I'm a Christian. I'm cautiously optimistic about a broad-based faith revival. But I worry it may be for the wrong reasons.
There have been plenty of instrumental defenses of religion, especially Christianity, in recent years. A common one is that it promotes Western civilization and values. (First-century Roman aristocrats would not have been amused.)
This puts the cart before the horse. It's an interesting and valid social-scientific question to think about the effects of religiosity on politics and culture. But embracing religiosity as a strategy to get a "better" politics or culture is self-defeating. If we embrace Christianity because we don't want to be barbarians, we'll end up barbarians with a Christian veneer.
We'll only get the civilizational benefits of Christianity if we become Christians for non-civilizational (or at least a-civilizational) reasons. I, too, am very fond of what Christianity has to say about moral anthropology, and therefore human rights. But the only reason to buy it is that *you think it is true.*
Couldn't agree more. I tried not to fall into the trap of saying anything so glib as "we must return to faith in order to avert fascism". I tried to leave it passive, because, yes, it has to be real for it to matter. After all, hedonistic, selfish Christianity already exists!
Isn't this a perfect summary of the millennial and gen Z experience? I think so: "the term Ratslosigkeit, an untranslatable word meaning roughly not knowing which way to turn, a cruel state of mind of the nineteenth century that many Germans have described with tragic eloquence. A gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values."
I have been wondering if our social depravity is picking up pace and showing signs of the same hedonistic weariness that Rome experienced. Language has certainly expanded to include taboo words I'd be beaten for saying in the 90's, and every streaming show hints at sex as if it's a requirement of every plot. Did Rome's depravity signal her barbarian defeat? If that's the case maybe we have a couple hundred years left. Selfishly, I'm hoping so.
You're mixing your foreign affairs with cosmic ones. It's the right way to 'understand' humanity, imo. Bravo.
Honestly, I'm kind of repulsed by it all. I look at our music, our series, our philosophy, and it's all just so unwise, so hedonistic, so selfish and individualistic, that I can't help but shake my head and mutter the "F" word from time to time. (That word, by the way, is "Fukuyama.")
I’m German and have lived in several countries over the years; for the past two years, I’ve been in Lithuania. Your point about the similarities with Weimar Germany really caught my attention.
I believe this also ties directly to the question of identity.
Even today, the way collective memory carries emotional complexity and the way we decide to let it shape our identity requires both honesty and acknowledgment. When we examine moral structures over time, we often see selective or double standards in moral decisions. These double standards can act as a kind of security mechanism within the moral framework. I wrote couple of essays about it.
A clear historical example is the Wilhelminian double standards: widespread hypocrisy or sanctimoniousness, especially around sexuality, morality, and social hierarchies. The ruling-class Herrenhierarchie manufactured propaganda that permeated society, reinforcing rigid, almost life-and-death distinctions between social and moral classes. Those patterns still influence how the wealthy and elite navigate hierarchy today.
What’s striking is how these elites often present themselves as a “self-legitimized” of there true core of their own identity.
For me, this points to something broader: we are living through a transitional phase marked by a deep deception of ourselves and of each other.
Your quotes from Malaparte remind me of Thomas Bernhard's writings that connect Nazism, declinist Catholicism, and bombing. His most run play (>26 performances), Eve of Retirement, is firmer than Malaparte, and I'd connect his themes with Pinter's later plays and Pinter's Nobel Prize speech. Also relevant (but less so) may be Zizek's writings on Christian Atheism, which try to recreate ties btwn secularism and earlier morality.
Heya, the bit about modern democracy made me think of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses; and then Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. I think both give us useful (if different) bits that can be added to your argument - and unfortunately, they both feel extraordinarily timely today (slight aside: one of my favourite things is seeing course outlines made by Arendt for her university classes, oh how I wish to have been in attendance). Great stuff, thank you!
The last decade and more I've been reading more and more of conservative and libertarian thinking, finding less and less to like. Conservatism lower-case c has always dominated. It may dominate this country as you see the New Deal rolled back along with civil rights of all kinds and open appeals not only to naked supremacy but invitations to enjoy cruelty and retribution for insults to the superior people. What is going to be fun as we liberals fall away and fall back is to watch the superior people fight over who is the most superior, those who have been reading German political philosophers or those who've been doing a lot of target practice.
You wish for the return of “a hard-charging belief in anything.” Yet you know that believers murder in droves; you cite the war in Ukraine yet somehow not the war in Gaza. Is it truly “belief in anything” that might help to right the ship, or is it belief in something more specific? Is it “belief” at all, or is it something deeper to which belief is mere ancillary?
Didn’t want to suggest that belief would prevent wars. Merely trying to nail down the roots of this phenomenon of barbarism. And, wars indeed hasten coarsening and shove societies towards barbarism. But it’s not that wars are barbarism.
Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to imply that believers are more likely to start wars or commit atrocities! Definitely a human thing in general.
As for deeper things, I was thinking of a few possible directions. One is that belief can be just one aspect of a social system that forms people in a particular (hypothetically not-barbaric) way. Practices and conventions and personal development strike me as being at least as important as belief, if we want to think about ways in which ideas adjacent to religion might help us.
Another possible direction is to ask what, in particular, belief might sometimes entail following. Damir’s piece has an implicit (and perhaps only partial) value system: he dislikes both decadence and barbarism. Punting to “belief” as the alternative is dodging the question of whether there is something actually worthwhile that decadence and barbarism might be compared to, and that one might try to move towards.
