America’s Political Prisoners Languish In DC Gitmo (9-13-22)

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Luke Ford

0:30 Does America have political prisoners?
02:00 Tucker on America’s crime wave
30:00 Capitol rioter accused of hitting cops with stick, https://www.courthousenews.com/capitol-rioter-accused-of-hitting-cops-with-stick-promises-to-be-on-best-behavior-if-granted-pretrial-release/
35:00 Videos Show How Rioter Rosanne Boyland Was Trampled in Stampede at Capitol, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/us/rosanne-boyland-capitol-riot-death.html
41:30 Richard Spencer against free speech
43:00 Kiwi Farms taken down
1:18:40 Tim Pool
1:29:30 Nick Fuentes and January 6 riots
1:31:30 Gilbert Gottfried and Norm MacDonald

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New York Times Devastating Expose Of Hasidic Schools (9-12-22)

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:40 In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html
02:00 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
04:00 The anti-semitic accusation
35:00 Agudath Yisrael, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agudat_Yisrael
1:01:00 Tucker Carlson on the 21st anniversary of 9-11
1:26:40 Moral Injury – Dr. John Doris, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxLNKpLcU1k
1:28:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
1:40:00 When there are people blocking your right of way on a public thoroughfare, do you say a loud “Excuse me!”?

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Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Nicole Hemmer:

* Ronald Reagan, himself a radio and television host, set out to repeal the Fairness Doctrine from the start of his presidency, something his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally accomplished in 1987. 26
Unlike Reagan, Gingrich had not always been opposed to the Fairness Doctrine. When Congress first tried to reinstate it, Gingrich signed on as a cosponsor. And he was not alone: in 1987 the Fairness Doctrine had plenty of conservative supporters, from Gingrich and Trent Lott, to Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan, to the Heritage Foundation and Ralph Reed. These conservatives, though generally fans of Reagan-era deregulation, believed that the Fairness Doctrine could be a useful tool to get conservative voices on air. If it were true, as conservatives contended, that liberal bias permeated US media, then a regulation requiring political balance could be a powerful weapon for conservative activists. 27
What conservative supporters of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 did not foresee, however, was the rise of right-wing talk radio. The Limbaugh juggernaut suddenly left the right wary of government regulation that might be used to hem in the popular radio host, who by the early 1990s was on over six hundred stations with an estimated twenty million listeners. Overnight, a bipartisan piece of legislation that had previously passed through Congress handily became anathema to Republicans. Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal dubbed the proposed legislation the “Hush Rush bill,” making clear that any vote for the legislation would be considered a vote against Limbaugh. The new bill went nowhere. 28
Once the Hush Rush crusade had passed, Gingrich and Limbaugh teamed up again to help kill antilobbying legislation. It was an odd crusade for Gingrich, who had built his reputation as a reformer but, in reality, was weaponizing ethics complaints to topple Democratic leaders. His biggest coup was successfully pressuring Democratic Speaker Jim Wright to resign in 1989 after stirring up an ethics scandal. While his intent was obvious—to take out prominent Democrats—he always insisted he was genuinely committed not only to reform but to cutting back on congressional luxuries and privileges. He had been hard at work on the Contract with America’s reform agenda, and a few months earlier he’d even given up his chauffeured car after his primary opponent attacked him for the extravagance. 29
Gingrich understood that opposing the lobbying reform bill cut against his arguments about ethics and reform. But he also knew that lobbyists had become a critical part of the apparatus connecting grassroots conservative organizations (and those that claimed to be grassroots) to Republican politicians in Washington. The reforms wouldn’t come soon enough to hamstring the GOP in the 1994 campaign, but they could annihilate the conservative political apparatus if enacted. So Gingrich, in addition to undertaking his own aggressive campaign against the bill, activated the other centers of power within the conservative movement.

* But the popularizers of this new racism, who wrote books like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve , Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism , and Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation , presented their ideas with all the trappings of intellectual respectability. Their heavily footnoted books brimmed with charts and references to scholarly works. And they touched a nerve: each was treated seriously by established news outlets and at times even caught the eye of Democratic moderates who found the scientific-sounding books to be a modern alternative to rank bigotry in their efforts to appeal to white voters.

