128: Antonio Gramsci

Hey, everybody, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know. My name is A.J. Hanenberg, and I'm joined by two of my illustrious and good-looking colleagues, Graham Donaldson. Did my illustrious or good-looking?

One is one. Well, I didn't say that both of you received equal measures. And Thomas Nagby. I feel like Graham wins in both categories.

Good on you, Graham. I guess YouTube can decide. Yeah, YouTube can actually see us. So, welcome to our podcast.

Yeah, we didn't think about that with the whole camera thing, didn't we? In fact, we are races for radio. Yeah, exactly. And also that I dress for radio.

I comport myself during the podcast. Today I look good because I had to show up for work. Usually I'm in, like, pajama pants. Do you remember that you showed up barefoot with pajama pants?

I had flip-flops. I think I had a haircut in like a year. I had a shower. Oh, my gosh.

That was, anyway. The dude abides. The dude abides. Indeed.

Anyway, we're a podcast about the classical world. We talk about old books, old ideas, philosophy, theology, art. I got another art one coming soon. And anything that kind of strikes our interest that is old and would be considered classical.

So, yeah, old stuff. Just finished Plato. We finished some Patriot issue, and we're moving on to a new topic. And Graham assures me that the person he's talking about today looks either like a frog or a turtle later in life.

Sure, he got older, he did. And so that's the controversy I assume we're talking about for the rest of the podcast. Frog or turtle, that's the question. I feel like it's going to be one of those internet votes.

Frog or turtle, and you just pick which one it was? Yes, exactly. The person here, the classical thing that we were talking about today, it's almost like a classical thing. I wish we didn't have to know.

But it's a classical thing to know. You should know. A man, a political theorist by the name of Antonio Gramsci. He's an Italian, a political theorist, and a c-c-c-communist.

What was that? It's like a little communist thing. So he was a Marxist political theorist at the turn of the century. And you're probably saying, so why are we learning about this guy?

His political philosophy was kind of a bedrock for a movement in political philosophy that sort of has had a lot of staying power and is definitely in the conversation in sort of the landscape today. So this is post-Marx, pre-Marx? So post-Marx. So he was born towards the end of the 19th century, died in the 1930s.

And he was a communist under fascist Italy. So communists and fascists don't get along very well. And I believe he was executed or he was definitely in jail for a long time. And what's the fascist Italian name?

Mussolini. Mussolini did not like Gramsci. But he was like a public figure during his life. He was a public figure during his life.

Soviet, Russia, German revolution. Mussolini didn't do anything to him? Hmm? Mussolini didn't do anything to him during his life?

I feel like Mussolini doesn't like you. Well, he was in jail. And most of his writings were called, if you find his writings, they're just called letters from prison or something. He was in prison for like 11 years at the end of his life?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does that sound good? Yeah. So he was fully into the whole Marxist communist thing of the early 20th century.

Was a little bit of a hero in Russia. But he kind of answered a, or put towards an answer of a really big burning question in Marxism. And that is, why hasn't this happened elsewhere? So I guess maybe we should back up a little bit and say, like, what are the salient features of Karl Marx's political thought?

How would we, like, sum up? Workers rise up and seize means of production. Yeah. So there's a division, an economic division between those who own and those who work.

So class conflict is the way of understanding history. That's right. So it's a class conflict. And then in places, that class conflict is going to be where the workers will rise up.

The workers are the proletariat. And they will rise up against their bourgeoisie overlords and seize the means of productions and move society towards a communal aspect. Hence the name. Would someone, would people want to draw a distinction between Marxism and communism?

I mean, maybe. What would be the... I might get this wrong because I get lots of things wrong. I'm just kidding.

That's how I was already sat in my sentence. My quotation with anarcho-primitivism was a long time ago. But that Marxism is the analytical tools of viewing things through a materialist class conflict lens. That is a way to understand history.

Communism is the, then, application. Sure. To say, therefore, because we've had class conflict, now we should move into a utopia that is without this conflict. Doctum and practice.

If you want to say it that way. When you say, you're saying anarcho-primitivism. Yeah. I like you said narco-primitivism.

Which, to me, sounds like doing a lot of drugs in a chemist situation. That's what that sounds like. No. Yeah.

Anarchist plus-primitivism. I'm narco-primitivist. There's, like, one journal that, like, publishes articles about it. Really?

And I don't know how they organize themselves. That's my question. Do they have an editorial? That's my thing.

Is there a printing press? That's my thing. Like, someone's printing this and distributing it. I don't know how they structure themselves.

I just have lots of questions. Anyway. So, yeah. That's really good.

So, then, you've got the doxy and the praxis. You've got the dogma and the practice. So, the dogma being Marxism and the practice being communism. And there's probably other practices of Marxism than communism.

But I'm not too well for a student. I don't know. But anyway. So, he was coming in and he was answering a question of, well, why didn't the proletariat rise up against their overlords?

