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?

Building The New Commons: A Manifesto

  Humanity’s strength is in  groups.  In fact, It is our way of cooperating and communicating together in small and large groups that has allowed us to become a dominant form of life on Earth.   

On the other hand the most important thing that we share with all other living things is  our need for energy.   

In fact, human evolution is intimately linked to the need for  energy.  The development of walking millions of years ago made it easier for proto-humans to go out on the savannah and get food;  The invention of stone tools for hunting and dressing meat gave access to a vital source of energy needed to support the growth and development of the larger brain size of modern human beings;  The mastering of fire; and then, hundreds of thousands of years later,  the domestication of plants and animals, and  the development of warfare and slavery -  all these major changes and innovations can be seen as ways of  capturing greater and greater amounts of energy.

As the form of energy that humans have been able to access has become more and more concentrated, our  power to extract from and to transform the earth has expanded exponentially.

 Our present industrial civilization has grown and prospered for the last two hundred and fifty years in lock-step with our growing use of  fossil fuels.  The expansion of human population, industrial infrastructure, our transportation and communication and international trade systems are all  dependent on the highly concentrated form of energy that comes from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Imagine our modern  world without cars, trucks, buses, freight trains, heavy equipment, motorboats, ocean-going tankers, chain saws and anything else that runs on fossil fuels.  It would be a very different world.   We would not be able to live in the same houses,  eat  the same foods, travel to the same destinations, or enjoy the same entertainment without fossil fuels.

With a global economy, for the first time in history billions of people are poised to achieve the same fossil fuel hungry life-styles that we have in North America.  But  will that actually happen?  

As the easy-to-get oil has mostly gone we are rapidly reaching diminishing returns, as we turn to the extraction of tar sands oil and tight oil and gas from fracking.  These unconventional forms of fossil fuels are a lot harder to get out of the ground than conventional oil and gas.  They require vastly greater expenditures for infrastructure as well as bigger flows of resources like water, natural gas and condensate.  And they  leave a much larger ecological  footprint and far greater output of greenhouse gases.

But the real reason that unconventionals are a dead end is that with each passing decade, the  amount of net energy gained from these extraction techniques becomes smaller and smaller.  In economics, this is called “diminishing returns” and it implies that as we throw more time and money at getting the oil out of the ground and refining it, we will be getting less economic product for our troubles.  Because almost every contemporary economic activity is dependent on fossil fuels it is inevitable  that our economies will slow down and start to contract, as a result.

 We are trending towards more and more resources and effort going into extracting fossil fuels and less of these resources available for human health and welfare.  As a result, we can expect to see future declines in life-expectancy and increases in chronic respiratory disease.

For two hundred and fifty years cheap  fossil fuels have  fueled the growth of the economy. This growth has had dangerous hidden costs.  Costs that, over time, have deeply undermined our ability to survive and sustain our civilization.  

 Economies grow by appropriating the natural  commons. Size matters - eventually the sheer amount of extracting, manufacturing, consuming, and wasting begins to overwhelm ecosystems.  The probability of ecosystem collapse then raises the possibility of human extinction.  This is a risk we don’t want to take.

The two most important ways to stop ecosystem collapse: stopping fossil fuel use and stopping economic growth - will happen together inevitably,  because of diminishing returns.

For most people abandoning fossil fuels makes little sense.  Cars and electricity are very useful.  But the global economic system is locked in a spiral of self-destruction caused by economic growth itself.  As economies grow, they suck up more and more fossil fuels.   Over time the amount in the ground gets depleted and what is left has more impurities and is more inaccessible.  We are looking at the bottom-half of the barrel.

I’m convinced that decreasing my use of fossil fuels is better for my health.  Walking and cycling are fun, safe, and they help lower  stress. It would obviously be healthier for everyone to use cars less often, but most of the incentives are towards using them more.  After all, buying more cars and using them more often have multiplier effects on economic growth.

 On the other hand I believe that the global effects of fossil fuel use make a far more persuasive and  powerful argument. An ever tightening series of booms and busts based on oil prices, increasing job losses, stagnant or decreasing wages, accelerated inequality, massive default on debt - that is what we are looking at when we look at the bottom of the barrel.  

For the global economy there is nowhere else to go.  Economic growth inevitably increases the demand for fossil fuels and causes more consumption and waste.  Global economic growth is already accelerating the depletion of resources and  diminishing returns from the energy sector.

