Fourth. The triad of fidelity attests to pain whereas the triad of control specializes in numbness. So, the Book of Lamentations, "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by. Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought on me which The Lord has inflicted on the day of His fierce anger" [Lamentations 1:12] The city voices its grief and loss and then notices that the other nations who pass by do not notice. Is it nothing to you? The triad of control, like the priest or the Levite on the way to Jericho [Luke 10:25-37] in numbness do not notice, they pass by on the other side, they have faster errands to run, they have reduced pain to a statistic and suffering to the cost of doing business. The practice of abusive power, exploitative economics, devastating militarism and the disturbance of the vulnerable of the Earth must continue, even if the pain therein produced requires denial. The denial is based on the race to domination and we cannot afford to linger very long in the hurt.
When such denial is pushed far enough it becomes numbness, what Robert Lifton calls "psychic numbing." The alternative (to) such numbing is to hear and touch and honor the pain that arises, what Lifton calls atrocity producing polices, systems and attitude. It is pain that lives beneath the surface of might, wisdom and wealth. And the triad of fidelity beginning with the Exodus narrative has the slaves cry out and then the narrative says God heard and God remembered and God looked and God took notice and God came down. The wonder of this triad is that God acts in solidarity. And the story of faith is the story of divine solidarity with human suffering and alliance beyond the drama of control. God bends God's-self toward the suffering of Israel and toward the suffering of the world.
But, of course, this triad of fidelity does not remain at a religious level, we can trace the cry and the holy response as it traverses the world of might and wealth. So right after the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 22, Moses comments on that psychic numbness, even though he had not read Lifton, and says you shall not oppress the immigrant. You shall not abuse the widow or the orphan because if you do and they cry out I will hear them. And if you lend money to my poor People you shall not deal with them as a creditor, you shall not exact interest and if you take your neighbor's cloak in pawn you shall restore it before the sun goes down. Imagine doing that with a 30-year loan every night.
These two laws in Exodus 22 focus on the vulnerable who are our primary candidates for pain, always the protection of immigrants and widows and orphans and poor people.
The university runs the risk of alliance with the interests of might, wisdom and wealth, knowledge from above that treats the cry as a necessary inconvenience.
It is possible, however, that the university may be a venue in which the long history of the subversive cry is hosted so that the long literature of truth and hurt is received and honored as a contemporary script. Preoccupation with the cry is natural in the humanities but it is no less urgent in the social sciences, in economics, in the Earth sciences, where the Earth itself cries out about the abuse.
The question that might haunt the university as it may haunt all of is is it, is it nothing to you, all of you who pass by?
The Prophet Amos chronicles this narcoticized self-indulgence, "Alas for all those who lie on beds of ivory and eat lambs from the flock who sing idle songs and drink bowls of wine and anoint themselves with finest oil but are not aware that Joseph is going to hell in a hand basket . . . So much is lost in translation. And that poem ends by saying, "They shall be the first ones to go into exile."
Those who do not notice will be displaced because the cry pulses and the numbing will not prevail.
The parable of the Good Samaritan from the link to Luke above is, as Marilynne Robinson pointed out, a refutation of the charge made in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins that the morality taught by Jesus and the Hebrew tradition called only for justice for the members of their ethnic group, he and the scientific racists Kevin MacDonald and John Hartung assert that is an expression of evolutionary psychology, gene selfishness, an evidence of natural selection at work.
But that's not at all true, it is a widespread lie told against Jews and the entire tradition, including, at times Jesus the Jew. The universalism that is made explicit in the Christian teachings of Paul are not absent from the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus reflects and extends that. That is right there to be read or ignored and lied about.
Jesus holds up, against two members of the most respected classes among the Children of Israel, a member of the widely disdained group, the Samaritans as the true neighbor to the presumably Jewish man who was mugged, robbed, stripped and left for dead. Robinson also points out, as W.B. does that in The Law, the Torah that extension to the immigrant, the stranger living among them, was already made. It already contained what would be called among late 20th century and contemporary liberation theologians "a preference of the poor," for the least among us.
