Green Shoots Grow from the Manure

The world is in a mess. From whence comes our salvation?

To be fair, the world was in a mess when I was young: the Cold War, the fears of nuclear annihilation, the segregation in the US South; the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and many others; the mailbox bombs, the plane hijackings. Perhaps the world is always in a mess. Perhaps it has only been in a mess since 1914. But it is at best a crushing disappointment that we have not made it better.

Normally in the course of history, as Ibn Khaldun observed long ago, a culture that is spent is replaced by a younger, more vital one emerging from the desert.

Now there are no more deserts left.

From whence comes our salvation?

The BRICS are making a play to replace “Western” dominance with a new coalition. I cannot see it working. The nations involved have nothing philosophically in common; they stand for nothing together, but perhaps raw power. The name of their organization is only the acronym formed of their names. Two of them, India and China, have recently been shooting at one another. So have two of the proposed new members, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Most of them look politically and economically unstable, apt to collapse at any moment: Russia, China, Iran, South Africa, proposed new member Argentina. Together they control a lot of oil, but oil is not the lever it was until recently. Its importance is likely to further decline thanks to fracking, improvements in nuclear, and campaigns against carbon.

It all looks more like a rear-guard action than the future.

And so, from whence comes our salvation?

It must come from green shoots within the democracies, I suppose. From some class of people now in the metaphoric desert, from voices crying in the wilderness.

From, for example, the nomadic truckers, living in their trucks or vans. From the despised “hillbillies,” like J.D. Vance and Oliver Anthony. From the Bible-thumpers. From the salesmen, the despised hucksters, like Trump.

Not, however, from the officially designated “disadvantaged.” Anyone officially designated such is given special benefits, and so is advantaged. They are also taught to be passive and lose initiative. It will be from the folks that the “good” people shun for supposedly moral reasons: those ritually and without evidence accused by those in power of racism, homophobia, misogyny, fascism, poisoning the wells, raping our women, and so on—the usual slurs.

These are the ones Jesus called to himself in the Beatitudes.

The stone that is rejected will become the cornerstone of the temple.