Part I: The greatest stories ever told
Part II: 9/11- agnostic
Part III: Captain, your men are already dead.
This response is organised around each of the parts of the film, taking contention finally with the ultimate argument of the film, which I shall call the Zeitgeist thesis, that we thus are being mainpulated by ‘the spirit of the time.’ The film does not proceed by rigorous argument, please forgive the occasionally nebulous treatment of the disparate subjects invoked by the film. This is not to say that the many elements drawn together in the film must not be treated as part of a common system, merely that the medium of film does not lend itself to the exhaustive discussion of the complexity of delineating such a large system for analysis. Finally, the citations provided are simply to indicate some of the background of my thinking, and are neither intended to be pedantic nor even academic as such.
Part I: The Greatest Stories Ever Told
“Yeshua says: Have you then discovered the origin, so that you inquire about the end? For at the place where the origin is, there shall be the end. Blest is he who shall stand at the origin— and he shall know the end, and he shall not taste death.”
-Gospel of Thomas, Saying 18
If we set aside the film’s well-presented evidentiary argument regarding astrological religions, that Jesus the Son of God is “Jesus” the Sun of God, there remains a sort of deontological argument, that because the contingency of the tradition of Jesus is true we therefore have a duty on those merits alone, prior to the Zeitgest thesis, to eschew Christian tradition. This aspect of the film’s argument fails for its conception of religion and mythic tradition, for its conception of what Jesus was and Christianity has become (here the film is closest to reasoned argument though on the wrong scale), and finally for its conception of what socio-religious duties might be or entail. The film further argues that the dual credulity and oprression, fostered by the Christian myth, founds the credulity in mendacious political fabulation. This argument can be dispelled with the same appeal to the myth. The mythic tradition, qua religion, is often misunderstood as being something of the remote past, of an experience of the world which is ontically divorced from our ability to experience the world in the present. This is of course a prime fallacy in human thinking, which in point of fact dates from, at least, the epochs which we in our sagacious modernity would consider steeped in myth. The vaunted rationality of the Ancient Greek world is no longer taken for granted (see ER Dodd, The Greeks and The Irrational), the decline and fall of the Roman Empire led to proliferation of superstitions, religions and heresies in the vacuum of political power (see P Brown, St Augustine; E Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and we can no longer speak with overweening simplicity of a retreat of reason in the ‘dark ages,’ (see Venerable Bede, Origen and Augustine of Hippo- both Roman North African, John Chrysostom, and Islamic Spain- Ibn Rushd,et al). The Christian mythic tradition as such is already evident in the pre-Christian development of the western-graeco-roman mythic tradition. Should we assume that the implementation of a pre-Christian dogma would somehow freeze the development of myth? or that there was no political utility in the myths of the day? (We answer, think of Helen of Troy). Turning again to the ancient Greeks: Homer, the blind bard, is widely known, even today, nearly three thousand years after he lived, if ever he lived. Yet, as sure as catechumens learn their creeds today and for well over a millenium, thousands upon thousands of thousands of Greeks studied their Illiad and Odyssey, learning of the wrath of Achilles and the vengeful and creative gods from ‘protected texts’. But does our present understanding (or even a hypothetical ancient Greek understanding) of the reality of the historical phenomenon we call “Homer,” that he may be several persons who may not even have lived at the same time, entail that we therefore understand the religious or spiritual meaning and value of the mythic traditions of the ancient Greeks to be somehow affected, let alone diminished? These sort of questions are a little ridiculous, and completely neglect everything that is known about the sacred (see Mircea Eliade on hierophanie), but we are forced into them by the rhetorical posture of the film, which begs this question in order to achieve its dismissal of Jesus and subsequently invokes hierophancy unevenly in its treatment of political myths. It is clear that the first section film had an evidentiary goal, to present the argument of a relationship between astrological religion, the purported historical person Jesus, and millenia of political oppression; this evidence is purported to be causative, but can only be corrolary. Once this evidence is demonstrated, the film argues for dismissal: Christianity, having a demonstrable genealogy and taxonomy and some relation to political and economic power, must therefore be dispensed of lock stock and barrel. It is to this rebellion against syllogism that we now turn, before considering the counterpoint to this thesis: to wit, Christianity provided the seed of radical equality needed to dethrone an apotheosised king. Bombarded as every person is by stimuli (even before the world of multi-media, which changed the quality of the stimuli but not quantity), we learn early in our lives to ask a question which is thought petulant by parents but is in fact of paramount philosophical importance: So what?. We must respond to this question by taking decisions about which stimuli will produce effective or useful information. Let us subject the evidence presented in the first part of