Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A Miracle in Colonel Sanders' Colon (The PTL Club, 1979)

What an amazing historical document. I had not intended to watch the whole thing, but I did, with rapt attention. It recalls deep, vague, long-forgotten memories in me. Perhaps I saw this very episode in 1979, when I was seven; perhaps it is just that Col. Sanders speaks exactly like the elderly people in my American childhood used to speak. I knew Americans from the 19th century, worshipful Americans with their very own pastors who spoke with regional accents uncorrupted by mass media. It's hard to believe now, but I did.

 

There is so much here! Jim Bakker's sidekick's awful doggerel in praise of the Colonel (19'38''); the delightful finale with the giddy KFC regional managers distributing chicken to the PTL crowd, as the Colonel himself enjoys a wing; the squirm-inducing story of the polyp in Col. Sanders' colon and the 'plunk' sound he heard in the commode after his post-op enema (8'40''); Col. Sanders's own creepy pastor who denounces the 'Jewish attorney' (sic) who performed the operation on the Colonel and failed, in his Jewishness, to realize that God himself had already begun his own operation on the chicken-magnate's colon (9'47'').

What is most stunning, of course, is the way this epitomizes so vividly the conspiracy of religion and entrepreneurship in American history. Col. Sanders is 'saved' not nearly so much when his pastor first prays for him, as when the Colonel forks over his first tithe. The simple-minded money-maker and the crafty man of God make a perfect pair. The whole history of the place is a history of duplicity, unctuousness, and unremitting hustling. I miss it.

The Two Bobs: A Note on Cults of Personality

Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.

The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.

This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.

That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.

But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:

The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.

Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)

And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:

[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.

In short, hail Bob.

Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher. 

Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.

A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.

Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?

Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.

Life and Death in the Orthodox World

I am not an Orthodox Christian. (I am not an orthodox anything.) Among my immediate blood ancestors there is Scandinavian Lutheranism, Southern Baptism, and Mormonism (I am not just any Smith, either). I wound up in a private Catholic school, and as a strategy to make me fit in better socially I was caused to be baptized at the age of 13 (the strategy didn't work). My mother re-married into the reform Jewish world, and now on that side of the family bar mitzvahs and Passover are as important as any other dates on the calendar. My father, I take it, is a libre penseur, but often mentions how impressed he was by Thomas Aquinas's version of the cosmological argument (that there must be a first cause).

To this not totally atypical history of American mongrelism it should be added that I have spent significant portions of my life in the Orthodox Christian world, and have had many important life experiences within it, involving both love and death. These experiences have at times caused me to respond, at least aesthetically and perhaps even 'spiritually', to Orthodox symbols: to say inwardly, at the sight of a blackened icon, something like, 'I get it'.

If I may attempt to distill some sort of essence out of Orthodox Christianity in just a few words, it is the variety of Christianity that still takes love and death seriously, that continues to have its hand in the way these are lived by individual members of the church, and to actively and minutely prescribe the ritual forms through which they are to be lived. The Enlightenment never happened, there is nothing about sola fide, and religion remains deeply entrenched in, some might say confined by, ritual.

The ritual keeps the realities of human life --particularly death-- constantly in view. Think of the display of Father Zosima's body in The Brothers Karamazov, and how disappointed Alyosha is when it begins to smell: this means he is not a saint after all. A curious way of making such a determination, but what it entails, among other things, is that dead bodies, and not just Zosima's, are left exposed long enough to figure out their prospects for sainthood. Corpses are put out there to reckon with, not hidden away and euphemized. In at least the Romanian variety of Orthodoxy, dead bodies are traditionally dug up by family members after 7 years in order to wash the bones. I've been told the smell is something awful. Death gets in your nose.

To the right is a photograph of Vitaliy Dergachev. It is the only photo I have of him, and most certainly the only one of him online. It was taken in my dorm room in Leningrad in 1990. You will notice my hair-sculpting products on the nightstand, alongside a stack of audiocassettes. He is looking at my train ticket to Moscow.

This Saturday will be the 20th anniversary of Vitaliy's death. On my reckoning, roughly half of the blame for this goes to alcohol, and roughly half to the hardline communist generals who, between 19 and 21 August, 1991, staged a coup d'état against the Gorbachev regime and sent all of Russia into a few days of, let us say, more chaos than usual. The generals' failure marked Yeltsin's unfortunate rise to power (he stood on a tank and looked brave and defiant for a moment), but that's all just politics and that's not what I'm here to write about.

I was a few days late in getting to Russia, thanks to the generals and their tanks in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. I was waiting at the Warsaw airport for LOT to resume its service to Russia, watching what I could of CNN but mostly making things out from the Polish media. My original ticket would have had me there one day before Vitaliy died; instead, I arrived one day after. Vitaliy fell off the roof of his highrise apartment block. Apparently, he had been drunk, and was amusing himself by balancing on the thin balustrade. Again, it is not as though the putschists killed him directly. They did not shoot him in the head. But if I may engage in some amateur counterfactual history, I suspect that had there not been a coup, Vitaliy would not have been drunk and balancing on the balustrade. Blame who you will.

