salvation – GV Loewen

Sin Agog

Sin Agog (the radical propriety of conversion)

It is a not uncommon feature of our finitude to accrue to oneself a sense of both regret and redemption. This is, for us, primarily a Christian frame of reference, for there is but fate inexorable and penance pedantic in the Greek moral mythos, and even in that Egyptian, from which the Christian sensibility is ultimately derived, one finds that living-on produces only the ledger by which Horus judges whether or not the soul has lived up to its predetermined value, or perhaps has even exceeded it. Thus, there is no redemptive force in pre-Christian moral cosmology. But we can ask, why redemption at all? What have I done, or not done, in this life such that I would require some soteriological entry into the next? Of course, if there is no ‘next’ phase of existence, redemption becomes purely a private matter, and it would be to my own person as an expression of the call to conscience afore which I would stand and be tested. For us today, this test is no longer a moral one, but one of public ethics to which the private self must for the time being bend its will and desire.

We have, however, a mythopoetic landscape first to tread, and like all mythic narrative, hyperbole and metaphor rule the day. Confessionals, pioneered by Saul into Paul in terms of posterity – Peter immediately felt remorse in realizing he had, in the most Greek sense, fulfilled Jesus’ simple declaration regarding denying Him thrice , but this was a private comprehension and never meant to be taken even as a Christian viewpoint; it was not prophecy in the Judaic sense nor prescient in that pre-agrarian, nor was it to be made into a foundation for a conversion event – and given an entire discourse, that of subjectivity, by Augustine. Before one is born again, one’s subjectivity is one of subjection; we have yet to object to ourselves as being mere objects in another’s eyes. The twice-born are not elites, merely those who have been enlightened; they are the to-be-saved, and form a pool of willing souls who have undergone the sternest of earthly examinations. Self-examination is also not Christian, but the entire rationale for submitting oneself to this perhaps daily evaluation shifts from the now transient Greek ground, moving from mythic and poetic thought to that historical and linguistic, scientific and aesthetic, to one of a kind of dress-rehearsal for judgment day, once again Egyptian in pedigree. One ideally would not appear before God wearing the dross of any worldly subjection, including the objection others make at our very existence.

In order to prepare oneself for potential salvation then, one needs to undergo conversion. In the Gospels, we have but a kind of charismatic convincing or yet baptism. One, there is yet no church to which to convert, nor even a systematic set of beliefs to adopt. Two, there are no figures who preach conversion as a liminality, or as an event in its own right. One is immediately transformed in Jesus’ presence, whether the interlocutor is beset with sin or blight, disease or infamy. This is Socratic dialogue taken in its most guttural, but also radically flattened-out, manner. There is no philosophical argument to be made or accepted, no dialectic, and no evaluating audience. The thesis is how I have lived, the antithesis how I must live from now on, and there is no further Aufheben yielding a synthesis,. The entire thesis must in fact be discarded in conversion; it is the patently non-dialectical process. Jesus presents his case not as a position within discourse, but one that hails from a source beyond all human thought. Yes, he certainly humanizes the glad tidings of redemption through faith, but their contents and their force emanate entirely from a non-human sphere. Like any visionary, Jesus is met with incredulity at times, and his message finds its most receptive ears amongst the marginal, the last who shall be first in the new leaven of things. But with Paul, who has, in spite of himself, pronounced his own conversion event and thence makes it into that apical ancestor of all further such experiences – if we are to take up the faith and become ‘twice-born’ we must picture ourselves on the road to Damascus, as the very first person to be converted – not only does his name change – this hallmark is found even in social contract societies within the rites of puberty and of death and has nothing to do with religion at all – he gains repute through taking up the message of the Gospels, with a variety of political adumbrations, no doubt, but yet with a sense of keen sincerity and concern for a wider humanity, the kernel of which is first seen with Alexander and his sense of cosmopolitanism.

This idea of ‘humanity’, so dear to us today as an ideal in spite of our reckless shunning of it in practice, is also something that can be queried. For if the road to salvation demands conversion, we must first reflect upon how our previous life, also human, does not and has not measured up to the new ethical standards of late presented to us. Youth can be baptized, but they cannot, in truth, become ‘converts’, for conversion, by its very character, must have material through which a point-by-point comparison may be made between the first born life and that twice born. This requires time served; indeed, one might suggest that conversion only is authentically itself completed by living the new life for some few years so that the comparative analysis itself may be completed. There is thus a conversion ‘event’, but this is not at all equal to conversion as an experience. The road to Damascus introduces the conversion experience, but only the Pauline epistles complete it. In them, we find references to not only how the author blanches at his previous life and the sometimes nasty actions which populate it, we also see that he widens his self-scrutiny to the cultures around him, be they Greek, Hebrew, or Roman. An ethnic chameleon himself, Paul is roused to rhetorical force in the face not so much of active resistance but rather of a placid disinterest. He is aware, as is any good orator, that resistance means that the other has begun to consider one’s arguments, whereas the apathetic or yet the diffident are much more at risk for missing their Kerygmatic content. Paul imparts the crucial idea that the new church shall not discriminate against any human being; all can convert to Christianity and indeed, all should do so post-haste.

