More On The "historical Jesus" Industry

IT IS ONE OF THE more curious things about the business of recreating "an" historical Jesus that it is both held that gospels written a few decades after the death of Jesus are considered to be too late to be reliable but that reconstructions done almost two thousand years later are to be considered better.  As the earlier post said, I was reading about one reconstruction made in the 1970s, trying to paint a "Jesus" before Christianity started based on allegedly accurate reconstructions of Judaism in and around where he lived and the ambient pagan culture and other things, along the way discounting what the Gospels had to say on many points while, also, using the Gospels as the primary source materials - which along with the various Epistles are the source material available.  This one, apparently, doesn't go for the later fad of using very late "gospels" which are even more obviously overlaid if not created out of extraneous theology and pagan philosophy that would be rejected by orthodox Christianity in Eurasia and Africa. I have to say that it might be nice if the "historical Jesus" industry would get its industrial standards straightened out to the point where the dating of Gospels really does matter in their credibility or if they come clean, that it is to matter only when the dating can be used to attack the common conclusions made about the canonical Gospels.  I've read the apocryphal gospels and I don't find any of them, including the Thomas Gospel, to be especially believable as compared to the Synoptic Gospels and that attributed to John, taking into account that they don't strictly agree on some things. I'm sorry but I think Elane Pagels is not credible.

I have a hard time imagining that, especially, Luke didn't have access to eye-witnesses to the ministry of Jesus and that what he reported from his research, was something he didn't believe was accurate.  We can suspect that it's at least within the realm of possibility that "Luke" had access to eye-witness or at least somewhat fresh testimony from those who saw and heard Jesus though we cannot be certain of that.  We can be certain that the entire modern academic community can have no such claim made for it. I find it remarkable in this "historical Jesus" business that the claims that the Gospels written within the span of living memory of Jesus but somewhat after are not reliable while it is claimed that reconstructions made almost two thousand years later are.

I also have a hard time believing that what Jesus really taught and did was not radically different from the various mainstream Jewish sects of his time, what would have left written evidence, especially the ones which the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles present as being in opposition to what he taught.  I do believe that Luke and the other canonical Gospels present a Jesus who would have had to depart from conventional religious and political beliefs in significant ways or he would not have gotten that opposition which, eventually, resulted in his death. I think, if anything, the writers of the Gospels and, perhaps especially Paul would have toned down the radicalism of Jesus because they were mostly if not all observing him and his message out of conventional Jewish thinking and the Gospel they provide is plenty radical to be getting on with.  

That filtering is certainly going on today.  One of the things I now find hardest to believe in the many recent "historical Jesuses" is how conventional they are in today's terms, recreated out of scholarly (modern) claims made about the religions of the time which are, as well, seen through modern eyes.    Brueggemann notes that the "historical" Jesuses they come up with are often suspiciously like which ever person is constructing it. Modern scholars sell a Jesus that is tailored for modern acceptance or their book goes nowhere and makes no splash, which is ironic, considering the fate of the apocryphal gospels in history.

If the picture of the "pre-Christian" Jesus movement has been unreliable for most of the past 2000 years, why would anyone imagine the information about Judaism or the ambient Greco-Roman culture which survives was any more reliable so as to recreate a reconstruction of that and to create an "historical Jesus" based on a modern sifting and reconstruction of the evidence?  Why are the sayings of the Jewish sages and Rabbis of the time not as vulnerable to elisions and accretions and the past and so in need of historical-critical pruning and bending?  Every fault that can be laid to the texts of the New Testament is certainly as likely to be true of everything passed down to us from the period.

One thing is certain, for Christianity to get started in and among the Jewish and pagan converts starting during the ministry of Jesus but, perhaps even more so after his death when the professions about him by his followers and their converts was the only information about him, they living in the very milieu which is the stuff of the "historical Jsus" industrie's claims to base their reconstructions on would have had to find what was said about him credible in all of its incredibility . Whichever Gospel or Gospels they adopted, they must have believed them.  And it would have to be sufficiently different from what was there before to generate any movement at all.  Especially one that survives till today instead of it having sunk back into the ambient culture and disappeared.  

I think it's pretty obvious that there are things about the way how to be a Christian is presented in Scripture that would have been a serious handicap to its widespread adoption.  The claim of resurrection during the present age instead of the end of the age doesn't seem to be something that Jews would have expected to happen. The claim that a carpenter's son, especially one of rather dubious fatherhood, one who lived and taught what Jesus taught was the Messiah doesn't seem to have been expected by anyone.  Certainly the claim of him being born to a virgin who claimed to have not had sex with a man was as capable of generating snark back then as it is today, probably more so.  The role that Women had in the witness of the Resurrection, they being the first witnesses who told men about it is nothing that would have been widely accepted as credible, Women not being considered credible witnesses.  I admit that I find the arguments for the authenticity of at least the belief in what the Gospels report by those who wrote them and the extent to which they were held to be true by his closest followers from the serious disadvantages for converting skeptics contained in them add to the credibility of at least what was said being believed to be true.  If it had been a consciously constructed con job you wouldn't expect those features to be there or to play such central roles in the claims, you would expect it to be constructed for easy sale and snark proofed.  

And on top of those disadvantages there are the central messages of Jesus, including the ones that so few of his would-be followers find it possible to do,

- selling everything you have, giving the money to those who are too poor to repay it,

- the whole host of personal privations and dangers advocated in it.  

- Central to the teachings of Jesus is the elevation of the destitute over the powerful, the marginal and nothings of their time over the elites, the opposition to the religious as well as economic and political elites and their power.  

- And to top all of that off there is the example of the Jesus as a powerless figure, held to be the Son of God,  being tortured and humiliatingly executed by the Roman government,

- and his earliest and closest followers presented as being headed for similar ends.  

Those aren't exactly made for easy sales.  Which is exactly why the "prosperity gospel" heresy as well as the Halloween horror house version of it is such an easier sell so much better than the real Gospel.  

That even among the heresies the real thing did succeed in establishing itself in some forms, in many places is something of a miracle. I think St. Francis arising as he did, where he did is a miracle.  More generally, I think the remarkable features of the monotheism that springs from the Jewish tradition flourishing and becoming so widespread across the world in ways that none of the far more powerful, far more widespread religious traditions of the time have is a remarkable phenomenon.  Perhaps especially Christianity which, in so many ways, contains its own greatest obstacles to success.  

There are some really good things about the recent scholarship into the origins of Christianity, especially those parts of it that call attention to the extreme egalitarian, leveling aspects of it - something which has certainly not typified the mainstream of Christianity after it gained political and legal acceptance and power.  But, as I said in my other post on this the other day, in doing that they also remove the most powerful reason for someone disinclined to egalitarian justice and economic leveling - and that is most of us - from making that effort, the divine authority of the one who gave those commandments to Christians.  

I have little emotional investment in things like The Virgin Birth but I don't think it's likely that there is a more effective or more likely source for bringing about the Kingdom of God than the belief that we are divinely commanded to do those parts of the Will of God which will comprise that Kingdom here, on Earth.  

And I don't think anything short of an expectation that us making that effort will have an effect on our eventual fate after death will make it happen, either.  I might like the idea that postmortem punishment is reformative and that, eventually, all will be convinced of the rightness of God's will but I think that punishment is still worth avoiding.  In that I find a God who both will not be mocked (as Brueggemann stresses) but who it is possible to love.  I don't think the Western Christian theory of eternal punishment is compatible with the idea that God is good and deserving of our love.  The God as described by Augustine and Calvin is one who you might fear but you could never really love, no matter how much you pretend you can.  

I think that accounts for why so many who are so wedded to the idea of eternal damnation are far more impressed with the power of evil than the power of good, I think they have an obsessive fascination with evil, the glamor of Satan which the Catholic rite of Baptism warns against.  Not that a lot of Catholics have exactly lived like that, including many clerics.  A number of those sitting in Bishops' chairs and higher might well be described as glamorously evil as well as most of the popular Protestant TV preachers.  I think the "trad-Catholic" fascination with pseudo-medieval bullshit is an example of how the devil can use the trappings of religion to corrupt the gullible, the fancier the better.  The trappings of academic respectability, with their own neo-medieval features and traditions historically based in ecclesiastical ranking and privilege and pomp, can serve the same ends, especially as filtered through the commercial publishing industry and NPR-PBS. And "liberals" are especially vulnerable to that.  I think they invent a Jesus who they hope will be compatible with modern, academic anti-Christianty.

I think there is plenty of work to be done in the conversion of conventional Christianity and, even more so "christianity" to the Gospel of Jesus.  Ironically, considering my criticism of Albert Nolan in that earlier post, I think it's exactly in the direction he announced his goal to be.  I don't think it's likely the "historical Jesus" industry is going to help that effort, I think it's far more likely to prevent it just as earlier establishment twisting and clipping of the Gospels did.  That's a radical stand, not a "conservative" one.

