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Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 153 - Born Again Ideology
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 153 14/04/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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* 1000 DAYS OF THEORY *
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Born Again Ideology
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~Arthur Kroker~
The New Protestant Ethic
------------------------
One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber's classic text,
_The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_, the fateful
relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in
American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the
original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of
Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was
destined to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical
project of capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political
climate marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based
politics, capitalism and its historical correlate -- modernism --
have actually folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist
codes of economic secularism and political pluralism, in the
interests of being reanimated with the evangelical spirit of
religious fundamentalism. What Weber foresaw as a primal compact
between Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism -- this migration, first
in Europe and then in Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards
personal salvation based on giving witness by habits of frugality,
hard work, and discipline into the essentially acquisitive spirit of
capitalism -- has been renewed in new key. On the centennial of _The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_, the political
universe is suddenly dominated by the spirit of what might be called
the *New Protestant Ethic* as the ideological reflex of the age of
networked capitalism and empire politics.
Animated by apocalyptic visions of the days of wrath announcing the
Second Coming of Christ, motivated by feverish aspirations to be
counted among the spiritually elect in the coming age of division
between the *Predestined* and the *Left Behind*, witness to the
vengeful spirit of the Old Testament, literal in its biblical
interpretations, monistic in its drive to hegemony among the world
religions, in active revolt against secularism, in bitter rebellion
against pluralism, the New Protestant Ethic is the foundational creed
of contemporary American politics.
We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought
that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles
between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out
that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the _Book of
Revelation_ emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every
political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public
life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life"
movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of
"same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem
cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of
American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with
faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily
sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of
culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its
theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical
ambitions.
Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency
represented by faith-based politics is the representative political
form of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of "completed
nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic)
phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted
with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always
sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will --
desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a
historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing
center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the
New Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty
formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective
proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in
violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New
Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the
crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is
reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the
semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To
those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent
instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted
that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of
(fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the
American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With
faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely
unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous -- an ethical
reconciliation between religion and technology in which the
apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the
power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is
now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of
life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential
life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension, world
culture.
Consequently, it may no longer be _The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism_ in its original Calvinist evocation of ascetic
propriety and regularity, nor capitalism any longer in its first
pioneering acquisitive expression. However, it appears to most
definitely be the New Protestant Ethic as the moral vision of
American politics in the 21st century -- intolerant, charismatic,
crusading. Breaking beyond the boundaries of private religious
belief, this fusion of religious fundamentalism and the
instrumentalities of increasingly cyberneticized imperial forms of
global warfare is, for example, the moral essence of the Bush
administration's political vision of "redemptive empire." Here,
"Reconstructionist" Christianity -- aggressive, projective,
fundamentalist -- is streamed instantly across the spacetime fabric
of American empire by a military intent both on "full-spectrum
domination of space" and, as recently announced, on "metabolic
domination" of the bodies of its global subjects. A dangerous fusion
then of fundamentalist Protestantism and cyber-war. In his first
press conference after the last American presidential election,
George W. Bush said: "I have earned political capital and I intend to
spend it."
There are intimations here: some known -- the sacrificial violence
directed against the cities of Iraq, recent reports of new versions
of experimental weapons -- poison gas and napalm -- used against the
citizens of Falluja, ominous warnings of adventurism to come in Iran;
and some stories unknown, unreported, already forgotten at the dark
edges of the real politics of empire -- the probable murder in a
southern motel room in December of Ray C. Lemme, a private
investigator, who it is reported was following the trail of The Five
Star Trust -- a secret fund out of Texas, Saudi Arabia, the
Phillipines -- which may have financed the widespread computer
manipulation of the last American election.[1] Thinking of these
events, I again allow those chilling words of George W. Bush to brush
against my thought: "I have earned political capital and I intend to
spend it."
Inauguration Day Blues & the Messianic Rapture of *End Times*
-------------------------------------------------------------
History calls us.
-- Condoleeza Rice, American Secretary of State
On Inauguration day, with the streets of Washington locked down tight
with security, paranoia in the fearful air, ABC television
commentators, probably trying to pass the time, remix visuals of
John Kerry with the laconic words: "At least in this country, we
don't line up losers against the wall and shoot them." The messianic
text of the inaugural speech proclaims America to be the moral
tutelary of global politics, self-appointed in a journey to bring
"freedom and democracy" to the world that may take many "generations
to come." President Bush's fateful political rhetoric -- "America's
vital interests and deepest beliefs are now one" -- carry with them a
sense of deep foreboding: intimations of future aggressions by a
rogue (imperial) state in the "name of liberty" and in the "image of
the maker of heaven and earth." God Bless America. God Bless the
American People.
Accordingly, the question: What would it mean to think American
politics from the perspective of *Born Again Ideology*? What new forms
of political interpretation would result from critical reflection
upon that strange, but very real, very intense relationship between
the resurfacing of religious fundamentalism in contemporary American
politics and cyber-warfare by which America projects its imperial
ambitions across the planet -- this epochal meeting in the American
political mind of its Puritan religious past and its increasingly
militarized version of the posthuman future? In a way that Weber
could only intimate we may well be already living in the ashes of The
Protestant Ethic: a supposedly dead resurrection-effect -- the
Protestant ethic -- hyper-moral, hyper-monistic, hyper-charismatic,
hyper-fundamentalist -- has suddenly come alive in the imperial
language of redemptive empire. Little wonder then that Frank Rich, in
a recent op-ed for ~The New York Times~, can write of the cultural
morbidity associated with "A Culture of Death, Not Life."
