Perhaps it outs one as a geek to say that Battlestar Galactica is the greatest television series of all time, but that does not mean it isn't true. This is not because it is merely great science fiction or because it is "dark and edgy", Caprica had this going for it, yet was entirely uninteresting. Battlestar Galactica is great for the reason that The Brothers Karamazov is great. Both are about life, death, love, sex, betrayal, unrequited love, despair, hope, madness, and faith and doubt - the very visceral ingredients of the human experience.
Some time ago I wrote that my main issue with Marxism was that I found no beauty in it. Eventually I thought this was a rather poor reason for rejecting it and I found I liked the theory and math of Capital, especially as interpreted by Harvey, so I thought I'd take it for a spin. It was something more scientific and rational to grab hold of while doubts about everything swirled around me.
Recently a formerly popular blogger publicly aired his abandonment of Christ for the philosophy of some obscure Marxist, to little response. I am not so much criticizing him as I lament for him. A good friend of mine once told me she believes that any good author, at some level, is writing about faith and doubt, their grappling with the Almighty. I suppose some lose that struggle between faith and doubt.
One would think that death knocking at the door would be the most difficult thing about cancer, but it isn't. What may have been the most difficult was the day I shit my pants and spent a long time weeping on my wife's shoulder, sobbing and soaking her shirt with my tears - that was when I knew life would never be the same, no matter how long I make it. Life has been hard. To be sure, there are many for whom life has been harder, but either way, life became much harder for me than I ever imagined possible. People have told me that this blog pre-leukemia is radically different than after. Though I fought against it and denied it to myself, I was angry - very angry - not at God, per se, but just angry and unhappy in general. I took that anger out on some people who did not deserve my ire, or at least did not deserve it in proportion to that received, and if it was you, dear reader, I am deeply sorry. It was something I had to work through, and I think I am now through it, at least for the most part. I am enjoying life again - difficult circumstances and all.
So, recently I changed my mind on the subject of beauty. It is THE reason. What is it to live a full life? Fullness is in the visceral, the bad and the good, and that is what makes for beauty on this side of death. Faith and doubt, Christ, is all part of that. It's not in some theory of perpetual revolution of the masses, which will never take place, and never really has without the leadership of radical petit bourgeois or, in the case of Paris, the artisans. It's not all bad, a lot of it is right, but it is lacking.
So what to do with this blog? My wife forbade my closing of it. Too many things have changed too fast, she says, and she wants at least these bytes of pixilated memory to remain. I understand where she is coming from. Nevertheless, subject matter has changed too many times. Val, my strength and refuge through the dark times, has given me permission to turn this into a family blog, and so that is what it shall become - pictures of the kids and all that. Over time the other content will go "missing", and some already has.
That does not mean that I intend to stop writing, far from it. I am presently putting together a new site. This time with Wordpress, as I hear that is where all the cool kids have gone. Once I have a little content, I will supply a link for anyone who finds it of interest.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Endings: Blog Finally
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
17 comments:
Love you dude!
Likewise! Of course I have never met your wife (or you for that matter) but what you write of her convinces me she is a perfect partner for you.
I have enjoyed your writings for quite some time now and admit that I would get dismayed when I saw you going down the Ochlophobist route. I liked the criticisms of greed and pride within Orthodoxy, and the teasing of White People and What They Don't Like. Interspersed with those were some good writings about true Orthodoxy (Christianity?). I do not know whether you want to remain Orthodox or not, but I hope that you will keep writing, without letting bitterness or despair take over, but with an eye on that which is beautiful.
Recently a formerly popular blogger publicly aired his abandonment of Christ for the philosophy of some obscure Marxist, to little response. I am not so much criticizing him as I lament for him. A good friend of mine once told me she believes that any good author, at some level, is writing about faith and doubt, their grappling with the Almighty. I suppose some lose that struggle between faith and doubt.
