Here are my latest uploads to YesSource, my Yes rarities youtube page (about which you can read here). This post is another addition to my series of Yes music posts and a collection of all my Yes-related posts is here. Yes, of course, is a, if not the, premier progressive rock band, and I am an enormous fan of it.
You can see all of my Yessource uploads here.
My latest YesSource uploads can be found here:
Here are my latest uploads to YesSource, my Yes rarities youtube page (about which you can read here). This post is another addition to my series of Yes music posts and a collection of all my Yes-related posts is here. Yes, of course, is a, if not the, premier progressive rock band, and I am an enormous fan of it.
You can see all of my Yessource uploads here.
My latest YesSource uploads can be found here:
This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:
In Brandenburg v. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, (SD NY, June 1, 2021), two nuns who formerly worked at a Greek Orthodox monastery sued the Archdiocese and several clergy members for sexual harassment by Father Makris at the monastery. One of the plaintiffs also sued over the conduct of Father Makris when he was Dean of Students at the religious college she attended in Massachusetts. When the student reported a sexual assault by a male student, Makris made her marry her attacker to cure the assault.
Invoking the ministerial exception doctrine, the court dismissed plaintiffs’ sex discrimination claims and their retaliation claims to the extent they are based on tangible employment action (hiring, firing, job assignments, promotion, compensation). However the court held that the claims for constructive discharge survive, as do the claims for retaliation to the extent they are based on harassment and not a tangible employment action. Some of plaintiffs’ defamation claims also survived the motion to dismiss.
You can learn more about this issue here.
Check out this post to Faye Cohen’s blog Toughlawyerlady!
Although lawyers are often the brunt of jokes and complaints, lawyers also have gripes about some of the people they deal with. This is a continuation of my last post which you can find here. Below are some of my gripes:
Angry birds. Some people are angry at everything, and they take that anger out on everyone around them. I call them angry birds. I am sorry that you lost your job because you got into a fight with a co-worker instead of asking Human Resources to handle your dispute; or your wife left you, and took the furniture while you were out of town; or your kid brought a pocket knife to school and was suspended; but don’t take your uncontrolled anger out on your lawyer. Life is not a bed of roses, and hopefully things will improve for you in the future, but I sort of doubt it, if you have an ongoing angry attitude and approach every situation ready for a fight. Lawyers try to improve your situation, but the problem may not just go away even if you have a lawyer.
Internet babies. Some people love to get their information from the Internet. I agree that it is a wonderful tool for providing general information, but it is not the be all and end all for all legal matters. Legal matters are handled on a case by case basis, often applying local laws, or even if federal laws are involved are involved, local judges may interpret them using local laws and local rules. The law is also constantly changing and different interpretations of the law are reached by different judges. Internet information should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is often incomplete, irrelevant, and often downright wrong, and can further lead someone down the wrong legal path who is relying on incomplete or incorrect information, or raise expectations of monetary settlements that are unrealistic for them.
People who disadvantage their own case and/or refuse to accept our legal advice. Here are some examples:
What me worry. Some people adopt a wait and see attitude which often prohibits their ability to bring a lawsuit as specific statutes of limitations apply, or their waiting damages their case so severely that is it no longer worth pursuing. Sometimes I tell people to wait and see what happens, but most often I suggest that some proactive action should be taken. I can’t do much once someone has attended an unemployment compensation hearing on their own and lost, without making objections, not presenting evidence, etc. The fact that you didn’t know about the procedure of the hearing, or that a certain legal process would be followed, or the agency staff didn’t tell you that having a lawyer is a good idea, is not an excuse. The law is usually premised on you talking to a lawyer in a timely fashion, so your rights can be determined. Your rights under the law can be lost even if you didn’t know you really had a case, or that you knew you had a timeframe in which to bring your case. This also applies to people who say “I was told I didn’t need a lawyer” by a clerk. A clerk is not a lawyer, and can’t give legal advice, so a lawyer, and not a clerk, needs to be consulted. People will use every excuse under the books when asked why they waited 5 + years to take legal action, or even seek legal advice, usually in estate matters, such as they were sick, they were depressed, they were ignorant of the law, etc. I have seen people lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because they did not timely take legal action.
