The Orthosphere

“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”

  Joshua 2:21

A shibboleth is a special kind of password, which is to say a key or badge that opens a social door and grants admission to a social group.  As everyone versed in scripture knowledge knows, shibboleth was at first a word that the lisping Ephramites could not pronounce, and that the Sons of Giliad therefore used to identify the survivors of a shattered Ephramite army.  When a bloodied and bedraggled warrior staggered down to the ford of the Jordan, he was challenged to pronounce the word “shibboleth,” and thereby show his secret badge. Those who pronounced it “sibboleth” were immediately slain.

As I explained some years ago, shibboleths often take the form of sacrilege.  The password that grants admission to one social group is in such cases a violation of the norms of that group’s enemy.  Thus anti-Christian secret societies used to require an aspiring member to trample on a crucifix, spit on a Bible, or otherwise treat the sacred objects and words Christianity as profane.  In on-line culture, such sacrilegious shibboleths are called “shill tests,” and in these tests an aspiring member is required to type words that an undercover agent would find it very hard to type.  As I explained in that long-ago post, to get past the sentries of one group, you must often slay another group’s sacred cow.

A shibboleth is a password that prevents infiltration by spies.  A “scarlet thread” is a secret badge with which a traitor makes himself known to his new compatriots, and is thereby passed over when his new compatriots descend like wolves on the people whose compatriot the traitor only pretends to be.  Like shibboleth, the term “scarlet thread” comes from the Old Testament, and more particularly from the curious tale of a traitor known as Rahab the Harlot.

Rahab the Harlot dwells in the city of Jericho, and when Joshua sends two spies into that city, the two young men somehow fall in with Rahab, who we must never forget is a harlot, and she hides these two handsome young spies in her house.  This house was built on, or rather up against, the city wall; and on its city-wall side had a high window that looked out over the countryside.  It was from this high window that Rahab lowered Joshua’s spies on a “scarlet thread,” after telling them that her people were ripe for conquest because they were rotten with fear.

“Your terror is fallen upon us . . . the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.”

Rahab’s reward for betraying her people is that she and her family will be spared when Jericho is sacked and its citizens are slaughtered.  But to assure their deliverance, Rahab must keep her family in her house (of ill repute), and must display the “scarlet thread” in the front window. of that house.

“Behold, when we come into the land, thou shall bind this thread in the window which thou didst let us down by; and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father’s household, home unto thee” Joshua 2: 18.

Thus a “scarlet thread” is a means whereby a traitor escapes the destruction brought down by his or her treason.  One wonders how many who “miraculously” survive some near-universal destruction owe their deliverance to display of a secret badge or “scarlet thread.”  Rahab was a harlot, so she knew how treachery works.

“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”

Not long after, as every Sunday-school scholar knows, Joshua’s army compasses the city of Jericho and “the walls came a tumbling down.”  Then, as many Sunday-school scholars do not know, before the sack and slaughter begins, a house displaying a “scarlet thread” is sought and a traitorous harlot is saved.   Which was very fortunate for that traitorous harlot and her family, because of Joshua’s army we are told:

“They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”  Joshua 6: 21

Like a shibboleth, a “scarlet thread” is a special kind of password, although it grants its possessor the privilege of escape and not admission.  It is a secret badge with which traitors and spies show their true colors to their true friends, and by which traitors and spies are exempted when their true friends utterly destroy their pretended friends with the edge of the sword.

 “We need to be stronger.  We need to fight back. It’s in the Bible.  If someone hits you, you hit them back, twice as hard, 10 times as hard.” 

Jason Burke, “Israelis Voice Sadness and Defiance over Gaza Protests on U.S. Campuses,” The Guardian.com (May 3, 2024).

This titbit of scripture knowledge is from Joseph Avi Cohen, a retired bank manager in Israel, who was recently asked for his man-on-the-street opinion of the American student protests.  I don’t suppose The Guardian is regular reading among Christian Zionists, but if it were they might be puzzled by Mr. Cohen’s words.  I suspect most Christian Zionists believe the book they call the Bible instructs God’s children to forebear, forgive, and, when all else fails, to hit back with tears and not even half as hard.

I am not sure that even the Old Testament is as vindictive as Mr. Cohen appears to believe, but “forgiveness” is not one of its great themes.  The word forgive appears as often in the Old Testament as it does in the New, but the New Testament is less than one third the length of the Old.  This suggest that forgiveness is roughly three times as important for a Christian as it is for an observant Jew.

Mr. Cohen’s remark is additional confirmation of this disproportion.

Forgive in the Old Testament is also something God does to his people, and is not something his people do, or are enjoined to do, to their enemies.  There is in the Old Testament a great deal about “arrows drunk with blood” and “glittering swords” that “shall devour flesh,” but very little about turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, or volunteering ones coat when ones cloak has been commandeered.

The Old Testament does laude the man who is slow to anger, and who is able to pass over a transgression, but this forbearance and forgiveness is for domestic consumption only.

I have not written this post expressly to condemn Mr. Cohen or his muscular creed.   Indeed, I have often lamented that too many Christians are like the skinny wimp who has sand kicked in his face and does not order the free book from Charles Atlas.

But my more muscular Christianity would not be anything like the ferociously vindictive, ten-teeth-for-a-tooth, gore-spattered, blood-drenched, tribal fury of Mr. Cohen.   And that is because my Bible has 260 chapters that Mr. Cohen’s Bible does not; and because those 260 chapters make all the difference.  I do not think those 260 chapters command me to eat sand until I dry up and blow away, or that they forbid me to order the free book from Charles Atlas, but I do think they make Mr. Cohen’s religion entirely different than mine.

“Whom will ye, then, that I release to you?
Jesus Barabbas, called the Son of Shame,
Or Jesus, Son of Joseph, called the Christ?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  The Divine Tragedy (1871)*

Longfellow here draws on Origen’s remark, in his Commentary on Matthew, that “in many manuscripts it is not contained that Barabbas was also called Jesus, and perhaps rightly so that the name Jesus would not belong to any sinner.”  From this it is supposed that the circumcision name the brigand known as Jesus Bar Abbas was suppressed in later copies of Matthew’s gospel, because pious Christians thought it sacrilegious for the Son of God to share his circumcision name with an infamous criminal.

Origin’s remark is bolstered by a  marginal note in a seventh-century manuscript of Matthew, attributed to both Chrysostom and Anastasius of Sinai, which states::

“In some very ancient manuscripts which I came across I found Barabbas himself also called Jesus, so that in these the question of Pilate ran thus—’Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you?  Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?”

The author from whom I have drawn these quotations translates “Jesus bar Abba” as “Jesus, Son of  the Father,” and tells us that “Father” here denotes a revered teacher and spiritual guide.**    Catholics, of course, still address their teachers and guides as Father, and Protestants convey the same meaning with the title Reverend.  So, by this interpretation, the murderous thief Jesus bar Abba may have been a preacher’s kid gone bad.

Or his name may have a more sinister significance.

Christians have more often translated Barabbas in the way Longfellow did, as meaning “Son of Shame,” or more completely as “Son of Shame and Confusion.”  This translation is countenanced by at least one secular authority who says that abbas was Hebrew for a foreigner ignorant of both the holy language and God’s law.***  Essentially a savage, a barbarian, or an infidel.  Since Barabbas was almost certainly born a Jew, and not a foreigner, his patronymic on this interpretation is an epithet that branded him an outlaw and pariah.

The equivalent English idiom would be Son of a Bitch.

Given the cosmic import of the choice between Jesus 1 and Jesus 2, I am not sure that we cannot accept both explanations of the ruffian’s patronymic.  I am also not sure that those pious Christians were right to suppress Barabbas’s circumcision name.  In fact, I think Longfellow improved on the redacted Scripture when he set down the Question that Pilate put to the Jews.

“Whom will ye, then, that I release to you?
Jesus Barabbas, called the Son of Shame,
Or Jesus, Son of Joseph, called the Christ?”

Which Jesus, in other words, will you receive into your midst as your spiritual guide? Will it be  Jesus 1, in whom I have found no fault, and whom some have called the Son of God?   Or will it be Jesus 2, in whom I have found very terrible faults, and whom you yourselves have until now called the Son of Shame?

* * * * *

Now I must acknowledge that most Christians see Barabbas (circumcision name suppressed) as the type of everyman, since  Jesus died in the place of Barabbas just as he died in the place of every sinner who is saved.  This is how Barabbas is represented in such popular Christian songs as Eldrid Hill’s “Barabbas” and Josiah Queen’s “I am Barabbas.”  In fact, it may implied in Longfellow’s poem, where Barabbas, awaiting execution, reflects,

“Barabbasis my name,
Barabbas,the Son of Shame,
Is the meaning I suppose
I’m no better than the best
And whether worse than the rest
Of my fellow-men, who knows?”

There is much to be said for Barabbas as the type of everyman, but this strikes me as an undersized interpretation.  There is, for instance, no suggestion that Barabbas was moved to repentant by his gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice.  What is more, when we see Barabbas as the type of all sinners who are saved, we do not see the significance of who actually saved Barabbas.

