The Dialogue
A sword prone to stabbing its wielder.
AI generated Melian Dialogue, Dalle2
The art of dialogue is a challenging construct for most writers, and rightly so. By definition, dialogue scenes are meant to show the soul of a writer in the nude, but many fear being called ugly, or worse, stirring obsession. Most writers can’t perform this ancient theatric rite. Often, it comes off impulsive, or immature with exaggerated words, featuring inflated monsters of the id. Rather, analogy and parable are used to teach lessons that their dialogue cannot. Or if dialogue is incapable of being received from contemporary hard hearts, as was the case for Christ.
Perhaps most replicated these days is the ever-quoted Melian Dialogue, in which the victorious Athenians teach the defeated Spartan colonials the fruits of their own worldview:
For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses--either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us--and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you … will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals…, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The summation of the Spartan resolve against Athenian dominance, can be paraphrased as:
Our resolution, Athenians, is the same as it was at first. We will not deprive of freedom a city of seven hundred years; but we put our trust in the fortune by which the gods have preserved it until now, and in the help of men, and so we will try and save ourselves. Meanwhile we invite you to allow us to be friends to you and foes to neither
No masks nor false pretenses. The Athenians needed either men to fight their wars, or women to breed more men to fight their wars. The Spartan colonials had both, and gave neither. Thus, the Athenians genocided the former, and stole the later. In the late dialogue the Athenians explained their reasons as such:
You regard what is future as more certain than what is present, and what is out of sight as already come to pass.
This dialogue, which you should read in full, was deeply cherished in the classical era for its raw realpolitik. The democratic and bureaucratic Athenian idealists let slip their mask for the Spartans to see pure power, and the Spartans could not stop it.
AI generated Melian Dialogue, Midjourney
The Melian Dialogue is near-contemporaneous with another - less remembered but just as cherished - in the Bible. King Jehu is crowned something of an anti-king and goes to make war on Jezebel, her male servant-generals, King Joram, and King Ahaziah. It is worth noting here two things. Jehu was crowned king while a king was already alive and on the throne, and both the kings of Judah and Israel were allied. The divided kingdom was united against God’s elect. The dialogue found in 2 Kings 9 reveals the traumatic consequences of trying to play fox to a wolf:
“Get a horseman,” Joram ordered. “Send him to meet them and ask, ‘Do you come in peace?’”
The horseman rode off to meet Jehu and said, “This is what the king says: ‘Do you come in peace?’”
“What do you have to do with peace?” Jehu replied. “Fall in behind me.”
The lookout reported, “The messenger has reached them, but he isn’t coming back.”
So the king sent out a second horseman. When he came to them he said, “This is what the king says: ‘Do you come in peace?’”
Jehu replied, “What do you have to do with peace? Fall in behind me.”
The lookout reported, “He has reached them, but he isn’t coming back either. The driving is like that of Jehu son of Nimshi—he drives like a maniac.”
“Hitch up my chariot,” Joram ordered. And when it was hitched up, Joram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah rode out, each in his own chariot, to meet Jehu. They met him at the plot of ground that had belonged to Naboth the Jezreelite. When Joram saw Jehu he asked, “Have you come in peace, Jehu?”
“How can there be peace,” Jehu replied, “as long as all the idolatry and witchcraft of your mother Jezebel abounds?”
Joram turned about and fled, calling out to Ahaziah, “Treachery, Ahaziah!”
Then Jehu drew his bow and shot Joram between the shoulders. The arrow pierced his heart and he slumped down in his chariot.
Jehu said to Bidkar, his chariot officer, “Pick him up and throw him on the field that belonged to Naboth the Jezreelite.
…
When Ahaziah king of Judah saw what had happened, he fled up the road to Beth Haggan. Jehu chased him, shouting, “Kill him too!” They wounded him in his chariot on the way up to Gur near Ibleam, but he escaped to Megiddo and died there.
…
Then Jehu went to Jezreel. When Jezebel heard about it, she put on eye makeup, arranged her hair and looked out of a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she asked, “Have you come in peace, you Zimri, you murderer of your master?”
