Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk begin their look into the history of power with a broad overview of what power is and how it is used, especially as it pertains to religious and cultural identity in history.
Dr Koontz - Agrarian, Egghead - Concordia Theological Seminary Fort Wayne
Rev Fisk - Author, Fanatic - St Paul Rockford
Visit our website - A Brief History of Power
Music thanks to Verny
Transcript:
We have got an inaugural issue, issue, episode of A Brief History of Power with two white guys. A delve into the unknown, no, not the unknown at all, the known with the intention that by the time we're done, we will understand a little bit better where we are in history and how as human beings and how as Christians we can stand in the midst of this present darkness. Now, how can two white guys help with that?
Not because we believe that truth is a universal reality, but it will take a while to probably convince you of that. Who is this show for? Everybody who wants to live a good life in the present age.
Who are we? I'm the sometimes right reverend, but generally jovial, JMF, Jonathan McAdam Fisk. I'm a pastor.
I'm the administrative pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. I'm an
author, inventor, a white guy, Norse, Germanic, American Italian, I don't know what any
of that means. And my guest, who is really the reason you'll be listening to this show, as
you will find out, is the good reverend Dr. Adam Koontz. He is the associate professor of
exegetics at ctsfw.edu. He's an agrarian, an egghead, a white guy. He's gone native from
Appalachia, though, and he did marry a Quaker, even though she's educated at Hillsdale.
He is your worst nightmare because science is probably racist.
We're going to be talking about everything in the history of the world in this show,
including, if I can even get my computer to show me, especially, well, Babel, Munster,
and America, whatever that means. But I got a more important question to lead us off
with, Pastor Koontz, Adam, I'm going to call you Adam on the show, and if I can ever get
my own video set up right for the stream, I'll stop paying attention to the computer and
pay attention to you. I need one more thing that's going to work.
If I just hit that, I think everything is okay in the world. So here's my real question for
you. Are the lizard people a master race?
That's my question.
Well, it depends on what you think David Icke is actually talking about. So help us with
that one. Help the listener there.
Help the listener out here. Not everyone knows there are lizard people. Not everyone
even knows that there are Yankees.
And the idea that they might be one of the same is perhaps too scary to mention right
now. So let's just start with a brief introduction to the history of lizard people then, I
guess.
So there's a British guy named David Icke who says that the ruling class of the modern
world are actually, the way he tells it, literally reptilian creatures who are masquerading
as human beings. And the revelation of that secret is the secret to understanding power
and political dynamics, economic dynamics in the modern world. So David Icke has been
accused by people who hear that more figuratively as being, among other things, anti-
Semitic.
Lots of things. Yeah. So like the Bible, pretty much everybody's words, it really matters
whether you mean them literally or figuratively.
That can kind of change everything.
So what was the era that Icke is writing in again? I really don't know him as a first
source.
I think he's still alive. I haven't honestly read him. It's more of internet knowledge that
has given me these.
Well, what about just this idea that there is a ruling class that is, in fact, distinct in
America from everyone else and that you don't really get to join it except maybe by
lottery, aka Hunger Games style? Well, not quite, but actually, yeah, that's kind of how,
you know, you win a Congress seat. That's it.
So this has always been a debate in America, whether or not we were going to have a
ruling class was, I think, probably the first debate. And there's a lot of stuff surrounding
the existence of the Constitution, which now people who call themselves conservatives
defend. But a lot of the same people with the same concerns back in the 1780s would
have said, no, this Constitution is going to centralize power in the United States, and it's
going to give rise to a ruling class such as the old nations of Europe have.
And I think they were right about that power dynamic. The content of the ruling class has
changed over time. You could track things like what last names are most prominent in a
Harvard graduating class.
But the fact of a ruling class, I think, is not to be disputed, and especially as income
disparity grows in the United States. So the poor generally become poorer, the rich
generally become richer. Look at, say, like California is like this, where the middle class
kind of shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.
Poverty grows, extreme wealth grows. As that happens, I think it becomes harder and
harder to refute the idea that we do have a ruling class in the United States.
Let me interrupt you and make anybody who's here for pop reasons just go away. Does
that mean that Hegel and Marx, regardless of whether or not we like them, are correct in
prophesying the route that history is going to take?
No, because they were deterministic about it. They thought that it would work out in a kind of obvious way. And Marx is a bastard child of Hegel.
I'm not going to pin Marx on Hegel, but the idea that somehow history works out in a
determined way that doesn't have to do with the second coming of Jesus is flatly wrong.
But when Marx is observing simply social conditions in industrial societies, and
remember, most of his work is actually produced in Britain, which is the world's most
industrially advanced society, then he's not entirely wrong about everything that's going
on. He was wrong about his predictions, which is why, like, the actual biggest communist
revolutions have taken place in what were at the time third world agrarian countries,
Russia and China.
But observing how miserable things make people, how much incomes change, how the
poor are thrust down, he's not necessarily wrong when he's doing essentially economic
journalism, which is what he started out doing.
So he's correct in that. But then you said you're not going to pin him on Hegel or you say
the other way around.
No, I said, yeah, I said I'm not going to pin Marx on Hegel because that's an entire
debate within really German culture about what is the meaning of Hegel and should we
take him in what given sense that has this or that actual political consequence.
Here's what I see. Here's what I see. I see the rise and fall of nations as prophesied by
our Lord, which we're both Christians.
We're just going to talk about it in those terms. I think everybody who's out there who's
not a Christian can agree there's been a lot of rising and falling of nations going on. It's
part of our religious perspective to just acknowledge this reality is going to keep going
on.
So I see a lot of that going on. I see a world in which however we might gripe against
authority structures, we need them. Communism is great until you need to gather and
then you have to have some place to put it right.
And it all falls apart at that point. So there's a clear need for hierarchy in the system. But
the hierarchy always gets abused.
And as a result, you end up having caste slash class distinctions that arise within what
family groups, tribes, as they grow, as they integrate, as they run into those who are not
like them in certain ways. And then over time, those that are underneath are more than
those who are on top who have and well, revolution. And what happens, you kind of start
at the bottom all over again.
And whether you're Ra's al Ghul or Thanos or whatever, it just keeps happening. The
alternative is that a greater power conquers. So some other big group comes in and just
kind of knocks off the group before they can destroy each other.