This is one of the idioms, if you will, that disgusts me about Christianity. There are certainly strains of Marxist thought that are, to use a broad brush, totalizing in their analysis and with regard to their demands, so to speak, on the adherent. There are sectarian Marxist/Socialist/Commie groups out there that promote this sort of totalizing posture. Such radicals are certainly among the minority of Marxists in the West today, as most Marxists in the West are considered "heterodox" or "unorthodox" but for the sake of discussion let's assume that this totalization is a normal part of Marxism. So then the Christian comes along, bemoaning this totalization, bemoaning the ways in which Marxism embraced supposedly takes the place of Christ or Christianity, what have you. The aesthetics of Marxism (there are many aesthetic traditions arguably informed by Marx, including some in use in certain Christian circles, but for the sake of discussion let's pretend there is one) is, when bad, bad because of this Marxist totalizing which diminishes the human person, and when good, good because it is, whether knowingly or not, in some fashion rejecting Marxism. The Christian would use this same pattern of analysis with regard to any -ism.
And then we learn that "true" art created by "good" artists receives its truth and goodness because the artist, "at some level, is writing about faith and doubt, their grappling with the Almighty." This begs a barrage of questions of course, such as whether this means a Buddhist raised in a Buddhist culture with no anxiety about any Almighty is incapable of producing “good” art, or if grappling with Nirvana or grappling with eight fold path is close enough to grappling with the Almighty to count as a struggle between faith and doubt at some level which makes “good” art possible - though, one would think if that were the case then the question an art informed by a “grappling with revolution” or a “grappling with class struggle” might also approximate “grappling with the Almighty” enough to potentiate “good” art. The thing that strikes me here is that we have just seen the same totalizing hand played which the Marxists have been accused of. Art becomes true and beautiful to the extent that, at some level, it involves a struggle with, as AV would put it, the sky god (as my group conceives/fetishizes it). Might we say that this is functionally no different than the hyper orthodox Marxist for whom true art done by good artists is only true, good, and beautiful when, at some level, it expresses class struggle and attempts in some fashion to come to terms with or to express the human experience of alienation? The Christian, who dismisses Marxism in this way, seems to just trade which ideology he/she is using to do the same thing. It's not the function of their ideology then that is through and through "wrong" or somesuch, it's the naivety of thinking that in rejecting a Marxist view of man and art (or any other "totalizing" approach to man and art) for a Christian one, they arrive at a means of analysis that leaves humans any more free or whole.
- cont'd -
In hindsight, the Christian intellectuals whose reflection impressed me most and formed me most were those who taught me to hold categories loosely – one was a sociologist and one was an anthropologist and they were two of the three intellectual mentors I had in my 20s. Both had come out of Christian traditions but were not orthodox Christians when I knew them, though one of them remained working in a Christian environment. This notion that it in in the struggle to come to terms, and not the confident and trite actual taking of terms, which grants us access to and potential for truth, goodness, and beauty is a notion that can be found within original Christian milieus, on occasion (here I think of Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky), but I think these men who influenced me were Christians who had come to this sort of cross between existential struggle mixed with Kuhnian paradigm dynamism via intellectual domains influenced by Marx, even if that was not stressed in the telling. Indeed, I tend to think that a Dostoevskian or Kierkegaardian “it’s all in the struggle” ethos will inevitably denigrate toward dogmatic and aesthetic rigidism if left in the confines of a Christianity that does not allow the use of at least nominally Marxist and/or critical modes of aesthetic formulation. As you well know, you see in certain American Orthodox circles the existentialist and supra-dogmatic or sub-dogmatic language of the desert fathers used all the time by people for whom it is nothing more than a rhetorical play of hand meant to evoke a posture within the context of intellectual (or anti-intellectual) and aesthetic rigidism and cookie-cutter didacticism. A sort of language of dynamic freedom within struggle advanced by people whose lives, decisions, mannerisms, and functional beliefs convey nothing but a static, firm, rigid attempt to annihilate struggle or get past/beyond it. Contradiction is found everywhere of course, and there is no need to single these people out – one can find plenty of critical theorists and Marxists dealing in aesthetics who are also using the language of freedom to cover an intellectual prison. I guess I’m just saying that I don’t see godtalk as an effective out.