But the other chief sensibility that the epistles own and thus introduce to Western discourse is that of the existential anxiety. This was non-existent for the Greeks, whose fates were predetermined and whose notion of Hades included only a one-way ticket. Anxiety is today understood as an elemental aspect of the Being of Dasein, but the Pauline version specifically addresses me to attend to how I have lived and the reasons for my life. Instead of desirefully feeling agog within our sinful subsistence, we must shed the very desire for that kind of life; we must, in our newly examined life, feel agog at the nature of sin itself, and thus question why on earth I have participated in it. This intensely interested concernfulness, the very source-point of Heideggerean ‘guilt’ – a term which he takes great, but to me, unconvincing, pains to make value-neutral – is shifted, in the process of the conversion event, from reveling in sin to examining it. And it is precisely this shift which, though a politics in Paul, becomes a full-fledged discourse with Augustine.

Yet we are not quite as fully absent from mythical narrative, even here. For Augustine consistently overdoes it, making his first born life out to be a veritable salmagundi of secularist sin. I once overheard one student who was appalled that he was having sex with a twelve-year old girl, but of course during this time period such an age was very much an adult; Mary was the same age when carrying Jesus. It is of interest that Augustine’s own audience would have found fault with different aspects of his self-examination than we today, but this makes for an enduring testament, allowing for errors of interpretation along the way. At the end of the day, however, we have no idea what Augustine did or did not get up to in his younger years, and this function of memoir in general – we must take the author’s statements at face value or, at the very least, as well-intentioned euphemisms to be used as both metaphorical models at first of – the pre-conversion life – and thence for – the newly ‘good’ life of the twice-born – is another invention of his. The essential tension which resides in subjective narrative is that it is always an amalgam of memory and imagination, of reality and fantasy, and the admixture very much depends on what kind of message one desires to communicate. The confession as part of conversion begins with Augustine and has had a great many mimics since. But as with any literary or even aesthetic form more generally, it can truly only be ‘done’ once. Given this, what are we to make of its historical appearance?

It most forceful sensibility is one of a radical propriety. I must come to own my prior life, warts and all, and to thence possess its experience as an absolute benchmark against which my new behavior and outlook can be measured. In conserving the notion of sin, mainly past but still possible for me, I can evaluate each present action through the comparison with the perduring shadow sin casts over human outcomes. Just because I have undergone a rite of passage, that I am a convert, does not mean that I am exempt from sin, only that I have a powerful manner of adjudicating it in my life and perhaps in those of others as well, which I could not have had before the conversion event. Just so, I must also learn to own this new ability; I must exercise just as radical a propriety over self-examination in the light of redemption as I do over the haunted landscape of my sinful past life. That life is over, but sin itself remains, since it is after all its own force, and does not accrue especially to me nor does it regard me as its only vehicle. And just as I was merely another once-born sinner, so too I now realize that in the light of a redemptive soteriology, I learn to take the human being in me as an end in itself; neither a means for other’s ends in subjection, nor as a way to judge others as fitting mine own through objectification. Thus the concept which is given the truest shift is neither that of sin nor even of action, but rather of interest; it is the orientation of my being agog that is transmuted from reveling to evaluating.

In sum, conversion is both an event and an experience. It is a point and a series. It contains the limen of the born-again but in so doing, does not purge the actual presence of sin, but instead reorients my interest toward it. I no longer desire it as an ‘in itself’, even if I may yet sin as my twice-born selfhood, but I rather desire to examine it and evaluate it as an action in the world. In conversion I move away from the shadowy essence of sin in order to actively grapple with its existence, in my life and in that of others. In the model of which the confessional representation of conversion begins, I am all agog within sin and because of it, but in the model for with which this same narrative structure concludes, my intense interest is in sin as a space that I may live without, and that in both senses of the term. Conversion excerpts us from the sinful life but does not exempt us from examining the character of sin which remains as part of my general humanity. If we take this language in its historical and thus wider sense, our conversion ethics of today allows us to critically examine our entire way of life and how it pronounces, in part, a misery upon others. ‘Sin’ in modernity orbits round injustice and inequality and is thus no longer radically subjective in its record. Even so, we must attempt to own it as if it were my personal error; the kind of mistake reserved for those whose conscience remains once-born.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Coincidence and Signage

