Cathedrals

Religious organizations have rushed to bring immigrants of their particular stripe into the United States with little regard for immigration law. Here in Boston, there has been a notable influx of Brazilians, Haitians and religious Muslims, who flock to churches and mosques. It may appear to the uneducated that this is pure philanthropy.

 

This is actually an ancient religious model to sustain clergy and wealth of the religious institution. The Roman Catholic cathedral in Europe, while now considered an art object, has been an enduring symbol of that religious paradigm. Aristocrats, colluding with the religious clergy, encouraged/forced impoverished peasants to flock to cathedral building sites during the non-harvesting seasons, where they were fed in exchange for backbreaking labor. By raping the land of its resources, aristocracy and Church used the threat of starvation as a tool to populate armies, quarries and scaffolds.

 

Now life in America, a promised land of supermarkets, welfare benefits and shopping malls, is the lure. In exchange, churches are filled and contributions made. Secularization of those who acculturate to the American Way over one or two generations creates a constant need for the religious to replenish the immigrant base of their congregations.

 

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, industrialists mimicked this religious model. They brought millions of laborers here to work in textile factories, mines and on railroads. These workers were fed little and paid a pittance. Then they were exploited by other industrialists as a market for manufactured goods. Few found the American Dream in their lifetimes.

 

We in the U.S. are in a new economy where labor supply far exceeds the demand in a country which produces too little and consumes too much. The new aristocrats, the techies, the bankers and the shareholders, have sponsored a government which has herded in a new influx of cheap and dispensable labor. They provide cheap food and domestic labor for a dwindling middle class who are now becoming redundant. They must be placated until they are outnumbered by a more easily manipulated and less educated voter base.

 

The great cathedral of a self-reliant and productive United States is rapidly becoming just one of many corporate high-rises across the planet, with the wealthy living in the penthouse and the rest of us scrambling for a place between the basement and the middle floors. Robots, cranes and computers are the new peasant workforce. The population below the penthouses is geometrically rising. Soon their consumption will no longer be a fuel of capitalism but will be a drain on what the wealthy will call 'society', which will be comprised of those with money and control of the robotic technology. The preview of this global trend is seen in the current global recession, as capitalism in an overpopulated and undereducated world grinds to its inevitable limits.