I’ve been thinking about the Old Testament prophets lately. I distrust end-is-nigh-ism; that “end” is often just the destruction of some solipsistic fantasy. Life goes on in whatever seemingly hobbled form. The fundamentalists I grew up with understood those OT doom-sayers quite literally. The surreal omens promised a real-world destruction always five minutes from a moment exactly like now. But that now never comes. Their strict textualism paradoxically precluded the OT prophs, with all their weird darkness and tragedy, from ever touching down in real life.
Bad faith theologians write the screeds off as condemnations of ancient dirty Hebrews then—and wicked hedonic (probably still Jewish) postmodernists now. If God is the ultimate reality and truth, those ancient peeps found some seriously deep ditches off the straight and narrow. The texts overflow with visions of perverted sexuality. But I think—then as now—any frantic, populist orgy existing in the streets is usually sustained by an equal moral rot in the hearts of the leaders. The thrusting and grunts peter out into boredom—unless they’re burrowing out from some hard kernel of hurt betrayal. I’m not an expert—but I’m guessing behind the hedonism lay corrupt bureaucratic religious leaders—proto-Pharisees the descendants of which Jesus would rail against centuries later—and analogues to our modern smug technocrats and scornful intellectual elite. That ancient elite grappled with an empire in bondage and decline. The old truths were distant—impractical. They could, though, be twisted into more useful contexts. The Pharisees relaxed into their own holiness. Hosea wrote of his bride the people Israel consorting with men possessing genitals the size of wild beasts. But don’t doubt for a minute the elites’ role in propping up that swollen member.
Rusty Reno continues that grand Pharisaical tradition of holding donkey cock aloft. He’s the editor of First Things, the leading magazine of the orthodox Christian right. He allots himself weekly soapboxes on the rag’s eponymous podcast. I used to listen religiously to it. I’d traded my fundie birthright for a self-styled humanist heroin addiction. That didn’t work out. After I got over, I longed for some current voice to reconcile the remaining stone-cold truths of my youth with that religion’s psychotic shipwreck on reality’s shore. Reno seemed well-read and sophisticated. I contrasted him with the more inclusive (and likeable) offerings from progressive faiths. Hard-line Catholics like Reno, though, held less of a Pollyannaish view of the human condition than Ned Flanders types. I’d thought I’d found a worldview that took in the tragic aspects of both life and the divine I’d experienced so closely.
I chanced on him, though, at a particularly revealing time (apocalyptic in the true sense of the word). Trump was blowing through the Republican primary, and putting on Messianic airs. That was blasphemy of course. But in hindsight it seems Trump is Spirit-chosen in a particularly dismal sense. He’s revealed without mistake the true rot of the times. Formerly, Reno and his ilk would dance urbane, knowing circles around naïve calls for a more Christ-like world. Nowadays though, as the kids say, they’re saying the quiet part out loud. “Trump may be an imperfect vessel (hur hur)—but at least he stands up for timeless Christian verities,” etc.
Here I guess, in polite society we’d come to an impasse. The words of Jesus were uttered two millennia ago, half-forgotten, then transcribed by writers with various aims and impulses. Who am I to be certain of Christ’s intent? Is the current society, mixed equally with virtues and vices, a half-passable excuse for a Christ-like world? Should it be encouraged? If so—then praised? Each age is stranded by these questions—or similar, more eloquent versions of them. One saying in the Gospels, though, I think gives us a hint. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Contra the fundamentalists, that “know” is a verb not a state of being. It banishes all easy, instantly understood answers. Between the fruit and the knowledge must lie an active and morally responsive interpretative twist. I think Jesus calls on us to square all “fruit” against Reality, and without all bullshit distractions like (forgive the term) ideology. The editor of this site once turned me on to Auerbach’s Mimesis. Auerbach wrote about the triumph of the Christian Gospels’ realism against the warped superstition of other ancient faiths. Early Christianity and its surviving writings sought to meld the divine with the lived realities of the poor, without drowning one in the other. (You don’t count, John.) I never made it past the maybe fifth chapter of that book. But Auerbach got me hooked on reality (and Christ) for life.
Which brings us to the coronavirus. Rusty has written an op-ed on the pandemic. He says there’s a stench of the “demon-possessed” in the notion we should shut down civil society to save every possible life. He asks whether we should sacrifice Truth, Justice, Liberty, and Beauty to save the fall of a single sparrow. He’s keenly aware of the resulting contradictions in his pro-life stance. “Killing is different than not saving, and collectively not saving is not an action,” or something… (Society doesn’t exist!)
His pro-life mental clusterfuck doesn’t concern me much. It’s obviously anti-life in regard to the sick and elderly. Reno can synthesize that dialectic to his Creator by whichever manner he sees fit. What alarms and enrages me is the fact that, well—he’s half right, you know. Half-right in that poisonous way that gives rise to barbarity.