Unions don’t do a great job of informing members of their civil rights or other laws management may have violated. This is not their job, so I can’t fault them. Their job involves representation based on a collective bargaining agreement, or other form of representation. For example, if someone has been injured on the job, or has a disability requiring a medical accommodation, union representatives generally do not deal with these issues, and if a worker waits until after the grievance and/or arbitration process is concluded, it is too late to raise other potential legal issues. Private lawyers are usually able to represent union members only in limited circumstances, mainly if civil rights or disability issues are involved. Sometimes union representatives work to undermine private lawyers, are hostile to them, and often threaten that if the employee retains a private lawyer the union will drop their representation. Usually a strong letter from a private lawyer changes their stance, as the union representatives making these threats are not usually lawyers.
Religion trumps the law. Occasionally people tell me that they will rely on God or Jesus to guide them. The law requires specific action in a certain time frame, such as administering an estate, and their lack of action can have monetary and even criminal penalties. It is good to have faith, but religious entities do not have standing in courts of law and people need to help themselves in a secular manner.
Check out this post to Faye Cohen’s blog Toughlawyerlady!
Although lawyers are often the brunt of jokes and complaints, lawyers also have gripes about some of the people they deal with. Below are some of my gripes:
Lawyers cannot guarantee results. Potential clients, especially those needing a lawyer for the first time, often say they don’t want to retain a lawyer unless a lawyer guarantees the result they want. Normally results are not within a lawyer’s control, especially if litigation is required, as we are not a judge or jury, and we can only do our best with a case. In fact, I tell clients that if a lawyer guarantees results in cases where a guarantee is not possible, they are not to be believed. Lawyers often boast about their abilities, but the results sometimes fall short. Results will often depend on a particular case, so in a personal injury case for example, where there is often insurance coverage, it is likely that some settlement will be negotiated. That is not always the case in other legal matters, and is often impossible in cases which basically only require a good defense.
A lawyer’s time should also be respected. There are some people who spend hours cruising the Internet and calling many lawyers, picking their brains, or when they don’t like the answer they receive, they continue to cruise until they receive an answer more to their liking. People sometimes tell me, when they don’t like hearing the reality of their situation, that they will continue to call lawyers until they find one “who knows what he/she is doing”. One would be pretty hard pressed to find a lawyer who knows a lot more than me in my practice areas after almost 40 years of experience. Even when several experienced lawyers tell them they don’t have a case, or their damages are not sufficient to warrant a lawyer’s time in mounting a case, they disregard their opinions. If one doesn’t have sufficient damages, pursuing litigation on principal is fine if one has many thousands of dollars to devote to their cause, but if one doesn’t have deep pockets, there is no point in being rude to the lawyer trying to tell you the reality of the legal system. Occasionally when people refuse to listen to my opinion, and they think they know more than me about the law, I suggest that they attend law school and practice for many years before they disregard my opinion, and often those of other lawyers, so lightly.
Touchy, touchy. Some people who call get upset because I tell them they have made mistakes in the past, which undermines or even prohibits proceeding with their case, and they feel this is an insult to their intelligence. However, if you are not a lawyer and do not have legal training and experience, you are not going to know what and how to do certain things, and my comments do not reflect on their intelligence. Other people feel they are entitled to embark on a long saga about their situation, sometimes going back years, and when I interrupt them to ask them specific questions so I can determine if they have a potential case, they don’t like it. Lawyers are not sounding boards to pour out one’s feelings and perceived wrongs done to them, and lawyers walk a fine line in trying to courteously listen to a long saga and not feel they are being taken advantage of and their time is being wasted, because sometimes these people just want to talk to someone to discuss how they have been wronged, but have no intention of pursuing any legal action.
Justice is as justice does. Pursuing one’s case, or defending one’s case through the legal system is often very costly. Every lawyer has often heard that a client is not interested in settling a matter because they want justice, and that means they insist on appearing before a judge or jury. Recently one of our office lawyers spoke with a judge who handles custody cases, and he told him he had heard 125 custody cases in 3 days. In almost every local court, there are vacancies and judges have a large workload, so even if they want to devote considerable time to a specific matter, they just can’t. Also, justice is not swift, and the reason it takes years sometimes to complete a case is because there are many cases working themselves through the legal pipeline at the same time, and giving one case priority over others is not possible, although clients often feel their case is the most deserving and important.
