Human Flourishing

Taylor makes an important distinction between what he calls older religions and the "higher" or post-Axial Religions. This term comes from what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, that period in the first millennium BCE when various higher forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets. 

Taylor talks about how these Axial religions initiated a break from what might be thought of as the kind of human embeddedness in a "given" world of spirits, demons, angels, and gods Barfield talks about as the "original participation" that typifies shamanic or animistic religions. These "early" religions accepted the world as they found it, and religion was simply a tool to help them manage, mainly through propitiation, the spiritual world whose powers determined their fate, and in doing so to obtain their assistance in achieving a level of human flourishing.  The higher religions challenged the idea that the "given" world of ordinary collective experience was all there was:

This what makes the most striking contrast with what we tend to think of as the "higher" religions.  What the people ask for [in the early religions] when they invoke or placate divinities and powers is prosperity, health, long life, fertility; what they ask to be preserved from is disease, dearth, sterility premature death. There is a certain understanding of human flourishing here which we can immediately understand, and which, however much we might want to add to it, seems to us quite "natural". What there isn't, and what seems central to the later "higher" religions,  . . . is the idea that we have to question radically this ordinary understanding, that we are called in some way to go beyond it.

. . . There is a sense in which, for early religions, the Divine is always more than just well-disposed toward us; it may also be in some ways indifferent; or there may also be hostility, or jealousy, or anger, which we have to deflect.  Although benevolence, in principle, may have the upper hand, this process may have to be helped along, by propitiation, or even by the action of "trickster" figures.  But through all this what remains true is that Divinity's benign purposes are defined in terms of ordinary human flourishing. . . .

By contrast, with Christianity or Buddhism, for instance, as we saw in the first chapter, there is a notion of our good which goes beyond human flourishing, which we may gain even while failing utterly on the scales of human flourishing, even through such a failing (like dying young on a cross); or which involves leaving the field of flourishing altogether (ending the cycle of rebirth). The paradox of Christianity, in relation to early religion, is that on one hand, it seems to assert the unconditional benevolence of God towards humans; there is none of the ambivalence of early Divinity in this respect; and yet it redefines our ends so as to take us beyond flourishing.

In this respect early religion has something in common with modern exclusive humanism; and this has been felt, and expressed in the sympathy of many modern post-Enlightenment people for "paganism"; "pagan self-assertion", thought John Stuart Mill, was much superior to "Christian self-denial". (This is related to, but not quite the same as the sympathy felt for "polytheism", which I want to discuss later.) What makes modern humanism unprecedented, of course, is the idea that this flourishing involves no relation to anything higher. (ASA, p. 150-51)

In other words, in the older religions, humans are embedded in the given society, society in the given cosmos, and the cosmos holds within it the divine.  The Axial transformations break this chain in several important ways, one of the most critical being the Jewish idea of the world being created from nothing. This is important and original because of the way it takes God out of the cosmos--he is above and beyond it; he transcends it; he cannot be contained by it. Says Taylor, "This meant that potentially God can become the source of demands that we break with 'the way of the world'; and what Brague refers to as 'the wisdom of the world' no longer constrains us."

This is the key to understanding the difference between paganism and the higher religions represented by the Platonic-Judaeo-Christian complex in the west and primarily the Hindu/Buddhist complex in the East.  While there are important differences that distinguish them from one another, the important thing for our purposes here is to understand how they are distinguished from both early pagan and modern humanistic naturalism.

My goal here is not to argue for the superiority of one side or the other.  The naturalists, whether shamanic or modern, have good reason to suspect the higher religions of not being what they represent themselves to be.  Naturalists who stereotype fundamentalist Christians as anti-intellectual and naive and Catholics as sheepishly authoritarian have good reason to do so, and I have to agree that if it were a matter of quantity rather than quality, Christianity's claims to be a higher religion would be laughable.

But Christianity and the other higher religions in their deepest essence have never been about quantity.  They are about moving off the axis of quantity onto the axis of quality, which is not an easy thing to do.  And as with any extraordinarily difficult human endeavor there are beginners and experts; there are the greater number who either never try, or if they do fail, and a fewer number who succeed.  And so it's possible to say that there's a qualitative difference between someone like Francis of Assisi and Pat Robertson, Martin Luther King and Bill Donahue, Teresa of Avila and Ann Coulter, Soren Kierkegaard and James Dobson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Tim LeHaye. 

They all profess to be Christians, but clearly some are better than others, and to say so suggests some standard by which they could be judged.  And I would say that standard has nothing to do with normal, healthy human flourishing or success as it is ordinarily understood--but rather with the first person's in each of these pairings willingness to embrace in one way or another the Christian logic of kenosis--a willingness to give up normal human flourishing in order to create an emptiness that can be filled by something outside the system of ordinary human flourishing.  And it might also be pointed out that the logic of kenosis being what it is, the exemplars of kenosis are largely hidden from the public view.

It's possible that I'm being unfair to the second person in each of these pairings.  I don't judge their interior struggles, which are unknown to me, but I think it's possible to discern something of the spirit that animates their public lives from the fruits of those lives. And those fruits are not hard to describe as singularly un-Christian from the perspective of someone who sees kenosis as the criterion. For the fact is that many who think of themselves as Christians really are more in the naturalist pagan camp for whom normal, natural human flourishing is the goal, no matter what they might think contrariwise.

That was my point in the post earlier this week about the Weather Gods in a Disenchanted Cosmos.  Many Christians have ascribed to the transcendent God powers that in the old religion were understood to be the powers of the immanent nature spirits that lived in their neighborhood.  That's confused thinking. I would argue the transcendent God of Judaeo-Christian theism, while he may know the number of hairs on your head, doesn't care particularly whether you're going bald.  His primary concern is not about human flourishing in the immanentist sense.  "Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth," says St. Paul in Col 3:2. "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword," says Jesus.  He does not come to make nice. He comes to sever us, to disembed or separate us from the normal world of human flourishing with its pleasures and pains.  He comes as a liberator who longs to cut us out and remove us from that world of normal human flourishing. The peace and the love that he brings is of a different order than the peace/love in the natural world, and the more we are embedded or enmeshed in that world, the less vulnerable are we to waking up to this different order of things from whence our liberation lies.

