8

Nonpolitical Politics

BUT ALL THAT GLITTERS is not gold. Non omne quod nitet aurum est. When we go digging for the goodness of the absolute, so fierce our passions can be that we do not inspect with care what we dig up. Nor do we reflect deeply on our means of digging, however deep our mining may go. Excavating a labyrinth in the dark, we may scarcely note the rubble, the subsidence, the pollution, the lives damaged and lost. We may not see the mess such mining leaves behind for those still on the surface, because that is precisely its point: to try to leave the mess, the mess of politics, behind.

And yet not leave it. It is for reasons of the surface that we go looking for golden absolutes anyway. Our social lives, with all their conflicts and concords, are what give absolutes their hoped for value. The glitter of the absolute turns out—once we turn this ore from side to side, inspecting its reflections—to be the sheen of the political. Although sought as an escape from politics, absolutes have their greatest attraction because of how they can be used in politics: but in a special kind of politics, what I will call nonpolitical politics. An absolute seems to be politically innocent from human affairs, due to its separation, deep in the ground or high in the sky, in nature or the divine. Thus, an absolute’s advocates feel their advocacy to be similarly innocent. They can therefore advance interests in human debate that seem to them disinterested, whatever the implications may be for the hierarchies and comities of our lives.

And yet, routinely, it is the advocates themselves who experience most of the advantages of such understandings of untarnished good.

Nothing brings the powers, and potential horrors, of nonpolitical politics to mind for me like my own small experience with gold mining. My wife Diane and I were visiting our friend Karl Muller in South Africa, where we had never been before. (I’ve since been many times, working with my colleague Mpumelelo Ncwadi, as chapter 2 describes.) This was during the height of apartheid. Karl is a White man, born in South Africa (although he is now a citizen of Swaziland), and a political radical. He was eager to show us his birth country, warts and all, so we might better understand apartheid and spread the word back in America. Gold mines were at the heart of the apartheid economy, and infamously dangerous and racist places.¹ Karl thought touring one would highlight apartheid’s injustices, and somehow or other, he was able to parley my undergraduate geology degree into a visit.² He also secured special permission for Diane to join us, as women at the time were banned from the exclusively male world of the mines.³

So it was that on October 15, 1984, the three of us found ourselves standing nearly four thousand feet underground, hunched over and covering our ears, trying to save our hearing from the loudest sound we had ever heard. We had been guided there by a section manager of the gold mine, who was White like the three of us. First, he had taken us to special locker rooms for Whites where we changed into boots, overalls, and helmets with lights. When we came out, the manager waved us over to where he was standing with two assistants, both slim Black men, one with a clipboard and pen and the other with a small satchel over his shoulder. We headed to the shaft and what they called the “cage,” a metal elevator car with an open latticework floor, roof, and sides.

On the ten-minute trip down, the manager decided to give us an education about why apartheid was in the best interests of all concerned, and how the mine racially organized its various jobs accordingly. “We understand our Blacks,” he assured us. I glanced over at the assistants who were with us. They were impassive as the manager explained how it was important to understand what Blacks were capable of doing and what they were not capable of doing, as well as recognizing the different skills of each tribal and national group.

“Mozambicans are clean—they make good tea boys,” he explained. “Angolans are smart, so they are great at cleaning toilets.” It was unclear why being smart suited one for cleaning toilets. Was that supposed to be an attempt at humor? While we were trying to figure it out, he went on, explaining that “Swazis make good drill boys,” as well as other attributions about the capacities and appropriate employment of various Black tribes and nationalities. Whites didn’t do any of these jobs, but there was no need for him to say that, and he didn’t. It was evident enough. And we never heard him refer to White mine employees as “boys.”

I looked over again at the two assistants, standing together with us in the elevator car. They gave no indication of even having heard what the manager had said. I wondered if they spoke English, and indeed if they were even part of our party or just taking the same car down into the mine with us. (It was only later that I learned that Blacks and Whites typically did not ride together in the cage.)

I looked over as well at Diane and Karl, catching their eyes. We were all in shock. While the manager’s focus was momentarily elsewhere, I quickly gestured with my hands about whether we should contest his outrageous statements. Karl shook his head. Something in the manager’s manner made it plain that we were there to listen, not debate and discuss. Close as we were in the cage, it was not a place for dialogue.

