The Fall of the Titans by Cornelius van Haarlem in (1588–1590)

In 310 BCE, Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, invaded North Africa. Burning his ships behind him, Agathocles and his army marched along the coast to Carthage, where they set up for a long siege.

According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (who wrote two and half centuries later), when the Phoenicians within Carthage saw the Sicilian Greeks encircling them, they took it as a sign of divine punishment, and sought to make religious amends.

Offerings were sent to Tyre, the city whence the Carthaginians had come as colonists, and sacrifices were made to its pantheon. But when these produced little result, the Carthaginians decided the arrival of their enemies was actually chastisement from one of their own gods, one of the oldest, whose cult they had of late been neglecting. Diodorus Siculus calls this god ‘Cronus’ — seeing him apparently as a kind of avatar of the god the Greek’s worshipped as the father of Zeus — but the Semitic-speaking Phoenicians themselves doubtless called him something else.

In any event, in the eyes of the Phoenicians, “Cronus had turned against them inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been supposititious.” Cronus, in other words, demanded the sacrifice of children of noble blood; certain impious Carthaginian shirkers, however, had been passing off slave children as sacrifices instead. Two hundred noble children were thus seized and sacrificed; another three hundred supposedly volunteered and were killed as well. In Diodorus Siculus’ telling, the sacrifices were public, and performed in a striking fashion. “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”

The very idea of mass child sacrifice is appalling, and this particular image of the practice has, understandably, proven remarkably durable. The question of whether and to what extent Phoenician religious practice actually involved such child sacrifices, meanwhile, has long been an object of debate.

Like Agathocles — who lost two of his own sons in the process — other Greek and Roman figures regularly waged war on Carthage; the numerous references to Phoenician child sacrifice among classical Greek and Roman authors must thus be viewed with some skepticism, even as possible propaganda.

So too with other sources. The Phoenicians were a cosmopolitan people, with entrepots around the Mediterranean, and as the Canaanites they play a role in the Hebrew Bible. The Tanakh condemns them for sacrificing their children to Moloch (likely the god whom Diodorus Siculus mistook as Cronus), and repeatedly forbids the practice among Israelites. In Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the rejection of child sacrifice is presented as fundamental to Israelite self-definition, bound up (as the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 illustrates) in its divine covenant and territorial patrimony. As with Greek and Latin sources, a modern skeptic can thus be suspicious of ancient propaganda — or at least exaggeration — in Biblical descriptions of child sacrifice as well.

Debates rage among archaeologists too, with furor centering around the interpretation of abundant child remains found at special cemeteries known as tophets (a term with roots in the Biblical description of the practice, and often deployed as a synonym for “hell”). Some researchers have insisted that these remains are of miscarriages or children who had died from illness; more recent analysis suggests that they were indeed ritually sacrificed, in bids for divine favor or to fulfill past vows.

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio (1590-1610)

No matter the latest findings or interpretations, the debates over bones and texts will likely rage on endlessly. Which in itself demonstrates the potent horror of the image of child sacrifice: it is an explosive thing to conjure, an ultimate image of depravity one can invoke. It defines and condemns the cultures and beliefs with which it is associated as backward, perverse, and barbaric. The image of child sacrifice correlatively functions to support narratives of how some superior societies supposedly have progress away from ancient depravity. By the same token, it also taps images of the most horrifying and comparative recent episodes of genocide and political violence. Thus, for example, Elie Wiesel, not long before his death, in a full-page open letter that appeared in numerous American and British newspapers in 2014, wrote in defense of IDF operations in Gaza: “In my own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.”

Scholars like Seth Sanders (writing in Religion Dispatches) have elegantly addressed Wiesel’s claim in both its theological and political context. The brilliant satirist Eli Valley has skewered its moral politics as well. For our purposes, what matters here is the simple fact of Wiesel’s making the argument in the first place, its immediate legibility in terms of the moral outrage it brings to bear on those it condemns, and the justification it correlatively furnishes on those it vindicates. After the immediate revulsion, the shock, that, These People kill their own children — the takeaway is simple. No matter the ultimate body count, or the technical question of whose weapons or tactical decisions do the actual killing, any group that could be said to willingly sacrifice its young must, like Carthage, be destroyed. They are an abomination; they must not be suffered to exist.

In this mode — as a synecdoche for depravity-that-must-be-stamped-out — the charge of child sacrifice thrives, with varying degrees of subtlety and transformation, in our contemporary discourse. First and foremost, the Blood Libel specifically — that longstanding Western tradition of accusing Jews of secret ritual killing of Christian babies — persists to this day, whether voiced as such by unreconstructed anti-Semites, or packaged, suitably tweaked and memefied, by alt-right activists and celebrities. This hoary conspiracy theory coexists with, and bleeds into, other narratives about elite corruption, a lexicon in which horrific violence against children regularly functions as a kind of Ultimate Horror and Primal Sin — the symbol and material correlative of unspeakable transgression, Satanic pacts, and The Evil That Goes On Behind Closed Doors.

From tales of Democratic National Committee members supposedly torturing children beneath Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington to the feverish predictions QAnon, the American right has proven a particularly welcome market for such thinking. Meanwhile, anti-abortion rhetoric painting Democrats as the party of “infanticide” has been renewed across the Republican mainstream.

In some instances, a fixation with child-murdering Death Cults can seem not just a primary feature of right-wing political expression, but its sole preoccupation, a frame for understanding everything else. Thus, for example, both the Green New Deal and pro-choice stances of politicians like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez can be exposed, one columnist at (erstwhile Tea Party clearing house) TownHall.Com argues, as expressing a single underlying evil: “When Democrats argue that abortion should be used as a means to improve modern weather, they are no different than the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas who called for the sacrifice of young children to improve the climate. Both have the same unrealistic intent — change bad weather; and, both have no comprehension of the brutality of murder and maiming of human children.”

What is less remarkable than the fact that such polemics about child sacrifice should continue to exist (how could they not, since they’re at least as old and as ingrained in Western culture as the Bible?) is that, in a truly gobsmacking way, they are entirely gratuitous compared with the actual, unvarnished truth.

One need not confabulate tales of cabals of authority figures secretly engaged in outlandish and heinous abuse; one need simply read the headlines. Consider the latest developments in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a story which might strike those previously unaware of it as too grandiosely horrifying to be real, like a hideous mashup of the Marquis de Sade and feverish 4Chan speculation, playing out in the highest corridors of American power. Yet as documented in a devastating series in The Miami Herald, it is all too real. A hedge-fund manager worth $2 billion, Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender whom investigators — including the FBI — credibly contend has assaulted and/or raped hundreds of middle and high school age girls over the course of decades. A prominent socialite and political donor, Epstein apparently did all this while rubbing shoulders with friends including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, the Duke of York, Kevin Spacey and other famous names, many of whom variously vacationed or travelled with Epstein on the jet he used to circulate between residences in Florida, New York, New Mexico, and a private island.

Through the efforts of a top-notch legal team (including both Dershowitz and Ken Starr), Epstein managed to avoid state charges for child prostitution. He even apparently helped draft his own federal indictment, securing a plea deal that immunized him and multiple accomplices from federal charges and resulted in a minimal sentence whereby he was allowed to spend up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in his Malibu office, receiving visitors including young women. Now a free man, he continues to jet-set more or less at will.

Epstein’s deal was brokered by then-US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, who lied to Epstein’s victims about the deal’s existence while concluding it. Acosta is currently serving in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Labor. He continues to hold this position despite the ruling of a Federal judge that Epstein’s deal broke the law.

Meanwhile, some of Epstein’s victims have alleged that he gave them to friends to abuse as well. “And then a pat on the back, You’ve done a really good job, thank you very much and here’s $200 dollars,” one victim, Virginia Roberts, told the Herald. “And before you know it I’m being lent out to politicians and to academics, to people that — to royalty! — people that you’d never think, like, How did you get into that position of power in the first place if you’re this disgusting, evil, decrepit person on the inside?”

Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya

There’s a reflexive temptation to take Virginia Roberts’ rhetorical question literally, and answer, That’s exactly how and why they get and keep their power to begin with. But this temptation is actually a bid to hide behind cynicism. Because Roberts, more than anyone, knows what’s she talking about. The full of force of her question lies in that she knows precisely how cruel and perverse abusive elites can be and she is still and even more shocked by the gap between their mainstream public respectability and their personal evil. Part of what shocks her, in other words, is not just the depravity of the powerful, or how much impunity wealth and influence can buy, but the way in which collective memory and public institutions seem incapable of integrating elite depravity and impunity into long-term consciousness or serious action.

Even for those with no reason to be shocked by anything, the dissonance still stupefies.

In June 2016, a California woman filed a lawsuit alleging that, in 1994, when she was 13 years old, Donald Trump raped her at a party at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan. Trump and Epstein are longtime associates. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” The woman remained nameless, but announced she was coming forward for a press conference on November 2, the day before the election. She then cancelled her appearance and withdrew her lawsuit, citing threats to her life. Trump (and Epstein) have denied her story.

Some twenty women have accused President Trump of sexual misconduct. Several women who participated in a Miss Teen USA pageant Trump owned have also told stories of his walking in to inspect them as they changed in their dressing rooms backstage. “Don’t worry, ladies,” one recalled him saying during an episode in 1997, three years after the alleged child rape at Epstein’s, “I’ve seen it all before.” The girls present in this episode included one as young as fifteen.

The dissonance is stupefying. There is no need for tinfoil-hat messageboard speculation or Lovecraftian True-Detective-style secret conspiracies. The exploitation and abuse of minors is right there, as cruel and ghoulish as you could imagine, out in the open. They are everywhere, overwhelming. Any given allegation will be debated endlessly and then forgotten, such that, while all of them may seem entirely plausible, no single one ever seems to rise to the level of being the one that will push opinion (or prosecution) over the edge. No one story seems like it can ever make a difference, precisely because there are so many of them. Meanwhile, institutional inertia and blatant corruption continue to insulate the powerful from serious accountability. In other words, the very scale, horror, and obviousness of the abuse is so great, and the accountability so obviously lacking, that a profusion of allegations paradoxically inoculates the accused through sheer repetition.

Trump is not alone in enjoying this dynamic. Other individuals and institutions enjoy — and weaponize it — too. Speaking before an episcopal conference this February, Pope Francis spoke in broad terms of “the scourge of the sexual abuse of minors.” Drawing heated criticism from victims’ advocates, Francis resolutely spoke of sexual abuse in remarkably broad terms.

Finally pivoting to the question of abuse in the Church twelve paragraphs in, Pope Francis stated: “We are thus facing a universal problem, tragically present almost everywhere and affecting everyone. Yet we need to be clear, that while gravely affecting our societies as a whole, this evil is in no way less monstrous when it takes place within the Church.”

Diluting any specificity of clerical sexual abuse into the strange question of who might want to see abuse as less monstrous when it occurs within the Church, Francis gestured at the relation between power and abuse before promptly eliding any consideration of sexual abuse in the context of power dynamics within the Church in favor of talking about “abuse” writ large:

It is difficult to grasp the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors without considering power, since it is always the result of an abuse of power, an exploitation of the inferiority and vulnerability of the abused, which makes possible the manipulation of their conscience and of their psychological and physical weakness. The abuse of power is likewise present in the other forms of abuse affecting almost 85,000,000 children, forgotten by everyone: child soldiers, child prostitutes, starving children, children kidnapped and often victimized by the horrid commerce of human organs or enslaved, child victims of war, refugee children, aborted children and so many others.

Francis thus presented sexual abuse in terms of a kind of both transhistorical universality and eternal evil.

[This] is, and historically has been, a widespread phenomenon in all cultures and societies. Only in relatively recent times has it become the subject of systematic research, thanks to changes in public opinion regarding a problem that was previously considered taboo; everyone knew of its presence yet no one spoke of it. I am reminded too of the cruel religious practice, once widespread in certain cultures, of sacrificing human beings – frequently children – in pagan rites. … Before all this cruelty, all this idolatrous sacrifice of children to the god of power, money, pride and arrogance, empirical explanations alone are not sufficient….So what would be the existential “meaning” of this criminal phenomenon? In the light of its human breadth and depth, it is none other than the present-day manifestation of the spirit of evil. If we fail to take account of this dimension, we will remain far from the truth and lack real solutions.

Moloch reemerges here, as does the idea of atavistic, demonic evil, operating across human history through secrecy and depravity, surrounded by taboos. Yet, truth be told, there seems to have been little “taboo” about what the worshippers of Moloch did. They left frank inscriptions about what they did and why, the deals they hoped to secure, the promises they killed to fulfill. They may not have had a bronze statue of Cronus, but the sacrifices were public enough, not hidden. Indeed, as some interpreters have suggested, this public awareness may have been the whole point. Phoenician practices of child sacrifice, they suggest, functioned as a mechanism for ensuring social cohesion. Since each elite family would have to make a sacrifice, and thus be equally bound in the enterprise of state. The problem, as Diodorus Siculus himself hints, arose when some Carthaginians weren’t sacrificing their own kids, but disposable substitute ones, the kids of others, who came cheap. In other words, they committed the impiety not of duping the gods, but their own elite confederates. Certain pacts must be kept above all.

The Flight of Moloch by William Blake (1809)

Today, what is perhaps more amazing than the ubiquity of revelations of abuse around us that they are frequently not even revelations at all. From the Church to Trump to Epstein to Michael Jackson to R. Kelly, the stories seem to have been going on forever, and even the newest allegations are marked with a kind of already-anticipated, horrifying familiarity. Vindication, if any is to come, seems like it will only ever arrive too little, too late, in a different kind of fuzzy temporality altogether.

After so much impunity, horror behind closed doors can be easier to imagine, and to be seen as inevitable, than public justice. Which is all to say that, at least as far as the immiseration and abuse of children is concerned, the idea of “revelation” has lost its apocalyptic charge. Everything is shown – but what is revealed entails no prompt consequences, let alone justice. Meanwhile, written even more prominently than tales of abuse and conspiracies of exploitation, signs of another kind of apocalypse proceed apace. The climate assessments are clear. Even if we undertake massive efforts at social and economic reorganization, today’s children will inherit a world of unprecedented social dislocation, resource warfare, and mass die-offs. This future is already here, distributed disproportionately among the most globe’s vulnerable, and poised to steadily threaten even the most privileged – who are scrambling to insulate themselves as best and for as long as they can. As we marvel, stupefied, over the barbarity of ancient civilizations, or debate the supposed barbarity of present groups, our horrified, fixated cries of These people kill their own children, they deserve to be destroyed! carry an unspoken admission and correlative fear: As do we, and so do us.

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Patrick Blanchfield  is an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute Social Research. He is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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“Political Feelings” is a column by Patrick Blanchfield about stories, scenes, and studies of religion in American culture published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Suffer the Children appeared first on The Revealer.

The Pennsylvania report is being covered intensively by practically every major news outlet, with each publication’s reportage including multiple brief vignettes of abuse. The reason the cases summarized in each outlet are different is because there are hundreds upon hundreds of different episodes to choose from. Their horror beggars imagination. A priest rapes a young boy so violently he damages the child’s spine, consigning him to years of painkiller dependency, and ultimately to overdose and death. A priest rapes a girl while she is in a hospital bed recovering from having her tonsils out. A group of priests whip boys with belts and force them to pose for photographs, naked, as though crucified. A priest rapes a girl and then arranges for her to receive an abortion — with the subsequent blessing and sympathy of his superiors. The sadism and perversion the report documents is so heinous that readers with a Christian upbringing may find themselves reaching for the vocabulary of demons and the demonic. So too did one priest, who, in warning his superiors about a sexual predator colleague, described him as an “incubus.”

