Truth Over Tyranny: Biblical wisdom for defeating the Technocrats.
These are my insights for defeating the Transhumanist Technocracy movement, based on the teachings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, on the weekly Bible portion.
With the elections coming up in less than two months — including a pivotal federal election — a big question on everyone’s mind is this: how do I decide who to vote for?
This is key. What qualifications should a candidate have, to earn our vote?
Is it their race? Religion? Nationality? Gender?
Is it their party affiliation?
Is it their position on abortion? Homosexuality? Transgender?
Is it their policy on borders? Guns? War?
The selection of a leader is critical for a nation’s future. The right leader can lead us into days filled with promise and potential. The wrong leader can lead us into days filled with dread and disaster.
We need sage advice on this all-important topic. Fortunately, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks provides it for us, in his commentary on Parashat Shoftim called “Power from the Outside or Self-Restraint from Within.”
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/shoftim/power-or-self-restraint/
Rabbi Sacks starts out by talking about one of the biggest threats to civilized life: unruly crowds. These were a problem even back in Biblical times:
“…Crowd behaviour is notoriously volatile and sweeps up many kinds of people in its vortex. The result has been that for a while, chaos has prevailed, because the police or the army has been caught unawares.
“The Torah describes a similar situation after the sin of the Golden Calf:
“’Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control . . .’” Ex. 32:25
How should the “authorities” deal with such crowds? Modern sensibilities call for the use of force:
“Crowds create chaos. How then do you deal with crowds? In England, the reaction is a call for more police, zero tolerance, and tougher sentencing. .. it seems to be a shared assumption that the only way you stop people robbing one another or killing one another is by the use of force. That has been the nature of politics since the birth of civilisation.
“The argument was stated most clearly by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, in his political classic, Leviathan. Without the use of force, Hobbes said, we would be in a state of nature, a war of all against all in which life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short…'”
However, the Biblical approach to maintaining social order is different. It was articulated by Moses in his speech to the Jewish people before they created their own nation in the Promised Land. It was not based on force, but on self-restraint:
“What Moses was proposing in Devarim was fundamentally different. He assembled the people and told them, in so many words, that there would be social order in the new land they were about to inherit. But who would achieve it? Not Moses. Not Joshua. Not a government. Not a tyrant. Not a charismatic leader. Not the army. Not the police. Who would do it. ‘You,’ said Moses. The maintenance of order in Deuteronomy is the responsibility of the entire people. That is what the covenant was about. That is what the Sages meant when they said kol yisrael arevin zeh bazeh, ‘All Israel are responsible for one another.’ Responsibility in Judaism belongs to all of us and it cannot be delegated away.”
Many restraints on behavior were placed on the king in particular:
“We see this most clearly in this week’s parsha, in the law of the king.
“‘When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, ‘Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,’ be sure to appoint over you a king the Lord your God chooses . . . The king must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself . . . He must not take many wives . . . He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.'” Deut. 17:14-17
In addition, the king was to have one qualification above all: humility.
“‘When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this Law . . . It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites.’ Deut. 17:18-20
“Only one man is commanded in the Torah to be humble: the king.”
Biblical politics are based on the fear of God, not government:
“… the Torah is as far removed as possible from the world of Hobbes, in which it is Leviathan – his name for absolute monarchy, the central power – who is responsible for keeping order. In a Hobbesian world, without strong government there is chaos. Kings or their equivalent are absolutely necessary.
“Moses is articulating a quite different view of politics. Virtually every other thinker has defined politics as the use of power. Moses defines politics as the use of self-restraint. Politics, for Moses, is about the voice of God within the human heart. It is about the ability to hear the words, ‘Thou shalt not.’ Politics in the Torah is not about the fear of the government. It is about the fear of God.”
A society in which social order is maintained by self-restraint, teaches its children how to behave:
“What Moses understood in a way that has no parallel elsewhere is that there are only two ways of creating order: by power from the outside or self-restraint from within; either by the use of external force or by internalised knowledge of and commitment to the law.
“How do you create such knowledge? By strong families and strong communities and schools that teach children the law, and by parents teaching their children that ‘when you sit in your house or when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.’”
Today, America remains the standard-bearer for a society based on self-restraint. In doing so, we keep the promise of freedom alive:
“This is a view of politics we are in danger of losing, at least in Europe, as it loses its Judeo-Christian heritage. I have argued, in many of these essays and several of my books, that the only country today that retains a covenantal view of politics is the United States. It was there, in one of the great speeches of the nineteenth century, that Abraham Lincoln articulated the fundamental idea of covenant, that when there is ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ there is a new birth of freedom. When only police or armies stand between order and riots, freedom itself is at risk.”
I would add this:
For me, the idea of a “humble ruler” translates into this: does he trust the people he will serve? Does he truly believe in “power to the people?” Does he have faith in us; that if we are given authority to manage ourselves and our own affairs, the social order will be maintained?
Sure, the government must intervene as needed; but if that will become the rule rather than the exception, then we know we have a candidate who is not out for us, but out for themselves.
And who will replace our freedoms with their force at every opportunity.