We emerged at the twelve-hundred-meter level (about thirty-nine hundred feet down), the shallowest working area of the mine at the time. (Today, the deepest South African gold mines reach down nearly four kilometers—almost two and a half miles.) It was surprisingly well-lit and cool. Continuing his explanation of how well everyone is treated and how much “we understand our Blacks,” the manager took us over to see a rest area for the miners, which also featured a board for hanging up tools, painted with two-dimensional silhouettes of the tools that were supposed to be hung on each hook. The two assistants came along with us. Evidently, they were indeed a part of our party. The manager proudly pointed to the board and said, “we paint the silhouettes because Blacks can’t see in three dimensions. You see, we know their nature.”

Can’t see in three dimensions? By nature? Was he pulling our leg, and maybe those of his two assistants? But there was no smile, no hint of a joke, however unkind and unfunny. (I afterward learned from South African friends that this was a relatively common belief among Whites during apartheid.)

That was not the only bizarre biological claim the manager made to us. Earlier he had explained how the mine company has to carefully select which Blacks to employ, putting them through a grueling weeklong physical training session in a massive steam room called a climatic chamber or an acclimatization chamber.4 “Blacks are hot-blooded, not just warm-blooded,” the manager explained. “Some of them their blood will boil if you overheat them.” Blood will boil? Likely in anger at this kind of treatment—which is probably what the training really served to detect, eliminating those who were unwilling to tolerate the abusive conditions of the mine’s racial hierarchy. (White miners, we learned, didn’t have to take the acclimatization training.)

The assistants remained impassive as the manager went on to explain that “Blacks aren’t stupid. In fact, they are great linguists,” referring to the click languages like isiXhosa that centuries of White overlords have struggled to wrap their tongues around. “But the thing is,” he continued, “they just can’t think logically or abstractly.”

Finally, to our great relief, he finished this line of explanation and instruction, and took us over to see the cooling equipment that kept this level of the mine so comfortable. I felt a desperate need to take the two assistants aside and say that I didn’t agree with what the manager was saying—that this was complete crap—but there didn’t seem any way to do so. I hoped they in fact didn’t speak English and didn’t know what he was saying.

The manager wanted to orient us under the ground, and reached for the clipboard and pen one assistant was carrying. Apparently, that was his role during our visit: to carry the manager’s clipboard and pen. The manager made a little sketch, showed us, and handed the clipboard and pen back to the man. The manager didn’t use the clipboard and pen again, but the man continued with us the entire time we were underground.

The manager told us he was happy to take us wherever we wanted to go in the mine. “We don’t have anything to hide,” he said. So I asked to see the working face of the mine and for a demonstration of rock drilling. The manager looked momentarily taken aback, but agreed. The manager had a word in Afrikaans with another White man—evidently the supervisor of this working level—and some arrangement was hastily made.

As we walked and clambered up and down ladders, the lighting gave out, the ceilings got lower and lower, the floors became covered with loose rock, and it got intensely hot. By the time we reached the working face, the tunnel was maybe four or five feet high, depending on the exact spot, and steeply sloped. We couldn’t stand upright. Neither could the miner, a small but muscled Black man. As we approached, he was resting by the rock face, stripped to his waist and covered with sweat, his drill laying on the sloping floor beside him. He had no goggles, no safety gloves, and was wearing only an ill-fitting helmet, ripped trousers rolled up to his knees, and thin, molded rubber boots, like one might wear in the rain. They were definitely not steel-toed. And no ear protection (which we didn’t have either). The manager said something, the supervisor pointed, and the miner picked up the drill. (We were later told it weighed about ninety pounds.) With impressive strength, the miner slung the drill up into a horizontal position, despite the low ceiling and the sloping floor with its covering of loose rubble. He turned the drill on.

It was like standing inside an earthquake.

I looked over at the manager, grinning at our discomfort as we flattened our hands over our ears. How could he believe such incredibly thin justification for such cruelty and exploitation? Evidently, because for him it seemed plenty thick enough. For him, it seemed just, and not political. For him, it seemed a matter of nature. Indeed, he had said exactly that.

When we left the rock face, sweaty and dusty from our few minutes there, ears ringing, the manager stopped us in a wider spot with a higher ceiling. He made some indication to the other of the two men who had been accompanying us, the one with the satchel. We then found out why he too was along. It was an insulated satchel, and he reached in and pulled out a cold Coke for each of us—for each of us White people, that is. I rather doubt that the four Cokes seemed just, apolitical, or natural to those two men. I think they were just as hot and thirsty as we were.