Why did it one? Why did it only happen in Russia? Which is a really interesting question, which I don't think we're going to have time to talk about. He had an answer for it.

But the question was, this is something that blew my mind. Everybody kind of thought it was going to happen in England or it was going to happen in Germany. Mainly England because they had such a boom in factories. They had such a boom in the industrial world.

With pretty rough conditions, right? With pretty rough conditions. That when everyone looked at the heat map of where they thought the communist explosion was going to be, everyone thought England because you had this big gap between the owners of the factories and these really crappy conditions. And so, everyone was like, well, those proletariat are going to lose their minds and rise up.

And it didn't happen. And so, Gramsci tried to answer this question. And so, one sort of basic tenet that I think is interesting to understand about Gramsci and his political philosophy and Marxism in general is that it's materialistic as its foundation. So, everything is just matter and energy.

Or as I always talk about it when I'm talking about materialism. Stuff and fluff? I always say electric meat. So, it's just like meat and electricity.

That's what the world is. I feel like that would be a great teacher. The world is just electric meat. Yeah, that's sort of basically the material.

If you just have a strict materialism, that's sort of what you're saying. And so, Gramsci's introduction into the political thought landscape was, okay, so why didn't it happen in England? And his answer was, it didn't happen in England or in any of these countries because everybody kind of generally believed the same thing about society. There was a, what do you call it, a hegemony.

There was a, everybody kind of looked at the world the same way. You had this cultural hegemony. And Gramsci's position was that when you have a cultural hegemony, everything sort of orders itself that way. You're not actually going to have the change that you wanted to have unless you had some sort of like fissure or breaking of that hegemony.

So, a cultural hegemony sort of has these two sort of platforms. These two things. One was the actual, what he called the substrate. And the substrate was just the economic world.

So, the proletariat, the factory workers, for us, the substrate, you know, the economic world is that, you know, we get jobs, we get salaries, we have taxes, we can own houses. You know, that's sort of our economic substrate. There's people who have debt, people that don't have debt, people that own things, people that rent things. And so, that's the economic substrate.

And then on top of that is what he calls a superstructure. Maybe it sounds cool or in Italian, I don't know. Superstructure sounds pretty cool, too. So, he has a superstructure.

And that is the sort of the driver of culture. So, in here, you find art and school and the myth of your people and law, philosophy, science, thing on the bottom, and for Marxists, the economic was always the engine, always the driver. But then on top of that, you have this superstructure that kind of regulates or keeps that thing in check. So, everything is sort of in this ideology.

So, to sort of put a quick little end to his thought on this, is that the superstructure is built explicitly in a way that some people are going to benefit over the exploitation of other people. So, this is, so the very sort of structure of society is built in a way where the art, the music, the law, the philosophy, even the science and education, the myth, the founding myth of the Italian people or whatever, right, or of Western Europe, because this is the context that they're in. All of that has been calculated and created that those who are the oppressors can keep their power, and those who are the oppressed are always sort of under the heel of the oppressors. But everybody's just like, ah, that's just the way it is.

Or the phrase that Grant should really like to use is he says, everybody just says it's common sense. Well, it's common sense that we have factories. Well, it's just common sense. This is the best way to do it.

And so, on the factory part in particular, that's the, I'm going to get my two terms wrong, the superstructure on top. Yeah, superstructure is the ideology, and then the substrate is just the economic engine. So the substrate is just assumed to always be the way it is. So people are just complacent.

They accept it. And everyone's sort of, well, ah, not only is everybody complacent, but within this political philosophy, there is a strong view of, like, historical context, historical determinism, that your place in time and history determines everything about you. So, excuse me, so AJ, what determines everything about you is the fact that you were born in 1983, four, five, five, five, okay. You're born in 85, you're born in Spokane, you're male, you're American, all of these things, your parents have their specific jobs, your specific historical context, the education that you had, everything is sort of determined who you are and what you think and what you feel about the world.

That there is no human nature that reaches, that can get out from that context. So there's nothing else that can sort of reach beyond that, and the only reason that you get along with the people around you is because they're sort of in the same contexts, and if you're lucky enough to get along with somebody who's from a completely different culture or nation, it has to do with all of these sort of accidents. There's no sort of, like, unifying human nature apart from context. Does this make sense?

Yes, it does. What do you mean? It makes me say, and there's something to, it matters what year you're born in, that influences what ideas you'll be exposed to, like, there's a part of that that makes sense. So, so far, I take three beefs.

All right, three beefs. One beef is that culture, he says, culture is designed to make sure people at the top play a different set of rules than people at the bottom. Yeah. I think that's causation policy.

Okay. I think our culture will result in certain people benefiting over other people. But I don't know that, like, the people at the top design culture that way and perpetuate it just because they're at the top. I think that's a natural result of, like, I think the common assumption came first that it's just common sense.

