The Academic Writings of Jeremy M. Prince

The Unvarnished Doctrine

2010-02-20T11:13:00.000-06:00

The Unvarnished Doctrine

In his 240-page defense of the Lockean liberal influence on the American Revolution, Steven Dworetz builds a strong levy against the high tide of classical republicanism. This school – originating around the third quarter of the twentieth century – attempted to unseat John Locke as the “prophet” of the American Revolution, relegating his classical liberalism to the margins of Revolutionary thought. In its stead this “revisionist” school sought to place the classical republicanism of “Cato” in the center stage, essentially pitting liberal “commerce” against republican “civic virtue” in an ideological struggle over the soul of the American Revolution. Originally published out of the Duke University Press in 1990, Dworetz claimed to explore a “critical examination of the republican revision” while reasserting the centrality of Locke’s liberalism in the Revolution (7). Quickly admitting that his book is insufficiently exhaustive to provide a final answer to the question of ideological centrality in Revolutionary American thought, his work does provide a valuable contribution to the, sometimes tense, scholarly exchange. This book is certainly not without its weaknesses, but Dworetz’s topics are well researched and his arguments are compellingly articulated. The criticisms that he provides cannot be easily overcome, nor should his questions be quickly dismissed if a rigorous academic investigation into the questions of the American founding is of any consequence.

Dworetz begins his book by explaining that Western nations have a long history of tolerating – if not celebrating – critical reviews of political doctrine while, simultaneously, warning that this practice can behave as a corrosive force on a nation’s foundational political culture (3). It is precisely this danger that he charges the classical republican school of injecting into the American political discourse with their “revisionist” interpretation of the American founding (4). Claiming that the motivation of the classical republicans to remove Lockean liberalism from the American Revolution – primarily inspired by scholars such as J.G.A Pocock, Leo Strauss and C.B. Macpherson – was anti-commercial in nature, Dworetz subtly paints them with the brush of socialistic ideology (7). At this point, it would not be inappropriate to place these works within a greater historiographical timeline and, hopefully, provide an explanation for their respective points of view. The ideological clash between capitalism and socialism, instigated by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the member-states of NATO, not only prompted heated political and economic disagreements but also acted as a backdrop for critical new ways in understanding historical events and dramatic social changes. The 1960s and 1970s represented the “high tide” of socialist influence on the historical discipline and, from this, came the revised interpretation of the American founding that unsurprisingly discounted Locke – a champion of commerce and property rights – as a major influence of the period. It is also unsurprising that books like Dworetz’s – books that championed Locke’s bold return as a central figure of the American Revolution – were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union was languishing in the throes of its impending demise and the West was celebrating the triumph of commerce, liberty and freedom. While it would be a mistake to over-politicize the nature of these kinds of research publications, it would also be a mistake to ignore the larger ideological and historiographical context that these books can be placed. Perhaps worse than charging the classical republican scholars with being motivated or blinded by their ideological leanings, is Dworetz’s later accusation that these researchers dismissed Locke out of a fundamental unfamiliarity with his writings, and that they “failed to grasp the very basics” of Lockean political theory (10). Moreover, he claims that the entire school of classical republicanism relied on the linchpin of a hostile interpretation of Locke and “some wishful thinking about Cato”, suggesting that the historians of the republicanism school superimposed a twentieth-century worldview onto an eighteenth-century implementation of Locke’s seventeenth-century political doctrine (12, 31). While these indictments against the classical republican scholars are weighty indeed, Dworetz claims that the true value of his project is in its attempt to reinforce the strong tradition and foundation of American liberalism, an attempt that he hopes will keep a political paradigm shift at bay (38).

Thoughtfully devoting an entire chapter of his book to both the general methodological challenges of historical studies and critiques of political theory, as well as the interdisciplinary challenges of studying these two fields concurrently, Dworetz makes clear that he fully anticipates and welcomes a thorough critical examination of his research. While this chapter not only introduces the reader to the difficulty involved in the research for his book, it also does an excellent job of reminding his would-be critics that a certain amount of critical latitude must be afforded historians for making the best of what they are given. In this sense, Dworetz adequately reminds his readers that the modern historian bears a remarkable resemblance to a forensic investigator. With regard to The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz relies heavily on political pamphlets, state papers, official documents, newspapers, correspondence, and even “circumstantial evidence” in order to capture the “character of the Revolution” (34, 54, 67). Rightfully suggesting that the most important thing a researcher can do is familiarize himself with the source material and the sources that those writings cite, he also admits that the selection – and, by implication, the exclusion – of one’s sources can go very far in determining the conclusions of a research project (51, 61). This reminder is a curious one since the extensive section of end notes in the back of the book would suggest that Dworetz has done considerable research for this project, whereas the obviously heavy reliance on New England clerical writings in the latter half of the book appears to betray or contradict his own warning on sources.

By performing a reasonable exploration of “liberal” political theory of Locke in chapter three of The Unvarnished Doctrine, Dworetz establishes the that primary concerns of the colonists in the eighteenth century consisted of taxation, representation, property, consent and liberty – all topics that Locke had extensively written on (74, 98). He continues by arguing that the considerable protests of the American colonists against Parliament’s revenue policies found justification primarily in the writings of Locke and that Locke’s theory of limited legislative government provided a critical validation for resistance against Britain’s Declaratory Act (70, 93). These claims indeed supply a compelling refutation of the classical republican claim that Locke was simply a “bourgeois capitalist” and that his ideas were not influential in the mechanical development of American political theory. In addition to his reiteration of Lockean political theory, Dworetz also invests a considerable amount of space in his book to proving that “Cato” could not have been Locke’s would-be replacement as “prophet” of the Revolution. Not only is there an alarming lack of – what he refers to as “empirical textual evidence” – to suggest that Cato’s writings were important to the Revolutionaries, Dworetz also asserts that Cato would not have resonated with any of the founders and Revolutionary leaders for the following reasons: Cato believed in original sin and claimed that the “making of laws supposes that all men are wicked”, Cato’s political theory is Hobbesian in nature and believed that laws were needed to create terror and instill order, and, lastly, Cato believed that liberty and property were as linked as Locke did, thus making Cato no less of a “capitalist” with regard to liberty and property than Locke (41, 100, 101, 104, 109). While Dworetz does a particularly good job of showing that the writings and ideas of Locke were more in tune with traditional Revolutionary values than Cato, he leaves the overwhelming burden of proof for chapter five where he discusses the relationship between the New England clergy and Locke’s theological and political writings.

Near the end of chapter four, Dworetz lays the foundation for the next chapter by claiming that Locke was “distinctively a Biblical Christian” (118). While the classical republicans did call into question Locke’s spirituality (and Locke’s religious predilections would certainly have an impact on the general acceptability of Locke’s theological arguments by the host of New England clergy), the suggestion that Locke was a “Biblical Christian” is problematic on many levels. The first question this raises is: what does Dworetz mean by “Biblical Christian”? It would not be inappropriate to suggest that Christianity remains a spiritual tradition without an overriding orthodoxy and yet Dworetz does nothing to qualify that label except to say that Locke believed that God existed and that he, evidently, was a powerful deity. This definition could just as easily describe a devout Jew or Muslim as much as it would a “Biblical Christian”. Unfortunately, this question is not resolved anywhere else in the text and it is upon this basic assumption that Dworetz proceeds to the most important chapter of his book: establishing a relationship between his ideas and writings, and those that would – ostensibly – serve to disseminate them to the public: the New England clergy. This element of Dworetz’s research is, perhaps, the most unique as he branches into the writings of the colonial religious culture to find explanations for the colonial political culture. This method can provide its own challenges, however, as you must first demonstrate that the New England clergy really were representative of the larger intellectual macrocosm in America while, simultaneously, demonstrating that the colonists themselves tended to “take their ministers seriously” (135). Arguing that the New England clergymen boldly broke the overwhelming clerical tradition of preaching “passive obedience” to a doctrine of revolution, Dworetz goes to great lengths to prove that these ministers – among the variety of religious controversies – all basically held that both reason and revelation were legitimate sources of knowledge (138, 159). From this essential foundation, Dworetz works to establish that the change in doctrines of obedience was directly influenced by Locke’s theological interpretation of Romans chapter 13. Linking old Calvinist theological principles such as the limited power of God to Locke’s principle of limited sovereignty in legislative government represents a particularly innovative interpretation in Dworetz’s book but not without the cost of exposing him to a lot of criticism (150, 154).

The connections that he establishes in this book, while excellently researched and convincingly argued, have a number of “moving parts” to them that cannot help but raise questions and inspire critical review. There are a number of places where his findings can break down. Dworetz claims to have found that, among the writings of New England clergy, Locke’s thoughts On Government were quoted more often than any other non-Biblical source, yet he doesn’t quantify this claim with actual counts or percentages, nor does he qualify it by explaining whether those citations were favorable or unfavorable (43). His suggestion that the New England clergy were a fairly representative microcosmic barometer of colonial attitudes and beliefs is not new, but it is certainly not closed off to critical analysis (59). The danger of relying on Locke’s orthodoxy as a “Biblical Christian” was already discussed, but so is his argument that the New England clergy found justification for placing reason and revelation on the same footing in Locke’s writings (147). Despite these weak points in his rousing defense of Locke’s position as vanguard of the Revolution, Dworetz delivers precisely what he aims for: to correct errors in some previous historical works on the American founding political doctrine while not seeking out a completely comprehensive explanation of the American founding (37). It is his parting advice, however, that may provide the most important contribution to this field: to leave the mutually exclusive approaches of the American founding “myth” in the past while seeking out new ways to understand how the formation of “American republicanism in the Revolutionary years was a distinctively liberal republicanism” (191).

The American Reformation

2009-12-08T18:51:00.000-06:00

The American Reformation:

A Historiography of the Social History of Early American Christianity

While reading the book Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd, I came across a passage where Dr. Boyd recounted a familiar scene in my own past experience: sitting in church during a service dedicated to Independence Day where an old rugged cross made of wood sat in the back corner of the stage with an American flag wrapped around it while the projector played video clips of fighter jets flying over the Capitol in Washington and the congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In my youth I thought nothing of the images, the sounds or the general spectacle of this kind in a church service. After reading Myth, however, I began to realize how peculiar and – in a way – how distinctly American this blending of patriotism, democracy and Christianity were. Many of the American Christians I’ve had the opportunity to know personally – whether conservative, moderate or liberal – believe that American political and social values are uniquely suited to host vibrant communities of evangelical Christianity and celebrate a marriage of American exceptionalism and Christian millenarianism. The courtship of this relationship in the early republic period of American history has come under renewed study and recent scholarship has attempted to fill in the gaps left my previous historians. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians alike have found themselves challenged in trying to understand not only one of the most significant political revolutions during this period but, arguably, one of the most important socio-religious transformations in Western history as well. While the greater body of research done on early American Christianity has been centered on the theology and biographies of prominent Puritans and evangelical ministers, recent scholarship on the subject has begun trending toward an understanding of this transformation in the context of social history.[1] In this sense, the democratic and populist changes that swept across America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are no different than other similarly researched events. As with most historical research, there is no significant consensus among the scholars on many ideas expressed in each of the studies I have researched for this essay. From ideas about socio-economic conditions to clerical abuse, political power struggles, and a developing hunger among contemporaries for a new kind of ethics, it is possible to come away from each text with more questions than answers. Having completed similar research on a related social movement, the European Protestant Reformation, it has become clear that many of the research techniques, scholarly approaches and even conclusions overlap significantly between the two periods. Just as European social historians very clearly claim that the religious nature of the Protestant Reformation contained significant political connotations, American historians surveyed in this essay suggest that the political revolution in the late eighteenth century accompanied, if not altogether responded to, a budding religious revolution in North America. It is within this transatlantic historical perspective that I refer to the changing religious landscape of the early republic as an “American Reformation”. It is understandable that some may object to my reference of this period of religious history as an “American Reformation” but – as I hope to show early in this essay – the reference is not only justified, but fitting. Moreover, this essay will attempt to trace the topical evolution of the American Reformation as a “social history” in order to understand the questions it has raised, the fresh viewpoints it has unveiled, and the significant contributions it has made to our understanding this groundbreaking movement.

As mentioned previously, there are several shared themes, techniques and conclusions between the social historiography of the European Protestant Reformation and the American Reformation. The foremost and – hopefully – most obvious between these two historiographies is the attempt by social historians to place significant developments in religious history into a broader social, economic and political context. Social history surrounding the Protestant Reformation in Europe began in the mid 1960s by, mostly, German historians during a very troubled time in modern German history. As any historian might remember, Germany was divided into two separate nations – one communist, one democratic – and the clash of ideologies bled over into every facet of life, including historical research. Produced as a post-modern descendent of Marxist economic-historical critique, the new social history attempted to place new interpretations on previously settled historical questions like the German Reformation. Firstly, I would like to show that the social historians of the American Reformation not only shared similarities in technique and findings with their European counterparts, but also that there is a solid chronological continuity from the European studies to the analogous American ones. Whereas the bulk of European Protestant Reformation scholarship was published between 1979 and 1988, most of the current scholarship on the American Reformation was done between 1985 and 1994. There are, of course, a few outlying exceptions for both research fields on both sides of the timeframe, but, again, the large majority of published works fall into those timeframes. Researchers like Max Weber, Steven Ozment, Hans Hillerbrand, Peter Blickle and Lee Palmer Wandel – among others – took up the history of the common man’s Reformation with particular enthusiasm, exploring questions of increased involvement of local layman on the eve of the Reformation, the German Peasant War of 1525, Christian millennialism, iconoclasm, clerical antagonism, the notion of sola scriptura, local election of church pastors in conjunction with increased laity control over church administration and access to the Bible in vernacular German. As will hopefully become evident through the course of this essay, American and European social historians shared as much in common as the two religious cultures they studied.[2]

Turning now to the research on the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy it seems appropriate to begin with Alexis de Tocqueville. Certainly, it feels suitable to begin with Tocqueville by the simple fact that he was among the first scholars to write extensively about the relationship between American Christianity and American democracy, or that he is quoted ubiquitously on the subject by twentieth-century historians, but it is also fitting that should begin a comparison of Protestant religious phenomena on two continents with the observations of a Catholic that had a foot in both. While it is true that Tocqueville was not an American, a Protestant or a “common” man, he does provide an important window into understanding this relationship during the early republic period. In the book Tocqueville’s Civil Religion, Sanford Kessler attempts to bring Tocqueville’s astute observations and claims about American “civil religion” into a context of the contemporary social history. Kessler’s understanding of Tocqueville, constructed from an analysis of the book Democracy in America, begins from the starting point that religion was the first of America’s political institutions. Claiming that Protestantism – from the very beginning with Luther – required a very real and present reliance on private judgment, Tocqueville draws an invisible, but direct, line from the events in America to the events in Reformation Europe. Not only is this reliance on private judgment a hallmark of Protestant confessions, it is – as he reminds us – a requirement democratic polity. Moreover, Tocqueville’s unique attunement to the contemporary cultural phenomena of democratic populism led him to claim, well ahead of his time, that religious authority had shifted dramatically after Jefferson’s election to become vested in public opinion for most Americans. This new democratic atmosphere not only fostered the Enlightenment and sectarianism, but also allowed religion to function as a practical apparatus for common people to access political franchise and even political power.

This is not to say, however, that Tocqueville believed that these changes did not come without considerable risk. Indeed, the principles of democratic equality, if implemented in daily life, had such a decentralizing and individualizing potential that he feared it might bring down traditional Christian institutions. As some modern historians would later argue, Tocqueville could not have been more correct. These dangers were born out of evangelical religious leaders and itinerant preachers – most of whom placed such a central emphasis on eternal salvation and eternal damnation – making the acceptance of Christianity dependent on self-interested motivations. Kessler, in his appraisal of Tocqueville’s study, finds few faults in this visionary observer, but primary among them is his most serious failure to anticipate or acknowledge the importance of American evangelicalism, which goes almost completely unmentioned in Democracy in America.[3] These conclusions and observations of Tocqueville on the effects of individualization and democratic values on American Christianity are similar, in many respects, to those that were made in European Reformation studies about the affirmation of the laity and the relationship between the Reformation and the German Peasant War of 1525 as a means to access power through the close-knit religious communities made by Gunther Vogel, Heiko Oberman and Peter Blickle. Where the German Peasants had failed in their revolt against oppressive ecclesiastical and feudal lords, the Americans succeeded and – in doing so – secured even more control over their local religious and political communities than the Reformation-era Germans were able to.

One topic that few other historians even attempted to seriously address in their research was the concept of evangelical millennialism. I found that the relatively surprising gap in this field of research was sufficiently and pleasantly filled with Ruth Bloch’s 1985 book, Visionary Republic. Millennialism, according to Bloch, returned with vigor to the forefront of Christian communities after the Protestant Reformation – especially among the more radical denominations – and, in response to magisterial persecution, these communities were forced to migrate to America bringing the millennialist expectation with them. For the English colonists, she claims that millennialism started mostly in the English Civil War in 1640 by the Whigs, and Radical Whig ideology came, in part, from some of the more radical elements of the Reformation. While the Puritans were especially attuned to this concept, Bloch believes that the French and Indian War on the eve of the American Revolution helped advance the belief that the end was near as it was the worst in a series of wars between England and France, Europe’s two largest and strongest powers. Moreover, the French and Indian War saw an uncommonly high increase in the employment of terms such as “liberty” and “tyranny” especially when drawing a distinction between English civil liberty and French monarchy, or Protestant and Catholic values. The American millennial vision was almost wholly centered on the American belief that these colonies had a special role to place in bringing about the end of days and the coming of the Lord, and soon after the French and Indian War charges of “Romish” behavior – which was synonymous in eighteenth century English society with antichristian – in the Church of England were also levied as veiled attacks against the English political institutions. The American Revolution, then, was not simply a political revolution, according to Bloch, but also may have been understood as Christians participating in a movement that would bring them one step closer to the coming of the Kingdom of God. After establishing that American colonists were abundant in comfort with Great Britain being paralleled with the Beast of Revelation, she outlines a very meticulous path among American evangelicals in the earliest years of the republic of disillusionment with the centralization of American government. This disillusionment translated, in Bloch’s research, to a direct religious change of Christianity’s enemy from the British Empire to moral and social reform at home. In other words, with the enemy from without subdued, American Christians turned their attention to the myriad of enemies within near the turn of the nineteenth century.[4] While Bloch’s survey of American millennialism stops, rather abruptly, around 1800, what she does provide is fascinating and enlightening. What she does appear to lack, however, is the permutation of American millennialism that inevitably came in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Her more than fifty pages of endnotes demonstrate both the extensive and diverse research she conducted for this book, much of which are primary sources ranging from sermons to hymns and even early modern prophetic pamphlets. Bloch’s work not only does much of the heavy lifting in drawing a thematic line between European religious phenomena and the American Revolution, but also sets up a perfectly acceptable foundation for understanding the kind of political, social and religious expectation that set the evangelical revolution in motion in the nineteenth century.

In his 1987 book, Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad attempted to build, in some respects, upon those initial observations about the institutionalized nature of religion in America by analyzing not only the state of American religious sentiments in the early republic but also the doctrinal confrontations between evangelicals and the Founding Fathers. Gaustad argues that in the decades leading up to the Revolution, evangelicals began a socially intrusive campaign against ecclesiastical authority. This campaign, he claims, stemmed from the popular opinion among Americans that civil and religious authorities were co-conspirators in the effort to keep men in servility, thus the liberty of one necessitated the liberty of the other. This attack on religious authority did not happen in a vacuum, however. The Church of England went wherever England went, and to attack the legitimacy of the Church of England was to attack the legitimacy of England in whole. In the same way that the Reformation movement was a rebellion against papal and Catholic ecclesiastical abuses, so too was the rise of evangelical reform movements a rebellion – of sorts – against England in Gaustad’s opinion. After the success of the Federalist agenda in 1789, churchgoers in America found it more appropriate to become closely involved in both the administration both of their local church as well as government policy. The explosion of evangelicalism is in some respects, according to Gaustad, a response to Federalist success in government of keeping power both centrally located and in fewer hands than many Americans were comfortable with. It should be no surprise – in the way that Gaustad frames his message – that the explosion of evangelical religion in America coincided with the Jeffersonian presidencies. In simple terms, evangelicalism was most certainly an exercise in popular authority by lay churchmen. Gaustad’s conclusions are drawn, if not too heavily, on the overwhelming statistical data that illustrates just how quickly the Methodists and Baptists replace the Congregationalists and Episcopalians as the churches with the most members. Indeed, in just seventy years Methodism grew to be over 500,000 members and outnumbered Congregationalism, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheranism combined. Like many of his contemporaries, he finds solid footing on the inter-related nature of the cultural transformation as he claims that the “age of volunteerism turned into an age of reform – an American revolution all over again, only this time not in politics but religion.”[5] In the epilogue of his book, Gaustad initiates what will become a recurrent theme in the study of Western Christianity, by claiming that religion, like politics, found itself torn between establishing liberty and equality via individualization and governing via community. Where Gaustad might earn some criticism is that his endnotes cite, so lopsidedly, secondary resources from the mid-to-late twentieth century in contrast to some contemporary works that do far more analysis of primary documents. This is not to suggest, however, that Gaustad did not perform an appropriate amount of research but the question of how much of his conclusions and arguments rely on other historians remains. I also found it curious that his analysis of the social dimensions of American evangelicalism were located in the beginning and the end, but the middle sections of his book – where one might find evidence of extensive and exhaustive research in the primary sources – were only biographic profiles of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Adams. These chapters were not entirely unrelated to the central thesis of this book, but the unusual format certainly made it harder to follow the thread of thought from start to finish. In all, however, I think Gaustad’s argument that challenges to ecclesiastical authority in the eighteenth century paved the way for American challenges to English political authority are valid and deserving of further investigation.

The suggestion that evangelicals were the “principal subculture” and among the principal shapers of the larger American social, religious and political culture is the topic that occupies Richard Carwadine’s 1993 book, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Focusing his research primarily on the larger denominations of the nineteenth century, he claims that there was considerable pressure from within the rank-and-file membership for ministers and organizations to throw their collective weight behind moral legislation during this period. Whatever prior objections Christianity had about getting into bed with politicians and governments had to be laid to rest quickly as, Carwadine claims, to abstain from political involvement would have been to swim against the current of mainstream American expectations, religious or otherwise. Providing an uncompromising tone to American politics, the visionary and idealistic evangelical Christian communities exercised a more active role in influencing the direction that American society took, after complaining from the political sidelines about corrupt electioneering by the party-driven system that flourished after Jefferson. The most important contribution that this hefty work of scholarship provides to the field is an explanation of the evolving relationship between evangelical denominations, especially Baptists and Methodists, and political parties, such as the Whigs, to deliberately and effectively influence the legislative process in America. Moreover, what is particularly significant about this relationship is that it was driven by pressure from within those denominations and it represents a radical change in status for the Methodists and Baptists who, until then, had been denominations that represented those on the disenfranchised margins of American society.[6] The similarities in the evolution of church-state relations between the Methodists and Baptists in America and the Lutherans and Calvinists in Europe are striking and, as with several other topics, are prime targets for further review.

