This is a photo of Miroslav Volf from his faculty profile at the Yale Divinity School.The following passage is a working out of the details from Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers, specifically what Wink calls the Domination System. Volf asks the not unimportant question of such an abstract concept - what does it look like, and how does it work? The following, part of his description, is more than apt in light of recent history. It comes from p. 88 of Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996):
In extraordinary situations and under extraordinary directors certain themes from the "background cacophany" are picked up, orchestrated into a bellicose musical, and played up. "Historians" - national, communal or personal interpreters of the past - trumpet the double theme of the former glory and past victimization; "economists" join in with the accounts of present exploitation an dgreat economic potentials; "political scientists" add the theme of the growing imbalance of power, of steadily giving ground, of losing control over what is rightfully ours; "cultural anthropologists" bring in the dangers of loss of identity and extol the singular value of our personal or cultural gifts, capable of genuinely enriching the outside world; "politicians" pick up all four themes and weave them into a high-pitched aria about the threats to vital interests posed by the other who is therefore the very incarnation of evil; finally the "priests" enter in a solemn procession and accompany all this with a soothing background chant that offers to any whose conscineces may have been bothered the assurance that God is on our side and tht our enemy is the enemy of God and therefore an adversary of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.
Aw this bellicose musical with reinforcing themes is broadcast through the media, resonances are created with the background cacophony of evil that permeates the culture of a community, and the community finds itself singing the music and marching to its tune. To refuse to sing and march, to protest the madness of the spectacle appears irrational irresponsible, naive and cowardly, treacherous toward one's own and dangerously sentimental toward the evil enemy. The state for "ethnic cleansing" and similar "eruptions" of evil - personal as well as communal - is set. The first shot only needs to be fired, and the chain reaction will start.
I do hope that some of this rings some bells. In light of the fact that it was published five years before the attacks on September 11, 2001 and six years before the drumbeats for war with IRaq began to beat, it does make one pause, no?
