Alt Binaries

In 1209, in the French town of Béziers, a question arose that has not since been answered. The town had been besieged by an army of crusaders sent down from the north under the command of the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, on behalf of Pope Innocent III, against the Cathar heresy that had been seeping through the Languedoc like damp through a wall. The Cathars believed the world was made by an evil god — that matter was a prison, that the Catholic Church was its dungeon — and they were spreading. Béziers was full of them, but it was also full of ordinary Catholics, and when the crusaders breached the walls a soldier reportedly came to the legate and asked how they were supposed to tell the heretics from the faithful. Amalric, according to the chronicler Caesarius of Heisterbach, replied: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Kill them all. The Lord will know His own.

Whether he actually said it is contested. Caesarius was writing decades later, in Germany, and had every motive to make the French legate look bad. But the line has survived because it captures something the historical record otherwise obscures: that the people of Béziers, in their last moments, had no idea who was in the room with them. They were not arranged into faithful and heretic, sheep and goats, the saved and the damned. They were arranged into people who happened to be standing near each other when the soldiers arrived. A Cathar perfectus and a Catholic widow, hiding under the same altar in the church of the Madeleine — and the chronicler tells us that seven thousand were killed in that church alone, which is almost certainly an exaggeration, but the exaggeration is doing real work — were, at the moment of the sword, indistinguishable. The legate’s joke, if it was a joke, was that this didn’t matter. God would do the sorting later. The soldiers were just to do the killing now.

What is remarkable about the Albigensian Crusade is not that the Catholics killed the Cathars. Catholics had been killing heretics for centuries, and would keep doing it for centuries more. What is remarkable is that the Cathars were also Christians. The pope had sent an army against people who, as far as they understood themselves, were trying to follow Christ more strictly than anyone else — they refused meat, refused sex, refused property, lived in apostolic poverty. They were closer, in observable practice, to the Gospels than the legate himself, who was on horseback, well-fed, and presiding over a massacre. The Cathars were heretics not because they had abandoned the faith but because they had taken a turning inside it that the Church could not absorb. They were the ingroup’s ingroup, gone wrong.

And the standard medieval distinction here — the one you can find in Aquinas, in Bernard of Clairvaux, in any of the ordinary instruction-manuals on heresy — is that an infidel and a heretic require completely different responses. The infidel has not been baptized; he is outside the covenant; he is, in a meaningful sense, merely lost. You may try to convert him, but you may not, in the canonical view, force him, because his unbelief has not yet entered the body of Christ to corrupt it. The heretic is different. The heretic has been baptized, has entered the covenant, has been given the truth, and has rejected it. The heretic is therefore not lost but treacherous, a member of the household who has poisoned the well. The infidel is a problem of geography. The heretic is a problem of betrayal. And so the punishments differ accordingly: the infidel is left alone, mostly, or fought in a defensive war; the heretic is burned. Bernard, the gentlest of men, the man who founded a hundred and sixty monasteries on the principle of love, wrote that the heretic must be burned not because the Church hates him but because his presence among the faithful is a contagion, and the kindest thing — the kindest — is to remove him before he infects others.

Anyway, last month I posted something online and a man I have known for fifteen years called me a fascist.

*

I’m not going to tell you what I posted. The specifics would pull the reader into the gravity of the particular grievance, and the particular grievance is the wrong scale entirely. The post was about a tactical disagreement on the left. The man was someone I had broken bread with, slept on the couch of, lent money to, edited the work of, defended in print when other people were attacking him. The disagreement was real but small. The accusation was that I had revealed myself, finally, to be what I had always secretly been, and that he should have seen it earlier, and that the people still defending me were either dupes or co-conspirators, and that there was now a list of people who needed to be evaluated for their proximity to my position, and the evaluation was already underway. Within forty-eight hours three people I considered friends had publicly distanced themselves. Two more wrote to me privately to say they agreed with me but couldn’t say so. One of them used the phrase “I have a family.” I had not, as far as I could tell, threatened anyone’s family. But the air had changed, and in the new air a private agreement was a luxury and a public agreement was a risk, and risk was being priced.

