The Cure For Ebola - Strong Central Government

The epidemic of Ebola disease in West Africa is bringing to the fore something that needs to be said loudly and clearly:  strong central government and well funded public health services are essential for our continued survival.

There has been a lot of blame passed around in the Developed world for the way that Ebola has gotten so out of hand.  Things that we could have anticipated, should have known sooner, etc. .. The fact is, the real reason that the present epidemic got out of hand is because it originated in countries that all have weak central governments and rudimentary to non-existent public health services.

When Ebola threatened to invade Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, it was beaten back by prompt and effective public health measures.

Suppose that Nigeria had had a government like Sierra Leone’s.  We would now be looking at an unimaginable catastrophe with hundreds  of millions of lives at stake.

Now that we have seen a handful of Ebola cases turn up in Europe and the United States, we are about to see a controlled experiment unfold.  One can easily guess what the results will be.  Ebola will be safely contained in any country with a strong central government and a good public health system  and it will not be contained in countries that lack these things.

We take a lot for granted about the way we live.  We may want to live free, without the restraints of big government.  But some of those restraints are there to keep society from breaking down.  Vaccinations, and universal access to medical care benefit everyone because they help prevent the spread of disease, and they allow more people to be productive members of society. Without public health and an educated public  there is widespread ignorance about how a disease spreads, and how it can be contained.

We are seeing the results of a serious epidemic  in West Africa when the governments in question are too weak to respond effectively.  What happens is an exponential increase in infections and death rates and the ominous breakdown in social institutions. Schools closed,  transportation and trade affected,  the breakdown of local governments, communities and families.  All of these things magnify the spread of Ebola and make the job of fighting the disease many times harder.   

The Ebola epidemic is a valuable real-time lesson in the importance of the Public Sector.  Simply put, if you want to avoid the plague, drowning the government in a bathtub is not a good idea.  

Answer to Ayn Rand

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the the rest of us as his servants or inferiors.  We can’t accept this.  We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody.  So we always speak of his meat as worthless.  In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.  - !Kung Healer ,  quoted by Boehm   1999   from Lee, The !Kung San.  

                                               VS

Talent and ability create inequality…. to rectify this supposed injustice, we are told to sacrifice the able for the unable.  Egalitarianism demands the punishment and envy of anyone who is better than someone else at anything.  We must tear down the competent and strong - raze them to the level of the incompetent and weak…     - Gary Hull (Ayn Rand Institute)  

Ayn Rand was an American intellectual, born in Russia, who has been very influential in the U.S. conservative, Republican and libertarian circles.  Her philosophy, which is reproduced  here by Gary Hull, is a glorification of capitalism, and an attack on altruism.

I don’t think Ayn Rand is just wrong, I think her philosophy is fundamentally false from its beginning to end. Egalitarianism does not mean the suppression of human abilities, instead, it is the very foundation of  human civilization.   

 I believe that egalitarianism was the major factor in creating a difference  between humans and the apes.   What differentiates us from the chimpanzees and other great apes is our ability to intentionally impose egalitarianism, to use social rules and mores to both control and eliminate the alpha male, replacing him by group enforced monogamy, and it is this milestone that led to language, and culture - without which we would not be here today.

What do I mean by alpha male? A human equivalent is John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's, Atlas Shrugged, . He is the most dominant male. In ape societies the alpha male is a very significant and unavoidable figure. He terrorizes and intimidates all the other apes in his group. There is only one rule in ape society - "Might makes Right".

Egalitarian hunting and gathering groups are made up of loose associations of nuclear families with pair bonded couples.  By divorcing sexual competition from hunting and sharing food,  groups without alpha males were able to out-compete groups that didn’t eliminate their alpha. 

 It was conscious egalitarianism that   led to the enormous human capacity to excel at so many different activities, and to the human ability to exchange with and tolerate other groups because these things are not possible with an alpha male present.    

  This is the exact opposite of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.  It was social levelling in hunting and gathering that eventually led to markets, economies and capitalism, because if we hadn’t gotten rid of the alpha male hierarchy we would still be selfish chimpanzees.

 

I think that the best answer to Ayn Rand is this hunter gatherer speech.  even though, in modern standards it appears to be  rather harsh and paranoid. I will explain my reasoning.

Hunting and gathering is a way of life that seems long superseded by our systems of agriculture and industry.  Nowadays, the few hunter-gatherers left are living on marginal lands:   deserts, jungles, scrub lands,  and frozen wastelands that often  have little or no economic value for anyone else.  When the land does end up having economic value, as is the case for oil extraction in Ecuador,  so much the worse for the indigenous tribes living there.

 Hunting and gathering used to be the only way of life,  but then around twelve thousand years ago our ancestors first domesticated plants and animals and created a world of agricultural surplus and with that came plenty of scope for social and political hierarchies.

Before what we call the “Neolithic Revolution”  there were around two million years of hunting and gathering and living close to the bone.  Those two million years drove the evolution of some of the most important aspects of human nature, notably our ability to cooperate, our extended period of infancy, pair-bonding, and the development of language.

