Peco Gaskovski:

Globalism and universalism, as appealing as they are rationally, are too rational. You can’t love an abstraction; you can only get obsessive or fanatical about it.

Is a unified vision of society possible across different peoples, lands, and worldviews, yet in a way that doesn’t dominate the local, and doesn’t impose its ideological gods on everybody? Maybe, but we’ll need a radically new breed of thought. 

For now, the localist spirit will tend to prevail, both in good and bad forms—wildflowers and weeds bursting up through the globalist asphalt. And it’s hard to imagine it otherwise in an age of upheaval, when it can feel like the problems facing our world just keep piling up. If the day should come when the lights wink out, and the internet dies, and when the look in everybody’s eyes becomes anxious and uncertain, we won’t be clinging to the promises we saw in the pixels of those dead screens, made by people far away who didn’t know us. We will do what people have done since the beginning of time: gather around our hearth, holding fast to each other and our prayers, and sharing whatever we have…

But even that isn’t putting it quite right. Really, the end is always near. Even when it flourishes, life can be taken away at any moment. Which means if we are going to love this home, these people, this God, we must always do it, not merely as a defensive response during a crisis, and not as a form of in-group tribalism or way of hiding behind our boundaries.

We just love, from the center outward, overflowing the boundaries whenever we can.

That is the hope of the future, I think.

Jürgen Moltmann:

A shattering expression of the theologia crucis which is suggested in the rabbinic theology of God’s humiliation of himself is to be found in Night, a book written by [Elie] Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz:

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice in myself answer: “Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows . . .”

Any other answer would be blasphemy.

Onsi A. Kamel:

In addition to attacks which have destroyed or otherwise harmed Christian churches and villages in Palestine and Lebanon, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are confirmed dead, and tens of thousands more are rotting under rubble. In Lebanon, Israel has killed thousands all across the country, and in the West Bank, hundreds. No doubt, Christians were among them. Israel designed a new AI system to identify targets in Gaza, deliberately selecting non-military targets and permitting twenty civilian deaths per militant—families shredded to kill one man. Israel calls the system habsora, “the Gospel.” 

[…]

It is a deep irony that conservative American Christians, who pride themselves on public identification with Christ and Christian values in a world hostile to his gospel, have abandoned the Church of Christ in Syria, in Palestine, and in Lebanon.… We have exchanged the birthright of the gospel for the lentils of Western civilization. God speaks to us when he proclaims by the mouth of his prophet, “And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” Perhaps, if God is merciful to American Christians, after the martyrs under the altar have cried out for judgment, the rubble we have made will fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.

Charles Taylor:

We have to avoid two unsatisfactory notions of what philosophical poetry could be. [Simon] Jarvis’ reflections on the possible relations of poetry to philosophy take us beyond the choice between (1) seeing poetry as a potentially decorative and pleasing presentation of a philosophical doctrine already elaborated elsewhere, on one hand, and (2) elevating it to the status of a direct route to philosophic truth, independent of ratiocination and argument, on the other. (1) denies that poetry can be a source of deep insight; (2) fails to see that it convinces through the force of the experience of connection, which is very different from conviction gained through the force of argument. This means that by its very nature, poetic insight will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic (which is not to say that philosophical argument, which aims at clarity and certainty, will not frequently fail to encompass these in its own way); but it also means that serious philosophy cannot afford to ignore poetic insight.

The orders invoked in the subtler languages of the last centuries do indeed make claims, but they are of another kind, and on another basis than the older doctrines of cosmic order. Compared to these the new invoked orders seem incomplete, lacking explicitness, tentative, or provisional. But in the new predicament, where direct, exact, nonsymbolic or nonmythical mirroring of the order is ruled out, and we can only create “translations,” the old kind of completeness and explicitness is unattainable.

That reduction to symbolic mirroring immediately recalls Robert Bly: “we need to notice that our visual imagination becomes confused when we can no longer see the physical king. Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination. Each person has to repair that imagination on his or her own.” (Not surprising that Taylor shows up there too.)

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. . . But there is much
to be borne. And one must be true.
Neither before nor after should we
look. But rather lie rocking.
Like a boat cradled in the sea.

— Hölderlin

And a second time he spoke
when the Lord kept the children beside him
and suffered them not to be taken away:
”These are the ones that are left us,
but where, Lord, is the Kingdom of Heaven?
Where, Lord, are the others?
What of them? What of them?
And he wept.

— Madeleine L’Engle

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I did not know what was so special about lazing around the house, or shovelling the snow that it had to be recorded. But Gholam must definitely have known.

A couple months ago I came across a short, 15-minute film from 2023: “I Am Trying to Remember,” by Pegah Ahangarani. And I found it so completely arresting. I thought I would include it in a future newsletter, but it seems more appropriate for today. If you have 15 minutes, I highly recommend watching it.