Angry birds. Some people are angry at everything, and they take that anger out on everyone around them. I call them angry birds. I am sorry that you lost your job because you got into a fight with a co-worker instead of asking Human Resources to handle your dispute; or your wife left you, and took the furniture while you were out of town; or your kid brought a pocket knife to school and was suspended; but don’t take your uncontrolled anger out on your lawyer. Life is not a bed of roses, and hopefully things will improve for you in the future, but I sort of doubt it, if you have an ongoing angry attitude and approach every situation ready for a fight. Lawyers try to improve your situation, but the problem may not just go away even if you have a lawyer.
Internet babies. Some people love to get their information from the Internet. I agree that it is a wonderful tool for providing general information, but it is not the be all and end all for all legal matters. Legal matters are handled on a case by case basis, often applying local laws, or even if federal laws are involved are involved, local judges may interpret them using local laws and local rules. The law is also constantly changing and different interpretations of the law are reached by different judges. Internet information should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is often incomplete, irrelevant, and often downright wrong, and can further lead someone down the wrong legal path who is relying on incomplete or incorrect information, or raise expectations of monetary settlements that are unrealistic for them.
People who disadvantage their own case and/or refuse to accept our legal advice. Here are some examples:
What me worry. Some people adopt a wait and see attitude which often prohibits their ability to bring a lawsuit as specific statutes of limitations apply, or their waiting damages their case so severely that is it no longer worth pursuing. Sometimes I tell people to wait and see what happens, but most often I suggest that some proactive action should be taken. I can’t do much once someone has attended an unemployment compensation hearing on their own and lost, without making objections, not presenting evidence, etc. The fact that you didn’t know about the procedure of the hearing, or that a certain legal process would be followed, or the agency staff didn’t tell you that having a lawyer is a good idea, is not an excuse. The law is usually premised on you talking to a lawyer in a timely fashion, so your rights can be determined. Your rights under the law can be lost even if you didn’t know you really had a case, or that you knew you had a timeframe in which to bring your case. This also applies to people who say “I was told I didn’t need a lawyer” by a clerk. A clerk is not a lawyer, and can’t give legal advice, so a lawyer, and not a clerk, needs to be consulted. People will use every excuse under the books when asked why they waited 5 + years to take legal action, or even seek legal advice, usually in estate matters, such as they were sick, they were depressed, they were ignorant of the law, etc. I have seen people lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because they did not timely take legal action.
Unions don’t do a great job of informing members of their civil rights or other laws management may have violated. This is not their job, so I can’t fault them. Their job involves representation based on a collective bargaining agreement, or other form of representation. For example, if someone has been injured on the job, or has a disability requiring a medical accommodation, union representatives generally do not deal with these issues, and if a worker waits until after the grievance and/or arbitration process is concluded, it is too late to raise other potential legal issues. Private lawyers are usually able to represent union members only in limited circumstances, mainly if civil rights or disability issues are involved. Sometimes union representatives work to undermine private lawyers, are hostile to them, and often threaten that if the employee retains a private lawyer the union will drop their representation. Usually a strong letter from a private lawyer changes their stance, as the union representatives making these threats are not usually lawyers.
Religion trumps the law. Occasionally people tell me that they will rely on God or Jesus to guide them. The law requires specific action in a certain time frame, such as administering an estate, and their lack of action can have monetary and even criminal penalties. It is good to have faith, but religious entities do not have standing in courts of law and people need to help themselves in a secular manner.
This is from edwardfeser.blogspot.com which you can find here. This blog is written by Edward Feser who is a Christian philosopher who I have been recently introduced to who I think provides effective clear, sobering, and direct responses to the advance of secular culture.
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Posted on May 22, 2021 here.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24)
For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? (Mark 8:36)
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4)
When people use or hear the word “capitalism,” some of the things they might bring to mind are:
1. The institution of private property, including private ownership of the basic means of production
2. Market competition
3. The existence of corporations as legal persons
4. Inequalities in wealth and income
5. An economic order primarily oriented to the private sector, with government acting at the margins and only where necessary
Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those things. Indeed, some of them (such as private property and a government that respects subsidiarity) are required as a matter of natural law. Eliminating all economic inequalities (as opposed to remedying poverty, which is a very different matter) is neither possible nor desirable. The concept of the corporate person has long been recognized by, and regarded as salutary within, the natural law tradition (whatever one thinks about its instantiation in modern business corporations). Socialism in the strict sense, which would centralize the most fundamental economic decision-making, is intrinsically evil.
