Twin Evils
So that we might diagnose the social condition of the United States in the most broadly helpful way, think of it as being at the mercy of gargantuan twins. But rather than the full-cheeked, giggling twins you may imagine instantly, these twins are comparably undernourished, copiously drooling and mucous-oozing. Even if the twins cannot be seen by every eye in the land, their incessant colic can carry from coast to coast.
One represents the spiritual crisis which arose from our turning away from the religious sentiments and into all the freedoms and rationality enabled by that turn. The liberation of the initial gesture has since been eclipsed by an exhaustion with its spoils. We are disenchanted with the material bounds of our world and untethered from any dogmatic or ritualized centrality. As such, especially despondent people seek, on the one hand, new sources of enchantment and healing. These are never—or seldom—connected to any original, traditional spirituality, but concoctions of different, not always related exotic strains that feel new despite often being older than the things escaped. On the other hand, some may seek a more rigid, but not too rigid, moral guidance, just as vague and hodgepodge, in the form of gurus, “secular” preachers, therapists, and life coaches.
The other twin represents the social crisis. What used to be written off as simple “polarization” has since intensified into a mutual antipathy toward participatory self-rule as a concept. This, too, is double-edged, with one portion of the population accusing the other of usurping or manipulating the reins of power. You are either a direct threat to the democratic process or you are using the democratic process to deny the true and rightful force of the people. Established models of leadership and communication of that leadership to the people have been subject to suspicion. Information, the lifeblood of democracy, is fictional. Democratic history is now one long line of totems waiting to be knocked over.
None of what I have just said is new. In fact the majority of recent social criticism poses and reiterates these problems with less amusing imagery. The object of this criticism is usually the apportioning of blame. Finding fault is the order of the public spirit, so finding the most amenable villain is often how the value of the criticism is judged. Does that mean that somewhere in there is a solution waiting to be applied? Is there a hero hidden within the steady supply of villains? What even is a hero by the standards I have just set? Clearly a babysitter with a surplus of patience and a will that cannot be bent by oppressive tantrums.
Much of the recent despair may lie in the perception that the babysitter, the most ideal babysitter, is dead. The new babysitter is likely to be anything but strictly human. Such a babysitter need not do much but keep the twins docile for the duration. Either the twins will mature into more stable toddlers on their own or they will (more likely) worsen but weaken by the babysitter’s indifferent noninterference. This is as much an acceptance as it is a resignation. It is harder to imagine the idea that, while the true babysitter is dead, it also lives and acclimates itself to times that are at once unique yet hardly alien from our patterns of behavior. It is rather a matter of taking things to the utmost limit of decay and neglect that makes us reach for the speed dial to call it over in our time of need.
The Eternal Demagogue
On February 7, 1497, the streets of Florence, Italy were flooded by thousands of boys, dressed in white gowns and holding red crosses. They set up altars on street corners and sang hymns, then knocked on doors requesting alms, or alms of a sort. From the Florentines they took veil holders, jewelry, wigs, perfumes, card decks, chess sets, gambling tables, any secular work of literature (Boccaccio, Ovid, Greek philosophers), any work of art that suggested the ornate or erotic (paintings with female nudity and immodest religious art), to name a few things. In a word, anything that suggested frivolity and pleasure at the expense of religious devotion was to be collected, amassed in an enormous pile, and set ablaze to the blaring of trumpets. In a few short years, the Carnival procession preceding Lent had gone from a purely pagan ritual, mostly involving the throwing of rocks, to an overpowering display of Christian reverence. The fortunes of its organizer would go decidedly south not long after that, but at that point he was at the peak of his unusual influence.
For the past few centuries, the only really important fact worth knowing about fra Girolamo Savonarola was that he is dead. Second after that was that he died violently, enduring excommunication, torture, hanging, and burning. Eventually one might come to know that this came about because the Dominican friar managed to gain control of the hub of Renaissance opulence amidst a post-Medici power vacuum, and for four years exerted such unofficial control over it that he turned it into both a free republic and a rigid theocracy. Such an arrangement would prove untenable, especially because, as his more fortunate contemporary Machiavelli emphasized, he was an unarmed prophet.
