Either I am a contrarian

Or I am determined to make somebody mad at me. *

Walter Brueggeman, in a series of lectures I attended last week, made an interesting connection, one I hadn't thought about. And when I did, I made some connections of my own. But the estimable Dr. Brueggeman first.

He started out with Deuteronomy, which he pointed out provided the richest material in the Bible on the topic of obedience to the covenants with God. The main theme he drew from Deuteronomy (with, of course, examples) was that the economy of God's people (those in the covenant) should be organized for the sake of the neighborhood. Not for the sake of the nation, the individual, the "greater good," but the neighborhood.

Stop right there and, if you know the work of Wendell Berry, recognize the connections. (If you don't, shame on you. Stop reading and go read some of Berry's non-fiction works on economy, and then come back. I expect better of my readership than that. Go on, this will be here when you get back. Right, then.) Berry critiques, for example, the phrase: "Think globally, act locally." It's nonsense, he says. We are incapable of "thinking globally," because the world is not merely an extension of whatever you have locally, just with strangers in it. It's far too complex for that, and trying to "think globally" simply minimizes the importance of the distinctness of other localities (which may have problems you don't, or not have the problems you do). Far better, he says, to think locally and act locally. Keep your eye on the neighborhood, in other words.

Back to Brueggeman: the situation described in Deuteronomy, he says (there is a bit of an anachronism here, since Deuteronomy is the restatement of the law and history set out in Exodus, and was written after the Exile, not before; but go with the flow a moment), existed by and large up until the time of Solomon, he of the temple and "wisdom." That's when it started going downhill, because Solomon led Israel away from the covenantal economy, and toward an imperial one.

Solomon became a centralized power in Israel (something, by the way, God had warned Israel about back in 1 Samuel). He became the main source and owner of chariots and arms, which he also sold; so he was an arms dealer. He levied tributes on those who came through Israel (it was on the trade routes), and on all the peole of Israel. Tributes, of course, are nothing more than taxes, and they do nothing more than take money from the many, and give it to the one: the king. It's good to be king; for the king. He also built the Temple, in a style typical for the Near East; but there's another issue there, and it's the same underlying issue: the Temple enforced control.

The Temple was arranged into three areas: the outer Temple, where women and slaves and all the "non-persons" of Israel could gather. The Inner Temple, where the men of Israel alone could go; and, in a small room at the back, the "holy of holies," where only the priest could enter. Brueggeman said if you put wings on the Temple, it would be a modern passenger plane. The elite board first, and get the best seats in a special section, while the rest of us board last and sit cheek by jowl. Those up front even get the curtain drawn so we can't see what they are eating. The cockpit, of course, is there the priest goes.

Contrast this to Sinai, says Brueggeman, where all of Israel saw Moses on the mountain talking to God. Now, most of Israel can't even go into the inner temple, and no one is allowed to venture into the place where God could be seen.

Control, in other words, with access guaranteed by accidents of birth. All the Jubilee stuff that comes into Deuteronomy, by the way, doesn't even exist yet, and under Solomon it never will. That would cost him control.

Solomon becomes "wise," too, not because he is born that way, but because he puts scholars on his payroll, and pays them to know and learn wisdom and give it to him as he needs it. He controls knowledge, then, too; as much as he possibly can. And Solomon does one more thing: when he fights his brother for the throne, he kills all his brother's supporters after he becomes king. All of them save the priest, whom he exiles to a small village, where the priest leaves so long as he remains quiet. His power consolidated, Solomon proceeds to build a Temple to prove his power and wealth, and to enjoy a reputation that he largely bought and paid for with other people's money.

Jump ahead about 400 years, to the impending Babylonian Exile. Now comes Jeremiah, descended from a long line of priests, from that very village where Solomon exiled the priest who had supported his brother. And now Jeremiah tells the reigning king:

Let not the wise boast of their wisdom,
nor the valiant of their valour;
let not the wealthy boast of their wealth;
but if anyone must boast, let him boast of this:
that he understands and acknowledges me.
For I am the LORD, I show unfailing love,
I do justice and right on the earth;
for in these I take pleasure.
This is the word of the LORD.

There is a direct rebuke of the descendants of Solomon there. Solomon who purchased his wisdom and his palace and his power and even the Temple, with his central concern for Solomon, and what Solomon could obtain, and own, and control. Solomon who used his control of horses and chariots to exact tribute (read: taxes) from others; who used the location of Israel along the trade routes to exact a toll for what passed through the land, and made sure the money went to Solomon, not to the community. Solomon cared about Solomon, not about:

How good and pleasant it is to live together as brothers in unity!
It is like fragrant oil poured on the head
and falling over the beard,
Aaron's beard, when the oil runs down
over the collar of his vestments.
Is is as if the dew of Hermon were falling
on the mountains of Zion.
There the LORD bestows his blessing,
life for evermore (Psalm 133)

The LORD bestows the blessing freely. Solomon makes sure the blessing is recovered and rewarded to Solomon. Solomon, like the Pharoah, says there isn't enough to go around: not enough money, not enough power, not enough wisdom, and I, Solomon, must control it all, must deal in it, must buy and sell in all the marketplaces, of arms, of ideas, of palaces, even of religion. Because of this, says Jeremiah, comes the Exile. Because of this, Isaiah tells Israel, the people, not the kings:

"Come for water, all who are thirsty;
though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat;
come, buy wine and milk, not for money, not for a price.
Why spend your money for what is not food
your earnings on what fails to satisfy?
Listen to me and you will fare well,
you will enjoy the fat of the land. (Isaiah 55:1-2)

Listen, not to the king, but the LORD. Fare well not because the king is wise, or rich, or virtuous, but because of the goodness of the LORD. And buy without money, buy food without price, because economic transactions are not the basis of true life. There is no basis of exchange here: "Come to me and listen to my words, hear me and you will have life." (Isaiah 55:3). It is the call of the Creator, who gave life simply by speaking, in the beginning; and who gives life still, simply by speaking. And what is life if not a gift, something for which you can't give anything in exchange, which you can't even accept or acknowledge or receive, because you can never step away from it, apart from it, stand beside it and recognize it as something other to you, something which you could be given. What you is there to give to, if you don't already have life?

And because of the Exile comes Deuteronomy; the book of identity; and not identity for the king, but for the people. The people to whom God has given the one gift which can be given: life.

The consistent thread through the Hebrew scriptures into the proclamation of the basileia tou theou is that humans must eschew and avoid political power, because power draws its source from the fear of scarcity. As Brueggemann reads the Biblical narrative, Pharoah represents the people who live in fear and anxiety and anger. Such people have no energy left over for the neighborhood. In the story of Joseph and Pharoah, the guy with the most power and authority and wealth, dreams of scarcity. Which is not surprising; Pharoah's oikos is governed by the fear of running out. It is what keeps him in control, keeps him in power and why the people allow him to rule. This anxiety about scarcity is what drives the Hebrews into slavery and so, in brief, Genesis moves into Exodus.

Now Pharoah is so afraid of scarcity, so filled with anxiety for what might be taken from him, he begins to kill the babies of the Hebrews (and here the parallel to Herod in the New Testament, where he is clearly Pharoah to all the Gospel writers, becomes clearer. This is where Matthew draws his parallel with the Massacre of the Innocents). This is Pharoah's anxiety at work. As my notes indicate from the lecture: "The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love." Which all by itself explains much about the reaction to Tom Fox, and even to the desire to go to war in the Middle East, a desire Wesley Clark says originally led to a plan to invade 7 countries in that region. But the story of the Exodus is that "Anxiety generated by ideology and social systems is not a part of the human condition." It is, in other words, our creation, and our creation, unlike God's, is grossly imperfect.

Enter Moses, a person with nothing who dreamed of freedom and departure from the "anxiety producing system." And then there is the miracle in the desert, the gift of God's abundance in the manna which comes to break the influence of the anxiety system (it comes as the people are complaining that they were better off in Egypt than in the desert). Our anxiety, Brueggemann notes, is a product of our lack of trust (faith) in God. God's offer of abundance, he says, calls into question the anxiety created by social systems, by human structures and strictures; and yet God never gives us more than "this day our daily bread."

I consider this point as I wander around the bookstore on a quiet afternoon, looking at titles like Why We Want You to Be Rich and The Joys of Much Too Much, which advises me on the cover that I can "have it all," including the perfect spouse, the perfect career, perfection in everything. And the anxiety of not obtaining all that, of never achieving "perfection"? Negative thinking which holds me back from my success; or, in some teachings, from having the faith in God that will pay off big for me. But the question of faith is yet another question, isn't it?

As for the issue of power, that is my own reading. The people of Israel got along well enough (with incidents of disagreement, of course; the Bible is nothing if not honest) under the leadership of Moses and the elders, and then the peace between tribes and families was kept by the judges, who were basically arbitrators. God warns Samuel that the people won't be happy with a king ruling over them, and when Israel insists God finally gives in, and gives them Saul. Things go bad almost from the start, and soon Saul is hunting David and jealous of this new king who will usurp his authority (think Herod several centuries later hunting down the infant Jesus; Matthew did). In a very real sense, Israel never recovered, and the prophets preach, not the vengeance and punishment of God, but the price of apostasy and greed, a greed and apostasy made inevitable by the decision to abandon the covenental economy in favor of an imperial economy. The covenental economy is proclaimed in Isaiah (64). The imperial economy was proclaimed by Gordon Gecko: "Greed is good." It is the economy of scarcity, of want, of never having quite enough and being driven by the constant goad to acquire more, to establish security based on insecurity, to store up treasure on earth where moth and rust and thieves will, sooner or later, get to it. Consider the actual historical experience of the Pharoahs, who could not take it with them. Sooner or later, someone else took it.

