Thank you for this compelling synthesis - the first amendment as the legal embodiment of all the prophetic teachings is an incredible insight. This piece (and Leo's encyclical) gives me hope at a far deeper level than I have felt in a long time.
“With everybody listening, Jesus spoke to his disciples , beware of the scribes and teachers of the law, who desire to walk around in flowing robes
and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplace and places of honor at banquets. But they cheat widows and steal their houses and for a show make lengthy prayers”.
Thanks for the synthesis you name 'The Relay'. I am a student and practitioner of many elements from may cultural relay innovations, and I always sensed the thread, but had never tied it to The Enlightenment so directly. Great essay.
Thiel is batshit. In his long wait for the antichrist, perhaps the only thing I find more absurd than his momentary belief that perhaps san francisco tech would stop the antichrist, is this latest conclusion that the pope is the antichrist. Vance and Rubio have some questions to answer. This is what happens when you raise intelligent gay children in extremely religious and unhealthy environments and then give them access to far too much capital during their breakdown stage. I fully blame our government for him for numerous reasons. Zero shock he is in Argentina and Uruguay, that has been coming. All that aside, very interesting analysis; I feel seriously under-educated now...
Exactly. I have the concept, but the threads of history and the learned connections were an education. Mr. Brock is always an education. I only wish, that after 3K years we wouldn't continuously repeat the process, that the witnesses would prevail.
As a long-term liver of universalist mysticism (directly experiencing it with Quakers, Bahais, and Indigenous people , it's uplifting to see it so cogently and wonderfully expressed. And Pope Leo is an absolute marvel.
Great write up. There's an old tradition in anthropology (more recently somewhat disputed) of a difference between priestly and shamanic cultures which parallels your argument, where the priest is within an institution, and the shaman directly connects with the mystical. Some cultures have had both, as you illustrate.
As for "The puritan apparatus on the cultural left," that phrase has over-simplifying implications. First off, there is no unified position of "the cultural left" to parallel that of the "Christian" nationalists. We've always been diverse here on the cultural left. Second, the Puritans were in inception those who were rejecting the authority of the Church of England to stand between the individual conscience and the divine, along the lines you advocate. Yes, this then became "puritanical" and itself government-enforced, especially in Massachusetts. But their sensibility evolved directly into Unitarian Universal and mostly quite liberal Congregational churches. America's cultural left descends in part through Emerson and Thoreau, the former from a long line of Massachusetts Puritan preachers, and decidedly not "puritanical."
In 1989, in the hallway to the Sistine Chapel, there was a money changer. It does seem the Vatican had a sense of humor.
I thought it would have been helpful for some readers if Brock had elaborated a bit more on what he meant by “the Puritan apparatus on the cultural left”. I understood his meaning not in one specific sense, as Whit Blauvelt responded to, but in the broadest sense. Anne Applebaum wrote about this in The Atlantic a few years ago in a piece called “The New Puritans”, or something like this. She wrote about how the Left had become as controlling and persecutory in its demands and literal mindedness as the Puritans once had become: “cancelling” people—shaming, punishing, firing, banishing those who are not “politically correct” in all the precise language and actions that this form of The Left, like the Puritans, see as morally righteous and necessary, and so, must be required of all—And, I would comment, how ironic this development has been from its once freedom-loving and inclusive social source in the “hippie” movement if the 1960’s. However, a very vocal part of this “Left” has now grown its own controlling and authoritative “teeth” to seek to be yet another fundamentalism and authority, as controlling, one dimensional and literal as the one it had once critically rejected…
Cecelia, thank you. You have read it the way it was meant to be read.
Applebaum's New Puritans in The Atlantic (October 2021) is exactly the reference. She named the structure — the small tribunals, the social shunning, the loss of work and friendship and standing for a wrong word said in the wrong room — and named it Puritan because that is what it is. Not Puritan in costume or in confession, but Puritan in apparatus: the conviction that the visible community must be kept clean of the heretic, that intention does not redeem error, that the procedure is the punishment, that the apology is never sufficient because the apology is itself evidence of the original sin. Hawthorne wrote a whole novel about this. We forgot we had read it.
