Thoreau and Mossad: Two Approaches

The winners write the history books, but the losers prophecy

Yesterday, I had a lot of fun writing my post on The Mind of Christ. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, but it’s a lot closer to the kind of writing I want to do — lyrical rather than logical, built on free association, and somewhat detached from the issues of the day. Let us continue with something like this for an outline:

I. Mossad and the Hezbollah Pagers
II. Thoreau and his Axe
III. Why the Prophets Prophecy
IV. Isaiah, Thoreau, and Jared Kushner

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I. Mossad and the Hezbollah Pagers

Yesterday, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, figured out a way to detonate modified batteries in pagers as small bombs in Southern Lebanon. At least a dozen died, including a young girl, and close to 3,000 people were injured. In my view, it was definitely a war crime. In my view, Mossad is an enemy of the human race. In my view, this is only the beginning of a hundred-year war to decide who will rule the world, and Israel will not back down without being made to back down. We are talking about global sovereignty here, and we’re doing so in post-theological terms, in Schmittian terms now: the sovereign is he who defines the state of exception. Meaning: there will be an international order, but it will not be the Logos, because it will allow at least one exception. That is to say, there will be rules — perhaps even draconian rules — but some person or people will be allowed to flout those rules when it is convenient. And the person or people who determine when those rules can be flouted, and by whom — that person is the actual sovereign, the actual king of the world. Religious doctrines aside.

If you need an example of what “the state of exception” looks like, look no further than the exploding pagers situation: Israel has not formally declared war on Lebanon. Nevertheless, Israel’s intelligence agency was regularly spying on Lebanese-Hezbollah opponents. That’s why they were using pagers. It was an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance. Does Israel have some sort of undeclared right to spy on foreign people in foreign territory? Absolutely not. Has the press looked the other way? Yes. Why? Because: Israel is the sovereign.

When the pagers exploded, the news was quick to report that “Hezbollah fighters were among the victims.” Well, undoubtedly. But this was not a carefully targeted attack. Everyone on planet earth who’s paying attention knows that the story would be written differently if somehow Iranian intelligence had injured 3,000 Israelis by remotely exploding their personal devices. But the stories were written to downplay what happened, even to justify it, because: Israel is the sovereign.

And America can’t do anything about it. Our institutions are infiltrated, controlled, bought. Our oligarchs are colluding with the Israeli government. I’ve written a long post about how I think we’re “re-arriving” at a situation humanity has experienced only once before — global Jewish hegemony. The last time, it took a literal miracle to save us. We’ll see how that turns out this time.

The main point for today is that Mossad does not have the same kind of moral imagination that you do. They will use every imaginable dystopian tool available to them, and for them, there is no question of ethics when it comes to deploying new technologies, using unprecedented forms of attacks or weapons. They are pedal to the metal accelerationist aspiring technocrats. They have every intention of creating a Total Information System and using it to prevent opposition on a global scale. They may or may not oppress their own citizens, but they will certainly police non-citizens around the world if they can. The “pre-crime” dystopia made famous in The Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, was absolutely an inspiration to Mossad. We can sit here and wag our index finger at them all day, and pretend to be their moral superiors. They do not care—as long as you don’t say anything about it publicly.

So that’s one track humanity might go down. That is, to speak totally without regard for morality, the logical conclusion of the arms race that is technology. Whoever controls global media and communications determines the state of exception—i.e., is the sovereign. If you thought that was America, because of Hollywood’s robust production, because of America’s prolific news media, you might want to look into who exactly owns those outlets, and consider what kinds of deeper loyalties they might have.

II. Henry David Thoreau and his Axe

I used to love teaching Thoreau. I would start with having students read Gerald Stern’s poem, Lilies. Thoreau was the first writer I ever loved. Every now and then, I love to look at today’s date, whatever it is, and scroll until I find that same date among Thoreau’s journals, to see what he said about the changes he observed in nature on a given day.

The first “scene” I ever remember loving in Walden was something quiet and simple:

Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.

It’s an unusually physical scene even for Thoreau, who was always careful to anchor his writing in the physical, even when he was leading himself through levels of metaphysical speculation. Everyone has heard the subversive counter-myth about Thoreau, that he lived only a mile from town, that his mother came to visit once a week, and so on. It is true, he lived in his cabin in the woods for only two years; but that is two years more than most ever attempt.

