After the Future

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Léon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

Frederick Buechner

In the Third Canto of Inferno, Dante says there "...trailed so long a file of people--I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls". Vergil tells Dante that they are the  sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise because they never chose sides. They are the "moderates," the nowhere men, those who take refuge in the mushy middle and praise themselves for their prudence and good sense. They now commingle with the cowardly angels, those who were neither rebels nor faithful, but stood apart, afraid to choose. 

It wouldn't surprise me if Buechner was thinking of this passage or of Eliot's allusion to it in The Wasteland.  But I would qualify it somewhat. I don't think the objective is to be heroic, because more often than not the pursuit of heroism devolves into a crude causa sui project. Muscular Christianity has little to do with the spirit of the gospels. I'd argue that the normal is ok, but that being normal is not normative; for the Christian impulse is about loving the normal and yet not accepting it as all there is, and from time to time acting in such a way as to subvert it. Whether those actions are modest ones or heroic matters less than whether they were inspired by grace. 

Despite the pejorative connotations, I don't think it's such a bad thing to be a pig.  It's simply a metaphor for our normal, natural life in a fallen world. There is so much that is good about that. Going to ballgames and hoping your team wins. Raising your kids to do well in school and to get decent jobs. Normal is the ordinary joys and sorrows, the tedium and excitement of a life lived through its different rhythms. It means arguing about politics and mowing your lawn. It's about falling in and out of love, and about our dreams for a better future. It's our life as talking, self-aware animals, piggies if you will, living on the earth, and if we see our normal life in this way, it's hard to take it too seriously, because really it shouldn't be.

This is not an argument for complacency, because while there is much in the normal that is truly good, it's not the only possibility. We may be little piggies, but we are capable being more. We want to be more or to think of ourselves as more, but there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it. The normal route people take to being more has to do with ambition and pride, this always leads to problems. The non-normal route is to recognize oneself for the piggy one is and then work with something that we don't think of as natural, but which is as much a part of our daily experience as the air we breathe. 

You know the movie A Day without a Mexican?  It tries to show how important to the life of L.A. is the mostly taken-for-granted presence of Mexicans. Well imagine the world without the taken-for-granted presence of grace. Maybe Quentin Tarrantino could be hired to do the movie about a world without grace--or maybe he already has.  For surely he has a knack for showing us the lives of people who live in a world of banal vileness, banal and vile to the degree that they are closed off from the reality of grace.

I believe there is a principle of metaphysical evil that operates in the world, and its purpose is to close humans off from the possibility of grace. Hell is the soul's state when it has become completely impenetrable by grace. But I doubt anybody takes up permanent residence in downtown Infernoville.  There are, though, plenty of people who live in its suburbs.  And there are people who likewise live in the suburbs of Paradiso.  But most of us live in the murky, in-between burb, which is downtown Purgatorio. It's the place we call normal, neither filled with grace, nor completely cut off from it. Dante puts the nowhere men in Inferno and they belong there if their indecision was a purposeful refusal of grace, but while sometimes it does, mostly it doesn't require of us heroic reaction to choose grace rather than to refuse it.

And so while these are metaphorical places, they are also metaphysical ones.  It's the condition of all of us who live in a fallen world. Paradiso is not a physical place, but the physical world is changed when it is within the gravitational pull of those people who have Paradiso within them. Non-normal things can happen.

Natura est vulnerata, non delenda.  Nature is wounded, not destroyed. I'm going from memory here, so I'm not sure, but think it's Aquinas who said it. It makes a difference if you think of the world as we live in it as wounded, because it suggests that health and wholeness was something lost and also that it can be regained. It suggests that what we have come to take for granted as normal is not necessarily healthful. It makes a difference because it contrasts with the naturalistic understanding that accepts the normal, natural world as the only possibility. And it makes a difference in contrast with the view, Eastern or Western, that understands the world as a prison with no possibilities other than to be a prison, so therefore a place that must be escaped.

It makes a difference because it frames for us the nature of the "heroic" work that we are called to do--the work that truly makes us more than piggies eating at life's trough.  And it defines what heroic means in ways that circumvent all the recognition-driven motivations that are at the heart of the traditional meaning of heroism. Natural heroism is piggy heroism, insofar as it's driven by adrenaline and testosterone. It is in my view morally neutral because it's natural and it’s instinct driven, even if prodigious in its accomplishment. It's usually nothing more than bucks bashing one another in a battle for dominance. Such heroism that is neither here nor there. For the heroism about which Bloy and Buechner speak is not about the performance of tasks that require extraordinary gifts. It is a heroism inspired by grace.

Heroism in this sense is the cumulative record of a life lived, usually obscurely, in response to the presence of the possibility of true freedom or grace. It is about the development of the kind of character, which, because it is capable of responding to grace in small ways over the course of a lifetime, is then also capable, if the occasion arises, of responding in a big way. It is only because of a lifetime of small decisions, small gestures, and the habits of soul that are developed as a result, that if something big comes, and even if notoriety comes with it, there is enough ballast to keep him or her from being blown over. 

David Bromwich's Obama Assessment

Obama’s warmest defenders have insisted, against the weight of his own words, that such hopes were absurd and unreal — often giving as evidence some such conversation stopper as “this is a center-right country” or “the American people are racist.” But the same American people elected an African American whose campaign had been center-left. He inherited a majority in both houses of Congress. It takes a refined sense of impossibility to argue that Obama in his first two years actually traveled the length of what was possible. . . .

Though Obama has hardly been a leader strong in purpose, his policies have indeed spun against the way they drove. Nobody bent on mere manipulation would so often and compulsively utter a wish for things he could not carry out. Yet Obama has done little to counteract the regression of constitutional democracy that began with the security policies and the wars of Bush and Cheney. This degeneration has been assisted under his negligent watch, sometimes with his connivance, occasionally by exertions of executive power that he has innovated. Much as one would like to admire a leader so good at showing that he means well, and so earnest in projecting the good intentions of his country as the equivalent of his own, it would be a false consolation to pretend that the years of the Obama presidency have not been a large lost chance. "What Went Wrong", Harper's June 2015.

In other words, he's a mostly decent guy who simply was in over his head. He was an outsider who was coopted by the insiders. A hack.

 

Quote of the Day: Bill Curry

Many of us–see Paul Rosenberg’s wonderful article right here in Salon–have long argued that the old categories are defunct and that much of what the old order calls radical has long since gone mainstream. Soon everyone will see it. For now, let me suggest a rule: any policy enjoying majority support in every poll must henceforth be called centrist, not “radical” or “left wing.” If you aren’t sure, look it up.