You are right about the irony. The 1960s movement that gave us do not trust anyone over thirty produced, two generations later, the apparatus that decides who may speak and who must be expelled — and that apparatus reproduces, almost beat for beat, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's apparatus for deciding who was elect and who was reprobate. The freedom-loving source generated its own fundamentalism because freedom without a tradition of mercy will always generate fundamentalism. Mercy is the harder discipline. The Puritans never learned it. Some of their descendants on the cultural left have not learned it either.
What I tried to mean in the piece is that this apparatus, like its mirror image on the cultural right, has served as one of the cover stories — one of the small operations behind which the larger operation has been running. While we have been excommunicating each other over language, the people Pogue named have been buying the country. The Puritan apparatus, in both its left and right registers, has been a tremendously effective mechanism for keeping us looking at each other instead of at them.
The relay is older than the apparatus. The relay will outlast it.
Thank you for reading carefully. It is the only payment that matters.
Please list some people who have been "cancelled" outside of a subset of those who have seriously abused women. I've been cultural, and on the left (there is hardly any real culture on the right -- arts have a liberal bias), and I've yet to see anyone cancelled. Was Trump cancelled for "grab 'em by the pussy"? Bill Maher was cancelled, but not by the left; he lost a show for not agreeing the 9/11 terrorists were "cowards."
The right has long played a game of accusing anyone who disagrees with their nonsense and bigotry as trying to "cancel" them. When? Where? A few protests at colleges against speakers who were openly racist and purposely provocative doesn't count -- those speakers used the "cancellation" to propel their careers. Is it "cancellation" to take down statues of Confederate generals? WTF?
I think the reductuve response to this essay of "well the left really isn't flawed and its sometimes puritanical response to difference" is a real shame. Acknowledging some of the ways that purity enforcement on the left has been problematic in its limiting function on open discourse and intellectual/dialogic meaning-making is simply observational, and immediately refuting and arguing seems to miss the opportunity to move toward the deep grasp of the oneness of human experience underlying all divisions and opposing all oppressions. To realize the powerful unity if human experience and soul-reality is also to move beyond the smallness of exclusive focus on assigning and litigating blame rather than expanding our vision and acting to find paths of mutual support. "why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
"I think the reductuve response to this essay of 'well the left really isn't flawed and its sometimes puritanical response to difference' is a real shame."
I really can't parse that. There are individuals everywhere on every political, cultural, and social spectrum who object when others don't think and see as they do. Knee-jerk reactions by people who identify with varieties of "centrism" are as common, maybe more common, than knee-jerk reactions from those to the "left" or "right" of them. Yet if you look for who most honors and promotes the ideal of toleration -- it's certainly not on the right, and is commonly found on the left.
None of us, of any persuasion, are perfect in our realization of our ideals. Nor, frankly, should everyone be tolerated. A man who beats his wife, or rapes anyone, should not be tolerated, for instance. Do you disagree?
The author of the Harry Potter books, J D Rowling, endured some fierce criticism and cancellation heat, as has the comedian Dave Chapelle, which he then continues to tease about. And quite a few more. But worse effects are writers never published and new editions of older, very good books which don’t meet the perfectionistic standards of this loud, controlling group, and also people fearing to write or speak at all about sensitive subjects in an unorthodox way.
JK Rowling entered the cultural and political debate taking a strong stance against trans identities, largely identical to the anti-trans rhetoric which so many Republicans have focused their political campaigns on. To respond to her about that with "fierce criticism" gets called "cancel culture," when her very mission on this is to cancel trans people?
Dave Chapelle continues to sell out large arenas and successfully stream some of those shows online (which are quite funny). Yes, some people object to him; he's hardly been cancelled. If you want to see real cancellation, the New Republic has a fresh article up on how U. Penn has totally surrendered to the Trumpists. Beyond Harvey Weinstein, and to some degree Woody Allen, where are the cancellations by the left that have actually cancelled anyone's career?