Coincidence and Signage (The ‘prose of the world’ revisited)

Wherever I go, I observe signs. Many are simply functional; some explaining traffic flow, keeping everyone safely moving in the appropriate directions. Other like signage would include the shingles of business and government, church and non-profit. These are basic locational signs, some with directions, which are then duplicated at the sites themselves. Without directional signage, daily life would become a hierarchical jumble of conflicting ‘local knowledge’; those having lived in a neighborhood or city having a distinct advantage over newcomers. Even so, such signage is yet handy for the experienced city-dweller, and all the more so, for those who venture forth from urban areas into those rural. Function is seldom turned to form at this level of the sign, and only when the state is anxious to make this or that political declaration, itself a sign of a different dimension, does directional signage become a vehicle for ideology.

The other major type of signage available to us in our contemporary scene is that of marketing. It too is primarily functional, but not entirely. While one could perhaps make a gentle argument that directional and locational signage betrays our penchant for social order in its most general, even vaguest, sense, advertising carries a double intent somewhat more bodily. While first oriented to only selling a product or a service, the presence of advertising is after all also a function of a specific economic sensibility, that of capital, wherein entrepreneurs compete for market and franchise through advertising. Here, the undertone of ideology is slightly more manifest than in mere locational and directional signage, for the very rubric of capital is contained within the ad, whereas all known cultures have some semblance of basic order about them, and one that is generally seen as value neutral. Running a red light might well get the communist killed as effectively as it would the capitalist. This said, advertising is not as neutral, and when I recently saw an ad on a nearby campus exhorting students to join the Marxist society I was bemused by its patent irony. It is clear that if one desires to share anything at all, advertising is the most effective way to do it, lending credence to the everyday sense we have that the ubiquity of sheer shill is nothing more than what can be taken from it at face value.

But the combination of signage and outcome lends to us another level of sensate; we are used to every sign being utterly honest about its information and direction. When our digital maps are slow to update, we can get frustrated, as this or that business or other site has, in the interim, moved or simply vanished. If I am on such and such street then I expect to find this or that address along it. I am aware, of course, that larger-scale businesses and other like concerns have more than one location, and so I must sift accordingly, but this is a very different challenge than not being able to find a site at all. I read a piece of signage, and through my success in following its directions, I transform that signage into a sign; that is, its information imparted becomes a force in my life, and one that has led to success. We are quite used to this tacit process of transformation and think nothing of it in the day-to-day. But its presence in our consciousness has a profound impact on how we understand and give meaning to the world more widely, as well as to the myriad of chance interactions we encounter in our smaller lives. This is so because we have already mastered, within our normative and standard rubric of routine, the ability to read the world as if it were a text.

Foucault, as a prologue to his famed book. The Order of Things, (1966), speaks of the medieval period being dominated by a worldview that based itself upon the ‘prose of the world’. Herein, signs were everywhere, just as is in our time, signage. Signs of what, exactly? Simply put, signs that the world was an autograph creation of God. God’s work spoke for itself, in a further sense, but if one desired to accrue meaningfulness to this odd dynamic of the otherworld and the this-world, one had to learn to ‘read off’ that signature which marked a great variety of phenomena. Our interpretation of the divine hand as quill thus re-marked, more than it did simply remark upon, that same world, creating an exegetically inclined prose. The natural world had become its own scripture. Foucault’s own point is that this worldview was about to give way to the incipient version of our own, wherein sign devolves to mere signage, and the world worlds its own way, apart from either human or divine design. Here, I want to suggest that the presence of the prose of the world has not in fact been utterly overtaken by modernity, but has rather been transmuted into what, even as a baser metal than the ideals of the alchemical mindset, is still functioning as sign and indeed, even signatory.

A modernist glance might note that God too had to advertise His works, and so marketing has in fact a longer history than it might seem, but this would ignore the contrast between a source who very much had the time to wait for His market to show authentic interest in the message being marketed, as well as the theological fact that whether or not one was ‘sold’ by its soteriological suasion, the events of the apocalypse and judgment would occur in any case. This is manifestly not the condition for contemporary marketers, hence their sometimes desperate haste and powerful panache present in their attempts to convince us that their own version of salvation is worth our while, and for that matter, our money. But advertising firms owe the majority of their success not to their inventive signage but rather to the more profound and historical fact that we are used to reading signage as if it were a sign. Advertising would have no power over us without this ability, and this interpretative skill, itself sourced in the primordial need for human beings to make their mortal lives meaningful and thus tolerable in some manner, was brought to its most sophisticated head during the medieval period.