I love to think of him, there at Walden pond, in the winter of 1846, alone on a clear day, lying on the clear ice, looking down to the bottom of the pond, spotting his axe. The way he interjects that cosmic rumination: “it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it.” I love to imagine him handily making a slip-noose, easily lowering it through the deep water, attaching it to the handle of his axe, expertly, and hoisting it to the surface again. No one watching. What a man is capable of being.

But Thoreau is more often remembered as a kind of utopian romantic, an unpractical larper — and as a loser. After all, America did not follow his path. Writing around 1853, he criticized the madness for technological progress:

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

…and America simply ignored him. The railroads were build from sea to sea, by hundreds of thousands of struggling Irish and Chinese immigrants, making little money, often barely breaking even for their labor. And for what? The car would make railroads largely defunct less than a century later. Thoreau saw it coming. He mocked the news as gossip. He said he needed to walk for four hours a day, and to read for another four hours each day.

His most profound criticism he reserved not for a specific technology, but for technology’s colluders: humankind. There are few paragraphs I love more in American literature than the third paragraph of his first chapter in Walden. Skip it at your own hazard:

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach;” or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars,—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

If this was about Americans in the 19th century, it is even more about Americans in the 21st century. When I taught this paragraph, students struggled to understand his learned allusions, so I supplemented: have you ever played whack-a-mole at the arcade? This is what he’s saying. We live life with an ever-growing “to-do” list, and it is a losing battle. We could have listened to him. We could have ceased, or almost ceased. We might have grown beans and rice and fruit trees, fished in clear waters.

Instead, we unleashed that strange god, electricity. We found uses for oil. Our towers became tall, taller, and then we exported all of this to the world, made it into an infernal race. Now, our wives are not happy unless their SUVs have heated seats and their gyms have hot yoga. Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita, but only losers do that now. Thoreau never learned to code, and coders write the algorithms. In fact, it is a nasty sort of irony that Thoreau has maintained his spot in the American literary canon. It is as if the coders and technocrats keep him there as a specimen, as a relic. Have you even tasted dippin’ dots? We have exploding pagers now. Update your definitions, mope. Try to keep up. Here, have a Modafinil.

III. Why the Prophets Prophecy

“Truth Coming Out of Her Well,” Léon Gerome, 1896

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee… —Matthew 23:37

The New Testament texts repeatedly accuse Israel of failing to listen to the messages given by prophets. But it turns out that recognizing prophets is not always an easy thing to do, because there is no prophet-accreditation school, no formal title. Prophets may be priests, but not every priest is a prophet, and one need not be a priest to be a prophet. Although there is an element of “telling the future” sometimes evident in prophetic announcements, the essence of prophecy seems to be “telling the truth.” Anyone can do that, in theory.

But getting people to listen is a different problem. As a matter of fact, there may be structures and incentives built in (unintentionally) to most institutions ensuring that truth either goes unheard, or is heard as antagonistic. It’s easy to imagine that the judges and kings of Israel, and the priests and elders, eventually, were not thrilled to hear people lacking formal credentials and titles attacking them.

Here is an interesting question: has there ever been a seer or a prophet who spoke in-alignment with established institutions and governing authorities? The truth is, just as candidates for sainthood living now will have to wait until after their death for canonization in the Catholic Church, nobody recognized the prophets, or listened to them, during their lifetime. Their words only became recognizable in retrospect, and that’s when their proclamations and their stories get incorporated, finally, too late, into the scriptures. A classic examples is in 2 Chronicles:

The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, until there was no remedy.

This pattern is repeated so frequently in the Old Testament that it becomes tedious, but two things are made evident in this structure: 1) The text eventually incorporates their stories because it wants us to finally learn the lesson, to stop making the same mistake. We really should be listening to them. 2) Prophets speak perpendicularly to the established institutions. They do not reinforce the worldly authorities; rather, they point out the flaws of the existing structures and criticize the fleshly assumptions, behaviors, and attitudes of hierarchs.

It’s an easy leap from there to ask a key question: why do prophets speak? What motivates them to speak, even at the risk of personal loss? The only plausible answer is: they have a commitment to truth that supersedes their commitment to any existing institutions in the world. Recall yesterday’s analysis of 1 Corinthians 2:15, the line before Paul’s remarks on “The Mind of Christ.” There, he says, “The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments.” The prophets are the people who are with the spirit, and because they are with the spirit, in theological terms, they are not subject to the judgments of “mere humans.” This means that unless our rulers are spiritual, unless they are with the spirit, prophets are not subject to their authority.

