Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Or, There Are Weasels Under the Coffee Table: Or, Is 19th Century Liberal Imperialistic Utopianism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Before I get finally and totally buried in the depths of the Dissertating Lifestyle, I present to you, my dear, long-suffering readers, the long-promised, oft-longed-for Deep Space Nine Mega-Post. This is my favorite of the Star Trek series, and so I have, as you might imagine, a fair bit to say.

American National Politics and the Justice Casino

American national politics makes more sense when you realize that, while shouting about urgent justice issues is an important element in how American national politicians get people to vote for them, American politics are in no way actually about justice.

As matters stand now, giving out "Justice party-favors" is an essential element in the tit-for-tat of economic-managerial, interest-based coalition politics, but these party-favors bear little or no relationship with any consistent theory of justice, or even the most gradualist, incrementalist idea of how to achieve it. They correspond, rather, to a predominant theory and practice of politics as a system of managing clashing group self-interests through an a-moral exchange of favors and patronage mediated by electoral machinery. Some of these favors are purely self-interested, i.e. they represent direct benefits for the group itself; some represent concessions to that group's purported theory of justice or at least their commitment to a particular justice-issue. From the standpoint of the larger political system, though, there is little fundamental difference between the two.

When you vote for a political party based on a justice-issue, you're essentially gambling that your interest-group will receive, in exchange for its support, political favors that will in some indirect way translate into a tangible but incremental movement towards justice as you see it. This isn't necessarily irrational, since there's always the chance in our political system that your interest-group really will win big (the Supreme Court being the big unpredictable slot machine that occasionally gives crazy Jackpots in the larger Casino of American political life)--but what you're doing when you direct your pursuit of justice towards national politics is still essentially gambling, not working toward justice in any clear, rational manner.

The real issue with this system, though, is not that such gambling occurs, but rather how much sheer energy is directed towards converting every single justice-issue, however urgent or life-and-death, into a ready-made political interest group ready to play long games of cards with the big boys, and what effects this has in the long run on those causes and the societal conceptualization of justice in general. A people trained to see justice, in the end, as a set of interchangeable tokens in a game of Blackjack is going to find itself relating to justice in a manner fundamentally incompatible with any philosophical or moral theory of justice since Plato, and therefore with a fundamentally incompatible idea of politics as well.

Whether this justice and this politics is remotely coherent in itself, or remotely able to *actually* manage the clashing interests of different interest groups and thereby prevent political division and violence, is another question entirely, though one our political system seems to be working very hard to put to the test at the moment. We shall see.

In Defense of the Awful, Terrible, No-Good Terrifying Alienated Surrealism of the First Two Seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation

Alright, stop the presses: I want to write something in defense of the first two seasons of TNG.

Now, before everyone stones me through the Internet (hundreds upon hundreds of virtual packets of communal sacred violence winging their way through the ether(net) to end the Contagion and reestablish order in society), allow me to explain exactly what I mean, and also what I don't mean.

Most notably, I do not mean that the first two season's of TNG (with the exception of a few episodes) are actually good seasons of television, let alone (Waru avertat) well-written seasons of television. For the most part, the dialogue is stilted, the characters unlikeable, the plots bizarre and frequently incoherent, and the overall setting stultifying to most ordinary forms of drama. On all these fronts, the later seasons of TNG are undoubtedly better.

Nevertheless, I have come to think that, when all is said and done, there is something to be said for the prevailing vibe, the portrait of a people and a universe, the cinematic and fictional and science-fictional qualities of Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and 2. Some of this even emerges out of the otherwise negative qualities of the show--and if I had to use a single word to name the elusive yet omnipresent value offered by these seasons, it would undoubtedly be "surrealism."

Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and (especially) 2 is, frequently, a glorious tour de force of surrealist entertainment, bordering frequently on horror.

Almost everything about the show, the characters, the plots, serves to reinforce this overriding sense of alienated surrealism 

Imagine: the human race, centuries in the future. A vast, powerful starship travelling through the blackness of space, crewed entirely by men and women in spandex jumpsuits and skirts who talk slowly and blankly and seem to be constantly concealing high levels of tension and mutual hostility. The society they live in, everything we see of it, is stamped with the same strange, sterile vacuousness that they themselves display, buttressed by a fanatical, ideological belief in its own absolute moral perfection.

Nevertheless, all is not well in paradise. All the sexuality displayed by the characters is marked by a bizarre combination of the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s liberationism combined with the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s sexism. Most of the character's backstories seem to feature some kind of tragic violence, especially death or estrangement from parents, as well as romantic relationship dysfunction. A number of the crew members seem to obviously dislike one another, but it can be difficult to pin down, because these dislikes are never expressed aloud, since all the characters interact, even when off-duty, with an odd sort of tense formality, like actors in a highschool production of Shakespeare. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact all of their emotions are being constantly monitored by the alien female psychiatrist in the skin-tight jumpsuit seated next to the Captain on the bridge. Her job, besides monitoring the psychological health of the crew, is to emote in an exaggeration fashion on behalf of the unfathomable the alien entities they encounter, breaking out into uncontrollable expressions of others' terror or horror, sadness or joy, as everyone else stands around and impassively watches her. For leisure, our heroes can make use of the perfect AI-created virtual-reality machine helpfully provided for their amusement, a machine that can display a perfect facsimile of any person or scenario and also has the power to create sentient life. They can also sit around their quarters alone and listen to classical music.