Anything could be a sign. What today we mainly put down to chance, happenstance, and more strongly, coincidence or yet the déja vu of the psychologists, was for our ancestors something to be noted. Like the Logos itself, not all of which could be directly understood by humanity, the prose of the world was both present and complete. Our human faculties, on the one hand, could access some of its truths, but our human failings, on the other, prohibited an holistic comprehension of the mind of God. Indeed, we only see the charlatan in the place of the mystagogue in today’s world, wherein those who claim to know the mind of God and thus its divine will as well, are generally seen for what they are. We have no record of such figures existing in previous eras, and this makes sense insofar as they had the open book of God’s creation and will before them, and all had the same access thereto. It was the lot of the gnostic to at first make a claim about knowing the truth of things in essence and thenceforth attempt to vouchsafe such a venture through the interpretation of the world as a complement to scripture. There was certainly seen to be a symbiosis between the two, but the addition of the world as a source of God’s truth and will greatly amplified the presence of a form of cultural literacy during the related historical periods, dominated as they were by the second wave of agrarianism, that of the feudal order in the West.

It is this very literacy that advertising now uses, rather unbeknownst to itself. Mammon has perhaps replaced Yahweh, especially amongst the latter’s original acolytes, we might gently suggest, but Yahweh seldom advertised in any indirect way. No, He made demands, followed or not, but one’s that all could understand if not exactly relate to. The world cast as a prose document has its source in the God who didn’t beat around the burning bush, so to speak. Yahweh’s competitors were often obfuscatory; meaning was obscure and thus meaningfulness a chore. It is this simplicity of demand that modern marketers borrow from the Judaic dynamic, as well as the sense that they would become as Yahweh was; a mascot for a better life.

For advertising in capital ultimately sells us its own form of earthly salvation. ‘Better living’ is its mantra, status only its mantle. What we demand from our own mode of production is worldly success, just as did the Calvinists who, not at all by coincidence, imagined that such itself would be none other than a sign of the divine salvation to come. They were to be saved, just as were the chosen people before them. It is confusing at the level of symbolics, to say the least, that the very people who so disdained the Jews sought to so emulate their situation. No doubt the worldly competition within the mercantile affairs of incipient capital was projected upon the deeper canvas of a competition for a reserved place in paradise. It was no more ludicrous for the originally marginal community of sectarians to claim that worldly wealth was a sign of God’s favor and grace than it was for a marginal ethnicity to claim for itself salvation by equally earthly kinship. But all such claims must be taken in the context of both the anxiousness that accompanies our daily rounds and the existential anxiety that is the hallmark of the human condition more generally. If such rationalizations appear as nonsensical today, it is due to our own displacing of such an anxiety into our demand for a better life in the here and now.

Does then advertising have the grace to make that desire into reality? Perhaps not by itself, but what it does do is reduce the level of happenstance in our mundane lives so that we might be able to more appreciate the possible irruptive presence of authentic signs into that same life. Coincidence is, at base, constructed from the sameness that marks mundanity just as did God’s autograph mark the medieval world. Reason in that latter and now mostly absent world was of a superior form of consciousness, but today it comes across as the mere rationalization of an inferior form. With abundant irony, it is marketing which today mimics the call to conscience which once animated an entire culture’s aspirations. Can we then use this seemingly omnipotent source of signage in capital to both engender a better material condition for all, but as well, and more deeply, engage in a latter-day eschatological ecumenism, one in which there is represenced the sense that each of us, as a human being, are subject to the same ultimate forces and are the object of the same essential conditions?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Valkyrie Eleison

Valkyrie Eleison (The Ultimate Narcissism)

But slight are they, unworthy a word;

still whole are my limbs and trustily knit.

If but half so well as my arm

shield and spear had availed me,

ne’er from foe had I fled;

Wagner, The Valkyries, Act one, Scene one

Of late, with visions of the human apocalypse a major theme in entertainment fiction, the mystery of our collective end made commodity and just in time, the wealthy among us seek to transcend their destinies by constructing heavily fortified villas in remote places, staffed by select groups of trusted friends and what-have-you, to be driven around – touring the wasteland which they believe to be our future – in equally adept vehicles, armored, with six wheels and powered by, well, whatever rapidly dwindling fuel supplies remain. Corporations which actually build these latter-day Babelian monsters report more business than they can handle, not that they are sorrowful in the least. For the bottom line of the dread-mongers trade is the ecstasy of an ejaculation of blood.

