The fetishism of positions

“OK, but what do you believe? Do you think abortion should be illegal?”
“Do you think a trans person is the gender they say they are?”
“Do you think Israel should get out of the West Bank and Gaza?”
“Should pro athletes be able to kneel during the national anthem?”
“Doesn’t everyone have a right to health care?”
“Of course immigration should be done legally or not at all, right?”
“Do you or don’t you agree that there is such a thing as White Privilege?”
“Should public school curriculum be multicultural?”
“So what are the limits on free speech?”
“Come on, what would you do with a terrorist in a ticking time-bomb scenario?”
“Are you a Marxist? A Libertarian? Do you even care?”
“Wait – who are you going to vote for? -- You're voting, right?”

Policy questions, foundational questions, questions of the moment, “purely theoretical” questions…. But always the insistence: OK, but after all the weighing-the-options, what do you think? “What is your position on ----?”

Of course anyone can be the target of such interrogation, but I am going to consider the case of the philosopher. There are at least three (or four) ways that this question, this making-it-personal, arises. There’s an aggressive mode, an “OK, wise guy, if you’re so smart, you tell us how it oughta be done. What do you even want, anyway?” At worst, this is a mode of revenge for making us think off of our own beaten track. It’s an attempt to change the subject, or even to turn the tables; to impose a shift from the implicit questioning that happens in thinking-out-loud, to an explicit demand for some kind of “actionable proposal.” It really means “put up or shut up,” or sometimes just “shut up.” It’s a shaming mode: you and your armchair, your ivory tower. Get your hands dirty! It can also be a demand to “stop hiding,” quite dancing around behind “suppose” and “what-if;” in other words: Come out and fight if you dare.

There is also an abdicating mode; a mode that says, OK, Yes, I understand the options, but what has your imprimatur? Yes, there’s this way or this way to think about it, you can be a utilitarian or a communitarian, you can say some things are right or wrong no matter what; you can think there are tragic choices or that the idea of tragedy always serves the status quo. And on the ground, you can show how question after question can be asked in multiple ways. But after all of this “teaching the controversy,” aren’t you afraid you’ve legitimated the wrong thing with implying a false equivalence? Mightn’t you be dignifying some options just by giving them airplay at all? Don’t let me make the wrong choice! In other words, Tell me what to think; or even, what to want.

Sometimes there's an unstable hybrid mode that says: Please tell me you don't think this wrong thing.

These modes fetishize positions. They are not, of course, usually put forward in the stark and, admittedly, caricaturized forms I have sketched. Moreover, each of them is right about something, whether it knows it or not. The aggressive mode senses that philosophy is indeed “hedging,” in a sense. It thinks that by naming this “elephant in the room,” it can render the philosopher nonplussed – a breach of decorum! – and that this will save it, or at least buy some time. Sometimes, as rhetoric goes, it works.

The abdicating mode, too, sees something true: there is a real risk involved. One may well be, as Levinas says in the very first sentence of Totality and Infinity, "duped by morality."

The aggressive mode casts the philosopher as having no skin in the game, or as playing for hidden stakes – a different sort of “skin,” and not the kind everyone else has in the game. On the other hand, the abdicating mode sees “stakes” very clearly, and is panicked by them.

I say that these wrong modes fetishize position because they imagine that if the philosopher will just “state clearly” their position on such-and-such, something will have happened And they know what will have happened: the philosopher will be knocked off their high-horse; or the student will have been given a hand up. In the case of the hybrid, the fear may be that the student will be pulled down, though usually the conscious worry is that they "won't be able to respect" the philosopher any more.

The philosopher, qua philosopher cannot (say I) answer any of these modes, because the philosopher knows that nothing will have happened if they answer. (Of course, plenty of teachers, and plenty of thinkers, do answer; they too can be prone to alienation and fetishizing. None of us is immune to to this.) Or, perhaps, they can and do answer, and they know that nothing has happened – because under the circumstances imposed by the assumption, nothing can happen. OK, you know that there are many, many people, doubtless very intelligent, who think such-&-such, as well as many others, equally intelligent, who think the opposite, and half a hundred shades in between. I have now told you my own intelligent opinion; now you have one more grain of doxa to add to one pile or another on the various scales. Or again: You are quite right: I have a different game to play in addition to the game about policy or about foundational principles. You challenge me to make a move about policy, or foundational principles. Here is my move. Now, what does that tell you about this other game?

There is one last mode of asking this question, and this last mode is personal. It just wants to know the philosopher as a fellow, as a comrade. It is not worried about getting the answer “right,” though it may well think there is or could be a right answer, and that this rightness is not a point of indifference. But what it is after is something like intimacy, or shall we say, encounter. Beyond all critiquable motives, beyond all “conservatism” or following-the-question-wherever, there remains the naïve and pre-legitimate (pre- because it comes before any criteria of legitimation) desire to know, Who are you? (Are you indeed “just asking questions?” Are you enjoying some subtle frisson that comes with provocation – and doing so under cover? Do you have a wish, a hope, of your own?) And this question arises in part because one is finding ones own way, and wants – hopes for – what? Guidance? Collaboration? Provocation? Company?

This mode sees the philosopher as pretty much the opposite of a troll. A troll is someone who is just fucking with you; they have no interest in you, only in your reactions; but in order to get your reactions, they must seem to have an interest in the subject at hand. In a certain sense (and put perhaps hyperbolically), the philosopher has an interest solely in you; the subject at hand is always the medium. And this in turn means that this third mode, this personal mode, itself begins already to take on this anti-trolling stance, by which one cares provisionally about the questions as they come up, but really these are all occasions for hanging out. This, by the way, is called friendship. It is not as casual as it sounds.

In the previous two posts I laid out a long double list of “positions.” They really have very little philosophical interest in themselves; they are meant only to be a lot of cumulative evidence for why I do not feel well-placed as either a “Progressive” or a “Conservative,” and that, after all, is a matter that really need only concern me – if anyone. But since I am not really all that atypical, I assume that there must be dozens, nay thousands, of ways in which someone could realistically be a halfway-thoughtful, semi-engaged political participant and not fit with the "political binary" of contemporary American lingua franca.

