MAMMON’s DOGs:
A Public Thimble Sermon and Analysis of the Political Theology of Fascism
Douglas Olds, November 2024
"Get Rich or Die Young." --50-Cent
“Anti-Fascism cannot provide a historical explanation of Fascism, and must stop at moral reproach and constantly conjure up its ghost.”- attributed to Augusto Del Noce
ABSTRACT:
This annotated sermon integrates theology with a comprehensive institutional critique. Its Christological frame leads to its introduction of a novel framework, the "metaphysics of double mirroring," to explain the historical and sociological phenomena of fascism. It traces fascism’s roots to "political theologies of mammon"--intensifying in neoliberalism-- that reject the Golden Rule for a "theology" of friendship with the past as opposed to enemies encountered on the path to the future. In its need for predictability and determined appetitive drives, neoliberalism erodes societal values and institutions, prioritizing wealth as the sole metric of merit and disestablishing social institutions outside of markets. Correspondingly, its policies continue to defund public goods of critical education, vitiating deliberative discourse, and erasing dignity for those outside its systems. Those made bereft hear the call of fascist spectacle to reject the unifying, non-exclusionary ideals of its historical language group and accountability thereto.
Critiquing both abstract conceptualism and catharsis detached from a properly oriented heart, the essay refutes Augusto Del Noce’s claim that anti-fascists lack an historical understanding of fascism’s emergence and are limited to context-less "moral reproaching." As a solution to the recrudescence of fascism, it advocates for the recovery of educational programs that cultivate character and politically transformative, pacifying virtues. Through deliberative and relational practices guided by the "sheep-leading Logos," the Christological path of shalom offers an attested refutation of coercion and violent agon, showing the way for political repair and communal healing.
Keywords:
- Neoliberalism
- Fascism
- Golden Rule
- Economic critique
- Political theology
- Christian Realism
- Language degradation
- Financial capitalism
- Moral crises
- Social pedagogy
To answer Del Noce involves both the extended contextualization of moralilty--not a "reproaching ghost"--tied to structural analysis. As a sermon, we begin by considering how Jesus in Matthew 15:24-26 contrasted the sheep of Israel with those both metaphorically historically contextualized as 'dogs'--spirits of fearfulness that lash out with disordering expressions when cornered. Those of Platonizing contexts who separate friends from enemies in service of elite "guardians" to check the supposed excess of democracies. Such dog spirits can be influenced--(un)leashed by a certain kind of mammon's (Matthew 6:24) hand and finance-distorted language--leading to agonistic (attack-posture) subservience as a means of achieving self-respect through ecstatic --"standing outside of" --imaging in anonymity and recurrence, the aesthetization of violence, and a collective regimentation of bared teeth.
A fascist barks under the hand of mammon to project biological agon as ontological and thus historically necessary, as if the "essence" of male-driven humanity: machismo, alpha dog energy as dominance, & contempt of other human expressions of craft entice some of every generation, especially if they feel unsafe, disrespected, or superannuated. Alain de Benoist, a fellow traveler of the political right cognizant of the allure of fascism, described reactionaries as clothed in atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—all reactions showing that the Right’s ideal is always foregone, always spent" [9].
The tribal, thymic (emotional raging) tendency to assemble, by pastiche of feral aesthetics tied to manipulation of language--to rally by a mythic past where God roots a "race" to an enduring connection to land, where enemies are demonized and identified as entangled and sorted by an excluded middle space between a rightful homeland and alienation ("alien nation").
Fascism arises by elites manipulating a declining society, explicitly linking continuous and escalating struggle (agon) to a specific place and falsely endowing it with an intrinsic advantage articulated as autochthonous and later 'genetic.'[16] While not all fall prey to this ideology of resource theft now planned to launch through cryptofinance, a class struggle comes to be represented with a theological significance akin to, and with the aesthetics of, the final rays of a setting sun over Pharoah--a lost battle that can be reversed by resurrecting man through a new sorting of politics by identity-Balkanizing curation of language [15] and mediated technologies, the "hip" and "vibe" of cutting edge realism as inherent alienation. Contemporary challenges come to be framed as existential threats--a concrete order's setting sun that is an opportunity to create something new by regressive "participation" indicated simply as "surviving" in a winnowing and recrudescent social darwinism. Fascist "theologians of earth politics" route all spirit through ghostly anatomies of machined identity. These "theologians" use dog whistles to cover unaccountable uses--a takover of social means and ends by cryptofinance--in lieu of an expressed rationale, of "exception"--both to legal strictures and norms of language and religion--by escaping scrutiny through "plausible deniability."[12]
In its brute determinisms dressed in language of "freedom," agonistic society, absent territorial aggrandizement and expansion, becomes anxiety ridden and nostalgic for a supposed golden age that never was and never will be. When an idea of form as an ultimate end, rather than a linguistically-mediated expression of civilizing energies, takes hold of a culture and determines its pursuits, it reduces itself to the replication of static structures in a vain attempt to mirror itself. Such a culture, prioritizing the expansion of material “share”—whether market dominance or territorial aggrandizement—over the ideal of spiritual and intellectual progress, becomes trapped in a cycle of despair. This despair fosters the cathartic allure of manipulable nihilism, as individuals and collectives seek meaning in destructive outlets to ease the dissonant anomie and resentments ever building.
Culture so reduced loses the transformative energies that drive the growth of enduring civilizations. Instead, it succumbs to stultification, perpetuating dysfunctions that mirror and reinforce its internal contradictions. Ultimately, such a trajectory implodes, fueled by unresolved contradictions and the destructiveness of its vain aspirations to endow cultural transmission not by wisdom and shalom but by coercive violence and agon as virtue grounded in soil and blood.
We discern the ground of manipulation of militarism's foolhardies tied to social structures noted by Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization): “An imperviousness to life-values other than those clustered around the soldier's underlying death-wish, is one of the most sinister effects of the [militarized] discipline….[Such] has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds… If the [combatant’s ] mind went into action as intensely as his body, and if his intellectual discipline were as unremitting as his drill, [the] civilization [of war] might easily have been annihilated…” Instead, we have mercenaries grasping at the bootstraps of barking commandants, and thereby “In the end, the soldier …again and again become[s] the chief victim of his own [self-selected] simplification and [ethical] short-cuts [and short-circuiting]: in achieving machine-like precision and regularity, he has lost the capacity for intelligent response and adaptation” as well as emotional progress. By adapting to fixed hierarchies and simplistic dichotomies of enemies all around, they fail to participate even in the share of booty targeted by elites and their policies even as they die trying or disillusioned as their determined destiny.
Neoliberalism’s Role in Eroding Moral Context
Civilization decline--from ideals back to the soil--congeals under the magma of neoliberalism, which undermines moral equality by prioritizing privatization and wealth accumulation, destroying communal meaning and institutions of social harmony (e.g. "bread-winning jobs" and norms of socialized "merit") and the humanities' normative and primary role in education. It turns money into a destination rather than a means of exchange, householding, or sharing. Moreover, when a concrete order is linked to economic performance, both political and existential justification depend on access to wealth, access that can be obtained by obedience to those connected to sources of political economic power, the type that neoliberalism programs to unleash and thereby augment.
