Thank you for the notion, from Havel, that risk inheres in truth. As a musician, I'm always looking for language to describe why it matters that we sing and sound our truth; and how to outline in sharp, clear detail where it is that music sounds the truth, and where it serves, instead, to conceal or deny it. Your voice has been helpful to me in this, and in much else, and I'm grateful for your work and to all those whose works have shaped yours.
Apr 17, 2022·edited Apr 17, 2022Liked by Timothy Snyder
A friend sent me something about Jesus giving His life and I couldn’t engage with it. Distracted by Christian white nationalists, exhausted by conversation with hardline pacifists, angry about any suggestion that rolling over and playing dead is a redemptive act, I decided that Easter isn’t working right now. My husband went to church and I mapped the news about mayors, intellectuals, public servants and children bound for “lustration,” filtration camps and pits against language from the genocide handbook you shared. Then I printed and stuffed your piece above into my bag in order to read it out loud (and to doodle flowers around paragraph four) from the passenger seat on our way to wherever for ham.
As you correctly say: “ 'To live in truth' means accepting a measure of existential danger…but death is not the point.” It is certainly not to be glamorized or glorified. I’ve been sensing just that happening and, before you spoke, couldn’t say why it felt so wrong. Each who fights, stays or keeps the record is to be praised, loved and remembered for living in truth more than for dying a martyr’s death.
Thank you, as always, Tim. Please know that you are inspiring not just thinking, talking and writing, but also action.
You have helped me understand why in the age of social media all the gifs on Easter saying “He is risen” irk me so. I’m a social worker with a masters of theology from Vanderbilt University Divinity School. The meaning of the Jesus story to me is his living truth and love. This essay is helpful in understanding Russia/Putin, as well as the evangelical Christian support of Trump. Thank you.
Thank you so much for a reflection I count as the best I've heard on this Easter 2022. As usual links to books mean I've ordered them! I am so appreciating the history you recommended recently - The Gates of Europe. There is so much to learn about this part of the world! There are times you can be tempted to think of the planet as a small place, but it is truly huge, filled with stories of life and stories of catastrophe. I forwarded your writing to some clergy friends. What you've written describes living theo + logos. I dread opening up Meduza each morning. Ukraine must win what Putin as a war crime has begun. At one level however the Ukrainians have won already. Just not yet fully. There is a small candle shop business in Door County Wisconsin that is owned by a first generation Ukrainian American. Her family who are immigrants to the US and citizens now are engaged in making candles of Ukrainian flag colors and shipping them all over the United States. They have been doing this since the war began and they have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for RAZOM! It lifts my heart every time I read of another effort that is rooted in the hope Ukraine's people are engendering for a world free of the very thing Putin's reign has produced. The question now is: will the western alliance step up to the huge task ahead. Will Americans and others stop moaning about gas prices and all the rest and stand up for democratic values and the nation that is bearing the highest cost each hour of each day? Will Americans wake up to the danger of the same fascism in our midst rooted in a one of our 2 political parties? That is our national struggle presently, but I fear too few are awake enough to recognize the danger. May 9 must not be a day Putin can celebrate.
This is an extraordinary essay. I was raised in the Catholic Church, and your analysis of guilt, death, redemption, and risk reveal perspectives I never thought about, nor had reason to. Of course, the rationales of the Inquisition, of Western colonialism, and now of evangelicalism. You have enlarged my understanding.
This analysis applies to all fascists and authoritarians who use Christianity for political purposes. Regardless of how you interpret Christ's dying and rising, no one can explain away how Christ lived vs how authoritarians live. Christ lived in caring for, providing for and loving those least fortunate while authoritarians would prefer to kill them.
