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Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

One of the things that struck me most while reading The Long Lneliness  is how relevant Dorothy Day's ideas still are. In my part of the country, at least, the peace movement came from the Catholic Worker movement and many activists are very conscious of that connection. 

Posted by jo(e)

Thanks for reminding me of Dorothy Day and for the great links. I do believe that Christianity and the other patriarchal monotheisms are inherently violent, with actions such as those of Pizarro the normal expression of a world view that is predicated on unthinking devotion to a jealous war god. Still, nobody can take anything away from the record of the Catholic Worker movement. 

Posted by rent strike

Speaking of Day's love for her country, the idiosyncratic libertarian writer Bill Kauffman penned an article several years back called "The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right." He connects Day to the decentralist, agrarian, anti-war tradition on the right (a tradition I'm pretty sympathetic to).

Anyway, you can read it here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Summer/ai_63500751/print 

Posted by Lee

I watched the PBS show also - it was fascinating.
(This is Natalie [Phelps] Holladay from. Just stumbled across your blog - say hello to Brandy for me!) 

Posted by Natalie

Jo(e) and Lee,

Thanks for the comments and the link! I also felt moments of resonance with the present while reading The Long Loneliness . Much about the Catholic Worker movement (or is it just the Sermon on the Mount?) certainly does still seem to speak to our most contemporary dilemmas.

My instincts are not to go all the way with Day to the distributist ideal described in Kaufmann's article; I guess right now I'm still either more optimistic about the possibility of meaningful community sustained on a large scale, or more pessimistic about the idea that the state's power can be counterbalanced by small communities. Hard not to feel the pull of many of Day's arguments, though, or to see the inconsistencies in my own beliefs pointed out by the fearless (and sometimes fearsome) coherence of hers.

For me, reading about Day raises a question that pervades the history of alternative and radical movements in America (or anywhere, I guess, but as Kaufmann's article shows, American radicals often frame it as a peculiarly American question, dating back to the days of Jefferson or before). The question, simple to define but seldom easy to answer, is: Can change occur from within existing structures, or must it proceed from a position totally outside them? It's ironic (or telling) that I lean strongly towards the first pole in many of my present beliefs, but that I have always been drawn like a moth to the flame by historical figures who stand at the other extreme. I always pull back when I get close enough to the fire, but it gets more difficult every time.

Rentstrike,

Thanks for your comment. I disagree that violence is somehow inherent to monotheism. Given that both Day and Pizarro were monotheists, and yet had radically different understandings of violence, I don't see how one could conclude that Christianity necessarily expresses itself violently, that "nonviolent monotheist" is literally a contradiction in terms. Violence isn't inherent to monotheism unless you want to maintain that Dorothy Day's monotheism was so incoherent that it doesn't even deserve the name. And surely you don't want to maintain that. You write that "no one can take anything away from the record of the Catholic Worker movement," but unless you take away that record's animating religious beliefs, then it should at least be seen as a counterexample to your generalization.

Suppose that I made the argument (purely hypothetically, since I wouldn't make this argument) that eugenics were somehow inherent to Darwinism--the logical and historical outgrowth of a belief that some organisms are better fitted for living than others. It would be easy to knock down my claim by showing that the eugenicist actually gets Darwin all wrong, and that there are other Darwinists who get him right. I would make the same claim about Pizarro: he is an aberrant Christian in the same way that the eugenicist or social Darwinist is an aberrant Darwinist.

Now, being wrong is not the same as being historically rare. But the fact that many--far, far, far too many--monotheists have used their religion in the service of genocide and murder does not mean that such violence is inherent to monotheism itself. There's two meanings of "normal" here that are getting confused--normalcy as conformity to a norm, and normalcy as redundancy. Pizzaro's Christianity has been "normal" in the world's history in the sense that it has been repeated among many professing Christians, bringing a "foul reproach," to borrow Douglass's phrase, on the religion itself. But Douglass's point (and mine) is that Pizarro's Christianity is "abnormal" because it fails to follow Christianity's foundational norms, which include, among other things, the idea that believers should love their enemies instead of strangling them.

Natalie!

Great to hear from you! Drop me an email sometime to catch up, and give my best to Aaron! We haven't read the Diamond book so we've been very interested in seeing the show. But I've heard from people who have read the book that it's better. (Isn't that always the way it is?) 

Posted by Caleb