But how is this not Hegel? How is this not Hegel? That's what I want to know.
I don't like Hegel. I don't think Hegel is right in the sense that he doesn't understand the
eschaton. So don't get me wrong in that.
I'm not a Hegelian in that regard. We're not moving toward a progressive better. But this
cyclical thing that I think what we want to do as we talk about Babel and Munster in
America is expose this cyclical thing that is something that should be obvious to anyone
who's watching.
And again, as part of the Christian religion. What do you think? I said a lot right there, I
think.
So I think I mean, I think the idea that history is cyclical is very common among non-
Christians for a good reason. So it's extremely it's foundational to Hinduism, but it also
exists in somebody like Oswald Spengler, who's looking at Western civilization after the
First World War and saying that history is going to is going to work in a cyclical way. And we're currently in the downward part of the cycle for what you could call Western or
European civilization.
The reason the issue that I have with that is not that I can't see that nations rise and fall.
The problem I have with that is that when you're using that as a way to actually inform
your own conduct, the Bible doesn't talk about things that way. So the Bible can notice,
for instance, that the Lord sets up certain kings and then can also tear them down.
And that at the end of history, all authority and power that does not acknowledge the
Lord will itself be torn down. It will be burned with fire. The issue is that in the present,
when the Bible's demolishing kings, it doesn't say that, well, you're on a downward
trend, so what can you do?
It's not fatalistic in that way. It says that you should, to the king specifically, that are
raging against the son of God, kiss the son lest he be angry and you perish in the way.
So the call that the church has and the call that we have here is not that everything is
going to hell and we're smart enough to show you how.
It's that everything is going to hell. So the need to repent and acknowledge the Son of
God as Lord and Savior is greater than it ever has been in our lifetimes.
So for those keeping score, I wanted to study the notes at home. That was Psalm 2, and
it's really worth spending some time on in context, especially with Psalm 1. Without
them, it's hard to really understand Christianity, I would submit to you, at a mature level.
With that said, so the answer to my initial question is yes, the lizard people are a master
race. So then the next question is, as those who are called not to throw up our arms in
despair, but to live among a world in which such things as these abuses take place,
regardless, whatever chain in the rise or fall of our civilization we're in, we are called to
pray for the city in which we dwell, for therein we shall find our good, and that's actually
loving your neighbor. We don't want them to have good as well.
So as we wait for all of that, that means we must cling to something that's different than,
well, the religion of the lizard people, and so that's the other direction or philosophical
tenet I want to throw into our talk. So one of the tenets is we believe that there are
classes in the world. They exist, and you can't do anything about it.
You can forgive it and work together, but you're not going to make it go away. So that's
kind of the one we just established, and there's a master class that usually is about
money and power, one way or the other, not race. And then you also have this other
one.
Turning the corner, just dive on this phrase for a second, that which can't not be true.
Okay, I mean, that's an extremely powerful thing to say, so it can be very, very easily
misused, but the way that I think about that phrase is that the things that we are
discussing are either in the Bible and they are clearly to be read, or they are occurring or
have occurred in history and are clearly to be seen. So the Bible assumes that you, as a
human being, even if you have not been born again by water and the spirit, you have
reason. And the thing that your reason should pay attention to is not what you are told,
but especially the things that you have observed or can observe through the
observations of others, like, say, in history.
And you have to compare those things and be careful about them and, you know, but
that you are paying attention to what is actually occurring, what has actually happened,
more than to what you are told about it or how to think about it. So when you're looking
at either the history that the Bible discusses, we're going to talk, I think, today,
especially about very ancient history, the earliest history, primordial history of the
human race, singular. Either that or the things that you see with your own eyes going on
that you've seen in life, that you pay more attention to those things than the machine
that is a combination of advertising, entertainment and propaganda that you have been.
If you're listening to this, certainly in English at this point in history, you've been born
into. If you know enough English to understand what we're saying, you live in a country
or know enough about a country that is like this. You live in a country that is determined
by a mixture of entertainment, advertising and propaganda.
And some of that might be false, some of that might be true, but it is not an appeal to
the things that the Bible talks about when it says that you should examine, for instance,
the fruits of someone's teaching or what it says when you should observe the destinies
of kings. Those are things clearly to be read out of history. Was this king successful or
unsuccessful in this or that venture?
It's not a matter of interpretation and it's not a matter of spin. It either is or isn't. Right.
One of the really unfortunate things and you're making a joke, but one of the really
unfortunate things is that increasingly anything that could be an appeal to objective
things, science, history, even maps, have now been deemed racist and therefore out of
bounds. You can't look at those things. And if you can't look at the things that have
actually occurred or are actually so right.
Do I, as someone who's five foot ten, have a really good chance of becoming an NBA
superstar? Probably not. In fact, certainly not.
Is that racist? Well, it's a fact, at least before it's anything else. And so when we're
talking about the Bible or history, we're talking about things that are there for you to examine.
The erasing of history is what barbarians have always done, and the redemption of the history of their enemies is what the civilized have always done. You don't have to be a Christian, at least in practice, to do that. You might need to be a monotheist to advocate
it as a moral.
But we'll leave that for another time. I'm also not going to just pretend that what you
drop there. The fact is the Googleplex matrix, whichever movie metaphor you want to
use, it's more real than the movies in terms of information control, mind loss, stupefying
of humanity, putting us into pod people kind of battery operation.
It is just as bad, and it is a zombie apocalypse of its own kind. And again, you don't have
to be a Christian to see this one. But Christians, really, we should be pretty good at
seeing this one.
Without chasing any of that too much, then, this idea that we believe there are things
that have to be true is where we have to start in the conversation with anybody, then,
about how to make sense of this. And that's where the reason comes into play. Like you
said, paying attention in a way that builds an understanding.
In this, then, I guess, that introduces the real problem, which is misunderstanding,
miscommunication. So even here already, I mean, I've thrown out some terms
pejoratively on purpose. We're calling this a show with some white guys because,
frankly, it's almost a racist term, right?
Just to exist as a white guy. So at this point, we just have to call a spade a spade and be
like, that's who we are, whatever that might mean. But then all of that, the hatred of
man, the fighting of man, that predates the flood, that predates creation, not creation,
that comes from the fall.