Then we headed to the cage for the ride back to the top, and, as it turned out, for another little demonstration by the manager. We emerged, blinking, into the noonday sun. As we talked with the mine manager, the two men wandered off across the yard, thinking they were done. But when they had gotten perhaps a hundred feet away, the mine manager lifted his hand and gave a sharp snap to his fingers. It was as if the men had hit the end of a bungee cord. They came zinging back, while the manager took out a pack of cigarettes from a pocket. He brought a cigarette to his mouth and bent slightly forward as one of the men produced a lighter and lit it for him. Then he waved the men away.

That wasn’t nature either. That was power.

Some ideas just grab you and won’t let go. They toss you high, swing you low, and spin you around until you are dizzy and giddy with their promise. Such an idea is the thought that there are moral realms beyond politics upon which we can base our actions and values, allowing the grace of the innocence of the absolute. Ideas about nature are a common foundation for such a conscience, what I have been calling a natural conscience. So are ideas of the supernatural. Other forms of reasoning can be as well. Key is our sense that the idea gives our motives grounds that we ourselves did not choose. We may then in good conscience, we believe, enact politics based on these motives that we contend derive from the nonpolitical. This is what I mean by nonpolitical politics, the paradox of pursuing interests that we believe are not based in interests—indeed, that we feel we may legitimately pursue precisely because we believe these interests are not based on interests.

The moral philosopher in all of us wants to find a sound basis for the good. On the whole, this is a welcome desire. But the sociologist in all of us should also recognize that we need to tread carefully with eyes wide open, and with mouth and ears ready to give and receive critique. The good, when we treat it as an absolute, is so seductive we may hardly notice when we are using it to do quite bad things—what I called the conundrum of the absolute in the first chapter.

I trust I am on solid moral ground when I declare that the manager of that South African gold mine was enacting bad things. But I have no doubt that he regarded himself as a good person, minus the occasional lapse. (No one’s perfect, after all.) At least, he went to great lengths to describe the procedures at the mine as based on the good—as treating people appropriately, according to their nature. Maybe it looked unfair from the perspective of the visitor to South Africa, unfamiliar with what the manager saw as the different capacities of Blacks and Whites. But he didn’t choose to give Blacks and Whites different capacities. It wasn’t his own interests that he was pursuing. There was nothing to hide. Everything was on the surface in the underground of the mine. Or so he believed he could claim to us.

I think the manager was well aware we did not agree. That was evident in his manner throughout our time with him. He showed little interest in learning about our reasoning, or about the reasoning of the two Black mine workers who were with us. Nonetheless, these were claims he needed to make to us and to the mine workers, and thereby make to himself personally and to the world politically. Few can find much comfort in the thought that others disapprove of us. Few are so confident in our comforts that we believe them unassailable. And so he sought a natural other—a first nature apart from human manipulation and therefore good, yielding a second nature—and a natural me and natural we that follows its guidance, and thus a natural conscience upon which to rest his moral soul.

We may take this as a sociological commonplace: that when people do things that others likely see as bad or even evil, or that they themselves might regard as bad or evil in another context, they generally construct it in their own minds as following a form of the good and just. One of the great questions of a moral sociology must be how people can construct the bad as the good—as well as the good as the bad.5 The nonpolitical politics of the natural conscience are a common means of that construction, whether on the part of that mine manager or on the part of so much other social mischief in this difficult and beautiful world.

The night I first met Mpumelelo I told him about that mine tour. He had mentioned that he has a degree in mining engineering and used to work in a gold mine—a different mine, it turned out, but one close by. Thinking it might be a point of connection, I told him about the manager, the assistants, the scene at the rock face, the satchel with the cold Cokes, and the men being called back to light the manager’s cigarette. He confirmed that what we experienced was not out of the ordinary. And he told an even worse story about how the cage at his mine had multiple levels, with the upper level for White miners, and how the White miners would open the trap door between the levels and urinate on the Black miners below on the trip down.

“That’s what it was like,” Mpumi said. “But the thing is this, Mike. They had to show that they were different from us. Apartheid absolutely depended on that.”

Mpumi was pointing to the third dimension of the natural conscience, the sense of a natural we. And he was pointing as well at how a natural we commonly takes shape as a double construction with a natural them. Although I believe not unavoidably, the sense of natural we is routinely highly bounded and hierarchical, based on a point of difference whose origin one ascribes to a natural other. Contending that the boundaries and hierarchies of human communities are for political gain is not a persuasive way to maintain those boundaries and hierarchies. Whether intentionally or not, the mine manager looked to nature to support those divisions, using the splits in the ancient triangle to maintain splits in human society—to find what he felt to be a nonpolitical thee, me, we, and them.6

Yet the double construction of a natural we and natural them is highly political, despite its claims to the contrary. Of course. We are political beings, whether people of the polis or people of the countryside, people rich or poor, people advantaged or hindered along the many axes of social privilege. I will argue in the last chapter that there is no necessary cause for sorrow in our political character, although there very well may be in the character of our politics. (My argument there won’t be surprising. It will, I believe, be familiar to how we commonly lead our lives and deal with the conflicts between us.) Nonetheless, we often seek a basis for fending off the social attributions others make and the political motivations they pursue, finding the good in what others may sometimes regard as the bad.

