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Religious ideas about the end of the world and other issues keep messing with our thinking.

The Modern Donatist Crisis: What the Fourth Century Roman Empire Can Tell Us About Today’s Left

A lot of what I write on this blog these days falls into the “comparative empire” school of writing. I make extended arguments by comparing some aspect of one or more pre-modern empires to a modern empire. I am going to do the same here but my argument is going to be less state-centred; the Roman state following the Crisis of the Third Century certainly comes into the story but it does not sit at the centre. Instead, a movement or set thereof within the empire is the centre of the comparison; and that movement is Christianity.

The Christianity that existed by the end of Constantine the Great’s imperial reign in 337 was radically different than the Christianity that existed a generation previously when Diocletian’s Great Persecution began in 302. The massive changes that produced the martial, state-sponsored heresy-policing Orthodox Catholic Church that Christianity had become by 337 were not just accepted. They were contested and vigorously resisted.

This resistance came to be known as the Donatist Controversy. And I want to argue that the heterogeneous set of social movements and ideologies known as “the Left” is very much like the similarly heterogeneous, diverse Christian movement of the late third century. And that we have been plunged, since the 1990s, into our own Donatist Controversy.

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

Christianity, from its inception, was riven with factionalism, as confirmed by the earliest scriptures in the New Testament. The Pauline epistles, dated to about 51 CE, are a record of disputes within the intentional communities founded by Paul as well as a larger dispute between Paul and Peter over questions of jurisdiction, revenue and compliance with Levitical ordinances. While we can see that, by the last decades of the first century, a proto-Catholic movement seeking to unify the factions had already appeared and attempted to smooth-over differences with its publication of Luke-Acts, the movement’s existence already attested to the belief on the part of many Christians that their movement was too factionalized and divided.

While it is difficult to assess the relative sizes of the different movements within Christianity, we can see that by the third century, early church historians like Irenaeus were already making long lists of all the different sects and factions that claimed the mantle of Christianity.

At the same time, members of these disparate factions had a lot in common and necessarily cooperated to advance or defend their shared interests.

Some, more moderate Christians, were little different than other residents of the Roman Empire. They served in the military; they owned slaves; they believed in Greek theories of physics; they paid taxes; they didn’t stand out at the baths because they were uncircumcised; they awaited resurrection at some distant future date when Jesus would return and take them up into the heavens.

Other Christians avoided all military service and other government jobs; they didn’t use slave labour; they adopted obscure Judean and Samaritan theories of physics; they dodged taxes; they avoided public baths or were received with scorn there because they were circumcised; they lived in hope that, any day now, Jesus would return and upend the socioeconomic order and declare the permanent Jubilee.

And there existed a wide range of Christian movements and sects between these two poles.

For more mainstream Christians, Christianity was about staying aloof from the ritual and political life of the empire so as to better sock money away for things like their kids’ education or invest in Christian burial societies that were much like modern life insurance companies, designed to take care of funerary and burial arrangements. There was a weekly Lord’s supper and they kept a low profile around the festivities for other gods because theirs was a jealous one.

And the Roman state wasn’t so concerned about them anyway. Since the reign of Trajan, the Empire had conducted few persecutions and generally adhered to a kind of “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy that Pliny the Younger, as a regional governor, had hammered-out in his correspondence with Trajan early in the second century.

For less mainstream Christians, life was that of a drop-out, living in an intentional community composed of other radical Christians, at the margins of legality, outside of the social mainstream. Christianity was the centre of life, political, social, intellectual, etc. And the Empire was not irrelevant because it was tainted with devotion to pagan gods; it was a force for evil that Jesus would smash upon his return in glory.

When Diocletian’s great persecution began, regional governors and junior emperors were told that all Christians, even the most moderate, would be subject to state oversight and punishment. Suspected Christians were rounded-up and ordered, at sword point, to make sacrifices to Roman gods like Saturn and Jupiter.

And many, many did.

Those who did not were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes tortured and occasionally executed. The thinking is that out of approximately four million Christians, comprising 10% of the Roman population, only 0.1% were actually killed in the persecutions. But the number of Christians the persecutions touched was enormous.

Obviously, these persecutions helped to rally moderate Christians, especially those in the regular army, and Germanic barbarian Christians who populated the irregular units of foederati,  on which the Empire had come to depend, to back the heterodox Constantine, who came from a Christian family, in his bid to succeed Diocletian.

But nearly a decade elapsed between the start of the persecution and the legalization of Christianity following Constantine’s seizure of power. And during that decade not only did many ordinary Christians recant their religion and sacrifice to pagan gods, so did many of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical officials, all the way up to bishops.

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

Following the persecution, two closely linked processes began to unfold that would result in the radical remaking of the Christian oecumene within the Roman Empire.

First, there was the state-led process initiated by Constantine, that sought to establish a doctrinal consensus and create a single normative, universal Christianity throughout the empire. As the process dragged on, the state became increasingly involved and increasingly coercive in its efforts to create a uniform, universal Christianity that would put the disputes that divided Christians behind them.

This process ultimately culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325, arguably the worst corporate retreat of all time, in which approximately three hundred bishops met for six straight months to hammer-out a single statement that was supposed to settle the major disputes in something akin to a modern “vision statement.” The meeting was so terrible that Saint Nicholas enters the historical record here as the guy who punched Arius, the Cyrenian presbyter and leader of the Arian movement, in the face.

Constantine chaired the meeting and would vacillate among different bishops’ positions, at one point requiring bishop Athanasius to flee into hiding in the Egyptian desert to avoid an imperial order to arrest him for heresy. In this way, participants in the council were acutely aware of the violent, coercive force of the state as a factor in their decision making.

In the narrative of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the meeting was about resolving a dispute between the soon-to-be Orthodox faction, led by Athanasius of Alexandria and the Arian faction led by Arius of Cyrene. And the story mainstream Christians tell themselves is that it was a dispute about the relationship among, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Was there a moment that God existed and Jesus did not? Was Jesus God or God’s son? These sorts of questions.

The Donatist Crisis

In what is often considered a parallel process rather than a closely linked one, a conflict began within Christianity that, like the debate between Athanasius and Arius, was centred on North Africa. In this case, it was between those who had held firm during the persecution and those who recanted. Were those who recanted able to administer the eucharist still? Perform baptisms? What about those who had been baptized by those who later recanted? Would those baptisms still count?

Donatus, the bishop leading those who did not break under threats or torture, argued that those who had not kept faith were not and may never have been true priests able to administer the sacraments.

We typically date the Donatist Controversy to 312-21 and Nicea to 325 but, if we stop looking at these as doctrinal disputes and see them as disputes about political power, their linkages become obvious and inextricable.

From the beginning, those who had submitted to the power of the Roman state saw the legalization and imperial patronage of Christianity as an opportunity to fuse with the state and come to co-own the very system Christianity originally opposed. But not only were they opportunistic, they resented those who had held firm to their convictions and paid a material price for doing so. While they were enthusiastic about dead martyrs and organized festivals to commemorate their sacrifice, it was easy to side with the dead because the dead cannot speak for themselves. They cannot contest the power or narrative of those commemorating them.

The living martyrs were the problem. Even those who were not Donatists were, nevertheless, an implied criticism. Their very existence, especially those bearing the marks of torture, offered a criticism of those who had apostasized, just by being alive and walking around.

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For this reason, it became increasingly important that the collaborators with aspirations to state power have their own alternative set of criteria for true faith, true Christianity. The theory they settled upon was that the power of salvation and efficacy of religious rituals did not inhere in the personal holiness of the person administering them. Rather, it inhered in the specific word sequences and formulas used in religious rituals.

The idea was that the power lived in specific sequences of words canonized as orthodox. There was already the Lord’s Prayer. But the problem was that the Lord’s Prayer made sense. It could be mistaken for non-ritual communication, as a plea for physical sustenance and forgiveness from a benevolent god.

A set of words, if it means something clear and everyone in the community generally agrees with the meaning, is a pretty lousy boundary maintenance tool or internal loyalty test. If you want to push people out who are so committed to forthrightness, directness, truth-telling that they get themselves arrested, incarcerated and tortured, because they refuse to say something false or disloyal, then you need to craft language intrinsically offensive to that sort of person.

Of course, language was not the first place the emerging alliance between the state and Christian “moderates” went. First, there was material patronage. The churches of the soon-to-be Orthodox were repaired with government money; jobs, monopolies, contracts became plentiful for these more flexible Christians. Meanwhile the Donatists continued to meet in damaged and ruined churches and struggle financially as pagans and moderate Christians formed a united from in denying Donatists financial opportunities and privileges.

But language was ultimately where it went. While the intent of past actors is never available to us and we can only guess at how much the results of the Council of Nicea were a genuine effort to build consensus with a formerly fractious social movement, only those steeped in Christian ritual and doctrine can see the Nicene Creed as anything other that word salad. By “word salad,” I mean a set of words that, on a superficial first glance, appear to mean something specific and precise but are actually nonsensical and corrosive of any adjacent meaning:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.

“Father” and “begotten” in close proximity seem like they are part of some sort of idea about the relationship between a father and his offspring. But what happens to the meaning of “begotten” if “eternally” modifies it? There is “one god,” the father and “one lord,” Jesus Christ. But he is also “God from true God.” So, are there two gods or one? Of course, there are no real answers to these questions because, for word salad to be successful word salad, it must sound like it means something but contain not just an absence of meaning but a negative meaning, a force of intellectual disruption that beats meaning out of adjacent words.

The Nicene Creed was just the highest-profile piece of word salad that the Church, in collaboration with the state, introduced in the fourth century because these formulas were more effective, I would argue, than patronage, threats or force. After all, the Donatists had already survived those things.

Word salad, on the other hand, is a well-known tactic in domestic abuse because, unlike any other class of language, agreement with it is necessarily coerced. Because word salad does not and cannot mean anything, no person will express agreement with it of their own volition; some form of external fear, pressure or threat is what compels verbal accord with and repetition of word salad. Therefore, the repetition of, or expression of agreement with, the nonsense cannot be anything but an expression of submission. One cannot voluntarily agree with it because there is nothing to agree with.

And so, the Nicene Creed became one of a set of tools of the newly fused Orthodox Christian Church and Roman state. These tools did not just help to push Donatists but the kind of person who would become a Donatist, a person resistant to authority, a person who so abhorred dishonesty that they would pay a price to tell the truth as they saw it. Furthermore, by making the saving power of the Church inherent in nonsensical sequences of words, one could effectively select a future leadership class by drawing from those who, as abused, abuser or both, were already familiar with these thought-terminating discourses of veiled intimidation.

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

I want to suggest that, while no means identical, there are many important parallels between this period in Roman history from 302-337 and our present moment.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, every left, socialist and social democratic party enacted policies of austerity, privatization, investor rights, trade liberalization, labour mobility, etc. Having spoken to some folks who were part of these governments, there is no doubt that they truly believed that there was no alternative. And Standard and Poors and the other bond-rating agencies of the world teamed-up with the World Bank and its International Monetary Fund to punish any government that did not comply with punitive credit downgrades and coercive “structural adjustment” programs.

But there were those who could not abide these things and burned their party cards, resigned their party memberships or parliamentary seats, took to the streets with the anti-globalization movement or even took up arms against neoliberalism like the Zapatistas.

For a while it seemed that socialist, social democratic and other left parties of the world were heading for extinction. But then something strange happened. As I have written elsewhere, the Third Way movement of liberal, socialist and social democratic that incorporated free trade, contracting out, austerity, privatization, investor rights and seamless labour mobility did not die out.

The first reason for their survival was that there were some greasy, shitty jobs that parties of the right struggled to get done when opposed by mobilized citizens. Strikes, rallies, blockades and other forms of direct action could slow or demoralize a conservative government. Furthermore, elections make governments fearful of angering a majority of the population. Capital soon found that Third Way governments could grease the wheels for radical reforms governments run by their friends could not.

This was, of course, epitomized in the coalition between the NDP-Green government of John Horgan and Andrew Weaver, which was able to triple fossil fuel subsidies in just three years, something the previous right-wing governments had been unable to do in sixteen consecutive years in office. That’s because Third Way governments can demobilize lefties and environmentalists by claiming to be their comrades and buying off those needing to be bought off.