On the other hand, other people using or hearing the term “capitalism” might have in mind things like:
6. A doctrinaire laissez-faire mentality that is reflexively hostile to all governmental economic intervention
7. The market as the dominant social institution, with an ethos of consumerism and commodification of everything as its sequel
8. Corporations so powerful that they are effectively unanswerable to government or public opinion
9. Doctrinaire minimalization or even elimination of social welfare institutions, even when there is no feasible private sector alternative
10. Globalization of a kind that entails dissolution of corporate and individual loyalties to the nation-state and local communities.
Now, all of these things are bad and should be opposed on natural law grounds.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely illustrative. And what it illustrates is that it is unhelpful to talk about either embracing or rejecting capitalism full stop. The term has too many connotations for that, and needs to be disambiguated. Hence the sweeping claims often made by both sides in the debate over capitalism inevitably generate excessive heat while reducing light. When people say “I support capitalism,” they often mean “I support 1-5” but their opponents hear them as saying “I support 6-10.” And when people say “I oppose capitalism,” they often mean “I oppose 6-10,” but their opponents hear them as saying “I oppose 1-5.” To a large extent, they talk past each other.
When we do disambiguate the term, we get more light and less heat. But we also lose the simpleminded pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist slogans. No doubt that is precisely why friends and critics of capitalism alike prefer not to disambiguate it.
Does this entail that no interesting general claims can be made about actually existing capitalism (as opposed to the abstract models of capitalism put forward by its defenders and its critics)? Not at all. Having pleaded for nuance, let me now boldly make some sweeping claims of my own. I can at least promise that I will offend both sides. Here are the claims:
I. Capitalism has made us materially much better off.
II. Capitalism has made us spiritually much worse off.
In defense of the first claim, I would simply refer to the standard arguments made by libertarians, free market conservatives, and liberals like Steven Pinker, which I regard as unanswerable. The rule of law, stable property rights, the price mechanism, the division of labor, and other aspects of modern market economies have made possible astounding wealth creation and technological advances that have raised the material conditions of everyone. As Pinker writes:
Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be a poor person, at least in developed countries. The old stereotype of poverty was an emaciated pauper in rags. Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans. The poor used to be called the have-nots. In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV. (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.) Almost half of the households below the poverty line had a dishwasher, 60 percent had a computer, around two-thirds had a washing machine and a clothes dryer, and more than 80 percent had an air conditioner, a video recorder, and a cell phone. In the golden age of economic equality in which I grew up, middle-class “haves” had few or none of these things. (Enlightenment Now, p. 117)
Before you respond that government had something to do with this as well, let me emphasize that I don’t disagree with that. Again, I am not talking about the laissez-faire fantasy capitalism of libertarian dreams and socialist nightmares. I am talking about actually existing capitalism, which has always had a significant public sector component – government provision of basic infrastructure, military research and development vis-à-vis technology, redistributive programs, and all the rest. The point, though, is that it was precisely the governments of capitalist countries that oversaw these advances, because they protected and supplemented the overall capitalist order rather than subverted it. Even redistributed golden eggs have first to be laid by the market economy goose.
But affluence can have a high spiritual cost, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike teach us. Modern capitalist society is essentially an instance of what Plato called the oligarchic sort of regime, which he regarded as the third-worst sort – or third-best, if you want to accentuate the positive. It is better than democracy and tyranny, but worse than either the rule of the Philosopher-Kings or what Plato called timocracy.
Now, keep in mind that the way Plato characterizes the five sorts of regime that he distinguishes is primarily by way of the kinds of souls which predominate in them, and that the characterization thus presupposes his tripartite conception of human nature (in terms of reason, the spirited part of the soul, and appetite). A society governed by the Philosopher-Kings is one in which the highest part of the soul, reason, is idealized and is dominant in those who govern. A timocracy is a society in which the spirited part of the soul, and the martial virtues that characterize it, is dominant in those who govern it. A democracy, as Plato characterizes it, is a society in which the lowest, appetitive part of the soul dominates and tends toward licentiousness. A tyranny is what results when a particularly ruthless democratic soul imposes its will on the rest.
