After the Future

Douthat on the Leftist Pope

But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.

That explanation rests, I think, on three ideas. First, that when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach.

Second, that Catholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy.

Third, that on recent evidence, the most expansive welfare states can crowd out what Christianity considers the most basic human goods — by lowering birthrates, discouraging private charity and restricting the church’s freedom to minister in subtle but increasingly consequential ways. (Source)

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

Regarding number one: Capitalism has never had a productivity or innovation problem, but it has always had a very serious distribution problem. Its productivity has made some people very rich, its innovation disruptive to traditional societies, their values, and ways of life often immerserating them. GDP per capita is a poor way to measure wealth. Free-market capitalism as it has evolved, especially since the last half of the 19th century, has created new kinds of poverty and slavishness that simply did not exist before.

Regarding number two: I mostly agree; there should always be a bias for the local and voluntary. But subisidiarity also recognizes that the Feds have a responsibility to intervene when the locals are incompetent, incapable, or unwilling to deal with problems that negatively affect its citizens on the local level. The Feds did the right thing when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock, and they should have done a better job when Katrina hit New Orleans. If the Feds were serious about improving educational achievement, they wouldn't be pushing on local communities ridiculous top down policies like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. They would be finding ways to intervene to mitigate the toxic effects of poverty in the lives of children who grow up in it.

And this brings us to the last of his points, so regarding number three: Does Douthat really think that the U.S. is any in danger of becoming one of the most expansive of welfare states? As for crowding out, please. I understand the point, but we're not living in stable ante-bellum communities where everyone knows who you are and when a stranger arrives in town it's a big event.

Conservatives get all nostalgic in their complaining about how bureaucracies have replaced face-to-face relationships, but that's the price of number one: the disruptive, innovative power of capitalism. I don't like bureacracies either, and as I suggest in my response to number two, there are places I think the Feds should keep their noses out of. But the scale of the social and economic disruptions that follow from number one is not "subtle". It requires by the logic of number two that it intervene to do the mitigating welfare work of number three. And the huge scale of the problems, alas, requires bureacracies whose scale is equal to the suffering. There's still plenty of room for the churches and other local voluntary organizations so that they need not feel subtly or grossly crowded out. But they are not competent alone to deal with the huge scale of the problems modern market capitalism has created. 

The pope gets this, and Douthat, good Catholic that he is, won't go all Rush Limbaugh on him. He wants to find the middle ground, and good for him. And he's right that there isn't anything substantively different in what Francis is teaching that contrasts with his predecessors. His is, rather, a matter of emphasis. And it is a matter of a pope  embracing a prophetic role, his papal bully pulpit, but this time as one who speaks as the first pope from the southern hemisphere, and who knows concretely the kind of suffering that follows from Douthat's abstract neoliberalism. 

 

Francis's Church

Timothy Egan in this morning's Times:

The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good reason.

“In terms of people in the pews, the Catholic Church lost roughly one-fourth of its strength over the last 35 years,” wrote the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their book “American Grace.” They argue that when the religious right politicized faith, they put a “not welcome” sign on the door for millions of people of faith. This was compounded by the hypocrisy of these same moral authorities protecting pedophile priests while ignoring the lifelong anguish of the victims. For much of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in places was essentially organized crime in clerical garb.

The spirituality of Pope Francis, like his namesake from Assisi, is by example. Shedding the glam trappings of power and the aura of invincibility, he lives in a spartan guesthouse, mixes with the folks and tries to give voice to the sick, the poor, the immigrant living in the shadows. He washes the feet of prisoners, and Muslim ones at that. He laments that worshiping “the god called money” makes for bankrupt human beings.

The church he envisions would be a “home for all,” not “a nest protecting our mediocrity.” It’s strong stuff, long overdue and as refreshing as a brisk wind blowing down from the Dolomites.

Sure. This is a welcome change. I think the world wants the Catholic Church to present its best self--a self that represents the spirit of the gospels rather than the spirit of moralistic fussiness and institutional self-protection. But nothing really changes until the Catholic Church moves out of Rome.

I know. It's not going to happen. Petrine ministry and all that. It's too bad because the "Roman" part of the Roman Catholic Church is its biggest burden. So long as the ghosts of the empire inhabit the Vatican hallways, there will be something fundamentally unchristian about the Roman Church. Popes like John XXIII and Francis come and go, but the ghosts remain. 

The Roman Church in the coming century faces the choice whether it wants to be a Church that appeals primarily to fear-and-order-obsessed, right-wing personality types or to all people of good will, and if the latter it needs a clean break with its history of abuses of power. The ghosts in the hallways are all about power--getting more of it and abusing it. Those ghosts are the spirit of Rome; they have nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. 

The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth

[This is a repost from 2010--with a few changes. I thought I'd throw it out there again since it links to a bunch of themes that have come up in comments recently--second naiveté, Mary, the flat, univocity of the post-Scotus cosmos, and the references to the Meditations, on which this piece leans heavily. This is theological pastiche, so take it for what it's worth, a thought experiment.--jw]

I think that one of the biggest problems with contemporary Westerners--even among people who think of themselves as religious--lies in their inability to  feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to the existence of anything outside the materialist box that frames our experience. There are vestiges of an older sensibility. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet moderns feel silly if they discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different from those that Carl Sagan would approve of.

And yet when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate. We want to retrieve it, but we are shy about it; we study these texts and other artifacts of premodern consciousness and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't. But we dare not take seriously their stories--safer to assume they are fanciful fictions, and any attempt to work with them is the stuff of trivial entertainments, like the novels of Dan Brown or the Indiana Jones films.

Modern consciousness has squeezed out the mystery in things that naive premodern consciousness took for granted, and so, echoing Paul Ricoeur, I'd argue that we need to develop a new mindset that embraces a 'second naiveté' that would once again be capable of experiencing what premoderns experienced and then tried to represent in their myths. The gospel tells us that unless we become like children, we cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It does not mean to regress into childishness, but to open up the parts of the soul that we have closed down, the parts that are open to the enchantment in Being, to be adults but to also the recover something lost. That's what I understand second naiveté to be.

In what I write here I assume that human consciousness as it is currently structured cognizes in its ordinary states only a small fraction of the full spectrum of Being. Second naiveté, therefore, is open to the idea of a supersensible, supra-rational realm that is wrapped around us and interpenetrates what we experience in ordinary sense-centered consciousness.  A second naiveté is open to the idea that people in every generation have experiences in which clues, indicators, epiphanies are given concerning the existence of this supersensible, supra-rational realm. The difference between moderns and premoderns lies in that moderns think these people are crazy and premoderns thought they were shamans, initiates, or saints.

Brooks on 'A Secular Age'

Brooks's column this morning tries to summarize Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's nothing particularly striking in it to quote, but if you're not familiar with the book, the column will give you an overview of its concerns, which are the concerns of this blog. The basic question for the book, Taylor says, is "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?"

I think the answer to that question is complex, and Taylor's grappling with it is an honest and interesting response, which is as a believer, a Catholic, to embrace the pluralism at the same time as to rigorously pursue his own faith commitment. What other sane choice is there? Faith, most particularly the Christian faith, is most itself when it eschews a Constantinian project, which isn't to say that it hasn't an obligation to evangelize, which I think is done for most of us in our deeds in how we live rather than in aggressive public professions. 

But I think it's also done by engaging with the spirit of the times and by reading the signs  of the times, and so along those lines I wanted to say a word about John Milbank Radical Orthodoxy. I bring him up because I started reading his dialog book with Slavoj Zizek entitle The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? 

