After the Future

Francis and the Conservatives

Conservative culture warriors are concerned that the church is selling out to secular culture and should more forcefully be a sign of contradiction to it, and I agree that the Church must always be such a sign of contradiction; it must always play a subversive role in its relationship to the world of princes and powers. But conservative Catholic culture warriors are disappointed in Francis because they want from him more confrontation with the secular culture, and for them that means confrontation on sexual issues. For them one's position on abortion, gay marriage, and divorce are litmus tests of orthodoxy--either think or behave correctly on these issues, or you're not really a Catholic.

I have a hard time understanding the obsession conservatives have with sex and why it has always been a marker for them about what is orthodox or not. It doesn't get that much treatment in the New Testament, and it could not be by any stretch of the imagination be seen as one of Jesus' primary concerns. Human sexuality along with a whole range of things in our experience of being fallen human beings needs to be transformed by grace, but it is not clear to me why sex is more important to conservatives than the way they use their money, or eat, or behave toward the poor and the prisoner. Why this obsession with sex? I suspect it has less to do with the spirit of the gospels and more to do with threats they feel to their tribal sense of identity. It's akin to the genital controversy in the early church concerning whether gentiles needed to be circumcised when they entered the church. The hard-line conservatives lost that one, and the Church didn't lose its identity--it expanded it. The same kind of challenge faces the church now.

The Church's essential role in the world right now is to be prophetic voice against very powerful forces in the world that seek to dehumanize us. There are lots of ways that sexual behavior is dehumanizing, and we see it all over. I've argued here that the Church's position on abortion only makes sense to non-Catholics if is presented as part of a larger spectrum of issues in a consumer society that dehumanizes us. There's a very powerful argument that can be made here that all but the most hardened secularists would be receptive to, but the public face of the pro-life movement is not broadly perceived as a defender of the deeply human; it is perceive, for good reason, as dominated by outraged Puritans on the warpath against heresy. This approach persuades no one, and it isn't very Christian, if by Christian we mean the spirit of mercy and understanding the suffuses the gospels. 

But that's why many conservatives tend not to "get" Francis. He's not an outraged puritan; his first priority is the first priority presented in the gospels, which is that the kingdom Jesus brought into a fallen world be born within the hearts of as many human beings as possible. When the rule of that kingdom takes root, it transforms the human soul and  makes the need for external rules secondary. The Church is not first and foremost a club you belong to and that you get kicked out of if you don't follow the rules.That is such a small, soul-shrivelled vision of what it is or could be. It is a place that points to the existence of this alternative regime and invites and encourages us to allow its rule to govern us.

Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and what that means for us is that insofar as we can say truly 'not me but Christ in me' that law is being fulfilled in us. It's not our adherence to the rules that matters so much as the degree that our hearts have been changed, and the sign of that is in our becoming more deeply human, more compassionate, more spirited, gentler, more vulnerable, and more fearless as truth tellers. But that truth telling, while it must be clear and firm, need not be strident and judgmental. 

In my experience, people who rely too much on the rules do so because they are fearful and lack practical wisdom. They have little common sense and a very weak instinct for what the decent thing to do is in a particular circumstance. They don't trust themselves, so they need to consult the rule book or authorities that they think are rules experts. They will often do or say terrible things because they think the rules permit it or even require it or some demagogue demands it. But the rules or the law have value in the sense of pointing to best practices, and the best practices have value only insofar as they provide a path for our becoming more deeply human. Our learning the rules benefits us like learning scales and chords benefits the aspiring musician, and it's useful to be taught them rather than to have to figure them out for yourself by trial and error. But they are not an end in themselves. They are tools to empower us to work more effectively and creatively in the world. 

That's the value of a living tradition: it passes on to us the value of what our ancestors have learned about what works and what doesn't so that we don't have to start from scratch. But the rules of the ancestors are historically and culturally circumscribed, and what's important is not the letter but the spirit or the wisdom that lies behind the rule, and as long as we work with that spirit, the rules can be changed and adapted to different circumstances. This might in certain circumstances look like caving in to secular society without it being that at all. But people who only focus on the rules and not the spirit that lies behind them find it very difficult to understand that. For them rules are rules. But that attitude toward rules makes idols of them.

So they are not an end in themselves. They have value only insofar as they point beyond themselves and increase our capacity for higher levels of human performance in the world, and for the Christian that means building bridges not walls, of trusting that grace is everywhere if only people would open their hearts to see it. Once rules become an impediment to that kind of work, they are not only useless, they are dangerous and lead to a dehumanizing spiritual emptiness, foremost among them the sanctimony of the religious zealot and the Pharisee. Zealotry is a parody of religious sincerity. It compensates by drawing from the lower instincts what it lacks from a higher inspiration by grace and love. A Pharisee is a technocrat of the spirit, and his condition is much worse. His is a cold, dead-soul state in which the he arrogantly believes himself superior by virtue of his expertise, his prodigious knowledge of the rules and of his perfect adherence to them. He is a spiritual Robespierre. 