* * * * *

In answer to Pilate’s Question, “Whom will ye, then, that I release to you?”  it is the mob that cries  out (in Longfellow’s version),

“Not this man, but Barabas!”

Not Jesus 1, whom some say is the Son of God, but Jesus 2, whom all say is the Son of Shame and Confusion.  Or, if we take Barabbas to mean the Son of the Father, we must suppose they are saying for the Son of the Father of Lies. 

Thus, when the mob cries out,

“Not this man, but Barabas!”

it asks to receive the Son of the Father of Lies as its teacher and spiritual guide.  And the mob immediately follows in the footsteps of its new teacher and guide by murdering an innocent man.

Pilate: ‘What then will ye
That I should do with him that is called Christ?

The People: Crucify him!

Pilate: Why, what evil hath he done?
Lo, I have found no cause of death in him;
I will chastise him, and then let him go.

The People (more vehemently): Crucify him! Crucify him!”

* * * * *

Barabbas is not the type of everyman, but is rather the type of the Antichrist.  He is Jesus 2!.  The type of everyman is the mob who must choose which Jesus wiill be released to do his Father’s work among them.  That mob made its choice, and received into itself the person and spirit of Jesus Barabbas, Jesus, Son of Shane ad Confusion, Jesus the Son of a Bitch.

Every man who comes after is likewise asked Pilate’s Question:

“Whom will ye, then, that I release to you?
Jesus Barabbas, called the Son of Shame,
Or Jesus, Son of Joseph, called the Christ?”

And as one old author explains, a great many answer Pilate’s Question one way with their lips and another way in their lives, thereby showing which Jesus they actually follow, which spirit they truly received.  The crowd’s answer, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” was, as one old author put it,

“A conduct which thousands have reprobated, and yet have in effect generally followed.”†

*) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Tragedy (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1872)
**) Edward Williams Byron Nicholson, The Gospel According to the Hebrews: Its Fragments Translated and Annotated (London: C.K. Paul, 1879), pp. 62, 141-142.
***) George Gliddon, Otia Ægyptiaca: Discourses on Egyptian Archaeology and Hieroglyphical Discoveries (London: James Madison, 1846), p. 118.
†) James Wood, A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, two vols. (New York: Griffin and Rudd, 1813), vol. 1, p 140.

“The extraordinary Red stress on confession betrays the extreme importance they attach to it . . . . Something intrinsic in communism makes this confession phenomenon indispensable to it; it can’t exist without it.” 

Edward Hunter, Brainwashing (1956)

We normally associate the word confession with an admission of guilt, as when a criminal confesses to his crime, or when a Catholic unburdens himself in the confessional.  We may however begin to suspect that there is more to confession that this when we consider that many Christian churches use the word confession as a synonym for creed.  Thus, we have the Westminster Confession, or the Augsburg Confession.

This second usage is much closer to the original meaning of the word, which was to admit some truth together. Con (together) + fateri (to admit) = confession.

The Christian confessions are described as “confessions of faith,” so that a “confessor” is one who agrees with every article in the public declaration of faith—the confession—with which he agrees.  With this in mind, we can see that, strictly speaking, a wrongdoer confesses only when he is confronted with an accusation and, rather than deny it, he agrees that it is true.

As noted in my epigraph, confession was an important part of Communist mind control, and confession remains an important element in contemporary Leftism.  We see this when a public assembly opens with collective acknowledgement of an “historic injustice,” such as slavery or the Holocaust, or with the avowal that the assembly is taking place on “stolen land.”  Participants in these rituals do not, so far as I know, thump themselves on the chest in the manner of penitent Catholics, but their public confessions tell us that they are engaged in ritual behavior.

Confession is ultimately submission to the authority with which one joins in admitting the truth of the confession, and it becomes a double submission when that truth is that one has one’s self been bad.  If a policeman accuses me of speeding and I confess, I am agreeing that the officer is not only correct about the velocity of my vehicle, but that he is also correct in thinking that the velocity of my vehicle is the concern of the police and the politicians who tell him what to do.

When I admit the crime, I submit to the officer and the official world of which he is a part.  I acknowledge their authority and place myself in their power.

Once we see the connection between confession, submission, and power, we will begin to understand why confession is so central in mind control.  If I, for instance, confess to whiteness, transphobia, and a preference for plastic straws, I submit to the official world that proscribes whiteness, transphobia, and a preference for plastic straws.  I confess that that world is the correct world, and that I, myself, have wronged.

To confess a truth is submission.  It is a double submission when the truth I confess is that I have wronged.  It is a triple submission—an absolute humiliation or abasement—when the wrongs that I confess are preposterous and absurd.

“I confess to almighty Gaia,
And to you, my brothers and sisters,
That I have greatly sinned;
Through my unprogressive thoughts,
And in my non-inclusive words,
In carbon footprints I have made,
And reparations I have failed to pay,
Through my fault, through my fault,
Through my most grievous fault;
Therefore I ask blessed Harriet Tubman,
All BIPOCs and queers,
To pray for me to Mama Earth and the Arc of History.

Humiliation and abasement are preparations for instruction, for one acutely feels the need for instruction when one has just confessed to gross errors and preposterous wrongs.  Propaganda is combined with confession because the ego is naturally proud, and therefor resistant to instruction and correction.  Rites of Leftist contrition confess, most essentially, a desperate and crying need for instruction.

“‘Learning’ and confession are inseparable from brainwashing . . . . Learning in this sense means only political teaching from the communist standpoint.  Confession is an integral part of the rites.”**

Propaganda is also combined with confusion because confusion creates a feeling of helplessness, and hence intense craving for help.  Confession plants the idea of moral inferiority; confusion plants the idea of intellectual inferiority.  The means is to set the mind a puzzle that cannot be solved, and to thereby break the thinker’s confidence in his independent power to make sense of the world.  This is done by battering his brain with mumbo-jumbo, false logic, and contradiction.

“Brainwashing is a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him.”***

Curiously, the effectiveness of confusion positively correlates with the intelligence of the one who is confused.  A stupid man is confused most of the time, so he is hardly discouraged by the discovery that there is one more thing in this world that he does not understand.  His brain has been befogged since birth.  It is the intelligent man whose will can can be broken on the rack of confusion.

Communists learned this from Pavlov’s experiments, although wily men have understood the demoralizing power of mumbo-jumbo for a very long time.  What Pavlov first discovered is, of course, that a dog can be conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.  This conditioning is accomplished by repeatedly ringing a bell when the dog is fed, until the dog at last reacts to the sound of the bell as it reacts to the presence of the food.  What Pavlov next discovered is that a dog thus conditioned will be demoralized, perhaps even suffer a nervous breakdown, if the sound of a bell is sometimes accompanied by food, and sometimes is not.

The demoralizing effect is worse in an intelligent dog that had figured out the old bell-chow connection, and was therefore proud to think it had figured out how the world works.†. This dog feels the defeat of its intellect when it fails to find the hidden meaning in a new pattern, which is not in fact a pattern, and which has in fact no meaning.   This may be why intelligent men are so often sedated and seduced by preposterous theories.

*) Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1956), p. 237.
**) Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 222.
***) Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 223.
†) John B. McConaughy, “A Review of Soviet Psychological Warfare,” Military Review, 40.9 (Dec. 1960), pp. 3-13.

My dear friend Bruce Charlton – an Orthospherean from before our first days and indeed the moderator at his own site of the discussion in which we decided to call this blog “the Orthosphere,” a pen friend of mine for years beforehand, and an honored contributor here still (so far as WordPress is concerned, he can post here anything he likes) – has it seems taken my recent post on the difficulties that bedevil radical ontological pluralism as a philosophical challenge. It was not intended as such, but so be it. It would be cheap of me to ignore his response, so, here goes: a fisking, alas.

At his own site, far more influential than ours, he writes:

Kristor, of The Orthosphere, is very good at expounding his own metaphysical assumptions (which are essentially those of Thomistic Roman Catholicism); but when it comes to making a comparative evaluation of different metaphysical “systems”… well, he just doesn’t ever do it!

I used to do it. But after four decades of work on it I moved on to other problems, because it became clear to me on the basis of a wide ranging comparative evaluation of different metaphysical systems that the traditional, classical Platonico-Aristotelian system of the West, and so of the Church (Roman and Orthodox, and thus derivatively of Protestantism), simply works better than the alternatives (along the way I considered process metaphysics, Tychism (of Peirce and of later quantum thinkers), Bergsonian philosophy, advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Sufism, Spinozan and Eleatic monism, Democritean materialism, Deism, LaPlacean determinism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and a number of others (indeed, I even for a few weeks seriously entertained pagan polytheism of the Viking and Greek sorts (on account of my interest in nature mysticism and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were both taken seriously by many serious people), and later of the Mormon sort; come to think of it, I suppose the only major systems I did not investigate were those of Gnosticism (which seemed silly prima facie, like New Age) and Neo-Platonism (which I figured was just Platonism, and I’d get around to it (I did))). The classical metaphysics of the West subsumes all the good bits of the other systems. After a while indeed it seemed to me that most of those other systems were either protoevangelia or partial quotations and borrowings from the mature Christian metaphysical tradition.