And then the people in power came second. I think it's more likely than the people in power getting together in, like, let's do it this Hatching it from the beginning. Yeah, maybe... Because it shifts, right?

When there was a big shift in the Industrial Revolution, new people came to power that hadn't been in power before, and so culture prior to power. Yeah. So it's, um, I agree with you that it sort of, it gives a pretty simplistic and primitive view of, like, history. Yeah.

It's using, so it's using, um, like, if you went in and actually looked at the history of political thought in England versus having, like, a cartoon version. Yeah. So that's kind of what he... It feels cartoon-y.

So I feel, I think this is ultimately the criticism of Gramsci is that he ends up presenting cartoon versions of things that are really big overgeneralizations as the vehicle for his ultimate goal, which is a communist revolution, which is a Marxist overthrowing. Yeah. The two other quickies. One of them is that, yeah, I think your context probably determines pretty much what you are, but that doesn't make it wrong, right?

It's like pointing out that, ah, you only know math because your parents were mathematicians because they taught in school. Does that make math incorrect? No, it doesn't. That doesn't necessarily reduce the value of the person just by pointing out that their context makes it, right?

Just by pointing out the process by which something is made or comes to be doesn't necessarily have a total bearing on its value. And it seems like he's assuming that it does, right? That we should resist the culture. It is wrong if the superstructure that you're getting taught was created for the benefit of the powerful, right?

So if the first thing is true, then the whole contextual argument of people being born into this and being sort of propagandized into this way of thinking about the world... Then it's someone forcing their position on you. And I think it relies heavily on that third assumption that there's no overarching human experience, but even by his own reasoning, like, yes, if my context and culture determines who I am, then there's a certain common context between all of mankind. We all experience things in a similar way.

We have similar bodies. We have similar needs. Like, there is a common thread through all of mankind, and that is part of the context that determines us. So simply saying that there's like, there's no common human experience is discounting his own evidence, I think.

Yeah. That's all makes sense. I feel like I don't have yet a grasp enough on, is this the entirety of his score? I like to get cranky as early as possible.

Which is fine if we make it fun. Well, I guess his point is that, like, the bourgeois and the proletariat both buy into the cultural hegemony. And everyone just sort of thinks it's common sense, but it's not common sense, it's power structures. And therefore, there needs to be a very explicit counter-hegemony in order to bring about a just or right change.

And so if you... So this is why the Communist Revolution or the Marxist Revolution failed in England, is because they have a cultural hegemony of what it means to be a British, what it means to be, you know, a British person. And the common British worker had an idea of it, and the British lord had an idea of it, and the British factory owner had an idea of it. And they all could understand why the other person, how the other person existed, and they were all more or less cool with it.

Not that the British worker who was maybe exploited didn't say, like, man, I wish I wasn't exploited. But I guess what Gramsci is saying is that eventually when he sort of, like, if you ask that British worker, what are you going to do about it, eventually he's going to get to some sort of phrase where he says, well, that's just not what you do. Well, why don't you blow up your factory? Well, you know, I don't want to kill anybody.

Well, why don't you want to kill anybody? Well, because there's... Because it would be wrong to kill somebody. Sounds like they're eventually reaching just the Tao, like the basic human notion of what's right and wrong.

And because... Sorry, if you're a new listener, that was C.S. Lewis' way of explaining the common human notion of the rule of what is right and acceptable versus what is wrong and unacceptable that he thinks spans all... Yeah, so I think that Gramsci, when Lewis talks about the Tao and he says that Nietzsche is trying to create a new Tao, Gramsci definitely is creating a political philosophy that rejects the idea of Tao.

Right. And really brings it into more of a pragmatic, almost Machiavellian, he quotes Machiavellian a lot, along with Marx in his work, that it really just comes down to the pragmatic and that the culture of one's day is not what it means to be a human person. Or, I mean, he really is coming up against sort of the classical, or not even the classical, the Enlightenment world. And so there's definitely sort of interesting...

He's going up against the Enlightenment world that takes, you know, that has a theory of natural law, classical views of justice, and says, like, well, the only reason everyone thinks that is because that's the useful cultural hegemony that keeps the powerful in power. Which is Aja's point of attributing a reason whether it's actually true or not, without delving into, is it a good system that is set up? Thinking back to your government episode from however long ago that was, it's a totally different view. It's instead of a good government that's established and we're trying to maintain that, we're fighting to fix what has always been broken.