Oligarchy as Plato conceives of it stands between timocracy and democracy. Like democracy, it is governed by the appetitive part of the soul. But the specific appetite it fosters, the desire to acquire wealth, is not as unruly or chaotic as the pursuit of sensual pleasure that dominates democratic society. Its satisfaction requires some degree of self-discipline and delay of gratification – and thus the bourgeois virtues, which, though not as noble as those honored in the two higher sorts of regime, at least put some restraints on the other appetites.
The trouble is that, for one thing, later generations within an oligarchy, who enjoy the benefits of affluence without having had to exercise the discipline required in order to create it, tend to become soft and decadent. And for another thing, there is money to be made in catering to the lower appetites. Hence oligarchy tends to decay into democracy in Plato’s sense. And that is why the America of the robber barons and of the military-industrial complex eventually gave way to the America of Woodstock and the sexual revolution, and now to that grisly amalgam of the two – the America of contemporary woke capitalism.
If easy affluence is corruptive of the natural virtues, it is even more corruptive of the supernatural virtues. The rich young man, though he showed initial interest in following Christ, opted instead to hold on to his possessions when he had to make a choice (Matthew 16: 19-22). This famously led Christ to warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).
Now, superficial readers of this passage suppose that it is fundamentally about the duty of material assistance to the poor. They overlook the reaction to Jesus’s teaching: “When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’” (Matthew 19:25). Why would they ask such a thing, since only a minority of people are rich? St. Augustine answered as follows:
When the Lord says that a rich man does not enter the kingdom of heaven, his disciples ask him who can be saved. Since the rich are so few in comparison with the poor, we must understand, then, that those who yearn for such material goods must realize that they are included in the number of those rich. (Questions on the Gospels)
Or as Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich, but who cannot bear the fact. Indeed, they can be in even worse shape if they add to this sin of avarice the sin of envy.
But it is a commonplace that those who suffer want of any kind are more likely to perceive their dependence on and need for God, whereas those who have much can become self-satisfied and distracted by worldly concerns. In particular, they are in danger not only of the sins people usually associate with wealth – avarice, gluttony, and pride – but of the even more insidious sin of acedia or distraction from the highest, spiritual goods. Hence the rich stand in special need of warning. How many more are bound to be in this spiritual danger, then, when many more are affluent – as they are in modern capitalist societies?
That Plato’s and Christ’s warnings have been borne out is obvious from the collapse of traditional morality and widespread apostasy from Christianity that have characterized modern capitalist societies, and from the way of life that has replaced them. In such societies, “success” is conceived of in terms of the acquisition of material wealth. Preparing the young for adulthood is conceived of in terms of training them for a “career” that will assure them this “success.” Pursuit of this goal is the preoccupation not just of an elite, but of everyone – achieving it is the “American dream.” Social justice is conceived of primarily in terms of enabling as many as possible to achieve this “dream.”
Everyday life is devoted to making money that one might spend on dining, entertainments, travel, and other material goods – which enable one to rest up so as to be ready to get back to making money. Advertising is ubiquitous, and consumers dutifully pursue the latest new product, the latest pop culture fad, the latest fashions, or the latest enthusiasm in cuisine. Though political fights may arise over various cultural and moral controversies, in the end it is the state of the economy that tends to determine who gets into power. Even conservative parties tend to cave in on “social issues” but will fight tooth and nail for tax cuts, deregulation, and the like. “It’s the economy, stupid!” is the bipartisan conventional wisdom.
Even otherwise traditionally-minded Christians become suckers for obscene materialistic distortions of the faith, such as the “prosperity gospel.” Liberal Christians, meanwhile, emphasize helping the poor and marginalized – not to save their souls, but rather to get them into the same rat race that the rest of society runs in. Christ says: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). But secularists and modern Christians alike, whether conservative or liberal, take the highest end of moral and political endeavor to be to build a world where no one ever has to deny himself anything and there are no crosses of any kind.
