TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD

This is a paper I heard presented at a symposium more than a decade ago. I've never seen it published to the Intarwebs, and I think it's extremely interesting and important. At the risk of annoying Dr. Maker, here it is in its entirety (transcribed by me - any errors are my own, all emphasis from the original).

What's particularly important about this paper, although it is nominally about art, is how closely it describes the workings of our "regnant postmodernist orthodoxy" in nearly every part of our society. Enjoy.

Creativity and the Apotheosis of Value

Dr. William Maker
Chair, Department of Philosophy & Religion, Clemson University

1999

I am going to argue that two widely held beliefs about creativity, values, and art, are fundamentally wrongheaded. I have in mind the notions (1) that individual creativity is the essence of art, and (2) that individual artistic creativity is the ultimate value and the proper model for all humany activity. I shall argue that these central postmodernist notions not only undermine traditional connections between art and values, but also render problematic the value of art and any coherent concept of art and of creativity. (Put differently, contemporary efforts to absolutize art and to promote the subjective freedom of creative self-expression as an absolute value trivialize art and render creativity incoherent.) First, I'll explicate these notions somewhat by exploring their roots in Nietzsche, where they find their paradigmatic and most intelligible articulation.

Today's regnant postmodernist orthodoxy which glorifies art and the unlimited freedom of individual artistic creativity (or creative play) has its origins in certain Nietzschean ideas concerning the relation between art, creativity, and values. Crucial to Nietzsche's thought are the metaphysical and epistemological assertions that the ultimate character of reality is flux, chaos, becoming: according to Nietzsche, there is no fixed reality, no coherent objective ground (in nature, reason, or god) to anchor our beliefs, and to determine thereby which are true and which false. Consequently, he contended, the ultimate character of all beliefs is that they are fictional postulates or fabrications, lies whose character as lies has been covered over or forgotten. (In more contemporary deconstructive parlance, everything is text.)

Furthermore, when our illusory fictions (religion, philsophy, science, and so on) have been unmasked for what they are, we see that the creation of illusions or appearances (the fabrication of a world of artworks) is not simply something artists do. Rather, it is the definitive essence of the human condition. And since the (traditional) artist creates knowing that he's creating illusions which are transparently illusory, fooling no one, (no one takes Van Gogh's Sunflowers for real sunflowers) the creative artist is the penultimate realization of human being and the most honest of human beings. (Arguably a culminating point of the Nietzschean artist as traditional artist would be Andy Warhol and his Brillo boxes and soup cans, for here the traditional distinction between a fabricated artwork and the purported real thing is brought into question by the artist's creation. With Warhol's Brillo boxes, our ability to distinguish between reality and illusion, and to recognize what is art, are questioned by the artwork itself. We have an illusion which calls attention to and makes its own illusory, artistic nature problematic: "art" as Nietzschean philsophy.)

If, for Nietzsche, the artist is the penultimate expression of human being, the ultimate expression is the individual who takes his very existence as a work of art to be created: to 'be all you can be' in the Nietzschean/postmodern universe is to remorselessly confront the reality of the human condition, and that means regarding one's life as a work of art, as the expression of purely subjectively willed choices whose only foundation and goal is that they are willed without foundation, created virtually ex nihilo, without the comforting illusion that there is any objective foundation for - or point to - what one has willed, except to be the expression of one's creative, willing power. (So if we shift focus from Warhol's creations to his self-creation of the persona "Andy Warhol", we get the point illustrated nicely: Warhol as Übermensch.)

Notice that this model of art as purely individual or subjective free creativity: the Nietzschean artist is not expressing an independent (universal) truth in the artwork (or life), not even an independent truth about the artist himself. The very notion of a stabile self or subject has also been deconstructed, or ironically displaced. In the Nietzschean, postmodern view there's nothing prior or anterior to the creative act (at least, nothing fixed and knowable) which is then subsequently expressed in the act. Nor is there something there outside the creative act which can be acknowledged as ultimately determinitive or self-defining. The ultimate artistic act is one of self-creation: the self is created through the undetermined choices whereby the self is first manifested in the work. Nothing found given either from without or from within can determine the creative act without it losing its essential character. Hence, for Nietzsche and the postmoderns, artistic subjective creativity is also the paradigmatic model for freedom.

It follows that whatever may be found given (from the inner world of subjectivity to the outer, objective world) is appropriate material for creative play: for the artist (and the life artist) everything is a fit subject and medium for art/life as art - there are no privileged subjects, materials, or stles which art (or life) can be restricted to. As Arthur Danto suggests in Art After the End of Art, anything goes. To acknowledge any antecedent given as authoritative, as opposed to being mere raw material for creative transformation, would be to deny the essentially creative power and to retreat to the foundational/objectivist bad lie, to surrender to the authoritarian hegemony of pseudo-objectivity. Thus the creative power of molding or arranging given materials - whether the artists' materials such as paint, canvas, or words, or the life artists' materials of existence - is not a means to some end other than the expression of creativity itself: that is the end in itself and hence the ultimate ground and determiner of value. Since literally everything is a created fabrication, there's nothing beyond the act to function as an independent criterion for judgment, even (as we'll see) as a basis for judging one created fabrication against another.

How do values enter at all into the Nietzschean transformation of art into absolute metaphysics? Values enter by way of an answer to the following obvious question: if there is no ground or basis for our beliefs, no objective distinction between the true and the false, why postulate one thing rather than another, or indeed, why postulate anything rather than nothing? For Nietzsche, the latter question confronts the issue of nihilism. (I'll return to the form subsequently.) In fact, there is no objective basis for not embracing nihilism (in Nietzsche's terms, 'willing nothing') save for the lingering integrity which comes from willfully affirming the very condition of groundless postulation which confronts one with nihilism in the first place: if everything is a fabricated fiction, one may affirm this very condition as definitive of one's being and, through so doing, be true to one's being. Authenticity is attained by self-consciously willing with the knowledge that the choices one makes are thoroughly arbitrary, fabricated creations which have no grounds, stability, point, or value beyond their being expressions of an unharnessed, creative will. To seek grounds, permananence, or any external validation for one's choices would be to lapse inauthentically into the old untruths, the bad lies which attempt to deny the abyssal conditions of life.

So this groundless creating is solipsistic - it is creating in the service of the ceaseless affirmation of the condition of creativity itself: the affirmation of the existence of a will subservient to nothing. And its point is to continually assert (and reassert) and to thereby enhance the conditions of this creativity. (There is nothing outside or beyond it which could justify, legitimate, or give it point; creativity here is not a means to an end, but the end-in-itself.) As Nietzsche takes such creativity, such willing, as the ultimate condition of life, he regards this (willing as an expression of the ultimate power of will) as life-affirming.

How do these notions make art, creativity, and values problematic?

If creativity itself is the point, if the manifesting of creative power is the essence of art, then the outcome of the creative act - art itself (or life as a work of art) - becomes secondary. For one thing, no work of art, nothing fixed, finished, and stabile, can truly grasp, express, or be the creative force or energy itself (which in Nietzschean terms is becoming, not being): only the act is genuine and paramount. So, because of the artwork's finished character it immediately betrays that which it is the expression of, and is thus always condemned to inadequacy. (It is a curious concept of what art should be if no work of art can ever succeed.) In fact, once finished, the artwork - as objective, stabile, done - immediately becomes a challenge to the ultimacy of living creativity, and stands in need of being overcome by ceaseless reaffirmation of the creative act. (So by the Nietzschean model, the more temporary and ephemeral artworks are, the better.) Thus - an ironic twist - when creativity becomes the essence of art, when artworks are, so to speak, not about anything, art itself is not glorified at all, but becomes secondary to what is finally some inaccessible feature of the artist's personality. The cult of the artist emerges.

In addition, if the focus falls upon the creative act, assessment becomes problematic, to say the least. For one thing, what drives the creative act is literally invisible, interior, subjective, incapable of being accessed for purposes of assessment. For another thing, if we look to the completed artwork as an (admittedly inadequate) expression of free subjective undetermined creativity, what grounds for assessing would not immediately violate the subjective freedom of the creative artist? If X is my creation and if being my creation is the whole point, there can be not legitimate bases for judgment (save, perhaps, for any I might postulate.) All of my creations are tautologically my creations (even if I am just recycling or rearranging others' work) and are thus, as mine, automatically good, successful as art. "Good" art becomes whatever an individual has produced, at least insofar as it bears some mark of difference from what others have done and from what the individual has done previously. Hence the postmodernist fetishizing of difference or otherness (as purportedly, what subjective freedom is all about) to the exclusion of all other criteria.

If creativity is the truth about art (and life), we have no basis, then, for any objective distinctions between good or bad art or indeed between art and non-art: art becomes thoroughly solipsistic and self-referential, at the same time we lose hold of any possibility that there is some inherent feature or features about artworks - the finished products - to determine what is good art and what is art at all. If it is true that everything is a fabrication, there's nothing definite we can point to to distinguish fabrications worthy of the name art from everything else. Nor is there any basis, among 'artworks' for meaningful value judgments, since critical judgments too are just groundless postulations. This suggests as well that there's no meaningful distinction between the artist and the critic: after all, everything is interpretation according to postmodernist hermeneutics. The acceptance of these Nietzschean doctrines can be recognized in the displacement of art and literary criticism by cultural studies, by continual attacks on the canon, and by the glorification of popular culture, all of which reflect the belief that we may not disparage any work or values in the name of purportedly objective criteria.