But the confusion of man that has amplified our inability to, frankly, talk to each other on
any level, which I just displayed pretty well, I think, in this lead up, that's another issue,
right? So we're not really going to zoom in on you have to believe in sin right now. We're
going to zoom in and say that you have to believe what Derrida taught, more or less,
because the Bible teaches it in Genesis chapter 6 also.
And with that, I'll leave that as the intro for you, Adam.
So what we're saying is that part of the issue, which could be either greater or lesser in
any given human society, but in ours is enormous, I think partly because of the power of social media specifically, and smartphones, is the fact of human miscommunication.
Now, the Bible's telling you that the reason that this is allowed to happen, that certain
humans permit certain technologies to prevail among others, is because technology is
emphatically not neutral. It could be really good.
That's what we're trying to do here. It could be really bad. And what happens in the story
of the Tower of Babel is that people who want to, quote, make a name for themselves,
that is, they want to be noticed in a way that goes along with their achievements rather
than the things that God gives them.
They get a bunch of other people to try to build an enormous tower. Most people see this
as being basically about the temples that were being built in the ancient Middle East that
were themselves towers and would be set over and obvious to any city in what's now
Iraq. And those were the sites of pagan control and also pagan power, also such things
as human sacrifice, the destruction of the family, and so on, through various means.
Something that I think should be credited to both ancient barbarians and ancient
pagans, and anyone who was both at the same time, is that their destruction was much
more forthright than what people do with us. Yeah, right. They were honest about it.
I sowed salt on his crops. I killed all his children. I mean, they're straight up, right?
And we're like, oh, I'm your friend. Just sign this paper.
They told you what they were going to do, whereas when they destroy our families, they
tell us that if I get a divorce from my wife, or if I father children but don't actually raise
them, or if I just never get married, I'm actually going to be happier than someone who
stays with his wife, or raises his children, or has children, right? So generally, we are
taught that the things that actually will destroy us, whether it's drugs or whatever, we're
taught that that stuff is actually going to be better for us, or cooler for us, or more
rewarding or mind expanding for us. I mean, Joe Rogan does this kind of all the time with
stuff that, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, was understood to be highly dangerous,
and for that reason was classified the way it was.
So we're generally sold our slavery as freedom, whereas in the ancient world, they're
much more forthright when they're enslaving you, which I give them a little bit of credit.
Again, it's just for the listener at home. So you got to go read Psalm 2. And now he just
he just dropped some language that if you haven't read 1984, you don't belong in the conversation.
So again, you can call us racist, go read 1984, pick up Animal Farmer on the way, realize
you're not a pig, then come back, and we'll talk about racism, right? Until then, you
know, slavery is freedom. Like, write that one on your forehead, and then say, I don't
believe that, and then start asking why you're doing what you're doing.
Sorry, Adam, I just despise tyranny. So okay, so Babel then, just to make sure this is
clear as well for any, I mean, we really hope that this show is not for Christians. Really, I
do.
What I want this to be about is, is honestly Republican values. I don't mean that the
party. What I want this to be about is, is liberty for your brother, because it's good to
love your neighbor as yourself.
And in this regard, so if someone doesn't believe that the Tower of Babel is a mystical
juju event that happened many, many millennium ago, that we, you know, we believe in
because Jesus has risen from the dead. That's a whole nother conversation that I'd love
to have. Um, Derrida, I dropped his name earlier on purpose.
It's not like this isn't what they all finally concluded, right? Like, they dismissed the Bible
at the beginning of the 1800s. It's all stories.
It's all fairy tales. And Derrida effectively brings us to that same point. So can you kind of
fill the listener in on that one without going into unnecessary trivia?
Yeah, so Derrida, the reason to bring him up is because if you ever studied the way that
words work in an academic setting, you will have read something of him, or at least
heard his ideas, even if you weren't reading him. I don't want to give him too much
credit because his basic idea that I do find actually, to some extent, important, which is
logocentrism, that the word is too central to people's lives. And that is partly an attack
on the Bible, but the insight that it does have, he's actually ripping off a guy that came
before him that no one's ever heard of, named Ludwig Klages, K-L-A-G-E-S.
And Klages said that part of the sickness of modern life is attention to words over life
itself. So we're sick, and we're unhealthy, and we're miserable, and we're living in
cramped cities, scurrying to get favor or money. We should be living in nature.
There's a lot that comes out of that.
But I think that something that is insightful about that— So you're living in the city
because you believe stories you've been told about why this is better, but you're not
really paying attention to what's actually going on. And so it's not as better as it could
be. There's a parable about this.
I've told it before. It's about the fisherman and the businessman. And he comes, he said,
you could do this, you could do this, you could do this.
He keeps saying, why, why, why? Because your life could get better. Your life could get
better.
Your life could get better. What do you do when it's all really the best? Sit on the beach
with your family.
That's what I'm doing. I'm a fisherman. Go away.
I mean, so you make fun of someone because he lives in flyover America, but he doesn't
deal with open air drug use or cramped conditions or paying to get himself anywhere.
Burning statues of elk. Yeah.
So I do think that the idea of logocentrism as a sort of enslaving thing, looking at words
as a technology, especially written and recorded words as a technology, is insightful
because that's exactly what's going on in Babel. They can still all talk to each other.
Their languages haven't been diversified and confused, and because they can still all talk
to each other, they can be controlled.
Right. And they're being controlled for the sake of the aggrandizement of at least
whatever number of them wanted to become famous, wanted to become important.
Are you saying that your native dialect protects your identity? Are you? What are your
cultural?
Are you what? Oh, man. Sorry.
I mean, that hits close to home, Adam. It hits close to home. Dialect.
Dialect. Is it even a thing? It is becoming a thing again.
I'm going to say attention to words over life one more time because that's so important.
What was the name of the gentleman who said, found that one?
The guy that I think is actually much more insightful than Derrida, who was himself a
kind of cramped, overly urbanized individual. The guy that I think is better is Klages. K-L-
Klages. Yeah.
Well, so is that, I mean, nothing ever is new because didn't Darwin kind of have the
rhyming steel theft? That guy thought at first I published it sooner kind of thing. I
remember reading that somewhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm just a Joe Rogan here.
I don't know. It's on the internet. I don't know.
