On The Necessity Of Being Socially Unacceptable, Uncomfortable And Icky

HAVING GONE OVER the transcriptions I made of Walter Brueggemann's lecture "Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality" I mentioned the other day, almost every sentence in it could generate an entire post about some aspect of current politics and current life.  I'm going to give into that temptation to go back over some of it.

Day 7 of my previous posts contained this passage which I'll comment on inside of the text:

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 abbreviated form,  this lays out in total what is wrong with the ersatz virtues of liberal democracy, especially as those in my generation, educated far more in movie theaters and by TV entertainment than the university, learned things.  The theme of most of the movies I've ever seen imagine their male leading characters as autonomous, standing outside of or against a community or tradition, insistent on having their own way, pursuing their own unfettered freedom without responsibility to much of anyone except, perhaps, a few people who they have some interest in, as even the minimal limits of the production code gave way to the heady libertarianism of the 1950s, 60s and onward, even the cinematically presented consequences of even the most depraved of those movie heroes, the gangsters, were made to not impinge on them, they gave us Trumpian figures as heroes and we wonder why so many entertainment addled Americans still fall for him even now.  

In many cases, the hero was presented as standing against some obvious wrong of the greater society but what may have been presented as a bold, brave, sexy, manly stand against some moral wrong didn't require that societal wrong as a plot outline, as in the answer to what are you rebelling against, "what'd'ya got?"  And when writers, directors and producers found out that nothing more than the emotional outline of that plot worked, it worked for gangsters and outlaws just as much as it worked for Atticus Finch.  A related outline of boldness, autonomy, etc. worked for the most degenerate of figures of the establishment worked perfectly for Donald Trump in Celebrity Apprentice.   Apparently it even managed to sell the fat, short-fingered degenerate as a sex symbol on TV in his fat, phony haired, orange tinged obvious phony.   The thing he rode into the presidency.

The extent to which this is true of what the "news division" presents as Christianity, the TV hallelujah peddlers, billionaire-millionaire astro-turf "traditional Catholics" are no less a product of Hollywood-TV style entertainment production values than Trump is, than the Republican-fascist biggest mouths like Gaetz and Green, Cruz or Hawley or the particularly odious form of Republican-fascist politician who got their start in hate-talk radio and TV. Suckers for the phony history of the Revolutionary period or "the way-est" or "the South".  All of that started in what generally college-credentialed TV and radio and movie bosses and script scribblers figured would turn them the greatest profits and enhance their wealth.  

And the American People, no less trained in their thinking by TV and the movies than my generation of Boomers were, are largely suckers for it, especially when it was sold in the language of secular civic virtue, "bold," "independent " "liberty," "freedom," and, yes, "rights." The Easy-Rider style of counter-culture was just the same with long hair.  The use by Trumpian and related American fascists in 2020 of the same language as the "counter-culture" of the 1960s should lead at least some people to wonder if those basic concepts removed from the kind of moral responsibility Brueggemann is talking about might not be problematic. The language of liberal-democracy in the mouths of CPAC fascism, the miscalculation of George Soros who was one of Viktor Orban's early supporters, all of that is evidence that there are foundational and fatal problems with liberal democracy.  

Of course, while there was the media-presented "counter-culture" of secular indulgence, there was a real counter-culture which tended to be religious which was, in many cases, genuinely counter-cultural in the way that Brueggemann points out that Jeremiah was.  I often think of Jeremiah and Bob Dylan at the same time, after reading Brueggemann.  Or The Staple Singers.

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. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction.

That is true IF and only if the liberal arts start out with that orientation and that intention.  Under secularism, with its inevitable rejection of the language of the actual truth of that kind of morality, its reality, its consequential truth when made consequential in actions, under the sciency amorality of secularism, that itself is not only rejected but made to feel uncomfortable and socially unacceptable and icky.

The main stream of imaginative literature since the so-called "enlightenment" has been in the diminution of the validity and reality and consequential nature of the morality of the Torah.  Not a little of the commentary on Scripture has the same flavor if not intention as the secular culture of the "enlightenment" and the ideological depravities that flow from it, including those which grew up upon finding the 18th century enlightenment was not an adequate or satisfying framing of life and reality.  

