The I-word and the habits of empire

Timothy Snyder at the Judenplatz, Vienna, May 9, 2019 (YouTube screenshot)

On May 9, Europe Day in the European Union, Timothy Snyder gave a speech "to Europe." In a time of radical skepticism and disillusionment (e.g., Brexit, Fidesz, National Front, Alternative for Germany), he reminded the European Union of its true contribution to the world. That contribution is not a sweet story of orderly integration of enlightened nation-states. In fact,

...[Y]our little implausible national myths allow you not to see that the European Union is the one successful answer to the most important question in the history of the modern world, indeed the one central question, which is: what to do after empire. What to do with empire?

The places of the world where empire is still the norm, said Snyder, are places where the imperial appetites that led to the Holocaust are still in evidence. Those appetites are characterized by (using Snyder's categories) ecological panic, dehumanization, and state destruction.

Snyder outlines the stakes involved in not taking imperial history and ambitions into account. He circles the globe for examples, but one side-note brought me up short: "The current predicament of the United States is a direct result of our getting our imperial past wrong." So, for just a moment or two I'm going to apply his imperial-appetite categories to our present American crisis. (He is not responsible for my applications of his ideas.)

Ecological panic. Hitler feared that Germany's resources within its borders would be unable to sustain its growing population; expansion was imperative, and only a united and aggressive Volk would do what it took to acquire needed territory -- and would thereby prove its worthiness to survive. I've already written how this master-race mentality infected my own family (here, for example).

Global warming and the wholesale slaughter of species may literally lead to a worldwide ecological panic, with terrifying implications for geopolitics. Compared to this global disaster for all life, the American perceived competition for jobs and the interrelated white-nationalist agendas ("Jews will not replace us!") may seem small-scale, but, having festered for centuries, they are our immediate and urgent reality. Tucker Carlson has built his brand on asserting the harm caused by immigration. (See Malice in Wonderland for examples.) Hate crime, not surprisingly, has been on the rise.

Glass facsimile (left) of data card at Oslo's Holocaust
Center, Bygdøy. Source.

Dehumanization. In Snyder's Europe Day speech, he recounts the Holocaust-era brutality of judging human beings solely on how much work can be squeezed out of them before it's more cost-effective to kill them.

That calculating spirit can now be enhanced by digital tools. We've already seen attempts at reducing human beings into digital campaign targets -- and we've also seen, as Snyder notes, how unwilling those who benefit from such campaigns are to investigate them. We can see how digital dehumanization provides convenient tactics for advancing ecological and Volk-national advantages for the who are determined to rule over others.

State destruction. When the empire hollows out the institutions of state as Germany did in occupied lands, setting aside laws and regulations in favor of freedom of action for those on top, unspeakable horrors become normal. Do we see anything like this in the USA? (Is it fair to count the weakening and outright corruption of several cabinet-level agencies, or the wholesale White House resistance to congressional inquiries, or the death of children in U.S. border custody, or the sabotage of Obamacare?) The history of the USA has always been a tug-of-war between the highest ideals of due process and the rule of law, and outrageous exploitation of labor and withholding of common resources, usually on the basis of race. Our foreign policy has too often consisted of the extension of this tug-of-war into all the world. These days, the idealist side seems to be slipping the wrong way.

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In this context -- countering a Volk-centered ecology, digital dehumanization (now implemented for social division and political gain), and the destruction of our rules and institutions -- I continue to advocate the impeachment of the U.S. president. Four months have gone by since I last wrote about this, and the symptoms of national corrosion keep piling up. Yes, the tempo of congressional and legal investigations into the Trump cult has increased, but the president seems to be able to reframe these fragmented challenges as "harassment" rather than a direct consequence of his own misdeeds and evasion. Meanwhile, he exercises no leadership to call the USA out of its slide back into ecological panic, dehumanization, and state destruction -- in fact, he actively feeds these appetites.

As the presidential campaign of 2020 draws nearer, we need the House of Representatives to conserve and focus its energy, and the always-wandering attention of the people, on the single task of holding the president accountable by the comprehensive remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors prescribed by the Constitution: impeachment. Donald Trump must not be allowed to enter the 2020 elections with his legitimacy as a candidate for president conceded without an honest and focused fight. Let him go on trial in the Senate with all the evidence presented in one coherent stream. Let the Senators, serving as jury, go on record forever, in full view of voters, with their judgment on the suitability of this man in light of our nation's heritage of idealism.

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A first substantial step in the U.S. Congress toward revoking the Authorization for Use of Military Force (aka the perpetual war authorization).

