March
2006
The Limits of Misrule
As you all know, a visiting preacher enjoys the luxury of not knowing anything about you. This morning I intend to luxuriate in my ignorance for a very particular purpose.
I want to play the proverbial man from Mars and engage in a thought experiment with you about the limits of misrule. And I will put my cards right on the table at the outset and tell you exactly what I think about the nature of the misrule that afflicts us today. After I have done that we can explore together the question of possible limits.
I am not going to do the obvious and begin by talking about the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration is not the sole source of our tribulations but rather one expression—albeit a very menacing expression—of a greater tribulation.
Let me start instead with the misrule represented by corporate dominance of our society and common culture. It’s not just that corporations own everything, right down to our time and increasingly even the language that we use; it’s that they set the rules for how we shall live. For example, all that Bush is doing in pushing what he calls his “ownership society� is importing into the public policy sphere the values of the corporate culture: a culture where I’ve got mine, Jack, and the devil take the hindmost—where overwork, over-consumption and massive personal debt are considered virtues and people who actually pay their debts are considered deadbeats—where privacy rights do not exist, where sucking up is rewarded, and where you really should sell out your closest associate if doing so will get you promoted.
Corporate misrule is what teaches us that things are more important than people. Corporate misrule is what gives us a mass culture and a mass media that stupefy and demobilize us rather than educating us for engaged citizenship. Corporate misrule is what has given us static real incomes for the people in the middle, sharply declining standards for the poorest, and an incredible 20-year surge in wealth and income for people at the top and especially for those at the very top—those whom Bush refers to as “my base: the haves and the have-mores.� Corporate misrule is the force that is rapidly shifting the nation’s tax burden to wage income and away from investment income—which of course has the double benefit to right-wingers of causing workers to resent government and vote Republican. Corporate misrule is the force that never hesitates to destroy North American jobs in order to transfer production to slave-labor environments in China and elsewhere. Corporate misrule is what is leaving millions and millions with no employer-paid pensions of any kind. Corporate misrule is what thrives on no-bid contracts for rebuilding Iraq or rebuilding New Orleans. And corporate misrule is what has now utterly defiled and polluted our political system to the point that almost no one who does not do the corporations’ bidding can expect be elected or re-elected to a significant position in government. In just the past five years corporate lobbying in Washington has exploded into a $3 billion-a-year industry, and that does not include the other billions they spend (and all of it is really our money, because it’s tax deductible) to win their objectives in state capitols and in city halls across the country.
Have I cheered you up yet? Good! Now let’s talk for a bit about the Bush Administration as a particular expression or instrumentality of misrule.
I don’t like to use the F-word in church, but I must say it’s beginning to look and feel a lot like fascism to me. I mean the way they use fear to keep people in line. The way they use the Big Lie technique so shamelessly. The way they welcomed 9/11 as an opportunity to put through their dominance doctrine and suspend civil liberties via the Patriot Act, whose many hundreds of pages had already been written when the attack took place. The way—and here they really do mimic Hitler and Mussolini—they substitute posturing and blustering for actual governing. The way they silence or ignore anyone who gets in their way or disagrees with them, whether it’s long-time civil servants, environmental scientists, responsible members of the intelligence community, or even generals who warned them that Iraq would be no walk in the park. And of course, most recently, the way they claim for themselves a kind of divine right to spy on all of us at will under their theory of the authority wielded by the “unitary� chief executive.
I must also say that what many regard as their mismanagement of the economy is not really mismanagement at all. I think it’s deliberate. That is to say, I don’t think anyone in this White House really believes that cutting taxes for the rich will stimulate the economy or create growth. These aren’t stupid people. I don’t think anyone there believes that running huge deficits as far as the eye can see in order to make those tax cuts permanent is sound economic policy. I don’t think they believe that borrowing $3 billion from Asian central banks every single working day is going to make the United States of America stronger in the long run.
Here is what I think, and you can call me paranoid if you want to. I think they wouldn’t mind a big meltdown in the financial system—a spectacular crash, if you will—because they know perfectly well that those who will suffer most if that happens—poor and working class folks—aren’t going to swing Left if that happens. There is no Left position to swing to or any Left movement to rally around. No, when the crisis comes desperate people are going to swing even more to the Right. They are going to embrace the man on the white horse who tells them everything will be all right if they will just hand over what remains of their liberty.
So where does all of this leave us? I said I would speak about the limits of misrule. This is why I wanted us to hear what Judge Learned Hand had to say about liberty way back in 1944. I agree with Judge Hand that the constitutional system as such cannot save us. We are naïve to suppose that the ACLU is going to ride to the rescue and save us through litigation once the final plunge into fascism has begun. No, the only limit to a future of otherwise unlimited misrule lies within us: it lies in our values, our vision, our passion for equality and justice and freedom. And I would say even more specifically that the real limit to catastrophic misrule lies within the community of people of faith who know what’s going on because we’ve seen it before.
What am I talking about here? Reincarnation? No, I realize this is Santa Monica, but what I mean by saying “we’ve seen it before� is that every time we rehearse and retell our own story as People of the Book—as people who bear the collective memory of ancient oppression but also of liberation—we find in that Book a reflection of our own situation and we discover the resources we need to resist and fight back against fascism-lite and even against fascism-heavy.
