Overcome Evil by Doing Good

Drawing on the Book of Proverbs, St. Paul offers a simple admonition to his readers:

“…if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Romans 12:20)

He then adds:

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It is a very simple statement. However, when anyone begins to suggest what that might look like, critics quickly begin to offer egregious examples that would ask us to bear the unbearable, with the inevitable conclusion: “Kill your enemies.” What is suggested, in effect, is that Christians should respond in the same way as any tyrant would, only a little less so. “Kill your enemies, but not so much.” (I use the term “kill” in this example only as the most extreme form of violence). A question: What is it about the Kingdom of God that gave Christ and the Apostles such a confidence in its non-violence?

Consider these verses:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” (Jn. 18:36)

And

“But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.” And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough.” (Lk. 22:38)

And

“And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matt. 26:52)

There is something of a mystery in Christ’s instruction to buy a sword. Many consider it simply a metaphorical way of saying that troubles are coming. Indeed, one of those two swords is drawn and does terrible damage to a man when Christ is arrested, earning a rebuke. I have always wondered if Peter (the one who wielded the sword) thought to himself, “But I thought He said bring a sword!” As it is, Christ restored and healed the ear of the injured man.

The key, I think, is found in Christ’s statement to Pilate that His Kingdom is not “of” this world. That does not mean that the Kingdom is located somewhere else. Rather, it means that His Kingdom’s source is not found within the things of this world. It is a sovereign act of God. As such, its reality is independent of our actions and will. There is nothing in the Kingdom of God that requires our swords (or even our words). It is heaven-breaking-into-our-world. It is unassailable.

This is the faith of the martyrs. The long history of the Church’s faithful who have gone to their deaths include many stories of terrible persecutions and tortures. They also include an abiding witness to an abiding sense that everything being done to them somehow misses the point. When Christ stood before Pilate, He was threatened with the might and power of Rome. “Don’t you know I have the power to release you or to kill you?” Human beings have no power over God. The Kingdom of God willingly enters into the suffering of this world, willingly bears shame, willingly embraces the weakness of the Cross. The martyrs acted as they did because their lives were not of this world. Christians should not live in this world thinking about a world somewhere else (heaven). Rather, Christians themselves are heaven in this world. It is that reality to which we bear witness (martyr means “witness”).

Modern nation states came into existence slowly, as one of the consequences of the Reformation. Some, like England, had a head start, inasmuch as it was partially defined by its shoreline. But most, like France and Germany, evolved more slowly. We imagine today’s modern states as though they were defined by blood and language. However, that is a fantasy, little older then the 19th century. Nationalism, sadly, was one of a number of romantic movements that served to replace the common life of the Church with romantic notions of lesser, tribal belongings.

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

I have noted, through the years, that the patriotism that inhabits the thoughts of many is a deeply protected notion, treated as a virtue in many circles. This often gives it an unexamined character, a set of feelings that do not come under scrutiny. Of course, there are other nation-based feelings and narratives, some of which are highly reactive to patriotism though they are driven as much by the passions and their own mythology. These are the sorts of passions that seem to have risen to a fever-pitch in the last decade or so, though they have been operative for a very long time.

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more. St. Paul goes so far as to say that our “citizenship [politeia] is in heaven.” The assumption of many is that so long as the citizenship of earth does not conflict with the citizenship of heaven, all is fine. I would suggest that the two are always in conflict for the simple reason that one is “from above” while the other is “from below,” in the sense captured in Christ’s “my kingdom is not of this world.” There is a conflict. We should not expect that the kingdoms of this world will serve as the instrument of the Kingdom of God. Such confusions have yielded sinful actions throughout the course of the Church’s history.

St. Paul notes in Romans 13 that the state “does not bear the sword in vain.” It has an appointed role in the restraint of evil. Such a role, however, is not the instrument of righteousness. It can, at best, create a measure of tranquility (cf. the Anaphora of St. Basil). The work of the Kingdom of God cannot be coerced, nor can it be the work of coercion. It is freely embraced, even as it alone is the source of true freedom.

My purpose in offering these observations is, if possible, to “dial down” passions surrounding our thoughts of the nation and politics in order to love properly and deeply what should be loved. That this is difficult, and at times confusing, is to be expected. We live in a culture in which the passions are marketed to us in an endless stream, carefully designed for the greatest effect. If these thoughts of mine help quiet the passions to some degree, then I will have done well. If, on the other hand, they have stirred reaction, then, forgive me and let it go.

If the Kingdom of God were a ship (an image sometimes used of the Church), then we should not be surprised when the seas become boisterous and the winds become contrary. Nor should we panic if we find that Christ is asleep in the back of the boat. His sleeping, indeed, should be a clue as to what the true nature of our situation might be. There are some who imagine that the work of the Kingdom can only be fulfilled once we’ve learned to control the winds and the seas. We fail to understand that they already obey the One who sleeps.

And so we come to overcoming evil by doing good. It is a common teaching in the Fathers that evil has no substance – it only exists as a parasite. All created things are good by nature. It is the misuse of the good that we label “evil.” To do good thus has the character of eternity. It is not lost or diminished with time. Christ said, “And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:42)

When the final account is given, the nations will not be named. Their wars and empires will pass into what is forgotten. However, the many cups of cold water and other such acts of goodness will abide. I could imagine such actions on the part of a nation, and there are probably plenty. They likely go unnoticed, or even derided as wasteful.

I think that our politics and patriotism want to measure the seas, where God is measuring cups.


Father Stephen Freeman is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.


Featured: Arrest of Christ, by Heinrich Hofmann; painted by 1858.


The Crisis of 2007: The Great Financial Capitalist Swindle

Despite the seismic crisis of 2007, a question persists that is likely to remain unanswered. Colin Crouch condensed it in the title of his 2011 book, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism: why did neoliberalism re-emerge stronger from the 2007 crisis, from which in fact it might have been expected to emerge, at the very least, weakened?

One plausible answer could be the following: the turbo-financial elites managed to make the crisis, for which they were mainly (if not exclusively) responsible, appear to have been caused by the inefficiencies of the public sector and by the Debt of the States. On this basis, by skillfully manipulating the consensus of public opinion, through the ever-zealous work performed by the intellectual clergy, the aforementioned elites managed to make the State itself—and, therefore, the Public—pay for the crisis: that is, they “generously” made wage-earners and pensioners pay for it, as if they had really been responsible for the failure of the financial system.

In this way, the capitalist system, with its asymmetrical social relationship based on bonds of Lordship and Servitude, has not limited itself to generating the poor as it has always done, but, evidently with the crisis, it forced them to subsidize the rich themselves through an authentic and genuine Economy of Swindle. Through it, it triggered concrete transfers of property and power to those who, from above, kept their resources intact and are in a position to manage credit. There is no image that clarifies the situation better than the one used by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook to title their study, The Winner-Take-All Society.

Incidentally, the fabula docet is that to assert—as the hedonistic singers of the free market paroxysmally do—that in the long run the economic system produces its own equilibrium constitutes a false position, since—as Hegel already pointed out—even the plague ceases at a given moment, but in the meantime hundreds of thousands are its victims. In addition to this argument in support of the need for political regulation of the wild beast of the market, Hegel mobilized another one: liberals make a profession of faith in individualism, but they are precisely the first to sacrifice the welfare of the individual on the altar of market power and economic equilibrium. They forget that it is not the market, as an abstract entity, but only the individual, as a particularity, who represents an end and who is the holder of rights.

In the context of the 2007 crisis, “Save the banks” was the new and indecent slogan repeated by the elites and, above all, by their politicians and intellectuals of reference. As if it were a new Aztec religion fed by human sacrifices, in the name of liberalism the resolution of all problems could wait, but the solemn call to help the banks in difficulties became the new categorical imperative to be obeyed immediately. And this was also thanks to the new imaginary spread urbi et orbi; an imaginary for which, basically, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (fiat profitus, pereat mundus).

According to a well-established practice that is fully inscribed in the modus operandi of ideology, the masters of discourse and of the media circus chose to invert reality; and attributed the responsibility for the crisis of private finances to the State, thus laying the necessary foundations to make it possible to attack it head-on and plunder it without restraint.

The storytelling, concocted by the anesthetists of consensus and by the administrators of the superstructures after 2007, can be summarized as follows: it was the increase of the Public Debt that caused the crisis, so it is fair and necessary to claim against the State. On the other hand, the cataclysms of speculative finance and fictitious capital should not be the subject of debate, almost as if they had never happened. Moreover, the “Public Debt theorem” proves to be functional to the neoliberal processes of de-sovereignization of the national State and the contextual simultaneous transfer of sovereignty from the State (and politics) to the banking system (and the economy). In the words of Mario Draghi, maximum exponent of the global class and protagonist—as president of the ECB—of the maneuvers referred to above, “a country loses sovereignty when the level of the Debt is such that any decision passes through the scrutiny of the markets, that is, of actors who do not vote but determine the processes.”

This situation, surrealistic to say the least, was on the other hand the palpable proof, as Dardot and Laval have suggested in Guerra alla democrazia, that in the framework of neoliberalism every obstacle becomes an opportunity, every collective tragedy a triumph for the ruling elite. The financial crisis was ridden to direct the offensive against the State and against wages, against the public and, in short, against the subaltern classes that live off their own labor.

This is also the quid proprium of the neoliberal order: to ensure that the Lords of Big Business enjoy the benefits of globalization without charge, often taking advantage of a tax system that tends to zero, where the losers of globalization—the “glebalized”—are the only ones who pay the bill on behalf of all, through the iniquitous transfer of the entire tax burden onto the shoulders of poor families and the impoverished middle classes. Neoliberalism, the supreme phase of the hegemony of the ruling classes and of the new spirit of capitalism, thus presents itself also in the form of a fanatical faith and a fundamentalist religion of the capitalist economy; a faith by virtue of which—in the triumph of a credo quia absurdum deprived of transcendence—the market is always right on principle, even when it is flagrantly wrong.

The fanatical faith of economic fundamentalism, coessential to the neoliberal order, is based on an ideological naturalization of mercantile exchange, elevated to the condition of an aprioric endowment of the human mind (a natural-eternal forma mentis) and, at the same time, to a natural relational practice among individuals, conceived in turn as free-trading atoms. If, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith already posed free exchange as a quid proprium of human nature (“no one has ever seen a dog make with another dog a deliberate and fair exchange of one bone for another bone”), Milton Friedman goes further. And he ventures to extend the activity of free exchange to the very foundation of human relations: “economic activity is by no means the only area of human life in which a complex and sophisticated structure arises as an unintended consequence of the cooperation of a large number of individuals, each pursuing his own interests.”

In this sense, the formula—among those preferred by neo-liberal discourse—”working to sustain the Public Debt” means, no more and no less, than working to pay usurious interests to the financial markets, depriving the real economy of those scarce residues of wealth that the financial markets have not yet managed to “dematerialize” and make their own. The States, deprived of their sovereign currency, are forced to pay very high interests for the loans obtained in the financial markets and this determines the uninterrupted growth of the Public Debt. This, and certainly not the excessive cost of the welfare State, is the real cause of the Public Debt, whose calculated increase is intended to annihilate, in perfect neo-liberal style, the residues of welfarism and public spending, favoring the complete privatization of the world of life.