If the rulers and the ruling institutions were aligned with the spirit, prophets would have no reason to speak. If the status quo is acceptable, if the government is righteous, there is no reason to contradict it. But when prophets speak, they speak critically of institutions that are dis-aligned with God’s spirit. See this clearly: prophets, by their nature, will always be in a kind of strife with the “powers and principalities” of this world. The contradict Satan, “the ruler of this world,” and for that they are scorned by all who are employed in Satan’s business. But who is employed in Satan’s business? Well, the answer is, whoever the prophets say are employed in Satan’s business.

Of course, you might imagine false prophets. But this is a bit like fearing archetypal “conspiracy theorists” as a scourge on society even after you learn that the CIA coined the term after the JFK assassination to limit further inquiry.

IV. Isaiah, Thoreau, and Jared Kushner

Let’s take the example of Isaiah as our case-in-point. In Isaiah 20, the prophet hears the voice of God saying, “Go, and loose the sackcloth from your waist and take off your sandals from your feet,” and the text adds, “and [Isaiah] did so, walking naked and barefoot.” Yes, a naked and barefoot man announcing truths to the wise men and rulers of Israel — I’m sure they were prepared to listen graciously, just as we would be.

Isaiah accuses Israel of blindness. They have fallen asleep. Israel is in the grip of Maya, and they do not want to hear a word about it. In chapter 29, the accusations pile up:

…the LORD has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep,
and has closed your eyes (the prophets),
and has covered your heads (the seers).
And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, '“Read this,” he says, “I cannot, for it is sealed.” And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, “Read this,” he says, “I cannot read.”

What a cutting image! How many times in my life have people told me they are incapable of reading. “Thoreau is too hard.” And, “No, I haven’t read the Bible today,” or, “The Old Testament is so boring,” or, “I have a hard time understanding it myself,” or, “I trust the priests and the commentaries more than I trust myself when it comes to interpreting the scripture.” Isaiah had heard it all.

His conclusion is black-pilled: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me… the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” In the New Testament, in Matthew 15:8, Jesus would cite this verse, in an effort to show that the pattern continued into the very present, through 850 years since Isaiah lived. Jesus insisted, “you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.”

And Isaiah goes on to blame Israel for its political scheming, which is a particularly insidious kind of lack-of-faith. He writes that God says, of Israel,

Stubborn children, who carry out a plan, but not mine, and who make an alliance, but not of my Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; who set out to go down to Egypt, without asking for my direction, to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the protection of Pharaoh turn to your shame, and the shelter in the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation.

This is so clear and so scathing! The cunning cannot hear it. I confess, I have been dragged into political hopes at times. But I am just as often skeptical of Pharaoh and of Egypt. These are so obviously archetypes, these are the gourd vine that grows up over Jonah for a day, which can be eaten by a worm in a single night. And because these are archetypes, they must be understood as having equivalents in the present. Who is today’s Pharaoh? Who is today’s Egypt?

I tell you, reader, the one thing I know: it is not Henry David Thoreau. It is easy to see that today’s Jews, which one might mistake for being God’s Israel, sought shelter in America, under various sympathetic Presidents since Nixon was ousted. But that was not a plan given by God. God never told them to go to America—that was a plan of their own devising.

You might just as easily see, though, that Christians, who I think are or at least were a better claimant to the status of being “God’s Israel,” were equally guilty of carrying out a plan of their own devising, of making an alliance, but not of God’s spirit, and of seeking refuge under “Egypt,” in the protection of Pharaoh.

It is so clear from reading the New Testament texts (do not say “I cannot read them, they are sealed!”) that God does not recommend that we infiltrate institutions, secure credentials and titles, make secretive alliances, and take over the courts in order to secure a sympathetic Pharaoh and safety in a modern Egypt. That is Jared Kushner logic. That appears nowhere near the Sermon on the Mount. God does not recommend that we organize as 501(c)3s. No!—for the gentiles seek after all these things. But instead, Jesus said, “do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.” We are to consider the lilies of the field. And that is to be our politics.

Do you not think Isaiah knew, as he was unstrapping his sandals, and taking off his sackcloth — as he began to stride into the city, to announce these things — that he would be deemed mad? That his social status would take a hit? Surely he knew he would be despised. What drove him to speak, against all these disincentives? I think Thoreau might have understood him:

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.

The platitude is true: the winners write the history books. But I think we discover a corollary: the losers (in the short term) foretell the future. We will retrieve pick-axes again, lie flat on clear pond-ice, fish, walk, and worship the dawn and listen to God.