Man and Sabbath

If man would be better off alone in the wilderness or even dead than living in a society that exploits, oppresses or persecutes him, what justification does such a society have for demanding his loyalty?

This question lies beneath the political philosophy of Right to revolution, a concept that gave birth to the democracies of Europe and America.

A concept of social rights, however, has existed long before the rise of modernity, in virtually every civilization, culture and community.

In Israel about 2000 years ago the destitute were legally entitled to pick grains from the edges of the fields. At some point Jesus and his disciples seemed to have some cash-flow problems, and they satisfied their hunger by doing so.

Only they did it on a Sunday, which gave their enemies an opportunity to accuse them of blasphemy: They weren't allowed to work on a Sunday.

Jesus, the last of the arcane gods

This is what prompts Jesus to ask the rhetorical question, if man was made for Sabbath or the other way around.

The question goes to the heart of the political discourse of modernity, a relatively new phenomenon if you look at the history of civilizations: In ancient times the legitimacy of power was sometimes challenged, but never questioned.

The concept of society as a mechanical device for collective survival is not a new one - before the machine became our role model, rulers and thinkers and mystics thought of society as an organism, where every individual had his assigned place as a limb on the body of a greater being, a god like Osiris, or a beast like Hobbes' Leviathan.

The question of the Sabbath touches on one of the core institutions in all of the three great monotheistic religions: One day per week should be off duty, devoted to peaceful contemplation and meditations on the deeper aspects of life human beings are also capable of.

The authority of institution

Psychologists call it sublimation, the ability to rise above the mundane and touch on... well, the sublime, even if the concept is most often associated with abstinence from sexual gratification.

The Sabbath, yaum al-jumu'a and the Christian Sunday all seem to be timeless reminders that life is more than working for survival, prosperity or glory. It is about more than achievement.

In challenging the absolutism of the holy Jewish day of rest and non-labour, Jesus touched a taboo. He was not just challenging a rule of thumb, a consensus to leave supermarket clerks alone for a while and let them sleep late and wake up with hangovers to Nescafé and over the counter pain killers.

He was challenging Institution, and Institution is society. Institution came before culture as we define it, and society cannot do without it: But even without society, without tradition and without governance, Institutions tend to rise up from the ashes of anarchy, reborn from cults and myths.

Culture and prejudice

Institution is that part of authority we cannot effectively rebel without denying a part of our own human nature; it is the impersonal aspect of hierarchy, the collective inclination towards picking order and formalization of preferences. Every culture is, in a sense, is a catalogue of prejudices.

But every powerful organ, every authority or institution, we have bitterly learned, must be checked by its counterpoint in order not to develop into tyranny and, subsequently, absolute corruption of natural social instincts. To have power is to employ human beings as instruments for larger, impersonal purposes.

However humane a person may seem, however noble his intentions, the very nature of power is to warp your perspective by presenting a wider set of options, confusing the limited senses of man.

For every step up the corporate ladder we see the people below us turn smaller, more insectoid, until they appear to be merely single cell organisms, cogs in the machinery of a supernatural system bulldozing its way through the universe,all engines running, no missiles pulled.

The mechanical world view

The greatest threat of the "new age", the somewhat empty, frustratingly transparent and subsequently empty existence of non-mythological modernity, is that human beings will begin to view each other and treat each others as instruments and ressources.

At the same time the Institution is growing: With the rise of the machines, more days are cut out of the work week for leisure, and more work hours cut out of every work day. This has its good sides, because people have more time for their family, for artistic pursuits and social work.

But it also endangers the former economical and social structure, the industrial society beneath the information society, which still forms the basis of our unprecedented prosperity.

Paradoxically, the freer and more rational we become, the more we tend to perceive the world in the cruellest possible light. The only defensible ethical philosophy left is utilitarianism, and in the logic of numbers one must always count certain "collateral damage" acceptable.

Humans become instruments of each other's well-being, and as such we risk forming a new cannibalistic ethos to replace old ones: Sacrifice is required, as warlords and poets have said, from the days of Homer to the hallways of Kremlin and the White House.

Humanism to the rescue

Still, humanism thrives, and from this fact alone one may draw enough hope to shake off the worst depression over the state of the world we live in. If the Cold War has taught us anything, it would have to be that we can make it out of any predicament:

If we were fatally flawed as in fundamentally destructive, vindictive and relentlessly cruel, we would not exist on Earth today.

Humanism is, in a sense, a form of absolutism, containing in its core a potential to grow into a hegemonic system. Faux humanitarian interventions, military conquest disguised as stabilization and ressource wars are not a thing of the future, but what defines the present condition and has done so for hundreds of years.

Counted in numbers of victims alone, the track record of the West is horrifying.

Yet, there is one element to humanism that keeps it balanced, striving for equilibrium where other ideologies and mythological paradigms have failed: The sanctity of the individual, which is the philosophical prerequisite to equality before the Law.

A humanism that despises the destitute, neglects the weak and employs torture, murder, oppression, intimidation and surveillance for its purposes, violates itself.