Over the years I was in Orthodox circles, because of the relatively high number of intellectuals found in American Orthodoxy and because of the high number of people who might, rightly or wrongly, be described as aesthetes, I had a lot of conversations with folks about art, music, literature. It just so happens that last night I was out having drinks with comrades including a fellow who is a non-orthodox Marxist and intellectual from Cuba (he's not a member of the Cuban Communist Party; he seemed to be something of a libertarian Marxist), here to set up a university student exchange program. I'm not sure I can yet express well the differences between the two groups with regard to these discussions, only to say roughly that my present company strikes me as more open, less sentimental, and more given to what we might call a holistic and more human view of art. But I know full well that given different sets of actors – one could have the exact opposite experience – spending time with sentimental, closed-minded, statically derivative Marxists and then finding a more free and open approach to aesthetics among some group of Christians. I’ve certainly met some Christians like that over the years, though my view of this is complicated when I consider that the Christians I have known who were like this have nearly always been influenced by critical theory and/or Marxism, but there I suppose I introduce by version of at some level…
- cont'd -
I remember this conversation I had about 10 years ago. I was nearing the height of my conservativeish stage and my seeking to find some traditional path to get me through modernity. Anyway I was over having drinks at the apartment of some friends - this couple were theologically liberalish Prots but politically conservative – talk about an unfortunate mix. They started talking to me about the beauty of medieval architecture and some of the buildings they had seen in Europe, and aesthetic relations between architecture, liturgics, and theology - in other words it was the sort of conversation we've all had a thousand times in Orthodoxy, except without the baggage of learned clichés used in convert circles, and we were talking about the glories of Western Christian architecture. Anyway, I had just read this book (I no longer remember what book it was - some medieval studies monograph from Ashgate or Brill or somesuch) which included a section that dealt with the actual construction of several different European medieval cathedrals and the social relations involved in those discussions. So, in the midst of this discussion, even though I was at the height of my traditionalist aesthetic bent, I go off on how I just can't reconcile the brutality and exploitation used to make these buildings, and the typical human experience of most human beings living around these buildings - especially their treatment by the people who "benefited" most from the buildings. The image of the happy pious peasant just so gloriously grateful to have the beautiful cathedral next to him is of course fanciful sentiment of the highest order. Anyway, these were just musings I was letting out because I had just read that book and then walked into a discussion of traditional Western religious architectural aesthetics, but what struck me was the response of these friends - they got serious looks on their faces and, in a nutshell, said, holy shit - we had no idea (though it seems silly now that one would not have an idea of feudal social relations involving most people being, more or less, chattel). But the point is that people spend all sorts of analysis on the artistic, liturgical, and theological aspects of the aesthetic parameters of a medieval cathedral, but don’t stop once to consider the social relations involved in building and maintaining it. That is colossally messed up and, it seems to me, horrifically anti-human. And those realities beg the questions AV raises – the sky god, who in most Christian tellings is content to damn most of humanity to hell, so needs to express this particular aesthetic truth and beauty via an architectural medium which “rightly” engages the theological and liturgical, and it doesn’t matter to him what sort of chattel is needed to accomplish all this – hell, he is in the eternal chattel torturing business himself anyway. So over the years I went back and forth and tried and tried to come to some terms with this aesthetic tradition in the name of Christ that was built on the bones and blood of the poor, that reinforced and divinized perverse and anti-human social relations, but ultimately I never could, hence...
- cont'd -
When thinking of Marxist art and beauty I can’t help but think of contradictions – like the fact that the British Isles folks tunes that so many Christian distrubutist ChesterBellocians longing for a Tolkienish shire in America love were preserved by people whose motivations vis-à-vis culture were formed by marx and socialism (from Alan Lomax to A.L. Lloyd to Ewan MacColl). I guess this is part of the reason I suggest that it is just as easy (for me, easier) to see the impulse toward “good” art coming from a sense of class struggle than it is to view it in terms of some struggle with the Almighty.
