Redeeming The Time

Communists must always go into the whys and wherefores of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.

~ Mao Tsetung.

A book I have returned to frequently since I first read it in the 1980s is Grey Eminence, Aldous Huxley's biography of the 17th century French Capuchin monk, Father Joseph, who served as a close advisor to Cardinal Richelieu during the Thirty Years War.

The book was first recommended to me by a friend who cherished hopes that I might convert to Roman Catholicism. After several conversations with me on the subject, he became convinced that my interests in mysticism might lead me astray into some sort of heresy. He offered Huxley's book as a cautionary tale about mysticism--which it undoubtedly is--and hoped that, by reading it, I would see the wisdom of submitting my "spiritual" impulses to the guidance of the Magisterium of the Roman church.

While such a conclusion is not necessarily unwarranted, it was not Huxley's, nor would it be mine. Moreover, the part of Huxley's book that would make the deepest impression upon me concerned the nature of mystical experience and its relation to politics in the 20th century.

For me, the key chapter of the book is X. Politics and Religion. There Huxley argues that the need for military efficiency and the need for industrial efficiency in a modern state combine to make totalitarianism inevitable. He then observes that totalitarianism is not conducive to mysticism and "theocentric" religion--for such modes of religiosity refuse to accord human beings final authority over life and death, over thinking and feeling. Instead, they look outside the world for such authorization--even in the political realm.

Huxley's remarks about the modern state anticipated Dwight D. Eisenhower's tardy warnings about the military-industrial-complex. In this respect, I found him to be prescient. I was less sanguine, however, about his observations on totalitarianism. I could see how a totalitarian government would have little tolerance for a "spirituality" (or any kind of religiosity) that failed to acknowledge its hegemony, but I was not yet ready to acknowledge the degree to which the United States had become a totalitarian state.

In the early 1990s, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent both challenged and disturbed my thinking about the nature of American political culture. I was willing to concede the powerful role of the media in shaping public opinion, but I was not yet ready to concede that the power of the media was "total."



I'm still not ready to make that particular concession. But lately I have begun to question whether "totalitarianism" actually requires total governmental control. Perhaps what is necessary for a modern state to be classified as "totalitarian" is a high degree of ideological agreement among certain key institutions (both public and private) that work in concert to produce a political power dynamic that cannot be effectively resisted through democratic processes. In other words, my understanding of totalitarianism has indeed become Chomskian over the years.

In the 21st century, the military-industrial-complex's control over the business of government is reinforced not only by the media, but also by the dominant religious institutions in the United States (collectively, the Christian church). The latter no longer produces figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Sloan Coffin--men of the cloth whose Christian commitments led them to actively oppose laws and government policies that they felt contradicted the gospel. Instead, Christianity (in its North American expressions) is dominated by an apocalyptic End Times eschatology that regards the United States as God's instrument on earth and its imperialist policies as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. These Christians have entered into a cynical alliance with Pro-Israel Zionist Jews (the cynicism, by the way, is mutual) and together they have created a united front against religiously inspired political dissent.

The fabled polis of Aristotle no longer exists in the United States (if it ever did). "Politics" under such conditions are farcical, mere spectacle.



In 1976, Martin Heidegger told an interviewer: "Only a god can save us."

In the first century of the Common Era, an anonymous author of the Pauline school wrote to Christians in Ephesus: "See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil" (Eph. 5:15-16, KJV).

As subjects of the American Empire, ruled by the military-industrial-media-ecclesiastical-complex, we can no longer legitimately consider ourselves to be the citizens of a democratic republic.

"In such a world," wrote Huxley, "there seems little prospect that any political reform, however well intentioned, will produce the results expected of it" (GE, 311).

In our present circumstances, the only way to "redeem the time" is to wait and watch, bearing witness to the tragedy that some have called "the project for the New American century" as it unfolds. In addition, I suggest we all pray that Hamlet's "divinity that shapes our ends" is as just as the ancient Near Eastern prophetic tradition--a tradition to which the 21st century Christian church is only too oblivious--would have us believe.