The reason I agree with Nolan about the political-economic-social content of the teachings of Jesus is because that is what he is presented as teaching in those very documents

IN WHAT SEEMS like it was months ago but was only a few days ago, I said that I didn't find much significant difference in the different English translations of the Book of Jeremiah that I was reading while going over that book starting at the end of Summer.  

Since then I have been reading the Luke Gospel, adding the recent translation of the New Testament by the Orthodox scholar and classicist David Bentley Hart and I have to say that there are some important differences between his translation and the other English ones I've got - all of them made by  either Roman Catholics or Protestants.  Since all of them purport to base their translations on various editions of the original Greek and not on later translations, it's interesting to see the profound differences based on subtly different readings of the Greek words and how something as profoundly different as the Western dark reading of the Scriptures of Augustine and the like and the far more light filled reading out of the tradition of the Greek speaking and reading theologians and commentators.  The Western, Latin reading of it so influenced by the gloominess of Augustine's late works has had a profound effect through such theories as original sin, predestination, eternal damnation (including the lurid meditations of unbaptized infant damnation) and the necessary denials of the goodness of God those require.  Either that or a compete inversion of the concept of goodness and evil.  And they do present a far darker character to creation and even God that has prevailed for so long in the West - finding some Catholic Jansenist heresy and, ironically, in the Western anti-Christian reaction against it.  I would say that the gaudy idiocy of alleged "Satanism" is a product of that Western misreading of the New Testament and the perhaps even greater attribution of power to Satan that "evangelical" Halloween season "Hell Houses" promote.  I don't think evil is as powerful as God, I think God will prevail, I'm with some of the great Orthodox theologians on that count.  

The notes that DBH made, giving his reasons for why he translated things differently from the prevailiing Western sourced English translations are pretty interesting.  One on the famous camel through the eye of the needle passage is especially interesting to me from my reading of Gregory of Nyssa, in particular the death-bed discussion he had with his sister Makrina.  Note that I have included his demotic transliterations but can't include the original letters of the Greek which Hart gives.

The text speaks of a (kamelos, acc. kamelon), "camel," but from the early centuries it has been an open question whether it should really be the homophonous (but poorly attested) word (kamilos), "rope," "hawser": a more symmetrical but less piquant analogy.

Which reminded me, immediately of what Gregory of Nyssa in On The Soul and Resurrection reported his sister and teacher Makrina conceived happened to a sinner's soul after death to prepare it for union with God, the soul in need of purgation was like a rope covered with mud that could be cleaned by drawing it through a knothole. It makes me wonder if they didn't think the correct reading of it was "rope" and not "camel".  I do have to say that the more of the Orthodox theologians I read the more convinced I am that the Western tradition went seriously wrong in some basic ways through bad translations of the original Greek of the Scriptures into Latin and, from there, through the influence of some bad theology that developed that bad reading.  I think much of Protestantism and even more of Catholic history is more influenced by the hellish theories of damnation than the Gospel of Jesus. He has some interesting things to say about the Catholic medieval innovation of Purgatory in regard to that.

Last week I happened upon a book review by Regina Schulte, published on the twenty-fifth  anniversary of the 1976 publication of Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan (I'd been looking for citations of Nolan to see if I wanted to read his stuff).  The review claimed that it was a different and earlier take on the "historical Jesus" industry from before its most recent and most popular manifestation, aided by cable channel and PBS publicity.  

Nolan, as presented by Schulte, and I would agree on a lot of things:

The author’s specific purpose sets this study apart from many past efforts to find Jesus in his human skin. At the outset, he makes clear that this is not an attempt to convert anyone, not a defense of Christian faith, not a merely academic pursuit. Nolan admits to being moved by an “urgent and practical purpose.”

"I am concerned about people; the daily sufferings of so many millions of people, and the prospect of much greater suffering in the near future. My purpose is to find out what can be done about it."

That is, certainly, something Jesus and the Jewish Scriptures he so frequently and masterfully quoted are concerned with. Since both were speaking to living People living in this world, in this life, that is the central focus of the written Scriptures, why they are so important to the creation of a just society and the attempt to create a decent life here, now and on Earth.

But I think it goes off track.

The all-inclusive political and economic system we have created has brought our world to the brink of disaster. Organized religion has offered little help, and sometimes has even exacerbated the problems. Jesus of Nazareth lived in a time and place that had problems similar to ours, albeit on a much smaller scale. The author wishes to find what, if anything, Jesus sought to do about them. What purpose drove his choice of mission?

I have, over and over again, agreed with the view of Jurgen Habermass that religion, specifically the Jewish conception of justice as in the Law and the Prophets and the Christian commandments of universal love are the only sources of modern egalitarain democracy and what is, I think, our best hope for the solution to those problems.  That some "organized religion" has hampered that is self-evident but I am skeptical that Nolan's conception of Jesus will be any more helpful than the mildest and generally ineffective efforts in the history of Christianity. Some of the most successful figures and movements toward that have been explicitly motivated by a quite different often more conventional  conception of Jesus and Christianity than the one presented by the "historical Jesuses" of academic imagination.  

I think a lot of it hinges on a non-divine, non-inspired, safely conventional materialistic  Jesus telling us to love our neighbor as our self, doing for the least among us, etc.  and someone who hears that saying, who died and made him God?  Moses posed that possibility to God who appeared as the Burning Bush.  It's even more relevant to today's secular world.  He would not have been believed if he was just saying it on his own.

“Context” is the guiding principle for this study: the socio-politico-religious environment contemporary to Jesus vis a vis our world today. Faith was not a pre-requisite for the author and neither is it for the reader.

To allow Jesus to speak for himself, Nolan set aside all preconceived notions about him—including that he is divine or the Messiah, or the savior of the world, as well as any assumptions that he was not any of these. Knowing that historical objectivity is always to some degree imperfect, Nolan chose our contemporary situation as the place to stand for the most unobstructed view of Jesus within his environment. The picture of that world is critical to a correct interpretation of what we read in the Gospels, and the author has researched it well.

From non-biblical sources he finds knowledge of the social mores, politics, Jewish religious traditions, the variety of Jewish sects operating among Jesus’ contemporaries, and even the way time was measured (very different from ours). Then, situating the gospel texts in that cultural frame, Nolan goes to work as methodically as would an ace detective. He looks for connections, clues, and contradictions that may shed light on a Jesus stripped of all aura in which Christian belief has clothed him.

There is so much in that which I agree with, either specifically or generally that I am sorry to say I think that the present day, common, resort to "non-bibical sources" that supposedly yield "knowledge of the social mores, politics, Jewish religious traditions, the variety of Jewish sects operating among Jesus' contemporaries, . . . " and assuming those give a more accurate and reliable picture of Jesus than the Epistles and Gospels is a huge problem.  The Epistles and Gospels are the only records, apart from several later quotes without much substance by non-Christians about Jesus and the early Jesus movement.  Without those we wouldn't have any knowledge that there was ever a person to be "the historical Jesus" in history.  

One of the most well-established facts about Jesus is that his thinking was not typical of the established Jewish thinking of his time and place, considering that the opposition of several of the major and most powerful strains of those traditions to Jesus and that the Gospel accounts all seem to point to the opposition of the Temple authority to him - AND JESUS NOT BEING ESPECIALLY SIMPATICO WITH THE TEMPLE AUTHORITY - I doubt looking for what modern scholars would present as typical thinking of his time would get you nearer to the Jesus who was at odds with the Jewish authorities and who was executed by the Roman administrator, reportedly at the behest of the Temple authorities who were afraid Jesus would be the motivation of a typical murderous Roman pogrom.  

You have to wonder at why anyone would bother risking themselves to become his followers if his teachings were not at serious odds with the ambient cultures, both Jewish and gentile, why anyone would have bothered to oppose the early Jesus movement, why, for example, his brother James, one of the major figures in that movement,  would be murdered, why, as Christianity developed in that very setting, would be so different from what was already there.  

You have to wonder if Jesus didn't teach something quite different from what was there already why he would have bothered to live such an atypical and often uncomfortable life for his last years, why he knowingly put himself at risk, why anyone noticed his movement.  

I don't think the modern recreations (they certainly don't agree with each other, Nolan thinks Jesus was middle-class, Crossan of the lowest class) of the ambient Jewish or pagan world of that time are any more a reliable recreation than the many "historical Jesuses" that have been created by modern scholars for going on centuries, now.  I don't think, as Nolan seems to claim:

It is a misunderstanding to locate this “kingdom of heaven/God” in an otherworldly, afterlife existence. Rather, it was a just way of living here (on earth) and now (not in an afterlife). In fact, the concept of an afterlife in heaven was unknown to Jesus and his contemporaries.