* “Time to rethink immigration?”
That was the question National Review asked on its cover in June 1992—a moment when, other than Pat Buchanan, not many Americans were thinking about immigration at all. Just a few years earlier, George H. W. Bush had signed bipartisan legislation to increase immigration to the United States with a focus on family reunification and skilled workers. The legislation had also created a commission to study immigration policy, which was quietly at work in Congress. But as a political issue, it did not appear to be top of mind for most Americans, garnering little notice in the 1992 election.
Still, the cover story caused a stir. The author, Peter Brimelow, was an immigrant himself—he grew up in Lancashire, England, before eventually settling in New York City—as was the editor who commissioned it. Brimelow had been through the process of becoming a US citizen, and what he saw as he waited in the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) revolted him. Comparing the INS waiting room to the tenth circle of hell, he declared there was “something distinctly infernal about the spectacle of so many lost souls waiting around so hopelessly, mutually incomprehensible in virtually every language under the sun.”
So far, he could be describing the frustrations of any bureaucratic experience. But he had some other thoughts on the inhabitants of the room. They struck him as docile in the face of the INS’s opaque and seemingly arbitrary rules, and he mused that such docility may have been “imbued in them by eons of arbitrary government in their native lands.” One other thing struck him about that waiting room, something he’d noticed elsewhere in his adopted home of New York: “Just as when you leave Park Avenue and descend into the subway, on entering the INS waiting rooms you find yourself in an underworld that is almost entirely colored.” 1
He elaborated on that idea of a colored underworld in his book Alien Nation , released in 1995. The book revolved around what he called “a plain historical fact”: “the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has always been white.” The immigration patterns of the past quarter century, however, had threatened to change that, triggering a “demographic mutation” that was steadily replacing the country’s “specific ethnic core” with one that looked more like the people waiting alongside him in the INS offices. To defend that white ethnic core, Brimelow concluded, the United States would have to enact restrictive immigration laws that heavily favored white Western countries. 2
Doing so would require repealing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with a racist quota system that limited immigration to almost exclusively white European migrants. Brimelow wanted that system back. Even though he argued that immigration—both authorized and unauthorized—had grown much too quickly and should be dramatically scaled back, he also railed against any limits on eastern European immigration, believing that the United States could easily assimilate those white migrants. He insisted that this was about not race but culture : immigrants from the “Third World,” if they arrived in large numbers, simply could not fully assimilate into US culture and, being poorer and less educated, would tax every system in the country, from welfare, to jobs, to health care, to the environment.
Brimelow’s insistence that his argument was not about race was undercut not only by his repeated emphasis on whiteness but by his distinction between earlier waves of immigration and the post-1965 pattern, which he described as dangerously dominated by “visible minorities.” He nonetheless swatted back the charge of racism in his introductory chapter. “Because the term ‘racist’ is now so debased,” he wrote, “I usually shrug such smears off by pointing to its new definition: anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal .” 3
That preemptive claim did not, of course, stop reviewers from pointing out the racism in the book. But it did show how Brimelow approached his critics: by framing his ideas as controversial truths that had been walled off from the realm of acceptable conversation. “The country is being transformed against its will, by accident, in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of the world, to no visible economic gain,” he told Brian Lamb in an interview about the book on C-SPAN. “And you’re not supposed to talk about it, so of course I couldn’t resist,” he added, his thin lips curling into a smile, as though he’d dipped into a tempting dessert rather than engaged in handwringing about the shrinking white majority. 4
Brimelow’s book grabbed attention for a number of reasons. His journalistic bona fides (he was a senior editor at Forbes and an editor at National Review ), his lilting northern English accent, his branding as a controversialist—all of these allowed him to present his arguments about race and immigration on national platforms throughout the mid-1990s. He had learned something that Pat Buchanan had figured out when he first contemplated a presidential run: “The principal press bias is not a liberal bias. It’s a bias for a good fight. The press loves to see a fight start, and hates to see it end.” Both men understood how media worked because they had been part of the journalism world for decades, connections that won them a hearing for their arguments about the superiority of white Western civilization and how best to defend it. 5
But Alien Nation , which Newsweek ’s Jerry Adler described as “one of the most widely discussed books of 1995,” also grabbed attention because it landed in the midst of a newly politicized debate over immigration. Across the United States in the 1990s, the politics of immigration were rapidly changing. Buchanan’s call for a border wall in 1992 looked prescient two years later, when California state politics exploded over Proposition 187. The proposition, if enacted, would strip undocumented immigrants of access to any social service, including public education. It passed with overwhelming majorities and the support of Democrats as well as Republicans. With the new bipartisan embrace of immigration restriction, Buchanan went even further, calling for new limitations on authorized immigration as well. He also veered away from economic arguments against immigration and toward something different: arguments about culture, whiteness, and the American identity that would become a defining feature of the neo-nativism of the 1990s.

* Both parties would shift right on immigration in 1993 and 1994. Both tended to frame the debate in fiscal and economic terms that, on their surface, were unemotional hard-numbers appeals. Yet, in both parties the actual debate over immigration took on a darker tone of invasion, criminality, and decline. When talking about immigration, Feinstein emphasized overcrowded schools and housing shortages. And while she never said, “They’re stealing your jobs,” “They’re cheating your children,” “They’re why you can’t afford to buy a house,” the implications were clear. They were even clearer in Wilson’s infamous border-crossing ad. It featured grainy video of migrants crossing the border while a narrator gravely warned of the ceaseless flow of Mexican migrants, evoking images of an invasion from the south.

* When he initially explored the argument for Losing Ground in a pamphlet he wrote for the Heritage Foundation, a donor read it and said it should be given a book-length treatment. Serious fund-raising—to the tune of $125,000—went to the project, setting Murray up at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, to write the book. 27
The Manhattan Institute was less thrilled with his next project. When Murray signed on to write The Bell Curve , the think tank’s leaders couldn’t stomach the genetic component of his argument. They severed their relationship with Murray after learning he was writing the book, at which point the American Enterprise Institute scooped him up. Murray and Herrnstein went ahead with the project, knowing that if it was already shaking things up in the planning stages, the book was destined to make a splash when it landed.
Of course, it was one thing to court controversy and another to be cast out as an extremist. Here, Murray benefited greatly from the way the mainstream press treated The Bell Curve . One reviewer, Charles Lane, writing in the New York Review of Books , refused to pull his punches. He noted that the book relied on studies from white nationalist and eugenicist sources and that their conclusions shared a great deal with those sources. “Both sought to restore the scientific status of race, and to reintroduce eugenic thinking into the public policy debate.” But in other coverage of the book, its sources and conclusions were rarely presented so baldly, and even when they were, they were bracketed by Murray’s insistence that the book was not racist. This matters, because, while it did land on the best-seller list, most Americans would encounter The Bell Curve through articles like the sprawling, twelve-page story that appeared in New York Times Magazine the week the book came out: a look at Murray living the high life while calling for the end of welfare for the poor. 28
Others would read about it in the New Republic , which devoted most of an issue to The Bell Curve , reinforcing the notion that controversy sold, even as it roiled the institutions that it touched. The decision to publish the excerpt triggered an explosive fight at the New Republic . Editor Andrew Sullivan had initially planned to simply run the excerpt as a cover story for the magazine. But that decision met with fierce resistance within the publication, leading to a lengthy series of rebuttals that ran alongside the excerpt. The editorial note that introduced the “Race & IQ” issue applauded the magazine’s courage in running Murray and Herrnstein’s work and denounced some of the internal objectors as illiberal. “If the TNR editors who authored some of the responses had had their way,” the opening essay read, “the debate before you—and the arguments of those very editors—would never have seen the light of day.” 29
In addition to framing publication of The Bell Curve excerpt as a matter of free and open debate, the opening essay went one step further: it declared that the book’s authors were not racist and that their findings were true. “A magazine should publish what is true. Sometimes the truth is intricate and ambiguous, which is why a debate may be needed to reveal the core of the matter.” It also bought in to the notion that Herrnstein and Murray were offering up a hidden truth: something unspeakable but accurate. For magazines like the New Republic , spotlighting The Bell Curve , even though it caused significant disruption at the publication, had important upsides: it reinforced their brand as defenders of free speech and purveyors of dangerous—but necessary—ideas.

