By Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft      

Immediately after the U.S. presidential election results were announced on November 9^th, 2016, the calls to action began to ring out. Faster than Minerva’s owl, they were followed by more than a few calls to theory.

One of those calls has been to read or reread the work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, and her ideas, never out of circulation, are now circulating more rapidly, more visibly.[1] The title of her most frequently mentioned book implies a judgment about the new American administration: The Origins of Totalitarianism. The hope seems to be that Arendt’s account of totalitarianism in Europe (in her work of 1951), or of lying in politics (“Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” 1971), or of political action (The Human Condition, 1958), might do something more than theoretical—that her works might, in a rather un-dialectical sense, guide practice as American liberals and leftists resist their new Republican government. As many commentators note, the week after Trump’s inauguration Arendt’s Origins sold so well as to run out of stock on Amazon.com. Impressively, this surge of book buying followed immediately after the January 21, 2017 Women’s March, which was the largest single-day political demonstration in the history of United States of America.

Arendt is not the only past or contemporary author to enjoy a fresh reading in darkened times: George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are two notable titles receiving renewed attention. Crisis has also occasioned new responses in a range of small magazines and literary journals—even pre-Trump, some were calling our moment a new “golden age” for publications (pointing to Jacobin, N+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others), and a renaissance-born-of-crisis for younger writers on the left. Post-Election, it is a full-time job keeping up with the deluge of essays from liberals and the left, opposing the right.

Photograph taken by the author at Amherst Books in Amherst, MA

Even within my social media feeds I have seen established and prominent scholars encouraged to speak out themselves against the rise of what some began to term “kakistocracy”—government by the worst among us. Their electronic acquaintances told them they should speak out; they said that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to write on politics, and to resist a feared new regime. Such calls, and the ideal of moral stewardship they evoke, did not seem out of place last November, in part because everything had started to seem out of place.

Yet, there is something anachronistic about calling for intellectuals, even as we (more literally, and often weekly) call our senators. It relies upon a feeling for the authority of learned persons, a feeling we have lost, if we ever had it. For one thing, this is because Trump’s electoral victory could be construed as the triumph of American anti-intellectualism.[2] For another, his victory seems to have been made possible by a gradual transformation of the American body politic that goes beyond mere polarization: in recent years we have increasingly been defined by a fracturing of our collective attention into what the literary critic Michael Warner once termed “counterpublics,” or what the political theorist Nancy Fraser called “subaltern counterpublics.” In our case, those counterpublics are defined by political orientation but also sometimes by nationalism, by race, by gender, by religion, and often by Christian faith specifically. It has become a commonplace that right-wing counterpublics define themselves over and against a mainstream “liberal” media, presumed to be controlled by hostile coastal elites. Thus, one would have to ask: What public could an intellectual address? Lastly, but crucially, in recent years arguments about the social role of humanistic intellectuals have begun to seem old-fashioned. They have been replaced by handwringing over the apparent decline of the humanities and social sciences within institutions of higher education, and concern over the ever-increasing public profile of engineers and scientists, not to mention the frequent reinterpretation of social and political problems as prompts for quantitative research and design. Thus conversations about the social role of humanists have become less common than rear-guard arguments for the “relevance” or instrumental usefulness of the humanities. To revive the ideal of the intellectual now, seems to point towards a cultural turmoil beyond the one that attends Trump’s election. It crystallizes the crisis of culture and value at which we have collectively arrived, for intellectuals cannot speak with any authority if the sources of their hard-won legitimacy, in the library or the lab or the field site, are ignored or forgotten.

This essay is not, notably, a criticism of calls for intellectuals to take action, nor is it an effort to take a position among the thousand versions of resistant, progressive and left politics that currently flourish in America. It is, rather, a reflection on the calls for “the intellectual” heard in late 2016 and early 2017. And it is about the fate of culture in the state of Trump, or more properly, about the legitimacy of expertise about culture.

To revive the ideal of the intellectual now, seems to point towards a cultural turmoil beyond the one that attends Trump’s election. It crystallizes the crisis of culture and value at which we have collectively arrived, for intellectuals cannot speak with any authority if the sources of their hard-won legitimacy, in the library or the lab or the field site, are ignored or forgotten.

A political crisis has produced a desire to reoccupy a cultural logic that once appeared passé: the moral or political legitimacy of intellectual life lived in public, and grounded in cultural work, often informed by serious scholarship. But this has happened at a moment when any notion of living in a unitary culture—i.e., possessing a set of canonical texts whose contents have ethical authority—has become laughable. For many liberals and leftists, the unitary and the canonical suggest an unappealing form of cultural conservatism, whose concrete political manifestations might include, but are not limited to, efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, ban abortion, restrict marriage rights to heterosexuals, and restrict transgendered persons to the bathrooms of their birth-assigned sex. And interestingly, the reoccupation of an old cultural logic is taking place at a moment when not humanism, but business and engineering (and science, but usually applied science) have the public’s eyes and ears. Calls for humanistic intellectuals to speak against Trump et al reach for a cultural form whose content seems to have drained away but whose structure nevertheless remains in place, available to be given new life. This structure is the notion of the social or political authority of people of learning, and of the legitimacy of their social and political commentaries.

***

Was the post-election call for intellectuals to speak out against Trump (a call that many, including Rebecca Solnit and Jedediah Purdy to name just two, have answered) simply a question of mobilizing resources for politics? Perhaps for some, the answer is “yes,” and the figure of the intellectual becomes an appealing icon of resistance against Trump, his retinue, and regime. For others, beneath the call stands a wish for a world in which reason and some hypothetical general public could harmonize at least a little – not necessarily a world of shared traditions, but one of reasonable publics. It is worth comparing both of these ways of invoking intellectuals and intellectual life, to a third idea about intellectuals, namely that the figure of the intellectual represents not only critique (if there is a single word that the left, and perhaps especially the academic left, associates with intellectuals it is “critique”) but also a secularized version of what religion once provided: shared cultural scripts, a sense of metaphysical grounding, the stewardship and interpretation and transmission of a set of common texts, whether those texts are literal books, or other artifacts of culture. With a nod to the intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, we might say that religion supplies a basic paradigm for many figurations of the intellectual, regardless of the fact that “the intellectual’s” work is normally measured against political benchmarks for impact and salience.[3]

Of these three ways of invoking intellectuals and their texts, the last articulates most plainly the issue of legitimacy, of why a deep preoccupation with the life of the mind should be taken to license political critique. This is worth meditating upon. After all, one of the many ways to frame the contemporary crisis of American culture and politics is in terms of lost legitimacy: our current government refuses the legitimacy of scientific consensus regarding global warming, to offer one glaring example. It is as though facts have become unmusical for our president, because he does not like their tune. We have not entered into a postmodern romp in which an ironic appreciation of the way facts are inevitably embedded in narratives, allows us to think more clearly; we are dealing with liars. The salient question becomes: in the face of the widespread rejection of informed or expert opinion, can thinkers who address the public, not only remind us of the existence of trained and experienced judgment, but give us a feeling for its connection to our mundane lives? It should go without saying that this is less a question about the actions of specific writers and thinkers, than one about the condition of culture.

***

To invoke the intellectual at a moment of political crisis creates an intriguing historical echo, for the term “an intellectual” originated in a moment of political crisis in France, a crisis fueled by turn of the century populist nationalism. During the Dreyfus Affair, the role of “the intellectual” was invoked first as a kind of slur, and then, subsequently, as a rallying call. The ranks of the conservative anti-Dreyfusards who were, on the whole, Catholic French Nationalists and often pro-military, did include scholars and writers such as Ferdinand Brunetière, a convert to Catholicism who viewed religion as the only sure source of social morality. And yet it was not with the conservative position in the Dreyfus Affair that the term “an intellectual” came to be associated, but rather with the liberal one. To be “an intellectual” meant speaking for a France defined not by blood and soil, or by faith, but by truth, the rule of law, and an inclusive vision of civil society.

It is as though facts have become unmusical for our president, because he does not like their tune. 

