"They should live as siblings, as though all things belonged to them as much as anyone else, and indeed they to all things." It seems to me that to live like that, on a small or large scale, would be the result of a decision, both individual and mutual, to transcend our "natural" (perhaps "natural" only because multigenerational habit/socialization, "the way it's always been") tendencies and to structure life/society/community otherwise. And perhaps the decision to live so differently includes a decision to accept a "grace" offered from beyond ourselves that we were designed -- that is in our nature -- to need. Enabling not a performance (or failed performance) but a fulfillment.
The radical anarchist tendencies in Paul explain why Christianity was properly received (and attacked) as "atheism" by the good, traditional, conservative, pious Roman citizen — just as institutional Christians receive the real practice and testimony of religionless Christianity (Bonhoeffer) or religion without God (Dworkin) today and fail to perceive they are serving the devils of this world. Pauline Christianity quickly fell into the devil's party as well. Jewish traditions rather than the distant offshoots of the original Jesus movement have possibly done a better job of understanding and accommodating and even balancing both tendencies, but the problem — icons and iconoclasm, Buddhas and needing to kill them — may be nearly universal.
Remember, Paul was not really much of an anarchist and did more than anyone to make a faith serviceable to the powerful and wealthy. He "belongs to everyone" in the manner of a "servant-leader," an idea fully realized in contemporary pop American business theology — the guy in the power suit who really, truly, and sincerely cares. (And thus is immune to giving real care or seeing the horrors his "helping" causes.) Paul was successful (as a guru and startup CEO/product evangelist) mainly because of patronage, and he was good at seeking it. Peter was a pro at guilting the rich for not giving more and taking credit for God whacking a couple that sold their land and kept some of the money for themselves. But Paul provided all the lasting philosophical justifications for a freedom that serves, and ultimately it tends to serve human masters. The saints and apostles became foundational moral and spiritual rent-seekers for a 2,000-year-old mafia! The depth of their failure (far worse than imitators like Marx and Lenin) is the extent of their success, or their perceived goodness and success, which has always shared a bed with western empires. The eastern churches have a refreshing honesty about this. An honest west would bless missiles too, and make saints of Machiavelli and the Medicis.
It's true, Foenus and Usura spawn Debito and Indebitare, all snapping at each other on Mammon's leash. They are least dangerous when left to their native habitat, the forest of family dysfunction, but unless you are a hermit, you will probably have to learn to live with (or at least around) them. It's not quite serving wild dogs to placate them and give them their space to do what they do. They're always going to take down some sheep, sick deer, and small children. It's naive to think this can be changed, and it's a deeper naivete to think we don't need both the threat and capacity to live with it, to see it's always in us, linked to us and not out there in systems and other people.
A related insight popped up yesterday after watching Matt Damon play Carroll Shelby navigating the Ford monstrosity to protect Ken Miles and bring about the kind of victory a Big Machine can only deliver when it has George S. Pattons within it driving what Ford made. (Certain saints may have played a similar role in the history of the western church.) This led me to see Ivan Illich as shockingly naive to wonder throughout his life why the worst corruption persistently comes from the best people organized for the most noble purposes. There are no "best people" or "noble purposes." The real pragmatists (and total cynics and sociopaths who rise to the top) get this. The naive and moralistic label these others "corrupt," but the real corruption is believing there are good people with noble purposes, and you are one or at least try to serve them.
I recall Illich said he had no mother tongue, but he loved the mothers he had to a fault. As radical and skeptical as he was, maybe this is why he never saw that there is no "best" or even "better" in human groups. A church, a family, a mafia, a police force, or a state — they are all the same but some are naive and ineffective at scale, like Illich, because they never consider their need for purges. (They are all — however differently — violent, "corrupt," and necessarily have purges.)
I also recall Illich regarded confession as a vestigial adaptation of an imperial juridical process and may have assumed that alone made it illegitimate. He certainly believed people did not need experts or any kind of "help" to sort out their own souls, which is true and not true, but he seems to have believed most of us can do the work on our own, if left to it. Again, naive.