These bizarre people, in this bizarre society, are travelling through space into the unknown. This unknown, it seems, largely consists of unfathomably-powerful superbeings bent on judging or controlling or testing the human race, or at least our heroes. Each one of these superbeings, who have no obvious relationship with one another or any larger cosmic order, has the power to bend the very fabric of reality and accomplish incredible feats--and their own nature, purposes, etc, are rarely if ever clear. One of these intelligences puts the human species on trial to prove its worth, one just experiments on them like rats in a maze, one underwrites the arbitrary laws of a hedonistic society, one constructs a perfect artificial environment based on terrible 20th century pulp novel. Their power and purposes are, for the most part, equally unfathomable.

What the hell even is this? Well, for the most part, it's the result of the combination of a number of behind-the-scenes things that didn't work out very well. For Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was an aspirational fable about a perfect evolved human race proving itself worthy at last, reaching ever-higher levels of existence through technology and scientific exploration, while giving a middle-finger to God and all other judgmental superbeings along the way. This didn't work out very well, though, and no one in particular could make sense of it or turn it into drama, so over time a succession of writers did their best to work with this idea, coming up with any number of one-shot high-concept science fiction storylines. The most competent of these by far was Maurice Hurley, whose fingerprints are all over the second season in particular. What he realized more than just about anyone else was that the Enterprise characters, as mostly blank ciphers of power and knowledge and perfection, really worked best (or at least most dramatically) when their power was challenged by superior power, their knowledge was stretched past its limits, their perfection revealed as a sham. So he wrote a number of stories where just this happens; a superior power acts, and our heroes do not understand how or why, nor can they do anything to overcome it: all they can do is escape or submit, and so survive, for a while. 

"Time Squared," perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is essentially a horror story. There is a power, an intelligence, that appears out of nowhere to threaten the Enterprise with destruction: but our heroes never make any sense out of it, what it is, why it's doing what it's doing, or how they can relate to it. Captain Picard, our arbiter of normal reality, is confronted with another version of himself, seemingly thrown six hours back in time, where he lies on his back, unable to focus on the world around him, but screaming in helpless terror, sure only of the need to repeat the cyclical events that brought him here. Picard, our Picard, is terrified: and in a key scene, he admits that despite all evidence, he recognizes nothing of himself in the person he sees. As if to underscore this, in the plot's pivotal moment, he shoots and kills his future self, then pushes the Enterprise to take a seemingly senseless action--and it works. They are all alive, free: for now, until the another inscrutable higher power makes them the object of its attention. 

"Where Silence Has Lease" is perhaps the most outwardly nasty of the episodes in the first two seasons: a horror story where our heroes are trapped in a starless void by a sinister intelligence who experiments on them like lab rats. In one such "experiment," an illusionary version of the Enterprise appears, that when beamed over to is all fun-house mirrors and illusions: our heroes exit one bridge directly onto another, looking through a door and seeing themselves from behind. Then an Enterprise crewmember dies in screaming agony, curled in a fetal position with his eyes wide and staring. Finally, the intelligence listens to Picard explain the mystery of death to two blank, illusionary versions of Data and Troi (the two strange, alien characters of the crew), and releases them again. Victory--of a sort.

 It is not just our heroes who are vulnerable to the terrifying powers of the universe, however, but their whole (supposedly superior) society. In "Conspiracy," the whole structure of the utopian Federation is infiltrated and taken over, without a shot being fired, by fathomless alien parasites who cannot be understood, cannot be negotiated with, but can only be defeated with brutal violence. The Federation is saved, for the moment. Still, they (and things much worse) are out there, waiting. 

The best of these episodes, and in a sense the climax of the whole theme,  is "Q Who?," Maurice Hurley's tour de force, which introduces the Borg, and makes the point emphatically that the Enterprise crew's ideological insistence on their own evolved perfection is a hollow sham in the face of a universe full of deadly powers they can neither control nor understand. It is, again, essentially a horror story. Q, the infinitely-powerful, mocking, judgmental superbeing, says the Enterprise crew are weak and arrogant, and cannot understand or control the universe as it is; and then he proves the point. Picard must beg, literally on bended knee for the help of this, mocking and judgmental but at least interested and sympathetic, superbeing against the fathomless, mindless power of the Borg. Their friendly superbeing has saved the day for them--this time. But the Borg are coming. 

These are (most of) the good versions of this story. There are bad versions as well, mostly (but not always) where Gene Roddenberry himself is calling the shots. "Royale," which has an interesting premise (fathomless superbeings kidnap a crew of astronauts, accidentally kill most of them, and then create an entire illusionary world based on a shitty novel for the one survivor to live out his life in misery), but which is otherwise a badly-paced mess; "Justice," where a race of child-like hedonistic sex-fiends turns out to be protected by an unfathomably powerful machine-god that nonetheless responds submissively to a moralistic lecture by Jean-Luc Picard;"Hide and Q," where Q is defeated and humiliated by yet another moralistic lecture on the perfection of humanity by the aforementioned Jean-Luc Picard; "The Last Outpost," where an ancient superbeing judges Riker worthy after he recites a line from Sun Tzu; et cetera. 

The benefit of this when it works, though, and even often when it doesn't, is that the strangeness, the surreality, never quite leaves you--and many aspects that might otherwise be considered straight-up "bad" can and do aid in that effect. The characters are written badly, taking on contradictory traits, likes, and dislikes, episode to episode and scene to scene, speaking and reacting in ways that no recognizable human person would do: but then, that helps with the sense of unreality, the sense that these are not human beings, not as we know them. Obvious conflicts among characters exist, but seem to have been deliberately edited out (as they often literally were by Gene Roddenberry's rewriting), or else resolved in the strangest possible ways: but we can treat this, too, as a sign of the dysfunction and alienation of a future society. Episodes are often heavily padded and paced glacially--there are shots featuring Captain Picard sitting on the bridge staring off into space and doing nothing; when an action is suggested, it is discussed in much more detail than is necessary; we watch in real time as mundane technological tasks are carried out; et cetera. But this, in a sense, is helpful; we can watch the unreality and strangeness of these characters and their world play out, and have time to focus on it, not merely on the shiny colorful plots and their supposed sense of excitement.