Easter will always bring thoughts of my mother and her starving family leaving captivity in Soviet Kazakhstan in the spring of 1942. They were arrested by the NKVD and deported by cattle car from the Polish city of L'wow, now Ukrainian L'viv, in April of 1940. In 1942 they managed to connect with the recently released Polish General Anders and the Polish prisoners of war that were in the process of being granted amnesty by the Soviets after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. My Grandmother, who was an accomplished singer before the War, sang Ave Maria for the survivors at a mass to celebrate their release. Not a dry eye in the crowd, so my Mother reports. Their thoughts and prayers were with the many thousands murdered and left behind to rot in Russian captivity. Sadly, their storey has never captured the attention of the larger world. Buried under the Realpolitik necessities of keeping an important Russian ally onside, they were ordered to keep quiet after an odyssey taking them through Persia and the Middle East and finally arriving in the U.K. Victims of geopolitics and the ambitions of powerful nations, they looked to start new lives and create new identities. A resurrection of sorts. Not the "Christ of Nations" you have identified in your article though, as these people had everything to live for and desperately clung to their humanity, despite the inhuman conditions. They managed to set down new roots in North America, but never received any meaningful recognition of the suffering they endured, let alone news of the fate of the many left behind. Archives of the victor nations rarely get the thorough exposure and timely critical appraisal they deserve. I see Russia acting out true to historical form. Never thoroughly called to account for their crimes during the Second World War, and left to create a glorious history unchallenged, it is no surprise that Russia has no shame. Putin has inherited a rich legacy of historical distortion to build upon and project his blood-thirsty political ambitions.
I am very glad to see there is space for an open dialogue to address the atrocites occuring at present in the Ukraine. Hopefully, this will not be another period of history where Russia is allowed to create an alternate universe of facts and ultimately avoid doing the hard work of transforming its brutal regime and the oppressive society that has been many decades in the making.
I very much appreciate the comments and reading the observations in Thinking about...The world certainly needs an informed and engaged America.
I'd like to share how I understand humanity and what is going on right now. My understanding is neurobiological and evolutionary but it gives me a lens to understand why and how bad things can get.
I believe we are being forced to face the frailty of human neurology. We are as humans very much individually vulnerable to neuro pathologies that can put us on a lifelong path of fear, defensiveness and worse. The prevalence of pathologies and damaged thinking is much greater than we thought or want to admit. It is however much greater understood than we think as well. Identifying damaged individuals, understanding the decisions they make and how they act are all predictable. Understanding may not make they less scary but it will take the element of surprise away.
About 100k or so years ago we began to benefit from group social relations. Our brains had evolved enough to begin to survive through invention and manipulation. Migration and browsing began to fade. Bigger brains, earlier birth meant many years of offspring support before reproductive viability. 12 years at this point today. We developed strong tribal identity impulses, learn to cooperate and keep long term relationships. We began to settle in place.
These evolutionary pressures were sudden and strong. The changes and inventions humans have made since then far out compete any close evolutionary relatives. In the short period of time since, close competitors are gone and we remain. This is prima facia evidence of the advantages of invention and cooperation. These changes are what we today call "pro social". Behaviors and thinking that do not promote these traits are called "anti social". These traits are so important to us that we have visceral and intense feelings about them. This is evolution at work as well.
But 200k years is a blink of an eye in terms of neurobiological adaptation to huge new life strategies. So how did our brains actually change in that short time? How did we accommodate social cooperation? There are many ways, but it's clear to me that the most important one is we grew a large "pre frontal cortex" (PFC) whose almost singular job is to temper the individual survival instinct that worked so well for 1 billion years but now needs to be contained. Those survival impulses are processed in what is called the limbic system and in the fear processing center called the amygdala. The PFC has direct connections with the limbic and amygdala and feeds it signals based on its processing of logic, planning and generally "higher level" thinking. The PFC has the job of calming down the fear generated by the amygdala using higher level logic that it can process.
We all feel the results. Here's an example, you’re at the zoo you turn and unexpectedly see a tiger. "Oh no, a tiger!" A moment later you think, "But... it's in a cage." The amygdala, being evolved for a very long time, is doing its job of assessing the tiger threat correctly and the result is fear. The PFC meanwhile processes what a cage does and sends signals to the amygdala saying, "cool it". It's what both entities evolved to do: the amygdala over perhaps a billion years and the PFC mostly in the last 200k or so.
