In college I read and found myself deeply influenced by philosopher Allen Wheelis' book, The End of the Modern Age. Wheels contends that placing humans at the center primarily characterizes the Modern Age. This removes God to the periphery, at best. It reminds me of Dostoevsky's famous phrase, that, "Without God all things are permitted." We find his view expressed in the Bible in Judges 21:25:
"In those days there was no king in Israel;
all the people did what was right in their own eyes."
For some, this sentiment, which we loftily call "Humanism," articulates the ideal libertarian paradise that Modernity has always sought to institute, where each person has the freedom to do whatever they want. Those of us who grew up in the 1960's knew this as a basic motivating ethos of the counter-culture: Do your own thing! "Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do, with whomever you wanna do it with" (The Mamas and the Papas). The idea that everyone has the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" appears in the foundational documents of the USA. Everyone gets to do what is right in their own eyes! All things are permitted! Cool!
Our society raised and indoctrinated people to adhere to this humanistic libertarian philosophy. Unfortunately, the reality of existence in which people do what they want and "everything is permitted" looks very different from the paradise it produces in theory.
Every person does not have equal gifts. Some have more strength, some have different skills and abilities, some we consider more attractive. The individuals with greater wealth and power have more opportunities to pursue their own happiness, and in the name of that goal they invariably infringe upon if not totally remove the freedom and wealth of other, weaker, people. Which means that our glorious and aspirational declarations of human equality has the actual effect of instituting a class system with some at the top doing as they please and taking what they want, while compelling everyone else to work to make that happen. We end up with greater inequality and worse injustice.
Modernity, capitalism, and even what we call democracy have always worked out this way. The man who proclaimed that business about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right for everyone... owned slaves. The Constitution he and his associates framed assumed that only white, male, property owners would have the right to vote. The economic system their descendants designed demanded and enabled the raw exploitation of other people's labor and the wanton extraction of the planet's "resources." The nation they founded spread across land stolen by violence from indigenous peoples, with much of the work done by enslaved Africans.
Humanistic individualism requires an underclass of exploited workers to enable the ones believing that everything is permitted to keep on doing whatever right in their own eyes. Hence colonialism.
The biblical text offers the remedy of a king. Sadly, the Israelites understood this to mean a king "like the other nations," and in the next few books, they get their wish. Predictably they start by splitting into two kingdoms. With a few exceptions, the monarchs of Israel and Judah reveal that leaving things up to humans results in disaster. For everyone doing what is right in their own eyes without God invariably produces tyrants. Resulting in Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Caesar.... Social Darwinism became the primary political ideology of Modernity. Humanistic libertarianism comes down to survival of the fittest. Obviously. The prophet Jeremiah observes that when each acts according to the stubbornness of their evil will (Jeremiah 18:12) disaster results.
Ion such a situation, the excluded and marginalized have to fight and shed their blood to gain rights that the establishment proclaimed as inalienably given to all. Only by laws limiting the freedom of the owners and privileged class could others attain such "natural" rights.
As a solution, the biblical text alludes, not to a human strong man, but to the Israelites' only real King: YHWH, God, the Creator. We find the only path forward for humanity when we stop imagining that everyone doing whatever they want will ever work, and realize that only humble submission to the Creator's will allows us to dwell together in peace and justice. We need to follow a Higher Power, One not defiled and corrupted by egocentricity, but in Whom we may find true equality and freedom.
We see embodied before us the Creator's will in Jesus Christ, who exhibits compassion, forgiveness, generosity, humility, gentleness, inclusion, and love. We participate in the only sustainable Way for humans to live together on this planet when we gather in communities that seek together to actually follow him.
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