Taylor, Millbank, and Zizek are not for everybody, and the focus of this blog is not to become a forum for technical discussions of philosophy or theology, but I sense a shift in the zeitgeist and while only a minuscule percentage of educated people could spend more than thirty minutes reading any of these books without giving up in frustration, I think it's important to point to and try to understand what they are doing: Challenging the presuppositions of modernity and hypermodernity and creating a space for believers to become essential voices in shaping the thought and imagination of the global fusion culture that is now emerging. The Western tradition is this Christian tradition. It isn't the whole story, but it's a critical part of it. 

Milbank's project to retrieve a tradition of Christian thought that uses Plato, and the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Iamblichus,  and moves through the early church fathers, particularly Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, then through Aquinas, Eckhardt, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists, Kierkegaard and the nouvelle theologie of de Lubac, Congar and other Catholic thinkers of the early 20th century is one I find very appealing in its broad outline. I am all for a post-Kantian, post-secular retrieval of serious, high-level metaphysics, and I don't think it's possible to do without this Christian tradition being an essential dialog partner.

And that's why the Millbank/Zizek book interests me. I'm not ready to talk about that yet, and when I do, I'm going to try to make it as accessible as possible to lay readers. But I'm convinced what they are doing is worth understanding and knowing about. 

Pope Francis and the Church of the Poor

Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.

He now maintains that he “would like a church that is poor and is for the poor.” But does this mean giving food to the poor, or does it mean also asking why they are poor? The dictatorships of Latin America waged a war against the poor, which continued in many places after those governments collapsed. Different factions of the Catholic Church took opposing sides in this war. Whatever the stated intentions of those who attacked and suppressed liberation theology, in practical terms they were the allies of tyrants, land-grabbers, debt slavers and death squads. For all his ostentatious humility, Pope Francis was on the wrong side. (George Monbiot, "Cardinal Sins")

Montbiot echoes the famous quote by Dom Heldar Camara, the bishop of Recife Brazil who became rather well known in the sixties and seventies: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Popes Benedict and Francis apparently don't think the 'why' question is one that the official church should bother itself about. As Montbiot's article reminds us, Benedict, during his pre-pope stint as the the head of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, was the heavy who shut down the efforts of so many priests and nuns who did care about that question.

They asked why, and understood why, and they risked and often gave their lives to do something about it by working to organize and empower poor people. But they were perceived as communist or as abetting a communist program when Cold War tensions were still high. But communism is an atheistic ideology, and it's a scandal for the church to be associated with anything so impious. As in Vichy France, better to work the fascists than the resistance, too many communists in the resistance, after all. 

Perhaps some day Benedict and Francis will be canonized because they understood how the church expects a saint to act. But in my view a saint is not a pious conformist; he or she is rather someone who is willing to risk everything in working for the regime of compassion and love to which Jesus and the gospels point. What have our current and former ecclesial CEOs risked in that way? Did they even have a clue when they met someone who did in fact live such risk? Or did they just see them as reds?

The Roman Catholic Church is animated more by the spirit of imperial Rome than it is by the spirit of the gospels, and that's why its spiritual authority is not taken seriously by anyone who has a clue about the latter. At least the new pope gets that the imperial thing and the red Gucci shoes are bad p.r., but we'll see if there's any substance to his humility. We'll see whether, in fact, his humility is just a mask for moral cowardice. I hope it isn't. But even if his is a true humility, will it have any impact in changing the imperial ethos that has dominated the Vatican since the 300s. Give me a shout if that starts to happen, but until then, who cares about what happens in that corrupt little city state. 

Premodern/Modern/Postmodern

American politics used to be primarily about people choosing candidates based on their positions on issues—taxes, deregulation, the environment, jobs, health care, energy policy, welfare, social security, national security, and so on. But elections have become more about making a statement about your identity; and national elections are about whoe we say we are to ourselves and to the rest of the world. The elections this decade are not so much about solving practical problems, but about deciding who we are. 

The country is in a state of identity crisis, not unlike the one now being experienced in the Islamic world. The crisis there involves a conflict between the centuries-old traditions of Islam and the threat that modernity poses toward it. It’s not unlike the crisis the Western world experienced at the time of the Reformation. As those who then supported the traditional crown-and-altar institutions rejected modernity, so now do the traditionalist forces in Islam reject it.

American identity was shaped in very large part by the rejection of the premodern, medieval model, and its feelings of scorn toward the medievalism of Islam today are similar to the deepseated scorn Americans felt toward the medievalism of Catholicism back then. The post-reformation religious wars in Europe were symptomatic of how profound many felt the stakes to be. These wars were not at the deepest level about territory and money. They were for the traditionalists about preserving the integrity of their age-old way of life and for the the moderns about freedom from the constraints of what they perceived tradition’s irrationality and corruption. As in Europe then, so in the Middle East now.

America, unlike its European cousins, came into existence as a modern, post-medieval experiment, and for the most part it’s been an experiment that has worked out. But just as modernity is now posing a challenge to Islamic identity, post-modernity is posing a challenge to America's modern identity. And just as Islam has very powerful factions on its right that feel a desperation to resist the inevitable, so does America’s right.

Both in the long run are losing causes, but both in the short run can do a lot of damage. Both forces here and there sense their inevitable extinction, and both like cornered animals are thinking now with their reptile brains, which means that it’s all about survival, and when people feel that their survival is at stake, they can justify the commission of any crime. The reptile brain does not think in moral categories. Its only concern is survival. And the cultural right in America really believes that the survival of the American way of life is at stake, and its destroyers are Islam from without and Liberals from within.

In my view this goes a long way to explain the behavior of extremists and their sympathizers on the cultural right both in this country and in the Middle East. The people within these factions in each society have to be treated carefully because they are truly like cornered animals, and as such they are very dangerous. It would be nice if we could just tranquilize them and have them sleep it off until the new thing gels, but the task is far more difficult and confusing—and sane traditionalists have a constructive role to play in shaping the future if they would embrace it.

I consider myself such a traditionalist. I am, after all, a Catholic, but I'm one with historical consciousness, and I do not dread but rather see an opportunity in a society that is no longer modern. And Catholics, like Jews and Muslims, because they have a foot in both the premodern world as well as in the contemporary globalizing world, have the potential to play a stablizing role for the world as it makes the transition into the postmodern, if they develop an imagination for doing so. Protestantism, I'd argue, is too much a creature of modernity to be of much help, but who knows. Certainly the restorationists within the Catholic Church are of no use. They are simply part of this larger right-wing backlash for which there is no constructive future. My guess is that if Catholics are to play such a role, the impulse for it will come out of the southern hemisphere, but not in my lifetime. Too much has to change. But that's a topic for another day.

In a free, rights-centered society, the right, even its nuttiest extremists, must be allowed their freedom, and in the long run their influence will wither away for lack of relevance. But right now they have more relevance than they deserve because they offer a solution to a culture-wide problem that the more progressive forces in the culture cannot yet offer. The right offers a very clear picture about what it means to be American for people who cannot live with the insecurity and ambiguity that characterize a period of cultural transition. And that picture is based on a fantasy of "the way we were." Ronald Reagan was iconic in this respect. He was the embodiment of the "way-we-were" American fantasy, and his appeal lay in his giving Americans some feeling of pride in being an American again in a confusing time of identity crisis.

The Democrats, as awful as they are, and as bereft of solutons as they are, best represent the path forward. But it's not about answers now. We first have to figure out who we are, and in the meanwhile we need to put people in office who will do the least damage. 

The Sacred Polity

"Was anybody else offended by...can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song.

"I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on their jersey," Beck said.

