The Possible and the Real

I am sore tired and a little cranky, but I want to post this now that I have written it. Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) I will illustrate it with some pix from Frederick's Sans Souci.

Another chilling piece in the New York Times about the curious and bloodthirsty penchant of Americans for imprisoning their own. It got me thinking about an old rule of history, and a corollary: if it is possible, then it has happened ... and the corollary, the possible generates the real. I'll get back to the American lust to punish wantonly after an excursus into the 18th century.

I have finished Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 and moved on to a biography of Frederick the Great, my favorite absolute monarch, which I last read in Berlin. Blanning's book is rewarding reading because he ranges across the period and the geography thematically before a rather short recitation of the events with which history buffs are much more familiar. He has a felicitous manner of expressing contradiction and dialectic, both historical and critical. In other words, he can see the Enlightenment, for example, both as a turning point or radical break and as a logical expression of all the forces which conspired both to create it and to attack it. I loved the way that he interwove the culture of reason and the culture of feeling, and I hope that my attempt to play with that through Judy Garland was not too oblique.

Blanning's period of history is goalposted by the end of the wearying and pointless slaughter that was the 30 Years War and the end of the wearying and rather more pointed slaughter that was the Napoleonic Wars. The 30 Years War was the last war of the Reformation, and the Napoleonic Wars were the first wars of the modern world. In between was a period of incessant but intermittent wars in Europe that were predominantly dynastic. Whether a Hapsburg or a Bourbon would reign in Spain (The War of Spanish Succession, 1702-1713) evidently mattered enough to massacre, slow bore, 400,000 people. Think of it, especially in the context of how much smaller the population was. 400,000 people. Precious few died in battle; vastly more died of disease and starvation and casual slaughter.

So this was the period of the rise of absolutism, such as it was, and absolutism had to cover its perks. Blanning does a good job of covering the notion of state and what I would call charisma, but he is much better at describing life and art and show and trade and livelihood. His first chapter alone is worth the price of the book ... he talks about transportation. I got to thinking that the slow rise of the West and the slow decline of the East might well hang on the different carrying capacities of horses in forests against camels in open ground and the manner in which Europe overcame its transportation disadvantage. It was a slow transformation, but by the time of Napoleon, Europeans could move human beings and materiel with an alacrity unimaginable 150 years earlier.

Absolutism was built on the back of new roads and forms of communication and organization that allowed genuine centralization and the accumulation of sufficient state power to undermine the centripetal tendencies of aristocrats. I think that the Reformation played a large role precisely by providing the centralized state with the opportunity to use religion quite independently of the church. But the key point is that absolutism became a reality because it was possible ... more precisely there could be no absolutism without the material preconditions for it. I think that is the difference between a teleological Marxism (in other words the notion that the possible leads inexorably to one reality) over a non-ideological materialist analysis (in other words the notion that you cannot grasp the real without looking at the possibilities that prefigured it).

This seems obvious, but we frequently forget it. Only my most dedicated reader will remember my rant against Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers who is one of those lazy reactionary thinkers who titillates to sweeping blame with which he swaggers and nods to himself. So the Enlightenment is responsible for the Nazis, and Stalin to boot. Yeah, and Catholicism is still the peaceful dove of love. A Burleigh forgets the simple fact that the real arises from the possible. As I like to point out, Pope Ratzinger does not strive to burn me at the stake because he can't. If he could, well, he would ... and we have the long history of his sordid little religion as proof.

I guess I am ranting.

Blanning's work is impressive because his happy prose weaves the endless tiny details of a period into a tapestry of what it became. His is materialist history. Louis XIV could only become the king because he had the means to do it ... he had to have the will and the luck and the genius as well. But no amount of luck or will or brains can make up for a lack of means or possibility.

And so it is with the American prison system. We incarcerate because we can. With that same technological and material possibilities, we could also educate and ameliorate and even save the planet. These too are possible. But the possible only underwrites the real, it does not predict it. The American prison system proves that we have the means. It also proves that our souls are empty, and it points again and once again to the naked greed that has crippled this great civilization.

It will be our epitaph. We could have saved the world, but we preferred to imprison crack whores. We had the means, and we made the choice. It was possible, so we fall back on the plaint that it had to be that way. No, no, it didn't have to be that way.

