Beyond the Promised Land: The Movement and the Myth

By David F. Noble

Iconoclast David F. Noble traces the evolution and eclipse of the biblical mythology of the Promised Land, the foundational story of Western Culture. Part impassioned manifesto, part masterful survey of opposed philosophical and economic schools, Beyond the Promised Land brings into focus the twisted template of the Western imagination and its faith-based market economy.

From the first recorded versions of “the promise” saga in ancient Babylon, to the Zapatistas’ rejection of promises never kept, Noble explores the connections between Judeo-Christian belief and corporate globalization. Inspiration for activists and students alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Sep 19, 2005
• ISBN: 9781897071786

David F. Noble

David Franklin Noble (July 22, 1945 – December 27, 2010) was a critical historian of technology, science and education, best known for his groundbreaking work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science, and the department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. Noble held positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Smithsonian Institution and Drexel University, as well as many visiting professorships.

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Contents

Prologue

1 Introduction: Hope in the Here and Now

PART I · THE EVOLUTION OF THE MYTH

2 Before the Promise

3 The Promise

4 Heir to the Promise

5 The Promise Objectified

History

Technology

The Market

6 The Promise Personified

PART II · THE ECLIPSE OF THE MYTH

7 The Promise Renounced

8 The Promise Defied

9 Beyond the Promised Land

Epilogue

Index

Prologue

THIS BOOK TOOK shape around the turn of the millennium, a recent but now distant time. As the twentieth Christian century drew to a close and the remnant of believers awaited ascent to another world, a different population took to the streets in defence of this world. Shedding much of their Western ideological inheritance, their biblical birthright, as it were, participants in the global justice movement embraced a new sense of themselves and the meaning and purpose of their lives. Unlike their forebears, they no longer suffused and sustained their struggles with ancient promises of redemption and transcendent guarantees of deliverance. Instead, they began to move onto another plane of struggle, beyond the promised land, having come to the understanding that beyond the promised land is the here and now.

This book, then, took shape in another era, before 9/11, before the American crusade in Iraq, before the eruption of the full fury of the people of the promise. As the warring heirs of Abraham fight it out across the globe, chosen people all—zealous Zionists, fanatical Christians, radical Islamists—the fresh start that was the global justice movement seems stillborn in retrospect. But if the project of corporate globalization proceeds apace armed to the teeth and with less overt opposition, it does so now also with less ideological legitimation than before the emergence of the global justice movement, hence the greater need for force.

The mythological sources of this legitimation, the biblical narratives of perfection, fall, and redemption, have now exploded to the surface of Western consciousness in all their absurdity and horror, tearing through their more subtle, secularized manifestations—in our ideas of history, technology, and the market—to lay bare the terrifying template of the Western imagination. It remains to be seen whether or not this eruption signals the demise of a deformed culture, or, with a vengeance, its retrograde renewal. But its violence might yet awaken us to the urgency of moving beyond our formative myths, a shift barely begun by yesterday’s global justice activists, whose message survives their movement. Is a post-biblical world possible before Armageddon? At the moment, that is the overriding question.

ONE

Introduction:

Hope in the Here and Now

ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2003, fourteen thousand farmers and indigenous people marched towards the convention centre at the start of the fifth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico. Some six miles from the meeting centre they were brought to a halt by police barricades. Using a mock WTO coffin as a battering ram, they made a partial break in the barricade. At that moment South Korean farmer Kyung-Hae Lee, a former president of the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation, climbed atop the rubble with his banner and stabbed himself in the heart. Earlier the fifty-six-year-old farmer had penned a message to the world explaining the reason for his suicide and exhorting his comrades to intensify the opposition to the WTO’s freetrade agenda. We Korean fellow-farmers and myself realized that our destinies are out of our hands already, he wrote. He warned that human beings are in an endangered situation in the face of an undesirable globalization of inhumane, environment-distorting, farmer-killing, and undemocratic,[sic] and declared, It should be stopped immediately, otherwise the false logic of neoliberalism will perish the diversities of agriculture and disastrously to all human beings [sic].

Two days later Greenpeace activists from Mexico and Argentina bound themselves to the anchor chain of a ship carrying 40,000 tons of genetically engineered corn from the United States to the Mexican port of Veracruz. The U.S. dumping of GE corn in Mexico must stop immediately, Greenpeace campaigner Doreen Stabinsky insisted. We are dealing with an emergency situation where one of the most important staple crops is at risk due to genetic contamination. The ship was temporarily forced back to sea, only to return later under Mexican navy protection. A few days earlier in Cancun, Vandana Shiva had made public a Citizen’s GMO Challenge to the WTO, a grassroots response to a complaint lodged with the World Trade Organization by the world’s major growers of GE crops—the United States, Argentina, and Canada—against European Union restrictions on the importation of those crops. Given the abundance of alternatives, the risks that genetically-modified (GM) crops pose to the environment and human health . . . the scientific uncertainty, and the lack of any socio-economic advantages, we declare that the use of the WTO dispute settlement system for imposing GM food on the world is totally illegitimate.