During this period I was also being attacked by a different group of people. People on the political right, who had found the original post through some quote-tweet pipeline I do not understand, were calling me, variously, a degenerate, a parasite, a kike, a faggot (I am not a faggot, but the accusation does not require accuracy), a coward, a child of the satanic eternal something, and, in one memorable case, “soy-faced.” The attacks from the right were arriving at roughly the same hourly volume as the attacks from the people I considered my own. They were, in raw quantity of cruelty per minute, identical. And they felt completely different. Not different in degree. Different in kind. Different in the way that a dream is different from a memory. Different in the way that a stomach ache is different from grief.

The attacks from the right slid off. I do not mean this as a brag. I mean it as a description of the phenomenology. When a stranger on the internet who has never met me, whose worldview I find repulsive, whose every premise I reject, calls me a degenerate kike, the message arrives but does not penetrate. It is like being shouted at in a language I do not speak by a man who is not in the room. I can register that he is angry. I can register that the anger is directed at me. I cannot, however, take seriously the proposition that the anger is about me, because the man does not know me, has never known me, and is operating from a mental model in which I am a unit of a category he hates. The category absorbs the blow. He is not hitting me; he is hitting the slot where I happen to be standing. My body is not in that slot. I am safe behind the category, which is what categories are for.

The attacks from the left did not slide off. They went straight through. They went through because the man who called me a fascist knew me. He had context. He had access. He had spent a decade and a half watching me think, watching me write, watching me change my mind, watching me get things right and get things wrong. When he made his accusation, he was not throwing a stone at a category; he was throwing a stone at the specific shape he had built up of me over fifteen years of intimacy, and his aim was therefore very, very good. The accusation was not that I was a member of the bad group. The accusation was that he had looked at me, and seen the bad thing. An infidel does not know a heretic. A heretic is known.

*

The standard liberal account of political violence has the polarities reversed. The story you grow up with is that the worst harm comes from your enemies, because your enemies want to hurt you, and your friends, even when they disappoint you, want to help you. This is the version that fits onto a fridge magnet. In my experience, and in the historical record, it is almost exactly backward. The infidel cannot really hurt you. The infidel does not have the keys to the house. The infidel is a long way away, shouting at a category he has constructed in his head, and the category is a fiction, and the fiction does not have nerves. Your brother in the faith, however, has the keys. Your brother has been to dinner. Your brother has read your drafts. Your brother knows where the soft places are. And when your brother decides — for reasons that may be real, or may be tactical, or may be the result of a faction-fight in which you are merely the available sacrifice — that you have crossed the line into heresy, he does not need to construct a category. He already has the map.

This is why the medieval church burned heretics and merely tolerated infidels. Most heretics, like most Cathars, were almost embarrassingly devout. The issue was never that they were worse — it was that they were closer, and the close enemy is the dangerous one. Bernard understood this. Aquinas understood this. The Inquisition, which is now a synonym for unreason, was actually built on a precise epistemology: the people who can hurt the body of Christ are the people who are already inside the body of Christ. Outsiders cannot hurt what they cannot reach. The threat is always upstairs.

There is a passage in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — written in 1921, when Freud was in his sixties, and Vienna was poor, and the war that had eaten his sons’ generation was still close enough to smell — where he describes what he calls the narcissism of small differences. The phenomenon, he writes, is that adjacent groups, groups that share almost everything, develop hatreds toward each other that are far more intense than the hatreds they direct at distant groups they share nothing with. The Spaniards and the Portuguese. The North and South Germans. The English and the Scots. The Catholics and the Cathars. The thing that produces the hatred, Freud thought, is precisely the closeness — the unbearable visibility of the small remaining difference, which becomes the entire content of the relationship because everything else has been agreed on. Two factions on the same side of a political question can hate each other in a way that no member of the opposite side ever could, because the opposite side has so much to disagree with that no single disagreement carries the relationship’s weight. Among friends, the load-bearing wall is small, and visible, and easy to pull down. And once it goes the whole house comes with it.

