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#1: The Lord Jesus
442 Plays2 years ago
I’ve been chewing on five or six different essays for the last several months, and they’ve never come out quite right, and I’ve realized that they’re all aiming in roughly the same direction.
Progressives and Nietzschean/post-Christian rightists understand the message of Jesus in roughly the same way — both view the gospel of Jesus Christ as a radical abolition of human hierarchy — they just disagree about whether that’s a good thing.
It’s completely at odds with everything I believe about who he was and what he taught, but it is an easy conclusion to draw from the four or five verses that ordinary people have memorized.
And however facile and incoherent it may be, this understanding of what Christ was Really All About clearly has broad social currency, which is why Christendom has been absolutely helpless in the face of progressivism for the last century or more. Most casual Christians are already progressives, they just don’t know it yet — so when it is introduced to them explicitly, the transition is completely natural, almost automatic.
So this episode is just an initial attack on that problem. I’ve never done a solo podcast before, so it’s a stream of consciousness, but I wasn’t having much success writing all this stuff down, and I needed to get it out of my head.
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Transcript
Introduction: Departure from Usual Format
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm going to try something a little different this week. Normally I do an interview format because it's easy to ask the questions and prepare ahead of time, but I've got some things rattling around in my brain that I just want to kind of throw out there and see what this does. I'm going to record this and I'm not going to stop the tape, so whatever happens happens.
Chickens and Pecking Order: A Metaphor for Dominance
00:00:44
Speaker
We have chickens at Rancho de Bennett here and if you keep chickens you'll learn pretty quick that having hens by themselves in any kind of large numbers is a pretty serious problem because the hens, because they have this parity of status and strength
00:01:07
Speaker
will be constantly fighting over who's at the top of the pecking order. That's where the term comes from, pecking order. And if you get a rooster in the hen house, basically he is so much stronger than the hens that he sort of grabs hold of them
00:01:30
Speaker
once or twice a day and asserts himself. And that pretty much takes care of the dominance hierarchy. There's not a pecking order anymore. It's basically just the rooster and everybody else.
Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity's Slave Morality
00:01:42
Speaker
And I've been thinking a lot about the Nietzschean critique of Christianity, that it's this concept of Sklavin moral, slave morality.
00:01:52
Speaker
And I've been really searching the scriptures for that phenomenon to try to understand where he gets that idea and whether or not it makes sense. And I think what I'm finding really is that to the extent there is this egalitarianism or this slave morality, it's really just a function of taking the concept of
00:02:21
Speaker
the existence of God seriously. Because if there is a God, then His capacity and His wisdom is so much greater than everybody else's that by comparison with them, we're all pretty much, we're all just pretty much chickens. We're all pretty much the same. And so the idea of having, and that's exactly how Jesus establishes it. He says,
00:02:51
Speaker
You've got this 10,000 talent debt that you owe and you're trying to hold your neighbor by the scruff of his neck over a hundred pence or whatever it was, some smaller
Hierarchy in Christ's Teachings: Stewardship vs. Rulership
00:03:04
Speaker
debt. Basically that your status in the dominance hierarchy is as equals under a single sovereign, the father. He actually says, don't call anybody master, don't call anybody rabbi, don't call anybody father.
00:03:20
Speaker
because you have one father in heaven. But then in various other places, he endorses honoring your father and mother. So I don't think that was intended to be taken totally literally, but it is this like leveling of the hierarchies. And you find in other places in the scriptures, including the words of Jesus, that various hierarchical relationships are still endorsed. There are still masters and servants
00:03:47
Speaker
And the masters are supposed to treat the servants well, but the servants are supposed to submit to the masters. And there wasn't really a distinction in the scriptures between the word for servant and the word for slave or bondsman. Wives are supposed to submit to their husbands. Husbands are supposed to love their wives. It's a reciprocal but unequal relationship. Children are supposed to honor and submit to their parents.
00:04:10
Speaker
And so I'm trying to make sense of how hierarchy fits into Christ's teachings. And I suspect that the answer is stewardship. So what is stewardship as distinct from rulership? If he's saying we can't be masters, but there are overseers for sure, there are shepherds, there are fathers and mothers,
00:04:39
Speaker
if these positions exist. And he says that you should be a faithful and a wise steward. And if you do, you'll be made ruler over all that he has. So it's not as if your position of inferiority, your position of subordination necessarily implies that you are eternally without a dominion of your own.
00:05:03
Speaker
The steward described as the faithful and wise steward is one who acts on his lord's behalf. So there's a recognition that the
00:05:15
Speaker
Stuart is not sovereign. He's not doing his own will. He's not getting necessarily what he wants. He's doing the will of a master. But the will of his master is essentially that you rule well, that you are not in your place to amass wealth. Your subjects don't exist to serve you. You're in that position to protect them, to enforce wise laws, to judge righteously between them.
00:05:45
Speaker
And that doesn't seem like a model of rulership that would have been totally foreign to pre-Christian people. I think it gets overblown as being this really radical idea.
Criticism of Christianity's Radical Self-Abnegation
00:06:00
Speaker
And I think that has to do with not just this concept of overseership or stewardship,
00:06:10
Speaker
But also, in general, I think critics, right-wing critics of Christianity, they have an interest in framing Christ's message as being more radical and more subversive than maybe it really was.