More or less missing from all of those lists was any extensive rationale. What I was presenting wasn’t a political theory; it was just a jumbled pile of stances, more or less raw, more or less without justification. This was partly from necessity -- I needed to provide a big-enough panorama to make the point I wanted to make: to wit, that it is possible (because it is a fait accompli) to maintain a number of positions that are at least prima facie at odds with the left-right spectrum. This is not a very revolutionary claim, of course. But it does press us towards an interesting question. Why, if someone like me is obviously possible, and on the assumption that I am not a freakish outlier (hmmm...), is the popular account of the "political spectrum" so pervasive? Has "the wisdom of crowds" just found the optimal way of sorting positions into a two-big-baskets setup? Or are there perhaps other interests that are served by the system that leaves so many other permutations out of consideration?

In the first edition of Capital, Marx uses a phrase which Zizek later appropriates as a brief definition of ideology: They do not know it, but they are doing it. True to form, Zizek cannot help but reverse this into “They know it very well, yet they do it.” Marx does not actually use the word ideology here – a word that by now has arguably become so overdetermined as to be useless, if only there was another (because those overdeterminations are part of the use), but the phrase is still a good brief pointer to this tangle of overdeterminations. In any case, in later editions, Marx considerably revised this chapter, but he kept the phrase – more or less. It is now, “We are unaware of this, but we do it,” and he is referring to the way we allow human relationships to be mediated by things. Soon thereafter comes the famous discussion of the fetishizing of commodities. I’m going to allow myself a gloss from the unlikely source Wallace Shawn, whose play The Fever I staged a bit over a year ago:

People say, about every thing, that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it.

Because the interpretation of Marx is fraught with difficulty, Shawn may not get Marx right in every respect; but I think he grasps the essence, which is brought out in a footnote Marx appends to the very phrase I mentioned before: We do not know it, but we do it. The footnote is to Galiani’s treatise On Money, and says:

When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons – “La Ricchezza e una ragione tra due persone,” – he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things.

Positions get lumped into more or less ready-made ensembles precisely because positions are fetishized; in exactly the way Marx spoke of the fetishism of commodities. It is not a coincidence; this fetishizing of positions occurs because “positions” come to us as commodities. A pre-given position is a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things expressed as a relation between persons. It looks like two people having a conversation, and so it is, or would be, but the conversation cannot happen, because the people involved have given over their interaction to the mediation of things: readymade notional ensembles.

A dozen objections arise at this point. What? am I imagining some unfiltered, unimpeded "encounter" that would happen if only those pesky "positions" didn't interfere? Where is this golden age supposed to have occurred? How naive! Didn't I ever read Derrida? Wittgenstein? Nietzsche?

As it happens, I do think philosophy involves a sort of naïveté; but let's come back to that. It could also be objected: I said earlier that philosophy was interested in “you,” and that every “subject matter” was just an occasion or even a medium; what, then, is the difference between this, and the ideological deformation I am criticizing now? Part of the difference is in that phrase of Marx’s – they do not know it but they are doing it; for Socrates is to be taken at his word when he says that the difference between him and his fellow Athenians is that he knows that he does not know. Zizek’s inversion of Marx (“they know very well, and yet…”) rightly heightens the tension, because under late capitalism, irony – made into a mode of style and in some sense collapsed into style itself – has become a commodity like all others, and indeed the very mark of the self-knowing commodity – because in this setting, the ultimate commodity, the ur-commodity, is style.

But irony is only necessary, not sufficient, for philosophy. There is also a kind of earnestness, or what I referred to above as naïveté. "In all their actions men do in fact aim at what they think good," Aristotle says at the beginning of the Politics, and this what they think is where they – and we – start, though we may have grounds to revise this later. Philosophy is saved from meta- and hyper-ironism by this naïveté, which however is different from the insistence of either the aggressive or the abdicatory demand for “positions” because that demand wants those positions as an end, an answer, whereas philosophy starts there – and that is where the labor of building a position finds its raw material.

If the fetishizing of the commodity is a forgetting of and repression of the labor involved in making it, we forget, too, the labor involved in the making of a position. Philosophy reminds us and says: you want to understand? Roll up your sleeves. But the point is not to "make" a position. Positions have their meaning in the context of life. The examined life entails an examined politics (which means, also: law, civics, economics, education, culture...); and there is of course no politics without policies. Whether, in any given context, there are particular policies entailed by philosophy per se, is – like so many issues – another question. But I am dubious – if you really want to know what I think.

And No, Not a "Conservative" either

Well, if anyone cared enough to read the whole of last post about Why I Am Not A (capital-P) "Progressive," the first thing I have to say is.... Why? Why would some one guy's "positions" be of the remotest interest? Sure, if you know me IRL, as the kids (used to) say, perhaps this kind of matters (and those are the ones I initially drafted this for, before I started getting all writer-y with it); but what could possibly be the fascination otherwise?

Here's one guess (though even here, "fascination" will be a strong word). Maybe you, too, are "not a Progressive" -- but, too, are not put off by my obvious hedging. If so, you too might also be "not a Conservative," and want to think a bit about how these things, or not-things, fit together. I will be of almost no assistance on the theoretical level, but maybe just enumerating examples will help -- ways in which positions don't match up with either "side" of this shadow-boxing match. We can extrapolate from the examples later, maybe.

I'm leaving completely out of account for the moment the "immediate context" of American politics -- our national case of the DTs. Going after the low-hanging fruit of the latest presidential tweet is impoverishing what was left of the smart liberal free press; we don't need more of that. That the current White House is a new low -- which is saying quite a lot -- is a point that I think needs no demonstration. That it has mouthed a number of points that were popular on the left within waking memory (especially in anti-globalist quarters) is less frequently mentioned, but I don't think this demonstrates anything beyond the administration's semi-incoherence and the way much of the left is a weathervane. In any case, I have been known to show up at demonstrations, sign petitions, and even strategically vote for Democrats lately -- all purely tactical decisions, which may be correct or mistaken or meaningless; but for the purposes of this post, I'm leaving the Narcissist-in-Chief off to one side. I hope he will soon be relegated there for everybody. (If and when that happens, we will see more clearly how much of a distraction from the real issues DT has been -- and how important this distraction will turn out to have been.) If the best the Left had to offer was "We're not D.T.," we would be in deep, deep trouble. Of course, we are in deep trouble anyway, but....