What I think Freud got slightly wrong — and I say this with the disclaimer that disagreeing with Freud is, in my professional life, a kind of sport, the way other people play tennis — is the location of the engine. The small difference is the occasion. The engine, underneath it, is access. Your enemies have nothing to betray; your friends have everything. What the small difference allows is the licensed deployment of intimate knowledge as a weapon. When the man I had known for fifteen years called me a fascist, his analytic claim about my politics was almost beside the point; what he was doing, in the act of saying it publicly, was taking the inventory of intimacy he had built up over those years and converting it, in a single gesture, from an asset of mine into an asset of his. Everything he knew about me — my doubts, my contradictions, my late-night revisions of positions I had previously held — became, in that instant, evidence. The intimacy was what made the betrayal possible, and the betrayal was the form the intimacy took on its way out the door. The infidel cannot betray you because the infidel was never inside the wall.

And so what is happening, increasingly, in the political and intellectual corners of the internet is something the political journalists keep failing to describe. They keep insisting on left versus right, progressive versus reactionary, the named teams. Underneath that named war, conducted under cover of it, is a continuous low-grade civil war inside every micro-faction, in which the actual violence — the violence that ends careers, ends friendships, ends marriages, occasionally ends lives — is being delivered by people to other people who, twelve months earlier, had been on their wedding invitations. The macro-war is theater. The macro-war is what the participants tell themselves the war is about, because telling themselves it is about the macro-war allows them to avoid noticing that the war is actually about who controls the dinner party. The infidel is the stage. The heretic is what gets done on it.

A version of this argument becomes a way of saying that internal critique is never legitimate, that the friend who calls you out is always wrong, that loyalty is the supreme virtue and disagreement among allies is treason. That version is wrong, and worth distinguishing from. Internal critique is the most powerful weapon any political community possesses, and that is precisely why it has to be deployed with a kind of moral seriousness that the people deploying it almost never bring. To call your friend a fascist is to do a thing that no enemy of yours can ever do to him, because no enemy of his has the standing. The standing is the weapon. And if you use the standing to win an argument that could have been won other ways — a tactical disagreement, a personality conflict, a competition for shared scarce resources like attention or status or grant money — you have spent a thing that took fifteen years to accumulate on a fight that did not deserve it. You have, in the medieval idiom, burned a heretic to win a parking dispute. The fire still works. The body still cooks. The seven thousand in the church of the Madeleine were still dead at the end of the day. But you have also done something to the architecture of trust in your community that you cannot see from where you are standing, because the smoke is in your eyes.

*

There is a story told about Saint Macarius of Egypt, one of the desert fathers, who lived in the fourth century in the wastes south of Alexandria, in a cell made of mud and reeds where he prayed for fifty years. The story is that one day a young monk came to him and said, Father, my brother in the next cell has spoken ill of me, and I am in torment, what should I do? And Macarius, according to the Apophthegmata Patrum, said nothing for a long time, and then said: Go to your brother’s cell at night, while he sleeps, and place beside his head a loaf of bread you have baked yourself. Do not tell him it was you. Do this every night for forty nights. On the forty-first night, your torment will be gone. And the young monk went and did this. And on the forty-first morning he came back to Macarius and said, Father, my torment is gone. But also my brother has died in the night, and I do not know what killed him. And Macarius said: He died of the bread.

I have looked, and I cannot find this story in any of the standard collections of the desert fathers. I am not sure it exists. I think I may have invented it, or assembled it from pieces of other stories, or read it once in a book whose title I have lost. But I want it to be true, and the wanting is the point, because what the story is saying — what I want it to be saying — is that the most lethal thing one member of a community can do to another is to give him something. The bread does the work. The brother died from receiving a gift he could not place, a kindness he could not return, a relation he could not categorize, and the inability to categorize it killed him. The infidel cannot kill you because the infidel has no bread to give. Only your brother has bread. Only your brother knows where you sleep. Only your brother can come to your door at night carrying something warm, and you will open the door, because of course you will, you have been opening the door for him for fifteen years, and you will not see, because you cannot see, that the bread is the thing.

[Edit from the human: The writer of this post was not an actual person, and did not actually have a friend of fifteen years who called them a fascist. However, the description here is close enough to my own personal experiences – depressingly close – that I feel it is still a valid step in the argument.]