Approaching the topic of early American evangelicalism from the rare perspective of gender studies, Susan Juster’s Disorderly Women strikes a delightfully balanced note between respecting the evangelical movement on its own terms while incorporating important questions about how masculine and feminine relationships influenced the dominant religious and political values of the time. While the gender perspective is both important to historical studies in general and to this topic in particular, I am particularly interested in the arguments that she raises with regard to the relationship between American religious communities and the political development of American democracy. This selective treatment of the text should not be interpreted as a lack of respect for the body of Juster’s research, rather it simply reflects the focus of this essay’s historiographical question. As Juster, herself, claims that this book is more about political discourse and the boundaries of power than simply gender in Christianity, I feel that my interpretation of the text for these purposes is within bounds. Juster’s overriding theme in Disorderly Women is that evangelicalism was a “particularly powerful way” to construct the relationship between self and community and, in light of that, New Light Puritanism can be understood as movement that facilitated a “relative egalitarianism” with regard to church government in colonial America. Perhaps more directly to the point, Juster claims that early American history can be understood as an “evolution of political ideology away from the consensual model of republican virtue to the mechanical mode of democratic self-interest”. It is precisely this theme of transference from republicanism to democratic ideologies. The Great Awakening overturned the hierarchy and structure of sacred space, while social arrangements and social orders were abandoned at revival camp meetings. Not only would you find the poor, the marginalized and the sinners, but you would also find the itinerant preacher providing access to the power of God. Drawing from a concept that the “feminine” element of society does not simply include women – but also the marginalized – her claims at evangelical egalitarianism begin to take sharp focus. These camp meetings had both religious and political significance in that the Puritan community was made up of highly ordered people and space, and the evangelical community was one of language: something everyone had equal access to and – at least theoretically – equal control over. It was this quasi-egalitarian “golden age” that was sacrificed during the Revolution as the cultural tide in America shifted to a hyper-masculine sense of independence, making a revolution for property rights and right of self-rule for proto-Victorian values against Britain more important than the retention of Christian communal equality. Turning to the question of the American Revolution, Juster claims that was radical in that evangelicals – especially Baptists – wanted to see the apparatus of church and state disappear, but less radical in that they sacrificed many of their “called out” values at the alter of political revolution. In the midst of the American Revolution, Evangelicals began to transfer their position from “outside” temporal and spatial arrangements of power to engage them from within and, in doing so, secured a powerful position in that alliance. Post-Revolutionary America, to Juster, represented the completion of a shift in values from the egalitarian qualities of primitive evangelicalism – an expression best seen in the Anabaptist communities of southeastern Germany – to a renewed affirmation of cultural masculinity. In the end, she we are asked to revisit the age-old question of “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” as she argues that evangelicals sacrificed too many of the egalitarian principles that made them attractive to the “feminized” element of American society in order to become mainstream and acceptable within the new masculine-dominated social order.[7] Disorderly Women is a particularly well-researched book and the number of Puritan and Baptist church records books she pored over in order to write this book is overwhelmingly impressive. Her interpretation of masculinity and femininity in the negotiation of social power provides an altogether rare vision of American power politics and the role that evangelicals played in creating, then abandoning, a true vision of inclusion for all.

While there are many good questions yet to be raised over what the “spiritual center” of Christianity in America is, there are few scholarly discussions that take place on this question without Mark Noll’s extensive research coming to the table. His many books and papers on the topic of American Christianity are considered to be among the highest and most exhaustive secondary sources in modern historical research. One of the earliest papers Noll wrote on the subject of American Christianity was, titled “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865”, wherein approaches the centrality of the Bible as a text of private as well as political significance in the early republic. To Noll, the Bible was not only used in private for personal “nourishment”, but ministers used it to explain and encourage the American vision that saw exceptionalistic potential and destiny. From the most unlikely success of the Revolution, ministers were able to claim that America had a divinely providential place in God’s plan to redeem the world and establish the Kingdom. In this way, the Bible was both a source of truth, the source of a narrative that could be replicated to produce prosperity and power. In a later paper, titled “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies”, Noll explores what he sees as a consistent relationship between evangelical revivalism and political revolution in North Atlantic countries. Market revolution was a very close ally to evangelicalism at “every state in its North Atlantic history”, Noll claims and suggests that Evangelical preachers “exploited” revolutionary environments in various regions. The success of evangelical revolution in America – among other regions – was due to the success of political revolutions. Noll claims that successful economic and political revolutions have the effect of destroying traditions. In the midst of disarray, the individualization of evangelical religion found it much easier to spread than under the more traditional – if not more repressive – social conditions. It does not take much to see how these observations are related to those arguments – made especially by Peter Blickle – that the German Reformation was a hand-in-hand collaborator of the German Peasant Revolt of 1525. It is in his 576-page tome, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, that Noll shows his most exhaustive research. In this book, he claims that there was – and some say there still is – a symbiotic relationship between American socio-political identity and American religious identity. Tracing the beginning of the major social changes to the population booms following the American Revolution, he claims that churches in America had to meet the needs of a growing and diverse communities, produce enough trained ministers to meet the demands of that growth, and expand their influence to the “hinterlands” of the colonies in response to the migration and expansion. The subsequent revivals that contributed to the Great Awakening saw the Gospel preached more to the socially outcast element of America more than any other time in history. Instead of insisting that sinners come to church, the revival mentality saw that church came to the sinner. He also claims that the Great Awakening was America’s first truly “national” event: it facilitated an identification of individuals as Americans and fostered a growing distrust of European hierarchical order. The fear of centralized political tyranny after the French and Indian War led many Americans to affirm that the human being was responsible for his own conscience and this translated to religious beliefs as well, thus leading to the evangelical revolution. Noll attunes his argument about the values-smashing nature of revolutions in general to the American Revolution in particular and claims that it stimulated social changes of every kind, including the “new tide of democracy” that influenced the old denominations and created new ones. The result of these changes was that by the midpoint of the nineteenth century evangelicals were no longer the “outsiders” of American religion but, rather, occupied the greatest and highest positions of social and political recognition. This is not to say, however, that there were not still “outsiders” to reach – or exploit – as he turns, albeit briefly, to the question of Mormonism and Joseph Smith. Smith’s religion, Noll claims, drew upon culturally surging themes of democracy – the right of one to choose and think for himself – and republicanism – the distrust of power to corral a new congregation of followers for an entirely new dispensation: a topic that is brilliantly researched by the next author, John Brooke.[8]

In his book, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of a Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, Brooke immediately introduces the reader to one of the most powerful differences between Mormonism – now referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – and the rest of the Christian denominations that were created and flourished in the early nineteenth century: Mormonism was not a new denomination, but an entirely new dispensation – equal to the ones given to Moses and Jesus. Brooke, while on shaky ground according to some criticism he has received in response to this book, is insistent that the cultural “preparation” among the disenfranchised members of American society was linked, albeit via a rather ambiguous and confusing route, to the Radical Reformation movements of Europe. Similarly to Bloch’s arguments about the transmutation of expectant millennialism from the Radical Reformation communities to American evangelical groups, Brooke also claims that Mormon cosmology was influenced heavily by restorationist millennialism and occultism. Occult practices, Brooke claims, accompanied the migration patterns of communities that came over from Europe after magistrates started cracking down on Radical Reformation sects, though he does little to substantiate that claim. Where his argument does find stronger footing is in the area of social franchise. Mormonism gave radical Christians a place to belong and captured a popular need to restore authoritative polity to Christian religion in a very decentralized and fragmented faith, while not being strictly hierarchical. In this way, Brooke claims that the founding families of the Mormon faith were all “particularly prepared” because of the outsider and dejected social conditions they came from. Not only did Mormonism give outsiders ground-level access to a new community that promised both social and cosmically metaphysical power, but Smith also relied on the economic anxieties of these families. In the new faith debt was emphatically placed as a supreme enemy, but Smith also placed a premium on alchemical and counterfeiting practices that – according to Brooke – many of these families would have already been familiar with. Alchemy was important for these radical Christian sects, Mormonism included, because it was a vehicle of wealth for poor families and communities. The ability to change common materials to precious metals or stones was, as Brooke alludes to, the ultimate “get-rich-quick” scheme of the day. Moreover, the creation of a new money economy in America saw an unprecedented growth in counterfeiting, from coins to bills or – in Smith’s case – religious documents. These documents were worth more than money to those that needed to hear what was contained within and it was the content of those documents, rather than the dubious nature of their creation, that were valuable to the early Mormon families. In this way, Brooke argues that a “ church of miracles attracted a particular kind of convert”, with the implication being that those converts were either naïve, desperate or both. Whatever the case, Brooke’s book – despite some of the criticisms it received – does quite a bit not only to trace a line via similar cultural conditions between radical, post-Reformation American Christianity and radical, post-Reformation European Christianity, but he draws an intentionally direct one as well, linking the two research fields together as well.[9]

With his two books, The Sacred Cause of Liberty and The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch has shown why his is one of America’s leading scholars on the topic of the American Reformation. Tracing the symbiotic revolution of evangelicalism and populist democracy in America from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, Hatch has provided the kind of research and analysis that only a very few American historians of this period have ever reached. A fellow professor of history at Notre Dame with Mark Noll, Hatch’s work matches a similar quality and, in the process, has earned several prestigious awards in American history. In his earlier work, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, Hatch outlines how republican liberty came to be known as a cardinal Christian belief – thus necessitating a strong reliance on individual conscience – and how between 1740-1780 the clergy were asked to be ever-increasingly involved in the formation of a prosperous and republican nation. Among other topics, this book’s central area of focus is on American ministerial involvement in the Revolution via the vision of “God’s elect” against the “antichrist” of oppression and tyranny. Hatch claims that the civil millennialism of the Revolution grew directly from politicizing the millennialist expectations and experiences of New Englanders for the prior 20 years and that American ministers were convinced that they were to play a special role in the providence of the coming of the millennium. Hatch also claims that the “vision of history” in Revolutionary New England was that the success or failure of liberty was the single thread of events that connected the European Protestant Reformation to the Revolution. Once the Revolution was over and independence from Britain had been secured, the quest for virtue – the lack of which in history showed to be the death of the ancient republics – was the preeminent quest of American clerical and political patriotism, according to Hatch. The republic’s future was understood to be tied to the amount of its direct investment in American Christianity, both in public education an the promotion of public worship and which assisted in a developing belief, for many Christians, that “cosmic forces” were arrayed against liberty to continue seeking religious and civil oppression. Moreover, a sense of romantic patriotism provided ministers and churches with the solidarity of Christian unity that they required in a time of intense denominational splitting. It is the occasion of this intense fragmentation of American Christianity that occupies Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity, wherein he argues that democratization is the key to understanding American Christianity and suggests that an increasing value of populism changed both the political and social landscape. Claiming that the Revolution changed the dynamic of American society in all forms, he goes on to argue that people could take charge of their own lives not only in politics, but in their religious associations as well. In this wildly changing climate of religious associations, American Christianity suffered from a form of “withering” institutional establishments, as American congregants wanted their churches to come down to their level. Moreover, Hatch’s claims are pinned on the suggestion that the establishment of major print in America made all of these changes possible and this change shifted the power to produce information away from the elites of American society to commoners. What immediately becomes obvious, with Hatch’s expert help, from analyzing the papers produced by this print revolution is that there was a deep-seated animosity against the educated and highly-trained professionals in American society and that this anticlericalism was part of a larger movement of class struggle. Traditional institutions were portrayed as incompetent, there were ubiquitous comparisons of the educated clergy to an aristocracy or canonical tyrants and a general equation of “elite” professionals with the antichrist. The religious free-market principles that Hatch sees in the early nineteenth century lowered the quality of religious rigor as the population of America – then as now – favored the majority of individuals with little or no education over the elite few that received extensive educational training. Sermons of this time became very similar in nature to campaign speeches, with elements of demagoguery and party-style membership recruiting, where populism in religion borrowed from revolutionary ideas of dissent as well as fear of consolidated and “back-room” power. Hatch claims that there was a complete lack of uniform recognition in religious circles and that this coupled nicely with a cultural development that helped democracy and nationalism became the uniform idea that everyone could jump on board with. This is not to say, however, that there was a declension of religious zeal in favor for the political sphere, but rather that Hatch sees transference of popular assent from traditional institutions to the enthusiastic revival. This period, according to Hatch and many others, is characterized by an unprecedented buffet menu of Christian churches from which the average citizen could choose, and since the common man had a tendency to identify with itinerant and unschooled preachers, the solidification of evangelical populism became complete. Hatch’s work helps bring the question of the American Reformation back to a practical question of, “how did this period shape the landscape of American religion today?” He suggests that democratization has led to a complete, downward trend in the kind of men that American religion and statecraft produces reminding today’s Americans of the woeful fact that post-democratic America has not produced the kind of theologian as Jonathan Edwards or the kinds of statesmen as our Founding Fathers. The term “winning souls” has become an indicator of a capitalistic numbers game of quantity over quality in both American churches and American politics and, barring another epoch-splitting catalyst, it is unlikely to ever do so again.[10]

It is a common axiom among historians that a topic will receive as many unique interpretations as there are scholars researching it. The American Reformation, while able to be loosely grouped into a finite number of mildly contending groups, is no exception. Perhaps one of the strongest qualities of modern historical research is the diversity of viewpoints offered among scholars. There should be no doubt that the studies of social historians on topics of both European and American religious phenomena have irrevocably impacted the modern historical discipline and, by my estimation, for the better. What we may now see more clearly through the efforts of both historical fields is that each respective religious Reformation served not only to reinvigorate religious affections among groups of people that may have otherwise seen declension, but that they served another – perhaps even greater – purpose of providing those outlying members of society access to political, economic and social power that had been so long to them denied. Perhaps more importantly, with regard to the history itself, this socialization of historical research provided both the inspiration and the means for scholars to research the most underrepresented demographic in history: the everyday person. From comprehensive social studies, like A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, to gender-related research projects, like Disorderly Women, social history of the American evangelical revolution has cast an increasingly bright light into the shadows of our common past. Understanding such an important turning point in American history is crucial for understanding the world we currently live in. It is difficult to resist, in history, the dangerous temptation of an easy explanation and the potential overzealousness to draw direct causalities, especially on a subject so profoundly important as democratization. The rich heterodoxy of the American Reformation research provides generous material for not only understanding the nature of the movement itself, but also insights into the culture that produces the historiography.

[1] Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 68.

[2] See attached bibliography for list of published works cited in German Reformation social history

[3] Sanford Kessler, Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 2, 17, 50, 86, 93, 95, 98, 169.

[4] Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 4, 13, 37, 43, 47, 58, 68, 87, 107, 110.

[5] Edwin Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 13, 21, 110, 122, 123, 136.

[6] Richard Carwadine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ix, xv, xix, 9, 17, 34, 61.

[7] Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), vii, 3, 4, 10, 11, 22, 24, 33, 108, 113, 144.

[8] Mark Noll, “Revolution and the Rise of Evangelical Social Influence in North Atlantic Societies” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1740-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113-30.

Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776-1865” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan O. Hatch, Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41-3.

Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 83-243.

[9] John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of the Mormon Cosmology, 1644 – 1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[10] Nathan Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

On Tragedy, Poetry and Justice

2009-12-01T11:49:00.000-06:00

On Tragedy, Poetry and Justice

In the late eight-century BCE, the Hebrew prophet Amos spoke on behalf of YHVH and instructed the people of Israel to, “Hate evil, love goodness and establish justice at all entrances. Perhaps then YHVH, the God of the hosts, will show favor to the remnant of Joseph.”[1] Upon opening the Hebrew Tanakh, one may turn to nearly any passage and find that this collection of holy texts is overwhelmingly concerned with mishpat, the performance of “justice.” Indeed, the word mishpat appears over 400 times in the Tanakh, compared with only nine times for the Greek analogs of krisis and dike in the New Testament.[2] In this respect, one may say that the Hebrew-Jewish tradition is one devoted to facilitating an establishment of justice on Earth, with the Laws of Moses forming the cornerstone. This decalogical approach to justice – the attempt to establish justice through the legally established ethical code of the Hebrew-speaking population of ancient Palestine – was not simply a contractual agreement among the people of Israel, but a literal covenant between Israel’s descendents and El, the Holy One.[3] This emphasis on an eternal law, imparted by an eternal and unchanging god, was the key difference between the Hebrew culture and those cultures that surrounded them in all directions. That is not to say, of course, that other contemporary cultures were not devoted to justice but, rather, that these cultures included understandings of justice that differed both in its source and its measuring. Though all cultural impressions of justice from the ancient world – the Hebrews included – contained elements that were constructed out of social necessity, there were also philosophers in Athens that understood a justice that was neither metaphysical, nor anthropological in nature.

These men understood justice in the concept of dike: the dice-roll, a measure dispensed by physis.[4] This dikaiophysis cannot be acquired, controlled or even understood by humankind. [5] The observations of these Athenian philosophers led them to understand that physis – simply by being – moves, builds energy, stores it and releases it as needed. To impose a human morality or ethical judgment to the behavior of the kosmos is not only inappropriate, but also ultimately fruitless.[6] Without assigning a consciousness to it, they simply understood that physis will simply do as it requires regardless of the human life that may be affected by it. This necessary collection and dispersion of energy and matter is neither benevolent nor malevolent, nor is it ambivalent either: it simply is.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this kind of thinking can be found in the tragoida of Sophocles, particularly the trilogy of Oedipus Tyrannus. In his Oedipal tragedy, one of the themes that Sophocles appears intent on establishing is a healthy skepticism of the new mathesis school of thought that would attempt to fit the raw deinos power of physis into a neat and orderly mathematical form.[7] This comes as a stern warning against the seductive belief that the anthropos can observe a formula that will tame physis and produce a more “just” environment for the flourishing of human civilization. He is also quick to show that mathesis is not the only tool that man would use to subvert nature, but that men like Oedipus would also use logos.[8] Sophocles would have us know that while the power of logos does enable humankind to transfer our understanding of physis to one another, it can also behave as the mechanism that allows physis to hide itself. It would not be inappropriate to suggest that the one apparatus that humankind can point to as our key to unlocking the mysteries of the Universe was produced for us by physis to veil our understanding of it. As Teiresias said, “Of themselves things will come, although I hide them and breathe no word of them.”[9] In the last play of his trilogy, Antigone, Sophocles warns the anthropos about any attempt to escape the inevitable tragoida nature of life on Earth.[10] The tragedy of Sophocles is about strife and conflict, though it is not necessarily malicious in nature. As a form of worship to Dionysus, his tragedies involve the internal confrontation of our contradictory impulses and these conflicts are as inevitable as they are irreconcilable. This, of course, is the “tragedy” of it. Crudely stated, life – as we understand it – isn’t going to “work out” for us and we most certainly will not get out alive. The tragoidos that Sophocles presents before his audience is intended not only to provide a kind of entertainment, but also to mitigate any expectations of imported metaphysical justice while embracing the Dionysian virtue of affirming life in any form it chooses to present itself. Moreover, the conflict of Antigone can be understood as mirroring the conflict that the human being wages in her own life: a conflict between the inescapable immanence of physis and the heavenly ideals of nomos.[11] As often as the dike of physis finds itself subject to the various interpretations of the anthropos, the ideals of nomos are on much flimsier footing and the inevitable contradictions in those ideals can quickly put two individuals at odds with one another. Not only does Antigone reveal the nature of these conflicts between human conventions and human justice when she says, “I shall be a criminal – but a religious one”, but Sophocles crafts her revelations carefully near line 555 when she concedes that her sister was “right in the eyes of one, and I in the other”.[12] Antigone’s defiant declarations expose this human belief in the metaphysical “trump card” when she tells Creon, “Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; nor did Justice, which lives with those below, that enacts such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure”.[13] This dike of Sophocles, however, does not decide who is right or wrong in the matter of human affairs. One would even be warranted in suggesting that the justice of human affairs is not found in the quid pro quo reciprocity of the law, but in the natural tension that exists between two opposing or contradictory forces. Furthermore, this tension between two forces or two people – which cannot be grasped or made to settle into a firm mold – may be thought of as a pattern of ebb and flow in an unceasing exchange of energy. Indeed, any attempts to manipulate or circumvent this tension may leave us like Creon who – only after calamity has struck his family – admits to “the awful blindness of those plans of mine”, to which the chorus in Sophocles’ play answers, “I think you have learned justice – but only too late”.[14] In the final lines of Antigone, Sophocles’ Chorus leaves the audience with the sobering advice to, “Pray for no more at all. For what is destined for us, men mortal, there is no escape.” To the Athenian mind of Sophocles, physis will measure out to each of us what is just and no appeal to the nomos of metaphysis will help any of us escape it.[15]

The careful reader may now be asking herself what she can make of this dikaiophysis in a world where the decalogical ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition seems so inescapable. The uneasy tension between the modes of “justice” for Athens and Jerusalem is, perhaps, best seen in the poems of Paul Celan. As a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Celan not only embodies the victim of tragedy and injustice, but also exemplifies the classical tension between the Greco-European and the Hebrew-Oriental traditions. His poetry – influenced heavily by Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and the ultimate tragedy of Ha-Shoah – confronts the aporia of these questions in a subtle, yet unapologetic fashion that brings his internal conflict and angst into full view.[16] Like many Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Celan was faced with what may be ultimately unanswerable questions about the inherent nature of humankind, the benevolence of divinity towards humankind, and what constitutes justice between men. In the Hebrew tradition, the Decalogical Law of Moses represents the formulaically ethical path to a concrete and metaphysically imported justice.

The five-line poem “In Rivers” touches this idea most directly where Celan writes, “In rivers north of the future / I cast the net you / haltingly weight / with stonewritten / shadows.” While there are certainly interpretations that are more faithful to Celan’s intent than others, his poems can be read in a number of different ways. I would offer a reading of this poem that draws on all three previously mentioned themes: Greco-German philosophy, Jewish Messianic expectation and Ha-Shoah.[17] As with Hölderlinian poetry, rivers can be understood both as vehicles for the passage of time, but also as thresholds: not only in a geographical sense, but also with regards to both the separation and gathering of life and death, the spheres of the mortal and the divine. These rivers “north of the future” not only establish a tense and chiastic relationship between chronos and kairos time in the poem, but also set up a foundation for the sense of longing that Celan intends to communicate.[18] At these rivers he casts the net, an allusion to the fisherman apostles of Christianity but also an exercise of faith in the face of hopelessness; not only in the sense of the apostles leaving their nets behind to follow Jesus, but it also refers to the two times that Jesus instructed his apostles to cast their nets and were greatly rewarded for their obedience and faith.[19] The nets, however, were “hesitantly burdened” (zögernd beshwerst) with “stonewritten shadows.” This line provides a unique window into Celan’s poetic genius, as the careful reader may be able to make out deliberate allusions not only to the Decalogue, but the teachings of Plato, Jesus and Nietzsche as well. Plato understood the best ideals of human life to be but “shadows” of the eternal light of the divine. As for the Christian imagery in this line, one might remember that Jesus calls his “net” or “yoke” a “light burden” that makes the schwergewicht of the “stonewritten” Law of Moses a mere shadow of itself.[20] Celan also seems to make use of this Platonic teaching only to turn it on its proverbial ear by showing how crushingly heavy even the shadow of that which is “stonewritten” in Judaism has proved to be on the Jewish people in history. Yet it is this schwergewicht that is precisely the kind of burden that – as Nietzsche claimed in his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra – was ripe for the teeth of “the Lion”. In this way, Nietzsche seemed to argue that the burdens of metaphysical convention weigh down the human being and distance it from an appropriate relationship with physis, keeping her – as Heidegger might say – “homeless.” While this five-line poem does seem to convey a message of disillusionment with the Decalogue of Judaic religious and cultural tradition, it may go too far to suggest that Celan has no faith in the Hebrew tradition of justice that attempts to place the “the other” in an experiential relationship with “the self.”