Useful as this history may be, efforts to create a grand unified theory of the intellectual (or a theory of such a person’s rights, or duties, or social function) are silly. The “intellectual” or, to use the later North American, term, the “public intellectual,” is not a natural kind. Rather, it is a role that is always local to a particular set of social and political circumstances. Similarly, calls for intellectuals, or admonitions about their responsibilities, are usually more performative than they are descriptive of anything empirical.[4]

Still, two characteristics associated with “the intellectual” during the Dreyfus Affair have been critical for the subsequent career of the term in the twentieth century. First, though that century was populated by Marxist intellectuals, conservative intellectuals, anarchist intellectuals, liberal intellectuals, technocratic intellectuals, and many other sub-types, the figure of “the intellectual” was foundationally associated with publicness of a sort, and perhaps most especially, with addressing the public through media forms such as the newspaper or, later, the radio, television and (more recently, but now ubiquitously) the Internet. The later twentieth-century North American term “public intellectual” thus duplicates a meaning already present in the original French Un intellectuel, as if the decades between the Dreyfus Affair and the term’s American usage, had required a renewal of emphasis on publicness, a reassurance that the “public thing” is at the forefront of our concerns. More pointedly, there is something anxious about the term “a public intellectual,” and it is tempting to wonder if this is due to an American suspicion that without the adjectival modifier, the life of the mind would be willfully private.

And second, expectations for intellectuals presumed that a narrowly trained thinker could speak with merit on topics distant from their area of expertise. Sometimes the grounding notion behind this type of transference was that expertise has a moral content beyond the specifics of the information and methods known to experts, giving them the ability—and sometimes the responsibility—to speak on pressing issues of the day. Thus, arguably, the intellectual at the turn of the twentieth century had as much in common with that old-fashioned English social type of the “moralist” as with that newer, twentieth-century type, the “expert.” Some commentators have observed this moral function of the figure of the intellectual and made it the basis of an intriguing claim: despite the frequent association between intellectuals and a secular public society the intellectual is at root a religious type, even when invoked at moments of political and cultural crisis like the one we Americans inhabit in 2017.

More pointedly, there is something anxious about the term “a public intellectual,” and it is tempting to wonder if this is due to an American suspicion that without the adjectival modifier, the life of the mind would be willfully private.

Writing in 1958, in a very different climate of debate, the sociologist Edward Shils wrote that intellectuals are those members of a society who feel an “interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience.” He also called this quality “sensitivity to the sacred.” Whether their connection to the extra-mundane is construed as sensitivity or need, for Shils, “intellectuals” are compelled by it. Intellectuals are distinguished not by having a greater measure of that need than those around them, but rather, by their social role. They are the ones who mediate between the everyday and the transcendent, however that latter concept gets defined. Indeed, Shils wrote, even without having extraordinarily sensitive persons, a society would produce intellectuals to fulfill its functional ends.

Shils’ essay, “The Intellectuals and the Powers,” was not preoccupied with the numinous or with prophecy as modalities through which intellectuals might make the sacred into a source of political guidance. Although he insisted that intellectual work begins with an essentially religious curiosity about things that transcend this world, Shils focused on secularized versions of that curiosity and his real interest was in social function.[5] As his essay ran its course his basis for the intellectual’s role in the clerisy appeared to be motivated by structural rather than spiritual considerations. He noted the role of intellectuals in the formation of nationalism and in the legitimation of specific regimes. And at last, he observed sweepingly: “Through their provision of models and standards, by the presentation of symbols to be appreciated, intellectuals elicit, guide, and form the dispositions within a society.”

Nothing in Shils’ description rules out a critical or even revolutionary role for intellectuals (he took careful note of intellectuals’ role in modern revolutions[6]), but his emphasis was on the intellectual’s guiding and conserving functions, as they ensure that the common life of a society will be lived in contact with its ultimate, and fundamentally extra-mundane, values. Writing in 1958, Shils observed that intellectuals were tending to work more and more often within the confines of institutions (whether those institutions were education and research-based, governmental, industrial, or journalistic) than outside of them. Over the decades since Shils wrote, the issue of institutional affiliation appears again and again in writings on intellectuals, particularly when an academic seat (or even, a chair) is understood to license comments on extra-academic matters, or when that same academic seat is understood to bind up and block energy that might have otherwise flowed into public life. As of 2017, however, Shils’ picture of conserving intellectuals working within institutions, has become somewhat harder to hold in mind. This is due to the collapse of many employment markets, including in academia and journalism, and because of the vast number of credentialed cultural experts unable to find work. Indeed, one of the storylines circulated about the wave of new magazines and journals is that much of their momentum comes from writers who otherwise might be employed as academics.

***

In 2016, shortly after Trump received the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency, the Christian literary scholar Alan Jacobs published an essay in Harper’s, entitled “The Watchmen,” in which he faced the white Christian resentment running through the nationalist or, more broadly, populist movements on the rise in Europe and North America. In the U.S. case, the feeling that America is no longer a majority white country has been joined to a sense that Christian values are embattled here. Taking no part in this spirit of resentment, Jacobs lamented the disappearance of religious thinkers whose writings had once linked communities of Christian faith and a mainstream liberal order. Why, in other words, is there no-one to counterbalance the public presence of not merely conservative, but actively anti-intellectual, Christians linked to right-wing movements? Conscious that such complex historical shifts are hard to render briefly, Jacobs tried to survey what had been lost. In England, in the mid-twentieth century, his ideal was exemplified by the missionary J.H. Oldham’s Moot, a discussion group and ad-hoc think tank which, for a time, included the sociologist Karl Mannheim, a Jew from Hungary and one of the great theorists of the figure of the intellectual in the Weimar Republic; it also included T.S. Eliot. Turning to the United States, Jacobs looked to the rabbi Louis Finkelstein, who joined with thinkers from other religious traditions in convening a “Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life,” a title at once broad, inclusive, and indicating lofty purpose. Much of the work done by the thinkers of the Moot and the Conference had to do with opposing what were then the great manifest threats to democratic society: communism and totalitarianism. That opposition had to take the form of an argument on democracy’s behalf, effectively (as Jacobs put it) a “metaphysical grounding” for democracy.

The crucible in which the specifically Christian intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century were formed, Jacobs explained, was the use of the materials of religious life as a resource for building arguments on behalf of liberal democracy. This is the political and intellectual context out of which arose C.S. Lewis, perhaps better known for his young adult novels than for his Christian apologetics, and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, to name two.

Jacobs’ essay, animated by a regret that we no longer have such voices, tried to account for why they have disappeared. His short-form answer, which feeds into a common narrative about the fracturing of the American electorate around intractable differences, is that they chose to vanish. Christian authors ceased to address themselves to a secular American public, itself available to religion but not politically defined by it, and began to address themselves to other Christians—to a Christian counterpublic, we might say.

Jacobs did not tell another salient part of the story, namely, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the increasing importance of certain fundamentalists who have access to the wealth and political connections they need to advance their agendas. He was focused on the question of why non-separatist Christian thinkers ceased to address themselves to the public. He took the recent career of Cornel West not as evidence against this argument (as he might have done; West certainly takes the role of the public intellectual as his primary work, and he is vocal about his Christianity), but as evidence for it: Jacobs argued that by insisting his politics are deeply linked to a prophetic Christian witness tradition, West had, over time, hindered rather than helped his influence in a basically liberal democratic public sphere.[7]

Christian authors ceased to address themselves to a secular American public, itself available to religion but not politically defined by it, and began to address themselves to other Christians—to a Christian counterpublic, we might say.

In Jacobs’ story about Christian intellectuals, an increasing gulf between believers and a liberal democratic public sphere placed non-separatist Christian intellectuals in an intractable bind: religion’s position in the secular liberal order would always be contested, and, after the premature declaration of the “end of ideology,” religion was no longer seen as a desirable or necessary source for arguments on behalf of democracy. Meanwhile, and as Jacobs quoted the observation of the novelist Marilynne Robinson, “the right has colonized the word [Christian]” leaving little room for Christians in the center or on the left.

To say that conserving and institutional accounts of the intellectual might be uninspiring at a moment of political crisis, which is also a moment of crisis for the institutions that have often supported intellectuals, would be putting it mildly.[8] And yet Jacobs’ lament about the disappearance of Christian intellectuals recalls, perhaps inadvertently, Shils’ account of intellectuals from nearly 60 years earlier.[9] Once again, Shils saw intellectuals as being, at root, motivated by the pursuit of the transcendental, and as transforming those basic impulses into a relationship with a rich symbolic and ethical inheritance, which can in turn serve a crucial pastoral function for the “laity,” however construed. Conservation and maintenance may seem unglamorous when the songs of the moment are full of resistance; they may seem neighbors to actual conservatism, and thus currently like an anathema. However, for Shils, they never meant conservative fealty to government or tradition, but rather first and foremost, obedience to abstract principles. His essay’s title “The Intellectuals and the Powers,” was meant to evoke the conflict that this produced, for insofar as Western intellectuals tend not to be clerics in a theocracy, they are the ones who observe the gap between present government and ideal governance, present social mores and ideal ones (however construed). There is, in other words, room for critique in Shils’ picture of the intellectual-as-secularizer, a picture that tends towards a kind of lay Platonism in its portrayal of the life of the mind as extra-mundane.

