OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3d ago
This is an area where I think it's also useful to start reading thoughts from other perspectives entirely?
Have you ever read Wolf Totem? It's a novel by a Chinese author, Lu Jiamin, who spent some time in Inner Mongolia, and he has a theory that Han Chinese people are 'domesticated' - he calls them Dragon Totem people - and as a result have been outcompeted and brutalised by wild steppe people and their descendants, which he calls Wolf Totem people. Notably he sees Europeans as Wolf people, and as the descendants of the steppe.
Here are a few passages to give you the impression:
“In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”
[...]
Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”
Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”
Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland... I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland—and it’s already been two years—the more complex I think it is.”
[...]
Chen sighed. “The way I see it, the most advanced people today are descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors. Not only did they inherit their courage, their militancy, their tenacity, and their need to forge ahead from their nomadic forebears, but they continue to improve on those characteristics. People say you can tell what a person will grow up to be at the age of three and what he’ll look like in old age at seven. The same holds true for a race of people. In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and at seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position. Learning their progressive skills isn’t hard. China launched its own satellite, didn’t it? What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins.”
“Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the differences in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something lacking in us...”
Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor. Our Confucian guiding principle is emperor to minister, father to son, a top-down philosophy, stressing seniority, unconditional obedience, eradicating competition through autocratic power, all in the name of preserving imperial authority and peaceful agriculture. In both an existential and an awareness sense, China’s small-scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though the Chinese created a brilliant ancient civilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop. When world history moved beyond the rudimentary stage of agrarian civilization, China was fated to fall behind. But we’re lucky, we’ve been given the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland, and, who knows, we might even discover the secret that has led to the rise in prominence of Western races.”
Now as a historical theory, there's a lot here that's doubtful - the proposed genetic link seems weak, Han are genetically closer to Mongols than Europeans are, at times he can't seem to decide on the racial associations (are the Romans weak decadents sacked by the Wolf people, or were the Romans Wolf people themselves?), and some reckoning with the fact that the Chinese have spent centuries kicking steppe peoples around seems necessary - but I think it's at least interesting as a window into how this sort of thing looks from another angle.
That is, here we have people immediately concluding that whites and Asians are both in the 'domesticated', Dragon category, but here's a Chinese voice utterly convinced that whites in the wild barbarian Wolf category.
I think it's also worth looking at theories in this in the context of trying to answer particular questions. Lu is writing in the context of the long Chinese tradition of wondering how the West outpaced them and how the Century of Humiliation happened. As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, and then in barely a century the Europeans comprehensively embarrassed, defeated, and exploited them, and even today the Chinese still struggle to understand how that happened and what to do about it. Lu's Dragon/Wolf, Farmer/Nomad distinction is an attempt to explain what's different about Europe and China on the macrohistorical level (and consequently places like Africa just don't rate a mention at all).
By contrast, when Westerners come up with theories about race and domestication and so on, they are trying to answer different questions. They perceive a different problem in front of them, which requires explanation. What's the mystery that is supposed to be solved?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?
You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?
I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up.
Isn't this premised on the idea that the people who were involved in CHAZ would have, had they not been involved in CHAZ, become real security threats?
Is that plausible?
At least two alternative possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, the kind of people who engage in street circus nonsense like CHAZ are not in fact the same sort of people who are likely to become real threats, like the early Bolsheviks. They're both radicals, in a sense, but they have very different strategies and interests. If these groups are different, then CHAZ might actually decrease overall security by making governments and security agencies devote time to CHAZ, rather than serious threats. Secondly, it's also perfectly possible that the kind of people who engage in CHAZ would go on to become serious threats - CHAZ itself is a clown show, but the experience of engaging in radical action, even the ineffective sort, might prepare people for more effective action later.
In fact both those possibilities might be the case. If I were a genuine radical - if I were part of a modern Weather Underground or something - I might look closely at CHAZ, identify the most competent or most radical people involved in it, and then aim to recruit them. Even if only the top 5% of CHAZ participants have real revolutionary potential, that's not nothing. A real radical might benefit from the existence of a large number of shallow, ineffective protests in order to skim off the top level of participants. For any organisation whose primary business is illegal, recruiting is a real challenge. Test beds like these protests seem useful.
Is that theory true? Is that what's actually happening?