00:06:30
Speaker
Specifically there's this strain of criticism of Christianity that goes something like well, you know Christianity is sort of this
00:06:41
Speaker
immunodeficiency virus where you're supposed to lay down your standards or your beliefs on behalf of anybody who might happen to come along that you're supposed to be constantly rolling over. And there's maybe an interpretation of Christianity, and that's certainly the progressive interpretation of Christianity, right?
00:07:01
Speaker
that the Sermon on the Mount dictates, you know, you turn the other cheek, you love your enemies, you bless those that curse you, you let he who's without sin cast the first stone. The four or five verses that everybody can
00:07:18
Speaker
recite off the top of their head, even people who aren't even nominally Christian. These are used by progressives to argue that essentially the message of Christianity is radical self-abnegation all the time, regardless of what it is, regardless of the stakes.
00:07:37
Speaker
that if somebody wants to take your stuff, you should let them take it. If they want to kill your kids, you should let them kill your kids. And that leaves us on the back foot a little bit because virtually all Orthodox Christians would agree that those four or five verses that are known to everybody
00:07:55
Speaker
really are fundamental to Christ's teaching. Progressives have this very straightforward punchy interpretation of what those verses mean that's pretty easy to justify without reference to anything else. You don't have to contextualize it at all.
00:08:14
Speaker
And in order to say, well, that's not quite what it means, you do have to go into this sort of exegetical frame where you're comparing the consequences of acting that way to other things that Jesus said and did and other things that prophets and apostles said and did. And you make yourself look weaker than I think just saying
00:08:35
Speaker
you know, never judge. Never judge anybody for any reason. Judge not means judge not. But I think this concept of stewardship breaks that open. I think that's the solution to both the pagan critique and the progressive critique of Christianity, which is that your children, because they are not yours, they're
Stewardship as a Solution to Critiques of Christianity
00:08:55
Speaker
not yours to give away. They're not yours to surrender. You have a responsibility to them. If they did belong to you,
00:09:02
Speaker
If it was about you and your possessions and your pride, then it would be different. But these are a heritage of the Lord. And that's true of your
00:09:15
Speaker
doctrines. So the fact that if you personally had some animus toward a particular group of people or a particular behavior and it was causing you to mistreat people who did that thing,
00:09:35
Speaker
then it's pretty easy to make a case that the Christian should let go of his prejudices, let go of his personal animosities. But if it's the Lord's doctrine that's being violated, then it isn't yours to give up. And I think that
00:09:58
Speaker
is maybe the simplest that you can make it. And this concept of stewardship is complicated by the fact that we've become sort of allergic to hierarchy. And what I mean by that is virtually every depiction of pre-modern hierarchy, whether it's the roles of men and women, the roles of masters and servants, the roles of the rich and the poor,
00:10:26
Speaker
We just sort of take for granted that those relationships were always characterized by animosity, that the high end status were contemptuous of the low end status and the low end status were resentful of the high end status. That was one of my big critiques of that movie, The Northman, which came out. It depicts this society that's so eaten up with class conflict that you really can't imagine it
00:10:56
Speaker
being like a peacetime functional society really at all.
Critique of Historical Hierarchies in 'The Northman'
00:11:01
Speaker
Like everything that happens in that movie is you're left to wonder why it didn't happen sooner. Why didn't these villagers, you know, they live in this thatch hut in the middle of Iceland in the middle of nowhere and like they're they're carving a living out of the frozen ground and
00:11:18
Speaker
there's more people like guarding the slaves than there are slaves and it's they can't they can't restrain them because that like they have work to do and they live in houses where you can just tear the roof off and walk out it's not like they can lock them up for the night and so the antagonism
00:11:42
Speaker
and the savagery like it's not just like they're making them work like they're just constantly needling their their serfs really for no reason and so of course when the time comes to to savagely murder all of the the rulers that's celebrated by absolutely everybody and i just it you really can't believe that your ancestors were like that you can't internalize that kind of thinking
00:12:11
Speaker
I know a lot of people thought that movie was really based or whatever, but that's fake. There's no way that it was like that. And that leads me to another subject that I wanted to get into. The Martyr Maid podcast is Easter podcast back in April. I've been just chewing and chewing and chewing on this idea.
00:12:29
Speaker
that he presents, which as far as I know is pretty much straightforward borrowed from René Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, which is a book about mimetic desire as sort of the explanation for sin and specifically Girard's thoughts about how Christ rescues us from this
00:12:51
Speaker
cycle of mimetic desire and also inverts a status hierarchy that led Pagans to
00:13:02
Speaker
basically kick cripples and piss on homeless people and just sort of mistreat everybody smaller and weaker than them. Basically that Christ invented the idea of being nice to your wife and kids and sick people and old people and poor people and foreign people that nobody did that until Christ.