It is a central tenet of Calvinism to imagine that if one is materially successful in this world, that it should be taken as sign of one’s elect status in the then novel Protestant soteriological doctrine. Salvation was always a mystery to this point. One did not know, and could not know, who was to be saved and who was to be damned. Now that the wealthy can save themselves, so they think, their investment in a bedamned future severs any Gordian knot traditionally associated with the divine mystery. And this not only in Christian belief but also in numerous Pre-Christian cultures, including those Nordic. The Valkyries, the choosers of the slain in battle and thus also, by definition, choosing those who will live to fight another day, are famously celebrated in the Wagnerian epic Ring Cycle. One of the most gripping scenes in film history has their ‘Ride’, from Act III of Die Walküre, providing the soundtrack for a vicious helicopter gunship attack in Apocalypse Now! (1979). But none of this has any relevance beyond the framework of the conflict between the happenstance of death in human life and the human aspiration to live on in its face.

Whirligig Valkyries or no, death, sudden and irretrievable, is the daily potential lot of anyone who lives. What the wealthy have decided, in their flight before this essential condition, is that they will build for themselves an impenetrable shield against not death per se, since even after the end of the world they too will still die, likely alone and starving in their obscure castles, but rather against chance itself. So it is not the idea that one has attempted to cheat death that is so despicable about their actions, but rather that they believe themselves to be worthy of life alone, outside of death; that they are superior to the rest of us simply because of the ‘signage’ of their logistical capacities, their entrepreneurial genius, their work ethic, their dumb luck, their inheritances, their elite marriage circles or any combination aforementioned. Instead of channeling their wealth and skills back into the world which gave them their fluky birth, in order to help save the species from itself, they, with a calculation both patent and precise, turn their backs on we lower forms of life. In interview, their contractors – who of course do not name their clients, some of whom are celebrities after all – say that these people seek escape not even from disaster of whatever type, but from other human beings. This is what they actually state as the reason for hiring such shadow-builders. The wealthy elites are quite aware of our resentment towards them, quite understanding of the dynamics of capital, and quite shy about fully trusting governments and their policing forces to ensure the longitudinal protection of their wealth. They not only build redoubts, they assuage their own recurring doubts by also contracting private militia, ex-military retirees turned post-imperial soldiers of fortune. Call their cliques night watchmen on amphetamines, perhaps. Will these trusty, if well-paid, dogs also benefit from being housed inside the structures they must risk their lives, supposedly, to protect?

The entire enterprise would be laughable if it were not the case that these elites see the world-joke being placed squarely upon us. Their utter lack of conscience, social or ethical or yet historical, places they themselves in the role of the court jester; observant, unwilling to commit, saying the things no others can say, for which of the rest of us would not choose as they have done, if we could only do so? But in fact, there are those whose concern is with the authentic human future, whose care is for the species-essence and for their human fellow. The idea of the apocalypse makes for thrilling fiction, apparently, but only the most cynical sociopath wills its reality. Even a Putin does not will it, and seeks to avoid it by bluff and bluster as well as by old-fashioned hammer-and-tongs combat over which the truer Valkyries still range. The sociopaths, including both the mock-Christian evangelist who sloughs off the responsibility for the ‘end times’ on an unwilling deity, as well as the neurotic and self-absorbed celebrity or entrepreneur, who feels strongly that the rest of us can really well go to hell, are fortunately few in number and tend not to seek political office. Even so, their presence constitutes an undergrowth of amorality that any sane society would shun. We have, in our ardor for fantasy both epic, as in that religious, and vulgar, as in that capitalist, indeed created this elite ourselves, and thus must bear the burden of its deepening legacy.

For those elites who do not seek egress from the responsibility they share with all those who live today, we might ask that they engage in their own capitalist combat and take out the companies whose leadership promotes self-seeking evil; whose directors hide themselves away from the too-public eye; whose founders imagine themselves immortal at our expense. Can one think that a Warren Buffet or a Bill Gates has a Wolf’s Lair awaiting their last call? A William Shatner, a Patrick Stewart? Perhaps we do not know, in any real sense, the famous and the celebrated. But what we do know is that increasing numbers of lesser lights are becoming more and more obsessed, not about the survival of the species, but rather about merely their own, paltry shadow-sylphs, half-souled dwarves whose only comfort is to live again within the penumbra of personhood, dwelling in a world made the darker by their narcissistic madness.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, health, religion, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Te Deum Tedium

Te Deum Tedium (Godforsaken Talk)

The objective factors in the ascendancy of neo-fascism in our times are well known. The demographics of biopower, the two-income earning family as a general necessity, the marginalization of male labor, the public appearance of alternative family and community due to technological advances in logistics and the military, and so on. But none of these, either alone or together, should be enough to convince a human being that their world is coming to an end. Change, certainly, but not apocalypse. So if more macro and historical factors have been exhausted without resolving explanation at this human level, what other variables might be present that would turn this specifically difficult trick?