* In response to the publication of The End of Racism , two Black conservatives at AEI, Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson, resigned in protest. In a joint interview, they denounced D’Souza’s book as “an anti-black pejorative” written in “an intemperate, irreverent, insulting way.” Both men had previously argued that at least some inequality was driven by what they saw as “dysfunctional behavior” in Black communities, but D’Souza’s screed landed differently. “We’ve been called Uncle Toms, which we are not,” Loury said. “But to be silent in the face of this book, written by a conservative colleague, would make us Uncle Toms.” 37
The resignations were not the first sign that this turn toward scientific and cultural racism was driving a wedge between Black conservatives and the rest of the movement. Loury had already gone through a split with the neoconservative magazine Commentary after it refused to run his review of The Bell Curve . Now he would sever ties with AEI over The End of Racism . D’Souza and Murray would remain at the think tank for years, part of what one critic called AEI’s “race desk”—which now had no Black conservatives. More than that, AEI had now rewarded the politics of outrage, outrage, making clear that it valued precisely the kind of controversy that led to Loury’s and Woodson’s resignations. 38
For D’Souza, it was all upsides. His and Brimelow’s and Murray’s experiences served, for a conservative movement that had grown uncertain about how best to talk about race, as proof of concept for how to use controversy to gain stature and win big advances in the post-Reagan conservative movement.

* Nineteen ninety-five was Laura Ingraham’s year. You could find her everywhere. Settled in the driver’s seat of her army-green Range Rover, zipping through Washington, DC, at sixty mph. Lounging in the back of a black limousine en route to the airport to make that evening’s taping of Politically Incorrect . On the cover of New York Times Magazine in a leopard-print miniskirt, arms crossed and chin jutting up in a defiant pose. “It’s getting a little crazy,” she told a Wall Street Journal reporter writing a profile of her that fall, “but it’s fun.”
Practically overnight, Ingraham had become one of the most sought-after conservative commentators in the country, the breakout star of a new group of right-wing women pundits. Young, telegenic professionals, they marketed themselves as next-generation conservatives: stylish, outrageous, media savvy, and steeped in pop culture.

* While the 1990s marked a turning point for right-wing media, which flourished online and on air, places like the new cable channel Fox News were not the main breeding grounds for the new brand of conservative pundit. Like most up-and-coming stars of the right, Ingraham made her way into the spotlight as a right-wing voice in mainstream outlets. She was a regular on Bill Maher’s comedy show Politically Incorrect , where she learned to blend politics with humor and outrage. She wrote occasional op-eds for the New York Times and worked as a pundit for CBS before being given her own show on the new cable network MSNBC in 1996. The style often credited to Fox News—the flashy graphics, punch-to-the-face punditry, and leggy blonde anchors—had been well-developed elsewhere first.

* Though she seemed like an overnight success, Ingraham had been laying the groundwork for a career in punditry for over a decade by the time she appeared on the cover of New York Times Magazine . Her career flowed from two main tributaries: the Dartmouth Review and the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). Those conservative institutions played a significant role in shaping the identity and style that would fuel her success in nonconservative outlets in the mid-1990s.
She arrived at Dartmouth in 1981, a few years after Dinesh D’Souza, and quickly fell in with him and the rest of the crew at the Dartmouth Review . Under his tutelage, she honed her ability to provoke liberals and snag headlines. She became editor of the Review after D’Souza graduated, practicing the same style of provocation publishing that had come to define the paper.

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Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Luke Ford

I first read this book two years ago and I still can’t get it out of my head.

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book by two Roman Catholics:

* Our argument, to put it all too simply, is that the development of the historical-critical method in biblical studies is only fully intelligible as part of the more comprehensive project of secularization that occurred in the West over the last seven hundred years, and that the politicizing of the Bible was, in one way or another, essential to this project. By politicization, we mean the intentional exegetical reinterpretation of Scripture so as to make it serve a merely political, this-worldly (hence secular) goal . Since this effort was largely undertaken by those who embraced a new secular worldview, the effect was to subordinate the method of interpreting Scripture to secular political aims. This subordination was essential in the early development of the modern historical-critical method.

* Jon Levenson: “historical criticism is the form of biblical studies that corresponds to the classical liberal political ideal.”

* For Troeltsch, the necessary effect of applying the historical method to Scripture was and is “the disintegration of the Christian world of ideas. . . .” “Once applied to the scientific study of the Bible and church history,” declared Troeltsch, “the historical method acts as a leaven, transforming everything and ultimately exploding the very form of earlier theological methods.” 39 The reason for this disintegration (or explosion), according to Troeltsch, is the irreconcilable difference that exists between the earlier dogmatic method, which presupposes certain historical facts, like the Resurrection, that stand outside a purely secular understanding of history, and the modern historical method, which assumes “secular history reconstructed by critical historiography.” 40 Secular history assumes that miracles cannot happen or at least such miracles cannot be verified by the historical method. More accurately, secular history assumes that all alleged supernatural beings or events can be explained in natural terms.
Since according to Troeltsch the historical method is essentially opposed to the dogmatic, then application of the historical method to Scripture can only result in treating it from the secular point of view—as one would any other artifact in the history of religions. The result would seem to be a complete relativizing of Christianity that, Troeltsch claimed, would indeed be “the consequence of the historical method only within an atheistic or a religiously skeptical framework.” Troeltsch, a liberal Protestant, asserted that he was seeking “to overcome this relativism through the conception of history as a disclosure of the divine reason,” wherein revelation is replaced by a “philosophy of history.”

* “It is difficult to overestimate the significance the nineteenth century has for biblical interpretation. It made historical criticism the approved method of interpretation. The result was a revolution of viewpoint in evaluating the Bible. The Scriptures were, so to speak, secularized. The Biblical books became historical documents to be studied and questioned like any other ancient sources. The Bible was no longer the criterion for the writing of history; rather history had become the criterion for understanding the Bible.”