So it's 1-2-3, what are we fightin' for? By "we," I mean Christians; whether we are fighting among ourselves for who can be members of "our" church and in what capacity, or fighting with politicians for how the power is divided, wielded, employed, and controlled. Are we fighting to establish our identity? Do we need to fight someone else in order to do that? Do we need to set our boundaries by who we are in opposition to? (That link is just one of many examples on one of many topics.) Is that any different from finding our identity in what we own, what we have, what we can keep? As long as my identity is in things or idea, does it matter what those things or ideas are? Is God simply an idea?

Which leads us back to the question of faith, but doesn't leave us with an answer. Frustrating, isn't it? I blame the limitations of blog posts.


*Well, that must have been how it seemed when I started this. I left that opening there but, since I haven't linked to anyone, perhaps no one will notice, or take offense. Or they'll all just continue ignoring me. Let the reader understand.

Re-considering the lilies

Brueggeman has inspired my thinking.

Start with this, the concluding paragraph to an interesting (and old) article by Thomas Frank:

Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.

Back up and get this, the preceding paragraph to that one:

And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.

Mihaly (I'm not going to try to even copy that last name) is right:  creativity is a matter of consensus. This applies to religious communities and their scriptures, as well.

How are the scriptures to be read?  Joel Osteen assures me the scriptures are to be read in a way that means God wants me to be rich.  Not spiritually rich (although that comes as a concomitant), but materially rich.  Fundamentalists assure me the scriptures must not only be taken literally, but soteriologically, in that only those who read scriptures as they do will escape damnation and eternity in a lake of fire.  There are other methods of interpretation, such as Brueggeman's.

And if you listened to that entire lecture, you got to the Q & A at the end, where Brueggeman ended with some harsh words for historical criticism of the very kind he did in his younger years (I have his books).  Well, his work was certainly informed by that 19th century scholarship; but his critique is not off-base, either.  His real target was the idol of historical criticism, probably including the Jesus Seminar, that seminaries and seminarians (i.e, pastors) tend to make of their education and their seminary experience.  Idols have always to be torn down and tossed aside.  Therein lies the perpetual problem of religious communities (and all communities), and the perpetual need to, as Brueggeman also says in that Q & A, to return to the scriptures.  He takes on there a campaign popular in the UCC in 2007, that "God is still speaking."  His reference to the comma is to a phrase the campaign attributed to Gracie Allen, of Burns & Allen fame:  "Never put a period where God has put a comma."  Brueggeman is right:  you can't treat that comma is if everything before it was now irrelevant and unnecessary.

So how are the scriptures to be read? On-line atheists proof-text them for stories of calamity and horror that disturb their delicate sensibilities, to "prove" something is wrong there; although what is wrong depends on who is looking and what they think they are finding.  Does such a search determine the utility of the scriptures?  Well, it does for the group doing the proof-texting; but for the rest of us?  Not so much.

Consider the matter of art.  It is only recently that Van Gogh has become one of the great artists.  I can still remember when he was more attempter than succeeder, more an effort than a goal achieved.  Now he is praised as one of the greatest ever.  Within my lifetime a sufficient number of experts have agreed that Van Gogh's work has "something important to contribute to the domain of art."  And we all agree because Van Gogh's work is at least representational.

I'm planning to go to a Rothko exhibit at the museum next week, before it closes.  I've been wanting to go because the only other place I can see Rothko's work whenever I want is the Rothko Chapel, and frankly, I find the experience there wanting.  I want to see more of his work and learn why I should appreciate it better.  Will I be convinced that Rothko has "something important to contribute to the domain of art"?  If so, will that mean that I finally understand Rothko's oeuvre?  Or will it just mean I finally accept the reasoning of the consensus of the community concerned?

The latter is not a failing.  Art is not objectively "good" or "bad."  Neither is science, though we act today (in some circles) as if it were.  Maybe we need to bring back the trope of the "mad scientist."  It might be a useful corrective again.

There is a Brueggemanian (at least!) challenge addressed to the people Thomas Frank is describing in his concluding paragraph quoted above.  The challenge is to the idea of "established expertise."  Brueggeman would personify that as "Solomon."

The interesting thing about Solomon is how little we know about him, yet how much we admire him for what he told us he was.  He was wise, was Solomon; and he had all the scholars in his employ to say so for him.  We think of him dividing the baby (when he never meant to); we don't think of him as an arms dealer, trading with other nations in order to create power for Israel, and shifting arms north and south between Judah and Israel in order to make money on these transfers for his coffers.  The only other time we think of him is the one Brueggeman mentioned; in connection with Jesus and the lilies.  As Brueggeman says, we miss the point of that one rather badly.

The consensus is virtually impenetrable, and the consensus is that Solomon was a Very Good Guy.

The consensus is wrong.  But consensus gets entrenched; it becomes difficult to dislodge.  Read the "featured comment" at that Frank article; it ends with a rejection of that paragraph on Van Gogh because, it argues, Van Gogh was clearly and objectively great, it just took time for the world to realize it.  Is art so clearly objective and true?  Are the great sculptures of Greece beautiful because we put them in museums?  Or do we put them in museums because they are beautiful?  What about primitive art, or the African art that inspired Picasso and early 20th century Paris?  Not beautiful because it is not Grecian?  Beautiful in spite of not being Western?  Beautiful because it is the work of human hands?  What is beauty, except what we agree on at any one time, in any one place?

As I say, when I was young Van Gogh was considered good; now he is considered one of the greatest ever.  What changed?  Van Gogh's work; or our consensus?

Consensus is not the parlous, weak thing it may appear to be.  Consensus is not the mere hardening of opinion into "common sense."  Consensus is powerful; consensus is determinative and definitional.  A dictionary definition, after all, is just the consensus of how a word is used, usage determining content and meaning, content and meaning determining definition.  When we decide definitions rule us, when we decide consensus is objective truth, we are shaping idols of stone and metal, and bowing down to them.

We should not sneer at the consensus; but neither should we worship it.  We can make an idol of consensus, just as fundamentalists (IMHO) make an idol of the scriptures, even as they make it over in their own image by doing so.  It's that kind of idolatry Brueggeman is warning the UCC General Synod against at the end of the Q & A following his remarks.  Consensus makes us think the historical school of Biblical criticism is the only exegetical approach pastors can offer their congregations.   Consensus makes us think Solomon was a Very Good Guy.  Consensus makes us miss the point of Jesus' statement to his disciples about the lilies and the raiment of Solomon.  Consensus can make us miss the whole point of the Scriptures, the entire reason why they are still important after so many millennia.

The consensus, after all, tells us what we are naked; and hungry; and we really should make that our ultimate concern.

He said to his disciples, "That's why I tell you:  don't fret about life-what you're going to eat--or about your body--what you're going to wear.  Remember, there is more to living than food and clothing.  Think about the crows:  they don't plant or harvest, they don't have storerooms or barns.  Yet God feeds them.  You're worth a lot more than the birds!  Can any of you add an hour to life by fretting about it?  So if you can't do a little thing like that, why worry about the rest?  Think about how the lilies grow:  they don't slave and they never spin.  Yet let me tell you, even Solomon at the height of his glory was never decked out like one of these."--Luke 12:22-27, SV.

Streams in the Desert

Nature, Annie Dillard tells us, is profligate. Consider the sunflower seed, and how true this is; not only true, but necessary. One seed will produce a plant with a flower the size of a truck steering wheel; and in that flower, will be many more seeds. Enough seeds to produce more plants, or to supply seeds for animals to eat, and still produce plants. Thanks to the profligacy of nature, one seed equals many seeds. Call it the arithmetic of biology, where 1+1=3, or 4, or a dozen, or two dozen. Without this arithmetic, life itself would be impossible. Without the wild profligacy of nature, none of us would be here to examine this wild profligacy. We are all the product of extravagance; but then there's the second part of Ms. Dillard's observation: "Nature is profligate, but wastes nothing."

Humans, it seems, waste everything. Which leads us to the conviction of shortage, of limits, of scarcity. We are convinced security is scarce, that is must be hoarded, defended, girded round with walls and barriers and men atop those walls with guns, all to protect what is ours, to keep it from running out, to prevent it from becoming scarce. Convinced of scarcity, we create scarcity. Consider the conclusions of Alfred Stiglitz. He estimates the cost of the Iraq war to already be $3 trillion, and anticipates the true cost, especially in care for veterans of the war, will end up between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. The White House response, of course, is the response of the defenders of scarcity as status quo:

"People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.

"It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. ... What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"

We are, you see, like nature: profligate; except that we waste what is most precious:

The war's gravest toll has been paid in blood. Fighting in Iraq so far taken the lives of 3,973 U.S. troops and left nearly 29,300 wounded. Its staggering expense, however, has already dwarfed the 2003 White House war estimate of $60 billion, and the price continues to rise.

"America is a rich country," said Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and former World Bank chief economist.

"The question is not whether we can afford to squander $3 trillion or $5 trillion," he told committee members. "We can. But our strength will be sapped. ... There is no such thing as a free war."