Anyway, he fell, I was late in getting there, and the first several days of my return to Russia were spent in a vortex of Russian mourning: performative, tragic, tiring. There were a number of hangers-on at Vitaliy's mother's apartment, other Leningrad urchins who, like Vitaliy, loved the Beatles far more than I would have tolerated from Western friends at that point in my life, who had been in and out of jail over the course of the 1980s for trading in bootlegged Beatles albums. There was a self-styled American writer named Winston hanging around, who was probably just some college kid. Vitaliy's mother was up and down, now serving tea and sweets with an ecstatic smile, now face down on the couch, heaving.

After three days or so there was a funeral, and needless to say it was open-casket. Vitaliy had been entirely reconstructed after his fall, and his face was covered with foundation make-up, hastily brushed on to hide the damage. I don't recall much of the service, except that the incense was overwhelming and the women were all putting on a good show of wailing.

What I remember more clearly is the pilgrimage to the cemetery afterwards: the hunchbacked gravediggers; how we all had to line up and kiss Vitaliy just before the coffin was put in the ground (I kissed his forehead, though others, including his mother, went straight for the lips); how we threw little religious trinkets and packs of cigarettes and poured vodka and beer into the coffin just before the lid was closed for good; how we all helped to throw dirt on top of the coffin before the hunchbacks came and finished the job. Sometimes, as I'm walking down the aisle of Whole Foods or something stupid like that, I recall in a flash that I was once involved in such a thing, and it is hard like death to carry on.

Once I was married in the Romanian Orthodox church. While Catholics and at least neo-Protestants like to get married in big flashy palaces (whether of the cathedral or the mega-church variety), the Orthodox seek out the most humble places of workship they can find. Now I was allowed to be involved in all of this without converting to Orthodoxy because I was, so it was emphasized at the time, a Catholic, and in at least this region of the Orthodox world there was some ancient entente with the Catholics that enabled cross-marriage. So there I was getting married in what Californian mega-church-goers would consider a clapboard shack, would associate architecturally with the religion of their own hillbilly ancestors. And yet this shack was actively sought out, and it was deemed pure, and utterly Christian, because primitive. Perhaps the limit case of this primitiveness is a holy site near the Agapia Monastery in northeastern Romania. It is a cave, and it was once the dwelling place of the venerable Mother Theodora of Sihla, who lived there for decades, wrapping her hair around her body instead of wearing clothes, talking to the animals. You can go there today and pray before icons and light candles in the dim glow beneath two slabs of incalculably many tons of rock: slabs leaning against one another, maintaining a tall sliver between them that stands across the centuries. Depending on how the candles flicker, you can sometimes make out the dark faces (not so much chiaroscuro as oscuroscuro) of icons painted directly into the cave walls, much as at Lascaux some millennia earlier.

Once I arrived at the end of a service at a church in Athens. Communion had already been taken, and the priest was on his way out. Some underlings brought the leftover consecrated bread out to the entrance of the church and the beggars and cripples of Athens dug in like pigeons. This was transubstantiated bread, mind you, supposedly the body of Christ. Now it always seemed to me that in Western churches the communion wafer was not really bread any more than it was really Christ: to take it was not just to eat Christ symbolically, but also to eat symbolically (how many calories do you think an Anglican wafer has?). The Athenian poor were at least getting something out of this ceremony, I thought: bread. This was a proper, living mystery. There could be no doubt but that transubstantiation had occurred.

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Playing the Bear

In The Bear: History of a Fallen King (tr. Harvard University Press, 2011), Michel Pastoureau relates that in a famous capitulary of 852-853, "Archbishop Hincmar of Reims... vigorously denounced, among other practices, 'vile games with a bear' (turpia joca cum urso) and demanded that the bishops of his province not tolerate such turpitudes under any circumstances. He provides no details about these 'vile games', but it can be imagined that they were dances or mimes performed at carnival time and still containing, in the late ninth century, powerful remnants of paganism, perhaps even simulations of copulation. A few decades later, Bishop Adalbéron of Laon, despite his strongly ursine name, also denounced games and masquerades in which men disguised themselves as bears or danced with bears. It was a wasted effort. The bear was the quintessential animal for disguises... and until the end of the Middle Ages, and even later, many prelates reeated, although they were not really obeyed, that a good Christian should not 'play the bear'" (83).