I’m phrasing myself cautiously; I personally do believe in something, but I’d take an uncertain person with a decently similar sense of direction over a “believer” with too much confidence in their goals to see the flaws in their thinking.
Well said. There's a lot of evangelical (the classic United States version) handwringing around social decline into decadence and barbarism as a result of losing the ritual and practice that Christian membership used to provide.
I tease Damir, because I'd argue Christianity is the contrast to barbarism, and he's beating around the bush with this 'belief' stuff. (Disappointing crusades, hundred years war aside, that deserves its own conversation and reconciliation)
I certainly agree with your last thought. It's a disappointment and struggle for me as a protestant to keep the virtue of humility front and center. If I have to deal with anyone, a humble seeker of the good and true is always better than any Master of Divinity student.
It may well be the contrast I'm actually driving towards John, but I'm not being explicit because I think it could also be broader, and therefore more useful to people. Or maybe Gemma's on to something: maybe I'm trying to avoid a full-on values system as a means of getting people to grapple with fallenness — barbarism as something we can recognize as inherent in us all. Arguably it's Rousseau's optimism about human nature that sets the Enlightenment on the course of unchecked individualism unto narcissism.
Well said, and a wiser approach, especially in this post-Christendom (for the West). I honestly don't know how other religions understand fallenness, presumably its important, with protestants it's a lynchpin.
The values system idea seems off to me, not that it's not what we're talking about, but as a full understanding of religion. Religion is belief, it's living in accord with some orthodoxy, but it's something more, too. It should be messy, full of mystery.
Writing as ethically exacting and morally serious as this comes along about as rarely as Halley's comet, so ... I wanna thank you, Damir - sincerely! - for giving us our fill until the next upstanding columnist lays it down sometime around 2100.
Yes, Western civilization has left us with quite the gaping void, hasn't it? And as Simone Weil said, all sin is an attempt to fill a void ... so in that respect, at least, the dynamic is exactly the same on both sides of the divide, whether you're talking about the hajduks or the onanists.
Which is to say, we're pretty much on the same page as to what the problem is, and in general agreement about the need for the "difficult commitments" of yore, but as for your attempt to propose a more viable alternative...? It's a hell of a lot better than the status quo, I'll give you that, but ... is it pragmatically within our reach? That, I'm not so sure of.
I'm aware of at least four brickbats that can be chucked at your argument. And, on the assumption that you have already realized the sincerity of my aim (as true as Costello's!), I'll go ahead and chuck 'em myself, and, afterwards, we can get together and see which of them have landed, and just how much of the resultant medical bill I'll have to foot...
My four biggest beefs are:
1. ... your succumbing to the conservative crank's crutch of dunking on Rousseau. It's a petty snipe, perhaps, but I do think you overstate the extent to which he still rules the minds of aspirant Jacobins on the American left, and you also miss the mark in attributing to him a largely populist legacy... PACE you and Sieyès, but Arendt landed closer to the truth when she declared him to be the prophet of the heart, and the main progenitor of the romantics in that his chief gripe about European culture was its perversion of savage man's primal integrity, over and above its stifling of the people's will. Whatever his influence on past revolutions, I suspect his greatest impact today isn't so much on the Democrats' "War on Misinformation" as it is on the tulpa-rolfing ennui of Tumblr goers, sex-bot humpers, and pseudo-radicals too disorganized to re-educate ANY-one, let alone themselves, but who nevertheless remain enchanted by meaningless mantras like "Il est interdit d'interdire!" because it seems to signal a return to some coveted, untamed state. So ... still a part of the problem, but, on the whole, much closer to the victims your WOC colleague Katherine Dee writes about than to a modern-day brown-shirted Maoist.
2. ... your conflation of "organized religion" with Christian resurrection... Put simply: Wuuuuh...? See, the thing that's always distinguished Christianity from its Abrahamic bosom-buds is that it has always been able to resurrect just fine without sweating the "organized" part of religion. From Lazarus to Christ Himself, Biblical resurrections have always centered on man, and not on mankind, per se; and the Pauline promise of the apocatastasis, or mankind's eventual submersion as a single body in Christ, can only be fulfilled by each believer fervently pursuing his own salvation, whether through prayer or by way of missionary work*. Hence why the Eucharist is never taken by the congregation as a whole, munching & sipping altogether, but by each congregant alone, munching & sipping one after another in a line before the priest... And, it's also why, if there's any cause for hope today, it's not the hope put forth by a specific sect, church, or denomination, but by those heroic individuals, both men and women, who dare to act contra mundum, challenging the godless by speaking in their own names and voices, instead of via the proxy of an idol (because, remember, the Christian church can ALSO be just as much an object of idol-worship as the Golden Calf was, or as were the many faces of Baal).
*here taken broadly to mean any public-facing religious act, and not just conversion.
