodox Church, but also the Roman Catholic feast-day of the Throne of Saint Peter… at Antioch. Hmmm. This deserves to be, if it isn’t one already, an Orthodox feast day as well. Antioch is, after all, indeed one of the five ancient Patriarchal sees, the first at which the disciples were called Christians (Acts 11:26), and one of two founded by the Holy Apostle Peter. Old Rome isn’t quite as unique in that respect as she sometimes pretends to be in her apologetics materials.

I have a particular love for the Church of Antioch, for the simple reason that attending Divine Liturgy at Saint Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 2009 was one of several fragmentary formative experiences that led me into the Orthodox Church. Witnessing, and receiving, the blessing of Fr Isaac (Crow) and the warm, ebullient hospitality of the multinational layfolk there – Syrian, Lebanese, Armenian, Palestinian, Ethiopian, American convert – was the single factor that turned my cerebral embrace of Nikolai Berdyaev’s religious philosophy into something real, something lived. As a somewhat peregrinating soul, it is true that I may be in an OCA parish now, and it is true that I was received into the Moscow Patriarchate by chrismation. But whenever I go ‘home’ to Rhode Island, my ‘home church’ is Saint Mary’s.

Antioch was an important hub of Christianity in the late Classical world, in part because it was the place where many Christians who came to believe in Christ at Jerusalem fled after the stoning of Saint Stephen the Protomartyr. Because Antioch was also a critical strategic post for the Roman Empire’s military in its perennial wars against Persia, this city also became a site of repeated persecutions of Christians.

The Episcopal See of Antioch was founded by Holy Apostle Peter in 34 AD, and is a solid claimant for being the oldest continuing existing Christian Church in the world. Indeed, the Cave Church of Saint Peter still exists in Antakya. Origen and Eusebios both agree with Saint Luke that Saint Peter was the founder of the Church in Antioch. Peter was promptly cast into prison by the Roman governor shortly after his arrival there, on a charge of corrupting the people. Peter was joined by Holy Apostle Paul, as well as Apostle Barnabas of the Seventy, and they began to preach to the people in Antioch, who were a mixture of Greeks, Hellenised Syrians and Jews.

The first ecclesiological dispute emerged at Antioch over whether or not Gentiles should accept the entirety of Jewish law – particularly circumcision – before being baptised; and also whether Gentiles and Jews should eat separately. Apparently Saint Peter was originally of the opinion that the entirety of the Jewish law ought to be upheld, including circumcision and laws on food cleanliness and table fellowship. Saint Paul, on the other hand, held that the Gentiles who were baptised ought to be held to certain core aspects of the Law, but that the Resurrection of Christ had made a strict adherence to the Jewish Law superfluous. Saint Paul apparently confronted Saint Peter at Antioch and the two of them discussed the matter. Guided by Peter, Paul and James the brother of Jesus – each of whom fell on one side of that debate at first – the Church forged a middle path between the extremes of Judaïsation and Hellenisation. But it was this middle path blazed at Antioch, described in Acts 15, which preserved the true radicalism of the message of Christ: it was neither to Jew nor Greek exclusively proclaimed; and it was a message as much for the poor as for the wealthy; and as much for women as for men.

According to Church traditions both East and West, Saint Peter ruled as bishop in Antioch for seven years before he sojourned to Rome and established the Church there in 43 AD. He had left his family in Antioch, and to this day there are still Syrian families with the surname Sem‘ân which claim blood descent from Saint Peter. When the Jews were expelled from Rome under Emperor Claudius in 49 AD, Saint Peter and the small Christian community in Rome shared in their fate. He returned to Antioch in 49 and ruled there temporarily until after Claudius’s death in 54, when he left Antioch in the care of Apostle Euōdias of the Seventy, the second Patriarch of Antioch.

We can see from Peter’s tenure in Antioch several distinct aspects of Antiochian Christianity that will crop up later in the city’s history. I personally have witnessed the multinational character of the Antiochian Church, which is not only Syrian and Lebanese Arabs but also half a dozen other nationalities. So indeed was the city of Antioch when Peter first came there home to many nations. We also see the determination of the Antiochian Church to persevere even under severe persecution. The Christians of the Syrian Arab Republic have indeed persevered under a persecution aided and abetted by the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and (sadly) the United States. We can see also from Saint Peter’s and Saint Paul’s time, the understanding of Christ as human and a particular instance of humanity, which would come to colour the Antiochian school of exegesis in the fourth to sixth centuries. The question of how Christ Himself would have ministered to the Gentiles as opposed to the Jews was at the forefront of the dispute between Saint Peter and Saint Paul; and the entirety of the Church is the richer for their wrangling about and ultimately coming to an understanding on that question. We can therefore behold in the early Christianity of Antioch a very distinctly localist sensibility, which is at the same time supranational and even cosmopolitan for its insistence on that same locality.

