Texture of enchantment

The Bible constructs a style of social organization that is neither of the government sector nor of the market sector: the Bible constructs a priesthood and a sanctuary as well as a weekly, seasonal, sabbatical year and jubilee Sabbath. 

The point of this non-governmental and non-commercial sacred space is to help cultivate civil society, to create a public space where covenantal bonds and mutual aid dominate the experience of the populace. This sacred space is where personal autonomy and the liberation from servitude are most directly achieved. 

Such a civil society has about it the texture of enchantment and a measure of grace. It is smooth and fluid and sensuous, where the barriers between people are lowered and a union between people is operating. 

The seasonal Sabbaths, the festivals, couple most directly to the sanctuary. The sanctuary is where the most obvious congregation of the civil society is manifest. The weekly Sabbath is more about the individual and his/her family and household; the sabbatical year is about the political/economy; the jubilee is about the deep matter of self-ownership, autonomy and the self-definition of the people's ethnic character and its relation to the people's land. 

Religious institutions in the Bible's version have a political/economic character to them. The institutions are not only of the priesthood, they are of the sanctuary coupled to the basic institutions of society: the military, the economy, and the political relations of power which connect the upper and lower classes. By filling out and making for a healthy and independent civil society, the biblical system assures the cultivation of a robustness and a resiliency in the society that can survive the collapse of governments or the unravelling of national institutions. 

Intermediate aftermath

The bloodshed in revolutions comes less from overthrowing the old regime and more from the process of achieving a consensus for the new regime. It is in the battle to sort out the shape and the leadership of the new order that the great struggle takes place. 

The same is true for disasters. It is not the natural catastrophe itself that causes the most injury to the body politic nor is it the immediate aftermath of the disaster; it is in the intermediate aftermath, when the various 'warlords' begin contending with each other for who will rule, that the real damage to the social order actually takes place. 

Supporting mutual aid

Gift exchange at the personal level becomes mutual aid at the collective level. 

Mutual aid can be organized and energized by the government agencies but it cannot be replaced by the government. 

It takes a particular kind of beneficence on the part of the ruling authorities to have them supporting mutual aid activities and mutual aid institutional structures. 

Upheaval

"Upheaval in disaster can be as immediate as political change, as intangible as ideological shift." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 154) 

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, for example, kicked off much of the anti-authoritarian thinking that underlined the Enlightenment thought of the time. 

Own devices

What disasters do is shut down the functioning of both the markets and the government agencies. 

"Disasters overload political systems by multiplying societal demands and empowering new groups on one hand while disarticulating economies and disorganizing governments (as well as revealing their organizational, administrative, and moral deficiencies) on the other." (A. Cooper Drury and Richard Stuart Olson as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 152.) 

After a disaster, the people are for a moment left to their own devices to discover for themselves the possibilities of mutual aid, which is another slant on gift exchange. 

That shut-down could also occur during the sabbatical year. With markets and government agencies shut down the people can begin to discover their own capacity. It's not just the land that needs to lie fallow and refresh, it's the human ground as well. During the sabbatical year the political ground of the society can reboot at the grass roots level. 

"In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as 'reestablishing order,' is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions – restoring power, cleaning up rubble. So the more long-term aftermath of disaster is often in some sense a counterrevolution, with varying degrees of success. The possibility that they have been overthrown or, more accurately, rendered irrelevant is a very good reason for elite panic if not for the sometimes vicious acts that ensue." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 152). 

Repression or terror

Terror is the outgrowth of failed states. 

The alternative scenario for what could take the place of failed states could be civil society. 

It is testimony to the grip the extractive sector has on the world’s imagination that our only choices these days are presented as being between repressive centralized states on the one hand or terror campaigns on the other. 

Neither of them

We've got the left-wing arguing for the provision of goods and services by the government and the right-wing arguing for the provision of goods and services by the market—and neither of them is right. 

Upright march

The empowerment of the ordinary citizen is the manifestation of civil society and the implementation of legitimate autonomy and the upright march of Leviticus 26:13. 