Mortality -- the more graphic, the merrier -- is the biggest
thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope,
we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month
now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms.
Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence, but as
necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top
entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time ~CSI~.
To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star,
Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to-cadaver
expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson
mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms.
Schiavo's.
-- Frank Rich, ~The New York Times~, April 10, 2005
As Rich concludes: "Once the culture of death at its most virulent
interests with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on
the living."
Accordingly, is the "culture of death" a symptomatic sign of the
psycho-geography of the American mind, or does the scent of death
attract such intense media fascination because it evokes a more
fundamental turn in political culture, namely that (terminal) point
when life itself gave up on the future, becoming born again in the
ecstatic (media) signs of its own death. Understood as the cultural
capstone of the New Protestant Ethic, this searing image of the
"culture of death" is perhaps less an exclusively media phenomenon
than a return to something autochthonous in American culture -- the
recurrence of 21st century America to the ruling passions of its 17th
century Puritan origins. Obsessive, judgmental, moralistic, hard
willed, messianic, intent on penalizing the signs of (earthly) life
in the name of eternal life: Calvinism, like Christianity in general,
always had about it a doubled fascination -- certainly with the
prospect of death as resurrection of the soul from the flesh of the
sinful body; but also the strict disciplining of Christian life as a
signifier of religious election. Propelled at the speed of (mass
media) light into popular culture, the spirit of Calvinism is
resurrected now as the scent of death which is the real attraction
and psychological driver of the "culture of life."
Specifically, virulent as only a resurrection-effect can be, the
Calvinist origins of the Protestant ethic have now successfully
mutated into the redemptive fundamentalist language of Born Again
Christianity. In contemporary political cartography, this is
perfectly symbolized as the division of America into the chromatics
of blue and red states. With this addition. Perhaps the red states
symbolize a certain psycho-geography in the American mind -- a
massive psychological reaction-formation -- imminent, subjective,
populist, faith-based -- which once linked with the instrumentalities
of power -- cyber-warfare, militarized globalization, elite-driven,
neo-conservative -- constitutes what we mean now by cultural fascism.
In the 20th century, the power libido of capitalist excess was
politically constrained by the bi-polar opposition of the Communist
Bloc. In the 21st century, the epoch initiated symbolically by the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the politics of empire -- capitalism
triumphant -- has no effective political check.
American empire, this spearhead of increasingly militarized
capitalism, is free at last to be the universal sign -- unipolar,
unchallenged, self-directing. It is finally at liberty to stamp the
political formula inscribed on American coins -- *E Pluribus Unum
(Out of Many, One)* -- onto global culture. Without its Communist
binary, without the necessity to maintain at least the rhetorical
illusion of political commitment to the ideals of democratic rights
and economic egalitarianism, empire capitalism swiftly backslides
into the specter of cultural fascism as its chosen future. Again, the
political formula is this: an imminent, populist reaction-formation
-- Born Again fundamentalism -- sweeping from the southern states to
the heart of the heartland of the industrial Midwest and west --
combines with a right-wing elitist agenda of imperial politics -- the
logic of cyber-warfare, "The American Project for the 21st Century,"
"full spectrum domination" -- to produce a politics of empire which
is incipiently authoritarian. Domestically, politically threatened
by the human rights struggles of gays and lesbians, this
psychological reaction-formation -- this virulent political backlash
against the politics of difference -- fuses emotionally around
issues of same-sex marriage, pro-choice, immigration, the restriction
of welfare rights and the weakening of gun control. Globally, it
projects itself outward in the language of ressentiment and
sacrificial violence -- a Born Again Ideology as the moral energy of
American empire -- what the American rhetorician and New England
politician, Daniel Webster, long ago called "Our Moral Republic."
Herewith, the language of religious fundamentalism merges with the
logistics of cyber-empire. Weber's dark prophecy concerning a bleak
future of "specialists without spirit midst this nullity which calls
itself a civilization" is not apparently our past, but the future.
Redemptive Violence and Panic Insecurity
----------------------------------------
This year, 2005, is a double anniversary. Not only the publication of
Weber's _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_ but also
the centennial of Albert Einstein's first publication of his special
theory of relativity. These events are not unrelated. It's my thesis
that Weber's grim vision of the "iron cage" has been projected into
history at Einstein's "speed of light." Today, the spirit of
capitalism in networked culture moves literally at the speed of life.
_The Protestant Ethic_ has been renewed in the redemptive, passionate
language of Born Again Christianity. What has happened this year,
this time, this day, is that we are witness now to a fateful
crossing-over of Born Again Christianity with the power of American
empire moving at the speed of Born Again light. That's Born Again
Ideology: networked imperial power animated by the disciplinary
energies of a now resurrected, redemptive Christianity moving at the
speed of darkness.
