The Legendarium according to Smaug

A meteoric dumpster fire

I’ve watched the first two episodes of Rings of Power. Even though I promised I wouldn’t.

It’s bad. And I mean really, holistically bad.

Let’s get the trivial concerns out of the way first. Casting Black actors and actresses to play hobbits, dwarves, men and elves isn’t at all a problem for me. If anything, Tolkien’s dwarves are supposed to be swarthy-skinned and dark of complexion, which for some reason they weren’t in the Jackson movies; and the hobbits were envisioned as being just as diverse of physical appearance as humans. The question is whether the actors and actresses can act well. (Sir Lenny Henry and Sophia Nomvete can and do act well here. Ismael Cruz Córdova? Not so much.) Also if it isn’t done cynically, which is a bit more questionable. Race politics have nothing to do with why I think Rings of Power is a full-on betrayal of Tolkien’s work.

What does, then? One word: Galadriel.

In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Galadriel was originally a stubborn, headstrong and adventurous girl—this much is true. She did have something of a growth arc. The reason she came to Middle Earth at the end of the First Age was because she was intrigued by the place. She was tempted, in part, by Fëanor’s promises of glory, and longed to see the shores of an unknown land and even to rule them as queen. But she refused to join Fëanor’s quest for revenge against Melkor for the death of his father (Galadriel’s grandfather) Finwë, and she (along with her father Finarfin and her eldest brother Finrod) refused to engage in the political quarrels of the Noldor which ended in the slaughter of the Kinslaying and the Burning of the Ships.

That is as much as to say: she was stubborn and adventurous, but neither brooding nor vengeful—she was of like mind with her father and brother, not having sworn Fëanor’s oath of revenge. Further, it is highly hinted by Jack himself that the reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she loved it. She loved the people, she loved the living creatures, and she especially loved the forests. The reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she found hope there.

Melian said: ‘There is some woe that lies upon you and your kin. That I can see in you, but all else is hidden from me; for by no vision or thought can I perceive anything that passed or passes in the West: a shadow lies over all the land of Aman, and reaches far out over the sea. Why will you not tell me more?’

‘For that woe is past,’ said Galadriel; ‘and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.’

In Rings of Power, there is no love at all in the character upon whom they wrongly bestow the name of ‘Galadriel’. There is no joy. There is not even a trace of hope. Her reasons for staying in Middle Earth have nothing to do with any kind of attachment to Middle Earth, land or creatures or people—and everything to do with hunting down her brother’s killer, Sauron. The makers of Rings of Power have made this ‘Galadriel’ into precisely a bitter, brooding, violent woman who is dead-set on revenge: in short, they have made her into Fëanor Mark II.

These are not the same character. Not even at different ages.

This is partly ideological. There is a current in the corporate culture machine’s interpretation of feminism, that thinks that in order to pander to women viewers they should make all female characters ‘strong’ by putting weapons in their hands—by making them ‘action heroines and corporate girl-bosses’. But this isn’t good writing, and arguably it isn’t even good feminism. Let me be blunt: Éowyn wasn’t a badass just because she picked up a sword, delivered a one-liner and stabbed a wraith in the ‘face’. If it had been just that, she wouldn’t have gotten any of the cheers she did. Éowyn was a badass because of the context of that action: she cared about Merry and her father enough to protect them.

This ‘Galadriel’? She doesn’t care for anything or anyone except her dead brother—and not even Finrod himself, but his ‘task’. This ‘Galadriel’ would never have been found worthy of the option of returning to Valinor in the first place—the pardon that the Valar bestowed only upon Finarfin and his children, among all of the Noldor. The only reason Galadriel was allowed to return to the Elf-home was because she wasn’t as vengeance-obsessed as Fëanor, and hadn’t taken Fëanor’s oath! Rewriting ‘Galadriel’ as another Fëanor doesn’t strengthen her—it diminishes her in ways that are frankly blasphemous.

And what’s worse, Rings of Power tries to make her Fëanorish vindictiveness a sign of her sagacity. Like Cassandra she warns of Sauron’s known-to-the-audience return when everyone around her, High King Gil-Galad and ‘Elrond’ particularly, disbelieve her and tell her she’s overreacting (the mansplaining chauvinist bastards). Never mind that in the book, Galadriel was the one urging Gil-Galad to show caution, not the other way around—and she was right to do so!

I’ve got other grievances with Rings of Power that operate on a similar level. The portrayal of ‘Elrond’ as Gil-Galad’s political staffer and speechwriter is particularly offensive. As is the notion that Celebrimbor would be worried about the size of the elves’ ‘workforce’ in building his Super-Duper Mega-Forge—sending ‘Elrond’ off to literally hammer out (and I do mean with a literal hammer) a labour contract with Durin’s dwarves. Tolkien would be appalled at this! His elves and dwarves had their flaws, but they were not industrialists and capitalists. Their crafts, were crafts. Capitalism was personified in Lord of the Rings by Saruman, and assembly-line Fordist industrialism metonymised by Isengard. They were certainly not valorised the way they are here.

But this should not come as a surprise. Both my gripes against ‘Galadriel’ and the characterisation of the elves and dwarves generally stem from a much broader complaint. That is: Rings of Power is nothing more and nothing less than the Legendarium according to Smaug. It’s Tolkien’s universe as interpreted by Jeff Bezos—born on third base, mega-polluter, war hawk defence contractor, exploiter of the poor—someone who doesn’t even value Tolkien or his œuvre and has nothing to do with Tolkien’s own ecological-minded Christian Tory-anarchist mythopoesis. Of course any interpretation he sponsors in order to garner a greater market share for his streaming service, is going to run dead against the logic of Tolkien’s universe.

Tolkien often expressed his own view through the words of Faramir. And this was Faramir’s view: ‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.’ Rings of Power, so far, takes the opposite view: trying to dazzle with special effects, battle sequences, blood and fire—while holding the substance of their source material, the characters and the setting, in utter contempt.

Give this one a hard pass.

Good general wisdom from VK

A Belarusian woman, Marishka B—, whose account I follow on VK posted the above two images to her public feed. I thought they made some very profound points in general, not just with relation to this war, so I’m resharing them here on my blog with a quick-and-dirty translation.

1. Any war will end.


2. Every nation is made up of different people. Not everyone participates in war. Don’t insult everyone in one group.


3. The politicians will end up agreeing. And you? You’ll be left with the mud you fling at your ‘ideological opponents’.


4. In wartime, EVERYONE lies. Don’t spread info that you're not 101% sure (or can’t verify) is true. If you want to write something, write only about what you saw with your own eyes. That’s being honest. The rest is participation in lies.


5. If you want to express your attitude to politics, express it. It’s not necessary to insult someone [while doing so].


6. You don’t like somebody else’s opinion, but you really want to speak out? Then speak out - about the opinion and not about the person. Because most often you don’t know them personally.


7. Hating people you don’t know is pathological.


8. People’s relationships are very complicated, even at the level of a family or a work group. [Relationships] between states are still more difficult. Only to idiots is everything clear and simple to understand. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t jump to conclusions.


9. Always be human and remember point 1.

Some very sound advice from Ms. B—, to always be human no matter what side of an argument you fall on. I won’t pretend I’ve always been (or still am) a model of good online behaviour according to these nine points, but with God’s grace I can try.

The billionaire class and the quest for man-godhood

Evidently, we now know that Jeff Bezos consults with psychic mediums. Elon Musk has a strange fascination with the eighteenth-century occultist and alchemist Giuseppe Balsamo. Peter Thiel and Larry Page have a long-standing association with modern-day occultist and alchemist Ray Kurzweil. What does this all mean? Is it simply that GK Chesterton’s observation is true, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but rather believe in anything?

This may indeed be part of it, and a very significant part at that. However, I’m not fully convinced. The behaviour of the billionaire class indicates that they do indeed believe in something: the acquisition of more and more material wealth and resources at the expense of everybody else. They already own so much of it that their continuing efforts to grab as much of the capital, as much of the real estate, as much of the infrastructure as they can is not an exercise in mere greed. It is rather an exercise of power and political control. But there’s even more to it than that. The willingness with which our hypercapitalist tech elites – Bezos, Page, Thiel, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and I’m sure quite a few others as well – have for over 20 years now been investing heavily in cryonics (Alcor), consciousness transference (Neuralink), private space travel (SpaceX, Blue Origin), virtual realities (Meta) and aging reversal through ‘biohacking’ (Altos Labs) is indicative of something else. They are using that wealth that they are sucking up in such great quantities, in an attempt to achieve the goals of mediæval and early-Renaissance alchemy: transmutation and immortality.