Cultivating tastes

It is not enough to replace government functions with civil society and mutual aid, we must figure out how to resist the encroachments of government that invariably break down the element of gift exchange in the transactions. 

Government intervention serves to break the chain of tradition, of traditing, by introducing coersion into the scenario. By exercising police power and taxation power the government also eliminates the possibility of gratitude. 

Both the market and the government have the advantage of large scale. The trouble with large scale is that it tends to favor the extractive. Both the markets and the governments favor the extractive by virtue of their advantage in the large scale.  

It is no good for government to provide public services unless the general public is also involved in its administration and delivery. Public goods must have a zone within the public sphere wherein they can be properly appreciated. Unless the public goods are seen as gifts for which the public ought to be grateful the delivery of those goods will be subject to corruption and degeneracy. 

The difference between the market and government on the one hand and civil society on the other is that neither markets nor governments require the education and training of the public. Markets and government work even when the public has not cultivated proper tastes for appreciating and for offering thanks for what the markets or governments provided. 

Civil society is more about the cultivation of the tastes than it is about the provision of the goods and services. 

Humble caring

Mutual aid feeds the personal soul even when the conduct is anonymous and unheralded. 

No glory, no immortality, no attempt to achieve the divine; just humble caring and contentment. 

Bestial underbelly

The fundamental question every society needs to answer is do we believe in the good instincts of the ordinary citizen or do we believe the ordinary citizen has a bestial underbelly which requires the disciplines of civilization for managing proper conduct. 

Revolutionary-in-chief

The Chumash offers a revolutionary program for how to get liberated from an old, oppressive order. It presents one approach to the processes of social change. It offers a linking between God and the forces of social justice. It tells the story of members of the ruling class (be he or she Avram or Sarai or Yosef or Moshe) who adopt the perspective of a sacred Other Who would stand as a covenantal partner and Who wishes to defend the autonomy of the ordinary member of society. 

God, in this view, is the revolutionary-in-chief. 

The thing to do these days is to clarify the biblical teachings rather than to try to rouse the rabble and thereby to foment the autonomy and the revolution from the bottom up. 

On the scene

The media arrive on the scene with the disaster relief 'experts' so they think the professionals are the ones who truly provide the relief rather than the indigenous population on the scene at the time who, through mutual aid, provide the most substantial assistance. 

Insulating the rulers

The problem with every scenario of disaster relief implementation is that they begin by insulating the ruling authorities from the impact of the disaster. 

As a result, those in power cannot experience what is happening on the ground and so they aggravate the problems. Rather than waiting, they panic and rush. 

They do not appreciate the resiliency of those on the ground at the scene of the disaster. Furthermore, the insulating of the ruling authorities makes the systemic problems become brittle. 

Social bonds

"As we define it, elite panic, as does general panic, involves the breaking of social bonds. In the case of elite panic it involves the breaking of social bonds between people in positions that are higher than we are." (Lee Clarke, as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 129.) 

Breaking social bonds is the modern-day version of the ancient world's breaching of a treaty.

Unruly citizens

The irony of the disaster scenario is that the two destructive forces – natural and social – are both unruly. 

The natural destruction threatens the population and its person; the social destructive forces – the mob, the panicked looters – threaten property. 

The ruling elites panic because at bottom they intuit their power as deriving from the preservation of property relations rather than as deriving from personal, human (dare we say covenantal) relations. 

For the ordinary citizen, disaster is a threat because of the natural destruction; for the ruling elites, disaster is a threat because the ordinary citizen might become unruly. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, for the ruling elites the population isn't the solution, the population is the problem. 

In the Eastern European Jewish community the elite panic took the form of trying to preserve not property rights but ideological rights. The selfsame brittle, paternalistic, condescending attitude of the ruling elite to the general public however was as much in evidence in Eastern Europe as anywhere else. 

God has faith in humanity. It is the ruling elites who lack faith in ordinary people. We have lost our faith in God because those who represent Him to us have lost their faith in us. 

Brittle and inflexible and rule-bound

Resilience is a form of fluidity which allows for innovation. 

Organizations, and especially bureaucracies, become brittle and inflexible and rule-bound and so they lose their resilience and their ability to adapt to traumatic shocks or their ability to deal with disaster. 

