Adherents to the apocalyptic tradition have now, in pluralist societies, two powers not well known to secondary cultures: freedoms of religion and association. By removing the social structures so effective in oppressing the minority culture, the primary has disarmed one of the major reasons for continued loyalty to the apocalyptic secondary identity (and the infrastructure that surrounds it). If there are no codified methods of oppression, then the methods and metaphors of apocalypticism lose relevance as critical techniques.

But the maneuver to grant the right of self-identification serves more than one useful purpose to the primary culture. Aside from moralistic tones of right and wrong, the deliverance of autonomy within the regulations and preexisting codes of primary culture also defuses a potentially dangerous situation, and that situation is the impending revolt (or at least the simmering hatred) that underlies all attempts at re/oppression. It is also the best strategy for nurturing an identity that is a hybrid of primary and secondary culture.

Consider the circumstances of minority groups in New Zealand: identification as either European descent or Maori is no longer a point of contention. There are Maori institutes of higher education and Maori is one of the primary languages of the New Zealand government. But greater than either the Caucasian/Maori identity is the larger, less specific cultural identity of being a New Zealander. In allowing the secondary culture the (many, if not all) freedoms of the primary, the government begins assimilating them into a larger collective citizenry.

Why does apocalypticism then still appeal to radical or marginalized groups? For the same reasons that it has become accepted that apocalypticism was an appropriate response historically. Pluralist societies are not immediately tolerant of all secondary behaviors or identifications. There are still codes and mores that govern behavior, still taboos that clearly delineate what is and is not acceptable to the majority body politic. Some secondary groups organize themselves around a shared interest in a taboo, or have found themselves on the wrong end of the cultural pendulum as the primary culture or the larger, nationalist monoculture (as I'm calling the assimilative collective citizenry) redefines what is or is not acceptable.

But the individuals threatened the most by the disarming of the traditional means of social critique that apocalypticism represents are the prophets, the charismatic leaders, the empowered individuals of the secondary culture. Whereas in the oppressive old regime, the secondary culture might have required primary-sanctioned mediators or have instituted cultural overseers (Jewish representatives to Rome, conservative community leaders in the segregated South), the allowance of self-determination obviates the need for middlemen. And in any circumstance where power is redistributed, there will be resistance to that redistribution.

This is not to suggest that current apocalyptic trends are somehow different because they are contemporary. The infrastructure that supported the status quo was served well through the wholescale uptake of the apocalyptic critique because of its previously discussed revolutionary/anti-revolutionary social message. Bodies of people who are accepting apocalypticism are doing so for the same reasons that it was accepted earlier: in a concerted attempt to shroud the messages of a secondary culture from the prying eyes of a monolithic primary culture. What is different is the context--that of a pluralistic society as opposed to a larger imperialist behemoth.

Because the secondary is allowed to self-identify, while simultaneously being aware there is a larger identification--and a larger pool of identifications to choose from--the secondary culture and its leaders are made aware of their status as secondary. Existence in a pluralist or democratic society necessitates recognizing this fact, and it is a construction that encourages identification beyond the secondary. The freedom then to self-identify as secondary is also coupled with the inherently contradictory requirement to identify beyond the secondary.

Freedom comes at a de-privileging of the self. In being allowed to exist, one must also allow others to exist, and this is the conflict that drives the current evangelical Christian movement in America. Any ideology that positions itself as the true or right way will come into conflict with pluralism and autonomy. Further, the dedication and abjection that any fundamentalist religious movement requires is inherently threatened by that same autonomy that allows it to exist. In other words, people must be free to choose their religion, so that they might choose fundamentalism; but that same freedom to choose also allows potential converts to choose something else.

This is the thesis of this entire series of articles: Autonomy is at best a necessary evil, and at worst a direct antagonist, to the contemporary fundamentalist Christian movement in the United States.

The next segment will discuss a repercussion of the positioning of autonomy as adversarial to fundamentalist Christianity: the legislation of morality.

A population can be insular without necessarily demonizing cultures peripheral (or, as insular derives from the Latin for island, external) to itself. Insularity is, in the case of the oppressed secondary culture experiencing apocalypticism, cautious self-identification only with those who share cultural competencies. It is a survival mechanism in a time where political subversion or the appearance of subversion brings drastic consequences.

