Lately my editor has suggested I change the name of my column, since I am rarely writing about philosophy.
I suggested the title “Rupert Jeremiah” which, I might add, is the title of one of my blogs.
OK, I admit I have a penchant for forecasting doom and gloom. When I was growing up, my mother’s nickname for me was Eeyore, the pessimistic donkey in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories.
I’ll also admit that Jeremiah is my favourite Hebrew prophet and I’ve written four essays about him. Check out that aforementioned blog, if you don’t believe me.
The fact is, last November, in my very first column for the Northern View, I riffed, in particular, on the future destructive effects of the Trump presidency for Canada.
Jeremiah wanted to be a priest, but he kept seeing catastrophe and he couldn’t shut up about it. He got thrown in a dungeon for his troubles, and then his prophecy was realized when the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed it.
What few people understand, even today, is that Jeremiah’s true greatness came, not from his prophecies, but from what he accomplished afterward, by changing the focus in ancient Judaism from making sacrifices in the temple to transforming the Jewish covenant into an inner process.
He called it a new covenant of the heart, and he revived and promoted a forgotten prayer, called the “Shema,” that emphasized a personal loving relationship with God that made it possible to worship as a Jew without ever needing to perform temple sacrifices again.
It’s no coincidence that Jeremiah wrote about this after the Jewish temple had been destroyed and the Jewish people had been exiled to Babylon.
It turned out that his prophetic writings and his prayer had a tremendous influence on Jesus hundreds of years later, which explains why the book that was written about Jesus ended up being called “The New Testament,” which, harkening back to Jeremiah, is just another way of saying “the new covenant.”
All the more reason for my newspaper column not to be called “Rupert Jeremiah” since I have no pretensions of spreading any religious message at all.
The reason I call it “The Philosopher Justice” is because I really do want to talk about philosophy, and in a way that is understandable for most people.
The trouble is that too many real events keep getting in the way. As much as I want to talk about the crucial difference between morality and ethics, where ancient Greek philosophy took a wrong turn, and why modern ethical philosophy is a fool’s errand, I have bigger fish to fry at the moment in dealing with rumours of war and invasions, the dangers of climate change, the importance of building resilience in Canada’s trade networks and supply chains, the growing dangers of authoritarianism, and the urgent need to prepare for a new flu pandemic.
Along the way, I’ll do my best to insert whatever philosophical wisdom I’ve garnered over the years, to put all this doom and gloom into a wider perspective.
Here’s hoping!