In a recent post; Kristor discusses the matter of whether reality is ultimately one (monism) or many (pluralism). By his argument, Kristor apparently supposes that he has logically rejected pluralism as in essence incoherent, therefore necessarily wrong.

On the contrary, I suppose that reality is both a Many and a One. It looks that way to me: I suffer at every moment a Many that is at One, so that many disparate things hang together coherently, indeed immaculately, and always. The difficulty then is to reconcile these two notions.

We run into trouble when we dully suppose – allured by an Ockhamian temptation to improper reduction – that reality is either simply pluralist or simply monist. Neither of those options can be correct, because they both founder immediately on our daily experience – on experience per se, so far as it has been ever vouchsafed to us. At every moment we all apprehend both a Many and a One. There’s no way around it.

Yet what he has done in his discourse is merely to demonstrate that when someone has accepted the assumptions of monism – then swapped out the assumptions that everything is one and replaced it with an assumption of pluralism, the result does not make sense.

I am not a monist. Monism is inadequate to experience. And it is logically incoherent; indeed, it refutes itself: on monism, there can be no such thing as an argument for monism. So, I have not accepted the assumptions of monism.

Kristor’s argument does not at all mean that pluralism is necessarily incoherent; for example when pluralism is one part of a different set of fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality.

On radical ontological pluralism, entities have nothing essentially to do with each other, as a matter of their common basic being. In that case, they cannot together form an integral cosmos, for there is no way to obtain a system of entities out of entities that can have nothing to do with each other. We find that there is an integral cosmos. Ergo, ¬ radical ontological pluralism. QED.

Bruce has not addressed this argument.

Perhaps he advocates something other than radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it, so that my argument does not really touch his metaphysical opinions. Or perhaps he does think that radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it is true, but has in mind metaphysical axioms that render it agreeable to our experience of an integral cosmos. At least in the conversation so far – three posts, now, counting this one – he has not been forthcoming about either of those alternatives.

Now if on the other hand plural entities *do* have something essentially to do with each other, why then they can well proceed to form together an integral cosmos – to have relations with each other, to exert causal effects upon each other, and so forth, and so together to form a world system, a cosmos. But if they do have this thing in common, the question then becomes, whence that thing? Is it in them essentially or necessarily? Why? How did it get into them in the first place?

Excursus: So we get to the familiar cosmological arguments.

NB: on radical ontological pluralism, none of the cosmological arguments can get underway; for, on that ontology, there can be no such thing as a cosmos, from which such arguments might proceed.

And perhaps Kristor regards his own assumptions as necessarily true because he does not acknowledge that they lead to any fundamental problems.

For example, I think he does not acknowledge the ineradicable depth of the problem of explaining genuine free agency for Men in a reality conceptualized as created from nothing by an “omni-God.”

Nah, this is easy. It is not logically possible to create actualities, that as actual can act, in any way other than as free, i.e., *as capable of action:* of decision among real options, thus also (to boot) of wicked decisions. Easy.

Nor do I think Kristor appreciates the ineradicable depth of the problem of accounting for the existence of evil in a reality wholly created by a wholly Good (and omnipotent) God.

Again, this is easy. If creatures are real, then they can really act; and if they can really act, then they can really choose between options, some of which are necessarily suboptimal. Their knowledge being finite and therefore imperfect, some of them are almost certain to choose unwisely and suboptimally. Some do, and catastrophe ensues. A sad situation, but unavoidable if you want actual and free creatures to begin with, who can do things like love, create, worship, enjoy …

Easy.

I think Kristor does not acknowledge the depth of these problems, because he is satisfied by those abstract and complex “answers” provided by Thomism.

Actually, I figured out theodicy on my own, before I began to read Aquinas seriously. I got started on it because I was personally and deeply engaged in a struggle to understand a massive horrid evil that permanently befell my innocent son, then just a boy. So far as I yet know, the solution is original with me. Once you see it, the solution is easy. So easy that it becomes obvious that there just is no Problem of Evil. There is rather only confusion about evil and actuality.

I limned the theodicy in a few sentences just supra. It took me a decade, and hundreds of pages of work, to figure it out.

And (to complete the circle) these are answers that themselves assume the metaphysical primacy of abstractions.

To talk of abstractions – indeed, to talk at all – is to employ abstractions. There is no way around it. So, never mind this objection: it tells with equal minuscule force against all language. If abstraction is bad per se, then the abstraction that abstraction is bad is itself bad. The notion that abstraction is bad per se refutes itself. Abstraction then is not eo ipso bad.

Kristor – following traditional RC teaching – assumes the fundamental and necessary truth of God’s omniscience / omnipotence / omnipresence (etc.) – and these are abstractions. Similarly; creation from nothing (ex nihilo) is assumed to be necessary, and that is an abstraction. More fundamentally; Kristor’s understanding of God as God, is an abstract one: his understanding of God is in terms of the definitional necessity of God having certain abstract attributes – such as those above.

Bruce on the other hand talks of God by using different abstractions. So, what? How is it possible to talk of God at all, pray – or of  anything else whatever, for that  matter – other than by employing abstract concepts? The question then is not whether this or that person uses abstract concepts, but rather whether the abstract concepts they use are both coherent and adequate to experience.

Radical ontological pluralism simply *cannot* adequate to experience, inasmuch as it proposes that the myriad entities of the Many are noncontingent; as such, they can have nothing to do with each other – this is just part of what it means to say that they are noncontingent – so that they *cannot* conspire to such a world as we experience.

Thus I propose something a bit less radical than radical ontological pluralism; namely, the traditional pluralist teaching of the Church, and of Western philosophy in the main stem from its root in Plato (who got his chops in the schools of Syria – of the Hebrews, i.e. (his Forms are the ancient Hebrew types, in terms of which – in types of which – the scriptures are written)), in which each one of the Many is supposed to be the providential fruit of an One, without at all escheating the actuality of each entity among the Many.

The reason this teaching is traditional is that it works better than the alternatives.

Although we can note that such a focus [on abstractions] seems to date from early in the history of Christianity (albeit there is no evidence of it in the contemporary eye-witness account of the Fourth Gospel) …

Even if there were no such evidence in John’s Gospel – a hard notion to square with his prologue thereto – no matter. We can see it in his students, Polycarp and Ignatius, and in the others of his school. Of course; for, it is not possible to communicate metaphysical or theological propositions in any way other than by employment of abstract concepts. Again, the idea that abstract concepts are by nature suspect is itself just such an abstract concept.

… we can still ask why is it that abstraction occupies such a fundamental position in Christian metaphysics?

OK, wait a minute here; how do you propose to discuss metaphysics without employing conceptual abstractions? Metaphysics *just is* a discourse about, and employing, conceptual abstractions. Dude, it isn’t even physics: it’s metaphysics.

For Kristor (and apparently for most Christians since some time after the ascension of Jesus) there can be no such thing as Christianity except from within the perspective of The Church (however that “The” is defined).

What does that tell you? We’ve got billions of Christians treating Christianity in the traditional way to which Bruce objects, for two thousand years. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, and even all the churches of the East who rejected Chalcedon. Then Bruce shows up and has … himself. Not that Bruce is nothing. He’s a formidable guy. But, really? Really? Whom does he trust?

Think of it this way. The market, composed of millions of highly qualified and interested investors, traders, analysts, etc., all arrive together – against each other, NB – at a current valuation of Apple at $x. Bruce values it differently. Who is likely to be right? Bruce, or all of them? I mean, come on.

This is why Tradition is utile. It saves so much time and trouble, such as Bruce and I have engaged in.

For Kristor; Thomism is just true, the nature of Christianity derives from the truth and necessity of the RCC; and therefore all legitimately Christian futures must build upon these.

Sorry, this just isn’t so. Indeed, it’s backward. I’ve proceeded as an honest investigator, and have learnt thereby (not always altogether happily, given my initial preferences) that, after 2,000 years of careful investigation and conversation, the RCC just has it almost completely right, mirabile dictu. Who’d a thunk it? I sure didn’t, to begin with.

I didn’t decide that Aquinas was just right about everything before thinking about any of it. Rather, I thought about it, and eventually – often after much difficulty – figured out that Aquinas had been right about almost everything after all. With respect to the rest, the jury is still out. Still working on it …

For what it’s worth, I’m a Whiteheadian Thomist (so that lots of the ontological pluralism that Bruce loves is woven into my metaphysics). I’m sure that would scandalize Thomas, at least until he heard my arguments …

So! These apparently trivial interpersonal debates between myself and Kristor – or, failures to debate, as I regard them – are like the tip of an iceberg of differences; that I regard as ultimately sustained by a deep and long-term problem of wrong metaphysical assumptions about Christianity being instead regarded as necessary and true metaphysical assumptions.

OK, but then let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Which metaphysical principles are wrong?

NB:  Bruce has not in his response actually addressed the inherent difficulty of the radical ontological pluralism I noticed in my post the other day. Namely: does it really work to suppose that reality is at the most fundamental level constituted of many utterly independent and non-contingent – and, thus, utterly unrelated – entities?