To conclude: we need to distinguish between art and non-art because if we do not so distinguish, art disappears as something recognizable at all. When everything is or can be art, nothing is art, and the idea of art becomes trivial. And we need to also distinguish between good and bad art: to hold that there is an objective (not just asserted) difference between a child's finger painting and a Jackson Pollock. But we can't make these distinctions unless we recognize that the Nietzschean postmodernists are wrong: that art is about more than creativity, that creativity is only a feature of art, and that art - to be significant - is not absolute. To be meaningful and valuable art must be subordinate to the human circumstances which gave rise to it.

I'll be posting the next installment of the "Six Pillars" series this weekend.

Prelude: Perspective on Anglo-American Protestantism - Part 2 - The Sixteenth Century

(NOTE: I know I said this Prelude was going to be in two parts instead of more. I lied. Keeping this portion all in one post through the 20th Century would make it way too long.)

Having covered some of the doctrinal issues at the heart of the dispute which broke Chistendom into warring sects in the early 16th Century, let's get back to the historical taxonomy of Anglo-American Protestantism.

Early 16th Century Evangelism

In 1517, Martin Luther (a German Augustinian monk originally educated as a lawyer) began vocally criticizing the Catholic church's sale of indulgences to finance work on St. Peter's Basilica (among other things, some of them much less savory). His criticisms and challenges to papal authority became broader, more theological, and more public to the point that Pope Leo X called him to account, threatening him with excommunication for heresy in 1520. Matters reached a turning point in April 1521 at the Diet of Worms, at which Luther was officially excommunicated, made anathema, and in effect declared an open target for violence. As a side note, King Henry VIII, who would later split with Rome, was awarded the title "Defender of the Faith" by Pope Leo X for a letter he wrote attacking Luther's heresy as part of all this.

Luther escaped to exile at Wartburg Castle under the protection of Elector Ferdinand III, where he spent nearly a year writing radical religious pamphlets and translating the bible from Greek to German vernacular.

In the modern era, the act of translation seems like a routine and somewhat tedious scholarly undertaking, not radical activism. But until this time (and especially before the advent of the printing press in 1440), the Bible was typically only available in Latin or Greek, and thus only highly educated people could read it for themselves. Everyone else was dependent on this highly-educated class (the Clerisy) for access to scripture, which was exactly how the the Clerisy wanted it. Remember that John Wycliffe, proto-Protestant radical reformer, focused significant effort on translation of the Bible into English in the 14th Century. That was not a theologically or politically neutral act. It was more like a cannon shot fired across the bow of the Church itself. After all, if people can read and interpret scripture for themselves, what do they need priests for?

Exactly.

Luther's tracts and ideas spread through Europe, crystallizing opposition to Catholic institutional authority and corruption. Other reformers, most notably the swiss theologian Ulrich Zwingli, began preaching radicalism. In Wittenberg, monks in Luther's home priory, instigated by the so-called Zwickau Prophets, revolted against their prior, denounced the Church magistracy, and engaged in iconoclasm (destruction of statues, images, and relics). Things were turning violent. Luther returned to Wittenberg and helped restore order there, but the fuse was lit.

In 1524, that fuse had burned down and touched off an explosion of violence. An estimated 300,000 German peasants revolted, many of them looking to Luther's pamphlets for theological justification in throwing off the rule of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther at first gave the peasants some sympathy, but soon repudiated their rebellion and refused to support them. Luther's repudiation split the peasant forces, and ultimately continental Protestantism, into separate camps. Those loyal to Luther and his ideas mostly laid down their weapons. The more radical elements, seeing Luther's repudiation as a betrayal, rejected him and aligned themselves with the more radical reformers. The hold-outs were defeated militarily in May 1525, after which many of them regrouped with other continental radicals and became the Anabaptist Movement. In the United States, we know their modern-day direct denominational descendents as the Amish and Mennonites.

All told, 100,000 people had died in less than two years.

Luther, having sided with the secular authorities to restore order against the radicalism he himself had set in motion, gained the official support of many princes and nobles, cementing a foothold for Lutheranism in Germany that remains to this day. Lutheranism spread across central Europe and into Scandinavia, though Poland and Hungary were re-converted to Catholicism during the Counter-Reformation.

"Lutheran" was originally a pejorative term, by the way. Luther called his theological positions and his church "Evangelical" (literally: "of the gospel").

In the meantime, in England, Luther's ideas found fertile soil among the reform-minded. His tracts were translated into English (along with a new English translation of the Bible by Tyndale), and despite fervent efforts by the Catholic Church to suppress them, reached a wide audience facilitated by the printing press.

However, before we can really dive into the English Reformation and its consequences, we have a couple of stops to make. First is a quick trip back across the Channel, to France, where a young Englishwoman named Anne Boleyn was growing up in the Court of Francois I.

France and Humanism

There had been reformist and radical movements within French Christianity long before the 16th Century. Most notably, the followers of 12th Century radical preacher Peter Waldo, the Waldensians, who were persecuted as heretics for centuries (and were the first to translate the Bible into vernacular French ... the ongoing attempt to route around information and doctrinal control systems is a recurring theme in this whole story).

By the 16th Century, however, the strongest impetus for religious reform in France was coming from forces set in motion within the Catholic Church itself, foremost among which was Humanism. Even Pope Leo X, who called Martin Luther to account for his radicalism and ultimately excommunicated him, was a well-known humanist.

In the modern era, we tend to think of humanism as being a non-religious, or even anti-religious movement emphasizing reason and learning and rejecting doctrinaire faith. However, humanism arose primarily within the Catholic Church as a response to the failings of medieval scholasticism, and the Humanists saw their approach as bringing the classical philosophies of reason in harmony with Christianity. Humanism would later become a major underpinning of the creation of the Jesuit Order and the Counter-Reformation before resurgent scholasticism in the Church would attempt to purge humanism entirely. Among the many churchmen who developed and led humanism in the 15th and 16th Centuries was a Catholic priest and reformer named Erasmus of Rotterdam, the "Prince of Humanists" and one of the most interesting figures of the period.

Erasmus was a vocal advocate of Church reform, and wrote many essays which became instrumental in both the Protestant Reformation and the later Catholic Counter-Reformation. He is most well-known today for his ongoing discussions with Martin Luther, with whom he was initially sympathetic, in particular his defense of free will. Erasmus ultimately stayed within the Church, challenging Protestant doctrinal radicalism while advocating reform and religious tolerance.

"Tolerance" was a byword of the early reign of Francois I in France. Though the king himself had no interest in religious reform, he was an enthusiastic humanist, cultivating an atmosphere of learning and inquiry at court that would thrive under the tutelage of the king's radical sister, Marguerite. Reformist ideas were welcome for discussion in Paris. It also didn't hurt that Luther's evangelicals were such a thorn in the side of Francois' sworn enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

That would all change in 1534, when the king would come to view Protestantism as a direct threat to his rule. But during the time Anne Boleyn was at the French court (1514-1521), serving as maid of honour to two French queens, she was steeped in humanist culture, learning, and religious tolerance. She became a devout Christian in an evangelical humanist vein, as well as a highly-cultured courtier.

On returning to England in 1522, Anne joined the court of Henry VIII in service to Queen Catherine of Aragon. With her charisma and French sophistication, she reportedly took the court by storm and was actively pursued by many noblemen, including Henry himself. At this point, we finally get back to where we started this background narrative: Henry VIII wanted an annulment of his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne, the Pope refused, radical religious elements used this as an opportunity to lead the king into schism, the Acts of Supremacy followed, and the Church of England (and thus the official English Reformation) was born.

The English Reformation

As mentioned in Part 1, the Church of England at first was not particularly Protestant in form or doctrine. It retained almost all of the sacraments and hierarchical structures of its Catholic predecessor. Rather than a Pope, its titular head was the English monarch, while its religious leader was the Archbishop of Canterbury. During Henry VIII's reign, Thomas Cranmer (as Archbishop of Canterbury) effected few reforms, most notably the change of services to vernacular English from Latin.

During the reign of Henry's son and heir, Edward VI, Cranmer instituted many more reforms and wrote the English Book of Common Prayer, containing many evangelical changes to liturgy and doctrine. He was ultimately imprisoned and executed as a heretic by Queen Mary during her attempt to restore Catholicism to England (for which he is venerated as a martyr by many Protestants), but by then the Reformation was deeply entrenched on English soil. The Church of England would remain the official Church of the realm, fully established by the Elizabethan Settlement following Mary's execution. Despite subsequent efforts by Catholic monarchs (e.g. the Stuarts) to undo that fact, so it remained.

But English Protestantism was hardly monolithic or unified. It was born of radical, even antinomian, theological principles, and would necessarily suffer much internal division and dispute. Even during the first days of the English Reformation, violent iconoclastic uprisings were common, against Catholics and even against the new Anglican Church. Anglicanism, in the form of the Church of England, retained much in common with Catholicism both formally and theologically, and was part of the secular power structure. That was bound to cause trouble with more radical reformers, and it wasn't long before that came to pass.