Below is a video, one of many available on YouTube, filmed in modern-day Romania. It features a traditional dance in celebration of New Year's Day, that bears nearly the same name as the activity denounced by Hincmar of Reims: from the Latin jocum cum urso, we still have today a Latinate remnant in the Carpathians, jocul ursului, or 'the game of the bear':

 

I've held forth on the theme of the incompletion of the project of depaganization visible in certain features of Balkan and Carpathian folk culture (see, e.g., this footage I took of a Christmas-Day goat dance). As an outsider I'm treading on sensitive territory here, and over the years I've learned not to make broad generalizations from fleeting glimpses of cultural exuberance (even if the thesis of an Unterschicht of pagan folk culture overlain by Orthodoxy is one that scholars such as Eliade readily accept).

But anyway today I just wanted to note how newly fascinating the idea of Christianization as an ongoing project --one that was by no means completed in the Middle Ages and one that still has more difficulty taking root in mountainous regions than in valleys (see also, in this connection, Sergei Paradjanov's masterpiece, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)-- now seems to me in light of Pastoureau's treatment of the cultural history of the bear.

His argument is that until around the 10th century in Europe --and moreso the further one moved from the Mediterranean and Roman-dominated zones-- there was a vibrant cult of bear worship. Bears were not just ordinary animals, but were in nearly every respect doubles of human beings. They were presumed to be interfertile with human women, and half-bear offspring were held to be particularly virile and heroic. In the 12th-century Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus casually notes that the Danish king is descended from a bear, an observation that is repeated as late as the 16th century in the work of Olaus Magnus, even if by this time Viking raiders had long since ceased the practice of going berserk, i.e., putting on the 'bear shirt' before battle and transforming themselves into their ursine doubles.

Pastoureau argues that the sexuality and violence of the bear made it a naturally suspicious creature for the church, and that by the high Middle Ages the ecclesiastical authorities had succeeded in deposing it, reducing it to the status of a chained curiosity, of a pathetic circus performer, while enthroning the lion in the bear's former place in the iconography of heraldly and more broadly in the medieval symbolic imagination. The lion was a safe king of the beasts in large part because it was entirely extinct in Europe; it was no longer phenomenally salient in the daily lives of European folk, and there was no threat of dangerous effects from consuming its parts, from wearing its hide, or from having sex with it.

The bear was already more or less extinct in France (and England, and the Low Countries), other than in parts of the Alps and the Pyrenées, by the late Middle Ages. The worship of it seems to have diminished in rough correspondence to its geographical disappearance over the centuries. Romania has by far the highest concentration of bears in Europe (thanks in part to Ceauşescu's promotion of bear fertility-- a policy derived entirely from his personal interest in accumulating hunting trophies), and is also the place you are most likely to see vestiges of the jocum cum urso that was already on the decline in France by the 9th century. 

I'm inclined to think, along lines spelled out by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State (and also in Malinowski's description of folk customs in his native village in the Polish Carpathians), that both the endurance of the brown bear as well as the endurance of what look like pagan customs are in the end just a corollary effect of geographical circumstances: mountains have different cultural histories and different ecologies, and neither can be fully understood without consideration of the other.

Nuclear Power and the Quest to Perfect Nature

A good book to read in light of recent events is William R. Newman's Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Now I don't have it handy and I don't want to misrepresent his argument, but if I recall correctly he suggests that a number of the desiderata of the early modern alchemists were in fact eventually obtained. We can in fact turn one element into another (if not quite the elements that interested them most); we do in fact have flexible glass, in the form of plastic, and so on.

Of most relevance, we do in fact have a sort of perpetual-motion machine, which was certainly the most sought-after invention of early modern Europe (in the 1670s G. W. Leibniz ridiculed Joachim Becher for having claimed to have made one; Becher responded by saying that Leibniz's plan for a high-speed conveyance belt between Hanover and Amsterdam was no less ridiculous). Definitions vary, but at a minimum a perpetual motion machine is one that gives you work without needing to be fueled (and thus has as a corollary but by no means primary feature that it can keep going forever). This, as I recall Newman suggesting, has been to some extent realized by nuclear energy. It gives us something for nothing.

But the persistent theme of Newman's book --the title references an expression from Pope John Paul II-- is that throughout Western history the quest to perfect nature, and to make it give us more than it is in its primordial state willing to give, is one that has throughout the same history left many people feeling uneasy. Newman himself is only diagnosing; he certainly does not side with the pope or with the Catholic wariness about modernity.

The former pope unwittingly finds common cause in his suspicion of humanity's Promethean ambitions with the environmentalists, who more often than not draw their inspiration from what they take to be pagan sources. Wherever the inspiration comes from --scripture or some imagined past harmony with Mother Earth-- it is hard not to think they're onto something as we watch what looks to be a nuclear meltdown in Japan. During a crisis like this, it is hard not to conclude that it is foolish to try to get something for nothing. In any such attempt, humanity will end up paying sooner or later. (I suspect this is why, in spite of so many scientific studies proving the contrary, conventional wisdom holds that aspartame causes cancer. For if it does not, we are getting something for nothing, which is impossible.)

