Black Helicopters over America

I'm a sucker for highbrow magazines. Delectable prose, nuanced thoughts, what's not to like? Sometimes even the poems are palatable. Sure, the authors are usually orthodox Leftists, but I've become adept at ignoring their hatred of God, country, religious people, children, rich people, white people, and Jews. Once in a while, though, the Left comes up with a whopper that even the Right couldn't match.

Like this one, from E.L. Doctorow's essay, "Notes on the History of Fiction," from the "Fiction Issue 2006" of The Atlantic:

"In the Iliad there are many gods; in the Bible, the God to whom the Biblical writers cede authorship. But under many gods or one God, the stories told during this time were presumed to be true by the fact of being told. The very act of telling a story carried
a presumption of truth."

This seems more a description of Doctorow's audience than an observation concerning Bronze Age peoples. Doctorow's readers seem remarkably credulous toward statements made, for example, by The New York Times or CNN. These enlightened persons do precisely what Doctorow describes Bronze Agers doing: believing a story because it is told. If anything, Bronze Agers were less credulous than Posters: the stories believed and accepted by the ancient peoples (even if they were as naively accepted as Doctorow imagines, which I doubt) were generated by trusted members of the community, not by highly-paid employees of capitalist corporations.

Doctorow seems to be indulging in an epistomological wet dream that even John Locke considered far-fetched: the ideal of a deeply incredulous sovereign individual who examines every belief he entertains, measuring its relation to the indubitable, foundational truths of sensory perception. Locke, as much as he did to advance the popularity of this ideal, didn't think it possible, at least not for most people. 300 years later, nobody seriously entertains this as an epistemological model; the reason being the obvious, common-sense one (cf. Thomas Reid) that human persons are compelled by both inclination and experience to exercise credulity toward certain sources. The issue, contra Doctorow, is not credulity; credulity is a necessary and inescapable feature of human consciousness. The issue is rather the directedness of credulity. And, faced with a choice to believe American literati or the apostles and prophets, I think I'll hedge my bets.

The Will to Empire

"Too Late for Empire," squealed the cover of The Nation as I browsed through magazines at the Lincoln Square Barnes & Noble. "True," I thought, "the United States' opportunity for empire, at least as far as the psyche of the citizens is concerned, passed a couple of generations ago, if we ever had such an opportunity." I reached for the magazine, since I remembered having seen a decent article in it once--but that was before Iraq, and before Neil Postman died. Sure enough, though the author laboriously sought to escape regurgitating drivel, he regurgitated drivel. Blaarrgghh. Organic produce of the American Left. I bought the "fiction issue" of Atlantic instead.

Fast-forward 24 hours: blood pressure rising, I'm sitting at a table in the church basement, having completely lost control of the Spanish-language Bible class that I'm supposed to be teaching. I try to interrupt the parallel conversations politely, to no avail. I stifle my anger, I walk to the bathroom, I peek in on my wife's babysitting, silently signing suicidal handguns to her as I drag myself back to the group that seems not to have noticed my absence. Sigh.

As my wife drives home, I remember the concessions that I made at work that day, which weren't necessary, but I made them anyway, without much fuss....

Reflecting on the day's events, I begin thinking that Nietzsche was right: my mentality is that of a slave, worse--of a bovine. I, member of a nation that cannot summon the will to empire, myself cannot summon the volitional force to impact those around me. Instead, I concede. I acquiesce. I walk away. I am weak, in the final analysis, and the world, insofar as it knows me, recognizes that I am weak. I am symptomatic of a generation so diseased in its voluntas that films like "American Beauty" actually resonate with people. Homer Simpson is intelligible in this society.

After letting Nietzsche shame me, I go on to Ayn Rand. This Atlas can't shrug, both because he's psychologically incapable of doing anything that inconsiderate, and also because none of the world's weight rides on his shoulders. An ontological superfluity. A metaphysical exercise in double-speak: I champion Constantinianism and patriarchy, but only from the safety of my keyboard. Away from it, I am a study in subjugation.

I drift off to sleep, extrapolating myself by millions, and imagining a future world in which China, India, and the Caliphate vie for world control, having relegated the reluctant West to ignominy and extinction. Maybe, I drowse, after we have squandered the corpus of power through weakness of spirit, our grandchildren will at least have the luxury of despising "niceness" as an archaic vice.

Divine Subversion

Last weekend, I committed an uncharacteristic oversight: I forgot my book at home when Tarayn and I went to the beach. In the car, however, I had a "New Horizons" (the OPC denominational magazine), the current "Banner of Truth" newsletter, and a Bible. I skimmed both periodicals, and then decided to experiment with speed-reading books of the Bible in order to get an over-all feel for the content. I ended up reading Micah.