Whatever sense of the world, of Star Trek, we get from these seasons is quite far away from the bright, colorful character action-adventure of the contemporaneous original-cast Star Trek film series; and even from the pulpier, weirder world of TOS (which had its own share of superbeings). This is, genetically and dramatically, an idea of Star Trek that sits the closest, perhaps, to that of Star Trek the Motion Picture: an evolved humanity, composed of blank, unpleasant careerists, makes surreal, trippy contact with beings yet farther along the terrifying path of evolution, with vast intelligence and unfathomable power. A step beyond, and this is an idea of science fiction drawn in large part from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's distancing parable about contemptibly small and petty evolved apes forcibly transformed by an unfathomable alien intelligence toward an isolated, distanced transcendence. Beyond that, in turn, this vision of Star Trek stands a lot more closely to the world of '60s and '70s sci-fi, The Twilight Zone, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke: stories about ideas, about the alienation of man in technological society, very often edging into outright horror.

And isn't there something about all this quite a bit more relevant, in our particular alienated, technological society, than the warm family and political drama of later TNG? The late-TNG and beyond Federation may be less of a utopia, but it is undoubtedly a much nicer place. In DS9, we eventually find, genetic engineering and experimentation is strictly banned--but in TNG Season 2, the Federation itself is carrying on such experiments, and accidentally creating deadly plagues in the bargain; and there is talk of conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet...

Later TNG largely replaced all this with stories about recognizably human characters existing in community, and then about politics and drama on a more human scale: cold wars and civil wars and family feuds and coups. This was executed a lot better than anything in the first two seasons of TNG, was a lot more interesting and thought-provoking and even meaningful, most of the time. Because of this it's easy to see the first two seasons as little more than an embryonic version of what was to come, picking out the elements that are the same rather than focusing on the differences--or just dismissing these two seasons altogether. The point of this blog post, though, is that it's worthwhile, also, to acknowledge that if a lot was gained, still something was lost in that transition as well. The first and even more so the second season of TNG were in many ways a recipe for a totally different show, a totally different vision of science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular. A better one? No. But one with an attraction all its own.

So: even if we (reasonably) decide to skip right over the first two seasons of TNG, let's acknowledge, for just a moment, the true surreality, the alienation, the horror, presented all too often in these episodes. Sometimes it is merely laughable, shoddy, obviously fake--but every once in a while, it becomes something more: genuinely disturbing. 

Anxious men in purple spandex sit alone in their padded rooms listening to Mozart, while outside in the darkness and silence limitless intelligences do unimaginable things for reasons no one can fathom--and watch, and judge.

Who can say why anything happens in such a world? Who can say what it means to be a human being in such a society? Causation has broken down, as have ordinary ideas of character and personhood. All there is to do is keep watching the alienated technological patients continuing to travel space, continuing to (hopefully) survive each encounter with their terrifying alienated universe.

Caveat spectator.

Note: if this interests you, I wrote a much longer & more comprehensive piece on TNG a few years ago which can be found here, as well as a shorter piece reviewing a few random episodes here. 

Rights Discourses, Theft, and Violence

The trouble with conceiving of politics as solely or predominantly an arena for the assertion and ratification of rights is that it inevitably favors the powerful over the less powerful.

A "right" in its simplest etymological and legal form (ius) is simply a claim of ownership over something (or someone). If this is my piece of pie, I have the "right" to eat it--or throw it away. But then, of course, the question quickly presents itself of just why I have this right, and how it relates to the rights or potential rights of other people. My friend feels a strong desire to eat this same piece of pie; does he have the right to do this? Do I have to respect his right by giving him my piece of pie? As in this example, the assertion of different rights in the real world quite often involves simply logical contradiction--while in many other cases, it merely involves obvious conflict, as there would be if I asserted my right to eat the pie, and my friend asserted his right to use it (temporarily) as a doorstop. Etymologically and philosophically, the only way to adjudicate these sorts of disputes is by reference to justice, which is simply the abstract universal form (iustitia) governing the concrete particular act of claiming or possessing a right (ius). All politics quickly reduces to ethical claims about justice--that is, who has a right to what according to our overall philosophical system, our understanding of the good, private and common, retribution, distribution, etc. This is not necessarily easy in each practical instance, nor is it intended to be.

Contemporary politics is largely an attempt to have rights without justice--and implicit in this, or often explicit, is the idea that rights ultimately depend, not on a rational, universal form of justice, but simply on law conceived of as a purely positive assertion of the State or some purely formal legal or contractual procedure. Yet if politics is purely about asserting rights and getting those rights ratified by the State or some other procedural machinery, it seems fairly obvious that the rights that will in fact be ratified will be those of the people who in fact possess the political power or expertise in manipulating contractual or other procedural machinery to have their rights ratified and those of others denied. If the definitions so far are correct, this claim is more or less tautological.

More fundamentally, the use of force to assert a right to something (or someone) to which one has no actual right is the most straightforward definition of theft (and violence) there is. Yet if a right is nothing other than a claim on something or someone, and if the validity of each and every right ultimately derives merely from the fiat of the State or another purely formal machinery, it's difficult to see how this does not, in the end, simply reduce right to force, or at least a sublimated or redirected form of force.

