Power to the Powerless and the Prophetic Imagination

At the beginning of The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann states

“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” - 

 People should accept the system as it is. Nothing is going to change. Don't even think about it, let alone discuss it with others. The entrenched powers create, maintain, and enforce this social reality and consciousness. This consciousness can be identified with what Brueggemann calls the "royal consciousness", that was created, maintained, and enforced by kings of Israel, beginning with Solomon. 

In the 40th Anniversary edition, Brueggemann reflects.

 “I would now alter ‘royal consciousness’ to ‘totalism’...The term ‘totalism’ refers to a socio-ideological arrangement in which hegemonic ideology takes up all the social space and allows for no alternative possibility. Its claim is ‘total’!” 

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, a book by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton

As I mentioned in my last post there is a resonance with the book, The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel. Coincidentally, both books were first published in 1978 and written in two very different contexts (capitalist USA versus communist totalitarian Czechoslovakia) and from quite different perspectives (a Christian Old Testament scholar and a secular humanist).

I have a Penguin Vintage edition which includes a beautiful Introduction by Timothy Snyder, written in 2018, also coincidentally the same time as the 40th Anniversary edition of The Prophetic Imagination, that I am reading. Their republicaton is testimony to the enduring influence of both books.

Havel coined the term "post-totalitarian" for his essay, writing, "I do not wish to imply by the prefix 'post-' that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships..."

Havel biographer, John Keane, describes Havel's definition of a post-totalitarian world:

Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'…it is therefore necessary to see, argued Havel, that power relations…are best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…

Here are a few note-worthy quotes from Havel's essay 

“If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.”

The entrenched powerful create a "royal consciousness" which defines social reality.

“As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual... Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.”

“Patočka [to whom Havel dedicated the essay] used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel polis. 

We cannot escape our responsibility to where we are located, both in time and place. [Aside: this has interesting parallels to what the Apostle Paul says about the "calling" of Christians in 1 Corinthians 7]. 

"If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. 

Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now-but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it.

In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one's responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it.”

Small actions by a single person to speak truth to power can have significant ramifications. 

For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, "The emperor is naked!"—when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.”

T]hey must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

“It is of great importance that the main thing - the everyday, thankless and neverending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully and in quiet dignity - never imposes any limits on itself, never be half-hearted, inconsistent, never trap itself in political tactics, speculating on the outcome of its actions or entertaining fantasies about the future. The purity of this struggle is the best guarantee of optimum results when it comes to actual interaction with the post-totalitarian structures.”