Musings on Media Gossip

 

I happened to hear in passing on the Dan Patrick Show on Monday that the LA cops (America's Most Bent Flics?) asked Rock or his entourage if Rock wanted to file charges against Will Smith. He or his posse, according to the ET commentators Nischelle Turner and Kevin Frazier, reported on the show that Rock declined to file charges.

Normally, I try to avoid banal gossip but I do listen to sports radio occasionally and, on rare occasions, I do enjoy the snark of TMZ. Sports radio, which is one of the few places where one can actually hear intellectual discussion on the media in the US, seems to have also become gossip ridden these days making it a microcosm so much of the US and UK media in these brave new digital world days of our lives.

 

Speaking of TMZ, that media outlet and others of its ilk, seem to have become practitioners of what is a rarety in the American media these days, investigative journalism. Some, by the way, might find it humourously absurd and ironic that the legacy of the Muckrakers and Woodward and Bernstein seems to live on amost alone in the investigative gossip of the gossip mongerers.

Musings on the World's Real Oldest Profession...

Some suggest that prostitution is the world's oldest profession. Others that it is spying. I, however, am going to go with bullshitting as the world's oldest profession. 

Bullshitting has been around at least since agricultural societies arose and monarchs needed ideological justification for their positions of power and authority. Religion, of course, gave them that justification. The mass media of film, television, radio, public relations shills, and advertising, of course, has become the world's biggest bullshitter. It is probably even a bigger bullshitter than the politicians of American mass society. It is probably even a bigger bullshitter than the capitalist flim flam men, snake oil salesmen, and side hustlers of the modern world. It is probably even a bigger bullshitter than American Christian revivalists.

The rise of digital social media seems to have increased the volume, mass, depth, and breadth of bullshite. Sadly, there are a lot of suckers out there who swallow the bullshite media and social media spew whole hog. Many if not most of these proverbial suckers have probably never read a reputable and thorougly documented work of history and social science in their lives.

So how does the media, and particularly the new digital media, allow for more easy manipulation of the listening and watching masses. In 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, for instance, 3% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, a country that had tense relations with the US, was responsible for 9/11. By 2003 thanks, in large part, to a campaign to change the minds of American citizens by the Bush the second administration, 44% of Americans believed Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In reality Hussein had nothing to do with the attack, he hated Al-Queda, the group responsible for the attack, Al-Queda hated him, and most of the hijackers were Saudi subjects not Iraqi subjects. By the way, the other thing Hussein didn’t have after the first Iraq war under Bush the first, was “weapons of mass destruction”, despite the fact that the administration of Bush the second claimed he did. The media, of course played an important role in making many Americans believe Hussein did have “weapons of mass destruction”.

Another example: In 2008 polls found that 51% of Americans believed that Barack Obama, a candidate for president of the United States that year, a man who had attended church at Trinity Church Chicago for 20 years, was a Christian. 12% said they believed he was Muslim. 32% said they didn’t know what his religion was. Two years later only 34% of Americans believed he was Christian, 18% said he was Muslim, and 43% said they didn’t know. Why the change? Most commentators attribute the drop in the number of those who believed Obama was Christian, and the increase in those who believed he was a Muslim, to the impact of right-wing radio and right-wing TV on those who listened to and watched right wing media, including the Fox News Network. In reality Obama was and is, at least nominally, a Christian.

Further Musings on the College and University in the Brave New Neoliberal Age...

Probably few of you have noticed that higher educational institutions are increasingly demanding confidentiality clauses from their employees, particularly those who are given "sweetheart" retirement deals, as happened recently at Indiana's Ball State University, so they can downsize in an era of when it is increasingly difficult to retain and grow the student population. More of you may have noticed that colleges and universities are hiring bureaucrats to ensure a safe "intellectual" environment on college and university campuses. At the same time, colleges and universities are increasingly hiring bureaucrats to ensure freedom of speech on higher education campuses.

On the surface these seemingly contradictory actions may seem rather odd. When you dig beneath the surface of the neoliberal college and university, however, they really aren't. This free to speak and not free to speak distinction is grounded in the administrative bureaucratic (corporate managers) distinction between customers (students) and employees (mid-level, including faculty, and low level bureaucrats, including adjunct faculty) who are managed by these administrative bureaucrats and who are increasingly managed by them in tayloristic like production strategy ways.

This distinction, of course,  tells you something about the increasing corporatisation of universities and the increasing limits on academic freedom at these now for profit (student population growth) non profit corporations. Welcome to the brave new neoliberal world.

The Films of My Life: Reptilicus

 

American International's American version of Reptilicus (1961)--there is also a Danish version--is a variation on Godzilla, which was itself a variation on King Kong (1933). The American version opens in Lapland but soon the action moves to Kobenhavn where we get several picture postcard moments of the city, particularly its Tivoli Gardens. We even get to hear a song sung in English by popular Danish singer Birthe Wilke, about the joys of nights at the Tivoli, "Tivoli Nights". The Danish military, of course, ends up having to battle the revivified reptile. Thankfully, and of course, the Danish military is led by an American, who provides the excuse for the aforementioned travelogue when he arrives at the aeroport and is driven to the Aquarium where the frozen Reptilicus is being stored and studied. How else, after all, would the Danish military win the battle against the giant lizard even though the American military man does get a little help from his Danish scientist friend, making Reptilicus a liberal film in Peter Biskind's typology of American films of the fifties?

Musings on a Life of Peace Activism and Its Discontents...

Sometime in the late 1960s I became intellectually convinced that the war the United States of America was engaged in in Vietnam was an imperialist war. Since I also became intellectually convinced that imperialistic wars were wrong, I also became convinced that the war in Vietnam was ethically and morally wrong. 

A little while later I got involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement at my junior high school in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas, T.W. Browne Junior High School. It was a very small movement, just me and my friend John Cirillo, the person who more than anyone else helped me realise that the Vietnam War was morally wrong. Our smallness didn't stop us from protesting the ROTC (Razis) at nearby Kimball High School or planning a walk out in protest against the war as part of the national walk out against the war in 1970, however. 

John and I planned the walkout to coincide with our every Friday pep rally in the afternoon at Browne. We spread the word orally. Hundreds of students left the pep rally, most of them for the reason, I suspect, that it meant getting out of class, with the intention of walking out of school a week after Kimball students did the same thing. Unfortunately, for us, the administration of Browne also heard about the protest and responded by placing two teachers at every external door and putting chains on those doors to keep us in. After milling around for a while, particularly in the central out door plaza at Browne, we had to admit defeat.