But how? Do I just say, no, I’m right and you’re wrong—that my concept of nature is the correct one and yours isn’t? What if you say the same thing right back at me? The solipsistic thought that the only truth is my truth is difficult to maintain for long, for the self is always in social context and social context is always in the self. Far easier it is when I conceive some others to be similarly constituted to me. The natural conscience commonly provides this ease by creating not only the sense of the goodness of a natural other and a natural me but as well the goodness of a natural we—a we that I understand in contrast to a them, or I must accept the vantages and disadvantages of that them as my own. Besides, it is far easier for me to protect any advantages I may gain via the nonpolitical politics of the natural we and them when similar others are similarly advantaged.

Which raises an important question: are nonpolitical politics always just a moral Trojan horse, where we hide our conspiracy as we gain access to the citadels of power? For it is certainly remarkably common that the nonpolitical politics we hear advanced in social life look an awful lot like the political politics of social life.

Conspiracies do happen. People do collaborate and coordinate in the framing of narratives that promote mutually advantageous outcomes, from corporate advertising to social movements to press releases to selective reporting to state censorship.7 But even in these circumstances, the collaborators sleep easier and better maintain each other’s respect when they feel that the conniving furthers purposes that are deeper or higher, derived from outside the human.

Thus, there is generally no need to sniff inside morality for the cigar smoke that rankled Thoreau’s nose in order to account for the common fit of proposition and position. We need only make the following sociological assumption: that people tend not to challenge ideas that support their interests. I will call it interests bias.⁸ This is perhaps the most basic observation of the sociology of knowledge.⁹ No conscious plan required. No need to light up cigars with others. The effort entailed is lack of effort. Face it, we normally don’t employ much intellectual rigor when we find a happy matchup between what we believe and what we want. There just isn’t the electricity there to set off the alarm bells of critique—at least not our own alarm bells.

It is not only in racism that we encounter interests bias and the use of nature in nonpolitical politics. Alas, we can also sometimes find it in environmentalism—perhaps most tragically in the creation of parks, reserves, national forests, and wilderness areas.¹⁰ This cuts close to the bone for me. I’m an environmentalist, and I’ve worked for decades on creating nature reserves and other forms of environmental protection.¹¹

My friend David Nickell is all too familiar with being subjected to this form of nonpolitical politics. Back in 2006, I emailed David that I was giving a talk fairly close to his farm. He emailed back the next morning inviting me to stay a couple of nights. A few weeks later, he and I were walking together through the nearby woods and meadows of what used to be his home: the Land Between the Rivers, what the US National Forest Service has renamed the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.

In far western Kentucky and extending south into Tennessee, two mighty rivers—the Tennessee and the Cumberland—run north in close parallel. The result is a kind of inland peninsula about five miles across and fifty miles long. Upward of a thousand families like David’s used to live there. Used to: in the 1940s, the authorities put a dam on the Tennessee, and in the 1960s they followed with a dam on the Cumberland, using eminent domain to claim all the land in between for a reserve and recreation area.

The Land Between the Rivers people didn’t go quietly. They’d lived there for generations. As we walk, David tells me the story of Miss Babe, a neighbor woman in her sixties who lived alone on her small farm.

“The government men were approaching her two-story frame house to present her with the condemnation papers. She told them to get back in their truck but they ignored her.” Miss Babe raised her shotgun. “One barrel took out the windshield. The second barrel offered enough reason for the government men to scramble to their truck and head back towards wherever it is government men come from.”12

I’m amazed at her fortitude, but David tells me the story has a bad ending. The “government men” convinced a neighbor to drive Miss Babe to a meeting in town. (She did not own a vehicle.) But there was no meeting. And while the neighbor was driving Miss Babe, they burned her house down. David describes Miss Babe’s reaction when she returned later that day.

“Rounding the curve at the top of ridge they saw the smoke. According to the man doing the driving she slumped in her seat and hung her head, but said nothing.”

David pauses, and I with him.

