The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Edward Thomas

No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.

Luke 5:37-39

It is often observed that the United States is the only country in the world held together by ideas, notions of freedom, justice, equality, liberty, etc. But it would be more accurate to say that America is a nation forged through idols, various false gods offering easy but fraudulent comfort in times of ascent. But like all idols, they stop working when material reality, the actual stuff of everyday life, turns sour. There are a million abandoned idols for every extant one.

The biblical injunctions against worshiping ‘false idols’ is a tell, a redundant term that betrays the limited understanding of Iron Age herders and farmers. Back then, idols were real and tribal, and people could be on the side of a good one or a bad one; the bad ones belonged to the tribes that lost battles and wars.

Today, we are still acting out these archaic fantasies that there are good and bad idols, true and false gods behind whom (or more accurately, in front of whom), we must line up to do battle. But as prosaic but terrifying reality — collapse of natural support systems, global warming, depletion of fresh water, hyper top-heavy winner-take-all capitalism, increased eco-refugee flows, food chain collapse, coral reef dieoff from oceanic acidification, mass species extinctions, proliferation of forever chemicals and microplastics, toxic social media saturation — makes its hulking presence unavoidably obvious, the old idols that circulate around tribe, race, religion, nation, and economically-based morality are gasping their last breaths of life, for they have nothing to offer in the present state of polycrisis. Of course, they will shamble on, desperately and loudly proclaiming that we must recover and resuscitate these old idols, for they have served us so well (!) over the last few centuries and millennia. And there is no doubt that the old gods can still do incredible damage, as they are, and have always been, proxies for human power, control, and domination. But these are certainly death throes, the last violent quakes of zombie ideologies.

In the broadest sense, the seemingly anodyne, HR-tested acronym “DEI” is really a hammer to the heart of the old, dying gods. Even beyond the diversity of people, what it suggests is that we must look beyond the straight-jackets of today’s idol-driven ideologies for something that completely reinterprets and recalibrates the past and the future – and that is not a comfortable idea. DEI writ large means that our current constellation of gods and idols is utterly unequipped to fend off the ecological (and thus economic and political, because they are all linked by the actual dying of the physical world) Sword of Democles that is starting to slice the neck of civilization itself.

National solutions, international solutions, global solutions — none of these will help if we’re still clutching our crystals and holy books, asking our dying idols, “Hey, does this work for you?” We must let the idols die and face the future, which is icy and afire at the same time, as one family of biological creatures, locked together in a holy mission to stop destroying our home, and to put something completely different in place to heal the damage that is already done, and to provide a sane path forward that allows humans and the natural world to thrive at the same time.

CODA: The cognitive decline and increasingly erratic behavior of Donald Trump are really signs of an idol-driven brain lashing out at reality, trying to remake the world to match the obsolete gods that have already jumped the shark. Like the biblical quote at the beginning of this piece, Trump and his MAGA minions are trying to force new wine of reality into the old wineskins that cannot handle the load. Fossil fuel dependance, sexual rigidity, white supremacy, the nuclear family as the basic economic unit, car-centric suburbia and exurbia, nationalistic balance of powers, endless economic expansion, the equation of labor with high morality, American exceptionalism, the stark separation of humanity from the natural world, theocratic dualism which sees the world as a cosmic battleground of good vs. evil — these are all examples of dying idols that have nothing of substance to offer in our present condition.

New wineskins are needed.