The Impostor

The tale of Lev Nussimbaum aka Essad Bey aka Kurban Said, and its competent telling in Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, throws into stark relief both the attraction of the impostor and the irreducibility of historical context in human lives. Born into a wealthy oil-magnate Jewish family in Baku (now Azerbaijan) on the shores of the Caspian Sea, Lev responded to the brutal reverses of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and then the rise of Nazism in the country to which he as exiled, by writing and re-inventing himself. Reiss writes:

For most of his life until fortune threw him to a place where he could no longer joke about such things, Lev would keep up a kind of comic dialogue with his writer friends about his "transformation" from Lev to Essad. It was not that he mocked his conversion or allowed others to. But among those he felt he could understand, and these were mostly his fellow Jews, he seemed to think it fair to reveal the transformation. With anyone else, he grew circumspect, neither denying nor accepting that he was covering up something. Rather than trying to refute anything, he responded by diving deeper into his identity and becoming more and more the Orientalist--more and more Essad Bey.

Remember transformation for a moment. I'll come back to that.

Many Jews of the late-19th and early 20th centuries adopted a stance as eastern, Asian, non-European, seeing in Muslim and other Eastern peoples kindred spirits opposed to the Europeans among whom they lived and who reviled them as conjunctures demanded. Lev was of this ideational caste, if you will, and as such might not precisely be seen as an impostor if we can accept that he genuinely converted to Islam and subsequently adopted a Turkish name. But he rewrote his past, and he dodged his present, and his religious system was always an act and never a belief. The identity came first and religion had to follow. That is a less rare pattern than one might imagine ... I believe it is precisely the pattern that has so many atheist politicians trundling off to church every week (does anyone with a rational mind believe that Hillary truly believes, or for that matter Obama notwithstanding his genuine earnestness?).

There was one exception to the precedence of artifice over belief in Lev, however. He was a genuine monarchist, a devoted follower of the dead Czar as well as the exiled Sultan and erstwhile Caliph. The historical background is that his life declined along with monarchy. But there is more to monarchism than nostalgia. It represents a pointed and deliberate false consciousness especially in a man as quick-witted and intelligent as Lev.

Monarchism is the worship of impostors. How's that? Monarchy is like religion in that any rational analysis reduces it to the nothing that belies it. What props up monarchs and gods is charisma and history and, again, irreducibility. To abuse the phrase of the day, they are what they are. So long as they hold power, they are powerful. When they no longer hold power they are windbags ... nothing more than the puffed up claims that surround them. To believe in them after their demise is affect because there is nothing to believe in ... the charisma has become a chimera.

For a man who constructed his life from whole cloth, monarchy conveys a sufficient reference to a reality in which the impostor can invest so as to create an imagined reality that is the imposter's stock in trade. Look back, young man, for the future bodes ill. It is in your imagined past, young man, that you can find the girding that will save you, nourish you, make you into what you can no longer be.

Again, Reiss writes:

He had had few friends growing up and had a precocious child's wariness of other children. Indeed, his passage praising absolute czardom begins with a short speech on why "I love old people, detest the youth"; the old are "calmer, cleverer, and more modest," and when the young turn their backs on them, as they inevitably do, they "must consequently fall into barbarism."

I love old people too ... like my father before me, I have always had friends older and often much older than me. As I get older, I tend to grouse all the more at the barbarism of intemperate youth ... notwithstanding the obvious fact that they are pretty wallpaper. That said, I have always been young ... by which I mean that I am impatient and revolutionary by nature. I do not brook idiocy and my definition of idiocy is broad and sharp ... I also enjoy oxymorons ... and I fail to understand why people are stuck and incapable of understanding history and necessity. The older people who are or have been my friends are young in that same way. And by turns, so many of the young about me are old in the sense that they accept what is given to them and look only for their own comfort. They bear similarity to the young of Lev's day I that they accepted what was given to them and looked for their own aggrandizement through a reductionist view of history. Our youth seem to have no sense of history ... time will have to tell whether that is a benefit or a torment.

What Lev saw in the old was that they understood transformation in a loose way, a clever way, modestly and with a smirk and a smile. What he detested in the young was their ideological fervor as he experienced it in the rise of the goose stepping youth of the brownshirts and the imperturbable murderers under red banners.