What’s the answer?  Is it to find another planet to exploit?  Imagine the preposterous amounts of energy and materials from our own planet we would be wasting on that endeavor. But, if the economy stops growing how do we manage to survive?  The answer is to stop and reverse the growth of the market and to rebuild and to reclaim the commons.

 

Human evolution  is also linked to the development of complex forms of cooperation linked to our development and  use of  the commons. It isn’t our use of fossil fuels that first  differentiated us from the rest of nature,  it was our creation and development of rules, roles, and dispute mechanisms.

  As humans we collectively create and maintain organizations that further the common good.  Our way of living together, sharing, cooperating, and helping each other in families and communities is what separates us from the apes and all the rest of creation.

Marriage, extended families, clubs and associations,  schools, hospitals, public councils and governments, religions and the scientific process are all created and maintained through the active participation of countless groups of people. This occurs  in  a social sphere of influence that can be described as a common space that humans alone inhabit.

  The commons are the things that we have in common, that no one is excluded from.  These are natural things like air, water, ecosystem services, climate, the ocean, etc.,  which we also share with all other living beings.  

There are also  very significant types of commons that are created from the human imagination: language, music, legal systems, and science are all systems that benefit everyone and are available or should  be available to everyone.

One of the best examples of a human built commons is language.  A language is a commons, because everyone in a certain locality can speak it, everyone uses it everyday, and the evolution of the language, it’s words, pronunciation,  grammatical rules, etc., are all collectively determined.  

Why did humans develop language?  The obvious answer, that we are more intelligent than other animals, begs the question of how we got that way.  Did we create speech because we are intelligent, or did we become intelligent because we created  speech?

According to Christian theology, humans are different because God created us in God’s image. That’s a great metaphor,kind of flattering, although also pointing to our flaws as our own  fault, but it’s misleading as an explanation.

I think it is important to understand what the difference  between humans and our primate relatives is and how it came about.  A tall order, I know, but  the more we know  the real reason for the difference,  the more consciously we can use this knowledge to adapt to the new challenges that now face us.    

Why did humans come to dominate the world?  Like all other animals we have to breathe, drink water, and eat.  How are we different?

By agreeing to live by rules  we  crossed an invisible line where we  created a common space in which everyone could participate and everyone could benefit. By doing so, we left behind the Darwinian world of dominance hierarchies.  

Not completely behind, mind you because dominance relationships are our default mode.  It takes constant and continual vigilance to maintain a commons, otherwise dominant individuals take advantage and take over.  That’s what rules are for, but they must be enforced.

All other primate species are organized according to dominance hierarchies.  The biggest strongest male gets the pick of the females and the choicest food.

In contrast, human nature is about the constant   tension between  hierarchies and egalitarianism.  We have individuals who are leaders and who dominate others, but we also have rules and institutions like marriage, that help groups of people to live together peacefully.

When proto-humans developed stone tools two million years ago they also developed the means to decisively overcome dominance hierarchies.  A man with  a stone blade can easily kill a physically stronger man.  According to the Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, evidence from various contemporary nomadic hunter-gatherers suggests that for most of human history, previous to the neolithic, we lived in small egalitarian  bands where dominance hierarchies were actively suppressed by various means of social control.

It was by creating and maintaining small egalitarian societies that humans made the first rule-governed commons possible. This, more than any other factor, is the basis for human exceptionalism.    

We are not descended from chimpanzees,  but we share an ancestor from millions of years ago, so chimps are human’s   closest relatives.

 A group of humans  that is rule-governed is many times more effective than a group of chimpanzees in spite of the fact that chimpanzees are physically stronger.

A dominance hierarchy, the natural state of chimpanzee life is a lot like a corrupt political system.  The dominant male has control over resources and the life for the subordinates is stunted and unpleasant.   In a corrupt system, goods and services may trickle down to the rank and file, but the majority of benefits go to a small elite.  

In a human commons like language, the system is self-organized to benefit everyone.  Everyone participates and everyone benefits from sharing information.

In contrast, in dominance hierarchies information is sequestered to serve or to avoid serving the interests of the dominant male.  This results in a lot of wasted resources that are  used solely to keep the majority impoverished while the dominant and his confederates get the lion’s share.