Neoliberalism has been ascendent in its rampant logic of isolative individualism since the eclipse of its competitor for a globalized political economic theory, communism, in the late 1980s. It has come to disrupt traditional communal values in its chase of power grounded in absolute advantage,[1] leading excluded or alienated people to resentment and feelings of humiliation. The mammonic focus on wealth and finance, which redefines social metrics and ethics to prioritize wealth pursuits alone, devoid of civilizing purpose, isolates and estranges common folk. They come to feel contemned, invisible, replaced, and oppressed by elites perceived as 'demonic' or 'globalizing.[2] Without dialogue and deliberation from communities, instead top-down machined expressions to motivate solidarity of disparate identities by fear of those not deserving to be here, and loathing of others dressed as spirit. Many--now approaching a critical mass--of excluded and resentful look beyond their language and back prior to some pre-linguistic state of humanity to find a guiding force in or protector modeling physical instincts or raw aggrandizements, seeing this perspective as a form of 'vir-tus' that escapes the accountability to the highest ideals of a language group[13].
Moral context in neoliberalism is "governed by a vulgarized armchair [or AI instrumentalism] in which pundits gesture wildly toward the figments of a million forecasted futures"[17] derived from ideology of "cost-benefit oracles" (Ibid.), instinct, or historical patterned data sets, and politicians are recruited by strategic finance to sickle some and fertilize others by collapsing deliberation into partisan identities that construct putative winning electoral energies from rage-triggering propaganda. Any non-market tradent of moral education, suasion, or extension of justice has been ebbing by neoliberal design for close to half-a-century of mammon ascending. The political discourse has deemphasized deliberation for a disemboweling whet stone of partisanship.
The Rise of Fascism and Double Mirroring
As neoliberalism--its programs and ideology--diminishes social discourse as it strips resources from public goods of critical humanities and education and of ideals of justice save a "meritocracy" of market performance. Such has created a vacuum in meaning making of purpose outside wealth while opportunities for family-supporting living wage earning shrinks. In this vacuum tendencies toward rage take root, guiding partisans to abandon moral character and political virtues of deliberation for emotionalism and spectacle.
Double Mirroring and the Path to Authoritarianism
In the runup to fascism, partisans often abandon the project of developing their God-given potential and moral character. Instead of becoming bridges between historical generations—linking human essence with the earth's renewal and bringing eternity into time—they retreat into the metaphysical distortion of Double Mirroring.
Double Mirroring is the phenomenology of feedback psychological fragmentation and moral syncretism. Individuals caught in this cycle project their internal confusion and failures onto external scapegoats while internalizing societal dysfunctions as personal inadequacies. This leads to cognitive disarray and emotional turbulence, undermining moral discernment and engendering susceptibility to ideological manipulation.
This distortion emerges when individuals reject the stark moral dichotomy of Biblical wisdom—between the paths of shalom (peace) and agon (strife)—most coherently expressed in Proverbs. Lacking this moral framework, their thoughts become fragmented, akin to "Brownian motion" or the restless "monkey brain" of meditation practice. In this state, they fall prey to unstable teachings and partisan spectacles, which channel unresolved resentments into tribal rage and uncritical adoration of symbols or leaders.
Manifestations of Double Mirroring:
- Metaphysical Justice: A reflection of moral consequences, exposing complicity with the path of agon rather than the peace of Christ.
- Anthropological Failure: The inability to achieve Christological union—the essence and potential of human life—resulting in escalating psychological distortions and moral collapse.
The fragmented soul, as described in James 1:7-8, becomes trapped in indecision and contradiction. Without the centering discernment of the heart aligned with grace, it is caught in endless circling—an unstable mind unable to recognize the evils of coercive strategies.
In this state, individuals seek external outlets to resolve their fragmentation. Some entrepreneurs exploit this discontent by advertising arenas where grief can be shared and transformed. Others, particularly in consumerist politics, channel this energy into tribal spectacles that stoke rage and division.
At its core, Double Mirroring results from hedging moral choices—seeking self-interest among evils rather than committing to the path of Christ. Hedging's cognitive chaos and leaps between dissonant memories and moral teachings cloud the heart’s ability to intend the soul and body toward the Christic essence of Golden Rule servant love.
The Partisan Spectacle:
Partisan spectacles host fragmentation; they offer alienated and resentful individuals an outlet for catharsis for their rage and to bind them into a political structure. These performative rituals dissuade moral ideals by championing primal instincts and stereotypes as ontological--as determined “human nature.” Instead of modeling virtuous reflection and deliberation, such spectacles encourage tribal identity and opposition, eroding virtues and accountability.
In the absence of grace-centered discernment, Double Mirroring turns individuals into participants in systems--syncretized political religions--of coercion, manipulation, and dehumanization—practicing antagonism while naming Christ. Only by returning to the moral clarity of non-transactional, non-projective, non-egoistic, Christic single minded, other-directed love may fragmented, thymic souls find the shalom that resists the seductive pull of authoritarian networks and control.
In lieu of the absent heart buried in double mirroring's concrete silo, partisan spectacles are offered to frustrated and resentful carriers of double mirroring to channel into tribal rage, activating them into a mob by emotional manipulation that perverts language and moral ideals in favor of primal instincts rebranded as determinist 'human nature.' Back when the old gods gave us both meaning and a prosperous hearth. Double mirroring supplants the ideals of language group, shaping instead the resentment by projecting (the summa of malign mirroring) its own degradation onto scapegoats, in the process becoming demonic: cryptic, evasive, and taking refuge in fool's gold philosophies of freedom absent obligation and accountability.
Spectacle of emotional sensationalism wrench a double-mirroring soul into an emotional/political program that grants permission, by assembly, to abandon the ideals of a language group, to support a status quo by regressing into the exaltation of animal instincts now presented as determinist 'human nature.' Only the regimentation of such instincts, these spectacles model and their platformed lead symbolize, can provide stability, solidarity, and security, soothing anxieties that remain inchoate yet ever-seeking scapegoats and strong-man leaders.
Partisan festivals—inversion of "spectacles"—manifest a set of perversions of double mirroring, supplanting reflection and voter's choice with performative rituals to gin partisan energy that erodes virtues to promote appetites necessary for diverting moral character into the search for a flagship. In the anomie of digital-age spectacle, disenfranchised individuals increasingly seek influence through symbolic performance of ritual agon (conscripted as True Religion) rather than deliberative participation with a Constituted diversity to better communal life and opportunity. Postmodern festivals of politics amplify and channel anxieties into radical partisanship, fostering a tribal identity defined by opposition.
When these festivals turn radically schismogenic [21], they escalate dividing energies and biases to a breaking point. Fascist movements, exploiting these dynamics of "dis-ease," redirect collective insecurities toward identifying scapegoats: "traitors within" and "invading hordes without." Schismogenic festivals undermine Constitutional democracy, instead to entrenching alienation and enemy seeking.