Francis is a mensch. He's deeply human, and as such a model of the transformed heart about which I wrote above. That anybody could resent him or think that he is damaging the church says far more about such a person's hardness of heart than it says about his being faithful to the truths of the faith. Conservatives worry too much about the forms and not enough about the life that gave them their shape in the first place. They are more concerned about good order, than they are with the life of the spirit. We need the forms, but they are not the important thing; the shaping creative power that lies behind them is. Align yourself with that which lies behind the forms, and the forms will take care of themselves. 

More on the Pope's Visit

This is a reflection on the pope's address to Congress and his address at St. Patrick's Cathedral mainly directed to nuns and priests.

In the life of faith, as in any realm of human endeavor, there are prodigies, journeymen, and hacks. A hack is somebody who lives his life imitatively or derivatively, someone who adapts uncritically to ethos around him and tries to make his way as best he or she can by doing what seems acceptable or unacceptable by others. Hacks never speak from what they know themselves; they only quote authorities or the law or use some other source extrinsic source of validation.

It's not that the authorities are wrong, but they only understand the letter not the spirit of the laws or rules. And they are therefore more likely to game them for their own advantage, rather that submit to the deeper truth that is often expressed in them. The Pharisees as depicted in the New Testament were hacks in this sense. They are  the symbolic representatives of a spiritually empty judgmentalism I call whited-sepulcher syndrome and which is found always and everywhere among people who think of themselves as religiously superior in some way.

A journeyman in faith is most of us who struggle to live lives of genuine faith. We have experienced moments of transformative grace; we try to live as best we can oriented by what we have come to understand in the light of grace. We are the ordinary people you meet everyday who have a sense of common decency and common sense. We're the people who are often right but often wrong, but when we're wrong admit it and learn from it, and move on. We're the sinners who, like the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, when they met Jesus were capable of recognizing in him something the hacks were not. The difference between a hack and a journeyman is that the hack goes through the motions coldly without the fire kindled in the heart of each man or woman who has encountered, in any of a million ways, the deep suffusing presence left in the world by the risen Christ, aka, the Holy Spirit.

For every encounter, whether it is while alone in prayer, while taking a walk on 4th and Walnut, whether in reading a book, the bible or some other,  or being thrown in jail, participates archetypally in the encounter with the risen Christ the  disciples, those two nameless journeymen, had on the road to Emmaus. Like their encounter, our encounter with the risen Christ in not obvious. But if you're a journeyman sinner, as most of us are, you recognize in the encounter a giving of a great gift. "How our hearts burned within us", they said after the encounter. Only later does it occur to you what in fact you encountered.  I'm sure that was the experience of the woman at the well, and of so many sinners who encountered Jesus when he walked on the earth,  in one way or another, experienced that burning in the heart without understanding what it meant, and whether it wasjust a flicker, or whether a raging fire, that fire in the heart is the core experience of the life of faith. 

Prodigies may or may not be aware that they are prodigies. More often than not, they aren't aware. They are prodigies because the intensity of that fire is greater in them than it is in the rest of us, and it would be hard not to be aware of that, but at the same time we are told time and again by the saints that they see themselves as poor sinners, and I don't think that's false humility. The more you see yourself in the light cast by the fire of grace, the more aware you become of how much you lack, how far the distance between what you are now and that which you were created to be. The prodigies are prodigies by virtue of their awareness that they have more in common with  poor sinners and all the wretched of the earth, than they do with the residents of Olympus.  

So the prodigy knows something the rest of us don't, and because they radiate this fire, we recognize in them an authority that perhaps they don't feel themselves, and yet they speak because they must, and when they speak, there is a tone that draws you in, even if what's being said is an idea you've thought wrong or resisted. You hear even ideas you were familiar with in a way you never heard them before. There is fire in them. They take hold of you, and burn in you, and transform you. In his speech before congress he  pointed to prodigies of the faith whom we should learn from, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. (Lincoln, I think, is more for obstreperous politicians to learn from than for the rest of us.) Each of them were kindled by the fire of heaven, and each of them were prodigies because of the way so many people who encountered them were transformed by them. 

