The Mixed Literature in War and Peace

I never wrote a final remark about War and Peace when I finished it, months ago. It's common ground to say that this is one of the best novels ever written, and I enjoyed it deeply. It has its boring moments of a hundred pages here and there, but what do we expect for a four thausand pages novel? Even the Brothers Karamazov has its boring moments. Gargantuan novels cannot escape this fact.

The novel itself can be read as an apology of Kutuzov, a prudent general completely the opposite of the military virtues Clausewitz praises in Napoleon Bonaparte, the virtues demanded in his days. He avoids confrontation, because he fears the size and proffesionalism of the Napoleonic army, not without good reasons. It even appears as if Tolstoy admires him for avoiding more casualties, for sparing human lives that the rest of the high command was so liberal to throw into battle, and we taste a touch of Tolstoy's developing pacifism. Kutuzov gives ground to the French invasion and he even abandons Muscow, probabbly the most dramatic decision of the entire campaign. Moscow's fire is probbably my favorite moment of the entire novel. It gives you a touch of the enormity of history.

Another aspect that might puzzle the reader is the insersion of certain essays about philosphy of history all through the novel, including all the second part of the epilogue, which does not contain a single sentence dedicated to the stroyline. This drives me to conclude that the novel actually finishes not in the second but in the first part of the epilogue.

To many people these inserted essays might look awkward or annoying. I liked many of them. Others I found less well accomplised. But the interesting thing is that Tolstoy tries to give a theoretical explanation of the world events that his main characters are living. In a strikingly Hegelian fashion, he tries to demonstrate that historical outcomes are not dictated by powerful individuals, but by long, autonomous and anonymous sociological movements. So far I share his view. But, of course, he tries to give it a positivistic approach that lacks all the methodological requierements to make these writings scientific essays, and you feel that he is trying to do this. This is not Tolstoy's to blame. He is part of a pre paradigmatic moment in the theory of history, and he cannot mothedologically organize all these numeruous facts to fit coherently into a single explanation. This is where Tolstoy's speculations fall short, and might even become boring, because he doesn't explain anything in the end, and the essays remain in the field of mere criticism of historians.

The combination between the main storyline, with its plots of romance, marriage, infidelity, with the world size events of the Napoleonic Wars, with its battles, politics, strategies, which belongs to the realm of epic, and these long reflections on theory of war and history, which belong to the realm of essays, make a combination of outstanding and impressive literature, to the point where it is doubful if we can catalogue War and Peace as a novel at all. It's something more.

Democracy vs. Liberty? A Misleading Debate

There is a problem with the traditional opposition between democracy and liberty. It consists in what authors assume to be individual liberty; it is strictly a bourgeoisie notion. When the government threatens liberty in this sense, by the arbitrary use of power over someone, the person in its individuality is not the thing being threatened, but a particular type of individual: the entrepreneur who dedicates his time to business and the objective of accumulating wealth for himself.

When the goal of the political and intellectual agenda of liberalism is to defend individual liberty, what is being defended is the form of life of a particular social class, because isolated individuals are not the ones threatened, but their social conditions as privileged members of the capitalist society. This is what individual liberty really implies in Modern Times since the French Revolution.

I don’t mean to say that the individual person is not threatened, because that’s what’s actually taking place. What I’m saying is that this threat to the individual is not intentioned at his individuality, at the uniqueness of his person, but is intentioned at his person as member of a social class. Liberalism portrays these rights as rights of everyone, but usually only the kind of people that want to live the bourgeoisie lifestyle really benefit from this notion and really care about its principles. People outside the benefits of a bourgeoisie lifestyle rarely get any concrete good. In this sense, Liberalism is an ideology that aims at making people believe that its principles also benefit them, when it is not.

The question now goes, why is the bourgeoisie the one really threatened by the power of politics and government? Let us begin from here: the central problem for the modern revolution is property, and not as Hanna Arendt thought: the establishment of liberty. One of the main objectives of the French Jacobinism (bourgeoisie ideology in its radical and uncompromising form) was expropriating the first owner of property in France: the Catholic Church. In Mexico, Benito Juarez’ Liberal-Jacobin revolution sought exactly the same thing. The secularization of state and society was part of this agenda seeking to expropriate the Church, at the same time it abolished the ideological edifice that preserved its moral authority. Modern science (and rationalism) came to support radical liberals in this aspect; it was their ideological weapon in the struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the decadent Catholic clergy. The clergy was one of the Ancient Regime’s ruling classes; and revolutions are the overthrown of past ruling classes and the establishment of a new ruling class.

Having the entrepreneur bourgeois become the main character of the new regime of individual liberties, being himself the more skillful in exploiting this regime of liberties, to enrich himself, to participate in politics and in the production of scientific knowledge that served to sustain his own privileges, he became the next target of the modern revolutionary movement. Here we understand why democracy is not a threat to the liberty of individuals as such, but to individuals as members of a particular social class: the privileged in the redistribution of Church’s property through market mechanisms. The individuals belonging to the proletariat class, who extracted little benefit from the new regime of individual liberties, but the promise of increasing their consumer capacity and nothing more, could not understand democracy but as the capture of political power to move their own class agenda. This is where Marx kicked in.

Worse still was the ideological mechanism that tried to convince people that the new regime of bourgeois liberties also favored members of a class of workers that became more and more proletarianized. Having taken from them the safety zone offered by religion, the new status quo was one of increasing alienation.

But, alienation from what? From the lifestyle the industrial revolution and modernity was, and is destroying: family, clan, agrarian community, church, professional guild, etc. I.e. an alienation from the lifestyle that consisted of charity, reciprocity and friendship, supplanted by the lifestyle of a producer and consumer of manufactured goods. The former was a moral life and the latter lacked any morality whatsoever, except the ethos of the self-made man, unconcerned about the suffering of others.

The regime of individual liberties left them to their own luck, without them being able to enjoy fully the immense wealth that the bourgeois society constantly reproduced. It was totally natural that the revolution became to be understood, since then, as the expropriation of the property of the bourgeois class.

