Prophet of Collapse

"Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.'" ---Jeremiah 1:10 (sixth century b.c.e.)

Jeremiah is known as "the weeping prophet." It was his job to bring the bad news that his nation was in decline, that his people were going from hard times to utter disaster, that his world, all of its political organizations, its economy and even its religious institutions were about to collapse. From his call "in his mother's womb" to his death as an old man, he witnessed the world as he knew it coming apart at the seams.

He saw the shining city of Jerusalem which had been established by a heroic young king David seiged , sacked and scattered to bits, its great walls battered to rubble so that not one stone was left standing on another. He saw the nation's brightest and best led like cattle, with rings in their noses, along the highway out of town and into captivity in Babylon. He saw the inviolable temple of Solomon, in all its grandeur and opulence, plundered and burned to the ground. And what he saw broke his heart.

There were many who contradicted Jeremiah's prophecy of doom. Some were outright deniers. They tried to shout Jeremiah down: "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!" they boasted. With the very presence of God Almighty in permanent residence right downtown, who could even imagine decline and collapse here? Ah, but Jeremiah's contemporary, Ezekiel, imagined it quite well. He sees the divine presence, the very glory (chavod) of God, levitate like a spaceship, hover over the temple mount for a moment, and then disappear over the horizon. The "chavod" becomes the "ichavod." The glory of God becomes the glory of God --- Gone! Ichabod! And all the incantations of the deniers chanting "the temple of the Lord" as if to say, "You can't touch this!" could not prevent this train from departing the station.

Others countered Jeremiah's severe message with a softer version that the hard times were just a temporary setback, the the good times were surely not over for good. They were the prophets of recovery. Some saw a "V-shaped" recovery. Others a more "U-shaped" recovery. What none of them saw was two generations of exile in a foreign capital, and a recovery, when it did finally come, that was a faint shadow of the former times, under the thumb of one after another foreign empire, from Artaxerxes' Persia, to Alexander's Greece, to Caesar's Rome. No, none of them saw that! But on the eve of collapse, that is exactly what Jeremiah saw.

However alien to our own imperial eyes and ears, one thing history teaches us is that civilizations rise and fall. All of them.

Jared Diamond followed up his Pulitzer prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel with his 2005 work Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In it he reminds us of the ephemeral nature of all societies. The Romans, the Inca, the Maya, the Anasazi, the Greenland Norse, the Easter Islanders all left remains that for centuries have been accompanied mainly by the howl of the wind. Diamond suggests that the use and misuse of resources, usually ecological resources, brought down all of these once great civilizations.

Another contemporary scholar, Joseph Tainter, actually bores more deeply into the cause of empires' falls in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter notes that all societies solve their problems by increasing complexity. Over time this investment in complexity requires even greater complexity to maintain. At some point there is diminishing returns on the investment, and societies literally fall from the weight of their own success.

The point is that "they all fall down." It is a point that is diametrically opposed to the central myth of our time: inevitable progress. The story we tell ourselves is that our current western civilization is the pinnacle of a long and ascending line of improvement. We tell ourselves that it is the superiority of our ideals and our ideas that has delivered us at this unequalled moment in history.

And progress is a powerful idea. It has worked wonders for some of us. It has delivered enough calories to feed a world population of nearly seven billion humans. It has provided us medical advances that have reduced infant mortality, extended longevity, and virtually eliminated many of the diseases that hounded every generation before us to earlier graves. It has given us transportation that makes no corner of the world beyond our reach, has put our kind's feet on the moon and sent remote vehicles to other planets. It has given us the military might to explode bombs from a console in Florida on the heads of enemies half a world away, stealth bombers undetectable to the most sophisticated radar, and a nuclear arsenal that can quite literally reduce our living planet to a radiated and incinerated wasteland. Look and behold! The wonders progress has wrought!

But I wonder; I do wonder.

I wonder about the dead zones at the mouths of our rivers that ooze with toxic chemicals and bear the very sloughed off skin of the earth, what we once called soil, to choke all life from our oceans. Those calories come at a cost.

I wonder about a medical system that is the leading cause of bankruptcy for American families, that releases its pharmaceutical compounds in every water system in the land, and imposes the rhythmic sounds of respirators and blinking lights of "life support" systems before delivering the bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars to "survivors."

I wonder about a transportation system that consumes a quarter of all our fossil fuels so we can drive a four-wheel-drive SUV to the grocery to get a gallon of milk. And I especially wonder about the decision to shunt our food production to feed our vehicles with ethanol when our fellow human beings face starvation.

I wonder about military might that is employed to secure our access to fossil fuels; requiring some eighteen year old to die for what some politician calls our "non-negotiable" American lifestyle.

I just wonder if our god "Progress" has been as benevolent as it has been omnipotent.

So I'm suggesting that we put progress in its biblical perspective: progress is an idol. An idol is a man-made substitute for God. Idolatry is imbuing a human creation with ultimate authority. Old Jeremiah, the prophet of collapse, the prophet of doom, reminds us that all these human fabrications are subject to decline and decay. Our most sacred myths, inevitable progress, unlimited growth, will not endure; they are neither inevitable nor unlimited.

The god of the Bible was once known as El Shaddai, "the destroyer". The Indian goddess, Kali, stands with her foot on the chest of Shiva who himself was a god of creative destruction. Jeremiah was sent "to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow..." All of that has to happen before we can even consider what it means "to build and to plant."