The Amoralists

The nihilism of the emerging world order

Imagine you’re a conqueror. You’ve just vanquished a horde of barbarians in some faraway land. You want to claim this land as part of your empire and make the barbarians into your laboring subjects. But they have nothing in common with you. They speak a different language, practice a different religion, have entirely alien customs from the civilization that spawned you. What’s more, they’re a freedom-loving people, and they despise you for ruling over them.

You have a massive army currently occupying the land you’ve conquered and with it, you can force your will on the subjugated population. Your soldiers flog anyone who gets out of line and summarily execute anyone accused of a serious crime or act of rebellion. The barbarians are terrorized into submission. But the more you oppress them, the more their hatred of you festers. Small, clandestine acts of rebellion are becoming more frequent rather than less. You’re constantly monitoring your subjects to find out if they’re plotting against you. At any moment, you fear, a serious revolt could erupt.

It’s extremely expensive fielding this large army with its far-flung supply lines, and keeping them stationed here means they’re not out conquering new territory for you. Sometimes you think you’re losing more than you’re gaining from your effort to hold onto this slice of turf. If you’re going to keep it for the long term, you need to find a more efficient way to control the indigenous population. Killing them all is out of the question, because you need them to till your fields and build the city you’ve erected in your name. What you need is for them to choose to obey you. You need them to have a reason to do your bidding without your having to raise the whip.

You try out a few innovations. First of all, you start converting them to your religion. They’re actually quite well-disposed to this, because they see from their own humiliation how much mightier your god is than the ones they’ve traditionally worshipped. They understand that they need to win his favor. So they accept your god as the greatest in their pantheon of deities.

But you also impress upon them that your god is a different kind of god than theirs. He does not demand blood sacrifices or rituals to appease him. Instead, he demands something else: he insists that his followers live their lives according to his moral code. Those who behave in accordance with his rules will be rewarded after their death. Those who fail to will be punished mercilessly in the afterlife.

The barbarians resign themselves to their new circumstances and begin to live according to the rules of their new god. They begin to see that their subjection to your rule is not just a temporary misfortune imposed upon them by the force of your army. It is, in fact, divinely ordained. Even more than that: their obedience to you and your deity is what separates them from other, lesser men who have not yet discovered His awesome power. Those who obey you, his agent on earth, partake in His godliness. Those who do not are little better than beasts.

Now your army can withdraw from the territory. Your subjects will not just accept your rule; they will fight for the opportunity to serve you as warriors, spreading your righteous reign to the uncivilized heathens of the wildernesses beyond. Your rule is sanctioned by the heavens. It is good, and those who submit to it are good, too. Those who refuse to are evil.

Your power has now become legitimate, which is to say, it’s perceived as legitimate by those who submit to it. As long as you sustain that legitimacy, you won’t need to fear rebellion. For that reason, however, rivals will no longer rely on their armies alone to contest your rule. Their principle weapon will be to undermine your legitimacy. Wars of arms fought by soldiers will be preceded by wars of words fought by priests, philosophers, and demagogues. Where once your right to rule was merely a function of the violence you could marshal to back it up, now it is a thing of ideas, beliefs, and arguments. You need not just soldiers, but intellectuals to uphold it.

The German sociologist Max Weber defined three types of “legitimate authority.” There is “charismatic authority,” which is the awesome, other-worldy personal magnetism of a epically great leader: Hitler, Napoleon, Gandhi, Lenin, Muhammad, Jesus Christ. There is “traditional authority,” which is just what it sounds like: the authority derived from the fact that things have always been done that way. And there is “legal-rational authority,” which is rooted in the recognition that a rule was constructed through the proper bureaucratic procedures.

Weber regarded legal-rational authority as the ascendant form of legitimacy in our modern world. It makes intuitive sense: we accept laws not because we agree with them, or because they’re old, or because a great man pronounced them, but because we have a legislative process that reflects our values as a democracy. You might think a law or an administrative policy is wrong, but it was drafted by duly elected representatives or the civil servants they appointed and it was upheld by the relevant courts. If you have an issue with that, the problem is more with you than with the rule. You hear this all the time in response to those who object to Trump’s mass deportation policies.

But to me, it’s too limiting. Because what underlies those very democratic values is something much older than bureaucracy: Christianity.

Christianity, in a sense, created political legitimacy. Before Christianity there was only power. There were gods, to be sure, but those gods, be they Greek or Roman or pagan, were not moral authorities. They were, rather, magic. They were bringers of good and ill fortune. They were loyal to those who were loyal to them, and loyalty was demonstrated principally through offering the proper blood sacrifices. In return for this tribute, the gods rewarded their followers with victories in war or with abundant harvests, while failure was punished with defeat, crop failure, natural disaster, and epidemic.