Shils’ account of the intellectual may, from our current vantage point, seem old fashioned and entirely inapplicable. But it bears a striking fidelity to the Dreyfus-era sense that the work of intellectuals shuttles between two sites, one of them scholarly and unworldly, and the other political. It also recalls the contemporary feeling that Jacobs articulated in Christian terms: that intellectuals have stopped imagining themselves addressing a mainstream public, and, in the process they have begun colluding with the fragmentation of that public along narrow sectarian lines. To expand from Jacobs’ account, those lines may be religious but they may also be nationalist, or racist, or congruent with patriarchal or, conversely, feminist interest. There are any number of ways to form a counterpublic.

***

The loss of an imaginary unified public has proceeded alongside the rise of a technocratic mindset. As Jacobs recounts to great effect, in 1946 the poet W.H. Auden, a Christian albeit idiosyncratically so, read a poem at Harvard entitled “Under Which Lyre” and subtitled “A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” in which he surveyed the difficult plight of humanists, the “sons of Hermes,” at a time when “Apollo’s children,” or, in other words the technocrats, were gaining influence. Among his injunctions to Hermes’ children was, “Thou shalt not sit/With statisticians nor commit/A social science.” Auden’s presentation was not only important because it thematized a conflict that C.P. Snow would re-articulate far more influentially twelve years later in his essay “The Two Cultures,” but also because Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant was present. Himself a chemist, Conant had recently been in charge of the Manhattan Project, and had witnessed the very first test of the atomic bomb. Auden reported that, when meeting Conant, he had felt he was meeting an ideological enemy.[10]

The middle of the twentieth century, which saw the heyday of the “little magazines” and journals such as Partisan Review, and would later become the focus of much nostalgic longing for subsequent generations of intellectuals, was also an important turning point. Thereafter, the scientist or the engineer would gain in prestige, while the humanists would slowly lose theirs. Writing in 1958, a year before C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, Shils insisted that science and humanistic learning both began in the same mood of keen interest in that which lies beyond the mundane world.[11] But talk of root motivations has little traction on worldly careers, and the scientists and social scientists, as Auden observed in his poem, had sometimes encountered very influential people, during the war:

            Professors back from secret missions
            Resume their proper eruditions,
            Though some regret it;
            They liked their dictaphones a lot,
            They met some big wheels, and do not
            Let you forget it.

The same year in which Shils published “Intellectuals and the Powers,” Hannah Arendt took up similar themes in the Prologue to her book The Human Condition. Whereas her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism had ended with the image of concentration camps, described as if they were artificial worlds built to accomplish the task of dehumanization, her 1958 book began with a different kind of engineering project altogether, namely, Sputnik, the first satellite, which the Soviets launched to orbit the earth in 1957. The Human Condition is most often read as Arendt’s full articulation of a theory of public political action, integrated into a tripartite account of human activity more broadly—labor, work, and action, the account runs. Usually forgotten is that the book begins with a critique of technocracy, with Sputnik becoming a displaced echo of the camps that the world saw as a signal of the future.[12] Arendt would soon become Auden’s friend, after he gave The Human Condition a positive review in 1959, and it is tempting to wonder if Auden’s earlier fidelity with the side of Hermes over that of Apollo had made him an especially well attuned reader of Arendt’s Prologue. Arendt seemed to have no doubts whatsoever that science and engineering stood poised to remake the world to suit the needs of “Man;” the accomplishments she expected, seemed taken from the pages of science fiction magazines.[13] Her judgment was, that the style of expert know-how behind such projects was, in some sense, contrary to political life as such, concerned as expert thought was with the accomplishment of tasks rather than with agonistic public debate regarding the appropriateness, the value, the desirability of those tasks.

What is most salient about Arendt’s mistrust, not of technology itself, but of technocratic approaches to intrinsically political problems, for our own moment? Perhaps it is that, over recent decades, and in a pronounced fashion in recent years, the Conants of the world have received vastly more plaudits than the Audens, and in particular ways that carry consequences for our public culture, either when construed at maximum generality, or when due consideration is given to our fracturing, our status as a plurality of subcultures and counterpublics. The post-election feeling that statistician Nate Silver had not simply been incorrect to predict a victory for Hillary Clinton, but that he had “failed us,” is entirely to the point; statistical modeling has become not only a tool to use, but something in which some of us placed faith.[14] The Arendt of The Human Condition encourages us to ask if our Conants may have misconstrued the character of the problems they are trying to solve.

As David Sessions argues in a recent review of Daniel Drezner’s book, The Ideas Industry, the most visible figures associated with expert ideation in American life have, for some years now, been engineers and scientists and not necessarily those scientists engaged in “basic research” but, rather, those who pitch their work as a solution to grand human challenges. Sessions embraces the framework created by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to understand such persons as “organic intellectuals.” An organic intellectual, according to Gramsci, devises and circulates the ideological justifications for the success of a rising social class, and the social class in question in our own time is that of the ultra-wealthy. “Thought leaders,” Drezner and Sessions write, are the preferred ideation-producers of the extraordinarily rich, and particularly because many of them present “solutions” to global problem areas (which range from disease to malnutrition to education to climate change) that only states, or conglomerates of the very wealthy can imagine themselves getting traction upon. “Thought leaders,” one might say, view the world through an optic that flatters the pretensions of their audiences and clients. The great conceit of what is sometimes called the “big ideas circuit,” consisting of conferences like TED and Aspen Ideas, is that private wealth and public benefit may intertwine in a new way in our new century, often with technology, especially emerging technology, brokering their contact—and often without much handwringing about who constitutes the public, and how they construe their interests, or in other words, without anything resembling Arendtian consideration for democratic process.

It is easy enough to point out what is vacuous about the “ideas industry.”[15] What is much harder is to describe the version of public discourse about ideas (including scientific ones) we might have in its place, and to describe why it might be desirable. The question of who fills the social role of the intellectual is tantamount to the question of who counts for a culture, of who gets to describe that culture’s horizons of value and salience.

The great conceit of what is sometimes called the “big ideas circuit,” consisting of conferences like TED and Aspen Ideas, is that private wealth and public benefit may intertwine in a new way in our new century, often with technology, especially emerging technology, brokering their contact—and often without much handwringing about who constitutes the public, and how they construe their interests, or in other words, without anything resembling Arendtian consideration for democratic process.

And if we deride the “ideas industry,” we must not forget that other versions of culture come with their own industrial qualities, or at least economic ones. As Theodor Adorno reminds us in his essay on cultural criticism (Kulturkritik) and society: to speak of culture may be to speak of abstract values, but it can also, and in bourgeois society perhaps it predominantly is, to speak of a property form.[16] If we find ourselves called by the deeply anachronistic idea that intellectuals (as opposed to experts) are concerned with something beyond the mundane, it is critical to remember that such transcendence is mostly aspiration. Indeed, it might be structurally akin to religion. It is a way of pitching our hopes beyond our means. Politically speaking, it is the capacity to imagine a better world, even if our representations of that world must circulate through this material and economic one. Once again, it is hard to describe a desirable public culture of ideas, but it seems obvious that it must rest on compromise, the appreciation of ideality in the midst of a fallen world.

The question we are left with, however, is what it means to invoke the powers and duties of the intellectual at a time of sundered consensus regarding common culture, and the value of any notion of the transcendental. A time, I might add, when our looming battles are over distinctly material things, including health care and the defense of a survivable version of our planet’s environment. This is the quandary that answers us, when we call for intellectuals. That we do not stop calling altogether is, however, extremely interesting. It suggests a persistent interest in the cultural and social role of persons called intellectuals, even after what we might call the “background metaphysic” of that role, has been lost. It suggests that even after the eclipse of universals, and even in a moment of deep political crisis from which universals are unlikely to free us, there is some desire for thinkers, however construed, to perform a crucial public moral and political function: to help us retain not only hope, but agency, in darkened times.

