Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part III - The Theology of the 99 Percent

Our previous chippings on the Occupiers concluded that the confluence of impulses which comprise the movement would fail to engage into the prevailing historical cycle if they sought to reform a system which, in our opinion, is beyond transformation.

No one who has applied a cream to an itch can complain of emollients. But palliatives do not deal with underlying causes which, in the case of dying empires, are pervasive and systemic. When the system itself is the disease, applying plaster to rot will not stop the decay.

But history also teaches that new life springs from rot. After all, why not? Why should we think -- other than adhering to some carte blanche notion of free will -- that human events are exempt from processes that apply to all other forms of life?

The “fall” of the Roman Empire and the concomitant “rise” of new racio-cultural, political economies in what became Europe provide an illustrative paradigm of sorts for our own looming future. Two of Gibbon’s three volumes attest to the complexity of the subject; so that apart from sketching some general contours this woodchip will focus on the existential and moral transformation that took place as orthodox Christianity replaced the weltanaschaung of paganism.

A preliminary word. The historical fact of regeneration which took place upon the so-called fall of the Roman Empire has been distorted by the myths of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which were simply the self justifications of a class. In order to see how rot gives rise to regeneration in the human social context, it is first necessary to disentangle from the anti-feudal capitalist propaganda that passes for orthodox history.

The propaganda of a “Dark Age” was first foisted on history by the Italian litterateur, Petrarch, who applied it in 1350 to literature written after the dated fall of Rome in 476. The epithet then got applied to anything ante-dating Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) which is considered to be the herald of the “new” scientific era. Lastly, the term got used as Voltaire’s hachet du jour in his ongoing diatribe against the Church.

Not surprisingly, the agitation for something “new” began by maligning that which was “old” but the agitation rests on a cornucopia of petards. The Middle Ages, it is said, was a time of intolerance and witch burnings. Actually, the (Spanish) Inquisition (1492) was the opening salvo of the modern nation state and the Reformation Wars (1540) exceeded the Crusades in brutality and devastation. The Dark Ages, it is said, was a time of ignorance and superstition. Actually, the 700 years after 476 saw more technological, mathematical, artistic and scientific achievements than the 700 years before. By the time of Augustus (27 A.D.), the towering greats of Ancient intellectual life had been dead 300 years. What ensued for the most part was 400 years of imitation, compilation, tinkering and slow decay. As for superstition, the notion that the ancients didn’t jump for a shadow is laughable.

It is worth mentioning that Reverend Cotton Mather’s treatise on witches and the spectral evidence of ghostly apparitions, (The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)), relied on the Bacon’s new scientific mode of analysis of which Mather was a serious student and proponent. Unless we disabuse ourselves of the anti-medieval canards we will be unable to learn from one of the great transformational events in history.

In this respect, Gibbon’s history was defective; for, as a Son of the Enlightenment, he espoused the prejudices of his Age. Relying on the formality that the Empire legally perdured until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Gibbon dutiful covered all the viscitudes of the fragmented administration of “empire” in the West during the Middle Ages. As a military-political chronology, Gibbon’s account is impeccable; however, it fails in its grasp of the human “impulses” that form the calculus of history.

Gibbon’s central thesis was that the Roman Empire fell because Christianity had sapped what was left of its vital force. Instead of being manly and martial, men became monkish and theological -- prattling nonsense instead of working on practicalities. Gibbon’s sardonic account of the theological controversies that racked the Empire as the very Barbarians stood at the very Gates, is one of the malicious delights of all history.

“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” (Decline, vol. I, ch. 15.)

Gibbon all but feasted in his melancholy and his account will convince the reader that no stupider beast stalks the earth than man, among whom Christian theologians must be ranked as the most deranged.

But Gibbon’s thesis forgot its own best evidence: the “manly” Romans were prattling inanely well before Christianity stalked the globe. They had long ceased to have any useful aim other than maintaining a stasis which evidently wasn’t serving the needs of most people stuck on earth.

