Instead of just letting that lecture I posted yesterday go eventually under the top page of my blog, as happens, I'm going to go over some of the points Walter Brueggemann made in it.
The idea I find most stunning in the lecture is his contrast between the prophetic writings of the Hebrew scriptures and the official, temple institution which is just an arm of what Brueggemann calls the contemporary "national security state" under Solomon. He explicitly related that ancient imperial-intellectual complex to our own, contemporary one. If you haven't listened to it, the place he does that most plainly is when he mentions Dick Cheney, who was the de facto head of the Bush II regime at the time the talk was given in 2007. It comes early in the talk. I will say that it is the most convincing analysis of both the scriptures describing the Solomonic security state and the prophetic reaction to it, including the variance of that with what Brueggemann notes was the original social safety net, especially in the book of Deuteronomy which I know of. It makes me think I should rethink converting to the United Church of Christ, except I think it's probably better to have an Irish Catholic who is being influenced by such protestant thinking than to have just another protestant.
I will be taking some time with this, which will involve a lot of transcription but, for now, I'll consider what he pointed out about the rules of two those parts of our imperial religion which have the most influence, today, business and sports. After talking about how both his own son and a football coach point out that even if you do what you're supposed to do, meeting or exceeding the stated goals of those jobs, you are expected to exceed even more or you are a failure. The ethic of competition, what is presented by the media, by business, the turning of winning over others into one of the major ethical holdings of American society is guaranteed to lead to evil. Here is what he said.
You're never good enough [under the rules of capitalism or sports]. This is not an accident in our society. This is a deliberate program of inadequate productivity that leaves everybody unsatisfied and eventually ruthless.
Brueggemann's linking of that to the ancient and contemporary imperial trinity of might, wealth and wisdom is something I am certain will leave me with a lot to think about, it is certainly relevant to my thinking about politics and why the left has failed. I am sure some of the fashionable folks who might read this will scoff at the inclusion of "wisdom" which is certainly an idol on the nominal left, with a position far greater than any real and serious pursuit of effective equality and real social leveling. The academics who have had such an influence, much of it obviously unwise and counterproductive, so often have an attitude of managing the great unwashed masses instead of real equality. They and so many of those who they have allegedly educated might love the idea of equality but not at a cost to their own status and asserted superiority. Their ruthlessness in protecting that status isn't far from that of the football coach whose income and influence they might very well resent - as do I for different reasons - and the vulgarity of the businessmen who they may also disdain as they silently envy. If that were not the case then the use to which they have allowed themselves to be made by the professional liars in the media would have been far less successful. Even uneducated people know when people are looking down on them, it's not as if the real feelings of the alleged intelligentsia aren't casually expressed by so many of them. Especially the students of those wise men who work in the media. The entire careers of some of them are one big inside joke about how stupid the masses of humanity are as compared to themselves.
Though I am certain that there are many who work in academia and elsewhere who will know what I'm talking about. You're less likely to hear them in the media than you will at synods and from pulpits. What Brueggemann said about Abiathar, the priest exiled to the back woods by Solomon, is also important. There have always been those who saw behind the false front that is put up to cover the corrupt imperial state, even that which is erected by its PR operation, its wisdom establishment. But a priesthood that is in cahoots with the imperial system and, in leftist terms, academics who lobby for that imperial establishment or another one will just continue the same thing. The way out of the wilderness for the left is not through supporting an alternative holder of the imperial throne, it's through something entirely different. The secular-atheist left is not that alternative, it is, if anything, a force for continuing the spiral of the past half-century after the murder of The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The struggle is not for power; the struggle is for legitimacy.
ReplyDeleteWhich does not come through power, although the world will tell you it does. Power is the world's way; powerlessness is God's way, and is the way of legitimacy.