So let us Orthodox Christians, too, spare a request to Saint Peter for his intercessory prayers for us on this day, when the Latins are remembering his stay among the people of Antioch. Holy Apostle Peter, who preached in the place where the disciples were first called Christians, pray unto Christ our God that we may be saved!

湖北加油！武汉加油！

My father-in-law, currently in Luoyang (which has been under lockdown for the past three weeks), tells me that the coronavirus which has been impacting central China so badly is starting to show signs of abating. Today Chinese hospitals discharged a record number of patients, who no longer show any signs of infection. Also, long-distance bus transit from Luoyang to other nearby cities is starting to run again. I’m not sure I entirely believe the coronavirus is completely contained and in remission; I’m not sure he entirely believes it either. But it’s a hopeful sign, a sign of improvement, and I pray things continue to improve.

This is not a detached or unemotional issue for me. I am a Chinese son-in-law. More than that, I am a son-in-law of the Chinese interior. One of my wife’s first cousins and her husband live and work in Wuhan, and they were among the people who were stranded from going back there when they came home to Luoyang over the Spring Festival. They’ve been under quarantine since the public response to the coronavirus outbreak began. Thank God, neither of them has shown any symptoms or has suffered in any other way apart from the frustrations of quarantine.

There are, as there have always been, two possible responses to the coronavirus impacting China. The healthy and helpful response is to support the doctors, nurses, medics and other health workers and volunteers who are fighting it in whatever ways are feasible and possible, to cheer those who are fighting it and to offer them moral support, and – again – to hope that the situation there improves. To the people staying up late and giving of their time and energy, blood, sweat and tears, risking infection themselves to fight the virus and cure as many people as possible, particularly those in Hubei Province, God bless you all. And to the people worldwide who are supporting the health workers putting themselves at risk this way, thanks and salutes to you as well!

But then there is the far less helpful response. As I’ve noted before, the less healthy response does not merely consist of the abuse, taunts and threats that mainland Chinese people living abroad – or even in places like Hong Kong or among the diaspora – receive. It also consists in wild speculations about the coronavirus’s origin. It also consists in using the coronavirus as an excuse to criticise Chinese culinary habits, hygiene or environmental record. It also consists in intimations that the government is somehow responsible for the spread of the virus. All of these things – whether they are meant to or not – feed into the schadenfreude and racially-coded collective victim-blaming mentality that gives rise to the abuse in the first place.

In keeping with this – I will continue praying for the virus’s victims and their peace, health, safety and length of days. I will continue praying for the skill and labour of the doctors, nurses and paramedics as they treat the sick. And I will ask readers of my blog to join me in donating to the Global Giving Coronavirus Relief Fund, or to the Hubei Charitable Foundation, which is one of the biggest and most active distributors of needed aid and hygienic products (including face masks), to keep fighting the good fight against the outbreak.

Coronavirus, China watching and xenophobia

The news about the coronavirus epidemic that is currently spreading and causing deaths in Hubei Province is worrisome enough. Henan borders Hubei, and I’ve been watching my wife and in-laws scanning the news with bated breath and hoping that no one they know has been infected or died of the illness. A tragœdy like this one which Wuhan is currently undergoing, shouldn’t be exacerbated by a racial panic that targets Chinese people. But, fallen humanity being what it is, if there’s something human beings shouldn’t do, chances are more than a few of them will find some way to do it.

The anti-Chinese racism that people are expressing out of fear of the coronavirus isn’t limited to the sticks, either. Racism is not exclusively a ‘deplorable’ failing, even though our government has instituted an ill-considered travel ban. Hate messages against Chinese people have been scrawled at liberal Columbia University. UC-Berkeley administration excused xenophobia as a ‘common’ and ‘normal reaction’ to the coronavirus outbreak. Chinese students have faced abuse at Barnard and the University of Manchester in the UK. ‘Pro-democracy’ food-service businesses in Hong Kong have started using the coronavirus as yet another excuse to discriminate against Mandarin speakers. Similar incidents of service discrimination and racist abuse against Chinese people have been reported in South Korea, Japan, France and Italy.

I suspect neither the American government, nor the ‘China watcher’ commentariat, can escape blame for this secondary outbreak of xenophobia. For one thing, the current administration does overreact to everything in intemperate and inappropriate ways, and this has an impact on public perceptions, and condones and creates space for prejudicial abuses. But, of course, this is the well-established modus operandi of the administration. Whether the target is Central American refugees or Muslim immigrants or black men – the administration thrives on associating legitimate fears of terrorism, violent crime and wage depression with a scapegoat. Preferably that scapegoat is of foreign origin or has foreign connexions. Suffice it to say I know exactly how I’m not voting this November.