The Roman Empire in the West, ended because it had failed to deliver. People turned their backs on an Idea which maintained relevance only for the “inner belt way” crowds at Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. Sometimes people literally packed up to go live with the Barbarians; other times they came to a modus vivendi with the new occupiers.

The non-official reality is difficult to summarize because it occurred beneath the official version of events and was the product of multiple, sometimes parallel, confluences.

Perhaps the first thing to bear in mind was that people did not openly “renounce” the Empire or even paganism. In architecture, art, law and religion they kept familiar and useful bits and pieces of the ancient world. They thought more in terms of practical adaptation. Roman columns and masonry got reused in construction, just as pagan moral codes got reworked into the seven deadly sins and cardinal virtues, and just as ancient learning got redefined into the seven liberal arts.

Secondly, the “fall” of the Western Empire was as much matter of privatizing and contracting-out government than of so-called barbarian conquest. The Vandals, Burgundians and Goths who took over chunks of the West did so as agents or “friends” of the Emperor (then residing in Constantinople). Rome had become an Empire-in-Franchise; a brand name. The avowals continued; the underlying reality transmuted.

This de facto privatisation of empire was not oligarchical but democratic. As a whole, the Empire had come to present the interests of a 1% senatorial class who competed in finding more subtle gradations and high falutin’ titles to distinguish their pecking order. The res publica was their berry patch.

The parceling out of empire to lesser dukes (“leaders”) or counts (“friends”) dovetailed with new arrangements -- new social-contracts -- between those rulers and the occupants. At all levels, people began taking control over their lives working on local, sustainable realities in architecture, political structures, law and religion, as well as the all-necessary economy. The lack of any coordinated program allowed snits like Voltaire sniff to about a “Dark Age” but what the monarchical Enlightenment called “chaos” was actually a social democracy that produced a better and freer quality of life than had been had under the rapacious and heavy hand of Empire.

The point is illustrated by architecture which is the face of a society. For near a millennium the principles of architecture had been settled: row upon row of arches and columns in four orders: doric, ionic, corinthian and composite. The impression was intended: pomp, pride, power in your face -- what we today call a “corporate presence.”

As the empire crumbled, architecture became smaller, more intimate and decorated with popular, Celto-Germanic motifs and patterns. Friezes and columns got illustrated with real and fantasy animals including such in-your-face hilarities as a leering monkey with drooping phallus.

What Petrarch had objected to was that art had become vulgus -- pertaining to the common folk. But the becoming of the folk was far more genuine than the stasis of Augustus.

Were the Middle Ages stable? No. They were chaotic and at times miserable but, despite reduction and rustification, they were vital. Were they classical and polished ? No. But they were colourful and delightful. Did they have a program? No. What they had, however, was Christianity -- a set of moral principles and existential attitudes intended to infuse the structure of the system whatever the system ended up being.

To Gibbon, and for us, the theological quibbles of the day seem like so much stuff and nonesense. But this is only because we do not understand the buzz words and vernacular of the times. Through symbols and metaphors people were arguing about root political understandings at the base of all things.

For Gibbon, the most ludicrous of these existential disputes was the fight between Arius and Athanasius over the “nature” of Christ: Had Jesus been a very exceptional being who became a god or had he always been a part of God from the beginning of time?

In order to understand the social significance of this seemingly pointless debate we have to remember that in the pagan world heroes and emperors were always becoming gods. The “trans-op” was known as an apotheosis and became so routine that the emperor Trajan’s dying words were “puto! fio deo” -- best translated as “Bleh, I’m becoming a god....” .

But in death and in life, Rome remained the province of the one percent. Its rulers and heroes may have ascended to Olympus but the mass of “humble” people living close to the ground returned to mere mulch, as insignificant in death as they were expendable in life. If Christianity had nothing different to offer, it had nothing better.

