Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.

When one reads the earlier corpus of English and other Germanic literature, one finds a fairly striking theme: most writing tends to be retellings of Bible stories in simplified forms, all of which introduce various (mostly idiotic) tropes from Germanic culture**. Christ became a warrior-hero, a blood-soaked proto-Ahnuld with a mighty righteousness and a willingness to martyr himself against the awful Jews***, and ‘martyrdom’ lost a relationship to the preservation or advancement of the faith around the time the barbarian gentiles became the dominant population in Christendom.

The tradition of cultural interference with scripture is interesting in a very specific way: religion is treated far, far more conservatively than culture. Active religious communities do not usually reassess their fundamental relationship with the core texts and beliefs of their religion; on the other hand, there seems to be a fairly pervasive willingness to inject new core texts and beliefs into it. The easiest example to point out is the various aphorisms and data from high literature which have made their way into the Christian canon: the Satanic serpent****, ‘the Devil can use scripture to his ends’♦, the Antichrist♦♦. One of the more enduringly admirable things about Christianity itself – the injunction ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ – is a bit of monastic marginalia less than eleven centuries old.

The introduction of culture to religion results in culture – usually treated as fluid and addressed in terms of its utility and relevance – being revered and preserved. It’d be interesting to run a full study of various elements of religious folklore in terms of their relative age compared to other such things – when it comes to religion, the modern transition from magical to correlational thinking is arrested, sometimes permanently. It took until the last century for the belief that women had one fewer ribs than men to fall out of fashion♦♦♦; the belief in a human os frontis was considered comical in the 18th.

Especially in light of its intimate relationship with the north Germanics, the Protestant communion finds the theological/rational approach to religion particularly bothersome. It is possible to get good theology from a Protestant congregation, and even to get some churches to follow it, but it is not possible to get the wider Protestant culture to accept the basic principle behind theology – that is, to reject the fairly radical faith in willpower and the supernatural endemic to Germanic cultures. The entire motive for much of the Reformation was just that – to reconcile the faith northern Europe held dear with a theology that stressed the relative futility of individual will. Luther’s logic, if you track it down and read it, is literally embarassing; it is a fairly thin excuse to rationalize a cultural shift, to introduce into his Christianity supremacy of will where there was free will, doom where there was determination.

This is where you get prophesy. While the pre-Reformation thinkers were perfectly magical in their thinking, they still accepted a sort of fuzziness about the capacity of their will to modify reality – they were generally concerned with finding a formula, either physical or verbal, to summon daemons / transfigure base metals / achieve the hidden knowledge of the divine. Crucially, though, the formula had to be executed; in the Protestant tradition, knowing the formula, and committing it to will, is sufficient.

The alchemists and demonaiacs of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance were proto-scientists. (The only great mind of the period worth noting who wasn’t either was Leonardo da Vinci, oddly enough – and he was thoroughly irreligious, too.) There is a major difference between that and both sorcery and soothsaying; the former seeks some natural causative, the latter to impose their volition on the present or future. (In terms of the past, this is the difference between reconciliation and denial.♦♦♦♦) In a causative system, wanting something to happen which has no way of happening won’t do anything for you. In a volitive system, all it takes is wanting it hard enough.

Predicting the future is notoriously hard on causative thinkers; even if they believe it’s possible, it’s really difficult to verify if you’ve got the proper formula even if your predictions come true. For volitive thinkers, every prophecy is self-fulfilling if you really want it to be. Jesus Christ might not have been big on the Secret, but Martin Luther sure was.

This is where we get to prophesy, the verb. Prophecy, as a noun, actually describes a sort of early social critique. Fred Clark explores this better and more familiarly than I ever could. (He’d probably disagree with me on other things here.) The point of this is that, because of a cultural predilection towards obedience to the supernatural and an emphasis on volitional thinking, the American Christian culture believes that the Bible is a predictive document. I would disagree with either ‘The Bible presents a realistic and positive code of conduct for modern life’ or ‘The Bible accurately and fully predicts the catastrophe awaiting mankind in the near future’; the difference is that I could debate the former. The latter is frivolous, and I mean frivolous in the sense it’s used in trial – so ridiculously baseless it doesn’t merit discussion.

Th most dangerous part of the use of prophesy is that it buries the intriguing commonality of social critique. One of the few roles we find in every human society is the clown; and while a relative minority of societies get convinced that they can predict events in the far future with some kind of mystical feat of will, every congregation of human beings will wrong somebody, some somebodies, or everybody – and then there will come prophecy, poetry, clowning; each is a cloak for criticism against the powerful, a warning to society to change itself before wickedness consumes it.