For his challenges to the Catholic hierarchy and Florentine society, Savonarola suffered a double infamy. First at the hands of the Church who condemned him as a heretic and then by the Whig historians who beatified him as the patron saint of tyrannical populists. The Savonarola “type” is discoverable at multiple inflection points of human social life. Robespierre embodied it, so did John C. Calhoun, Carrie Nation, V.I. Lenin, Archbishop McQuaid (as opposed to the cagier Éamon de Valera), and Ruhollah Khomeini, to name a few. In each case these figures could command and captivate the masses through a kind of moral mesmerism. Though their charms lasted for different durations, the charms did, in the end, dissipate as cooler, more rational and liberal heads prevailed, when the people, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s words “preferred cakes and ale … to the rule of the saints.”
But even if demagogues are reluctantly welcomed upon appearance, they can be let in by someone through a side door. For a time, Savonarola proved to be an adept reader of public sentiment. The popular will was a morally sensitive will in a time when morality seemed both desired and precious. It did not hurt that Savonarola was also an impossibly holy man. He possessed, moreover, a genius for showmanship. In addition to his Carnival processions and “bonfires of the vanities”, Savonarola was a spellbinding preacher, infusing his sermons with ominous and sometimes accurate prophecies. And he was iconoclastic in ways that would envy most performance artists, going so far as to stab at a Bible, as witnessed by Machiavelli, to demonstrate his Old Testament-style ferocity.
Savonarola did not limit his power to words and gestures. An important wing of his support based came from youth. Writing of the 1497 bonfire, Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi credited its success to “the agency of children.” Indeed, an important source of Savonarola’s influence was his dependence on the youth, who he organized by the thousands and greatly empowered. “So great was the terror and fright aroused by these children,” goes another account, “that gamblers would flee … leaving everything behind.”
[W]hen they found a girl or a married woman adorned with much pomp and vanity, they would correct her and say, “On behalf of Jesus Christ, King of our city, and of the Virgin Mary, we ask that you lay aside and abandon these vanities; otherwise sickness will fall on you.” But they uttered these words with such gentleness that the women would be stung with remorse by their warning and with many tears remove those vanities from their heads and give them over to be burned.
If a youth morality police seems on the face it the most nefarious aspect of the friar’s regime, and it cannot be said that it was used all to the good, it is also the most renewable and, when so handled, carries its independent force.
The Punk Reformation
“Let me tell you now, I don’t give a fuck what you are. But you do not beat up people for being gay, you do not beat up people for being black, you do not beat up people for being women, you do not beat up people, period.” So Fugazi singer Ian MacKaye spoke in 1988 during an improvised interlude amid their feminist anthem “Suggestion.” His is one of many such monologues to which audiences of any Ian MacKaye-fronted band have become accustomed. Its appeal is in the cadence, which assumes an unusual balance of the impassioned and the authoritative. And while this style of speaking and playing has been widely imitated, MacKaye’s balance itself has seldom been successfully replicated.
1987 is punk’s most significant year; more than 1977, more even than 1991. If the latter years were in any way revolutionary they were more so of marketing. The former on the other hand has a legitimate claim to shifting paradigms. By that year, punk’s nihilistic streak had run out. Black Flag, Big Black, and a slew of hardcore brutalists had either faded or mutated. At the same time Ian MacKaye, then 25 years old, was founding Fugazi. Some six years earlier he’d laid the groundwork for an ideal of punk that rejected self-harm, solipsism, and the destructive herd conformism it engendered. He, along with the Think and Grow Rich-hawking Bad Brains, emphasized a positive mentality, rooted in personal discipline and consideration of others. A punk need no longer to drugs or engage in casual sex in order to qualify as part of the scene, as jocks do off the field. A punk should no longer have to define themselves by the pain they endure or inflict on other punks. Punk was as much about what you brought to your chosen community as by how you asserted yourself against your compulsory one.
Fugazi solidified this shift by imposing limitations on the behavior of the audience. Where previously it was only Neo-Nazis who were subject to audience enforcement, Fugazi lowered the threshold to accommodate most physical discourtesies. Moshing and similar outbursts were forbidden while they played, and no exceptions were made when they occurred. No punk was free who took a cavalier attitude toward the space of others. These acts were beyond the limit of tolerance, even when dealt with humorously and reluctantly on the band’s part.