The hunting-gathering groups ranged from about thirty to one hundred people.  Less than thirty made it difficult for the group to survive and defend itself from other groups.  More than one hundred created too much conflict and caused groups to fission.

If the nomadic hunting and gathering societies form the bulk of human history,  then they formed the evolutionary crucible for the development of the human brain, and  the distinctly human forms of cooperation that led to  language and culture.  By the time we get to the neolithic revolution, twelve thousand years ago, brains are modern, languages are present and evolving quickly, and culture is becoming more cosmopolitan and  more representative of life in fixed communities.

Social institutions,  technology, language - all taken for granted, all developed over two million years,  in the stone age.  The real question is:  How was our unique form of human cooperation made possible?  Ayn Rand claims the idea of “property rights" borrowed from Aristotle's "Politics" and eighteenth century British apologists of market capitalism like John Locke.  But for millions of years, people had no more property than they could wear on their backs.  

Somehow they managed to survive without capitalist economies and fossil fuels.  How they did it is explained by the  !Kung healer’s speech.   The Bushmen don’t tolerate bullies or tyrants in their midst.   They use very effective social methods of persuasion with the threat of ultimate sanctions ever-present in the background.  The way they sustain their way of life is by actively,  vigorously, and collectively  suppressing the alpha male.

With minimal possessions, a nomadic hunter-gatherer group is evidence of the necessary and sufficient social institutions needed for a human group to survive for long continuous periods.  Egalitarianism or social levelling is universally practiced in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.  It seems plausible that that is because human hierarchies, with alpha males at the top, are inimical to hunter-gatherer survival.

I can anticipate some objections at this point.  Look, if these hunter-gatherers were around two million years before they began to domesticate plants and animals and live in hierarchical societies, maybe they should have done it sooner.   Maybe the whole hunting-and-gathering schtick holds people back and they could have “been somebody”  sooner by coveting property and creating markets. Also someone may say, why is hunting and gathering relevant today?  It has nothing to do with us….

One thing that we do know through science is that climate change played a huge role in human evolution.  Our ancestors survived through a successive series of brutal ice ages.  It was all about survival and nothing but.  Climate change forced humans to be more cooperative than any other animal.  

It’s interesting that Libertarians and followers of Ayn Rand both tend to  deny the existence of human induced climate change. The idea that unfettered Capitalism could actually be bad for our future doesn’t get any traction with these folks.  Nor is there any interest in life before Capitalism.  If they think about hunting and gathering societies it is just to disparage them as hopelessly primitive.

Why egalitarianism?  All nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are actively egalitarian. The alpha traits of boasting, intimidation, greed, and selfishness are met with social disapproval and censure.  Adultery is discouraged and actively disapproved of.      But instead of discouraging productivity and initiative this has the exact opposite effect because it separates sexual dominance from other skills and abilities that differentiate people and contribute to the group as a whole.

Egalitarianism levels the playing field, and makes it possible for people with diverse abilities and  experiences  to thrive without getting beaten up or intimidated by an alpha male because they somehow threaten the alpha’s status.

It is not a coincidence that Rand’s most popular novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,  celebrate the alpha male and even celebrate the right of alpha males to destroy things if they don’t get their way and to rape women if they feel like it.  That’s the way it works in both wild and captive chimpanzee groups too.

Humans differ from chimpanzees because we have found ways to avoid conflicts by jointly following rules and we have put severe pressure on alpha males to behave pro-socially and by and large it has worked to our collective advantage.  Humans out compete everything else because of our skills in cooperation.  Individuals add to society but it’s the cooperation between many people that gets most things done.

The alpha male is deep in our instinctual selves.  Even though we internalize social mores, we still need a lot of guidance from others as to their attitudes and judgements about our behaviour.  Our feelings of shame, guilt, and empathy help to guide our behaviour in more pro-social directions.  Without them we are nothing but dangerous psychopaths.   The quote from Objectivist Gary Hull, about the evils of egalitarianism, is true to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but it is also a paean to psychopathy.  Within it there is no recognition of our social reality.

Hunter-gatherers who managed to survive in a direct line of descendents for millions of years before the present, are the minimalists who created human nature.   They didn’t survive for so long because they honoured private property, they survived because they were able to share food in good times and bad, they were able to learn from each other and other groups and they were able to collectively control, and,  when necessary,  eliminate the alpha male, creating a level playing field for the first time, and ultimately leading to human civilization.

The "Laws of Leadership"

I've been reading a book by leadership guru John Maxwell, called
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I'm impressed with Maxwell's
page-turning writing style and his simple pithy examples. "Leadership
ability is the lid that determines a person's level of effectiveness."
That's an eye-opening point he makes in his first chapter.

Another quote: "to add growth lead followers but to multiply
growth lead leaders." This one reminds me of what's behind the success of the Religious Right and the Christian mega-churches in the United States. Maxwell himself acknowledges his connection to Bill Hybels ,pastor of the hugely influential Willow Creek Community Church.

Outside Bill Hybels' office is a poster with the caption: "What is
our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?"

Every year Willow Creek Church hosts a leadership conference
which, in previous years, has featured Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush as speakers.