The last deity to walk on Earth (or water)

In a sense Jesus was the last of the old gods, a humanitarian looking ahead towards a better society, but also a mystic revered as a deity. In an age where the growth of mythological legend around a common man, Jesus managed to utilize the last remnants of what may be called the Dream Age of mankind.

Like Hercules he would fight demons, like Hermes and Pan he would play pranks on the establishment, preferring rural scenarios or even the wilderness to the bustle of the cities growing in the foot prints of Roman civilization. Like Dionysus he was at first rejected, but later found worthy to accepted into the relatively exclusive Olymp of Jewish-Christian tradition.

His ascension to divinity is unique in the way it marked the end of the living gods, a phenomenon known to and practiced in most of the ancient cultures we know of. He was not the first humanist, but Jesus was the first - and perhaps the only man - combining the traits of the humanist with the cult of the shaman, and in the end it became his downfall.

His charisma was too powerful. His suggestive powers and the urgency of his task, to shake the Jews out of their self-created cycle of misery, took control of him and forced him to self-destruct so an even greater myth could be weaved around him.

When you read the story of Jesus, it compels you, not because he is a god mistaken for a man, but because he is a man mistaken for a god: He tries to fight it, the superstition and the mindless pandering, but as described in Life of Brian the entire society is locked in absurdly rigid and intricate codes, a matrix devouring all attempts to reform it.

The age of man (and woman)

When you look to modern day gurus who claim divinity or invoke even the passionate support of millions, their feats are not quite as remarkable as their cult of personality, and the trace they manage to leave in the history books fleeting.

From below a new type of hero arises, characters like Ghandi, King and Mandela, Lennon and - dare I say Bono? - who invests their lives, their talents and their quirks in a strangely indefinable vision of universal love and cooperation.

From "oppression anywhere is a threat to peace everywhere" over "imagine no possessions - I wonder if you can" to "make poverty history" there is a thin red line of hope, of relentless commitment against all odds, perhaps even against any kind of scientific reasoning.

No wonder the religious establishment were unnerved by lines like "imagine there's no countries... and no religion too." Christians - who for a Thousand Tears has held its breath, until on the expiration date predicted "The Beast" was loosened from all corners of the world - does not want that kind of world, even if it was the world envisioned by their Lord and Master.

Sadly, peace defies their purpose, which is ultimately an impersonal purpose, the purpose of any organization - to recruit new members, to exercise political power, to persuade through coercion if necessary and possible without too damaging reproach.

The heart of the darkness

Some of the people in the world, namely the Jews, know that the Apocalypse is nothing to fear. It is already over. The worst of what can happen has happened, a tribulation so grotesque in its cruelty that men are stunned by merely browsing through its catalogue of horrors, and there was no divine intervention.

Jesus did not step down from his heavenly throne in the final hour, separating the sheep from the goats, rewarding the meak and banishing the vile. Christians, suspecting this was the case, had spent more than a millennium maiming and murdering political enmies. Even in the dark ages Europe had a strange infatuation with the machine.

In the abscence of god, a deus ex machina, men began to build a mechanical god extending far beyond the latest gadget or software application. Literature and cinema has always obsessed over conscious machines, the deus in machina. In our wildest dreams and nightmares machines take over - about 90 percent of all science fiction tinkers with the theme, even if the truth is far more horrific.

And the truth is humans have always been its own worst enemies, not because we are viciously temperamental or neurologically addicted to violence: We produce conflict, but conflict is not the essence of the shadowy side of man. The heart of the darkness is oppression, the ruthless dehumanization of others for more or less specific purposes we seek to justify with elaborate ethical calculations.

This is where violence and rage stems from, seemingly unjustified and irreparably damaging when it touces our lives, robbing us of loved ones and traumatizing us with the impression that of all the disasters, which may befall us, and of all the risks we expose ourselves to on a daily basis, the cruel indifference of our fellow man is the greatest threat.

The oppression of macro-interests

What I am trying to explain is how it is built into the fabric of society, a certain amount of callousness, producing a constant amount of violence. It is unavoidable, a part of being a human just as much as our ability to handle instruments, think abstract thoughts, enjoy artistic expressions or calculate advanced algorithms.

Unavoidable, at least, as long as we hold on to the arcane thought of society as an organism with its own vital interests which may at any time overrule indvidual needs. This was why Jesus spent so much time in the desert, just as it is why the Navaho went for vision walks and quests, to regain the inner equilibrium you lose from being helplessly tied to the web of social duties and political ambitions andcommercial interests.

A lot of it is illusion, and more than anything it is what religious books, from Tao Te King and Mahabharata over the Iliad and Odysee to the Bible and the writings of Khalil Gibran are about. Reality, to most human beings, is essentially... essential. Our thought processes revolves around happiness, good health, steady relationships, emotional comfort and reciprocity in friendships.

Society - to all who have not thrown themselves into the universal vanity competition of mainstream society all over the world in the hope of one day striking the number seven with only one dice - is partly the enemy. As much as it provides us safety and comfort, the tipping point where it becomes a nuisance, an oppressive power robbing us of free expression of our true and diverse natures, is always close at hand.