That's exactly, I mean, that's how academia and science within it, but academia
generally so often works. It's not the person who actually discovered it first or was most
insightful. It's the person who was able to publicize himself best.
Whoever makes it cool. That's right. And Derrida also happens to have a name that
rhymes with the movement of poets that weren't so different that I studied doing being a
lit major in the seventies, San Francisco, the Dadaists.
So you got, you got the Derridaism and the whole thing's basically an onomatopoeia for
what they're really talking about, which is that nothing makes sense. It's just noises. And
the thing is like, yeah, in a sense, that's what happened, except not really because we all managed to like her together still.
And so there's definitely communication taking place and it uses these sounds. And we
all seem to agree that while dogs may be diverse, they are not cats, at least. Well,
wouldn't want to offend your snowflake sensibilities these days.
Generally, unless your dog comes out and self-identifies as a cat, your dog is not a cat.
Yeah. So the distinction in realities, maybe we want to go from this, that which cannot,
can't not be true is that there, even under Babel, there is still a common sense reality.
I'll just call it the term that it should be a common sense reality that we all experience
and language is not so broken that we can't talk about it.
Right. But language, I mean, let me give you an example of how this can be co-opted,
right? So this, the slogan, which really became ubiquitous in media and politics during
the Obama administration was diversity is our strength.
And you'll find all kinds of things saying that. Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. military,
lots of things. That's an appeal, first of all, to just observable human difference.
That could be racial. That could also, that's generally what's most amplified in the media.
That could be linguistic.
That could be all kinds of things. What they're doing there, though, is they're taking the
observable difference and they're co-opting your opinion of it. They're saying this is
always our strength.
Well, I mean, if I'm trying to build a house and there's five guys, that's probably not
enough, but just run with me. And we all speak five completely different languages. So
it's not like one of us speaks Norwegian and the other one speaks Danish.
It's like one of us speaks Danish and the other one has Tagalog and another guy is doing,
you know, Swahili. It's going to be really hard to get things done, especially if we haven't
all done the whole thing many times before with people we could understand. So what
you can see there is that the way that you are generally lied to is not by appealing to
your reason.
They're not giving you facts and letting you think about them. They'll give you half a fact
or they'll acknowledge a fact, such as human beings are different from each other in all
kinds of ways, and then they'll take that fact and then give you a slogan on top of it.
Power works through slogans.
That's why advertising and entertainment are so incredibly powerful, even though
people are usually kind of very obviously naturally irritated by it.
Yeah, repetition is more powerful than we realize. Okay, I want you to keep going on
that. But the idea, again, that words are technology and they always have been, and
technology always gives a person a leg up in power over the person who does not have
that technology.
You are just more capable than they are. So it begins to be a reality that an animal
species that has words is going to have a leg up on the other species straight up, and
then a family or a tribe that has better words, a language that's more adept, doing
whatever it needs to do, is going to have a leg up. Eventually, if you can control the words so that people hear your words and that basically becomes the only language they
can speak, well then you also have a leg up.
But you'd have to be able to manipulate the language itself. You'd have to keep it from...
I don't know if this is right or not, Adam.
Languages tend to run into each other and then sort of back and forth, and wars make
them go all the way around. And as a world, we're kind of committed to not having the
war go all the way around, it would seem. And yet we need the language to do so
somehow for the sake of the power.
And maybe that's the struggle that's going on now. It doesn't matter. Words are techs.
Tech is not neutral because it's used by somebody. It actually isn't neutral. It just is there
by itself.
But whoever's using it has an agenda. We've got to know what that is. Can we dovetail
from that from Babel to Munster somehow?
Can we connect those dots?
Yeah. So, I mean, Munster is an event that happens in the 16th century that has to do
with people taking over a city, people whose sort of spiritual descendants are the
Mennonites. But I'm not at all pinning what happens on the Mennonites because they do
all kinds of stuff.
In some ways, they really reflect early Mormons better than modern-day Mennonites.
They're doing polygamy in this city. They're doing kind of total anarchy.
They look like what's going on in American cities in 2020.
Well, yeah. Because polyamory, however polyamory is actually functioning in modern
Seattle or San Francisco, the actual practice, the observable thing that you can see with
your own eyes is the same. That is that human beings who are actually created to match
up one-to-one, a man with a woman, are now matching up like one-to-five, one-to-four,
whatever.
And the fallout from that, because it's running against what you can't not acknowledge is
true, which is that you're set up for that one-to-one match. You were made for that one-
to-one match, one man, one woman. When you push against those boundaries, you are going to encounter varieties of chaos within yourself and other people that you didn't
even imagine, which is why things like Munster in the 16th century look like miniature
versions of things that we only really become capable of on a massive scale in the 20th
century when our technology catches up with our delusions.
Because now we can institute massive campaigns of killing, massive campaigns of
destruction of marriage. And once we do that, we end up replicating Munster all over the
world. So what's kind of helpful about it is that it's a little snapshot of a bunch of stuff
that it would take roughly 500 years for us to accomplish as a species, again, on a much
bigger scale.
And you think that's what's actually happening right now?
Yeah, I think what is happening is that we are utilizing technology in a way, because
technology is unprecedentedly powerful in a way that is unprecedentedly destructive.
Yeah, we don't even know what we're doing.
And we have no idea. Because I think that the thing that the human being never knows,
and this goes for anybody with anything that you do wrong. I'm not just talking about
completely destroying your family.
I'm talking about when you said something and it wasn't the right thing to say and you
do it at the time. When we do things that are wrong, whatever your standard is, dear
listener, dear viewer, whenever we do things that are wrong, we do things that
disappoint us, not to speak of the Bible or God. Those always have consequences that
we cannot foresee.
Because the thing about the power to choose good or evil in the present moment is that
it gives us a kind of delusion that we are like gods and that we can determine
everything. If that were true, we would be able to know, OK, if I do this, that's going to
end up costing 1762 lives within the next three months. But we never know that kind of
thing.
We can sometimes guess. And with our really big stuff, like ideologies, so reinstating the
kingdom of God on Earth, that's what they were doing in Munster in the 16th century,
communism, national socialism, whatever. You never have any idea of what it's going to
cost you once you've made that decision from which you cannot go back.