00:13:22
Speaker
And I'm maybe being a little hyperbolic there, but that is what he presents as the case in this particular story, the story of Apollonius of Tiana. He's comparing this pagan holy man, Neopathagorean holy man,
00:13:40
Speaker
to Christ because they were contemporaries. And while Christ was placing himself in the role of the victim, the outsider,
Rene Girard and Pagan Narratives: Mimetic Desire and Compassion
00:13:50
Speaker
the oppressed, the poor, the meek, the humble, Apollonius of Tiana is in a city wracked by plague. He's in the city of Ephesus. And he tells the Ephesians, I know how to stop the plague. The way you stop the plague is there's this blind beggar
00:14:10
Speaker
and we all need to get around him and beat him to death with rocks because he's an enemy of the gods and they do it and the day is saved and the plague is lifted and he frames that as essentially a mob hysteria, a mob panic, a massacre
00:14:29
Speaker
that happens because of this desire to scapegoat the weak and the deformed and the outsider and I kind of just don't buy it frankly because I mean for starters there's there's lots of details they include in the story that I've left out first of all it starts with a blind beggar and and what's interesting about that is these pagans and the the the chronicler notices this the pagans don't want to
00:14:58
Speaker
smash this blind beggar who's begging for his life and he's something like he's so manifestly miserable, I think is the phrase they use.
00:15:09
Speaker
It takes one or two to throw a rock, and then his eyes flash, and they realize he's not blind, he was shaming, and then that gives them the courage they need to finish the job. They bury this guy in rocks, and then they pick through the rubble of the rocks, because he's kind of like, hey, look what's underneath those rocks, and they pull back the rubble, and there's a dog, a Melosian hound the size of the largest lion, and he's foaming and vomiting
00:15:38
Speaker
like a rabid dog would and that's supposed to be indicative of the fact that this was a demon and so they don't just beat this homeless guy to death and the plague is lifted and everything's fine. The structure of the narrative is constantly providing this extraordinary justification for this thing that they had to do.
00:16:00
Speaker
which doesn't really make any sense if you're trying to situate this story in a context where the culture actually despises the weak and the poor and the deformed and the stranger. Like it's not even clear how being a beggar works if nobody takes care of beggars. And it's even less clear how or why a demon would choose to disguise himself as something that everybody hates and everybody wants to pick on and kill.
00:16:27
Speaker
The implicit in that story is that it chose the form of a blind beggar specifically to elicit compassion from the mob. And at every step of the way, they're resisting until he reveals himself to be this danger. And the message of that story, as far as I can tell,
00:16:48
Speaker
is not like it's so cool to kill random homeless people. The message of that story is that sometimes evils disguise themselves as beggars, sometimes evils
00:17:03
Speaker
hide behind pity. And that's just so self-evident to me living in our present time that I'm like, I just felt like Gerard Gate got the exact wrong message from that story. And to the extent that you think Christianity was a critique of that thinking,
00:17:25
Speaker
I think you're wrong about Christianity, and I also think that your version of Christianity is partly how we got into the situation that we're in, because we're so paralyzed by any cause that appeals to our compassion. However tendentiously, however cynically, it really doesn't matter. As long as they say, oh, you're picking on the weird kid, you're picking on the cripple,
00:17:54
Speaker
you'll pretty much swallow anything. Most of us will. I mean, even those of us who try not to, it's a difficult instinct to suppress. And I actually think it was kind of difficult even for pagans to suppress that instinct. I think that's a universal human thing. Nobody wants to hurt people. Nobody is immune to cries for mercy. And you see that reflected in their religious traditions too.
00:18:23
Speaker
I really don't understand where the idea comes from that they despised strangers and the poor. I guess I can understand where the impulse to be maybe paranoid or shut the gates comes from. That's a natural human impulse that still exists, but I don't see the pagan traditions as intensifying or endorsing that. In fact,
00:18:49
Speaker
You really see the opposite. I mean, in the Odyssey, Odysseus appeals to Polyphemus with the idea that Zeus Seños, Zeus of the Stranger, Zeus of the Wayfarers,
00:19:02
Speaker
is the guardian of travelers and beggars. Supplicants I think is the word but it's you know you could read it that way. And it's Polyphemus's refusal to show hospitality to Odysseus and his crew that leads to Polyphemus being blinded and cursed by the gods. And there's this theme throughout Greek and Norse myth
00:19:27
Speaker
Which that's just what I'm most familiar with. I understand it's also present in Hindu mythology.
Pagan Myths: Hospitality and Kindness to Strangers
00:19:31
Speaker
Lots of Proto-Indo-European myth has this theme of the gods or the god or gods traveling in disguise to test the hospitality of mortals. And they'll go specifically as a weak person or a lame person. Odin famously one-eyed an elderly traveler.
00:19:53
Speaker
And there's a story in the Grimnes Mall where Odin and his wife Frigga have a bet where they've both raised these two foster children.
00:20:05
Speaker
these mortals, and Frigga's child is obedient but is living in basically in a cave with a Jotuness, a giantess, and just has children. And Odin's ward, Girath, has a kingdom. And Frigga says, well, the problem with your guy is that he's inhospitable.
00:20:34
Speaker
he's torturing strangers who come to his hall. And that's about as bad as you can get to be inhospitable and unbecoming even of a king. So you can see this status argument that's taking place, like who is the higher status, this tyrant king who's inhospitable or this simple sort of family man, very classic story.
00:21:01
Speaker
And so Odin goes in disguise to sort of test Girith's hospitality and see if the rumors are true, but also to kind of prove to his wife that she's full of crap.
00:21:15
Speaker
And the thing is, Frigga goes out ahead of him to King Girath's Hall and says, there's this very dangerous sorcerer who's coming to your hall and you need to watch out for him. And the way you're gonna know him is that your dogs will be too afraid to bite him. And sure enough, Odin comes by the hall dressed as a wayfarer, a traveler, and King Girath finds that the dogs won't go after him and he has him
00:21:43
Speaker
arrested and set between some fires, which I don't know if that means he's literally being burned or like slowly dehydrated and that's a form of torture. But anyway Odin suffers this punishment just the same as he would if he were immortal.