From a traditional Christian point of view, then, the main danger of actually existing capitalism is not that it makes people poor, but on the contrary that it makes them rich compared to most people who have ever lived, and certainly fixates them on the acquisition of material wealth. It has thereby led the mass of mankind into a particularly insidious sort of temptation that relatively fewer were faced with in previous ages. Most people read passages like Matthew 19:24 and smugly think of the rich as “them.” But to paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the rich man, and he is us.
Is the solution to abolish riches? No, because wealth is not intrinsically bad, and indeed is a positive good. Again, the problem is not riches per se, but the fixation on riches. And the fixation can exist even when riches do not. The solution is to counter this fixation. Sound principles by which this might be done were set out by popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, and John Paul II, who condemned socialism in absolute terms, but defended capitalist institutions only with significant qualifications of a kind that no libertarian or classical liberal could accept – and who insisted that both the crisis of modernity and the social transformation needed to remedy it are fundamentally moral and religious rather than economic in nature.
Related reading:
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx
Joe Arcieri is a friend of mine who I worked with for many years during my ten years working for Acme Markets. Joe, when not stocking milk or saving lives as a nurse, is an excellent guitar player. I have had the privilege, from time to time, of (badly) plunking my bass guitar with Joe as he melts a face or two with a great solo.
As great musicians do, Joe has written some of his own songs and keeps a soundcloud site to post them. When I have opportunity, I will post his music here as well.
Here is his composition called “BaBy!” which you can find here.
Here are the links to the previously posted songs by Joe:
C. S. Lewis wrote that to be modern is to be consumed by the magical impulse “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” This entails giving up one’s soul in exchange for power. “Once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.” We will also have forsaken the ancient wisdom which holds that the soul is only truly free when in harmony with what is real.
Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton’s survey of America’s post-secular religious landscape, examines prominent twenty-first-century attempts to “subdue reality” by force of will. Contrary to the popular perception that America has become increasingly secular, Burton shows that religion is flourishing, albeit in non-traditional guises. Insofar as “religion,” in Burton’s functionalist usage, names those beliefs and practices that serve “both individually and societally to give us a sense of our world, our place in it, and our relationships to the people around us,” it has always and everywhere suffused human life. Today that suffusion is apparent even in avowedly “secular” institutions like the Supreme Court, which recently enshrined the sacral metaphysics of gender theory in law. The George Floyd protests also demonstrate the power of the progressive social justice religion to effect a nationwide Durkheimian “collective effervescence.”
Burton describes the new religions practiced by more than fifty percent of Americans today as “Remixed.” The religiously Remixed, “shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative internet and consumer capitalism,” prefer “intuitional spirituality” to institutional churches. They mix and match different practices to form their own rituals and belief systems. While most Remixed are “nones” or “spiritual but not religious,” many self-identified Christians also practice Remixing.
Remixed religion, Burton suggests, would be impossible apart from our long conditioning by consumer capitalism. At its heart, Remixed religion is selfish, choice-obsessed, therapeutic, and adaptable to expediency—making it a natural bedfellow of progressive politics. These new religions of the self may partially satisfy the human need for narrative and wonder, but they threaten to dissolve our civic institutions in a sea of “personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment.”
Burton traces the roots of the Remixed to the intuitionalist faiths of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and Quimby’s New Thought. While the postwar economic boom accelerated individualist trends in American religion, America has always been fertile ground for self-worship and charlatanry.
Today’s charlatans are the “spiritual entrepreneurs” who reinvent snake oil in the myriad guises of a “wellness” industry worth $4.2 trillion, exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience bazaar Goop. The theology of wellness is gnostic, pitting the intuitional self against society. According to the gospel of wellness, we each have a “moral responsibility to take care of ourselves first before directing any attention to others.” But because the work of “self-care” is never complete, care for the other is never quite justified.
Among the darker forms of self-worship, Burton examines the recent explosion of occultism among American progressives. This movement drew scrutiny last year when the proprietors of Catland, an occult supply store in Brooklyn, ritually cursed Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Modern witchcraft combines “progressive feminist politics with a fervent opposition to institutional Christianity—which is dismissed and derided as a bastion of toxic patriarchy, repression, and white supremacy.” Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of Catland, is an apologist for “black magic,” which is countercultural, dangerous, and a tool for resisting oppression. Bracciale, a white male, argues that non-whites and queer people should “decolonize” witchcraft and restore its African roots by embracing the language of white European Luciferianism. Such farce is typical of the incoherence of the Remixed.