Elder minds in any organization that truly understand it over time (i.e., they know its Shadows) know the only effective way to lead and protect the group is to embrace the requisite "sociopathy" of freedom and power. To do it responsibly or well requires constant wrestling with the internal affairs division or secret police, the naive puritanical moral conscience expressed in policy and bureaucracy. (Those jackals are needed too.) The problem with us and our groups is not a solvable structural or orienting issue like hierarchy, patriarchy, etc., and it is not summed up by the stain of an original sin to be thrown off by grace or the slave moralist's declaration of inner freedom. It is not something to be reformed or "cured." It can't even be balanced, but you can try and make a decent living out of failure and hypocrisy, and you can stack the deck to deal grace to yourself.
Hi Dan. I don't interpret Illich that way myself, but we will all see things as we see them, no doubt. I'm inclined, with Jack, to see more possibilities than selective histories allow. And while optimism feels naive in my small circle of experience, I still find myself with hope. I consider it a necessary madness.
Dan, you make a lot of compelling points and though I am woefully ill-equipped to make any kind of argument, counter or otherwise (and in fact, I am probably of the position that the argument is part of the problem), your refrain regarding Illich etc being "naive" seems to depend on the assumption that there is some kind of rock hard fact- in this case, an old school notion of the "fittest will always game the system to their advantage." If one doesn't accept that notion, you are naive and you can't even have a conversation. If I got anything out of Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything was that there was some compelling evidence that States didn't have to emerge the way they did (though James Scott has an even stronger theory that the emergence of cities supported by agri-taxation is why states look the way they do.) I'm further encouraged by Tyson Yunkaporta's work, Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story that at least point to how the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia avoid exactly these kind of power games through complex systems of relationality between "All Things" that are reinforced in a myriad of ways, including story, ceremony, etc. My apology if I have missed the central point of your comments. Again, it is the assertion of naivete that abrades. I think David's particular gift is finding the truest pearls embedded in his tradition, and whether Paul was yet another player or not (your description as start-up CEO sounds apt, though it is also true that those guys can often be true believers) does not change the places and possibilities to which David is pointing.
I guess that's not too bad as a distillation of my lengthy riffing lazily around the clear point I'd like to think I'm stalking: "The fittest will always game the system to their advantage." I think it's a bit darker though. We, all of us, or almost all of us, will always do our best to ensure others suffer more, and as our circle shrinks, it can become quite nakedly mercenary. Before that point, we can use all kinds of denial — morality, culture, politics, religion, professing to care and to help — to conceal the fundamental horrors that our living requires in any age, in any state of technological development.
Of course Paul was a true believer, but I doubt he was much of an anarchist or communist in our sense. Projecting those things on him seems liable to mislead. I don't mean to dismiss him but to uncover his real value. What if great founders are honest swindlers persuaded of exactly what they preach, and their followers always betray them by enhancing their worst tendencies, their missteps, their opacities or blank spaces until the seamless garment of the most successful tradition is stretched and elaborated to a threadbare condition? This is a kind of reduction of how Eric Voegelin saw all civilizations, but he believed there were foundational insights or truths experienced only by the founders and precariously encoded and passed along after them, but that doesn't imply any perfection or especially healthy balance in the founders. More likely they had a moment of virtuoso improvisation.
Seeing a tradition this way, like the figure and teachings of Jesus or Paul, isn't about debunking but getting a clearer, non-idealized view of it. Yes, take down the idols and idealizations, but I don't think you should throw it out — or that you should save anything in particular. Maybe just spend a lifetime on the problems posed. I like the Talmudic wisdom/joke, if you believe all these teachings, you are a fool. If you reject one, you are a heretic.
I don't think it is possible to fully discard a past, but it is perilous to pick and choose what to save and what to let die. And people who imagine that is not what they would be doing (again) to construct a better society concern me unless they are in touch with their inner dictator and psychopath. If they claim no history of violence at all and a desire to purge it forever, then I think more and more they are overgrown, well-sheltered children. "Naive," is the right word for this, and I agree it abrades as a put-down, but naive is what it is, and I offer it from close personal experience wishing things could be otherwise. (Graham Greene said innocence is not a virtue but a mute and deaf leper who has lost his bell coming at you without warning. Milton on "cloistered virtue" had a similar thought.) People of the modern west at its imperial heights who imagine farm and family life in community as a possible peaceful future where they become wise elders who have eliminated violence (which they conflate with moral evil and the worst crimes and corruption) have completely broken with reality, IMHO. It might be a dangerous, narcissistic delusion, or astonishing denial, or scary and willful ignorance.
