But I’m still stuck on Steubenville… well, not just Steubenville, but rape… well, not just rape, but rape culture… well, not just rape culture, but the notion of “consent” that is front and center in discussions of rape in rape culture.  Let me backtrack for a moment.

The first response that was as interesting as it was outrageous was that of the mainstream media that poured out its pathos for the young men who committed the rape – and a number of other crimes against this young woman.  “Their lives are ruined,” went the central narrative – and we saw they young men weep at fairly light sentences, in part, we might assume, because they would be listed as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.  We are visual creatures, and simple-minded at times, and so the young woman, who understandably is staying out of the limelight, disappeared.  Her pain, humiliation, and sorrow were not on public display – and this is a performative society.

In response to the media’s total insensitivity to the actual victim, a good number of people responded with scathing criticism of the media.

This was followed by the usual debates about whether women need to take responsibility for protecting themselves from rape, or whether men – perhaps – should stop assaulting women; and my position on this is pretty clear.  Rape is caused predominantly by men (like mass murders, by the way, only a lot more often).  Men bear the responsibility, full stop.  As for women taking precautions, I know for a fact that many women already take all kinds of precautions out of hard experience.

Men do not typically check the back seat of their automobiles before they get in at night, for example, and I don’t personally know any woman who doesn’t.  Fear of a kind not familiar to most men is the daily fare of women in a society dominated by men, and often dominated with violence or the threat of violence.  For women, the threat of violence always include the threat of violence that is sexual.

The exception for men is the threat of prison, where men rape other men with greater frequency than is the case outside of prison – which not surprisingly turns the rape victim into an honorary woman – a “prison bitch.”  If that doesn’t tell us something important, we are brain all brain dead.  In fact, it tells us something very important about a lot of things that we ought to recognize, which we stubbornly and collectively do not.

I celebrate the fact that some kind of justice was done in the convictions of the two men who committed the rape; while at the same time, I have all sorts of conflicting thoughts and emotions about the legal system that convicted them.  I have huge questions about the whole “sex offender” thing – which applies equally to a zillion cases that are anything but equal.  I also need to mention my antipathy for one of the tropes that has become popularized by the ever-present Law and Order television series, specifically the Special Victims Unit episodes.  In that program, it is repeatedly claimed that “sex offenders” of various kinds are incapable of changing – as if it were some form of genetic defect.  This foolishness is cited almost as a scientific fact, complete with psychological “profilers” (which I personally consider to be con-artists of the first order) to substantiate this notion.

My problem is that this notion sets apart rapists as another species – Homo rapus, if you will – who is unlike other people, that is, unlike other men.  Rapists rape.  Not men.  All we need to do is lock them up, castrate them, or kill them; and the problem is solved.  This is bullshit, pure and simple.  Men rape because men are culturally encouraged to violence, trained in the the eroticization of violence, and taught that women are the appropriate objects for sex, domination, and humiliation.

Again, prison is a fearful place for men, because a prisoner might be turned into an honorary woman – a horrifying fate.

Yet, many of us see the possibility of prison rape as a legitimate aspect of a convict’s punishment.  I have seen some comments on line that celebrate precisely this possibility for the rape convicts at Steubenville:  “Now they might see how it feels!”  Justice then is not restorative, but vengeful.  It sure isn’t protective, because spending time in prison are not going make a man less likely to rape after being locked up in a culture where your choice is to be a “jocker” or a “bitch.”  The prison rape as punishment theme, then, simply re-inscribes the association of sex with power, aggression, vengeance, hostility, and humiliation that underwrites rape in a rape culture in the first place.

We can’t have that cake and eat it, too.

Understandably, there are a lot of people writing about Steubenville with the question – the right question in many respects – and that is, “How do we raise boys to become men who won’t rape?”  At least that question sidesteps the dilemmas of legal justice where rape could be used to punish rape.

In one article, a woman who was addressing this topic noted that among a group of fellow mothers of boys, when asked what qualities these women wanted to see in their boys when they became men, they replied with answers like, humor, strength, work ethic, and athleticism.  They were taken aback a bit when she said she wanted to see her boys learn to be kind.  Oh yes, they replied, as an afterthought, of course… kindness is good, too.

In her subsequent remarks, she listed some qualities along with kindness that might help her boys grow into men who don’t rape – no matter the circumstances.  Among those qualities she listed something to the effect of the ability to understand “consent.”

My own happy association with a certain form of feminism set a little warning bell ringing at this remark, not because I don’t agree with it, but because I have been taught by women who have given this a lot of thought that “consent” is not as simple a thing as it sounds.  You can’t cover everything with a slogan like, “No means no.”  For starters, a woman who is passed out can hardly say “no,” but it is more complicated even than that.

The feminists who made me aware of this are the ones who study the relationship between sex and structural power; not just whether women get paid the same as men or whether women have access to the levers of power that men do, but how the sex act itself is inflected with the social power of men-as-men over women-as-women.

I’ve learned about male power (my power) and its abuses from my wife, too, who continues to teach me every single day, and whose love and patience with me has been redemptive.

Consent as a legal term in a liberal legal framework is inadequate to describe the reality of what women do and do not choose in a society where their capacity to survive and flourish is defined within a more general relation between men and women where men exercise dominance and women are trapped in dependency.

“Consent” is circumscribed by law into a momentary episode – beginning, middle, end – with no prior history or context.  Did she say yes, did she say no, was she capable of giving consent?

In the real world, it is never that simple.

A few examples.

If a man and a woman have a few drinks, and she “consents” after three drinks, is that consent meaningful?  Five drinks?  Twelve drinks?  Where is the cutoff?  Or is there some perfect demarcation that marks the difference between what is right and wrong, ethical or unethical, consensual or non-consensual?  Plenty of people will say that none of this makes a difference – yes means yes and no means no, period.  But that is a legal(istic) argument that refuses to acknowledge the difference between three drinks and ten, which is very real.

If a man and woman work together, and the man offers the woman money for sex, is that consensual?  If she needs the money because she is poor?  If she needs the money because a child needs to go to the doctor?  If she works for the man instead of just with him?

Consent is slippery.  Very slippery.

How about a married woman who – for any number of reasons – does not want to have sexual relations with her husband, but does because she fears he will abandon her if she doesn’t?  How about if he has threatened abandonment, and that would result in poverty for her?  How about if it would result in poverty for her children?  Is consent as meaningful in each case?

How about a woman who has been raised since a girl and indoctrinated with the idea that without a man, she will be worthless or helpless?  If she is also given to understand that  to “get and keep” a man, she will have to have sex, is she really the equal sexual agent of men that she is in the eyes of the law?

How about a woman who, through hard experience of being preyed upon by men, makes a decision to marry or cohabitate with a lesser-evil male to achieve the status of “taken” as a form of protection from all other males?  I heard a thing on NPR once about a book for potential prison inmates that suggested finding a good ‘jocker” early and giving him sex as a form of protection from other inmates.  Is that very different from the choices some women feel compelled to make?

I totally understand that we want to raise boys who understand and respect “consent.”  The young men who were just convicted at Steubenville either didn’t understand it – or more likely – ignored it.

Men – not Homo rapus, men – who otherwise do not rape have been known to rape when given a particular opportunity.  War is a good example, but frat parties are equally notorious.  That men seek to understand whether or not they can “get away with it” is a manifestation of rape culture.

But if men are going to be part of the solution and not merely reject being the problem, then we are called to understand “consent” in a far deeper way that what we can or cannot get away with, than with the legal definition of “consent” that turns courtrooms into voyeurs that go over and over every excruciating and horrifying detail of a victim’s experience – taking the victim with them.

If we are going to be part of the solution, then we will have to approach every situation, first of all, without being on the make.  But more importantly, we need to adopt an attitude of contrition in our relations with women.  I know some men will object to this idea of contrition, because in liberal society we are called to be contrite only in instances of personal guilt.  But the problem here begins with structural power that we have inherited – like it or not; and it is a power that we cannot wash off our hands like blood.  It’s there, attached to us by history and custom and law.  Before we can stand across from our sisters in mutual acknowledgement of our full humanity, we have to stand there contrite for the power that lays at our feet like a shadow.  Our regret for this power – our contrition – is the bridge we can lay between us, and as such contrition is a gift to men.  It is the attitude where we can be open to fully understand – in every moment – that we need to ask, ask again, and ask again – then listen, listen, and listen again.

Only then can we do our part to ensure that “consent” has real meaning beyond the brutal sterility of law.  This may be more controversial than believing that we should encourage boys to be kind.  It may also be the precondition.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

*

Witch Hunt History

A dominant impression in popular American culture is that witch-hunting and witch burning were a medieval artifact of Western Christianity.  Some even speak of paganism as a more humane system on that account, especially as it has become voguish (and inaccurate) to claim that paganism is an ancient form of proto-feminism.  Most of our contemporaries – at least those who think about this at all – carry with them the idea that witch-hunting and witch burning were products of superstition that were swept aside by the post-Enlightenment certainties of science.  In fact, the subject of witch persecutions is far more complex; and the history of witch persecutions turns out to be illuminative of each historical epoch of which it is a part.  This is true, however, only when witch persecutions as a whole – across place, time, and culture – are studied and understood as a phenomenon of gendered power.

Studies show that belief in witchcraft – understood as a malevolent practice – existed in early China, Babylonia, and Egypt.  Laws against it were promulgated in these various societies, as well as in pre-Christian Europe and Imperial Rome.

Hebrew law forbade all forms of sorcery and divination, though in the context of Hebrew monotheism, these practices were understood not so much dangerously efficacious as an idolatrous alienation of affection from the true God.  The comment in Exodus that a “witch shall not be suffered to live” is actually a mistranslation of a Hebrew term for ‘someone who poisons’ into the word “witch.”

History has left us with many questions about when and how certain practices came to be primarily associated with women, even when the language to describe them may have been gender-free.

Romans were superlative record-keepers, so one of the earliest indicators of the popular association of malevolent witchcraft with women is an account from 331 BC, in which 170 women were executed for witchcraft.  The designated witches were convicted of causing an epidemic.  Epidemic was the catalyst again, from 184-180 BC, over which time the various Roman authorities put around 5,000 of these “witches” to death.  Witch burning was in the Empire before Christianity came onto the scene.

By the 6^th Century there appeared somewhat mythologized written accounts of Vistula River Goths engaging past anti-witch campaigns.  In the Gothic account, witches were exclusively women.  So we can see that there was an explicit association of female with dangerous sorcery in Germanic and Roman society reaching back some time.

Little known nowadays, Roman persecution of witches – as well as persecution of witches by non-Romans in the Germanic provinces – pre-dated Christianity; and for the first four centuries of Christianity, Christians themselves were emphatically opposed to executing witches.  The Roman practice of killing women as witches was actually curtailed by increasing Christian influence in Roman society after the Constantinian conversion.

Between 300-700 AD, the church implemented laws against “devil worshipping” and sorcery, but these crimes were described bisexually as those of “witches and wizards,” and the punishments were kept intentionally mild.

St. Augustine called witchcraft “illusion, not a crime.”

A Christian who believes that there is a vampire in the world, that is to say, a witch, is to be anathematized; whoever lays that reputation upon a living being shall not be received into the Church until he revokes with his own voice the crime that he has committed.”  (Synod of St. Patrick, 5^th Century)

In 906, the Vatican declared the belief in witchcraft (in its efficacy) to be heretical.

By the time of the Norma Conquest, the church regarded witchcraft in a manner consistent with many of our own contemporaries – as a less than catastrophic superstition – that warranted only mild rebuke.  The Bishop of Worms wrote a long treatise circa 1020, in which he discounted the supposed efficacy of sorcery, witchcraft, and other purported forms of magic.  Sixty years later, Pope Gregory VII beseeched the King of Denmark to cease and desist with witch burnings, which were becoming an occasional response to events like crop failure.  Two centuries earlier, Pope Nicholas I had forbidden torture outright for Christians.

The church, then, had denounced sorcery and witchcraft, centuries prior to the Enlightenment, using the same basic argument that we use today in response to claims of magic and sorcery – that it is illusory and inefficacious.

So how did the church, Western Europe, and even the American Colonies devolve into the orgy of female witch persecution that began in earnest in the 15^th Century?

We find that records of these outbursts of official and mass misogyny – against “witches” – can function as windows into the whole cultures of the past – economic, political, social, technological, and ideological.

Two things seem important to point out at the beginning.  First of all, the majority of witch persecutions were under civil, not ecclesial, authority.  Secondly, accusations, trials, and witnesses were highly localized, with women comprising nearly half of all accusers and hostile witnesses in documented cases.  Women, like their male contemporaries, and formed by the same customs and narratives, internalized the “ontologies” of the witch hunts.  Structural male power can and does exist without translating into exclusively male initiative and agency.  Hegemony, by definition, entails the psychic development of consent among the governed.

Hereafter, we will look at three developments that contributed to this grotesque perversion of the Gospels:  the church became the captive of politics and war; the church adopted the surrounding cultures’ mistrust of and contempt for women; and the church went down the wrong path with what Ivan Illich called “the criminalization of sin.”

