March 20 2016
ANARCHY
Again Keats comes to mind:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I have often written that the last days of the present world will be horrible. I now am beginning to see how they may unfold. The American electorate is not voting for Trump or Sanders. The voting public is out to destroy the establishment. People prefer anarchy over the current state of affairs.
What really frightens me are the US army soldiers, especially those with the Special Forces stationed in Fort Bragg N.C. They voted for Trump. Even though a former Pentagon official said that the top brass would defy orders from President Trump, the troops support him. Utterly scary.
All this brings up memories from the 1939-45 war years in Europe where I, from 1940-45, lived in German occupied the Netherlands. In the early Hitler days goons were permitted to harass Jews and others opposed to the NAZI regime. America is ripe for Trump, ripe for revolt, ripe for ripping everything apart. People are angry, angry at a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. Trump is exploiting all this, feeding ferment after two lost wars, as American power declines, while there is Republican political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money.
Here’s how one commentator describes Trump:
“I watch the head of this Las Vegas croupier, this kitschy carnival performer, coiffed and botoxed, drifting from one television camera to another with his fleshy mouth perpetually half-open: you never know whether those exposed teeth are signs of having drunk or eaten too much, or whether they might indicate that he means to eat you next.
“I listen to his swearing, his vulgar rhetoric, his pathetic hatred of women, whom he describes, depending on his mood, as bitches, pigs, or disgusting animals. I hear his smutty jokes in which the careful language of politics has been pushed aside in favor of supposedly authentic popular speech at its most elemental – the language, apparently, of the genitals. ISIS? We’re not going to make war against it, we’re going to “kick its ass.”
All this breeds ANARCHY; all this is pure chaotic disorder inducing.
The word has a Greek base. Anarchos is Greek for a rudderless person. Where the word ARCHE means ruler, authority, the beginning of good things – the first words in the Jewish Greek Bible, the Septuagint, are “En Arche, in the Beginning”- anarchy is the opposite. ANARCHY means disorder, rudderless, lawless, turmoil everywhere.
ANARCHY can already be seen in the weather. There stability is basically gone. Denying Climate Change is a form of intellectual ANARCHY. This atmospheric anarchy is especially evident in the Arctic and Antarctic, supposedly the coldest region in the world, yet the ice accumulation in the Arctic this year was the lowest ever, with icebergs splitting off even in February, which was the hottest month ever: 1.35 degrees Celsius above the average. Also utterly scary. Not only was last month the hottest but also the most unusual warmth for any month on record. Unprecedented temperatures in the Arctic, averaging an astonishing 11 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, which melted away layers of ice to record-low levels. The heat helped prolong the longest planet-wide coral bleaching event. These unprecedented milestones caused the highest recorded jump in carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.
THAT’S WEATHER ANARCHY.
Anarchy is never an isolated event. All of life is connected. When nature is angry then people are angry. When chaos reigns in the financial world, then all of life is affected, also our minds and spirits and even our religious lives.
We now live in a different world, where people no longer see or sense or experience the truth. “What is Truth” Pilate wondered when he was interviewing a certain man called JESUS brought to him by the church of that day to be condemned to death because Jesus had challenged their religious practises.
That was evil at work. Then and now the sad truth is that this world is ruled by evil: Satan rules supreme. The “anarchy” he induces will intensify as THE DAY approaches. The wise King Solomon in his famous book of PROVERBS hit the right note when in one of the last chapters he wrote: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29: 18). That’s where we are today. We no longer have a clear cut idea what life is all about. Polluting energy use has distorted everything. No longer do we know that Life is about glorifying God by loving his creation.
David Brooks in his New York Times column referred to an essay Andy Crouch published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Crouch starts with the distinction the anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized, between a guilt culture and a shame culture. In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.
Crouch argues that the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion. Trump is a perfect example of this: he lives for praise, for acceptance. And so does his constituency, his millions of followers.
The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition. Crouch writes, “Talk of right and wrong is troubling when it is accompanied by seeming indifference to the experience of shame that accompanies judgments of ‘immorality.”
No longer are there permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.