3. ... your averral that faith's salve is its power to cool human passions: the cock-blocking "ought," I guess you could call it... I mean, yeah, that's one use of faith, and a totally valid one. Both repression and sublimation are necessary psychic devices for holding our libidos in check and keeping at bay those "evil energies" you rightfully ascribed to history's worst atrocities... But how realistic is it to try and order the kids who are coming of age today to silence their sex drive, when every one of us is being bombarded by the electrical equivalent of a 24/7 aphrodisiac? There's a reason why Catholicism has a bit of a pedophilia problem and Orthodoxy does not (and it's not just 'cuz we the betta half)... However much sense that forced celibacy amongst the clergy might have made in the Middle Ages, it's become abundantly clear that this is no longer a psychically sustainable tenet, within the hormone cyclotron of mass media. Institutionally speaking, there's just no stifling the amped-up passions of the post-electronic age - at least not without risking such malignancies that it can truly be said the cure is much worse than the sickness...
Make no mistake: we need MORE discipline, not less. But the real question is: TO WHAT ENDS do we put the excess, manic energy of our Digi-world? For those who can still repress, great! But I think the evidence plainly shows that REPRESSION NO LONGER SCALES, and there's no going back to a time when every self-respecting gentleman and lady could be counted on to "hold it all in." Unlike you, it seems, I don't view passion and religion as mutually incompatible. What's now missing is not emotional reserve but a common work ethic for channelling our passions towards more positive ends... And that's why I've come to believe that modern Christians have much more to learn from the antinomian fuckeries of Prince, than they do from the Pope or even from the Puritans under Jonathan Edwards. It's certainly proven to be a much better fit for me than the chastity ring, I'm-a tell you that.
4. And, lastly ... your whole premise that we are going back to barbarism, by labelling Weimar German youth and the Vance-guard as "young barbarians." R.G. Collingwood made the same claim - that fascists were barbarians - in his po-faced, sorites-stuffed snoozer, THE NEW LEVIATHAN, but - here, as there - I find it to be such a lazy, ad homin-ish distraction from what's actually at stake. Nothing's gained by drawing false parallels between the cruel crudities of our contemporary moralists and a pagan body like the Visigoths, because it's not the barbarians we have to fear... No, it's something far worse: Niebuhr's "bland fanatic," himself a descendant of Nietzsche's "cultivated philistine," both of whom gave rise to our own "pop Brahmin." What's their common denominator? The fact that they'd all protest loudly if you told them they'd just raped and pillaged an entire village, even if that's exactly what they did... They'd talk instead of "international democracy" or "racial purity," would deflect the accusation with talk of "collateral damage" or vent about the "lack of will" amongst the Afghans, Iraqis and Vietnamese, which kept us from winning wars on their behalf...
I'm talking, of course, about hypocrites, and a barbarian, at his best, ain't no hypocrite, but is, like any frank pagan, unabashed about his brutal nature. That's why, on one hand, you have someone like Miguel de Unamuno dropping the shocking assertion that progress usually comes from the barbarian, and, on the other, Chris Lasch declaring that an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a cultural Christian... Would that we WERE living in an age of barbarism! Alas, though, that barbaric rebellion you spoke of is neither wholly barbaric nor even much of a rebellion. All we've got, in this year of our BORG, are two sides of the same bastard coin, a society of sinners who are neither macho oppressors nor contemptible scumbags, but, instead, little more than a drab, debased delusion... It's like what Moses said when he came back from Sinai to find the Israelites out-Heroding Herod: "It is not the sound of the cry of mighty men, neither is it the sound of the cry of weak men; but it is the sound of sin that I hear" (Ex. 32:18).
... well, there ya go. There's my four big brickbats.
I thank you once more for continuing to be among the few online writers who are earnest in fulfilling your responsibilities as a public intellectual (Shadi Hamid, your comedy partner, being another one) ... and ... if you need me to chip in on the cost of IOP or occupational therapy, because of the injuries sustained from my projectile critiques, here's the number for my insurance ... and here, also, is my lawyer's phone... She's the one who holds the purse strings, you understand, and who will be more than happy to talk you through the basics of what I am legally obligated to cover, on account of the fact that YOU JUST GOT WRECKED, SON! What, whaaaaaaaat? Yeah, that's right... you heard me... Oh, snap! Yea-heaah, or isn't that right?
Seems like a stretch to compare what we're going through to the rise of fascism in Germany, but I get it. The Good War myth (per Slotkin) is all encompassing. People have that, Rome, maybe Vietnam and the Movement Myth to draw from, and so this is what we get.
The better historic analogy and precedent is probably the Gilded Age. Sky high rates of immigration and foreign born, urban machine politics and reconstruction excesses, plutocrats and growing wealth gaps and obscene displays of wealth, and what many perceive to be a fraying social order. And so there's a slow burn backlash - exclusion acts, moratoria on immigration, trade protectionism, a wave of vigilantism, and populist/reformist movements paired with political realignments. We get our Bryan and McKinley, Debs, Watson, Coughlin, TR, and Wilson - followed by a doubling down on "openness" and economic liberalism through Coolidge/Hoover, and then during the next big downturn in '29 ('73 being one of the original catalyzers) the dam breaks and we go with FDR.
Psycho-spiritually, you had a lot of the same anxieties you see today. Around IQ and HBD, vitalism, racial purity, and all sorts of crankery and woo - their theosophy and our effective altruists, their sanatoria and our protein loaders and fitness maximizers.
Aside from the vigilantism from 1890-1930 of ~2 lynchings per week, it seems like a really big stretch to compare it to what the Nazis were doing.
You do wax hopeful at the end that a resurrection of Christianity is possible. I know by the numbers it is waning, but I see the evidence of Christianity everywhere; it’s certainly not dead.
