Did you read the Wisdom of Doubt series?

“Not necessarily” — right. But in the actual history of this America, it is a fact. I can’t give the whole story now, but let me just remind you of a song I’m sure you know. It starts, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” The PERCEPTION was of injustice, of course, but the LANGUAGE in which it was perceived was largely messianic. The distinction you are making between the present and the future seems, in this context, forced. The whole point of messianic thinking is that “now IS the future.” We all know this can be a lens that horribly distorts everything, but in the example I gave, it said to the believers (including the slaves), “the time you’ve always dreamed would arrive, is now.”

I am not ADVOCATING messianic thinking. I am acknowledging its widespread existence and trying to understand it.

Basically, I think messianic thinking originates in conditions of extreme social crisis, allowing people to survive psychologically; but at other times it can perpetuate crisis because that’s the model it presents. Life is full of crises, but maybe it’s a question of identifying crises accurately, not assuaging one’s fears with lemming-like deceptions.

“… messianic thinking is a chief cause of suffering in the world, and we’d all be better off if everyone would stop doing it. I can’t imagine what “resources” exist within the eastern religions for perpetrating messianic concepts, but if there are any they need adjustment.”

First of all, I meant, what resources exist in WESTERN religions for alternate interpretations of messianic concepts — because, even if it’s true that we’d all be better off if everyone would stop doing it, that’s tantamount to saying we’d be better off if there were no Judaism and Christianity. Which of course mny people believe, but I didn’t think you were one of them.

“essentially there’s a big difference between accepting a doctrine of “end times” as a metaphor or a mystery (common among more liberal Christians) and believing in a literal End Time that requires true believers to bring the planet to Jesus before it can happen. In other words, the more concrete one’s belief, and the more the belief dictates one’s actions, the more harmful it is.”

I certainly agree with this, and in fact here you are BEGINNING to answer my question. You are saying that messianic concepts must be understood metaphorically not literally. Some time I hope you can talk about what one would understand if one were to do that, and how to make that case to religious Christians and Jews. To say that it is “common” among more liberal Christians seems to me a kind of tautology; to me the point is that it is NOT COMMON ENOUGH among Christians, period.

Well, no. The only people drafted for Beinart’s war were kids his own age with far fewer prospects who signed up to defend the country and sadly didn’t hold out for the contract rider that would have allowed them to sit out the chance of being killed or maimed for some hubristic neoconservative Harvard boy’s thought experiment.

But after all, he didn’t think he was sending “many” of the little people to their deaths, and a few years after it became clear that he was, he committed to rethinking the situation. What more can you ask?

Odd that the genocide-level death numbers of the oppressed peoples of Iraq he claims to have been doing this in service of don’t figure as something he regrets gambling with.

Not necessarily. If there’s an injustice right in front of you, and you try to stop it, I don’t see the messianism. The nature of messianic-type action is to trash the present to enable an ideal future. If you are taking care of the present, that’s an entirely different act.

Thus, Maha, I don’t understand your answer, or rather, I understand it, and I even agree with it — but I don’t see where it answers the question I asked.

I guess I didn’t understand the question. You asked “Are there non-linear ways of understanding messianic concepts, and if so, what resources exist within these particular traditions for doing so?”

My point is that messianic thinking is a chief cause of suffering in the world, and we’d all be better off if everyone would stop doing it. I can’t imagine what “resources” exist within the eastern religions for perpetrating messianic concepts, but if there are any they need adjustment.

So if you support religion in this country, are you saying the value is entirely IN SPITE OF the messianic flavor of American religion?

This takes a longer answer than I can provide at the moment, but essentially there’s a big difference between accepting a doctrine of “end times” as a metaphor or a mystery (common among more liberal Christians) and believing in a literal End Time that requires true believers to bring the planet to Jesus before it can happen. In other words, the more concrete one’s belief, and the more the belief dictates one’s actions, the more harmful it is.

To think it’s all going to totally change at some point sounds to me in itself like messianic thinking.

I see it as taking care of the present. Fundamentalism is hardming the planet in myriad ways and has to be dealt with.

“Selfish impulses, when they get out of control, can tear society apart, he [Irving Kristol] warned. To preserve social order we need a fixed moral order. We therefore need a clear sense of the absolute difference between good and bad, strict rules that tell us what is good, and powerful institutions that can get people to obey those rules.”

This seems to me to be the crux of the Bush Administration’s orientation to everything from Katrina, to the Middle East to the stacking of Federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court with those that know what is good and right and have the power to enforce it.

People in New Orleans who hadn’t saved money and empowered themselves to escape were/are bad; Arabs and Persians are bad for many reasons, and control of the courts is necessary not only to get those strict rules into place, but also of course, to protect the rule bending that is “necessary” to reward the financial interests of “the good guys” who, after all, are entitled to benefit for all that righteous work they are doing.

But underneath all of that it seems to me is the psychological framework that cannot tolerate relational ambiguity because of the excruciating anxiety it causes. The anxiety is both conscious and unconscious and plays out in the primary and secondary gains frame.

The primary gain for attacking Iraq, and Iran if they can engineer it without obliterating the party for 2008, is delineating the good from the evil and reducing anxiety by invoking the best defense is a good offense strategy.

The secondary gain is the assuagement and soothing of the unconsciously held fear of being controlled or dominated that would produce the experience of helplessness. To the non-maturative personality the dominant/subordinate relational modality is the only one there is, which is to be oblivious to the more highly developed mode of mutual and cooperative.

The irony here is that when they are subordinated/ousted from power it is mostly because they have precipitated that very result via their own behavior, a small factoid that they tend to be blind to–lucky for us or they might be even more deceptive and manipulative than they already are.