Walter Brueggemann contrasts that with the dominant secular articulation that has no time for all of that in its pursuit of power and control and wealth, none of which is any surprise though it would be to those who he's talking about. In that triad greed is good, explicitly or under the surface of it.
He doesn't but, of course, I would contrast that with the paradigm of biological progress in the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of the origin of species. I've commented on that long and at enormous length but, since a theme of his talk is the role of academia in the triad of control I can't resist pointing out something that occurred to me recently.
I wonder about the great question of how species arose out of other species, the original species having been said to go extinct in time. But there is a huge difference between a species which changes into another species (perhaps under a somewhat superficial and short-sighted human conception of species) and the cutting off of a species through human extinction through hunting or destruction of habitat as the human paradigm of control does like no other species ever has. If a species gave rise to other species, is that really the same thing as that species being wiped out without them leaving a persisting line of offspring, no matter how different they look from their great-great-great. . . grandparents?
I'm unaware of anyone explaining how that is consistent with the claims of Darwinism, natural selection. Especially now when other mechanisms of biological change are known to happen and the actual evidence of natural selection is so weak that it might all not be there at all. I think natural selection is a delusion, the product of scientists pretending to explain something that can't be observed or quantified so they substitute a theory and pretend that is sufficient. I would call into question whether or not the entire troublesome history of Darwinism-eugenics-scientific racism might be on a short-sighted framing of the actual framing of the question of how species change over time. Apparently the great-great-great, . . . grandparents of different species were sufficiently "fit" so as to leave a persisting line of very different looking offspring, going back far enough, individual species, of course, leaving a number of different species in time. "Flaws" and all which made the original species "go extinct" when what really happened is it just changed. I think it calls into question the entire structure of natural selection which may well be a human delusion with its genocidal legacy and its continuing legacy in "Bell Curve" scientific racism as political policy promoting economic injustice. I've noted a few of the new atheists of the 00s have explicitly supported that.
Natural selection is certainly the misidentification of the British class system as a natural entity a fit model of nature when it is founded on an entirely artificial, man made law created and enforced means of squeezing the life out of the English poor and tying them down to a parish that was reluctantly responsible for those the Law of Moses commanded be treated much better. A more malignant serfdom with minimal obligations from the affluent and more easily disposed of poor People, the poor houses a model for 20th century death camps. I think the academic character of how Darwinism and, in fact, all of modern biology arose in the industrial system of the 19th and 20th centuries cannot help but present a distorted picture of the evolution of species that is a product of the prejudices, the expectations, the habits of thought and the self-interests of those affluent men who first adopted it and made allegiance to it mandatory within that profession and it persists as an unconsidered habit.
And so much of that results in our modernistic form of the triad of control, especially in regard to the attitude of racial, class and gender inferiority and superiority, replacing the Brit class system model of immutable and unequal value of People for the Christian egalitarian model of the Gospel, one hardly overly practiced in professed Christianity even before then but certainly there in the scriptures for rare individuals and rarer groups to read and take seriously enough to try to put its radical egalitarianism and provision for the poor, "deserving" and "undeserving" into effect. Some even to the extent where they tried to imitate Jesus, who goes farther than Jeremiah does. However, I think it is worth thinking about how prominent Jewish People have been, for their relatively small numbers in the great progressive movements of social equality and provision to the least among us, something that is used against them by those professed Christians who are all in on the triad of control, gun-toting Christmas cards, "herd immunity" anti-"Critical Race Theory" and all. It certainly shows what a lie the scientific antisemitism mentioned above is. The universalism shows up a lot earlier in the Bible, it never shows up in Darwinism which denies and tries to refute it. That is, except through an ass-covering afterthought of "mutual aid" which cannot coherently be made compatible with natural selection. It would have been no help to the slaves held in America at all, certainly not compared to the Hebrew Scriptures.
The more I go through this exercise the better I think Walter Brueggemann's method of considering the contrast between the two triads many different ways in this lecture is. It's a way to go deep into it. No doubt in this one there would be many more ways to look at it. I'd like to read some from different perspectives.
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