The issue of the day is “trade.” I’m amazed when economists invoke the theories of David Ricardo as if nothing’s changed in the 200 years since his passing. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage asserted that free trade always results in a net benefit to the trading partners since each sells goods on which it enjoys a natural advantage: climate, raw materials, labor supply, etc. But when jobs cross borders in nanoseconds the advantages everyone seeks are low wages and weak governments. Somebody must tell the neoliberals this is no longer about who has the best weather to grow bananas in. In fact, it is no longer about trade. It is about whether democracy rules commerce–or commerce rules democracy. It’s a subject Sanders knows well. Clinton appears clueless.

This is the debate we need: how best to turn back the impersonal tide of globalization and begin conscious creation of a new, intentional economy. This isn’t the debate Clinton or the media is prepared to have. But it’s the one the country urgently desires, and one progressives can win. Like the polls, the throngs flowing to Sanders’ events and the small-dollar donations to his campaign attest to the ripeness of the moment. The real proof’s in the power of ideas.  (Source)

Curry and Rosenberg seem like a good guys, but they're wrong if they think that mainstream opinion still matters. That's a defunct idea that they have yet to understand. The real question is not what most sensible people think is the right thing to do, but who has the power to get it done. We voters are given a choice between A and B, but we really want C. It isn't on the menu because the people who have power don't want it on the menu. And nobody, especially someone like Bernie Sanders, has the power to put it on the menu. 

The mainstream media narratives understand who has the power and how power in Washington works--they are themselves part of the power ecology.That's why they disregard polling on various issues. They know public opinion is irrelevant when it comes to making or shaping policy. And so does Hillary. She's a paradigmatic insider, and, yes, that hurts her in retail politics where public opinion does matter.

And it might hurt her this cycle as it did in 2008, but even if by some miracle Bernie Sanders was swept into the presidency, he would be paralyzed because he would have close to zero insider support. Sanders is the paradigmatic outsider from a quirky state with a little over 600K people--until a few months ago he didn't even belong to either of the two main parties. Maverick outsiders don't change large, dysfunctional systems; maverick insiders sometimes can: Gorbachev and Pope Francis, for instance. Hillary isn't a maverick anything, and she could never be. She will always play by the insider rules. She thinks she can win by playing by insider rules, and she probably will. 

Small-government Conservatives, Libertarians, and Neoliberal Democrats dominate the insider political class, and the system works well for them. They understand and are comfortable with the insider power game and its rules. They play it well, and they see no reason to change it. They have no motivation whatsoever to support a maverick outsider like Sanders if he were to be elected. What the voters think, even if it's 95 percent of the American electorate, doesn't matter, because they have no insider power. Look at the polling on gun control--it's overwhelmingly for it. And voter opinions will continue not to matter as long as the system is set up in such a way that members of the insider political class are essentially employees of large corporations and other moneyed interests. 

Way too much attention is focused on the presidential race. If you're serious about change, it has to happen in building strong local organizations who send smart, progressives to city, county, and state legislatures where they develop the skills and a constituency base that holds them accountable. And from the best of these, you send somebody to D.C.

What? You say local politics is boring? Yes it is. And that's why real change is so difficult to effect. What goes on locally is crushingly tedious. And since nobody pays attention because it's so boring, the hacks get elected, and it's the hacks that get sent eventually to D.C.

And that's why we're screwed. The whole system is so massively complicated that nobody--even honest non-hacks--really understands what's going on, so elected officials listen to charming, reasonable sounding lobbyists who, because they know more than you about their issue, can talk you into supporting things that you would never have supported as a  first-time candidate. Because then you were an outsider and you naively believed that you were mainly accountable to the voters. But once you get elected, you become an insider, and then you understand that your day-to-day life is dominated by insiders, i.e., lobbyists and senior elected officials in your party, most of whom are hacks. 

Pretty soon you see that your bread gets buttered not by the voters but by other insiders, and that these insiders have a vertically integrated system from Washington down to the local school board positions. If you want a career in politics, you quickly come to understand who your real constituency is, whose interests you really must serve, and that constituency is not the voters. You find a way to do just enough for the voters to get you elected again, but most of your energy is deployed in doing what you can for your more important constituency, now your colleagues in insider hackery because now you, too, have become a hack, even if at the outset it was never your intention to become one. You don't think of yourself as a hack; rather you see yourself as a realist and a professional. This is pretty much Obama's political arc in hackery. 

You have to be very smart and very strong not to be coopted. And the few who don't get coopted get marginalized and made irrelevant. That's the Bernie Sanders' arc. 

Post Secularism and the Sacred

Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that typified the experience of it for our premodern ancestors. In any event, the common name used to describe this story of the shriveling of meaning is 'secularization', but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred years.

My goal here is not to lament what we have lost. The social conservatives are naive if they think we can find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice.  We are moving into a post-secular era, and this movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern period. Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing. Retrieval uses the bricks of the forgotten or rejected past to build something new. Nostalgia wants to set up house in an abandoned ruin.

The conservative program and its strategies that focus on prayer in schools or other religious practices in public places will not solve the problem of the lost sacred. Such strategies derive from a significant underestimation of how deeply secularized we have become. Yes, surely, our public institutions and political discourse have become profoundly secularized, but even more significant has been the degree to which our cognitive/perceptual capacity has become secularized as well. Secularization has affected not just our institutions and public discourse, but also the very way we experience the world. It affects what we see or don’t see in nature, in other people, in the everyday world that surrounds us in our homes and workplaces. Our public, secular language is an honest reflection of our secular experience. Just changing the language won’t change the experience. 

***

It has often been noted that we Moderns in the West have developed what is fundamentally a mechanomorphic imagination of reality. The world has lost its numinous quality, its ability to enchant. We see it now as a big machine—as something interesting and complex and full of unanswered questions about how it works, but we have a very hard time thinking about it in terms other than as something machine-like. And in some quarters of the culture there is serious talk about how the human being is evolving into something evermore machinelike.  We see this reflected particularly in contemporary film. Cyborgs are everywhere.

But we moderns also believe that our mechanomorphic view of the world is an accurate reflection of the way it really is.  Any talk, for instance, that suggests that the earth is our Mother, as has become popular in New Age and ecological circles, seems dotty and overly sentimental. And yet for people in an earlier age, this was their reality. That the earth was a godlike being was as obvious to them as the law of gravity is to us. The gods and goddesses were everywhere inhabiting and animating the streams and forests and mountains, and the modern sensibility finds it impossible to believe this experience of the world was ever anything more than the product of the over-fertile imaginations of a primitive people still living in a dreamworld.