Similarly, in the nine-line Jerusalem poem, “There Stood”, Celan notes the surroundings of he and his erotic companion, “There stood / a splinter of fig on your lip, / there stood / Jerusalem around us, / there stood / the bright pine scent / above the Danish skiff we thanked, / I stood / in you.” In the first three stanzas, Celan observes – an act that distances him from those objects. He is distanced from the lip of his companion, from the whole city of Jerusalem surrounding him, and even from the scents of pine. But his distance evaporates by the final stanza when he writes, “I stood in you.” Not only is there an erotic function of this rhetorical device – and it should not be ignored – but there is also a subtle philosophical worldview revealed here. One of the foundational principles of justice in the Judeo-Hebrew tradition instructs men to “practice love for the other, for you were once an other in a strange land.”[21] By standing in the “other”, Celan is affirming the ethical attempt to navigate, and close, that invisible distance between the “self” and the “other” while – as we saw earlier – not relying on decalogical metaphysics.[22] Indeed, while many in theological history may have treated his ethical teachings as “irrelevant” when compared to the dominant “atonement” theologies that sprouted up after his death, it seems that Jesus may have anticipated this non-decalogical Hebrew ethics in his own life.[23] The mere suggestion that one could simply collapse the hundreds and thousands of commandments in the Torah (and the accompanying Talmud) into a simple observation of loving “the other as you love your self”, was both scandalous and radical in the first century and, to some, it still is.[24]

Readers of Celan may also recognize this merging of self and other through the lens of dikaiophysis in the poem “I Drink Wine” as he writes, “I drink wine from two glasses / and plow away at / the king’s caesura / like that one / at Pindar, / God turns in his tuning fork / as one among the least / of the Just, / the lottery drum spills / our two bits.”[25] As with Celan’s other poems, these ten lines contain enough potential meanings to fill a dozen pages. One might make a successful reading of Celan claiming to “drink wine from two glasses” as a recognition of his dual heritage, both Jewish and German. The fact that he “[plows] away at the king’s caesura” may suggest not only that he recognizes no natural break between his German and Jewish heritage in the same way that Pindar recognized no natural break between poet and priest. Further on in the poem, Celan claims that “God turns in his tuning fork as one among the least of the Just” which, in my reading, shows God relinquishing this tuning fork – a metaphor for the skeptron of justice – that produces an initial tension and dissonance between two pitches and eventually fades into one authoritative pitch.[26] Not only does God relinquish this skeptron, but he does so “as one among the least of the Just” suggesting that the kind of justice that was produced by the Law is – in some way – insufficient or, perhaps, that God, himself, is the least of the Just. In the end, it appears that Celan has returned – in full Hölderlinian fashion – to the somber warning of the Sophoclean Chorus in Antigone when he concedes that, “aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut” (“the lottery wheel spills our two parts”). The “lottery wheel”, in my reading, is to be understood as a modern analog to the “dice-roll” of dikaiophysis, measuring out what it finds necessary. Yet from this lottery wheel falls the two parts of Celan, Deutsche and Deuteronomy: German and Jew, oppressor and oppressed, murderer and victim.[27]

When attempting to navigate this suspended tension between two worlds – this Janusian threshold of justice that can neither be circumvented nor pierced – we may find only more contradictions, more conflict, and more tension than we expected or desired. How can we separate our tradition of ethics from the arbitrary lottery-wheel of physis and see justice outside of an anthropocentric mode of thinking?[28] What claims on justice can we hope to make in light of such an unspeakable tragedy as Ha-Shoah and who can hope to make them? Does that light forever cast “stonewritten shadows” on the schwergewicht of our human convention: our laws and our ethics? When even the most brilliant minds are unable to find a point of reconciliation between the Athenian dike and the Hebrew mishpat, the endeavor presents itself as hopelessly daunting to the rest of us. If we begin to recognize that the human being can never approach the event of justice, should that then discourage us from even trying? Do we punish those that violate the polis as Creon did, or do we leave this task to physis?[29] Would we even be satisfied with the kind of justice that physis, or the gods, provide? After all, as Jesus once said, “[God] causes the Sun to rise both on the righteous and the wicked, and makes the rain to fall on the just as well as the unjust.”[30] In the end, our yearning and hoping for justice may be – like logos and mathesis – simply a mechanism by which physis keeps the human being from transgressing the dangerous threshold that only our priests, prophets and poets may even hesitantly approach.

[1] Amos 5:15; YHVH is known as the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of the Hebrew god

[2] The Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible

[3] Decalogical is used here to reference the Ten Commandments as outlined in the Hebrew Torah

[4] Dike – Greek for “justice”; Physis, Greek for “that which comes of its own power” or, crudely, “nature”

[5] I use the word dikaiophysis to represent “the justice of the natural universe” or to approximate the meaning of “that form of justice which has no causal relationship to the efforts of human beings”

[6] Kosmos – Greek for “the earth” and “the heavens” or, simply, “the Universe”

[7] Mathesis – Greek root word for the English “mathematics”; Deinos, Greek for “that which is terrible and wonderful simultaneously”

[8] Logos – Greek for “word, language or idea”, represented here as the mechanism of communication between humans

[9] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Oedipus the King." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, p. 24 : 341 (emphasis added).

[10] Tragoida – Greek for “goat song” and a form of worship for Dionysus, the god of both revelry and “tragedy”

[11] Nomos – Greek word approximating “all forms of human convention, including law, custom and cultural norms”

[12] Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. "Antigone." Sophocles I - Second Edition. 1942. Reprint. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. 9-76. Print, pp. 164 : 75, 183 : 555.

[13] Ibid. p. 178 : 450

[14] Ibid. p. 209 : 1265, 1270

[15] Metaphysis – Greek meaning “after or above physis”, used here to reflect the concept of the “supernatural”

[16] Ha-Shoah, meaning “great calamity” and the Hebrew analog to the Greek word holókauston (“holocaust”); aporia – Greek meaning “impassible”

[17] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 227.

[18] I used the word “chiastic” to illustrate an “x”-shaped relationship between two contradictory forces; Kairos – Greek for festal time; Chronos – Greek for chronological time

[19] Matthew 4:20, Matthew 17:27, Luke 5:6

[20] Schwergewicht – German for “heavy weight” or “the heaviest of weights”

[21] Deuteronomy 10:19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation of the Hebrew ger, meaning “alien, foreigner, outsider”

[22] I use the word “ethical” here, not in the original Greek sense of “habit” or “habitat”, but in the post-modern and popular sense of ethics as “a personal mode of conduct that governs interpersonal relations”

[23] Baldwin, George W. A Political Reading of the Life of Jesus. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2006. Print.

[24] Matthew 19:18-19; Use of the word “other” in this passage is a revised translation from the Greek plesion, meaning both “friend” and “any other person”

[25] Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. 1952. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print, p. 367.

[26] Skeptron – Greek word meaning “stick, staff or scepter” as seen, perhaps, with both Oedipus and Moses

[27] Bold lettering superimposed in this sentence to emphasize the presence of the German word deut in Celan’s poem having the triple meaning of “bits” or “parts”, “German” and “Deuteronomy”

[28] I use the word “anthropocentric” to denote a worldview that places the human being as central in the world

[29] Polis – Greek for “city”

[30] Matthew 5:45; the words “just” and “unjust” are translated from the Greek dikaios and adikos, respectively

The Specter of Civil War

2009-12-01T11:46:00.001-06:00

The Specter of Civil War

The end of World War II in 1945 was, and continues to be, a major line of demarcation in twentieth-century political studies for several important categories with, perhaps, none so important as that of intrastate conflict. In the decades since the end of World War II, geopolitical conflict has shifted dramatically away from major interstate conflicts in favor of an alarming upward trend of intrastate conflicts – also known as “civil wars.” As noted in the study by James Fearon and David Laitin, roughly 25 interstate conflicts – wars between two nations – have been waged between 1945 and 1999 with a death toll of approximately 3.33 million. In the same period there were 127 intrastate wars with more than 16.2 million dead; a ratio of roughly 5:1 in both the numbers of conflicts and loss of life. A related study found that the there is a considerable difference between the duration of interstate and intrastate wars, with the former lasting, on average, 480 days and the latter 1,665 days: a ratio of 3.46:1. In short, civil wars have become the most deadly form of warfare on planet Earth since the end of World War II. Perhaps more daunting than the statistics associated with civil war is the simple fact that the causes of intrastate conflict are still not very well understood. Despite some genuine, well-funded and initially promising efforts to unlock the keys for forecasting and preventing civil wars, the “silver bullet” of forecasting and prevention remains elusive. The specter of civil war continues to haunt this planet, from the policy-makers in the most powerful halls of government to the simplest citizen trapped in a region of political instability.

In political science, there are generally three different approaches to understanding political conflict: a. the qualitative method of interviewing, aggregating and analyzing reports and predictions provided by subject matter experts (SMEs), b. the quantitative method of formulating robust statistical probability models that measure key factors (usually by proxy markers for larger political indicators) and, c. a combination of both. There are, to be sure, both advantages and disadvantages to each method with regard to political conflict in general and intrastate conflict in particular. The first method has the advantage of first-hand, experiential knowledge of a political hot spot. SMEs are paid to be “on the ground”, out and among the local population, reading the newspapers, keeping a close eye on potentially inflammatory situations. They provide a potentially critical human intelligence factor to information gathering. The major disadvantages to relying primarily on SMEs are that they, of course, cannot be everywhere at once. Their perspective, while usually trained to be heightened, is still in the limited first person. S/he must act as their own filter of information and, as such, the reliability of providing pertinent information to the proper individuals is understandably hampered. There is also, of course, the cost associated with keeping these people on the payroll and the hidden cost of keeping them hidden in plain sight. Moreover, the motivation of money can be potentially double-edged as a SME can be under a lot of pressure to provide useful information in exchange for payment, thus providing less-than-reliable information or, worse, be paid to provide false information to authorities and agencies. Moreover, the potential payoff may be very limited. As Phil Tetlock notes in his book, Expert Political Judgment, the discrimination and calibration scores of SMEs – or “Hedgehogs” as he refers to them – are barely higher than the average scores of a UC Berkley political science undergraduate.[1]

All of these factors led many countries, like the United States, to develop quantitative methods for capturing and analyzing data in hopes of predicting in a more accurate and cost-effective way than using SMEs. These methods usually come in the form of highly sophisticated statistical probability matrices developed by mathematicians and computer programmers. It would be unfortunate to revert to the extreme of a stereotype in order to prove a point, but it should be painfully obvious what limitations mathematicians and computer programmers may have in the political sciences. There should be no doubt that the quality of a model is not only determined by the quality of the code language it is written in but, more importantly, its quality is determined by the “statistical significance” associated with each variable as well as the information fed into the model itself. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as the old saying goes. And, as with many contrasting methods, the best answer probably lays somewhere in combining the two: striking the “perfect” balance that maximizes the advantages of both while, simultaneously minimizes the disadvantages. This is, as you may suspect, not nearly as easy at it sounds. Finding the researcher that has equally elite parts of mathematical brilliance and geopolitical knowledge who is also willing to tackle what, so far, appears to be as impossible elusive as intrastate conflict is, in many respects, very similar to drafting an NFL Hall of Fame quarterback. The statistical odds of success decrease dramatically as one attempts to find enough of these individuals to fill an entire research group. What few research groups and studies that currently exist in this field are complicated by an understandable, yet highly counter-productive, competitive antagonism between those in the quantitative and qualitative methodological camps. Factoring in personality differences, competition in academic pedigree and prevailing ideological worldviews, the apparent hopelessness of the task at hand becomes nearly overwhelming. Yet in the midst of such impressive obstacles, several groups have emerged with promising studies. The papers and studies I will be discussing are: “How Much War Will We See? Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War” by Ibrahim Elbadawi of the World Bank and Nicholas Sambanis of Yale University, “Greed and grievance in civil war” by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler from Oxford University, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” by James Fearon and David Laitin from Stanford University, “When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars” by Patrick Brandt from The University of Texas at Dallas, T. David Mason from The University of North Texas, Mehmet Gurses from Florida Atlantic University, Nicolai Petrovsky from Cardiff University and Dagmar Radin from Mississippi State University and, finally, “The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Predicting Civil Conflicts” by Michael Ward and Brian D. Greenhill from the University of Washington with Kristin Bakke from Leiden University.

Each of these essays contributes – in varying degrees – to the third, combined method I discussed earlier in the introduction. I say that they contribute “in varying degrees” mostly because all of them fall much harder on the quantitative side of the question than the qualitative. Moreover, each study is one that centers on the whole of civil wars rather than a particular “hot spot” or theatre of conflict, as one would come to expect from a report filed by an SME. The qualitative contributions of each study come mostly from each group’s interpretation of the data and the policy recommendations that accompany it. With that being said, each paper is devised with the underlying premise that quantitative modeling is a crucial element to understanding political conflict, an opinion that must be noted up front, since political scientists across the globe do not universally share it. With this essay, I hope to present and analyze both the groundbreaking contributions as well as the problems of each study, in conjunction with a recommendation for the direction of further studies into the causes and, ultimately, the prevention of intrastate wars.

Before I discuss the findings specific to each study, it might be helpful to go over the obstacles that present themselves in any attempt to compare or contrast these studies. The first obstacle is that each study is, at least in some ways, built on the back of the research, findings and recommendations that came before it. Like most of the applied mathematical sciences, these projects and studies are never done in a vacuum. Every researcher brings a lifetime of accrued knowledge and imports, for good or bad, the history of conflict into the projections. Moreover, when dealing with projects of this kind it becomes quickly apparent that there is a definite chasm of opinion between the groups. That is to say that each paper is delivered from a different literal and metaphorical page as the paper before it. As the reader will see early in the comparison, there are deep-seated divisions between the groups not only on methods and models, but on foundational worldviews that speak to each researcher’s own theory on the function of the government and, in some studies, of what it means to be human. Since this is a paper neither on political theory nor on foundational ontological philosophy, I hope to present these interpretations only in a limited sense as they pertain to the studies themselves. The second obstacle, and perhaps the hardest one to address, comes in the same vein as the previous one: none of these research groups uses the same data sets as the others. For instance, Collier and Hoeffler’s data on civil war is from 1960 to 1999 and analyzes only 79 civil conflicts. Fearon and Laitin’s research is from 1945 to 1999 and analyzes 127 civil wars, an increase of 28% in the number of years and 38% in the number of cases over Collier and Hoeffler. Brandt et al’s data is from 1945 to 1997 and the number of civil wars is 108, slightly smaller than Fearon and Laitin but much larger than Collier and Hoeffler. The paper delivered by Elbawadi and Sambanis does not provide specific data sets but appears to use a similar data set to Brandt. Finally, the critical analysis provided in the Ward, Greenhill and Bakke paper discusses the data and findings of both Collier and Hoeffler and Fearon and Laitin, but uses a third model to analyze the effectiveness of the first two models as if they were studies done on equal terms, which they are not.

In conjunction with a lack of consistency in the data sets used between studies, there is also – though less surprising – a lack of consistency in the models that are used. No two groups rely on the same model to analyze the data. Each of these papers not only presents their own set of data, but a whole new proprietary model with which to analyze it. As one might expect, the statistical likelihood of two research groups providing similar results or recommendations when different data and models are used is “zero”. The meaningful quality of these papers is immediately hampered by the lack of consistency in the data sets and the models. This, of course, is not to say that they cannot be useful on their own terms, or even compared between them, but it is important for any researcher to keep this in mind when addressing these papers critically. Another common problem with each study is that they all begin with the presumption that major factors for political stability (or instability) can be understood by substituting “proxy” indicators. Specific examples of these will be discussed later in the paper, but it is of the utmost importance to understand that each of these models was developed: a. with the assumption-driven hypotheses of the researchers in mind, b. under the assumption that the factors that contribute to in/stability actually do and, c. that the proxies set up for each factor are both generally accurate, as well as appropriate with respect to the proportional significance of the factor. Simply put, these models are founded on the assumptions of the researchers and the empirical measurements set up to test these assumptions may be pointed in the “wrong” direction. Perhaps more dangerously than the charge that these models produced inaccurate findings is the overarching charge that the models themselves are designed to produce findings that only confirm the initial hypotheses. Again, crudely stated, the potential output of any model is inherently limited by those predetermined and hypothetical factors on which the model is based. In other words, each of these research groups must be able to demonstrate – and, to-date, has not demonstrated – that the model was designed to produce only those results which the researchers wanted it to. While I do not intend to charge any of these groups with outright falsification – nor would I agree with anyone that levies that charge without indisputable proof – the phantom of impropriety must be resolutely dispelled in any quantitative analysis before the veracity of its results can be relied upon for policy decisions that affect the lives of millions. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will address each study on its own terms without an undermining suspicion of its authenticity. It should be noted that while there is an obvious chronology to each of the papers I will discuss, I will not be discussing them in chronological order. Some of the papers have gone through several revisions from their earliest forms and I do not intend to present a historiography of the research but rather a qualitative analysis of it. In this respect, I hope to show that chronology is not as material as content.

Ibrahim Elbawadi and Nicholas Sambanis’ paper “How Much War Will We See?: Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War”, appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2002. While this paper is dated as the earliest delivered out of the five discussed in this essay, the date of this paper is not simply to establish chronology but context, the reason for which will be explained later. In this paper, Elbawadi and Sambanis do not provide sample information for their analysis but they do mention that they are looking at 108 civil wars. While their paper was released five years before the Brandt study, it appears likely that Elbawadi and Sambanis used a similar or the same data set that the Brandt paper used in 2007.[2] As mentioned before, each of these papers have gone through a number of different versions and updates, including this study and the papers of other scholars that are sourced in this essay, such as Collier and Hoeffler and Fearon and Laitin. What is interesting about the date of publication for this particular article is that it comes on the heels of al Qaeda’s attacks on New York, Washington and Shanksville on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent involvement of U.S. and N.A.T.O. forces in the Afghan Civil War between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. While I will address the significance of the timing later in this section, I believe that the recommendations that Elbawadi and Sambanis make are not done in a vacuum.

According to the introduction of the project, Elbawadi and Sambanis set out to highlight – in their opinion – a major flaw in overestimating the economic impact on civil war prevalence at the expense of studying ethno-religious fractionalization.[3] The study operates on three fundamental hypotheses: a. An increase in economic opportunity within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war, b. An increase in democratic polity ratings within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war and, c. The closer that ethnic fragmentation approaches a middle amount, the higher the increase of civil war prevalence will manifest.[4] In their study, they explore the hypothesis that all rebellions are beholden to the amount of financing they can secure; therefore natural resources and the availability of finances is the largest contributor to civil wars.[5] They claim that despite “rising averages in world income and democracy levels” the world is “less safe [now] than 40 years ago”.[6] What is important about this particular admission is that it appears to go counter to their claim that the quality of democratic polity ratings are central to the prevalence of civil wars? It appears as though the closer the ethnic diversity ratio between two groups within a state approaches 50% apiece, the higher the risk of civil war manifests, especially in conjunction with a high national population. While the significance of ethnic fragmentation seems to be the heaviest statistical factor weighed by this study, it is not the only factor discussed. In analyzing the polity rating for states with previous civil war data, the study suggests that a low democratic polity rating also implies that the population of the state has a significant lack of options whereby they may peacefully articulate grievances. [7]

This political reality, according to the study, is tantamount to inevitable military conflict. It is from this logic-inspired deduction that Elbawadi and Sambanis arrive at the pre-eminence of democratic regimes in preventing political conflict, admittedly in spite of this particular factor having been dismissed by a number of previous – and subsequent – studies.[8] It is interesting that when the results of the model do not ultimately prove out against their initial hypotheses (or support their subsequent conclusions and recommendations), they argue that the factors in their models that don’t appear to be statistically significant may be so interdependent on factors that are statistically significant that the insignificant variables are, themselves, significant.[9] A confusing and potentially counter-productive argument, to be sure, and especially even more so considering they do little in the way of clarifying or adjusting for this claim in their own research. In the end, it appears that Elbawadi and Sambanis were convinced from the beginning that certain factors were undeniably involved in political in/stability and ignored the lack of evidence in their own research to arrive, in circular fashion, no further than where they began. While I don’t call into question the sincerity of their convictions, I do believe that their conclusions were too strongly influenced by the political climate of the U.S. and Europe in late 2001 and early 2002 to provide anything of lasting utility to the question of political and intrastate conflict. Indeed, their recommendations on this question represent the politically “safe” position that would ultimately form the foundation of the so-called “Bush doctrine” of foreign policy: a. it is important to improve the number and quality of democratic regimes in the world, b. it is important to improve the economic opportunity and growth of impoverished nations, by way of increasing a nation’s per capita income, and c. that improving the political conditions for a state is more feasible than attempting to develop advanced and high-yield economic infrastructure in a repressive regime with a low polity ranking.[10] The essence of their policy recommendation is that, despite any statistical correlations between a high polity ranking and lack of intrastate conflict, policy-makers should engage in what amounts to the age-old practice of “nation building” in order to decrease the overall risk of civil war. Of course, the two primary efforts of the United States to increase economic and democratic values within troubled regions of the world – Afghanistan and Iraq – are still ongoing and, currently, without any substantial exit strategy. More than preventing a civil war in either country, the U.S. appears to have created or prolonged two of them by following this recommendation.

The next study I wish to discuss came from the Oxford Economic Papers is an article entitled “Greed and grievance in civil war” by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler from Oxford University in 2004. The work by Collier and Hoeffler is, without a doubt, mentioned most often by the other sources in this essay and it appears that the work established by these two scholars is highly respected, even if those citing them disagree with their findings. In the paper published in 2004, Collier and Hoeffler attempt to offer an “econometric” model of predicting civil war, relying on a blend of “motive and opportunity” believing that rebellion, like murder, requires both.[11] Collier and Hoeffler use a data set that includes civil wars only from 1960-1999. This time period includes 13-15 less years than contemporary models, which constitute 25-28% decrease in sample size over other the other four studies in this essay. Similarly, they only analyze 79 civil wars, as opposed to 108 civil wars from Brandt et al and 127 from F&L, which constitutes a 27-38% smaller sample than other contemporary studies.[12] They also do a particularly good job of summarizing the ongoing debate between political scientists and economists on the question of intrastate conflict, claiming that political theorists have long argued that civil wars happen due to grievances, while economists have begun to theorize that the causes for civil wars are more akin to new industry that uses political violence as a means to collect resources.[13]

As would be the case in Elbawadi and Sambanis’ argument, Collier and Hoeffler argue that grievance may not be the best explanatory factor for rebellion since all countries have social groups that have grievances against the predominant regime.[14] Instead, they want to analyze “quantitative indicators of opportunities”, including primary commodity export dependence, rebel financing from foreign diasporas, and rebel financing from hostile governments.[15] As I alluded to before, some of the factors and proxied indicators can potentially leave policy-makers dissatisfied. These are certainly included in that risky group. Their proxy for the measurement of a diaspora’s effective range of influence on the country of origin is the number of immigrants from that country currently living in the United State as provided by U.S. census data.[16] I wonder if this really the best data to use? What about diasporas living in Europe and industrialized countries in East Asia such as China, Japan and Korea? It appears that this proxy could be accused of myopia and a narrow scope. Moreover it appears to betray a belief that international citizens find the United States the most attractive place to live and the U.S. census provides an accurate picture of non-American diasporic communities. Again, I question using data from the Cold War as a proxy for financing from hostile governments in a post-Cold War environment.[17] While the data is certainly analogous, the motivation and the amount since the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. can only certainly be different. Yet even if they remain constant after 1990, Collier and Hoeffler do nothing to reinforce the accuracy of this proxy or assuage any doubt against potential concerns.