The second reason, more important in this comparison, is the way Third Way contracting-out practices function. Contracting-out is a practice whereby a government reduces the costs of providing a service by laying off the government employees who are providing it and hiring a private company to do the job instead. The private company is able to do this and make a profit by reducing wages for the work, which is easy, as the workers providing it are no longer direct employees of the government.

Third Way governments are more creative and cost-effective in much of their contracting-out because they contract charities and other non-profits to take on government work. Frontline workers in the non-profit and charitable sectors are especially reluctant to seek higher wages because they are often altruistically motivated to do the work they do and because they can see that money spent on their wages is being taken from some other area of charitable endeavour. Guilt is a powerful force in keeping wages down in the charitable sector. Furthermore, many non-profit workers labour shoulder-to-shoulder with volunteers who are being paid nothing for doing the same or similar work.

While wages are driven down in such arrangements, they tend to rise dramatically for those in charitable and non-profit management. Their organizations grow; their budgets grow; and so do their salaries and status. Over the past generation, the high-level manager class has expanded to include thousands of non-profit executive directors and management consultants and become seamless with senior civil servants, MBAs in the corporate sector, lobbyists and, as Lenin termed them, “the labour aristocracy.”

We often use the term “Astroturf” to talk about non-profit organizations that appear to be grassroots but have actually been created by a wealthy individual or consortium thereof. But I want to suggest that there is a kind of Astroturfing of pre-existing organizations that the arrival of more government money caused. The leadership of non-profit organizations came to be increasingly selected from above, based on who can redirect state patronage towards the groups rather than democratically from below.

The putative leaders of our social movements are increasingly those either patronized by the state or by wealthy individuals. And they are filling our organizations with people who resemble themselves, ambitious ladder-climbers eager to burnish their resumes with time in the non-profit sector, mainstream people who see social movement groups the way their grandparents would have seen fraternal organizations like the Rotarians or mainline churches like the Presbyterians.

We Are the Donatists

The problem is us. We stupidly think that local environmental, feminist, anti-poverty, anti-racism, etc. groups are our groups. We think that those of us who lost jobs, influence, power during 1990s austerity but held firm to our principles are the true foundation, the backbone of social movements and left-wing political parties. We stupidly think that the kids joining the local environmental group are there to get a criminal record for being arrested on a logging road when, in fact, they are there in the expectation that they will do some community service in exchange for a flattering line on their CV.

We are the Donatists, my friends. Our standing has declined as governments have lavished patronage on our rivals in civil society; theirs has risen.

We are today’s Donatists because those who vote austerity and climate arson through our legislatures, and those who campaign for them, are not satisfied with the wealth and prestige their capitulation has brought them. They are today’s version of Constantine’s moderate bishops. And they hate us. Because, like the Donatists, we are an implied criticism of them just by getting out of bed in the morning.

We are today’s Donatists because dead martyrs like Ginger Goodwin are memorialized, and praised to the skies, while surviving martyrs like Svend Robinson are being airbrushed out of our past, targets of a concerted campaign of at best, Forgetting and, at worst, Damnatio Memoriae.

Like Christianity 1800 years ago, “the Left,” has become, in a little more than a generation, a captured political formation hellbent on weeding out the vibrant discourse, diversity of opinion and strength of character on which it once relied to survive. It has turned against these virtues and is now, consequently, the enemy.

And so, it should not surprise us that we are being tested, with increasing frequency, by word salad being placed before us as one loyalty oath after another. “Sex work is work,” is just one of the thought-terminating clichés vying for the status of becoming our modern Nicene Creed.

Painful as it must have been for true Christians in the fourth century, we have to acknowledge that the institutions in which we grew up fighting for peace, socialism, feminism and planetary survival have, seemingly overnight, been captured by the very forces we oppose and are now being turned on us.

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There Is No Alternative: Ontological Dualism and the Fiction of Political Choice in Canada

The Uselessness of Policy Resolutions

In a recent post, I suggested that no policy resolution passed by Canadian political party convention between 1994 and 2020 had effect on party election platforms or policies enacted while in government. While there may have been instances of party conventions adopting policies also adopted by their part in government, these adoptions were either post-facto or coincidental.

Time and again, every Canadian political party from the Greens to the Conservatives has defied the policies passed at party conventions and written election platforms into which, not just members but ordinary MPs and MLAs, have negligible input. With all power concentrated in the office of party leader, to select candidates and caucus members at will, since 2003, it is not surprising that Canadian political parties run like the imperial Russian state. Power flows into the office of the autocrat by vote of the members in convention. Thereafter, all power remains concentrated in that single person until removed by a party convention or stepping down.

In such a system, there are other powerful people with decision-making power, finance ministers, attorneys and solicitors-general, chiefs of staff and candidate vetting committees but their power is not derived from party members or even voters at election time. It comes from and is solely dependent upon selection by the party leader.

I have rehearsed these arguments in other essays in recent years, more than once. But what I have not chosen to examine further is the thinking and behaviour of party activists who spend hour upon hour drafting policy resolutions, getting them prioritized on convention agendas and building a supportive coalition of convention delegates to vote them through.

A half-remembered tradition of convention resolutions affecting party platforms and government policies from Canada’s first century seems an insufficient explanation. We are approaching fifty years since consequential votes at national policy conventions were part of our political culture. And given the general state of collective amnesia that envelopes our politics today, it seems quite improbable.

So, what does motivate these folks to pass resolutions at the conventions of parties that they know will ignore them?

I want to make a radical suggestion in the form of some fancy religious studies/theology terminology: ontological dualism.

Ontological Dualism

As Los Altos Institute approaches its tenth birthday, we are settling into an organizational identity, history and culture in which we can observe patterns. One is that, unlike many ecologically conscious, socialist communities, our culture is not especially atheistic, even though atheists are likely a majority.

Rather, it is a culture friendly to and representative of atheists and other “ontological monists,” like Jews, Mormons and Sikhs. These faith communities, like atheists, tend to either reject or minimize the idea of the supernatural. All of creation, whether originating in God or not, is governed by the same set of rules in ontological monism. If people have spirits, they are material, either epiphenomena generated by brain activity or physically detectable parts of the body our instrumentation cannot yet pick up. If angels exist, they have physical being of some kind and operate within the same systems of physical causation as human beings.

More importantly, ontological monists focus their religious practice on creating a just order on earth. The work you do for God here on earth is an end in itself, not a means of purchasing a ticket to heaven. If God has a kingdom, the centre of religious practice is building the part of it that exists on earth. In other words, our institutions members may be atheists but if they are theists, they are likely “religious but not spiritual.”

Ontological dualism, on the other hand, is something we associate with most religious folks. Their discourse and practices are heaven- rather than earth-centred. What we do on earth is understood to be “just a test,” as memorably characterized by David Shore’s Gregory House. Our actions on earth are highly consequential only insofar as they are the basis on which God judges how we will live our next life, whereas, for ontological monists, they are consequential for the opposite reason, that this earth, this society, are the ones that are most real and merit our sole or primary attention.

For ontological dualists, then, religious debates are often about guessing, deducing and describing the divine order and divine judgement that are understood to follow this life on earth. The phrase “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” seeks to mock this kind of speculation that has characterized most theological and cosmological writing across religious faiths.

Ontological dualism is a way of thinking that grew up gradually between the Classical Period (500-322 BCE) and the Englightenment (1750-1849), with Plato often credited as its progenitor. The idea that material reality was an inferior creation made by a fallen divinity called the demiurge, and that it was but a shadow of the true reality, the world of forms, which could only be perceived in one’s mind’s eye, was easily hybridized with a wide variety of religious traditions. And as hard science increasingly diverged from the descriptions of the cosmos in religious doctrine, we built a category of ever increasing size to enable science to continue advancing unimpeded by religion.

In the Middle Ages, this even became formalized in educational institutions. There were two separate academic fields that studied the heavens, Mathematical Astronomy, an empirical discipline used to calculate the length of years, the timing of eclipses and the like and Physical Astronomy, the discipline that described how the universe really is. In this way, the crystalline spheres made from the quintessence (fifth element) that encircled the sun, moon and each of the planets orbiting the earth could be safely protected from the insights of mathematical astronomers about how the planets moved.

In this way, religious authorities were happy to admit that the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo constituted major advances in the field of Mathematical Astronomy. They were just not pertinent to Physical Astronomy.

This was something Galileo could not abide. The existence of Physical Astronomy as a discipline was anathema to him. “It is for the church to decide how to go to heaven, not to decide how the heavens go,” the quotation attributed to him goes. Rather than being content with their being two universes, a natural one governed by empirically discoverable physical laws, and a supernatural one governed by laws communicated through the church, Galileo saw only one universe, making him a heretic and an ontological monist.

Although the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton saw the movement of the boundary between the natural and supernatural, it nevertheless required the continuation of this bifurcated view of the universe to prevent religion and science from going to war. As long as science did not pronounce heaven, angels and the immortal soul either subject to discoverable physical laws or non-existent, an uneasy peace could be maintained, until the next time the nature-supernature boundary had to be moved.

Secularized Dualism

I have spent some time writing about how conservative religious folks today are focused on pushing the dividing line between the natural and the supernatural backwards. Faith communities that once broadly accepted that our climate, geology and evolution of species were in the “natural” category of phenomena now campaigning to place these in the “supernatural” category, things that only God can describe through his chosen ministers. But what I have not done is adequately examine the ways that these categories have been maintained in the mental architecture of the secular and the unchurched.

Among scholars of religion who have sought to explain the sharp differences between American and Canadian religiosity, the most important theory is that the Social Gospel movement came to be absorbed and institutionalized through the Canadian state and its party system. Canada’s first truly national socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the first to form government was an explicitly theocratic party led by a succession of churchmen. The party’s first leader was Methodist minister and former Canadian Labour Party MP, J S Woodsworth; its first premier was T C Douglas, a Baptist minister.

And not only was the Social Gospel the animating ideology of the CCF; it also functioned as a hegemonic discourse within progressive, liberal Canada. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had written his own book on the Social Gospel and declared it to be the principal ideology of the longest premiership in Canadian history, comprising just shy of a quarter of the twentieth century.

Canadian secularization proceeded more rapidly and more completely than US secularization, it is argued, because liberal Protestantism essentially fused with the state and its party system, while religious conservatives were much more averse to leaving traditional denominations that were based on religious affiliations that could be traced back to the Old World.

But evidently, this secularism is more superficial than we realized. As so often happens with an idea you drum out of language and discourse, it actually grows more powerful in the dark, in the uninterrogated unconscious of groups and individuals.

The Modern Policy Convention

How better to explain political party conventions than as secularized ontological dualism, our Protestant heritage returning to bite us?

Think of a political party convention as an Anglican or Lutheran synod. Geographic delegations arrive from all over to do three kinds of business:

  • hard-nosed, bare-fisted organizational politics, deciding who holds powerful positions, how resources are divided-up and which team of adherents gets to dominate the positions that control the organization’s purse strings and real estate portfolio;
  • enjoying all the social connections that are based around the organization, great conversations with people of like mind that one rarely sees, leavened by free food and drink often dispensed in acts of competitive hospitality by different factions of the organization; and
  • forging agreements, reaching compromises, conducting votes and holding debates about a divinely-ordered world you have never seen, settling questions like whether gay couples stay together in heaven and are recognized by God as spouses, deciding whether the soul enters the body at conception or quickening, deciding whether evolution is a hoax or whether it is actually the hand of God himself, in other words, making supernatural decisions about what God, his angels and heaven are like
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Folks sure have got excited about whether God blesses same sex unions, whether gender exists is heaven, whether slave-owners are served by their slaves in heaven and conducted contentious votes on these subjects, despite the fact that they know their votes do not control God, nor do they control the created, physical world. And yet they vote and fight and organize and undergo schisms, all because they disagree about things they cannot affect.

This is the modern political convention. No one is debating policy resolutions about what their party’s next government will actually do. They are debating what hypothetical governments that will never exist should do. Party policies are hypotheses about the organization of heaven, not plans for organizing on earth.

