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Bourgeois Salvations

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On Protestantism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and their relation to capitalism.  See also this previous essay.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.

– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

 

1.

In Behemoth – the first great work of sociological and political analysis of Nazi Germany, published in 1944 – Franz Neumann, a political scientist affiliated with the Frankfurt School, commences a consideration of the roots of German fascism with an account of the ideologies of the revolutionary Protestant movements of Early Modernity.

He writes:

In the periods of religious wars and civil insurrections, the rising middle classes had great need of peace and tranquillity; merchants and industrialists yearned for equality with the clergy and the nobility. As a result, a central secular authority was established and its sovereign power was justified as that of an institution to which men owed not only outward obedience but sincere inner devotion. Charismatic justification of existing authority thus found a place at the beginning of bourgeois society…

 

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The great ideological fault line between Catholicism and Protestantism was always the issue of salvation.  How is one saved?

Martin Luther answered the question of salvation by pioneering a set of five conditions or methods by which one may be saved, sometimes known as ‘the five solas’: sola scriptura (by scripture alone), solus Christus (by Christ alone), sola fide (by faith alone), sola gratia (by grace alone), and soli Deo gloria (by glorification of God alone). …

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Joy to the World Review

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doctor-who-christmas-special-2024-ncuti-gatwa-nicola-coughlan-5283b1d

First off, I want to note that technically Penn’s and my Patreon is well short of where it should be for me to be doing this. I ain’t no grinch, and so I’m posting publicly anyway, but seriously, it’s a pretty sizeable shortfall in our monthly budgeting. I’m currently finishing up the epic Neil Gaiman section of Last War in Albion over on the Patreon, which you’ll see here in a few months, and I’ve also finally started work on my inevitable Blake book, so it’s an exciting time.  And besides. Next episode isn’t at Christmas and I can grinch it up as much as I want.

Right. On to the fun stuff, or at least this curious little thing we’re calling the Gatwa era, and may someday find out if we’ll be calling it that for more than another eight episodes. Let’s start with the obvious: this is loads of fun, in a big dumb Christmassy way. Yes, obviously this is not my favorite mode of Moffat because I’m a basic bitch who prefers dark and epic Doctor Who to comedy. But it’s still Moffat, with all his weird little idiosyncrasies, which at this point feel like pulling your favorite jacket off the rack and slipping it on. I in no way hope he takes over again after Davies (though I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to actually be unhappy if it happened), but this is always going to be the most straightforwardly “my Doctor Who” there is. The bit at the start where the Doctor realizes he’s seen something because he’s suiting up—nobody else writes that particular Doctor, and I just plain vibe.

This one even avoids Moffat’s standard tics more than Boom did. There’s a bootstrap paradox and a long way around, and there’s not a single other writer who would have done that Christmas farce cold open, but this isn’t a “play the hits” episode in the same way. In some ways it’s much closer to “play the misses”—I remember seeing the AV Club’s review drop a few days ago and being utterly bemused at its longing for the classic Moffat specials of yesteryear like The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe and The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which this was apparently not as good as, and feeling like I should quickly Google how The Berenstain Bears are spelled to make sure I was still in the correct reality. 

Mostly, though, this feels like its own thing. Boom came early enough in the Gatwa era that everything was up in the air, such that it felt like Gatwa doing a Moffat episode as part of the work of establishing himself and figuring out what this show is. This, on the other hand, feels like Moffat doing a Gatwa episode, which is to say that it feels like Gatwa-era Doctor Who is a defined enough thing to riff upon. The death of the hotel manager is a good example—Gatwa’s Doctor simply handles that emotional beat differently than Smith or Capaldi would have, and Moffat writes it accordingly. …

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meet the elders

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What they talkin’ ‘bout?
They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’. – Kendrick Lamar

So, here I am at my mother-in-law’s house. It’s Christmas time, and my wife’s family is big on the holiday, so naturally, when Judy Collins is doing a Christmas show near her mom, we go. It was a lovely time; honestly, time spent with my mother-in-law usually is. It took me a while to really understand how that family works, but now that I do, it’s an extreme pleasure to get to watch my wife be loved. On our way out the door to go home, she and I stopped and talked about that for a moment—about the way that people constantly miss the things we both see so clearly about her. About the way she is assumed to be working in bad faith, or trying to be provocative before she’s even opened her mouth. But I’m ahead of myself, because it was that morning, after taking a shower, and getting a little early packing done that I walked out into the living room, when my wife handed me her phone.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me. Reader, I didn’t.