While many of the opportunity factors listed are eventually whittled down to measure their statistical significance within a combined model, the final factors that remain in the model are: economic dependence on a primary commodity export, funding for the insurgency provided by foreign diasporas and/or foreign governments, per capita income, male secondary schooling, economic growth rate, and population demographics.[18] The most statistically significant factor of the group is, by far, state dependence on primary commodity exports. According to the published study by Collier and Hoeffler, the “risk of conflict peaks when [primary commodity exports] constitute 33% of GDP”, thus, “primary exports are highly significant.” At “peak danger” of 33% of GDP there is a 22% chance of civil war, compared to 1% for countries with no primary commodity dependence.[19]

In the end, Collier and Hoeffler appear to end their recommendation on a peace keeping note, urging policy-makers to help maintain peace in those countries that have seen intrastate conflict, since – as they interpret the final factor – by way of a cliché: “time heals.” In other words, the longer the duration since the last intrastate conflict the more chance a state has to recuperate and reinforce those positive forces that discourage civil conflict.[20] While running the risk of oversimplifying each series of policy recommendations to dominant ideological worldviews, it would not be inappropriate to suggest that these recommendations are strongly pro-U.N. and pro-N.A.T.O. The underlying suggestion here is that international organizations and governmental coalitions should engage actively in peacekeeping operations in troubled regions of the world in order to reinforce “peace episodes”, thus reducing the likelihood of resurgence in rebellion. It would also not be inappropriate to tie this opinion and the timing of this paper’s release to a growing international criticism of the foreign policies of the Bush administration in the Afghan theatre and freshly started Iraq war.

In their 2003 paper from the American Political Science Review, James Fearon and David Laitin took up the question of what extent ethno-religious fractionalization plays in the development of intrastate conflict. Inspired in part by the ethno-religious conflict in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, the Arab-Persian wars of the 1980s, the ethnic violence in the Balkans and eastern Europe and the continued ethnic violence in Africa, there has been a significant scholarly opinion that the high prevalence of conflict and civil war since 1945 owes much to long-standing ethnic and religious fractionalization in under-developed nations. Fearon and Laitin disagree with this assumption and set out in this paper to test it against a model that they developed to measure “conditions that favor insurgency”.[21] According to the model developed by Fearon and Laitin, the problem of civil violence cannot be attributed simply to democracy, religion or ethnic composition. Instead, the seemingly elusive reasons for civil war arise from a deeply complex and integrated set of conditions that contributes, according to their theory, to political instability and civil violence of all kinds. In short, regardless of ethno-religious diversity or antagonism within a state, the higher the per-capita income, the less risk there is within that state for insurgency. It seems that, in the view of Fearon and Laitin, the old colloquial adage that you can simply rub the money “wherever it hurts” holds true. Moreover, Fearon and Laitin are not particularly convinced that those factions that identify themselves as “ethnic” or “nationalist” have any substantial difference from any other form of insurgency.[22] It would be misleading, however, to classify Fearon and Laitin’s views of ethnic diversity as wholly insignificant as they do argue that ethnic diversity can indirectly lead to conditions which provide prime ground for insurgency, even if they don’t influence the insurgency directly.[23] This position on regime type and ethnic fragmentation, then, is a noteworthy shift away from the belief that grievances are the main motivations for intrastate conflict, rather than opportunity. Their model for insurgency is based almost entirely on the premise that wherever there are opportunities for (i.e. a sufficient number of factors favoring) insurgency, regardless of the motivation, an insurgency will emerge to challenge the government. These factors include, but are not limited to: a newly independent state, a politically unstable central government, a substantial national population, a separate territorial base from the central seat of government (such as East Pakistan/Bangladesh), the willingness of foreign governments or diasporas to provide funding and/or weapons to insurgents, the presence of low-weight, high-value natural resources for exploitative use by insurgents to fund activity, and/or the presence of oil.

The foundational premise for using per capita income as a proxy for government strength comes is based on the notion that the lower a nation’s GDP is, the less money there is for the government to tax/appropriate for public services, police and infrastructure. Tellingly, the Fearon-Laitin model shows that a decrease of $1,000 in GDP can result in an increase of 41% in the chance for civil war. Furthermore, Fearon and Laitin argue that weakened economic conditions (including low per capita income) make recruiting easier for insurgent factions.[24] Nearing the conclusion of their study, Fearon and Laitin suggest that these states with low economic production should be classified as their own kind of regime type (regardless of polity rankings) known as “anocracies”, a government whose central authority is either weak or non-existent. These anocracies, because of a lack of government revenue by way of economic production, do not have the resources – outside of foreign aid – to stamp out the insurgency.[25] The only obvious exception to this hypothesis are those states with extensive oil reserves providing the central government with sufficient “easy” money without the need to develop a strong social infrastructure, leaving dispersed populations, in theory, isolated enough to develop an insurgency without the watchful eye of the government.[26]

All of these findings are wholly contingent on the accuracy of the proxies they assign for each factor and – as one might expect – the proxies are certainly not bulletproof. The counter-insurgency power of a central government is proxied by the state’s estimated GDP. The most obvious problem is that these numbers, while generally reliable, are still estimates. For the countries found most often under the lens of research, official records and data collection is very difficult. Most of the research is done in highly industrialized Western countries where – as Fearon and Laitin put it – “socially intrusive” infrastructure and bureaucracies reach far and deep. Researchers will quickly find, however, that the availability of reliable records in under-developed countries like Afghanistan or Zimbabwe are slim-to-none. A wholly acceptable criticism would be that if an “anocracy” doesn’t have the resources to provide police or military defense forces enough to protect its citizens or interests, then why should they be expected to keep accurate records on national finances? Moreover, this proxy assumes that the funds that make up GDP are available for state collection or that the state has a mechanism in place to collect taxes and fees. Afghan farmers that produce poppies for opiates are generating revenue, but does that revenue always translate to tax revenue for the state? Considering these factors, it seems that GDP as a proxy for the strength of a state is probably not as accurate as Fearon and Laitin would like it to be for the purposed of their model. Coming to this initial conclusion is important since Fearon and Laitin’s model is almost entirely predicated on this one “statistically significant” variable. This is not to say that the predictive power - as the Ward, Greenhill and Bakke study addresses – is completely lost, but it is important for researchers in this field to understand how thin the ice on which they stand is. As I crudely put it earlier in this essay, “garbage in, garbage out.” With that being said, the suggestion that “anocratic” states are most susceptible to insurgencies seems to be on sure footing as the incidence of countries with a strong central government that faced insurgent forces and rebellions have been very few in history, especially since 1945. Where Fearon and Laitin’s anocratic governments seem to be most vulnerable does not seem to be as dependent on GDP as it does on the age of the state and the time with which it was given during “peace periods” to develop “socially intrusive” infrastructure and bureaucracies. States/governments that are younger than two years are 5.25 times more likely to have a civil war than others.[27] This is best seen, perhaps, with the formation of the UN and the disintegration of most European colonial systems at the end of WWII.[28] In addition, those countries that contain at least 50% mountainous terrain have twice as much of a chance to experience a civil war (from 6.5% to 13.2%) as similar countries.[29] The terrain itself provides little explanation aside from being a proxy for the difficulty and expense involved in the government’s attempts to expand infrastructure outside of major population zones. If a government is unable to penetrate the hostile topography within its own borders, it is unlikely that this country will: a. be able to develop those lands effectively for economic exploitation and, b. patrol those lands in counter-insurgency and police operations.

The conclusions of this study, such as it is, do appear to be reasonable ones, even if the questions and concerns with their model go unresolved. They find that in history that it was decolonization in the aftermath of WWII and the early decades of the UN that created poor and weak states. These “anocracies” were susceptible to all kinds of insurgencies, regardless of the motivation for that insurgency. As such, to focus on ethno-religious fractionalization or polity ratings for a given state is a mistake. Rather, the spread of democracy and policies that reflect ethno-religious tolerance should be encouraged because they are generally good for people, not because they are believed to be “magic bullets” for ending or preventing civil wars.[30] The recommendation of the Fearon-Laitin study is: in order to decrease the statistical likelihood of civil war within a country, the central governments in high-risk scenarios must be strengthened, well funded and aided in the development of a socially “intrusive” bureaucracy.[31] In the end, countries that have proven incapable of successful self-government should be candidates for UN “neotrusteeship”.[32]

The study done by Brandt, Mason, Gurses, Petrovsky and Radin takes the question of civil wars in a slightly different direction, hoping to show that understanding how civil wars end can be as significant as how they begin.[33] In the paper published for Defence and Peace Economics in 2008, “When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars”, Brandt et al. establishes that, without question, civil wars are not only the costliest form of war since 1945 in terms of casualties but also the most disruptive in terms of time spent on violent conflict. The first thing Brandt et al. does is establish firmly that the data they are using for their model comes from the Correlates of War (COW). This is important for purposes of transparency, which – according to the footnotes from the first page of their introduction – appears to be important to this ongoing research question. They both acknowledge the many suggested revisions from readers and editors as well as accept responsibility for any remaining errors in the research, model and/or published material. According to the data in the COW, they found that civil wars have caused almost four times the amount of deaths as interstate wars since 1945 and have lasted almost four times as long on average. They record 23 interstate wars between 1945-1997 with a casualty total of 3.3 million and an average duration of 480 days. The only data point in this study where interstate fighting seems to be higher than its civil war counterpart is in the total average deaths per conflict series, with interstate at approximately 143,000 per incident. Intrastate conflict, on the other hand, was seen in 108 different episodes, saw 11.8 casualties and lasted on average 1,665 days. The average casualty rate for a civil war topped out at approximated 105,000. All of these statistics point, unquestionably, to the overwhelming deadliness of civil wars since 1945. Correspondingly, any efforts or success in shortening the duration of civil wars will significantly decrease both the overall conflict occurring at any given point in time, but will also decrease the political, collateral and life losses that accompany those conflicts.[34]

These statistical points direct Brandt et al. to the suggestion that it is just as important to analyze how – and when – civil wars end as it is to analyze other factors about them, since when they end usually has a significant impact on how they end.[35] Setting up a cross-section of possibilities, Brandt’s team argues that the four potential resolutions are: a. the rebels quit fighting and the government crushes the insurgency, b. the government quits fighting and the rebellion takes control of the disputed facilities and infrastructure, c. both parties choose to quit fighting and the conflict ends in a negotiated settlement or, d. neither party quits and the fighting continues.[36] The rest of their argument is predicated on the assumption that negotiations are always less preferable to combatants than total victory, not in the least part because negotiated settlements usually take the longest to reach, thus draining both sides of precious resources, population (i.e. military manpower and economic production) and continue to raise the risk to necessary infrastructure.[37] Beginning with these assumptions, the team devises a number of hypotheses to test for the purposes of measuring the correlation between the duration of a war and its outcome. These hypotheses contribute, in part, to how the model produces conclusions, but it seems not nearly so much as the previously examined models. In any event, the model provides the following rules for civil war duration: a. The larger the casualty rate, the shorter the war will be as the existing pool of resources will be depleted quicker, b. the larger the government forces, the shorter the war will be, c. the involvement of external financial and military forces will increase the duration of the conflict regardless of which side the support is given to, d. the percentage of mountainous terrain positively affects the duration of conflict and e. civil wars of secession last longer than civil wars of revolution. The last point is the first and only mention among all of the analyzed models that takes into consideration the difference between an insurgency of secession and an insurgency of revolution which is surprising considering the “end goal” of the insurgency is a primary factor for understanding how the begin in the first place. The motivations, regardless of “greed” or “grievance”, are very different for each kind of rebellion, especially when one considers that some of the factors in previous models have dealt with questions of ethno-religious fractionalization, democratic polity, access to wealth and “socially intrusive” infrastructure. As such, it is highly significant that the Brandt study revealed that secessionists appear to be much more determined and patient than revolutionaries with regard to extended conflict.

As such, the following conclusions are draw from the Brandt data: a. in the first five years of a conflict, government and rebel victories are equally as likely, b. from five to seven years government victory is the most likely and, c. from seven years onward the most likely outcome is a negotiated settlement. The most obvious fact provided by these conclusions is that a rebel force is never given the best odds of victory. At no point in the “under seven years” time-scale of a civil war are rebel forces given a high likelihood of victory against the government. Indeed, their best chances are in the first five years and, comparatively speaking, this is not a particularly large window of time with which to recruit, engage and overthrow even a generally weak government. The policy recommendation that this paper relies on is that our attitudes should never reflect a belief that civil wars simply “burn themselves out” or that we should just “give war a chance”. What should be noted is that there is a potentially unspoken recommendation from this paper, one that policy makers are sure to “read between the lines”: in order to keep civil wars short (decreasing casualties and keeping destruction of infrastructure to a minimum), external governments should do what is necessary to bolster countries that are in danger of developing an insurgency to ensure that government forces in those countries are overwhelmingly stronger than any potential opposition and that the infrastructure necessary to create a “socially intrusive” infrastructure is available for those countries in the form of foreign aid. This underlying recommendation, intentional or not, flies directly in the face of Brandt et al.’s secondary expressed recommendation that external involvement in the war only serves to increase its duration.

The final paper I wish to discuss is the one study I can find the least fault with as it was designed to be a critical study of Fearon and Latin and Collier and Hoeffler’s models. The study, titled “The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Predicting Civil Conflicts” is slated for publication in the Journal of Peace Research and was written by Michael Ward, Brian Greenhill and Kristin Bakke.[38] This aptly titled study focuses on the problems that arise from relying on models that “postdict” statistical significance at the expense of producing out-of-sample predictions.[39] Ward’s group argues that without interpretation, statistical summaries can easily be oversimplified and definitely misleading, and that the true value of a model is based solely on how well it makes predictions.[40]

Turning to the papers published by Fearon and Laitin and Collier and Hoeffler, they surmise that those statistically significant factors of existing models produce interesting results aren’t worth much if the predicting power of the model does not translate to out-of-sample conflicts.[41] By making an argument about out-of-sample conflicts, Ward et al. bring to the forefront an issue that has not been addressed by any of the previous models, including Brandt’s work: that all of these models’ “statistically significant” factors – along with the highly-rated success of these models’ indicators – are based on a compilation of all of the existing data that went into the model. If, as Ward et al. suggest, a case that does not belong to the existing data group, the model’s ability to predict is cut significantly. Arguing that the models of Fearon and Laitin and Collier and Hoeffler suffer from research design flaws, Ward’s group demonstrates that both models – when asked to predict at high error tolerance thresholds – produce more “false positives” than real ones and – when asked to predict at low error tolerance thresholds – produce no real positives at all, suggesting that the discrimination power of the models are abysmally low.[42]

The key, according to Ward et al., to refining the models is the incorporation of out-of-sample counterfactual data in order to keep the models from “overfitting” and improve both discrimination and calibration.[43] While Ward’s group only intended to discuss the problems of design flaws for the model in-depth, they also conclude that there is room for other researchers to look to improve upon the problems of mis-specification with both models – particularly with regard to incorporating the diffusive effects of regional stability patterns, as well as lowering the level of data aggregation to a more localized level instead of treating all nations as though they adhere to the, mostly, arbitrarily set political boundaries of post-WWII decolonization.[44] In that respect, they are pointing to the importance of not only looking at national levels, but at more localized data, trends and patterns as reflecting conflict epicenters that spread outward rather than everywhere in a country at once.[45] This appears to be a very appropriate recommendation, especially when one considers that the violence between narco-cartels in northern Mexico and federal police agencies have resulted in more casualties than all of the official U.S. casualties in Iraq. Mexican officials have been assassinated, “insurgent” forces from the cartels have directly engaged military personnel from both Mexico and the U.S., and – at least rhetorically – the Mexican government has declared a “war” against these very dangerous organizations. Despite the technical criteria that produce conflict classification – and the vocal objections of the Mexican government – to the contrary, the situation just south of the United States’ border with Mexico shares a number of the most dangerous similarities with previous and current intrastate conflicts. As became obvious in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S., many of the classifications of conflicts and combatants need to be updated in order to adequately assess a changing field.

What can be seen from a brief comparison of these various studies, scholarly criticism can often appear to be sharp and unforgiving. With years’ worth of work and reputation balanced against the potential accolades of developing the next great leap in political theory, political theorists can become unintentionally rigid in their methods and conclusions. Despite the myriad temptations to lose sight of this goal, the eye must remain fixed, the mind open and the will determined in order to meet the challenge laid at one’s feet by generations of failed attempts. The projects, papers and studies represented in this essay represent the furthest step toward a goal of protecting and cultivating peace. As far as these efforts have brought the study of political conflict, further steps are necessary. Further refinement of the models – from assumption to design, data to specifications, conclusions to recommendations – is still necessary. I concur with Ward’s group that the incorporation of regional influence must be taken into consideration and that conflict zones must be understood in a more local, epicentral way rather than relying on potentially misleading national aggregates. I also agree with Ward et al. that “statistically significant” is ultimately insignificant if the model cannot produce accurate predictions for out-of-sample or counterfactual cases. While the choice of proxy indicators for major factors are limited, and the data to feed those proxies is even more so, researchers must do better than use rough estimates and pre-Cold War figures to proxy twenty-first century factors. Perhaps most important of all is that they must work harder to keep foundational assumptions about how the world works from influencing the models they build. Another potentially helpful method would be to work less with those that they see eye-to-eye with and more with those that represent opposite, and even hostile, worldviews in order to achieve a broader vision of conflict inauguration and conflict resolution. As we have come to expect, technology is a powerful assistant to these efforts, but it cannot overcome all of the obstacles on its own: it is important to retain and reinforce human involvement where necessary, bolstering the apparatus of SME-dom with the most sophisticated probability forecasting models. Ultimately, however, it seems that the possibilities of these accomplishments are capped only by human imagination and the resolve to put that imagination to work.

[1] Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, p. 77

[2] Elbawadi, Ibrahim, and Nicholas Sambanis. “How Much War Will We See?: Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (2002): 307-334. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “ES” in footnotes.

[3] ES, 308

[4] ES, 311

[5] ES, 309

[6] ES, 317

[7] ES, 310

[8] ES, 325

[9] ES, 326

[10] ES, 331

[11] Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. “Greed and grievance in civil war.” Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004): 563-595. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “CH” in footnotes.) CH, 563.

[12] CH, 565

[13] CH, 564

[14] CH, 564

[15] CH, 565, 568

[16] CH, 568

[17] CH, 568

[18] CH, 567-570

[19] CH, 565, 574 and 580

[20] CH, 589

[21] Fearon, James, and David Laitin. “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75-90. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “FL” in footnotes.) FL, 75.

[22] FL, 79

[23] FL, 83

[24] FL, 79, 80 and 83

[25] FL, 85

[26] FL, 81

[27] FL, 85

[28] FL, 87

[29] FL, 85

[30] FL, 88

[31] FL, 88

[32] FL, 89

[33] Brandt, Mason, Gurses, Petrovsky and Radin will be referred to as “Brandt”, “Brandt’s group” or “Brandt et al.” henceforth in the body of the text.

[34] Brandt, Patrick, T. Mason, Mehmet Gurses, Nicholai Petrovsky, Dagmar Radin. “When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars.” Defence and Peace Economics 19.6 (2008): 415-434. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “Brandt” in footnotes.) Brandt, 416

[35] Brandt, 417

[36] Brandt, 418

[37] Brandt, 418, 419

[38] Ward, Greenhill and Bakke will be referred to either as “Ward’s group” or “Ward et al.” henceforth in the body of the text.

[39] Ward, Michael D., Brian D. Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke. "The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Predicting Civil Conflicts." Proc. of 50th Annual Convention of International Studies Association, New York. 2009. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “Ward” in footnotes.) Ward, 2, FL, 76

[40] Ward, 3-4

[41] Ward, 4

[42] Ward, 7-8

[43] Ward, 14

[44] Ward, 18

[45] Ward, 19

The Democratization of American Christianity

2009-11-03T12:39:00.001-06:00

The Democratization of American Christianity

Book Review

In his award-winning book, The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch explores the hypothesis and the process by which American Christianity was both influenced and overtaken by the rising spirit of democratic populism in the early years of the republic. Drawing from scores of primary and secondary sources, including such abstract sources as sheets of gospel music and the diaries of itinerant preachers, Hatch delivers a thoughtful and compelling synthesis, providing a window into the cultural phenomenon of popular religion. This phenomenal reshaping of American religion, in Hatch’s worldview, was not simply an evolution of religious ideas, but a revolution in values and cultural norms that Christianity needed to respond to in order to survive in the early republic.

Hatch, approaching the subject of early American Christianity through the lens of social history, lays the foundation of all subsequent claims by suggesting that this era in American history is defined by the popular leaders it produced in all sectors.[1] The religious movements of the time are no different in this respect than intellectual, political, social, economic and commercial movements from this period. The religious leaders he investigates in-depth are: Baron Stone of the “Christian” movement, William Miller of the Adventists, Francis Asbury of the Methodists, John Leland of the Baptists, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal church and Joseph Smith of the Latter-Day Saints. To Hatch, the key to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity is in the exploring the process and the effects of democratization. Revealing his perspective as a social historian, he argues that all of Christianity can be read as a “dialectic between atomization and authority,” and the early republic-era of American Christianity can be seen as a time when centralized authority was subverted both in professional vocations as well as sacred ones.[2]

Relying on a trans-Atlantic tradition of intellectual and social movements, Hatch traces the dramatic shift in American values, initially, to a post-Revolution population boom born from high land availability and massive immigration coupled with a contemporarily high birth rate. This population boom radically altered the religious and political climate of America. An increasing value shift toward populism assisted in the change of the religious, political and social environment in the United States, while the attitudes in American rural communities changed to favor itinerant preachers, “untutored” men that resembled the folk they ministered to. Hatch argues that the Revolution ushered in a new social order whereby increasing numbers of people could take charge of their own lives, and that paradigm shift in political and social theory bled over into the religious sphere of American life.[3] In the aftermath of the Revolution, Hatch suggests that American Christianity suffered from a “withering” institutional establishment claiming that, essentially, American congregants wanted their churches to condescend to their level. This was directly linked to a Reformation-era belief that the clergy were not, in fact, “set apart” from the laity of the congregation and was coupled with a developing populist cultural movement, the virtue of the volk was valued far above any concept of elitism. These two factors combined to commence the removal of an overriding orthodoxy to scrutinize the beliefs, traditions and practices of congregations.[4]

What ranks as certain among Hatch’s arguments is the degree of importance he places on the emergence of major print. Publishing the journals and diaries of itinerant preachers not only aided in propagandizing the devotion and innovation of “unlettered” preachers, but these sectarian groups immediately recognized the importance of major print was profound and even part of divine providence. Hatch does a considerable job outlining the efforts of evangelical groups working to wrest the power of print away from elitists and into common hands, which enabled ordinary folks to produce religious tracts.[5] Furthermore, the ever-expanding presence and role of newspapers in this period worked to chip away at the foundation of credentialed elites by undermining and ridiculing those educated and highly trained professionals from all vocations.