I don't think we can really understand much about things like the world of St. Paul without experiencing the absolute cheapness of life, including human life, and still try to give it infinite value at the same time. It seems like the inverted face of those who thought the true path was paved with violence to call for peace when there is no peace, as the prophet Jeremiah said. The best we can do is to mitigate all the unpleasant things we're prone to mislabel as "evil," but that involves participating in them. If you need hope and optimism, it has to coexist with these realities, I think, not pretending they are not there.
So I agree there is always something that *seems* good and true to save and start again, but the same thing always happens — so maybe there is just something very wrong with us? That is the "orthodox" or at least radicalized Pauline view from St. Augustine over against your apparent Pelagian belief we can get society right. That implies we can get ourselves right. What if we can't?
The "argument" or dialectical nature of traditions of arguments for "true paths" played out in time are indeed most likely part (or symptomatic) of the problem. Storytelling is one way to step outside it.
I like Scott because he tells stories and his work — a whole discipline or sub-field — came out of his very direct personal experiences with peasant communities who ended up revising his first book (or dissertation) for him. I like him because he's not naive in his discussions of power, but he does not present himself as a guru with answers and grand theories, although his theories are incredibly strong and useful. (I first ran into him when someone published an essay describing the situation of academic labor in relation to Scott's ideas about power and communication hierarchies.)
Scott's own autobiographical self-disclosures are ones I remember keenly because they position him as someone who learned from (pacifist) Quaker teachers how an individual can stand up against a whole group — and also that he is not such an individual. Instead, he accepted that he is the typical sort of person who will do almost anything to avoid pain and who should practice "anarchist calisthenics" by breaking small laws every day. (This last bit is in "Two Cheers for Anarchism;" the rest is in other essays and interviews.)
I think these personal stories must explain Scott's clear-eyed realism, whereas someone like the Apostle Paul will dangerously overestimate human potential if not his own. (I am thinking of the "thorn in my flesh" Paul referred to — a chronic disorder of some type that he suffered and overcame daily so prison and torture were easy.) I like to imagine the Shadow Paul as a version of the limping evil genius character in The Usual Suspects whose brings down all his confederates and enemies with his stories or as Scorcese depicted him in The Last Temptation — going on with a story that makes the resurrection real even if Jesus walked away from the task. This plucky Hellenized Pharisee spreading universal fraternity after running the first inquisition in Christian history...what could go wrong? (I guess there is also Ahab calling Elijah a self-hating anti-semite.) Things repeat themselves. People repeat themselves. They bring out the dark mutant growths from seeds and graftings from their founders and wisdom traditions. We persist in the madness of taking known paths to losing all our shit whether we want to break with or preserve some part of our imagined past. The only consistent feature of all the crimes however is people trying to perpetuate and extend their influence over others and the future.
I have been put off (for the time being) from bothering to read The Dawn of Everything by the way people read it and apparently how it wants to be read. Maybe most Really Big Books of this type deserve only a diagnosis for their symptoms and tendencies. (The more we say, the more we see our diseases; this is why I offer such long comments.) But I have read with interest *about* TDoE, and Scott Alexander Siskind "ruined" it for me by pointing out Graeber and Wengrow follow a tradition of sociological and anthropological projection. They pin on small indigenous groups the left-socialist qualities they would want in their own imagined utopias. However, many of these qualities are precisely the things that make hells of hick towns and intense ethno-tribal chauvinisms. Gossip and reputational management keep the collective together and incapable of greater crimes. Their pettiness and levelling strategies prevent development of oppressive hierarchies as well as anything beyond a very basic subsistence, probably because they know anyone who gains a position of intellectual and technological advantage will exploit it. To prevent this, pure old fashioned envy and meanness keep egos fragile and wills weak out of fear of being shunned and essentially murdered by exile and ostracization. It is simply ancient totalitarianism at a small and human scale. It is not beautiful. The domestic terror, the Stockholm syndromes in every family, or the monasteries as they were and are, not as their Rule says they should be. Rules do nothing but create rulebreakers, who tend to have more virtue potential than rule-followers.
We never, ever solve these problems do we? The best claims to success and human communities are all celibate, same gender monastics who invariably relied on wealth, power, and martial arts to succeed and sustain themselves by taking in donated, discarded, or upwardly mobile children, depending on the larger social conditions.
