"Future Shoes" by Michael Finley

The best book I've read about the future lately is about events 2000 years ago that are still unfolding. It is a life of Jesus -- but a different sort of one.

"Desire of the Everlasting Hills" by Thomas Cahill is the third in his excellent "Hinges of History" series, commencing with "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and "The Gifts of the Jews." In this book he asks the most basic of all questions: How can human beings as a species overcome their propensity for violence and cruelty and live peacefully together?

The hills of the ancient world, from Hammurabi to Augustus, were soaked in the blood of the powerless, Cahill says. But what the hills cried out for was a cessation to the bloodletting. Which is where Jesus comes in.

Jesus was a devout Jew, Cahill says, with a radical vision of a more simplified, universal Law. His mission was the mission that the religion named for him has botched: to extend mercy to the powerless, and to plead mercy to the powerful.

The Jews already adhered to this formula. Jesus's gift was to take the chosen people's idea of the mitzvah and to universalize it for all people -- Samaritans, centurions, and slaves. He, with the help of Saint Paul, fashioned a portable, monotheistic spirituality that a jaded empire was hungering for -- Judaism-to-Go.

According to Cahill, only the final, most controversial gospel, the Book of John, insists on Jesus's divinity. Catacomb Christians accepted it with reluctance because it forever shut the door on Christians being a flavor of Judaism. And it meant the new faith would be dogged forever by the claims of its most mystical and most power-mongering subgroups: pietists and gnostics who created a secret, sacred center -- a church. Kind of like winning the Civil War and getting South Carolina back.

Despite his provincial origins, short career, and catastrophic death, the power of Jesus' idea has survived over many centuries. While Christianity as an institution has had major ups and downs, the personality of Jesus has stayed attractively real over time.

It happens that I, too, have tried my messianic hand at solving the historical problems of mankind. Three years ago, I published, along with Harvey Robbins, a book called "Transcompetition." It was an effort to work out on paper a methodology for dealing with bullies -- in the workplace, among corporations, and between nations.

The best Harvey and I could come up with was the necessity of the underpowered to band together and maintain a public voice of censure when predators are on the prowl. But then, it was not in our power to create an afterlife in which to punish the cruel victors in this life -- the Saddams and Microsofts of this realm.

But I realize, looking back, how rooted our ideas were by my Catholic -- and Harvey's Jewish -- upbringings.

But here's the miracle. Jesus' prescription works. Not that Caesars do not continue to arrive on the scene, or that cruelty and injustice are things of the antiquarian past. But the world is getting better, grain of sand by grain of sand. We have a United Nations so that countries can maintain a semblance of ethical oversight over one another.

We see the "Christian" ethic sprouting in surprising places. At Tienanmen Square, where martyrs' blood was spilled for the freedom of all. Democracy itself, for all its infelicities, is a kind of miracle of nerve. In the daily deeds of charitable enterprises, many of them purely secular, that opt to spend what they have, and give what is theirs, to help those in need.

Marxism gave it a shot, and failed -- because the dictatorship of the proletariat is a sorry substitute for "respect others as you value your existence (love God)."

We dream of a future in which every individual enjoys great power, delivered mainly by technology -- connectivity, access, and visibility. But technology is no guarantee of grace; indeed, the first use new technology is usually put to is oppression. And the world remains poor, with power out of reach for most people.

For true change, a better hope is to alter the paradigm of human nature that we hide behind, and use to excuse our lazy pessimism. Maximizing power is not the answer; leveraging it and losing it is -- and broadcasting our awareness that our competitor is also our brother, and we are all in this thing together.

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