First Things
Moses does what many would-be world citizens who have committed real-world acts of terrorism and conspiracy have done throughout the modern era. Moses flees from Pharaoh into Midian as Lenin fled to Switzerland in order to escape from the tsar’s secret police. And is this surprising? What could be more natural and normal? What, to recall Nussbaum, could be more simply and post-culturally human than to revert back to our basic animal desire for security and survival? Or, as the shopkeeper in Islamabad worries, what is more nakedly human than to seek transformation of the world into an amoral playground for the powerful who seek dominion and pleasure?
God does not leave Moses alone in his incipient multicultural personality, his Bolshevik combination of universalism, idealism, amorality, and selfishness. On Mount Horeb, the LORD God appears to Moses and commands him to return to Egypt to act on behalf of the enslaved Israelites. Moses resists, anticipating our present ambivalences. Who am I to go? How can I impose my worldview upon others? If I do go, then in whose name should I say I was sent? After all, some say we should live according to the god of duty, others the god of utility, and still others the will of the majority. God does not give Moses an epistemological principle to adjudicate. He does not provide a governing principle or a master ideal. Instead, the LORD gives Moses his everlasting name.
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To my mind, the trajectory of the biblical account of Moses, a trajectory reenacted every time a child is circumcised or baptized or in any way dedicated to a determinate cultural authority rather than left free to float along in life as an unattached, uncommitted, unclaimed world citizen, helps us understand an important point of conflict in the current culture wars. On one side, we have an educational ideal widely held. This vision wishes to deracinate. If we can live as cultural polytheists, exposed to many different perspectives and allowing no divine name to take possession of our souls, then our moral imaginations will be freed from the limiting confines of no one culture’s view of good and evil. On the other side, we have an old-fashioned ideal, one as old as culture itself. In this view, the human person must be subjected to and formed by that authority of the divine, without which he or she will live only as an animal, seeking only the base goods of pleasure, power, and survival. The conflict is fundamental and irreconcilable.
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human–which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism. (more)