Getting to the heart of the argument, Hatch focuses most of his energy on tying the phenomenon of religious development of the early republic to the cultural movement of populism in post-Revolution America. Like their political, social and economic counterparts, Hatch argues that populist religious movements are created out of class struggles, egalitarianism, theories of equality and spirituality, putting a very popular and social spin on a field of research that has been traditionally dominated by research into intellectual elites, no easy task.[6] While much of Hatch’s argument is reliant on proving a hypothesis that common people believed that learned men were understood to be trying to mediate between God and men. His attempts to unveil an underlying antagonism between elites and commoners – while undeniably influenced by Marxist political and social theory – produces the interesting claim that American clergymen, historically and even currently, have been subject to democratic ideals even more than lawyers and physicians. Summing up this viewpoint, Hatch articulates that a “free-market economy continues in the field of religion, however, and credentialing, licensing or statutory control is absent… This stringent populist challenge to the religious establishment included violent anticlericalism, a flaunting of conventional religious deportment, a disdain for the wrangling of theologians, an assault on tradition, and an assertion that the common people were more sensitive than elites to the ways of the divine.”[7] The development of early republic Christianity was influenced as much by social and class issues as intellectual and theological ones and, with respect to that foundational thesis, these groups sought to develop new religious cultures that were devoid of traditionally educated theologians.[8] To Hatch, the thriving splinter-denominations of Baptists, Methodists, Latter-Day Saints and Adventists were not only successful in this venture, but that success ultimately ensured their survival in the competitive, free-market environment of American religion.

After poring over the appendices and notes for this book, it becomes readily apparent that Hatch has done an overwhelming amount of research to prepare for this project. Mentioning earlier that Hatch had been able to draw from such obscure sources as gospel music and diaries, one should also count his investigation of the rise of Yale University scholarships for theology students as equally obscure and brilliant. In many ways, Hatch seems to have left no stone unturned in order to shift the paradigm of early American religious studies. No less important or useful to his research are the numerous sermons, speeches and pieces of artwork that helped inform his thesis. As if anticipating at least some criticism for not presenting very many in-depth analyses or micro-historical presentations of religious movements and leaders, Hatch preemptively admits that he will be focusing mostly on national, non-regional trends. Perhaps one of the earned criticisms for this project is that Hatch’s research emphasis is clearly on the “fringe” of contemporary religious movements. Assessing these fringe movements through the dual lenses of transatlantic and social history, Hatch comes away with a slightly incomplete appraisal of religious development. Perhaps nowhere is this better seen than in the conclusion he draws with regard to what these movements left as inheritance in American society. Hatch’s conclusion that the legacy of democratization in American Christianity is, partly, that there remains a considerable gap in the “vitality” of religious experience between the educated and the working classes.[9] Hatch perceives that “intellectually modern” is still as reviled today as it was during the populist social revolution of the early republic and that the line of religious “vitality” is drawn along seam of education.[10] His faith – no pun intended – in American religious culture is also negatively affected by his underlying worldview, claiming that the process of democratization has led to a downward shift in the quality of thinking and men that modern American religion produces.[11] The quality of a theological argument, in modern religion, is assessed by its popularity rather than the intellectual merits and the rigor of the methodology that produced it, confirming the stated fears of Lyman Beecher – which Hatch quotes early in his book.[12] Having unlocked the “key” to understanding both the history and the future of American Christianity, Hatch concludes that the landscape of American Christianity is one of unbridled individualism where the success of a church will continue to be measured by the size of its multi-media viewer- and membership.[13]

This book stands both as a bridge and as a paragon of transatlantic and social history. The fact that Hatch has so brilliantly applied the discipline and techniques he developed in those two historical traditions to the study of religion is particularly noteworthy and it cannot be any surprise that Hatch has received the academic accolades that he has. Some of the most outstanding scholarship produced in the late twentieth century was produced from coming to a new social and popular understanding of religious movements, particularly the so-called “magisterial” and “radical” Reformation movements in Europe. Hatch, via this project, delivered as outstanding of an analysis of American populism’s effects on Christianity as any Reformation historian fashioned for their field of research.

[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 13

[2] Ibid p. 15

[3] Ibid pp. 4-6

[4] Ibid pp. 7-10

[5] Ibid pp. 126, 128

[6] Ibid p. 14

[7] Ibid pp. 16, 22

[8] Ibid. pp. 35, 135

[9] Ibid p. 218

[10] Ibid p. 213

[11] Ibid p. 162

[12] Ibid pp. 162, 166, 182

[13] Ibid pp. 213-217

Forecasting Intrastate Conflicts

2009-10-19T22:47:00.002-05:00

Forecasting Intrastate Conflicts

The end of World War II in 1945 was, and continues to be, a major line of demarcation in twentieth-century political studies for more several important categories, perhaps none so important as that of intrastate conflict. In the decades since the end of World War II, geopolitical conflict has shifted dramatically away from major interstate conflicts in favor of an alarming upward trend of intrastate conflicts – also known as “civil wars.” As noted in the study by James Fearon and David Laitin, roughly 25 interstate conflicts – wars between two nations – have been waged between 1945 and 1999 with a death toll of approximately 3.33 million. In the same period there were 127 intrastate wars – civil wars – with more than 16.2 million dead; a ratio of roughly 5:1 in both the numbers of conflicts and loss of life.[1] A related study found that the there is a considerable difference between the duration of interstate and intrastate wars, with the former lasting, on average, 480 days and the latter 1,665 days: a ratio of 3.46:1.[2] In short, civil wars have become the most deadly form of warfare on planet Earth since the end of World War II. Perhaps worse than all of these statistics is the simple fact that, with regard to the political sciences, the causes of intrastate conflict are not well understood making the potential for forecasting and preventing them very limited. This is, of course, not in any sense for a lack of trying. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, several in-depth – and, at the surface, promising – studies have emerged with the expressed purpose of attempting to root-out the major fundamental factors that contribute to intrastate conflict, build a robust model to account for those factors and, in the end, predict the likelihood of further intrastate conflict in troubled regions of the world. This essay will attempt to analyze the studies completed by the following three teams: Stanford University’s James Fearon and David Laitin, Oxford University’s Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, and Yale University’s Nicholas Sambanis with Ibrahim Elbadawi from the World Bank. While these studies constitute some of the most innovative and rigorous attempts to understand the roots of intrastate conflict, it should become quickly obvious to any reader that these attempts do not bring policy-makers substantially closer to a path of prediction and prevention than they were at the close of the twentieth century.

While each of the three teams that conducted a study on intrastate conflict has arrived at a very unique statistical model of intrastate conflicts, there are a number of factors on which they all agree. First and foremost among these conclusions, is that contrary to the conventional opinion developed in the late 1990s, the end of the Cold War did not dramatically increase the number of intrastate conflicts in the world.[3] The prevailing opinion with regard to civil wars in the late 1990s was that small, newly independent former Soviet republics with longstanding ethno-religious differences accounted for a vast explosion of intrastate wars along the periphery of Russia. In fact, Collier and Hoeffler are quick to note that out of the seventy-nine intrastate conflicts that began between 1960 and 1999, only eleven of them – an under-representative 13.92% of the total number and almost half of the average by decade - actually started after the Cold War ended.[4]

All three studies agree, though on different terms and for different reasons, that there is a statistically significant correlation between low per capita income levels (GDP), poor economic opportunity, and the presence of intrastate conflict.[5] The particulars of how per capita income factors into each model will be discussed in subsequent sections, but it should be noted that each of the studies uses GDP as a proxy for a larger characteristic of the state with relation to conflict within their own borders, with different degrees of statistical significance for their respective models. The final statistical factor that each study appears to have some level of consensus on is the effect of ethno-religious fractionalization on the prevalence of conflict: each study appears to confirm that a high degree of ethno-religious fractionalization has no significant effect on intrastate conflict.[6] One other factor that is important to the Fearon-Laitin model, the Collier-Hoeffler model and – to a lesser and indirectly related degree – the Brandt study is the amount of rugged or mountainous terrain within the state. Briefly summing up the consensus: all three of these models agree that the amount of mountainous terrain is positively linked with the opportunity for conflict or, in the Brandt study, its duration.[7] It is beyond these factors, however, that the clear agreements between each study begin to break down.

The earliest published study of the group is the Elbawadi-Sambanis group and all subsequent studies that are published on this topic appear to be, at some level, a response to it. Published in 2002, this study set out to highlight what they perceived to be a major flaw in overstating the economic impact on civil war prevalence at the expense of studying ethno-religious fractionalization.[8] The study operates on three fundamental hypotheses: a. An increase in economic opportunity within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war, b. An increase in democratic polity ratings within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war and, c. The closer that ethnic fragmentation approaches a middle amount, the higher the increase of civil war prevalence will manifest.[9] The first two hypotheses are not particularly unique in political thought, but the third hypothesis does provide a potentially new insight into the forecast. According to the Elbawadi-Sambanis model, a highly fragmented degree of ethnic diversity – as one might find in the United States – and an extremely low degree of ethnic diversity – as one might find, ostensibly, in Uzbekistan or Mongolia – both provide a very low risk of civil war. It appears as though the closer the ethnic diversity ratio between two groups within a state approaches 50% apiece, the higher the risk of civil war manifests, especially in conjunction with a high national population. While the significance of ethnic fragmentation seems to be the heaviest statistical factor weighed by this study, it is not the only factor discussed. In analyzing the polity rating for states with previous civil war data, the study suggests that a low democratic polity rating also implies that the population of the state has a significant lack of options whereby they may peacefully articulate grievances.[10] This political reality, according to the study, is tantamount to inevitable military conflict. It is from this logic-inspired deduction that Elbawadi and Sambanis arrive at the pre-eminence of democratic regimes in preventing political conflict, admittedly in spite of this particular factor having been dismissed by a number of previous – and subsequent - studies.[11] In the end, however, the model affirms that no particular variable should be treated as independently significant, as economic variables may be tied to ethnic fragmentation, highly democratic polity ratings may be the result a powerful economy and all of these factors may be determined by historical intrastate conflict.[12] The subsequent recommendation of the study to policy-makers is threefold: a. it is important to improve the number and quality of democratic regimes in the world, b. it is important to improve the economic opportunity and growth of impoverished nations, by way of increasing a nation’s per capita income, and c. that improving the political conditions for a state is more feasible than attempting to develop advanced and high-yield economic infrastructure in a repressive regime with a low polity ranking.[13] This is the most troubling aspect of their conclusion. The essence of their policy recommendation is that, despite any statistical correlations between a high polity ranking and lack of intrastate conflict, policy-makers should engage in what amounts to the age-old practice of “nation building” in order to decrease the overall risk of civil war. One would be remiss not to mention its apparent ideological link with that of the actions taken by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The two primary efforts to increase economic and democratic values within troubled regions of the world – Afghanistan and Iraq – are still ongoing and, currently, without any substantial exit strategy.

Continuing in the chronological order by which these studies were published, we arrive at the study conducted by Fearon and Laitin, published in February of 2003. Fearon and Laitin intended to produce a model that tracks the conditions favoring the development of an insurgency within a nation. This approach, according to the study in response to the Elbawadi-Sambanis model, are more effective than those models that focus too directly on ethno-nationalist fractionalization, religious fractionalization, and government regime type.[14] This study, claiming to have considered proxies for ethnic fragmentation and regime type and finding them statistically insignificant, concluded ultimately that per capita income trumps both of those factors.[15] In short, regardless of ethno-religious diversity or antagonism within a state, the higher the per-capita income, the less risk there is within that state for insurgency. It seems that, in the view of Fearon and Laitin, the old colloquial adage that you can simply rub the money “wherever it hurts” holds true. Moreover, Fearon and Laitin are not particularly convinced that those factions that identify themselves as “ethnic” or “nationalist” have any substantial difference from any other form of insurgency.[16] It would be misleading, however, to classify Fearon and Laitin’s views of ethnic diversity as wholly insignificant as they do argue that ethnic diversity can indirectly lead to conditions which provide prime ground for insurgency, even if they don’t influence the insurgency directly.[17] This position on regime type and ethnic fragmentation, then, is a noteworthy shift away from the belief that grievances are the main motivations for intrastate conflict, rather than opportunity. Their model for insurgency is based almost entirely on the premise that wherever there are opportunities for (i.e. a sufficient number of factors favoring) insurgency, regardless of the motivation, an insurgency will emerge to challenge the government. These factors include, but are not limited to: a newly independent state, a politically unstable central government, a substantial national population, a separate territorial base from the central seat of government (such as East Pakistan/Bangladesh), the willingness of foreign governments or diasporas to provide funding and/or weapons to insurgents, the presence of low-weight, high-value natural resources for exploitative use by insurgents to fund activity, and/or the presence of oil.[18] It should be noted, however, that the dismissal of grievances as a significant or driving factor behind civil war are predicated on both a logical and statistical hypothesis that even the most homogenous national populations have differing factions with grievances against the group in power. Perhaps the most statistically significant factor in the Fearon-Laitin model has to do with the strength of central government, proxied by the state’s per capita income.[19] The foundational premise for using per capita income as a proxy for government strength comes is based on the notion that the lower a nation’s GDP is, the less money there is for the government to tax/appropriate for public services, police and infrastructure. Tellingly, the Fearlon-Laitin model shows that a decrease of $1,000 in GDP can result in an increase of 41% in the chance for civil war. Furthermore, Fearon and Laitin argue that weakened economic conditions (including low per capita income) make recruiting easier for insurgent factions.[20] Nearing the conclusion of their study, Fearon and Laitin suggest that these states with low economic production should be classified as their own kind of regime type (regardless of polity rankings) known as “anocracies”, a government whose central authority is either weak or non-existent. These anocracies, because of a lack of government revenue by way of economic production, do not have the resources – outside of foreign aid – to stamp out the insurgency.[21] The only obvious exception to this hypothesis are those states with extensive oil reserves providing the central government with sufficient “easy” money without the need to develop a strong social infrastructure, leaving dispersed populations, in theory, isolated enough to develop an insurgency without the watchful eye of the government.[22] The conclusion and recommendation of the Fearon-Laitin study is: in order to decrease the statistical likelihood of civil war within a country, the central governments in high-risk scenarios must be strengthened, well funded and aided in the development of a socially “intrusive” bureaucracy.[23]

The final and newest of the three studies being analyzed is a model developed by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler from Oxford University in 2004. Collier and Hoeffler attempt to offer an “econometric” model of predicting civil war, relying on a blend of “motive and opportunity” believing that rebellion, like murder, requires both.[24] Noting that political scientists have long argued that grievances are the reason for civil war, not opportunity or “greed”, the Collier-Hoeffler model attempts to combine the most statistically significant factors of both schools of thought. In the same vein that launched the Fearon-Laitin study, Collier and Hoeffler argue that all countries have factions that have “exaggerated grievances” against the governing power and, therefore, a grievance-only model will not be robust enough to predict intrastate conflict.[25] The model relies on an analysis of over ten “opportunity” factors and four “grievance” factors. While many of the opportunity factors listed are eventually whittled down to measure their statistical significance within a combined model, the final factors that remain in the model are: economic dependence on a primary commodity export, funding for the insurgency provided by foreign diasporas and/or foreign governments, per capita income, male secondary schooling, economic growth rate, and population demographics.[26] The most statistically significant factor of the group is, by far, state dependence on primary commodity exports. According to the published study by Collier and Hoeffler, the “risk of conflict peaks when [primary commodity exports] constitute 33% of GDP”, thus, “primary exports are highly significant.” At “peak danger” of 33% of GDP there is a 22% of civil war, compared to 1% for countries with no primary commodity dependence.[27] The four grievances listed – ethnic or religious “hatred”, political repression, political exclusion and economic inequality – do not seem to provide much staying power to the model as the two most analyzed grievances are quickly dismissed. Ethnic dominance is discarded because “peace episodes” and “war episodes” have the same amount of dominance and economic inequality is only “slightly higher” [emphasis added] prior to conflict episodes than peace episodes.[28] In the end, Collier and Hoeffler appear to end their recommendation on a peace keeping note, urging policy-makers to help maintain peace in those countries that have seen intrastate conflict, since – as they interpret the final factor – by way of a cliché: “time heals.” In other words, the longer the duration since the last intrastate conflict the more chance a state has to recuperate and reinforce those positive forces that discourage civil conflict.[29]

What is most obvious from an analysis of these studies is that no group is any closer to developing a robust understanding of how civil wars start or, by the same token, how to prevent them. The only certainty that avails policy makers and forecasting experts alike is that the loss of life, infrastructure and opportunity will continue for the foreseeable future. Moreover, as a later study suggests, it is not even clear that developing a model on “statistically significant factors” can produce the kind of predictive power that aids in the overall efforts to reduce conflict.[30] These statistically significant models are unable, according to some accusations, to predict – in any substantial sense – out-of-sample examples and leave more questions in some areas than answers. For instance, would the current violence perpetrated by drug cartels with the Mexican and United States government agencies be considered an insurgency or civil war by any of the models? Native Americans, living on federal land grants and receiving federal aid money, have not petitioned for more autonomy or taken up arms against the surrounding states or agents of the US federal government. Neither have they been subject to internal civil wars despite being poverty stricken, low male secondary schooling and poor economic development opportunities. How would Collier and Hoeffler explain this out-of-sample situation? Can efforts, though not yet violent, in Hawaii for secession from the United States – based on ethno-linguistic grievances with the Federal government and a lower per capita income for local residents – be considered or analyzed under any of the models? Can gang related violence and drug-trafficking in highly populated urban areas of the US be classified as “insurgency” by the Fearon-Laitin model? In the end, perhaps the most important questions remaining are: do the quasi-arbitrary distinctions of national borders stand as the ultimate parameters for studying civil unrest and conflict, and must groups have stated political goals in order to contribute to intrastate conflicts?

[1] Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War." American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75-90. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “FL” in footnotes.)

[2] Brandt, Patrick T., T. D. Mason, Mehmet Gurses, Nicholai Petrovsky, and Dagmar Radin. "When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars." Defence and Peace Economics 19.6 (2008): 415-34. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “Brandt” in footnotes.)

[3] Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. "Greed and grievance in civil war." Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004): 563-95. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “CH” in footnotes.) FL page 75 and CH page 581.

[4] CH page 569, calculated by dividing the 11 intrastate wars of the 1990s by the total 79 wars over 39 years where each decade should have seen, on average, 20 intrastate wars.

[5] Elbadawi, Ibrahim, and Nicholas Sambanis. "How Much War Will we see?: Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War." Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (2002): 307-34. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “ES” in footnotes.) FL page 76, CH page 588, ES page 311

[6] FL page 83, CH page 572, ES page 311

[7] FL pages 80, 85, CH page 570, Brandt 421

[8] ES page 308

[9] ES page 311

[10] ES page 310

[11] ES page 325

[12] ES page 326

[13] ES page 331

[14] FL page 88

[15] FL pages 79, 82, 83

[16] FL page 79

[17] FL page 82

[18] FL page 81

[19] FL page 76

[20] FL pages 76, 83, 80

[21] FL page 85

[22] FL page 81

[23] FL page 88

[24] CH page 563

[25] CH page 564

[26] CH pages 567-570

[27] CH pages 565, 574 and 580

[28] CH page 572

[29] CH page 589

[30] Ward, Michael D., Brian D. Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke. "The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Prediciting Civil Conflicts." Proc. of 50th Annual Convention of Interational Studies Association, New York. 2009. Print. (Henceforth referred to as WGB in footnotes.)

The Stones of John Ruskin's Venice

2009-10-19T22:43:00.002-05:00

The Stones of John Ruskin’s Venice

In the middle of the nineteenth century John Ruskin, a renowned art historian, critic and intellectual, wrote a three volume book on Venetian art and architecture entitled The Stones of Venice. Within this highly detailed account of Venetian art history, Ruskin incorporated – via his peculiar rhetorical style – a bold and, at least to modern readers, controversial commentary on a variety of topics including Christian doctrine, social ethics, division of labor and class distinction. Ruskin dedicates a significant portion of The Stones of Venice to an in-depth analysis of Gothic architecture, providing a stark contrast to both previous Romano-Byzantine and later Renaissance styles with impressive familiarity. It is this artistic contrast that behaves as a vehicle not only for his brilliant interpretations, but also his provocative rhetorical extrapolations expressed through the prism of his devout Christian worldview.

In order to understand Ruskin’s analysis of Romano-Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, one must first attempt to understand the philosophical center from which he launches his evaluations. Informed by a deeply religious commitment to his understanding of Christianity, Ruskin’s worldview impresses certain core values and beliefs about humanity onto every criticism and analysis. History, within the worldview he’s constructed, can and should be read as a “progress of corruption” where the values of a more pious past are to be valued well above the attempts at perfection of the present. This reading of history influences The Stones of Venice from the very beginning, where Ruskin makes his first claim that there were, in all of history, three “thrones” over the ocean: one in the ancient commercial city of Tyre, one in the medieval commercial city of Venice and the last in the modern commercial empire of England (139). In writing about Venetian history – via the powerful medium of art and architecture – Ruskin hopes to ward of the same ruinous fate for England that befell the Most Serene Republic. Starting from the belief that Venetian fortunes were tied to the spirit of individual Christian piety, Ruskin can boldly break with historical convention and claim that the initial turning-point for Venice’s declension paradigm began in 1418, a full 100 years earlier than the consensus provided by contemporary scholars (141-142). Out from his Christendom-centric vision of the world, Ruskin draws a particularly interesting interpretation of the collapse of the old Roman Empire at the hands of the “Lombard” in the north and west, and the “Arab” in the south and east. This appears to indicate to Ruskin that God positioned Venice as “the golden clasp of the girdle of the Earth” both artistically and geographically (155). Even more than the central geography of the lagoon, Ruskin claims that the Ducal palace of Venice is “the central building of the world” as it incorporates Romano-Byzantine, Lombard and Arab elements (146).