You just don't know. And previous generations, because they anchored how they talked
to each other about the past within a specific civilization that was already over, right?
Greco-Roman civilization, they would call what I just described as crossing the Rubicon.
That's when Caesar decides to invade Italy. That's going to enrage the Senate. And from
that point on, he either wins or he dies.
He either becomes Caesar or he dies.
Yes, Trump is Trump in Seattle and Portland is great. It's great.
So when you're looking at history, whether it's Bible history or any history, the value that
you get out of that is that you're seeing human beings who are not actually nearly as
creative as we think we are making decisions. And you can observe it's like a shortcut to
life experience. And then you don't have to sit there and actually make the same stupid
decision that was made 300 years ago in the same situation.
We're not nearly as creative as we think we are. And we don't have near the memories
we think we do over a lifetime. You think you remember stuff and you really don't.
You really don't. You make up stories based upon memories that affirm what you want to
do now, basically. And the more you let somebody else tell you stories, the more is their
stories you're using to make up your story.
It's just as simple as that. You're going to believe and be what story you get told. And
again, Christians, we kind of believe that the story of who Jesus is is the primary one.
It's actually the only real one. You got to get tied to it, all that kind of stuff. But so
Munster, though, is of interest because in the midst of a Reformation revival, 1500s
Europe that saw the printing press technology, also the stuff come together, the
technology is part of what made so much of this possible.
Not only what we would call the good aspects of the Reformation, but Munster
specifically is a place that was made possible by the printing press, where it's pulling all
of these eschatologically end of the world expectant Anabaptists together for some sort
of new utopia, their peasantry by and large, which means they're starving, right? There's
a medieval world, it's Black Plague era kind of stuff. And they just are descending on this
town.
In the meantime, in the middle of the town, you have a wild eyed preacher. We'll get into
that a little bit more. So this ties into what can happen not only when you have the
confusion that Babel brings, but then when it is usurped by technology and an individual
man with his own will, the Ubermensch, however he might be, if he's not really good,
does some crazy stuff.
And then we want to look at that in that lens. And we want to ask also then as Christians,
what does that mean for where we are today? It's not really about can we get a party
elected at all, but it certainly is about how do we, I mean, I'll ask the question the way
I'm asking it for myself.
The question is, it's not how do I go underground? This is not the Benedict option. You
and I have talked about this before.
This is how do I go on the attack knowing I have to build my own boat, right? Like I need
to be in my own boat to be able to attack. And in that regard, I can't rely on the
civilization to just prop me up the way that it seems Americana sort of did, at least for
white people for a while.
I don't know. What do you say? What do you say?
Oh, I would say I would say that I find it more helpful to think about America the way the
people that started exploring it and then started founding it as a distinct country with its
own ways thought about it rather than sort of how it was talked about in the 1950s.
Because I think already in the 20th century, you're being sold a version of America that's
going to end up sucking everybody into a city. I think the 1920 census is the first time
that more Americans live in urban areas than rural areas.
And when you get sucked into that and then after that, you have the advent of radio and
TV and now the Internet. You're going to get rid of accents. You're going to get rid of
dialects with that always goes words for things.
I mean, like city people often don't. They can't even tell one tree from another. Right.
So you're losing you're losing words for the world.
There's the ones there's the ones with the needles.
Right. And there's the other one. The other ones.
Yeah. What's the difference there? One looks there's the ones that look like a Christmas tree and then there's the ones that don't.
Right.
Yeah. I'm trying to come up with a pun for deciduous, but I can't really do it very quickly.
So many, many have tried it and failed at that.
But you're suggesting there are epochs to American history. And by that, we would
include the explorers and pre 1776 kind of stuff, especially if we're going to understand
our rights, liberties and freedoms as what now native born or converted citizens,
whether you like it or not. I'm just gonna leave it this right now.
This show is because whether I like it or not, I'm a citizen of the United States. And so is
Adam. We got to figure out how to live here.
And so we're still here. We want to be good people. What do we do now to understand
that?
We got to know there were epochs of this history that brought us to this point before we
go into all of that. And again, along with, you know, how do we live here now? What are
we trying to achieve?
I mean, we're setting a longer tenure for this podcast. It's long form, but only an hour at
a time. What is it we need to see differently in all of this?
And you're not allowed to say Jesus, even though that's true, too. But you have to be
like, let's do the first article side of this thing. Government wise, what's our end goal
here?
What are we trying to teach people?
Our end goal is to give people a sense of how to understand things, because our goal is
not to gain power over you such that you give us money or give us votes or something.
That is something unique about Christian preaching is that I don't want anything from
you. I simply want this for you.
And what I want for you is far greater wisdom about how the world works and why it
works the way it does. And also how relatively easy that is to see once you understand something about what has already happened. Then you're ever going to gain from
listening to all the various sources you could be and probably are right now taking in.
Yeah, I think everyone has to agree with Saint Paul, whether you believe in the
resurrection or not, that these things were written for our instruction. The whole thing is
there that we might not. I think Paul says this again of the Corinthians, desire evil as
they did.
And let us debate what evil may be if we must. But let's all agree we don't desire evil if
we want to live in a civilized world. We're going to work toward good instead.
And let's figure out what that is. Well, that's part of this huge, huge question. I got one
more thing that we talked about.
It's not on my notes in front of me, but we mentioned in the text. I think this is very
important. It may be the tangent that ends the show.
We'll see. If we're going to talk about Babel and what happens because of Babel, that
means we've introduced something called the Table of Nations. And the speckled history
of this thing is fascinating and a little bit of fun.
And so I would like to embark on this with the listener, at least. Let's begin with it as a
mythology. Let's just assume it's a mythology.
It's a general record, right? This is somebody's guess. And then, you know, later when we
get to things like the guys we know are really there for sure because we got like bones,
right?
Okay, fine. We'll acknowledge that. But until then, let's also see.
There's some like, well, I'm just going to say you don't have to believe the Bible's all true
to believe a lot of the stuff the Bible says because it actually happened. And it can
inform you. You don't have to throw it out and say there's no ancient history.
So that's what we want to do here a little bit with this Table of Nations thing and at least
suggest that there are three primary civilizations that exist in ancient history, right, with
ties to each other and to a flood that they all seem to think happened. But we can leave
that for another time.
