Ordinary People

 

Consider, by way of illustration, Eric Hobsbawm, the famous, much feted, and unrepentantly Marxist historian. No one would feel personally threatened by him at a social gathering, where he would be amusing, polite, charming, and accomplished; if you had him to dinner, you wouldn’t have to count the spoons afterward, even though he theoretically opposes the idea of private wealth. In short, there would be no reason to suspect that he was about to commit a common crime against you. In this sense, he is what one might call a moderate Marxist.

But Hobsbawm has stated quite openly that, had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning and prosperous socialist society, 20 million deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay; and since he didn’t recognize, even partially, that the Soviet Union was not in fact on the path to such a society until many years after it had murdered 20 million of its people (if not more), it is fair to assume that, if things had turned out another way in his own country, Hobsbawm would have applauded, justified, and perhaps even instigated the murders of the very people to whom he was now, under the current dispensation, being amusing, charming, and polite. In other words, what saved Hobsbawm from committing utter evil was not his own scruples or ratiocination, and certainly not the doctrine he espoused, but the force of historical circumstance. His current moderation would have counted for nothing if world events had been different.

Theodore Dalrymple.

 

One of the most depressing books I have ever read is Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Based upon the detailed records of one the Nazi extermination squads in Poland, the book details much about the type of men who made up the unit.  It's tempting to thing about such men as being vicious psychopathic thugs with a long history of anti social personality traits, but the chilling and sobering truth is that many of the men who executed women and children in cold blood were just ordinary people in peacetime.   People who would sit next to you on the bus, smile at your children, do your plumbing and excuse themselves if they bumped into you, could, if put in the right circumstances, put the a bullet through your spouse's brain. What made the fact the more horrifying is the fact that many of these men did these things voluntarily, even when given a choice to opt out. When the war ended, many of them to returned to live out the rest of their lives as upstanding local citizens.

The book came to mind as I trawled through my X feed. Post after post celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, and while the usual leftist suspects were represented, what shocked me the most is how many ordinary looking people celebrated it. I can understand schadenfreude but healthy societies have always seen it as a guilty pleasure and something one should be ashamed to have. The celebration of it, really marked someone as being of vulgar manners and declassé. However in post after post, Pilots, nurses, teachers, soldiers, mental health workers, etc. People not dressed in the usual garb of antifa or the degenerate,  but people who looked like polite bourgeoisie celebrated his demise.  

Much of the Right's talk about the decline of our society is focused on the "elites" but the reality is that these men could not achieve their strategic objectives with out co-operation a large numbers of the managerial class who live polite, affluent and well disciplined lives. What has been most disquieting to realise is that the people who could be our future torturers and executioners, given the right circumstances, are people who we are politely rubbing shoulders with us now. The whole leftist juggernaut needs to be seen as a pyramid of elites supported by a base of fellow travelers.

I was never a big fan of Charlie Kirk and did not pay much attention to his posts. I always felt that his business model was naive. The idea that you could rationalise and debate your point and make your opponent change his mind through the force of facts and good argument was, in my opinion contrary to lived human experience. What if your opponent doesn't respect facts or argument, what if they simply wanted to punch you out and dominate you. What if fantasy was preferential to reality. His socaratic style of argument was ultimately silenced by a bullet through his neck. And while the Left, I believe made a massive miscalculation, the reality is that Charlie Kirk is dead. His death celebrated by many of the "polite" people we live with and who if given the chance would gladly fill the ranks of Reserve Police Battalion 101 or its modern equivalent.

These are dangerous times indeed.

Christian Vitalism.

I will open rivers on the bare heights and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land fountains of water. I will put the cedar in the wilderness, the acacia and the myrtle and the olive tree; I will place the juniper in the desert together with the box tree and the cypress.  That they may see and recognize and consider and gain insight as well, That the hand of the LORD has done this, and the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Isiah 41:18-20

The other day, Ross Douthat did an interesting interview with Jonathan Keeperman: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. It's an interesting interview, especially this part which I thought was worthy of comment.