"The country that gives them the ability to...pursue their happiness in peace and safety is not worth putting your hand on the heart."  (Source)

In a secular age, it's hard for most cosmopolitan types to understand why Glenn Beck gets so upset at things like this.  I think I get it, but I'm going to give one of my long-winded explanations to provide some context to explain what I think is going on. Doing so also gives me  a platform to talk about a couple of other things as well. And in doing so I'm going to lean heavily on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, chapter 12--"The Age of Mobilization".

In the pre-Reformation Europe, the world still had an enchantment about it--some things were sacred and some very much were not. But it was a rather vertical, static sense of the sacred. The sacred was experienced in special times during the cycle of the seasons, in sacred places, and in sacred ritual actions. The sacred was sharply distinguished from the profane, and profane behavior in a sacred time or place was more than a breach of decorum--it was sacrilegious.

Today secular cosmopolitans and even, I'd say, most believers have lost any sense of the intensity of experience that was associated with the sacred--or, for that matter, the sacrilegious. Comedians keep trying to push past the last vestiges of an old decorum as if they were on some other sacred mission, but it's all rather inconsequential. They think they are lion tamers in their imaginations of themselves, when in fact in a reversal of the Monty Python sketch, they are really dealing with anteaters.

And with Beck you have  someone who articulates a nostalgia for the lost sacred--and that's the part I get, kind of, because I, too, feel that loss. But Taylor illuminates something that I as someone who grew up in a pre-Vatican Catholic world (I was born in 1950, graduated 8th grade in '64 and high school in '68) had very little sense of--the sacred rituals of American civil religion. We Catholics had our own definition and way of experiencing the sacred and the sacrilegious, and all the Protestant versions of it (with which I associated the rituals of civil religion) seemed rather pallid, a kind of wannabe sacred that really didn't cut the mustard. It was all so much going through the motions. The various rituals of American civil religion always seemed kind of silly and unserious to me, the way the Shriners play at being some kind of initiatory mystery cult--they're acting out a collective fantasy that has lost any real connection to the living spiritual forces that gave these rituals their shape.

So here's where Taylor helped me understand something I didn't before. I had only a passing acquaintance with Bellah's work on civil religion in the 70s--it didn't really interest me because it had little to do with what I believed to be a vital spiritual future.  But that work is important if you want to understand what's going on in American society today, and I'm more interested in that now than I was then. I see now that there was a moment when American civil religion really had valid sacred power, where the rituals weren't empty or without reference to something noble.  And I understand how it functioned effectively to replace the experience of the lost sense of the sacred that pervaded the collective imagination in the ancien regime:

In an enchanted world, there is an obvious way in which God can be present in society; in the loci of the sacred.  And the political society can be closely connected to these, and can itself be thought to exist on a higher plane.  Ernst Kantoriowicz tells us that one of the first uses of the term 'mystical body' in European history referred to the French kingdom. The king himself could be one of the links between the planes, represented respectively by the king's mortal and undying bodies. . . .

This is a description of what we'll call the old-school sacred polity. But this model began to crumble after the Reformation for lots of complex reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to write about here.  But three very important factors were the religious fragmentation of Christendom that broke apart its organic sense of modeling a hierarchical cosmos, coupled with the post-Copernican understanding of the cosmos that supplanted the Ptolemaic hierarchical scheme, and lastly the project by both Protestant and Catholic counter-Reformation elites to purify religious practice and belief by purging the pagan vestiges of popular religion, which were essential for maintaining a sense of the world's enchantment. 

Educated ecclesial elites were among the most aggressive in trying to stamp out all that superstitious enchantment; nevertheless, it continued, even in the Protestant countries, well into the 19th Century. In Catholic countries there was what Taylor calls the baroque compromise, which allowed for a little of the old mystery and spiritual exuberance, but it was definitely 'new school'. I experienced as a child the last gasp of that baroque ecclesial mentality. The old-school practices of the heath, that had been largely accepted and reframed in the pre-Reformation Christian social imagination, were now taboo.

But despite the resistance to these changes by these heathen heathdwellers, a new notion of the sacred began to take hold of the imaginations of the educated elites, especially in the Protestant countries. Here's Taylor on this shift:

Now with advancing disenchantment, especially in Protestant societies, another model took shape, with relation both to the cosmos and the polity. In this the notion of Design was crucial. To take the cosmos, there was a shift from the enchanted world to a cosmos conceived in a conformity with post-Newtonian science, in which there is absolutely no question of higher meanings being expressed in the universe around us. But there is still, with someone like Newton himself, for instance, a strong sense that the universe declares the glory of God. . . . Now the presence of God no longer lies in the sacred, because this category fades in a disenchanted world. But he can be thought to be no less powerfully present through His Design.

So before getting to our more intensely late-20th century experience of secularism, there was an intermediary stage that was very much at the center of the American project. It was carried primarily by what I have written about here as the whiggish spirit for which the Puritans and other northern Calvinists were the chief bearers. The sacred wasn't something experienced in sacred space so much as it was experienced in a kind of sacred time--or perhaps more accurately in a sense of Providentially ordained historical purposes. This is what I'll call the new-school sacred polity.  Its citizens belonged to a society that was developing, moving at the cutting edge history according to a divinely ordained purposes.

One's experience of the sacred correlated with this sense of living one's life as a free individual, but in a free individualism that was attuned to the evolving effort to fulfill that plan, and in doing so to be on the right side of history:

The presence of God in the cosmos is matched by another idea: His presence in the polity. Here an analogous change takes place. The divine isn't there in a King who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society which plainly follows God's design. This can be filled in with an idea of moral order which is seen as established by God, in the way invoked, for instance, in the American Declaration of Independence: Men have been created equal, and have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The idea of a moral order which is expressed in this Declaration, and which has since become dominant in our world, is what I have been calling the Modern Moral Order. It is quite different from the orders which preceded it. Its members are disembedded individuals who come to associate together. The design underlying the association is that each, in pursuing his or her own purpose in life, acts to benefit others mutually. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others, and offers them mutual help of certain kinds.

But in the earlier days, when the plan was understood as Providential and the order seen as Natural Law, which is the same as the law of God, building a society which fulfills these requirements was seen as fulfilling the design of God. To live in such a society was to live in one where God was present, not at all in the way that belonged to the enchanted world, through the sacred, but because we were following His design. God is present as the designer of the way we live.  We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as "one people under God".

This is the basis for American exceptionalism that was felt especially strongly in the 19th century. Lincoln was an exemplar in his sense of the nation's providential mission, and his vision and his prodigious ability to articulate it have made him the architect of America's second founding. He articulated what so many Americans came to believe--that America was  the world's "last best hope".  Not because it was flawless, but because in the American soul there were these better angels working to accomplish in a more perfect union a providentially ordained design. Lincoln--who was no churchgoer--more than any other prominent American I can think of had a profound sense of America as sacred polity in the new school sense. He was the St. Paul, so to speak, of American civil religion--not its founder, but its most eloquent evangelist.

So this sense of higher national purpose comprised two elements: first, the sense that there was something providential in the American project to the degree that it was progressively moving toward a greater realization of this higher purpose or design, that it was in this sense a project of the nation's better angels; second, a collective sense that while we are a self-reliant, freedom-loving people, we are also good neighbors, that we have as individuals a vested, mutual interest in the welfare of the whole society--that we all have a shared hope for a better American future.

This idea of moving toward a more perfect realization of a divine order was was not a possibility in the  collective social imagination of the  old-school sacred polity.  The order was already established, and people lived virtuous lives in conformity with it or they lived dissolute, disordered, sinful lives out of conformity with it.  But in the new-school sacred polity it became a commonplace, especially for the more "whiggish" factions in the new American republic, that the American providential purpose was to realize more perfectly over time the ideals articulated in the Declaration, and in doing so to be a light to the nations. And to a large degree, and for a long time, America was that.