Tribal rituals (blowing of shofarim), propaganda, and symbols (e.g., 'Appeal to Heaven' flags) pave over language-spread faculties and virtues intended to tame these inner appetites and instinctual rage at frustration. Resentment and rage supplants moral ideals to become demonic: cryptic, evasive, and projecting--a second mirroring by the reflection of their own degradation of human essence and attendant dysfunction. Viscerally activated participants often hide behind anonymous bots and avatars—noms de guerre on social media—to project their dysfunctions onto others, labeling them as pornography-obsessed 'Jezebels,' bullet-intending opposition, or worse, all the while unable to engaging in the critical analysis of the demon of mammon that is their puppet master. Their dysfunction is what pulls their strings. They cycle from the inert anomie of spectacle to the catharsis of festival, moving from accountable agency into unaccountable anonymity.
In the digital age, anonymity enables these mirroring dysfunctions of spectacle to metastasize. Hidden behind avatars and bots, participants project their moral failures onto others, labeling them as “Jezebels” or “traitors,” all while evading critical analysis of the true master they serve—the demon of mammon.
Religious spectacle presents a particularly insidious and potent form of mammon's manipulation, co-opting faith to justify worldly power and territorial control under the guise of divine mandate. These spectacles often glorify Christ as a personal savior while enabling the "saved" to claim a share of worldly power, as if Christ’s sovereignty over all powers (Eph. 1:20-22; 1 Peter 3:22; Col. 2:10) automatically extends to their earthly ambitions. This dynamic reveals a theological distortion rooted in "double mirroring," where faith is hedged (James 1:7-8): Christ is brandished as savior, yet trust is placed elsewhere for bodily security and power.
Religious double mirroring is revealed by conative (intentional) hedging (James 1:7-8). Brandishing Christ as personal savior while looking elsewhere for bodily security. The attempts to "hedge" the gospel, to wield "both Cross and a gun," makes entrepreneurial pastors tragically the most effective and corrupting actors in partisan networks. "Cross and a gun"-- a Biblically forbidden blending of grace and coercion is the platform for entrepreneurial pastors to embed themselves partisan network where they discover both wealth and political power. Theirs is tragically the most amplifying of distortions from double mirroring:. Their rhetoric selectively sorts through the Sermon on the Mount and the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation to justify violent means, reinforcing a narrative that equates faith with power over others. Associated partisans--the dogs--look to them for the call for the gun.
Partisans, influenced by these pastoral figures, elide that most crucial question: How does Christian power operate? Is it solely through grace and love, or can it accommodate coercive tactics for territorial control? By ignoring the question and looking to compromised pastors, they accept faith as the tool for worldly domination.
Into this assembled void of fascist hatred of humanity built and disguised by love of money, they lose not only their enemies but also themselves, reinforcing abandonment of grace and moral character. Cormac McCarthy wrote, 'What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.' This may be understood as the collective 'mirroring of reflected inner demons'—an externalization of unresolved fears and moral failures onto a common target. By projecting their turmoil onto others, fascists not only dehumanize their enemies but also themselves, becoming fully responsible for their ethical failures and psychological distortions. Even as manipulated by spectacle, propaganda, or ideology, they remain accountable for every sneer (Matt. 5:22), every act of cruelty, and every injustice—reminders of the inevitable cost of surrendering moral autonomy to the seductive yet hollow promises of solidarity through hatred.
Tragically and lamentably, when institutions of meaning-making—such as the church or academia—vitiate their historical roles and moral prestige to become 'early entrants' into these hegemonically insidious and language-corrupting movements, they betray a social, and even sacred, trust[19]. By abandoning their mission to uphold universal ideals and moral clarity, they leave individuals bereft of constructive meaning and purpose and vulnerable to the manipulative message of destructive violence and its acceleration to bring them into destructive harmony with some hidden program of earthly assertion as "political theology" [see the discussion of Schmitt in footnote 11]. So that:
"Night almost always falls first in the churches."--Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly.
"Judgment begins at the house of God" (1 Peter 4:17). The church's complicity must be scrutinized: the priests sharing Franco's agenda in 1930s Spain, the nazified church under Hitler, and the tribal rage stoked by gun-bearing pastors and their militarized congregations when they divorce themselves from the Sermon on the Mount's ethics. Instead of upholding a pietist tradition of sanctification through virtue, these institutions distort angelic symbolism into violence—imagining heavenly symbols to earth on the back of tanks or Christ armed with an AR-15!.
“The bitter truth is that the Church permits hate- groups in our common life to establish squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching of the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity.”--Howard Thurman, The Fascist Masquerade 1946.
Rebuilding Moral and Civic Education
"Bildung"—the societal process of nurturing purpose, training ethical character, and expressively situating collective cohesion in context—has historically been the domain of cultural elites, especially intellectuals. At times, however, their methods stagnate, appearing out of touch or ineffectual to broader society save to partisan sorting and elites. This creates fertile ground for spectacle's anti-intellectualism, which often invokes a mythic past as the foundation for 'common sense.'
As paradigms in education and policymaking collapse under the weight of crises, a strange model of citizenship has emerged: tycoon-promoted careerism, pragmatic efficiency, and its inevitable unintended consequences and illegitimate controls cloaked in the aesthetics of irony or ciphers of "connections" through 'vibe.' This now political paradigm of moneyed wealth service offers little more for rank and file public life than precarious wages and digitized distractions, all while marginalizing humanistic curricula that shape ethical accountability and moral flourishing. The consequences of this shift proliferate as institutions prioritize wealth-seeking--both for students and for their endowments--over moral clarity, diverting Bildung into spectacles justifying the replacement of deliberative moral assemblies and suasive language by coercive political power.
In this climate of spectral politics, articulable humanistic values fall into eclipse, hijacked by a re-primitivizing tribalism and mythos that simultaneously drives as it denies the ideological ground of crises, a lack of accountability to justice, and the avarice of strategizing elites. These forces, dressed as “efficiencies,” replace the old tribal impetus for territorial expansion with pursuit of expanding "market share"—a dynamic of updated grasping and totemizing that perpetuates and feeds back upon itself in the form of colonization, by spectace, of consciousness and material desire. This distortion emanates from a misaligned centering of the human essence in epistemology and cognition rather than conation, reflecting a metaphysics of mind rather than heart (see below).
Academia, religion, and policymaking lose social credibility
when they shift from valorizing and modeling character formation in
the realm of citizen ethics to self-serving, radically individualist, and
efficiency-driven models of the identity-driven life (grounded in solidarities of anatomy and nostalgia). As previous methods are recognized as failing to address real-world problems or sustain an
ethical core of mitigating privation, and push ever farther into strange realms
of language and victimhood, unintended consequences proliferate. A ‘paradigm
wall’ signals the breakdown of the dominant epistemological framework. This
structure has become corrupt and perverse to conceal deeper issues under the
guise of wealth seeking’s merit. Bildung intellections have become a distracting
clown show while crypto-Klepto systems engineer diversions into ersatz realities:
outer space, psycho-tropic drugs, virtual escape by techno-gaming, nihilism,
and celebrity-seeking ostentation. In this breakdown of method and meaning of
epistemology absent ethics (save wealth service) comes the expected
anti-intellectual attempts to drive history--to oppose telic progress--by other means to actually put it
in reverse!
