A little glimmer of insight

For some reason, this entry sparked a thought (which is a rare occurrence for me). It was a recollection of this response to Rehoboam after he foolishly decided to continue Solomon’s Pharaoh-like treatment of Israel by telling them to get back to work or they’d get worse from him (2 Kings 12). The people cried:

“What portion have we in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, David.” So Israel departed to their tents. 2 King 12:16

What I notice here is the instinctive tendency of a mis-ruled people to tuck in and retreat to what is known, what is local, what is familial. To be sure, Israel would almost immediately move from this normal and healthy reaction to tyranny by being led into apostasy and lies by their new king, Jeroboam. But the reaction itself was not wrong. Indeed, the text suggests that God promised Jeroboam help in his revolt if he would remain faithful to Him. But Jeroboam, for reasons of “practical politics” refused fidelity to God, because he couldn’t permit the center of cultic worship to remain in Jerusalem, in the heart of David’s kingdom. So he set up a new cultic center at Bethel and instituted the worship of golden calves, demonstrating that politicians are smart about little things and deeply stupid about big ones.

Why do I note all this? Because it seems to me that part of what I’m looking at as I ponder the way in which people are groping around for a leader at present is a deep erosion of trust in our institutions, coupled with precisely this tendency to return to what is safe and known. I’m certainly doing it, trying to mine the Catholic Tradition as best I can for some way in which to order our society because I have not the slightest shred of faith that our ruling classes, our corporations, or our Manufacturers of Culture have either knowledge of or interest in the common good. I also suspect guys like Glenn Beck are doing something similar, only in his case, he’s turning to his safe and familiar tradition of kooky apocalyptic Mormonism. And others are doing much the same. Only in our deeply fragmented post-Christian culture, there’s no longer a common cultural heritage to draw on. In a certain sense, we are on the position of Rome in its decline.

I don’t have any crystal ball and can’t see the future. However, for my money, it seems to me that the Catholic tradition has the obvious track record here in terms of weathering civilizatonal decline and the collapse of faith in human institutions. It’s done it before multiple times, so I’m thinking (quite apart from things like “eternal salvation”) that the smart money would be on it doing it again, if anything in the west is going to do so.

Just mulling stuff over….