Long before Einstein's scientific vision of relativity theory,
America always was a quantum country. A culture of communication, it
has always privileged the speed of light as the emblematic sign of
its technological omnipotence. A culture of relativity, American
political economy could gain a global empire because it learned how
to transform the purely theoretical principle of instrumental
activism into the pragmatic business methods associated with the
"enhancement of adaptive capacity." A culture of violence, American
militarism split open the atom of colonizing power with the reactor
of crusading, missionary consciousness. A culture of foundational
political narratives, America's ruling rhetoric was never based upon
the modernist logic of binaries, the logic of either/or. Politically,
America is a quantum culture because it has always only been an
energy field simultaneously combining opposite changes of state. In
its rhetoric as much as in its politics, culture and economy, America
has always been both wave-form and particle. That is America's
secret, its seduction, its curse.
The signs of (quantum) America as simultaneously wave-form and
particle -- opposite changes of (cultural) state simultaneously --
are everywhere. Symbolically, it's the split visual energy field of
the American flag with its stars and stripes. Historically, it's the
received interpretation of the Civil War as a redemptive moral
struggle fusing opposing violent energy states -- Confederates and
Unionists -- in the continuing story of the American Republic.
Legislatively, it's the Federalist Papers proclaiming an impossible
(quantum) political theory with its vision of unequivocal
states-rights and strong central government. Culturally, it's the
governing contradiction of faith-based political populism and rule by
political elites. In the American official song-line, it's the
unspoken contradiction of a national anthem with inspiring
republican political rhetoric and impossibility of popular
participation. Einsteinian before Einstein, American exceptionalism
has everything to do with the fact that it is the political precursor
of quantum reality -- a contested style of government, a warring
field of religion and technology, a violent energy field of
individual subjectivity -- which anticipates by several centuries the
great scientific discoveries of modern times.
A nation of possibilities ("the American dream"), a country of
probabilities which absorbs the difference, America is and has always
been a historical singularity, a quantum culture, a spacetime fabric.
Breaking with European (binary) discourse, America has always
represented a fusion of pre-Enlightenment subjectivity and posthuman
technology, just waiting to happen. Consequently, if Einstein's
special theory of relativity could speculate that light is both
wave-form and particle simultaneously, that light is both/and,
opposite states simultaneously; that is only to repeat the political
formula that has animated American political culture from its Puritan
beginnings, namely that this would be a culture simultaneously of
redemptive violence and panic insecurity. And if Einstein could
theorize against and beyond Newton's modernist vision of an
entitative universe (where discrete objects interact at a distance)
that we live in a spacetime fabric moving at the speed of light, this
was only to repeat what had long been established in the founding
covenant of the United States. Namely, that this "good land" (in the
words of the Mayflower Compact) was visualized from its historical
inception as an imminently religious, imminently unified fabric of
spacetime moving literally at the transcendental speed of
(theological) light. And if quantum theorists after Einstein could
theorize that implosive change occurs in quantum culture by virtue of
a "tunneling effect" whereby warp holes suddenly and unpredictably
open up in the spacetime fabric, linking singularities from the past
and the future, that is exactly what is occurring in the politics of
American empire today. Here, a (religious) singularity from the past
(the Puritan origins of faith-based politics) has now literally
tunneled its way into the future. Fueled by the Born Again emotions
of religious premodernity, the American (cybernetic) posthuman opens
onto a future in which atavistic religious impulses stream across the
spacetime fabric of a technoculture moving at the speed of (digital)
light. If this appears contradictory, paradoxical, indeterminate,
that is probably because America is the first, and definitely most
singular, expression of the "quantum idea" politically realized.
Precipitated by the (symbolically) cataclysmic events of 9/11, by
waves of panic fear and calls for redemptive violence unleashed by
this sudden dissolution, this breaching, of the boundaries of the
sovereign body politic, a warp hole has opened up in the spacetime
fabric of American empire linking two singularities -- religious
fundamentalism and cybernetized global militarism -- into what
quantum physicists call a "common world-line." Literally, the psychic
shock of 9/11 -- aided and abetted by a neoconservative regime with a
preemptive plan of strategic military action already in place --
ripped wide open the unitary spacetime fabric of the American mind,
providing for a momentous fusion of two seemingly opposite ideas --
technological futurism and religious prophecy -- which, until that
moment, had maintained their solitude according to the rituals of
modernity. Instantly, the vengeance-seeking energies of the
(religious) past poured through the psychic fissure of 9/11 to take
flesh in the materiality of cybernetic warfare and crusading
empire-consciousness.
We all know the enlightenment fable of the supposed death of god. But
that story, the Nietzschean myth of the death of the sacred in our
(enlightenment) minds and with it the supposed triumph of the rights
of reason over religious sectarianism, is, it must be admitted,
increasingly specific to the particularities of European late
modernist experience. Like Hegel's vision of the owl of Minerva which
takes flight at dusk, the God of the New Testament may have died in
European consciousness in the age of progress precisely because a new
incarnation of God, the God of the Old Testament, fusing a crusading
politics of redemptive violence and a domestic tutelary of panic
insecurity, was being born by way of the American political
covenant.
The second coming of god then as the real politics of American
empire: a fateful meeting of the ancient prophecies of the Old
Testament with full-spectrum futurism of cyber-warfare. That's Born
Again Ideology, and this time, the rulers of the American covenant
intend to get it right, far right, with a style of political action
-- an unyielding politics based on preemptive action, a politics of
hand to mouth existence, constant military interventions, ceaselessly
stirring up turbulence, media provocations intended to provoke panic
fear among the domestic population for which redemptive violence is
the only recourse -- a style of political action which, with its
scapegoating and appeals to intolerant, charismatic leadership is
hauntingly reminiscent of what Leo Lowenthal, the Frankfurt School
theorist writing in exile during the 1940s, described as the imminent
strategy of authoritian ideologies.