My anti-war activities at Browne were only the beginning of my anti-war activism. I wanted to attend anti-war rallies at Lee Park in Dallas but my father wouldn't let me noting, probably accurately, that the police would likely beat me over the head if I went. I supported Bobby Kennedy for president because of his opposition to the war. I hated Hubert Humphry so much for his support of the war that I was even momentarily blinded by my emotions into supporting Richard Nixon who said he had a plan to win the war. John, on the other hand, supported Gene McCarthy who was also opposed to the war and who in retrospect I wish I had supported because I came to understand that his plan for ending the war was superior to Kennedy's. I supported George McGovern for president in 1972 because I quickly realised that Nixon's "plan" to end the war was demagoguery of the worst sort and simply a cynical strategy to get votes and because McGovern too opposed the war and wanted to end it.

My opposition to the war inevitably drew me to pacifism and my interest in pacifism, in turn, drew me to the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends. In the 1970s I became increasingly involved in Quaker peace activism, the phrase many Friends preferred to the more pacific sounding pacifism. I began attending Quaker silent meetings. I became involved in Quaker actions beyond anti-war activism. In the 1970s and 1980s when I lived in Bloomington, Indiana I was involved in Quaker protests against nuclear energy. When I lived in Athens, Ohio I protested against American covert actions in Nicaragua though I didn't regard the anti-Noriega movement and the Sandinistas as the essence of manichean goodness in the known universe. Activism nutted by reality. When I lived in Provo, Utah in the 1990s I went down to the Nevada Test Site where the US government tested nuclear weapons, the progeny of the nuclear weapons the US dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the name of ending the war, to protest those indiscriminate nuclear weapons and their testing which had negative health impacts on the "downwinders". When I moved to Albany, New York I got involved in the many local Quaker protests against the many ultimately American imperialist wars in Iraq, the former Jugoslavija, Iraq again, or Afghanistan.

Over the years I came to admire Quaker anti-war persistence despite broad public apathy. In a city of almost 100,000 people and a mid-major megaversity of 18,000 only around twenty to thirty people, at best, regularly came to witness to and speak truth to power about the intellectual and moral evils of war, something that inherently violates, as I came to realise, human rights and which unleashes destruction, brutality, mass murder, vigilante "justice", and rape. 

This is not to say that I didn't have several intellectual problems with Quakerism. In the face of apathy and the seeming lack of impact of anti-war peace activism I came to appreciate Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of Quakerism. Niebuhr argued, and I think rightly, that Quaker attempts to make the world Quaker were doomed to failure because they were too utopian. I also came to appreciate John Howard Yoder's argument that the only viable way for pacifists to witness to the world was to understand that the world, as Niebuhr also argued, was fallen and hence never perfectable and that the only space from which witness to the fallen world was possible was from a community that separated from the world and practised in its everyday life the agape and pacifism that it preached.

Eventually my realist side became ever more prominent and in the face of mass public apathy, ineffectual activism, and the ever increasing American police and surveillance state, I came to understand that even Niebuhr's more nuanced approach, one that jettisoned the manicheanism, was problematic because no one, and certainly not the United States, had any moral ground to stand on in a world of grey. I also came to understand the wisdom of Buddhism and Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. I came to realise, in other words, that you can only do something about what you can do something about.

Musings on History, War, and Human Beings

It is worth noting, historically speaking, that war has been around since the rise of expansionist civilisations in large scale agricultural societies in China and the Near East. It is worth pointing out the empirical fact that war has, since the rise of those civilisations, been a constant and has often been regarded as a form of diplomacy by the elites who guide and direct political policy. And while a minority of humans have opposed war--the Anabaptists since the 16th century and the Quakers since the 17th--and worked to end it particularly since the 19th century, those few who oppose wars have not been successful as history shows. Wars continue whether among the great powers, the minor powers, and almost everyone with a military. Finally, it is worth pointing up what Buddhism and Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer have preached, that you can only do something about what you can do something about.

Humans, of course, empirically speaking, have been characterised by pettiness, silliness, narcissism, emotionalism, gullibility, moronicity, an obsession with money, an obsession with power, and war, to name a few human characteristics. And while It is true that humans can also be compassionate, human compassion is generally selective in its application. Human compassion, in other words, is generally applied selectively and situationally by the very humans who claim to be compassionate. That such a form of situational or selective ethics is not respectful of the human rights of all humans should be obvious even to those blinded by the ethnocentric and nationalistic light.

Musings on War, Human Rights, and Pacifism

On the theological and social ethical level, it is clear that pacifism is the only perspective that fully respects all human rights and doesn't make them captive to a partisan nationalist and hence ethnocentric ideology. Second, pacifists recognise that there is no war in the era of total war, the fundamental reason just war theory and its secular variants are problematic to say the least, that is moral or just. Everyone involved in war commits human rights violations. Total war itself is thus inherently a violator of human rights. A true pacifism, thus, recognises that things are generally muddier than Reinhold Niebuhr argued when he distinguished between better and least better options during war and argued that the moral person had to make a choice for the least worst option. How such a choice escapes the prison house of ideology, however, the hermeneutic circle, remains for me a mystery. Additionally, by supporting one side in a war, one undermines a neutral and hence fair and judicious pacifism and one undermines a pacifism that stands for the human rights of all. By choosing sides one undermines a pacifism that is truly non-partisan as it must be if it is to mean anything and if human rights are to mean anything. By choosing sides one sacrifices not only fairness but justice since justice requires dispassion and fairness rather than partisan passion. 

It is fine if one wants to choose sides. But when one chooses sides, and this is often done under the influence of selective manichean and melodramatic cultural formations, one has to recognise that one is choosing sides and hence one is no longer able to analyse what is happening with an air of dispassion and one is no longer a proponent of the human rights of all. Selectivity and human rights do not go together. 

On the social scientific level, it is clear that the Annales School is spot on. The Annales historians of the twentieth century noted that history must be conceptualised in terms of long term factors and causes and short term factors and causes (though one might add mid term causes as well). When understood in this sensible way it is clear that what is happening now in the Ukraine is the product of great power struggles that go back at least to the eighteenth century, the same long term factors that were responsible for World War I and World War II. It is also the product of short term factors. In the case of the current war in Eastern Europe the short term factors igniting that war include NATO expansion clashing with Russian ideologies associated with the near beyond, itself very much related to the dominant twentieth century great power struggle, Russian and Ukrainian tensions in the multicultural state that is the Ukraine, itself tied to struggles over nationalism, power, and identity, and Ukraine's and the West's refusal to engage with Russian concerns for economic, political, and ideological reasons, also related to great power tensions of long standing.