Despite that warning, that predator’s superiors effectively did nothing about it. And this is the other half of the report’s story: the revelation of sophisticated and elaborate mechanisms for shielding predators, avoiding public scrutiny, escaping legal accountability, and even punishing victims and families. Time and again, whistle-blowing clerics and parishioners (including some who worked in law enforcement) approached their pastors and bishops to report abuse, confident the Church would act decisively. And time and again, the reports were ignored or rejected, and abusive priests were transferred to other parishes, not infrequently being promoted and given even greater access to vulnerable children. These stories, too, beggar belief. When a father shows up to a rectory in Pittsburgh with a shotgun to confront his daughter’s abuser in the 1960s, the Church responds by sending the priest to a Church-run mental health facility for “evaluation” — and then assigns him to teach middle school in San Diego for the next two decades. When another priest dogged by child sex allegations eventually resigns, his superiors write him a letter of reference — for a job at Walt Disney World.

For seven decades, priests who were known, and self-admitted, abusers were laundered within the system. “The bishops weren’t just aware of what was going on; they were immersed in it,” observes the report. “And they went to great lengths to keep it secret.” Those lengths included “continuing to fund abusive priests, providing them with housing, transportation, benefits, and stipends— and leaving abusers with the resources to locate, groom and assault more children.” Indeed, in numerous cases, as the report makes clear, the Church lavished money on dubious “treatments” for abusers, and paid large sums to abusers in order ease their departure from the clergy, all while running out the statute of limitations clock on legal actions by victims and fighting over pennies necessary for their medical and mental health treatment. The report refers to this edifice of cover-ups and wrongdoing as “The Circle of Secrecy” — noting this phrase is not its own devising, but rather the coinage of former Bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald Wuerl.

For his part, Wuerl is no longer in Pittsburgh — he’s now Archbishop of Washington, D.C. But the Church in Pennsylvania’s response to the report is stunning in its own right. “Sadly, abuse still is part of the society in which we live,” writes Alfred A. Schlert, Bishop of Allentown. “We acknowledge our past failures, and we are determined to do what is necessary to protect the innocent, now and in the future.”

Perhaps Bishop Schlert is sincere in his concerns about “society,” though one might suspect that he and other apologists want to have things both ways — to keep the City of God at once hygienically apart from Earthly “society,” while also strategically shifting any blame for clerical misconduct onto contagion from it. But, in any event, let’s consider the abstraction of blaming “society” alongside the concrete details of the following episode, included in the Grand Jury materials, which occurred near Pittsburgh in the 1960s.

In his message, the victim revealed that while living in West Newton when he was around seven years old, he was told by a Sunday school teacher that missing mass could make you die. Concerned for his mother who was missing mass, the victim went down to the church to plead the case of his mother. The victim related that “Father Gooth” [Guth] took the victim into the rectory office where Guth sat in a chair as the victim stood before him, sobbing and pleading for his mother’s soul. Guth asked the victim whether he believed that Jesus suffered and died for our sins, in response to which the victim said “of course” as that is what he was taught. Guth talked about penance and having crosses to bear and asked the victim if he would do anything to save his mother. Guth then spoke of secret confessions and penance before reaching over and unbuckling the victim’s pants, pulling them down, fondling him, and sticking his finger up the victim’s anus. The victim believed Guth then spoke in Latin. The victim stated he was frozen stiff when the abuse was occurring and that when Guth was done, he was instructed to pull up his pants and that if he told anyone about the secret penance, not only would his mother go to hell, but he [the victim] would burn with her. Guth then gave the victim a nickel and warned him again not to say anything to anyone or his whole family would burn in hell.

Or consider this episode, which occurred in the very diocese of Allentown itself — Schlert’s current bishopric — back in the early 1980s.

The victim said that his first memory of abuse happened while he attended CCD [Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, AKA “Sunday School”] class at St. Bernard’s, where [Monsignor J.] Benestad was assigned. The victim was taken out of class by a nun and delivered to Benestad in his office. The victim had worn shorts to CCD, which was against the rules. The victim was told that shorts were not proper attire and that not wearing proper attire was sinful. The victim was told to get on his knees and start praying. Benestad unzipped his pants and told the victim to perform oral sex on him. The victim did as he was told. Benestad also performed oral sex on the victim. The victim recalls that, after the abuse, Benestad would produce a clear bottle of holy water and squirt it into the victim’s mouth to purify him.

Whatever the problems of “society” more broadly, it is impossible not to see in these horrors very particularly Catholic features: tropes, however twisted, of sin, penance, mortification, and punishment, concepts and ritual items wielded as tools of abuse. These priests, in other words, did not just rape children using their hands, mouths, and genitals. They also raped them using their faith.

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I grew up around priests, and in the Church. I served as an altar boy, first in my local parish church and then in a cathedral, for almost ten years. I received an impeccable education from Jesuits, for free, a gift for which I am still grateful. To this day, I count priests among my friends. Liturgical music can still transport me, and the slightest whiff of incense — Jerusalem brand — opens up Proustian vistas of memory.

But I left the Church for good in the Summer of 2002. I was in Massachusetts, right as the first, explosive investigations of clerical sexual abuse were being made public by The Boston Globe. During the Sunday homily at my then-parish in Cambridge, the pastor read us a letter, sent by the Archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law. The topic was a legislative effort to add a so-called “Protection of Marriage Amendment” to the state constitution, which would have pre-emptively denied efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Unsurprisingly, Law urged support for the amendment, in the most strenuous terms; it was our duty as Catholics, a decent people with family values, to pressure our legislators accordingly.

Our pastor read the letter, and then, to his credit, spoke briefly for himself. In so many words, he admitted that he only read it because he had to, and that he felt uncomfortable with it. He expressed particular hesitation with the linchpin of Law’s argument: that same-sex marriage would be “damaging to children.” In light of breaking news about the Diocese’s history of covering up sexual abuse, and particularly given our parish’s thriving youth choir program, he felt it was not his place, let alone Law’s, to make any such pronouncements.

I forget the exact words the priest used, but I suddenly felt moved to tears by his candor and even bravery. I also found myself realizing, with almost crystalline clarity, that I was crying about something else, too: that this was it for me, that there was nothing there for me, that I wanted no part in an institution that could produce such a scene. The contortions of loyalty and pain, the suffering it generated and the empathy it at once made possible and denied — I couldn’t bear it. I don’t remember if I left while everyone else shuffled around for communion. But I do remember walking out and telling myself not to look back.

To be sure, I was never, in retrospect, or even as I saw it at the time, a “Good Catholic.” In fact, to be perfectly frank about it, the phrase and idea of being a “Good Catholic” always struck me, if not as an oxymoron, than at least a kind of provocative irony. The very core of Catholicism as I was raised in it hinged on a self-critical, precarious relationship to the idea of goodness. Your Goodness as a Catholic was always ever only provisional, contingent upon a logic of confession and atonement in this life, and of final judgment in the next. At one point, in a theology class, a priest asked us what our favorite words in the liturgy were. I knew the whole thing by heart, and my response was immediate: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” These words are said right before Communion — or at least they were (a recent update to the English liturgy brings the expression closer to its origin in Matthew 8:8). They paint a poignant picture: the finite human, mortal and frail, begging only a single, transformative gesture of healing from the infinite divine.

Reading the Grand Jury report today, those words keep coming back to me. Their power still speaks to me, but now I detect something else in them. On the one hand, they express a posture of beseeching receptivity towards the Divine; on the other, they signal profound vulnerability to all-too-human abuse. The episode in West Newton, with the child begging for intercession on behalf of his mother, looms. How vulnerable is a seven year old, burdened with the ontological guilt of Original Sin, and navigating an austere calculus of punishment according to which his mother can go to hell for missing Mass? If you carry within you some basic fault, some constant taint of dirtiness and shame, does it not follow that further debasement is somehow inevitable? That you can never be entirely sure if you’re getting what you deserve — or what you want? Or that, in the muck and sinfulness of your humanity, if goodness and healing were to come you, you might mistake them for exploitation and filth — or vice-versa?And if the whole enterprise of sin and forgiveness is so over-coded by themes of concealment and privileged divulgement — the very logic of confession — does that flow seamlessly into relationships of being groomed and then keeping silent — of understanding that You Keep The Secret, or You go to Hell?