This is (a little) more brief than the last post, partly because that was a low bar, and partly because my critiques of the Left are internal critiques; these are made from without. I was raised in a conservative household in a conservative state (Utah), so I cannot take seriously the demonization of ordinary-folks conservatism (even the much-maligned "DT Supporter", though I was so proud of my home state for the lost-cause candidacy of Evan McMullin), and I still have a fondness for red-white-&-blue bunting, and small towns with lots of front porches; but I left the Republican Party behind even longer ago than I left the Democrats. If anything, I am more "small-c conservative" (not "further right") than most of the GOP; but I'm definitely "further left" (not "more liberal") than nearly every Democrat I know.

OK, then. If I'm not a Progressive, why not, the other thing, whatever that is? (Again, even more than last post, these positions here are not presented as full-blown arguments. They are, at most, indices. Or maybe symptoms. Note, too, the frequent recurrence of variations on the phrase "....but that is a different issue.")

1. I am an artist -- mostly a musician, but I do graphic art and, if you haven't noticed, a lot of writing too -- and sometimes art offends the shit out of people, with bad taste, irreverence, whatever. Oh well. I'm not saying the artist shouldn't care about codes, mores, standards, consequences, norms, canons, and so on; nor that being offended is somehow morally salutary or snaps a person out of their little cozy close-mindedness. I too have been turned off, offended, and repulsed by someone's "art." I'm just saying I would prefer that the law should pretty much stay the Hell out of this.

2. I have yet to see an account of social conflict that has persuaded me that the lion's share doesn't come down to class. (The closest has been Stan Goff, who argues that gender is even more basic, and sometimes he almost tips me over to his side.) This all by itself makes me a Marxist, in some senses. Though of course, aristocrats also know it comes down to class.

3. Speaking of Marx: Late-capitalist economics is clearly a pyramid scheme. I believe that human beings are free, and therefore we can decide to behave better; that we are not fated to be determined by the "laws" of the market. (This doesn't mean I think markets cannot be treated as an object of a kind of science).

4. I am a localist; I believe in community -- its value, its indispensibility, for the good life. You might think this makes me a likely conservative -- and in small-c terms, this is close enough to true; but by the same token, I am therefore in a certain sense not an "individualist," in the sense of the individual posited (or constructed) by Lockeanism, and thus the whole modern small-"l" liberal idea of modern society or can-do, go-it-alone pull-yrself-up-by-yr-bootstraps nonsense which underlies a certain sort of conservative critique of social safety nets. (I am not sure I want my safety nets to be administered by the state, but that's a separate question.)

5. I am deeply suspicious of profit motives, and the venality of power. As far as I am concerned, beyond a certain threshold, The Bigger, The Worse.

6. I am persuaded by the critiques that show how comfort here is too often underwritten by misery elsewhere; and I think that we are under spiritual obligation to change this. How we live with (engaging or evading) this responsibility isn't simple, but there is a difference between engagement and evasion.

7. Despite my remarks about Identity Politics, I am deeply sympathetic to critiques of racism on large scales and small, and I am disgusted by it whether it is overt or covert. I am likewise moved by complaints of women who have to deal with guys being jerks, and systemic arrangements that enable and abet this. And likewise by the obvious ick-recoil that gays and lesbians had to deal with in my youth. I supported marriage equality in civil terms because I believe (on more or less libertarian grounds) that mutually-consenting people can do what they want with each other. (Should they? is another question, but it isn't one that I want decided by legislation.) This is not the same as endorsing religious marriages as a sacrament for same-sex couples; if you believe in sacraments at all, you have a whole different set of considerations to include in such a query. (I.e., that's another other question.)

I do not idolize "Diversity" for its own sake, nor Equality either, but in my encounters with other people individually and other groups, I genuinely try to lead with my curiosity and openness and not with defensiveness. There is a place for defense; it's not up in front. In short, while I may have all sorts of criticisms about specific behaviors of minorities and marginalized groups, about the tactics of activism within / on behalf of those groups, and indeed about the theoretical ramifications of thinking in terms of "marginalized groups" as the go-to first and last theoretical stop -- reservations about all sorts of aspects of the typical Social Justice itinerary and its theoretical underpinnings -- I do want to ask myself hard questions, catch myself at residual prejudices, and cultivate empathy for people who have a different and difficult row to hoe. And those empathizing efforts make me want to cultivate kindness -- which is painfully lacking when you listen to the defensive postures (and derisive snorts) on the right (I'm thinking of what is known as "the comments section" here). (That the left, to be sure, has its own cruelty, I neither deny nor condone; and -- because I am arguably "on" the left and unarguably surrounded by it here in my coastal city -- I fear that cruelty more; but that is (as usual) a different question.)

I am quite sure that "kindness" sounds to others, at times, either like a laughably/woefully inadequate response, or just the wrong word entirely for how I articulate my stances. That's a different matter; but I take it seriously. The biggest example these days seems to be so-called gender-nonconformity. Is it really necessary to underscore that people no matter how they comport themselves (i.e., how they "present") should be treated with dignity? It is true that not agreeing -- however tentatively -- with someone can itself be construed (wrongly, I hold, of course) as an affront to their dignity; can, indeed, be (mis!)characterized as questioning their right to exist. That is, however, no reason to throw the game and just forget about kindness and respect. If my stance is not accepted as respectful, I may not be able to control this; but I'm certainly not going to act disrespectfully by my lights.

8. I loathe trolls. (Lowest-grade Dada. Ugh.) Trolling I define (leaving aside, for now, the problematic question of actual propagandists or agents provocateurs) as willfully provoking the emotions of another for no reason other than to provoke; what is known as "fucking with people." (There can be such provocation that does have other, or further, rationale, and here the line can blur, but it does not vanish.) The troll is akin to the bullshitter -- they do not care about the correctness of their position; being right, or persuading someone, is not the point. But while the bullshitter is invested in seeming as if they are saying "something", and producing an effect of confusion or a vague impression that the bullshitter has said Something Important, the troll is invested in getting a rise out of the other side. This makes trolling (and this is not news) very much like bullying, and it brings out an icy fire of cold wrath in me. My severest judgment is reserved for cruelty and humiliation. I know humiliation from the other side; and I also know the temptation to it.