*

Power Dislocations

The 14^th Century brought bubonic plague to Europe.  International trade (the movement of rats) and urbanization (concentration of human populace) acted as accelerators for the disease.  Popular superstitions were inflamed by the experience, and the Romano-Germanic attachment to the notion of witches was fanned from ember to flame.

This was not a phenomenon generalized throughout Europe, but highly localized, albeit in several far-flung locations.  Around 26,000 witches would be put to death in what is now Germany, for example, while only four witch burnings appear to have ever taken place in Ireland.  The diversity of the Middle Ages is only infrequently remarked, leaving the impression that much that was anecdotal was somehow universal through Western Europe.

Witch trials and executions were sporadic, local, and frequently caused by mass panics in conjunction with the scapegoating of people (mostly women) who were already unpopular in the community.  It is likely, too, that personal vendettas and self-interest played a powerful role in many accusations.

The plague also shifted the demographics of Europe, increasing the value of labor and empowering peasants to the point that they began to rebel throughout Europe.  The general state of unrest led to accusations and counter-accusations among officials of church and state, at a time when corruption had become endemic in the Roman Catholic church.  Nothing was so unpopular among the masses of Europeans as the selling of indulgences, coerced bribes from the loved ones of the dead to clergy in exchange for clerical “intervention” on the deceased behalf in a 12^th Century Catholic invention – purgatory.  Pope Sixtus IV implemented the indulgence system through a network of collection agents as a new papal revenue stream.

In 1492, the same year that Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain expelled Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and financed Cristobal Colon’s western expedition, Rodrigo de Borgia, a member of the notorious Borgia political clan, took office as Pope Alexander VI.  He proceeded to scandalize Europe with his elaborate political machinations, his accumulation of wealth, his infamous sexual appetites, and his bald-faced nepotism.  Alexander rigged the Sacred College of Cardinals by appointing 12 of his own at once, one being Borgia’s son.

Borgia and his family had great influence on the Vatican by virtue of their enormous wealth.  The fast track was prepared for Borgia well before he ascended to the papacy.  Trained initially as a Doctor of Law, within three years of his ordination as a priest, this ex-lawyer became a Bishop.  The longstanding arrangements of church and state – sometimes fractious – had shifted into a direct church-state merger in the person of Alexander.  Popular dissatisfaction was increasing to a boiling point, when the Pope’s political maneuvering inadvertently created a minor war between France and Naples.  This set off another wave of political realignments that in turn resulted in greater social dislocation and popular discontent.

As Brad Gregory points out in The Unintended Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2012), “medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, and Western modernity is failing.”  But the breakdown of the Reformation and the crises of modernity were and are in many respects structural inconsistencies.  The breakdown of Christendom (Christianity in power) was based on the failure of Christians – especially powerful Christian men – to practice what they preached.

In 1517, when Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses, criticisms of the Roman Catholic hierarchy were hungrily received by masses of people who had been thrown into chronic uncertainty by the tectonic political shifts taking place then in Europe.  In 1525, Huldrych Zwingli introduced a new liturgy as alternative to mass in Zurich.  In 1530, Jean Calvin broke with the church and founded yet another theological tradition that would oppose itself to the Roman Catholic church.  The Protestant Reformation had begun.

Small wars erupted, and by 1618 there would be the very big, very complex, and very destructive Thirty Years War.  Between the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Protestant and Catholic, and even Protestant against Protestant conflicts created an increasingly hateful rhetoric on all sides, the equation of enemies with Evil, a kind of Manichean mindset that mapped easily onto the psychic terrain of Romano-Germany now in upheaval.

This rhetoric increasingly included accusations of devil-alliance and witchcraft.  The suspicions of one another as members or not of one or another legitimate church easily led to accusations of witchcraft; and as in all societies that are placed on a more or less martial footing, suspicion of one’s own people accompanied the increased preoccupation with the supposed plots of enemies and spies.  Suspicion had become a way of life.  Accusation followed.

The church had itself been aligned with secular rulers since Constantine joined the church and Theodosius established it as the “state church of the Roman Empire.”  While monasticism resisted “the world” (a euphemism for the political order), the church hierarchy – modeling itself on secular political power – adapted its practices and doctrine to accommodate the exercise of male official power.

The example of Jesus – an “effeminate pacifist,” preaching redemption by love – was subsumed by the 2^nd Century into an increasing reaction against the spiritual equality of women in the Christian view.  The emerging church, reflecting the surrounding society, was dominated by men – who apparently suffer a perennial temptation to masculinity constructed as domination.

Whether by exposure to the warlike secular rulers before establishment or by operating within the halls of power after establishment, the church forgot its early gender subversion and its pacifism.  These were forgotten together, because the preparation for and practice of war is and has throughout recorded history nearly always been constitutive of male power, the practice of which was understood as a high masculine virtue.  One could go so far as to suggest that patriarchy and war share a long co-history, and in fact have been mutually constitutive.

Two Centuries after establishment, Emperor Justinian – a leader who pursued a policy of constant war – appointed the church’s bishops.

Justinian, in his military attempts to restore the old Roman Empire from his capital in Constantinople, was trying to pick up the pieces of empire that had been chipped away by “barbarian” (non-Roman) incursions and intrigues.  Justinian prefigured nation-builders like Napoleon in his attempt to enforce a broad cultural conformity.  He believed that his empire ought to have one, and only one religion.

Justinian was observant of the Christian doctrine of his day, and an active a participant in church debates.  So Justinian also sought to “protect the purity of the church” by executing heretics.  The Christian church, which just four centuries earlier had been the victim of persecution by the Roman authorities, now set about the persecution of the “other.”  That this departure was initiated by a leader immersed in the business of war ought not to surprise anyone.

Heresy was punished by death, an indication that the church felt threatened by heretics.  Threats are directed at something and that is something another has to lose.  What the church (as an organ of the empire) now had to lose was power.

The church did not opt – as Christ had – to take the way of the cross.  On the contrary, the church adapted to the successor regime of those who had executed Jesus.

The church did not seek power, but fell into it.  The church was rapidly becoming the institution with the only literate people with administrative experience, and the public moral standing to legitimate power.  Many of the rulers throughout Europe prior to the final Christianization of Europe were themselves either Germanic or heavily influenced by Germanic culture.  Most political leaders were barely literate.

Rome itself fell, according to some simple historical formulae, because in this arrangement of legitimation from church and governance from military powers, power was separated institutionally from authority.  (The nation-state would eventually resolve this contradiction, with the active assistance of the church; but it would also result in Christians killing other Christians in a series of wars between nation-states.)

The church, in its alliance with power since Constantine, now found itself the most stable political force in Europe, where borders and rulers were changing with the seasons.  The church, in other words, had trapped itself into a kind of political responsibility that was never anticipated by the early church, and one that now forced the militarily powerless church to align itself with worldly leaders – taking in many cases what appeared to be the lesser of several evils.  In this way, the church used its own accumulation of power to eventually become the servant not of “the least of them,” but of states.

As empires shifted and multiplied, the church found itself fragmented, having established its bases with secular authorities that later divided.  By the 11^th Century, the Great Schism had occurred separating the Eastern and Western churches, with the Western church aligning with the Bishop of Rome against the Bishop of Constantinople.

*

By the 12^th Century, the horse collar and horse shoe came into broad use through Central Europe, allowing larger fields further from home, and agrarians began to concentrate in small villages.  These towns became parishes, where local merchants began the process of monetary accumulation that would eventually allow them to usurp the power of the feudal lords.  This nascent capitalist class would also be drawn into the Reformation as partisans of Protestantism, particularly Calvinism, which preached – contrary to Catholic social teaching (however hypocritical some church officials were, and are) – that the accumulation of wealth is virtuous; and that alms to the poor simply encourages sloth.

From 1378 until 1417, there was a schism within the Roman Catholic Church, wherein two different popes were recognized by two competing factions.  These destabilizations coincided with various social disruptions, even as the church became more embroiled in political intrigue, slouching toward Pope Alexander VI – the notoriously venal and violent Roderic Llançol i De Borgia

The church had lashed itself to an unstable political ecology, a situation in which the temptation to cold-blooded pragmatism became more and more urgent – and divided.  By the time the witch persecutions began to take off in certain parts of Europe, the church was already accommodating so many practices that are antithetical to the Gospels that embracing the notion of witchcraft – especially as a way of demonizing enemies or terrorizing subjects – was as easy as spelling B-o-r-g-i-a.

It was during this period of dissolution within the church that the church established the Inquisition – a loose confederation of church officials who tried people for heresy.

Started in the 11^th Century, the Inquisition or Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis (Inquiry on Heretical Perversity) these tribunals seldom practiced torture, acquitted a goodly number of people, and only infrequently used the death penalty (administered not by church but secular authority).  This moderation was abandoned in response to the threat of Protestantism, and by the 15^th Century had become a weapon against Jews and Muslims, especially in Spain.

The Inquisition was not synonymous with witch persecutions, though there were around 500 witch burnings that were the result of the Inquisition’s participation in witch-hunting subsequent to the establishment pf the Inquisition.  Many of these were convictions based, however, on heresy as the charge, witchcraft still being seen as superstition.  Even during the witch-craze between 1576-1640, more than half of those tried only as witches by Inquisition clerics were acquitted.

In 1258, Pope Alexander IV (not to be confused with Alexander VI) had explicitly forbidden the trial of witches by inquisitors.

“The Inquisitors,” wrote Alexander IV, “deputed to investigate heresy, must not intrude into investigations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest heresy involved.”

Pope John XXII reversed the church’s position on witches in 1326, after two attempts on his life, one with poison (associated in the Medieval mind with witches).  The fear of witches was becoming more widespread throughout Europe and many priests were infected with it, leading them to petition the more cautious Pope for an expansion of the inquisitorial charter to include prosecution of witches.  In 1347, bubonic plague decimated Europe, heightening the general fear of witchcraft.

Torture began to become a more frequent practice during witch trials, especially as the Reformation began to pick up momentum.  In a particularly odious example of church dissembling and cowardice, the church officials conducted questioning, but anything that required physical violence was the purview of the state.  The state had become a kind of Shabbos goy, doing those things that might sully the church of Jesus.

The church participated in witch-pogroms, in part, because the church had become the captive of politics.  It had found itself competing for the loyalty of Christians in the wake of schism and reformation, demanding it by force on the one hand and pandering where necessary to popular prejudices and illusions that had previously been rejected by the church.  The church’s incoherence in both this practice of persecuting “witches” and attempting to salvage political power was a reflection of an extremely tumultuous political ecology.

The Crusades were undertaken in part to unify European Christendom in a time of great political turmoil, and had inured the church to war.  With war comes the logic of war, including “collateral damage” and tactical massacre; and when Christians massacred other Christians who were the cohabitants of Muslim communities, it was seen as tactical necessity.  Since the mission was holy, went the logic, then the means were sanctified.  Crusaders had all been promised a direct pass to Heaven by Pope Urban II, telling them they were all shriven of their soldier sins in advance of committing them.

Another line was crossed in this period, too.  Christians killing Christians.  In 1054, the Council of Narbonne declared that “no Christian shall kill another Christian for whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ.”

By the time the church was attacking renegade Christians in the Albigensian Crusade (in what is now southern France), the church was endorsing massacres of heretics.

During the massacre of men, women, and children at Beziers in 1209, troops appealed to the abbot with the dilemma that some Catholics lived among the residents, to which the abbot replied, “Kill them all, and God will know his own.”

The phrase “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” is a common expression among today’s United States combat arms branches of the military.

The inhering hard-heartedness of the practice of war became part of the church’s political language.  That this hard-heartedness could so easily be turned against “witches” should be no surprise.

By the 16^th Century, Christians were killing Christians throughout Europe in mutually organized warfare.  Christians had fully embraced the world’s death-dealing man-sport of war.

*

Sin and Crime

[W]ith the New Testament, some very new forms of perception – not only of conception but also of perception – came into the world.  I believe that these forms have had a definitive influence on our Western manner of living, shaping our way of thinking about what is good and desirable.  I also believe that this influence has been mediated by the Christian Church, which bases its authority on its claim to speak for the New Testament.  The Church … attempted to safeguard the newness of the Gospel by institutionalizing it, and in this way the newness got corrupted.

-Ivan Illich

The church’s vulnerability to the depredations of modernity originated in the multiplication of hypocrisies by a warlike church.  There is little doubt that populations themselves were sick to death of wars, and these wars’ association with the church was clear and well-understood.  This loss of general credibility began with people’s willingness to disbelieve, which had nothing to do with the superiority of a science that was not yet developed.

The church’s institutionalization under conditions of establishment made this inevitable.  The church’s claim to infallibility included the complex development of a comprehensive, self-justifying world view.  Once aspects of that integrated world view were disproven in part (consider Galileo), the institution reacted defensively and with a total absence of good will.  It sought to impose the old “truths” as doctrine, by force if necessary, long after the church’s erroneous claims with regard to “natural science” were even viable.  This reaction to the church’s epistemological crisis undermined and is still undermining the church’s credibility, even though the radical otherness of God from the temporal world – established as orthodoxy in the early church – had never required, in fact rejected, the inclusion of God within nature or seeking “evidence” for God in nature.  In other words, no account of nature as knowledge – and out accounts are still multiplying – is required to cohere with the account of an unknowable God.

