And all it takes to counter that consciousness, as kings have always known, is satiation

(1) The Solomonic achievement was one of incredible well-being and affluence:

Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea; they ate and drank and were happy. Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt; they brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life.

Solomon's provision for one day was thirty cors of fine flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, a hundred sheep, besides harts, gazelles, roebucks, and fatted fowl. (1 Kings 4:20-23)

Clearly, there is a new reality in Israel. Never before had there been enough consumer goods to remove the anxiety about survival. The counter-culture of Moses lived in a world of scarcity, whether one talks about hurriedly eating unleavened bread (Exodus 12:8-11) or the strange gift from heaven in the wilderness (Exodus 16). And all it takes to counter that consciousness, as kings have always known, is satiation. It is difficult to keep a revolution of freedom and justice under way when there is satiation. (In our own economy questions of civil rights seem remote when we are so overly fed. And when we look at the Soviet Union, how strange it is that the burning issues of freedom have become agendas for consumer goods.) That is what is going on in Solomonic Israel. The high standard of living claimed by the text is fully supported by the archaeology of the period. The  artifacts, walls, and building remains attest to a well-ordered and secure social situation.

It is nonetheless reasonable to conjecture that the affluence and prosperity so attested to is not democratically shared. The menu report of 1 Kings 4 just cited most likely represented only the eating habits and opportunities of the royal entourage, which, at best, was indifferent to the plight of the citizenry. And then or now, eating that well means food is being taken off the table of another. This notice in 1 Kings 4 suggests that the satiation had become an accessible goal for the royal society. Covenanting which takes brothers and sisters seriously had been replaced by consuming which regards brothers and sisters as products to be used. And in a consuming society an alternative consciousness is surely difficult to sustain.

Change the names and a few of the nouns and it sounds very familiar. Of course.  We should also keep in mind that it was the educated class who would have had a stake in the prosperity of the Solomonic system who recorded the abundance. As in our media, such even modest elites in the media have no problem in erasing the underclass if its to their advantage to do so. We don't have that record in the historical books, we get that in the Prophets, the protest singers against the system. Though even such protest, as we can see in our day, is always in danger of becoming part of the system, often even in the very means they choose to believe they are opposing it with.

 

 The greatest importance of the "historical books" of the Bible is not is not antiquarian, it is in what they can help us to understand about life and how to live during our times. An unjust society of affluence, unevenly distributed and dependent on the forced labor of a laboring class, the disposing of the disposable, the constant impoverishment and indebtedness of those without, the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy. Tribute from subjugated people. That is the United States, Russia, Britain, and so many other countries in the world presaged.

The criticism of "social action" earlier in this series of posts from Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination may have been confusing, so used as we are to considering the depth of the Mosaic-Christian faith with social-work, with elevating the lower through the conventions of education so they can become prosperous within the system. That, as Walter Brueggemann has not yet explicitly said merely imagines an endless and eventually universal elevation of everyone within a system which, at its core, cannot do that because it is based on exploitation of the kind which Solomon instituted, from which the Children of Israel were saved by God. The system is a pyramid scheme, in as fitting a metaphor as could be invented, in which it is impossible for there to be anything like universal justice. If it were even a remote possibility for it to do that, the existing power differential would ensure that those who already had more would rig it to their benefit. AND THAT IS ON THE ASSUMPTION NOT IN EVIDENCE THAT "MAKING THE SYSTEM REALLY WORK" WOULD EVER, POSSIBLY HAVE THAT RESULT. 

 

Social work, education that is done with the motive of training children and adults to be cogs in the machine, maybe ensuring their oiling and maintainance as long as they can stay useful to the machine is, first, not an unexpected substitute for virtue in a materialist world view, but one which is never going to be egalitarian and universal and will certainly never be capable of taking the radically transcendent view of people and living beings as individuals that can only come from other than a materialistic framing. It can certainly never really believe in nor pursue real human equality because human beings will never be of equal worth in that kind of materialistic economics. And economics,as can be seen in the official "opposition" socialism, Marxism, will ALWAYS be the transcendent goal of materialism. As I mentioned in my second post yesterday, Darwinism shares in that hermetically sealed view of reality, even to the point where a physician can give breezily optimistic views of the good that will come from hundreds of thousands and very realistically expected millions of deaths.

 

It reminds me of the old capitalist snake oil scheme that I first heard Mortimer Adler promote, in which there would be universal stock ownership, as if stock ownership was any kind of a guarantee of universal egalitarianism among those who already own it instead of it being a system of those with a leg up and more savvy making money off of the inabilities and differences in resources even among those with the means of owning stock and making investments.

And that, itself, is what the secular conception of "social action" will always devolve into. If I didn't suspect that from hearing ol' Mort's hair-brained replacement for enforced equality the essential nature of secular liberalism became clear to me when I went online and read, unfiltered, the thought, the attitudes, the snobbery of the secular lefties, not the "liberals" those who declared themselves socialists and leftists, the most lefty of the left. Cruel jests about "trailer trash," jokes about the bad teeth of the underclass (it is fucking expensive to maintain the health of teeth over a lifetime, especially with the American style diet) and a myriad of other would-be humorous efforts are as ubiquitous on the college-credentialed "left" as overt racism is in Republican-fascism.

Those are just a few of the thoughts that this passage brings to mind, no doubt they have brought more to yours. I am really finding this informal "course" in this topic, on Walter Brueggemann's book is worth doing. I would encourage you to get the book, read it in ways that I can't go into- I am not including Brueggemann's notes which,though not as plentiful as those of, say Hans Kung are no less important and vitally necessary for the fullest reading of the book. I will repeat that the depth of scholarship and thought in the areas of theology and biblical study is some of the deepest I have found over many topics. 

 

Note: I am having some kind of trouble getting the links to the Jewish Publications Society 1917 text I've been linking to for the Bible passages this morning, I will try to figure out why and put the links in, though you can probably find it elsewhere.