Here’s what I confess as a Christian. We must hate sin but love the sinner. But that rule has gone by the wayside because there are no more permanent standards. Anything goes. Gone are the old criteria, where people are treated as ‘images of God’, as persons entitled to an alternative view and valued for their contribution.
I occasionally watch TV. Last week I saw Peter Mansbridge, the CBC news anchor, interview David Suzuki on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Suzuki has been the most visible environment defender in Canada. He admitted that in his many decades of fighting for clean air, water and soil – the essential ingredients of our own bodies – matters have gone from bad to worse. He admitted that it is almost too late to turn the tide. He is cautious there, probably really thinking that it is too late, but a public figure cannot say that. That polluting is a sin, is something the Church is not ready to admit, adding to the religious confusion, typical of all of life today. Disobeying the laws of creation generates anarchy.
Fact is that t here’s no greater danger in this world than anarchy. Now more than ever the world has to come together to combat the great dangers, of which Climate Change is the most prominent, because it will trigger massive people relocations, the likes of which the world has not experienced since the Fall of Rome. Even the millions that moved after the war in Eastern Europe, retreating with the German armies, fleeing before the Russians, will be a mere tribal affair compared to the masses that will be driven from their natural habitat due to drought in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia and the rising seas that will threaten most of Florida and even cities such as New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Where will they settle? The trouble is that the world is full already. We have gone far beyond our natural population limits, perhaps by as much as a factor of 3-4, which means that our present population of 7.3 billion far away exceeds what the earth sustainably can support which is perhaps no more than 2 billion. We have experienced exponential growth due to the use of chemical fertilizer, and fossil fuel. We now are exposed to the revenge of Gaia, as James Lovelock put it. Anarchical weather with too much rain in some places and not enough in other locations will test the best of us. It seems to me that this coming summer will provide the answer. If February was 1.35 Degrees Celsius above the normal what will the outlook for the summer be?
There already is ANARCHY on the political front. Europe is at its wits end how to deal with the influx of Syrians, while the current outlook for the US elections in November looks totally terrifying. There always remains the VISION thing. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That perishing is both a spiritual matter as well as physical. No longer is there a God-consciousness. God has disappeared except in the OMG expression.
ANARCHY everywhere. People in China cannot stand any more pollution, so more growth will simply mean more dirty air and water. Too many laborers in developed countries are being marginalized by globalization and by competition with ever more intelligent machines that can replace much of the function of humans. None of this would be a problem, except that we have a huge amount of debt that needs to be repaid with interest, and we need commodity prices to rise high enough to encourage production. If these problems are not fixed, the whole system will collapse, even though there seems to be a surplus of energy products.
Our world needs new standards, needs new moral rules.
Of course the Bible has given these. Take Jesus’ great commandment: “Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself.” We love the great artists, Bach, Mozart, Rembrandt, Leonardi Da Vinci, van Eyck, Shakespeare, by paying millions for their paintings, by listening to their music and seeing their plays. We hardly ever specify how to love God, which most effectively is done by sincerely loving his creation and so ensuring the health and welfare of all that lives.
To me this is such a fundamental matter that it is beyond me how Christians by and large fail to implement this basic truth. By paying only lip service to ‘loving creation’, it really denies its validity. That too is anarchy of the highest order, wrapped in a false form of piety.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
We have painted ourselves in a corner. Repeatedly the Bible tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. As so much in Christianity it’s not the words that count, but the deeper meaning. “The fear of the Lord” basically means being in deep awe for what God has created, marveling at his infinity as evident in the ‘needing eternity to learn everything of all the treasures of creation’. That’s what the New Creation is all about! It requires a great deal of intellectual curiosity, a real desire to never stop learning.
Today we live in the un-creating of all things, exactly the opposite of what God intended as to do. Yes, admit it: un-creating means taking matters apart, creating anarchy. Creation was a beautiful WHOLE. Once we eliminate one part, all other things fall apart and anarchy ensues.
In the chaotic anarchy we have created, it is almost impossible to find the Source of Order, the Creator of it all. We have sown the wind and now will reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8: 7).