00:21:59
Speaker
Ostensibly to see what people will do about it, and the king's son shows pity, hospitality, brings him water, takes care of him, and then he is rewarded with the wisdom of Odin. Odin recites this poem that gives him this great wisdom, and then King Girath
00:22:21
Speaker
who had tortured him under false pretenses, who'd been lied to, realizes what he's done, stands up to release Odin from his bonds, and basically his sword falls from his sheath, hilt first on the ground, and then he trips and is run through by his own sword.
00:22:40
Speaker
So it's this, and then his hospitable son reigns in his stead with the wisdom of Odin. So there's this clear message of the gods are like secret shoppers, and they are out there specifically to test how you will treat people when you have no fear of retaliation.
00:23:01
Speaker
And your treatment of the poor is a sign of piety. It's how you show respect to the gods. Not necessarily because you...I mean honor was a much more straightforward question back in those days. A beggar didn't have honor. But you're expected to honor strangers because Zeus honors strangers or Odin honors strangers. That's just the way it is.
00:23:23
Speaker
And so the gods clearly were concerned with at least ameliorating the distinctions between high status and low status people in these pagan traditions.
00:23:36
Speaker
There's another story where Leto is cast out of Olympus with her twins by Hera. Basically she got pregnant by Zeus and Hera didn't like that and so she's thrown out. She hasn't come explicitly to test these mortals but she comes to their water, their pool
00:23:55
Speaker
and begs them for some help with her and her children. And theoretically she could have said, you know, I'm a goddess and I'm here to demand my due of respect from you mortals, but instead she teaches them. She says the sun and the air and the water belong to everyone. She invites them to show hospitality. She says,
00:24:18
Speaker
I come for a public gift and I beg you grant it to me as a supplicant. Let these children move you also who stretch their little arms out from my breasts." So she's saying, we're weak, we're poor, we're all alone, take pity on us.
00:24:32
Speaker
And they don't. They actually stir up the pool to make it muddy so she can't drink it. And then she turns them all into frogs and turns their whole land into a swamp. And that's the vengeance that they receive for their treatment of this weak, lonely woman who is a goddess. But maybe the most Christian-like of the pagan hospitality stories that I found is the story of Bausus and Philharmon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. Baucus Bausus.
00:25:00
Speaker
So Zeus and Hermes are traveling through Phrygia. They're looking for hospitality, a place to stay, and it says they're rejected at 1,000 doors.
00:25:07
Speaker
which is maybe familiar to those who've heard the parable of Christ where he's talking about the the servant of the Lord trying to invite people to the Lord's son's wedding and he says you know all he invited all the rich people and all the rich people said I can't come and then so he goes into the the the highways and the hedges and he rounds up the poor people. So Zeus and Hermes rejected at a thousand doors all of the the finest homes until they find the rude hut
00:25:32
Speaker
of this pious elderly couple, Bausus and Philharmon. They offer him, they offer them a bench, a rough blanket. He says, a wretched looking chine of meat and various other colorfully inadequate comforts. Basically, he describes every piece of what they offer him and how pathetic it is. Ovid does this in Metamorphoses.
00:25:54
Speaker
And for this, the gods destroy the entire rest of the region in a flood. But they transform Bouses and Philemon's little hovel into a grand temple. And they say, Bouses and Philemon, what do you want? You can have anything you want. And they say, we want to be stewards of your temple, and then we want to die on the same day, so that we never have to be apart from each other. And so they're turned into trees that guard the outside of the temple.
00:26:24
Speaker
And so it's this very overturning of hierarchies. The last are made first and the first are made last because they cared for strangers, they showed compassion with the best that they had, however meager it was. Now this story is recorded around the time of Christ, a little bit prior to his ministry. So maybe you could say these ideas were in the air
00:26:53
Speaker
But you can find these hospitality stories all over the place and it's clearly not something that the gospel's introduced into the world. Now you could argue that what Christ introduced was fanaticism with respect to hospitality, caring for the poor, caring for the meek, resisting not evil.
00:27:18
Speaker
And that's a pretty easy case to make given the scriptures that have become proverbial. But it is a difficult case to make if you're looking at how Jesus behaved, how the apostles behaved, what they taught.
00:27:34
Speaker
how every other Christian tradition from the beginning of time has interpreted these. They've always been viewed as central to Christian teaching. The Sermon on the Mount, basically from the day it was given, was this is clearly important to the message of Jesus. But it's never been interpreted with this suicidal fundamentalist attitude. And I think the reason that's the case
00:28:01
Speaker
is that pre-modern Christians did not view the hierarchy that they lived in and the doctrine and they didn't well frankly they didn't view everything about their surroundings and the way they live as something that was theirs to change. It didn't belong to them the way that we assume that our society belongs to us because of
00:28:28
Speaker
democracy and egalitarianism. We have this idea that everything is in our hands. And you can point out that this theology is very obviously consuming Christianity. The people who are adopting it are not necessarily becoming less fervent. They're not losing their principles. They're becoming possessed by a single principle.