Sure, the nation had its dark side. There has always been a  violent, rapacious aspect to the American character, but it was balanced by this other side, these better angels, this feeling for a providential destiny, and for the hope of a society ruled by decency and a spirit of mutual help. This sense in those who bore the nation's better angels empowered them with a zeal that is hard for progressives today to imagine or embrace. Just read the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to get a feel for it if you need some reminding.

It's hard today to think of American evangelicalism as being a force for progressive change, but it was. The last time we saw it was in Martin Luther King's rhetoric that drew deeply and powerfully from this now submerged sense of the new school sacred polity. And that's the last time we saw any real significant change in this country. I'd argue that without an appeal to the new school sacred polity nothing significant gets done. I'd like to say that if Lincoln was the American sacred polity's St. Paul, then MLK was its St. Augustine. Augustine's imagination of the world and God's relationship to it dominated Europe for over a thousand years--would that MLK's did so as well.

But for most educated now Americans it's too hard to believe that America has a providential role to be at the cutting edge of history, or to think of America as Lincoln did as the world's last best hope. People mouth the words from time to time, but it doesn't resonate. That's what was different, though, about Obama.  When he used the language of the sacred polity, it resonated, and it awakened what Lincoln called our better angels.

I think this was the key to Obama's mystique during his campaign, and is the reason why for so many of us he is now such a crushing disappointment. During the campaign, he awakened that latent sense of America's sacred providential calling, he roused those better angels. But when they reported to work the day after his inauguration, he told them to go home. He told them that America is a game played by insiders, that it was back to business as usual and that he would govern in a way that was in its substance, if not its style, in continuity with everything decent Americans hated about what had happened to the country since the invasion of Iraq.

That's Obama's great failure--not to recognize the opportunity that was afforded him, that these angels with his leadership could have accomplished significant progress toward the change we all long for, whether we consciously recognize it or not. But Obama so far has disregarded them, and he has given new life and restored legitimacy to the forces of regression, which were on their heels in 2008. That's what's so infuriating--this sense of missed opportunity.  And so now we're told by all the jaded types that those of who believe in those better angels were foolish ever to think they exist. I insist that we were not.  And I insist that nothing changes until those angels are roused and put to work.

***

The culture wars in America since the 70s is a war between two competing forms of nostalgia--between those nostalgic for a sacred, providential sense of America's purpose--the cultural right--and those nostalgic for the lost, collective spirit mutual help--mainly progressives on the cultural left. The odd thing about this culture war is that both sides need the aspects in the other they oppose. It's as if the American soul were riven in two, and in its division cannot stand. They each in their way flip and flop impotently, gasping for breath like fish on a dock. We're left with impotence, stalemate, frustration--the best people at best mustering a kind of diffident goodwill, and the worst a barbaric ferocity that commands the field.

The cultural right is all about a longing for this static sacred with little sense of what I described above as the national project of our better angels--it is on the whole remarkably mean spirited and small minded. And the cultural left is all about social progress without any sense of history's having a sacred or providential dimension. And that's why, I'd argue, progressives are so weak. They lack the force of deeply inspired conviction. They don't really believe in the better angels, except maybe as a quaint, air-quoted metaphor, so they would never think to call upon them.

Progressives on the cultural left don't "get" what Lincoln and MLK "got". They don't understand that in order to resist the enormous power of the barbaric forces that now dominate in our political and economic sphere, there has to be a deeply felt spiritual counterforce that resistance can draw from.

So what's the takeaway here? Someone like Glenn Beck recognizes on an unconscious level that something is missing--a feeling for the sacred that all of us whether we realize it or not deeply long for, but he doesn't know where to find it. He looks vainly for it in a preservation of dessicated forms rather than in a recovery of the broad-minded generous spirit Lincoln helped us to imagine. These forms without their originating animating spirit are zombie forms, possessed in his case by paranoid demons and the delusional thinking that follows from such a possession.

This kind of extremist right wing conservative embraces a fantasy sacred, one that has no existence or force except to reinforce his delusional thinking. By their fruits you will know them. Progressives, on the other hand, reject any possibility for experiencing the sacred, and so don't, and so on the whole lack the collective will to oppose the barbarians except to write nasty things about them in their blogs. And so we're at this impasse. And the barbaric forces rule until somehow or other the better angels find their footing in some kind of social movement that understands the power they have to make the difference.

We must at some point retrieve this sense of a sacred national purpose in the way that Lincoln and MLK understood it.  And to recognize once again the difference between the sacred and the sacrilegious, and that there is nothing sacred about markets; they are profane neutral. Nevertheless there are some market behaviors, like the kind of thing we've seen done by Wall Street, that are downright sacrilegious--deep, appalling, abject affronts to what in our collective sense of decency and common national purpose.

I fear that if a movement inspired by the nation's better angels does not arise, we will eventually be thrown into a dialectic of barbarism, one barbarian faction seeking to supplant the reigning barbarians in an endless cycle of political king of the hill.  We were supposed to be better than that--and at times we have been, but we're in a part of the cycle now in which we have no sense of our national purpose.

I guess the question is whether the game is lost or whether we can at some point recover what we've lost. I'm pessimistic, but not without hope. 

Rest in Peace, Bob Smith

I've just returned from the funeral of Bob Smith, one of my oldest and dearest friends.

He was undergoing cancer treatment, but his prognosis was good.  I spoke to him a week or so before he died and he sounded great.  One person who spoke to him the day before he died said he sounded great, very upbeat and eager to get back to work at Cornell where he was Catholic Chaplain for the last eight years. Last Tuesday morning, while in the hospital for treatment, he developed  a stomach hemorrhage very suddenly and essentially he bled to death. He was 78.

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

Why was he a Catholic?  Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer."  In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or theorized about.  So the present age has no use for Christian faith.  But the believer, he thought, should count this as an advantage, and see the present age as preferable to "Christendom," when the churches prospered. "In the old Christendom," he explained, "everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it.  But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs."  From Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, p. 460.

That encapsulates the point of my "Cultural Identity" posts (here and here). Catholicism in the U.S., like the conservative strains of Judaism, had been until recently countercultural, i.e., countercultural to the mainstream culture defined by the tension in values between Calvinistic moralism on one hand and rationalist modernism on the other--both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism. The Catholic world I grew up in was in most respects the one that Percy entered into in the 1940s when he became a Catholic. That Catholic world had very little consonance with and to a large degree stood in contradiction to Calvinism, rationalist modernism, and materialism--but that Catholic world no longer exists. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics stopped living in their own countercultural world and started living in Calvinist/Modernist/Consumerist America.

More on 'Lost' and Dante's Island Down Under

About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography.  I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up pretty well. I'm off on some things, but I think I caught the spirit of what they were trying to do. You can read the whole post if you want, but I think the most relevant grafs are here:

For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.

It's interesting to think about the meaning of the crucifixion on Calvary in Jerusalem and of Christ's harrowing of hell after it as a kind of blasting a hole in hell, which allowed the people from the North to pass to the south. That passage, impossible before the crucifixion, is the path of salvation, the path back home. The Greeks imagined Hades as a grim dead end and the Jews imagined Sheol similarly. For them there was no way back to the Island. So after the crucifixion humans from the post-Adamic fallen world in the Northern hemisphere could find passage back to the South, through Hell, and then beyond to climb the Purgatorial mountain, to its summit, Eden, which is the staging area for salvific release into the heavens. This is a journey Dante takes with Beatrice in the Paradiso cantos.

Dante passes through hell and then comes out in the south on the Island at the South Pole, and then he climbs the purgatorial mountain there to reach the original Garden of Eden. And from Eden he departs into the several levels of heaven defined by the planetary spheres, the fixed stars, and the realm that lies beyond the fixed stars where one encounters the Godhead in the Beatific Vision. This was Dante's journey in the flesh, and perhaps it's analogous, in its Purgatorial phase, to the journey the Lost survivors have made that have brought them to the Island. 