You know where I'm going with this. Damage to how these systems work creates very predictable anti-social thinking and behaviors. Full damage to PFC or it's connections can produce unrestrained fear and violently defensive behavior. It is all understandable and depressingly predictable. It is also not uncommon. Full damage is rare, but under development due to abuse, damage during life and even inheritance is not rare. In fact, damage to more recent evolutionary structures are expected to be more common than damage to much older structures. More recent structures also have more variation of expression than older systems. The net result is although we are meant to be pro social, we are still very vulnerable to anti social thinking and behaviors.
There is a lot more to be said, but this is a comment. I just wanted to share the lens through which I make sense of people, all people. These are the realities of humanity and its neurological limits. Anti-social thinking is expected but it is evidence of damaged neurobiology and does not belong in human society anymore. It is also largely permanent during an individual’s life because it is biology at work. Other systems compensate for an inaccurate and fearful view of the world, but it will always be a compensatory force on a broken biological system.
Jesus actually did intentionally provoke the state (the Romans who cruelly occupied Palestine), most notably by riding in glory into Jerusalem on what we now know as Palm Sunday. He knew he would be executed for it. Love and truth is always attacked by the rich and powerful, by the armies of ignorance and hate. He modeled how to stand up to evil, even at the risk of death.
I've long known that some who identify as Christians manage to exploit their claimed religion to justify or rationalize immoral behavior. Past and present. But this is my first exposure to a clear explanation of how they use "innocence" as a moral shield. I guess that's how they can sleep at night. Thank you.
Recently been reading about Alexander Dugin & Putin's mentor Ilyin. Dugin in particular loses me with his metaphysical ramblings leading to battles between Heaven & Earth with US & West as the enemy. First comes the book, the treatise, a manifesto; apocalyptic battles that are abstract one moment and the next reality with dismembered & burned bodies scattered over an entire country. But first comes the ideas. A philosophy that explains the absurd. Ilyin & Dugin abstract but see death & killing as a battle Russia must win because they are innocent. Their convoluted theories make my head spin. But there are more similarities than differences between Putin's & Dugin's religiosity and American Christo fascists. Logic just as warped. In their world view the battle is destiny. No matter massive death & suffering. Unbelievable in 21st C. Professor Snyder has mentioned Ilyin many times, but today we have a new and dangerous ivory tower philosopher in Dugin. Like to see or read Professor Snyder's take on Ilyin, Dugin & American Christo nationalists.
I have taken a few days to absorb your essay. As a person who was raised Catholic, and who then took another path, Christian perspectives most often remind me of the duplicity in religion, rather than the spirituality. Jesus is certainly one, among many, people who have shown us that truth takes courage, and that the price of living in truth, and speaking truth, may be very high indeed. Still the biggest part of the courage is in living in truth. You shared this thought beautifully in the paragraph:
"During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror."
I have had a strange life, and Ithink, fairly regularly, about whether there are things I would kill for (probably none, as I have no children), as opposed to the things I would die for (a still-short list, but one that makes me aware of my values).
Thank you again for such a thought-provoking piece.
Would have loved to her you speak as the sermon this Sunday. Ours was not really celebratory. Our small liberal UCC church was filled for the first time in 2 years with many new people. Our pastor was a bit flummoxed by it. She didn't expect a crowd after being mostly empty for 2 years. But I really was more than that. She was in no good mood at all. The traditional hurray and hosanna she not on her mind. Instead was Ukraine, US democracy, Florida and Texas and her own struggles with ADHD. I was nervous all those new folks would leave and not come back.
But, I believe they will. I think we are all feeling hit and bruised by not just Covid, but with Ukraine and nuclear annihilation and the rest. Our pastor was not ready or even in a mood to run church yesterday, but neither were we. No one really left with the typical shallow feelings of Easter joy. The foreboding continued. But I think we all appreciated the honesty and vulnerability of having no answers.