The West Coast has been something of a hotbed for New Age spiritualism and occult esoterica since the late 1960s, which shouldn’t be surprising given that it rose out of the counterculture that had its epicentre there. Esalen, Druid Heights, Green Gulch, the Waterkin, Soka Gakkai (at least in its US bulwark) and – yes – the Church of Satan, all have their establishment in California, with a significant portion of those being based in San Francisco. (One should also note that this spiritual and social milieu also produced Fr Seraphim Rose; take that as you will.) So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Silicon Valley as a whole has imbibed that same spiritual atmosphere. After all, it’s fairly common knowledge that the æsthetics and design philosophy of Steve Jobs were highly influenced by Zen Buddhism.

The ‘performance artist’ Marina Abramović in her collaborations with Microsoft supporting their innovations into ‘mixed reality’ is something of a case-in-point. Microsoft did pull down the ad with Abramović in it. And Abramović was evidently baited by the ‘conspiracy theorists’ into fervently denying ever being a Satanist. (Honestly, I believe her. I think she’s genuinely a performance artist, doing an act that sells. It follows that she is not likely to be a very happy or balanced person.) But that is really a distraction from the main point. The entire project of ‘mixed reality’, the blurring between what is real and what is virtual, and the idea that human beings will act as their own demiurges, crafting themselves as homunculi in this new pseudo-reality, is very much still a concern. Witness Zuck’s new project Meta, in all its insidious glory.

That’s really what this is about: it’s the choice highlighted by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The desire to transcend death is part of the human condition. But the choice before us is this: in seeking after that transcendence do we turn to the living God of the living reality, and the God-man who appears to us in the flesh, embodied within the stuff of our own everyday material lives? Or do we instead attempt, by means of power, wealth, and all the alchemy and extension of life/consciousness they can buy with it, to become as far as possible ‘little gods’ – to become man-gods? This choice is heightened, to almost apocalyptic terms, by the growing grasping control over the reality by the few, and the accessibility (and desirability) of the illusion by the many. As Berdyaev himself put it:

Today the soul of man no longer rests upon secure foundations, everything round him is unsteady and contradictory, he lives in an atmosphere of illusion and falsehood under a ceaseless threat of change. Evil comes forward under an appearance of good, and he is deceived; the faces of Christ and of Antichrist, of man become god and of God become man, are interchangeable. A large number of contemporary people have “divided minds.” They are the sort of folk whom Dostoevsky displayed to us…

If it’s an affectation, the occultism, esotericism and attraction to alchemy by our ruling class is certainly an odd one. To be absolutely clear on this, I do not think (pace QAnon) that the occultism and esotericism and alchemy-dabbling of the ruling class is wilful and orchestrated (at least on the human level). After all, Ayn Rand influenced Anton LaVey, not the other way around, and therefore logically must have preceded him. The cupidity of the elites preceded the interest any of them had in spiritualism and esoterica. When one is driven by the lust for greater and greater degrees of wealth and control over the means of production, the desire to become ‘like gods’ becomes that much more powerful.

Berdyaev—and, by extension, Dostoevsky—must be given his due on this question, though. We are faced with the choice between occult (that is to say, metaverse and mind-hack, a technological illusion of power and control, a façade of freedom from necessity); and the freedom that comes from paying respect to reality on the other. It is increasingly clear what choice many of the ruling class (Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Page et al.) will ultimately choose to make, and we should take care that they don’t make that choice for us.

A Closer look at Dave Chappelle’s recent work

‘Is it possible that a gay person can be racist?’ asks Dave Chappelle.

This is perhaps the driving central question that Dave Chappelle is struggling through, meditating on and trying to iron out with his final instalment of Netflix stand-up specials, The Closer. For even asking this question, for posing it – and for trying to work out in his usual button-pushing, boundary-smashing, politically-incorrect way some of its necessary ramifications – the woke Tumblr-liberal Twitter outrage machine for which Dave Chappelle can do no right since Sticks and Stones, along with its establishment legacy-media accoutrements from NPR to the Daily Beast, are dragging him behind the truck. Even GLAAD put out a statement condemning his routine.

Personal note here: I was a huge Chappelle’s Show fan when it first aired in my college years. Those sketches – Tyrone Biggins, Clayton Bigsby, his impressions of Prince and Lil Jon – are all still ridiculously funny. ‘I’m Wayne Brady, bitch!’ is never not going to be funny. It’s true, though, that in some ways he is treading on old ground, thematically speaking. At its best, Chappelle’s Show explored the really uncomfortable areas where racial violence, injustices, power imbalances and stereotypes interact with sexual expression and insecurities. People who were outraged about Chappelle making jokes about Leaving Neverland, or who say things like ‘too bad Dave died in ‘05’ as though 2005 Chappelle and 2021 Chappelle are irrevocably discontinuous, need to remember that he was making fun of the OJ Simpson trial, the R Kelly trial and the accusations about Michael Jackson, fifteen years before that. Moreover, he explains fairly clearly in the Chappelle’s Show sketch why he has such a sceptical attitude toward public treatment of black celebrities: he believes black men are held to an unjust racial standard, both socially and legally, based on racialised fears of black male physical prowess and sexuality. And here again we see this in his treatment of the recent ‘cancelling’ of rapper DaBaby over his alleged homophobia, while, Chappelle notes, his career suffered no such scrutiny when he shot and killed another black man in a Walmart.

That same theme, unsurprisingly, pops up repeatedly in The Closer. He recounts his various run-ins with fans and haters of his stand-up – one with an older white woman in a parking lot, one with a mother and transgender daughter in his hometown, one with a lesbian and her partner in a nightclub, and one with a gay man recording him on his phone while his friend tried to pester him who then called the police on him. True to form, his anecdotes are liberally sprinkled with ‘bitch’ and ‘nigga’, and they often depend on him exaggerating the antagonism that each of these fans or critics showed him at first. Occasionally they descend into deliberate self-mockery. But they do have a serious point to them. The point that Chappelle makes – directly and circuitously – is that human suffering is universal. Certain ‘tribes’ are not specially chosen by their suffering – not even black people. Chappelle remarks with a tinge of sadness the scenes of anti-Asian violence that he saw, much of it coming from black people, that he felt couldn’t be papered over. ‘Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not black. Empathy is bisexual – it must go both ways,’ Chappelle quips.

Here’s the thing. I suspect – I don’t know it to be the case, but I suspect – that I was the cause of Dave Chappelle’s long departure from comedy. That’s right, me.

Not me alone, of course. I wasn’t the only immature, thoughtless white kid in 2005 laughing along at Dave Chappelle doing impressions of famous black people, or portraying black stereotypes if only to make fun of those who hold them. But how much of a difference is there, really, if a white person laughs at a black person making fun of black people, and if a white person laughs at a white person making fun of black people? I genuinely believe Dave felt really bad about that: the fact that his blackness shielded him from criticism that he would otherwise get from his own ‘tribe’, when his jokes went too far against them. He wasn’t being a diva at all. You listen to him talk about how random white guys would come up to him on the street with his son and say: ‘I’m Rick James, bitch!’; or the heckling white kids screaming ‘White Power!’ at him when he performed in Hartford in 2013, and there’s genuine sadness there when he talks about it. Here’s the thing: I think those experiences, in his extended leave from comedy, informed and enriched his perspective. So when he appeared on SNL after Biden’s electoral victory last year, he was able to say this:

All these white people out there that feel that anguish, that pain, they’re mad ‘cause they think nobody cares—and maybe they don’t—let me tell you something. I know how that feels. I promise you, I know how that feels… Everyone knows how that feels. But here’s the difference between me and you: you guys hate each other for that. And I don’t hate anybody, I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through; that’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got to find a way to live your life; find a way to forgive each other.