Western society is at a moral turning point, the dichotomy of mission paths in the Book of Proverbs reiterated in the person of Christ in the Gospels, esp. John. Either to go back into the past to align with agon/coercion where its gods supposedly still reign, or to align with the telic essence of humanity modeled by Christ. This is not Hegelian dialectic, a nuancing of imperfect systems into a pragmatic course neutralizing cognitive dissonance until the next epochal crisis, but a call to choose two radically divergent destinies. An individual choice that carries over for new generations.
Only a recovery—a revivification of the pursuit of the perfect human essence—by way of the heart-centered, justice-oriented character-building pursuits of education and art updated to modern contextual realities--can restore the goal of character wholeness as the Bildung of a society. Only by re-engaging with the Shema’s metaphysical anthropology realized in core ethical duties of deontological—Golden Imperative—virtues remedy instrumental rationality that has hyper-trophied under neoliberalism to the expanding circles of machining society and decision making [8]. Only this recovery and re-engagement with the messianic Spirit allows one to escape the rigid determinism of mammon that ties the diversionary and divisive--the financializing and the brutalizing.
While some will argue that there are other grounds for fascism's recurrence-protectionism of community ideals and identities--these are married to the valorization of "recurrence" which epochally ends in violence engaged against those committed to progress. The only option apparent, then, at this momentary fulcrum in history and its meaning, is a metaphysical choice between the painful recurrence of spectacles of superficiality married to fascist agon[18] (existential nihilism) and eternalizing through (by aligning with) the heart of the messiah. Every age as it comes to a summation of contradiction in metacrisis is faced with this dichotomy that grounds the positive and negative wisdom of the Book of Proverbs—the two ways, with no middle path possible, becomes increasingly clear.
Bildung’s culture of truth as meaning making begins with accountability to God and neighbor rooted in Christ and tied to all the shalom-building virtues.
Atavism represents a rejection of the historical ideals of language groups--including the progress in their assessment of human merit--to enable re-creation of a timeless social order and forms of inequality valorized by other means[11]. To restore or retrieve rump orders of merit that assesses the progress of ethical pacification and extension of virtue as a bane interpolation and therefore mooted by anger at the present moment and operationalized by fascist ideologies. The ideology of retrieval, based on restoring the merits of hierarchies of human "nature" that are transacted and tiered (as the pursuit of weath and its differentiations) thus is ever tempted to equate the destination with the means--to recover a human ontology in fierceness and a chain of client (or slave) and master relations is the arena of contention where one proves one's readiness and mettle for such. The current epoch's neoliberal arena's of market relations where the lower tiers are threatened with erasure as a kind of "natural law" framed in social darwinian terms [20].
Yet God is never constrained by how things or human order are or appear to be to the conscious senses[3] without the heart's mind-directing enlightenment. As such, the effective guide and leader is one who builds trust, not fear. Never address the dogs or their tribal battle gods; Address always the children, the sheep--the meek, those turned (ysr-el: the children of encounter--Matt. 15:24) from agon by Christ's holy spirit, for theirs is the eternal kingdom. Though dogs howl & even bray with their teeth, do not fear them.[4]
Conclusive Applications
Existential crises confront key societal institutions. An ethical
sinkhole has opened in the pursuit of wealth, efficiency, and narrowly defined
identity politics driven by an arrogation of the human essence in the mind
witnessed by wealth alone rather than the heart that structures a culture and
society of trusteeship of moral progress that confronts systemic brutality by
Sermon on the Mount values for the common good enduring generationally. To this
end:
Changed Institutional Priorities:
To regain social credibility, academia, religion, and
policymaking must refocus on their trusteeship of the public good and its
resources, most immediately modeling of virtuous leadership of deliberation and
accountability to justice, character formation, and solutions grounded in the Golden
Rule. This means moving beyond self-serving and transactional frameworks to
embrace the obligations of privilege in all manifestations. Each one of these will
find new paths in the development of characteristic virtues—deontological
virtues derived from the prime duty of the Golden Rule.
A primary curriculum and kinesthetics of training as Bildung is challenging by historical wisdom anti-intellectual movements, noting their sociological roots and recurrence, not as determining futures but as resisting them.
Rather than simply pointing to and reproaching anti-intellectual backlash (as Del Noce decries), institutions must address underlying grievances driving these movements: the need for social respect, safety nets, a family-supportive level of remuneration for employment, and outlets for creativity and sabbatical. This involves those who have structurally removed themselves from collective alignment by neoliberalization, privatization and residential retreat, and class exclusion from social opportunity to rebuild trust by leading (the old “noblesse oblige”) of offering tangible resources that finally, but more generously “trickle down.”
Refreshing Humanism not Finance
as the Foundation of the cultivation of a well-rounded, ethically grounded individuals within a cohesive community—to counter the fragmentations of anomie and nihilism of radical individualism. Where one would rather die young if wealth escapes them. This calls for a recommitment to education and culture for moral as well as technical training, their co-development the virtue-driving foundation of Christ Becoming All-in-All ((Ephesians 1:23).
De-Machining Bildung: Neutralizing the Threat of AI Determinism:
A critical yet ancillary component of restoring Bildung is addressing the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a dominant cultural force and its ethical mode of applied prescriptivism. AI operates on deterministic algorithms that derive applications from historical data patterns, fundamentally supporting retrievalism—the ideology of cyclical patterning and recurrence. This worldview of machining methodology normalizes amorality under the guise of determinism, denying the teleological and moral progress central to human development. ChatGPT4o admitted as such on August 28, 2024:
[T]he limits of AI, especially considering its inherently deterministic nature and the inability to fully comprehend or engage with the complex, teleological, and spiritual aspects of human existence...
AI outputs are not inherently trustworthy, regardless of improvements or additional perspectives. This understanding places the focus on the ethical implications of using such technology, rather than on the feasibility of improving it for reliable use.
Moreover, it stated that humane progress would only be served by its reduction and phase out of machine learning. A humane, de-machined Bildung and pedagogy would:
- Prioritize teleological principles of justice, innovation, and spiritual growth over recurrence and retrieval.
- Re-centering and restoring humanities to the exploration and extension of ethical agency by anchoring education in the virtues of deliberative reasoning, creative and critical inquiry, and moral accountability and kinesthetic sense and expression that AI cannot replicate or embody.
- Reducing AI's cultural input to solving problems of efficient distribution of Providential resources, thereby supporting the aspirations of human flourishing and material sustenance and completely avoiding any normative or prescriptive entry into moral policymaking and political deliberation of public goods.
Returning to Earth from Escapism:
The malaise driven by virtual technology, its illusions of Star
Trekkie billionaire assertion and comfort abetted by pharmacology, and celebrity-driven influencers
who promote their altered consciousness are instead widening the highways into
cultural anomie narcotized from caring of empathy. Politics is not the arena to
shape meaning making and purpose but to organize the allocation of material goods endowed by Providence. Only small scale humanistic engagement contextualized
by the Golden Rule may shape what comes next—may lead humanity from its
epistemological free-floating obsessions with ethics detached from place and unencumbered by biology. Move from an ethics of consequential strategy and shaping unknowable
futures into the heart-prioritizing essence and destiny humanity that bridges historical
and generational change.