Like the corporate goal of maximizing profits, the goal of the
Willow Creek Mega-church is to maximize the conversion of unbelievers. It has 13,000 member churches and a 50 million dollar state-of-the-art worship center that features the largest auditorium in the United States.

Hybels, in his book: "The Courageous Leader" says: "Leaders see the big picture and understand how to help others to find their place of
service within that picture." My problem with Bill Hybels is that he
is not thinking big enough. Just because you use words like "God" and
"Jesus" doesn't mean that your vision is big enough. It's simple – the
big picture is how are we going to survive, both as a civilization and
as a species. One of John Maxwell's quotes on leadership is apt here:
"Anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course."

Corporations, are required, by law, to be run solely in order to
make money for their stockholders. And they have become enormously successful to the point where the size of many corporations rivals that of the nation-state. Exxon-Mobil Corporation has an economy that's bigger than 180 countries. Many of these huge corporations,including Exxon, are corrupting governments so that they will implement policies that further the corporation's own profit-making goals. The problem is that, even though corporations are now as powerful as nation states the rules of the game are fixed so that
these corporations assume no responsibility for future generations.

The problem of focusing on growth of any kind, is that it is
too narrow a focus. While corporations have grown bigger than many
states the environmental and human cost has become too high. Think about the fate of the Titanic. It was so big for its time that people thought it was unsinkable. But its captain couldn't see the iceberg in time to change the big ship's course and the Titanic went down.

When you don't see the bigger picture you aren't navigating,
you're steering blindly. By concentrating on growth, corporate leaders
have forgotten to look ahead at the consequences of their actions.
Making more money is great but as the natives say: "When the rivers
stop flowing, and nothing can grow in the soil you won't be able to
eat money."

Bill Hybels' favourite quote is "the local church is the hope of
the world." But where was the church when corporations were denying and delaying action on global warming? By prioritizing emotional issues like abortion and homosexuality the religious right has wasted its moral capital. And by mobilizing it's members to help elect the worst president in U.S. history for two terms of office it has essentially abdicated it's leadership and become a tool of the Republican party.

Megachurches like Willow Creek may be exemplary at churning out leaders but if those leaders don't see what's coming then it's more a case of the blind leading the blind.

Kairos and Global Warming

“From the moment when a (large scale) disaster appears inevitable and especially after it becomes a reality, it can, like every great torment, become a productive force for the religious point of view. It begins to suggest new questions and to stress old ones.”

“Dogmatized conceptions are pondered afresh in the light of events, and the faith relationship that has to stand the test of an utterly changed situation is renewed in modified form. But the new acting force is nothing less than the force of extreme despair, a despair so elemental, that it can have but one of two results: the sapping of the last will of life, or the renewal of the soul.”

I love this quote from Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian because it seems so appropriate for our times. And yet, it was not written in response to the threat of global warming, it was written seventy years ago, just after the second world war ended, a war which like the ancient Babylonian and Roman assaults on Jerusalem, threatened the very survival of Judaism. This quote comes, not from Buber's most famous work: I and Thou, but from a book called The Prophetic Faith, a book about the ancient Hebrew prophets.

Judaism is unique among the world religions in having a long historical line of major prophets – historical figures like Jeremiah who spoke truth to power at a time when there was no free press or human rights. The Hebrew word for prophet “nabi”, means “one who is called” . The nabi saw themselves as called to speak the word of God even if it was opposed to what the Hebrew kings and their subjects wanted to hear. The prophets challenged their rulers to adhere more strictly to monotheism and eschew the worship of other gods. They also protested against injustice and gross inequality. This was at a time when the Hebrew culture and religion were under direct threat of extinction from the much more powerful empires around them.

It is instructive to note the historical period when the Hebrew prophets were active. We are talking about a period of about four hundred years from the time of king David and king Solomon, to the rebuilding of Solomon's temple after the Babylonian exile. During these times the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah were declining in power and increasingly threatened by the powerful empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

Eventually in 722 BCE , the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian army and the population scattered to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire, where they disappeared from history. That's what happened to the ten lost tribes, by the way.

Two hundred years later Judah, the remaining Hebrew kingdom was conquered by the Babylonian army. Solomon's temple was reduced to rubble and the major portion of Jerusalem's population was exiled to the capital city of Babylon.

It was during these disastrous times that the Hebrew prophets were active. The amazing thing is that with all this destruction the Jewish religion not only survived it became more resilient. In contrast, there is no Moabite, Canaanite, Egyptian, or Babylonian religion today in spite of the fact that some of these countries lasted much longer than Israel and Judah.

After Solomon's temple was rebuilt the Hebrew Bible records no more major prophets. Ezra, the Jewish leader who oversaw the rebuilding of the temple was most likely the same person who edited and redacted the Hebrew Bible into the basic form that we know today. He wove together the various writings – the historical material, and the writings of the prophets into a single work which codified Jewish monotheism. A large part of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, is devoted to the writings of the prophets, and for a very good reason. For without these prophets the Jewish religion would not have survived.

A common misperception of a prophet is of someone who predicts the future. This is not what the Hebrew prophets were doing, and if it was they would not have been able to save the Jewish religion from extinction. I think Buber has the best description of what prophecy is about: “ A true prophet does not announce an immutable decree. He speaks to the power of decision lying in the moment and in such a way that his message just touches this power.”