In Dante's imagination of the earth, the southern hemisphere, the world down under, is the underworld, in the sense that it is under the top part of the world, but the top half is the realm of fallen consciousness, of Maya, illusion. In Christian mythopoetic terms, the northern hemisphere is a place of fallen exile, the place in which we're all metaphysically "lost." The underworld is for fallen consciousness a dream world, but from the perspective of those down under, the northern hemisphere is the hallucination. The underworld is non-hallucinatory because there lies the path home. A journey into the underworld must be undertaken if one is to find his way home. He must pass through it to get back where he is to end his exile, to be no longer lost, to return to where it all began, where lies the real home and the ultimate destination for all those who by grace and choice undertake to become un-lost.

***

Clearly Cuse and Lindelof are playing with this traditional cosmology, as they are, of course, using ideas from several other sources. This is for them a wildly syncretistic exercise, but all the more interesting for that. The Postmodern era is the Age of Syncretism--of all manner of creative fusions. [I'm not saying that this is a Christian allegory, but clearly Christian ideas are among those that significantly influence the story they want to tell.]

So the Island in the Lost narrative, in addition to being a cork, is a threshold, a place between here and there, and the writers do a very interesting job of creating a sense of displacement or dislocation that relates to the situation of these exiles: Is being on the Island really to be Lost, or is it to be found?  Hasn't Jacob found them and brought them there? And it's clear that their longing for home in the Northern hemisphere is nostalgia for the hallucination, like the Israelites in the wilderness longing to return to Egypt. They are exiles, yes, but right where they need to be.

And since the detonation of the Jughead and the creation of the sideways reality, a new kind of alienation into a hallucinatory exile has been created. It is the obverse of the more conventional idea of exile, which is to be "neither/nor"; in its being "both/and". The more typical form of exile in at Ptolemaic or Newtonian universe is to be neither here nor there, to be between home and some future destination, either a future return to the original home or to find a new one. No two things can occupy the same space at the same time, but can one thing occupy two spaces at the same time, to be both here and there?  The Lost writers seem are telling us that it is possible, but if so, what are the implications? And it's not a good thing to be so split.

A traditional pre-Einsteinian archetype for exile, for being "lost" is the biblical neither here nor there, to be neither in Egypt nor yet in Jerusalem, to be wandering futilely in a wilderness. But post-Jughead the survivors in the Lost story are now both here and there in two parallel realities at the same time--on the Island in the Southern hemisphere and in the sideways reality in the Northern hemisphere in which Oceanic 815 never crashes.

And while those on the Island (except Desmond apparently) have no awareness of their other lives in the Northern hemisphere, those in the northern world are all gradually awakening to their parallel existence on the Island. So this is the big question to be resolved in the next six hours:  What is the relationship between the two parallel realities? How is it possible to live in two worlds with two separate narratives at the same time? Are they both equally real, or is one a kind of hallucination, and if so, which one is the hallucination?  For me the answer is clear, but we'll see if that's where the writers go with it.

Because if the Dante paradigm gives us a clue, the northern hemisphere is the fallen world of illusion (and we're specifically talking about Los Angeles here to boot) and the southern hemisphere, or the underworld, the world down under, is the staging area for salvation. And if the writers are working with a Dante-esque logic, the people in the sideways timeline in the northern hemisphere are living in a hallucination from which they must wake up. They must return to the Island, and it appears they are in the process of figuring that out as the men, anyway, are having experiences that awaken them to the memory of their Beatrices, Claire for Charlie, Penny for Desmond, Libby for Hurley, and Helen for Locke. The memory of something emotionally real awakens them to their hallucinatory status in the sidways timeline. Very Dante-esque.

This logic would explain why it was wrong for the survivors to leave the Island in 2004, and why Farraday was wrong to set off the bomb that created the timeline in which Oceanic 815 never crashes. The sideways reality represents a regression, the comforting fleshpots of Egypt; the true path lies ahead on the Island. The Island is a wilderness staging area in which the survivors are learning that their old ways of thinking are obsolete; it's where, like the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, they are being prepared to move forward on to the next stage.

The writers have put the North Pole in the Tunisian wilderness rather than in Jerusalem or the Sinai, perhaps to avoid being too Judaeo-Christian in their references. It's probably a nod to Mithraism and the Hermetic tradition, but I'm not sure about that. And they clearly meant the sideways reality to be more positive than I depict it here, but I think it's clear that what happened or happens on the Island gives shape to what happens in the sideways reality because they are all dead in in the sideways northern world--it's real, but not their "real" lives, and it is a kind of hallucination from which they need to awaken as they remember their real lives in the crash timeline. 

The sideways reality is a post-death dream from which they all must be awakened. It's what the Tibetans call a bardo state, which is very much like what Dante is describing as Purgatory, a transition state between our incarnate life and whatever comes next. And that awakening is an anamnesis or remembering of their real life, which was their Island life and the choices and deeds done there that earned for them the redemption that allows them to wake up in the sideways reality and "move on". Moving on could mean almost anything from reincarnation to an encounter with the Godhead.

The Island timeline is the "real" timeline, that's the point of Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Richard, and Frank successfully flying off to resume their lives off Island.  That time line is the one that matters in the drama of human freedom, and it's the only one that matters.  That's the time line in which Jack dies among the bamboo trees and Hurley and Ben live out their lives as number one and two protecting the Island, and in which Desmond probably sails home to Penny and his son.

The writers resolved the problem of the two parallel realities by affirming the existential substance of the crash reality and the dreamlike bardo-like quality of the sideways reality, a reality from which they needed to awake. The sideways timeline is a kind of collective fabrication, a collective fantasy constructed from their positive karma, so to speak, but which is a temporary holding pattern until they all remember who they are and in that remembrance experience a kind of resurrection--they remember who they are for one another as one mini community within the larger communion of saints. But I have to think about that some more.

The series as a whole has not come completely into focus for me--there are still lots of loose ends, but I have to say that I think they pulled it off.  It's not perfect, but it's a brave attempt that has succeeded beyond what we should ordinarily expect from prime-time TV.  I'll have more to say as the dust settles. 

***

UPDATE:  Unanswered questions:

What would MiB/Flocke have done had he escaped the Island?  What was at stake in  preventing his successful escape? Would he still have been the smoke monster off Island?

What was at stake in saving the Island? What would have happened if Jack hadn't put the plug back in? 

What really happened after the bomb went off and what is the sideways reality, really? Is it just in the dream consciousness of the key survivors? Or is there a whole universe full of people living an alternative history with the Island at the bottom of the sea?

Who is Mrs. Hawking?  I mean really.

Remembering/anamnesis as resurrection?  New twist to an old idea?

 

Ideas Matter

[Ed. note: I'm reposting this 2005 piece as a follow up to "The Communion of Saints" post I put up over the weekend.[

My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the framework I have developed over the years. It contrasts dramatically with the framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing the modern narrative.  It’s closer to, but also pretty different from, the framework within which most conventional Christians operate. 

I have said elsewhere that I’m a Catholic because I believe the whole thing--the fundamental doctrinal, sacramental, and liturgical package makes beautiful, profound sense to me. (The ecclesial power structure is pretty corrupting, but that’s to be expected because all power structures are corrupting.) And it’s important to say that it’s just not some rigid, doctrinally pure Catholicism that makes sense to me—much in Hinduism also makes sense to me, and I have also learned much from shamanic religions and from Kaballah, the Christian Hermetic tradition, and from the Orthodox Sophianic tradition.  And it all connects, and provides for me a framework that is always in the background of everything I write here. For me the word catholic is just right--all embracing,  broad, synthetic, more interested in connections than distinctions, but at the same time true to it's own Christocentric logic.

