Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 22

Rachmaninoff in Sydney

I recently got a wonderful email from my student Annalise Shero, who is spending what we here in Texas call “summer” in Sydney, Australia. (Which sounds pretty great.) With her permission, I’m sharing her message below.

Last semester in Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century, you told us about Rachmaninoff’s Vespers and played a portion of them in class for us. Since you introduced me to this piece, I would like to tell you a story about it.

This evening, I attended a live performance of the Vespers in the Sydney Town Hall, which had a unique staging. The choir was placed centrally in the cavernous hall, and the audience could sit right around them. Those seats were very expensive, however, and I am currently a Budget Patron of the Arts, and so my seat was not close to the choir at all. In fact, I was barely inside the door, tucked in an alcove.

My seat provided a very interesting visual and auditory subtext to my experience of the evening, especially considering the history of the piece. When the performance began, the lights in my little alcove dimmed completely. I sat in the dark, observing the lights over the choir and most of the audience, yet not included in it. Likewise, the acoustics of the hall and my alcove created auditory distance. I could hear the distance between me and the choir.

I suffered no true loss in quality, the choir was brilliant and beautiful, yet I felt the metaphoric poverty of my seat through the presence and distance of this glory. I felt like Zacchaeus, immensely glad to have as much proximity as I did, and I felt like I was with Simone Weil, reveling in the beauty while among the outsiders.

The choir filed out the side doors, and the small ensemble played a contemplative interlude. Was it over? Perhaps the ending was different than I remembered, ending with gentleness instead of glory. But then! But then!! The doors immediately behind me opened letting in great golden light, and there in the entryway the choir sang the final movement of the Vespers. I was immersed in sound and light. I sobbed.

When the choir concluded, not a soul moved, nor breathed. (I was desperately trying to weep as quietly as possible). We spent several seconds suspended in silence, the sound of the liturgy still sinking into our bones. Then it was as if the applause would never end, and at this point I laughed until I couldn’t breathe all over again.

Mildred Pope

That’s a portrait of Mildred Katherine Pope (1872-1956). 

There are periods of history in which, for certain people, all the doors they would most want to pass through are closed, locked, and barred, and nothing can be done about that. Then there are periods when all those doors are wide open. But there are also the periods in between, when the doors are locked but can, just maybe, be unlocked; closed but capable of being opened by those who are bold and resourceful, patient and determined. Indeed, those specially gifted people are the ones who ensure that the doors will be open for those who come after them. 

I’ve been reading about Mildred Pope — who was one such person, and to an exceptional degree — because she was Dorothy Sayers’s tutor at Oxford, and the model for the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night. 

Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity. As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanor committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of anyone she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle. “No research at all,” had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, “and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.” And even then she had added: “But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.” 

This is a wonderful tribute, but the back story, as it were, of Mildred Pope is a truly remarkable one. Her DNB entry is brief but eye-opening, and much of what I know comes from it. 

She came up to Oxford to study at Somerville in 1891 and stayed for most of her life, first as a librarian, then as a tutor. But though her undergraduate experience had many high points — especially in her performances in field hockey and disputation: she was “renowned for her pace on the wing … and her level-headedness in debate” — her academic career was somewhat rockier, because there was not one scholar at Oxford who could instruct her in the subject she loved: Old French philology. Essentially, her education in the field which she would make her own was achieved through an extended exchange of letters with Paget Toynbee of Cambridge — whose intellectual roots were in Old French but who had become, by the time he knew Mildred Pope, England’s finest scholar of Dante.

Miss Pope (as her students later called her) seems to have been deterred by nothing, taking her First and then going on to study philology at Heidelberg before returning to Somerville. Later she was awarded some sabbatical time to pursue her doctorate at the University of Paris under the guidance of the legendary medievalist and philologist Gaston Paris. She received her doctorate in 1903, though Oxford did not see fit to award her a B.A. until 1920, when other female graduates were so acknowledged — she would receive hers alongside Sayers.  