Lastly, Marxism is no more or less angry than Christianity. It may offer different types of anger. The quietism of a Fr. Stephen Freeman is a façade and it can only be afforded with such affect by people living comfortably middle class lives as he does. There are plenty of happy Marxists out there, on the internet things get exaggerated – which is true for all intellectual persuasions. When considering the accusation of bitterness one must also keep in mind the smugness of those doing the spiritual analysis. If all the data you have presented on this site concerning a parish in Riverside is true, then I think that your analysis of that data has been unquestionably true. If for whatever personal reasons you don’t care to discuss those matters anymore, great, fine. But you should be thanked for having spoken truth in the face of a despicable expression of anti-humanity and astounding spiritual arrogance and cult-like controllishness. Thank you for that.
sorry, but above when I wrote "and the social relations involved in those discussions" I meant and the social relations involved in those construction projects
Owen,
My rejection of Marxism is not at the level of Marxism as "totalizing which diminishes the human person, and when good, good because it is, whether knowingly or not, in some fashion rejecting Marxism." Of course I could say that it may be totalizing in the sense of boiling the human experience down to class struggle, but I don't think that is a fair critique of what any sane Marxist actually believes. So, some Christians you find personal influential, in hindsight, were influenced by Marx - so what? I don't think that Christianity exists in some bubble where it cannot draw from the outside. It is not as if this post is to mean that I am resetting my positions to Pactum Serva c. '08.
If totalizing statements haven't always been a part of this blog, I don't know what has. Of course I could name a number of contradictions to the statement. The Irish folk album which stands above all others is the Andy Irvine and Paul Brady collaboration, while Andy Irvine also plays a wonderful tribute to James Connelly (fun fact: James Connelly called on a priest before the end). My favorite science fiction trilogy is atheistic to its very core. The point can be drawn out, but take it as you will, good art can still come out of an incomplete anthropology. Still, speaking in a personal sense, I cannot say that an aesthetic devoid of "spiritual struggle" of some sort has ever appealed to the very core of my being. Your mileage may vary, as they say.
At some point the question of importance for you switched from "how is life to be lived" to how to "come to some terms with this aesthetic tradition in the name of Christ that was built on the bones and blood of the poor, that reinforced and divinized perverse and anti-human social relations." Okay. I think it was fairly inevitable that the Church would become an instrument of class power, really from the point that it was decided that bishops should know how to read. I don't think this counters the fact that at its core, at least on a spiritual level, Christian anthropology is incredibly egalitarian. If you are using the reasoning that you cannot come to terms with actually existing Christianity, yet can come to terms with actually existing Marxism, I find your point incredibly weak.
When I spoke of the "formerly popular blogger", I was speaking of Arturo, not you. Which is silly, to say the least, as he had pretty much already revealed his rejection of Christianity, yet for some reason, when he wrote it more bluntly, it affected me in a manner I had not anticipated, which was more or less the answer to my self directed question of whether or not I still believe, becoming the final catalyst in my rejection of said ideology. Though, I am also saddened if you are following that same path, even if not surprised. If you made this known in the blog world, it happened outside of my currently limited scope of reading. I know you had a falling out of some sort with Gabriel, and I assume it is probably associated with this issue.
As for my anger or bitterness, I did not mean to imply that Marxism is inherently angry or bitter. I quite literally meant "I" was deeply angry and that it directly influenced my decisions and tone - and really, until fairly recently, I think most people had a greater problem with chosen combination of tone and approach than content. It will likely make you spray your screen with beer in laughter, but one of my reasons for converting to Orthodoxy was to avoid gurus and personality cults. I don't regret addressing this issue but, were I to do it again, it would have been in a way that would not have hurt or insulted people I care about - and beyond that, at some point I was insulting people just to insult people.
The attention to aesthetics here prompts me to share a recent conjecture of mine...it is abstract and might be bullshit...but what the hell:
The place of aesthetics in life and history is what I, so far, perceive to be the greatest lack in history and the historical process. If Hegel and Marx (predecessors and followers) have accomplished some penultimate point (in a vague ideal still to be fully realized and understood), I would place them in the categories of Knowing and Doing (Thought/Will or Truth/Good). This amounts to Hegel and Marx focusing on two aspects of the trinity of life, which is Knowing-Doing-Making (Though-Will-Feeling or True-Good-Beautiful).
The latest steps have accomplished the most in those two aspects but only a little (a lot but marginally?) in the way of the beautiful.
Does this strike you as making sense at all? Is there still lacking some grand step to be made in the beautiful?
If that is the 'tri' aspect of life, what is the 'dual' aspect? Is it not only subject/object but 'sky god'/human...or revealed/real...God/man...Church/state? Whatever the duality, what is accomplished in the tri aspects of life must also be worked out between the dual aspects and vice versa.