No idea!
My point is that being able to imagine a situation in which X event benefits Y people does not constitute evidence that Y did X. It's not that easy to transmute theory into fact.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
This doesn't pass any kind of parsimony, does it?
Do you need to posit a benevolent(?) conspiracy to explain hyper-polarisation in American life? Surely not.
And surely where we would expect to see evidence of any such covert action, we don't. A deliberate act of social engineering on the scale of the entire US would require large numbers of people and large, coordinated programmes that we don't see. Meanwhile, if we do look for causes of progressive attitudes to race, it seems to me like we see large efforts put forth by non-state actors, for reasons that are plausible on their own independent of any 'defense-in-depth' plan.
I think it's plausible that American polarisation over unimportant or superficial issues might function to obstruct deeper polarisation, and that through this process real or successful revolt becomes less likely. But if so, it seems more likely that this is a happy accident, rather than something planned for an implemented by an agency.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
What's more American than inventing a bizarre new identity for yourself, especially a sexual identity, and proclaiming that to the world? I would have thought America's at the forefront of that.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?
I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I don't have a graph over time or anything, but we do have, what, four prominent Neo-Nazis? Three? That's a pretty high number by internet standards, and plenty of people around them who are sympathetic in a soft way to them. We don't seem to have many actual left-wingers, though.
I'm not tarring everyone here - I'm here, after all. But I feel like we have more capital-R Racists here than we do lefties.
It's true, I think, that the Motte is mostly blue tribe. Even the racists and Neo-Nazis here are in fact blue tribe. (Per the original formulation, there are Republican-voting right-wing blue-tribers, and Democrat-voting left-wing red-tribers. The tribes aren't just voting groups.) Indeed, I suspect that their position is actually more appealing for a young, clever, right-wing-attracted blue triber. Being a Neo-Nazi is special - being a (pseudo?) intellectual far-righter obsessed with genetics and population IQ and ethnostates makes you just as anathema to the left as being a MAGA barstool type, but it at least makes you different to the MAGA type. You can still position yourself separately from the poorly-educated populist blue-collar beer-and-guns-and-Jesus type of right-wing, because I really doubt anyone in the far-right wants to be confused with them.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
In an attempt to broaden access to the program, Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) have held trainings to help other faith groups improve their grant applications, including hosting a joint webinar with the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). JFNA and the Orthodox Union joined with the USCMO, the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations, and several Christian denominations to call for increased funding to the program. The joint lobbying effort resulted in Congress appropriating twice the previous year's funding for 2021.[17]
This seems like an odd thing to do if the whole thing is a Jewish scam.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Synagogues in Australia do this - I believe the guards are mostly volunteers who are trained on the synagogue's own payroll.
In the past I found it a bit odd, since noticeably mosques and gurdwaras don't do this, despite Muslims and Sikhs also being religious groups that are widely hated, and which are actually more publicly identifiable than Jews due to their headscarves and turbans, but since October 7 I have re-evaluated a little and am more understanding of Jews feeling a need for special security.
I suspect socio-economic factors also play a role - Australian Jews are on average wealthier than Muslims or Sikhs, and thus more able to pay for security. It's also possible that the fact that Jews are indistinguishable in everyday life makes synagogues more vulnerable to random attacks, not less. If I want to attack a Muslim or Sikh, it's relatively easy to identify one on the street and then attack them when they're most vulnerable. (To be fair, most attacks on Sikhs are a result of people mistaking them for Muslims - actual anti-Sikh sentiment is quite rare.) However, if I want to attack a Jew, I need to go to a bit more effort to identify who's Jewish, and observing people going to synagogue is a good way to do that.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I think you make a number of implausible assertions here?
You equate “unlimited immigration” with “the effective destruction of ethnic Europeans”. It is not at all clear that this is the case. Declining birthrates might lead to a numerical decline or even collapse of ethnic Europeans, but the presence of absence of immigrants doesn’t change that. You might argue that if the demographic balance of a European country changed so that there were very large numbers of ancestrally non-European people in it, that might effectively destroy what that nation once was – but again, that’s not the same thing as the destruction of ethnic Europeans. I think you need to be more precise here.