Strictly speaking, what has been said above is hardly refutable proof of Ezra Pound’s assertion that “a nation that does not want to get into debt makes usurers rage,” as well as of the vital need for nationalization of the banks in order to reduce the public debt and free itself from the auri sacra fames of the financial markets. The case of Japan remains exemplary. It has a sovereign currency and, despite having a fairly high Public Debt, is not subject to the rapacious attacks of financial speculation. In fact, on the one hand, Japan is guaranteed by its own Central Bank, which acts as “lender of last resort” and, on the other hand, 95% of the Japanese Public Debt is in the hands of the Japanese and not of speculators.

From this also follows the governmental character of the crisis: to govern by means of a crisis—one of the cornerstones of the neoliberal raison—means to manage it as a weapon for the benefit of the ruling classes who live off capital and against the dominated classes who live off labor. In effect, there is no crisis that is not exploited by capital and its servile governments to accelerate and intensify the transformation of the economy for the benefit of the dominant classes, sweeping away all still existing limits and, therefore, specifically and gradually weakening the sphere of the Public and the State.

If neoliberalism not only does not implode but strengthens, even after the continuous catastrophes it generates, it is also, because it continually manages to change the world (in the capitalist sense, of course), adapting it to the demands of the market, and exercising (also in this case in a capitalist way, that is, for the benefit of the ruling class) the hegemony theorized by Gramsci: from the Cato Institute to the Heritage Foundation, from the Adam Smith Institute to the Institute of Economic Affairs, from the Mont Pelerin Society to the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, capitalism triumphs also thanks to its cultural hegemony, that is, through the domination combined with the consensus it manages to impose on all those who, truly, should have every interest in rebelling against it.


Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the IntellectualThe Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre ReturnsThis article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.


Featured: le Naufrage (Shipwreck), by Joseph Vernet; painted in 1772.


Drone Ideology for Volunteers

In the realm of ideology in Russia we have the following picture.

The state has done a lot to marginalize radical liberals. This process began in 2000 and took 24 years with several administrations. The influence of liberals on Russia’s ideology has steadily declined, but it is still very significant—primarily in culture, education, and science. Only liberals or those who do not receive clear and precise instructions from above can fight liberalism in such an uncertain and protracted manner.

At the same time, patriotism was growing steadily, but just as slowly—sometimes freezing on the same frame for a year or more. This was demanded by both our Crimea and the Special Military Operation (SMO). But even here the authorities acted as cautiously and uncertainly as they did with the dismantling of liberalism.

But new cadres had to be trained, and the main focus was the training of a special type—pure volunteers, ideological drones, managerial drones. This is how an interesting phenomenon emerged—a class of ideologically neutral statesmen oriented toward power and the managerial vertical as such.

At first, they tried to introduce a simulacrum of ideology, but then they gave up on that, too. Mass training of young and not so young volunteers of power has given birth to a whole new managerial class. It somewhat resembles the functioning of a computer or Artificial Intelligence. It does not matter what data the operator loads, what commands he gives. A computer is not supposed to reason. The main thing is that the algorithms work correctly.

Volunteers—carriers of zero-ideology—are now trained on an industrial scale. This is half good (they are not liberals), half bad (they are not patriots). The SMO and the war with the West (it is a long time coming, maybe forever) requires a further and rapid shift in the center of gravity toward an ideology of meaningful patriotism. Zero-ideology carriers are perfectly fine-tuned drones, and they are perfectly suited for this purpose—to process a patriotic program. But the operator has to hit the “enter” button. And the operator’s finger trembles. And the government volunteers are still processing what they have. For now—it is a testing ground and a laboratory. But it is time to get the program up and running.

But this principle was transferred to ideology, where such a model looks strange. An ideological class with zero ideology, a political drone. It is no longer liberal (minus-ideology), but not yet patriotic (plus-ideology).

At the same time, other neural networks are gradually forming in society and the nation—with a pronounced patriotic content. These are not zero-volunteers, but plus-volunteers—volunteers, heroes of the front and rear. The state stands on them. They create Victory, and therefore history. They are ruled by the spirit.

Zero-volunteers have nothing against patriots. But they have nothing for them, either. They have a different algorithm. It is time to unite these networks.

I hope that after the elections the authorities will hit the “enter” button to upload to society a full-fledged patriotic program, the general outlines of which are quite clearly outlined by the President, the decree on traditional values, the concept of foreign policy, etc. Plus-ideology, the foundations of patriotism are announced and outlined by the authorities. It is logical if their implementation starts in full force after the elections.

After all, it is time for us to start winning.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Featured: Golconde, by René Magritte; painted in 1953.


The Civilizational Approach

To effectively confront the West in the war of civilizations that Russia is already waging, we must take into account the hierarchy of plans.

The highest level is identity:

  • what is the identity of the enemy (who are we basically at war with?);
  • what is our own identity;
  • what is the identity of the other civilizational actors?

We have to start with such a civilizational map. And already at this level we encounter a problem: the enemy has penetrated so deeply into our own civilization that he has partially hijacked the control of meanings, mental structures to determine who is who—not only from outside Russia, but also from within it. Therefore, we need to start with clearing the mental field, the sovereignization of consciousness.

Here is the next problem: the so-called civilizational approach. The enemy has managed to impose on Russian socio-humanitarian science that the civilizational approach is either wrong, marginal, or optional. But. The rejection of the civilizational approach automatically means only one thing: full recognition of the universality of the paradigm of Western civilization and consent to external control of the consciousness of Russian society by those with whom we are at war.

In other words, anyone who questions the civilizational approach automatically becomes a foreign agent—in the truest sense. It does not matter whether this is intentional, foolish or out of inertia. But now it is only thus and no other way. Only a civilizational approach allows us to talk about a sovereign public consciousness, and thus about sovereign science and sovereign education.

This is the last call for Russian humanitarian science: either we rapidly move to the positions of the civilizational approach (Russia = sovereign civilization), or we write a letter of resignation. Sometimes the increase of scientific knowledge is achieved by subtraction, not addition—if we subtract nonsense, toxic algorithms, subversive epistemological strategies, in a word, the liberal virus of Westernism.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Featured: The Triumph of Civilization, by Jacques Reattu; painted ca. 1794-1798.


Arché and Montesquieu’s Principles

E principio oriuntur omnia ( Cicero, De re publica).

1.

In the Esprit des lois Montesquieu wrote “Having examined what are the laws of every government, let us now see those which are relative to its principle. Between the nature of government and its principle there is this difference: that it is its nature that makes it so, and its principle that makes it act. The one is its particular structure, the other the human passions that make it move.” The importance that the President à mortier attached to the “principle of government” was anticipated in Book I, when in illustrating the foundations of the laws of each people he writes, “They must be in harmony with the nature and principle of the government established, or intended to be established, whether forming it, as political laws do; or maintaining it, as civil laws do.”

To find the principle of each government, Montesquieu starts from the nature of it, and in particular who “exercises supreme power, and, secondly, how he can accomplish it,” and concludes the chapter thus, “I need nothing more to find the three principles of the above governments; they flow naturally from them. I will begin with the republican government and first speak of the democratic” of which he points to virtue as the principle. Immediately afterwards he explains why “A monarchical government or a despotic one does not need much probity to maintain or sustain itself. The force of the laws in the one, the arm of the prince always raised in the other, regulate or govern everything. But in a popular state an extra spring is needed, which is none other than virtue… for in a monarchy, where he who enforces the laws judges himself above them, virtue is needed to a lesser extent than in a popular government, where he who enforces the laws feels that he himself is subject to them, and will bear the burden of them.”

And, in the republics themselves, democracies need far more of it than aristocratic governments: “Greek politicians who lived in a popular government recognized virtue as the only force capable of sustaining it;” while “virtue is also necessary in aristocratic government, although it is not required there as absolutely… By nature of the constitution, it is therefore necessary for that body (the aristocracy, ed.) to possess virtue.” And this lesser virtue (because it is limited to the governing body) is moderation: “Moderation is therefore the soul of these governments; but that… which is founded on virtue, not on cowardice or laziness of mind.”

By contrast, in monarchy “the state lives independently of love of country, of the desire for true glory… of all those heroic virtues we find among the ancients… Laws take the place of these virtues, which are now useless… I am not at all unaware that virtuous princes are not rare, but I do say that it is very difficult that in a monarchy the people are so.” Thus, in monarchies the principle, the “gear” that makes the state work, is honor, because “ambition is dangerous, in a republic, but it has good effects in a monarchy: it gives it life, and it has the advantage of not being dangerous.” Finally, in a despotic government, “As in a republic, virtue is needed, and in a monarchy honor, so in despotic government fear is needed: virtue is not needed there, and honor would be dangerous. The prince’s immense power passes entirely into the hands of those in whom he confides… when in a despotic government the prince forgets for a moment to raise his hand, when he cannot annihilate in the twinkling of an eye those who hold the first places, all is lost… It is necessary therefore that the people be judged by the laws, and the great by the whim of the prince; that the head of the last among the subjects be secure, and that of the pashas always in danger.”

2.

In conclusion according to Montesquieu:

The principle (of the “form”) of government is the driving force that makes it act.

This principle is, to varying degrees, virtue; this must be possessed by those who govern: in democracies, by all citizens, in aristocracies by the optimates, in monarchies by the king. He does not write it, but even in despotic states the despot must have a glimmer of virtue (perhaps different). Honor and fear are feelings that belong to the subjects. In particular to the collaborators of the sovereigns.

The principle is necessary, because a body politic is composed of men, is a vital institution and cannot disregard what is likely to make men act and thus the institution. Laws are necessary, but not sufficient for the existence and vitality of the whole.
The principle is what “unifies” rulers and ruled: it affects the command/obedience relationship, and is at once a factor of integration and legitimacy.

Like the “classical” political thinkers, Montesquieu sees institutions made up of men, where some command and others obey: it is far from the French thinker to believe that a beautiful constitution, complete with moving enunciations of principles, and myriad implementing laws (equally moving) are enough to make a viable state. Laws are not enough: to constitute and preserve it requires the gear that makes them live. Indeed, between the laws and the principle (the gear), there must be consistency: it would be clueless to constitute a democratic government without a modicum of virtue, and even more so a despotic government without fear.
Virtue plays an extremely important role in this context, primarily because it recurs—even if not equally necessary for all—in the three non-despotic forms of government; and in this, Montesquieu harks back to ancient political thought, for which it was natural to link the fate and fortune of the polis to the virtue of the citizens; and not to the mere “goodness” of the laws. If, as Montesquieu writes in the opening of the Esprit des lois, “Laws… are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things; and, in this sense, all beings have their own laws: the gods, the animals, man,” from the very beginning of the work he fixes—so to speak—the relationship between existent and normative: in which the former determines the latter far more than the latter can do on the former.

In this sense, the principles of government are the indispensable gear for the community: which, not living by rules alone, even the best possible ones, must be based on a (general) principle that determines it to act. Because on the historical level—and not only—to exist means to act: and acting calls for mobilizing the human will(s); the Thomist rule, omne agens agit propter finem, applies, which, more than a century after Montesquieu, a great jurist like Jhering would identify in the connection between purpose and interest.

3.

Shortly after Montesquieu’s death, the figure of the legislateur, of the one (those) who gives (give) certain rules to the community, began to be emphasized; and of the same rules—fixed in laws—which, rather than being discovered by studying the “nature of things,” are the product (prevalent or exclusive) of the human will. It is this that gives laws to things, and not vice versa. The relationship between the existing and the normative begins to tilt in favor of the latter. Modern constitutions that are the fruit of human reason (of equity, justice, but in effect of will) are the most obvious fruit of this. That constitution which is not such if, as Thomas Paine wrote, you cannot put it in your pocket, written, the result of public deliberation, following (mostly) free and rational discussion. For a long time, however, the main links that anchored the normative to the existent, particularly to will and virtue in citizens, were not lost. Indeed, the French Revolution, and the Jacobins in particular, made virtue a necessary and primary element of the new political regime: a sign that the links to the real were still robust.