The Books of My Life: ITV Cultures

 ITV, British Independent Television, has been a part of my life since the 1970s. My teenage years and my subsequent adult years have been filled with ITV programmes like Upstairs Downstairs (London Weekend Television, 1971-1975), Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981), The Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984), Inspector Morse (Central Independent Television and Carlton, 1987-2000), Lewis (Granada and ITV, 2006-2013), Vera (ITV, 2011-), and Endeavour (Mammoth, Masterpiece, Endeavour, 2012-). These shows, along with shows on the BBC like Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005-), The Forsyte Saga (1967), Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974), Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), I Claudius (1976), The Good Life (1975-1978), Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Butterflies (1978-1983), House of Cards (1990), and the Beeb's adaptation of the Shakespeare plays (1978-1985), to name just a few, showed me how good, how intelligent, how compelling, how dramatic, how tragic, and how funny television could be, particularly when compared with the often at best mediocrities that populated the airwaves of the three  commercial networks that dominated American television before the 1980s, CBS, ABC, and NBC.

The anthology ITV Cultures edited by Catherine Johnson and Rob Turlock (Maidenhead, Berkshire, Eng: Open University Press, 2004) explores the economic, political, cultural, and geographic history of Britain's first commercial network, ITV, and its regional franchises across the UK, from the advent of commerical televison in 1955 to the early twenty-first century. Chapters look at the institutional history of ITV and the changing economic and regulatory ecologies within which it had to operate (Johnson and Turlock), whether it is possible to construct a canon of ITV television shows (John Ellis), and the role of patron and publisher Lew Grade played at Associated Television, one of ITV's original regional franchises, and Incorporated Television Company, which Grade owned until it was bought by ATV, and which produced programmes for the franchise (Jonathan Bignell). Other chapters look at ATV's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1959) which was co-written and co-produced by Brits and Americans (Steve Neale), and London Weekend Television's Upstairs Downstairs (Helen Wheatley) and its nuanced engagement the neo-Victorian and Edwardian movement of the 1970s and with second wave feminism in its narrative and its mise-en-scene, both of which were successfully sold overseas, and LWT's strategy of making "quality" programmes not only for the domestic market but also for overseas markets at a time when the cost of making dramatic TV programmes was skyrocketing and which, as a result, brought much needed monies into ITV's coffers free of the levy regulators laid on ITV advertsing revenue (Rod Allen). Another chapter focuses on the only failure of an ITV regional franchise, Wales's West and North Television, as a result of its limited number of broadcast translators, the tensions between the BBC and the Independent Television Authority (ITA), the body that regulated commericial television in its early years, particularly over TV broadcasting in Wales, the commerical and public service remits mandated for ITV, commitments WWN met by broadcasting Welsh programming, and WWN's financial inexperience and lack of financial expertise (Jamie Medhurst). Still another chapter looks at Independent Television news, the news provider for all ITV franchises, which has been caught between ITV's commercial and public service remits, between commercialism and profit and its mandate to serve the public good, and both profited and suffered as a consequence (Jackie Harrison). Finally, two chapters explore the ITV talk show Trisha (1998-2010) and the ITV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (1998-2017, 2018). Sherryl Wilson and Matt Hills argue respectively that what some academics and scholar fans see as trash television actually have, in the case of Trisha and its thereapeutic aspects, a public service component, and, in the case of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a degree of creativity in its mise-en-scene. Millionaire also has, Hills argues, an appeal to game, quiz, and puzzle enthusiasts, some of whom are scholar fans who can put Millionaire into its commerical and public service contexts. A very helpful timeline of ITV history ends the anthology.

A couple of things struck me while reading ITV Cultures. First, I was struck by how a television network that was initially regionally structured in order to avoid Londonocentrism and regionally structured in order to emphasise regional programming, was, over time, centralised in London. Second, I was struck by how ITV's regional franchises were, thanks to the relaxation of governmental regulation, concentrated into fewer and fewer hands over time. Both centralisation and concentration, of course, are the legacies of the revival and triumph of sectarian laissez-faire liberalism or neoliberalism after the late 1970s and the neoliberal takeover of the Conservative Party and even parts of the Labour Party. Finally, I was struck by the similar impact the coming of cable television and satellite television had in the UK and US. They ended the duopoly, at least on one level, that was ITV and the BBC in the UK and the cartel that was CBS, NBC, and ABC in the US. This, in turn, allowed neoliberals to argue that now that there were so many different television stations out there in the terrestrial and digital universes, governmental regulation could be relaxed and competition and diversity could be left to the market. Given that the market produces much of the same product, however, and given that Channel Four, which came on the air in 1982 with the remit to produce product for the part of the part of the market that was largely ignored in the age of governmental regulation, is no longer that different from other commercial channels, the logic of the neoliberal argument can certainly be questioned.

ITV Cultures should be a must read for those interested in the history of broadcasting and the history of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Highly recommended as an introduction to the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and, if to a much less extent, the demographic aspects of commercial British television and beyond.

Musings on Fairy Tales and Bullshite or How I Emerged from Fairy Tales into Reality

Once upon a time I believed in fairy tales. I believed what my seventh grade Texas Civics class socialised into me about the joys of being a Texan and living in Texas, the best state in the United States. I believed that the Texas city I lived in, Dallas, was one of the best if not the best city to live in in the world. I believed that the Dallas Cowboys were the best football team in the National Football League or the American Football League. I believed that those "damn" Yankees victimised the wonderful Confederacy politically and economically. I believed that the United States was in Vietnam to protect the world and the democratic South Vietnam from a communism that wanted to take over the world. I believed when I was doing duck and cover drills at school, that I was doing this because the evil Russkies wanted to bomb the US back to the stone age, because the USSR was the devil incarnate, and because the Soviets hated our "democracy", our "freedom", and our best of all possible worlds.

Then, thanks to my best friend at T.W. Browne Junior High School in Oak Cliff, my colonised by boosterism mind suddenly saw the empirical light. I learned that Texas, like any state in the Union, and Dallas, like any city around the world, had its problems. The Texas and Dallas I lived in was still segregated, thanks to Jim Crow, just like in the other states of the former Confederacy. I learned that the Confederacy was the land of cotton and slavery and that the Southern mantra of states rights meant protecting the peculiar institution. I learned that while no place is perfect I preferred Austin to Dallas. I learned that the US was a democracy in myth only. I learned that the US, like the USSR, was a great power, that it had, like other modern core nations, been involved in imperial projects including a territorial expansion driven by the notion of manifest destiny around the globe, that it was presently engaged in the covert destabilisation of nations that it perceived of as dangerous enemies, and that it wanted to make the world safe not for real "democracy" but for American business interests. I learned that those who politically and economically controlled South Vietnam were a Christian minority put into power by the American powers that be. I learned that the US had given permission for the overthrow of the South Vietnamese leader and that the American political elites had lied about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. I learned that the media lied about Spain bombing the Maine in Cuba, about Germans bayonetting Belgian babies during World War I, and about the supposed North Vietnamese massive attack on "peaceful" American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam. 