I should say: I was never abused. The closest I came was a strange encounter with a layperson CCD instructor, a stockbroker in his thirties, in what was supposed to be some sort of Sex-Ed/theology class, yelling at me and some other pubescent boys, veins popping in his neck, about how “JESUS DIDN’T GET NAILED TO A TELEPHONE POLE SO YOU COULD DROP YOUR SHORTS.” My friends and I just looked at each other, completely uncertain what the guy was talking about. The priests my friends and I knew, as altar servers and teachers in our all-boys school, were nowhere near as florid or erratic. And besides, you made allowances for priests — didn’t you have to be a little weird, a little “queer” (in the old sense), to become one in the first place? Their frequent oddity was part-and-parcel, a necessary evil, so to speak.

Of course, some were weirder than others. The priest who was a little too enthusiastic about hugs; The priest who was always hanging around groups of athletes, who was always ready with pats on the back after a game, who had clear favorites on the team, who would sometimes massage a boy’s shoulders. The priests we made snickering jokes about in locker rooms; jokes that served, not coincidentally, to defuse and redirect pervasive homosocial tension.

To be clear, I do not think these men ever crossed certain lines — or at least, I do not know if they did. For what it’s worth, they never seemed predatory. The affect they broadcast instead was more a kind of sadness. You could see it when they didn’t think we were watching. Glimpses in their eyes and faces of deep loneliness and frustration, the tells of bodies and souls too-long macerated in yearning and lack. The sadness they’d struggle to disguise when talking of former colleagues and seminarian friends who had left the cloth behind to marry women, and, in at least one case I knew, to marry a man. The same tonalities of sadness you might sometimes perceive learning of the priests who, having given up possession of significant worldly assets, spent their meager funds overindulging on liquor and tobacco and fatty food.

I leave it to others to address the delicate questions of how celibacy or the oppression of the closet are implicated in clerical abuse. Likewise, I cannot stress enough there is to be no question of excusing such behavior in the guise of “explaining” it — if anything, as the Grand Jury Report documents, this bait-and-switch has been an integral part of the Church hierarchy’s own cynical publicity M.O. for years. By the same token, we must always reject as obscene any attempt to equate sexual abuse to non-heterosexual orientation (another classic misdirection). After all, as the report makes painfully clear, the targets of abuse in Pennsylvania included not just boys but girls too, both women and men. And the psychology research on sexual predators is unequivocal: abuse is first and foremost about availability and vulnerability — it is about power, and about being able to get away with it.

But, again, there is something in the episodes the report contains, something that resonates with the core of my experience of Catholicism — and I suspect I am not alone. A particular configuration of innocence and guilt, of expiation and profanation, that suggest some deeply flawed, corrosive worldview, a sadistic-erotic matrix of pleasure, suffering, secrecy, and guilt. This suspicion is underscored every time some Bishop or professional apologist circles the wagons and takes every discussion of abuse or abusers as an assault on Catholicism itself. What if, you start to wonder, in some way — they’re right? What if, in a basic way, these outrages are not incidentally Catholic, but essentially so? And what are we supposed to do, then?

Reading the report, I feel many things at once. Part of me wants to smash altars with a sledgehammer. Part of me wants RICO investigations into every archdiocese and diocese in the country. And part of me wants a priest to put a hand on my shoulder while I cry, to tell me that everything will be all right, that these were not real priests, that all this, somehow, can made understandable and redeemed in light of God’s love.

No matter what I do, there’s some part of me that wants nothing more than to feel the forgiveness of Grace, some feeling of total forgiveness, acceptance, and love that undoes the most basic of faults. I feel this even as I understand that, in large measure, that conviction of a fault in the first place is something that was put in me by the institution that I want to heal it. What the Church shaped in me was a conviction of fallen-ness, of broken-ness, of sinfulness, of a fundamental pain and tragedy and unworthiness written through all of human existence that cried out for the healing transformation of grace. And what the Church took from me was the belief that any such transfiguration was possible through it. Reading the Grand Jury report, I suspect that, in this too, I am not alone.

One of the gold crosses given by Father George Zirwas, member
of a clerical pedophile ring, gave to altar boys he abused.

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Patrick Blanchfield  is an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute Social Research. He is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Soul Murder appeared first on The Revealer.

A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on Sept. 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. The Border Patrol opened the holding center to temporarily house the children after tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the border into the United States during the spring and summer of 2014. (Photo: John Moore—Getty Images)

Writing in 1943, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the light-hearted atmosphere of a peaceful Warsaw plaza while the Jewish Ghetto burned across town. A sky-carousel turned “to the strains of a carnival tune.”

The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

The merrymaking of Poles and Germans proceeds apace, even as some 13,000 Jews are murdered and their quarter razed nearby. Their carefree self-indulgence seems – in the most charitable reading – psychotically disconnected from the monstrosity unfolding in front of them. But Miłosz seems to suggest that the proximity in fact charges their fun with a superadded liveliness, even an erotic frisson: a hot wind, fueled by the pyres, that bounces kites and lifts skirts. Visiting the town of Oświęcim (in German, Auschwitz) as a child, I recall being baffled by the existence of discotheque not far from the concentration camp. “How could people still dance there?” I naively wondered. Today, older, I realize how stupid this was. Of course people dance there now; people danced there even then.

A burning street in the Warsaw Ghetto, during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. (Photo: Yad Vashem Archive)

Here is what is happening right now in America. Thousands of immigrant children are being held in mass detention facilities overseen by Federal agencies. The practice of detaining children who arrive at the border unaccompanied is longstanding, and horrifying as is; new to the picture is a “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, issued by the Trump administration, whereby children who arrive with family members are forcibly separated from them such that they can then, in an evil slight of bureaucratic hand, be declared “unaccompanied.” The adults are sent to trial for illegal border crossing (a misdemeanor), regardless of whether they actually sought to seek asylum (which is entirely legal). Meanwhile, the children are placed in detention facilities – incarcerated – with no clear mechanism for or prospect of reunification with their families; some parents have already been deported, their children left behind. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security denies the existence of this policy one day, and then defends it publicly the next. Meanwhile, President Trump blames the Democrats for his own policy – which he could change with the stroke of a pen – and then unsubtly uses the children in question as a bargaining chip in a bid to get Democrats to cosign funding for a Border Wall.

One parent – that we know of – has already committed suicide after being separated from his wife and child. As for the children themselves, some two thousand have already been separated from their families, joining nine thousand other immigrant children already in Federal custody; an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages an array of already overcrowded detention facilities erected on military bases, warehouses, and at least one converted Walmart, estimates that 30,000 could be detained by August. The images and stories that have emerged from such places – that have been glimpsed on carefully managed facility tours or leaked – are horrifying. A 5-year-old from Honduras cries himself to sleep clutching a stick-figure drawing of his family. Children, including a Salvadoran six-year-old, scream for their parents while a Border Patrol Agent mocks their cries. Teens self-harm and threaten suicide while staff are instructed to prevent siblings from hugging.

These scenes, from the present moment, invite justifiable comparison with some of the darkest moments in American history – Japanese internment, the forced removal of Native American children from their parents and communities, the systematic separation of Black slave families. They also cry out for comparison to historic nightmares abroad. They resemble, to be sure, an American version of Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceaușescu’s mass orphanages, the so-called “slaughterhouses of souls” which inflicted trauma on hundreds of thousands of children.

