After the Future

Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty

Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it is necessary for a musician to submit to the discipline of his or her instrument. You can noodle away on your fiddle, or you can find a teacher and really work at it. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and it comes down to a fundamental resistance to submit to a basic discipline. But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run has the longer term goal to be trained to become more free.  The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because he can play things that are impossible for the noodler. The goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission.

Now the problem facing any spiritual aspirant in our western consumer culture is that most of the religion that seems to be flourishing today has very little to do with developing spiritual freedom. There are people everywhere who are spiritually starving and all they can find is spiritual junk food, which has an unwholesome, addictive effect. And when the junk food offered identifies itself as Christian, it gives Christianity a bad name.

I don't know for sure what the pope, Joseph Ratzinger, would say about the goal of Christian practice being a deeper level of freedom. I suspect he would agree in theory--his early writings show he understands and has embraced the concept, but his persistent attempts to suppress Liberation Theology in Brazil in the 80s shows he was never very sympathetic to the idea people putting the theory into practice. He would probably argue that the goal of true spiritual freedom is rarely realized, and that too many people who think they are exercising real freedom are in fact deluded and more than likely really in the grip of compulsion, aka, sin. The road is narrow and the path steep toward the attainment of genuine freedom, he might say, and, Liberation Theology is not what it advertises itself to be. Maybe.

But maybe true spiritual freedom is so rarely realized because the authorities are too fearful of people getting it wrong than hopeful that they'll get it right. It's the old Grand Inquisitor scenario envisioned by Dotooyevski's Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. This idea that the clergy has to keep those in its care in a childlike dependent state to keep them safe from harsh truths that they could not bear to know or cope with. Leave the politics to the grownups who sacrifice themselves to deal with the world's ugly truths so that you children might remain innocent

So the question I would put to him then would be this: Is it really desirable that people should just be well-behaved children? Or is that as much a form of unfreedom as the compulsiveness of, say, the sexual libertine? Is it significantly better to be a prig than it is to be a debauchee. Is it better to be a Pharisee than a tax collector? Is it better to be the older son or the prodigal, younger son? It's not good to be either, but if you had to be one or the other, which would it be?

I'm pretty sure he'd say it's better to be the former in these pairs--the prig. It's safer, less messy. And as a parent I understand where he's coming from. Much less to worry about if your kid (or your priests and nuns) is well-behaved and repressed, if he's a member of the party of the Superego rather than of the party of the Id.

This kind of moral conformism is the bias of the cultural right and leads to spiritual passivity and a defensive, fortress mentality. The Jesus of the Gospels was completely the opposite; if any thing he came to subvert such fortresses of the mind. But the strength of the fortress correlates with the intensity of the fear, and the intensity of the fear correlates with the intensity of violence needed to suppress the threat. And the threat they fear is true, genuine freedom.

I think there are times in everyone's life when he or she must make a sacrifice of his or her freedom, but such a sacrifice has value only if it is freely chosen. Being well behaved little children is not the goal of Obedience. Obedience in the spiritual sense is rather the submission of the will to the logic of grace. And while certainly we have a duty in the parenting of our children to challenge their natural narcissism--they must learn self-restraint and to master their compulsivity--our more important duty to them is to nourish their freedom, and the development of their conscience. Because in the long run having a well-developed conscience is the only thing that matters. It is the cognitive capacity they must  develop if they are to discern the movement of grace in their lives or distinguish truth from illusion.

There's a reason why Jesus got a much warmer reception among those in the party of the Id who had morally scandalous reputations than the morally righteous who were the party of the Superego--the former were less smugly sure of themselves, more vulnerable, more open to the surprising and the new possibility. They were, for sure, in a state of unfreedom, but they were not locked up tight the way the Pharisees were in their whited sepulchers. The unrighteous were disposed toward freedom and recognized true liberation when it came to them. They had a capacity for discernment that the Pharisees did not. The Pharisees had highly developed superegos, but profoundly underdeveloped consciences. Conscience is one of those use-it-or-lose it kind of things. Better to use it and be occasionally wrong than not to use it at all.

We are all of us in our different ways in states of unfreedom. It's a given. It's what Christians mean when they talk about original sin. But in the final analysis it doesn't matter what the particular form our unfreedom takes. The more important issue is how well disposed we are to be free. Will we greet the Liberator if he should come to us, or shall we turn away from him in fear? Pharisees and Inquisitors want nothing to do with Him.