this film to that very question- so what? In very brief, the evidence presented by the film runs thus: the tradition we know as Jesus is actually a composite of traditions amalgamated syncretically from local and regional traditions, Hebraic texts, gnostic myths, but is chiefly inspired by intensely pagan astrological and heliocentric religions, making Jesus the Sun of God (it will by now be clear that I enjoy this slightly punning turn of phrase, which incidentally, is exploited rather than stultified by many Christian traditions). This is the evidence, the genealogy of “Jesus,” from which to derive conclusions. The only reasonable conclusion to derive is that of the genealogy itself; there is no duty, either in support or to contravene the tradition, inherent in a genealogy, it is a trace. The next argument is that the Roman Empire used Christianity to consolidate power. This is true, but Christianity is not unique in this, the Romans had many hegemonic religious traditions, of which Christianity was simple the last. Christianity was also, obviously and demonstrably, much larger than Rome and its Empire, as it did not take long for the Church to fragment into finer factions than did the Empire (there is the major schism of Rome and the Eastern Church, but also finer distinctions across the globe, eg Celtic and Coptic). Ultimately, religious, economic, and political powers have historically, occasionally, been riven by actual theological or cultural dispute. Whence, then, the implication that Christianity should be dumped? The film’s contention that Christianity ought to be eschewed is not a theological argument, but a political one, leading ultimately to the Zeitgeist thesis. It is susceptible to defeat on its own terms, and to refutation by a counterargument that Christianity in its mytho-religious traditions carried the seeds of unprecedented demotic equality necessary for the liberal political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, and upon which we still rely today. The early Church, qua body politic, is quite rightly depicted as seeking to consolidate the diverse strains of Christianity with an unsavoury praxis, establishing an hegemonic text- not novel in itself, Greece for example had Plato and Homer- propagating it through an hierarchical structure with vestigial powers from the glory days of Roman Christianity, and consigning all other variations, of which there were very many, to heresy. The punishment for heresy? Excommunication, which amounted to the relief of sanction for whomsoever should attack the body or thieve the property of the excommunicated; this was a markedly temporal punishment consistent with sanctions for theft or murder, but founded in religious dogma. (Historically theft has been very heavily sanctioned, which punishment only began to wane substantively following WWII with the inception of the welfare state in western Europe and with the New Deal in America.) There can be little argument that the Roman Church- from its earliest days down, perhaps also, to the second World War- has at important times represented phariseeism writ large, and that with epochal regularity, the cultivation of mundane power has consumed the potential for religious benevolence (eg on a small scale, the sale of indulgences). The coincidence of Canon Law with national or regional rules and laws certainly serves to further confuse the “sacred” and “profane” roles of the Church (using Eliade again). But this is still far from a complete picture of Christianity, nor will we approach such a complete picture in this essay. Nevertheless, consider that every Protestant child knows (or should know from compulsory schooling in most states) the general line of the story of the development of European Protestantism: the 95 theses, Diet of Worms, Geneva, Oxford, the Puritans, and then of course America America America; the child may yet ignore the attendant or eventual evils of all of the above and their ilk. Perhaps we should not fault the film for lack of nuance in the development of the political element of the Church, as Christianity forms just one part of Zeitgeist thesis and its nuance is not helpful to the thesis. The existence within the Church, as within every body politic, of counter-hegemonies, however, is surely a relevant concern for a film which seeks, in the Zeitgeist thesis, to draw a political conclusion from disparate data. These counterhegemonies have turned on precisely the issues outlined in the film as the fruit of the maniputlation: the extraction of money from the congregation. Far more important to ecclesiastical wealth are land holdings and charitable (tax-free) status, but these are not argued against in the film. The last argument of the first section of this film, is that Christianity provides a foundation for furture myths. This presupposes two things: (i) the deontological argument for dismissal of Christianity on its own merits, and (ii) all myths are alike and should be likewise dismissed. These conclusions simply cannot follow from the existence, which is conceded, of a corrolary relationship between the Christian religious myths and Christian and non-Christian political myths. The myth invoked in the film to illustrate the putative causative connection between Christian religious myths and political myths, is the Christian political myth of millenarian eschatology, or to paraphrase the film, ‘the fundamentalists who think the world’s about to end when Jesus comes back,’ which it numbers at 100 million. As critics of the historiographical Jesus are wont to observe, millenarian traditions in the time of Jesus were ubiquitous, the survival of Christianity is mere accident. This has remained true throughout recorded history (think of Branch Davidians in Waco, or even