Presenting our initial problem, then, as a dilemma between democracy and individual liberty is misleading, because that individual liberty is not a privilege or right of isolated individual understood as citizens. It was never that way. It really consists of a regime of liberties that privilege the class (and race) who owns capital. The defense of the individual is the ideological surface of the dominance of that class (and race); that is, the modern ideology of the oligarchic regime of which Aristotle speaks in his Politics.

Democracy, on the other hand, is not the historic triumph of all over the oligarchy. It consists of the triumph of the proletarianized masses that, through messianic leadership, oppress the bourgeoisie, which does not cease to exist. It’s not as is usually believed, that the Rousseaunian democracy oppresses the individual. It oppresses concrete individuals as belonging to a social class, in the same way the Liberal oligarchy defended the liberty of some by oppressing the proletarianized majority.

But democracy does not free the proletariat from their pauper state. Instead it enthrones this pauperization, it mystifies it, it deifies it. The proletariat does not come out of its poverty, does not stops being ignorant. Instead, democracy is the rule of the poor, of the ignorant, of the meager, against the government of the old privileged, of the propertied, of the educated: us!

With this I conceptually defend the traditional notions Plato, Aristotle and Polybius had of democracy and oligarchy. The regime of individual liberties is no less arbitrary because it respects isolated individuals. It leaves enormous masses of individuals to their own luck, in a market system that really favors the bourgeoisie. Democracy does not achieve a contrary positive effect. Contrariwise, it’s the majoritarianism regime that idolized being poor, ignorant and pauper, without taking the people out of poverty. The people are seduced by the messianic leadership that aims at plunder, humiliate and reduce the bourgeois class. None of the two regimes present a comfortable solution for both classes, because we are not all proletariat, nor the regime of individual liberties favors us all.

Madison’s republicanism, instead, offers a different solution. By not starting from the liberty of isolated individuals, his model does not favor a strict bourgeoisie oligarchy. And by not starting from mass democracy, his model does not favor messianic leadership that leads to the tyranny of the majority. He starts from the principle that we are all members of groups, and that it’s through group and collective identity that we participate in politics. Our identities are determined by race, religion, social class, etc., and not by the uniqueness of our personality. We, as individuals, choose the group identity that we want to mediate between us and the government. The result is the fragmentation of society in a plurality of minorities (and not in an “infinite” number of unique personalities). This prevents the absolute dominance of a proletarianized majority by avoiding the formation of a unitary class conscience. But it also avoids the dominance of a bourgeoisie oligarchy by avoiding abandoning individuals to their own luck.

The great problem of individualist bourgeoisie Liberalism is that inevitably puts a proletarianized majority side by side with a privileged minority. With Madisonian democracy this does not happens, because the formation of minority group identities fragments both social classes, and even permits communion between bourgeois and proletarians across other group identities like religion, region and race.

Democracy is no longer an egalitarian regime, nor an individualist one (both are sides of the same coin), but a regime of group equality, as representation favors this spontaneous “corporative” vision of society.

The different group interests contrast and win relative majorities as temporary and not permanent coalitions. Hence most individuals enjoy being part of the majority in some topics, but have to bear being minority on other issues. The democratic principle of the rule of the majority is never broken, but it prevents tyranny by obstructing severely the possibility of a permanent coalition out of potential tyrannical majorities. It also avoids the absolute dominance of a minority economically privileged because it has a broken conscience itself. Their different members will sometimes win, when they form part of the majority, and will sometimes lose, when they form part of the minority.

In few words, the regime consisting of the equilibrium between masses and elites that Aristotle calls politeia, without threatening individual liberties, but at the same time permitting the rule of the majority in the form of minority coalitions, is not Tocqueville’s or Stuart Mill’s Liberalism, not the collectivism of Rousseau or Marx. Madisonian democracy the true Aristotelian politeia, or the Polybean republic. And it is in Madisonian pluralism where we find a more genuine form of democracy.

Is Modern Liberty Moral Debauchery?

This weekend I saw on TV a pop music video where they were selling the idea of sexual liberty, with a homosexual tone. The chorus would insist on the word "liberty! liberty!" from beginning to end. The song was in Spanish, and I couldn't retell the name of it. Anyways, I'm not interested in promoting it; just mentioning it to make my case.

This idea of linking liberty to sexual license has always produced discomfort in me, especially because I don't see this value anywhere in any major religion or spiritual philosophy. Contrariwise, sexuality is usually seen as base, immoral, destroyer of the bond between human beings with the higher being of God. The idea can't be proved empirically, but it happens that every major religion, from India to the Americas, rebuffs sexuality as something unworthy of a transcendent life. But because we like the word "liberty", because we link it to the highest values we strive for in the West, the discourse that tries to link liberty with sexual license disturbs me profoundly, because it forces me to choose between liberty and spirituality, and nothing can be further from the truth. The point of spirituality is to truly free the human spirit from the bonds that incarcerate it to its material condition. If the discourse of sexual license as liberty is true, we are forced to deduce that spirituality enslaves us, or liberty is a base and unworthy thing. I reject that conclusion. Instead, I want to bring to notice another discourse that is very old indeed, but no less true.

The solution to this problem was offered by Plato, in his Laws, book III. There he debates the virtuous middle path between liberty and slavery, where liberty is the condition under democracy and slavery the condition under monarchy. He considers both extremes vicious and contrary to prudent moderation that leads to true, elevated happiness. In 694a he speaks of "the just middle between slavery and liberty". A strange thought, isn't it? We are taught that slavery is always bad, always deplorable. But what kind of slavery is he talking about? Not the institution of slavery, that's for sure, but the acceptance of the higher truths of virtue that moderate the inclinations of the individual's will. This is a very old debate, but by presenting it this way he has illuminated me on this issue (like most of the time when I read Plato).

From Hobbes onward we have taken liberty to be to do whatever we want without interference from external things. But Hobbes does not follow that: the more liberty the better for us. Contrariwise the government is formed to regulate our liberty and solve the collective action dilemma that would lead us to self destruction. Plato and Hobbes agree on something essential: more liberty is not always better. I agree with those terms. The difference is that for Hobbes, individuals cannot be trusted to be sociable unless they are compelled by an extraordinary external force, whereas for Plato the cultivation of a virtuous life lead to self regulation and the enjoyment of true happiness and true liberty. 

