Monday, November 30, 2020

Psycho Killers: A Review of 'The Hunt'

The Hunt got a lot of mixed reviews before it was out because of its outrageous subject material. In short, the movie involves stereotypical liberals hunting/murdering stereotypical "deplorables" through an elaborate (though bungled) set up. The rage about the movie was due to this superficial read: Hollywood slaughters Middle America for entertainment. This reading is, as stated, shallow and does not get into the real good and bad in this movie. The Hunt operates at two levels: a critique of the psychodrama of contemporary politics, but also a perverse valorization of hidden forces that drive the plot on wards (many times unintentionally).

The movie is a thriller. After a doctor, feminist, and urbane liberal murder a redneck who "woke up" on the plane, the plot begins in the middle of things. Various Trump voter types (e.g. "Yoga pants" white girl, white nationalist, redneck, trucker, wanksta) wake up gagged in the woods. Soon they find some weapons and come under fire. The movie screws around with you through some throwaway subjectivities (i.e. you follow one character for a few minutes before they're shot or blown up, transferring to the next character). Over the course of the next hour, nearly all the "deplorables" get wiped out through gruesome kills. One character, however, stands out: Snowball. Unlike the others, she is neither panicked nor incompetent. She anchors as the movie's main subject, following her as she tries to find out how to escape. She becomes the heroine.

But before we return to "snowball" (or what her name means), let's return to the main cast of characters. On the one side, there are the hunted "deplorables". The movie mocks their aggressive bravado, but indirectly complements their decency. The hunters give their prey access to weapons, with an implicit assumption that the liberal killers are using the same "stand your ground", second amendment, logic. Yet they're not competent killers. Most of them get wiped out in the first barrage. Another group gets tricked by trusting an elderly couple (Ma and Pop) running a fake Gas station. Being told they're in Arkansas (an ambiguously"friendly" territory: a red-state that produced the Clintons), the elderly couple shoot and poison the hunted. Armed to the teeth, they simply could not countenance they had wandered into the spider's web. Throughout the movie, many of the "deplorables" die because they have a naive trust in American authorities, whether it's elderly small-business owners in flyover country or (later) the American embassy. The irony is that while the red-staters take to their guns quickly, they are not apt to survive an actual tactical onslaught.

The liberals, in contrast, become hardened killers overnight. The background, revealed over the course of the movie, is that this group of friends had joked about killing "deplorables" in the wake of the 2016 election. The joke riffed off the fact that there had been a rumor about "Manorgate", where elite liberals hunted regular Americans for sport. The friends participated in this joke and, these texts being leaked, ruin the careers of all these liberals. The NGOs, corporations, and foundations that hired these people removed them because of bad optics. The leader of this gang, Athena (played by Hilary Swank), decides to punish these people. If they're so afraid of liberal elites murdering them, then why not make it a reality? Athena rents a space in rural Croatia to execute her plan, unleashing the slaughter at the beginning of the movie. She hires a "professional" (who turns out to only have been in the National Guard) to train her and her friends in combat, tactics, and firearms. The liberals engage in stereotypical conversation and speech tropes. One man gets called out for "gendering it" when he says "guys". Ma and Pa engage in self-criticism when, as they clean up corpses, Pa refers to "black people", with the justification that NPR said it was ok. And Athena, when getting fired, condemns the "academically challenged" and "toothless rednecks" as evil. In a not so subtle nod, Athena's name reveals her fundamental character: she's the brains of the operation and she prides herself for her intellect and smarts. The liberals are the smart ones getting dragged down because of "deplorable" rednecks and the selfish.

The kicker, of course, is that ressentiment drives the blue-staters as much as the red-staters. They lose their jobs because of insensitive comments. They train themselves in a rural compound to kill the people ruining the country. They are all white, with the exception of one guy who exiles himself to play a "crisis actor" embedded among Middle Eastern refugees. The liberals think they're the good guys, getting even with the degenerates electing a degenerate. All in all, the set-up is a nod to the climate of the 90s: militias, election of Clinton, government accusations of rightwing terrorism. The moral is that American politics is an obscene psychodrama, driven by ressentiment on both sides. "Deplorables" think liberal elites are murderous (and are shocked when they find themselves in the middle of their conspiracy theory). Liberals decide to become so to own the "conservatives" (there's nothing particularly conservative about rightwing American politics). Both think they know more than the other. Both think they're saviors of the country and representing what's good in America. The tropes even blur as one "deplorable" fantasizes about reporting this crime and getting on Hannity like "those two jew boys [Woodward and Bernstein] who did Nixon in". Both sides are equivocally deluded, idealistic, and full of raging resentment. While the "deplorables" don't come out looking too moral or smart, the liberals are even more vindictive and depraved. They're the ones that use their resources to actually hunt people for sport, self-consciously becoming the monsters they're accused of being. American politics makes people into murderous sickos.

Here enters "Snowball". She is a John Wick style waifu: quiet, stable, hyper-competent in combat, and a little crazy. She appears like the others (originating from Mississippi with a southern drawl), but never acts like them. She meets up with a pseudo-Alex Jones podcaster (Gary) and, later, a redneck (Don). Both men are loud and big, but are constantly confused and outmatched. Snowball saves Gary from opening a truck rigged with explosions. Don celebrates the US embassy rescuing him and Snowball from Croatian military-police. He is blind to the fact that he (bribing the foreign police) is part of the plot. While Snowball ruthlessly kills the envoy (kicking him out of the car and running his head over), Don is bewildered and freaks out. Snowball proceeds to kill the rest of the liberals and their military advisor. She even gets goaded to kill Don when Athena acts as if he's in on it. Yet she only shoots when Don, wild-eyed and scared, raises his gun against her. Ultimately, Athena and Snowball engage in a final "boss battle", with Snowball surviving and Athena dying.

The movie has a good ironic sense for metacommentary. The various characters operate according to tropes. Snowball laconically remarks that she was remiss to interrupt Athena's villain monologue. See, Snowball explains, she's not the woman Athena thinks she is. She's not the Crystal Creasey (her real name) who accused Athena of being in on Manorgate and as an evil liberal elite. Rather, she's a crazy combat veteran from Afghanistan who is not interested in the psychodrama. Athena names her "Snowball" because she's a pig (per Orwell's Animal Farm). Yet Snowball corrects her: she doesn't fit the character of political idealist Snowball. Athena is dumbfounded that a hick knows Animal Farm, to which Snowball gives the punchline: Athena is snowball (and her revolutionary idealism put her in the grave). This dialogue climaxes a point made repeatedly throughout the movie: the liberals aren't as smart as they think. The embassy rep has a map of the compound in his trunk (which Snowball uses to kill them all). Athena picked up the wrong woman, screwing up her research. She doesn't even understand the meaning of her own snooty symbolism. Athena also expresses bizarre levels of materialism, diving to save a priceless bottle of champagne and begging (when Crystal is about to throw her through a glass-door) "no more glass". Part of the comedy is that Crystal grants her request, opening the door before throwing her. Respect for property and the fine things lingers even as Athena is literally in a battle for her life.

The tropes of "deplorable" and liberal operate to obfuscate the characters from themselves and their situation. Snowball, as the accidental outlier, simply destroys the liberals and outlives the red-staters. At one point, Snowball tells Don a bizarre version of the Tortoise and the Hare. Per the fable, the jackrabbit loses after arrogantly dozing off. The moral of hard work and perseverance pays off. But there's a twist: later that night jackrabbit shows up at Turtle's house with a knife and murders all of them. To a stunned Don, Snowball explains the real moral: power is power and the Jackrabbit always wins. The point plays out in her conflict with Athena, when she kills her because Athena simply is not a survivor but an idealist. She follows the script, in both living and dying, and does not simply act to live. Crystal Creasey may superficially appear as a hick (accent and all), but she simply doesn't care. Conservative myths and liberal myths are still myths, just-so stories that comfort one faction against another. The reality is that those who can will, and Crystal's self-possession guides her gracefully through survival. The last scene, after reaping the fruits of her victory (eating Athena's grilled cheese, wearing her dress and heels, and taking her dog and privately chartered jet back to the states), she simply drinks the priceless champagne from the bottle. Winners win.

All in all, the movie is an excellent attack on the idealism that fuels the ressentiment on both sides. It really twists the knife in the liberal side, that they're even sicker than the "deplorables" because they have the resources to brutalize the mud people they hate. They're not any different than racists lynching a black man and having a picnic (as if it's a kind of sport). But the movie also unintentionally promotes a hyper-ideological ethos through its unreality. Crystal Creasey, or Snowball, is not a real character. A completely competent and sober waifu killing machine is no more real than John Wick or Rambo. But the movie doesn't seem aware of the unreality of its own protagonist. As the National Guardsmen is dying, Crystal gives some of her background: she is a combat vet from Afghanistan who's been in "the shit" (unlike the Guardsman). Of course, there are no female infantry (let alone special forces), so this backstory does little to explain her competence in tactical infiltration, weapons expertise, and hand-to-hand combat (let alone her survivalist instincts). It would have made more sense (just barely) to tell a story about her dad teaching her these things in the Mississippi swampland. Of course, her ruthless drive to survive comes from her mom, the one who told her the modified Tortoise and Hare fable. She is a male fantasy of feminine power, talented in war and straightforwardly feminine. Though the movie does not draw the parallel, if Athena is really Snowball than Snowball is really Athena (ending the movie in her garb and with her goods). Yet the movie does nothing with Crystal's unreality, and as such it only feeds into the hyper-ideology of the movie's background.

Besides a subtle valorization of the military (who've been in "the shit"), the plot turns on the liberals losing their jobs. In a flashback, Athena is fired for her and her friends' dark sense of humor. The reason is that these jokes (seeming to confirm red-state hysteria about Manorgate) are bad optics. They look bad to the company (or NGO or foundation, depending on the other characters' stereotypical jobs) and investors. While the movie shows the liberals as a fountain of psychopathic cruelty and resentment, it does not develop the larger corporate element. Not a few elites weather criticism for atrocious things they say and do. The thing is that Athena (and her friends) are wealthy liberal elites, but they're not really running the show. They are simply political agents, dependent on the democratic mechanisms of voting like red-state hillbillies (an equivalency which drives their psychic discomfort and rage). At the end of the day, they're cogs in the machine (though, ones with better resources and more plugged in) just as much as "deplorable" voters are. The movie deplores the insane psychodrama of blue-state and red-state, but it does nothing but presume the edifice of financial control and military dominance. Power is power, after all, and the string-pullers remain without criticism. This assessment is true to a degree, but deserves critique. Whether its the invisible forces of corporate-media pressure or the unreal war goddess, the movie does little to reveal the engine of American psychodrama. The resentiment did not originate itself, as Athena jumped fully formed out of Zeus' head, another myth the movie subtly leaves untouched. In the end, violence and money are the way of the world. The plot guides the viewer to celebrate Crystal's victory as she enjoys the spoils of war.

