Deep Democracy.

A democracy inclusive of all...  as in all.

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead....  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.  All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.  Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.    

--G. K. Chesterton

I love that Chesterton quote.  I want to take it further.  Way further.  I favor a democracy that includes the dead by recognizing and accounting for the ways things our forebears did them.  I also favor an even deeper and broader democracy that looks out for the interests of people who have not come yet, people who will look to us as ancestors. 

Christian theology understands this in terms of the Communion of the Saints, and gathering of all the faithful, living, dead, and yet to come.   

Furthermore, why do we limit democracy merely to humans?  Why can we not find a way to attend politically to the best interests of animals and plants, even the planet itself?  

What would politics look like if we asked what effect this or that policy or initiative would have on the future?  What if we asked whether people yet unborn would benefit from this decision, or hate us for it?  Do our decisions make life better or worse for our offspring?  What if we extended Jesus' teaching about doing unto others to include people not yet alive?

Indeed, what gives us the right to do so much as cut down a tree without the tree's permission, let alone slaughter a cow or dam a river? 

Genesis empowers humans to "till and keep" creation, which the word "dominion" sums up.  The example of such dominion we find in Jesus Christ, who exercises it in terms of care, cooperation, respect, love, and seeing every living thing as a sign of God's saving Presence.  The only "rights" we have with regard to nature or anything else -- in other words, the real meaning of freedom -- we find in obedience to the will of the Creator, revealed in Jesus.  We certainly have no right to destroy, poison, exploit, misuse, abuse, deplete, or otherwise degrade something that does not belong to us but to God (Psalm 24:1).

Anyway, a deep democracy would act on behalf and for the benefit of all.

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Borg's Dualism.

I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product.  I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity.  As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God...  I realized that whatever "divine revelation" and the "inspiration of the Bible" meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority.

--Marcus Borg.  

Someone approvingly put this quote on Facebook.  I understand why, but this quote demonstrates Borg's unhelpful approach.  He actually reveals his fundamental unfamiliarity with non-dual thinking, and therefore his basic reflexive commitment to Modernity and therefore Empire.  His first two sentences show that he does not believe something can be both human and divine.  He sees these as mutually exclusive categories.  In order to accept that the Bible "is a cultural human product," he says we have to "let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product."  We apparently cannot have both.  He denies that God works through people and communities.  In this he basically denies God's ability to do anything, even exist or be in any meaningful way.

(I haven't read all of Borg, and this quote may not represent his views at all, for all I know.  But it does represent a very common way of thinking.  So I apologize if I am unfair to him.)

On the one hand, the quote affirms the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity of humankind since it implies that human beings have no capability to do anything good.  Certainly, God cannot work through or in them.  Or at least God did not work through the ancient communities that produced the Bible.

On the other hand, he makes God so wholly other, so utterly and essentially disconnected from human life and perhaps creation itself, that God does not and cannot bridge the infinite gap and participate in human life in any way.  Or at least God did not do with in relation to the two ancient communities he talks about.

Maybe he only disrespects those "two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity."  Maybe other communities exist that he can respect and even see God working within, I don't know.  He doesn't say, at least, not here.  (But I suspect not.  I sense that Borg mistrusted all traditions and all communities, and only believed God could work with individuals, at best.)  

Why, I wonder, can we not see the Bible as both a divine and human product?  Why can we not understand that God works through and in communities, ancient and otherwise?  Why does he apparently imagine it impossible to see the Bible or anything as both the product of historical, mortal humans, and at the same time God's word communicated to people?

Where does Jesus Christ land in Borg's binary scheme?  Either he sees Christ as "fully human," and therefore as an utterly un-divine first century Jewish teacher, or as "fully God" as some Gnostic, docetic phantom who could never "become flesh," let alone die on a Roman cross.  (His Westar Institute currently toys with both of these views.)   

The Church addressed this question more or less definitively at Nicaea and Chalcedon, declaring Jesus Christ as both fully human and at the same time fully divine.  This of course makes no sense to the dualistic mind that demands things be stuck in exclusive, logical categories.