Ideas matter; they either imprison or liberate. One’s ethics follow from one’s metaphysics. One’s behavior in the world follows from one's beliefs, whether consciously chosen or unconsciously assimilated, about the fundamental principles that govern the way the world works.

But any belief system is just a complex delusional mental superstructure if it doesn’t make a practical difference in the way we live, and ultimately the difference test is 'by their fruits you will know them.' Most people’s behavior in the world is determined by unconscious instinctual impulses.  They may have a very noble ideational superstructure that makes them feel good, but their behavior in the world is just as unconscious and instinctual as the next guy's. For most people what they think is spiritual is just socialization to be well-behaved. Their lives are still mostly instinct driven, and their religious ideas are sterile. They effect no transformations in the soul.

For me the fruits test has more to do with how ideas affect the disposition of the soul to be open, supple, and fertile. Christianity is not about being well behaved. It’s about being subversively productive, bearing fruit.  This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in the gospels. The bottom line is not whether you minded your Ps and Qs, but whether you made a difference, whether you brought something new into the world, no matter how humble or innocuous.  In other words, has one been an infusion point in the world for the liberating grace that seeks always to penetrate the regime of delusion and to subvert it.   

The only measure for the success or failure of a human life that matters is the degree to which one was an effective infusion point.  It matters hardly at all what one’s conscious beliefs are if he has lived a fundamentally sterile or fruitful life. It doesn’t matter whether someone is Muslim, Christian, or atheist. What matters most is the disposition of the soul toward the ubiquitous, superabundant presence of grace, whether recognized as such or not. Are you open or are you closed? If you’re open and you act, you’re an infusion point, and the world is changed. And ideas matter to the degree that they open one up or close one off to the possibility of this 'more' breaking in from outside the system. If you believe you live in a closed system, then you think and behave like a prisoner.

The great saints in all cultures are those through whom this grace, this 'more' from outside the system, pours into the world in torrents. But for the rest of us it’s enough that we be cracks in the wall through which it trickles. I’m not talking about anything humanly spectacular here. The simplest acts of kindness, of loyalty, of speaking the truth, can be infusion points of grace into the world, and they may bear fruit in ways that we never know. It’s only important that we are open and that we act. “Think not of the harvest, says St. James in his epistle, “but only of proper sowing.”

While the obsession with doctrinal purity is to me absurd and often a sign of mental illness, nevertheless, the mental framework within which one lives, depending on its suppleness or rigidity, affects the disposition of the soul. What you believe and think makes a difference. What you believe can open up possibilities, and it can close them off. It can lead to cynicism or naïve idealism, to slavishness or proud resistance. The soul suffers significant consequences if the mind is seduced by cultish ideologies of the left or right. It is precisely from these mind prisons that so many people need to be liberated, and religious fanatics are among those in direst need. 

The Pharisees in the gospel stories are the paradigm for this kind of enslavement to religious ideology. The obsession with correct behavior and correct belief becomes a wall that closes one off from grace. I’ve called it elsewhere whited-sepulcher syndrome. By their stench you will know them.

Which leads me back to what I want say about Original Sin. I think it makes a difference if you live within a mental framework in which this concept plays a role.  I want to  explain how it has come to make  a difference to me.  But this is long enough for today.  More another day.  For Part IV, click here.

The Communion of Saints

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church. (Source: Nicholas Kristof)

Indeed, the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican. It should be obvious, but I guess there are Kristoff types who need to be surprised from time to time by encounters with people who don't fit the stereotype.

I haven't been writing about all the stuff going on about Ratzinger and his involvement in the Catholic child rape scandals mainly because I have so little affection for him to begin with. Since the 80s I've seen him as representing pretty much everything that I see as wrong with the Church, and it would be too easy for me to pile on. Nevertheless, I suspect he's getting a raw deal when it comes to many of the accusations aimed at him. It's probably a lot more complicated. It almost always is.

But I wish people outside the church understood better that there are two Church cultures. There is the corrupt, Byzantine culture of the Vatican, which St. Peter himself, if he were to show up, couldn't clean up. Individuals come and go, but that culture remains from century to century. It's a nauseating scene, and I just hope the whole faux-medieval construct part of it collapses from its own dead weight. Maybe something saner and more Christian would emerge from the rubble.  But the Vatican and the people who run it don't matter so much as they think and as most outsiders have been led to believe. It represents the public face, but not the church's deepest, inmost reality. 

"The Church," as St. Augustine said, "is a whore, but she's my mother." That tension in the life of faith has always been there and always will be. There is a second culture of people who have been deeply nourished by the deeper reality, and that culture is the Communion of Saints. The first culture, the unfortunate public face, is relatively unimportant for the life of the Church; the second culture lives from a kind of Mother love that sustains and justifies its existence, no matter what else might be true about it.

***

Yesterday I caught the last segment of "This American Life" (starting around minute 38) in which Dan Savage, the Seattle-based, gay, sex-advice columnist, was talking mockingly about his having been brought up a Catholic and movingly about his deceased mother and his mother's Catholicism.From his description of her, she must have been a great lady. He talked about how since his mother's death, despite his loathing just about everything the Church stands for, he finds himself sitting in a Catholic church--St. James Cathedral in Seattle--several times a week.

And his talk was his attempt to think out loud about why. The official Church still stands for things that nauseate him. He can't believe in virgin births, and resurrections, and all the other improbable assertions of traditional dogma. For him the Church's ideas about human sexuality are beyond ridiculous--they're dangerous and homicidal. And yet there he is, sitting in a church two or three times a week.

I think that what it comes down to is this: your ability to take the Christian faith or any of its truth assertions seriously depends on your encounter with people who have been deeply changed by it, the "it" being the inmost reality of the Church. Faith is never first about believing in certain incomprehensible and unlikely propositions; it's about feeling the mystery and having one's life turned upside down by and encounter with the truth to which it points.

And very often, perhaps most often, that mystery is mediated by our encounter with people whose lives have been so turned upside down. Priests and nuns have conventionally committed to this upside down-ness in their vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, which are upside-down response to the right-side up values for which the pursuit of wealth, pleasure/family, and power/fame within limits are normal, natural, healthy behaviors. These pursuits are not in themselves bad; they're just so "right-side up". St. Francis of Assisi was a prodigy of this kind of upside-down-ness. But there are a lot of people who live the form of upsidedownness with right-side up souls. And there is a very heavy concentration of them in the Vatican.

But to be a monk, a priest, or nun is not by a long shot the only way to live upside down. The Amish live another form of Christian upside-down-ness in relationship to what they perceive, with good reason, to be the modern Babylon. T.S. Eliot explores this right-side up/ upside down tension among sophisticated moderns in his play, The Cocktail Party. And there are all kinds of ways that people of real faith live upside down. To live upside down is not fundamentally a negative statement. If it appears to be mostly about renunciation, it isn't. Any seeming renunciation is a consequence of one's having responded to something else, something more deeply real, that leads one to the see the things apparently renounced as having less value.

Christian ascesis is a path of liberation, and if it isn't, it's a dangerous waste of one's time. It's analogous to the discipline of the musician or athlete who doesn't so much renounce a normal life so much as she chooses a rigorous practice regime as a means to an end, which is to perform at a high level of capability and freedom. If the practice is not a work of grace and freedom, it leads to a form of soul-deadening Phariseeism, or as I've called it elsewhere, the whited-sepulcher syndrome described in Matthew 23.