The future is uncertain. What decisions we make now will effect our future. The role of the prophet is to point out the consequences of our present actions and the possibilities of renewal if we change our behaviour.Today, three thousand years later, our global civilization is under threat of extinction from the very different threats of global warming and eco-catastrophes. And religion does not play the same role that it did in ancient times.

 Because our civilization is global, and there are many world religions no single religion has the capability to unify and preserve our cultures. Our civilization probably doesn't have one hundred years left, let alone four hundred years. The world religions are slowly responding to the new ecological threats, but the role of the prophet is now paramount and the new prophets are not necessarily religious prophets. While religion has a definite role to play in all of this it is largely scientific knowledge that feeds modern prophecy, if we keep true to Buber's definition of what prophecy is.

In the Greek language there are two concepts of time: “chronos” which refers to sequential time, and “kairos” (pronounced keros) which refers to the right time or opportune moment. According to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich kairos refers to a crisis in history which demands a life-changing decision on the part of each person. According to Tillich, the coming of Christ is the prime Christian example.

Today global warming is our kairos. This is what Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew has said, and he elaborates in his essay: “The Orthodox Church and the Environmental Crisis”

"Our way of life is humanly and environmentally suicidal....yet the crisis is not first of all ecological. It is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world......At a time when we have polluted the air we breathe and the water we drink, we are called to restore within ourselves the sense of awe and delight, to respond to matter as a mystery of ever increasing connection."


I can't help seeing an analogy between Patriarch Bartholomew's saying that this is a crisis in the way we perceive reality and relate to our world and the Hebrew prophets' relentless emphasis on monotheism during their prolonged crisis. The ancient Hebrew prophets saw monotheism as the key to Jewish survival. The importance of monotheism to Judaism is that it redefined the relationship between the Jewish people and the divine and it changed the way they perceived the divine. Jesus called the “Shema” from Deuteronomy the great commandment: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your might.” It basically sums up Judaism in one sentence.

I am not advocating monotheism as the answer to the ecological crisis. Judaism was saved from extinction because the Jewish prophets, and especially Jeremiah, worked hard to change the Jewish people's perception of their relationship with the divine. To love God with all your heart is to make God personally meaningful, which means that this relationship can survive regardless of whether or not there is a temple, or official priests, or the proper sacrifices. That's why Judaism could survive and grow stronger after the destruction of the temple and the exile.

 Our civilization will only survive if we wholeheartedly meet the challenge of global warming together as one human race. It is possible, as possible as uniting humanity against an alien foe.  We  caused global warming but we can't go back and undo it. What we can do is to fight it together.

Jeremiah - Prophet of Doom or Prophet of Hope?

Some Fundamentalist preachers call a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or drought, “punishment from God”. They use the fear induced by a disaster to divide people . The impending destruction from global warming is going to be fertile ground for religious innovators. During a prolonged crisis people tend to get religion. Just look at Iraq, which used to be a secular country, but is now threatened with civil wars based on the religious divide between Sunni and Shia Moslems. Instead of spreading apocalyptic doom, we could profit by seeing global warming as a challenge for each and every one of us to behave responsibly, in order to increase our ability to survive.

The ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah is a prime example of someone who profited, in the right sense from a disaster, because by his writings he managed to reinforce the survival of the Jewish people at a time when they were threatened with extinction.

Jeremiah prophecized the destruction of Jerusalem, the capital of Judea 2600 years ago. At the time, the Jewish kingdom of Judea was threatened by the Babylonian Empire, centered in what today is called Iraq. A century earlier the Assyrian Empire had crushed the adjoining Jewish kingdom, Israel, and scattered its inhabitants to the winds. That was a wake up call for the Judeans.

Josiah, the new king of Judea, got religion. He instituted religious reforms and executed all the foreign priests in Judea and Israel. He had apparently discovered a “forgotten” scroll while renovating the Jewish temple. Jeremiah was a contemporary of Josiah's and probably was an advisor to the king. There's a credible theory that Jeremiah is actually the author of this scroll. Most Biblical scholars think that the scroll was what we now call the book of Deuteronomy, or “second law”. It was called that in a later Greek translation, because it referred to Moses' second telling of the Ten Commandments.

Why does the Bible have Moses recite the Ten Commandments twice, each time in a separate book of the Old Testament? The book of Exodus tells the dramatic story of  how the Hebrew people were freed from slavery, given new laws and a new land, all through God's intervention. But, doesn't pronouncing the laws a second time take away from that dramatic story line?

Back in Judea,  the young king Josiah dies in battle, and so do his religious reforms. Jeremiah ends up in a dungeon for warning everybody that Jerusalem is about to be destroyed. Unfortunately, he's proven right after the Babylonians lay seige to Jerusalem, take it and the Jewish temple, and break it up into rubble. Then for the coup-de -grace, they round up all the upper and middle class and march them into slavery to Babylon. You may have heard the song: “From the Rivers of Babylon”, which refers to this event.