Nonetheless, the church that had capitulated in so many respects to the ways of the world, especially to war, had solidified it institutionally and ossified it ideologically.  This was not a process of antithesis, but of osmosis.

This struggle between church and the Enlightenment cannot be grasped through some evidentiary debate that sees the sides as antithetical.  The Enlightenment grew out of the church.  Ivan Illich, the late Catholic social critic, makes a case in a series of interviews just before his death that modernity is not the opposite of Christianity, put its deep and demonic perversion.

Witch-burning itself co-evolved with the Enlightenment, and shared many of the beliefs and assumptions of the so-called fathers of the Enlightenment.  First case in point is Jean Bodin.

A nominal Catholic, Bodin is remembered as principally a lawyer and political philosopher.  His political philosophy revolved around social order, which was perceived to be in short supply during his life (1530–1596), specifically calling for the establishment of powerful central states (what would come to be called a modern nation-state).  He called for dialogue between the various Abrahamic religions, and placed minimal emphasis on church as a political actor.  He is rightly seen as one of the fathers of the Enlightenment, and yet his life will always be notorious for his enthusiasm to kill women as witches.

Maria Mies, writing about Bodin in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale – Women in the International Division of Labor (Zed Books, 1999), deserves an extended quote here.

The persecution and burning of the midwives and witches was directly connected with the emergence of modern society: the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a ‘natural science,’ the rise of science and of modern economy. The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.

There was a calculated division of labor between Church and State in organizing the massacres and the terror against the witches.  Whereas the church representatives identified witches, gave the theological justification and led the interrogations, the secular arm of the state was used to carry out the tortures and finally execute the witches on the pyre.

The persecution of the witches was a manifestation of the rising modern society and not, as is usually believed, a remnant of the irrational “dark” Middle Ages.  This is most clearly shown by Jean Bodin, the French theoretician of the new mercantilist economic doctrine.  Jean Bodin was the founder of the quantitative theory of money, of the modern concept of sovereignty and of mercantilist populationism.  He was a staunch defender of modern rationalism, and was at the same time one of the most vocal proponents of state ordained massacres and tortures of the witches.  He held the view that, for the development of new wealth after the medieval agrarian crisis, the modern state had to be invested with absolute sovereignty.  This state had, moreover, the duty to provide enough workers for the new economy.  In order to do so, he demanded a strong police which above all would fight against witches and midwives who, according to him, were responsible for so many abortions, the infertility of couples, or sexual intercourse without conception.  Anyone who prevented the conception or the birth of children he considered as a murderer, who should be persecuted by the state.  Bodin worked as a consultant to the French government in the persecution of the witches, and advocated torture and the pyre to eradicate the witches.  His tract on witchcraft was one of the most brutal and sadistic pamphlets written against witches at that time.  Like Institoris and Sprenger in Germany he singled out women for his attack.  He set a ratio of 50 women to one man for the witch persecutions.  This combination of modern rationality, the propagation of the new state and a direct violent attack on the witches we also find with another great master of the new era of European civilization, namely Francis Bacon. (pp. 83-4)

Bodin sketched out a post-aristocratic society that would be ruled by his own up-and-coming merchant class.  Note how the role of women has changed in Bodin’s rationale.  Whatever degrading beliefs preceded this era about women, Bodin has introduced a new and utilitarian instrumentality to the proper role of women, that is, as state breeders.  They are required to produce workers to power the New Future being mapped out by an emerging European bourgeoisie.

The beginnings of the technocratic nation-state also marked the beginning of the rule of lawyers.  Bodin himself practiced law, but in previous periods, the interpretation of law was neither needed nor greatly emphasized.  Mies again:

Similarly, there is a direct connection between the witch pograms and the emergence of the professionalization of law.  (p. 84)

With the emerging nation-state, Roman law was being adopted to replace Germanic law, and universities were opening law schools to train juris doctors who could effectively manipulate and interpret the complexities of ever more technical law.

Many people were chagrined by the sudden outgrowth of lawyers, complaining that they were generally lazy, parasitic young men who twisted reason in order to allow the rich to gain at the expense of the poor.  There was actually a good deal of truth in this assessment, as there still is today.  (I can’t help but remember Jesus’ encounters with the scribes – the lawyers of his day – and his rebuke that they had let the letter of the law trump the law’s spirit.)

“The reasons why the sons of the rising urban class were flocking to the law faculties,” writes Mies, translating a 16^th Century chronicle, “was the following:  ‘In our times, jurisprudencia smiles at everybody, so that everyone wants to become a doctor in law.  Most are attracted to this field of studies out of greed for money and ambition.’”

Witch trials were big business.  Each one employed a host of judges and lawyers, who competed in verbal puffery with one another to extend and thereby raise the costs (and payouts) of the trial, which even included bills for the alcohol consumed by the soldiers who pursued and captured the alleged offenders.

The fact that the witch-hunt was such a lucrative source of money and wealth led in certain areas to the setting up of special commissions which had the task of denouncing ever more people as witches and sorcerers.  When the accused were found guilty, they and their families had to bear all the costs of the trial, beginning with the bills for alcohol and food for the witch commission (their per diem), and ending with the costs for the firewood for the stake.  Another source of money was the sums paid by the richer families to the learned judges and lawyers in order to free one of their members from the persecution if she was a witch.  There is also a reason why we find more poor people among those who were executed.  (Mies, p. 85)

Witch trial funds were used to finance portions of the 30 Years War.

*

Kramer

After the French Revolution, those who had prevailed in the initial contest of arms sought out writers, who could become the propagandists of the victors.  Subsequent accounts of the Revolution suggest that these ideas determined the shape of the struggle, when in reality, the opposite was true.  The outcome of the struggle determined the narrative to consolidate the power of the victors.

I cannot avoid a discussion of the Malleus Maleficarum.  This was the notorious witch-hunting guide penned in 1486 by the German priest, Heinrich Kramer, aka Institorius.  It is hard to say whether this book was one of the motors of violent misogyny in the emerging Enlightenment, or whether Kramer was a cultural expression of existing popular misogynistic notions and practices.  In either case, we can see it now as a tract that actively promotes the idea of devils against the more skeptical voices of the church who had in the past named these ideas popular superstitions.  It is not accidental, in my view, that Protestants and Catholics reciprocally demonized one another, and in so doing resuscitated these superstitions.

Kramer was a crackpot who stumbled into a niche.  Prior to his glory days as authority on witchcraft, he had been run out of the province of Tyrol for his near-crazed indictments of several women there as witches.  The local bishop called Kramer “a senile old man.”

A papal bull had been issued two years prior to the publication of Malleus Maleficarum.  Summis desiderantes affectibus, composed by Pope Innocent VIII, gave official church recognition of the existence of witches, and called on the Inquisition (already established) to intervene.  When the church assented to the witch burning craze, it assent acted as an accelerant.  Kramer’s book was adopted as the authoritative text on witchcraft.  Between 1487 and 1669, 36 editions were published.  The ‘senile old man’ became famous on the burnt bodies of women.  The church collaborated every step of the way.

Some scholars now suggest that the role of Malleus may not have been as formative of the epoch as previously claimed, analogous to the French Revolution example.  Whichever it is, modern readers will alternately find the actual text shocking, even anachronistically funny.  But within the Malleus, we can also find the cultural axioms of Kramer’s time, place, and class, with regard to women.

The title of the book means “the hammer of the witches.”  Witches is written in the feminine form.  The reason, explains Kramer, that women are more likely to be witches is related to the multiple deficiencies inhering in every woman.  Lust, inability to reason, weakness… but mostly lust.  The insatiability of women was a key theme of the day.

This was considered dangerous to men, because there was a corresponding belief that every time a man ejaculated, he surrendered a day of his lifespan.  Men’s lust was projected onto women, who men perceived as intentional temptresses, trying to steal men’s days.  The humiliation of “barren” women was undoubtedly associated with this idea – wherein men who were losing a day of each life with each ejaculation were confronted with a grim cost-benefit analysis.

This was nothing new.  Men had and have been projecting like this for millennia.  What was new in this case was the rise of the lawyers, to which Mies alluded earlier.

Ivan Illich locates the origins of this lawyerly society in the church, explaining to a significant degree how the church “got here from there,” from calling witchcraft a foolish superstition to participating in a pogrom against various European women.

Illich called this development “the criminalization of sin,” and he draws an historical line from the witch pogroms back to the 12^th Century, drawing on the work of Gerhart Ladner, author of The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Harvard University Press, 1959).

*

New Yoke

The horse collar was adopted in Europe in the 12^th Century.  The ropes and yokes used before the non-choking collar was employed would press against the animal’s windpipe.  The new breast collar allowed the horse to dig in her hindquarters for a push without pain or hypoxia.

Soil in Europe was mostly deep and mostly wet, and once in the new harness, horses could double the output of oxen.  Farm families were able to plow larger fields in less time, so farmers were able to move their residences nearer to town.  Towns grew, and this in turn gave rise to the parish church, which became the organizing center of life in these new villages.

New religious practices and rituals flourished in these towns, local relic-veneration, special saints’ days, festivals, and local rules that governed in the name of the church’s idea of hospitality and neighborliness.  These practices fit well together in these villages, where most people knew most other people very well and were probably related to them at least by marriage.

The greater density of settlement also led to the need for greater administrative control within the population to ensure the peaceful settlement of public concerns and disputes.  A new idea crept into the thinking of administrators.  Contract.

Contractarianism, which would come into full flower with Hobbes four centuries hence, germinated in 12^th Century Europe.

*

Conjuratio, Contract, Conscience

The Codex Theodosianus was published in 438 AD by its namesake, Theodosius, the Emperor of Rome.  In this comprehensive legal code, for the first time, oaths were taken to be legal instruments.  Early Christians did not take oaths as a matter of spiritual discipline.  Oaths are prohibited in Matthew 5:33-37.

5:33. Again you have heard that it was said to them of old, thou shalt not forswear thyself: but thou shalt perform thy oaths to the Lord.  5:34. But I say to you not to swear at all, neither by heaven for it is the throne of God: 5:35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king:  5:36. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.  5:37. But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil.

The Codex did not merely overturn the Christian antipathy for oath-swearing.  It went much further.  It made the oath a secular legal instrument, a legal obligation.  Most Christians went for centuries afterward never taking an oath of any kind.  It was not necessary in the locally-self-sufficient ways that peasants managed their lives.  But the contract was established.

So the oath laid there.  The newly-necessary administrators of the new villages engendered by the horse collar picked it back up.  They made it part of a new notion called contract.  We will say a great deal about contract further along, but for now the important thing to remember is that contract disembodies an agreement from its other social contexts and validates it only before the officers of law.

The distinction between contract, a modern notion, and covenant, a notion reaching back to the origins of the Hebrews, is that a contract is predicated on suspicion – and it places limits on the obligations spelled out; whereas a covenant is based on love or family, and it implies obligations without limit.

Oddly enough, the first way the church adopted this legal notion of contract was with regard to marriage, already seen as a covenant – a bond of love in the sight of God – in Christian thought.

Heretofore, there had been various customs within Christendom for making marriages.  Some were parentally arranged, some were assisted by matchmakers, and so forth.  The norms varied, but no one had ever conceived of the idea that the man and the woman making the union would select each other, as equals before the law.

It was the Roman Catholic church that introduced this idea of a woman consenting as an equal with her own future partner.  And marriage was codified with a contract.  The first known reference to this legal-consent to marriage is in a 12^th Century letter from Heloise to Abelard, when she left her religious life to pursue him.

Lest anyone get the idea that this contract undermined the rule of men over women, we need to understand the essentials of this contract.  The woman was free until she had undertaken the contact, whereupon the conditions of said contract obliged her to obey her husband, and required him to protect and provide for her.  The contractual agreement, as Carole Pateman describes it in her book, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), was for female obedience in exchange for male protection.  A grown woman was a legally free agent to submit to this subordinate status with whom she chose.  And as Pateman also points out, husbands had a “sex right” within that contractual relation.  It has only been in the last decade or so that we have acknowledged such thing as marital rape precisely because that “sex right” has been integral – if unnamed – to male-dominant cultural beliefs about relations within marriage.

By 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council was convened by the church, the marriage contract was recognized throughout the church; and women were further confirmed in this newfound portion of legal equality when the same council mandates yearly, private confession “for men and women.”  (In most places, prior to this practice, confessions had been in public, not exclusively in a private session with the priest.)

To make a long story short, the parish system had given rise to a changed, and far more juridical outlook on the practices of the church.  Ivan Illich:

This re-introduction of oaths reaches an epochal point in the twelfth century at the height of feudalism, which was based on conjuratio, or oath-taking.  It was then that the relation of love in its supreme form, the commitment of a man and a woman to each other forever, on the model of the Gospel, became defined as a juridical act, through which an entity called marriage comes into existence.  And for this juridical act, God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality when he is summoned as a witness.  The fealty of citizens in Europe’s expanding cities was conceived along the same lines – as a contract sealed by a divinely-witnessed oath.  This conjuratio, or swearing together, in the face of God, give the European city the particular quality of sacredness which it takes on between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  (p. 86)

The major sin within marriage was adultery; and seeing as how the church had adopted the juridical role of law-enforcer in making this new thing – marriage – both a contract and a sacrament, the idea of sin became conflated with the idea of law-breaking, of crime.  A sin had now become a crime, placing its resolution not in Christ, but before the administrative authorities.