El had gotten a letter from the Northeast Thing’s Special Investigation Committee informing her that she was banned from their event, citing a rule that had simply not been there when it might have been used to consider the targeted harassment levelled at my wife and my community by that event’s president, David Carron. I would love to say I was surprised by this, but I don’t think anyone who’s been paying attention possibly could be.

I have, to this point, kept my tongue. Not that this has stopped multiple people from silently unfriending or blocking me over El’s actions—which is wild for a group of people that spent years not raising an eyebrow at someone whose husband paraded around the event with a confederate flag mug. But I don’t want to flame out of the community, even though I feel its leadership is making cruel and frankly dangerous errors, because I love it, and I’ve loved this event. I have hinted at this in some places, and stated it in others, but my primary work right now—and if you know me, you will know how important my work is to me now that my health is in a place where I can finally do that work—is studying to become a priest of Sága, a goddess of language and divination for whom I keep a small vé at the event. Each year, I’ve run a ritual for her, and have a couple more years worth of ideas for how I’d change and grow that ritual now that I’ve had a couple runs to teach people what to expect from it. The space itself had gravity. We set it up as a social space; a goddess of language needs stories, and stories come from people, not just books. Unsurprisingly, this drew in a mostly young to middle aged queer crowd, several of whom I know have also had seismic spiritual experiences in that vé, in the space I set up and invited my goddess into.…

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Morning Album Reviews: Thatcher Week

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Over on the Patreon, I have been running a weekly Morning Album Reviews column for almost a year now. It is not focused on new music, or even on a particular genre or style–just whatever 7 records El curates for me that week. I won’t know what they are before she plays them for me, as the column’s name implies, in the mornings to wake me up. It started it’s life as a lark over on Bluesky, and blossomed out into what it is now–it’s a real study in accidentally taking something much more seriously than you’d intended.

Here’s a normal review, to give you a sense of the project:

10/25 Halsey’s 2024 The Great Impersonator

With their often messy sound, distinctive voice, and pristine pop instincts, Halsey has been a favorite of mine since Hopeless Fountain Kingdom in 2017. But more than that, they are just relentlessly interesting: No two of their records have been doing the same thing within the wide genre of pop, and this one takes that instinct to new heights—a sensible move for the artist after 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, their record about pregnancy and motherhood as body horror, produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It saw them drifting farther away than ever from the standard pop record formula to critic’s delight, and fan’s dismay.

In the years between starting If I Can’t Have Love and now, Halsey had their son, broke up with his father, got dropped by their record label, and got diagnosed with a couple of chronic illnesses that had been hiding in the cracks of their busy life. It’s been a time, to say the least, and it’s no wonder they’re thinking about the self as an artistic construct.

They are an artist who has always been defined by change, and driven by it. When describing this album for Apple Music, they talk about that: “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” The Great Impersonator is a direct exploration of that idea.

In the lead-up to release, over on Instagram, Halsey did a countdown for 18 days: one for each song, with photographs of themself re-creating other artist’s photos, linking each song to it’s inspiration. Some are more straightforward: You can hear the bluesy PJ Harvey vocal dripping off of “Dog Years,” but might need to squint to find the Dolly in “Hometown.”

“Step right up,” the record announcement goes, “Witness the uncanny ability of a woman who can become anyone, anything your heart desires,” but that’s all part of the illusion. This record is more a love letter to the things that built Halsey as a pop artist than it is a spectacle of lack of the self, with their usual veiled confessional lyrical turns and polish.

…

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11:27 in Sokvabekkr

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Stop playing with me ‘fore I turn you to a song. – Kendrick Lamar

Ever since Monday there’s been this Draugr following me around. Weirdest thing. 

OK, look, let’s say up front, this is a petty footnote. “Exiting the Draugr Castle” is a major work on my part—a big swing essay tackling important topics. This is some bullshit—an update to enliven the holiday weekends of the sort of people who check Eruditorum Press on a holiday weekend. 