Later, as Ernst Forsthoff writes, “the doctrine of the state took a path that distanced it from human qualities, and consequently also from virtue. In Georg Jellinek’s work, which well represents the period at the turn of the century, this is no longer mentioned.”

Hence the later one “became a doctrine of the state without virtue.” Probably, indeed to follow Forsthoff surely, the whole thing was a consequence of legal positivism (broadly understood), whereby the doctrine of the state is the doctrine of its institutional and functional system, and prescinds from human qualities. In this we can also see a prevalence of “technical,” and, in particular “technical-normative” aspects; Carl Schmitt wrote that already clear in Machiavelli’s thought was the technical aspect of conquering and preserving power; but this technique did not prescind from either human qualities or human relations. Whereas contemporary normativistic “technique” implies doing without—or reducing to the minimum—the one and the other.

However, as Forsthoff writes, the success of positivism was such “that German law, neither before nor since, has ever again reached or maintained, in jurisdiction and administration, such a high level;” and this was possible in good part, thanks to the qualities (to the “virtues”) of the German professional bureaucracy, the result, in particular, of the alliance “between a historically based Enlightenment and the legacy of the Reformation,” whereby “this legal system, apparently stripped of all ethical reference and stuck to the purely technical plane, still had its own ethics, in that it was based on specific human virtues, without which it could not be understood.” Thus, to think that a state can stand on the strength of the goodness of laws alone is to make a partially true (and therefore partially false) statement. No “good constitution” can function well if it is not adapted to the objective situation and the existing real forces, in which the moral qualities (virtues) of those who govern, or rather exercise public functions (starting with voting), are included to a decisive extent.

4.

Forsthoff’s findings should also be updated according to what is thought—mostly—about in these years, in the late postwar period, which has become a (third) postwar (cold) period.

Nowadays, anyone who speaks of virtue would move to laughter (or a smile), and not only because of the unedifying spectacle offered by the ruling elites, but, even more, because no one thinks of virtue as a factor in sustaining the community, and democracy in the first place, anymore. He would be answered that good laws are enough, and he would be considered an oddball. But to the writer, and given the consideration accorded by Western thought to the necessary relationship between virtue and good institution, it seems bizarre to argue otherwise; and the first retort that comes to mind is the Tacitian corruptissima res publica, plurimae leges, on the other hand amply confirmed in Italy over the last half century. Secondly, if so many thinkers, from Plato to Aristotle, from Cicero to Machiavelli, from Montesquieu to Mably (to name a tiny fraction) have held the contrary, it is not clear why one would share the idea that a state needs only good laws and, above all, does not need a certain amount of virtue (and especially what experience of what political unity corroborates it).

To a large extent this is the outcome of the extreme phase of the functionalization and technicalization of law, the most coherent conception of which is legal neopositivism. A prerequisite (and general condition) of which is to conceive of the world as a universe of norms, where there are no persons (or subjects of law), but centers of imputation of legal relations; there are no hierarchies of men, but gradations of norms; not subjective rights, but norms to be applied; not the sovereign, but the Grundnorm, and so on in a consistent de-humanization (and de-concretization) of the worldview. The only human element remains the “knowledge of the jurist;” in which this conception is revealed as the ideology of a particular social group, of the officials of the decadent phase of the bourgeois rule of law.

In such a conception, everything that is “extra-normative” is not legal (and therefore irrelevant): at most it comes down to the appeal to “constitutional values.”

This seems to have the function of satisfying (at a minimum) the need to ground collective existence on something that is nonnormative anyway, and thus to “gain the ground of a recognized legitimacy” by going beyond mere legality. That is, it constitutes the exception to the mostly shared view (by jurists).

5.

In fact, the “classical” conception (within which to place Montesquieu’s theory of principles) was the answer to the question: when is order vital (in the first place) and just?

The answer—given more than two millennia of political reflection—combines “existential” and “factual” factors with others of a more properly “normative” and legal nature, with the former prevailing over the latter. Personal qualities, beliefs, legitimacy, authority constitute (but do not exhaust) its essential cornerstones.

If, on the other hand, one asks for an answer to the question of how one should correctly (validly) interpret a legal norm, and more generally how the jurist’s knowledge is to be attuned to the normative system—that is, a different question—and one with reduced content, the answer normativists give, by expunging from the horizon of the (practical) jurist any “factual” element, has its correctness. For which, however, as noted, particularly because of the formal character of such a theory of law (and the like), there exists (and does occur) the risk that “by reducing law to logical propositions disregarding their content, some piece of it too important to be neglected, or bracketed, is lost along the way, so to speak, just as a physical theory is exposed to the risk of neglecting some aspect of reality too important not to need to be explained. On the other hand, who can assure me that my model of knowledge of reality is truly coextensive with the reality I want to explain? In other words, who can assure me that my reasoning really explains everything I need to explain? Science risks being a set of propositions that, paradoxically, does not photograph the world, but itself; that is, the scientist risks seeing nothing but his own reasoning, and not the reality he wants to explain. “Truth” thus means only consistency to the starting assumptions, which, moreover, are unproven, and dissolves reference to reality, to explain which the “pure” scientist began to do science. We are facing a real implosion of the system.”

And this is precisely the point: by narrowing the problem of the order to that of the proper application of norms, one expunges from the legal horizon the main and determining elements, and in any case much of what is necessarily part of it. That is, both the aspect of the unity, action and cohesion of the social group, and that of the application of law (through organized coercion and legitimate violence); so normativism has been regarded by many as a legal gnoseology, and it is, because, consistently, it eliminates from the legal horizon everything that is “factual.”

Conversely, and in the line of classical political thought, we find (among others) the institutionalist jurists, who obviously take into consideration (maximally) the order and all those existential factors that condition and determine its form and action, with particular regard to the concrete situation.

Hauriou, who in Précis de droit constitutionnel repeatedly criticizes Kelsen, beginning with the error, which he stigmatizes, of assimilating “objective order to static order” and subordinating “strictly the dynamic to the static.” Whereas “what men call stability is not stillness, but the coordinated (d’ensemble) slow and uniform movement that lets a certain general form of things subsist.” To make sense of and understand it, Kelsen’s essentially static system, in which there is no place for human freedom, is wholly unsuitable.

Santi Romano with the constant attention he gave from his youth until shortly before his death to the problems of change, legitimation and crisis of the legal systems is, likewise, exemplary of a dynamic and vitalistic conception of law. Going back to Montequieu, he was very clear that a human community lives in history, in space and (also) in time: the same can be said of Hauriou and Romano, who have a sense of “two-dimensional” law.

Instead, a static system is, as it were, to paraphrase Marcuse, a one-dimensional right, since it takes no account of time—and consequently of history (as of so many other things).

In this sense Hauriou’s critique of “static” systems that convert into a contemplation of rules is penetrating.

6.

That being said, it is necessary to see what the concept of virtue was for Montesquieu and whether it is still necessary today:

“Virtue in a republic is a very simple thing. It is the love of the republic: it is a feeling and not a series of notions.”

However, given the equivocity of the term, Montesquieu since the avertissement to the Esprit des lois has been keen to define it, outlining its public and political and not private (i.e. “non-political”) character by specifying:

“What I call virtue in the republic is love of country… It is neither a moral nor a Christian virtue; it is political virtue; it is the gear that makes republican government act (mouvoir).”

Consistent with what Plato (Callicles’ thesis in the Gorgias) and Aristotle already held, political virtue is connoted by the citizen (civis), i.e., the public man, not the bonus paterfamilias, i.e., the private man: an essential distinction, maintained by philosophical thought and particularly Christian theology, from Luther to Bellarmine. And which, consistent with the general confusion of public and private, nowadays is often no longer understood, to the point that, to hear some crude demagogue, any good man (as long as privately honest) would suffice to lead a state. Which (not new, but often repeated) aroused Croce’s sarcasm, as of “the ideal that sings in the soul of all imbeciles.” Surely there is no need for that kind of private virtue: not that it spoils; but surely the state can exist and act even if sexual mores are relaxed and business mores not exactly adamantine.

Instead of the other, what Montesquieu called political virtue is felt to be needed, in proportion to how much it has been reduced for over fifty years.

How one feels the need for Montesquieu’s lesson on the principles of government as sentiments and as gears to make the state institution act. The contrary, much-repeated thesis that good rules (laws) are sufficient is flawed by (at least) three errors:

The first of which is the reduction of law to legal gnoseology, as a technique of applying norms to the concrete case. Appropriate to this conception is the criticism above that “some too important piece of it” is thus lost. Whereas law is essentially a system for regulating action. It is the orientation that gives human actions the decisive aspect for understanding the essence of law.

Second, and consequently, that rules are not enough: these can regulate, permit, command actions, but without ever neglecting that the “object” of them is human action.

And above all, finally, that in order to sustain the original legal phenomenon, that is, the institution, it is necessary to leverage (also) the feeling that makes “government act.”

A state that does not act, that does not leverage sentiment (i.e., principle) is a gangrenous institution: to exist, in history, means to act. Acting does not mean (only) enforcing rules, but above all having what in different terms of similar concepts has been called virtue, love of country, sense of state. Without which—or lacking which—the state falls or decays.

Of course, one can reply like Don Abbondio that virtue is like courage: if one does not have it, one cannot give it. But one must reply that a first step to (attempt to) have it is to think that it is necessary. That is, the opposite of current idols.


Teodoro Katte Klitsche de la Grange is an attorney in Rome and is the editor of the well-regarded and influential law journal Behemoth.


Featured: Allegory of Virtue and Vice, by Veronese; painted ca. 1581.


The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure On Creation

Then appeared the peripatetics, whose master and leader was Aristotle, and whom St. Bonaventure treats with some moderation during the calm period of the Commentary on the Sentences. At this time he is well aware that Aristotle taught the eternity of the world; now, as we shall see more fully later on, he considers that the doctrine of the eternity of the world is extremely hard to reconcile with that of creation; he does not believe then that Aristotle considered matter and form created by God out of nothing, even from all eternity: utrum autem posuerit materiam et formam factam de nihilo, hoc nescio; credo tamen quod non pervenit ad hoc.

Relying upon charitably interpreted texts, St. Bonaventure supposes that Aristotle considered the world as made by God from eternal elements. The philosopher’s error was therefore double, since it rested on the eternity of the elements and on ignorance of creation ex nihilo, but it had at least an advantage over Plato in not supposing that matter could ever have existed without its form. The error of Plato, which assumed God, matter and the idea in separation, seemed to him then more objectionable (multo vilior) than that of Aristotelianism which assumed God and a matter eternally perfected by its form: ideo et ipse etiam defecit licet minus quam alii. Later St. Bonaventure expresses harsher opinions about Aristotle, but yet he will never expressly deny that his God without ideas and without providence made the world eternally, of eternally existent matter and form.

So it clearly appears that those who of all philosophers came nearest to the truth yet failed to reach it. Now it is just there, at the precise point at which the skill of philosophers breaks down, that revelation comes to our aid, teaching us that all has been created and that things have been brought into being in the totality of what they are: ubi autem deficit philosophorum peritia, subvenit nobis sacrosancta Scriptura, quae dicit omnia esse creata, et secundum omne quod sunt in esse producta. Thus it is that the reason when better informed perceives and confirms with decisive arguments the truth that Scripture affirms.

