RT @nick_routledge: @johnmilbank3 A hidden civilizational premise remains: the nation-state as a stable subject. But the frame itself—a total complex that sacralizes flight from any politics not secured by business as usual, exceptionalism and violence—is under eschatological audit. Dust on the scales before Him.
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1/ The stark truth is that on the one hand a form of interlocking, totalized, psychotic universalism, with no interest in its abolition, ultimately requires the unifying articulation of conclusive planetary intervention at the nation state level. This, hardly an original insight. Image text: What's remarkable about the sovereign nation-state as political form is not just its malevolent hegemony, but how recently it achieved that hegemony, and how completely this recency has been forgotten. 1/ Ultimately, nationalism, "the venom of modern history" (Steiner), proves no more substantive than the mimetic aggregate of chronically malignant fictions and fabrications upholding the whole shebang. Like a thief in the night, a deeper, genuine Wholeness subverts it all. @nick_routledge Apr 22, 2021 #EarthDay2021 “Before 1914, the earth belonged to the entire human race.” Stefan Zweig on open borders, from his memoirs, The World of Yesterday. Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport. Indeed, I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today. No permits, no visas, nothing to give you trouble; the borders that today, thanks to the pathological distrust felt by everyone for everyone else, are a tangled fence of red tape were then nothing but symbolic lines on the map, and you crossed them as unthinkingly as you can cross the meridian in Greenwich. It was not until after the war that National Socialism began destroying the world, and… 2/ Cohn? Kuhn? Prigogine? Thom? Gould? Hardly secular loners, outliers or madmen in relating phase-changes of total and irrevocable transformation in a mere instant of history or 'Day', as planetary prophetology describes the inescapable Reckoning due the Nation State Complex.
Open original document@Plough @KenBurns “Greatest nation in the world”? That is empire speech, the myth of magnitude mistaken for moral rank—and the world hears it as idolatry even when we mean it as affection. America is a nation fiercely summoned by a planetary promise, and will be judged by the same measure.
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“I tremble for my country,” Jefferson famously said in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, in words chiseled on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial, “when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Jefferson drew on for the Dec. of Independence. “The laws of impartial Providence,” he wrote in 1774 to the Virginia legislature on the question of slavery, “may avenge our injustice upon our posterity.” The idea that the God who saves the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is now passionately invested in the tawdry partisan politics of a particular nation-state in North America in late modernity, is a notion so ridiculous that one must laugh or cry. Well, of course. That said, Jürgen Moltmann, the German theologian recognized as one of most influential Christian systematic theologians of the 20th Century and, furthermore, pretty much the 'de facto' global authority on Christian eschatology and messianism, would like a word.
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