The essay went over about how I expected. Good number of people who are still cool with me, more who aren’t. Landing slightly more punitive than I’d hoped—caught some Facebook blocks from people I’d honestly expected more empathy from. But like I said, you don’t write an essay like that unless you’re ready to lose friends over it. The good news is that nobody’s played “collective guilt” and taken it out on Penn or something. 

Except, like I said, this one fuckin’ Draugr. And the funny thing is, he’s the one I hemmed and hawed on including, cause I was less sure I thought he deserved it than some. Needn’t have worried, turns out. Cause the Quisling went on an absolute unfriending spree, dropping not only Penn but a swath of other friends of mine, and also managing to blow up his local community in the process. Must have been something I said.

Thing is, some of those blocks I caught seem to have been in response to him accusing me of “all but doxing” him. And as that’s lie worthy of Tyr himself, I think it’s time for one last ray of disinfecting sunlight. 

So, here’s the thing he’s pissed at me for—a Bluesky post I made where I included these two screenshots.

Now, as you can see I went through and blacked out everyone’s names there except, of course, David Carron’s. I labeled the two people who had been characters in Draugr Castle, and left their Facebook icons, which I suppose means that if you really wanted to go scavenging around Facebook you could probably find them, but come on. That’s not fucking doxxing. For one thing, I’d already identified the Quisling as Associate President of the Troth. In what is probably not a surprise to you, the Troth’s website will readily inform you who its current Associate President is. Anyone who was terribly interested who the Quisling was could have figured it out from the original essay, which has been read by 2500 people at this point, and had a far easier time than they would reverse engineering his Facebook icon from a screenshot.

And I knew that when I posted the essay. I, in fact, put a lot of thought into exactly how identifiable people were. I wrote it so that anyone in the community could trivially solve the roman a clef for most of the main figures, but so that readers from outside the community would not. The only two exceptions were David Carron, because fuck him, and the Quisling, because it was impossible.…

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Freelance Subversion: Time Bandits

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With Life of Brian out of the way, Terry Gilliam had partially unshackled himself from Monty Python. He was unable to bring his masterpiece Brazil to the big screen, but he was free to focus on his own movies. He’ll come back to Python in 1983 for The Meaning of Life, which is the movie most influenced by the Pythons’ solo careers, but from now on, he’ll be an artist in his own right rather than just the Monty Python cartoonist. Gilliam is Python’s Peter Gabriel, the member who goes off and does weird, antagonistic art for an audience who knows his new stuff better than his Python work (granted, he splits Peter Gabriel duties with the equally wayward John Cleese). When he does return to Python, it’s like an old novelist reuniting with his college buddies. He doesn’t have a Spamalot moment, infusing one of his old hits with some new clever, fun bits. From this point on, Terry Gilliam is a forward-looking director.

At least in theory. Gilliam can’t stop himself from co-writing a movie with Michael Palin. And it’s hard to blame him. Aside from being a notoriously lovely chap, Palin is Python’s second best writer. Time Bandits benefits enormously from Palin’s influence. It’s consistent in character, theme, plot, and tone, an enormous leap in quality from Jabberwocky. While Time Bandits explores a lot of the same ideas as Jabberwocky, it feels more like a movie you can show your kids for fun than one you’d show them as punishment. For the first time, Gilliam directs a classic on his own terms, rather than splitting duties with Terry Jones (like in Holy Grail), or feeling like he’s putting a demo reel on the big screen (Jabberwocky).

Time Bandits has an all-timer of a premise (a step up from Jabberwocky, which only narrowly has a premise). Kevin, a young boy in the English suburbs, is whisked away from his miserable life by six dwarfs who are fleeing their boss — who is God  — after stealing a map that allows them to travel time and space. Unlike the Doctor who stole a Tardis and ran away, the dwarfs aren’t interested in seeing the wonders of the universe. They don’t even know the history of the universe they helped create — Napoleon and Agamemnon are unfamiliar names to them. The dwarfs only want to rob the whole universe blind. The cosmos is their Treasure Island — damn the safety of the young boy in their care.