Is radical ontological pluralism coherent – whether in itself, as a proposal for the construction of world systems, or in re our quotidian experience of just such a world system?

So far as I can tell, it is not. For, how does one go about constituting a coherent world out of utterly independent entities, that have nothing at bottom in common, or therefore to do with each other? How does one build an integral world out of mutually incommensurable entities?

This, NB, is the nub of the problem of the Many and the One. How do you get a coherent, integral universe out of a set of disparate events, that are all different from each other?

The traditional answer is that, while they are indeed disparate and different, each of the Many has something in common, in virtue of which they can find each other mutually intelligible, so that they can then accommodate themselves to each other in such a way as to constitute together an integral world. And the thing they have in common, according to tradition, is that they are all members of a communion with their common origin, and thus with each other.

No common origin, no common basis of communication, then no possibility of communion, or then of any common world. Rather, then, only islands of being, cut off from all others. Not a Many, then – not a set of members, not a group or genus – but rather just a Democritean chaos.

No One → no coordinate Many; no coordinate Many → no cosmos.

It is hard indeed to see how a coherent integral cosmos could be accomplished in any other way than in virtue of a prior One. It would be good to hear how it might be done. Until such an account has been provided, skepticism about the notion is bound to perdure.

It would be terrific to hear of such an account. Useful and possibly productive conversation on the topic could then proceed. Otherwise, not.

“But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.  And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.” 

Matthew 21: 38-39.

One event only has made the Holy Land holy.  It is an event that was in many ways odd.  It was certainly quite unlike conventional notions of a holy and sanctifying event.   Harps were absent; the air was most likely heavy and foul; diaphanous light was nowhere to be seen.  It was, to be frank, a shabby event, on a grubby day, in a squalid place.  And I am sorry to say that the conduct of every man who took part was disgraceful.

There may be other holy lands on other planets, reverenced by beings quite different than ourselves; but this is the Holy Land of men.  They say everyone gets the face he deserves.  I say all planets and beings get the holy land they deserve.

Ours, the holy land of mankind, is a shabby, squalid, grubby place of disgrace.

In Scripture, the word grace means favor, so when we read that Noah “found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” we are being told that Noah found favor.  He became, not without reason, God’s favorite.  In a proverb it is said of God, “Surely he scorneth the scorners but he giveth grace to the lowly,” and we are thereby supplied with the antonym of the word grace.  That antonym is scorn.

We have another proverb from the playwright poet William Congreve, commonly rendered as “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”  Few men pass through life without seeing this confirmed, either intimately or at some short distance.  The actual lines from Congreve are,

“Heaven has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.”

The woman in question is raging and furious because she is no longer her former lover’s favorite.  She has been scorned, has fallen out of favor, has been disgraced.  In scripture disgrace likewise means withdrawal of God’s favor (see Jeremiah 14:21).

What Congreve tells us, and all experience confirms, is that the withdrawal of favor very often makes the former favorite insane.  It sometimes causes the former favorite to seek the reasons he or she fell from favor, and to try to reform.  But since men and women are, for the most part, narcissistic and vainglorious beings, this does not happen very often.

It certainly did not happen when God’s favor was withdrawn in our Holy Land.

Many Christians are in the habit of chanting that the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world, but I daresay very few consider that he first took away what had been the world’s grace.  God’s former favorites fell out of favor, and much of their conduct ever since, like that of Congreve’s jilted woman, has been predictably disgraceful. 

Rage, hate and fury; fury, hate and rage.  At God, and more especially at God’s new favorite.  There is, it appears, no jealousy so deathless as the jealousy of men who no longer find grace in the eyes of God.

All of this was, of course, foretold in a  parable that is hot, strangely enough, a homiletic favorite.  This is sometimes called, “The Parable of the Householder Demanding Fruit from His Vineyard.”  In the parable said householder plants and trims an excellent vineyard, and then graciously lets it to some favored husbandmen (i.e. caretakers).  The householder thereupon travels to a far country.  After a time, the householder sends servants to receive the fruits of his vineyard, and these servants the favored husbandmen stone and kill.  At last, the householder sends his son, thinking that even the most obstreperous husbandmen will respect his flesh and blood.  But he is mistaken, as the line in my epigraph relate.

The householder therefore withdraws his favor from the obstreperous and homicidal husbandmen.  In modern terms, the former favorites are fired, sacked, given the boot.  Because the householder’s former favorites rendered no fruit and murdered his son, they no longer find grace in his eyes.  They are now and forever disgraced.

Thus, when Jesus asked his disciples what the householder would do to his former favorites, they correctly answer.

“He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.”

This parable of course foretells the disgrace of the Jews, the termination of their days of employment as God’s favorites.  As Jews (not as individual human beings), they are scorned from that day hence (their former status having been been “miserably destroyed”), and this withdrawal of God’s favor has, predictably, made made many of these former favorites insane.

I have said that our Holy Land is a place of disgrace.  No doubt many of you are itching to remind me that it is a place of grace also.  This is true, but that is not something of which Christians needs to be reminded.  Christians remembers without bidding that Christ rose from the dead.  Christians must be reminded that, before that glorious advent of grace, “the veil of the temple was rent in twain.”

“From the top to the bottom,” in case there is any doubt.

Our Holy Land must a place of disgrace because we are narcissistic and vainglorious beings who must be reminded that God has no fixed favorites.  He does not love us for what we are, but for what we do.  He could snap the Cross in two, just as he rent the veil of the temple in twain.  Disgrace may come to any man, any tribe, any church.

Jesus loves me, but I know,
It may not always be thus so,
Serve him well, he has your back,
Otherwise you get the sack.

Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
But he can let me go!

Leftism rules. That’s obvious to anyone who can think accurately. But the Left thinks the Right rules. And so do many normies. Why can’t some people see the obvious?

[I call our enemies “the Left.” Yes, traditional American politics is dead; we are in uncharted waters. But supporting unlimited immigration, divorce and abortion, for example, is leftist by definition. Our enemies are leftistish, whatever else they are.]

The following goes a long way toward explaining the conundrum. In it, “racist” is a stand-in for anyone who shows any kind of opposition to the current System:

*

In America, it’s not formally illegal to be a racist. But the dominant culture defines racists to be bad people so racists are always subject to punishment.

Being in harmony with the culture, punishment of racists is rarely formally illegal, and is often carried out by creative interpretations of existing law, which is not formally anti-racist. (See, e.g., Daniel Penny.)

Officially, you can be a racist if you want. This makes leftist dominance plausibly deniable. Unofficially, they will punish you if you’re a racist. This gives teeth to the leftist System.

Remember, this does not only apply to “racists.” It applies to anyone who speaks or acts, even one time, against any aspect of the current system.

“It is absurd and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political ‘Right’ to fail to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of the economy. . . . We must . . . uphold that beyond the economic sphere an order of higher political, spiritual, and heroic values has to emerge . . . an order [of] the things worth living and dying for.”

Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953)*

The Z-man’s latest post discusses the rise of a Romantic Right.  He wrote this post in response to am on-line kerfuffle over some video celebrating the mundane joys of contemporary Babbittry, or what might be called the Griller Dream.  Apparently some Griller posted a video of himself living the Griller Dream, and the new Romantic Right sent up a digital howl of derision.

“There’s more to life than Work and Grilling!  Or at least there ought to be!”

The Z-man sort of gets it and sort of does not, since the American “Right” almost always sees Romantics as men of the Left.   This is both a consequence and a cause of the profound philistinism of the American Right, and I would say one large reason for its failure.  If an American Griller would only set down his hamburger flipper and think for a moment, he would realize that materialism has always been the rock and foundation of the Left.  If he unfuddled his head by cutting back on the brewskies, this Griller might even begin to suspect that there is something distinctly Lefty about his beloved Capitalism

“Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the center of which is constituted of technology, science, production, ‘productivity,’ and ‘consumption.’”*

These lines are again from Julius Evola, than whom very few men can claim to be farther Right.  And he is correct.  Capitalists and Marxists disagree over details of administration, but they answer with one voice when asked what life is all about.

It is about going to work and grilling!

In other words, Capitalism and Marxism are the two schools of what Thomas Carlyle called “Pig Philosophy.”

“The Universe . . .  is an immeasurable Swine’s-trough . . . . Moral evil is unattainability of Pig’s wash; moral good, attainability ditto . . . . Paradise [is] unlimited attainability of Pig’s-wash . . . . and the duty of all Pigs, at all times, [is] to diminish the quantity of unattainable and increase that of attainable.  All knowledge and device and effort ought to be directed thither only; Pig Science, Pig Enthusiasm and Devotion have this one aim.  It is the Whole Duty of Pigs.”**

The boast of Capitalism is that it fulfills the Whole Duty of Pigs efficiently.  The boast of Marxism is that it fulfills the Whole Duty of Pigs equitably.  Beyond that, there is not a speck of difference.