There was no halachic response to the Genocide (irrespective of whether the response might or might not have been effective there was no halachic attempt)  because halacha had lost its resilience and had become brittle and moribund. 

We need a way to model systemic dysfunction in those situations where the ecological values have become weak and are breaking down. 

The unchampion

The more we favor the heroism of the individual, the less we have faith in the basic wellness of the community; the less we have faith in the community, the more we depend ourselves on the wisdom of the ruling elites. 

The Greek myths belong to a vision of people who need the ruling elites whereas the biblical story presents a vision of society founded in the wisdom of crowds and organized to harness their autonomy. 

The Greeks depend on drama to resolve their social challenges whereas the Chumash is anti-dramatic: the resolution comes not from the release of tension between tragic forces that have been building up in some sort of narrative arc. People living well together in bucolic harmony are, dramatically speaking, not all that interesting. 

The Spartans may have had it more right than the Athenians. The Spartan instinct might have been suspicious of the outstanding exemplary over the strength of the team or the tribe. 

Likewise this divide might separate the Mosaic from the Davidic. David is a champion the way Moses is not. The rise of the House of David fixed and sealed it as the locus of power and ingenuity for the nation, and it resulted in the fall of the people of Israel. 

Teach autonomy

Our task is not to make the world a better place so much as it is to teach people autonomy. 

When people believe in themselves, when they open their eyes and see more possibilities, when they stop waiting for leaders because they see their circumstances as their being able to do it themselves then legitimacy will take its proper place alongside authority and life will improve, human nature will improve, and peoples’ cultures will dominate their instincts. 

Disease of the spirit

PTSD comes from stress that is meaningless. It is a symptom of someone having been challenged without the possibility of that stress being released into a higher calling. PTSD comes from the stresses of trauma without the esprit de corp that typically accompanies disaster and war. 

PTSD is as much a disease of the spirit as it is of the nerves. 

Skillful effort

"That the worst time becomes the best is interesting, but hardly ideal. That the best times, the safe and affluent ones, become the worst poses other challenges, of how to maintain a sense of purpose and solidarity in the absence of emergencies, how to stay awake in softer times. The religious language of awakening suggests we are ordinarily sleepers, unaware of each other and of our true circumstances and selves. Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful effort keeps us awake." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 119). 

Here is a clear expression of the biblical program: to apply the skillful effort in times of feast to keep the society awake to the character of the relationships that bind its members together.

Earthquakes

The institutional alarm the power elite raise every time the general population merely assembles in large numbers is a symptom of  how disparate the classes in society are becoming. This elite panic that underlines so much that's ordinary in the life of modern day collectives is the Achilles's heel of industrial secularism; and it’s that very weakness in Western  society which the Islamic terrorists are targeting. 

Terror is the introduction of disaster. It is not meant to simulate war, it is meant to simulate earthquakes because earthquakes show up the weakness of the ruling authorities, whereas war shows up their strengths. 

Earning solidarity

The challenge to a society that has achieved abundance is to recreate the sense of purpose and solidarity under conditions of beneficence that typically arise easily under conditions of emergency and distress. 

How do we earn our sense of solidarity in a society that has removed so much of the risk and the pressure of survival which typically comes with youth and the struggle to grow? 

Predictability

"There are good reasons we left behind that existence [an existence lived close to the bone that daily experiences risk and daily remakes the circumstances of survival; an existence that binds people together with an urgent necessity that is also a satisfaction], but we left behind with it something essential, the forces that bind us to each other, to the moment, and to an inherent sense of purpose. The recovery of this purpose and closeness without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human. Or perhaps the dawning era of economic and environmental disasters will solve the conundrum for us more harshly." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 113) 

That great task of being human is the problematic the Bible was designed to solve. The imposition of the periodic artificial disaster that is the sabbatical year is the simulation of crisis or pressure without having to suffer in the process an hysterical sense of catastrophe. The predictability of the sabbatical year allows the general public to choose and embrace the challenges of the disaster, and so to benefit from the opportunities for transcendance the 'calamity' would bring. 