Of course, the tri and dual aspects leave the final aspect: unity (one/absolute/concrete) which is where it is all going.
Finally, if I have not accomplished complete foolery so far, I think this is where Arturo is right on. 'Organisation' and 'embodiment' might allude to this lack of feeling and/or beauty. With Arturo, the beautiful has always been there but, as he accounts his history, perhaps it is the thing missing?
Speaking truth. how rare, but how easy when pain has conquered. Thank you.
Lotar,
Again my apologies for not communicating well what I had intended to communicate here. Setting aside the areas where I think we have perhaps been talking past each other I'd like to address two points you make.
On the matter of anthropology I tend to follow those Marxists who view Marxism as historically contingent upon developments in thought that came out of Western thought, particularly Western thought influenced by Christianity. This is not necessarily to say that without Christianity you don't get Marxism - Marxists don't tend to play alternate universe games - it is to say that in the development of anthropology over time Marxism comes about via processes that are very much contingent upon Christianity and, in particular, certain ideas that either stem from Christianity or were codified and advanced by Christianity. At this point, to the extent that Christian anthropologies leave out the sorts of things I suggest, I find them lacking. The Christian might look at Marxist anthropologies and assert that they lack the spiritual element and so forth. At which point I would say that this is asking Marxism to answer questions it is not asking, whilst for Christians to leave out Marxist observations about social relations is necessarily dubious and suggestive of an unstated agenda, given what has been observed in the last 200 or so years with regard to economic/material/social relations.
Further, what "spiritual anthropology" in modernity is not derivative upon a materialist anthropology of some sort? Basically, I think that most conservative/traditional Christian anthropologies are a cover, a front, for a material agenda that is essentially reactionary and meant to keep people in their "station." I think many Christian folks don't think of their anthropologies in this way, but nonetheless they function in this way. At the same time, there are modern Christian anthropologies which essentially embrace Marxist anthropological insights and terms, but add a spiritual element to that. I have no problem with such a move. Icing on the cake, whatever floats people's boat, etc. I know some Christian Marxists that assert that there needs to be a combination of Christian and Marxist anthropology in order to have a whole, complete anthropology. I am not here to dispute that - I find I generally have enough agreement with such persons that an argument over anthropology would be a waste of time. But I do think that a conservative/trad Christian anthropology that does not make use of Marxist terms and ideas (and here I speak of these in the broadest sense – many use Marxist terms without self-identifying as Marxists), is incomplete with regard to human material and historical existence, which is to say pretty much all of human life that humans are able to analyze and study objectively and subjectively. Inevitably an attempt to embrace a conservative/trad Christian anthropology is an attempt to magically go backwards in history - not only or not especially to a prior state of human conditions but to a supposed but not real prior consciousness regarding human relations and experience - and I find this project hopeless, much like those Christians who want to return to the 1950s, and have a view of the 1950s which leaves out all the nasty bits, like separate water fountains for blacks and legalized rape within marriage and very different standards between men and women when it came to the question of adultery and pollute whenever you see fit and so forth.
- cont'd -
On the question of actually existing Christianity vs. actually existing Marxism I see the two as difficult to appropriate in equivalent terms because I don't actually have the choice to participate in actually existing Marxism. I will say that given the choice to move to Cuba, if my family were not a factor, I probably would, though I have my doubts that Cuban socialism will survive the vultures circling the soon coming post-Castro era. I say this only because I could really use the free health care right now and I know several people in Cuba, even some who are critical of Cuban socialism, who prefer Cuba to the U.S. have have sold me on that line of thought. That said, I probably would not join the Cuban Communist Party so I don't know to what extent I would be embracing the actually existing Marxism there, at least ideologically speaking. I think for all of its faults Cuba is generally an easier/better place to be working class than the U.S. is. I would certainly not want to live in China. I don't know enough about Venezuela. No way to North Korea, and so forth. But all of these things involve defecting and a number of steps I am not in a position to take even if I wanted to. I also keep in mind that actually existing Marxist states, in the broadest sense of the term (states that appeal to themselves as attempting to follow a Marxist model) have only existed for less than 100 years and are thus much younger than capitalism and have gone through some horrific fits and starts. To make a "fair" comparison to capitalism we would have to compare actually existing Marxism at age 400 or so, and this is impossible for me to do, obviously. With regard to the whole notion of actually existing Marxism - for a Marxist we are all living in actually existing Marxism because even those living in capitalism are living in societies where in the process from capitalism to post capitalism is at work. My Cuban friends, one of which I had drinks with this past week, will tell you that Cuba is a far way from communism, and they disagree to whether or not Cuba is even socialist - the general line is that the word socialist only accurately applies to Cuba by way of comparison to other states - most Cuban intellectuals think that Cuba is still working on achieving socialism, let alone communism. And this is hard to do when you have to run resorts for bourgeois tourists in order to get much needed cash for your people, all in the context of the blockade, etc. Not to mention the cult of Castro, etc. It seems that actually existing socialism will not be fully pursued until capitalism no longer has the grapple hold on the world it currently does.