Reason may not be the answer, but I don’t see how religion in general, or Christianity in particular, could be the answer to our barbarity, and I am not convinced that freedom from religion necessarily breeds the virulent barbarism we see today. I will admit that over the years I have increasingly become a realist and see humans as barbaric by nature, or at least easily capable of barbaric acts. Christianity has perpetrated barbarity as well as having been the inspiration and justification for it - the crusades and the inquisition, just to name two. Religion itself has never overcome our nature to be inhumane.
Obviously the human species has a capacity to reason, above other species. It may not be our first impulse, but we can cultivate it within ourselves. My defense of reason as a potential mitigating force is not that I eschew a religious perspective - I am religious, just not Christian - but I think we need to encourage the cultivation of reason as a way to encourage less virulence. We need to value it as a tool, value the heritage of The Enlightenment - it's given us many good ideals and helped turn the tide on some bad practices. It's not perfect because we're not perfect.
The Enlightenment did not kill God in my view. But The Enlightenment may have killed the omnipotent, authoritarian God - a God that has certainly inspired much barbarity. Certainly technological and scientific advances have demoted God and religion from their once exalted position. In my view, that’s a good thing. Because if God created us as the bible says, in his image, then he gave us reason. He gave us the ability to grow, expand, become better. I think we have to use all of the tools in the toolbox.
I think the descent part of this essay is spot-on. But religion is not going to be the counterpoint to this descent into narcissism, hedonism, and barbarism. Religion has already sold out to the prevailing problematic culture. The counterpoint, in my opinion, is coming from those who see what is required by the times: self-understanding, understanding of others, and compassionate action. This is G*dly, but it ain’t religious. Some of it might be located in traditionally religious circles. Most of it will not be found there. Homo sapiens must evolve, die, or lose its apex status.
I liked your analysis of where we are, but not your conclusion.
First of all, you're never going to get enough people to follow one religion, Christianity or otherwise. We live in a pluralistic society and, supposedly, we value that. Second, Christianity has had some really bloodthirsty periods in its history. That does not mean it would going forward, but no religion has fundamentally solved politics: religion is first and foremost spiritual, not political. If what you are proposing is a tool for social control, religion was somewhat effective in this way earlier in our history as a species, when communication between regions was far slower than it is now, but it was draconian in most cases, particularly toward women. I mean, The Crusades and The Inquisition, seriously.
We have the capacity to use reason, but it obviously does not come easy for us. Meeting in the middle (politically I am left but realize more and more that change will have to come from consensus as to what we value) and using our ability to reason, perhaps influenced by our spiritual morality, will be more effective than some sort of Christian revival.
I don't agree that the Enlightenment killed God - how can you kill God? It simply gave us a better way to find common ground that one religion cannot - a better, more humane tool for social control and cohesion. Religion is the personal, the Enlightenment is the Commons.
Leave aside the question of whether it is desirable, I’m not sure a return to religion is possible. I gesture at that at the end.
Similarly, I don’t think I’m making the case that religion breeds peace. I’m just suggesting that emancipation from religion may breed a pretty virulent kind of barbarism. So it’s a more cautionary tale about confidence in “progress”.
Especially confidence in “reason” as a progressive force. I think there’s a lot to be cautious about here.
You do wax hopeful at the end that a resurrection of this faith is possible. I know by the numbers it is waning, but I see the evidence of Christianity everywhere; it’s certainly not dead.
Reason may not be the answer, but I don’t see how religion in general, or Christianity in particular, could be the answer to our barbarity - I just don't see how we have been emancipated from religion, Christianity or any other religion. I will admit that over the years I have increasingly become a realist and see humans as barbaric by nature, or at least easily capable of barbaric acts. Christianity has perpetrated barbarity as well as having been the inspiration and justification for it - the crusades and the inquisition, just to name two. Religion itself has never overcome our nature to be inhumane.
My defense of reason as a potential mitigating force is not that I eschew a religious perspective - I am religious, just not Christian - but I think we need to encourage the cultivation of reason. We need to value it as a tool, value the heritage of The Enlightenment. Perhaps I see us having been emancipated from reason, not religion. Perhaps we need to value both in equal measure, allowing the two to balance each other.
The Enlightenment did not kill God in my view. But The Enlightenment may have killed the omnipotent, authoritarian God - a God that has certainly inspired much barbarity. Certainly technological and scientific advances have demoted God and religion from their once exalted position. In my view, that’s a good thing. Because if God created us as the bible says, in his image, then he gave us reason. He gave us the ability to grow, expand, become better. I think we have to use all of the tools in the toolbox.
It's certainly not an essay in praise of Trump, but it's hardly hateful. You might want to read more carefully.
That said, insofar as your handle is actually meaningful to you, you're the actual target of my polemic. So it's fine, don't bother reading more carefully if you don't want to.
I'm a Christian. I'm cautiously optimistic about a broad-based faith revival. But I worry it may be for the wrong reasons.
There have been plenty of instrumental defenses of religion, especially Christianity, in recent years. A common one is that it promotes Western civilization and values. (First-century Roman aristocrats would not have been amused.)
This puts the cart before the horse. It's an interesting and valid social-scientific question to think about the effects of religiosity on politics and culture. But embracing religiosity as a strategy to get a "better" politics or culture is self-defeating. If we embrace Christianity because we don't want to be barbarians, we'll end up barbarians with a Christian veneer.