The alarming thing about the relative absence of prophecy in its proper sense in modern American culture is that prophecy itself exists to fill a definite necessity: that is, the righting of wrongs and the correction of the wickedness of society – and, in that beautiful phrasing, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. A culture which believes comfort and affliction are products of willpower – that victims, at least on some level, deserve it – is one without a great deal of use for the idea of a social critic♣. On an even greater level, there’s the very real question of what use there is in criticizing the powerful if (a) all we need for a better society is to want it and yet (b) we’re fated to receive the society we deserve. They like to say that Calvinism is a major part of capitalism in general and Anglo-American society in particular♣♣; if the prosperity and majesty of Nebuchadnezzar proves his righteousness in the eyes of God, who is some pissant with a fancy education to gainsay him?

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* – Prophesy ['pɹɔːfʊˌsaɪ] is an awkward verb, and all the more so in that it describes a situation that only occurs when someone is actively being an idiot and predicting things. If I really wanted to do this up brown, I’d asterisk it every time it showed up – it’s inarticulate and irregular (ablauts are non-productive in modern English) compared to propheci(z/s)e.

** – Germanic culture is used here for want of a better phrase. For the record, I despise broad statements about culture; but there’s no particularly simple way to sum up the accepted method of inquiry without using the phrase. In fact, I tend to despise the word ‘culture’ as vague at best and at worst a sort of willfully ignorant handwave similar to ‘irreducible complexity’ – that is, in the social sciences. Since we’re talking about language usage here, it just barely squeaks in. Sowwy!

*** – Of course, these days it’s the homos that killed Christ; the entire hand-washing thing was just some kind of metrosexual fussiness.

**** – Shakespeare.
♦ – Dante.
♦♦ – I don’t even know – it’s not a straight-up invention of Darby, but the single Antichrist as the principal actor of the Protestant eschaton is certainly his baby, as is the general set of characteristics given to him.

♦♦♦ – Women have one fewer rib – Unbelievably, some people actually still hold to this; this includes women. It’s also worth noting that spare-rib-removal was, and sometimes still is, an optional part of male-to-female gender reassignment; sometimes you just have to smile and nod at these things.

♦♦♦♦ – denial: In general, this attitude is fairly cod-Nietzschian: it doesn’t really explore the abandonment of convention or the positive obligation to achieve the will to power, but it holds, per the pop version of the Gay Scientist, that forcing everyone to acknowledge a certain version of things while under your authority makes it part of reality, and as such the trick is gaining power over as many people as possible to as to force your will on the world. It’s worth bearing in mind that denialism (whether it be the mundane kind where you pretend previous embarassments never happened, or the more malicious kind that involves denying major tragedies for which you have at least partial and/or residual responsibility, like with the Holocaust) is powered by contradictions, not harmed by them – it thrives on the cognitive dissonance in believing in two contradictory things. Trying to gotcha, say, Romney’s supporters on his fairly liberal record is an act of futility; all it takes is him declaring himself a Reaganaut and the Reaganauts accepting him to make it true by sheer force of will. Michael Moore could do this and quite likely pull it off.
And, for that matter, the most devastating thing about this will-powered version of reality is that it appears to work – if a prerequisite for existing in polite society is to accept the Official Story, the Official Story might as well be the true one. On the other hand, there’s always the possibility of someone fucking it up, and the fear that governs any such system collapsing as a result. At the very least, no matter how powerful you convince everyone you are, you are still mortal.

♣ capitalism burying social critique – Clowns (whose normal role is to comment on the absurdity of daily life under the mask of humor) have been viewed by the public with disdain, contempt, and fear since Reagan. Hmm.

♣♣ Calvinism as part of capitalism – I don’t particularly buy this, and I buy it even less when it’s used to explain why the Protestant societies became major centers of wealth while non-Christian countries didn’t. Weber, for whom putting all the Protestant societies together is a huge stretch and yet lumping every society west of the Bug into a single feeble, womanly mass is second nature, got it very wrong when it came to the development of capitalism. For what it’s worth, the easiest single predictor of industrialization is the potential payoff of primary production; the French farm economy was wealthy enough to support a firmly entrenched physiocratic school of economics, whereas in England the soil mostly supported grains and wool. There are some holes in this, obviously – the big question being why Scandinavia came so late in industrializing – but it’s a decent enough way of working out the order if given a bunch of countries and told they industrialize within the same generation.

♣♣♣ – Soulja boy up in this bitch: watch me shuffle; watch me jig – ‘Superman’ refers to a punitive action taken against a partner falling asleep during sex: one jizzes on the back and sticks a bedsheet onto the slick, resulting in a makeshift cape. ‘crank that Roosevelt’ refers to a seductive unisex dance named after FDR, our sexiest President and second only to McKinley in wheelchair head.