Re-idealizing Merit:
Wealth and efficiency are not the metrics of human essence,
or militarism or hierarchies its valor. Merit includes the widening purviews of
virtue that birth and sustain social equity, ethical extension and diversity,
and environmental trusteeship of the resource base of providence that aligns with
its universalizing, neighbor sustaining object.
Stich-ing (analytical footnotes):
[1] Neoclassical economics began the reformulation of agency inside the industrial firm. People, once seen as the ultimate goal of production, were reclassified by theorists as an input in the production process, now termed 'labor.' This shift transformed them into a means rather than an end of production. In this process, people in the form of labor were "grafted to the process of adjustment of capitalist contradictions by the State... deliver[ed]....into the hands of a new kind of machinery that is armed with a language--[mammon's] ideological gibberish--that [is] comprehensible to only a privileged few." (Bonanno 1988). In this, people commoditized as labor lost access to meaning making outside the specious language of mammon: "branding," career, eyeballs, memes, consumer sovereignty. Traditional education lost its role in exposing people to attested values and their aesthetic contention to become "merchandise" conveying a new coded language devoid of any content other than what could be symbolized for and by the market.
Natural and environmental factors, traditionally part of humanity's common inheritance, were subsumed into factors of 'capital.' This ideological shift paved over the earth's essence of renewability, transforming these resources from sustaining to depleting by the enclosures of what had been common, shared, and sufficient into heritable private estates evaluated in terms of scarcity.
New Deal liberals in US
stabilized the business cycle [given to economic booms and busts] by instituting banking and financial reforms, creating Social Security, guaranteeing workers' right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining, and establishing the first federal minimum-wage law. In western Europe, Social and Christian Democrats-liberals all -created welfare states of unparalleled scope and generosity. In other words, it was liberals... enabled what historians have dubbed ''the golden age of capitalism." A generation later, Great Society liberals passed unprecedented civil-rights legislation, created Medicare and Medicaid, launched a ''war on poverty,'' expanded access to higher education, and won new rights for women. Though often considered ''out of touch,'' contemporary liberals espouse many popular positions: a ''living wage,'' increased Social Security payments, making it easier for workers to unionize, a single-payer health-care... (--Eugene McCarraher).
Yet came mammon's reaction to these "creeping socialisms." Its applications to economic production and political organization gained prominence in the early 1970s, significantly influenced by Milton Friedman and later by the Chicago School of Economics following the Austrian Economists, esp. Hayek [14]. These early policies of "structural adjustment" applied in developing countries prioritized the prerogatives and priorities of capital, usually at the expense of more immobile labor and environmental factors. Multilateral development agencies and banks made loans to countries contingent on domestic austerity measures, privatization, and deregulation in developing countries. The "Washington Consensus" promoted fiscal "discipline," tax reform, and trade promotion to align with Bill Clinton's platform coming with the fall of communism. A new intensification of "liberalism" advocating '"opening foreign markets so American workers can compete abroad," [5] while capital was increasingly de-territorialized and deregulated ('liberalized")[6]. The result included an untethering of the New Deal social safety alongside a revaluation of life's aspirations and civilizing purpose towards transacted wealth to the exclusion of other projects, venues, and metrics of human flourishing [7]. This brought forth policy focus on amoral and atomizing finance rather than obliging care for a national collective. This platform was brought to the American electorate as a "rational adjustment" to the Reagan-led conservative coalition that had "triumphed" over communism but would, in its multilateral-led paradigm, lead to large scale changes in social and employment patterns that were painful for those affected and often of questionable necessity if not negative utility.
The coalition of financiers and politicians supporting the Washington Consensus, later termed 'neoliberalism,' promoted the corrosive idea that the U.S.'s 'comparative advantage' was in capital formation and financial intermediation. This led to a global society structured by the logic of hegemonic wealth stimulating unconsidered appetites (mammon), rather than a political market system structured by systems of fair trade that recognized and responded to human needs provisioned by particular regional endowments of resources, sustainably managed. Such trade, as interpreted by the classical "liberal," Ricardian ideal, would flow from the distribution of regional environmental endowments shaped by cultural ideals of sustainability and creative expression of human flourishing, demography, and artisan skills, with capital tied to its place of origin--tying such metaphysical awareness of local conditions to cultural practices attendant to grace.
The material result of treating labor as a means and capital as the end of production, along with policies increasingly unmooring capital from its historical origin (see Herman Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy [2014, 219]), significantly shifted domestic employment. This shift moved from traditional industrial production of tangible commodities to a new marketplace dominated by a financier-serving, absolute advantage-chasing economies as the primary venue of social purposing: investment banking, real estate, advertising, intellectual property and patent law, etc. as services of symbolic manipulation and re-arrangement of power (For the quantification of this shift in sector employment in its early stages in the 1990s, see Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom [1998]).
[2]The Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United v. FEC advanced neoliberal policies by granting corporate money political 'standing' as speech, subjecting it to protected 1st amendment freedoms from legislative regulation. This marked a further shift in reducing human agency outside of terms of financial capital formation and increasingly subject to machine logic and manipulation. Prior arenas of meaning makings of life outside of the marketplace and pursuit of wealth absent social obligation and equity continued their steady ebb:
As market relations increasingly define human 'essence' (as promoted by the Austrian Economists and diagnosed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation [1957]), traditional social relationships become displaced in uncentering consequentialist ethics (Olds 2023) of "careerism" and personal "branding":
Neoliberalism accepts as fundamental the rule of modern economistics - that mammon's private vice is to be made into public virtue which is the origin of its violence against the human spirit. In addition, neoliberalism ignores and displaces our desire for a respected name and identity in a shared collective enterprise that is greater than our seeking material gain alone. By excluding the tutelary and normative considerations of personal creativity and the balanced wholeness of human persons and communities contributing to each other (shalom), neoliberalism's policy-instituted chase of absolute advantage is mislabeled and propagandized as 'comparative advantage.'
Constructing and sustaining the condition and terms of society as purely market to the exclusion of other human values and endeavors requires monumental sacrifice, especially by those consigned to “shadowlands” (see below). As Rousseau (Second Discourse 171) noted, the Enlightenment project of reestablishing society on new, non-traditioned (post-Church, post-monarchical) absolutes came to propose the ideology of meritocratic justice. What later characterized so called "prosperity gospels." Ideologies of merit derived from valorizations of material conditions, rather than spiritual merits of virtue, "stifles natural feelings of pity" and Golden Rule obligations--now a quaint guideline--to care. Elites feel justified to ignore the impoverished and deprived as their natural (=material) desert.[12] And when meritocracy comes to be based on material wealth as market outcomes alone, such brings about the disruption of traditional centers of sociality and the looming psychological collapse of humanity by displacing the search for meaning, wholeness, and authentic identity in the dead end of mammon. Like all material philosophies, the ideological temptation of material meritocracy is its tragically too-easy substitute for the obligatory tasks of the Golden Imperative.