I don't think there is anything we should regard as more authentic about what Jesus thought than what the Gospels presents him as saying, exists.  About the afterlife, for example:

- The parable of Lazarus and the Rich man - which certainly presents something close to a conventional Christian conception of "heaven" and "hell" as happening while the present age of life on Earth is going on, that being a parable out of the imagination of Jesus. Where was Abraham's bosom supposed to be if not somewhere other than Earth, a where was the Abraham that Lazarus was in, where was the rich man being afflicted?

- The Transfiguration in which Jesus talks to both Moses and Elijah - Moses certainly believed to be dead by Jews and Elijah said to have been taken bodily into heaven.  Though their description matches best, if anything, the risen body of Jesus, including sudden appearances and disappearances.

- His answer to the Sadducees (who, being Hellenized Jews, are believed to have not believed in an afterlife) when they gave him the riddle of the woman who was married to seven infertile brothers in succession is certainly relevant, where he tells them, citing the Words of God in Exodus to prove that Abraham and Jacob are alive in a present-tense conception of that, even though they were both dead in the here and now.

- The account of Jesus telling one of those being crucified with him that he would be with him that day in heaven.

- On top of that there are the arguments among his followers about which of them would sit closest to him at the side of God.  I don't think there is any reason to believe that they thought Jesus was talking only of the life here on Earth during the present age.

Even if, as modern scholars would seem to imagine Jesus as believing what Madalyn Murray said, that when you die your body rots and that's all there is to it, those presenting his life and thoughts closest to him, certainly don't seem to present him as believing in that.  He is recorded as saying his "Kingdom is not of this earth."  Where is it, then?  Though he doesn't go into much detail about it because his ministry was, indeed, to those living here and now, he said so.  I can agree with this next passage on that count.

The kingdom of heaven would replace the established system, the kingdom of Satan. Key elements of the latter were: 1) money, 2) prestige, 3) exclusive group solidarities, and 4) power. (Sound familiar?) A chapter is devoted to each of these, demonstrating how embedded they were in the socio-politico-religious fabric of those times. The recognition of these dynamics in the twenty-first century will surely come easily to readers.

I certainly agree with all of that at least in some sense, and I am even quite prepared to agree that, from what is presented in the Christian Scriptures, that any culmination of Creation would extinguish those features of reality that comprise our conception of physical creation.   I think there is some evidence of that in the testimony about the post-crucifixion appearance of Jesus.  The body of the risen Jesus was physical but it is also presented as more than physical. Jesus says, explicitly, that his risen body is not a "spirit."  Frankly, I'm more concerned that the risen Jesus ate some broiled fish instead of being a vegan, but he did claim that People are more important than many birds. Maybe that requires a different post to go into. He also warned against coming into contact with his body after the Resurrection.  Though he told Thomas to touch him, Hart's notes about that in the Gospel of John giving Thomas the role of declaring Jesus to be divine are especially interesting.  

I think one of the problems with Nolan's and most of the "historical Jesus" creators' is that they think there is a simple binary distinction to be made between the physical and the "spiritual."  The same enlightenment notion that, somehow, the Creator is detached from the Creation in our everyday as well as modern scientific conception of that.*  I think the "historical Jesus" industry in academia and elsewhere reads the available evidence quite superficially and is, itself, as embedded in an ideological (I'll be provocative and say secular theological) system as they accuse early and later Christians of imposing and even the writers of the very sources we have that there ever was a Jesus.  The whole thing is saturated by the materialist-scientism of modern ideology, academic orthodoxy, the means of educated people to gain status and cred for their claims, the way to get asked to talk on camera by PBS or some cable channel or whatever.  

I doubt any modern scholar, even very good ones, are more credible about the teachings of Jesus, the ambient thinking of Jews and gentiles, the world of Jesus than Paul or the authors of the Gospels, especially the Synoptics.  Paul confesses himself to have been in the thick of that ambient Jewish culture to an extreme degree before his conversion, one it authorized to suppress the Jesus movement. It's possible that James may have actually been related to Jesus, it is as certain as anything about him that the same Peter who Paul had an argument with was among the closest followers of Jesus. To take them and their earliest readers who developed Christianity on the basis of the reported memories of what Jesus said, as not credible seems to me to make even less sense than to historically-critically debunk every non-Christian source modern scholars base their claims about the "context" of Jesus in.   And it would certainly be possible to do that with those.

The reason I agree with Nolan about the political-economic-social content of the teachings of Jesus is because that is what he is presented as teaching in those very documents. Especially the author of Luke and in the Epistles of Paul and James.  The same documents that are picked apart to fit the remnant into that modern ideological system as they were cherry picked to support medieval pagan remnant political-economic inequality as will be on display in the coronation of Charles III.  I think a lot of it is based in an ahistorical context by the teachings of some far, far later Jewish writers and theologians who had their own perhaps quite valid motives for deemphisizing speculations about the after-life. I am not convinced that the Jewish Bible is as non-eschatological as modern readings of it claim.  The passages indicating an afterlife are few, things like Saul having the spirit of Samuel conjured after his death, but they are there. There seems to have been widespread Jewish belief in ghosts. I wonder if maybe their emphasis on the here and now isn't a reaction against the Egyptian and other gentile fixations on life after death.  As Jessica Mitford said, that was a society where the funeral directors got entirely out of hand.  The fixation on the afterlives of the Pharaohs was certainly part of the oppression of those living in the here and now, which, after all, is the thing that sets the entire Old Testament off.  There is a good reason why the Jewish religious tradition - including Jesus and those who first followed him - is useful in the struggle for equality, democracy, justice and a decent life in the here and now and it is that emphasis on the here and now, but that isn't the only thing there, perhaps not even the thing that empowers it.

I think it is impossible to understand the original appeal of the Gospel of Jesus unless it had some very distinct and radical departures from the ambient culture of his and slightly later times.  If that is true then trying to reconstruct "the historical Jesus" by watering him down with the norms of the very culture that opposed him in life and killed him in death and, reportedly, violently opposed his earliest followers who remembered him, is an obvious folly.  I think it is a product of academic specialists who want to water down Christianity to make it fit comfortably into our own culture, the one that Nolan and Schulte and I want to criticize, academia is as much a part of that as banking is.  I think for that there is no better or likely more successful resource than the actual Gospels and Epistles, Acts that make up the New Testament. And I don't think stripping Christianity of its scandalous differences from our current materialism and scientism is going to do much but discredit Jesus and the radical Jewish tradition he was probably the most radical representative of.

I have the same motives as Albert Nolan says are his.  Honestly, I don't see any more appeal in a non-eschatological Christianity than I do in the vapid generalities of mid- to late 20th century Unitarianism.  I don't see anything in a demoted Jesus that would go anywhere in the future just as I don't believe the "historical Jesuses" of modern creation would have generated any kind of movement, never mind one of People prepared to become martyrs, one to have been Christianity, especially in the period when the ambient world was of most danger to it, the period in which the world resorted to in retrospective recreation was up and running instead of merely many modern scholarly claims.  Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Makrina were one generation removed from that, their parents were alive for the very end of it, their grandparents were dispossessed in an anti-Christian pogrom. I don't think the Jesus of the "historical Jesus" efforts has a future and I certainly wouldn't depend on them to get me my daily bread or bring any kind of kingdom which will distribute God's will for equality and justice in the tradition of Moses even as well as it's at times happened in the past. I think the disasters we are in now are a product of the abandonment of the Gospel, both by modern materialist-atheist-secularists and the pseudo-Christianity of Mammonist "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics," or the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow.   I think the disasters of Christendom in the period when there was such a thing are generally due to a slightly different nipping and pruning of Jesus.  I think we need more Jesus as presented by Luke and Matthew and Paul, not cutting him down to less.

* Modernism, in its many superstitions in regard to science, doesn't seem to get that the exclusion of God from science is a human choice, just as they don't seem to understand that a realistic view of what legitimate science tells us is not an all-encompassing, all-inclusive view of even those things science can discern through its exclusions from consideration and within the limits of its ability.  It is a product of the highly ideological and self-interested presentation of science as an ideology instead of a convenient methodology.  As a fascinated student of the ubiquity of ideological scientism, it's amazing how much of that replaces actual science in the public's imagination.  It is as remarkable that the biggest, fattest promoters of "science" are as apt to misrepresent it as the biggest, fattest (and most ready to claim their ownership of Jesus)  religionist Christians to misrepresent the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets.  I think the historical-critical movement that arose in reaction to that has combined the first with the wreckage of the second one.

Covid Isn't Necessarily Easier The Second Time Around

THIS PAST TWO WEEKS have been pretty bad but I seem to be getting better. 