So, no. He’s not being a bigot. He’s not trying to ‘punch down’ on gay people or trans people. Even when he’s defending Jo Rowling or DaBaby or Kevin Hart, or putting himself on ‘Team TERF’, he’s not ‘punching down’. He’s not trying to play a ‘zero-sum game’ with his humour. He’s still trying to get through to the people who go around wearing their pain and anguish like a chip on their shoulder, and ask them to use a bit of real empathy. This was the point of his lengthy bit about the sadly-passed trans comedian Daphne Dorman at the end of his set. If you listen carefully, he wasn’t using her memory as a human shield to deflect criticism – he doesn’t need to do that because he knows he’s gonna get criticised no matter what. He was trying to demonstrate what real empathy can and should look like.

My take on The Closer is that it aligns with, and is of a piece with, what Chappelle has been trying to do all along. Dave clearly believes that there is a purpose in his art, a purpose that he himself acknowledges openly that he doesn’t always succeed in attaining. He’s using his deliberately button-pushing humour, getting into those uncomfortable places where race and sexuality butt heads, and to a certain extent he is doing it to provoke. But the purpose of that provocation is to try and get black men to empathise with how Asians suffer. To try and get gays, lesbians and heterosexual women to empathise with how black men have historically suffered and continue to suffer. To try and get trans folks to empathise with how cis women suffered and suffer. And to remind people that, however much ‘failure’ hurts, even ‘success’ doesn’t make you happy or fulfilled. In a way, Chappelle has intuitively understood the ‘woke’, seen through the poststructuralist Tumblr charade of ‘intersectionality’… and is trying to show us the difference between ‘allyship’ (which brooks no laughter or criticism) and real solidarity.

Why the TYT vs. Jimmy Dore fight isn’t just Twitter drama

If you follow Left Twitter at all (and I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t; it’s as much a mess as the rest of Twitter), you wouldn’t have really been able to miss the ongoing feud between The Young Turks – Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian – on one side, and Jimmy Dore on the other. Basically, what it amounts to is this: Ana Kasparian baselessly, gratuitously and vulgarly called The Nation reporter and author Aaron Maté a Russian agent on the TYT show, Maté demanded an apology, and Jimmy Dore leapt to Maté’s defence when Kasparian doubled down. Now TYT has been smearing Jimmy Dore as a sexual predator, and lining up to attack anyone who defends Aaron Maté, including Glenn Greenwald and Rania Khalek.

Now, some folks on the highly-online left (namely Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball), have basically dismissed this spat as meaningless ego-driven Twitter drama. And, to be fair to them, there probably is some element to this that is personality-driven. But it would be a mistake to mischaracterise the fundamental dynamics of this online spat, which really hit at one of the fundamental flaws – or, I should say, fundamental contradictions – at the heart of Anglophone liberal and leftist politics.

Basically, on one side, you have people who are intimately familiar with venues outside the United States, who understand that non-Americans are people with legitimate aspirations, life goals and a need for basic dignity. And these people have lived in these venues long enough and inquired deeply enough, that they have come to understand that American military and economic power projection is an existential threat to these people and these communities. In short, they are anti-imperialists. Now, I’m not sure about Jimmy Dore. He’s a comedian, not a journalist, and in some cases it shows. But note that people like Stephen Kinzer, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin, Max Blumenthal, Ajit Singh and of course late lamented figures like Robert Parry and the great Robert Fisk – have all spent significant amounts of time outside the Anglosphere, doing on-the-ground reporting and talking to ordinary people in conflict zones.

On the other side, you have people who, if they don’t outright support it, then at least don’t strongly object to the use of American military and financial dominance to achieve political and economic goals, regardless of who gets trampled on in the process: Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Hondurans, Russian-speakers of the Donetsk Basin, Eastern European Jews, Romani, Syrians, Palestinians, Yazidis, Armenians, Libyans, Yemenis, Iraqis or Afghans. This side is automatically better-disposed to American intelligence and military power blocs, and will predictably characterise even mild critics of American intelligence and military power blocs as ‘authoritarians’, ‘tankies’, ‘Marxist-Leninists’, ‘apologists for dictators’, ‘Russian assets’ or ‘Chinese assets’, while themselves posing as advocates for democracy and human rights. Indeed: this is precisely what Ana Kasparian did to Aaron Maté.

And here’s the thing: this divide goes back all the way to the beginnings of the organised Left. Anti-imperialism as an organised force in the West started, arguably, with William Morris… who was intimately familiar with the brutal mass killings, tortures and rapes carried out by the original Young Turks (the same genocidaires that Cenk Uygur named his YouTube channel after) against the Bulgarian peasantry, and who understood the British Empire’s willing and knowing complicity in the Ottoman government’s heinous barbarism. Morris’s opponent on the left was a man named Henry Hyndman, an early disciple of Marx in England who supported British imperial projects in Ireland and in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the disputes between Morris and Hyndman over this matter led to Morris’s leaving the SDF in 1885.

In short: yes, Twitter is toxic. Yes, Twitter is personality-driven. Yes, there’s definitely a personal element to these online fisticuffs. But let’s not be naïve about what is actually going on. This is a bad-faith attempt to ostracise and silence Maté and others like him who are well-informed critics of empire. There is a shadow-movement on the left which still maintains a faith in the fundamental goodness and moral righteousness of American power projection. And then there is the part of the left which has a more realistic understanding of the nature of power, and which is willing to both oppose the abuses of American power and expose and demystify the propagandistic supports for it. Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté are on the principled side here: the side which William Morris took back in 1885. The Young Turks are - at best - Hyndmanites and apologists for Anglo imperialism. That is, of course, presuming that they aren’t something considerably more sinister, like nostalgists for genocidal Ottoman tyranny in the Middle East. There is a clear choice to be made here, and it is also clear which choice is the correct one.

Venerables Thalassios, Limnaios and Baradatos, Hermits of Kyrrhos in Syria

Caves in the Syrian desert

This Soul Saturday, the twenty-second of February, in the Orthodox Church is also the feast-day of three Syrian ascetics, Saints Thalassios, Limnaios and Baradatos. All three men were known personally to Blessed Theodoret of Kyrrhos, who wrote about them in his Religious History. Full disclosure: a lot of my post here will be borrowing from my friend, comrade and fellow-metalhead Fr Deacon Aaron’s blog. He writes at length about Thalassios and Limnaios, and a third hermit John, with particular reliance on Theodoret’s History.

Saint Thalassios [Gk. Θαλάσσιος, ‘of the sea’] was the eldest of these three, and probably a good generation older than Theodoret. Theodoret describes Saint Thalassios as ‘a man adorned with many good qualities, but surpassing the men of his time in simplicity of character, gentleness and modesty of spirit’. Saint Thalassios made his hermit’s cell in a cave in the side of a hill south of the as-yet-unidentified village of Tillima near Kyrrhos in Syria, where Blessed Theodoret visited him. Tillima had once unfortunately been a centre of the hæretical teachings of Marcion, but the presence of holy men such as Thalassios in its midst seems to have had a salutary effect on its spiritual health and cultivation.

He was joined in this cell by a disciple, Saint Limnaios [Gk. Λιμναῖος, ‘of the lake’]. Saint Limnaios was many years younger than his spiritual father Thalassios. ‘At a very young age he entered this wrestling-school and received a fine education in this consummate philosophy,’ writes Blessed Theodoret, where Limnaios ‘received sufficiently the teaching of the godly old man and made himself an impress of his virtue.’ Theodoret describes Limnaios as having imposed upon himself a discipline of total silence, and supposes this was a penance for his having been somewhat overly free with his tongue in his earlier life. Saint Limnaios spent some years with Saint Thalassios but then went off on his own to learn from Saint Marûn.

Similarly to Saint Makedonios Krithophagos and Saint Eusebios of Asikhan, Saint Limnaios when he went out by himself took up residence in a rough stone enclosure with no roof, as Theodoret says he lived in ‘neither house, nor tent, nor cabin’, and had lived this way constantly for thirty-eight years by the time Theodoret wrote his History. He bore illness and infirmity gladly and eased his pains through prayer. He gained a significant reputation as a healer, and was able to heal by faith through the sign of the Cross and through the invocation of the divine Name.

As such, he gained a significant following, and crowds would come to discourse with him and to be healed by him, gathering at the one crack in his stone wall through which he could bless them. Saint Limnaios had a special love for the blind, and he built two huts near his own enclosure for a group of blind beggars who came to him, and he instructed them in singing from the Psalter. Saint Limnaios took care of the blind beggars himself by dividing with them what he had from the generosity of his worldly visitors.

