The Lack Of Faith Or Bad Faith Of So Many Make The Secular Left Impotent To Change Anything

The alternative consciousness wrought by Moses also provides a model for energizing.  Moses and this narrative create the sense of new realities that can be trusted and relied upon just  when the old realities had left us hopeless.  It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order.  Energizing is closely linked to hope.  We are energized not by that which we already possess but by that which is promised and about to given.  It is the tendency of liberals to rail and polemicize, but in the lack of faith or bad faith of so many it is not believed that something is about to be given.  Egypt was without energy precisely because it did not believe anything was promised and about to be given.  Egypt like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed.  If there is any point at which most of us are marginally co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns. 

"The alternative consciousness wrought by Moses also provides a model for energizing. . . . We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns."  

It's hard to say which things Walter Brueggemann says are the most important ones, he doesn’t tend to make insignificant points, but this seems to me to be among the most important things he has to say in this entire book.   

I happened to go look at one of the moderately popular lefty websites this morning to see if my predictions about how they would be taking Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential choice was coming true,  before typing out this post, and it was doom and gloom and nihilism and hopelessness and thoroughly steeped in the long, doomy-gloomy, nihilistic and hopeless culture of aging,college-credentialed, scientistic, modernist, materialist, atheist “leftism”.  Anyone who expects any change to come out of such people is risking only one thing, perpetual disappointment and following that dismal line to nowhere and nothing which the secular left has been on for a long time.  Of course, that might be better than when such people thought they were going to follow the bouncing dialect into Stalinism or Maoism and then onto an anarchist paradise before the sun went red giant and our constituent molecules would disperse and prove it had all been for nothing.   

Atheism is exactly like that as it even lacks the appeal of degenerate Mammonism, the motivator of Trump and Republican-fascism and, in fact, all such gangster regimes, including those of Stalin and Mao that those dead and dying off “idealists” of the secular past held up as a model to the West which considered them out of their minds. 

If you want change, don’t look for it being led by any of the above.  As I’ve never stopped pointing out, they’ve had the American left in the wilderness for much longer than Moses had the Children of Israel in one.