So Graeber and Wengrow are probably right — things could be different. Our conditions can be differently deplorable, on the whole. Maybe better for me and worse for you today, that is relative and variable. Like crime and persistent entities, it can be pushed around but not removed, which makes genocide seem like a plausible solution, but it would have to be universally inclusive to work. Because the overall insanity, dysfunction, and sociopathy may be constant. So, the inevitable demise of humanity is good humanism, a thoroughly ecumenical and orthodox hope.
I think what you immerse yourself in here is less the fullness of the cosmos and more the wound to your imagination. But you seem certain that it is well and true. So what is one to say but no, no thanks. I imagine you convince yourself that few dare to look at the dark like you. It is a mistake and it seperates you from company and love. I konw what an easy mark this comment will be for you. Ducks in a barrel as they say. Silence would have been less respectful though. I wish you healing of this hurt. It is a thing that can be.
It's out of order for anyone to engage in mind-reading and soul-diagnosis in a medium like this, without context or (of course) relationship. You have no idea, and I have no idea either why you find it necessary and somehow more "respectful" to project all this imagined history and intention on me. You even anticipate becoming a target of retaliation while unloading all this vague passive-aggressive diagnosis on me! Huh! The only darkness I've looked into lately is the shallow pool of overly online Europeans who think they can think and write their way into personal and cosmic redemption via Substack (and other) echo chambers of redemption rather than circle the same drain as everyone else, in a fashionably mediocre way.
ooh, i finally found the Substack comment word limit.
This is not an argument for a bleak determinism; the situation is merely desperate and maybe hopeless, but not serious and often funny. I am only a determinist (maybe) retrospectively. I assume everything is contingent in the moment — the fraction of a nanosecond that is always before us now — and so things always could be otherwise. It seems this way to me, and it has more value to believe this and be wrong than to believe we have no freedom at all and be right. But when things consistently go badly in similar ways with human groups, there must be something to learn from this — perhaps the trying — and caring — is part of the problem. Perhaps most people and groups are essentially not free and bound to their demons, so if hope depends on human agency, it is a very tiny shred of hope (and maybe Pelagianism) I can share with you. All history allows us to hope is that this minority position gets a little attention before the collective assimilates it.
"They should live as siblings, as though all things belonged to them as much as anyone else, and indeed they to all things." It seems to me that to live like that, on a small or large scale, would be the result of a decision, both individual and mutual, to transcend our "natural" (perhaps "natural" only because multigenerational habit/socialization, "the way it's always been") tendencies and to structure life/society/community otherwise. And perhaps the decision to live so differently includes a decision to accept a "grace" offered from beyond ourselves that we were designed -- that is in our nature -- to need. Enabling not a performance (or failed performance) but a fulfillment.
The Romans course has me looking at everything Greek-wise, and I've been thinking of the word Xaris (grace) meaning 'kindness'.
I love this, David. Thank you for sharing what you've clearly thought on and wondered toward for some time. Your gift has been received here. -Adam
Thanks so much Adam!
The radical anarchist tendencies in Paul explain why Christianity was properly received (and attacked) as "atheism" by the good, traditional, conservative, pious Roman citizen — just as institutional Christians receive the real practice and testimony of religionless Christianity (Bonhoeffer) or religion without God (Dworkin) today and fail to perceive they are serving the devils of this world. Pauline Christianity quickly fell into the devil's party as well. Jewish traditions rather than the distant offshoots of the original Jesus movement have possibly done a better job of understanding and accommodating and even balancing both tendencies, but the problem — icons and iconoclasm, Buddhas and needing to kill them — may be nearly universal.
Remember, Paul was not really much of an anarchist and did more than anyone to make a faith serviceable to the powerful and wealthy. He "belongs to everyone" in the manner of a "servant-leader," an idea fully realized in contemporary pop American business theology — the guy in the power suit who really, truly, and sincerely cares. (And thus is immune to giving real care or seeing the horrors his "helping" causes.) Paul was successful (as a guru and startup CEO/product evangelist) mainly because of patronage, and he was good at seeking it. Peter was a pro at guilting the rich for not giving more and taking credit for God whacking a couple that sold their land and kept some of the money for themselves. But Paul provided all the lasting philosophical justifications for a freedom that serves, and ultimately it tends to serve human masters. The saints and apostles became foundational moral and spiritual rent-seekers for a 2,000-year-old mafia! The depth of their failure (far worse than imitators like Marx and Lenin) is the extent of their success, or their perceived goodness and success, which has always shared a bed with western empires. The eastern churches have a refreshing honesty about this. An honest west would bless missiles too, and make saints of Machiavelli and the Medicis.