Right. So Table of Nations is Genesis chapter 10. So this comes right before Babel.
And the reason it comes right before is because God's intention for mankind is not that he be completely united in everything he's doing. That's not actually necessary. We
don't all have to be the same.
There are three sons of Noah. They survived the flood with him, along with their wives.
The sons are Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
So classically, by people who understand these things actually to have happened, which
we also do, Shem is sort of the Middle East. And I'm going to say sort of because you
have a lot of movement, obviously, after Genesis chapter 10. Ham is sort of Africa,
beginning from Egypt and kind of extending down as far as the Bible cares to narrate.
And Japheth is, you could think of it then as just Eurasia, which will then separate into
Europe and Asia over time. But this is to say that everyone has a common source in
Noah. But the fact that they are different and that they spread out from each other after
they're together, after the cleansing of the world, the fact that they then spread out is
actually fine.
It's okay. So that Christianity, for instance, doesn't actually, unlike, say, Islam, have a
specific holy language that everyone has to recite. And the reason for that is that the
fact that we have different languages or different nations and kind of the sense of
ethnicity, that we are different from each other, is actually okay.
It's neither here nor there in and of itself.
We're not against the diversity of a binary reality as Christians. It's not our issue. We're
okay with things being different.
We're okay with there being a day and an evening and all this kind of stuff. But I want to
emphasize some key, like, I don't know, political points here. That means we are working
with the assumption that humans, as we know them on the planet right now, the seven
billion of us plus, have a common ancestor.
But that is our assumption. Now, I don't know that everyone out there assumes that. I
think you should.
I think it's pretty weird to not. I know we got the debates about the homo others and all
this and the older sapiens that were around or whatnot. But aside from that, science
even shows us pretty clearly that there was a genetic eve, I think is what they call it, or
something like that.
So we believe that. And then we're like, oh, it happened again with Noah. But whatever,
let's just assume that it's the mother who got off the boat with Noah, right?
If you really want to worry about it. And it was a local flood, blah, blah, blah. Just ignore that argument for now.
And stick with that. We all have one source. That's our affirmation.
But then we also have three colonies that came from that source. So imagine flying to
different planets for billions of years and then coming back together. And what came of
that?
And because evolution didn't have to take place, but in fact, the design of creation
adapts faster than evolution could ever hope it could do. You come back and you end up
with things that look as diverse as China, Egypt and Persia. This sort of is your big
ancient reality that comes out of this.
And Persia being Assyria, right? It starts with Assyria and then eventually becomes
Persia. And eventually, what was China or Wei or whatever, the ancient east, that's
because of the way that the central plains work.
That's also Japheth, who ends up in the far north. So you're Norse and you're Finnish and
all this. That all becomes the Japhethites.
And they're these outsiders. Too much of the biblical story, really, most of the biblical
story takes place within Shem's tents. And there's engagement with Ham from time to
time, you know, exodus, stuff like that.
So, you know, again, say what you will about our beliefs regarding this. The history is
pretty, like, presumable, right? Most of this, right?
What do you say?
So I think it's really easy to see why this matters when you realize that either in
mythologies that are explicitly mythologies. So Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, or
a lot of American Indian mythologies, they will account for the creation of themselves.
There's no account of the world.
There's no account of where everything came from. There's an account of themselves,
right? So the Chinese flood myth, for instance, is wrapped up in a story about where the
Chinese came from.
You can see this too in modern mythologies concerning human diversity, right? So you
have a favored class. Sometimes it's as crude as people of color, meaning their virtue is
that they're not white.
But it'll be like, you'll be given lots of knowledge about the history of Jews or the history
of blacks. You'll have relatively little knowledge about, I don't know, colonial Massachusetts, actually a source of things that are real in modern America in a very big
way, or colonial Virginia, which provided a bunch of the first presidents. So people won't
know about that.
They'll know about sort of the histories, at least in some regard, of what are understood
within our society post-civil rights era as protected classes. That's dangerous in the
sense that knowledge of anyone's history to the exclusion of anyone else's, especially in
a really complex place like the modern US, is going to end up elevating that people
group over others in the same way that pagan mythologies elevate their own nation over
all others, right? So the expression of, well, why do the Chinese deserve to rule over the
Koreans?
Or why do the Japanese deserve to rule over the Ainu, who are actually sort of the
people in the Japanese islands before the Japanese? That's always explained in terms of,
well, we have a mythology. We have a history.
We have the God's blessing. We are the chosen people of the gods or God or whatever.
And therefore, we deserve to rule.
So here, power is connected to only knowing somebody's history and especially
asserting that we really have nothing to do with each other. Because as soon as you can
say that, as soon as you can say, we don't have a common problem, say, sin, and that
doesn't have a common solution, say, Jesus Christ, as soon as we're all completely
different and disconnected, that's the point at which you get to destroy me if you're not
like me because I'm not even really a person. You don't even have a way to account for
the fact that I exist.
The British called the French frogs. There's frogs. Them frogs didn't kill them frogs
because they're racists.
That's what they were, those British. But so were the French, because so was everybody
until they realized that they shouldn't be. And the only civilization I've ever been aware
of actually trying to do that is the one we're in.
I don't know of any other civilization that started being like, we're not going to be racists.
I don't know of any. Can you think of any, Adam?
No, I mean, if you look at the abolition of slavery, I mean, slavery exists in basically
every human society you can think of. Including the Mongolian people on islands. Yeah,
just saying only only only Western countries have ever gone about abolishing it in any kind of formal way.
Mythology is necessary to property rights is what I got out of your most recent set of
things, which I think is really interesting. We tell ourselves stories to make it OK to have
what we have. That's called justification if you're keeping score at home, which is kind of
fun.
But going back to Sham Ham Jafeth.
Yeah.
So when I say Persia or Assyria, you said Middle East, right? So this this means that the Jews are related to the Palestinians in a way that I am not. Their families are closer to other's families, right?
Whereas, strangely, what we call the white, the Anglo, whatever that means, the
Western Eurasian and the Eastern Eurasian are kind of distantly connected to each other
and are closer in that way. And then you have what what Cush, Egypt, what becomes
Africa, which I don't think anybody has any question today that black people are black.
They are they are not white.
They are not what Jafethites. They are not Shemites. They are Hamites.