Under such a system, I assert "my" rights, and am met in return with my neighbor's assertion of his conflicting or even contradictory rights. What adjudicates between our two claims is not, in fact, any universal rational principle, but merely the relative power or ability of us both in relation to political power and/or the machinery of legal or contractual power and enforcement.

If I steal my neighbor's farm by force, and then have that theft ratified by a legal authority, have I violated any principle of politics? What if I passed the law first, and then stole the farm? This is not a fanciful example, but is in fact a straightforward description of the English Enclosure Laws. If I kill my neighbor, but then justify it by the claim that he was violating my right to privacy (or property, or autonomy, or security, or subsistence, or self-actualization, or national identity, or), and have that legally ratified, have I committed violence? How would we know?

It should be straightforwardly obvious that the rights in turn asserted by different groups and different "sides" in our current political discourse are in conflict or even contradictory to one another. The question, then, is whether it is possible, absent a robust philosophical idea of the good and justice, for these claims to be adjudicated in any way that does not ultimately reduce to force. Another question is to what degree it is possible for our political system, inasmuch as it is founded on purely formal adjudication of contradictory claims, to continue to successfully sublimate or redirect the direct, private use of force among these different parties.

In any event, though, my objection to modern rights discourse is not just practical, but more basic and philosophical. A political system that consists predominantly of the assertion & counter-assertion of rights & their purely formal ratification by the state or other procedural machinery is inevitably going to be one in which theft and violence (philosophically speaking) are both encouraged and frequently approved, and where the powerful dominate the powerless with little fear of retribution. This is my fundamental objection.

On the Zizek/Peterson Debate

I really think that the analysis of figures like Zizek, Peterson, and other popular contemporary mass-media thinkers and rabble-rousers depends upon seeing them to a large extent as a further evolution of Protestant sectarianism, following very much in the line of people like Emanuel Swedenborg or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. Judged by that standard, however, they fall rather far short.

It's incredibly frustrating and almost subliminally annoying to me that both Zizek and Jordan Peterson explicitly see themselves as in some sense Christian, both rely on the content and social prestige and glamour of Christianity for their interest and appeal, and at the heart of both of their proposals for society and what they both openly call "redemption" are two self-constructed, supposedly more universalizing and modern versions of Christianity--and then both of their replacement versions of Christianity, inasmuch as they actually state them, could not be more shallow and boring if they tried. Many Christian heresies are a lot of fun! Many are quite compelling!

Peterson's "Christianity means the individual is sovereign and should try to pursue individual moral excellence in balance with social altruism" is just 19th century Liberal Protestantism without any of the fun parts, and Zizek's "Christ died so we could escape God the tyrannical father figure and pursue our paths in freedom and struggle," while it gets points for zaniness, is pretty standard "freshman philosophy student reading Nietzsche for the first time" stuff, and is rightly of very little interest even to most devoted Zizekians.

However popular Peterson and/or Zizek and their random commentaries on society get, the reality is their versions of Christianity will never gain any kind of social traction, and will never have the tangible social impact even of the most deracinated Liberal Protestant church, which at least manages to still function stably as an institution. The legacy of the 18th to early 20th century explosion of Protestant sectarianism that created such movements as the Shakers, the Swedenborgians, the Mormons, Christian Science, and others (including the distant forebears of modern American Evangelicism) is still very much with us, not only because their "modern, more universal" versions of Christianity were rather more interesting in content, but also because they actually did things and built things, some of which endure to this day.

That neither Peterson or Zizek shows any interest in actually building anything is in large part, I think, the result of the modern mass media landscape, which grants a very illusory form of fame and attention without any need to engage socially or build institutions or even create particularly interesting or novel sets of ideas. Zizek and Peterson, for all their bluster, function as mass media figures, like your average Twitch streamer, and little or nothing else. This is how their power and influence and ideas are effected in the real world. It's thus very hard for me to imagine most people remembering Zizek's or Peterson's systems, no matter how much they talk or how many people watch their Youtube videos. All this gives a tinge of futility and exhaustion and despair to everything I read or hear by them that is really rather depressing.

We either need better Christian heretics, or we need people to admit that Christianity itself, not to say Catholicism, actually still exists and functions just fine in the modern world, and that, while it clearly and manifestly can still function as a basis for personal and social and political life and the building and reforming of communities and institutions, the new updated versions of Christianity proposed by abstracted mass-media stars can't and don't.

Pakleds and Klingons and Riker Rapidly Losing His Mind, Oh My!

So once again, after many years (months? minutes? I dunno, folks, I'm bad at math), the much-heralded, much-longed-for return of the Nathan Israel Smolin/Captain Peabody Star Trek Oral(?) History Blog Post Series Extravaganza! 

Continuing where we left off, here are a few mini-reviews of episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. As with my TOS reviews, the idea is to skip over the most famous ("Best Of") the series, and instead highlight a few episodes that are not on any big lists, but which showcase aspects of the series as a whole, its strengths and weaknesses and special qualities. So without further ado, let's begin with one of those Weaknesses I just mentioned.

The Orthodox Schism: a Few Comments

Alright, here's a brief explanation and a few comments on the Orthodox Schism, which I'll give in two sections: (1) the immediate crisis, and (2) a little bit of the deeper historical and ecclesiastical background as I see it.

The Scenario

The immediate crisis can be most easily understood by looking at things from a very basic standpoint of ecclesiastical entities and numbers. Since math is hard and exact numbers impossible to come by, these will be by design very approximate and drawn from readily-available-through-googling sources.

The Russian Orthodox Church is numerically the largest Orthodox church in the world; by usual estimates, about half of the three hundred million Eastern Orthodox in the world are under the direct jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow. It is this, rather than any ecclesiastical claim to primacy, that makes Moscow one of the most important centers of world Orthodoxy, with a great deal of sway even other Patriarchates.