Terrence Malick makes a film about one of my heroes of faith, Franz Jägerstätter.

Challenging Apartheid tourism: the case of Palestine.

What is happening to Iraq's Christians?

Fact and (science) fiction, and our plans to return to the Moon.

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Argentinian harp player Xime Monzón...

Quakerism of the future

Source.  

John Yungblut's pamphlet Quakerism of the Future: Mystical, Prophetic, & Evangelical dates back to the exact year I became a Friend -- 1974. I think those three adjectives remain compelling right now, 44 years later.

Granted, as a deep student of Carl Gustav Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yungblut's definitions of those three adjectives may not have exactly been old-school. This particularly goes for his reflections on the word "evangelical." But the dynamic conversation among these qualities -- different definitions and all -- may be vital if Friends are to grow in usefulness to the Body of Christ, and to those who've not yet been convinced.

The stakes are high. Instead of growing in our ability to offer radical hospitality to those who might find refreshment and liberation among us, FOUR of the yearly meetings I've served and loved have divided. Why, dear Friends, could you not have used our differences as fertile resources to keep each other more honest, more genuinely progressive AND evangelical, more equipped to reach out to our fractious and fragmented neighbors, instead of prioritizing our tightly calibrated internal purity filters!?

Here I've sampled a bit of how Yungblut, with clarity and courtesy, models the conversation among these disparate but necessary qualities:

Mystical ... I totally understand that we're not all mystical, and we don't elevate mysticism as some super-subtle elite key to understanding Friends. But right from the start, we've honored the spiritual gifts that George Fox and some of his companions had -- a particular sensitivity to the inward movements of the Holy Spirit. They didn't exalt those "openings" above the confirming testimony of Bible and community, but those inner confirmations anchored the movement in spiritual reality above earthly hierarchy, above social status, above the claims of wealth and power. In our own day, as authoritarians and their sophisticated technologies confront angry skeptics and anarchists, all with their own competing mythologies demanding our loyalty, we need those God-given anchors. We need to take the time to listen deeply inside ourselves, seeking and finding the inner witness of God that the mystics correctly tell us is there.

I love the quotation Yungblut found in E. Herman's The Meaning and Value of Mysticism. It applies every bit as much now as it did when she wrote in 1915:

Thrust down by victorious institutional, rational, and moralistic forces, the mystic note floats up from the depths -- now muffled, now clear. Every now and again the penalty of success overtakes the ruling system, and Christian [people], disillusioned of a hollow civilization and an externalized church, listen to the submerged melody and find it a song of deliverance, and out of such moments of reaction are born the great spiritual movements, whether explicitly mystical or only showing deep affinities with Mysticism!

Nobody is demanding that all Friends be mystics like Fox or Penn -- though Yungblut insists that the capacity is within each of us. I just plead that this precious influence be welcomed in the mix.

Prophetic ... In identifying the prophetic imperative, Yungblut provides another compelling quotation, this time from our near-contemporary Friend Lewis Benson:

In Fox's preaching about Christ the prophet he identifies himself and the Quaker movement with the Hebrew prophetic tradition and he regards his oppressors as standing in the priestly tradition ... For Fox, Jesus' death on the cross is not just the death of a prophet, but the death of the prophet of the end-time, who was sent to end the succession of prophets and to be the living head of God's people in the New Covenant. Fox's mission was to restore prophecy to the central place in the life of the Church, and he saw that this would involve a head-on clash with the priestly establishment.

Yungblut directly links the prophetic ministry of Friends, including our advocacy and action for social justice, to our "mystical consciousness of Jesus' presence in the gathered company, and of his immediate prophetic utterance through the spoken ministry of one of its members, chosen by him for the purpose...." He also warns:

The white heat of early Quaker testimony cooled when the mystical consciousness that supported it died down. In the same way, institutionalized good deeds in the form of service, no matter how well-intentioned and dedicated, are not capable, themselves, of rekindling the fire of this same mystical consciousness.

Yungblut goes on to survey possible sources of "rekindling," noting that "the opportunity of the sixties, to serve the cause of civil rights under the inspired leadership of the contemplative revolutionary, Martin Luther King, Jr., has gone by, and no amount of nostalgia can bring it back." At the time, he saw seeds of possibility in intentional communities and "life centers," by which I think he's referring to the Movement for a New Society and similar experiments. What would a current survey suggest?