Inextricably merged

What happens in a disaster is that people can see clearly how important to their individual well-beings is the collective well-being. 

Rather than turning into extremely selfish marauders the sensible and most immediate thing to do is to fortify that community to which one most belongs. The slow grind of daily life that imprisons people in isolated chambers comes during a disaster to a startling hault. Instead, solidarity and empathy enable a sense of connectedness and belonging beyond what ordinary life in today's world offers up. 

"The 'outsider' becomes an 'insider,' the 'marginal man' becomes a 'central man.' People are thus able to perceive, with a clarity never before possible, a set of underlying basic values to which all people subscribe. They realize that collective action is necessary for these values to be maintained and that individual and group goals are inextricably merged. This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely acheived under normal circumstances." (Charles Fritz as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 108.)

Cultivate the virtues

We often need to discover the courage that lives inside of us. 

A society that collectively helps to cultivate the virtues that lie in individuals dormant, often unaware and unappreciated, would be a sturdier society than what passes for social organization today. 

The ability of a people to rise to the challenges of a disaster is a measure of its resilience

Self-direction

Leadership can infantalize and make servile the general population being led. It takes a special kind of leadership to promote the self-direction of the citizenry being led. 

Protracted disasters

The Great Depression, virtually all wars, the Genocide – these were all protracted disasters that served in the 20th century as agents of social change, if not progress. 

Xenophobic strangers

Anarchy has become 

"a synonym for mayhem, chaos, and riotous behavior because many imagine that the absence of authority is equally the absence of order." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 90) 

Scripture moved the locus of authority to a divine Other Who enters into covenant with an entire people. After God abdicated the treaty the rabbinic regime moved that higher authority to the imperial power or the state power of the diasporic, host government. In the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel, the gedoylim defined the government of the state as a surrogate for the host diaspora government, thereby denying the conundrum of whether or not God's treaty obligations with the people had been resumed. 

The central question the Jewish people must answer today is how to manage the problem of national authority. The disaster of the Genocide is offering a window during which time the Jewish people can arrange for an effective and radically new answer to that age-old question. We have another few generations to do our work and then the historical window will close and another crisis will have gone to waste. 

The mainstream religions are there not to impose authority over anarchy but rather to impose it over unruly mortal authority that, in the absence of a higher power, does not respect limits and exploits the fertile core, which will result in a resource curse on the general population. The problem of anarchy is not general lack of authority, the problem of anarchy is civil war where no central power holds sway over a variety of smaller powers. 

It was 

"the English Civil Wars that prompted the timid authoritarian Thomas Hobbes to imagine that the only alternative to chaos was a strong central authority. ... 'And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, not a culture or religion binding together a civilization, only a convenience. Men in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, blank, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 91) 

This Conservative view places as much emphasis as it does on the honoring of contracts because that contractual, strategic view of social cohesion is the only thing that binds people into a larger collective. A civilization of xenophobic strangers is what that view produces, alas. 

Reaching across

"Altruism and charity are distinct if not in the acts themselves at least in the surrounding atmosphere: altruism reaches across with a sense of solidarity and empathy; charity hands down from above." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 87)

Restrained & oppressed

Man's instincts are seen either as savage and unruly unless restrained by the authority and the power of the ruling elites, or as loving and compliant unless ground down and oppressed by the authority and the power of the ruling elites. 

Rationality is either the dominator of unreasonable passions or the suppressor of the spirit of community and of common purpose. 

On the one side lies fascism, on the other anarchism.  

Life becomes molten

"The word 'crisis' is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. ... Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, a purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules." (Henry Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change, as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 79). 

Ruts and routines

"Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are – helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths – or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 70) 

When they say that without the teachings of Scripture human nature would be horrible they are denying the best in the human spirit. Scripture doesn't alter human nature, it enhances it. It enables our best instincts to find a happy home in the political/economy so that the mechanisms of state are oriented in support of the mechanisms of individual autonomy and mutual aid. 

Caring and appreciating

Government institutions have a way of crowding out the cultural institutions every society needs to give its citizens a sense of membership and belonging and the kind of meaning that comes of performing mutual aid. 