I am going to suggest here that there is one such stressor in particular, which in turn contributes to an existential anxiety; the kind of concern that leads a person to believe in the coming void, and not merely become frustrated that the world has left one behind. For the Calvinists, it was their earthly or material conditions which were taken to be a sign that they themselves were to be saved, that they were of the elect. The Reformation had brought with it a renewed interest in the sense that one could not know of one’s fate until and unless the day of judgment arrived. One’s Christian destiny was predetermined, true enough, but one lived on in ignorance of the final result of this prejudgment. Originally adopted and thence adapted from the Egyptian scales of judgment, with Horus asking the shade if it had struck a balance between its potential and its acts in life – the few who punched above their ethical weight class were honored in the afterlife, but woe to those who did not rise even to their own gifts, no matter how slight – the Christian version of evaluation eventually did not need to ask, per se, but rather one was simply informed of one’s record upon death. So a person, thence a culture, for the apocalypse, a personal judgment writ large and an historical one completing the narrative in the ‘end of all history’, was to evaluate an entire species’ accomplishments and its deficits alike. To be found wanting as a soul within the arc of the Oversoul was to determine one’s final fate.

And for all eternity. How could there then be a more stimulating motive to make one’s earthly existence into a paragon of the good? The Reformation sectarians who invented the Protestant Work Ethic could in no way find fulfilling the idea that one could not, in principle know anything at all about one’s destiny. Just as there had been signs of God’s presence in the world, the narrative of the Medieval period suggestive in the sense of the authorship, the creation, of that world as being autographed by a divine hand, so there must be similar signage which pointed to, in an individuated sense this time, a greater meaning for one’s life. This sensibility, originally regionally Dutch alone, rapidly spread, through the Anabaptists and into North America with the Puritans and by the early 18^th century, the Baptists themselves. It should be recalled that this American church, now associated with the historic South and Mid-West, had its origins squarely in the Yankee mindset, with the very first Baptist church, which is still standing in Providence. This is not insignificant, for it was the unique amalgam of faith and works which animates much Christian orientation in today’s America, that could only have been forged in the revitalized region of Puritanism and its work ethic. Indeed, part of the Salem effect, perhaps its largest part, was the sense that those who worked through uncanny means were simply cheaters to the general ethic, whilst most others slaved away in the duller light of the day to day.

So then as now. The alternative genders, the wealthy urban professionals, the intellectuals, the leisure and vice of the inheritors and the like, all these are the contemporary witches. They have attained such numbers and power that surely this too is a sign, this time of the end times; the day of judgment must be nigh. Puritanism may have lost its purity, but it has maintained both its faith and its works, or better, it has fostered a faith in works while at the same time a working faith. And if divine judgment seems distant and even a trifle aloof in our modernity, earthly judgment can itself provide a sign, a way to winnow those who might yet be saved from those who have given up salvation for the salacious salivations of this world alone. In order to make that evaluation, of course, the remaining Puritans have to wrest power from those accursed, as well as those who may well have cursed themselves; those who were never Christian certainly, but also those who had been, but then had let their mortal desires overtake their better sense of self. This is the political aspect of sectarianism: a way to prove that evaluation still exists.

But in order to vouchsafe its efficacy one must go a step further, and it is this I will suggest is the motivating leitmotif of Evangelicalism today. If for half a millennium Protestants could rest something of their living soul, their conscience, upon the pillow of earthly wealth and success, and thus correspondingly, of a relative lack of material impoverishment and failure, the loss of these worldly props would prompt a crisis, not just in culture, but rather in existence. If one loses the signs of one’s elect status, this is no mean historical shift. It is not a question of demographics, technology, economics or politics, but rather one of ontology itself. I am no longer amongst the elect, or I am in danger of losing that status. There could be nothing more devastating, to the point of its appearance as a patent and potent evil in one’s life, the very worst thing that could ever even be imagined. I mock them not, but am rather attempting to convey some of the emotion that must be present in any heart which has witnessed the very promise and premise of its eternal existence suddenly vanish.

Any one of us can surely empathize with such a tragedy. The loss of a loved one would come the closest, but even here, while it calls into question one’s own life and one’s future, one indeed lives on, even perhaps with the solace that we might at some point ‘meet again’, as the old song has it. But to be told, even in indirect terms, that one’s eternity is now annulled, that one is at least as liable to find oneself in hell as in heaven, overtakes even the most intimate of losses. So too then does the kind of mourning involved overtake any personal grief. For such faithful, no matter that this intuitive belief has been muted by both the day to day and its distractions as well as the simple passage of time blunting the edge of its soteriological suasion, such a loss has to be reckoned with before the time in question, if there could be any possibility that salvation was still an option.