00:28:53
Speaker
which is, as long as there is one lost sheep, we will abandon the 99, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the context. If there's one person who feels unwelcome in the tent, we will change whatever we have to change to make that one person feel welcome.
00:29:14
Speaker
But in the context of that analogy, it sort of equates to someone has left the sheepfold, let's abolish the sheepfold, let's just not have fences. And in this sort of homely analogy, that's obviously not what the shepherd would do. The shepherd would go get the one and bring it back into the sheepfold. Meaning back into communion, back into harmony, back where it's safe.
00:29:42
Speaker
And obviously if you're putting yourself in the role of the shepherd, leaving the ninety and nine to fetch the one,
00:29:50
Speaker
you're putting yourself in a hierarchical position, an elevated position relative to the sheep. You know what needs to be done and they do not. Anyway, I think there's a certain read on Jesus that is basically wrong, that he introduced an entirely novel moral framework to the Near East in 33 AD or whatever, that people would be just baffled by these bizarre
00:30:19
Speaker
teachings that he presented, and I don't think that's the case. It doesn't seem that way when you read it. It seems like he is reminding people of straightforward moral obligations that they are consciously rejecting. When he talks about, you know, the law says to honor your father and mother, but you are declaring everything that your parents might ask of you. You're saying, oh, that's a gift that I'm going to offer to the temple as a way of getting around your responsibility to your parents.
00:30:49
Speaker
He's not introducing this concept of you should take care of old people. He is holding them to the principles that they already understand to be true from the law. They already had the two great commandments, love God, love your neighbor. They already had care for the poor and the stranger and the sick.
Jesus' Teachings and Existing Moral Frameworks
00:31:12
Speaker
He was reminding them of their responsibility. And they're behaving like people who know they should be doing better.
00:31:20
Speaker
And that may be an artifact of our dispensationalist read of the Scriptures. We don't have the idea that Jesus introducing the New Covenant was really changing the playbook in any historical sense. So we believe Moses was a Christian, Adam was a Christian, Elijah was a Christian.
00:31:43
Speaker
all of the prophets at least had the gospel, had the understanding themselves and the degree to which they taught it was contingent on the readiness of the people to hear it. And apostasy was a part of that cycle. We're reading the book of Judges in church right now and it's this constant cycle of apostasy and repentance and restoration and
00:32:08
Speaker
decadence and collapse and on and on it goes. And that rhythm, that pattern repeats itself throughout the scriptures. And so the ministry of Christ is not a total overturning of the lessons taught in the Old Testament. It's the consummation. It's not being done away. It's being fulfilled.
00:32:32
Speaker
And what that means is that there's a closer moral kinship between the righteous Jews of the Old Testament and also the righteous pagans than seems to be indicated by this other model of Jesus totally overturning everything.
00:32:53
Speaker
Which has led to some interesting discussions in church. If you're a Protestant of a certain stripe, you can read the genocide of the Canaanites and say, well, that was the old covenant.
00:33:09
Speaker
God wanted them to act like that, but we don't do that anymore because God changed the rules. And we don't really have that. Joshua was a Christian and died as a warlord with all that blood on his hands and he went to heaven. And so you have to reconcile that in your mind. And this feeds into this other topic that I want to address, which is Abraham and his Abedim.
Abraham's Servants: Loyalty Beyond Coercion
00:33:36
Speaker
The word Abedim
00:33:37
Speaker
uh is a plural noun it's variously translated as servants or slaves or bondsmen or serfs but all of these words imply a level of social organization that didn't exist at the time in order to have chattel slavery of the kind that we're familiar with 19th century triangle trade slavery
00:34:02
Speaker
It's defined in comparison with, in contrast to wage labor, day labor, things that were people whose rights were legally codified, including slave owners, a slave owner, what he could and couldn't expect from a slave in the antebellum South.
00:34:21
Speaker
was defined and circumscribed by the state. Now Abraham has these abedim, but he lives in tents in the desert essentially.
00:34:33
Speaker
His, the boundaries of that relationship between him and his Abadim, his servants or whatever you want to call them, is really just defined by custom. Like there's no, he's about as sovereign as you can be. There's no high king with police that are gonna either catch his slaves if they run away or punish him for mistreating them. It's just
00:34:57
Speaker
his personal charisma, his leadership, whatever coercive means he has to employ, we don't really know, but they're living in tents and they are grazing livestock, which severely limits the value that you can extract against a person's will.
00:35:16
Speaker
Like if your job is to watch over and round up livestock, you're going to be by yourself a lot and you're going to come home to a tent with a flat that closes. And so it's just like, how are you going to restrain and coerce these people? What defines the limits of what can be asked of these people? And the picture that emerges is basically
00:35:42
Speaker
that these Abadim belong to Abraham's household. And what does that mean? As far as I can tell, it means they belong to his household the same way that you belong to your household. And I don't know if you've ever taken someone in or had someone take you in. I've had both experiences.
00:36:02
Speaker
And the nature of that relationship, it's an unequal relationship, right? You are under someone else's roof, you're eating their food. Are you free to refuse them if they ask you to do something? Yes and no. There's clearly a power dynamic at play there, but in most cases, that power dynamic remains implicit because of gratitude and loyalty and respect.
00:36:30
Speaker
I mentioned on the Granite Mountain movie podcast a couple of weeks ago that Dune is like the anti-Northman, that it's the opposite.