I see far more trolling on the "right" than on the "left." (I am speaking, for the most part, of the common citizenry here -- again, of "the comments section," where the real depressing outline of hoi polloi comes out in stark relief. As the internet has changed the public square, the distinction between the peanut gallery and the stage has gotten blurry, however. There are now plenty of low- and mid-level "official" commentators and policy-makers who seem to me to flirt with trolling or at least with the sort of pseudo-trolling that comes from preaching to the choir -- and that serves to "legitimize" trolling proper when the choir is sent out into the comments-sections.) Since the troll qua troll does not care about the issue, it's an interesting question why one side of the binary attracts them more, and I think a prima facie case can be made for the argument that the Left, bleeding-heart that is is, makes itself an easy target. But n.b., since the troll doesn't care about the issue (the troll simply enjoys the spectacle of anti-racist righteous indignation; they are not making a principled case for the right to wear blackface), the troll can be accidentally associated with a an argument that has, in itself, some abstract plausibility. Conversely, certain moves in serious argument (or in serious art -- see (1) above) can look like trolling, because sometimes an emotional effect -- even offense -- can be part of a set of argumentative (or artistic) moves. They cannot be the point of the argument, however. (The case of art can be interestingly different, but -- though this is a longer argument -- even here offense as the primary end undermines the integrity of art qua art, I think.)

9. I don't have a scientific degree, but I value the (loosely so-called) scientific method, and I am a scientific optimist in the sense that I think science is good. Technology... well, we can have that conversation. And the one about how to tell the difference or separate them. Anyway, what this means is that I don't foreclose (though I may be dubious about) the possibility of real solutions coming out of research; and I don't believe in "forbidden questions." (This can also set me apart from the left, of course, depending on which question we're talking about.)

10. I am, as mentioned, ambivalent about the military. I'm just dispositionally not a hawk, and lots on the right are -- unless they are isolationist, which I'm not either.

11. I'm genuinely unsure what to do about the oncoming ecological ruin that we have wrought, but I'm absolutely sure that the rapaciousness of industry and capital own the lion's share of the blame for the damage we could have seen (and indeed did see) coming. There may be plenty more blame to go around as well, but in this at least, we could have used for the last century some actual conservatism -- with, you know, some real conservation in it. And yes, desperate times make for desperate measures, and at this point I'd be happy to give the EPA carte blanche within certain to-be-determined (but broad) parameters.

12. I started out my explanation of Not Being a Progressive with an account of how and why I value existing goods over possible but imaginary ones; and I mentioned there that this can make me look like an apologist for the status quo. I'm not. And far less am I merely in the grip of nostalgia. I am religious, yes; I am a "traditionalist", yes (tradition refers to something real); but I'm neither a triumphalist nor a fundamentalist, for the very good reason that they are not traditional (that "real" that tradition is about is not "literal", it is more than literal -- though if pressed, I will take the humble submission of "literal" over the arrogant subtlety of "you know, spiritual" any day). I love culture, but culture, like everything human -- like everything created -- is temporary and passing. I understand nostalgia, and I do not think it is either stupid or inevitably "reactionary;" but I understand that it is nostalgia. As Ivan Illich said when facing similar charges of crypto-conservativism, "I'm not endorsing the past. It's past; it's gone. Even less am I endorsing the present." One should be able to speak well of the past without being accused of "wanting to turn the clock back," or some such foolishness. I can name, and mourn, what is being lost, try to salvage what can be salvaged, or even "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!'", without trying to use the force of the state (as if there was anything "conservative" about that) to enforce a delusion.

13. I am not eager for, but I do expect, the Revolution. Probably too late.

The proper attitude to take towards that, however, is another post.

Why I am not a "Progressive"

Last post but one, I offered a kind of apologia for a weaselly apolitical politics, of a sort. Partly because it could have been mis-read as a defense of political indifference, I concluded with a promise to mention "some things to which I am not indifferent." The interest of such a list of positions is certainly limited, but my hope is to indicate some of my pre-existing biases or instincts which are supposedly more-or-less correlated with "Progressive" and "Conservative" labels in the current American political scene, and which (cumulatively) serve to dis-align me with either such wing. Why such correlations even happen is partly understandable, and partly at least explicable; but it is also partly opaque. After all, why should a general hawkish military stance be aligned with lip-service to balanced budgets ("fiscal responsibility"), an enthusiasm for charter schools, or a desire to repeal Roe v. Wade? Why should a high degree of comfort with proposals of bureaucratic "oversight" go along with championing gay marriage, or (supposed) anti-gerrymandering? I understand how these things have made common cause from time to time; what I don't grasp is why they are held to be deeply, philosophically aligned. I still don't have a full-blown theory of political coherence, descriptive or prescriptive. About five years ago, Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex offered a sketch, on a roughly sociological level, of such a rationale, and I think it's fairly good as such accounts go; it's purely descriptive but you gotta start somewhere. I'm not going to argue for or against Alexander's theory here, or offer an alternative, but I commend it as the beginning of a conversation. What I am going to do, in this post and the next, is toss out some positions -- some of them are close to what you'd call "policy" positions, others are much higher-altitude (or foundational, depending on your point of view). All they really have in common is that they are mine. These two posts are not an attempt at a coherent platform. They are just a sort of pile of pieces of an incomplete mosaic of some of my socio-political concerns. To show that the mosaic is even completable would be a further project, worthwhile (for me, anyway) but of far larger ambition. The "pieces" here are just picked up and described one by one. They are indices (not causes) of whatever it is that makes me feel alienated from, not at home with, and (sometimes) unable to talk with, those who call themselves Progressives (this post), or (next post) Conservatives. We'll see if anyone is still reading by then.

Well then: Why am I not a Progressive?

First off, what is it I'm claiming Not to be? Well, it's kinda vague, actually, since there's no one place where you go to see what "The" Progressive Platform is, but I have in mind here a cloud of attitudes, styles, and default positions, which quite possibly no single self-described Progressive actually maintains, but all of which I encounter routinely here in Blue-Bubble Seattle. Some of these positions are actually further left than mainstream Progressivism, but they're all more or less in the left-liberal or left-radical zeitgeist. If anyone wants to argue that I've got this wrong, I'm interested.

The following numbered points are not intended as single-sentence theses with some subsidiary commentary. Each one is, rather, a little cluster of concerns that are related (and sometimes also related among each other) but don't always reduce to a neat summary. The fact that I have called them "biases" above does not mean they are unconsidered, or held merely out of stubbornness or inertia. I've thought a lot, and continue to think, about each of them. But it will be obvious that no item below is presented here as a full-blown argument. Each is, at most, a statement of position from which an argument would be mounted, or for which an argument is called. Usually (and with some of the items more than others) I have included some of the pieces of what such an argument would be, and any one of them could be expanded into a full post, or more than one.

