The Afghani Millennium that Failed and the Theology of “Pressure Machine”

Greetings,

This week I have some thoughts on Afghanistan to which you probably should not pay that much attention and a review of the Killers’ new album, “Pressure Machine.”

The Wages of Two Decades of Unseriousness

Last year was a pretty rotten time to be a law professor. I taught a class in a tennis court in a failed effort at in-person-but-socially-distant corporate law, combined with a simultaneous Zoom component for students who couldn’t be present in person, including one young woman learning the Delaware Corporations Code via the internet from Kandahar province.  She is now in legal limbo in Northern Virginia awaiting the outcome of her asylum petition. Watching the Taliban sweep across Afghanistan as the U.S. withdraws, I keep thinking of her.

I doubt that I have anything of great interest to say about Afghanistan.  One of my defining adult intellectual moments came early in the Afghan War.  I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” blog, then one of the juggernauts of next generation news commentary.  Sullivan was going on at great length about his opinions on counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. In the moment, I realized that I was engaged in a fundamentally unserious activity.  There was absolutely no reason that I or anyone else should care what Andrew Sullivan had to say about counter-insurgency tactics.  You probably shouldn’t waste your time on what I think about Afghanistan either.

For all of the blood, toil, and treasure that the United States has put into Afghanistan over the last 20 years, I can’t help feeling that it’s been a similarly unserious process. As the first American bombs were falling on the country, a group of U.S. officials and Afghan exiles met in Bonn, Germany and drafted a new constitution for Afghanistan. It was going to be a good, liberal democratic state, one that respected individual rights, the will of the people, and wouldn’t harbor nasties like Al-Qaeda. It was a noble goal.

I wonder if that wasn’t the problem.  Liberal democracy tends toward visions of the millennium.  To be sure, it’s a pretty modest millennium of moral pluralism, a chastened state, and perhaps a basic social safety net.  Denmark as the New Jerusalem.  But for all of its modesty, it can be a pretty puritanical faith. Human rights activists are nothing if not puritans. The problem with the vision of the promised land is that has a tendency to see everything short of crossing the Jordan into Canaan as an unacceptable bit of moral cowardice.

Furthermore, our millennial visions tend to require inauguration by a Second Coming, a revolution, or a regime change.  What liberal democracy – especially in the high church, Kantian, rights-obsessed variety popular across the political spectrum in America – lacks is comfort with incremental, ameliorative reforms in the face of injustice. Watching the Taliban take over Afghanistan after 20 years of failed American nation building, I wonder if everyone wouldn’t have been better off with twenty years of incremental tinkering to make the tribal and religious rule more humane and less destructive.  That is, after all, historically how Denmark became Denmark. Of course, the reality is that I really don’t know.

I just hope that her asylum petition is granted.

Clasping Hands Through the Veil

Brandon Flowers and the Killers have dropped a new album, “Pressure Machine” that has many a Latter-day Saint heart atwittering.  I’m a person of no musical talent and very little musical knowledge.  To the horror of my children, I mainly listen to bluegrass and opera.  I do, however, really like Brandon Flowers and the Killers, in no small part because it is so easy to see the Mormonism in the interstices of their music.  Also, because “Miss Atomic Bomb” is a great song.

I don’t have much to say about “Pressure Machine” musically.  I don’t think it’s even in their top three or four albums.  My son, who unlike me is brimming over with musical knowledge and talent, said, “It’s just the same old Killers baseline and chord structure” and my musically astute wife described it as “sad cowboy music.”  I just like the music of Killers’ songs like “Fire in Bone” or “Human” more than anything on “Pressure Machine.”

That said, I loved the album.  

There is a close relationship between spiritual experience and aesthetic experience.  It’s not accidental that much of the most spectacular art in the Western tradition can be found in its churches.  Indeed, post-religious thinkers like Matthew Arnold or Friedrich Nietzsche, who still understood enough about faith to lament its “long withdrawing roar,” offered aesthetic experience as a kind of substitute for religion.  That strikes me as a spiritual and aesthetic dead end, but I suspect that you can’t have a religious life that fully disentangles the spiritual from the aesthetic. 

That’s what makes Flowers’s music at least potentially so religiously powerful for Latter-day Saints.  We inherited our aesthetic sensibilities from 19th-century Methodists and Reformed Protestants and then overlaid them with various forms of kingdom building.  The result has been a musical aesthetic that at its best is a kind of triumphal joyfulness (think the choral music of Mack Wilberg) but at its worse degenerates into a kind of shallow optimism (think the Osmonds).

What’s powerful and refreshing about Flowers is that he takes identifiably Mormon tropes and ideas but leaves them at an allusive level. This gives his lyrics a kind of plausible deniability for non-LDS listeners, but the ideas are definitely there for those who have ears to hear.  He then embeds those ideas in stories that are fundamentally about brokenness, albeit a brokenness in which redemption exists as a hope.  I think that his song “Fire in Bone” is the clearest example of this aesthetic.  It’s a profoundly Christian setting of the Prodigal Son to rock music but within an implied story of family that contains echoes of sealing theology.  (As all good Mormon readings of the Prodigal Son should.)  I think it’s this combination of understated religion and brokenness that makes Flowers’s music powerful and almost unique within the Latter-day Saint tradition. 

Which brings me to “Pressure Machine.”  It’s a series of narratively connected songs that revolve around a small Mormon town in central Utah.  (I’m told that it’s Nephi in Juab County.) The result is a kind of Mormon Spoon River Anthology set to the music of the Killers.  The characters in the songs struggle with disappointment, despair, self-destruction, and misfortune.  Domestic abuse, adultery, the opioid crisis, small-town bullying, defiant disbelief, and the senseless accidental deaths of the young all make their appearances.

There is also redemption, but it isn’t the straightforward Christian redemption of songs like “Magdalena” or “Fire in Bone.”  Rather, redemption comes in the beauty to be found in the interstices of ordinary human life, the beauty of family, landscape, or an empty blue sky that might curtain heavenly mansions (or might not).  It’s an almost atheological redemption but only almost.  The theology is peculiarly Mormon and thus hard at times to recognize as theology.  It’s a sanctification of the ordinary and the promise of an eternity that is closer to Nietzsche’s eternal return than Dante’s Paridisio.  In short, it is a very Mormon redemption.  As Brigham Young put it, “Joseph Smith made heaven and earth shake hands and become friendly together.”  In a broken world, Flowers offers the understated sweetness of ordinary life in a troubled Mormon town of old Deseret as the point where those hands clasp one another through the veil, if only for brief moments.

See you next week,

Nate

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