For moderns this is the mentality of children who have not yet awakened to the way things really are—the way the enlightened, rational, modern sees them. But maybe the truth is that moderns have fallen asleep to a world that premoderns were awake in.  We are hyper-aware of things and the mechanics of things, but oblivious of the kind of spiritual activity that permeates things and gives them their life.

So to say that meaning has collapsed does not mean that there is no meaning; it is simply to recognize that the public world into which we have been acculturated, liberals and conservatives alike, has been stripped of any possibility of there being robustly experienced, collectively recognized sacred meanings. All that is left to us are the husks of things, and when we look at these husks we see only their physicality, and so our questions about them become limited to their mechanics and how they work. And so one is left with the world as a machine, and if one asks what this machine is for, the only answer that makes sense is for our economic and entertainment uses. In such a world, what is there to hope for but better bread and better circuses? 

The old religious answers to that question have come to seem incredible because the language in which they were developed was steeped in an experience of the world in which the sacred was a part of everyone’s common experience. If for moderns it doesn’t make sense to talk about the spirits who animate nature, how can it make sense to talk about the sacraments, or transubstantiation, or apparitions, or the communion of saints?  These words are labels for experiences common to the premodern consciousness. To use such language meaningfully assumes a kind of everyday experience of the sacred and of a sense of intimate connection with mostly invisible worlds. In a world that moderns have come to experience everyday as a machine, such language just doesn’t work.  It’s too much at odds with our ordinary understanding of how things are.   

And so as the sense for the sacred as a common experience diminished during the modern era, so did meaning. Surely people find ways to give their lives meaning; but these meanings have no robust, transcendent reference or validation. Meaning as something given from out there has progressively diminished over the last five hundred years.  Meaning has become more and more what we make it. We live in a Potemkin village of "public" meanings, for what lies behind them is simply the void.  Meaning is not "given" out there; meaning is what we project into the world from within. This is now a commonplace with which every Freshman in college is familiar.  It's at the heart of what conservatives object to when they talk about moral relativism.  But conservatives do not offer a way forward; their only answer is to look backward with nostalgia to a time when things were less "relative," when there was tradition into which we were all acculturated that gave us a sense of public, and therefore "objective" meanings.

***

This is why, in my opinion, Nietzsche is the eye of the needle through which any way forward must pass. Nietzsche's was a deeply conservative, Romantic religious sensibility, but he recognized with the full force of his being the implications of this collapse of public meaning and hated what it was doing to modern men and women.  Nietzsche was nauseated by the modern experience and by the kind of soulless human being it was creating.

A part of him was the nostalgic classics scholar who wanted things to go back to the way they were in a Golden Age, but he saw with greater clarity than most his contemporaries what had happened in the West--that the world of public, given meaning as it had been defined by the Christian West no longer made sense, and he drew out the logical consequences. And so in such a world he saw humans as making one of two choices that led to false consciousness: either to continue in religious beliefs that simply could not be held by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty; or to revert to Last-Man, bread-and-and-circus meanings. To read him seriously is to make oneself vulnerable to be stripped of our illusions, and requires that if we are to move forward honestly, we must do so on terms that are chosen in freedom, not given by tradition.

Nietzsche's absurdist metaphysical narrative is an profound articulation of our era's dark night of the soul, a dark night through which we must all pass if we are to mature spiritually. The mother's milk of tradition is no longer proffered. We have to stand on our own. Nietzsche's was such an attempt to walk in freedom--a failed attempt, but a noble one nevertheless. His is not by any means the last word, but it is a word that must be heard and absorbed if we are to find an honest way forward.

His myth of the eternal return dramatically articulates how profound was his experience of the world a closed system impervious to transcendence and grace.  But he insisted that even in a world that was metaphysically meaningless, the human being nevertheless had to find a way to aspire to be something “more.”  The human being is hardwired for transcendence, whether he likes it or not. But toward what does that transcending transcend?

He understood his philosophical task to find a way to affirm that in a world where nothing is given to him—in a world where all a human being has is his own freedom and will and the inner resources of his soul—to achieve nobility by self-overcoming. If there is no transcendence out there, then transcendence is something that one must find within.  And so “self-transcending” becomes its own goal. There is no heaven or future afterlife reward of any sort. The human being’s dignity and nobility lie in his refusal of such fantasies and in refusing to surrender to any meanings except those of his own making.  Such a human being he called the uebermensch, translated sometimes as the ‘superman’, but more accurately as the ‘overman’.  But really what he meant was the ‘overcoming man’.

I think Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural problem, like Marx's in the economic sphere, was essentially correct; and his solution, like Marx's, while it had a tremendous cultural impact during the twentieth century did us little good. Both got the diagnosis right, but the prescription for a cure wrong. Marx's dialectical materialism is a crude ideo-myth, and while Nietzsche's mythic projection of the uebermensch points to a truth about human nature and human aspiration, it is only part of the story. 

The human being is truly an “overcoming man,” and I would agree with Nietzsche and his disciple Sartre that the deepest dignity of the human being lies in his unconditional freedom, and I would agree that the assertion of this freedom is at the heart of what makes the human being in his thinking and in his willing the remarkable and unique creature that he is.  But the human being is so much more. And the absurdist narrative central to the Nietzschean metaphysics is not the only one in which such an affirmation of radical human freedom is possible. There is also a Christian possibility. It's a possibility that embraces everything true that Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche have to tell us, but it "overcomes" it, moves beyond it. 

It's precisely this 'moving beyond' toward the Absolute Future that Christianity and Judaism have given to the world, and I'd argue that it's the reason for the restless dynamism in cultures that are shaped by Judaeo-Christian mental habits. A dream about a better human future shaped during the modern, Enlightenment period tried to divorce itself from its Judaeo-Christian heritage, and maybe that was unavoidable. But the task going forward is to retrieve what was lost, and that means among other things a retrieval of a lived sense of the sacred. Second naïveté is the method. We are done with the debunking; it's time now to re-bunk, if by that we mean to retrieve what was lost when we started to think about the world and everything in it as machines. 

A 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, of course, that new thing will involve fusions with salvageable elements from other non-Western traditions and with the ongoing developments in science and technology. What makes them salvageable is their ability to disclose the Real.