And like, that's cool, yo. Like, I'm OK with all of this. And we are because our
presumption is that we're all from the same grandma.
Right. But we should not pretend that we haven't been on different planets for a while
and that we like have to figure out how to talk again. And then also, generally, we're all evil and we'll try to use each other.
Correct. Bummer. And I think I think another way to understand this is that the Bible,
although it can acknowledge something that will eventually be called race, thinks more
directly in terms of what we might call ethnicity.
That is, what is the difference between a Norwegian and a Dane? What is the difference
between somebody who is Zulu and somebody who is Xhosa in modern South Africa?
And so race is kind of a category that you could you could certainly acknowledge on kind
of sitting on top of ethnicity.
But ethnicity defined as having a common ancestor. And and it's more than just sort of simple genetics or sort of the way that you look. It's also things like your language, your food, your culture, your shared history.
That sort of stuff matters in a way that often gets lost for modern people, partly because modern places are much more mixed up. Everyone is more mixed. Everyone is more mobile.
Everyone has been in the place that he's been in usually a lot for a much shorter time than in the ancient world where people are traveling less, moving less, seeing different things less and therefore have more hit, more shared history with the people that they live right next.
Yeah. I mean, you would find somebody in ancient Babylon who would live next door, you know, white guy and a black guy. Effectively, he would live next door to each other and not think a thing of it because they live next door to each other.
Right. And yet they might the same guy might see someone from a different tribe from his continent, right? Both of them.
And simply on the basis of that despise him because of a long history of stories they've told each other in the family. Again, the history of power, then, if we're going to look at the structures that have become what today we call hegemonic nations, global states and the companies that run them. We're going to look at that.
Then we have to see how this these three giant families dispersed were thrust back together over the last couple of millennium because of technological advancements, as well as for the sake of, we would say, the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ and this impactful day called Pentecost. But forget it. Just get of all the technology’s, all technology’s fault.
We've seen this pulling together of the globe in this regard. And as a result, you've seen the question has a little bit. Is it fulfillment of prophecy from Noah to his sons?
So what how history is played out? You certainly have seen a history of Cain and Abel more than a history of, say, Peter, James and John as we meet each other. And then that's what we're trying to kind of take a big snapshot of.
Let must be the narrows if we're going to. And then let America be scenarios to right
where we are now. So we can, again, make good citizen decisions along the short
response.
I think it is it is helpful just to sort of wrap up to think about technology as one of the most powerful forces, because when you look back at this primordial history of the world that you have in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, you get a mention that the people who are descended from the man who killed his brother, right? So Cain kills Abel. Cain's descendants are the people that are they're most technologically adept.
They're the people who invent the most. And so one of the dynamics, I think, that you
should pay attention to as you look at history and as you look at modernity and even the present day is who has control of what technology that doesn't tell you the end of the
story. I don't want to leave you hopeless, especially if you're a Christian.
But even if you're not, you don't need to be hopeless because technology is not decisive.
Our God is. Whether or not you acknowledge him right now, he is decisive.
He holds the fate of the nations in his hand. So I'm not worried as I wake up every day.
But for human beings, understanding how powerful words are as a form of technology
and how powerful technology is generally is to understand a lot more about history than
just saying, oh, it was this guy's fault or that guy's fault.
Because when you start thinking about history just in terms of people groups, you
generally fail to explain why those people groups became powerful in the first place.
Why do the English dominate the Irish? Why do Europeans dominate Africans in the 19th
century?
Why do the Hutus dominate the Tutsis in Rwanda during the genocide? Why do these
things happen? Why do the Hutus hate the Tutsis so much?
But look up Rwanda in genocide. Look at the dynamics leading up to it. When you look at
those things, you are seeing how technology interacts with how wicked human beings
generally are, not only in groups, but alone.
And then you can explain a lot more about what has happened and what is happening
than some of the more simplistic ways of explaining things that you have on offer in so
many other places.
So the question is not whose fault is it? The question is who benefits? Quibono.
And this is a question I want to bring up again and again, because it's going to be the
question that lets you ask or intrigue, peer behind the curtain of what's going on. And I'm
going to say it a little bit different way here, as like an introductory parable, I guess. It's
not the guy who owns the gold mine.
It's the guy who makes and sells the shovels. That's the guy who's making money hand
over fist.
Right?
And so who benefits is always the question. So let's kind of swing it all back around and
spend like another six minutes to close here or so on Munster and say, who benefited
from, what's his name? Juan with the F, the first one, the one who rides out to Coyote
style, Don Coyote style to his death.
What's his name? Oh, you don't have it.
I was thinking about Tomas Munster.
That's what I was. Okay. No, no, no.
Oh, okay. Hold on. Did we just, did I confuse you then?
You did.
That's all right. We'll come back to that one. We'll come back to it.
No one knows but you and me, and they know that there's some guy. Now, do you know
what I'm at least referring to, right?
No.
Okay. No, I'm lost. You're going to love it then.
You're gonna love it. Okay. We'll come back next time with the name of this guy who,
again, is going to set up a, what I can only call a Don Coyote moment in real history,
where he rides out of the city, which he has gotten people behind him and thousands of
people in the city to believe he's going to go out and fight for God against the Baron
who's come out to meet him.
And he gets slaughtered in front of him. And the siege goes on after this. And this is just
Munster again.
We'll come back to that. Then let me close with this instead. Who benefited?
Oh, man. Who benefited from Babel? Who benefits from Babel?
What an interesting question. I'm afraid to ask it. Go.
The people that benefit are the people that control the real estate and the upper floors
of the tower they're building. That's who benefits, not the people who are building.
So we're assuming this is just for the sake of analogy, right? This is a story about you
build a big tower to make a name for yourself in the ancient world. Who's going to do
what in this building?
Right. And start again. That's great, though.
Your answer is awesome.
Keep going. So it's not the guy, if you think about, like, you've probably seen a picture of
guys building skyscrapers in, like, 1930s New York. They're hanging off some steel
beam, you know, eating their lunch, like 40 stories up, right?
That guy didn't go on to be a millionaire. The guy that hired him made several hundred
thousand dollars. The guy that hired that guy was the guy that was actually benefiting.
That's the guy that gets to pass on that wealth to great, great grandkids.
Put his name on the side of the building.