Reflecting on the strangeness of the prophets, I thought of the contrasts between what I had just read from 2 reputable Reformed monthlies and what I had encountered in Micah. Other than obvious differences such as inspiration, canonicity, ancient Near-Eastern situatedness, and the like, I was struck by the fact that both periodicals were noticeably self-congratulatory, whereas Micah was not, and that both magazines were rather arcane in their content and concerns, whereas Micah was speaking from within his culture to the pressing issues of his day. More than that: he was creating the issues of his day from within the matrix of his society.

Pondering these differences, especially the second one, prompted a recollection of my church history professor's rule of thumb for separating heroes from villains in the annals of the church: "In every generation, there are those who withdraw from the age, those who go along with the age, and those who confront the age." Simplistic, yes, but there's truth in it. Let us call those who withdraw "separationists," those who accomodate "accomodationists," and let us designate those who confront "subversives." I designate those who confront the age "subversives" because prophetic effectiveness seems to be tied to a limited integration within a societal universe. Micah spoke, not in generalities, but as one who was familiar with the places and the practices of Israel. He was a participant in his culture as far as that was conscionable; and in what was unconscionable, he confronted as one who knew--that is, he subverted from within.

Also, as I read a disappointing article from Ian Murray on John Knox, I thought that another difference between the prophet and the "Banner" articles was the depth of the sources. (I am speaking of both texts as merely human documents at this point, of course.) There seemed to be an existential de profundis in the prophet's words that I could not detect, in any degree, in the magazines'; a depth, not merely of feeling, but of experience. I think that you all know what I mean: you have heard a gardener speak movingly of her plants, and you have read a poet speaking tediously of love. The de profundis aspect has little or nothing to do with the topic, and everything to do with the experiential nature of the knowledge that is shared. Micah moved me, it startled me, it disoriented me, and yet there is much that is repetitious in his book, if one reads the other prophets. However, I found little else but tedium in my periodicals, mostly, I thought, because there was no depth of experience in them (also partly because the prose was bad).

Returning again to the arcane nature of the articles that I hastily read, it seemed to me that in the concern of the orthodox to avoid accomodationism, we have slipped, sometimes intentionally, into a separationism that has rendered us utterly irrelevant to our culture. (As a side note, this struck me again recently on a visit to a heavily gay neighborhood in the West Village. I couldn't imagine what we could say there that wouldn't make us seem like Amishmen.) If we are to avoid consignment to a parallel existence in this culture, I believe that we must rediscover a "divine subversion," a speaking de profundis from within in order to deconstruct and re-form. It's been done before; look what Constantine the Great did with Roman government, or what Calvin did with the Renaissance and Scholasticism. Submersion in order to facilitate subversion; I have every confidence that it's possible. But let us take care that we do it de profundis; the superstructure crashes down much harder that way.

Quotation of the Day

"Life is a stupid, senseless accretion of mundanities. Enjoy it."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Cogito Ergo WHAT? Or, It's a Geodesic, Stupid

As many of you know, American Philistine exists in part to assist in the translation of orthodox Presbyterianism from the antiquated idiom of Victorianism into the dialect of the "post-everything" person (a dialect which we call "poster parlance"). However, as I told a dear friend during a recent cigar-smoke-and-rum inundated evening, it is sometimes difficult to imagine what shape a faithfully translated Presbyterianism would take. It seems to me that one helpful move in creating this new incarnation would be to exit the Cartesian-Newtonian universe that we lamentably seem to still inhabit.

I've been reading Heidegger's Being and Time recently, and his discussion of Descartes started me thinking about orthodoxy's penchant for operating within a Newtonian universe, with all the Cartesian baggage that that universe entails. The only problem being this: several years back, there was this dude named Einstein, and he kind of interrupted the whole Newtonian gig, much as we all preferred the Newtonian thing. And then, around the same time, some dog named Heidegger came out with this anti-metaphysical phenomenological ontology that kind of turned into existentialism when Sartre and Camus got a hold of it. So, what happened is kind of like this: people don't really live in a causal, dualized universe anymore. They live in a relativized, existentialized universe.

Derrida, for example, has made bank with the idea of "curved space," the lines of which are known as "geodesics." He fruitfully uses Einsteinian physics as metaphorical bolstering for his infinite play. Meanwhile, we're still talking about moths and flames. To make matters worse, we still rely on the Platonic tripartite breakdown of the soul, which is hopelessly antiquated now that "the ghost in the machine" model of humanity has been discontinued. Like it or not, we are in a quantum universe, with all the counter-intuitiveness that's entailed by that. And the human inhabitants of that quantum universe are deeply imbued with a sense of "the horizon of their ownmost possiblities," to use Marty's catchy phrase. So, as a step toward the translation of orthodoxy, I suggest that we locate the correct universe and life form first.

Heidegger for Today

From Being and Time:


"Irrationalism, as the counterpart of rationalism, talks about the things to which rationalism is blind, but only with a squint."

Quotation of the Day

"Centuries from now, anthropologists will sift through our commercials instead of our art, because the ads will tell them what our fears and dreams were circa 2006."

-John Devore in The New York Sun