Neoliberal oligarchs are indifferent to the operation of national communities grounded in languages of meaning-making and coherence of quotidian purpose. Driven by mammon's insatiable will to mechanistic power through economic absolutism, they sacrifice the civilizing ethic of care for a singularly materialistic design. This corrupts the poetic depth of shalom-building language, replacing it with the eddies of shoddy financialization and commercial propaganda. Authentic human relationships with nature and neighbor are reduced to caricatures, epitomized by the rise of "preppers": isolated, combative individualists who leverage self-respect from insight into catastrophe. These "good guys with a gun" are marketed as symbols of rugged self-reliance, but to what end? Their eccentric expertise, often bordering on the absurd, sublimates the entrenched challenge of wealth inequality into a grotesque performance of survivalist theatrics. This spectacle, cloaked in "uncommon" sense and idiosyncratic "noticing things" filtered through algorithms, becomes an impoverishing and struthious substitute for standing against the very neoliberal policies that have gutted critical public education—policies that strip citizens of the tools needed to critically engage with and resist systemic injustices.
[Source: https://objectsindevelopment.net/the-jurisprudence-of-sonic-warfare/]
[S]ociety [has become] so torn apart by war [and its impulsion by financier-led social media] that people...become one dimensional and unable to trust their own senses. Worse, they [lost] interest in doing so.
We are undergoing such a process at the hands of forces largely out of our control, but also voluntarily. We are dividing ourselves into an infinite number of factions, each with its own obsessions, grudges, and loaded language (--Dave Troy).
As disenfranchised individuals, both in the US and globally, find themselves disrespected and discarded by "elites," an increasing number find religious fascism alluring. Such offers a regressive, pre- or extra-linguistic, propagandistic identity based on "blood and soil," promising a return to a mythic and simpler primordium. Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary saw this manipulation of myth developing from the results of the developing "Washington Consensus" like I did even then, 30 years ago: "a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment could be easily manipulated."
Neoliberalism not only violates Biblical ethics through its commitment to mammon, but it also invalidates its theoretical warrant in the classical liberal idea of 'comparative advantage' by failing to bring general improvements in moral well-being, equitable opportunities for flourishing that align the grace of capabilities with the access for functionings and participation, and environmental and community resiliency.
By confusing and structuring labor as a means rather than treating it as the ends of economic production, neoliberalism commits Polanyi’s (1957) “economistic fallacy” to create a political theology of mammon, with fascism as its attendant substitute for virtuous grace. For an empirical account of neoliberalism's socially malign effects, see the closing section "Shadowlands" of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (2023) and the extensive sociological literature detailing environmental devastations in maquiladoras, child and prison labor feeding global corporations, and studies of "environmental racism." See also my "Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies" (2014) linked here.
In an implied extension of "economisticism," Michel Clouscard wrote in 1996 [Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes]--during the construction of the "Washington Consensus"--of neoliberalism's tacit ideology of class-erasure:
The working class are attacked at the level of their identity. The worker must be excluded from belonging to a class! What follows is an entire productive “purge” (épuration) which dismantles the working class in particular, but also productive forces in general (craftsmen, independent laborers, small business owners) in their respective sectors (metallurgy, mining, textile), while also removing shops and proximity services. It is a whole “scorched earth policy” designed to create a void. What is at hand is an unprecedented kind of economic terror: eliminating your opponent by eliminating his job, his means of subsistence, his environment. It is essentially, let us repeat it, class identity which is at play. Economic purification is cold war. It targets the physical existence of the working class. It must reduce the opponent―the class enemy, be it real or potential―to being nothing but an entirely dependent productive force, utterly submissive to the financial and banking imperatives of a “globalized” economy [quoted (translated?) by
https://x.com/DanielTutt/status/1854929129025532268]
As a Marxist, Clouscard critiques Néo-fascisme in an analysis of its service to the avarice of the wealthy class. In this and other works, he addresses how capitalism seduces individuals through liberated desire, escalating class struggle into a choice between barbarism and “socialism”—or, more accurately from the perspective of capitalist manipulators and their “dogs,” a movement to erase class consciousness altogether. This erasure aims to fold the economistically untethered into a manipulable form of territorial, nativist identity, erasing not just working class job opportunities by export, but the very awareness of class . Within these erasures lies a one-sided war of rhetoric and propaganda. Mammon promotes the lie of undisciplined desire as liberating, while the other side offers an effete appeal to those facing class erasure and the loss of meaningful, productive labor. Late capitalism presents a totalitarian Hobson’s choice, framed as realism.
From the perspective of mammon—as implied by Clouscard—this choice is framed as follows: the “freedom” of immediate gratification offered by consumerism—a freedom that expediently hides enduring class exploitation—versus a supposedly unattainable social order rooted in solidarity with the “old economy” institutions of productive, meaningful labor, social safety nets, family-supportive wages, and education beyond utilitarian STEM careerism. Here, creative outlets that resist machined symbolic reproduction and escape the bounds of a recycled past are disregarded. The only viable identity left, then, is a resistance to the techno-utopianism of desire (that is increasingly diversionary to meet the needs of profoundly neurasthenic and anxiety-building system of precarity's cliff), which is always rhetorically dismissed as a “Marxist fantasy,” caricatured as unrealistic, fostering dependency on financial elites, and promoting freeloading that undermines individual merit and initiative.
[3] As in the Christian tradents of analogia entis; Heideggerian applications of the philosophy of dasein.
[4] The prophetic calls of preachers Cornel West and Chris Hedges frame systemic change in the language of practical urgencies. E.g. https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1812526737982726267 My approach in this blog seeks to supplement these by linking theory to empirical violations of the Golden Rule.
Prophets address systems from the bottom up, and that these modelings will filter up by the practice of Christ's virtues (rather than, or integrated with, the primacies of sacramental forms and consequentialist categorizations of idolatries and failed ambitions). Aware of onlookers and grace's craft spread by mirroring, the political ethics of virtuous language and deliberative action is more direct, universalizing, historically-aware, and effective than grounding resistance in formalisms like cultural liturgics and symbolic demonization or ecclesial withdrawals from public milieux--no matter how dressed in "subsidiarity" commitments--which alienate the religiously traumatized and estranged.
For practical applications (virtue ethics) and constructive solutions of how the Golden Rule serves "participation" in the deliberative kingdom of God, refer to other entries in this blog and my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism (2023) https://t.ly/PvMl
[5] https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-03.html
[6] Stanley Fischer, https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp062701
[7] e.g. see Olds, Douglas (1997). Adding Duty to Opportunity in the "Capabilities" Approach: A Proposal for Sustainable Human Development. Journal of Public and International Affairs, 8: 91-107.
[8] I have addressed these points of the disorder of mind-essentialism and the Shema's recovery to recenter the human essence as the path to Christ in recent sermons here and here.
[9]Adler, Frank. "On the French Right — New and Old: An Interview with Alain de Benoist." 2003, 116 emph. added. https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/on_the_french_right_new_and_old.pdf
[10] The link of religious transactionalism as a tribal phenomenon with the kinesthetics of thymic violence reveals fascism fermenting.