No matter. When she died the Times of London reported that the establishment and development of the teaching of medieval French at Oxford was almost wholly her doing. Further, “It would be fair to say that Pope effectively invented the discipline of Anglo-Norman studies.” Her recruitment of other dons to the cause of women’s suffrage in the 1910s was severely frowned upon by the university authorities; she was impervious to intimidation. Throughout the Great War she devoted her summers to intense and demanding relief work among refugees and displaced persons in France and Belgium. In 1928 she became the first woman to be appointed Reader at Oxford. 

She was, a historian reported, “the most beloved of all Somerville’s tutors,” and when she left the College in 1934 — to accept a professorship at the University of Manchester — a Gaudy in her honor was held. Sayers was asked to offer a tribute, and she did, calling particular attention to Pope’s “integrity of judgement” and “humility in the face of facts.” Above all, Sayers said, Mildred Pope exemplified “the generosity of a great mind … that will not be contented with the second-hand or second-best.” 

Here’s to the great Mildred Pope. 

metaphysics and history

A follow-up to my recent post on Adam Roberts’s new novel Lake of Darkness. I said in that post that Adam is a metaphysical writer, and that’s something that fascinates me about his fiction. But metaphysics is not my native tongue; I am able to grasp most prominent metaphysical concepts, but not easily, and I don’t employ them comfortably.

One interesting development in Christian theology in recent years has been a resurgence in metaphysical argument after a long period in which theology was governed and directed by an attention to salvation history. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God has been perhaps the most important and influential book in this regard; I think I see Hart’s influence in the decision by Katherine Sonderegger to begin her systematic theology with The Doctrine of God – God conceived within the conceptual frame of classical metaphysics – before moving on to the specifically Christian understanding of God as Triune. I find this development interesting; but for me personally it is not welcome. I am not a metaphysical thinker but a historical thinker, and in trying to grasp the Christian Gospel, salvation history is where I begin and end. I am strongly more sympathetic with a (Lutheran or Barthian) theology that starts with the Cross and works backward and forward from that. 

So I read a book like Lake of Darkness with delight, but its theological framework is essentially alien to my way of thinking about God. I can appreciate and enjoy – and I do, very much – but as a kind of outsider; again, like someone speaking a laboriously acquired second or third language. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said; for me, it’s “No ideas but in people and events.” And no theology except the Theology of the Cross. 

topological theology

Adam Roberts is a metaphysical novelist, in two senses of the word. First, like the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, he delights in fabulous conceits, extreme metaphors, analogies pushed to and beyond their apparent limits — “knight’s moves,” he has said in the past. Events or ideas start in one direction, then suddenly veer off into another. 

But Adam is also a novelist who engages metaphysics: the metaphysics of Kant in The Thing Itself (the title tells you what the dominant concept is), that of Hegel in The This (Absolute Spirit, or the Absolute — or Abby) and now that of Gilles Deleuze (the “fold,” most obviously, though perhaps the structurally related concept of the plane of immanence is equally important). 

Consider this: What is the relationship between a black hole and ordinary space? We imagine something, anything drawing closer to the black hole, closer and closer, still in ordinary space, and then it crosses the event horizon, from which it cannot return. We conceive of that something, anything as being outside the black hole but then, having crossed the event horizon, being inside it.

But what if space is folded, and folded in such a way that inside and outside are not stable, perhaps not even relevant, concepts? Or, to put the question a different way, what if space is a Klein bottle? 

(Take a look, when you have time, at this lovely collection of Klein bottles at London’s Science Museum.) 

A Klein bottle doesn’t have an inside, and because it doesn’t have an inside it doesn’t have an outside either. It cannot be described in those terms. Well, what if the universe is like that? 

And what if there is a God? 

And what if there is a Satan, the Adversary of God? 

And what if God flings Satan into an oubliette called Hell? 

And what if the event horizon of the black hole is a doorway? 