The third Syrian ascetic we commemorate today is much younger than the other two, and apparently has little connexion with them other than his places of origin and struggle. Saint Baradatos [Gk. Βαραδάτος, apparently a Semitic name deriving from the toponym Nahr Baradâ نهر بردى‎, the main river running through Damascus] was a native of Antioch, who as a young man struggled terribly with ‘strong passions’ and ‘fiery, indomitable lusts’. Upon undertaking the life of a hermit, he had to tame these lusts with some ascetical disciplines that might strike us moderns as extreme. He confined himself within a wooden cell that was deliberately constructed to be too small for his tall frame, such that when he stood he had to stoop down and such that he could not lie down straight but had to curl up his legs and back when he rested. His cell had no windows, instead being put together so loosely that the wind and sun could flood through the cracks between the timbers. It also had only one door which at all times Saint Baradatos kept obstructed.

Baradatos spent many years within this flimsy box, until Bishop Theodoret himself managed to convince him to emerge from it, for the health of his frail body. After this, Saint Baradatos began to undertake his ascetic disciplines standing up. He covered himself in a garment cobbled together from animal skins, which covered his entire body except two small slits for his nose and mouth to allow breathing. He could not see through this leather garment and could not walk on his own, having to be led by the hand. Instead he stood stationary at the gate to the town, and kept his hands raised to heaven, praising God always. He reposed around the year 460, his body having been exhausted from his ascetic exertions.

Saint Baradatos’s ascetic extremes can and should demand some scepticism – particularly since the bishop who recorded his life in the History personally found some of them to be unhealthily strict. However, these ascetic feats were far from crazed; they had a true and proper purpose. And Saint Baradatos himself, under the influence of his discipline, had attained an excellent scholarly mind as well as a calm, reasonable and dispassionate personality. He gave clear and thoughtful answers to the theological questions which were put to him, and his advice both spiritual and practical, given even to non-monastics and non-ascetics, was temperate, reasonable and salutary. Saint Baradatos was one of three men – the other two being Saint Simeon Stylites and Saint James the Solitary – that Emperor Theodosios II trusted, to help effect a reconciliation between the Patriarchs John I of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria. Holy hermits Thalassios, Limnaios and Baradatos, sea and lake and river of spiritual wisdom inexhaustible, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Soul Saturday, Tone 8:

Only Creator, with wisdom profound, You mercifully order all things,
And give that which is needed to all men:
Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of Your servants who have fallen asleep,
For they have placed their trust in You, our Maker and Fashioner, and our God.

Theopolitical questions abound

The future of politics and the rôle of the Church in a world where liberalism appears to be increasingly exhausted is again a hot topic. Chase Padusniak at Patheos Catholic has given a good run-down of a recent debate in the Roman Catholic Church Life Journal on the topic of post-liberal political theologies. To wit: is the future of Christian political theology intégriste, anarchist, or something else entirely?

To be honest, I do feel like I have drifted away somewhat from the flow of this debate in the blogosphere – my interests on this blog having largely delved into historical topics rather than current affairs. But, as chance would have it, they are not unrelated – and I do on occasion pop up for a breath of air. I won’t say it’s exactly ‘fresh’ air in the current instance; the Church Life Journal debate is essentially a reprise, in a slightly different key, of a blogosphere argument sparked by an article in La Civiltà Cattolica a year and a half ago, on Americanism and the œcumenism of fear. But that does not mean by any stretch that the CLJ debate is without importance! We are, after all, trapped in a post-liberal moment whether we like it or not. It is only good sense that we should begin to examine the grand narratives and comprehensive doctrines that will naturally fill the void. It is also good sense to interrogate them hard. We need to question where we go from here, and also to begin asking what, if anything, can be salvaged from the ordo of liberalism as it steers itself towards shipwreck.

The problem, as it is posed by both Troutner and Waldstein, is clear. Liberal social orders pretend to be neutral arbiters and level playing fields between various incommensurate comprehensive doctrines about what constitutes the Good. The liberal ‘creation story’ is one in which a neutral state is able to stave off – either with actual violence or with the mere threat of it – the various forces of religious bigotry and fanaticism behind which lurk the disintegrative forces of chaos. We are now beginning to see and understand that this pose of neutrality and levelness is, indeed, just a pose – that liberalism itself is a comprehensive doctrine, but one which does not actually constitute its own substantive ‘good’ and instead provides only various formal and procedural simulacra of the Good (debate, discourse, proceeding, election, trial, rules-based order). So far, so good, so to speak. Where Troutner and Waldstein begin to disagree is in their diagnoses of the liberal worldview – and this leads them toward diametrically-opposed conclusions about the correct uses of political power and the correct relationship between the Church and the state.

For Troutner, the nature of liberalism is fundamentally parasitic on the legacy of Christendom’s improvements on prior pagan systems of political ethics. Liberalism appeals to various expectations which grew out of the apostolic and patristic witness at the beginning of the Christian age – things like human dignity and equality before the law – and, to slightly contort his analogy, metastasises those expectations into bedrock principles of a new order which must be preserved at any cost even from the religious worldviews that brought them into being. Troutner believes that liberalism can be defeated only by providing counter-narratives which demonstrate this sophistic sleight-of-hand. Waldstein, on the other hand, understands the rejection of hierarchy and obedience as ethical categories to be present in the fall of Lucifer and, consequently, in the first fall of man. Satan, in this account, is the first liberal. Waldstein’s account of the distinctions between liberalism and the Christian worldview become, in this perspective, far more Manichæan in character. It is therefore not surprising in the slightest that Troutner ends up espousing a form of Christian anarchism and Waldstein, a form of theocracy.

As a brief aside: I do wish Troutner had gone a bit further in his critique of intégrisme, and gone into its – so to speak – moral genealogy. In its original form, the intégrisme of Charles Maurras and Action française was not particularly Catholic: Maurras was an agnostic, and the creative force behind Action française came from the anti-Dreyfusards. French intégrisme was rooted not in Catholic thought but in atheism and positivism: the thought of Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan in particular. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to substantiate from this Troutner’s point that intégrisme is often little more than an imitative inversion of liberalism. The ‘moral genealogy’ of intégrisme matters, because the one true point about the liberal compromise on matters of religion is that it does stave off, temporarily, the more substantive question of what takes its place. That question does indeed seem an ominous one, in no small part because those of us who have been steeped in liberalism’s self-written mythology are the ones who must bring forth what replaces it. For those of us who are critics of liberalism, that should scare us.

More: Orthodox Christians cannot afford to remain neutral on this question, and in fact we already are struggling with it in ways that heighten our awareness of the underlying problems in ways which are not necessarily as immediate for our Western brothers and sisters. This is one of the Big Questions, to which the Russians in particular were keenly sensitive when they were grappling with the notions of nihilism, anarchism and autocracy in their own country, before the Revolution. One need only peruse one of the novels of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to understand immediately that the most sensitive minds of the Russian intelligentsia found the liberal compromise to be not only untenable, but in some sense contemptible: the characters in the great Russian novels who espouse the ideals of contemporary European liberalism, progress and Whig history almost always turn out to be hypocrites. The sensitivity of the Russian men-of-letters to the stakes of the Big Question of political theology, however, did not save them – the Revolution hit them all the same. The attempts at articulating the Kingdom on earth failed miserably even as their final triumph was proclaimed from the Kremlin in 1917.

This failure is still with us. The current political problems currently dividing the Orthodox Church can be traced back to an imperial ecclesiology which neither the Russian nor the Constantinopolitan Church has fully managed to shed. Still more problematically, this imperial ecclesiology undergirds on a practical level what may be the most useful and worthwhile concept the Orthodox historical witness has to offer on the Big Question of political theology—symphony.

Once one begins to acknowledge that Church and state are two distinct things – a realisation that struck Christian thinkers very early in their interactions with the Roman Empire – various forms of theopolitical engagement begin to emerge. The first and oldest form of theopolitical engagement there is, is simply the state cultus: cæsaropapism. Cæsar is the pontifex; or, still more crudely, Cæsar is god – and the state is (above) the church. Obviously, this form of theopolitical engagement was unacceptable to the early Christians living under pagan Roman rule, but it would become much more palatable when Rome’s emperors became Christian themselves. In more subtle forms, every kind of civic religion and every kind of personality cultus that forms around a sæcular leader partakes in this form of theopolitical engagement.