Even apart from witchcraft, Remixed religions consistently exhibit Lewis’s magical impulse. For the Remixed, nature—especially our sexual nature—exists to bear the imprint of human will. “If wellness culture centers the perfectibility of the body as the locus of personal spiritual growth,” writes Burton, “then sexual utopianism takes that corporeality to its logical conclusion . . . why shouldn’t sexuality be the place for us to access not just pleasure but meaning and purpose?” Remixed sexuality casts a vision of a transformed social order. And that vision is increasingly popular. One-fifth of Americans admit to experimenting with “ethical non-monogamy”; even more have experimented with BDSM and other kinks. Authenticity, after all, requires acting on our desires. Refusing to indulge one’s kinks is thus to forsake one’s own perfection.
While the Remixed faith of the sexual utopian may seem like New Thought by way of Thelema, it is perhaps best understood as—to coin a phrase—neoliberalism of the body. Remixed religion is so appealing, in part, because it “is inseparable from a consumer-capitalist model of sexuality.”
But not everyone has the same purchasing power in the sexual marketplace, and thus not everyone can access the meaning-making power of Remixed sexuality. In her penultimate chapter, wryly titled “Twilight of the Chads,” Burton examines the ressentiment of “incels,” men who for want of good looks, money, or social skills are “involuntarily celibate.” Incels want to burn the world down (along with all the sexually successful Chads and Staceys), and Burton’s characteristic empathy is muted as she walks us through their misogynistic world. Incels are a small but noisy subset of what Burton calls “nihilistic atavism,” a Remixed religion focused on reclaiming ground lost to feminism and progressivism. At its most reasonable, the new atavism may resemble Jordan Peterson’s program of renewed male responsibility. But it is best characterized by outsized denizens of the “manosphere” such as Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), who advocates a muscle-bound, homoerotic Nietzscheanism that longs for the emergence of Übermenschen worth submitting to. It is hardly accidental that BAP’s obsession with submission resembles the sexual utopian’s affinity for kink.
Burton believes three rival strands of Remixed—social justice culture, nihilistic atavism, and Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism—are battling to become America’s new civil religion. Each belligerent resembles the others. Whereas intersectional feminists want to destroy society for its misogyny and racism, new atavists want to destroy it for having yielded to the enervating forces of progressivism. Both the cult of social justice and the cult of techno-utopianism prize disruption, valorize the self, and see nature as an obstacle to the body’s perfection.
By emphasizing narrative, Burton renders complex phenomena accessible to general readers without sacrificing precision, and her analysis flows directly from the testimony of the Remixed themselves. But readers will be left with questions. To what extent is the egocentrism of American religion intrinsic to the American project itself? In the context of liquid modernity, are genuinely new faiths possible? Or are all new faiths doomed to serve only as therapies for the “spiritually fluid”?
Remixed religion is mutable and prone to imitation because, at its heart, it preaches only the self and its will to power. No civilization whose civic religion is so crassly nihilistic can long survive. And no self whose faith is Remixed can long endure as a self. Remixed religion is in the business of producing what Malachi Martin called “aspiring vacuums”: denatured souls dispossessed of the ability to will that which is proper to their natures; that is, individuals ripe for possession by the will of another. Most despairing of all, the Remixed are trained to welcome such demonic subjugation. One woman interviewed by Burton explains that during BDSM sessions she pictures herself as a “hollow cane of bamboo,” an empty vessel for external will (“energy”), rejoicing in the annihilation of self.
This is the false re-enchantment of the magician’s bargain. The unmaking of one’s soul is disguised by therapeutic appeasement. And yet re-enchantment remains perhaps the most important task for a civilization incapable of experiencing the meaning inherent in our world. That meaning cannot be “chosen” by humans. It can only be discovered—by participation in what Lewis called “Deep Magic,” the unbegotten power that sang the world into existence. Burton says in her introduction that she has rediscovered such enchantment in a return to faith. I’m not alone in hoping she will share that journey in her next book.
By Tara Isabella Burton and published in First Things on June 29, 2020 and can be found here.