Both the Arians and the Athanasians held to much the same liturgical practices and imperatives of moral conduct. They were not enemies; but a chasm separated them on their answer to the fundamental value of human existence.

For the Arians, Christianity was just another religion in the pagan pantheon. This meant that although some men became gods the rest of us nameless mortals could expect from life nothing more than what luck assigned us. Jesus was a very, ultra special person; but so too had been Heracles, Achilles and the great prince of peace, the Divine Augustus.

For the Athanasians, God himself came down -- apoandrosis, as it were -- infinitely validating each and all of us by coming into contact with us down here, in the valley. Not only that but when He did come down his “triumph” was not that of some pretty-boy, gym-toned Apollo but as sorry assed, shameful and pathetic as could be imagined -- God the Defeated One. Nicene Christianity stood for a complete inversion of the pagan cosmological order.

Of course, the pagan gods did participate in human affairs, but they did so at a remove as manipulators, little different from the remove of master and slave. On a primary existential level pagan humanity stood estranged from its gods and alienated from itself.

The dispute between the Arians and the Athanasians was the ultimate one percent - ninety nine percent divide. Once the “theological lingo” is cast in context, we can understand why the orthodox Christians fought with such determination for the Nicene Creed.

They were not interested in formulating a military strategy for defense of the homeland or in coming up with a plan to revive the economy or for political reform. Those problems were so intractable that the best anyone could do was hope that calculus of history would figure it out somehow.

Instead the Athanasians insisted on a change of “root consciousness” from one that worshipped “exceptional cases” into one that insisted that “as you treat the least of these” so you treat the Eternal God himself.

The cynic will rightly remark that Christians have often betrayed their own Gospel. But that does not alter the radical nature of their revolutionary “good news.” The same cynic might justifiably remark that none of this god-stuff is actually true. But that too is not the point. What is important, from an historical and sociological perspective, is that people believed and acted on it and fought for it as if it were true.

In practical terms, the eternal divinity of Christ got translated into what the Church today calls the preferential option for the poor The option was stated in the Gospel of St. Luke:

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. ...
He hath shewed strength with his arm:
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
(Luke: 1:46 55)

St. Luke’s Gospel was written “to the Romans” and once we recall what the Roman point of view was, we can see that the Gospel fell but a little short of a declaration of war against Augustus’ “vital stasis.” The Christian answer to the Ara Pacis was Mary in the Manger:

Nativity by Giotto

But Luke’s focus was less on political structures than on animating attitudes. Throughout medieval literature his Magnificat got restated in tales and lessons that focused on ordinary common mulch people: the lowly shepherd, the monk who falls asleep and awakes in Eden, the prince in unrecognized disguise, the lowly maiden. And it is Luke’s orientation that was carried on in A Christmas Carol, Les Miserables, Huck Finn, and -- it seems to us, the Occupiers.

Today, the motto of the One Percent is, “Wealth makes right.” Perhaps they are right. Obama certainly bespoke a very Roman attitude when he said that he did not begrudge Blankfein his billions.

But what is heard from the 99 Percenters is precisely the cry of the preferential option for the poor. The “option” is not a question of charity but of due and proper inheritance based on the conviction that all are called to the Table, not only those who can afford $35,000 a plate.

The questions that are being directed at the Occupiers are very much the types of questions that the Pharisees fired at Jesus: what is your program? how would you provide...? what do you say to those who ask how you would balance...? And the answers of the 99 Percenters are very much the kind of “irrelevant” non-sequiturs given by Jesus: lower tuition! provide home care to the disabled! get the money changers out of the temple!

But it is precisely the non-sequitur wherein the strength lies; for a sequitur would merely accept and continue the stasis. It seems to us that the worse thing the Occupiers could do would be to come up with a “solution” because, in fact, the political, economic and ecological problems confronting us are intractable.