Douthat: Now a more personal objection, rooted in my own religious commitments. As you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that late modern life has become decadent and some sense of possibility, of action, of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and A.I. are going to create. I agree with all that.

However, I’m also a Christian. All of the authors that I’ve mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition — Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age Pervert — see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally either a religion of the weak, or a religion of women, that it’s against the erotic.

When I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot, but there’s also a lot of people who, in their own story about what went wrong with the right — the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy — they think, at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk-drinking Christians who didn’t understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: I’m curious, what is your attitude toward those debates? What’s your attitude toward Christianity and religion?

Keeperman: My belief is that there’s a tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. It’s not just my belief. My favorite author, Ernst Junger — actually, Passage Press comes from his book, “Forest Passage” — there’s a great book of letters between him and Martin Heidegger. Junger’s view is that none of this vitalism is sustainable without religion, and actually Christianity, specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe — against which our individual will is being tested at all times, and which a vitalist view of the world is insisting we’re constantly pushing against — all has to live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don’t think these things are incompatible.

Douthat: Junger, if I’m remembering his trajectory correctly, was part of the German right. He’s not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich, and he’s not someone who listeners should think of as like Heiddeger, who goes Nazi in that way, but Junger remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.

My sense of him is that he did have a view of Christianity as you describe, to some degree, but it was Christianity as a useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. Then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, it’s time to succumb to full Christianity. It seems to me that in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age Pervert, like the Nazis.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I’m a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.

Keeperman: Your concern is that it’s merely being cynically operationalized.

Douthat: Not even cynically. It’s more like Christianity is this great mythic structure within which we can operate, and that’s not what I believe about Christianity. I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that’s part of it. The Christian doesn’t just think that nature imposes constraints, it’s that God imposes constraints as well.

Now, what's interesting in this conversation is the implicit assumption of the incompatibility between Christianity and Vitalism.

I suppose we must begin by first defining terms.  Traditionally, vitalism was the notion that living things possessed some kind of "extra thing" which made them alive and distinguished them from inanimate things.  That's not what I think this conversation is all about. Vitalism, in the context above, is more about a essence which celebrates life and and all of it positive elements. Things like strength, beauty, youth, joy, fertility, Eros and so on. It's also an essence whose antithesis is the weak , the ugly the sterile and the joyless. Imagine Spring in all of its glory as opposed to late stage Autumn, with gloom of winter just around the corner. Vitalism is not just pro-life, but pro-healthy beautiful and bountiful life. I also want to make sure that the reader makes the distinction between the goodness of life and immanent beliefs that imply some kind of sacredness in natural things.

Looked at in this light, we then have to ask ourselves what is Vitalism's relationship to Christianity. In my opinion this relationship has broken down and while Christianity may be officially "Pro-life" on the books it doesn't operate that way in real life.

The more I look at this, the more that I'm am prepared to give some ground to the Vitalists criticism of modern Christianity in seeing it as "anti-vital".  This was, after all, Nietzsche's great criticism of Christianity in that enabled a revaluation of values by  inverting the values of the past. Instead of praising the beautiful, strong, fecund and joyus--as the pagan world did-- it  it elevated the weak, sterile, ugly and suffering. The essence of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was that it was anti-life.

The pagan world, for all of its vitalism, was a brutal one, especially towards the weak, poor and those who were not "useful. Christianity's notion that even life's "losers" still had the imprint of the Imageo Dei  and were thus worthy of care and charity transformed the evaluation of the poor.  The poor were no longer seen as life's failures but an opportunity whereby Christian love could be expressed. And the poor, instead of being viewed negatively were seen positively instead.

Loving a man because he is a brother in Christ is a different proposition to loving a man because he is needy, and its very important to distinguish the man from his condition. And sometimes, theologians reflecting on the objects of Christian love have failed to make this distinction, or even worse, elevated the condition over the man.

Take for example, the evangelical counsels of perfection. Here we see that the notions of poverty, chastity and obedience are elevated as means to achieve Christian perfection through a denial of self.  But where the error can creep is in the understanding of why we deny. If we assume that wealth--material stuff--is an evil which distracts us from the pursuit of our love for God, we've entered into the world of Manicheanism, on the other hand, if we see the love of God as greater than the good of wealth we have stepped away from that world.  To reiterate, one evaluation sees riches as "bad", the other as a "good". 