Jefferson's Very Short-Lived Conviction That All People Are Created Equal - Founding Fibs That Crush Democracy, etc.

NOTE: I was going to just post the quote with a few comments but another school shooting is being announced as I type this so I am amending.

Extracts from Debates in the Congress of Confederation, preserved by Thomas Jefferson, 1776 [as quoted in The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact, by Wendell Phillips]
 
Congress proceeded the same day to consider the Declaration of Independence.

The clause reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out, in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of Slaves,  and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.  Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures;  for though their people, have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.*

 *[The clause was as follows: "He, [viz, King George 3d] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep a market where MEN should  be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain the execrable commerce." - Editor].

Of course the only slightly older Jefferson never gave up the holding of the descendants of the enslaved Africans whose slavery he so rightly condemned as permitted by the British Government.  He accommodated his ideals to the same interests as those of the brutal slave holders in South Carolina and Georgia, the ones who, during the Constitutional Convention were cited as killing the most slaves through working them to death in rice swamps, the reason that the very trade condemned above was allowed to continue, explicitly permitted by the fabled Founders under the Constitution.  As I noted, the rice barons so accommodated were the moral equals of the Krupps and I G Farbens who worked Jewish slaves to death during the Nazi era.   I can't imagine no one else has never made the connection

Letters from Jefferson to his fellow aristocrat "planters" after the Revolution advocate that they increase their slave holding as a means of wealth building. Man of science that he was, Jefferson had calculated the rise in his wealth whenever one of his slaves - perhaps including the one he raped and had children with - gave birth.  

The same interests, in some cases the very same rich, white men who came together eleven years later to create, unauthorized, a federal government never really even considered even the promises made to poor white men that they had  retained in their Declaration of Independence from the British government, promises with which they got so many poor men to fight their revolution.  They deeply regretted the measure of democracy they had allowed in the Articles of Confederation which led people like Shays and his followers to believe they really meant those things, including the right of People to overthrow a government which does not support their rights and legitimate interests.  One of the things about revolutions and the constitutions that come after that, they never figure that the right to overturn a government should ever apply to what they create.  The founders made it very difficult to amend it, certainly the slave-power would have made it impossible to amend in regard to slavery and the Northern financiers who controlled the governments in those states would have made it impossible to amend against their wealth acquisition.

The real history of the United States, the real history and character of the Constitution, the real history of the most sordid branch of government, the Supreme Court, isn't pretty, it is as ugly as genocide, slavery, male-supremacy, white supremacy - our indigenous and long standing and empowered form of fascism, American apartheid - and economic inequality.  The pious lies which fill our popular kulcha, especially what flows out of Hollywood and from Broadway, the myth of the nobility of the framers (most of whom despised democracy and equality), the fetish of the founders feeds the legal profession and judicial crushing of any legislated attempt to move beyond that evil into equality and democracy and as much of a decent life for all as can be achieved.  I will point out that the clause condemning the Native Peoples who the white land speculators were murdering and robbing and displacing survived the group editing process and is still read every July 4th by DC Press Whore-hacks on NPR in that annual putrid exercise.

There is a reason the Roberts Court relies so much on the lie of "originalism" the lie of "textualism," it is because those evils inserted into the Constitution by slave-holding white-supremacists, wealthy, self-seeking aristocrats - most of them prominent lawyers (a profession second only to the media in the peddling of lies and fiction) are still there and ready to prevent any struggle for equality, for equal justice, for economic justice, for democracy even against the ownership of certain people of their own bodies - what the overt pro-slavery provisions and those inserted to protect slavery from democracy was from the start.  That it has been so recently been used against Women to so little reaction is no surprise.  Those provisions were put into place to keep Black People and others from the ownership of their bodies and lives, something put up with by white People for most of our history.  The Republican-fascist majority on the sitting Court, including Clarence Thomas are the successors of Charles Pickney, John Calhoun, Roger Taney,  Jefferson Davis, . . . Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and, let's admit it, the KKK and other extra-governmental enforcers of white supremacy.  The media and others who sandbagged Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are in on it, too.  Anyone who believes the press freed to lie is a guarantor of democracy and freedom is a total knucklehead who has been asleep for the past fifty-four years as they enabled Republican-fascism.

We are in for some terrible days ahead, the patched together democracy that existed for a short time after 1964 has been destroyed and its foremost engine of destruction was the American media, "journalism" and, even more so, the fascist-chic of entertainment, civic pieties, sentimental depictions of the South and the ol' Way-est. Before the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and the various provisions assuring Women of their rights as citizens, American democracy was everything from a blatant lie to a mere aspiration.  The decline of education and egalitarian Christianity has some considerable role in it but it is primarily due to the successor of education and Christianity, the mass media.  The stultification of Americans by television and movies and, now, the internet is part of it but more so the putrid moral decay of selfishness, consumerism, superstition, the appeals to racism and bigotry, lies told about liberals, the fascist chic starting in the 1970s and pandering to all of our worst faults.  

I would be at fault if I didn't also acknowledge the role that the "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU played in the destruction of democracy out of an idiotic and amoral fetish for the imaginary rights of liars, of rich liars, of Nazis and fascists and white supremacists, etc.  That quite dodgy effort piously held as idiotically sacrosanct has a history that is sometimes ugly and one of epic stupidity, especially in the period after the Sullivan decision, one of the major events in the sandbagging of the long fought for nascent Voting Rights Act era near-democracy.  I think the materialist-atheist-scientism of many of its major figures is entirely relevant in its willful, professionally cultivated moral blindness.*

After more than two centuries of struggle under it, we're not going to get equality and democracy from the United States Constitution.  As its critics at the time of its adoption and after saw, it is a pro-slavery compact an anti-democracy document, an engine of aristocracy.  It will always tear apart any attempt at those even after enormous sacrifice in struggle and blood, as happened after Reconstruction from the Civil War, as happened in the wake of the huge steps forward in the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and other legislation and, weakest of all, Court decisions that briefly and atypically furthered equality and democracy.  The Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have, by narrow majorities, destroyed what thousands and more died and bled to achieve. And that's held to be OK under our system.

We will never get equality, democracy if the anti-democratic Senate's role in staffing the corrupt Court is not taken from it, we will never get it as long as the Supreme Court usurpation of the legislative and executive functions is still acquiesced to.  Though that is something that can't be blamed on the Constitution or even on some of the worst of the framers of it but is a power grab by John Marshall and Roger Taney, supposedly the best and the worst of them.  I blame the lawyers for letting them get away with that one. Some lawyers. Especially those with elite educations.  The self-educated Lincoln rejected it, we haven't had another president with the courage to follow his reasoned and principled lead.  And then there are things like "corporate person-hood," inserted by not even a "justice" but a clerk of the court who went on to be a successful gangster lawyer.

We should, once and for ever, tear up the Constitution and base a new one on both the legitimate promises of the Declaration of Independence, including things like that deleted clause AND THE HARD EXPERIENCE WE HAVE HAD IN THE PAST TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES, ESPECIALLY THAT OF THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED UNDER THE ONE WE HAVE NOW.  

We must make it plain in a real Bill of Rights that rights only belong to living beings, that there is no right to lie in the mass media, there is no right to advocate fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or any other ideology that is known to get people killed in the millions or which advocates discrimination.  The sheer lunacy and obvious inadequacy of the Bill of Rights holding that Nazis and Stalinists and our indigenous white supremacists should forever have a chance of doing it again, the lunacy of our civic piety holding that as a virtue impeaches it as morally and intellectually vacuous as little else could. But there is one thing that may surpass that demonstration of its depravity.

We must make it clear that there is no private right to own weapons of mass murder.  The damned Constitution as it is AND THAT IS WHATEVER THE SUPREME COURT SAYS IT IS can't even keep school children safe from mass murderers, they are as unsafe as Africans and Native Americans were under it in 1789. I'm sure none of the "justices'" children or grandchildren go to schools at risk of that, they don't care at all about those who are sacrificed to the gun industry and Republican-fascist ideology. OUR OWN CHILDREN ARE FAILED BY THE BILL OF RIGHTS, the supposed best thing about the Constitution in our national myth. It is a total failure.  I should be among the most important cautionary documents in the world of what will lose you egalitarian democracy, justice and a decent life.  We're about to lose whats left of it here.

* The representation of "Justice" as a blind goddess is certainly lived up to by the pretenses that judges cannot see reality as plain as the fact that white supremacists, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, etc. have a record of murdering People in very large numbers and have explicitly stated intentions of oppressing and enslaving People.  The reason the morally bereft majority of the Roberts Court can pretend not to see the growing mountains of bodies under their "Second Amendment" and the rest of it.  Those gangster lawyers in black robes are in the business of pretending not to be able to see what is right there for everyone to see even as they will make the most precisian of distinctions when it comes to dividing up loot among the wealthiest gangsters and corporations.  The "enlightenment" notions about such things are a basic aspect of why we don't have equality, democracy, a decent or even a safe life.