The problem with Hobbes' notion is that he does not give us a solution to the problem of excessive liberty that does not imply frustrating it. The less government interference, the more liberty we enjoy, because we can do with our bodies whatever we want: hence, sexual license. This is one of the more paradoxical conclusions from Hobbes' Christian thought. But Plato, two thousand years before, already gives us the solution. If liberty in the abstract sense is a good thing, an aspect of the virtuous life, excessive liberty, in order to be bad for us, has to be something else. We call it licentiousness or debauchery, and it cannot be termed with true liberty without reducing it to an absurd concept. Why? Because true liberty is always moderate, prudent, self-regulating, conscious of divine truths, respectful of God and the aspect of God within us. All of these sexual licentiousness destroys, debasing the body, divorcing it with all its spiritual potentials. 

In this sense we have to see slavery not as oppression, but as moderation. In what sense? The Arabic word Islam gives us a hint: it means "voluntary submission to God," the origin of all universal truths and of all spirituality. If in all major religions God commands against sexual license, and also in pagan thinkers like Plato the same conclusion is reached, we have to accept that, empirically or not, all relevant spiritual traditions guide human beings through another path, and to another end than that portrayed in modern secular ethos and its sexual licentiousness. This not only includes homosexuality, but any kind of excessive practice of sexual life, like pornography.

I even claim that modernity is cheating on all of us. Excessive sexuality never produces true happiness, and the joy enjoyed by so many who live like this is an illusory comfort for a life void of spiritual content, of transcendent meaning. Contemporary capitalist, secular and modern values are contrary to ancient and universal wisdom. The idea that sexual license is liberty is derisory, and we should rebuff it whenever we find it expressed. 

Christian and Nostalgic criticism to Capitalism

There is a common misconception in our times that if you dislike or criticize the capitalist society you must be a left-wing socialist. In the same way if you disagree with state run economies you must be a right-wing capitalist. However, not all criticism to capitalism comes from a socialist progressive approach. The best example in our times is the criticism waged by the Pope Benedict XVI in his multiple writings and sermons. Capitalism leads to self-interest as selfishness, which produces alienation, and ends charity within the human heart. I come from a similar perspective.

There are two layers of thought that I use to address the modern world. The first one is the pessimist and pragmatic. The second one is the Christian and judgmental.

1) By pessimism and pragmatism I mean yielding to reality. Yielding to the times you were born in. This is a scientific approach. It simply tries to understand our world to the limit of our intellectual capacities, without making universal moral judgments.

You can still make moral judgments, but they will always be in pragmatic form, which is almost the same as to say that they are not moral. I deny any claim of utilitarianism of being a moral philosophy. There is nothing moral in the useful. Morality demands sacrifice, because it is the external form of love, and love is the core of moral actions. In the extreme this demands martyrdom. Profiting from moral acts runs contrariwise to common sense.

The whole point of this layer of understanding capitalism is playing by the rules, because you acknowledge that it is beyond your human capacities to really "make a difference". Economic success is not making any difference. It's playing by the rules. Actually, you come to understand that if you want to be efficacious in this world, you first need to take it as the starting point, and this demands playing by the rules.

Understanding how things are is the ultimate goal. If you start from a moral judgmental vantage point, the task of understanding is totally blocked, you will fail to differenciate between truth and falsehood, and any enterprise set from these principles will ultimately fail, or turn into monstrous consequences, like it happened to Marxism. Hence, philosophy of praxis is denied.

2) But we don't want to yield our capacity to judge. We still want to preserve our ability to say that murder is a reproachable act. But this is where we must accept that we move in a different layer, not completely disconnected with the previous one, but with different rules.  

The idea is that we can be good, and all good comes from God. And the teaching of Jesus is the ultimate content of God's will. Jesus points to love and rebuff self-interest egoism. As I said, taken to the extreme, this reaches martyrdom. In sooth, true Christian behavior runs contrariwise to capitalist demands and conceptions. But it also runs contrariwise to socialism. Why? Because socialism is nothing but the next step in the progressive movement. It is supposed to be the next stage after capitalism. But Christianity already rejects capitalism from the very start. It rejects the logic of economics, which socialism and Marxism push to its ultimate consequences. In this debate, capitalism and socialism are allies against Christianity and any other kind of religious thought and feeling. In my view, this includes Islam.

The cleavage would be, then: capitalism/socialism vs. Christianity/Islam. Curious way of seeing it, right? We are not taught to see it this way. Well, this is what I want to offer. Any kind of religious thought and feeling is concerned with God and with loving concrete human beings in need. Capitalism only promotes egoism and individualist alienation and socialism only promotes social consciousness at an abstract level, detached from concrete human beings, because it considers charity to be an obstacle to revolution.

But Christianity rebuffs any universal call to change the structural conditions of society. It does not consider it to be possible. Its call is for individuals to engage in charity, not in spurious revolutions or big and ambitious political agendas. Christianity is realist in the sense that it takes the world for granted. In few words, it acknowledges that capitalism is a foul system and liberalism a false and self-defeating ideology, but its call is not to change the world or men or societies. Christianity has been going around the world for quite a long time to realize that such a call is spurious and filled with pride and self-righteousness nonsense. It would simply be ideological delusion. Philosophy of praxis is again denied.

The world cannot be changed, but that doesn't mean that we cannot criticize it from a nostalgic point of view. That is, from a pessimist approach. Acknowledge men as he is, acknowledge his vulnerability to corruption and sin. Don't pretend that you can create a society of angels. Don't pretend that you can extricate capitalist evil from the world, because you can't. It's better to understand with a cool head, and act pragmatically. But on a higher layer, create the Christian consciousness that would allow you to work in this world by imitating Jesus and helping the poor, not with grandiloquent ideologies, but with humble and true charity.