So in that sense, it's not just a view of owners and workers, but it's actually... The categories get extended to oppressors and the oppressed. And then Gramsci's solution is that you need to go and gather a basket of the oppressed. And they can be oppressed in all sorts of different ways, and they can be oppressed for all sorts of different reasons, and then together they come and they try to forge some sort of counter-hegemony to take down the system.

and so um but it doesn't actually happen does it the founding of that counter hegemony or never gets to a large enough size yeah so the communist so this is maybe this is where we talk about russia so the communist revolution that happens in russia people people said so why did it happen there um and it didn't happen in england his answer was well there wasn't enough of a cultural hegemony cohesion between the ruling class so like the stars and the landowners and the actual people that overthrow so this is kind of the funny thing about about marxism or about communism is that communism thinks or marxist revolution thinks it's going to be the proletariat that overthrows the bourgeoisie but it's always the like disenfranchised bourgeoisie that overthrows the franchise bourgeoisie right like it's not a it's not a workers rebellion right the people who took over russia in the workers rebellion were not like farmers and factory workers it was university students right um so it's like the young bourgeoisie who don't have a place in the old bourgeoisie system um say well the whole system is the whole system is a problem so we need a counter system to sort of a system so um gramsci says then what um then instead of trying to go to factory workers and convince factory workers that they need to like take up arms against their their um their overlords is you're gonna come up to a factory worker who's like a good catholic who's like you know i just don't you know uh you know god put this you know i submit to the authorities under me and gramsci's revolution is like oh man this isn't gonna work um um what we need to do if we're gonna get the proletariat to get out of the cultural gemini we need then therefore the revolution starts by going into the organs of culture so instead of having proletariat overthrow so we don't go at we don't go for the substrate we don't care for the economics of the situation like marx did we go for the superstructure um and so then you should have these little uh gramsciites or whatever going into the art and school and the myth of of the people the storytellers of laws the philosophy the science and education so he says you know you have people who um whose job it is is to present a counter narrative right to the to the prevailing narrative since everything is just a game of narrative and oppression to present a counter narrative and eventually when that counter narrative gets more and more and more foothold well then the common sense for the proletariat shifts and then what's common sense for the proletariat not being you know violent or revolutionary is now like oh maybe we should do this sort of thing so you know if you think like 19 oh animal farm right like boxer the horse is the proletariat and uh you know boxer the horse isn't convinced about this um but he goes along with it because the pigs who are the disenfranchised bourgeoisie um you know kind of yeah get boxer on board but it's not coming from boxer is that the name of horse boxer you remember yes oh yeah i had a student read a story where he died and became glue in the bottom of her backpack oh because he goes through a glue pack that's what i was gonna say he is cool i wonder if that went into the story too of eventually it's not about the worker right yeah it's not about the worker at least and this is i mean there's lots of criticisms of granchi but one of the criticisms of granchi is this it's not like this isn't this is not a system of like enfranchising the poor man this is um a system of enfranchising the intellectuals who aren't in the intellectual citadel right um and so um and so then but you know and he was saying like yeah but if you want to if you want to change the system like you do this you don't go and you don't try to like you know um rile up the fact that the coal workers in northern england you don't you know go to the coal workers in northern england you go and you get a bunch of true believers into newspapers or newspapers or making films about it or blog it up yeah blog it up uh write music that kind of thing is the purpose not to then impact the substrate so by taking you mean yeah i do so you start with the superstructure but isn't the purpose of that superstructure to yes to eventually alter the substrate you're saying this is a question of tactics you start with the superstructure but then the end goal is still people that yes the end goal is still that is that um unless those disenfranchised bourgeoisie then get into power right and then are the new power and then just keep it right like um so then you know instead of so once they get to be the editors of a major newspaper or whatever um instead of then using that for the struggle the real struggle it's like okay well now now you know um instead of instead of getting a promotion about you know working in an institution i sort of have done it through uh through force um i guess is the way to put it um um i don't know too much about this this this plus a bunch of other political philosophy is what is made up what's called critical theory in uh in sort of the modern uh political theory um i know that gramsci isn't himself like this is this isn't solely all the political theory because there's like a frankfurt school i don't know anything about and there's all sorts of other things in there um but this is what i find fascinating is like yeah um is compare this to the government of middle ages for example so the man the king and peasant in the middle ages believe that they were taking part in a harmonious system that was orchestrated through almost a divine hierarchy and so the king was king because god had him king he was born king and the peasant is peasant because that is his lot in life and yes there could be uh the wheel of fortune could turn so that the king could be a happy king or crappy king you could the peasant could have a wonderful life or a life of hardship so there was uh volatility in the uh in the life of of the individual person but we were always taught in the middle ages like there's not a whole lot of social mobility that's why i was told right and this is part of there's not a lot of social mobility because the idea of social mobility was that disruption was calling into questions or the harmony of of the of the order okay go ahead i was gonna say but i think we currently misunderstand that that order was perpetrated by the kings to keep the serfs in place whereas like but that's the thing we just we just finished my podcast on plato where he basically lays out why a philosopher king is the best way to do things why the people at