1: I value existing goods -- things and situations that are real, concrete, and working for people, even if imperfect; and so I always tend to ask: what are the costs to the imagined reform / innovation / shiny new thing you are proposing? Because the imaginary new thing -- no matter how "necessary" it is by someone's lights -- is not going to be as good, in some ways for sure and maybe in all ways, as the thing we actually have that is good.

This is essentially what is at play in people's concerns over (say) "gentrification" of a beloved old neighborhood; or in the "development" of a piece of "empty" land; or the replacement of one set of practices with another. I think liberals and further-left folk alike are often pretty cavalier, if not in outright denial, of those costs, though of course they are also ready to marshal a long list of such costs when it suits them. ("Gentrification" is sometimes one such.) Sometimes those costs are worth it; sometimes they are revealed to have been worth it in retrospect. It is rarely absolutely clear.

These questions arise in all sorts of situations. Should we build a mass-transit system? Seattle decided No, back in the 1960s, and arguably is now paying the price. The San Francisco Bay area decided Yes, and has a different set of problems. Should we ban salmon fishing to save Orca whales (another current question in my corner of the US) -- a question that has profound and immediate ramifications for the viability of native tribal culture? Should lobster fishing, or coal mining, or logging be banned? I don't say there can be no right answer about this, given the competing costs; I'm saying costs are real in any event.

In worrying about what gets lost, I am aware that this can look like status-quo'ism, or "privilege", from the outside. I take seriously the possibility that I could be missing something relevant -- this is just what is entailed by humility -- and that one reason I could be missing it is a degree of comfort. But that possibility is not the end of the conversation, and I do not like the frequent attempt to weaponize it.

This love of existing goods means that I am less ready to jump aboard with ideas that sound great, or even ideal. I believe in the inevitability of many, many unforeseen consequences of the best-laid-plans. Therefore, while I expect the Revolution, and not with dread, neither am I eager for it.

2. Related to the foregoing: I think Progressivism can be extremely casual about discarding cultural forms, in the name of (ostensible) justice or equity. I am an ecological conservationist (at least), and my ecological concerns go hand in hand with my cultural ones.

A good example of this is gender: after a lot of (still ongoing) reading, I just do not believe that most of the arguments against the so-called "gender binary" hold water (in fact, I often don't think they are even intended to hold water); but more than this, I think it is extremely perilous to try to eject a feature of cultural discourse -- the cultural ecology, if you will -- that has structured our experience since there was culture at all; and arguably since before we attained consciousness. A similar argument may be made (more limited in historical scope) about "marriage equality." The denial of the American left (liberal and radical), a few years ago, that this involved a "redefinition of marriage" was astounding to me. That's exactly what it was, and if people cannot see it, or do not have the courage to admit it, this merely bespeaks how gravely marooned we are from our own past, or how in thrall we are to rhetorical tactics that are indifferent to truth. Say that marriage has been redefined before; say that the past is well lost, if you like; but don't deny that it is real, and really different.

Now, on the off-chance that it might surprise you (having just read the above paragraph) to learn that I voted for same-sex legal marriages in the state of Washington, I want to respectfully submit that it is a mistake to extrapolate from high-altitude considerations to on-the-ground tactics -- or vice-versa. Alternatively, you may take it as a case study in how weaselly or vexing or "hard-to-pin-down" my "politics" is. Again, though, I swear this is not because I'm just that subtle and interesting -- or that I delight in being perverse. It's that the link between "theory" and "practice" is itself not straightforward.

The two foregoing examples (the "gender binary" and gay marriage) might imply that this critique about being casual with cultural forms has mainly to do with sex and gender. This is not the case; these examples (I have written somewhat about gender, at least indirectly, earlier this year) just happen to get so much attention that they are hard to ignore. (The reasons for this attention are doubtless interesting in their own right.) In fact, this critique of being cavalier about received cultural forms pertains (in my opinion) across all kinds of categories: art; commerce; property; class; etc. The short version of this is: Progressivism, probably as a function of its apparent prizing of egalitarianism above all, strikes me as being fundamentally (though often unconsciously) opposed to hierarchy. I am not so opposed. In fact I think this opposition is incoherent and impossible. (If I was developing arguments, here would be the place to venture into the very problematic distinction sometimes offered on the right between equality "of opportunity" and "of outcome," a distinction I think is too rough-and-ready to be of much help after the opening moves.)

3. Among these cultural forms is, above all, religion. I see a crucial place, an irreducible, central and non-negotiable place, for religion in human affairs, which when vacated leaves something like a cross between an amputee's stump and a black hole. This place is not the individual place of "worshiping according to one's conscience," though that is an acceptable if limping liberal modern shorthand if no other language is at hand. Because of this, I am fundamentally at odds with modernity, and therefore with progressivism which is in some sense its logical conclusion. I have often noticed that when you scratch a progressive you will find a fundamentalist -- usually an anti-fundamentalist fundamentalist. Even my good irreligious friends who acknowledge the over-the-top disdain and bile in the (no longer so "new") New Atheists ("Oh sure, Dawkins and Dennett are really abrasive about this," or even just "People don't need to be so fucking arrogant") do not really seem to me to grasp what I mean when I talk about faith. Doubtless most of the responsibility for this conversational impasse lies with me, if it is a question of responsibility.

I am a believer in -- not a fetishizer of -- tradition. Things that have been around for multiple generations probably are embedded in a cultural ecosystem in ways that escape immediate notice, especially when the ones who are doing (or not doing) the noticing are enamored of the latest loud fashion. This doesn't mean that traditions should enjoy some immune-to-critique status (hard-to-discern effects are part of why critique is important); but I think it is very short-sighted to carry out such critique cavalierly or by reflex. This is because, for all this embeddedness, traditions are also, in a crucial sense, fragile. They can be broken in a single generation, and once they are gone, they are gone -- maybe rebootable (and this is not nothing), but no longer organically connected.

There's a practical, policy-impacting aspect to this orientation of mine: very often, in a contest between "religious values" and other interests, I'm going to side with the former. Of course such legal "victories" as these contests afford are Pyrrhic ("... according to one's conscience"), or, at best, temporary stays against defeat. But they may count for the individual.