The second form of theopolitical engagement is the inverse of this: theocracy, or papocæsarism, wherein the church is (above) the state. The divine laws as interpreted by the priesthood with direct reference to the æternal ends of man become the laws by which all human beings must be made to live. For Christians and heretics both, from Savoranola and Chauvin to Joseph Smith, this has always been an attractive option – and intégrisme does not entirely avoid the temptation of it. It has also been, for most of Muslim history, the preferred form of theopolitical engagement: the primary political organ being entirely contiguous with the religious community, the ummat al-Islâm, it made sense for there to be no distinction either between religious law and civil law.

The final form of theopolitical engagement to emerge is laïcité: the idea that there is a bright and impenetrable line between the affairs of the state and the affairs of the Church, and never the twain shall meet. This is the dominant form of theopolitical engagement encouraged under the liberal order. There can be friendly forms of laïcité characterised by pluralism and tolerance – this is the model encouraged in the United States. There can also be less-friendly forms, like those adopted in France and Turkey. And there can be forms that are downright hostile, where the state actively oppresses and attempts to destroy the Church – as under the ideocracies of the twentieth century.

Orthodox Christians recognise a third form of theopolitics that emerged under Emperor Saint Constantine and was theorised under Emperor Saint Justinian of Eastern Rome and, in Russia, under Tsar Ivan IV Grozniy: the theopolitics of church-state symphony. It shares with theocracy an acknowledgement that politics has an æternal dimension. But it also shares with laïcité the acknowledgement of separate spheres of Churchly and stately concern; however, it does not draw the bright impenetrable line between the two. Church and state are partners, or brothers, and assist one another in various ways. In Orthodox theology, the model for this relationship is that of Moses and Aaron. Aaron, the elder brother, is kohen (כוהן, priest); Moses, the younger brother, is məḥoqeq (מחקק, lawgiver). Moses stands above, and goes up the mountain; Aaron stays below among the people. Moses commands, compels, prods, rebukes; Aaron persuades, pricks consciences, reconciles, makes peace.

Now, obviously, even from the Hebrew perspective this relationship is fraught with irony and dysfunction, as all good families are. Moses has a nasty temper and even murders an Ægyptian in a rage – which is what leads to his exile. Aaron is weak-willed and bows to the will of the crowd when they demand an idol be built with gold they’d brought out of Ægypt. God permits neither of the two brothers to enter the Promised Land with the people, because both of them are impatient and grumble at God in Miribah. Also, despite their dissimilarities of function, the two brothers and their offices are not exactly equal. Even though it is Moses who anoints Aaron, in Jewish (and in Orthodox Christian) tradition, Aaron began his work as prophet before Moses did—which is not the case, significantly, in the Islâmic tradition. When Moses dies, only the ‘sons of Israel’ weep for him; when Aaron dies, all of Israel weeps for him, including the women. Even so, it is clear that only these two could lead the Hebrew people out of Ægypt and get them within sight of the Promised Land; and it is not coincidental that this is treated in the Greek Patristic literature as both a this-worldly, political end and an æternal, spiritual one.

The good thing about looking to the Exodus as a model for the symphonic relationship between Church and state is that it seems to imply it doesn’t necessitate an Emperor. Remember, there was no melek מלך in Israel before Saul! However, the bad thing about the idea of symphony in Church-state relations is that in the Christian era, it has never been done without one. And there seems to be an unhealthy tendency among the ‘priests’ of our time to seek out a ‘lawgiver’ among the ‘nations’ who are not our brothers. The American right-wing evangelicals who in our time hold up Trump as their ‘Cyrus’ (even as Trump rages and threatens and sanctions the children of the actual, historical Cyrus) is merely the most visible and risible example.

In that case—chto delat’? When I first wrote that article on symphony, I mentioned that Fr Stanley (Harakas) held up symphony as a yet-unfulfilled ideal to be striven for, and that Vigen Guroian was the one urging caution and a less-maximalist approach to the question of political involvement by the religious. I fear I may have gotten that slightly wrong. In his book, Fr Stanley does indeed hold up symphony as the only desirable form of theopolitics, but takes a decidedly more pessimistic tack when it comes to the question of how and whether it can be achieved. Harakas and Guroian actually agree far more than they disagree on this particular question, to the point that Harakas actually advocates little more than issue-based advocacy for Orthodox laypeople and clergy, to the tune of about two core issues.

I would love to see either Guroian or Harakas (or both!) engage with both the advocates of Christian anarchism and the intégristes. Personally, I hold with neither the anarchists nor the intégristes nor the liberals, and am rather deeply distressed that in the imagination of a very significant portion of the American electorate – including portions of the American electorate I naturally tend to sympathise with – these three options seem to be the only ones on offer or seriously considered. After all, Berdyaev (and the rest of the Vekhi authors, for that matter) was none of the above. None of the above, too, was Mother Maria, who spurned the ‘egoistic vegetarianism’ of Day’s anarcho-pacifism, but also had no easy words of comfort either for the émigré Russians who dreamed of a fœderal liberal-democratic Europe, or those who dreamed of a new Tsar. By the end, none of the above was Saint Ilya Bunakov – who, rejecting liberalism and anarchism and theocracy, was prophesying a ‘new word’ of political synthesis when he was murdered by the Nazis.

Axiomodernity is going to demand, soon if not already, a politics of the Cross that falls into none of these traps. We do not get to the Cross by imitating the unrepentant water-bearers for Pilate; nor do we get there by taking up arms on the roadsides with modern-day Zealotry; nor do we get there by fleeing to the hills like the Essenes. Or, we may as well say, we can get to the Cross on any one of these roads but only through repentance, prayer, fasting and self-giving (how else?). With regard to the symphonic ideal, we need to bear in mind the example of Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, who is living and working under the most hostile of conditions. If such a symphony is ever to manifest itself, I do not claim to know what it will look like, but I have a hunch that it will have to be through aggressive gestures of humility and generosity.

Is political tolerance a virtue? Is polarisation an evil?

Let it not be thought, however, that I affirm that it is necessary to prize every peace. For I know that there is splendid disagreement and the most destructive unanimity. Yet one must love a good peace which has a good purpose: unity with God.

- Saint Gregory the Theologian

This may be a rather dangerous piece to write at the beginning of Lent and in advance of Forgiveness Sunday, but I don’t think that danger can be avoided. Over the past couple of days, The Atlantic has been making hay out of a political study that they themselves commissioned, to break down attitudes of political partizanship at the county level throughout America, including a profile of the ‘least politically-prejudiced place in America’. Personally, as a philosopher with an interest in politics, I am still not quite sure what to make of this study, its results, or the undergirding assumptions which seem to have prompted it in the first place and which continue to colour the perceptions of its findings.

In the main, one thing that troubles me about it is that it appears as part of a genre of media and ‘think-tank’ pieces that decry ‘tribalism’ and ‘polarisation’ in terms that invariably punch harder one way than the other. The fact that Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a political extremist of the pro-corporate big-business Club for Growth liberal-right by any objective measure, can brand himself as the herald for this kind of political tolerance gives some indication of the utter sham it is. The other insidious thing about these studies, in my own view, is that they seem to hold up a purely-contextual standard and a mythos of ‘moderation’ that, on examination, has exactly zero connexion with the classical virtue of the same name. Being perceived as ‘moderate’ in American public discourse is cheap; by which I mean that it requires no independent thought, it requires only a modicum of political savoir-faire in place of actual knowledge of issues, and it certainly requires nothing by way of a moderate lifestyle which is easy on the natural environment and on the social fabric. (Put another way: moderation in the classical sense is achieved by ascetic discipline, not by adopting a centrist political outlook.)

At the same time, these pieces are – even if they are only doing so cynically – pointing toward some kind of real deficiency in our public life. The fact that Ben Sasse can find such a kind reception at NPR, even if it is only for purely self-interested and self-promoting reasons on both sides, does speak to a real human desire for a more person-scaled politics; and you can see this still more clearly in The Atlantic’s profile of Watertown. There is something deeply desirable about making and maintaining real connexions with real people who disagree with you, connexions which are notably promised but not well delivered on by online social media. There is something that strikes most of us, intuitively, as intrinsically wrong about applying ideological litmus tests to personal relationships. There’s something that instinctively appeals to us about that Jefferson quote. I think there’s something real in that moral intuition that deserves to be teased out; but – as you can probably tell from the foregoing paragraph – I do not hold that this moral intuition itself constitutes any kind of ‘higher good’.

