Sermon to the Dark Sages.

[alice wellintown]

You would think it hardly necessary to remind academics that the
transfer of power from land to financial capital, from the land in the
country to the complex networks of the city, from the large farm to
the large factory has involved a concomitant transfer of power away
from those who hold titles and maintain them through personal
allegiance, service and protection to a monarch or dictator to those
who control labor and the exchange of goods, and that the organization
of the workers,  and so forth, is surely progress over the rebellion
of Spartacus.
For the obvious fact that the center of gravity has shifted, the
political power no longer held by kings, and lords, and dictators has
been accomplished with a great emancipation of the individual from the
rigid bonds of class and caste and of the dregs of religious custom
that the Ancient Dregs sometimes questioned but in the end, almost
always affirmed.

We have produced, along with our weapons of mass destruction and our
damaged Earth, political organization that no longer depends on the
“superior” authority of the sages and kings and the un-elected
tyrants, chosen of the gods. We have constructed a political
organization that does not reduce the free will to a sin of our
parents, but promotes the exercise of voluntary choice.

As I listen to Dr. King speak of the gradualism that has produced the
tragic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, an apartheid system of
education here, still (2013), in the great City of New York, an
incarceration rate for many that is proof that King’s dream remains
only a dream unfulfilled, an unemployment rate, a stagnation of
incomes even as profits set new records,  and a roughly 3% of the
population that amasses, through our corrupted system, dominated by
oligarchy,  more and more of the wealth…and so on down the road to
Canary Row and to a Detroit belly-up, I am not ready to turn
Malthusian and bang the death drum , call out Chicken Little,
surrender to the pessimism of a sky falling into a toxic sea because,
again, it seems hardly necessary to point out how the spread of
political individualism, the spread of ideas founded on the idea that
individuals may exercise free will and therefore are encouraged to
question the laws, even the laws of science. There is progress, and
are I say, justified hope, in the simple fact that we now think
differently about the world, that the states are not ordained by gods,
are not the work of a divine, often wrathful god, but the work of
women and men who labor to satisfy their own desires, to exercise
their free will. These are not, despite the sophomoric rants of Howard
Zinn’s disciples, the new dark ages, or even dark decades.  Only
ignorance, ignorance of history, and propaganda, and yes Zinnis
propaganda, would cause one to reach such a conclusion. We do not live
in the best of all possible worlds. Nor would we want to. But please,
the world is less violent, more peaceful, a better place than the one
I was born into. It was darkness when the Kennedys were murdered, when
King was shot down. When Nixon and Vietnam….these are not dark days.
The economy, stupid, needs fixing. We know how to fix it. That’s
progress. We need only exercise our free will and our conscience.