Inbox: - Rubicon - Dominion Dominion the core conceit of secularism: that all religions were essentially the same. ‘The measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and the suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.’ 22It was this, the epochal lesson taught by Jesus’ death on the cross, that Nietzsche had always most despised about Christianity. Two thousand years on, and the discovery made by Christ’s earliest followers that to be a victim might be a source of power – could bring out millions onto the streets. Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world. For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ 33This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still. Among the Roman elite, however, he was famed for one particular accomplishment: the equation of their city’s conquests with the order of the cosmos. Five hundred years after Darius had promoted a very similar vision of empire, **Posidonius was able to reassure his Roman patrons that their triumph was born of more than chance.** ## the rest is history on the enlightenment Replace religion and superstition with philosophy. Start date: 1660. Spinoza and the founding of The Royal Society. End date: 1790, advent of Napoleon. Clubs, coffee houses, literary salons. Europe it's more court based, England it's more social. There's a lot of fun, people are really enjoying it, really excited. The sociable quality of it is absolutely fundamental. TH: it is very culturally contingent, but it is brilliant at disguising itself as universal. Enthusiasts for enlightenment values tend to feel same way as religious: entire world should be converted to their values. Continental enlightenment: airy fairy abstractions, mad utopian ideas. Anglo-Saxon enlightenment: skepticism, empiricism, common sense, Dr Johnson kicking his rock to disprove idealism. Protestant Vs Catholic countries. Protestant countries the enlightenment goes with the grain, it's conservative, it doesn't aim to overthrow. In France, leading figures of enlightenment are much more confrontational. Didero, Voltaire. Voltaire writes that he doesn't believe in God but he wants his tailor and his servants to believe because otherwise he'll be cheated and cuckolded. Augustine Vs Pelagius: are we naturally sinful or naturally good? Augustine says sinful, and wins. Rival universalism: Christian, Muslim, enlightenment. Freemasonry central to Enlightenment. Masonic lodges. ## unknown interview I think history is the only academic discipline that is also a branch of literature. Paul's lectures are "by a quantum degree" the most influential texts we have from the Roman empire. N: at the heart of Christianity is the idea of strength in weakness. Valorisation of those who are oppressed, those who suffer, those who are slaves. Triumph of slave over master, tortured over the torturer, oppressed over the oppressor. It's like a depth charge under every structure of privilege. It means the privilege can become something that is problematic, something evil, something you have to be cleansed of. Again and again through the whole history of Christianity you have the rich trying to give up their wealth, throw it away, in the French Revolution to be rich to be privileged can lead to your death. And now to have no privilege is a source of privilege. Intersectionality is a recalibration of something fundamental throughout Christian history. Interviewer: and n saw this as an intellectual virus. TH: absolutely, N hated it. N was really into the idea that the strong the brave the beautiful had basically been corrupted. The blonde beast had been tamed and insured in a monastery and had become a sick, miserable thing, and that this was terrible. And that therefore we needed to get over this terrible slave morality. What we know though N didn't is that this would be taken up by the Nazis. Nazis repudiated idea that slave should triumph over the master. Rejected idea that no Jew or Greek. In 60s **ppl on West realised we don't have to ask what would Jesus do, we can just ask what would Hitler not do.** Basically that's the guiding principle in every western society now: what would Hitler not do. Which is why ultimate insult now isnt to day you're a Satanist, but you're a Nazi. N famously says without Christian beliefs you can't have Christian values. Ideas like human rights and secularism don't just exist. These are essentially theological constructs, rooted in theological history. To believe in human rights is just as much a leap of faith as to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ rose on the third day and ascended into heaven. And that was the condition of people in the middle ages, people didn't realise that they were believing, just like most of us don't believe in human rights, we just think that they exist. When liberals say we should let refugees in, people say why, they say human rights, people say I don't believe in them, liberals say well you're a fascist then. At a certain point all you can do is say I think that they exist therefore you ought to think that they exist. This is a growing problem for liberal society within the West, but also for Western country on the global stage. UN charter was able to present ideas as if they were so universal that the rest of the world ought to sign up to them. But what's happened recently is that as western power retreats, so the culturaly contingent nature of those assumptions about human rights, about the secular and so on, have come into retreat as well. Idea of separation of church and state is extremely Western. Very unusual. Most cultures lacked it. Not clear will persist. Interviewer: where does this leave us? TH: I don't know. I don't feel any great responsibility to say I do. I've basically only written this because I think it's interesting. I think it's just so interesting for its own sake. It's not that I'm offering this as you know, that it will change society or anything. I just think it's really really interesting. I suppose what I would say, it kind of makes me feel that I can't really take anything for granted, I guess. I guess I'm a liberal who has lost his faith, I don't really believe it any more. If I hold to liberal principles it's you know in the way a Catholic who has lost his faith goes to church and does the rituals. So I'm kind of looking around for some solid foundation on which to rest my gut instincts. So I think it is quite a corrosive process in that sense. Where will society go? In Europe and America i guess there are 3 routes. One is liberalism has become self sustaining in EU and USA Nietzsche was wrong you don't need Christianity. Another is that Nietzsche was right, and you'll get increasing insistence that we don't owe anything to the weak or the poor and that the idea of universal humanity is junk. Might shade into a soft form of fascism. We have been somewhat innoculated but the truth is that fascism was terribly attractive to people, people like strength and power and glamour and swagger and flags. Third possibility is ah shit we better cling to Christianity. In other societies, India, China, unclear probably return to their roots. Maybe West will also return to roots: for now it still thinks it's values are universal, that it's way of seeing the world is the way the world is, but this seems likely to decline as world becomes more multo-polar and other parts of world go their own way. I think this will foster a sense of "well, we are what we are". ## Spectator pod On: N see cruelty as the necessary expression of how the strong impose themselves. It's not cruelty for itself but cruelty as a necessary corollary of the right and the ability of the strong to do as they please and wish,and there is a kind of glory and splendour, for Nietzsche, in the exultant power that Achilles displays. Avhles is not really worrying about all the poor people that he is slaughtering. Hitler blamed collapse of Greek and Roman civilization on the kind of cancerous effect of Paul's universalism. And Paul's obsession on the victim rather than on the blonde beast, the triumphant, the strong. Persians: good and evil. Greeks: universalism. Right from the beginning you have the question of what do you do with people who don't want to have their distinctiveness dissolved into universalist mush. [...] You have a message of peace and love and universal dignity and you are wholly convinced that these are ideals that entire world would benefit from sharing, but there are people who don't want to share in them. What do you do with them? Do you turn the other cheek? Or, do you send in the lads? Were facing same dilemma now: what do liberals do with people who don't want to be liberal? Hitler and the Nazis are the corpse of God. How long will calling people Hitler maintain its power? If it starts to lose its power, what will enable us to affirm and insist and sustain ideas like universal dignity of human beings or human rights or other values that are actually as theological as the idea that the lord Jesus Christ rose on the third day. ## A C Grayling Vs Tom Holland Jewish scriptures bear the stamp of Persian dualism. That's crucial because what that does is normalise the world. What that does is to cast the entire world as something that divided between darkness and light, between lie and truth, between evil and good.