The Policy Consensus

There are reasons, of course, that this shift followed the end of the Cold War. Even after Canada moved from the British imperial sphere to the US from the 1930s to 50s, it was viewed as advisable for Canada to have a stable, thriving manufacturing sector, supplied with food and raw materials by the country’s Atlantic and Western peripheries. Local elites in Atlantic and Western Canada functioned concurrently as clients to what is termed the “Laurentian elite” of Quebec and Ontario and clients of American elites who were extracting an increasing proportion of the materials from the Canadian periphery.

The central dynamic arose after the Second World War in Canadian political economy were efforts by Western Canada’s peripheral elite to become a US periphery, unmediated by the needs of Central Canada. Deregulation, ending supply management, free trade and investor rights were the calls of Saskatchewan potash, Manitoba hydroelectric, British Columbia timber and Alberta oil interests. These interests were vigorously opposed by and typically lost to the Laurentian elite that presided over the Windsor-Quebec City industrial strip.

But since the end of the Cold War, all of Canada is now the periphery. The Laurentian elite are presiding over the deindustrialization of Quebec and Ontario and are seeking to reach an accommodation, even to merge with the rentier elites of Western Canada. But the now-ascendant resource elite of the West are split over whether to accept this fusion with the Laurentians or to seek dominance in their own right and the creation a new Central Canadian resource elite.

That is all Canadian federal elections are about now. The Conservative Party of Stephen Harper represented the latter, and, to the horror of the Laurentian elite, was able to govern Canada with little assistance from Central Canada’s old elite. Attempts by the Laurentian elite to retake power on their own ended in disaster in 2008 and 2011 with Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

We must understand that Justin Trudeau was able to take power because of his efforts to accommodate the resource elites of the West in new and unprecedented ways, not just as junior partners but senior partners in his political coalition. The price for dealing the Laurentian elite back in was policy continuity with the Harper government; in fact, the Laurentian elite are being tested, even now, to see how far they will go for the oil industry, whether they will be successful in amplifying the policies of Stephen Harper when it comes to fossil fuel subsidies, pipeline-building, etc.

And as we have seen from the Horgan government in British Columbia and the Notley government in Alberta, every political party in this country has got them memo: we are the periphery of the American and Chinese empires. Our local elites serve at their pleasure and here to tax local populations so subsidize the extraction of their resources.

And as much as they might pretend not to, the folks at the NDP, Tory, Green and Liberal conventions all believe this in their heart. They have truly internalized the belief that there is no alternative. The only break they have from the preordained policy consensus their labour carries is the chance to organize and win the debate how many angels can dance on the head of pin.

Otherwise, we would have to admit that our current political levers are no longer connected to anything in the real world and then, we would be responsible for fashioning new ones to bring the our omnicidal petrostate to heel.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

American Caliphate II: The Caliphization of the American Presidency

Following my last piece, American Caliphate I, I am once again returning to the ways that government, religion, culture and class interacted in the various Muslim caliphates that existed from the seventh through twentieth centuries and how these interactions are similar to recent American history. In this second exploration, I am going to be emphasizing the ways in which the post-Reagan Republican Party has functioned like the government of a caliphate and not like an Enlightenment-era secular political party.

These pieces are being prepared as companion reading for my up coming course, The Holy American Empire, offered by Los Altos Institute starting in May of 2021

  1. The Caliph in Sunni Islam

Following the original Ummayad and Rashidun Caliphates, the predominant Muslim caliphates, the Abassid and Ottoman, treated Sunni rather than Shi’a Islam as the normative religion of their state, even if not the sole or even always the official religion. While there exist many what Christians might call denominations of Islam, Druze, Alawite, Sufi, Ismaili, etc. most of the world’s Muslims fall into two groups, Sunni and Shi’ite.

While there are many important doctrinal and historical differences between these two branches, differences relevant to our discussion here are their institutional differences, i.e. the organizational structures of these faith communities.

Shi’ite Islam is characterized by a pyramidal organization with ranks like Allamah and Ayatollah for clergy hierarchically above other Imams. We might compare it to Christian episcopal structures we associate with Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Orthodox Christianities where above a priest is a bishop and, above a bishop, a pope.

Sunni Islam is characterized by a flat organization of equal Imams with no ecclesiastical ranks above other ranks. We might compare it to Pentecostalism and the non-denominational movement in the United States and Latin America, a free religious marketplace where churches compete against one another for congregants. When Sunni Islam is functioning unrestricted by the state, the “call to prayer” is literally a competition to call folks within earshot to prayer by offering an attractive advertisement for the mosque in question.

Because of this lack of hierarchical authority, the role of the Caliph has traditionally been more important in Sunni societies. Although a Caliph attains his job by winning an essentially secular crown through some combination of dynastic inheritance and military support, the Caliphal model installs the head of the empire and its army as head of the various imams in his territory. While he might not be trained in doctrine, he nevertheless is head of the Sunni oecumene upon attaining the office of Caliph, in the way that pre-1453 Byzantine emperors and pre-1917 Russian Tsars were the chief churchmen of their respective empires.

Given the plurality of doctrine and competition for congregants, one might argue that one of the reasons we see Sunnis over-represented in the great caliphates of history is that Sunni Islam needs a caliph in order to make necessary doctrinal, liturgical and other changes in order to adapt and move with changing times, as all great world religions must. Without a caliph, the Sunni system will eventually break, either due to an inability to adapt and make new doctrines about new things, or due to the unrestrained centrifugal force of different Imams making different local doctrines sending the religion off in new and different directions, depending on local congregants. In this way, it should be understood that the institution of the caliph was not just important for Sunnis under the political authority of the current caliph but for those outside the state he controlled who nevertheless looked to him for leadership, a role formalized in law in 1001.

So, what does all this have to do with America, a nation purportedly founded on the separation of church and state?

2. America and Religious Freedom

First, let us begin by looking at what “separation of church and state” has traditionally meant. When the United States came into being as the first state in the world based on liberalism, the eighteenth century social movement we associate with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, it became a vital tool, an experimental ground, that liberal thinkers used to see how ideas of individualism, equality and limited government played out.

One of the things that was unclear to the founders of the US was the difference between a right accorded to a sub-collective, e.g. a state, a territory, a county, a town, a private club and one accorded to an individual. This was bound-up in the question of what rights could be operationalized at the level of the individual and what rights could only have meaningful force in the hands of a sub-collective. As Sarah Barringer Gordon has persuasively argued, it was not until the first election of the Republican Party to national government in 1860 that these tensions began to be resolved in a relatively clear and consistent way, due to America’s conflict not just with the Confederate States of America over slavery but with the Kingdom of Deseret (i.e. the Mormon Church) over polygamy.

3. The Structure of American Religion 1850-1975

Until the 1860s, the separation of church and state and guarantees of freedom of religion were understood to protect the rights of states, territories, counties and towns to select their religious affiliation. In nationalizing and elaborating on the social contract developed in Puritan Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the US guaranteed the right of the state of Maryland to be Catholic, of Massachusetts to be Congregationalist, etc.

But in the 1850s and 60s, its meaning inverted. It became the obligation of the US federal government to prevent states, territories, towns, etc. from imposing a single religion on their residents. Freedom of religion ceased to be seen as a right that could only be made operational through a collective to one that any individual could exercise in defiance of their neighbours’ belief. A law created to protect sub-collectives from federal government interference became a law that was used to protect individuals from the imposition of their neighbours’ religion on them through local government.

While the US had always been a free religious marketplace, this severing of religious institutions from governments forced otherwise minimally hierarchical religions to develop and maintain large representative bodies uniting people across the country by denomination. The forging of these stronger federations of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, etc. was contemporaneous with the intensification of sectionalism associated with the Civil War. It is in this period that we see the creation of powerful, regionally affiliated but technically national denominational organizations like the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern Baptist Convention.

As readers can see, embedded in their very names are theories of centralized, deliberative decision-making. Conventions and synods are meetings, meetings where decisions about doctrine are made. While churches could technically opt out of these bodies, this was often disadvantageous, not just because of the loss of economies of scale in publishing, something central to the success of any nineteenth-century religious mass movement, but because, in an increasingly mobile, kinetic America, leavened by massive railroad subsidies, folks who moved for work liked to stay in the same denomination, not try out some new local flavour. This was especially important as many Christian denominations did not recognize the baptisms performed by other churches.

In this way, most American Christians were part of major national religious denominations for the next century and a bit. Annual and biannual synods and conventions would entail hundreds, often thousands, of ministers from a particular denominational grouping coming together to fashion doctrinal responses and changes to move with a changing society and changing needs of congregants.

These denominations were politically powerful and could and did swing elections by delivering congregants to the polls with a religiously-based voting agenda. After all, the constitution prohibited the institutional fusion of church and state, not the ideological fusion of religion and politics.

4. America: From Secular Republic to Caliphate

But during the 1960s, that began to change. Religious denominations we might call “liberal,” Quakers, Congregationalists, Methodists began suffering crippling declines in their congregations. Many people became “spiritual but not religious,” non-religious folks who had previously gone to church out of a sense of civic-mindedness stopped and even those continued to see themselves as members significantly reduced their church attendance, aside from special holidays and festivals. The expansion of both government and non-profit charity work gave a lot of new options to folks whose main payoff of attending church was helping out or bossing around people in need.

But conservative denominations also began suffering not long after the demographic tailspin of liberal Christianity began. Old school hellfire Baptist preachers had begun losing congregants, especially those in remote communities, to Sunday radio broadcasts by preachers skilled in using broadcast media, as far back as the 1930s. This was followed by the rise of the televangelists of the 1970s, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and their ilk.

The corrosive force represented by the holy men of radio and TV was not just one that permitted congregants to make their religious observances from home; it also steered people towards two relatively new and rapidly growing movements, Pentecostalism and non-denominationalism. These were religious movements lacking denominational structures and, in the case of the non-denominationalists, actively hostile to those structures. While these churches were independent from one another, organizationally, they had the following common characteristics: fundamentalism, avowed scriptural literalism, political conservatism, anti-communism and beliefs in Biblical pseudoscience. This pseudoscience took the main forms of (a) effacing modern knowledge about women’s reproductive systems in favour of supporting the distinctive Roman Catholic doctrine that any miscarriage of a zygote, embryo or foetus that can be blamed on a person is murder; and (b) young earth creationism, the idea that the earth is literally 6000 years old, that fossils can be created in less than ten years, that humans and dinosaurs cohabited and that evolution is a hoax.

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By the mid-1970s, there were efforts by the most powerful and popular televangelists to create denomination-like entities that could give these new conservative religious movements, that were growing at the expense of mainline conservative groupings like the Baptists. Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart offered an attempt at a Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God. Jerry Fallwell took a different path in creating non-denominational organizations of Pentecostals, non-denominationalists and others to carry out specific tasks, Liberty University for religiously-based postsecondary education and the Moral Majority for the purpose of engaging with electoral politics.

Thanks to the US primary system, organized political entryism can dramatically reshape national politics, which is what we witnessed, first with large numbers of these new conservatives registering to participate in the 1976 Democratic Party presidential primary to support the first Born Again Christian, Governor Jimmy Carter, to run for the presidency. They quickly soured on Carter as he came to be seen as soft on communism, supportive of an expanded federal government and guided by mainstream science on energy policy.

A far more appealing candidate was populist California governor Ronald Reagan, who had lost the Republican nomination in 1976 but was now heavily courting the Moral Majority and their allies. Republicans’ dog-whistle messaging had already been used to bring Southern white supremacists into the party’s expanding coalition. As chronicled by Fred Knelman in Reagan, God and the Bomb, this project now extended into the conflation of a first-strike nuclear war and US support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with the fiery eschaton described in the Book of Revelation and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party with the Antichrist. Opposition to abortion ceased to be a Catholic issue and was taken up by Reagan’s new conservative coalition too.

But a strange thing happened.

One might think that the Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, Assemblies of God and Moral Majority would shoulder past the Southern Baptist Convention and Billy Graham, and others who had claimed to be leading God-fearing conservative voters, and become America’s answer to the Ayatollahs who had seized power in Iran the previous year.

But the opposite happened.

The new, increasingly theocratic America was not structured like a Shi’ite kingdom or republic. It began transforming into a caliphate. The authority of figures like Robertson, Fallwell and Swaggart receded, and in their place was Ronald Reagan, arguably America’s first caliph. Republican national conventions became not just a place to make public policy and nominate a candidate for the presidency. This quadrennial event has become the place where America’s religious conservatives, not just Pentecostals but conservative Baptists, Lutherans and others go to make doctrine. And this group has come to be known as “conservative evalgelicals.”