Those who chose to stay in the Anglican Church and reform it from within came to be known as Puritans (originally a pejorative term that does not describe an actual Protestant denomination but instead covers several of them in common). Those who chose to leave the Anglican Church and form their own came to be known as Separatists or Dissenters (also blanket terms, including several denominations). While those who wished to preserve the status quo of the Elizabethan Settlement came to be what we now call Anglicans.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Before we can talk about the Puritans, Separatists/Dissenters, and the English Civil War, we first need to talk about John Calvin.

John Calvin

Calvin (actually, Jean Cauvin) was born in 1509 to a middle class French family in Picardy. He showed great intelligence from an early age and was in training for the priesthood by age 12. By the age of 16 or 17, however, he had left priestly training and begun studying law with the humanist emphasis then prevalent in France. He appears to have been a gifted legal scholar, but his life was apparently filled with personal misery. In 1533, he experienced a religious conversion, broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and became a Protestant activist. When King Francois I began his persecutions of French Protestants (the Huguenots) following the Affair of the Placards in 1534, Calvin was forced to flee to Switzerland. By 1536, he had taken up residence in Geneva and published a defense of his faith and statement of doctrine titled, Institutes of the Christian Religion.

To say the book was a religious blockbuster would be putting it mildly. It was a sensational hit that had far-reaching impact not only on Christian religious thinking throughout Europe, but even left its stamp on the written form of the French language for generations.

There are several important doctrinal positions which originate in Calvin's writings, and have become foundational for all Reform (or "Calvinist") Churches:

The Regulative Principle of Worship - Calvin held that the only permissable forms and content of worship were those explicitly contained in scripture. Everything else was prohibited. In practice, this meant that even musical instruments were banned from worship services, which tended to appear very spartan in constrast to the pomp and display of Catholic masses. Taking the prohibition on "graven images" very seriously, Calvinist Protestants tended to engage in iconoclasm.

Covenant Theology - God's nature with respect to His creation is necessarily a volutuntary condescention in which God has made a series of promises to and demands of man. By virtue of existing as God's creation, man is party to these covenants and must abide by them as existential conditions. They are threefold. First is the Covenant of Redemption, by which Christ gave himself in sacrifice to fulfill the necessity of atonement for the sins of man and in return God grants redemption to those who trust and have faith in Christ. Second, the Covenant of Works promises life for obedience to God and death for disobedience. Third, the Covenant of Grace grants eternal life for those who are redeemed through faith in Christ. Calvin further elaborates on this with an emphasis on the relationship between Law and Gospel.

The Five Points (TULIP) - Though Calvin himself did not articulate these as such, these five principles have come to be regarded as essential to Calvinist theology. The are:

Total Depravity - Because of Adam's Fall into sin, everyone is bord into the service of sin, inclined to reject God, and driven by their nature to be sinful. The "total" here doesn't mean maximum evil for everyone. Rather, it means that the sinful state of our existence permanently effects every part of us, and we are not free to escape it without God's grace.

Unconditional Election - God has unilaterally chosen those to whom he will extend his mercy and grace from Eternity, and only the Elect can be saved through Christ. Everyone else is damned to suffer the wrath of God. It's important to note here that the word "elect" is used here in the sense of selection. We're going to come back to this, because it's transmogrified over the years into a major component of Modern Universalism.

Limited Atonement - When Jesus died on the cross, he offered atonement for the sins of the Elect in substitution for their own individual atonement, so long as the Elect become one with Christ through faith. In other words, Christ died to save you from your sins, but this atonement is limited strictly to the Elect. Nobody else.

Irresistible Grace - If God has chosen to save you (i.e. you are one of the Elect), you will be irresistably brought to faith and a state of grace. The will of God cannot be thwarted by man or circumstance.

Perseverence of the Saints - If God has chosen to save you, you will continue stalwartly in your faith and righteousness. Those who apparently fall away from faith and righteousness either did not possess true faith, or have not been elected by God. It's important to note here that "saint" is not used in a Catholic sense of canonization here, but rather in the sense of one sanctified, or made holy. Protestants (especially early ones) referred to anyone who was exceptionally faithful, holy, and righteous as a saint.

Calvin, of course, was also well-known for his positions advocating ontological determinism in theology, which can be seen in many of the doctrines above. This is often misrepresented as Calvin's advocacy of a kind of mechanical, clockwork determinism in the universe with no room for human choice. Rather, Calvin (and Luther), asserted the unilateral sovereignty of God over existence. What God wills cannot help but be. Therefore, everything is necessarily predestined by God's will. God pre-ordained and has foreknowledge of everything.

One might suppose from this (as the many critics and even some proponents of Calvinism have) that human choice is therefore irrelevant and free will cannot exist or be efficacious. Rather, in Calvin's conception, the important realization from understanding predestination is that God already knows what you're going to choose, not deny you the choice, and elected to extend his mercy and grace to you on that basis, before you were even born. It's not that you don't have free will, but that God's power is the source of everything.

Calvin didn't originate this idea (Augustine did), and it's a mistake to give it centrality in our understanding of Calvin's theology. Calvin worked hard to explain predestination, but he did not make it central to his theology. The lynchpin of Calvin's theology was justification by grace alone: one can only be saved and made holy by God's unilateral extension of His grace. There is no bargaining with Him over it, and no way to pick the lock on the Pearly Gates. God decides.

A few hundred years later, it's sort of difficult to see why this was such a big deal. Consider that prior to the Reformation, Christians spent an inordinate amount of time and energy doing things to try and "buy their way" into Heaven: purchasing indulgences, doing penance, endowing churches, and that sort of thing (a bit like resume-polishing before a big job interview). Calvin and Luther said, essentially, that stuff doesn't matter. The power of salvation and justification is God's alone, you can't save yourself, you can't talk your way into His grace, and it's foolish and sinful to try. He already knows you and whether you're worth saving. If you ARE worth saving, you'll be spending your energy on being faithful in Christ and doing God's work in the world, not grinding through the spiritual equivalent of SAT Prep or wheedling for a higher grade when you mess up an exam. You will know the Elect because of their faith and righteousness, just as God has always known them and thus selected them from before time.

These were very attractive and influential ideas at the time, and they would have an enormous impact on Protestantism in England and Scotland. Cranmer was an admirer, among many others.

Calvin's impact on the continent was also powerful. His ideas became central to the Huguenot movements (French Reform churches) and Swiss churches. He was hailed as a major spiritual and intellectual leader of the Reformation, though he ultimately broke with Martin Luther in Luther's ongoing dispute with Zwingli. He gained substantial and uncontested secular power in Geneva, where he had created and led the Consistorial Court and founded a university. He used this power to provide shelter for English and Scottish Protestants seeking refuge from the Marian Persecutions (Queen Mary's attempts to restore Catholicism to the British Isles). Among the refugees Calvin sheltered was a renegade Catholic priest named John Knox, who would go on to start the Scottish Reformation and found the Presbyterian movement.

And so we finally return to the sceptred isles, where we'll stay until we cross the Atlantic to the New World.

Late 16th Century

Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne in 1558, succeeding her half-sister, "Bloody" Mary I. Because Henry VIII's marriage to Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon, had been nullified by the Church of England and Act of Parliament in the 1530s (so Henry could marry Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn) Mary's ascension to the throne in 1553 had included an Act of Parliament which restored Catherine and thus Mary to legitimacy and consequently made Elizabeth a bastard. This was reversed when Elizabeth became queen, but meant that full religious rapproachment with the Catholic Church was not politically viable even if she had wanted it. As a result, another Act of Supremacy was passed and the Church of England restored as independent of Rome.

Elizabeth was raised Protestant but was not doctrinaire. Rather, she was a highly-educated, moderate, and pragmatic ruler in both secular and religous affairs. She inherited a country wracked with problems, and her primary interest was securing stability. She could not afford ongoing civil conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The Catholics had been in control again (tenuously) under Mary. But the Marian Exiles had returned from the continent on Mary's death, full of Calvinism and zeal for radical reform. As queen, she engineered the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which re-established the Church of England on a modified, toned-down Reform (Calvinist) theology with room for Catholic beliefs, revoked the harsh laws proposed against Catholics, removed anti-Papal language from the litany, and made membership and attendance in the Church of England mandatory to all her subjects under the Act of Uniformity. Thus was Anglicanism truly born in a form we would find recognizable today.

Although the Elizabethan Settlement drew the English Reformation to a close and quieted most open religious conflict, it was at heart a compromise. Henry VIII's Church of England was essentially Catholic, but without Latin or the Pope. Edward the VI's was very Calvinist. Elizabeth's was a bit of both. Like most compromises, it truly satisfied nobody and merely pushed the more difficult issues below the surface where they could (and would) fester for years, bickering over trivialities like ministerial vestments, before erupting in paroxysms of violence. This is another pattern we'll see again.

Puritanism

Many English Protestants were relieved to see the Church of England restored and the Catholics deposed, but found that the theological and organizational reforms therein did not go nearly far enough to suit their tastes. Many of them agitated for significant reforms in Church governance and doctrine, with only limited success.

