I had a conversation after my first post about the Filioque with a reporter that I like quite a bit that illustrates a pretty existential problem with our existing framework for our begrudging partnership on Earth. After acknowledging the material evidence that the United States was likely to be more than a “passive observer” of the increased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, the reporter indicated that it didn’t impact their opinion of the conflict. Why? Because even if the CIA or the State Department more broadly had helped to escalate this fight, it’s for the greater global good since this side of the world is generally better than Russia’s.
There’s a lot to unpack there, but I’m not especially interested in examining the intricacies of that line of thinking (I feel that the Filioque hypothesis answers it, so feel free to re-read in that context) or calling this reporter out for a few reasons:
I like the person, first of all, and I don’t publicly name people who talk to me about stuff unless they ask me to. That’s just good practice. I’m not a journalist, and would rather dig ditches than be one, so I am freed from feeling some sort of obligation to call out a talented workaday writer just because of my personal bias towards my own opinions.
This person might be right about the United States being better! I don’t know. Russia sucks, it’s not like it’s particularly hard to believe the West is a better model for the global utopia. It’s practically impossible mathematically to come to fruition, so I have abstained from choosing a path that leads nowhere.
I think that this person’s perspective is, from a purely objective standpoint, the dominant ethos of most of the political media—therefore, you don’t even have to call them out individually. The conversation itself works as a media critique. Recently, I had to remove a section of a piece that said the United States helped instigate Russian concern by involving itself in the creation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a position that was uncontroversial in mainstream academia way back in 2019 when it first happened. Then in March of this year, the Associated Press announced that actually, saying the US was involved in the formation of the church is a Russian talking point. Weirdly enough, Mike Pompeo bragged about it, framing it specifically as a move to counter Russian influence, back in a tweet from the official archived Secretary of State account in 2021, a year before the invasion. Did the Russian disinformation machine get to Fordham University in 2019 and the social media manager for the Secretary of State in 2021 to lay the groundwork for Putin’s Holy War pretext? Well, I guess that’s up to the scribes, because this is the last time I’m bringing this up before moving on to more fun stuff.
Look, there are a couple of caveats we should establish here before proceeding, and given that these midweek posts are meant to be more informal I don’t mind breaking the fourth wall as much. The first caveat is that neither I, nor the theologians and academics who wrote about this back in 2018 / 2019 know exactly how involved the United States was in forming this new church—it’s right there in the paper that I linked above that evidence is both insufficient enough to ascribe blame and sufficient enough to raise eyebrows. In addition, some of the writers I’ve discussed this subject with have cautioned against ascribing too much competence to the CIA or Mike Pompeo. Hey, no argument there, but he also did pretty publicly take credit for it, and it seems—let’s say far-fetched—that the academics wondering about the United States interest in this church—three whole years before the invasion—are precognitive propagandists.
In that case, the argument against United States involvement at any level in the creation of the Orthodox Church is basically “the Secretary of State was making very public moves in 2018 and taking credit as late as 2021 for something that didn’t happen.” Again, totally plausible given the history of all institutions involved here, but also a little silly to take at face value. I don’t know how the modern process of substantiation goes, but typically when a person says “I did something” it’s relevant to at least mention that they said they did it. OJ Simpson is still a considered a criminal in the eyes of much of the entire American public and he took less credit for his thing than Pompeo did for the Orthodox church.
(The other argument, which I am only including to hedge against pedants, is so disingenuous that if you believe it I would like you to close the browser and never read anything I write. Nevertheless: you could argue, as the United States did in its official statement at the time, that Pompeo and the United States were encouraging religious freedom. But both churches have the same belief structure. This wasn’t like the Islamic Revolution or something. So, if you buy that, it’s because you are not equipped to handle this world yet. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but sometimes you have to let people know that they have the reasoning skills of a young child so they can back up a few steps and absorb some YA before moving onto the grownup stuff.)