As for what the White House said about Mr. Stiglitz' estimates, he has a very direct response:

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, I think the White House lacks the courage to engage in a national debate about the cost of the Iraq war. The Joint Economic Committee has asked the White House to come down and discuss the numbers; they’ve refused. Security is important, and we don’t deny that. The question is whether this war has been the best way of obtaining the security. And no matter what you’re going to do—you know, what you think about security, you still have to look at the cost. The costs have been important, even for the way we’ve waged the war. The reason the administration presumably did not buy, for instance, the MRAPs, these special vehicles that would have reduced the number of deaths by a very large fraction, is economics. So, you know, no matter what one says, economics is important, and the American people have the right to have an understanding of what those costs are. When we went to war, they said it was going to cost $50 billion. We are now spending that money upfront every three months, and that’s not even including the cost of veterans’ healthcare and disability down the line.

The market determines value based on scarcity. As Mr. Stiglitz explained to Amy Goodman:

When we say $3 trillion, that’s really an underestimate. We attributed, in our book, only $5 to $10 to the war itself. But if you look back, in 2003, futures markets, which take into account increases in demand, increases in supply—they knew that China was going to have increased demand, but they thought there would be increases in supply from the Middle East—they thought the price would remain at $25 for the next ten years or more. What changed that equation was the Iraq war. They couldn’t elicit the increase of supply in the Middle East because of the turmoil that we brought there. So we think, actually, the true numbers, not the $5 or $10 that we used, because we didn’t want to get in a quibble, but really a much larger fraction of the difference between $25 that it was at the time in 2003 and the $100 we face today.

Scarcity is the peculiar province of economics, the "dismal science." How much is available to go around, how fairly can it be distributed? This is the assumption of utilitarianism, this is the assumption of John Rawls' "Theory of Justice," this is the assumption of economists: scarcity is the nature of the world, now how do we adjust our desires to meet this wholly reasonable and undeniable conclusion? The economic pie can only be so large. Full employment, for example, would be disastrous: without a scarcity of jobs, what bargaining power would the employer have, what incentive would drive the workder to labor rather than laziness? With every niche filled, there would be nowhere to go, and little reason to worry about being asked to go. Scarcity is not only reality, we deem it necessity. The desert is our model for the world, it is the spur of our incentives: we are not creatures driven and derided by lust, because lust we can market. Lust is another model of scarcity, as you can never have enough things, look good enough, have enough sex or be attractive, knowleadgeable, witty, intelligent, enough. You must always lack and desire what you do not have. It is not lust we are driven by now, but fear. Fear for our security, but also fear for our want, fear that the world, indeed, is not enoughm and that we must always have more. Our fear is that the world is actually the desert we are afraid it might be, and that enough will never be afforded us.

Oddly, I think this is new, and it is American. In Stanley Kubrick's vision of Anthony Burgess' venture into the future, the world they imagine in A Clockwork Orange is not a world of plentitude and scarcity: it is a world of emptiness and spiritual waste. Alex is a creature of appetites, but those appetites are not the appetites Sitting Bull complained of. The love of possession is not a disease with him: indeed, he sees the world as his oyster, and reprimands his "droogs" when they spurn his authority over them. He reminds them everything they want is theirs for the taking, and, indeed, the live a life of crime and rape and theft that supplies all their needs, but their needs seem to be small. They steal cars and money as an exercise in power, not possession. Theirs is a dissolute life, but it is not a possessive one. Still, to an American eye, Alex's world is a very British one. He lives in a block of concrete flats, government housing small and cramped and anonymous, with even the public are in the lobby defaced in reaction to the soul-lessness, the dehumanizing atmosphere of the place. But no one complains of that, and the solution doesn't seem to be a more open marketplace. Alex's one venture into a store reveals as glittering and gaudy an arena as ever could be wished for, so it isn't lack of goods that plague his world, it is lack of humanity, and that is not a purchasable commodity. Indeed, the woman he kills inadvertently is a merchant in human happiness, and a collector of frankly pornographic art. The primary difference between her and Alex is his use of physical power, of violence. It is enough, but it isn't violence driven by what she owns and he doesn't. Yet what we hear today about terrorists or illegal aliens is all the same thing: we have something "they" want, and they will come and take it from us, will enjoy what we have, and we won't be able to any longer. That is not a fear peculiar only to American culture, but it is certainly a fear peculiar to American political culture today.

No character in Kubrick's film seems concerned with acquisition at all, or with what will be taken from them. Their only concern is power, and who wields it (rape, after all, Alex's favored mode of expression, is just another form of violence; and all violence is about exerting power). Which is another way of looking at scarcity, and another reason why we ventured, as a country, into a disastrous and misguided war. We were even assured the war would not create scarcity but defeat it, and now when Alfred Stiglitz tells us just the opposite has happened, the White House hastily changes the subject, deflects attention from the fear of want to the fear of losing what we have. So Americans at home are told only to worry about scarcity, are told only to shop after national calamity, or how we don't have the resources to help the people of the Gulf Coast after Katrina; or how we can't help borrowers caught in the subprime mortgage catastrophe; or told how we can't wage war and help the poor, the homeless, the sick, the infirm, even the veterans of the war that is making everything else too expensive, although we are assured that war either costs us nothing, or is a price worth paying. Power itself is an expression of scarcity, so that even those of us who proclaim power a necessary evil which we will wield wisely, confess the scarcity of the world, rather than the profligacy of God, the Creator who made the profligacy of nature.

Looking at what technology has wrought across the face of the earth since the discovery of the uses of petroleum barely 100 years ago, and the near exhaustion of that same resource today, it would seem economics and the notion of scarcity is not only true, but rational. That is the lesson of global warming: that there isn't enough to go around, and now we must reduce our demands, we must limit what we can do, expect, desire. The world is a desert, and we must act accordingly. Ironically, the desert is precisely where people have gone for centuries to encounter the God of Abraham, the one known as the Creator.

Consider, first, that is has always been this way; and it has not always been this way. When was the last time you heard someone talk like this?

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
-- Edward Bellamy

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.
-- John Dewey

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings
-- John Stuart Mill

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play.
-- Robert F. Kennedy

We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

Three from the 19th century, two from the twentieth. It is hard to imagine an American public figure today speaking as Bellamy and Dewey did, or an American politician speaking as Kennedy did. And Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, only had a "dream," not a critique of American society that sounds very much like the little regarded and much despised liberation theology of Latin America. A helpful prelude, though, to a discussion of a much older text, and much older ideas, from another culture. Too old, and ideas are easily dismissed as ancient and irrelevant. But Ecclesiastes is right, and again and again we learn that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. We take that, too, as a lesson of scarcity, and tell ourselves nothing could be new under the sun, so we must accept the present as an inevitable and ineluctable extension of the past; which is no more true than the myth of scarcity we cling to for our survival.

You can consider this in the terms of what Naomi Klein calls the "shock doctrine." Or you can consider it in even more direct terms, of who gets to control the natural resources like water. It comes to the same end: the preaching of scarcity, commodification as a way of making something more desirable. So long as someone else can create a scarcity which they can then supply, they will have power. And what is true for multinational corporations was equally true for Solomon:

Solomon became a centralized power in Israel (something, by the way, God had warned Israel about back in 1 Samuel). He became the main source and owner of chariots and arms, which he also sold; so he was an arms dealer. He levied tributes on those who came through Israel (it was on the trade routes), and on all the peole of Israel. Tributes, of course, are nothing more than taxes, and they do nothing more than take money from the many, and give it to the one: the king. It's good to be king; for the king. He also built the Temple, in a style typical for the Near East; but there's another issue there, and it's the same underlying issue: the Temple enforced control.

The Temple was arranged into three areas: the outer Temple, where women and slaves and all the "non-persons" of Israel could gather. The Inner Temple, where the men of Israel alone could go; and, in a small room at the back, the "holy of holies," where only the priest could enter. [Walter] Brueggeman said if you put wings on the Temple, it would be a modern passenger plane. The elite board first, and get the best seats in a special section, while the rest of us board last and sit cheek by jowl. Those up front even get the curtain drawn so we can't see what they are eating. The cockpit, of course, is there the priest goes.

Contrast this to Sinai, says Brueggeman, where all of Israel saw Moses on the mountain talking to God. Now, most of Israel can't even go into the inner temple, and no one is allowed to venture into the place where God could be seen.

Control, in other words, with access guaranteed by accidents of birth. All the Jubilee stuff that comes into Deuteronomy, by the way, doesn't even exist yet, and under Solomon it never will. That would cost him control.

Solomon becomes "wise," too, not because he is born that way, but because he puts scholars on his payroll, and pays them to know and learn wisdom and give it to him as he needs it. He controls knowledge, then, too; as much as he possibly can. And Solomon does one more thing: when he fights his brother for the throne, he kills all his brother's supporters after he becomes king. All of them save the priest, whom he exiles to a small village, where the priest leaves so long as he remains quiet. His power consolidated, Solomon proceeds to build a Temple to prove his power and wealth, and to enjoy a reputation that he largely bought and paid for with other people's money.

Under Brueggeman's analysis, Solomon might well fit into Klein's "shock doctrine." Solomon fights his brother for control of the throne, and kills his brothers supporters; if that isn't "shock and awe," what is? Then Solomon consolidated control in his hands, and became an arms dealer with the nations around Israel, even as he made Israel a military power. Such power, of course, is about scarcity. Only friendship with the king will provide security for the subjects. Only the king's wisdom is wise, because he has the best scholars to prove it. Only the king's power is just and fair, because he provides the security against rival kingdoms whom he also arms, and has to arm against. As long as the king keeps all good things scarce, and provides some measure of those things who are loyal to the king, then all is well with the king in his kingdom. But consider the rest of the story from the Hebrew scriptures:

Jump ahead about 400 years, to the impending Babylonian Exile. Now comes Jeremiah, descended from a long line of priests, from that very village where Solomon exiled the priest who had supported his brother. And now Jeremiah tells the reigning king:

Let not the wise boast of their wisdom,
nor the valiant of their valour;
let not the wealthy boast of their wealth;
but if anyone must boast, let him boast of this:
that he understands and acknowledges me.
For I am the LORD, I show unfailing love,
I do justice and right on the earth;
for in these I take pleasure.
This is the word of the LORD.