Like its predecessor, Time Bandits scoffs at the idea of heroes. Kevin, ostensibly a fairy tale hero, is more interested in his books and violence than human suffering (as poor Shelley Duvall and Michael Palin find out). The dwarfs are mostly sociopathic upstart criminals. Ian Holm’s Napoleon is too busy giggling at violent puppet shows to accept Castiliogne’s surrender. Robin Hood (who of course is John Cleese) is a phony leading a gang of gratuitously violent Merry Men.…

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Capitalism and the Protestant Reformation

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To say that the protestant Reformation is an expression of the rise of capitalism is not to say that you have capitalist Protestantism on one side, feudal Catholicism on the other.  Protestantism did not (usually) express the ideology of capitalism in a direct way.  It did not enjoy exclusive support from the rising bourgeoisie.  Catholicism did not exclusively express the old ideology of feudalism, or take its support exclusively from old feudal ruling classes and their hangers on.

There’s some truth to that picture, but only at the extremes (where, as Bakunin said, we see things more clearly).  Calvin’s Doctrine of the Elect is almost suspiciously perfect in how it provides a justificatory ideology for capitalism.  (We shall be coming back to this in later parts of the M.R. James series, for which this post is a kind of parenthetical theoretical bookmark.)

Overall, however, that wasn’t how it worked.  Catholicism, in many ways, embraced rising commodification, despite being as based in the power of landed property as any feudal aristocracy.  Rothbard and Hayek claimed to see prefigurations of their own libertarian free market ideology in the writings of the Salamancan scholastics (this is still an idea that libertarians are obsessed with).  Protestantism caught fire partly because it expressed popular disillusion with the very marketisation of religion – the selling of indulgences, the buying of private masses and prayers, the profitability of episcopal sees, etc – that was increasingly seen in the Catholic Church.

Rather, what we see is a very slow and gradual breakdown of feudal economic stability, and the slow accumulation of wealth and power in new and rising sectors, as a result of rising forms of trade and production, which leads to the growth of increasingly wealthy and powerful middle classes, to political controversy and struggle between classes, and thus to centuries of instability and of ideological squabbling over how to make sense of the mixed-up world.  A huge part of the instability is caused by the mixture of capitalist and feudal methods.  Increasingly marketised, feudal society found its production methods lagging behind its consumption and investment needs.  Exacerbated by the insatiable appetites of ruling classes for both conquest and luxury, this was the root cause of multiple interlocking crises which rocked the world of the late middle ages, only accelerating the instability which further accelerated the economic reconstruction.  At the ideological level, both Catholicism and Protestantism are trying to understand the instability and reconstruction.  They come to be the two great camps in the realignments and renegotiations of religious ideology because of two material expressions of the rising bourgeois system: the revolutions in communication and in government.

A glib answer to the question ‘Why does Protestantism happen?’ would be ‘the printing press’.  But this begs the question: why does the printing press happen?  It is both cause and result of the development of technical processes, the slow build-up of new technologies within feudalism, and thus of the growth of literate publics who want to read.  This rise of literacy and political involvement is an expression of class struggle, itself partly stemming from – and reciprocally causing – the growth of new classes as a result of that slow accumulation of change. …

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Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts)

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Screenshot of a dictionary definition of "flyting" resembling the album art for Kendrick Lamar's "euphoria" single. David Carron

Think I won’t drop the location? I still got PTSD. – Kendrick Lamar

ᚠ. Establishing Shot of a Cow Licking the World into Being

Funny story: I just spent five years being a heathen.

It ended poorly. There was a dispute, I set a red line, and it got crossed. And since one’s honor is the only thing in this world that one truly owns, I’m not a heathen anymore. But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was.

ᚢ. What’s a Transsexual Menace Like You Doing in a Religion Like This?

So I was in a sex club in North Carolina, and I saw this cute girl wearing a Mjolnir pendant. And what struck me about it was that it was a dainty Mjolnir pendant, which wasn’t something I’d ever seen before, so I chatted her up. One thing followed another, including the cute girl turning out to be a hot boy, me turning out to be a cute girl, and the two of us getting married, until in August of 2019 I found myself pulling up the trail to a campground in Pennsylvania to spend five days in the woods with a bunch of heathens at East Coast Thing, the second largest heathen event in the country.