For it is certain that the more a productive cause is primary and perfect in the order of being, the more profoundly its action penetrates its effects. In the case where the cause considered is the absolutely primary and perfect being, the action that it exercises must extend its efficacy to the total substance of each of its effects.

In other words, if God produces a thing, He can only produce it integrally, and His action necessarily engenders its constitutive principles, matter and form, at the same time as the compositum. Similarly, the less aid it requires for its action, the more noble and the more perfect is the agent. If then we consider the most perfect agent possible, his action must be completely sufficient in itself and must be exercised without recourse to any external aid. Now the case of God is exactly this; He is then capable, in Himself, of producing things without the help of pre-existing principles. On the other hand, God is perfectly simple; His essence is not divisible into particular beings; He does not extract things from Himself by dissecting His own substance; so He necessarily extracts them from nothing. In the same way, lastly, if God is truly perfect and absolute simplicity, He cannot act in a part of Himself; in each of His actions, it is His whole being that is concerned and comes into play; now the nature of the effect is necessarily proportioned to that of the cause; so just as the action of a being composed of matter and form can engender a form in a matter which is already present, so an absolutely simple being such as God can produce the integral being of a thing. Acting in all His being, His effect can only be being; the natural result then of the divine action is the bringing into existence of that which nothing preceded, except God and the void.

A second problem, and one inseparable from the foregoing, is the question when this integral production of beings can have taken place. The human reason, incapable of discovering with its own resources the true nature of the creative act, is similarly incapable of determining accurately the moment of creation. Either we know that creation consists in producing the very being of things, without employing any pre-existing matter, and so it is obvious that the world was created in time; or, on the contrary, we believe that the creator used in His work principles which were anterior to the world itself, and thus the created universe seems logically eternal. The kernel of St. Bonaventure’s argument on this point was always that there is a contradiction in terms in supposing that what is created out of nothing is not created in time. The idea of a universe created by God out of nothing and from all eternity, an idea which St. Thomas Aquinas considered logically possible, seemed to St. Bonaventure so glaring a contradiction that he could not imagine a philosopher so incompetent as to overlook it.

His thought, which he does not develop at length, although he states it with the greatest energy, seems here to follow St. Anselm very closely and to proceed from a vigorously literal interpretation of the formula ex nihilo. The particle ex, in fact, seems to him capable of only two interpretations. Either it designates a matter existing before the divine action, or it simply marks the starting point of this action, implies and establishes a relation of order, fixes an initial term anterior to the appearance of the world itself.

Now the word ex cannot signify a matter, for it here determines the word “nothing,” the very significance of which is absence of being, which could not therefore designate a material in which things could be shaped. It can only signify the starting point of the divine action and establish the initial term of a relation of anteriority and posteriority. It follows that to say that the world was created ex nihilo is either to say nothing or to say that the non-existence of the universe preceded the existence of the universe; that before there was nothing of the world and that only afterwards the world appeared; to suppose, in a word, the beginning of things in time and to deny their eternity.

Although this seems to have been the central and decisive argument in St. Bonaventure’s eyes, since it makes the eternity of a world created out of nothing seem contradictory, it is presented to us from the time of the Commentary on the Sentences flanked by other arguments of no less historical importance, based on the impossibility of the created infinite. It is easy to prove on this point how inaccurate it is to explain St. Bonaventure’s thought by his ignorance of the Aristotelianism of Albert and St. Thomas. For it is with the help of Aristotelian arguments and in opposition to Aristotle himself that he shows the impossibility of a world created from all eternity; better still he expressly refutes the thesis which St. Thomas was to believe supportable; St. Bonaventure therefore is fully aware of the position that he takes up, and he dismisses the teaching of which he is alleged to be ignorant on the ground of maturely considered principles.

In the first place, the eternity of the world contradicts the principle that it is impossible to add to the infinite; for if the world had no beginning, it has already experienced an infinite duration; now every new day which passes adds a unit to the infinite number of days already gone; the eternity of the world supposes therefore an infinite capable of being augmented. If it is objected that this infinite is so only, as it were, at one end, and that the number of days gone, infinite in the past, is finite in the present, nothing substantial is asserted. For it is evident that, if the world is eternal, it has already passed through an infinite number of solar revolutions and also that there are always twelve lunar revolutions to one solar; so that the moon would have accomplished a number of revolutions in excess of the infinite. So, even considering this infinite bounded by the present, and considering it infinite only where it really is so, in the past, we end by supposing a number larger than the infinite, which is absurd.

In the second place, the eternity of the world contradicts the principle that it is impossible to order an infinity of terms. All order, in fact, starts from a beginning, passes through a middle point and reaches an end. If then there is no first term there is no order; now if the duration of the world and therefore the revolutions of the stars had no beginning, their series would have had no first term and they would possess no order, which amounts to saying that in reality they do not in fact form a series and they do not precede or follow one another. But this the order of the days and seasons plainly proves to be false. This argument may seem sophistical from the Aristotelian and Thornist point of view.

If Aristotle declares that it is impossible to order an infinite series of terms, he refers to terms essentially ordered; in other words, he denies that a series of essences can be infinite if it is hierarchically ordered, if its existence or causality is conditioned from top to bottom, but he does not deny that a series of causes or of beings of the same degree can be infinite. For example, there is no progression to the infinite in the ascending series of the causes of local movement in terrestrial bodies, for superior movers are required, requiring in their turn an immobile first mover to account for them, but we can suppose without contradiction that this hierarchical system of moving causes exists and operates from all eternity, the displacement of each body being explained by a finite number of superior causes, but being preceded by an infinite number of causes of the same order. St. Bonaventure is not ignorant of this distinction and, if he does not accept it, it is not because he cannot grasp it, it is because it implies a state of the universe which is incompatible with his profoundest metaphysical tendencies. In St. Bonaventure’s Christian universe there is, in reality, no place for Aristotelian accident; his thought shrinks from supposing a series of causes accidentally ordered, that is to say, without order, without law and with its terms following one another at random.

Divine Providence must penetrate the universe down to its smallest details; it does not then account only for causal series, but also for those of succession. The root of the matter is that St. Bonaventure’s Christian universe differs from the pagan universe of Aristotle in that it has a history; every celestial revolution, instead of following indifferently an infinity of identical revolutions, coincides with the appearance of unique events, each of which has its place fixed in the grand drama which unfolds itself between the Creation of the world and the Last Judgment. Every day, every hour even, forms part of a series which is ruled by a certain order and of which Divine Providence knows the whole reason; si dicas quod statum ordinis non necesse est ponere nisi in his quae ordinantur secundum ordinem causalitatis, quia in causis necessaria est status, quaero quare non in aliis? St. Bonaventure refuses to admit not only causes but also events accidentally ordered.

The third property of the infinite which is irreconcilable with the eternity of the world is that the infinite cannot be bridged; now if the universe had no beginning, an infinite number of celestial revolutions must have taken place, and therefore the present day could not have been reached. If it is objected, with St. Thomas Aquinas, [Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I . 46, 2 , per tot., where St. Bonaventure’s arguments are discussed point by point: ad 1 and 2 against his interpretation of ex nihilo; ad 6 against the argument “infinita impossible est pertransiri“; ad 7 against the impossibility of an infinite series of accidentally ordered causes; ad 8 against the actually realized infinity of immortal souls]—that to bridge a distance it must be traversed from one extremity to the other, and that, in consequence, one must start from an initial point which in this case is lacking, we shall answer: starting from the present day, we must necessarily be able to fix a day infinitely anterior to it, or else we cannot fix any one; if no anterior day precedes the present day by an infinite duration, then all the anterior days precede it by a finite duration and therefore the duration of the world had a beginning; if, on the contrary, we can fix an anterior day infinitely removed from the present day, we ask whether the day immediately posterior to that one is infinitely removed from the present day or whether it is not. If it is not infinitely removed from it, neither is the preceding one, for the duration which separates them is finite. So if it is infinitely removed from it, we ask the same question about the third day, the fourth, and so on ad infinitum; the present day will not then be further removed from the first than from any of the others, which amounts to saying that one of these days will not precede another, and that they will consequently be all occurring at the same time.

A fourth proposition incompatible with the eternity of the world is that the infinite cannot be understood by a finite faculty. Now to say that the world had no beginning is to say that the finite can understand the infinite. It is generally admitted that God is infinitely powerful and that all else is finite; it will be admitted further, with Aristotle, that every celestial movement implies a finite Intelligence to produce it or, at least, to know it; no doubt it will be allowed, lastly, that a pure Intelligence can forget nothing. If then we suppose that this Intelligence has already determined or simply known an infinity of celestial revolutions, since it has forgotten none of them, it necessarily possesses today the actual knowledge of an infinity of memories. And if it is objected that it can know in a single idea this infinity of celestial revolutions which are all similar to one another, we reply that it does not know these revolutions only, but their effects also, which are diverse and infinite, so that actual knowledge of the infinite must necessarily be attributed to a finite Intelligence.

The fifth and last impossibility which St. Bonaventure brings forward against the eternity of the world is the coexistence of an infinite number of given beings at one and the same time. The world has been made for man, for there is nothing in the universe which is not in some way related to him; it cannot have ever existed therefore without men since it would have had no reason for existing; now man lives only in finite time; if then the world exists from all eternity, there must have existed an infinite number of men. But there are as many rational souls as there are men; therefore there has been an infinity of souls. Now these souls are naturally immortal; if then an infinity of souls has existed, there exists an infinity of them in actuality also, which we have already declared impossible. And the evasions which are attempted in order to escape this error are worse than the error itself. Some suppose metempsychosis, so that a finite number of souls could pass through different bodies during an infinite time, a hypothesis irreconcilable with the principle that each form is the proper and unique act of a determined matter. Others suppose, on the contrary, that a single intellect exists for the whole human race, a still graver confusion, since it involves the suppression of individual souls, of last ends and of immortality. [This objection seems very strong to St. Thomas Aquinas and he hardly sees how the supporters of the eternity of the world can meet it, unless by supposing that the world has always existed, like the unchangeable bodies or the eternal Intelligences, but unlike corruptible beings such as the human species. Cf. Summa theologica, ad 8].

1938.


Featured: Saint Bonaventure, by Claude François; painted ca. 1655.


O, Sister! On The Nature Of Tyranny & The Resistance Of Schoolmen

Besides conveying personal sentiments to a most precious person, this letter is a pivot between my memoir, An Excess Of Love, and the finale of this triptych concerning nudism, family rearing, and education, Pearls Before Swine. It is a distillation of dynamics which attend The Problem, namely the lateness of the hour, the appropriate response of the republic to the occupation, and the sexual shift which must immediately attend the resistance if the good seeds yet sown are to bear fruit.

Introduction: Rumbles From The Goldfish

Spring ‘24

O, Sister!, Ya, Shaqiqa!,

The time of the hobbyist has passed. There is much work to do and the hour is late.

Any number of people have followed and follow the development of Apocatastasis Institute this decade of glory. I see the statistics on the school’s website and newsletters, I read the correspondence we get, I am flagged down by men about town – most of whom believe I am mad – to speak about the Institute.

The numbers of these things are healthy enough and regular enough to know that if my work is lonely, it is the loneliness of a goldfish in a bowl. But for all the eyeballs the Institute draws, I don’t know how many of the yoes I am still on speaking terms with. I did not make this cold situation, their women did, but that is besides the point.

