Why That Religious Commandment Is The Actual Basis of Any Legitimate Government - Beyond The Left Of The Left

THE FIRST BOOK of Walter Brueggemann that I read was The Bible Makes Sense in which he said that the entire Bible, both Testaments, the entire monotheistic tradition revolves around the Exodus story.  The Children of Israel enslaved under Pharaoh, their mistreatment, the attempted genocide, their crying out for deliverance, the commissioning of Moses and Aaron, the liberation, the long wandering in the wilderness as God, through their experience, makes a People of the escaped slaves, very significantly and certainly informed by that experience The People being given The Law through Moses, etc.  

Over the several years since I read the book and studied it, it's sometimes been hard to figure out how, especially things in the Christian Scriptures, went along with Brueggemann's claim about it all relating to the Exodus and Sinai experience.  

I was asked what I thought was political about the Golden Rule that made it the basis of Western democracy, why I thought that was the actual basis of the historical existence of democracy as a modern political entity and not some ill-defined "enlightenment rationality." Which is worth going through.  Though I'd specify I said it was the basis of the elusive, yet to be attained genuine form of that, EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.  I won't,for now, again go through why I don't believe in the authenticity or durability of any other kind of democracy except the egalitarian form.  Don't worry, I'm sure I'll repeat myself on that unless we happen, through some miracle, to suddenly attain it and I can finally die happy for having seen it.

In meditating on the Commandment in the form Jesus gave it, Do to others what you would want them to do to you, it first seemed that you could only be personally responsible for actively delivering on it by acting that way yourself.  You couldn't get the others to do the same to you, that was their choice and responsibility. That was better than the alternative, certainly, but it didn't really satisfy me as being as effective in producing a better life as The Law and the Prophets should be.

But there is something else that Brueggemann pointed out about the Exodus story, God doesn't even enter into it till many verses and a couple of chapters have set things up, the flourishing of numbers of the Children of Israel in Egypt, their enslavement as a means of disempowering them (establishing their unequal status), the grinding labor and oppression under Pharaoh, his paranoid decision (no doubt because he realized he'd given them good reason to hate him) to murder all the male children of them, the infancy story of Moses, his achieving a consciousness of his ethnicity - he killed an Egyptian who who he saw beating a Hebrew slave - etc.

Brueggmann points out that when Moses finally has his incredible mystical experience of God directly talking to him through the burning bush, God, God's-self tells him that what motivated God to act through Moses and Aaron were the cries for justice by the Children of Israel.  It's clear that the righteous act of the freeing of them from bondage originated in their own consciousness of their own oppression and their protest against that, crying out to God for justice.

I think that that's something that is certainly seen in the case of Black Americans who have gotten no justice without doing the same thing.  That's an experience that is literally the same for all identifiable groups who have suffered oppression, discimination and genocide.  

It's so obvious that even those of the privileged, straight-white-affluent-oppressors will launch complaints about the endangerment or limitations on their privilege will imitate it, that's certainly what is seen all through the media, from the totally fascist, through CNN and on to NPR, they carry the complaints of the comfortable and affluent while suppressing the cries of the really oppressed. And they promote the stupid non-consideration that there is a difference between rich-white-gangsters whining when they have limits put on their theft and oppression of workers and despoliation of the environment and the real oppression of minority groups, of the destitute, the poor and even the lower ranks of what are called the "middle class" by those the media and the law and the culture favor.  For anyone who has the faith that the "free press" is going to save us, have you seen CNN since it was sold to a right winger?  

Doing your part of doing unto others is an absolute moral obligation on which a decent life and society and egalitarian democracy depends.  

But it depends as much on those who are not beneficiaries of a reciprocation by those with more wealth, power, those given a privileged place above the unprivileged doing what the Children of Israel did in Egypt, crying out against their oppressors, against their oppression.  

One of the things that is symbolized in the Seven Plagues that Moses and Aaron administered as a means of persuasion is that inequality has real consequences and those consequences will strike against the richest as well as the poorest, eventually that will be the case no matter how long the richest among us can shield themselves from those consequences.  I think the Seven Plagues in the story are an excellent abbreviation for all of the consequences we see around us today AND THE BRILLIANCE OF THE STORY IS THAT IT PROVES THAT EVEN THE HARSHEST LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE WILL BE IGNORED OR DENIED BY THOSE WHO ARE PRIVILEGED.  As Jesus put it, it's harder than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for the rich to twig onto moral obligations and to carry through with them.  