There is something of an ‘ideal type’ that gets presented in these think-pieces, which can be informative as a starting-point. Look carefully at how Watertown is presented in The Atlantic, this ‘nine-square-mile town of 26,000’. It’s a close-knit small Northern town. It’s got active churches. It’s got ‘eyes on the street’, so kids can play safely outside on their own. It’s got ‘a daily, family-owned newspaper, a busy YMCA, and two different Rotary Clubs’. ‘Everybody’s kids go to the same schools and play sports and act in community theatre together.’ It also has a military base; something that connects it to the broader national project. People meet to discuss current affairs over breakfast groups. Democrats marry Republicans; pro-lifers and pro-choicers are lifelong friends. They ‘have relationships that go back generations, which is how things get done’. There’s something of the Yankee town-hall ideal in this portrait of Watertown that cannot be anything but deliberate, and it’s captured in this punch-line delivered by Dr David Fontana of George Washington University: ‘Politics—like many other things—works better when it is conducted among friends and neighbours, rather than among strangers.’

This is a very tempting picture, not least because there is a great deal that’s right about it. Who doesn’t want some kind of harmony in interpersonal relations, that is mirrored by a harmony in politics? Who doesn’t want to have a body politic made up of friends and neighbours? (Solzhenitsyn was a fan of this model; take that as you will.) But Fontana’s Watertown-as-formula, which seems so common-sense as to be almost banal, deserves to be catechised. Does it in fact deliver what it promises to deliver? Should we want to be Watertown?

So, let’s start with the conditional. How do we determine who is, or is not, a ‘friend’ or a ‘neighbour’? Let’s turn to the Lysis, which is one of the ‘early’ Platonic dialogues which ends in an aporia and does not provide us with a ready answer of what defines friendship. Even though the Lysis leaves us with more questions than answers, we can already see some of the contours of what constitutes friendship and love from Socrates’s questioning of Lysis. On the one hand, real friendship cannot exist between two people who are already completely self-sufficient and virtuous. Friendship feeds on a certain desire for the whole, for the good, where it does not yet exist. And yet, in order for this desire to be there in the first place, some disposition for the good must already be in place even though the good itself is somehow lacking or deficient. It can be seen from the Lysis that friendship, indeed love of any sort, requires a certain level of difference, but it must be the kind of difference that mutually drives the two different persons toward the beautiful and the good. Lysis insists, under Socrates’s prodding, that true friendship cannot exist between the good and its opposite, evil. The conversation also seems to insist that a substantive shared understanding of the good is required for any true friendship, lasting or worthy of the name, to be present.

In the portrait of Watertown you can see hints of this common striving toward the good even between people who don’t agree – you can see it clearly in the human-scaled portraits of the people that are highlighted there. But notice what is missing from the general features of this genre of editorial and policy-writing: any insistence on the need for a shared conviction about the substance of the good. All that matters to them is the procedure emptied of content – but of course, a mere procedure devoid of content is already not Watertown. And here’s the even wilder thing: across the political spectrum, large majorities of Americans actually already do agree on what they say they want; they are just prevented from expressing those desires by the realities of the political system, which they are then told by the gatekeepers of centrist opinion that they are wrong or sick (or divisive or tribalist or partizan) for wanting to participate in! Most Americans right and left already agree that it would be good for the wealthy to pay more in taxes. Most Americans support Medicare for all defined as a single-payer healthcare system free of cost at the point of use. Most Americans believe it would be good for new mothers to stay at home on paid leave. Most Americans believe it would be good for Americans to be able to buy cheap generic pharmaceuticals from abroad. Most Americans think it’s a good idea to end our support for the Saudis in Yemen. These are all just, life-affirming goals which people of goodwill on the left and the right can support.

In these cases – probably not so much in others – these majorities of Americans actually do have a fairly clear idea about the form and content of the good; and they actually do agree on it. So, in one sense, I fully endorse the initial study in The Atlantic. It takes this much of a right tack: partizan stereotyping and secondary polarisation are undesirable because they prevent those of us who agree on these common-good goals from working together on these kinds of issues. But in a much broader sense, there’s more wrong with this study than there is right with it, because the Atlantic authors want us, as part of the moral of the story, to default to an indifferent centrism that is defined primarily by its lack of content with regard to substantive social goods. They (and other centre-to-centre-right authors in this genre, like Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Andrew Sullivan, Emily Ekins and Amanda Taub) are using the very real problem of dissatisfaction and anger with the political process, as a fig-leaf to cover other, more fundamental deficiencies in our body politic that have much more to do with environmental degradation, declining public health and distributional inequities in wealth, than they do with incivility or polarisation.

And those facets manage to peek in even in the portrait of Watertown. The recent government shutdown, for example, closed down the town zoo – to the chagrin of children and parents who live there. But instead of reflecting on what manner of dysfunction caused the shutdown, what its effects were on the local people, and what ultimately ended the shutdown (a concerted strike action by federal employees), the author instead takes refuge in a poetic metaphor that boils the whole thing down to an ‘intractable conflict’.

Again, do not take the foregoing as an argument for incivility. (There is a place for incivility, but that argument is a separate one.) Rather, this is an argument instead for a substantive politics based on working-class solidarity and true friendship across sectarian lines, which (because it is substantive, and because it is politics, and because it is working-class) we can expect will be attacked as uncivil, divisive, tribalist and so on in the press. We need to be fully cognisant of this going forward, both because the corporate media will encourage us to turn away people who mostly agree with us for the sake of dividing us, and because those same media outlets will turn around and blame us for the resulting division.

Instead, what we need to foster is some semblance of common agreement around a set of good purposes for a good accord as Saint Gregory the Theologian would have it. Though he was speaking specifically to theological agreements and disagreements, the same principle can apply to the ‘lower’ orders of agreement and disagreement as well, including politics – since we may affirm that certain political orders are more beneficial to human flourishing than others, on a definition of human flourishing that would include the spiritual goods after which the portrait of Watertown is so clumsily striving. We cannot allow the false, destructive facsimiles of unanimity and ‘tolerance’ emanating from the gatekeepers and beneficiaries of the current unjust right-neoliberal ordo to distract us from seeking the genuine truth that a just unanimity, on some level, is not only possible but halfway to being built already.

The problem with ‘woke’ ad campaigns

It seemed to me for a moment like my memory was playing tricks on me, but apparently not: looking back into ye olde blog archive, about five years ago I posted this little gem about Proctor & Gamble promoting hip, ‘woke’ feminism via their Pantene brand, targetted at women. And now it seems the same big pharma corporation is using one of their ‘men’s’ brands, Gillette, to get in on the same angle, with a hip, ‘woke’ variation on their slogan, ‘The Best a Man Can Get’. Back then, I believe the exact phrase I used was: ‘Guh.’ So, here it is, gentle readers: the Feminist™ critique of toxic masculinity. Brought to you (again!) by Proctor & Gamble. Guh.

Back then, I made the rather simplistic point, echoing Nancy Fraser (who said it better) that neoliberal capitalism and feminism are not necessarily at odds with each other. Indeed, they even have some common interests. Not that such a conclusion was wrong, of course. The confluence between neoliberal interests in demoralised, replaceable, fungible labour on the one hand, and the liberal-feminist suspicion of rooted family structures on the other, is clear, obvious, and requires critique from the left. Such a critique is not only possible, but historically-evidenced and necessary. But now that angle of approach seems to miss a broader point: a point that has only come into clearer focus as I have read more books by Christopher Lasch, René Girard, and Thomas Frank.

Thomas Frank, author, analyst and contributor to the Guardian, the Baffler and the Real News Network, whose book Listen, Liberal is a notable cry from the heart for the American political left to remember its working-class roots, has an incisive critique of ‘woke’ neoliberalism from the opposite angle. Sure, on the production side of the equation, there is a confluence of interests between a sæcularising left which views the family with suspicion and a corporate capitalism willing and ready to seize upon the breakup of the family œconomy for the cheaper labour it frees up. But on the consumption side of the equation, Frank’s The Conquest of Cool ought to be required reading.