“In dictatorships like Iran,” says Ahangarani, “part of history is constantly being wiped out, especially the brutality of crimes and the mass executions.” The film and the images of people who were lost, she says, is “a reminder that what happened then is happening today and that we should not be indifferent.”

So many. So many Gholams. So many Mohammeds, Amirs, Alis, Bahrams. So many Mehris, Mandanas, Zahrasadats. They were all executed. They were all erased.

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I am thinking again of something from the Croatian writer Jadranka Brnčić:

Holy Saturday is a silent phase between the Good Friday and the Resurrection, but it is not an empty phase. On the contrary, in the experience of silence and notable absence, the solidarity of God with those who are suffering grief, pain, and abandonment is most clearly expressed. The experience of “no news” in the situation where good news is hoped for is an experience of deepest desperation, insecurity which paralyses human capacities to act – shall we accept the emptiness of death, or shall we continue hoping? Holy Saturday therefore offers a salvific reading of the situation of insecurity – sometimes there is nothing we can do to know more about the events or to change them, yet we constantly experience social or emotional pressure to “do something” or to “change something.” The theology of Holy Saturday therefore stands in juxtaposition to this pressure; it tells those who are deprived of means to change events that “doing nothing” save remembering is not an empty activity but a state of profound truth-seeking and truth-telling.

That quote comes from her excellent essay “Lost Bodies, Missing Persons, and Extended Mourning,” in which she addresses the kind of suffering specific to those whose loved ones have been “forcibly disappeared.” They are left in an extended and often permanent state of “ambiguous loss and unresolved grief” which, she explains, is not an occurrence that could warrant a term like “missing persons,” but is an instrument used by those in power alongside more flagrant forms of violence against civilian populations.

Holy Saturday is such a unique lens through which to see the world’s suffering. And I wonder if the “tragic waiting” that Brnčić and Ahangarani describe and that is experienced by so many is not one of the most exacting lenses through which to see Holy Saturday.

From “Affirmation”:

What word of courage may I bring to you,
What word of solace or of sustenance?
Our faiths have fallen from us and left us bare;
The dream, fantastic and compassionate,
That like a veil of love and glory hung
Between us and the bitterness of things,
Is lifted, and the universe has grown
Vaster, and much more lonely. Nor shall Thought—
Crying into the dark, and listening, listening—
Get any answer to its prayer: the night
Is soundless and the starry mouths are sealed.

Yet the deep heart still knows that all is well
And the truth greater than we dare to dream,
Greater and more exalted! Though the mind,
Fashioned for humbler uses, may not grasp
The meaning of the mystery; though Thought—
For all its longing, all its labor—gain
Hardly the comfort of a hope, there is
A self within us, wiser than the mind,
And deeper than all thought, that still endures
Firm at the helm through all the storms of chance
Forever, in unquenchable belief
And courage not to be abated: life,
In rage and fear, in love and agony,
Weaving her splendor from the dust of death,
Bears in her breast—though inarticulate—
A holier confidence; her running grass,
Her herds trampling the uplands, her fierce wills
In bush and brake, her ravening hosts that throng
The fields of ocean and the aisles of air—
Furious, furious, for continuance—
These answer, these bear witness, all is well;
These in indomitable zest affirm
The wonder and glory of a universe
In which all lusts, all hungers, all defeats,
All agonies, are woven to one Doom,
And every heart-beat is an act of faith
Praising the hidden purpose!

         Stern, indeed,
Are the realities; the wheel of heaven
Revolves, with all its motions, and the planet
Heaves forward blindly, bearing us along
Into the Void—we know not why nor where;
Embattled between two oblivions
We stand, for a brief moment, and lift up
Our faces to the light—but in our blood
The voices of the generations past
Strive, and the generations yet unborn
Are urgent in us that we play our part,
As actors in a stately tragedy,
To some triumphant close. Courage and faith,
These will best serve us here. And as for Him
Whom we have sought beyond the stars in vain,
Perhaps He may be nearer than we know.

—John Hall Wheelock

I’m currently reading Žiga Vodovnik’s A Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism. The title comes from a quote from Emma Goldmann in 1969:

Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future.… It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions.… Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

This is a strong part of what draws me to anarchism. There’s something largely apophatic about it. To borrow a phrase from early in the book, anarchism says every ‘no’ for the sake of many (undefined) yeses.

Part of that apophatic face makes it good at calling bullshit. And its more prominent voice can be pretty harshly so. Howard Zinn’s brief introduction to Vodovnik is a bitchin’ example. Here’s a sample (emphasis added):

The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievement—it is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to what is most needed by people,because the organizers and distributors of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises motivated only by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes, and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to “anarchy” (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful economic system in America?