***

[1] See Zoe Williams, “Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt,” The Guardian, February 1^st, 2017. Williams’ article is among the better of the wave of articles and essays that have used Arendt to try to come to grips with Trump. Another excellent example is Jeffrey C. Isaac’s “How Hannah Arendt’s Classic Work on Totalitarianism Illuminates Today’s America,” The Washington Post, December 17^th, 2016. See also Karen J. Greenberg, “Beyond the Origins of Totalitarianism,” The New Republic, April 14^th., 2017, and Nicolaus Mills, “She Called Out Trump’s Lies Decades Ago,” The Daily Beast, February 13^th, 2017. There have been many other, shorter articles, of varying levels of quality. For example, see Olivia Goldhill, “Hannah Arendt’s WWII philosophical study of totalitarianism shows ‘alternative facts’ are nothing to laugh about,” Quartz, February 8^th, 2017.

[2] The classic and still-relevant text is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).  

[3] For the most relevant example of Hans Blumenberg’s approach to intellectual history via paradigms, see his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).

[4] For an example of someone currently striving to serve such a role one might look to professor, blogger, and highly engaged Facebook-er, Corey Robin who shared his thoughts on the subject in an article on “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” published last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

[5] As Shils wrote, “In secular intellectual work, this involves the search for the truth, for the principles embedded in events and actions or for the establishment of a relationship between the self and the essential, whether relationship be cognitive, appreciative.”

[6] Two years later, Shils would write of the “special affinity which exists between the modern intellectual orientation and the practice of revolutionary or unconstitutional politics, of politics which are uncivil in their nature.” See “The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States” World Politics, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Apr., 1960), pp. 329-368.

[7] For a deeply personal and appreciative, but also strikingly critical, look at West’s recent career, and the role of “prophecy” in West’s work, see Michael Eric Dyson, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” The New Republic, April 19^th, 2015.

[8] Shils’ contemporaries certainly did not share his emphasis on the conserving functions of intellectuals. The year after Shils’ essay was published, Seymour Martin Lipset published an essay entitled “American Intellectuals: Their Politics and Status,” in Daedalus, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Summer, 1959) pp. 460-486. In this essay Lipset noted the anti-conservative (in political terms, but also in cultural terms) bias of American intellectuals in the early 20^th century. See Lipset, 461.

[9] Jacobs’ essay is also the Christian counterpart to a story that was told by the intellectual historian Russell Jacoby nearly 30 years earlier in 1987, in a well-known book entitled The Last Intellectuals, which described the loss of publicly-minded writers, mainly on the left, mainly New York-based, and the “retreat” (as Jacoby’s story ran) of many of our best writers and thinkers into the academy. Jacoby’s book’s greatest legacy may be that it entered the term “public intellectual” into circulation in North American circles, crystallizing a set of ideas about the relationship between the life of the mind and public politics that have swirled through European and American life for decades. See Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

[10] On the Harvard context for Auden’s delivery of his poem, see Adam Kirsch, “A Poet’s Warning,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2007.

[11] And, in 1959, Shils would give a speech on the circumstances of developing nations, in which he identified the condition of modernity with a scientific outlook. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) pp. 1-2.

[12] I owe this observation to Benjamin Lazier; see his “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture.” American Historical Review (2011) 116 (3): 602-630.

[13] These included: creating life in test tubes towards eugenic ends, extending the human life span, and escaping from the earth itself through space travel. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958) pp 2-3.

[14] Notably, Silver has explained the sense of surprise at Trump’s victory as an artifact not of the failure of statistical methods, but as an artifact of emotional, and narrative, thinking, especially in newsrooms in liberal cities. See his March 2017 interview with Christina Pazzanese at The Harvard Gazette, “The puzzle in politics and polling.”

[15] See Drezner’s aforementioned volume, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Another well-established critic of the ideas industry is Evgeny Morozov; see his To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).

[16] Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

***

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft is a writer and historian currently based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he writes about the quest to grow meat in laboratories. A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied at Swarthmore College and did his doctoral work in European intellectual history at Berkeley. His book Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt was published by Penn in January 2016. He is @benwurgaft on Twitter.

The post The Call to Theory appeared first on The Revealer.

***

Blanchfield: What prompted you to take up the subject of the Devil in the first place?

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian environment, but the devil was not a big part of anyone’s thinking in that setting. I dabbled with apocalyptic speculations, which often include some notion that the devil is secretly manipulating world events, but I quickly grew bored with that pursuit when I realized that people who are trying to predict the Day of Judgment are essentially making stuff up. And to the extent that the devil appeared in preaching, he was more of a metaphor for the idea of temptation in general, rather than a figure that people seriously envisioned trying to interfere with their lives. So as I drifted away from the church, the devil was not a theme that I was predisposed to carry with me. The fact that the devil is so central to my research now is something that would not have made sense to me at virtually any point in my life before it actually happened.

The real origin of this research interest come from the summer before I started my PhD. It was going to be the last time in my life for the foreseeable future when I did not have any assigned reading or deadlines, and I asked my doctoral advisor, Ted Jennings, if he had any advice for how I should spend my time. He recommended that I read through some material that I likely would not read otherwise—for instance, the early Church Fathers. That made sense to me, especially because I had done a lot of research into the Catholic tradition in college (fun times!) and therefore had some background to contextualize it.

The standard approach to the early Christian thinkers known as the Church Fathers, or patristic writers, is to show how they anticipate the doctrines that would eventually be taken as orthodox—in other words, to show that orthodoxy was true “the whole time,” not a later development or innovation. I was determined to read them against the grain on that, and there was one topic in particular where that proved to be surprisingly easy: the question of why Jesus needed to come and die on the cross in the first place. Somewhat shockingly, this question, which would seem to be absolutely central to Christianity, has never had a set answer. You could be tortured or exiled for having the wrong opinion about the precise relationship between the divine and human wills in Christ, but there is no official orthodox teaching on the whole reason we’re presumably doing any of this in the first place.

The most familiar contemporary answer to the question of why God sent Jesus is encapsulated in the slogan: “Jesus died for our sins.” In other words, Jesus’s suffering and death represents a vicarious punishment for our guilt, which we can cash in on (whether through baptism, fervent belief, or some combination thereof). The answer I found in the Church Fathers was radically different: Jesus came to rescue us from the devil. In a weird version of Social Contract theory, the Fathers claimed that when Adam and Eve followed the devil’s advice to eat the fruit in the Garden rather than God’s command not to, they submitted to the devil rather than God as their ruler. Jesus’s death on the cross and resurrection represents a strategy to get humanity out of its contractual obligations to Satan. The key here is that Jesus is not only human, but divine—so when the devil demands obedience and then arranges for Jesus to die as punishment for his failure to submit, he is actually claiming to have power over God, which is impossible. Hence the spell is broken.

I was fascinated by this strange story, which seems so foreign to Christian teaching from the medieval period to today. I decided to do my dissertation (which I ultimately published as The Politics of Redemption) on the transition from this early narrative to more modern conceptions of salvation, and the more I thought about it, the more the role of the devil was the crucial point of contention. It quickly became clear that the devil was in danger of taking over my entire dissertation, so I got myself to focus by promising myself that I would devote a whole book to the devil later on. And now here we are.

Blanchfield: One of the running themes of the book is how the idea of the Devil is yoked to attempts to reckon with the problem of evil, the problem of suffering in a universe supposedly governed by a beneficent God. But, as you document, once created and invoked, the Devil has a way of exceeding the purposes to which he’s put – a transition from a “theological tool of the oppressed” to a “weapon of the oppressor.” This slipperiness is as pervasive as it is perverse, especially when it comes to a truly scandalous reversal – the “story of how God became the devil.” I wanted to ask – do you think this kind of trajectory is built into Western Christian theodicy as such? Must such theodicy always boil down to “denying the existence of unjust suffering”?

I do think that the possibility for such a reversal is built into Western monotheism, which is torn between two impulses. On the one hand, there is the rejection of the polytheistic equivalence among local gods: it’s not that we have our gods and you have yours, but rather that we have the God and you have a delusion at best and a dangerous lie at worst. This radical claim necessarily entails that the one God has to be in charge of everything in the world. On the other hand, what makes this claim plausible as something more than ethnocentric chauvinism is the conviction that the one God is necessarily a God of justice. He’s not like the Greek gods, manipulating human beings for their own amusement—he wants to hold us accountable to moral laws, and he also makes commitments that he sticks to. (For more detail on this, I would point people to Jan Assman’s The Price of Monotheism, which is a short, very readable, and very powerful book that I highly recommend.)