The real Right has always rejected Pig Philosophy with profound disgust, protesting that Pig’s-wash is nothing but a means to higher ends.  To say otherwise is as upside-down and backwards as putting businessmen—or even worse, workers—at the head of Church and State.  The real Right has never touted “bourgeois values”—safety, respectability, a careful calculation of profit and loss.  The real Right has instead championed “aristocratic values.”  It has taught that some things are worth dying for, honor is more important than respectability, and that all bean-counting economists and statisticians should go to hell.

Or as Evola put is,

“We must declare in an uncompromising way that in a normal civilization the economy and economic interests—understood as the satisfaction of material needs and their more or less artificial appendices—have always played, and always will play, a subordinate function . . . . that beyond the economic sphere an order of higher political, spiritual, and heroic values has to emerge . . . an order solely in terms of which are to be defined the things worth living and dying for.”*

We are so far sunk in bourgeois values and Pig Philosophy that even supposed men of the Right find it hard to say just what “higher political, spiritual, and heroic values” might be.  Our politics is nothing but a wrangle between Capitalists and Marxists over the correct way to manufacture and distribute Pig’s-wash.  Our Churches are little more than soup kitchens with stained glass windows.  And when it comes to “heroic values,” one’s choice is limited to giving one’s life to the spread Pig Philosophy on either Capitalist or Marxist lines.

Stripping away all on-line drama, the Alternative Right was always, at heart, a rejection of Pig Philosophy (i.e. materialism) in both its bourgeois and proletariat forms.  It was almost entirely a movement of romantic young men who felt in their souls that,

There’s more to life than Work and Grilling!  Or at least there ought to be!

* * * * *

“But it is not the danger of the noble man to turn a good man, but lest he should become a blusterer, a scoffer, or a destroyer.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885)

What Nietzsche called a “good man,” I have called a Griller.  Nietzsche’s “good man” is respectable, he plays it safe, he makes careful calculations of profit and loss.  Nietzsche’s “noble man,” on the other hand, lives by aristocratic values—values that transcend Pig’s-wash and are not universal in the herd.  Death is not for hi, the greatest evil.  He places his sense of personal honor before the demand for social respectability.  And he says to hell with all bean-counting economists and statisticians.

A “noble man” is higher than a “good man,” but as Nietzsche says, he can all too easily become something far worse.  A noble man falls into ignobility through disillusionment.

“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope.  And then they disparaged all high hopes.”***

They become that most pathetic of all pests, the cynic who has lost his faith and now insists that others must lose their faith as well.

Outwardly the fallen noble man may resemble a Griller, but he has none of the redeeming qualities of that amiable buffoon.  He is not generous; he is not cheerful; he knows no joy,  He is rather cold, and bitter, and addicted to pleasure in its crudest (i.e. gourmet) form.

“Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim.  ‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they.”***

The fallen noble man carries about him an offensive odor because he is what our old colleague Thomas Bertonneau called “subscendent,” appeasing his frustrated hunger for transcendence with food of the flesh.  What is worse, the fallen noble man becomes a destroyer of nobility, and of the longing for nobility, because he hates what he has lost.  His cynicism is at bottom a form of jealous spite.

“Then broke the wings of their spirit; and it creepeth about, and defileth where it gnaweth.  Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.  A trouble and a terror is the hero to them.”***

We should welcome the rise of a Romantic Right because this is a return of the real Right, and we should damn the phony bourgeois “Right” to hell.  But we must never forget that this higher path is the more dangerous path, because a noble man has farther to fall.

“But my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul!  Maintain holy thy highest hope! Thus spake Zarathustra.” ***

*) Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, trans. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, n.d.), pp. 166-167.
**) Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850), pp. 28-29.
***) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Commons (New York: The Dial Press, 1928), chap. 8.

James of all men must have understood the perennial problem of the Many and the One, profoundly. The title of his book is manifest evidence of his comprehension of the difficulty: A Pluralistic Universe.

NB: universe.

Here it is: how can an otherwise utterly solipsistic Many, that as an aboriginal Many, with none of them any basic original connection to any One, so that each and every of that Many have no inherent connection to each other – so that, e.g., they have nothing essentially in common as a forecondition of their very being – constitute together a coherent cosmos: a universe? How can an utterly unrelated set of events coordinate and indeed integrate in an intelligible whole – a whole intelligible as such, so that science about it is within it possible? How can a coherent and intelligible universe result from a radically raw polyverse?

Excursus: The raw pluralist ontology amplifies to an infinite degree the problem for Cartesian dualism of the radical ontological incongruence, and thus the inconceivable causal connection, between the utterly different sorts of entities that constitute res mensa and res extensa. For, what is the medium of connection between utterly disparate entities of a Many in which each such entity is radically solipsist? In which, i.e., each eternal and thus absolutely disparate entity, being each itself eternal, and thus nowise contingent upon any other, has nothing to do with any other? Has, i.e., no reason to care about any other, or even to know of any other – let alone, to accommodate itself to any other?

Relation per se of entities – any relation whatever –  is the death of raw ontological pluralism, in which each entity is eternal, and thus nowise dependent upon or derivative from some One, or then from any other; for, an eternal cannot anywise continge. It is therefore the inescapable necessity of a transcendent and thus ubiquitously immanent Lógos, upon which all others continge, and are therefore able to interact, and coordinate, so as to procure a cosmos.

Excursus: it should be noted, prominently, that temporal and spatial relations among entities are subject to the same difficulty. If the purely and originally plural ontological entities of the Many have no fundamental relation to each other, that is founded in some prior matrix of relation – which, as logically prior, must be causally prior – then they cannot be temporally or spatially related. As each of them must be thus unrelated temporally (and spatially), they must then also be each atemporal; which is to say, eternal, and so, changeless.

Radical ontological plurality arrives then at Eleatic immobility.

As with mere atheism, mere pluralism can’t cut the necessary ontological ice. From the zero of the Lógos – which is to say, from atheism – there is no way (other than, “That’s just how things are” (which is in itself a Theist Argument)) to get to intelligible concrete actuality, or then to science; to human knowledge of any sort. Likewise, from the zero of the transcendent ultimate One (who is the Lógos) – which is to say, from ontological pluralism (or, as it used to be called, naïve polytheism, aka chaotic theomachy) – it is impossible to obtain a coherent coordinate Many, that can together cobble up an ordered cosmos.

You can’t even get a theomachy, or for that matter a conflict of any sort, except in virtue of a prior context of basic agreement. Conflict per se presupposes a prior general agreement. Any such context implicitly, and necessarily, then ultimately presupposes the One.

By the same token, even ontological creaturely freedom presupposes the One. One cannot be free except in respect to some other. Freedom in respect to what, exactly? Freedom in respect to nothing at all is just chaos, after all.

There’s just no way out from under God. Other than, of course, the Hell of alienation from him.

Sorry. The situation is quite digital: obedience to the Lógos, or … disobedience, with all that such entails.

All talk then of creativity independent of the Lógos is just noise, wishful thinking; is the high wide road to perdition.

“‘There is something very big going on, that I can see, and what it is maybe I shall learn in good time, or in bad time . . . . Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,’ said Treebeard; ‘they mostly concern the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future.  I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me.” 

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Two Towers (1954), chap. 4.

George Washington famously warned Americans against “foreign entanglements,” drawing their attention to the possibilities of their “detached and distant situations” and exhorting them not to “forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation.”  Parents should give similar advice to their children, and should not, as so many do, extoll the life of boundless concern and bottomless solicitude for other people’s troubles.  Jesus told his disciples “to take . . . no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”  He might have added that the same can be said for strangers and their “things.”

Those strangers shall take thought for the things of themselves (not your things), so you had better take thought for the things that are yours.

There is at my university a great deal of fatuous blather about “selfless service,” this mostly from ruthless careerists who have elbowed their way into the high offices where fatuous blather is expected.  I am  in my dotage more inclined to follow the example of Treebeard, since a man who does not take his own side will have on his side nobody at all.  Everyone should remember what happens to Boxer, that exemplar of selfless service in Orwell’s Animal Farm.  He works and works for the great cause of the Animal Farm, and when his health is finally broken,

“Sure enough, there in the yard was a large closed van, drawn by two horses, with lettering on its side and a sly-looking man in a low-crowned bowler hat sitting on the driver’s seat . . . .‘Fools!  Fools! Shouted Benjamin . . . do you not see what is written on the side of that van . . . . ‘Alfred Simmons, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler . . . Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal.  Kennels Supplied.’”*

This is precisely how those who live by the motto “Selfless Service” will be served.  They will be exploited until they are broken, and then they will be sold for parts.

* * * *

“What is not supposed to be my concern!  First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes.  Only my cause is never to be my concern.  ‘Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!’”

Max Stirner The Ego and His Own (1885)

Stirner is today largely forgotten, but he was in his day a philosopher of some note.  His point here is that every cause under the sun makes claims on my attention, my concern, my time, my pocketbook, even my body and blood.  And yet those causes recognize no reciprocal claim on my part.  My part, so far as every cause is concerned, is to play Boxer, not Treebeard—to slave and at last be slaughtered in the “Great Wars” of some wizards or some pigs.

*) Chap. 9
**) Max Stirner The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1907 [1882]), p. 3.

