Goodbye, Gene Genovese

I realize that I am late commenting on this, but the unfortunate truth of our culture is that we do not announce the deaths of great thinkers with quite the same vigor as the deaths of mediocre musicians. I met the news of Eugene Genovese's death--a few nights ago when I finally heard it--first with disbelief and then with a profound, perhaps misplaced, sense of loss. I came to Genovese somewhat late in my academic career, after making the unlikely shift from Byzantine intellectual traditions to Southern ones, from oriental mysticism to Baconian rationalism. Genovese became something of an inspiration to me, both because of the monumental shift in focus that he represented in his academic life (from Marxist to conservative, the mind of the slave to the mind of the master) but also simply as a native northerner who developed a profound fascination for southern history. My comparatively recent turn to southern history means that I have only just scratched the surface of Genovese's contributions to the field, but Consuming Fire and The Southern Tradition proved easily the two most influential works in cementing my love for the South as an object of study. Genovese will be missed. He was the sort of scholar who might very well have gone on producing monumental new works indefinitely if life allowed it. It is my good fortune to be left with so many volumes of his thought still unread so that I might continue to have new experiences of him for years to come.

In tribute, let me leave you with these thoughts by Genovese, a voice from beyond critiquing the blindness of that overwhelming majority on the Right who proudly claim conservatism in ignorance of its most basic features:

Southern conservatism has always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendency of the profit motive and material acquisitiveness; to the conversion of small property based on individual labor into accumulated capital manifested as financial assets; to the centralization and bureaucraticization of management; to the extreme specialization of labor and the rise of consumerism; to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and scientific and technological progress; and to the destructive exploitation of nature. Thus, down to our day, southern conservatives have opposed finance capitalism and have regarded socialism as the logical outcome of the capitalist centralization of economic and state power...

What goes largely unnoticed is that, on much of the American Right, the conservative critique of modernity has largely given way to a free-market liberalism the ideal of which shares much with the radical Left’s version of egalitarianism. The traditionalists are entitled to gloat, for they have always regarded socialism and radical democracy as the logical outcome of bourgeois liberalism. The free-market Right professes to believe in a level paying field and an attendant doctrine of equality of opportunity, despite all evidence that neither could ever be realized. The projected hopes are no less an invitation to disillusionment and despair than their counterpart in the Left’s chimera of equality of outcome and ultimate condition. And they are just as cruel. The left-wing version of egalitarianism generates the politics of envy and the degrading psychology of victimization. Those who cannot match the performance of others blame sexism, racism, and other forms of social oppression for their personal failures and shortcomings. Their frustration, anger, and irrationality produce effects all the worse since there is often a measure of truth in the complaints.

Anarchy in May: Eller on the Just Society (Pt. 1)

The following is part of the Anarchy in May series which examines Christian anarchism and quotes prominent Christian anarchist thinkers. For a more detailed introduction and a table of contents, please see Anarchy in May: Brief Introduction and Contents.
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For the next three days, I will be sharing a lengthier portion of Eller's Christian Anarchy, much too long to be placed in a single post. His point, however, is critical enough that I think it warrants extended presentation. During this portion of his work, Eller is attempting to contrast the way humanity attempts to establish a truly just society and the way Jesus endeavored toward that same end. He presents his argument by an examination of the human struggle for "classlessness" on every level of society. Lest this term provide a stumbling block, Eller clarifies, "In our context, remember that “classlessness” is a synonym for 'justice.'" If the ultimately just society is the one where every person is treated equitably, than the perennial quest for a classless social system, made notorious through the contemporary efforts of Maxists, is certainly one of the most visible attempts to acheive that end.

Because Marxism represents the most infamous attempt to construct the classless, and therfore just, society, Eller begins his examination there:

(In the following, this is as much as I mean by “Marxism.” It is shorthand for “any philosophy that defines social progress in terms of a class struggle toward classlessness.” My use of the word intends no other overtones, is entirely descriptive and in no way pejorative.)

Yet all such “Marxisms”—even while being sincerely dedicated to classlessness—see no other possibility of getting there except by taking off 180 degrees in the other direction. Classlessness can be achieved only by first locating the class distinction that is at the root of the difficulty. The “oppressed class” and the “oppressing class” must be spotted and publicly identified. Once identified, the consciousness of the oppressed class must be raised—which, of course, inevitably leads to the raising of the class consciousness of the opposite number as well. A deliberate polarizing is taking place in order that the oppressed class might consolidate its power (“solidarity” is the very word, “ideological solidarity”)—this in preparation for the struggle, the warfare, which is intended to eventuate in classlessness.