The Republican party’s policies and public pronouncements have become, for forty percent of Americans, the equivalent of hadiths, formal additions to Islamic doctrine, made by committees of Imams appointed by a Sunni caliph. In other words, just as Republican candidates are necessarily parasitic of these technically independent, autonomous congregations for votes in primary and general elections, the congregations are reciprocally dependent on the Republican Party and its leader to organize, systematize and pronounce on doctrine.

While God Bless America, was originally a piece of popular music composed by a secular Jew in 1918 in support of isolationism, the song, and, more importantly, the phrase, was adopted by conservative imperialists in the 1960s who saw America as an especially divinely-favoured and divinely-mandated imperial hegemon needed to confront the atheistic, Antichrist-led Soviet Union.

Presidents, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had already been using the clause “God bless America,” in political rhetoric but whereas Richard Nixon mentioned God in just one in six speeches (16%) in his 1972 presidential campaign, eight years leader, Reagan mentioned God in nineteen in twenty (95%) of his stump speeches in 1980. And during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, this clause increasingly took on the character of a caliphal benediction.

The president transformed from a first-among-equals supplicant, personally asking God to bless his country into a more clerical role. The president was acting as an intercessor between God and His chosen people, utilizing his privileged access to God to make a plea on behalf of the American people. In this way, the president transformed, for conservative evangelicals, into the head of American Christianity, a role similar to that of Constantine the Great and his successors, vicegerent of God on Earth.

5. The Elaboration of the Caliphate in the Twenty-first Century

Following the turn of the century, 9/11 and the beginning of the second Bush presidency, two additional shifts took place, one at the level of discourse, the other at the level of institution.

First, a new benediction came into being following the September 11th terrorist attacks, “may God continue to bless America.” This amplification of the benediction now made it clear that God’s blessing was a contingent blessing, implying that a lack of blessing of the Democratic Party presidencies of the 1990s, and the social liberalism with which they were associated, could help to account for God’s unwillingness to protect the US from Osama Bin Laden. Now, the president was asking, pleading, negotiating with God for America to continue receiving His blessing, provided they behaved according to the moral order of the Bush Administration. In this way, the president’s role was that of a divinely, favoured intercessor, proximate, as medievals would say, to God’s right hand.

In this way, America’s caliphs have become keepers of America’s covenant with God, granted unique intercessory powers to plead on the nation’s behalf when it falters.

The other innovation of the Bush presidency was the expansion of school vouchers and other systems permitting the state funding of conservative evangelical religious schools, both of the fee-paying and non-fee-paying variety. The Bush era also these schools increasingly exempt from curricular demands that might get in the way of teaching young earth creationism and other kinds of conservative evangelical pseudoscience.

To this were added the “faith-based initiatives.” The Bush Administration argued that, contrary to earlier legal interpretations, the separation of church and state need not apply to the federal government partnering with and funding churches, provided the partnerships carried out secular activities. While the Blairite austerity of the Clinton-Gore years had entailed increasing partnerships with the secular non-profit sector to deliver things like school lunches and care for the disabled, Bush-era austerity, unique among the austerity programs of the Global North, included the delivery of an increasing number of services through parts of churches supposedly walled-off from their proselytizing arms.

In this way, the post-2001 US has come to resemble a caliphate, more and more, with the highest spiritual, religious, political and military office in the land fused in a single person when the Republican Party is in power. This caliph engages in increasing patronage of the nominally independent churches affiliated with the GOP. A mutual dependence now exists between conservative evangelical churches and the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; without the caliph, new doctrine cannot be made or imposed on diverse churches because no alternative mechanism to do this exists. The Southern Baptist Convention and Missouri Synod Lutherans are dying on the vine, their higher officials largely irrelevant in the platform/doctrine-making process, their individual ministers more likely to wield doctrinal power by becoming a delegate to a Republican national convention than any synod.

The extent of this transformation was impossible to gauge until the rise of Donald Trump and his decisive primary victory in 2016. Trump had not previously been a religiously observant man. He was a serial philanderer, divorcer and patron of prostitutes. He was ignorant of the Bible and of basic Christian theology. And he did not present himself as having undergone a conversion experience; he continued to use lewd and vulgar language and chose to feel-up his daughter on national television while accepting his party’s nomination.

Despite an inauspicious start and apparent constitutional incompatibility with the role of holy intercessor, the Trump presidency turned out to be the greatest doctrinal innovator in the history of conservative evangelicalism. First of all, to account for Trump’s behaviour being at variance with that of conservative evangelicals, key churchmen like Franklin Graham came forward to explain that Trump could not be judged by the standards of other mortals, that God had granted him a series of divine “mulligans,” exempting him from the rules applied to ordinary mortals. These exemptions are very much along the lines of those granted medieval caliphs to consume alcohol, miss holy observances and keep harems.

Second, policies and actions by the American state framed as necessary evils by previous caliphs, became positive goods. Separating toddlers from their parents and imprisoning them, state-mandated rendition and torture and war itself changed from being imperial practices to be swept under the rug and formulaically denied or condemned, to practices that were good and merited celebration in America’s expanding Theatre of Cruelty. God now demanded torture, murder, and torment of tiny state-created orphans. The caliph said so and the chorus of agreement from Pentecostals, non-denominations and other conservative evangelicals was deafening.

The live dismemberment of political opponents by bone saw, like an end to elections and term limits, was something to which Trump openly aspired for the future of his caliphate, a new wave of divinely-mandated torture and extra-judicial killings.

Like caliph Abu Bakr, founder of the original dynasty of caliphs, Trump has been accepted unproblematically as the leader of a religious community with whom he had little prior affiliation or specialist knowledge because of a theology that conflates the head of state, head of the army and head of the church. And they eagerly await the return of a legitimate ruler following the “stolen” election of 2020, a candidate anointed not by votes but by God himself.

If one wants to understand the broad Republican acceptance of massive voter suppression and growing demands to throw out any ballot that does not result in the continuation of caliphal rule as illegitimate, it is because, central to America’s transformation into a caliphate, is the understanding that what makes a president legitimate is not votes or elections, it is recognition of his intercessory status by the churches of the land, as God’s vicegerent on earth.

Authoritarianism Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The Tory Party’s Climate Change Vote Is Scarier and Means More Than You Think

There is so much to unpack from this weekend’s Conservative Party convention vote on climate change that one struggles to know where to begin. So, first, what happened: the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole, and his surrogates, placed a resolution before the national convention of his party to affirm the scientific truth that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an apparent effort to be cast by the media as a moderate and modernizer within the party, he used his platform as leader, not just in the convention hall, but in the media in the days leading up to the vote, to strongly promote a “yes” vote in support of the resolution. The resolution was defeated.

This is fascinating, first of all, for anyone studying the changes in epistemology wrought by the twenty-first century. If there is one thing to characterize the Trump era it is the collapse of the separate categories of “knowledge” and “power” into a single category. To quote OCAD professor Eileen Wennekers, “Covfefe points us to the master discourse of the Trump Administration. What it means is that when Donald Trump says something, it becomes a word.”

To be clear, the party that received the largest share of the popular vote in the last election (from just over one in three Canadians) just held a vote on whether a piece of science is true. This is of a piece with a larger trend across the political spectrum of completely conflating knowledge and power. Of course, a political party has the power to determine which physical laws are true. For decades now, the US Republican Party has believed that how zygotes, embryos and foetuses work is something to be determined by democratic voting rather than scientific investigation.

But this has spread to include a whole galaxy of physical laws now determined by democratic votes—the Anglo American conservative universe is full of science created by voting. Energy from solar power is impossible to store and cannot be generated on cloudy days. The Australian mega-fires were a combination of targeted arsons committed by climate change activists and false-flag operations that used special effects to simulate fires. And windmill cancer continues to kill Europeans by the thousand every year.

Progressives have taken a different direction. Science is now made by government-appointed experts. Prominent progressive activists and journalists now propound the theory that the political jurisdiction in which one lives determines how Covid-19 transmission works. If one prefers the views of better-published, more qualified scientists over those of BC’s chief medical health officer concerning the utility or masking or the susceptibility of children and adolescents to Covid variants, one is “against science.” Even when the only public figure in North America who concurs with her views on these subjects is Donald Trump.

What makes Bonnie Henry infallible is the fact that she is the most senior public health government official in her jurisdiction and has been given a title and powers reflecting this. If the medical chief of the province’s oldest hospital disagrees with her, this does not mean that there is a debate over medical science. It means that Royal Columbian Hospital’s chief doctor has turned against science itself.

In other words, while progressives prefer autocratic, state-based authority to determine scientific truth and conservatives prefer democratic, party-based authority to determine scientific truth, both of Anglo America’s main political groupings concur that power can be converted directly into knowledge.

And that is just the first remarkable thing about this vote.

Until this weekend, whenever a fellow activist talked to me about how their party convention was going to vote on an important environmental or social issue, my response would always be the same, “Look at all the provincial and national party conventions in English Canada since 1993. Tell me of one vote on a policy resolution that has materially affected a party’s platform or policies it has enacted in government.”

That’s because, until this weekend, there was none. The only convention votes that have mattered since 1993 have been the selection and deselection of party leaders. Period.

As I have written extensively elsewhere, through a combination of changes in federal and provincial law and changes in political parties’ organizational structures over the past generation, Canadian politics has diverged from other democracies in systematically draining the power out of parliamentarians and party members and concentrating it in the office of each party’s registered leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, resolutions by party members could force changes in platform and government policy, these are routinely ignored. Whereas, in the twentieth century, party members or legislative caucuses needed to approve party platforms, this is now done by head office staff and the office of the leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, candidates were chosen by the mutual agreement of local members and the party leader, local agreement is now an optional formality.

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Given this situation, one must ask two questions: (1) Why did Erin O’Toole place a resolution before his party’s membership and campaign for it to be passed, when he could just as easily have kept climate change off the convention floor and then written his desired policy into the party platform unilaterally, (2) What are the implications of this concession of power to party members?

First, let us be clear: nothing has changed legally. O’Toole still has the power to write the defeated resolution into his party’s platform. The only reason the convention vote has power over him is that he sought and campaigned for the approval of the members. It is his choice, not some institutional or legal change that has given meetings of his party’s membership this power over him. But this is now a real power. By arguing that he required this vote in order to campaign effectively in the next election, O’Toole has turned the democratic vote of his members into something necessary and real.

So why did he?

Likely, O’Toole has been observing how the “rally around the flag” effect under Covid has made our leaders even more infallible than they were previously. Party activists, at least in parties like the BC NDP and BC Liberals, understand themselves, when they attend a convention, less as decision-makers and more as members of a lavish theatrical production. A party activist’s job at a convention is to bust out of their role as an extra and get a brief speaking part at the microphone, praising their leader and his wise policies, irrespective of their private thoughts on the matter.

O’Toole must have expected that Tory convention delegates would behave like members of other parties and work from the script he had handed them. But they didn’t. Instead, we witnessed the building of an impressive coalition against the resolution led not by oil industry shills but by Campaign Life Coalition, the largest anti-abortion organization in Canada.

The Religious Right has long chafed under the authoritarian leadership of the new Conservative Party that they worked so hard to create in 2003, a leadership that has shown a surprising loyalty to Canada’s cross-partisan consensus to keep women’s reproductive rights out of parliament. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole have all been effective at isolating, marginalizing and cutting off support from the anti-abortion movement when it came to voting on their key issue.

But what this establishment did not see coming was the emergence of a larger Trumpian coalition of forced birth advocates, climate change deniers and other stigmatized groups fronted by an issue other than abortion. In this way, the Tory establishment has found itself stuck in the 1990s, when these groups were separate and smaller, as compared to the present-day reality where, for many, climate change denial, assault weapon legalization and putting women with insufficiently documented miscarriages on death row are politically inextricable from one another.

This moment in Canadian politics should worry both left-wing and mainstream Canadians. A populist revolt against the autocracy of Canada’s political structures is happening. Rank-and-file party members are standing up to their leaders and building alliances to challenge the power of our country’s political class and the consensus they embody.