Of course, there is one source of energy which simply gives, and gives, and that is the sun. It is not a perpetual motion machine --it will run out of energy at some point in the future-- but on the scale of human existence, it may as well be. It is the starting point of the terrestrial life cycle; it is so important to our existence that philosophers have at times suggested that even though it is a particular, and there is only one of it, still in some sense it ought to count as a sort of honorary universal. Aristotle said that 'the sun and man generate man', and that has it just right. Each species is responsible for its own reproduction in specie, but the sun (via the plants, the atmosphere, and so on) keeps it all going. And at least if we are willing to accept the conditions of an organismic life cycle (finiteness, illness, etc.), then we may say that it does so for nothing.

All this leads me to think that the anti-nuclear, pro-solar camp is really, whether it knows it or not, taking up a parti pris in a very fundamental and millennia-old debate about the proper comportment of man towards nature. The two camps are roughly, as I see it, these: the one says you should go with it, the other says you should fuck with it. 

Increasingly, though I have a lingering admiration for early modern inventiveness, I am coming to think that the quest to perfect nature will always come at a cost greater than any advantage it confers, and I am ever more sympathetic to the papal warning, and to all the pagans who have heard it. I am coming to agree ever more with Ogden Nash: "Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough."

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The image is of me at Rancho Seco nuclear power station, near Sacramento, California, circa 1988. Photo credits Jay Truesdale.

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

*

See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.

On Seeing a Deer: A Postscript

I failed to mention in my recent reflections on the possibility of a cervidocentric theology that there is in fact a very important precedent for this approach in the history of philosophy. I am referring of course to Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th-century Andalusian Arabic treatise describing the ascent of a human orphan raised on a deserted island by a motherly doe. The primal experience of her solicitude, the observation of the wisdom inscribed in her parts and in her actions, leads the boy gradually to certain knowledge of the truths of Divine creation.

Now as I've already said I'm wary of the need for such an ascent: I am perfectly content to simply stop and admire the doe. Yet I do think it highly significant that the author chose to start with precisely this animal. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the very word 'deer', cognate to the German 'Tier', may be understood to mean simply animal as such. There are animals that don't quite qualify for this generic status, in view of exceptional, often negative traits on top of their animality: they are loud, they eat meat, they eat garbage, they copulate in human view. But the deer is the silent plant-eater of the forest: elusive but without a trace of evil. God's perfect creature.

If Ibn Tufayl's orphan had been raised by an elephant, say, or a mongoose or a tapir, the God he ended up coming to know in the end might have looked very different indeed.

On Seeing a Deer

In a number of posts recently I've attempted to convey the difficulties I face in connection with the question of belief in God. I have said that my answer to the question is generally context-dependent, and that I find that most contexts require the hardest Russellian line possible: namely, that not only is it naïve to answer in the affirmative; it is already naïve to accept the question as meaningful.

Now I have been living for a little while in a wooded region of central New Jersey, where there are many wild animals, including many deer (human inhabitants now speak of 'overpopulation'). Sometimes when I am driving I spot a deer in the woods along the road, and I slow down, and I stare at her, and she stares back at me.

What I am thinking in these moments is something like this: Hail, creature of God. The last two words of this silent salutation are strictly speaking redundant: to pick a being out as a creature is already to ground its being in a creation, performed by a creator. This is why 'creature' is not a scientific term. Now I have railed at length and on record against what is called 'creationism'. But when I meet a deer in the forest, it remains the case that this is an encounter with a creature. There is no other word for it.

Some might take this point as a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God. But I hate arguments for the existence of God, and I think the teleological is probably the worst of the lot. I have no interest in moving up from the deer to something supposedly better than it. But nor am I prepared to abandon the category of creature in favor of quadruped, vertebrate, etc. To this extent it is in encounters with wild animals that I get a full blast of just how much religion is left in me.

Philosophy of Religion Is a Fraud, But...

Right after typing out some of my recent reflexions on atheism, I came across this post at Religion Dispatches magazine, telling of a prominent philosopher of religion who has come to the conclusion that he has devoted his career to a subdiscipline that is in essence a fraud. Keith Parsons of the University of Houston is now abandoning this area of teaching and research (presumably to work on something else).

Is the philosophy of religion a fraud? As it is currently taught, yes, it most certainly is. It is, again, a huge waste of time to argue about the existence of God, not because both sides will stick stubbornly to their guns, but because this is not a universally meaningful question. We might as well be arguing about whether the Australian Aboriginal ritual object called a tjurunga is in fact responsible for impregnating Aboriginal women.