We'll only get the civilizational benefits of Christianity if we become Christians for non-civilizational (or at least a-civilizational) reasons. I, too, am very fond of what Christianity has to say about moral anthropology, and therefore human rights. But the only reason to buy it is that *you think it is true.*
Couldn't agree more. I tried not to fall into the trap of saying anything so glib as "we must return to faith in order to avert fascism". I tried to leave it passive, because, yes, it has to be real for it to matter. After all, hedonistic, selfish Christianity already exists!
Meant to skim this but couldn't put it down.
Isn't this a perfect summary of the millennial and gen Z experience? I think so: "the term Ratslosigkeit, an untranslatable word meaning roughly not knowing which way to turn, a cruel state of mind of the nineteenth century that many Germans have described with tragic eloquence. A gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values."
I have been wondering if our social depravity is picking up pace and showing signs of the same hedonistic weariness that Rome experienced. Language has certainly expanded to include taboo words I'd be beaten for saying in the 90's, and every streaming show hints at sex as if it's a requirement of every plot. Did Rome's depravity signal her barbarian defeat? If that's the case maybe we have a couple hundred years left. Selfishly, I'm hoping so.
You're mixing your foreign affairs with cosmic ones. It's the right way to 'understand' humanity, imo. Bravo.
Honestly, I'm kind of repulsed by it all. I look at our music, our series, our philosophy, and it's all just so unwise, so hedonistic, so selfish and individualistic, that I can't help but shake my head and mutter the "F" word from time to time. (That word, by the way, is "Fukuyama.")
Fukuyama? Tell me more.
Now that is a vulgar request to ask of a stranger ;-D
what exactly are you thinking of when referring to the “hedonistic weariness that Rome experienced”?
Mostly bread and games, but admittedly a small part of me still subscribes to Roman decadence.
Also, when you pay off a rival instead of fighting them, well it isn't what made you great, to say the least.
and yet Romanitas even after bread and circuses lasted longer than the entire American project to date …
A source of pessimism for me as well.
Hey, I thought I’d leave a comment.
I’m German and have lived in several countries over the years; for the past two years, I’ve been in Lithuania. Your point about the similarities with Weimar Germany really caught my attention.
I believe this also ties directly to the question of identity.
Even today, the way collective memory carries emotional complexity and the way we decide to let it shape our identity requires both honesty and acknowledgment. When we examine moral structures over time, we often see selective or double standards in moral decisions. These double standards can act as a kind of security mechanism within the moral framework. I wrote couple of essays about it.
A clear historical example is the Wilhelminian double standards: widespread hypocrisy or sanctimoniousness, especially around sexuality, morality, and social hierarchies. The ruling-class Herrenhierarchie manufactured propaganda that permeated society, reinforcing rigid, almost life-and-death distinctions between social and moral classes. Those patterns still influence how the wealthy and elite navigate hierarchy today.
What’s striking is how these elites often present themselves as a “self-legitimized” of there true core of their own identity.
For me, this points to something broader: we are living through a transitional phase marked by a deep deception of ourselves and of each other.
Your quotes from Malaparte remind me of Thomas Bernhard's writings that connect Nazism, declinist Catholicism, and bombing. His most run play (>26 performances), Eve of Retirement, is firmer than Malaparte, and I'd connect his themes with Pinter's later plays and Pinter's Nobel Prize speech. Also relevant (but less so) may be Zizek's writings on Christian Atheism, which try to recreate ties btwn secularism and earlier morality.
Heya, the bit about modern democracy made me think of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses; and then Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. I think both give us useful (if different) bits that can be added to your argument - and unfortunately, they both feel extraordinarily timely today (slight aside: one of my favourite things is seeing course outlines made by Arendt for her university classes, oh how I wish to have been in attendance). Great stuff, thank you!
The last decade and more I've been reading more and more of conservative and libertarian thinking, finding less and less to like. Conservatism lower-case c has always dominated. It may dominate this country as you see the New Deal rolled back along with civil rights of all kinds and open appeals not only to naked supremacy but invitations to enjoy cruelty and retribution for insults to the superior people. What is going to be fun as we liberals fall away and fall back is to watch the superior people fight over who is the most superior, those who have been reading German political philosophers or those who've been doing a lot of target practice.
You wish for the return of “a hard-charging belief in anything.” Yet you know that believers murder in droves; you cite the war in Ukraine yet somehow not the war in Gaza. Is it truly “belief in anything” that might help to right the ship, or is it belief in something more specific? Is it “belief” at all, or is it something deeper to which belief is mere ancillary?
Didn’t want to suggest that belief would prevent wars. Merely trying to nail down the roots of this phenomenon of barbarism. And, wars indeed hasten coarsening and shove societies towards barbarism. But it’s not that wars are barbarism.
It would be more correct to say that humans murder in droves.
I'm curious what you mean by something 'deeper than belief,' though.
Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to imply that believers are more likely to start wars or commit atrocities! Definitely a human thing in general.
As for deeper things, I was thinking of a few possible directions. One is that belief can be just one aspect of a social system that forms people in a particular (hypothetically not-barbaric) way. Practices and conventions and personal development strike me as being at least as important as belief, if we want to think about ways in which ideas adjacent to religion might help us.
