Holy Martyr Dasios of Durostorum

Saint Dasios of Durostorum

The twentieth of November is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of the holy martyr Saint Dasios of Durostorum, a young and handsome Roman soldier of the Legio XI Claudiana, stationed on the Danube River, who was martyred in the early fourth century. He was the first of the martyrs to be slain at Durostorum during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian. The centre of his cultus is in Italy, in the city of Ancona whence his relics were moved for protection against the marauding Avars. But he is also reverenced among Orthodox Christians particularly in the Balkans.

Dasios [Gk. Δάσιος, L. Dasius, CS Дазий] was a youthful and vigorous soldier of the Roman legions, who was openly allowed to have been a Christian under prior Roman Imperial administrations. With Diocletian’s ascent to power, however, the Christians among the Roman soldiery were faced with a difficult choice: to keep their positions by denying Christ and swearing fealty to the Emperor as a living god; or else to face ritual humiliation, torture and execution. Pagan festivities were often used as pretexts for detecting and persecuting Christians, and Dasios was no exception to this. Because his features were so fine, he was chosen by lot to be the sacrificial ‘king’ of the festival of Saturnalia. He refused this honour, and told his fellow-officers that: ‘Since I am fated to die, it is better that I die for Christ as a Christian.’

He was apprehended and interrogated by his commanding officer, a man named Bassos, before whom Dasios openly denied the divinity of the Roman Emperor. For this act, as was supposed, of lèse-majesté, Dasios was hauled before the co-emperors Diocletian and Maximian themselves. Again and again he confessed Christ before them, refused to acknowledge them as gods, and moreover openly denounced the impiety and error of the whole of the festival. Many who were there at Durostorum thereafter came to believe in Christ. For this, Saint Dasios was cruelly tortured and given over to be beheaded by the sword. The execution took place on the twentieth day of November – the twenty-fourth day of the lunar cycle – at the fourth hour; his executioner was a man named Aniketos, also called Iōannēs. In this way, the holy martyr of God received the crown of his victory and was welcomed into the company of the saints.

His relics were buried in Durostorum – later Silistra in Bulgaria – by local Christians. They were popularly venerated even shortly after his death, and a Vita was written in the fourth century not long after his martyrdom. When the Turco-Mongolic Avars invaded Thrace in the 500s, however, the relics of Saint Dasios were moved to Ancona in Italy for safer keeping. They were enshrined in the Chiesa di San Ciriaco there, in an exquisite marble sarcophagus, and continued to receive the adulation of faithful Christians at that resting place. In 2002, in a gesture of goodwill toward Orthodox Christians, Pope John Paul II on a visit to Silistra in Bulgaria made a gift of Saint Dasios’s right upper arm to the Metropolia of Dorostol, in a marble sarcophagus which was a careful replica in miniature of the one in Ancona. Holy martyr Dasios, bold confessor of Christ before the pagans, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!

Hidden motives?

Well, it seems I got quite the response on social media to my last ‘political’ blog post here. Much of it was… let’s just say, uninspiring, but predictable. Allow me to quote some of the responses here, verbatim and unedited, to give my readers some idea of what they entail and the general tone and intellectual quality – or rather, the distinct lack thereof – of their contents.

Seems like you simply suffer of the reveres [sic] of Trump derangement syndrome.

Did I just catch a nauseating whiff of someone’s positive opinion of Donald Trump?

No. Of Putin.

So you’re saying that those of us who have witnessed Trump’s deference to Putin on TV and who have been told of his silence on Russian aggression and the payment of rewards for the killing of American soldiers in Afganistan [sic] are just intellectually lazy and basically gullible fools? I say, sir, what are your hidden motives here? Do you believe that the Orthodox Church in Russia is the servant of Putin, in view of his being the untitled Czar of Russia? Are you one of these people who believe that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor, no matter what his title?

Practically all of this is utter rubbish. One needn’t dig very far into my writings, either here, or on Silk and Chai, or on Facebook, to understand that, to put it mildly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the current president, that I did not vote for him, that I have criticised ‘leftists’ who did support him, and that I have no intention of voting for him this November. And the fact that even a passage like this, in the piece of writing in question:

A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!).

… can be taken as evidencing any sort of warm feelings or latent sympathy for Trump is so far removed from reality or even basic reading comprehension that it rather beggars belief. Particularly when my opposition to everything Trump stands for – greed, corruption, capitalism – is so clearly stated; and particularly when the Caucasian gentlemen proudly evincing such a lack of even the rudiments of basic English rhetoric are soi-disant fans (and one actual family member) of noteworthy English-language rhetorician David Bentley Hart. I’m not entirely sure what that actually says about how Dr Hart interacts with his family and his fan base. Suffice it to say that the most charitable tack in this case would be to not pass any comment at all.

And with regard to the last quote, again, even a modest perusal of my comments on church-state relations on this blog – both in general and specifically – evidence that I give a rather strong answer, and much the opposite of the one the author of the last comment assumes, to the question of: ‘Do you believe… that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor?’ My answer is, quite simply, no. Allow me to direct you, sir, to my following pieces of commentary on church-state relations in Russia, which form a rather consistent thread going back over eight years:

• Where stands the Church?
• More silliness: the theological orientalism of SoJo
• Defending Russian Orthodoxy as Orthodox and as Russian
• More thoughts on Orthodoxy and nationalism
• (In)vested interests
• Americanism and intégrisme: theopolitics abound
• China, the Vatican and the Open Church
• Mechanöcephäly
• The Moscow Patriarchate and pension reform
• Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now
• Theopolitical questions abound

As you can see from a brief perusal of these posts, the common thread that unites them all is an equal-opportunity suspicion of all neatly-hierarchical configurations of the relations between church and state – including all three of papocæsarism, cæsaropapism, and sæcularism. Even with regard to Russian politics in particular, I am very far from being an uncritical supporter of Putin. In fact, I acknowledge and celebrate the instances in which the Russian Orthodox Church does support the civil rights of Putin’s domestic critics and those who protest his policies, as well as the instances in which clerics themselves do this. I am more than happy to see, for example, the Church speak out on behalf of Russia’s social safety net, or on behalf of the unborn, or on behalf of Russia’s indigenous ethnic minorities – and it usually has to critique state policy in doing any of the above. I am more than happy to see the Russian Orthodox Church speak truth to power, and it actually manages to do so far more often than the American churches collectively do with all their much-vaunted (and largely taken-for-granted) supply of freedom from state interference.

A bit more troubling, though, is that it seems that anyone who stops to examine, or seeks to question, the dominant Blob-driven media narrative surrounding foreign affairs in the United States – even doing so from the standpoint of wanting to preserve peace – is taken as having sinister ‘hidden motives’. In fact my motives are quite open. I don’t want America and Russia to go to war. I don’t see anything productive, or useful, or positive in the current frozen conflict, and ‘hot’ proxy conflicts, we seem to be in, all around Russia’s rather broad and wide front porch. I truly do not believe that Russia is intrinsically any worse than any other large nation-state with its own values, its own history, its own path dependencies and its own interests. I truly do believe that war is a racket that hurts ordinary Americans, and that consent is continually manufactured to keep that racket going, whether in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Syria or in Yemen or in Somalia or anywhere else. Those are my motives; judge them as you please.

And so, in a slightly more civil vein, addressing this comment:

Hmm, I get the sentiment that the media harped on Russiagate to the point of absurdity but I’m not sure why you seem unwilling to admit that, per the senate committee, there seems to certainly have been in regular secret communication with state actors and utilized the intel they received…

I’m not sure what polling data tells us either… I don’t think anyone cares whether or not the majority of babushkas like Trump or not, nor do I think the claim was that the Russian public was helping or something.

Seems obvious that a country we’re (still) a global competitor with would benefit from a bit of chaos and destruction of our trust in our political apparatus (even if that doesn’t make them uniquely evil and the system was already in bad shape).

First of all, I think there is a bit of a double standard here, in the form of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Russiagate is an archetypical Big Lie in the sense that it posits Trump as a literal asset of the Russian state, and it operates the way most Big Lies do, in simply making elliptical references to this position without ever explicitly articulating it in its most overt way. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Take, for example, that recent billboard in Manhattan telling people to ‘VOTE’ – for Biden, naturellement – ‘Because Russian lessons are expensive.’