That needs some qualifying.  I don't think the "kenotic" ideal in Christianity is in complete opposition to normal human flourishing, but such flourishing is not the ultimate goal. It's clear from the gospel accounts that Jesus cares about the ordinary happiness of the people he meets. The Cana story on its most accessible level would support that. The healings and revivifications, the feeding of the 5000.  (Obviously there are other more important meanings to all these stories, but the ordinary health and well being of the people affected by these actions is certainly part of that meaning.)  I think it's safe to say, even by the most rigorous kenotic standard, that it is not a good thing that humans suffer, that children get sick and die, that bad things happen to good people.  But they do. 

There are lots of religious explanations for why things are now set up that way.  But whether those explanations satisfy or not, the central insight in both Christianity and Buddhism is that this system in which human suffering is so pervasive is not the only option, and that the usual ways that humans try to manage suffering using the time-honored avoid-pain/seek-pleasure methodology leads ultimately to a dead end, even if one is relatively successful in that regard. Success in this  project is the goal of Kierkegaard's aesthetic man. And the Christian doesn't move beyond the aesthetic man so long as he is concerned with finding peace in which peace is defined by more pleasure and less pain in the naturalistic sense. Both Buddhism and Christianity agree that the solution to the problem of human suffering lies outside or above the "natural" system.

And so propitiating God about concerns that relate to our pains and pleasures, our natural hopes and fears is a waste of his time if it does nothing to break us out of the dead end. What we may think of as 'our good' may not be, and probably isn't, what God thinks of as our good.

Taylor says of the effect of this basic insight of the higher religions on the societies in which they emerged:

The highest human goal can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before.  Either a new goal is posited, of a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing.  Or else Heaven, of the Good, lays the demand on us to imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mundane order of things down here.  This may, indeed usually does involve flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family, clan or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal.  And  of course, this may be expressed by a redefinition of what "flourishing" consists in. . . . (ASA, p. 153)

These don't at once totally change the religious life of whole societies.  But they do open new possibilities of disembedded religion: seeking a relation to the Divine or the Higher, which severely revises the going notions of flourishing, or even goes beyond them, and can be carried through by individuals on their own, and/or in new kinds of sociality, unlinked to the established sacred order.  So monks, bhikhus, sanyassi, devotees of some avatar of God, strike out on their own; and from this springs unprecedented modes of sociality: initiation groups, sects of devotees, the sangha, monastic orders, and so on.

In all these cases, there is some kind of hiatus, difference, or even break in relation to the religious life of the whole larger society.  This may itself be to some extent differentiated, with different strata or castes or classes, and a new religious outlook may lodge in some of them.  But very often a new devotion may cut across all of these, particularly where there is a break in the third dimension, with a "higher" idea of the human good. (ASA, p. 154)

There is so much more to say about this.  Are, for instance, concerns about economic justice then no concern of the higher religions? Are the Buddhist monks of Burma failing to aspire to the higher goal? Rejection of this world and its concerns has frequently been the response of those who strive for the goals prescribed by the higher religions. And the attempts of those who have tried to change the world to conform to the higher ideal have more often than not ended in disasters. But I will explore these themes in future posts or if questions about those issues come up in the comments to this post. 

The main goal here is simply to make the distinction between, on the one side, the goals of naturalism, whether of the archaic or modern variety, and of the higher religions on the other.  And also to point out that much of what passes for "higher religion" has more in common with the goals of naturalism with whom it  disputes not about ends but the means to attain them: Is it more important to pray for continued good health or to see the doctor regularly.

Comments

[Matthew]

"what we usually understand as human flourishing."

The plausibility of this entire theory seems to hinge on, first, there being some state of affairs that most people have always understood as "human flourishing", and second, this definition as being insufficent and in some way spiritually poor.

I'm not yet convinced that either of these things are correct; it seems that different cultures understand "the good life" in different ways, and that these definitions of good are fairly disconnected from the idea of an external spiritual reality.

[Jack Whelan]

Matthew--

I'm not sure I understand your point, but let me attempt an answer by clarifying mine.

I think that Taylor's (and my) point is a simple one. There are two fundamental forms of religious thinking and behavior. The "earlier" kind accepts the world as it is, and seeks the help of the gods to live well in it. So you propitiate the gods of fertility for good crops and lots of children; you pray to the weather gods for rain in droughts, and so on. In this system, the gods are sometimes benevolent, sometimes wrathful, and so religious behavior is about doing what will keep the gods happy.

There are differences in the way these rites are celebrated from culture to culture, but what is more striking are the similarities. And we should not be surprised that there are such similarities. All humans naturally want prosperity, long life, healthy children, the respect of the community, and victory over one's enemies. This seems to me to be obvious and uncontroversial. If you disagree, you'll have to explain why. Mircea Eliade is the best resource I can point you to if you want to know what support there is for my stressing the similarities more than the differences.

So Taylor's point is that when the newer, "higher" religions emerged during the Axial age (Egyptian religion and Hinduism are in their own category), there was a break with this acceptance of the world as it is. There was a new religious impulse that asserted that there was an unambiguous, unfickle, unmanipulable Good. And the religious task was not to persuade this Good to come down here to make things right in world of pain and pleasure, but that it was our job to aspire toward that transcendent Good, not so that we'd get rich and the rains would come every year, but because aspiration toward the Good was a goal in and of itself and as such the ultimate end of human existence. And that everything in this life makes the deepest kind of sense only when it is oriented toward that Good.

This had an enormous impact on the societies in which these newer religions emerged. There were some who separated themselves from the larger society to devote themselves completely to this project. And these devotees would tell the people in the societies that they left that they had it all wrong, that reality is completely different than they thought it was. They told them that they were asleep and that they needed to wake up.

