Kingdom Come

“God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears tht they should not hear;) unto this day.” (Romans 11:8)

Whaaat!! That is talking about the Jews!

Your antisemitism is showing. As if Christians are the Untouchables.

Dissing the Great Awakening revivals is certainly treading on fundamentalists’ holy ground. But how many American preachers recognize that they inflame war exactly like jihadist Imams?

To understand what is taking place today, we need to understand the nature of the recurring political-religious cycles called “Great Awakenings.”

Each lasted about 100 years and consist of three phases, each about a generation long.

1. Technological advances outpace the existing ethical capacity to cope.
2. Religious revival brings changes in church beliefs and practice.
3. Political reform is effected by a coalition of church and state through shared commitment to improve society.

A Hegelian dialectic occurs in each of the Awakenings:

“the way in which two very different forces or factors work together, and the way in which their differences are resolved.”

The Roman concept of religion had never been that of an…exclusive obligatory moral loyalty to an unseen and highly spiritual Being.

The native official religion…was a part of the state system, and its administration a part of the administration of the state. The citizens and subjects of Rome were all naturally regarded in a technical sense as adherents of its religion as much as of the rest of its political system…the Roman mind was quite incapable of conceiving that any purely religious cult could reasonably exist that demanded exclusive spiritual loyalty to itself alone from its devotees. Hence Roman law and custom regarded the adherents of all these other religions as special groups of citizens or subjects organized into voluntary associations or clubs for their own purposes, not inconsistent with their proper civic loyalty. To cite a modern though not very precise parallel, they were, from the official Roman standpoint, like special religious confraternities in the Christian Church of today. Such voluntary associations were therefore usually permitted.

Conspiracy theorists apply Hegel’s philosophy as an instrument of social control used by a shadowy cabal bent on implementing a New World Order.

The theory goes like so: (Step 1) dark forces contrive a crisis, (Step 2) which…instils fear in the public…(Step 3) a solution to restore public order [through] New laws and policies…are enacted [which] covertly serve the purpose that the dark forces wanted all along: the enslavement of humanity. This is a form of mass mind control that shepherds an oblivious public towards tyranny and oppression.

An extremely popular…reading states that Hegel’s dialectic is a way of understanding the world through…the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Something happens (a thesis), which provokes a response (an antithesis); both ideas are then melded together (a synthesis)…[also called] “problem, reaction, solution…”

Antithesis

For Hegel, the phenomenon of things becoming their own opposite permeates the world. [Emphases added here and below.] It even finds its way into popular sayings, like pride comes before a fall; someone is in a great position but then suddenly finds themselves in a terrible one. We see it in Greek tragedy, too: Antigone champions family over the state and Creon champions the state over family. Their extreme positions lead to conflict, and then inevitably to (an already fated) catastrophe.

“Both have a good position to defend, the family or the state,” says Houlgate. “But they go wrong and violate one another’s rights. And they do violence to themselves. They promote the right thing, but in such a one-sided way that it ends up turning into the wrong.”

Synthesis

Thinking in a Hegelian manner can help us better understand the…angry, bewildered people who buy into conspiracy theories. In his analysis of civil society, Hegel notes how societies that are geared towards maximising wealth leave masses of people impoverished and alienated.

“If you listen to some of the Trump supporters… they articulated a sense of being left behind. No one cares about us. That strikes me as being a kind of alienation,” says Houlgate. “If you build into this a sense of resentment and unfulfilled entitlement – would that explain why people lose trust in standard news outlets and things?…I think Hegel might ask us to think about the self-contradictory elements in the society we’ve produced.” [Emphasis added.]

We can ask dialectical questions. Why has civil society, whose purpose is to secure the welfare and rights of its participants, produced subjects who feel so abandoned? How has the internet, which offers the full breadth and scope of human knowledge at our fingertips, resulted in such ignorance? When did Hegel, a philosopher who historicised humanity’s understanding of the character of freedom, become the purveyor of a theory that posits mankind is doomed to enslavement?

If we’re lucky we might produce a synthesis, and a greater understanding of how the world both does and doesn’t work.