If the South, if the Mid-West, if the interior West, etc. reject egalitarian  democracy the states and regions that do favor equality and democracy should break away from them and form one or more independent countries.  The price we pay for retaining the United States as it is is enormous - think of that during the next school shooting which will happen any time now as it is happening as I type this.  If the people in those regions want to retain the privileges of the gangsters who run things and who pander to their racism and their worst character flaws, we'd best face that and get shut of them.  I will, of course, feel sorry for those who live in those regions who do favor equality and democracy, a decent and safe life but I feel sorry for those who live in places that might face the hard truth and the reason we will never have it as things are now. Including most of my family and friends.  They have a right to those things.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Listening To The Dead

 Listening To The Dead 

 

This is a set of five plays about members of the Cartwright-Tully Family centering on the mixed blessing of being clairvoyant, especially the ability to communicate with the dead.  I consider it a masterwork by one of my favorite writers of audio drama.

How A Tender Regard For Doing Fairness To The Slaveholders Who Used Up Slaves Fastest Was Embedded In The Constitution

THE RACIST EVEN HOMICIDAL CALLOUSNESS in regard to Black People held in slavery of the affluent white men who wrote the Constitution can be seen in a particularly chilling quote from one of the viler members of the Constitutional Convention, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut.  He was a very rich lawyer, the son of a wealthy farmer who quickly amassed a fortune of his own, including in public securities, one of the primary beneficiaries of the Constitution he was participating in framing and whose overt corruption in that regard didn't keep him from high office in the new government.  It wouldn't have, Washington appointed him and he, too, greatly benefited from what was drafted.  He named Ellsworth to be the second Chief Justices of the Supreme Court.  But, then, many, probably most of the members of the Constitutional Convention seem to have made out very well out of what they created.  Washington doesn't seem to have given much of a thought to the fitness for office of a number of those he appointed, he seems to have appointed Ellsworth primarily to regionally balance his appointees.

The passage and quote concerns how the Convention accommodated the various economic interests of two sets of slave owners, those who held slaves in places like Virginia and Maryland and those in Georgia and South Carolina, how some of the pose of wanting to restrict the importation of slaves had a far more mercenary than a moral basis and proves, beyond question how truly cold blooded the members of the Convention were, even when presented with the deadly fact of slavery.  Even those "good masters" of the conventional civic piety of my young alleged history classes** can't be said to not know that the institution they benefited from was not also based on working slaves to death by some of their good friends and esteemed associates.  I'll give you three paragraphs on pages 176 and 177 of the Dover Reprint of An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution.

None of the powers conferred by the Constitution on Congress permits a direct attack on property.  The federal government is given no general authority to define property.  It may tax, but indirect taxes must be uniform, and these are to fall upon consumers [the kind of regressive taxation scheme to get the poorest to pay even a ruinously higher percentage of their wealth in taxes than the very rich could pay without pain, typical of ancient and modern despotic regimes and our tax system].  Direct taxes may be laid, but resort to this form of taxation is rendered practically impossible, save on extraordinary occasions, by the provision that they must be apportioned according to population - so that numbers [the majority] cannot transfer the burden to accumulated wealth [that the over-taxed masses can't stick it to the fat cats].  The slave trade may be destroyed, it is true, after the lapse of a few years;  but slavery as a domestic institution is better safeguarded than before.

Of course the anti-democratic features embedded into the Constitution prevented Congress from taking such action, certainly among the reasons for embedding them.  The abomination of retaining property requirements to vote in federal elections, the anti-democratic character of the Senate, giving the white supremacists even more power in the House by letting them steal representative's seats by counting 3/5ths of those they would never represent but would exercise that power against - what the Roberts' court is re-instituting on behalf of Republican-fascism only counting the disenfranchised at 5/5ths for stealing non-Republicans' representation for their opponents.  And, as has been a feature of American life, through those previous corruptions, the ability to sway presidential elections through the filthy dirty scheme of the Electoral College.  All of those issues immediately prevented the provision that would have theoretically allowed the abolition of the slave trade after two decades from the drafting of the document, probably the most insincere of all of the many  insincerities of the Constitutional Convention.* As can be seen throughout American history, any attempt at equality, equal justice and economic justice have and still do have to fight uphill against those corruptions.  But now we have come to the thematic quote in its setting.  I will not again, for now, go into the terrible record of the Marshall Court, even after importation of slaves was outlawed, flouted the law from the bench.

Even the destruction of the slave trade had an economic basis, although much was said at the time about the ethics of the clause.  In the North where slavery, though widespread, was of little economic consequence, sympathy with the unfortunate Negroes could readily prevail.  Maryland and Virginia, already overstocked with slaves beyond the limits of land and capital, had prohibited the foreign trade in Negroes, because the slave-holders, who predominated in the legislatures, were not willing to see the value of their chattels reduced to a vanishing point by excessive importations.  South Carolina and Georgia, where the death rate in the rice swamps and the opening of adjoining territories made a strong demand for the increase in slave property, on the other hand, demanded an open door for slave-dealers.

South Carolina was particularly determined, and gave northern representatives to understand that if they wished to secure their commercial privileges, they must make concessions to the slave trade.  And they were met half way.  Ellsworth said:  "As slaves multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland that it is cheaper to raise than import them, whist in the sickly rice swamps foreign supplies are necessary, if we go no farther than is urged, we shall be unjust towards South Carolina and Georgia.  Let us not inter-meddle.  As population increases;  poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless."  

So there it is, the rice swamps of Georgia and South Carolina, the high numbers of slaves worked to death in them discussed openly, proving that was a known fact to the "founders".  And them enabling that to continue so as not to be "unjust" to the rice barons of those states, permitting them to work to death ever more kidnapped, enslaved Black People was encompassed in the Founders concept of justice but abolishing slavery was not.  That was certainly to be reproduced in the notorious sugar plantations which hadn't yet become common in the United States and in other instances.  Nor does it account for the impending boom in the cotton industry due to the invention of the cotton gin seven years later and its ever increasing demands for more slaves.  And that was even as they insisted that the slaves they worked to death be counted toward the representation that the white aristocratic slave owners got in the Congress and, also, the Electoral College, the same species of election rigging that the Roberts Court is re-instituting as the Court allowed to rise again during the entire Jim Crow period - which persisted even after the Voting Rights Act started to be implemented - on their reading of the Constitution.  Only, as mentioned, under the updated version of 3/5ths, they get to count 5/5ths of those prevented from voting in order for them to represent the white supremacists who run those states and those who gerrymander and vote suppress.  So under Roberts-Alito era Jim Crow, they can have even more stolen power in Congress and in the Electoral College.*

We're talking about the Krupps and IG Farbens of 18th century America whose interests were so tenderly represented in the Constitutional Convention, with Northern financial interests taking up their cause.*  That Oliver Ellsworth anticipated the day when poor whites would take the place of enslaved blacks, no doubt anticipating the economics of using up and killing off workers you weren't allowed to access as your personal property, is not a surprise.  Have I mentioned he was one off the vilest of the idolized founders?

Here is more about Ellsworth from page 196:

No member of the Convention distrusted anything savoring of "leveling democracy" more than Oliver Ellsworth.  Later as Chief Justice he denounced from the bench Jefferson and the French party as "the apostles of anarchy, bloodshed, and atheism."  In the Convention, he opposed the popular election of the President and favored associating the judges with the executive in the exercise of a veto power of acts of Congress.  He believed in the restriction of the suffrage to those who paid taxes.  He was a warm advocate of judicial control, in general, and thoroughly understood the political significance of the system.

For anyone who has some feeling that the hatred of the common People and the thirst for judicial power was totally unprecedented when later courts started grabbing the power which the Roberts Court is using to produce something closer to Ellsworth's theory of government than Lincoln's.  Since he was appointed by Washington, you cannot disassociate Ellsworth's previous thinking from him and from the Senators, including "founders"  who confirmed him to the position.  

I do have to say that reviewing Beard's book and looking up his citations which I can find in my currently limited online time (bless archive.org, Project Gutenberg, etc.) I have a far greater appreciation for how terrible the Federalists were and that the 1800 Jeffersonian revolution was a necessary though far from adequate corrective to the original Constitution whose early history shows just how bad the original document was.  The corrupt manner of its adoption, not to mention its drafting, the anti-democratic and corrupt character of it and the truly stupid features embedded into it figure heavily in both the political, partisan and judicial histories of the first years of the United States - all of that containing features that still, when translated into current terms, are in the most serious need of amending out of existence because they endanger the possibility of democracy and equality and justice.