The bold actions and statements at the gates of the WTO put in relief what must be understood to be a radical break with the hegemonic ideological structure of Western society and the West-dominated world. Two of the central tenets of this structure were not only subjected to question but rejected outright. Faith in the ultimate beneficence of both the unfettered self-regulating market and the untrammelled development of science and technology, so long enshrined in paeans to laissez-faire and policies of laissez innover (freedom for unrestricted technical innovation), had been shaken to the core. In the past any and all opponents of these heretofore self-evident truths had always been effectively derided, disarmed, and dismissed as enemies of prosperity and progress. But no longer. Here, in Cancun, as anticipated four years earlier at the WTO meeting in Seattle, the tried and true shibboleths and strategies rang hollow and ran aground. On its final day the WTO meeting collapsed in disarray, with delegates of the world’s poorer nations walking out in frustration and without any agreements on world trade.

The decisive defiance of the evangelism of free trade and the enchantments of scientific and technological innovation that surfaced at Cancun signalled a far more profound rupture in the substrate of Western culture, an unseen fracture that, in fact, was what made the surface events possible. For this defiance reflected an unprecedented departure from the mythological foundation of the Western imagination, which has its roots in the Hebrew Bible. This fundamental shift in thought not only inspired the opposition but also, more significantly, gave it its resolve and confidence in the face of power and tradition.

Of course, here as always the pronouncements of the free traders were belied by the contradictions. Rich nations demanded the opening of other countries’ markets for their goods in the name of trade liberalization and global prosperity, attacking their opponents as selfish and short-sighted while at the same time protecting their own industries with tariffs, subsidies, and patents. Likewise, the promoters of genetic engineering heralded the elimination of world hunger and assailed the critics for being unscientific, indeed anti-science, while being unable themselves to marshal any sound scientific evidence for the safety or even for the technological, economic, or environmental viability of their wondrous products. But their ideologies had heretofore been impervious to such contradictions, since the plausibility of their position rested not on facts but on faith, not on realities but on dreams. Thus, it was not evidence or arguments that rendered the new challenges so effective. More fundamentally, it was the erosion of the faith and the dreams, a fissure in the bedrock of belief in the myth of the promised land. Hence, the true significance of events like those at Cancun eclipses any concerns of the moment, for all their drama, and lies rather in a movement of mind beyond the promised land.

Throughout Western history the myth of the promised land has given resonance both to the legitimating refrains of myriad regimes of domination and to the hymns of hope of those subject to them. But that those stories were fed from the same source served mostly to strengthen the hegemony of the powerful rather than subvert it, as the oppressed tended too readily to mistake their masters’ tales for their own (with their masters’ studied encouragement). More significantly, while the myth of the promised land could mean different things to different people, in all its forms it had one basic structure—a structure that located the fulfilment of the promise in a place and time far removed from that in which it was offered, and that projected hope away from its source in the concrete contingencies and exigencies of life, indeed, in life itself, and onto some abstract predetermined destiny.

The ideologies of technological progress and free-market panaceas are only the latest, secularized, manifestations of this mythology. The rebellion against them, however, no longer derives from, or defers to, the same mythology. Instead it draws its energy and insight from the opposite: an insistence upon the present and the particular, human volition, and an uncompromising affirmation of life. This explains the resolute refusal to surrender to predetermined and deferred destinies that are out of our hands. It is time to abandon the empty promises of religion, technology, and consumerism, an Australian activist declared several years ago. In Seattle another anti-WTO activist reflected, I saw that inevitabilities could be challenged.

Beneath such words lies a new way of thinking that rejects the very notion of inevitability, or of finding refuge in abstract promises. Over against what it sees as the moribund but still dangerous utopianism of the powerful, this way of thinking poses an anti-utopianism of hope in the here and now, of hope as trust in life itself, in the words of Christopher Lasch, a disposition to see the promised land not as a distant objective but as a present reality, the ground and basis of our being.

The myth of the promised land is a tale told by strangers. It is the mythology of a people adrift, of a population without location, the rootless and restless, the displaced, the exiled. Cut off from any sustained terrestrial connection, they have sought their place in time, in an otherworldly arena of purpose, meaning, and direction, in reified ideas of God, history, the future, universality, and transcendence. At the heart of this mythology is the conviction that there is an overarching order to human affairs, independent of human will, that can be discovered through revelation or reason, or some combination of both, and that people’s fortunes ultimately depend upon whether or not they align themselves with this order.

