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JANUARY 6TH: A Meditation on the Nature of Power

1/5/2022

3 Comments

 
​        History will play games with you, if you’ll let her.  Sometimes she starts with strange juxtapositions.  That’s the case on the sixth of January when the great Trumpite riot of 2021 coincides with the Christian feast of the Epiphany.  That’s the celebration of the journey of three magoi, astronomer-astrologer-futurologists who travelled from the vestiges of the once mighty Persian empire looking for a king and ending up in a stable. Magoi weren’t kings but they kept their eyes on power, and thought about it in surprising ways.  For them real power was part of  the order of things out there in  the universe. So they squinted at the stars in the heavens, crunched numbers on an abacus, decided something big was about to happen in Judaea, a new ruler, perhaps, one who could displace the quisling regime run by corrupt collaborators with Rome.  If that domino fell, how many others might follow? It was worth checking it out.
       Suppose, then, instead of relegating this story to the Christmas pageant or making it an occasion for a Twelfth Night frolic as we could in pre-Covid days, we approach it as a meditation on power.
       The story occurs only once in the canonical gospels, the one by Matthew (chapter 2., 1-13). Ιt’s easy to guess why Matthew might have been attracted to the story, since  according to later tradition he was a former tax collector, that is, was an ex-extortionist and collaborator with the occupying Romans.  He was a “publican” and surely hated for it, until he found his life shattered by a Holy Man who people thought might be made the king of an independent Jewish state.  Like the magoi Matthew was drawn to thinking about power,  heavenly and not so heavenly.

              In his story the magoi bring gifts worthy of a king, but they said, it seems, not a word.  Then they  returned home “by another route,” to avoid telling what they had found to the quisling king of the region.  Matthew, you see, wrapped his story about the visit of the magoi in a garish melodrama leading up to the slaughter of every young child in the realm.  That’s another kind of power, not attuned to any cosmic order, but all-too familiar on earth.
        To these magoi, however, real power was rooted in the nature of things, specifically in the order of the universe.  To last or amount to anything its holders had to be  attuned to that cosmic order, or as ancient writers were more likely to say, to “the heavens.”. That is what lets the magoi predict things and, I suspect, shape their individual lives

.       The magoi  had no monopoly on this idea. It's not   just a coincidence, I believe, that something similar turns up in the prayer Matthew reports Jesus taught his followers to use (Matthew 6, 9 - 13).  In it God is a father but a cosmic one, someone to whom one should exclaim – to paraphrase- , “ Let your kingdom arrive! Let your will come into being down here on earth,  the way it does in the cosmos.”  
        The “Lord’s Prayer” occurs once more in the canonical gospels, Luke 11 2 -4   There it lacks  the  language about a heavenly father whose will is to be at work on earth as it is in the heavens.  Luke, in other words, omits the talk about a tie between earthly needs and regularities out there in the universe, ,        Such terminology is specific to Matthew. Perhaps he remembered hearing it because it resonated with him, while others forgot all about it.
         Matthew’s story, in other words, might be thought of as a meditation on power, real and suppositious and on  its roots, cosmic and otherwise. It’s  also an invitation to think again about power, something we might all benefit from.
In any event, it’s hard to imagine a view of power more contrary to this than  that of those who on January 6th  shouted their curses and trashed the Capitol on behalf of a man  obsessed with one kind of power.

--
 -- A lot to argue about here.  Let's hear from you.









3 Comments
Nick Maki
1/6/2022 05:31:33 pm

The language used a year ago (e.g., "if YOU don't fight like hell, YOU'RE not going to have a country anymore") is a stark contrast to the 3rd person petitions in the Lord's Prayer. It seems to me to indicate a shift from centering on cosmic (alternatively, "systemic" or even "collective") sources of power and order to purely individual ones.

An important thread, I think, in modern right-wing cult thought is the belief in radical human agency. It goes a long way to explaining the fetishization of a "self-made man" (an absurd term to begin with), prioritization of personal freedom over collective good, and broad mistrust of impersonal institutions. Even conspiratorial thought is grounded in the possibility of nefarious "others" having the agency to do evil at an implausible scale.

Human agency is real, but entrepreneurial myths and the epistemic overconfidence of the information age have blinded us to the limits of our individual power and - more importantly and often intentionally - caused us to lose sight of the power we can tap into when we look outside ourselves.

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Gary Pence
1/9/2022 02:32:34 pm

As always, your thoughts are engaging and provocative.

I also thought that the fact the insurrection took place on Epiphany was especially ironic. I hadn’t thought through the parallels between January 6 and the gospel story read on Epiphany until prompted by your blog..

I do think you are right that the convergence between the two is about power. At risk of allegorizing the gospel story one could imagine Trump as Herod afraid of losing his power to the newcomer Biden. We see his champions in the Congress and White House plotting to destroy the newcomer. But persons on whom he depended, Mike Pence, the Attorney General, the military, others, refused to cooperate. Can we say that they returned home by another route? And so he unleashed a murderous throng to wreak destruction and—insanely—to protect and save his rule. One could compare the mass slaughter of the children by the infuriated—and equally insane—Herod. Of course, all the plots of the tyrant ultimately failed, but the ominous aftermath hung over Jesus as it does over us today. And Jesus was executed some three years later. Will our democracy end four years after the attempted coup?

That may be going overboard, but it’s uncanny how the fearfulness of the tyrant, in terror of losing his power, is juxtaposed with the hopefulness and commitment to truth of those who exploited their small modicum of power to vanquish the tyrant, this despite the efforts of the lackeys within the Congress itself and the mob assaulting them from without.

I am beginning to wonder whether the Republican and Democratic Parties differ in the very sort of power they seek to employ. The Republican Party seems to exercise an extreme version of what process philosopher and theologian Bernard Loomer has described as “unilateral power.” This is "the capacity to influence, guide, adjust, manipulate, shape, control, or transform the human or natural environment in order to advance one’s purposes.” At its extreme end this is tyrannical power. I would like to think that the Democratic Party is trying to employ what Loomer calls “relational power.” This is "the ability both to produce and to undergo an effect. It is the capacity both to influence others and to be influenced by others. Relational power involves both a giving and a receiving.” Relational power can appear to be weak in comparison with unilateral power. That is because it is not relentless in pursuing its own goals. It takes others into account. And that requires respect, empathy, collaboration, consensus. Unilateral power unites forces to obliterate others, conceived of as “the opposition.” The Epiphany story and the entire Gospel could be understood as the ultimate defeat of unilateral power by relational power, God’s power. Can we hope for the same in our own political life?

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MckinneyVia link
2/14/2022 05:05:23 am

Thank you for sharing informative content. It means a lot to me hope you do more articles to post.

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