The question of whether or not the states would have possibly formed a federal government under something that took the terms of the Declaration of Independence seriously is never asked.  The lie that they had the intention of creating a government in which all people would be equal and equally endowed with rights is never faced.  When they got the chance to put a federal government in place they did no such thing. They reneged on the stated intentions of the Declaration of Independence.  Their intentions from 1787 should certainly be considered something we don't have to pay any regard to, "originalism" is a theory invented to destroy any progress that has been made towards equality and democracy by reestablishing the very thing which that struggle had to be waged against.   It was clearly a most corrupt deal from the start. And it was on just that basis that the propaganda for the adoption of it was argued to the propertied white men who were the only ones (and a minority of even those) who ever got a voice in its adoption.  

There is no rational reason for anyone who doesn't favor the kind of vile inequality that Oliver Ellsworth, General Charles Pinckney who said similar things on that point [p.177] and a number of other viciously anti-egalitarian "founders" obviously held to, to tolerate any call for any return to the status quo of the "originalists" who are, to a person, pro-wealth, white-supremacist and an enemy of equality and equal justice.  It is as idiotic an idea as the idea that Samuel Alito dipped into witch burning, husband-rapist supporting Stuart era judges in the England that the Founders broke away from to come up with his overturning of Roe vs. Wade.  There is no reason that the vilest characters who have been dead for more than two hundred years should have a say in the character of the American government today.  Certainly their will being imposed on on anyone who wasn't a. white, b. male, c. propertied (in most cases actually affluent in the terms of the time) d. a male white supremacist (taking into account that two on the current court are a Black Man and a Woman).  No one should feel under any obligation to have their self-interested bigotry and immorality rule us from the grave.

The milquetoast liberal resort to pretending that the document that has kept us from equality and equal justice, economic justice, embodied those principles is a desperate lie.  Any of that content had to be forced onto it by later agitators and organization.   It has always, with the fewest exceptions been used to swing us back to inequality injustice and economic injustice whenever progress is briefly made with enormous effort and sacrifice.  It will until it is basically changed or ripped up and a new government based on us learning the lessons of the terrible history of life under the Constitution,  faced full on, especially looking at the way the Supreme Court has used that document to thwart equality and equal justice.  It is and always has been, along with the Senate, the primary enforcement mechanism of the oligarchs against the interests of We The People as they insist on being opposed to us and our rights.

* I pointed to this quote by Hamilton in one of the Federalist Papers before in response to a champion of Hamilton as imagined by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact by Wendell Phillips.

The first thing objected to is that clause which allows a representation of three fifths of the Negroes.  Much has been said on the impropriety of representing men, who have no will of their own.  Whether this be reasoning of declamation, I will not presume to say.  It is the unfortunate situation of the Southern States to have a great part of their population, as well as property, in Blacks.  The regulations complained of was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention; and without that indulgence, no Union could possibly have been formed. But, sir, considering some peculiar advantages which we derived from them, it is entirely just that they should be gratified.  The Southern States possess certain staples, (tobacco, rice, indigo, &c.,)which must be capital objects in treaties of commerce with foreign nations;  and the advantage which they necessarily procure in these treaties will be felt throughout all the States.  But the justice of this plan will appear in another view.  The best writers on government have held that representation should be compounded of persons and property. . .

Keeping in mind Hamilton was an anti-democrat who believed the rich should govern, encouraging monarchy and one of the most dangerous men in the country at the time he picked a fight with another dangerous man, Aaron Burr.  

Hamilton certainly knew about the issue as discussed in the Convention, he knew what was generally known that he was advocating northern financial interests make money off of the deaths of slaves in those death camps.  

Anyone who wonders why Elie Mystal has such a low opinion of the Constitution can't know the actual history or the contents of it.  The lies we've all been taught and told and absorbed from fiction and show-biz about the Constitution is one of the greater mass delusions.  The citing of "1776" the Gadsden Flag, and other clap-trap from that mythology as Republican-fascists and Trumpzis tried to hijack the dangerous Electoral College process proves that it is actively dangerous.  If you take comfort in their failure in 2021, the Supreme Court is about to let them accomplish the same thing in the Southern and other states dominated by Republican-fascists, just in case you think electoral democracy is safe in their filthy hands.   The great irony for anyone who has read what the "founders" really said would know that it was exactly the Trumpian rabble violently taking power that was why so many of them hated democracy.   It proves how empty and banal and meaningless all of that clap trap is.

*  Here is what John Quincy Adams  in an Address at North Bridgewater, November 6, 1844 pointed out about the  3/5ths provision as a power grab by the slave power:

You are told that this is no concern of yours, and that the question of freedom and slavery is exclusively reserved to the consideration of the separate States.  But if it so be so, as to the mere question of the right between master and slave, it is of tremendous concern to you that this little cluster of slave owners should possess, besides their own share in the representative hall of the nation the exclusive privilege of appointing two fifths of the whole number to the representatives of the people.  This is now your condition, under the delusive ambiguity of language and of principles, which begins by declaring the representation of the popular branch of the legislature a representation of persons, and then provides that one class of persons shall have neither part nor lot in the choice of their representatives;  but their elective franchise shall be transferred to their masters,  and the oppressors shall represent the oppressed.  The same perversions of the representative principle pollutes the composition of the colleges of electors of President and Vice President of the United States, and every department of the government of the Union is thus tainted at its source by the gangrene of slavery [in post-Civil War terms, "white supremacy" works even more in their favor].

Fellow-citizens, - with a body of men thus composed for legislators and executors of the laws, what will, what must be, what has been your legislation?  The number of freemen constituting your nation are much greater than those of the slaveholding States, bond and free.  You have at least three fifths of the whole population of the Union.  Your influence on the legislation and administration of the government ought to be the proportion of three to two.  But how stands the fact?  Besides the legitimate proportion of influence exercised by the slaveholding States by the measure of their numbers, there is an intrusive influence in every department by a representation nominally of persons, but really of property, ostensibly of slaves, but effectively by their masters, over-balancing your superiority in numbers, adding two fifths of supplementary power to the two-fifths fairly secured to them by the compact, CONTROLLING AND OVERRULING THE WHOLE ACTION OF YOUR GOVERNMENT AT HOME AND ABROAD, and warping it to the sordid private interest and oppressive policy of 300,000 owners of slaves.

And that imbalance through vote suppression is magnified in the Senate where a handful of tiny states can kill massively popular legislation, Democrats' votes are regularly nullified under the provisions allotting power in the Senate on the basis of state and not numbers of voters.  That has gotten steadily worse as the country grew, adding tiny population states, especially in the central West to those older ones in the East such as Vermont and Maine.  The thing is rigged to prevent democracy and equality.

** I remember "Washington was good to his slaves," being said by a third-grade teacher.  My beloved fourth-grade teacher, a fiery tempered Irish Catholic with a great sense of humor - my only Catholic teacher till I reached high school - didn't hold with such bullshit.  She concentrated on geography instead of history, probably for that reason.  I remember she liked me naming FDR as one of my heroes (my parents loved him), she was probably the first Democrat I had as a teacher, too.

Just How Irrational The Supreme Court's Ruling Power Is Can Be Seen In The Dishonesty Of Its Origin

 It should be said, however, that Marshall no longer 'idolized democracy,' as he declared he did when as a young man he addressed the Virginia Convention in 1788.  On the contrary, he had come to distrust popular rule as much as did most Federalists.  Albert J. Beverage  The Life of John Marshall, Volume 3

RECENTLY FORMER SUPREME COURT "justice" Stephen Bryer was asked if there was any Supreme Court precedent that was safe from the Roberts-Alito court, Bryer quipped "Marbury v Madison?"  Which is, of course, one of the unquestionable cases listed by Amy Coney Barrett when she was asked which cases were beyond being overturned by the Court, though she listed others that I have no doubt wouldn't be safe.  She as several of the others in the majority on the Dobbs decision blatantly lied about Roe v Wade being safe as it was a well settled issue of the court.  And everyone knew each one of them lied as the lied it, including Susan Collins.

The Supreme Court is not likely to ever give up a power which is found nowhere in the Constitution but which they have successfully grabbed and exercised, increasingly, against the representatives of the voters, which the Roberts Court is exercising on behalf of their majority's party, the Republican-fascists, in order to maintain their power even against the will of a majority of Americans. That power will have to be pried away from them by the democratic branches of the government or by The People, eventually, probably after much bloodshed and a possible but no means certain attempt to actually establish an egalitarian democracy.