Conclusion: Capitalism sucks. Liberalism is its false and self-defeating ideology. But this is the world in which we were born. Live with it, as long as you don't fall into trap of believing, like many fools, that it is really a more just, more fair and more happy world.

The Conflict behind the Exodus: Forget about the Egyptians

The book of Exodus is an epic. It qualifies as an epic because it is a very old oral tradition that speaks of a foundational myth, with heroes, foes, war, destiny and divine intervention; especially the first 15 chapters, the famous chapters that tell how Moses escapes Egypt, was spoken by God in the desert, and returns to free the Hebrews. He becomes a sibylline that foretells catastrophes to fall on the Kingdom of Egypt, while the Pharaoh stubbornly denies freedom to the Hebrews, but eventually they break free. Everyone knows the story.

Among the ancient epics, it is a remarkable tale. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and so forth, the main characters are mortal men and women, helped and burdened by divine beings. But in the Exodus, if we pay close attention, we discover that the main character is God and not a particular man. He is the hero who acts through Moses, His messenger. Moses is, in contemporary film culture, the Lord's avatar. And this we can legitimately say because, with a few exceptions, Moses never speaks his mind to anyone, but only to God, and when he is addressing anyone else, he is speaking the literal words that God spoke to him, so that his words are not his but the Lord's. And all the calamities that he foretells are not made by him but by God. Even the stubbornness of the Pharaoh is determined by the Lord's will, so that the story's evil force also springs from the Lord. The only thing that appears to be out of God's grasp is the faith of the Hebrews, the people He is trying to convince by all these spectacular signs.

The Exodus, as any other epic tale, tells us a lot about the people to which it belongs. The first remarkable feature is its theocratic nature. Whereas the Sumerian, Hellenic and Latin epics are centered on human beings aided by gods, the Hebrew story is how God is being assisted by a man. The former are humanists, because they center in the human hero's struggles against nature, and the deities around him are other aspects of his humanity and of nature (call them metaphors, if you wish). On the contrary, the Exodus is theocratic, because it centers on the history of how God convinces the Hebrews of his supreme nature. At first glance it appears to be the story of the Hebrew people against the Egyptians, led by Moses who is helped by the Lord, in a similar way as the Iliad is the story of the Achaeans against the Trojans, led by Achilles who is helped by Athena (broadly speaking). The problem is that Moses is no Achilles, and God is no Athena. Moses is an old man who cannot do anything by himself, not even having rhetorical skills he is aided by his brother Aaron, while Achilles is young, handsome, and the strongest of men. Contrariwise God can do anything, including manipulating the enemies emotions and decisions, whereas Athena is just one among a multiplicity of deities struggling between themselves to move their particular agendas with more or less success. In the Hellenic poem the gods are more like humans, and the heroes are demigods breeded with them. But in the Hebrew book humans are truly humans, and the Lord is truly a god. This is where the Hebrews break completely with all the peoples around them.

Even though it appears that the story of the Exodus is the tale between the struggle of Hebrews against Egyptians, when we realize that the Egyptians, and their king, are nothing more than tools in the Lord's plan, we come to understand that that conflict is set above a deeper dialectic. If God is already determining all the actions of the Egyptians, depriving them of free will, then the conflict is only apparent. God manipulates them in order to humiliate and destroy them, without them being able to fight back, not to speak of the inexistence of their gods. So, what is the true conflict in the Exodus? Let us explore Moses' role, and see if it guides us to solve this question.

Most of the tale consists in the Lord speaking to Moses, and actually telling him what is going to happen, because it is in God's will what is finally going to happen. In a way, God is the narrator of most of the story, because He is telling ahead what eventually happens (in narrative theory, something called prolepsis, commonly referred to as flash-forward), and Moses just goes out and foretells it. First, it means that Moses is a very successful augur. Second, because the Lord is just revealing to him what He is going to do, Moses and the Hebrews, as opposed to Pharaoh and Egypt, are only spectators of God's unfolding power. They are not doing anything; actions against the Egyptians are never taken by them, so they are not actors in this play. What is the play? God, the main character, destroying the Egyptians. This play (Hebrews watching God) is what seems to be played in the Exodus, because in the end the true spectator is the reader of the book, not the Hebrews. The conflict with the Egyptians is a play being watched by the Hebrews, where the Hebrews' narrator is Moses, and Moses' narrator is the Lord, the ultimate narrator. This passive relation between Egyptians and Hebrews is being beholden by the reader, the ultimate beholder. The true question to the ultimate beholder, that is "we", is: what is the play we are truly reading? God reveals it to us when he speaks to Moses as follow:

"Go in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may tell in the hearing of your son and of your son's son how I have made sport of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them; that you may know that I am the Lord" (Exodus: 10: 1-2).

We should understand now what is the conflict at hand. The Egyptians are only there so that the Lord can make sport of them. They are not free actors. They can't fight back. And the Lord is doing this because he wants to show Himself to the Hebrews. Moses is the messenger in this showing, so that the Hebrews recognize that He is who He is. During the rest of the Exodus, the Hebrews are constantly questioning Moses, and God has to come all over to help him with all these miracles. The Hebrews believe for a time, and again they become skeptic, so God has to show Himself again, and Moses has to explain it to them. The only free actors are the Hebrews, who have the choice of not believing, and God is acting through Moses so that they may believe, by knowing who He is. The true conflict of the Exodus is the dialectic of faith and disbelief, whereas the calamities falling upon Egypt is just God literally showing off, so that the Hebrews may know His power, and believe. In sooth the Lord cannot make them believe out of His own will. He is convincing them.

Without human free will, this convincing action would be spurious, a mere act of appearances by God. So He gave them free will so that they may decide for themselves whether to believe or not. The rest of the story is simply destiny, and free will plays no role, so that there is no conflict. The Egyptians are destined to be obdurate so that they may be destroyed, and in this act, God shows Himself. The Hebrews are destined to escape and find their promised land in Canaan, but this destiny is only fulfilled when they truly believe, and as they decide to believe, they take one more step. In few words, if they don't believe, they perish. The fulfilling of their destiny requires their faith. In this way destiny and free will are linked, because the Lord makes them fulfill their predetermined end with the condition of deciding to believe in Him. This is the moral and theological teaching I find behind the book of Exodus.