There is among orthodox socialists the view that the present structures can be kept if only they are correctly inverted so as to benefit the working public instead of private capital. It is an intriguing proposition. After all what is the difference between G.U.M. (Soviet Russia’s All-Commodity Store) and Walmart other than ownership?

We, however, are not so sanguine. Systems are by definition integrated wholes and what is integrated at present is a system of despoliation and destruction that kills off the very insects that give us life. True revolution will come when the system or the climate collapses in such a way that allows and impels people to cobble together their own nearest and best solutions. What matters when they do so is their animating existential imperative.

We do well not to overlook the fact that the protesting “99 Percent” are actually less than 1% of the U.S. population and an infintessimally small sliver of the world population. They are nowhere close to attaining a political threshold that is going to cause any leader to loose sleep. They are but a cry in the wilderness; but from Oakland to Athens, the Occupiers speak the conscience of a new “Dark Age” and therein lies the hope.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

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Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part II : The Cycles of Empire, Applying Plaster to Rot

A hope is abroad in the land that occupying public places is a harbinger of coming change. I am loathe to sour anyone’s apple but these smattering protests will not alter the nation’s trajectory. At most, they will wrest some economic emollients from the gorgons that rule. True revolution comes only from the great cycle of history.

In the Calculus of 99 Percent, we discussed how political movements arose less from platforms than from a confluence of popular impulses in a given direction. We concluded that the success of any confluence depended on whether it engaged into the prevailing historical trend -- what Hegel called the Zeitgeist. In this woodchip we will look at the two halves of the historical cycle.

For, if there is a singular lesson to be learned from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) it is that the past cannot be revived and the future cannot be avoided. While this might seem too obvious for words, Gibbon’s three volumes is testament to how persistently the obvious is ignored. Mankind follows its hopes not the winds.

Reviving the Past

One of the most hilarious statements in all of history was the opening line of the official biography of Caesar Augustus,

“At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.”

Of course, as a master of deceit, Augustus never quite lied. He did not say that he had “restored the Republic” but rather “liberty” to a republic which was simply presumed to exist. The presumption, completely unfounded in fact, was the cornerstone on which was erected the majestic edifice of Augustan statesmanship.

Although the Augustan constitution lasted for near 500 years, it was not a Republic. As Gibbon inimitably put it,

“The system of the Imperial government ... may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world ... concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.”

The Caesars understood that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

But some were not content with the assurance of a farce. At periodic intervals over the next 500 years some reactionary would stir things up with a cry and clamor to “restore the Republic!” One of the most energetic attempts took place in 275 A.D. when, in default of an Emperor, the Senate reclaimed its ancient prerogatives and with ostentatious hustle and bustle occupied itself with the business of governance. Its future pretensions were soon deflated.

“On the slightest touch, the unsupported fabric of their pride and power fell to the ground. The expiring senate displayed a sudden lustre, blazed for a moment and was extinguished forever.”

Well, not quite. It continued to sit, like cows taken out to graze, for another two hundred or so years. But it became so irrelevant that no one knows when it finally closed up shop. One day, it just wasn’t there.

That did not stop people from seeking to revive a dream. A millennium later, some fellow named Rienzi got it into his head to restore the republic even though Rome had by then been reduced to a town of 30,000 and the Forum to a goat pasture.

If the word “Libertarian” comes to mind, that is the point.

The American Republic ended with Franklin Roosevelt. Although the New Deal sounded the death knell of a delimited federal government, it was the World War which actually instituted a bureaucratic imperium. In either event, the Republic ended because economic, social and historical forces were pushing it beyond its 18th century confines. As Roosevelt put it in his inimitably homiletic way, we couldn’t continue living under “horse and buggy” law. (Press Conference 31 May 1935)

Up through John F. Kennedy, presidents dutifully played the part of a republican first magistrate. Since then, they have made Caligula and Commmodus their showier models. But whatever the facade, the functional fact is that the country’s political and economic policies are determined by and for a military-industrial-financial complex. Democratically electing officials does not equate with electoral control over policy.

