Trump-Sauron wants to erect that vanity arch in DC to be filled with attack drones and snipers, and he and his people are going ahead even though they have not followed the procedural rules for starting such a project. This will make the abysmal Reflecting Pond disaster look like child’s play, and it will definitely follow the same script and pattern.
Trump tells Xi he prefers China’s new media to his own, meaning he wishes he had the same degree of control over American news media as Xi has over China’s.
“Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.
But is he evil?
If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”
She continues:
There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.
Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do.
He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran – i.e. carry out genocide – announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.
“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”
The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.
To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.
Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump:
Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins’s ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn’t mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they’re relieved to watch a man who never hides it.
The worst evil, Neiman argues, “may be the denial of evil – as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, who warned us, calling Trump “fascist to the core.”
The media — too spineless to label Trump a fascist — prefers the word “authoritarian,’ which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but “will not make fascism more bearable.”
Authoritarianism, she notes:
[I]s a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.
We are in deep trouble.
The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place.
Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement.
Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free.
And 81% of Evangelicals think he is King Cyrus, the Second Coming or their Lord and Savior and turn around and call it good. All I can say is I am glad I am an atheist.
“The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.”
Sadly, the default drift of institutions in general is in the direction of authoritarianism; unless guardrails are carefully erected to prevent such drift, they will readily follow a fascist’s lead when they see he has staying power, which Trump showed them he had with his election to a second term. We also as a country saw ample evidence that the guardrails we thought were sufficient against such drift were far, far too flimsy, in some cases almost nonexistent. If we get a second chance, much firmer guardrails must be put in place; but I don’t think we will get second chance.
Even when Trump leaves office and MAGA falls by the wayside, he and they have created a gargantuan permission structure that future presidents and administrations can be expected to use to foist their own undemocratic intentions onto the country; his presidency has shown how what formerly were considered unacceptable actions by an American leader were nothing but a gossamer web of conventions that could be blown away by a strong wind: future leaders of the US will take that example in earnest.
Correction: ….what formerly were considered unacceptable actions by an American leader was a belief based on inherited norms that were nothing but a gossamer web of conventions etc…
What does all this say about the American people?
So long as there are good ‘sales’ at Walmart and Target, and their favorite TV shows continue unabated, they don’t care.
I’m rereading Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out Case. There were a good number of wonderful Roman Catholic novelists in the first half of the 20th century; I’m not sure there are any of equal talent and insight in these times. I wish there were; we could use them.
On September 28th it will be the 50h anniversary of the finest double album ever released in US popular music. I am, of course, referring to Stevie Wonder’s spectacular Songs in the Key of Life, which was released 50 years ago. 🙂 If you, somehow, have not heard this musical gem you should seek it out.
I am doing a parallel reading project of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and reading the Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey. While I am finding specifics about Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of Homer to be laughable the core idea that the Enlightenment unleashed a new form of vicious technocratic managerialism is not an inherently unique idea, and where Adorno/Horkheimer seem too sweeping Ellul (oddly, perhaps?) seems more nuanced. Their respective reactions to managerial technocracy complement each other in interesting ways. When certain types of evangelical thought leaders inveigh against the nasty rationalism of Enlightenment over-confidence the North American writers (usually) seem to have no idea that Adorno and Horkheimer had “been there, done that” in their landmark contribution to critical theory.
Now I have many disagreements with Adorno but I’d rather disagree with Adorno DIRECTLY by reading his work than to decide I don’t like Adorno because of what people say ABOUT him. When I want to think about why and how he was wrong about American popular music I can listen to Stevie Wonder and hear that what he did in his songs has more staying power and ability to touch people’s lives than, say, even a few well-made Schoenberg string quartets. I’m not really anti-atonality (Berg’s Wozzeck is remarkable) but I think Adorno created a brutal double bind in which he declared tonality “used up” and also claimed no traditional forms could be used any longer because … a bunch of Germans did “all that” already. His Eurocentric take was wrong.