[Ed.: This is a revised version of an essay originally posted in May 2006.  See also a related post, "Christian Liberty."]

The Post-Secularist Age

I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy or the Confederacy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times. The Age of Reason is as dead as the Age of Faith. We're entering a new era now, and it's not clear what it will be like, but we have a few indicators to work with.  I think it can be described in a preliminary way as "post-secularist."

We are entering an era in which for a while anything goes. It's an era in which at the beginning, where we are now, there will be no consensus about anything, and people will believe pretty much whatever they want, whatever suits them. The human mind is ingenious and endlessly inventive. It can come up with the cleverest ways to justify the most absurd ideas. All any argument needs is a splinter of truth, and with it an elaborate fortress of delusion can be built.

And yet there is something in the sanest of us that, despite our proclivity toward delusion, knows the real thing when we find it. And we are more likely than not to find the real thing in those elements in our heritage that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time. And the future lies in salvaging or retrieving those elements from the Western tradition and using them to build something new. In the coming era, I think, that new thing will involve fusions with salvageable elements from other non-Western traditions and with the ongoing developments in science and technology. 

A healthy culture's mythos has to mesh with its logos--right now there's very little connection between the two. And attempts to begin to integrate them are rejected by both sides. Think about Teilhard de Chardin's treatment at the hands of either the Vatican or Steven Jay Gould. But Teilhard is a proto post-secularist thinker--a man writing perhaps a century before his time if by "his time" we mean a time when a thinker grapples with questions the culture at large cares about. However provisional the validity of his ideas, his attempt to merge logos with mythos, in his case science with a mystical, experiential Christianity is central to a healthy post-secularist way of thinking.

So the mythos side of the equation has to be rooted in both experience and in traditional wisdom, all of which was in its time derived from experiential inspiration or illumination. The world's great religious traditions provide the ballast that keeps things on an even keel. It doesn't matter what the officials of these traditions say or how they try to control things, because they cannot control the uncontrollable. Everything we need is available to us or is implied in these traditions; the question only remains whether we have the discernment and will to undertake the quest to find there what will do us any good. 

What will all this mean for Christians? I think it's pretty obvious that what passes for spiritual or moral authority is changing. Too great a proportion of the world's population is too well informed and will continue to have too easy access to too much information. People will not consent be told what to believe or how to behave if what they hear makes no sense, but they will hearken to those who have found a way to live deeply that which has been retrieved from what sleeps in the tradition.

The new authorities will be those who live something that demonstrates that a robust alternative exists that is plausible to the mind, resonant with conscience, and refreshing to the soul. If what conservatives believe is really true about the Logos having incarnated in history, what are they worried about? That Logos, because it is at the center of everything that's real, and because it is the very substrate of Being that makes everything intelligible, is always with us. We don't need the old forms; we just need to develop a kind of post-rationalist 'Logos think', a way of thinking and imagining the world that is saturated by the Logos. And sooner or later there will emerge people who speak with transcultural "authority," because how they live and their justification for it will resonate in both heart and mind; it will make both soul sense and intellectual sense.

There will always be the people who want things in black and white, and while they can cause a lot of trouble, they are not the future. Even if their influence is strong for a while, it will be short-lived. They are not the ones who are searching out a way forward. The future lies with others who can no longer be satisfied by the rationalist/materialist, flat-souled straitjacket of the cultural left or the dead, abstract fundamentalism/dogmatism of the cultural right. They will demand something real, something that lives, that's intellectually honest, and yet warm and fertile. 

We no longer can maintain a "first naivete", which is the state of the believers in premodern traditionalist cultures in which it wouldn't occur to anyone to question the traditional beliefs and lore. We've lost that innocence forever, no matter how much fundamentalists and dogmatists on the religious right resist accepting it. Nevertheless, we must search out what Enlightenment thinking has rejected as irrational with a 'second naivete', which is the attitude toward the suprarational that is childlike in its receptivity, but shrewd and discerning in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous, what makes sense and what brings life--and what's just obsolete, primitive thinking.  

***

Secularism and the materialism that is associated with it is on its last legs, but they will continue to have their partisans. Rationalist secularism/materialism was for a short time the spirit of the age, and it excited those who were among the age's most influential thinkers from the French philosophes through Marx, Darwin,  Freud, and to their followers today on the cultural left. I don't begrudge them their day in the sun; I learned much from them. But their day is done. Some kind of post-secular fusion narrative will emerge after a lot of thrashing around.