Language is representational. It can reveal  what is not visible or present to others and thus it benefits the group more than it benefits any particular individual. That is why it is   much more likely that it developed once humans created egalitarian societies.  

Before the crucial development of human egalitarianism sharing information was not as desired a  trait.  For the dominant, language would have made it harder to keep what he had  to himself. And it would have been the same for the subordinate.  For the subordinate to share information would  have meant giving up more of what she had appropriated to the dominant.

Language, organization, education, planning, and rule-making: these are all human abilities that have enabled us to  create thriving cultures and civilizations.  It is significant, that all of these activities are things that people do together that do not require fossil fuels.

Even though our present civilization depends on fossil fuels the human race has survived most of it’s existence without them and will do so again.  Adopting renewable forms of energy will be important, but because their net energy production is much lower than conventional fossil fuels, they are unlikely to power a modern economy, let alone economic growth.  Also, aspects of their production may be equally dependent on fossil fuels. Thus, there may be no choice but for society and the economy to run on less power.

The problem is in our reaction to the economic damage that this will cause.  Declining pay cheques and increasing costs will fuel mass discontent and anger.  Because of the amount of money riding on these issues, people will likely be misinformed by corporate and government propaganda. There is a real danger that people will be manipulated by blind prejudice and hatred to turn to authoritarian and fascist regimes.

All the more reason that we need to start now to increase the growth in the Commons.  The more Commons we build together, the more we participate in building community.  The more we participate in building community the more we are immunizing ourselves from political forms of tyranny. Participating in governing the Commons will help to inoculate ourselves  from apathy and  raise the level of knowledge and the quality of discourse.  

   In order to survive for more than the next fifty years we must  leave fossil fuels in the ground.  But if we were to abandon fossil fuels too quickly we would risk economic, political, and social collapse. We must gradually abandon fossil fuels and build up new commons in their place.  This will help us maintain better health and welfare over future generations at the same time replacing the bipolar world of economic booms and busts with a system that serves everyone equitably.

Avoiding the Fossil Fuel Sinkhole

 With cheap and easy access to the fantastically concentrated forms of energy known as fossil fuels we have super-charged our economies, growing exponentially for the last two hundred years.  Fossil fuels have made possible global and national transportation,  national and international electrical grids,   industrial home heating, industrial mining, industrial agriculture, and the global mass production of goods and capital.  

There is a problem with this scenario however. If global demand for fossil fuels increases exponentially, which is implied in the idea of continuous economic growth,  and  supply increases arithmetically, as is implied by the finite amount left, energy will start to cost society more and more.  

As more of society’s resources are devoted to extracting, refining, and distributing fossil fuels there will be much less resources left over for everything else.   Vital functions, such as health care, education,  and clean air and water, will be neglected as resources, infrastructure, manpower, and energy are  all sucked into the sinkhole of fracking and tar sands expansion.

At the same time degraded output in the form of particulates, greenhouse gases, polycyclic hydrocarbons, and other biotoxins are exponentially increasing in the atmosphere, and some toxins are becoming biologically concentrated in top predators and humans.

In order to extract ever more distant and degraded sources of fossil fuels, massive capital spending must ensue, capital spending that could have gone  into developing an infrastructure for the production and distribution of renewable energy.

Once spent on pipelines and bigger tar pits extraction facilities,  refineries and distribution networks, and in cleaning up and compensating for the pollution that is generated from all these sectors of the fossil fuel industry, there will be little left for development of renewables.  Time and resources will have been wasted on the dead end of fossil fuels, and the possibility of surviving on less energy-wasting and cleaner renewable sources will be denied to future generations.

      As I write these words Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister has set into motion a shrinking of science from the public sphere in Canada.  Environmental Science, Sociology, Biology, and Climate Science  are all being targeted  for major pruning in favour of the needs and wishes of the Fossil Fuel Companies.

 It is puzzling that at this time we would require less scientific knowledge about keeping air and water  clean, conserving the soil, tapping  renewable energy, and keeping biodiversity at healthy levels.  It is this body of knowledge which will be  the basis for our continued survival.  

There is a fork in the road ahead.  One road leads to extinction and the other road leads to our survival.  As a society we have to make this choice.  We can choose business as usual - a momentary abundance of power, dominance and Inequality that amounts to a toxic dead-end,  or we can choose a life that ensures the continued existence of humanity for the foreseeable future.    While we still have the chance, let’s choose life.