It’s smarmy. It’s a snarl. It actually works on the same level as Trump’s own allusions to Mexico or to Muslims. That is to say: the authors of this billboard know that what they are saying is literally indefensible. If Trump wins reelection, he isn’t going to force us all to speak Russian, nor is Russia going to annex America at Trump’s behest. But by making the insinuation that he will, they are tapping into a broad web of innuendoes that was assiduously built up in the wake of the 2016 election that Trump is actually a Russian asset. It is also subtly making an inference about Russian language, or about Russian culture, that runs under the semiotic surface. Saying ‘Russian lessons are expensive’ in this pejorative context is almost to call Russian-speaking people – not the government, the people – frauds and cheats. It’s to look on the language as dirty, on the culture as dirty, on the people as dirty. Because the people who put up this billboard are, without a doubt, nice lily-white northern liberals, any response to an insinuation of bigotry on their part will be met with a chorus of craned necks, rapid disavowals, fervent hand-wringing and voluble umbrage of various sorts. But there is simply no avoiding the fact that at its root, Russiagate apologias of this sort are an expression of base, ugly, knuckle-dragging xenophobia. So, yes, sir. It is a materially-important fact that the ‘majority of babushkas’ have no love for Trump, have no use for Trump and have no desire to see Trump elected. Because that is the level of discourse we are at right now, sad to say.

But this is what Russiagate apologia looks like at its most kneejerk, scattershot and intellectually-lowbrow: its ‘motte’ form. The ‘bailey’ form of Russiagate apologia – that is to say, the most intellectually-defensible form of the Russiagate myth – is the continued prosecution of the DNC email hacking scandal of 2016. To refresh my readers’ memories, the story goes like this. A hacker, or group(s) of hackers, supposedly working on behalf of the Russian government, managed to access nearly 20,000 emails from a server operated by the Democratic National Convention, and submitted this email archive to WikiLeaks which then published them on its website. This was done, supposedly, with the collusion of certain members of the campaign to elect Donald Trump, with the express intent of discrediting Hillary Clinton and materially compromising her chances of winning the election.

Even at its most intellectually defensible, Russiagate is still a total fiction. As I pointed out before, and as a number of reputable journalists of the American left (such as Matt Taibbi) have pointed out repeatedly, the Mueller investigation turned up nothing and went home. The problem is that that hasn’t stopped the political class from making hay of it for the purposes of distraction. So, when the investigation has already been done, found nothing, and thrown in the towel, it really doesn’t mean that much that the DNC has opened a new lawsuit (after having lost one already) or that a Senate Commission has issued a statement that contravenes much of what the actual investigation it is based on has said or failed to say. At this point, further harping on an already spectacularly-poor showing by the Democratic Party in a national election does little but point to the pathetic impotence of said party: its creative bankruptcy, its lack of ideas, its moral impotence and its abandonment of any semblance of responsibility for its own failures.

Let Trump’s record on Russia speak for itself – it’s voluble enough, and there’s little in it for a peacenik like me to like. Trump has, according to the Brookings Institute (no friend of the administration or of Russia):

• identified Russia and China as America’s ‘adversaries’
• restricted exports to Russia
• repeatedly issued sanctions against individuals in the Russian government
• authorised provision of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian government
• bombed Russian and Syrian forces in Dayr az-Zûr (2017)
• expelled Russian government workers in New York, Washington and Seattle
• unilaterally withdrew from the INF treaty limiting nuclear armament buildup
• sanctioned Russian banks providing aid to the Venezuelan government

Saying that Trump is somehow an agent of the Russian state when he continually attacks Russian state instruments and economic interests, often with far blunter instruments than Obama did, is rather ludicrous. That more than anything else, is why I commend the ‘babushkas’ of Russia, and the people of East Germany, Bulgaria and Slovakia, for not buying the cockamamie that the American intelligence community keeps pumping out, for not buying the pusillanimous self-pitying sob stories of the American Democrats, and also understanding that Trump is not their friend. On all points, in consideration of the available evidence, I happen to agree with them.

The spellbreaking power of the Elbe

Eastern Europe truly is a very different place from Western Europe, in part because many of the illusions and lies that our elites have concocted for us about political realities simply shatter and vanish upon contact with Eastern Europe. And by ‘Eastern Europe’ I do count those areas of what is more properly called Central Europe, which begins in the Elbe River basin and includes what used to be East Germany.

Take Russiagate, for example. Russiagate was always a lie – and a flimsy lie at that, but no less dangerous for being flimsy. The American journo class, and especially MSNBC, tried incredibly hard to paint Trump as an agent of Russia, someone who served primarily Russian interests, who was elected essentially at Russia’s behest. The lie was repeated so baldly and so repeatedly that the Putin-Trump ‘bromance’ and the Russian ‘love affair’ with Trump became articles of faith. The only problem is that none of it is actually true, and the Russiagate story is used to play centrist Americans for suckers. Neither Putin, nor the Russians who elected him and continue to support him, ever had much use for Trump, save for the fact that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the Pew poll that came out at the beginning of this year regarding attitudes toward Trump and America worldwide still support this view. Russians really don’t like Trump, who has a confidence rating of 20%. For comparison, Trump polls as well or better in Canada (28%) and every single Western European country surveyed – the UK (32%), the Netherlands (25%), France (20%), Spain (21%), Italy (32%) – except Germany (13%). On the other hand, despite the growing impatience with him, Russians do still love Putin, and the same Pew data gave him a rating of 73%.

But what do I mean when I say the Elbe dispels political illusions? I mean precisely this: the lie of Russiagate becomes ever more untenable the closer you actually approach Russia. Where the Russiagate story about election collusion and Trump being a Russian agent has purchase, one would expect to see equally or near-equally low approval ratings for both Trump and Russia. And indeed, in Western Europe this is generally the case, with Russia receiving approval ratings about on par with Trump there, according to Pew data collected in February this year. This is not necessarily a good indication that they ‘buy’ the Russiagate story, however. It may simply be the case that Western Europeans see both Trump and Russia as threats to their interests.

But the Elbe breaks this spell, hard, in two different ways. First of all, one sees the expected low approval ratings for Russia in Poland (33%) and the Ukraine (32%). However, both countries show markedly higher approval for Trump. Poland, in fact, is the only country in Europe where a slim majority (51%) have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, whereas in the Ukraine a plurality (44%) believes the same. Intriguing, no, that significant portions of the populations in Poland and in the Ukraine approve of Trump but do not approve of Russia? If Trump were Russia’s agent, wouldn’t one expect to see those numbers closely coincide, as they do in Western Europe?

On the other side, we have countries where Russia polls highly, but Trump does not. Bulgaria has a remarkably high degree of trust in Russia (73%), but Trump is even more unpopular there (26%) than in Canada or Italy. Likewise Slovakia – a solid majority of the country trusts Russia (60%), which is far more than can be said for Trump (34%). And finally Greece, where Russia generally (58%) and Putin personally (52%) sway a majority of the population’s trust, but where Trump (25%) is as thoroughly distrusted as in Western Europe. Even in East Germany, this same pattern seems to hold: 43% of East Germans have a favourable opinion of Russia – markedly more than in West Germany (33%). But East Germans also seem to loathe Trump every bit as much as their West German neighbours do, with an approval rating in the high teens. It’s very much the case that the closer one gets in proximity to Russia, the more ludicrous the idea that the Russian state or, even more so, the Russian people are invested in Trump seems to be. And that seems to hold regardless of what opinion one has of Russia.

One of the notable analyses that accompanied the Pew study was the degree to which European support for Trump was predicated on domestic political objectives and orientation. The new nationalist right parties tend to have far warmer feelings for Trump on average than their countrymen – even when those new nationalist right parties are also Russophobic, as in Poland and Hungary. On the other hand, warm feelings for Russia simply do not seem to be driven as much by ideological considerations, at least in Eastern Europe. As I have said before, pro-Russia parties in Eastern Europe tend to fall as much on the political left or even in the centre as on the right.