But as we might have predicted, one thing that Parsons does not consider is that, short of simply declaring a research program bankrupt, one might first consider whether there are not more fruitful approaches or more fitting methodologies for getting at the core of the thing that has long interested you. And here I just have to shake my head in amazement that my fellow philosophers seldom even notice the possibility of an ethnographic turn. Such a turn would make philosophy of religion into a data-driven, interpretive program, and thus it would parallel the turn currently being defended with some reason by advocates of the new, so-called 'experimental philosophy'. It would not ask, "Does God exist?" or "Is the soul immortal?", but rather "How does culture x's belief in such-and-such transcendent entity fit, logically and structurally, within that culture's universe of meanings?" When this task is accomplished, one can move on to cultures, y, z, and so on, and eventually come up with a schema for the universal parameters for the range of possible beliefs about some entity, say God or the soul, that is of interest to philosophers of religion.

Parsons is still beholden to that prime directive of philosophy (to which many x-phi advocates, at the cost of coherence, also remain committed), that "if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it." But this would mean that no one should devote serious attention to Australian Aboriginal theories of reproduction, and to my mind that would be to let something interesting and important fall off the academic agenda. Of course, when Parsons says 'serious academic attention' what he means is 'serious attention from academic philosophy', and one might reasonably ask whether the comparative and data-driven turn is not a turn away from philosophy (a similar question is being asked of x-phi advocates who are interested in psychology experiments).

My own inclination is to respond: who cares? As long as it gives better results, then why should we be afraid to cross disciplinary boundaries? But upon further reflection I also have to add that Durkheim and Mauss, for example, are also better philosophers than, say, John Hick or Louis Pojman. They are asking vastly more sophisticated questions, and using vastly more rigorous methodologies, to find answers to problems that they themselves recognize as emerging from the Western philosophical tradition.

The one great difference between the French comparative-religionists and the later philosophers of religion is that the former are perfectly willing to take seriously beliefs that they aren't considering adopting themselves. This is what philosophers simply can't do, as Parsons nicely demonstrates for us, and this limitation is the root cause of my estrangement from my own discipline (though the emergence of boundary-defying tendencies in academic philosophy in recent years, including experimental philosophy, does give me some hope that in the long run it will be worthwhile to stick around).

Ancestor Worship and Atheism

I learned about the existence of atheism and anarchism at around the same time (I think I was twelve). It may have been simply their parallel structure as words that caused me to interpret them in similar ways. I imagined that atheism properly understood is not so much a doxastic state, a lack of belief in the existence of some external entity, but rather a normative state, an opposition to the existence of that entity, or, perhaps better, an opposition to that entity's supposed claim on my soul. On the standard interpretation, by contrast, atheism involves the denial of the existence of an entity, while anarchism involves opposition to an institution that everyone acknowledges to exist. Its existence is the problem that gives any self-identification as an anarchist its sense and purpose.

Yet there may be something revealing about this misunderstanding-- something that leaves anarchism intact, while forcing us to rethink what it is we are asking, or answering, in conversations about religious belief. Now I've long insisted that it's a huge waste of time to argue either for or against the existence of God. I'm sympathetic to Bertrand Russell's view that claims about God are 'bad grammar', even if, as I see it, he was motivated by cocky self-assuredness, while on this question I suffer from the opposite weakness: total incomprehension.

Things start to make a bit of sense to me however when I turn from philosophical speculation to the ethnographic record. We know that, for the most part, preoccupation with the existence or non-existence of an omnipotent omniscient supernatural creator is a feature of only a particular type of society. It is, to put it succinctly, an abstraction from the idea of the monarch, and debates about the existence of God that characterize the modern era run parallel to the emergence of alternatives to monarchism. In this respect, it is no less provincial to suppose that the question "Do you believe in God?" is universally meaningful, than to suppose that one might reasonably ask of a paleolithic hunter-gatherer whether he prefers republicanism or absolute monarchy.

Countless ethnographic reports tell us that in relatively simple societies (and I mean 'simple' not as a judgment but as a description of measurable features) it is not the supreme being or first cause or summum bonum that is of interest: it is rather ancestors, the way the dead continue to play a role in the world of the living, the way they are reincarnated back into that world through new births, and the way they influence that world for better or ill depending on how the living regulate their behavior. This is what matters, and even if there might be some myth about the origins of the world or even about a supreme entity that rules the 'other side', this is nonetheless not what their religion --if we can speak of such a thing-- is centrally about.

This is something many early missionaries understood. For them, it was a matter of bringing God to the people who had not yet heard of him, in the savage and barbarian lands such as America, and not a matter of insisting that they exchange one god for another. This was a categorically different project for them than the conversion of the Chinese, for example, who were held by many (particularly the more liberal Jesuits) to already have a perfectly viable distinction between God and Creation, which would now only need to be recast in Biblical terminology: a cosmetic change more than a change of heart.