I said a while ago that in the midst of turmoil and suffering there is currently no Left position and no Left movement for people to rally around. Let me amplify that comment. In the Republican Party that has emerged over the past 40 years you can observe the Corporate Right and the Religious Right melding into a powerful movement capable of taking power and wielding power. But what do you see in the parallel history of the Democratic Party? With the unions devastated and with the old civil rights and women’s movements fatally diminished over the same 40-year period, what was once the party of the so-called “little guy� is today dominated by wealthy liberals and trial lawyers. Nice people, no doubt: enlightened people—many of them pro-gay and all—but they bring no critique of corporate dominance because they in fact are doing very well under corporate dominance.
The reason progressive communities of faith represent our last and best hope is that they have—we have—an independent place to stand. We have a place and a point of view that isn’t about spinning and that isn’t about positioning. We have a ready-made and still powerful critique of the religion of wealth and the cult of dominance that comes directly from within our prophetic inheritance. We understand from the depths of our hearts and minds and souls that allowing and even encouraging the strong to exploit the weak is not the way to construct a peaceful and prosperous society.
I will even say that if all we had from our religious inheritance was the Book of Jeremiah we would still be able to decode the signs of the times and find a place from which to resist the fascist usurpers and call out the corporate creeps in their bespoke suits and fancy Italian loafers. After all, Jeremiah is the prophet Jesus quoted when, in his greatest single provocation, he overturned the tables of the bankers and denounced the religious authorities for making God’s house into a house for predators and robbers. Jeremiah understands a society in which false piety reigns while even the priests themselves are lining their pockets and exploiting the poor. Yes, indeed: “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule as the prophets direct; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?� (Jer. 5:30-31)
Jeremiah, of course, was not able to save corrupt a corrupt Kingdom of Judah from its fate—it collapsed before his eyes, and he himself ended up going into an Egyptian exile—but he did stand fast. He kept faith, and his legacy or portion is to teach Israel—and teach us—that the truth is non-negotiable and indestructible—that no tyranny and no abuse can extinguish the light within as long as we choose to live from that light and walk in that light without fear.
I want to close with some thoughts about the prophetic vocation in our time and in all times. This is prompted by the title of Taylor Branch’s new book about Martin Luther King Jr., which is titled On Canaan’s Edge. I have not read the book yet but just its title is illuminating and relevant, as have been the titles of the other books in the trilogy: Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire. The allusion, quite obviously, is to Moses who could not enter the Promised Land but who was allowed to see the land from Pisgah’s heights.
Moses is also traditionally understood as the first of the prophets. It is in relation to his example that scripture says God will “raise up prophets like Moses� in each generation. James Lawson, who was very close to Dr. King, once told a group of us that the significance of Moses’ call to service—and indeed of the call to every prophet—is that Moses begins to see as God sees. He is awakened to the suffering and hope of a people in bondage.
It is our privilege and, if the truth be told, also our burden as people of faith to open our eyes and begin to see the world as God sees it. For us this means paying attention to the heroism and the agony of the people at the bottom of our system of plantation capitalism: the poor and the working poor. It means seeing them as bearers of good news, because they have information—real information—about how the system works and what it may take to overturn it. For those of us who enjoy white skin privilege, seeing the world as God sees it also means acknowledging and working through our own unacknowledged racism and understanding how racism continues to make possible the corporate domination of this society. Seeing the world as God sees it also makes it clear that the choice we face is still the choice that Martin King discerned 40 years ago—a choice between chaos (the reign of violence) or just community.
People of faith seeing the world through God’s eyes must not waver on this point: we must unconditionally reject violence and choose instead the path of active nonviolence. And we must do this not just as a private choice—as some kind of private piety—but as sound social critique and as sound strategy. Because if we really look at history, and particularly at recent history, we will see that violence always fails to deliver what it claims it will deliver. Violence is historically and materially deficient, whereas the path of nonviolence—of soul force—can transform whole societies when it is allowed to work. Think not only of America’s modern civil rights movement—a movement still unfinished—but think as well of the people’s moral victories in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in the Philippines and South Africa and many other places. Places where people chose to employ a force more powerful than violence: where they organized, kept the high ground, and withdrew their consent from unjust governments and rulers.
People around the world today are beginning to say that the only way to bring American violence and American imperialism to heel is to do something similar to this: to deny legitimacy and withdraw consent even in the face of U.S. government threats and bribes and badgering. But of course the world’s people cannot succeed in this approach unless people living within the belly of the beast—that would be us—also understand the stakes and join the struggle and withdraw our consent from these dangerous leaders and their policies. American Christians—the good kind—should be in the vanguard of withdrawing consent, nonviolently and persistently, in all kinds of ways ranging from teach-ins and street demonstrations to voter education to boycotts of war-machine corporations to withholding the portion of their taxes that supports the war machine.
But what will you do when the end comes, asks Jeremiah. It’s still a good question. I think the crisis is probably coming sooner than we may think, and we need to prepare ourselves by learning the habits and techniques of nonviolent resistance right now.
If this sounds a little terrifying, it should not. As I said, if we will only reconnect with our own story in the Book of Life we will realize that we’ve seen it all before—that we’ve been here before—and that insofar as we remained faithful we were delivered, the land was eventually redeemed, and all the tyrants and oppressors were cast down from their high places.
There is a limit to misrule. We are that limit. As I said, it’s both a privilege and a burden. But most of all it’s a privilege. Thanks be to God, who helps us to see the world clearly—who invites us to stand with dispossessed and disenfranchised—and who ultimately gives us the victory if we do not waver in our commitment to truth, to nonviolence, and to the still-shining promise of beloved community.
Texts: Jeremiah 5:20-31; Judge Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty,� an address given in New York’s Central Park on May 21, 1944