There is a direct rebuke of the descendants of Solomon there. Solomon who purchased his wisdom and his palace and his power and even the Temple, with his central concern for Solomon, and what Solomon could obtain, and own, and control. Solomon who used his control of horses and chariots to exact tribute (read: taxes) from others; who used the location of Israel along the trade routes to exact a toll for what passed through the land, and made sure the money went to Solomon, not to the community. Solomon cared about Solomon, not about:

How good and pleasant it is to live together as brothers in unity!
It is like fragrant oil poured on the head
and falling over the beard,
Aaron's beard, when the oil runs down
over the collar of his vestments.
Is is as if the dew of Hermon were falling
on the mountains of Zion.
There the LORD bestows his blessing,
life for evermore (Psalm 133)

The LORD bestows the blessing freely. Solomon makes sure the blessing is recovered and rewarded to Solomon. Solomon, like the Pharoah, says there isn't enough to go around: not enough money, not enough power, not enough wisdom, and I, Solomon, must control it all, must deal in it, must buy and sell in all the marketplaces, of arms, of ideas, of palaces, even of religion. Because of this, says Jeremiah, comes the Exile. Because of this, Isaiah tells Israel, the people, not the kings:

"Come for water, all who are thirsty;
though you have no money, come, buy grain and eat;
come, buy wine and milk, not for money, not for a price.
Why spend your money for what is not food
your earnings on what fails to satisfy?
Listen to me and you will fare well,
you will enjoy the fat of the land. (Isaiah 55:1-2)

Listen, not to the king, but the LORD. Fare well not because the king is wise, or rich, or virtuous, but because of the goodness of the LORD. And buy without money, buy food without price, because economic transactions are not the basis of true life. There is no basis of exchange here: "Come to me and listen to my words, hear me and you will have life." (Isaiah 55:3). It is the call of the Creator, who gave life simply by speaking, in the beginning; and who gives life still, simply by speaking. And what is life if not a gift, something for which you can't give anything in exchange, which you can't even accept or acknowledge or receive, because you can never step away from it, apart from it, stand beside it and recognize it as something other to you, something which you could be given. What you is there to give to, if you don't already have life?

And because of the Exile comes Deuteronomy; the book of identity; and not identity for the king, but for the people. The people to whom God has given the one gift which can be given: life.

The consistent thread through the Hebrew scriptures into the proclamation of the basileia tou theou is that humans must eschew and avoid political power, because power draws its source from the fear of scarcity. As Brueggemann reads the Biblical narrative, Pharoah represents the people who live in fear and anxiety and anger. Such people have no energy left over for the neighborhood. In the story of Joseph and Pharoah, the guy with the most power and authority and wealth, dreams of scarcity. Which is not surprising; Pharoah's oikos is governed by the fear of running out. It is what keeps him in control, keeps him in power and why the people allow him to rule. This anxiety about scarcity is what drives the Hebrews into slavery and so, in brief, Genesis moves into Exodus.

Now Pharoah is so afraid of scarcity, so filled with anxiety for what might be taken from him, he begins to kill the babies of the Hebrews (and here the parallel to Herod in the New Testament, where he is clearly Pharoah to all the Gospel writers, becomes clearer. This is where Matthew draws his parallel with the Massacre of the Innocents). This is Pharoah's anxiety at work. As my notes indicate from the lecture: "The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love." Which all by itself explains much about the reaction to Tom Fox, and even to the desire to go to war in the Middle East, a desire Wesley Clark says originally led to a plan to invade 7 countries in that region. But the story of the Exodus is that "Anxiety generated by ideology and social systems is not a part of the human condition." It is, in other words, our creation, and our creation, unlike God's, is grossly imperfect.

Enter Moses, a person with nothing who dreamed of freedom and departure from the "anxiety producing system." And then there is the miracle in the desert, the gift of God's abundance in the manna which comes to break the influence of the anxiety system (it comes as the people are complaining that they were better off in Egypt than in the desert). Our anxiety, Brueggemann notes, is a product of our lack of trust (faith) in God. God's offer of abundance, he says, calls into question the anxiety created by social systems, by human structures and strictures; and yet God never gives us more than "this day our daily bread."

The answer here becomes an answer that can never gain wide acceptance, because it requires a faith that cannot be imposed, nor would I choose to try to impose it. That way, too, requires an argument from scarcity: the portrayal of a god whose grace is necessary for life, but such grace is in short supply and available only to those who rightly and properly believe. That grace was bestowed upon the widow when she fed Elijah, but she was already of the house of Israel. That grace was bestowed freely and without first asking payment in any kind by the people who came to Jesus to be healed of their blindness, their lameness, their diseases. They know only that he had a reputation for power, and often they were amazed at how he treated them. They, too, were accustomed to scarcity, but Jesus blessed them with an open and generous hand, and never took back a blessing because they had not given him or God the proper due. Likewise when the prophets promise streams in the desert and the world coming to Jerusalem to pay homage to the one true God, it is a scene of benevolence and reverence, not of an enslaved humanity making a forced pilgrimage to Zion. The promise of life through the actions of the Creator are to be bestowed through the children of Abraham, not on them exclusively as a precious reward, as something rare and precious and available only to a few. But to live in that promise, to live in what Christians call the basiliea tou theou, is an act of faith, and that faith cannot be imposed even though it is a precondition to the trust that abandons scarcity and sees abundance.

The sunflower is profligate in its production of seeds from one seed, and there are enough to feed the birds or people and still make more sunflowers. But still we make sure the seeds are not free. If we did not, who would grow them? The sunflowers, of course, would grow themselves. But to appreciate that intellectually, and to live in the world that implies spiritually, are two very different endeavors. One might be utopian; the other is sheer madness; or simple faith. The latter are two conditions that often appear alike.

It can seem quite radical to think this way. But thinking this way doesn't mean you have to abandon all you know, nor that everything you know is wrong. But it might just mean that some of what you think, needs to be reconsidered. The Celtic Christians at the end of the Roman Empire would call that "seeking the place of resurrection." Which is yet another way of seeing abundance where others see only scarcity. It is open to everyone, but it is not incumbent on anyone, except those who choose it. And to those who do, it is a question of whether or not they truly choose life, of whether we truly trust God to be profligate enough to give us this day what we need.

Call it a Lenten meditation.

"Are there no workhouses"?

Unfortunately, this long story on Huffington Post disappeared almost as rapidly as it appeared. It deserves more consideration:

There have always been people who for one reason or other -- inability to find a job, old age, disability, racism, sexism, drug addiction -- have been unable to cobble together the means to support themselves. For most of the nation's history, and for all of its colonial past, those people have been dealt with much differently than they were following the enactment of the New Deal, and, in particular, the 1935 Social Security Act, which created old-age insurance, unemployment insurance and welfare. Those programs were expanded over the next several decades and grew to include Medicare, Medicaid, the children's health insurance program and food stamps.

Consider just a few facts from the article:

Quantifying the success of a social policy is an exercise often frustrated by life's infinite variables. But Social Security is one program so effective that the entire decline in poverty can safely be attributed to it, even by the most cautious academics. "Our analysis suggests that the growth in Social Security can indeed explain all of the decline in poverty among the elderly over this period," concluded Gary Engelhardt and Jonathan Gruber in a rigorous 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research report on the program.

And then, where we are going:

The nearly 54 million people drawing Social Security benefits receive, on average, $1,073.80 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the program keeps some 20 million people out of poverty, including 13 million elderly Americans. Engelhardt and Gruber calculate that each ten percent cut in benefits would lead to a 7.2 percent increase in poverty. Such cuts are beginning to seem likely, despite the robust state of the program's finances, which can cover full benefits through 2037 and boasts a surplus trust fund of $2.6 trillion as of this fall.
...
The keystone of the Social Security Act, its eponymous retirement insurance, has already been fractured by a deal between Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who this month agreed to a Social Security payroll tax holiday as a method of stimulating the economy. Republicans openly admit that when the holiday's expiration arrives next year, it will be treated as a tax hike, meaning Social Security's dedicated revenue stream, which has never been tampered with before, may now be compromised, at the same time that leading Democrats propose cutting benefits and raising the retirement age.

But Republican opposition is not something cooked up by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and handed on to Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint:

Time Magazine summarized the position of Social Security's Republican opponents in 1936: "Wage earners, you will pay and pay in taxes...and when you are very old, you will have an I.O.U. which the U.S. Government may make good if it is still solvent."

Delaney and Grim begin with the story of "Aunt Winnie," a poor woman removed to a poor house in the late 19th century; and they note that this kind of "social service" is being championed, openly, by Glenn Beck:

Aunt Winnie, whose story is preserved in the archives of the Historical Society of Washington, had been sent to an American institution that was by then some 300 years old and went by a variety of names: the county farm, the poor farm, the almshouse or, most often, simply the poorhouse. She would probably have been surprised to learn that more than a hundred years later, after the virtual eradication of elderly poverty, a powerful political movement would materialize with the mission of returning to the hands-off social policies that made the poorhouse the nation's only refuge for the jobless, the aged, the infirm and the disabled.