It's true, Foenus and Usura spawn Debito and Indebitare, all snapping at each other on Mammon's leash. They are least dangerous when left to their native habitat, the forest of family dysfunction, but unless you are a hermit, you will probably have to learn to live with (or at least around) them. It's not quite serving wild dogs to placate them and give them their space to do what they do. They're always going to take down some sheep, sick deer, and small children. It's naive to think this can be changed, and it's a deeper naivete to think we don't need both the threat and capacity to live with it, to see it's always in us, linked to us and not out there in systems and other people.
A related insight popped up yesterday after watching Matt Damon play Carroll Shelby navigating the Ford monstrosity to protect Ken Miles and bring about the kind of victory a Big Machine can only deliver when it has George S. Pattons within it driving what Ford made. (Certain saints may have played a similar role in the history of the western church.) This led me to see Ivan Illich as shockingly naive to wonder throughout his life why the worst corruption persistently comes from the best people organized for the most noble purposes. There are no "best people" or "noble purposes." The real pragmatists (and total cynics and sociopaths who rise to the top) get this. The naive and moralistic label these others "corrupt," but the real corruption is believing there are good people with noble purposes, and you are one or at least try to serve them.
I recall Illich said he had no mother tongue, but he loved the mothers he had to a fault. As radical and skeptical as he was, maybe this is why he never saw that there is no "best" or even "better" in human groups. A church, a family, a mafia, a police force, or a state — they are all the same but some are naive and ineffective at scale, like Illich, because they never consider their need for purges. (They are all — however differently — violent, "corrupt," and necessarily have purges.)
I also recall Illich regarded confession as a vestigial adaptation of an imperial juridical process and may have assumed that alone made it illegitimate. He certainly believed people did not need experts or any kind of "help" to sort out their own souls, which is true and not true, but he seems to have believed most of us can do the work on our own, if left to it. Again, naive.
Elder minds in any organization that truly understand it over time (i.e., they know its Shadows) know the only effective way to lead and protect the group is to embrace the requisite "sociopathy" of freedom and power. To do it responsibly or well requires constant wrestling with the internal affairs division or secret police, the naive puritanical moral conscience expressed in policy and bureaucracy. (Those jackals are needed too.) The problem with us and our groups is not a solvable structural or orienting issue like hierarchy, patriarchy, etc., and it is not summed up by the stain of an original sin to be thrown off by grace or the slave moralist's declaration of inner freedom. It is not something to be reformed or "cured." It can't even be balanced, but you can try and make a decent living out of failure and hypocrisy, and you can stack the deck to deal grace to yourself.
Hi Dan. I don't interpret Illich that way myself, but we will all see things as we see them, no doubt. I'm inclined, with Jack, to see more possibilities than selective histories allow. And while optimism feels naive in my small circle of experience, I still find myself with hope. I consider it a necessary madness.
Dan, you make a lot of compelling points and though I am woefully ill-equipped to make any kind of argument, counter or otherwise (and in fact, I am probably of the position that the argument is part of the problem), your refrain regarding Illich etc being "naive" seems to depend on the assumption that there is some kind of rock hard fact- in this case, an old school notion of the "fittest will always game the system to their advantage." If one doesn't accept that notion, you are naive and you can't even have a conversation. If I got anything out of Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything was that there was some compelling evidence that States didn't have to emerge the way they did (though James Scott has an even stronger theory that the emergence of cities supported by agri-taxation is why states look the way they do.) I'm further encouraged by Tyson Yunkaporta's work, Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story that at least point to how the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia avoid exactly these kind of power games through complex systems of relationality between "All Things" that are reinforced in a myriad of ways, including story, ceremony, etc. My apology if I have missed the central point of your comments. Again, it is the assertion of naivete that abrades. I think David's particular gift is finding the truest pearls embedded in his tradition, and whether Paul was yet another player or not (your description as start-up CEO sounds apt, though it is also true that those guys can often be true believers) does not change the places and possibilities to which David is pointing.
I guess that's not too bad as a distillation of my lengthy riffing lazily around the clear point I'd like to think I'm stalking: "The fittest will always game the system to their advantage." I think it's a bit darker though. We, all of us, or almost all of us, will always do our best to ensure others suffer more, and as our circle shrinks, it can become quite nakedly mercenary. Before that point, we can use all kinds of denial — morality, culture, politics, religion, professing to care and to help — to conceal the fundamental horrors that our living requires in any age, in any state of technological development.