This is also the period in which the idea of a conscience was introduced within the church.  Prefiguring Bentham by more than 400 years, the church used the notion of conscience (an internal forum) as a way of extending its rule-making into the psychic interior of its members, a kind of late Medieval panopticon.  This was a new idea, conscience.  It was also a precondition for the development of the nation-state and its “citizen,” where morality would become privatized, so long as life-or-death loyalty were reserved for the state.

[I]f you want to understand the idea of the patria of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the idea of the fatherland, the idea of the mother tongue, to which I owe sacred loyalty, the idea of pro patria mori, that I can die for my fatherland, the idea of citizenship as something to which my conscience obligates me, then we have to understand the appearance of the internal forum [conscience] in the middle ages.  (Illich, p. 93)

*

The Reformation broke over the church with Luther’s theses in 1517.  The church was shattered into pieces.  The Roman church found itself in competition for the loyalty of both princes and peasants.  Between the churches, the public square had been converted into a competitive marketplace, wherein each faction was branding itself and standing that brand against another.  In this kind of sectarian devolution, each faction finds it necessary to differentiate itself from the others, and those areas of former agreement are swallowed up in the escalation of both sectarian hostility and opportunistic salesmanship.

In response to this emergency, the Council of Trent was convened between 1545 and 1563.  In it, the Roman church was referring to itself as a societas perfecta, a perfect society, based in law.  Again, the church prefigures Hobbes’ state in Leviathan.

Illich says of the council’s self-description, it was:

“a self-understanding… reflected in the legal and philosophical thinking of the time, which had begun to portray the state in the same terms, that is as a perfect society whose citizens internalize the laws and constitution of the state as demands of conscience.”

Basing his Gospel exegesis on the Parable of the Samaritan in Luke 10, Illich interprets the story to be one where the old social boundaries are effaced in the new life, where we can see the divine in the face of she who one chooses, like the Samaritan who chose a wounded enemy as a friend.

Illich goes back to oath-taking.

[W]hy and in which context of the covenant between God and his people.  The covenant of the Old Testament consisted in God taking an oath to Abraham.  It is his prerogative to take an oath and, thereby, establish Abraham and his descendants as his people.  The New Testament continues this covenant and excludes the oath.  Instead of joining people through an oath, the New Testament proposes to unite them in the Holy Spirit. (p. 84)

With the rise of this juridical mindset came the power of the lawyers, who we see in Mies’ account as the shakers and movers in systematizing the torture and killing of “witches.”

And it starts with the Codex Theodosius, where oath-taking becomes a legal instrument, points out Illich, when even Roman law had not yet done this.  With the Codex, the primitive Christian way of enacting its own community – communion and a shared kiss (the conspiratio, the exchange of the Holy Spirit through the exchange of breath) – had been overturned, and with it the highly personal, covenantal relations that were previously maintained by scrupulous honesty (word is bond) – a people whose virtue transcends law, as Paul described:  “You are not under the law.”

Codified law became the new basis of community conformity.

In this way, what was formerly categorized as sin was transformed into crime, and church as community was further trumped by church as governor.  As the church merged with empire, then merged with states, then was broken into pieces by the Reformation to compete for state sponsors and popular bases, it found it necessary first to promulgate laws that would criminalize sin.

In time, the state assumed the law, mastered the churches, and re-established them as dependencies.

*

Men and Women

Barbara Zdunk was the last person executed in the West for witchcraft, in 1811, in Reszel, Poland.  The Roman Catholic Church has never renounced its position (and reassumed its former position) that witchcraft is an inefficacious superstition, even though this flies in the face of the Thomist realism that supposedly animates the church’s current relationship to science.

But neither power dislocations nor the church’s transition from witch-skeptical to witch-believing can explain how women came to be burned, by Catholic and Protestant alike, as witches.

Prior to these contingent circumstances, males had already seized a monopoly on social power at the expense of women (and their children).  This reign of men over women cannot be accurately dated, because this reality was already manifest when humans began recording their activities for posterity.  As seems to be the case in all relations of dominion-subjugation, the dominator needs to belittle the one who is subjugated; he needs to strip her of full membership in the ethnos.

Contra the Gospels, where the boundaries are crossed over with advent of the new life, church men moved to re-inscribe the boundaries; and one of the key practices in that re-inscription was the practice of warfare and statecraft.  These practices also sharpen the perception of gender division, lend political to cultural power, and form men into people with the will to dominate understood as integral to their sexual identity as men.

Nowadays, we see women’s devaluation in a specific and modern form, and therefore we might say a woman is stripped of her essential humanity.  In wars, the enemy always earns an epithet (the first I heard was “gook” for Vietnamese), as a signifier of his or her status, less-than.  Otherwise, it is more difficult to subjugate.  That may explain why many of the so-called church “fathers” went on record so unabashedly about their feelings of revulsion and contempt for women-as-women.

The rule of men-as-men, if history is any indicator, will always tend toward the denigration of women-as-women.

[all I am ready to share right now... again, rough.]

As surely as the moment you are in right now, reading this, that moment when you become a corpse will arrive with the same immediacy and become as irrevocable as five minutes ago is now.

There is an idea in modern culture that death is the opposite of life, life being a reified abstraction that can be transferred across time and space, ignoring the actual bodies of the living – which will die – and the actual lives of people – in the concrete sense – as I write this, I am alive as a specific person in a specific time and place.  The abstraction life can be measured and monitored, even in individuals, as we can observe in any technologically replete hospital room.  It’s opposite, death, occurs when the metrics of life are absent.  Stan is in the hospital, and his ECG is bouncing along in a visual display accompanied by beeps to let the professionals know that he has a pulse.  Stan quits breathing, his heart slows and stops, accompanied again by the flattening of the electronic line and the beep has become a domesticated electronic scream.  Stan’s brain cells begin to perish, and he shits himself.  Stan is now dead (concrete); that is, death – the abstract opposite of the metric-life – has won.  The doctors and nurses and machines that were enlisted in the struggle against Death and on behalf of Life have lost.

Catherine Pickstock, whose dense but fascinating book, After Writing, says that death has been converted in modern thought from being a part of life into being the opposite of life.

In her chapter entitled “Signs of Death,” Pickstock situates this transfiguration of death in the Enlightenment.

[A] shift in attitude has occurred, where a former cultural familiarity with death and its integration into life is replaced by a retreat from death in a double gesture of denial and mystification… In general, the main reasons offered.. for this retreat focus, to differing degrees of intensity, on, first, the drift towards immanentism, culminating in the triumph of reason in the Enlightenment, according to which, death is the last remaining scandal [in the antique sense, as a stumbling block -SG] which refuses to be mastered; and, secondly, advances in medical science which mean that in the West, so-called “untimely” death or deadly epidemics occur less frequently, encouraging the synecdochal dream that mastery over disease presages an eventual triumph over death itself.  And so contemporary historians appear to have shown that the apparent imminence of scientific triumph over death finds expression in an evasion of the continuing reality of death.

She calls this evasion necrophobia; then she proceeds to show how modern necrophobia paradoxically becomes necrophilia – the love of deadness.  Reified “life” transcends actual living beings, being comprised instead – as hospitals show us – of a system of metrics, an ontological flattening, based on the totalizing claim that reality can be reduced, atomized, and finally captured.  To effect this capture, we first needed to learn how to defeat time – which is understood as the carrier of death.

Pickstock calls this capture of time “spatialization.”  Everything is understood only after it is filtered through a scientific grid of some kind, frozen as a scatterplot on a graph, wrapped in  a protective layer of measurements against the flux of time – with rationality having the last word.  There is a question begged, of course, with this “rationality,” and that is the conviction that everything is apprehendable – and therefore available for our use and subject to our power and control, through the application of science.

An example, writ small (pun intended).  This blog post.  I am writing.  Unlike when I speak to you in person, where my embodied words pass away as quickly as they are spoken (a function of time), when I write, I am attempting to capture time, to press the pause button, to contain this bit of the world in a little package.

Enter repetition.  Gutenberg through the digital age, the packages of atemporal reality can be reproduced en masse, an immense exercise of power.

Our world writes, leaving the written and reproducible word in books, ads, magazines, billboards, instruction manuals, street signs, maps, etc.  We live in a written world, a world dominated by virtuality; and there can never be a proper comparison between our written world and that of any former society where orality – spoken speech – was primary.  These former societies, correspondingly, were characterized by a “cultural familiarity with death and its integration into life.”   Neither time nor death were enemies; but these were other people whose lives, quite often, were lived in liturgical communities, and in a universe that was animate and mysterious.  The preservation and reiteration of that mystery was, among other things, an exercise in humility.

Language becomes formative of all when that language is hegemonic.  That may be a shade tautological, but the point is, language is the practice that produces meaning, often is ways that are invisible in the same way that hegemonic cultural norms become invisible – naturalized into inescapable axioms.

Ever since Descartes, the tendency of language in Western culture – which has been exported across the world via capitalist expansion and commodification – has fetishized the fact.  Facts are organized into the schema – a spatial allegory.  Science calls facts and the fact-supported schema, truth, which it then attempts to isolate (freeze, spatialize) to discern more facts.

Spatialization is therefore a ritual order which monitors the desires of the masses, achieving domination as much or more than the control of ideas about reality as by military forces and visible, voted-in apexes.

There is a word that describes how this shift in language and ideas conjures a “spatialized” universe that is inert, dead, driven by inertia:  objectification, which is a species, above all, of power.  An objective universe – one that has been taken out of God’s hands and placed in our own, one that has been – a la Carolyn Merchant – de-animated.  A dead universe.  A dead “objective reality” is desacralized; it is made available to satisfy the desires of the living.  This shift to a spatialized and available universe on the one hand grants great power to those who have power, but it also creates a terrible sense of vertigo.  The world that surrounds us is dead, and it threatens to swallow us all up in that endless deadness.  We need to place a barrier between us and all that space.  We have created a dead universe out of our necrophilia – the attraction to the non-living schema – which we now need to conceal in order to get on with our lives – which are totally separated from death, because to die is fall into the abyss.

This necrophilia can be seen already in the early-modern focus of attention not on the deceased, but on his survivors and their display of piety in the erection of elaborate tombs and monuments.  Although these displays appeared to be bestowed in the direction of death, such monuments in fact consecrated the appearance of life by attesting to its perseverance, thus sheltering life from death.  Later, this evasion of the dead and the dying is manifest in the extradition of the dead to a position at the margins of the city during the industrial era, the removal of the dying to the functional space of hospitals, in the discrete elimination of corpses, and in the domestication and beautification of death which has taken place from the Romantic period up until the present day American cult of “morticians” and “death parlors.”

The reductions of science are derivative, not primary.  I look out my window, and I see a squirrel feeding.  That actual squirrel is understood by science as a series of derivations – animalia, chordata, mammalia, rodenta, sciuramorpha – none of which are this particular squirrel, who is alive in front of me now.  The elevation of these derivatives is not unrelated to the elevation of the financial derivatives that have caused so much mischief for the last few decades (not today’s preoccupation, however).  It is the transposition of truth from something revealed and temporal into something timeless, universal, non-living, and understood as a spatial analogy – this is where the squirrel fits, inside a taxonomy, frozen for all time.  It is immortality of a sort, but an icy immortality that flies over the heads of the actual mortal beings it has left behind.  Pickstock calls it the “textual calculus of the real.”

Language has become “a linear, informational sequence,:” according to Pickstock.  Language becomes simply a microphone for those “facts.”  The grammar is asyndetic, that is, spare and unadorned, privileging the nouns.  It claims to precisely capture the “real.”  Instead, it has captured us.

Although asyndeton is presented as the ideal representational structure for bypassing mediation, and undoing the division between mind and matter, it is nevertheless predicated upon that very division.  The absence of conjunctions in asyndetic syntax ensures the omission of all clausal relations and hierarchies, in favor of a serial juxtaposition cast in the genre of the catalogue or list.  Thus the events narrated or objects described in asyndetic prose are necessarily presented as obtainable, scrutable, and given…

We believe that we can theoretically know all there is to know, because everything is available through the categories of this “textual calculus.”  We have “squeezed the universe inside a ball” with the notion that all there is, is available to us as terrestrial beings.  The whole, dead universe.  And so the power of this making-available has made the human being – in the disembodied abstract – sovereign over a realm of deadness, the very deadness that threatens to swallow up the actual humans – alone now in their egos – who occupy this Kingdom of Exteriority.

Reality itself, as objectified, and represented in unhierarchized and disjoined clauses, is rendered static and inert, beyond any possible manifestation of difference, a condition tantamount to closure or indifference, thinly disguised by the jagged display of its promiscuous juxtapositions…

…although the spatiality of juxtaposition and absence of connections communicate a consoling permanence and immobile density to the components of the catalogue, ultimately this unity is shattered by the inherent violence of linearity, or the perpetual outrunning of clauses… This hidden violence and disarray induce the reader to abandon the passive role of recipient, in order to engage in a private re-establishment of coherence.  Thus, the citizen of the spatial city experiences the need to control, but only as a palliative expedient, within the confines of private hermeneutic activity.  Furthermore, the citizen unconsciously  experiences its relation with reality as consisting in control by force.