And to a certain extent, I believe ideology does matter. A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!). These Orthodox countries do, after all, seem to have done a better job on the whole of keeping their social services and transfer mechanisms intact despite the onslaught of neoliberalism against them. The fact that the countries which are traditionally within the Orthosphere seem to be particularly cool toward Trump and warm toward Russia does seem to indicate a certain ideological distaste for what Trump represents, over-against that which Russia represents. These are taken, with good reason, to be two different things.

But what does seem to matter in these countries, is not ideology, but culture, which in some ways underlies politics more deeply than ideology does. Bulgaria has a deep and abiding connexion to its Orthodox roots, going back to the Seven Saints. Bulgarian literature has a strong Russophile streak – for example, Ivan Vazov’s famous novel! And of course there is the long history of peasant rebellion which this literature implies, which is echoed in the interwar distributist governance of Aleksandar Stamboliyski. In particularly the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, too – and Carpathian Ruthenia in particular – there was a strong streak of both peasant rebellion and cultural attachment to Russia, which has carried its echoes into modern-day Slovak politics.

It’s actually a bit sad, because the data I’m drawing on here really are hidden in plain sight. It’s just that convenience and force of habit weigh more heavily with the average consumer of news media than truth does, and therefore this intellectually-lazy and baseless association of Trump with Russia continues unabated, to be used – as it inevitably will be – as a blunt instrument and as an accusation of disloyalty against the opposite ‘side’ in American electoral politics. What a truly sorry time we live in, where even the people who claim to be on the side of ‘facts’ and ‘reason’ are simply blind to both. What few hopes I have left for sanity in the West, are actually in the East of the West… in the Elbe Basin and beyond.

So what did South Korea do right?

South Korean drive-in coronavirus testing facility

The one bright spot in this saga of the novel coronavirus is the performance of South Korea’s health care system, as they managed not only to ‘flatten the curve’ but actually smash it. Whereas China was learning by trial-and-error which solutions to the outbreak in Wuhan would prove most effective, South Korea was watching and taking careful notes. Once the disease hit their borders they implemented the plans they had with an astounding vigour and efficiency. So what did they actually do right?

1. Aggressive rapid testing. South Korea used its month’s reprieve from new cases of the coronavirus to develop a reliable test for COVID-19 which is easy to administer and quick to return results. Then both public and private laboratories working together unrolled 10,000 individual tests in February, the vast majority of which of course came back negative. Because they had implemented this aggressive régime of testing, once the case load started ramping up, they actually had the means to process 12,000 coronavirus tests per day throughout the country. Many of these are done in drive-in testing centres where patients are tested for coronavirus through the windows of their cars and given their results within the hour. Oh, yeah: and it’s free at the point of use.
   
   Here, though, our government essentially squandered the brief window of reprieve bought for us by China’s much more Leviathan-esque testing and containment policies. Instead of authorising public state labs to start doing tests to prepare for the inevitable ramp-up, the administration sat on its hams. Very possibly, the administration was pressured to do so by the big pharma companies which stand to profit by developing proprietary coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines which they can sell. A government fettered to unfettered capital simply did not deliver the kind of timely and efficient results that South Korea’s mixed œconomy did.


2. Innovative use of GPS and GIS. The South Korean government implemented a tracking and public access database system that allowed the public to view each individual confirmed case of COVID-19, as well as keep tabs on the position and movement of these cases. In the United States, we would likely consider this an intolerable breach of civil liberty, and an intrusion into individual privacy. However, there is little question that in South Korea’s case, this aggressive use of surveillance technology and public access to information about the spread of the disease and infected areas absolutely did save lives and prevent the rampant proliferation of new cases.


3. Social solidarity; deference to authority and the elderly. It may sound a bit oxymoronic, but concerted efforts at social distancing are in fact, in the case of a pandemic, a form of social solidarity. I could do so, but I’m not going to attempt to tie the South Korean public’s coronavirus response directly to Confucius or Mencius. Attributing broad social trends like this to a vague cultural-stratum ‘Confucianism’ is and should be rather suspect. This sort of analysis indeed can be lazily or frivolously used to tell just-so stories about any difference in outcomes between an East Asian and a Western nation, whether positive or negative. And it’s also important to emphasise that this respect for authority is not the same thing as what most Westerners mean by ‘authoritarianism’.
   
   But it absolutely is the case that the Korean public has a number of cultural advantages in this case. It’s a foregone conclusion that South Korea wouldn’t have the kind of outcomes it does, if ordinary South Koreans hadn’t listened to the relevant public authorities, considered health to be a public matter instead of a merely individual one, and limited their own personal freedoms of movement and association out of respect for, and solidarity with, the elderly and immune-compromised.
   
   American insistence on resisting any and all forms of constraint or limits – even if those limits are soft and imposed by custom, social stricture or religious dictum instead of by the state – has already come to the fore in a particularly ugly and crass way as we’re facing down this crisis. You see young people going out to St Patrick’s Day parties in defiance of the state government and the CDC’s recommendations. You even see people publicly defying the advice of the CDC because ‘this is America’ and ‘I’ll do what I want’. This is what happens when you have more respect for comedians and talk-show hosts than for scientists and schoolteachers. It’s also what happens when you consider health as a merely individual matter: the attitude that ‘I’m young’, ‘I’m healthy’, ‘I’m being careful’ and ‘I’m not about to put my life on hold’ is dangerous and irresponsible. The people who have this attitude show a cavalier disrespect for the elderly that in this case could be lethal.

Again, this is not a call to panic. In panics human beings tend to revert to their baser selves, not their higher ones, and that is precisely what we do not want at this point. To be frank, the time for a concerted, humane (in the Confucian sense of ren 仁, or in this case in 인) action on the coronavirus was a month and more ago. But what should be done still can be done in advance of the logarithmic inflection point. Follow the recommendations of the CDC. Keep your hands clean, cover your cough, don’t share your fork. Moreover, call your parents – and grandparents and other elderly relatives if you have them – and make sure they’re okay.

South Korea has demonstrated that a liberal political system is not necessarily an impediment to an effective response to a pandemic. But if you’re going to have such a political system, you need to have, and what’s more you need to actively and ferociously preserve, the underlying forms of humility; solidarity; family feeling; deference to authority; self-limitation including in movement, speech and privacy; and acknowledgement of collective limits that elsewhere in the industrialised world we seem to have left by the wayside. A liberal political system is untenable without a certain set of illiberal presumptions about the way the political world functions.

‘What consequences should China face?’

I’d kind of given up on watching the Democratic debates, in large part because they are so badly staged in general. But there was one question which I felt it would be wrong to ignore. Dana Bash’s question to Bernie Sanders during the CNN presidential debate – ‘What consequences should China face for its role in this global crisis?’ – was smarmy, and it played into the unfortunate tendency of American China-watchers to find something to blame about the Chinese government and the Chinese people, whom they’re fairly bad at distinguishing from each other. As it stands, though, the good senator from Vermont struck something of the right tone in his answer:

I don’t think this is the time for reparations. Now is the time to be working with China. They are learning a lot about this crisis. And in fact, we have got to work with them, we have got to work with the World Health Organization, we have got to work with Italy, we've got to work with countries around the world. If there was ever a moment when the entire world is in this together, got to support each other, this is that moment. Every country on Earth is going to be affected. Every country on earth has got to work together.

Senator Sanders is right. The Chinese government has been learning a lot throughout the crisis, and a lot of that learning was trial-and-error. There is no valid reason to believe the Chinese government knew what to expect, and their reaction to the warnings of Dr Li in Wuhan was understandable even if, in hindsight, it was incorrect. In the United States, it is difficult to get ordinary Americans, or even the government, to take the warnings of doctors and the CDC seriously. Add to this, that our government has had a lot more advance warning and infinitely more knowledge than the Chinese government initially had, to prepare for the inevitable transmission of COVID-19 cases to American soil. Those who live in glass houses oughtn’t throw stones.

Such a question as Bash’s bosses chose to have her ask Sanders amounts to irresponsible and frivolous red-baiting. Ms Bash wanted to pin Sanders as a China sympathiser, probably based on his previous answers to China-related questions. And she wanted to do so in much the same way as the New York Times wanted to pin Sanders as a Soviet sympathiser for hosting a perfectly normal (and indeed encouraged!) sister city exchange between Yaroslavl and Burlington back in the 1980s. The question is not serious, and yet the fact that both liberal and conservative media outlets took it seriously is its own problem. The Blob still wants us to believe that its moral legitimacy is unquestionable, and that it is competent not only to pass judgement on how other countries conduct their internal affairs, but also to decide upon and enforce ‘consequences’ on them.