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. 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 whose source was the Transcendent Real. The world's great religious traditions provide the ballast that keeps things on an even keel to the degree that they are aligned with the Transcendent Real. 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 conservative Christians believe is really true about the Logos having incarnated in history, what are they worried about? That Logos, the beating heart of the Transcendent Real, because it is at the center of everything that' is 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 promises whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but we must find a place to bring along the 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.}

Quote of the Day: Matt Taibbi

I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong. What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks. They’ve been encouraged to launch costly new offensives in already-lost cultural wars, and against a big-government hegemony of a kind that in reality hasn’t existed— or perhaps better to say, hasn’t really mattered— for decades. In the meantime an advanced new symbiosis of government and private bubble-economy interests goes undetected as it grows to exponential size and robs them blind.

From Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (pp. 16-17). 

Can A Catholic be a Progressive? (Part 3)

The Catholc Church, because it is sustained by a core group of people who are deeply sane, always has and always will adapt and survive. This core group derives its sanity from its being deeply aligned in a way suitable to their historical cultural circumstances to the Transcendent Real. Sometimes people from this core also have roles in the Management class (see diagram below), but often enough the Management class has an ethos that is out of alignment with the Transcendent Real. The American bishops and everal of the Renaissance popes come to mind.

When the management class is out of alignment, it's destructive at its worst and  embarrassing at best, but never fatal. Because the life of the Church does not depend on its managers; it depends on its Prodigies and Disciples.

 

 

And so it is they, the Prodigies and Disciples, who provide the ballast from generation to generation and from century to century that sustains the life of the Church because whether the Managers are aligned or not, the Prodigies and Disciples always are. But often enough, Prodigies and Disciples play roles in the Management class. In my lifetime we have seen the emergence from within the Management class two popes, John XXIII and currently Pope Francis--both insiders and Church bureaucrats who, like Gorbachev did in the Soviet Union, realized that their organization was out of alignment with the Real. But the difference between the Church and the Soviet Union lies in that the Church has the historical-cultural and spiritual ballast to survive these necessary adjustments. The Soviet Union did not. It was from the beginning the paradigm of the deracinated Liberal project, and as such it was doomed to eventual failure.

So you might say, why do we need the church bureaucrats and all the institutional claptrap? Maybe the Quakers are the only Christians who have an organization that is truly shaped by the spirit of the Gospel. There's a part of me that is sympathetic to that point of view. It's so much simpler and cleaner, but I would argue that we have to resist the desire for the simple and the clean. Purity is not a Christian virtue, and the obsessive preoccupation with it is deeply misguided, indeed sinful when it leads to what I have called elsewhere 'whited sepulcher syndrome': squeaky clean on the outside, stinking soul rot on the inside. The goal is to be Real, inside and out, if by Real we mean evermore aligned with the Logos, who we Christians believe is the deep ground of the Real.

St. Augustine said that 'the Church is a whore, but she's our mother', and that points us to an imagination of the Church that is more complex and interesting because it is never anything more or less than a reflection of the full humanity it embraces--with all its vices, foibles, and farces, as well as its prodigies, its saints and prophets. Saints and prophets are not Prodigies of Purity; they are Prodigies of the Transcendent Real, a transcendent Real that we believe is deeply embedded in the heart of everything that is dark, messy, and impure.  'Neatness' and 'purity' are not Christian values. Jesus was not fussy. Repentance, humility, compassion, menschiness, and the greatness of soul that follows from their practice are the deep Christian virtues, and the Church is at its best when it embraces its understanding of itself as cultivating and exemplifying virtues. 

I want to belong to a Church that is as messy as all humanity is, and which is also capable of recognizing its folly and adapting when its ideas are out of alignment with the Real. I want to belong to a Church that can show the world it can repent, that it has the humility to understand its limitations, but also the courage to say No to everything that seeks to diminish our humanity.  I want to belong to a Church that provides the infrastructure that cultivates the full humanity and development of its singers--its Prodigies and Disciples--a transnational, transcultural infrastructure that includes monasteries and universities, soup kitchens and mission hospitals, local parishes and regional synods. I want to belong to a Church that provides a venue for its current prodigies to sing about the Transcendent More that inspires their lives, a Church that honors the ancestors in preserving  and celebrating the memory of its Prodigies who have lived in every century since at least the time of Abraham. And I want to belong to a Church that celebrates and faithfully reenacts the central turning point of human history, which it does every day and every where in the Mass.

The life of the Church is cyclic. It has its ups and downs. But when the Church is most itself, it is a force for human progress. Are its efforts sometimes clumsy and misguided? Yes, of course. But if it's capable of horrible things, it is also capable of repentance and reform, and it is uniquely capable of providing the Christian Humanist frame that I have argued is essential for resisting the Conservative and Neoliberal agenda that is working so hard to diminish our humanity. 

 

George Lakoff's Progressive Narrative

George Lakoff in his work over the last thirty years makes a serious attempt to lay the groundwork for Progressives to reassert their influence in the U.S., a country today whose narratives are otherwise dominated by Conservatism and Neoliberalism. He argues that all thinking is governed by foundational or deep metaphors that are embodied, i.e., are not just "ideas", but are our neural circuitry. A broad acceptance of a progressive narrative requires a change in the nation's mental habits, which means changing the neural circuitry in their brains.

Habits, i.e..our neural circuitry, can be changed. It's not easy, but it can be done. The brain isn't infinitely plastic, and as with the breaking of bad habits or the adopting of new good habits, it takes effort and commitment. But social change comes with changing minds, and changing minds requires changing mental habits, and so that will required effort and commitment. Like the development of any habit, it's about repetition. Conservatives get this; Progressives don't.

Conservatives and Neoliberals changed the political mental habits of the U.S. over the last thirty to forty years, and they did it because they knew how to change the frames in their favor, and whoever owns the frame wins the argument. Conservatives understand how to cognitively frame an issue so that any debate about it is on terms that must accept their basic value assumptions and metaphors. Liberals don't understand frames and think facts and reason are enough.

For Lakoff, and for me, Conservatism is rooted in a dysfunctional metaphor. He calls it the 'strict father' metaphor, and argues that it is dysfunctional because it undermines democracy and lays the foundation for authoritarianism. This supports my contention in Part 1 about how secular Liberalism's ontological agnosticism, insofar as it has a tendency to promote an anything-goes cultural ethos, promotes the conditions for the kind of backlash in which societies too often are inclined to embrace the authoritarian strong man. The evidence for this backlash is all around us, and the conditions for its worsening are getting stronger, not weaker. Liberals and secular Progressives see the backlash as comically absurd, and it would be if it weren't so dangerous. And Progressives and Liberals are deluding themselves if they think the country's changing demographics favor them in the long run.