That need to control and that sense of vertigo that drives us away from the context provided by death as part of life is felt as a lack.  We begin to dream of the things we require to fill the void.

This lack resides at the heart of capitalist economy which organizes wants and needs amid an abundance of production, so that desire is secularized, and equated with the fear of not having one’s needs satisfied.

Catherine Pickstock is making a much larger argument in her book, one related to liturgy – she is an Anglican theologian, after all.  The point I wanted to explore here is her description of spatialization and some of its outcomes – in particular her characterization of modern culture as necrophilic, presenting itself as necrophobic.

We are necrophilic because we do not participate in something meaningful and universal – within the abyss resides the textual calculus.  It is literally disembodied, creating what Pickstock calls a “pseudo-eternity.”  Our categories, our taxonomies, our calculations and grids, transcend the lives of individual persons.  But since they are themselves constituted in the experience of embodied human beings, who are faced with an existential crisis – that this pseudo-eternity holds nothing for them at the hour of death.  Nothing.  This is what is at stake; and this is what must be domesticated.

She names this as “a supra-linguistic philosophical logos, independent of time and space … a rationalistic gesture which suppresses embodiment and temporality.”

In this world, where each person is a goldfish in her bowl, terrified of the breathless exterior, we feel compelled to concupiscence.  We want everything, faster, now… we lack.  If the time is not “filled,” we are vulnerable to the recognition of that exterior – with its howling deadness.

I’ll let her have the last word (a long one for your cogitation):

This accumulation was driven by an anxiety to cancel lack and to retain presence through identical repetition.  But such apparently guaranteed possession interrupts the inevitable passage of life into death, and mistakes the passing away which is life for sheer deletion, so effecting a pseudo-eternity of mere spatial permanence which, unlike genuine eternity, is exhaustively available to the human gaze.  Such pseudo-eternity is composed of things which are only preservable and manageable as finite, and therefore as “dead.”  On this basis it can be claimed that modernity less seeks to banish death, than to prise death and life apart in order to preserve life immune from death in pure sterility.  For in seeking only life, in the form of a pseudo-eternal permanence, the “modern” gesture is secretly doomed to necrophilia, love of what has to die, can only die.  In seeking only life, modernity gives life over to death, removing all traces of death only to find that life has vanished with it.  And so there is a nihilistic logic to this necrophiliac gesture, this sacrificing of life to a living death so as to ensure that when death arrives to unmask life of its tinsel, he finds only the presence of absence, life reduced to the deathliness of equivalence.

Underlying the modern negotiation of death is the assumption that by reifying a quality, one obtains access to it in its true nature.  However, this act of reification suppresses its real nature, which is to remain open.  Hence if death and life are seen as discrete and opposed, then existence itself is turned into a closed object – which is to say, given over to death.  And it is true that such a production of death can serve many interests.  The invention of the baroque anguish of death permitted the fully fledged inauguration of the ethic of accumulation and sacrality of investment.  New mercantilist operators in alliance with experimental philosophers were able to take advantage of the situation by advancing – or inventing – risk, and then offering – or rather, marketing – the supposed “necessary” security to counter it.  The secret idea behind this economy is that death is unnatural to life, and yet the protocol of such machinations, predicated on desire as lack, moves by means of the oscillation of supposedly natural life and supposedly unnatural death.  For the murderous outrunning of the obsolete and derelict by innovation is a production of the very death it proposes to obfuscate… the production of anxiety of mutability is the condition of possibility for absolute power.

The corporate perception managers, the governments of both Bush and Obama, the military itself, and most of the general population of the United States, participated in a mythology about Petraeus – that he was a modern-day Clausewitz specializing in counter-insurgency, an intellectual warrior for the post 9-11 era.

Emblematic of that genius was a media event called The Surge, which accompanied an operation that was characterized mostly by paying people not to attack US soldiers in Iraq.  The second surge was in Afghanistan, and we can see clearly now that this operation inaugurated the end game of defeat for the US in Afghanistan.  The US was, contrary to its wishes, expelled by the Iraqis – another defeat.

That these are not seen as defeats by most Americans is a testament to that perception management bloc of military and media, which has managed to report on these wars for years now without ever using the word “defeat.”  At this point, helicopters are never shot down; they “crash” under circumstances that are not yet clear.

This Veterans Day, we aging vets will again crawl out of our suburban foxholes to form Jingo Phalanxes on Main Streets all across the home of the brave; a national show of force for aging phallo-centrism.

We aging vets are soldiers left behind – by our own bodies, damn! – who have not been told the war is over.  For us, it is over.

Now we enter into the precious body of war only on our national Easter, wherein the dead combatants are raised, and the newly-armed actors praised.  Every soldier is a hero.  We need a ribbon magnet for that.

We idolize war in the United States of America; and that is why the perception management bloc doesn’t honestly need to work that hard to get the general population with the program.  The Bloc, so to speak, can look at militarized America and say, “Our work is done here.  Mars be praised.”

This week, Petraeus, the Director of the CIA, stands disgraced by his extramarital affair with… a member of the media, his co-biographer, in fact – Paula Broadwell.  The extremely tight relationship between the military-security apparatus and the media is now embodied, and as such, it has become a scandal.

I mean that in the biblical sense.  Skandalon is the Greek equivalent of mikshowl in Hebrew, meaning a stumbling block.  It is something that “trips people up.”  One of the ways skandalon trips people up is by revealing something that deflates power – again in the biblical sense.  And in this sense, the Petraeus affair has revealed, at least parabolically, the incestuous relationship between media and military.

Journalists are now seated on advisory boards for the CIA; and no one questions the journalistic propriety of that.

In the last two decades we have seen the media monopoly-military merger develop to the point that our wars are selectively used as reality TV.  Generals are feted as if they are great public intellectuals.  The lines between politics, entertainment, and official violence have been effaced – almost, as Petraeus just discovered.

In Petraeus, the merged-role of a General and that of a media star, both now mutually reinforcing, proved hazardous.  Once upon a time, Petraeus was seen as a future President.  No mas.

With your resume on the screen in the early 21^st Century, in an age of the spectacle, the way to get noticed is to be spectacular on screen.  Future historians will marvel at the superficialization of our culture as we slid into a state of mindless bureaucratic individualism.  Images reflect images that are reflections of images.  We buy books on personality makeovers.  We take a lot of pills.

Power stumbles, power is revealed.

The scandal in the modern sense – doing things that are public outrages – is that Petraeus cheated on his wife.  Fair enough.  He resigned.  Full stop.  Loss of efficacy, and all that.

The more serious scandal might be that he revealed classified information to his confidante; and here is where the contradiction between journalism and the military is most clear.  The security of the nation-state is paramount, more so when that state is already highly militarized.

What we have not heard, which ought to be a scandal, and is not, is that Petraeus may be guilty of war crimes.  He was a commander when crimes were clearly committed:  plunder and failure to protect civilians, torture, and wanton destruction.  These are violations of law; and they did happen on his watch –quite a lot.

But since no one has the power to bring charges except Petraeus’ colleagues and the current government, he will never face those charges.  The decision has been made.  No prosecutions, because the wars themselves have been started and maintained by illegal means.

The media supports with silence.  One peep, and they “lose access.”

Might makes right, and we oughtn’t forget it.  Maybe I’ll carry that sign in the next Veterans Day parade.

Since none of his predations as a General will be a public scandal – because in the United States, we love war and men with guns – then we are left with little else to do but reflect on what we are.  Here’s what I see.

We are a technologically-disembodied society without a justifying morality, captured by the economics of war.  We have one civic God – the nation-state called United States of America – and our sacred relics are soldiers and former soldiers.

I can decry the elite PR apparatus ‘til the cows come home; but the fact is – as we can see every Veterans Day – we participate in this war-idolatry en masse.  We are a lost people; and no government can fix that.

It’s scandalous.

Jackson described a Texas billboard he has seen during the Bush-Kerry election contest that featured a cowboy boot alongside a plastic shower shoe (called in the vernacular, a flip-flop).  Not only was the pun apparent, it was reinforced by the phallic columnarity of the boot, standing erect, and the outline of labial folds made by the inverted-Y thongs of the now receptive flip-flop.  Sexual aggression versus sexual receptivity.  In men’s prisons, this distinction determines who will be seen as real men (jockers) and lady-men (bitches).  Apparently, the same trope functions effectively in the wider world of public relations and electoral campaign strategy.

A popular put-down these days – one that has been enthusiastically adopted regardless of age, ethnicity, or class – is, “I’m gonna make you my bitch.”  On popular television programs, I have even seen this used by women – addressed to men – as a way of doubling the male’s humiliation.

No polemical sortie is more effective during any election campaign than putting a male candidate’s masculinity – defined as aggression, even the ability to take life – into question.  He is “soft” on crime, or he is “soft” on “welfare queens,” or “soft” on terrorism, or “soft” on foreign policy.

I call this penile politics.

During last night’s “debate” (if that is what we call these alternating sound bytes), Obama had an uphill climb after some fatigue or distraction had misled him into a torporous passivity during the preceding “debate.”  His performance (puts me in mind of that pomo business of “gender permformativity”) was lackluster; he lacked aggression; he was too soft.

[None of this has much to do with actual policies, since neither candidate is actually considering such sideshows as policy during an election.  Policy talk is tactical, not representative of any real intent, and largely determined by managers who groom and coach and drill each performer to make the most of the latest focus group research.  Both will fall in behind the money after the game is over.  But I digress.]

Since a debate affords no opportunities to pose with chainsaws or guns, however, the next best thing is a body count.  In this, Obama enjoys a tremendous advantage in penile politics.  Obama earned his bones within hours of assuming the presidency by ordering drone strikes that killed at least 20 people (combatant status unknown… to this day).  But Obama secured that most important probative accoutrement for masculinity – a trophy – midway through his term; and this was the trump card last night in the penile politics follies of 2012.  Obama made the point, “Osama bin Laden is dead.”  He, of course, points this out a lot – often to the wild chants of “USA!” by Obama supporters, who just four years ago were incensed at George W. Bush (apparently for aesthetic reasons, since the actual policies of Obama have been extremely similar to those of Bush, and often more aggressive at expanding wars and effacing civil liberties).

If only I had the resources, I would set up a public information website that tracks penile politics.  It would sift through political talk all over the US and abroad, seeking out these direct references to dominator-masculinity in puffing up one male candidate or throwing the masculinity of an opponent into question.

Women, of course, are already at a disadvantage – being biologically vaginated; but the answer has been, in the case for example of Hillary Clinton, former candidate and now Secretary of State, to out-man the men in bloodlust.  Secretary Clinton had no problem voting for every war that has come along, and she personally supervised the US actions surrounding the coup d’etat against the democratically elected government of Honduras.  If you don’t mind killing people, honorary masculinity is waiting for you, sisters!  Yay, liberal equality!

Spin-meisters have already given the “debate” to Obama.  The bin Laden trophy is big penis points.

And about how tempo tasks are the ritual used to manifest the warrior-father.  Reviewing then with Ann Kibbey, 2003:

Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric… from Bush’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell’s insistence that “time is running out” as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the “Showdown” or “Standoff” with Iraq. The evocation of the Western and all its prejudices now infuses U.S. culture and underwrites U.S. militarism. It seems that Bush, initially distinctive for his inarticulateness and stupidity, has succeeded in forcing (and enforcing) that same inarticulateness and stupidity on the U.S. public.

People were stunned when Bush patronizingly dismissed the massive anti-war demonstrations in his “Father Knows Best” speech on the following Monday, but that’s consistent with the gender ideology of the Western. As we ought to be aware, the ideology of gender and the ideology of genocidal violence are intertwined in the Western. The parallel action that typifies the conclusion of the Western (and other U.S. ‘action movies’) has generally been characterized only by its racist polarization of populations, which creates an artificial binary opposition that is resolved through the physical annihilation of one side by the other. But there is another dimension to it: The polarization of gender roles that is intertwined with it. What Americans seem slow to realize is the repugnant role in which they have now been cast, that of the female victim who must be rescued and saved by the male hero, a female victim whose role is to be helpless, mute, and passive, immobilized by fear as she awaits the outcome of the chase. Such rescues are in no way about social justice. They are artificial “tempo tasks” (Sergei Eisenstein’s wonderful phrase). The tempo task actively closes off ethical and political issues. That is its purpose. With the inception of the tempo task – “time is running out” –, morality is located in the sidelined female victim, whose role is not to act morally, but to merely personify and symbolize morality. She passively awaits the outcome of the genocidal violence whose purported aim is to rescue her. This is why we are now being told to hunker down in the cabin, wrap ourselves in plastic sheeting, put duct tape over our mouths, and await the outcome of the horrific violence that is being perpetrated ostensibly to ‘save us.’

No wonder, then, that Bush had no difficulty relegating the anti-war demonstrations to the role of moral symbolism, the cries of the helpless victim in need of rescue. He used it as yet another occasion to display his own ‘masculine heroism’ with which he intends to save us from danger, first from ‘evil’ Iraq, and then from ourselves through the pending Domestic Security Act. Many people also seem to think this upcoming war, repulsive though it is, will be short. After all, tempo tasks end the film and impose their version of order very quickly – it’s the last part of the movie. No plans for reconstruction? Hey, that’s not in the movie script.