Another possible direction is to ask what, in particular, belief might sometimes entail following. Damir’s piece has an implicit (and perhaps only partial) value system: he dislikes both decadence and barbarism. Punting to “belief” as the alternative is dodging the question of whether there is something actually worthwhile that decadence and barbarism might be compared to, and that one might try to move towards.
I’m phrasing myself cautiously; I personally do believe in something, but I’d take an uncertain person with a decently similar sense of direction over a “believer” with too much confidence in their goals to see the flaws in their thinking.
Well said. There's a lot of evangelical (the classic United States version) handwringing around social decline into decadence and barbarism as a result of losing the ritual and practice that Christian membership used to provide.
I tease Damir, because I'd argue Christianity is the contrast to barbarism, and he's beating around the bush with this 'belief' stuff. (Disappointing crusades, hundred years war aside, that deserves its own conversation and reconciliation)
I certainly agree with your last thought. It's a disappointment and struggle for me as a protestant to keep the virtue of humility front and center. If I have to deal with anyone, a humble seeker of the good and true is always better than any Master of Divinity student.
It may well be the contrast I'm actually driving towards John, but I'm not being explicit because I think it could also be broader, and therefore more useful to people. Or maybe Gemma's on to something: maybe I'm trying to avoid a full-on values system as a means of getting people to grapple with fallenness — barbarism as something we can recognize as inherent in us all. Arguably it's Rousseau's optimism about human nature that sets the Enlightenment on the course of unchecked individualism unto narcissism.
Well said, and a wiser approach, especially in this post-Christendom (for the West). I honestly don't know how other religions understand fallenness, presumably its important, with protestants it's a lynchpin.
The values system idea seems off to me, not that it's not what we're talking about, but as a full understanding of religion. Religion is belief, it's living in accord with some orthodoxy, but it's something more, too. It should be messy, full of mystery.
Writing as ethically exacting and morally serious as this comes along about as rarely as Halley's comet, so ... I wanna thank you, Damir - sincerely! - for giving us our fill until the next upstanding columnist lays it down sometime around 2100.
Yes, Western civilization has left us with quite the gaping void, hasn't it? And as Simone Weil said, all sin is an attempt to fill a void ... so in that respect, at least, the dynamic is exactly the same on both sides of the divide, whether you're talking about the hajduks or the onanists.
Which is to say, we're pretty much on the same page as to what the problem is, and in general agreement about the need for the "difficult commitments" of yore, but as for your attempt to propose a more viable alternative...? It's a hell of a lot better than the status quo, I'll give you that, but ... is it pragmatically within our reach? That, I'm not so sure of.
I'm aware of at least four brickbats that can be chucked at your argument. And, on the assumption that you have already realized the sincerity of my aim (as true as Costello's!), I'll go ahead and chuck 'em myself, and, afterwards, we can get together and see which of them have landed, and just how much of the resultant medical bill I'll have to foot...
My four biggest beefs are:
1. ... your succumbing to the conservative crank's crutch of dunking on Rousseau. It's a petty snipe, perhaps, but I do think you overstate the extent to which he still rules the minds of aspirant Jacobins on the American left, and you also miss the mark in attributing to him a largely populist legacy... PACE you and Sieyès, but Arendt landed closer to the truth when she declared him to be the prophet of the heart, and the main progenitor of the romantics in that his chief gripe about European culture was its perversion of savage man's primal integrity, over and above its stifling of the people's will. Whatever his influence on past revolutions, I suspect his greatest impact today isn't so much on the Democrats' "War on Misinformation" as it is on the tulpa-rolfing ennui of Tumblr goers, sex-bot humpers, and pseudo-radicals too disorganized to re-educate ANY-one, let alone themselves, but who nevertheless remain enchanted by meaningless mantras like "Il est interdit d'interdire!" because it seems to signal a return to some coveted, untamed state. So ... still a part of the problem, but, on the whole, much closer to the victims your WOC colleague Katherine Dee writes about than to a modern-day brown-shirted Maoist.
2. ... your conflation of "organized religion" with Christian resurrection... Put simply: Wuuuuh...? See, the thing that's always distinguished Christianity from its Abrahamic bosom-buds is that it has always been able to resurrect just fine without sweating the "organized" part of religion. From Lazarus to Christ Himself, Biblical resurrections have always centered on man, and not on mankind, per se; and the Pauline promise of the apocatastasis, or mankind's eventual submersion as a single body in Christ, can only be fulfilled by each believer fervently pursuing his own salvation, whether through prayer or by way of missionary work*. Hence why the Eucharist is never taken by the congregation as a whole, munching & sipping altogether, but by each congregant alone, munching & sipping one after another in a line before the priest... And, it's also why, if there's any cause for hope today, it's not the hope put forth by a specific sect, church, or denomination, but by those heroic individuals, both men and women, who dare to act contra mundum, challenging the godless by speaking in their own names and voices, instead of via the proxy of an idol (because, remember, the Christian church can ALSO be just as much an object of idol-worship as the Golden Calf was, or as were the many faces of Baal).
*here taken broadly to mean any public-facing religious act, and not just conversion.