As long as we insist on constructing a society of walls, of extreme privileges juxtaposed with gross despair, a society in which individuals are asked to sacrifice themselves for a system that has lost all ability to care - being a system, as it is - we will not find peace, in our individual lives, in our communities and in the world society forming around the ethereal vision of mutual respect and awe for the universe we live in.

We are all beggars now

A man may put his life on the line for people he has no particular affiliation with or affinity for, but no self-respecting man will ever accept to extent the same fate to his children. In a state of hopelessness humans will react with desperate measures, against all logic or reasoning or rhetoric, forcing upon the world whatever warped interpretation they have cooked up from their limited perspective.

This is the tragedy: Most of the evils of the world arise from a combination of basically healthy instincts combined with scarcity. If you think it is bleeding heart liberalism or the speculations of an ivory tower intellectual, a simple exercise of the mind may convince you. Let me remove three elements from your society: The rule of law, the institution of education and the basic access to food and water.

We all know how it would end - literature and cinema has made the scenario trivial. Hobbes was right - he can rest assured of the greatness of his mind, whereever he lies. It is, however, not a testimony to the fundamental evilness of man or a latent tendency towards anarchy, as some like to interpret it. It is simply the nature of things, our nature. We get warped by circumstances, sometimes bent out of shape.

The Western society - like almost any other society in the world - is severely disfigured. The economy threatens to grind to a stand-still, imposing Argentinian conditions on everyone. We are all beggars now - something now joins the financial jockeys on Wall Street and the beggars silently protesting in front of the subway. Something ties the Kenyan goat herd to the CEO's of the big car companies in Detroit.

One choice is left, just one

What we are about to learn is that nobody behaves very gracefully or accepts it peacefully, when they are about out of options. We are all the same that way, only our privileges have kept us from seeing ourselves mirrored in the eye of our fellow man. These privileges had to be taken away for us to regain equilibrium, to accept the vision quest, the dream walk to a better place, to have the blinders of vanity and conceit removed from our over-commercialized eyes.

And it was about time too. In fact, the timing is so great one might consider believing in God once more. Jesus would have enjoyed the irony of it too. He did not care much for neither religious scribes nor fools dreaming of a money tree in their backyard. He died raging against the unholy alliance of commerce, religious institutions and politics. I believe he signed his own death sentence when he smilingly nodded and let his disciples grind those corns for seed to chew on to pacify their hunger pains.

"You are not allowed to do that on a Sunday", the authorities on civil behaviour would correct them.

But you are allowed to starve every day, to suffer and to die - there is no law against that. No law against war profiteering either, on selling arms to sit back in your Malibu mansion to watch the rest of the world blow themselves to bits and pieces, at least not to the religious crowd: To them it is more important to uphold the abstract notion of a Puritan society. They don't spend their Sundays thinking about the people starving, but fretting about all the sinners doing all the fun stuff with zero regard for kingdom come.

And no law can protect us against the corruption of government, the violation of national sovereignty and the scores of thousands of innocent going to that mysterious place wearing nothing but ragged skin, stripped naked to the bone while still bleeding. You are allowed to die from curable medical diseases, because the medical companies cannot be expected to dump prises on Red Ocean market characterized by ruthless competition. You are allowed to die in your home, surrounded by high tech appliances and grieving relatives, because insurance won't cover the particular nature of your heart condition.

What is the purpose of society?

We should ask ourselves: What enrages us? If we are enraged, why not about that?

Wen did human lives become secondary to ethics? How did we foster a society, where individuals merely count as consumers and, at best, votes in political circus? What good is society, if it abandons its children to the streets, with their parents all of a sudden finding themselves confined to their homes armed with guns and baseball bats against possible home invasions? The latent nihilism of the mechanistic society fosters the virulent movements of rebellion, whether channelled into political upheaval or criminal activities, petty and organized.

When Jesus asked if Sabbath was made for man or man for Sabbath, he pointed out the inherently absurd in cherishing institution over lives - and societies, countries, churches and governments are all just constructs, formalized social structures representing cultural ideals. The principle of balancing weights apply once more: When society neglects its fundamental purpose, to take care of human needs, the top of its structure is either overrun or simply abandoned.

A society can have many a redeeming feature, but it will never be a healthy society, if it prioritizes the abstract notion of collective survival over the needs of its people - like in the case of Katrina the guardians may find there are all of a sudden no people left to guard and, for the very same reason, few ressources to boast of. For a society to make any kind of sense it must, at least, offer better options than the wilderness. It kind of defies the purpose of society, if it becomes a nightmare to the people living in it.

There is no more crucial political issues to discuss than the issue of a humanized society, because every anti-social tendency feeds of the reluctancy of the privileged classes to extent the benefits of culture to those who produce it. Reversely, virtue grows out of attention and care, education in comforting environments and the generally civilized influence of artistic products. Peace, itself, is a product of cooperation of willing minds.

This is why my third "sermon" in the series was about Man and the Sabbath.