The problem is that this revolt is taking place on the political right; there is no sign of it on the left. The sense that people can organize together and, through democratic voting, challenge elites and their agenda is coming back to life in Canada but inside the our party of the right.

While this, combined with an imminent election defeat, likely marks the death of O’Toole’s political career, it marks the very opposite of death when it comes to the Tory party. As we have seen again and again, movements that mobilize and engage regular folks with the idea that they can confront power and make change ultimately triumph over movements that do not, whether or not they immediately seize state power.

This weekend is a sad and troubling moment when it comes to the climate crisis, to women’s reproductive rights and to the pursuit of economic equality. But it could be a good day for democracy in Canada, if rank-and-file New Democrats, Greens and Liberals tear a page from the new book Tory members are reading.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #2: Internment, Amnesia, the Maximato and Hindutva

This article is the second in a new series on authoritarianism, an online companion to Los Altos Institute’s reading groups on the new authoritarianism and on global diaspora and migration. Starting February 2021. It is part of my efforts to open up a larger field for both comparative and connective analysis of authoritarian movements past and present and in the Global North versus Global South. If you would like to support more scholarship like this, please consider responding to our Institute’s annual financial plea.

Last week, I wrote about the dangers of historical blindness when it comes to the catastrophic legacy of Canada’s residential school system. Unfortunately, Canada’s white settlers need to stage a performance of tearful ancestor-blaming in order to continue those very ancestors’ despicable policies.

Today, I want to write about another of our forebears’ sins and how our narration of it is blinding us to rapid and dangerous changes in geopolitics that are fueling the rise of the “new authoritarians,” like Recep Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Narendra Modi, the elected leaders of some of the largest, most diverse states on earth.

Specifically, I am writing to explain why it is that remedying this historical blindness helps us to understand that, next to the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Flag, the next most prevalent flags at the Trump movement’s storming of Washington were the flags of the Republic of India and of its ruling party, BJP.

The Problems of Canadian Nationalism

Canadian civic nationalism is truly progressive in that it buys into what historians call “the progress myth,” an idea that the things that liberal folks like about their societies, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, free markets, open borders, tolerance, universal education, ecological sustainability, technological innovation etc. are baked into history itself; that human beings are merely agents of an invisible force called “progress” that will inevitably triumph in shaping our societies into societies that progressives (i.e. most Canadians) like.

Part of the evidence for progress is the idea that the generations that are currently alive are the best people there have ever been. By best, we mean most thoroughly embody such progressive policies as pluralism. Those of us who are at the peak of our social influence, in early middle age, believe ourselves to epitomize those values better than any previous generation of human beings in the place where we live.

To progressives, Donald Trump and his cohort of authoritarians are a glitch, a blip, an aberration. Perfunctory, symbolic efforts are invested in getting rid of those folks because history will do that. The real work of being a progressive  if how they use their time is anything to go by) when it comes to the civic nationalism of a place like Canada, is to prove oneself more progressive than other putative progressives. One could do this by calling them out for their insufficiently full-throated praise of a progressive value or cause or, maybe, less adversarially, making sure that the cans in the recycling blue box on one’s front porch shine brighter than those in one’s neighbour’s.

But the most important thing in Canada’s progressive civic nationalism, more than virtue-signaling or chastising one’s neighbours, is ancestor-blaming. There is only one area of ancestor-blaming that can compete with our crocodile tears for the Indigenous people whose land we continue to confiscate and poison, whom we continue to abduct and incarcerate from cradle to grave: Japanese Internment.

The Japanese Diaspora in the Pacific

Following the Japanese Empire’s bombing of the military base the United States was using to colonially occupy the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Canadian and US governments began stripping citizens and residents of Japanese extraction of their homes, their businesses and their civil rights, breaking up communities and relocating them to BC’s interior and the Prairies.

This process was not merely one of the most flagrant abrogations of human rights in Canadian history and, on top of that, nakedly racist (no such measures were taken towards Germans, Italians or Finns); it was clearly also commercially motivated. The strongest voices supporting internment were canneries and fishermen, and it was the white-owned parts of the fishing industry who benefited most from the resale of Japanese land, boats and canning infrastructure. Powerful Japanese businesspeople were suddenly penniless; powerful fishing and canning cartels were smashed.

There is no question that, as with the residential schools, our ancestors were on the wrong side of history. But, as with the residential school debate, flattening our forebears into no more than moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash facsimiles harms our ability to make sense of and ethically respond to the present.

In Canada and to a much greater extent, the US, Japanese immigrants were initially understood to be a kind of white or honourary white immigrant when they began arriving on the Pacific Coast and Hawaii in the nineteenth century. Newspapers, encyclopedias, school textbooks all sought to draw sharp distinctions between Chinese and Japanese people based on the geopolitics and racist pseudoscience of the day. The Japanese played baseball and wore top hats; their country was a formal ally of the British and French Empires; they had beaten a great power (Russia) in a head-to-head war in the twentieth century.

While Japanese settlers on the Pacific Slope faced a great deal of racism (and nowhere more so than British Columbia), their typical defense was their sharp racial difference from the Chinese, an indebted failing state that was exporting indentured servants to balance its books.

Like Jews, Turks, and Arab Christians, the Japanese existed at the margins of whiteness initially, with national laws typically recognizing them as white and local opinion typically not, in the early years of the twentieth century.

Ironically, it was following the war in which Japan was an effective ally of Canada and the US that the Japanese hold on whiteness grew more tenuous by the year. The failure of governments to demobilize First World War veterans, resulting in inflation, homelessness and major social upheaval (of which the Winnipeg General Strike was but one instance) was a global phenomenon. Eager to diffuse the emerging socialist consciousness that had toppled the Russian Empire, major corporations and media throughout the capitalist world began offering an alternative to socialism to cure the ills of demobilization and the early 1920s: racism and nationalism.

Always a strategy since the nineteenth century, major media and corporations began describing the workplace as a site of racial and national competition. Major manufacturers funded patriotic associations and conservative newspapers written in immigrants’ first languages and encouraged residential segregation of different ethnicities. In this environment, anti-Japanese sentiment hardened, especially because Japanese lineages were competing so effectively against Europeans. The more Japanese folks were pushed out of white society, the more they subscribed to cartels and buyers’ clubs, a local, practical economic nationalism.

But Internment was not simply produced by a rising tide of racism, segregation and economic antagonism. Something else had to happen to lead to this event:

The Maximato.

The Mexican Diaspora and Its Interwar Weaponization

Few people outside of the historical profession have heard of the Maximato and fewer still appreciate its global impact. In 1924, just as fascism was emerging as a distinct political force, two years after Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power and one after the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany, an admirer of Mussolini’s became president of Mexico.

In Mussolini’s first half-decade in power, prior to his 1928 reversal and creation of Vatican City, the centre of Il Duce’s agenda was anti-clericalism. Mussolini and Turkey’s Kemal Attaturk led political movements in societies that had traditionally been dominated by a single religion. Beginning in 1922, both governments began the violent repression of conservative religious leaders and enacted legislation like veiling bans to break the power of clerics over their followers. But the most ambitious of the 1920s authoritarian anti-clerics was Calles. Priests and bishops were prohibited from public assembly or wearing religious dress and the Callistas smashed the old church-led education system, just like Attaturk’s movement in Turkey. This ultimately led to the Cristero War in Mexico which spilled over the border in to the United States when US Catholic clergy and the Knights of Columbus began running illegal guns to the rebels.

Understanding that their longstanding control of education was the church’s greatest power, Calles and his fellow Mexican revolutionaries moved quickly to build a state-funded, secular, universal education system under the direction of the federal government and expelled or drove out thousands of clergy.

For Calles, the Cristero War was just one limitation of his power. Another was the Mexican constitution, which prohibited the re-election of a president who had served his full term. Recognizing the magnitude of his project of remaking Mexican society into a secular, authoritarian, one-party state (like what Attaturk would achieve in Turkey or Nasser in Egypt), Calles worked, from the beginning, on means to rule Mexicans via proxies. The term Maximato refers to this because, in this Save time and money by ordering from our convenient, discreet and in-expensive Indian online pharmacy.Our online medication store sells only brand-name prescription drugs, at the lowest prices let these sufferers to avail the viagra cialis on line treatment. It’s the devotedness and hard work done by Late best price on viagra Hakim Hashmi who dreamt of serving people by utilizing the healing power of mother nature. This novelty should uphold the following two rules (3 cialis online australia and 4). 3. In contrast, subliminal message experiments’ subjects display no effects whatsoever after the end levitra australia online http://foea.org/6-revision-v1/ of the experiments. system, like an early Roman Emperor, Calles’ true power came from his informal rather than formal position. Under his successors, Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodriguez, he was still recognized, acknowledged and deferred-to as the Maximo Jefe.

While many appreciate the personal and temporal magnitude of the Maximato, our historical amnesia prevents us from fully seeing its spatial and popular elements. As much as the Maximato, as a project, was about governing beyond Calles’ 1928 term limit, it was also, especially in the context of the ongoing Cristero War, about governing beyond the US-Mexico border.

So, in the 1920s, Calles began the most ambitious campaign of politicizing a diasporic community the world had ever seen. Organizers for Calles’ party went beyond creating local associations across the border to vote in Mexican elections; these associations also participated in American elections, embedding themselves in the Democratic Party machine in Denver, Reno, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. Consulates multiplied and grew; soon consulates were partnering to create Spanish-language day and night schools. Organizing rallies, unionization drives and political education became part of the duties of a consul in the Mexican diplomatic corps.

This was a major innovation.

Because immigrants from a state were typically the most hostile to the rulers of their homeland, especially Sikhs and Irish Catholics who understood their homeland to be under a hostile occupation, Calles built on the fact that most Mexican emigrants had backed the revolution of which he had been a leader. But with a twist: the revolution was continuous, and taking place under his direction. Now emigrants could be equal parts in the building of a patriotic, secular, revolutionary state with not just members but with political aspirations outside Mexico’s borders.

This organizing played an important part in the rising tide of anti-Mexican racism in the US. But it also inspired other authoritarians to reimagine their movement as a global one, in which their diaspora played a central role.

The Failure of the Axis Powers at Diasporic Weaponization

For Adolf Hitler, this proved mostly a headache; diasporic Germans were cautious about proclaiming their sympathy for a hostile foreign power after the First World War and so most pro-Nazi parties outside Germany were those of non-Germans who had narrated their nationality into the Nazi myth of the “Aryan race.” Consequently, Hindu fundamentalist and high caste Hindus formed the majority of Nazi-tribute parties in the various electorates and principalities of British India. And many of these groups and individuals went on to form the Hindutva parties out of which the modern BJP was formed.

Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers, looked to the example of the Maximato in their imagination of the role their diaspora might play in the coming global conflict but there is no evidence that the Japanese government put even a fraction of the thought and investment into creating something similar with their large diasporic populations in the US, Canada and Brazil.

Although they liked the idea that the Issei and Nisei might make a crucial difference in the coming war the British Empire and possibly the USA, aside from the odd proclamation, Hirohito and his prime ministers offered negligible material organization or inducement. But, beginning in California and traveling up the coast to Canada, many Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians reacted to increasingly restrictive laws and growing anti-Asian sentiment by publicly identifying with Japan and its imperial project.

And it is no coincidence that despite British Columbia being far more strident and extreme in our anti-Asian sentiment, the idea for Internment came from the South, from the US.

The thing is: there really were pro-Empire, pro-Hirohito activists and organizations within in the Japanese community on North America’s Pacific Slope, despite the negligible and ineffectual help from Japan.

Our forebears were not reacting to nothing, not acting merely out of a deep-seated racism, nor merely out their covetousness of their Japanese neighbours’ land and fishing fleet. Those things were no doubt preponderant factors in this crime without which it would not otherwise have taken place.

It is that our ancestors needed an alibi for that crime and that alibi was the false and exaggerated belief that the Empire of Japan had weaponized its diaspora as a political and paramilitary force.

So, how does the present change if we suddenly remember our excuse, our alibi and its origins in a real phenomenon that altered the politics of the American Southwest?

The Hindutva Movement in the Present

Maybe we would notice, then, the ways in which Narendra Modi is building his own modern Maximato, one that extends beyond the boundaries of India to encompass a larger Hindutva nationalist community and political project. One of the most striking moments of the 2016 Trump campaign was its celebration of Hindu nationalism in a nationally-televised event, presenting Trump and his movement as the Hindutva choice for America, something reenacted and reciprocated a hundredfold on his tour of India.