Neither the marketplace nor the government’s halls can deliver what society craves and what the healthy human soul yearns for: a community where people can experience a good sense of belonging. 

We know why not the market but why not the government? Because the market says you don't have to be generous while the government says you don't have to appreciate the generosity. The charitable act needs the act of gratitude or it becomes stillborn. The point is not merely to alleviate suffering in the moment, it is to create a climate of mutual obligation that makes for a palpable sense of society as community. 

So if not the market and not the government, then what? The Constitution. Caring and appreciating needs to be written into the very code of compact. Others call it the Bible. 

Necessary for happiness

"Nature ... has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants that the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends with our being." (Quoting Thomas Paine’s  The Rights of Man in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 64.) 

Here is a simple statement of the distinction between the realm of scarcity, that which is necessary for existence, and the realm of abundance, that which is necessary for happiness. 

"Capitalism's fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 89). 

Public self

"Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 62) 

By leaving out the possibilities of the public self we fail to acknowledge how much of our happiness and sense of well-being comes from our being embedded in a healthy society that supports the joy and love and sense of purpose that comes of true connection with one's fellows and one's God. 

Sharing the loss

The antidote to loss is sharing. It is not only that sharing mitigates the material burdens that loss inflicts on the less fortunate (what we call dispersion or spreading the loss), the experience of having the loss shared by others has the effect of actually lessening the impact of the loss, no matter how severe the loss is. 

When others join the bereaved in their experience of loss, the loss feels less onerous. 

Military temper

The kind of joy and sense of fulfillment people get when thrown together to manage the challenges of some disaster are not unlike the sense of fellowship and belonging soldiers feel in battle when they are part of an army dedicating themselves to the fulfillment of a higher cause. 

That sort of loss of self conjoined with a simultaneous discovery of a higher, greater self is likely what the Chumash means with the word 'tzvaot.' 

"The martial type of character can be bred without war ... The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper." (Quoting William James in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 53.) 

The Chumash's mode of inflaming the civic temper is the imposition of a national sabbatical year. In James' terms, sheviit would be the moral equivalent of war. 

Aliens & locals

It is difficult for an alien, occupying force to do nation building because it is vital for the locals to take care of their own. The entire system has trouble getting off the ground because as soon as a foreign occupying force takes charge, that force cannot trust the locals to do the right thing. 

Under occupation, authority (the alien force) and legitimacy (the locals) have trouble cooperating. 

The key fact of the Mannah was that every family did its own food collecting so that it was not something the ruling elites could get their hands on. Only when Moshe is away are the ruling elites of Israel able to regain their power through the Molten Calf/ Disguised Wheel. God cannot abide among a stiff-necked people because the stiff-neckers are anti-God: they are anti-ordinary people and pro-ruling elites. 

Extreme emergencies

In a disaster the military doesn't necessarily know what it is doing, and neither do the city fathers and the commercial leaders, many of whom likely achieved positions of authority for the wrong reasons. 

Institutional instincts tend not to work well because in a disaster institutional leadership cannot think flexibly enough to deal with the problems on the street. Instead, institutional leadership turns reflexively to shoring up its own power first, which is the wrong thing to do in extreme emergencies. Disasters are not the time for institution-building. In the end, it's just people tackling situations for which they are, in all probability and at best, ill-prepared. 

Elite panic

The primary concern of the ruling elite is the protection of property and of property rights (contracts) and only secondarily the protection of people and their autonomy. 

A society that uses free markets to do most of its public and private allocation could well be expected to favor material property over the personal welfare of the population. 

Sabbatical years are about the temporary suspension of property rights. Disasters should be understood as mini-sabbatical years. 

The response of the ruling elite to protect property before the personal welfare of the population is what we call 'elite panic.' Elite panic is the attempt to countermand the sabbatical year character of a disaster. 

The greater the inequality in apportionment, the greater the upper class's fear that the lower classes will pillage and loot should the ruling powers lose control of the social order. Elite panic's severity should be in direct correlation with how far the upper class would fall should they become part of the lower classes. 