That's the dark lining to the movie. It is true that the psychodrama of blue-state vs. red-state weaponizes people into insanity. The movie embraces an average, working-class, heroine (Crystal at one point reveals she works at a car rental). But the dark forces that lurk in the ground remain without criticism. The viewer might believe that power is power, and simply become cynical about moral categories of right and wrong. Crystal has little obvious moral compass (besides expressing some concern for a refugee baby when Gary is about to open up on the "crisis actors"). She simply survives. Such is a basic trope for the horror-thriller movie. Right and wrong dissipate as you grip your chair and desperately want the protagonist to make it through the ordeal. The movie leaves this impulse untouched. The real problem of the red vs. blue psychodrama is that morality is weaponized for manufactured political consent. While The Hunt rightly mocks the insanity of American politics, it only treats a symptom and not the source.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Let Us Reason Together: A Theory of Dialectical Immaterialism

 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

The problem of knowledge begins with the relation between universals and their concrete instances. Whether the universal is real (per Platonic forms) or nominal (a synthetic category of customary use), how do you know what "it" is? Cartesian rationalism dealt a severe blow to the dominant Aristotelian science of the day. Form became increasingly difficult to conceptualize, even as an empirically observable element to any concrete, hylomorphic, entity. In other words, Cartesian philosophy introduced skepticism about whether "form" even existed. And if it did not exist, what was it, precisely, that man knew? And how?

A classic Cartesian example is a piece of wax. You can touch it, smell it, taste it, and all sorts of empirical observations to figure out its properties. But then you put it in fire, and all such properties change. Yet we still call it a piece of wax. How do you recognize it as such? Descartes believed that we do so through a process of pure intellectation, where we refract the image of the wax into our mind, stripping it away of its sensory properties until we get to an unimagistic concept of wax. It is this pure thought of this thing that gives us the grounds to speak intelligibly of wax as wax, whether hot or cold, hard or soft, solid or liquid, with fragrance of honey or not, etc. Such depends upon the existence of matter and the mind's capacity to grasp a hyper-sensory category that we can call, simply, 'wax'.

But this project seemed to assume formal existence when such was hard to prove. Locke rejected this effort to preserve natural categories. Per his tabula rasa theory of the mind, wax has a bundle of properties that are impressed on the mind (the various sensory experiences we have interacting with said wax). From these experiences, we can abstract an average notion of "wax" with the properties we normally associate with it (likely, we imagine wax as a solid, not a melted semi-liquid). But why do we do this? Why not say that melted wax is not wax anymore, but something else? A major element of Locke's epistemology is humility and human incapacity. We intuit that wax is still wax even if it went through the fire (especially if we let it harden back). It's this process of experience, through time, that grants a commonsense, even "noumenological", access to reality qua reality. We sense the reality, the extrasensory substrata to "wax", which we intuit to mean a material continuity. There's a thing behind the aggregate, and contradictory, properties of wax. The human mind can invent various categories to explain this continuous identity, but these are our limited (and perhaps faulty) ways to approach reality. Nevertheless, sensory experience actually grants access to reality. We don't need to close our eyes and enter the confines of our mind to aniconically imagine the Real, the wax behind the wax, the pure abstraction of "matter" as the Cartesians would do.

Locke is trying to defend empirical sensory knowledge as real knowledge. He does not exactly reject Cartesian dualism, mind and matter, though he undermines it. Matter is, basically, all there is. The existence of mind is a divine miracle, the superadded quality which appears in the human animal. George Berkeley, also an empiricist of a kind, rejects this approach. Berkeley believes Locke and Newton (as well as Cartesian philosophy as a whole) will lead to materialism and atheism. Man's mind is simply an empty slate, operating primarily as a video-camera set to record. Cogitation, for Locke, involves a reflection on the material recorded. Mental activity is fundamentally reactive and reflexive. For Berkeley, such an approach fundamentally undermines the concepts of empiricism, the human mind, and God's providential governance over all things.

Berkeley begins with a radical move. He rejects the abstract concept of "matter". It might not seem obvious, but matter is not an empirical concept. One does not see, touch, taste, or smell matter. It is posited as the pure potentiality that subsists beneath all our sensory experiences. One rapidly subordinates empirical experiences to an abstraction that is literally unthinkable. Berkeley rejects Locke's distinction between primary and secondary categories. The former refer to material reality (e.g. space), while the latter refer to human experience of material reality(e.g. color, which depends on human eyes). But how can the human mind abstract anything without particularities like color? Can you imagine a triangle without color? Additionally, what is space to a mind without body? What about an eyeless creature? How is something like a flower experienced by a worm in relation to a man? The idea that this category is universal, while color is not, is simply ridiculous. Berkeley rejects this distinction to make the point that everything, from an actual flower to a flower in your imagination, is "idea".

The "idea" is fundamentally passive. It is something one experiences in the world or thinks about in the mind. But all of these ideas are mind-dependent. They don't exist without a mind to experience them. Hence Berkeley introduces a new dichotomy: "spirit". While the idea is passive and inert, the spirit (the willing intellect, the mind) is active. Locke screwed up the relation between mind and reality because he considered the mind as primarily passive. Yet it is the mind reaching out, through seeing and listening, which makes reality visible. It is not enough to have rods and cones in your eye to see color. There must be a mind present looking (even if this action is done subconsciously). Ideas are not out there doing things to you, per se, it is the mind interacting with a world available. While this approach might seem to undermine the existence of the world for solipsistic insanity (i.e. there's no world out there, but the only thing you can know is your own mind), it does not if you take Berkeley's Christian theology. Since only minds are active, we experience a world of other minds. You might get surprised when someone shouts your name. The experience is not simply sound, but intelligence. Of course, you could get tricked. You think you hear your name, but it's the sound of a bird or a car or something else. What grabs your attention, when you hear your name is the intelligence behind the call. You experience, indirectly through the series of ideas, another spirit. When it comes to reality as such, the divine Logos is "speaking". It is this Mind (the Creator Mind of all minds) that sustains our public world.

Our various experiences of the world have coherency through this divine mind. It's in this way that Berkeley eliminates the non-empirical abstraction of matter. We consider wax as "wax" because we notice a, divinely given, pattern of things. Wax is the "ideas" that constitute its sensory experience (even if seemingly contradictory). Wax is hard, cold, fragrant, soft, hot, etc. There's no metaphysical thing under these ideas. The aggregate our mind puts together as one thing, and not several, is the wax. The thing is the thing because we perceive, and reckon, it so.

Here, Berkeley develops new concepts to bridge the seemingly impossible gap between spirit and idea. First of all, if the Spirit is interpreting various ideas into bundles, what are these bundles? They can't simply be ad hoc products of individual minds. Wax is single thing, not several things (one which is yellow, one which is hard, one which is fragrance, etc.), and not because someone forced all to believe wax is such. Secondly, if "spirit" and "idea" are fundamentally different, how can spirits produce ideas? How can the active produce the passive, if there's no "stuff" beneath either acting mind or inert experience (rational or sensual)?

For the second question, Berkeley revives a neoplatonic concept of "energy" (or "fire"). To summarize briefly, neoplatonists synthesized Aristotelian notions of energeia (working) and Stoic notions of "fire" to produce an account of how the higher realm of intellect interacts with the lower realm of matter. While developed in many different directions, in the Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking East, among pagans and Christians, this basic schema reaffirmed the good of material (empirical) reality through its subordinate place beneath the realm of the intellect. A recent essay ("Gregory of Nyssa's Bundle Theory of Matter") has even argued that the great Cappadocian pursued a similar strategy to Berkeley, rejecting the abstraction of "matter" beneath experienced qualia. Nevertheless, Berkeley's metaphysic argued that the activity of the mind, through thinking and doing, left "ideas" in its wake. Thinking is not simply passive reflection, but action and action requires a metaphysical base (i.e. being and doing are real). Thus, our ability to interact with other minds depends upon our positing this activity through the experience of strings of ideas through time (a given which has reality according to the Logos' ordering of the cosmos). In short terms, we see action through successive actions and must posit the existence of an active element, namely a "spirit" or mind.

But this raises the first problem again. What is this stringing together of several ideas? Why does the mind not instinctively treat every idea as its own thing? Berkeley introduces the concept of "prejudice" to explain this mental activity. Not a negative or pejorative term, prejudice is the way our mind patterns the world. It's a product of mental activity, the string to hold together several ideas. Thus, it's not a yellow, a hard, a cold, a fragrance, but the singular bee's wax. However, and this point is key for the major argument of this essay, this process is constantly revised through experience in the world. As Berkeley knew from his efforts at monetary theory and evangelizing, people can create bad prejudices. As one example, Berkeley's bank project was a process of national re-patterning. Gold was not wealth, but industry was wealth. Parliament, as the mind of the Irish nation, had to create the patterns to didactically instruct people. This process was gentle and discursive, not brainwashing or interrogative. It was a process of conversation, between the individual mind and the world around, a conversation that the national Parliament (as the public, and legitimate, authority) guided. This task reflected how God communicates to people in the world. The Logos does not violently rip open souls, like a machinist with clockwork, to reprogram or fix. Rather, the Logos appears, speaks, dialogues, and makes certain empirical observable facts. The Logos instructs the individual mind about the cosmos, preserving the dignity of the mind as an active element engaged in constant patterning. In Christian form, one either patterns things towards saving knowledge of the truth, or towards ultimate destruction.

It's the above that I want to conceptualize as "dialectical immaterialism". It is Berkeley, I think, who offers a great way to approach the problems of German idealism. Like Hegel, the mind pursues objectivity through its own subjectivity. There's no way out from the human mind to some rationalist paradise of reality simpliciter. Instead, one is always in time and bound to time. Berkeley was not as radically historicist as Hegel would be (a product of romantic counterattack against Kant and his philosophical heirs). But Berkeley's empiricism produced the same set of problems. The real world remained the very basis for knowledge, yet it was also a kind of trap. You could not simply step outside and posit what the world looks sub specie aeternatatis. It is from the very patterning that man gains insight into things as they really are. The goal is not to achieve objectivity per rational positivists. You can not see the world from nowhere because you are always a subject and the world is fundamentally mind dependent. But like Hegel, the goal is to find objectivity through the absolute subject (and not get lost in the relativity of the always historically conditioned). For Berkeley, the absolute subject was the Logos, the creator mind who is constantly speaking to creation.