Then, in a hoarse whisper, David continues, “They had pushed her house into a pile with a bulldozer and set it afire—all her possessions still inside.”¹³

We come to David’s family’s former homestead. It’s spring and a great bank of his mother’s jonquils burst white and yellow from a small clearing in the forest. David explains that jonquils mark the location of former homes throughout the area, and I think back on several other jonquil patches we had passed earlier. I take David’s picture in front of his mom’s jonquils.

I’m dazed by the callous tragedy of it all. How could the officials bring themselves to do this, I ask David when we get back into his truck. David explains that they thought they were doing the right thing. Local people had maintained a collectively managed commons in the Land Between the Rivers, a large section of woods they called “the Coalins.” Nobody knows where the name the Coalins came from, David tells me. But it was full of wild turkey and deer, due to local people’s sound management. It may be hard to believe now, but turkey and deer had virtually disappeared from the rest of Kentucky. So hunters and environmentalists wanted the Coalins for a reserve, as well as to use the local flock and herd to repopulate turkey and deer elsewhere. Others wanted the entire Land Between the Rivers area for flood control, water supply, and possibly hydropower. These are all ecological purposes, they contended in various ways—purposes that came from nature, not politics. And the tourism, the hunting development, the water regulation, and the cheap power would be great for the economy, that seemingly inescapable natural absolute. Besides, muttered outsiders, the local people were just “hicks” and “hillbillies” anyway—a natural them.

Back at his house that evening, David points out the interests bias of the “government men”: that they had careers to advance and incomes to maintain. He tells the story of one of the federal attorneys who condemned the land. David explains that a local television station interviewed the attorney years after the removals were complete. The interviewer apparently asked the attorney the same question I had asked: How could the officials bring themselves to do this? The attorney replied that he was just doing his job and had thought nothing about it but now felt terribly. “If I die and go to Hell,” David quoted the attorney, “it won’t be for drinking whiskey and chasing women; it will be for what I helped do to the Between the Rivers people.”14

The mine manager and that attorney are not alone in the list of those who have sought to use nature in this invidious way, sanctioning not only the double construction of a natural we with a natural them but a natural hierarchy of we and them. I will not attempt to review this sorry history here, or to detail its continuing legacy in the politics of today.¹⁵ Rather, I will hope that I have provided enough in these two examples to encourage readers to be alert to this form of argument when they encounter it.

I hope we can also be more alert to the parallel use of the divine in the nonpolitical politics of legitimating hierarchy. To help with that watchfulness, I’ll give an example of this use, too. Yet it is difficult to do so without giving offense to someone—especially since I do not have space to provide a comprehensive review from all the bourgeois faiths. So there is a risk that I may be perceived as picking on the particular faith tradition of the example I give. I’ll have to accept that risk, while mentioning that I could have drawn examples from any of the bourgeois faith traditions that I have discussed in this book, including the more electrum ones.

The example I’ll give are the writings of the Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin—but, to repeat, not because of any special venom for Protestantism. Rather, I use this example because it also gives me a chance to discuss the rise of this major development in the world’s largest religion, and its relationship to the history of bourgeois life. In a more perfect book than the one I have written, I would have found a way to fit the Protestant Reformation into the chapter on Christianity. There simply wasn’t room. So I’ll use my discussion of the nonpolitical politics of Luther’s and Calvin’s natural conscience as an opportunity to also squeeze in a bit of this history—which begins with Catholicism.

“Rue Saint-Agricol? Did you ever hear of a Saint Agricol?” I asked my wife Diane as we took a left off Place de l’Horloge, the main square of Avignon. We were exploring the city on one of our first weekends living there during the sabbatical I describe a bit in chapter 5.

“Nope, never heard of that saint,” Diane replied. “There’re a lot them! But I think Rue Saint-Agricol leads to a church with the same name. Saw that on the map.”

Right she was. Other than Jerusalem or Rome, Avignon could justly claim to be the most Christian city in the world. In addition to the cathedral—Notre Dame des Doms, the former seat of Christendom during the fourteenth century, when the Papacy temporarily moved to Avignon—the old city inside the walls has another ten churches. (It also has a stunning nineteenth-century synagogue in the former Jewish quarter.) One of those churches is Église Saint-Agricol d’Avignon, the oldest church in the city other than Notre Dame des Doms. It dates back to the tenth century CE, although most of what we see today comes from a major reconstruction of the Église in 1321 CE, plus a few later renovations.

“Intriguing name,” I mused. “It must mean something agricultural.”

“There’s the church. It looks really interesting. Shall we go in?”