So, transformation. Impostors do transformations. They are loose about it. The con man smiles and draws you in. My father called one of my younger brother's best friends a "beloved infidel" ... the guy was an impostor, but you had to believe and you had to accept the letdown because you knew you had believed. You could not pretend otherwise. Transformation on some level is not being able to pretend otherwise.

There is another kind of impostor, the one who does fake-outs, and regressions, and bait and switch. The one who substitutes glibness and the snide for the con man smiles. What is appealing in the impostor like Lev is disgusting in the ideological impostor.

I speak, of course, of neo-cons and other such reductionist ideologues of contempt and self-assurance.

My readerly ride through the terrifying years of the 20s and 30s with Lev/Essad was a little easier than it usually is. I have always found the interwar period one of the most difficult in history to imagine because the horrors into which it descended were so unprecedented in scale. Did Lev's peers know? Did the cabaret people, the communists, the brown shirts, the working class, the street walkers ... did they have any inkling of the guillotine blade under which they lived, of the rapid drop into hell which the uncertainty of their lives portended?

In that vein, I sought out some reading on the development of thought and politics in the 19th century. I really want to read about German and Italian unification, but then I stumbled on Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers. Sure, I thought, there's a meditation on how junctures arise in history.

Alas, the book is mired in the inability of the simple-minded to get beyond finding someone to blame. And who, do you suppose, would be at fault for both Nazism and Bolshevism ... why the Enlightenment, of course, not to mention pretty much anybody who lived before during or after the events and to whom one can paste the label "liberal".

The book was so nauseating that I could not get past page 44 ... I actually wrote "this is unreadable" at the bottom of page 39. The problem too often with the modern ideologue is that he cannot let himself resist snideness no matter how many opportunities are presented. Adjectives and asides and little sneers everywhere. So, speaking of the era of the Enlightenment, he writes:

Censorship, lax in practice but all the more resented in theory, as well as ferocious blasphemy and sacrilege laws, sought to compel orthodoxy. The philosophes tended to highlight the most extreme cases, often omitting crucial details that might have modified their starkly contrived contrasts. (page 30)

Elsewhere, he refers to the "several existing tendencies and novel developments that are known as the Enlightenment" (page 37) ... in other words, the great force that initiated the permanent decentralization of religion and idolatry in European life if

In other words ... and this is the essence of the weakly expressed thesis of the book ... Catholicism and absolutism were kindly forces that occasionally did naughty things, but really given a few more decades they would have led the world to a peaceable kingdom of goodness and light, and the awful liberals and Nazis and Bolsheviks would never have come to pass. If only those horrible impostors, the philosophes, had not mucked it all up. O for a good auto-da-fe ... where was holy mother church when we needed it.

Burleigh like all neo-cons is an impostor. They claim a connection to the past, but they sing a tune that makes no sense. They pose as monarchists or defenders of holy mother church (I have no proof, but I'll eat my hat if this guy isn't a revanchist Catholic). But in fact they propound a radical theory of the dissolution of democracy. They are not conservatives ... they are radicals who seek to enshrine an entirely new political elite who are beyond critique.

What a contrast is the transforming impostor Lev from the dissembling impostor Burleigh. Remember that things called by the same names are not by force the same.

Mark Lilla, who wrote the saddeningly sycophantic The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West about which I commented here and here, wrote a "damning with faint praise" review in the New York Times. Lilla writes:

The utopians did not believe in God but they very much believed in religion. That is the truly novel development in the 19th century, and one which Hurleigh never manages to bring into focus: the less people talked about God, the more they talked and worried about religion. For the utopians, the revolution's defeat of the Catholic Church represented an enormous step forward for the human race, but also posed an unprecedented challenge. Once men thought themselves free from God they might think themselves free from one another, like elementary particles floating in the void. What modern, postrevolutionary society needed was a new religion, or a surrogate one, a system of symbols and ceremonies bringing individuals together without reference to a revealing, transcendent God.

There is so much teleology here that it is hard to swallow. Society did make some civic gods, and Burleigh blames all of that on the Enlightenment ... but history is never complete. So the fact that the first attempts at constructing a civil life without the stultifying effects of godliness were incomplete is hardly surprising. The fact that some of them were more bloody than anything that had come before is an effect of the industrial means at hand ... only a fool would wish upon us the medieval inquisition in possession of the tools of modern destructiveness.

