What in the World is David Brooks Talking About? Part II

In his NYT article, "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact," David Brooks paints a picture of Western history in tones of black and white, from ancient to current times, pagan to judeo-christian, in a semiotic shakedown that amounts to bad vs. good. Maybe easy reductions like that appeal to some readers, but they're pretty much always wrong.

As an example of macho-pagan cruelty he cites the hero of the Iliad as an example. He writes, "Think of Achilles slaughtering his enemies before the walls of Troy. For a certain sort of perpetual boy, what could be cooler than that? But there is little compassion in this worldview, no concept that humility might be a virtue. There is a callous tolerance of cruelty." The only problem is that's exactly the author's point. From the first lines of the poem Homer tells us that the work will be about "Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,/That caused the Akhaians [or Greeks] loss on bitter loss . . . /Leaving so many dead men."* He couldn't be clearer, namely that Akhilleus' rage is foolish, immature, senseless, and tragic. The book goes on to make fun of the great "hero," featuring him whining to his mommy, the goddess, Thetis, and pouting when he doesn't get his way, such that it's impossible for any close reader to walk away thinking that acts of violence are in any way extolled; in fact it's just the opposite. As a counterpoint to the unthinking Akhilleus the author offers Odysseus in the same epic, a short guy who lacks Akhilleus' brawn who must rely on his brains instead. His patroness is Athena, the goddess of wisdom and thought.

For anyone missing the anti-masculinist, anti-brutalist message in the Iliad, there's Homer Odyssey, a work which contrasts and eclipses the earlier one by focusing on so much proto-feminist energy. Odysseus gets top billing, but one could argue that his partner, Penelope, is the true hero of the story. She puts off the advances of a gang of suitors, opportunistic thugs really, by keeping her cool, which is to say by using not physical force but brain power. When Odysseus finally makes it home to Ithaka Athena counsels him to return incognito, in rags, as a beggar, in order to carefully suss the situation on the home front; she knows the dumbest thing in the world would be to go in like some "typical guy," brandishing a sword; the device also gives the poet an opportunity to make comments about class.

In disguise it's only another woman, the nurse, Eurykleia, who recognizes the homecoming king––she and the dog, Argus, about whom I've written separately. Then in an amazing passage of thinking-in-action we find Penelope observing Odysseus in bum-drag, mulling over the identity of the stranger, a homeless man whom decorum bid she take in and treat like royalty––the gang of suitors wanted to give him the boot, but Penelope insisted he stay. She is slowly putting two and two together about the guy, working past appearances. It's also a subtle nod to the royal status of all human beings.

The point is almost eight centuries before the christian stories, in which the protagonist waxes about the good Samaritan, the Greeks espoused an ethics of kindness, and that at a time when women and the underclass were treated like chattel. And many centuries before Matthew quotes Jesus saying, "Live by the sword, die by the sword," Homer was calling war and violence, allegorized first in Akhilleus' mindless actions, and then those of the greedy suitors, "doomed and ruinous." Millenniums before christian culture got it about women, if christian culture has gotten it yet, Homer viewed them as complicated, thoughtful, smart, and even superior in many ways. Anyone who reads those works, or works generally in what people call the pagan era, as paeans to masculinist cruelty and violence is simply not paying attention.

To then go on to set up a judeo-christian ethos as a corrective to the pagan is wrong on the face of it, especially in light of the genocide taking place in Gaza today. But then what Brooks refers to as the judeo-christian era or ethos has been in fact marked from the beginning by cruelty and violence. I'll leave it to scholars of the early church, post-Constantine, to talk about the excesses there; for me the history comes more clearly into focus at the time of the christian crusades. Talk about a centuries-long debacle, and blood bath. When the christians finally arrived in Jerusalem in 1099 CE, after having left a path of destruction along the way, the zealots killed tens of thousands, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians––basically anything that walked. It was the kind of savagery that makes Akhilleus' fictional revenge look like small potatoes, only it actually happened.