Today’s break is a belated recognition and repudiation of this exilic remove from reality, out of which the promised land mythology arose in the first place. It aims not to erase the creative contributions to the human spirit generated by that myth of ceaseless motion and spiritual striving, but to correct for its undue overdevelopment in Western consciousness, at the expense of a more settled and sustainable existence. The new outlook, rooted once again in the particulars of place, recalls more ancient stores of wisdom from which the myth of the promised land took leave, and it does so in order to restore some balance to belief, for the sake of human and planetary survival.

PART I

The Evolution of the Myth

TWO

Before the Promise

RECORDED HISTORY dawned in the settled society of ancient Mesopotamia, the world’s earliest civilization. There in the Tigris-Euphrates valley five thousand years ago the invention of writing coincided with the development of pottery, leaving behind an enduring record of engraved clay tablets that chronicled the rise of cities and towns, kings and empires. The time and place also marked the advent of an agricultural economy, commerce, and systems of government and law. It saw the evolution of not only such technologies as sickles, ploughs, and hoes, irrigation works, wheeled transport, the potters’ wheel, stone-building, metallurgy, and sailing ships, but also of that epoch’s most advanced culture of science, mathematics, literature, and the arts. The abundant cultural remains of this civilization reflect the hegemonic mythology of the age, grounded upon polytheistic and animistic religious practice, focused upon (female) fertility, and rooted in a belief in the fundamental correspondence between human experience and the regular rhythms of nature and the cosmos.

By the first half of the second millennium BC this fecund society had come to be centred at Babylon, capital of the Babylonian kingdom and the site of enormous intellectual endeavour and literary creativity. It was here that the first code of civil and criminal law was formulated under Hammurabi. And it was here also that the first masterpiece of human literature, the so-called Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in the Akkadian language by an anonymous Babylonian poet. This remarkable saga recounts the exploits of the legendary Sumerian king Gilgamesh of Uruk, who had supposedly lived a thousand years earlier. While there is no solid historical evidence that these events actually happened or, indeed, that Gilgamesh ever lived, the Babylonian poem clearly draws upon earlier Sumerian poems and other still-extant artifacts testifying that Gilgamesh was the subject of a much older oral and cultic tradition. Judging from the record of existing copies of the Epic, moreover, we can see that interest in Gilgamesh endured for another 1,500 years after the Old Babylonian Epic was written, especially in its later form edited in the twelfth century BC. It is safe to say, therefore, that the Epic of Gilgamesh well reflects the spirit of this first permanently settled society. The later version was deciphered from parts of tablets first unearthed in the mid-nineteenth century AD, after having lain in ruins for 2,500 years; fragments of the earlier Old Babylonian masterpiece came to light over the next half-century.

The Epic of Gilgamesh imparts the wisdom of place, the worldly sense of a society in which people lived in cities and cultivated the land. Rendered literally, it rejects as foolish and futile the quest for immortality and transcendence and counsels acceptance and celebration of the human condition—its losses and limitations as well as its joys—as the only path to peace and happiness.

The hero of the Epic is the young and powerful king Gilgamesh, half-divine in origin—his mother Ninsun was a goddess—but nevertheless mortal. Vain and tyrannical, the wilful king lords over his people and tries their patience until they implore the gods to create a rival who might keep him in check. In response the goddess Aruru fashions out of clay Enkidu, who, covered with hair, roams the wilds with the animals. To separate Enkidu from his herd a trapper sends Shamhat, a harlot from Uruk, to civilize the wild man. She plies him with her charms, her bath and garments, her food and drink, and, having succeeded in her assigned task, takes him to Uruk. There Enkidu encounters Gilgamesh in a contest of strength. Having surrendered his animal powers in his seduction by Shamhat, Enkidu loses the fight and submits to the king’s supremacy. The two former rivals become like brothers.

Together, in search of fame and glory, Gilgamesh and Enkidu set out on heroic adventures. First, in defiance of warnings from the elders and despite the initial hesitations of Enkidu, they succeed in slaying the fearsome Humbaba, guardian of the sacred cedar grove of the gods, which allows them to cut down the trees and use the timber for temple doors. Second, they slay the mighty Bull of Heaven (the constellation Taurus)—sent to kill Gilgamesh by the vengeful Ishtar, goddess of love and war, after the king had derisively spurned her amorous advances. They use the bull’s enormous horns as vessels for holy oil. In retribution for defying the gods and despoiling and thereby desecrating nature and the cosmos, the gods decide that one of them must die, and choose Enkidu. Despairing of his terminal illness, Enkidu at first curses Shamhat for making him weak and bringing this premature end