But, as an exercise, let’s take the question seriously. What consequences should China face? Let’s start with the doctors and paramedics in Wuhan. The consequences they deserve are medals and parades in their honour. They are heroes, full stop. What consequences should the government face? That’s a very different question. The Chinese government did make some mistakes – again, with the benefit of hindsight, these are easier to see – in their initial response. But on the face of it, they ought to be lauded by the international community for an admittedly heavy-handed response that kept people alive and bought the rest of the world two months to prepare for the coming epidemic. And what consequences should the Chinese people face?

Even to pose this last question is to expose the narcissism and inhumanity of the thinking of the foreign policy establishment here. They do not even care to distinguish, when they speak of a country, between the people and the government. How else can we explain the persistence of sanctions – particularly those against Iran and Venezuela – as they are dealing with a pandemic that has killed almost a thousand of the people of Iran, not merely the government? How else can we explain the eagerness with which the foreign policy establishment wants to punish China – and Iran, and Venezuela – while we still haven’t allocated sufficient money and energy to caring for our own people? We can no longer pretend that the public health problems of one country will stay within that country. And so the real question becomes: what consequences must our government face for their sheer inability to change course when confronted with a pandemic?

Markets don’t work in a public health crisis

Osmel Martinez Azcue, who got a $3,270 bill for a coronavirus test

In China, we have already started to see more people being released from quarantine than new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus. The initial curve has peaked. Though there were some criticisms of the way Chinese authorities handled the outbreak in the first couple of weeks, it now appears that the crisis response from the Chinese government has been more than adequate to the test.

What did the People’s Republic of China do right? Well, first off: it made testing for COVID-19 free at the point of use. Honestly, that was the only humane and the only reasonable thing to do. As the otherwise-hostile Isabella Steger notes over at Quartz:

“This is exactly why there are few infection cases in the US. People there don’t even want to go have the test [because of the cost],” wrote one user, responding to an article about an American man returning from Wuhan who received a large bill after US health officials placed him in quarantine. In China, testing and treatment for coronavirus is free.

The mainland Chinese health care system in general delivers better care at better prices to the people who need it most in a crisis: the poor, the immune-compromised and the elderly. In this crisis that’s unfolded since the Chinese New Year, the Chinese government has mandated that coronavirus testing be free for the user. In contrast, American hospitals are charging anywhere between $1000 and $3,200 (in the case of Osmel Martinez Azcue from Florida) for administering a coronavirus test.

The fact that insurance companies do so much to hide the information from the insured until they can slap them with a four-figure bill shows, not only how inhumane the American health care system is, but also how ill-prepared it is to deal with a public health crisis of this magnitude. Financial worries and the threat of medical debt are keeping Americans away from clinics and hospitals. This should be gravely concerning to anyone concerned about public health efforts, because the infection will spread faster and will claim more lives, the more cases of COVID-19 go untested and untreated until it’s too late. As David Wallace-Wells at New York Magazine put it yesterday:

The testing shortage is catastrophic: It means that no one knows how bad the outbreak already is, and that we couldn’t take effectively aggressive measures even we wanted to. There are so few tests available, or so little capacity to run them, that they are being rationed for only the most obvious candidates, which practically defeats the purpose. It is not those who are very sick or who have traveled to existing hot spots abroad who are most critical to identify, but those less obvious, gray-area cases — people who may be carrying the disease around without much reason to expect they’re infecting others. Into this vacuum has stepped the Gates Foundation and Amazon, which are trying to deliver large-scale testing capacity at least within Seattle.

But in what awful, dysfunctional universe do we live that it has fallen to private companies and philanthropies to deliver necessary medical support in a time of American pandemic? There is probably no stronger argument for public health care than the crisis we are living through today, and no more grotesque indictment of our present system that leading providers and insurers had to be cajoled into waiving fees and co-pays to even deliver tests.

Only a few short weeks ago, the corporate American news media were all but salivating over the idea that the novel coronavirus was a ‘test’ of the legitimacy of the Chinese communist authorities – and behaved as though it was merely a Chinese problem and one that would not spread to the West. But life comes at you fast. Now, it appears, our own public health system is being weighed and measured and found wanting in comparison with China’s. And the infuriating thing is that this coronavirus outbreak really isn’t the test of an either-or choice between civil liberty and decent long-run health outcomes. There are readily-available models of democratic governance with protections for needed civil liberties, which can also provide this kind of comprehensive response, at low cost to the people who are most vulnerable.

Actually solving this problem and preventing future ones, however, doesn’t appear to be on anyone’s agenda on either side of the political aisle – unless we count outsiders like Bernie Sanders and others promoting Medicare for All. Certainly centrist-wonk Democrats have no desire at all to better prepare the health-care system for the next outbreak, and the Republicans have even less. So instead we are getting two reactions: official denial and anti-Asian racism, with semi-official proxies in the media like Tucker Carlson being the biggest proponents.

This is not a call to panic; panic does no one any good. Speaking personally, I’m not for stockpiling toilet paper or hand sanitiser. But it’s past time to get real about what it will take to save American lives in the future. The novel coronavirus may not look like a big deal in the present moment, but that will change; and even if it does blow over with few deaths – In shâ’ Allâh – there will absolutely be future public health crises. Only a system which can react to such crises in a manner that is not driven by the profit margin stands a chance of being effective.

Brat: the film that made me a critical Russophile

Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr) in Brat

Before I proceed much further in this Kazakhstani film series I seem to have touched off (and that dates back to the beginning of this blog, come to think of it), I think it’s probably worth going back and revisiting a cult film that left a fairly deep impact on me personally when I first watched it in college – even though it is very much not a Kazakh film. Having recently watched Igla I was inspired to go back and watch this film – one which I have seen before but not yet commented on. If Igla was a præmonition of Trainspotting, as I hinted in my recent piece, then this film was absolutely a deliberate echo of that film.

To demonstrate how deeply this film impacted me, let me just say this. When I was still an Episcopalian, this was one of two films that made me start to sympathise, in a critical and unromantic way, with modern Russia – the other being Kavkazskii plennik. It doubled as one of the sources, along with Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, that humanised the Russian people for me and made real to me their plight and desperation during the 1990s under Eltsin. The irony in this, is that despite this very real sympathy, it shows Russia at some of its very worst: violence – including sexual violence; drug abuse; alcoholism; escapist licence of all sorts; naked pursuit of lucre; casual racism; gharbzadegi; the ever-porous boundary (but in 1990s Russia particularly so) between biznes and gangsterism. I am talking, of course, about the low-budget crime thriller Brat by Aleksei Balabanov, starring Sergei Bodrov, Jr.

Brat deserves its place as a classic in Russian cinema, and Balabanov his reputation as a genius for having directed it. The film was shot on a shoestring budget; and the only reason it got off the ground at all was because of Balabanov’s relationships with Sergei Bodrov, Jr and the lead singer of Nautilus, Vyacheslav Butusov – whose music features prominently in the film.

The film follows the tight-lipped Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr), a young demobilised army vet who claims he only ever served at HQ, and whose favourite expression of approval is ‘нормално’. The first time we see him he’s walking onto the set of a Nautilus music video, and gets into a fight with the director and the bouncers which sees him detained and threatened with arrest if he doesn’t shape up and get a job in a week. His disappointed mother, who sees him as a disgrace to the family, tells him to go find a job like his older brother Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), who lives in Leningrad. Danila, of course, does what he is told by his mother – like a dutiful son would.