This was to any extent uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t not heathen. I’d long described myself as having the protection of Loki. Way back in college a friend of mine—who ended up becoming a minister for like a decade—knocked on my dorm room door and told me that she’d found a sort of weird spirit around, and it seemed to be mine, and suggested it might be Loki. And after my life really just started to bounce from improbability to improbability, with weird careening plot twists like crashing out of academia after spending a decade in higher education and then making it as a professional Doctor Who blogger, “the protection of Loki” ended up being a pretty good shorthand for the question of “how the fuck do you manage to live this sort of charmed existence, you absolute weirdo?”

But I didn’t work with the larger Norse/Germanic pantheon. Heck, I didn’t even really work with Loki—I just graciously accepted his protection. Mostly I worked with Ahania, a minor figure in William Blake’s personal mythology, in a self-conscious homage to Alan Moore’s famous decision to worship a glove puppet. That had started to change with my marriage to Penn as we entwined our magical practices, but we’d only been married a couple of months and that was still in its early stages.

But the real reason I was nervous was the same basic reason the daintiness of Penn’s Mjolnir surprised me, which was just… the fucking viking of it all. The faith attracts a type, and it’s one where you’re not exactly surprised there’s a nazi problem.…

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Freelance Subversion: Jabberwocky

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Part 1 of a look at the movies of Terry Gilliam. 

In 1977, the members of Monty Python are in a weird space between Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Michael Palin and Terry Jones have just made their successful first series of Ripping Yarns, while John Cleese is in between series of Fawlty Towers and in the process of divorcing Connie Booth. Eric Idle has done Rutland Weekend Television, is getting ready to do a Rutles movie, and has hosted Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, Graham Chapman, the Python who notoriously fared worst as a solo act (despite being the group’s best actor), is getting ready to write, produce, and star in a comedy film called The Odd Job which is so obscure that I’d never heard of it until I checked Wikipedia five minutes ago.

Meanwhile, Terry Gilliam attempts to start his solo directing career with Jabberwocky. Unfortunately for him, his first solo movie gets marketed in America as Monty Python’s Jabberwocky. Gene Siskel’s scathing review of Jabberwocky seizes on that aspect of the marketing when he declares the movie “suitable for those who like unfunny comedies.” Certainly if you watch Jabberwocky as a comedy, you’re going to have a miserable time. The jokes only make up about half the movie’s runtime, and many of them jut out awkwardly from the bits where the plot happens. Some of the jokes are very good — the scene where King Bruno promises his daughter the west tower only for the tower to immediately disintegrate is a knee-slapper. The whole ending is a very solid and incredibly bleak joke. But Gilliam didn’t do himself any favors by starting his solo career with another jokey medieval fantasy film featuring Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Neil Innes (nor does he ever seem to learn his lesson). Add some executive incompetence and bad marketing into the mix, and it’s remarkable that Terry Gilliam has directed 11 more movies since Jabberwocky.

But Gilliam has been a terminal contrarian his whole life. He’s not so much box office poison as a commercial suicide bomber. Starting his career with a bleak anti-comedy that makes Holy Grail look like a glamorous vision of the Middle Ages is just what we expect from him. Jabberwocky is an extremely grimy and bloody fairy tale with crepuscular lighting that could well have influenced David Lowery’s The Green Knight. The skeleton of many of Gilliam’s later movies are here. Jabberwocky looks at the same fables that Disney treated as escapist and goes “gee, wouldn’t you hate to live in this kind of story?”

The protagonist, a cooper’s son named Dennis (played by Michael Palin), lives in a time of knights and monsters, but he’s more interested in stocktaking than adventures. He spurns the beautiful Princess who falls in love with him for a fat girl who couldn’t care less if he got eviscerated by a Jabberwocky (spoiler warning: Gilliam’s gender politics will never improve). He becomes the story’s hero purely by accident, and when he gets the fairy tale happy ending, it’s a nightmare for him — the antithesis of the tedious middle-class life he really wants.…

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Ithaca a Saga

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The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.

ᚨ (Ansuz)

Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.

In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.

This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.

Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.

He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died. 

This much is known.

This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?

This much is known.
This is how the story ends.

Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.

And then he screams.

Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.

The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.

The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.

The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.

What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.…

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