But they are also something else: they are concentration camps. As the historian Andrea Pitzer explains in her authoritative global history of concentration camps, One Long Night, the idea of a concentration camp need not necessarily imply extermination. Pitzer writes,

For more than a century, countries have established refugee camps to coordinate food and shelter during crises. But where the camps exist predominantly to isolate refugees and relegate them to dangerous or inhospitable terrain, serve as de facto detention areas to discourage border crossing, or become permanent purgatory for detainees unable to return home, they begin to take on characteristics of concentration camps. With refugee populations, a clear line does not always mark the peripheries of concentration camp definitions.

This is precisely the territory in which we find ourselves today. As I write, the Trump administration is contemplating erecting mass “tent cities” to house even more child detainees. It is worth recalling that Trump recently pardoned Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who bragged about building tent cities for immigrant prisoners, which he proudly described as “concentration camps.” Now, it seems, we shall have these for children, and Pitzer herself has called these what they are.

We all know where this goes. Such facilities already are – and only will be more so – incubators for abuse, violence, and health epidemics, mental and physical. We already have an immigration system in which a Texas deputy can cover up “super aggravated sexual assault” of a 4-year-old immigrant child by blackmailing her mother into silence with threats of deportation. America’s prisons and juvenile facilities enshrine violence and sexual abuse as a feature, not a bug – there is no reason not to expect this here. Children will be raped, children will be brutalized, children will die. Meanwhile, the authorities, state media, and regime sycophants will minimize the suffering and dehumanize the victims. Laura Ingraham already tells us these facilities are “basically summer camps,” Ann Coulter says the children are “actors,” and the Secretary of Homeland Security herself warns Americans not to be taken in by the constructed suffering of immigrants “posing as families” to “abuse” our “generosity.” These disavowals, at once breathtakingly divorced from reality but also underwritten by a not-so-subterranean glee in cruelty, will only get more brazen once there are child bodies to count. And even when there are, Tucker Carlson will doubtless remind us that “the American family,” the only family that really matters, faces suffering that is “measurable and real.”

Central Processing Station in McAllen, Texas. (Photo: Center for Border Protection)

There are not many anti-Nazi jokes that survive from the pre-war era, a fact that testifies, not incidentally, to the thoroughgoing ruthlessness of the German police state. One such rare joke dates from the period when dissenting Germans would still be sent to concentration camps for “rehabilitation” and “reeducation” and then be returned to the general populace. It involves two Germans talking with each other (here adapted from a telling by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius):

Hans: Georg, you’re back from the KZ, how was it?

Georg: Wonderful! We did calisthenics, took naps, sang songs. There were buffets and lectures in art appreciation. It was a grand time.

Hans: I am surprised – Udo told everyone it was a nightmare of brutality and pain.

Georg: And that’s why he was sent back yesterday!

This joke gets at some key things: that everyday Germans did “know” what was going on; that the pressure to minimize and disavow reality was ubiquitous; and that that pressure came not from fear of security forces foremost – but from fear of one’s own neighbors, who worked as informers. We see very similar mechanisms operative now. The cages are not really cages, DHS says, even if yes, technically speaking, it admits that the phrase is “not inaccurate”; the appropriate phrase, per Fox’s Steve Doocy, is “walls [built] out of chain link fences.” Their staff are not camp guards, they are “Consequence Delivery Agents.”

In this nightmare factory we call America, where people sic armed, trigger-happy police on one another out of sheer racism, and where people routinely threaten deportation against neighbors whom they wish to tormentor exploit, the sense of mounting fear, and of joy in cruelty, lurking behind the jokes and circumlocution is palpable. But our pretenses of not-knowing are even flimsier than those of Germans living under Nazism. The photos of immigrants’ confiscated rosaries and clothes come in real time, our moment’s analogues to the piles of shoes and tallitot at Auschwitz. They are glimpses of a present incubating a future that only promises worse. Action is necessary – from acts of civil disobedience to support for activist groups to demands for the abolition of ICE, CBP, and DHS and more. And so too is an honest confrontation with the uncomfortable truth that these new horrors also represent a clear continuity with our all-too-recent past.

We have no excuses. All that is unfolding now is happening against the backdrop of a period of record stock market gains and unprecedented wealth. If we permit such things now, what do we license when – not if – things get worse? The hot winds are already blowing.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Summer Camp at the Nightmare Factory appeared first on The Revealer.

Pitt Rivers Museum Facebook Cover Photo

The organizing principle for the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England is simple: everything. Spawned from the personal collection of a pioneering 19^th Century British archaeologist and ethnologist, Augustus Pitt Rivers, the museum contains well over half a million artifacts.

Spread on multiple levels throughout a cavernous structure attached to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, these objects are arranged not by region of origin or era of construction, but instead categorized by use, as artifacts of different domains of human life, indexing various (ostensibly universal) activities and interest. A case labeled “Treatment of the Dead” thus includes both Victorian urns and Shinto shrines, Andaman skull relics and Medieval European memento mori; it sits beside another case (“Treatment of Dead Enemies” with similarly far-flung contents. And there are hundreds of such displays, encompassing a bewildering archive of human pursuits and proclivities: Whistling Arrows, Smoking and Stimulants, Bells, Rattles, and Xylophones, Puppets, Skis, Model Boats, Snuff-Taking Equipment, and Lutes. The collection of religious artifacts is particularly astounding: totems, idols, ritual masks, incense braziers, ritual knives, prayer rugs, sacred jewelry, etc. Amidst this profusion of objects, variously “primitive” and high-tech, are also a variety of scientific instruments: telescopes, microscopes, slides, dissection tools. Alongside all the rest, their presence makes a point that is simple yet profound: scientific inquiry, like religious devotion, is a human phenomenon and a material practice, something humans do that involves things that humans make. Their metaphysical propositions and disputes over descriptive accuracy set aside, science and religion are presented together, first and foremost as grounded in a shared materiality.

But this even-handed emphasis on science and religion’s shared grounding also disguises implicit hierarchy. Pitt Rivers was a devout adherent of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, a man who believed not just in assessing the adaptations and fitness of animals, but of weighing the superiority and decay of cultures and “the races.” Just because the display objects lie together, side-by-side does not mean they are equivalent – in fact, quite the opposite. They are artifacts of cultural adaptation and decline, and their proximity is meant to illustrate evolutionary narratives of improvement or stultification. Tracking these narratives was something the polymath Pitt Rivers saw as demanding dedicated interdisciplinary study, combining ethnology and anthropology and archaeology. It was also raison d’etre for his collection, and his museum. As he wrote:

The ethnologist and the anthropologist who has not studied the prehistoric archaeology of his own country compares the present condition of savages with that of the Europeans with whom they are brought in contact. He notices the vast disparity of intellect between them. He finds the savage incapable of education and of civilization, and evidently destined to fall away before the white man whenever the races meet, and he jumps at the conclusion that races so different in mental and physical characteristics, must have had a distinct origin, and be the offspring of separate creations. But the archaeologist traces back the arts and institutions of his own people and country until he finds that they once existed in a condition as low or lower than that of existing savages, having the same arts, and using precisely the same implements and weapons; and he arrives at the conclusion that the difference observable between existing races is one of divergence, and not of origin; that owing to causes worthy of being carefully studied and investigated, one race has improved, while another has progressed slowly or remained stationary.

Note Pitt Rivers’ phrasing about scholars comparing “the present condition of savages with that of the Europeans with whom they are brought in contact.” Pitt Rivers was a distinguished military officer, with a particularly keen interest in weapons; in his museum, walls of clubs and swords give way to muskets and then rifles. “Contact,” it seems, includes a lot of conquests – the outcomes of which vindicated white racial superiority. Quite un-self-consciously, Pitt Rivers’ museum was intended as a scientific archive of, and monument to, a global colonial empire, erected in the most erudite precinct of its metropolitan heart. The objects may share space in the same glass display cases, but what both separates and contains them is the purest kind of ideology.

