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Review:
I’m a substitute teacher in a large American city, mostly at inner-city schools. Probably because the students are all about the same age and, except for the few who work minimum wage jobs, are equally without income, occasionally (and cautiously for fear the school authorities will suspect my subversion) I’m able to imagine a classless, egalitarian community with sufficient vividness to convince myself as well as my students that what I have merely imagined has actually come to pass, namely, that the students seated before me and I have somehow dissolved the world of rank and social status that hamstrings our attempts to deal fairly with each other and, along with everyone else, cooperatively own the global enterprise called life on earth. For several minutes the class and I exist in a state of trance. I present my case so simply and eloquently to them that I cannot believe it is I who speaks. And they on their part listen and respond so generously and articulately that they cannot believe it is they who attend. And although our camaraderie is transient and unconsecrated no one leaves the room without feeling that for a few moments we attained a high spiritual state.
That I can invoke a few moments of classless society by merely imagining it gives me a glimmer of hope that the various social, political and economic institutions all of us create in order to tolerate living together are shaped by different spiritual ultimatums we deliver to ourselves from which we imagine there is no appeal. That means to me that however massive its public edifices; however myriad the megatons of brick and marble, granite and concrete that reify the political state and make it a colossus, the entire conglomeration floats precariously inside a bubble of faith such that should the bubble burst, the state turns to rubble. Sermon On The Flats is my attempt to prick that bubble.
My thesis is that universal belief in fortune or luck constitutes the primary religion of mankind. The universality of the belief is, I think, beyond question. Moreover, I strongly suspect that when the people of one culture or another worship the gods or God–and I include here secular concepts such as manifest destiny and personal fate–they in fact are worshipping fortune under one guise or another. Since an examination of the various cultures of the world is beyond my competence, I have focused primarily on ancient Roman culture–supplemented by references to ancient Greek and medieval history–because, thanks largely to the detailed narrative of the Roman historian Livy, the domination of the idea of fortune as the primary object of worship in all periods of Roman history is, in my opinion, clear beyond doubt.
It is likewise my contention that the fortune worship of ancient Rome is an early example of the veneration of fortune that continues unabated today not only privately among individuals but publicly among nations. Fortune worship is the state religion of every nation. For if history is the blow by blow, war by war description of the scramble to control the limited resources on earth, then whichever nation or block of nations finally monopolizes those resources will be hailed “Champion of History,” not because it enjoys moral superiority over other nations (although no doubt it will lay claim to it) but because it has the good fortune to possess the physical capabilities required and to deploy its forces with the timing necessary to conquer the planet. Lady Luck crowns the winner. And because she rules history and hence determines which nation survives and which goes under, she, as it were, holds the patent on the adoration of public officials (and their constituents) the world over, while the founders of the afterlife religions like Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed merely possess the franchise for dominion over the fortuneless and unextraditable dead. For this reason I believe that the fortune worship of Rome is merely an early phase of the fortune worship of the planet Earth.
Because the natural resources of the earth are limited, but in every generation everyone engages in pursuing their happiness to the fullest extent, a pursuit whose expense is charged against those very resources, then, inasmuch as the scarcer the resources the stricter will be the control over them, with the upper limit of control being perfect monopoly, the planet seems destined to submit itself to and be ruled by the fortune of a single person or group of persons at the head of a single institution which monopolizes those limited resources, backed up by a massive military force. The alternative to fortune worship (and to the dictatorship of the planet Earth) is fairness worship–that is, that as the result of a spiritual upheaval occurring at the same time as a social one, blind faith in fortune which fuels fortune worship will dissolve into a sense of camaraderie in the face of existential incomprehensibles equally dumbfounding to all, a spiritual egalitarianism which will express itself in an economic one; in the universal cooperative ownership of those precious resources. Fortune versus fairness: the history of the world is the story of this conflict which has yet to be resolved.
Shakespeare characterizes our general situation as full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It can also prove to be full of sweetness and light and still signify nothing. We freely choose how the nothingness is to feel depending on how we feel about merging our fortunes into one and owning it cooperatively as against having a single fortune imposed on us from above by a superior. Each pursuing his or her happiness independently of all others (as everyone has always done in every period of history) is a luxury the earth can no longer afford. Be that as it may, because everyone has always done so, it follows that by vicariously experiencing in hindsight the history of any culture to which one is attracted–in our case Rome–one steeps oneself in the very same brew that threatens daily in our own time to boil over and annihilate us. How to consolidate the fortunes of all without subordinating one fortune to another: that’s the real question posed to the modern Oedipus by the sphinx. But because of our infatuation with luck we are no closer to addressing the problem–not to mention solving it–than the Romans. It is the primitiveness of our own times that keeps ancient history current.
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