The other as used here is a psychological term to describe the basic taxonomy of human experience. Following Jacques Lacan's discussion of the mirror stage of human development, the assumption of language by a speaking individual requires a recognition of the boundaries of the self and everything else. Prior to the infant's ability to grasp language, there is no division, there is no separation between itself and the environment. As the infant begins to understand that its reflection in the mirror is both self and not-self, it formulates a theory of the world that underpins the entirety of human consciousness. That theory is the basic expression of the dichotomy between Self and Other.

Self is what we know, what we recognize as identical or similar to ourselves. At its most basic level the Self is that ephemeral presence we name I. As socialized persons, however, we extend the category of Self to include those who possess the same cultural competencies--and thus are more likely to experience the world in a similar fashion--as ourselves. Thus our family, village, clan, ethnic group, or nationality becomes an extension of the Self.

The insularity first encouraged by apocalypticism can be seen as a celebration of the Self in an atmosphere of repression. The secondary culture is on the verge of being swallowed, of being resocialized, by the dominant oppressor. Because the oppressed is not allowed to express the characteristics that have until now defined him as Self, he seeks another outlet to do so. Thus the secondary culture becomes more strongly bonded by virtue of their threatened extinction or assimilation at the hands of the primary culture. This is the foundation of the drive for insularity, of identifying most strongly with those already recognized as Self.

It is only in societies where the minority position is protected that the resocialization process can be perceived as nonthreatening. If there is no danger to the secondary culture's identity--that is, if there is no process of conversion to the mores of the primary culture--then the insularity can lead to something of a peaceful coexistence. The emergence of ethnic neighborhoods during the great immigrations into the United States in the mid-1800s and early 1900s are somewhat representative of this phenomenon. There were conclaves of Irish, Polish, Catholic, Romanian, Chinese, Japanese, and various other ethnicities that functioned both in the primary British colonial-informed culture as well as maintaining an insular identity among similar immigrants: the neighborhood itself, having chosen to exist as a unified entity of one particular group, can be seen as an insular secondary culture.

It was never likely that this type of coexistence would ever occur prior to the development of legal protection and recognition of the secondary against the primary. (The Constitution's protection of minorities against the "tyranny of the majority" is what makes this possible in United States society.) The imperialism of Rome, Babylon, Assyria, and the other great empires of the early world was not a matter of coexistence, but geared more toward assimilation in the name of ensuring loyalty. While there are exceptions to every pronouncement, the requirements for secondary cultures to perform in the identifications of the primary, at the expense of their own identifications, is strong evidence for this conjecture. That is, while the Jewish population existed as both subjects of the Roman empire and as Jews, there were legal, social, and religious ordinances in place that prioritized loyalty to Rome over Jewishness. The worship performance at checkpoints in Meiji-era Japan to screen for covert Christians is another example of the dominance of the primary.

One of the strongest reasons for assimilating--for denying one's prior identity and resocializing as a member of the oppressive primary culture--is survival. It was the case with Roman and Babylonian empires that the punishment for indulging in dual identifications, for sustaining ties to the secondary culture, was torture, imprisonment, or death. It would seem this would automatically generate the conditions necessary to begin to conceive of the dominant culture as the Other.

This is not the case. Loyalty to the dominant culture will never last long if it is only legislated, and the enmity produced by tormenting people will eventually overpower the ruler's grasp. The emperors were shrewd leaders, and had an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of power. (They may not have dressed it in psychological terms, but they understood what they were doing.) The only way to convince people to embrace their servitude, to celebrate the nature of their oppression, is to convince them that their identification in the secondary culture is wrong.

It is a masterstroke. To convince someone that their servitude is not a thing to rebel against, you must force them to accept not only the dominance of the primary culture, but its justness, its righteousness. And the easiest way of doing so is to subvert their secondary identities as being the Other. In the American South, prior to the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, this is clearly evident in the construction of white/black.

Specifically, in the texts and accounts we have of that time, there is a very active construction of blackness, as inferior, as mentally weak, as bestial. But there is never any real question of the construction of whiteness--whiteness is at most the background against which blackness becomes apparently wrong. The terms used to describe ethnicity and racial division bear this out. Slaves were colored, and their Caucasian oppressors were white. The implicit suggestion is that coloredness exists as an aberrance, whereas whiteness is the proper state of being. White folk were not white folk, they were folk.

So at last we have a reasonable answer to the question of the investment of Otherness. The primary culture in a strongly imperialistic society becomes a receptacle for the oppressed culture's notion of the Other as a kind of reflexive act of survival. Faced with the prospect that their cultural heritage--their preexisting socialization--will become unfamiliar, the secondary culture both closes ranks and begins to reaffirm its own self-identification by reversing the terms of the activity. The dominant people seek to define their slaves as Other; in response, the slaves ever more strongly identify with each other as Self, and begin to recast the dominators as Other.