- cont'd -
Actually existing Christianity, on the other hand, is in front of me every day. And yes, I made, publicly enough, the decision some time ago that I would not participate in forms of Christianity that presented a culture that was petit-bourgeois (or bourgeois, god forbid) dominant. Hence if every Catholic parish around were like most Catholic parishes in this diocese I would never, ever, go to Catholic Church. I believe that a petit-bourgeois dominant Christianity - one that affirms and supports and in a sense deifies petit-bourgeois life (which is typical of most suburban Catholicism, nearly all Evangelicalism, most convert Orthodox parishes, most mainline churches, etc.) is so obviously ridiculous and pointless that it hardly merits any consideration. The idea that one can spiritually benefit from an environment in which petit-bourgeois life is presented as a good renders the spiritual life a complete farce. There is a sense in which in my understanding the material overrides the spiritual - in the sense that if you get the material aspects of social and economic relations wrong then your spiritual teaching/belief/milieu is utterly pointless. But I could just as easily explain it in a way that emphasizes the spiritual diseases indicative of the embrace of and defense of petit-bourgeois values and modes of life. I've gone back and forth on the emphasis there in the last couple of years but I don't think the emphasis matters in terms of the conclusions drawn and the praxis (or lack thereof) which follows.
Owen,
Bear with me, I just spent a night at the hospital, so I'm not sure how well I am presenting my thoughts.
I think there is a tension or contradiction within Christianity, where on one hand it is revolutionary in saying that the slave is equal to the master, and on the other is anti revolutionary in telling the slave to obey his master. I think that the fact that these days most Trads support some sort of Liberalism shows that Christianity, even conservative and traditionalist Christianity, at some level, is not opposed to the forward march of man. What this means, I am not sure of. I suppose I could say that perhaps the question of the ordering of society, class relations, etc, is beyond the scope of what Christianity is concerned with, and perhaps that is just a cop out.
Not too long ago I was complaining about some of this to my parents, as it related to my experience - the glorification of bourgeois values, placating the rich, etc - and their response was that all churches are this way, its just people. I think to some degree they are right. Just because there's shit in the sausage doesn't mean I shouldn't eat it.
From what I hear, the Cubans are seriously considering adopting the Chinese economic model. When I am talking about actually existing whatever, I'm talking about the gap between reality and ideal. Perhaps it is easier to overcome that gap when not directly facing it. At least I see the Church being more realistic in saying that gap won't even be close to closed until the next life. I do not see that gap ever being closed in revolutionary Marxism. If it came down to choosing a new country (for the sake of healthcare I totally understand the sentiment) I would have to admit I'd rather go for a social democratic state. I'll agree that their path to socialism has appeared to have also failed, but I think in general it was done more humanely.
Inevitably an attempt to embrace a conservative/trad Christian anthropology is an attempt to magically go backwards in history
I think in a lot of ways this is true, but I'm not sure it necessarily has to be this way. Often it isn't really even anything like conservative/trad, but rather a blend of this moralism and that of liberalism. So you get guys like Venny offering some cheap platitude about unwed mothers, then insisting that the gubmint should not be subsidizing bastardy. I think there needs to be some balance that recognizes the social conditions that are producing what traditional Christianity would call social ills, shifts condemnation from victims and so on.
Marxism is about taking; Christianity is about giving. That's the fundamental difference. Communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin: materialism.
Post a Comment