I’ve got a somewhat different programme in tone this semester for readers. Last semester, I took them deep into the digital abyss. In ‘Digital Nihilism,’ I identified the mechanism. In ‘The dissolution,’ I made a bolder ontological claim about it. And in ‘Día de Muertos,’ I offered a prescription: ritual. This is for two reasons. First, a definitive commitment to a specific metaphysical claim (which is what religion offers) is something I’m still personally somewhat unsure about. Second, ritual as a category has been secularised, which both makes it far less contentious and also suggests something about its universality.

I think very hard about what I want my body of work to look like. I’m extremely intentional in the themes I invoke and the topics I write about. I admit that the theme of ‘Exile and Altered States of Consciousness’ is a challenging one. Because I’m also working on two musical projects at the moment, I think I chose it mostly for its aesthetic value by accident. But the challenge is something I want. I’m an opinion columnist, not a “public pontificator.” I’m going to need to figure out how to tell a fascinating story through opinions relevant to our readers.

About Gen Z, our behaviour, late-stage capitalism, John Calvin of Geneva, Switzerland, his presence in the American imagination, and what an achievable, comprehensive solution looks like.

So, I guess I'll begin tonight.

Prelude:

‘Calvin in Geneva’

He’d been a spectre looming over the city for years. But 1555 marked the first year that a French theologian named John Calvin exercised what was essentially unchallenged authority over the city of Geneva, Switzerland. “It was the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles,” a contemporary Scottish theologian named John Knox said of the city under Calvin.

In a way, John Knox wasn't lying. In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, if such a thing as “Protestant Rome” existed, it was surely Geneva.

The problem, however, lies in what Calvinist theology did to the individual.

It began with predestination. Before you were born, God had already determined whether you were going to heaven or hell. The verdict was sealed. Nothing you could do would alter it. This should have produced passivity. Why labour toward a destination already fixed? Instead, it produced a nightmare: it produced the perpetual need to know. And in that need, a new kind of self was born: one that watched itself constantly, searching its own conduct for signs of a fate it could never confirm.

Rome certainly wasn’t perfect. In many ways, that was sort of the point of the Reformation. But at least it had art. For all its hierarchy, it produced beautiful things and permitted people to experience a spirituality through sight and sound, to let the metaphysical move through the senses even as the institution remained repressive at its core. Calvin distrusted the senses. He was suspicious of art, banned singing in the church, and treated the human capacity for beauty as a forge of idols. Thoughts. Emotions. Feelings. The life of the mind. All to be distrusted. What could be trusted was work. Visible, productive, quantifiable work.

The individual, in Calvin’s theological constellation, was nothing. The feelings were snares. The imagination itself was fallen and couldn’t be trusted. Worth was not for the self to assess. The interior life of the individual was a site of evidence, not a soul to be cultivated. Data for a verdict you would never receive.

In Calvin’s Geneva, you were nothing. And you had to watch yourself be nothing, every day, to see if that nothing was what you were always meant to be.

Calvin died in 1564, but the architecture of the self he constructed: anxious, surveilled, labouring to produce signs of an election it could never prove, persisted within the first groups that would begin the American project. And if you truly want to understand why modern America behaves the way that it does, you need to understand what the Reformation did to the interior life of its inheritors.

Calvinism travelled through the Great Awakenings, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of a now secular empire. Through the internet and into the minds of Gen Z, where it has returned. But not as theology. As ethos. What Max Weber called “the Protestant Ethic,” work as salvation, time as debt, the terror of being seen and found insufficient. We inherited the structure but lost the God who might have offered grace. The auditor remains. The verdict never comes.

Nathan Cole was a farmer and carpenter in Middletown, Connecticut. In 1740, he heard that a preacher named George Whitefield was nearby and rode twelve miles with his wife on a single horse, both of them out of breath, arriving to find thousands already assembled. He watched Whitefield take the scaffold and felt, he later wrote, “a heart wound.”

What followed was two years of torment:

“I began to think I was not Elected, and that God made some for heaven and me for hell. And I thought God was not Just in so doing... My heart then rose against God exceedingly, for his making me for hell; - Poor - Me - Miserable me... I carried Such a weight of Sin in my breast or mind, that it seemed to me as I should sink into the ground every step... Hell fire was most always in my mind; and I have hundreds of times put my fingers into my pipe when I have been smoaking to feel how fire felt: And to see how my Body could bear to lye in Hell fire for ever and ever.”

Cole eventually found peace. But most of us never get to that part of the story. We inherit the structure without the resolution, the watching without the verdict and the anxiety without the grace. The fingers in the pipe, testing what it feels like to burn, but no vision of the gate of heaven to release us.

‘Exile and Altered States of Consciousness’ (Jan. 30)

'Calvin's Theme'
by Ariel Ramirez

(Unreleased)