I, in other words, grew up. I was no longer the boosterist true believer. I was no longer someone guided by socialised emotions of national pride, emotions that blinded me by their opaque light. I was now someone who had the critical and empirical abilities to recognise that politicians and corporations lie, propagandise, and bullshite. I learned that one had to apply one's critical intellectual faculties to explore and to interrogate that bullshite and in order to learn about what really happened. I learned that I preferred to live in the truth rather than in a mental world of bullshite. I have never looked back.

Further Musings on Propaganda, Bullshite, and Colonised Minds

Those of us who do fieldwork know that you can't always trust what people, what informers, tell you. When it comes to religion, including nationalist civil religion, people will tell you what they have been socialised to think and say, they will tell you what they think you want to hear, and they will sometimes lie to you. 

Ethnographers, of course, can verify the rhetoric of informers. When they do, they sometimes find that the rhetoric and reality aren't always consistent. They find that someone who tells you they go to church every Sunday doesn't actually go to church every Sunday. 

Historians too have found that primary source material isn't always factually accurate. The Ancient Egyptians, for instance, routinely claimed in documents to have won battles historians and archaeologists know they didn't. American elites claimed that they were in Vietnam to preserve democracy. That they put minority Christians in charge of a Buddhist dominated South Vietnam didn't seem to phase them because they were either demagogues or they had drunk the propaganda flavoured koolaid. British newspapers claimed that the evil Hun was killing Belgian babies during WWI when they weren't. American newspapers claimed Spain bombed the Maine during the Spanish American war when it didn't. Western media claimed Saddam Hussein was killing babies during his invasion of Kuwait when he wasn't. It turned out to be propagandistic bullshite pedelled by someone in the Kuwait court. 

So, as any social scientist knows, there is a lot of bullshite out there and we have to be aware of the role bullshite plays in society, in culture, and in the minds of those who imbibe bullshite without recognising what it is. 

Speaking of colonised by bullshte minds, one can only marvel at the naivete of the non-critical. One can only marvel at the levels of ignorance, intentional or not, and of ommission or commission, intentional or not, among the naive and among true believers. One can only marvel at the intentional or unintentional regurgitation of a mythistory that makes the obvious not obvious and the fiction fact by the naive and the true believer. Only the intentionally blind and those blinded by the bright lights of demagoguery and propaganda, of course, could miss what is obvious, could miss what academics have noted for years, namely that NATO expansion has been a problem in Western and American relations with Russia since 1990, the year the Ukraine came into existence. That so many elide the obvious points up the empirical fact that most people, even the seemingly intelligent, have been colonised by innocent, melodramatic, and manichean propaganda or misinformation which they confuse and conflate with reality. All of this, of course, is not a surprise to those who are critical, those who are able to see through emotional, melodramatic, and manichean bullshite, those who are able to put things in historial context. They know that, to paraphrase what PT Barnum once said is true, a sucker who is made into a sucker by propaganda is born every minute.

More Musings on How to Do Social Science and History

We can use Hitler's invasion of the USSR to help us understand and comprehend how to do social science and history. First off, we need to note that there are facts: fact Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941. That is not an opinion. It is a fact and no amount of bs can change the fact of when Hitler invaded the USSR.

Social scientists and historians don't stop at the facts. We want to try to understand, for instance why Hitler invaded the USSR. There are five valid empirical strategies by which we can try to answer the question why Hitler invaded the USSR: the economic approach, the approach that emphasises politics, the approach that emphasises culture, the approach that emphasises demography, and the approach that emphasis geography. All five of these empirical interpretive strategies are what Max Weber called ideal types. What he meant by that is that we can isolate them for analytical purposes but in the real world some or all of them interact and impact human life and human society often at the same time. 

So let's use these approaches to ask why Hitler invaded the USSR. Demographic argument: Hitler and the Nazis believed that they were the superior race and that Slavs and others, the Russians are Slavs, were inferior. Hitler, it can be argued, believed the war would be over quickly because Germans and Nordics were the superior race, a superior race that inferior Slavs could not resist. Take note here of the fact that the belief in racial inferiority or superiority is cultural, it is, in other words, a belief. It is not a fact. Beliefs, as such, we can conclude from this, can impact behaviour and culture and demography interacted to help produce Nazi culture and ideology. 

Geographic argument: the USSR was close to Germany and it lay on a plain between the Netherlands and the USSR. This geographical fact, the plain between the Netherlands and Russia, promoted wars in that part of Europe again and again over the centuries. 

Political argument: Germany and the USSR were great powers. As Great powers there were tensions between the two as there always are between great powers. Cf. the tensions between the US and USSR after WWII. Note that here one can add in the cultural tensions, such as the Nazi hatred of Communism, which they regarded as inherently Jewish.

Economic argument: Germany did not have much oil. The USSR did. Hitler, was thus, out to conquer the oil fields near Baku so he could pursue a war effort in which oil was essential.

Cultural argument: As I noted, the Nazis believed that there were superior races, like the Nordic race, and inferior races, like the Slavs and Blacks. No group was more inferior or more deviant in Nazi culture and ideology than Jews. Given this, one can compellingly argue that Hitler invaded the USSR and Eastern Europe because that is where the Jews geographically were and that he attacked the USSR because he intended to bring the final solution to bear on the Jewish question once and for all in the areas of Europe where most of Europes Jews were. And that is why he invaded the USSR despite having a treaty with that nation. 

As I said, there can be multiple factors at work in human social life. Economics is always at work. Politics is generally at work. Demography is often a factor. Geography is often a factor. Culture is always a factor. I tend to emphasise cultural factors in my work while remaining cognisant of the fact the economics, politics, demography, and geography are also generally impactful as well. Why? Because while Hitler's army was being surrounded in the USSR he used the trains to send Jews and others to the death camps. 

By the way, there is one empirical argument that I think has little or no validity, the one which suggests that Hitler was out for world domination. Hitler was actually out to get lebensraum, living space, in Poland. He was out to dominate Europe. And more than anything else he was out to eliminate the Jews, decadents, and the disabled, with the Jews being Nazi enemy number one. This means that the notion that is so prominent in Western demagoguery and discourse these days, the Hitler as James Bond villain out to take over the world ideology, isn't a useful metaphor or analogy to apply to other supposed megalomaniacal Hitler's who have followed in the master's footsteps.