As you know, I’ve two works out this spring; one on my time in ‘Rounds About Danbury on Holy Saturday, An Excess Of Love, and the other concerning naturism and child rearing on St. Anthony’s Day, Pearls Before Swine. Those are polemical works as soon as they are artistic; they are meant to provoke as soon as they are meant to inform. Patrick Pearse asked Thomas Clarke how to speak at Glasnevin. “Make it hot as hell,” the old jailbird said. “Throw discretion to the winds.” So have I, though even on a good day you’d never say I was the prudent sort. Before these two literary clouds burst, however, a rumble of thunder. I thought it worthwhile here to sketch in miniature the situation and principles which background both coming works; and I thought to do so to those who have been so patient to one so odd: to the Chosen Lady and to her children.

In this we walk a tightrope. Herein we must comprehend a tyranny of massive dimensions and subtle complexity, make allowances for people’s duty of state and ignorant complicity in The Problem, critique us putzers for our incompetence heretofore, and for all these handicaps we must sketch the appropriate response; and we must do all this in brief.

Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming: The Problem

The enormity of The Problem is a daunting thing. Its mass invites one to say with John The Revelator, “Who can make war on the beast?” The vanquishing of this thing has been my sole professional and personal focus for twenty years.

We might bog down in an hundred places when trying to comprehend what exactly is The Problem. It is really quite simple, though. “The Problem” is a catchall for the parasitic social combinations which have arisen in each and all areas of society (i.e., educational, economical, religious, political, telephonic, artistic, etc). These combinations prey on their hosts to the misery and impoverishment of their victims. This situation has obtained because a queer perpetual motion machine has developed. It has been made to develop by wicked men with wicked ends.

The Problem has engineered a system with two lines which meet in a node. On the one it has finessed a culture of child rearing and formal education which primes a man to be a lifelong victim – perhaps a sucker – for The Problem. On the other node, as The Problem is energetic (or “spiritual”), The Problem has equally finessed a culture where the most promising of its chattel – for we are all but livestock for this system – will be enlisted to be the arms and ears and eyes of this selfsame oppression.

The node where these things meet is the child. It is the education of the child which will largely decide if he will be a saint or a parasite in later years. The soul and heart and the mind of the child is the battlefield. The Problem knows this. Do we?

The Nature of the Occupation

Tyranny is but a spirit. If it is to hove into men it needs arms and legs. What is different with our tyranny is that it has so successfully made those it has conquered believe they are free. Nothing in my historical knowledge offers a parallel to this success, to convince a nation of shackled surfs they are the freest beings in the history of Man. We walk down the street and see a society whose each storefront, bank, and civil office sits upon the republic as a conquering army – and this isn’t polemical, their own legal system is clear on this point (you may start with the Lieber Code) – and we are bid believe these enemy combinations mean us well and are us.

The nature of the occupation is such that decade by decade it takes millions of little boys and girls and turns them into its pining servants. It is hard to believe, Ya Shaqiqa, but banks turn couples out of the home they raised their families in, the state sends CPS agents to scare young mothers to vaccinate their babbies, and police pigs pull over women and children to shake them down on the side of the road. Astaghfirullah! I cannot imagine such things, but I am told they happen very close to home.

Now it is true that all decent mankind would gladly disembowel themselves before being found in the costume of a banker, a CPS lackey, or a police pig, but we are faced with the reality that The Problem hasn’t the slightest difficulty enlisting willing accomplices into their tyranny by the millions each year. How has The Problem done this? By subtly inclining each and every aspect of pedagogy in its favor.

It is the bounden duty of parents and teachers to instill such an ethic into youth that they would never entertain going over to the enemy to staff their systems of oppression. The republic fails every time a youth grows up to become a landlord, police pig, ghost writer, attorney, AMA doctor, or CPS eunuch; every time any of the offices of oppression are staffed with those who were once little boys and girls.

Every work in the class, and every moment with the family, must build the contrary spirit; the spirit of holiness, charity, and freedom.

Iron Sobriety

The months contemporary to this letter’s composition have seen the savaging of the Palestinians in the worst fitna in eighty years of crimes done them. I saw a bombed up little girl in hospital; she only had one arm. She said her limbs had gone to heaven before her. I saw a father amputate the leg of his maiden daughter on their kitchen table. I’ve seen again and again the Yahudi telling refugees to flee to “safe zones” only for their AI targeting system – named “The Gospel” – to blow the families to smithereens. And I’ve watched this happen while American Christians have snickered, and yawned, and egged on the colonists and their rabbis.

Mark my words, this level of violence will be used on all non-hackers the world over in due course. Palestine is but one open air testing ground of the archons. This violence is the natural conclusion of The Problem if left unchecked. Always does this reality background my every word and work; and when you wonder why I do strange things and say hard words, O Sister, it is because I know the iron sobriety of what is coming.

In the face of this overwhelming tyranny we must be patient in our daily duty. Our trials are nothing compared to what the Palestinians have known, but we ought to be prepared to feel their chains in due course. Part of the tyranny is provoking the helpless. I have seen the Yahudi stealing the bicycles of children only to throw them in dumpsters, and I have seen them dacking old men in front of their grandkids. There is nothing the abused can do in their slavery but move on. We must always brace ourselves for the patience of such a situation. Sabr, sabr, sabr; patience, patience, patience.

Our sorts are not serious people. We dick around with half-baked ideas and slogans, and flake out the first time drama or fear is dangled before our nose. (B’Zeus, look at how the Connecticut munafiqun have treated me all these years, and me the best friend they ever had.) When our children are double and triple amputees, and when we haven’t eaten in five days, and when white phosphorus is sprinkling down, and burning our faces and flesh down to the bone, perhaps our sorts will stop playing games. When that day comes, Apocatastasis Institute will not seem so strange to people; on that day they will see what I was trying to head off. And should it not come, is there not wisdom in living each day as if it’s your last?

The Solution

Some years ago I wrote in The Trotsky Train, “Only when there’s stability to society, when men own their capital, when they memorize the poetry of the land, when local musical compositions and books proliferate, when the churches are packed each morning, standing room only, for Lauds, and the same twice over for Sunday Mass, then the scholar can take a cigarette break, but only for a minute before he’s back at it again. It is your work, it is my work. There is your end [telos] to education, there is your wealth, there is your success.” Strangely enough, it was rather favorable religious sentiments like this which caused the church rats of ‘Round Abouts Danbury to run me out on a rail. This has always been the program of Apocatastasis Institute.

The hope to scotch The Problem is, as it has always been, the youth. Here we do not praise them as The World does, for their vapid qualities, their vices, and the ease with which they can be separated from their money. We praise the youth for what God saw in Daniel and Apostle John, St. Lawrence and Claire Crockett; we praise them for their gaiety and idealism, their passion and their purity. God has given the talents, it merely remains for pedagoges to keep these virtues from being strangled out of them.

The Headwinds

Four gales and five roar in the face of educational and social reform. In no particular order they are the dominance of visual media over written/oral culture, the absence of living examples to model our efforts on, our double-minded mien, the nesting of present Christianity within the bourgeoisie, and the feminine spirit out of order.

The shift in the last hundred years from a text-based to a visual society has brought with it many social changes. One of these is that abstract ideas become increasingly difficult for people to comprehend. It’s tangential to this letter, but more than anything else this is why there has been such a falling away from conventional religion since World War II; people literally cannot imagine abstract ideas like grace, God, or salvation any longer. Or look at that naked lecture I gave; people were so caught up with the visual novelty they never stopped to hear what I was talking about. What was it I was talking about?

Anyway, this difficulty to grasp abstraction isn’t a matter of native intelligence but of mental muscles which have been left go to seed. All that has kept school attendance so robust these last decades was social-cum-economic pressure to do so. Now that that economic incentive has been found wanting, we see interest in formal education rapidly recede. And into this declining interest and rising suspicion of high schools and colleges comes Apocatastasis Institute. What timing! B’Moses, if it was raining soup John Coleman’d be out there with a fork.

Next we see that, having grasped The Problem, the lot of us have no living models to form our response on. We are trying to revive familial, religious, social, and economic cultures from books and blogs. This necessarily produces clunky and incomplete results.

Another headwind we breast is our double-minded mien. We both hate this system, or at least we comprehend certain failures of the present order, and we want to fit into it. Do you remember that panel you so kindly invited me to? As the event was winding down I raised the question as to what society homeschooling was forming. I’ll never forget the looks on the women’s faces; it was clear the question had never occurred to them. They had no concept of the social aspect of formal learning.

This raises the next theme which will be so prominent in my coming writings, the futility of Christianity nesting in the middle class. Here there is very much an overlap with the previous point about our being double-minded, for the principles of Christ are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. The split of affections between those who want grace and respectability, those who want God and mammon, those who want the Beatitudes and barratry, are the reason why St. Esau’s high school failed, and the reason which has fundamentally recessed each parental tantrum I have weathered these twenty years.

We finally get to the most furious gale and the metatrend of An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine, the feminine energy out of line. This is the gorilla in the room. However it is we describe our worldviews – different on a thousand particulars, O Kind One, but marvelously the same – our people are really just as afflicted by the same dominant feminine energy we associate with other sectors of society. Until this is put into line no social reform will last.

Duties Of State

Like all competent criminal and parasitic enterprises, The Problem has carefully fostered our complicity in our slavery. The vampire will have his prey invite him in; the street gang will compromise each new member in criminality; prions will hijack a host for its own ends. We have put the noose around our neck because everything from the cradle has suggested it to us.

Attending any invention of this complicity is overwhelming guilt. It is a spurious guilt for it is the “guilt” of a duped man. There is in fact no guilt, but The Problem must make their victim believe there is. There is in truth only one way a man can be guilty after learning he has been taken in by The Problem: that he continues the ways and days of Jahiliyyah after he knows the truth.

Emotional intelligence is sorely neglected in family rearing, formal education, and the workaday world, and the neglect of so vital an aspect of life has consequences. One of the consequences of this pseudo-guilt is that people lock up in defense.

Told that they damaged their child in one bogus John Rockerfeller medical procedure or another, they continue passing down trauma rather than admit the error theretofore; told they enslaved their child in a LEGAL NAME which will rob and reeve his every piece of property, which will put him under the galling yoke of the Bar Association, for the remainder of his days, they continue with birth certs; told they wasted the childhood of their offspring in an educational system designed to form workers hungry for strangers’ smiles and frowns, they continue. Only here is culpability, only here is guilt. As Oscar says, “He who sins a second time wakes a dead soul to pain/ And makes it stain it spotty shroud, and makes it bleed again.”

Still and all, every allowance must be made not only to salve the conscience of the abused but to make allowance for various compromises too. Not all men have the same duty of state, and we must never forget we are under an occupation. The resistance of a single man to The Problem is different from the resistance of a mother; the resistance of the able-bodied is different from the resistance of the so-called disabled; the resistance of a child is different from the resistance of an old couple. The nature of opposition is different based on circumstance, the spirit is the same. Only a broad, catholic (sic), and masculine spirit will be able to instill and marshall this sentiment properly for the liberation of the people.

This too is a fine line. Men no longer read for regular lengthy periods, so men do not have the mental muscles to grasp nuance. People cannot grasp our situation, a crisis which speaks gently to those used, abused, and complicit with The Problem; roughly to the active partisans of The Problem; and impatiently with pretended foes of this abuse whose incompetence has stalled out proper resistance. There is no nuance, and so people fall into us vs. them, black and white, thinking. One of the first casualties in such an environment is humor, at least the good sort. Our masters think in grays, in complexity, and that is why we are in slavery and they are not.