Enter leaders who are either cynical opportunists, narcissists, or perhaps even a few authentically concernful persons who, like their needy followers, also see their souls awry, and thus the faithful must risk choosing a political Anti-Christ of Revelations in order to make a meaningful choice at all. This only adds to their burden, which the rest of us may witness if we care to do so; tragic, solemn, and desperate as it is. For at its deepest level, sectarianism and neo-fascism in today’s society rest upon the sense that those involved within its ambulatory aura are trying to save themselves and for all time. In doing so, they have asked, nay, begged us to join them. That we refuse to do so, that we indeed mock them instead, is only the further proof that we are the damned after all, and that God would forgive His faithful of even our outright murders, since we had the same choice they themselves did, and rejected it out of hand.

And so this is our current scene: a large minority of the once-elect searching with all due diligence and desire, desperation and doxa for any possible sign that their eternal souls will not suffer the dismal dirge of a devil’s drag. That the rest of us are blind to both the metaphysics, and much more importantly, the social reality of this ultimate motivation, truly is a sign that we are in for a coming hell on earth.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The State of the Division Address

The State of the Division Address

I speak to you today from an unknown location. This place which has no name, and which can only be called therefore a space, is nothing less than the Now. It is immanent; it is fullest presence. It calls to the conscience and yet must defer its response to the future. This future does not yet exist and yet it in turn is imminent, almost upon us. It is simply what is next, and because we cannot entirely know the next thing, event, time or place, its import escapes us. Living as humans within the ambit of mortal consciousness, knowing the past exists as memory, trace, artifact and history; knowing the present is too fleeting to dwell within; and knowing that the future is itself unknowing of its own presence, it is perhaps inevitable that we turn elsewhere to understand the meaning of our condition, odd and fragile.

Even though each one of exists simultaneously in all three guises of abstract time – we have memories and we live in cultures which have histories; we are ‘in’ the moment without being inside of it as if we were halted and time had stopped; and we design our lives so that a future of some kind is expected if not entirely taken for granted – and thus each of us understands, however incompletely, the indwelling of our beings in that unknown location which nevertheless speaks to us of existence itself, it has become clear that we as a mass culture have limned ourselves into an unenviable position regarding the definition of this ‘elsewhere’ to which we direct all of our collective energies.

The choice laid before us is one between two further abstractions, freedom and salvation. They are opposites, even antagonists, and their hold upon our imagination is such that if we do decide for one or the other, the one left to the side is immediately scrabbled up as if it too were part of the singular decision; being saved first is also being free, being free first is thence being saved. Because these two conceptions refer to states of being and their relationship to Being, whatever the definition of this may be – it matters only for the ethnographer to delineate the contents of belief, here it is a question of contrasting absolute values of faith – it is always possible to add to one’s choice an indefinite list of other traits which are claimed to accrue to the original state. One thus finds ultimate freedom in an intimacy with a Being and a history which offers salvation of beings, or one finds that one has saved oneself, not only from the History of Being as an alternative and oft-seen superior ontology, but also from the very much human history that is just as often understood to have been a conflict sourced in beliefs about Being. So, on the one side, salvation offers an exeunt from our mortality; it is the finitude which hallmarks historical consciousness uplifted into the infinitude which expresses the continuity between Man and God. The cosmos presents to us no longer a finite experience, but one more in line with its own cycle of infinity. On the other side, finitude is accepted as a celebration of the open future in which anything may occur and through which I may become anything I desire, thereby placing me within the infinitude of cosmic evolution. My finite existence become infinite through my participation in that ongoingness which in its totality must escape my partial imagination. In this very incompleteness do I find my ultimate freedom, since I have no reason nor ability to know the whole.