Rapture and the American Mind
-----------------------------
To interpret the evangelical religious vision in American politics as
only a useful addendum to America's political/military ambitions is,
I believe, to miss to the point. The animating energy of the American
imperial project is essentially religious, not political. The ruling
American mythopoetic is eschatological. It is about 'end times.' It
is animated by a strictly religious vision of 'end times,' spellbound
by the imminence of the moment of 'rapture,' that moment when
political crisis unleashes the violence, desolation and destruction
of Armaggedon prophesied by the Book of Revelation, enthusiastically
reconstructionist, with the language of the Old Testament as its
psychological horizon, the emotional horizon, of American
imperialism. This is why it is of more than anecdotal interest that a
recent Marine assault operation south of Baghdad was code-named
"Operation Plymouth Rock," why American soldiers go into battle with
camouflage bibles, and why the poignancy of that recent television
image of Marines creating an impromtu baptismal fount out of spent
artillery shells in order to be anointed in their terms "in the
spirit of the Lord" during the fighting for Falluja.
When the first Pilgrims -- the Massachusetts Bay Colony -- crossed
the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th century, their
historical self-consciousness was truly ancient, not modern; informed
less by the constraints of economic necessity than by biblical
scripture: Matthew 5:14 to be exact which provided the scriptural
basis for John Winthrop's famous shipboard declaration of the
Mayflower Compact during that "great migration' wherein he spoke of
the colony's collective destiny as the creation of a 'City upon a
Hill.' These were a people of a biblical migration whose
psycho-geography was a fourth-order simulacra: a virtual symbolic
reality which had no reality referent other than its own closed
scriptural tautology -- literally a universal sign populated most
deeply with the voices of Daniel and Matthew, the seven-headed beasts
of the Book of Revelation and the four beasts rising from the ocean
of Daniel.
Listen anew to the Mayflower Compact, this early rhetoric of empire
which is literally burned into American governing political rhetoric,
from Daniel Webster's reinvocation of the spirit of Puritanism as the
essence of the American "Moral Republic" on the occasion of the
100th anniversary of the "first encounter" at Plymouth Rock,[2] to
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech
to the political rhetoric of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, father and son
and probably the next son too.
For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the
eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely
with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to
withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and
a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies
to speak evil of the ways of god all profess for God's sake; we
shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause
their prayers to be turned into Curses upon us till we be
consumed out of the good land whether we are going.[3]
Not just the yearning to be a City Upon a Hill, but something else
too, something little remarked in the inspiring glow surrounding the
phrase a "City Upon a Hill." Consider again that ominous sentence:
"If we deal falsely with our god... we shall be made a story and a
byword through the world" -- a fear of failure, an imminent
self-doubt, a sub-text of potential shame and evil and potential
curses.
There are two America's present in the rhetoric of the Mayflower
Compact: the much-remarked utopia of the rise of the American
Republic, but also the hard-scrabble, bible-belt, unforgiving
psychological territory of the fall -- a feared world of shame and
curses, an apocalyptic vision of desolation accompanying the
withdrawal of God from this "good land." With this, the familiar
story of the America Eden -- America as a religious covenant
signified by the image of itself as a "City Upon as Hill" -- flips
in the first instance into the cruel, imaginary country of the
American Gothic. Tainted from the very first moment of its
articulation with just the barest hint of panic insecurity, the
political rhetoric surrounding America as a "City Upon a Hill" has an
undetectable crack just beneath its psychic surface, namely, an
imminent fear of the catastrophe awaiting a "chosen people"
unfaithful to the terms of the religious covenant.
Consequently, even before the Puritans came out of the sea at
Plymouth Rock, the American political code was firmly set in place.
This would be a political culture dialectically bound by the rhythms
and tensions of the master codes of the rise and fall, redemptive
violence and panic insecurity, spasms of the "war spirit" and inertia
tinged by a melancholic sense of fatalism.[4] But if this is the
case, isn't the story of the American covenant a continuation of the
much older story of the rise and fall of cosmological experience?
Doesn't the Puritan invocation of the Mayflower Compact signify that
the real historical project of America would rise and fall with the
adequacy of its response to the problem of salvation? In this case,
the resurgence of faith-based politics in the 21st century would
represent less a moment of rupture with America's self-conception as
a secular technoculture driven by the speed of business than a
faithful return to the generative political problematic underlying
the American dream -- the more ancient dream of the desire for
salvation leavened by fear of banishment. And if the United States
has never managed to escape its genealogical roots in the salvation
myths of cosmology, this would indicate that its political future may
well unfold in accordance with the more enduring metaphysics of
cosmological experience, mediated through the specificities of
contemporary American culture: its ontology (salvational), its
epistemology (faith-based), its political organization (theocratic),
its aesthetic (the "culture of life"). In current American political
vernacular, issues of globalization and its consequences for a
multinational world are eclipsed by the specter of cosmology.