I have a son enrolled at the University of Texas.  To avoid being late to work, he was yesterday obliged to wade through a clash of pro-Palestinian protestors and Austin police, where the former were being arrested and the latter were, to his mind, remarkably numerous and energetic.  These were not qualities he had formerly associated with the Austin police.  “Nowhere to be seen” and “Wadya gonna do?” had been, he thought, the mottos of that thin blue line.

Walking to work or class, my son was last year from time to time forced to jog because a psychotic derelict with a machete would playfully pursue him on Guadalupe Street, the main drag adjacent to campus.  This was not owing to personal animosity, since this psychotic derelict would roar, brandish his machete, and lunge in the direction of any pedestrian.  To this colorful titbit of the urban experience, the attitude of the Austin police was bemused indulgence.

“Nowhere to be seen” and “Wadya gonna do?”

Bemused indulgence is not, however, the attitude of the Austin police to pro-Palestinian protestors, and this despite the fact that, as my son told me yesterday, the protestors were flamboyantly leftist.  They were in fact loudly signaling that they had all the right opinions but one.  When the same sort of people pyrotechnically protested the death of George Floyd, cops everywhere yawned and clipped their fingernails.

Here are some relevant lines dredged from the archive.  They first appeared in a post from 2015.

“Everyone has heard the quote, ‘to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.’ This is always attributed to Voltaire, although apparently without warrant, since there is no record of his having said it. In fact, it is most probably a refinement of a statement first made in 1993 by Kevin Alfred Strom, a White Nationalist who was thinking of his persecution for Holocaust denial. Whatever its provenance, it is now an internet meme, and rightly so, since it neatly encapsulates a self-evident truth. Power has its privileges, one of them being lèse-majesté.

We can invert this and say that a sure sign of powerlessness is the absence of lèse-majesté. In other words, ‘to learn who the truly marginal nobodies are, simply ask who you are allowed to criticize.’ Criticize here means mock, ridicule and call rude names. To lay the proposition out fully, we should state it thus: ‘to learn who the truly marginal nobodies are, simply ask who you are allowed to mock, ridicule and call rude names in polite society.’ If you can make a group the butt of a joke, or the object of scorn, and still be invited to the next wine and cheese party, that group has no lèse-majesté. They are marginal nobodies.”

I once read an essay lamenting the disappearance of what I recall the essayist calling, “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  The essayist was one of those late-onset conservatives we call “liberals mugged by reality.”  The “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” were the polite, often Christian, white-acting blacks who had won the late-onset conservative’s sympathy when the Civil Rights Movement was young.

What the late-onset conservative did not understand was that the success of the Civil Rights Movement entailed the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  Obviously, “white shirts and bow ties” here simply signify acting white.  That is what respectable white men were wearing around 1960, and because whites were hegemonic in 1960, respectable blacks wore them too.

The wardrobe of lower middle-class American males changed very markedly by the late 1960s, so there were very few blacks outside the Nation of Islam wearing white shirts and bow ties; but the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” was caused by something deeper than the sartorial revolution of the late 1960s.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement meant that blacks were now free to act black.  The key word that I just used is hegemony.  To this I must add the companion word toady.   A hegemon has the power to impose his vision on the world, the toady yields to that power and conforms to that vision.

What we can learn from the lament of the “mugged-by-reality” liberal (a.k.a the “late-onset conservative”) is that hegemons can fail to see their own power.  When they survey a throng that dresses and acts like down-market versions of themselves, the hegemon does not see toadies.  At least not always.  He sees “negros in white shirts and bow ties,” who’s unlikeness to him goes no deeper than to the color of their skins.

But the point of a liberation movement like the Civil Rights Movement is not to allow toadies to go on dressing and acting like their former masters.  It is to liberate the toadies from hegemony and allow them to act like themselves.

We see this in the liberation movements we call the Women’s Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement, both of which quickly went places that shocked some of their early supporters.  Thus the “feminine businesswomen” and “confirmed bachelors” quickly went the way of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”   They did not all become power-skirts, leather-boys, and black panthers, but enough did to make many former hegemons into “late-onset conservatives.”

The hegemony of straight white Christian males has been, of course, entirely destroyed.  This is why the teaching toadies of today’s actual hegemons do little but rail against it.  We must never forget that Cassandra was effectively mute, while the appointed oracles of the regime always shriek with contagious alarm at newfangled phantoms and ghosts of rivals long dead.

We must also never forget what I will call the Hegemon’s Illusion, which is to believe he is loved when he is in fact only feared.  I do not suppose that straight white Christian males will be in a position to fall under the Hegemon’s Illusion any time soon, but as toadies we may possibly use it to our advantage.

“Those who preach faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good works, or the mere regulation of outward acts.”

Sir James Macintosh, Diary (July 17, 1808)*

Although his opinion was perhaps colored by a Scotsman’s protestant pride, the famous liberal Sir James Macintosh is almost certainly correct in saying that the doctrine of salvation by faith yields, at least in its first bloom, an exceptionally virtuous society.  Calvinism is particularly conducive to popular virtue .  It certainly puts a damper on carousing in alehouses, hooting at bawdy shows, betting on cock fights, or cavorting like Peter Pan around a maypole; but it at the same time significantly curtailed a man’s chances of being cuckolded, murdered, or robbed.

Every traveler I have ever read agrees with this favorable view of Calvinist society, although some have been of the opinion that Calvinism and sobriety both depend on some third cause.

“The Calvinistic people of Scotland, of Switzerland, of Holland, and of New England have been more moral than the same classes of other nations.”*

Macintosh suggests that this is because men and women governed by the doctrine of good works always end up haggling to secure salvation on the most advantageous terms.  In ends in Talmudism; it ends in casuistry.  It ends in legalistic dickering over how much credit one receives for each good work, and how much penalty one pays for each act that is not good but sin,

“The later mode of considering Ethics naturally gives rise to casuistry . . . .”*

I have read some casuistry, but always with feelings of mild disgust.  It seems an answer to the question, “how much can a get away with?”   It seems like a definition of technical virginity, or  Bill Clinton’s conception of truth.

“The tendency of casuistry is to discover ingenious pretexts for eluding that rigorous morality and burdensome superstition, which in the first ardor of religion are apt to be established, and to discover rules of conduct more practicable by ordinary men in the common state of the world.”*

It has been said that hypocrisy is the only alternative to casuistry, since men who cannot excuse thier base conduct will naturally conceal it.  Possession of a “pure mind” is no doubt superior to invention of ingenious pretexts to sail very close to the wind, but rascals have always found it  easy, and have often found it convenient, to dress up and talk like the most zealous puritans.**

Setting such pharisaical puritan impostors aside, it does seem that the doctrine of faith yields more and better fruit than the doctrine of good works.  The reason is that the doctrine of faith incites a desire to be good, whereas the doctrine of works incites a desire to be good enough.  And from good enough the doctrine of works too easily descends to as good as can be expected.

“The casuist first let down morality from enthusiasm to reason; then lower it to the level of general frailty, until it be at last sunk in loose accommodation to weakness, and even vice.”*

*) Robert James Mackintosh, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, second ed., two vols. (London: E. Maxon, 1836), vol. 1, p. 411.
**) H. Hensley, Henson Puritanism in England (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), pp. 65-69.

One is a minor point: if we live in a digital simulation, how is it that analog long playing records and non-digital pictures exist?

The other is more along the lines of a mind-blowing drug-induced-seeming speculation: If we live in a simulation, the creators of the simulation could have made it that there is indeed a God, a heaven and afterlife, near death experiences, life reviews, souls for humans and other sentient beings, telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, mediums in our “reality” and all the other things scientistic atheist simulation lovers abhor. Who says our alien creators wanted us to be atheists? Since church going theists are happier and healthier than other groups, I think we should believe in God because they provided us with one. (Sarcasm)

“For those of us who are believers, it’s a biblical admonition to stand with Israel.” 

Mike Johnson, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives  (April 20, 2024)

Genesis 12: 3 is the locus classicus of Christian Zionism, most especially the first half of this verse; for here Christian Zionists read that God told Abram (soon to be Abraham) that, in addition making his posterity a “great nation” by whom “shall all families of the earth be blessed,” God would “bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.”  It is from this line that Christian Zionist deduce that their safest bet is to step and fetch it for the Jews.

If we give bombs to Israel, God will repay us with interest (although that way of saying it may suggest a meaning Christian Zionists do not intend).

I have quoted, as is my wont, the King James translation, but must allow that more recent translations replace thee with you.

 “I will bless them who bless you, and curse them who curse you.”

Now I grant that the semantics of a preposition can be as slippery as a bar of soap, and that no preposition is more slippery than “you.” Does “you” here refer to Abraham himself, or does it refer to the “great nation” that God has just promised to make of Abraham?  And if it refers to the later—if God meant not “you” but what a Southerner means by “you all”—we are still left to wonder who today represents the “great nation” that God made of Abraham?

For close to two thousand years, Christians believed that they were themselves the “great nation” that God made of Abraham.   Because they were Christ bearers, it was they by whom “shall all families of the earth  be blessed.”  If asked who was cursed for cursing their “great nation,” they might point to any number of passages in scripture, where Jews spoke of Christ and Christians in the most imprecatory terms.