Per Berkeley, the Logos has a myriad ways of speaking. Naturally, the Logos speaks through the givenness of created experience. The wind and the rain, the snow and the sun, the trees swaying in the wind and the rabbits nibbling on grass, all of these are part of the Creator's speech. Our very bodies and souls are part of this speech as well, the existence of their varied faculties that we (as mind-spirits) use constantly. Additionally, God also speaks in unique ways that Christians call revelation (or special revelation). Hence, Berkeley recognized that many pagan philosophers recognized the Logos. Revelation involved the history of the Logos' work to create a people to save the world, ultimately manifest in Christ Jesus.* The Logos speaks in many different ways. Sometimes in peace and sometimes in wrath, sometimes with clarity and sometimes in riddles or parables, the Logos is not simply a sublime reality but the creator (and savior) Mind. Thus reality was either fundamentally God-based or matter-based. One theory would subsume the other. Per early modern definitions, atheism was not the non-existence of God (a relatively stupid claim) but the lack of providence from said God (or gods). Epicureans believed in the gods, but were atheists because the gods didn't bother in the affairs of the world. Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish heretical philosopher, was called an atheist because God was reality; God had no separate existence from nature or history. Aristotle posited God as an explanatory cause, but the Aristotelian god is not active in the world (but dreamily enraptured in his own contemplation).

While Hegel was not an atheist in this sense, Marx certainly was. Reputedly turning Hegel on his head, Marx embraced dialectics within a materialist (and not idealist) framework. It was the contradictions from material reality (not the social ideas through time) which fired history forwards. Marx's Aristotelian tendencies (whether his teleological definition of man and nature, as well as part of his concept of value) fits well with this materialism. Unlike the crude rationalists or positivists before, the dialectical process is absolutely necessary to explain how man is not simply a product of his times. If radical historicism is correct, then relativism easily grabs control. Knowledge of the past is not an objective vision, but a subjective construct (per Lessing's ditch). We learn, perhaps, things were not quite as they are. But the Enlightenment quest for universal reason was dead in the water. Both Marx and Hegel reject this irrationalist turn in their own way, and dialetical theory is necessary to pursue universal (meaning publicly accessible) knowledge of reality.

What Berkeley contributes is how this dialectical relationship is construed. Berkeley's theory of ideas encapsulates both sensory and mental (even socially mental) experience. Berkeley's empiricism even privileges the sensory as primary, often determining the shape of our mental ideas (i.e. we must see flowers before we mentally imagine flowers in all shapes, sizes, colors, etc.). Yet this form of dialectics is not simply man's engagement with the material world around him. It is an engagement with the minds that produced reality, and most importantly the Mind which creates all reality. For Hegel, history is the drama of God's self-realization. For Marx, man becomes "God" through actualizing nature in the drama of history (leading towards communism). Man becomes a masterless and self-mastered in the cosmic drama. For Berkeley, history is God's self-disclosure towards man's actualization (rebirth) as sons of God. The biblical drama is the Logos' plan, the pattern for individual humans and human societies. Dialectical immaterialism (or dialectical empirico-immaterialism, or something else ugly but explanatory) aids to make this point clear. We simply don't have access to the world, the process of patterning is how we gain knowledge, and the process of dialetics (the conversational back-and-forth) is how we achieve true knowledge of the real. But this process is, ultimately, not one of progressive gains, but apocalypse. Per Berkeley, the Logos takes flesh and dwells among men. Per Hegel, the world-spirit appeared on horseback. And so on.

It's this anachronistic analysis of Berkeley, a kind of post-Hegel reassessment, which offers a strong way for Christians to give an account of metaphysics. Lest one be overcome with anxiety, this way forward is not a rejection of tradition. As stated above, Nyssen seems to have discovered a similar set of problems (even if his lack of empiricism did not motivate a better theory of history). The quest, as it had been for Hellenic neoplatonists, was to see the real. This quest, whether it's ancient Greece or ancient China or India, is shared among most philosophers. It's the quest for reality as rationality (and rationality as reality, per Hegel's remark) that supports any substantive account of society, ethics, even eschatology. Lest we simply believe the myths given to us (whether myths of autochthomous tribes with their gods, or myths of progress and infinite perfectibility), there must a be a vision of the whole. Yet this sight comes to us through time, amid the rapid flux of all human experiences (both directly experienced and indirectly experienced through testimony/faith). To historicize Berkeley's empiricism, all our ethics, social organization, and ways of life depend upon knowledge of the End. Kant's categorical imperative is flimsy for this job.

In short, the rational-real project must go on if we're not to become animals (with a Nietzschean fantasy of being a Homeric heroic ape-man). Yet its success depends upon a dialectical approach, an awareness of limitation and human subjectivity. Berkeley, as a radically Christian philosopher, has a vision of the New Jerusalem, an alternative to a Marxian eschaton of communism. A dialectical approach would also ratify the revelation (in individuals and social organizations) of the gospel, the new way of life revealed in Christ's death and resurrection. Such an approach ratifies certain views of what's possible and impossible, but only through dialogue with the Logos. In this way, Berkeley (as much as Hegel and Marx) serves as a way to think beyond the neoliberal prison we all exist within. The myth of infinite progress out of infinite complexity, a metasystem of non-systems, can be abolished. A Popperian claim for universal science (and progress) can be rejected for the absolute subject. One sees the end proleptically in a solitary vision: Christ on the cross. Power, authority, law, righteousness, and flourishing find their definition in this epicstatic movement of mind to Mind. This is the way.



*This accords with very early Christologies, where Christ (as Logos) is the God revealing/revealed. No one knows the Father except through the Son (Mt 11:27). None have seen the Father but the Only-Begotten (Jn 1:18). Many more verses share a similar claim. As the Wisdom and Mind of God, the Logos many times revealed God through prophets and wonders. But in the flesh, the Logos makes God known through His Name: Jesus, the Christ. Irenaeus and Justin Martyr continued this tradition, and many others, emphasized this traditional interpretation. Christ is the key to the entirety of Scripture, the main agent that knits the whole of Israel's history together. It was not until Augustine's age, where trinitarian concerns altered this theology. Now it was God-as-trinity who appeared in the OT. While not untrue, the primacy of the Logos as revealer/revealed dissipated.

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Subject Unto the Higher Powers: A Radical Account of Passive Obedience

In any history of the Church of England, or the Reformation in England, one is bound to come across the doctrine of "passive obedience". This concept became key during the Reformation, particularly among churches established or integrated with a ruling regime. This concept developed along with early-modern efforts to strengthen the power of monarchies, usually concomitant with divine-right absolutism and the baroque (somewhat totalitarian) aesthetic that bedecked it. This crisis was put forward as a stop-gap, a strengthening of some institutions to prevent the rapid collapse of social legitimacy. The Gelasian dyarchy (the two-swords) had always been something of the farce (the concept was developed by a pope Gelasius who lectured a Byzantine/Roman emperor who yawned at such goofy pretensions). But after the Reformation, there was a real crisis of authority and legitimacy throughout most of Europe.

Was this a cause of the Reformation? No. Rather, I would point to the late Medieval crisis that the ultramontane papacy had created and survived, as well as the Renaissance turn to both bolstering, and undermining, absolutist regimes. The high papal hand that Leo X wielded was a product of both a highly fraught Italian politics and the short-lived victory over conciliarism. And, of course, the mood was intensified by the victorious Turks in the East, who were rapidly advancing beyond the borders of the dead Roman imperium into the heart of Europe. All of these things coincided to create a frantic mood, as various features of society threatened to overthrow pope or emperor. Sometimes one or the other backed opposition, as France supported the Florentine republic sans Medici; sometimes with both closing ranks against a common foe, as in the case of Bohemia with the Hussites.

Yet, in any circumstance, absolutism intensified as popes paled before god-princes (both Catholic and Protestant). And yet the official propaganda to support these regimes many times papered over internal weaknesses. Only really in the case of Louis XIV did the propaganda match the effective machinations of a keen schemer. In England, the rhetoric of the Stuarts provoked upheaval, as the various organs of society (in England, and in other British kingdoms) turned on each other. In the aftermath, the Church of England (which had survived exile, official sanctions/proscription, and doses of persecution) embraced the doctrine of passive obedience as a sine qua non of faith. To Dissenting contemporaries, and most modern readers, this doctrine smacked of toadyism and luke-warm erastian politicking. It was the triumph of mediocrity and the reign of quislings.

But one realize what this doctrine did. Passive obedience was, in the main, formulated as a negative. One ought to not resist the ultimate authority of the land if he seeks to punish you. This is especially noted in the cases where the supreme authority is a tyrant and persecutes the people. This doesn't mean "active obedience", or giving aid/support to said supreme authority. It simply means not resisting, not rebelling, and not attacking the right of said authority to inflict you with punishments. It doesn't mean you have to keep your mouth shut, or to not tell such authority that it acts unjustly. Rather it simply means you don't seek to overthrow said authority if it misuses its authority. Hence why, during the reign of James II, the seven bishops refused to serve the king, even as they didn't challenge his authority. To some Anglicans, this was a principled application of passive obedience that shamed the king and stirred the nation against his unjust proceedings.

But, more interestingly, is how this doctrine actually implies a level of radical ambiguity. Ironically, during the later Stuart period of William III and Anne I, and more so after the Hannoverian succession, to speak too loudly about passive obedience could get you in trouble with the government. Preaching about passive obedience was considered to be subversive by the ruling Whigs. Why? Because it really wasn't clear who or what the supreme magistrate was in England/Britain during these heady days.

George Berkeley, getting himself in a little troubled, wrote a tract in defense of passive obedience against Lockean arguments about contracts and older whiggish constitutionalist arguments. However, as much as Berekely sounds like a stick in the mud, he signifies how this doctrine is something of a basic principle that needs establishing, and not so much a recipe for political action. In other words, passive obedience was a universal virtue in the same way honoring your parents or fidelity to a spouse was. And, in the converse, rebellion was a universal vice in the same way parricide or adultery was. But these values, taken in the abstract, don't answer practical questions. Here, Berekely lays out the simple moral dimension and the complicated application:

In morality the eternal rules of action have the same immutable universal truth with propositions in geometry. Neither of them depends on circumstances or accidents, being at all times and in all places, without limitation or exception, true. ' Thou shalt not resist the supreme civil power ' is no less constant and unalterable a rule, for modelling the behaviour of a subject toward the government, than 'multiply the height by half the base' is for measuring a triangle. And, as it would not be thought to detract from the universality of this mathematical rule that it did not exactly measure a field which was not an exact triangle, so ought it not to be thought an argument against the universality of the rule prescribing passive obedience that it does not reach a man's practice in all cases where a government is unhinged, or the supreme power disputed. There must be a triangle, and you must use your senses to know this, before there is room for applying your mathematical rule. And there must be a civil government, and you must know in whose hands it is lodged, before the moral precept takes place. But, where the supreme power is ascertained, we should no more doubt of our submission to it, than we would doubt of the way to measure a figure we know to be a triangle. 
In the Various Changes and Fluctuations of Government, it is impossible to prevent that Controversies shou'd sometimes arise concerning the Seat of the Supreme Power. And in such Cases Subjects cannot be Denied the Liberty of Judging for Themselves, or of taking part with some, and opposing others, according to the best of their Judgments; all which is Consistent with an exact Observation of their Duty, so long as, when the Constitution is clear in the Point, and the Object of their Submission undoubted, no Pretext of In|terest, Friends, or the Publick Good, can make them depart from it. In short, it is acknowledged, that the Precept enjoyning Non-Resistance is Limited to particular Objects, but not to particular Occasions. And in this it is like all other Moral Negative Duties, which consider'd as general Pro|positions, do admit of Limitations and Restrictions, in order to a distinct Definition of the Duty; but what is once known to be a Duty of that sort, can never become otherwise by any good or ill Effect, Circumstance, or Event whatsoever. And in Truth if it were not so, if there were no General Inflexible Rules, but all Negative as well as Positive Duties might be Dispensed with, and Warpt to Serve particular Interests and Occasions, there were an end of all Morality. (Berkeley, Discourse of Passive Obedience, LIII-LIV)
Part of Berkeley's point here is to frame the difference between universal/general laws and concrete historical application. "Don't commit adultery" is a universal command but it doesn't actually tell you who your spouse is or every instance of what constitutes adultery. The problem Berkeley has with Lockeans and more radical Whigs is that they deny the universal law. Either because government is a contract that can be dissolved (Locke's reworking of Hobbes' naturalist myth) or because man can rebel for a higher cause (liberty, property, God's kingdom, etc.), this permits one to override an obligation to obey. Throughout the essay Berkeley deals with various concerns, complaints, and criticisms advocates of these positions would put forward. However Berkeley stands his ground: exceptional times don't permit you to sin. And if rebellion is a sin, it's always a sin, even if it's a smaller sin when compared to a tyrant abusing his own people (an argument Berkeley makes). Berkeley is interested primarily in the principle, and less so in the application. It's from the principle that people can reason. But Berkeley's work was rejected and his career put on the backburner because these kinds of arguments smelled of Jacobitism, support for the now deposed Stuarts who lurked in exile.

However, it's quite clear that Berkeley is softballing the argument in a bid to articulate what he sees as basic Christian morality. Who is the supreme authority? That's something that people will have to determine when it's not clear: is it Anne and the succeeding Hannoverians? is it James III? or is it Parliament? Berkeley discounts the idea that "the People" can be the supreme authority because it's ultimately incoherent, but this too could be on the table. And this passive obedience is directed towards this sovereign authority, not lesser ones (who don't have the right to rebel, rejecting the Lesser Magistrate doctrine of radical presbyterians). All in all, politics involved this level of epistemic uncertainty without disguising it. All Berkeley wanted to nail down is the basic demands of Romans 13.

In this way, the Anglican concept of Passive obedience was not toadyism but a faithful articulation of  New Testament ethics. While not a few Anglicans became partisans of this or that monarch, the general principle was sound: it is a vice to join revolutionary violence against the ruling sovereign and state. Ironically (a lot of irony here) this meant conservative members of a state-affiliated church (a relationship become more and more strained) had a stronger grasp of distinguishing between church and state than parliamentary revolutionaries generations before. I'm not saying these churchmen exhibited the apostolic ethic completely, or that they fully grasped the proper understanding of the church amid the worldly powers. However, what this does underline is how liberalism and dissenters were not necessarily the architects of a NT free-church tradition.

The problem of contested power is quite common and it can often lead to either a kind of rebelliouness against the unjust (not something st. Paul countenances in Romans 13) or a defacto indifferentism. The latter case is what becomes toadyism, especially as Christians become involved with hubs of power. Christians struggle to remain both residents and aliens. The separatist ethic does not amount to becoming Amish, but it does demarcate loyalty to Christ through which the ethic of passive obedience finds  a place. Loyalty to a state is conditioned by other ethical requirements, but the doctrine of passive obedience is useful to describe this conditioning. One only has to not rebel against the supreme authority's right, not support, defend, justify, or abet it, let alone praise or celebrate it. And, per Berkeley, this command does not necessarily identify where that supreme power lay.

Friday, November 27, 2020

Question: The Dialectic of Torture and the Process of Conversion

I found the following quote from a work on George Berkeley (Constantine Caffentzis' Exciting the Industry of Mankind) which I thought exemplified certain dynamics within modern theology. Here it is:
"Heidegger most clearly exemplified the the plus-question. He was the prime academic philosopher of the Nazis, and he clearly concluded that world domination required thorough effort at creating an elite which repudiated the 'positivist' values embedded in 'western' philosophy. His effort required a radical questioning of this tradition in order to rid the new world conquerors of any remaining nostalgia. He therefore commanded his students to violently question themselves. (His later disgust with the Nazis had nothing to do with 'humanitarian scruples'; on the contrary, he left party activity because the Nazis were not thorough-going enough for him.)
To carry out his task, Heidegger was undoubtedly impressed by his Catholic youth, his catechism and the routine of the inquisitor's interrogation. For the questions involved in inculcating and extracting statements of faith were not interested in 'information.' Indeed, in such interrogations, the sentence radicals [open ended questions like "who are you?"] are treated in a totally cynical way. For in the confession box, in the catechism school, or on the inquisitor's rack, the questions are meant to strike terror in the confessee, the catechumen, or the tortured; they are to make the subjects question themselves in order to destroy the interrogatees' resistant silence. They are not meant to reveal some hidden information but to create a new alethia (truth) relation between the power poles. One's 'most intimate secrets' are exposed under this kind of questioning; not in a statistical spirit, but as a sign of the submission due to the questioner qua representative of Being. 
Indeed, in seventeenth-century English, 'question' was synonymous with 'torture', and to read Heidegger is to experience all the tricks of mental torture. One is continually terrorized, made uncertain, mystified, and humiliated, given the sense of being lost and needing someone or something new to get one's bearings... the neologisms, the philosophical riddles, the complex grammar, the classical tags, the continual reference to death, anxiety, and (in the post-war years) nuclear holocaust are functional to the 'questioning' that Heidegger demands of his pupil-readers. 'We' must question ourselves as a matter of duty, if we wish to be part of the 'elite' in the Nazi universe of the 1930s or some more defuse regime after the Fuhrer's death. All who do not undergo the 'ordeal' at the hands of the 'master' are considered not-quite human or, equivalently, 'human, all too human.' After all, it is the voluntary decision to undergo the question that is the initial sign of one's superiority. The Heideggerian text is a rack full of deliberately confused and confusing questions which stretch the brain to submission-interrogative devices for a 'brainwashing' to reduce the psyche to a poor naked thing. Heidegger's critics, like Adorno, are quite off the mark; Heidegger's jargon is authentic enough...it is the jargon of the interrogator employing a simple, though quite fallacious logic appropriate to the boot-camp promises of the drill sergeant: you cannot learn to command unless you learn to obey." (C., Exciting the Industry of Mankind, 162-163)
What here Caffentzis adumbrates is how 'questions' may not be so much a means of discovery, but destructive creation. To anyone who has had any experience with military life, one understands the final line. It's also the same mechanism of cults: you must be destroyed in order to be saved, reconstituted as something else. And there's pride in this transformation. 'You' emerge from the torture rack as something better, stronger, maybe stranger.

Heidegger was interested in both Augustine and Luther in his reworking of theology in his crusade against ontotheology and metaphysics. For him, as many before, conversion was a violent wrenching, a harsh reorientation in a world that is itself opaque and disturbed. When you enter the world, it is not gentle but a being thrown. And thus all shifts, changes, turns are themselves violent and painful. Thus, redemption, the converstion to Being and becoming its shepherd in a world of miscues and blindness, comes through this question-answer transformation. One must pass through this threshhold in order to be something new and alive. One must suffer to overcome suffering.

There's something true to this paradigm, but it's not in the innate value of suffering as such. Rather, as St. Paul would say, in suffering we gain fellowship with Christ. We too bear the cross, we too die with Him, we too are buried, and we too are risen. And yet this suffering is not itself the conversion, but the conversion is oriented to "picking up your cross" and following the Lord. But there's a subtle difference between this and what Heidegger describes, resourcing contemporary Roman Catholic practices as they had developed from and through the Middle Ages.

It's a subtle distinction because I dislike the naive Enlightened evaluation of nature as "out there" and pure. Not only is it a lie (culture is natural and untamed nature can be ugly) but usually masks exploitation. Suffering should neither be put through the utilitarian calculator nor aestheticized as an innately beautiful act. Proverbs has a prayer to neither have too much nor too little, lest one forgets God or is turned to sin (respectively). In the latter, pain and suffering are not goods but become serious temptations. In Christ, suffering is given an out, becoming a means to enter into the fullness of life. But suffering has no intrinsic value and does not necessarily provoke nobility or virtue.

Caffentzis contrasts Heidegger to Berkeley's antimaterial idealism. For the bishop, the concept of "matter" (the sheer potentiality of primary attributes for Locke, Newton, et al.) was a path to atheism. Better to attribute the experience of the real to the active creation and governance of God. Through our lives God is constantly talking to, nudging, puzzling, suggesting to us. God converts us through questions, but not in the same way Heidegger framed things. Rather, for Berkeley, God lays out puzzle pieces and poses us with their incoherence, a mystery that naturally intrigues our minds as created and active minds. Deep cries out to deep. Berkeley's account is similar to C.S. Lewis' description of his conversion: it was like gently waking up from the sun's rays.

In contrast, Heidegger's description is not unlike Luther who saw a level of violence and warfare in his conversion. Luther believed God only came to him through anfechtung, intense inner suffering and convulsion. Of course, the importance of this conversion has a long debate, and how to best understand Luther's theologia crucis is contested. Later Pietists, looking to increase spiritual vitality among fellow Lutherans, systematized Luther's conversion experience as normative. To be a true Christian one must pass through the paralyzing fear of the Law, standing before God's withering gaze and the void, crumpled up as worthless trash ready for the flames. And from that experience, and that alone (I'm simplifying a bit), one is open to receive the grace of acceptance, forgiveness, and transformative love. Only after passing through these flames does one truly walk as a Christian. Of course, many found Pietist insistence upon this phenomenon as deeply destructive. Not only may it call into question the identity of Christians who had not experienced things this way, it also seemed to create a new spiritual elite. Moravians modified this Pietistic emphasis on suffering (allowing love/peace to go before internal anguish over sins, creating a rift with fellow Pietists. But from these Germans, as they migrated to England and English America, revivalism emerged. This conversion-driven piety inflamed American evangelism: from Whitfield and Wesley to C.G. Finney and beyond.