Of course Paul was a true believer, but I doubt he was much of an anarchist or communist in our sense. Projecting those things on him seems liable to mislead. I don't mean to dismiss him but to uncover his real value. What if great founders are honest swindlers persuaded of exactly what they preach, and their followers always betray them by enhancing their worst tendencies, their missteps, their opacities or blank spaces until the seamless garment of the most successful tradition is stretched and elaborated to a threadbare condition? This is a kind of reduction of how Eric Voegelin saw all civilizations, but he believed there were foundational insights or truths experienced only by the founders and precariously encoded and passed along after them, but that doesn't imply any perfection or especially healthy balance in the founders. More likely they had a moment of virtuoso improvisation.
Seeing a tradition this way, like the figure and teachings of Jesus or Paul, isn't about debunking but getting a clearer, non-idealized view of it. Yes, take down the idols and idealizations, but I don't think you should throw it out — or that you should save anything in particular. Maybe just spend a lifetime on the problems posed. I like the Talmudic wisdom/joke, if you believe all these teachings, you are a fool. If you reject one, you are a heretic.
I don't think it is possible to fully discard a past, but it is perilous to pick and choose what to save and what to let die. And people who imagine that is not what they would be doing (again) to construct a better society concern me unless they are in touch with their inner dictator and psychopath. If they claim no history of violence at all and a desire to purge it forever, then I think more and more they are overgrown, well-sheltered children. "Naive," is the right word for this, and I agree it abrades as a put-down, but naive is what it is, and I offer it from close personal experience wishing things could be otherwise. (Graham Greene said innocence is not a virtue but a mute and deaf leper who has lost his bell coming at you without warning. Milton on "cloistered virtue" had a similar thought.) People of the modern west at its imperial heights who imagine farm and family life in community as a possible peaceful future where they become wise elders who have eliminated violence (which they conflate with moral evil and the worst crimes and corruption) have completely broken with reality, IMHO. It might be a dangerous, narcissistic delusion, or astonishing denial, or scary and willful ignorance.
I don't think we can really understand much about things like the world of St. Paul without experiencing the absolute cheapness of life, including human life, and still try to give it infinite value at the same time. It seems like the inverted face of those who thought the true path was paved with violence to call for peace when there is no peace, as the prophet Jeremiah said. The best we can do is to mitigate all the unpleasant things we're prone to mislabel as "evil," but that involves participating in them. If you need hope and optimism, it has to coexist with these realities, I think, not pretending they are not there.
So I agree there is always something that *seems* good and true to save and start again, but the same thing always happens — so maybe there is just something very wrong with us? That is the "orthodox" or at least radicalized Pauline view from St. Augustine over against your apparent Pelagian belief we can get society right. That implies we can get ourselves right. What if we can't?
The "argument" or dialectical nature of traditions of arguments for "true paths" played out in time are indeed most likely part (or symptomatic) of the problem. Storytelling is one way to step outside it.
I like Scott because he tells stories and his work — a whole discipline or sub-field — came out of his very direct personal experiences with peasant communities who ended up revising his first book (or dissertation) for him. I like him because he's not naive in his discussions of power, but he does not present himself as a guru with answers and grand theories, although his theories are incredibly strong and useful. (I first ran into him when someone published an essay describing the situation of academic labor in relation to Scott's ideas about power and communication hierarchies.)
Scott's own autobiographical self-disclosures are ones I remember keenly because they position him as someone who learned from (pacifist) Quaker teachers how an individual can stand up against a whole group — and also that he is not such an individual. Instead, he accepted that he is the typical sort of person who will do almost anything to avoid pain and who should practice "anarchist calisthenics" by breaking small laws every day. (This last bit is in "Two Cheers for Anarchism;" the rest is in other essays and interviews.)
I think these personal stories must explain Scott's clear-eyed realism, whereas someone like the Apostle Paul will dangerously overestimate human potential if not his own. (I am thinking of the "thorn in my flesh" Paul referred to — a chronic disorder of some type that he suffered and overcame daily so prison and torture were easy.) I like to imagine the Shadow Paul as a version of the limping evil genius character in The Usual Suspects whose brings down all his confederates and enemies with his stories or as Scorcese depicted him in The Last Temptation — going on with a story that makes the resurrection real even if Jesus walked away from the task. This plucky Hellenized Pharisee spreading universal fraternity after running the first inquisition in Christian history...what could go wrong? (I guess there is also Ahab calling Elijah a self-hating anti-semite.) Things repeat themselves. People repeat themselves. They bring out the dark mutant growths from seeds and graftings from their founders and wisdom traditions. We persist in the madness of taking known paths to losing all our shit whether we want to break with or preserve some part of our imagined past. The only consistent feature of all the crimes however is people trying to perpetuate and extend their influence over others and the future.
