I recently
saw a video by a libertarian commentator named
TJ Brown, also known as That Guy T, on YouTube making a tongue-in-cheek thought
experiment that the liberty movement would do well to consider forging an
alliance with fascism to effectively protect Western culture from the left’s
violent domination.
I understand he was not being literal and so I am not going to
grand stand against fascism. To do so is too easy and obligatory these days. I
consider the ideology “small potatoes” as a cultural force. Of course, it is
immoral. So is Pharaohism. Neither will be a viable cultural force in the West.
Suspending all moral considerations, appeals to pragmatically align with its
small band of Internet advocates are a dead-end outreach strategy for liberty.
I agree with Brown’s larger point though: the liberty movement
is not a culturally effective force because liberty is never a transcendent end
around which to develop culture. Liberty is a means to an end. The end, the
driving force of communities, is ultimately virtue. Virtue, values, morals,
ethics, these are the domain of systems thinking. Systems thinking is about
establishing a common vision that animates and orients human beings’ passion
and sacrifice.
An ethic of virtue is what must be the cornerstone of a lasting
culture. I’ll go one step further, a common ethic, not rules, is what makes a
cultural body antifragile, as Nassim Taleb would say. An antifragile structure
is one that gains strength through stress and adversity. Such a body does not
simply survive difficulty but becomes better through it.
We need an
ethical framework to cultivate an antifragile culture. To establish such a
common virtue we must have a common story that binds people together. That’s
where we get the word religion: the Latin
root means “to bind together.” In much of history, culture and religion were
always understood as synonyms. Religion was not, as secular modernism says, a
private ideological fancy of faith, but a cultural fact, an animating narrative
and future vision of a people.
The West’s cultural narrative is not fascism. It is
Christianity. Christianity is the two thousand year old antifragile cultural
fact that makes the vision of what is best about the West so beautiful. The
elements of Western culture reflective of personhood, property rights, free
speech, non-aggression, and mercy are fruits of Christianity.
Fascism, on the otherhand, is faddish and fragile. It only acts
as a dependent mirror double of its rival, leftism or what I call victimism.
Since its vision can only be seen through the eyes of its twin, it has no firm
foundation of itself to stand. It parasitically apes the aesthetic and
metaphysics of the local religion of a people, usually Christianity.
All state ideologies are inherently sacrificial in their logic:
someone, nonviolent and innocent, must be threatened with physical violence,
theft, and shame for the collective to thrive. I rank the victimist
denomination of the state, known as political correctness, much more powerful
and dangerous in its threat against innocent life. Trump is a throwback “Winners”
brand in an epoch of feigned victim-concern for social status. As such, his ilk
will continue state violence but their statist denomination will never been
entrenched or effective in establishing cultural norms.
There is a
paradox to unlocking the meaning of our cultural conundrum. We must understand
that behind victimism, the religious power structure moving the West, is a
desire to “hide the fingerprints” of our collective murder as a species. For as
long as we fight over which ideology, race, gender, or income bracket is the
oppressor and which is the oppressed, we are never able to look at the real
demon parasitically feeding off of all human conflict: the desire to have your
neighbor’s status and property and, ultimately, to be your neighbor. The desire to violently cast out
any neighbor that you perceive to be robbing you of cathartic oneness with your
tribe. The desire to exploit power over rivals.
Those qualities of humanity are never talked about as universal
afflictions to constantly repent of and guard against. Instead, we relish in
their obfuscation and weaponize the resulting guilt as a bludgeon against our
opponents.
We must see the evil plaguing humanity as violent exploitation
of power differentials, not difference itself. Nevertheless, we must be able to
honestly assess the power differential at play in our own culture by seeing
victimism as the hegemonic power of our time as it parasitically deforms and
mutates the deconstruction of the Cross, in its unfolding revelation of
collective murder and envy, to create a monstrous license to hunt “deniers,
heretics, and bigots” with moral righteousness the likes of which we haven’t
seen since the days of our pagan ancestors and their human sacrificial slave
gathering campaigns.
The apparent paradox is that human evil is universal when the
reigning cultural power in the West says it is only particular to current
ruling collective groupings they deem the beneficiaries of past differentials.
At the same time, the idea that victimism is somehow equal in power with its
reactionary right wing echo is absurd. Because of its effective imitation of
Christianity’s concern for victims, it is the supreme hegemony of the West. But
the way to defeat its power is to not to scapegoat it as an alien other but to
continue to expose and defend its victims and all other victims of our
collective violence.
Sun light
really is the best disinfectant. The cross will continue to haunt and agitate
cultures to lo and behold the victims of sacrificial violence
consumed for collective cohesion. As such, we can swim with its current or
futilely fight against it. Nietzsche and fascism attempted to turn the clock
back before the Cross to a pagan golden age when violent sacrifice was
unquestioned and reserved as the mostly-exclusive domain of the winners, the
excellent, and the powerful.
Victimism is faux-Christianity. In order to preserve the beauty
of the West, we must rediscover the roots that made it great: rediscover the
power of Christianity to instruct virtue and deconstruct the mythic veil of
violence hidden in archaic religions and all modern ideologies.
Because it is not an ideology but a culture, Christianity
presents us with a choice and a story.