I have generally been, and remain, fairly ambivalent about “capitalism.” There are good defenders and terrible ones. And there are good critics and there are terrible ones. Often, the defenders of capitalism are describing a system which we do not, in fact, have. (As Chesterton put it, Private Enterprise is as utopian a notion as Utopia itself.) And it is also true that the maladies of the western world, or even its greed alone, cannot be summed up, and are often lazily and partisanly avoided, by talking about something called capitalism.

At the same time, however, it can’t be wrong, and in fact must be a truth-telling requirement, to admit that the products of that system we call capitalism — products of which we both happily enjoy and needlessly consume — are, as far as the system goes, only ever accidentally related to love, care, and genuine human satisfaction while being derived from a process that is wildly and needlessly destructive of many things in the course of its “churn.”

A lot of us, and especially those of us who grew up on the Right, were more or less indoctrinated trained (sometimes for understandable reasons) to react as though this kind of criticism could only ever come from the Soviet Union. (And don’t get me started about the flip flop.) The result has not only been that so much needed criticism is swept under the political rug, but that it is swept under the mental rug, precluding the ability to think about, let alone provide, that needed criticism at all.

We need to be better critics. We don’t necessarily need to be anarchists (in the proper, radical egalitarian sense, not the lawless caricature), but we could certainly gain from hearing what they have to say.

Anarchism, however, so far as I have read it, knows it cannot follow its own critique, like Zinn’s above, with an alternative systematic vision — and it does not want to, because a systematic vision is precisely what anarchism opposes.

Of course it’s true that we need to know what we are for, not merely what we are against. But for a lot of life, it really is enough to know where and when simply to say no, even if the various and often conflicting yeses that we are looking for remain unclear or unknown.

Avoiding stupidity and avoiding what you know causes harm, and refusing, wherever possible, to participate in those things — this is not nothing. Because in the midst of all those nos always remains a human soul, a walking, talking imago Dei capable at any moment of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These do not need a system or a political party or an army.

And in a world filled to the brim with power, exploitation, and hypocrisy, a righteously placed ‘no’ might often be exactly what is needed. If we denounce the bad while praising the everyday, chaotic love and goodness we find wild in the world… well, this is probably the most normal way to be human. It’s not a utopian vision or a project looking for completion but an ideal sentiment, a banner to be held aloft wherever you are.

There are many more things to say, but that’s a good start on a topic I’ve wanted to broach.

Noah Millman:

And it’s not enough to violate the law. You need to violate the law in such a way that nobody feels they are protected from the authority’s arbitrary will, lest they think the sovereign is limited in some way that privileges them, or even that they are part of the truly sovereign group. In the end, Hobbesian logic must leave every individual subject to Leviathan as fearful of random violence as they were in the state of nature, because if they have anything to rely on other than the sovereign’s inherently changeable will, that anything could be understood as a limit on the sovereign’s authority, and an authority with limits is not a sovereign at all.

I can’t know for sure, obviously, but it does feel to me like that’s the precedent the Abrego García case is intended to set. That, to me, is the difference from the Bush-era renditions. Those resulted in all sorts of horrible human rights violations, and set terrible precedents (some of which are now being relied upon). But they were fundamentally driven by policy goals related to fighting the War on Terror; the damage to the constitution was a byproduct. I don’t think that’s the case here. The Abrego García case isn’t terribly important for the government’s stated goals related to immigration, but it is perfectly designed to force the court to either accede to blatant illegality or to risk flagrant and open defiance of its edicts. It’s a constitutional crisis either way—and that’s the point. We’re facing a constitutional crisis becausethe governmentwants a constitutional crisis, because their fundamental objective is the assertion of absolute presidential sovereignty.

Peter Hooton:

Vicarious representative action comes over time … to acquire a broader significance in Bonhoeffer’s theology. In Christ, humanity is always something shared and never solitary. Ontology and ethics are inseparable. Human beings live naturally in the ethical situation of encounter. They may, of course, seek to avoid this, by notionally reducing the ethical task to the selective application of certain fixed principles—and then “withdrawing from responsibility for the whole, to a purely private bourgeois existence, or even into the monastery”—but this simply betrays a false understanding of ethics, and a shallow appreciation of life. The isolationist approach, says Bonhoeffer, will always fail “due to the historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] of human existence.”

In Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, vicarious representative action is worldly, responsible action, freely undertaken by human beings out of love for other “real” human beings. And because all such action takes place necessarily within history, it will always entail risk, and a degree of moral ambiguity. Those who act responsibly “in their own freedom” must themselves weigh the merits of their actions and be responsible for their decisions. There are no formal, saving rules of the game to which they can appeal—for in this case “they would no longer be truly free”—just as there is no “ultimately dependable [human] knowledge of good and evil” in this God-reconciled, but still fallen, sicut deus world. The responsible actor must, therefore, surrender to God, at the very moment of execution, “[t]he deed that is done, after responsibly weighing all circumstances in light of God’s becoming human in Christ.”