In brief, The Conquest of Cool details how the notably un-cool marketing machines for the American corporate world managed to study the rise of the youth movement and the counter-culture of the 1960s and make rebranding themselves a perpetual strategy. The ‘hip’-ness of youth rebellion and non-conformism was coöpted and transformed, with resounding success, into an ‘official capitalist style’, starting with the first minimalist advertisements for Volkswagen in the 1960’s as they catered to the youth market with a self-subversive style, and ending with the embrace of the sleek futurist æsthetic that is the Apple brand. Not only that, but they did so in full faith that the creative-destructive aims of the counterculture were right and just and good – which should be a trifle disturbing for anyone who truly believed in the counterculture! As Frank writes:

Many in American business, particularly in the two industries studied here, imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years…

Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they were secretly planning to subvert it… but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalise American business and the consumer order generally.

Here we are at the end of the 2010’s, though, and ‘woke’ has now replaced ‘hip’ as the wilfully-coöptable and creatively-destructive potential partner of the modern ad man. I daren’t speak for Frank on this question, but I imagine he would have a field day with Proctor & Gamble’s new ad, because there’s so much there that echoes beat-for-beat the thesis of The Conquest of Cool. The narrator signalling his authenticity with an earnest appeal. The children symbolically bursting through a screen playing an old Gillette TV commercial (notice the subtle self-critique, which adds to the feeling of ‘earnestness’). The old Berkelite solid-state television set playing tellingly-retro cartoons and lowbrow Archie Bunker-style sitcoms. The man with neatly-combed hair, shirt and tie making sexist jokes in front of a studio audience. The male executive in a corporate boardroom ‘mansplaining’ what a woman has just said. Picket fences. Barbecues. Polo shirts. All the tactile and visual touchstones that indicate the 1950s vital-centre mainstream against which the original ‘youth culture’ rebelled. The implicit message is clear: sexism is unhip. It’s square. It’s not cool. It’s something old people do, or else it’s something old people model or condone for young people to copy.

By contrast, the ‘wokeness’ in the ad is signalled through the use of modern technologies – cable news, for example, and smartphone cameras. ‘Woke’ manliness is performed by young people with non-conformist hairdos and neatly (Gillette?)-trimmed hipster beards. ‘Woke’ manliness is young dads stepping out into the yard or struggling against the oncoming crowd at a busy intersection to break up a fight. And the sign-off, of course, is an appeal to the future: ‘the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow.’

I would just take a moment to note that there is very little wrong with the message itself: sexism and violence and bullying are generally things we can agree are bad (or ‘toxic’, if you prefer) and should change. But Frank would have us notice the packaging, the subtext in which and through which that message is carried – and he would point us straight to Girard in doing so. There’s always a mark. There’s always a designated butt, a scapegoat – and in this case, it’s the old people. It’s not even enough to say that the ad misses the mark even though the ‘flight from feeling’ is still the most pronounced and the most violent among the young, because that doesn’t quite address the impulse to pick out and attack a mark in the first place.

There is, after all, something quite ugly about a company that points to old and old-fashioned folks as ‘the problem’ in what is otherwise a laudable anti-bullying message. (Ageism is a thing, guys.) There is something even uglier and more hypocritical in being lectured to about the evils of bullying by a company which ruthlessly exploits slave labour in its supply chains, but does nothing about it because the victims of this particular kind of bullying are invisible in the news cycle this ad glorifies. Of course the ad provoked a backlash: it was designed to. More attention means more airtime. More negative press gives Proctor & Gamble more free opportunities to look like a ‘woke’ rebel and culture-jammer against the ‘squares’ who complain. Again, Thomas Frank, keen cultural observer that he is, noticed this years ago:

Ordinary working-class people are right to hate the culture we live in. They are right to feel they have no power over it, and to notice that it makes them feel inadequate and stupid. The ‘Middle Americans’, after all, are the people the ads and the sitcoms and the movies warn us against. They are the prudish preacher who forbids dancing, the dullard husband who foolishly consumes Brand X, the racist dad who beats his kids, the square cowboy who is gunned down by the alternative cowboy, the stifling family life we are supposed to want to escape, the hardhat who just doesn’t get it. Conservatives are good at pinpointing and magnifying these small but legitimate cultural grievances. What they are wrong about are the forces that create the problem.

Thomas Frank’s now 15-year-old analysis would not be out of place today – with one very notable exception: the last sentence. As Frank himself points out in his more recent book, conservatives are the ones who are wising up, and noticing that in the post-Trump era, the old playbook of social conservatism + markets doesn’t work anymore (not that they ever did so well). Don’t believe me? Ask Tucker Carlson! Now, of course Tucker Carlson weds his critique of unbridled markets and their penchant for destroying the things that social conservatives claim to value (communities, churches, local businesses, agrarian lifestyles, nuclear families) to a chord of Yellow Peril racial animus that is unacceptable. And of course Carlson refuses to posit any sort of real alternative to capitalism. But that doesn’t stop his line of critique from being popular among the same people the left should be reaching. This has been the logic of the backlash from the beginning.

If there is no critique from the left of the sort of performatively-‘woke’ capitalism that Proctor & Gamble is engaging in with this ad, the field will be wide open for the neo-Coughlinist ideology of Tucker Carlson and those who will inevitably follow him. And 2016 is behind us now, so we know what ‘woke’ neoliberalism looks like and sounds like, and more importantly how it performs, when it goes up against an even marginally self-aware appeal to popular anger over such cultural slights. This is not a development to welcome.

Venerable Biscop of Wearmouth, Benedict of the North

Saint Biscop (Baducing), Abbot of Wearmouth

The founder of the Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Monkwearmouth, Biscop (Baducing) of Wearmouth, is celebrated today on the Orthodox New Calendar, the Roman Catholic and the Anglican calendars. The patron of all English Benedictines, Saint Biscop was also the spiritual father and mentor of the Venerable Bede, whose writings had a profound influence on my own decision to join Orthodoxy. A point of clarification first: Biscop is the saint’s personal name, not his title; upon being tonsured he took the name of Saint Benedict the Venerable of Nursia, whose life and works he strove to his utmost to emulate, and whose religious rule he implanted in all of the monasteries in which he was involved.

Biscop was born in 628 in Northumbria to eldern of high birth; in his youth he was a þegn of Óswiu wæs Æþelferþing king of Northumbria. However, even as a young man of the world, he had no love for fighting or violence, held his lands and his worldly wealth at little value, and would not marry. At the age of twenty-five he was overcome with an urge to go on pilgrimage to visit the Tomb of the Apostles in Rome: a popular pilgrimage destination for English Christians in later generations as well. Along the way, he met another young man – Saint Wilfrid – who accompanied him on his pilgrimage as far as Lyons. This pilgrimage apparently was something of a conversion experience for Biscop. He fell in love with the manner of life among the Roman religious, and upon his return to Northumbria some years later strove to introduce aspects of it among the English.

Biscop made a second pilgrimage to Rome in 665; the æþeling of Northumbria, Ealhfriþ, desired to accompany him on this journey, but his father Óswiu forbade him. In Rome, Biscop made the acquaintance of Pope Vitalian; and on his return he stopped in Lérins, France, where he left the world and took the tonsure. The young þegn stripped himself of all worldly pretensions and made himself humble in the service of God, learning the monastic disciplines and taking upon himself without grumbling the lowest place among the brothers. Having spent two years there, the itch to go again to Old Rome came over him, and thither he went. This time, when he came into the city, he was in the company of another Englishman, Wigheard, who was coming before Pope Vitalian to receive the omophorion of Canterbury. Wigheard was stricken with an illness, however, and died: Vitalian instead appointed Saint Theodore of Tarsus to the position on the advice of Saint Hadrian. Pope Vitalian had the young monk Biscop accompany the saintly Greek hierarch and the Berber monk part of the way back to England as a native guide, and joined them there after an eventful winter. Biscop was made Abbot of St Peter’s in Canterbury, the abbacy which was soon to become Hadrian’s. Again he left after two years for Rome; only this time, he brought back with him books by the Church Fathers, and a great many of them, and returned with them to his home country of Northumbria, where he met with Óswiu’s son Ecgfrið. The new king was quickly impressed by the depth of Biscop’s learning and his great zeal for building the Church, and so gave him a gift of seventy hides of his own land, on which to build the monastery of St Peter at the mouth of the Wear.