The notion of a God of justice is what generates the problem. If we did not expect God to operate according to moral principles, then the existence of suffering would not be a problem—God presumably has his reasons, and who are we to question? But if God is supposed to be just, then we very much do have the right to question, as shown most famously in the Book of Job. This is something that I think is really cool about the great monotheistic traditions, and it’s not something I would want to jettison for the sake of logical consistency. Unfortunately, historically most theologians have tended to disagree with me on that point, particularly when monotheists shift from being marginal protest movements to collaborating with the powers that be. Then the demand for justice gives way to the enterprise of explaining away our experience of suffering as deserved punishment, as contributing to a greater good, or what have you.

That’s when the demand for justice transmutes into apologetics for injustice—producing an order that is, in its own way, much more cruel than, for instance, the ancient Greek scenario in which the gods are openly messing with us because that’s just the way they are. And it leads to a situation that is much more claustrophobic, because there isn’t the possibility of playing off the gods against each other. God is the only game in town. That being said, however, I don’t know that it makes much sense to call for a “return” to polytheism, especially since even in Greek culture itself, people like Plato and Aristotle were very uncomfortable with the amoral nihilism of the gods and started developing ideas very much like monotheism as a remedy. This is not to say that we are dealing with a necessary progression, only that it’s not realistic to try to get rid of the idea of monotheism altogether—eventually, someone is likely to stumble upon it once again.

Blanchfield: In your work, you draw on Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “racialization,” bringing it to bear on categories of persons both very real and hypostatized – from racial and ethnic minorities like Jews in Medieval Europe and African-Americans in the contemporary United States to demons and angels and witches and more. I know I’m shamelessly exploiting your knack for lucidly explaining complicated concepts, but this notion of racialization may be novel to some of our readers – could you expand a little on it, in its own terms but also on what it means for you and for The Prince of This World?

The first step is to recognize that at a biological level, race is not real. Yes, there are some clear patterns where people who can trace their ancestry back to different regions display certain differences in their appearance, but the concept of race has never ultimately been about simply classifying such observations. Race is a political concept, not a biological one. The term “racialization” highlights this fact: being a member of a certain race is not something inherent, it is something that is done to you. And it is done to you in order to mark you out as something that needs to be tamed, controlled, and subdued. It is a way of naturalizing an order of domination.

Where I push Weheliye’s concept in a slightly different direction—and I wouldn’t say it’s a critique at all, just a matter of emphasis and context—is by emphasizing that racial theory also carries with it an element of moral guilt. It’s not that Africans, for instance, are thought simply to be inferior and only suited for work. Within the Christian worldview, they have to deserve their suffering. And Christians already have a readymade model for this weird notion of deserving to suffer for something inherent: original sin. In terms of this doctrine, which Martin Luther was hard at work radicalizing right as the drive for colonization and slavery was really starting to pick up steam, one of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God is that all their descendants (i.e., all of us) are born with a distorted will, such that we cannot help but sin. Yet because the problem is with our will, and the free will is the seat of moral responsibility, it is a moral problem. Babies are literally born guilty of rebelling against God, and theologians are quick to remind us that original sin is a sin like murder is a sin—so babies are morally at fault through no fault of their own.

The example of the Jews is crucial here, because for traditional Christian theology, they represent a kind of doubling-down on original sin. When they reject Christ and say, “May his blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), that means that they are renouncing their covenant with God and joining forces with the devil—a condition that is subsequently passed down to all Jews, who are “naturally” aligned with the demonic and yet still morally accountable for their supposedly nefarious deeds. (Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews is a great account of this disturbing theological tradition.) Similarly, when it comes time to justify the enslavement of Africans theologically, we get the rather absurd invention of the “Curse of Ham,” which takes an obscure story from Genesis and uses it to argue that Noah cursed the ancestor of all Africans to perpetual servitude. (If you read the actual story you will see that Ham is not actually cursed at all. Rather, his son Canaan, who conveniently shares the name of the land that the Israelites will conquer after the Exodus, is the one whose descendants are doomed. It’s not a very edifying story in any case, but it clearly has nothing to do with Africans or modern slavery at all.)

So in short, racialization is a secularized version of certain Christian strategies for group-based victim-blaming. (I approach this question from a different angle in this blog post.)

Blanchfield: Let’s turn to the nominally “secular” legacy of the Devil and contemporary politics more broadly. Taking a page from Carl Schmitt (and Giorgio Agamben, for whom you are also the primary English translator), you trace how what some may think of as a quaint or defunct concept of the diabolic actually has a recognizable, powerful impact on post-Medieval and even very modern configurations of sovereignty, revolution, freedom, personal responsibility and more. Your reading of Social Contract theory, of thinkers like John Rawls, and more is really great stuff – I won’t spoil it in favor of just commending it to readers (unless you want to)! But reading the book now, in 2017, I felt a real desire to hear you relate that political-theological genealogy to our contemporary moment in a sustained way, and tying in some of the thinking you’re doing now as part of your next project. So, unless you object, can we do that?

Thank you for not spoiling the Social Contract analysis—it is one of my favorite parts of the book, and something that actually took me by surprise (at least in the specific form it took). It’s when I start to come up with results that even I don’t expect that I realize that I’m really on to something!

In the conclusion of The Prince of This World, I start to gesture toward more specifically contemporary concerns—as opposed to the broader generalizations about modernity as such that appear throughout the text—but I didn’t have the time to develop them more fully. I took advantage of some lecture opportunities to start thinking more intensively about the relationship between my devil research and neoliberalism—which was a major theme in my pop culture trilogy and which forced itself upon me as a real-world concern when I had the good fortune to finish up my PhD just as the Global Financial Crisis was really getting underway.

I have posted a transcript of the lecture on my blog and also expanded it slightly into a journal article for those who want more detail, but the basic idea is that neoliberalism is a vast mechanism of victim-blaming. It gives us just enough free choice to blame us for our failures, but not enough to give us any meaningful agency or opportunity for change. I draw a theological parallel to the situation of the fallen angels (better known as demons), of whom the devil is the leader.

One of the most challenging theological questions is how angels, who are created perfect by God, can rebel against him. The answer that the Western tradition gradually settles on is that in the instant after they are created, God makes a unilateral demand for submission to the divine will, and a certain percentage of the angels resist. This whole scenario seems to lack everything we associate with a morally relevant decision—it is instantaneous, free of deliberation, totally shorn of any meaningful context, etc., etc. Yet God uses this arbitrary impulse of resistance as a pretext to curse the demons forever, locking their wills into a permanently rebellious state (similar to original sin, but with no possibility of redemption). This is entrapment in its purest form: the demons have only the narrowest sliver of freedom necessary for God to blame them for their condition.

On the basis of this parallel, I claim that neoliberalism is a social order that tends to demonize its subjects. It does not directly legitimate itself by pointing to its positive results—which are increasingly meager—but indirectly justifies the state of the world via victim-blaming. Hence it’s not the case that the authorities set up a situation where the only source of economic growth was unsustainable asset bubbles. Instead, a critical mass of people just up and decided to buy houses they couldn’t afford, leading to a financial crash. And lest you think I am exaggerating, the infamous “Santelli rant” that launched the Tea Party was explicitly focused on punishing the “losers” who had caused the crisis through their bad choices.

Blanchfield: I know you’re doing a lot of work on neoliberalism. But although it’s a venerable term that’s entered the mainstream lexicon in a big way since the Democratic failure in the elections of 2016, good definitions of it can be hard to come by. Some of this seems to be a function of there being different schools of thought, but part of it also seems to be a deliberate reticence on the part of its advocates (and practitioners) to identify it as a singular ideology or even as an ideology at all. If anything, I’m reminded of the section of The Prince of This World where you read Irenaeus’s denunciation of a supposedly Satanic magician-figure whose teachings, Irenaeus claims, are the source and core of all heresy: “his successors do not publicly confess his name but keep it a secret…furthermore, they do not teach a united message but constantly modify it.” Sounds as protean and as deliberately mystified as neoliberalism to me! Against that, can I ask, what’s the most interesting and suggestive definition of neoliberalism you’ve come across, and/or come up with?

You are right that neoliberalism is deliberately slippery. In fact, for those who want a sneak preview of the book I’m working on (Neoliberalism’s Demons), the first line of the first chapter is: “Neoliberalism loves to hide.” The term is very seldom used for self-identification, but there is one noteworthy exception: Milton Friedman’s lecture “On Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects.” There he calls for a return to the pre-war free market order—which he calls “liberalism,” in virtually the opposite of the American usage of the term—but one that has learned the lessons of the intervening years (hence “neo”). Where the classical liberalism of the 19th century had imagined that the free market emerges spontaneously, neoliberalism recognizes it as a human construction and a choice. (Melinda Cooper, in her excellent book Family Values, defines it similarly but more narrowly: neoliberalism is an attempt to build a new form of free market liberalism in the wake of the welfare state.)