That movement's most outspoken proponent is Fox News host Glenn Beck, who doesn't merely pine for the pre-New Deal era in general, but regularly prevails upon his audience to recognize the particular genius of some of the period's presidents, whose ideologies of inaction he holds up as the American ideal.

But as they point out, that kind of governmental inaction is as American as cherry pie. And the human problem is older, much, much older. Walter Brueggeman described it as the "theology of scarcity," and traces it back to the Biblical record of Solomon's reign. Or, to quote myself from three years ago:

Solomon became a centralized power in Israel (something, by the way, God had warned Israel about back in 1 Samuel). He became the main source and owner of chariots and arms, which he also sold; so he was an arms dealer. He levied tributes on those who came through Israel (it was on the trade routes), and on all the peole of Israel. Tributes, of course, are nothing more than taxes, and they do nothing more than take money from the many, and give it to the one: the king. It's good to be king; for the king. He also built the Temple, in a style typical for the Near East; but there's another issue there, and it's the same underlying issue: the Temple enforced control.

The Temple was arranged into three areas: the outer Temple, where women and slaves and all the "non-persons" of Israel could gather. The Inner Temple, where the men of Israel alone could go; and, in a small room at the back, the "holy of holies," where only the priest could enter. Brueggeman said if you put wings on the Temple, it would be a modern passenger plane. The elite board first, and get the best seats in a special section, while the rest of us board last and sit cheek by jowl. Those up front even get the curtain drawn so we can't see what they are eating. The cockpit, of course, is there the priest goes.

Contrast this to Sinai, says Brueggeman, where all of Israel saw Moses on the mountain talking to God. Now, most of Israel can't even go into the inner temple, and no one is allowed to venture into the place where God could be seen.

Control, in other words, with access guaranteed by accidents of birth. All the Jubilee stuff that comes into Deuteronomy, by the way, doesn't even exist yet, and under Solomon it never will. That would cost him control.

Solomon becomes "wise," too, not because he is born that way, but because he puts scholars on his payroll, and pays them to know and learn wisdom and give it to him as he needs it. He controls knowledge, then, too; as much as he possibly can. And Solomon does one more thing: when he fights his brother for the throne, he kills all his brother's supporters after he becomes king. All of them save the priest, whom he exiles to a small village, where the priest leaves so long as he remains quiet. His power consolidated, Solomon proceeds to build a Temple to prove his power and wealth, and to enjoy a reputation that he largely bought and paid for with other people's money.

The theology of scarcity says there is only so much to go around, and a wise ruler will see to it that limited amount is preserved and protected and used prudently, lest we run out. Kindness becomes a kind of madness, because there isn't enough to share; there is only enough for those who are deserving. Which, say Delaney and Grim, is precisely the "problem" with Social Security, or any aid to the poor:

What is dangerous about Social Security is that it works. It is evidence that people can do a better job insuring against life's cruel downturns by working together and pooling resources than by going it alone in the market....

And Democrats pander to the relentless fear that an offer of kindness may wind up helping someone who either doesn't need the aid or who is in need but is to blame for their pitiful circumstances. President Obama articulated that worry in a weighted response to a question about why his attempts to slow foreclosures had been largely unsuccessful.

During a meeting with progressive bloggers, Obama was asked to defend his administration's failure to stem the foreclosure tide. The president's worry, he said, was that his anti-foreclosure program might accidentally help people who didn't deserve it. "The biggest challenge is how do you make sure that you are helping those who really deserve help, and, if they get some temporary help, can get back on their feet," Obama said, specifically adding that he didn't want the effort to assist "people who through no fault of their own just can't afford their house anymore because of the change in housing values or their incomes don't support it."

In other words, if we cannot help the deserving, perhaps it is better not to help anyone at all.

Read the story of "Aunt Minnie" at the beginning of the article, and try to imagine yourself in her place. Where, in a major urban area, would you go to build a shack from tar paper and scraps? One whose land would you put it, and would they let you stay there? The homeless now live under overpasses or bridges or in ditches, if they are allowed to. Since Houston widened I-10 the overpasses, once home to the homeless, are barren concrete stretches. I can only assume the police are more diligent about driving people away who seek shelter there. I don't assume there are more rooms for them, more "poorhouses" or workhouses or debtor's prisons. Where would I go if I lost my jobs, and so my house? Where would you go? Who would take you in, and for how long?

Or should we go back to this?

"I am informed that you are three months back on your rent. The understanding that I had in your case was that if the county furnished the food, you were to take care for your own rent," wrote a county commissioner to Green on Jan. 26, 1937, one of the coldest winters of the century. "If you do not 'snap out of it' and get to working and paying your rent, my next call on you will be with the police officer and will take your whole family to the county farm. The state of New Hampshire will place your children. A word to the wise is sufficient."

We end, because 'tis the season, with the parting words of the Ghost of Christmas Present to Scrooge:

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

If we are not responsible, if we are not our brother's and sister's resource and refuge, who is?

"Context Is All"

 And admittedly I don't have the full context for this Hauerwas quote:

I can illustrate what I mean by suggesting that rights language has become too powerful by calling attention to a remark by someone who I believe was in the Department of Justice during the Civil Rights campaign in Mississippi. Several Civil Rights Workers had been killed, the spokesman for the Department of Justice was appropriately outraged. In order to express his outrage he resorted to the moral vocabulary in which he most felt at home.  He said those who had been killed had had their rights violated.  When "rights" become a more basic moral description than murder you have an indication that your language has gone on a holiday. 

Of course, one cannot help but have sympathy for the Department of Justice representative.  He was using the most significant language he knew to indicate what a horrible moral crime had been committed.  Yet the very appeal to the violation of rights as fundamental moral description may indicate a profound worry about such a morality.  For if confidence in the language of rights is lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be. I worry, therefore, that for many reasons some are trying to make the language of rights do more work than it is capable of doing. 

But it puts me in mind of Wittgenstein's concept of "language games," where words used in one context mean something completely different in another; yet one doesn't recognize the distinction, and thereby introduces confusion.  For example:

Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says "No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you." If some said: "Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?" I'd say: "No." "Do you contradict the man?" I'd say: "No."

...

Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us.  If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near.  It isn't a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: "You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein."

...

Whether something is a blunder or not--it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

With the middle example as our guide, the Justice Department spokesman means something altogether different than Hauerwas supposes, because they aren't speaking within the same language games.  I say this simply because there is no federal murder statute; but murderers (such as the men who killed Ahmed Arbery) can be tried in federal court for civil rights violations.  So the DOJ spokesperson was not, as Hauerwas presumes, speaking in absolute terms of rights (as Hauerwas is), he was speaking of "rights" as a term of art within federal civil rights law.

Law is what Wittgenstein would call a "particular system."  True, "rights" spills out of law into everyday discourse, as Hauerwas argues; and there our problems begin, per Hauerwas' argument (I'm not here to critique that; I need to study it, in fact.)  But his example is, shall we say, poorly chosen.

To put a fine point on it, I agree with this:

If you need a theory of rights to know that torture is wrong, or if you think you need rights to ground your judgements that torture  is morally wrong, then something has clearly gone wrong with your moral sensibilities. What follows is my attempt to defend that remark by giving you a list of what I regard as some of the disabilities associated with rights language. 

But "rights language" is a language game of its own, and "rights" is not always the same term in every such game. 

*The irony of repeatedly using a portrayal of Solomon for these posts is not lost on me.  As Walter Brueggeman pointed out in a lecture I attended once, Solomon bought his wisdom with the money he made as, literally, a Middle Eastern arms dealer.  He hired scholars, had them write wise things and, being king, he took credit for it. Same as it ever was.

Still looking for the keys

I like The Cubit because it is usually very sensible, as in the case in point.  And more and more I like the story of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamplight, because it is such a good explanation of how we form grand theories of everything, like the origins of religion:

And Barash is alarmingly comfortable engaging in wild speculation and generalizations. Nowhere is this clearer than in his treatment of the origins of religion. Riffing on the alpha-male-polygamy theme, Barash argues that religion comes from fear of a powerful male father. God, he suggests, was “created in the image of a dominant, alpha male polygynist.” Contemporary religion is the legacy of that terror.

Reading this little account, I was struck by three things. The first is that Barash’s evidence almost entirely comes from cherry-picked passages of Abrahamic scripture, which might not be the most rigorous way to analyze All of Religion. It’s one thing to note that people have used metaphors of romance and rage to describe their relationships with the divine, and quite another to conclude that these literary expressions represent the fundamental human fear-impulse toward faith.

There are two conjoined problems there, and it's not just cherry-picking (proof-texting, we seminary graduates like to call it) the scriptures for whatever suits your thesis.  That problem is related to the problem of interpretation which too many people not trained in philosophy or literature or even just textual criticism or scriptural studies, are prone to overlook:  everything you think is a matter of interpretation.

So if I say the "Old Testament" presents God as hairy-thunderer smiting the wicked and declaring war on all kinds of people in favor of Israel, well:  I'm ignorant.  I'm also wrong.  True, I can "read" the scriptures for that interpretation, but what I'm doing is interpreting scripture:  I'm not establishing objective truth.  Post-modern thought is pretty much an acknowledgment of this fact (Wittgenstein is particularly interested in it):  we interpret a text just by reading it, and if we don't change the frame of our interpretation, or better critique that frame and recognize it's influence on what we "read," then we fall into error.

