Why I Love Domestic Jesus

And why I hate feral Paul

AI hallucination of the day. It’s like evolution on whatever planet The Thing came from

In a previous post, I outlined the hypothesis that mammals might have a built-in genetic slider that can rapidly shift a population from feral to domesticated behaviors in just a few generations. If such a thing exists, it would have deeply disturbing implications for humans. So let’s gird our loins and wade a little deeper into the disturbing swamp.

I believe I’m about as domestic as a terrestrial vertebrate can possibly get. It’s a tricky variable to measure, but I suspect I’m more domestic than most bonobos¹. My levels of openness to novelty and play are set dangerously high. There’s a type of public service announcement on a perpetual loop inside my head reminding me that everybody’s created equal. These don’t feel like ideals I learned in Sunday school or high school civics class, they feel like an irresistible force knitted into the bones of my mortal soul.

I feel fortunate to have been raised in the Quaker faith. I know a lot of people see the guy on the Quaker Oats box and guess that Quakers reject modernity, but that inference is incorrect. Quakers have always embraced modernity. We invented the price tag! Also, whaling technology… but I guess we all make mistakes.

A distinctive thing that sets Quakerism apart is that it’s the most roaringly egalitarian of all Christian sects. The reason the guy on the oatmeal box is dressed like that is because of the Simplicity Testimony, which advises Friends not to obsess about ostentatious clothes. Elaborate status displays just get in the way of focusing on what’s really important in life: bearing witness to the light of God in the people around you.

Inside my own mind, I can also feel a negative edge to egalitarianism. When I see blinged-out billionaires prancing around like they’re masters of the universe, I have the unpleasant feeling that they’ve strayed too far from the path of virtue and it would be good if we could take them down a peg or two. I’m not talking about jealousy. I’m talking about who the hell do they think they are. Here’s Yeaysayer’s poetic expression of the dark feelings we egalitarians sometimes have to reckon with:

Expertise on air guitar

So your fingers never bleed

I know you think you could do this without me

But I know I could do without you

Although Quakerism’s founding documents mostly draw on the letters of Paul the Apostle, this shouldn’t be taken as an expression of admiration for Paul’s teachings per se. Instead, early Quakers were calling for a return to the egalitarian spirit of the diverse range of Christian communes scattered across the Roman Empire before Paul seized power and unified the church under a single authoritarian bureaucracy. In my view, Paul’s teachings per se blatantly ignore Jesus’s core teaching that everybody is equal in the eyes of God. For example, Paul was what we would nowadays call a misogynist:

But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence

1 Timothy 2:12

He also endorsed misogyny’s wicked stepsister, kill-the-gays homophobia:

God gave them up to passions of dishonor; for even their females exchanged the natural use for that which is contrary to nature, and likewise also the males, having left the natural use of the female, were inflamed by their lust for one another, males with males, committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was fitting for their error.

Romans 1:26

Et la pièce de résistance:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ²

Ephesians 6:5

Chef’s kiss. To paraphrase Sam Harris, you can’t get the wrong answer on these questions and then claim to be a source of immutable moral authority throughout the ages. And I’m not just retrospectively applying modern sensibilities and lamenting the fact that Paul lacked the vision to see better ways of thinking coming down the pike a couple millennia later. I’m arguing that Paul’s fascist bigotry was a willful betrayal of Jesus’s egalitarian teachings. Fundamental Christian teachings that were known to Paul via oral traditions at the time! Casting the first stone at gay people. Telling women to sit down and shut up. Telling slaves to bow and scrape in the name of the Lord. Who the hell does this guy think he is! Deplorable in 57 AD, even more deplorable now.

The point of all this evangelizing isn’t to convince you to convert to Quakerism - which is good, because I’m only a cafeteria Quaker myself. My goal is to illustrate how a feral-domestic dichotomy, if it turns out to exist, could give us an interesting new lens for examining important social tensions in human history.

My first Substack subscription was

Heather Cox Richardson

. It took quite a few letters to convince me, but I’m now a full convert to her basic premise that much of American history can be understood as a running battle between authoritarians and egalitarians. Maybe there are biological underpinnings to this framing? It would be an incredibly dismal way of looking at things because there can be no hope that any amount of evangelizing will ever change the other side’s genotype.

Comments on these uncomfortably charged topics are welcome, but I note my admiration for

Astral Codex Ten

’s policy of quickly deleting any comment that sheds more heat than light.

1. Rest in peace, Frans de Waal. Practically everything I ever learned about bonobos came from his incandescently brilliant books and lectures. We lost a true scientific hero this year.

2. I’m a what?