Ordinary people, most of whom are not Leftist Intellectuals, don't want to live in an anything-goes cultural ethos, they crave 'positive' norms to provide identity and purpose; they need to feel that they are part of a solid social consensus on what is right and what is wrong. And the hard right meets that need in a way that agnostic secular liberalism does not. That's why the hard right will remain a powerful force in American and global politics no matter how crazy and foolish its policy prescriptions. It's not about what makes practical sense; it's about feeling ontologically grounded in something bigger than one's own puny sense of impotent individual freedom. The more impotent people feel, the more they are attracted to demagogues.

Now Lakoff's solution is to promote a positive Progressive counternarrative that uses empathy, care, responsibility, protection, and empowerment to ground the deep metaphors for it political program. He argues that these are the deeper positive foundational values that shape American democracy, and that there are enough people in the country who have these values wired into their neural circuitry--people who tend to vote blue--and enough of them also who, though they tend to vote red, are what he call as 'bi-conceptual' i.e., people who are wired with both conservative and progressive circuitry. Biconceptuals can hold views that seem contradictory, but the contradictions need not be apparent to them. What's needed, then, is for the Progressive circuitry to be activated more extensively in the brains of such bi-conceptuals by more aggressive, repetitive, positive Progressive messaging. This is the way new collective mental habits are formed.

I am very sympathetic to this project, but it is a very heavy lift when the hard right has the fear card to play over and over and over. Fear usually wins because of the way it floods the neural circuitry. Fear wins when there is no robust possibility for noble aspiration. The real problem is is not conservative messaging, but the way that messaging is so deeply linked to fear.

The paradox, of course, is that the more the country adopts the conservative agenda, the more insecure the collective psyche becomes. Conservative domestic policy is all about removing the protections and regulations that keep us safe; conservative climate change denial leads to policies that increase the chances of ecological catastrophe. And  conservative foreign policy, because it is so paranoid and destabilizing, leads to our current state of endless war on terror, a war mentality that in fact increases terror rather than reduces it. We're in a kind of fear-fueled vicious circle, and it's hard to see how we can pull out of it. It's going to take more than Progressives mounting a more robust counterframe strategy. They have to find a way of inoculating the collective psyche from fear.

Progressives now are at a disadvantage in the political sphere and will continue to be until some consensus can be formed around a commitment to an ideal that calls for courage and sacrifice. Secular Liberalism, with its utilitarian-dominant ethos, offers no robust possibility for collective noble aspiration. Utility does not inspire heroic effort, and heroic effort is what is called for. An appeal to empathy, protection, and empowerment are not in themselves powerful enough to do the job when fear floods the neural circuitry. The only antidote to fear is courage, and we humans are capable of courage, but we find the capacity for it only when there is a positive ideal that warrants the sacrifice of one's utilitarian interests for that ideal.

To provide the fuel for their revolutions, idealists on the secular left have always had to make a bargain with the devil, i.e., to recruit the anger and resentment of the oppressed. Moral outrage is a good thing, but that is different from resentment and the violence that inevitably follows from it. Resentment-fueled violence, even if justified by noble ideals, in almost every case, leads to regression. It leads to a new set of oppressors replacing the old set. It's not progress; it's the same-old, same-old. 

I don't think that real progress in the U.S happens until someone emerges, a figure like Gandhi or MLK, someone who is a Prodigy of the Transcendent Real, who is not just about the right kind of messaging, but who awakens something more, something deep in the human spirit that longs for the Real. The brain circuitry will follow.

Can a Catholic be a Progressive? (Part 2)

Everybody, except maybe David Brooks and his gang, knows it’s not working. By 'it' I mean the cultural/political/economic system we call 'society'. On one level you can say, "Well, has it ever worked?" And the answer is sometimes better, sometimes worse. But because the stakes are higher now it's more important than ever that it work better. At this point in the human story there are unprecedented numbers of people, and the systems to keep them fed, housed, and employed are very fragile. The environment and climate are suffering unprecedented stress. And humans possess now unprecedented levels of power, and the damage that could be done with that power if abused is also unprecedented. But the potential to use it constructively is unprecedented as well.  

So all these factors make it more important than ever that 'it' work better. But nobody has a clue about how to do that. That's because we are, to use McLuhan's phrase, looking at the future in the rear view mirror, or to use George Lakoff's, we're thinking in the 21st century with 18th century brains. The narratives and metaphors we use to organize the social world are utterly inadequate to the challenges that confront us. They are in a deeply fundamental way misaligned with the Real. 

The combination of population growth, increased levels of economic inequality, innovations in biotechnology and information technology will force a global reorganization. That's just common sense. What we accept as normal now will not be normal one hundred years from now. Something has to give. Current trends in technological development and in economic organization suggest that this future will be shaped by forces that will dehumanize most of the world's population unless an alternative humanizing counter narrative can be broadly accepted. The problem is not one of limited resources or productive capacity but of a failure of collective imagination and political will.

A new humanizing narrative better aligned with the realities of 21st Century must emerge. But what will be its source and inspiration? Certainly no plausible solution will be developed through anarcho-capitalism and the market--that's the consensus reality among the Neoliberal global elite right now, and it's the governing narrative from which we must be delivered. But then neither will a solution be developed from within the secular Left. Its agnostic understanding of the human being and its ultimate purposes are inadequate for reasons I explained in Part I. And certainly no solution will be developed through the fundamentally nostalgic and reality-averse appeal to traditional values. Something new has to be introduced into the system, and that ‘new’ has to have a galvanizing, unifying, inspirational impact on the collective human spirit.  

This 'new' will work if it does an adequate job of realigning our imagination of the world with the Real. This realignment in part involves necessary adjustments to the Consensus Reality that are required by what science has uncovered about how the mechanics of the physical and life worlds work. But it more importantly it requires a moral realignment. It will work if it advances the ball in a moral sense, and this will require a more evolved imagination about how we organize and distribute our material resources. For it to work, it must offer deeper, nobler, more interesting possibilities for a human future than are currently broadly accepted or understood today. I want to suggest, indeed the whole mission of this blog has been to think about, how this future might be shaped by the 2000 year old Christian Humanist tradition for which the Catholic Church, for all its flaws and moral failures, has been and continues to be its most stalwart custodian. I'm not saying that it has 'the' solution, but I do think it, or perhaps more precisely, those of us whose understanding of the human have been shaped by it, have a critical role in shaping one.