Burleigh is just such a fool. In that, he poses as an impostor, for he is surely intelligent enough to know that there is no going back, and that his very stance is itself as much a daughter of the Enlightenment as is liberalism or socialism or agnosticism of what have you. So he pretends to this conservatism ... but it is a lie. No, for the neo-cons, there is much more afoot. There is a bloody reaction, the telling doom of their enemies, the victory of their snide asides.

Ooops ... now their hero is McCain ... how the feigning mighty are melting into dust.

I will try to return to the relationship of fascism and religion at a later point.

Tonight's drink is a Piña Colada, RL's very own recipe, as he says. And then, a hard day having been had by all, we followed that with an exquisite Blue Moon, this one slightly flavored with a little Marie Brizzard Parfait Amour ... which makes it just a little grapey in a carnavalesque sort of way.

Photo by Arod of a window on Noe Street in the Castro.

Paradox

Is it paradoxical that I start this post with the concept of paradox even as I confess that I have given up on Roy Sorenson's A Brief History of the Paradox? I always feel a little guilty when I abandon a book mid-read, but alas this sweet little tour of the history of Western logical theory began to feel a little too theological and not quite as paradoxical as I had hoped ... by theological I mean that theology is bunk but the history of religion is fascinating, and that is true of philosophy too in my particular view ... philosophy is oh such a yawn, but the history of ideas has no bottom to its depth. Sorenson's review tends to lard a thick layer of philosophical musing on a thin skeleton of known philosophical history, and it left me in its dust. This raises both the sidebar question of whether lard and dust should ever be used in the same sentence, and the more central question of whether there is any utility to philosophy.

The answers would be no and yes, and it is paradoxical that while I answer no and yes, my practice in the event was yes and no. To whit, I did use lard and dust in one sentence, but I did not find any utility in this case for philosophy.

Sorenson argues that paradox is a question that has too many answers. I think of paradox as the poor sister of dialectic ... poor by reason of its having been stripped of context and content. Take the engaging paradox of the heap ... if you have a heap of sand, and you take away one grain, is it still a heap? Repeat this process. What is the line between heap and not-heap? In real life, people answer that I know a heap when I see one. And this suffices for everyday purposes, but it does not give us a grasp of deeper or inner reality. In that sense, every paradox points to the paradox of gawd and the stone. If gawd is all powerful, then he can create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift. But is he cannot lift it, he is not all-powerful. Is the everyday answer to that conundrum this: I know a gawd when I see one? Well, not quite. (I remind the irregular reader that I figure, as a die hard atheist, that the name of gawd is irrelevant given his omnipotence so I spell him however strikes my fancy, no matter how puerile such a conceit might appear to the religious.)

I prefer the notion of dialectic ... as simply put as I can try, dialectic is the notion that counterposed forces in history through their engagement with each other create new oppositions related to but not identical to those which spawned them. That such forces are incompatible does not prevent them from engaging, and it does not prevent a synthesis which contains the evolution of both even as it spins a new contradiction composed of but not identical to the opposition which generated it. It's not that paradox isn't fun and profitable especially during the latter stages of drinking parties ... no, it is that dialectic is the fascination that keeps on fascinating.


So I reluctantly left Sorenson's book in the dust (well, actually, I am still carrying it around in my man purse in case I change my mind and give it a reprieve), and I turned to Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, the story of a Jew born in Azerbaijan who masqueraded as a Muslim prince in the gathering gloom of Nazi Germany. A great read, recommended. It interests me here because it draws attention to the difference between paradox and dialectic. Lev Nussenbaum, the hero of the tale, is certainly paradoxical in the sense that he cannot be all or each of what he claims. But more to the point, his career draws its potency from its involvement in the most compelling contradictions of the period in which he lived, 1905-1942, or the first Russian Revolution through the middle of the worst war of all.

It reminds me of the paradox of the set of sets which do not contain themselves. Imagine a set of all things red ... I derive this from an interview with Sorenson on NPR ... because a set has no color, the set of all things red does not contain itself. So the set of all things red is a member of the set of sets that do not contain themselves. But is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves a part of itself? If yes, then no; if no, then yes. In other words, if the set of sets that do not contain themselves does contain itself, then it does not contain itself. But if it does not contain itself, then it does contain itself.

