I read Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience or his booklet on laughter when I was in the seminary. I don’t have the time, inclination, or capacity to go presently into Bergsonian philosophy. All I can say is that I see his dynamics of closeness and openness as both necessary, if only in following our nineteen-month grandson who is beginning to feel his way between the rules necessary for life, which he can only receive without rational discussion, and the constant, necessary exploration that will translate later as a permanent struggle between desire and delayed gratification. But what I don’t see evoked in Blake Smith’s reflection in the Tablet on Bergson or in Bergson himself—except in his idea of the prophet—is the necessity for modern capitalist society, i.e. all of us, to use and abuse the traditional, conservative moral systems that are vehiculated by millions of villagers going to work in new cities. They bring to their work and new urban environments their traditional values of fidelity, courage, honesty, sense of duty, reciprocity, cooperation, etc. These values in turn are systematically used and abused by corporations because they are fundamental, costlesss externalities that help modern enterprises succeed. The capitalist machine, however, needs to destroy these values in turn if it hopes to transform all of us into grand, infinite, solitary, desiring selves who owe nothing to anyone—or who think so—and calculate as rationally as they can their interests and rates of satisfaction. All in the name of freedom, a value that doesn’t appear in the Bible, or at least that word… So, I see liberalism only as the handmaiden of capitalism. It gets recycled in ads that are paid for by global companies. But it seems impossible for most of us to go back to traditional, survivalist moral systems and old fabulations. From where I stand—California coast, with a housing market that tracks the riches of the Silicon Valley—, the future is worrisome. And yet, perhaps there are prophets among us, including Spinoza at the head of them. Perhaps all of us are called to be prophet-like, because we are realizing at long last that we are all in it together and that the global economy is only there to turn us into that one body that Novalis talked about: Einst wird alles Leib/ Ein Leib = “One day everything will be body, one body”. So, perhaps a universal capacity to work and live in dignity and fidelity (חסד) is waiting around the corner to be recognized by all of us.