* The systematic exclusion of the supernatural and the consequent attempt to give natural explanations for events like miracles, theophanies, and other alleged irruptions of the divine or angelic effectively secularizes Scripture, making it one among many other manifestations of religious belief without verifiable substance. It relativizes and privatizes belief, or simply eliminates it as unscientific. In doing so, it removes Christianity as a political force, making of it at best a bearer of nondogmatic moral teachings that undergird the political order. There is no doubt that this transformation of Christianity accords nicely with the modern secular political aims. The question we pose here is: Did this happen by accident or design?

* According to Levenson, the historical-critical approach has an intrinsic aim, not found in Scripture itself, of producing the beliefs that accord with modern secular political aims , where religion is either reduced to mere private belief unsupported or rejected by reason and science, or made to serve as a moral prop for a particular kind of political order. The defining secular political aim is to keep religion from disturbing or significantly determining public life—an understandable aim, given that the modern historical-critical method was largely forged during and just after the great “wars of religion” that so disturbed political order in the late 1500s and a large portion of the 1600s. 45 But to say that it is an understandable aim only highlights the fact that it was an alien one, forced upon the text, rather than derived from it.

* Averroes (or Ibn-Rushd, c. 1126–1198) was a Muslim philosopher [who] argued in his On the Harmony Between Religion and Philosophy that there is indeed one truth, but it is known according to the capacity of the knowers: at the bottom are those open only to rhetorical persuasion, in whom appeal is made to the imagination and the passions; above these are those capable of dialectic, who are satisfied with the probable arguments of theology; and finally, at the top and fewest in number, are the philosophical men who demand rigorous rational demonstration. Needless to say, the hierarchical ranking entails a superiority of the truths of natural reason to those of revelation, but it also includes the notion of control of the masses by the philosophers using the myths of religion.

* What should be done when the philosophical arguments of Aristotle contradicted the truths of Christian faith? Aristotle could be rejected (the radical Augustinian approach); Aristotle could be corrected and worked into a synthesis (St. Thomas); or the truths of his philosophy could stand, in contradiction, alongside the truths of faith, creating a kind of double, incompatible set of truths, the truth according to reason and the truth according to revelation…

* “The specifically political feature of Marsilius’s Averroism consists in his completely secular approach to all aspects of the state, including those connected with religion, theology, and the church. The Averroist method meant that problems could be investigated by rational procedures alone in complete independence of faith and of the theological tradition founded upon faith.”

* Spiritual authority resides in the Bible, not in the ecclesial hierarchy; yet Marsilius places the authoritative interpretation of the Bible ultimately in the hands of the civil legislator, the legislator humanus. He argues that the power to interpret doubtful passages of Scripture resides not in the pope or any other bishop, but in a general council, one whose members are ultimately determined by human legislators.

* The shift of authority is not from the pope and council to the text itself, but from the pope and council to the expert in interpreting the text.
Herein lie the first awakenings of the modern biblical exegete. In regard to the order of authority, we are far closer in these passages to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century understanding of the role of the professional scriptural scholar than we are to the sixteenth-century attempt to root authority in the biblical text as against the papacy. The “expert” stands in authoritative judgment not just above Church councils and the papacy, but also above the inexpert who are the vast majority of the faithful. He even stands above the text itself, insofar as it is his expertise that unlocks its definitive meaning.

* In rejecting universals, nominalism rejected Aristotelian forms, and this rejection, we recall, was theological at root. The forms, even understood as ideas in the Divine Mind, seemed to Ockham to limit God’s will. But the elimination of forms left reality as a collection of essentially unrelated particulars, each of which, presumably, could then be an object of empirical scrutiny. 128 Yet empirical examination of sheer particularity as such is notably difficult. The human mind understands more by similarity than difference. Rather than being left with an intractable mass of particulars, natural philosophers such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton would substitute mathematical forms as the new universals, the ideal forms that define the shape and activity of passive or inert matter. For most theologians in the seventeenth century, these mathematical forms were taken to be impressed by God according to His will; they were the “forms” of His commands, or laws, of nature. Since for these theologians the laws had their origin in God’s will, the laws could be otherwise, and so, presumably, would the mathematical forms they took. 129 But again, the theological belief in the ultimate contingency of the laws was short-lived. Within a century, the inner necessity of mathematics was identified with the laws of nature, and nature came to be governed by its own laws, the result being that the “necessitarianism” of mathematics drove out the possibility of divine action (and soon enough, the Divine).

* Ockham’s denial of universals allowed for, but did not of itself cause, the replacement of Aristotelian forms with mathematical forms. The most accurate characterization might be that Ockham’s nominalism left a vacuum that would be filled by another kind of universal. If the modern account of the laws of nature did indeed have its origin in Ockham’s desire to safeguard God’s omnipotent will, 130 these laws would soon enough break away from the will of God (in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and come to be considered self-subsisting causal powers that either limited or excluded divine action. One can hardly downplay the importance of this development for the judgment of nineteenth-century German scriptural scholars that the miraculous had to be excised from Scripture or be reduced to the mythological.

* Indeed, Wycliffe argues that, however worthy the idea of a Holy Roman Empire is in theory, the universality is impracticable because the vast geographical distances and obstacles (such as mountains and seas) and diversity of languages and customs make such rule impossible; therefore, “the terrestrial Empire ought to be dissolved”.

* Wycliffe’s participation in English messianic nationalism lent tremendous weight to the establishment of a national Church, one (again) in which the king ruled, in the style of David and Solomon, the priesthood. Since the focus is on the nation, the English nation, Wycliffe’s exegesis in support of a national Church could not help but involve a politicization of Scripture. If England is the new Israel, salvation history as found in Scripture must be reinterpreted with English history as its culmination.