Last July, not far from Pitt Rivers museum, at St. Anne’s College, a group of scientists, scholars, and clerics gathered together for a conference hosted by Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion by the Templeton Foundation and the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). The meeting, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life,” focused primarily on the implications of what has become known as “the New Biology.” As many of the conference participants and organizers quickly stipulated, the phrase “New Biology” is something of a misnomer, less the name for a new kind of discipline than it is a shorthand for a variety of new tools. These tools are hard to describe, let alone imagine fitting coherently in a museum display case. Technologies like CRISPR sequencing have allowed biologists to precisely edit gene sequences in specimen organisms, producing particular, quantifiable effects in terms of the expression of various traits; meanwhile, new techniques for exploring epigenetics have expanded scientific scrutiny into an entire register of heritable characteristics that operate at a level just above DNA itself. The adoption of these tools has help prompt a recent revival of what’s known as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), a sort of grand-unifying working model for the evolution of living organisms that attempts to combine classical Darwinian and more recent evolutionary theory with new experimental data. In the words of Massimo Pigliucci, a proponent of the EES and one of the conference’s major speakers, these developments together mean that the idea of “life as an object of study” has undergone a distinct and dramatic change.

More granularly, a running theme through presentations and talks was how New Biology might affect, first and foremost, thinking about causality, and, second, undoing ideas of static organismic integrity in favor of multi-causal, interdependent systems. Dame Ottoline Leyser, a plant biologist and Professor of Plant Development at the University of Cambridge, illustrated this shift in perspective by asking her audience to consider a common specimen plant: the thale cress (Arabidopsis). Per Leyser, both scientific and popular considerations of such a plant inevitably proceed both in terms of linear narratives (from seed to plant, sprout to flower, etc.) and in terms of discrete levels of focus and scale (this is the function of the stem, this is the function of a petal, this is what roots do, etc.). Yet targeted interventions on the genetic and epigenetic level, reveal that linear narratives are insufficient, and that efforts at understanding biological processes at artificially constrained levels of scale fall short: organisms are dynamic, with their parts and environments in constant feedback with one another. “A cell is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting molecules, sensitive to local and systemic inputs,” says Leyser. “And a meristem is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting cells, sensitive to local and systemic inputs.” And thus: “A plant is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting meristems, sensitive to local and systemic inputs.” Assessing her specimen plant as a specimen for an entire way of thinking, Leyser summed it all up: “The whole plant is a system that’s absolutely ridden with feedback, so I’m not that interested in [singular] causation.”

The idea of organisms as dynamic systems, and an emphasis on multi-factorial, interdependent processes rather than on singular causation was what, for most of the conference’s participants, activated the most religious resonances. Rather than upsetting many Western theological visions that emphasis God as First Cause or Prime Mover, the insights of the New Biology are taken as instead validating that premise. As Fraser Watts, an Anglican cleric and one of the event’s ISSR organizers put it, “For a Christian thinker, the living world seems increasingly to reflect the interdependence of Father, Son and Spirit.” Per Watts, the “holistic approach” of the new biology “takes a huge number of variables and tries to understand how they work,” thereby sidestepping tired debates over “monocauasal determinism.”.[1]

As the event proceeded, a certain ambiguity became visible. Although many participants would, in Q&As and casual conversation, attest to specific religious commitments, actual expressions of belief were kept to a minimum coming from the podiums. In fact, one of the most striking things in the first two days of dozens of talking about evolution in causality is that I never once heard the word “God.” And yet God was also ubiquitous – and not just God in the abstract. The implicit point of reference was, throughout, a very Christian, even specifically Protestant, notion of God as a Creator, with a plan for creaturely life and human transformation. The ISSR’s logo may feature symbols for a variety of traditions (the Star of David, a Sikh khanda, a Sanskrit om) but at this event at least there wasn’t much interrogation of how these traditions might frame the stakes of a “religion” versus “science” encounter differently. When one of the few Buddhists at the event did raise a post-lecture question, saying how, in his view, the world might be seen less as a dynamic system or divine creation than as “a torture device” intended to produce suffering, the response was sort of a sympathetic befuddlement. Interventions that did not deploy configurations of the discussion’s two operative dialectical terms – science on the one hand, and religion (read: Christianity) on the other – simply did not appear to compute.

But Christianity was not the only theme that was ubiquitous yet unspoken, determining certain dialogue outcomes even as it foreclosed others. What was also everywhere, but unspoken, were politics and money. As an event funded by the Templeton Organization, this conference depended on the largesse of an organization with a history of specific political commitments and policy agendas. Speaking off the named record, several participants stressed that support for conservative religious causes were no longer part of the organization’s culture, and that the independence of this event from any such considerations was sacrosanct. Yet, regardless, as with not naming God, the discussion of “dialogue” between science and religion proceeded without naming any of the material dimensions that made it possible in the first place. In one of the capstone lectures, a noted theologian and public intellectual described today’s youth as plagued by a sense of disconnection, a yearning for meaning and answers. This anomie, he suggested, meant millenials were a ripe audience for the insights of religious figures working in dialogue with scientists. When the question arose as to how those youth’s unhappiness might also relate to political uncertainty and their economic fortunes, consideration of how that might be germane was deferred in favor of starting “conversation.”

After four days of conversation, always positioned as conversations started towards opening-onto yet other, future conversation-to-come, it soon became clear: this was the purpose of the exercise, this was that conversation. An abstract dialogue between two abstractions (“religion” and “science”) as a dialogue meant, in practice, the interaction of representatives of various institutions (the academy, and certain specific established religions) obliged to continuously talk around the structures (capital, politics, disciplinarity) that were the conditions of possibility for the dialogue itself.

The conversation was certainly fascinating, and the atmosphere cordial, but it all felt, in its own way, on display, framed by and for a particular ideological gaze, an artifact of some obscure cultural purpose, in its own ideological glass case.

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[1] Not that certain types of determinism were entirely absent from the event: over lunch one day, a PhD student working in the philosophy of mind explained that in addition to being a Calvinist, he’s also a biological determinist. In other words, in his view, human are robots, all the way down and some of those robots are programmed to be the Elect while others, not so much.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Purest Kind of Ideology appeared first on The Revealer.

It’s OK to feel confused this time of year. Perhaps, depending on where you live, the weather seems a little disorienting, with spates of balmy sunshine upending your normal expectations of winter. Perhaps the displays and merchandise in stores in your area turned over to Christmas themes earlier than usual, or at odd intervals, resulting in a bewildering mishmash of cues as to which holidays Capitalism thinks everyone should be celebrating, or at least anticipating. Or perhaps Daylights Savings simply threw you for a loop you still haven’t gotten over. Our body clocks mark time not just by reference to the rising and setting of the sun, but by social cues scientists called zeitgebers ­­– calendars, clocks, holidays, more. December in America, where temporality is attenuated by so many competing and overdetermined markers, is always a month when time can feel a little out of joint, a little dysphoric.

The signals coming from the bully pulpit of the highest office in the land aren’t helping. This past November’s National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony was the ninety-fifth Tree Lighting event since President Calvin Coolidge instituted the tradition. Yet to hear Trump tell it, the Presidential celebration of Christmas lapsed into obscurity long ago. As he told the Values Voters summit this past September, “You know, we’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore. They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct…Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” Fulfilling his pledge of “stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump, who says the Bible is his “favorite book” but has had a hard time saying anything specific about it (beyond that he likes the idea of an eye for an eye) officiated at what the White House’s press office described as “reviv[ing] the tradition’s religious spirit.” And he laid it on thick accordingly.

Of course, this is all nonsense – the only real faith at play here is bad. The narrative that previous administrations have been forces of anti-Christmas sentiment, like the idea of a “War on Christmas” itself, is a longstanding canard, just so much cheap culture war bait. Barack Obama, for one, wished Americans Merry Christmas all the time.