Likewise you just assert “the only legitimate purpose of the state is to guarantee the posterity of the people that constitute that state”. You don’t offer any argument for this – you seem to think it’s self-evident. That does not seem obvious to me. For instance, one might argue (and I am tempted to) that the creation of posterity is the proper responsibility of individual families and communities; the role of the state is in this process is to facilitate the conditions in which it is possible for families and communities to raise children. But the state itself is not the thing that guarantees posterity. We might reflect on the fact that communities have been successfully reproducing themselves since long before the state existed. Rather, the role of the state is not to guarantee certain activities that more properly belong to the private sphere, but rather to mediate interpersonal and inter-communal disagreements that would otherwise turn destructive. You can get most of this out of Hobbes. The state’s job isn’t to make sure you have kids. That’s up to you. The state’s job is to prevent a war of all against all.
Overall I think you just make a number of expansive claims that run past the available evidence. You say “replacing ethnic European majorities in order to mitigate identitarianism has been the stated policy of Western governments for 60 years now”, and that you have quotes or documents to prove it. I doubt you have those, particularly given the bolded part. It will be very easy to find quotes and documents arguing for more migration, but the purposive part of the statement is the controversial part. It’s, well, my theory of conspiracy theories – bundling the obviously true (lots of Western governments have been pro-immigration) with the obviously untrue (the purpose of this is “to mitigate identitarianism” or that this is a plot to destroy ethnic Europeans). The existence of alternative, more plausible motivations (such as just wanting more workers for obvious economic reasons) doesn’t get a look-in.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.
Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I wonder if it might be worth nuancing 'pro-Intifada', 'pro-Hamas', and so on?
It seems to me that many of these protests are, yes, genuinely opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, and supportive of 'decolonisation' interpreted to mean 'Israel should not exist and all Israeli Jews should leave and find homes in other countries, and if they refuse, they are legitimately the targets of lethal violence'. But the rhetoric and justification given for this is so radically different to the rhetoric and justification of either Hamas or any on-the-ground Palestinian resistance movements that I think the gulf is worthy of recognition. For the American campus protester, what Hamas or Palestinians actually want is close to irrelevant - their politics are not so much pro-Intifada or pro-Hamas they are anti-coloniser. Israel is a 'coloniser', which makes them the bad guys, which makes the opposite of Israel the good guys.
If nothing else, the campus protest ideology is not the ideology of the Hamas charter, or even the revised one. I don't think the protesters are reading that charter and unironically agreeing with it. (Though I grant that the revised, 2017 version seems calculated to appeal more to liberal Westerners.) Almost none of them are Muslims, for a start. It's something different, and must have its own origins and influences.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
Congratulations - that earned a real laugh from me.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.
I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.
As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.
Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.
Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?
What?
Let's take even just the first claim you made - that Christianity preaches slavery to Christ. Quick sanity check here.
John 15:15 - "I do not call you servants [douloi] any longer, because the servant [doulos]does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."
Galatians 4:7 - "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God."
(See also the entire allegory of Hagar and Sarah to follow, in which Christians are identified with the children of the free woman, not of the slave.)
Galatians 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
1 Peter 2:16 - "As servants [douloi] of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil."
2 Peter 2:19-20 - "They [the ungodly] promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
It seems pretty clear to me. I've recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Screwtape Letters, and its demon narrator's apt description of the natures of Hell and Heaven is, "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
I'm not sure how much more clear it could have been - the goal of Christianity is not subjection to God as a miserable slave, but rather adoption as co-heirs with Christ, sharing in the glory of Christ's own status (cf. Romans 8:29, Christians are "to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family"). This is explicitly contrasted with the image of slavery in the Bible. Thus St. Athanasius summarises (ch. 54), "He was made man that we might be made God". This isn't some hidden secret.
Where images of slavery or servanthood appear in a positive context (e.g. Galatians 5:13), it is reconfigured in a deliberately surprising way - "through love become slaves to one another". The image of a voluntary mutual 'slavery' where each person genuinely seeks the other's good is striking and noticeably not the same thing as the domination of a master over chattel.
