Epiphany Games

         The scene last Friday----the date of the traditional January 6th Feast of the Epiphany----seemed out of season when citizens were asked to view the government's secret "intelligence" leaders as truth-speakers. How can one forget their record of over throwing governments, arming Central American dictatorships and fabricating evidence of Sadam Hussein's WMDs?   The spy report appeared more like the last stand of an Ancien Régime than an expose' of Putin hacking the nation's political campaign (which was not news); and it seemed to play the dual role of trying to curb the incoming rambunctious Trump team (so the spy masters could stay in power?) while at the same time leaving the most serious issues of our era unmentioned: vast inequality, refugees, and capitalism itself.

          Everywhere except in the U. S. growing social instability is ascribed to the impact of capitalism in creating inequality and increasingly destroying the hopes and dreams of people around the world whose future in a globalized and technologized era seems ended; the stuff of which paving  stones and crowds sprayed by gunfire is made. 

           Adam Tooze at the Columbia University Department of History links the critical writing of Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Stiglitz about capitalism with Sociologist Wolfgang Streek, former head of the prestigious Max Planck institute (London Review of Books, January 5, 2017) writing that with the current direction of capitalism

We should expect ever intensifying stagnation, inequality, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and the escalating risk of major war, all of this accompanied by a pervasive erosion of social order, a generalised social entropy.

       There is another even more important foundation to capitalism's reign. These secular corruptions are matched by the corrupt role faith communities play in legitimating market forces and outcomes. This is the problem mentioned in our last blog: patriotism equated with divine purpose, power confused with justice. Most followers of the Christian tradition practice it as an other-worldly faith that excuses believers from criticism of economic and political events; the very stuff out of which Jesus' kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven" is made. 

         The corruption of this vision is a silence that lends legitimacy to the reign of capitalist economics.  Jewish and Islamic tribalism play their own corrupting role in diverting attention away from their greatest traditions that equate God with justice and truth for all peoples.  According to Professor Streeck

we have since the 1970s been living in....a 'post-social society ... a society lite'. We cope individually with conditions of increasing uncertainty, while at the macro level both society and economy become increasingly ungovernable. 'Life in a society of this kind...demands constant improvisation, forcing individuals to substitute strategy for structure, and offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age.'

        This week Donald Trump and his cabinet of capitalists will try to increase their grip on us. Senate Republicans intend to jam through the President-elect's cabinet appointments without accounting for or vetting these billionaires' financial affairs, which if left in place may compromise formation of a multitude of foreign and domestic U. S. policies. But are these not already compromised by the corrupt practice of revolving doors between government agency leaders and the comfortable Christianity of people with money in their pockets and bank accounts?   Professor Streek again:

What makes capitalism toxic is its expansiveness, its relentless colonisation of the rest of society.... It undermines the family units on which the reproduction of labour depends; it consumes nature; it commodifies money, which to function has to rest on a foundation of social trust. For its own good, capitalism needs political checks....We should be bracing ourselves for a prolonged and agonising decomposition of the entire social fabric.

         A friend, Rev. Jerry Fox, reminded me of Hannah Arendt's warning about The Origins of Totalitarianism:

"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it...In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies."

         What the Magi were looking for at their first Epiphany was a new day.  It should be the faith communities' vocation to bring about that new day, an Epiphany in the real world without games.