Or take the notion of the "preferential option for the poor". Ostensibly, what is there to criticise about this notion, but if you think about it more deeply, you begin to see that under this schema its implied that  God's love to a person tends to be graduated inversely to their degree of material possession. Now imagine yourself as a poor devout Christian. Any effort at self-improvement with regard to material well being will have an inverse affect on God's relationship with you. It's a recipe that promotes poverty and encourages misery. It's a subtle way of saying that wealth is bad and poverty good.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying we don't have a duty to the poor, but the danger is in linking the strength of God's love to a man's material status thereby blessing or cursing the "materiality" of the man. As objectionable as the the prosperity gospel is,  the poverty gospel is its mirror image, and without any of its material benefits.

Likewise a theology which valourises the "margins" links God's love to the degree of disability or social dysfunction to the object has. The clear implication is this schema is the more one moves away from their marginal status the less one is pleasing to God. The logic here is that God is less likely to be in the middle or top and more likely to be in the periphery.  The Bourgeoisie, who've made some success of life,  are thus clearly objectionable.

Nietzsche was of the opinion the ressentiment was the mechanism that was responsible for the Christian hatred of the the good things but he was wrong. The more I've looked into this the more I am of the opinion that  asceticism is the door though which Christianity is made prone to "value inversion". I want to be clear, however, that I'm not repudiating the counsels of perfection,  as asceticism does have a place in Christianity, but it needs to be very strictly policed  lest it corrupts the faith it attempts to uphold. Human thinking is very sloppy, mix that with asceticism, and its very easy to see how life's maladies could be come elevated in the ascetic Christian schema, resulting in an outlook that makes joy, pleasure and strength suspect, or outrightly sinful.

But where the damage has really been done is in robbing Christianity of it's vitalism. It's one thing to love the poor, the weak and the marginal but it does not have come at the expense of loving the material, strong and beautiful.  There's room for both.

I would place myself in the Thomistic camp of Catholic thinking and if I had to give a technical description of what Christian Charity/Caritas is, it would be: A potency, which expressed in act, can instantiate or perfect form. It's a technical definition that does no justice to its implications. Poetically, it can best be described as a power that gives birth, plenitude, and is able to renew all things. It is the engine of life, strength, perfection, beauty and happiness.  When one actually begins to grasp what Charity/Caritas IS, one can understand why men give up everything for it, but not because the other things are bad, but because, when bathed in its light "all things are like straw".

Christianity is a vital religion, but the ascetic tradition has been a weak-point which has been exploited to wound the faith. I'm firmly of the belief that we are living in an age of heresy.

What interests me in our modern Christianity is the neglect of the vocation of the knight, a product of the ages of the faith. His disappearance from the Christian conscience is, I think, a manifestation of the mutilation of Christianity. And the reason I bright this up is because one of my favourite movies, Excalibur deals with just this theme. The movie iss full of Christian allegory and shows what happens when a kingdom goes wrong. One of my favourite scenes is when Percival recovers the Grail. England is wrecked with famine, pestilence, disease and misery. After Arthur drinks from the Grail the land and the king restores his strength. As the knights ride through the fields the trees begin to bloom and the land is reborn.

Christianity is a vital religion.

Some More Thoughts on the Ordo Amoris

It's this blogs contention that the main reason for the collapse of religion in the West is due to a withdrawal of Grace, primarily as a result of a transformation of the understanding of Christianity by modern theologians and the religious leadership. In "Biblical" language, the shepherds have led the people astray and God isn't too pleased.

Charity or Caritas more precisely, is the stuff of God. Get that wrong and you have God wrong,  and you also get Christianity wrong.

This is why the subject of the Ordo Amoris is interesting, because getting it right is only possible if you understand Caritas properly. And as I said in my previous post, the main reason for misunderstanding it is because when the term "love" is used it is usually associated with emotions, whereas Cartias resides in the Will.