Let's go on:
Does Christianity counsel slaves to uphold the institution of slavery? I can only assume you are referring to 1 Corinthians 7:21-24. But this does not at all tell slaves to uphold slavery, or to recommend slavery as a practice. Rather, it is the position I just described - that slavery is irrelevant. He doesn't even tell slaves not to become free, if they get the chance. Paul's counsel is that worldly status just doesn't matter. This is supported by, as I noted in that previous message, what we see in Philemon - Paul isn't an outright abolitionist (as indeed would be pretty impossible in the first century), but his advice to the Christian master is to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother".
It seems worth adding to this, well, the subsequent two thousand years in which Christianity and Christians seem to have been quite well-positioned as regards the abolition of slavery. Sometimes this was in the form of large organised movements, as in Britain, but other times it has been slower. Privately I find something inspiring in the history of slavery in the Byzantine Empire - there was no society-wide war against it, no great battle. Rather, they just... slowly... stopped. Laws were passed against abuse of slaves, and then reducing slaveholders' power, and eventually it just faded away. The tempering aspect of Christianity here seems evident. By contrast the Teutonic pagans you describe were much more enthusiastic slavers.
What's next? Does Christianity counsel submission to greater powers? Well, define 'power'. It certainly counsels obedience and love to God, who is naturally the greatest power, and from there it recommends peaceful coexistence with earthly authorities to the extent that it is possible without disobeying God. But when that is not possible, it recommends protest. I hate to invoke the stereotype here, but you are saying that the tradition that encouraged people to peacefully yet defiantly become martyrs, steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the compulsion of the Roman state even to the point of being torn apart by lions, is a tradition that "counsels submission... to Rome". Does that not seem even the slightest bit off, to you?
If you argue that Christianity counsels obedience to God, certainly. No one's going to dispute that. But this is hardly unusual. If you want to make the Teutonic comparison again, it is not at all clear that a Teutonic tribesman's submission to the chieftain is qualitatively different to that of a Roman citizen's submission to the emperor - not least because, in Christian Rome in particular, the emperor's authority was contingent upon being accepted by the citizen body. That was why there could be so many revolutions in Constantinople, for, while the emperor's power was at least partly theocratic, it was also something held from the republic and there could be revoked, should the emperor be a tyrant. You can see this kind of legacy also in English-speaking Christian traditions - in Britain, where parliament claimed the power to overthrow and replace the king if necessary, and even more radically in America. The evolution of Christian views towards autocratic authority is definitely complex. I'm not going to say that there are no Christian bootlickers, whether historically (de Maistre etc.) or today (the caesarism of someone like Stephen Wolfe, say); but I am saying that a view of Christianity as uniquely servile in its understanding of politics is absurdly mistaken.
And... that's it. Those are all the specific points you make.
You're just, well, wrong.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
[...]
To the rest I say—I and not the Lord—that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. And if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
[...]
Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband. Husband, for all you know, you might save your wife.
[...]
The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband.
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
OliveTapenade
21d ago
I'd tend to agree with this, yes. It's been cited far too many times before, but the old woke versus racist skit still rings true. In some cases the overlap is even stronger.
I recently found myself reading Yasmin Nair on Palestine, and was struck by this line:
Liberal Zionists are, I believe, taken aback by constant reminders that their pallid views are now exposed as insufficient for these times, as the world literally marches past them, losing patience with their weak discourse about concepts like “human rights” and “freedom of expression.”
I'm sure I don't even need to say what it resembles. The portrayal of liberalism as weak and self-defeating, the obsession with a putative Jewish conspiracy controlling the nation, the call for violent revolution - ultimately it reminds me of many of the Motte's own far-right posters. Even on the psychological level, when we find themes like the validation of anger, praise of strength and aggression, the sense of the whole culture as a kind of malicious conspiracy against one, the felt sense of solidarity with an almost-wholly-imagined public, even an online culture that's saturated with memes, affected irony, and deliberate overstatement to either signal in-group loyalty or trigger propriety-obsessed centrists...
The mirror is there. The far-left and far-right share basic values, even if they're sitting in different camps.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Well, yes, Paul isn't denying that people are still Jewish or Greek or barbarian or Scythian in a literal sense.
He's denying that Jewishness or Greekness or barbarianness or Scythianness are relevant to one's identity in Christ. Those things do not matter, which is why Christianity thus tends to resist politics that are premised on asserting their importance, and why attempts to reconcile Christianity with overtly racialist politics can only function by mutilating or perverting Christianity.
