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Sodom has been on my mind since the first reports in January of an asymptomatic virus spreading like wildfire. It is a natural human reaction, when visited with a plague, to ask: What have we done to deserve this?
This question can be asked in two ways: one which tacitly presupposes that we did not deserve this and the other which assumes that we did, for some yet to be ascertained reason. When “9/11” struck, nineteen years ago to the day, most Americans asked the question in the first manner. At that time, Woodchip pointed out that we were asking the question in the wrong way. So now, as we are visited with fire, flood and plague, I have been asking myself again: What have we done to deserve this?
However, he went on to say that homosexuality was not condemned per se but because it was the offspring of sexual licence, generally. And sexual licence was not condemned in itself but because it was the offspring of hedonism, which came from the pursuit of selfishness which was begat by neglect of the poor and needy. The author concluded, “... it must be admitted that homosexual behavior was only the outward manifestation of their true sin. They were a prideful people and delighted in cruelty and neglected any form of social justice.”
Given where it came from, I was rather astonished by this conclusion; for, if the “true sin” was something else, whether or not homosexuality as such was sinful got reduced to a side issue, rather like fighting off lizards when a dragon is breathing on your neck. But even more interesting than that was the author's rejection of looking at the world in terms of isolated phenomena which could be dealt with in themselves.
What the author sketched was the genesis of sin through its various hierarchical manifestations. In today's parlance, he was describing the “organic ecology of sin.” The root of evil is not butt-fucking, it is not even hedonism... it is the pursuit of selfishness with indifference to the weak and needy. It is a state of alienation from fellow man. So viewed, the story of Sodom was very properly placed in the larger Genesis narrative. Pursuing your own knowledge will get you expelled from Eden; pursuing your own interests will get your city destroyed. In the end, it's a pretty simple, albeit uncompromising and drastic message.
It is a message I have been thinking and writing about all year. Especially this year, in which we have been bombarded by a thousand pixelated issues and problems each of which needs some kind of fixing and each of which generates an equal amount of controversy. It is as if being barraged by a torrent of ping-pong balls, we think that what we are experiencing can be dealt with by “tackling” each of the balls that bounces on our head and around us. Politicians love this because it enables them to present us with baskets of ping-pong solutions without ever confronting fundamentals.
The pundits in the press are constantly chasing after ping pong balls too. We are subjected to reports (and more usually lectures) on masks, on tests, on distancing, on food insecurity, on unemployment, on the housing crisis, and so on. When it comes to the holocaust in the West we get preachy articles about how we need to tackle “climate change” and pronouncements like,
“The blazes scorching the West highlight the urgency of rethinking fire management policies”Other press pundits and media mouths express shock and surprise at the extent and ferocity of the fires which they half explain by citing the “exceptional” heatwave combined with “unusually” dry conditions.
A more proper focus would be: what begat unusually dry conditions? I can't see why anyone should be shocked and surprised at what is happening in California. The triad of drought, heat and fire began accelerating in 2008. In that year Sonoma and Napa counties were blanketed in a gray haze for weeks. Every year since then the fires have gotten worse.
Back in the 70's, environmentalists understood the negative implications of a consumer-commuter driven economy. But their calls for sustainable and ecological concepts of development were ignored. Instead, for decades California has dedicated itself to the pursuit of riches for the rich. Its tax structure, its zoning laws, its building booms, its water policies, its industrial agriculture, its dotcom and tech economies are all tied to making a buck for buck-makers, indifferent and usually hostile to the needs of the poor and useless -- and by "useless" I include animals and eco-systems.
People, don't want to connect the dots because to do so would undermine the assumptions that undergird their way of life.
It may seem strange to connect homelessness with seasonal fires but they are intimately connected. To see how this is so one has to trace our habits and manners of being to their underlying operative “paradigm.” We must, like the evangelical author, trace each level of phenomena back through and to their genesis. I could get to the point immediately but won't because I want first, if only briefly, to survey the moral ecosystem of Sodom.
Our way of life was trenchantly summarized by George Orwell in his preface to the English edition of Mein Kampf.