***

We are at a point in human history in which all the traditional narratives have broken down because none seems adequate to the complexity we humans are struggling to comprehend. Those who cling to the old narratives tend to be escapist and reductionist fundamentalists and dogmatists, their minds addled by chronic cognitive dissonance. Look at the candidates now emerging for the nomination of the Republican Party. Is there one among them that you can take seriously? They are tripping over themselves in their efforts to appear the greater buffoon. And the Democrats, while I'd argue that they are better aligned with the complex reality that we are trying to deal with, are mostly concerned about their own narrow self interests or with a culture-war liberation agenda, which, from my POV, amounts to so much rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. And the shrewdest and sanest among progressive Democrats and other progressives, the ones who realize that the fundamental problem is to change the narrative, to change the rules of the game as it is currently organized, have no real influence or power. They lack power because they don't have a robust, broadly appealing narrative that supports a progressive agenda. 

And the churches, whether the Catholic Church or any other, are either clueless or lack any credibility when it comes to shaping a moral imagination of the future. Pope Francis has been a welcome breath of fresh air, and my optimistic side is hopeful that by the time his papacy ends he will have laid a foundation upon which others can build. But when it comes to the managerial class in the Church, the default has been disappointment and low expectations, and despite Francis there's little reason to think that we can expect much from the managerial class within the Catholic Church. The  Christian humanist imagination of the future that will correct our current profound misalignment with the Real will have to arise from the bottom up. 

So let me lay out here a little diagram that depicts my model for how "progress" happens, and then we can talk about how Christian Humanism has a role to play in relationship to it. This model owes something to William James and Charles Peirce, something to Plato, and something to thinkers like Jean Francois Lyotard and George Lakoff. It's simpler and easier to understand than any of the above, but I think it does a decent job of modeling what we know from common sense and a little bit of thinking outside the normal rutted ways of our 18th and 19th century brains. 

The diagram lays out how I understand social evolution to happen. There is a polar tension between the Transcendent More and the Consensus Reality, and there is a tension between the Negative and the Positive. If there were only the positive, the control obsessed Managers would be happy, but it would be a static, changeless, stunted, suffocating kind of social existence presided over by the Grand Inquisitor or someone like him. If there was only the Negative, then we'd be living in nihilistic nightmare world in which everything sacred and worthy of reverence would be debunked, mocked, or at best regarded with supercilious, ironic detachment.

The important thing is that there be a relationship between the two. You need the Critics to point out the inadequacies of the Consensus Reality because it is always inadequate since it is always dwarfed by the Transcendent More. The problem with the Critics lies in that they often don't believe there is a Transcendent More mainly because they have no direct experience of it, at least that they recognize. And so whatever they know about it is conveyed indirectly through the Consensus Reality's claims about it, which, during a decadent cultural period like ours, is a rather stale, misaligned, and static rendering of something that lies underneath it that is alive and dynamic. The problem with the Managers is that they prefer static and stale because it's easier to manage and control. They often have more in common with the Critics in their skepticism and resistance to the 'New' that the Prodigies and Disciples would introduce to them. 

But because the Transcendent Real is not static or controllable, it is something that always exceeds our grasp of it, and yet it always beckons to us to approach it and to be changed by it. And the most influential of those who hearken to its beckoning are the Prodigies of the Transcendent Real. They are those whom we have recognized through history as mystics, artists, and prophets, and in some cases philosophers in the mode of Socrates, Kierkegaaard, and Nietzsche. They are the extraordinary people--the avatars, the bodhisattvas, the saints--who point us to the Real that transcends our ordinary experience, shaped as it is by the limiting filters of the Consensus Reality. 

The Consensus Reality is a necessary collective social construction. It's the collective story we tell ourselves so that the world might make some sense within our limited ability to make sense of the fundamentally unfathomable. But it isn't pure fiction; it works to the degree that it is has some relationship to the Real or the Transcendent More. Progress is the change made over time effected by the continued adjustments that the Consensus Reality makes as it becomes clear that it is no longer adequately aligned with the Real. These adjustments are both moral and material. The Consensus Reality, for instance, has progressed to reject human sacrifice and slavery, to point out some obvious examples.  It has also recognized that the earth is not the center of the material universe and that, despite Bishop Ussher's earnest calculations, it is somewhat older than six thousand years.  

I think that the first thing a future-oriented, progressive Christian humanism would assert that goes beyond the scope of what secular progressives can assert is that we're not living in a closed system, that whatever most of us take for the Real is simply a provisional consensus reality, but that there is a Real, and that the goal of human history is to gradually align our Consensus Reality with it. This is a moral and intellectual task that has social and political effects. 

Our current predicament lies in that our moral evolution has to catch up with what we've learned from science and with how that new knowledge has willy-nilly shaped 'it'--the modern cultural/political/economic social system. Moral evolution has been possible in the past because there have been throughout human history prophets, prodigies of transcendence, who have awakened in the rest of us the ways in which the moral Consensus Reality is misaligned with the Real. Gandhi, MLK, Nelson Mandela (all of them deeply influenced by the Christian Humanist tradition) are recent prophetic figures in this sense. Most recently Pope Francis has played this prophetic role regarding climate change and the Neoliberal economic system that is wildly productive while at the same time egregiously exploitative. The role of the prophet is not to develop a blueprint for reform, but to awaken our consciences. The blueprint can be developed by conscience-awakened Disciples and Managers.

The prodigies of the Transcendent are not merely inventive or clever; they discover or uncover aspects of the Real that are outside the perceptual or cognitive range of most ordinary humans whose experience of the Real is largely determined by the Consesnsus Reality. But these Prodigies need to have a connection with people in the Consensus Reality who are capable of recognizing the value of the 'expanded awareness of the Real' they present, to appreciate it, and to work with it in ways that gradually change the Consensus Reality and its social imaginary. Everything depends on the openness and ability of this core of people to recognize and work with the expanded awareness of the Real, and it's this core of people--these people whom I'm calling the "Progressives"  within the church--who have sustained it through the centuries because they've kept it aligned with the Real when it has got out of alignment with it. 

While misalignment with the Real is our chronic condition--it's what Christians call original sin--there are moments in history when this misalignment is more severe than in others, and at this moment, our Consensus Reality is deeply, deeply out of alignment, and that is why "it" doesn't work. Adjustments that work move us forward because they more adequately align the Consensus Reality with the Real, and so the only way we move forward is to find some more deeply adequate way to align the Consensus Reality with the Real. And so the question becomes, how might that happen?