This is a different role from that played by the shaman in the earlier religions, whose job was primarily to help the people to flourish in the "natural" sense. Their role was not to help people in the tribe to attain "supernatural" or transcendent ends. You didn't become a Buddhist monk or an Essene or go live as a Hermit in the Egyptian desert if your primary interest was normal human flourishing.

Now the debate I had with the naturalists last summer had primarily to do with their saying that this aspiration to something outside the natural system was delusional and harmful, and most likely crazy. Well it certainly looks that way when sane is defined in terms of natural human flourishing. But my purpose here is to make it absolutely clear that the kind of Christianity that is all about praying for victory in war or rain in Georgia has nothing to do with the Christianity that is a higher religion in the sense defined above. If they're both crazy, they're a different kind of crazy. The higher religions stop being "higher" when they lose their countercultural or prophetic relationship to the larger society.

[anon]

Jack,

From what I read on your blog, you seem to be a very studious and learned man of religion. You mention that you're a 'post-modern' Catholic, which leads to my question. I'm curious to know what you think about the 'post-modern' Christianity of Paul Tillich?

[Jack Whelan]

Anon--

I'm not a Tillich kind of guy, so I have never been attracted enough to him to study his work. I'm not sympathetic to the Bultmannian demytholigization project of which he was a proponent, and I don't buy into his Christology. I see Bultmann, Tillich, and much of liberal Protestant thought as an attempt to shrink something huge, mysterious, and unfathomable into something more manageable and acceptable to the typical university intellectual. I see the religious and theological task as the opposite of that, as an attempt to move into and expand into the hugeness, not to shrink it down.

So I don't see the future of Christianity as evolving out of prmitive understanding of Christian beliefs, but rather as a gradual retrieval of them in a postmodern, postmaterialist, postsecular synthesis of modern critical thought with premodern experiences, insights, and intuitions. Premoderns had a better grasp of the hugeness and mystery than we moderns do. We have to learn again what the ancestors knew, but without losing what we have gained. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Tillich would be cool with that. Maybe some day I'll have some time to spend with Tillich and find out he's more interesting than that, but for now he doesn't appear to me to be that helpful in what I'm working on.

[Anodos]

Mr. Whelan, it's me again. What was that word ? krikey !

I endorse your postmodern Christian approach. Christians badly need to redefine and find themselves as such.

However, Paul Tillich, whom I've only discovered last week, seems to me to be rather a milestone than a stumbling block on the way to a reborn Christianity.

Your issue with him seems to be his lack of apprehending the hugeness of Revelation. Permit me to contradict you with a quote taken almost randomly from a chapter that I've just finished reading from his "Courage To Be":

"Above all, he does not admit the question of meaning in its universal and radical sense. The question is in him, as it is in every man as man under the conditions of existential estrangement. But he cannot admit it because he is without the courage to take the anxiety of emptiness or doubt and meaninglessness upon himself."

He is talking about a type of neurotic, who actually shrinks from the apophatic hugeness of non-being, which is the other side of Revelation.

To me, Tillich seems to rather frighten his readers with that hugeness, than to shrink to fit within their limits.

Speaking of which, I come to the other commenter, Matthew. He seems to embrace an easy relativistic view of things, very common nowadays. Their postulate is "nothing is absolute; everything is relative." Does anybody see, though, the absolutist character of this statement ?

Not that I'm against postmodern relativism. Contrariwise, I think it's exactly what theology misses. God is relative as much as He's absolute... But there also exists a bad relativism, a pathological form of it, and I'm afraid it's the Matthew's kind.

As to the two kinds of religion, one seems to fit in Barfield's "original participation", and the other to be a way to the "final" one.

[Jack Whelan]

[The following comment is from Anodos. I got it as an email, but it didn't post here--JW]

Mr. Whelan, it's me again. What was that word ? krikey !

I endorse your postmodern Christian approach. Christians badly need to redefine and find themselves as such.

However, Paul Tillich, whom I've only discovered last week, seems to me to be rather a milestone than a stumbling block on the way to a reborn Christianity.

Your issue with him seems to be his lack of apprehending the hugeness of Revelation. Permit me to contradict you with a quote taken almost randomly from a chapter that I've just finished reading from his "Courage To Be":

"Above all, he does not admit the question of meaning in its universal and radical sense. The question is in him, as it is in every man as man under the conditions of existential estrangement. But he cannot admit it because he is without the courage to take the anxiety of emptiness or doubt and meaninglessness upon himself."

He is talking about a type of neurotic, who actually shrinks from the apophatic hugeness of non-being, which is the other side of Revelation.

To me, Tillich seems to rather frighten his readers with that hugeness, than to shrink to fit within their limits.

Speaking of which, I come to the other commenter, Matthew. He seems to embrace an easy relativistic view of things, very common nowadays. Their postulate is "nothing is absolute; everything is relative." Does anybody see, though, the absolutist character of this statement ?

Not that I'm against postmodern relativism. Contrariwise, I think it's exactly what theology misses. God is relative as much as He's absolute... But there also exists a bad relativism, a pathological form of it, and I'm afraid it's the Matthew's kind.

As to the two kinds of religion, one seems to fit in Barfield's "original participation", and the other to be a way to the "final" one.

[Jack Whelan]

I'm not going to argue with you about Tillich because I don't know enough about him. I'm sure there is much value there. My comments were simply to explain why I don't feel compelled to read him. Maybe some day I will, but for now his questions are not my questions.

I think that the relativism of postmodernism that is correct is the relative and fragmentary comprehension any of us have of the truth at any one time. Our understanding is always changing, and so therefore our relation to the truth is relatively deep or superficial; it's never a relationship of of total possession or control. And as with any relationship, even a relationship with the Absolute, it evolves and changes and hopefully deepens and matures, like love. I've often said here that you can only truly know what you truly love. The world's great lovers are also its great knowers. And so knowledge because it is dependent on the quality of the relationship is always relative.

[realpc]

Christianity and Judaism are not "higher" than paganism or shamanism. For one thing, you say the lower religions are concerned with daily life and the higher religions are not. This is not correct. The Old Testament is about how to get along with Yahweh in order to have a prosperous and fertile life.