Reformers within the church, referring to themselves as "the Godly," focused on two major changes. First, they sought to replace the episcopal church hierarchy (with its quasi-catholic structure and bishoprics) with presbyterian polities: from conventicles (meetings of laypeople) to councils of elders (presbyters) in a sort of bottom-up republican organization. As they envisioned it, closely following the Reform (or Calvinist) model some of them experienced in Geneva, authority at the local level would be by a board of pious elder parishioners called a session or consistory, answerable to a higher assembly to which they would nominate members, called a presbytery or classis. These would then be grouped into a synod in similar fashion, and synods would join together to form a general assembly as necessary. This was predicated on a reading of the Bible in which all Christians together are the church and priesthood equally, with certain pious elders nominated to share governance of the flock. Obviously, this method of governance was at odds with the aristocratic monarchy governing England at the time, and was considered borderline seditious. It probably also sounds eerily familiar to citizens of most modern Western nations.

Second, the reformers sought to change the Book of Common Prayer to remove what they considered to be impure doctrines and reword the liturgies to be much more Calvinist in form. These proposed reforms were numerous, from sabbatarianism (strict observance of the sabbath) to the abolition of wearing clerical vestments to the removal of what they considered "popery and superstitions." This strenuous activism to purify the church earned the reformers the epithet "Puritans," bestowed on them by their opponents.

Though the Puritans were almost uniformly Calvinist in their theology, it's a mistake to assume that bishops and theologians who opposed them were not. In fact, many of the staunchest opponents of the Puritan reforms were also Calvinist in outlook. The issues were forced to a head in the early 1570s when the Anglican bishops sought to enforce uniform subscription to the Book of Common Prayer along with the 39 Articles. A number of prominent Puritans reacted strongly to this move. Thomas Wilcox and John Field wrote what is now considered a definitive statement of Puritanism, Admonition to Parliament, in 1572 to chastise the bishops and prevent the requirement for uniform subscription to the Book of Common Prayer by all clergy. This touched off a major controversy in the Church of England, and though Wilcox and Field were even imprisoned for a year over it all, there were ultimately too many Puritans within the church for the uniform subscription requirement to be strictly enforced.

Puritan activism renewed in the early 1580s, with more strident calls for presbyterianism and even congregationalism (authority held by independent congregations) in church governance and an effort to replace the Book of Common Prayer with the Genevan Book of Order. Once again, these efforts failed. By the late 1580s, Puritan frustration and activism had become much more strident with the publishing of the Marprelate Tracts, denouncing the Anglican bishops as agents of the anti-Christ and "ministers of damnation." The resulting backlash and crackdown left several leading Puritans imprisoned and facing trial in the Star Chamber. Numerous others made the decision to leave the Church of England and go their own, separate way. John Greenwood and Henry Barrowe were executed for advocating separatism (considered a form of sedition, because the Act of Uniformity required all English citizens to be members of the Church of England), and Parliament passed the Religion Act and Popish Recusants Act, which gave those worshipping outside the CoE three months to join the church or abjure the realm in forfeit, failing to do either on pain of death. No Puritans were ever prosecuted under these nominally anti-Catholic Acts, but they existed as an ever-present threat. Nonconformists (such as the Brownist Separatists) still left the church, but generally kept quiet about it after Greenwood and Barrowe were executed.

English Catholics, of which there were still many, were hardly quiet during this time as well. There were several rebellions and even a plot to replace Elizabeth on the throne with Mary, Queen of Scots. This kept tensions high, and contributed to a general sense of paranoia on the part of Puritans and Separatists on the lookout for creeping Popery.

Moving into the end of the 16th Century, the Puritans had adopted a lower profile, focusing their zeal on the cultivation of individual rather than collective or national piety and righteousness. Though they had not succeeded in their many attempts to reform the Anglican Church from within, most of them remained and their number grew so much that by the opening of the 17th Century, they had become a well-known (and increasingly successful) stereotype with a distinct culture and religious outlook. They had also had a large impact on the educational establishment, entrenching themselves at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the more radical Congregationalist Separatists had absconded abroad, including a group calling themselves the Pilgrims, who first left England for Amsterdam, and then later for the wilderness of North America.

Scotland and Presbyterianism

The progression of the Reformation in Scotland was far more tumultuous and violent than in England. The Scots had been aligned with France for some time, and had seen strong French Humanist influences. However, Protestant Evangelism was making inroads and at the same time was being ruthlessly suppressed. Henry VIII had been trying to bring Scotland over to alliance with England by arranging the betrothal of the infant Scots queen (Mary) to his son, Edward. Local reaction against the match was strong, however, and the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Cardinal Beaton, used the opportunity to seize power, repudiated the betrothal, and arranged to have Mary betrothed to the French Dauphin (the future Francois II) instead. Spurned in his ambition and outraged at the broken betrothal promise, Henry promptly invaded Scotland, devastating and then occupying the lowlands, where English Protestantism swiftly spread.

In 1546, Beaton arrested and executed a Calvinist preacher named George Wishart. Outraged supporters immediately stormed Beaton's castle and murdered him, occupying the fortress for a year and calling for Henry's assistance. Joining them during the occupation was a former student of Wishart's, a young Catholic priest named John Knox. Henry attempted to relieve these "Castelians," but the local Scots called on the French for aid. French forces seized the castle and pressed the rebels (including Knox) into service as galley slaves before Henry could reach them. The damage had been done to Scots Catholicism, however. For everywhere that Henry went, Protestant activism was sure to follow.

Chained to an oar and suffering increasingly poor health, Knox spent a little over a year and a half as a galley slave. We don't know how he got free, but in 1549 he arrived in England, where he began preaching Protestant sermons, married, was appointed a preacher and royal chaplain to young King Edward VI, and ran afoul of Archbishop Cranmer. With the death of Edward and ascension of Bloody Mary, Knox was forced to flee England for Geneva, where he met and became a student of John Calvin. Over the next five years, he preached, issued withering condemnations of Mary I and female rulership in general, and renewed his connections with Scotland (then under the regency of Marie de Guise-Lorraine, dowager queen).

In 1559, after Elizabeth I attained the English throne, Knox returned to Scotland via England, where immediately on his arrival he was declared outlaw and a large number of Protestant supporters summoned by the dowager queen to Stirling for punishment. Instead, Knox led them to the fortified town of Perth, where he began preaching to the crowd and incited a riot. Marie gathered an army of French troops and loyal nobles and marched on Perth, which the Protestants evacuated rather than be beseiged. When Mary garrisoned the town with troops in French pay, the Earl of Argyll and Lord Moray repudiated her and joined forces with Knox, greatly improving his position. With their help, he re-occupied St. Andrews and ultimately all of Edinburgh, calling on England to come to the aid of their fellow Protestants. Protestant forces from all over Scotland rose up and flocked to Knox and his Lords of the Congregation. Marie called for French assistance. That was the final straw for most of the Scots nobility, who immediately deposed her as Regent, locking her in prison where she died shortly thereafter. English troops soon arrived and hostilities ceased.

Knox had, in a very short time, instigated a full-blown religious revolutionary overthrow.

In August of 1560, the Scottish Parliament called on Knox and five other ministers to develop a new Confession of Faith for Scotland. Soon thereafter, the jurisdiction of the Pope in Scotland was abolished, the celebration of Catholic mass banned, and the reformed faith officially adopted for all of Scotland. Knox would then spend months writing his Book of Discipline to describe the organization and liturgies of the new church. This church was to be run congregationally in a presbyterian polity. Each congregation would be self-supporting and elect its own minister. Overall authority would be delegated to a panel of Superintendents rather than Bishops. A nationa educational system to teach the principles of universality would be created. And parts of the law would be placed under exclusive ecclesiastic jurisdiction.

Sounds like a complete win for Knox and the radicals, doesn't it? Not quite. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

To pay for all this, Knox proposed using the seized properties of the Catholic Church. The Scots nobility, who had used Knox' revolution as an opportunity to grab every Church asset they could lay their hands on, weren't terribly keen on that part of the plan. And then there was Mary, Queen of Scots. Though she had been a small child when all of this started, shipped off to France at the age of five, and married to the French heir to the throne, she had just turned 18 and was returning to rule her kingdom. Not only that, but her husband had in the meantime become Le Roi de France, Francois II, making her Queen Consort to a very powerful, very Catholic monarch, who had then himself died, leaving her free to return home.

The Scottish Parliament considered Knox' Book of Discipline, and then elected to let discretion have the better part of valor, leaving the decision up to the returning queen regnant.

In other words, they punted.

Mary, in a pragmatic acknowledgement of her lack of significant temporal power and to the frustration of the Scottish Catholics, chose to accept the newly-ascendent Protestant order as a fait accompli. She even strengthened ties with England (as presumptive heir to the English throne) and persecuted a few rich Catholics.

What she did NOT do was give the thumbs-up to Knox and his Book of Discipline. Frustrated in his ambitions by yet another queen, Knox, true to form, began preaching against Mary. This did not win him friends and influence among the nobility, who knew on which side their bread was buttered.

All was not lost, however. The political situation meant that Protestant Scotland had no Act of Uniformity. Individual congregations were free to organize and worship however they wished, so long as they were Protestant Christian. Many of them chose to do so according to the Book of Discipline. This is how the Presbyterian Church came into being, of which John Knox, radical revolutionary and exponent of violent overthrow, is the acknowledged progenitor.

---

In our next installment, we'll follow this mess into the 17th Century, where it embroils England in Civil War and results in the founding of the Massachussets Bay Colony.