Musings on Manichean Mythistory...

Manichean history, a variety of mythistory and a history grounded in the notion that there is good and there is evil in history, has been around for a long time. Its origins probably lie in ancient Persia with its apocalyptic myth of the struggle between a good god and a evil god. It was incorporated into nascent Judaism during the Persian exile. It entered and became central to Christianity thanks to Paul who believed that Jesus would be returning soon, perhaps even within his lifetime, and thanks to its sometimes Zoroastrian like binary between god and the devil. 

Given the influence of Christianity on Mediterranean culture and the culture of the West, manichean mythistory has long been at the heart of Western culture and the settler societies that grew out of Western European culture thanks to Western European imperialism and colonisation. One variation of this unalloyed good versus unalloyed evil "reading" of history is the great man and evil man "theory" of history. In the twentieth century the template for the latter has, of course, been Adolf Hitler.  Ever since World War II those categorised and classified as evil by the purveyors and regurgitators of manichean mythistory have often been seen as metaphors if not embodiments or incarnations of Hitler. During the two Iraq wars, for instance, Saddam Hussein was, compared by several commentators to the Austrian, and as a result, portrayed as a madman out for world domination, a villain seemingly right out of a James Bond film. The latest iteration of Hitler and occasionally Stalin, who probably takes second place in the evil man of history twentieth and twenty-first sweepstakes and perhaps first for those who came of cultural and ideological age during the anxious and anxiety causing Cold War or who have bought into the myth that Russia stole the election for Trump, is, of course, the leader of Russia. That Putin is more Tsar than commissar is irrelevant to the demagogues and the media who purvey the manichean myth that Putin is the latest embodiment or incarnation of evil in the modern and postmodern world.

Great men, of course, have populated mythistory and the mythistory that passed for academic history for years. The American civil religion, for example, celebrates George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin as the founding fathers of an American nation the civil religion preaches to Americans is holy and tends to whitewash the less that righteous behaviour of these secular saints including slaveholding, Deism, and having children by their slaves. American comic books have long been populated by superheroes who seem to be the secular equivalent of the Christian saints of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Even Protestants, who did away with the religious saints of Roman Catholicism after the Reformation, have continued to populate their mental and material culture worlds with secular saints who are engaged in the global fight of good against evil for control of the universe. Many regard celebrities, whether from the entertainment, political, sports, or business worlds, as, thanks in part, to the media propaganda machine, secular saints. The latest to enter this pantheon of manichean grounded sainthood, thanks in part to Western propaganda and the media propaganda machine and thanks to his use of the manichean melodrama he undoubtedly learned from the media, is the president of the Ukraine. He is, after all, a former TV star.

Interestingly, the postmodern era of the late twentieth century in the core nation world has seen the rise of a less myth based history, a history that looks at reality warts and all, a history that has proven to be extremely controversial in a postmdern world characterised by a culture war between modern traditionalists and postmodernists, and the advent of media organisations that have merged traditional media sensationalism with digital gotcha culture, cultural cynicism, cultural skepticism, and cultural snark. Postmodernism with its fragmentary and diverse culture has given rise to the kind of pendulum swing Michel Foucault argued tended to occur in manichean binary cultures. It has led to a media hunger for and a mass frenzy for investigative gossip about the foibles of its secular saints, particularly its entertainment, political, and sports celebrities, which now includes those who have become celebrities thanks to the new digital media and unreal "reality" television. In the comic book world this new postmodernist culture of sensationalist gotcha cynicisim, skepticism, and snark has led to the return of the Great Depression era noirish Dark Knight vigilante and the Soviet Red Son Superman, a reflexive comic book that interrogates cultural manicheanism and its secular saints. In film it has given us films, particularly independent films in the US, that explore, in an often non-judgemental way, the dark side of human life and which often celebrate the anti-heroes or outlaws that populate its film frames. 

Despite all of this we need to remember, as Foucault notes, that while the binary may get somewhat messy in postmodern snark media like TMZ, in postmodern comic books like the Dark Night series of graphic novels, and in the contemporary postmodern American independent cinema, it still undergirds a lot of the culture of the West not only in its manichean form but also in its often manichean anti-form. Additionally, the manicheanism, melodrama, and saint making and evil making culture of propaganda surrounding the Russian and Ukrainian war should remind us once again how prevalent manichean culture with its mythistory still is in the West. Finally, it should point up to the empirically minded how effective it still is in manipulating the masses, who undoubtedly knew and still know little about the broader contexts of the Russian and Ukrainian conflict and who probably couldn't find the Ukraine on a map a few weeks before the conflict began.

But is there some truth in a manichean mythistory that divides the world between the good and the bad, the saintly and the demonic, the godly and the devilish? That issue seems to me to be more a question for theologians and social ethicists who ground their ethics and morality in some metaphical first mover or entity. What empirically oriented social scientists can say is that humans have, over the course of human history, exhibited behaviours theologians and theological ethicists would describe as good and they have exhibted characterists theologians and theological ethicists would describe as bad. Given this, it would seem more accurate for the empirically inclined to conceptualise human behaviours as lying along a continuum rather than as entirely distinct components of an either/or binary. It would thus appear to be more empirically accurate to conceptualise humans as capable of behaviours that theologians and theological ethicists would regard as both good and bad simultaneously.

Musings on Empire and Imperialism

1. Who is to blame for the current European situation? As I am not a theologian or an ethcist I can only point out that if we want to play the blame game there is a lot of blame to go around and a lot of blame to apportion if we want to be fair and balanced. If you want to blame, blame NATO, blame the US, blame intransigent I gotta show em my cock is hard Biden, blame the Ukraine, blame Russia, blame Putin, blame stupidity, blame hubris, blame moronicity, blame humans, blame imperialism, blame empire. 

2. More important than playing the blame game is to put what is happening in Europe into context. Putin has repeatedly warned the West and NATO, an arm of American imperialism, for years that Ukraine and Georgia were off limits for NATO expansion. He offered Ukraine Finlandisation, which means that Ukraine would have to remain, like Finland, neutral. While perhaps not perfect when you live next to an empire, which Pierre Trudeau likened to sleeping next to a cranky elephant--Trudeau was referring to the US and he well knew what it was like to be dominated by American economic, political, and even military imperialism--there is no perfect. I would think that, Finlandisation is better than war. But that's me.

3. Today American military bases can be found around the globe and they are, quite clearly, at least on one level, instances of continuing American imperialism. As for America's many imperial wars in my lifetime, the overt ones start with Korea and end with Iraq. The covert ones are going on around the globe almost everywhere as I type including in the Ukraine. Did you see that marvellous photo of McCain, Lindsey Graham, with the Ukraine military? But then the US is an empire. 