Jeremiah was spared exile, because he advised the people of Jerusalem to surrender before the seige. Half of his people, the people of Israel, were lost to history after they were conquered by the Assyrians. What could he do to save the other half when they've just been enslaved and exiled to Babylon? It didn't look good. But Jeremiah, who predicted this would happen, has been thinking about this eventuality for a long time. He learned from the example of king Josiah, that instituting religious reforms from the top down lasted only as long as the king lasted. If Judaism is to survive in exile, than it must come from the heart. And it must reflect a people's humble origins, not the rich and the powerful.

The “Shema” is by far, the most important Jewish prayer. It is singled out by Jesus as the “Great Commandment”, the one that sums up all the rest of them. The name “Shema” comes from the first two words of the prayer: “Hear oh Israel”. The words of the Shema, especially the words: “...you shall love your Lord God with all your heart...” are not in the book of Exodus when Moses first recites the commandments. But they are there when Moses recites the commandments the second time, in the book of Deuteronomy. Could Jeremiah have inserted the Shema into Deuteronomy? He may not have created it, but it's a prayer that sums up his life's work.

Deuteronomy is a more subdued book than Exodus. Moses is preparing the Hebrews for their life in the promised land but he doesn't get to go there himself. He keeps telling them “Remember you were slaves in the land of Egypt.” Kind of a strange way to prepare people to move to a promised land, don't you think? But not if the people that you are addressing are slaves in exile, as was the situation when Jeremiah addressed the Judeans. "Remember your humble origins, and keep religion in your hearts." This is the message of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy.

Jeremiah's “rediscovered” scroll that fizzled when king Josiah's rein ended, got a second lease on life with the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah had  learned to use the story of Moses to inspire the exiles from their hearts. He had discovered a way to keep Judaism alive in a new age, where the Jews were going to be under the thumb of empires for a long time.

To this day, in Jewish homes everywhere, the Shema is recited at sunup and sundown,  and at other significant times as well. That's the mark of a great prophet. Someone who can turn a catastrophe into an opportunity for people to keep the world alive.

Jeremiah and Resilience

Resilience is the ability of communities, cultures, and social systems to survive major shocks. When we look around us, what social institution stands out as being resilient over a major span of time?

What stands out for me is the history of Judaism. What other religion, language, or people has survived in the face of repeated foreign conquests, forced exiles, and enslavement for 3000 years and counting? I would call the continued survival and prospering of Judaism the prime historical example of human resilience.

What is it then that made Judaism resilient? Strange as it seems, I believe that part of the answer to this question lies in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.

The lifetime of Jeremiah ( 655 -586 BCE) was a profoundly crucial time in Jewish history. Jeremiah had predicted that Jerusalem, the Jewish capital, home to Solomon’s great Temple, was about to be conquered by the Babylonians, a prediction which was not implausible given that at the time the Babylonian army was laying waste to most of the rest of the Middle East.

But the people of Jerusalem were in denial. Jeremiah was characteristically unrelenting, he unnerved them, as he would us today. They did not want to hear Jeremiah’s message and they rejected him and brutalized him, treating him as a pariah.

Unfortunately for the people of Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s prophecy came true. After a prolonged siege, which caused terrible suffering, the Babylonian army took Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish temple, put to death much of the Jewish leadership, and enslaved the rest of the Jews and marched them off to Babylon. Jeremiah they spared, and he was left to live where he chose.

At this point the Jews as an identifiable people should have disappeared from history. But, in fact, just the opposite occurred. During the next sixty years of slavery, the exiled Jewish community thrived and developed a resilience that is maintained to this day.

Within a hundred years of the exile the Hebrew Bible had been compiled and gathered together, largely in the form we see it today, with Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Lamentations, Psalms, the Prophets, and the wisdom literature.

What role did Jeremiah, who was left behind in the ruins of Jerusalem, have in all of this? Because the Jews were in exile, and the Jerusalem temple was no more, the strategy, championed previously by Jeremiah himself, of basing Judaism on a centralized temple with its hierarchy of temple priests became unworkable.

But this went against the whole tenor of ancient Middle-Eastern religions, which was that any particular religion was based on location.

Jeremiah, at some point, realized that basing a religion on sacrificing at a temple created a fatal vulnerability. His innovation was to promote the idea of an “inner covenant” - an inner relationship between individual Jews and God best exemplified by the daily Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy called the “Shema”.

By reciting this prayer everyday any Jew could keep covenant without the need to make sacrifices in the holy temple; thus permitting Judaism to thrive in exile, or in any place where there were a gathering of Jews, even where a Jew existed outside of any Jewish community.

The Shema is still recited twice daily by observant Jews. At the very beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It goes:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart... 
The book of Deuteronomy, which contains the Shema, as well as a second retelling of the Ten Commandments, hence the name “Deuteronomy”, appears to have been “rediscovered” during King Josiah’s rein. Jeremiah was closely associated with King Josiah and there is good reason to believe that Jeremiah probably had a hand in writing Deuteronomy and in its “rediscovery”.

The centralization of Judaism in the sacrificial temple in Jerusalem had given the Hebrews the illusion of enduring power. But successive conquests by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans proved the folly  of this idea.