Curiously, the United States, this self-proclaimed, immensely
confident spearhead of technological modernity supposedly born as
the Canadian philosopher George Grant said in the age of progress,
has its mythic roots in a form of consciousness that is biblical,
intensely spiritual, disciplined, given over in the first instance
to frugality, moral uprightness, disciplined labor, and later to all
the excesses of redemptive violence and panic insecurity, consumer
ecstasy and bouts of economic over-indebtedness. Perhaps like
Foucault's theorization of the death of representation in _Ceci
n'est pas une pipe_, the Puritan Pilgrims never really crossed the
Atlantic. Perhaps in their minds, they were always one with the
children of Israel fleeing the evil Pharaoh: not the Egyptian
Pharaoh, but the royalist restoration in England and with it the
collapse of the Anglican Church into the apostasy of ceremony and
the reinstallation of religious hierarchy. These were refugees from
Babylon intent on reenacting in the New World what the historian,
Barbara Tuchman, has described as the essence of English Cromwellian
religious enthusiasm -- the power of the "bible and sword".[5] What
came ashore at Plymouth Rock was, I believe, the premonitory shadow
of the "last man" of Nietzsche's Zarathustra -- a fully armed
spirit of Nietzschean ressentiment: an exiled religious community
fleeing persecution in England and indifference in Holland,
separatist, infused with the crusading spirit of the religiously
elect, and most of all sexually perverse in its relationship to the
body. The founding of America never really was (exclusively) about
capitalist political economy, but about libidinal religious economy:
an obsessive, disciplinarian attitude to the body which read Old
Testament phantasmagoria into the body's desire, aggressively
policing the bodies of women, parishioners, indigenous people.
Separatist, resentful, hardened in the bitter anvil of European
religious struggles, filled with the spirit of the spiritually
elect, obsessed to the point of sexual perversity with suppressing
the body's libido, the Puritans came ashore as an eschatology -- a
hard, cold vision of end times -- just waiting its chance for full
historical expression.
Now much has been made of the capitalist origins of the American
experiment, but less so of the origins of American exceptionalism in
the psycho-geography of the Old Testament. The very terms which trace
the horizon of the so-called American dream -- the 'American
covenant,' 'City Upon the Hill' -- indicate that governing American
rhetoric is steeped in the ancient binaries of the Old Testament.
Everything else is, I believe, at present derivative: blasted away in
the contemporary fundamentalist turn to that primitive vision of the
spirit of Puritan nihilism which came out of the sea at Plymouth.
George W. Bush's appeal for the "expansion of freedom in all the
world" is the emblematic rhetoric of missionary consciousness, just
as much as the "culture of life" movement awakens in the American
mind a Puritan habit of mind which is intolerant and disciplinarian
in equal measure.
It is as if for one brief historical moment which has now been
effectively eclipsed, the light of political reason, hard won from
religious persecution and the exhaustion of Europe's unending
religious wars, dims again as the apocalyptic language of religious
eschatology asserts itself anew. Thought from a critical, liberal
perspective, the Puritan tradition represents that continuous, but
episodic moment, in the American mind wherein the forces of reaction
break out from the silence of many hearts fueled by ressentiment
into the public passions of zealotry and scapegoating -- witness the
deep continuity of America's historical experience of "culture of
backlash" politics -- the ideological specter of McCarthyism, the
politics of race-baiting, union-baiting, sex-baiting, or the recent
anti-terrorist campaigns codified into law by the US Patriot Act.
Understood from the liberal side of the dialectic of reason, this may
well be the case, but in terms of diagnosing the genealogy of the
politics of American empire, I do not believe this to be an adequate
theorization of the times in which we live.
We should listen anew, listen intently, to what the Puritans had to
say, for theirs is, I believe, the foundational creed of contemporary
American politics. Not in its specifics -- their calls for frugality
and self-discipline and bodily sequestration have disappeared under
the surface of consumer capitalism and the society of the spectacle.
Today, Nietzsche's "last man" runs on digital empty: electronically
interfaced by iPods, IM, and consumer prosthetics; hooked on porn,
soaps, cosmetic surgery, and Fox TV; bunkered down in front of plasma
TV, surround sound pumped up full; silently fascinated by media
reports of terrorists hunted down, captured, and imprisoned, perhaps
tortured; and morally gratified with scenes of military violence
visited upon an always accidental enemy.
But for all of this, the founding codes run deep: the spirit of
Puritanism has not disappeared. Provoked by the classic psychic
symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment -- "someone has to pay for my
feeling ill" -- the spirit of Puritanism may even have intensified.
The rhetoric of exceptionalism -- America as a City upon a Hill,
bonded in the beginning as in the present with a predestined
religious covenant with God -- is the essence of American political
self-consciousness. Call it what you will -- the American Dream, the
Founding Covenant, the "Redemptive Empire" -- this is an animating
rhetoric of moral exceptionalism which if it does provide (faithful
in advance to the later political theories of Carl Schmitt and
Giorgio Agamben)[6] a justification for the moral rightness of the
cold power of the executive imperial state in determining who is and
is not subject to the language of the exception, this should not
distract our vision from the essentially religious nature of the
American calling, nor from its uniqueness in linking together in the
experiment of a "Moral Republic" an essentially Old Testament version
of Christianity with a New Republican version of neo-conservative
politics. Appeals now for faith-based politics, faith-based public
policy, faith-based governance, commerce, science, and education do
not represent something strikingly new in American political
discourse, but constitute a return to an original unity of
essentially missionary discourses -- science and religious belief,
governance and faith -- which is the very essence of the new Covenant
that is America. In American discourse, there are no real opposites,
only clashing patterns in creative tension.