While they tend to feed the public libertarian bromides about how the market is a natural condition that the stupid government is constantly disturbing, true neoliberals know that the free market is something that has to be created and sustained through state activity. And the reason they think that the free market is desirable is because it represents the greatest possible range for the expression of human freedom.

Blanchfield: In The Prince of This World, you write:

The shift from God to humanity is certainly a radical secularization of the Medieval paradigm, but it results in a claustrophobia that is if anything even more extreme than that of the medieval paradigm. What initially appears as an opening to the infinite horizon of creative self-determination collapses into an endlessly tautologous justification of the way things are. And this is because freedom remains the modern answer to the problem of evil.

So much of the neoliberal order seems to be precisely about fetishizing the idea of choice and personal responsibility while also justifying the status quo of an essentially static and oppressive social order which individual choices cannot change – freedom becoming just another “apparatus for generating blameworthiness.” With that in mind, I have to ask, what do you think might be a political theology of (and for) neoliberalism?

Kotsko: Political theology is another one of those confusing terms, which tends to be used imprecisely to refer to any kind of parallel or connection between the political and theological realms. In The Prince of This World and even more in the new book, I try to define it more rigorously by tracking down the root of the parallels we see between the two realms—which turns out to be the fact that both theology and political discourse are trying to provide a holistic account of how the world is and ought to be. More specifically, both discourses are responding to a stubborn problem. On the theological side, it’s the problem of evil, of how a good and all-powerful God can allow suffering and injustice to happen. On the political side, it’s the problem of legitimacy, of vindicating the right of the governing authorities to hold power. I contend that the two are ultimately not separate problems, but are deeply intertwined: the problem of evil is the problem of whether God really deserves to rule the world, while the problem of legitimacy is the problem of how to account for the negative results of the social order.

So if we ask about a political theology of neoliberalism, we are really asking about how neoliberalism attempts to legitimate itself, how it justifies itself in the face of the suffering and injustice that it allows or even generates. And the core of its strategy is, as you have noted, to point to human freedom. Neoliberalism allows for the greatest expression of human freedom, and hence anything bad that happens must be something we have all, collectively, chosen in some sense. This is a very powerful strategy, because it plays on the deep structures of guilt and shame that modernity has inherited from Christianity. It allows neoliberalism to get into our heads, to get us to focus so much on our own failures and disappointments that we can’t see the bigger picture. It’s an amazingly elegant mechanism for creating a whole society full of isolated individualists. Yet it is also a fragile and increasingly brittle strategy, because it depends on neoliberalism offering up at least some modicum of rewards to go along with its punishments—and that is something that it is increasingly unable to do. How long can people be expected to blame themselves for failure when success seems impossible?

At the same time, a political theology is not something that people can simply up and decide to turn away from. The social structures of legitimacy form us deeply, and one thing my research has convinced me of is how desperately people try to cling to those structures of meaning even as they begin to crumble. In Why We Love Sociopaths, I suggested that the anti-hero trend in “high-quality television” represented a way of doubling down on a broken social contract. By lionizing and idolizing characters who lie and cheat and steal their way to success, people were still trying to hold onto some shred of hope that success was still possible. Far from being edgy and subversive, then, such shows were actually an attempt to shore up people’s investment in the neoliberal order. It’s not hard to draw the connection between that trend and our current political debacle, where a vocal plurality of our fellow citizens appear to virtually worship the worst man alive—not despite, but because of his nihilistic pursuit of wealth and fame.

Blanchfield: Two more questions, the first, lighter, to queue up for darker one. Your book is primarily concerned with really high-level (but lucid!) accounts of the Devil in philosophical and theological texts. But readers who are familiar with your other work (Why We Love Sociopaths, Awkwardness, and Creepiness) know you’re also a keen consumer and trenchant critic of television, films and popular culture more generally. So, what have you found to be the most interesting portrayals of the Devil in the modern Hollywood cannon? Which have you hated, which have you loved?

One of the dubious benefits of being the guy who wrote a book on the devil is that everyone is constantly asking me if I’ve seen some particular pop-culture manifestation of the demonic. The truth is that I have made no systematic survey of the devil’s pop-culture presence. I may yet do so—a kind of sequel to The Prince of This World about the devil’s weird secular afterlife, not only in pop culture, but in literature, opera, etc., could be a fun project—but in the meantime, I have been reluctant to let the devil take over my downtime. That being said, I do have one contrarian opinion: The Devil’s Advocate, which many people have praised to me, is actually pretty simplistic and predictable. Yes, it’s fun to watch Al Pacino chew the scenery in a certain way, but as far as “self-justifying sociopath” speeches go, his rant about how humanity and the devil deserve each other does not even break the top ten in my opinion.

My personal favorite is actually an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, called “The Devil’s Due.” It’s the closest thing to the weird early Christian narrative of redemption I have ever seen in pop culture form. The Enterprise is visiting a planet, and suddenly a being appears who claims to be a deity that their ancestors sold themselves to in exchange for peace and prosperity. Now, by the terms of the contract (a literal written document!), she is collecting her payment. Obviously, Picard believes she’s a fake and tries to prove it, but in the meantime they set up a trial (with the impartial emotionless Data as the judge) to dispute the terms of the contract and find some way to wriggle out of it. In the end, no divine incarnation and self-sacrifice proves to be necessary, and more generally, it’s unlikely that the writers had the patristic writers in mind. But by pushing a familiar “selling your soul to the devil” narrative onto a social-political level, they inadvertently tapped into a much older vision of the devil.

Blanchfield: You close the book on a really tantalizing and poignant note – observing how the desire to obliterate or cast out one Devil has a way of merely installing new ones, and contemplating that the path forward might involve recuperating neglected speculation on what it might mean to redeem or “save” the Devil. Without pushing you to say anything you might not want to, what do you think this might look like or entail? Is there room for the Devil, and for saving the Devil, in this world of human vulnerability versus abstract, impersonal destructive forces, from the market to global war to climate change?

That note was poignant and tantalizing to me as well—it did not represent a fully-formed concept or definitive formulation, but an intuition of where my investigation might lead, beyond the boundaries of this particular narrative and argument. It felt to me like the only way I could end the book (and in fact, I must have tinkered with it and then changed it back to the way it was a couple dozen times prior to submitting the manuscript), even if I could not fully account for that intuition. Thinking about it from the distance of a couple years at this point, and particularly as I am finishing up a second book project that follows up on many of the intuitions of the conclusion of The Prince of This World, I feel like I am better able to articulate what I was getting at. (In fact, this response may turn out to bear an uncanny resemblance to portions of my as-yet unwritten conclusion to Neoliberalism’s Demons, where I will hopefully make another concluding gesture I cannot fully account for….)

Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.

Hence, when I talk about the devil being saved, it’s not just a question of one more creature being added to the “saved” ledger. If the devil can be saved, if there is no outside to salvation, then the whole meaning of moral obligation seems to be overturned—why should we maintain this whole structure of guilt and punishment at all, if it is only going to be set aside as irrelevant to our ultimate destiny? This gets at a real tension within Christianity itself: on the one hand, it wants to transcend the order of reward and punishment, but it nevertheless can never seem to break with it.

So what I’m asking is not so much what it might mean to forgive Dick Cheney or the big bankers or Rahm Emanuel or whoever, but what it would mean to come up with a politics that, at its deepest level, was not structured around blame and merit, reward and punishment. That is easier said than done, as 2000 years of Christian history shows us, in part because it is so hard to imagine what could replace it. (“Love” is often put forward as a candidate—and let’s just say I have my doubts.) But we have to find some way, if not to replace it altogether, at least to restrain it through some other principle, because the logical endpoint of the mechanism of blame is to consign us all to a living hell.

***

Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College. He is the author, most recently, of The Prince of This World, and he blogs at An und für sich.

Patrick Blanchfield is the 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.

The post The Prince of This World: Adam Kotsko and Patrick Blanchfield in Conversation appeared first on The Revealer.

Like most family stories, the one told to explain why my Mennonite grandparents chose to switch churches in the 1950s has a few variations. As one version goes, the pastor of Byerland Church, where many of our relatives were active members (and where several generations are buried), asked that my grandmother reconsider the length of the strings on her covering. They were a little too short for the pastor’s modesty. She declined; my grandparents found a new congregation, Willow Street Mennonite Church.