“[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.”In such a view of life, there is also no room for dedicating one's life to the service of others so as to insure that there are no poor in the first place. As Erich Fromm (The Sane Society - 1955) put it,
[Modern man's] value as a person lies in his salability, not in his human qualities of love, reason, or in his artistic capacities. Happiness becomes identical with consumption of newer and better commodities, the drinking in of music, screen plays, fun, sex, liquor and cigarettes. Not having a sense of self except the one which conformity with the majority can give, he is insecure, anxious, depending on approval. He is alienated from himself, worships the product of his own hands, the leaders of his own making, as if they were above him, rather than made by him.
Or, perhaps Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the three leading Catholic theologians in the 20th century,
"Whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated."No room for patriotism and military virtues. No room for love, reason or artistic qualities. No room for the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless. When three very disparate personalities seem to be converging on a point, it is worth considering what that singular point is.
The first two quotes, clearly take hedonism to task. For Fromm, the pursuit of happiness had been conflated with the chase after consumer goods and objectified stimuli, both of which distracted man from developing a genuinely individual sense of self. Written in the early 1950's one can smile at Fromm's innocence. What he could not foresee was the extent to which a “sense of self” would itself become commodified. Hedonism today goes far deeper and beyond the Satyircon of “fun, sex and liquor.” It permeates the development, cultivation, improvement and maximization of “the individual” which has become a profit making industry that not only alienates man from himself, but does so by infusing into him an externalized concept of self which he thinks is his own so that in pursuit of ego he looses self. Fromm saw the impact of the fetish of the commodity (Marx) on the individual, but he did not live to see the progression of the fetish to the point were it swallowed the individual in a maze of fit-bits, consultants, psychiatrists, gurus, investment advisors, trainers, and endless web pages for “developing” his individuality and “managing” all the diverse and fragmented aspects of his objectified personality.
Hitler saw the matter similarly; but, whereas Fromm's passage presupposed a pure autonomous individual independent of consumer conformity, Hitler's Spartan concept of “patriotism” was based on subsuming the individual to society.
The question of 'nationalizing' a people is first and foremost one of establishing healthy social conditions ...Whereas Fromm criticised how consumerism had alienated man from himself, Hitler focused on how those who controlled consumer societies, sub nom “liberal democracies,” alienated man from his society; and, since man is a social animal, to that extent also, from himself. In Hitler's view, true individuality cannot be realised autonomously but only “through the nation,” i.e., fit into the social whole. By the same token, since the one is always comprised of the many, a society of alienated men is no society at all. In effect, both Fromm and Hitler, protested not simply against hedonism but against homo-economicus, and, in so doing, they both harbored classical notions of the polis.
“The aim of all social activity must never be merely charitable relief, which is ridiculous and useless, but it must rather be a means to find a way of eliminating the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life - deficiencies which necessarily bring about the degradation of the individual or at least lead him towards such degradation.”
“I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in order to respect a thing I must at least have some knowledge of it. (Mein Kampf, Ch. 2.)
“Il n'y a pas, chez le Grecs, d'economique politique, parce que la vie économique, pour les penseurs grecs, n'est qu'an aspect soit de la vie familiale, soit de la vie de la Cité, la vie poltique. Et nous aurons a montrer comment, l'economie politique est précisement née de la rupture avec la conception grecque de l'homme. (Henri Denis Histoire de la Pensé Economique, Press Univ. de France 1966.)A rupture, as well, we might add, from Nature.
“There was not among the Greeks a political-economy, because economic life, for the Greek thinkers, was but an aspect either of family life, the life of the city, political life. We shall demonstrate how political-economy is specifically born from a rupture with the Greek concept of man.
It is von Balthasar who focused on the raison d'etre of the rupture. For him, as for the others, “the true sin” arises form “a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria.” But, unlike the other two, he goes on to posit that this exaltation of lucre itself arises from constructing faith and knowledge as opposites and from subordinating “forces of love immanent in the world” to science; that is, to what is measureable. In a word, Balthasar excoriates the so-called Baconian Revolution which Benedict XVI, Balthasar's protégé, wrote had “created pathologies of its own.”