And while there's some truth in the above (i.e. the need for internal conversion and transformation), conversion as necessarily violent mishandles scripture. While St. Paul's confrontation with the risen Christ was shocking (Saul was blinded by divine light and confused by the question of Christ, "why do you persecute me?"), it was not particularly violent. There was no haunting, no account of inner doubt, no conscience afflicted with the Law. Romans 7 is quite clear that, when awakened to the problem, the Christian realizes a self (and world) at war with itself because of sin. Baptism, a divine sentence of death, ends the pattern of this-world and initiates a pattern of living fit for the-world-to-come. However, conversion does not require a prolonged affliction of conscience. The New Testament does not fundamentally describe the gospel according to Medieval categories. The question is not: "how do I find a gracious God?" These questions derive from other historical paradigms that are alien, if not hostile, to the New Testament's account. It is more of an external crisis than an internal one. The Law is not mainly about wounded consciences, but the failure of Israel to be a light unto the Gentiles. How could the people of God, sin sick and wed to death, be the means of God's reign over Heaven and Earth? Again, to be clear, it's not that this approach does not involve moral psychology. Rather, it's that salvation/damnation do not primarily revolve around the individual's conscience. Per the NT and the Second Temple Judaism that formed its context, baptism and conversion did not require any Lutheran-esque anguish.

The Heideggerian paradigm, whether through a Roman disciplinarian regime or through the law-gospel dialectics, rips up the soul to transform it. It is the doctrine of brainwashing everywhere, a brutal attempt to reach into the mind of the other. Of course, the purpose is salvation. The inquisitor's role in torturing heretics through interviews and physical pain was to save souls. Psychological warfare was an attempt to master how one could transplant a worldview into the head of another, re-coding their intuitions. Such is not simply shaming someone, but transforming them. This process is evil, the way men end up creating all kinds of monsters. Whether mindless zombies, ravenous werewolves, or predatory vampires, the process of conversion is a violent bite. In the hands of the inquisitor, this process is vile and dishonors Christ when associated with His name. God help us.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Melting the Golden Calf: Berkeley and the Links Between Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism

George Berkeley had the unenviable position of being right when everyone else was wrong. The context was the early Hanoverian period in Great Britain. Berkeley was the descendant of Anglo-Irish, a bishop in the Church of Ireland (the little sister of the Church of England), and a reformer. Avoiding censorship through a novel genre, Berkeley wrote a list of questions as to what the root cause of Irish poverty was (The Querist). In short: Berkeley believed the problem was Mammon. The Anglo-Irish gentry were obsessed with their hard money (gold) because they wanted access to a world market of luxury goods (silk, wine). The result was hoarding money, spending it in overseas markets, and depriving Ireland of any native industry. The landless poor survived through scratching the dirt and localized barter. Despite Ireland's potential wealth in beef and farming, the Irish poor seemed listless and indifferent. They owned nothing and survived through feigned ignorance to their greedy landlords. The Irish economy would remain poor as long as its native industries were underdeveloped and its money was spent abroad.

Berkeley's project was to create a national bank for Ireland, but one differing from the Bank of England and John Law's experiment in France. The bishop's main obstacle was "idolatry". Like Law, Berkeley saw through the monetarist fixation with gold or other hard currencies. However, here the similarities end. Law's national bank linked money directly to royal fiat. He engaged in grotesque forms of street theater to make his point: throwing gold from his carriage and pouring buckets of pig shit on the commoners who rushed to grab it up. Yet this project rapidly came undone. Royal fiat money had no internal mechanism to regulate its spending. It ran wholly on futures, mainly the Mississippi company's projected wealth in Louisiana land. When this project collapsed, with currency value run up by greedy investors and dumped for a killing when success stalled, Law discredited his own theories. French elite rejected any idea of a national bank, leaving the crown dependent on all kinds of private contracts with investors and bankers (shady or otherwise). Money grounded on nothing, except royal control, could easily destroy the economy it supported.

The key to this project was Berkeley's assault on "idolatry". Like Law, Berkeley saw through the monetarist fixation on gold. A consummate schemer, Law sought to create a national bank for France linked to royal fiat. He was reputed to engage in forms of grotesque street theater to make his point: riding his carriage into Paris, stopping to throw gold coins, and pouring buckets of pig shit on the people stooping to pick them up. However, as Berkeley noted, this project ran out of control because the fiat currency ran out of control with greedy investors. Seeing the potential for infinite wealth, financiers backed the Mississippi land bubble, ruining the fortunes of not a few (and poisoning the French crown against central banks). But Berkeley agreed with Law that gold was nothing, except whatever man imputed to it.

Berkeley, like Law, thought gold itself was nothing. Money was what men imputed to it. However, the bishop's project involved Irish parliament's supervision of the money supply, managing the currency for the public good. The superiority of parliamentary involvement, than simply royal control, was that parliament involved the gentry whose wealth was necessary to create Irish industry. The more the gentry became involved with managing funds, the more they would realize the need to enliven Ireland's industry. Additionally, with a government led project to create national industry, the peasantry would have a reason to participate for their own good. Berkeley's intent was to create incentives to stir up public activity, to get the Irish gentry and peasantry to think of themselves as a single nation. Additionally, to prevent Law's bubble, Berkeley proposed the bank hold reserve currency in various forms of wealth. The bank would not only possess gold, but also land and linen. Berkeley did not believe gold's mystique could disappear overnight, but its monopoly of symbolic potency could weaken if it was convertible. Gold was not a fetish that innate power of wealth. Possessing shiny rocks did not make a nation wealthy. Rather, industry produced a nation's wealth. Thus a national bank could "excite" (per the title) and direct Ireland's industry to enrich the entire people. However, parliament rejected Berkeley's plan (which he introduced as bishop). After turmoil racked Ireland, the parliament eventually got a carbon-copy bank modeled on the Bank of England (a privately owned national bank that printed paper-money linked to gold). Berkeley's plan, though rejected, had been to "excite the industry of mankind", as only a central money supply could do.

This quote, as much of the above content, is from Constantine Caffentzis' Exciting the Industry of Mankind (2000). Caffentzis sees in Berkeley a subtle economic mind that met ruin when his ideas were blown apart, but a voice worth recovering. There are obvious parallels to much of what goes on today. Private banking/financial institutions dictate national policy under threat of loan restructuring and debt collection. Nations are plunged into decay through austerity policies that reorient tax bases to servicing debt. Large quantities of natural resources (land, minerals, oil) are repossessed in this mad grab. Yet we don't live in the gold economy anymore, but in alternative fetishes (dollars, oil, etc.). As the 2008 financial bubble showed, wild speculations built upon nothing but man's desires end up consuming all. Of course, in our world of corporate socialism, the bankers shed some crocodile tears as they begged for QE saving. And in a figure like Obama they got it. As the president so poignantly put it to the bankers:"my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks". Fiat currency at the beck and call of investors will spiral this boom-bust cycle in even more dramatic and insane forms. And as the current Corona virus economy shows (with the rapid adoption of QE for people), money reflects the energies of people and should be serviced to their benefit.

Berkeley's major opponents weren't fiat currency madmen, but gold-bugs. Locke and Newton, with this empiricist epistemology, led the way in defending a species-only economy. And it could be brutal: Newton's governance of the national mint saw the death penalty for coin-clipping (such became necessary to control currency quality and the price of gold). Locke was quite clear that only the rational and better sort had claims to reaping the fruits of the land. Similarly, William Petty (a pioneer of political-economy) thought Ireland should be converted into a giant cowherd, the people be damned. Berkeley rejected this gold fetish, which enslaved men to things with ideas of innate value.

Caffentzis picks up (and I think rightly) the conceptual parallel with Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism". Not unlike the stereotypical savage with a bone in his nose, the goldbug trusted an arbitrary substance to offer power and protection. Collect enough gold (or have an economy that circulated enough in to create a positive balance, or at least a claim on it) and you were rich. Berkeley knew this could end in disaster: the influx of American gold ruined Spain's economy (and not, as some were apt to say, a native pride and laziness among Iberians). Gold was believed to have an innate power and potency that man could then manipulate for their (or their country's) betterment. To Berkeley this notion was idolatrous. In Marxian terms, this was the deification of a substance that had almost purely exchange-value. It was no different than setting up one's wooden idol in the center of town to protect the community. Executions for coin-clippings were no different than throwing babies into Molech's flames: a supra-human order had to be satisfied lest catastrophe strike.

Thus, one learns an economic lesson from Moses' destruction of the golden calf. The problem with idolatry was never physicality, but imputation of agency and power to things which were inert. It was rejecting the Creator (as supreme mind) for the creation (the mindless qualia). It turned the world upside down. Israel's idolatry was not abandoning the Creator per se, but transforming the Creator into an image they could see, touch, and control. Loss of control bred fear, as God (and Moses) seemed to have disappeared. In their place, the Israelites manufactured a new medium for divine presence. It reversed the order of things: God had summoned Israel (through Abraham's seed and Moses' prophetic intervention), Israel had not summoned God. Hence why God's wrath was so severe (through the Levites who zealously destroyed the idolators).

This judgement wasn't naked divine omnipotence (i.e. listen to me or else!). It was to preserve the justice and humanity of the created order. Man is made erect to lift creation up to the heavens, not to bend down to the earth and serve what is made.

 The clown-prince of philosophy, Slavoj Zizek, offers a relevant analogy here. Attacking the scholarly fad of deep-ecology, Zizek recounts how someone had given an account of a trash heap from a more neutral vantage. Avoiding anthropo-centrism, the process of decomposition reveals swarming and creative production. It is only from a human perspective (with all the sights and smells of decay and rot) that we judge a heap of trash to be repulsive. However, Zizek says, why don't we apply the same approach to a Nazi death camp? The symmetrical beauty of fire, corpses, worms, and dirt all combine to create an energetic ecosystem. The point here, as it should be obvious, is how morally sinister deep-ecology is. This "neutrality" is obscene because the humanizing of nature is beautifying nature. Green philosophy rightly rejects the destruction of the environment for human greed. But it does so for all the wrong reasons. Inert things don't have rights. Even animals don't have rights. Nevertheless, it is humans who should hold account other humans for the destruction of things and animals when the priestly vocation of mankind is rejected. To humanize creation is to administer the task of stewardship and care. Such is to make the world a lovely place.

To try to imagine a world from a sub- or supra-human perspective is ultimately to miss its beauty. It's why Berkeley was disgusted with Mandeville's Fable of the Bees: how can you marvel at the harmony of a system full of prostitution, drugs, and murder? Apparently Mandeville tried to reconcile with Berkeley, as his intent wasn't to valorize greed, but the point still stands. You can never cease to see things humanly, for to think humanly is to think intelligently (made in the image of the Logos). Perverse attempts to see things from Mother Earth is simply a myth to advance an alternative judgement. Perhaps it's necessary to judge rightly (the way fiction snaps us out of bad paradigms). But when the myth is believed for itself, idolatry is afoot. And the end result of idolatry is the enslavement of man to nature forces.