When things fall apart, people often have difficulty facing and accepting the changes that are required to survive.The choices seem to be either to embrace expediency and abandon tradition altogether, or rigidly adhere to tradition and deny that anything has really changed.

But the first choice of abandoning tradition leads to dissolution and the eventual loss of identity. The second choice, of rigid adherence and denial leads to escape from reality and self-destruction as the familiar world falls apart around one’s ears.

This situation is a lot like the worsening ecological and economic crisis that confront us today. In the face of these crisis many people may recognize that there is a problem, but they will deny that we need to make any major changes to our comfortable way of life.

Like Jeremiah, modern environmentalists predict disaster but things still don’t seem that bad, so they are mocked and ignored as scolds and annoyances.

But, eventually this commonplace view will prove untenable, as the global economic and political crisis deepens. We may well have to adapt to severe economic shocks and the breakdown of social structures in the wake of these shocks. Our entire global civilization may be at risk of collapse.

In today’s world, political leaders have relied on the continuing prospect of economic growth to solve our most pressing problems - best exemplified by the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the expanding global economy is rapidly drawing down our reserves of fossil fuels, while the global exponential increase in energy use is leading to the spectre of uncontrollable global warming.

The idea that we can continue growing our national and global economies in the face of finite resources and finite reserves of fossil fuels is a similar kind of illusion to the one in Jeremiah’s day that a religion could remain powerful only if it continued to be identified with a certain location.

. Our Industrial way of life, that is predicated on the massive utilization of cheap fossil fuels, appears to us as powerful and impregnable. But it is incredibly vulnerable to disruption once  the effects of climate change begin to overwhelm us.

The signs of these coming catastrophes are all around us, but, as in Jeremiah’s time, most people choose to ignore them or discount their relevance. The lesson of Jeremiah is that resilience - the ability to survive shocks and insults - comes not from economic or political power or advanced technology. Resilience comes from inside, from our hearts, as we work together to surmount all obstacles.

Jeremiah And Global Warming

According to Martin Buber, A true prophet does not announce an immutable decree. He speaks into the power of decision lying in the moment and in such a way that his message of disaster just touches this power.

Martin Buber was born in Austria in the late nineteenth century. His most famous book is I and Thou. In that book Buber argues that human existence can be divided into two ways of relating. One is towards an object that is separate in itself, which he calls “I-it”. That is the way we think about things and use things. The other kind of relation is called “I – Thou”. which occurs in love and friendship. The “I – Thou” relation, is not a relation of subject to object, but rather a relation in which both members in a relationship share the unity of being. The ultimate Thou is God.

Martin Buber died in 1965. Here is a quote from his book The Prophetic Faith:

From the moment when a (large scale) disaster appears inevitable and especially after it becomes a reality, it can, like every great torment, become a productive force for the religious point of view. It begins to suggest new questions and to stress old ones.

Dogmatized conceptions are pondered afresh in the light of events, and the faith relationship that has to stand the test of an utterly changed situation is renewed in modified form.

But the new acting force is nothing less than the force of extreme despair, a despair so elemental that it can have but one of two results: the sapping of the last will of life, or the renewal of the soul.

What's interesting about that quote is how relevant it is as a description of the response of religion to global warming. Of all the Biblical prophets, Jeremiah is the most relevant to our modern problem of global warming because it was Jeremiah who after his prophecy of destruction was fulfilled, realized he had been in error, and reversed his prophetic mission.

There are two kinds of prophets in the Bible. The early prophets were diviners who foretold the future and transmitted the divine will for special occasions or for important persons. Descriptions of these prophets is sketchy and not much of what they had to say has been written down. In contrast, the Writing prophets which includes the twelve so-called Minor Prophets and the three Major Prophets: Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, addressed themselves to the Hebrew nation as a whole and challenged the popular values and moral practices of the people and their rulers. The Hebrew word for prophet is “nabi” which means “one who is called”. They are called to speak the word of God even if it is opposed to what the rulers and their subjects want to hear.

The role of the prophets was critical during the four hundred or so years after the reign of Solomon because The Hebrews were twice threatened with extinction, and it is the prophets during these times that speak most relevantly to the dangers of extinction, and to the choices that people must make in order to ensure survival.

The Prophets and the Hebrew kings together form about a third of the Hebrew Bible. The ancient Hebrew prophets were a variety of people: A son of working people like Micah. an aristocrat like first Isaiah, or a son of a priest, like Jeremiah. The prophets were said to speak God's word directly without intermediaries.

Three thousand years ago the kingdom of the Hebrew speaking peoples reached it's height with the two successive kings, David and Solomon. But things drifted downhill from there. Solomon's kingdom split into two after he died – A northern kingdom called Israel and a southern kingdom called Judah.

This is a period when the Hebrew kingdoms were declining and assailed on all sides by the greater powers – Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. Sometimes the little kingdoms kept from being swallowed up by making alliances with one or the other big power but it didn't always work in their favour.

Take the fate of the northern kingdom - Israel - in 722 BCE, Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and permanently exiled the majority of its inhabitants. They were dispersed to other nations that Assyria had conquered and were assimilated and their descendants eventually lost awareness of their original identity. These are the ten lost tribes – so important to the Mormons but forgotten by everyone else.