00:36:38
Speaker
because Northman is this movie where all of the hierarchies are brutal and coercive and miserable, and Dune is a story of very happy hierarchy.
Hierarchies in 'Dune' vs. 'The Northman'
00:36:50
Speaker
It's the hierarchy, and this I actually think is the way that most hierarchies have operated. It's the way that people have commanded loyalty and led one another
00:37:01
Speaker
for most of history because it's the way that works. And it's silly, I think, to reference a movie, but I think it actually captures the emotional resonance of it. And I actually think that's why critics, to the extent that they were really, like you could watch them really try to find a reason to hate this movie. Like they wanted to talk about culture appropriation a little bit. They wanted to talk about like a white savior. But you could tell they were kind of like having a hard time working up a hard on about it.
00:37:31
Speaker
And I think the message that they are not really able to articulate is that a hereditary elite, a sovereign family could deserve and earn the absolute personal loyalty of the people that they rule by law. Now, to say that the Atreides retainers are like part of the family,
00:37:53
Speaker
is not accurate. They're not peers. Jason Momoa is not really Timothy Chalamet's brother. He's a subordinate. He works for their father, but there's also a sense in which he's superior because he's older and more experienced and he gets to kind of, he gets to say no to the prince.
00:38:13
Speaker
But these retainers belong to House Atreides in the same way that you belong to a family. They possess House Atreides as their own, and House Atreides possesses them. They aren't attached to this noble house as a result of some kind of ideological sympathy. There's not a set of Atreides values that they subscribe to, and that's what makes them loyal Atreides retainers. It's just their house.
00:38:39
Speaker
And obviously if you come from a good family and you love your dad and your mom, then you can be proud of your association with that house. But even if your parents are only so-so, they're still that loyalty or should be. Anyway, there's no real ideology for them to subscribe to because Leto isn't bringing like tolerance or democracy or even a relaxation of the feudal compact to Arrakis. It's just a reverse.
00:39:08
Speaker
The Harkonnens have this modern capitalist, laissez-faire relationship to Arrakis. All they have is a corporate mining contract, meaning they have the right to go get the spice and nothing is standing in the way of that. The emperor owns Arrakis and he lets the Harkonnens come and rape it essentially. But Leto receives Arrakis in fief complete, which means Arrakis and its people are his personal property.
00:39:38
Speaker
and he treats them like that, and that's what makes him the good guy. These reciprocal, futile obligations between the duke and his subjects aren't optional. Nobody gets to say no to the duke. But they're not purely coercive either. It's sort of like, well, and maybe this is the last modern thing that you could compare it to. The relationship between parents and children. Obviously, you're not free to ignore your obligation to your children.
00:40:06
Speaker
but it would be insane to imply that that's the reason why you meet those obligations. You don't feed your kids because the police will come if you don't. You feed your kids because you love them and by love we mean you view them as extensions of yourself. You care about them because
00:40:25
Speaker
they're part of you, their welfare reflects on you, their accomplishments too, you want to see them succeed because their success is in a meaningful sense your success. And I think a lot of moderns sneer at stories like this where there's a wise king who's a father to his people as being this sort of self-congratulatory myth concocted by the aristocracy.
00:40:49
Speaker
the the marxist and also the libertarian model of prototypical government like the first government is the stationary bandit there's these organized gangs of pirates and extortioners and they get tired of moving around so they settle down in one place and they impose class and hierarchy on these primordial egalitarian communes at the tip of a sword
00:41:12
Speaker
And as far as I can tell, the hard right more or less accepts this model too. They just say, well, the pirates were based and red-pilled and cool. But anyone who's ever been taken in by a high status person has seen how these state-like patronage networks bloom up spontaneously around powerful families, wherever they're allowed to do so.
Spontaneous Patronage and Power Networks
00:41:35
Speaker
And there's nothing coercive about it. There's an energetic, charismatic man whose household, as his capacity expands, his household expands beyond his blood relatives to include this broad network. Friends, allies, proteges, employees. And as his personal gravity intensifies, these relationships become more and more obviously unequal. People who were his peers,
00:42:03
Speaker
Now they sit at his table and they check with him before they make a move because they depend on him for support. And when he gives him a gift, they can't really reciprocate it. And over time, if they stay in that configuration, they're pulled into stable orbits.
00:42:17
Speaker
The patron stops being just this very useful, valuable friend and becomes more like a mentor, a counselor, someone who bestows favor, someone who protects, someone who judges between people within that system. And the client, the subordinate in this relationship, stops just being grateful or solicitous or courteous toward the patron.
00:42:39
Speaker
and he starts to understand his own ambitions and his own status and even his sense of self in this subordinate relationship to the patron. You think about Tom Hagan in The Godfather. He was taken in by Don Corleone and clearly sees himself again not as a peer to Michael
00:43:01
Speaker
But who he is as a person is Don Corleone's conciliary. And when he gets snubbed by Michael and told that he's not a wartime conciliary, you can see how that devastates him because it breaks him off from who he thought he was. And patronage is not exactly fatherhood, but it's an obvious abstraction of fatherhood. That's why the etymology is the same.
00:43:31
Speaker
it occupies a similar emotional space. So not only is government not spawned from criminal gangs, criminal gangs are actually the clearest modern illustration of how primordial power coalesces around families, which is exactly why we find stories about organized crime so compelling. There
00:43:53
Speaker
easier ways of getting money and even power in a certain sense. But tribe is something that has to come in existential crisis, existential stress.