the bottom should be working at the bottom of the people that are the warriors should be the warriors why the king should be the king and you also have old myths the sword of damocles it sucks being king people want to kill you when you're king you have all kinds of worries that a farmer doesn't have right so we make the assumption that number one being king is awesome i don't think that's true and number two that being at the bottom is terrible life if you have a decent lord that isn't horrible to you and you can just farm and run your farm how you want to like that's a wonderful life in fact that's life that Odysseus shows at the end of um exactly and so for us to sort of like backshop our attitudes onto the world and say like all those poor peasants is to discount right what all of them believe was that like yeah one-handed rule it means that you get a lot done if he's a philosopher king it means we are an incredible country and who wants to be king being king is a nightmare right but if he sucks we're all gonna suck right exactly yeah so there's there's the there's a king at the top but there's also tyranny at the bottom right it's like a reverse picture so as sort of modern people who live at the tail end of the industrial revolution the beginning of what everyone call this the digital revolution we look at that and we say oh man that sucks because you don't have the opportunity for vast financial growth that one can have or you know like you look at that and you say we have social mobility what's the point of living and right and um and the person in the middle ages would you know um would say like your ambition is the thing that you live for exactly like why why are you trying to do that like there are so many other things to live for it's family the church sure and not to overly romanticize the past because there's tremendous upside to living in a technological world where you know we don't pull you and there were a lot of people that want to be king and try and kill people but generally speaking when you're talking about um but i think the biggest different differentiator is that in that old view and even in certain sense in the in the enlightenment view there is an idea that it's not just materialism that's driving everything so we need to take either the eternity of the soul or we need to take the spiritual world the fact that human beings are a body soul composite and that should be baked into our not only that should be baked into our government structure uh you definitely have that in the middle ages in the enlightenment you have if you're cynical you would say that the enlightenment wanted the fruit of the christian society without the trunk or without like a belief that's probably the cynical way they spent their they spent their time digging the roots out from under the tree yeah they still had the tree and they wanted the life that came from that system being whole but they didn't want to accept the dog so they want like i love sitting under this tree but gosh these roots are just uncomfortable for my bum so let's see where the roots keep the tree or they wanted the um yeah they they wanted the goodness that comes out of the praxis but they didn't want the doxy or they didn't want the doctrine that went around what time did you say that was the enlightenment you didn't like enlightenment and uh i'm moving into sort of like 16th 17th 18th you know yes i mean yeah well yeah in many ways what's happening sort of the digital world is sort of almost the end of the enlightenment and of course everyone newspapers are talking about uh the end of the liberal order whatever you want to call it it seems like what i mean say what you will of nisha but the dude was a prophet he's he realized early what was happening he's like look when we dissociate ourselves from god we lose everything like all values are going to be valued and i think what what he kind of predicted is coming true and so gramsci's like good you've got yourself out from god here's the playbook of like for the unenfranchised to become enfranchised and to have power so it's a tool book or it's a skill set but even then like to what end to the end that i have power and cash i guess it's the end of self-actualization but that assumes that the people at the bottom have no power to self-actualize the noble end would be that you're doing this with poor man or for the oppressed man the cynical reading of it would be that you're doing this because um if they're if if skills could do in some way um or if being able to do something can correlate into wealth or power then those who have nothing other than anger or you know or mobilization uh this is the way that they can sort of like have the seat at the table that's a more cynical way of reading it so even even with the charitable way if we're doing this for the poor man like so in the what's the end the end is that we overthrow the oppressors and that then everyone is absolutely equal is the end equality communism like i mean um i think uh one of the things that everybody who is part of the disenfranchised bourgeoisie who wants to take over the enfranchised bourgeoisie if they don't have a unity of thought of what that system is going to be or if they or more dangerously if they have that anything is better than this mentality then that's a real dangerous place to be because there are things worse than the military there are things worse than with the current yeah um yeah so um yes um so i just yeah the um the problem with this view because it oversimplifies it oversimplifies it has a strong sort of view of the determinism of your historical context um and um basically it's like control the gemini control the world that's kind of his his view on it um and that's that's yeah um he wanted to sort of see this happen in italy and then you can sort of see how um uh what fascinates me is that fascism and marxism are really two sides of the same coin um in this and that's a whole other podcast but um anyway what's our time stamp like here uh you have 31 minutes okay cool um so the this sort of um way of thinking about the world makes its way into theology theology always is trailing theology theology always trails like the world no theology always trails philosophy um so philosophical things that happen in the 18th century or 19th century often find themselves in sort of work their way into the theology of the 20th century you can see this going all the way back um the uh really the theology of the protestant reformation comes from a lot of the political philosophy of like 100 years before it and stuff um and the heresies that came before it um that's a whole other podcast but um so this happens all the time in uh in theology is that theology is always trailing philosophy so this philosophy um sort of find it finds its way in to western christianity so to christianity in um in yeah in europe and in north america and it first finds its way in catholic theology so catholic theology often is a little bit more sensitive um to philosophy than protestant