The impostor, the rake, the poseur, all are like the set that does not contain itself, for if they are who they are, then they are not, and if they are not who they are, then they are. The poseur's life in itself is only passing interesting, but the era which is his playground and which is the force behind his fraud, that is what we can view through the lens of the indissoluble contradiction that is his life. Reiss does a good job of revealing all of that, and so the dialectic that he explicates keeps me much more spellbound than the equally estimable efforts of Dr. Sorenson.


Photos by Arod of street art in downtown San Francisco, sometime last summer.

The Stillborn God

I promised a while back to lay down Stephen O'Shea's exciting recounting of muslim/christian relations around the Mediterranean from the 7th through the 16th centuries to dive into Mark Lilla's recent The Stillborn God. During my "hiatus", I did just that ... well, at least half ways. (Click here for all my posts which have discussed this book.)

Half ways because I just had to give it up on page 124 of 309 pages of labored prose. I can say this for the book ... its turgidity is more annoying than its turbity ... by which I mean that it is more bloated than muddy, but not by much. This is the classic case of a modern book that any competent editor could readily reduce to a two-part New Yorker essay. Lilla indulges far too much meandering reminding his readers of introductory college humanities stuff that, he assumes, we have forgotten somewhere between spouse number two and SUV number three. But a tiresome review of the commonplaces of intellectual history is the least of the problems.

I suppose some sense of the impulse to completion will force me back to this annoying prose. But this is what stopped me in my tracks ... the Vicar is Rousseau's apologist for a de-theologized, or natural, religion in the famous parable in his Emile:

The Vicar's faith is not the Christian faith. But neither is it opposed to Christianity. That was what was so revolutionary ...

Revolutionary, indeed. Rousseau was exiled for this piece of writing, but I would assert that it was not because it was revolutionary but rather because it was an argument in the character of its times that threatened the perquisites of the cynical theologues who had the power to exile him. But in the grander scheme of things, this is precisely the apology for religion that allows the desperate to cling to it even in the face of "death of god." This was not atheism, but a pseudo-theism that allowed atheists to pretend to believe in god.

Early on in this blog, in the context of the good lord taking poor ole Jerry Falwell to his reward, I argued that there are three types of the religious: the earnest, the desperate, and the cynical. The Vicar's argument is the classic statement of how the desperate should interpret religion, how they too can join in.

Lilla's point in the long run is that secularists have to understand the mindset of the religious, and this is without doubt completely and totally obvious. But it hardly justifies forcing good secularists to plunk down $26 and hours of their free time to read through a turgid reiteration of "natural religion" arguments whose validity expired with the power of the Church to burn us alive, or leastwise chase us from our homes and livelihoods.

The straw man nature of Lilla's argument rears up even in the introduction ... the man seems to love cheap rhetorical tricks such as broadly obvious lines disguised as insight:

Fragility is a disturbing prospect. We see this in our children, who love fairy tales where occult forces threatening their worlds are exposed and mastered.

Good lord, children, fairy tales. But then he slides, as if the critical reader is blind to the obvious conflation, to describing "modernization, democratization, the 'disenchantment of the world,' 'history as the story of liberty'" as the fairy tales of our times. This is a set-up, a con job. Once you adopt this self-righteous dismissal of the themes of modern western civilization as mere fairy tales, there is not point in reading the rest of the book ... just skip to the mushy conclusion.

I guess this is as far as I can get tonight on this piece ... tired and back-sore. I am always annoyed by liberals ... secularists, if you will ... who feel compelled to interpret the idiocy of religion in a warm, fuzzy light. Religion was once ineluctable, unavoidable. It is now a curse. We need to find a way to obviate it, not to re-invest in it.

Call things by their real names.

I'll try to get back to hashing this book up on another, hopefully more lucid, occasion.

Postpostcolonialism

Sitting outside at the Cafe Flore, my long-time haunt, with only intermittent Internet access. Beautiful windy Sunday afternoon in the old town ... totally sexy young gay guy holding forth beside me on some sort of enthusiastic self-discovery theme. Like old times at the Flore in the early 80s when I sat here afternoon after afternoon consuming the battles of Napoleon, drinking too much coffee, arguing with passing fellow gay libbers, taking the sun in considerably less clothing than I prefer nowadays.

That's not why I am writing. I have been having a little trouble settling on a book to read ... sometimes these little interludes in reading can get protracted when you work for a living because the stretches necessary to devour a book do not present themselves daily.