* For Wycliffe, Scripture alone could only mean Christ alone, for He and He alone is the “Book of Life,” the “Scripture that cannot be destroyed.” The difficulty with this position is that the high-flying metaphysical realism that makes it intelligible cannot easily pass into common coin (and, indeed, becomes suspect anyway with the condemnation at Constance). The “decay” of the position into a simple notion of sola scriptura, in which the individual reader of the text claims immediate access to its truth, was inevitable, and indeed occurred in Lollardry. In fact, it was inherent in Wycliffe’s original argument. Where else was Christ to be known but through the Scripture? And if the Church and the hierarchy were not only corrupt, but likely among those damned by predestination, then all authority of interpretation was thrown back upon the individual believer. Since multiple interpretations will then naturally arise, the confusion will call for an authoritative clarification. Wycliffe would have this done by properly trained theologians, but since they are in service to the state, the remedy for clarification falls to the secular power. The practical effect will be for the state to settle theological disputes arising from multiple interpretations according to exigencies of state.

* Machiavelli is legendary as a teacher of evil, a man who counseled princes to cast away all notions of right and wrong and do whatever furthers their political causes, no matter how brutal or duplicitous.

* Machiavelli was deeply concerned with the interpretation of the Bible insofar as it served his purposes. It is central to his project, as a self-conscious founder of “new modes and orders,” that he must treat Holy Scripture in a most unholy way. The reason for this treatment is profoundly political, or to say it another way, fundamentally secular. In The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, Machiavelli asserts that, in contrast to the ancient, pagan vigorous and manly love of freedom, Christianity makes citizens effeminate and hence incapable of the rigors of true political freedom.

* Christianity is just one more religion, and as such can be treated with the same detached curiosity as the ancient pagan religions were treated by ancient sages. For Machiavelli—partly from his own character but also from witnessing the morally decrepit state of the lives of churchmen—this detached curiosity assumes that religion is a false but politically necessary and powerful tool for irreligious rulers to control their subjects. This is as true for popes as it is for great religious leaders (such as Moses) who appear in Holy Scripture.

* In order to understand Machiavelli’s intent, we must do that which is forbidden and, following Machiavelli’s lead, “reason about Moses.” We must treat Moses’ actions as we would those of Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and any other merely human, merely historical example. To do so, we must read the Bible alongside other ancient historical accounts, in the same kind of historical-critical treatment as one would any other historical work. This implies that one is considering the Bible’s author as one among equals with Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, and other eminent ancient pagan historians.
It is difficult to overemphasize the momentous effect of this great shift in the consideration of the Bible. The recovery of ancient texts in the Renaissance—in the deepest sense of recovery: a reading of pagan authors on their own terms, a consideration of what pagan sages said independently of Christianity and even in antagonism to it—contributed far more as a catalyst to modern secularization than many historians would lead us to believe. Our concern with Machiavelli in particular is the way he uses pagan authors as guides to reading the Bible as one would any other historical work, a mode of approach that contributes to the later historical-critical assumption that the Bible must be treated as one text among others. The assumption in both instances is that faith in the Bible as revealed actually obscures its real meaning, so that its real meaning can only be recovered, or better uncovered, by laying aside faith and deferring to history as known by reason. Machiavelli provides a template, an exercise in exegesis, which works to alert Christianized minds to long-buried pagan truths.

* Interestingly, Cyrus the Great is the only prince in the list found in both sacred and secular sources, both in the Old Testament (primarily in the prophets Isaiah and Ezra) and also, most notably, in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. That gives the reader a chance to compare the two accounts.

* Was Moses really offended by idolatry at Mt. Sinai on behalf of God, or did he merely order the slaughter of those Israelites who opposed his rule? Was Moses really guarding the priesthood in opposing the rebellion of Korah (Numbers 16), or eliminating his political opposition? Machiavelli later informs the reader, “whoever reads the Bible judiciously will see that since he [Moses] wished his laws and his orders to go forward, Moses was forced to kill infinite men who, moved by nothing other than envy, were opposed to his plans.”

* Religion provides political order, but political order is always particular, founded on particular soil with a particular people and with particular religious beliefs and rituals. What is essential, Machiavelli notes, is not the truth or falsity of each religion, but the power of its particular historical formation on a people, and the prudent prince should do everything he can to maintain it.

* Given the moral caliber of popes and cardinals, their use of Scripture to justify their indulgences, indiscretions, immorality, and naked political ambitions was an egregious, even epic, example of politicization—one that was clear to all of Europe. This hypocrisy not only stained the Roman Curia and brought about the splintering of Christianity in the Reformation (which had its own politicizing effects upon Scripture), but even more, served for centuries to come as an exemplar illustrating the alleged fundamental duplicity of all priests and all “organized” religion. In regard to modern scriptural scholarship, the effects will be multiple: the rejection, downplaying, or downgrading of the Old Testament priesthood as a corruption of the true religion (the true religion either embedded in a submerged layer of the Old Testament, or contained only in the New Testament); the exegetical excision of all nonmoral aspects of the Old and New Testament as harmful accretions, in an effort to purify Christianity of its harmful historical accidents; and finally, the treatment of the Bible itself, by those who have given up their faith entirely, as an earlier illustration of the corruption found in the Renaissance Roman Curia.

* His discovery of the “key” to the underlying motives of biblical figures created a new mode of exegesis, and Machiavelli therefore can rightly be considered as one of the earliest, and certainly the most influential, sources of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Even aside from Machiavelli, this suspicion defines itself against tradition. Since the orthodox treatment of the text assumes a unity of appearance and reality, orthodoxy itself becomes suspect, and the hermeneutics of suspicion thereby defines its exegetical approach against the traditio of interpretation.

* it is ultimately misleading to designate the historical-critical method as historical and critical, since history is understood according to the critical framework of a quite particular philosophy. Machiavelli’s treatment of Scripture as a history according to the mode of Livy is the founding paradigm.

* an especially notable trait of modern biblical exegesis is its adherence to some quite practical, this-worldly political or moral system that defines the exegetical framework by which the enlightened hermeneut parses the text. Using this framework, he finds (at the end of his labors) that some key figure in the Bible (be it Moses, Jesus Himself, or St. Paul) is really a Stoic, a common sense Englishman, a Deist, a Hegelian, an existentialist, or a Marxist revolutionary. All the passages that seemingly contradict such a surprising interpretation can be put down to the cleverness or benevolent condescension of the key figure in hiding his true identity, or the stupidity of the masses as manifested in the key figure’s disciples (who being unable to grasp the truth, embrace and then embellish a religion built upon a mythologized account of the key figure, complete with miracles).