As far as Thiel is concerned, I read about him moving his family to Argentina literally minutes before reading your newsletter. He cited security reason for the “temporary move!” Huh????
I had to look it up several times to make sure I was reading the story right! Honestly, it makes me wonder what Thiel is thinking?
Here is a guy, a nomad, who has citizenship in multiple countries including Germany, Malta, US, and possibly Argentina. He’s like a global parasite that lives off his host nation—until he completely extracts every last ounce of value before fleeing for greener pastures!
Or, perhaps his “predictive modeling” database has been bestowed a wisdom that eludes the rest of us and he knows something the rest of us do not!
I’m leaning towards door number two—but still a bit dazed and confused! Extremely weird situation and circumstances.
FYI: if such an anti-Christ exists, then may I suggest that like all things in MAGA, it’s pure projection! And may we all bear witness—now and forever!
And new zealand. For a good 5 plus years they were all rushing for bunkers there, as far as I could tell based on a very loose argument about nuke fallout spread. Pretty sure that argument got quashed a few years ago given the next hot spots like Uruguay. They either did too many drugs, or perhaps not enough, during covid.
Fantastically good essay! Thank you, Mike Brock, for tying up the key pieces of what I learned both in and out of school and life, into a whole understanding that the truth inside them was meant to demonstrate and prove. And you did it so economically and elegantly that you forged a strong and useful understanding we can now use, to take forward into the field of battle ahead. Life is on the line once again…
Thank you for this compelling synthesis - the first amendment as the legal embodiment of all the prophetic teachings is an incredible insight. This piece (and Leo's encyclical) gives me hope at a far deeper level than I have felt in a long time.
the Gospel of Luke 20: 45-47
“With everybody listening, Jesus spoke to his disciples , beware of the scribes and teachers of the law, who desire to walk around in flowing robes
and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplace and places of honor at banquets. But they cheat widows and steal their houses and for a show make lengthy prayers”.
What a journey - philosophically, spiritually, politically - your words have woven. What a gift! Once again, thank you.
Thanks for the synthesis you name 'The Relay'. I am a student and practitioner of many elements from may cultural relay innovations, and I always sensed the thread, but had never tied it to The Enlightenment so directly. Great essay.
Thiel is batshit. In his long wait for the antichrist, perhaps the only thing I find more absurd than his momentary belief that perhaps san francisco tech would stop the antichrist, is this latest conclusion that the pope is the antichrist. Vance and Rubio have some questions to answer. This is what happens when you raise intelligent gay children in extremely religious and unhealthy environments and then give them access to far too much capital during their breakdown stage. I fully blame our government for him for numerous reasons. Zero shock he is in Argentina and Uruguay, that has been coming. All that aside, very interesting analysis; I feel seriously under-educated now...
Maybe it’s closer to home—Thiel, or perhaps the antichrist isn’t a man but a priestly class itself! Just a thought…:)
Mike, this was truly a tour de force. You marvelously have brought so much together and that is so relevant to get today. Kudos.
This was an odyssey of information. An epic essay. After such a feat think you may need to take some Zen time out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=So0ZrTwf8vI&pp=0gcJCTkCo7VqN5tD&ra=m
Exactly. I have the concept, but the threads of history and the learned connections were an education. Mr. Brock is always an education. I only wish, that after 3K years we wouldn't continuously repeat the process, that the witnesses would prevail.
This piece is amazing. You have to get it to the pope. I'm serious. Thank you for this.
As a long-term liver of universalist mysticism (directly experiencing it with Quakers, Bahais, and Indigenous people , it's uplifting to see it so cogently and wonderfully expressed. And Pope Leo is an absolute marvel.
What an informative and inspiring read
Great write up. There's an old tradition in anthropology (more recently somewhat disputed) of a difference between priestly and shamanic cultures which parallels your argument, where the priest is within an institution, and the shaman directly connects with the mystical. Some cultures have had both, as you illustrate.