All that was left was the tiny kingdom of Judah and the Assyrians came very close to conquering it. But they retreated before they could capture the Judean capital of Jerusalem. After that the Assyrian empire weakened, and over a century the Babylonians become the dominant power.

In 621 BCE a “forgotten” scroll was discovered in Solomon's Temple by the high Priest Hilkiah during extensive renovations. When the young king of Judah, Josiah heard the scroll read to him he was said to have tore his clothes and repented of his grandfather Manasseh's syncretistic policies, setting out on a violent and dramatic religious reform. What was this scroll? Most Biblical scholars believe that it was probably a version of the book called Deuteronomy.

Some Scholars believe that Deuteronomy was composed in the 8th Century BCE to address the threats to Israel's political and religious survival. It was brought from the northern kingdom to the southern kingdom where it was then hidden from King Manasseh until the more sympathetic grandson, Josiah, came to the throne.

Deuteronomy means “second law” in Greek, because the Ten Commandments occur for the second time in the Bible in this book. The real influence of this book is its overriding message about choices that the  “ Chosen People”can make. It goes like this: If they have a strictly monogamous relation with the Hebrew god Yahweh, then he will bestow his great blessings. But if they go "whoring" after other Gods, then they will be cursed by terrible suffering and destruction.

The book is a series of speeches that Moses gives to the Hebrew tribes just before he dies. It is only after this that the Israelites cross the Jordan, and reach the “Promised Land”
We called on Yahweh, the God of our fathers. Yahweh heard our voice, and saw our misery, our toil, and our oppression, and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. (Deut 26: 5 – 10)

For this law (Torah) I enjoin on you today is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach.... I call on heaven and earth to witness against you today: I set before you life and death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live. (Deut 30:11 – 14, 19)

The Deuteronomic formula, that good times follow the people's faithfulness to Yahweh and bad times follow when they worship in the temples of other gods, quickly became a powerful influence on prophets and scribes. Scholars call the two historical books of “Kings” in the Old Testament “The Deuteronomic history”. It's the history of Hebrew kings scrupulously edited to fit the Deuteronomic formula. The people are always rewarded with good times when the king prohibits the worship of foreign gods, or punished when the king permits syncretistic worship.

Deuteronomy was so influential and still is, because it gives an overarching meaning to history. It helped the Jews feel that Yahweh was a just God even when they were suffering. But its essentially a formula. No matter what bad things happen it can always be explained as caused by the people's infidelity. It cannot be refuted. It's patently false, but that didn't prevent it from being very successful. Proof of that is the fact that Judaism is more than three thousand years old and still going strong.

In contrast the scientific evidence of climate change and prediction of global warming can be refuted if the refuting evidence is strong enough. Science can always be improved and updated.

Modern day fundamentalists try to deny the reality of global warming. They see global warming as a rival to their Deuteronomic explanation of why bad things are happening. Preaching about Hurricane Katrina punishing the New Orleans sinners is vintage Deuteronomy. But contrary to the Deuteronomic theory which divides the”Chosen People” against everyone else, Science has the potential to unite people from all cultures because it does not demand absolute faithfulness to one particular religion.

The Deuteronomic formula does not speak to our times any more. Are the people who lost their Southern California homes being punished for angering God? Were the poor in New Orleans sent Hurricane Katrina as punishment for their licentiousness? Was the Nazi Holocaust God's punishment for Jewish sins? The very idea would make God a worse tyrant than Hitler.

The other major innovation of Deuteronomy is that it insists on one central place for worship. That's why a big part of Josiah's reforms was to destroy rival shrines and execute foreign priests in the countryside of Judah and in Samaria, the former site of Israel. These reforms meant that Jerusalam was favoured above all else. As a result, places with important biblical connections, like Shiloh and Bethel were downgraded and sacrifices to Yahweh were only permitted in Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.

Before the Assyrians, the Hebrew tribes were more equal rivals with the other tribal groups - the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Philistines, etc. But when people make peace with their neighbours it becomes almost inevitable that syncretistic worship will develop. Syncretism, is that very pagan, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and yes, Unitarian approach of mixing and matching different religious elements together.  But when the great powers of Assyria and Babylonia come to the fore, the practice of syncretism was not so benign, for these huge empires and their triumphant gods threatened to swallow Judaism without a trace. That's why the prophets worked so hard to steer the people away from syncretism.

After twenty years of his reign, Josiah was killed by the Egyptians in the battle of Megiddo. His death necessitated some reworking of the Deuteronomic theme. Josiah had kept faithful to Yahweh,  so why did Josiah die young and most of his reforms die with him? Only one of his reforms successfully remained after he died, and that was the centralization of worship and sacrifice in Solomon's Temple.

There are some scholars that think that the prophet Jeremiah had a hand in writing and rewriting Deuteronomy. There are similarities in style and focus between the writings of Jeremiah, and the content of Deuteronomy. The book of Kings ends abruptly with Josiah's death, and whoever wrote the Deuteronomic History had put a lot of hope in the promise of Josiah's reign. They must have been sorely disappointed by Josiah's untimely death.