But Terry Teachout had a comment that describes Adorno as a critic, that the best critics do more for us by being wrong than average or good critics ever do by being right, because a great critic will say something that forces everyone to talk about something in new and different ways. So by that measure Adorno is great precisely because he was so wrong. Adorno was wrong, but he’s HELPFULLY wrong. I also don’t think he “anticipated” Trump. Anyone who thought Ike was going to be the next Hitler was obviously wrong about that part.
I’ve been reading a lot about the philosophy of music, theological aesthetics and the development of demonological speculation in Jewish and Christian writings. Richard Horsley comes off as a profoundly annoying self-citing one-trick pony but, on the other hand, whenever I get annoyed that he hasn’t bothered to read Amanda Witmer or reliaze Susan R Garrett pointed out in 1997 that “magic” was a polemical accusation and has never been a useful term for analyzing ancient writings influential in Christian and Judaism I wish Horsely would read more widely.
On the other hand, his proposal that (informed by post-Marxist ideas about attention to material conditions) demonological speculation in Jewish writings exploded in the wake of Seleucid rule is pretty compelling as a thesis. Horsley is also aware of work by John Collins and by Nickelsburg that has revisited apocalyptic in the last forty years to propose the Bultmann/Schweitzer paradigm is mistaken in the main. Horsley has a simple idea, that apocalyptic is a post hoc scholarly term imposed upon a diverse set of works and that if you go and read those works they were responding to the crises of serial imperial rule within the Yehud, and that apocalyptic is ancient literature anticipating not the end of time but the demise of empire(s).
With this recalibrated conception of apocalyptic it makes a book like Adam Gussow’s Beyond the Crossroads, about a quasi-apocalyptic discourse in blues lyrics, fascinating to read. Adam Gussow’s book Whose Blues? is also a great read, an interesting engagement with traditional blues scholarship and more recent revisionist work (glad to see Elijah Wald and particularly John W Troutman’s books getting mentions).
Gussow attempts to defend the historical importance of Africa diaspora influence on the emergence of blues but situates blues as a concrete response to Jim Crow in the South rather than as a concept of some kind of ontological blackness.
Adorno claimed that we should look at the contradictions in a culture to get some clarity as to where its faultlines and failures might be. In terms of the liberal arts in general but music in particular, it can seem as though the biggest aporia comes when race is regarded as a social construct in finance, law, science, and just about any field of scholarship … and then in the liberal arts music is functionally presented as if it is mystical racial property. This kind of mindset replicates Richard Wagner’s ghastly Judaism in Music pamphlet. Victor Anderson wrote a short but fascinating book in the 1990s called Beyond Ontological Blackness wherein he argued that it’s necessary to confront how black activist scholarship took on an ontological conception of race formed by the 18th and 19th century European arts scenes, and that it was important to reject the idea that the Artist as individual genius AND racial exemplar was a path forward for North Americans. And yet the idea of music as a racial property (in the sense of music expressing the properties of “the” race” and being “the” property of the originating race) can show up even in an essay like Wesley Morris’ essay on black music in the 1619 Project.
We have to be able to do better than to just flip the script of Wagnerian racist art mysticism. It’s possible, but it’s only going to be possible if we find a way to ascribe historical significance to the evolution of musical styles without imputing some kind of ontological racial essentialism to those styles.
What I have found is that music theorists can be like theologians and political theorists–each partisan has their one pet theory or metaphor and they want to run with that to the rejection of all alternatives. Fans of christus exemplar rip on penal substituionary atonement as if one were bad and the other good, but there was no shortage of liberal Protestants who rejected atonement theories as barbaric who were in denominations that were running INdian boarding schools in the United States. I take John Gray’s point from Seven Types of Atheism that there are a whole lot of atheists who are bellicose and intransigent as the theists they despise, and there are theists who resemble atheists in their concession that there’s a whole lot we don’t know and that human frailty isn’t something we can ever be done with.
I have felt lately as though we live in an era in which interdisciplinarity is the buzzword of choice for academics who are so relentlessly intradogmatic they don’t get out and read people they disagree with except to scapegoat them for the obviously unavoidable demise of pax Americana, whether its evangelicals blaming commies or leftists blaming evangelicals. The blame game is part of the culture industry and that culture industry does not have actual human flourishing in mind but selling more products and THAT, I think, is a point from Theodor Adorno that I can really agree with.