4. I have long been fascinated by the American civil religion. Americans like to think that their country is just there to lend a hand and to make the world a better place (translation, make the world accessible to American business and military "interests"). It is interesting to compare and contrast Britain's revelling in being an empire with America's studied amnesia of the fact that it is an empire. Britain's elites generally accepted that they were imperialists and they believed that they and their nation were, as their empire spread across the globe, "civilising" the world (translation: making it safe for British interests) thanks to Britain's natural and/or god given economic, political, cultural, and demographic superiority. The US generally revels in the myth of its civilising and helping hand "mission" and its own sense of economic, political, and cultural superiority (American White supremacists would add biological superiority to this mix), but it continues to wallow in its own John Wayne innocence. Such amnesia is not quant. It is simply delusional.

5. I want to end by noting that anyone who believes that Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq were defensive wars has been snorting the imperial koolaid and drinking too much cocaine. To paraphrase Chapelle, imperialism is a hell of a drug.

Musings of the Differences Between Apologetics and Polemics and Empirical Analysis and Interpretation

As an ethnologist and ethnographer and historian I am interested in apologetics, what we believe is true, and polemics, what you believe is false. However, I am not interested in either as a form of practise  though I am, of course, aware of the fact that demagoguery has become a cottage industry particularly in the core nation West with its modern secondary socialisers such as media and schools.

As a student of socialisation, enculturation, and deviance, I have, of course, noticed the tendency of those engaged in apologetics and polemics to tar anyone who doesn't fall into civil religion line during times of crisis with the stench of deviance, of violating and profaning societal cultural norms and values, and sacred national myths and legends. As a student of Mormonism, of course, I can't help but be reminded by all of this of the Mormon apologetic and polemic faith historical practise of categorising some, in typical demagogic practise, as "anti-Mormon".  

This tendency of some Mormon faith historical commentators and pundits, of Mormon apologists and polemicists to, distinguish, in melodramatic and manichean fashion, solely between "Mormon" and "anti-Mormon", however, elides the fact that not all criticism of Mormonism is grounded in emotions like fear, anxiety, hatred, disgust, or the binary of orthdox and heresy. There are, in fact, some criticisms of Mormonism (and of the US, Israel, Russia, the Ukraine, to chose a few other examples) that are grounded in valid empirical frames of analysis (economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic) necessitating that those of us who are dispassionate and empirical add a third category into the dualistic and generally manichean mix of demagogues: empirical approaches to Mormonism. The fact that apologists and polemicists for the Mormon faith don't really want to add that third category simply points up how political and cultural use can be made and often is made of such binaries and how useful such dualisms can be and are in culture wars. That such a binary is inherently apologietic and polemic also needs to be noted.

One thing ethnography and ethnology taught me is that to be fully empirical one has to approach cultural groups from both an emic or insider perspective, and an etic perspective grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic theoretical and methodological frames. I understand (verstehen), for instance, that Russian and American culture have their ideologies of exceptionalism, chosenness, messianism, and global or at least group mission (and here is where the various economic, political, cultural, and geographic imperialism comes in). By utilising such emic approaches, by "going native" in other words, one can gain an understanding of how cultural ideologies work in practise and one can get a glimpse into the societal mind and into national and state civil religions and how these work themselves out in real life.

Once I have an emic derived cultural base, I try to go all etic on social and cultural arse. I try to analyse them, in other words, through economic, political, demographic, geographic, and particularly cultural frames. When one does this one quickly recognises that such cultural ideologies like all cultural ideologies are cultural and ideological contructions and that humans, given their tendency to fetishise the particular, universalise particular constructed cultural ideologies turning them into, as Emile Durkheim noted, in the process, their totem or their god making their particular society sacred and holy as a result. 

When one understands this process of fetishisation one can also comprehend the fact that anyone who profanes the sacred civil religion is in danger of being categorised as evil, demonic, or a heretic, inquisited, ostracised, and even burned at the stake. Deviants and dissidents become, as Durkheim recognised, examples of what happens to those who deviate from the norm (shoutout to Rush) for all of society to see. Those who can be brought back into line are brought back into line for humans, after all, are a conforming species as social scientific studies have repeatedly shown. Those who can't are stigmatised as outsiders, as deviants, as heretics.

By the way, recent events in Europe have foregrounded what earlier research has shown, namely, that there really is not much new that further studies can add to the understanding of apologetics and polemics or demagoguery in the core nation world. Most of the masses in the core nations continue to get their news, if I can call such sensationalism, manicheanism, and melodrama news, from a secondary socialiser, the media. The only difference is that the brave new digital world has broadened and enlarged the media environment, made it more ever present, and dumbed it down to penny press sensationalism, manicheanism, and melodrama even more than it already had. The media continues, particularly during times of crisis, to function and serve as a propaganda arm of governments and particularly, in the West, of imperial America, its mouthpieces and clones in parts of Europe, and its ever expanding military arm in Europe, NATO. The masses continue to avoid reading books written by reputable scholars, who put things into broader context and avoid the fallacy of the great and evil man approach to history, in order to fact check the melodramatic and manichean sensationalism the media peddles and parrots. And they, in turn, by and large ditto it and parrot it back on dumbed down social media sites like Facebook. Welcome to the postmodern world.

Musings on How to Do Comparative History...

So what do we do when we study comparative history? Comparative historians explore similarities, for example, American and Russian notions of choseness, American and Russian messianism, American and Russian notions that they are on a mission to change the world, American and Russian conquests of frontiers and their brutalisation of indigenous peoples on those frontiers, American and Russian modern bureaucracies, and American and Russian oligarchies. Comparative historians also explore differences. The US is, for instance, a settler society, a society that originated out of European colonisation. Russia is not a settler society.

So let's take an empirical and scientific example to flesh the comparative history of the US and Russia. It is a descriptive fact that in many ways self proclaimed "democracies" are fake democracies given that they are bureaucratic in nature and hence oligarchic. As Max Weber and Robert Michels noted almost a hundred years ago, bureaucracies are inherently inequalitarian and unequal. How so? Because bureaucracies, as Weber and Michels note, are hierararchical. The few at the top have more power and authority (and make more money) than those in the middle and those at the bottom. This should be pretty obvious to anyone who has gone to high school, one of America's educational and socialising bureaucracies.Is America characterised by modern rational means-end hierarchical bureaucracies? Yes. Is Russia? Yes. Is Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Ukraine? Yes. So, if Weber and Michels are correct, then the US is not a democracy in the strict sense of the term. I assume no one wants to argue that Russia is a democracy so that issue is moot.