With the re-election of George W. Bush, the Puritan vision of America
as a City Upon a Hill finds its articulation in a renewed interest
in the language of a morally recharged, historically projective,
militarily crusading Christianity. For example, in the American
(electronic) homeland, theological visions of "Reconstructionist
Christianity"[7] suddenly proliferate with endless salvational
spin-offs, from specific religious theorizations of "theonomy"[8]
and "denominationalism"[9]to the apocalyptic vision of the Left
Behind armaggedon. Politicians, most of all, get into the
(theological) act. Literally. With Pat Robertson of the 700 Club,
President Bush is said to be a self-proclaimed 'premillenial
dispensionalist.'[10] As opposed to other warring camps in what is
described as "Reconstructionist Christiantity," (reconstructionist
because it believes in the power of Christian belief and action to
dramatically transform both personal identity and the course of
history itself by imposing the biblical strictures of the Old
Testament upon American society) President Bush is held to believe
that the moment of Rapture -- the 2nd advent of Christ will be
brought about by a certain constellation of political events
prophesied in the Old Testament, most famously the reunification of
Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon on the Temple
Mount. In combination with his closest White House advisors, he is
held to affirm his unique executive historical position to realize in
present-time the long-prophesied history of the 2nd advent. President
Bush is, in fact, viewed by some Born Again Christians as God's
chosen sign of the elect, the long-anticipated sign of the coming of
moment of Rapture, with its prophesied division of the transcendent
Christian elect from the vast multitude that will be "left behind."
The psychosis of these new pagans occupies the highest offices of the
politics of empire.
Which is why, I believe, in the present circumstance there can be so
little public protest at the suppression of traditional
constitutional guarantees of civil rights in favor of faith-based
politics and disciplinary power. With Born Again Ideology, the
secular rhetoric of American exceptionalism has been disappeared as
something superfluous to the essentially religious essence of the
American mind. Here, the Kantian project of universal freedom is
displaced in American political discourse by a vision of salvation
which, refusing to express itself in strictly religious terms, merges
perfectly with the political vocabulary necessary to the extension of
empire.
If it be objected that this is a temporary phenomenon, I would note
that the spirit of Rapture has always been the enduring song of the
American homeland. Call it what you will -- the steely belief of the
original Puritans that they were less founders of a new political
colony than a moment of redemptive renewal, a reinvocation in the
wilderness, of an ancient religious compact (America literally as the
new Jerusalem); evangelical revivalism in the backwoods religious
tents of 18th and 19th century America; or those appeals to empire
from the litany of Manifest Destiny to contemporary visions of
Redemptive Empire; America has always been an essentially religious
cosmology, wrapped in the shell of technology. Consequently, could it
be that in the contemporary political juncture, American
exceptionalism is less understandable in terms of traditional
political imperialism than a violent effort to breed the objective
worldwide crisis necessary to biblical revelation, to the Moment of
Rapture?
Vampire Puritans
----------------
In his brilliant study of American classical philosophy as a moral
quest, _The Wilderness and the City_,[11] the political theorist,
Michael A. Weinstein, proposed this discerning thesis about the
foundational logic of American society. For Weinstein, the American
mind has always oscillated between two extremes -- between the "war
spirit" and spirit of "acedia." Here, American exceptionalism is
rooted in classically split consciousness veering between a raging
"war spirit" (which, as de Toqueville noted set out to conquer the
continental wilderness with a bible in one hand and an axe in the
other); and panic fear (tempered by melancholic self-doubt)
concerning the imminent dissolution of the boundaries of the self.
Exploring the fundamental tension between American naturalists --
John Dewey and George Santayana -- and American vitalists -- Josiah
Royce and C.S. Peirce -- with William James' will to pragmatism as
their philosophical mediation, Weinstein asks whether the essence of
American experience is not an ontology of "hatred of existence" --
covered up by aggressive displays of a veneer of frenzied activism
over the reality of panic fear. As Weinstein states:
The challenge for the modern spirit today is to pass through
Nietzsche's trial of world-sickness. American culture, which is
the last outpost of Western individualism, has evaded
Nietzsche's insight into the hatred for their own existence when
the veils of piety have been lifted from their awareness. Among
the American classical philosophers only William James came
close to the Nietzschean phenomenology of the spirit, but he
drew back in horror from reflection of his panic fear and chose
to stimulate in other people a will to believe.[12]
The gravest of ills today is the massive aggregation of the weak
into organized complexes that trample on the disorganized
weak... There is a near universal sense of injury in America
today, a will on the part of many to "get even." This sense of
declining life, as Nietzsche's analysis predicts, a bitterness
that is often overt but that even more frequently hides a
brittle piety.[13]
Reflecting upon Weinstein's understanding of the moral basis of
American exceptionalism as "brittle piety" and 'hatred of existence,"
could it be that the Puritans of the Mayflower Compact with their
intense self-consciousness as Old Testament prophets, engaged in
their own terms in a "Great Migration" across the waters of the new
Red Sea -- the Atlantic -- fleeing an evil Pharaoh (the royalist
restoration in England) brought to the shores of Plymouth Rock
something very different, more chilling in its implications for its
vision of "end times?" Before the "bitterness" and "brittle piety"
that have come to typify Nietzsche's last man in the contemporary age
of "declining life," I wonder if the Mayflower Compact was not the
language of vampire-speak, spirit possession, a strange
extra-terrestrial, extra-historical, extra-juridical language of the
Old Testament, steeped in strong emotions of exile, resentment,
vengeance, and optimism. Did the Puritans cross the Atlantic Ocean or
the Red Sea? What was the Great Migration? Did they ever really
settle America the land, or was America for them always something
intermediary, spectral, a material instrument, a Great Migration, on
the way to a final homecoming with the righteous god. With the
Puritans, are not we suddenly time-warped to the psycho-geography of
strange aliens?