* What makes Luther’s challenge historically significant is the combined force of his particular theological reformulation and the peculiar political context of his time. As some historians have remarked, if not for that political context, Luther’s challenge would likely have remained a merely local affair, quickly contained and diffused by the joint efforts of the emperor and the pope, and with the help of the German electors.
As R. W. Scribner and C. Scott Dixon rightly note, it is clear that “From the very beginning, the question of religious reform was so inextricably linked to political issues that it could never give rise to an unpolitical Reformation.” Nor to an unpolitical exegesis of Scripture.

* This substitution of the individual soul for the Church—which does indeed follow from his doctrine of justification by faith alone—eliminated in one stroke the necessity of the Church as the essentially distinct counterpart to the state, and by consequence, allowed the state to assume the structure of ecclesiastical authority over the individual believer-citizens.

* In Luther’s alternative ecclesiology, in which there is no real distinction between priest and lay, 187 the Church as a necessary, permanent, and divinely intended body of Christ that visibly mediates salvation has been made secondary and derivative to what becomes the primary relationship of salvation, the promises of God known through the biblical text to the individual soul.
Without this move, the characteristic privatization of religion in modernity, and hence its increasing removal from the public realm, would not have been possible, and even more, the religious affirmation of modern individualism, which gave it such strength as it arose in the seventeenth century, would have been far less powerful. But the most important effect was the removal of the Church as a visible entity, which allowed the state to fill the vacuum.

* Luther: “Everybody is not to be toyed with. Therefore God would have authorities so that there might be order in the world.”

This was a startling admission by Luther, especially in light of his notion of the priesthood of all believers and his earlier hopes that translating the Bible into the vernacular would finish the work he had begun. Luther was not the only one worried about Mr. Everybody. A magistrate’s report given during the Hanseatic Diets of 1525 complained that “everybody, and above all the uneducated, even women, dare to preach the Gospel and the Word of God . . . and using Christian freedom as a pretext, they live according to their own will and fancy, disregarding the ordinances and regulations. . . .” At the heart of the problem was exegesis: the “everybodies” were interpreting the words of the Gospel wrongly, twisting them “from what they really meant in order to please the common people . . . and this would lead to carnal freedom, which would be followed by revolts against the magistrates and bring about the ruin of towns.” 234
Exegesis soon became a widely recognized political and a theological problem. This is made quite clear in the debate between Luther and Karlstadt in regard to images. The direct implication of Luther’s position is that proper interpretation of the commandment against idolatry, and more important, its enforcement, must necessarily become a civil matter for “we are under our princes, lords, and emperors,” and “we must outwardly obey their laws instead of the laws of Moses.” 235 It is not surprising that exegetical divergences from Luther would soon be politically suppressed, and the proper interpretation politically impressed.

* We cannot overestimate the effect Luther’s public judgment of the canon had upon future scriptural scholarship. Ranking the books of the Bible according to a “true kernel,” thereby creating the “true touchstone for testing every book,” will take many forms over the next centuries, often in imitation of Luther’s emphasis on St. Paul, but sometimes in direct opposition, where St. Paul is the great distorter rather than illuminator of the “true canon.” Because it will become increasingly obvious—as it did for Luther’s own critics, both Protestant and Catholic—that individual books do not provide unanimous affirmation of the chosen kernel, exegetes will increasingly turn to sorting through individual texts, layering them according to authentic and spurious, early and late, pure and tainted passages, a tendency that will reaffirm the above-mentioned attempt to recover the original Gospel proclamation from the Scriptural text witnessing the decline.

* Luther’s goal was not to create the modern secular state, but to remove religious authority from the governing powers. While faith is to be grounded sola scriptura , the secular power does not use the Bible to govern. 265 The secular power governs by reason and the natural law, which do not pertain to the realm of the spirit, but do pertain to the realm of the flesh. Yet, as Cargill points out, this demotion of reason to merely secular concerns, and the elevation of faith completely above reason with no analogical connection between the two, bring about a kind of Averroism, however unintended. Faith is irrational rather than supernatural, and reason is entirely independent and thoroughly natural.

* Luther’s division of the sacred from the purely secular also prepared the way for acceptance of the modern assumption that the state is entirely a-religious and concerned only with the well-being of the body, and that religion is purely an inner, spiritual, and private concern (which we will see played out in John Locke). Luther thereby contributed to the West’s reception of a purely secular, materialistic notion of politics adumbrated by Marsilius and Machiavelli, and later enunciated by Hobbes and Locke, where government is defined solely by external coercion, bodily preservation, and physical comfort.

* Luther’s theological efforts seemed to ignite political rebellion among the lower orders. Luther well understood how politically combustible his theological position was. As he himself said, “Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany. Yea, I could have started such a little game at Worms that even the emperor would not have been safe.”

* As moral conditions declined, rather than improved, with time, “Luther preached more and more to emphasize the law.”

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Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt: the Politics of Order and Myth

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:

* In the years since World War II, the prevailing paradigm of politics has largely centred on the redistribution of resources. Hobbes and Schmitt, by contrast, help us appreciate two other conceptions of politics. Firstly, these thinkers averred that it is the problem of order not redistribution – which is the fundamental concern for any society. Secondly, both were acutely aware of the role played by myth: that is, how shared ideas – sometimes created for this very purpose – serve to promote order, social cohesion, and law-abiding behaviour.

* they actually provide a perspective that is quite different from that of the lion’s share of contemporary political thought.

* Future historians will perhaps consider the period between 1945 and, say, the 1990s as a historical parenthesis during which the problem of distributive justice over-shadowed other concerns in political thought. An influential – maybe even the – definition of politics in that epoch stated that politics was ‘the authoritative allocation of values for a society’ (Easton 1965, p. 50), that is, that it was essentially concerned with the distribution of goods.