We can only express spiritual truth according to a non-duality that recognizes the interpenetration, radical inclusiveness, and mutually participatory nature of Reality, with a panentheistic, incarnational view of the Creator. 

I understand Borg's resistance to toxic and pathological Fundamentalism that habitually used the Bible as a weapon against their enemies, claiming their sour, exclusive, and self-serving interpretations as the Word of God.  I understand that this kind of theology does a lot of damage to people and communities, including the Earth itself, and contradicts the love of God revealed in Jesus.  But offering as an alternative to such evil the equally toxic and pathological, sour, exclusive, and self-serving approach of Modernist historicism, gets us nowhere.  It accepts and affirms the binary, dualistic, either/or approach of fundamentalism, and just turns it around.  It rejects Jesus and God in a different way, with the same result: people fall away from the love of the Creator. 

This describes the story of Christianity in the Modern Age.  Two slightly different flavors of toxicity battling against Creator and creation, one using God as a weapon of their own egocentricity and the other using godlessness in the same way.  People imagine these as the only choices: fundamentalism or atheism.  And either adopt a religious fascism for the sake of social order, or they wander off to figure things out "on their own."  In either case, they remain in bondage to ego and Empire.  Modernity uses this strategy continually: setting up illusory opponents in dualistic competition/conflict/war, offering these as the only choices, so that people can't even imagine the truth outside of this linear, binary grid.

The only way out of this dead end we have available to us in discipleship rooted in the grace of the Creator revealed in Jesus Christ.  Freed of such binary dualism, Borg knows this now.  He died in 2015.

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Political Rant for a Turbulent Time.

Restoring the Status Quo Will Not Cut It.

I have read many commentators expressing mystification about President Biden's stubborn unpopularity.  They list his legislative accomplishments, which frankly do border on the miraculous: the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, the remarkable and transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, and a couple of other achievements give him one of the most successful and impactful first terms of any President since FDR.  At least on paper, the economy roars ahead, creating jobs by the millions.  Inflation declines, interest rates may soon as well.  We have largely put Covid behind us.  He revived NATO and led Europe in standing against Russian aggression in Ukraine....  By all normal measures, Biden should enjoy stratospheric polling and coast to re-election.

But not only does he not have a lead in polling, but his presumptive opponent -- the twice-impeached, four times indicted on over 90 charges, disgraced, incompetent, disingenuous, breathtakingly corrupt, aging, and arguably mentally ill predecessor, by any measure the worst President in history, who actively and intentionally undermined the Constitution and attempted to reverse a 180-year tradition of peaceful transfer of power, against whom like 70 courts ruled on this, and who provoked a violent and deadly riot against the Capitol, and one of the most unpopular figures in American politics, who has lately spouted obviously fascist tropes like calling his opponents "vermin" and whining about immigrants "polluting our blood" -- remains not just competitive but often ahead.  

What the hell?

I understand the sober, circumspect observers who reassure us that polling this far out has no point and usually gets it wrong.  They mention how Obama and others languished far behind (but not this far behind...) a year out, and came back to win reelection.  They remind us that voters have not yet started paying attention.  They blame the media's inexplicable harshness towards Biden.  And so on.  All of which would make more sense if we had some confidence that we live in normal times.

What if we have left normal behind us?  What if we do not live in the same era or world as we did even a few years ago... and I fear that Biden does not get it.  He seems to still want to function according to norms, procedures, standards, and practices that may have held for generations, or even centuries... but no longer work.  

Look, he can spout about how government still functions, and that we can even accomplish things in an arguably bipartisan manner.  But I wonder if policy and legislation have ever mattered less.  Arguing facts and statistics doesn't work when people feel nervous and riven with anxiety, sensing a world in uncontrolled tailspin.  The standard economic metrics may not relate to real people anymore.  Maybe they show us the security of the top 1% or even 20%, while not really reflecting the lived experience of most Americans. 