Was Jesus part of the great nation that God made of Abraham?  Then by whom was Jesus cursed and by whom was Jesus blessed?  Do we perceive the likeness of Abraham in the faith of the man born into blindness?  Or do we perceive it in the Pharisees, who persecuted that man, called him a liar, cast him out, and stated the essential question with crystalline clarity?

“Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his disciple but we are Moses disciples.  We know that God spake to Moses: as for this fellow, we know not from whence he is” (John 9: 28-29).

To be a Christian is, like the man born into blindness, to know whence Jesus is.  Whence and whither, for that matter.  It is to believe that the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant passed to Jesus, and thence to his disciples; that Jesus and his disciples are now the “great nation” by which “shall all families of the earth be blessed;” and that whatever blessings and curses God might now choose to dispense, he will dispense on behalf of Christ’s Church.

* * * * *

Setting these sublime objections aside, one would like to ask House Speaker Johnson if he knows that scripture does not contain a simple “admonition to stand with Israel.”  Whatever Israel may be, and whatever standing with Israel may amount to, the admonition takes the form of a bribe and a threat.  Considering the bribe, one would like to ask how those who have blessed, or even “stood by,” the State of Israel have been blessed?  We can see the curses that fall on those who have cursed the State of Israel, although these are not self-evidently of divine origin.   Blessings for the blessers are however promised and expected.

The Reverend William Henry Johnstone was an early and hearty Christian Zionist who in several books preached the universal happiness that would attend restoration of Israel to the Holy Land.  In 1844, Johnstone wrote:

“Without any reference to the Bible, it must be clear that the residence of Israel in the Holy Land would be fraught with the greatest blessings to mankind.”*

Great and universal blessings were likewise promised by the Zionist apostle Theodor Herzl in his 1897address to the Zionist Congress at Basle.  He assured the assembled that “there is a conciliatory force inherent in Zionism,” offering as evidence “the friendship of Christian Zionists.”  It was not “through paltry considerations of expedience” that Zionists “clasp the hands so amicably held out to us,” he said, but rather as an earnest of the promise of a dawning millennium of international comity.

“They say that we create new differences, and yet we bring nearer to one another by a negligible effort, without the use of artifice.”

Needless to say, the blessing of effortless international comity has yet to be realized.

Likewise the blessing of a relaxation of the revolutionary spirit in Jews.  Herzl admitted that some Jews were, in 1897, exhibiting a ferocious hostility towards the people and culture with whom they resided as an alienated minority, but he explained that this was nothing more than the bitter fruit of their wanton persecution.

“Far and near, now in the South and now in the North, Jew-hatred springs up,”

Herzl’s thesis was that the worst consequence of this Jew-hatred was not the spilling of Jewish blood, the destruction of Jewish property, or the insult to Jewish honor.  It was the hatred for gentile society that these spontaneous outrages kindled in “the souls of our people.”

“Ever and again they undermine our sense of right and honor, and they cause their victims to become enemies of a social system which permits such things.”

Thus, Herzl conceded that “Jews constitute a disintegrating element,” but insisted that this was only because they lacked a homeland to call their own.

“But since we [the Zionists] wish to form the Jews into a constructive element, we ought logically to have the support of all those who do not desire the Jews disintegrate everything.”

I’m not sure that a conditional promise not to “disintegrate everything” constitutes a boon by which “shall all families of the earth be blessed,” but this boon like all other promised boons has yet to arrive.

*) William Henry Johnstone, Israel in the World: or, The Mission of the Hebrews to the Great Military Monarchies (London, 1844), pp. 193-195.
**) Theodor Herzl, The Congress Address of Theodor Herzl, Delivered at Basle, August 29, 1897, Nellie Strauss trans. (New York: Federation of American Zionist 1917), pp. 12-13.

A local minister has taken to the pages of our local newspaper to tell its readers about his trip to The Border “to bear witness to the reality of people seeking asylum in the U.S.”*   The phrase “bear witness” means, of course, to testify or give evidence by declaring something that is personally known.  When an honest Christian uses this archaic phrase, which he presumably knows from its frequent appearance in the New Testament, he normally means to testify or give evidence of his personal knowledge of Christ.

So it was used by Christ himself, when speaking to his disciples, and Christ among Christians imight be thought to have a certain authority.

“But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning” (John 15: 26-27).

So you might be thinking that this Man of God went to The Border to tell the wretched refuse gathered there from the teaming shores of the earth about Christ.  You would, alas, be wrong, since the Man of God did not bear witness to The Border, but rather bore witness from The Border.  His mission was,

“seeing their lived experience through the eyes of faith, and to share that testimony.”

When a Christian uses the phrase “eyes of faith,” he means eyes that see supernatural significance in an event that is, to infidel eyes, meaningless or mundane.  So it was used by John Wesley, who had some knowledge of Christian diction, when in a hymn he wrote:

“Lift your eyes of faith and look
On the signs he did ordain!
Thus the bread of life was broke,
Thus the Lamb of God was slain.”**

Thus we see that our journalizing Man of God did not go to The Boarder to bear witness of Christ to the “asylum seekers,” but rather so that he could bear witness to American Christians that “asylum seekers” have supernatural significance.  Though infidel eyes may see them as a mundane mess caused by rotten politicians, foreign and domestic, the “eyes of faith” see “asylum seekers” as something not dissimilar to Christ.

“See the slaughtered sacrifice,
See the altar stained with blood!
Crucified before our eyes,
Faith discerns the dying God.”**

Or rather, not dissimilar to—perhaps identical with—Christ’s Second Coming.  For by bearing witness to newspaper readers of what he saw on The Boarder with “the eyes of faith,” Reverend De Leon hopes to lead those readers to, as he puts it,

“the kind of transformational vision the prophet Isaiah spoke of where ‘all people shall see it together.”*

The quoted scripture of course alludes to a famous passage in which the faithful are enjoined to “prepare the way for the Lord” by making his way straight, and level, and smooth.***  It does not, some feel unfortunately, explicitly enjoin the faithful to also remove border controls, but some will no doubt tell us this meaning is implied  by the words,

“the rough ground shall become level,
The rugged places a plain.”***

With the eyes of faith, Reverend De Leon has seen that preparing the way for “asylum seekers” is, in its supernatural significance, equivalent to preparing the way for the Lord, and that when this is done,

“the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
And all people will see it together.”***

To Reverend De Leon’s “eyes of faith,” the immigrant invasion is, as I just said, a sort of secular Second Coming.

“And then shall appear the sign of the Asylum Seeker on The Border: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn (for their days shall then be numbered), and they shall see the Wretched Refuse of the Teaming Shores of the earth coming in the clouds of propaganda with political power and maudlin glory.”†

Reverend De Leon concludes his postmodern Apocalypse with two take-home points.  The first is that “our migrant neighbors have a lot to teach us” about what it means to “love God fully, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.”*  He does not bear witness that any of these migrating soon-to-be neighbors are loving each other, or indeed are loving us Americans, as they love themselves; but he does insist that a Christian does not truly love these new “neighbors” unless until he believes every word these new “neighbors” say.

Suggesting that these new “neighbors” might be what scripture calls a “false witness” is, as Reverend De Leon puts it, “denying their lived experience.”  For it seems that the “eyes of faith” perceive that an “asylum seeker” never lies.

In his second take-home point, Reverend De Leon bears false witness as to the meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan.  You know the shopworn grift.

“If someone is in pain, regardless of who they are or where they come from, Jesus teaches us to be a neighbor to that person.”*

As I have explained here more than once, the endless repetition of this falsehood does not make it true.  The true gloss of the parable of the Good Samaritan, as anyone who bothers to read it will discover, is

If you are in pain and someone helps you, regardless of who they are or where they come from, Jesus teaches you that this helper is your neighbor.

The point of the parable is that the Samaritan is good, in spite of the fact he is a despised Samaritan, and that the battered Jew he assists is bound to honor him for his assistance.  The parable of the Good Samaritan certainly implies a certain type of internationalism, but it is a Stoic and not a humanitarian internationalism.

Before Stoics philosophy, the Greeks divided the world into Greeks and Barbarians.  Stoics taught that the primary division in humanity is between good men and scoundrels.  Before the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Jews divided the world into Jews and Gentiles.  Jesus taught that the primary division in humanity s between good men and hypocrites.  

That is to say men who do good and men who make a great show of their goodness, but are in fact only pretending.

*The Eagle [Bryan-College Station] (April 20, 2024).
**) John Wesley, Hymns on the Lord’s Supper, ninth ed. (London: New Chapel, 1786), p. 14.
***) Isaiah 40: 1-11.
†) Apologies to St. Matthew (see 24: 30).