Thank you for the notion, from Havel, that risk inheres in truth. As a musician, I'm always looking for language to describe why it matters that we sing and sound our truth; and how to outline in sharp, clear detail where it is that music sounds the truth, and where it serves, instead, to conceal or deny it. Your voice has been helpful to me in this, and in much else, and I'm grateful for your work and to all those whose works have shaped yours.
A friend sent me something about Jesus giving His life and I couldn’t engage with it. Distracted by Christian white nationalists, exhausted by conversation with hardline pacifists, angry about any suggestion that rolling over and playing dead is a redemptive act, I decided that Easter isn’t working right now. My husband went to church and I mapped the news about mayors, intellectuals, public servants and children bound for “lustration,” filtration camps and pits against language from the genocide handbook you shared. Then I printed and stuffed your piece above into my bag in order to read it out loud (and to doodle flowers around paragraph four) from the passenger seat on our way to wherever for ham.
As you correctly say: “ 'To live in truth' means accepting a measure of existential danger…but death is not the point.” It is certainly not to be glamorized or glorified. I’ve been sensing just that happening and, before you spoke, couldn’t say why it felt so wrong. Each who fights, stays or keeps the record is to be praised, loved and remembered for living in truth more than for dying a martyr’s death.
Thank you, as always, Tim. Please know that you are inspiring not just thinking, talking and writing, but also action.
You have helped me understand why in the age of social media all the gifs on Easter saying “He is risen” irk me so. I’m a social worker with a masters of theology from Vanderbilt University Divinity School. The meaning of the Jesus story to me is his living truth and love. This essay is helpful in understanding Russia/Putin, as well as the evangelical Christian support of Trump. Thank you.
Thank you so much for a reflection I count as the best I've heard on this Easter 2022. As usual links to books mean I've ordered them! I am so appreciating the history you recommended recently - The Gates of Europe. There is so much to learn about this part of the world! There are times you can be tempted to think of the planet as a small place, but it is truly huge, filled with stories of life and stories of catastrophe. I forwarded your writing to some clergy friends. What you've written describes living theo + logos. I dread opening up Meduza each morning. Ukraine must win what Putin as a war crime has begun. At one level however the Ukrainians have won already. Just not yet fully. There is a small candle shop business in Door County Wisconsin that is owned by a first generation Ukrainian American. Her family who are immigrants to the US and citizens now are engaged in making candles of Ukrainian flag colors and shipping them all over the United States. They have been doing this since the war began and they have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for RAZOM! It lifts my heart every time I read of another effort that is rooted in the hope Ukraine's people are engendering for a world free of the very thing Putin's reign has produced. The question now is: will the western alliance step up to the huge task ahead. Will Americans and others stop moaning about gas prices and all the rest and stand up for democratic values and the nation that is bearing the highest cost each hour of each day? Will Americans wake up to the danger of the same fascism in our midst rooted in a one of our 2 political parties? That is our national struggle presently, but I fear too few are awake enough to recognize the danger. May 9 must not be a day Putin can celebrate.
This is an extraordinary essay. I was raised in the Catholic Church, and your analysis of guilt, death, redemption, and risk reveal perspectives I never thought about, nor had reason to. Of course, the rationales of the Inquisition, of Western colonialism, and now of evangelicalism. You have enlarged my understanding.
This analysis applies to all fascists and authoritarians who use Christianity for political purposes. Regardless of how you interpret Christ's dying and rising, no one can explain away how Christ lived vs how authoritarians live. Christ lived in caring for, providing for and loving those least fortunate while authoritarians would prefer to kill them.