If we are on one side of the event horizon and Satan is on the other side, are we outside and he inside? Or vice versa? Or, if the universe is a Klein bottle, must we abandon those modes of description altogether and think instead of the topology of Creation, the ways in which Creation is folded, deformed, twisted, bent — but does not have an inside or an outside? 

Think on these questions, try to come up with an answer to them, and then ask one more: Where is Satan? 

You are now ready to read Lake of Darkness. Don’t worry: after all, facilis descensus Averno. 

• 

Okay. Adam Roberts, then, is a metaphysical novelist, but he is also an acute social observer, and the novel raises non-metaphysical questions as well. As I was reading Lake of Darkness, at a certain moment I began to realize that its characters, human beings from the far future, aren’t very smart. Or perhaps I should say that they know very little. One clue: they are familiar with many things from our time, they know of the book Alas in Wonderland, they sing our songs, like “We all live in a yellow sunny scene” and “Hail the Conquer-King Hero Comes.” Why do they get these things slightly wrong? Because they’re illiterate. Very few of them can read or write. Why? Because when they want to know something they just ask an A.I. and the A.I. tells them.  

Artificial Intelligence has built for them utopias to live in (many different ones, because after all one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia) — but, and one key character comes at least partially to understand this, these places are really “infantopias.” Playgrounds for children. The humans of this far future are intellectually what the humans in Wall•E are physically: coddled into placid uselessness. 

Now here comes someone, a man. He carries a walking stick that looks a bit like this:

The heavy lids of his eyes display prominent folds. He says something along these lines: “Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste. And I hate to see human beings reduced to this soporific condition, this infantile paralysis of the mind and spirit. You’ve sat back and allowed your machines to make the crooked places straight and the rough places smooth. With my help, you can reclaim your independence, you can free your mind, you can be once again what you were … made to be. You just need to give me the chance to set things in motion. Oh, it’ll hurt, to be sure; but you know what they say: No pain, no gain.” 

The gentleman has a point, doesn’t he? 

Doesn’t he? 

The Game

By the time he wrote “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Conan Doyle was growing tired of Sherlock Holmes, and the tiredness shows in the messiness of the story. This was the eighth of ten Holmes stories published in 1893, after seven in 1892 and six in 1891; and the novels A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890) had preceded the short stories. No wonder Conan Doyle was ready to kill Holmes off, as he did in “The Final Problem” — though of course he felt obliged to bring him back later, with less and less success. That’s a story for another day. 

(In his letters he sometimes wrote of Holmes, “I am weary of his name,” but in his memoirs he gave a more decorous explanation: “At last, after I had done two series of [Holmes stories] I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore as a sign of my resolution I determined to end the life of my hero.” Conan Doyle took much greater pride in his historical fiction, for instance The White Company.) 

In the story at hand, Mr. Melas is an interpreter, a “remarkable linguist” who is Greek “by extraction” and who specializes in that language. He tells Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes — about whom more in a moment — about his recent experience of being kidnapped and taken to some unknown location to serve as a translator between his two English captors and a Greek man whom they also hold captive, along with that man’s sister.) The two Englishmen eventually release Melas and give him some money for his trouble, though one of them warns him: “If you speak to a human soul about this — one human soul, mind — well, may God have mercy upon your soul!” 

So when the Holmes brothers hear this story, what do they do? Why, Mycroft places an advertisement — an advertisement based on everything Melas has told him — in all the papers of London, seeking information about the situation. In other words, he ensures that Melas’s captors, who have shown themselves to be ruthless and violent men, and who have made the most dire threats against him, will know everything. Mycroft shows no awareness of this likelihood, while Sherlock merely remarks to Melas, “I should certainly be on my guard if I were you, for of course they must know through these advertisements that you have betrayed them” — and then walks away, leaving Melas to his fate. Moreover, when Sherlock and Mycroft finally decide to take some action, they move in a most leisurely fashion. 