You can try to draw a worldly/spiritual distinction, but I think that's perilous in practice and often ends merely in the assertion of a double standard. The worldly or political life of a Christian must be shaped by his or her spiritual life also - neither Jesus nor Paul confine their teachings to an abstract realm of the inward spirit, but rather understand that their spiritual teachings have profound consequences for the way one lives and interacts with others. Thus, for instance, when Peter refrains from joining Gentiles for meals in Galatians 2, Paul rebukes him to his face. The spiritual equality of all people in Christ has obliterated the kind of distinctions that might have justified Peter shunning his Gentile brothers and sisters.
Which is to say that the spiritual does have bearing on the political. How could it ever not?
OliveTapenade
22d ago
We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.
I would have said most of them are, to be honest. There are a bunch of... well, the language I use here will be controversial, but I would say racialist, anti-semitic, alt-right or neo-Nazi type posters and it is entirely unsurprising to me that those people hate Christianity. It is in their interests to try to roll Christianity together with other movements, in order to promote rejection of Christianity.
I find it morbidly absurd sometimes. The woke hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is patriarchal, homophobic, deeply linked to white supremacy, and so on. They only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of those supposedly far-right-supporting elements. On the other end of the spectrum, the far-right also hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is weak, universalist, over-compassionate, the source of the cultural rot and hatred of strength and vitality that is enervating the West, and so on. They in turn can only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of these supposedly far-left slave-morality elements.
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist. Judith Butler writes a whole chapter of Gender Trouble condemning the pope and attacking that retrograde Christianity, and then you pop over here and it's all about how Christianity is destroying the West because it doesn't hate Jews and/or black people enough. Quite a surreal experience.
Once again I'm reminded of a bit from Chesterton, from chapter VI of Orthodoxy:
A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
[...]
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.
(I have omitted Chesterton's specific examples - he has half a dozen or so - for reasons of space, but you can easily check them.)
It's as if the same pattern plays out again. Christianity is both too racist and not racist enough, too Western and not Western enough, too Jewish and yet also too anti-semitic, and so on, in every category, both far-left and far-right beat it with the same stick.
Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
...I think this might be using 'slave' in an idiosyncratic way, fully detached from any concept of slavery in the traditional sense, i.e. the owning of human beings.
I know this is just a riff on Nietzsche, but it bears noting that Nietzsche's master-slave morality is itself idiosyncratic to him and I'd argue a very implausible way of understanding the history of Western civilisation.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
I think this is glossing over a substantial amount of Islamic history - in particular, the Umayyads were moderately Arab-supremacist, and Islam made a much stronger universalist turn with the victory of the Abbasids, who were non-Arab and therefore strongly inclined to an interpretation of Islam in which ethnic or tribal identity is irrelevant.
In the case of Christianity, I think it's going to be important here to clarify 'anti-racist', since the term admits to so many interpretations today. I think one could fairly assert that at least from Paul (the historical Jesus being less clearly accessible), Christianity is a *non-*racist religion, in the sense that race or ethnic identity is simply irrelevant. The big early leap is going from Christianity as internal to Jews to Christianity for all people, but once that leap was made - and it appears to have been made extremely early - it was set. Thus in the New Testament we see conversions of everyone from Ethiopians to Macedonians, divine revelations to indicate a universal call (Acts 10), preaching to all people (Acts 17, all of Paul's career), and a theology in which "there is no longer Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian". We even find this universalist language put into the mouth of Jesus (e.g. John 10:16), whether you think that's historical or not.
However, none of that is the same thing as 'anti-racism' in the dogmatic modern sense. The traditional Christian position going back as far as the New Testament is that race/ethnicity/cultural-identity/ancestry is irrelevant, and what matters is personal faith, such that one who believes is the true descendant of the patriarchs (cf. Matthew 3:9, Galatians 3:6-7), even taking priority over the flesh (Philippians 3:2-7). This is obviously quite different to anti-racism in the modern sense, which remains deeply interested in race as a moral and ethical category.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
You made a claim about the British colonisation of India and the Aztec response to Cortez. Both of those claims are false, and you were challenged on them, and your response is to... what? Assert that the Indo-Aryans somehow prove it as well? Despite not presenting anything that would plausibly indicate that?