This diagram above lays out a model that provides a way to understand how moral progress happens. It grounds my hope that progress will continue to happen, and that it is our long-term destiny no matter how many backward steps we take, how many disasters we suffer because of our inability or refusal to get properly aligned with the Real. Because from my Christian Humanist POV, at the heart of the Real is not randomness and cruelty, not the cold impersonal mechanics that from a purely materialist POV govern the cosmos. Rather we assert that we find there the Logos. Randomness and cruelty are indeed lowercase 'real', and that 'real' is an essential part of the story, but the Christian Humanist asserts that it is a 'real' that does not have the last word. It's a 'real' that can become progressively transformed by the Logos/Real, but only to the degree that we humans learn over the millennia to align ourselves with it, and that requires us to keep moving as it moves. 

Can a Catholic be a Progressive? (Part I)

As a practicing Catholic in the Dorothy Day/Daniel Berrigan/Oscar Romero/Thomas Merton wing of the Church, I'd argue that yes, of course, that Catholicism at its best, at its most mature, is always a progressive force in the world. But is it intellectually coherent for Catholic to align with a progressive political agenda? I think this is an understandable question because of the commonplace way that the term 'progressive' is synonymously associated with the term 'liberal'. The quick answer is yes, but with a different understanding of the meaning of history.

To be a proponent of human progress does not require that you imagine it in terms framed by Enlightenment rationalism or in the techno-capitalist terms that are most commonly associated with the term "progress". To be a Secular Progressive today means that your philosophical grounding for your worldview, whether you are aware of it or not, is located in the basic anti-traditionalist, rationalist, naturalist, and utilitarian assumptions that have shaped modernity since at least the 17th century. Those assumptions are alien to Catholicism, but Catholic  opposition to Liberalism as a philosophical worldview is not the same thing as an opposition to progress.

On the contrary, it is more than possible, even perhaps a requirement, that a Catholic, or any Christian, be a progressive, if by that we mean someone committed to a vision of history that is in the long run a movement toward the realization of a deeper, richer experience of what it means to be human. In that respect Catholic Progressives often find common cause with Liberals even if the reasons are different. Their political agendas overlap where there is common cause on a politics that resist dehumanization and promote broad human empowerment, but they part company when their different understanding of the 'human' conflicts.

Catholic progressives and secular progressives can agree on most issues that relate to economic and social justice, but disagree on an issue like abortion. Secular progressives see the Church's position on abortion as regressive, and certainly within an Enlightenment rationalist frame, that's understandable. But within a Christian humanist frame, an anti-abortion stance is progressive because of its fierce determination to protect always and everywhere the rights of the powerless and voiceless. I understand why secular liberals see the decriminalization of abortion as progress--it makes perfect sense within a frame in which liberation from repressive traditional values is always considered a good thing. But surely the thoughtful secular Progressive can recognize that an anti-abortion position has a legitimate claim to call itself progressive as well and to argue that abortion is at best a necessary evil that should be rarely used and at is at worst a techno-capitalist procedure that is both dehumanizing  and barbaric. As unlikely as it might seem to Liberals now, I don't think it's ridiculous to expect that a future fifth or sixth wave feminism will retrieve the negative attitudes about abortion universally held by their 19th-century, first-wave predecessors.

I think the same logic inclines Catholic Progressives to embrace gay marriage. It's hard to argue that people who want to solemnize their commitment to one another in bonds of love is dehumanizing. If anything, a position that would deny homsexuals the right to marry is  dehumanizing and seems impossible to defend on Catholic or Christian Humanist terms, even if many Catholics do so. The idea that gays and lesbians are in some way deformed is monstrous. The weak arguments against gay marriage are rooted in custom and in rather obsolete understanding of natural law that has been superseded by what we know today about homosexuality, which is that it's not a choice or a "lifestyle". If it is not sinful 'to be' homosexual, what logic can defend the idea that homosexual acts are therefore sinful? Promiscuity, whether hetero- or homo sexual, is another matter. 

***

But I'm not here to get into arguments about abortion or gay marriage. The question I want really to address in this post is which values-frame in the long run will have the greater staying power, the progressive frame defined by Christian humanism or the progressive frame defined by secular liberalism?

While Catholic progressives share some common ground with Secular ProgressivesL/iberals because both share a hope for a better future, the ontological grounding for that hope differs significantly. And so, therefore, do the assumptions about what a good society should look like. From the Catholic Christian Humanist perspective, secular Liberalism too often goes wrong because it has no way to resist proposals for a better human future that are grounded in thinking or policies that are simplistic, naive, mechanistic, materialistic, or crudely utilitarian. And so, therefore, Liberalism has no way to resist a Jacobin idealism that sincerely believes that the ideal society can be engineered by well-meaning technocrats. Robespierre was a paradigm of Liberal virtue, and the invasion of Iraq was a classically naive technocratic Liberal project. The Catholic tradition offers as a counterbalance to both technocratic managerial liberalism and its libertarian free-market opponents--both different sides of the same coin--the principle of subsidiarity. (See also here and here.)

From a Catholic perspective, the Liberal/Enlightenment ideal for a better human society looks like a distorted version of ideas about the future that were severed or uprooted from the Judaeo-Christian soil in which they germinated and sprouted. Like cut flowers, social movements and revolutions inspired solely by Liberal ideals, look very appealing for a while, but soon shrivel and morph into something quite ugly--counter-revolutionary terror, dictatorship, Stalinist purges, Maoist famines and cultural revolutions, and Cambodian killing fields are not the work of religious fanatics but of secular ideologues inspired by Liberal ideals.

A purely Liberal vision of the future is humanly unsustainable because the Secular Liberal understanding of the human being is so deeply flawed. It's not that it's completely wrong; it's right about reason and freedom, but it leaves so much else out. Freedom and reason in Liberal anthropology hypertrophy into a bizarre caricature of itself. We have the development of humans in Liberal societies that C.S. Lewis called in The Abolition of Man "men without chests" or that Nietzsche described as Last Men, i.e., soul-shriveled men and women who at best are shrewd consumers but incapable of noble aspiration.  

Fundamental to the Liberal credo is an agnosticism about the meaning and purpose of human life. Liberal humanism celebrates the human individual and her freedom, but this free individual is an ontologically ungrounded and contentless cipher. For Liberalism, it is enough simply to be free from the oppressive constraints imposed by others, especially prescriptive traditionalist institutions like the Church. And the only kind of politics that energizes Liberals is an agenda focused on the liberation of oppressed minorities. That's fine as far as it goes, but Liberalism comes up empty when someone asks what to do with her liberty after she gets it. The Liberal would say anything she wants, so long as she does no harm to others. 