The modern ROC encompasses not only the modern nation of Russia, but also the Orthodox believers in (most) former Soviet nations. One of these, by far the most important, is Ukraine.

Ukraine, like Russia, is an extraordinarily large and populous country, with about thirty million nominal Orthodox believers and a very large number of parishes, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical holdings. It is also, by most estimates, a rather more religious society than Russia, where the vast majority of the populace are nominal members of the ROC, but where actual Church attendance is the lowest of any European country (consistently under 10%, and closer to 1-2% in major cities). It is this basic issue of numbers and parishes, more than anything else, that makes the question of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church so important for Moscow. As matters stand now, roughly half of the parishes of the ROC are in Ukraine rather than Russia; and this does not including the many parishes that have left Moscow and joined other Orthodox groups in the last thirty years.

The question of Ukrainian autocephaly, then, is not at all a distant or theoretical one for the Moscow Patriarchate. Giving up Ukraine means giving up a very large proportion of believers and institutions, and all that goes with them--including a great deal of Moscow's status in the Orthodox world generally. A fully united, autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church would be, immediately, the second largest Orthodox jurisdiction in the world, and a strong counterweight to Moscow. This is something that Moscow has shown itself entirely unwilling to accept.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople, on the other hand, directly presides over, in Turkey itself where it is located, one of the tiniest flocks in the world (perhaps 5,000), though it also has jurisdiction over many ethnic Greeks worldwide and most Orthodox in America and the West. Still, even with this, its numbers are a tiny fraction of Orthodox in the world (perhaps 6 million): its status in the world of Orthodoxy comes far more from the fact that it is universally regarded as the First See of all the Orthodox patriarchates and the "center" of Orthodoxy as a whole. What this means is not always very clear, but since the Eastern Orthodox churches are all descendants of the Church of the Byzantine Empire, and since Constantinople was, of course, the absolute center of that Empire and of the Church attached to it, that fact alone carries with it a great deal of prestige and influence.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople wishes to grant autocephaly to Ukraine, as it has to many other Churches formerly subject to it (including Moscow itself). Autocephaly, "having one's own head," means that the Church in question is self-governing, typically led by a Patriarch who has jurisdiction over the Church and all its dioceses and ordains its bishops.

Part of the issue is that there is no clear procedure or structural principle underlying "autocephaly" or its granting. The Byzantine Empire was an extraordinarily centralized society where Church and State were deeply entwined, with both centered around Constantinople and the office of the Emperor, who possessed religious as well as political authority. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, however, and later with the rise of modern nationalism, Byzantine Christians became politically and ecclesiastically "balkanized," gradually divided among multiple competing political and religious structures. The practice of "autocephaly" that has become the norm in modern Orthodoxy is little more than the regularized practice of Orthodox groups, largely for political reasons, breaking off from the Constantinopolitan center and managing their own affairs instead, generally with at least nominal (even if effectively coerced) consent from Constantinople itself.

The immediate impetus for Constantinople's move in Ukraine, though, is not so much ecclesiastical order (there are nation-states whose Churches are not autocephalous, and nation-states that are) as the desire to resolve a long-standing crisis and schism in Ukrainian Orthodoxy itself.

When the Soviet Union fell and Ukraine became for the first time in modern history an independent nation, a request was made to Moscow that the Orthodox in Ukraine be immediately granted autocephaly. The request was predictably denied, but in an equally predictable response, a large group of Orthodox clergy and believers in Ukraine broke off anyway and elected their own Patriarch, Filaret Denysenko. It is very difficult (at least for me) to tell precisely how many members this Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, as it is known, has, but some polls have shown its number of self-declared members to be actually larger than the ROC in Ukraine (though the ROC has many more parishes in Ukraine, and the numbers are muddied due to the large number of Orthodox in Ukraine who had no explicitly declared allegiance at all and who probably attend, if at all, ROC parishes), and has grown in recent years due to the military conflict between Ukraine and Russia. For the last thirty years, it has, however, not been recognized by, and not in communion with, any other Orthodox Church outside of Ukraine. There is also, confusingly, a third Orthodox jurisdiction also in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, which has its roots in independent resistance among the Orthodox to Russian rule, but in the more immediate past is largely the result of distrust and hostility towards Patriarch Filaret, who had been a prominent Russian Orthodox bishop under the Soviet Union and thus is a man with strong past ties to the KGB and the Russian government. The UAOC is not in communion with any other group, including the Kyiv Patriarchate. Taken together, then, these two jurisdictions represent, both within Ukraine and for world Orthodoxy as a whole, a sizeable proportion of believers, parishes, and clergy separated from and not in communion with the rest of the Orthodox world.

Constantinople's solution to this problem is, in the abstract, relatively obvious: to officially grant Ukraine autocephaly, thus reuniting all three Orthodox groups in Ukraine into a single Church with a single Patriarch, in communion with the rest of the Orthodox world.

In reality, of course, this solution is far from simple, predominantly because Moscow (for the reasons discussed above) will never accept it, but also because of internal divisions within Ukrainian society that make reconciliation between pro-Russian and pro-nationalist factions (for obvious reasons associated strongly with the ROC and the two independent jurisdictions, respectively) very difficult. This is the basic situation leading up the events of the past few weeks and months.