Walking around in the ancient gloom, we soon learned that Saint Agricol did indeed have an agricultural connection. His name came from the Latin agricola, which means farmer (as we ought to have remembered). But he wasn’t a farmer. He was the son of a Bishop of Avignon, and eventually went on to become Bishop of Avignon himself. (The Catholic injunction for priestly celibacy was rather loosely enforced at the time.) His prayers saved the city from an invasion of storks who were dropping dead snakes everywhere, causing disease, we garnered from a sign in the church. Because of his intercession, the storks reportedly grabbed up all the snakes in their beaks and flew away. Agricol was deemed a saint shortly after his death in 700 CE. Agricol became immensely popular when people found that, apparently, prayers to him could bring rain, good weather, and plentiful harvests. He is now considered the patron saint of Avignon. There’s a huge painting of him in the church, successfully pleading with Jesus to save the city from the storks. His relics are in a small reliquary just below the painting.

“Cool!” I exclaimed when we came back out of Église Saint-Agricol. “Fabulous church.”

“I loved it too,” agreed Diane. “But you know, Mike, it didn’t seem very bourgeois. But it is certainly Christian. How are you going to explain that?”

A fair question, and it’s one that had me stumped for a while. The accounts of Saint Agricol do indeed have a strongly pagan flavor to them. His name and powers clearly respond to pagan concerns for agricultural sustenance. His feat of stopping the stork invasion also shows a strong command of an ecology, a nature, which is by no means necessarily good. And he has a highly immanent presence. This is where one comes to pray to Saint Agricol, not some other place. He has no other church dedicated to him. Not only are his relics in the church, he was born in Avignon, he died in Avignon, and now he is the patron saint of Avignon—and only of Avignon.16 He is not just Saint Agricol. He is Saint Agricol d’Avignon. And he is indeed Christian, a faith that does not today typically emphasize pagan silver.

But the time of Saint Agricol and the seven hundred or so years that followed his life—from his birth in 630 CE to about 1400 CE—was not a very bourgeois period in Europe. During the European Middle Ages, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, urbanism underwent a major decline. Once a city of a million, Rome had been reduced to about fifteen thousand inhabitants by about 1300 CE, when most of Église Saint-Agricol was built. By then, there were only a few cities greater than fifty thousand inhabitants in size: Constantinople, Florence, Milan, Paris, and Venice. Most were under ten thousand.¹⁷ And this was before the Black Death, which killed about 60 percent of Europeans between 1346 and 1353, greatly reducing even further the size of the cities that remained.18 The Roman Empire had never been a majority urban society. Even at its peak, roughly 75 percent of people continued to live agrarian lives.¹⁹ But the proportion of urban people in the Roman Empire’s former area shrank well into the low single digits during “the calamitous 14th century,” as Barbara Tuchman aptly termed it.²⁰

This period of urban collapse saw a corresponding effervescence of new saints, now mostly forgotten, that adherents felt had pagan powers—like Saint Agricol. The class background of these electrum saints didn’t matter. What mattered was that they spoke to pagan concerns. People looked to Saint Solange of Bourges, a virgin shepherdess who died in 880, for help with rain and to protect shepherds and shepherdesses. They also looked to Saint Heribert of Cologne, an archbishop who died in 1021, for help with rain and drought. They looked to Saint Engelmaro, a peasant who died in 1100, to protect their cattle and bring good weather and harvests. They looked to Saint Isidore, who was a farmer and died in 1130, for protection for farmers, farm workers, livestock, and rural communities. They looked to Saint Julian of Cuenca, a philosophy professor who became a hermit and died in 1208, both to bring rain and to assist the craft of basket making. Other pagan help was sought from saints Odo of Cluny, Theodore of Sykeon, Phocas the Gardener, and others whose patronage was believed to aid the agrarian concerns of rural folks.

These were not the nonpolitical politics of a natural conscience, concerned with the problems of desire. These were direct requests from the divine for assistance with ecological sustenance in an often-dire world.

Nonpolitical politics made a major return on October 31, 1517, however. That was the day a thirty-four-year-old theologian named Martin Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, along with a work that came to be known as the Ninety-Five Theses, but that Luther had titled the Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. (Contrary to the widespread story, there is no evidence that he ever nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, Germany.) An indulgence was a theological forgiveness that one could purchase from the Church to compensate for some bad action, increasing one’s chances to get into Heaven, despite the transgression. The Church used indulgences as a major source of funding for its operations. Luther thought that the practice corrupted the Church, and he declared in his sixth thesis that the Church “cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring and showing that it has been remitted by God.” This move to eliminate human judgment was an attempt to restore a nonpolitical divine. Although initially hugely controversial, it turned out to be hugely popular. And who remembers Saint Agricol now, aside from the residents of Avignon and a few tourists?