Of course, there is a historical and anthropological background to it. I.e. that there is a historical migration of a people of Semitic origin from the Nile Delta to the western shores of the Dead Sea and the Jordan river, carrying with them a novel religion: monotheism. And that all the calamities occurring in Egypt must date to a time of troubles, like a crisis of central authority, maybe civil war, maybe the actual rebellion of the Hebrews, who in the very beginning of the book are increasing in population and it becomes a policy problem for the Egyptian central administration (an immigration problem, if you wish). Now the origin of the Hebrews' religious belief is still the topic of a long historiographical debate that I decide to ignore. Why? Because if we believe in God, then it is perfectly logical to think that Moses' role as a prophet is perfectly possible, and any scientificist doubt is cast as spurious.

However, the Exodus, and Moses as an epic character, tells us a lot of the Hebrew people, and of the very first origin of Christianity. First, political power and greatness is irrelevant to the sight of God, who can do anything. Second, the true hero is an augur with personal contact with God, and not a warrior, so that the ethos of this people is based on religious faith and not physical qualities. Third, the people concerned is not a warrior nor conqueror one, but a prophetic people, and their triumph over the rest of their neighbors rests on their faith and not on their might, because God's might makes war for them. (There is a warrior aspect of the Hebrews in the Deuteronomy and, of course, in Kings. But lets stay with the Exodus). Finally, lacking in any warlike virtues, the Hebrews believed in a God that redeemed them of this historically fatal weakness, and this belief has been the spring of the world's two major religions, whereas the religions of mighty warrior, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, the Hellenic Iliad, the Latin Aeneid, the Aztec Aztlan Myth, become mythological and epic literature.

In the end, in history, faith ultimately triumphs over physical and material qualities, and the knowledge on them. The Jews are still there, where the Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians, Romans, etc. disappeared. Our nations and empires and economies rise and fall, where Christianity and Islam will endure for a lot more.

7 Principles on Public Debate

Debating is a great art, and a great enjoyment. Not all the people indulge in debating, but others with a democratic spirit do. I'm one of those, and in the process of reflecting on my own style of debating I've reached certain principles of debate. This applies more to social networks, the new public forum for the exchange of ideas, mostly political, but not excepting religious or philosophical or otherwise. But because religious is most of the time an extremely sensible topic, and for good reasons, I'm going to remain in the realm of political speech.

1: Debate is not an act of social agreeability. That is, don't debate for the purpose of being liked by others. Do it because you have an idea and you want to make its case against the opposition of others.
If you are too much concerned about what others might think of you, and you aim at leaving a good impression on other people's minds, then debating is not your art. Engaging in an exchange of political speech demands that you pay heed to your ideas first, and to the ideas of the others, second. Not to the opinions others might have of you personally. Aim at ideas and arguments, not at your self-esteem.

2: True debate demands that you begin by casting doubt on your own argument. That is, leaving a space of doubt from which the argument of another might come in. Otherwise you would never be open to what another might be saying, and debate becomes impossible. Always hear the argument of your opponent, and try to figure out in what aspects is it convincing, so that you might adapt those aspects into your own argument.

3: It follows that the aim of debating is "the best argument", not necessarily your first argument. You can change it as the debate moves forward, always having in mind that you want to perfect your first argument, if it still holds. If it does not hold in the end, then debate is over and you lost. But never forget that in debating, losing sometimes makes you win, because then you can wield the winning argument in another conversation.

4: In order for this to be possible, you need to abstract yourself to a certain extent. That is, never go personal. Debaters that go personal are only diverting the conversation because they are scared of being challenged in their ideas. Never do this. It is very easy to fall into this sin of debate, but you must recognize when it is happening to you and change your approach completely.
In the same way, when you see someone becoming too personally sensible, that person is not willing to honestly debate. Next point will expand on this.

5.0: Identify your opponent. This requires more extension.

5.1: Know if your opponent is making a self-righteous argument. It is really easy to identify this, because self-righteous arguments are usually one dimensional, simple minded and unrealistic. People that engage in these are, in my view, lacking in concrete data or intellectual background on the topic, but have passion for it, so they need to give their opinion. The easiest way to make an opinion is by wielding a normative claim. So a lot of people engage in this, especially in the social networks because I guess you wouldn't invite one of these for dinner.
Self-righteous people come from simple moral assumptions. They are easy to identify because usually they express them for themselves. The problem with speaking politics from moral assumptions is that, most of the time, they are crowded with ideology, and ideology is very difficult to cast out. People feel that they are in the right, and any kind of compromise means giving up to evil. And, of course, no one reasonable wants to give in to evil.  The first thing, and most important, eliminate any good/evil (manicheist) structure of argument from your own argument.
So, when you recognize a self-righteous debater, make him know: first, that he is naive and simple minded, and second, never give in to his/her sophistry. Attack it furiously and ridicule him/her, because there are few things worse than a self-righteous argument unconcerned for realistic and interesting debate. In sooth, they are not arguments, because they are not interested in being argued. Out of a self-righteous speech, an argument is impossible.

5.2: This is connected with the previous rule. Don't be politically correct. Move your argument if you think it's reasonable. How do you know if it's not reasonable? Because you might be using a manicheist structure of argument that cannot reach a final and better conclusion.
Remember, being politically correct breaks the rule of being concerned with ideas instead than with your self-esteem, or with opinions others might have of you. You don't care what others might think or say of you. You are only concerned with having the better argument. If others think you are being offensive, that's their problem and their Freudian complexes, not yours. Others should understand when you are moving a reasonable argument and not a manicheistic, ill-willed speech. If they cannot recognize this, don't waste your argument with those people.