Christianity is not "higher" because it doesn't care about daily life. It doesn't care about daily life because you get your prosperity in the next world.

You mistakenly think Christianity is "higher" because you are thinking of Christian scholars. The whole idea of people being scholars and making a living by thinking occurs in certain societies, not in others. And it is only a minority of the society who has that kind of leisure time.

Most people, in most times and places, are concerned with daily life, no matter what their religion is.

You have no basis for saying pagans and animists were less evolved. We do not know very much about preliterate prehistoric societies. Maybe they had their philosophers. But nothing was written down.

So you assume they were "lower" because of their religion. You are mistaking and confusing various factors.

I do not see any reason for assuming religion has evolved or is evolving. What is evolving and increasing madly is information and communication.

For the minority in any society who have the time and desire to think about more than daily pleasures and problems, there is an avalanche of information coming from all sides.

Our thinking may be more sophisticated, postmodern, as a result. I don't think that makes us wiser or elevated or enlightened. Just more sophisticated, more conscious, more clever, more in control of our lives.

The trade-off is we lack the certain and strong faith of the ordinary believer. And we also lack the pragmatic unconcern of the ordinary non-believer.

We post-modernists are not higher, we are not better, we are just different.

I think I'm a post-post-modernist, actually.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc

You seem to miss completely the point I'm trying to make which is that the definition of a higher religion is that it requires at least a partial disembedding from the ordinary life that all humans experience. My point is that Christians are not Christians if they are not in some degree disembeddedd or see disembeddedness as part of their experience. That's where the expression "in the world but not of the world" comes from. How is it possible to even conceive of such an idea if there was not some experience on which it was based?

This has nothing to do with scholarship--it's the experience of every human who takes seriously the idea that there is a spiritual dimension to existence that calls one out of the "world" as it is commonly experienced. That the world as it is ordinarily experienced is not the whole story. That the meaning and purpose of life is to be ruled by this higher while living in the lower and possibly to look for ways to transform what is lower into something ruled by the higher.

So my first question to you is whether you understand the disembedding concept? If so, are you saying that the disembedding that is characteristic of Buddhism and Christianity and Platonism is not something you think possible? Of if possible, not desireable? Please engage the argument on the level it's presented on.

I have an essay I'm preparing this week that will develop this idea of disembedding further.

[realpc]

"every human who takes seriously the idea that there is a spiritual dimension to existence that calls one out of the "world" as it is commonly experienced."

That is typical of shamans and mystics from all times and places. The most "primitive" of societies had shamans. I think there has always been a minority, in any society, of people who are what you describe as disembedded.

I do not think it is special to Christianity or Buddhism. Most Christians and most Buddhists are embedded. Yes, the founders taught their followers to look beyond. But most people are just not natural mystics. And I don't think they should be. As I said, being an outsider of any variety -- intellectual, prophet, shaman, seeker, etc. -- has its downside.

No, the disembedded are not going to shine light on the world. We've had Buddhism and Christianity for many centuries and human nature did not change. We advanced technologically and we have more information. We are more confused and disoriented. We are more postmodern.

All that is cool. I am not against confusion, that's how it is. But I am very much against the idea that some people are more evolved than others, that some people know how to make things better for all the rest of us.

If you follow Jesus, you live for the next world, rather than this one. Fine. If you follow Buddha your goal is to escape the world and its suffering. Not to revel and glory in the miraculous gift of life. To despise it because every pleasure brings its corresponding pain.

Are mystics more evolved than warriors and businessmen? I really don't see why that idea has caught on. Are mystics going to bring us peace on earth and economic equality? Never, at least I hope not.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc--

I'm kind of perplexed as to how I should respond to your comments. It's clear that you are not sympathetic to what I write about, and that's fine. I expect most people who come upon this blog don't care much for the themes I'm develop here. It's a place for me to think out loud, and that has its limitations, and it's not something I expect most people to be interested in but I'm grateful for the people who take the time to write thoughtful comments to challenge me when my thinking is flawed or ask for clarification when I've been unclear.

But either because of your lack of sympathy or lack of background, your comments show that you do not really grasp what in fact I am talking about. And my attempts to explain never seem to get anywhere with you, so I don't see the point of responding to the kind of comments you make.

I would be more interested in opening a dialog with you if instead of your just expounding about your own opinions, you asked questions to obtain clarification about points I write about that you don't understand. Mostly your comments are framed as disagreements, but your disagreements are hard to take seriously until you've shown that you understand what you disagree with.

Now admittedly this idea of disembedding isn't a familiar or obvious concept, and my explanations might be more confusing than illuminating. But where our discussion might be more fruitful is in your challenging me to be clearer about what I have poorly explained so that we can both get as much clarity as we can about what disembedding, or whatever, is and how it has had an impact on culture.

The sophisticated argument that Taylor is making, which reinforces an argument I've been making here since Day One of this blog is that Modernity is a very weird and anomalous trip in the history of human consciousness. The whole point is to try to understand why it happened in the West and not in other places. And a big part of it has to do with our Judeo/Hellenic heritage, the disembedding effect of the peculiarly playful rationality of the Greeks and the obsessive monotheism of the Jews are arguably preconditions for the profoundly disembedded modern mind. Christianity, Judaism, and even the Greeks depended on their mystics for data that informed their worldview, and that in turn had an enormous impact on the larger culture. But the goal is not to make everyone inot a mystic. That's not my point at all.

So here's the thing. Are these ideas interesting to you? Are they ideas you want to explore? If so, approach them with less dismissiveness and try to enter into them rather than just saying the same old thing over and over again.

[realpc]

You're accusing me of not getting your points, but I think you don't get mine. I see you as coming from a particular perspective (and maybe I'm wrong about it), and it is a perspective I strongly disagree with. You are obviously an educated thoughtful person, so I became interested in analyzing why I disagree.

This does not mean I disagree with you in general. Only on some particular set of assumptions I have read between your lines.