First, the choice: the hidden structure that glued archaic
societies together through violent sacrifice of a common enemy has now been
exposed through the telling of the wrongful persecution of Jesus and his
subsequent nonviolent vindication. Therefore the old hierarchies, the modern
vestige of which is the nation-state, will increasingly erode and breakdown as
humanity wrestles with and becomes aware of this revelation.
As the late anthropologist René Girard discovered, human
sacrifice or scapegoating as a social ordering mechanism only works if we do
not know we are scapegoating. If we do not fully see our victims for what they
are. Our choice is to build culture on nonaggression and nonvengeance or to
live by the sword and die by the sword. Without the cultural training wheels of
sacrificial violence protecting us, we will spiral into never-ending mirror
violence cycles. No brakes.
And now the story.
Paul of
Tarsus was once named Saul. He was a zealot, a true believer, of his
religio-cultural order, what is now called 2nd Temple
Judaism. He witnessed the rise of a new upstart movement called the Way and
understood if he allowed it to prosper, it could devour and destroy the
sacrificial society he cherished. So in his patriotism and commitment to the
Temple, he hunted and killed advocates of this new story, one that posited the
Temple—the heart and soul of political and social order—was null. That the
Temple—the center of power—instead resided in the hearts of all men, regardless
of their social status or race.
Saul eventually traveled to Damascus to crush the rebellion’s
growth there. On the road to Damascus, something happened. Saul says he
encountered a vision of Jesus of Nazareth, the supposedly dead-and-risen
founder of this new movement. Saul recounts that he was thrown off his horse as
Jesus told him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for thee to
kick against the pricks.”
Saul, now Paul, spent three years in Arabia. What did he
consider?
Paul
quotes Jesus as saying, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” The
saying was well-known to Paul’s Greek audience as an idiom about the
inescapable power of a god. In fact, as my friend Jerry Bowyer points out, it
was most famously uttered by Dionysus in Euripedes’ play The Bacchae. In it, Dionysus, the god of the frenzied
crowd, is on trial by King Pentheus.
Pentheus does not believe Dionysus is a true son of a god.
Dionysus protests the king’s persecution of his cult followers and warns him of
his divine command over his destiny with the reference to an ox being unable to
kick the pricks that keep it harnessed to the master’s plough.
Indeed, Dionysus eventually escapes and, at the end of the play,
has Pentheus torn to pieces by his followers.
By putting the words of Dionysus in Jesus’s mouth, Paul is
drawing a direct contrast between the sacrificial logic of the god of the
collective and the God of the victims of the collective. Jesus is challenging
Paul to renounce his use of sacrificial violence to persecute his followers in
the name of God. However, his ethic is one of true nonviolence: upon
conversion, Paul does not seek revenge in the name of Jesus against his former
fellow persecutors of Christians. Instead, he offers the same mercy and
forgiveness shown by Jesus. He announces a new era in which all-against-one
will no longer be the reigning social ordering principle. This is the beginning
of the personhood revolution.
It is interesting to note that the zealots persecuting the
followers of the Way eventually were consumed by their own sacrificial logic when
their insistence on violent resistance to Rome led to their total destruction
in 70 AD. Likewise, the Roman culture eventually tore itself to pieces by
maintaining a sacrificial ethic of might-makes-right, even after its ostensible
conversion to Christianity. But note, these ends are not produced by vengeance
perpetrated by those imitating the culture of Jesus. Rather, it is nature
taking its course on cultures that refuse to change their minds about the
prerogative of collective violence.
In quoting
Dionysus through Jesus, Paul is not scapegoating Dionysus as an enemy-other,
but redeeming Dionysus with a forgiving end to the cycle of vengeance the old
pagan order built. The quote marks a historical shift from virtue being the
sacrifice-of-other to self-sacrifice. Being a god, Dionysus was himself a mythic cover-up of human sacrifice. Jesus,
too, was a ritual sacrifice but one that exposed its evil logic as the madness
of collectivism rather than edicts from the sky.
Fascism tries to resurrect Dionysus and all other sacrificial
orders: a vision of peace through selective violence. But since the Cross, the
sacrificial cat is out of the bag and such flagrant hiearchies no longer sit
well with our consciences. Victimism demands this same redemptive mechanism but
tries to shield our eyes to its violence by claiming to use it only in the name
of official victims. Such witch hunts only implode into guilt-riddled chaos
with the subsequent loss of differentiation.
Christianity offers respect for differences and peace through
mercy. Nietzsche understood this:
Dionysus
versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference
in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. [In
Dionysus] Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates
torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case,
suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—counts as an objection to this
life, as a formula to its condemnation. (The Will to Power,
542-543.)
For liberty to prosper, we need a culture. We must choose.
Dionysus or Christ.
David
Gornoski [send
him mail] lives in central Florida where he runs an agricultural
start-up as well as public speaking and essays. His wife is a travel agent from
Russia. They have a very interesting angle as international contrarian
millennials with an interest in Christian nonviolence/voluntarism as a fresh
path for liberty to advance. He freelances commentary for WND.com, Jerry
Bowyer's AffluentInvestor.com,
Discovery Institute as well as other publications.
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