When Rome Falls, Yves Olade

when rome falls, yves olade

[ID: “you drank so much sunlight you’re drowning in it.” end ID]

[“The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.

And that is, I think, much the way we talk about forgiveness in contemporary America. It’s regarded as a universal good, as something we should give, freely, regardless of whether the perpetrator of harm has done the work of repentance, regardless of whether they have fully owned their harm, regardless of whether they have done the work of repair, regardless of whether they have done the work to change. As one Twitter user put it, “In my white, Christian, middle-class culture, not forgiving someone is seen as a bigger sin than the original action. It . . . calls into question whether you’re ‘godly’ enough.”

Not long ago, my friend Jason found himself in a difficult situation at work. He was tasked to work with Dan, a colleague who, while not a direct supervisor, had a higher title and position in the organization than he did. Dan threatened and bullied Jason in a number of ways, including warning Jason that if he didn’t obey Dan in every way, Dan would make sure that Jason would be blamed for errors in Dan’s work. Jason brought his concerns to his manager and then HR, and the initial “solution” to the problem was to allow Jason to work on other projects, away from Dan. Jason felt that this was workable, and he made it clear that, in order to feel safe working on another project with Dan, he would need an apology, an acknowledgment of the threatening behavior, and assurances that it would not continue—or, at minimum, explicit assurances from HR that similar behavior from Dan in the future would not be tolerated. However, despite the fact that none of these measures were taken, Jason’s boss began pushing him to return to his work with Dan on another project. The boss urged Jason to forgive and forget, to regard Dan’s behavior as simply a difference in working styles. So often, pressure to forgive comes with a minimizing of the harm caused, a refusal to see its full impact.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022

could you please elaborate that post about spiritual ennui not being the cause of many social phenomena? theres a whole book I started reading recently (work pray code) which is predicated on the idea that in the US work has come to replace religion as the centerpiece of peoples lives (simultaneously bc of a withdrawal from religion as a country and bc of capitalism demanding that life revolve around work) and I wasnt completely convinced by the authors evidence toward that hypothesis. or was the social phenomena in question more like online culture stuff?

i don't know that particular book or author, so i don't have a sustained critique of them. but in general, yes, i'm frustrated by hypotheses that basically boil down to the idea that a decline in religiosity and religious infrastructure is causing some kind of spiritual poverty that is in turn responsible for various social ills. commonly i see this argument used to 'explain' phenomena including: the persistence of astrology and occult sciences; gun violence; political 'polarisation'; drug use; perceived cultural decline; 'mental health crises'; &c. broadly these analyses tend to draw elements from max weber's idea of disenchantment,¹ a large-scale diagnosis of modernity's devaluation of religion, and from the related notion of desacralisation, the process of divesting individual objects or institutions of their divine properties or provenance.

i think these analyses are really fucking bad and here are some major reasons why:

they're not materialist. by this i mean that, instead of looking for material factors and conditions that might explain social and cultural phenomena, they turn to metaphysical, philosophical, and intellectual explanations. let's think about the persistence of astrology as an example here. on a disenchantment analysis, people are getting back into astrology because, having lost (organised) religiosity in their lives, they feel a spiritual void and seek to create new cosmological meaning through engagement with an anachronistic science-turned-spiritual practice. this explanation sucks. in addition to the fact that astrology and occult sciences never really 'went away' in the first place (& neither did religion lol), this explanation treats spiritual practice and belief as mostly an individual/psychological phenomenon, neglecting rigorous sociological attention to how these ideas spread and how group and community dynamics nurture them and form around them. it also ignores things like the profit motive for astrological practitioners, and related points about how heterodox sciences in general thrive in contexts where professional and class interests create a massive gap between laypeople and experts, barring the general population from accessing and engaging with scientific discourses and critique. 'disenchantment' also grafts onto a general idea about 'alienation', positing that the decline in religiosity creates a sense of loss and disconnect and that this psychological experience drives interest in practices like astrology. but when we talk about 'alienation' in a marxist sense,² we mean material conditions of production: the literal, physical alienation of a labourer from their products, and of a capitalist from the world (because they produce only proximately, via the labourer). the psychological experience of alienation is a result of this real material process of estrangement and expropriation; a weberian analysis that tries to put alienation down to cultural or intellectual factors is not useful for understanding material changes and the 'base' economic relations.

these types of 'disenchantment' analyses tend to claim or imply that they're making universal sociological arguments: religiosity decreases, x takes its place. but in fact these are highly culturally and historically specific arguments. weber's formulation was explicitly premised on a highly eurocentric and teleological conception of 'modernity' and modernisation, wherein the west led the world in a process of 'rationalisation' that involved jettisoning spirituality. that he was ambivalent about the consequences of this process does not make the argument any less flawed. for example, even defining religiosity is not so easy (do we measure by church attendance? private internal belief? community values?) and although the catholic church has become less powerful in certain ways since the reformation, a) it's hardly gone away and b) it doesn't follow that spirituality or religiosity writ large have declined. sticking with the astrology example, if the weberian explanation holds, we should be able to come up with some set of criteria for identifying societies with high or low degrees of religiosity, and then associate that with prevalence of astrological practice. but uh, both of these things vary widely between countries, regions, social groups, &c, almost as though there are other factors at play here, and 'religion' and 'astrology' themselves also have varying meanings, uses, and practical manifestations in varying social and historical contexts.