Evangelical ... In naming this quality, Yungblut admits up front that he expects push-back, both from the more orthodox part of his audience and from those who want nothing to do with evangelicalism as understood among typical liberal readers of Pendle Hill Pamphlets. To the latter, he is clear about the fatal cost of cutting themselves off from their New Testament roots.

When I suggest therefore that Quakerism in the future must be evangelical, if it is to survive, it is first of all because I believe that only this recognized connection with our tap root can prevent our withering in time, like any other cut flower. ... To have survival value I believe the Society of Friends must be evangelical in the sense of preserving a faith that is demonstrably and organically related to the gospels in the New Testament.

Yungblut affirms this sense of "evangelical" in the sense of a movement formed and informed by the Scriptures -- sprung from the Christian "phylum," to use his metaphor. However, he also describes and sets aside the more recent meaning of the word "evangelical" -- emphasizing "salvation by faith in the atonement of Jesus." Yungblut does not exactly reject us doctrinal evangelicals as Friends. Having encountered evangelical Friends at the 1970 St. Louis conference of Friends, which grew from an evangelical Quaker initiative, he wrote: "... as a member of the liberal side of the spectrum, I feel that being challenged in this manner by other members of our own household of faith is a very salutary experience."

He goes on to make two points: (1) The emphasis on literal salvation through Christ's atonement for our sin (and the crucial identification of the historical Jesus with the eternal Christ) is a doctrine he personally cannot accept without making some crucial distinctions; but (2) we as Friends must nevertheless remain united as a New Testament faith. His doctrinal arguments seem dated to me -- limited by modernist assumptions springing from "recently acquired evolutionary and depth-psychological perspectives" requiring "that I henceforth distinguish between the Jesus of history and the evolving Christ myth."

Since Yungblut wrote those words, our understanding of how faith and science relate has continued to evolve, weakening rather than strengthening the modernist perspective. Even so, Yungblut's arguments with orthodoxy do not reduce the main service of his pamphlet, undiminished after four decades: encouraging a courteous, fertile, and productive conversation about Quaker revival.

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A fourth adjective? ... I affirm the ongoing importance of being mystical, prophetic, and evangelical, but I'd like to advance another adjective: pentecostal. I don't mean joining the branch of Protestantism bearing that label, but I do mean to suggest strengthening these interrelated capacities that I believe were once part of our spiritual inheritance from the earliest days, but may have weakened:

• readiness for a wider emotional range (I'm speaking as an introvert here!)
• welcoming a wider range of social classes
• a greater openness to healing
• a deeper attentiveness to spiritual gifts.

What capacities do you believe we ought to strengthen?

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John Yungblut did not take the survival of the Friends movement for granted. Near the beginning of his booklet he wrote:

... In my judgment the only Quakerism that can survive in the future will have to be mystical, prophetic, and evangelical. These are the qualities that, taken together ... are the very best elements in our tradition. They constitute what, it seems to me, we should want to survive. If I could be sure that they would be better preserved in the future by some other fellowship of believers, I, for one, would not hesitate to join others in a dedicated dissolution of the Society of Friends.

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Peter Brierley's article (PDF), "Nominal Christians," is an interesting survey of the measurements of Christian commitment among Europeans, including some comparisons with Christians in the USA. Brierley summarizes the vocabulary that has been accumulating over the last few decades to describe the waxing and waning of Christian self-identification, the categories of "spiritual" and "religious" and the effects of migration: "nominal Christians"; "notional Christians"; "fuzzy Christians"; "nones"; "invisibles" ... and so on.

Speaking of vocabulary, Roger E. Olson adds another term, postconservative evangelicals, and explains where he/they fit in among contemporary theologians. (You decide whether his sampling range is adequate.)

Are you able to drink the cup of Jesus? Or did you think that, when Jesus became Lord, you'd be sitting pretty?

Thirty years ago, Rodney Clapp interviewed Eugene Peterson, reminding me of the qualities I'll always associate with him.

Garret Keizer considers existing conventional wisdom about the rise of Donald Trump, and persuasively adds another factor: the pull of pugnacious nihilism. Teasers:

...It may not be out of bounds to quote from a nearly forgotten book by Nazi turncoat Hermann Rauschning called The Revolution of Nihilism. Published in 1939, and subtitled Warning to the West, the book characterizes Hitlerism as a form of vacuous "dynamism" with "no fixed aims" and "no program at all." A movement of "utter nihilism," it is "kept alive in the masses only in the form of permanent pugnacity." ...

A sense of radical incredulity, spectacularly typified by Trump’s refusal to believe his own intelligence services, is but one manifestation of the nihilism that brought him to power. What makes him "the real deal" in the eyes of his most ardent admirers is largely his insistence that almost everything else is fake.