4. For the better part of a decade I have found the excesses of "Identity Politics" frustrating, and increasingly impossible to engage -- hence, increasingly dangerous. (And please, see above (1) under remarks on "privilege".) I am deeply turned off by rebellion for its own sake, and I see this a lot -- under the just-enough excuse of righteous indignation. It's like going after low-hanging fruit by burning down the orchard -- the stupidest of both worlds. That these excesses are often turned against fellow, but not-woke-enough leftists, increasingly raises concerns that the Left is devouring itself; but they are also (of course) aimed against conservatives of whatever stripe, who are really looked upon as an enemy. We need to think about this. I think there is room for the idea of enmity, but this is the wrong place to look for it. Snark, tone-deafness, self-righteousness, disdain, and contempt are all at play in such characterizations, and it ought not take me pointing it out to see that they are wrong.

5. Here's an opportunity for some to exercise, or exorcise, your choice, some of that aforementioned self-righteousness. I do not condone the availability of abortion on demand, and I see the left as fairly incoherent on this matter. I am not exactly "pro-Life" (though I have used this as a self-description, it's really a placeholder, sort of like "worshipping according to one's conscience" (see above under (3)) -- in other words, not very good). As I read the history of this question, the notion of "Life" as it is deployed here is of very recent mint, and I am pretty persuaded by the genealogy Ivan Illich has traced for it; it is a kind of secular feel-good word, and possibly a kind of idol. In any case, my position here stems not from a high-level desire to honor Life, but from garden-variety a distaste for killing people. If there is any high-falutin' philosophical principle at work here it is a commitment to the irreducibility of personhood, a stance I found in kindergarten well summarized by Horton the elephant: A person's a person, no matter how small. There are, however, other small things besides small persons. Conveniently, Stan Goff has written recently on this, noting that in Christian and specifically Roman Catholic theology,

more than a thousand years after the Pentecost, the modern “fetus” had not yet been invented. The unborn were seen in two phases: pre-ensoulment and post-ensoulment. Ensoulment was signaled by the quickening, the sensation of the baby’s movement in the womb, something that happens as early as fifteen weeks into a pregnancy, and as late as twenty weeks. Abortion was not considered murder until after ensoulment, or the quickening.

That at some point abortion is the killing of a person I consider not up for debate -- at least, I really cannot imagine what would make me entertain such a debate. But the insistence that this point was the moment of conception is a very late development (see Goff's post for some orienting landmarks here), and I think it bears questioning whether the whole rationale for it is the "progress of science."

I am not a Roman Catholic and I do not take my thinking orders from the Magisterium; but I would understand if anyone suspected this. I am opposed to the death penalty, opposed to torture, deeply ambivalent about the "permissability" of suicide under any circumstances. (My stance on this pre-dates my brother's suicide, but of course there are all sorts of debates to be had on this question -- because, among other reasons, suicide is not just one thing.) I am undecided about the coherence of just-war theory, but in any case support only defensive -- or at most extremely surgical offensive, guerrilla-style -- strikes. My belief regarding combat (not just armed combat but yes, especially this) is that it ought to be like T'ai chi ch'üan -- you give your opponent the dance they need to trip themselves up and lay themselves flat. Sometimes that requires making contact, sometimes even making contact first, but you know the difference between doing this judiciously and doing it viciously. In my own life, while I may go back to being vegetarian, at present I eat because animals are killed; and even were I to go back to vegetarianism, given our economic and ecological realities, there is no end of the violence upon which I am indirectly implicated. Nonetheless, I cannot square my stance on violence with abortion on demand. I grant that in this fallen world sometimes the least-bad way forward -- at least by our lights -- is still violent. I would settle for the Clintonian line of abortion being "cheap, legal, and rare," but show me a Progressive who really means this (that's a serious request, I may have overlooked someone), and backs policy to realize the rare part. Because of tactical concerns (see (1) on "privilege") I tend to let the pro-life women do the talking on this one (a lot of words got cut out of this entry on the list before I posted), but the tactical question has not very much to do with the issue itself. I do not dispute that abortion has been historically, and especially recently, bound up with a hell of a lot of sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny, because it obviously has. I'm also aware that this stance ought to commit me to other positions about women's health, childcare, and so on, and I'm down for those. And, because this issue is such dry tinder, I will add that I do not regard abortion as quite the same thing as "murder" (which in this case is a legal term, not a moral one); it may occupy its own position in the logical space that pertains to the killing of human beings. I know and love people who have had abortions or been party to them. I am deeply opposed to and repulsed by the shaming of anyone who has had an abortion, as I would be opposed to shaming military veterans (or, for that matter, convicted murderers.) This does not mean I am on board with recent name-it-claim-it-wear-it-on-a-T-shirt fashion; but people should be able to tell the truth without being derided.

6. Speaking of combat: I think Progressivism is a bit casual and blasé about Islamic terrorism, starting with a squirmy discomfort with calling it "Islamic terrorism," which needless to say is not a synonym for Islam. I'm not saying the Right, in whichever stance, has got this right either, but Progressives seem to me to lack much theoretical ground to stand on. Part of the reason is that the Left is just a little bit incapacitated when thinking about religion (see above under (3)), so it tries to change the subject to something else (this is happening right now in the minds of some readers of these very words). I don't think those other subjects are irrelevant. But leaving religion out (and for conflicting reasons at that) reveals a kind of bankruptcy.

7. On a related note, Progressives are also, in my experience, at best conflicted when it comes to the military. This is a conflictedness I happen to share, so I don't claim to have worked out a consistent stance here (let alone a "workable" one), but I think most Progressives shove this down into the memory hole with a pretense that they'll "deal with that later".

8. I think the far Left (Marxist and Anarchist alike) is often far too casual about the actual processes of production -- about what is involved in creating prosperity and thriving. I don't have a full-fledged account of this either, and I certainly share the critique of capitalist rapaciousness, but I'm unpersuaded by the positive accounts of economic growth or technological innovation offered on the further left, which suffer from a kind of reductionism that is just inevitable when you think culture is all a symptom of, well, blind material forces. On the nearer-left, among most "Progressives" who reject anarchism or Marxism, you find the opposite problem -- an under-theorizing of business as usual, a satisfaction with band-aids or an unreasonable hope in oversight and intervention, which all amount to kicking-the-can.

