Varn Vlog: Julian Assele on Christian Personalism and The Left
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ธ.ค. 2023
- We talk about the following works:
Zizoulas, Being as Communion, Chapter 1
This essay by Scottish Minister George MacDonald (www.online-literature.com/geo...)
Ratzinger, The Divine Project, the Chapter headlined as "Man, The Divine Project."
MLK, Testament of Hope, An Experiment in Love.
Then we discuss how pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of personhood tie certain religious notions into conceptions of selfhood that as "relational" as that of Marx. Julian and I disagree but ultimately admit that both Christian (specifically Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic) personalism and Marxism have relational notions of self as opposed to the liberal atomized one.
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here.
Please support our Patreon: / varnvlog
Host: C. Derick Varn ( Twitter: @skepoet Bluesky @varnvlog.bsky.social)
Cohost of Excavations: Jordin Dubin
Cohost of Vulgar Complexity: Abi Hassen
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro Musics: Spaceship Revolution by Etienne Roussel (Solo Intro), Bitterlake (Political Intro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro), The Siege of Kalameth by Jon Björk (Main Show Intro), Teknique by Anthony Earls (Nailing It Down Intro).
Outro Music: Let Down by Issue AB
Intro and Outro Video Design: C. Derick Varn (Main Show Intro, Show Outro), Djene Bajalan (Solo Intro, Political Intro, Space Outro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro)
Art Design: Corn ( / cornflow ) and C. Derick Varn - บันเทิง
JPII was influenced by the phenomenology of Huesserl but before he went into transcendental idealism and fused it with early 20th century scholasticism. Also he was influenced by the vitalism of Max Scheler
Religion and race: there is an interesting thesis by Gil Anidjar a scholar of late medieval Arabic and Sephardic literature at Columbia) that links the rise of the conception of race to the process of secularization in European Christianity (which from Anidjar's point of view would be actually pleonastic since he argues secularism IS Christianity, but I digress). See Blood: A Critique of Christianity (2016). There could be a bone or two to pick for Marxists with Anidjar's poststructuralism and how he articulates his thesis, but overall, the thesis has some very compelling historical arguments to make about how we conceive of religion, secularization and imperialism.
Great reading suggestion
@@VarnVlogOn another note, but in the line of Christian personalism and the left in contemporary time, this new years eve, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (and the 40th of the EZLN's founding). I was wondering if you intended to put out something on the subject matter. I put it in relation to Christian personalism because of the huge role that the indigenous catholic movement Pueblo Creyente and bishop Samuel García have played and continue to play as the main support base of the EZLN, in spite of the organization's marxist intellectual origins. Whatever what one thinks about the value of the EZLN, its positions, objectives and legacy today, I think they might be very important to cover as symptomatic of the transformations (evolutions and hangups) of the left and of the idea of revolution in the post-Cold War world. A mostly reformist armed uprising, Fidel Castro once commented on its leader Subcomandante Marcos that he was a revolutionary who talked too much and fired all too little. The movement´s intellectual accommodations of its originary marxist roots with indigenous culture, beliefs and religiosity, is at once pragmatic in the context of the Chiapas highlands and in line with the coming onslaught of post/de-colonial thought on the left from the 1990´s onward. Lastly, the later socioecological turn towards the "defense of the territory" (a much broader social trend throughout Latin America and indigenous territories in the North, but nonetheless organizationally closely linked to zapatismo in Mexico) is another symptom of a peasant-indigenous-working class forced back into a mainly conservative defensive position. Anyhoo, i think it could be a very worthy topic.
I really don’t wanna be around anybody who’s interested in Christian communitarianism, I do think it’s all about power and I don’t understand why anybody would not understand why I am a socialist
Julian is my favorite Christian
I love this information you’re getting out to the world, it’s just sucks that you don’t realize how alienating it is when you say, “I don’t know why you’re a Marxist because of XYZ- You’re making a mistake doing that
Cardinal McIntyre
Jules 💖
The Trinity, that’s basically the religious equivalent of superposition in quantum mechanics.
The Iron Triangle of Christianity
Francis, the Woke Pope!