* the most influential thinker of Anglo-Saxon academic political theory during that period, John Rawls, set
the agenda for the revival of normative inquiry precisely by addressing the question of who has and gets what as the essential problem of politics.

* But for Hobbes and Schmitt, the over-arching, perhaps overwhelming concern is the problem of war versus order. Politics is, then, primarily about controlling violence and maintaining order in the face of forces that undermine social cohesion and political authority.

* Max Weber’s famous definition of the state is precisely about this: the monopoly on violence is the essential property of the state.

* It could be argued that the perspective of order and violence is still under-represented not only in the social sciences – the sole exception being international relations – but also in contemporary political
philosophy. Moreover, it could be argued that recent developments, such as the rise of terrorism, violent political protests against ‘globalisation’, and the recurrent breakdown of order and social cohesion in many economically disadvantaged parts of the world, especially Africa, should inspire us to reorientate our inquiries toward the problem of order.

* For Hobbes, the fundamental problem is, famously, that ‘Nature [has made] men apt to invade, and destroy one another’, a problem that can only be solved by a sovereign wielding absolute power over them. And Schmitt, of course, says that a political community is not even political if it does not prohibit private revenge and retaliation, that is, maintain its monopoly on the political, at least in times of war.

* Hobbes’s implosive conception of consent, ‘every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth’.

* If order is the fundamental concern for any political community, then it cannot keep violence and civil unrest at bay only by means of the police, the judiciary, and the military. The fabric of society is more fragile and at the same time more robust than that. According to a very old tradition in political thought, political communities need not only people policing them, but also a common ethos for which to strive. In short, they need what could be called a myth…a set of ideas that is created for political purposes, that gives meaning to
the world and provides people and communities with common beliefs and values.

* So ideas can in some cases be more powerful than firearms. Stalin once contemptuously asked how many divisions the pope had, implying that military force was what really counted; today, there is a new pope who still
possesses no divisions of men and women under arms, yet he is, arguably, more powerful than the heirs of Stalin.

* Oakeshott’s vision is a dandyesque and authoritarian society whose members regard one another with detached yet courteous interest, whereas Schmitt’s involves the total state maintaining unity by telling and enacting the tale of other people as enemies.

* The task of the intellectual historian, after all, is not to be a kind of schoolmaster and to hand out good or bad marks for right or wrong interpretations of classical texts – rather, he or she must ask what choices underlay certain interpretations (even those demonstrably false), and what purposes they might have served.

* Schmitt did not stop to argue about – or even just to refute or to accept – Hobbes’s central claim about the state as the outcome of a collective authorization…

* Two things strike the careful reader of On human conduct: on the one hand, the emphasis Oakeshott placed – in almost Millian, Tocquevillian or Burckhardtian manner – on energy, initiative, adventure, risk, confidence and
engagement. More energy seemed a value in itself, and confident enactment of an adventure – even if it resulted in failure – infinitely preferable than any secure achievement of ‘suburban pleasures’. Now, time and again this particular perspective was in turn strengthened and more fully expressed with religious allusions. One was the image of civil association as a civitas peregrina that Oakeshott memorably described as “an association, not of pilgrims traveling to a common destination, but of adventurers each responding as best he can to the ordeal of consciousness in a world composed of others of his kind, each the inheritor of the imaginative achievements
(moral and intellectual) of those who have gone before and some joined in a variety of prudential practices, but here partners in a practice of civility the rules of which are not devices for satisfying substantive wants and whose obligations create no symbiotic relationship.”

* On the one hand, Hobbes shares a strong war/crime distinction with Schmitt. On the other hand, Hobbes never suggests that lethal enmity gives a ‘meaningful’ tension to human life. Hobbes also describes the way feverish human minds may imagine enemies where none exist.

* In both Political Theology and Roman Catholicism, Schmitt suggests that a dangerous, unqualified belief in humanity’s natural goodness motivates a peculiarly modern agenda bent on tearing down all forms of authority.
According to this view, Schmitt writes, once individuals live in complete, unencumbered freedom, all problems will become technical or economic rather than political or moral. This belief finds its definitive home in Soviet Russia, which Schmitt views as a frightening amalgam of irrational Eastern Christianity, radical anarchism, and the basest form of socialist materialism. The Russian Revolution signifies, for Schmitt, nothing less than a rebellion against the theistic notion that good must be granted, encouraged, or at least partially imposed upon man from outside, that is, transcendentally by God.

* In Political Theology, Schmitt sympathized with the responses to anarchism and socialism launched by Catholic counterrevolutionaries, such as Maistre, Bonald, and especially Juan Donoso Cortés, who promulgated the
belief that man is evil – pure and simple – and that any authority, as such, is good.

* Two changes in circumstance seem to have profoundly affected his ideas between the publication of Roman Catholicism and the composition of The concept of the political. Personally, Schmitt had broken bitterly with the Catholic Church after an embarrassing divorce and remarriage. More generally, the drastic economic, social, and political effects of the surrender terms dictated to Germany by the Allies at Versailles in 1919 had become more painfully apparent. These two situations almost simultaneously removed the explicitly Catholic, moral foundation of Schmitt’s intellectual efforts and transformed Western liberalism into an enemy of the same magnitude as Eastern anarchosocialism. Interestingly, Schmitt did not yet adopt a more hostile attitude
toward Jews in this era. Indeed, The concept of the political is dedicated to a Jewish friend from Schmitt’s youth who died serving Germany in the Great War; some of the most respectful passages of the work are reserved for Leftists of Jewish descent, Marx and Lukács; and, in an important lecture appended to the work, Spinoza – no less a bête noire for many anti-Semites than Marx or Freud – is placed right alongside Schmitt’s intellectual idol, Hobbes, as a chief representative of ‘the heroic age of occidental rationalism’.