Jonestown, Guyana), and is also true of non-Christian religious and political myths (think of anti-western jihad). As Bob Marley said, “man to man is so unjust… but who Jah love no man curse,” which suggests that this equation can only run in one way, with Jah blessing overriding man’s curse. The alternative, that man may bless what is divinely cursed is absurd, as there can be no ascertaining accursedness (see the story of Job who was highly favoured by YHWH). There are of course many problems with Christianity past and present, but Christianity as a whole represents far too much complexity, even within the historically dubitable person of Jesus, for the arguments advanced in the film. The attempted deontological argument for the dismissal of Christianity because it is a contingent and syncretic mytho-religious tradition is a misunderstanding of mytho-religious tradition, which was always already contingent and syncretic; proving that a religion has a history is neither a proof against the existence of God, nor a proof against the utility of that myth or religion. The use of a religious myth for political manipulation has been true in the past, and is likely to continue regardless of the political myth constructed from actual- including actual mythical- explanations of phenomena (think of ‘social Darwinism’ which is utterly contrary to all modern ethology- see Dawkins, The Selfish Gene). The final argument of this section of the film, that Christianity, with its many tributaries, consitututes a common denominator of credulity is simply fatuous; the evidence for stupidity in the world is, to borrow a phrase, that ‘stupid is a stupid does.’ The two epigraphs to this section are intended to create a tension between the likelihood of self-serving but illegal behaviour and the utility of a parsimonious explanation. There are two main elements of the film’s argument, and the proposed tension is the antidote to faulty logic in both. The first concerns the relative plausability of explanations for the events of 11 September, 2001, the second concerns the film’s assertion regarding the mythic aspect of these events and their explanations. Conspiracies, statistically, are difficult to maintain secretly, a crucial element of conspiracy, suggesting that conspiracies are built to fail, and succeed only extraordinarily. This is not to say that the purpose of the conspiracy fails, it may well succeed in its objective, but the secrecy is most often compromised. The problems are multiplied for public figures whose lives may be scrutinised with relative ease. A classic example of this is the political intriguing around Oliver Cromwell, peerless in his dishonesty: when the young unwitting Captain Huntington was sent to scare Charles I into flight so that the latter might be apprehended as a fugitive and therefore more easily executed, but instead discovered that he was a dupe for Cromwell and informed the King of the plot to cause his flight, the future Lord Protector Cromwell literally laughed off the charge of conspiracy when confronted by the Captain. I do not dispute the clear potential for a so-called ‘false-flag’ scenario, but it must be weighed against clear evidence. This is why the attacks of 11 September, 2001, have been so damning; while lacking clear evidence, we can be sure only of what did not happen. The positive arguments for what did happen are not persuasive. Loose Change, a leading exposition (in film) of alternatives to the official account and explanation of the hijacking, is wanting in its description of both the official and alternative explanations for the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings, whereas Zeitgeist does expound on some of these details. The account of the behaviour of cordite in causing the molten steel in the basements is especially helpful, as its use is alluded to in Loose Change but never explained. This film rehearses the leading conspiracy theories, suggests other false-flag incidents, and concludes that the attacks on 11 September must therefore be of a piece, despite the phenomenal lack of evidence for a positive conclusion. This is double-think worthy of the Bush administration. (Parabasis: there can be no question that Dubya is behind 9/11 as some may be tempted to suggest, the only explanation acceptable to logic, but acceptable in no other way, would involve an entrenched power of longer standing and more expansive operation; the film does not suggest such a connection, favouring instead the far more plausible involvement of an organisation with more longevity in tenure of office, like the CIA). The destruction of a purported account of these attacks does not of any necessity create or entail the creation of a true (or truer) story. Nor can false stories become political myths by virtue of their mendacity, as suggested by the film’s quotation: “a myth is a story which, though widely believed, is not true.” That’s the definition of misunderstanding, misprision, mistake, or even stupidity; it is not myth. Myth requires a certain epistemic reliance upon the myth as foundation for further knowledge. As science has gained currency, ontogenic myths have ceded importance (nb, not existence) to myths of the genesis of morals. In this respect, there has been an attempt to mythologise the events and accounts of the attacks of 11 September. It is not, however a fait accompli, nor is it equivalent to past or present religious myths; the suggestion doesn’t pass the least muster. While not emphasised by the film, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have rightly become questions of paramount importance for American body politic, and exhibit similar traits to the purported mythologisation of 9/11. This similarity, now and across history, suggests that including an analysis of