Biscop hired masons and glassworkers from Francia – the latter being the first artisans in the country to produce stained glass – and undertook yet another trip to Rome to furnish his new abbey with relics; all manner of books both religious and sæcular, in both Latin and Greek; a monastic teacher of music – in particular, plainchant; and a letter from Pope Saint Agathon securing for his monastery full independence from sæcular political interference. So diligent was Biscop in establishing this monastery that the Divine Liturgy could be celebrated within its walls within a year of the land being blessed. He also brought icons in the Eastern Roman style, and used them to create (as Venerable Bede describes) an iconostasis in the nave of the Church: ‘so that every one who entered the church, even if they could not read, wherever they turned their eyes, might have before them the amiable countenance of Christ and his saints, though it were but in a picture’. Ecgfrið King was so impressed by what Biscop had been able to accomplish that he augmented his earlier gift with a further forty hides of land out of his own store of wealth for an additional monastery, the monastery of St Paul at Jarrow – which would be joined for ever to that of St Peter in Wearmouth. To head this new monastery Saint Biscop chose Ceolfrið, a younger monastic who would be the closest mentor and spiritual father to the young Bede. He also chose Saint Eosterwine, his cousin who likewise had a fervent zeal for the Church, to help him take care of Wearmouth’s daily affairs and to act as prior and co-abbot of the monastery.

Biscop made yet another trip to Rome to acquire more books. When he returned, however, he found to his sorrow that Ecgfrið his king and friend had been slain in battle and his faithful helper Eosterwine had succumbed, along with many of his brother-monks, to a virulent plague. Ecgfrið was succeeded by his Irish half-brother Aldfrið; Saint Eosterwine was replaced as prior at Wearmouth, on the rede of Ceolfrið, with the gentle and knowledgeable deacon Saint Sigefrið. Aldfrið, a man who held learning in high est, had a good working relationship with Saint Biscop; in exchange for two fine silk omophors he had brought from Rome, Aldfrið sold Biscop three hides of ‘sundered land’ bordering Monkwearmouth on the south side of the river – a fishing village which in later times would grow into a city of some prominence.

Saint Biscop’s own time, however, was growing short. Sigefrið was smitten with a deadly wasting illness, and Biscop himself was lain out with a sickness that robbed him, slowly and sorely, of the use of his limbs, and crippled his body for three years – the pain came to be such that he could not sleep. However, he still took it upon himself to celebrate, without complaint, the Divine Liturgy and fulfil all the duties of his abbatial office; and though his body was wasted his mind was kept clear, pure and sane until the very end of his life. His final words to his brethren were to exhort them to remain united – both the Wearmouth Abbey and the Jarrow Abbey; to hold steadfast to the Benedictine Rule and way of life; to preserve and expand the massive library of books and holy writings he had procured from Old Rome; and never to overlook anyone among the monks on account of birth, however rude or poor or lowly, but to follow the man who showed the greatest meekness and spirit of love in his own life.In his last hours, on the fourteenth of January, the brethren of Wearmouth and Jarrow read the Holy Scriptures aloud for him, and also read from the Psalter. Saint Biscop reposed as the brethren were chanting the eighty-second Psalm, which was by Saint Bede taken as a sign that no spiritual enemy had laid hold upon him as he met his earthly journey’s end, but that he departed in blessedness.

This great and zealous Benedict of the European north displayed in his life the most admirable traits of his order. He was dissatisfied with the warlike and acquisitive society into which he had been born, and sought to change its character starting within himself. He was peaceful, meek and kind; he treated the poor (Sigefrið) and rich (Eosterwine) brother-monks alike; he sought learning of all sorts, but especially that holy learning which came from the Church Fathers.

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So my gentle readers may be wondering by this point (or perhaps not – is it any wonder The Heavy Anglo Orthodox has a thing for English Benedictines?) why I have been highlighting the hagiographies of all these early English, Frankish and German saints: Willibrord, Hilda, Bernward, Éadmund, Eanflæd, Ælfríc, Botwulf, Berin, Eadburga, Sturm, Hildalíþ, Ecgwine, Hadrian and Beorhtwald. Well, the short answer is and deserves to be: because they are Christlike, and because they are ours – as Westerners we ought to be looking to such a paradigm anyway.

But I feel like I can’t and shouldn’t stop there – particularly not after I was led to go back and read the Rule in the spirit of Liz Bruenig. These hagiographies form a pattern, and certain subtle – or perhaps not-so-subtle – golden threads begin to emerge from it to those with eyes to see them. These men and women who took Benedict as their rôle model did indeed set their faces against the prevailing winds of their cultural moment, but it behoves us to consider precisely what kind of cultural moment that was. As Peter Heather’s books on the subject bear witness, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire saw the wealthy and propertied gather up and stockpile as much wealth as they could, build their own private infrastructure, and barricade themselves behind gates to be barred against not only the Vandals and Goths and Huns – the heretics and heathens – raging outside, but also against the poor and dispossessed. Bereft of its legal structural safeguards, in the waning days of Western Rome, the impulse of the patrician (steeped in the legal principles of dominium proprium, the absolute right of Roman man to his lands, his money, his wife and kept women, his children) was to save his own skin and let the world burn.

Following up on a point broached by Sam Rocha a year ago, it was this particular tendency of the Roman sæcular culture in crisis that so thoroughly repulsed the historical Saint Benedict. A careful reading of his Rule shows that the world it tries to build within the walls of his community is a systematic dismantling of the legal principle of dominium proprium and its replacement with a diametrically dissimilar way of living. A Benedictine monk gives up all manner of private and personal property. He gives up any claim of ownership or control over other people – particularly women or children. He gives up his right to eat and drink what he likes, or sleep when he likes. And – this is the most important part – he gives up his self-will and submits to obey Jesus Christ, the Law of Love in the flesh, in the person of the Abbot and in the persons of the poor who appear before him at the abbey door.

That’s the thing about these Benedictines in their monastic communities: they may have a porter, but they are not barred against the sick, the suffering, the sorrowful, the afflicted, the captives, the needy and the poor of the world. It was a direct rebuke to the way the gates of the dominus of the post-collapse Italian latifundium was barred. The monks are there together to do what is needed first to help the least of these, with love and hospitality and real solidarity being their second law (the first being to put their self-will to death and obey God in love). So, listening to the representatives of the Tallahassee DSA talk about the localized, decentralised, caritative, put-yourself-second and do-what-you-have-to ethos behind what they are calling ‘disaster socialism’ – getting needed supplies, services and free pizza to the victims of flooding when the state wouldn’t help – I couldn’t help but think: that’s our real Benedict option, right there. That’s what we need to be doing to bear witness against the sickness of our culture.

Look closely at the hagiographies, read them with care – not the truncated ones on my blog, but the actual ones written under a discipline by later monastics. And you find that that’s what Abbot Biscop was actually promoting in Northumbria. That’s what Ecgwine was actually preaching in Worcester that angered the rich so much that they sent him to Rome in leg shackles. That’s what Willibrord actually did in the Low Countries when he led his weary, hungry and thirsty companions into the fields of wealthy landowners. That’s what Botwulf in Suffolk and Hilda in Whitby actually did, to the point of giving away all their food stores and goods to the poor when disaster struck. Were they preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, risen from the tomb? Uh, yes. Were they evangelising heathens? You bet. Did they keep the Great Commission at the front of their minds? No question. But these early English monastic saints were often to be seen going out of their way to be generous to the people who needed it most, and using the word of Christ not as a fearful exercise in withdrawal from a hostile and callous culture, but instead as a bold call to leaven it.

And leaven it they did. King David, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, was wise to say that ‘the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done’. One of the innovations that came with the flooding of the poor and dispossessed into the margins of Empire, was the adoption (particularly along the Upper Rhine) of the open-field system, a communal institutional arrangement adopted in towns and rural settlements which pooled communal land resources so that all the members of the community could use them. Contrary to the conventional wisdom put forward by the Encyclopædia Britannica, this socialistic-looking agrarian system was not an age-old way-things-have-always-been-done, but instead a deliberate institutional response to the agrarian crisis of mounting population pressures on dwindling marginal land resources. The adoption of open-field structures was also no doubt aided, abetted and blessed by the spread of Christianity and the presence of monastic communities like the Benedictines who adopted communal property as a rule, and who served the poor as a rule. The option promoted by the historical Saint Benedict, and Saint Biscop who took his name, was one which emphasised equally a refusal to countenance ‘the way things are’ in the world, and one which sought to transform the world by example.