I don't want to oversimplify, but will have to for lack of time right now. I strongly disagree with what I perceive as some kind of evolutionism, or progressivism, in your thinking. It is very common in New Age thinking. I happen to be kind of New Age myself (synthesizing information from various cultures, trying to go beyond my own time and place). But I feel very strongly about, for example, Ken Wilber's evolutionism. I think it's elitist wishful thinking.

I think technology evolves, human nature does not. And even if human nature did evolve, I see no reason to assume it would evolve towards increasiing kindness and mushiness. (No, I am not opposed to kindness, I just think it becomes sickly unless balanced with toughness.)

Well I have lots to say on these subjects. Maybe I read you all wrong and you are not a progressive evolutionist.

I can be extremely critical and argumentative when I see certain patterns. I find it challenging to analyze and look for bugs in the logic. So that's what I am doing. Maybe you can't respond because you just find it too unfriendly. People are always happier to communicate within their own intellectual crowd.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc

I'll try to explain where I'm coming from, and you tell me if that's what you think: I'm a theologically conservative Christian who has the profoundest respect for the reality of evil. I am Niebuhrian realist in my expectations for what's possible in the political sphere, and my political posts here are not about promoting heaven on earth but about preventing a devolution into hell, which is a very real possibility for America. I am suspicious of all utopianism and of the Jacobinism that usually accompanies it.

That being said, I think that the human project is a drama unfolding in macro time, and that there is the possibility of success or failure. A positive, or at least optimally positive outcome, is by no means a given.

Moral dilemmas confront human beings at every stage in this unfolding drama, but the nature of these dilemmas is different at each stage. The dilemma that confronts us now is one of disembedded freedom. Evolution is in human hands as a choice. And the question that confronts us is whether we let the process be driven by greed and power (in my view the unintended consequence of Libertarianism) or by human impulses that come from a higher source.

I am not for any minority imposing its will on a majority. I am for persuasion or awakening the majority to its best possibilities, and in trusting in the basic decency of most human beings to make the right choice when the choices are clearly presented to them. So, one of the principal roles played by people of faith down through the ages has been prophetic. And by prophetic I mean challenging the current power arrangements from the standpoint of a higher morality than what ever is the self-justifying excuse of the powerful at the moment. I have a prejudice that power corrupts, and I assume that the powerful are inclined to use their power for corrupt purposes unless they are prevented from doing so by a vigilant citizenry.

So I see what I'm doing in this blog as an attempt to work within that prophetic tradition. There is no understanding what I'm about unless you understand that.

This is not a "liberal" project. Do you think someone like Martin Luther King was a liberal? I think you probably do, but he (or I) is a liberal only in the crudest kind of typology. No, he was a Christian in the prophetic tradition whose mission was to awaken decent Americans to the injustices of his people, and every decent human being, regardless of party affiliation or ideology hearkened to his call to wake up.

Are the principled conservatives at American Conservative Magazine really closet liberals because they opposed from the beginning the invasion of Iraq? No, they saw the neocons as Jacobins attempting a hubristic and doomed social engineering project in the Middle East. Liberal and Conservative have almost no real meaning anymore. They are media shorthand to keep us all from thinking through the issues for ourselves.

So in this situation, you ally yourself with whoever is an ally to prevent corrupt or unjust policies. So my perspective has little to do with liberal ideology or liberal values. If some of the things I say sound liberal or leftist, it's more along the lines of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So a guy like Chomsky fits into my thinking that way. I think his analysis of American imperialism is better than almost anything you can read elsewhere. He's not perfect, but he's closer than most to understanding what's really driving our foreign policy. So I'd ask you rather than bandying the word "Chomskyite: around as if it were some club, please tell me specifically what he says you disagree with. It might turn out I agree with you about those things, but I suspect you have the typical "moderate's" knee-jerk rather than thoughtful rejection of Chomsky's analysis of American power. He's actually rather close in many respects to the perspective of the American Conservative Magazine. It's not about ideology it's about knowing the facts and connecting them in a convincing way.

So given this explanation, do I still fit into the pattern you think I'm in?

[realpc]

Jack,

Like me, you don't fit into any simple pattern. I agree with you on some things, maybe most. We are both very "conservative" in some respects, although very "liberal" in others. Like you, I find the usual political semantics confusing and obsolete.

I think Chomsky is interesting as a harsh critic of American foreign policy. I don't trust him for accuracy, though. And I think he is a flagrant utopian, with absolutely no concept of evil, or the other religious concepts you have mentioned. He is a leftist in the traditional sense of the term.

I guess where I disagree with you most is in economics, because I am sort of libertarian.

I will try to write more about this later.

[Jack Whelan]

I agree with Chomsky's analysis of the problem but not his prescription for a solution. As far as accuracy goes, compared to what standard? The one we've come to accept in the MSM or from the propagandists in the administration? There are always some facts that may be in dispute, but the overall analysis NC provides is among the most accurate, clear, and sober.

People who resist Chomsky's analysis are usually people who, in my opinion, underestimate the malign influence of corporate power on government policy. And it is not surprising that someone who thinks of himself as an economic libertarian would be sympathetic to the corporate laissez-faire agenda. The megacorporations love laissez-faire ideology because it philosophically justifies letting them do as they please unchecked or regardless of its impact on anybody else's interests except their own.

So here's the question I pose to you as a libertarian: Do you really believe in invisible hands that regulate markets for the common good, or is it more realistic to see corporations, in seeking their self-interest, to do everything in their power to manipulate and game the system to their advantage?

If the latter, do you not think that corporations have an unfair advantage, an advantage that far exceeds the influence of ordinary citizens whose interests lose in every conflict with corporate power because they simply will never have the same amount of money or political clout? Do you not agree that there is a significant danger in the whole political system evolving into a corporate cronyist system if corporations are left unrestrained? In fact, isn't that's what we've been seeing especially when Republicans have been in power? Do you see that as a positive development or one that is just reality that we can or outght not do anything about? If you agree that is not a positive development, what remedies are there except for government, in the interests of the broader public, to legislate restraints?