The way forward requires that we look ahead with hope but also backward with a second naivete. This avoids the calcification problems associated with Lot's Wife Syndrome, because it is not motivated by a desire to retreat to the familiar. Rather it is motivated, as was our father Abraham, by a longing to move forward into an unknowable future yet trusting in a promises whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but not without bringing along essential gifts that were bequeathed to us from the ancestors. 

[Ed.: This is a substantive revision of a post originally put up here in January 2006.}

Reverting to the Oligarchical Historical Norm

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the "economic royalists" and asserting that "we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.")

But there has been no radical change, only caution and timidity and more of the same. The royalists remain triumphant, and working people are absorbing blow after devastating blow. More than 1.2 million of the long-term jobless are due to lose their unemployment benefits this month. (Bob Herbert)

***

Precisely because republics required civic virtue and disinterestedness among their citizens, they were very fragile polities, extremely liable to corruption.  Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage, or honor. In republics, however, each man must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries, for the sake of the public good. Monarchies could tolerate great degrees of self-interestedness, private gratification, and corruption among their subjects. After all, they were based on dependence and subservience and had all sorts of adhesives and connections besides virtue to hold their societies together. Monarchies relied on blood, family, kinship patronage, and ultimately fear.  Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1993, p. 105. 

Wood is talking here about the "corrupting" system of dependency and patronage that typified the oligarchical/monarchical system in England, France, and elsewhere in the 18th Century. It was a society in which only the rich were truly free, because everyone depended on them for favors, for work, for appointments. They were the primary employers and the primary consumers. Any hierarchical patronage system perpetuates itself through dependency, co-optation, and fear. As wealth and power become more concentrated at the top of the hierarchy, everyone below becomes dependent on those above. The people at the bottom are perceived as barely human scum. I think we have to ask  whether America is really republican in its fundamental ethos anymore.  We have the form of a republic, but the soul of an oligarchy.

An Alternative to the Feckless, Purposeless, Weak-Kneed Dems?

E.J. Dionne on Democratic malaise:

. . . the GOP seems to be doing all it can to make itself unelectable, veering far to the right and embracing a tea-party movement that, at its extremes, preaches the need for revolution. That sounds more like the old New Left than a reinvigorated conservatism. Oh yes, and can you think of one thing Republicans stand for right now other than cutting spending? Never mind that they are conspicuously vague about what they'd cut.

Yet it is Democrats who are petrified, uncertain and hesitant — and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse. Obama's bold rhetoric about "the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels" was not matched by specifics because he knows that nearly a dozen Senate Democrats are skittish about acting. Why does it so often seem that Republicans are full of passionate intensity while Democrats lack all conviction? . . .

The Long Con (Updated)

I think we should get out of the habit of calling corporate Dems "centrist" and "moderate". That's how they want to be perceived, but that's not who they are. Their political posturing does not matter; whose interests they serve does. When the media or reasonable, moderate, grown-up Dems in the rank-and-file accept the posturing as substance, they show they don't know they are being fleeced by the corporate-Dem long con, and they make victims of us all. Bill Clinton was/is the master of this game; Arkansans were merely his first victims. But it would seem from the results last night, Arkansan Dems haven't learned from past mistakes, but then neither have most of the rest of us. And so it continues.

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Update from the Washington Post:

LITTLE ROCK -- For all the millions that both sides spent on the bruising Arkansas Senate Democratic primary race, Yvonne Thomas admits she went to the polls not having much of a sense about the candidates.

What she did know, and what turned out to be the only thing that mattered in her decision to cast her ballot for the embattled incumbent Blanche Lincoln, was this: "Obama wanted us to vote for her," said Thomas, who is African American. . . .

Where's the Leadership, Mr. President?

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand. . . .

If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

That doesn’t require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can’t do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, and soon, he’ll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well. (Frank Rich)

I suppose we can still hope that at some point Obama will wake up. But for now he has presented himself as just another weak Democratic enabler. He's not a bad guy, and I hope he gets his eight years, but he has shown that he hasn't the strength and leadership capacity to do more than mark time while the thugs on the Right consolidate their gains and plan their next advance. He's just another wonkish, weak-kneed Liberal letting the bullies kick sand in his face and thinking it "moderate" virtue to do so. Either that or he must think all that sand in his mouth is just from what's blowing in the wind. It isn't.