Protestantism (and the changes it in time encouraged in Catholicism) turned out to be hugely popular because Europe had changed a lot in the two centuries since the nadir of European urbanism in the eighth to fourteenth centuries. The Renaissance is often described as a cultural and intellectual movement, but it was equally economic and geographic. It was a time of massive economic growth and expansion of trade, due to improvements in shipping, manufacturing, and banking—which supported, and were supported by, the cultural and intellectual innovations. Cities grew once again. London, Naples, and Paris all had at least four hundred thousand inhabitants by 1650, and cities of fifty thousand or more were common. Luc-Normand Tellier calls it an “urbexplosion,” writing that “the rate of urbanization of Christian Western Europe reached again the level it had under the Roman Empire, one thousand years before.”21 It was, in short, a bourgeois echo.²²

Luther wasn’t the only one who heard this echo. It resonated for many because along with the growing cities of the growing economy came the renewed growth of class. But what justified the renewed inequalities? As Max Weber famously argued, Protestantism contended that these inequalities were, at least potentially, justified by God—by the goodness of God’s impartiality in the machinations of human affairs.²³ Calvin was particularly explicit about this interpretation. In his view, the grace to go to Heaven depended upon fulfilling one’s duty to one’s assigned station in life, one’s “calling,” an assignment that comes from God. As Calvin put it in his Institutes of Christianity, sounding like he had just put down a copy of the Bhagavad Gita before he picked up his quill:

[T]he Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition. Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man’s mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord, that he may not be always driven about at random.²⁴

There was a certain equality in this notion of divinely assigned stations, for everyone had one. But there was also a significant stinger: no one was “to overstep his proper limits.” As Weber noted, the notion of duty to one’s assigned station gave “the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence” that we ought not to question.25 Wealth, or the lack of it, was no one’s fault. You couldn’t be blamed for being rich, nor should you begrudge being poor. It was all for the good because it came from the good, ordained by God.

The bourgeois echo was thus a matter not just of class but of its characteristic moral argument: nonpolitical politics.

I’m standing in front of a handsome stucco and brownstone apartment building, five stories high, on a quiet, shady street in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany: 43 Günthersburgallee. My wife’s father—we all called him Opa after our kids were born—lived here before World War II. I’m thinking about how nonpolitical politics can also be based on combining absolute ideas of nature with those of the divine, not just one or the other, and in the process creating doubly absolute conceptions of community and hierarchy, of natural we and natural them.

Opa’s family were German Jews. Opa’s father owned a leather wholesaling business across the river in Offenbach, making a comfortable enough living to purchase 43 Günthersburgallee. The family’s apartment was on what Americans call the second floor and Europeans call the first floor.

Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933. Opa was seven and attended a fine private school, and he was one of just three Jews in his class. One day shortly after Hitler’s election, the teacher took Opa and the other two Jewish boys aside and quietly suggested that they should not come to school the next day. Opa was puzzled as he told his parents the story that evening. But they understood. They immediately transferred Opa to an all-Jewish school, as did his friends’ parents with their children.

I’m thinking about this episode as I look at 43 Günthersburgallee. The sign on the driveway to the back of the building says “Einfarht freihalten!” which basically means “keep the access open.” If only: later in 1933, on September 3, Hitler gave a speech in Nurnberg on his view of a “higher race” that had the right to dominate “lower” races in the fight for lebensraum or “living space”—a right granted by nature, he claimed. In Hitler’s words,

The higher race—at first “higher” in the sense of possessing a greater gift for organization—subjects to itself a lower race and thus constitutes a relationship which now embraces races of unequal value. Thus there results the subjection of a number of people under the will often of only a few persons, a subjection based simply on the right of the stronger, a right which, as we see it in Nature, can be regarded as the sole conceivable right because founded on reason.26

Hitler brewed here a dangerous moral mix, combining notions of absolute nature with hierarchical notions of natural we and natural them. And who had the favor of being in the “higher race” or “master race”? In his view, only those with “German blood.” As the Nazi party platform of 1920 put it,

Only a member of the race [referring to the “master race”] can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.²⁷