3. ... your averral that faith's salve is its power to cool human passions: the cock-blocking "ought," I guess you could call it... I mean, yeah, that's one use of faith, and a totally valid one. Both repression and sublimation are necessary psychic devices for holding our libidos in check and keeping at bay those "evil energies" you rightfully ascribed to history's worst atrocities... But how realistic is it to try and order the kids who are coming of age today to silence their sex drive, when every one of us is being bombarded by the electrical equivalent of a 24/7 aphrodisiac? There's a reason why Catholicism has a bit of a pedophilia problem and Orthodoxy does not (and it's not just 'cuz we the betta half)... However much sense that forced celibacy amongst the clergy might have made in the Middle Ages, it's become abundantly clear that this is no longer a psychically sustainable tenet, within the hormone cyclotron of mass media. Institutionally speaking, there's just no stifling the amped-up passions of the post-electronic age - at least not without risking such malignancies that it can truly be said the cure is much worse than the sickness...
Make no mistake: we need MORE discipline, not less. But the real question is: TO WHAT ENDS do we put the excess, manic energy of our Digi-world? For those who can still repress, great! But I think the evidence plainly shows that REPRESSION NO LONGER SCALES, and there's no going back to a time when every self-respecting gentleman and lady could be counted on to "hold it all in." Unlike you, it seems, I don't view passion and religion as mutually incompatible. What's now missing is not emotional reserve but a common work ethic for channelling our passions towards more positive ends... And that's why I've come to believe that modern Christians have much more to learn from the antinomian fuckeries of Prince, than they do from the Pope or even from the Puritans under Jonathan Edwards. It's certainly proven to be a much better fit for me than the chastity ring, I'm-a tell you that.
4. And, lastly ... your whole premise that we are going back to barbarism, by labelling Weimar German youth and the Vance-guard as "young barbarians." R.G. Collingwood made the same claim - that fascists were barbarians - in his po-faced, sorites-stuffed snoozer, THE NEW LEVIATHAN, but - here, as there - I find it to be such a lazy, ad homin-ish distraction from what's actually at stake. Nothing's gained by drawing false parallels between the cruel crudities of our contemporary moralists and a pagan body like the Visigoths, because it's not the barbarians we have to fear... No, it's something far worse: Niebuhr's "bland fanatic," himself a descendant of Nietzsche's "cultivated philistine," both of whom gave rise to our own "pop Brahmin." What's their common denominator? The fact that they'd all protest loudly if you told them they'd just raped and pillaged an entire village, even if that's exactly what they did... They'd talk instead of "international democracy" or "racial purity," would deflect the accusation with talk of "collateral damage" or vent about the "lack of will" amongst the Afghans, Iraqis and Vietnamese, which kept us from winning wars on their behalf...
I'm talking, of course, about hypocrites, and a barbarian, at his best, ain't no hypocrite, but is, like any frank pagan, unabashed about his brutal nature. That's why, on one hand, you have someone like Miguel de Unamuno dropping the shocking assertion that progress usually comes from the barbarian, and, on the other, Chris Lasch declaring that an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a cultural Christian... Would that we WERE living in an age of barbarism! Alas, though, that barbaric rebellion you spoke of is neither wholly barbaric nor even much of a rebellion. All we've got, in this year of our BORG, are two sides of the same bastard coin, a society of sinners who are neither macho oppressors nor contemptible scumbags, but, instead, little more than a drab, debased delusion... It's like what Moses said when he came back from Sinai to find the Israelites out-Heroding Herod: "It is not the sound of the cry of mighty men, neither is it the sound of the cry of weak men; but it is the sound of sin that I hear" (Ex. 32:18).
... well, there ya go. There's my four big brickbats.
I thank you once more for continuing to be among the few online writers who are earnest in fulfilling your responsibilities as a public intellectual (Shadi Hamid, your comedy partner, being another one) ... and ... if you need me to chip in on the cost of IOP or occupational therapy, because of the injuries sustained from my projectile critiques, here's the number for my insurance ... and here, also, is my lawyer's phone... She's the one who holds the purse strings, you understand, and who will be more than happy to talk you through the basics of what I am legally obligated to cover, on account of the fact that YOU JUST GOT WRECKED, SON! What, whaaaaaaaat? Yeah, that's right... you heard me... Oh, snap! Yea-heaah, or isn't that right?
Seems like a stretch to compare what we're going through to the rise of fascism in Germany, but I get it. The Good War myth (per Slotkin) is all encompassing. People have that, Rome, maybe Vietnam and the Movement Myth to draw from, and so this is what we get.
The better historic analogy and precedent is probably the Gilded Age. Sky high rates of immigration and foreign born, urban machine politics and reconstruction excesses, plutocrats and growing wealth gaps and obscene displays of wealth, and what many perceive to be a fraying social order. And so there's a slow burn backlash - exclusion acts, moratoria on immigration, trade protectionism, a wave of vigilantism, and populist/reformist movements paired with political realignments. We get our Bryan and McKinley, Debs, Watson, Coughlin, TR, and Wilson - followed by a doubling down on "openness" and economic liberalism through Coolidge/Hoover, and then during the next big downturn in '29 ('73 being one of the original catalyzers) the dam breaks and we go with FDR.
Psycho-spiritually, you had a lot of the same anxieties you see today. Around IQ and HBD, vitalism, racial purity, and all sorts of crankery and woo - their theosophy and our effective altruists, their sanatoria and our protein loaders and fitness maximizers.
Aside from the vigilantism from 1890-1930 of ~2 lynchings per week, it seems like a really big stretch to compare it to what the Nazis were doing.