Cartias is more about doing the right thing, regardless of your feelings about the subject. This is why scripture makes a big deal about "Loving" your enemies. Doing the right things by your kids is easy, because you get positive emotions associated with them, doing the right thing by enemies is hard because the emotions push in the opposite direction. But the Christian always aims to do the right thing regardless of the feelings a person has. It all starts to get confusing once feelings and emotions are confused with the Will.

This article, written in Church Life Journal is an example of thinking gone bad. The fact that it is written by a professor of theology at Loyola University and a Law school professor is just another example of the rot in our cultural institutions.  It gets off to a bad start by first quoting Vance:

There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

and then setting up a straw man argument:

"We believe that Aquinas would look askance at the way Mr. Vance employed the idea of ordo amoris to justify cutting off concern for needy people at the nation’s doorstep."

Anyone looking at Vance's comment fairly would not say that. Vance left space for care of the needy but recognised that there were other more pressing priorities as well. And Vance did not argue that Caritas is a zero sum game. 

It's a Strawman argument and Law professors should not set them up.

The article then goes on to say:

What Aquinas says about the order of love or charity (the Latin terms are amor and caritas) describes how we show love to people in the way appropriate to that person’s relationship to us, and we love those closest to us more because we have more ways and opportunities to love them. For example, we care for our children not simply by supporting them financially or granting them access to a safe haven, but also by changing diapers, driving carpools, reading with them, cooking for them, taking them to doctors, cuddling with them, and so forth. It would seem perverse to forego such acts of love and simply send them a check. But no one thinks check-sending is unfitting when dealing with needy strangers; their relative distance often makes this form of beneficence the most fitting way to show our love. Distance does not remove the obligation to help, though it might modify the nature and extent of the help that might be rendered.

All fairly solid traditional thinking on the matter. But then it goes pear shaped:

Love of neighbor as contemplated in the ordo amoris does not require us to treat everyone the way we treat our own children, but it does require us to respond to cases of manifest need.

and,

Thomas Aquinas writes that, when confronted with two people in need, “If one of the two is more closely connected to us and the other is more needy, it is not possible to determine by a universal rule who should be helped more, because there are different degrees of both neediness and proximity, but this requires the judgment of a prudent person.” The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need. Aquinas rejects the idea that one can address such matters via universal rule (or executive order). Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations, which suggests less a closed-door policy on immigration and more the creation of a system in which people seeking refuge can have their claims heard in a timely and fair way. [ED]

Firstly, Aquinas doesn't say there is an automatic response to manifest need to the exclusion of everything else. Aquinas clearly says that Prudence needs to be involved even  in these matters.  Not only prudence, but a Prudence formed which springs from a properly formed Christian conscience.

Secondly, what the author is trying to do here is to tie the orthodox positions of Aquinas with her position on immigration, thereby giving it a moral legitimacy. Furthermore, what the authors also do is ignore context, equating the roles and responsibilities of the private citizen with responsibilities of a member of government, whose domains of action and responsibility are totally different. Thirdly, while she states that prudence should regulate judgement in complex situations, but in the end she simply reduces the imperative to act to "urgent need." I don't think Aquinas would be impressed.

There also is an air of unreality in the article which equates the expansion of Christian virtue with a real world means to provide it. While virtue strengthens virtue through habit, an expansion of the virtue of compassion does not always come with the actual means to satisfy it. Every Beauty Pagent queen wants to alleviate world poverty and cancer, but they're still here, despite the sincerity of intention.  Love may be infinite by resources are finite the pain comes in dishing the resources out appropriately. Living in La La land is no help when there are mouths to feed and responsibilities to fulfill here and now.

The other day I heard of a family with four children who were of constrained means, they could only afford to send two of their children to good schools, and I know they're loving parents, but man, that's a hard call.

Likewise given a finite set of resources, Governments frequently have to make tradeoffs for the common good, which sometime injure other parties.  Governments may sometime--in acting for the common good--have to close the door, even for desperately needy people.

In the real world the allocation of resources by men of good will isn't just reduced to need. Other factors such as obligations, responsibilities. long term consequences and self-interest also matter. Opening your door to a serial killer in middle of a winter night may be helping the needy but its also insane.