A reflexive reliance on the genre conventions of the Western has not only led to silence. It has helped to obscure the reality that this war has already been going on for many years, that the bombing of Iraq was never stopped and has already intensified again, that genocide has already been perpetrated by economic sanctions, that the much-touted weapons of mass destruction are those of the U.S., whose depleted uranium weaponry has already mutilated or killed much of the population of southern Iraq.

The genre conventions of the Western have mandated a deafening and ignorant silence in the U.S. in the last year. An important dimension of this silence is the de facto moratorium on gender issues. Ideologies of gender become highly coercive when they are taken for granted, when debates about gender are suppressed as unimportant, when they are dismissively cast aside as irrelevant. To be silent now about gender is to take the bait, to perceive the current political and economic crisis through the lens of socially conservative gender roles.

So this is what we mean by “tempo tasks.”  Now to the corresponding subject for today:  elections, and what we like to call “penile politics.”  Both sides in this election are suggesting that failure to elect (Obama, Romney) will have catastrophic consequences.  In terms of sheer stridency, the Republicans have won out by a length with the birther “controversy,” Obama’s alleged fealty to Islam, and the rest of the racially encoded (black muslims in your basement) appeals to white negrophobia.  Atavism sells in the United States of America.  But the Democrats have comported themselves as worthy opponents, with claims that democracy-as-our-way-of-life is in immanent danger from a Romney presidency.  Romney would destroy the economy, lead us into World War III, sell us out to corporations (in these, I haven’t discerned the difference between the two candidates, actually).  My facebook page was so cluttered with these dire warnings of Republican apocalypse that I suspended the account today.  It is affecting my mental health, I think.

Has this just become a cultural default?  Historian Brad Gregory writes:

The de facto guideline for the living of human life in the Western world today seems simply to be “whatever makes you happy” – “so long as you’re not hurting anyone else” – in which the criteria for happiness, too, are self-determined, self-reported, and therefore immune to critique, and in which the meaning of “hurting anyone else” is assumed to be self-evident, unproblematic, or both.  Because there is no shared framework within which such disagreements might rationally be debated and perhaps overcome, and yet life goes on, moral disagreements are translated into political contestation within an emotivist culture – one that is closely related to if not largely identical with the individualistic “therapeutic culture”… Protests, the exertion of power, and manipulation, whether overt or disguised, displace rational discourse, as has become ever more apparent, for example, in American public life and the media in recent decades.  Everything becomes “political” because once morality has been subjectivized no arguments can succeed, since there is no shared set of assumptions from which they can proceed.  Hence the applicability of Foucauldian notions of power to analyses of contemporary Western society.  (The Unintended Reformation, Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 182)

Within that sweeping description by Gregory, there seems to be a game dynamic.  That game dynamic is strategic and zero-sum.  Escalation of antagonism is built into the process, which comes to be a form of low-intensity war.  The reasons for going to war are then subsumed into the tactical considerations.  Opportunity overcomes principle.  This tension where opportunity and principle come into conflict is exactly where the tempo task can be most effective in “overcoming” the contradiction with the rationalization that “we don’t have time for niceties.”  This is a male trope, and one where men traditionally re-seize prerogatives from women and weaker men, valorizing contingent male power (and violence where necessary!) as redemption embodied in a warrior-father or his symbolic equivalent.

At a time when we ought to be questioning the assertions of so-called leaders and taking their every fallacy to task – no matter which side they are on – we find instead this frantic and increasingly dishonest sloganeering… for the greater good, of course.

In the 20th Century, the United States of America documented itself as no other place has ever been.  We wrote down everything we thought.  We took a lot of pictures.  No realm of American life has been better preserved for posterity than public relations, because the product of public relations becomes this peculiar and anachronistic artifact – a reflection today of what we thought then, from the persuasive material that designed what would only later be understood as common sense.  We can see an ideology in the making.

Hygienic Baby

Dr. Amy Laura Hall, a Methodist Reverend and Ethics Professor at Duke University, collected old ads from throughout the latter 19th and 20th Centuries that pertained to children, childbirth, motherhood, and family.  Dozens of these ads punctuate her entire book, Conceiving Parenthood:  American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction.

Figure 1.1 in the book is a poster published by the American Social Hygiene Association, circa 1922.  On the poster is a plump, healthy, smiling, naked white baby, sitting on a blanket.  The poster title is “The Baby.”  The script beneath the baby photo reads:

Human beings, too, are mammals, and fertilization and development take place within the mother.  The period of development or pregnancy is nine months.

At birth the muscles contract and push the baby through the birth canal (vagina) into the outer world.

The human mother can bring more than the simple animal instincts to the aid of her new-born child.  Real motherhood develops by the addition of knowledge and understanding to the mother’s instinctive love.

The story of this baby – this hygienic baby – is specifically a white American baby, of the proper sort.  The story, however, begins with a vagina (birth canal).  In the narrative above, the woman has been reduced to an incubator for a new citizen, her body providing a birth canal to facilitate the birth.  The poster was part of a campaign for “better hygiene.”  This hygiene extended from the microcosm inside the baby to the hazardous social macrocosm, where hygienic babies and unhygienic babies had to be kept separate to prevent the contamination – the infection of the desirable infant.

“This poster is characteristic of a shift,” writes Amy Laura Hall of “The Baby” poster, “that unquestionably enabled notable gains in infant health through public-awareness campaigns for domestic hygiene.”

But the hygiene came at a cost, for the benefits were socially, economically, and racially encoded.  “The baby” on which the domestic hygiene effort focused was too often a specific baby – a baby the logic of the day judged to be worth the effort.  At the same time that social and medical scientists focused on “the baby,” they established what were touted as objective. factual, indisputable tools for determining just which babies were worth the effort.  The same language system by which the mother s, social workers, and physicians could measure gains lent scientific legitimacy to a calculus of human life.  This calculus reflected a growing sense that the individual baby was a precious but fragile commodity to be quantifiably evaluated, carefully habituated, and hygienically safeguarded from those humans and households on the other side of a divide.  (italics in the original)  (p. 23)

This nationwide push for social hygiene was coupled with the rise of a self-conscious, aggressive, and protracted eugenics movement.  The same leaders, thinkers, and advertisers who crafted and sustained the social hygiene movement and its emphasis on eugenics were those who promoted a new vision of “the right” family – nuclear, white, affluent, and obedient.  This writer was born almost dead center in the 20th Century, so we had television to data-stream these ideas directly to us every day.

Domesticating God

My generation was one of the first that was weaned on television, and for the children so raised in the USA, our staple viewing was all produced by Disney.  It was Disney who made me want to be a Mouse-keteer, Disney who indoctrinated me on the unlimited wonders of technology, and Disney’s “Swamp Fox” character that schooled me in American Revolutionary mythology… undoubtedly “Swamp Fox”  – a character whose forte was unconventional warfare – pointed me in a direction that eventually led me to the Army recruiter’s door and from there into the male death-cult of Special Operations.

In 1945, six years before I was passed through the birth canal into American citizenship, Disney produced a social hygiene short film, called Wanted:  Better Babies:  How Shall We Get Them? The title was cribbed from a eugenics essay by the same name written for People magazine in 1931. This essay is online, and I can only suggest readers look it up to read what was then considered state-of-the-art applied science.

Excerpt: Any scheme for obtaining a more favorably balanced birth rate by economic means must be judged by at least two main criteria. First, how far does it exercise the right kind of selection and thereby satisfy the requirements of eugenics? Second, how fully does it satisfy the economic requirement of insuring the selected families against the decline in the standard of living which is often the penalty of having children? For our present purpose, and in the present nebulous state of knowledge, the right kind of selection means one that increases the number of children in families where both parents rise well above the average in intelligence, strength of character, and general value as members of society. Insurance against a decline in the standard of living means more than relief of the sudden financial strain which often accompanies the birth of a child. It means also that as the number of children increases up to reasonable limits, the family is not obligated to economize to a degree that it is painful or humiliating, but can live essentially as before. Some sacrifice on the part of parents for the sake of the children is doubtless desirable, but it is obviously too much to ask ordinary human beings to step down to a lower economic level and build a new set of social relationships because they have three or four children. It has been suggested that some kind of insurance might solve the economic phase of the problem of the dangerously low birth rate among the finest of our middle classes. Such insurance might provide for the payment of specific sums whenever a child is born, or for the education of the child after it leaves the public schools.

By then, the US government was actively involved in eugenics.  Mainline Protestant churches lent a justifying hand in the national campaign with the development of a unique theological amalgam called “natural theology.”

Orthodox and neo-Orthodox Christians continue to decry this theology as an attempt to domesticate God, part of the slide into deism, and finally atheism.  It was an attempt to continue the merger of Protestant theology with capitalism, so remarked in Weber’s opus, though it did so using the language of social Darwinism, making social Darwinism synonymous with Nature.  Nature dictates natural selection, and since nature is of God, then capitalist modernity is the progressive fulfillment of the promise of the Kingdom of God.

The term “hygiene” came to be associated with describing and policing the boundaries of this emerging and ordained Future.  This meant not only keeping “germs” out of your food; it meant keeping the elect separate from the others.  Eugenics was at the center of this project.

With this new moral framework in hand, the US state felt not only entitled but obliged to take up the task of building the eugenic paradise, the new future.

The Symbolic Power of Infection

It was in 1927 that Oliver Wendall Holmes spoke on behalf of the Supreme Court of the United States, reviewing Buck v. Bell, regarding involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.”

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.  The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.  Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The scientistic frame of mind that led to the eugenics movement in the United States and elsewhere in the world was based on this very unscientific extrapolation of the ideas associated with, for example, boiling drinking water, to disinfecting the body politic.  Hall writes:

As a white, Methodist clergywoman in a church considered by many historians to be the most characteristically American, I have a vested interest in this wake-up call.  The irony beneath this book involves my belief that the very Protestant tradition that should have emphasized a sense of divine gratuity, human contingency, sufficient abundance, and the radical giftedness of all life came in twentieth-century America instead to epitomize justification through meticulously planned procreation.  To put this point in its starkest possible form:  a tradition that had within it the possibility of leveling all believers as orphaned and gratuitously adopted kin came instead to baptize a culture of carefully delineated, racially encoded domesticity.  (pp. 9-10)

Dr. Hall’s book is a genealogy of perceptions, and in this I place her in the same category as both Barbara Duden and Ivan Illich.  Her reflections and criticisms of this hygienic chain of  being, with its microcosm in mother’s womb and macrocosm in a world divided between fit nations and unfit ones, using these many examples of the persuasive publications of the times, is  particularly resonant with this 61-year-old, who in this book relived the epistemological markers of my own formation as a white, male American.

Her thoughts have added power because she is most critical of the extremely influential role of her own and other mainline churches in promoting the Hygienic Life and worshiping a very sly idol called Progress.

The New Future

“To hell with the future.  It is a man-eating idol.”

-Ivan Illich

The term “progressive” has a dubious pedigree that most people who call themselves political “progressives”  tend to suppress (if most are even aware of it).  The Progressive Movement at the beginning of the 20th Century enjoyed a period of unparalleled belief in the power of social engineering to create this new future.  Progress and eugenics were inseparable in the ideological field of the progressive period.  This vision was highly nationalistic, and its racialism was open and accepted.

The progressive periodical Nation bears its name from the 19th Century – explicitly nation-alist. It was, until after World War II, an active proponent of eugenics.  The Nation featured the works of arch-eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, who is more well-remembered for her advocacy of birth control than of eugenics, is still seen by many as a kind of feminist founding mother.  Her apologists can take some responsibility for the efficacy of right-wing abuse of her eugenics-advocacy to tar feminism with the same brush as Hitler.  The reason some of her apologists are partly responsible is because by downplaying or disappearing Sanger’s ideas on eugenics to preserve her image after eugenics (named as such) has gone out of style, they have opened themselves to the accusation of propagandizing through selective truth-telling.  So they can be effectively silenced by anti-feminists who are at least wielding word-for-word reproductions of Sanger’s own words to indict her.  Hall cites an article by Sanger for the Methodist magazine Together (1957!):

“History’s greatest race is speeding to its climax:  Population versus world food supplies.  And the way it looks now, there may soon be Too Many People.”  With a stock photograph of turbaned, brown-skinned men in a gathering, the essay, in image and word, calls on Methodist readers to endorse the exportation of family planning.  “The World is exploding at the seams,” Sanger warns.  “From the Orient to South America, from Eastern Europe to the U.S., soaring birth rates are posing future problems potentially more dangerous than the H-bomb.”  Sanger thus begins her article by portraying a world beset by a danger even greater than the ever-present Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation.  In characteristic style, she goes one to name “teeming Asia” in tones of infestation:  “Have-not nations, with millions more mouths to feed each year, must spill over their borders in unending aggressions, searching for more and more food producing areas.” … [M]ainline Protestants in the United States came to see themselves as the forgers of a new worldwide domestic order through the promotion of properly calibrated, usefully capable children.