Prelude: Perspective on Anglo-American Protestantism - Part 1

Before I get into dissecting each of the Six Pillars of Modern Universalism in detail (something my current workload is interfering with - sorry for the delay), it's important that we gain some historical perspective on how Protestant theology has evolved with and impacted Anglo-American cultural attitudes since the 16th Century.

This is a subject much too broad and complex for a thorough treatment here. It could easily fill several volumes, and will take two long posts for me to get through the short version. If you'd like to explore it in more depth and have a tendency to masochism, I strongly recommend Wylie's The History of Protestantism.

In the Beginning...Sort Of

In 1534, King Henry VIII culminated a five-year struggle by formally repudiating Roman Catholic authority and establishing himself as the supreme head of an independent Church of England under the Act of Supremacy, ostensively so he could engage in a bit of serial monogamy. Though previously a staunch Catholic and defender of the Roman Church (with the support and assistance of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey), Henry came under the sway of several charismatic Protestants, including Anne Boleyn. He also wished to annul his dynastic (and very Catholic) marriage to Catherine of Aragon in pursuit of a male heir, and Anne was reportedly quite fetching in the bargain. Protestant reformers at court seem to have used this as an opportunity to advise the King into schism with Rome.

Kings prior to Henry had navigated their way through similar marital difficulties without resorting to schismatic religious extremity. Why did Henry suddenly feel the need to kick the Pope to the metaphorical curb of Dover? Obviously, there must already have been some theological fulcrum on which so opportunistic a political a move could gain leverage. That fulcrum was widespread theological dissent throughout the British Isles, and the force which acted on it was a Lutheran evangelical named Thomas Cromwell.

These are surface details, and ultimately distract from the real doctrinal transformation which began in English Christianity in the 14th Century (and possibly even before). The Act of Supremacy was not the founding of Protestantism in England. In fact, Henry VIII himself never became a "Protestant" as such, even after he became supreme head of the CoE, though the church did adopt many Protestant positions starting with the reign of Henry's very Protestant son (by his very Catholic third wife...Anne having 'lost her head' after giving birth to Elizabeth), Edward VI.

Confused yet?

Though the start of the Protestant Reformation is usually marked by historians at Martin Luther's nailing of his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints' Church, Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, English theological radicalism significantly pre-dates Luther, starting in earnest with John Wycliffe and the Lollard Movement as far back as the 1380s, and possibly even to Pelagius (of the eponymous Pelagian Controversy) in the Fifth Century.

Wycliffe was an early, maybe even the first, proponent of what came to be the defining doctrinal beliefs of Protestantism in opposition to Catholic authority. He also was responsible for the full translation of the Bible into vernacular English in 1384, making scripture directly accessible to the ordinary Englishmen (thus turning "the jewel of the clergy (into) the toy of the laity"). Between Lollardy and Lutheranism, by the 1530s England was rife with religious dissent and spoiling for a confrontation with Rome.

Irreconcilable Differences

What are these doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Protestantism?

First of all, they're all Christians. As such, they share core beliefs in God, the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the redemption and eternal life in God's Kingdom which Christ's sacrifice on the cross opened up to mankind.

They also share a number of issues of concern. Foremost among which are the natures of Sin, Repentance, Redemption, Grace, Salvation, Faith, Justification, and Virtue. Remember these, because we're going to be coming back to them many times, even after we've crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a few centuries, and left the associated religious beliefs far behind.

Where these Christian sects differ (and have repeatedly schismed over the years) are first on issues of the source and structure of religious authority, and second on the nature and means of salvation through God's justification.

Authority

The Roman Catholic church being ecumenical and, well, Catholic (with a monolithic hierarchy to maintain doctrinal and lineal continuity of apostolic succession from Jesus himself) asserts its universal, supreme, and infallible religious authority as established directly by God through Christ and then through the Apostle Peter. To make communion with Christ and be saved, one must do so through the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, its ordained representatives, its liturgies and sacraments, or not at all.

Protestants, on the other hand, believe that the only authority on God's will is, well, God (Christ included by extension), and the only means we have of understanding that authority and its meaning is directly from the Bible as God's Word (this is often referred to as the doctrine of sola scriptura: scripture only as ultimate religious authority by virtue of not being able to talk to God directly, e.g. gnosis). Thus, the Christian Church, for Protestants, becomes the entire invisible fellowship of all Christians individually saved. Knowing the will of God and acting on it in one's life is the individual responsibility of a magisterium of one - you - and the means of accomplishing this is through your direct understanding of God and Christ through study of the Bible. Religious institutions, in this view, are inherently fallible and do not constitute ultimate authorities on the will of God.

Where there is only one Roman Catholic Church, the structures of Protestant Churches are myriad and diverse. Some are arranged in a nearly-Catholic Episcopal structure with very similar liturgies and sacraments (Lutherans), and even Bishops (Anglican). Others are governed by democratic polities (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Reformed). Others are led by charismatic personalities (Pentacostals), and still others have no discernable authoritative structure at all.

This issue of authority, and the persistant, active, and radical anti-authoritarianism of Anglo-American Protestants, is central to understanding how Modern Universalism evolved as a belief system and succeeded in conquering much of the world. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in the modern era, all extant anti-authoritarian ideologies are descendents of this dispute originating in Christianity.

Justification and Salvation

Christianity, unlike the Judaic tradition from which its central myths derive, is deeply concerned with the lasting consequences of Adam's defiance of God's word when he ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is the source of the Christian concept of Original Sin: that all people are born into a state of separation from God, perhaps including a propensity depravity or even an innate corruption of the soul, due to Adam's Fall from Grace. Consider:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned —

To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.

But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 5:12-21

This notion of Original Sin is unique to Christianity, and central to its belief system since about the Second Century, A.D. Because of Adam's Fall, everybody is removed from the Grace of God (Fallen Nature), doomed by descent and association to remain separate from God and barred from eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven after death. It is a stain on us which we are born with and cannot escape. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven after we die, we must first be cleansed of our sin and corruption so that we may return to the state of grace lost so long ago. It took the sacrifice of Christ on the cross in intercession with God to open the way for people to be absolved of their sins, including the Original Sin, and be saved for eternal life in the Kingdom. Prior to Christ's sacrifice, this salvation was impossible.

As a result, Christians are concerned about how they can be "saved": remove themselves from a state of sin (atonement), enter God's grace through Christ, be "justified" by God (made righteous and holy), avoid an eternity of punishment in hellfire, and gain eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven. Soteriological opinions on how to go about doing this however, or even the nature of the states of sin, grace, atonement, justification, or salvation themselves, are far from uniform.

The Catholic conception of salvation and justification was described in detail at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), itself a response to Protestant "heresies" proliferating at that time. This articulation of Catholic doctrine reflects the official position on salvation then and now:

For Catholics, salvation and God's justification are an ongoing process of transformation from sin to holiness, dependent on faith and good works. To be made righteous (justified), be saved, and enter into the grace of God, one must be baptized, cultivate faith and obedience to God's will, perform the sacraments to become one with Christ through his Church, atone for one's sins, avoid committing mortal sins, and progress on the path of righteousness. In this doctrine, you begin wholly on the outs with God and have to spend your life doing things to get back in his good graces, gaining salvation points. Hopefully, you've done a good enough job that by the time you die, infusing yourself with righteousness, you are accepted in His Kingdom for eternity.

The downside of this is that by being faithful, you aren't automatically saved. And you can undo all this work of making yourself righteous by committing a mortal sin and failing to go out of your way to atone for it. It's a very "walk the talk" kind of approach. It also means that the process of your salvation is a sort of cooperative mutual undertaking and negotiation by both you and God, necessarily mediated by the Church in order to maintain connection to Christ.

In theological circles this is known as "synergism."

In contrast, Reform theologians of the 16th Century (notably Luther and Calvin) rejected the idea that one's salvation and justification should be at all dependent, even in mediation, on a corrupt institution of man (e.g. the Roman Catholic Church, then embroiled in controversy over its policies on priestly malfeasance and selling indulgences: pre-emptive atonement for sins not yet committed). Salvation is a matter between God and his people individually, they argued. Further, to suggest that man can exercise any control over God's will in the bestowal of His justification is to reject God's omnipotence and arrogate oneself to the divine position: itself a heinous sin.

You can probably see now how this connects to the issue of authority discussed above.

In this view, the cleansing of sin, grant of justification, and bestowal of God's grace is by God's will alone. Through his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus took away the sins of the world and gained the possibility of justification for man. Man can only then gain the possibility of God's justification and ultimate salvation by becoming one with Christ, something that can only happen through faith. But the ultimate grant of that justification is still God's alone. Not only that, but salvation therfore becomes an event, the unilateral exercise of God's will toward the faithful in Christ, and not an ongoing process or negotiation. Thus faith can receive salvation by instrumentality, but cannot cause it.

Theologically, this is the doctrine of "divine monergism."

Which all may seem like splitting hairs if you haven't got a dog in this hunt. But let me assure you that this issue is of overwhelming importance in the history of Christendom and the development of Western culture and politics. As Martin Luther said, "This one firm rock, which we call the Doctrine of Justification, is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness ... if this article stands, the Church stands; if it falls, the Church falls."

If the Church falls, and it arguably did just that if we mean that it no longer unified Christendom after the early 1500s, what then?