Trump’s particular fixation on his predecessor’s supposed lack of respect for the holiday has always been a transparent synecdoche for his broader program of insisting that America’s first black President was racially and religiously suspect. It’s never been subtle – as when, in 2011, Trump accused Obama of honoring Kwanzaa but ignoring Christmas (spoiler: Obama actually began his Christmas Tree Lighting that same year by wishing America Merry Christmas no less than two times in a row).

Who knows what Trump actually believes about Obama and Christmas. He’s still, it’s been reported, putting stock in birtherism (at least when talking to his confidants). But the paradox of Trump will always be that, for a man who appears to have no filters when it comes to broadcasting his internal monologue on Twitter, his actual interiority remains as impenetrable as the black box of an airplane wrecked miles beneath the ocean. His actions and beliefs will always exist in some indeterminate no-mans-land between grandiose self-delusion and cynical pandering. The more interesting question is what to make of the people whom he is pandering to, whose belief in an American Christianity under siege his fact-free utterances confirm and fuel, no matter how much fact-checking or even video tape evidence is provided to the contrary.

What’s at stake here is what the philosophers of science (drawing on the work of CS Peirce) would call the question of “fixation of belief” – the question, put crudely, of how we adjudicate evidence for our beliefs about the world, and how we decide what counts as evidence in the first place. Assessing the durable fixation of a belief (“Barack Obama Waged War on Christmas”) despite abundant evidence otherwise, two possible explanations suggest themselves (and they’re not mutually exclusive).

The first is to blame a poverty (or echo chamber) of evidence that is misleading or incomplete. Consuming “news” tailored to highly partisan audiences, this interpretation runs, people simply have never gotten the data about what Obama actually said or did. The matter, in other words, is about information silos, and a hermetic fracturing of information about a shared empirical world. In a moment of ever-more totalizing news market segmentation, this certainly is a problem.

But the more radical and more troubling prospect is that evidence really doesn’t matter – or rather, that what constitutes “evidence” is itself configured quite differently for people in different positions. What critics might offer as “evidence” to “correct” this putatively mistaken belief (that Obama ignored Christmas) takes the order of reasoning backwards. For some, Obama’s supposed anti-Christmas impiety isn’t a conclusion to be drawn from a stockpile of evidence; it is a conviction that evidence can only confirm, or that, at worst, exist as a supplement to. The evidence, in other words, merely proves the rule (“Obama didn’t celebrate Christmas, this video of him saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is just a sideshow”) or, even worse, underscores and expands it (“Obama didn’t celebrate Christmas, and this video of him saying it, when he clearly doesn’t mean it, is actually him disrespecting it even more”).

We enter here into a realm of what the Classicist and historian of Greek religion, Paul Veyne, would call “the realm of plural truths,” or “multiple truth-plans.” In his magisterial Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, Veyne not only answers the eponymous question (yes, of course they did) but also unpacks the thornier question of how they believed in them. Veyne flags an obvious problem: the same Greeks whom Europeans so often praise as the inaugurators of Western Reason, the first creators of traditions of inquiry from geometry to philosophy to arithmetic, also seemed perfectly comfortable with talking, in a quite matter-of-fact way, about things that were decidedly unreasonable. And not just Zeus turning into a shower of gold to impregnate a princess, or a snake-haired Medusa transforming men into stone, but heroes – mortal men – standing ten feet tall, killing oxen with a single punch, and likewise. A Greek might admit that they had never seen Zeus or the Medusa, Veyne observes, and so could plead out of stipulating what might be plausible for their powers to entail, but they had certainly seen plenty of their fellow mortals, and knew from experience that none had powers such as these.

Rather than attributing to their belief in myths a merely figurative status, or seeing Greek authors as all hiding a secret skepticism, Veyne takes them at their word and postulates that, for the Greeks, their gods and superhuman heroes were real, as real as their everyday lives, but in way where those realities complemented and coexisted with each other rather than existing in contradictory tension. For the Greeks, Veyne writes:

[There existed] a horizon of collective memory a world that was even more beautiful than that of the good old days, too beautiful to be real. This mythical world was not empirical; it was noble. This is not to say that it incarnated or symbolized “values.” The heroic generations did not cultivate virtue any more than do the men of today, but they had more “value” than the men of today. A hero is more real than a man, just as, in Proust’s eyes, a duchess has more value than a bourgeoise.

Veyne, for his part, does not restrict this capacity for a fungible notion of reality to the Classical era; he sees it operating in his contemporaries in modern Europe. And with this in mind, we could also say that, for some Americans, a similar perspective holds. The “truth” of Obama’s failure to celebrate Christmas isn’t, for them, an empirical matter; it is an ignoble one. As a villain, he is more real than the person who appears in videos of him; he has more existential value and urgent meaning as an anti-Christian icon than he ever could as a flesh and blood man.

Our discourse does not, of course, like thinking about Americans’ perceptions of reality as being at once so straightforward and yet so alienated (and alienating). Suggesting the real-world, politically significant existence of simultaneous plural realities is the type of thing that gets one labeled a postmodern cultural relativist, a trainwreck of a label that will cause most people’s eyes to glaze over and a small, elite minority to go into conniptions.

The more common impulse is to, instead, speak in the quasi-pathologizing language of “derangement syndromes.” The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer inaugurated this move back in 2003, describing what he called “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Krauthammer defined Bush derangement syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush.” One of the prominent Patient Zeros Krauthammer fingered as suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome was then-Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean, who had who had voiced (elliptically) an “interest” in supposed Saudi warnings to the Bush administration pre-9/11. Make what you will of Krauthammer’s mockery of Dean’s fuzzily conspiratorial suspicions, which crudely refracted what remains a murky chapter in US-Saudi relations. But Krauthammer also used the idea of Bush Derangement Syndrome to discredit, among others, journalists and commentators like Bill Moyers – a move which now looks transparently sleazy. Indeed, while in 2003 Krauthammer dismissed Moyers as “ranting,” events since then have proven Moyer’s skepticism about the Iraq war entirely justified, and his warnings about a “right-wing wrecking crew” now seem downright prescient. Krauthamer’s piece may not have aged well, but since it proved an effective rhetorical cudgel, the concept of a “derangement syndrome” stuck. Indeed, under the Obama years, takes about Obama derangement syndrome were ubiquitous, even though a running theme seemed to be trying to talk around how many Americans simply despised Obama because he was black. You can find “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takes around now, too – in no small part because, whatever its status as a nosological category, Trump himself seems to still suffer from an acute case. The hothouse ecology that is early twenty-first century American political life seems to be a petri dish for such maladies.

But glib diagnostics of “derangement syndromes” aside, the distressing problem of what to make of our coexistence in a nation of plural realities – some shared, some opposed, some complementary – abides. It is a queasy feeling to realize that, mutatis mutandis, your disgust or antipathy for the current President may be just as intense, as visceral, and as taxing as your political opponent’s feelings towards the previous one. Your hate may be the one that’s pure, as Alexander Cockburn would famously put it, but this is grim consolation when taken in context. Indeed, it may well be that the function of American politics now consists precisely in mobilizing such feelings of all-consuming intense partisan hatred in four-and-eight year cycles of triumph and exhaustion, the better to perpetuate an underlying state of affairs which we would rather not confront. Which suggests, beyond the debates and debunking, and beneath the seasonal and temporal dysphoria, a deeper consensus, and a longer-term trajectory. Because after the dust from this latest round of nonsense over the war on Christmas has settled, we will enter yet another year of an America at endless, and very real, war.

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Political Feelings is about political affect and the politics of affect in America. You can read previous installments here.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Political Feelings: Derangement Syndromes appeared first on The Revealer.

By Patrick Blanchfield

This is the first installment in a new column called Political Feelings: Stories, Scenes and Studies of Religion in American Culture being written by Patrick Blanchfield for The Revealer. Political Feelings is about political affect and the politics of affect in America, and will pay particular attention to questions of religion and religious themes. Blanchfield says of the column, “I’m particularly interested in the affective landscapes of extremism, violence, and civic religion, which I see as both urgently of the moment and marked by subsurface, dislocated temporalities and disguised repetitions: in other words, by traumas.  As a site of both collective and individual memory and communal intensity, bound up in both history and present struggles, religion represents a quilting point and nexus for experiencing, understanding, and working through the traumas that are, and that continue to shape, public life in our newly contentious and painful moment.” 