Easter will always bring thoughts of my mother and her starving family leaving captivity in Soviet Kazakhstan in the spring of 1942. They were arrested by the NKVD and deported by cattle car from the Polish city of L'wow, now Ukrainian L'viv, in April of 1940. In 1942 they managed to connect with the recently released Polish General Anders and the Polish prisoners of war that were in the process of being granted amnesty by the Soviets after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. My Grandmother, who was an accomplished singer before the War, sang Ave Maria for the survivors at a mass to celebrate their release. Not a dry eye in the crowd, so my Mother reports. Their thoughts and prayers were with the many thousands murdered and left behind to rot in Russian captivity. Sadly, their storey has never captured the attention of the larger world. Buried under the Realpolitik necessities of keeping an important Russian ally onside, they were ordered to keep quiet after an odyssey taking them through Persia and the Middle East and finally arriving in the U.K. Victims of geopolitics and the ambitions of powerful nations, they looked to start new lives and create new identities. A resurrection of sorts. Not the "Christ of Nations" you have identified in your article though, as these people had everything to live for and desperately clung to their humanity, despite the inhuman conditions. They managed to set down new roots in North America, but never received any meaningful recognition of the suffering they endured, let alone news of the fate of the many left behind. Archives of the victor nations rarely get the thorough exposure and timely critical appraisal they deserve. I see Russia acting out true to historical form. Never thoroughly called to account for their crimes during the Second World War, and left to create a glorious history unchallenged, it is no surprise that Russia has no shame. Putin has inherited a rich legacy of historical distortion to build upon and project his blood-thirsty political ambitions.
I am very glad to see there is space for an open dialogue to address the atrocites occuring at present in the Ukraine. Hopefully, this will not be another period of history where Russia is allowed to create an alternate universe of facts and ultimately avoid doing the hard work of transforming its brutal regime and the oppressive society that has been many decades in the making.
I very much appreciate the comments and reading the observations in Thinking about...The world certainly needs an informed and engaged America.
Thank you for this excellent article. It let's light into a very, very dark place.
Many thanks for your thoughtful analysis on this particular Western-rite Easter.
I'd like to share how I understand humanity and what is going on right now. My understanding is neurobiological and evolutionary but it gives me a lens to understand why and how bad things can get.
I believe we are being forced to face the frailty of human neurology. We are as humans very much individually vulnerable to neuro pathologies that can put us on a lifelong path of fear, defensiveness and worse. The prevalence of pathologies and damaged thinking is much greater than we thought or want to admit. It is however much greater understood than we think as well. Identifying damaged individuals, understanding the decisions they make and how they act are all predictable. Understanding may not make they less scary but it will take the element of surprise away.
About 100k or so years ago we began to benefit from group social relations. Our brains had evolved enough to begin to survive through invention and manipulation. Migration and browsing began to fade. Bigger brains, earlier birth meant many years of offspring support before reproductive viability. 12 years at this point today. We developed strong tribal identity impulses, learn to cooperate and keep long term relationships. We began to settle in place.
These evolutionary pressures were sudden and strong. The changes and inventions humans have made since then far out compete any close evolutionary relatives. In the short period of time since, close competitors are gone and we remain. This is prima facia evidence of the advantages of invention and cooperation. These changes are what we today call "pro social". Behaviors and thinking that do not promote these traits are called "anti social". These traits are so important to us that we have visceral and intense feelings about them. This is evolution at work as well.
But 200k years is a blink of an eye in terms of neurobiological adaptation to huge new life strategies. So how did our brains actually change in that short time? How did we accommodate social cooperation? There are many ways, but it's clear to me that the most important one is we grew a large "pre frontal cortex" (PFC) whose almost singular job is to temper the individual survival instinct that worked so well for 1 billion years but now needs to be contained. Those survival impulses are processed in what is called the limbic system and in the fear processing center called the amygdala. The PFC has direct connections with the limbic and amygdala and feeds it signals based on its processing of logic, planning and generally "higher level" thinking. The PFC has the job of calming down the fear generated by the amygdala using higher level logic that it can process.
We all feel the results. Here's an example, you’re at the zoo you turn and unexpectedly see a tiger. "Oh no, a tiger!" A moment later you think, "But... it's in a cage." The amygdala, being evolved for a very long time, is doing its job of assessing the tiger threat correctly and the result is fear. The PFC meanwhile processes what a cage does and sends signals to the amygdala saying, "cool it". It's what both entities evolved to do: the amygdala over perhaps a billion years and the PFC mostly in the last 200k or so.