In Part 2, coming up next, we'll continue to look at history of what the early Protestants believed and the many and various permutations those beliefs and their organizational expressions followed as they evolved and migrated through time and space to the present. The Church of England, for instance, falls somewhere between the Pope and John Calvin on these issues, leading to more shenanigans in 1559 and 1662. By the time we get to Methodism in the 19th century there are so many variations and cross-fertilizations that we'll have to skim over lots of detail.

Then we'll get back to the Six Pillars of Modern Universalism with enough historical perspective to understand where they came from. I promise.

Some time ago, Mencius Moldbug wrote a series of articles which got me thinking in depth about the nature of our regnant orthodoxy. He proposes (without much elaboration) that modern western liberalism, which in its current incarnation I'm going to refer to from this point forward as Modern Universalism, is a direct lineal descendent of Reform Christianity (sometimes referred to as Calvinism) via North American Mainline Protestantism and the Progressive movement.

That's a provocative thesis, especially since Modern Universalism as it stands today is generally anti-religious and anti-Christian in many of its ideological stances. Telling a Berkeley hippie liberal that he's the modern doctrinal inheritor of the Puritans is unlikely to be gladly received.

Yet, there is no denying that all the current manifestations of Modern Universalism (political correctness, egalitarianism, democratic antinomianism, Rawlsian social justice, welfare statism, autonomy theory, etc.) are closely related to core doctrines which trace their lineage all the way back to John Calvin and his Reform contemporaries. As one illustration of this, Mencius points us to a 1942 Time Magazine article, "American Malvern." The article notes, at a point midway through the Second World War, the "radical internationalist" program of a large group of mainline Protestant Christian leaders. Without quoting the whole thing (it's a short read - go check it out), note the combination of two things: "Super-Protestant" and a "sensational" and "radical" program of political collectivism and internationalism.

I put "sensational" and "radical" in quotes here because that's how Time refers to the manifesto points proposed by these churchmen. To the modern ear, however, they sound like run-of-the-mill, uncontroversial US government policies which have been in place for decades.

Oops. I think we just caught a glimpse of the Puritan Behind the Curtain.

What makes this thesis so provocative is that, if Modern Universalism really is the direct descendent of Reform Christianity via Mainline Protestantism and Progressivism, then our current political dichotomy - liberal vs. conservative - is essentially a religious conflict, not political. Not only that, but it is the continuation of a religious conflict which has embroiled the English-speaking world since before the English Civil War.

It also means that the United States has been a crypto-theocracy since at least the beginning of the 20th Century if not the 17th, and the inherent liberalism of our entire system of government constitutes a state religion, sans deity. How's that for a finger in the eye of liberal sanctimony? Though, really, this shouldn't be at all surprising. The method has precedents. After all, John Locke basically created Social Contract Theory by omitting all the biblical references from the Calvinist Covenants.

Every religion has its core doctrines: axiomatic articles of faith or maxims on which the religion is founded and without which it fails. Islam has its Pillars and Calvinism its Points. We should expect that, if Modern Universalism really is the present incarnation of Reform Christianity, it will have its own doctrinal orthodoxies on which it stands. More importantly, these orthodoxies will have traceable roots leading back to their antecedents in Mainline Protestantism, Progressivism, Massachussetts Puritanism, and ultimately back to the Christian Reformation itself.

Looking closely, we do indeed find this to be the case.

The Six Pillars of Modern Universalism

When we look at the core premises of Modern Universalism, we find surprising consistency across not only various factions within the United States, from the ruling elite down to the rank and file citizens and radical activists of all sects, but also internationally. Following on the chaos of World War II, Modern Universalism has conquered the world and remade it in its own image.

As an example of its prevalence, consider that whenever we hear the description "moderate" in relation to some domestic or international position, this usually denotes "Universalist" with a decidedly positive valence. Those who dispute the truth of these Pillars are cast as "extremists," evildoers who seek to unleash sin on the face of the Earth and must be stamped out with extreme prejudice.

Modern Universalists in all their various flavors may argue over interpretive details, but on the six basic pillars which support their worldview, they are virtually unanimous. Unanimity, however, does not imply consistency, as we shall see.

Those six pillars can be described as follows:

(1) Equality
Everybody is by nature the same in status, right, and dignity.

(2) Pacifism
"Violence never solved anything."

(3) Election
That which is good must be chosen, and in being chosen becomes the right and good.

(4) Progress
It is necessity for the human condition to make constant progress toward perfection.

(5) Autonomy
The primacy of individual self-determination.

(6) Social Justice
The form of society and its institutions must express and uphold the principles outlined in the first five Pillars.

Every one of these Pillars is considered by Modern Universalists be uncontroversially and self-evidently true, good, and right. They might be true, but then again, they might not. Their goodness is a matter of debate. They are certainly far from self-evident. Coming up, I'm going to explore the Six Pillars individually, looking at each for its Modern Universalist form and practice, its implications and contradictions, and its historic derivation from the doctrines of Reform Christianity to the present day.

Among the side effects of my having spent a great deal of time recently traveling around the world for business purposes (aside from boosting my mileage accounts and keeping me from regularly updating this blog), is that I've been watching lots of episodes of The Dog Whisperer.

No, really. It turns out that there are only two or three TV channels with English programming in most of the places I've been hanging out lately, so when I have some downtime and want to zone out, I'm typically left with either HBO or NatGeo's periodic Cesar Millan marathons. I can only watch so many crap movies before my brain starts to leak out my ears, so that leaves Cesar.

If you haven't seen The Dog Whisperer, here's a quick summary: people have pet dogs which display all kinds of problematic behaviors, from aggression to random destruction to self-injury to incessant barking to, well, just about any sort of irritating, crazy canine misbehavior you can imagine. Enter Cesar Millan, who has made a lifelong study of dogs and seems to have an intuitive understanding of canine psychology. More importantly, he's also a keen observer of human behavior as well. As you might expect, most dog problems are actually people problems.

This is because dogs are pack animals, programmed by evolution and breeding to respond to their place in the pack order, and communicating among one another in uniquely doggy ways. The people in their lives often try to relate to them as quasi-people rather than dogs, projecting their human assumptions about behavior onto their non-human pets, which causes the dogs confusion and fear. As Cesar often points out, every dog pack has a leader. In its relationships with people, if the dog doesn't see a clear pack leader he assumes he's it. That can be a very difficult and fearful psychological position for a dog to find itself in, especially when the reality is that he's just a dog in a people world. Thus the crazy and irritating behavior.

Watching Cesar quickly sum up each new situation, establishing a rapport and dominance with the dogs, and then analyzing and diagnosing the human variables in the equation is highly educational. The guy is really, really good and his masterful psychological insights apply to the people as much as the dogs involved. Though to be fair the situations are usually pretty simple once you know what to look for. They typically follow this pattern:

1) Dog is living with people who either treat it like a retarded, emotionally-needy human, project all their hang-ups and insecurities onto it, keep it confined and inactive, ignore it, indulge it indiscriminately, or all of the above.

2) The dog, faced with such confusing and unnatural conditions, becomes psychologically unbalanced. This is displayed in a variety of ways, from neuroticism to aggression. There's also quite a bit of variety in how extreme the misbehavior and psychological problems get and how long they go on before desperation drives the people involved to contact Cesar.

3) Cesar enters the picture, watches the dog(s) and the people both separately and together, diagnosing problems.

4) Cesar establishes a calm but direct physical dominance over the dog. This is done non-verbally using body language and physical interaction which the dog instinctually understands. Essentially, he communicates with the dog on a level the dog can actually understand, from a perspective the dog can relate to, rather than expecting the dog to decode unfathomable and capricious human whims.

5) Cesar then has the dog's owner establish the same sort of dominance. This is sometimes done right away, or sometimes the dog is strenuously exercised first. Cesar emphasizes the following order of interaction with dogs: exercise, discipline, affection.

6) In a surprisingly short time, the dog's behavior seems to miraculously rectify. Sometimes Cesar uses the introduction of a problem dog to his own personal dog pack as a therapeutic exercise to effect this.

7) Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole process is how transformed the dog owners are as well. Part of this is certainly connected to the release and resolution of their frustration and other emotional responses to the dysfunctional relationship they had with their pets. But more importantly, many of them discover within themselves a satisfaction and empowerment in learning to effectively assert themselves with their pets in a constructive way.

Some of these episodes can be deeply powerful on an emotional level. One woman who has spent her life in fear and passivity makes a major breakthrough toward her own psychological well-being in the process of learning how to be a pack leader for her dog. Another has problems with a service dog she has been training for her own needs, and in the process of working to resolve the dog's behavioral problems reaches a point of psychological healing where she doesn't really need the service dog so much anymore.

But this isn't a TV program review. It's about to become social commentary. You might want to go pour yourself a drink before we continue. Actually, make it a double.

Fundamentally, the problems Cesar Millan grapples with on his show boil down to the incompatibility of human expectations and behaviors with the realities of canine nature. Dogs are dogs, and people are people. For instance, people will often show their dogs affection when they perceive that the dogs are upset about something. This is a natural human instinct in calming other people close to us when they are upset. With dogs, however, all it serves to do is further unbalance the dog's already unbalanced state of mind. Affection does not calm an upset dog. To be calm and balanced, the dog needs to know that the pack leader is calm, balanced, and in full control. If no pack leader is in evidence or showing signs of not being in control (e.g. the human is not acting like a calm, pack leader, but is instead being conciliatory to the dog), then the dog must be the pack leader. As pack leader, the dog is NOT calm, and thus the whole situation spins out of control.