“Even when Trump leaves office and MAGA falls by the wayside, he and they have created a gargantuan permission structure that future presidents and administrations can be expected to use to foist their own undemocratic intentions onto the country; …”
I have grown to loathe talking politics. It just infects everything these days, but I have to make a comment on this idea; there is nothing new under the sun.
While each President and lawmakers do have their limits they always provide the USA with a slippery slope of behaviors.
They all slowly bring a new norm for people to use to fuel their own personal desires. It’s called “the normalization of deviation.”
Just look at the transition of Christianity over the last half a century. What is accepted these days as normal behaviors and lifestyles would never have been condoned in the past.
The Bible is true when it says, “…they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
The problem is the new norm has become the new truth.
TH,
Regarding your comment on politics: All cats are equally grey in the dark.
As for the transition of Christianity over the last half century: at least it’s not acceptable for KKK members to wear their sheets and hoods to church anymore, something that was at one time considered a normal behavior in many mainstream churches in many parts of this country.
“Name one false doctrine or cult that started in a pew.”
To go by Scripture, church history and the background of the ecumenical councils, the answer to that question, JD, would be “all of them”.
NT scholars regard 1 Corinthians as an epistle that was attempting to cut off cults of personality at the pass after they had been reported as already under development, for instance. It is also clear from reading the epistle even without someone like Gordon Fee’s scholarship to clarify textual stuff.
Was there a distinction between pew and altar in the earliest church? It seems to me the distinction between laity and clergy was extraordinarily porous, and very undefined, in the earliest church, and there were as yet no altars or pews, yet the problem of false doctrine had already started as scripture testifies(WTH gave one example; there are others involving angels and the resurrection).
If I answer a question about a cult that started in a pew, just in my own lifetime I’d say it’s easy for cults to start in the pews. Anyone here who knows my backstory knows who I’m talking about but for the ones that don’t … .
I actually met Mark Driscoll and was part of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Cults can start in pews every Sunday. He didn’t seem too bad when I met him circa 1999-2000 but I’d say the Mark Driscoll I met back then would regard the Mark Driscoll of today as a crazy heretical sell-out. King Joash started well and worked to repair and renovate the Temple but after the death of the high priest he went downhill fast.
It’s a silly realization to share given my history, but a few years ago I saw a photograph of Driscoll where he had no fascial hair and I thought, in the first two seconds, I was looking at a photo of Pat Robertson. I don’t blame the guy for sticking with the facial hair if he realizes that without it he looks like Pat Robertson. I wouldn’t want to be confused for Pat Robertson, either.
The Trump thing bores me to be honest, whether it is people for him or against him. Presidents don’t actually have too much power anyways. Politics is so low frequency and lethargic, much rather focus on the Kingdom.
The core saying—usually “a man, a movement, a machine, and a monument”—is most often attributed to evangelist and writer Vance Havner. He used it to describe how a living religious movement can become institutionalized and eventually preserve its past rather than its original vitality
Your six-part form, adding “message” and “memory,” appears to be a later adaptation rather than a wording with a single clearly documented origin. Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr popularized a related “Five M’s” framework: human, movement, machine, monument, and memory
Different pastors and writers have also attributed variants to Ray Stedman, Floyd McClung, Peter S. Ruckman, and others, which is why precise attribution of the expanded version is uncertain.
Thanks for that.
The sucker saying I assume is derived from the well-known words of P. T. Barnum. First of all known for entertainment, showmanship and stripping folks of their hard earned cash. The parallel to today’s church/circus hucksters is evident, sad to say.
What’s on your mind today?
Trump-Sauron wants to erect that vanity arch in DC to be filled with attack drones and snipers, and he and his people are going ahead even though they have not followed the procedural rules for starting such a project. This will make the abysmal Reflecting Pond disaster look like child’s play, and it will definitely follow the same script and pattern.