When I finally see Deepak Chopra, I am confused, because the only thing he has in common with the enormous portrait photograph in front of which he stands are the rhinestones. In the photo, Chopra’s wearing something between a Nehru jacket and an unbuttoned leisure suit with a clerical collar; here, he’s sporting an untucked blue shirt and jeans, and floats above the ground in a pair of expensive basketball sneakers with translucent red outsoles that look like they’ve been hewn from solid garnet. Chopra in the photo is ageless and well-coiffed, the scleras of his eyes distressingly luminous in a way that suggests some serious Photoshop. Chopra on the red carpet looks as haggard, bleary, and unimpressed as I feel.

But then I see the diamonds.

Scanning the crowd in the YouTube event space, Chopra moves his head, and the dozens of gems that stud the rims of his glasses refract the overhead lights and camera flashes. He’s wearing the same glasses in the photo, where their luster suggests a kind of halo emanating from his temples. Amid the weird pastels and earth tones of Silicon Valley corporate décor their gleam is mesmerizing. Are the diamonds real? It is impossible to tell. Chopra ducks backstage. Perhaps he must prepare. Soon, it has been promised, he will re-emerge to debate Skepticism itself.

The event in question has been billed many ways. It has been billed as a stand against “fake news” on the one hand and as a concerned response to supposed campus intolerance toward “free speech” on the other. It is also a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of an organization of self-professed skeptics, which publishes a quarterly magazine. And, finally, it is a “live variety science show” featuring sundry celebrities and a white Canadian hip-hop artist who will rap about the wonders of evolutionary psychology.

The event space, located in the YouTube offices, is located above the sprawling arcades of the Chelsea Market, a block-long former warehouse turned into a warren of restaurants and boutique shops. Looking for the venue, I search end to end twice, feeling like an extra wandering on the set of Blade Runner, disoriented among the rush of people wearing strange glasses and earpieces, the rushes of steam and smell from hissing woks and grilling meat. Only by observing a flow of young men and women, all well-dressed and carrying similar-looking messenger bags, leaving from one hallway under the watchful eye of an unobtrusive security guard do I find a table to check-in with a QR code. A ride in a freight elevator later, I am in a converted loft space. A camera crew is setting up, and caterers thread between rows of chairs balancing platters of California Rolls. A wall of screens behind the stage blares the words: TRUTH? HOW CAN WE KNOW? Filtering in from omnipresent speakers, a soundtrack alternates trap instrumentals and Andean flute music. There is an open bar.

Soon enough, things start. TRUTH? HOW CAN WE KNOW? is being broadcast live online by the progressive-leaning The Young Turks YouTube channel; it’s being MC’ed by Jayde Lovell, who hosts a show on its lineup and is the founder of a science-focused PR consultancy. She works the crowd, starting with “Any skeptics in the house tonight?” and lingering on lines like: “There’s only one kind of facts – real facts.” Lovell’s is the most strictly speaking political voice of the evening, though her jokes about Bernie Sanders (“Yes, there is a God, it’s Bernie Sanders”) fall flat.

Photo by Patrick Blanchfield

The event’s real gravitational center is the founder of the Skeptics Society and editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine. An academically trained historian of science turned popular writer and public advocate for scientific skepticism, Michael Shermer has a Wikipedia page longer than many Nobel Prize winners and more than a few nineteenth century wars. His organization, the Skeptics Society, is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to debunking pseudoscience and addressing controversies in science education; among other things, it organizes a speaking series in California (where Shermer is based) whose roster has included Bill Nye, Dinesh D’Souza, and various figures associated with New Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, etc.). The press packet I have been sent makes additional claims. Listed among the Skeptics Society’s “Proudest Moments” is “Investigating the Holocaust Deniers.” “The Skeptics Society was the first organization to delve into the ideas behind this organization,” says the text. “Dr. Michael Shermer interviewed members of this group individually, and published the story in a cover story of Skeptic magazine.” Beneath this, headshots of numerous “Celebrity Skeptics” including “a celebrity illusionist,” a “world-class magician,” Seth MacFarlane, and a propulsion engineer at NASA.

Shermer is friends with Chopra, whom he has promised to “debate” throughout the evening. And so Shermer and Chopra sit opposite each other on stools and talk, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes joined by various internet celebrities and podcasters. There are interludes: that rapper Baba Brinkman performs; a magician bends spoons; and video segment after video segment features Shermer debunking various pseudoscientific misbeliefs or lecturing wryly about the logical insufficiencies of theism. But running through it all is Shermer’s dialogue with Chopra. If “dialogue” is the right word for it. Mostly Shermer talks in wide generalities about the importance of rejecting nonscience and “alternative facts” in favor of “truth” and Chopra responds by asking questions about the ultimate grounding of consciousness or what of the Self endures between our breaths. As the evening proceeds, Chopra’s interventions grow increasingly koan-like (“Where is yesterday now?”) and build to pronouncements like “99.99% of the universe is not empirical,” and “We are all God – in drag.” Shermer, for his part, promotes a campaign whereby people who send him video testimonies about their experiences becoming skeptics will receive a physical card they can carry in the wallet, the better to self-identify as a “Card Carrying Skeptic.”

Shermer and Chopra may present and even think of themselves as radically opposed, but in truth they are sides of the same coin, equally at home here. New Atheism and Skepticism are far from unwelcome in Silicon Valley, and Shermer, with his TED Talks and hot take on “the bias police” and backlash against former Google employee James Damore, fits right in, too. Chopra, for his part, has recently been appointed Professor of Consciousness Studies at Sofia University, a small private institution in the Bay Area, and talks about the lessons he’s learned about human desire by listening in to tech pitches in the lounge of the Palo Alto Four Seasons. He’s also recently released his own Virtual Reality meditation app. “In 20 minutes you get a journey to enlightenment,” he promises, describing his product as offering insights into consciousness that leave René Descartes in the dust: “He was good for his time but didn’t have VR to take it to the next level.” Both men are, in their way, each selling something. Tonight’s gestures at political language (“fake news” and “alternative facts”) are just that, gestures, so many gambits at branding and relevance, current events buzzwords as Celebrity Friends. The only real politics here is money, little else.

I revisit the bar where, as one of the few attendees who is actually tipping, I am greeted warmly. Standing there, I catch a glimpse of the YouTube office down the hallway, guarded by yet another security guard. The fixtures and décor are about what you’d expect – high-tech comfort, with a self-consciously lively chic. The space here is so pristine, so self-consciously new, and hip, and young. Below, the Chelsea Market is also a manicured Disneyland of amusements and pleasures, servicing the tech workers who walk through it each day. The logic seems to be that they can experience New York in all its diversity (which really, as so often, just means culinary diversity) without ever leaving the footprint of their workplace. It feels like being onboard a spaceship, or a cyberpunk arcology – some totally enclosed concentration of resources of cultural capital, at once corporate and hyper-connected, yet also somehow feudal and autarkic. This event, featuring a professional celebrity skeptic and a professional celebrity mystic, feels, in its own way, like a repetition of something much older – priests and philosophes debating as an after-dinner amusement for the Bourbon court, poets and wits earning their keep through banter at the Medici table. The horizon of possibility for contests between belief and skepticism, fact and fiction, truth and lies, all sustained and confined in a hermetic bubble of patronage, wealth, and stardom.

Out of nowhere, Chopra interrupts a panel of podcasters and minor celebrities. He has something to say. He holds his mic in one hand, and shapes his other into some kind of teaching gesture. He grins broadly, and the diamonds in his glasses gleam. A pause, and then: “All knowledge is ignorance.”

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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