I think that libertarians see any attempt to put restraints on corporate power as socialist over-reaching. They're like the NRA when it comes to the most common sense restraints on gun ownership. Is that true in your case? I would argue that Libertarianism only works in an economy of small and middle size businesses where competition prevents power from aggregating into enormously large and powerful blocs. That's not our situation. There are huge industries in defense, pharmaceuticals, energy that are gaming the system to their advantage in a way that penalizes the rest of us.

Do you agree with that or not? If you agree, what is the remedy? If the market fails to put restraints on these businesses, something else must, and there is nothing big enough and powerful enough to do it than a government that represents the will of the broad public in a democratic system. That's not socialism; it's just a common sense to put a check on otherwise unbridled power.

I understand the appeal of libertarianism, and I would describe myself as a libertarian in the cultual sphere. But I don't think it works in the economic sphere. In my view the libertarian horror at socialism blinds them to probable outcomes that could be far worse. I'm very curious about your answers to these questions.

[realpc]

Capitalism does not work unless people, and corporations, play by the rules. And the rules have to be reasonable and as fair as possible.

So I definitely believe the government should police and control corporations. Making and enforcing laws is an important function of government, as even libertarians should agree.

There are different kinds and degrees of libertarianism. I said I am "somewhat" libertarian. I definitely believe in some kind of invisible hand. I believe in universal intelligence and I think economic systems, like natural systems, have their own intelligence.

Capitalism does not provide safety and security for all, and it certainly does not provide equality. But it's infinitely better than the miserable attempts at economic engineering we have seen.

I do not believe humans are capable of designing and running an economic system that is not despotic. Whoever controls the money owns the citizens.

The US was designed, but in a negative sense. The purpose of the design was not to control the citizens, but to control and restrict the government. That is why we turned out to be the freest nation ever -- as even Chomsky has admitted.

The American founders never could have foreseen the explosions of technology and industry. Their system was much simpler and easier to understand than ours.

So yes, we have many serious problems resulting from the mad pace of progress.

(continued in next post)

[realpc]

I think your question is whether I think big corporations are taking over the world. I am not sure, because I can't see the future. But it seems to me that the intense competition between corporations tends to control them. And they are owned by us, the public. Would we continue buying shares of a company known to commit evil acts? Some would, but not the majority.

If it were publicized that a certain company used slave labor, for example, many Americans would stop buying the product and the company's stocks. The need for customers and investors keeps most corporations at least minimally honest.

As I already said, I think corporations should be controlled and expected to obey laws, just like individuals are. We will never have them perfectly under control, but could probably do a lot better than we are now.

Chomsky is not a good source of information. He is biased and intensely emotional. He means well, but he is not logical, and therefore cannot point the way for practical reforms.

Chomsky is angered by cruelty and injustice -- that's good. We all feel angered by that. But for most of us, the anger is tempered by the understanding that, in many cases, there is no clear villain. Life cannot always go well for everyone at all times. Yes, when there are clear villains they should be caught and punished. But in so many of the things Chomsky complains about, there are none.

Chomsky appears to have a vision of how life should be. When reality doesn't match his vision, he becomes enraged. This is typical of leftism, since Marx. There is an underlying assumption about how life should, and could, be.

The novel "The Island" by Aldous Huxley is a good example of this kind of leftist fantasy. It's a contest between the evil life-hating capitalists and the enlightened peaceful socialists. This scenario has never happened, except in the fantasies of leftists. This vision of a beautiful peaceful Island where everything would be perfect, if only the capitalists weren't so cruel and greedy, is probably in the back of Chomsky's mind.

There is no thought as to why the world, supposedly, divided into good guys and bad guys in this way. It just has, and we have only to fight with the good guys.

In addition to well-meaning outrage, I think some leftists are also motivated by personal resentment. They don't hate power and wealth so much as they hate not being in power and not having wealth themselves. But that part of their motivation is unconscious.

Since you are a Christian I can see why you hate the way conservative Christians have aligned with big business. Jesus would not have been happy. But I think they support business in general, big and small, because they don't want to lose our traditional American freedom. It's hard to draw a line between family business and giant corporation, since many of the giants started as a little family store, or in some kid's garage.

Conservative don't want to make it hard for people to do that. Conservatism and Christianity do not belong together, that is true. But they came together as the two great American traditions.

[Jack Whelan]

It's one thing to say that corporations have to play by the rules--of course they do--but who's making the rules? It seems pretty obvious to me that those who have the most power and influence make the rules, and they make the rules to suit themselves.

I think that there are many sincere Libertarians who are living within an obsolete imagination of an ideal America grounded in the Jeffersonian idea that American democracy is founded on a citizenry comprising self-reliant family farmers, professionals, craftsmen, and small businessmen. If that were our economic reality, then I'd be a libertarian, too. I have no quarrel with capitalism and how market economies work on that smaller scale. And your ideas about the balancing and tempering effects of competition would make sense if that were our situation. But it's not.

The grow-or-die logic of capitalism demands that the winners in this struggle become behemoths through mergers, acquisitions, and by working the local and federal governments to get the most favorable terms possible to insure their growth and survival. This kind of cronyism is natural and to be expected unless it is legislated against and the laws rigorously enforced.

There's a reason government grew during the Reagan years, and it's not because of welfare to the poor; it was because of welfare to corporations and already wealthy who gamed the system in this way. It developed as a horrible problem in the late 19th century during the Robber Baron era, and was dealt with in the early 20th by progressive elites like Teddy Roosevelt and later his cousin, FDR. And it's been happening again since Ronald Reagan who was on a mission to roll back the restrictions and regulations inaugurated by the two Roosevelts.