Unfortunately prodigies are rare, especially among the professional clergy. Most are journeymen, and alas too many are hacks, and too often the hacks rise to positions of authority and power in the Church. One of the signs of a hack is that he or she is stridently judgmental. Hacks think they have the truth in ways that others don't, but they don't know The Truth, none of us does. The best we can do is speak the truth as best we know it, and if there is grace in it, then it will be heard and will take hold in the heart of him or her who hears it. That's what is so wonderful about the way this pope speaks. He speaks the truth, very often an uncomfortable truth, in such a way that and in such a tone that it will take hold of more hearts than from listening to a thousand sanctimonious rants of clerical hacks. 

He'd be the last to admit it, but the pope is for these reasons a prodigy of faith. He asks for our prayers because he understands the importance of his task and the obstacles that lie before him. He knows that he can accomplish nothing by himself, that it is not he, but Christ in him who accomplishes anything that is good. While we are all of us vicars of Christ insofar as our actions are inspired by grace, the pope is the Vicar of Christ in a uniquely symbolic way as the the representative of all us in whose hearts Christ has taken up residence, no matter how cramped the accommodations he finds there. He is the Vicar of Christ in all of us.

So Pope Francis asks for our prayers so that he might represent that which is best in us as he confronts the enormity of those forces that seek to dehumanize us. He knows that he cannot do it by himself, but only with the support and the good will of a quorum of earth's humans, we journeymen in the world who in their encounter with this good man encounter not just him but the confluence of the world's good will. We empower him by our prayers to be in a special way someone who when people encounter him can say in truth, "Oh, how our hearts burned within us."

A Word on the Pope's Address to Congress

Maybe the sentiments of the woman who wanted to throw a shoe at him represent a larger proportion of those listening to his speech than you would otherwise be aware of,  but I for one was deeply moved by this speech. In part it was the incongruity of this man in Renaissance garb talking to a body that not too long ago would have had a quorum who thought of him as either the anti-Christ or some Machiavellian schemer promoting superstition to disguise his own dark power agenda. And he's a Jesuit, to boot. The Jesuits were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another for their sly, scheming ways. So if nothing else, I hope for many his speech broke the stereotypes associated with popes and Jesuits, but I'm sure there are many in a cynical place like D.C. who were left implacably entrenched in their prejudices. 

I've been reading around the web on liberal sites, and it's interesting how people seem to think that the pope can just say whatever his personal opinion is: How can a guy be so right about this and so wrong about that? When you're the pope you don't get to just say what you might personally think. There are 2000 years of thinking by people who thought culturally and historically circumscribed, were mostly thoughtful, decent people, if not prodigies of the spirit and mind. And so anything any pope says, even things that seem 'new', must have some continuity and consistency with the teaching and thinking that preceded it.

For him it's mostly a question of emphasis, of drawing from this 2000 year tradition of thinking and reflection and applying it to what the world--or what this particular audience--needs to hear now. In that respect this address to congress was close to flawless. 

Turning Points 1

I want to do a little thinking out loud about 'turning points'. There are little ones and big ones, world-historical turning points, like the shift from what we now call the premodern to the modern. And there are smaller one's like the shift from the New Deal paradigm in American politics from the '30 through the '70s  to the Neoliberal one in the 1980s until at least now. A basic theme of this blog since its inception has been that at least since the sixties in the U.S.--it starts earlier in Europe--we are currently, undergoing a world historical turning point from modernity to whatever comes next. We call it "postmodernity" for want of another term, because all we know now is that "modern" assumptions in the way they shape our social imaginary are not working, and whatever comes next has not yet presented itself in a way that we can positively characterize. 

As with the shift from the premodern to modern, say in the 1600s, such turning points don't happen all at once. In England it happened sooner than in France, where it happened sooner than in Central Europe, where it happened sooner than in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and there earlier than in the Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world.  And wherever it happens, it's confusing because there are as many continuities as there are discontinuities, and it's hard to know which discontinuities are significant, and which are just random or irrelevant.

So there are major world historical turning points like the shift into modernity, and then there are smaller, more local adjustments to it. In some posts later this week I want to talk about the French Revolution as such a local adjustment to better understand the way continuities and discontinuities lie side by side. But today I want to just throw out an idea about how what's happening in our presidential politics might be a local adjustment, but interesting nonetheless. 

Are we in the midst of a turning point in our politics in the U.S right now? Probably not, but it's a more interesting question for me at the end of the summer than it was at the beginning. It's hard to say who's more fed up: the right or the left. Either way when you combine the disaffection exhibited by Trump and Sanders supporters, it's clear that  a large percentage of Americans are deeply alienated and they are acting out. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their combined effect and in their different ways represent a serious rejection of establishment politics, and that rejection appears to be qualitatively different from previous cycles. 