Just the yama part, then.
Thanks for the response!
You do wax hopeful at the end that a resurrection of Christianity is possible. I know by the numbers it is waning, but I see the evidence of Christianity everywhere; it’s certainly not dead.
Reason may not be the answer, but I don’t see how religion in general, or Christianity in particular, could be the answer to our barbarity, and I am not convinced that freedom from religion necessarily breeds the virulent barbarism we see today. I will admit that over the years I have increasingly become a realist and see humans as barbaric by nature, or at least easily capable of barbaric acts. Christianity has perpetrated barbarity as well as having been the inspiration and justification for it - the crusades and the inquisition, just to name two. Religion itself has never overcome our nature to be inhumane.
Obviously the human species has a capacity to reason, above other species. It may not be our first impulse, but we can cultivate it within ourselves. My defense of reason as a potential mitigating force is not that I eschew a religious perspective - I am religious, just not Christian - but I think we need to encourage the cultivation of reason as a way to encourage less virulence. We need to value it as a tool, value the heritage of The Enlightenment - it's given us many good ideals and helped turn the tide on some bad practices. It's not perfect because we're not perfect.
The Enlightenment did not kill God in my view. But The Enlightenment may have killed the omnipotent, authoritarian God - a God that has certainly inspired much barbarity. Certainly technological and scientific advances have demoted God and religion from their once exalted position. In my view, that’s a good thing. Because if God created us as the bible says, in his image, then he gave us reason. He gave us the ability to grow, expand, become better. I think we have to use all of the tools in the toolbox.
I think the descent part of this essay is spot-on. But religion is not going to be the counterpoint to this descent into narcissism, hedonism, and barbarism. Religion has already sold out to the prevailing problematic culture. The counterpoint, in my opinion, is coming from those who see what is required by the times: self-understanding, understanding of others, and compassionate action. This is G*dly, but it ain’t religious. Some of it might be located in traditionally religious circles. Most of it will not be found there. Homo sapiens must evolve, die, or lose its apex status.
I liked your analysis of where we are, but not your conclusion.
First of all, you're never going to get enough people to follow one religion, Christianity or otherwise. We live in a pluralistic society and, supposedly, we value that. Second, Christianity has had some really bloodthirsty periods in its history. That does not mean it would going forward, but no religion has fundamentally solved politics: religion is first and foremost spiritual, not political. If what you are proposing is a tool for social control, religion was somewhat effective in this way earlier in our history as a species, when communication between regions was far slower than it is now, but it was draconian in most cases, particularly toward women. I mean, The Crusades and The Inquisition, seriously.
We have the capacity to use reason, but it obviously does not come easy for us. Meeting in the middle (politically I am left but realize more and more that change will have to come from consensus as to what we value) and using our ability to reason, perhaps influenced by our spiritual morality, will be more effective than some sort of Christian revival.
I don't agree that the Enlightenment killed God - how can you kill God? It simply gave us a better way to find common ground that one religion cannot - a better, more humane tool for social control and cohesion. Religion is the personal, the Enlightenment is the Commons.
Leave aside the question of whether it is desirable, I’m not sure a return to religion is possible. I gesture at that at the end.
Similarly, I don’t think I’m making the case that religion breeds peace. I’m just suggesting that emancipation from religion may breed a pretty virulent kind of barbarism. So it’s a more cautionary tale about confidence in “progress”.
Especially confidence in “reason” as a progressive force. I think there’s a lot to be cautious about here.
Thanks for the response!
You do wax hopeful at the end that a resurrection of this faith is possible. I know by the numbers it is waning, but I see the evidence of Christianity everywhere; it’s certainly not dead.
Reason may not be the answer, but I don’t see how religion in general, or Christianity in particular, could be the answer to our barbarity - I just don't see how we have been emancipated from religion, Christianity or any other religion. I will admit that over the years I have increasingly become a realist and see humans as barbaric by nature, or at least easily capable of barbaric acts. Christianity has perpetrated barbarity as well as having been the inspiration and justification for it - the crusades and the inquisition, just to name two. Religion itself has never overcome our nature to be inhumane.
My defense of reason as a potential mitigating force is not that I eschew a religious perspective - I am religious, just not Christian - but I think we need to encourage the cultivation of reason. We need to value it as a tool, value the heritage of The Enlightenment. Perhaps I see us having been emancipated from reason, not religion. Perhaps we need to value both in equal measure, allowing the two to balance each other.
The Enlightenment did not kill God in my view. But The Enlightenment may have killed the omnipotent, authoritarian God - a God that has certainly inspired much barbarity. Certainly technological and scientific advances have demoted God and religion from their once exalted position. In my view, that’s a good thing. Because if God created us as the bible says, in his image, then he gave us reason. He gave us the ability to grow, expand, become better. I think we have to use all of the tools in the toolbox.
Ah, yes. Another absurd attempt to equate Trump with Nazis.
Go ahead. Preach to the choir. But have you noticed that your congregation is shrinking by the minute?
I got fed up with the Trump-hate years ago. But, some people thrive on hate.
It's certainly not an essay in praise of Trump, but it's hardly hateful. You might want to read more carefully.
That said, insofar as your handle is actually meaningful to you, you're the actual target of my polemic. So it's fine, don't bother reading more carefully if you don't want to.
Don't shoot the messenger.