Romanticism, especially as it declined into late 19th and 20th century decadence, wasn't much better. Some really great writing was produced during that entire time but there isn't really much to find that will produce the kinds of results that Brueggemann is talking about in it.  It's more of a distraction to those who find themselves depressed and distraught about the life that is produced by the kinds of "freedom" that has become the reality of most people.  The voyeurism of so much of the legitimately artistic literature of the period is only different in quality and range of imagination and not in kind from Hallmark made for TV movies.  I would propose that the oppressiveness of secularism and its byproducts are even worse than the imagined oppressiveness of 17th century established churches aligned to the political powers and the law, which were seldom any more governed by the kind of things Brueggemann finds in Jeremiah and the Prophetic tradition.  Our science-tech conducted wars are certainly more destructive and far more indiscriminate in who gets killed than the often anti-religiously cited 30-years-war was.  The modern genocides of the scientific regimes kill far more people, whether the most efficient of those genocides as conducted by the Nazis or the non-industrial, free-press driven one in Rwanda.

If you think I'm calling for any part of our history to be reproduced as our future, you are entirely wrong.  It is stunning how our free-press, entertainment glutted minds can't imagine more than the most inaccurate and base either-this-or-that alternatives.  I can't imagine what that better future will be with any great detail but I know if you try to reproduce the past you will a. fail because the past cannot be reproduced now, time doesn't work like that, b. likely reproduce some of the worst aspects of the past (look at the racist 1776 romantic bull shit of the Trumpians if you want a good example of where that would lead us), c. you will only turn that into the kinds of oppressive ideologies that the Jewish prophetic tradition is full to the top with warnings against.

I do know that with the power of human numbers, human technology, the pollution of the planet and atmosphere, nuclear and other powers, if we don't drastically turn around the world in the direction that Jeremiah and Brueggemann points to - which is not about any humanly made past epoch -  there will very likely not be a future, barring some more dramatic divine intervention of a kind which enlightenment ideology and social strictures forbid polite people from expecting and which the Republican-fascist use of The Book of Revelation most certainly is not anything like.

The triad of fidelity excuses the seduction of the reasoning of autonomy, it fends off the counter temptation of absolutism.

Autonomy, "every man thinks for himself," as opposed to the "counter temptation" of absolutism, no one thinks for themselves but are given what they are to think.  

The cheap limits of cinematic and dramatic and, ironically, "enlightenment" imagination doesn't allow for the imagination of other alternatives to those "opposites."  It is amazing, when you think of it, how many false dichotomies are the only habit of thought permitted or achieved in the modern world.

It refuses absolutism through the ongoing disputatious practice of interpretation. So that the old Torah cannot just be read.  

This reminds me of the advice of the atheist-materialist who didn't think like one, Richard Lewontin, to the conventional hero of popular atheist-materialism, Carl Sagan that if he wanted to hear lively disputation about the nature of the universe he should leave the elite university he taught science at and to to an Orthodox study hall in Brooklyn.  

And there can be no recourse to the original intention or what we call originalism, which is to misconstrue the tradition.

I believe that what Brueggeman means by "the old Torah cannot just be read" is that it has to be made real in the real lives of real People who live in history and the history of now can never be a mere reproduction of what was in even the period of the Prophets.  It will always be as new as good jazz is always new and never a reproduction of the past.  But you can go through the motions through habit and the results won't be good.  Creation, time, goes from the past to the future through the present.  That is the reason for it. Deny that as we might, it is how time which we all live in works. The prophetic tradition accounts for that.

Because it is the great work of the university to nurture competent hermeneutists who refuse the easy relativism of popular culture and who refuse the temptation to absolutism whether of God or sect or country. The tradition requires interpretive agility that knows that the memory is the beginning point but never the conclusion. The tradition is always being reformulated in radical contemporaneity with deep rootage that is not deleted by interpretation.

This passage is, of course, tied to the friction between the would be "originalists" the "fundamentalists" of religion but, especially useful to us right now, the Constitutional fundamentalists of the Supreme Court,  and those who by "interpretation" delete the moral center or meaning of Scripture, most certainly by the discrediting-debunking of the historical-critical methods that have gotten us a bit in the way of loosening some of the priestly purity codes in sexual behavior and gender roles but which, in the process, have diminished so much of what is true and of vital importance in every area of moral urgency in the material and mental well-being of the least among us and the vulnerable.  

I am very tempted to go into that and might this week if I have the time in terms of what it gave and what the results, good and catastrophic,  were for gay men, something I know and have witnessed first-hand as a gay man in the time I've lived.  Believe me, I've got some experience in the reformulations of radical contemporaneity and deep rootage in tradition, between the heady language of and life of libertarian freedom, the reaction of traditional LGBTQ hatred as "Christianity" and discrimination, the practice of unfettered freedom and the radical consequences of ignoring the most basic of moral considerations for the well-being of others in the context of sexual freedom on that basis.  Much of it personal experience, even more in intimate observation of the lives and consequences for other gay men and LGBTQ people. I have a feeling the experience was like a long, slow, rabbinical disputation, lived out over years, while looking backwards.  I think I'll give into temptation to talk about that later this week.  Though this piece from years back did some of it.