Now it seems to me that it makes sense to call an Amazonian native circa 1600 an 'atheist' only to the same extent that it makes sense to call her an 'anarchist'. She has no familiarity with state structures or with the idea of a causa sui, summum bonum, etc., but in both cases there is no real opposition, just a different range of belief options afforded by the particular sort of society in which she happens to live.

Yet while anarchism is supposed to concern an individual's beliefs about what is best for human society, atheism by contrast is supposed to be about the way not just human society in fact is, but the way the entire world is, with all its galaxies and quarks and so on. It is supposed to be a viewpoint about the ultimate causes of these things, and about what is sustaining them in existence and giving them their natures. That's a pretty tall order for any -ism, especially when we know that there is such a rigid correlation (in the ethnographic record, which for some reason no one wants to look at) between beliefs about the transcendent order on the one hand and the civic order on the other.

Now I am, as I've confessed repeatedly in this space, both an anarchist and an atheist, but I see the latter more or less as a direct consequence of the former: not so much as a view about what's actually behind the quarks and galaxies and magnets and stuff, but rather as a direct corollary for the transcendent realm of my principled commitments in the immanent realm. I don't need God because I don't need kings. I'm with the 16th-century Amazonians. (At least deep in my heart I am; in actual practice I am a run-of-the-mill liberal democrat and a non-practicing unitarian universalist, just like pretty much everyone I know.)

The so-called atheism of someone like Dawkins, from this perspective, looks at least as foolish as the piety of any bishop. It is born of a deep assurance that ethnographic data can be of no interest in formulating claims about the ultimate nature of reality, and this because of an absolute certainty that the ethnographic lens could never be turned back upon oneself, whose declarations about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being are motivated by reason and reflection alone, and not by the range of options one has in a particular time and place. (Hitchens, by contrast and to his credit, admits that he is an 'Anglican atheist').

The tragedy is that a century ago it looked like we were well on our way to a sophisticated science of religion, grounded in ethnographic data. Marcel Mauss was an atheist too, but he was light years ahead of Dawkins in his understanding of what it is to be an atheist, and by the same token of what it is to experience the world religiously or through the filter of ideas about transcendent beings (whether ancestor spirits or a supreme creator).

These days I'm trying to figure out when and how that vital research program trailed off, and left us only with yokels like Dawkins and Ratzinger to represent each his own position in the crudest and most un-self-aware terms possible. I suspect it has something to do with the rise of US Cold War hegemony (which made it seem that the American liberal democratic way of thinking was just thinking simpliciter) and of postmodernism (which made the study of human cultural diversity by European-trained scholars into an act of 'violence'). But now that these two trends are fizzling as well, perhaps now is a good moment to reclaim that early 20th-century scientific seriousness for the future study of religious belief. 

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A Problem about Religious Faith

Consider the following inscription:

In case you need some help (I did), it says Weltliche Weisheit ohne Gott, ist die größte thorheit. Which, being Englished, means, roughly, Worldly wisdom without God is the height of foolishness.

I found this  written on the front page of Valentin Weigel's Philosophia Mystica of 1618 while doing research in the rare books collection of the University of Helsinki. The book had been owned by the Scottish-Russian alchemist, mystic, and statesman Jacob Bruce [aka Iakov Brius] (1669-1735), and we may assume that the sentence is written in his hand. 

Now, if you were to ask me whether I agree with the claim, I would reply: "I suppose, but I would greatly prefer that it be left in its nearly indecipherable state, that it be left untranslated, and that it be entertained as a possibility only when browsing through dusty old leather-bound books in Nordic summer light filtered through stained glass." Translated into English, typed out, and considered under circumstances far removed from its initial discovery, I find the force of it is already greatly diminished. If I were to hear it from, say, some Dockers-wearing sap at a Midwestern Bible fellowship, I would reject it categorically.

It is true, though: worldly wisdom without God is the height of foolishness. (It does not follow from this that there is a God; it is enough that all worldly wisdom be irredeemably foolish. Which it is.) It is true, but whether or not one is receptive to its truth is going to depend entirely on the cultural and aesthetic setting of the truth's delivery. I am finite, mortal, confused, and all my striving is in vain, but I can only hear this from words on old paper, preferably not in English, preferably hard to decipher. I cannot hear it from representatives of the present age, whom I dismiss out of hand as banal. And I cannot hear it from anyone I consider my social or intellectual inferior, even if it is true.

I think this says more about the nature of religious faith than about my hang-ups. Dawkins, Dennett, and the other  'new atheists' would have us believe that there is a problem about the truth claims of religion. It seems to me, rather, that religion is, in its essence, the coming-together of members of the same sociocultural stratum around a cluster of indisputable truths (such as the one I transcribed from Jacob Bruce), and that the real obstacle to accepting them is not their content, but rather the cultural distance of the people touting them. This was clearly the key factor in Dawkins' ridiculous tour of middle-American mega-churches. It was a factor, moreover, that he, in his sociologically tone-deaf English self-confidence, was wholly unwilling to take into consideration.