The events themselves have proceeded fairly straightforwardly, though how they will proceed in the future is very open to question. Constantinople has proceeded quickly towards the process of granting the UOC autocephaly, declaring their intentions, sending exarchs to Ukraine to negotiate with the independent jurisdictions (the ROC naturally ignored them), and finally, in recent days, unilaterally declaring all the members and clergy of the UOC-Kyiv Patriarchate and the UAOC to be in communion with Constantinople and canonically regular. In the near future, one would expect, they will officially grant Ukraine autocephaly, and the Ukrainians who accept this will elect a single Patriarch (who may or may not be Filaret, as discussed above).

Moscow, on the other hand, has responded to this first with belligerent rhetoric, then with increasingly extreme canonical and ecclesiastical moves. Members of the ROC, including most prominently Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the ROC's official head of external relations, have referred to the conflict as a "war," have threatened not only to break communion with Constantinople, but also to permanently dethrone Constantinople from its position as the First See of Orthodoxy, and have compared the forthcoming schism to that between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy as "the largest schism in a thousand years."

Following the sending of exarchs, the ROC officially "suspended relations" with Constantinople, a step that has been taken only once in recent history, when Constantinople granted autocephaly to the tiny, formerly Soviet nation of Estonia (with little over a million inhabitants in total) in the early '90s. At that time, however, the ROC and Constantinople fairly quickly came to terms and agreed to a solution that would allow two independent jurisdictions in the nation, one under the ROC, and one independent.

Following Constantinople's rehabilitation of Filaret and the UAOC, however, Moscow has in recent days taken the more drastic step of totally breaking communion and all clerical relations with Constantinople. This means not only that the Patriarch of Constantinople will no longer be prayed for in the Liturgy along with the other Orthodox Patriarchs, but also that all faithful of the ROC are forbidden to receive communion in Churches under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, and vice versa. In the past few days, officials of the Moscow Patriarchate have forbidden their faithful from receiving communion at any Churches ecclesiastically subject to Constantinople, even on Mount Athos, the world center of Orthodox monasticism--they have also publicly declared that the position of Primate in Orthodoxy, formerly held by Constantinople, simply no longer exists.

The question at this point is what happens next, on multiple levels. Constantinople has shown no signs of slowing their process, and in the near future they will likely finally and officially grant autocephaly to Ukraine; this will in turn likely trigger a response from Moscow, which may go so far as a formal act of excommunication or anathematization directed at the Constantinople Patriarchate.

On the ground, in Ukraine, the question is to what degree the granting of autocephaly actually unites the various Church groups involved. At minimum, the UAOC and the UOC of the Kyiv Patriarchate will be united with one another and with Constantinople. The ROC in Ukraine will also certainly continue to be out of communion with them, and will now no longer be in communion with Constantinople as well. The ROC in Ukraine, however, may, and almost certainly will, lose parishes and faithful to the new independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This process, though, has the strong potential to lead to judicial conflicts and even open violence, as faithful and clergy of different factions vie for individual parishes and all that goes with them. In the long run, this process may, or may not, lead to a decisive victory for one side or another; but in all likelihood both groups will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

Outside of Ukraine, though, the situation is even more incalculable. The fact of the ROC being out of communion and actively hostile to Constantinople is in itself, by sheer force of numbers, significant; it means that the most sizeable group of Orthodox in the world no longer consider Constantinople to be the Primatial See of Orthodoxy and no longer participate in any of the common structures or projects spearheaded by Constantinople--which are, essentially, all of the common structures and projects that exist within Orthodoxy. Whatever Constantinople does apart from the ROC will be, by that fact alone, dramatically less significant, less prestigious, and less effective.

The real question, however, is how the other autocephalous Churches of world Orthodoxy choose to respond to this state of affairs, which presents them with an immediate and highly fraught puzzle. Within Ukraine itself, these Churches will be forced to decide which of the two jurisdictions to be in communion with; and outside of Ukraine, they will have to decide what, if any, steps to take in response to Moscow and Constantinople's breach in communion.

The most likely step for all these Churches, at least in the short term, is, paradoxically, simply to do nothing. It is far from unprecedented within Orthodoxy for a Church to be simultaneously in communion with multiple Churches that are not in communion with each other. There is, in fact, such a situation going on right now; the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, the two most important Middle Eastern Orthodox Churches, have not been in communion with each other over a jurisdictional dispute for a number of years. No other autocephalous Church, so far as I know, has made any move in response to this; they have simply continued to simultaneously relate to and be in communion with both.

Of course, with Constantinople and Moscow, the issue is not nearly so simple. Jerusalem and Antioch are poor, marginal, and persecuted; both Constantinople and Moscow have strong ties of direct and indirect influence extending all across the world of modern-day Orthodoxy. It is practically impossible for any autocephalous Church to simply ignore either one, let alone both.

Leading up to this break, Moscow, at least, has been actively seeking support from other Patriarchates; by my count, the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Serbia, and Bulgaria have all been brought to make strong statements of support for the ROC in Ukraine and against Constantinople's actions in recent weeks. The Orthodox Church in America, which has close ties to the ROC but is nominally autocephalous (an autocephaly granted by Moscow, and thus not recognized by Constantinople), has simply stated that they would not break communion with Constantinople. The Patriarch of Antioch has pointedly refused to endorse either side, but has bitterly complained about the divisions in the Church and the lack of attention shown to his own conflict with Jerusalem.

We are, really, in uncharted waters here. There are any number of theoretical ways this situation could resolve itself, but much depends on the precise actions and reactions of the parties involved. What is very close to certain is that neither side will, at this point, back down in their immediate conflict with one another: Constantinople will officially grant autocephaly to Ukraine, and Moscow will continue to try to cut itself loose from Constantinople.