That's what the movement conservatives want--a return to the "freedom" of the Robber Baron era--and they use the language of libertarianism to justify this agenda, and people like you and so many others buy into it because in principle it sounds so right. It sounds so American. America is about freedom, after all. But the reality is that the George Baileys lose time and again to the Henry Potters, and Bedford Falls becomes one version or another of Pottersville. And I see people like you colluding or enabling this trend insofar as your Libertarianism makes it so difficult for you to support politicians who want to resist this trend because you see them as socialists or Chomskyites or whatever. It's not a matter of being ideologically left; it's a matter of common sense in understanding human nature: The powerful from time immemorial do what they can to aggregate and consolidate as much power as they can in their own hands, and societies stratify with a small minority at the top dominating the system. This elite is responsible in almost every case of starting wars for their own profit or vainglory, and making the rest of pay for it after they fill our heads with patriotic bromides and fear of an exaggerated enemy.

Or you see what's happening domestically as the economy becomes increasingly Wal-Martized, which means that the small business and family farmers and all those wonderful people who would love to live self-reliantly, but on a smaller scale, can't survive--so they wind up being employees for some huge governmental or corporate bureaucracy.

So my question to you is that if you are not a movement conservative libertarian, and think the government has a role to play in regulating corporate behavior, why is it that, as I recall, you have a problem with the New Deal? Isn't it a balance between the inevitable problems of inequity and disruption caused by lassez faire and the stagnation caused by socialist command economies? We can quibble about the effectiveness of different programs or whether certain New Deal policies were effective or counterproductive, but do you agree in principle that the New Deal or something like it is the necessary middle way?

We'll deal with the Chomsky issue another time. I don't want to be sidetracked by that here.

[realpc]

" Isn't it a balance between the inevitable problems of inequity and disruption caused by lassez faire and the stagnation caused by socialist command economies?"

Yes, I do believe in some kind of middle way. I am not a libertariann. When I said I'm somewhat libertarian, I meant I believe we have to trust free markets, to some extent, because there are no practical alternatives. I did not mean I am an ideological libertarian. I believe in common sense and balance.

I agree with you the government has more responsibiility now than the 18th c founders could have foreseen. I agree that some aspects of the New Deal are good -- actually many Republicans accept parts of the New Deal.

I strongly disagee with Democrats who hate big business but fail to see that big government is at least as dangerous.

So I agree with you, the power of big business has to be balanced and restricted in some way, though I may disagree on many of the details. I think there are other counter-forces besides government -- the media and public opinion, for example. Public opinion ended the Vietnam war. Americans are free to organize and lobby, and that can be a very powerful balancing force.

In short, don't be too quick to hand over more power and money to the government. New Deal thinking can be very dangerous. I think we need social programs for the elderly and disabled, but we should resist temptations to go too far with that.

[Jack Whelan]

Then what precisely do you disagree with in what I have been writing here?

Do you agree that the Republican party is the tool of the powers that want to roll back any kind of governmental controls? Do you believe in anything they say about the motives for our foreign policy in the Middle East?

And if there really isn't anything of substance, just details, are you even considering voting Republican in '08?

[realpc]

I wrote a long comment but your software thinks it's spam.

[realpc]

Trying again. Spacing was mangled by my email program. I don't want to straighten it all out and have it rejected again. I hope it's readable.

"Do you agree that the Republican party is the tool of the powers that want to roll back any kind of governmental controls?"

No I don't think it's nearly that simple. Both parties are to some extent corrupt because that's life. The Republicans have been in power lately so they're probably a little more corrupt.

The Republican party, like the Democratic party, includes people who
are honest and well-meaning, along with the cynical crooks. And both
parties consist mostly of people like ourselves, who are neither angels or
devils.

"Do you believe in anything they say about the motives for our foreign policy in the Middle East?"

Yes, I believe some of it. The Iraq war is not simply about grabbing oil. I don't even think there was any intention to steal anything -- too easy to get caught and terrible for our image. And I don't think the Bush
admin was setting out to conquer the world and rule it forever. Who
wants that kind
of hassle?

I think a certain amount of national interest was involved in the
decision, and a certain amount of corrupt cronyism. But I think the
overriding
factor was that it looked like a chance to finally get the Middle
East under control and protect Israel.

Iraq was supposed to be an easy victory (that will go down in history
as one heck of a miscalculation). Iraq was supposed to love us for
setting them
free and making them prosperous, and we would have a strong ally just
where we need one.

Another big factor in thte decision was the certainty that Suddam had
WMD. US intelligence was fooled. Ok, that's no excuse, the greatest
nation in
the world shouldn't get tricked so easily. But I am quite sure that's
what happened. I do not think Bush lied about the WMD, he was
misinformed by the
CIA which was itself misinformed. If Bush lied, then so did Colin
Powell, and I don't think Powell lied.

Iraqis who hated Suddam misled us. As I said, we should not have been
so gullible.

No Bush is not a maniac or an idiot. Just a normal egotistical and
fallible politician who got in over his head.

Yes I would certainly consider voting Republican. Why not? I vote for
the person, not the party. And I don't think the Republicans are
devils or the
Democrats are angels.

I agree with some conservative philosophy and some liberal
philosophy. I am not a progressive, but I am to some extent a
liberal. I see absolutely no
reason to throw liberalism and progressivism in the same box, as they
have been.

I will try not to vote for a New Deal Democrat. They aren't looking
for common sense and balance. They think all our problems can be
easily solved by
following Europe's example.

[Jack Whelan]

Ok. We're making progress. I understand that you're not an ideologue and that in terms of principles we're not that far apart. So if we have differences it's more about our perception of what's going on rather than our basic philosophy.

So let me push you a little. If you've read my blog over time you know I'm no fan of the Democrats, and I understand perfectly why lots of people have trouble voting for them as a group, but I would argue, that at this time they represent the lesser evil.

I don't think Bush is an evil guy; I think he is a hapless leaf blowing in the wind, and the wind that's blowing him is the country's corporate power elite. Do you need some convincing about that?

Has anything I've said about how people with power always want more? Isn't that human nature? And isn't it true that the Republican party is the tool of the wealthy and powerful in a way that the Democrats are not? Isn't the problem with the Democrats that they've given up their role as the representatives of the the middle and working classes to try to become more like the Repbublicans in becoming more corporate in the DLC/Clinton style?