But that's just one of the excesses of a "christian" Europe. We use the word holocaust today to refer to the horrors of a specific event in the 1930s and '40s, but it would be more accurate to say that was just the latest in a series of holocausts in christian times. There was the Inquisition; waves of witch killings; anti-Muslim slaughter-campaigns, propagandized in The Song of Roland; global colonization by the conquistadors; the burning of heretics and sodomites at the stake; the wars of reformation and counter-reformation where many millions died; the slave trade and slave system; the terrors of KKK lynchings; the genocide of Native Americans––and that's just for starters. There's the millenniums-long campaign in judeo-christian cultures against same-sex love, causing untold pain and millions of broken lives, a trauma that's ongoing. To unpack the gory details of so many christian actions is to look upon extended scenes of horror. And that doesn't include the brutal holocaust of animal lives, or the onslaught against the environment, milleniums-long events that are only ramping up at an alarming, ungodly pace in our own day.

There are American presidents, almost all practicing christians, as if it were a requirement for the job (post-founding fathers, who were secular deists); many owned other human beings and treated them like animals; they passed laws enshrining racial victimization. The pious church-goer, Andrew Jackson, dispossessed more than fifteen thousand Native Americans of their ancestral lands, brazenly ignoring the Supreme Court's injunction against the move, forcing them onto foreign territory; about 4,000 Cherokees alone died on the journey. There was the mass genocide of the Pequots by the Massachusetts Colony christians; the massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek; the more than six million Africans who died on the passage from Africa to the "new world"; the countless queer folk who suicided because of christian morality police throughout the modern era; and an untold number of women battered, bruised, and slaughtered by husbands who felt it was simply their divine right. There was the Holocaust, killing millions of not just Jews but homosexuals, Roma, Communists, and any other group that didn't fit the eugenicist ethos of the nazis. It was occasioned in a country of Catholics, but mostly Lutherans, a group whose founder was a vocal anti-semite.

The sheer volume of hate, vitriol, violence, and murder in what people call the christian era is unfathomable––almost too much to contemplate––including a mandatory, forced and policed, religious observance that lasted multiple centuries, going on millenniums, none of which was the exception to any rule but de rigeur in christian times. And yet Brooks has the audacity to claim, "The Judeo-Christian ethos showed the world something loftier than paganism." He laments we're heading into a pagan century, as though what's occurring is some kind of departure. The comment is problematic in light of history, one that christians on the whole run from and deny, never mind fail to atone for or correct. Talk about a failure of humility. Indeed the scale is so enormous that one is tempted to think of those atrocities as part and parcel of some terrible trait not of any era but of humanity as a whole, irrespective of the culture.

It's conceivable to say that humans were always pagan and remain pagan; it would be more accurate to say we're post-nomadic. When humans settled into agrarian cultures ten thousand years ago and developed cities the race for power and privilege was on; the competition to control land, borders, property, and bodies. That effort has challenged our better angels in many ways, brought out the worst among the power-brokers all too often, and that ugliness continues today; ancient and modern thinkers both have tried to temper things with a series of ethical statements, but it has done little or nothing to stanch greed or victimization. There've been many ethical types calling out abuses, calling for kindness––seers, prophets, saints, and untold numbers of ordinary folk––though their voices have mattered little to those, mostly men, bent on owning and controlling everything for their own benefit.

In fact the christian stories are a botched attempt at advancing an ethic in that they speak out of both sides of their mouth. The Jesus figure talks a good game in the gospels about love and only love but then goes on about a metaphorical separation of goats and the sheep, the bad and the good––he himself thinks in simplistic, binary terms; never a good sign. He harps about kindness toward the meek and poor while positing a hellish, hopeless afterlife where the evil will forever gnash their teeth. In fact like so many things, the christians plagiarized their afterlife from the one in Virgil's Aeneid, written in 31 BCE. The gospel writers seem not to have contemplated much the illogic of positing a god of love who is perfectly content to consign people to eternal suffering. Though faith and logic have never made good bed partners.

Brooks' point is that Trump is an aberration in a largely lofty, ethical christian era, but that argument too begs logic. It would do us all good to know our history, and literature, because simplistic arguments only perpetuate the problem. In fact Trump is as much a symptom as a culprit––Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it best when years ago she commented, "He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out . . . . But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified [and] reanimated." The "infrastructure," of course, is an army of mostly christians and christian nationalists hell-bent on destroying secularism, the empathic elements of DEI and wokeness, the very deist principles that founded this country. Brooks would have us think that it's the pagans who are to blame, but Trump is in so many ways the poster-boy for the message underpinning the judeo-christian ethos from the get-go, in this world and the next, namely patriarchy and everything that goes with it.

*Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. NY: FSG, 2004.