00:44:08
Speaker
this i think is why so many veterans even if they've become sour on the mission will express nostalgia for combat because that's where you connect with other men on that level and probably the only civilian analog is criminality because you are asking
00:44:28
Speaker
people to take your life and your freedom into their hands, which is why snitching is such a betrayal. And so we start with this prototypical government of a household like Abraham's household, which
00:44:43
Speaker
They may have been purchased as slaves. They may have been disciples. They may have been friends who sort of became part of Abraham's entourage. But however it happened, he drew these people to him that were part of his household and identified with him. And you look at the way that he treats them and the way they treat him, it's clear that they're subordinate to him or obedient, which they're called abedim. And I'm pretty sure the etymologies are related.
00:45:12
Speaker
But it's not clear how that subordination is maintained or how far it goes. He has them go with him into these uncertain, dangerous battles. They go with him to rescue Lot, and it's these circumstances where you would need really high morale people because it's... You wouldn't want people who would run away if they didn't have a spear pointed at their back. And you couldn't possibly muster enough, you know, like the Romans had people in the back with spears to kill people who ran away.
00:45:42
Speaker
He gives his most trusted servant Eliezer all of his wealth and he sends him alone into a distant country, sends him back to their homeland to go find his son a wife. And prior to the birth of Ishmael, that servant Eliezer is the heir to everything that he has anyway. So
00:46:01
Speaker
whether he bought them or not, these are people that have intense bonds of loyalty and are clearly united by more than just his ability to coerce compliance. And feudalism scales this dynamic up considerably but it doesn't change it.
00:46:21
Speaker
At bottom, it's just a series of these relationships nested and repeated fractally. And you can see that if you read some feudal oaths. It's very clearly these not father-son, but father-son-like relationships between the Lord and his vassal, and between the vassal and his sub-vassals or his serfs. And when that system became unsustainably large and complex, your feudal patron gave way to Patria, the nation.
00:46:52
Speaker
It's the same emotional circuits, but it's pointed at a more abstract object, which is your forefathers and then the land of your fathers. And now as migration and intermarriage have weakened this concept of patria,
00:47:07
Speaker
the civic or propositional nation introduces another layer of abstraction. Finally, pretty much completely unmoored from the concept of family. The nation becomes anybody who ascends to a particular set of ideals and moral principles.
Modern Views on Hierarchy: Critique and Loss
00:47:22
Speaker
But you can see how that's either redundant
00:47:25
Speaker
in the sense that I will row in the same direction as anyone who's rowing in the same direction. Or it's incoherent and self-defeating, especially here in the US where shared ideals include this refusal to insist upon any shared ideals. And in the process of becoming unmoored from this concept of family as the fundamental unit of society, which is a phrase in our family proclamation,
00:47:51
Speaker
In becoming unmoored from that principle, we've also completely lost the ability to conceive of positive, joyful hierarchies. And so on the left, you have a concept of hierarchy, which is that no stone can be... Moldberg had this great phrase on a podcast. He said that the US government is going to Ukraine with the mindset of
00:48:18
Speaker
they see one stone on top of another and they say we have to liberate the stone on the bottom. So this complete leveling of not only interpersonal hierarchies but even hierarchies of reason. The idea that one way of living is morally or even practically superior to another is an unacceptable hierarchy. It's oppressive.
00:48:45
Speaker
And actually don't think that that's postmodern neo-Marxism. Or if it is, postmodern neo-Marxism is really just an elaboration of this fundamentalist Christianity that your aunt and your public school administrator subscribe to.
00:49:04
Speaker
the idea that, well, there's God and God is the big rooster and we're all just chickens here and so there can be absolutely no hierarchies of meaning or value of any kind whatsoever.
00:49:19
Speaker
And if you extrapolate that to its natural conclusion, it's hard to understand what thinking even is under that framework. Is it permissible to think? Because cognition is inherently rooted in questions of decision and value. We will do this, we will not do that. If you can't say this thing is better than this other thing, then essentially any choice at all
00:49:46
Speaker
is the imposition of a hierarchy and therefore oppressive and therefore it's judgment and judgment is the only sin. So that's the left wing perspective and then on the right what I see is discussed with that, discussed with this total leveling against all reasons, this unbelievably destructive leveling of hierarchies
00:50:11
Speaker
but to essentially accept the leftist frame of what hierarchy is like and say, well, yes, lordship is oppressive.
00:50:22
Speaker
and lords should have contempt over their inferiors, and the underlings will have resentment toward us, the superiors, and we're gonna have to whip them into shape, and that's all right, because it's better than this thing, this leveling of hierarchies. And you know, a case could be made, but you really can't accept
00:50:46
Speaker
their framing that people invented caring about their wives and children. People invented caring about poor people, you know, in the 19th century or in the 1960s.
00:50:59
Speaker
or that compassion was always the domain of women, or that romantic love is something that was invented in the 19th century. And before that, women were just chattel. I mean, you can see that in the myths of the way that the gods interacted with their wives. There's this clear give and take, this clear desire, at least for peace, if not for love,
00:51:26
Speaker
Because coercion is exhausting, even if you don't have any moral problem with it. And that, I think, is where Christ's supremacy becomes so valuable to the relationship.