Like the error of thinking the Hebraic picture of God is one of a fearful cosmic tyrant.  Indeed, the idea of God as "powerful male father" is almost laughable to anyone who has read the scriptures without looking for confirmation of that particular bias (i.e., with ideological blinders on.  And why that kind of interpretation is not anti-Semitic has always been a mystery to me).  A God who dares Israel to put him on trial, and who declares faithfulness to Israel even when they have betrayed their covenant, a God who restores Israel even after the breaking of the covenant, is not exactly a power-mad father figure reaching for the belt to teach the children a lesson.  The lesson of the Exile is not that God dealt out to Israel what Israel dealt out to others when it was being established, but rather that God leaves Israel to the consequences of its decisions, so that perhaps Israel will learn that both faithfulness and faithlessness to the covenant have their consequences.  God doesn't smite Israel; God redeems Israel.

Or consider the story of Israel under the judges, and then Israel demands a king, like all the other kingdoms around.  God gives Israel what they ask for, after warning Israel against it.  Walter Brueggeman has done a lot of work explaining how Solomon has a reputation for wisdom and goodness because he purchased that reputation, not because he earned it.  And yet God is the angry father figure?  How much of the Hebrew Scriptures do you have to ignore to draw that picture?

Which brings us to the drunk under the lamppost.  As The Cubit asks, is focussing on Abrahamic scripture really the best way to analyze "All of Religion"?  I think Buddhists and Hindus, to name just two, might be surprised by that.

But to someone raised in America, the light is so much better under the Bible's lamp.....

Eve of Destruction

Well, actually, afternoon before the big meetup at Saddleback Church. But let me just say that, in this interview anyway, Rick Warren strikes me as, well, clueless. Or tone deaf to the insidious nature of irony:

RW: Right now civility is a losing battle. It's easy to demonize from a distance. When people sit behind a screen they lose all civility. The anonymity makes people more ad hominem. One of my three life goals is to help restore civility to civilization. I just think the Internet has made us ruder.
JG: Small goal.
RW: All three of my goals are impossible, but I'm trying. To restore civility, to restore responsibility to individuals, getting people to stop playing victim. And to restore credibility to churches, because in many ways they've been co-opted by politics.

And the best way to do achieve that last goal, of course, is to hold a public forum with the two presumptive Presidential candidates, in your church, where you, the pastor, get to moderate. Or is that just so meta-ironic it's no longer even irony anymore? I mean, it's kinda like how Jesus took over temple worship by chasing all the moneylenders out of the public area of the Temple, and got everybody to see things his way after that. Or how he deposed Pilate and made Rome give up claim to Palestine in order to teach people that giving Caesar what was Caesar's meant making Caesar give up something first.

Oh, wait, that's not what he did at all. And I'm a little fuzzy on "getting people to stop playing victim," unless he means what David Brooks said about China's Szechuan province and (implicitly) how Americans reacted to Katrina and Rita (hint: we're a nation of whiners). But let me go a little further, because this really bugs me:

RW: The answer is, we must do all we can. People say America is not the policeman of the world. We may not be, but the Bible says, if you have been blessed, then you are to care for people who can't care for themselves, you are to speak up for people who can't speak for themselves, and to defend the defenseless.

Actually, the Bible doesn't make helping others conditional. When Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew, he doesn't say that those who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoners, were well-off and doing charity work out of their abundance. He said they did it, period. He didn't say they could afford to; they just did. When the widow listened to Elijah and made a meal for him before serving herself and her son, it was clear there was no food left. Yet her faith and her hospitality to a stranger meant there was enough for all of them until the famine passed. The Bible is full of such stories. There is never any serious emphasis on giving from your abundance. In fact, that's what Walt Brueggeman would call the teaching of Solomon, not the theology of the God of Abraham. So we don't give because we have so much to share, or because we are so richly blessed by God (and implicitly deserving of such blessing). We take care of those with less than we have because we should. The law was the gleanings of the field were left for others who needed it; that the widow, the orphan, the slave, the alien, all powerless groups, were to be cared for, or there would be prosperity for none. When John the Baptist tells his audience in Luke to give up their second coat to the person with no coat, or give food to the person with no food, he is making exactly this point. It isn't your excess you share, it's whatever you have: period.

But, of course, that kind of preaching won't fill a mega-church. And I won't even touch on the idea that this nation had a moral imperative to invade Iraq.

There is a difference between that and living under oppression, living with fear for your life. That's why whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage, you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.

Screw that "turn the other cheek" gab! We've got evil to overcome! This is the kind of moral/religious justification for war that Reinhold Niebuhr stood on its ear two generations ago, especially when he wrote about the "irony of American history" (and yes, there is that nagging question of just how we define "evil," especially considering the state of Iraq today. The good Rev. Warren let's that pass right by, and Mr. Goldberg helps him ignore it.) But that was many years ago; I doubt that anyone would know.....

It is always so much easier to judge, than to subject yourself to judgment. Which is what makes commentary like this so precarious. So let me clarify: I have no animus toward Rev. Warren. I don't think much of this forum tonight, as either a political or a theological exercise; and I disagree with his ideas, as far as I can ascertain them. But I'm enough in agreement with his interest in civility to say that I my only interest is to point out some alternative to what Rev. Warren presents, which I would call "the usual American theology." It's not that he's wrong, or "bad;" but there are alternatives, just as there are alternatives to McCain and Obama appearing in his church, answering his questions, tonight.

ADDING: Wow, Just wow. Tickets for the event tonight were $500 to $2000. And yes, even at a church with a facility as grand as Saddleback obviously has, it's hard to believe that money isn't paying the bills for use of the space, not just for "network feeds." Also, two questions come up:

1) Hospitality: " 'When you have the national stage, shouldn't you be open to everybody? A church that espouses its openness is now catering to the haves and have-nots.' " One can at least safely say that the first are still first, and the last are still last. Wonder what purpose that drives at the church?

2) Separation of church and state:

Some residents had concerns about the church taking money for a political event. One the church's Web site, Warren said he felt the event was not a violation of church and state.

"It has no government sponsorship," he said in a statement.

Well, most presidential campaigns don't. But Presidential campaigns are all about the government. Which is the problem with this forum in the first place.

Imagine what a mission-oriented church could do with proceeds from tickets selling for $500 to $2000. Never get their hands on that kind of money, is what they could do; because they aren't selling what the world is buying.

Obviously Rev. Warren is. Render unto Caesar, and all that. Sort of the reason Jesus never got involved in Roman politics.

"New Styles of Architecture, a change of heart..."

"The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love."--Walter Brueggeman

This clause was enough to make me pay attention:  "In a world of scarce resources...."

And already we're back to Solomon and the theology of scarcity v. the theology of plenty (which alone puts the lie to the atheist chestnut that the scriptures are Bronze Age (or Iron Age, opinions vary) texts with no relevance to modern existence.  Then again, modern atheists are merely evangelicals insisting their position on God is the only one that should be allowed; that it another argument, but its also quite certainly an argument from scarcity, an argument for a theology of scarcity.)

Southern Beale quotes that from the American Enterprise Institute, who uses the opening rhetorical twitch to argue for, of course, limited use of scarce resources to actually help, you know, people.  But that is always the point in the theology of scarcity:  people are too damned expensive!  Other things must be protected first, especially, in the modern worship of the market as a great green god:  money. Because, you see:

In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending. This opinion is not immoral. Such choices are inevitable. They are made all the time.

Especially by the people in power.  Consider these quotes as a partial response to the presumption of AEI:

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization -- Edward Bellamy

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. -- John Dewey

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings -- John Stuart Mill

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play. -- Robert F. Kennedy

We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. -- Martin Luther King, Jr

Start with Bellamy's idea of education that must be something other than an education in buying and selling.  He calls that "an education in self seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization."  No education today reflects Dewey's idea:  "the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality."  Education today is all aimed at getting a job, and being a consumer and a producer of goods, at seeking at the expense of others.  The most desirable lot of human beings is reflected back to us in "The Wolf of Wall Street" or the celebrity of Donald Trump and the Kardashians.  As Robert Kennedy points out, the GNP does not allow for the health of our families; indeed, the AEI says it can't:  resources are too scarce.  Triage must be performed.  Some must die, and so decrease the surplus population.  People are too expensive; the are just too damned many of you!

As my friend at Thought Criminal never tires of pointing out:  what atheist position is going to champion the ideals of Bellamy, Dewey, Mill, Kennedy, or King?  Stephen Weinberg fancies himself a moral avatar because he is brave enough to admit his selfishness, that he cares first for his family and then for his friends and really not at all for society at large.  Ethics understands this as an entirely unethical stance (has Weinberg even read Crito?); Weinberg proclaims it the new basis for ethics.  O brave new world, that has such ignorant creatures in it!

Let not the wise boast of their wisdom,
nor the valiant of their valour;
let not the wealthy boast of their wealth;
but if anyone must boast, let him boast of this:
that he understands and acknowledges me.
For I am the LORD, I show unfailing love,
I do justice and right on the earth;
for in these I take pleasure.
This is the word of the LORD.