Sabr: The Generational Nature Of The Resistance

O Sister, the Solution is simple: preserve the natural virtues of youth – gaiety, idealism, passion, and purity – in the student until death; titanic is the vision and patience to effect this. The Problem has aligned the entirety of its social institutions to killing or co-opting these very things, all the soon to make an adulted slave. To nurture the above virtues into later life we need to scotch trauma, cultivate the four wealths, and be a fulcrum of unity.

Everything in this order is designed to traumatize men. From conception to burial the life of man on this plantation is one compounded hurt after another. I do not speak of the natural slings and arrows of this valley of tears but the carefully fostered hurts designed into our child rearing behaviors, and those of afteryears.

It was as clear as clear can be that the response of families last June and October vis-a-vis the nudist aspect of Apocatastasis’ work was triggering a great deal of trauma in those individuals which had nothing to do with me or the school. I mean in Pearls Before Swine to advocate for naturism in the classroom, family sleeping and bathing, and related health approaches which will diffuse or altogether do an end-run around designed hurts. How the devils of evil suspicion roared – or rather, texted – their filthy insinuations at – or rather, about – me. Apocatastasis Institute will exercise and heal those possessed harpies yet.

And what was the subject of that nude talk I gave in Manhattan, the one all the dusty Karens were clucking about with their innuendo? Vulnerability and mortality. It is really only in vulnerability that an high trust society can develop; it is only in consciousness of our mortality that we can be grateful. Let the classroom be such a wholesome training ground.

O Kind One, to end trauma only brings one to the mark; it only brings one to the starting gate of life; it only brings one from the red, as the capitalists say, to $0. An healthy society needs to be rich in four things if they are to be sane. They must be rich in spiritual, cultural, social, and economic capital, and they must be ranked in this order, if they are to be lasting. The religious bounty of the community must be great; each man’s cultural knowledge, contribution, and engagement ought to be robust; our interpersonal comportment must always be in honor, and our social trust must be of a high level; and if a man must waste his time in commerce, at least let each and all own the means of his livelihood. How will we do this? By instilling these sentiments and training in his schooldays.

Finally, it falls to pedagogues and schools to form the fulcrum of unity in society. Stimulated by telephonic media, our society is fragmenting into a thousand pissy bubbles. Whilst stroking the egos of the partisans this only serves The Problem, for a people must be divided if they are to be conquered. After the church, the school is the place where a common ground may be cultivated free of factionalism and denominalization. Alas, I’m afraid the Church is no longer interested in any social role beyond pocketing checks from the DNC, so it falls to schoolmen alone to serve this social end.

Barefoot & Happy

Many moons ago, long before Apocatastasis, and long before even Nancy, before the saints ran my patient hide off from St. Esau’s, I saw a vision of what education could be. I saw a sight of barefoot teachers and learners allowed to live their vocations sans meddlers. O Good Sister, I cannot say our educational interaction has been perfect, muscha, but it has been as perfect as this vale of tears will allow. You and your dear husband come as close as I can hope to that oldsome vision: vulnerable lot we, we’re trying to make sense of this crazy life, and to milk the classroom for this end. Thank you.

Hark! A Voice like Thunder Spake

The men must rise at this hour. I do not say they must rise in physical force, for – should The Problem persist – that is a duty which obliges a future generation. (Arrah, it falls to us to rear this generation.) No, ours is not the generation capable of the gun. I say all healthy men and communities are those who can handle the gun; it is an altogether different matter whether they ought to do this.

Save for the shining example of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan, if the Muslims – a spiritually, familiarly, physically, and culturally healthier bunch than we – were unable to physically check The Problem in two decades of immortal and heroic struggle, there is no way the men of America will. Unlike the robust Musslemen, we North Americans are intoxicated, fat, estrogenated, sexually dissipated, and fragmented into an hundred political and a thousand religious parties.

So how must men rise? They must rise in leadership. The most pressing area where they are to do this is in religion, for The Problem is really a spiritual sickness; where grace, sacraments, and charity recede, like a tired, sugared, stressed body, The Problem comes in like a cold.

On the heels of a masculine religious revival, men are to rise intellectually; the working man as soon as the bourgeois, the Hottentot as soon as the stockjobber. The most immediate area where intellectual leadership bids us to labor is in formal education.

Querelle des Dames

You said I burned bridges. That is a dangerous metaphor to one so vain as I, for it is too tempting to make a comparison with Horatius! (It is Lent and I must resist temptation.) But let us stick with that analogy nonetheless, I burn bridges. So I speak bluntly if I speak at all: women ought now cede instructional roles in all educational modalities towards students aged at- or after puberty. Let us honor what good they have done, particularly in homeschooling, and show them the door. They have done some good yes; now let us magnify their labors, and to do this there must be a sexual changing of the guard.

The reality is that alternative education has stalled out for fifty years because it is almost completely a feminine enterprise, and it is not given to women to see beyond their family concerns. At this point men must lead in alternative education or the whole enterprise should stop wasting everyone’s time and fold up. As it stands, The Problem which alt ed-ers apprehend, and the educational Solution which will dismantle The Problem, cannot be shouldered by women. They have had half a century to prove themselves and they have stalled out at a kitchen table.

How loath I am to say this. In their diapers and in their heels, I have loved the daughters of the republic as they are, something like a sister or a daughter. Surely every little girl was once a snowflake in heaven. From their sundressed car seats to their seven year old sandaled feet, from their chokered necks and sixth grade scuffed knees to their prom rigouts and blushing smiles, I have gone out of my way to not so much as shake their hands. More times than not I cannot bring myself to look into their eyes, so fair are they. And horndog I, don’t I put the souls and virtues of Rachel Corrie and Israa Jaabis and Donna Mcguire on blast like none other, and don’t I hope my daughters will be strong as they were strong?

Yet for two decades I have watched formal education strangled by the feminine spirit. I saw St. Esau’s high school destroyed by menstrual rags (see, An Excess Of Love), and I have seen Apocatastasis Institute hampered again and again by the same (see, Pearls Before Swine). I was content for many years to cover their nakedness, to excuse the shortcomings which always attend women in the classroom. I said The Problem was big and that we needed each and all hands on deck were we to instantiate The Solution. I do not say that now, for I’ve seen again and again the unmoored feminine energy degrade our time in the class, waste our resources, and stall out in a stunted grasp of The Problem and The Solution.

In the essays to come I did not want to shove against the feminine energy as forcefully as I did, but the behavior of those Connecticut broads last year forced my hand. I have seen white trash behavior from that bunch, but last year was beyond the bounds. It is clear that sort is a liability to everything they profess. I love what they profess, and so I have shoved back against those liabilities. They were drunk, but not with wine; they staggered, but not with strong drink. Perhaps my writings will cause them to sober up.

The End Of The Matter

I thought it worthwhile to condense for you those major principles which background my coming works, An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine. Besides, these are the assumptions I take into those dinnerly conversations which are such a welcome break from the administrative duties which so obsess my days of late. I imagine that I should become persona non grata when my projects are published, but we must grasp the sobriety of the moment and the weight of The Problem. If there must be a Cato in Carthage let it be me; let me sit in the ashes and rubble to make my point to the world. And if men will say I am mad after those essays drop, they at least won’t say that I lied as their teachers lied, that I was frivolous as their parents were frivolous, or that I sat around when there was work to be done.

You in your way, Shaqiqa, and I in mine, must keep our heads about us as we reestablish formal education on a free, holy, and agentic footing; and whilst instilling the durability of youthful virtues in afteryears, let us both continue being gay, idealistic, passionate, and pure.

Always children we, Sister,

I kiss your head, and your feet, and your hands,


John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideasand is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at it website.


Featured: Gust of Wind, by Jean-François Millet; painted ca. 1872.


Leibniz’s The Theodicy, or the Dystopia of a World without Tears

Leibniz’s theodicy, according to which, our world is the best it can be has often been mocked by progress-mongers like Voltaire. How, indeed, can we justify the existence of a good God and a harmonious world when, on the contrary, the latter contains so many misfortunes? This question, less heard than it might seem, lies at the heart of the works of Dostoevsky and Aldous Huxley, who question the truly utopian nature of a society without tears. Would not a world without tribulations be a world deprived of freedom and poetry?

In The Theodicy, the philosopher Leibniz sought to demonstrate that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” a claim that earned him much ridicule, starting with Voltaire. In Candide, Voltaire ironized the naïveté of Leibnizian optimism through the character of Pangloss, who repeats at every turn “everything’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” How could anyone believe that the best of all possible worlds existed, given the wars and epidemics, the misery and death? For Voltaire, the world cannot be said to be the best it can be as long as the question of Evil remains.

“One day, all will be well, that is our hope / All is well today, that is the illusion.” In these verses, written after the Lisbon earthquake in November 1755, a catastrophe that claimed between 50,000 and 70,000 lives, Voltaire reaffirmed the idea that is at the heart of the Enlightenment: the perfectibility of the human race, the march of progress towards a world free of “useless pain,” towards a “Christianity without tears,” to quote Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. To get there, we must, like Candide, “cultivate our own garden,” working to establish human happiness here on earth rather than in the next world. Yet Leibniz is not blissfully optimistic, nor is he blind to suffering or injustice. Voltaire pretends not to have understood Leibniz’s idea that Evil is necessary for the Best. “It is true that we can imagine possible worlds without sin or misfortune, and we could make novels and utopias out of them… but these same worlds would be much inferior in goodness to our own,” comments Leibniz in his The Theodicy. These utopias, these novels, are what we find in the writings of Aldous Huxley and Dostoyevsky.

Towards a Christianity without Tears

Indeed, we can reread Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece Brave New World as a hermeneutic of this controversy between Leibnizian and Voltairian ideas. From this perspective, the title translated into French [Le Meilleur des mondes ] is perhaps more meaningful than the original Brave New World. The novel, undoubtedly less Manichean than it appears (less so than George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, to which it is often compared), deals with the establishment of an earthly Jerusalem, a system that rationally defines human happiness.

Moreover, Huxley does not dispute the eutopic character of Fordian civilization, i.e., its happiness. The new world state he has imagined truly brings happiness to mankind. Its Controller, Mustapha Mond, affirms: “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off, they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death.” The happiness Voltaire had hoped for has finally arrived. But this “never grandiose” happiness can only be established at the price of renouncing “high art,” freedom, nobility, heroism, poetry, danger, sin, in a word, Shakespeare, everything that, for the Controller, is merely “overcompensations for misery.” For the Controller, if Edmund, the character in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, had known Fordian civilization, he would undoubtedly have renounced his tragic and grandiose destiny for a seat in an inflatable armchair, a sexual partner and the harmless drug Soma.

As a counterpoint to this end-of-history civilization, a reserve of savages, as if placed in a jar, bears witness for the new man to what the free world was, the world before its rationalization. Here, animality confronts sterilization. Misery, old age, solitude, cruelty and whipping still reign on the Reservation. This world may seem crueler than the Fordist World State, but contrary to what the Controller thinks, Edmund may not give up his destiny. John, the savage who lived on the Reservation, has known anguish and tears. He has known Lisbon, he has found Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is worth Lisbon to him. For Othello, he goes so far as to “[claim] the right to be unhappy” from the Controller. In his view, the best of all worlds is not one that “[gets rid of] everything unpleasant”, but one that “[learns] to live with it”. The best of all worlds is one of nobility rather than ease. For the savage, “Othello is better than those feelies.” No Othello without passion, no passion without suffering. Here is Leibniz: a world without unhappiness would not be as good as ours.