And then you somehow pivot to ancient Greece, where Apollo is actually a deity of many things (including prophecy, music, light, disease, archery, healing, etc.), and the only arguments you make are firstly that one of Apollo's many epithets relates to the founding of cities (never mind that that is also true of many other deities), and that... you think one statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur? Okay? This isn't even considering that an ancient Greek 'colony' is something very different to British India.
This is all, frankly, bullshit. You have some sort of general theory about superior racial archetypes - it's basically just a recapitulation of the old Nordic/Aryan category you get from people like Gobineau - but whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.
Let's try to clarify this a bit.
Motte: More attractive, more physically capable people are more likely to successfully reproduce.
Bailey: There is a well-defined Aryo-Nordic race that is recognised across many cultures for its superior beauty and intellectual capacity.
The motte is true, sure. But the position you're arguing for overall is under-specified, you haven't made any actual argument for it beyond gesturing at a handful of isolated observations that fail to cohere into a theory, and whenever any one of those observations is indicated to be false, you ignore it and immediately jump to a completely different observation, often centuries or even millennia away. This is not a real argument.
What are the actual points of evidence here? Some guy on YouTube makes videos of himself flirting with girls around the world. The British colonised India. The Aztecs thought Cortez was a god. Indo-Aryan peoples conquered northern India around four thousand years ago. Apollo was revered as a founder of cities. One statue of Apollo has a similar nose shape to some guy. Even if all these points were true, they don't cohere into a plausible macrohistorical theory. Anyone could, with a similarly arbitrary process of selection, cobble together a theory of racial superiority from the same random noise. There is no rigour to this hypothesis.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
I accept your compliment!
I guess part of my point is that it seems to be that the traits we assign to each group are heavily influenced by the location wer'e starting from and the particular questions we want answered. The top-level comment here is interested in black-white relations, so the dynamic he zeroes in on is mature/neotenous, with wild/domesticated as a secondary factor. Lu Jiamin is interested in Chinese/European relations, so he focuses on a different dynamic - wild/tame, or steppe/agrarian, or something else entirely. It's also, I think, very noticeable which qualities of different groups he thinks are revealing. Diet appears to be important to Lu, but I don't notice any of the Western HBD types mentioning diet. Presumably diet comes into it because his binary is to do with agrarians (eating grains, weaving clothes from plant fibers, etc.) with nomads, hunters, and pastoralists (eating meat and dairy, wearing clothes made from fur and wool, etc.), but it also seems like for him diet is one facet of a broader lifestyle that also involves political and cultural practices (e.g. women's rights, parliamentary democracy), and for that matter economics. He thinks that a free market and a competition of equals is paradigmatic of the Wolf peoples, whereas Chinese communism, implicitly, is another form of the 'Dragon King' to which the Chinese people bow. The stereotypically Chinese/Dragon way is to have a tremendously powerful central authority that coordinates all economic and social activity, on a strict hierarchical lines, and to which the people meekly submit - the CCP is structurally the same as the emperor.
This seems especially interesting to me because Lu doesn't try to reduce it to a single factor, like genetics or descent. I notice in the top-level comment here (and in the usual comments of our local racialists) a very reductive approach, trying to find the one controlling factor. For Lu, it seems to be a complex - genetics play a role, but so does culture, education, political structure, economic structure, and so on. Thus Lu maintains some hope that it might be possible to teach the Chinese to understand or respect wolves (indeed one of the central themes of the novel is a lament for the dying grassland), to teach them to preserve the grasslands they are destroying, to discover the secret of the West, and form a kind of hybrid. There is a kind of fusion. By the end of the story, the wolf cub that Chen Zhen has raised dies, and they skin the wolf's pelt and tie it to a pole, like a flag:
By the end, the wolf has become a dragon, soaring through the air towards heaven, and Chen, one of the dragon people, has found his own wolf's soul.
(And then the grasslands are destroyed, because the Chinese government is terrible, and both the wild wolves of the region and the last nomadic herders die out. Boo!)
So there's something more to it than just under-resourced speculations about population genetics. (Indeed, the genetic part is one of the weakest parts of Wolf Totem, and can feel like a self-hating Chinese person's recapitulation of some kind of Aryan thesis.) There's more than one factor here - there are chances to learn.
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