The second version of the story involves my grandfather who, they say, was inclined to purchase health insurance for his young family, a violation of Byerland’s ordinances. While health insurance was popularized in the 1950s (see here for more on the history of health insurance in the US) Mennonites traditionally did not participate in the growing program. Many Anabaptists—a category of Christians that includes both the Amish and Mennonites—have, because of their history of persecution in Switzerland and subsequent countries after the Reformation, refrained from participating in corporate, legal, and government practices or institutions such as: health insurance, lawsuits, military conscription, or public schools. Even today, very few Amish vote.^[1]

While churches like Byerland and Willow Street no longer require that members dress plainly or go without health insurance, many Anabaptists continue to cover medical costs without insurance.^[2] The Amish, for instance, pool their congregation’s money to meet the medical needs that members accrue.^[3] The practices of Mennonite churches are hard to generalize. Their worldly engagement has both drastically changed and not changed at all in the past several decades, depending on the congregation and the conference. Still, the Anabaptist population remains relatively small: about 1.4 million global church members.

Health insurance has changed radically in the past half century because of the increasing rate of self-employment (and unemployment), the decline of affordable job benefits (and salaries against cost of living), the increasing age of the population, the radical rise of medical costs, and the greater availability of medical treatments. When the Obama administration broached health care reform, it was not a minute too soon and about 30 years too late. But ideological and political differences warped the conversation about quality national health care provision into the spectacle of a national World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., match.

In January 2010, when the policies and provisions of the Affordable Care Act were just taking shape, I wrote a piece for the web publication, Killing the Buddha, about right-wing commenters who got wind that Anabaptists would be exempt from the law’s mandate. “We’re all Amish now,” the likes of Michelle Malkin and Don Surber claimed. “I’d say the Amish have about 16 million people who might want to become Amish and be conscientious objectors to being drafted into Obamacare,” Surber wrote at the time, callously managing to demean both the religious convictions of an entire Christian denomination and to mock the desperate need for equitable care coverage for the rest of the country. (Why 16 million? Perhaps that was Surber’s sad reach for a critical mass?) Malkin’s point that “some faiths are more exempt from government intrusion than others,” I wrote at the time, “is further explained by Raymond Arroyo, [a blogger on Laura Ingram’s website]:

So get this straight: the Amish, Old Order Mennonites and possibly Christian Scientists can opt out of the health care plan, with no penalty, while Catholics and other Christians are bound to pay premiums that fund abortion. How is that fair? Hundreds of Christian, pro-life hospitals, doctors and nurses may soon be forced to violate their consciences and offer or perform procedures they consider morally objectionable.

The conflation of health care providers (hospitals) who serve a pluralistic society with individuals (doctors, nurses, and folks like Surber) who might oppose certain constitutional medical treatments, is not an error. Conservatives have been successful at claiming that institutions and businesses have consciences just like individuals.^[4]

As it turns out, right-wing, anti-Obamacare conservatives were onto something. First came a wave of “religious exemption” haggles between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church. Then evangelical Christian corporations won the right to flout the law.^[5]

Catholic and evangelical families have also found a way around the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandate in increasing numbers through health sharing ministries, which look a lot like mutual aid societies, a relic of the pre-insurance days. Health sharing ministries have had a revival in the wake of Obamacare’s passage. Last month, Buzzfeed’s Laura Turner wrote a long exposé of Samaritan Ministries, “one of a number of Christian health care sharing ministries in the US that take the place of traditional health insurance by pooling and redistributing members’ money each month.” Samaritan is a nonprofit based in Peoria, Illinois with revenue of more than $34 million in 2015 (up from $6.6 million in 2013). Its members are asked to send their prayers and monthly checks (enrollment costs are based on family size) to those in need and can then submit copies of their medical receipts to the organization for reimbursement.

How many are enrolled in such cost sharing “ministries”? Turner writes that the three largest ministries, Samaritan, Medi-Share, and Christian Healthcare have just under 900,000 individuals. That includes nearly 400,000 new enrollees since February, 2016. Even smaller ministries are experiencing incredible growth, some at the rate of 200% since last year.

Many other health share ministries exist in the country, but they are much smaller, like the Mennonite organization Liberty HealthShare, based in Florida. Another, according to Turner, is Solidarity HealthShare, which is Catholic but partnered with a Mennonite organization to meet Obamacare’s stipulation that qualifying health sharing ministries existed before 1999.

Several factors are attracting evangelicals and Catholics to health care ministries like Samaritan: members appreciate the low overhead costs, aided by the fact that CEOs tend to earn a fraction of what corporate insurance companies do (Samaritan’s CEO took home $184,000 in 2014; in 2015 Aetna and Cigna’s CEOs earned $17.3 million each).^[6] “I haven’t felt like I’ve been throwing my money away to grease some CEO’s pocket,” a ministry member named Jennifer told US News’s Kimberly Leonard last year.

Members also like the sense of community created by sharing financial needs and prayers. But the big draw for many of the Catholics and evangelicals who have rushed to enroll since the passage of the ACA is the ministries’ anti-government and “pro-life” practices, an ideological mix that is as political as it is religious.

At reason.org, Jim Epstein wrote last year that Samaritan protected members from paying for others’ bad behavior. He quotes: “Do you support abortion, sexual immorality, drug & alcohol abuse with your health insurance?” from the cover of one Samaritan pamphlet which, he writes, later warns that “Joining with ‘unbelievers’ to cover the ‘health consequences of sinful living is not a way of showing the love of Jesus Christ.’”

However one might wish to interpret and institutionalize Jesus’s prejudices (on Epstein’s claims of what Jesus would do, I beg to differ), the new iteration of health care ministries pose serious problems for patients. While they satisfy the Obamacare mandate, they bypass most of the consumer protections that Obamacare made law, like inclusion of those with preexisting conditions. As Turner finds, “there are serious drawbacks lurking below the surface” for many members. Samaritan, for instance, has a lifetime cap “between $125,000 and $250,000.” Chronic illness, addiction, mental illness? You’re on your own.

Other restrictions, as noted by health care blogger Sean Parnell, involve members’ demonstrated religious conviction. Parnell writes about Solidarity, which launched last year:

The requirements for membership in the ministry are fairly consistent with those of other ministries, for example no drug or alcohol abuse. Regular church attendance is also expected. Not surprisingly for a Catholic entity, there are also prohibitions on contraceptive use (Protestants tend not to have objections to married couples using contraception) and an expectation that members “[r]eceive the Sacraments regularly” and “[c]onsult with our priests over matters of moral conscience.”

The questions that the current ministry boom raises are many. While the pre-ACA methods and size of health care sharing ministries were apportioned to a small minority religious group (Anabaptists), the increasing inclusion of Catholics and evangelicals signifies something new, primarily because this group’s newfound use of ministries appears to be significantly politically motivated. Where once these ministries sheltered unique religious convictions, centuries old—Anabaptists largely live sequestered from general public life—the new and growing membership of Catholics and evangelicals has begun to transform ministries from havens of protection into organizations that enforce exclusion and even jeopardize member’s health and financial well being.

The articles I’ve linked to above often chronicle cases of ministry members whose health care bills were denied or whose membership was terminated because of coverage restrictions. Turner’s article is framed around a couple whose adopted child was ultimately not covered. Lifetime cost caps, denial of those with existing conditions, and lifestyle requirements further embed discriminating practices.

Ministries like Samaritan have raised concern across the country. As Kimberly Leonard writes at US News (linked above):

Commissioners or judges in Washington, Kentucky and Oklahoma tried to shut health sharing ministries down in recent years, but state lawmakers stepped in, allowing them to run without the same regulations insurance companies face. According to the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, 30 states have such exemptions.

As the status of health care hangs in Trump’s balance, many leaders in the Catholic Church have come around to the health care provision, urging congress to not repeal the law. Many of the ACA’s protections have proven beneficial to millions.

While the ACA is deeply flawed (a recent article by Helaine Olen at The Atlantic goes a long way in reminding us that our current system is not even close to meeting our health needs), Republican’s opaque and diabolical plan to un-insure 20 to 24 million Americans—while simultaneously relegating elders, the disabled, the chronically and terminally ill, the mentally ill and pretty much anyone who doesn’t have a full time, salaried job to the not very metaphorical curb outside the emergency room door—the politicization of affordable and comprehensive care in the country is likely only to increase.

***

^[1] Although that hasn’t stopped Republican’s from focusing efforts on this “often forgotten block of voters”: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/09/elections-america-amish-voters-160915122802283.html

^[2] You can learn more about plain dress here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_dress

^[3] The Amish do not have physical churches, they meet in families’ homes; the bishop, deacon and ministers work together to define the level of worldly engagement the group will have, from clothing styles to telephone use.