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In looking for blues dessert, I went to Moscow's Roadhouse club and "I Found My Peace of Mind."

Faultlines

Bob and Sue Henry. Bob is pastor at Silverton Friends Church. Thanks to Bob for permission to publish his sketch notes. Photo taken at today's banquet to honor newly recorded minister Alice Maxson and outgoing superintendent Becky Ankeny.

At our just-concluded Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church annual sessions, we spent over four and a half hours discussing whether or not to approve the Yearly Meeting elders' report, which included its decision last year to release West Hills Friends Church from membership in the Yearly Meeting. (Background page one on YM site, background page two on West Hills site.)

During this week's sessions, Ken Redford, clerk of elders, described how his analysis of the groups involved in these discussions had changed. The two groups aren't just advocates for affirming same-sex relationships on the one hand, vs advocates for a position opposing such relationships on biblical grounds, on the other. Ken now makes a different distinction, one that resonated with many Friends at the yearly meeting sessions. In his view, one group consists of those who may hold either of these preceding views but can co-exist in one body with those holding the opposing viewpoint ("we can agree to disagree") and, in contrast, the other group consists of those who simply cannot agree to disagree -- those for whom affirmation of same-sex relationships is "a bridge too far." For the latter group, such acceptance would be a "shattering" violation of the Yearly Meeting covenant as described in our Faith and Practice, and as such, would subject the local church involved to the Yearly Meeting elders' process provided for such violations.

Last year's decision, by the elders, was announced just after the end of the annual sessions and was quickly appealed by eight churches, although not by West Hills itself. The decision (in the form of the letter that the elders sent last year to West Hills Friends Church) was included in this year's booklet of reports for the annual sessions. A letter from the Yearly Meeting's Administrative Council, distributed at the start of this year's sessions, explained,

The Administrative Council acknowledges that approval of Board of Elders report would result in the decision to release West Hills Friends remaining in effect. If the members in business session do not reach consensus around the Elders' report, several outcomes are possible, such as the following:
a) Refer to the Representatives for a final decision to be reported back to the business meeting.
b) Refer to the Representatives for consideration and recommendation to the business meeting.
c) Refer back to the Elders for consideration, or
d) Another leading from the Holy Spirit.

Although the statements made by Friends on the floor of the sessions didn't differ remarkably from previous years, there was a tender spirit throughout these long hours. Clerk Brad Holton frequently asked for periods of silence or singing, and was scrupulously fair in his clerking. Even so, the tension was high. Many Friends of more conservative leanings felt betrayed that the elders' years-long process of discernment and resulting decision were in effect being nullified, while those on the "agree to disagree" side continued to express hope (sometimes in strong terms: "I will not approve the decision, and I will not agree to step aside") that West Hills could remain in membership. In odd mirror-image conversations between the sessions and at lunch, I heard each side talk about the politicking that the other side was doing -- that was in fact the most discouraging thing for me to hear as the background noise of a community supposedly committed to the leadership of the Holy Spirit.

Brad Holton allowed the business session to continue an extra hour and a half beyond the scheduled end of business. The cross-trade of irreconcilable statements continued to the end, after which he had (as I saw it) no choice but to go to the list of options in that letter and announce that the Administrative Council and the representative body would continue to work on an outcome at a later date.

I have two very contradictory impressions. Conservatives (that is, Friends whose understanding of biblical interpretation opposes any same-sex behavior, as well as those who believe that the plain language of today's Faith and Practice should settle the matter, whatever changes might occur in the future) saw the elders doing a long, hard, mutually respectful process of discernment with West Hills Friends, leading to the decision to release that church -- which moreover did not appeal the decision within the 30-day deadline. The stream of objections from those who could agree to disagree, as represented in the appeals from other churches, and the business-meeting discussions, should not have affected the outcome unless they could obtain unity around the liberal viewpoint, which was clearly not going to happen. I understand why those conservatives were unhappy to contemplate yet another half-year or more of delay, at least, with no clear end in sight. Who would not be frustrated in a similar position? It was no wonder to me that some left the sessions in a cynical or separatist mood.

