Beyond the Promised Land:
The Movement and the Myth
By David F. Noble
Between the Lines, 214 pages, $19.95
In this annoying little tract, York University professor David F. Noble does a too-quick dash through Western social, religious and intellectual history, and identifies the source of all the woes that have beset us throughout the career of our civilization and, through us, have cursed the whole world. It's the Bible. More exactly, it is what Christians call the Old Testament (aside from the wisdom writing known as Ecclesiastes). More precisely still, it is what Prof. Noble calls "the Hebrew mythology" of a land promised, briefly won, lost and, at last, transfigured into an objective to be realized fully only beyond the end of history.
Nowadays, this narrative and the related themes of exile and redemption, which are unarguably central to both the Hebrew Scriptures and to Christian imagination, 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." We are shown the barbarous manifestations of "Hebrew mythology" in several contemporary things Prof. Noble deeply dislikes. One is Zionism, which he condemns and dismisses in seven pages and never returns to. The more important one is globalism -- the truest and most destructive offspring of malignant biblical faith in the Promised Land, and the imminent danger to which this book would alert us.
Though hardly meaning to do so -- in fact, he means to do exactly the opposite -- Noble manages to spin a dark aura of invincibility and inevitability around the contemporary phenomenon of the global market. The makings of both its alienation and imaginative power are rooted, ultimately, in God's call to Abraham (and Abraham's foolish acceptance of the summons) to leave behind roots and homeland, and become an exile in permanent search of another country.
Though the origins and content of the Hebrew Scriptures are "mired in the realm of fantasy and scholarly fiction," and, he says, neither Abraham nor Jesus ever existed outside the delusions of their followers, the biblical narratives about these people seem to have taken up residence in our minds, like cancers, poisoning our souls.
Just about everyone from Abraham to the present day, whether he meant to do so or not, has been complicit in creating what the author considers to be the living hell of globalism: Charlemagne, Roger Bacon, the Puritans, Freemasons, Hegel, "the Franciscan fellow-traveller Christopher Columbus," Adam Smith, John D. Rockefeller, Marx, Ronald Reagan (at the end of whose presidency, "[t]e stage had been set for 'globalization,' the latest incarnation of the myth of the promised land").
So devoted is Noble to finding the biblical toxin everywhere, he looks at Martin Luther King's final, sublimely impassioned address to his followers in the U.S. civil rights struggle and sees even there "the same assured spirit of earthly triumph and heavenly salvation [that]impels the suicide bombers of fundamentalist Islamic youth.. . . ."
But while almost all Westerners who have thought, worked, merely lived and died, or who are still alive, stand condemned before David Noble's Throne of Judgment, there are heroes in this book, all of them anti-globalists, or at least anti-Christians. This congregation of the blessed include the farmers and indigenous people who marched on a 2003 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Mexico, and Korean farmer Kyung-Hae Lee, who penned an anti-globalist statement, then publicly stabbed himself to death. The anarchist Bakunin and the thinker Nietzsche also get places in Noble's heaven, as do, remarkably, the braying rabble that nearly toppled the rule of law in France in 1968. (At least it's as braying rabble that I remember them; Noble considers the anarcho-nihilist revolt of the 1960s to have been, admirably, "a spontaneous eruption of rage against the routinized alienation of modern society, in all its forms, and an irrepressible release of creative energy.")
Other inspired efforts to resist "hegemony" in the last 30 years or so include "mysticism, shamanism, witchcraft . . . organized atheism . . . and the ancient traditions of indigenous peoples."
The most obvious source of Noble's manner of presentation -- tripping lightly through vast tracts of intellectual history, for example -- is Marx's brilliant Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). But our author is not a splendid agitator such as Marx, and one imagines that he would be a happier man were he pursuing his scholarly interests in the history of technology rather than trying, as he does so unconvincingly here, to rouse his readers to fling themselves into the fight against strange, new, fugitive and fascinating phenomenon of the first genuinely global market in history.
John Bentley Mays is a Toronto art and architecture critic, and a columnist for Globe Real Estate.