the wars concomitant with the 9/11 accounts will not suffer from being a straw man. The war in Afghanistan is, as a matter of intuition as well as political speech, acceptable as a legitimate to most Americans; paradoxically, it, more than the war in Iraq is susceptible to the charge of illegality, as retribution for an attack is contrary to the powers for the use of force in the United Nations Charter, Chapter VII. This charge is only obviated by the government of the country being illegitimate, which fortunately the Taliban was: revenge was therefore permissible. And then Iraq… consider that if ever there were a resource worth fighting over, it’s probably oil- there’s no myth or mystery there, except those insisted upon and generated by the disciples of Leo Strauss. That lengthy discussion will be left alone, suffice it to say, and of this thre can be little doubt that it is an instance of the military-industrial complex at its most voracious. These issues are undoubtedly important for discussion within the American polity, but the relation they bear to the Zeitgeist thesis remains unclear, that they support the thesis is untenable. Wars are inherently a matter of obfuscation of purpose. Consider three truths of the second World War (from the Allies’ perspective): (i) It was a war against aggressive and murderous fascism; (ii) it was a war for imperial gain; (iii) It was never a war motivated by the abolition of terrible genocide and sundry murders which were sanctioned by the Nazi regimes (plural, due to puppet governments of Vichy, etc). These are all true of ’39-’45, that paragon of justified war (itself descendant of holy war, by way of Grotius, et al). The justified war conducted by the Allies is perhaps a myth, but it was not so at the time of the war, when many different voices could be heard in diverse dissents. Subsequent armed conflicts of the Cold War and post-Cold War period have vitiated the potential for mythologisation which otherwise has attended even the most plutocratic of wars. Furthermore, World War II antedates General-cum-President Eisenhower’s warnings of the confluence of military and commercial concerns. There is not a war that can be named that cannot be so pilloried, going all the way back up to the Pelopennesian War with the famous, but undoubtedly mythical, theft of Helena. The false-flag proposition, however, is less easily dispelled. In this respect the film argues validly that, if the false-flag scenario is true, then Americans are being duped on a truly impressive scale. Such a conclusion, if valid, which validity depends on the truth of the false-flag scenario, represents a significant malfeasance against the American public, murder against those who perished, and further liablity for those individuals who died slowly from the direct effects of the attack. It necessarily involves, as has been noted by Lippman, Chomsky and others, a manufacture of consent, but it does not require or entail a conspiracy of the scope proposed in the Zeitgeist thesis. A manufacture of consent has the opportunity to arrange the content of your thoughts by manipulating facts and emotions across a narrow spectrum of information, concerning most often purported facts whose veracity cannot easily be ascertained by the subjects of the manipulation, and emotions which are visceral and primal in the sense of appealing to survival or survivability. The Zeitgeist thesis, by contrast, proposes the pre-determination by some agent or agents, not of the content of certain thoughts, but of the sources of content for very nearly all thoughts. There can be no doubt that the sources of content for our thoughts are in large part determined by our local culture (towns, cities, counties, maybe even smallish states), and perhaps entirely determined by culture more generally (leaving room of course among all this ‘nurture’ for reasonably resurgent arguments from ‘nature’ and DNA); the further suggestion that there can be some agent to manipulate this determination, foreclosing possibilities deemed undesirable, and plying autocratic or plutocratic malevolence upon the many for the pleasure and gain of some few cannot really be taken seriously. The political myth of 9/11 is a struggling and unfavoured account. In the early days and even years of the 2003 Iraq invasion, there was a wide belief that Iraq was in point of fact involved in the attacks of 11 September, and that Iraq was a long-time supporter of the Al Qaeda network. That these assertions, based like the World War II myths on good and evil and survival, cannot be said to by myths in the same vein as the World War II myths; they are propoganda. There can certainly be a connection between propoganda and mythologisation, but it takes more time. The cure for propoganda is proof, but there is little positive proof for what did happen, and a good deal for debunking the findings of such soothsaying bodies as the 9/11 Commission. The film does not address the development of myth or the variety and varying effectiveness of different myths, committing itself instead to a game of semantics where the mythical status of the accounts for the attacks of September 11 is assured by the diction of its proponents, to wit, shouting down opponents for heresy. The film is unable to demonstrate that this is mythical rather than merely politically expedient. The law of income tax is, as a law, properly framed if for no other reason than one is liable to detention (arrest) and and deprivation of liberty (jail) for non-compliance. This may rankle for some as it would seem to go against the idea that nulla poena sine lege, that there can be no punishment without a clear corresponding law, and for the most insistant that there be explicit statutory authorisation. While there may be some dissenters