American punk rock has long been reliably infused with the creedal. In the decadent southern California scene of the late-1970s, Black Flag was off-putting not for their chaotic performances but for their “Calvinist” ethic of daily rehearsal and seemingly perpetual touring schedules. Big Black’s salacious and dissonant sound was girded by Steve Albini’s rigid commercial and aesthetic asceticism. Greg Sage of The Wipers took the asceticism further, going so far as to abstain from touring, even with Nirvana. This was a disparate idealism driven by a vague notion of “politics,” not unfamiliar in the United States, which prized autonomy from the stultifying effects of mainstream uniformity. Yet the advent of Fugazi reasserted the idealism, both in expression and example, with an unprecedented consistency and accessibility too timeless to be confined to mere political fashion.
“Ian’s not a religious person,” Mark Sullivan said of his classmate and onetime bandmate, “but he behaves like one.” True enough, but that behavior did not come from a vacuum. Ian MacKaye’s father was a theologian who served as the religion editor of the Washington Post. His family attended St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, “a highly progressive church,” according to Michael Azerrad, “that held rock services, ordained female priests, and sanctioned same-sex marriages as early as the sixties.” His parents were involved in civil rights and antiwar causes.
Against the perception of beleaguered outcasts exiling themselves to the city away from dogmatic, close-minded “fundamentalists” of their small town, MacKaye fashioned “an anti-establishment stance” with “strong connections to the best aspects of Christian morality.” It is a stance rooted in both individual conscience and communal solidarity with a mind towards correcting injustice and fostering tolerance. More importantly, it was not a passing, largely aesthetic cast of “new morality” like Transcendentalism, Objectivism, or Satanism, but bound by long-held concerns, passed down by broad consensus but free of institutional strictures. Just as Martin Luther, an admirer of Savonarola, sought to rid the Catholic Church of its excesses through direct, bottom-up action, Ian MacKaye sought to course-correct punk from its path of annihilation. And his followers, in their own ways, tried to stay the course.
The Krishnacore Awakening
“People go after sex like it’s the only thing in the world,” said Rob Fish in 1995. “And if you depend upon it for happiness you’re in a lot of trouble, because you’re going to suffer.” At the time Fish was going by the name Rasaraja Dasa, and serving as the vocalist for 108, one of a handful of hardcore bands promoting Krishna Consciousness. “It’s funny, he added, “sometimes people say religion or the Hare Krishnas don’t belong in hardcore, but the Hare Krishnas have been hardcore longer than any of these people. The whole idea of hardcore is to reject the society, this culture that’s forced us into a lifestyle that we don’t want to be a part of. And Krishna Consciousness is about rejecting that lifestyle and coming to the real.”
Just as MacKaye was starting Fugazi, others were already putting his ideas into practice, and some might say getting out of control. Ray Cappo and his band Youth of Today galvanized New York City’s straight-edge scene into a far more abrasive and simplistic, if not more militant, form. But even after adding veganism to its regimen that wasn’t enough. “When we started [Youth of Today], I was anti-greed, anti-lust, anti-anger,” he told Spin in 1995. “But as the band got bigger, I found them blossoming more. They were weeds choking the life out of me.”
Krishna Consciousness had already made its way into the downtown punk scene by way of bands like the Cro-Mags. For, as Ben Parker wrote, “[i]f you couldn’t play like the Bad Brains, you could still follow their religious lead.” Cappo took it up eagerly, traveling to India, practicing Yoga, becoming a monk, and founding a Krishnacore band of his own called Shelter. “I find it peculiar that bands can perform without having any message,” he went on. “It’s easy to spread a message in the hardcore scene because it’s already a little society. And Krishna is a nice message.” Shelter’s album Mantra, according to Spin, “is easily digestable metalcore that includes vegetarian battle cries, attacks on sex and TV, and homages to self-realization and Bhagavad Gita.” “I couldn’t understand people/Wasting their time on so-called love/And drugs and occupations/While outside the window is a crumbling nation/So I searched for sincerity and lost popularity,” goes Shelter’s “Metamorphosis.”