Freedom from idolatry is equally freedom from commodity fetishism. Man does not serve mammon, but God. Yet, whether its gold or dollars, the things we worship become the haunt of demons, pulling men into the dark depths of bondage.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

A Revelation of the End: Kojeve and Christian theology

Kojeve’s theory of the End of History, and his idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel, fit somewhat well with a Christian view of history. This is strange primarily because Kojeve is an atheist and one who, quite ruthlessly, purges out theological concepts that mystify theoretical accounts. Kojeve can be said to write like an instruction manual (which makes sense, given his career as a bureaucrat for the Fourth/Fifth Republic). Nevertheless, I would make the seemingly special-pleading claim that Christianity (qua its canonical scripture) does not really qualify for Kojeve’s ban. Of course, to argue such is to explicitly deny his claim that Christianity is a ‘myth’, but we’ll see if my claims stand up.

To summarize Kojeve’s position: Hegel is not a dialectician, but the opposite (Kojeve goes as far as to call him a ‘positivist’ and ‘empiricist’ in the final chapter to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel). Philosophy, at its roots, is dialectic, made famous by Plato’s Socrates. In the classic Socratic dialogue, an interlocutor makes a claim about something (law, piety, gods, art, knowledge, etc.) and Socrates questions him. This is thesis-antithesis (with Socrates as consummate antithesis). But the indirect form of Plato’s speech is not simply to turn Socrates into a mouthpiece for Plato, but to leave the reader in a position of judgement. The reader is confronted with an esoteric crisis, where only Plato’s students (and true lovers of wisdom) can properly give an account (and the uninitiated are locked out). Nevertheless, it is the outsider participant who then produces a synthetic statement, coming to knowledge of the thing in question.

Such is the nature of philosophy until Hegel. For this dialectical process works on all levels, whether between interlocutors or societies. It may be waged with intelligible words or systematically through war and trade. Either way, one proposition is met with another, producing a crisis that forces a kind of resolution. But prior to this dialectical event, alternative forms of reasoning are possible. The first is ‘myth’ which is, essentially, a thesis with an aura. The ‘myth’ is a monologue, not a dialogue (thus not dialectic), a statement accounting for the world. The ‘myth’ is not simply an empirical account, for any statement includes an account of itself, which exceeds the empirical or rational faculty. To account for this state of affairs, the mythic monologue claims divine origin (and the author is simply a recorder of some being from a celestial realm).

In this definition, such includes even conversations with the divine (hence the biblical religion). While superficially dialectic, because it denies a human dialogue partner (and instead a non-verifiable, abnormal, ‘other’), it is still ‘mythic’. Yet such can exceed myth through this continued dialogue. Kojeve sees Augustine as a Platonic dialectician who relapsed. But the result is the pseudo-dialectic of ‘meditation’. Augustine speaks with God, but it is really a mediated conversation in/through his soul. In Descartes, the Augustinian dialectic drops God out and simply turns the soul (or self) into the dialogue partner. It’s at this point, where Cartesian philosophy and its rationalist component resembles a secular religion, a mystification of man’s relationship to himself. And it makes sense (though Kojeve doesn’t make this claim in the chapter I’m summarizing) that natural-rationalism (which sets up Lockean empiricism) gave rise to Deism. Within the context of the Enlightenment, a nature-religion of Reason would offer the social glue to pull together the polity as the lowest-common denominator civil religion. Of course, like the ‘myth’ of classic religion, it struggled under the antithetical blow of the Socratic questioner. Thus, it again makes sense that it would breed a kind of vicious inquisitorial stance. One may see Robespierre’s “cult of reason” manifest this ethos: a trial and auto da fe of atheism giving rise to the goddess Reason, as the burning of heresy clears the way for the truth of the church.

While some may mistake Hegel’s idealism as a form of ‘meditation’ (and thus a form of crypto-theology), Kojeve rejects this reading. Instead, Hegel is doing nothing more than giving an account of philosophy. He is a historian of philosophy, someone witnessing dialectics on the world stage. Hence Kojeve quotes Hegel favorably when the latter says: “World history judges the world”. Hegel is the analyst of these debates, not a participant. Hence his absolute idealism is not an account to produce one more myth. If it were, it would flunk Hegel’s synthetic test. In other words, if Hegel were simply producing another ‘myth’, his account could be given an antithetical counterpoise, reigning the dialectical process all over again. Instead, Hegel’s absolute vision is from the end of events. When Hegel remarks that Athena’s owl only takes off at dusk, he is commenting that his task only takes place when the end has come. The end Hegel sees is commensurate with his judgement, at Jena, that in Napoleon he saw the world-spirit on horseback. What Hegel is saying is that in Napoleon (as a figure and symbolic synthesis of the Revolution) he saw the product of history’s end. Thus, Hegel’s account is simply to state the end of the process (at least, thus far). One cannot see further than the end without simply producing another ‘myth’ (which, again, would only participate in the dialectical process of philosophy). That is precisely not what Hegel is doing. Instead, the task of absolute idealism is, ironically, empirical.

It’s this reading of Hegel that inspires Kojeve’s “end of history” thesis. The battle between the US and the USSR is given a dialectical read: the thesis of capitalism met with the antithesis of communism. In Kojeve’s estimation, he believed the US would win through modification (the Keynesian liberal synthesis). But Kojeve goes further in his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right to explain how his own account, like Hegel, is an empirical verification of socio-historical dialectic. Law, as a phenomenon, takes place between three actors: A, B, and C. A acts, B resists A, and C (an impartial and disinterested ‘other’) is called upon to resolve the dispute. This definition (which Kojeve labors over to defend from various attacks) is what grounds the synthetic nature of republican citizenship. Kojeve sees a dialectical struggle between three phenomena: equality, equivalence, and equity. Equality is an aristocratic ethic, the idea that each gets the same share as the others. Equivalency, however, rejoins antithetically about a state of affairs where equality is deficient. Kojeve uses the example of food: equality says each person gets the same plate of food. Equivalency asks: what if someone is larger and needs more, or someone is hungrier? The result is the need to adjust results so that each gets the proportionate amount. But such thus denies the equality of the participants (one gets more than another ‘equivalent’ to his/her need). The synthetic resolution is equity: reinstate equality in a way where the disparate needs are done away with.

As I stated, equality is an aristocratic ethic, whereas Kojeve pegs equivalency as a liberal-bourgeois ethic. However, these social forms reflect a more basic social arrangement: the relationship between master and slave. In an aristocratic society, the master’s equality is based upon his fundamental unlikeness to the slave (who has no part in the division). Equivalency is to undo this equality through an abolition of the master-status. It is the slave ethic, manifest in the liberal theological idea that we’re all equally slaves viz. a statement like the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In other words, God (or one could replace with a secularized theological concept like “Nature” or “the Market”) is the only master and all men are equal in their inequality as the slave. The instability in this concept is the struggle of disparity from the superficial claim that all are slaveless masters. Inequality rears its head as equivalency becomes the ethos. The synthetic solution is the ethic of the republican-citizen: equity is to engage in the social and political task to remove the disparities that would result in the slave need to reject the aristocratic fair share. I might modify how Kojeve analyzed these relations and the way these terms fit together (such as the “aristocratic” US South being a fount of liberalism viz. its greatest theorist, John C. Calhoun).

The relation of this theory to the End of History is that the crisis of the Revolution was the revolt of the slaves qua bourgeois third estate. The Terror was the radical instability of the bourgeois, having won the battle against the aristocrats-slaves, tore itself apart as slaveless masters. Napoleon’s victory was a revelation of the synthesis. Napoleon was neither another Robespierre with tact (in other words, he was not a bourgeois despotic anti-despot), nor was he a return to the old order (misreading his imperial crowning as a return to ancien regime monarchy). Rather, Napoleon represented the triumph of the citizen-ethic of the republic, where he initiated programs to establish and enforce the rule of law. One may quibble with the historical facts about Napoleon’s reign and rule, but perhaps the Hegelian assessment (viz. Kojeve) offers the best account of why its so hard to peg Napoleon as either rightist or leftist (in a way, he transcends them because he’s instantiating a different order of things). And I’m sure it’s in Napoleon and his Continental system that Kojeve, as a lifelong economic bureaucratc, saw deGaulle and the nascent EEC (which Kojeve helped design). It was a synthetic project to build the “Latin Empire”, a suprastate entity that was the only means to defend and sustain the citizen-republic (beyond city-states and nation-states). The Latinate Continental system was the alternative (not as an idea, but as an actual polity system) to American or Soviet domination.

Thus Kojeve, being a Hegelian of sorts, saw his task as this radical empiricist, a historian of philosophy, giving an account of things as they are. It’s from the historical task that Hegel, unlike the primitive philosopher, can hear the trees speak and sit in silence as he gazes the activity of the city. He doesn’t need to talk or debate anymore, but simply witness. It’s on the other side of a transhistorical process that Hegel bears witness to the absolute. Of course, Kojeve’s reading may be incorrect. But if it’s not, Hegel cannot be swatted away as a buffoonish quasi-totalitarian who lost himself in his own head. For the dialectic to end, for the absolute to be recognized as such, is to see man’s task transfigured. Kojeve sees this as man qua human returning to a kind of animal existence. I’m not exactly sure what this means. It seems to simply mean that man’s return to silence, a destination of historical dialectic, is to cease the human task. It means that the need of philosophy, the self-consciousness produced through the process of confrontation between thesis-antithesis, ceases. While something might seize up in the breast, and maybe part of the reason why someone like Scruton (according to a quote on Wikipedia) called Kojeve a “life-hating Russian at heart”, perhaps this panic is due to a liberal ethic of debate for debate’s sake. Kojeve doesn’t mean we’ll become dumb beasts, but that the distinctly human task of self-conscious dialectic becomes unnecessary. Instead, the posthistorical man can frolic in the goods of citizen civilization (perhaps what he means by men becoming “snobs”) with one another. I’m not really sure.

As a Christian, I find a number of these points worthy of reflection. Hegel must be taken seriously as a philosopher of history. I have mistaken Hegel as distinct post-Christian, and perhaps there’s some truth to that, but not in the way others have stated. Hegel is not trying to bring about a new myth (a new thesis touching the edge beyond his own empirical ability of recount the ages), and so any attempt to use him as a “system” would be a radical act of misunderstanding. Hegel is simply bearing witness to the “end’ (meaning its point), which is precisely what the Apostles do with Christ. They’re not trying to build a new system of thought. Christ is the Omega (Rev. 1:11; Rev. 22:13). He is the God’s last-speech act in these Last Days (Heb. 1:1-2). He is the Second (and final) Adam (1 Cor. 15:45-47). The difference here is, perhaps, that Christ is not simply the “end” but the “origin”, being both Alpha and Omega. Such an interpretation would be at odds at a strictly dialectical process, though Hegel sees history as the Absolute’s self-recognition. Thus, Eden appears at the End as the New Jerusalem. Christ reigns as the Crucified Lord. We may make a theological statement about God’s unchanging, but nevertheless God’s covenantal presence with us is fundamentally distinct at the end from the beginning. History, at the End, did matter. And thus, the Apostles possess a quasi-empirical quality about them. They are not exegeting in a radically allegorical fashion, but in a way where Israel’s history makes sense in the visage of Christ Jesus. The Pharisees couldn’t make sense of the sacred books because they didn’t know the One (the hermeneutical key) to whom they gestured (Jn. 5:39).