If there is for me one defining characteristic for what it means to be a Christian, it's this way faith inverts one's values and world view, so that one must see the world from the bottom up, and that's precisely what has always been wrong about the Vatican world view--it sees things top down, and thinks of itself as having some privileged possession of the truth unavailable to others who don't stand with them at the apex of the hierarchy.

That sense of privileged position is almost always an indicator or Phariseeism. The truths of the Faith are the community property of the Communion of Saints in its long, evolving history, from the patriarch Abraham to the present day--it's the possession of all those who have had this inverted relationship to normal, right-side up reality. They are people who have had an encounter of one kind or another with the Mystery, and they have submitted to have their lives turned upside down by it. Theology is simply the attempt to make some sense of the world in the light of this having been turned upside down, and the theology of the great figures in Church history can make no sense unless you have some sense of what this upside down relationship to the world is.

So the test of "faith" should not be whether one believes in certain propositions, or whether one behaves according to some conventional moral code, but by whether there is a certain upside down-ness that characterizes his or her life. And that upside-down-ness leads to behaviors and attitudes that have a deeply moral character, deeper, more wholesome, and life-giving than any conventional morality allows for, because in the end it is a morality that is governed by the logic of love.

And I recognize that upside down-ness in Dan Savage's mother, and to the degree that her life was lived by the upside-down logic of Divine love, she represents that deepest, inmost reality of the Church, which is the life of the Communion of Saints. He told the story about his mother's reaction when he came out--she called a priest. Yes, she was the kind of Catholic that would be shocked to learn her son was gay, but she recovered, and then she let it be known among everyone in the family that if anybody had a problem with her son's being gay, they were  going to have a much bigger problem with her. For some people, people without an upside-down heart, learning this about one's son would force a choice--either to reject the son or to reject the Church. But Savage's mother is interesting because she loved both and found a way to be fiercely loyal to both. Listen to the full recording to get a better sense of the woman than I can render here. She is a living example of someone living in the creative tension I write about in the post entitled "Metaxis."

Religious dogmatists, fundamentalists, and priggish Pharisees on the one hand, and rigid rationalists, materialists, and cynics on the other, are what they are because they can't live in the tension between two seemingly opposing things being possibilities. It's easier to submit to one side or the other rather than to live in the tension between them. But living in that tension, especially when it is a tension created by the logic of love, is what makes us most deeply human because of the way it stretches our souls. 

Savage's mother clearly was big-souled in that way, and because she was, he has to take the faith seriously that she took so seriously. He can't dismiss it even if he can't make any sense of it. Savage clings to his rational, right-side up view of the world and is challenged by his mother's irrational upside-down faith-centered view. And ultimately he or anybody cannot make any sense of the faith unless he first submits to the necessarily upside-down, irrational, improbable logic of divine love. Once that becomes more than an abstraction; once it becomes a reality in one's life, the head trip becomes secondary, and quite frankly, not really much of an obstacle. It makes sense even if one can't explain it to right-side up people. But it can only begin to make sense, once your life has been turned upside down and experience the world with that perspective. First things first.

Savage's mother's life and faith have forced such an encounter for him. It's forcing him to live his own metaxis, and that's what I see as the impetus behind his TAL talk--his need to understand this tension and his hope of resolving it. The nuns and priests that Kristof met and describes in his column are big-souled in that way, and so force Kristof into a metaxis that he feels compelled to think out loud about as well. Because that's the way it works. If we're lucky in life, we meet people who force these tensions on us and in doing so give us the opportunity to grow our souls. That's what the Communion of Saints is all about, this massive collection of life stories of ordinary people who have been open to this upside-down-making encounter and who live with the discomfort that comes with it. 

So Savage is wrong to think that Christian faith is primarily about finding comfort. I'm sure there are several layers of reasons for his being drawn into that church, and to be comforted in his grief is certainly one of them, and legitimate. But something deeper also is at work I suspect, and comfort is not the main thing he'll get if he keeps sitting there, because he'll have to continue living in that tension, which will not be easily resolvable for him.

And so he's mistaken if he thinks sitting in a church is only going to bring him the comfort he longs for--if anything it's intensifying a fundamental tension in his soul and in doing so forcing the choice between either/or and both/and. So long as he keeps sitting in that Church, even if he does nothing else, he's in 'both/and' territory, i.e., metaxisland, and that's a good thing, and I hope he keeps living there and explores its topography. 

Modernity and Soul Atrophy

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an interesting lecture/slide show by the late Leonard Shlain, a physician who has written a couple of interesting books about the interface between rationality and irrationality, science and art, literacy and orality. His book, the Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image and my reading through the McLuhan opus were very influential in shaping my thinking in the late 90s and early part of this decade until I became sidetracked by the Cheney/Bush political crisis.

I've often stated here that while developments in the political sphere might be affecting us acutely in immediate ways, developments in the cultural sphere change us in ways that affect us profoundly in the longer run. What's possible in the political is determined almost completely by the conditions in the cultural sphere--the sphere of our collective soul life.  And I've also argued that since we are in a decadent or transitional cultural period, we have little or no sense of future possibility, and that for want of another argument we keep impotently rehearsing the Scopes trial over and over, which is the classic argument of the modern era, which no longer exists, since we are all postmoderns now, whether we know it or not. 

So I want to return to this attempt to grapple with what's happening in the soul sphere, and I'll probably be reposting older posts or essays I've written years ago in an effort to prime the pump and to plumb to see if there's any interest out there in thinking about what's happening along the lines I am interested in approaching it.  So following is my first repost, and if this interests you be sure to watch the Shlain video to which I linked above:

Sunday, April 10, 2005

The Hypertrophied Eye

Protestantism is the expression of faith that resulted from changes in consciousness effected by the spread of literacy after Gutenberg. Catholicism is the expression of a faith shaped by a consciousness formed in traditions and customs that have its roots in oral culture. A literate consciousness is one that hears the Word while reading alone. An oral culture hears the Word when it is read aloud and heard in the assembly in the context of a sacramental ritual--the mass--which became meaningless hocus pocus for the modern Protestant sensibility. I'm not talking here about the difference in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants, but about a very fundamental difference in the way each experiences and encounters the Word.

A spoken-word culture shapes minds that easily swim in the world of symbol and mythopoesis. The premodern ear-centered imagination is a far richer than the literal literate mind of moderns. Things change very dramatically when a culture tips toward literacy from orality. It's the difference between whether the ear or the eye is the main organ for processing information that comes to us from the world outside our minds. And this shift from orality to literate consciousness is central in understanding what caused the shift from medieval to modern consciousness. This is Marshall McLuhan's basic thesis, and it's an important one to understand if we're to grasp the significance of what is happening to us at this moment as once again consciousness is being changed by our continuous exposure to electronic media.

There are so many things that can be said about this, but the most important for my purposes here is the way these processes require the hypertrophied eye. Did you ever think that what we mean by doing science is essentially thinking only about what we can see and that the scientific revolution was founded on the development of instruments like the telescope and later the microscope that helped us to see more, and that knowing eventually became equated with seeing. In contrast, knowing in a textless world came from what people heard, from the poets and storytellers, which meant that human knowing by people not less intelligent than us was more metaphorical and analogical. The experience of knowing was different because it was done in very different mode of consciousness than the one we now take for granted as universal.

In the scientific age, the age of seeing, everything that was invisible was thought to be unreal—or merely a matter of subjective opinion. But the effect of this new habit of thought was to render a whole dimension of reality as unreal subjective fantasy even though for preliterates this dimension of reality was as objective as the chair upon which I’m sitting. In other words the invisible dimension of reality was pushed into unconsciousness, and as the mind individuated during the modern era, we came to understand the “unconscious” as a personal, subjective realm rather than as a transpersonal collective one. The "unconscious" means for almost everyone today our individualized personal reservoir from which arise personal thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, and we project back our own experience into the minds of the primitive preliterates as having thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the way we have them. Therefore, moderns think, the mythologies they created are the same thing as moderns writing science fiction--a species of imaginative speculation.

