@MichelleLZier @lukeburgis 2/ Moral warfare, a pattern as ancient as culture itself. What is novel is that the mechanism, now exponentially network-amplified, has crossed an epochal threshold in which self-justifying reciprocities of violence and counter-violence are spinning completely out of control.
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Copy of tweet: end/ So, an algorithmically-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and, all told, a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would inevitably deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes' 'war of all against all', plus nukes. What next, then?
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Messianic movements are messianism in action. Even the “facts” of suffering and frustration require ideas and social symbolism before they can assume cultural shape and historical reality (i.e., before they can manifest themselves, be expressed, and function as such in a particular place, time and culture). Conversely, beliefs and doctrines require a specific constellation of facts and situations in order to pass from potentiality to actuality. The student of the subject is therefore faced with two distinct problems: 1) How do messianic ideas arise and develop, and how do they function within the total culture and history of a specific society? and 2) What situations or events precipitate movements, that is, turn a messianic ideology (which sometimes has been kept in theological deep freeze, like the belief in the Second Coming in most major Christian churches) into active social ferment and historic movement? R. J. Zvi Werblowsky Jewish Messianism in Comparatist Perspective
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The notion of a messianic pair (a priestly-Aaronic and a royal-Davidic messiah) might serve as a useful reminder of the antiquity of the view (to be met with also subsequently in kabbalistic messianology) that the messiah is not so much a saviour-redeemer as a sign and symbol of the redeemed order over which he presides. After all, Abraham was called not in order to be “saved” (let alone bring salvation), but to be a model and paradigm of the righteous and blessed life. He was called to be a paradigm of blessing (and not a source of blessing: this is a much later homiletical interpretation which, to be sure, is of the greatest interest to the historian of religion). The actual redeemer is God himself, who cometh unto Zion (Isa. 59:20), and not from Zion as the reading of St. Paul (Rom. 11:26) has it. Werblowsky
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My point is that mahdism (like belief in the parousia) can be doctrinally marginal, and in fact “dormant” for most of the time, but become central at the right kairos. Space does not permit here a fuller discussion of the problem of “marginal” versus “central”. Suffice it to say that major developments in religion, at times even revolutionary transformations, are often best accounted for in terms of shifts between these two terms: no absolute innovations, but what has been marginal moves to the centre and vice versa. Hinduism is not even heir to a messianic pre-history; yet the expected appearance of a saviour-avatara once the present yuga (cosmic period) has run down to its inevitable zero-point of self-destruction can acquire eschatological and even messianic characteristics. Even our present aeon of the Buddha Gotama Shakyamuni is running down to its inevitable end, and the manifestation of the next Buddha, the expected Saviour-Boddhisattva, Maitreya. R. J. Zvi Werblowsky