Moral Compass in the Heart of Darkness

The Syrian refugee catastrophe has become a metaphor for the devil himself, so obviously born of the confabulations of the rich nations. Their dearest interests, not the Syrian people's, is the keystone to the nightmare. Syria has become a twenty-first century version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel about the African ivory trade written in 1898.  In a land awash with American, Israeli, Russian and Iranian agents (to name a few)—the current version of Conrad’s novel is re-enacted in corporate and global struggles over food, oil, and control of the tech universe. 

This dystopia of rich and poor struggling in Africa and the Middle East now clearly extends to the struggles over growing inequality in the U. S. and Europe.  Both last week’s solo terror attack in Washington and the assault on the huge shopping mall in Nairobi lap at the shore of American imagination, which is why the FBI has been sent scurrying in all directions to learn where it might happen next.  

Amid such moral confusion it may be helpful to take recourse to John Milton, the 17^th century Puritan poet, who worked as a pamphleteer and civil servant during the first English Revolution.  An eloquent advocate of free speech, Yale’s Professor John Roberts tell us he invented “the very language of insubordination, creating an entire vocabulary of resistance, protest and revolution.”  This was because he wanted the biblical Word about righteousness and justice to become incarnate in the revolution’s new social and political institutions.

 There was not quite that intention with the American Revolution though we Americans have thought it so. The emerging USA pursued a different incarnation: to make all men free to pursue their own interests; and as it turned out on a vastly rich continent, men used slavery, Native American removal and financial manipulation to make themselves rich if they could. Because some could, later they enshrined their success and wealth as the customary measures of a divine American way. It was, in fact, an incarnation of themselves. 

Karl Barth, the famous 20^th century theologian, pointed out how this 18^th century formula worked.  In effect, God was given an honorary box seat—at the top of the grandstand—but men were given the central place on the field of play. His most terrifying example was the 19th century Dutch colonial empire which he described as a place of wealth and skulls, the skulls of the slave trade.

There was something about the Puritans like Milton, and the earliest Christians including Augustine, that understood this human propensity to self-elevation.  Anyone who reads about the despoiling of Syria can understand the ancient Christian sense of being caught in sin.

Ironically, the community seldom heard from in public life today is the faith community, composed more than any time in recent decades of highly educated and trained clergy and lay leaders, many of them women, and from a younger generation.  They could exercise a public and transformative role identifying saints, sinners and devils.   More about this in the next Public Liturgies blog.