A Sufficiency Other Than Our Own (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash
This is the sixth in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the previous posts here.
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. It is my intention in this and following weekly blogs to take up each of these eight claims and to consider how we may in good faith respond to them. I have no doubt that such a careful pointed response to each of these distortions is an effort worth making. I will take up each claim in turn.
The sixth claim is that liberty equals selfishness. This claim imagines that “liberty” means to be totally unencumbered in the reach for wealth, control, and power. All of this, of course, is the extreme expression of the deep American creed of “individualism.”
The inescapable outcome of such posturing is an unsafe society marked by an undercurrent of ready violence that preys upon the innocent and the vulnerable. Selfishness becomes the platform for ready violence, so that those who are smart enough, quick enough, ruthless enough, and lucky enough can imagine themselves to be self-sufficient. Such “self-sufficient” models, moreover, draw to themselves the admiration (not to say loyalty) of many wannabes who have no chance whatsoever to be self-sufficient, but who nonetheless are glad to be clothed in the mantle of “liberty.”
It is easy enough to identify in scripture examples of those who thought they could live in autonomous liberty. I could readily think of two such cases. In the first case, Pharaoh of Egypt is cited in the prophetic tradition as an example of imagined autonomy. I suppose there is a side glance at the claim of Egyptian religion wherein Pharaoh is a god. But it is more likely that the basis for such self-imagination is effective economic and military policy. For the prophet the matter grows out of Israel’s own Exodus tradition wherein Pharaoh is remembered as a violent, abusive, exploiter who knows no limits in his ready exercise of coercion. In the prophetic oracle of Ezekiel 29:3-7 (extended into chapters 30-32), Pharaoh becomes the target of a prophetic assault and of divine diminishment. The prophetic charge against Pharaoh is that Pharaoh imagined and claimed that he himself had created the Nile River:
I am against you,
Pharaoh King of Egypt,
the great dragon sprawling in the midst of its channels,
saying, “My Nile is my own;
I made it for myself” (Ezekiel 29:3).
The claim is echoed in the prose verses that follow:
Then you shall know that I am the lord. Because you said, “The Nile is my own, and I made it,” therefore, I am against you, and against your channels, and I will make the land of Egypt an utter waste and desolation, from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border of Ethiopia (Ezekiel 29:9-10).
The truth is exactly to the contrary, says the prophet. It was the Nile that has “made” Pharaoh, that has produced his wealth and permitted his power. Thus Pharaoh, like many after him, has confused the creator and the creation. And when the role of the creator goes unacknowledged, it is easy enough to imagine that one is self-made. Not only does Pharaoh imagine he is self-made and has himself created the Nile (the true source of Egyptian life), but in the reprise of verses 9-10 YHWH reiterates the charge against him.
We know from an earlier poetic piece in Isaiah that Assyria, a counterpoint to Egypt, had in the same way imagined itself as the key actor, the subject of the powerful verbs:
With my many chariots
I have gone up the heights of the mountains,
to the far recesses of Lebanon;
I felled its tallest cedars,
its choicest cypresses;
I came to its remotest height,
its densest forest.
I dug wells and drank waters,
I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt. (Isaiah 37:24-26).
This is a generic boast of the powerful who readily imagine they are self-starters. Already in the oracle of Isaiah the puffed-up “I” statements of would-be autonomy are countered by the “I” statement of YHWH who, it is here claimed, will prevail.
Have you not heard that I determined it long ago?
I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass,
that you should make fortified cities crash into heaps of ruins…
I know your rising up and your sitting down,
your going out and coming in,
and your raging against me.
Because you have raged against me
and your arrogance has come to my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
and my bit in your mouth;
I will turn you back on the way by which you came (Isaiah 37:26, 28-29).
In the oracle of Ezekiel the “I” of YHWH will prevail, this time over Egypt:
I will put hooks in your jaws,
and make the fish of your channels stick to your scales.
