Wilderness Ethics: Survival, Spectacle, Sovereignty, or Solidarity

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’”

People are hungry in these times. If Marx was right that “the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production,” then never has the earth hosted such a multitude of the wretched.[1] Staying alive is expensive, and wages are flat. Luxury skyscrapers sway vacantly above the unhoused while millions more scrape together rent. Politicians run on cutting inflation but cut taxes for the wealthy instead. Delores Williams called it a “forced condition.”[2] The scarcity capitalists manufacture to make their dough keeps driving up the price of bread.

Survival becomes the dominant preoccupation of the masses in such times. Scarcity atomizes, promotes competition, and tries to force individualized solutions. It appears in the every-man-for-himself, bulk-up, and misogynist manosphere and their trad wife counterparts. It is the prosperity gospel that reduces God to a personal vending machine. It is the Sisyphean quest for optimization: that by perfecting what Jacques Ellul called “technique” within ourselves, we might finally become good enough to succeed, enough to survive.

The fruit of scarcity is fear. It looks like young men opening fire on darker bodies while tech oligarchs build bunkers for the apocalypse their algorithms may plausibly trigger. Shared well-being, communion across differences, prophetic imaginations, and collective action erode into antagonistic isolation.

In the face of such temptation, Jesus refused to exploit his divinity for self-interest. When the crowds grew hungry, however, he felt their pangs as his own and fed them in cooperation with a child’s generosity, until an embarrassment of abundance was left over. 

. . .

“Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.’”

People are lonely in these times. Atomized in a landscape of scarcity, many find the only way out is to be seen. The scarcity economy birthed an attention economy where the real melts into a meme, as Guy Debord called it, “the society of the spectacle.”[3]

Perhaps a relatively benign example will do better than the fantastic. Alex Honnold—who once loved to climb rocks just for the sake of climbing—began filming himself climbing rocks, to be seen, to make money, to buy food. But once life is converted into the commodity of spectacle, it demands repetition on a larger scale. Now millions watch live as he climbs the world’s tenth-tallest building, praying he won’t be thrown down (or secretly hoping he will). And of course, we all post about it, hoping for a slice of the profit spun off the latest spectacle.  

Spectacle has become both the means and the end. In the economy of the spectacle, corporations pay influencers—human beings alienated from their humanity and reduced to digital avatars who perform an image of being human—to craft the kind of scene of themselves that sells products. In the politics of the spectacle (centered on a WWE Hall of Fame inductee), governance itself is reduced to an endless cycle of attention-seeking, whether by dropping tweets or dropping bombs. 

How strange, then, is this Jesus who told his followers to keep his identity secret and counseled them to squeeze into a closet and pray where no one could hear. This Jesus whose most spectacular act—his very resurrection—was performed while no one was watching. 

What profit is there in this for such times? Perhaps it lies in a refusal that would mark the very abolition of every system of profit.

. . .

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’”

People lust for power in these times. Advisors to the president call for a new Caesarism, revitalized along the lines of the tech-world CEO. Meanwhile, the official job title of the wealthiest man in the world is Technoking—a man whose business model has recently been termed “sovereignty as a service.”[4]

“Sovereign is he [sic] who determines the state of exception,” Carl Schmitt opined.[5] And those in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, or anywhere someone once depended on USAID know what this means. It is precisely the politics of death Achille Mbembe said it was. For precisely the one he said it was.[6]

Sovereignty is back in vogue. Few can be the richest or most powerful, but many seek someone to wield the right to determine who lives and who dies. Sovereignty is whiteness, ever striving to sustain itself in the state W.E.B. du Bois called “the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”[7] It is troops snatching lives from borders, homes, and streets. It is man over woman. Capital over workers. America over everyone. Gross Domestic Product over creation.

And yet there is a price to pay for such power. To possess is always to be possessed. To have “all these” is indeed to remain one who must, like any other, “fall down and worship.”

For Jesus, the last temptation was an illusion that obscured the real choice between first commandment faithfulness and idolatry. The necropolitical path of sovereignty is always an act of idol worship. Before Mbebe, the Didache had already called it “a way of death.”

Jesus demonstrates another way. Faithfulness to God, in which we lay down the desire to rule and instead take up love, is the communal path of abundant life down which we all get free.

. . .

Survival, spectacle, sovereignty. The options are laid before us.

Certainly, this includes theologians and the institutions that have recently housed us. Do we make our budget cuts, keep our heads down, and survive? Do we ramp up the quality of the show to capture more clicks and get dollars flowing back our way? Or do we throw what weight we still have behind those who would be king, praying for some reestablished fiefdom of our own? Pick an option, and you will find a school of theology down that road.

The fourth chapter of Matthew, from which these verses were taken, continues by showing Jesus opting for another way.

Returning from the wilderness, he makes his home back among the people. He organizes a group of followers. Against the sovereignty of idols, he preaches the Kingdom of God, teaching a way to be otherwise. He sets about healing the people’s wounds. Each decision leads closer to his execution.

In place of self-centered survivalism, commodified spectacle, or the death-dealing power grabs of sovereignty, Jesus demonstrates why he is called Immanuel: not the domineering God over us, but God with us. The God who shows that love, in times such as this, looks like solidarity.

If there is to be a shared future—much less a future for religion, its scholars, and its institutions—it must lie among the people, down that rugged path called solidarity.

—

[1] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Prometheus Books (Lanham, MD: 1988), 69.

[2]  Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Orbis Books (Maryknoll, NY: 2013), 15-18.

[3] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets (2014).

[4] Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, “Chapter 3: Sovereignty as a Service,” Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, HarperCollins (New York: 2026), 32-56.

[5] I am drawing this quote from its repeated uses in Giorgio Agemben, Homo Sacre: Sovereign Power & Bare Life, Stanford University Press, (Palo Alto, CA: 1998).

[6] Achille Mbebe, Necropolitics, Duke University Press (Durham, NC: 2019).

[7] W.E.B. du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Flame Tree Publishing (London: 2022), 55.