If planned domesticity is the hope of the world, and the United States is the world superpower, then aptly ordered domesticity is arguably the salvation of the planet.  (Hall, p. 16)

*

Citing General Electric’s campaign in the 40s and 50s to promote nuclear power (with no mention of Hiroshima or Nagasaki), Amy Laura Hall quotes a GE infomercial film short:  “Truly the superpower which man has released from within the atom’s heart is not one but many giants… But all are within man’s power, subject to his command.”

The language of domestic fitness and the rhetoric of atomic progress are related through what seem, on first glance, to be some fairly bizarre examples.  While certain readers of this book may recall first hand images such as the one from a General Electric handout touting the domestic advantages of nuclear power.  I see such images as somewhat macabre.  My generation [Hall was born in the 60s] held no illusions that the Civil Defense Department’s “Duck and Cover” safety drill would save us from nuclear attack, and a good number of my cohort suspected that the adults running our country could not ensure we would live into adulthood.  The mixing of happy homemakers, hamburgers, and atomic energy seemed quite odd, at first look.  The idea that the “superpower” released “from within the atom’s heart” was “within man’s power, subject to his command” – to quote the General Electric film A is for Atom – was extraordinary.  But what passed as ordinary sense during the Atomic Age was made up of images that intertwined national progress, orderly families, and the obedient atom, “subject” to human reason. (pp. 292-3)

In Chapter 2, “The Corporate Breast – ‘Scientific Motherhood’ during the Century of Progress,” Dr. Hall includes an eight-page sub-section on the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, an event that had a World Fair atmosphere and World Fair hype.  The exposition featured babyfood giant Gerber, which advertised loudly that it was the cutting edge for “progress in infant feeding.”  The fair also featured a new invention: the baby incubator… with live white babies in them for demonstration purposes.

The baby incubator with live babies offers a conceptual link between the exposition’s “Forward, Ever Forward!” exhibits of science and industry and the Midway, at the center of the fair, with such attractions as Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, a sampling of “freak shows,” Darkest Africa, and the Old Plantation Show.  Positioning the “odd,” “freakish,” “mysterious,” and “quaint” right in the midst of the overall message of the Century of Progress may seem at first counterintuitive.  But at second, deeper glance, the arrangement makes sense.  As “mankind” progressed upward, forward, and away from merely mortal limits, it seemed necessary to those crafting the exposition to place at the center a midway – a titillating reminder of the “uncontrollable” and “accidental” in nature and culture.  The scientifically prepared wombs with “live babies” offered fairgoers a chance to view human life in a palpably vulnerable and nascent form – struggling at the point of viability – as a sort of scientifically macabre cross between the fully mechanical Wonder Bakery and the Midget’s Midway Village.  Would these babies make it, or would they not?  Were they destined to die, as freaks, of an older Mother Nature, or were they creatures  on the cusp of progress?  The barely live babies presented the question of the Century of Progress Exposition in symbolic form.  (pp. 158-9)

Hall shows that most of the assumptions of progress, including the eugenics movement, were in fact internalized by white America, and that these assumptions are embodied today in testing for genetic defects of adults as prospective parents and of the unborn.  They are embodied in the ideal of the nuclear family, which was forged by the eugenics movement (Grandma and Grandpa have some retrograde ideas about raising children!), and in the notion of “responsible” family planning.  And still, today, these hidden assumptions operate in tandem with gender, racial and class preconceptions dating back to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Chief among those ideas is the idea of raising “productive citizens,” children who will “succeed,” for lack of success is a marker of unfitness, and a stain on the reputation of parents on the other side of the imaginary hygienic divide.  To prove one’s family’s membership among the elect, then, we have learned to measure how many and what kind of kids, and how to enrol them at ever earlier ages into the child-success industry, lest they be suspected of being one of the tainted.

Taint

This book is about taint.  Ancient purity codes created the sense of taint, of contamination; but modern taint is also associated with lives that are managed by technocratic monopolies, like the medical-pharmaceutical establishment.  The taint of undesirability came dressed  up in theological clothing, not in relation to unfitness, but with the idea that an unborn child is a forming citizen (in the nation-state of the elect), and a woman’s body is the incubator.  Without this conceptual leap from unborn person to unborn citizen (to whom many insist we offer constitutional protections while in utero), the social hygienists would lack the teleological basis for determining how to cultivate this good, white citizen.

Taint is cooties.  An invisible form of contamination that can clothe the other.  It is the secret ingredient in racism, in imperialism, and in patriarchy – which describes Woman as tainted.

Hall features ads for Lysol, marketed as a “feminine hygiene” product in the late 40s.  One is written, “Still ‘the girl he married.’  That is because, as the ad tells you in the finer print, the smart, modern wife has learned “the correct practice of feminine hygiene,” using, of course, Lysol disinfectant (yes, as a douche).  Another ad shows a distraught women in the living room, with her husband’s back to her.  “Love Quiz… for married folks only,” it says.  Beneath that, “Why does she spend evenings alone?”  We know, because the ad goes on to say, “Because she keeps her home immaculate, looks as pretty as she can and really loves her husband.  BUT, she neglects that one essential… feminine hygiene.”  She is tainted.

Progress and Taint.  Carrot and stick.  Riffing on a 1957 article in the Methodist Together magazine, Hall writes in a sub-chapter called “Spiritual Efficiency,” perhaps meaning the marriage of God and Taylorism:

Together‘s purpose might also be pithily described by way of its monthly feature Little Lessons in Spiritual Efficiency.  By methodically gathering up the flotsam and jetsam of domestic life, ordering the home with spiritual efficiency, a household might become the epicenter of Hope itself.  The decade  from 1950 to 1960 involved a characteristically American push to the fore, and the small details of family life held national import.  The organized family schedule on the avocado-colored refrigerator; the discrete domestic prayer closet; the homemade, creche inspired holiday cards – these were the pieces of incarnate, embodied life through which a newly fragmented  world was to be made whole.  Anxiety about the future is certainly not unique to that decade and this nation.  But the emergence of the nuclear family ideal (what Stephanie Coontz has aptly termed “the way we never were”) warrants close interpretation.

As the decade progressed, unease over the role of the United States had undeniably played in the creation of nuclear weaponry mingled with growing Cold War tensions over Communism.  To quote one 1956 Together essay, the postwar period was feared to be a time of “hunger, disease, and ignorance,” where “evil and terrible men” would “undertake to entrap us with all manner of mental, bodily, and spiritual poisons.”  It was through small efforts, “little by little,’ that those who believed in Jesus would “win the victory,” enable the “Kingdom,” and save the world.  The mainline Protestant model for parenting reflected and reinforced the way forward.  The Methodist mothers, fathers, and grandparents to whom Together was addressed were vital for securing a hopeful future.  With effort, “the Christian home” would become the crux of the age – the site at the intersection of scientific progress, national security, and blessed, divine providence.  As Lysol was to grant a “fresh, clean, wholesome feeling” to “restore every woman’s confidence in her power to please, so would a properly cleansed and situated family restore every person’s confidence in America’s power to provide.  What was hidden in the Manhattan Project would be disinfected during the 1950s, allowing a hygienic, safer, happier future for our children, and for the children worldwide.

Conceiving Parenthood is a history.  It demonstrates that many of the ideas we now feel are most “retrograde,” and which we attribute unconsciously to premodern superstitions, are actually the offspring of modernity, in the case of this book, the 19th and 20th Centuries (and she shows that many of the underlying assumptions of these “superstitions” are still active in our social imaginary).  Maria Mies is another author that exposes many post-Enlightenment notions whose origins are concealed in the mistaken idea that they preceded The Age of Reason.

The Bodin Effect

That conceptual leap in The Baby poster that reduced woman to a birth canal, and the unborn child to a citizen-in-the-oven, was first taken during the Enlightenment, as influential men were talking about – in Bacon’s terms – tearing nature open to reveal HER secrets, Bacon’s rape-autopsy metaphor for the practice of science.

Specifically, Jean Bodin – the 16th Century jurist and philosopher, first to articulate the philosophical foundation for mercantilism.  He articulated a duty for women to bear children to populate the nation-state.  Women were a means to produce more hard-working citizens.

A nominal Catholic, Bodin is remembered rightly as principally a lawyer and political philosopher.  His political philosophy revolved around social order, which was perceived to be in short supply during his life (1530–1596), specifically calling for the establishment of powerful central states (what would come to be called a modern nation-state).  He called for dialogue between the various Abrahamic religions, and placed minimal emphasis on church as a political actor.  He is rightly seen as one of the fathers of the Enlightenment, and yet his life will always be notorious for his enthusiasm to kill women as witches.

Maria Mies, writing about Bodin in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale – Women in the International Division of Labor (Zed Books, 1999), deserves an extended quote here.

The persecution and burning of the midwives and witches was directly connected with the emergence of modern society: the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a ‘natural science,’ the rise of science and of modern economy. The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.

There was a calculated division of labor between Church and State in organizing the massacres and the terror against the witches.  Whereas the church representatives identified witches, gave the theological justification and led the interrogations, the secular arm of the state was used to carry out the tortures and finally execute the witches on the pyre.

The persecution of the witches was a manifestation of the rising modern society and not, as is usually believed, a remnant of the irrational “dark” Middle Ages.  This is most clearly shown by Jean Bodin, the French theoretician of the new mercantilist economic doctrine.  Jean Bodin was the founder of the quantitative theory of money, of the modern concept of sovereignty and of mercantilist populationism.  He was a staunch defender of modern rationalism, and was at the same time one of the most vocal proponents of state ordained massacres and tortures of the witches.  He held the view that, for the development of new wealth after the medieval agrarian crisis, the modern state had to be invested with absolute sovereignty.  This state had, moreover, the duty to provide enough workers for the new economy.  In order to do so, he demanded a strong police which above all would fight against witches and midwives who, according to him, were responsible for so many abortions, the infertility of couples, or sexual intercourse without conception.  Anyone who prevented the conception or the birth of children he considered as a murderer, who should be persecuted by the state.  Bodin worked as a consultant to the French government in the persecution of the witches, and advocated torture and the pyre to eradicate the witches.  His tract on witchcraft was one of the most brutal and sadistic pamphlets written against witches at that time.  Like Institoris and Sprenger in Germany he singled out women for his attack.  He set a ratio of 50 women to one man for the witch persecutions.  This combination of modern rationality, the propagation of the new state and a direct violent attack on the witches we also find with another great master of the new era of European civilization, namely Francis Bacon. (pp. 83-4)

Bodin is sketching out a post-aristocratic society that will be ruled by his own up-and-coming merchant class (and the lawyers like himself).  Note how the role of women has changed in Bodin’s rationale.  Whatever degrading beliefs preceded this era about women, Bodin has introduced a new and utilitarian instrumentality to the proper role of women; that is, breeders.  They are required to produce workers to power the New Future being mapped out by an emerging, male, European bourgeoisie.

This notion is actualized full-bloom in Hall’s account of medically-managed motherhood (by a male-dominated medical establishment).  As Mies herself described, women were undergoing housewifization:  they were recast as household consumers, sex-objects for hubby, and breeders of citizens.

Pop Darwin and Human Husbandry

Conceiving Parenthood shows how enthusiastically post-Reformation protestants picked up this idea of child as productive citizen, merging it with the novel notions of the 19th Century that were stimulated by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which were mapped onto the individualist meritocracy of Social Darwinist fantasy.

Reverend Hall traces the evolution of the popularized notion of adaptation, transferred inappropriately from actual adaptation in nature onto social dynamics, which revolved around the idea of “fitness,” by reviewing the ideas of 19th Century Protestant thinker George H. Napheys (1842-1876).

Napheys wrote a eugenics manifesto in 1871.  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was only published 12 years earlier, and Napheys riffed like Herbert Spencer on its supposed implications for human society, in a publication called The Transmission of Life: Counsels on the Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Function.  Hall:

Choosing a mate carefully for the sake of producing stronger, keener, and more efficient offspring had been business as usual for slaveholders in the South.  Marriages among the elite across the United States may have been founded on the acquisition of more intangible forms of power, but slaveholders sought wherever possible to force intimacy between slaves who would produce better workers.  Naphey’s advice, characteristic of his time, can be interpreted as an effort to encourage those who were, in a palpable sense, the building blocks of a post-Civil War economy to internalize the kind of discriminating criteria that would make for a better crop of future workers in an industrialized era.  What [historian] Matthew Fry Jacobson notes regarding the rhetoric of immigrant workers – that those few who brokered the meaning of American citizenship did so in part as a function of waxing and waning needs for cheap labor – arguably applies also to those who brokered the meaning of procreation for the native-born to whom Napheys wrote.  (p. 224)

Napheys proclamations with regard to scientific hygiene seem worthy of ridicule today.  He used the word “taint” to describe both biological “defects” and “infections” within the body politic.  His claim that “cowardice, jealousy, anger , envy, and libertinage” were inherited may have gone by the wayside in the scientific community, but it is still retained to some degree in racist pop-culture.  We still hear the term “teeming” in conjunction with poor people in big population centers, and we are still warned by many of declining birthrates (of the right kind of babies) in contrast with the rising populations of babies on the wrong side of the hygienic divide.

Just as importantly, perhaps, his framework has remained intellectually respectable, albeit couched in different terms to survive post-Hitler, post-Civil Rights moral scrutiny.