“The Diktat of the “scientific method” is that “only the certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific.” As a result, questions about origins and destiny are “relegated to the realm of the subjective.” Human “conscience” becomes individualized and loses its power to create community. (Benedict Regensburg Address (2006)The Baconian Diktat is just that -- an entirely arbitrary decree that only certain forms of knowledge, called “objective,” shall be considered worthwhile while others, disparaged as “subjective,” shall be brushed aside into the wastebin of “idiocynracies.” It is precisely that Diktat which Pascal criticised in his famous pensée on l'esprit de geometrie et l'esprit de finesse. However, the exaltation of the quantifiably “objective” is itself no more than a subjective preference. One can always choose to behold the world through aesthetic or other moral values.
At this point the typical argument is that subjective feelings are “arbitrary” -- as if earthquakes and meteors were not? Well, comes the reply, we haven't figured out the hidden laws behind earthquakes. To which it might be answered, that we haven't yet figured out the hidden laws behind affections. It will be argued that the definition of a calorie is useful. As if heart warmth were not? Yes, it will be rejoined, but technique allows us to supply our basic needs. As if one man helping or forgiving another did not answer a basic need? It is not that the scientific method is bankrupt; what is destructive is its exaltation as sola mesura.
There is nothing wrong in defining a calorie as the quantum of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree. But it is wrong conclude that the warmth of the heart has no “objective” value. In fact, true science, in the sense of becoming intimate with the ways of the natural world, produces its own aesthetic and moral wonder. It is the alienation of science from beauty, it's dwarfing into a disfigured niebelung that is the sin against nature.
Ultimately, the insistence on scientific objectivity is pathological. The pathology arises because by decreeing that only certain forms of knowledge are “objectively valid” man allows himself to be convinced that his individual subjective feelings have no objective value, precisely because they are not shared. They are not shared because everyone else asserts that they only value that which is “scientifically” measurable, even if they secretly harbor the same subjective sentiment. Thus the feelings of one man's heart find no objective resonance and he, in turn, becomes distrustful of his own feelings which he discounts as being merely “personal value judgements.” He joins the crowd in denial of the shared subjective. Everyone ignores the community of feeling between themselves as they bow down to the totem of science. Now, by their own hand and lost in subjective autonomy they grasp at scientific objectivity.
What we are led to, then, is that the genesis of Sodom's sin is not simply alienation of man from man but more primarily an alienation from “forces of love immanent in the world” which occurred when Man first took a bite from the apple of the measureable. Stated another way, the alienation of man from his fellow man does not arise in isolation, as if it were a free-standing sin, but in correlation with those forms of knowledge to which he has decided to give precedence, and eventually sole precedence.
It is through this truncating of one half of our perceptive faculties that questions of political-economic policy become reduced to what is utilitarian and quantifiable and it is this reduction that becomes the premise for economic science. From thence arises the notion that the free market can be assumed to be both the means and measure of social good. The liberal movement was founded precisely on a rejection of l'ancien régime, of feudal economies based on tribal or personal-relations (Marx), and indeed of Plato's Republic which was based on a socio-moral concept of Man. Far from ushering in a promised era utopian scientific progress liberalism has let loose “dark satanic mills among mountains green.”
And promises of a rational futurama that ended up being far less wonderful and, indeed, even far less rational than promised.
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| 1939's Scientific Future |
This liberal thesis cannot be dismissed out of hand. We have to ask what happens when subjective sentiments -- becoming objectified by virtue of being shared -- rule out expressions of dissenting sentiments that are not shared by one or more individuals? Are hippies allowed in Plato's Republic? Without the tension and dynamism presented by dissent, a “shared community of feeling” becomes robotic and tradition gets replaced with mere conformity and repetition.