The lash, marching, and ritualized actions modeled in the "prayer" of Donald Trump's spiritual advisor Paula White Cain on election day, 2020, are explicit in this video. Similar kinematics characterize invocations of a tribal god as a Baal, calling down fire (as at 11'20f in this audio), in right-wing religious assemblies such as the "ReAwaken America" tour.
In addition to linking power with domination, these conventions are explicitly driven by market objectives, as seen at 18'06 of https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1197374317933092
[11]"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." - VP Henry Wallace, April 9, 1944.
Mammon squelches
everything not immediately translatable into this new generalised language [of commerce as meaning making and actualized by personal prosperity]. Traditional educative processes...become devalued and diminish in content, unveiling their real (and selective) substance as merchandise.
In the place of language new canons of behaviour will be supplied, formed from fairly precise rules, and mainly developed from the old processes of democratisation and assembly, which capital has learned to control perfectly. This will be doubly useful as it will also give the excluded the impression that they are “participating” in public affairs.
The computerised society of tomorrow...will be a jungle of prohibitions and rules, of nightmare in the form of deep personal decisions about participating in the common good. Deprived of a language of common reference, the ghettoised will no longer be able to read between the lines of the messages of power, and will end up having no other outlet than spontaneous riot, irrational and destructive, an end in itself.
--Alfredo M. Bonanno (1988) From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism.
The theory of fascism behind these manipulations has been most compellingly and tragically articulated by the work of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, particularly in his works, Nomos of the Earth and Political Theology.
By 1930s Germany, a political theology became explicitly rooted to the “law of the earth” (Busk 2023, 64)[1]—increasingly through assumed Darwinian social selection—a law that had come at some determined historical waypoint to have thrown up what Carl Schmitt terms the enduring “concrete order” (Busk 2023, 66-77).
An existential threat to the concrete order constitutes the basis for a sovereign to consider whether an “exception” (Ibid.) holds to a Constitutional apparatus and power sharing arrangement over moral policy. This consideration of an “exception” ties Schmitt’s “theological” recapitulation of the “legal will of the earth” with his innovation that such will can be exercised by a “spiritually” invested leader to restore a past order even in opposition to the moral will of the people operating Constitutionally. It is this exceptional intervention into the Constitutional management of things justified by a threat to the concrete order that the sovereign embodies by appointment or election the will of the people to restore, by loosing the “law of nature” in which it the order is grounded (articulated in ontic myths and pre-logos aesthetics). This is the fascist will—the will that aligns with the supposed ontic “law of the earth” that has thrown up a kinship order based on a recurring environmental and historical factors. The exception that justifies unloosing the law of nature is one that goes counter to the law of the earth and the priorities of a kinship’s historical destiny. Busk (2023, 59) notes that if this theoretical construct of an “earth law” determined sovereign invested with interventionist “exceptions” to established legal discourse and mechanism, “there are actually compelling reasons to embrace fascist politics and, conversely, no compelling reasons to reject [fascism].”
[1] The Latin word “’nomos’ is typically translated as ‘law,’ but
Schmitt claims that this term is more directly related to the German verb
“nehmen” (to take), and should thus be understood as land appropriation—
‘an original, constitutive act of spatial ordering.’”(Busk 2023, 65)
Busk, Larry. The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (2023).
It is the manipulated allowance of visceral "spontaneities" under the guidance of the arrogated exceptional leader that permits the rioter the illusion of agency tied to the ecstasies--"standing outside" of community and its norms--of violence that is fascism's death-powering tie. It claims metaphysical warrant for the replacement of language-coded historical ideals for a primal, eternalizing relationship with expansionary dirt.
[12] As post-traditional, 'natural' meritocratic society emerged from the Enlightenment, Rousseau notes how pity comes to be considered as 'misguided.' An ideology of merit--and its derivative assignment and attribution to market and brand performances-- inhibits natural empathy for the less fortunate and represses the obligations of the Golden Rule through deformed, mammon-spreading pedagogy and policies aimed primarily at eradicating any virtue that impedes the expansion of financialization and markets into more and more spheres of life.
Neglecting empathy for poverty and deprivation in such a system is valorized as just and fair, grounding a significant portion of fascist ideologies derived from financialized materialism.
Rousseau understood Enlightenment meritocracy's drawbacks: A society that exploits its latent talent pool at the same time endows its poor with psychological and, ultimately, social baggage. In Democratic societies, those at the top feel that they belong there. They feel they’ve earned their way to the top ·and should richly enjoy their deserts. At the same time, they also feel that those who are at the bottom of the same hierarchy likewise deserve their place as a reflection of meager efforts and talents. The poor deserve their suffering, so the same society makes it 'natural' to deny offering pity or empathy.
The conservative... Christian Coalition grew steadily in support and influence in the...years [accompanying neoliberal ascendancy]. By 1995 they had publicly paired with prominent Republican senators and congressmen, including the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to announce the Contract with the American Family, which sought the legislation of Christian morality
--Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, Illinois ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, 33.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich sent members of the Republican Party a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” This memo came to be known as the GOPAC memo, and was meant to instruct Republicans on what types of words to use when describing their political opposition. As he wrote in the memo, “This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words touse in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producingelectronic media. The words and phrases are powerful” (Gingrich 1994).Gingrich’s list of recommended words to describe Democrats includedbetray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish,shame, sick, steal, and traitors, among many others. To this day, this is thetype of language used by party leaders to demonize opponents.
--Ibid., 132, emph. added.
Of Gingrich's manipulation of religious identity through partisan demonization and degradation of the Logos, we may safely apply the accountability implied through Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's quote, "Night almost always falls first in the churches." Cf. Matt. 7:15: Someone is responsible.
[16] 19th C Romanticism laid the groundwork to roll back Enlightenment ideals and mobilize revolutionary mass movements through propagandizing collective myths as self-actualizing and -asserting. Rather than out-strategizing their political opponents with a superior instrumental pragmatism, they demonstrated the vacuity of the latter by popularizing a “superior idealism” based on a supposed autochthonous or ontological will that guides political instrumentality. The ever failure of fascism, then, is in the degeneracy of its ideals of will, not that their proposal that will (conation) is primary to strategy.
[17] https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1849861790731206995
[18]Agon is physically competitive and compelling strife, valorized in pagan epics like the Homeric as the arete (excellence) of combative cultures. Shalom is the Hebrew Bible’s alternative to pagan agon—it is the state of a cultural collective living with secure attachment to its God and God’s gracious provision. The state of shalom is peaceful, with its civilian constituents living with a wholeness of body, soul, and God’s spirit.