Thus in the Hegelian-Kojevean account of the End of History, Christians should be theoretically in agreement. There should be no manic anxiety of the classical liberal, who can’t imagine the conversation coming to an end. Such doesn’t end creativity but enables it upon the historically derived foundation. Liberalism as an ethos and ethic can’t stand (or understand) such a concept and it turns to slander. Perhaps that is why Hegel is constantly reviled and his project condemned as a failure (even as the mania of the bourgeois ethic of equivalency seems only to reproduce its own constant set of crises). Kojeve saw the USA and the USSR both undergoing the dynamics of this synthesis, with the former as right-Hegelian and the latter as left-Hegelian. But I digress. The point here is that the Christian sees a point of life beyond the struggle, where what we understand as “man” won’t be the same. The eschatological fulfillment, where the blessed will be one in faith and at peace in one Spirit, partaking of the divine nature and seeing an end to sin and death.

And yet the struggle is still ongoing. A Christian may take issue with the necessity of a synthetic process (though it’s a concept not unknown viz. reference to the Fall as felix culpa), but there remains a dialectical conflict. God speaks, Satan questions, man responds, God presses the question etc. The End is revealed in Christ, the final word, the Yes and Amen to all promises (2 Cor. 1:20). But the final word presupposes a series of words, and thus history. However, throughout Christian theology, one may appreciate from Kojeve’s Hegelian schema that the Apostolic faith returned to the ‘mythic’ (or at the very least, viz. Augustine, to a self-referential ‘meditation’). Historically, a devolutions corrupts the Christian liturgy from its apocalyptic sacramental rites to thaumaturgic pageantry. Christ ceased to the apocalyptic king to a mythicized Roman imperator. This isn’t to repeat a “Fall of the Church” narrative or repeating the Hellenizing thesis. But corruption and reifying mythification did happen, though perhaps not the same in all places and as intense. But there’s no denying that Christ seated at the Right Hand of Majesty became confused for some sort of mirrored heavenly capital. The emperor or pope (depending on the theoretical underpinnings, East or West) became the earthly vicar for Christ’s kingdom. Thus, like a Roman emperor (whether actually in Constantinople or as a ghost enthroned on its grave, per Hobbes about the papacy, in Rome) Christ had need of an imperial bureaucracy. Biblical doctrines of saints and angels morphed into a kind of heavenly patronage system. Contra not a few, this shift isn’t a return to paganism (or a paganizing) but Romanizing Christian doctrine. It was the assertion of a new philosophic thesis, wrapped in divinity as ‘myth’, that returned to govern the Empire.

A Christian can put the pieces together through using Kojeve’s Hegelian schema. The purpose of Christian theology, contrary to any other kind of theology, is to bear witness to the end. It’s not a monologue disguised as dialogue, or an internalized dialectic, per Kojeve. In fact, given how Hegel’s philosophy-as-history synthetic judgement became confused for a kind of myth of its own, you would think Kojeve could be somewhat self-aware about such a process happening to Christianity (perhaps he did make such a statement somewhere). Of course, the major difference between Kojeve and Christianity involves a recognition of a supra-mundane agent who acts through self-insertion. Thus, God exists beyond, yet our dealings with the Logos are strictly historical. In this way Christianity is different from Hegel, as the Absolute is not the whole itself, but someone else. It’s in this way that, I think, one may claim a Berkleian metaphysics in service to Christianity against an atheistic materialism. It’s a parallel system but that depends recognizes an ‘other’ that supports the whole, not the whole itself as self-supporting. The Logos and matter accomplish the same goal in each system, but the former makes sense of the historic reality of Christ and the Apostolic witness. Of course, I don’t hope to convince those who don’t already believe. But the argument (rather strong, I think) for Christianity depends upon empirical historical judgement (i.e. the four facts of the resurrection: Christ’s death, the burial, the empty tomb, and the appearances to the Apostles and others). Of course, it is a presuppositional question whether such is possible.

Whether or not one accepts all elements of Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, or his synthetic account of law in civilization, a Christian can benefit from this account. It certainly not only moves beyond certain liberal hang-ups and hyper-theological accounts (which make Christianity a debate partner with other forms of theology), but it helps to appreciate the finality of Christ. If Christ is not the End, as many functionally believe, then the apocalypse of Christianity is rejected and transformed into a cult in service to another project.

Friday, November 20, 2020

The Myth of Popular Sovereignty: A Review of Richard Tuck's 'The Sleeping Sovereign'

Richard Tuck, a historical political theorist who specializes on the early modern period, defends Bodin/Hobbes from a charge of crypto- or quasi-totalitarians. They conceptualize a singular state, it's true, that monopolizes legitimacy and violence. Both men, quite fittingly, write in a period of severe turmoil and civil war (French Wars of Religion and English Civil Wars respectively). Tuck's major contribution, though, is to note their radical theoretical division of sovereignty from government. In the case of Hobbes, this distinction even permits a crypto-democratic origin of government. Unlike divine-rights of kings or Filmer's Patriarcha (i.e. monarchy derives from Adam's original fatherly authority), Hobbes posited a naked individualism. In the state of nature men banded together to end the war of all against all. They, in a primitive act of self-constitution, elect their own constitution (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and cede their authority to this new sovereign (the mortal god of state, Leviathan). While many political theorists in 17th and 18th c. ignore (or misunderstand) this novel political arrangement, Rousseau latches onto it. Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that the state is a primitive compact to handover governing authority, but rejects alienating this original authority. Rather, the primordial mass grant authority to their government (whichever form) but reserve the right to reclaim it. They are (per the title) the "sleeping sovereign", with regnant government as vizier. If the sovereign awakes, due to trouble in the realm, it can reclaim this power from the vizier and reconstitute the polity. Tuck sees this Rousseuan theory at the heart of America's constitutional settlement.

As far as historical reconstruction goes, Tuck is right on the money. Bodin and Hobbes cannot be read as simply totalitarians avant la lettre. Rather, they're trying to find a constitutional arrangement that best defends a present system of governance from archaeological criticisms. Against critics, who appeal to natural law or scripture (both of which could justify divine-right of kings, as well as the right to rebel), they constructed a novel theory. In Rousseau's hands, this theory underwrites revolutionary change and democratic politics. And fundamentally, Tuck thinks the latter is really important because democratic governance has proved to be rather ineffective. The sovereignty/government distinction can save a fundamentally democratic nature for political society. The government may be oligarchic (a clique of professional politicians and technocrats), but they serve the People. Tuck primarily considers the plebiscite as the best means for the People to reassert their sovereignty. Through the plebiscite, the People can alter their constitution, set legislative agendas, or settle major policy issues (this book, based on a series of lectures, was published before Brexit). Tuck ties together early modern developments in political theory to some prescriptive thoughts for saving a democratic polity with a elected representative system (that seems farther and farther away from any democratic control).

If I were going to be frank, I'd say Tuck is a well-read naive goof. He's not stupid, but his proposal is airy and idealistic. He appeals to the plebiscite, but there's more to it than that. Who decides when a plebiscite should be conducted (i.e. who decides to wake up the slumbering sovereign?) and how it should be conducted? As stated, Brexit happened after this work came out. Many in the UK and abroad claimed that the plebiscite was not legitimate, that it was too close, that people voted and didn't really mean it. Blairite/neolib Labour has pushed to undermine Brexit, often appealing to a second referendum. If you're allowed to keep voting until "you" get what you want: what's the point of voting in the first place? Remainers claimed that the Leave campaign was underhanded, using all sorts of media tricks and lies (through arch-warlock Dominic Cummings). They claimed it was the revanchist politics of the old against the young, bigoted nationalists craving a return to the Empire. Pro-EU advocates claim the real people of the UK don't really want it. The Leave vote has also motivated Scottish nationalists to push national independence in EU terms (Scotland voted majority to Remain). All in all, critics have claimed a dozen different reasons why the People aren't the People. And they have a limited point: what is this abstraction called "the People"?

Perhaps, indirectly, the abstraction is what saves democracy for academics like Tuck. The abstraction (especially if it votes correctly) vindicates the concrete crudity of many ordinary folks. Per critics of democracy in the late 19th c. and early 20th c., why should the redneck who thinks the moon is made of cheese get the same vote as a nuclear physicist? This created attraction to the vanguard party of the intelligentsia in Leninist Communism, as well as the Great Man with a coterie of party technocrats per Fascism and Nazism. Both claimed Rousseauan themes and both claimed to speak on behalf of the people. Rousseau was no fan of democracy, even as he valorized the People. The way he could do so was through his distinction between general will and the will of all. The latter is the aggregate of wants, polling people according to their specific interests. The former is what is actually good for the People qua Commonwealth. The General Will was singular and organic, while the Will of All was piece meal and a private opinion. In this theory, it was quite possible for two things to radically diverge. A few, who could see far, could know the General Will, even if the majority (counting heads) opposed it. At first, the nobility were receptive to Rousseau's teaching (Marie Antoinette, dressed as little bo peep, made pilgrimage to the Genevan's tomb). Robespierre and his Jacobins saw themselves as the heirs to this theory: they alone knew what the Republic needed against its many enemies, foreign and domestic. They purged the popular counterrevolutionary insurgency in the Vendee. They purged the crude urban profanity and atheism of the Herbertists. They purged the mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie of both the Girondin and then Danton's less radical Jacobins. In all of these violent political moves, Robespierre claimed the mantle of the General Will. And after his fall, Napoleon would ultimately claim it again. His plebiscite for the imperial crown won thunderous support (even if it was a vote held with an army on the horizon). Napoleon was a true sovereign in this regard, putting the people back to sleep through a campaign of depoliticization (which, for not a few, was welcome reprieve to an era of guillotines).

If Rousseau could fit a Napoleon, then he was truly an heir to Hobbes. While in no way favorable to democracy, Hobbes was not a royal fetishist. Some scholars have convincingly argued that a subtext (whether intended or not) to Leviathan is praise for Cromwell. While himself a rebel and agent of subversion, Cromwell smashed the Presbyterians who promoted a divided sovereignty. Cromwell's Protectorate restructured the commonwealth around his office through a militarily imposed constitutional settlement (the Instrument of Government). The Lord-Protector held his own council of state (replacing the privy council) and had his own parliaments. Additionally, Cromwell's Independency had no truck with Presbyterian clericalism. The state was not beholden to a plurality of priests and the conscience of the nation would not be held hostage by a coven of clergy. Charles II's attempt to reclaim England came at the head of a Scottish Presbyterian army, whose pledge depended on Charles Stuart's adherence to the Solemn League and Covenant. And whether or not Hobbes was an admirer of Cromwell (or hoped Leviathan would let him return to England), his work found positive reception among Cromwellian Independents. While Independency opposed any return of the Church of England (whether episcopal or presbyterian), they still expected state management of religion. Every congregation was independent, but the Protectorate sent Triers out to see if the churches remained within the bounds of orthodox Protestantism.