theology um i don't know why that is but by sensitive i mean like picks up on it faster and has kind of like a higher adoption rate of taking a taking a philosophy and trying to work out a christian theology around it or where you're explaining it in life of of the christian texts um so this uh i don't know too much about this but this does um sort of bear kind of an interesting thing that i think if i may make a bold prediction about the future we'll look at that in a second so this kind of thinking about the world that gramsci has works its way into some catholic theology of the early to mid 20th century that generally gets its name called liberation theology now not all liberation theology is um marxist or not all liberation theology sort of is using a tool book that comes from a uh materialist worldview or materialist way of viewing the universe but a whole but a lot of it is and a lot of that uh catholic feel that catholic liberation theology found a place of expression in places where there were lots of marxist revolutions going on so mainly latin america in the early 20th century early mid 20th century so you might get into this later but um isn't there a fundamental disagreement if marxism is a materialist philosophy and religion kind of a definition has a spiritual component so this ends up being the criticism actually the famous the famous criticism that cardinal ratsinger before he became pope he wrote a lot about the problems of of this liberation theology being he says the only way that it can be used in actuality is if you kind of have to become full marxist for to buy it and become full marxist you end up having to like think of a materialist universe um so therefore i can't really have any coalescence or coherence with christian dogma um and then a lot of the um liberation theologians response were like fine maybe but it still works so you're you're making a picture than i'm used to for liberation theology and this is too in the weeds i don't feel like i myself have a firm i have i'm yeah i think so i think i think one way of telling the story is marxism infiltrated the church therefore they combined into um liberation theology the more charitable yes in the way someone who actually believes that would say it i believe is more akin to saying that the story of exodus is one that's told over and over again through time that there are oppressors there are oppressed god sides with the oppressed to free them that's the story we see in exodus um and in some sense what happens with christ it's the conquering of death which is oppression so this is good because this all comes down to the central problem and that central problem is not the doxy not the belief but the actual practice so there's a so there's orthodoxy but is there an orthopraxis when it comes to this sort of thing so this is interesting therefore we should topple oppressors so yeah so here's the chairs sort of the charitable or if you wanted to give a biblical attempt to flesh out this kind of philosophy you would say that the cross of christ is god siding with the victim yes the oppressed the oppressed and the christian needs to side with the oppressed because god does and insofar as the christian is the oppressor the christian needs those two things are mutually exclusive and so christian needs to lay down their rights or their privileges as an oppressor to take up sides next to the oppressed okay so that's the maybe the the dog that was even getting into practice at the end so the dogma would be god sides with the oppressed and the christian must side with the oppressed um that's the dogma the praxis then becomes a real sticky and thorny issue because one version of that telling is the only way that one man can this is the version i disagree with the only way that a man or a woman or a christian can repent and actually then be in god's kingdom and have repentance is that they lay down their oppressive they lay down their whatever their two two two three oppression are and take up the cause of the oppressed and that is and that is the way that you atone for your sins and that is the way that you that you repent the reason i'm a problem with that is that now you've turned the um conversion of the soul and you've turned the the christian repentance into a it has to be a political action there's now you have to do political things now the reason why we as christians especially modern christians get our shorts and a lot about this is because there was a huge division definitely the protestant church between two ways of thinking about this when it came to justice and when it came to um uh what do christians do in light of the difficulties of the world um and there's a split i don't really know when this happened but i can sort of give color to the split as someone who's lived who's lived in protestant christian in my life this is sort of seeing it from the inside so the split is generally speaking the mainline denominations took on the mantle of your faith must be worked out in action and that's political action so be it um so it is a it is that you have to work it out in the political sphere that the christian has to be um a worker in for the justice of the oppressed and if that means you know doing x y or z specific example of that then that is what the christian must do that is the orthopraxis so that is um that is the mainline route and the mainline churches have gone down that route the more the other route and this is probably the route that we all grew up in um is the doubling down on the personal conversion the billy graham route it's like no it all has to do with a a strong strong strong belief and then insofar as that strong belief prompts you to act then you can go and do charitable acts of good work but those terrible acts of good work don't prove or don't do anything they just are what you're supposed to be doing and that's where that sort of split came from but i mean i think we know or we you know the book of james is so challenging in this because it's talking about you know faith without works is dead and works without faith is what do you call it uh i think you make this up as you go faith without works is dead is a dead faith and works with no faith is like you know vain or something um you have to sort of marry the doxy and the praxis together yeah um and so then the big question is and this was a big question the catholic church that ratzinger wrote about wrote against was is proper catholic action orthopraxis is the word is it siding with those who are trying to who say they are bringing power to the disenfranchised through social revolution so that's a big question there's tons of bishops in latin america like yes we got poor people and if and if the people in power are not going to help the poor people then we're going to use my influence as a church to do this this is orthopraxis and um and ratzinger's response to that was this actually isn't the way that we should be talking about salvation in the gospel it's not through um political action it's it's through the