In striking down FDR’s modern legislation, Justice Sutherland ominously warned that “every journey toward a forbidden end begins with a first step.” Sutherland was indisputably right; he only omitted to note that the first step had been taken during the French and Indian Wars. Back then, Spain’s Count of Aranda, who was a far more astute soothsayer than Sutherland, warned of the threat posed by the England’s “pygmy” which he said would grow into a voracious giant. With crisp clarity, Aranda foresaw what the astigmatism of American self righteousness has seldom grasped: that the country always was about expansion and exploitation. Now, in 1945, the pygmy stood astride the world like a colossus. The raucous and expansionist energies of a republic had achieved empire; and, Empire achieved, there was no returning to the Republic.

Restoring the Future

The Roman Republic’s achievement was likewise Empire -- the unification of the ancient Mediterranean world. Augustus supplied the administration for a reality that the Republic had accomplished.

In critical respects the Empire was as much a sham as the pretence of a republic. It never was a unitary commonwealth existing under universally applicable constitutional norms. That had been Caesar’s goal and the reason for his assassination. Romans were not about to share their rights and status with conquered others.

Augustus dispensed with any notions of multi-cultural egalitarianism. He granted Roman citizenship only as a reward for compliance and service. Under his stewardship, the “Roman Empire” became the formality of a supra national middle class urban band that participated in a certain “international style” and that sponged off the countryside while excluding a massive subclass of slaves, metics, under-employed, unemployed and rural poor. Most excluded of all were the German “barbarians” --- illegal immigrants seeking a better life within Roman confines.

Thus, the Augustan achievement came with a problem: how to protect the homeland from barbarian “assaults” while maintaining cohesion and prosperity in the “civilized” (i.e. urbanized) part of the world. Roman policy became one of containment and stability. It aimed at a vital stasis, the great image of which was Mother Rome, uniting East and West within the winds of trade and amidst a cornucopia of plenty.

Frieze from Ara Pacis (the Roman Twins reflected in the Tradewinds of East and West)

A curious bifurcation arose. The stability of the system reduced politics to the farcical squabble of ambition. The two last contenders of the dying Republic, Marius and Sulla, had both been ruthless and ambitious men, but they each represented divergent interests and real political choices. But Augustus had settled everything. Real political choices did not exist. What other policy could there be but the maintenance of the status quo?

On the other hand, the structural weaknesses of the system meant that no matter who clawed his way to the top he was faced with dealing with the same perennial fissures: the failure of the center to hold while the peripheries gave way militarily, economically and culturally.

In the beginning of empire, Rome plundered the provinces sucking wealth toward the center. However, armies create their own ancillary economies. The maintenance of legions on the frontiers stimulated the growth of cultural hybrids and local economies which drained wealth from the center even as the vital stasis of the center was defended.

The balance of economic vectors was not helped by the massive concentration of wealth in Italy itself. The Roman family farm disappeared with the Republic. Thereafter, the equivalent of “agribusiness” sought ever quicker profits in cash crops displacing more labor-intensive forms of production such as olive oil and wine.

If the word “globalization” comes to mind that too is the point, although the analogy ought not to be pressed too hard. The lesson behind the shadow of analogy is that events are less the products of choice than of cyclical processes at work. The centrifugal forces which ultimately collapsed the empire were not the result of “wrong” choices but rather of choices dictated by circumstance, which were logical and usually necessary at the time they were made.

The Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called “Scientific Revolution” have convinced us that the structure we choose to live in is a matter of choice. It is not. It is a question of the inevitable processes of generation and decay applicable to all things under the sun.

Throughout Gibbon’s work the theme is repeated. A crisis arises, the emperor repairs, revives, reforms, repels. Things look good for a while until another crisis arises and things start to fall apart again. Repeat. From time to time an emperor undertakes to repair matters by launching a major war of conquest, which after an initial success, recoils and leaves matters worse off than before.