Cesar makes a compelling case that this is an essential property of canine existence. Moreover, the needs of the dogs in question differ from breed to breed, as some breeds (especially working and hunting breeds) are high-energy and some (especially smaller breeds) are insecure, etc. Individual dogs also have their own particular, inherent personalities, which must be addressed specifically.

As Cesar often says, "Never work against Mother Nature."

Most dog problems result because of people trying to do exactly that.*

That's all well and good when it comes to rehabilitating dogs. But what about people?

I think it's fair to say that Mother Nature has a few things to do with human behavior as well. And yet, we seem to work very hard against her, denying our inherent natures at every opportunity. Our expectations of human behavior have become radically out of synch to the realities of human nature. The result, as we should expect, is widespread psychological imbalance, pathological behavior, frustration, and stress. I don't need to start romanticizing plains Indian bands, list stress morbidity statistics, or make you sit through the self-important tedium of Koyaanisqatsi for you to recognize the truth of this.

It's all around you. Everywhere. So ubiquitous that most of us take for granted that that's just how it is, like water to a fish. Modern life is stressful, frustrating, and confusing.

For the better part of a century now, and perhaps longer, modern western civilization has been predicated on some basic assumptions like these:

1) Individual autonomy is the highest individual and social good,
2) Individual and social identity and worth are therefore only defined and valuated by autonomous choices,
3) We are (or should be) all equal in our capacity for the exercise of autonomy,
4) Anything unchosen is therefore of either no value or has negative vale (as an obstacle to autonomy or the equal exercise of autonomy - ascribing value to the unchosen is considered morally corrupt this schema),
5) The moral valence of individual choices only has meaning in the pursuit of individual autonomy (only the chosen can be good, and only if it furthers individual autonomy).

This is the dominant secular Arminianism of our age. Free to be You and Me.

If that sounds a bit abstract for you, consider this: it is an inherent property of human existence that we are genetically determined to be male or female. Our sex is not chosen, it's a preconditional given, with many, many, many phenotypical consequences, physical and behavioral. Males tend to be larger, stronger, and more aggressive than females. Females tend to be more verbally adept and faster-maturing than males. The distribution of behavioral traits among males tends toward a wider, flatter distribution than among females.

These, and many other differences besides, are directly connected to the inherent, unchosen fact of sex. No part of that fact can be said to be chosen, which makes it a sort of "original sin." Even the recent innovation of sex re-assignment surgery can only change rough secondary physical sex characteristics and nothing more. Therefore sex must, in the context of the principles listed above, be disregarded as a source of individual and social value and identity. Only aspects of our sexual nature that are the result of autonomous choice can have any moral valence at all, and then we can only differentiate them as truly the product of autonomous choice if they are contrary to what we might expect of our given sexual characteristics.

In other words, nothing having to do with your sexual nature as a human being can be regarded as truly the product of automonous choice, and thus of value, unless it is in some way contrary to the unchosen nature of your sexual existence. Otherwise, how can you know that you really chose it, rather than just being that way by predetermination? Further, any expression of value connected with the unchosen nature of your sex is considered highly suspect and probably morally corrupt as anathema to individual autonomy. Would a Christian revel in and take pride from his original sin? Of course not.

And so, we deny that there is anything inherently important about being biologically male or female, or that there is any value to the behaviors we would expect of males and females being male and female. We dare not acknowledge that men or women might be better at some things than others by virtue of simply being born male or female and that this could be a source of value and good for ourselves or society. We dare not suggest that certain behaviors congruent with our unchosen, sexed existence are better, healthier, more valuable, more desirable, more balanced than those which might be contrary to it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This is a clear example of our expectations driving us to work against Mother Nature.

Like Cesar Millan watching for the source of canine psychological imbalance, we should expect then that acting on these expectations against Mother Nature will result in lots of human unhappiness, problematic behavior, neuroses, stress, aggression, and a variety of other ills specific to the situation of each individual involved.

I don't think I'm giving away any secrets when I say that our modern western societies are full to the brim of exactly those things. We are philosophically committed to denying the importance of a huge pysical component of our existential being, with predictably pathological results.

And, like a dog owner contributing to the behavioral dysfunction of his pet by giving him yet more and more of that which is unbalancing him, thinking that it will set his mind at ease and make him better though it is contrary to his nature, our prescription for addressing all of these human ills is more autonomy. Always more autonomy. If all this autonomy is really so good for us, why does it result in so much misery and frustration?

Worse, to resolve the conflict between this worship of autonomy with the inconvenient facts of our nature, we must more rigorously and assiduously stamp down Mother Nature in all things human: social institutions and interactions as well as individual behavior.

The end result is pathology compounded by absurdity in a vicious downward spiral. Would that we had a "Human Whisperer" who could calmly resolve these contradictions in a half-hour of tidy narrative. Unfortunately for us, there's no such external agent. We've got to break the chains on our own and find peace with ourselves. Our society is sick, and the sickness is of our own making.

I don't mean to suggest that the nature of human biological sex is the main source of so many of our society's ills. It's only one of many, though an obvious case. What could be more thoroughly intertwined with our physical nature than sex? What else that is so deeply entwined with our physical being do we work so hard to deny?

But there are plenty of other aspects of human life that are governed by unchosen facts we strenuously work to ignore or contravene. Take international debt finance, for instance, where choosing to ignore fundamental and inflexible mathematical realities is considered prudent policy in the pursuit of economic autonomy. And yet it has only succeeded in impoverishing us.

I leave it as an exercise for posterity to ennumerate them all. The task is beyond me.

---

NOTES:

* As you might expect, Millan's self-taught methods and positions on this subject have got lots of official experts' panties in a twist. A number of the usual suspects -- tenured PhDs, media mouthpieces, and NGO spokesmodels -- have come out criticizing Millan for being an uncredentialed dog bully. Their primary criticism, so far as I can tell, comes down to two things: (1) people are listening to Millan instead of them even though he doesn't have a PhD in Veterinary Behavioral Psychology or Comparative French Literature or whatever, and (2) he's too assertive for their taste.

I'm preparing a very long piece (series of pieces, actually) on socio-economic class. In the meantime, here's something else. I've probably written on this subject before (now that I'm older, I can use age as an excuse for memory lapses rather than carelessness), but it's still important.

Years ago, I was reading an interview with Edward Tufte, the graphical information guru, in which he off-handedly mentioned what I have come to believe is one of the most valuable pieces of career advice I've ever heard. I don't remember the exact quote, and my Google-fu does not reveal the source to me, so here it is in paraphrase:

The odds are very much against any of us being the very best at whatever we choose to do, but a very reliable way to be successful and have a large impact on the world is to be very good at two things together.

Here's the thing: at the top level of any activity or career, skill, hard work, tenacity, or any other critical success parameter you can name become largely irrelevant to who reaches the absolute pinnacle and who doesn't. Everybody in the 99th percentile is very, very, very good at what they do already. What determines who goes from the 99th to the 99.9999th is mostly chance and circumstance: in other words, random.

Oh, all those essential qualities -- hard work, conscientiousness, intelligence, etc., etc. -- are still important. You can't get from the 40th or 80th or whatever percentile to the 99th or even the 95th without them. But once you're there near the top, it's mostly chance that gets you any further than that. You happen to be in the right place at the right time. You happen to be born into a family with resources and great connections (*cough*BillGates*cough*). You happen to have been born with a 200 IQ and movie-star good looks and a relentlessly energetic metabolism¹. You meet the king of an oil-rich state at a party and discover you both share a passion for extreme horticulture. Fashionistas develop a sudden taste for electric suspenders at the same time you're bringing electric suspenders to market. Whatever.

I hate to say it, but it's true.

In fact, a huge part of that kind of elite success is working incredibly hard and smart to be positioned in order to take advantage of circumstance when it comes along. Very successful people prepare relentlessly to exploit the opportunities presented by chance, and go out of their way to look for them.

But that only works if circumstance actually falls in your favor. If it doesn't, you spend a lot of time and effort for nothing. It's not something you can plan for.

There are things you can do to increase the odds, of course. Lots of them. One of the most important is to do what you can to increase the number of rolls of the dice. Very successful people aren't "right" in their decision-making any more often (percentage-wise) than anybody else. However, they do make lots more decisions (and act on them) than regular folks, statistically increasing the number of times the dice can roll in their favor even if the hit rate stays the same. Combined with a strategy to limit losses and maximize gains, this can lead to tremendous personal and professional success.

But again, that only gets you so far. Beyond that, being smart and hard-working and adaptable and super-competent isn't the differentiator. You also need to be really, really lucky.

One way to dramatically increase your "luck" is to set yourself up in an under-served, or under-populated segment and start doing something different. Different doesn't necessarily equal good, but it does significantly reduce both (a) the competition who might be working diligently to outmaneuver you and exploit the same opportunities, and (b) give you much better odds of stumbling on something valuable that hasn't already been done to death.

