Dear God,

“My outlook is not purely American and I feel sometimes disturbed by the lack of balance in the powerful civilization of this country. It is technologically very strong, spiritually superficial and weak. There is much good in the people, who are very simple and kind, but there is much potential evil in the irresponsibility of the society that leaves all to the interplay of human appetites, assuming that everything will adjust itself automatically for the good of all. This unfortunately is fatal and may lead to the explosion that will destroy half the world, of which there is serious danger.” (51-52)

First, I want to say, briefly, that I came to an answer for the question I posed yesterday about who we might follow. My answer is the mystics — those who’ve devoted their lives to the quest for love and truth. This embraces those from every great religion, including, of course, Vodun, as well as those who’ve embraced one form of humanism or post-humanism — I’m thinking of those like Nietzsche and Foucault, Sartre and Fanon, et cetera. It is wisdom that we humans seek. But more important than wisdom, or even the love of it, is love. So, I choose to follow those drunk with love — from Mahatma Gandhi to Simone Weil, from Thomas Merton to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of course, we must listen and learn from science too, but this cannot be our sole guide, since it alone so easy devolves into a pragmatic positivism that only leaves us in the nihilistic position we find ourselves in now, following the dictates of technocrats telling lies that austerity for the poor is necessitated by market forces, while they drink Dom Pérignon at their UN galas. Enough. I didn’t want to speak of politics today.

The quote from Merton above is apocalyptic. Of course, in the Judeo-Christian tradition apocalyptic literature functioned as a critique of empire. It was an imaginative space that not only allowed oppressed people to believe in a future justice — often vindictive and bloody — but opened up a zone for resistance to empire.

While Darwin removed the need for any teleological tug on evolution, it was the Manhattan Project that removed any need for you when it came to the end of the world. Thanks to human ingenuity and science we discovered the possibility of a human driven apocalypse. Now, though it’s still very much a possibility, we don’t fret much over nuclear annihilation. Instead, since we lack the political will and power to figure out a way to decouple economic growth from carbon consumption, and since we can’t question the necessity of globalized capital, which requires at least a 3% annual global growth rate to be sustained, we push head long into the apocalypse of radical environmental transformation. Not the end of the world, but the end of the world that still has the capacity to comfortably sustain 9 billion people if we organized ourselves along sustainable and equitable lines. What interests me in apocalypse is the human capacity to imagine ends and goals. We are teleological creatures, us beings in time. Why do we always imagine the end of the world? Why is this easier to imagine than the end of our current mode of life? I think we need utopian imaginations now more than ever, which is another way of saying we need to imagine the Kingdom of God come to earth. Help us in this endeavor.