A biblical heritage.

Down to the Plymouth Rock, that had been to their feet as a doorstep Into a world unknown – the corner-stone of a nation! The American story begins around Chesapeake Bay and at Cape Cod. But the Virginian foundation, with its tobacco plantations, its English riff-raff and its African slaves, was wiped off the slate by the Civil War. So that the good ship Mayflower and turkey at Thanksgiving became the primary myths. A depiction of the aboriginal Americans arriving from England with very definitive ideas on right and wrong.

The Pilgrim Fathers were Puritans whose world view was based on the Bible. (Cranmer’s Bible rather than the King James Authorised Version, as they were fleeing persecution by that monarch.) And the biblical influence pervaded the New England colony. They had wandered in the wilderness and reached the Promised Land. They had escaped from bondage to build a New Jerusalem. And, with the Almighty on their side, they would fight the heathens and so reduce them that they would disappear from history.

The Native Americans were treated as Canaanites and Philistines. They could be killed indiscriminately as they counted for nothing in God’s project for his chosen people. And because illness took the greatest toll (small pox, measles, tuberculosis, etc.), as with the plagues of Egypt the Lord of Hosts bore the brunt of the extermination. The two and a half centuries separating the Rock at Plymouth from Wounded Knee were a continual land grab. The native populations were pushed ever westward to fight among themselves. And, when they had nowhere left to go, the survivors were camped like refugees in desolate places that nobody wanted. Just the way the Good Book sad it should be. Though captain Smith fared better than Samson, and general Custer lacked David’s military genius.

America has constructed itself on the premise that worshiping the Bible God gave special rights and obligations. Superiority over other beliefs, other gods and traditions, and the duty to proselytise by force and destroy recalcitrants. This was partly due to the brutal religious wars in Europe where massacring one’s opponents was habitual, and partly to Puritan hubris. To paraphrase Max Weber, success is a sign of God’s benevolence. If His eye is on the sparrow, the end justifies the means.
The Christian Bible contains the Old and the New Testaments. And the Gospels are clearly influenced by Greek humanism. The tribal/national God, Yahweh/Eloim, becomes a universal and transcendental concept, and the Galilean Jesus is a peripatetic. The God who speaks and writes, who inhabits prophets, judges and kings, is silenced and removed to some heavenly outer sphere. This break with the past was consumed when Paul preached to the Gentiles. When circumcision, Abraham’s original covenant, was superseded by baptism.

Faced with the contradiction between old and new interpretations of faith, the Byzantine and Roman Churches proscribed the old and replaced it by saintly “biographies”. But the fall of Byzantium, the Renaissance, Gutenberg’s revolution and the Reformation brought the Old Testament back into the spot-light. And the Reformed Churches have had to deal with that duality ever since. Retribution or love, an eye for an eye or turn the other cheek, it is a schizophrenic situation of Jekyll and Hyde proportions. A form of double-think and double-talk that characterises most western societies.

For historical reasons, Zionism is not encumbered by the Gospel testimony. The Zionist God is exclusively pre-Christian. He commands angel armies, rains down brimstone and stops the Sun, and enjoys nothing more than the perfume of fresh blood and burning flesh. He is a violent God from violent times. But here again a duality appeared. The Babylonian exile had developed writing, scholarship and commentary. This led to the adaptation of the Torah to a wider perception of the world. Confronted with the might of empires, the desert God of war became an urban God of law. For every conceivable situation, a ruling decided what was right. Rules that were deduced from the Pentateuch to give the Mishna, the Gemara and finally the Talmud.

Joshua, Samson and David are the central figures of the biblical saga, on a par with the heroes of the Iliad. But Joshua is preceded by Moses the law-maker, and Jesus is vaguely related to David through his stepfather Joseph (Matthew 1). Conquest is always a lawless and destructive process. And all accounts are of bloodshed and mayhem. So Moses, who killed a man in his youth but would never shed blood again having God to do the work, could not enter the land of Canaan where men would be doing the killing. Once he had led the tribes out of Egypt, Moses became wholly preoccupied by the Covenant. The perpetual agreement between man and his creator founded on a set of written rules. The idea that life in general and community life in particular are governed by certain laws that cannot be broken without dire consequences. Something comparable to the Gaia concept and Human Rights.

There are no stories of Jesus writing. The stepson of a carpenter having sojourned in the desert (with the Essenes?), he may not have mastered the difficult art of calligraphy. But then he had no need to set down laws that existed already. His task was to revive them and replace them in a new context. The personage described in the Gospels opens the way for a Hellenisation of the Torah. He integrates the Dionysian and Osirian elements of a loving bountiful God who lays down his life to save humanity. Gods who die and come back to life are agrarian. They are quite the contrary of Abraham’s pastoral God, and would have been anathema for the tribes fleeing Egypt. But, in a world dominated by Greek culture, and where Roman emperors were made living gods, the New Testament was a perfect adaptation to the times.

The Bible is a mix of covenant, conquest and redemption. And the two nations whose ideologies have been the most influenced by the Scriptures are Israel and the United States of America. The first is stuck in the dilemma between the rule of law and the rules of war. The second is unable to pass from the rules of war to the promise of universal peace. Both nations are congealed in between, and their destinies seem inextricably linked.

Divide and rule.

The three pillars of government are force, money and consent. Government also needs precise geographical borders to separate it from other armies, currencies and ideas. Inside the national limits the military, the police and the intelligence agencies work together, the nation’s currency is legal tender, and one language is taught, one story told, one ideology propagated. Uniformity makes government possible, and a single model encourages conformity and submission. However, an immutable status quo invariably leads to nihilism and sclerosis of the power structure. This can be avoided by installing a meritocracy. Government renews itself by co-optation, while partisan discussions give the illusion of opposed opinions and possible change.