I have been put off (for the time being) from bothering to read The Dawn of Everything by the way people read it and apparently how it wants to be read. Maybe most Really Big Books of this type deserve only a diagnosis for their symptoms and tendencies. (The more we say, the more we see our diseases; this is why I offer such long comments.) But I have read with interest *about* TDoE, and Scott Alexander Siskind "ruined" it for me by pointing out Graeber and Wengrow follow a tradition of sociological and anthropological projection. They pin on small indigenous groups the left-socialist qualities they would want in their own imagined utopias. However, many of these qualities are precisely the things that make hells of hick towns and intense ethno-tribal chauvinisms. Gossip and reputational management keep the collective together and incapable of greater crimes. Their pettiness and levelling strategies prevent development of oppressive hierarchies as well as anything beyond a very basic subsistence, probably because they know anyone who gains a position of intellectual and technological advantage will exploit it. To prevent this, pure old fashioned envy and meanness keep egos fragile and wills weak out of fear of being shunned and essentially murdered by exile and ostracization. It is simply ancient totalitarianism at a small and human scale. It is not beautiful. The domestic terror, the Stockholm syndromes in every family, or the monasteries as they were and are, not as their Rule says they should be. Rules do nothing but create rulebreakers, who tend to have more virtue potential than rule-followers.
We never, ever solve these problems do we? The best claims to success and human communities are all celibate, same gender monastics who invariably relied on wealth, power, and martial arts to succeed and sustain themselves by taking in donated, discarded, or upwardly mobile children, depending on the larger social conditions.
So Graeber and Wengrow are probably right — things could be different. Our conditions can be differently deplorable, on the whole. Maybe better for me and worse for you today, that is relative and variable. Like crime and persistent entities, it can be pushed around but not removed, which makes genocide seem like a plausible solution, but it would have to be universally inclusive to work. Because the overall insanity, dysfunction, and sociopathy may be constant. So, the inevitable demise of humanity is good humanism, a thoroughly ecumenical and orthodox hope.
I think what you immerse yourself in here is less the fullness of the cosmos and more the wound to your imagination. But you seem certain that it is well and true. So what is one to say but no, no thanks. I imagine you convince yourself that few dare to look at the dark like you. It is a mistake and it seperates you from company and love. I konw what an easy mark this comment will be for you. Ducks in a barrel as they say. Silence would have been less respectful though. I wish you healing of this hurt. It is a thing that can be.
It's out of order for anyone to engage in mind-reading and soul-diagnosis in a medium like this, without context or (of course) relationship. You have no idea, and I have no idea either why you find it necessary and somehow more "respectful" to project all this imagined history and intention on me. You even anticipate becoming a target of retaliation while unloading all this vague passive-aggressive diagnosis on me! Huh! The only darkness I've looked into lately is the shallow pool of overly online Europeans who think they can think and write their way into personal and cosmic redemption via Substack (and other) echo chambers of redemption rather than circle the same drain as everyone else, in a fashionably mediocre way.
On second thought....I promised myself I wouldn't thumb this ride anymore.
This will bring no good thing tonight. Go with G-d, atypically mannered wayfarer.
ooh, i finally found the Substack comment word limit.
This is not an argument for a bleak determinism; the situation is merely desperate and maybe hopeless, but not serious and often funny. I am only a determinist (maybe) retrospectively. I assume everything is contingent in the moment — the fraction of a nanosecond that is always before us now — and so things always could be otherwise. It seems this way to me, and it has more value to believe this and be wrong than to believe we have no freedom at all and be right. But when things consistently go badly in similar ways with human groups, there must be something to learn from this — perhaps the trying — and caring — is part of the problem. Perhaps most people and groups are essentially not free and bound to their demons, so if hope depends on human agency, it is a very tiny shred of hope (and maybe Pelagianism) I can share with you. All history allows us to hope is that this minority position gets a little attention before the collective assimilates it.