The pessimistic lesson is that if the Republic could not be restored, neither could the Empire be saved. Gibbon’s tale cautions us that no movement will succeed if the direction of its impulse goes contrary to the prevailing historical flow.

In the Shadow of Ozymandias

Around the world, people grow up in the shadow of past civilizations. That the American Empire would fall was a fact as certain as her supremacy acquired in May 1945. The question was never “if” but always merely “when”.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

However, there are no such shadows in the United States and this has allowed for a curious disconnect in the American mind. Although Americans were fairly candid about their imperial (“expansionist”) impulses throughout the 19th century, at the moment we conquered (“liberated”) Europe and achieved empire, we relapsed with charming insouciance into thinking we were just a basically “inward” looking nation which was beholden nonetheless to defend others against nefarious aggressions at great sacrifice to ourselves.

Historical accidents in the United States lent credence to the republican fantasy. The Civil Rights Movement allowed the impression that fundamental political choices yet remained to be made and could be brought about democratically. In fact, civil rights for blacks was carried on the back of the Commerce Clause. As the Supreme Court made clear (Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) 379 U.S. 294), national economic integration required social integration. Although the conflict had the appearance of a political choice, segregation embarrassed the flow of commerce and fell before the same necessity which drove the empire itself.

It is somewhat debateable whether the United States could have chosen to be a different kind of empire than it has been. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Inaugural Address proffered that hope, as did the prospect of a “peace dividend” upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. But assuming such choices were possible then, that water has passed the bridge. The U.S. is on an historical trajectory which is by now unalterable. The United States is not going to “change” direction and become a republic again. Nor is it (as we said when Obama was elected) going to “go Swiss”.

However, it was precisely to that nostalgic republican sentiment that Obama played to during his presidential campaign. Obama could provide emollients both in the pursuit of hegemony abroad and in the maintaining a semblance of equity at home. His betrayal, within the greater fraud, was that he provided not even that.

And, it seems to us, that those same nostalgic sentiments drive the Occupiers whose demands net down to calling for the system to be other than what it is.

Some circumspection is in order. The other day we chanced on a photo of an oil rig in the gulf -- a giant crustacean like creature arisen from the deep. As colossal as it was, its size was but a distilled reflection of the vast economic and political complex that produced it. It did not require a Marx to caution that attacking such a giant windmill was an act of folly.

The military-capitalist interests, together with their ancillary camp-followers in academe, the media and cultural institutions are so deeply “invested” in America that they are America. Others are simply tenants in passing.

Occupiers might well look into their own wallets. In it, the majority of them will find a Visa or MasterCard, promoted as “passport to the world” -- an entré into the very supra-national middle-class “band” that was called the Roman Empire. The real 99 percent are lucky if they have a plastic bucket to fetch water with.

If change truly came, we would not recognize ourselves or our surroundings or anything we have come to think of as natural and normal.

This is not to say that the 99 Percenters should not do what they have to do, which is to protest. We chipsters too did our duty; but we did so with the consciousness that what is called “democracy” is simply a cheap (if noisy) way to maintain social peace and compliance; that the financial institutions which raped the world economy and the military-corporate interests that maintain trillion dollar wars are not going to be shamed into peace and equity by a few thousand protestors.

Practically speaking, there is nothing wrong with upping the price for selling one’s vote. If the ruling gorgons can be forced to disgorge a thicker stream of trickle out, we’re all for it. But true political change will not begin to occur until corporations are de-personalized and the Senate, whose sole purpose always has been to thwart the popular will, is abolished. Even that, would only get us up to the European starting line; and, although European political mechanism are far more responsive to democratic impulses, they too have bowed before the gorgon.

In the end, Obama had he tried and Occupiers were they to prevail can only apply plaster to rot. The good news is that in rot there is regeneration.

©Woodchipgazette, 2011
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