To See the Fractal Empire. To Let it Go
I’ve recently been enjoying the BEMA podcast, in which two followers of Jesus discuss the Tanakh. (I highly recommend to anyone who’s interested.) This month, I’ve especially been struck by the episodes about Exodus. Marty Solomon, “rabbi” of the podcast, points out that the story of Moses is largely a story of two kingdoms: the kingdom of “shalom,” which is found through pursuit of God’s will, and the kingdom of empire, which is represented by Pharaoh.
Let’s say empire is a state of thriving that relies on the domination of others.
I first started thinking about modern empire when U.S. was about to invade Iraq. The Bush administration was broadcasting a garbled message about the next target in the “War on Terror.” Hardly anyone I knew was particularly concerned for the lives of ordinary Iraqis. I remember sitting on a lawn outside a concert hall in Montgomery County waiting to see a movie around that time. The Star-Spangled Banner played before the film, and everyone stood up with their hands on their hearts. The U.S. would ultimately invade a sovereign nation that had committed no overt act of aggression against it. Surely, some people said, this was empire writ large.
Ironically, two years earlier, Osama bin Laden had accused America of being a kind of empire — a cultural empire spreading libertine secular materialism throughout the world, without the world’s consent.
Today, macro-level expressions of empire are easy to find. See Amazon warehouse workers forced to remain in the path of a tornado under threat of dismissal, for the sake of a slightly wider profit margin. See the battle between organizing labor and a breakfast cereal company.
See billionaires in space. See Republicans at a loss to persuade in the larger sociocultural conversation now laying the groundwork to override the 2024 election — for no greater reason, truly, than the refusal to lose.
See Russia poised to invade Ukraine for the sake of a stronger Russia — essentially bringing guns to a factory fight, using conquest to do the work of desired global economic clout. See China right threading the poorer parts of the world with infrastructure projects and insidious obligations, while evolving into a society with deeply troubling notions of civil liberties within.
Really, I think we have all become surprisingly identified with empire — often in subtler, more insidious forms.
When middle class Americans defend liberal immigration policies, partly on the basis that people arriving from poorer countries are willing to jobs that they wouldn’t do, isn’t it possible to see empire there, too? Who made our clothes? The devices and comforts around us, and the materials that compose them?
If I am troubled by Jeff Bezos’ wholly indulgent journey to space, I have to see that a pivotal event occurs whenever I open the door to thank the person who has just run up the driveway to deliver a package.
I can look at the desire to rise above it all, through entrepreneurship. How egalitarian is entrepreneurship at its heart? What types of success do we celebrate at all?
Fundamentally: when I feel empowered, what does that mean for others? And do I care?
When I go out and about in public I am struck by how many people appear to want to be known by their imperiousness. It’s as though America is breaking into fiefdoms, large and small. Popular notions of success strongly suggest that identity is fiefdom, and without fiefdom, there is no identity. A recent Facebook meme trumpets: “You can either work for your dreams, or work for somebody else’s.” The notion that there is anything we could just do together, or without someone dominating someone else, is getting progressively erased.
Empire persists, too, when we imagine that the response to empire is more empire. It’s tempting. Surely if we see empire for what it is, we are the righteous ones, and therefore all we have to do is get the reins of power, because our empire will be a righteous empire that gets it all right. Right? But I appreciate the way Charles Eisenstein has framed it: folk that have not assiduously overcome of the ideologies that have led to systemic dis-ease in themselves are only likely to reproduce them.
It seems clear to me that any effective resistance to empire absolutely requires us to to divest ourselves of it. Thoroughly. And that’s a very personal, inner activity.
Once one sees the distasteful nature of empire, it’s not hard to want to divest, either. But it’s also not hard to feel stalled out for a lack of alternatives. What is there to go toward, except an anemic state of negations? Not-power, not-domination, not-force . . .
In the BEMA podcast, Marty Solomon talks about “shalom,” which he further describes as “the way of the shepherd.” His position is unabashedly theological: the alternative to the hierarchical power of humans is surrender to the harmonizing power of God.
Surely, no small part of the life-giving message of the Scriptures is the renunciation of notions of human-centered power for the sake of alignment with a more vitalizing universal order. Once one sees it, then one can begin to appreciate how keen and nuanced the instruction actually is.
Organized religions, particularly organized Abrahamic religions, have gotten pretty imperial themselves at times. But in fact I do think it’s possible that a fair way to distinguish authentic interpretations of both Judaism and Christianity is the extent to which the scriptures are used as an injunction against domination of others, against empire.
Of course, not everyone believes in God, and if you don’t believe in God, then a theistic notion of harmony is ridiculous. Perhaps at least we can all perceive some kind of “cosmic law,” an emergent property of groups, or of all living systems, which we can heed as a law greater than our own.
Surely the environmental crisis calls us to this sort of awareness, for instance.
Surely, our efforts to protect and revive the living things on this planet is an encounter with a dynamic system that, in aggregate, is hard to distinguish is hard from a higher intelligence.
Isn’t there something larger than ourselves, something archetypal, which can guide us?
However we divest of empire, and whatever we embrace in its stead, there seem to me to be some plain, emerging truths:
Empire is destructive, and its tendencies inflect all of our lives.
The way out of “The Matrix” is first to see its pervasiveness. Within and without. And to renounce it.
Power that has a determinate effect on others is never a personal attribute. It is a collective trust. It is a tool that must be treated the property of the group (or the property of God). It must be used with repeatedly affirmed consent. It does not belong to the wielder
When we serve empire, we serve ourselves, and we must fight for what we keep.
When we divest of empire, what we serve continually renews us.
It’s possible to surrender to greater goodness.
It’s possible that goodness is more alive, more intelligent, more personal, and more imminent than we first imagine.
Certainly all worth considering, perhaps particularly during this season of holiday, organized around the birth of a king into the most humble of circumstances, author of a revolution that is rooted in notions of lifting the lowly, toppling the great, healing fulfilling the most heartfelt need, and eventually establishing a world of peace and well-being, right here on Earth.