[Overheard conversations are both alluring and annoying ... in a discussion of acting and life, the cute one is trying to defend the notion that notwithstanding artifice, there is a baseline of honesty which one cannot breach. His interlocutor is trying to defend the notion that a certain level of dishonety is necessary and not be bothered about. I'm with the cute guy. As this develops, I am more and more intrigued.]

So I tried mowing through Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, but it is all a little obvious and vastly too vast ... when an author disposes of the first three dynasties of Chinese history in 10 pages, and when I learn nothing from it ... well, it was just too boring. So I thought I would take a detour through Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization as a post script to having read Justin Pollard's richly rewarding biography of Alfred the Great: the Man who Made England. I heard Cahill speak last year at MRU (where I work) and he gave a riveting and entertaining off-the-cuff lecture about death. I subsequently read his Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. He's great fun ... like being a culture-vulture tourist in history. But it slowly dawns on his reader that this is a great, long-winded, undeniably fascinating and well-written but nevertheless revanchist defence of Catholicism. It gets a little nettlesome, and evidently his craftiness was somewhat less subtle when he wrote the Irish book.

I am no fan of Augustine ... this will not surprise. I like to argue that two of the most disastrous lives in religious thought are Paul and Augustine who between them managed to muck up any possibility that Christianity might be liberation with their death-obsessed loathing of the senses. This is what Cahill writes concerning Augustine's flirtation with Manicheism:

For a while, [Manicheism] let Augustine off the hook ... it absolved him from any responsibility for his raging lusts ... it was a made-to-order religion for a smart young provincial who needed to explore every dark corner of the the boiling city and experience every dark pleasure it had to offer and at the same time think himself above the herd. But it couldn't keep up with Augustine's fearlessly inquiring mind. Like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormonism, it was full of assertions, but could yield no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect. [my italics]

Ah, the conceit of the Catholics. Sublime. To paraphrase the Mohammedans, there is no system but the one system ... the Catholic system. Everything else is sterile. (I would certainly agree that Jehovah's Witness-ism and Mormonism are sterile, but that is a subset of the sterility of religion.) Then there is the knowing nodding about dark pleasures. What is so bloody dark about pleasure? Why do intellect and system and genius have to start with the rejection of the senses? This is an obscene conceit whose only proof is its own infinite repetition. And it is a little rich to imply that the "system" was in place when Augustine more or less invented the bulk of Catholic doctrine out of thin air and his own self-loathing. Christians in those days were a fractious lot who barely agreed on anything including, and especially, the nature of Jesus.

There is a lot of this sort of religious conceit about its own exclusive depth these days, and more intensely in the last little while. The obvious deadliness of religion in the current era is such that even the supine press has to note the rise in atheistic or secular revulsion at all of it. After each new atheist tome, there are various backhanded ... Cahillesque, if you will ... defenses of religion ... to whit, that morality is only possible with religion, that atheism is sterile, the poetry of the spheres kind of lunacy. And then there is the argument, which is at the core of Cahill's unadmitted defense of Catholicism, that European civilization is founded on Catholicism or Christianity, that there is no Europe without it, and by implication that we should be worshipful towards it.

I'll get back to this in a moment. But this rising debate between consistent atheists and secularized apologists for religion takes place in the context of a political period that I like to call post-post-colonialism. Among humanists ... terminology for delineating who we are talking about in these zones tends to be vexatious, but secondary, I think, to the argument ... among humanists, I think there is a rising but embarassing understanding that colonialism was a multivalent as opposed to a monolithic phenomenon. Colonialism was not an exclusively moral impulse, but rather the moral reflux that followed upon the history. That is to say that the long progress of European civilization put it in a position of rising power and military and technological superiority at a time when many of the places it conquered were in political torpor and all of them were technologically weaker. This historical judgment is not moral, but that is not to say that a morality did not flow from the circumstances, and that we can readily reject that morality after the fact ... that is, now.

But how do we explain the political, military, and technological superiority of Europe at the moment when colonialism's rather short reign began? Is it Catholicism, or Christianity, or the Protestant Reformation? Is it climate? Is it the millennium and a half of competing micro-states? Is it the Enlightenment?