What Aquinas and Christian common sense dictates is that prudence should regulate the expression of Charity and need is one of the factors of consideration. Sometimes Love hurts. And this is where we come, once again to trying to understand what Christian love is. If you conflate it with happy feeling then any outcome that causes painful feels is going to be evil. This is why they pull out the crying kid everytime they want you to donate money or support their policy and why they don't want to show the MS 13 member trying to get in.
They know that modern Christianity has become an exercise of feelings and not an act of considered goodwill.

The Ordo Amoris is Flatter Than You Think

In and interview the other day,  JD Vance bought to attention the concept of the  Ordo Amoris, the idea that within Christianity, as it was traditionally understood, there is a legitimate ranking of our love.  Vance was speaking in the context of U.S. politics, primarily with the idea being that "Charity begins at home" which meant by implication that governments have their primary duty to their own citizens and then to rest of the world. 

Vance got a lot of push back, from the usual suspects but also from a significant number of Christians of all denominations. It's this group that interests me as my interest is in the self destructive nature of modern Christianity. i.e Christian Buddhism.  So I thought it  worthwhile to look at their approach to the subject.

If we divide the parties in this discussion to self, kin and stranger, the objection of the Christian Buddhists is that by prioritising the self, and by extension kin, we are are, in fact being selfish and leaving the the dregs of Christian love to strangers. Christian love, they argue should be based upon need and not proximity to self. Self care is equivalent to selfishness and we all knows what Christianity thinks about selfishness. Implicit in this line of reasoning is that self-care is wrong in a world of competing needs. At the extreme end, you have the modern Christian thinkers, who see the "stranger" as the face of Christ and therefore anyone who who deprioritizes them is deprioritising Christ. Then of course are all the radical Balthasarians, Bathrians with their vague moralising bromides about encounter and radical love, poverty and self-giving.

I begin to tune out.

The big idea that these guys have is that the poor--especially illegal migrants--are a kind of spiritual litmus test which gives you a chance to prove your Christian bona fides. The more you give, and support them the better the Christian you are. And it helps if they're really repulsive. Because we all know how Christ went to the margins and loved the unlovable. Illegal gang members with a history of savage violence and crime are particularly high on totem pole of Buddhist Christian love. Love them by inviting them into your home and with your family and your are a true disciple of Christ. Prudence, common sense and some hesitation are all example of the failure to commit fully to Christ when he presents himself as the "encounter" with the  repulsive migrant. The problem is that how the "encounter" ends in the parable of the Good Samaritan is not how it sometimes ends in real life.

Total commitment to the migrant even at the expense of the self is the name of the game. And not only does this form of Christianity aim at self-denial but it also agitates against policies which discriminate against the migrant and urges people toward government polices which subordinate all other interests to them.

Despite some of the more sensational aspects of illegal immigration such as the gangs and the violence the reality is that most illegal migrants who come to a country are not criminals but people simply seeking a better economic life. They are simply the poor and the question then is, what duty sort of duty of care does a Christian actually have towards them.

Now, I am not a official spokesman for anyone but in my opinion, it really depends on the circumstances. There are no hard and fast rules.

In  Mathew 22:34-40, a clear hierarchy of love is established. First love God, then love your neighbour as you love yourself. Note, the neighbour and yourself is established as an equivalent.  Contrary to many who supported Vance he's not way down the list. One of the things that characterised pre-Christian societies is their strong family based networks. What made Christianity so radical to the ancient world is that its love extended outside the family circle even to the repellent. And there's plenty of passages in scripture where neglect of the poor is punished quite severely by God. "Nearest and dearest" taking "priority" is the wrong way of looking at it.

Now the concept of the "self" is an interesting one since different cultures view the self differently.  In some of the more Nordic countries and the Anglosphere, the self is seen as a quite autonomous with a limited number of obligations to others.  The individual is seen more as an "elementary particle". On the other hand, in much of the rest of the world, the self is not seen as "autonomous" but as someone who intermeshed with the wider community with lots of legitimate obligations toward them. Christianity is pretty big on making sure you fulfil your legitimate obligations. Christianity takes a dim view on such things as children abandoning their parents, on not paying for works undertaken by others and parental neglect.