cross of christ so that's the only thing and in some sense it feels like you are now splitting hairs and um okay so all of this if i'm to understand anyway just before we get into your opinions just so we can trace the rat is so this is grim sheet not a christian not not a theologian um someone who has a atheistic moralistic philosophy that philosophy's toolkit getting adopted in a theological framework and is now uh in the theological framework in um uh in liberation theology the early 20th century and then my prediction about process in the future but we'll get there i think theological adoption is a bit of a mistake and a simplification of what happened in the exodus and on the cross and here's why so if i understand the bravest theology as you described it i'm sure there's probably shades of nuance that we didn't get to but if you're saying that god went to the hebrews and freed them from the egyptians like to bring them freedom so first of all what did he free them into it wasn't democracy at best it can be called another tyranny right he made the decisions he made them wander for 40 years in the desert is that the attitude we're supposed to adopt for the people and push them into the desert and if we're talking about christology jesus sided with the oppressed if he oppresses us against who what oppressor yes so either either it's ourselves which seems like a contradiction and that's the thing is like it can't be contradiction so therefore he must be siding with us against some other oppressor and the person who brought death to us as a result was him so either he is siding with us and we may we seem to make god a tyrant in both cases i think if we are too side with the oppressed in this instance we we would make a it would be an incorrect understanding to say that like that is god demonstrating that we need to divide mankind into oppressors and oppressed i think we should see mankind as something that has been saved because that was the action of the cross and that we have because of all of man and yes some people need our education more than others right the people who are poor people who are sick but that doesn't mean that we should neglect those who happen to find themselves in positions of power not that we should like send money or anything but just that it does it is not like his goal was not to drive a wedge his goal was to redeem all of us and if we look at exodus the goal was not to make pharaoh look like a chump it was make god look good to reserve a people that would eventually result in christ in a single saving action that saved us all so we have to save somebody is to devalue his action is what i think now you're yes there's another key problem in there and that is that it begins to conflate the idea of sin so christ died on the cross not to free us from oppressors like romans um christ died on the cross to free us from the oppression of sin and death yes so once you start to say the sin that you need to atone for is belonging to being oppressor um now you've made it a pretty difficult situation because now you've ascribed the sin of the world onto a group of people so this is actually why you're sort of looking at some of the oppressions is like lust yeah no but we hear this i think we probably heard this even preached about in our churches which is to hear the phrase systems can be sinful and maybe there's some nuance that needs to be teased out of that but that but if that's the question is is that necessarily true um um i don't know maybe i don't get into that into that thing but this is that kind of thought that well uh well you know maybe you can be a great person but you're part of a system that's really sinful because you bought a shirt that was made by slave labor or whatever and so um now you're in this really strange position well is this a sin that i need to repent of is this like and do nothing well if i just sort of like if i just sort of pray to god and say like i'm sorry that i bought a shirt by slave labor people can be like well that's kind of cheap so the next question is maybe you guys start doing something about it so then we're getting into the okay so then this is um um is that the fact is that the christian life is that we begin to then um start enacting to start sort of redeeming these sinful systems well the only way to redeem the sinful system is to start like cracking heads to the people that want to keep that system that's when it starts getting real real sort of squishy here because i mean that's the revolution would be violence but that's many steps removed from if someone came to you and said i'm really convicted of the evils of slave labor and textile production and they are going to buy locally sourced you know i mean you wouldn't be gross than that like and in some sense they're making the world better in the sense that they're moving money away from a system that enslaves people to one that is um not right like i don't know we started seeing we started seeing weird manifestations of this in sort of christian evangelicalism remember coney 2015 yeah remember that was what was that maybe the world 2015 yeah so coney was this warlord in africa who was doing terrible things in the nation that he was in and um uh a group of of sort of christians decided they were going to make him internet famous to try to lever the lever uh sort of twist the arms of power to go in and take care of this world right that was like that's that's a fascinating uh that's a fascinating sort of practice right there already like that's sort of an interesting um case study in thinking about this but my prediction that i sort of mentioned was um protestant evangelical christianity hasn't really thought through this um this sort of liberation theology so liberation theology has been bouncing around in catholic thought for a long time has a lot of ink spilt and a lot of um sort of um figuring out where the catholic church stands on this particular issue as people who are out of communion with the catholic church over liberation theology and the extent that you know it should play into revolutions and government overthrows and all this sort of stuff um um i worry that um the wing of the church that didn't start thinking about works they thought about um sort of more billy graham doubling down on on um personal salvation um um if the members of that denomination are not if they are catechized into a type of faith that revolves around um more one's personal feelings about things which i think is a really valid criticism of a lot of uh sort of modern evangelical at least practice and not theology theology is probably fine you probably go read a theology book from a from an evangelical theology like yeah that's great good theology um but the sort of the way it's played out at least in churches you know that i grew up in and we've talked a little bit about this on the podcast before if there is a weakness or if there is sort of like a um fragility in um in um sort of solidly having practice flow out of biblical understanding something like a