With the exception of the God of the Jews, deities tended not to have particularly strong opinions on how their followers led their daily lives. They did not instruct mortals with power on how they should and should not wield it. Those who could do so were free to partake in slavery, rape, infanticide, and torture of their enemies on a level beyond what the modern mind can comprehend. The gods had nothing to say about these behaviors other than perhaps cheering them on as the just desserts for their worshippers’ fealty. To say that they were “wrong” in a pre-Christian era would inspire not so much opposition as confusion and bewilderment, as if you cast moral judgment on the way someone treated their sofa bed. There was simply no conception of the powerless having any essential moral value, let alone “rights.” It was Christianity that brought to humanity the revolutionary idea that every human being had intrinsic value as a beloved child of God. Even more: that the poor and oppressed were closer to god than the rich and powerful.

Without this paradigm shift there would be no conception of democracy as we understand it today. Greece and Rome, to be sure, had their democracies, but they were little more than caste-based oligarchies. Their franchises were restricted to a privileged class of “citizens.” There was no notion that their slaves possessed a value as inherent to them as it was to heroes and kings. Slaves, of course, did not disappear with the arrival Christendom, but from then on, their status existed in awkward tension with the precepts of the religion of their masters. It required justification. In antiquity there was no such cognitive dissonance.

This is a pretty long prelude to a comment on what’s happening today. As I’ve argued before, Trump is not a Christian president, and by that I don’t mean that he doesn’t purport to worship Jesus Christ. By “Christian” I’m referring to the taken-for-granted assumption that almost all of us share that there is an inherent moral equality of all human beings. That belief was once the most revolutionary concept in human history; today it is so ubiquitous it transcends what we ordinarily describe as “faith,” and is shared by people of almost every religion or no religion at all. The French revolutionaries, who burned down churches and executed priests, and the various Communist revolutionaries, who denied the very existence of God, were, ideologically, Christian. They inherited, and, indeed, were the radical expression of the conviction that humans were morally equal, a conviction that did not exist before the Christian doctrine invented it.

The Trump administration does not subscribe to this basic Christian precept. It’s hard to overstate how radical a departure this is from 2,000 years of human history. It’s not that there haven’t been governments far worse. Countless atrocities and even genocides have been carried out by Christian societies, sometimes in the name of Christ. But there were always those who dissented on Christian grounds, from Bartolomé de las Casas railing against the enslavement of indigenous people in the New World to Martin Luther King, Jr. protesting Jim Crow in the American South.

This dissent was something unknown outside of Christendom. There were no ancient Norwegian dissidents protesting Viking atrocities in the name of Odin, because there was no conception of human rights ordained by the Norse gods. But as long as Christianity has existed, so has there been a set of moral principles that even despots have been forced to reckon with. Countless rulers could, and did, violate those principles wholesale, but only at a cost to their legitimacy. Through two millennia of Western civilization, such tyrants tortured logic to align their actions with Christian values, arguing, however unconvincingly, that there were “races” of men who were subhuman and therefore lived outside of the Golden Rule, or that conquering people through violence was the only way to bring them to salvation by wiping away their superstitions and forcing them to embrace Christ’s love. Often these rationales were sanctioned by the Church, but just as often, there were dissenting priests who saw through the charade and said so, citing scripture. Some of them became martyrs, and some of those became saints.

We still live in a Christian era. Betraying Christian morality erodes a government’s political legitimacy today as it has for two millennia. For that reason, those who are protesting Trump could well prevail in the end. But it’s astonishing the extent to which this administration seems to deem itself free from the obligation to offer even a convoluted justification for its actions on Christian grounds. The Bush administration draped itself in the Christian language of liberation from oppression as it invaded and occupied Iraq. The Trump administration is brazenly jacking Venezuelan oil like a bunch of Viking raiders. The rhetoric Trump and his supporters have used to demonize Somali-Americans bears not even a hint of acknowledgement that they share an equal moral standing with everyone else. The operating principle of this administration, made painfully clear by ICE’s antics in Minneapolis, is that the strong will inherit the earth. This was the assumption of the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Vikings, the Magyars and the Saracens — but not of the Christian kings, even the cruelest and unholiest of them. They were compelled to bend the knee, at least performatively, to the Lord’s commands as written in the Gospels.

Such is not the case with this White House. They seem to seek no moral justification at all. Political legitimacy is not a concern of theirs. There is no ethical foundation to their authority, however flimsy or contrived, beyond the mere fact that they were elected. They have legal-rational authority but not even the pretense of obeisance to the hegemonic moral ideology of our time. This is a world largely unknown to us, one in which there is only power, not legitimacy.