The reporter, for what it’s worth, indicated that according to his sources he had no knowledge of anyone at any level of government that wanted this to happen. Well, I’m sold.
The second caveat I am going to be as clear as I possibly can be about, thereby avoiding any confusion: The Russian State is a remarkably corrupt authoritarian horrorshow, the invasion of Ukraine is very bad and illegal, and the atrocities being committed should disgust everyone with a conscience. I’m not pro-China, or pro-Russia or whatever, because it seems insane to me to even have an opinion on that if you don’t live there. This blog is not a value judgment in favor of any state, including ours, of which I pretty clearly harbor some resentment towards at times but overall feel at peace with because I like the Appalachians. For all you Marx freaks out there, I believe the term is lumpenproletariat: my pop was a mailman, my mom was a nurse, and all this revolution shit is beyond me.
Thank goodness that’s out of the way. Let’s proceed with a topic that has garnered much attention among the liberal and “progressive” (yuck, meaningless) PoliSci types, which is that of “agency.” Specifically, much of the influence of the United States is written off by those who claim the Ukrainians are quite obviously exercising their agency as a nation to maintain their sovereignty. This is very true at the individual level, and these war lovers are absolutely correct to say that it is dehumanizing and condescending to deny valor and agency to those Ukrainians who are fighting for their home country. My writing descends into sarcasm at times, but this is 100% earnest: the Ukrainians who are defending their land and the ones who are forced to flee are braver than I am. I hesitate to ascribe morality to it because of the militia situation and the fact that both countries have some pretty bad politics, but there is no denying that Russia is the aggressor and the Ukrainians from the far left (such that one exists over there) to the far right are defending their country.
I do not believe, personally, that it is mutually exclusive to feel insane grief and stress about what is happening to Ukraine while also feeling it is justified to criticize the United States strategy, in the near or long term. Even if you agree that Western alliance with Ukraine equates to a better version of global hegemony, obviously whatever strategy was deployed broadly by the West has worked out terribly for the Ukrainian people. That angers me, because it makes me feel as though I have no agency in controlling what is done in my name. You have agency at the individual level, so you are welcome to feel about it as you wish.
But your agency at the individual level is negated by agency at the state level, and the people who write this off live in a fantasy world. To avoid controversy by discussing Ukraine and Russia, you can look squarely at our own home country: do you feel like you’ve got a lot of agency to influence the direction of the American state right now? While liberal democracy in theory is a more utopian vision of government, it hasn’t ever been implemented and we still certainly don’t know what one looks like here. Who do you vote for if you don’t think that the United States should be killing people in other countries? Who do you vote for if you think that the United States should provide healthcare to its citizens? Who do you vote for if you think the United States should not incarcerate so many black people, or should maybe think about disarming some of that insane firepower the cops have? The reflexive answer for affluent liberals is, of course, the Democrats, the party of incremental leftward pendulum swings that later turn into massive rightward tidal waves. The midterm rhetoric is already in full bloom wafting that familiar stench: Biden and the Dems didn’t do anything they said they would, but if you don’t vote for him in November, you won’t get a chance to see if they don’t do anything again.
Do you consider that “having agency” in shaping the direction of your state and community? Certainly there is more agency in that system than under an authoritarian state, but that’s not the same thing as having agency, that’s just lesser of two evils rationalization. The Ukrainian people did not vote on the separation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, for example. That decision was led by a radical schismatic and other powerful church leadership in Kyiv, along with powerful allies in Constantinople, Rome, and the United States. The counterargument, given that Ukraine is a liberal democracy, is that it was an election issue, and Zelensky won, meaning enough people wanted it. But if you buy that argument, it also means you accept an observably flawed premise: that a state’s constituency has agency over what actually happens once the votes are cast.
Would enough people have wanted the autocephalous church of Ukraine to be an election issue if they knew it might escalate tensions such that it would contribute to Putin’s domestic pretext to launch an illegal invasion? Hard to say!