You know where I'm going with this. Damage to how these systems work creates very predictable anti-social thinking and behaviors. Full damage to PFC or it's connections can produce unrestrained fear and violently defensive behavior. It is all understandable and depressingly predictable. It is also not uncommon. Full damage is rare, but under development due to abuse, damage during life and even inheritance is not rare. In fact, damage to more recent evolutionary structures are expected to be more common than damage to much older structures. More recent structures also have more variation of expression than older systems. The net result is although we are meant to be pro social, we are still very vulnerable to anti social thinking and behaviors.
There is a lot more to be said, but this is a comment. I just wanted to share the lens through which I make sense of people, all people. These are the realities of humanity and its neurological limits. Anti-social thinking is expected but it is evidence of damaged neurobiology and does not belong in human society anymore. It is also largely permanent during an individual’s life because it is biology at work. Other systems compensate for an inaccurate and fearful view of the world, but it will always be a compensatory force on a broken biological system.
Jesus actually did intentionally provoke the state (the Romans who cruelly occupied Palestine), most notably by riding in glory into Jerusalem on what we now know as Palm Sunday. He knew he would be executed for it. Love and truth is always attacked by the rich and powerful, by the armies of ignorance and hate. He modeled how to stand up to evil, even at the risk of death.
I've long known that some who identify as Christians manage to exploit their claimed religion to justify or rationalize immoral behavior. Past and present. But this is my first exposure to a clear explanation of how they use "innocence" as a moral shield. I guess that's how they can sleep at night. Thank you.
Dear Dr. Snyder,
Gratitude to you for all you do in service to democracy.
Your work spans eons, including ours.
I’m grateful for your work.
Blessings upon you
Recently been reading about Alexander Dugin & Putin's mentor Ilyin. Dugin in particular loses me with his metaphysical ramblings leading to battles between Heaven & Earth with US & West as the enemy. First comes the book, the treatise, a manifesto; apocalyptic battles that are abstract one moment and the next reality with dismembered & burned bodies scattered over an entire country. But first comes the ideas. A philosophy that explains the absurd. Ilyin & Dugin abstract but see death & killing as a battle Russia must win because they are innocent. Their convoluted theories make my head spin. But there are more similarities than differences between Putin's & Dugin's religiosity and American Christo fascists. Logic just as warped. In their world view the battle is destiny. No matter massive death & suffering. Unbelievable in 21st C. Professor Snyder has mentioned Ilyin many times, but today we have a new and dangerous ivory tower philosopher in Dugin. Like to see or read Professor Snyder's take on Ilyin, Dugin & American Christo nationalists.
I have taken a few days to absorb your essay. As a person who was raised Catholic, and who then took another path, Christian perspectives most often remind me of the duplicity in religion, rather than the spirituality. Jesus is certainly one, among many, people who have shown us that truth takes courage, and that the price of living in truth, and speaking truth, may be very high indeed. Still the biggest part of the courage is in living in truth. You shared this thought beautifully in the paragraph:
"During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror."
I have had a strange life, and Ithink, fairly regularly, about whether there are things I would kill for (probably none, as I have no children), as opposed to the things I would die for (a still-short list, but one that makes me aware of my values).
Thank you again for such a thought-provoking piece.
Would have loved to her you speak as the sermon this Sunday. Ours was not really celebratory. Our small liberal UCC church was filled for the first time in 2 years with many new people. Our pastor was a bit flummoxed by it. She didn't expect a crowd after being mostly empty for 2 years. But I really was more than that. She was in no good mood at all. The traditional hurray and hosanna she not on her mind. Instead was Ukraine, US democracy, Florida and Texas and her own struggles with ADHD. I was nervous all those new folks would leave and not come back.
But, I believe they will. I think we are all feeling hit and bruised by not just Covid, but with Ukraine and nuclear annihilation and the rest. Our pastor was not ready or even in a mood to run church yesterday, but neither were we. No one really left with the typical shallow feelings of Easter joy. The foreboding continued. But I think we all appreciated the honesty and vulnerability of having no answers.
Rich Howard