We do know this. Social theorists such as Max Weber might later speak
of the convenient convergence of Puritan habits of work --
self-discipline, frugality, hard work -- with the moral qualities
necessary to support capitalism as a historical project, once the
latter was liberated from the ethical constraints of religious
worship. This is most certainly the religio-capitalist territory of
Max Weber's _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_.
However, with the advantage of 21st century cultural hindsight,
perhaps we can now add a small, but important, vampire modification
to Weber's famous thesis. Could it be that American capitalism is a
direct extension of an earlier religious impulse, namely the double
necessity of first making of everything a 'great migration' (what
Nietzsche would later call a 'crossing-over, a gamble, a passage over
the abyss); and a will to nihilation energized by the 'hatred of
existence' which was the essence of Puritan psycho-geography --
hatred of the body, hatred of nature, hatred of Europe, hatred of the
reinstallation of Catholic ceremonial rituals in Anglicanism, hatred
of life itself. Long before the post-structural reflections of
Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray and Lyotard, the Puritans of the
Mayflower Compact were the first semioticians of American experience,
prophetic embodiment of what is meant by a society of the "universal
sign." The collective identity of Puritanism was so fused, closed,
self-reinforcing, tautological, so circular in its symbolic exchange,
so sexually perverted in its disciplinary obsessions, so fetishistic
and cosmological that it could have only one possible result --
expand to fill the fabric of spacetime, or perish from this earth.
In the imaginary of Puritan eschatology, there is to be discovered
the fundamental grammar of the American way -- either succeed in the
will to empire, whether the sacred empire defined by the religious
compact or the "Redemptive Empire" of decidedly more recent
imperialist ambitions; or suffer the catastrophe of vanishing from
the face of the earth. No mediation is possible between redemptive
violence and panic fear. In Puritan futurism, America would either
subordinate the recalcitrant matter of earthly space and bodily flesh
to the eschatological language of end times or it would disappear.
Indeed, it was with good evangelical conscience that Puritan morality
justified the extermination of indigenous peoples and the
appropriation of their ancestral lands. As self-proclaimed founders
of the New Jerusalem, Puritans established what would quickly become
the American colonial pattern of demonizing indigenous peoples as
radical negation itself -- nothingness -- before relieving them,
first of their territories, then of their lives. While the Wampanoag
Nation in Massachusetts was the first victim of the Puritan crusade,
what might be called the Puritan model would soon be applied with
clinical savagery by the American military ag ainst all indigenous
inhabitants of Turtle Island. Ironically, redemptive violence and
panic fear may have bred that most European of all nihilisms --
Blake's "monstrous consciousness" -- in the Puritan mind and heart.
With the Puritans, what Nietzsche would later diagnose as the
distinctly European disease -- "Man" -- crossed the Atlantic to take
its revenge on the New Canaan of the America's. On that day in 1620
when the Puritan spirit rose from the sea at Plymouth Rock, something
very ancient in the story of human rage, something very bitter,
recalcitrant and viral, just aching for revenge, forced itself upon
the unsuspecting peoples, animals and land of Turtle Island. Beyond
their specific religious cosmology, Puritans were also, I would
claim, the unwitting carriers of an important particle of European
metaphysics -- the spirit of vengeance-seeking nihilism -- which, in
the crusading, salvational language of evangelical missionary
consciousness, they injected directly into "this good land" of
America.
Consequently, John Winthrop's vision of America as a "City upon a
Hill" may well be viewed as comprising the very essence of the
American dialectic -- a metaphysics of the war spirit and panic
insecurity -- conquer or perish. Here at last was a migrant people in
flight willing to stake their existence on a metaphysical gesture --
the spirit of the Puritan vampire -- who were not European, decidedly
not wholly human, never feudal nor modernist, strangely posthuman
perhaps. Similar to Augustine's _Confessions_ in the garden at
Cassiacium where the will to believe finally fused the Christian
trinity of will, emotion and intellect in the flesh of his own
subjectivity, the Puritan confession has burned its way into the
American personality: life itself as a 'great migration' -- a "going
across" the natural body to the biogenetic body, but also crossing
the bodies of economy, nature, society, politics, these libidinal
territories of an expanding empire, in pursuit of the saving grace of
redemptive violence. What came out of the ocean at Plymouth Rock was
a psychic precursor of faith-based American political culture: a
biblical spirit infused with feelings of discipline and revenge, as
implacable in its hatred of existence as it was motivated by yearning
for salvation from a sinful world.