If one wants to critique the arguments of Weber and Michels it would be wise, of course, if we want to be scientific, to actually critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, two social scientific giants, empirically. One might, for instance, argue that Weber and Michels are right but that there are multiple bureaucracies in the US, unlike in Russia where the political bureaucracy is dominant, and that economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies are engaged in a struggle for power and hegemony in the US, a struggle that opens up spaces for something like the New Deal and Great Society, both of which brought a greater degree of equality to the US. On the other hand, one might argue that the New Deal to Great Society was an anomaly in American history (as was the notion that America was characterised by a consensus from the Great Depression to Nixon) and that economic oligarchs have controlled and still dominate and control the economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies of the US. One might go on to argue, in descriptive mode, that such control makes these elites, thanks to the authority and power (not to mention monies and wealth) that comes and accrues, in large part, from one's position in hierarchical bureaucracies, the ones who really control the US and dominate it economically, politically, and culturally. One might go on to argue that the social and cultural capital that accrues from one's bureaucratic position replicates oligarchic power in "democratic" oligarchies like the US. One can conclude, as a consequence, that the US is an oligarchy that is not really that different from oligarchic Russia.

Feel free to disagree. If you do, however, please be empirical and please respond to the empirical arguments made. Pithy and empirically challenged statements of the nationalist civil religion faith drawn from the nationalist civil religion catechism do not do anything for me. No religion does. They should not do anything for anyone who wants their analysis to be emprical and scientific.

More Musings on Russia, Oligarchy, and Bullshite...

What has been the central issue for me is not the oligarchy that is Russia (or the Ukraine or the US). As I noted all of them are oligarchies. So are, though I will concede in varying degrees along a continuum, Iceland and Denmark. I have largely focused heretofore on the role culture, politics, and economics played and play in the current European war and the role culture plays in the framing of that war. My focus, in other words, was on the demagogic bullshite that always accompanies such conflicts. My discussion of oligarchy was related to the common myth among those who have drank the koolaid of American civil religion that the US is a "democracy".

There is no doubt, descriptively speaking, that the US and Russia are great powers and that they like to throw their ecoomic, political, and cultural weight around. There is no doubt that NATO expansion, as several commentors and intellectuals have noted over the years, has played an important role in the leadup to the current war. There is no doubt that an elected government sympathetic to Russian concerns was overthrown in 2013 and 2014. There is little doubt that the US played a role in that coup. That is what great powers knee jerkingly do. There is no doubt that Ukraine is a multicultural state in the mold of the old Austria Hungarian Empire. There is no doubt that the multicultural nature of the Ukraine has led to tensions and culture wars in that state and has made political culture in the Ukraine dysfunctional. There is no doubt that Russia has played a role in that dysfunction and there is equally no doubt that they didn't create it. There is no doubt that manichean cultural frames are a factor in how some, many of whom probably know little of the history of the leadup to this conflict, know llittle of the Ukraine including its history, and who probably couldn't tell you where Ukraine was on the map before the conflict, "read" this war and its broader contexts. 

Let's be honest, most of those who have been turned into red faced vigilantes recently have been made into rageoholics by governmental historically deficient demagoguery and by the media, a media that, on one level, is a demagogic arm of Western governments and which is hardly known for operating outside the nationalist hermeneutic circle. See the Birmingham School studies on media framing and assumptions. The media, by and large, tend to be about as critical and historically inclined as a paper bag. None of what I say, of course, is Russian "disinformation". It is descriptive fact and that makes it different from the manichean and historically anemic disinformation being spread by many in the nationalistic and imperialistic American government and the nationalist, sensationalist, and melodramatic American media (all of which is paralled in much other Western media), which always becomes more penny in form and content in periods of imperial and nationalistic crisis. 

Christian social ethicist and former pacifist Reinhold Niebuhr, of course, made the argument, in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the US, an argument which is fundamentally and inherently normative and ultimately, as a consequence, theological. Niebuhr argued that flawed democracies were, relatively speaking, "better" than aggressive authoritarian regimes and that one had to ultimately chose between them. Niebuhr was quite aware, when he made this argument, of the flaws of American "democracy" its, for instance, chasm between rich and poor and its racism. It is a valid ethical and theological argument, a, in other words, valid normative perspective. And it is even grounded, unlike some ethical and theological arguments, in descriptive fact making it more realist. Nieburh's approach, of course, was central to the rise of liberal realist foreign policy and the doctrine of containment. It is also less manichean than other normative perspectives in that it recognises that societies must by typologised on the basis of more "good" and less "good". 

That said, it is also a valid to note the descriptive fact that in many ways these "democracies" are fake democracies given that they are bureaucratic in nature and hence oligarchic as Weber and Michels note. if one wants to critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, of course, it would be wise, at least in my opinion, to actually critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, two social scientific giants, rather than frame the issue within what is more or a normative than a descriptive frame. One might, for instance, argue that Weber and Michels are right but that there are multiple bureaucracies in the US and that these economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies are engaged in a struggle for power and hegemony, a struggle that opens up spaces for something like the New Deal and Great Society, both of which brought a greater degree of equality to the US. On the other hand, one might argue that the New Deal to Great Society was an anomaly in American history (as was the notion that America was characterised by a consensus from the Great Depression to Nixon) and that economic oligarchs have controlled and still dominate and control the economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies of the US. One might go on to argue, in descriptive mode, that such control makes these elites, thanks to the wealth, money, authority, and power that comes and accrues, in part, from one's position in hierarchical bureaucracies, the ones who really control and dominate the US economically, politically, and culturally. One might go on to argue that the social and cultural capital that accrues from one's bureaucratic position replicates oligarchic power in "democratic" oligarchies like the US. One might then go on to argue, as a consequence, that the US is an oligarchy that is not that different from oligarchic Russia. I think I will make that argument.

Musings on the Social and Cultural Construction of Reality...

I think the first time I learned that people create on construct their own "realities" was when I was a Biblical Studies student. It quickly became clear to me while taking Biblical Studies classes that many Christians had been socialised or brainwashed during Sunday School into Harmony of the Gospels bs. As a result of this socialisation or brainwashing, they couldn't see the obvious contradictions and inconsistencies in the gospel texts. They couldn't see, for example that in one gospel Jesus is born in Nazareth while in another he is born in Bethlehem. They couldn't see that in one gospel Jesus goes to Egypt while in another no Egyptian excursion is mentioned whatsoever. Since then, I have seen people constructing their realities often out of manichean comic book whole cloth again and again. I guess it really is true that most humans prefer fairy tales to the messy reality that is all around us.