True, but it is a canard to then switch tracks and argue that, therefore, the free market ought to rule. The so-called “free market” is just happy talk (like Europe's current Four Freedoms) for the dictate of capitalist dynamics. The argued notion that a modus operandi is a neutral substitue for an arbitrary summum bonum is false. No real cultural or ideological tabula raza is actually possible. In the liberal universe, the “market place of ideas” (as Justice Brandeis conveniently put it) will always be dictated by the market place of money, by measureable “investment” -- an investment which doesn't care about sentimental aspirations or ends so long as they produce a return.
It will be argued that the market simply reflects personal choice; and that the fact that the stock of a company that produces yoga mats may have soared through the roof does not negate the fact that a vast number of people chose to practice yoga. No one practices yoga in order to reap a financial return on his or her mat. The commodification of a choice and the choice itself are two distinct things.
The answer to this argument is that“individual choice” does not arise in isolation but from market forces themselves.
“Every society creates the type of 'social character' which is needed for its proper functioning. It forms men who want to do what they have to do. What kind of men does our large scale bureaucratized industrialism need . . . [where] our economic organization is based on continuous consumption? ... [Modern man] lives under the illusion that the thoughts and feelings he has acquired by listening to the media of mass communication are his own.” (Fromm, Our Way of Life Makes Us Miserable. (1964).)Of course, Hitler went on to exercise rather stern control of his own. But the point to be made is that the individual is always informed by the society in which he lives. What distinguishes liberal democracies is what Marx called "the conceit of the eighteenth century Robinsonade" -- the pretence of being different, the petard that society begins with "the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman" who makes his own way in the world, according to his own independent notions and choices. In reality, the choice that matters is not the individual right to choose but society's choice of the right formation to espouse.
Or as Hitler put it,
"Now the people must possess some means of giving expression to their thoughts or their wishes. Examining this problem more closely, we see that the people themselves have originally no convictions of their own. Their convictions are formed, of course, just as everywhere else. The decisive question is who enlightens the people, who educates them? In those countries, it is actually capital that rules; that is, nothing more than a clique of a few hundred men who possess untold wealth and, as a consequence of the peculiar structure of their national life, are more or less independent and free. They say: 'Here we have liberty.' By this they mean, above all, an uncontrolled economy, and by an uncontrolled economy, the freedom not only to acquire capital but to make absolutely free use of it. That means freedom from national control or control by the people both in the acquisition of capital and in its employment. This is really what they mean when they speak of liberty. These capitalists create their own press and then speak of the 'freedom of the press.' In reality, every one of the newspapers has a master, and in every case this master is the capitalist, the owner. This master, not the editor, is the one who directs the policy of the paper. If the editor tries to write other than what suits the master, he is ousted the next day. This press, which is the absolutely submissive and characterless slave of the owners, molds public opinion. Public opinion thus mobilized by them is, in its turn, split up into political parties." (Speech to Hamburg Workers (1940).)
The choice between summum bonum or modus operandi is not an easy dilemma to resolve. One is obligated to recall that for all its talk of love and redemption the Church burned recalcitrants and heretics. For all their social talk about regenerating the individual in a community without class divisions, the Nazis ended up exterminating the useless, the purposeless and the despised. But on the other side, the freedom of choice offered by liberal non-choice is equally spurious; for the choice of capitalism itself necessarily marginalizes and, in the end, extinguishes the “disinterested” -- that is, those not desirous of or good at “making investments.” The answer to Plato, according to Calvin Coolidge, was brusque and to the point: The business of The Republic is business.
But if that is the case, then we must ask: what is an investment? Simply put, it is the expense of a certain amount of value (capital) in order to earn a return of value that is greater than the amount parted with. But it is equally axiomatic, that the increase in value must be paid by someone other than the investor, otherwise what would be the point? Howsoever buried in the chain of economic consequences, the return doesn't come from the investment, but to the investor from the value of some resource or someone else's labor or from some gratuitous resource. (The use of the correct preposition tells all.)
Let us put aside stocks and hospitals and factories and, in the manner of simple cloth coats, look instead at the simple single family dwelling. The whole idea in the United States, is to buy the real estate at the lowest swing-point in the market and wait until the property appreciates. It's really neat magic! In twenty years, the “investment” will have appreciated sufficiently that one can sell at a 200% profit and retire! Alternatively, one can keep the properties and rent them out. No need for universal pension programs.