5.3: Don't debate with people that don't want to debate back. This is a hard one, because it's easy to fall in the temptation of crushing someone with low self-esteem. But there are two basic types of these: a) the people with low self-esteem, frightened at the possibility of an argument. In this case it simply might not be Christian to castigate these people, even though the temptation is always present. Usually you will simply stop talking because the other is too frightened to say anything at all, and that is very discouraging. b) The arrogant that think that debate is a waste of time because their ideas are so perfectly right. These are much worse, because it's people that don't think you are worth having a good and interesting conversation. They simply don't answer back because they think low of you. It happens all the time in certain academic environments. Usually they just want to ridicule your speech, or hear you for a moment, while rejecting your specifics with small comments without framing their own argument, so that it is impossible for you to strike back. They hold what they think in order not to expose it to attacks. Cowardice, I know. But it's not infrequent.
I'm still not sure how to tackle this type, but my intuition tells me that the best way to handle them is to wield your argument so aggressively as to shake their space of comfort, and take some pleasure out of that small revenge.

5.4: There remains the good type of opponents, the kind you can go on debating for a life time. That is, those that have a similar approach than you. They don't get easily offended, they are willing to frame complex arguments, and answer back your attacks with good defense and competent counter attacks, so that you can learn from them. The exchange can appear to be very aggressive indeed, but as long as none of you gets personally offended, then you are doing fine.
Of course there will always be people you don't agree with, because as soon as you recognize their abstract principles, you acknowledge that they are formally opposed to yours. When both recognize this, usually the conversations run very deep and philosophical, but without much hope of reaching a final conclusion. You can still learn from the different arguments, but you must yield the possibility of convincing or being convinced in an absolute sense. So simply enjoy the debate.
There are others with a more pragmatic approach that are willing to trade off some of their principles and move forward to a new level of conversation. You must try to be the same way, and maybe, a final conclusion can be reached. However, that is unlikely.
In any case, these are the good guys, the ones you can really engage in long, interesting and fraternal conversations, however opposed the arguments might be.

6: Remember that all kinds of arguments, no matter what, have an intellectual background and a set of abstract principles. When hearing someone's case, you will hear a lot of specifics. Remaining in the realm of specifics never gives you the chance to reach a final, better carved argument, because you could go on debating at infinitum without true learning. Identify where the argument is coming from, by digging into its intellectual background, and by forcing your opponent to reach his/her abstract principles.
This is done by putting a lot of pressure on your opponent, asking uncomfortable questions and making bold statements. If you know some history of political thought, you may even identify the background of any argument by identifying its abstract principles. Then, you already know the family of arguments that are already part of that debate, and you can wield arguments from people smarter than you from previous times or better schools.

7: Try to argue from your own intellectual background and abstract principles without sounding too pedantic. It is true that by doing this, it is inevitable that you will distill some pedantry, but depending on the level of intellectual formation of your opponent, you may show more or less pedantry. It is very important not to sound too pedantic if you are debating with someone with much lower levels of knowledge than you, for two reasons: a) you don't want to alienate your opponent by instilling in him/her resentment and, b) you don't want to confuse him/her so as to appear that you are lecturing. Lectures are not debates.

Conclusion: these are principles better assumed in political and public debates, acknowledging that religion moves in a different direction (i.e. converting the other person into your religion without being converted back). Your aim is to find out the better argument, by assuming that your a priori ideas are not the better ones, and you want to learn from your opponent some things that might enhance your speech. It is done by contesting your opponnent's arguments to the level where you can be convinced of some of it, and integreate it to your own argument. This inevitably changes some aspects of your a priori ideas, but for the better.
Finally, wherever you hear or read self-righteousness or political correctness, make war on it like it is a jihad.

La Religión no pasa de Moda

La religión es el único tema que jamás pasará de moda mientras exista el género humano, 
Desafortunadamente para nuestros amigos los secularistas revolucionarios. 
Y no porque el ser humano necesite creer en algo, sino porque Dios sí existe, 
Y al género humano se va a seguir manifestando. 
Y como los creyentes, a diferencia de los secularistas revolucionarios, no somos tontos, 
En Él vamos a seguir creyendo, 
Y en Su honor vamos a seguir orando.

The Right to have Bad Taste

¿Have you ever thought that a bad, sour wine from somewhere around the corner is better than a good Spanish rioja or a French cabernet or an Italian sangiovese? For someone who likes wine the difference is sublime and obvious. Now imagine that someone would tell you that they prefer the bad, sour wine from around the corner, and also adds that in the end is only about taste; i.e. that there is no qualitative difference from a random experiment with grapes and a traditionally exceptional rioja or cabernet or sangiovese.

Imagine someone telling you that because he prefers a street hotdog than an Argentinian cut or a top-rate salmon, it is also a matter of taste, and there is not qualitative difference from eating in a food cart than in a good prestigious restaurant. It is all about individual choices and there is no objective quality that ranks some things above others. Now imagine this same person telling you that because more people drinks Smirnoff Ice, or some popular mezcal, massively produced and with extensive marketing for the poor Average Joe, than they drink an eighteen year Scotch, the popular Smirnoff or the burdensome bad quality mezcal are actually better than the Scotch. Or that the random experiment with grapes be better if people drink it and like it more than the rioja and so forth. Sounds ridiculous, isn't it?

Food and drinks are aesthetical experiences, just as music is for hearing, writing is for reading, films are for watching, and so forth. ¿Have you ever heard someone arguing that Independence Day is a better movie than The Godfather? ¿Or that there is no better or worse, because in the end it's a matter of taste, so that it cannot be argued that The Godfather is better in quality than Independence Day? ¿How about comparing Twilight with Hamlet? ¿Or Lady Gaga and Pitbull with Beethoven and Mozart? ¿Or the average street painter with Rembrandt and Picasso? These comparisons, as coarse and brute as they sound, are the logical conclusion of the utilitarian belief that aesthetical experiences are always a matter of taste, and there is no inherent beauty behind artistic expressions; i.e. a metaphysical aesthetical reality that cannot be gauged by the scientific method that only studies physical phenomena.