As for "The puritan apparatus on the cultural left," that phrase has over-simplifying implications. First off, there is no unified position of "the cultural left" to parallel that of the "Christian" nationalists. We've always been diverse here on the cultural left. Second, the Puritans were in inception those who were rejecting the authority of the Church of England to stand between the individual conscience and the divine, along the lines you advocate. Yes, this then became "puritanical" and itself government-enforced, especially in Massachusetts. But their sensibility evolved directly into Unitarian Universal and mostly quite liberal Congregational churches. America's cultural left descends in part through Emerson and Thoreau, the former from a long line of Massachusetts Puritan preachers, and decidedly not "puritanical."
In 1989, in the hallway to the Sistine Chapel, there was a money changer. It does seem the Vatican had a sense of humor.
I thought it would have been helpful for some readers if Brock had elaborated a bit more on what he meant by “the Puritan apparatus on the cultural left”. I understood his meaning not in one specific sense, as Whit Blauvelt responded to, but in the broadest sense. Anne Applebaum wrote about this in The Atlantic a few years ago in a piece called “The New Puritans”, or something like this. She wrote about how the Left had become as controlling and persecutory in its demands and literal mindedness as the Puritans once had become: “cancelling” people—shaming, punishing, firing, banishing those who are not “politically correct” in all the precise language and actions that this form of The Left, like the Puritans, see as morally righteous and necessary, and so, must be required of all—And, I would comment, how ironic this development has been from its once freedom-loving and inclusive social source in the “hippie” movement if the 1960’s. However, a very vocal part of this “Left” has now grown its own controlling and authoritative “teeth” to seek to be yet another fundamentalism and authority, as controlling, one dimensional and literal as the one it had once critically rejected…
Cecelia, thank you. You have read it the way it was meant to be read.
Applebaum's New Puritans in The Atlantic (October 2021) is exactly the reference. She named the structure — the small tribunals, the social shunning, the loss of work and friendship and standing for a wrong word said in the wrong room — and named it Puritan because that is what it is. Not Puritan in costume or in confession, but Puritan in apparatus: the conviction that the visible community must be kept clean of the heretic, that intention does not redeem error, that the procedure is the punishment, that the apology is never sufficient because the apology is itself evidence of the original sin. Hawthorne wrote a whole novel about this. We forgot we had read it.
You are right about the irony. The 1960s movement that gave us do not trust anyone over thirty produced, two generations later, the apparatus that decides who may speak and who must be expelled — and that apparatus reproduces, almost beat for beat, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's apparatus for deciding who was elect and who was reprobate. The freedom-loving source generated its own fundamentalism because freedom without a tradition of mercy will always generate fundamentalism. Mercy is the harder discipline. The Puritans never learned it. Some of their descendants on the cultural left have not learned it either.
What I tried to mean in the piece is that this apparatus, like its mirror image on the cultural right, has served as one of the cover stories — one of the small operations behind which the larger operation has been running. While we have been excommunicating each other over language, the people Pogue named have been buying the country. The Puritan apparatus, in both its left and right registers, has been a tremendously effective mechanism for keeping us looking at each other instead of at them.
The relay is older than the apparatus. The relay will outlast it.
Thank you for reading carefully. It is the only payment that matters.
Please list some people who have been "cancelled" outside of a subset of those who have seriously abused women. I've been cultural, and on the left (there is hardly any real culture on the right -- arts have a liberal bias), and I've yet to see anyone cancelled. Was Trump cancelled for "grab 'em by the pussy"? Bill Maher was cancelled, but not by the left; he lost a show for not agreeing the 9/11 terrorists were "cowards."
The right has long played a game of accusing anyone who disagrees with their nonsense and bigotry as trying to "cancel" them. When? Where? A few protests at colleges against speakers who were openly racist and purposely provocative doesn't count -- those speakers used the "cancellation" to propel their careers. Is it "cancellation" to take down statues of Confederate generals? WTF?
And yes, I was a hippie in the 60s.
