How I Spent St. Patrick's Day 2026

 I took a break from around 4 to 8 pm. I forced myself to walk down to the convenince store for smokes. I confess that I broke fast with a chicken thigh.

Yesterday, I read  The German Philosophy that Emancipated America (Marginalia Review of Books).

Unlike Brown, most of American Christendom believed that owning black persons was morally permissible if not biblically sanctioned. Moses and Paul said nothing definitive for or against racialized slavery; they asked simply that masters show reasonable benevolence—or reasonable wrath—toward their property. But if not Christian soldiers, who marched in the Captain’s antislavery army?

 In An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War against Slavery, and the Refounding of America (W.W. Norton, 2024), the intellectual historian Matthew Stewart serves up some revisionary surprises to the received history of antebellum abolitionism. A sequel to Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton, 2014), the book claims that John Brown’s closest conspirators in the antislavery cause were not in fact upright Christians but a pack of Northern infidels whose radical philosophy complemented his radical faith. 

White Christian Nationalism either gets its block knocked off or is exposed as blasphemous cretins. 

When Douglass did speak about God, he emphasized His proportional justice. The line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural that stirred him concerned the size of the payment God would exact for slavery. Douglass praised Lincoln for implying that slavery could not have ended except in catastrophic bloodshed and that God’s retributive justice in America was necessary. The horrors of war were real and regrettable, but equally so were those of slavery, and the world could now measure on the battlefield how much blood had been spattered on the cotton field. Douglass’s “sanguinary abolitionism” resembled John Brown’s, except that, for Brown, belief in God’s justice came from revealed religion, whereas for Douglass, it was an inference of reason. The God of the abolitionist infidels was “Nature’s God” (or as the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza once called Him, “God or Nature”). To them, Nature’s God was not some anthropomorphic legislator of positive laws that mortals could bend if they pleased. On the contrary, He was the very laws of nature from which no living thing, even free human beings, could veer. In the shooting war over slavery, Douglas reasoned, the laws of nature would at last supersede the corrupt civil laws of the United States. The less responsive that religious abolitionists were to this message, the louder Douglass proclaimed it. As early as 1852, at an antislavery conference in Ohio, he received a question about it from Sojourner Truth, a black activist of the moral-suasion school. Truth asked, “Frederick, is God dead?” Douglass replied: “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”

It also has a reminder of why separation of church and state is good for religion.

According to Hartman, however, Marx’s pivot toward America started well before his newspaper gig. As early as 1843, Marx was studying the complex interaction between the U.S.’s secular political state and its popular religious culture. Unlike in Prussia, the U.S. Constitution did not affirm Christianity or any other official religion and even specified in its First Amendment that the state must never establish one. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville discussed in Democracy in America, religion was endemic in American civil society. Marx concurred with Tocqueville that the secularization of the public sphere was not antithetical to, but in fact encouraged, the proliferation of private creeds. On the one hand, Marx believed the state’s decoupling from religion was progressive insofar as it rendered conflicts between private religion and public law as political (legal, constitutional) rather than theological (scriptural, cultural) questions. On the other hand, the coexistence of a thoroughly secular state with a deeply religious society showed that the political emancipation from religion did not complete the human emancipation from religion. Marx followed Feuerbach in thinking that religion was a mode of self-alienation in which human beings projected the essence of their own being onto an illusory deity, and he saw an analogy in the secular state’s respective orientations to religion and private property. A state could abolish religious belonging or asset ownership as preconditions for political enfranchisement without abolishing them from civil society. The American order was the near-perfection of modern Christianity—i.e., a totally secular state bulwarked by a totally religious society—and of bourgeois capitalism—i.e., a political-economic system that safeguarded capital’s right to dominate labor.

I will admit that I have not thought much of the difference between society and government; I just presumed it.

I also learned something that makes me less antipathetic to Marx:

Hartman thinks that most Cold Warriors, whether they bear-hugged America or Russia, failed to grasp the truth of Marx’s dialectical historiography. “The most important thing to know about [Hegelian-Marxist] dialectic,” he writes,

is that…history was a process of unfolding…in which every paradigm contains the seed of its undoing. The unfolding of contradictions conserves the past and reembodies it in the future. Just as we detect some semblance of the present in the past, we seek to detect some semblance of the future in the present. Yet this does not mean that the future is more of the same. Nor does it mean there is a definitive path to the future, or that humans have no role in carving such a path…[H]umans do not sit idly by awaiting the unfolding of history. Humans are the unfolding of history.

This is the same species of humanistic necessitarianism that the radical abolitionists invoked in their cause to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker believed that the laws of nature necessitated slavery’s abolition because the system was antithetical to human self-preservation. They might have underestimated just how long it would take to abolish slavery’s “badges and incidents” (a political project that is ongoing two centuries later), but they were right that corrupted Christian theology, not any natural law, bulwarked slavery. Similarly, Marx’s materialist philosophy held that industrial capitalism could not survive its own contradictions and would have to evolve into a more rational social order that better met humanity’s needs. And while he and his American adherents underestimated their foe’s resilience, they were not wrong about its totalitarian underbelly or its compulsive greed – grotesqueries that remain on full display into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

 When is the time for free human beings to make the necessary happen? Neither Stewart nor Hartman fully answers that most important question, but then, neither could their very capable muses.

Reading that is listening to What is “white culture,” anyway? | Code Switch (NPR Podcast). I must be less than white. Like John Donne, I think I am part of a continent.

As for other things considered today. 

 Who were Clan MacLean?

 Russia has no ideology. Therefore, no fig leaf for its land grabs.

Yes, Caprica sucked (it was boring in execution and characters), but I do not think it was the end of a Battlestar Galatica franchise. Ronald D. Moore left nothing to be done with the characters when he put together a series that did have an ending. 

 The SyFy series deserving more was Farscape.

Not all historical what-ifs are created equal:

 What I really took away from this one was the hidebound approach of the French towards military doctrine. That may have beat them more than German arms. Something to think about as Donald Trump bungles his way in Iran.

 Suzi Quattro has never been a big figure in my musical universe, but she is still kicking, and I like this one:

 So is Peter Weller, who I like but never really followed:

 One of several videos watched due to my curiosity about naval warships; not something you might have expected from one living landlocked:

 

 

James Cagney showing class and outwitting Gore Vidal:

 Why “London Calling” mattered - and I think this album matters even more now.:

 

A little Byzantine history because why not? Being Eastern Orthodox enhanced an earlier interest in the Eastern Roman Empire.

 

 Musical break, Luis Russell - Doctor Blues:

 Lectures in History: The Spanish-American War

 

 

Not only is it not so dry and boring as its title might lead you to think. More importantly, since Donald J. Trump thinks he is channeling William McKinley, it is timely.

Fewer problems, less pain, but I have some things still to write and do. Good night.

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