* Two points support those who insist that the instances of anti-Semitism expressed by Schmitt at this time were merely rhetorical efforts to better ingratiate himself with the Third Reich: firstly, he never expressed such
sentiments in his pre-Nazi career; and, secondly, Schmitt’s anti-Semitism seemed to emerge only when Schmitt came under suspicion as a late-arriving and inauthentic Nazi and then intensified once he was openly denounced by the SS in their publication Das schwarze Korps. Conversely, the main objections to the ‘opportunism’ thesis can be summed up as follows: Schmitt persisted in the deplorable denunciation of Jews and Judaism in his postwar
work; and his Nazi-era anti-Semitism was too fervent and too deeply entangled with the substance of his arguments to be considered merely cosmetic.

* Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, an otherwise astounding interpretation of Hobbes’s use of symbolism, is a case in point. When explaining the collapse of the Hobbesian sovereign state,
what he considered to be the pinnacle of political theory and practice, Schmitt assigns to the ‘Jewish philosopher’, Spinoza, the central role in an esoteric passion play (LS, p. 55). Schmitt posits Hobbes’s absolutist state as a ‘mortal god’ that was betrayed by Spinoza on behalf of ‘his own Jewish people’ with dramatically detrimental consequences for Christians (LS, p. 60). The God-become-Man Leviathan state, who came to bring peace and security to humanity, was undermined by the ‘liberal Jew’, Spinoza; the latter used the
subjective freedom of conscience permitted by Hobbes to turn particularist societal forces against the unity of the state so as to benefit the interests of assimilating Jews (LS, p. 57). As Miguel Vatter brilliantly points out (2004, pp. 190–92), according to this narrative, Spinoza and the Jews effectively crucify divinity incarnate, the Leviathan state, on the cross of private conscience, unleashing chaos and disorder on the Christian world in the form of the Enlightenment, the age of revolutions, world wars, and even, at the deepest levels of the text, the mechanically oppressive and abusive Nazi state itself.

* Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar liberalism as a suicide pact closely tracked Hobbes’s argument that ‘those princes who permit factions, do as much as if they received an enemy within their walls: which is contrary to the subjects safety, and therefore also against the law of nature’ (Hobbes 1841, ch. xiii, §13, p. 176). Weimar Germany, forced to wear an off-the-shelf English suit (limited government) was an incoherent polity because ‘a multitude of men, enemies and subjects, living promiscuously together, cannot properly be termed a kingdom’ (Hobbes 1841, ch. xvii, §5, p. 256). This domestic incoherence, stoked by seditious domestic factions in league with foreign powers, redounded to the benefit of Germany’s mortal foes because of, to use Hobbes’s words, ‘Quarrels, Factions, and at last Warre’ (Hobbes 2005, ch. xviii, §15, p. 144). As a first step to solving this problem, the Tudor monarchy acted decisionistically…

* Arguing that constitutional limits on sovereign power could be crippling, especially in wartime, Hobbes compared constitutional government to playing tennis while being pushed around in a wheelbarrow by counselors who cannot agree among themselves.

* Liberalism can also cripple the state in confrontation with deadly enemies by a dogmatic adherence to freedom of trade. Hobbes and Schmitt agreed upon this basic idea as well. Private merchants can endanger national security by selling all manner of harmful technology to our enemies…

* Finally, liberalism can weaken the state and expose it to its enemies by cleaving dogmatically to the principle of publicity. Secrecy is essential for dealing with the enemy. This was one reason why Hobbes’s preferred monarchy to other forms of government: he associated ‘serious consultation’ with ‘Deliberations that ought to be kept secret’…

* It is difficult to imagine Hobbes being brought to nausea and despair by a peace treaty of any kind. He viewed the powerful psychological impact of group humiliation on the behavior of individuals as part of the human
comedy, not as a basis for his own political theory. Indeed, he was convinced that human beings would be better off if they could give less importance to enhancing their reputations and more importance to preserving their lives. This is why, in the end, Schmitt alleges that Hobbes had no serious concept of the enemy. Hobbes may have agreed that war was inevitable; but he never suggested that war made life meaningful and thrilling and serious. He did not imagine that facing an enemy would help degraded men escape a depoliticized social world. The
[awe-inspiring] state of Schmitt’s dreams, contrariwise, is not a peacekeeping state. Hobbes was morally attracted to the normal situation; Schmitt found normality boring.

* In his review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell said that capitalism and socialism offered people a good time, whereas Hitler offered people struggle, danger and death. Schmitt’s deadly conflict, shooting adrenaline through combatants’ veins, lifts them above the frivolity of consumerism. Schmitt even suggests that the value of life stems not from reasoning but rather emerges in a state of war where men inspirited by myths do battle.

* Hobbes calls himself ‘an enemy to Atheists’ (Hobbes 1841, ch. xiv, §19, p. 198, n. 2) not only because such an avowal is prudent exotericism, but also because he means it. True, Christianity’s principal contribution to political development has been religious civil war, a particularly virulent kind of bloodletting unknown to blood-drenched antiquity (Hobbes 1990, p. 63f). But religious sentiments and beliefs cannot be eliminated from human consciousness. It is therefore crucial to wrap secular authority in ‘the cloak of godliness’ (Hobbes 1990, p. 26), using mankind’s ‘Fear of things invisible’ (Hobbes 2005, ch. xi, §26, p. 86 and especially their ‘feare of damnation’ (Hobbes 1841, ch. vi, §11, p. 78) and ‘apprehension of everlasting torments’ (Hobbes 1841, ch. xxi, §5, p. 156) to discipline unruly subjects into obedience. If the sovereign does not lay hold of superstition and use it to master the reason of his subjects, then his rivals will. That is the thinking behind Hobbes’s important principle: ‘the authority of interpreting God’s Word, … belongs not to any foreign person
whatsoever’ (Hobbes 1841, xvii, §27, p. 293). He acts upon this principle himself, giving his own sovereignty-friendly interpretations of Holy Scripture – the hermeneutical equivalent of seizing the outworks from which ‘the enemy’ might otherwise impugn the civil power.

* In Behemoth, Hobbes wrote that Christian ecclesiastics gain sway over the minds of young men by making them feel guilty for their perfectly natural sexual desires.

* the Hobbesian ‘enemy’ is not simply chosen by the sovereign without any reference to a norm. Instead, the enemy, for Hobbes, is precisely the individual who violates the fifth law of nature, namely, compleasance.

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