Musings on Fantasy, Civil Religion, and the Opiate of the True Believing Masses...

1. The Ukraine is not, despite the claims of some who are clearly deluded, a democracy and never has been. Its ranks high in corruption. It has long been dominated, as has the US and Russia, by oligarchs. Only demagogues, ideologues, and those demagogued and, as a consequence, not fully cognisant of reality can make the humourous claim that the Ukraine (or the US, for that matter), is a democracy.

Why is virtually no nation or state a democracy? One word, bureaucracy. As Max Weber and Robert Michels noted almost one hundred years ago, bureaucracies are inherently oligarchic because they are grounded in vertical hierarchies with different degrees of power and authority. Some, those few at the top, have more of each. Many more, those at the bottom, have less of each. Bureaucracies, in other words, are grounded, in inequality. Bureaucracies are inherently unequal. 

Is the US a bureaucratic society? Yes. It's governmental, business, and cultural structures are bureaucratic. So, of course, is the Ukraine, Russia, and Canada. Of course, I know empirical evidence is not really relevant to those who prefer to live in the world of myth and legend, in the world of early John Ford films, in other words. So, in the final analysis, I know empirical facts are irrelevant to those who prefer to live their lives in a gauze of myth and legend and who prefer their reality to be unreal. 

2. Speaking of those who prefer the mythic illusion and delusion to reality, demagogues, ideologues, and those blissfully demagogued have to ignore a host of facts. They have to ignore US overt and covert actions in the Ukraine, ethnic and linguistic divisions in the Ukraine, varying ethnic sympathies in the Ukraine, and, most pertinently, the American role in the overthrow or coup against a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine in 2013 and 2014. 

As one commentor recently noted ignoring these indisputable facts, ones those who know little about the real rather those inscribed within an imaginary Ukraine live in a "black-and-white moral universe where tales of Good versus Evil always result in the princess being rescued by the knight [also see the film Pretty Woman] or whichever other comforting myths you need to tell yourself. The US deliberately chose — across administrations of both parties — to subsidize and “train” Ukraine’s military, flood the country with weapons, and otherwise assume the role of primary foreign sponsor. That’s the indisputable reality".

3. Sadly, those who prefer their reality to be mythic cannot counter and they don''t even try to counter, empirically grounded arguments, such as the points made by Weber and Michels about bureaucracies and oligarchies. They don't try to counter the clear historical fact that money and wealth, something the oligarchs have in bundles, dominate American economic and political life. They simply prefer to make empirically anemic generalisations grounded in the myths and legends of the American civil religion whether they are Republicans drugged up on their devotion to Tangholio or Democrats drugged up on the fantasy that the US, when run by Dems, is the essence of goodness in the modern world."

This, of course, makes having empirical discussions with the faithful true believer impossible since empirical evidence never impacts the minds of the true believers. As my old religion professor noted, one might as well bang one's head against a wall.

The Books of My Life: The Kingdom of God in America

H. Richard Niebuhr, the brother of prominent, well known, and influential historian, foreign policy commentator, and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote three books that are now considered classics in the sociology, cultural history, ethography, theology, and social ethics of American Christianity. The first, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), explores how region or geography, race, and class impacted American religion, particularly American Protestantism, and divided it. The second, Christ and Culture (1951), explores, by typologising how Christian groups conceptualised the relation between Jesus and the world (Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture), the relationship between the church and the world. The third, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1937), explores the key, central, or dominant cultural symbols at the heart of American Protestantism.

Taking what we would today call a symbolic anthropological approach with its emphasis on "going native" and key symbols,  Niebuhr argues that three key interrelated symbols, the sovereignty of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the coming kingdom, with varying emphases and in various permutations, have been at the centre of American Protestantism since the colonial era whether Puritan Protestantism, Quaker Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, or the Protestant social gospel. Niebuhr also argues, in Durkheimian fashion, that over time these key symbols were secularised and, as a result, became central or key symbols in the American civil religion with its emphasis on American choseness,  whether as a result of divine grace or because America is nature's nation, American mission, and the coming utopian age that will arise out of American choseness and America's mission to the world.

The Kingdom of God in America is a classic for good reason. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in American history, American culture, American religion, Protestantism, and American Protestantism though not everyone will find its mix of history, ethnography, and reformed theology, its mix of descriptive and normative analysis, in other words, compelling. Highly recommended for its historical and ethnographic approach and analysis.

Musings on European Tensions...

1. The thing about NATO expansion is that it provided the context for what happened in Georgia and what is happening in the Ukraine. Given this, the argument that the elimination of NATO would have prevented both conflicts is equally if not more valid than the NATO is necessary argument. 

2. Great powers, including the US, always engage in state sponsored aggression in covert and overt ways. I am not sure any organisation, including the UN, can put an end to this reality at this point in time. Nationalism, after all, is a religion and it is, thanks to its apologetics and polemics (demagoguery), a powerful constructed faith which can turn even intelligent people into faithful red faced emotionally driven rageoholics. Periodic inquisitions and purges in the US point this fact up again and again. 

3. One has to look at imperialism on the descriptive level. Only then can one make normative judgements. One cannot ignore the past or present behaviours of any great power, including the US, and let's not forget that the US and its groupies helped destabilise the Ukraine over the years and was involved in a coup which overthrew an "elected" (I recognise that using the terms election and the Ukraine in the same sentence is problematic in all cases) government in 2013. and 2014. Given this descriptive reality one cannot avoid, normatively, putting some of the blame on the US mame. 

4. Power is a drug. And it is a drug that one can find everywhere including in the US, past, present, and, I suspect, in the future. 

5. On a normative level, I think a secular Calvinism is the most realistic approach to viewing human life, all human life, including that in the US. Humans, it seems to me and as history seems to show, are pretty skanky and slaggy. Flim flam capitalism and American and Russian imperialism are just two recent examples of human skankiness and slagginess. That said, one also has to go native and understand, for example, Russian paranoia, a paranoia grounded in the realities of the two world wars. Going native shows that both the US and Russia are imperialist great powers, oligarchies, bureaucratic societies (and hence oligarchic) with cultural ideologies of exceptionalism, messianism, and global mission. 

6. By the way, I don't think that finlandisation of the Ukraine is a problem. I doubt if the Ukraine will ever be Finland economically or politically, but I find this proposal, one Putin has, according to sources made, a reasonable and rational one and probably the best one given the circumstances. It is fascinating that the US apparently dismissed this reasonable, rational, and pragmatic proposal out of hand.