Check out this post to Faye Cohen’s blog Toughlawyerlady!
As Aretha Franklin sings in her song, all of us want, need, and expect a little respect. As a lawyer, and as a frequent participant in the legal system, because I regularly appear in courts and at hearings of all types, and I am often in court and government offices doing one thing or another, I too expect a little respect. Of course, I am not the only one, as all participants in any government and court processes expect to get a little respect. Not only do they expect a little respect, but they often look toward courts and agencies as their savior in a given situation. This inclination should be controlled, as the bottom line is that all systems are operated and staffed by people and people are imperfect, people often have their own agendas, people are subject to influence and corruption, and people have their own lives and issues to deal with and do not necessarily give priority to others’ concerns. Participants in the legal system are required to follow stringent rules, and the general public should be granted the same respect by the persons employed by that system that they require as part of a formal justice system. Below are some recent examples of instances where I thought people involved in the legal system could have given a little more respect to me and other participants.
I was in Municipal Court the other day in Philadelphia County. Municipal Court is the lowest level court that people can sue or be sued in, damages cannot exceed $12,000, and often people are not represented by lawyers. What follows is pretty typical in Municipal Court proceedings. About 15 cases were scheduled for 9:15 am, and everyone who had a case that morning was in the room. About 10 am a Commissioner, who is not a judge, entered, and proceeded to call the cases. The Commissioner has limited authority, cannot determine the outcome of a case if there is a contest, and cannot enter what is known as a default judgment, which means the party sued who allegedly owes money does not appear, if that judgment contains a request for interest and attorney’s or collection fees. On that day that meant that most of the people remained in the room because the Commissioner did not have the authority to resolve their matters. The judge came in at 10:45 am. Now you can bet your dollar that if the lawyers or clients were not present at the time they were due they would be in trouble, unless they had a good excuse, and sometimes that isn’t enough. I was one of the first cases called by the judge, so I was finished by about 11 am, but considering the other party did not appear, is there a good reason I had to wait all of that time?
A couple of years back a judge had been elected to Municipal Court solely because her father was a well-known athlete, and she had name recognition, although the Philadelphia Bar Association did not find her qualified. The courtroom was full of people when she arrived, over an hour after the rest of us were told to be present, she heard one case, during which she was speaking on her phone, then she suddenly stood up and announced that she had an emergency, and left the courtroom. We were given a choice of rescheduling the hearing or entering into a mediation process. After I chose the mediation process another judge became available, but I was told I had to go to mediation because I was one of the first ones asked. I did not leave the court until 5 hours later on a matter that should have taken an hour tops.
I received a notice for jury duty recently for a Monday. I was told that I may be excused from jury duty but I couldn’t be given this information until after 4 pm on the previous Friday. I was excused, but I missed an entire day when I could have scheduled appointments. Once again, there seemed to be a minimal concern for respecting jurors’ time. I understand the system can be difficult, but knowing something about the court system, I certainly think a juror can be given a couple of days’ notice in advance if they are going to be excused, rather than an hour before a prior workday.
Laypeople do not understand that judges aren’t always held to schedules and can rearrange schedules. In a recent case, that had been pending before the court for some time, which was scheduled for trial the following week, and required that some depositions had to be taken by videotape to meet the deadline, at the final conference, the judge stated that the case would not take place the following week, but would take place four months later. This trial had been scheduled for many months, and schedules were arranged to accommodate the given dates. This happens all of the time in the court system.
In all of the above examples, a little more respect for my time as well as others’ would have been appreciated.
This is from religionclause.blogspot.com which you can find here:
Today the Texas legislature sent to Governor Greg Abbott for his signature SB8 (full text), the state’s version of a “heartbeat” abortion law. Except in medical emergencies, it bans performing or inducing an abortion if the physician has detected a fetal heartbeat. Unique to the Texas law is a provision that allows any private person to bring a civil action against a physician who has violated the statute, and against anyone who knowingly aids or abets the abortion, including reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of the statute. However, no action may be brought against the woman on whom the abortion was performed. Plaintiff may recover statutory damages of not less than $10,000 for each abortion the defendant has been involved in. Daily Beast reports on the new statute.
You can learn more about this issue here.
judicialsupport 