Fine. But appreciation in value doesn't happen to just one house on the block. That might be the only appreciation-in-value that a particular owner is concerned with but the appreciation is block-wide, neighbourhood wide, city wide and ultimately state wide. What this means is that throughout the state housing becomes increasingly expensive and beyond the means of more and more people.
Should wages and income rise in tandem with the selling price of the house, then there will have been no real-value appreciation. In a market economy, all value is relative. It is greater or lesser than something else, which means that for every gain there must be a corresponding loss. Thus, while one man's home appreciates others are priced out of owning a home at all. Owned housing becomes a privilege for the few, who then wring their hands and say, “we must do something to help the less fortunate.”
Of course, the issue is not soley some kind of “natural appreciation” that occurs in the manner of a growing plant. Accelerated appreciation, called a “return on investment,” is built into housing market. On average, real estate developers reap an 18% profit on their investment. One builds a house for $100 and sells it for $118.00. Totally apart from “appreciation by scarcity,” jacking up the price of that new home jacks up the value of all others in the area.
The same applies to rental housing which becomes increasingly expensive for the many. An investor in rental housing expects at least a 7% return on his investment. This expectation all but insures that “affordable” housing will not be affordable for anyone in the lower 80th percentile. Thus, whenever some politician starts yapping about “investing in affordable housing” he is yapping a scam.
What would happen if there were a vast publicly financed housing program in New York or San Francisco or Seattle or Washington? A program whereby the goverment built at cost and provided truly affordable housing and subsidized construction and take out loans for single family dwellings. Imagine, everyone has a place to live! There is no “housing shortage.” At that point “housing values” would plummet. That is the law of the market. And with the plumetting of value, there goes the Gentrified Liberal's retirement egg.
The entire investment paradigm of social policy is a semantic hoodwink. An investor doesn't set out to “create jobs.” He sets out to earn a profit by exploiting the availability of a labour pool... the cheaper the better. And if it's cheaper in China, he will “create” jobs over there! In tandem, if a Chinese investor can make more money buying up real estate in Canada, that too is what he will do, making housing completely unaffordable for the average Canadian.
Whether it is the United States, Germany, Russia, China or Indonesia, what governments everywhere seek to do is to spur investments which is seen as the panacea for everything. Is there homelessness? Spur investment into “affordable housing.” Is there unemployment? Spur investment into “job creation.” Wonder of wonder, the lust for money will solve everything! But once one pokes at the fetish, it is easily seen that “Investment!” is simply a rallying cry to “CREATE POVERTY”
Balthasar's point was that once you make the profit margin (by whatever pleasant label disguised) the aim and method of social policy you have embarked on the destruction of civil society and of nature itself.
Investment more than anything else has brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse. To see how we need only contemplate a battleship.
Several years ago I was watching a documentary on the Bismarck. As the camera panned over its turrets, its massive, guns, its propellers and riveted sheets of steel. I became fascinated with a massive eight inch nut and bolt. What had it taken, I asked myself, to produce that nut
As it turns out a Nazi propaganda film on the construction of a locomotive answered the question. With a typical German fascination for technique, the film went through each and all of the stages of the assembly of a single locomotive -- the smelting, the turning, the shaving, the calibrating, the grinding, the heating the cooling, the fitting... It was, to put it simply a massive operation.
Bismarck's Bolt was no different. From the mining of ore -- and the machines and transport involved in that alone -- to the smelting and molding and grooving -- and the machines and energy involved in those steps -- the nut represented a million discrete instances of human effort that had flowed, one way or the other, into it.
Hitler recognized this chain-of-value. When he took office, the country was lacking an appreciable gold-reserves as a result of which the Reichsmark wasn't worth much. Hitler decreed that henceforth, the value of the mark would be “backed up” by the labour of the nation. Since Germans are industrious people, the value of their currency soared. This monetary principle is well recognized to day but in 1933 it was radical.