Covetousnous, envy, jealousy

In a society lacking in hoarding and abounding in acts of generosity, it makes little sense to covet the wealth of one's neighbor. 

Covetousnous, envy, jealousy all are signs of a society that is unwell, whose members are given to hoarding what they have and coveting what they lack. 

During disasters, covetousnous comes across as unbecoming because it stands in such stark contrast to the otherwise prevailing acts of generosity. 

Not-hoarding

Acts of generosity are acts of not-hoarding. 

We hoard to make certain our futures. When we cease to consider the future we become more generous and abandon our hoarding behavior. General equanimity likewise bespeaks a self-possession that argues against the myth of a terror-stricken populace unable to cope with the hardships of disaster. 

"... the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos ... [and] the general equanimity" were the two things that struck William James about the conduct of the ordinary citizens in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 55). 

The contrary image the ruling elites have of the people's character and the one they convey to the public these days is that of spoiled children devoid of strength and lacking in fortitude. The image of modern day society is of a people who lack virtue utterly. It is a mean and cold world we are brewing together. 

Sign of belonging

People act coldly to their fellow citizens according to how strongly they identify themselves with the ruling elites. 

If you see yourself as a man of the people, you care for the people; if you see yourself as one of the rulers, you demand for the people to take care of themselves. In an odd sort of irony, to be uncaring of the needy could well be understood as a sign of one's belonging to the ruling elite. 

When disaster strikes and the ruling elites seem to recede from view it's easier for people to see themselves as men and women of the people. 

Houseless vs homeless

Whether the houseless are homeless depends on whether the community is there to take them in and offer them support. 

Homelessness is a condition of the community's indifference, not of the conditions of one's real estate holdings. 

Kooky and illegitimate

Novel communities are often based around beliefs before those beliefs have been properly embedded in their practices. As a result, such communities tend to come across as kooky and illegitimate. 

It would be important for practice to lead belief in the process of transformation from the prevailing social order to a biblical utopia. So long as the practices are well understood, the belief systems needn't be emphasized. It's not how we couch the beliefs that counts, it's how we couch the values and virtues that support those beliefs. 

Non-revolutionary revolutions

Disasters are warm-ups for general collapses. They are practice sessions that reveal what, absent the impositions of the ruling elites' traditional conventions, what human nature wants. The true change agents could harness disaster just as, if not more effectively than, the old ruling elites. 

Disasters are non-revolutionary revolutions, as collapses would likewise be. 

The agents of utopian change need not foment revolution to accomplish true advances in the human condition. They do however need to develop and perfect the utopian program they would install to replace the collapsed social order both with respect to the betrayals of that utopia which strongman rulers would attempt in the early moments after the establishment of the new utopia, and with respect to the residual claims to power and authority the remnants of the ruling elites would insist onto the new order even in the face of the manifest bankruptcy of the old system. 

Uncharismatic

"Some religious attempts at utopia are authoritarian, led by a charismatic leader, by elders, by rigid rules that create outcasts, but the secular utopias have mostly been committed to liberty, democracy, and shared power. The widespread disdain for revolution and utopia takes as its object lesson the Soviet-style attempts at coercive utopias, in which the original ideals of leveling and sharing go deeply awry ... Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 19) 

The threats to utopia come not only from the resistance of the established power elites, they come also from the betrayal of legitimate utopia by the dystopia that comes from authoritarian utopia – the even lesser tempered hubris of the absolutist revolutionary or revolutionary cabal whose certainty crushes the human spirit it pretends to ennoble. 

In the Chumash God's immediate presence serves as the higher authority that keeps any leader or group from usurping the legitimate autonomy of the people. God is the divine Other with revolutionary intent Who hopes to devise a people that can support a paradise. 

"A certain kind of twentieth century utopian idealism has died, the kind that believed we could and should erase everything and start over: new language, new society, new ways of organizing power, work, even family, home, and more. ... But we have also learned that you can reinvent the government but not human nature in one fell stroke, and the process of reinventing human nature is a much more subtle, personal, incremental process." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 20) 

Utopias are a more intense version of the prevailing order: either more intensely authoritarian or more intensely anti-authoritarian; either a ruling elite that is stronger and more controlling or one that is either weaker or altogether absent. 