9. I am deeply turned off by collectivist superstructures. I'm enough of an individualist (despite what I said above about religion) to chafe at being told how to think -- or to act. When faced by need, I do not want my help (which I will sometimes willingly give) to be coerced. This means I'm less friendly to the idea of tax-funded and bureaucratically-managed social services than many progressives. I am, moreover, very skeptical of human over-reach, which has occasioned many of our current woes -- especially in other parts of the world where our best intentions led us to stage numerous interventions that fucked things up. (The establishment of obligatory charity and manifest-destiny noblesse oblige has been a moral catastrophe. See, on this point, Ivan Illich, who argues that such doing-good-in-the-third-world makes things worse pretty much every time, and more recently Anand Giridharadas who suggests that it's actually pretty self-serving.) This obviously does not entail turning a blind eye to suffering; it need not even mean doing less; it may well mean doing more. It certainly means doing this very, very differently than almost all contemporary interventionist "charity."

10. I believe in the relevance of Dunbar's number. I'm a localist. Which means I don't buy the tenability of large-scale "solutions". I also (for similar reasons) believe that certain utopian promises ("Universal Health Care") are likely to have promised way too much; others ("Universal Basic Income" -- though it seems better than many alternatives) are likely to create as many problems as they solve. That doesn't mean we can't dream big -- but we are mortal, and we need to 'fess up to this.

11. I find groupthink distasteful, and overweening confidence abetted by groupthink downright creepy. I don't always succeed, but I try hard to eschew the usual vocabulary for social and political questions; too often it serves as a substitute for thought. It conceals prejudices -- or wears them on its sleeve (which is worse). And, like all default settings, it is subject to parody; and when you live in a parodic age, it is best not to make oneself a target. (The young people I work with sense this parodic potential instinctively. They dutifully attend to the lessons in microaggression or the gender-spectrum that are placed before them by well-meaning adults who are trying to raise them to be on the right side of history; but in their off-hours, which I get to see as an after-school "supervisor," they veer towards parody, employing terms like "racist" or "oppressive" or "stereotype" or "identifies as ___" in as over-the-top a manner as they can. They also instinctively sense, and avoid, the border between this parody and mean-spiritedness.)

When the right parodies the left, when (say) the language of wokeness gets turned for comedic effect into a joke, it shows that the users of the language have not thought about the weak points. (Sometimes. Other times, it's just a bad joke.) Just because the take-down was of a straw man, does not mean you don't have a lot of straw yourself. That straw is the padding provided by shared assumptions, by having recourse to terms accepted by the like-minded; if your reaction to having those terms disregarded is simply "that's not funny," you may be right, but that rightness may still be getting in your way. I am genuinely perplexed about politics, in a way that (to judge by their "it's-just-obvious" tone) many Progressives are not. I am often persuaded by Nietzschean or Platonic critiques of democracy. But you don't have to be a name-dropping philosopher to be kind of sickened by the in- and out-grouping social dynamics of political tribalism, and to want to listen to the other side(s).

12. I am largely convinced that the story told by Progressivism about history is incoherent and in many ways in bad faith. To put things very baldly: Progressivism tells a Whig version of history -- what has happened was bound to happen, because Progress! -- which nevertheless casts itself as embattled and heroically striving against the Powers That Be. Each of these aspects of the tale seems to me extremely unlikely to be true without exception; together, they almost cancel each other out. It is clear to me that the "direction" called "progress" is often accidental, and not at all always progress towards what I call Good. On the other hand, for the last hundred and fifty or so years (at least in the so-called First World), "Progressivism" has in fact, as I read the record, been ascendant, and gradually consolidating its position, in a feedback loop between academia, government, media/entertainment, industry, and the military, with a little inter-caste warfare keeping things interesting.

That is not an argument, only the outline of an intuition (call it a prejudice if you like, I won't argue.) It would take a long excursus to spell out the whole critique, which would be complicated, and possibly (given the state of my thinking at present) involve contradictions or aporiae. That's politics for you.

*

OK, so there you have it, a sketch of where I see my significant divergences from Progressivism, with some addenda about other left-liberal and outright genuine Left positions thrown in for good measure.

These are critiques from within. I am not a capital-P Progressive, but if we are still using the Left-Right distinction (I don't see why we have to, but that's another argument), I am a man of the Left (OK, sure, I'm a "centrist," but a radical one). And, since I am not the smartest person on the Left, of course there are many other folks, who may well call themselves progressives, who share some variety of these criticisms. The worries about identity politics are becoming widespread; the critique of "callout culture" and the righteous indignation of various movements is gathering force. I know left-wingers who are pro-life, who are for genuinely responsible gun ownership, who are "fiscal conservatives," and so on.

So it's only fair to give some counter-point: Why am I not, then, that other thing, whatever it is, on the right?

Well... if you are still with me, stay tuned.

What happened

I had been going to post two long lists of points on which I diverge from political "progressives" or "conservatives," but before I do that, I realized that today brings us the first Sunday of Advent, and tonight brings the first night of Hanukkah. This coinciding* of the youngest of the great Jewish festivals with the beginning of the Christian year made me consider again the relationship between the faiths.

Hanukkah commemorates the re-dedication of the second Temple after its desecration by the Seleucids. It was the last great miracle story (though as I noted earlier, the story of the miraculous oil seems to first enter the documented tradition in the Talmud; it does not figure in the text of I or II Macabees) that would have been the heritage of the various sects of Judaism in the era of Jesus. This is important because Christianity and rabbinical Judaism are not really in the relation of daughter and mother, but rather of sister and sister. They are both descendants of the Temple cult and the ferment of Judaism in late antiquity which Josephus, for instance, describes as a congeries of competing groups (Zealots, Essenes, Sadducces, Pharisees, not to mention the Samaritans). The decisive parting of ways between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism can be traced to the crisis that befell the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem, and especially the Temple, in 70 A.D. Until that catastrophe, Christians could reasonably be understood as a minority Jewish sect among others -- a sect who believed, and proclaimed across the ethnic divide, that the Anointed One had come and that this was of universal significance. Afterwards, their belief that the Messiah had come made them respond in a fundamentally different way to the loss of the cultic site than did the compilers of the Mishna. The latter are often interpreted as conservatives who were doing everything they could to salvage the practicability of tradition in a new, decentered context, while Christians blithely went out into the Empire and beyond freed from the shackles of a moribund legalism. But Margaret Barker has argued (suggestively and persuasively, to my mind) that Christianity was in a certain sense "more traditional" than its sister, and at least as closely linked to the Temple; in the liturgy, theology, and mysticism of the early church, Barker has traced the cosmological and ascetic grammar of Jerusalem Temple ritual. I have written almost nothing here on Barker (yet...) but she is one of a divergent handful of recent scholars whose work recuperates the importance of unwritten traditions in this seemingly most familiar of Western religions, Christianity. To be sure, not everyone in a academia is convinced by Barker -- she is, after all, proposing/enacting something of a revolution -- but for a fellow like me, who is an avowed Platonist with an eye to esotericism, this sort of thing is... interesting.