Is Shakespeare Worth Children’s Suffering?

The question, then, is no longer, as Dostoyevsky thought, whether Shakespeare is worth a pair of boots [“The question that divides us all boils down to this: which is prettier, Shakespeare or a pair of boots?”—The Demons]—the answer is all too familiar—but, as Huxley wrote, whether Shakespeare is worth “the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” If Shakespeare is worth the unhappiness, then let us affirm with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. If not, let us swallow that blue Soma pill they are handing us.

It’ is the same Cornelian dilemma that defeats Ivan’s reason in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. On the one hand, Ivan revolts against the Leibnizian idea that a greater good can justify an evil. Nothing, for Ivan, not even the perfect happiness of all, “higher harmony” or Truth justifies the tears of a single child. Nothing great or beautiful can come of children’s suffering, only disgust and rejection. Who can remain insensitive to the terrible account he gives of this little girl whipped and trampled every day, forced by her own parents to eat her own excrement, beating her chest and calling for help from a “Good God” who never comes? Or the boy who was fed to the dogs in front of his mother? Ivan refuses to allow this “absurdity” to promise a better plan, unless the loving God the little girl invokes is no better than Job’s cruel, vengeful God.

On the other hand, Ivan also refuses the Soma, the “earthly bread” that the terrible figure of the Inquisitor—whom he invented to solve the problem of evil—offers man in exchange for his freedom. To make man happy, to “lighten his burden with love,” the Grand Inquisitor, like Mustapha Mond, is ready to renounce his own happiness and salvation [The Controller smiled. “That’s how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness. Other people’s—not mine”]. Ivan has guessed the earthly consequences of establishing Voltaire’s City: any attempt to rid the world of its misery and suffering can only lead to an even more absurd materialistic tyranny, whether consumerist, as in Huxley, or socialist, as professed in 19th-century Russia. The Grand Inquisitor is none other than the counterfeit double of the good shepherd he faces; his caricature who treats humanity not as a flock where each sheep has a priceless and promising value, but as mere cattle. Ivan recognizes the devil in the Inquisitor.

Take Up Your Cross…

In the naïveté of his twenty-three years, Ivan was full of love for life, that “enchanted cup” in which he “[became] intoxicated with tenderness” before heroism, the ideal and the “tender shoots of spring.” He wanted to live, “even in spite of logic,” without looking for meaning in his life. Yet he cannot help it—Ivan just does not know how to live; he is not Dimitri, his brother, the figure of the pure savage. [Dimitri, rather than Shakespeare, quotes the poets Goethe: “Man, be noble!” or Schiller: “Turn chaos into suns,” but all from the same impulse]. Though he loses his faith, he does not believe salvation is possible without God. Though an atheist, he has none of the cynicism of Rakitin or Chigalev in The Demons. If heavenly happiness disgusts him as long as a single child experiences hell here below, earthly happiness is even more repugnant to him if it comes at the price of human stupidity.

To deprive man of his freedom, even if it is for his own good, or to grant it to him, even if it means that he will abuse it and make his children suffer, is always too high a price for Ivan, who is incapable of simply relying on God, like his younger brother Alyosha, who, although frightened for a moment by his elder brother’s words, answers, like John in Brave New World: “I want to suffer.” Alyosha does not know how to respond to Ivan’s science, but he does know how to forgive, and retains faith in a God who became incarnate to share our pain and misfortune. In Brave New World, the Bible is hidden from men, locked away with Shakespeare. But “if we drive God from the earth, we’ll meet him underground!” exclaims Dostoyevsky’s Dimitri, whose soul is resurrected when he is condemned to the mines. A tragic hymn to the God of joy rises from the underground ruins of Lisbon, and Leibniz lends his voice to it: “And Jesus wept” (John 11: 35). There is no Christianity without tears.


Jean Chamaillet studied history at the University of Angers.


Featured: The Bridge in-curve, by Grace Cossington Smith; painted in 1930.


A Philosophy of War by Henri Hude

The English edition of A Philosophy of War, by the French philosopher, Henri-Paul Hude, has just been published. We are happy to bring you an excerpt from this very important and timely book.

What is war today? To answer this question, we can no longer rely on notions of war elaborated in various classic works, because we are faced with a new problem—how to save humankind from annihilation in a total world war involving weapons of mass destruction. The simplest answer is to establish a “Leviathan,” whose promise and project is straight forward: cancel all powers except one, which will be universal and absolute, and start a war without end against all free powers and all liberties. This way eventually you will get peace forever. But can Leviathan actually deliver on this promise? And peace at what cost, because Leviathan demands absolute and unlimited power over the entire human race? It is this problem that Philosophy of War lays out in all its chilling detail. Is there another solution that can bring political and cultural peace to the world? Indeed, there is, and this book next details a very clear path, one that also ensures that we do not become enslaved by Leviathan. Nations, and their “wisdoms” (that is, “religions”) can unite as peace becomes possible. If you love liberty and desire peace, then this book is for you.

Please consider supporting the work of Professor Hude by purchasing a copy of the book.

I was twenty years old and suffocating at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, often just called “Ulm” because of its location on the rue d’Ulm. There, Marxism lay heavy and it was oppressive. But there was an exchange program with Amherst College, in Massachusetts. Seizing the opportunity, I fled to America. On the flight over, I listened to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” In America I breathed free. I enrolled in a course on the Cold War (even then!). But I was not a diligent student. I meditated, read, wrote, reflected, contemplated and prayed. I was happy. France is my mother. America was my first love.

I spent a year at Amherst, as a teaching assistant in French, in what was then called the Department of Romance Languages, at the top of the hill, next to the great library, which was so precious to me, since I also had to return to the Sorbonne with a demanding piece of work on the status of logic in William of Ockham.

Next to the library was a memorial, which looked over a particularly beautiful view of the forest below that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nature has never moved me more than in its autumnal glory in New England. Large stone parallelepipeds were arranged in a sober, solemn semicircle. Names of battles were engraved on them. I always sat on the one that read, “Normandy.”

Another memory comes to me, with particular intensity, one day, when we came to revisit the D-Day landing beaches. Our sons were swimming in Omaha Beach. They were playing, splashing and shouting with joy. It was life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. I kept an eye on them. But I was thinking of your sons of long ago.

When I arrived in the United States, my mind was in a fog. At Ulm, my first “caiman” [slang for a supervising tutor who resembles an allegator because he devours your time, your freedom] had been the philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the pontiffs of French Theory. From the outset, our relationship was atrocious. I dumped him, but was left with a choice between two other tutors, a half-mad Nietzschean and the famous Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. I made the rational choice, though I soon realized that I had fallen out of the pan and into the fire. Good God! Between French Theory, Marx and the Antichrist, where to go? I went to America, thanks to my English tutor.

I am a citizen, a philosopher of action. The practical is my element. I abhor idle questions. I love knowledge, not sterile erudition. For me, man is the decision-making animal. But to decide, you have to see things clearly and live in the real world. What I encountered in the United States was reality. When I landed in Boston, I was intellectually cataracted. I knew the world existed, but I saw everything through a kind of fog; I could not really see that it existed for real. I knew there was a God, but that was even less clear. Between God and me, a wall. Among you Americans, the veil dissipated, my lens cleared. After much reflection, one winter’s day, at dusk, after the rain, I left Crossett, where I shared an apartment with three truly excellent roommates, and, walking aimlessly, stopping suddenly, in the light of a street lamp, I admired the damp bark of a birch tree, its tender green beneath the brilliant white, hemmed in black. I was finally in the world and the world was here. Later, the wall fell, too.

By the time I left the States, my mind was at rest. There is nothing like a year of freedom, in a free country. For America was then a free country: a well-possessed middle class, powerful industry, a functioning political constitution, a decent culture, both classical and original. Infinitely less ideology than in Europe. A serene harmony between religion and freedom. Common sense and natural fairness. Free discussion between convinced and civilized people. Opportunities for all. A shaken but still substantial moral consensus. You could feel that something was beginning to sour, but the mood was still excellent, compared to the fetid atmosphere I had left behind.

On the plane ride back, I again listened to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. But I was now returning, strengthened, to my Europe that was slashed by wars, revolutions, ideologies, totalitarianism and absurd atheism. The America from which I returned was more like the Old World, but not frozen or hardened, rather preserved alive and modernized, like an eighteenth-century Europe that had evolved without trauma, highly civilized, without anti-religious fanaticism. Is it all over? Does that America no longer exist? Must America also be a heartbreak for me?

If it does not find both reason and God, the USA will have a war and it will lose it. It will remain a great nation, like France after Napoleon and his excesses. As for Europe, alas, I wonder if there will be any of it left.

****

Finally, the question for the USA, which I am taking the liberty of asking, in publishing this book, is quite simply: “Have you decided to be Leviathan?” And the second is its sequel: “Or will you decide, on the contrary, to make us dream again?”

****

Let us take a closer look at Leviathan’s prerogatives. Leviathan will have at its disposal all national armed forces, which will have become international mobile gendarmerie squadrons; the nations themselves having become mere territorial administrative divisions within the state. This unique and rigorous organization will prevent the proliferation and dissemination of weapons.

Armed groups outside the world’s public forces shall all be classified as terrorists. National independence, local autonomy, freedom of association and individual freedom will no longer be relevant. Given the level of risk, the precautionary principle will demand that all citizens and groups be considered potential terrorists and placed under continual surveillance. Every opponent of Leviathan becomes an irresponsible, reckless person; a madman, an insurgent, a terrorist, a criminal, because mankind can only choose between (1) War or (2) Leviathan politics (Leviathan’s continual, universal and irresistible action of force, constitutive and conservative).

Leviathan is the solution to the problem of real Absolute War, but on condition that all claims to freedom, all claims to natural rights, are repressed. This repression is the essence of Leviathan’s policy. It is indeed a war against any plurality that might be reborn—against peoples and nations, against individuals, groups, families, against all freedoms. Through this heroic, titanic act of force, Leviathan, a single, total state, unjustly threatened by the deaf hatred of all, but indifferent, free and resolute, sure of its right to absolute power, will impose itself on all, not without the consent of all, and truly at the call of all. It thus shall force them all to total disarmament (military, political, legal, technical, physical, moral and intellectual). From what was a chaos of nations and individuals in mortal danger, it shall make a single world people, no longer terrified, but reassured by their partly happy, partly angry submission to absolute world power. Barring a profound cultural change, such is our future.

To preserve humankind’s right to survival, Leviathan will neutralize any threat, even preventively, in a discretionary manner. It will generalize and trivialize the anti-terrorist practice of targeted assassination, but not only against individuals, also against human groups.

The Leviathan State shall remain a Republic, unique and universal. There will still be a social pact. This pact will be made between every terrified individual on Earth and the unique Leviathan, endowed with absolute power, spiritual as well as temporal, whose sole law shall be public salvation. It shall be the very reason and free will of every individual on Earth.

To be strong enough, Leviathan shall remain concentrated. It must include only the wealthy and educated elite—and only them—provided they adhere to Leviathan’s policies. They are the ones who will benefit from medical progress. What will be the relationship between the rich and the rest? “The relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for the future relationship between superhumans and humans.” No doubt this is why the culture of powerlessness talks so much about animal rights and promotes vegetarian eating. Inferior individuals will be reassured to know that they will not end up as corned beef.