Other autocephalous jurisdictions will try to mediate this conflict, but there is not really anyone in the Orthodox world with any significant amount of sway with either Patriarchate. A Council could be called, but it is extremely unlikely Moscow would ever attend such a meeting. Only a few years ago, Constantinople tried to summon a Pan-Orthodox Council in Crete, but was stymied by Moscow's unilateral refusal to attend (ostensibly for doctrinal and organizational issues)--a fact that ipso facto rendered the Council a dead letter. It does not seem likely Moscow would ever attend a Council where it actually had something to lose; and there is no longer an Orthodox Emperor to force them or anyone else to do so.

An Estonia-like solution is, of course, still very much possible; an agreement whereby both jurisdictions are allowed to exist in Ukraine simultaneously in communion with one another and with the rest of Orthodoxy. With every day that goes by, this becomes less and less likely, but it is still an obvious solution and can never be discounted. This resolution would presumably lead to at least a healing of the immediate Schism, though it would not bring an end to the deeper issues bringing Moscow and Constantinople into conflict. The status quo would be maintained, in other words, but not reconciled.

If the Schism continues and escalates to the point of open excommunication, whatever the other autocephalous Churches do, this would de facto lead to a situation where world Orthodoxy, over time, becomes more and more separated out into two clearly divided, hostile, competing institutions. Other autocephalous Churches could, in all probability would, be drawn into it and break communion with one side or the other. Or, if all of them maintain an ostensible neutrality, the labyrinthine, schizophrenic dimensions of modern Orthodoxy would be greatly increased. Either way, the ability for Orthodoxy to operate in any univocal or united way, or to ever join in on any common projects or statements, would be effectively neutralized.

In the long run, of course, regardless of what happens in the near future, one side or the other could "win out" in such a way as to render the other side impotent and of far less significance in Orthodox affairs. This does not seem particularly likely to me, but both sides have partisans who strongly believe in these scenarios, so they should not be entirely discounted.

The scenario by which Constantinople "wins" is fairly straightforward, and generally involves less "total war": due to on-the-ground conditions, the united Ukrainian Orthodox Church rapidly absorbs the ROC in Ukraine, and becomes too large and successful for any other Orthodox Church, including Moscow, to not to be in communion with. After the other autocephalous Churches gradually accept it as an equal and partner, Moscow is forced to accede, and the UOC thus takes its place in the pantheon of autocephalous Churches as a strong counterweight to Moscow's supremacy; and in the long run, a smaller, chastened, and more humble Moscow becomes a more reliable and less independent part of Orthodoxy under the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The scenario whereby Moscow wins is also fairly straightforward, but rather more brutal: Constantinople has very few Orthodox believers under its direct jurisdiction, relying for its position and authority on soft power and prestige. If Moscow can successfully use its clout, which includes at least potentially the entire political and diplomatic power of the Russian state, abundant monetary funds, and numerous believers scattered throughout the world, to persuade other autocephalous Churches to join it in breaking from or even excommunicating Constantinople, at a certain point, Constantinople would simply become a tiny, poor, and insignificant Church, and a threat to no one. At this point, it would matter very little what they did or decided on any question; Moscow would be free to operate however they wished, whether, in the long run, they returned to communion with Constantinople or not. Moscow could even, depending on the situation, take the most drastic step of all: claim for themselves the Primacy ostensibly vacated by Constantinople.

As I said, I do not think either of these scenarios particularly likely, though they each have something to commend them.

Historical/Ecclesiastical Background

The difficulty with Orthodoxy as a modern phenomenon is always that it has never had a fixed Church order or ecclesiology. The Church of the Byzantine Empire had two institutional sources of unity at the highest, universal level, both of which modern Orthodoxy has no access to: the office of the Emperor, and the office of the Pope.

While it initially contained multiple Patriarchates with some degree of independence, following the Muslim conquests, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch were all lost to the Empire, while Rome and the Latin Church became gradually estranged from Byzantium first politically and later religiously; this led, in the long run, to an almost total ecclesiastical hegemony of Constantinople in the Empire.

Constantinople's status even as a Patriarchate, however, had been heavily disputed, to say the least. Prior to Constantine, there had been three Apostolic Sees generally recognized: Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, all of which had personal ties to the Apostle Peter. Rome was, of course, the acknowledge Primate, as the See where Peter and Paul had shed their blood. Byzantium, on the other hand, was a minor city politically and ecclesiastically, with no even legendary ties to Peter or any other Apostles.

After Constantine re-founded Byzantium as his new capital, Constantinople or New Rome, the vastly increased political importance quickly translated into greater ecclesiastical importance as well. During the late 4th and 5th centuries, clerics of Alexandria and Antioch competed over and against Constantinople and to maintain their own primacy in the East, a conflict that led eventually to the estrangement of significant numbers of their followers from the Empire and the Imperial Church. Finally, at the Council of Calchedon, the assembled clergy, absent the Roman legates, passed a canon declaring that Constantinople, because it was the Imperial City, ought to be the second See in the Church after Rome. Pope Leo the Great, however, reacted angrily to this appeal to politics in Church order, and publicly annulled the canon, since Constantinople was neither an Apostolic See, nor could it possibly take precedence over the older Apostolic Churches of Alexandria and Antioch.

Still, in the long run, the close ties between Church and State in the Byzantine Empire, where the Emperor held ultimate sway in both spheres, made Constantinople's religious hegemony simply a fact of life, one that received little official legitimation for centuries, but which became more and more official over time and especially as Rome's role in the Byzantine Empire, for many centuries (particularly those of the so-called Byzantine Papacy) powerful and decisive, gradually waned.

