Martin Luther believed that to be saved, one must first be damned. 

The US defense industrial base has fallen apart since the end of the Cold War. Now, it is being rebuilt as never before. 

Out of darkness comes a great light. The current suffering could lead to glory. Rebuilding the Industrial Base may be the concursus generalis for all Americans, not just the one percent of the one percent. Polybius (died 124 BC) noted long before the fall of the Roman Empire: 

We have not had to suffer either epidemics or prolonged wars and yet the towns are deserted and the lands barren. We lack men because we lack children. People are too fond of money and comfort and not enough of work. Consequently they are no longer willing to marry, or if they marry, they try to have no more than one or two children, in order to bring them up in luxury and to leave them a finer inheritance.

Consider the American Republic forewarned, then, that without national purpose and economic prosperity, they are headed for a similar fate. Folks seek a cushier experience of drug-induced sports gambling and endless Instagram stories as opposed to the deep study of Scripture, philosophy, and focus on the existential. Who are we? Why are we here? Why is there anything at all? What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? The West needs a rebirth of critical citizenship that privileges the lost soul in the library over the software engineer building carcinogenic social media apps and playing pickleball on the weekends. 

Yet what the West has come to privilege above all else is whatever earns a bigger profit. The social media marketer is vindicated daily; the historian caught between the library and homeless shelter. 

If there is a God, he probably would not be OK with a few earning billions while others are made obsolete; Christians are supposed to care for the conscience of the weak. In the words of the Old Testament prophet Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an overflowing stream.” With inequality growing by the day, perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he wrote in his 1882 book The Gay Science that “God is Dead.” Aldous Huxley believed religion was just a means of social control that preyed on the hopeless in their most vulnerable form in order to distract them from the realities undercutting their happiness. If you are poor in this life, the theistic argument goes, you will receive abundance in the next. Karl Marx believed religion is the opiate of the people, allowing them to accept outrageous inequality........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)