I would agree it is condescending to deny people agency at the individual level, but I don’t think that’s what’s being suggested here by those who argue the West has helped escalate this conflict for years. It’s certainly not what I’m suggesting, for what that’s worth. I am merely suggesting it’s disingenuous to project “agency” onto what you want to happen, when in reality your agency is checking a little box and crossing your fingers. If your neighbor is anything other than white Anglican, pretty good odds one of their grandpas (either here or whatever colony) was a slave or indentured servant because of words on a piece of paper, an affluent landed gentry, and a military to help quell rebellions. Doesn’t sound a lot like agency. Sounds more like permission, to me. That can be taken away, even if you vote for the right people.
If a handful of global hegemonic powers dictate which countries do and do not have their basic needs covered, there’s very little agency at the state level, negating any real agency at the individual level in issues of foreign policy. In a neocolonial system, foreign states act at the beck and call of the global economic powers, who otherwise starve them out if they act up. It’s not especially complicated. It’s happening in Afghanistan right now. How much agency do they have? This one isn’t a history lesson or convoluted theological concept. While the political media try to dance around whether the United States is warmongering in Eastern Europe, it was only a few weeks ago that Biden announced a redeployment of United States troops in the Forever War in Somalia. And, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, nobody voted on Mike Pompeo and the United States helping the Ukrainians “secure religious freedom,” even if it was just a blowhard media war game stunt. And on the subject of agency, when the men and women and children in Afghanistan that we’ve already failed for twenty years starve alone in their home, or when the bullet casing lay smoking next to the dead Sub-Saharan African, I wonder: did you get a vote on that one, blockhead? Feel like you can do a lot to prevent it?
And if your answer is “well, I didn’t vote for that, I voted for the other stuff,” then you have separated your essence (i.e. what you want) from the material reality of your actions (i.e. voting for people who will kill foreigners in your name) and have Filioque brain poisoning. Sorry to be the one to tell you, but you better start reading some ideas from another hemisphere before you end up back in the mouth of madness when you realize Marx’s entire understanding of the world is based on flawed western hierarchical source code that he wasn’t capable of seeing around. Not his fault, the internet wasn’t around yet so he was at the mercy of the Western academics, who were at the mercy of the Latin Church movements, who had a bad habit of obscuring or outright destroying history that lived within the common folk in narratives the state couldn’t understand. Unfortunately for those who seek to obscure it, the Word is divine and the Word lives long enough for the truth to come out with time.
Theology Study
Sundays are going to be reserved for the fun theology stuff. But! I do find myself constantly enjoying old theology as a really helpful tool with understanding current events, and I think making some recommendations (even for Wikipedia holes) will only help to reinforce my overall hypothesis on the material foundational narratives of our lives which inform how we create the material world around us. See? I can be a materialist, too. It’s like a switch. It’s honestly the easiest form of analysis there is. You look at stuff and say what it is. I’ve never understood why people get so impressed by being able to do that. It’s like a bulleted list with commentary around it. Wow!
My midweek analysis might lend itself towards this kind of more topical analysis, or media criticism, or the more materialist concerns of the less advanced. To make up for putting you through the news, I will give you something fun to consider alongside it.
For this one, we’ll continue the topic of the Filioque: City of God, by coward Augustine of Hippo, the man who converted to escape execution and then turned everything to shit. If you’d like to know where the beginnings of the “barbarian at the gates” Western Christian hierarchy poison started in earnest, that’s as good a narrative to start as any. I found it appropriate as a companion piece to the conversation I had (and the many conversations I’ve had watching otherwise smart people say some pretty weird stuff), if only to reinforce the idea that it has been many, many centuries of scribes in empires trying to rationalize away the atrocities their personal vision of utopia creates. I’m just as guilty of it as anyone reading this is. I was raised in a culture formed in the image of the Filioque and the City of God, too.
Until this Sunday.