Civil Commotion

I happen to know people so stupid they will believe this check is from Donald Trump. It undoubtedly is worth tens of thousands of votes next November.

A debate between Richard Carrier and Dennis MacDonald draws attention to how little is actually known about Jesus.

Last year Dennis MacDonald and I [Carrier] had a moderated conversation on the PineCreek channel regarding the plausibility of Jesus never really being a person in history. MacDonald is famous for proposing the Gospels construct myths about Jesus partly from Homeric and other other Gentile models, and partly from Jewish Old Testament models. His Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark is still an enduring classic. His equally important work on the Septuagint parallels is the lesser known Two Shipwrecked Gospels. But his latest survey of both features in constructing the mythology of Jesus is Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero.

In all of this MacDonald is a minimalist but not a mythicist. He believes almost everything said about Jesus in the Gospels is mythical. But he also believes there is some, albeit scant, data supporting some sort of real historical Jesus.

Except for the local Southern Baptists, who are adamant for Biblical inerrancy, it must be obvious to anybody of ordinary intelligence that there is a wide space between the literary Jesus and the historical Jesus (if such a person ever existed). The only thing that may be said with certainty is that there is no attestation of Jesus’ existence outside the canonical Gospels, written decades after Jesus’ death — nothing. When Pastor Bubba howls and bellows that he knows Jesus said this and wants you to do that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, he is merely repeating Christian traditions, not sharing scholarship.

Here in North Carolina there was a rally at the state capital today demanding that the coronavirus restrictions be relaxed.

Dozens of people, many wearing red, white and blue and waving American flags gathered outside the legislative building in downtown Raleigh Tuesday to protest the stay-at-home order that has shut down businesses and crippled North Carolina’s economy in an attempt to slow and contain the spread of coronavirus.

The order, issued March 27 by Gov. Roy Cooper, prohibits gatherings of 10 or more people, closes businesses not considers “essential,” and asks people to stay home other than trips to buy groceries, pick up prescriptions, visit a health care provider, exercise, care for family members, volunteer to serve the needy or visit a place of worship.

I’m sympathetic to merchants harmed by this, especially the mom-and-pop shops that don’t have long lines of credit and provide little more than a living for the owners.

But they’re not going to like being dead, either. The irony is that a serious, nationwide lockdown of about a month would stop the pandemic cold; half-measures are going to prolong the discomfort.

The current issue of Philosophy Now is devoted — not for the first time — to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Little of the issue seems to be behind a paywall, and it’s worth your time to go over and browse.

To ‘get’ Nietzsche it’s important to locate him properly in the history of Western thought. His career as an academician began in 1869, a decade after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and shortly after the revival of the application of critical scholarship to the Bible in the 1850s in Germany. He was intellectually competent to understand both, and was the first to foresee — or, at least, the first to say aloud — that Christianity could not withstand the twin assaults of critical scholarship and science that undermined the Christian narrative.

It became his philosophical project to construct a framework for living that didn’t rely on Christian dubiety and supernaturalism. Along the way, he managed to make himself one of the most misunderstood thinkers of all time, for reasons both fair and unfair.

• Nietzsche reworked his thinking endlessly, with the result that his thinking constantly evolved. The Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human is not the Nietzsche of Twilight of the Idols^*. All of Nietzsche’s work contains gorgeous writing that warrants quoting, but are not necessarily representative of the final shape of his thinking.

• Christians hated him then, and hate him today, and were happy to lie about him.

• His sister became his literary executor upon his death, and she was too stupid to understand his work — but glad for the money and prestige it could bring her. She unthinkingly mined passages from his notebooks and published them as The Will to Power, and hobnobbed with Hitler, causing a lot of confusion about when he thought what, and how it all fit together.

Nietzsche was writing for our time, for the age when science and scholarship would combine to cripple and destroy Christianity and nihilism would hang over the landscape as the devout were unmoored; he foresaw the indecent alliance between the Republican Party and the Evangelical Right — and the danger it poses.

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^* Twilight of the Idols is the book to read first if you’re interested in Nietzsche’s thought. It is the last book written entirely when he was sane, and was intended by him to be a survey of his thought — a sort of valedictory before commencing the work that was intended to be his magnum opus, The Will to Power, which he abandoned and is not the book by that name subsequently published by his nitwit sister.

The New Yorker has a profile of Mitch McConnell that is not behind a paywall and definitely is worth a read.

Although the two men almost always support each other in public, several members of McConnell’s innermost circle told me that in private things are quite different. They say that behind Trump’s back McConnell has called the President “nuts,” and made clear that he considers himself smarter than Trump, and that he “can’t stand him.” (A spokesman for McConnell, who declined to be interviewed, denies this.) According to one such acquaintance, McConnell said that Trump resembles a politician he loathes: Roy Moore, the demagogic former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, whose 2017 campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat was upended by allegations that he’d preyed on teen-age girls. (Moore denies them.) “They’re so much alike,” McConnell told the acquaintance.

Trump is a cheap, ignorant demagogue, and he soils everything and everybody he touches. McConnell is scarcely any better; he is cynical and opportunistic, but at least knows how to behave in polite company. They deserve each other.