Just as no level of prosperity can outweigh a diagnosis of cancer or heart disease, if we sense the bottom dropping out of civilization itself, extra cash in one's paycheck doesn't matter that much.  Do people sense the center not only not holding but starting to give way beneath them?  Have our systems and institutions become irrelevant and ineffective, if not actually harmful?  Do we feel this fundamental malaise and sense of impending doom, or at least chaos?  I feel like we're on the Titanic and Biden brags about improving room service. 

When people start asking "What's normal done for us lately?" it does not help to brand oneself as the re-establisher of normal.  Maybe people feel that the old normal has gone and will not come back, and they peer ahead with trepidation because a new normal has not yet established itself.  They wonder what it will look like when it does, and who will decide about that, and how much turbulence they will have to endure before that happens?  And the fact that they can't put their finger on or articulate any of this only makes it scarier. 

Every night on MSNBC the hosts and experts revel in Trump's legal woes.  Experts predict his likely conviction and the triumph of the American Criminal Justice System.  Of course, I hope Trump ends up in a Federal prison.  But having seen our legal system at work up close, it looks like a matter of deals and games played among rich and connected people.  I know that it exists in part to humiliate the poor and powerless.  Why should I want to see it triumph?  We know it has never really worked for minorities at all, and insiders readily manipulate it in their own interest.        

Other systems teeter on the edges of legitimacy as well.  Our economic order actively sinks into a kind of techno-feudalism as a handful of overlords like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Google, Apple, and other multi-billion-dollar corporations and individuals increasingly manage the world economy for their own benefit.  Musk alone has $215b, which means he could give every human on earth a billion dollars and still have well over $200 billion to squeeze by on.  Capitalism steadily reveals its original purpose as a system that kills the earth while obscenely enriching a very few.  They respond by idiotically pouring billions into ventures to the Moon and even Mars.  

We see the world of business infected by frankly evil forces epitomized by the murderous Sackler family which received no significant consequences or punishment at all for intentionally driving millions of people to addiction and death!  Or the fossil fuel companies which knowingly and constantly continue to destroy the very ability of the planet to sustain life, and spread lies about it.  Again, with no penalty.  

Our political system seems in freefall as well, as we have had to endure the repeated election of Presidents who do not win the most votes, a Congress stifled in manifold ways by its own rules, a Supreme Court which has lost legitimacy due to obviously partisan decisions, not to mention overt corruption.  We see an aggressive rise in voter suppression laws, with many states, hamstrung by gerrymandering, come ruled by a cynical and entrenched minority.  Our 18th century Constitution and medieval legal system simply does not have the structure or flexibility to deal with this level and scale of sabotage, duplicity, and manipulation.

We lose 35,000 people to gun violence every year, and the government cannot enact even the most tepid and sensible regulations to curtail it.

Mass and social media have become cesspools of lies, hysteria, partisan spinning, pornography, mindless entertainment, and despair.  And we're careening into a world enmeshed in AI with no plan and no guardrails.   

Our health care system costs an unconscionable amount of money, excludes many people, and has lost the trust of a large segment of the population.  I don't agree with them, but I totally understand why some don't trust vaccines.  Big business designed the whole system for their own enrichment; they have lied to us repeatedly and compulsively in the past.  

And the world order we all got used to no longer functions.  Who predicted a land war in Europe due to Russian aggression?  And we find ourselves completely unable to do anything about the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. 

Our immigration system remains inadequate.  Republicans demagoguing it refuse to work on any improvements.  It has become a lightning rod for racist paranoia.  It results from failed policies, and the climate crisis, in Central and South America.  We ignore the suffering and courage of millions of ordinary people. 

To sum up, our society languishes in crisis largely because of the rampant exploitation by the wealthy elite, and everyone else seeks to follow their example.  They control all social and cultural institutions for their own profit, even the ones most of us could until recently trust and respect.  In Greed We Trust would serve as a more accurate national motto than the sanctimonious and hypocritical one we display now.  

Which reveals a crisis of character in Americans as trust and civility break down and we have trouble even communicating with each other.