Yeah. Yeah. And so it's the guy that's in control of the worker, not the worker who
benefits from that work that is coordinated by technology, specifically in Genesis 11.
That technology is a single language. They can all talk to each other. Keep going on that.
You got more. I mean, it's basically to see, like, when you're looking at things that are
occurring, whether it's your job or your family dynamics or it's your country or it's
history, you want to look at what is actually what actually came out of it. So this is why
history is especially helpful.
What actually came out of it? Who got rich? Who got poor?
So let me just give you a simple example here. I have four ancestors between the two
sides of my family that died in the Civil War, all on the Union side. The benefit they got
out of that was a small pension, much smaller comparatively than it would be today.
They went back to poor farming communities and life went on as it always had for them.
There were people, however, during the Civil War, especially in the North, who got
fabulously wealthy. Generally, they could pay for a replacement to go.
They didn't have to get drafted as my ancestors did, and they got a lot wealthier during
the Civil War. So they benefited. So that's to say, well, what is the actual effect of this
thing?
Here are some actual effects. They're always going to be some are going to be good.
Some are going to be bad.
You don't want to make a single judgment about anything, but you want to see what
actually occurred. Do I know that people became fabulously wealthy because the Civil
War happened? Do I know that the United States became in much greater debt or that's
when we first started having income taxes, at least in the North?
All of these things are to say who actually benefited, not what was I told it was about,
but what actually occurred and who actually benefited from what actually.
So I think that's a nice place to put a footnote so that it can't be said we didn't address it
as we talked about three major family groups spreading over the earth. What about
those Native Americans? Where do they fit into that whole picture, including what you
just said at the end?
I think do you mean, OK, because in the 19th century, Native Americans means like.
How the Incans, Mayans, and also to recognize that's no different from the same
question who benefits all the way along. Right, right, right.
So when you're when you're thinking about like American Indians, right. So one of the things you want to go back and you want to look at, like, well, what did people tell themselves was going on? Right.
So there's there's a mixture from American Indians. It's largely negative. But then you have some of these instances, especially in South America, where they see the coming of the whites, at least at first as prophecy or divine judgment.
But it's generally negative. OK, obviously, the whites, the whites are telling themselves
different things, right? Or Europeans, whatever you want to call them.
The term white doesn't really exist as a demonym at the time. So they're telling
themselves this is happening so that we can spread the gospel to them. Right.
So we're going to use this as a means to spread the gospel that did actually occur. But
it's not mainly what occurred necessarily. So the thing to look at there is what is actually
occurring, not what did I tell myself?
Because what people tell themselves, especially when they're when they're going
through a string of victories, is obviously God wanted this to occur. That's generally what
any people group will tell themselves when they're winning.
That's what anybody tells himself when they're winning. Anybody that people do every
individual on the planet. Oh, thank you, God.
That guy doesn't have God on his side. I scored the ball.
Right, right. Yeah. Even even in cases, I mean, if you think about like the motto that's on
the the Prussian troops that are part of the larger German imperial troops in World War
One, what is their motto?
God with us. Right. Does God actually care about the neutral status of Belgium or
whether or not, you know, Alsace remains in Germany or goes back?
So my my theological answer, insofar as it applies to our faith in Jesus Christ, he cares
very much. But you have you have a point, though. I mean, he also knows where the she-goat gives birth and all that.
So he knows it all. But does he does he pay a lot of attention to it? Is it his primary chief agenda, the neutrality of Belgium?
Probably not.
And so recognize that human beings generally are lying factories because they're
justification factories. Yeah, right. Always churning out.
Now, we're out of time, but like let's let's do that for the secularist here, though, because
I think it's not fair for us to assume original sin, even though I think it's fair for everybody
to assume original sin if you just strip it away of the theological kind of boogeyman that
you got with it. I mean, just as a catch all term for talking about the the what generally
cynical and narcissistic bend of humanity that left unchecked, we tend unto violence. I
mean, I can we cannot all just like affirm that.
And do we have to be like Christians to say that? Right. And that's what you're meaning
by this, right?
I do.
Like, why why are you not the person you want to be? And why are other people so often
not the people that you wanted them to be?
Right, right, right. You gave me a few other questions that I'm really curious about to
dive into next time. But I think that's a good a good bite off the top of the iceberg here.
We're in it for the long haul that the goal, the goal of a brief history of power is not
simply to show you who hurt who win first. Hatfield-McCoy, it's round, around, around,
around. And if we're just going to ask who did it first, an eye for an eye, then it's going to
be a whole lot of death, a lot of death for death.
So the alternative is to learn how history has rhymed so as to curb our lesser nature into
a more civilized format. And whether you believe you need a monotheistic idea or not,
doesn't matter to me. If you agree, we need a civilized life.
I'm happy to disagree about whether there's a God if we agree that we shouldn't kill
each other. And then from there, we can talk about how to recognize the powers of nature or whatever, right? But right now, I think we stand at a time in history where we
very well could descend into a global barbarism, at least on certain levels.
And so to be able to learn to think and not just believe what I was told back in the vault
with Fallout School about how Americana was so great. And if you don't catch the
references, that's fine. But the point is, we were all trained to watch the great America
defeat the great Russia, at least regardless of your skin color, I think, in this country.
And many of us watched that challenger go boom together. And we knew something was
a kilter, something was off. And a whole generation became cynics and complainers.
And now there's a generation that wants revolution. And they're either going to revolt
into chaos or they're going to discover those things you can't not know, which are good
for your neighbor, which we hope to again discover as we look at what fell apart in the
past. My guest, the real source of value in the show.
I know his name, but his title is so cool. The good Reverend Dr. Adam Coutts, associate
professor of exegetics at ctsfw.edu. That's Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort
Wayne, Indiana. You can go learn from this guy at his feet there.
He is an agrarian egghead white guy and your worst nightmare, because science is
definitely racist. I am sometimes right, but generally jovial. Reverend Jonathan Fiske.
Lots of stuff about me you can find elsewhere. Patreon and my Patreon is how the show
is paid for, but you don't need to pay a dime to listen to this show because it's all about
some other thing. This is here just for you to learn how to put your fist in the air and then
maybe put it back down again and extend the right hand of peace toward your neighbor
because we're all in this thing together.
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