You may want to dismiss that because it is a religious text that makes a religious claim.  But tell me what Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris has written that is of greater moral value than that; tell me what Bill Maher has said which contributes more to the moral discourse of humanity than those words.  Is it better to be anti-religious, or to show unfailing love and do justice and right on the earth, and to take pleasure in those things than in one's own sense of cleverness?  Which is better: the pronouncements of AEI on how to deal with scarcity, the ramblings of Stephen Weinberg on what he imagines ethics are, or this "Bronze Age" text:

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly;
all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain,
set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

Both texts from the same book of the Bible; both rest on the authority of God, but not on presenting  the commands of God.  The king who dealt justly and fairly proved he knew God; but the world rewards the king who sets his eyes and heart on gain alone, ignoring the innocent blood he sheds ("In a world of scarce resources....") and the cruel acts of tyranny such greed must perpetuate.  Justice and fairness, after all, require constant self-reflection, constant regard for the other and constant evaluation of one's motives and actions.  Stephen Weinberg's ethic starts and ends with regard for himself.  The cause of the lowly and the poor is of no importance to him whatsoever.  How does he deal justly and fairly with anything?

The theology of scarcity is that there isn't enough now to go around, so we must hoard what we have and protect it from other claimants.  We must regard them as savages who have to be eliminated.  The theology of scarcity is that we cannot share, because to share is to lose.  The widow who fed Elijah during the famine should have saved her oil and meal for herself and her son; even though it probably would have run out, and they would have starved to death.  But who can know the future, and who can trust in a world that is actually abundant?  Better to trust that there will never be enough.

Better?  According to whom?

After a while the stream dried up, for there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go now to Zarephath, a village of Sidon, and stay there; I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ He went off to Zarephath, and when he reached the entrance to the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks. He called to her, ‘Please bring me a little water in a pitcher to drink.’ As she went to fetch it, he called after her, ‘Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well.’ But she answered, “As the Lord your God lives, I have no food baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask. I am just gathering two or three sticks to go and cook it for my son and myself before we die.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elijah said, ‘go and do as you have said. But first make me a small cake from what you have and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself. For this is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of flour will not give out, nor the flask of oil fail, until the Lord sends rain on the land.’ She went and did as Elijah had said, and there was food for him and for her family for a long time. The jar of flour did not give out, nor did the flask of oil, as the word of the Lord foretold through Elijah. 1 Kings 17:7-16 (REB)

Why I went into the woods

Stirring the pensieve again...

And speaking of the demonic:

Austin - Today Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee unanimously voted against HB 1, the Republican budget proposal for 2012-2013. HB 1 passed the Committee on a vote of 18-7 and will be considered by the full House of Representatives in the coming weeks. Democrats on the Committee spoke out against the proposal to cut funding for neighborhood schools, make college more expensive, and eliminate basic services for children, seniors and the disabled.

House Democrats have called on state leaders to fix the $10 billion permanent budget hole created by the Republicans' 2006 tax plan and use a portion of the $9.4 billion Rainy Day Fund to address the 2012-2013 budget, but the leadership has refused to do so.

Rep. Dawnna Dukes (D-Austin) said, "In many cases the cuts in health and human services are making life and death decisions. Texas children, senior citizens and disabled Texans deserve better. With inadequate resources, our school children are destined to a second class education and unable to compete in today's global economy. This budget is unacceptable to our constituencies who have sent us to ensure a first class education for our children, protect our citizens, care for those who no longer can care for themselves and provide services to those who have nowhere else to turn."

Rep. Craig Eiland (D-Galveston) said, "Texas is experiencing a budget shortfall, but cutting funds to schools, the elderly and disabled is not the only way to address our problem. It is important that we uphold the commitment to our citizens and not put the most vulnerable of our population, like children, the disabled and the mentally challenged at risk. I will continue to work throughout the rest of the session and any special sessions to have a bill with the appropriate cuts that I can eventually vote for."

Rep. Eric Johnson (D-Dallas) said, "Just like so many Texas families, the state has put money into savings for times of fiscal crisis. Texas Republicans are today demanding that we make devastating cuts that will hurt Texas' school-aged, elderly, and disabled residents, cuts that they would never suggest for their own families. It is unconscionable that such brutal cuts are being proposed while billions of dollars sit unspent in the state's savings account."

Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio) said, "Not a single person showed up in our committee and asked us to eliminate pre-k grants for our youngest schoolchildren and financial aid for college freshmen, but that's what this budget does. Prior generations of Texans have invested in educating children in our state, but this generation will drop the torch if this budget passes.

The budget is almost $8 billion short of funding our legal obligations to schools. These cuts will destroy the infrastructure of education and health care that past generations have built for our children.

The Republican budget fails to uphold our obligation to our children and threatens to end our state's prosperity. We can do better than this if the Republicans fix the recurring $10 billion hole they put in the budget with the 2006 Perry Tax Swap and eliminate tax loopholes that litter our tax laws."

I highlighted a portion of that to emphasize the destructive nature of the demonic. It is this desire for destruction which sets this apart from the merely selfish or short-sighted. This is not the theology of scarcity; this is the theology of destruction. This is beyond despair; this is demonic. What do I mean? I mean this:

The consistent thread through the Hebrew scriptures into the proclamation of the basileia tou theou is that humans must eschew and avoid political power, because power draws its source from the fear of scarcity.

This has certainly been true all my life. In my childhood, it was the Cold War, and the fear of scarcity was the fear of a scarcity of liberty, a scarcity of life itself in the shadow of the Bomb. We only had to capitalize it to know what we all meant. That fear turned into the informal slogan of the Bush Administration: "Freedom is not free." The scarcity lingered on, the idea that nothing is ours without purchase, without price, and purchase and price always means one to a customer, and only to the paying customer. Blow you, Jack, I got mine!

Before that, and even alongside it, was the scarcity of security in one's job; so that white plantation owners, long after the end of slavery, kept poor whites fearful of poor blacks who would take their property, their jobs, their women. Scarcity was a handy tool for keeping the poor from noticing their enemy was the wealthy who exploited their poverty, not the blacks who shared it, who even suffered worse from it. Power draws its source from the fear of scarcity. And when that fear is not enough, or when that fear replaces reason itself, it becomes demonic. It becomes destructive.

But maybe we have only ourselves to blame, because one can never have too much milkshake. Scarcity is built into our very way of life:

Scarcity is the peculiar province of economics, the "dismal science." How much is available to go around, how fairly can it be distributed? This is the assumption of utilitarianism, this is the assumption of John Rawls' "Theory of Justice," this is the assumption of economists: scarcity is the nature of the world, now how do we adjust our desires to meet this wholly reasonable and undeniable conclusion? The economic pie can only be so large. Full employment, for example, would be disastrous: without a scarcity of jobs, what bargaining power would the employer have, what incentive would drive the worker to labor rather than laziness? With every niche filled, there would be nowhere to go, and little reason to worry about being asked to go. Scarcity is not only reality, we deem it necessity. The desert is our model for the world, it is the spur of our incentives: we are not creatures driven and derided by lust, because lust we can market. Lust is another model of scarcity, as you can never have enough things, look good enough, have enough sex or be attractive, knowledgeable, witty, intelligent, enough. You must always lack and desire what you do not have. It is not lust we are driven by now, but fear. Fear for our security, but also fear for our want, fear that the world, indeed, is not enough and that we must always have more. Our fear is that the world is actually the desert we are afraid it might be, and that enough will never be afforded us.

But now what we agree we are living in the desert, we have panicked, and we are turning on each other.

Except, of course, we aren't. No one followed George W. Bush when he tried to use his "political capital" to lead us into privatizing Social Security. Wisconsin hasn't followed Scott Walker into accepting his union busting law. Ohio is moving to put John Kasich's similar attempt on the ballot for repeal. GOP governors across the country who moved to destroy in the name of fear and scarcity, are finding they have no support for their demonic actions. Even John Boehner, who insisted until recently that "we are broke," is now ignoring the demands of the Tea Party to reach a reasonable compromise with the Democrats in order to avoid calamity. Which is not to say the legislature in Washington is beyond reproach:

Who are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted “Welfare Reform 2011” bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I’m sticking to those related to food.)

These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.

There is something evil in that, too; but we have become so inured to reducing the poor to greater poverty (Title X funds once signed into law by Richard Nixon and championed by then Rep. George H.W. Bush are now anathema in D.C.) that it's almost status quo, rather than a dramatic turn toward destruction. Which, itself, is a sad statement. Consider:

What’s poverty? Poverty guidelines have not changed since the 1960s: “A family is counted as poor if its pretax money income is below its poverty threshold,” which is $11,161 for a single adult — think about that! — and $17,286 for a couple with one child.

The poverty rate in 1959 was nearing 40 million. It dipped to about 23 million in 1973, only to rise again in the early 1990s to about 39 million. But the poverty rate in America in 2009 was the highest it’s been in the last 50 years, at about 43.6 million.

Who is "broke"? Who is damaged by current economic conditions? Who has the real problems here? People who can get the attention of TeeVee and politicians by traveling to D.C. for a "rally"? Or the poor, the destitute, the kind of people no U.S. politician has visited, at least in my memory, since Robert Kennedy?

Meanwhile, the Tea Party and its supporters continue to clamor for calamity, and they are set to achieve it in the "laboratories of democracy," if not on the national level. Even as they clamor, though, their support falls and the extremism they pursue in the name of liberty is being seen as a vice by the greater public. Which means there may ultimately be some redemption in the rush to extremism. an ironic result to countenance from one who is himself so extreme in his defense of the "attack upon Christendom."

I was re-reading Thoreau's words with a class I had assigned the excerpt to:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
...
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.

It has been 30 years or more since I first read those words. I had forgotten them, but they were obviously buried somewhere, and fertilizing that did grow in my mind over the decades. Should we live like men? Or like baboons? The question is as timely now as it was in the 19th century.