Viktor, also known as ‘the Tatar’, is a hitman for a mobster nicknamed Krugly (Sergei Murzin) who talks seemingly only in rhyming clichés. Viktor is tasked with taking out a Chechen rival of Krugly’s, though Krugly dislikes Viktor’s cocky attitude and makes plans to eliminate Viktor at the same time. Viktor, in order to save himself, thrusts the job onto Danila when he arrives. Danila’s subsequent adventures in S. Peterburg see him attempt without success to buy Nautilus’s new album; befriend a homeless German named Hoffman (Yuri Kuznetsov) and a heartlessly-transactional bar-frequenting junkie named Kat (Mariya Zhukova). When carrying out his ‘job’, he is attacked by Krugly’s henchmen and flees in a tram operated by a married woman named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), with whom he starts up a love affaire. Danila is pulled deeper and deeper into the corruptions and temptations of S. Peterburg, yet despite the brutal acts of self-preservation and temptations he is prone to, he somehow manages to hold onto a certain sense of decency and honour – something which he finds lacking in his entire body of acquaintance (except for the homeless German and Sveta). He also manages to protect the weak and outwit his enemies not only by outgunning them but also by jury-rigging together matchbox flash-bombs, pop-bottle silencers and nail-filled shotgun shells from the various dingy apartments he crashes at.

Storywise, the plot is straightforward almost to a fault; the only digressions are the ones that happen within sight or earshot of the protagonist, and these are usually dealing with the music of Nautilus. And cinematographically, Brat is a very claustrophobic film which clearly was making the best of its limited budget (and possibly making a subtle literary commentary on the setting). Most of the action takes place in cramped, narrow apartment hallways with flickering incandescent lighting. Every window and mirror is dingy. Even Krugly’s headquarters is decked out with a dusty ‘80s IBM sitting in the background, and little else. There are lots of long takes, and the film is paced specifically to deglamourise the violence of its protagonists. Despite a lot of characters being shot to death, the blood effects are minimal and usually kept in a blurry background. Balabanov is also clearly a big fan of fade-to-black transitions, with a lot of the punchlines to various story sequences being left implied.

Brat relies a great deal on filmic symbolism to establish its moral universe. Danila, with whom we are supposed to sympathise, is unassuming in appearance, and dresses in an oversized grey turtleneck sweater. The other young people around him – especially Kat – are decked out in the expressions of Western counterculture of the time: black leather, piercings, eye shadow, mohawks. The people who hold power, like Krugly, are also aficionados of Western styles. Krugly wears Versace and drinks Hennessy. ‘American’ music is associated with drugs and cheap loveless transactional sex; it is compared unfavourably to the healthier and more wholesome Russian-inflected music of Nautilus, which provides the backdrop to Danila’s affaire with Sveta.

It’s also definitely a piece which reflects its time, almost more so than its place. In fact, Brat is a mirror that’s held up to an entire generation of young Russian men caught in a struggling time, for whom Danila Bagrov became something of an instant anti-hero. Danila is not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘good man’ – this is something that Sergei Bodrov himself has made clear in his interviews, and is voiced in the film itself by Sveta. But despite his weaknesses he possesses a folksy cleverness masqued as gullibility and an innate sense of justice. It’s unclear by the end of the film as he skips town whether or not he has lost his soul entirely – although the German, the sole uncompromised voice of conscience in the film, claims he has.

Balabanov’s Brat made me a critical Russophile, not only in that it showed the depth of the œconomic woes and spiritual degradation of Russia in the lawless ‘90s, but also hailed back to a rich and vibrant literary world in historical Russia. The motif of Leningrad (and which is referred to explicitly with its præ-Communist name of S. Peterburg in the film) as a corrupting influence, an artificial city of masonry ruled by greed, a malevolent force that parasitically feeds off the strength of its residents and makes them weak. S. Peterburg as a character in her own right – that’s pure Dostoevsky.

In short, I would say that Brat is a film one needs to watch, and not only watch but feel, to get an appreciation of how Russia got here as a country. It’s not all about communism and it’s certainly not all about ‘authoritarianism’. There is a real spiritual and material struggle behind modern Russia, that is too often disregarded or sneered at in Anglophone coverage of current events there. The questions Balabanov poses to his viewers are meant to reflect this struggle and the dimension of Russia’s shared life – along cultural, political and œconomic dimensions – that was simply AWOL in the 1990s. Danila Bagrov is a cultural icon and hero for his time precisely because he is flawed, and precisely because he is fallen – but perhaps not irredeemable.

Familial love against the nationalist myth

Saints Peter and Fevronia of Murom: Russian patrons of familial love

The family represented the initial cell of human society. The holy history of the Old Testament shows that the state was not formed at once. The Old Testament people had no state before Joseph’s brothers went to Ægypt.

- Basis of the Social Concept, III.1

Christian patriotism may be expressed at the same time with regard to a nation as an ethnic community and as a community of its citizens. The Orthodox Christian is called to love his fatherland, which has a territorial dimension, and his brothers by blood who live everywhere in the world… At the same time, it is contrary to Orthodox ethics to divide nations into the best and the worst and to belittle any ethnic or civic nation. Even more contrary to Orthodoxy are the teachings which put the nation in the place of God or reduce faith to one of the aspects of national self-awareness.

- Basis of the Social Concept, II.3,4

It’s a worthy goal to resist nationalism in its current, explicitly post-Christian form, as the foregoing Christian thinkers in the linked Commonweal article have publicly done. However, to do this effectively, there needs to be a comprehensive, anthropological account of the separate human origins of the nation and of the state. When I say anthropological, I mean one that is accountable to the data regarding human society’s material origins. However, we should know well enough by now that, however much we Christian critics of voluntarism and nominalism may reject the is-ought distinction, mere insistence on facts does not have the persuasive power we need. Mere logos, issued forth by the babbling superego at the end of its tether, clearly no longer suffices. Mere pathos won’t do either, and nationalism is unanswerable on the sole basis of competing winged visions, competing ethea. My suspicion is that logos, pathos, ethos and mythos are all integrally necessary to posit a challenge to the siren call of nationalism. A comprehensive anthropological account of nation and state is therefore, by necessity, theological or at the very least mythological.

The fundamental organising principle of the society is the family, whether we consider that the band or tribe, or the nuclear family. The two forms have the same institutional function and material purpose. Of all human institutions the family, forged from the basic erotic urge and the desire to procreate, is more deeply rooted in our præ-history than any other social institution. Recorded history, on the other hand, gave us three subsidiary institutions: the nation, the state and the market—in that order.

Because state and market are the most ‘recent’ and the most rationalised of the subsidiary institutions, the case that the state precedes or undergirds the market is the easiest to make from a sæcular perspective. Karl Polanyi convincingly argues this case in The Great Transformation, using both œconomic and historical evidence: ‘that the modern market œconomy is a special, historically rooted form of social organisation. It is not a natural, universal system for organising societies, as its champions assert.’ Specifically, Polanyi demonstrates convincingly that market processes are wholly dependent on a juridical-institutional rationalism that can only derive from modern state structures. Because the libertarian / (anarcho-)capitalist political mythology is the most obviously false and most obviously anti-Christian, it’s also the easiest for consistent Christians (as well as sæcular conservatives, sæcular social-democrats and sæcular nationalists) to refute. The necessity of some kind of state control or state intervention in markets is thus indicated.

The gap between the nation and the state is less obvious, and it’s a tragœdy that this is a line that runs as a fault-line within Christendom (also within Islâm, Judaism and even Buddhism), and not just between sæcular and religious accounts of the human condition. I’ve made the argument before that Orthodox Christianity has better and more complete intellectual resources to draw on in distinguishing the nation from the state than the Western Christianities do – in part because of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine legacies of intentionally multi-national political projects. Unfortunately, we don’t use these resources because they have historically been at odds with the (in some cases understandable and just) desires of Orthodox peoples for political self-determination.

Here is where the invaluable witness of governance in post-colonial countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia, comes in. The naked artificiality of colonially-imposed Westphalian state structures and their inability to provide governance aligned to the common good provides the most obvious rebuke to those accounts of social reality which identify the nation with the state. An equal rebuke from the opposite direction involves the success story (however qualified by various social problems, later structural weakness and corruption) of the Qing Empire in building a convincingly multinational modern state. Each case seems to suggest that national belonging precedes efficacious state structures, and moreover that state structures need not map neatly onto tribal or cultural identities. These imperfect but compelling witnesses – furnished forth by the Byzantine state, the Yugoslav state, the Qing state, the Czechoslovak state, even the Russian state and also arguably the sæcular supra-national aspirations of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism – alluringly suggest a broadly ‘Eastern’ answer to the challenge of the Westphalian order: an answer rooted in an autocratic understanding of the state*.