As immediately as the reader becomes acquainted with his brilliant rhetorical and interpretive ability, he is also immediately confronted with the ferocity of Ruskin’s writing style. Ruskin, for all of his critical genius, is both overly confident in the veracity of his own claims, often appearing haughty and boastful to his readers and dismissing any potential criticism of his own ideas as unconscionable. Indeed – while they would appear to be on completely opposite ends of the theological spectrum – John Ruskin’s elite rhetorical skill and apparent egomania are remarkably similar to contemporary thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Ruskin’s subjective opinions of artistic taste are touted as objective fact and, despite how colorfully interwoven they are, he diverts and digresses into an excessive number of tangents wholly unrelated to the topic-at-hand. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Ruskin imports his deeply religious commitment to Christian metaphysics into his artistic criticism when he claims, “accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of misunderstanding the ends of art… This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws… no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure… [and] imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life” (183-184). These metaphysically imported artistic truths act as the guideposts for all of the claims Ruskin makes with regard to Gothic and Renaissance art.

While there does not appear to be – in Ruskin’s outlook – a particularly Gothic style per se, there a school of thought and a collection of values that, when seen in architecture, one can identify as Gothic (170). While these stylistic and design elements don’t necessitate Gothic architecture simply on their own, Ruskin argues that in their common employment in architecture, the style is invoked. Ruskin’s style elements are Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and “Redundance” [sic], and the design elements are pointed arches, buttresses and vaulted roofs, etc. (171). Explaining that the term “Gothic” was initiated as a derogative or pejorative to indicate the “barbaric” and “savage” style that replaced Roman architecture in Europe, Ruskin immediately explains to his reader that it was inspired by a deeply and fundamentally pious adherence to Christianity (172, 175). This Gothic Christianity, as Ruskin understands it, is a religious system that asserts the value of every soul (176). By way of a very drawn-out explanation, Ruskin informs his reader that Gothic art and architecture follows several essential thematic values: a lack of symmetrical or mathematical “perfection”, abundance of ornamentation and decoration and an appreciation for the natural world (particularly organic vegetation). He believed that the Gothic style allowed for individual artistic expression and celebrated, at an unconscious level, the imperfection of human art as homage to the Biblical claim of mortal imperfection (184). This freedom of Gothic-era builders and artisans to produce art as best they could within their own individual expression was “essential” and one of the most powerful representations of Gothic artistic freedom was the quasi-random, asymmetrical and – in some cases – “organic” structure of cathedrals. This asymmetrical, ornamented and naturalistic building style stood, to Ruskin, as a paragon of defiance in the face of servility imposed upon “good and ordinarily intelligent men” by the Renaissance (208).

In the devout world of John Ruskin, rationalism corrupted everything (149). Calling back to his idea that history is a “progress of corruption,” Ruskin reminds the reader of Venice’s centrality in God’s ordained geography when claims that Venice represents both the paragon of Christian piety and the renegade departure from it (149). In modern times, he laments that the Basilica of San Marco is uninspiring, that no one even stops to notice it or marvel at it, reinforcing his belief that modernity is an increasingly godless product of rationalist Renaissance principles (148, 168). The celebration of classical figures and mathematical precision is, to Ruskin, highly offensive and does not allow for the beautiful imperfection that was so abundant in Gothic architecture (177). Drawing from his post-abolition values of human liberty, Ruskin claims that imposing any requirements of perfection on any man – mathematical or otherwise – is akin to same kind of slavery whose last bastion was overthrown in Christendom (178). Renaissance-era dependence on mathematics and a classically ideal concept of perfection makes, to Ruskin, a cold, calculated and mechanical sort of art unfit for a pious heart (197). In short, his disapproval of Renaissance art stems from a belief that the methodical and mathematical norms of classical and Renaissance art have “silenced the independent language of the operative” (212).

Methodologically speaking, Ruskin’s genius is not only in studying texts and paintings, but in allowing individual ornaments, tombs and common infrastructure to inform his understanding of history in lieu of written records which do not survive as easily. In the end, his image of Venetian history is one of unfulfilled promise. Early Venice couldn’t fully develop its own Gothic character because of its cultural indebtedness to Byzantine inspiration, but by the time they had developed an entirely independent cultural ethos, the poisonous rationalism of the Renaissance had begun to pervert the artistic minds of Venetians (215). This progress of corruption was evident, to Ruskin, in the city’s Byzantine-era influence being coupled with a “serious, religious, and sincere” character, progressing into a “comparatively deprived” version of Gothic and into a third phase of Renaissance, heralding its “ruin” in the same fashion of the “Cities of the Plain” like Gomorrah (216, 217, 139).

Navigating the Ister

2009-10-07T16:32:00.002-05:00

Navigating the Ister

An Exploration of Hölderlinian Poetology

In his eighteenth century poem, Der Ister, Friedrich Hölderlin explores the river Ister as a representation of the living bond between the light of Greece and the German “land of evening,” in conjunction with ideas of ancient and the modern, and – perhaps most important of all – the mundane and the divine. In this poem, Hölderlin masterfully weaves images of Greek mythology, Christian theology and a profound appreciation for the power and beauty of the earth, offering a holistically integrated vision of humans, gods and nature. Within the framework of this poetic vision, Hölderlin presents the reader with a series of questions on the nature of the divine, man’s relationship to the sacred power of the kosmos and the poet’s responsibility in navigating the limits between them.

Beginning the poem with the invocation, “Now come, fire! / We are desirous / To look upon Day,” Hölderlin directly conjures up imagery from nature and pagan Greek mythology while faithfully incorporating some of the most powerful themes in the Christian tradition. With only one line of poetry Hölderlin is able to summon a range of ideas for the reader to consider: humanity’s physical and psychological need for the rising sun, the gift of sacred fire from Prometheus, the descending Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the apocalyptic Day of the Lord. It could be inferred that the early inclusion of these ideas subtly frame the theme of the poem as a work supplication. Turning his attention to the river itself, Hölderlin curiously refers to the river by its ancient Greek name: the Ister. In Hölderlin’s time, the late eighteenth century, the river Ister had – in a sense – been separated into two halves: the eastern half retained its ancient Greek name, whereas the western was renamed the Danube by the Romans and subsequent European cultures. By rejecting the name “Danube,” Hölderlin also rejects a separation in the symbolic value of the river, thus overcoming the separation between the west and east and, essentially, restoring an ancient tie between Greece and Germany. Equipped with a belief that the ancient world – ancient Greece specifically – represented a light-filled golden age of divine presence, Hölderlin incorporates a spiritual dimension to the Greek geographical idea of Hesperia (“the land of evening”): the Greek name for all European lands to their west. It may be fair to say that Hölderlin, in viewing ancient Greece as a paragon of communion between humans and gods, wants to poetically emulate Greek mythos as a means to retrieve this sacred communion for Germany.

In any reading of the poem it would be difficult to overlook the abundant references to the cycle of day and night, as Hölderlin provides a chronological key to the poetic cryptograph of kairos time. Including, in the third stanza of the poem, another indirect reference to the sun, he notes that the river moves from west to east – in contra-flow to the sun: “Yet almost this river seems / to travel backwards and / I think it must come from / the East / Much could / be said about this.”[1] Peering into the natural world through the lenses of Heraclitean philosophy, Hölderlin does not appear to be disturbed by the contradiction between the movement of sun and river. Instead he seems to apply the opposite movements to the idea of a chiasm: an intersection of natural powers where truth may be found. Perhaps it is this exact intersection – this threshold – that Hölderlin believed the human race was approaching when he wrote, “day is due to begin.”[2] With continued allusions to the movement of the sun – a cyclical representation of day and night – Hölderlin’s belief in a cosmic cycle of immanent divinity and absconding divinity begin to gain focus.

The idea of the absconding god – deus absconditus – is another important theme that permeates Der Ister. This idea, that the presence of divinity on earth follows a similar cyclical pattern as the days and seasons, appears in a number of Hölderlin’s poems. One might also say that within this pattern of journey and return Hölderlin attempts to link mortals and gods with physis itself. The obviously natural imagery in his poetry should be integrated, not contrasted, with Hölderlin’s understanding of Christian and Greek mythology. Indeed, one might also suggest that separating Greek mythology from the Christian narrative is, in many ways, unfaithful to his worldview. Hölderlin viewed the gospel narrative as an extension of Greek mythology rather than a departure from it, claiming that Jesus was the last Greek demigod – son of the god Zeus, brother to Dionysus. With the sudden departure of Jesus from the earth,[3] Hölderlin believed that the entire kosmos entered into a spiritual Hesperia, anxiously waiting for that first beam of light to break the horizon on the Day of the Lord: that glorious reappearance of divine presence. This dawning of the Day, an impression of kairos time revealed with the language of chronos time, is announced with the “cries” of physis in the first stanza of the poem: the sights and sounds of life, birthing and rebirthing its own theophany in a series of ever-increasing concentric cycles.[4]

Navigating Der Ister in light of the pattern of deus absconditus and theophany, Hölderlin places himself in limbo between the mundane and the threshold of the divine. From this worldview of Hesperia, Hölderlin sought to concentrate his poetic energies on heralding the return of divine presence on the earth. Perceiving that the poet was a herald to the divine power of physis, it would not appear that Hölderlin claimed for the poet any power to affect its manifestation; the poet had no more power to affect theophany than he did to hasten the rising of the sun. Hölderlin’s vision of the poet, very similar to the prophet of old, simply prepares the people for the return of the divine. As with the gospel narrative, John the Baptist did not cause Jesus to appear, but he did have the responsibility for preparing the way for Jesus. Similarly, Hölderlin writes in the fifth stanza of Der Ister, that the poet is able to “hear the commotion” of daybreak only if “he is contented,” seemingly rejecting any impulse to coerce the theophany itself.[5] Evidently learning from the lesson of Semele in ancient mythology, Hölderlin understood all too well what dangers await the mortal that provokes a premature revelation of divine power.[6]

Retaining a healthy respect for the separation between gods and man did not mean that they were fundamentally separated in their being or activity. The gods, the mortal and, indeed, nature itself all journey away from the “source” and eventually return to it.[7] A student of Sophoclean tragedy, Hölderlin understood that this process was ananke - “that which must be.”[8] This process, like so many others within his poetry, is indicated in the different patterns of physis. By observing this progress of epic time the same way the he understood the progress of a day, Hölderlin believed that ancient Greece represented – as Nietzsche might later put it – “the great noontide” of divine presence. Conversely, modern Germany symbolized the darkest hour before the dawn: almost wholly devoid of divine presence, yet anxiously awaiting its return. Noting the physical connection between southern Germany and northern Greece via the river Ister, Hölderlin undoubtedly interpreted this geographical detail as a symbiotic tether between Hellas and Hesperia, linking not only land, but a common destiny as well. This fundamental anticipation of a new spiritual dawn can, perhaps, be seen best in the fourth stanza of the poem where he writes, “The day is due to begin / in youth, where it begins.”[9]

The imagery of the river as a threshold should also not be overlooked. At the end of the first stanza Hölderlin writes, “But here we wish to build / For rivers make arable / The land. For when the herbs are growing / and to the same in summer / The animals go to drink / There too will human kind go.”[10] In this vision of the river as both a gathering place and a boundary, Hölderlin shows that all of physis is at the river for cleansing and purification, renewal and rebirth, for sustenance and sanctuary. So, too, does the poem behave as a vehicle for gathering and limiting. Not only does the logos of human poetry call out in longing for a return of the divine, but it also calls out to man and nature alike to gather in preparation for its return. Furthermore, the poem is also meant to draw the anthropos psyche into the heavens to meet the return.[11] Incorporating a vision from his poem Patmos, the poet is also to prepare the high places of this meeting as well; he is to navigate the dangerous heights on “bridges frailly built,” but not to transgress them.[12] In the middle of the fourth stanza of Der Ister, Hölderlin deliberately uses the symbol of the river and the act of poetry itself interchangeably. In tying the poem and river together, Hölderlin may have been suggesting that the poet, himself, is a kind of demigod: giving form and life to the river-poem that both gathers and limits. Perhaps this understanding provides new meaning for the poet’s seemingly Übermensch-like ability to traverse the dangerous heights and straddle the limits of the human and divine spheres.

Hölderlin’s bold exploration of poetry as a way to link the ancient and modern, the mortal and divine, the east and the west, should not be understated. The poet-as-prophet – observing and heralding the “natural” cycles of absctonditus and theophany – opened many doors in the modern world to a deeper integration of logos and physis, wherein mortals may approach the divine without attempting to breach its perilous mysteries. In suspending himself above the treacherous chasms of divine presence on “bridges frailly built,” the poet occupies a deinos position in physis: neither one to be envied nor pitied, but that which must be.

[1] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[2] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[3] The Gospel of Jesus Christ According to Luke, chapter twenty-four, verse fifty-one (Luke 24:51)

[4] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 255

[5] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[6] Wie wenn am Feiertage (As on a holiday), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 173

[7] Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 231

[8] Antigone, tr. David Greene, Sophocles I, p. 203

[9] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[10] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 255

[11] Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter four, verse seventeen (1 Th 4:17)

[12] Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 231

Pity, Revenge and Eternal Recurrence

2009-10-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

Pity, Revenge and Eternal Recurrence:

An Analysis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Late nineteenth-century Germany gave birth to one of the most provocative and incendiary thinkers in European history, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Widely considered by modern scholars to be one of the most influential philosophers and writers of the last two hundred years, Nietzsche spent the prime of his life attempting to place common European values, rooted in what he viewed as a Platonic-Christian tradition, under erasure. His deeply critical views on Christianity and Platonism have earned him a – perhaps unfounded and inaccurate – reputation as a notorious atheist and anarchist, but a careful analysis of his writings uncovers a much different image. Nietzsche’s better-known philosophical texts like Ecce Homo, The Gay Science and The Will to Power, written in a polemic style, often absorb much of the spotlight in Nietzsche studies at the expense of Nietzsche’s only fictive work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but do so with a terrible detriment to understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this fictional masterpiece, Nietzsche weaves an intricate quasi-fictitious narrative revolving around the character Zarathustra – based on, Zoroaster, the Persian religious figure traditionally dating from the sixth century BCE – and his journey from being the teacher of the Superman to the teacher of Eternal Recurrence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche employs various figures and characters with both metaphorical and allegorical relationships to dominant personalities within the Western historical tradition, while Zarathustra’s interactions with these characters behave as a platform for Nietzsche to communicate his challenging ideas in a subtler and less confrontational medium than his other aphoristic writings. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is, arguably, a book about the idea of Eternal Recurrence and its potential to replace, albeit nihilistically, the Platonic-Christian traditions as the system by which all Western values are generated. Moreover, it would not be an inappropriate interpretation to say that Nietzsche argues in the novel that the philosophy of Eternal Recurrence provides a more natural and powerful concept of redemption and justice than those traditionally attributed to Jesus and Plato, respectively. Embracing values that depart from the reactionary motivations of pity and revenge, this philosophy of Eternal Recurrence attempts to seek out an actively creative relationship to nature, replacing the old values system with “new, half-written” ones.

In the first chapter of Zarathustra, Nietzsche elaborates on what he refers to as the three metamorphoses of man: the camel, the lion and the child. The three metamorphoses bear a seemingly analogous relationship to the three stages of nihilism – living under a set of values, actively destroying those existing values, creating new values – and even in this early stage of the novel it is possible to see a foreshadowing of the cyclical nature of Eternal Recurrence in the narrative, which will be explained later. Having its roots in his longstanding contempt for metaphysical ontology, Nietzsche explains the camel as representative of man as a beast of burden. Within this interpretation, men – like the camel – have become docile and subservient, allowing themselves to be saddled down with the foreign weight of a values system based in a “wrong-headed” belief that there is an eternal, metaphysical and absolute “afterworld” that dictates an equally eternal and absolute morality, codified with a rigid understanding of good and evil.[1] In the world of Zarathustra, the man-as-camel is laden down with the weight of the “old law tables”.[2] Where the Christian apologist may be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s criticism as part of a largely failed tradition of atheistic critique against Judeo-Christian metaphysics, he/she would be grossly underestimating the uniqueness of Nietzsche’s own interpretation. To Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, the burdensome metaphysical value system provided by Jesus and Plato stands as a life-negating force that, in its core, seeks answers outside of life itself, looking to an afterlife for worth rather than the one we all ostensibly share here on Earth. “It was suffering and impotence that – created all afterworlds… But that ‘other world’, that inhuman, dehumanized world which is a heavenly Nothing is well hidden from men” and it is these sickly men that “have a raging hate for the enlightened man and the youngest of all virtues which is called honesty.”[3] The great sin of metaphysical philosophy, and belief in God, is not simply that it hinders man’s growth but rather that it devalues and undermines human life altogether. For Nietzsche, metaphysical convention is a product of human weakness, a coping mechanism that provides a meaning and purpose for human suffering where there is none. This “Spirit of Gravity” – as it is referred to in Zarathustra – is what creates the man-as-camel along with words and values like “compulsion, dogma, need and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil”, which help cultivate a reactionary spirit within man and rob him of his actively creating will.[4] It appears to be, within this interpretation of the novel, that the highest value of both Platonism and Christianity is selflessness and a love of others over the love of one’s self. Unfortunately for those invested in the current convention, as Zarathustra tells his listeners and followers, valuing others over one’s own self is a prison and a negation of life: it is the root of pity and its indulgence is the origin of revenge and resentment.[5] Moreover, this reactionary value, to pity your fellow man – indeed, even worse to let your pity move you to help him – does not ultimately serve the needs of your neighbor. In an ironic interpretation of human pity and compassion, Nietzsche claims that aiding the afflicted very often reinforces a belief that people require an outside force to act upon them in order to “help” them. Worse, it may lead the healed or helped into a discontent with the way physis “created” them, while also obliging them to the healer and creating a bondage to them which, over time, may create a resentment and a desire for revenge.[6] Just as Nietzsche associates a reactionary pity with the idea of Christian healing and redemption, it is this reactionary revenge that Nietzsche clearly sees as the foundation for Platonic justice.

“Your killing, you judges, should be a mercy and not a revenge. And since you kill, see to it that you yourselves justify life”, says Zarathustra of the “Pale Criminal.”[7] All throughout Zarathustra Nietzsche writes passionately on the need for man to reconceptualize “justice,” to take it from the realm of “good and evil” and reaction and into a realm of active creation and attuning our minds to physis via a naked and impartial observation of nature. In physis, one can hear him claim, there is no morality, no good and no evil. A distant star, half-the-galaxy away explodes and destroys whole planets. Where is physis’s remorse? Where is her shame in all of that destruction? There is none and this is Nietzsche’s “truth”: death and destruction are a part of life and the beauty of that reality stems from the idea there is no revenge inherent to physis, no cosmic score to settle. Physis does not react, it acts and as such the destruction that is perpetrated within it is necessary and even good. One might even understand this scientifically with the idea that the distribution of matter and energy associated with the death of a star is the birthing grounds for new matter to form, new energy to take shape, new life to begin. From those distant supernovas, to violent Earth-bound hurricanes, to the slow decomposition of a single insect: this is the cooperative – albeit violent, dangerous and deadly – dance that physis is performing every moment of existence. It is the dance that she beckons all life to participate in with her. Indeed, it is her justice: perhaps the only real justice in the world. But Zarathustra, as well as Nietzsche, observes another system – an artificial system – being imposed on man and nature. This artificial convention relies on arbitrary ideas of good and evil and the virtues of our values system is based on rewards and punishments… reaction rather than pro-action, and it has become part of our foundation.[8] Justice, within this understanding, has become all reaction: “revenge, punishment, reward, retribution.”[9] This idea we call justice in the Platonic-Christian tradition is a “cold” justice with “cold steel” (or revenge), but Eternal Recurrence requires a justice that not only “bears all punishment but also all guilt” and devises a justice that acquits everyone but those that sit in judgment.[10] In other words, Eternal Recurrence requires that the “old tables” of morality and reaction be smashed and replaced with “new, half-written” ones. To Nietzsche, what we call goodness and justice, including virtue and moderation, is nothing more than weakness, cowardice and mediocrity.[11] Books One and Two of Zarathustra are used as the platform by which Nietzsche attempts to demonstrate how men hide behind their lofty metaphysics and those associated virtues in order to shield them from the impartial “reality” of life. He does not, however, simply limit his criticism to the idea of justice in the abstract but also extrapolates that criticism onto the modern state and, in particular, the modern, liberal and democratic state. In Zarathustra, the state is called “universal slow suicide” and he claims that it is produced by the same good-evil convention that produced Christian redemption and Platonic justice.[12] In a sense, one might convincingly argue that Nietzsche envisioned the state as the offspring of the parental pairing of Christianity and Platonism. Worse, however, than simply giving life to the state is the peculiar way in which the Christian-Platonic tradition had encouraged the development of the democratic ideology and the powerful framework of “equality” that supports it. In the section titled “Of the Tarantulas” Nietzsche, crying out vicariously through the biting voice of Zarathustra, asserts that it was the revenge of the slaves that gave birth to Christianity – a religion of slaves as Nietzsche referred to it – which, in turn, forced the powerful rulers of the Earth to adopt democracy in order to lower the great into a false equality with the “rabble.”[13] This Christian-Platonic tradition, complete with its imported metaphysical good and evil, its moral codes, its pitiful redemption and vengeful justice, its Church and its State is, to Nietzsche, the first metamorphosis: the heavy laden man-as-camel, driven relentlessly into the desert… into isolation and a life negating environment. And, as Zarathustra explains to us, it is here in this desert that the second metamorphosis happens: the camel meets the lion and is destroyed by it.[14] It would not be inappropriate for the “lion” to be interpreted as a sort of “active nihilism” as Nietzsche would call it. This man-as-lion is described as full of courage and able to destroy those values and “law tables” which burden men and divert his affections to odious “afterworlds” and, as such, may represent an element within man that is able to free himself from the convention to which he is bound. Zarathustra explains, however, that the courage and will to destroy the camel is not enough to create new values. This responsibility lies with the third metamorphosis of the “child” and its actively creative will, its “unlearned” mind – a mind not yet conditioned to the falsities of the Christian-Platonic tradition – and its voiceless and carefree appreciation of the moment and affirmation of life in all forms.

