We Were and Are Robbed

3 PROPHETIC CRITICIZING AND THE EMBRACE OF PATHOS

We have considered as a paradigm for prophetic imagination the formation of a consciousness that is a genuine alternative to the royal consciousness. Now a question must be faced (and it is surely a contemporary question): What would such an alternative consciousness be like? Here I take only the modest step of considering some ways in which the prophets of Israel addressed this task, but behind that explicit consideration we necessarily wonder what we might do, given our situation.

We also are children of a royal consciousness. All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is How can we have enough foreedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask as Israel's prophets asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable. To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness even before we begin. We need to ask not whether it is reaslitic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.

I will give into the temptation to say that what Brueggemann says we are challenged with is whether or not we are willing to become thought criminals. That is what these alternative thoughts to what he calls the "royal consciousness" are or will be considered, called that or not.

In our modern, scientistic-industrial "enlightenment" the very name of the prerequisite of that, the act of imagination, is downgraded to mean fantasizing the unreal, the act of children and the ignorant and delusional. That doesn't mean that imagination stops, it doesn't, everything about the republican form of "royal consciousness" in our scientistic "enlightenment" requires acts of imagination, I would hold as detached from reality as any that religion is accused of - at times with justification, especially when religion engages in acts of "royal consciousness" and is as invested in it as any gangster government and society is .

Asking if the alternatives are politically practical and economically viable are, indeed to concede too much at the start because everything is set up to make that so. In the focus of so much of my consideration of this as a contemporary question, the American Constitution and, in what that actually became very fast, in practice, the system that is in so many ways fully invested in the "royal consciousness" in terms of political expediency and economic rigging of things for the aristocratic and rich and, so, empowered. To start out with that as a given is, indeed, to abort the prophetic criticism of things. That has been one of the major faults of the American left since the diminution of religion in it, specifically, in the American context, the serious consideration of exactly the civil law in terms of the Mosaic law and the intensification of that articulated by Jesus and the epistle writers.

I know that secular lefties don't like it but it is a fact that almost if not all of the major progress of the abolitionists, the women's equality movement, the extension of the abolitionist movement in the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, and even labor unions and all of the progress,hard fought, hard struggled and hard gained was done through that kind of prophetic imagination, not through the pursuit of the Marxist dialectic or some other secular, often materialistic soc-sci informed pseudo-scientific prattling. In each and every case when that secular, anti-religious, or religion indifferent faction took control, it ended in the discrediting of the left, its decimation, its impotence and its not only failure to make progress, but loss of what had been gained.

The American left lost its credibility in nothing so much as its letting the Marxists sucker us into feeling sympathetic for them because they were treated mean by their fellow gangsters in capitalism. They provided the capitalists, the gilded-age gangsters their most effective tool to fight back against the prophetic imagination, such as it was, that opposed them. And the strongest evidence that they never really belonged to any left was their support for gangsters who ruled in other lands, the Soviet Union, the countries that were progressively occupied by the crime bosses in Moscow, again in China and in other countries where Marxism produced perhaps a more efficient appearing politics and economics - those efficiencies are easier to achieve when you turn people into a raw material resource and mill and grind them up like you would rock or wood or any other commodity without regard for their status above such material objects.

And, with the encouragement of Hollywood and scribbling class tales of the passion of the commies, whether in the Palmer raids or in the red-scare of the post-WWII period, it is unsayable on the left that the American left got played for suckers and we still are, only now it's fashionable to call such suckering "socialism" using a name that has been so coopted by gangsters, Marxist or Nazi or deluded secularist anti-religious American academics that it is useless for anything but enabling Republican-fascism.

No, all of that is pathetically inadequate for mounting a real alternative no matter how much we may, occasionally gain from the methods of science, even in the collection of statistical data and analysis, unless you start and finish with something more than that,exactly the kind of prophetic imagination that we can attribute to the Mosaic tradition, the ancient Children of Israel, we're not going to have it from any other source in sufficient strength. The extent to which those habits of imagining an alternative consciousness and life are present in at least a potential form in American culture is important to us having any success at all. I have no doubt that, as it says in the Bible, that God imparts the same knowledge of right and wrong to other peoples in other places, other covenants were made through that kind of insight, but we live here, now and in the context we live in. 

 

Brueggemann says in this passage, " We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.  And he is right, we were robbed of the courage to think these thoughts, and it was not only by those with power here, it was with those who we gave power to sucker us with various forms of materialistic scientism, modernism and the coercive power of fashion, academic, in the writing publishing class and in show-biz entertainment.  They robbed us the same way they get our money through advertising.  By appealing to our strongest weaknesses.