Giambattista Vico thought the dominant point of education should be to foster creativity and imagination. What a heaven that would be. He aligned poetry with the human soul and considered rationality to be a mere element of it and not the most important at that. He was worried that applying the scientific method to humans would be dehumanizing, as indeed it often is. Recently, an academic podcast guest said that he could not possibly believe that cats and dogs have emotions merely by observing them. When he told his friends the result of his scientific examination, that those animals do in fact have emotions, they replied, “D’uh. We could have told you that!” The academic insisted that such intuitive knowledge was no good at all. While meditating, an image came to mind of the academic strapping his wife to an examination table to find visible signs of her love for him. Vico, on the other hand, would like to include, as contributors to knowledge, “sense perception, rumor, myth, fables, traveler’s tales, romances, poetry and idle speculation.” Better to deal with someone with emotional depth than the robotic mode of being of the self-made autist.

Vico coined the phrase, translated into English, as the “Barbarism of Reflection.” In Vico’s cyclical view of history, this occurs during a period like the Enlightenment when science and rationality prevail and claim to offer a path to a perfected society. First religion is discarded and then morality, based as it is on religious principles. Man plans to make himself in his own image, throwing off the shackles of social institutions and using freedom of speech and thought to question them all. Equality and democracy must reign, not unchosen bonds of family and flag. Each man must be free to explore his random desires and anyone who questions that should be put to death, or at least imprisoned and canceled. Man becomes a wolf to man.

The constraints of social institutions and mores are the result of tradition and trial and error, not rationalism. God is not found merely rationally – or if He is – He will be as vulnerable to rational refutation. It is the necessity of God that logic can provide, not His existence.

It takes imagination and wonder to comprehend our own amazing existence which we typically take for granted. It can even seem boring. There is a Big Bang, stars are formed and go supernova, creating heavy elements, making planets and later, life possible. Some of this gelatinous water and dust raises its head and takes a look around itself. Self-awareness, consciousness. What? How? No principle of science makes life likely or even feasible. If life and consciousness did not already exist, they would seem frankly impossible. Scientists would deliver sermons on the topic of its unachievability.

Creativity and imagination are precisely what is needed to jar one out of this settled frame of mind; to stop taking our own existence for granted. The Big Bang and then us. That is absurd. Entropy should just keep increasing. The universe should not create this combination of body and soul, clicking the remote to see what’s on TV because we’re bored.

Hubris: arrogance; faith in reason and man alone. Cynicism and a failure of imagination mean death to God and the supernatural. But, the longing for them lives on.

If Vico is right, that fables and fantastic stories; King Arthur and the Myth of Atlantis, are necessary fertilizers for the soul, then the small minded and tiny hearted rationalist is in fact missing crucial nutrients for his well-being. Stories and fantasies about artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the Simulation must provide his parched soul with elements of what it needs. The gods are prevalent in human life in the Age of Gods and the Age of Heroes. It is only in the Age of Men that they start to recede. Theism is natural to man and until the Age of Men, universal. A longing for the fantastic apparently is impossible to kill. We would cease to exist as human beings without it. So, we like to imagine that we are about to create artificial general intelligence. Some even saying that God does not exist yet. We are about to create him. God will be a creature and we will be His progenitor. These asinine scientistic types go on to muse about an infinity of other worlds and to insist that we are the inhabitants of a video game being played by aliens; the Simulation. Hello. Meet the Sims.

This might all be fiction, but at least, from their point of view, it is science fiction. It is a strange state of affairs when our ancestors to a man felt the world to be alive and organic, filled with spirits – this living mineral, plant, and animal world – based on intuitions of the divine deep within their souls – and these are to be replaced by 1950s and 60s era sci-fi shows; the final confirmation that the world is a machine and we are machines mysteriously living in it. Lex Fridman, self-described robot simulacrum look-alike, recently commented on the fantastic machine of nature. Wrong metaphor! Can we get these people to read better fiction with broader ideas? The hubristic like machines because they are designed by men and are not dependent on God. No. We are dependent on the super alien beings who wrote the Simulation or the programmers about to create God. Wake me up for God 2.0 because the beta testing is going to be a nightmare!

“He says the idea is expanding that the rich, for whose benefit the war is waged, have procured substitutes to fight for them, while the poor, who have no slaves to lose, have not been able to procure substitutes.”

J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary (1866)*

 In the American Civil War, many men of means preferred “shouting the battle cry of freedom” from a distance, and so, if conscripted, took advantage of laws that permitted them to hire substitutes.   Although the patriotic song I have just quoted declared, “we will fill the vacant ranks with a million freemen more,” the men who sang it in that era did not necessarily mean to imply a promise of personal service.   After all, what is freedom other than the motto of a society in which every variety of help may be hired, and every social relation reduced to the cash nexus.

“O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced . . . in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to man.”**

Man to man and man to woman also.

If one man may hire another to tend his sheep or harvest his corn, why may he not hire another to undergo the rigors and risks of a soldier’s life.  If one man may hire another to keep his accounts or answer his correspondence, why may he not hire another to undertake the tedious task of writing his college application essay.  Well, if I correctly interpret an email that pinged into my mailbox this morning, there is no reason he may not hire a substitute and be relieved of that tedious task.

Avant Garde College Prep Services is not, of course, simply an example of the reduction of every social relation to the cash nexus.  It is also an example of the shifts to which poor Society is reduced when that curious concoction of moaning and boasting that we call a College Application Essay becomes the “open sesame” of worldly success.  Better hire a substitute to write it for you.

*) J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, two vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1866), vol. 2, p. 30.
**) Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1840), p. 61.

(Readers of the comment threads will understand best)

Soon or late, each just man finds
How rare is meeting of two minds,
How scarce the dialectic art,
How each fool thinks himself right smart.

If life you’d fill with sad frustration,
Devote yourself to disputation,
For when you correct and explain,
Your words are wind, your efforts vain.

A man would rather be afflicted
With hives than be once contradicted,
Or with opposing views distressed,
Since he loves his own notions best.

If you must parlay and debate,
Avoid the funny farm inmate,
The dogged crank with glittering eye,
Zealots who bark and preachify.

Do not suppose you can assuage,
The man who boils with righteous rage,
His tone you cannot calm or cool,
His wild hair smooth for Sunday school.

If views you must air and exchange,
Take care always to arrange,
A partner who enjoys a joke,
No matter how your views provoke.

If you’re addicted to palaver,
Do not consort with a cadaver,
Find at all costs a curious man,
Whose mind is not tight-sealed can.

“The happiness of others, therefore, has a depressing effect, their unhappiness an elevating effect upon our self-esteem.” 

Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics (1899)

Commenter Club Schadenfreude objects to Kristor addressing him as Club Schadenfreude, but his objection is not my concern here.  I am, rather, concerned with the meaning of schadenfreude, and perhaps with the significance of operating a club by that name.

Schadenfreude is, of course, a German word that denotes the pleasure a man takes in another man’s misfortune.  Not in the misfortune of an enemy, I hasten to add, for that is mere malice.  Schadenfreude is the pleasure he takes in the misfortune of a stranger, and perhaps more particularly the pleasure he takes in the misfortune of a friend.  Schadenfreude is, in other words, a perversion of compassion, and it is a pleasure with which very few of us are altogether unacquainted.

Ethicists generally recognize schadenfreude as the twin of envy, envy being unhappiness occasioned by another’s happiness, schadenfreude happiness occasioned by another’s unhappiness.

“These are well-known phenomena:  they are never entirely wanting in man.  The pessimistic philosophers love to dwell upon this truly partie honteuse of human nature.”*

The French phrase means “shameful part,” and like the shameful parts of the human anatomy, envy and schadenfreude are sentiments we take care to conceal.  We take care to conceal them because they are dishonorable sentiments, envy entailing an admission of weakness, schadenfreude being pity without the mask.

We see that pity is not all it is cracked up to be when we reflect that pity is much more agreeable to give than to receive.  The reason for this is not hard to discover.  When I express pity for my friend’s misfortune, I am secretly  gratified by the reflection that my circumstances are, by comparison, quite comfortable.  When I pity a friend, I am in fact praising myself.

This relation is reversed in envy because, when I praise a friend, I implicitly confess that I am, by comparison, pitiful.  Envy is thus wounded self-esteem.  Schadenfreude on the other hand is self-esteem petted, stroked, and exquisitely gratified.  It is, as I just said, pity without the mask.  As Lucretius says in his great atheist poem On the Nature of Things (c. 75 B.C.).

“’Tis sweet, when down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another’s laboring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should be thus smitten, but because ’tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared.”**

Schadenfreude is not, as is sometimes said, malicious pleasure.  It is the pleasure of marking, by observation or report, the suffering of evils from which I have myself been spared.  As Lucretius goes on to say:

“ ’Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies embattled yonder o’er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril . . .”**

Schadenfreude is, to wrap this up, a psychological trick with which my ego assures me I am special.  I am (naturally but dishonorably) gratified by the misfortunes of strangers and friends, not because I hate those strangers and friend so bitterly, but because I love myself so tenderly.  It is owing to self-love, as my epigraph puts it, that news of their good fortune has “a depressing effect” on my self-esteem, whereas my self-esteem is by reports of their misery most decidedly elevated.

This may be evidence, I cannot forebear to mention, of Adam’s sin.

*) Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics, Frank Thilly ed., Fourth ed. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1899), p. 593.
**) Book 2, William Ellery Leonard trans.