While including high-caste and Hindu fundamentalist Indians in mobilizing a transnational diaspora based on a shared Aryan mythic heritage disgusted Hitler, the Modi movement’s version of the project is not squeamish in this way. And we are beginning to see the kind of infrastructure the Maximato built appearing in societies around the world, an activist diplomatic staff of highly politicized consuls, working to build and strengthen Hindutva patriotic associations in our communities.

And we are not just seeing this phenomenon in far right parties. Like the Callistas, the Modi-ites are working in many scenes. Progressive and left parties with a predominantly white membership are especially susceptible, quickly placing Modi-ite entryists in key spokesperson and decision-making positions. Our hunger to tokenize brown bodies to demonstrate our legitimacy to other white Hindutva candidates for our supposedly socialist municipal party, Proudly Surrey. The BC Green Party, similarly, has nominated individuals aligned with far-right forces in India in the 2017 and 2020 elections. In the US, those trying to outflank Bernie Sanders on the Identitarian left welcomed the Modi movement into the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign.

Because today’s authoritarians have a different approach to diversity and cosmopolitanism, one that seeks to organize different peoples into a hierarchy rather than seeking to eliminate difference, Modi-ites often adopt discourses that superficially invoke unity and allyship among the autocthonous Indian religions Hindutva permits. This enables them to insinuate themselves into broadly liberal or progressive organizations, even as their primary agenda is to build a global authoritarian religious fundamentalist movement. That is because progressives, increasingly, see nothing but colour and reduce a person’s politics to what they perceive to be the interests of that person’s race, gender or sexuality.

The Modi movement and the Trump movement are increasingly organized and connected global movements that are self-conscious in their understanding that they are part of a worldwide struggle between a new and vibrant populist authoritarianism and a shopworn, exhausted and confused set of movements defending democracy. And so, MAGA hats appear at Hindutva rallies and Aryan supremacist flags fly comfortably next to those of the Confederacy.

And we are turning a blind eye, partly because our innate racism combined with progressive smugness makes us refuse to see differences of opinion among folks we do not consider white. Consequently, when activists like Surrey’s Gurpreet Singh, publisher of Radical Desi, or organizations like Indians Abroad for a Pluralist India, ask for our solidarity in standing against this Modi-backed program of institutional capture in the Indian diaspora, we fail them when we don’t show up; and, in turn, fail the global movement against the new authoritarianism.

But I also have to wonder if some of our unwillingness to make common cause with those calling this out goes back to the cartoonish image of Canadian ancestral villainy on which our civic nationalism is based. Our ancestors were wrong and evil to make so much of a handful of pro-Hirohito rallies and speeches, wrong to see these things being precisely organized and commanded by a force already present. Our ancestors were motivated by greed and racism to see an organized movement where there was none, and they then massively overreacted to this illusion. Therefore, we reason, any talk today of weaponized diasporas and global alliances among authoritarians must be both wrong and racist.

I would suggest that taking this position is grossly irresponsible. We need to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens of all extractions against globalizing authoritarian movements. Canadians have been right to stage anti-Trump marches and protests over the past four years, against Trump’s foreign policy, against his domestic policy and against the actions of his supporters in Canada. I think our non-white fellow citizens deserve the same kind of solidarity when staring down a far more organized movement that makes no distinction in its murderous intent towards Indian Muslims, irrespective of the country whose citizenship they hold.

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The Hollow Earth: Neoliberalism’s Encounter with Covid-19 and the Uberization of Society

            This essay begins with a long discussion of my old friend George and how I came to know the central anecdote in this story. If you want to skip ahead to the jeremiad about neoliberalism, just scroll down to section two.

George M Gibault (1949-2016)

George in his last years

            My late friend George Gibault served as the BC Social Credit caucus Director of Research from 1975-1995. George was an eccentric polymath and one of the finest strategists the political right has ever had in BC. When not teaching himself different regional styles of banjo music or how to speak Latvian, he was involved in a long thought experiment about what kind of language super-intelligent space-faring dogs would speak. A Turkic language, he decided.

            For obvious reasons, George and I became fast friends when Troy Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and I bumped into him en route to our lunch meeting to discuss how to keep the BC Electoral Change Coalition together in 1998. We became aware that Troy had paid our bill and left hours ago when the restaurant finally told us they were closing. Like what we call “cultural historians” in my line of work, George had an uncanny talent for seeing something universal, structural and profound in a society by examining the thinking of those at its periphery. For this reason, we both had a carefully curated set of illustrative anecdotes about our encounters with people more eccentric than ourselves, anecdotes that were not merely funny but either were, had been or would be illustrative of something pressing and profound in human society. This is the first (but will not be the last) of my posts whose foundation is a George Gibault story.

(It is also worth noting that this story also formed the foundation of a shockingly prescient role-playing game Philip Freeman and I ran in 2003-06, which predicted the burkini, ISIL, increasing rates of gender reassignment surgery, rolling coal and the globalization of OK! Magazine, among other things.)

George had many jobs in addition to his formal role in the Social Credit governments that ruled BC from 1975-91, as a strategist, administrator and policy wonk. But one of his most cherished was one of several he was forced to take on following the accession of Bill Vander Zalm to the premier’s chair. “The Zalm,” was a tad eccentric, himself, and liked to shoot from the hip policy- and strategy-wise; at one point, he took a three-month leave of absence from the premiership to star in the Sinterlkaas Fantasy, an CTV-Dutch co-production in which he played both Santa Claus and himself, set in Fantasy Gardens, the theme park he did not just run but resided in. So George appointed himself as the person who would take meetings on the premier’s behalf that might otherwise cause the premier to fly off on an unhelpful tangent.

One such meeting was with the leader of the Ontario Social Credit Party. The Social Credit movement had begun in Canada during the inter-war years as a conspiratorial and somewhat confused offshoot of William Jennings Bryan’s popular monetary reform movement in the US. The original Social Credit parties in Canada were explicitly anti-Semitic and believed that provincial governments printing as much of their own scrip as they wished would get Canada out from under the International Zionist Conspiracy that was controlling all governments through the monetary system.

In the 1940s and 50s, in BC and Alberta, Social Credit parties became big-tent anti-communist parties of liberals, Tories and populists whose purpose was to keep socialists, trade unionists and urban liberal cultural elites out of office. And to a lesser extent, the national Social Credit movement had followed suit, becoming a primarily anti-communist, anti-metric, anti-secularism organization where the anti-Semitism was kept to a dull roar.

The Hollow Earth

But by 1989, when the Ontario Socred leader arrived, the BC party was just two years away from electoral obliteration and Social Credit in the rest of Canada had died back to fringe status by the end of the 70s. George figured that the last thing his boss needed was a dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking from some wingnut from Ontario. Besides, George, himself, was curious about what the guy had to say.

“The number one issue,” the guest from Ontario explained, “is Global Warming.”

“Really?” George replied. “Why?”

“We have to accelerate it.”

The reason, the man explained, was that the earth is hollow. The inside is a Dyson sphere with a tiny black sun in the very centre, providing a small amount of warmth. Over 90% of all of the Jews live inside the earth, which is made out of gold. They retain their dominance over the world economy by shipping the gold to their coreligionists on the surface through secret passages under the polar ice caps.

It was necessary to increase BC’s carbon order cialis australia After grabbing that authentication the drug starts working within half an hour of taking meal. This causes the veins of the penis to absorb a greater amount cialis overnight delivery http://www.heritageihc.com/buy5785.html of blood, upon which the muscles become more comprehensive. These combinations are purchase levitra http://www.heritageihc.com/visit then tested in clinical trials to see how effective they are. You’ll be able to attend the classes according to your time tadalafil super active and convenience. emissions, he explained, in order to melt the polar ice caps and reveal the secret passages. Then we could invade the centre of the earth and everyone would have all the gold they needed. This, then, would end world hunger.

I think George made the right move. The Zalm might have been convinced. Today, after all, he is campaigning against chemtrails.

For many years, I delivered this story with the “end world hunger” bit acting as a punchline, to explain to my economic history students some basic things about what currency reform can and cannot do.

But this vision has been haunting me of late. Because it describes the incipient class system that the Covid-19 global pandemic is producing, especially in jurisdictions run by “progressive,” technocratic neoliberal governments like BC’s. Depending on one’s class experiences of the pandemic in such places are radically different.

Members of the managerial class, comprising managers, college instructors, lawyers, government bureaucrats and other white collar workers have had their workplaces shut down under crowd-size rules. They have been ordered either to work from home or to go home and stay on a state-funded work furlough, and have been asked to leave their homes as infrequently as possible.

Importantly, almost no new managerial or instructional jobs are being created, while many are ceasing to exist. Were one to try to find work in such a sector, one’s job search would be fruitless.

But now, let us think about those who work with their hands, cashiers, construction workers, industrial workers, delivery drivers, taxi operators, etc. In BC, in the case of construction and industrial workers, not only have crowd size rules been suspended at their workplaces; their works has been declared an essential service. Building condos, building dams, digging pipelines are all areas of work where every safety rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a non-binding guideline, and the government has promised that nobody will inspect work sites, to even check for guideline compliance.

Worse yet, such work has been declared an essential service, making it pretty much impossible for anyone to obtain the necessary layoff notice to receive government assistance. That means that industrial and construction workers are being compelled on pain of bankruptcy and future homelessness to keep going to work in unsafe places under unsafe conditions.

But the real story is delivery drivers, the only growth area of the economy with new jobs being advertised. There are longer shifts for cashiers now, too, with special hours for elderly people to shop with greater distancing, creating more cashier jobs in key sectors like groceries and liquor. If one is in the customer service of driving business, the number of people you encounter per day does not decline at all. And, in many cases may increase. Former delivery drivers and cashiers, even if their wages were high enough to qualify for government employment benefits in the first place, and even if Uber Eats, Doordash or Skip the Dishes paid into government insurance programs, still could not obtain unemployment benefits because it is clearly demonstrable that there are jobs available for them, in the only growth sector of the job market. There are no layoff notices in this world, just desperate people in financed cars hoping to make enough money to keep it on the road.

When Uber busted its way into BC, we only envisaged the Uberization of taxi service. Instead, we are seeing the Uberization of society itself.

Strip away the pseudoscience and anti-Semitism and we find the world of the Ontario Social Credit Party emerging organically out of the collision of neoliberalism and a protracted global pandemic.

There are those who work INSIDE, in a safe place, made out of money, dimly lit by a dark sun. And there are those who work OUTSIDE, in a dangerous, lethal place, paid minimum wage or less, compelled to work whether they wish to or not, serving the INSIDE people under the light of a large, bright sun.

The people on the inside are financially secure, paid primarily by the state at a liveable rate with mortgage payments deferred and other small perks. The people on the outside are financially and physically insecure, paid primarily by private sector businesses at poverty wages, supplemented by occasional tips from the inside people. They must work because no government help is coming to replace their wages, working, as they do, in “essential” industries that, in some cases, are even growing. Their rent is not suspended. While temporarily protected from eviction, those who get behind can be evicted the day the state of emergency ends and are still subject to collection agent harassment, wage garnishment and civil suits for unpaid bills.

And the worst thing is that, unlike old Socred thinking, this is not the result of a conspiracy. This is simply the consequence of neoliberal societies’ encounter with a biological virus, somehow mutating both the virus and the societies into something both more lethal and more unjust.

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Extinction Will Be Stopped by Conversion, Not By Raising Awareness

Back in June, I promised that I would write about the alternative to raising awareness, as a paradigm for understanding shifts in political allegiance, conversion. To get more fully into this piece, it is probably useful to review the one it follows.

Green Politics, Paradigm Shifts and Raising Awareness

A few years after I joined the Green Party, the second great upwelling of environmental concern in post-war North American society began. From 1988-92, there was a period of tremendous environmental concern and activism in Anglo American society, reaching its crescendo in the 1990 Earth Day celebrations and TV specials. During this time, Angus Reid conducted a poll asking Canadians if they would vote for a Green Party, if only one existed. We, in the Green Party of Canada, were confused and surprised. But 14% of Canadians appeared to tell Reid that they would be voting for us the first chance they got.