Dawkins and the mega-church pastors will all look foolish, in due time (Ted Haggard already does). Meanwhile the truth-revealing cachet of the dusty old books will continue to grow.

Shimkus's Shibboleth

A minor storm of outrage has been set off by Representative John Shimkus's (R-IL) 2009 testimony before the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, in which he assured the chairman that there will be no further climate change since "the earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over." You can see it all here:

 

A first thought on seeing this might very well be: "Who let this yokel into the meeting?" And then the sinking realization: "Oh yes, of course, this is the US House of Representatives, who are all elected by their constituents." Congressmen always come across as a cut below senators. They can often be spotted wearing bolo ties and cowboy boots, small mementos of the places they come from, almost always discarded for anonymous blacks, greys, and reds if and when they ever reach the upper house. So it's not at all unusual to spot a congressmen who retains a bit of local flavor. In fact, his principal job is to spice things up at the federal level by bringing a recognizably local manner to the house chamber, and all the better if the small people back home are watching.

This testimony, I mean to say, is a performance, and more specifically it is a hand signal, a shout-out, a shibboleth for the people Shimkus has figured out he needs to gratify in order to be reelected. Congressmen can do their gratifying openly, in the language of the regular folk who elect them, while senators and presidents can only do it in code. Congressmen generally really are of the people, rather than just being representatives of the people. Being of the people, they are free to express the anti-Enlightenment sentiment that has been simmering in pockets of the West since the 18th century, and that is now at full boil in that pocket of the West we call the 'Midwest'. One may honestly doubt that Shimkus or his constituents themselves believe what they claim to believe; the insistence that they believe this is really just defiance, or negation, of what they are being told to believe by people they resent.

In this respect Shimkus's crude display of illiteracy ought to appear more as a public declaration of a certain sort of affiliation, rather than as having to do with some sort of clash of ideas. The compatibility of God's infallible word with empirical science, and with an allegorical understanding of the factual content of scripture, is something that was already worked out not hundreds of years ago, but thousands of years ago, within the first century of the spread of Christianity, in the subtle philosophical doctrines of Christian Platonists such as St. Clement of Alexandria. We've been over this stuff already, and countless Christians have worked out to their own satisfaction a way of interpreting the world based on tools more handy than a simple, blunt, literal reading of the holy book. Were they condemned as heretics when they made use of these tools? Generally, no, and as often as not they were made into saints. So whenever an American neo-Protestant politician says that he is constrained to believe x because he is a Christian and the Bible says he must, then quite apart from any concerns about the separation of church and state one may still wonder why his freedom to come to conclusions based on his own faculties of reason, judgment, and inquiry is even more circumscribed than that of the first-century Church Fathers.

I try to keep out of this sort of stuff because I think that in general to comment upon it is to become complicit in the cycle of predictable stupidity followed by impotent shock. On the rare occasions I cross over into what is called the 'liberal blogosphere' I am alarmed at the inability of its players to grasp that they are not, or not only, speaking truth against lies, etc., but are also occupying a certain role in a certain unsavory game that requires and craves constant refueling from performing monkeys like Shimkus. I believe that it is better to step back a bit, to remove oneself from this obscene cycle.

The reaction to Shimkus that follows the usual rules of the game, the one that I know without looking has already popped up at the Huffington Post and elsewhere, says: Shimkus is in error here. Global warming is a phenomenon that is unconnected to anything we might uncover through our amateur interest in Semitic philology. To which I want to say in reply: No shit, but who cares about the content of his claims?

We need to be analyzing the claim that the truth about climate change lies in scripture not as a context-free proposition, but as a speech act and as a performance. It's a delirious performance, one that blends wildly different registers of speech by combining phrases like 'parts per million' and 'cap and trade' with words like 'infallible', 'theological', and 'discourse', sometimes in the very same sentence. We should study the conditions that make this sort of confusion possible, and seek to eliminate them. Little or no progress will be made in this task by acting as though Shimkus is an equal communication partner who may properly be held up to our own standards of reason and judgment, and who may properly trigger our disappointment when he says something stupid.

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Insectotheology

Friedrich Christian Lesser, Insectotheology, or, A Reasonable and Literary Essay, Showing how a Man, through Careful Investigation of Otherwise Little-Noticed Insects, May Arrive at a Vivid Knowledge and a Sense of Marvel Before the Omnipotence, Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice of the Great God (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Michael Blochberger, 1738).

 

Frontispiece to Lesser, 1738.

