“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military.” Dominic Crossan, God and Empire
“We must keep shopping.” Former-President George W. Bush
I own a MyTouch 3G phone by HTC. It’s got the Google owned operating system, “Android.” I can check my e-mail, send texts, get maps and directions, and follow twitter and facebook and myspace. I can check the weather report and my bank account balance. Sometimes, I even use it to make phone calls.
I always have my smart-phone with me. I left it in the back of a cab a few weeks ago, but luckily a friend noticed and grabbed it. I didn’t get it back for about 24 hours. I spent those waking hours frustrated, not sure how to go about my daily tasks. Without my fancy-ass cell phone, my life was impoverished. My life was a little less alive.
I believe that my cell-phone offers me abundant life.
I mean, I don’t REALLY think that. Of course I know that it is just a luxury item and, though it has many useful functions, my life would probably go on just fine without it.
And yet, I behave as though my cell phone offers me abundant life.
I have been saying for some time that our normal, everyday Western way of life makes us complicit with all kinds of evil. Having a smart-phone is perfectly normal. It’s also become a kind of idolatry.
The normal and the evil, side by side.
We find many very creative ways of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon. We never see the factory farms where our chicken-nuggets come from. We import our cheap goods from far away places with factory conditions that our department of labor and our investigative journalists are unlikely to ever see. We cover our landfills in green, green grass. We pretend there’s no connection between the demand for more jobs and off-shore oil drilling. We work 60 hours a week and say that we’re doing it to provide for our families.
But our most creative way of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon is by living a story in which that kind of thing is just the normal, everyday way of doing things.
In an oft-noted curiosity of statistics, it seems that the more “developed” and wealthy our culture becomes, the less we perceive ourselves as happy. I’ve witnessed myself the hurt our children carry in their hearts from broken homes, despite parents who have worked so hard to provide so much for them. We’re doing our best in these normal, everyday lives and we’re still having hard a time of it. I’ve begun to worry that it’s not just the obvious vices that are tearing us apart. I’m worried that our “normal, everyday” way of living is making us complicit with all kinds of subtle, systemic sin. Our dissatisfaction perhaps comes from the inherent consequences of our sin, however blind to it we may have become.
What is that system of sin?
Well, we’ve taken to calling it “Imperial Life,” following the cue of some folks we rather respect. (See: Rob Bell’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians; Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President)
In Imperial Life, we put our faith in the sprawling progress of the empire. The problem is, empires need slaves. Sometimes those slaves are people who live on less than $2 a day who have to work for the factories our companies build in their country because otherwise they starve. Or their children starve. Or worse. Other times, those slaves are people who are so addicted to the pleasures the empire has to offer that they sell their whole lives to keep a steady supply at hand. Slaves the way junkies are slaves.
And the empire feeds on both of these people. Many inexpensive hands are needed to shape inexpensive resources into inexpensive goods that can be purchased to keep us other folks working to create new ideas for new products for the inexpensive hands to make from inexpensive resources.
And so the corridors of Babylon go craning for the skies. So, the sun never sets on the American empire.
And in order for this sort of economy, this economy of quantity over quality, to flourish, there must be stability. There must be peace, no matter how many enemies our naïve greed (and let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) makes for us around the world. So, there must be, along side the most prosperous, creative, productive, progressive nation the world has ever seen, the most sprawling, inimitable military the world has ever seen.
Our Empire needs the Pax Americana
And, if that military also makes jobs for every day people building jets and guns and predator drones, which makes money for those who own factories and makes careers for those who legislate the defense spending budgets? Well, then all the better.
And yet here we are, just normal, everyday people, trying to get by in the land of the Empire. Working our jobs. Raising our families. Going to church, singing about abundant life and then going to the mall to buy some.
And yet we feel ourselves sinking into a living death.
And every time we go to the Empire to ask for a remedy, they give us more of the same poison. Every time we ask them for bread, they hand us a stone.
And we go home, singing their praises.
And what we do in church makes less and less sense.
What exactly are we doing at church, anyway?
Coming up next: What does a Church capitulated to Empire look like?
I am wondering if we might construe what we do in church and what we do in the empire as the enactment of two very different dramas. We tell a drama in church of gathering together, of being called to lift up our voices to God, to hear the word, to pray w/ one another, to eat a meal together and to then go forth as living signs of god's love.
ReplyDeletebut where is this in regards to the drama of empire? we are called together to do what? we raise our voices for what? we eat fast food we don't eat together. We go forth to do what? shop? bicker? ignore? be distracted?
I guess my question about empire is this: how can it possibly give us a story to live in, a drama to act out that is anything but fracturing and isolating? Perhaps it's as you're implying; empire mimes the drama of the church but for serving its own purposes.
The other questions that I have are for more than just this post. They are questions of immediacy and action. What, if anything, can I do right now to live into this drama of christ in its simplicity and protest against empire? Do I have to get rid of the toys of empire? What about the advantages that we've received passively from imperial life? What about the advantages of growing up white in america? Or growing up not poor? Or going to a good school, or being given gifts that are the spoils of economic imperialism? I'm wondering about the here and now, the right now and not the next day or the next semester, etc.
What is to be done now?
You're a fellow intellectual pugilist, so I'm going to trust that you can handle me pushing back with a little forthrightness:
ReplyDeleteYou asked a number of questions at the end that I think are at odds with one another. You ask what we can do right now and then you also ask about a number of really complicated, nuanced, difficult concerns that will eventually have to be dealt with by people who grasp the problems presented by a life sold-out to empire.
And you clearly grasp those problems, as evidenced in the rest of your remarkably insightful comment. Seriously, everyone, go read that comment again. John cuts to the heart of what Empire deprives us of as fully human.
But I think the question what is to be done now?, is implicitly answered in your comment as a participation. In other words, what we can do now is try to: a) name the problem with the old story well; b) improvise imaginative ways of re-narrating that are in continuity with the alternative story: c) talk about both endlessly so that we start to believe the truth of it over against our formation in the Empire's veal crates.
In short, what can be done immediately is a dialogical re-narration.
At least, that's what I feel up to so far.
Dialogical re-narration is precisely what I was attempting to indicate through the question "what is to be done now?" but in a manner more action oriented. What I mean by this is the following: we might construe this quest for simplicity and abundant life (two concepts that I think go hand in hand rather than stand in opposition) as possible by doing simple things. So talking about the two stories is a necessary step but I am wondering if there are actions that be taken. We are not merely re-narrating, we are re-narrating a DRAMA. We are actors performing actions (complete actions if you will) in a drama that we rehearse and perform week after week, day after day. If this is the case, I am wondering if "improvising imaginative ways of re-narrating" has more traction as actions than as talk. I am not saying that talk is empty, far from it. I don't, however, think that the movement away from empire and into abundant life is a direct, church-camp-altar-call type of transformation. I think it is much more like a call to discipleship, a continuous and long-form transformation by way of practices and teachings.
ReplyDeleteI do want to make the further comment that I don't want to have a set of rules from which we can derive actions. What I am looking for is the result of communal imagining. I am inquiring about concrete practices that we might begin to engage in for the sake of transitioning out of imperial living and into abundant life. (In other words that Jon will certainly get, not Kant but Aristotle.)