However some believers in science-as-religion (i.e. not in science-as-science), think that because the scientific method for studying nature has been so successful, only through that method any kind of reality can be grasped and known. Following this premise the only way of knowing what is better and what is worse in artistic expressions is by studying the statistical aggregate of all individual preferences. This leaves Beethoven and Mozart as objects of a minority cult of intellectuals and Pitbull and Lady Gaga as the peak of our civilization. The same can be said of the author of Twilight viz. Shakespeare, or the author of A Game of Thrones viz. Virgil or Dante or Cervantes or Goethe and so forth. Hence, they mistake virtue with popularity, two very distinct things. Of course this is the product of a confusion in some scientists that mistake their method with objective reality. This is translated ideologically as liberal thinking: the idea that individual preferences and choices cannot be morally or aesthetically judged. But they can be judged. To explain this we must understand a couple of things about ignorance.

I think there are three types of ignorance. (1) when someone simply don't know something because it hasn't been taught to him. (2) when someone physically can't know something, as when they are blind and ignore what colors are. (3) When someone is ideologically handicapped to understand something that is within his intellectual reach.

The supreme nature of a masterwork of art, like the 9th symphony or The Aeneid or Gone with the Wind or Macbeth and so forth, can be known. It can be taught to anyone, but it the teaching of it doesn't guarantee that they are going to like it. The masterwork has an inherent aesthetical value independent of our individual preferences. We can acknowledge this, or we can suffer the second and third types of ignorance, so that we cannot understand what is it that makes Beethoven far superior than Pitbull, and we might deduce that Pitbull is better that the German composer because it happens that we extract from it more utility. Hence we suffer from blindness. Our ignorance blocks our understanding and our ability to see the sublime nature of a real and true work of art viz. a popular combination of rhythms. The third type of ignorance can recognize the beauty of Beethoven, but thanks to scientific ideology that disregards anything metaphysical, i.e. the human condition itself, we would conclude that there is no qualitative difference between our taste and that of the common people.

This is inevitable in thinking that only extension is subject to knowledge and not intention. Science can understand everything except the human condition, because everything human is filled with intention and lacks extension. That is, it's filled with metaphysical meaning and devoid of physical relevance (I'm vaguely using Collingwood against Russell in this argument). Masterworks of art have an aesthetical intention of beauty, virtue and are ultimately the peaks of civilization's achievements. The only extension that they have is how many people like them, and how much utility they extract from it.

The problem with liberals and those of economic intellectual orientation is that they do not understand that there is a taste for garbage and bad things. People can consciously enjoy and like something qualitatively bad. People can have bad tastes. And there is nothing wrong with it. But not because it is not wrong it follows that there are no qualitative differences between high culture and popular culture. I myself like Pitbull's music very much. I think it's perfect for parties, perfect for a joyful time, I extract a lot of utility from him. But I also acknowledge that it's a bunch of garbage, and I have the right to like and enjoy garbage, just as some times I enjoy the food carts better than a delicious restaurant, or watching a terrible movie like Schwarzenegger's Commando (a movie I like a lot) than The Godfather. Another example: I don't like Shakespeare as much as I think I should. I don't extract from it the sublime experience I get from Tolstoy, Virgil or Dostoyevsky. But not because I don't feel so much attracted to his plays, he is less of a genius. I'm the one with the problem. It is me the one that cannot connect with his art. I'm the one suffering from ignorance. But the masterwork remains the same.

Now, the difference between liking Mozart more than Beethoven, or Tolstoy more than Dostoyevsky, or Milton more than Shakespeare, or Homer more than Virgil, is a matter of taste, because we are talking about geniuses and their masterworks. You can prefer one over the other without degrading the any of them. We acknowledge the geniality of all of them and we pick our preferences among them. But what we cannot do is following this same reasoning with other artistic expressions that are intuitively of a lower level.

In few words, the perception of a work of art does not depend exclusively in the affection created in the subject in the form of utility. The reality of a trully artistic work lies in its capacity to imitate beauty in itself, as a virtue and as a sign of excellence viz. mediocrity. Just because someone might enjoy more the visage of a public housing project architecture over Florence Cathedral or Istambul's Hagia Sofia doesn't mean that all qualitative, metaphysical, aesthetical differences are levelled. Anyone unable to comprehend this suffers from a dreaful lot of ignorance.

Nothing comes out of the blue

Define a Christian society. I define it as a present living generation gathered around a national flag whose ancestors five generations earlier were vastly of a Christian confession.

Like all definitions, it has an arbitrary element. The arbitrariness lies in setting the boundaries of the concept, but the content of the concept must be real, in that it denotes something that exists. The content of the concept is more or less ambiguous in that it expressely says "were vastly of a Christian confession". This ambiguity cannot be avoided, given that no society of a national scale can be proved to be 100% pure in ideological and confessional content. Variations will always exists. So, "vastly of a Christian confession" demands the use of intuition viz. reason. We know when a society is vastly Muslim, e.g. Egypt, even though we know for certain that Christian Coptic minorities survive within it. The same is applied to most of our Western national societies, whose pluralism obfuscate reason when identifying the original ideology or confession of the given people.

We can say, for the sake of precision, that a society has a confessional or ideological adjective attached to it when no farther than five generations earlier than the present living one has the same mean and mode relating to the respective adjective. Hence, a Christian society would be one whose population of ancestors five generations earlier were in mean and mode of a Christian confession.

The reason why tracing back into ancestral background defines today, and not simply the content of today, is that human societies are always and without exception the product of historical conditions which lie in the past generations. A definition of a current society based only on living conditions assumes that the present does not need the past to have existed, which is, of course, nonsense. It is logically inconceivable that a present would subsist without its subsequent past. "The past is never dead. It's not even past" Faulkner.

The reason why I'm asking myself this is because of the problem posed by secularism. Where does secularism come from? The question is too abstract to denote anything. It would be more precise to ask: where does Western secularism come from? This implies that secularism depends on the culture that produces it. It is not a universally concrete notion. It is a historically concrete notion.

There is a narrative of Western secularism that aims at de-Christianizing societies, by promoting a form of society that sometimes contradicts and even destroys the Christian background from which it comes. I'm talking about the reality show-liberal-everything goes type of thinking. What I'm trying to say is that the secularist narrative plays at ignoring the historical fact that it comes from a particular cultural background; that of European Christianity. This leads to a misunderstood notion of secularism that is played against its Christian origin.