I think the reductuve response to this essay of "well the left really isn't flawed and its sometimes puritanical response to difference" is a real shame. Acknowledging some of the ways that purity enforcement on the left has been problematic in its limiting function on open discourse and intellectual/dialogic meaning-making is simply observational, and immediately refuting and arguing seems to miss the opportunity to move toward the deep grasp of the oneness of human experience underlying all divisions and opposing all oppressions. To realize the powerful unity if human experience and soul-reality is also to move beyond the smallness of exclusive focus on assigning and litigating blame rather than expanding our vision and acting to find paths of mutual support. "why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
I love this. Thank you for this.
Sarah, What does this sentence try to say:
"I think the reductuve response to this essay of 'well the left really isn't flawed and its sometimes puritanical response to difference' is a real shame."
I really can't parse that. There are individuals everywhere on every political, cultural, and social spectrum who object when others don't think and see as they do. Knee-jerk reactions by people who identify with varieties of "centrism" are as common, maybe more common, than knee-jerk reactions from those to the "left" or "right" of them. Yet if you look for who most honors and promotes the ideal of toleration -- it's certainly not on the right, and is commonly found on the left.
None of us, of any persuasion, are perfect in our realization of our ideals. Nor, frankly, should everyone be tolerated. A man who beats his wife, or rapes anyone, should not be tolerated, for instance. Do you disagree?
The author of the Harry Potter books, J D Rowling, endured some fierce criticism and cancellation heat, as has the comedian Dave Chapelle, which he then continues to tease about. And quite a few more. But worse effects are writers never published and new editions of older, very good books which don’t meet the perfectionistic standards of this loud, controlling group, and also people fearing to write or speak at all about sensitive subjects in an unorthodox way.
JK Rowling entered the cultural and political debate taking a strong stance against trans identities, largely identical to the anti-trans rhetoric which so many Republicans have focused their political campaigns on. To respond to her about that with "fierce criticism" gets called "cancel culture," when her very mission on this is to cancel trans people?
Dave Chapelle continues to sell out large arenas and successfully stream some of those shows online (which are quite funny). Yes, some people object to him; he's hardly been cancelled. If you want to see real cancellation, the New Republic has a fresh article up on how U. Penn has totally surrendered to the Trumpists. Beyond Harvey Weinstein, and to some degree Woody Allen, where are the cancellations by the left that have actually cancelled anyone's career?
I know this a really late reply but I highly recommend "The canceling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff.
Well, now I have finished. Brilliant, beautiful tapestry. I hope your vision is vindicated
Thank you Mike for being one of the lineage, an indefatigable witness for this moment in time.
Mike, once again you blow my mind! Brilliant! 👏
As far as Thiel is concerned, I read about him moving his family to Argentina literally minutes before reading your newsletter. He cited security reason for the “temporary move!” Huh????
I had to look it up several times to make sure I was reading the story right! Honestly, it makes me wonder what Thiel is thinking?
Here is a guy, a nomad, who has citizenship in multiple countries including Germany, Malta, US, and possibly Argentina. He’s like a global parasite that lives off his host nation—until he completely extracts every last ounce of value before fleeing for greener pastures!
Or, perhaps his “predictive modeling” database has been bestowed a wisdom that eludes the rest of us and he knows something the rest of us do not!
I’m leaning towards door number two—but still a bit dazed and confused! Extremely weird situation and circumstances.
FYI: if such an anti-Christ exists, then may I suggest that like all things in MAGA, it’s pure projection! And may we all bear witness—now and forever!
And new zealand. For a good 5 plus years they were all rushing for bunkers there, as far as I could tell based on a very loose argument about nuke fallout spread. Pretty sure that argument got quashed a few years ago given the next hot spots like Uruguay. They either did too many drugs, or perhaps not enough, during covid.
And South Africa
The connections in this writing are astonishing. Something to reflect on as we move forward into the unknown future we are all a part of.
Fantastically good essay! Thank you, Mike Brock, for tying up the key pieces of what I learned both in and out of school and life, into a whole understanding that the truth inside them was meant to demonstrate and prove. And you did it so economically and elegantly that you forged a strong and useful understanding we can now use, to take forward into the field of battle ahead. Life is on the line once again…