During that time, many new people joined the Greens and membership in environmental groups shot up higher and faster. But our election results did not reflect this. We got 1.4% in a 1988 byelection in BC, 2% in 1989 and our best result in any BC riding in the 1991 election was 4.4%. The federal party did even worse.

This did not dishearten the party’s base. And what I began to hear, with increasing frequency, was that there would be a massive, quantum, ten- or twenty-fold increase in our vote once the “paradigm shift” happened. While this was, to some degree, an appeal to the strong eschatological I have describe in Green politics on more than one occasion, I want, in this piece, to look seriously at the precise meaning of this term and how it presaged a catastrophically bad theory of social change that hobbles Green and green politics up to the present day.

The term “paradigm shift” was developed by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His argument was that science takes sudden and massive leaps forward when a “paradigm shift” takes place. An example of this is the massive shift when the theory of a universe of planets encased in crystalline spheres, making circular orbits, governed by the will of God was replaced by free-floating planets, moving in elliptical orbits, governed by the invisible forces of gravitation. Kuhn argued that science makes these major leaps forward when the model that is being used to interpret and store information becomes weighed-down with too many exceptions, too many aberrations and it is easier to come up with a new system that explains these things than it is to continue modifying a system that has had to create too many special cases and exceptions to explain away observable data.

The universe of Ptolemy and Copernicus gave way to the universe of Kepler, Galileo and Newton not because its model was conclusively disproved but because the new model was so much less cumbersome in its explanations and contained fewer special cases and exceptions, that the sheer weight of all the eccentrics and epicycles brought it down in favour of a system simpler to explain, that modeled far more – but not all – of the available data.

Greens believed that as more and more information about the harms of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. became available, human consciousness would undergo a “paradigm shift” that rejected liberal capitalist politics and economics in favour of a new, green model of politics and economics. The way forward, to political success, then, was clear: raise awareness. Circulate more and more information about the health impacts, ecological impacts, social impacts of the current social order and, upon reaching a certain threshold of information, society would undergo that paradigm shift.

This, of course, fitted well with the kinds of people most Greens were: people eager to be seen as the smartest, most informed person in the room, and eager to spread the information that made them so, to educate others.

As I have stated previously, the problems with this are obvious: one is that it assumes that people share the moral and ethical views of those raising the awareness, that society is united in a belief in utilitarian liberalism. It assumes that people prioritize future generations living as well or better than us, that they think extinction of species is bad, that they think poor people dying in extreme weather events is bad, that they wish to minimize human suffering. It also assumes that people will remain within the Enlightenment episteme and not choose an alternative theory of physical causation like sodomy causing hurricanes and gay marriage causing fire tornadoes.

But most importantly, it suggests that people have not already bought into the idea of enjoying their lives at the expense of others, be they one’s children, people in the Global South or other species. The SUV-driving World Bank economist who spent half the year in Sierra Leone implementing austerity programs and starving people to death with social program and food subsidy cuts was sure that the paradigm shift was coming any second, that he was a classic utilitarian, someone happily foregoing immediate gratification in the service of a greater good.

The idea of social change by paradigm shift is absurdly premised; first, it argues that moral, ethical and political choices function, for a society, the same way science does; second, it is premised on the idea that there is only one ideology in the world, utilitarianism and that everyone in the world is a utilitarian, someone who will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, personally, socially and ecologically. Paradigm shifters suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, first, in failing to imagine that not all people think the way they claim to think and, second, in failing to realize that they themselves do not think as they claim to. But rather than confronting this, they go forth and raise awareness.

The term “raising awareness” has problems beyond those identified by Doug Stanhope. The term, itself, appears to have arisen in the 1990s to replace the term “raising consciousness.” Whereas “raising awareness” refers simply to the idea of increasing the amount of information one’s interlocutor possesses, “raising consciousness” is about much more. Popularized by the Second Wave of the feminist movement, it was not just about giving women new information about their status in society; it was about offering an alternative theory of what it meant to be a person of worth as a woman, independent of patriarchy’s or an individual man’s evaluation of you.

Unlike raising awareness, raising consciousness was about providing women two things: new information about their status in the world and a new moral order within which to situate this information. Information about the gap between men’s and women’s wages is only significant if one decides that men’s and women’s work is equally valuable. Information about rates of unprosecuted domestic assault is only significant if one decides that it is wrong for men to beat their wives.

“Raising consciousness,” in turn, came out of a Marxist vocabulary. A key purpose of a communist party, according to canonical Marxism is to challenge “false consciousness” among the working class, beliefs like the idea that bosses are people more deserving of money than their workers, even if they work fewer hours and less hard, or the idea that people deserve family money they inherit from a rich relative. The problem has never been that people don’t know there is a massive wealth gap between rich and poor and that family wealth determines more of one’s economic fate than one’s own actions and choices; the problem has been a false consciousness that sees these things as fair.

The Nature of Conversion

When we look at the adversaries of progressives, we see social movements that are growing more powerful by the day. Neo-fascist movements, the Christian Right, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, etc. do not raise awareness, nor, indeed, do movements on the left that are not progressive i.e., movements that have abandoned coalitions with liberals and scorned accommodations with neoliberalism. Momentum and the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, Our Revolution and the other movement groups behind Bernie Sanders, the student strikers for climate who stand behind Greta Thunberg, these groups are not raising awareness. These groups are seeking converts.

A conversion superficially resembles a paradigm shift in that it is a sudden realignment of one’s affiliations and consciousness but is, in more ways, opposite. When a person experiences conversion, the information they have does not change; what changes is the moral order in which they place that information. People do not join the Sanders movement because they have just received a new piece of information about the lack of healthcare for low-income Americans; they join because a fire has been kindled within them that suddenly makes poor people dying because they don’t have health insurance an evil they can no longer abide. People do not join Extinction Rebellion because they have just become aware that climate science is true after previously deeming it false; no, they join because they can no longer abide the scale of death, suffering and extinction our civilization is causing.

When we look at the Christian Bible and examine conversion stories, none of them are based on information. They are based on an encounter with another person or persons who have realigned their lives based on a new morality they have adopted.

We must remember that conversion is something far more natural to human beings than a paradigm shift. Many kids bully other kids in school. They do so because they enjoy the suffering of the kids they are bullying, until they don’t. Then, suddenly, they feel remorse, shame and realign their lives to behave in less hurtful ways. This is conversion. The information doesn’t change; morality changes.

Our adversaries understand this perfectly. They understand that people feel powerless, insignificant, dirty, That’s why; the patients are suggested to take this cialis sale find for more info now drug in the amount advised by the doctor. This has grown into increasing concern by in Athletic Physical Therapy researchers and endurance sports participants. levitra 20 mg It is highly suggested to avoid having intoxicants and over consumption of food while using this medicine. buy vardenafil levitra http://www.wouroud.com/blog.php Erectile dysfunction develops when there is less or no blood provision to the male viagra without prescription canada organ under the influence of this health problem from their male partner. morally compromised. They understand that the world is full of people who want to be good guys, heroes, people who want to turn their lives around with a new sense of purpose. And so, instead hurling information at them, information they usually already have, they sell moral realignment. They offer people a sense of renewal, purification and purpose.

Amazing Grace

At the beginning of the Enlightenment, we still understood the power of conversion. One of the most important and uplifting hymns of that era is Amazing Grace. The semi-apocryphal story of the hymn is that it was the story of a slaver, John Newton, delivering African slaves to the Americas, a slaver who had grown wealthy and powerful running his slave ships, delivering their human cargo. Then, one day, in the midst of a storm, on board his slave ship, God spoke to him and he realized the evil of what he had been doing:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

T’was blind but now I see

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear

And Grace, my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear

The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares

We have already come.

T’was grace that brought us safe thus far

And grace will lead us home

Newton knew the same things about slavery after that moment as he did before. He had been “blind,” not to the conditions under which he captured his slaves or the conditions under which he kept them. He had been blind to the evil of these acts. The scales fell from his eyes and he had a new purpose, a new story of what his life meant.

Stories of conversion are tremendously compelling to people from all walks of life, a chance to press the reset button, annihilate one’s past mistakes and re-describe oneself as an agent for good.

So, why, then do progressives recoil from the idea of conversion as their mission, their political strategy? Some, as I said above, comes from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that different people have different theories of good and bad or good and evil, other than utilitarianism. Such blindness is inculcated through concepts like “social justice,” the idea taught in the caring professions, like nursing and social work, that those who disagree with us simply do not believe in social justice i.e. utilitarianism, rather than recognizing that those who disagree with us have a different theory of what justice is and that everyone believes in a social justice.

But the other problem is this: shame. Progressives believe that shame is unnatural and unhealthy. It is not enough to be a good person now; one must always have been a good person. The idea that one’s life’s work is one of moral elevation of the self is an alien one. To have been a bad person in the past admits a kind of fallibility and saddles one with a guilt that progressives imagine to be unendurable. That is because, by and large, while being very well-intentioned, they exist in a culture that engenders a lack of character. I fall back on the brilliant words of the film the Big Kahuna to explain what I mean:

PHIL: The question is do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion, Bob, you do not, for the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.

BOB: You’re saying I won’t have any character unless I do something I regret?

PHIL: No, Bob. I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t ’cause it’s too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don’t matter in the end. Then you will attain character. Because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face.

Unacknowledged Shame Is Paralyzing Shame

I noticed this after the 2009 electoral reform referendum in BC. I was on a board of directors who made bad hiring decisions and bad strategy decisions that ensured the victory of the status quo. Had we made better decisions, individually and collectively, we would have offered British Columbians a campaign that made sense and deserved their vote. So, I issued a public apology for letting the movement down. No one else did. Everyone else blamed our adversaries for beating us, like that wasn’t their job. I recall after the 2015 election Ken Georgetti, former head of the BC Federation of Labour, write an Op/Ed piece stating that the NDP’s drop from first place to third was not the party’s fault or labour’s fault; their strategy was sound; it was the voters who were to blame for not finding it appealing.

In fact, progressives are awash in shame for their failure to avert the extinction event we are now facing. The shame they think they are avoiding has actually paralyzed them. And it is only by acknowledging that shame, by acknowledging one’s culpability, one’s past failures that one can begin anew and fight with the moral clarity necessary to challenge the global death cult that welcomes the extinction event. And that can only be accomplished through conversion, by acknowledging our shame, our loss, our failure and reorienting our morality through an act of contrition and humility and then calling upon others to do the same.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 2: Why We Must Choose Hope Over Progress

Many people forget that the original ideology of progressivism and the original Progressive Party were created by US President Teddy Roosevelt as an explicitly white supremacist ideology. The idea was that human civilization was a number line, a one-dimensional graph along which every individual human and every group of humans progressed. As they moved forward through time, the fundamental principles of physical and social Darwinism called upon them to change and, as they met new challenges, they changed or died.

As individuals and societies moved along the line, they became more restrained, more polite, more literate, more intelligent and lighter-skinned. Every society that was not England, Germany or America was simply a point behind them on the number line of progress, when people were swarthier, dumber and less restrained.

Much as there has been a Herculean effort to remove progressivism from its white supremacist ancestry, it had remained wedded to it for an unexpected reason: it was a theory of easy and inexorable wins. The world was moving towards a predetermined goal; all one needed was to be on the right side and the engine of history would do the heavy lifting and arrive at the future society with which one had sensibly decided to align oneself. In this way, taking up the “white man’s burden” as Teddy Roosevelt believed Rudyard Kipling had asked him to do on behalf of the British Empire was not that hard a job. It was mostly about waiting to be proven right.

The idea that violent, exhausting, life-threatening struggle was the engine of history, be it the struggle conceived by Karl Marx or the divinely-ordained racial struggle conceived by John Brown and Nat Turner has always been anathema to those who believe in the Progress Myth. In other words, there is a strange and intimate dance between Progress and Whiteness.

In the mid-1980s, the colour line moved over me and, although I had been raised in a black family and remained surrounded by black relatives and mentors, I became white, not necessarily a permanent identity but one with which I have been saddled these past thirty-plus years.