In other words when you love your neighbor as yourself, your "self" should be understood as a self with obligations. A father, for example, is not a an autonomous self but an individual with real duties and obligations to his wife, kids and other family members. A man can't just ditch these if he doesn't feel like it. They're real obligations which he is committed to, even if someone poor comes along. It helps if we like the ones who we are obligated to but like has got nothing to do with it.  It's all about the love.

In other words,  for the Christian, the poor are another legitimate obligation onto the self.

Now, given that most men have finite resources the issue in the face of all these competing interests becomes one of "resource management" and how to achieve the optimal result i.e. the virtue of prudence. As mentioned before, in pagan days, resource allocation was purely driven by "natural sentiment", so resources were allocated to those whom we felt a natural affinity to, but Christianity is quite explicit in rejecting this view. Christianity demands that we help those in need even if we don't have a natural inclination towards them.  But it doesn't compel us to be stupid or self-destructive.

The Christian Buddhists are right in that a Ordo Amoris which puts the poor on the bottom is the wrong way to look at Christian Charity but where they err is the utter abandonment "prudence" when it comes to resource allocation.  Their altruism becomes pathological when it neglects to recognise all other legitimate and binding competing interests which compete with the "poor", seeing the poor as the only metric by which to judge our actions.  Mix that in with a notion which praises self-sacrifice and you've got a recipe for self-destruction in service of the "poor".

This is what I mean;

You are well aware of the generosity which our Lord Jesus Christ had, that, although he was rich, he became poor for your sake, so that you should become rich through his poverty.

I will give you my considered opinion in the matter; this will be the right course for you as you were the first, a year ago, not only to take any action but also even to conceive the project.

Now, then, complete the action as well, so that the fulfilment may -- so far as your resources permit -- be proportionate to your enthusiasm for the project.

As long as the enthusiasm is there, the basis on which it is acceptable is what someone has, not what someone does not have.

 It is not that you ought to relieve other people's needs and leave yourselves in hardship; but there should be a fair balance- your surplus at present may fill their deficit, and another time their surplus may fill your deficit. So there may be a fair balance; as scripture says: No one who had collected more had too much, no one who collected less had too little.

2 Corinthians 8:9-15

You can quote other bits which come to the same conclusion but the stand out feature of this text is a balance needs to be struck between competing needs. And note there is no obligation for "heroic" self-destruction.

Merry Christmas

Jesus did not come to dominate the world. He came to save it.Quite a different object; an entirely different operation. And he did not come to separate himself from the world. An entirely different method. You see, my friend, if he had wanted to withdraw from the world, to retire from the world, he had simply not to come into the world. It was as simple as that. In that way he could have withdrawn in advance. There was never to be such a chance again. Such a good opportunity: of remaining at the right hand of the Father. As long as he was seated at the Father's side he was withdrawn from the world, in, a certain sense, in a way you will never be, infinitely more than you will ever be. Had he wanted to withdraw from the world, if that was his object, it would have been perfectly simple; he had simply not to go into it. 

The centuries had not yet opened, the gate of salvation was not open, the great story had not be. And if not to be in the world was his object, then he had merely not to start. That short tour was unnecessary.  But, on the contrary, he did go into the world, into the centuries, to save the world. He even went twice. Or rather he only went once, but doubly, twice in once. The intention being doubly underlined.

First of all, in a first movement, making an infinite movement, an infinite leap as it were, as God he became man, et homo factus est, which you must admit, my friend, is not exactly a way of withdrawing from the world. It was perhaps, on the contrary, a way of entering into it infinitely, in full: to be there, to become part of it by incarnation. In corpus incarnem. Might it be said that no one ever went into the world so fully?

Charles Peguy, Temporal and Eternal.