He looked up at the window and called out, “Who is on my side? Who?” Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. “Throw her down!” Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot.
King Jehu, without battle, conquers the whole of Palestine with his words alone. Imagine how bad things must have been that the common man, slave and citizen, obeyed him at his request. We can see the man is something of a chad, as the soldiers knew him primarily for his wild Tokyo drifting skills on the chariot. He was racer or something of a famous sportsman, along with his military background. Earlier in the passage, when he is declared king by a prophet-youth, he doesn’t think much about it. The people of his camp, however, are still loyal to the faith and say he should accept the divine calling. All around Jehu are people who value faith in Yah more than he does, and when he finally decides their support is worth taking the chance, it is revealed that all of Palestine will obey his celebrity status over their degenerate elites.
AI generated Chariot King, Midjourney
The lesson here repeats in history. Often, at the end of empire, there isn’t a final conquest as we see in dramatized tv specials. When Rome was sacked in 410 AD, there was no battle. Slaves opened the gates of Rome to Alaric’s army without a fight, the church made a deal with him to arbitrate gold payment from pagan buildings, and Alaric likewise designated churches as safe zones for Rome’s citizenry as he marched through to pry the gold from the walls. Records show no rapes, and possibly no murders. After, Alaric went back to being a general for Rome, fighting barbarians. Likewise, these soldiers joined Jehu without a fight, and these Eunuchs threw Jezebel to her death without a fight. The end of an era needed no genocidal war of conquest, just a compelling dialogue to contrast the moribund institutions with the vitalized hero.
Today, the study of dialogue as a means of producing truth is known as Dialectics. You’ve likely heard of Hegelian dialectics, Marxist dialectics, etc etc. While the forms are myriad, the goals are often the same: Try to reduce bullshit.
Near his death, Josef Stalin penned a curious text titled “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics”. By his time, the term used to describe dialectics was “Diamat” (For both Russian and English), short for Dialectic Materialism. In this text, Stalin challenged people to consider the binding power language has upon a people, and how this could serve the revolution, as well as splinter it. He writes:
language, as a means of intercourse between the people of a society, serves all classes of society equally, and in this respect displays what may be called an indifference to classes. But people, the various social groups, the classes, are far from being indifferent to language. They strive to utilize the language in their own interests, to impose their own special lingo, their own special terms, their own special expressions upon it. The upper strata of the propertied classes, who have divorced themselves from and detest the people particularly distinguish themselves in this respect. "Class" dialects, jargons, high-society "languages" are created… The "aristocratic language" or the "bourgeois language" in contradistinction to the "proletarian language" or the "peasant language." For this reason, strange as it may seem, some of our comrades have come to the conclusion that national language is a fiction, and that only class languages exist in reality.
…
A language has only to depart from this position of being a language common to the whole people, it has only to give preference and support to some one social group to the detriment of other social groups of the society, and it loses its virtue, ceases to be a means of intercourse between the people of the society, and becomes the jargon of some social group, degenerates and is doomed to disappear.
Stalin was concerned with the abstract hand-wavy dialectics that were beginning to proliferate amongst the intelligentsia of his empire. Made up words with equally inventive definitions tend to offend the commoner and be a matter of pride for the educated. Although Stalin doubted language could create class long term, the jargon of a person can clearly identify friend-enemy distinction in the short term. Stalin cautioned that such newspeak, far from forming class distinctions as it did in novels such as 1984, would instead isolate a group of intellectuals and doom their entire movement. So, if all Marxists adopted strange jargon, the revolution would fail. He wanted the dialectics of Russia to be materialistic, using real-world definitions and practical examples.
Hence, Diamat.
AI Midjourny Stalin, because why not?
I think there is much to learn from Diamat, especially in appealing to common people who have no patience with the opticratic tongue-games of bourgeois virtue. Such an approach with Diamat is in direct contrast to the embellishing and inventive terms proliferating today. Diamat can’t co-exist with bizarre buzz words and abstract terms that can’t easily be visualized in a standardized and clear way. Diamat requires you first start with a material example applicable to common experiences, and then construct an argument from that. However, do note Stalin did expect evolution:
As a science, Marxism cannot stand still. It develops and is perfected. In its development, Marxism cannot but be enriched by new experience, new knowledge -- consequently some of its formulas and conclusions cannot but change in the course of time, cannot but be replaced by new formulas and conclusions, corresponding to the new historical tusks. Marxism does not recognize invariable conclusions and formulas, obligatory for all epochs and periods. Marxism is the enemy of all dogmatism.