in the peon echelons of the IRS, there is no legal argument whatever adduced in the film, because the tax code is damn complicated, manifold, and mutable by statutory instrument (executive orders, etc.). Nevertheless, the clear and obvious intention of the federal legislature, Congress, has been to cause a tax to be collected on its behalf. This is a basic constitutional principle of legislative intent, which is anyway immaterial as the power to levy federal taxes was enshrined in the 16th Amendment to the Constitution (passed in 1913). There can really be no doubt about this. Ask Wesley Snipes. As to the correctness of the federal reserve system, I admit both my suspicion as well as inexpertise. I do not have the requisite knowledge to prove the malevolence or other volition of the central bank. I am personally acquainted with bankers, though not central bankers, and while there are many ethical bankers, the attitude which pervades is all too human: “the tears of strangers are mostly water,” (an Indian proverb, from Goa?). As suggested in the quotation from Adam Smith (in Part II), there is an anti-competitive (or ‘anti-trust’) inertia to conglomerations of similar if not identical interests. This is clear also from the many laws and institutions around the world whose remit is precisely to countervail that tendency. There are definitely big economic questions about modern history that have not been satisfactorily answered before, and this film doesn’t really answer questions so much as impute causality where correlation at most is implied. We can however be sure that massive structural oppression is possible from the world’s institutions, even under the aegis of ostensibly sound principle: the leading example must be the IMF’s application among developing countries of currency manipulation, and tarriff and subsidy evisceration in the name of comparative advantage, but resulting instead in demonstrable, even flagrant, economic imperialism. That having been said, the concept of debt and its functions are incredibly complex and obviously necessary to public fincances (public debt as I understand it is very different from personal debt). Many states have suffered famines and lost wars because they did not have the financial mechanism of debt, the history of Renaissance Europe is practically the repetition of this phenomenon. Perhaps this is in part due to the historical aversion to usury (interest bearing loans, i.e. debt plus interest) on the part of Christians. I’ll be doing more learning on all this, and am happy to be educated by people who know. There can be no doubt that a great many people are manipulated and led about, perhaps as many as 100%, but at varying times- you can’t fool all the people all the time (or else who would be sufficiently lucid to put together a documentary designed to enlighten others?). That people are manipulated by misunderstandings about astrological religion, Jesus, or Christianity, or any other facet of their experience of the world is almost equally certain, and that some of those misunderstandings were or are politically constructed is also true (see Fr. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography). The conclusions of each section of this film do not follow from the evidence presented, nor does the final argument, the Zeitgeist thesis, find adequate support in the preceeding sections. Instead of advancing a cogent argument, this film presents a compendium of conspiracy, a Summa Conspirata (to hearken back to the nominalist tradition of Ockham et al, from §1), and suggests that, taken all together the evidence is overwhelming that someone, somewhere, is controlling us, for some reason, to some end. Stripped of the various interesting expositions from the three sections of the film, the structure of the Zeitgeist argument is ugly. Religion or politics or usury have each in their way produced perncious results, none so evil however as to cause the thing to be dismissed entirely. That there is some further end comprised of these elements, to wit, our complacency and domestication for easy use by some big brother, is undemonstrated, unnecessary, and unlikely. Although more distasteful in terms of any kind of humane ideal, and decidedly less exciting than the Zeitgeist thesis, there is reason to believe that in the absence of immediate and personal motivation (especially in terms of instability of life and livelihood), most humans do not react, let alone act. That people are generally a little recalcitrant is a much simpler explanation for the low levels of engagement in society or democracy and general discomfiture in society. If a reasonable answer is available so simply, perhaps the conspiratorial penchant of this film is in fact counterproductive; by emphasising an external conspiracy to explain the futility of participation in society, the film effectively makes an exculpatory argument for those who do fail in this participation. The argument of the Zeitgeist thesis is thus reduced to a polemic at best, more likely just a complaint: the people with power, influence or wealth refuse to cede it willingly. That news, of all news, ain’t new.
Part II: 9/11- agnostic
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
-Adam Smith
“Categories should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
-William of Ockham (attributed)
Part III: Captain, your men are already dead.
“A law is a command which obliges a person or persons, and obliges generally to acts or forebearances of a class.”
-John Austin, (Lectures on the Province of Jurisprudence, Lecture I)
"There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible." -Judge Learned Hand
Conclusions
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation”
-Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