John Marshall had been seeking to gain powers not found in the Constitution for the Court for several years by the time he worked a minor case which no one no longer cared about to achieve his ends. He knew that among those we was working against was Thomas Jefferson who was the president in an election which ended the electoral power of Marshall's Federalists in elective office and James Madison, one of the chief authors of the Constitution he had to claim to be acting under. Just how outrageous that got can be seen in a pages long quote Louis Boudin gave in his Government by Judiciary from Senator Beverage's biography of John Marshall which made this point about his claim that a part of a previous law passed by the First Congress unconstitutional, one of several extraordinary steps he had to take to gain that power for the court:

No matter which horn of the dilemma Marshall selected, it was hard to see how his views could escape impalement.  He chose neither.  Instead of allowing his cherished purpose of establishing the principle of supervisory power of the Judiciary over legislation to be thus wounded and perhaps fatally injured, he made the decision of this insignificant case about which the applicants themselves no longer cared - the occasion ofr asserting that principle.  And he did assert that principle - asserted it so impressively that for more than a century his conclusion has easily withstood repeated assaults upon it, which still continue.

Marshall accomplished his purpose by convincing the Associate Justices of the unconstitutionality of that section of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789 which expressly conferred upon the Supreme Court the power to issue writs of mandamus and prohibition, and in persuading them to allow him to announce that conclusion as the opinion of the court.  When we consider that, while all of the Justices agreed with Marshall that the provision of the Ellsworth Judiciary Law requiring them to sit as circuit justices was unconstitutional, and yet refused to act upon the belief as Marshall wanted them to act,* we can realize the measure of his triumph in inducing the same men to hold unconstitutional another provision of the same act - a provision, too, even less open to objection than the one they had sustained.

The Theory of the Chief Justice that Section 13 of the old Judiciary Law was unconstitutional was absolutely new, and it was as daring as it was novel.  It was the only original ideal that Marshall contributed to the entire controversy.  Nobody ever questioned the validity of that section of the statute which Marshall now challenged.  Ellsworth, who preceded Marshall as Chief Justice, had drawn the act when he was Senator in the First Congress;  he was one of the greatest lawyers of his time and an influential member of the Constitutional Convention.
 

One of Marshall's associates on the Supreme Bench at that very moment, William Paterson, had also been, with Ellsworth a member of the Senate Committee that reported the Judiciary act of 1789, and he, too, had been a member of the Constitutional Convention.  Senators Gouverneur Morris of New  York, William S. Johnson of Connecticut, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, William Few of Georgia, George Read and Richard Bassett of Delaware, and Caleb Strong of Massachusetts supported the Ellsworth Law when the Senate passed it;  and in the House James Madison and George Wythe of Virginia, Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut heartily favored and voted for the act.  Most of these men were thorough lawyers and every one of them also helped draft the National Constitution.  Here were twelve men, many of them highly learned in the law, makers of the Constitution, draftsmen or advocates and supporters of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789, not one of whom had ever dreamed that an important section of the law was unconstitutional.  

Furthermore from the organization of the Supreme Court to that moment, the bench and bar had accepted it, and the Justices of the Supreme Court, sitting with National district judges, had recognized its authority when called upon to take action in a particular controversy brought directly under it.  The Supreme Court itself had held that it had jurisdiction, under Section 13, to issue a mandamus in a proper case, and had granted a writ of prohibition by authority of the same section.  In two other cases this section had come before the Supreme Court, and no one had even intimated that it was unconstitutional. . . .

The outrageousness of the claim by Marshall and his majority in claiming that unconstitutional power for the court, on the basis of the Constitution IN CLEAR OPPOSITION TO THE DEMONSTRABLE DISAGREEMENT OF SUCH A LARGE NUMBER OF THE DRAFTERS OF THE CONSTITUTION is impossible to overstate.  The fact that he had run into the very Act when he tried to call his fellow justices to mutiny against the Congress a couple of years before IN WHICH THEY CITE THE PROVENANCE OF THE ACT AS REQUIRING THEM TO FOLLOW IT only strengthens the point, also from slightly earlier Beverage's biography.

When the Republicans [Jefferson's party, not to be confused with what has become the Republican-fascists] repealed the Federalist Judiciary Act of 1801, Marshall had actually proposed to his associates upon the Supreme Bench that they refuse to sit as circuit judges, and 'risk the consequences.'  By the Constitution, he said, they were Judges of the Supreme Court only;  their commissions proved that they were appointed solely to those offices;  the section requiring them to sit in inferior courts was unconstitutional.  The other members of the Supreme Court, however, had not the courage to adopt the heroic course Marshall recommended.  They agreed that his views were sound, but insisted that, because the Ellsworth Judiciary Act had been acquiesced in since the adoption of the Constitution, the validity of the act must now be considered as established.  So Marshall reluctantly abandoned his bold plan, and in the autumn of 1802 held court at Richmond as circuit Judge.  To the end of his life, however, he held firmly to the opinion that in so far as the  Republican Judiciary Repeal Act of 1802 deprived National judges of their offices and salaries, that legislation was unconstitutional.

It should be noted that Marshall's opposition to a situation that had been in place since the First Congress seems to have begun after the Jeffersonian revolution which toppled Federalist power on the national level.  I would be curious to find out what he had to say on this when it was Federalists who operated under the law that came back into effect after the repeal of the last-minute Federalist Judiciary Act of 1801, put into place, certainly, so that the Federalist dominated Federal judiciary could rule by fiat against the elected branches of the government, elected by The People who turned out Federalists from power.  Certainly that will feel familiar to those of us who have watched the Rehnquist and Roberts Court during the terms of Democratic presidents and Democratic congresses. 

That the facts of the issue proves the Constitution as it was even under its early years of operation was quite a mess and that the very idea of "originalists" that the power they exercise to destroy things like the Voting Rights Act, to reimpose Jim Crow law in Republican-fascist controlled states comes from the Constitution is so absurd on its face that I can't begin to imagine how honest people, with this history available to them, could go along with the power grab.  Why we still will be putting up with it as the Roberts Court re-legalizes Jim Crow as they have nationalized Women's bodies and lives doesn't speak well for the conventional wisdom in such matters.

Marbury vs. Madison has to be gotten rid of, we have to have a Supreme Court more like those of other functioning democracies, none of which have that self-created power and they seem to get by without devolving into the kind of despotism we have certainly had in many regions of the country for almost our entire history.   Though as most of that history is invented, promoted and imposed from above, it's not on The People who have been lied into believing in the sanctity of the Founders generation or the integrity of the Supreme Court.

Note: Don't think I have any high regard for Oliver Ellsworth, among the worst of the Federalists from the start.   I'll have more to say about him in a future post.  You can consider these posts as having the goal of attacking the cult of the founders, the founder's fetish that rules our myth-based popular conception of the Constitution and the Supreme Court and all that stuff.

Covid Again

I CAN REPORT that "herd immunity" is bullshit because you can get covid-19 more than once and a second bout (even while being boosted) can make you wonder if you're about to give up the ghost.  I was so sick on Sunday night that I was thinking of calling 911 but couldn't afford it if I lived, a hearse would be cheaper.  The fever was so high that I figured I might not want to survive it.  I definitely lost weight because for three days I couldn't stand the thought of eating, losing my sense of taste temporarily.  I didn't even feel like drinking coffee, that's practically a symptom of impending mortality when you're as addicted as I am.  My brother pointed out that no one is more careful than I am about social distancing, so anyone can get it even if they are vaccinated and careful.  We're far from out of it, I doubt we ever will be unless they come up with the kind of vaccine of the kind that they can't get for other viral illnesses, so far.

This has been one lousy year after a series of them.  Drought, disease, Dobbs and the rest of the goddamned Supreme Court session.  I've ended my study of Jeremiah and have decided to hold onto the Lamentations until the end of Lent. I've decided to go through Luke again.  I need a lighter yoke for a while.   

I curse Trump and the Republican-fascists for their role in spreading lies about Covid-19, I curse Murdoch and the other fascist media and the complicit-middle-roader media that helped them while pretending they weren't.  Most of all I curse carnivores who will, I am afraid, end up killing us all to feed their appetites for mass-imprisoned, slaughtered animals, the origin of so many of the worst pandemic diseases and the murderers of wild animals who are the origin of so many of the deadlier and less widespread ones.  I really do blame them all, them and the Darwinists who came up with such a stupid idea to start with, championed by right-wing idiot-economists and lawyers who pretend they're scientists.  

Yeah, I'm sore from too much time in a reclining chair and feeling cranky.   Doesn't mean that what I said isn't sincerely meant or true.

Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong

MY NOTING THE FAILURE OF "ENLIGHTENMENT" THINKING in riffing off of Hannah Arendt's great essay Lying in Politics is absolutely justified not only by her text, it is supported by another brilliant critic of the technocratic ideology of the time who cited exactly this essay, and who I will get to in a minute.  