these 'disenchantment' explanations pretty much all start from the same rhetorical operation, which goes something like: "[x problem] is bad and harmful, which is discordant with my imagination of what 'the west'/the usa is 'supposed' to be like. why does such a [developed/modern/wealthy] society have these problems?" from there, it's a move to a critique of modernity/rationality/the speaker's notion of 'progress', and specifically a critique that aims to identify and root out some kind of spiritual rot or void, without ever challenging or problematising the construction of such notions of 'progress' or the processes of imperialism and colonialism that make 'the west' and wealthy lifestyles possible. in other words, these are generally reactionary arguments that seek to preserve the status quo of the material processes of exploitation and production, but want more psychological fulfillment for a few people.

these explanations are just really fucking bad and over-simplified explanations of how religion functions and what effects it has in a society. again, part of the issue here is that 'religion' is not even really a cohesive category and certainly not a unified set of practices. it works sometimes through institutions, which have their own financial and class characters; it interacts with and sometimes seeks to control politics; it also functions to enforce group identity and community cohesion. these are not inherently good or spiritually fulfilling things, and these effects all vary in different religions, societies, and historical contexts, which makes statements about the consequences of 'declining religiosity' kind of nonsensical on their face. religion can be a vector of racism, of caste, of other inequities; given astrology's essentialist character and resemblence to similarly class- and race-enforcing and -creating psychological projects, i'm certainly willing to entertain arguments that modern astrology performs these religious functions. but again, this argument would require actual materialist analysis, not just the vague diagnosis that 'people want to create spiritual meaning' in a 'modern' world supposedly too 'rational' to fulfill that need.

¹ term borrowed from schiller, but schiller used it somewhat differently and in a different context

² marx's later texts largely subsume the idea of 'alienation' or 'estrangement' into a larger analysis of 'commodity fetishism', which has its own theoretical problems in the construction of the 'fetish' concept; see j lorand matory's "the fetish revisited: marx, freud, and the gods black people make".

[“The charity model we live with today has origins in Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven. It is based on a moral hierarchy of wealth—the idea that rich people are inherently better and more moral than poor people, which is why they deserve to be on top. Not surprisingly, the charity model promotes the idea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immorality and that only the poor people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.

Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements such as sobriety, piety, curfews, participation in job training or parenting courses, cooperation with the police, a lawful immigration status, or identifying the paternity of children. In charity programs, social workers, health care providers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, and government workers determine which poor people deserve help. Their methods of deciding who is deserving, and even the rules they enforce, usually promote racist and sexist tropes, such as the idea that poor women of color and immigrant women have too many children, or that Black families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off separated from their families and communities, or that people are poor because of drug use.

We can see examples in government policy, like the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs (TANF), which impose “family caps” in fourteen states. These laws restrict poor families from receiving additional benefits when they have a new child. For example, in Massachusetts, a single parent with two children receives a measly $578 in TANF benefits each month. But if a second child is born while the family is already receiving TANF, that child is ineligible, and the family receives $100 less per month, for a grant of $478. This policy emerges from the racist, sexist idea that poor women, especially women of color and immigrant women, should be discouraged from having children, and the faulty assumption that their poverty is somehow a result of being overly reproductive. We can also see harmful, moralizing eligibility requirements when people have to prove they are sober or under psychiatric care to qualify for housing programs.

Charity programs, both those run by the government and those run by nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make it stigmatizing and miserable to receive help. The humiliation and degradation of doing required work assignments to get benefits too small to live off of, or answering endless personal questions that treat the recipient like a fraud and a crook, are designed to make sure that people will accept any work at any exploitative wage or condition to avoid relying on public benefits. Charity makes rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth.”]

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid

watched 'across the spiderverse' yesterday and it really stood out to me how, in the midst of all the explosions and web-slinging and Deep Family Talks™, 'across the spiderverse' has a lot to say about white supremacy. it stands out to me that when miles needs his allies the most, he's abandoned by gwen and peter (his two closest friends from the first film)—not because they don't love him, because they say they do, but because their love doesn't extend past the reaches of the system set in place and miles' place in that perceived system. they're full of "oooh don't be maaad at me" and "this is for the best!" as miles is running for his life. as miles is insisting that his dad shouldn't have to die to maintain some stupid fucking system. peter and gwen, instead of putting miles first or prioritizing their love for him, instantly justify and let go of him when his existence challenges a framework they are comfortable in and already supported by.

meanwhile, miles' real sources of support are hobie (a black anarchist who very loudly protests the system) and margo kess (a black VR gamer). when he needs to escape, they're the ones who actively help him out. even jessica drew, i think, kind of helps—it seems at the end she's ambivalent about really chasing miles down, and you can see throughout the film she's tussling with her thoughts on the spider society, pushing its boundaries here and there.

and getting back to gwen—yeah, we can see that she is struggling with problems of her own the whole movie. she's insecure, she's unmoored, the spider society is something that makes her feel safe. but the movie doesn't let her problems soften or apologize for her betrayal of miles. she's wrong. she is wrong. the movie doesn't deny it, not for a second, and the narrative never uses her issues to justify what she is foisting on miles.

i'd be really curious to know how much of this was discussed by the creative team—because from the outside, it looks like they planned a film centered on the black lives matter movement, with a story about challenging oppressive systems and valuing black solidarity, with a sidebar discussion on white supremacy, and then just....made it. actually made a movie about black people surviving a system that doesn't recognize them as human. and did it with superheroes and pop art and a segment made entirely out of Lego. and then got everybody to watch it! like! what!!

i'd be curious to see if this stood out to anyone else, and especially to hear black fans' thoughts and analysis. i did a quick sweep through the tag (man y'all are horny for miguel), but i'm sending this post out there hoping other people might have thoughts they want to share too.

anyway great movie 10/10

i know i talk a lot about the relationship between humans and animals in ancient rome and i’m constantly very emotional about it but i NEED you all to look at this part of a mosaic of a race horse named polidoxus that says “whether you win or not, we love you, polidoxus”