A part of me says we've seen this movie before. Sanders is just Howard Dean redivivus, and Trump is Herman Caine. But maybe that's rearview mirror thinking. I never, for instance, thought Solidarity had a chance in Poland in the 80s because I thought that they'd wind up like Czechoslovakia in '60s. During a turning point the old rules don't apply, so  Poland in the early 80s wasn't Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. And similarly 2016 isn't 2004, and Sanders isn't Howard Dean (who btw has already endorsed Hillary)(nor is he Dennis Kucinich*), but maybe, just maybe,  Sanders is our gruff, unpolished version of Lech Walesa. Both are honest, serious men,  both were or are in a little over their heads, and both have this way of exceeding your expectations. 

Trump is a ridiculous figure; he is not a serious man, and his chances of being elected president are far lower than Sanders. But it has become clear that the people who are attracted to Trump are non-ideological and generally low information; they're mostly just fed up. Their anger and frustration needs to be channeled, and Trump offers one way for them to channel it. But if Trump leaves the stage, Sanders might for many current Trump supporters be the next best choice. I suspect that the anti-immigrant theme that seems so strong among Trump supporters is intensely real for a few, but is soft-symbolic for most. It's a symbolic issue for low-information people to channel frustrations the cause for which they don't understand. Sanders has an outside chance of becoming an alternative channel for them. Stranger things have happened. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. 

Again, it's a long shot, but I find myself watching more carefully than I thought I would be. Even Sanders realizes that his getting elected won't mean much unless he catalyzes a sweeping out of congressional Republicans in the way Dems were swept out in '94 and '10. If there's now congressional sweep, then his election won't qualify as a turning point; it will just be an anomalous discontinuity. 

*I'll have more to say about Jacobin magazine and Jacobins in general in the course of my reflections on the French Revolution. But I find it astonishing that any historically well informed group would use the Jacobin name as a way of branding itself. I guess it means for them that they're real, serious leftists, not just namby-pamby liberals or progressives. But the historical Jacobins' most representative figures were the paranoidal, bloodthirsty prigs Robespierre and his weird, little sidekick Saint-Just, not to mention psychopaths like Carrier and Collot d'Herbois. Why would anybody want to identify with them? Why not call your magazine Khmer Rouge?

A Word about Kim Davis

If you have a religious conservative in your life who thinks that Kim Davis is a hero, ask him if he understands the concept 'pluralism'. Ask him if he understands that the whole idea of religious freedom is to allow everybody to practice and believe what he wants without government interference. 

Government is a civic institution, and its scope of responsibility is exclusively about civic issues. The government has no interest in marriage except that it is a civil contract between two or more parties. It should allow the Mormons to be polygamists, too, if it's just a matter of setting up the contracts between adults. It should make no moral judgments. It can't in a pluralistic society where there are so many different kinds of  beliefs. It has to remain neutral and non-judgmental. It treats within its sphere all religions and beliefs and lifestyles equally (so long as there is no harm), and in doing so protects Kim Davis from some future government preventing her from practicing or believing as she wants. 

So let's take her at her word that she truly believes that it's against her conscience to issue these licenses to gay couples. What are her options? The first is resignation. Issuing these licenses will be a normal part of her job going forward, and she cannot in good conscience perform the job the voters elected her to do.

Another option would be civil disobedience, to remain in the job while refusing to issue the licenses in the expectation that she will be impeached. She could then use the impeachment proceedings to explain why she feels the law is unjust. Then she should  let it will play out in the political sphere as it will with constitutional amendments if there is the popular and political will to effect them.

Either way, she cannot function in that position unless she agrees to follow the law by issuing the licenses. Ultimately the test of Davis's convictions is not how much jail time she does, but whether she stays in the job. She cannot be taken seriously if she remains in it. If she's sincere in her convictions, we should be hearing either a resignation announcement or that she will be going through an impeachment process. Any kind of compromise to stay on the job will prove that she isn't morally serious. 

Quote of the Day: Randolph Bourne

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them.

Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war.

Loyalty — or mystic devotion to the State — becomes the major imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

War—or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy—seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole.

In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community.

The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of “democracy,” it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort. (Bourne, from "War is the Health of the State", 1918)

I may not be doing it very well or presenting it very clearly, but I'm  trying to get at something that transcends left and right, that is beyond our thinking about what is commonly accepted as progressive or reactionary. It's about trying to understand something that we think we understand but really don't because in so many ways its' the very ground our thinking. 

I am preparing an essay in which I will be comparing Wolin, Bourne, and Theodore Roszak, because they are each in their own way approaching  the problem, which I believe is the core problem, but that is extremely difficult for us to see. For Wolin its 'inverted totalitariansism', for Bourne it's the 'state', and for Roszak, it's the 'technocracy'. They are all pointing to phenomena with which we are very familiar, but because we are related to it as a fish is to water, we have no real perspective on it or understanding of it. It's very familiarity is what makes it so hard to understand.