When the Byzantine Empire fell, however, the believers and Church structures that had once been a part of it were brought into a state of disarray. Nations and ethnic groups were forced to fend for themselves, which they did in different ways. Some (the large proportion of Antiochenes who now form the Melchite Church, the majority of the Kyivan Rus who now make up the Ruthenian and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Churches, etc) re-entered Communion with Rome and became a part of the modern, post-Reformation Catholic world of multiple sui iuris Churches under the ultimate governance of the Pope; others remained in communion with Constantinople while learning to manage their own affairs, leading to the existence of "autocephalous" Orthodox Churches in the modern sense.

The Church of Moscow, however, adopted a rather more aggressive strategy, forging extremely close ties to the expansionist Muscovite Empire. Its "autocephaly" was gained essentially by force, including an incident where the Patriarch of Constantinople--who had traveled to Moscow to raise funds, since the Ottoman Empire maintained the Patriarchate only on the basis of compulsory extortion and simony--was held captive in Russia until he agreed to grant the Bishop of Moscow the title of "Patriarch." Along with this aggression in Church matters came the ideology of "Third Rome," which held that, just as Constantinople had been the First See in the Church not due to any Apostolic pedigree, but solely due to its role as the capital of the Orthodox Empire, so too, Moscow, the capitol of the Orthodox Russian Empire, had now inherited that same primacy. As Moscow and the Russian Empire expanded politically, so too did the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, leading to many churches that had been formerly been subject directly to Constantinople now becoming subject instead to Moscow.

When the Russian Empire modernized under Peter the Great, so, too, was the Russian Orthodox Church modernized; in 1721, the Patriarchate of Moscow was actually abolished, replaced by a Synod subject to the Czar, and not reinstituted until 1917, in the throes of the Russian Revolution. The ROC, however, was soon, under the Soviets, officially abolished--and it was not until 1943, when Stalin made the decision, to benefit nationalistic sentiment against the Nazis, to revive and sanction Russian Orthodoxy, that the Patriarchate was officially restored once again. Under Stalin and his successors, however, the ROC was thoroughly penetrated and largely controlled by the KGB, even as it was marginalized and downplayed by the officially atheistic state. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladmir Putin, however, the ROC has re-forged its close ties to the Russian State, receiving a great deal of support and approbation from Putin, and in return endorsing his policies and political affairs.

Constantinople, on the other hand, suffered after the fall of the Empire through centuries of repressive Ottoman rule--until the rise of the modern Turkish state following World War One, which paradoxically butchered its followers and drove them out of the country, reducing it to a tiny fraction of its former numbers, while at the same time by its official secularism giving it, for the first time in centuries, almost total freedom to operate independently on the global stage. This, for the most part, seems to be Patriarch Bartholomew's vision: of a restored Orthodox Church separate from, liberated from, the State and now operating in a unified way under the strong, independent leadership of Constantinople.

If this break is happening now, then, it is in large part because these two institutions are both in positions of relative strength--and also because their basic visions for the structure and order of Orthodoxy as a global institution are radically in conflict. Moscow, in a sense, is the less ambitious one; it wishes to ratify a Church order tied to political structures, and in particular to the ethnic-national Orthodox Empire embodied in the contemporary Imperialism of the Russian State, which sees all of its former holdings, whether nominally independent or not, as part of its sphere of influence and consequently under its spiritual and jurisdictional sway. Patriarch Bartholomew, on the other hand, ambitiously wishes to forge a modern Orthodox Church that exists as a universal institution independent of national, ethnic, and political divisions, ruled by a strong independent Primate whose status comes, not from current Imperial sway, but from past tradition, and divided in an orderly fashion into autocephalous Churches whose boundaries are dictated by those of nation-states.

The two groups also have more intellectual debates and alignments, the largest of which is how Orthodoxy ought to relate to other Christian groups--in particular the Catholic Church. Patriarch Bartholomew is famously ecumenical, and is personally close friends with Pope Francis, with whom he as cooperated on a vast number of projects. The Patriarch of Moscow, however, is generally opposed to rapproachment with other Christian groups; though he was finally brought to meet with the Pope for the first time in history in recent years, the ROC has always been the main foot-dragger and obstacle to cooperation between the Catholic Church and Orthodoxy.

Over Ukraine, the issue is also one of jurisdiction. Kyiv was formerly under the direct jurisdiction of Constantinople, which was eventually forced, by the political realities, to allow Moscow to ordain its bishops. Moscow thus claims Constantinople has no right to grant Ukraine autocephaly, since it is its own canonical territory. Constantinople, for its part, claims the exclusive right, as Primate, to grant autocephaly; it has, in the past, refused to recognize Moscow's attempts to grant its subject Churches this status. It also claims that Ukraine, regardless of the changes brought about by conquest or the grant in question, is properly its own canonical territory--and thus Moscow has absolutely no right to jurisdiction over it.

This is not an easy dispute to resolve, on any level. Constantinople's claim to a strong primacy independent of any Orthodox Empire is at least historically an innovation; Moscow's claim to absolute jurisdiction over the Church of another nation-state due to past Imperial rule is at base ruthlessly political: but the far deeper issue underlying both these stances and the conflict as a whole is that there is, in fact, no clear way to resolve any of these disputes, neither in terms of Church structure nor in terms of canonical jurisdiction, within the institutions and traditions of Orthodoxy as it has existed since the Fall of the Byzantine Empire.

The resolution of this dispute, then, depends in reality not on any intra-Orthodox ecclesiastical principle, but simply and solely on the will of the parties involved, as well as the chaotic conditions and fortunes of politics and history.

As a Catholic, all I can say is that we ought to pray, whatever Christian group we may belong to, for all those believers who are caught up in the middle of this fiasco: and trust, ultimately, in Christ, who loves his Church, and will unite all those who belong to him, finally and forever, in the Kingdom of his Father.