Trump tells Xi he prefers China’s new media to his own, meaning he wishes he had the same degree of control over American news media as Xi has over China’s.
“Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.
But is he evil?
If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”
She continues:
There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.
Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do.
He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran – i.e. carry out genocide – announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.
“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”
The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.
To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.
Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump:
Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins’s ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn’t mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they’re relieved to watch a man who never hides it.
The worst evil, Neiman argues, “may be the denial of evil – as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, who warned us, calling Trump “fascist to the core.”
The media — too spineless to label Trump a fascist — prefers the word “authoritarian,’ which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but “will not make fascism more bearable.”
Authoritarianism, she notes:
[I]s a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.
We are in deep trouble.
The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place.
Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement.
Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free.
By Mr. Fish on Chris Hedges site
And 81% of Evangelicals think he is King Cyrus, the Second Coming or their Lord and Savior and turn around and call it good. All I can say is I am glad I am an atheist.
“The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.”
Sadly, the default drift of institutions in general is in the direction of authoritarianism; unless guardrails are carefully erected to prevent such drift, they will readily follow a fascist’s lead when they see he has staying power, which Trump showed them he had with his election to a second term. We also as a country saw ample evidence that the guardrails we thought were sufficient against such drift were far, far too flimsy, in some cases almost nonexistent. If we get a second chance, much firmer guardrails must be put in place; but I don’t think we will get second chance.
Even when Trump leaves office and MAGA falls by the wayside, he and they have created a gargantuan permission structure that future presidents and administrations can be expected to use to foist their own undemocratic intentions onto the country; his presidency has shown how what formerly were considered unacceptable actions by an American leader were nothing but a gossamer web of conventions that could be blown away by a strong wind: future leaders of the US will take that example in earnest.
Correction: ….what formerly were considered unacceptable actions by an American leader was a belief based on inherited norms that were nothing but a gossamer web of conventions etc…
What does all this say about the American people?
So long as there are good ‘sales’ at Walmart and Target, and their favorite TV shows continue unabated, they don’t care.
I’m rereading Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out Case. There were a good number of wonderful Roman Catholic novelists in the first half of the 20th century; I’m not sure there are any of equal talent and insight in these times. I wish there were; we could use them.
On September 28th it will be the 50h anniversary of the finest double album ever released in US popular music. I am, of course, referring to Stevie Wonder’s spectacular Songs in the Key of Life, which was released 50 years ago. 🙂 If you, somehow, have not heard this musical gem you should seek it out.
I am doing a parallel reading project of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and reading the Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey. While I am finding specifics about Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of Homer to be laughable the core idea that the Enlightenment unleashed a new form of vicious technocratic managerialism is not an inherently unique idea, and where Adorno/Horkheimer seem too sweeping Ellul (oddly, perhaps?) seems more nuanced. Their respective reactions to managerial technocracy complement each other in interesting ways. When certain types of evangelical thought leaders inveigh against the nasty rationalism of Enlightenment over-confidence the North American writers (usually) seem to have no idea that Adorno and Horkheimer had “been there, done that” in their landmark contribution to critical theory.
Now I have many disagreements with Adorno but I’d rather disagree with Adorno DIRECTLY by reading his work than to decide I don’t like Adorno because of what people say ABOUT him. When I want to think about why and how he was wrong about American popular music I can listen to Stevie Wonder and hear that what he did in his songs has more staying power and ability to touch people’s lives than, say, even a few well-made Schoenberg string quartets. I’m not really anti-atonality (Berg’s Wozzeck is remarkable) but I think Adorno created a brutal double bind in which he declared tonality “used up” and also claimed no traditional forms could be used any longer because … a bunch of Germans did “all that” already. His Eurocentric take was wrong.
But Terry Teachout had a comment that describes Adorno as a critic, that the best critics do more for us by being wrong than average or good critics ever do by being right, because a great critic will say something that forces everyone to talk about something in new and different ways. So by that measure Adorno is great precisely because he was so wrong. Adorno was wrong, but he’s HELPFULLY wrong. I also don’t think he “anticipated” Trump. Anyone who thought Ike was going to be the next Hitler was obviously wrong about that part.