However, by the same token, each sinking of a Bismarck, each blowing up of a locomotive, each bullet fired represented not simply a “waste” of resources but an annihilation of the life-blood of the nation. The efforts of countless lives were rendered for naught. This is what is only symbolised by the horrible scenes of endless rubble and destruction that is a war's aftermath. War is not only a destruction of things but a wasting of human life-effort that put itself into the creation of those things.
Since 1945, we are triumphantly told, we have avoided such colossal wastage. No indeed! No more eight-inch bolts lie useless and corroding at the bottom of the sea, And it is true... we have not seen such massive destruction as was wreaked during the World War. Instead we get endless masses of plastic straws, disposable diapers, disposable pens, disposable bags and Dixie cups floating on ocean surfaces. The wonder of the the post war economy is that it found a way to exceed the waste of war by pacific means.
War used to be considered the premier act of destructive consumption. Today's consumer society is simply destructive consumption by other means. The entire dynamic of our consumer economies is predicated on planned -- indeed instant -- obsolescence. Enterprises will cease to make money, and thus cease to exist, unless they bank on being able to sell an endless stream of cars, washing machines, razor blades, cell phones, and so on, as repetitiously as possible, despite the consumption of resources that such re-production entails.
The beginning and end of the matter is that we are despoling the world's ecosystem in order to produce things whose only raison d'etre is to facilitate a return on investment. Advertising creates artificial needs and, for those things that actually are needed, planned obsolesence insures that we need them again and again. After despoiling the world to “keep economies going,” we despoil it again with mountains and oceans of garbage. Peace has become more destructive than war.
Behind this destruction lies the paradigm of investment. Everyone hates the war-profiteer but why should the peace profiteer be any less loathesome? Oh yes.. capitalism is non-ideological! It doesn't exterminate people for being Sikhs, Jews, or heretics... It just extinguishes for the sake of making a buck! Capitalism is the most destructive of all ideologies. Pointing fingers at some religious or poiltical “extremism” is distracting bullshit.
Capitalist apologists will answer that even orangutans and birds “consume and destroy.” That is perfectly true. All of nature is based on a cycle of destruction and reproduction. But what makes for “natural harmony” is that death always becomes the source and foundation for rebirth. It is a harmony which is intricate, awesome and perfect in its balance. The cycle of human production and consumption has always been, to a greater or lesser degree, defective. When the “profit margin” becomes the “sole criteria” is becomes apocalyptic.
At bottom, the monster is a political-economic mind-set that looks at the world only in terms of investment and asset appreciation without any genuine concern for promoting a socio-ecological community based on reciprocal obligations between humans and with nature. Nature will respect us if we respect her. We haven't. She strikes back.
I can't see why anyone should be shocked and surprised at the fires engulfing California. The triad of drought, heat and fire began accelerating in 2008. In that year Sonoma and Napa counties were blanketed in a gray haze for weeks. Every year since then the fires have gotten worse. People, just don't want to connect the dots -- especially well off people whose connected privilege allowed them to purchase sylvan real-estate.
Economic privilege leads to feelings of insularity. People in San Francisco would say smugly, "Oh but we have off shore winds so we never experience any of that." As if the day would never come.
The rolling hills of Napa and Sonoma were once home to small farms and vineyards coupled with a few unpretentious get-away resorts. Beginning in the 1970 the region fell victim to investors. Acre by acre valleys were developed into subdivisions or regimented rows of vines like vast military cemeteries. The hills were turned into the private preserves of the rich who drove out the mountain lions and coyotes. The Napa Valley became the “monotony of the unique” -- an uninterrupted corridor of Mediterranée Faux, where corrupt politicians could dine au cave with the founders of for-profit hospitals and where San Francisco's managerial class could delude themselves with pretensions of sophistication.
Stop squinting and you will see the human misery that enables California's Wine Country to offer us its cornucopia of boutiques and chardonnays: the day-laborers imported from Mexico, living ten or 20 to shack and huddled on street corners in the chill of the morning. Whose feet walk in these satanic vineyards among California's once golden hills?