But what has become unconscious for us was conscious, or semi-conscious, for them. They lived in a world that was permeated by the gods. The gods were not in here locked in our individual unconscious minds, but out there animating a world shimmering with their presence. We have just come to think that the poor benighted fools were projecting intrapsychic unconscious content onto the blank screen that was the world around them. They weren't. This is simply the prejudice of a shriveled kind of mind that knows only with its eyes and brain.

Nature, for moderns, became the realm of "common sense,” but it has never been other than a cognitive consensus based on sharing in the heritage of alphabetic literacy. The world became “Newtonized” as mystics like William Blake lamented. The scientific process cast aside traditional lore and authority as steeped in superstition and the irrational, and substituted a new understanding of objectivity which required the freezing of reality by making most of it irrational, i.e., opaque to reason, except its physical husk. The world literate moderns came to live in is more like one of those awkward looking exhibits at local Natural History Museum than the living, buzzing, spiritually animated and soulful world of preliterates. And it is this experience of the world that is at the heart of our allienation and of our longing for something more.

Our cognitive capacities to understand more deeply come from listening and speaking. “Out of the depths I cry out unto you, O Lord.” What depths is the Psalmist speaking of? Music and the spoken word correctly heard engender feeling states that are the precondition for deeper modes of cognition. Music is very important here, and the trivialization of music is linked to our loss of a sense of the sacred and of the "moods" or "modes" of consciousness needed for extraordinary cognitive states. And so insofar as our acoustic sense has atrophied, so has our capacity for cognitive depth. What passes for deep thinking is just complex thinking, which comes from complex seeing, analytical seeing, decontextualized seeing, abstract seeing.

So I would argue, then, that Marshall McLuhan was one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century. For him understanding the shift from orality to literacy was central to his understanding about how the modern mind is programmed, and his ideas about how the mind is being even now reprogrammed by electronic media is a major driver that is bringing us into a post-modern, post-literate world.

This is really the meaning behind McLuhan's idea of how society is becoming tribal. He didn't mean by this Balkanized or fragmented; 'tribal' was a positive word for him, and he didn't mean it as a regressive movement. He meant it as a way of describing a social connectedness that was lost during the modern era. The point bears repeating: post-literate doesn't mean a regression to preliterate, as it is commonly supposed. But reading and the eye will no longer remain virtually the exclusive means through which we obtain and process information. The goal is to return to a broader, more balanced cognitive capacity that will allow for a more ready acceptance of objective realities that are “unseen.”

McLuhan's point is that the human being in becoming literate paid a price by throwing off what had been a more balanced ratio among the senses. The hypertrophied visual man lives in a kind of estrangement from the world around him in a way that was not the experience of the preliterate, acoustic man. Modernity and its eye centeredness created the conditions for the possibility of individualism and critical reflection, but it also led to the gradual disenchantment of the world which became reified, Hamlet's sterile promontory, a thing over against which we become aware of our own subjectivity, but which in itself lost its numinous character. Yes, we developed a capacity to see with our physical eyes more accurately—but we see only the surfaces of things, and as a result our ability to cognize a richer kind of multidimensional reality has severely atrophied.

Electronic media is changing us profoundly, but these changes are gradual just as the shift from oral to literate did not change humans very quickly. Literates until recently lived in a world in which most people were still illiterate, and the oral world still flourished in the rural areas, and the oral culture preserved there was an endless source of material and inspiration for the literate artists of the last two or three centuries. But as literacy has become almost universal and along with that the rural world withers as it technologizes, another way has to be found to break out of the literate straitjacket so many have come to assume is the sole basis for our civilized life.

I feel very ambivalently about technolgoical civilization, because it's not at all clear that the changes that come are an unambiguous good. So the question here, as elsewhere, is who's in the driver's seat--the serpent or the dove? (Matt 10.16) If it's the serpent, we're likely to evolve into a race of cyborgs. But if the dove is driving or at least influences the direction evolution will be taking in the future, something else is possible.

And so if there is one point I hope I’ve made so far it's that being literate is not the goal of the evolution of consciousness; it’s just a stage. And whatever anxiety we may understandably feel about the unknown terrain to be navigated ahead, we need to trust that we will have the resources to find our way. These technologies cannot be feared, they must be mastered and used for transformative purposes. And the one rudimentary resource we have to achieve that now at this point is conscience--Protestantism's bequeathal to the future, which is the way the serpent part of us searches out and listens for the prompting of the dove part.

Bishop Tobin

Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who compose it try to do more, they almost always overreach, make fools of themselves, and cause unnecessary suffering. This seems to be the case with Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin publicly announcing that he has asked Congressman Patrick Kennedy not to take communion. 

We are mistaken if we see these men in the hierarchy as anything more than house management who are not nearly as important as the song and its singers that draw people into the "house" they manage. They have been for a long time deluded into thinking that they have some kind of special spiritual authority. Except for those rare occasions when they meet in council, they just don't. They've been wrong so many times it's borderline ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with being wrong, so long as you learn from it and don't presume that you actually know more than you do. It's OK to be a hack--most of us are--but you have to recognize that's all you are, and resist the temptation to think you know and understand more than you do. It's in the over-reaching that so much avoidable damage is done.

The managers are company men, not particularly bright or insightful, nor particularly stupid, not particularly holy or good, but not particularly bad, in other words they are mere humans like the the rest of us. The best among these managers recognize a good singer when they find him or her and find ways to step aside and let her song be heard.  And every now and then a really talented singer becomes a manager, and people listen, not because of his role in the hierarchy, but because of his song, which touches the heart and changes us, opens us up to new possibility. That's where moral and spiritual authority lie, not in promulgations of infallible truths. But singer/managers are the exception, not the rule.

Republican Intellectuals

Look- the intellectual wing of the Republican party is dead. What is left are brain-dead acolytes spreading meaningless and simplistic anecdotes, trite stories, and distilled nonsense passed on that has a more fitting home in AM radio. The McCain campaign, once again, is just a symptom of the real problem- an intellectually incurious and lazy movement in the final ugly spasms of death. The McCain campaign is now, in their interviews with the press, spreading what we can all recognize as wingnut email chains. John Cole

I've been reading Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, and it's been very helpful for me in filling in some gaps and in stimulating me to think why I lean left rather than right or why people like Douthat, Larison and some of the others at Culture 11 lean right instead of left. When I read these people I find that I have more common ground with them than I have with a lot of people who self-identify as Democrats, but I guess I still can't get past the idea that some of these--Douthat in particular--can self-identify as Republicans. 

I'm not going to make the argument here, but I think the argument could be made that the policy prescriptions in his and Salaam's book have a better chance of being adopted by moderate Democrats than by the people who are running the GOP. (And this defense of McCain by Salaamis a perfect example of how very smart people can indulge in  ridiculously delusional thinking. Or is his motive just to be a smart-ass contrarian? Can he possibly believe what he's writing? Does he have no grasp what the Republican Party has become? Does he believe that even if the "real McCain", as opposed to the "bad McCain" we've been exposed to in the last year, were to reemerge that he would control his party rather than the party controlling him just as his campaign controls him now?)

Maybe the issue is generational. I grew up Catholic in a Republican dominated suburb on Long Island graduating from a Catholic High School in 1968 and from Boston College, a Jesuit university with a conservative reputation in 1972. Just about everybody I knew was unconsciously conservative, and I think I associated being conscious with being liberal--at least until I began understanding unconscious liberalism.