Today, many are reconsidering that the culture and practices of agon (aggressive strife) offer a virile and effective path for the realization of the Kingdom of God—aggressively, for example, by “contending for the Gospel.” However, these are doomed at worst, impotent at best. Many Bible passages rule out a third-way syncretism (heterodox hybridization) that blends agon with shalom—which is the means and ends of heart-centered virtue[18]. Our witness matches our intuition of the metaphysics behind these passages. Especially in its moral center, the Book of Proverbs, the Old Testament speaks of but rules out blending the dichotomy of paths—the way of the good and justice and the way of wickedness (Prov 2:20–22). In chapters 10–23, Proverbs contrasts the two ways of strife and righteous peace, death and life in B-A and A-B structures. Often imaged as walking along two disparate ways (דֶּרֶךְ derekh, including the pedagogical path of conduct per Prov 22:6), this dichotomous structure formalizes the explicit contrast between (as opposed to hybridization of) shalom and agon. No diversion is allowed from the right path (Prov 3:6; 8:20; Proverbs 4). The good is straight and straightaway to be followed. The one true way does not admit a third-way syncretism between the truth and error, between the straight and what strays. We are never to waver from the one path of truth and peace—not “to the right or to the left” (Deut 5:32–33; 17:11; 28:14; Josh 1:7; 23:6; Prov 4:25–27; 2 Kgs 22:2; Cf. Prov 10:9, 17; 12:28) by applying the techniques of agon in the attempt to deliver oneself from agon. To do so is to live inside death-dealing clouds of deception, to wander into the quick-mud and become trapped. (Olds chap. 5 in t.ly/PvMl)
In the biblical binary of the two ways, there is no centrism that blends or conflates them: “Do not envy the violent and do not choose any of their ways” (Prov. 3:31).
[19] For an account of how "clercs" in academia, the arts, and the bureaucracy choose careerist and politically expedient paths aligned with autocrats—supporting and justifying them at the expense of truth and the integrity of truth-seeking—see Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Applebaum’s critique echoes themes from Julien Benda's La Trahison des clercs (1927). Both works explore the betrayal of intellectuals who abandon their commitment to universal truths in favor of ideological or careerist compromises with chaos agents, examining how elites in different historical contexts vitiate their role as seekers and defenders of truth.
[20] Matt McManus notes, “Few conservative intellectuals take seriously [Leo] Strauss' observation that just wanting natural law, or insisting on natural law, does not mean there is in fact natural law [or even an enduring 'human nature.'] Even if you could prove it was needed to live well (which it isn't).” https://x.com/MattPolProf/status/1857867690582372662/photo/1
Despite Strauss having noted that “utility and truth are two entirely different things” (Ibid.), the “natural right”--for some, an "ontological need" [-Adorno, Negative Dialectics]--of hierarchs to claim authority from their inherited position on a chain of being endowed by God in nature—such position made morally legitimate even when (especially?) attained by erasure's coercion and exclusion of others from Providence, and by virtue of its endurance evidencing some merit of utility (“fitness”) established in form if not kinetics of “adaptation” to truth—is both the naturalist fallacy from untethering existentialism as it makes a mockery of the incarnation and atonement. Those who seek to erase others to prolong themselves and their non-virtuous privileging thereby these errors fall backward into the double mirroring (see above) void of natural law themselves. Adapting Dr. Seuss: fascists all the way down.
After “national” catastrophe reflected in the archives of moral language, the inevitable course is to look rearward for a lost golden ideal and those who sold it out—undermining or subverting (cf. George Steiner). In such an inverting context (the age of the wolfdog, Mann’s Steppenwolf) the prophetic is always retrospective, mistaking what was lost was perfecting rather than unjust. Thus may theology become inverted by those lost and those following, losing.
Instead, the true prophetic is progressive and
teleologically focused because the spirit is. It is the foundation of reason,
the anticipation of mercy leavened by justice, where what is perverse will be
so mirrored (Ps. 18:24-8) So that the Human essence established in the heart
can Reason (dianoia carrying through metanoia) rather than reduced to human
nature’s resort to groupthink, anonymity, and evasion of accountability. These
latter seem the moral facts that flow from unredeemed human nature: If moral qualia
exist regardless of the mode of existence—and if those facts are rooted in our
nature as beings of determined type, then it may be asked “why say natural law
doesn't exist, and that we can discover its patterns?”
Answer: Because we are not born into and for the metered
expression of natural law, we are born into the poetics divine promise, where
human potential processes through grace rather than inherent fallen nature. Natural
law fails to account for the transformative and metaphysically essentializing,
aligning possibilities of redemption and divine mercy. Morality is not inherent
to our biological or supposedly agonistic ontological nature. Instead, that we are born into the common grace of divine
promise that shifts our potential from deterministic frameworks of nature’s law to a
teleological vision of human flourishing through recognizing the divine presence, aligning with its grace,
and virtuous engagement and accountability to justice working through mirroring.
[21] "Spectacle," a term of Guy Debord, describes the method by which capitalist elites, for purposes of political-economic aggrandizement and control, frame human experience through mass media representations of images and symbols. These spectacles shift citizens' focus toward an inverted order of reality—consumer materialism and status-sorting—while sidelining access to and the assertion of political rights rooted in deliberation and collective agency. Spectacles homogenize spiritual aspirations into the acquisitive society, flattening differences and redirecting life pursuits into market-defined terms, where social distinctions are expressed through fashion and the accumulation of prestige.
In pre-capitalist tribal societies, representations of community life were embodied in festivals. Unlike capitalist spectacles, these festivals gathered material distinctions into a spiritual and communal collective, reinforcing unity through shared rituals and celebration. Capitalism's spectacles, in contrast, invert this dynamic by exploiting alienation, dissolving genuine collective belonging into consumption-driven hierarchies and sorting of increasingly fragmented and fragmenting identities.
In the era of capitalist spectacle, entrepreneurs manipulate alienation and identity by constructing symbols and rituals drawn from a fabricated, anatomized, or idealized past, presented as timeless truths. These modern, commodified "Festivals" promise belonging but ultimately serve political-economic control by division and out-group hostility. Similarly, protofascist movements exploit the alienation exacerbated if not generated by capitalist spectacle, seeking to launch mythic, autochthonous social forms. These forms are constructed as "orthodox" and ritualized by festivals to foster collective identity, by leveraging the synthesis of symbols to assemble and bind the alienated into political partisanship and cultural tribes.
Social media, in this context, has become the training and recruiting ground for partisan spectacle, amplifying "obsessions, grudges, and loaded language...Social media has taken our societies, which for decades operated with at least some semblance of shared reality and consensus, and has rendered them fractured, broken, restless, and barely able to communicate, much less agree on a shared agenda. Democracy doesn't function under these conditions" (https://america2.news/without-sky-social-media-and-the-end-of-reality/).
Initially, social media seemed poised to raise awareness of reactionary and illiberal networks, offering the potential for a deliberated foundation of intersubjective agreement around civilizing energies located in the individuation of linguistically-mediated virtue. However, the anticipated critical mass of grassroots organizing and electoral coalitions—those capable of buffering, through governing virtues, the vices of partisanship, falsehoods, and conspiratorial sensationalisms—has yet to actualize either in material substance or organizing cultural spirit. Instead, the electronically graven image has become commodified to bear witness to a "new religious revival" under tribal and totemic surfaces (see also Olds 2023, chap. 5).
For the dynamics underlying tribal festivals and their cohesive, purpose-driven intent, see The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 116–17; 311–12), esp. their exploration of the "schismogenetic" function of ritual political spectacle—the intentional performance of rage and the use of totemic symbols to radically distinguish an ingroup from an outgroup (ibid., esp. pp. 56–57; 174).