I feel no pity for those desperate estate-owners trying to “save their investments” amid the flames. How did they treat the strangers in their midsts?
“Sodom and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49.At the time Ezekiel was written, the indifference to our natural equality took the form of indifference to the poor, not seeing our commonality of need and worth. Today, the indifference takes subtler and at the same time more pervasive “structural” forms. Although stepping over the poor as if they were not there has certainly not gone out of fashion, the deeper and greater indifference lies in a perversion of thinking that has us believe that what is actually unnatural is “the natural law” of the market. That, indeed, is the essence of the fetish of the commodity -- thinking that our gluttonous construct is a self evident law of nature, through which all perspectives and atttitudes must be filtered.
Which brings us back to butt fucking.
“They were a prideful people and delighted in cruelty and neglected any form of social justice.”In the days of Sodom, strangers, precisely because they were not part of the community, were regarded as not having rights. How could they? Rights were part of the community's construct and if one were not part of the community how could he share in the construct? Correlatively, the most disgraceful thing a man could endure was to be put upon -- relegated into a submissive, passive position. Through slavery one lost one's manfulness. So too by getting fucked where sex was used simply to degrade. In either case, the slave-fuckee was a depersonalized creature used and ignored and, most importantly, simply not considered a communal being or "social animal." This was the sociological context behind the accusation that the Sodomites neglected the poor and delighted in acts of humiliation and violence against those who had no rights or recourse.
Cruelty and neglect are not separate phenomena but have their shared genesis in an alienation from our fellow creatures. However this overused word has lost its full colour, coming to connote an individual psychological condition whereas it is actually a social condition that is objectively heteronomous.
The word social derives from the root sekw meaning to follow with and thus to be a companion or ally. Of course, com-panem, means to share bread with. Thus, to be social is not simply “living together” in some free market happenstance but rather to share the road and bread with one's fellow men, as in a pilgrimage.
Sodom's abomination consisted in neglecting and willfully debasing those who ought to be and rightfully are our allies and companions in life. That abomination was not an offence against persons but was first and foremost inescapably an offence against "society" as such. In short, through its abomination Sodom necessarily laid waste to itself. It could not but do otherwise. We have met the locusts and they is us!
By the same token the sins of Sodom cannot be remediated by individual action by which social concern is relegated to a personal hobby rather than being at the core of one's being. The abomination cannot be “off-set” by the flim flam of charity or even of “safety nets.” The sins of Sodom can only be expunged by a total “productive re-orientation” of the city. We must on no account think of ourselves as pursuing our individual happiness but only as co-responsibles for the collective good. This is something soldiers in the best military units understand. The individual is not important in himself but only in so far as he participates in, contributes, and is of use to the unit or community. Our greatest happiness is to be welcomed, cheered on and relied upon by our fellows. We thirst for this, and, as Orwell pointed out, it was the allure of fascism.
But this motivating principle is not possible without a correspondng intellectual adjustment that reconnects the mind to the heart and that subordinates the market to aesthetic and moral demands rather than the reverse.
Europe's much ballyhooed Four Freedoms call for the “free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.” These are nothing more than the four basic elements of capitalism. No less; no more. Not a single reference to beauty or love or sacrifice, to freedom of conscience, the freedom to be noble, the freedom to do good. Nothing. And it is to this sordid and lowest possible conception of co-existence that Beethoven's sublime Ode to Joy has been prostituted as Europe's anthem. It is an abomination. And if Europe is bad, America is worse. For whereas Europe still retains a vanishing social conscience, the United States simply has none, only an occasional and transitory sense of individual guilt which gets assuaged by religious insanity, spiritual preoccupations or some communitarian kitsch
Our leaders are the worst that have ever existed. They are monsters. They prattle and peddle the poison of investment as the solution to our problems and thereby doom us and the planet to fire and brimstone.
Unless we cast of the yolk that binds us (and binds some of us very nicely) we will deserve our destruction. One is left not to weep for mankind but for the innocent and helpless creatures we have involved in our sin.
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