Social utopia

"The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation – hunger, ignorance, homelessness – and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18) 

By that standard the Chumash is clearly angling to create a social utopia. Those two goals are precisely the two most oft repeated instructions in the Chumash: take care of the orphan and the widow; and be kind to the stranger for you were a stranger in a strange land. 

Default setting

"Utopia is in trouble these days. Many no longer believe that a better world, as opposed to a better life, is possible, and rhetoric of private well-being trumps public good, at least in the English speaking world. And yet the yearning remains ..." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18) 

The trouble with the building of utopias is that many of the entrenched powers around the world are bound and determined to defeat any honest attempt at arriving at an alternative to the status quo. They view utopian experiments not as innocent attempts at making the world a better place but as ideological threats to their hold on power. The ruling elites would like us to believe we have no alternative to their rule, nor that we could materially do better for ourselves than the present situation. Utopia puts the lie to both those predicates; and disasters show utopias up to be part of our natural, instinctual way of organizing community. 

"The map of utopias ... needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18)

Styles and species of well-being

Emotions have two dimensions: positive vs negative and superficial vs deep. 

A materialistic society may move people further to the positive than to the negative but at the cost, at the same time, of moving them away from the deep and toward the superficial. Furthermore, it could be the materialist approach might well reduce the swings of positive and negative feelings at the expense of lowering the average level of welfare. 

Another issue could be that there are various styles of happiness and welfare: satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment, joy, glory, etc. Material goods and services might well be able to be listed in a preference ordering, that is true, but the sorts of pleasure people derive from material consumption and production doesn't necessarily exhaust the full range of styles and species of fulfillment and well-being. 

Social calm

Disasters are disruptions of the established order. They challenge the ruling elites because they disrupt the social calm that is the ruling elite's claim to power. 

General disaster calls into question the legitimacy of the established order. Should the old order be replaced by something new and different, perhaps better, perhaps worse? Disaster is different from collapse, where the old order has been shown to be bankrupt and must be replaced without a doubt. 

Humor

• Disaster (dis-aster: a wrong star), 
• Catastrophe (cata-strophe: an unexpected twist in a story), 
• Emergency (e-merge: to come out from under, from submergence).

All these require, first of all, a sense of humor in order to keep things in proper perspective. 

Victim or victor

The opposite of victim is victor. 

To cast oneself or one's people as the victim is to deny the possibility of victory. 

To see oneself as a victim is the beginning of cowardice. Surely it is the expression of impotence and the envisioning of a lack of effective leadership. 

Servile affluence

The most powerful hold the ruling elites have over their subject peoples is the internal disqualification that says it is silly to believe that utopias are within reach. 

So long as people buy the story that they can't fundamentally improve their social systems, that the most people can hope for is perhaps to raise or lower the general welfare on the margin, then the status quo will remain in the hands of those rulers who cannot imagine a brighter day, who cannot imagine a society fed by the deeper wellsprings of fulfillment, satisfaction, and contentment. 

People’s own lack of conviction reduces them in conception to diminished selves and dismal societies, with moments of joy amid a sea of pain, isolation, and dejection. People have become servile in their affluence.   

Privatization of desire

The privatization of society not only moves the institutions of commerce into the private sector but, more important, it moves the self-understanding of the members of society into atomized units who cannot presume the proper functioning of a social order to justify their own acts of generosity and their own pursuit of caring and contentment. 

The privatization of society is, in effect, the Sodom-and-Gemmorah-ization of society. 

The privatization of desire and imagination results in getting us to believe we are not each other's keepers. 

Pre-planned disaster

The phoenix is reborn from its own ashes. It must be consumed in fire and thereby purified before it can be reborn anew. 

Disaster is the fire that burns out the old and allows for the new to be reborn. 

The sabbatical year is an artificial, pre-planned sort of disaster that requires the sort of solidarity common challenges tend to bring out in people. 

Human nature in disaster

"... the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 8). 