This leaves us with the third, most troublesome and most intellectually-hoary of our distinctions: that between the family and the nation. Here is where even the witness of scientific materialism and anthropology inevitably fades off into the mists of mythos and we are left with competing incommensurate comprehensive accounts of the good. Ironically, the further away we get into the præ-history of human sociality, the more closely the post-religious liberal / New Atheist (including the 1970s sex-positive post-feminist) mythology of human social origins looks suspiciously similar to the most virulently reactionary blood-and-soil alt-right nationalist mythology.

In both accounts, the family is a distinctly unnatural and unwelcome imposition on the basic reality of the primordial hunter-gatherer band. In the post-religious New Atheist-cum-third-wave feminist account, the family was a structure imposed concurrently with the rise of agrarian settlements, towns and cities. It superimposed itself upon the natural, healthy, primordial equality of men and women and the uninhibited protean sexual liberty which that equality is taken to presuppose. Along with the family came all the great host of social evils of civilisation: patriarchy; hero-worship; sexual division of labour; hoarding of agrarian wealth and so on. The nouvelle nouvelle-droite inversion of this mythology differs in only one respect: the assumption of a primordial equality. The right-wing mythology of human social origins also posits the hunter-gatherer band before the family. But instead of seeing the family as the origin of various inequalities, they see the family as the origin of various forms of effeminacy and weakening of the tribal spirit, the kin affiliation which they take to be the fundamental organising principle of human existence.

It is only when we begin to consider this new nationalism, not as a set of political principles but instead as a mythos rooted in the exaltation of primordial brutality, that we begin to truly comprehend its power and its seductive spiritual drive. It is a mythos, moreover, that is not founded independently of feminism, but precisely as an inversion of feminism predicated on the flight from feeling: a flip-side of the coin, as it were. In place of the Goddess myth which was erected precisely as a pseudo-anthropological attack on Christianity, we have another form of pagan mythologising happening on the same pattern: only priapic-totemic rather than yonic-totemic.

It therefore becomes clear that the problem, the contradiction, regarding nationalism lies at a deeper level than the superstructural problems of policy organisation of the state. They relate to the basic problem of the sexual division of labour. And the oppositional stances taken up by both the post-feminist and the nouvelle nouvelle-droite accounts of præhistory stem from the current relation between sex and œconomic life being profoundly sick and alienating. But we can’t simply pop these duelling mythologies back in the bag, so to speak. At the risk of sounding crypto-Sorelian rather than Marxist, they can be resolved only by appealing to a counter-mythology. Here I appeal to Scripture.

The Scriptural witness, which is not history but a vision of the Liturgical ordering of the cosmos, does however confirm a hierarchical ranking of præhistoric and early-historic human institutions. Of the four, only the family—however rooted it is in our fleshy desires and animal appetites—is prælapsarian. Sex and procreation between men and women is blessed by God as good, prior to the Fall, in the very first chapter of Genesis.

The nation (goy גוי), conceived of as the band or tribe, appears in Scripture only after the Flood in Genesis 10, and it appears on account of the drunken shame of Noah and the behaviour of his sons on beholding it. It is a postlapsarian development. Contrary to those who posit a racist theory of Scripture, this is not a curse only on Ham: it is Noah’s curse on all of his sons that they be thus divided from each other. Note that in the original Hebrew Noah does not bless Shem or Japheth, only God. The term also appears in the promise of God to Abraham, that he would become the father of many nations. But this promise is contingent on his obedience to God, which is lost when he enters Ægypt, and regained only after he proved himself willing to sacrifice Isaac.

The state and its structures – the idea of ‘rule’ or ‘dominion’ (mashal משל) applied in a coercive and legal sense – appears in Scripture only in concert with another sin: the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers into Ægyptian slavery in Genesis 37. It is noteworthy that in subsequent chapters Joseph himself is first a victim, and then a master, of the Ægyptian state! Notice how the ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ promised by the state corrupts family ties (first Joseph’s brothers to him, and then Potiphar’s wife to her family) even as it legitimates itself by those ties and claims to extend them!

The very first instance of market relations in Scripture appears at the tail end of Genesis, and it appears only because Joseph is managing the affairs of the Ægyptian state: that is to say, he is regulating mercantile affairs. The term trade (karah כרה) appears only in Deuteronomy 2, in the desert concurrently with the Mosaic law, and at that only after (and because) the Hebrews were found worshipping the golden calf and desiring to go back into Ægypt after entering the wilderness. The implication in Deuteronomy is that Moses is issuing laws relating to buying and selling, only because the hearts of the Hebrews have been hardened against the Edomites, and they have fallen away from the early gift-œconomic relations of Abraham and Isaac with the Canaanites. Note well: the idea of regulating markets is issued by the lawgiver – the very icon in Scripture of the just state!! – directly in answer to the wayward and sinful Hebrews’ worship of golden idols!

See how Scripture precisely in its mythopœic account of the human – and the Hebrew – story thus categorically affirms the primacy of family before tribe; tribe before state; state before market. Each progression, each differentiation of social life into ever more complex, highly-determined and rational forms, represents a further falling away from the Edenic purpose of God for man. And yet, we are not called upon to retrogress atavistically: we cannot recreate Eden on our own power. Even after the appearance of Christ, the Mosaic law is still needful for us.

But the logic of familiality, even of erotic desire, is written into the very fabric of Creation and even our cosmology as Christians. We do not worship a priapic hero-god who slew a monstrous Tiamat and created the world from her corpse. We do not worship the stone idols of Willendorf and Dolní Věstonice. More to the point, though: we do not worship a disembodied monad, but instead a God who is in a more-than-metaphorical sense a Father with an Incarnate Son, with a very human Mother. Even though scientific facts are on our side (like the fact that a healthy man of any race and a healthy woman of any other race can naturally produce healthy, viable and fertile offspring), this is ultimately the only way to out-mythologise, to out-narrate, the new nationalism and its nouvelle nouvelle-droite intellectual underpinnings. We gain nothing by reverting to an insistence on the intermediary mythologies – and particularly not Hobbesian and Lockean ones of state and market – that have long since ceased to convince even the converted.

* A word of caution is in order here. When I use the term autocratic, I precisely do not mean what is now vulgarly called totalitarian or authoritarian-populist – a Weberian ideal posited in bad-faith opposition to the democratic or free or liberal rules-based world, with its roots in the broad Machiavellian-Montesquieuian-Gibbonite strain of Whig orientalism. For one thing, this dichotomy is not useful. Since 2003 I have been keenly sensitive to the fact that democracies are capable of – and now routinely do – behave in ways that Arendt would not hesitate to call totalitarian. This is one of the reasons why I still single out Christopher Hitchens, Liu Xiaobo and Václav Havel for particular censure: they were, when they lived, all advocates of democratic totalitarianism insofar as they enabled the wilful distortions of truth by the Bush Administration that led to over 600,000 wrongful deaths in Iraq, and the mainstream acceptability of rendition and torture. By this same token, the autocratic governments I mentioned above were not absolutist or totalitarian by Arendt’s understanding, for the simple reason that the heads of state were not laws unto themselves.

The high demands of the axiomodern

Something about our days has me thinking about the fall of (Western) Rome. The crisis of faith in the old established institutions – in our case as much political as religious. Wasteful infighting among the ruling class (check). The growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor (check). The insecurities about immigration and the border (check). The prevalence of usurious consumer lending (check).

What’s more, in both cases, there is a worrying trend of being closed off to radical alternatives. The Roman Empire was addicted to œconomic growth – and it grew by conquering land and slaves. In our case, growth is predicated on leveraging debt into investments in technological progress. But just as the Roman Empire ultimately lost steam as they began running out of land and people to enslave, so we are also coming up against certain hard limits to technological progress, as well as on the strain we can put on the biosphere. This is – to put it mildly – very troubling. We are headed full-steam toward a big collapse and we seem to have misplaced the brakes.