The liberal, English-language China watchers also have two main attitudes to answer for, with regard to the spread of anti-Chinese xenophobia abroad. These attitudes are subtle and pervasive. The first is the selective conflation of the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of the Chinese people with those of the government. I say and emphasise ‘selective’, because the liberal tribe of China watchers always sets apart and fetishises a particular group of urban, libertarian-leaning students and dissidents on account of their river-elegiac political similarity to the Western mindset. And the second consists in the often undeliberate or half-deliberate framing – whether belittling and denigrating, or posing it as a threat – of Chinese cultural practices, foods, trends and habits as somehow dirty, scary, harmful or weird.

Speaking to the first tendency. It’s a telling tic that blue-check commentators like James Griffiths, James Palmer and Melissa Chan often talk about ‘the Chinese’ in a monolithic and pejorative way when they inexplicably fail to agree with them, against a government that they have a priori designated as evil and meriting destruction. This rhetorical tic has some rather objectionable ramifications when it comes to public health disasters like the coronavirus, ramifications which these authors hasten to deny and disavow for themselves. These China watchers assert both governmental responsibility for, if not the outbreak itself then the paucity of the response. They also have a record of asserting, decrying and deploring the Han majority’s complicity in that government – excepting a handful of West-friendly ‘dissidents’ of their choosing. They stop just shy of the racist conclusion of their own logic: that the Chinese people are to blame for the disease. The China watcher also doth protest too much, methinks.

The second tendency is related, and more subtle. Allow me to give a brief example. Now Palmer decries the blatant and obvious racism of blaming Chinese hygiene and cuisine for the public health crisis. But in 2016 he came very close to blaming the Chinese people themselves for being lazy, cutting corners and subscribing to an ethic of ‘chabuduo 差不多’ – that is, ‘more or less’ – that resulted in just such disasters. (You know Palmer’s full of shit when he starts with his pinyinisms aimed at an English-speaking audience.) This piece comes insidiously close to a self-congratulatory just-so tale about democracy and capitalist work ethic allowing the Anglo-European nations to revitalise their native standards of craftsmanship and safety and quality control in consumer durables and infrastructure (and just what was our infrastructure like in 2016?) – while China was sorrily mired in cut-rate industrial filth by its sheer size and inertia, not to mention an oppressive illiberal government. Stories like these actively feed the kinds of Eurocentric self-congratulation that I’ve had the singular misfortune of getting to see and hear first-hand directed at Chinese patrons in European shops, or at Chinese shopkeepers by European tourists. In the imaginations of certain Germans, French and Italians, China is synonymous with ‘shanzhai’ – with cheap knock-off brands and copyright infringement. And Chinese people themselves are considered to be cheats and losers.

Note that ordinary Chinese people just can’t win this game against the China watcher hermeneutic of suspicion. Chinese people like Sichuan’s Li Ziqi 李子柒 are trying to promote old-fashioned craftsmanship. People in inland second-tier and third-tier cities, even working-class people there, are trying to bring back traditional clothing replete with standards of artistry and quality that would bring tears to William Morris’s eyes. But Li Ziqi gets criticised in China watcher circles as an escapist and a nostalgist, for which the authors add a superfluous pinyinism of xiangchou 乡愁. Why? Reading between the lines: it’s because Miss Li is not overtly a dissident.

And the hanfu movement of course is painted in sinister terms by Anglophone news media as a kind of Han cultural revanchism. Full disclosure: I had one hanfu enthusiasts in my seventh-grade English class in Luoyang. She was about the furthest thing from a Han nationalist you could get; her interest was apolitical and in fact a bit twee, in the same way Victorian enthusiasts and steampunks are here. But, because the hanfu folks are also not overtly dissident and pro-West, they must therefore be culpable and complicit in the worst of their government’s evils. See how this game works?

If I may give some advice which I know won’t be taken, coming as it does from an expat who somewhat ‘went native’: China watchers need to watch themselves. The China watchers spend their careers assiduously summoning psychological fears of the rise of a dark, monstrous and inscrutable Asiatic menace. Then, when laymen without such local expertise suddenly start acting on those fears, they at once trip over themselves trying to decry the self-same racist attitudes they’ve been tutoring.

The worst part of it is, the racial panic over the coronavirus has even got me jumpy. I took my son Albert into the urgent care clinic after he’d been in a minor fender-bender, and the first thing the RN on duty asks me is, ‘has he been to China in the past twenty-one days?’ It took me a bit longer than it should have to register that this was a perfectly routine question and that there was no stereotyping involved. The nurse hadn’t even gotten a good look at Albert’s face yet to tell that he was mixed-race. Even if she had, there’s no reason to assume she was asking out of prejudice. Even so, I’m afraid there was a bit of a passive-aggressively acid tone – Minnesota’s rubbing off on me, sad to say – to the ‘no’ that I answered the poor girl with.

It’s sad and infuriating to me, in the same way I found the closure of the Confucius Institute at UMN last year sad and infuriating. It’s bad enough I have family members watching the news and the conflicting reports on WeChat trying to figure out if their friends and acquaintance are safe and healthy, without the very real danger of a backlash against my family for being Chinese in the middle of a racial panic.