As concerns the plain text of Faith and Practice and the procedures outlined in it for "shattering" instances of non-compliance, I felt that the can't-agree-to-disagree group had governance process on their side. But from a systemic viewpoint, the more liberal (agree-to-disagree) side also had a valid argument: there is no unity today in our yearly meeting on the sexual ethics portions of Faith and Practice, and using those portions to force an outcome somehow feels artificial. "It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem," said one Friend. My own metaphor: removing the canary doesn't make the mine safer. West Hills' non-compliance is symptomatic of a faultline that runs through many churches and even families, a faultline that itself threatens the future of Northwest Yearly Meeting but hasn't been given adequate attention or even definition. Is sexual identity and behavior the main issue, or is it our understanding of biblical authority and the authority of Yearly Meeting structures and documents? All of the above? And, most importantly to me, why didn't our process seem trustworthy enough to earn the patience required to tackle these underlying strains?

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Faultlines, part two: the restructure.

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Internet Monk: Wendell Berry and the "politics of mutual estrangement."

New York Review of Books: Which Europe? Conference of European Churches: What future for Europe?

Why are so many black Americans killed by police?

Russia and America, it's time to talk face to face.

Today, it makes sense to examine the possibility for direct conversation “over the barriers” between Russia and the US — if only because the level of mutual distrust, both genuine and as shaped by media outlets, is almost as great as it was during the Cold War.

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Blues dessert from the late Magic Slim, performing in Brazil.

"I didn't have the heart..."

Joshua Kaufman, with his daughter, Rachel Kaufman.

Photo by Andy Eckardt; source.

"Why I didn't talk: I didn't have the heart to raise children, to tell them what I became -- an animal, to survive."

The speaker was Joshua Kaufman, Auschwitz and Dachau survivor, explaining why it has only been in recent years that he has talked about his death camp experiences.

Kaufman was interviewed by Owen Bennett-Jones on BBC Newshour last Friday. (Podcast available here, episode title "Russia Olympics ban remains," but it may cycle off the site after today. I kept my copy.)

Among several other riveting exchanges, Bennett-Jones wanted to know what Kaufman felt about the five-year sentence given to Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning for his complicity in the murder of 170,000 people. Kaufman thought the sentence was nothing -- a "picnic" -- but he had no hate, no desire for revenge. All he wanted was, for the sake of future generations, for Hanning to go with him to Auschwitz and bear witness to what had happened.

Kaufman's words about becoming an animal to survive really hit me. What does that mean, exactly? I suppose it means being backed into a corner where being human was no longer an option. Kaufman worked at the gas chambers; if I had been in his place and they ordered me to empty the bodies from the gas chambers, as ghastly as the task was, as tangled up as the corpses' limbs might be, I'd surely shut down my brain to do it.

And not just my brain, my soul, too. I remembered Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, whose GULag characters descend to a state of bare existence that's so numb that even killing oneself seems like too much trouble, never mind troubling about the fate of others.

So Kaufman didn't want all this to  affect his children's upbringing. But now his adult daughter is in the know. Rachel understands and admires her father's ideals and helps him express them to the news media. Judging by press accounts of the witnesses at Hanning's trial, those ex-prisoners who still remain alive want the world to know about an evil so massive, so thoroughly organized, so intent on genocide, so heartless that those who fell into its grasp sometimes had to become animals to survive. It's pretty clear that, whatever state of subhuman existence was required for survival, the Nazi system's uniforms, power, perverted technology, and a cult of racial superiority had already formed a master tribe of beasts.

I understand the survivors' sense of urgency. The beasts of ruthless objectification still roam our planet. As Ilya Grits says, "even now significant numbers of people regret that the 'great' European cannibals were not able to bring their 'cause' to a successful conclusion." What do we tell our children -- and when -- to ensure that they don't fall under that deadly spell?

Christians, whose faith is sometimes labeled as a religion for the oppressed, have an additional responsibility ... never to let the beastly infection of elitism and objectification compromise our witness. How well are we doing?

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Great Britain votes today in the EU referendum. One of the most balanced defenses I've seen for Britain's remaining in the European Union comes from an Anglican bishop, Nick Baines. A sample:

...The language of pure, selfish, tribal self-interest – economic, cultural, social and political – is not one that translates into my understanding of Christian identity or justice. When Paul the Apostle wrote to the Christians in Philippi that they should “have the mind of Christ” and “look not to their own interests, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves”, I don't think he was indulging in other-worldly piety. A confident people is strong enough to face this, not to close it down.

David Williams is not preaching about Trump.

Micael Grenholm quotes Christy Wimber on taking the Vineyard back to its roots. Micael's post includes a video of Jack Hayford speaking to a Vineyard congregation -- it wasn't hard to imagine him saying more or less the same thing to us Quakers.

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From Poland: a tribute to Little Walter.