Marauding bands

"... the citizens any paradise would need – the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough – already exist. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 7). 

The problem with that picture is not how people behave immediately after a disaster has struck but how people will behave later, when they will have had the chance to assemble marauding bands to plunder the countryside. 

For that reason the Chumash introduced the notion of sheviit and miqdash, to limit the accumulation of material wealth and to afford the society the room to promote a better system where meaning trumps worth and where neighborliness prevails over local warlords and where God's empire keeps the peace.  

A mediocre ruling class

The Industrial Revolution enabled the ruling class to promote to the general public an abundant materialism that concealed the possibilities of joy and fulfillment which would come from a sense of embrace and belonging that is typically afforded by general collaboration. 

The European societal defect of a mediocre ruling class found its way to the New World in the form, first, of Southern plantation owners and then in the form of Northern industrialists. Such a ruling class was focused on the material gains that can come from the extraction and exploitation either of slave labor or of the natural environment. 

It is a ruling class intoxicated with the possibilities of organizing society according to the values of worth rather than of meaning. It is a ruling class that has made its peace with a God they had long since deemed irrelevant. Such a ruling class replaced the simple joys and sorrows of a meaningful, simple, humble, local society with the attractions of a gaudy, complex, hubristic, global system whose skyscrapers resemble the Tower of Babel. 

Civic possibility

Disasters unveil a social desire and a vision of civic possibility that ordinarily lies hidden behind the too-fast, alienated hustle and bustle of modern-day life. 

Disasters force us to dust off our simple virtues to deal with the demands of the moment, and it doesn't matter that the demands are for the welfare of others or for ourselves. 

Disasters reveal how valuable meaning can be in our lives; and how much more meaningful value matters to us than all the worthy value we accumulate for ourselves but then rarely really use properly. 

A sense of belonging

That society is happiest which affords its members the opportunity to experience a sense of belonging. To feel that belonging is to know an embrace and a joy that is incomparable. People cannot on their own provide themselves with such an experience. 

A sense of belonging is the other, mundane side of feeling the divine gift of God's grace. It is to know oneself in a firm identity in a way that absent such self-knowledge leaves one thin and unanchored. 

To be able to live a public life and a civil society that has about it inclusion, purpose and power is to be able to be multi-dimensional in a way that fufills and satisfies deeply. The present becomes clear while the past and the future tend to recede quickly and with not too much residue. 

Generosity requires generous society

In order for people to be able to help each other the society must be sufficiently well organized that their help would be both appreciated and reciprocated. 

Generosity requires a generous society as a prerequisite. 

Theories of political development that start from individuals on their own cannot ever get to the station of having society organized as generous. The chumash's story, on the other hand, of God providing the Children of Israel with a fully built up political/economic infra-structure is all about the possibility of individual generosity having already been enabled by a God Who provides not only the requisite abundance for such generosity but also the social system that can endorse such generosity. 

Collective abundance

Qayin kills Hevel because Hevel's offering is fatter than Qayin's, and God favors it. 

Qayin wanted Hevel's place with God, not Hevel's greater material wealth. It wasn't what Hevel had that compelled Qayin, it was his closeness to God that he envied. Hevel is killed because he fulfilled the obligation to appreciate God's bounty more exquisitely than did Qayin. 

If there is a lesson here, it is that it is better for the abundance to be delivered to God by the collective before it turns into an arms race. 

After catastrophe strikes

When a catastrophe occurs the key event is the instantaneous ineffectuality of the ruling elite. Authority breaks down in the first moments of a crisis and all that's there to service the situation is legitimacy – people helping each other. 

What is on display after a catastrophe strikes is what society might look like without the insidious shaping of the human heart the governing authorities impose on their subjects for the sake of making it easier for them then to impose order on the society. 

The bottleneck

How much do the ruling elites stand in the way of man's bond with God? Is their impoverished vision of human potentiality the bottleneck that keeps people from knowing what man might achieve under His guidance? 

Maybe what we need to know about God we need to know on our own, individually. Maybe the basic knowledge of God cannot be mediated through intermediate, mortal rulers.