I know, Lincoln let McClellan and some of the other bullies of his day push him around at first, but in the end Lincoln woke up and took command. I still believe Obama has the raw potential to be so much more than he's shown. For that reason, I reserve some hope, but if he loses in '12, this will be the reason why:  Nice guy, smart guy, but no real capacity for leadership in a moment of historic opportunity.

Deneen's Two Cents

I came across this recent talk entitled “Sensus Communis and Nature’s Law: Why Communities Know Natural Law Better Than Philosophers” given by Patrick Deneen at a conference at Princeton. It supports Mike McG's dissent to my posts about the perils of allowing our social lattices to disintegrate and why kids' attitudes, and those of society as a whole, are trending toward lower levels of social empathy:

Tocqueville was not uncongnizant of the reality of America’s official philosophical doctrine, the more individualistic and self-interested claims of its official Lockeanism. He noted a strange fact about Americans – every action they undertake, even those that are clearly motivated by fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice, tended to be justified in terms of self-interest. He writes almost with a kind of perplexity over this American propensity, writing that “they do not do themselves justice; for one sometimes sees citizens in the United States as elsewhere abandoning themselves to the disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man; but the Americans scarcely avow that they yield to movements of this kind. They would rather do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves.” (502). What Tocqueville identifies is a gap or lacuna between the official language of Americans and their actions. What he saw was the practical legacy of Puritanism – the active engagement of self-governing individuals toward the achievement of the common good in conformity with the Good – but what he heard was philosophical Lockeanism, that stated claim which the philosophy is more honored than the actions. He identified a puzzling disjuncture between word and deed, and worried whether over time word would begin to shape deed, whether our actions would increasingly conform to our claims. In worried tones he wrote, “one must expect that individual interest will become more than ever the principle and unique motive of men’s actions; but it remains to know how each man will understand his individual interest.”

Dying Traditions IIIb: A Dissent & Response

Mike McG, a long-time ATF reader, from time to time sends me thoughtful dissents. I deeply appreciate that he takes the time and makes the effort to do it.  I got this one last night as a comment in response Dying Traditions IIIb with a message that the site wouldn't let him post it there. (If others have that problem, please email me from the link at the top of the column to the left.) I've edited out the first several lines about the posting problem:

. . . Our fundamental values are aligned and our cultural heritage is virtually identical. And yet both our ‘build out’ from the values and our evaluation of the heritage are remarkably distinct. I find Jack’s critique of the cultural left to be cerebral and generous (they are his neighbors, after all), his critique of the cultural right to be visceral and contemptuous (they clearly aren’t his neighbors), and his dismissal of centrists to be unusually lacking in nuance.

Quote of the Day: Brad DeLong

Have decades of widening wealth inequality created a chattering class of reporters, pundits and lobbyists who’ve lost their connection to mainstream America? Has the collapse of the union movement removed not only labor’s political muscle but its beating heart from the consciousness of the powerful? Has this recession, which has reduced hiring more than it has increased layoffs, left the kind of people who converse with the powerful in Washington secure in their jobs and thus communicating calm while the unemployed are engulfed in panic? Are we passively watching an unrepresented underclass of the long-term unemployed created before our eyes? (Source, h/t Digby)

American elites live in remarkably tightly sealed bubbles.  But it's only a matter of time before the bubbles start popping, and it won't be pretty.

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

That is what my fellow Texans of younger generations should learn about the Lost Cause. Under British protection, the CSA might have evolved into a squalid banana republic run by landlords for the benefit of investors and industrialists in Britain. Without British protection, the CSA might have survived as a proto-fascist regime, with an economy of permanent war socialism and a government run by colonels. In either case, the victory of the Confederacy would have been far worse for most white and black Southerners than its well-deserved defeat. For ensuring that I would be born in the United States of America instead of a broken-down failed state that combined the least attractive features of apartheid-era South Africa and death squad-era Honduras, I say: Thank you, President Lincoln, and thank you, Gen.Grant. (Source)

Yes, maybe so.  But we'd still admire Southern ruling-class manners, wouldn't we?

I wonder if anyone has done a comparative study of manners in which the "gentility" of  in-group members toward one another correlates with the brutality of manners toward those who are outsiders. Not just in the South, but in Europe and Asia too.  I suspect there's some weird compensatory nexus there: "Yes, I am capable of committing or sanctioning unspeakable cruelty, but admire my delicacy and subtlety in the drawing room or tea ceremony." It's as if the latter feeds off the former.