My governor—like yours too I’m guessing—has over the last two weeks shut down large swathes of civil society. On livestreams, with the utmost solemnity, they inform us of ever more closures. And they go about the task with something close to verve. (“The moment we’ve been training for!”) I’m no strict libertarian, but I think it should trouble all of us how completely the state has shut things down in response to a perceived threat. As a communist friend of mine said, “I do not trust this ruling class to do anything but kill us all off and enslave the remaining.” It’s necessary to realize that these actions are both necessary and undertaken by a dangerous political class—one with hearts rotted out by either progressive Twitter/Golden-Age TV or crypto-fascist conservatism. They’re prodded on by STEM technocrats, eager to finally run their fingers across the police state. Op-eds in the Atlantic and similar joints moisten their loins over China’s brutally efficient response. Reno accurately projects onto his opponents a psychotic fear and repression of death, while missing that emotional clampdown in himself. Twenty-first century Babylonian capitalism keeps everything eternally fresh, hip, and clean. Any evidence to the contrary is swept under the rug. Reno, staggering under reality’s blow, stammers “Fuck it all, I want it back!” The technocrats at least have the decency to recommend some austerity to get the engine running smoothly again.
We’re right to be skeptical of that austerity when it threatens to immiserate the lives of the already miserable poor. But there’s more than one value we hold dear. We live in a world of contingent, incrementalistic skullduggery. Our ideals march forth conjoined with a hundred other little backward steps. Another hated vice blossoms forth into the surest spring.
Truth, Justice, Beauty—Reno’s imperatives are traps. Peel back those empty names, and Rusty’s left with a putrid, strange fruit. To know what’s been taken we must see what’s left. And what remains are (beautiful term) society’s “essential” sectors. The working poor: healthcare employees, delivery drivers, and gig workers risking their health to Uber pizzas and liquor to Brooklyn lofts. (Corona leaps over America’s schizo distinction between often-mocked “McJobs” and the classic “respectable” working class.) The family, or what’s left of it—uncomfortably and as if for the first time forced into emotional intimacy with each other. Public parks (admittedly mostly deserted)—communal spaces for wonder and reflection. Religious freedom—though, thankfully, virtually all congregations have shifted online so as not to kill off their elder parishioners. Retail necessities—enter any major shopping center and be greeted by the same heroic faces as last week (and new faces: recently laid-off food workers). They frantically restock, attempting to keep pace with an elite’s decadent, disastrous appetites.
We’ve hit the bedrock of society. The barren ground from which both leftists and paleoconservatives imagine their desired utopia will sprout. The same arid soil which Jesus trod, and in return washed from the feet of the least among us. Surveying the field, Reno can only sputter a desire to get back to those “timeless Christian values.” The world reveals itself and he wants to run.
Reno chalks up his alternative facts to his anti-materialist worldview. For me growing up, anti-materialism meant rejecting a soulless cosmology of atoms bouncing indifferently off each other, and to no purpose. A Spirit breathed life into things: history and daily life must be understood from that vantage point. In our post-truth world, I’m starting to see anti-materialism mean something different. It’s becoming more a rejection of shared, easily observable sensory data. The kind from which basic swaths of consensus could form. (“Reality has a well-known bias against whatever I dislike…”) This does no favors for either side. Folks with a faith in something more like contingency are lumped in with strict dialectic materialists. And as religion turns further away from the world, I fear it becomes paradoxically more haughty, artificial, and man-made. Framing his error in such terms, Reno sabatoges the integrity of his entire system. He disastrously takes sides in a false debate between materialism and fantasy.
When Reno rattles on, or Trump threatens “The cure must not be worse than the problem”—they’re speaking true words, but employing them in the service of denial. Our god-given social needs are being thwarted by these prohibitions. But they’re equally unmet by the status quo. Reactionaries long for Beauty’s return, but that “beauty” melts away into frenetic consumerism, the stock market, and the workings of a vast and unknowable economy that stokes insatiable hungers. That “truth” has little to do with what makes my heart beat. In fact it hurts working people seemingly every chance it gets. Social distancing and state-wide closures have devilish consequences. But they’re necessary, and obviously the lesser evil—especially considering the hellworld reactionaries want to corral us back into. Let’s critique that lesser evil and map out for better days. We can only get back to the future if we start with the facts of life at the base of society. Let’s at least be real.
I’m pretty sure Pharisees like Reno are destined for eternal ruin. But I don’t have to summon some super-ego ridden fantasy of eternal hellfire and damnation. Natch, they already inhabit it. As the cliché goes, hell is life without the possibility of love. And it’s my (I suppose) Christian faith that compassionate, true understanding is a rivulet which empties out into the bottomless sea of love. Without that universalist understanding, I think, Reno and his kind are doomed. He goes through everyday life—small, meaningless interactions—like a psychotic compartmentalizer. He won’t take in the humanity of those underneath. The barista hands him his morning coffee—“Ha! I guess gender studies wasn’t very liberatory after all!” He squints at a tiny glass rectangle in his palm and has immaculate rebuttals to the suggestion he should ever change. He heads to the store to stock up on things he doesn’t need. The store is out—he curses fellow hoarders and the machinations of the lamestream media. He attends one last mass before the Church too shuts down. He basks in the holiness while the homeless wander disconnectedly half a block away—all’s well. He heads home and fucks his wife. She’s modest—a real catch!—and a go-getter like himself. He rests his head on the pillow. It takes a long while—too long—to swat away errant thoughts and rehearsals of comebacks he might use tomorrow. But at last sleep limps welcomingly his way. In those final moments, when waking and dream merge into one unvarnished truth (perhaps?)—he lets down his guard. He’s defenseless at last as he sinks into that little, universal, temporary death. And then he remembers that nothing really makes sense.