Then, at the end of the story, while the Holmes brothers and Dr. Watson do manage to save Melas, the Greek man dies and his sister is carried away who knows where. Not only do our heroes not find the criminals, they don’t even look for them — they just go back home. Some time later they read a newspaper article that describes the deaths of two Englishmen abroad. These may or may not be the criminals; Holmes doesn’t bother to try to find out. 

So, obviously, Conan Doyle just wasn’t thinking through the details, even some of the most important details, of his own story. He was writing in a hurry and wanting to be done not just with this story but with Sherlock Holmes. And yet …

The invention of Mycroft Holmes is a stroke of genius. This is the first story in which he appears, indeed the first time we learn of any member of Sherlock’s family, and after two novels and twenty stories his introduction gives the reader quite a turn. The idea of another Holmes who has even greater intellectual gifts than Sherlock but absolutely none of Sherlock’s energy is a terrific one. Mycroft is brilliant and fat and lazy, a character interesting in himself — he is the essential predecessor to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe — but even more interesting as a kind of funhouse-mirror version of Sherlock.

(Also, the Diogenes Club, of which Mycroft is a co-founder, sounds awesome.) 

And this contrast in Conan Doyle — between a mind still fizzing with ideas and that same mind sick and tired of the donkey work of working out the details of stories — is, I am convinced, the source and cause of The Game. The Game, which treats Holmes and Watson as real people and Watson’s narratives as faithful accounts of what actually happened, is a way of maintaining delight in Conan Doyle’s imaginative creations while avoiding too much sobering contemplation of his obvious bunglings. 

Thus Ronald Knox, in his essay “The Mystery of Mycroft,” has an excellent explanation for the strange behavior of the Holmes brothers in “The Greek Interpreter”: Mycroft is in cahoots with the two kidnappers. And not just that: “It can hardly be supposed that a man of his attainments would have leagued himself with a couple of garrotters like Latimer and Kemp with any good will. The association can only be explained if we conjecture that both he and they were part of a greater organisation. Enough said, for every student of Holmes literature; the next word that leaps to the mind is Moriarty.” To this Knox adds some interesting reflections on the possibility of Mycroft’s being a kind of double agent, and on how much Sherlock was likely to have known of “his brother’s duplicities.”  

This will strike some of my readers as an odd comparison, but when I think of the Sherlockian Game I think of Jacques Derrida — and particularly of Derrida’s magnificent long essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination. The essay is a detailed reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that begins by noting the long line of critics who have complained that the dialogue is “badly composed.” Some say that Plato wrote it when he was young and didn’t yet know what he was doing; others say that he wrote it as an old man who had lost his intellectual fastball. Okay, says Derrida, but what if we start with a very different assumption? What if we assume that all the eccentricities and apparent shortcomings of the dialogue are in fact cunningly devised stratagems? What would see then? 

The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words. 

Note that Derrida does not argue that the dialogue’s author did in fact know what he was doing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he cared whether Plato meant or intended all that may be found by the shrewd student of the Phaedrus. He is merely saying that the working assumption that the dialogue is fiendishly complex and wholly coherent is more “fertile” — it “discovers” more, it unearths “a more secret organization.” It’s more fun. Derrida is playing the Platonic Game. 

Academic literary criticism doesn’t do fun these days. It rarely has, of course, but now it has descended fully into an apparently permanent, and permanently dour, secular-Calvinist recitation about structures of oppression — and, when critics lift their heads long enough to notice that students are utterly bored by all this, have no better response than to say Neoliberalism made me do it. I am not sure academic literary criticism can ever come back from its moribund state, but its best chance of doing so would be to try to have some fun. Surprise itself. Play the Game. 

after the Re-Learning

Tom Wolfe in 1987: 

The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite; the cities of 2007 will look more like the cities of 1927 than the cities of 1987. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of the next century, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with a ghastly awe upon our time. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself — but also the capacity to escape to the stars on space ships if it blew. But above all they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes. They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their neo-Louis bergeres, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover. 

Was Wolfe correct? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. 

courting sickness

Tolkien, letter to his son Christopher, 31 May 1944:

I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse. I was sick. 