But more than that, we need to begin considering our place in the historical arc. We are living in the waning days of a hyper-capitalist globalism, and we are caught between factions which are taking refuge in a range of extreme and bizarre ideologies held over from the last century. The ‘alt-right’ is preparing for a race war over dwindling resources, while the ‘Tumblr liberals’ are still stuck somewhere between Rules for Radicals and Excitable Speech. Libertarians and counter-culture conservatives are sounding a retreat from the institutions. Honestly, I think the counter-culture conservatives get more right than most people credit them (at the very least they have the civilisational scope of the problem right), but really none of the above ‘options’ offers anything resembling long-term thinking. Indeed, the ‘Tumblr left’ and the ‘alt right’ seem to be flip-sides of the same Mad Max petrol-can cap. The libertarian-slash-crunchy-con position offers very little more by way of a map to the coming wasteland.

To be sure, there are some interesting proposals out there: the ‘slow food’ movement in developing countries isn’t, by the way, so much about boutique consumer alternatives as it is about preserving food sovereignty, which – it strikes me – will become a much more widely-regarded topic as political weakness, biosphere stress, scarcity and mass migration begin to make themselves more strongly felt. (People need to eat even after the collapse of the state.) Even so, these alternatives are lacking in the big-picture department. The one man who, it strikes me, has laid his finger solidly on the current problem – if not yet the solution – is the counter-cultural Russian conservative Aleksandr Shchipkov.

Here is how he puts it in his essay, ‘Axiomodern’:

Postmodernism seems to be rolling, rolling back and rushing into antiquity. Sociologists broadly discuss the “technical paganism”, “new pantheism” and “new barbarism.” … The refusal to subsidize complex and costly cultural projects gives rise to simple and radical projects. All this is true, but it is only one part of the problem. The second, even more important part is that the archaism of culture is secondary. Its real reasons lie in the archaism of politics.

It’s not about thousands of Syrian refugees, these Eastern “barbarians”, as Europeans call them. Our own inner barbarian of the West, which has been set at liberty, is much more dangerous. The era of neoliberal panopticon is inevitably slipping away. The time of idols and temples of the post-digital era comes. This means a rapid dechristianization of the Western world. And the elitist concept of culture, for its part, welcomes the moral terror by all sorts of “Pussy Riots” and attempts to call politics “art”.

Elitism has already turned into barbarism in arts. Similarly, it has turned into dechristianization and dehumanization in society and politics: fundamentalism, neo-Nazism, new Migration Period flooded Europe, the latter, as a “reward” for centuries of colonialism. For the sake of preserving the situation, the present Western political regime cultivates “a new barbarism” to counter the inner barbarian, who always was on guard, but now he seems to be unleashed, with the outer barbarian. Such is the result of postmodernism that rehabilitated the primitive sacrality and cave instincts.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, notice the incredibly short shrift Shchipkov gives to the various alt-right Camp of the Saints fantasies. The real problem – and, being a practising ‘cradle Orthodox’, he understands this all too well – lies instead within. (This is a common talking point among counter-culture conservatives who have at least skimmed After Virtue, but not one, in my view, taken seriously often enough.) Our élite classes have inculcated and ‘set at liberty’ an ‘inner barbarism’. Now, in order to figure what Shchipkov means by this, one has to rather intuit it by means of the various examples he gives (the radical ‘feminist’ art of Pussy Riot being the main one); but reading him charitably, he takes the ‘inner barbarism’ to mean more broadly a politics of affect or a politics of emotivism, motivated by ‘cave instincts’. The ‘new barbarism’ responding to the enemy at the gates, who is now also unleashed by the élites, is clearly the faux-populist nativism now seen in various far-right politicians in Europe and the Americas.

Shchipkov mobilises a high historiographical language to contextualise and counter this dichotomy. Actually, the ‘Bronze Age’ terminology that he uses along with ‘Axiomodern’, is summoned forth out of the Russian literary usage – i.e., the Golden Age of Russian literature and the Silver Age. (And his reference to the late-Soviet poetry of Oleg Okhapkin shows that the Russian literary usage is foremost in his mind.) But in Russian as in English, ‘Bronze Age’ calls back to Hesiod in this context – and doubly so when coupled with a Jaspersesque epithet like ‘Axial’. Shchipkov isn’t just quibbling over poetry; he’s talking about the grander-scale rise and fall of human epochs. He understands that we are in the middle of a massive historical transition, and not a particularly pleasant one. The reference to the plight of literary Christians like Okhapkin under the Soviets, additionally, hints that the already-arrived age of ‘post-digital idolatry’ will make overwhelming and even martyrific demands on Axiomodern Man.

Axiomodern has a bronze colour shade reminiscent of the golden classics. This bronze glow, of course, can be noticed not only in literature but also in the sphere of social mores. It is Russia who will play an important role in the return of Europe to Christian roots. Therefore, the “Bronze Age” may be universal. We already have one foot in the new era. Axiomodern has come. And responding to Pasternak's catchphrase: “What millennium is it outside, my dears?” you can answer directly, “Axiomodern. Bronze Age.”

We new ‘axiomoderns’ are faced with a crisis of the soul and a crisis of the social sphere that go hand-in-hand. The twin collapses of Catholic and Orthodox public praxeis are merely signposts of these broader crises. We are the Goths and Huns and Vandals who have sacked Rome, who are sacking it right now. On the other hand, we are also the Goths who are tasked with picking up the pieces and assembling it into mosaic. We are being called to transcend both the politics of affected umbrage plaguing the left, and the politics of nativism plaguing the right – both of which we know will end in the filth and debasement of bestial savagery. Also, the aretē being demanded of us now has an additional element of danger attached. Where in collapses of ages past man was tasked with conquering and taming wilderness in forging a new civilisation, now we are tasked with compassing a sophrosunē that preserves and restores our ailing and overburdened biosphere, not through atomised ‘green’ pieties but through acts of collective political heroism.

No pressure.

The Russian clerical rôle in demystifying China

Archimandrites Hyacinth (Bichurin, l) and Peter (Kamensky, r)

My hat is off, deeply, to Fr Dionysius (Pozdnyaev), the rector of the Russian Orthodox mission in Hong Kong, for having spearheaded the translation project of a book on Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky), The First Russian Sinologist. The book comes as part of a Chinese-Russian-English translation project on Orthodox missionaries in China, and though brief, it is deeply valuable both from a historical and from a philosophical-theological perspective. It is written in the style of a Russian hagiography, but it presents an important side of the history of European Chinese scholarship of which is not commonly-known. Personally, I found it deeply fascinating and indeed surprising, as it resonated with my experience of both being an expat in China and being tugged inexorably in the direction of the Orthodox faith. It also addresses several intellectual directions and questions I’d been clumsily groping toward on this blog. The Sinological work of Archimandrite Peter is of a great pivotal importance not only for Russian understanding of China, but also for the rest of the West’s understanding. Though his primary mission and concern was religious rather than scholarly, he can nonetheless justifiably be considered a kind of proto-Sa‘îd, a man who was devoted to understanding and explaining China on its own terms, and along the way deflating various Western European orientalist constructs and fantasies about China, which had been en vogue throughout the 18^th century.

The Russian Missions in Beijing were primarily focussed on the descendants of the Albazinian Cossacks, who had been captured by the Kangxi Emperor in 1685 and later resettled in Beijing. This volume from the Orthodox Church in Hong Kong is particularly valuable also for its treatment of the Albazinians, of whose history I was aware only in the broad strokes, though I did at one point help the Holy Dormition Church in Beijing with the translation of some historical materials related to them. The Cossacks who were defeated and surrendered at Albazin to a superior Qing force were not only spared by the order of Kangxi, but in fact welcomed by him and respected for their brave resistance; the Kangxi Emperor apparently took pains to woo them to his service. Those who took his offer – which was most of them – were enrolled in the Bordered Yellow Banner and accorded the rights and honours of Manchu bannermen. They were given a disused Buddhist lamasery in which to celebrate Divine Liturgy; their Orthodox priests were in fact originally called ‘lamas’. Most of them took Chinese surnames: Yakovlev became Yao 姚; Dubinin, Du 杜; Romanov, Luo 羅; Khabarov, He 何; Kholostov, He 賀. And they intermarried with Manchurian women, gradually adopting Manchu and Chinese customs as their own – this was the situation which faced the Russian missionaries there.

In any event, the Russian Mission was chartered by Tsar Peter the Great to serve this population; however, it soon developed several additional purposes, including missionary ones, diplomatic ones (the Russian Mission often being the primary go-between between the Tsarist and the Qing governments), and scholarly ones. In particular, the last decades of the 18^th century and the first decades of the 19^th saw an immense broadening and deepening of the significance of this mission with the work of Archimandrites Hyacinth (Bichurin) and Peter (Kamensky).