Aristotle reasoned that government should strive for the common good. The Augustinian view was that rulers should serve God and the Church. Machiavelli, a contemporary of Luther and Calvin, counselled the prince on how to grasp power and maintain his dominion. The enlightenment closed the circle and, returning to the Athenian ideals, Lock and Rousseau conceived social contracts. But, in the intervening two thousand years, the city-states of Antiquity had been replaced by nations.

In his preface to the French edition (Argone 2003) of The Twentieth Century, Howard Zinn wrote, “Nations are not communities and never have been. Any country’s history, presented as a family story, hides bitter conflicts of interest (that are sometimes made public but are mostly repressed) between the conquerors and the conquered, the masters and the slaves, the capitalists and the workers, the dominant and the dominated, be it for reasons of race or gender.” And, “…this book is radically sceptical with regards to governments and their attempts, using culture and politics, to snare ordinary people in the great web of a “national community”, supposed to bring about the satisfaction of common interests.”

Nations are artificial constructions. Conglomerates held together by the cultural cement of languages and by the particular world view each of them transmits. A multitude of points of view that place each nation at the centre of the universe, and bolster national pride with tales of heroism. A partial view concocted by the rulers for their subjects. A top down message diffused by school curricula and mass media. And, when the movement encounters a counter flow of popular culture that refuses denial, the flow is assimilated as part of the main stream. Nevertheless, the language is changed and the past is rewritten, so that the point of view is displaced without losing is central position. Political revolutions are carried and preceded by cultural movements. As both rely on language for their existence, the new modes of expression are necessary for social change. And the impact of a cultural movement is largely dependent on diffusion, on the technology and the media of the historical period.

A cultural counter flow can modify the point of view of a nation. To do this the flow needs a medium. And one may ask, as did McLuhan, “Is the medium the message?” Or is each new medium such a surprise that it briefly opens unforeseen doors through which pass new messages? It is hard to accept that the content has no significance. However, the categories of hot and cold do seem to relate to experience. The sound of a voice is more emotional than are the printed words. And so is a picture, and even more so when sound and image combine. Controlled mass circulation of print accompanied the stiff, tight-laced 19th century. Then radio and cinema exploded the corsets that had bound society. A cultural tsunami, a huge upsurge from the depths, unfettered noise and glaring lights that were only quelled by war.

A cultural medium may be hot or cold, but the content is the message, and the control of the content determines the cultural point of view. New media take society by surprise and open up the gates of culture to an up swell from below. New sounds and images take the place of their predecessors, giving another point of view. But each time the process is stopped before it can run its course. Each time the new mode of expression is restrained by the language barriers around nations, and by media control.

Nations are a fairly recent development. They first appeared as replacements for kingdoms, where monarchs ruled through (and sometimes against) the land owning aristocracy. This monopoly of wealth and power was overthrown when the classes of trade and industry controlled a majority of the kingdom’s riches. The old feudal bonds were broken and a new entity had to be invented to maintain the cohesion of property. The kingdom had belonged to the king and his nobles. The nation was shared out among the propertied classes, old and new.

The end of hereditary power, and of rule as a family affair, brought back ancient forms of government. Notwithstanding that history had shown time and again that municipal government was un-adapted to larger endeavours. Monarchy allows disparity, as all are equally subjected to the monarch, to a minority of one. Democracy creates a situation where a minority is subjected to a majority or, in most cases, where a majority is subjected to a minority. If a society is perfectly uniform, if the citizens are culturally homogenous and egalitarian in the distribution of wealth, then the government of the city by the majority votes of elected representatives is likely to be determined by reason and conviction, with respect to the common good. This may have been the case with the Athenian demos and the Roman gens, the original clans who shared a common fortress and place of worship, on their acropolis or Capitol. But both cities were soon beset by social conflicts between rich and poor. So that cultural cohesion became the only support of government. A “them and us” situation facilitated by perpetual war, and by a cultural identity propagated by writing and literacy.

Representative government and majority decisions can regulate the politics of a homogenous urban population. The geographic space of a nation does not have homogeneity. The inhabitants do not share a common habitat, and their cultural habits will vary accordingly, from their food and clothing to their language and beliefs. Majority rule widens the cultural gap. To the social divide of the city is added the ethnic divide inside the national boundaries.

Western Europe constructed itself on the ruins of Rome, with the obsession of autocracy and empire (Eastern Europe was Byzantine). Along with territorial expansion by conquest, they were the cultural heritage of Latin. When printing began to diffuse the spoken idioms, the Latin monopoly of the written word (by monks in monasteries) was broken. But the imperial ideal was kept alive by the powerful monarchs who imposed their particular idioms, Spanish, French, English, and German (Russian). Over the past hundred years, the slow progression of elected representation and majority rule has split these entities into ever smaller more homogenous units. Government is increasingly localised and culturally uniform. (However, empires do not let their subject peoples go easily, and Europe has been at the heart of two hot world wars and a third cold one, followed by fighting in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Tchetchenia, Georgia, etc.) These smaller units have led to a greater interdependence, a dense mesh of cultural and economic links that makes future conflict almost impossible. But the cultural uniformity of local government brings to the fore the social divide. When ethnicity no longer divides society, the distribution of wealth becomes a class struggle. So far, only the capitalist classes have formed a supranational alliance. The European working classes have lagged behind. Constrained by language barriers, trade unions have proved incapable of uniting beyond their contracting national boundaries. Will the accumulated crises that seem about to unfold together (finance, industry, commodities, climate) change that disparity? Majority rule tends towards consensus with cultural and social homogeneity. Capital rules by the division of labour. And there are no signs that the coming upheaval will advance the solution to this fundamental contradiction between capitalism and democracy.