Religious institutions, intended to cultivate spiritual values like compassion, humility, forgiveness, non-violence, generosity, and acceptance, do not.  Christian churches should encourage personal transformation and social justice.  But now, on the one hand, the Evangelical movement has completely discredited itself with its infatuation with easily the least Christlike human ever to hold the Presidency, the old-line churches sink into ineffective irrelevance, and the rise of people claiming no religion (the "nones") portends a nation with no spiritual guidance at all beyond the craving of individual egos.

And churning under everything portends the most consequential earthquake of all: the deepening and spreading climate catastrophe, brought on all of us by centuries of waste, growth, extraction, destruction, and profit.  We see exponential increases in wildfires, floods, and extinctions, with stronger hurricanes, longer and more severe droughts, hotter and more unpredictable weather, and a steady rise in species extinction, sea levels, habitat loss, and the number of climate-related diseases and refugees.  In 2023 we shattered all records for atmospheric heat, by far.  Governments respond with big meetings and brave statements and goals... that they largely do not enact.  We have moved past the tipping point where we can prevent it; now we scramble just to limit the damage. 

Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks openly and enthusiastically gush about different kinds of minority rule or even autocracy that need to be invoked to impose their will  on everything.  They dream of "Red Caesar" and martial law.  Large portions of Congress advocate for Trump's election lies and other preposterous and paranoid propositions, a level of blatant disloyalty to democracy not seen in our country since the 1860's.  Twenty-five percent of Americans profess a willingness to accept political violence if it achieves their goals.  Having gone full nihilistic fascist theocracy, we have no reason to hope the Republicans can offer anything but brutal, repressive tyranny. 

In the face of this blizzard of toxic political, moral, economic, cultural, and ecological sludge, Biden's boasting about the "bipartisan" Infrastructure Bill seems somewhat... inadequate, even quaint.

If Biden goes into the 2024 election campaign as the great restorer and maintainer of the status quo, he will only win because people hate Trump more than they fear the future.  The "America Is Already Great!" argument didn't work for Hillary Clinton; why should it help Biden?  People know things do not look great right now, and they don't know what to do about that.  If left with the choice between propping up a rotting and ineffective faux-democracy and burning it all down in an orgy of autocratic retribution, I fear disaster.    

And I find it hard for Democrats to claim to present a viable alternative, when they have morphed into the party of the wealthy, educated, connected elite.  Embracing Wall Street and Neoliberalism under Clinton, Democrats have helped to oversee the slide into inequality and polarization.  They have largely abandoned and therefore lost the working class and frankly seem far more concerned with pushing advances in social equity... we need this too, but it shouldn't happen at the expense of economic justice for all.  The fact that most American families do not have $400 in the bank for an emergency says it all.

And when the Democrats do come into power, they manage to squander it by adhering to archaic and obsolete, arbitrary rules, rules they could change had they the will.  Instead they still pretend we live in 1999 (or even 1789).

Even our version of democracy has lost a lot of its legitimacy with many people.  For if this system brought us to this place of anxiety, confusion, division, and grief then maybe, some people may reason, we should try something else now.  Indeed, can Biden claim the role of protecting "democracy," when the system he wants to sustain shows only a casual relationship to actual democracy?    

We need a credible third option.  Or, we need the Democrats to realize the depth of the crisis, and present a plan to repair and renew America.  What if they remade themselves into the party of responsible, forward-looking, major, fundamental change?  What if they talked about wealth redistribution more directly, even proposed a Guaranteed Basic Income?  What if they started advocating for actual democracy, and developed a battery of Constitutional Amendments, and other measures that indicated a truly transformational vision for the 21st century?  What if they said, "We get that things do not work for people and that the country approaches freefall; here's how to fix it"? 

If 1789 gave us Constitution 1.0, and after the Civil War we developed the 2.0 version.  Clearly we need 3.0 now.  That should include an array of political, economic, media, tech, and judicial changes that would make the economy more equitable and opportunity-driven, and government more representative, responsive, accountable, nimble, and open.

We cannot sustain our current situation.  Something has to give.  We can either collapse into violent minority rule, or present and fight for a vision for renewal.  We can try to impose the terror of white supremacy.  Or we can offer the hope of liberty and justice for all, the multi-cultural, multi-racial, communitarian democracy that stands as America's highest goal, and always has.     

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