"How should we then live?" is emerging for me as the question of 19th century Europe. Tolstoy; Kierkegaard; the Romantics (now reduced to a minor literary movement that lasted only a few decades; no longer the sweeping change in fundamental human thought which we are still living through. Sometimes scholarship can be so blinkered and so in love with minutiae and novelty....); Thoreau; Emerson; the U.S. Civil War itself. So many writers and thinkers and events raised the question of what life was for; a question first raised in response to the Industrial Revolution and one still relevant today. It was the question raised by Sartre and existentialism in the aftermath of World War II. It is the question raised by mega-churches and the "Gospel of Wealth" and every vulture theologian who longs for the time when people open their eyes and realize their despair and come running back to the Church, if only in order to fill the pews and justify the time spent there by the loyalists, and to improve the self-esteem of the person in the high and lonely pulpit. It is the basis of the question of whether we should or should not live by faith, whether we should preserve our ancient metaphysics or toss the baby out with the bathwater; whether, having torn up noblesse oblige in our desire to be free Jeffersonians, we must now preserve the tattered Social Contract.

"How should we then live?" is emerging, for me, as the question of 19th century Europe. Tolstoy; Kierkegaard; the Romantics (now reduced to a minor literary movement that lasted only a few decades; no longer the sweeping change in fundamental human thought which we are still living through. Sometimes scholarship can be so blinkered and so in love with minutiae and novelty....); Thoreau; Emerson; the U.S. Civil War itself. So many writers and thinkers and events raised the question of what life was for; a question first raised in response to the Industrial Revolution and one still relevant today. But not a question many people want to tangle with. Far easier to wrestle with the question of how to get through the day and increase my acquisitions and improve my bottom line. Still, as even TV commercials knew in the '60's: "Is that all there is?" Is the goal of life simply to have a goal in life, and that goal to be "He who dies with the most toys, wins"? If it is then, of course, all we live with is anxiety about what we have, what we don't have, and how to keep the former and obtain the latter. As the cigarette commercial used to ask: "This is living?" And it answered its own question: "Some people don't think so."

But only some; most of us continue to live lives of quiet desperation. How should we then live?

Re-reading Thoreau has made me reconsider Sartre. Consider how this, with a slight shift of emphasis, becomes Sartre's responsibility of the individual:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

Surely we must; but can we do it?

We can't live the life of a Thoreau, anymore than he would want us to. We can't return to the idyllic life of the simple Russian peasant, the type of life Thomas Hardy worked hard to show us was neither simple nor idyllic. Maybe the question, though, isn't "Can we do it," but: "Can we avoid it?"

Aye, there's the rub.

Take poverty, for example. Is the poverty of another a detail that fritters away my life, that diverts me from the true responsibility of living? Or is it a burden I take upon myself merely by recognizing its reality, especially if I d nothing further about it. But responsibility! Am I responsible for the poverty in the world? Am I responsible to the extent I do nothing about it, to the limit to which I lift not a finger to alleviate it in the life of one soul I encounter in all my long, long years? Is my life to be spent in contemplation and rectified by giving away what I have and ennobled by attending more to nature than to society, and improved by working selflessly for the benefit of the widow and the orphan?

How should we then live?

Can we avoid the life of awareness Thoreau and Sartre urge upon us? Certainly we can, but what credit is that? Do not the Gentiles do as much?

How should we then live? Getting and spending and laying waste our powers? This is an old, old story:

As Brueggemann reads the Biblical narrative, Pharaoh represents the people who live in fear and anxiety and anger. Such people have no energy left over for the neighborhood. In the story of Joseph and Pharaoh, the guy with the most power and authority and wealth, dreams of scarcity. Which is not surprising; Pharaoh's oikos is governed by the fear of running out. It is what keeps him in control, keeps him in power and why the people allow him to rule.

So long as Pharaoh kept us scared, kept us anxious and without energy for the neighborhood, the anxiety of scarcity could rule. It is not clear that is going to prevail much longer; or at least, that such anxiety can carry us all the way into pure destruction, into the realm of the demonic. Our leadership may be going there; but the people are refusing to follow.

This anxiety about scarcity is what drives the Hebrews into slavery and so, in brief, Genesis moves into Exodus.

Now Pharaoh is so afraid of scarcity, so filled with anxiety for what might be taken from him, he begins to kill the babies of the Hebrews (and here the parallel to Herod in the New Testament, where he is clearly Pharaoh to all the Gospel writers, becomes clearer. This is where Matthew draws his parallel with the Massacre of the Innocents). This is Pharaoh's anxiety at work. As my notes indicate from the lecture: "The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love." Which all by itself explains much about the reaction to Tom Fox, and even to the desire to go to war in the Middle East, a desire Wesley Clark says originally led to a plan to invade 7 countries in that region. But the story of the Exodus is that "Anxiety generated by ideology and social systems is not a part of the human condition." It is, in other words, our creation, and our creation, unlike God's, is grossly imperfect.

Enter Moses, a person with nothing who dreamed of freedom and departure from the "anxiety producing system." And then there is the miracle in the desert, the gift of God's abundance in the manna which comes to break the influence of the anxiety system (it comes as the people are complaining that they were better off in Egypt than in the desert). Our anxiety, Brueggemann notes, is a product of our lack of trust (faith) in God. God's offer of abundance, he says, calls into question the anxiety created by social systems, by human structures and strictures; and yet God never gives us more than "this day our daily bread."

That is from a previous post of mine. Here is another example of Brueggeman, one where he attaches Israel directly to America through, not theology or history, but anthropology:

The treasured narrative memory of Israel is so familiar that we scarcely notice that it is not really a “religious” memory. It is a political-economic memory about the time when we were slaves in Pharaoh’s Egypt. Israel can remember the oppressive circumstance when we were nothing more than instruments for the acquisitive economics of Pharaoh (Exodus 5:4-19). We were busy making bricks in order to build pyramids that would bestow grand immortality, and busy building granaries where Pharaoh could store and exhibit his economic monopoly as he controlled the world’s food supply. We remember the pain and the sweat and the resentment and the anger and the foul smell of the huts in which we had to live.

We are able to remember that there was a dramatic contest between the intelligence community of Pharaoh (now called “magicians”) and the daring challenge of Moses, who had no credentials. We had heard about the contest that played to a draw. Some of us trusted Moses, many doubted him and some simply refused. The ones who trusted followed him in that dark night of death, reached the waters and crossed. The memory was sealed as Miriam and the other women danced the dance of YHWH, the God of economic emancipation: “The Lord will reign forever and ever” (Exodus 15:18).

We headed out to a new world, and departed Pharaoh. The memory, so vivid to us, culminated at Sinai. We assented, in a blank check, to the new rules of YHWH, because we knew they would be better than the old quotas of Pharaoh (Exodus 19:8). Right from the mountain we heard the holy voice of the covenant speak to us 10 times about the love of God and love of neighbor (Exodus 20:2-17). We pledged our loyalty and in that instant were converted from a company of weary slaves to a people summoned to neighborliness (Exodus 24:3, 7). It was a transformation wrought by the holy power of YHWH, but we gladly signed on.

This is the narrative memory we deeply treasure. We treasure it so much that we teach our kids and we regularly perform it in order to recall why this night is different from all other nights. It is the night of death and of new life. It is the night of departure. It turns out to be the event of abundant bread. And before we finished, the narrative led us to new promises and pledges of loyalty to neighborly justice. The trek from slavery through abundance to covenant is one we made in wonder. And we keep making it, always again in wonder. And every time we perform it well, it is yet again an awesome miracle that we can hardly trust.

Read the whole thing, of which that is an overly long or unjustifiably brief taste. Those last words are the best, for me: "The trek from slavery through abundance to covenant is one we made in wonder. And we keep making it, always again in wonder. And every time we perform it well, it is yet again an awesome miracle that we can hardly trust." We don't trust it at all, of course. And we don't always make it; or rather, we don't always want to make it. But somehow, we do. Not as a religious pilgrimage, but as a people pursuing democracy and the creation of a more perfect union. As Breuggeman says, citing the words of "America the Beautiful:"

We sing this belated version of our Manifest Destiny. It is serious reuse of the older biblical narrative and we do not doubt that the God of liberty and covenantal justice and mercy and compassion continues to be the primal agent in our history. That version was primarily Protestant; we have, however, all appropriated it. We have gathered around it a mix of deep faith and patriotic pride, sure that this radical God willed a revolution in public power that ends in practices of peace and prosperity, with liberty and justice for all.

Brueggeman draws the parallels between America and Solomon, some of which I've mentioned before. He applies what he finds in Scriptures to the "current" financial crisis (his words are from 2009), and he points out that: "Sinai is not an ancient memory; it is rather a current mandate," a word that, taken out of context, would surely disturb and challenge many more people than it should, for many more reasons than they should.

It is the covenantal justice, and mercy, and compassion, that we must focus on. We can avoid it; but for how long? We can do it; but where do we start? Auden once wrote about "New styles of architecture/a change of heart," indicating perhaps that the external could eventually influence the internal. But it's the internal that affects the external, if indeed there is a distinction between them. Jesus pointed out many times that it isn't what goes into a person that is the question, but what comes out. What you do, not what you think, is what matters. When the sheep are separated from the goats, the sheep had no better thoughts than the goats did; it was their actions that determined their fate. Neither group knew who they had served or failed to serve; it was the service (or lack of it) that mattered.

Maybe the beginning of an answer is to begin thinking about what we can do for others, rather than thinking about what we don't have for ourselves. It seems like a small thing; but it is the seed of such a big thing...