It is, I believe, the primal spirit of the Puritan Vampire --
redemptive, violent, extra-terrestrial in its spiritual ambitions,
steeped in the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament -- it this
spirit of the Puritan Vampire which issues again through the
political rhetoric of faith-based politics. Here, "brittle piety" is
swept away by feverish faith. Individual "bitterness" is collectively
masked as the "culture of life" movement. "Hatred of existence" is
transformed into the missionary consciousness of the "redemptive
empire." Signs of the Puritan vampire are legion: from fundamentalist
faith in the vision of "premillenial dispensationalism" to the new
Covenant of the Mayflower Compact; from the current language of
crusading imperialism to Puritan beliefs in the necessary application
of redemptive violence against the body, particularly the unruly
bodies of outlaw women, witches, and sorcerers. Signs of the ecstatic
spirit of disciplinary Puritanism are everywhere: from the
military's obsession with sexual perversion -- Abu Ghreib rethought
now in the words of a Texas defense lawyer as normal "cheerleader
sports" to an almost fetishistic obsession among the "organized weak"
with purifying "traditional marriage" of the perceived "social
contamination" of gay and lesbian love. From delirious White House
ecstasy with visions of Armaggedon to the Puritan rapture of the New
Protestant Ethic, public life embodies a sense of time curving
backwards, with the spirit of the Puritan Vampire as the future of
faith-based politics.
Here is the moral essence of American triumphalism. Here is why
American empire, which may objectively -- strategically -- already
in rapid decline from economic over-indebtedness, military
over-expansion, media hubris, could also only be in its infancy.
Nietzsche once remarked of that strange creature we call a human
being that for all its resentment, cruelty, paranoia and fetishes,
for all of its panic fear of the inner abyss and desperate struggles
against the cage of its own moral conscience, it was a will, it was
a going forth, and "nothing besides." Stopping for a moment from
their game of wagers, the pantheon of gods took notice that with this
birth of the "human, all-too-human," something fundamentally new was
happening. But then Nietzsche was always the first philosopher of the
American mind. If he could prophecize that he would only be
understood posthumously, perhaps it was because his reflections on
the "last man" as the final outcome of the will to power would only
really take hold in the shadows of American empire in the 21st
century. Equally, Nietzsche's philosophical twin, Rene Girard, could
write so eloquently and truthfully about "sacrificial violence"[15]
because he too sensed the advent of the desolation of redemptive
violence with its cruel episodes of "scapegoating" and "sacrificial
violence" as the "end times" of Armaggedon. Strangers in their own
times, migrants of the darkness of intellectual imagination,
Nietzche's "last man" and Girard's "sacrificial violence" remain
strong psychic pulsars, pointing the way to the social apocalypse of
Puritan eschatology once resurrected in the form of faith-based
politics.
Notes:
------
[1] Wayne Madsen, "Texas to Florida: White House-linked Software
Operation Paid for "Vote Switching" Software
(http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/
120604madsen.html)
[2] Daniel Webster's Plymouth Oration
(http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dwebster/speeches/plymouth-oration.html)
[3] John Winthrop's City Upon a Hill, 1630
(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm)
[4] For a brilliant account of the migration of American political
thought between the war spirit and acedia, see Michael A. Weinstein,
_The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a
Moral Quest_, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
[5] Barbara W. Tuchman, _Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from
the Bronze Age to Balfour_, New York: Ballantine Books, 1984.
[6] Carl Schmitt, _The Concept of the Political_, translation,
introduction and notes by George Schwab, New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press,1976. Giorgio Agamben, _Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life_, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen,
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998.
[7] For an excellent account of the vision of Reconstructionist
Christianity, see: Robert Parsons, "Christian Reconstruction: A Call
for Reformation and Renewal,"
(http://atheism.about.com/od/reconstructionist/)
[8] For an affirmative account of the religious tenets of theonomy,
see: Jay Rogers, "What is Theonomy?
(http://www.forerunner.com/theofaq.html). For a critical account of
the politics of theonomy, see: "What is Theonomy?
(http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/2850/Theonomy.html)
[9] D.G. Tinder, "Denominationalism,"
(http://mb-soft.com/believe/text/denomina.htm)
[10] For a critical reflection on the political implications of
premillenial dispensationalism, see:
http://www.gsenet.org/newsstnd/rch.php
[11] Ibid; Weinstein, _The Wilderness and the City_. For a compelling
account of American classical philosophy as a continuing response to
the "death of God in the West," see Chapter 7, "American Philosophy
and Modern Individualism," (pp.129-156) where Weinstein argues that
American thought, substituting the collective ideal of 'society' for
God, is expressed in "successive appeals for deliverance to the
community and... parallel critiques of the war-spirit," (p. 136).
[12] Weinstein, p. 154.
[13] Weinstein, p. 155.
[14] For a contemporary account of the Wampanoag struggle which
continues to this day and which most recently involved a majority US
court decision that the Wampanoag were "not a tribe" for land
repatriation purposes see: (http://www.inphone.com/seahome.html)
[15] For his theorization of sacrificial violence under the sign of
the "scapegoat," see: Rene Girard, _The Scapegoat_, trans. Yvonne
Freccaro, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and
Theory, University of Victoria (Canada), and Director, Pacific Centre
for Technology and Culture (PACTAC). With Marilouise Kroker he
co-edits _CTheory_.
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