Judaism is Not Folkish

Rather, it is Axial

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This blog has advanced a number of ideas that have proven controversial, to say the least. And not just controversial vis-à-vis the mainstream, but also controversial within the radical right. Perhaps the most controversial idea of all that we have advanced is that the Axial Age was a) a tragedy, and b) not inevitable. Many people have hung their hat on the moral and epistemic framework that grows out of the Axial Age, as the solution to modernity. When it is shown that this framework is rather the foundation of modernity,¹ they are faced with a choice: pivot, or take their place beside Jordan Peterson as an upholder of—rather than a dissenter from—the current order. This has quite naturally produced some objections.

One such objection is that there really was no Axial Age. When someone says “there really is no XYZ”, this can mean a few things. Sometimes, they can just be right, though not in the case of the Axial Age. Sometimes, it can mean they literally don’t want you to notice that thing—think “there is no whiteness”.

But alternatively, it can mean that they don’t want you to notice that thing was ever not there, because it being born in a time and place robs it of being foundational and the default. This is mirrored in activist scholarship where you will sometimes hear something like “there really was no renaissance” or age of enlightenment. Or, rather than talking about the real renaissance of the 15th century, they will speak of the renaissance of the 12th century or the Carolingian renaissance, or any number of other “renaissances” in all times and places. When there is a “renaissance” every Tuesday, the historical uniqueness of the actual renaissance is undermined. There was never a time when we weren’t upsetting the apple cart. Revolution is our tradition, don’t you know? This is the move made by people who question whether there was an Axial Age.

One of the important revolutions that happened in that age is the advent of monism and monotheism. The two go hand-in-hand, and sooner or later the one becomes the other. Judaism is sometimes advanced as an objection to the Axial thesis, because it seems to uncomfortably straddle the mutually exclusive categories of “axial” and “folkish”. But this complication is only apparent, and to understand why, we must say a bit about folkishness.

Folkishness is not simply racism. If it were, it would be a lot less interesting. It is loving your folk, of course, but it’s a lot more than that. Folkishness is to ethnocentrism what the forest is to the trees. It is the building block. It is the precondition and ontological prior. It is the stuff out of which nationalism is made. It contains worlds inside of itself beyond ethnocentrism. So what else is it besides that?

Folkishness has at its root the idea of difference as primary.² We are what we are not because of a static essentialism, but because we exist in opposition to others. This difference is both horizontal (between folks) and vertical (within folks). Without such an ontological commitment to difference, there can be no hierarchy.

Folkishness is committed to the immanent. It does not outsource the meaning and stakes of life to another world; folkishness is nothing if not this-worldly. As a corollary of this, folkishness regards nature and the world as his superior and himself as subordinate to it. As another corollary of this, folkishness locates the source of normative force—the gods themselves—in this world. They may inhabit other spheres, but not exclusively.

Folkishness is oikophilic. It loves what is close and native to itself. This is the real root of ethnocentrism—the ethnocentrism is not itself foundational, but derivative of this love of the familiar. Because of its inherent qualities, folkishness is strong enough to strike out into unknown spaces. But it holds the heroic return at least equal to the heroic withdrawal. It does not fetishize infinite expansion for its own sake, but regards that as the heuristic of the cancer cell.

Folkishness is concerned with the root. All our imperatives proceed from prior imperatives, reaching back to the origin of who we are as a people. Folkishness is not backward-looking, but its growth through time proceeds from a root. It loves what is ancient, and while it does not balk at what is new, it distrusts novelty as an end in itself. It is inherently opposed to linear history.

So how does Judaism stack up to this conception of folkishness?