As a consequence, I have an odd experience to talking to other white people about certain things. One that comes up with increasing frequency in debates about climate politics is this one: if you tell a white person that all signs point to our failing to arrest runaway feedback mechanisms in climate change, they will demand to know why you are telling them to give up. So often, when I tell white comrades that chances are that we have already passed the point of being able to arrest the omnicide, they will demand to know why I am telling them not to fight, why I am okay with them and their kids dying. The white co-optation of the Martin Luther King Jr’s paraphrasing of nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker that “the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has somehow been used to justify this theory that victory is easy and inevitable or not worth fighting for.

That is not to say that the people who would later become white have always had such a view. Both the Bronze Age Greeks and Norse believed that honour demanded one must fight with the expectation of victory, even though defeat was inevitable.

For good or ill, JRR Tolkien hated progress and progressives. And the theories of time and morality he puts forward in Lord of the Rings argue that the great Manichean struggles between good and evil are won by the opposite of progress, when it comes to fighting for a just future: hope.

In the family in which I grew up, the idea that one was fighting against white supremacy was completely disconnected from the certainty, probability or even possibility of victory. One was born into a Manichean struggle between good and evil that began before you were conceived and would continue long after your death. You fought against white supremacy because it was right, whether it was during a time you were winning, like the 1960s or when you were losing like the 1870s or today.

There was never any connection between one’s participation in the struggle one’s chance of success, especially in the immediate term. One was born into the struggle and stayed in the hassle one’s whole life. Some people, like me, or my great aunt Connie could “pass,” but abandoning the struggle was one of the most dishonourable things one could do.

Kamagra tablets have emerged as a challenging ED drug of levitra online no prescription generic origin. One approach can be changing the nutrition plan of the patient, which includes a gluten shop at store discount levitra free diet and elimination diet. 4. Using toilet stool is the only solution that can help in improving cialis on line the energy level to a great extent. This procedure is used to treat excessive wounds, burns and infections such as vitiligo. cialis usa online heritageihc.com That is why I was moved to tears when Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire concession speech contained the words “we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” It seemed that Obama was culturally translating between the African American idea of hope and the white idea of hope, the former being the internal strength to struggle against evil and the latter being a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of triumphing over evil.

It brought me back to the other great cultural translation project of my childhood, Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien reached back to Eddas and transmitted the Norse ideal that even though every rational oracular prediction said that the gods would lose the final battle and evil would triumph over good, the Aesir and Vanir fought on because somewhere in the distant future, beyond the final battle was a peaceful and just future called Gimli, that although they could not see how to get there and would never get there themselves, they fought for.

The central, the fundamental battle of the soul around which Lord of the Rings revolves is the contest between progress and hope. The two secondary villains of the novels are Saruman the Wizard and Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (Tolkien’s Byzantine Empire analogue). These men were the two most powerful in the known world. One was the greatest of the seven hypostatic istari, the god-men sent by the gods to aid the people in the confrontation against the greater evil, the minor god Sauron; the other was the ruler of the most powerful, prosperous kingdom.

Both men possess palantirs, oracular stones that permit them to see throughout space-time, and it is these stones that bewitch them and lead to their downfall and betrayal of the forces of good. Because Peter Jackson, maker of the LOTR films a generation ago appears not to have understood the central thematic element of the story he was telling, he depicts our secondary antagonists as being mind-controlled or bewitched by Sauron himself and falling under his sway. That is explicitly not what Tolkien sought to show or told his readers. Rather, by being directed to see the overwhelming odds stacked against them, the greatness of Sauron’s power, the vastness of his hosts, they lost hope.

Denethor’s response to the loss of hope is to fight halfheartedly and hopelessly, carrying out his duties as ruling steward but rejecting all strategems based on courage or hope. He does this until the apparent death of both of his sons, at which point, we orders a giant funeral pyre to be built and commits suicide, trying to take as much of his family and city with him. Until his suicide, Denethor is an incrementalist. He “knows” he faces defeat so he retreats as slowly as possible.

Saruman’s response to the loss of hope is to switch sides and attempt to carve out his own personal share of Sauron’s dominion by conquering first. He explains to his former allies that their “only hope” is to join with the forces of evil so that they might make their corner of it less evil. Saruman, too, is an incrementalist. Every mile of territory he conquers before Sauron does, is territory that will fall under his less-harsh yoke when the war is over. In this way, Saruman offers a better Middle Earth, “one practical step at a time.”

Gandalf, our istari hero, on the other hand, forms a small multi-racial fellowship of ordinary people who bet on a profoundly improbable strategy that has almost no chance of success; one member of the fellowship even betrays it when he is overwhelmed with hopelessness. But the fellowship does not draw hope by evaluating the probability of victory. Their hope is based on these aphorisms Gandalf quotes, “many are the strange chances of the world and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter… for even the wise cannot see all ends.”

In this way, hope comes not from the chances of a particular plan succeeding. It comes from the fact that human intelligence is fallible, that the universe is big and unpredictable and strange, that only God can see all ends. Hope comes from an acknowledgement of our smallness and fallibility not from our power and our knowledge. Denethor and Saruman believed they had seen and thought all possibilities; Gandalf had the humility to know that no one could. That does not mean averting one’s eyes from the facts before you, of the permafrost melt and the methane and sea ice feedback mechanisms, nor from the rising spectre of racist authoritarian movements everywhere. It still means using all that information to make judgements but to reject the hubris of Saruman and Denethor and recognize that, as one is not God, one cannot be all-knowing.

But for the fellowship to succeed, Saruman and Denethor first had to be defeated. And this is the reality the left faces today. There is a final battle we must soon join against the family annihilator patriarchs leading this global death cult but interposing themselves between us and them are the Sarumans and Denethors of the world, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans, the Pete Buttigiegs and Kamala Harrises of the world, those who hide an agenda of betrayal, capitulation and self-immolation behind a discourse of “progress,” “good first steps,” “pilot programs,” and “realism.” This is the politics of “incremental gains” which now means not even that but rather “flooring the gas over the cliff and then letting up.”

And the only way we can do that is by being fundamentally hopeful. That means finding and transmitting joy, camaraderie and certainty of the rightness of our struggle and not of our chances of victory.

Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

There Are No Climate Deniers, Only Climate Fundamentalists – Part One

For eight years, I have been writing about three things (1) the epistemological shift that is ending the Age of Reason and bringing us into the Age of Authenticity, (2) the question of the base unit, how it is that the Age of Reason, unlike other epistemes, saw the base unit of society as the individual person and not the patriarchal family unit, and how anti-Enlightenment forces are challenging that and (3) how the climate crisis is linked to fundamentalist religion, the authentic episteme and the base unit. Finally, I have also mused about how it is that (4) Anglo America has been the crucible of these things.

I am now prepared to tie these things together in… however many words this takes.

Essentially, this piece is about how no individual disbelieves the climate crisis but the discourse communities into which they stack themselves do. This is a means of embracing contradiction without experiencing cognitive dissonance by storing contradictory pieces of information in separate, non-overlapping locations. The means of doing this was pioneered not by climate arsonists but by fundamentalist religious movements, movements that, in the 1920s became tools of the petroleum industry.

It has long been understood that religious fundamentalism is the Janus face of the Enlightenment. The Age of Reason, like any other episteme, was so intellectually and socially hegemonic that it structured the beliefs both of supporters of the Enlightenment and those opposing it politically, culturally and intellectually. In essence, the belief that supernatural actions could not happen inside profane space-time was made universal. It provoked one of three reactions: (1) atheism – the belief that there had never been a god, angels, etc. and that the physical laws of the universe could explain all past, present and future events, (2) deism – the belief that God had once acted inside our universe but that this time had long ago passed and that now, we lived in a naturalistic system, (3) fundamentalism – the belief that even though it was clear that supernatural events did not take place that, to be an ethical person, one must “have faith” i.e. declare one’s belief in them.

While most Christian churches initially embraced deism, this position was an emotionally unsatisfying one. While deism was near-hegemonic in the nineteenth-century Christian world, the twentieth century is a story of its abandonment and the collapse of deistic churches, their members either becoming atheists or fundamentalists.

One must understand that fundamentalist belief is totally unlike the religious cognition of pre-Enlightenment people and peoples. One religious studies scholar explained it as fundamentalists holding tightly to their beliefs, whereas pre-Enlightenment Christians and Muslims were held by their beliefs. For pre-Enlightenment people, God, demons and angels were self-evident, observable phenomena. For fundamentalists, there is an equal certainty that these things cannot be observed and do not exist. But because they believe that such a belief would make them bad people, they solve this problem in two ways: textualization and socialization.

Textualization entails preferring a plain reading of canonical texts to one’s own cognition. When I say “canonical texts,” I refer to something far older than the Enlightenment; I mean the texts that a movement says its thinking is based on because that text is closer than other texts to the mind of God. But, until the rise of fundamentalism, nobody believed that the Vedas, Christian Bible, Jewish Bible, Koran, Analects or Tao Te Ching were written by God himself; the most extreme claim was that the Koran had been dictated by God, still allowing for human corruption, human error and the fact that God communicated at a bandwidth that exceeds human comprehension.

It is this last nigh-universal belief that structured how pre-modern people engaged with canonical texts or “scripture.” They believed that they had to be decoded, that their meanings were neither reliably obvious nor reliably literal. They invented disciplines for decoding scripture like typology, developed by the Stoic movement for the Iliad and Odyssey, practiced by Christians and Muslims for centuries thereafter on the Koran and Bible, or Cabalism, developed by Jews and practiced by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
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In this way, pre-Enlightenment peoples understood interpretation by the human mind as necessary to unlock the meaning of scripture. Fundamentalism reversed this proposition. It argued that because one’s consciousness could not believe in the supernatural, its judgement must be suspended and substituted with the most literal-possible reading of sacred texts i.e. the one involving the least interpretation and cognition. Instead of the mind interpreting the book, the book corrected the errant mind. It is in this context that we must understand “scriptural inerrancy” to be a central proposition of fundamentalism. It is not merely the declaration that scripture is now the unmediated word of God, even when it itself declares otherwise; it is the declaration that the book is a better thinking machine than the mind, that while the mind can err, the canonical text cannot and therefore must be deferred-to.

This idea was pioneered first in the Muslim world, with the Wahabi movement, one which, like Christian fundamentalism, began in cities because that was where the Enlightenment episteme first gained hegemony.

Socialization is a process that I have only come to understand by observing people who claim to deny climate change in action. It is only by seeing how climate arsonists use scientific denial in the public square that I have come to see how fundamentalism produced a second refuge for supernatural belief.

In service of other points I have been making on this blog, I have been stressing the difference between subjective space and intersubjective space. Subjective space is what we think inside ourselves, the thoughts, feelings and ideas that exist silently in our heads, that we then express from time to time. Intersubjective space is culture; it is society; at the micro-level, it is conversation. It is where our identities live; it is where the value of a commodity lives in a capitalist society. Inter-subjective space is the intellectual and cultural air we breather, the water in our fish-tank.

When I argue with individual climate denialists on social media or in person and say “You are only pretending to believe that climate science is not real. You are feigning ignorance and stupidity. But you are not dumb. You know the truth,” the reaction is silence, retreat or concession. No individual climate denier appears able to withstand this unless supported by a larger audience. It is only when deniers know they are being observed by others of their community that they will drag out fake studies, bullshit links and mangled postmodernism. That is because while no individual climate denier believes in their pseudoscience, the intersubjective space in their communities does.

In this day and age, unlike a generation ago, there is never a moment when any climate science denier thinks that climate science is false. The only place where that belief exists is when two or more deniers have a conversation about its falsity. They experience a sense of social accord and support by expressing social agreement. This is what I mean by socialization: in a room of twenty climate science deniers, not one single individual disbelieves climate science. But the room, and every conversation in it does. This is why fundamentalists must pray together and out loud; only then, can the supernatural become real, not in their heads but in the social space between them.

This cognitive sleight of hand was not developed for climate denial. It was developed, naturally and unintentionally, by the fundamentalist movement in reaction to the Enlightenment. So that rooms full of non-believers could collectively believe in God, by substituting the judgement of the room, for their own, in the same way they substituted the judgement of the book for their own. It is just that some lucky and canny oil men bought a controlling interest in fundamentalism in the first half of the twentieth century, that turned it into their death cult’s most potent weapon.

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The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed  to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

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Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

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