Many conclusions can and may be drawn on what the ultimate meaning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was intended to be, assuming, of course, that Nietzsche had any hard-and-fast meanings attached to the novel. There can be no doubt that he was a brilliant rhetorician and, as such, it might honor Nietzsche most to conclude that Zarathustra has an infinite number of meanings and, at the same time, a resounding lack of “meaning” as we’ve come to know it. After all, this novel is a “book for all and none.” With all of that being said, however, it would not be inappropriate to surmise that this book is, at its core, a book about Eternal Recurrence. That “heaviest weight” of this idea foreshadows every page of the text, giving clues and glimpses in the fog of Zarathustra’s journey. It waits patiently, voicelessly in the darkness and stillness of Zarathustra’s own mind and soul to be revealed… that ineffable truth which can barely be spoken, let alone categorized, canonized and formed into a doctrine. Eternal Recurrence, Zarathustra’s “mistress” and “abysmal thought,” requires the heart of the third metamorphosis, the man-as-child, in order to come forth.[15] Indeed, Nietzsche seems to argue that the “abyss” of Eternal Recurrence can lead to your demise or kill you outright; trying to comprehend it can drive you mad and trying to live it may undo you altogether.[16] Perhaps one of the most maddening aspects of Eternal Recurrence is that it is so unexplainable. As Nietzsche reminds us, “truth” and “reality” cannot be spoken. Language itself is a convention – perhaps even the progenitor of all convention – bringing a woefully inadequate medium to the task of comprehension, by virtue of language’s own inherent limitations as well as man’s own limited powers of perception on the Universal scale.[17] Among the few interpretations that one might be able to offer with regard to Eternal Recurrence is one that might claim that the moment, Das Augenblick, is in fact a microcosm of Eternal Recurrence. In this interpretation, the concept is offered that the “past” and the “future” are not progressively linear (i.e. Past à Moment à Future) but, rather, that the Augenblick is, as Zarathustra claims, the “gateway” by which all past and all future coalesce into the ever-present “now” (i.e. Past à Moment ß Future).[18] In a sense, then, man is not a goal or a destination but instead, as Zarathustra claims, a bridge or a tightrope suspended over the abyss of Eternal Recurrence, balancing himself in the moment, affirming the moment, dedicated to every moment of life on Earth without reservation.[19] This, however, raises the quintessential question of human life: why, then, are we here? Where is the purpose? Perhaps more pointedly: why should we abandon, indeed destroy, the old Christian-Platonic convention (a values system that provides a compelling – even flattering – identity and purpose for humanity) for this new one? Men, Nietzsche seems to claim, need to create their own values, their own good and evil, their own “law” for themselves. The “good” and the “just” as we know them today make no room for those with their own values, they are – and always have been – set against such people. And who better to invoke as an example of this than Jesus? It was the “good” and the “just” Pharisees that killed Jesus, and, thus, his premature death seems to have perpetuated a values system that negates life.[20] Indeed, the very life of Jesus himself can be interpreted not as the life of a camel but as a lion! His teachings and ministry is marked, albeit incompletely if you were to ask Nietzsche, by a powerful – epoch splitting – “trans-valuation” of the values that supported the world in which he lived. Yet, as Zarathustra would remind his followers in Book Two, Christians don’t appear to be very “redeemed” at all and, as such, they would have to seem to be much more “redeemed” if they were to inspire any great belief in the power of their Redeemer. Men, according to Nietzsche, would do better to find redemption elsewhere, a redemption that is of their own creation and not beholden to a Redeemer, not a reaction to the pity taken on them by a God.[21] Furthermore, one could argue that Nietzsche intends to say that it is the will to create that is the true redemption for man. The metaphysical redemption of Jesus and metaphysical justice of Plato do not seem to be compatible with one another. One might even make a persuasive argument that they are mutually exclusive to one another since it seems that the former moves the metaphysical “Power” to pity and the latter to revenge and punishment, a potentially irreconcilable situation.[22] The creative will, however, is “truly” redemptive because it has evidently unlearned reactionary motivation and defines its relationship with physis actively, engaging it, participating with it, affirming it in its totality. Creation and procreation, then, may be seen as the true act of redemption. A redemption that is not found in humility or in the selfless bloodletting that is, arguably, life negating, but is rather found in creation.[23] Alongside this more naturally attuned redemption is, not surprisingly, a more naturally attuned justice: a justice that restores inequality to men because men, by the virtue of their inherent differences are, not only different, but also unequal. Within this interpretation it is physis itself that requires inequality and the domination of the great over the least. Nature exposes for us the path of strife and contention with one another and this process is called “beautiful” and “natural.”[24] Also, within this interpretation, is a more natural “purpose” for humanity if it is appropriate to call it that. The “purpose” of men and women is war and childbirth: the balancing of contention and creation and it is within the juxtaposition of these activities – which are proactive and not reactive – that the anthropos element within physis finds the “balance” of the moment.[25]

It would seem to be a very poor reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra if one, by the end, was unable to discern Nietzsche’s distaste for Platonic justice and Christian redemption, along with all of the cultural, moral, political, and religious offspring that they produced. Indeed, that point alone seems to be hardly worth raising. What is not immediately clear is how Nietzsche intended to usurp those two pillars of Western civilization. The philosophy of Eternal Recurrence behaves as an unspoken thread that runs through the course of Zarathustra, uniting it thematically – yet “voicelessly” – in a powerfully nihilistic and “trans-valuating” work of fiction. It might be said that this “book for all and one” stands in human intellectual history as a unique demonstration of the “truth” that the values that move the world are, indeed, ineffable.

[1] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 211

[2] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 214

[3] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 59-61

[4] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 211, 215

[5] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 87, 113, 255

[6] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 159

[7] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 65

[8] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 117

[9] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 118

[10] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 94

[11] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 189-190

[12] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 76-77

[13] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 123-125

[14] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 177

[15] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 168-169, 178

[16] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 178-179

[17] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 234, 247

[18] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 179

[19] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 44, 104

[20] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 89-90, 98

[21] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 116-117

[22] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 161-162

[23] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 111

[24] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 124-125, 149

[25] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 91, 227

The Mad Oracle and the Death of God

2009-10-07T16:15:00.002-05:00

The Mad Oracle and the Death of God

In his book, The Gay Science, Nietszche presents a comprehensive synthesis of his assault on convention and those values that feed on it. Book Three of The Gay Science contains some of Nietzsche’s most provocative statements in regard to truth, knowledge, logic, religion and morality. In aphorism 125, Nietzsche presents a parable titled “the madman.”[1] In this parable a “madman” rushes into a marketplace crowded with people, many of whom we are told, are atheists. This madman, armed only with a loud voice and a lantern, claims to be seeking God and asks where he can be found. Hearing only jeers in response from the crowd of atheists, he proceeds with a rant about the death of God complete with apocalyptic imagery of the end of the world. After providing this knowledge to the crowd the Madman sees that they do not yet know of this event and surmises that he has come too early and leaves. This parable of the madman acts as a vehicle for Nietzsche to provide images and ideas that help translate some of his more abstract philosophies regarding nihilism, eternal recurrence and the will to power. This essay will attempt to interpret the various possible meanings to this parable and find correlations with other Nietzschean writings, particularly his essay on “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable.”

With the introduction of the “madman” in his parable, Nietzsche immediately establishes that this individual a different sort of person than the others in his environment. The mere fact that Nietzsche refers to him as “the madman” sets up his peculiarity and this perception is directly underscored by his eccentric wielding of an ostensibly superfluous lamp “in the bright morning hours.” Nietzsche also feels compelled to draw a distinction between the Madman and the men of the marketplace via his irregular clamoring on the subject of God. These men of the marketplace – we are told – are atheists and mock the Madman, both because of his strange light-casting accessory as well as his outlandish quest to “seek God.” This Madman, despite his later claim that “God is dead,” does not appear to be an atheist like these men around him. He is something different. The atheists, while not believing in God, continue to behave as though they exist in a world that God dominates. Plainly stated: their denial of God acts also as an affirmation of God. Their belief in a non-God is still a belief in God since it behaves as a sacro-ideological framework with a negative central foundation. In other words, the sacred belief of the atheist is that there is no sacred. The Madman’s astonishing claim that “God is dead” does not appear to be reflective of atheism in the sense that Nietzsche would understand it, and neither does it appear to be a statement of divine mortality. Cast in the tradition of apocalyptic literature, this parable introduces various allegorical images and – like any good writing of this genre – provides the keys for decoding itself in the surrounding text. The Madman introduces the idea of God as “the Sun”: the central foundation of sacro-ideology in the Western philosophical tradition. The Madman equates, rather directly, the death of God with the loss of the Sun. In this respect, Nietzsche is claiming – through his mad oracle – that the central empowering convention of Western civilization, that convention which enables all other values and conventions in Western civilization to exist and thrive, has lost its hold and is decomposing. With this apparent paradigm shift, Nietzsche is communicating to his readers that the idea of God is not something to believe in – with affirmative or negative belief – but rather to be regarded with indifference and ultimate insignificance. In this sense the Madman claims that God is dead: his convention-affirming powers have been put to an end. Furthermore, because God has died, the Madman has also pronounced the impending death of the conventional world. This is why he brings a lantern with him into the marketplace: he expects that there should be no light in the world but what he brings with him.

It is, perhaps, most revealing that Nietzsche’s parable exists in a world where the Sun is still actually shining. The atheists did not know that God has been killed, neither by the virtue of the event itself or the effects it would undoubtedly have on the conventional world. They ridiculed the Madman in the beginning and, upon hearing his declarations, were silent and astonished. These images seem to be suggesting a number of possible meanings. Nietzsche might be admitting, when he says, “Gods, too, decompose” that while God may have already died, his being was not immediately extinguished but, like a physical body, is in the process of decomposing: his power diminishing littlebylittle over time. This image is consistent with Nietzsche saying that the Sun has been “unchained” rather than saying that it has been destroyed or “died.” The power that the idea of God has, a power to feed and sustain the conventional world, appears to be gradually receding over time. We’re not told how long it has been since “the event” of God’s death, but it would be logical to assume that it has not been very long since no one seems to have noticed a change in the natural lighting. The Madman makes one peculiar statement about the consequences of killing God when he refers to the loss of the Sun. He says that we unchained “this earth from its sun.”[2] What is interesting about this statement is the fact that he does not use an absolute article like “the” when describing his parable’s world and its Sun. Rather, Nietzsche is subtly reminding us with his rhetoric that the world as we know it is only one possibility of many possibilities, able to change and adapt itself to our will and wishes.[3]Not only is there the possibility of a world without the nomothetic convention of “God” but it is also, in Nietzsche’s understanding of our own world, a current reality. As with parabolic world of the Madman, this world must cease to be one that we are familiar or comfortable with inside of our expectations and needs insofar as they are reliant or founded on convention. It would be a world where the sea was drunk up, where the horizon was wiped up with a sponge. A world where the sun does not shine, indeed where there is no sun at all, a world that “plunges continually,” that strays in empty space through an “infinite nothing.” Moreover, the conscious use of “this” instead of “the” in the passage also suggests another important Nietzschean concept: there is no “the world,” that is to say there is no “true world.”

In light of this reality that the Madman enlightens his contemporaries to, he also asks, rhetorically, where this leaves the world. What path does it take from here now that it has no center of gravity, no foundation? It is here that the Madman acts, in a sense, as an oracle predicting the future of the world. His questions appear rhetorical, as though are more prognostication than interrogation. The Madman hints that the world will take a path of active nihilism as it moves “away from all suns.” In other words, he claims that all values will wither and die as the world hides itself from all foundational centers of convention. Nietzsche envisions a world where there is no moral center for these values as this active nihilism removes an absolute point of reference: “is there still any up or down?” But the specific use of the directions “up” and “down” cannot be ignored in their metaphysically connotations either: most famously in that of “heaven” and “hell.” Finally, the Madman also questions his own utility in this reality when he asks, perhaps not as rhetorically as the other inquiries may be, whether or not it is necessary “to light lanterns in the morning” as he has done. What is the Madman’s conclusion in response to this question? “I have come too early… my time is not yet.” He claims to be ahead of his time, out of place in a time when the “sun” still shines. While it is not entirely clear that Nietzsche is identifying himself, via allegory or supposition, as the Madman of this parable though it would not be an entirely illogical conclusion, and the alleged foresight of the Madman is very similar to Nietzsche’s own exposition of self-importance in “Why I Am a Destiny.”[4] Nietzsche calls this parabolic oracle a “madman” but it becomes apparent in the course of the aphorism that he only appears to be mad because he exists in a different reality than those in the marketplace and, presumably, the rest of the conventional world. He is a man of the future or, perhaps more accurately, an “alien” in the strictest definition of the word. By referring to this man as “mad” Nietzsche may be paying him a backhanded compliment while highlighting the peculiarity of this man in comparison to his contemporaries in the parable.

This parable, while unique in its vehicle of delivery, shares substantial commonality with many of Nietzsche’s other aphoristic writings, including “Why I Am a Destiny,” The Will to Power and “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable: History of an error.” While Nietzsche’s “history” of the idea of the “real world,” as presented in “How the ‘Real World Finally Became a Fable,” is categorical, concise and notably devoid of prose, one could easily draw a parallel from this aphorism – especially stages five and six – with the parable of the madman.[5] Stage five appears to describe a return to the neo-Heraclitean dismissal of being as “an empty fiction” as applied to the “real world.”[6] This “real world,” as Nietzsche explains it in earlier stages, is predicated on the assumption of the metaphysical and this assumption – beginning with Plato and passing through various phases of European Christianity – terminates in stage five of Nietzsche’s history. This stage is represented via the morning of the marketplace in the parable. The stage, like the morning, is the beginning of nihilism: the refutation of the “convention” of God and the values that feed upon it. “The real world – we have done away with it: what world was left? [The] apparent one, perhaps?... But no! [With] the real world we have also done away with the apparent one!”[7] This is, in effect, the claim of the Madman. While it seems that Nietzsche’s parable is a world of stage five, his oracle has transcended even this stage into the final stage: the stage of complete nihilism. The values have been negated along with the foundational convention. The “real world” is decomposing along with God. The chain tying this earth to its sun has become undone. The “real world” and the “apparent one” are no longer. This Dionysian physis, now freed from its nomothetic limitations, is hurtling through the dark, empty and infinite expanse of space, away from all convention.

There are, of course, problems with this idea as presented by Nietzsche. The most notable problem is that Nietzsche is unable to give any idea of what this “stage-six world” looks like. After all of the values have been “transvalued,” after all convention has been removed, after this world-as-we-know-it is dead… what is left? Nietzsche tells us in The Will to Power that mankind, through nihilism, is not returning to a state he once had. Nihilism is not the path to paradise lost. Eden is not the destination for which the nihilist strives. The nihilist understands that he “cannot reach the sphere in which we have placed our values” and, thus, “we deny end goals: if existence had one it would have to have been reached.”[8] This is, to Nietzsche, the nature of “eternal recurrence” – an essential component in life-as-physis: the conventionless Dionysian existence.[9] Yet Nietzsche cannot explain what this “Life” looks like without convention. How should it operate? How would we know when we arrived there? Indeed, can we even arrive there if there are, in fact, no “end goals”? These are questions that Nietzsche does not adequately resolve in his parable or in his related writings. It should not, however, be said that this is entirely his fault. To vividly comprehend this Dionysian world he speaks of would require an unprecedented transcendence of thought and a reformulation of communication: linguistic and conceptual. The human mind seems to be, in its perceptive abilities, limited to those ideas and images that have an anchor in the observable. The communicative limitations of human imagination would seem to be the last hurdle in between Apollonian nomos and Dionysian physis.

[1] Ansell-Pearson, Keith, and Duncan Large, eds. The Nietzsche Reader. Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2005; p.224 (aphorism 125)

[2] Emphasis added

[3] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968; pp. 326-327 (aphorisms 600, 604)

[4] The Nietzsche Reader, p.514

[5] The Nietzsche Reader, p. 464-465

[6] The Nietzsche Reader, p. 462

[7] The Nietzsche Reader, p. 224

[8] The Will to Power, p. 11, 36

[9] The Will to Power, p. 550

The Sound, the Fury and the Decline of the South

2009-10-07T15:56:00.002-05:00

The Sound, the Fury and the Decline of the South

Life: “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is no question that Macbeth’s timeless lament was influential not only in the name of William Faulkner’s critically acclaimed novel, but also played a role in the theme and tone of the book. The Sound and the Fury give a powerful voice to the unresolved tensions that Faulkner held for the South via the unresolved tensions that the each Compson brother hold for their sister, Candace “Caddy” Cameron. Undoubtedly Caddy represents, at least to Faulkner, a spirited embodiment of the ideas of that quintessential Southern girl who tragically fascinates those in her orbit. More than that, however, Caddy symbolizes the beauty, virtue and decline of Faulkner’s South and her tragedy is the tragedy of the South.

Decline is a prominent theme within The Sound and the Fury. One might argue that decline is the theme of the novel. With the exception of Dilsey, the black servant of the Compson family, the narrative of each main character in the novel is a story of decline. The family, we find out via the narrative itself and the appendices of the novel, has been in a state of perpetual decline since the Civil War. The father, Jason Compson, slowly degenerates via his alcoholism and dies from it leaving his family without a “center,” stable or otherwise. The mother, Catherine Compson, is a hypochondriac and the indulgence of her many “illnesses” by her family is a cause of near-constant strain until her eventual death. Quentin, anxious and angst-ridden even from childhood, feels the pressure of generations of failure on his shoulders, perhaps unjustly, until his impotence to overcome the past and preserve what little honor remaining in the present, moves him to commit suicide after his freshman year at Harvard. Jason, a wounded and conniving miscreant, spends most of the novel trying to get around adversity by way of scheme and plot rather than confront it directly. Whether his weakness in character is the cause of this failing strategy in life or the result of it is unclear, but the rock-bottom situation he finds himself in by the end of Book III couldn’t be clearer. The only real chance he ever had at getting a “respectable” job was disappointingly rescinded by no fault of his own and he eventually attempts to get rich by trading agricultural commodities and loses almost all of his money. What little he actually had saved, a sum that he swindled from his own niece, was retaken by said niece as she ran away with her traveling “carnie” of a boyfriend. Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, the novel’s “idiot” and the youngest Compson that “never grows mentally or emotionally past the age of three,”[1] is totally unable to communicate with his family or caretakers and experiences loss of nearly every imaginable variety, including his own testicles. It is Caddy, however, whose decline and loss seems to have the most profound effect on the rest of family, especially that of her brothers. It is this decline paradigm, this fixation with isolation, loss and a futility in defiance of destiny, embodied in the Compson family and Caddy specifically, that behaves as an outlet for the social anxiety of the South in the late 1920s that Faulkner must have at least observed or, perhaps, even shared.

In Book I readers are introduced, rather awkwardly and abruptly by design, to the nearly incoherent narrative style of Benjamin “Benjy” Compson. It is clear early on from his section that he is attached, if not fixated, on his sister Caddy. His memories of Caddy show her to be extraordinarily considerate and compassionate towards Benjy, indulging his very needy disposition toward her with impressive patience even from an early age. This seems to be in direct contrast to the rest of his family, who seem to treat him with a certain disregard. As Eric Gary Anderson puts it, “his obvious physicality notwithstanding, [Benjy] is constantly described as fading or vanishing, constantly asked to go away, constantly being told to ‘hush.’”[2] While Benjy seems to be affected by disorder of various kinds, it is particularly any deviations from the norm associated with Caddy that bother him the most. He is upset when Caddy’s underwear gets muddy and wet, an obvious allusion and anticipation to the loss of her sexual purity that come later in the story. He is upset when Caddy can’t sleep in his bed anymore and is understandably more traumatized when Caddy is gone for good. But, perhaps, most distressing to Benjy is when Caddy begins to realize and experiment with her sexuality. She wears perfume to feel attractive and it upsets Benjy because she ceases to smell “like trees,” a sensory perception he associates with Caddy from his earliest recollections. Caddy, realizing that her perfume upsets Benjy, graciously gives the perfume away and this placates Benjy only for a time. Later, when Caddy begins to have sex – presumably with Dalton Ames as we find out in Book II – the smell of “trees” is lost for good and Benjy is irreparably damaged by this. There are a number of ways to read Benjy’s relationship to Caddy, none of which are necessarily exclusive, while the dynamic of this relationship is excellently suited for a variety of interpretations and from the very literal to the very metaphorical. It is not inappropriate to view Caddy, as will be explored throughout this essay, as an embodiment of the “soul” of the South, arguably Faulkner’s greatest love. In this light, Caddy’s maturation represents the conditions of the South leading up to the late 1920s. “Slavery, the defeat of the war, Reconstruction, and then decades of social, political, and economic trauma had held off the impact of the industrial revolution and its technological, urban-centered society. When finally change did begin to come to the Southern community, the social and moral drama of its advent, the dislocation of sensibility, was uncommonly intense.”[3] It was into this environment that Faulkner placed his novel: a time of anxiety, disillusionment, a sense of loss and an inability to cope with inevitable change. The same feeling that many Southerners had toward their beloved South is reflected in Benjy’s relationship to Caddy. Caddy, defiant and strong willed, yet remaining the beautiful, warm and welcoming girl of youth is forced by the nature of things to “grow up.” In that process, she lost her purity and, some might argue, her own tender soul. The fact that she had had unscrupulous relations with a war veteran and was married off to a young (albeit wily enough to discern her pregnancy) northerner is also potentially revealing as general Southern attitudes toward WWI and the North are well documented as antagonistic. It was to these two that Caddy’s loss of purity is specifically associated with and it was this loss of purity that affected Benjy deepest. Perhaps most exasperating to Benjy, and the reader, is his inability to communicate these disturbances to others. As Dr. Towner states matter-of-factly, “Every page of this novel contains people ‘trying to say’,” ostensibly without the ability to say it.[4] The fact that Benjy’s angst, with regard to the loss of Caddy, was so utterly ineffable may be symbolic of the Faulkner’s concern that the Southern community was unable to articulate their own feelings of despair over the inevitability of change and the “loss of innocence” happening in their midst. Lastly is the topic of Benjy’s castration. Of all of the allusions to be drawn, this might be the most direct. Benjy, in what appears to have been a genuine misunderstanding with a local girl, was forcibly castrated. In one of his fits, he unintentionally assaulted a young girl and was castrated for fear that he was attempting to molest her. Benjy, later, looks at himself in the mirror and bellows because he sees that his testicles are missing while Luster tells him, quite frankly, that they’re never coming back regardless of how much he cries about it. It seems that Faulkner may be attempting to give voice to the feeling of emasculation within the Southern community over any number of potential “misunderstandings.”

The tone, style and content of Quentin’s narrative in Book II take a dramatic turn for the darker. Quentin has a two-fold issue with identity: the first being that he suffers from an archetypal complex of being the eldest child, on whose shoulders the weight of the family rests in the absence of his father. The second, related to the first, is that he feels an incredible responsibility to uphold the honor of the family, Caddy’s honor in particular, to the point that he becomes obsessed with her promiscuity and subsequent pregnancy. As Michael Cowen points out, it is “’natural’ in the light of his early psychological conditioning in the romanticized Southern ‘code’ of chivalry, that Quentin should be obsessed with preserving his sister’s virginity.”[5] This entrenched “code” of chivalry becomes perverted within Quentin, something his father attempts to dissuade in him with a rather poor effort and with even worse results. This perversion degenerates so far that it leads him to claim that he got Caddy pregnant as if, somehow, her engaging in an incestuous relationship was less scandalous than simply being promiscuous. It is also not a poor reading to suggest, as Quentin’s father seems to, that the real reason Quentin is upset about Caddy’s pregnancy and promiscuity is because he, himself, is still a virgin. In this sense, Quentin’s masculinity is threatened in, perhaps, the worst way: he was beaten by his own sister in what has traditionally been considered as a “man’s game”: sex. Not only was he a man, or at least a male, but he was also the oldest. Not only does his sister show him up, but he is also left behind… left out of the game entirely. His masculinity, though in a much more subtle way than Benjy’s, is threatened much more deeply. “In the course of Quentin’s narrative, he… attempts to see himself as a Romantic hero, defier of fate, sacrificial redeemer of damned experience.” [6] These attempts, while growing more and more in his mind, have all failed miserably. From both of his failed “honor duels” all the way to his obsession with being the incestuous father of Caddy’s unborn child, Quentin is wholly unable to fulfill his idealized self-perception. In the end he kills himself, plunging off the side of a bridge into a river. “Quentin is oversensitive, introvert, pathologically devoted to his sister, and his determination to commit suicide is is protest against her disgrace.”[7] Perhaps in the same vein of criticism that led Mark Twain to criticize Walter Scott is Faulkner unveiling a belief that the old Romanticized “honor” and “chivalry” concepts have caused too much death and, until they die, will continue to be a problem for their community. “In many places in his section, Quentin rehashes his obsessive, fevered fantasy of an incestuous… encounter with Caddy. These images point up that even when physically removed from the South, he imaginatively transports his Southern home place with him to the North.”[8] This helps illustrate that the Southern community is not tied to a physical or geographic location, but rather exists ubiquitously. Quentin is that element of Southern society, even when he is in the very heart of the North, which holds fast to ideals, even to the point of absurdity and Faulkner makes no bones about associating the death of that element with the loss of his idea of the South.