I will draw you up from your channels,
with all the fish of your channels sticking to your scales.
I will fling you into the wilderness,
you and all the fish of your channels;
you shall fall in the open field,
and not be gathered and buried (Ezekiel 29:4-5).
The outcome of that countering divine “I” is the primary claim of the oracle:
Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am the Lord (v. 5).
It is the hard lesson of the Exodus narrative, now belatedly reiterated, that YHWH is Lord, the lesson that brutality, with relentless insistence, has taught to Pharaoh; see Exodus 7:5, 17, 8:22, 11:7, 14:4). It was the same lesson for Assyria and for every would-be autonomous agent. The much acclaimed power of Pharaoh is decisively penultimate. In order to instruct Pharaoh in this reality, the Lord of history promises the utter devastation of the land of Egypt:
No human foot shall pass through it, and no animal foot shall pass through it; it shall be uninhabited for forty years. I will make the land of Egypt a desolation among desolate countries; and her cities shall be a desolation forty years among cities that are laid waste. I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, and disperse them among the countries (Ezekiel 29:11-12).
And even in the belated divine resolve to “gather” the Egyptians who have been “scattered” by YHWH, the recovery of Egypt is modest and limited, never again to achieve its former power:
Further, thus says the Lord God: At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the peoples among whom they were scattered; and I will restore the fortunes of Egypt, and bring them back to the land of Pathros, the land of their origin; and there they shall be a lowly kingdom. It shall be the most lowly of the kingdoms, and never again exalt itself above the nations; and I will make them so small that they will never again rule over the nations. The Egyptians shall never again be the reliance of the house of Israel…Then they shall know that I am the Lord God. (Ezekiel 29:13-16).
The only good thing, in prophetic perspective, is that the Egyptians will know that YHWH is Lord! Of course this is all a poetic piece and nothing more. The poetry is preserved in Israel not because it is “true,” but because it tells of the ultimacy of YHWH and the penultimate status of every other claim. The upshot is that autonomy is an illusion. Self-sufficiency is a mistaken pretense that will, in the end, yield to the will of the creator God. Pharaoh surely has great liberty of action. But finally his liberty reaches its limit and is curbed. It is curbed by the realities of history. Moreover, Israel’s prophets insisted that the “realities of history” are the working out of divine will and divine purpose. And if Pharaoh would not learn that early, he would learn it late. Given this prophetic calculus, reference might be usefully made to The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, by Paul Kennedy (1987).
Kennedy surveys the course of the modern Spanish, Dutch, and British empires and comes to the conclusion that in each case economic prosperity ran amuck through excessive military spending. Those governments did not take into account the reality of limited resources and governed as though there were no limits. But, says Kennedy, the reality of limits could not be circumvented by the grand illusion of limitless resources. Kennedy never once mentions any theological claim in his analysis. It is easy to see how Israel’s prophets would have taken up this recognition of “limits” and insist that it is the creator God who set such limits. Either way, liberty as selfishness could not work for Pharaoh or for any who came after him.
In a very different idiom, the parable of Jesus in Luke 12: 13-21 takes up the same issue, only now the sphere of the narrative is not large-scale national ambition, but (as usual with the parables of Jesus) an imagined individual managing his daily life. The framing of the parable is a warning against greed:
Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions (Luke 12:15).
The parable concerns a rich man who produced abundance. This man is surely a model for self-sufficiency and self-aggrandizement. The man’s produce outran his storage space. He considers what to do with his produce that he is unable to store. He might have thought to give some of it away. Or he might have considered cutting back on production in order to give his land rest for a season. But he did neither. Indeed, such options never occurred to him, because the former would have required him to recognize his needy neighbors. The latter would have required him to have respect for the land. But the farmer has no regard for his neighbors and no respect for the land. He is singularly preoccupied with his surplus that he intends to keep and protect. He makes plans for more storage (bigger barns!), so that he can keep it all for himself. His plan includes (not unlike Pharaoh; see Exodus 1:11 on the requirement of more storage capacity) a series of first person verbs reflecting his assumed control of his future:
I will do this;
I will pull down my barns;
I will build bigger barns;
I will store all my grain and my goods.