I didn't mean to be away this long. But it's been a busy year and several things have conspired to keep me away from my blog. Work and family commitments and put constraints on my time but perhaps the biggest issue has been an intractable writers block that has meant that whenever I want to put up a post my capacity to write simply evaporates. It's very frustrating as replying to comments on other's sites comes easily and with little effort. But composition and putting thoughts to keyboard in some kind of orderly manner.....that's been difficult.

I am hoping for better in the New Year as I can feel a nascent urge returning.  I hope it is not a false one.

While I like the whole tradition of Christmas, I generally find the Christmas period a bit off-putting. The focus on gifts and gluttony tends to make the stores and car parks places I want to avoid as the goodwill people are meant to show each other evaporates in the pursuit of the elusive car-parking space or the jostle for gifts.  The consumer culture on show is definitely repellent.  I am not the first to comment on this as year we get sermons from the pulpit about the vapidity of our materialist culture which seems contrary to the spirit of Christmas. And, in sense, it definitely is, but in the last few days another thought has popped into my mind about the Season.

While the crass materialism of Christmas is definitely nauseating, so is a unthinking reactionary spiritualism while tries to diminish the material aspect of the events surrounding the Incarnation. We all know that God became man by this mechanism, but what's also important to remember that when the Three Kings came to honour the Son of God they did so with produce of the earth: Gold, Myrrh and Frankincense. They honored him not only with their thoughts but also with things, earthly things.  Things which in-themselves were good. They honoured him in a material way.

The Incarnation was the physical manifestation of God's goodwill to man.  So in a sense, when we give presents or host our friends and neighbours for a feast we're trying to convert our spiritual good will into a material reality. It isn't all just thoughts and prayers.  So therefore a Christmas without gifts or feasting is a bit a like an incarnation without a baby Jesus. It's sort of defeats the point.

Therefore Christmas should be a bit of a material indulgence; a bit of a splurge. This thought has put a bit of a different perspective on the Christmas season and encouraged me to bear the rude crowds with more patience and goodwill.

But I'll still avoid the car parks.

I want to wish all my readers who are still around a very Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year.

And Jason, thanks for checking in. Best wishes for the Season!

A Tweet to Ponder: II

My previous post on Catholic economic under-performance in Prussia during the late 19th C got me thinking about confounding factors that could have influenced the disparity.  I mean it may have been possible that the Catholic situation may have come about because the Protestants in Prussia may have rigged the game against them. After all Catholic/Protestant relations were quite hostile for a long time and perhaps, if Catholics had been "left alone", they would have reached or exceeded economic parity.

The problem with this line of thinking is that there is a very easy argument to refute this with and that is the economic situation of the Jews.

Now, in 19C. Prussia, Catholics and Protestants disagreed on many things but one thing that they both seemed to agree on was antisemitism.   And while the antisemitism in Prussia was not the antisemitism of the Nazi party, hostility to the Jews was widespread and many in many higher bourgeoisie environments they were considered declassé and deliberately excluded from them.

The things is that none of these social disadvantages translated to a decline in economic performance. In fact it did the opposite. This paper deals with Germany as a whole but I think that the numbers would be fairly representative of Prussia:

In the early twentieth century, a dense corporate network was created among the large German corporations ("Germany Inc."). About 16% of the members of this corporate network were of Jewish background. At the center of the network (big linkers) about 25% were Jewish. The percentage of Jews in the general population was less than 1% in 1914. [ED]What comparative advantages did the Jewish minority enjoy that enabled them to succeed in the competition for leading positions in the German economy? Three hypotheses are tested: (1) The Jewish economic elite had a better education compared to the non-Jewish members of the network (human capital). (2) Jewish members had a central position in the corporate network, because many of them were engaged in finance and banking. (3) Jewish members created a network of their own that was separate from the overarching corporate network (social capital). The density of this Jewish network was higher than that of the non-Jewish economic elite (embeddedness). Our data do not support any of these hypotheses. The observed correlation between Jewish background and economic success cannot be explained by a higher level of education, a higher level of social capital, or a higher proportion of Jewish managers engaged in (private) banking.

In a footnote in the article, Weber himself is cited with data from the late 19th C which illustrates the extent of disparity among faiths:   

Average capital tax per 1000 persons of each denomination for 1895: Protestants:954,900 Mark; Catholics 589,800 Mark; Jews: 4 Million Mark.