Does the cronyism of this particular administration not disturb you? Do you not think it makes a difference that our VP was the former CEO of Halliburton, the largest single no-bid contractor in Iraq? Does the corporate welfare represented by the Medicare Drug Prescription Bill not suggest something rotten? Do all the connections of this administration to the energy industry not cause you a little discomfort?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. And I'm not even going to go into the the whole agenda at the heart of the Republican Party that seems perfectly ok with torture, the loss of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretaps, and the aggregation of power in the executive branch in such a way as to make a mockery of the constitutional checks and balances. Every principled American is alarmed about those trends if they are even half informed about what's been going on. It's outrageous, and if there is any resistance to it, it's not coming from principled Republicans in Washington. The Democrats are bad, but the Republicans are beyond awful in this regard.

So when you say you don't vote for the party but the individual, that seems on the face of it to be a decent, common-sense approach, but do you not think that it makes a difference if one party or the other has a majority? Do you not think that even though there are many decent individual Republicans, they are powerless because the real power in the party is in the hands of movement conservatives in alliance with neoconservatives, both of whom demand conformity to the party line as they define it, or else? Isn't it obvious that with the exception of a handful of Republicans like Hagel and Snowe, Republican representatives in Washington are facetiously conformist and compliant to the party line showing hardly any capacity for independent thought and action?

So don't tell me that Democrats are the same way; because to the degree that they are, they are disorganized and weak in relationship to the kind of hardball politics being played by the power core in the GOP. The Dems are useful at this point only insofar as they represent some counterbalance or push back to the agenda of the power core of the GOP. Can you see the reasons for my concern here? Can you understand why I wonder that you don't seem to be concerned--that you could even consider voting for someone who will necessarily be a tool of this vicious agenda? It's not about voting for the Democrats; it's about resisting the agenda of the GOP power core.

When the Democrats pose a threat, we can talk about opposing them and their agenda. Right now the greatest threat is that there is no way to effectively oppose the agenda of this GOP core. Do you not see that while individual Republicans might be fine, they are powerless to do anything without cooperating or being coopted by the corrupt inner core of the party?

Also, which presidential candidate running as a Republican would you consider voting for? Ron Paul is the only one who isn't a complete tool of the party's agenda described above.

[realpc]

"the Republican party is the tool of the wealthy and powerful in a way that the Democrats are not"

Yes, because Republicans have tended to be pro-business while Democrats have been pro-union. I don't think it's wrong to be pro-business. It's wrong to be corrupt. I think unions are sometimes necessary but I don't like them in general. I don't think workers and managers should feel they are on opposite teams.

I already explained what I think about corporations. Many of them started as little family stores. How can you blame people for working hard and trying to improve their business? Some are naturally going to do a lot better than others.

And corporations are owned by all of us. We are their owners and their customers. So why do you automatically assume they are malicious enemies?

I am not saying corporations are generally virtuous. But you get a very misleading slant from Chomsky. He very simply hates business. I don't know why. Maybe he thinks it's ruthlessly competitive -- that's partly true, but so is life in general.

"Does the cronyism of this particular administration not disturb you?"

Yes, I don't like cronyism. It is human nature though. Politicians, like everyone else, would rather help their friends than their enemies.

I voted for Democrats in the mid-term election because the Republicans had too much power for too long. We need a lot more turnover in congress.

"Republican Party that seems perfectly ok with torture"

Democrats have been hysterical about this. Yes torture is wrong, but the word loses all meaning when it can refer to almost anything, including throwing a Koran in the toilet. The word has been thrown around just to get people riled up.

No we should not use torture because we're trying to be better than our enemies. But there is no comparison between what you're calling torture and what most of the world considers torture.

9/11 was momentous and outrageous. At the time, we didn't know if it was just the start. The government had to tighten security, and it's hard to know exactly where to find the balance between security and individual rights. Maybe they have gone too far in some respects. Technology has complicated things by making it easier to violate privacy.

As I said, I think the Republicans had too much power for too long. There were some good reasons for their success, since they appealed to middle class common sense and morality. The Democrats were becoming out of touch with what Americans really believe and care about. McCain summarized the situation recently when he said he couldn't make it to Woodstock because he was "tied up at the time."

The Democrats became involved in some good causes, like civil rights and ending the Vietnam war, but they also managed to alienate the average hard-working, church-going American. And that's a mistake.

Of course the Republicans took advantage and made the most of the Democrats' bad luck.

When I say I don't like the Democrats much, progressives usually assume it's because I think they're just as pro-business as the Republicans. That's Chomsky's complaint, not mine. I don't like the Democrats because they have become the progressive party, and I often have disagreements with that worldview.

For example, the Democrats are squarely on the side of the anti-Intelligent Design fanatics. That is a very real turn-off for me. The Democrats are becoming the party of oh-so-smart condescending academics. Yes there are religious Democrats but the party is very much an atheist's haven.

"Which presidential candidate running as a Republican would you consider voting for?"

Right now, I would consider McCain or Huckabee, maybe Ron Paul. Of the Democrats I might vote for Hillary or Obama, but not Edwards.

[Jack Whelan]

We've probably taken this as far as it can go. I'm clearer where you're coming from; I hope you're a little clearer where I'm coming from.

We'll have to agree to disagree about the threat posed by the power core of the Republican Party--it's really not about what the party publicly professes, but about what it's blatant cronyism and its quasi-authoritarian mentality is doing to our country. You seem to think that there is some Chomsky Kool-aid that people drink, but really it's just a question of being well informed about what's going on and connecting the dots. You may not think we're in a state of crisis now, but what if I'm right? Isn't better to play it safe. And playing it safe, at least for now, means doing everything possible to disempower the GOP power core.

If it were just a matter of two persons running for office, I'd vote for Paul over Hillary if that was the choice. But as much as I dislike Hillary, I'd rather have a Democrat in office before a Republican because the GOP has proven itself time and again to be too much influenced by well organized and well funded crazies. It's an embarrassment to be an American so long as these people are running things. With the Democrats we'll have politics as usual, stinky, but not as crazy dangerous.