The strange thing to me is that Tolkien, having by the time of reading Sayers’s Gaudy Night developed this unparalleled hatred and disgust not just for the book but also for its characters and author, then decided to read the next book in the series. This seems strangely self-punitive, does it not? 

(I also find myself wondering when the sickness set in: the Tolkien says that he followed the adventures of Lord Peter “so far” as Gaudy Night, which is the tenth novel devoted to him. Should we assume that Lord Peter remained “attractive” to Tolkien through the first nine novels? He’s rather vague on this point, but the “by which time” suggests that the loss of attractiveness and increase in loathsomeness was a gradual thing.) 

on deciding not to read a book

I had been thinking of reading Eliza Griswold’s new book Circle of Hope, but then a friend sent me a passage that included these sentences: 

Franklin Graham was different from his father. Billy Graham preached broadly about God; Franklin Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, exemplifying the rightward political and cultural swing among most evangelicals in the late twentieth century. 

Billy Graham “preached broadly about God”? Billy Graham??? That’s not an idea that would survive an encounter with one Billy Graham sermon — any one among thousands, but why not start with this one? Pretty much the only thing Billy Graham did for the whole of his long career was to preach the unique saving power of Jesus. 

(Imagine someone claiming that Charles Darwin wrote broadly about knowledge rather than addressing himself specifically to biology. Imagine also someone writing that and then having it published by a big New York trade house.) 

Here would be a more accurate (if not perfectly accurate) complaint: 

Billy Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, but his emphasis was on Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Savior,” not on Jesus as the one who began his public ministry by claiming the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That Jesus’s message, rightly understood and heeded, would transform not just my heart but the whole social order is not something we heard from Billy Graham. Now Franklin Graham, along with many other evangelicals, has made a rightward political and cultural swing that has taken him even farther away from the whole message of Jesus — that message being neglected in favor of a Christian nationalism that seeks political power and social control, and is willing to tolerate any behavior or unbelief by politicians who promise such power and control. It’s for very good reason that today’s politically-minded evangelicals want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools rather than the Beatitudes.  

If journalists want to criticize evangelicals, well, evangelicals have done plenty that rightly incurs criticism. But for heaven’s sake, people, take the time to learn something about those you criticize — the most basic, most elementary facts. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then just don’t write about those people. 

UPDATE: I have had good cause to say this many times in many contexts, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to say “It’s different now than it was then,” you need to know as much about then as about now. If you’re going to say “Franklin Graham was different from his father,” you need to know something about his father. If you’re going to say that American society is disintegrating and that we’re at one another’s throats in an unprecedented way, you need to know the actual precedents. If you’re going to say that Christians now live in a “negative world” whereas they once lived in a “positive world,” you need to know something about what it was really like to try to be a faithful Christian, say, sixty years ago. As Dogberry says, comparisons are odorous, and especially when they’re based not on careful study of the available facts but on vague impressions assumed to be infallible.  

the diaconal charism

Earlier today I read this conversation with David French about how he was made unwelcome at his church because of race and politics. I had read an earlier column by him on the subject, but I was especially attentive to this discussion because I just before I read it I had been walking Angus and listening to Morning Prayer on my phone. 

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely love the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app. It takes about 20 minutes to listen to any one of the services, which features a liturgy well said, lectionary passages well read, and the occasional psalm or canticle well sung. 

Anyway, one of the Scripture readings for Monday, August 12 is the passage from Acts 6 that describes the founding of the order of deacons. And I was noticing, as I heard that passage read, that the whole impetus for this new order was an injustice in the life of the church: “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.” The Hellenists are Greek-speaking Jews, people shaped to a considerable degree by Greek culture; many of them were born and raised outside Israel. The Hebrews were Jews of Israel, speakers of Aramaic and readers of Hebrew, who clearly considered themselves more culturally (and religiously) pure than the Hellenists. 