If the economic field was "rigged" against everyone who wasn't Protestant then the Jews had found a way to bypass the system.

The point of this is if we control for economic performance within one country--where we can eliminate the confounding variable of different national economic policy--and religious bias as well, we see that religious differences really do matter when it comes to economic performance.

Finally, its not as if Catholics at the time weren't aware of their economic status. From the Catholic Encylopaedia of 1907.

One important consequence of the Kulturkampf was the earnest endeavour of the Catholics to obtain a greater influence in national and municipal affairs; how weak they formerly were in both respects was clear to them only after the great conflict had begun. These efforts took the name of the Paritätsbewegung, i.e., a struggle for equality of civil recognition. In turn the discussions awakened and fed by this movement soon led to a vigorous self-questioning among the Catholic masses as to the fact of, and the reasons for, their backwardness in academic, literary, and artistic life, also in the large field of economic activities (industry, commerce, etc.). On the other hand, the reconciliation between Church and State made it possible for the Catholics of Germany to participate more earnestly than hitherto in the public life of the Fatherland, in illustration of which we may point to the notable contributions of the Centre party. (1896-1904) to the solution of the great imperial problems of that period.

Now the reason why economic performance matters is because of the relationship of economic power to modernity.  If we consider modernity as being about the material conditions of existence, then those who control the provision of these goods and services will in fact control modernity. The people who control the media will control what is presented on it. The people who invest in technology and infrastructure will control what gets built and where. The people in government will regulate all of it.

The contention of this blog is that the Protestant world was by and large the principal shaper of material world of modernity until about the early 1970's, the Catholic world lived in its shadows and was also shaped by it, and it is its collapse that has ushered in the Negative World.

A Tweet to Ponder

The other day this interesting tweet popped into my feed and I think it encapsulates some of the thoughts I have with regard to the relationship with Protestantism, Christianity and modernity.

It's no mean feat to have achieved a literacy rate approaching 100% and an infant mortality rate roughly a third of a city--with all its institutions--that has been in place that two millennia. It's all the more the impressive considering the it was a wilderness sixty years prior. 

I had a brief look today at the religious history of Toledo, Ohio and from what I could glean it would appears that Catholicism established the first roots there but it was displaced very early on by waves of Protestant immigrants who were hostile to it. Essentially Toledo was a Protestant dominated town.

Toledo Spain was one of the cultural centers of Catholicism and it's interesting to see that nearly two millenia of learning and culture did not confer upon it any advantage on the issue of infant mortality compared to some backwater in the New World. Now the metric of infant mortality is not simply about how many kids live past a certain age, it also is a metric of paternal misery and sorrow. No matter how you cut it, an improved infant mortality rate is a GOOD thing and less dead children usually means happier parents and siblings with all the subsequent second and third order benefits that accrue. Prosperity doesn't just mean wealth, but allows for better nutrition, housing which leads to less disease and misery.

The issue here is why wasn't Toledo, Spain--with its head-start in learning and culture--able to translate that into practical improvements with regard to the day to day life of its citizens.

It's this blog's contention that it was the Catholic/Protestant divide that explains a lot of the performance differential.

Since my blogging has been light over the past year I thought I would just use this post to recap some of the ideas I want to propose. Namely:

1) That the Catholic world while originating modernity was unable to implement it.
2) The Protestant world while initially rejecting modernity was able to harness it and control it till the sixties.
3) The theological changes within Protestantism, especially in the late 19th Century set into train events that would undermine it,  so that by the Mid 20th C, mainline Protestantism--the Protestantism that was embraced by the senior managerial class who were the captains of modernity--had repudiated many of its original moral and theological beliefs.
4) The void left by this collapse was filled by a secular humanism unmoored from any fixed moral principle.
5) Catholicism has been peripheral to this turn of events.
6) The collapse of the faith in all of the West has come about from a "de-gracing" of it.
7) Since Grace is the foundation of Faith, any theological, philosophical,  political or cultural movement that is not calibrated to the Will of the Christian God will fail.