liberation theology um i think it's going to hit uh protestant churches hard i think i think it's going to come in there's going to be a destabilizing thing people are going to have to figure out well what do we do how do we frame our um how do we frame the the sorrows and sins of the world into how i live my life and gramsci gives a political answer liberation theology gives a theological version of that political answer that i think um um i don't say it's a trojan horse but i think it's something that is a pretty volatile thing that um that i don't think lots of people i don't think is really yeah um understood too much there's more to the worldview than just um deciding with the oppressed there's again the materialist angle to it it's only seeing conflict yeah yeah exactly that's a portion of it yeah um and there's one last thing just to give maybe a little more cream to this uh i'm not a baptist i don't know much about baptists i don't know very much about the baptist southern baptist convention but this was a point of contention in the 2019 southern baptist convention which was how much should we allow this kind of political thought and um philosophical theological uh tool kit to be used in our baptist seminary so this was an actual proposition that came through it got passed um there's a lot of opposition to it so i don't know much about baptists but you know the biggest denomination or biggest sort of organized denomination in the u.s and if they're sort of having conversations about this then uh yeah then i think it's going to be something that is a um a sort of a wing of theology that protestants haven't thought about for 50 years but more other mainline denominations have so anyway sorry your thoughts amber uh i thought i think they're about the current political climate which we might want to straight away from i mean i think it's a lot of people would be making would be thinking about the current political climate the thing is like we don't yeah how do we how we know what's happening well i'm just saying like when i grew up churches seemed to be insular like the concern from the pulpit was my personal walk with christ and now i think churches are encountering pressure from the outside to deal with political things that are happening outside of the church doors that have to do with larger groups of people than just the individual right because those groups of people have representatives in the church and outside of the church and i think that there's only so long pastors can listen and learn before they have to take a stance and one of those stances is going to be liberation theology right i think that yeah so so i think just we will probably see this like a theology of practice concerning groups and oppressed peoples come to the next couple years because because of that pressure to move away from concern with an individual walk across then this is part of the timeline of so these churches so bill graham even as an example you have some form of reform inside the church it starts a new movement the movement gets large it becomes the main line a new reformer comes along like isn't this just yes yeah i think that's a whole way of phrasing it is that like this maybe is coming in and breathing a little life into some of the rot right or is coming in and pointing out some blind spots right we've talked about cultural blind spots before yeah i mean when i said my you know churches were insular in a lot of ways it was about us rather than being about like part of a calling is to go and help the poor but my my worry was that um uh when it becomes a narrative of opposing the oppressor no it's more that we're not coming in to um a lot of a lot of big denominations um um haven't done a very adequate job of forming thoughtful christian thinkers and and sort of um uh biblical literacy uh theological understanding i don't mean like everybody you know um can pass it can pass quiz but on you know orthodoxy or whatever but i mean like a real wrestling with like okay i'll give you an example so um when is it right to be civilly disobedient okay well there's a there's the bible story of the phrase scripture give on to caesars you can use that as a let the authorities have their authority um because god is ultimately in control so you know like they're gonna do what they do and so give on to caesars and the other biblical story is god or jesus flipped over the the tables in the temple because they were exchanging things and profaning god so which so those are both biblical when do you know to apply which one to a current context of unrest or whatever and the thing is the reality is it's really difficult to do that it's really hard to do that and you need to have healthy cohesive bodies that love each other to be able to think that through um to be able to be you know the light of god in the world and i wonder if there are as many healthy bodies that love each other than we think they are there are i don't know i don't know how to answer that question well this is sort of augustine city of god it's like when augustine says how many people are in the city of man how many people are actually in the city of god we don't really know we don't really know how many people are actually in the city of god um because it's the city of god we don't get to see it but so how many people are going to church but are actually in the city of man this is something augustine talks about in the city of god so i mean it's not like it's a new thing um not too but anyway but the the warning is i mean the actual sort of maybe theologically interesting question is is can you take a tool and this was a debate at the Baptist convention can you take a methodology of interpretation of the world that is rooted in materialism and actually use it for theologically and have it still be orthodox and the convention said yes the convention said yes the Catholic Church said no and that's sort of the big debate so is there yes so anyway is a heuristic that sees the world as a press and a presser can that completely seamlessly fit into Christian theology and have it engage the culture or whatever you think you want to use to justify to use it anyway really good pressling stuff but it's yeah anyway that's Antonio Gramsci and yes as he got older he ended up looking he was a very very short man he was like maybe five feet and he had big old soup shoulders and as he got older he ended up looking more like a frog or a turtle he kind of like sunk into himself and he was like this little short guy this little like rip the system hang on guys so okay well this has been Classical Stuff You Should Know and I guess goodbye to our listeners both in audio and on video this is the first it's weird it's our first recording session with video so hi I guess the next time we record you'll see us in different clothes yeah it's weird it's been three weeks we've gone on the same stuff so you can check us out at classicalstuff.net if you're like giving that'd be awesome if you 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