I’ve been reading a lot about the philosophy of music, theological aesthetics and the development of demonological speculation in Jewish and Christian writings. Richard Horsley comes off as a profoundly annoying self-citing one-trick pony but, on the other hand, whenever I get annoyed that he hasn’t bothered to read Amanda Witmer or reliaze Susan R Garrett pointed out in 1997 that “magic” was a polemical accusation and has never been a useful term for analyzing ancient writings influential in Christian and Judaism I wish Horsely would read more widely.
On the other hand, his proposal that (informed by post-Marxist ideas about attention to material conditions) demonological speculation in Jewish writings exploded in the wake of Seleucid rule is pretty compelling as a thesis. Horsley is also aware of work by John Collins and by Nickelsburg that has revisited apocalyptic in the last forty years to propose the Bultmann/Schweitzer paradigm is mistaken in the main. Horsley has a simple idea, that apocalyptic is a post hoc scholarly term imposed upon a diverse set of works and that if you go and read those works they were responding to the crises of serial imperial rule within the Yehud, and that apocalyptic is ancient literature anticipating not the end of time but the demise of empire(s).
With this recalibrated conception of apocalyptic it makes a book like Adam Gussow’s Beyond the Crossroads, about a quasi-apocalyptic discourse in blues lyrics, fascinating to read. Adam Gussow’s book Whose Blues? is also a great read, an interesting engagement with traditional blues scholarship and more recent revisionist work (glad to see Elijah Wald and particularly John W Troutman’s books getting mentions).
Gussow attempts to defend the historical importance of Africa diaspora influence on the emergence of blues but situates blues as a concrete response to Jim Crow in the South rather than as a concept of some kind of ontological blackness.
Adorno claimed that we should look at the contradictions in a culture to get some clarity as to where its faultlines and failures might be. In terms of the liberal arts in general but music in particular, it can seem as though the biggest aporia comes when race is regarded as a social construct in finance, law, science, and just about any field of scholarship … and then in the liberal arts music is functionally presented as if it is mystical racial property. This kind of mindset replicates Richard Wagner’s ghastly Judaism in Music pamphlet. Victor Anderson wrote a short but fascinating book in the 1990s called Beyond Ontological Blackness wherein he argued that it’s necessary to confront how black activist scholarship took on an ontological conception of race formed by the 18th and 19th century European arts scenes, and that it was important to reject the idea that the Artist as individual genius AND racial exemplar was a path forward for North Americans. And yet the idea of music as a racial property (in the sense of music expressing the properties of “the” race” and being “the” property of the originating race) can show up even in an essay like Wesley Morris’ essay on black music in the 1619 Project.
We have to be able to do better than to just flip the script of Wagnerian racist art mysticism. It’s possible, but it’s only going to be possible if we find a way to ascribe historical significance to the evolution of musical styles without imputing some kind of ontological racial essentialism to those styles.
What I have found is that music theorists can be like theologians and political theorists–each partisan has their one pet theory or metaphor and they want to run with that to the rejection of all alternatives. Fans of christus exemplar rip on penal substituionary atonement as if one were bad and the other good, but there was no shortage of liberal Protestants who rejected atonement theories as barbaric who were in denominations that were running INdian boarding schools in the United States. I take John Gray’s point from Seven Types of Atheism that there are a whole lot of atheists who are bellicose and intransigent as the theists they despise, and there are theists who resemble atheists in their concession that there’s a whole lot we don’t know and that human frailty isn’t something we can ever be done with.
I have felt lately as though we live in an era in which interdisciplinarity is the buzzword of choice for academics who are so relentlessly intradogmatic they don’t get out and read people they disagree with except to scapegoat them for the obviously unavoidable demise of pax Americana, whether its evangelicals blaming commies or leftists blaming evangelicals. The blame game is part of the culture industry and that culture industry does not have actual human flourishing in mind but selling more products and THAT, I think, is a point from Theodor Adorno that I can really agree with.
I think that in our country we need to realize that we are fat sheep.