Is apocalypticism a necessary condition for this maneuver? No. But is this maneuver in secondary cultures a byproduct of the emergence of apocalyptic traditions? Yes. The cultural competencies that allow for members of the secondary to identify each other also serve to strongly define those who do not possess those competencies as outsiders. And with apocalyptic literature's strong emphasis on the coming social change as the end result of revelation or catastrophe, it is easier still to allow oneself to refuse to identify with the members of the primary at all.

The next piece of this essay will begin to examine the specifics of American Christian evangelical apocalypticism and its ramifications for a democratic society.

Unlike any of its American counterparts—the utterly noxious cultural misconception Xiaolin Showdown chief among its thematic rivals—the subtext beneath Naruto’s glossily animated surface and big, expressive eyes is a story about the corrosive effects of child abuse.

This is a show about the abused, about how the traumas visited upon us in childhood build our worlds in bruises and blood.

There is Sasuke, the last surviving member of the Uchiha clan, a self-proclaimed "avenger." The talent in his bloodline is the sharingan, an ability that lets him learn and mimic any other ninja’s learned abilities merely by witnessing it once. He is often proclaimed the strongest, the fastest, the best of the new class of ninja by his teachers, and he is something of a romantic idol for the girls in the school.

This is the primary dichotomy of the series: the outcast and the favorite, the reject and the popular kid. The fire inside Sasuke is the desire to mete out vengeance on those who have wronged him, those who have deprived him of his parents. This is his goal, and the entirety of his experience at school is secondary to becoming strong enough to kill his enemies.

The mystery of Naruto’s orphaning explains the odd facial marks he wears: three equal length lines radiating out in 45-degree increments on his cheeks, what I first mistook to be tattoos of cat whiskers or scars. They are the only external evidence of Naruto’s birth: The Village Hidden in the Leaves was terrorized by the Nine-Tailed Fox, a demon made of fire that destroyed and consumed. The ninja lords that rule the village have sealed the demon inside Naruto, a foundling, and it seems as if this is the source of his boundless energy and the irrepressible mischief he is compelled to get himself into.

The idea of a school of warrior children, of lethal boys and girls training against each other in a struggle to out-kill and outlast, performs a striking allegorical function as we learn the background of each student. Almost without fail, these children have been attacked, tormented, beaten, traumatized, victimized, or made to sacrifice without compensation or consent. Naruto holds the demon inside of him, is watched by the ninja elders for any sign that the demon will break free—and at the first hint of recklessness they will kill him. Sasuke lives to assimilate the power and the means of destruction, driven to relive the circumstances of his raising.

Even the side characters we might easily forget bear the scars of early abuse. There is Shino, son of a clan of "beastmasters," who in a spectacularly gruesome fight, defeats his opponent with a flood of parasitic beetles that live inside him. The birthright of the clans is a blood pact with these beetles: the child is infected with a colony, and in return for letting these insects feast off his or her spiritual energy, he can command them in battle. But the host has no say in whether or not the infection takes place; and it is a crapshoot whether the host may even survive the initial infection.

Shino’s opponent, Zaku, lived on the streets as a beggar and a thief. In a flashback we see him ruthlessly beaten for stealing a loaf of bread, his arms battered and broken, and in a particularly cruel turn of the narrative, an enraged Sasuke twists Zaku’s arms behind his back and snaps them in half with a mad cackle. The acquisition of power is inadequate to prevent Zaku from being abused again, and the lesson is clear: only the strongest can prevent themselves from becoming victims.

All these children have traumatic pasts, and they wind up enrolled in a school that trains them to harness violence and use it in controlled bursts. They are institutionalized in such a way that their self-worth is tied to recreating the circumstances of their abuse, only—and this is key—with themselves as the abusers.

It is because of this utterly perverse incarnation of the bildungsroman that I suggest the point of Naruto is not escapism or entertainment: it is the literalization of the cycle of abuse. These children are abused, and because the abuse shapes their formative years, because the abuse is in a very real sense their only socialization, they grow up knowing only violence and fighting. Childhood abuse has configured their mental landscapes so that their only outlook is on the world as a war, as a continuing struggle between potential abusers and potential victims.

A fighting school for beaten children is possibly the most apt and the most agonizing description of the potential fate of abused children that I can think of.

How odd we market this toward children ourselves...