Obviously, the action serves to exacerbate the very class distinction it is out to eliminate—but there is no other way. The “oppressed but righteous class” must gain power over the “wicked and oppressing class” in order then to replace it, destroy it, dominate it, absorb it, or convert it and so leave itself as the one, total, and thus “classless” class. The ideological solidifying and polarizing of the class distinction, which the accompanying intensification of the class struggle, is the only way to classlessness.

Granted, this Marxist theory presents some problems: Are we to “continue in sin that grace may abound”?—play up class antagonism in the interests of classlessness? But I don’t know who has come up with any better solution (actually, I do; but I am holding that for a bit). In common practice, of course, the business proceeds according to program through the spotting of the class distinction, the raising of consciousness, the building of ideological solidarity, and the hue and cry of the class struggle—only to hang up on the final step of creating classlessness. For some reason, at that point everything that can go wrong invariably does.

Thus, with the Soviet Union of proto-Marxism, the comrades of the oppressed working classes achieved their solidarity, won their revolution, and even established the bureaucracy which was to be the instrument for creating their classless society. Yet instead of the workers’ classless society becoming the total order of the day, lo and behold, the bureaucracy itself introduced a new class distinction—doing this by itself becoming totalitarian over everyone else. So it went; and so it goes.

The Best Part About Atheist Persecution

The aggressive and repressive atheism of the USSR intrigues me. John Anthony McGuckin, in his book The Orthodox Church, gives a very brief history of the Russian church during this period, and some of the tribulations he describes are astonishing.

Under communism all expression of Christian freedom was dangerous. All formal evangelistic and catechetical work was forbidden to the church…The Bolshevik government rapidly passed anti-religious legislation even before it had secured a totalitarian grasp on the state. It confiscated all private and all ecclesiastical property in December 1917, and in January 1918 withdrew any state subsidy for ecclesiastical institutions, separating church and state, and outlawing any form of religious instruction of the state’s citizens. Between 1917 and 1923, when the Bolshevik zeal was hot, twenty-eight Russian bishops and 1,400 priests were executed.

From there McGuckin goes on to describe the thousands more, both clergy and laity, who were sent to work in labor camps, many of whom died while imprisoned there. If the human cost were not incalculable enough, the USSR went further still. They converted churches into museums and cinemas, stripping them of their icons, relics, and religious memorabilia. Whatever had value was sold in Western markets at obscenely reduced prices (considering that the often ancient items were in fact priceless); whatever did not was burned or defaced. And still the state atheism rolled on.

In 1926 the law explicitly forbade the continuing exercise of communal monastic life in the fewer than half the monasteries that had somehow managed to carry on in spite of the persecutions, a measure that accelerated the monastic decline, but still could not quence monasticism completely. The measures against the church were conducted by the ‘League of Militant Atheism’ with cells in every village. In 1927 the Council of People’s Commissars tried to initiate a Five Year Plan, whose aim was to ‘eradicate the very concept of God from the minds of the people, and to leave not a single house of prayer standing in the whole territory of the USSR.’

McGuckin’s account is, he admits himself, brief and incomplete, and yet at the same time it feels like he never runs out of new and horrible ways that the government of the USSR could enforce its program of dogmatic atheism. Monks and nuns were sent to Gulags and asylums (on the grounds that to be a monastic is to be insane). Christian universities were closed. Mobs were organized to interrupt the liturgy. McGuckin notes, and cites others who have the same observation, that the persecution under the communist regime in the USSR has been the most extensive, both in relative casualties and sustained duration, in the history of the church. The cost is of course beyond the grasp of cold numbers, but he estimates that the Soviets killed 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, and 120,000 monastics.

Yet in all that, this is what truly struck me:

Even so the religious life of Russian Orthodoxy was irrepressible. Even in the dark times of communist persecution the Orthodox attendance at the divine liturgy was far higher than European church attendance.

It cannot help but reinforce for me the truth that a church that does not suffer with Christ cannot call itself the body of Christ, not in the truest sense.