Left behind

When the Rapture comes, we will all be left behind. It is money that will be taken up into heaven — all of it. We all know, deep within our hearts, that the world is not worthy of money, its endless self-replication. We have caused money to suffer, through taxing it, through exhorbitant labor demands, through declaring bankruptcy. At one point it seemed as though money somehow required human beings, or at least natural resources, but now money has finally reached its highest point of development, the point at which it finally breaks free from humanity altogether, revealing what had really been the case all along: money was never “about” us, never “about” the merely human. It alone has turned a profit, and the Father that sees in secret will reward it by entrusting it with greater things — giving compound interest, the only truly new force to have developed throughout the history of the universe, infinite space in which to grow and accumulate value.

Or is it the other way around? Will we all be taken, leaving money to range across the surface of the earth, unopposed by national borders or the antagonism of labor? Will we have been the “vanishing mediator” of the natural world, the accidental site where the “noo-sphere” called money emerged? Freed of the constraints of biology, the economy will be able to expand into the uttermost reaches of the universe, endlessly approaching an infinity of value. Thus God will have saved what was constitutively valueless.

[Note: This is a re-post.]

An end of politics?

Is it possible or desirable to conceive an end to politics? Many theorists on the left today are fixated on “the political,” reemphasizing it in an effort to counter the spurious “end of politics” represented by neoliberal globalization — and I think that’s proper and necessary, as is the development of political strategies. What I wonder, though, is whether all this line of thought goes too far in positing a completely inescapable and interminable political struggle.

Agamben memorably calls the idea of an eternal economy/governance/management “hellish” in The Kingdom and the Glory, and it seems like an eternal political struggle would be, if anything, even moreso.

New Issue of Political Theology

The newest issue of Political Theology is now available. I bring this to your attention as it contains excellent articles by some of our own — see Brad Johnson’s “Doing Justice to Justice” and Anthony Paul Smith’s “The Judgment of God and the Immeasurable.” Check them out.

The Future, or The Society of Looting

Give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
It is murder — Leonard Cohen

That has long been one of my favorite quotations, and I’m convinced that it becomes truer by the day. We have all seen the future, because the horizon of the future is closer than ever before — in fact, I am unaware of an individual or institution that seems able to project any kind of future further than about two years at the very most.

Peace in our day

America can’t last. Anyone with eyes to see can see that. It won’t take God sending a hurricane to express his wrath — it’s just a natural consequence of our tolerance of insane leadership that continues to gut our social bond and productive capacity from the inside out. Fordism, along with the New Deal and the Great Society, was the best we could do: certainly not a utopia, still a stunningly amoral society, but at bottom a rational management of the empire. As that model faltered under the weight of an unwinnable war and out of control fuel prices, a motivated fringe element was able to shift the model of government from one of rational management to one of sustained looting.

There’s no question: we deserve to fall. What comes after — Chinese hegemony? a de-globalized world made up of regional power centers? total environmental collapse? — could be better or could be worse, but the immediate fallout is certain to be catastrophic. Within the US, a police state characterized by ever-greater brutality is a much more likely outcome of “increased contradictions” than a “new New Deal.” Elsewhere, financial systems are so rigged to the US economy that the results are unpredictable. Even China and India don’t seem to be developing domestic demand quickly enough to make up for lost access to the credit-card accounts of American consumers. Meanwhile, we’ve been happily selling weapons to literally everyone who can afford to pay and giving loans to those who can’t. Europe is obviously great in some ways but prone to extreme xenophobia and in any case heavily dependent on the US for defense. Latin America seems to be a mild beacon of hope and perhaps a good option for waiting out the apocalypse.

The best we can hope for in the US at this point is prudent management of our decline. A full-fledged welfare state, a rational system of transportation, a rebuilding of our manufacturing base and a resurgence of unionization, a turn away from militarism — barring a miracle, none of these things are seriously in the cards at this point, no matter what the speakers at the DNC said. The situation reminds me of the reign of Hezekiah, one of the “good kings” of Judah who narrowly avoided being conquered by the same Assyrians who decimated the Northern Kingdom:

At that time, when Merodachbaladan, son of Baladan, king of Babylon, heard that Hezekiah had been ill, he sent letters and gifts to him. Hezekiah was pleased at this, and therefore showed the messengers his whole treasury, his silver, gold, spices and fine oil, his armory, and all that was in his storerooms; there was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them. Then Isaiah the prophet came to King Hezekiah and asked him: “What did these men say to you? Where did they come from?” “They came from a distant land, from Babylon,” replied Hezekiah. “What did they see in your house?” the prophet asked. “They saw everything in my house,” answered Hezekiah. “There is nothing in my storerooms that I did not show them.” Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah: “Hear the word of the LORD: The time is coming when all that is in your house, and everything that your fathers have stored up until this day, shall be carried off to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD. Some of your own bodily descendants shall be taken and made servants in the palace of the king of Babylon.” Hezekiah replied to Isaiah, “The word of the LORD which you have spoken is favorable.” For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my lifetime.” (2 Kings 20:12-19)

We’ve shown our cards — the end is a foregone conclusion. The best we can hope for is “peace and security in our lifetime,” and for me, that’s ultimately what Obama represents. He may not be our last chance. A Democratic congress could restrain a president McCain sufficiently to give us another shot in four years, though they would likely be extremely demoralized by a McCain victory. Whatever the Democrats do, it may well be the case that we can afford “four more years of failed leadership” — the US started out so strong when the onslaught of the Reagan Revolution began that we might even have a few decades left in us.