Christian Hierarchy and Stewardship: Modern Fears
00:51:40
Speaker
Because you're both oriented toward Him, and you as a man are in this position of stewardship, this position of presidency, but everybody knows where that authority comes from. And you aren't having to continually defend it and reestablish it on your own merits.
00:51:56
Speaker
And I think this actually translates to other hierarchies that modern people are terrified of because if they just acknowledge that a hierarchy exists, they're essentially arguing that they would like to be oppressors or they would like to be oppressed.
00:52:11
Speaker
And that's why you basically just can't even have the conversation with most people. If you introduce differences in cognitive ability, differences in temperament, they will run, almost physically sometimes run from that conversation because they have no way
00:52:27
Speaker
to contextualize that information if they admit that it's true in a way that makes them feel like they're still a good person. If they acknowledge hierarchy, they risk being transmogrified into the same kind of monster that their ancestors were or that they assume they were. And all of the familial relations that we have left would prove to them that that's not the case if they would examine them. I mean, your relationship to your kids, even your relationship to your dog,
00:52:54
Speaker
You don't have contempt for your dog and your dog doesn't resent you. You don't have contempt for your kids and your kids don't resent you or they shouldn't. Guys who are honest about their relationship to their wives don't view their wives with contempt. We're all just in the places where God put us.
00:53:10
Speaker
and I watched the response to Northman when it came out you know these guys have read Nietzsche or they've read blogs by guys who've read Nietzsche and they learned that this impulse to be kind to things that are smaller and weaker than them is actually this psychological prison built by their stunted resentful inferiors to establish power over them and so they're trying as hard as they possibly can to swallow their revulsion
00:53:40
Speaker
cruelty and be like oh it's it's so cool how the men at arms are constantly antagonizing their slaves for no reason and Wow, I wish I got to march sobbing children and old people into a barn and light it on fire like
00:53:59
Speaker
It's just absurd. And it's also silly, I think, for normal people to look at a movie like that and go, gosh, I'm so glad that I live in now times when we've invented caring about our wives and kids and treating strangers decently.
00:54:16
Speaker
and not skinning people alive for no reason. Anyway, I think we have to get back to that concept of hierarchy, of being where God placed you. And you can find that mentality of the strong protecting the weak. You can find that back in the code of Hammurabi. That's not something that Jesus sprang on us 3,000 years into the game. It was not a surprise.
00:54:42
Speaker
Alright, one last thought and I'm going to call it quits. The concept of immortality that a mortal was capable of achieving in Greek myth was kleosaphthaton, meaning undying fame. And this is the notion that
00:55:02
Speaker
your deeds will ring out and be remembered and be sung by poets forever. And that's as immortal as most people get to be unless they have a special dispensation from the gods. And this is often contrasted with the Christian notion of not seeking glory, not seeking
00:55:22
Speaker
to be seen of men and I was looking around for this concept of kleos to see if it could be found anywhere in the scriptures and what I found instead was doxa which is so kleos is rooted in hearing kleos has to do with your name ringing out and being heard by people but doxa
00:55:46
Speaker
is the word for glory and it has to do with your appearance, how you are seen.
Pagan vs. Christian Glory: Reputation and Honor
00:55:54
Speaker
But they both have the same connotation of public opinion and reputation. And what's interesting about that is it cuts back to this idea of taking godhood seriously, taking the idea that there are gods seriously.
00:56:11
Speaker
Because Christ doesn't fault the Pharisees for seeking honor, he faults them for seeking the honor that comes from men and not the honor that comes from God. Now, if there is a God and there is a book written in heaven where everyone's deeds are recorded,
00:56:27
Speaker
and you have the option of pursuing the good opinion of the poets and the good opinion of the crowd or of seeking the good opinion of God and having your name written in his book and having your deeds extolled by him as he did with John the Baptist and a number of other people. Obviously you would choose to be in God's book.
00:56:52
Speaker
and Christ himself, when he's comforting the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he says, ought not Christ to have suffered these things and then to enter into his glory, which is doxa, that Greek word we were talking about.
00:57:08
Speaker
And then in 1 Peter, Paul says to the elders, feed the flock of God, which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd shall appear, you shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.
00:57:27
Speaker
And that unfading crown is Amarantinontes doxxes, which is basically the same thing as Cleosaftiton, except it's a visual thing that is not fading away, rather than a sound which is not decaying into silence.
00:57:42
Speaker
So anyway, my read on all this is that both the pagan and the Christian perspective have been defined in contrast to one another in a way that distorts both. And that's not to say that, you know, it's all one thing, but it is to say that there's a reason the message of Christianity was resonant to pagan European peoples.
00:58:08
Speaker
They weren't Lovecraftian moral aliens, and they wouldn't view you as Lovecraftian moral aliens, you know, because you give your daughter a hug and a kiss while you're leaving for work. Or the fact that you love your dog even though he's stupid and dirty.
00:58:22
Speaker
So anyway, that's like five or six different essays that I've been chewing on, and you can probably see the stitches where I put them together. But I feel like it's all one thing. It's all this question, all one question that I've been trying to attack from all these angles. And it hasn't worked in writing, but maybe if I just get it out there like this, I can stop thinking about it and move on to something else.
00:58:51
Speaker
So anyway, that's the Bennett's phylactery podcast episode one. Hope you enjoyed it. See you maybe next week. I don't know. See ya.