This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe gang discusses the week’s news, including Trump’s embarrassing NFT scam. Richard discusses our culture’s obsession with Hitler, which is undergirded by a “negative theology” and “negative morality,” in which the “good” is a negation, “not being Hitler.”
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| When I was growing up in the 90s, you would turn on cable and cable television, that is, and the history channel would almost literally be the Hitler channel. | |
| Like, it was Hitler's henchmen at 8 p.m., you know, Hitler versus Churchill, the battle that defined the century at 9, and then, like, Holocaust. | |
| It was just endless. | |
| Black and white programming involving all of it, involving the Holocaust maybe to a less degree. | |
| It's mostly Hitler and maybe some D-Day in there, too. | |
| So we're obsessed with Hitler. | |
| He is fast and endlessly fascinating and grotesque, at least in the way that he's represented, etc. | |
| But it's not just that. | |
| It's that we have like liberalism has a negative theology and a kind of negative morality. | |
| right? | |
| And so, you know, even conservatives will stress this, is that who are we to judge anyone's lifestyle? | |
| You know, who are we to tell them you can't become a woman, or you can't be a sexual pervert, or you can't consent to this or that? | |
| And maybe even that you can't take this illegal drug on your own time so long as it's not hurting. | |
| This is the so-called non-aggression principle. | |
| And it is a, you know, effectively, if you are not harming anyone but yourself, you are free to do that. | |
| That's the kind of libertarian form of it. | |
| I think the liberal form is just a kind of more robust and kind of self. | |
| Exploratory version of that negative morality. | |
| We're going to start recognizing multiple sexualities and we're going to start recognizing new forms of sexual experience and new identities. | |
| There are new minorities that we didn't even know about. | |
| But it's all negative. | |
| And so it's all about not being Hitler, in effect. | |
| And Hitler is at the very center of this ideology. | |
| So it's this negation of any form of affirmation and just a positing of not Hitler as your moral compass. | |
| And this goes along with other forms of negativity. | |
| I mean, if you go to Germany, it's becoming like this in the United States, in a way. | |
| In Germany, it's pretty intense, where any new memorial in the town is more or less about the Holocaust. | |
| So I remember one of the last times I was in Berlin. | |
| It wasn't the last time, but anyway, I was in Berlin. | |
| They had just announced this Holocaust memorial, and it was these weird, dark, curved shapes that almost looked like tombstones in this huge array. | |
| And it was extremely monotonous, but I think more than that, I was kind of unnerving in the way that postmodern art can be. | |
| And so it was this way of like the monument affecting you, demoralizing you, the monument unhinging you, the monument unnerving you. | |
| And so the public space that might have had an image of... | |
| Frederick the Great or Goethe or whatever is kind of being replaced by this negation of a monument, a kind of anti-monument, this contemplate the Holocaust injunction. | |
| And what marks our time, and I do think it's kind of changing, and how this will play out is interesting, but what marks our time is this negative theology and negative morality. | |
| A negative morality of not Hitler and a negative theology of the Holocaust. | |
| So you're placing this like negation, literal annihilation of human beings as a kind of like the center of Jewish identity and in a way Christian identity too. | |
| I think this is profound. | |
| And I also think it's probably unsustainable as well. | |
| Like, what does it mean that we can't, you can't assert a myth, ultimately. | |
| You can't, like, and the only more, I mean, people might have sexual morality in their own personal lives. | |
| Surely many do, but it's, morality is ultimately about collecting the herd and pointing in a certain direction. | |
| And in an anti-morality, you can't do that. |