In light of this, it seems not a coincidence that three months after Josiah died Jeremiah prophesied that Jerusalem would be destroyed. Jeremiah, holding true to the Deuteronomic formula, believed that the Babylonian Empire was doing the will of Yahweh and punishing the Judeans for their sins of syncretism.

Jeremiah was an unhappy and a very unpopular man. He first resisted his calling. ...He refused again and again to pass sentence in Yaweh's name upon his beloved people, but the word remained in his heart like a burning fire,shut up in his bones and he was weary of the vain effort to contain it.(Buber, Ibid.) People called him a traitor. Perhaps he saw the inevitability of the Babylonian juggernaut, perhaps he felt obliged to castigate the people of Judah for neglecting the poor and allowing syncretism. But his claim that the Babylonians are Yahweh's retribution against the Judeans was rejected by most Judeans.

There was a popular sense amongst the Judean royalty after Josiah's death that they could evade Babylonian captivity by allying themselves with the Egyptians. But after the Assyrians and Egypt were defeated by the Babylonians at the battle of Carchemish, Egypt ceased to be a big player.

By adopting the Deuteronomic centralization of Worship the Judeans put all their eggs into one basket, increasing the vulnerability of their religion. Many Judeans had faith that the temple in Jerusalem would not be destroyed because it was so holy. But Jeremiah saw that this idea was threatening the survival of Judaism. If the temple was the only place to go to worship Yahweh then what if the Judeans were exiled?

Jeremiah is commanded by God to go to the Temple gate, and there proclaim:

Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, who enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”

For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another... I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors for ever and ever. (NRSV Jeremiah 7)

Jeremiah hears God's voice telling him to do unusual things that we might now call street theatre, as many of the other prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel did. He walks around Jerusalem with a wooden yoke around his neck to symbolize the yoke of Babylon that he claims everyone must take on for their sins. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem they spared Jeremiah.

Five hundred years later, as recounted in the New Testament, Jesus is forced by the Roman Centurions to carry a huge wooden cross through the streets of Jerusalem to the place of his crucifixion. The cross is both symbol and reality of Rome's brutal repression of dissent. Ironically it becomes the symbol of triumph in Christianity.

Jeremiah is commanded by God to go down to the potters house and watch the potter work his wheel:

The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me. Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?....At one moment I may declare concerning a nation that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it. But if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on. NRSV: Jeremiah: 18)

According to Martin Buber, the future is not something already found in the present hour, it is dependent on the real decision that is to say, the decision in which man takes part in this hour. ... To be a prophet means to set the audience, ...before the choice and decision, directly or indirectly.

Jeremiah's pleading and castigating didn't seem to work very well for him. He was thrown in jail. Then into a dungeon. The prophets who had the ear of Josiah's weak successors, predicted that the temple would survive the Babylonians, but it happened instead, as Jeremiah foretold. In 586 BCE Jerusalem was levelled after a terrible siege and Solomon's magnificent temple was reduced to rubble.

The Babylonians exiled ten thousand of the higher status Judeans and sent them into slavery in Babylon. After the exile and the destruction of the temple, Jeremiah realized that the covenant between the Israelites and Yahweh was not made from temple worship or following the written Torah, but from the living relationship between the chosen people and Yahweh. He then proclaimed his other famous prophecy, a prophecy of salvation for that time of deep suffering. In it, Jeremiah foresees the day when Yahweh will form a new covenant with his people one that's written in their hearts without tablets or intermediaries.

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God , and they shall be my people.....for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest.

According to the Deuteronomic formula, when Jeremiah was not successful in getting his people to change their ways, his prophecy of destruction was fulfilled. But that didn't mean he wasn't ultimately effective. I think Jeremiah realized that instituting religious reforms from the top down wasn't going to work, because those reforms would just disappear when the reforming king passed on. But if the moral sense of Judaism was taken to heart, then it would make for a more lasting covenant. After the exile the Jewish religion survived both in Jerusalem and in the Diaspora. And I believe it has a lot to do with the Jewish people taking up Jeremiah's call for a new covenant. As also it becomes the inspiration for the Christian Bible, the “New Testament” which means in Latin - “New Covenant”.

Jesus was greatly influenced by Jeremiah and by the book of Deuteronomy. The Shema, the Deuteronomic prayer that starts out:

Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is our God, the Lord alone.You shall love Yahweh with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might.

Deuteronomy 6: 4-6 is called the great Commandment by Jesus. It is the one he says that sums up all the other commandments. The Shema is considered the main statement of faith by all Jews. It is recited at sunrise and sundown and at special occasions, in practicing Jewish households to this day.

Deuteronomy had it's day. The Deuteronomic formula gave Jewish history meaning and an enduring sense of purpose. But the Deuteronomic theory - that the fate of the chosen people is dependent on their faithfulness to one God is too exclusive. We are all in this together. We need to think about all humans, not just one group. It shouldn't be a Darwinian race to the bottom to see who survives. And we need to understand the consequences of how we live and how it affects others and the very ecosystems that we depend on.

The false prophets tell us that we don't have to change, that we can avoid hard decisions indefinitely. Can we really trust their soothing words?