Excluded from sovereignty will be the people, and above all the middle classes, if there are any left. These masses shall be deprived of political and economic rights. This deprivation shall be ensured by biocratic surveillance, repression and prevention—including genetic augmentation or diminution, remote brain control and regular intake of various prescribed drugs/medication. Elections could probably continue without much inconvenience, but we shall need to be sure that their outcome will not endanger Leviathan. The anxious fear of death and war, and the culture of powerlessness, will allow us to associate a reassuring servitude with a happy awareness of security and freedom.

Analysis of the Leviathan inevitably has the whiff of a “conspiracy theory.” Let us say a few words about this. What we call “conspiracism” lies at the crossroads of (i) a hypercritical philosophical tradition, (ii) the new postmodern class struggle and (iii) the historical dynamic tending towards the realization of Leviathan.

A) Philosophical conspiracy is central to the constitution of modern and postmodern critical reason. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud set out to reveal or denounce the occult interests, material or impulsive, unconscious or masked, that pull all the strings in our individual or social lives. More radically, this conspiracism goes back to Descartes. Its major feature is “doubt,” the basis of philosophical modernity, which remains inoperative without the introduction of the “Evil Genius,” a hidden, fictitious or mysterious power which, in its power and malignity “has employed all its industry to deceive me.” But then,

B) why do modern and postmodern elites hate “conspiracy?” For the same reasons that Descartes reserved the use of modern, critical reason for a thinking, conservative elite. If everyone began to doubt everything in morality, law, history, religion and, above all, politics, there would be revolution, communism or anarchy. Postmodern enlightened elites do not hate hypercritical (and therefore conspiratorial, in the philosophical sense of the word) reason, but since they have disrupted certain social equilibria and renewed the class struggle, they do fear revolution, if the use of criticism does not remain their monopoly, or were insufficiently controlled. Globalization, for example, would then be the object of a more or less Marxist critique. Marxism has long accustomed minds to seeing ideologies as the masks of powers and their means of domination. In line with this idea, conspiracy theorists (especially in long-developed countries) see in the praise of globalization an ideology at the service of elites and capital against people and labor. Elements A) and B) converge as follows:

C) with the dynamics of the Leviathan, which unfolds by virtue of a rather impersonal and involuntary logic, which surpasses all those who pride themselves on creating it. The elites believe, often in good faith, that Leviathan is the solution, even if they have reservations about one aspect or another. Leviathan will undoubtedly favor the elites, but their privileges will serve the general interest, and the people are quite irresponsible when they oppose it. Their populist demagogues will be potential terrorists. The people, who do not see it that way, think like George Orwell and attribute historical dynamics to the psychotic will to power of monstrous and perverse elites, from whom it is always legitimate and rational to expect the worst.

In summary, the term “conspiracy” is somewhat contradictory, as it tends to disqualify a political critique of globalization in the name of a modern or postmodern reason that is nonetheless philosophically conspiratorial. It is also a source of confusion, because it mixes relatively classic and timeless political issues (such as the tensions between oligarchy and democracy) with the problematic of Leviathan, specific to the hypertechnical age.Let us now complete our analysis of Leviathan. Under its empire, war can only exist between Power and each individual or group, large or small, potentially delinquent or rebellious. This war, if well waged, will be reduced to a reassuring political and cultural police action, as extensive as necessary, but conducted with discretion—and to a gendarmerie or special forces action, or secret political police, against all attempts at secession or sedition (liberation). This war will be permanent and without end, just as the fight against the underworld is for the police.

The social pact implies adherence to the politics of Leviathan (its constituent war). The freedom of the social pact exists authentically as unconditional adherence to global security totalitarianism, which has become the only reasonable regime imaginable. And all rational liberals have finally rallied to enlightened despotism.

Leviathan will not afford, especially in just a few decades’ time, to let a single lone wolf slip through its net, even for a moment. One would be enough to destroy everything. Universal control shall therefore be preventive. Surveillance shall be continuous, focusing not only on outward appearances, but also on everything that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as brain waves and hormonal flows. Anything that is not authorized must be prohibited under the most severe penalties.

Leviathan will control everything. Attempt and intent will be punished as much as action. A sci-fi movie like Minority Report is a pretty good approximation. As it is impossible to take the slightest risk of recidivism, extra-judicial elimination is the only conceivable measure against any untimely exercise of freedom. But Leviathan will be worry-free. With technical progress, death is no more than an instantaneous, painless, non-tragic and unannounced obliteration. Public opinion will just believe it to be a natural death.

It is in Leviathan’s interest to make people believe that war is an inevitable effect of the unchecked ecological crisis, since this would be the cause of a global food crisis, leading to a furious struggle by all for the means of subsistence. In the final analysis, this crisis is itself the effect of human proliferation. Peace therefore will require that Leviathan have the right to regulate demographics and impose appropriate morality—libertarian or rigorist as the case may be—to ensure that the set numbers are respected. Aldous Huxley understood that the reproduction of the species is too serious a matter to be left to the freedom of individuals. Here again, a science-fiction film like Gattaca provides a pretty good approximation. “The love of servitude cannot be established except as a result of… a greatly improved technique of suggestion… a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers.” Demographic and eugenic totalitarianism, as well as the most imperious sexual moralism (lax or rigorous, depending on what social utility requires), will be therefore indispensable to social and political control, barring major cultural change—and this (it should be noted) irrespective of anything one might reasonably think on the subjects of demography and ecology. All growth is incompatible with totalitarianism, without which there can be no true Leviathan, and therefore no guaranteed world peace.

****


Artists as Intellectuals?

In a society like ours, of consumption, opulent for the few, whose god is the market, the image has replaced the concept. We stopped reading to look, even when we rarely see one.

And so artists, actors, singers, announcers and TV hosts have replaced intellectuals.

This replacement comes from a deeper one; when intellectuals, especially after the French Revolution, came to replace philosophers. It is true that philosophers continued to exist, but the general tone of these last two centuries marks their public disappearance.

Progressivism, that infantile disease of social democracy, is characterized by assuming the vanguard as a method and not as a struggle, as was the case with the old socialism. The old newspaper La Vanguardia still exists in Barcelona.

The vanguard as a method means that for the progressive it is necessary to be, against all odds, always on the crest of the wave. Always ahead; in the vanguard of ideas, fashions, uses, customs and attitudes.

The progressive man always places himself in the temporal ecstasy of the future, neither the present, much less the past, has any significance for him, and if it does, it is always in function of the future. He is not interested in the ethos of the historical Nation, and even goes against this historical-cultural character. And this is so, because the progressive is his own project. He is always installed in the future because he has adopted the avant-garde as his method. No one and nothing can be in front of him, otherwise he would cease to be progressive. This explains why the progressive cannot give himself a project of country or nation because it would be placed in front of him, which implies and creates a contradiction.

And as no one can give what he does not have, the progressive cannot give himself nor give us a political project because he himself is his political project.

The progressive man, being the one who says yes to every novelty that is proposed to him, finds in artists his intellectuals. Today, in our consumer society where images have replaced concepts, we find that artists are, in the end, those who translate concepts into images. And the formation of the progressive consists in that, in a succession of truncated images of reality. The homo festivus, the emblematic figure of progressivism, of which thinkers such as Philippe Murray or Agulló speak, finds in the artist his ideologist.

The artist frees him both from the effort of reading (a habit that is irremissibly lost) and from the concrete world. The progressive does not want to know but only to be informed. He is greedy for novelties. And the world is “his world” and he lives in the glass bell of the old neighborhood stores where the flies (the people and their problems) cannot enter.

Porteño progressives live in Puerto Madero, not in Parque Patricios.

The tactic of the progressive governments is to transform the people into “the public;” that is, into a consuming public, with which the people cease to be the main political agent of any community, to cede that protagonism to the mass media, as ideologists of the masses, and to the artists, as ideologists of their own elites.

This is a mechanism that works at two levels: a) in the mass media, hundreds of journalists and broadcasters, those loquacious cultural illiterates, according to Paul Feyerabend’s (1924-1994) apt expression, tell us what we should do and how we should think. They are the messengers of Heidegger’s “anonymous one” that through the dictator “is,” says, thinks, works, dresses, eats, plunges us into improper existence; b) through artists as translators of concepts into images in theaters and cinemas and for a more restricted public with greater purchasing power: for those who are satisfied with the system.

The artist fulfills his ideological function within progressivism because he sings the infinite themes of vindication: gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia, adoption of children by homosexuals, consumption of marijuana and cocaine, the fight against imperialism, the defense of indigenism, immigrants, the reduction of sentences for criminals, a nod to marginality and a long etcetera. But he never sings about the insecurity in the streets, prostitution, the sale of children, pedophile tourism, the lack of employment, the increasing murder and robbery of people, gambling for money, etc. No, that is not what Mastroiani’s film talks about. In short, he does not see the sufferings of society but its joys.

The artist as an actor represents all those plays where political correctness is represented. And in this sense, as Vittorio Messori says, in the first place is to denigrate the Church, to criticize the social order, the bourgeois virtues of moderation, modesty, thrift, cleanliness, fidelity, diligence, reasonableness, making the apology of their opposites.

There is no actor who does not rend his clothes talking about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, although no one represents the Christian or gypsy women in those same concentration camps.

Thus, if they represent Heidegger as a Nazi and Stalin as a master of humanity. The Pope always as an executioner and the nuns as perverts, but the moneylenders as needy and the pimps as liberators. No more depictions of the Merchant of Venice, nor of Martel’s La Bolsa. The conductor who dares to touch Wagner is excommunicated by the thought police of Jewish aesthetics in classical music.

In the local order, if they represent Martin Fierro, they remove the payada and duel with Moreno. General Belgrano is portrayed as a doctor. Perón as a bourgeois and Evita as a revolutionary. Even when the emblematic figure of every actor is Che Guevara.

All the theatrical hermeneutics is penetrated by psychoanalysis tinged by the logic of Freud and his hundreds of disciples. Logic that is resolved in the rescue of the “other” but to transform him into “the same,” because in the heart of this logic “the other,” like Jehovah for Abraham, is lived as a threat; and that is why in the supposed rescue I have to transform him into “the same.”

The artist is educated in difference; we see it in his outlandish clothing and behavior. He thinks and looks different but his product ends up being one more element for the homogenizing cohesion of all differences and otherness. He is one more agent of cultural globalization.

The pluralism preached and represented ends up in the apology of the sweet totalitarianism of the social democracies that reduce our identity to that of all equally.

Finally, the political mechanism that is at the base of this dissolution of the other, as the distinct, the different, is consensus. In it functions the simulacrum of the Kantian “as if.” Thus, I lend an ear to the other but I do not listen to him. A delayed negation of the other is produced, because, in the end, I seek to bridge the differences by reducing him to “the same.”
This is the ultimate reason why we have been proposing for years the theory of dissent, which is born of the real and effective acceptance of the principle of difference, and has the requirement of being able to live in that difference. And this is the reason why it is necessary to practice metapolitics: a discipline that involves the need to identify ideological diversity in the area of world, regional or national politics, trying to turn this diversity into a concept of political understanding, according to the wise opinion of the political scientist Giacomo Marramao.

Dissent should be the first step in making genuine public policy and metapolitics the philosophical and axiological content of the political agent.


Alberto Buela is an Argentinian philosopher and professor at National Technological University and the University of Barcelona. He is the author of many books and articles. His website is here.


Featured: The Serenade, by Jacob Jordaens; painted ca. 1640-1645.