Continuing on after what she said about advertising and the dishonest habits it instills, she said:

The second variety of lying, though less frequent in everyday life, plays a more important role in the Pentagon Papers.  It also appeals to much better men, to those, for example, who are likely to be found in the higher ranks of the civilian services.  They are, as Neil Sheehan's felicitous phrase, professional "problem solvers,"  and they were drawn into government from the universities and the the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses, and prepared, as they thought, to solve all of the "problems" of foreign policy.  A number of the authors of the McNamara study belong to this group and it is to them, after all, that we owe this truthful though of course not complete story of what happened inside the machinery of government. [The basis of the Pentagon Papers.]

The problem-solvers have been characterized as men of great self-confidence, who "seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail," and they worked together with the military of whom "the history remarks that they were 'men accustomed to winning.'"  We should not forget that we owe it to the problem-solvers' effort at impartial self-examination, rare among such people, that the actors' attempts at hiding their role behind a screen of self-protective secrecy (at least until they have completed their memoirs - which in our century have become the most deceitful genre of literature) were frustrated.  The basic integrity of those who wrote the report is beyond doubt;  whether he knew them or not, they could indeed be trusted by Mr. McNamara to produce an "encyclopedic and objective" report.

I will break in to point out that Arendt's characterization of the modern memoir, already true in her day has become such a flagrant and profitable practice that it is typical of those who witness the most serious of wrongdoing which they don't report but save up for their memoirs and "journalists" who will save stuff that a real reporter should be expected to report in a timely manner, so as to have it figure in the ending of wrongdoing instead of the profitability of the reporters' eventual book deal. I think we would all be better served if a ban on such book deals and a requirement for the timely reporting of crimes in office were a routine part of the hiring of all government workers.  The class of nest-featherers who save it for their book don't seem to make especially good public servants.

But these moral qualities that deserve admiration, clearly did not prevent some of them from participating for many years in the game of deceptions and falsehoods.  Confident "of place, of education and accomplishment,"  they lied perhaps out of mistaken patriotism.  But the point is that they lied not so much for their country, certainly not for their country's survival, which was never at stake, as for its "image."  In spite of their undoubted intelligence - it is manifest in many memos from their pens - they also believed that politics is but a variety of public relations and were taken in by all the bizarre psychological premises underlying this belief.

Still, they obviously were different from the ordinary image makers.  Their distinction lies in that they were problem solvers as well, hence they were not just intelligent but prided themselves on being "rational,"  and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above "sentimentality" and in love with "theory," the world of sheer mental effort.  They were eager to find formulae, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, which would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them,  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be.

I'll break in again to point out this is a description of what could be considered the liturgical language of materialist enlightenment scientism in which the trappings of mathematical logic and science replace late classical Greek, late stage Latin, early Slavonic or otherwise dead languages and incense. In a Protestant context, early 17th century literary English.  Perhaps that was as deceptively and superficially persuasive to the men who generated it as they hoped it would be to their intended audience because of that. Such absurdity is certainly part of the stock-in-trade of the pseudo-social-sciences and other such over-attenuated fraudulent mimicking of scientific method and mathematics. If you object to me pointing out the pseudo-scientific nature of those things which pretend to deal with human behavior, something which is, in every way "man made" consider the next sentence and the rest of the paragraph.

However, unlike the natural scientist who deals with matters which, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and which therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian as well as the politician deals with human affairs which owe their existence to man's capacity for action, and that means, to man's relative freedom from things as they are.  Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past as well.  In so far as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until his theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts.  Instead they will be tempted to fit their reality - which, after all, is man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise - into their theory, thus mentally getting rid of a disconcerting contingency.

Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong - it was Hegel, the father of modern utopian thinking, who held that "philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental."  Indeed much of the modern arsenal of political theory - the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios, written for imagined "audiences," and the careful enumeration of usually three "options" A,B,C, whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the "logical" middle-of-the-road "solution" of the problem - has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions.  The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, and therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgement for the multitude of real possibilities.  What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of these facts.  

It strikes me that this is also a huge temptation and common practice of the highest and most theoretical reaches of the legal profession, Oliver Wendell Holmes certainly wanted to do something like this in his attempt to make the law more like what he imagined to be science in order to achieve scientific predictability in the law.  That what might have been predictable was merely an illusion based on his dreamed of methodology, inapt to real life and certainly not producing justice would certainly not have worried such a lofty thinker.  The higher the judge, the more removed from consequences they seem to be.  The, I hope dying or dead, fashion of "neuro-law" that I read about about decade ago is probably an even more decadent development of something similar, aping, though, not physics but the "behavioral and cognitive sciences" as revealed in the man-made, artificial, multi-color brain images of fMRI.  In the Roberts Court the getting rid of facts is certainly the basis of most of its Republican-fascist majority opinions these days, many of those very obviously reliable facts disregarded those of science.

If you don't think I am almost irresistibly tempted to take up just about each and every point of this to point out that what Arendt criticizes reeks of 18th-20th century "enlightenment" thinking, you must not have read much of what I've written here.  She noted that the "problem-solvers" tried to copy what they believed physicists could do, one of my central criticisms of the "enlightenment" and all of those alleged sciences which operate far, far outside of the realms where you really can follow scientific method.  In that they prove they are certainly stuck in the 19th if not 18th century view of science because one of the greatest achievements of modern science and mathematics was to explode that myth that those most exigent fields of logic and scientific method produced an absolute view of reality.  

I will forego that long digression to point out something I didn't realize before last night, that I'd read some of her essay in reading Joesph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he cites this section of the essay to point the same thing out in a different context of popular and scientific gullibility.

Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we would call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science.  But science may also be seen as an addictive drug.  Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.  Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of a age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality.  Thus we have very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint.  Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hoards of professional problem solvers.  As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:

"They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational" . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them;  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not "judge" they calculated . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making."

And so too have nearly all political confrontations, such as those between races and those between the governed and their governors, come to be perceived as merely failures in communication.  Such rips in the social fabric can then be systematically repaired by the expert application of the latest information-handing techniques - at least so it is believed.  And so the rationality-is-logicality equation, which the very success of science has drugged us into adopting as virtually an axiom, has led us to deny the very existence of human conflict, hence the very possibility of the collision of genuinely incommensurable human interests of of disparate human values, hence the existence of humans themselves.

It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinnner argues.  If they are, then its presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do.  But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certainly knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.[I went through one of A. S. Eddington's essay which made the same point a few years back.]  When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations.  No such sets of correspondences can ever be proven to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of  set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empirically observed phenomena.  Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the sifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition.  It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the abandonment of that theory.  Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict.  In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.

The man on the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well proven as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion . . .

As Hanna Arendt derived from her reading of the Pentagon Papers, such faith in scientific method and logicality well outside of where it can honestly be applied is hardly just a habit of the common Person.  This denomination of scientistic faith is the real faith tradition of most of us with college credentials or merely an exposure to media, even those who deny some of the most well established science, such as the science of human caused climate change and it more than has its match in lawerly and, especially judicial arrogance which uses the same framing but with even very good science available to it, will dispose of both science and evidence and reality, though they will go through a charade of logicality, such as Alito does, a going through motions which some of his younger fellow "justices" seem to not feel they need to go through as a charade.  The habits of scientific method, the pretenses of modern educated thought to follow logicality in the decadent state of eutrophic "enlightenment" culture are, perhaps like those matters that Arendt notes are the object of public lying:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.

This pose of logicality, of scientific thought which, Weizenbaum notes that science is very much like a game in which the method is to follow the human made rules of the game. The pretense is that there is no other means of arriving at reliable truth that should be consequential in human law.  No wonder the Supreme Court so breezily lies about the nature of the Bill of Rights, misrepresenting when it doesn't totally ignore the legislative record of the 14th Amendment in their games of "originalism" and "textualism", the necessity of the Voting Rights Act in such a decadent intellectual environment which, nevertheless, poses as if it has all of the presumed virtues of both science and logicality while pursuing the most raw and ruthless of power and oppression.  

A Note: In what I said the other day about the role that cinematic and video fantasy and sci-fi play in such things as the crackpot idea that Biden and NOAA can control the direction of a hurricane, talking more about it, it occurs to me that the "science" in sci-fi often, maybe typically presents science and technology as ultimately powerful, either now or in some past long ago and far away or in some maybe even human future.  It is omnipotent and omniscient.  You can add that to the list of gods of materialism, I suppose.  That so many more People imbibe that non-reality than have much of a familiarity with real science and entirely more than who have any real knowledge of the actual limits of science is certainly not a trivial matter when it comes to the gullibility of up to millions of us to such delusions.  The insistence that such a thing could not have any significant effect strikes me as being just as absurd as the belief that science and technology have such ridiculously claimed powers now.