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I am that Nietzsche and Marxist that you wonder why I am a Marxist and frankly I will tell you what Che said- I can’t help it !the world is Marxist
Please don’t give anyone the idea that you can be a Christian and be a Marxist!
I don’t want to make the world a better place and I’m still a Marxist
I can get up in the morning (and care about politics) and have a mechanical materialist view of the world because I know that I have no choice but to care about my survival, in the ecological and social environment. That doesn’t require me to make some sort of value judgement about the worth of my life or the efficacy of my actions. Politics is a fundamental determinant in our social environment, conditioned by the division of labor and power sources we can harness. And this mechanical understanding led me to care about Marxism and communism. You don’t need to believe in a soul or compatibilist free will to get out of bed, just as believing in these things can equally result in paralysis of action and behavior (like being discouraged after defeats from participating in socialist politics because you “didn’t want it hard enough” something I’ve experienced with leftist subjectivists/compatibilists in political orgs.
True. It's survival of the fittest
You aren’t following your own logic enough since your politics is fundamentally based on a counter factual.
What’s the counter factual? That it seems unlikely for socialism to develop in the future, given past events? My own survival bias may very well cause me to orient towards improbable outcomes, as my brain is more concerned with survival than painting the most objective picture of reality. But belief in free will, compatibilist or not, isn’t going to change that, just maybe give me a false sense of power over the bad outcomes. When I was a compatibilist I spent a lot of time blaming myself and others for ruining socialism with their bad intentions. Now, I know to focus on the environmental factors instead. The social environment of the early 2010s USA just wasn’t going to produce a mass left wing movement of any type, no matter how motivated or sincere we were. But some limited good came of it, I don’t regret it and I’ll continue to follow my survival instinct for improbable yet optimal outcomes and keep pushing for communism, so long as the probability for it, however remote, does exist. So far, Marxist materialism seems to be the best model for understanding that probability.
@@zainmudassir2964Indeed, I like to say we are all conscripts in the war against nature, and we should eliminate our sources of internal conflict (classes, property, states, etc) to better cooperate in prosecuting our offensive.
Actually, no, none of this follows from your premise as you have made a compatibilist argument for hard determinism and then dishonestly conflated "subjectivism" with "compatibilism" because you have include your beliefs as have effect, beliefs that you have "chosen" to have it, but you have decided the choice of belief that choice has belief in determinism has consequences, but in a purely deterministic universe in which agency has no feedback, this is literally nonsense. It is transparently contradictory. In a pure determinisitic universe, belief is literally irrelevant and you can believ e no other thing that one you do since the first atom moved in causal chain going back to the big bang. There is no reason to assume that any belief would have consequences and not way for anything to develop other than what it does. In which case, revolutionary politics is literally meaningless and will happen or not based on a causal chain going back to the beginning of the universe of which you are literally of no importance.
Now, you also aren't a properly speaking Marxist--as Marx did see explicitly human choice as part of the feedback loop and freedom of which communism would develop, and it is not remotely a "model of probability." It was a necessary, dialectically induced for Marx, although one that he did not necessarily see as universal if the ethnological notebooks are to be taken seriously. Furthermore, Marx thought material constrains limited human development but that people did have a choice, otherwise revolutionary politics is impossible. This is compatibilist definitionally--i.e. there is no counter-casual free will but human agency does imply real decisions and those decisions have consequences. A Newtonian determinism nor a schtocastic vision of the universe does NOT remotely imply that.
"The social environment of the early 2010s USA just wasn’t going to produce a mass left-wing movement of any type, no matter how motivated or sincere we were."
The logical probabilistic deductive from this, which also doesn't matter in a purely determined universe anyway, is that this is likely outcome and there is no other outcome.
You try again, Lev. I don't believe in counter-casual free will, but you do think that willed belief structures matter is which "compatibilist" even if you engage in misunderstanding the terms. Also, your "conscripts on the war on nature" is basically non-cognitive for a deterministic belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of evolution from a deterministic perspective. So next time you try to convince me I am wrong, prove to me you understand the basic logic implied by the words you use.
The first premise you used was a strawman and this been build of that those miscasting from there.