Even among early Christians, we may deduce that there were multiple possibilities, because several early Church Fathers write against "judaizers" like the Ebionites -- a group that seems to have held on to a number of ritual observances not unlike the Galatians whose regard for "the Law" so vexed St. Paul. This tendency resurfaces under different circumstances every so often, and it is of more than merely academic interest. In Jacob Taubes' lectures collected in The Political Theology of Paul he cites Guy Stroumsa on the same subject:

Guy Stroumsa from Jerusalem...is studying the sermons of Cyril of Jerusalem and came upon the fact that Cyril says 'Jews' when in fact he means 'Jewish Christians'. This is fourth century..... Today we have attestations of Jewish Christians going up to the 10th century in Arabic manuscripts. Which...revolutionizes the prehistory of Islam, because Mohammed didn't throw Jewish and Christian traditions together in his own head...but he very precisely soaked in Jewish Christian tradition.... (The Political Theology of Paul, p 42. The reference to Stroumsa is Gedaliahu Guy Stroumsa, " 'Vetus Israel'; les Juifs dans la litterature hierosolymitaine d'epoque byzantine," chapt 6 of Savoir et salut (Paris; Cerf 1992))

The crypto-Jews in late Renaissance/early modern Spain and elsewhere (sometimes called Marranos) wound up sometimes with a curious hybridized observances, some of which have lasted to the present day. But more recently, in the mid-19th century and then again in the mid- and late-20th some Christians went the other way. Sometimes disaffected Western Protestants with an attraction to Judaism, sometimes ethnic Jewish converts who understandably felt the tug of their heritage, they come to identify as Jewish but also proclaims the messiahship of Jesus. Sometimes they are insistent that they are not notzrim but yehudim, even if their practice looks (as it might) like standard evangelical Christianity. As with Jews generally, there are different degrees of halakhic observance, and plenty of other diversity.

Not long ago, in the wake of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I thought about wearing, in solidarity with Jews but as a Christian, a little medallion -- a magen David with the cross in the center. Don't do it, said my wife; it's a symbol that comes out of messianic Judaism, and it won't read to Jews as a sign of solidarity, but as one of appropriation, or worse.

Oddly, an origin in messianic Judaism had not occurred to me -- I'd always regarded this cross-in-the-star to be effectively a Christian/Jewish version of the "Coexist" bumper sticker. (As it turns out, the sign has passed out of currency among messianic Jews -- the most usual one lately is a melding of the seven-branched candlestick and the ichthys, which is either found on some first-century artifacts, or forged to look like it is.)

As for the cross-in-the-star, although I'd hoped it would communicate my assertion of standing with Jews as a Christian and because I am a Christian, it's true that it does look, or can be read as, a symbol of religious colonization. My wife insisted, and I, of course, yielded in the face of her objections (she after all is the Jew I was most concerned to not offend!); but as I thought about it, I realized that my initial theological hesitancy had been borne out. Of course, one could raise any number of questions about messianic Judaism. Some adherents distinguish it very sharply from Christianity with what I assume is sincerity; others regard it as a doomed mash-up of competing orthodoxies, or as a trojan-horse missionary ploy, or as a weird religiously mediated political liaison between American zionism and evangelicalism. It may be all these in different cases. In others, it's clearly an effort akin to radical protestantism -- a back-to-roots effort to rediscover and re-identify with the earliest church (construing the "early church" along the lines of the Ebionites, more or less). My friend Duane Christensen was a thinker somewhat of along these lines.

Even were one to grant that messianic Judaism is an unambiguous affront to all Jews, it would clearly be a further step to regard the the cross-in-Star-of-David as an antisemitic sign. But it remains, I think, problematic, on purely Christian grounds. After all, what does it mean, exactly? I had been trying to say that Christianity only makes sense in the context of Judaism; that in a crucial sense you can't be a Christian without "being a Jew" first. Although I am sure many would quarrel with such a formulation, I certainly believe this -- but the sign with the cross inside the star does not quite communicate it. The cross is not, after all, an abstract glyph of Christianity; it is the picture of the instrument of the death of Jesus, the instrument by which (says the prayer during the Stations of the Cross) He has redeemed the world. But Jesus hangs on the cross under the superscription The King of the Jews.

In 1941 the Russian Orthodox priest Dmitri Klepinin was living in occupied France. As the persecution of Jews gained momentum, and what it meant became clear to any who had eyes, father Dimitri decided what to do. He was already involved, with Mother Maria Skobtsova, in an underground network for refugees and resistance figures, centered at the house for the poor run by Mother Maria. He began making out forged Christening certificates, enabling many Jews to escape. In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested him, Mother Maria, her son Yuri, and another worker, Elia Fondaminski. Part of the transcript of Fr, Ditiri's interrogation has been preserved:

Interrogator: And if we release you, will you promise never again to aid Jews?
Father Dimitri: I can say no such thing. I am a Christian, and must act as I must.
Interrogator, striking the priest across the face: Jew lover! How dare you talk of those pigs as being a Christian duty!
Father Dmitri, holding up the Cross on the chain around his neck: Do you recognize this Jew?

Father Dmitiri died a year later, in the Dora work camp. He and his three co-prisoners are commemorated in the Orthodox Church on July 20. Maria Skobtsova and Dmitiri Klepenin are named among the Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

It is sadly and scandalously true that the history of the Church and the Jews is stained by antisemitism; anyone who denies this is either in bad faith or woefully unaware. How then to express theologically the right sort of relationship, symbolically?

Strictly speaking, the sign that makes theological sense (Christianly speaking) would not be the Cross within the Star. What, then, about the Star -- or shield, which is what magen means -- upon the Cross?

This sign might well also be imperfect. It could still be seen as an offensive appropriation, or as a jarring syncretism. There may be other worries. Given the fraughtness of politics it seems unlikely that any symbol is going to be unproblematic. But -- assuming the right understanding is in place -- this sign has one clear advantage, which a friend of mine put succinctly: "After all, that's what happened."

*Strictly speaking, it is a near-coinciding, since the Jewish day begins at sundown.