It is not against the spirit of secularism to accept the Christian background without which it would have never emerged. Philosophically both are distinct, but historically, that is really, they are not. Atheists feel disgruntled with such definitions, because they are the first in society to act against our Christian past, not realizing that in it lies the core of our identities, values, and normative claims. By de-Christianizing our societies with a false notion of secularism, they only undermine the true basis from which our normative claims are raised, in an intellectual project that is self-defeating. Normative claims simply cannot hold in themselves in the pure abstract, but only to philosophers, who are a negligible minority of any society, usually ignorant and unattached from real and daily problems. Their self-righteous feelings to free all individuals from the bondage with our inheritance only leaves a vacuum. No rational notion ever fills the life of anyone without the help of traditions.

All I'm saying is that the Western European civilization still is a Christian civilization, and that many of our institutions are the secular versions of our theological times. E.g. international congresses are nothing but the modern versions of the ecumenical councils; our parliaments, the nationalized versions of the estates of the realm; the European Union nothing but the Medieval idea of imperial unity (both failures, by the way), etc. In the Americas the Christian background is still an accepted idea, though we seem to be going down the unfortunate doom of nihilistic Europe. Hopefully, we will do better than that for a couple more hundred years.

My Borges' vision of Marx

The Circular Ruins is one of my favorite short stories by Borges. I don’t have an academic degree in literature, so what I’m about to say might have already been said before, but if that’s the case, I’m unaware of it.

I think that The Circular Ruins is a metaphor of Marxism. It came to my mind the first time I read it years ago, and it happened to me again this time. Of its own story Borges said that “everything is unreal” (Fictions, prologue, 1941). He might have been frank with this three-word introduction, but I think there is much more of it.

The argument of the story is that the wise man, or magician, that comes to live in the circular ruins wants to “dream a man: he wanted to dream him with thorough integrity and impose him on reality.” He even says that “the purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.” The rest of the story is the struggle of this wise man to create inside his dreams a perfect human being. In order to achieve it, he practices various strategies that do not work so well at the beginning, and ends up asking the help of supernatural beings, or gods. At first it seems to be a completely fantastic story, with the usual references to enigmatic problems and descriptions common in Borges writings. But going back to the argument of conceiving a perfect man in order to impose it on reality, I cannot avoid thinking that the wise man is Karl Marx.

Now, Marx was too careful to fall into utopianism, and he thoroughly hated it. The gigantic effort he did to device his immense sociological system of dialectical materialism was an impressive rhetorical narrative to disguise what really is a utopia with the mask of scientific reality, which we can trace as early as his The German Ideology (1846). He knew that the man he was calling for was inexistent during his lifetime, but the vast majority of his thinking consists in proving that the true human condition has the potential to one day become that man, by changing the world in which he lives, hence changing him. This is what fallows logically from dialectical materialism, inherited from Hegel’s dialectic. And this is precisely one of Marx’s major mistakes: he thought that he was conceiving the true material human being, whereas what he was doing was making out of a logical deduction an empirical claim; an obvious fallacy.

To go back to The Circular Ruins, the first device developed by the wise man is to dream an amphitheater full of students to whom he is imparting a lecture. He was “looking a soul that deserved to participate in the universe,” that is someone who legitimately can be imposed on reality, according to the first argument. The purpose was to find out who of those students was the true man he was looking for, by digging in their intellectual abilities. Soon he finds out that they are a crown of uncreative, unintelligent repeaters of his doctrine. The wise man is an eminent professor, a thinker, a philosopher, like Marx. But his doctrine only produces ideologues, like most Marxists. The wise man is disappointed by his followers (like Marx in his late years) and wakes up very distressed.

At this point the story suffers a break in which the wise man must depart temporarily from his mission in order to rest and think it through from the beginning. He realizes how arduous, time consuming and difficult it is to conceive such a man. He takes longer and longer, paying attention to every detail of his body, as detailed and as long as Das Kapital (1867). But when he finishes it, the man won’t wake up. The creation is so unreal that the creature remains unconscious of his potential for living. Just as the 19^th and 20^th centuries saw failed revolutions, because Lenin’s new man wouldn’t be born to start the final revolution of all; the revolution that would impose the new man on reality, making capitalism obsolete and the entrance to the final stage of history, communism, possible.

The wise man gives up and asks the gods for help. He realized that his intellectual quest is supernatural. This is where Marxism reaches its delusional peak, because claiming the ultimate social scientific truth, what they are looking for cannot be naturally reached. So, how can it be scientifically true? It can’t. Marxism must yield to the fact that it has all been a dream, an arbitrary act of imagination, a violent will to make reality the way it wants it to be, and not the way that it simply is. Marxism turns totalitarian. In Arendtian sense, it uses violence to force upon men and reality the form that it wants them to have. This is the horrible true material conclusion of Marxism, and it has the name of Stalin, the truest of all Marxists. However, Marxism today wants to naively reject this claim (for good reasons though).

In the last part of the story, the wise man manages to wake his imaginary man into reality by the help of the god of fire (godly fire is the metaphor for totalitarian violence). His son travels somewhere to other ruins to teach the new doctrine (to disturb other countries politics). One day some travelers tell the wise man that his son has proved to be invulnerable to fire. Of course, he is nothing but a product of imagination, a ghost, an unreal man. The wise man is afraid that his son might realize that truth, hence undermining his life experience and existence. But suddenly a fire breaks around the circular ruins, burning them. When the wise man tries to escape he realizes that fire cannot hurt him. He is also a product of someone else’s imagination. He cannot experience true human suffering. He cannot understand the true human condition. If he would have, he wouldn’t have tried to conceive the perfect man in the first place. Fire, the technology of totalitarianism to create the perfect man, ends up destroying the ruins themselves, and demonstrating the wise man that he has been living a fictitious life. This is the tragic outcome of all the mythical heroes of Marxism, from Trotsky to Che Guevara and beyond.

If Borges didn't mean to make a metaphor of Marxism, at least I find it strikingly similar.