Hobbes/Cromwell and Rousseau/Napoleon signify that Tuck's appeal to plebiscites needs broader contextualization. And while Hitler and Lenin, to pick odious examples, reflect a similar trend, it's not of necessity. Hobbes/Rousseau are not, contra idiot Popper liberals, proto-totalitarians, and Cromwell/Napoleon are not themselves totalitarians. However, they themselves become sovereigns and they depend upon a popular rule, even as the people are depoliticized and reorganized for state consolidation (often times war). And yet the purpose of this shift (and why, for Hobbes, sovereignty was alienable) was to secure peace. Only academic elite, who are often far from substantial loss or conflict, rejoice in revolution qua revolution. Many regular people join in for concrete goals, but they have hopes to shut it off at some point. Thus, these new regimes require new justifications. For Hobbes, this depended on his "state of nature" theory. Rather than imagine the Hobbesian state of nature is a historic time (where men's lives are, in Hobbes' famous lines: nasty, brutish, and short), it is a founding myth. It appears as "time out of mind", but it more accurately depicts the current moment he lived in. The time of nature was the time when men devolved into an atomized animal state. Giorgio Agamben grasps this point in his State of Exception: the return to the state of nature was hyper-nomic killing zone produced by state forces unleashed. Per Hobbes' analysis in Behemoth, the civil wars (and blood bath) happened because of divided leadership. Presbyterians (Hobbes' main villains) had turned the commonwealth against itself (manipulating Parliament to siege the crown). The end result is every man as his own leader (the state of nature). It's not the absence of authority, but the breaking of monopoly over authority. Thus, Independency may offer wide berth to general Protestantism, but it's still state sanctioned. The English republic beat and branded the radical Quaker, James Naylor, for claiming he was the second coming of Christ.

The concrete manifestations of Hobbes and Rousseau offer the actual vision of Tuck's reconstruction. Popular sovereignty does not mean a swarming or buzzing public sphere of popular politics. If the Glorious Revolution (1688) counts as an example of popular sovereignty (and there's an argument to be made that it would), then even a limited franchise parliamentary system limited politicization. It was the Whig dominated Parliament that would revoke the triennial act, replacing it with the septennial act. Parliament was not to be elected every three years, but seven. The rotten-borough system was a form of collective management, to keep Parliament from becoming too unstable and unwieldy. The senate and people had spoken against James II's absolutist project, supporting (actively) William of Orange's invasion. Plebiscites effectively work to limit popular politics (with plebiscites often following pre-planned and scripted out comes; in other words, I don't think Napoleon would have held a plebiscite if he thought he could lose). The irony is that the more formalized democracy is in political structures (whether representation, government mandated plebiscites, etc.), the less democratic politics can be. Hobbes was ok with this form of democracy: people should involve themselves in popular politics only if the state first says it's ok. The abstraction of The People can simply obfuscate how little concrete people actually have a real say. Instead, the Will of the People is supposed to cow opposition (regardless of how managed and curated this demonstration of said will actually is). The appeal to a nearly vitalist political economy, where the nation and other abstractions are treated as organic wholes, simply disguises the dirty reality.

The United States has had a complicated relationship with the idea of popular sovereignty. In a way, the Constitution of 1787 played the same kind of game that 1688 did. The convention (who met in secret, originally with an agenda to reform the Articles of Confederation, not junk it) claimed a popular sovereignty. The Constitution would become a political fetish, as the reified and binding will of the People who spoke to ratify. Early strict constitutionalists, like Thomas Jefferson, had no such fetishim (Jefferson thought new constitutions should happen every generation or so). Rather, his sticking to the letter of the constitution was to prevent the growth of the federal government into all kinds of new powers and authorities (a fear that came to pass). Jefferson was not against strong government, but he supported limited government. If there were no concrete limits (like the ones found in a written text), then the federal government would reduce states to provinces (as happened) and become the foreign tyrant that the American Revolution was supposedly against. Many allies of Jefferson joined him in this opposition to wide constitutional interpretation, but some focused more on the erosion of state sovereignty. A major (if not defining) element to early American politics was where sovereignty resided: the federal government, the People (viz. the Constitution and popular elections), or the states.

These positions were not absolute and they were no chosen ideologically. Often actual political actors switched from one position to another due to class considerations. The Confederacy was founded on J.C. Calhoun's ideas of state sovereignty and southern nationalism. But like Calhoun, CSA leaders shifted on the issues. Calhoun became a state sovereigntist when the federal government (under Jackson's administration) threatened the cotton kingdom with high, protectionist, tariffs. CSA officials broke their own commitments when it came to protecting cotton oligarchs from the economics effects of the war, as well as conscripting poor whites to continue the fight. Many northern, free-soilers, joined with the Union's efforts against the slave-power monopoly. Like Jefferson, they feared too much power in a private clique. But man of them (like Salmon Chase) abandoned the Republicans, who were rapidly becoming the party of industrial capital. The new industrial manufacturers (who were becoming, or fusing to, the financial element) increasingly placed sovereignty in the hands of the federal government. As long as they controlled the levers of power, it worked for them. When they felt a threat (populists or radicalized corporatists, like Bob La Follette) they blocked their opponents from power. The point of this overview is simply that support for where sovereignty is located reflects interests, often more so than an ideal polity. Cromwell secured his state by wooing large landholders and London's merchant community. Napoleon enriched budding industrialists and French merchants. These were elements to the location, and preservation, of sovereignty.

The real question, among these movers and shakers, is how the government relates to the supposed unalienable sovereignty of the People. If it exists (and we metaphorically imagine an abstract collective as an individual), who wakes it up? Does Tuck imagine academics or activists are the nervous system alerting the body to imminent danger? Is the sleeping sovereign supposed to naturally wake-up when the vizier's failures make too much noise and stir the People from its sleep? I don't really understand how any of this is anything but ex-post facto idealizing? Per the Hobbesian myth of a primordial assembly, why would not a government simply invent its own legitimacy? Whether a historical justification (Napoleon's plebiscite) or a mythic one (Hobbes' notion or Cromwell's doctrine of providence), either make a government's claims into a reality. The Constitution of 1787 depended upon an idea of majoritarian politics and Lockean representation to make the Constitution an act of popular self-determination. And even as Delaware and North Carolina voted against the Constitution, what choice did they have? Were they going to go it alone? The result is a kind of political legend to explain the current moment.

However, Tuck's point is generally useful. Sovereignty and government should be distinguished to prohibit totalization or other political evils. Ironically, that's why there's something to the Chinese legalist idea of the serene monarchy, explicated here. The sovereign's role is to be extra-political, upholding the realm of politics that operates at the level of government. The sovereign's role is to uphold a particular political society. If the sovereign becomes too involved in micromanaging government, it can lead to the politicization of the sovereign and a challenge to the political order as a whole. Elizabeth Tudor was perhaps one of the greatest monarchic sovereigns, often reserving her judgements from public view. In contrast, even as he was one of England's most godly kings, Charles I opened his sovereignty to challenge. He had become accustomed to political cut and thrust when he helped create popular and parliamentary pressure for war with Spain (the Blessed Revolution of 1622-24). Yet he acted as Prince of Wales. In 1640, facing a hostile Parliament, he dusted off these old tactics. They backfired, creating a divide Parliament, and a population increasingly frustrated with his attempt to manage the people. This anger gave a window to certain presbyterian-parliamentarians, who wanted to established an oligarchy. Charles, rightly, opposed being made into "the doge of Venice" (a fear he often expressed). To Charles' credit, he learned these lessons when it was too late. He would rather die a martyr than become a prisoner. Nevertheless, the confluence of sovereignty and governance bred its own turmoil.

Frankly, if the goods of democracy are to be preserved (which has more to do with economics, but that's another topic), the myth of popular sovereignty should be abandoned. It not only allows the veil to be pulled over peoples' eyes (thinking they have control when they, in fact, do not), but becomes a fetish and idol for political theory. A monarch represents the commonwealth, which includes the people, but the monarch does not act as the people, even if the monarch should act for the people. Why mystify what a king or queen does? Similarly, if the sovereign of a country is a council (as the Ephors were for Sparta, even as it had kings for governance), the same should be the case. They act for the people without claiming to act as the people. Concrete people have all sorts of wants and desires, and perhaps they're contradictory or bad for the whole. Majoritarian procedure in a parliament may be sufficient for their actions, but why use this to throw a blanket over the entire nation? Why pretend that it's my choice when it's not? Popular sovereignty is an effort to brainwash people into thinking the system's choice is actually their choice. Such manufactures the impotent rage that continues to legitimate the system, while also breeding a functional apathy. As the machinery of sovereignty and government becomes increasingly complex, so too does the resultant "deep-state" receive an indirect mandate. There's a reason why the last couple presidents who pursued an independent agenda from the Praetorian deep-state ended up destroyed. Kennedy's familial and personal politics resulted in a bullet to the head; Nixon's shady and manipulative behavior towards his departments resulted in impeachment. Both were internal coups, despite popular mythologizing. Both represented an entrenchment of an oligarchic bureaucracy, filled with technocrats and financiers of varying stripes. But because no sovereign can stand apart from the political cut and thrust (even if a lame or captured one), the pressures of government make action even more impossible.

It's not popular sovereignty that will reassert popular politics against whatever monolith chokes the people. Pace Tuck, plebiscites and government sanctioned participation will never really address substantial causes. Brexit is proof, where a bluff was called and the people (even in a slim margin) rejected European integration. Nearly five years later, it has yet to be implemented. The lack of legitimacy among many (but not all) of Britain's ruling elite has simply stalled out efforts. Effective popular politics, in the US and the UK, depended on people organizing on their own terms. Labour became a viable party because of the labor-union movement. Organizations of farmers and urban laborers created populism and labor-unionism in the US, which not only got FDR elected but created pressure for the limited reforms they wanted. But these organizations derived from class interests, not idealism of political design. Democratic politics, as happened in the past, grow out of interested-based organizing. The role of political ideology, like popular sovereignty, is basically to gut efforts. It was when people gave up hope in the two major parties, as well as the normal channels of authority, new popular options changed the board. In the mean time, you can simply express your own views without worry about an "Overton window" (itself a product of technocratic managed consent). You can simply ignore the fake TV drama of elected politics and pursue wisdom. The less you become enthralled to an abstraction (like The Will of The People) the more you can be free to flourish as God's image.