An a propos review appeared today in the New York Times, "The Political and the Divine", a review of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla ... you will have to read this right away, as the Times shoves everything into its vault after only seven days ... I know they are trying to make money, and I subscribe online precisely in order to have access to their vault, but it is a sad drag on the national conversation that everything in this flagship publication disappears in a week. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein starts by writing that "Some of us have been taking the European Enlightenment a little bit for granted." And she goes on to note, not without some sympathy, that Lilla argues that "Hobbes's thinking on the religious impulse [i.e., that it arises because man is a frightened ignoramus] [is] both historically pivotal and psychologically simplistic ... The religious impulse isn't merely a matter of man's cringing self-protective fear; it can also be an expansive response toward the universe, morality and freedom, and a strain of post-Enlightenment thinking, featuring thinkers of the caliber of Kant, struggled to do justice to religion's expansive aspects."

According to Goldstein, Lilla argues that the Enlightenment occurred only because of "Christianity’s own fundamental ambiguities — torn between a picture of God as both present and absent from the temporal realm, an ambivalence powerfully represented by the paradoxes of the Trinity — that made it 'uniquely unstable,' subject to a plurality of interpretations that became institutionalized in sectarianism, and hence to several centuries’ worth of devastating upheaval.” Goldstein has a lovely turn of phrase. In reference to this, she writes: "Or as I would less soberly paraphrase his point: Christian political theology encouraged the development of Enlightenment progressiveness the way that runaway mitosis encourages the discovery of cancer cures."

There's something here, of course. The Europe we know ... and the larger European civilization which through its bastard child, The United States, dominates the world, arose through, or leastwise in the company of, Christianity. But Christianity proved susceptible to science and rationality in a way that, straightforwardly, Islam has not proven itself, notwithstanding the monotonously reiterated fact that it once was more scientific than its contemporary Christ-lovers.

Here is where we return to Cahill. The fact that seculars ... the children of the Enlightenment ... need to contemplate the role of religion is not an entrée to a revisited Catholicism. It did happen the way it did, and we need to know and understand it. But that is not, ipso facto, an argument for a return to a church which, every day these days, proves what a decrepit wheezing old biddy it is.

[Alas, the fascinating discussion next to me ultimately foundered on the shallow shores of multiculturalism ... identity and background and colonialism and all that. The cute guy ended up being silent for quite a stretch as the studly other guy lectured him on how he should think. All the vitality of the discussion drains away ... cutey tries to start it up again by returning to his favorite word ... liminal. I want to chime in, but I am twice their age and cranky as hell. It eventually resurrected itself ... they are quite a vital pair. ... omigawd, cutey has an iPhone. The other guy is actually quite a stud, Brazilian, I think. It feels like they are cruising each other, but are lost in this by reason of the deep discussion. I've had that experience where the intellectual nature of the conversation makes it impossible to leap back to the sensual ... a bit like having Augustine sitting in on your moves. ... Eventually they part, but not before being certain that each of them plans to end up at Martini's at Valencia and Market. If I weren't such an ole fart, I'd go just to watch what ends up happening.]

Sir Salman

Bravo to the Brits for knighting Salman Rushdie. Predictably, the pustulent zealots who terrorize the Muslim world are rioting again, calling for killings and slaughter and maimings. They're good at that, their only stock in trade. We ... and by we I mean rational lovers of freedom ... we need to remind these swaggering bigots that we have a history too. We fought religious bigotry in our world for centuries, and we beat it back. We will not be dragged back into the dungeon in which these monsters live and where they drool and rub their hands in glee as they torture their victims.

Salman Rushdie is without a doubt one of the greatest English authors of the period, perhaps in history. When I was at Cal, I taught his Midnight's Children, an epic saga set in Bombay during the birth of India and the horrid Partition visited upon Indians not by the British but by bigoted Islamists. Graduate students often end up being rather sequestered in what they study. My tiny, fraught-with-squabbling department was predominantly concerned with South Asian studies, and the few us involved in Southeast Asia had little choice but to teach South Asian material. I viewed it as an opportunity to get out of my sequestered life for a bit, and I chose to teach the literature of Partition because I had never read it before ... if I could not stay ahead of a bunch of freshmen, then I didn't deserve to be teaching them. I remember that reading of Midnight's Children as one of the intellectual oases of my graduate career.

Two little quotes, out of context, that illustrate both his style and his prescience:

Is it possible to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival?

And this paragraph that ends the book:

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is their privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

Salman Rushdie is my hero. Shame on his professional Muslim haters. They have nothing to offer but the bile of their frothing nightmares.