Some background on the state and purposes of China scholarship in Europe, and the phenomenon of chinoiserie, would not be amiss here. The first people to bring knowledge of China back to Europe were the Jesuit missions, the most famous of which was headed by Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China about 100 years before the Albazinians did. The Jesuits are not to be wholly despised: they deserve ample credit for facilitating a massive cultural and scientific exchange between China and Western Europe. But it can’t be denied that they had, and have, a certain agenda in how they presented – nay, advertised – China to a modernising Europe. The Jesuits facilitated and encouraged the development of European chinoiserie, which flourished in cities and in aristocratic circles throughout Western Europe – Germany, Spain, England, Poland and France – as well as Russia. As Archimandrite Peter’s biographer notes:

[18^th century] Europe was marked by the vogue of everything Chinese, in large part formed by French Jesuit missionaries. However, their works showed China as a fabulous, visionary world partly [reminiscent of] the town of Kitëzh—a messianic town veiled from the eyes of those who aren’t enlightened by faith and purity. Russia, closely connected with Europe, was not immune to such a vogue. Catherine the Great, for example, was in correspondence with Voltaire about Confucius…

The ancient doctrine of Confucianism was understood as cursorily as Chinese art was delicately adapted for the enjoyment of the aristocracy. Amusing bucolic scenes and grotesque ornaments à la chinoise made by European artists were as far from real China as Confucius’ quotes translated by Russian sentimentalists were far from the original ones. Bizarre rococo fantasies materialised in theatrical performances and masquerades, bamboo bridges and tea-houses, pavilions and towers that decorated English, French, Polish and Russian palace gardens were only the extravagant inventions of these very Europeans. This artistic world, surprisingly combining the antique with Chinese, and rocaille with classics, became ingrained in Russian culture in the second half of the 18^th [and]the beginning of the 19^th centuries.

On a brief personal aside, I should note here that I have a rather complex relationship to 18^th-century chinoiserie, and not a wholly negative one. Yes, I’ve griped about Voltaire and his self-serving coöptation of Confucius – but I’ve also expressed a certain admiration, both political and æsthetic, for Bill Hatchett’s equally self-serving coöptation of Ji Junxiang for the purposes of mocking Horace Walpole. There is a great deal of chinoiserie, fantastic and ‘extravagant’ though it may be, that may have an artistic and even intellectual merit in its own right.

But, of course, the problem with chinoiserie, which is the problem with all orientalism, is that it renders a living, breathing non-Western tradition of [art, handicraft, music, literature] senseless and silent in the service of a Westerner’s fantasy of the same. And that fantasy often comes saddled with a great deal of intellectual baggage; when the reality fails to live up to that fantasy, violent recrimination is often the result. And no, I’m not talking about Keziah Daum; there’s an important and very serious difference between wearing a dress because it’s pretty, and indulging an untrue and harmful fantasy. The fetishisation of the Asian-feminine; the ‘othering’ of the Asian mind; the paranoid fear of being overrun by a faceless horde from the East – all of these ‘types’, though they have roots further back, seem to find their first sprouts in this period. And the Society of Jesus, for the purposes of promoting their missions abroad, absolutely did have a significant rôle in cultivating both the ‘Shangri-La’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’ fantasies, particularly in France.

Perhaps it was inescapable on account of gæography, that the task of promoting a clearer and truer picture of China would fall to the Russians. Both Archimandrite Hyacinth (Bichurin) and Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky) already had a certain breadth of perspective which allowed them to be more generous and sympathetic: Hyacinth himself was a member of a Central Asian minority (the Chuvash people), and Peter was an avid linguist, versant in Ancient Greek and Latin, who had already undertaken translation and lexical work in the Tatar, Chuvash and Mari languages. As the head of the Ninth Russian Mission in Beijing, Archimandrite Hyacinth was exceedingly scrupulous, perhaps even a touch too much so, in his promotion of Chinese materials: he recommended that Russians interested in China studies ought first to undertake studies of Russia’s ‘near abroad’: Tatarstan, Qazaqstan, Dzungharia, Mongolia and Tibet. One of Archimandrite Hyacinth’s lasting accomplishments and legacies in China scholarship was his thorough and psychologically-astute volume on Chinese Grammar, which historian Christoph Harbsmeyer has described as ‘deserving of careful comparison’ with the work especially of his contemporary Pierre Abel-Rémusat, and generally ‘sadly neglected by Western sinologists’.

As for the student Pavel Kamensky, though he may have started out his studies and life in Beijing with a somewhat sentimentalised understanding of China, he was very quickly disabused of it, though to his credit he did not succumb to the violent disillusionment that would characterise much of Western Europe (and, indeed, later Solovyov). But, with a typically-Slavic candour, he did leave some ‘unflattering estimations’ of prior missionary-based works on China; for example:

[The] Chinese notes of Jesuit [Jean Joseph Marie] Amiot are a body without a soul. Though he was a repertory of learning, these works really are not only good for nothing but also harmful. He … explained nothing. Moreover, he absolutely dishonestly tried to complicate the things that had been explained before. Hiding behind Chinese names he wrote such bogus stories that were unheard-of in China despite its dateless antiquity. The senseless contradictions that you can see in every line can prove my words.

As his biographer put it:

Acquaintances with real China, its philosophy, culture, state structure, religious and everyday life gave Pavel Kamensky an opportunity to keep a sensible view on China for life. This view was far from the romanticisation of China’s image and mythologisation of its spiritual traditions, but at the same time far from an ignorant neglect of Chinese culture.

In addition, upon his return from Beijing Pavel Kamensky immediately set about making recommendations for the Mission’s reform, including setting standards for competence and specialisation for new missionaries before they entered China, and greater cultural sensitivity among the missionaries for (northern) Chinese customs and dietary restrictions. His proposals attracted attention, and he apparently had to be pressured into undertaking the head of the Tenth Russian Mission (and with it, the tonsure, the rank of Archimandrite, and the monastic name of Peter). Sadly, he was bound to butt heads with his predecessor in the office Archimandrite Hyacinth, whom the newly-tonsured Archimandrite Peter apparently lambasted for his lukewarm missionary work. For his part, Archimandrite Hyacinth reciprocated with a bitter grudge against his successor, and complained about the new Mission head’s purported lack of scholarly rigour and poor linguistic attainments in Chinese and Mongolian.

However, Archimandrite Peter was no slouch in scholarship himself. Though his primary focus was on re-catechising and re-evangelising the descendants of the Albazinians (which he did with great affection and care), he nonetheless compiled the first Russian translation of the Analects and adding to the Russian store of knowledge dozens of Chinese gazetteers as well as more important classical Chinese works on gæography and law. Archimandrite Peter was a keen and insightful reader of the Chinese Classics, and if he was unsparing toward contemporary European commentaries on them, it was largely on account of his familiarity with the originals. However, he was also to exclaim, late in his life:

Oh, China! You carried away so much of my priceless time. I spent 27 years dealing only with your mechanical tasks, yet I’m comforted by it because I lost this time fulfilling my office. If not, I could not bemoan it with any tears. These Chinese activities, day and night, not only prevent your accumulation of knowledge but deprive it through their permanence.

Russia herself is in a rather unique position. Poised between the West and the Far East – as we can see in this very history of thought! – Russia has a dual perspective, being both the object of Western orientalist fantasy, and the subject of fantasies it borrows from thence. And Russia has often been faced with the temptation to orientalise herself for various reasons. The good common sense of people like Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky) has been a valuable gift along multiple dimensions.

It seems there was something almost providential in Russia’s realist approach to China studies in the very early days of the 19^th century, well before the revival of the field in Western Europe and America under Legge, Waley, Gabelentz and Julien. But it is more than a frustration and a shame, to compare this pivotal rôle played by these two remarkable Russian scholar-monks, with the bleak and dismal state of China studies in Russia today. Particularly given the unique confluence of gæostrategic, œconomic and cultural interests between the two, it seems a scandal to think that the academic and political work in Russia needed to sustain and inform this opportunity is sorely flagging.