It’s a bit preachy keen, but someone “Liked” it, and so I’ve elected to share it.
In the faith communities referencing Moses, competition for power and wealth through subscription and the many demonstrations of devotion and loyalty have produced some bloody “competitions” across time and space. The pious have long fought among themselves — schisms will do that — as well as taken aim at external enemies.
Has as much not been the way of the world?
This day is a little different: we may see one another through what we have to say, and hearing and seeing more, we may think a little more as well.
Moses challenged politically absolute power and with the guidance and power of God removed from it the Jews and the “mixed multitude” that would join them. Not much has changed. No one likes to be tyrannized.
The Jewish liberation story and much else about Judaism proved potently attractive enough to inspire uptake — give Hillel the Elder some credit — by the “restive of Rome”, i.e., those tiring of the brutality and excesses of the powerful. Even with eased conversions, the tribal ethnolinguistic culture (perhaps) could not begin to absorb the numbers, and the Romans looking for a new answer may have had other cultural needs better addressed by Jesus / Paul.
With Christianity in place, General Constantine finds his mission, and about 300 years later, General Muhammad develops his.
The Jews: they appear to worry much less about subscription, power, and wealth, and it’s pretty clear where and how the Hebrews have settled.
Aside: in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed by a Christian government to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims (ref. Raphael Patai’s _The Jews of Hungary).
This may be the best time to get off the medieval merry-go-round by looking forward while leaving some attitudes and beliefs plus archaic doctrines and methods far in the past where they belong.
While most of the western public has been focused heavily on violence associated with Islamic extremists and the sense of related threat coming off the brutal depopulating of Syria (in no small part, that’s what the stupid piece of bloody theater has been about), it may have overlooked its own predictable reaction. Where we have been stung by an attack, we naturally respond with cultural pride and state patriotism leaning into nationalism. The result for the dictatorships of the world (different talks — same walk) is the modern renewal of feudalism and related conflict.
The manipulation has been paying off for the world’s political criminals.
In the post-Cold War framework, the “West” has been duped and played into perhaps assisting the enterprises of former and current communist elites in sustaining the feudal worldview needed to maintain for themselves medieval political absolute power.
We think of refugees and displaced people in a spatial context.
Somebody has lost their home, their security, their purchase on the control of their own life, and so they wander in-country or beyond, and depending on their personal characteristics – the movies always say “character”, but social reality is much different – they’ll grow again where they plant themselves or suffer the indignity of loss and rootlesness.
The segment you’re interested in is wandering through time with an unhelpful toolkit, and the obedient base can’t figure out why it’s not working. They’re mired in conflicts wrought by mutual greed and jealousy, and, perhaps like Imam ______, the more clever of tongue thrive on the turmoil by offering the unreachable untrue.
I recall a Star Trek episode in which a “holodeck” (synthetic surround theater) Dr. Moriarty achieved sufficient mastery of his own artifice and cyber environment to threaten the ship. Spoiler Alert! The solution at the end, which had to be negotiated because Moriarty really had interfaced with ship’s control, was to provide him and his woman (it’s complicated) with a cyber universe of their own. The world that would seem infinite to the evil couple was in the greater reality contained (and possibly ejected into space).
One might say of Catholic and otherwise conservative or orthodox observance in religion that all of it sustains something that took place a long time ago.
The figures have been frozen in time. The particular above have been especially well preserved by Keats’s poem.
Most of the religious in the modern world who attend a service also leave it with something taken away, and that adds its part to their lives and their search for a place for themselves. The monastery exists too. Add pope and papacy, the “Christ Process” – got that one from a Jesuit supplying blankets to the Four Corners region – and the existence of a timeless space maintained in the mind with the volition of the thinker.
Muhammad and his Islam may have had issues with boundaries – related on BackChannels: “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” – just an opinion, of course, and that got into the patronizing and permits and orders produced within the Qur’an, not so complete for this world but ever so demanding in its build around injunction. The Muslims — the Islamists — that interest you may believe they are carrying out still relevant orders when they are raiding their targets – murder, theft, rape, and rapine – but in reality they are doing so much only for the aggrandizement of their chosen authority beneath the Eye of Heaven.
Ditto Putin.
What is the escape plan from the medieval worldview and its imposition – and impoliteness – today?
Universally, nature figures out how to destroy or mutate monocultures, whether in agriculture or in human existence. While we may be in a divine sense of “One cloud, one earth, one sky”, we are nonetheless highly differentiated humans x person x family x clan x tribe x nation.
For agriculture, the related science industry strives to maintain comprehensive seed banks as part of the arsenal at hand to address natural mutations adverse to production — of the simple enjoyment of something gardened — in the growing environment.
For the discussion of culture, BackChannels promotes the view that our planet’s cultural inventory” links to fewer than 7,000 living languages, each of which represents how a group of people in comparative isolation — population-in-place — used human sound and sign to aid in perceiving and addressing from their perspective their own particular environmental and social challenges and opportunities.
Often, instead of typing “The Jews (live in Israel)”, the note may be similarly but more tellingly expressed as “The Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”.
Arab, Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun — same treatment.
As “The English” — and English — have gone everywhere in some fashion, the language today provides a modern medium for communication without the demand for the erasure of other language cultures. And with the age of English colonial expansion now past, one may expect the resurgent greater being of other language cultures in their cores (x ethnolinguistic cultural density) and at their margins and finally in the mixing bowls of heterogeneous (multi-cultural) political spaces.
The American slogan, well linked to the European invasion of or presence in — interpretation is moot — North America, well reflected the necessity of tolerance and varying degrees of separation and mixing in the New World beneath the benevolent and idealist umbrella of a secular and humanist vision of governance. The delivery thereby of great personal freedom — to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim or of any other faith community — and to speak the new language, English, while retaining the power to speak also every other language on earth, to be multilingual by choice, has been also part of the bargain. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Pashto, Urdu, “Jamaican” — no problem, mon.
The American way has worked in America.
Other of the authentic open democracies of the world have found similar equilibrium and a key to prosperity and survival in related law and rule of law.
Other systems, much less liberal, some totalitarian, appear still invested in the feudal / medieval worldview and they “express” in nefarious methods (e.g., “Active Measures“, deception, disinformation, disingenuous speech, etc.) and vanguards their desire to impose their singular will — criminal, despotic, intolerant — far beyond their own context, and not only in space but in time as well.
For the most part for those preferring to live “back there” somewhere, the world goes on around them and evolves a both more inclusive but also widely varied cargo packed into the myriad cultures of humanity.
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
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