It would be a safe assumption that Krishnacore may have been a fractional source of converts for Krishna Consciousness. It certainly didn’t last beyond the 1990s. Indeed, many, such as 108 guitarist Vic DiCara, would fall out bitterly with the movement over hypocrisy, rampant abuse, and overtly cultish tendencies. The failure of Krishnacore is a typical kind that occurs when agitated youth succumb to a subculture for its seemingly exotic and contrarian aesthetic rather than its spiritual or philosophical rigor. But it was not, at the same time, so outrageous or misplaced an ambition on the face of it. Whether MacKaye truly intended to or not, he’d opened a hybrid course of citizenship and discipleship in punk. Mere attitudes gave way to standards of conduct, by which you measured yourself by the most exacting rigors, as you assumed everyone else did, or be cast back into the aimless decadence of mainstream life.
Twin Goods
Savonarola would rely on his youth morality police to carry out the bonfires and enforcing his bans on taverns, gambling, and sodomy, regardless of gender. Punishment for sodomy included barring from public office, parading in the streets, branding, and even burning. At the peak of his powers from 1495 to 1497, over 700 people were accused of sodomy, which often included political enemies. These were seen as a gauge of Savonarola’s popularity, but the friar’s enthusiasm to burn actual humans, according to contemporaries, was ironically one of the signifiers of his downfall. Nevertheless, moral reform and youth’s role in embracing and perpetuating it remain the most timeless and integral lynchpins of his legacy.
In the 1990s it was not unheard of to see news reports and daytime talk show panels about the danger of straight-edge “gangs,” kids dressed in matching hooded sweatshirts, high top Nikes, and X’s scrawled in black sharpie on their hands. They were so dedicated to clean living that they’d assault anyone so much as nursing a beer. These reports were exaggerated. Youth crews existed, of course, but like the Krishnacore movement that was born from it, the movement was never easy to manage internally. At times they were more preoccupied with policing for colleagues who “broke their edge” than with any broad moral redress.
How a Savonorolan youth resurgence takes shape in the 21st century is hard to clarify in the particulars. We have to contend with much more than what the friar or even Ian MacKaye had to contend with. We must confront not only with the bent morals of people but the amoral influence of mass technology and the potentially competitive authority of AI. And much of society is already rampant with anxiety of a socially restrictive dystopia coming right around the corner.
But trends highlighted five years ago, when this essay was first written1, have merely adjusted for time. They have in many cases been made worse. The twins roam as irritable as ever, sparing no region their supply of tears, snot, and spit-up. Embraced liberal freedoms become thoughtless habits. Unfettered curiosity, the beauty of diversity, and the liberation of authenticity become respectively orthodoxy, choreography, and cruelty. The place of youth within that framework, though sincerely heralded in rhetoric, appears in practice to be merely decorative. By what example are the young supposed to conduct themselves?
At a certain point, even habits become so numbingly routine as to be hardly worth the maintenance. The will of the public will rediscover its moral sensitivity. That sensitivity is not preoccupied with order—there was nothing all that orderly about Savonarola’s Florence—but with correcting errors, killing habits, and regaining social responsibility. When that will reaches an intense enough pitch, it will have support to carry it through in a youth brigade that comes in its own state of hunger and disuse. “[T]he reason why I entered into a religious order is this,” Savonarola wrote his father, “the great misery of the world, the wickedness of men, the rapes, the adulteries, the thefts, the pride, the idolatry, the vile curses, for the world has come to such a state that one can no longer find anyone who does good.”
The new punk mentality and the old pious morality share an overlapping principle that sees wickedness in complacency and obscenity in contentment. Their discipleships echo across time with undiminished clarity. Because while you can always set youth on fire, you cannot burn it.
This essay originally went up on Jacobite in the summer of 2017, through which it became one of my more popular pieces. But now that Jacobite is no more, it has given me the opportunity to go back and excise the essay of its more dated elements (like the many Benedict Option references), its stilted rhetoric, and its rusty structure. The revised version you are now reading, for a smaller but more diverse audience, trades audacity (or “shock” as one reader described it) for what I hope passes for refinement and functionality.