Theostigma 1: The Cities on the Plain
The oldest human truth and why it is relevant today (a series)
You can picture this however you like; it was more than four thousand years ago and these places, having left us no written history, may have never existed. They were, in some tellings, a pair of cities; in others, they were five or thirteen. These settlements existed on a fertile plain in the Levant and quickly grew rich. Predictably, this led to population increase—by birth and by immigration—and the well-established, propertied descendants of the founders grew increasingly haughty and inhospitable.
Although the ruling classes were not generous, they did have enough of a sense of personal shame not to let the needy die on their own doorsteps, so they did give alms, but in the form of coins that had been debased and marked (stigma) so as to indicate that the holder had received them in desperation and was, therefore, in debt (payable in future labor) to the society and its governing class. Merchants, of course, would not use this second-rate money for their own spending, but understood when taking it as payment that it came from people with no wealth or important family, who could therefore be put to work at the lowest possible wage. The coins themselves did not buy leeks; the coins and labor did. The charity of this system was limited and conditional, but the destitute were able to find daily work.
The cities’ populations continued to grow. The quality of valuable land almost never increases at the same rate. The few who control capital ensure that labor always holds a subordinate position; demand for it is always increased more slowly than supply. The natural wage for standard work falls to, or below, the level of subsistence. More work is demanded for less, because there are a large number of desperate wage workers and there isn’t much work that the wealthy truly need done.
In time, the wealthy and bored realize they can use these destitute people, paying for sustenance in the stigmatized currency, for increasingly degrading purposes. They could be flogged for sport. They could be pushed into contracts of permanent and even generational servitude. They could be paraded about in humiliating costumes, like people vanquished in war. They could be made to fellate their social superiors in public, forced to copulate with animals, or anally penetrated.
God’s disgust with this civilization of misers and perverts reached a point where he decided to give them one final test. Two angels took human form and entered Sed’m, the richest of these cities. They went in with nothing; they had no means to secure food or a place to sleep. They took alms, in the form of these defiled leaden coins, and tried to purchase lodging with them, and by this time there was an established local practice of what was done with vagrants, and it wasn’t pretty…
God—or, in earlier tellings, one of the gods—intervened before the rape could be inflicted. No one, or virtually no one, was spared. The civilization left no trace but a name that would be used for millennia to name sexual practices (as in, sodomy) considered extreme.
The scholarly consensus about this story—the version in today’s Bible names two of the cities, Sodom and Gomorrah—is that the lesson was not intended to be about sexual practices per se, but the cities’ lack of charity. The warning is that the lowliest beggar might be God’s chosen messenger, so one ought never treat another human as shabbily as the poor and unpropertied of that doomed society—and of ours—were.
I do not want to be historically inaccurate and claim that the ancient Hebrews were “woke” and free of prejudices that most people today rightly consider to be bigoted and harmful. On the contrary, there is copious evidence, from other parts of the Bible, that they did find non-procreative sexuality abhorrent, a view which I personally reject. But we should put this in its proper context. The Hebrews were a nomadic, pastoral, stateless people on the margins of civilization; as such, their greatest fear was extinction, making population a moral cause, especially in the face of sedentary, enstated adversaries with twenty times as many people. To them, because each birth was one step away from their entire people being wiped out, all human life had value.
On the other hand, in property-based, sedentary societies—those of their enemies—the fear is not of extinction—there are more than enough people; it is felt that there are too many—but congestion. Desirable land is finite and has all been claimed. Positions in important institutions have been allocated generations in advance. Unless set to inherent independent wealth, a person newly born will fall into serfdom or, worse, wage labor to fund his own existence. The society must find ways to turn people away, because the addition of each new worker depresses wages for those whom previous generations have failed and who therefore rely on the labor market to survive. The value of new human life is negative. It was out of compassion—not perversion—that denizens of these ancient city-states, like modern peons of capitalism, made sure, using birth control as much as it was available, to avoid creating existences they did not have the resources to make tolerable. The ancient world did not have oral contraceptives; “onanism” and “sodomy” were its methods to curtail population increase.
The disgust many ancient Hebrews likely held toward homosexuality is not one we should share—in the modern context, it is inexcusable bigotry. At the same time, there is something noble—it wasn’t wrong then, and it’s wrong now—in their distaste for enstated societies that used so-called “property rights” to ensure a negative value (or, in today’s terminology, a “cost of living”) of new human life. They observed wealthier and more powerful societies, saw that average people were treated shabbily in spite of the rival civilization’s wealth, concluded they would not want to live there, and felt disgust.
We would like to believe, as humans, that wicked societies will be struck down. As for whether it is true, that is harder to say. Nobody can prove God exists or doesn’t, so we will never know if supernatural intervention exists. Certainly, there are reasons to believe, if no God exists, the opposite: that ruthless societies will prosper, just as the worst individuals reliably climb to high rank within them. This is why it is not unreasonable at all, in science fiction, that extraterrestrial life is presented as probably dangerous or malevolent—as in Blindsight, The Dark Forest, and The Mist. If the conservative view that war and capitalism reflect “human nature” is the correct one, and if there is no countervailing pressure against selection, we would expect that evil shall eventually triumph and that, in alien civilizations more advanced than ours, it already has. Still, it is natural to hope for something else, to want to believe that good and evil objectively exist (as I believe they do) and that there is a reason—it must invariably be a supernatural one—that good might actually win.
We have not yet discussed good and evil at enough length to make derivations, but there seems to be a very old human truth—theostigma—buried in all human religions, at least if they exist for long enough to develop maturity. When Yahweh sent two messengers, he did not dress them as kings but as beggars. Cassandra, given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, is not received as an oracle but is shunned and hated for what she predicts. Jesus, believed by the Christians to be mashiach himself, is humiliated, tortured, and killed for it in the most dishonorable way the Romans could conceive. While it is common for immature, puerile societies—such as modern Christian prosperity cults and “New Age” weirdo faiths where wealth and fame can be “manifested”—to expect that God’s Chosen shall be rewarded and loved by societies, it is known to anyone who has observed humanity and thought deeply for more than twelve minutes that the opposite is the case. Evil prospers in human societies, and to be previously selected (if such a thing exists) for a good purpose ensures that one will be miserable in them. But why? Is God powerless to stop this? Why can the one sapient species we know exists in the universe not help itself but create atrocious societies that make the same mistakes over and over again? Is all of this, in fact, strong evidence that God does not exist?
Theostigma is the notion that God tests his Chosen—that to receive capabilities and missions of theological weight will not result in prosperity but, instead, a very high likelihood of an extraordinarily difficult life. Why, though, must the Chosen, whoever they are, be tested? And are only a few people chosen, or are all of us chosen, it just happening to be (since, under capitalism, most lives persist in purposeless net dishonor) that most people fail to achieve anything close to a purpose? What can these issues tell us about morality, politics, economics—even neurology? I can’t promise that I’ll reach any answers; even to ask the right questions must require more than a life’s work. But we will get started, and we may discover enough to understand why we, as humans, seem doomed to create societies—like the one named in the Bible, so far gone in injustice and perversion it intended to rape a pair of angels—in which evil prospers, and whether there is anything we can do about it.