I will say to myself…
It is all “I” and “my” as it was for Pharaoh. There are no other characters in the story. We may imagine that his greedy wealth has isolated him. But he does not care, or even notice. He knew himself to be self-made and self-sufficient, so he never looked around for any other. He only addresses himself, “Soul.” He issues imperatives to himself based on his isolation:
Relax;
eat;
drink;
be merry!
His is the predictable outcome of such a self-sufficient life in its success! But then, the parable jars:
“But God said to him!” (Luke 12:20).
Surely he was surprised by the abrupt address. Likely he believed in God, but it had never occurred to him that God would have anything to do with his agrarian prosperity. The preposition is an adversative. It interrupts a settled, peaceable narrative concerning a peaceable settled farm. It turns out that the man is not alone, as he had imagined. He had addressed himself as “Soul,” but now he is called by a different name, “Fool.” In that instant a “soul” has become a “fool” because he had misconstrued his true situation. It turns out that a demand is placed on him by the one who is a commanding presence: “Your life is being demanded of you.” Now, for a second time the term “rich” appears in the paragraph. He is “a rich man” (v. 16). But now “not rich toward God,” not rich beyond himself, not rich toward the neighbors who are in the purview of this demanding God. His liberty-become-selfishness is shown to be a non-starter, because this is a demand that is beyond his horizon.
In what follows in the sequence of the Lucan text, Jesus follows the parable with an instructive summons to his disciples, the ones who had signed on for his alternative life (Luke 12:22-34). He invites his disciples away from the endless vexations faced by the farmer in the parable, the same vexations that had before him beset Pharaoh. Such vexations concern food and clothing, and the stored “stuff” that preoccupies us, the stuff about which the birds and flowers seem not to know or care. Then Jesus commends his disciples to “your father.” (Jesus has not yet arrived at rhetorical gender inclusiveness!) This “father” is the one who has curbed the grandeur of Pharaoh and who broke the spell of the rich farmer. This same father creator God knows what we need. This is “my father’s world,” and that world (still gendered in rhetoric) teems with care and provision that are assured for our common life.
Instead of worry and anxiety and storage and self-security, try the alternative governance! Give alms (v. 33). Serve a different purpose! Rely on different assurances! The parable is a potent articulation on its own. But its force is greatly enhanced by juxtaposition of the teaching in Luke 12:22-34. The parable, in this sequence, supplies an introduction to the teaching of Jesus that is a summons to an alternative way in the world. The alternative way is alternative to greed that is propelled by anxiety. It is alternative to fear and violence. It is an alternative to compulsive accumulation.
In our society that has run aground with fear, anxiety, greed, and eventually violence, this is an urgent moment for alternative. The good news is that we need not live by the pathologies of our society. Indeed, we cannot finally live the way of selfish greed, anxiety, and violence. We cannot, because as with Pharaoh, the creator will not tolerate such a way. We cannot live that way because, like the rich farmer, we are haunted by another holy address that rushes upon us occasionally. Those of us caught up in the cycle of fear, greed, and violence eventually are called by our right name, “Fool.” And then we are addressed by the alternative.
What a way to think about the church! We church types are the people who know that liberty is not and cannot be selfishness, that accumulation does not work, that anxiety does no good, that greed never succeeds, and violence has no future. We know that. We are the people who affirm that. We do not always remember what we know, and we do not always live it out. But we meet together regularly to remind each other of what we know. What we know situates us differently in the world, yields a different set of hopes, and summons us to different duties. There is a relentless communitarian tilt to the gospel that refuses the mistaken American creed of “individualism.” The good news is that we cannot and need not be self-sufficient.
Walter Brueggemann
August 5, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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