the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good - More On The Manchin Betrayal And The Secular Left Likely Making Things Worse

IN THE PART of Walter Brueggemann's Slow Wisdom As A Sub-version of Reality I posted the other day, there is this passage which I put a paragraph break in for some reason I don't recall: 

The force of Torah aims to resist autonomy wherein one imagines unfettered freedom without responsibility.  Freedom to seize what belongs to another because of more power or freedom to exploit the vulnerable neighbor.

In the end Torah is Israel's testimony  to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good.

Consider the second part of that.  The Torah, The Law, The Mishpat asserts that social existence has a covenantal shape, that our socieities are based on mutually agreed to promises and obligations to each other welfare, not on rugged individualism and illusions of independent, autonomous units of self-interest.   

Consider even more how Breuggemann, rightly and, given his life's work of studying Torah, identifies what freedom apart from those mutually agreed to promises and obligations to each other's welfare leads to, those with more power getting the freedom for themselves to exploit the vulnerable Neighbor.  That is what happens, that is like a capsule history of the political history of humanity and our economics in easily almost all of it.  And the results are nothing that the largest majority of People have any stake in pretending it's going to come out with them being the ones on top.

It is why the Jewish tradition, the tradition that starts with the story of slaves held in bondage, facing genocide through Pharaoh's fiat that all of the boys born to the Hebrews should be killed,* extending through their long journey to the promised land and their further trials and blessings, falling back, failing and trying again comes to make the most audacious claims in the history of human politics and economics, the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. 

That is more radical than any secular social reform movement has ever asserted, it is more radical than what loves to consider itself the leftiest of the lefty left.  Those anti-democratic systems  fail to even start to get there for similar and opposite reasons that the anarchists (who love to believe they are the quintessence of leftiness) do.  Anarchists are too focused on autonomy and unfettered freedom and are generally hostile to the possibility that laws higher than human choice are at all important in any of this.  They imagine that things are just going to happen for the better as if there is anything in human history or the natural world that would lead someone to rationally believe that that is going to happen without human planning and intention on the basis of good will and a kind of disinterested universal love that is most certainly not what I've read expressed in much, if any political anarchist literature.  Other than, maybe Tolstoy and Dorothy Day, anarchists lean far more to the love of violence and dependence on anger and hatred and, in the case of that poster-icon saint, Emma Goldman, the violent elitist gansterism that her hero, the proto-Nazi Nietzsche favored.  When I see the black block anarchists of the Pacific North West, I certainly don't see anything that will ever be anything else except what they will mostly be, a tool of Republican-fascism.  The most ineffective worker at a Catholic Worker house of hospitality is more radical than they are. 

Human intention, human thought, human empathy, sympathy and love are certainly part of the Creation just as much as physical forces and those pretty pictures that the space telescopes catch.  But it only happens, it only becomes real as it is chosen to happen by human intent.  That is our place in the progress of Creation and it exists due to our choice to make it happen.  Anyone who believes that conscious, free choice is an illusion will wait and wait and wait for it to happen, like some theorized rare event of physical causation and it will never happen.  Which is one of the reasons that secular leftism can so much be counted on to be not only ineffective but counter-productive.   If you expect it to happen as an external natural event of unthinking causation, you're better off waiting for pie in the sky. 

* Which would be genocide in a patriarchal society, I wonder if that's got something to do with Jewish identity being dependent on matrilineal heritage.   I think there is probably a somewhat more modestly sized truth behind the Exodus narrative, they couldn't have gotten so much right by imagination alone, it had to have grown out of a real human experience of real human events.  It was the literary style of the ancient and classical world to exaggerate to make a point, but the point would never have occurred to them except as a product of their lived experience.