Of course, you can be TOO different as well. That's just as much a problem as being completely the same. You want to be unusual enough to set yourself apart, but not so unusual that nobody understands (or cares) what you're doing. Sometimes everybody else catches up, as our general society did with personal computing and internetworking, but that doesn't actually happen very often (and when it does happen, it's because somebody took something really out there and pushed into a form that the mainstream could relate to, such as a Macintosh or the World Wide Web).

That's where the advice from Tufte comes into its own. Find two (or at most three if you're really clever) great tastes that might taste great together if you could only figure out a decent recipe. Master those things to the level hard work and all that other non-circumstantial stuff will get you, then blend them together in a way that they both reinforce each other and do something new and genuinely interesting. Tufte took data analysis and synthesis and combined it with a clear eye for graphic communication. Both are valuable and necessary in their own right. Each exists in its own domain where there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of conceptual crossover. Yet each becomes much more powerful with the influence and integration of the other.

That still doesn't get you to the absolute elite level of success, but it gets you much closer and with a lot less difficulty than trying to be the Best at any one thing. Really. I mean it.

Thinking on this, I'd have to say my two things are (1) emotionally compelling spatial design, and (2) a clear, in-depth understanding of financial economics. Most people can appreciate how important each is. The two things don't have a lot of obvious domain crossover (for instance, one is highly analytical, while the other is ... NOT). And when they're combined, they both get a lot better. That gives me a niche, and it's been a very fruitful one for me. I may not be the World's Greatest Designer, and I'm certainly not an elite investment financier, but I know how to use an understanding of financial economics to make my designs much more compelling, and how to use design to make a financial proposition really, really good. That mash-up has allowed me to find a stable, lucrative, successful place for myself in the world, contribute much of value, and leap-frog many of my peers in the process (not that anyone is keeping score, but still).

I showed you mine. Now show me yours. What are (or could be) your two things?

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Note 1: Contra our regnant orthodoxy, it is now abundantly clear that how smart you are is just as genetic as how physically attractive you naturally are and what your basal metabolism is. Thus, it's mostly a matter of circumstance rather than hard work or intent. Extreme effort can change it a little bit, but only a little in proportion to the genetic determinant. If you're really smart, congratulations! You got lucky. Don't pretend it's anything more than that.

I’ve been active in computer network-facilitated conversations for a long time now, going all the way back to my first interactions on Compuserve and the Citadel BBS in 1981-82 (which a buddy and I hacked and crashed with a buffer-overrun attack using my dad’s NEC PC-8001 CP/M machine with 10MB Winchester HD and high-speed modem) and the summertime use of the University of Washington’s VAX mainframe when my parents enrolled me in some computer and biology classes to get me out of their hair (I was twelve at the time, and by far the youngest person in any of those classes … spending a lot of time around college computer geeks for summer did not do me any favors, though I managed to escape a life of social awkwardness and lucrative stock options nevertheless).

Then there was USENET, before it started to suck (and for long afterwards too … damn you, DejaNews, for making that shit permanent).

And email. Especially the moderated email lists, some of which contained extraordinarily well-thought and well-written essays on a wide variety of subjects with lots of engaging and constructive commentary from list participants. There are several of you on my friendslist here who I know from those days. You know who you are. I bet you miss it too.

The email lists dropped away too, the victims of moderatorial ennui and the drifting attention of their participants. I often wonder what happened to their archives. I know there are several somewhat-famous internet pundit/bloggers as well as nationally-known professors today who cut their rhetorical teeth on those lists while unknown students. The founder of Wikipedia was one of them, too. Perhaps they’ve sent their henchmen around to hush everything up and destroy the archive hard drives.

In a fit of narcissistic self-importance, I had my own website, where I collected the things I wrote as a sort of folio of problematic essay writing. The segue to keeping a weblog was natural (and gradual, like Fox turning into a sex channel in the Simpsons’ future).

All of which is a tedious lead-in to the observation that this LiveJournal account will very soon be ten years old.

I’m not really sure what to make of that. My son was a toddler when I started this thing, and he’s now nearing high school age. I’m not such an early adopter of Teh Eljay that I have a four- or five-digit LJ User ID, but I’ve been here for a long time now. I was here for the heady, early days in which people actually used this thing to build meaningful social relationships and write amazing, insightful, beautiful things. I made my own contributions to that as I could. If you’re really interested in dissecting that corpse, go poke around through my Memories list. I won’t re-hash it.

Then there was 9/11 and the tumult surrounding the GWOT. We all went a little crazy there. Best not to re-hash that either.

Then LJ became the Pink Ghetto, overwhelmed by teenage girls angsting about … well … whatever it is they angst about, by the hundreds of thousands. I stuck around, because I liked the interface (especially the threaded comments), and had connections here.

Then there was Facebook, SixApart, and now the Russians. I link-blogged for a bit. Then I let the thing fall into decrepitude for awhile and tried to resuscitate it by recording some of my thoughts about the markets. Meh. Can’t keep that up either. I’ve created and dropped a dozen other blogs on other platforms (blogspot, wordpress, you-name-it) covering all sorts of different subjects (philosophy, markets, land-use regulation, design, aesthetics, games, etc., etc.)

But it doesn’t click anymore, either metaphorically or literally.

I still read my friends list every day, via an iPhone app (just as I do with Facebook and all that other stuff). I even comment occasionally. Since the start of this year, for the first time in THIRTY years, I do not own a personal computer or have one available for my consistent use in my home. This was written on borrowed time on a borrowed machine. The thing is, I find I actually kind of like it that way. It’s quite liberating in its way. You ought to try it.

But I do miss it … sort of. It’s not so much LJ I miss, though I do miss what LJ used to be. That’s long gone, just like the wonderful, but very temporary, energy and camaraderie that fueled the email lists back in the early 1990s: an ephemeral, fleeting thing.

What I miss is the mode of expression and the discussion with interesting people. So, while I can’t promise much, I’m going to make a stab at renewing the long-form, essay-style blog post here as I find the time and opportunity. I won’t tell you to stay tuned, because you might have to wait a bit for me to get my act together, but you might check back occasionally to see if anything’s popped up.

In return, I’d like to hear what you really think. Deal?

"Money is overthrown and abolished by blood."
~Oswald Spengler, "Decline of the West"

Want to know what keeps me up at night? The thought that maybe Spengler was right. About everything.

Ireland's Parliament, rather than formally repudiating that small nation's crushing debts, recently voted by a narrow majority to surrender its national sovereignty to the European Central Bank and the senior bondholders of Irish government and bank debt. This has me thinking about Oswald Spengler.

Money is ascendent across all of Western civilization, just as a hundred years ago Spengler predicted it would be in the endgame of democracy. To Spengler, democratic government and oligarchy were faces of the same coin and emblematic of a civilization moving into winter.

Spengler was a terrible visionary. Reading his magnum opus, "The Decline of the West," (written between the first and second World Wars) is a journey into both the past and future: a view into the mind of the sort of erudite and open-eyed scholar of history that just does not exist any more in our Orwellian world, and shocking glimpse of our own present and future through the eyes of the past.

There is no power greater than money in Spengler's conception of history, save one: Blood. "The sword is victorious over money," he wrote. This is an iron law, and inescapable. When money finally becomes ascendent, it will fall to the sword. Great wealth can master everything except death. So it has always been, and so it always shall be.

The only way Ireland, now fully mastered by money, will ever be a sovereign nation again, and the only way the Irish people will ever again be free, is by the spilling of blood. And how far away are we from that same fate? That is a very sobering and profoundly disquieting thought.

What if Spengler was right? About everything?

Too early to tell for sure, but it looks very much like the DJIA put in some sort of intermediate-term top today. I know I've been looking for tops for months now, and we might still get another rally high, but sentiment and commitments of traders are at historic highs right now. In fact, many measures of market psychology are much more extreme right now than they were at the top, in 2007. So the market is more bullish now than it was at a major price high 27% higher than where the market is today. That should give even the most staunch Fed-frontrunning bulls some serious pause. We may see an upward spike into the end of the year holiday season, but this thing is almost done.

No! you cry. The Fed will succeed in hyperinflating the dollar and and the stock market! They're already prepping QE3 and the PPT will never let stocks drop now! It never pays to go against the Fed .. .. .. .. right?

Um, not so much.

Been watching the bond market recently? The verdict is in, and it ain't good for the Fed. LOL Bernanke. He's maybe 50 to 75 basis points away from armageddon in the long bond. The Fed's bond portfolio lost more than $8 billion in value today. If Treasury yields continue their meteoric rise, the Fed is going to be forced to raise rates. Mark my words. All the pieces are in place for what I've been saying for years now: when this comes unraveled, we're going to spend years stuck in a high-yield deflationary depression.

Gold seems to need a final blow-off high before it reverses on the major trend. Could it crack $1500? Maybe. Commodity tops are always volatile and flighty. Silver has been touching and reversing hard of its multi-decade resistance line, flirting with EPIC FAIL. When it starts to collapse, it will probably telegraph a major reversal across the entire commodity complex. That's coming, but not quite yet.

Similarly, USD is still in short-term corrective mode despite an up day, and looks like it needs to make a new corrective low below 79.0 on DXY0 before it begins a hard reversal to the upside (target above 100.0 DXY0). I could be wrong about that.

Merry Christmas!