There was a certain ecumenicalism to the Nazi view of the German master race, however, accepting all those with German blood “without consideration of creed.” But the moral absolutism of Nazism was also plainly religious as well. It initially welcomed German Catholics like Hitler as well as German Protestants, although later advocated only Protestantism, conveniently overlooking Hitler’s own upbringing—not to mention his Jewish grandfather. Jews, however, were defined as immediately non-German by virtue of their Jewishness, no matter how long their families had been in Germany, which was well over a millennium for many of them. And German converts to Judaism were no longer considered members of the German master race. As a German court during the Nazi years ruled concerning one such convert to Judaism, “in cases when the individual involved feels bound to Jewry in spite of his Aryan blood, and shows this fact externally, his attitude is decisive.”²⁸ Yes, Nazis defined Jews as a race, a natural them based on ideas of nature, but everyone also knew them to follow a different religion. Jews thus served twice over in the creation of the moral contrast necessary for envisioning an absolute community, derived from absolute conceptions of both sides of the base of the ancient triangle: nature and supernature.

Moreover, although Hitler himself seems to have been an atheist, he commonly spoke about God in his speeches, especially to advocate what Nazis called “positive Christianity.” Under this view, all Jewish-composed texts had to be rejected from Christianity, including the entire Old Testament, and Jesus had to be defined as “Aryan” and not the Jew he was. Positive Christianity also was an attempt to merge Christianity into Nazism. As the Reichsminister for Church Affairs put it, “True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially the Führer to real Christianity…. The Führer is the herald of a new revelation.”29

Directly opposite 43 Günthersburgallee is a lovely little neighborhood park, with playgrounds, a basketball court, and benches scattered among the trees and grass. I cross the street to have a look at it. Opa must have played there, as well as his brother. But not after November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” when civilians and paramilitary forces smashed Jewish homes, shops, schools, and synagogues across Germany. Opa’s father’s leather business in Offenbach was among those destroyed.³⁰ Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Jews began going out as little as possible, hoping to avoid notice.

The Gestapo came around to 43 Günthersburgallee too. They demanded to see Opa’s father. They found him in bed, pretending to be sick. The soldiers weren’t convinced. Still, they told him if he could get a certificate from a non-Jewish doctor documenting that he was sick, they wouldn’t take him away. Opa’s mother called a Christian doctor who agreed to come to the house. The doctor signed a certificate saying Opa’s father had an infectious disease and gave him some pills that made him run a fever. Then the doctor quietly took his leave, refusing payment. When the soldiers came back, they accepted the certificate and left, leaving Opa’s father home in bed.

The family recognized that they would all have to leave, if they could. Sensing trouble, Opa’s parents had already sent his older brother to England the previous year. Opa had been too young, they felt. That didn’t matter now. Opa would have to go—and to go alone, if necessary, even though he was just thirteen.

They heard of a man at the travel documents office who took bribes. But the family had almost no money. Opa’s father’s business had been destroyed and their bank funds impounded. Plus it would take too long and attract too much suspicion to sell 43 Günthersburgallee. Desperate, Opa’s mother sold her jewels and other family valuables. Opa’s father still had to pretend to be sick in bed, so Opa headed off to the travel office on his bicycle with a huge packet of cash. Opa found the man. He took the money without question and gave Opa an exit visa. In December, just a few weeks after Kristallnacht, Opa took a train alone for England, not knowing whether his parents would follow.

A couple of weeks later, out of the blue, a woman knocked on the door of 43 Günthersburgallee, a complete stranger. Her boyfriend was making arrangements for Jews, she said, so he could save up enough to marry her. It wouldn’t be cheap, however. Somehow Opa’s parents scraped together enough other cash. The woman came back. They gave her the funds, hoping the arrangement wasn’t just a scam. A few days later she came back once again and handed them the necessary papers. Opa’s parents packed a few clothes and left immediately for England. In time, Opa, his brother, and his parents made it to the United States.

Not all of Opa’s relatives were so fortunate. Frankfurt has put little square metal markers into the sidewalks outside the homes of Jews who died in the concentration camps, one for each person who died, listing their name, their birthdate, the year they were arrested, and the camp they were sent to. I cross back from the park and look at the six markers outside 43 Günthersburgallee. Max, Simon, and Frieda Stein. Julius, Jenny Klara, and Kurt Flörsheim. I’m fighting back tears. Some cousins of Opa’s mother had moved into 43 Günthersburgallee just before Kristallnacht. They remained after Opa’s immediate family left, hiding and hoping. I don’t know if their names were Stein or Flörsheim. No one in the family remembers now.

But the Steins and the Flörsheims were certainly someone’s cousins. Indeed, no matter the politics, they were everyone’s cousins. We all are. At least that’s the only vision of the natural I can accept, I find myself thinking as I take a last look at 43 Günthersburgallee: one that glitters with the inclusion of us all—a natural we with no natural them.