The irony here ought not be lost on you. It means contemporary progressives are not materialists, nor Marxists. Rather, they’re dogmatic mystics. I rather often have an inner pinch whenever I hear Republicans call Progressives “Marxists”. I’m educated enough to know that’s nonsense. They’re left wing, sure. But Marxists they are not. Furthermore, least I be removed from my Centrist perch, many mainstream Republicans can be categorized in this way when they mention abstractions and buzzwords. Do you, dear reader, actually have an idea what “No Child Left Behind” looks like? I don’t. Some children should be.
A test here is if you can draw your buzzword and if your drawing can be recognized by others, akin to the “Draw a Person” test for measuring competent levels of personhood. Here would be a “Draw an Ideology” test. But you may then ask, what of it. Am I calling for a predominantly spiritual Christian side of politics to become pure materialists? Probably not. But if you want to engage in dialectics with your enemies, or even your own friends, approaching it from a Diamat fashion first can at least create a solid concrete baseline to build off of. In many ways, our ideologies have become as fiat as our currencies, and whereas currency can have gold, you dear reader need something more than petty abstractions like “Make America Great Again” or “Build Back Better”. These are fiat dialectics. Fiat-lectics? Fidi? Fiadia? I’m rather terrible at this - let’s call it Fialectics for now, though feel free to suggest better.
There is another layer here worth going into as well. A problem I see quite often among the users of Fialectics, right and left. Namely, the seemingly unaware power language has to constrict your thinking as much as expand it. Though, to explain this, I have to go back to the mid-2000s for a bit.
In 2007, Bioware released the game Mass Effect to many applause. The game was a new IP for the elsewise known producer of Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age. They were a decent company with a great writing staff, and Mass Effect proved a creative script that scored many fans such I. As with many good sci-fi series, it was designed around a magical substance, Element Zero. If you, dear reader, wish to write a sci fi do understand that all good science fiction is just fantasy in space, plus some kind of magic. Element Zero’s special magic was that an electric charge made it add or subtract apparent mass in its field of influence. A novel solution to faster-than-light locomotion, and ironically somewhat proven with the discover of the Higgs Field a few years after.
Mass Effect shows a galaxy linked by relays that use this technology and creates some mystery by positing that they were built by a long-dead civilization: The Protheans. Most of the lore revolves around why they disappeared. Humanity, and other aliens, end up becoming heavily reliant on the relics of Prothean engineering and forgo developing their own technology. In a sense, they are using something through an opticratic performance, without actually understanding what it does, how it works, or what it may be doing to them. All they know is if they send the right signal at the magic space catapult, their ship gets flung to another star system. The technology is so far beyond their own, why bother trying to do it yourself? It’s just so easy to send the signal and use what’s there already. Humanity, and the other aliens, have become something of a space-age cargo-cult waving at the relays with the correct electromagnetic dance that makes them zoop.
A Mass Relay, if you’re curious…
One of the more haunting elements throughout the game are biotics, or people who have been exposed to Element Zero for too long, so their bodies have started to collect the material along the electrically active parts of their nervous system. They develop the ability to manipulate gravity, but at the cost of tumors, headaches, and declining health. None of them know exactly what they are doing, and the best that civilization can do is offer implants to help maintain the body as it declines. Personalized cargo-cults.
Eventually, as the game plays out, it’s discovered the Protheans did not build the relays. Rather, they found them like humanity did, and like many have before. It is discovered the galaxy is regularly harvested by the builders of the infrastructure. Thus, they are called Reapers, and they are some of my favorite villains in all of science fiction. They are 2km-long bio-synthetic entities, each made with the DNA of a harvested race and the minds of its citizenry uploaded into the semi-synthetic hardware as a kind of mini hive-mind. Every 50,000 years they invade to make a new Reaper as part of their reproduction cycle, adding to their collection of hive-minds.