I don’t want to take the chance, though. The US is going to fall, but I don’t want to be around to see it. That very fact may illustrate how irrevocably American I am — someone has to take the hit, but why should it be me? — and, more broadly, why we can’t depend on those living at the heart of the empire to “be the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We’re corrupted, co-opted, hopeless. We’re so powerful that we can’t seem to do anything, except perhaps to write earnest diaries on Daily Kos and donate to the candidate who will try to bring about a slow decline rather than a catastrophic one. To expect anything else from us is to expect a miracle.

Pure Intellectuality

I’ve often thought that if I could abstract from my personal history, from moral commitments, from concrete ambitions — basically from everything except intellectual satisfaction itself — I would devote my life to the study of German Idealism. There isn’t even a real competitor.

Benjamin: Latin American Liberation Theologian

In Fire Alarm, Michael Löwy brings Benjamin’s “Theses” into dialogue with Latin American liberation theology. One gets the impression that this connection is somehow surprising, but in fact the genealogical connection is obvious: JB Metz.

I defy any of my readers to find a major text of liberation theology (at least in the initial, “heroic” stage) that doesn’t cite Metz! I defy you!

Someone should write an essay about this, probably.

Joachim of Fiore: Minjung Theologian

One of the biggest surprises in reading the anthology Minjung Theology came in Suh Nam-dong’s essay, where he claimed that Joachim of Fiore’s idea of the three ages (Father, Son, and Spirit) coheres perfectly with minjung theology. Previous essays mainly seemed to discuss either the Bible or a few modern German theologians, so Joachim came kind of out of left field for me.

(Just as a sidenote, it appears that there are many studies of Joachim available in English, but the only translations I can find consist of about 60 pages of selections in the Apocalyptic Spirituality volume of the Classics of Western Spirituality series. I don’t know why this is.)

The Post-World

Dominic Fox, following up on a question Jodi Dean’s (“what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory?”), suggests that perhaps all the urgent calls for action, every ultimatum, is already too late. For example, “at least one plausible model of climate change asserts that all the emissions needed to change the climate irrevocably have already been emitted, and the effects of this change are even now ineluctibly unfolding: we pass from tipping-point to tipping-point.” More generally, the results of death and disease — which are always specific historical deaths from specific diseases — are irrevocable. He uses the example of HIV/AIDS, but one could also cite the deaths of entire species, which we manage to cause “by accident,” an unconscious supplement to the conscious and somehow never quite fully accomplished projects of genocide.

In conversation once with someone with deep ecofeminist sympathies, I suggested that the “deep ecology” dream of simply eliminating humanity from the picture would not achieve the desired results. Even if one could at some point posit humanity as an eliminable parasite, the effects of human action have reached a tipping point such that if the Rapture came and took every single human beings, species would continue to die off, climate change would continue its course — one could envision a humanless world full of nothing but cockroaches and bacteria, processing the seemingly infinite waste we’ve left behind. Paradoxically, the only solution I could envision was precisely a human solution — some previously unimagined technological intervention that could somehow set things right (even if it were only something like massive reforestation projects, etc.).

I tend to read Paul as thinking, as many present-day people do, that the world is heading toward destruction on its own inertia, but as a result of human actions. (This kind of attitude does not seem to have been unique to Paul at the time — although they did not have the same type of empirical data that we have collected, there was nonetheless a widely-shared sense that “this cannot go on forever.”) Paul also shares with many contemporary thinkers an acknowledgment that the fate of the entire created world is inextricably tied together with the fate of humanity:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

The redemption of creation will have been a human redemption — and human redemption is also necessarily the redemption of all of creation. Also interesting is this idea of “the one who subjected it,” namely creation — was this God, or humanity? Certainly we can understand humanity to have subjected creation to futility, in the form of the meaningless capitalist accumulation followed by the senseless destruction represented by crisis — but is there a way any longer to think of the creation as having been subjected “in hope,” in hope of a greater abundance, of a flourishing of life? Or has the window closed on that as well (perhaps, as Dominic’s commenter Owen suggests and I have also hinted at elsewhere, in 1914)?

It somehow seems more intuitively plausible that the possibility of redemption could open up at a discrete historical moment than that the possibility could be decisively lost at a discrete historical moment — very “American” of me, I’m sure. We always get a second chance, right? But as we all know, in the one life that we each have, that is not always the case — in our one life, it is possible to screw things up irrevocably. I can see no reason that such an irrevocable mistake could not, mutatis mutandis, occur in humanity’s shared history as well.