New Eugenics and Skinned Women

Hall tells an anecdote about James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix openly advocating Napheys animal-husbandry approach to women and children, which Watson called simply “making better human beings.”  He even called for selective breeding to “make girls prettier.”

Hall’s book actually opens with an ad for a boutique birthing center in Durham, North Carolina.  Motto:  “finally, a childbirth center that’s as stylish as you are.”    It is called “just the right place to find something perfect to take home with you.”

Eugenics is still practiced.  But it’s been privatized.  And it is still based on the woman-and-child-as-professional-client, and no longer adheres to the crude formulations of “fitness” from the past.  The “medical monopoly,” so named by Ivan Illich, had locked the technologically-liberated, modern, expectant mother into being a passive recipient of service.  Like a car.

Amy Laura Hall’s book reminded me constantly of another book I’d read, by Barbara Duden.

Barbara Duden, in her book Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Harvard University Press, 1993), delivers a “history of perceptions inside the skin,” of a medical monopoly within which pregnant women are thrown open (in a way that echoes Sir Francis Bacon’s cruel metaphor for the practice of natural science – of tearing Nature open to expose her secrets).  Pregnant women turn their bodies over to the care of this technocratic monopoly, where they are “turned inside out,” skinned, as it were, with ultrasounds peering into their innards.  Duden’s most provocative initial claim is that the idea of “life,” as it is now understood in political and ethical speech, is a relatively new notion.  This critique of “life” puts her squarely in the crosshairs of policy debates, in particular debates about criminalizing abortion.  Her observations put her in neither camp, though they are also uncomfortable for each.  She declaims:

I want to emphasize that this essay espouses none of the positions that typically appear in current controversies over life, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, or the environment.  It formulates no opinion on the legal regulation of abortion or on access to prenatal care, nor does it deal with the social, ethical, or medical evaluation of chemical, genetic, or surgical interventions.  I limit myself to one task:  to show historically that the human fetus, as conceptualized today, is not a creature of God or a natural fact, but an engineered construct of modern society.  I shall discuss the many-layered process involved in the synthesis of this fetus, the invention of fetal norms and needs, and the pseudoscientific directives that ascribe the responsibility for the management of a new life – as defined for optimal measurement and supervision – to women.  Listening to my pregnant friends and reflecting as a historian, what I am deeply troubled about is this:  how a woman’s acceptance of this kind of fetus not only disembodies her perceptions but forces her into a nine-month clientage in which her “scientifically” defined needs for help and counsel are addressed by professionals.

It is easy to see how both Duden and Amy Laura Hall recognized that the advantages of modernity come at a cost, and that women – supposedly liberated Western women – are the captives of technocratic fecundity.  In fact, I will suggest that these two books can be read together to good purpose.

Making Her Case

The subjects addressed in Conceiving Parenthood are big subjects, important subjects, heterodox subjects.  But one of the best reasons to read the book, and of course look at the pictures – this is a picture book – is that it is a delight to read, and it is presented with such systematic clarity.  This will be true for secular readers, up to the point where she writes down theological reflections.  For believers, even that language is written with clarity.

Her style, which works very well for this book, is very like ancient Jewish exposition – the midrash.  Each illustration is an actual historical artifact; and for each you hear an exposition both lyrical and logical.  With each, you receive a little history; and each midrash links with the last.

She follows this development of managed motherhood from the Civil War to the present, using these ads – the commercially produced propaganda of the day, presented with the same pseudo-authority as today’s pharmaceutical ads, for example.  One ad sings the praises of bottle feeding the infant with 7-UP.

The use of old ads and progress-propaganda is an extremely effective pedagogical device, in part because it presents readers and discussion groups with undeniable evidence of her central theses.  This technique also traces – using the compulsive documentation of the 20th Century – the evolution of our own present-day technocratic establishment – the rule of the professionals.

I’ve left most of the book out, because I don’t want to be a killjoy.  I’d recommend it first to any and every mother.  It’s really about you.  And it’s important.  That said, I found the book to be lively and engaging; and I am not a mother, but a grandfather, and a Christian.  Finally, this is a hell of a good history book.

Last Reviewer’s Word

On this website, De Clarke and I have frequently criticized a still-prevailing kind of biophobia.  Conceiving Parenthood shows dozens of examples of this phenomenon, and how that fear of living contamination jumps the epistemological tracks from science, to pop science, to manufactured compulsions for “cleanliness,” to mistrust of freshly grown food, to racial beliefs, to genocide.

We oughtn’t forget that every modern campaign of genocide is accompanied by the portrayal of the target population as germs, rats, or cockroaches – the biotic symbols of impurity.  The same “bug killers” we use today were used to kill humans en masse in war, are still stockpiled as “chemical nerve agents,” and that the insecticide ad on your TV uses the double-metaphor of pestilence and war.

While late modern citizens of the US seem to have eschewed the eugenics of the past, the idea of a “successful baby” still suggests – as its opposite – the idea of unfit babies.  Much populationist speech today, even combined with ecological speech, reminds us of Margaret Sanger’s words, quoted here by Hall:

It was Margaret Sanger who first warned of the “indiscriminate fecundity” of the poor, arguing that charity only “encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it… a dead weight of human waste.  (p. 277)

Last Author’s Word

It is my hope that the interplay of hymnody with the images and narratives of mainstream American culture may prompt families of faith and kinship to tell narratives of grace as well as struggle as they work their way through the book.  For the images and advertisements and national campaigns that appear here as representative are merely part of the story from the past three generations.  It is my hope that stories will emerge about life with those who could not or would not be ordered, with those who slip through the screens, appear haphazard, and have not been judged as calculatedly capable.  It is my expectation that such stories are available, after digging, in even the most picture-perfect family.  Through faith in the one that will come again to conquer grief and pain, we may have the courage to dig truthfully. (Hall, p. 20)

Sapolsky remarked, as a young researcher in Kenya, that while he studied baboons – in his case, using baboons to study the effects of stress – he found the animals to be highly disagreeable.

When he and Lisa Share published their article, they described what happened to a troop of baboons that Sapolsky had long observed, at the very point where he’d cut off his former research.  A catastrophe had befallen “Forest Troop” that led Sapolsky to cut off contact and return home.  The troop was scavenging food from a tourist facility, where it contracted bovine tuberculosis.  The plague wiped out most of the males in the troop.

The reason the males died was that Forest Troop was run by the males who were most successful at violence.  A pecking order was established, and the smaller females were not permitted to feed until the males had their fill.  The contaminated food was meat, prized by baboons, and so the males hogged down the meat, and accidentally saved their female counterparts.  As Sapolsky had said, they were highly disagreeable.  The troop had a culture of bullying that ensured – as we said in the army – that the shit always ran downhill.  You took it from the more dominant, and you dished it out to those who were weaker than you.

In 1993, Sapolsky and Share returned to Kenya and rejoined the Forest Troop.  What they found was that, while the ratio of female to male was more than two to one after the dominant male dieoff, the ratio had returned to approximately half and half.  That was no particular surprise.  Pubescent male baboons migrate into new troops.  What was surprising was how pacific the troop remained, long after the loss of the former dominant males.  The troop was highly cooperative and generally non-aggressive.  It was even moreso than another troop they observed during this period – as a kind of control group that hadn’t undergone the mass death of males.

Of course neither party is talking much about money spent on war; and there are good (pragmatic) reasons for that.

War is currently the best of several bad options for the United States (speaking here of the nation-state and its “interests”).  War simultaneously accomplishes “politics by other means” against other nation-states and non-state formations, and it is embedded in the economy in such a way that it serves as a surrogate export market as the US exsanguinates the last drops of its former non-war industries into distant maquilas.  People can sell everything from fighter-bombers to frozen chicken to duct tape to angora goats to the Department of Defense, and they do.

Since war is a good option – from a strictly pragmatic perspective – then neither party will open real public criticism of war spending or the practice of war.  These interests reach locally into individual communities in individual districts where this or that plant or this or that base circulates money through those local economies.

(Say what you want, ye moral paragons.  Every time we drive or ride, we are doing so on a flow of oil which requires a half dozen naval battle groups to guarantee.)

These are relations of exchange and patronage; and while this is important, our topic today is money… itself.  What is it?  Neither party talks about that either; and with far better reasons than those they have for minimizing criticisms of war and war spending.

So what is money?  What is this stuff we are all seeking, fighting about, hoarding, loving, and hating?

Not going down the road of past debates about gold standards or the way present-day banks and the government produce money.  This is the minutiae of only the latter post-Enlightenment; and I just don’t agree with theories in which certain manipulations of money will teleport human society back into the Garden of Eden.

The reason I ask is that when people argue about whether to spend money on war or schools or surveillance technology or health insurance, and when people argue about “their” money, those wages and salaries and other personal remunerations called income, and they argue about taxes taking “my money,” none of these partisans ever takes the trouble to point out that the ability of money to do what it does is extremely contingent.  It can gain and lose value, or be swallowed into black holes like the Wall Street bailout; and most of us – the overwhelming majority – have neither the knowledge of the system nor the authority – even when acting collectively – to protect, stabilize, or otherwise control the value of money when monetary crises emerge.

And they do.

And one has.

And they will again.

And neither those who want more bombers nor those who want universal health care are talking about this.  Because thinking about money more deeply than mine-and-yours confronts them… us… with a crisis of faith.

In a world where production is far-flung and diffuse, and where consumption remains inevitably local, most of us no longer understand the specifics of how all those things get done that more or less stabilize our society.  We assume that certain critically placed people with grave but obscure responsibilities are doing their jobs.  These people are called “Them”… or “They.”

They and what They do is unknowable; therefore our belief in Them is predicated not on evidence, but faith.  That’s no indictment.  I am a Christian, so faith for me is not somehow the opposite of reason.  I do however, believe that faith can be misplaced.

In this case, the crucial article of faith is that there is some firm and immovable ground upon which both money and politics rest.  (Let’s not pretend they can be separated.  The modern nation-state is a direct outgrowth of the monetization of economy, and the captains of the state are produced or selected by haute finance.)

It is far from clear that we can assume that our money now will hold its value… even in the near term.  I can pretty confidently predict that US money will crash or phase out at some point in the future.  There is no ground.  It’s an agreement, and if the perceptions of a currency change (look now to Europe), an essence called “value” disappears into a gaping omniverse of nothingness.

What was once shells or red ochre became gold and silver, became IOUs, became paper, became digitalized.  Money.

Money requires an agreement between people that it has value.  That value corresponds to things-for-sale as prices.  One medium for many things and so value is divorced from things we use.  Value can fly around in pieces as a pure substance alienated from actual things.  Flying value.  As long as we all agree to recognize it as a valid carrier of disembodied value.

But money is something else, too.  Money is an entitlement.  Modern economies have intentionally been created to make as many people possible as dependent as possible on money to survive.  That means that those who have a lot of money can compel those with very little money to do things those with a lot of money don’t want to do.  If I have the money, I am entitled to whatever it is you are selling – even your obedience (like in a job).  Since most actual things for sale are products of both material (nature) and labor, then money becomes an entitlement to nature and labor.  Those with more money have more entitlements to nature and labor.

This is a legal entitlement.  Money is a legal entitlement; its status is afforded by the state.  The state underwrites a single currency that can serve both as an exchange-value and as a means of collecting taxes.  That’s what “legal tender” means that is printed on dollars.  “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.”  (I love hearing people talk about how the government is taking away their money, when the money they are talking about is backstopped and maintained at some value through the heroic interventions of the state.)

Our generalized dependence on money means that we are exactly as vulnerable as money is.  We cannot “ride out” a hypothetical and sudden devaluation of money (or, for that matter, free-falling prices).  In earlier societies, there were various mixes of gift economy, direct barter and other reciprocal economies, redistributive economy, and market economy.  Our current system is one where legal measures were taken by past leaders to stamp out those other forms of economy, allowing the market alone as an economic practice.  With the suffocation of other forms of economy, money became ever more essential for basic necessities – while the profit motive moved and concentrated production further and further away from consumption.

The flying-value of money created poverty.  Only in a society completely dependent upon money can the lack of money become a a crisis.  A peasant without a job can grow something at least.  A city-dweller finds food at outlets… for a price.  Poverty is the flip side of great wealth.  The flying-value of money allowed some people who were very “good with money” to accumulate more than they ever could without that particular kind of entitlement.

If money fails, we will not abandon ship en masse.  If money fails, most of us are lashed to the ship.

But there is more to money than just our lack of resilience in the face of its power, or the way it lets a few people gain dominion over others by the trick of flying-value.  Money is a corrosive that burns through the connective tissues of communities.

“Without general purpose money,” Alf Hornorg wrote, “people couldn’t trade tracts of rain forests for Coca-Cola.”

Just a couple of thoughts.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world’s nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the “most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake.” As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: “This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever.”

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving “Copenhagen Accord” that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. “Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight,” an angry Greenpeace official declared, “with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport.” Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius.” And in the very next paragraph, it declared that “we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required… so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius.” By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we’ve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.” NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet’s most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: “The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.” At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: “Some countries will flat-out disappear.” When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a “suicide pact” for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, “One degree, one Africa.”

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it’s fair to say that it’s the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world’s carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it’s become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees…

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