Both of these absolute values are powerful expressions of the will to life. Salvation seeks life eternal and thus the overcoming of both will and history. Freedom desires a will that is itself endless, hooked into both human history and that cosmic. I marvel at both senses of how we are what we are, a consciousness made up of an ethical conscience, a reasoning wide-awake thinking, and an uncannily clever unconscious which, contrary to some popular psychological accounts as well as old-world demonologies, tirelessly works wholly in the service of that very reason. Once again, while salvation seemingly offers sanctity to being, freedom appears to offer it sanity. The difference lies in one’s willingness to frame will and faith either together as sibling allies, or as contiguous but contrasting interests and drives. Salvation unites will and faith by subsuming will as the worldly manifestation and agent of faith. Freedom unites both by defining them as almost the same thing; one must have faith in one’s will, for instance, and one must will oneself to have faith in the face of both an impersonal though intimate history, and a cosmos both anonymous and aloof. Salvation tells us that we are not alone in our quest for the wisdom, not of the ‘how’, but of the why, while freedom declares that our solitude is at the very heart of authentic choice and the being-able of living as a reasoning being. It takes the presence of human reason to be evidence of our evolutionary ability to free ourselves from that very evolution. Salvation seeks to convince us that this ability is the kerygmatic gift of a God; bestowed upon us so that we can know of God’s will and perhaps even of God’s mind. Freedom assures us that the Gestalt of the entire history and pre-history of our species is contained within that same kernel; our ability to think things through with no end is thus just as infinite as is the mind of any divinity.

So is it an effort merely of perspective to offer ourselves these two ultimate sensibilities? Are we describing to ourselves the converse side of the same shining object, the brilliance emanating therefrom blinding us to the reality that it is the same thing of which we are speaking? If this is indeed the case, then we have defined both salvation and freedom only incompletely, using the other as a foil and as counterpoint, when in fact they are two names for the same basic will to live and live on. At present, from our unknown mortal space, we can only suggest that this may be the most reasonable manner to think about them. In doing so, we avoid placing them in competition with one another and we may even be able to use each one as a way of understanding the manifold of the other. This is not a purely historical exercise, in that we are not solely interested in questions such as ‘how did the concept of freedom change or limit that of salvation?’ or ‘how does the lingering belief in salvation impact or impinge upon our conception of freedom?’ and the like. No, such a question that brings together salvation and freedom in a tandem query about the meaning of being-present, currently unknown, states at once the division in our contemporary culture and a manner through which it can be partially overcome. It tells us why we are so divided, which in itself is a kind of Godsend, as well as expressing a doubly powerful means by which we can understand one another with a great deal more authenticity and intimacy than we currently do.

For right now, the extended presence of the Now in both directions, as it were, we are nothing but division, and the boundary drawn up in the sand beneath and between us is inscribed by the hand of a being who has taken on for itself either the divine or the cosmic. In both we are utterly mistaken about our condition. In reality, we are neither the authors of salvation nor of freedom, for we are but expressions, in both narratives, of either a superior being which is Being ‘itself’, or another order of being which encompasses all beings. To pretend to either is to at best avoid our status as the ‘one who can think but not know’, the ‘one who can reason through unreason’ – referring to the interface between the conscious mind and that unconscious – and the ‘one which lives on in spite of death’. Neither the divine nor the cosmic has any use for such devices as we have conjured for ourselves, so in dividing I and thou, I am not only doing a disservice to that mortal genius I am also dragging the infinite down to my small level. Only in my narrow imagination does it concede and consent.

Instead, this state of the current division in our global society should inform us that we are dangerously near the precipice which heralds the loss of all meaning. In placing overmuch the value of absolution into absolute terms, both the purveyor of salvation and that of freedom have excerpted themselves from their own shared humanity. In spite of the historical argument that salvation speaks to us of something that has always been and is itself timeless, whereas freedom recognizes that the essence of time is tempered only through temporality and thus cannot be overtaken by Being, it is more truly a question of whether or not there is to be a human future. In this, salvation steps aside from the ongoingness of the imminent future, and freedom seeks to influence, even control, its oncoming mass. Salvation pulls me out of its way, freedom allows me to step bodily into it. More truly then, the apparent choice to be made between the two absolute values is one of ethics. Do I take myself out of history entirely, that passed and that yet to be made, or do I throw myself once more into the flux through which I have also lived? Is this a choice for the moment, or is it rather that we are staring in the face of the very passage to Being? In a word, that we must choose freedom first and let salvation happen in due course, that freedom is in fact a choice and salvation is simply an outcome? It is too trite to simply tell ourselves that ‘heaven can wait’, for in imagining that something other is indeed awaiting us takes the edge away from living being; that double-sided edge, one of which we own as a visionary sword and the other of which threatens us at every mortal turn. No, just here we must step back and honestly answer to our ownmost condition: I cannot know of my own salvation; I cannot avoid my own freedom. So the very choice between absolute values is itself a false one. Spurious and specious, both salvation and freedom, one the unknowing fraud of premodernity and the other the overwrought charade of our own time, have combined to render human existence too partial to its own projections. The time has come to place both to the side and step away from the disunity they have sowed amongst our shared humanity. Only by doing so will we have an opportunity to discover that if and in the first place, either of them were ever real.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.