I have no quarrel with the assertion that the choices any person makes is a matter of individual conscience. But good societies have ideals and basic norms, and those ideals and norms have to be grounded in a human ontology that is rooted in something deeper than a do-your-own-thing ethic. As a society we need images of noble aspiration, and I believe that (1) in the long run this fundamentally unsatisfactory negative, agnostic idea about the meaning of the human is collectively unsustainable, that (2) it will be supplanted by a new "positive" consensus understanding, and  that (3) it's quite possible that this new consensus will develop around an imagination of the human that will be regressive and dehumanizing--if a more deeply grounded, ontologically positive imagination of the human isn't adopted instead. 

What we saw in Germany in the '30s was not an aberration. It was in large part a reaction to the groundless, anomic, 'whatever' liberal ethos that shaped German society during the Weimar Republic years. By the same logic Dylan Roof isn't an aberration. The banning of Confederate flags in public places will be a Pyrrhic victory if Liberals don't try to better understand why Dylan Roofs and lots of others like him are attracted to violent, ultra-reactionary political movements. People like Roof are simply incapable of living in the fundamentally anomic social environment that Liberalism promotes. The more anomic our society becomes, the more attractive will these reactionary violent social movements be for people like Roof who cannot deal with threats to their sense of self that are so deeply linked to social constructs that support what Liberalism deconstructs. You're asking for trouble when you take something that has positive value, no matter how wrong, away from people and don't offer them something better. The negative value of open-ended freedom espoused by the Liberal ideal is not for people like this--or for most ordinary people--something they perceive as 'better'. 

'***

I'm not advocating a return to the conformist fifties, but I think that it has to be recognized that societies don't function well if there isn't a basic consensus around shared positive ideals. There's a critical, essential place in every society for the negative. But here's the thing: the positive has to be held in tension with the negative. It's just that Liberal intellectuals tend to embrace the negative in a way that unbalances things and promotes an experience of chaos and identity loss that most ordinary people are incapable of managing well.

The negative has its place. Positive ideals can rigidify if they are not held in a metaxic tension with the negative. And the positive ideals embraced by any society must adapt and evolve as conditions change. That's the heart of my argument that Catholic 'positive' ideals about marriage need to evolve in response to our changed understanding of homosexuality. Societies that flourish are dynamic and adaptive, and they flourish to the degree that they are responsive to what I call the Prodigies of the Transcendent Real-- the mystics, and artists, prophets who have what Keats called 'negative capability'. Prodigies of the Transcendent Real are capable of living within a groundless uncertainty that knows that whatever we think of as Real is at best provisional and metaphorical. All spiritually mature people know that there is no certainty and no security. And they recognize that all creative work--i.e., all human progress--requires the ability of society's mature souls to move outside of the provisional metaphors that shape its social imaginary. 

Positive social structures evolve slowly, but sometimes in spurts. But to the degree that societies evolve, they do so because they have people in them--the Prodigies of the Transcendent Real--who can go outside the 'positive' construct but also stay related to it. All creative work requires from the creator the ability to have one foot in the familiar, positive construct, i.e., the consensus collective imagination that we take for the real, but also the other foot in the negative, the "Transcendent More" that envelopes it. If such a society ignores its mystics, artists, and prophets, it will rigidify, shrivel, and eventually collapse. The basic principle of biological evolution--adapt or die--operates on a social spiritual level as well. 

And Catholicism, despite its reputation to the contrary, has survived because it has adapted. But  it has adapted not in some willy-nilly way to whatever the trend of the moment might be. It has survived because its Prodigies of the Transcendent Real have kept it aligned with the Real in the ways that matter most deeply. The official Catholic Church is often dreadfully wrong, but it lives and thrives to the degree that is is grounded the Transcendent Real. And from age to age it has stayed grounded, not because of its institutional structures but because of they ways its most mature souls have kept it rooted in the Real, a Real that is largely invisible to the Consensus Reality shaped by modern post-Enlightenment philosophical assumptions.

Christian Humanism, since it is grounded in an understanding the Transcendent Real always has one foot outside the Consensus Reality and one foot in. Since the beginning Christians have been subversive of the Consensus Reality, certainly the Roman and Jewish authorities saw it as that. And when after Christianity became the Consensus Reality after Constantine, its greats souls fled into the Wilderness to live outside that Consensus. The third-century Egyptian Desert Fathers, the medieval mystics, the early modern mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and more recently figures like Terese of Lisieux, Simone Weil, and Thomas Merton are all subversives of the Consensus Reality in the name of the Transcendent Real.

And so while the ordinary Catholic in the pew, like most humans, is mostly concerned about security and order, the life and vitality of the Church has always depended on its Prodigies of the Transcendent Real and on their influence on a core of mature Christians who "get" what they have to teach us. It's this core that has kept the Church from becoming the rigidified caricature that non-Catholics see it to be. It is often that caricature, but it is so much more than that when you scratch the surface.

***

Societies as living organisms have a structure, and that structure either serves evolutionary progress or it obstructs it. A Weimar normlessness obstructs progress as much as a fascistic obsession with norms and social order does. Most humans are not particularly awake; they are living in a socially conditioned dreamworld. Societies need historically/culturally apt metanarratives that do a good job of waking people up, and in doing so call forth what is best in them. The Liberal modernist/post-modernist narrative does neither. And unless a culture-wide narrative emerges that calls forth what is best in us, we are likely to have imposed on us one that calls out what is worst. 

So the open-minded Secular Progressive reader might be saying to herself, well maybe, maybe not, but the last place I would look to remedy the shortcomings of Liberalism is to the Catholic Church. Such a reader might say that the claims I make here that the Catholic Church has been on balance a progressive force in history are laughable. What about Galileo and Bruno? What about the Spanish Inquisition? What about the priest pederasts and the notorious Vatican financial corruption? What about a thousand other examples of the Church and its representatives behaving stupidly and abominably? Why would serious person look to the Catholic Church as source of moral authority or wisdom? If there have been "progressive" voices among Catholics, they have always been an insignificant minority, an exception to the rule when the rule has been corruption and will to power.

My response to these charges is hinted at in what i've written above, but I would like to develop some of these ideas further,  and I will do that in Part 2 that i'll post in the next week or so.