So we see here the very common injustice that arises from people preferring members of their own cultural group to “others,” not realizing, or not accepting, that such distinctions are erased when one enters the Body of Christ. And when I consider what happened to David French in his family, I think: Every church needs deacons to do precisely what the first deacons did — that is, to give comfort and support to the people of God justly, that is, with no regard to differences in culture or race or politics, because, as Peter says a little later in Acts, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).

The diaconal charism is indifference, in an old meaning of the word: “Without difference of inclination; not inclined to prefer one person or thing to another; unbiased, impartial, disinterested, neutral; fair, just, even, even-handed” (OED definition I.1). And divided as we Christians are by so many worldly or diabolical forces, we desperately need that charism. 

Stephen is of course the patron saint of deacons, but if they need a priestly and episcopal patron also, I would suggest Basil the Great, for reasons I explain in the opening paragraph of this post. And if you want more along these lines, I wrote in more detail about Basil and his extraordinary family here. They all exhibited, to an extraordinary degree, this diaconal charism that I believe is so woefully lacking in the American church. (And probably in every other church as well.) 

anarchism as a spiritual discipline

Perhaps the most unusual element of my 2022 essay on anarchism is this: I present anarchism not as a political system but as a spiritual discipline. I don’t put the point quite that bluntly, but I come fairly close:

The first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy — what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power.

You’ll have to read the essay to find out who Odo is.

It should be obvious that if you are delighted with power politics – if you think the purpose of politics is “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” of your victory – then you won’t be worried about your own will to power. You can just turn off your conscience and go on the attack, thinking only about winning (good) and losing (bad). My recommendation that the desire to impose order on others is a desire that needs to be reflected on will seem obviously silly to you. But there’s another way of thinking about the political order that is equally incompatible with the kind of reflection I counsel in that essay: the libertarian model.

Libertarianism doesn’t want to impose order on others, but its most passionate advocates have a strong tendency to assess existence in terms of winning and losing – winning and losing not in the corridors of political power but in the marketplace; the individual entrepreneur controlling the segment of the market in which he works. As Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, it’s all about DOMINATION; just not domination by law. Anarchism, by contrast — this is my argument in that essay — stands between (libertarian) chaos and (seeking to become) the Man. Some of the most thoughtful anarchists like to say that “anarchy is order” – but order that emerges from collaboration and cooperation rather than being imposed by governmental power. I don’t think it’s possible to create an anarchist system, because an anarchism imposed on people by those in power isn’t anarchism.

Here’s what I think can be done: Try, in every way we can think of, to increase the number of situations in our lives in which we are neither dehumanized by an omnipotent state nor engaged in ceaseless competition with one another in an omnipotent marketplace. As Wendell Berry has written, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” We should assume that privilege whenever we can, and take it upon ourselves as a collaborative of equals to determine what, in any given case facing us, justice and mercy are. In other words, what I call the anarchic imperative is an attempt to rebalance what Berry has called “the two economies”:

For the thing that so troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, it is probably natural to pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out. And we can say without presuming too much, that the first principle of the kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it, we may say, whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it. That is to say that the kingdom of God is orderly.

Amen to that. But what is the nature of that order? Eschatologically, it certainly ain’t anarchic: it is the kingdom of the archē, the source of all things, the Lord. But to understand and instantiate that Kingdom here and now – when, as St. Augustine says, the City of God and the City of Man are inevitably and confusingly mixed – we need to collaborate with one another to increase both our knowledge and our ability to act effectively.

I have argued at some length that Christians aren’t pluralists – we believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10) – but in our current position we should expect, accept, and even embrace plurality. We need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to a plural world, and we can do that by expanding the sphere of voluntary collaboration, negotiation among equals, emergent order, even when such expansion makes life more difficult for us. That’s anarchism as a spiritual discipline.

Since for almost everyone politics is about two questions — “How can I get everything I want?” and “How can I thwart and punish my enemies?” — I have no illusions that this post will find any sympathetic readers. But it’s what I think. Whaddyagonnado.