MDMD the myth of redemptive violence/Lambton Worm

[Doug Millison]

This myth, as Walter Wink explains it, provides an interesting light in
which to read the story of the Lambton Worm which Pynchon embeds in M&D.
What Wink calls the"Domination System" shares some of the characteristics
of the system ruled by They in GR.


http://www.Bridges-across.org/ba/powers/

http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/powers/4_system.htm

Faith in violence, Wink says, is the real religion of our time, its
spirituality,because people believe violence "saves" and that it seems to
be inevitable.

He traces the development of the conquest state in history, which led tothe
predominance of what he calls the Domination System:

No matter what shape the dominating system of the moment might take from
Ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana to feudal Europe to communist
state capitalism to modern market capitalism), the basic structure has
persisted now for at least five thousand years, since the rise of the great
conquest states of Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E. (TPTB 39-40)
The result was large standing armies, high taxes, deterioration of the
statusof women and the poor, slaves as booty of war, the consolidation of
citystates into empires and a spiraling into cycles of ever greater
violence.

A parallel result was the spread of what Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive
Violence, the notion that violence "saves," that it is successful and
reallyrepresents the natural way things are. This persists as an unexamined
assumption behind our thinking today:

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It,
and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our
society today. (TPTB 42)
A supreme example and source of this faith is the Babylonian myth of
creation. This tells of the god-hero Marduk slaying the serpent-monster
mother Tiamat, and how the world was created from her slain body. There,
Wink says, violence precedes creation. This myth spread throughout the
ancient world.

The biblical myth presents the opposite. In the biblical faith the creation
is good, and Jesus taught love of enemies, not their extermination.

We see the domination myth enacted again and again in comic books and TV
cartoons: Helpless people are threatened or brutalized by evil creatures. A
hero flies in to rescue them. At first he loses and suffers greatly but
eventually prevails. The evil beings are defeated and usually destroyed. It
is seen regularly in movies and books and reenacted in public life.

This does not encourage support of democracy and law. It is a vigilante
kind of justice, as when the lone western hero outdraws his evil opponent
and leaves him in the dust. It reflects impatience with legal protections,
a desire for instant justice, violent solutions, a yearning for a white
knight on a great horse who will set all things right. This is infact a
totalitarian fantasy. Wink writes:

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting
uncomplicated, irrational and primitive depiction of evil the world has
ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is the one into which
virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the
process of maturation. (TPTB 53)
The devastating result is that children are brainwashed into the faith of
the dominator society. They are taught to locate evil outside of themselves
and to scapegoat other peoples. The double effect is loss of ability to see
evil in oneself and one's own system and the violent reaction to those
whose ways are different.

The myth of redemptive violence appears on the large screen in the nation
state and its supportive religious idolatry. Such a system cannot tolerate
a real and absolute God, only a tamed one. So if God can't be eliminated,
He (sic) must be domesticated. Religious language is used constantly by the
leadership of the nation in support of violence.

It was fine men who tortured the woman we spoke to in Argentina. One
insisted to her, "But I go to Mass every morning too." Another proposed
marriage (they had tortured her husband to death two years before). These
men were not sadists. They had merely surrendered themselves to the idol of
the state. Once they had crossed that line, any evil was good if it served
the idol... (ETP 97-8)
For a nation to believe that it embodies the good is dangerous to itselfand
others. Wink speaks of his love of country and the need for a more
modestview by Americans of their calling from God.

http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/powers/8_practical.htm