Last Gasps are still gasps
The thing that makes me happiest these days is the prospect of getting to work with my graduate student again in the fall. She’ll be taking “Theological Foundations of Ethics,” and “Scripture and Social Justice.” I’m gathering the books for the classes and have the reading lists on a document I look at to put me in a good mood. For the ethics class, she’ll read
Plato, Euthyphro
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Paul, Epistle to the Romans
Augustine, Confessions (selections)
Hildegard of Bingen, The Book of the Rewards of Life
Aquinas, Summa Theologica (selections)
Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian, Treatise on Good Works
Bartolomé de las Casas, (still working out which precise text/s I’ll use)
Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self
Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections
Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Community
Some highlights from the scripture class are Jonathan Boyarin’s superb essay “Reading Exodus into History,” José Porfirio Miranda’s Marx and the Bible, Itemelung Mosala’s Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa, and Farid Esack’s Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism. I am completely stoked about seeing her journey through these ideas.
But, there’s also a melancholy aspect to this joy. This week I said “no” to working on the revisions to the graduate program. Our graduate program had been explicitly centered around liberation theology. The new program will be a program in “ministry and leadership” and will be fundamentally fused with the business program. All the classes will be hybrid religion-business classes, so it will essentially be an exercise in putting a spiritual face on management. I get along with the new director very well, but all I had to say was that to my core I am an anti-capitalist, and we both understood I wouldn’t be a good match. So, I look to a future in which I won’t be working with graduate students anymore, and I’ll be in a department that has fully succumbed to what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò refers to as “elite capture,” in which identity politics get absorbed by the ruling classes.
Back when I lived in Oakland, there was a flowering bush outside of my window. It would burst into bloom, and after a while, the flowers would fade, but a few blossoms would hang on. They hangers-on didn’t contribute to the lovely sense of proportion the early blossoms did; they created a kind of awkward balance in the shape of the bush. They blossomed amidst the patent passing of most of the blossoms. I would meditate on those blossoms as a kind of metaphor for continuing efforts amidst the sense that it is too late to fix the climate crisis. Similarly, I feel like my student - the last remaining student enrolled under the old structure - is one of those blossoms that keeps blooming even as the zenith of beauty has passed.
Perhaps that is also the sense I am carrying to the protest I’ll attend later today. I’m not going out of hope or anger. I’m simply going out of duty. I’ve been to two protests this year; neither time did I feel like I accomplished anything. I was glad to be counted, but I had a sense that there’s not enough energy or cohesiveness to our popular resistance for it to be much more than yelling into the wind. There are too many fronts on which to fight - there’s the basic erosion of democratic norms, there’s the apparent economic shift into a new feudalism that billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen slaver over, there’s a wholesale abandonment of ecological concerns, there’s a major backlash against identity politics that threatens to undo all sorts of gains, there are ongoing human rights abuses, there’s the juggernaut of criminalizing swaths of people, and there’s the general technological dumbing down of culture as a whole. It’s exhausting.
Over the last year 100 days (it feels like forever), I’ve found my greatest energy in the overall story of the Bible, a story in which persistence persists through defeat after defeat. As I was reading Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination this week, I came across an insight that reflects that sense. Drawing on sociological and anthropological studies of prophecy that shift our sense of prophecy from the image of lone individuals getting special messages from a deity to a productive cultural matrix that creates conditions for people to be attuned to such messages, Brueggemann notes that one feature of those conditions is that “there is a long and available memory that sinks the present generation into an identifiable past that is identifiable in song and story” (xxx). Brueggemann doesn’t advocate a conservative attempt to preserve or return to the past - but rootedness in the past lets us relativize the present. We can see and feel the cycle of victories and defeats, of accommodation and resistance, of decay and renewal. Of course, this is why there is such a push to censor history, to paint over murals, to literally whitewash the past. If we can’t root ourselves in lessons from the past, each moment must be total, so every defeat must be “the end.” I remember well the way in which the Daily Kos community lived and died by the results of every midterm election, a kind of panic that came with not having a deep respect for a larger sense of time than the immediate moment. But the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE was a much bigger crisis than any midterm election, but a community managed to remember their history and reconstitute themselves. If they could get through that, we can get through this.
Recently, I also started reading John Curl’s For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. I haven’t gotten far, but it’s already provided me with a different sense of rootedness amidst the dizzying onslaught of the present I described above. For example, I never knew that that the Mayflower Compact was an explicit rejection of incipient capitalism. The Pilgrims were funded by investors, who wanted to fund a colony for extraction of wealth from America - and as such they stipulated that the pilgrims would be restricted to doing work for themselves only two days a week - the remaining work would be done for the investors. When a rogue leader signed the contract without authorization from the larger group, the larger group maintained solidarity with the indentured servants among them and signed the Mayflower Compact, which set the stage for the governor of Massachusetts to unilaterally break the contract with the investing corporation in 1623. This is not the story I was ever taught in grade school. What kind of class consciousness would we collectively have if we knew a founding moment as a moment of effective resistance to emerging capitalism? Of course, there are other lessons about historical ambiguity, given that the founding moment also inherently set in motion the genocide of Native Americans, was bound by an exclusivist Christian identity, and restricted democratic practices to men. And there is the fact that that originary moment of resistance to extractive capitalism ultimately laid the foundation for the most capitalist society on earth. But Curl effectively weaves that example into a larger narrative of alternative economic arrangements - a history that gives the lie to Margaret Thatcher’s cruel and triumphalist neoliberal cry, “There is No Alternative.”
It seems likely that the billionaire class will be positioned to take advantage of the coming recession to reshape the economy in even more unequal formations, and if they do, our collective protests will be a kind of last gasp of democratic expression. But we don’t know what seeds we are planting, how we are training muscles for better resistance in the future, or when the cycle will turn back in our favor. So, like the blossoms that hold on when it’s clear that blooming will end soon, like my joy in teaching what may be my last graduate student, I’ll drag myself to yet another protest, to affirm that what happens at the end is still a happening.