Jesus and Hillel were right when they identified that Commandment as the condensation of The Law and the Prophets in one sentence. You could spend a lifetime in unfolding it to apply it to real life.  Remember that when Hillel said that to the wise-guy who demanded he recite the Torah to him while he stood on one foot then told him to go study.  That study is meaningless unless it is made a part of our lives, of our conduct, of our demands on our societies, on our governments, on our civil legal systems.  That is why so much of religious writing is hollow and merely annoying in the end.  

That it has so seldom been understood and practiced,  that that civil law is anything but egalitarian or just and that the profession of lawyer and judge, the all-sacred commandments of contract law are generally just enabling those who can pay the most getting away with breaking it,  is an indictment of liberal democracy and the secular republic.  That all allegedly Christian churches have not been at the forefront of demanding and pressuring and coercing and nagging and guilting the allegedly Christian people to do that, as is so excellently seen in, for example, many of the Black Churches, is an indictment of the pseudo-christianity that a disturbingly dangerous percentage of Christians give lip service to.  The kind of stuff you hear from the mammonists of the Republican-fascist party, the TV hallelujah peddlers, the majority of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, etc.  And yet they wonder why young people reject Christianity in view of that florid hypocrisy.  Though, I wouldn't necessarily think a lot of those who reject Christianity are really interested in the costly justice of egalitarian democracy, they've been sold the opposite by the materialist-atheist-scientistic secularism that is as bad as the pseudo-Christian hypocrites.

We are, through myriads of academic and other modern writing used to the failure of deputed "Christians" in this regard being given to condemn Christianity to that most certain of deaths under modernism, being unfashionable.   But the same people never, ever make the far more obviously relevant criticism of secular, civil government, law and society when, if anything, they are worse because they never deal with the morality of it.  Academia's habits and norms are as willfully blind as the worst of theology and other official church talk.  Academia is as tied to Mammon as the civil law and secular government and the worst of ecclesiastical establishments.

Even if you see this it's a constant struggle to do it, it's especially hard for someone who is affluent and that accounts for even many of us in the lower-middle class, especially those of us who are white and can pass as straight.  It's hard to maintain but it is absolutely necessary to do more than that, it's necessary to do what the slaves in Exodus and in the American context have had to do and struggle against it. I wish I had read Brueggemann's book when it was first published in the 1970s, I'd have saved four decades of futility in the tail-chasing of secular political economics.  That's what happens when you consciously decide to exclude God from the problem, there is no absolute goal, there is no one to point the direction to that.  You have to choose to believe in order to stop going round in circles and move ahead.  That is one of the most important lessons of the Jewish monotheistic tradition, what makes it superior to all of the static systems, pagan and materialistic.  I'd rather "waste my life" trying than giving up in lazy, self-satisfied, wallowing in whatever measure of affluence I can hoard for myself.

I will add that though I think a lot of the story as written in Exodus may well have not happened like the narrative has it, that the numbers of the Children of Israel and many other things may have been exaggerated in the typical narrative practices of those cultures, that many of the passages may well be allegorical creations that encapsulate an experienced truth through an illustrative fiction, I have come to believe there was someone who corresponds to Moses whose flashes of insight and revelation produced the core of The Law and who well may have led a group of runaway slaves out of the oppression of Pharaoh.  I also am convinced that, as it comes down to us, even in the books of the Torah, that that core of insight has had many accretions added to it, some of them in concord with that original insight, some of them corruptions of it.  Like all of the Bible, especially the oldest books of it, trying to discern which is which is a risky endeavor.  That is why I have decided to make Hillel's and Jesus's key to it the hermenutic with which I will work that. That and the rule of thumb Jesus also gave for testing claims of holiness, "By their fruits you will know them."  

I think there was such a person as Moses and I think he had real mystical insights into these things which accounts for why his idea of God and of the moral nature of the universe is so different and why it has endured while none of the others - except areligious Mammonism - has.  Without independent verification of Moses and what really happened, that's a conjecture but it's one I believe in.  The best written evidence we have of that is the Hebrew Scriptures and the other versions of that, the Septuagint and the other versions of the story.  But the truth of it isn't written on paper or on clay, it's in the lived experience and observed experience of us, especially those who struggle against injustice, against inequality and for real democracy. Especially those closest to the experience of the Children of Israel under Pharaoh.  The only alternative is the gangsterism of Pharaoh or Trump or Putin or Xi or Bolsonaro or their pale imitators in gangster states and even secular democracies around the world.

I've never read an academic alternative to the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels which I don't now think would devolve into the same thing just under another name. I'm totally skeptical of that because of what I see all around us, too.  The history of the 20th and 21st century, the support of the secular left for Marxist gangsters, the "Long Detour" of the American left,  etc. Even now the support by the would-be moralists of the American secular left, the stinking Green Party, Noam Chomsky speaking up for Putin put the rotten cherry on top of it.