The series’ protagonist, Commander Shepard, does not speak to many of them. When Shepard does, they demonstrate something of a subtle longing for their original life as individuals, yet also total submission to the Reaper dogma and the continuation of the cycle. They are a peculiar villain in that they don’t seem to actually know why they do this at first.
In that first game, the main Reaper that Shepard is hunting is known as Sovereign. Sovereign appears to be something of a philosopher-king, as future reapers by and large do not care to debate with Shepard as to their actions. In something of a dialogue in the classical sense, Sovereign explains exactly how the Reapers have maintain the cycle for over a billion years:
Sovereign : The Protheans were not the first. They did not forge the mass relays. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind.
Commander Shepard : Why would you construct the mass relays and leave them for someone else to find?
Sovereign : Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays. Our technology. By using it, your civilization develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of life. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.
Sovereign himself
The Sovereign Dialogue, though fictional, remains, one of the most pause-inducing dialogues I’ve ever read. Consider it carefully. The idea that what you accept from another mind can actually limit what your own mind can come up with ought to give you pause too. How do you know everything you were taught is neutral?
Suppose you never had a calculator. Would you not be better at math as a result? Suppose you had no smart phone. Would you not be forced to look at more people? Each technology you decide to use prevents the manifestation of some skill you could have had. This isn’t so much a pro-luddite argument, as it is a call to be more self-aware. After all, many of these technologies force you to develop skills you could not develop otherwise, such as coding. That balance is something for you to figure out.
If you’re wondering what this has to do with Fialectics, I want you to consider the value ad-hoced onto terms you use every day. How can you trust them? Is it purely because they are popular? It got me thinking back then, and still gets me thinking to this day. The principal: what you use uses you, is so simple and yet so demonstrably true.
AI generated Turnip Merchant, Midjourney.
The primary reason for me writing this stemmed from watching Ryan Turnipseed debate his own denomination over the words they’ve been using in their official statements and documents of beliefs. This has been an ongoing theme in Ryan’s recent output. He is concerned that when you use words like “Racism” and “Social Justice” you accept terms that have a history of use contrary to traditional Lutheran beliefs. Christianity has its own words and terms for dealing with morality and day-to-day behavior. Why adopt foreign words?
There are two problems with adopting them: Firstly, that they imply Lutherans lacked the language to speak about these issues natively, and thus must co-op loan-terms. Secondly, the mentioned assumption that these words have 1:1 parity with theological concepts in Lutheran beliefs. What Ryan is getting at is very much the problem Mass Effect revolved around, and with a few simple edits of the Sovereign Dialogue, it may become clearer to you, dear reader:
Your theology is based on the linguistics of the Progressives. Our linguistics. By using it, your theology develops along the paths we desire…You preach because we allow it, and you will apostatize because we demand it.
This is the heart of Ryan’s concerns, and it’s something no Christian denomination appears ready to face. I cannot honestly tell you, dear reader, how it has gone over the heads of so many. I certainly didn’t notice this myself until very recently, and I know with certainty the numbers who do notice it are hardly in the tens of thousands in the United States. We are lazy and adopt all new terms freely. Furthermore, this is hardly limited to Progressives - there are similar problems with the Conservative end. As the saying goes, ask a Conservative what he wishes to conserve, and he will simply tell you what Progressives wanted twenty years ago.
The goal of this piece is to get you thinking about Fialectics, not to provide an easy fix or complex solution to it. I can suggest a few things, such as challenging you to draw your ideology. Test it. Locate buzzwords and ask yourself if they are original or imports. Ask yourself what exactly you are importing when you use those words. Try to construct the ideology without them. Can you write your beliefs without any words invented after 1800? If you can’t, you’re likely dealing with something grafted onto you.
Regardless, do try to find ways to turn your dialectics into something more real and tangible. Diamat is a good start, but it is vacuous of all spiritual truths. It’s a start. A way to build a body of ideals. But you’ll have to figure out the spirit it can house.
Ultimately, you will have to create dialectics that do not destine you to abandon what you first received.
Fascinating insight