And that our shepherds cannot be trusted to feed us the word of God.
@ JD,
What good is being fed ‘the word of God’ if you (generic you) don’t practice it?
Belief systems are a dime-o’-dozen.
“Even when Trump leaves office and MAGA falls by the wayside, he and they have created a gargantuan permission structure that future presidents and administrations can be expected to use to foist their own undemocratic intentions onto the country; …”
I have grown to loathe talking politics. It just infects everything these days, but I have to make a comment on this idea; there is nothing new under the sun.
While each President and lawmakers do have their limits they always provide the USA with a slippery slope of behaviors.
They all slowly bring a new norm for people to use to fuel their own personal desires. It’s called “the normalization of deviation.”
Just look at the transition of Christianity over the last half a century. What is accepted these days as normal behaviors and lifestyles would never have been condoned in the past.
The Bible is true when it says, “…they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
The problem is the new norm has become the new truth.
There is nothing new under the sun.
TH,
Regarding your comment on politics: All cats are equally grey in the dark.
As for the transition of Christianity over the last half century: at least it’s not acceptable for KKK members to wear their sheets and hoods to church anymore, something that was at one time considered a normal behavior in many mainstream churches in many parts of this country.
Name one false doctrine or cult that started in a pew.
People need to feed themselves the word of God and let the Holy Spirit teach them.
“Name one false doctrine or cult that started in a pew.”
To go by Scripture, church history and the background of the ecumenical councils, the answer to that question, JD, would be “all of them”.
NT scholars regard 1 Corinthians as an epistle that was attempting to cut off cults of personality at the pass after they had been reported as already under development, for instance. It is also clear from reading the epistle even without someone like Gordon Fee’s scholarship to clarify textual stuff.
Was there a distinction between pew and altar in the earliest church? It seems to me the distinction between laity and clergy was extraordinarily porous, and very undefined, in the earliest church, and there were as yet no altars or pews, yet the problem of false doctrine had already started as scripture testifies(WTH gave one example; there are others involving angels and the resurrection).
If I answer a question about a cult that started in a pew, just in my own lifetime I’d say it’s easy for cults to start in the pews. Anyone here who knows my backstory knows who I’m talking about but for the ones that don’t … .
I actually met Mark Driscoll and was part of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Cults can start in pews every Sunday. He didn’t seem too bad when I met him circa 1999-2000 but I’d say the Mark Driscoll I met back then would regard the Mark Driscoll of today as a crazy heretical sell-out. King Joash started well and worked to repair and renovate the Temple but after the death of the high priest he went downhill fast.
It’s a silly realization to share given my history, but a few years ago I saw a photograph of Driscoll where he had no fascial hair and I thought, in the first two seconds, I was looking at a photo of Pat Robertson. I don’t blame the guy for sticking with the facial hair if he realizes that without it he looks like Pat Robertson. I wouldn’t want to be confused for Pat Robertson, either.
The Trump thing bores me to be honest, whether it is people for him or against him. Presidents don’t actually have too much power anyways. Politics is so low frequency and lethargic, much rather focus on the Kingdom.
Who coined the saying
Man
Message
Movement
Machine
Monument
Memory?
Probably the same person that said
“There’s a sucker born again every minute”.
AI says:
The core saying—usually “a man, a movement, a machine, and a monument”—is most often attributed to evangelist and writer Vance Havner. He used it to describe how a living religious movement can become institutionalized and eventually preserve its past rather than its original vitality
Your six-part form, adding “message” and “memory,” appears to be a later adaptation rather than a wording with a single clearly documented origin. Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr popularized a related “Five M’s” framework: human, movement, machine, monument, and memory
Different pastors and writers have also attributed variants to Ray Stedman, Floyd McClung, Peter S. Ruckman, and others, which is why precise attribution of the expanded version is uncertain.
I think I first heard it from Ray Stedman…
Thanks for that.
The sucker saying I assume is derived from the well-known words of P. T. Barnum. First of all known for entertainment, showmanship and stripping folks of their hard earned cash. The parallel to today’s church/circus hucksters is evident, sad to say.