I’d suggest listening to this song while reading this post — it’ll help you understand the point of my use of italics.
Most of my work is about literature and the arts, and I like it that way. I plan to keep it that way. In fact, I plan to go even further in that direction than I have. But I also have a long history here on this blog of thinking out loud about political and social issues, and I have been, over the course of the last fifteen years or so, elaborating an argument that I would like to summarize right now, with links to the key posts. I’ve written some interlocking series that collectively constitute the extended form of this argument, but here I will try to summarize my case as concisely and pointedly as I can.
What most Christians — on the theological right, the theological left, and in the middle — fail to understand is the fundamental distinction between the city of God and the city of man. We (by which I mean “those total losers among my fellow Christians, and certainly not me”) are always trying to transform the city of man into the city of God, or else pretend that the city of man can be tuned, as it were, to divine purposes. These tendencies keep us enmeshed in the workings of the city of man, and cause us to neglect our citizenship in the city of God.
This, by the way, is not an argument against voting. It’s not an argument against political activity. It’s an argument against confusing the city of God and the city of man. You can work for the good of the city of man without making the mistake of believing that you are a citizen of it.
The biblical image of the city of man, and therefore the permanently relevant symbolization of this, is: Babylon. We live in Babylon. We do not live in a Christian America, we do not live in a fundamentally Judeo-Christian framework. We live in Babylon. And Babylon is owned and operated by transnational powers, which can be conceptualized in one of two ways. You can say that Babylon is run by a kind of collaboration between (in theory) democratically elected governments and multinational corporations. Or you can say that the city of man, Babylon, is run by what the Apostle Paul calls the Principalities and Powers. Both of these descriptions are correct as far as they go, but the former is more useful when it is seen as but a practical outworking of the latter.
In this sense, the briefest and best name for the regime under which we live was given to us by Bob Marley: it’s Babylon system. It is a far-reaching, multi-tentacled network of forces that enlists us in its own projects. So when we’re fighting it out on social media — whether Christians are fighting against non-Christians, or Christians of the left are fighting Christians of the right — what we’re all doing is treading the wine press. We are doing the work of Babylon system.
It’s slightly comical that the people who most intensely despise one another are performing the same labor for the same boss. What left and right are really trying to do is get management to take their side in some particular dispute, but in so doing they ensure that management remains management. Babylon system remains sovereign, building church and university … deceiving the people continually. The Prince of this world remains the Prince of this world. He will promise you victory over your enemies and he may even deliver it: but when you sell yourself to him in order to gain such a triumph, there’s no option for manumission.
So what is required in order to offer meaningful resistance is to stop treading the wine press — to decentralize, to disaggregate, to localize, to refuse and disobey. This is why I recommend anarchistic practices. James Scott, in Two Cheers for Anarchism, talks about strategies of resistance that begin with simple non-cooperation:
Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organization, escapes notice. And that’s just what the practitioners of these forms of subaltern politics have in mind: to escape notice. You could say that, historically, the goal of peasants and subaltern classes has been to stay out of the archives.
You can start with non-cooperation. Your employer may insist that you have a presence on LinkedIn, let’s say — so have one, but don’t post. And when you do post, do in the spirit that Wendell Berry has recommended: Every day do something that does not compute.
We don’t have to retreat into the literal wilderness, but we do need to retreat into local and material lives that are not at the command of Babylon system. When you buy a paperback book and scrawl your thoughts in the margins rather than scroll through your social media feed, or when you buy a CD or a vinyl record rather than subscribe to a music service and listen to whatever the algorithm feeds you, you’re doing what will not compute — quite literally. Ditto when you trade herbs and vegetables with your neighbors, or even when you pay for the coffee of the person behind you in line. (You thereby make yourself more legible to the Powers in order to make them less so.) You can repair rather than buy new, and that goes for ideas as well as manufactured products. You can practice handmind.
These are very small refusals, tiny ways to act in the city of man as a citizen of the City of God. But very small refusals make a path for bigger ones, and in the very long run can make Babylon system a falling empire. It’s important to remember, as James Scott says, that “A great deal of the symbolic work of official power is precisely to obscure the confusion, disorder, spontaneity, error, and improvisation of political power as it is in fact exercised, beneath a billiard-ball-smooth surface of order, deliberation, rationality, and control.” The Principalities and Powers are not as mighty as they contrive to appear; and resistance to them is never futile.
Oh, and one more thing: about all this, Tell the children the truth.