^[4] For more on the history and evolution of institutional conscience (for instance, hospitals) see here: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1086&context=ndlr

^[5] http://www.npr.org/2012/02/07/146511839/weekly-standard-obamacare-vs-the-catholics; see also Little Sister’s of the Poor, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/obama-beats-the-nuns-on-contraception/398519/

^[6] Although the cost savings for families enrolled in health ministries is disputed: http://www.healthline.com/health-news/christian-health-cost-sharing-programs-growing-in-wake-of-obamacare

***

The post The Politics of Healthcare Sharing Ministries appeared first on The Revealer.

Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no. Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. 

—John T. Elson, TIME Magazine, April 8, 1966

On October 17, 2016, Russell Johnson stood at the podium addressing his audience of fellow theologians and religion scholars. “I’m currently teaching an introduction to theology course,” he said, “and last week one of my students began a paper with this inauspicious line: ‘God is one of the most important figures in Christianity and other religions.’” A few chuckles bounced around the crowd. 

“Throughout the centuries, this statement would be so obvious and understated that it’s laughable,” Johnson continued. “But in recent years it has become quite controversial.” 

Johnson, a PhD student, was introducing Theology, Ethics, and The Death of God at the University of Chicago, a conference timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the 1966 TIME Magazine cover that scandalized the world by asking, “Is God Dead?”

Of course, TIME wasn’t the first to pose that question, as Rémi Brague, professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, made clear in his keynote address later that day. “The idea of a dying god is old hat in the history of religions,” Brague stated plainly.

Take the Corpus Hermeticum, an Egyptian-Greek wisdom text from the second and third century AD, mentioned by another scholar during the Q&A that followed Brague’s talk. As the disciple Asclepius laments in the text: “A time will come when it will appear that the Egyptians worshipped the divinity with faithful mind and painstaking reverence — for no purpose. … For divinity goes back to heaven and all the people will die, deserted, as Egypt will be widowed and deserted by god and human.”

Such statements — and the fact that we keep making them, century after century — might say more about us than about the welfare of any particular deity. For example, when Asclepius cried, “How mournful when the gods withdraw from mankind!” historians say that the writer was responding to the march of Christians into Egypt, and the subsequent demise of a sacred worldview.

For the last two millennia, theologians, philosophers, believers, magazine editors, and the rest have been pondering the demise of God. But when we say that ‘God is dead,’ what are we really mourning? 

***

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. …

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Friedrich Nietzsche’s mother had wanted him to become a minister like his father. But in school, young Nietzsche found himself drawn to an iconoclastic brand of philosophy, one determined to expose the cowardice of theistic rationalist thinkers who had come before. At age 20, he renounced his faith in a letter to his sister.

“Do we, in our investigations, search for tranquility, peace, happiness?” he asked. “No — only for the truth, even if it were to be frightening and ugly.” 

Renouncing things suited Nietzsche. He later renounced his Prussian citizenship without claiming any other, leaving him stateless. In the years during which he wrote The Gay Science, he was busy renouncing his health, binging on opium and writing himself prescriptions for a risky sedative called chloral hydrate.

In severing himself from the cozy constraints of God, country, and body, Nietzsche seemed to be actively seeking out that frightening and ugly truth. Perhaps he had realized that such a thing could only be achieved by decisive choice, not by accident. In other words, if the distractions that humans worshipped were to die, their murder would need to be premeditated. 

Nietzsche’s parable of the madman would eventually usher God-is-dead-ism into modernity. But the year after The Gay Science was published, the philosopher’s unorthodox thoughts on God would render him all but unemployable. There was an eerie parallel to the madman’s own fate. 

At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”

The bleak light of Nietzsche’s lantern, it seemed, would not be visible until things became much darker.

***

Against the void of a black background, the blood-red font appeared bold and threatening. Just three words: “Is God Dead?” The eyebrows of unsuspecting folks in the grocery store check-out line must have leapt with surprise when they saw that April 1966 cover of TIME magazine.

Otto Fuerbringer in 1982. Credit Time Inc.

Otto Fuerbringer knew how to get that kind of reaction. The coldly intimidating TIME managing editor possessed an undeniably strong sense of editorial judgment. “Even his critics felt his sense of timing on cover stories was exquisite,” wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be, his history of 20th century media powerhouses.

For the cover story itself, titled “Toward a Hidden God,” Fuerbringer assigned TIME religion editor John T. Elson to trace the thinking of “a small band of radical theologians [that] has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God’s death, and get along without him.” 

The story fit the modern, counter-cultural focus that Fuerbringer — himself a moderate conservative, but with the business sense to fill a lucrative niche where he saw one — had been working to bring to TIME. The week before “Is God Dead?”, the cover story had been a sympathetic profile of vice president and liberal darling Hubert Humphrey; a week later would come a cover story positioning the city of London, with its ranks of up-and-coming rock’n’rollers, as the center of the cultural moment.

God might have been dead, but TIME was sure hitting its stride. Indeed, the “Is God Dead?” cover prompted intense public conversation (and 3,421 letters to the editor).

“We were very lucky in the ’60s,” Fuerbringer would say in an interview decades later. “It was a newsy decade.” Except, “Is God Dead?”, for all its supposed iconoclasm, didn’t contain much real news at all. Time would largely prove the TIME cover to be a non-story. 

Elson wrote about the decline of the once firm conviction that had defined American religion. He cobbled together the scattered musings of philosophers, theologians and scientists to form his precarious conclusion, that New Age interpretations of the gospel may be the only way for churches to succeed going forward. (While Elson acknowledged Billy Graham and his emerging charismatic revival, as well as the new, more ecumenical Catholicism precipitated by Vatican II, he underestimated their tremendous influence.)

In other words, the piece was not an elegy for God so much as a blurry snapshot of one minor stumble in the deity’s public life — one that, today, looks like blatant scaremongering.

Fuerbringer himself would likely shrug off such criticism. As he liked to say of the magazine’s shelf life: “It only has to be true this week.” Tellingly, three years after the infamous article, in the final week of 1969, the TIME cover rolling off the presses featured a bright white backdrop with angelic golden rays emanating upward behind the title: “Is God Coming Back to Life?” 

***

“Word on the street in the 1960s was that God was dead, but scholars debated which god precisely had died,” Russell Johnson said in his opening remarks at the University of Chicago conference. “Was it the God of classical metaphysics? The God of Constantinian Christendom? The hypothetical God-of-the-gaps? The anthropomorphized, mythological God? The oppressive white male God? The detached, Latin-speaking, traditional God? Or the God of abstract, imposed doctrine?”

Most of the 14 conference presentations over the next two days would grapple with some version of that question. One presenter assessed whether technology and modernization had helped us leave God behind. Another considered the death of God through the lens of Buddhism, which never had a “god” to begin with. 

Mostly, though, the presenters argued about obscure theologians and made painfully narrow academic cases. (A sample presentation title: Beyond Vattimo’s Christian Atheism and Girard’s Christianity-as-Religion-Destroyer: Considering the Axial Age and a Broader Theoclasm.)

But it didn’t take a religion degree to feel the disenchantment that the scholars were picking apart. The approaching presidential election was painting a fresh layer of dread onto every new day. Even closer to home, the famously long-suffering Chicago Cubs, having made it to the playoffs, now appeared intent on giving away their spot in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The presenters and attendees invoked both baseball and politics repeatedly over the course of the two days, often in jest, although their comments betrayed a deeper truth: their society was again reckoning with a pesky feeling that certain cherished institutions were crumbling.

Less clear was what to do about it. As Johnson said in his final remarks, on the last day of the conference: “As we leave this room, this haven of conversation, and go out into the world of action, the question lingers — how do we live after the death of God?”

No conference could answer that question. But as they filed out of the meeting space, perhaps the assembled group of religion scholars and historians took some small comfort in the fact that, after all those centuries of proclaiming the death of the divine, prayers were still prayed; hymns were still sung. That, no matter the outcome of the election, the country would keep lurching forward through history. And as for the Cubs — well, there would always be next year. That shape-shifting melange of doubt and truth and dread, of darkness and the unwelcome lanterns that occasionally burn through it, was sure to outlast them all.

***

Jake J. Smith is an independent writer and journalist based in Chicago. He covers public policy, Midwestern history, and religion. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, The Wilson Quarterly, NPR Illinois, WBEZ, and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter at @JakeJeromeSmith. 

The post Is God Dead Yet? appeared first on The Revealer.