Pascal's Wager and the Religious Right

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal's wager --that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it-- should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

There is, we must concede, a non-zero, if vanishingly tiny, possibility that the message of Yoke-Up Ministries is correct, that you, as the woman says, will go to hell.

Pascal had supposed that the persuasiveness of his argument to any rational thinker would result in submission to the long-standing authority of the Catholic church.  But the problem is that the argument is no more, and no less, compelling coming from a 17th-century Catholic philosopher defending traditional faith than coming from a couple of rough and unwashed rednecks in Louisiana in defense of a strain of enthusiastic neo-Protestantism that Pascal himself would have deemed diabolical.

Remarks to the Concordia University Philosophy Students' Association, November 16, 2006

By Justin E. H. Smith

I have been invited today to make some sort of case either for, or against, the existence of God.  I would like to explain instead why I believe that to do either would be a huge waste of time.

I think it is most unfortunate that our culture insists on echoing ad nauseam the false dichotomy between the theist and the atheist that Russell and Copleston foisted on us.  The latest, mediocre copy of the Russell character is a British biologist named Richard Dawkins, who is having a hell of a time raking in royalties and doing the talk-show circuit for his new book, The God Delusion.  To say this is a waste of paper is too soft a review.  It would be a waste of electricity were it posted on a blog.  I feel as though I am wasting my breath in simply mentioning it.  Dawkins’ argument is something like this: religion is irrational, and irrationality has bad effects, like the Inquisition, and September 11.  Science is rational, and has good effects, like cures for diseases.  Religion is a vestige of the childhood of civilization, and it would behoove us to grow out of it.  Dawkins believes there is a positive correlation between belief in a transcendent moral order and doing harm.  The empirical evidence however suggests that there is simply no correlation whatsoever.  Palestinian suicide bombers tell themselves stories about the paradise that awaits them, true, but Japanese kamikaze pilots wrote Romantic poetry about the oblivion of death.  Osama bin Laden believes in God, Pol Pot didn’t, etc.  The most cursory review of 20th-century history tells us that to assume that a despot’s ontotheological convictions might shine light on his actions is quite simply arbitrary.  We might just as well focus on his preferred brand of toothpaste.   

Mel and Monotheism

By Justin E. H. Smith

I would probably not consider myself in any position to hold forth on God, were talk of this sort not all the rage in Hollywood, and were I not such a slave to trickle-down fashion. But I remain an ordinary mortal, and would do well to proceed cautiously. I should perhaps begin by defining my terms.

It seems to me that God is nothing other than the inflation to infinity of our experience of paternal authority. I was never all that impressed with paternal authority. I preferred maternal solicitude, which inflated to infinity gives us not God but, well, infinite longing for more maternal solicitude. Our access to this begins decreasing around the time we stop breastfeeding, and when it is reduced to a mere residue at puberty we begin to look for alternative sources of it. For the most part, we look in vain, but the absence of what we long for does not cause us to supernaturalize the elusive object of our longing(save for a few neo-pagans who have made the category mistake of suggesting that God may be a woman).

The Heresy of Intelligent Design

By Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to explain why, in the matter of the origins of species, there can be no compromise position, no accommodation by one side of the principle tenets of the other. There can be no way of conceding the basic mechanisms through which evolution works while holding onto an anthropocentric view of the cosmos or a conception of human beings as unique among creatures in their likeness to the creator. It is time, in short, for evolutionists to be clear: you are either with us, or you are against us.

Another Monkey Trial?

Dover, Pennsylvania Rejects Intelligent Design; Rev. Robertson Issues Fatwah on Town

By Justin E. H. Smith

Earlier in this space I have argued that rational, progressive Americans should be no less concerned about anti-evolutionism than about the so-called pro-life movement. The former issue may appear easier to neglect, as debates about it have an air of intellectualism and irrelevance, while as for the latter women's rights are at stake, and clinics are bombed. At bottom, though, both are but fronts in the same ugly war, for in each case the Christian right makes an ungrounded claim to the sanctity of some class of entities -- human beings among animals in the one case, fetuses among human beings in the other -- argues that as a result of their sanctity these entities are effectively off-limits to scientific investigation, and portrays itself as a persecuted minority in view of the broader society's refusal to play along.

The Hairless Apes of Kansas

Why US Progressives have a Stake in the Evolution Debate

I would like to explain why I think the war on evolution in the United States is one about which all progressives should be concerned.

Compared with the campaigns against abortion and homosexuality, the other two members of that trifecta of Godlessness, evolution may seem unimportant. The first two concern judgments about what is right and wrong, whereas with the latter it is only a matter of truth and falsehood. But it is precisely in debates about what is right and wrong that people should be taking up sides based on preference. When it comes to true-or-false questions, the traditional assumption has been that it does not matter what you prefer; all that matters is what the evidence imposes.