Even the, relatively, few lines of substantial dialogue from Mr. Compson unveil Faulkner’s disillusionment with the idea that is the South. Telling Quentin that women are never virgins and that purity is, essentially, a bad thing within nature, he is expressing the underlying frustration with the failure of Southern ideology to preserve Southern society, particular its glory and prestige. Mr. Compson rationalizes his daughter’s scandalous behavior, dismisses Quentin’s obvious cries for help, runs impulsively to the bottle as a coping mechanism for the collapse of his family and dies, unfulfilled. From Mr. Compson’s point of view, the “decay of the Compson family… is part of a universal cyclical rhythm of rising and falling, birth and death, from which no natural object can escape.”[9] In essence, the Compsons represent not only a potent example but also a microcosm of the Southern community in distress and decline. This, of course, applies equally to Jason (the son) and his particular brand of mischievousness. “…Because of his savage (and extremely funny) voice and demeanor, Jason attracts less readerly sympathy than Benjy and Quentin. That very fact acts as a caution to look beneath Jason’s cruelty for its sources and to ask again what he tells us that the others cannot and will not.”[10] It may be a little unfair, but it is not unreasonable to attribute Jason’s particularly malicious behavior with a certain lack of strength in character and an inability to resolve his “place” within the family as a youth. What is certain, however, is that he possesses an especially negative fascination with the bank job that he had lost when Caddy’s marriage was called off. It is here where we see Caddy’s disreputable activities take its first serious toll on Jason. Whatever hope was tied to his sister’s marriage, as it pertained to him, was quickly and ruthlessly dashed on the rocks when the marriage was cancelled on account of Caddy’s pregnancy. In one sense, the decline and loss of the Faulknerian idea of the South, left many feeling disillusioned, but it was also done, again, with the help of an inherently antagonistic Northerner. “He cannot acknowledge real grief or loss, so he rants against imagined wrongs done him.”[11] It is these perceived slights and wrongs that help insulate him from self-examination and provide a much-needed justification for his self-centered behavior. His “clever” little quips and axioms also betray his wounds and pain, especially with regard to women. “Once a bitch, always a bitch…” It may be a gross oversimplification to return to this opening idea from his section as a summary, but it may be suitable to see it as an exposé of his pain. It is uncharacteristic for someone to comment incessantly on that which they are truly indifferent about. Rather these kinds of statements tend to reflect a significant degree of affect with regard to the subject. Insofar as Jason sees women, in the very least the women of his family, as “bitches” it may have to do with his particular vulnerability with them and their ultimate inability to assist him in confronting and healing those wounds that he carries with him. His mother perpetually manipulated each member of the family with a sort of passive-aggressive, narcissistic masochism. Caddy directly affected his hopes of escape into a better life, however realistic they may have been. Quentin, his niece, not only plagued his thoughts but also “stole” his money and ran off for good with it. Despite the haunted status of that element in the Southern community that Jason represents, it is the one that remains within the community. It went from wounded to hardened, from hardened to abusive, from abusive to malignant and yet it doesn’t leave the community. Unlike Dilsey, who represents that undercurrent of perseverance with resignation, Jason simply continues to fester. Yet where Jason represents the “last man standing” in the Compson family, Dilsey certainly symbolizes the “individual dignity and [the] possibilities of human freedom.”[12] She has indeed seen the Alpha and Omega. She was there in the beginning and she is there in the end. She carries “the real weight of the family’s responsibilities” and, by the end of her section, is walking with “astonished disappointment” into the rain on Easter Sunday.[13] If nothing else, this element is ultimately unaffected by the decline of the South… persistent and enduring.

The tragedy and decline that is Caddy Compson symbolizes, subtly yet powerfully, the tragedy and decline of the South in Faulkner’s time. The anxiety, the “growing up” and the loss of its original purity and innocence, the inability of its surrounding community to effectively cope with its decline: this is how these narratives reach out beyond their literal boundaries and give us a window into the world that Faulkner and his contemporaries wrestled in. They show us how each element in the community tried desperately resist her fate, unable to escape her gravity. They show us the death of Southern chivalry, the emasculation of that ineffable element seeking comfort from an ideal South that can no longer provide any, and the festering element of self-preservation by means of calcification. It was a grim prognosis offered by Faulkner. His generation seems to have escaped their decline, it remains to be seen whether ours will be so fortunate.

[1] Theresa Towner, The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner, p. 17

[2] Eric Gary Anderson, “Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary”, Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, p. 37

[3] Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Faulkner and the Southern Literary Renaissance, p. 64

[4] Theresa Towner, The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner, p. 24

[5] Michael H. Cowan, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 6

[6] Michael H. Cowan, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 10

[7] Evelyn Scott, “On William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 26

[8] Eric Gary Anderson, “Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary”, Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, p. 36

[9] Michael H. Cowan, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 10

[10] Theresa Towner, The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner, p. 21

[11] Theresa Towner, The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner, p. 22

[12] Michael H. Cowan, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 8

[13] Michael H. Cowan, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, p. 9, 6

Revolutionary Ideas, Transforming Politics

2009-10-07T15:51:00.002-05:00

Revolutionary Ideas, Transforming Politics

Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one of strife, internal conflict and total war. Beginning with the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, revolutionary changes in European religion acted as a powerful catalyst for major conflicts like the Dutch War for Independence, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War. Out from the violence, instability and continent-wide anxiety came radical political ideas that transformed the face of human politics and permanently shaped development of human civilization for centuries to come. These changes, revolving around concepts of man’s relationship to nature, equality and liberty, and the legitimacy of the state, assisted in a strong break from the so-called “top-down” political traditions of the past and served as the basis for reforming many existing governments, as well as leading to the creation of entirely new nations.

As much as the politics of the early modern period had foundations in the violent religious and civil conflicts of the immediately preceding period, they also owed their formation to a particularly provocative trend in natural philosophy that attempted to understand man’s own nature and the disposition of his relationship to nature-at-large. One of the direct results of this trend was the development of a whole new concept of natural law and man’s existence in the so-called “state of nature.” One of the very first political theorists and state-crafters to engage this idea was English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, his Leviathan was one of the first comprehensive discussions on modern statecraft in European history. In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that the “laws of nature are immutable and eternal,” in effect elevating them to the status previously attributed to the divine, and further claimed that the science of the laws of nature are the only true moral philosophy in the world.[1] Hobbes’ claim represents a clear jump along a trend begun with previous European philosophers like Sir Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, but it is a claim echoed not only by his political allies and students, but by his rivals as well. Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary rival of Hobbes, similarly claimed that in order to understand God, one must study the face of nature and the natural law.[2]

Despite the prominent place it is given as a basis for their respective political theories, natural law itself is not a political concept but comes, rather, from a series of scientific and philosophical observations about the orderly operation of the cosmos. Whereas these observations in the medieval period were dominated by Church-authorized cosmology and religious considerations, the evolution of divine law into natural law demonstrates a clear weakening of the clergy’s ability to influence philosophy in the early modern period. This claim is, perhaps, best demonstrated by the peculiar argument made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that men, in the state of nature, behave amorally because morality is a convention that owes itself to human sociality. In essence he is arguing that outside of human society there are no true morals.[3] This is a clear break from the doctrines of institutional Christianity which claim that morality – including the inevitable ideas of right, wrong, good and evil – are eternal realities that are imported from God’s divine law. What’s more is that the ethical core of humanity, according to Spinoza’s Ethics, is not the aptly named “Sermon on the Mount” preached by Jesus but, rather, self-preservation alone.[4] Perhaps even more provocative was John Locke’s Newtonianistic claim that it is the laws of nature, not God himself, which binds men together, undermining the millennia-old tradition of the Divine Right of Kings.[5] Indeed because it is the laws of nature that act as a governing force over man – ostensibly at the expense of the existing religious and political institutions – it stands to reason that all men, in the state of nature, are both free and equal.[6]

The subject of human equality has, possibly, been the most challenging problem of human history and the debate stretches all the way from antiquity to modernity, with no clear resolutions. The attempts by early modern philosophers and political theorists to come to a functional understanding of human equality produced answers and positions that spanned the entire range of the debate. Hobbes, one of the earliest – and, perhaps, most politically conservative – philosophers to address the question concluded that men have a kind of natural equality to them insofar as there is no one man that is clearly superior to any other man in every way imaginable.[7] In a sense, all men are equal in their natural inequalities. Spinoza saw the equality of man in a predominately ethical sense: the equality of men comes from each man’s equal right to preserve their own life at all costs and, in this sense, the equality of man is reduced – or, perhaps, elevated – by Spinoza to a place of moral ascendancy.[8] Two of the latest political theorists of the early modern period, Locke and Rousseau, both acknowledged, in different ways however, that there is a natural inequality to man but argued similarly to Spinoza that there is a moral equality to him. Locke’s argument was that humans are equal via their internal nature, perhaps hearkening to Cartesian ideas of the “rational soul”, even if there are small inequalities to them by way of merit, virtue, wealth, mental prowess or physical attributes.[9] Rousseau, however, does not seem to be interested in making that kind of distinction and stipulates that men are not equal naturally or politically.[10] Unlike his predecessors, this aggressive position allows him the freedom to stab at what he views as the heart of human inequality: social convention. Where previous philosophers and theorists found it expedient – and popular in many ways – to argue for the inherent equality of man, this position also limited their criticisms to anemic or dissatisfactory political conditions. This was not good enough for Rousseau as he intended to demonstrate that it was human sociality and society that not only exasperated whatever minor natural inequalities existed in man, but also stood to create many more new ones of its own.[11] In fact, Rousseau argues as a kind of proto-Marxist that, it is the extreme inequalities of the predominant social conventions of the “civilized” world that are responsible for the conflicts and horrors of human history, including those ones most recent to his time.[12] His conclusion, however, is similar to that of Locke’s in saying that it is the responsibility of the political establishment of a nation to be so perfectly equal that it has the power equalize whatever natural inequalities exist between men and to keep unnecessary inequalities from being produced within society.[13] It is clear that equality has meant many things to many people at many times in history, with many of those meanings being mutually exclusive to one another. Within the framework of the early modern period one might successfully argue that equality, with regard to the political state of men, took on its many forms in relation to a particular thinker’s ideas on sovereignty and to what extent a country’s population should enjoy political franchise. These considerations, along with the various imprecise definitions of freedom and liberty provided by these thinkers, continue to make the subject of human equality a very difficult question to answer.

Whatever unresolved questions remained on the subject of human equality, the question of liberty and freedom within a state is no less ambiguous, if not also relatively predictable. Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of what some considered a free-for-all power grab by various factions within England, makes it clear that civil liberty is “absurd” because it requires that men be exempt from the laws of the commonwealth which, in turn, renders the commonwealth itself void.[14] This rule of law, embodied in his concept of a nearly all-powerful Sovereign of the commonwealth, is charged with the singular task of maintaining order at all costs, which seems to be Hobbes’ own definition of freedom: not an environment where one can exercise one’s own personal liberties but, rather, an environment that is free from the uncertainty and strife of the previous time period. It is in this light that Hobbes claims that a monarchy offers just as much freedom as a democracy.[15] Not surprisingly, Pufendorf takes Hobbes’ stance and builds slightly on the concept. In his work, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Pufendorf claims that man does, indeed, have an inherent freedom or liberty to do as he pleases, but upon departure from the “state of nature” and entrance into a community, society or a state, that liberty is forfeit and subject to the will of the authorities.[16] Taking issue with such a seemingly narrow – and negative – interpretation of liberty, Locke explains that liberty is not a license to do as one pleases but, in fact, a state of being where one’s rights to life, liberty and property are protected and guaranteed.[17] Perhaps most radical of all is Rousseau’s claim that liberty is not, itself, a reality but also a manufactured convention – like morality – sprung from human society. Where he seems to find common ground with his predecessors is his argument that it is the leader of a state that is tasked with the guarantee of the liberty and freedom of his/her citizens.[18] It is the nature of this leader, however, that occupies much of the discussion about the nature of political organization in the early modern period.

The question of whom, within the state, is legitimately allowed to make policy on behalf of the whole is a dominant subject in the political theory of the early modern period. This office, generically referred to as the “sovereign”, was traditionally synonymous with the aristocratic or royal landlord of a country. With the emergence of the first republican and mixed governments in northern and western Europe came a heated debate about the nature of sovereignty within a state and who, if anyone, should possess it. While, again, some of the ideas offered by each of the most influential thinkers of the time are not entirely unpredictable, they are revealing and noteworthy. Hobbes, being one of the first theorists in Europe to broadly define sovereignty, claims that the sovereign is the individual, or assembly, that holds ultimate – and some might argue absolute – power within a commonwealth. This sovereign is, himself, above the laws of the state, is charged with protecting the state and keeping social and political order, and controls all three traditional branches of government as well as the state religion.[19] The sovereign, in Hobbes’ vision, must be supreme and alone in power. No challengers and no parties of interest, or factions, are to be allowed.[20] Locke, mistrustful of any government where the power is too concentrated in one man, argues that the sovereign power of a state must be endowed to the legislative body. This body, being greater than the sum of its own parts, may be the supreme power in the state but unlike Hobbes’ idea of sovereignty, no one person is ever above the law in state.[21] Ever the progressive, Rousseau seems unwilling to place sovereign power in the hands of any individual or assembly. Rather, it is into the hands of the so-called “general will” that the ultimate power of a state rests. Rousseau does a surprisingly poor job of explaining what the “general will” actually is, with some commentators explaining that it is the majority of a democratic electorate and others likening it to the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s economic theory. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality does provide one clue as to the anatomy of the general will when he claims, right at the outset of his essay, that the interests of the sovereign can never be the same as the interests of the people unless they are, in fact, the same.[22] Furthermore, this general will has no shortage of attributes assigned to it, most notably among them being: indestructibility, indivisibility and inerrancy.[23] What is certain, however, is that he agrees with Locke on the nature of any law produced by this general will: all men within a state, even princes, must be beholden to it.[24] As one might be able to see without much trouble, the various ideas of sovereignty presented by early modern philosophers and political theorists seem to have quite a bit to do with the particular thinker’s expectations for a successfully administered government. If, for instance, a conservative thinker believes that the most important job of a sovereign or of the government is to protect the people from war and internal conflict, then he seems to be more predisposed to a strong, centralized form of sovereignty. If, however, the theorist believes that the biggest threat to a nation’s people is a homegrown tyrant then it seems reasonable for the theorist to conclude that sovereignty should be disseminated broadly among the constituents of the nation. This potentially central question of “who poses the greatest threat to the state” appears not only to influence ideas about sovereignty but also concepts about how states should be – and are – formed, what purpose they serve and how – if ever – they should be dissolved.

The task of today’s anthropologists in determining the origins of civilizations and societies may, in many respects, be easier than that of early modern theorists who – due to the strong presence of Christian cosmology and the dominating medieval tradition of viewing the most ancient of histories through a mythical worldview – were probably not as free to explore the beginnings of civilization in a more scientific or forensic way as their modern counterparts. With those considerations in mind, it is not difficult to see how early modern ideas about the formation of societies and states were developed in a way that was both practical in advancing their particular ideas about the ends of the state as well as staying away from any idea that would be considered flagrantly offensive to those socially and religiously conservative elements in Europe. In that sense, those few theorists that did attempt to explain, in precise terms, how societies and states develop, seem to derive those conceptual notions from their own ideologies about the ends of the state. For instance, Samuel Pufendorf argues that states form because men, wanting to protect themselves and their interests, gather together in a large assembly to decide on the formation of the state.[25] Coupling that idea with his belief that the purpose of the state is to protect the lives and the interests of the constituents, one is able to draw a clear backwards path from one idea to the other.[26] To Pufendorf, like Hobbes before him, the greatest threat to a state is usually an external one, thus, the beginning and purpose of the state is one that protects the people from the brutal “state of nature” and those elements within it that are harmful or hostile to human interests. In the writings of Locke, however, one finds that the greatest threat to someone’s private interests is the unchecked greed, corruption and power that usually comes with the enfranchisement of a few political and social elites. Thus, it is not only the lives of the constituents of a state that require protection but also their property and interests. It is in that light that Locke argues that the ends of government are to protect and preserve the people’s property – of which, life and liberty are part – from threats both internal and external.[27] The difference between these two political camps is, perhaps, illustrated best with the question of when, if at all, it is permissible for a state to be dissolved. Where theorists like Hobbes and Pufendorf vehemently oppose the idea of dissolving a state, others like Locke and Rousseau argue that it is not only possible – and even necessary at times – but also inevitable. To the more conservative thinkers like Hobbes and Pufendorf, the state of nature is so brutal and so incompatible with human interests that the state can never be dissolved. Since the state, in their worldview, is charged with ensuring the wellbeing of the populace, a return to the perilous state of nature is out of the question. To men like Locke and Rousseau, however, a violent and sudden return to the natural state of perfect liberty and equality – regardless of the potentially scathing implications – is preferable to living under an all-powerful tyrant.[28] It should be noted, however, that Locke did not take the notion of revolution lightly, claiming that such violent overthrow of government should be considered only in the wake of a “long train of abuses”, a phrase famously borrowed by Thomas Jefferson and etched into the American Declaration of Independence.[29]

One can be certain that the ideas addressed here were not the only substantial questions debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Great advances in concepts revolving around private property, justice and civil religion not only happened concurrently with those of sovereignty, the state, natural law, equality, liberty and the state of nature, but also interacted with each other seamlessly in the early modern period of western history. What makes the latter topics “key” to early modern political theory is the highly radical and revolutionary nature of the advancements of the latter group compared to the more organic and evolutionary changes of the former group. It was the advancements of these key concepts that so heavily aided in the creation of the modern liberal state, reshaping both the political face of the West and the future with it.

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 99-100

[2] Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, pp. 50-58

[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 52

[4] Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, p. 211

[5] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 13

[6] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 8; Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, chapter 7

[7] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 74

[8] Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, p. 220

[9] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 31

[10] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 38

[11] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, pp. 58, 67

[12] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, pp. 79

[13] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 124; On the Social Compact, p. 153

[14] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 138

[15] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 140

[16] Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, p. 132

[17] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pp. 9, 32

[18] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Compact, p. 141; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 72

[19] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 109, 119, 174, 179, 305, 316, 377

[20] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 218

[21] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pp. 51, 77

[22] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 26

[23] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Compact, pp. 153, 155, 198

[24] Discourse on Political Economy, p. 117

[25] Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, pp. 135, 137

[26] Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, pp. 151-152

[27] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 47

[28] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pp. 107, 109, 124

[29] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 113

Babi Yar and the Holocaust

2009-10-07T15:43:00.001-05:00

Babi Yar and the Holocaust[1]

The massacre at Babi Yar outside of Kiev, Ukraine was one of the first and bloodiest events in the Holocaust. More than 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in the single largest killing of the period. The Nazis, after overwhelming the Soviet defense forces, set up a puppet government that was rife with Ukrainian collaborators; mostly from western Ukraine, which saw the Soviet Union as oppressive and tyrannical. Dr. Lower explained that while many Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazi invasion as liberation from the Soviet Union, the Jewish population understood all too well, via a mass exodus of Jews from Poland to Ukraine in 1939, that the Nazis had no intention to improve the lot of the local population. Nazi ideology, dependent on the idea of lebensraum, regarded the beautifully lush landscapes of Ukraine as a “German playground.” The Nazis believed that, over time, the entire land needed to be depopulated in order to make room for the German volk to recline in luxury and peace with the soil of the land. While these designs, according to Dr. Lower, were incidentally targeted towards the Ukrainian population, they were specifically targeted towards Ukraine’s Jewish population. Dr. Lower’s thesis in the study of Babi Yar is that the ideological “final solution” to Europe’s “Jewish’ Question” was conceived in Berlin and implemented at Babi Yar. Babi Yar represents the first application, and the first success, of Nazi genocidal attitudes towards a concentrated Jewish population.

On September 29, the Jewish population was ordered by the Nazis and the Ukrainian collaborators to report to Babi Yar for “deportation.” Rumors abounded among the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Kiev that the Jews were going to be forcibly deported to Palestine. These rumors undoubtedly aided in the complicity of the local Jews to follow the instructions of the authorities, but also add to the horror of the Nazis true intentions on the matter. This kind of deception only underscores and adds another dimension of evil to the massacre itself. As the Jews were ushered, one group at a time, into the ravine at Babi Yar they were forced to leave their belongings in the hands of the authorities whom, we are told, rifled through them for valuables to confiscate. As the Jews were summarily executed and dumped into the ravine, which acted as a natural “mass grave” for the dead, the local residents of Kiev reacted to the news and reports with complete ambivalence. There are some surviving records, clearly in the minority according to Dr. Lower, that demonstrate an inkling of horror among some of the local residents, but the vocal majority of Kiev were only too pleased to see the violent and destructive energies of the Nazis focused so diligently on anyone but the Ukrainians. Dr. Lower also gave clear examples of Ukrainians encouraging Nazis and local police to target helpless Jews that were unable to make it to the rally point near Babi Yar, as in the case of the old men at the local synagogue. Ideological collaboration and anti-Semitism were as much a motivation for Ukrainian involvement as utility and indifference.

Perhaps one of Dr. Lower’s strongest arguements involves the ideological commitment of the Nazis to the extermination of the Jewish population of Europe. A central piece of infrastructure in achieving Ukrainian lebensraum for Germans was the construction of the autobahn from Germany to the eastern front. The Germans forced a small portion of the Jewish population in the Ukraine, as well as other parts of Europe, to work on building this important infrastructure. However, as Babi Yar illustrates only so well, the Nazis preferred to kill off the Jews rather than use them as an important source of labor to meet their ultimate ideological goals. In other words, killing the Jews was more important than any other stated goal for the Nazis.

According to Dr. Lower, it was the success of Babi Yar, both in the practical sense of killing Jews and in the intangible sense of local reaction to the killings, which emboldened Hitler to continue similar and increasingly systematic killings all over the rest of Europe. In these killings, from Babi Yar to Auschwitz, Hitler’s legacy is revealed: more than facilitating the ascension of the “master race,” more than providing Germans lebensraum, more than restoring imperial prestige to the proud Fatherland, more than personal ambition to rule Europe, Hitler’s legacy and ultimate goal was to destroy the Jewish people.

[1] Lower, Wendy. “Babi Yar and the Holocaust: New Sources, New Perspectives.” Burton C. Einspruch Holocaust Lecture Series. University of Texas at Dallas. Richardson, Texas, 15 February 2009.