I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end.
I'm enough of an Hegelian to see Protestantism and Modernity as the antithesis of Catholicism and pre-modernity, and so it follows quite possibly, if history is dialectical, as I think it is, that the Postmodern era on whose cusp we sit will be a synthesis of the Modern and the Premodern, the Protestant and the Catholic, of the individual conscience and of a renewed sense of sacrament and communion.
So I am a Catholic and a progressive, but I reject the term ‘Liberal’ as a way of describing my politics because I think that the phrase "liberal Catholic" is an oxymoron, but I do believe that all Catholics are called upon to be progressives if they believe, as they should, that the Spirit is active in history. This seems to be an assertion about Catholicism that goes against every stereotype about it, stereotypes that historically have been well justified. Catholicism, except for a few decades last century in Latin America, has rarely been associated with progressive cultural or political causes in the modern period. That is why I make a distinction between a Catholic intellectual/aesthetic sensibility and the institutional distortions of that sensibility. Those distortions can be traced back to Constantine, or perhaps more interestingly to the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic as Simone Weil argues in her essay "The Romanesque Renaissance".
The point I want to make now is that the modern social imaginary does not give us the resources to push back against problems that derive uniquely from the modern suppression of the premodern, and so it's not unreasonable to assert that a part of the solution lies in retrieving suppressed aspects of the premodern, but in a postmodern key. I don't know if it's dialectically inevitable, but if real spiritual progress is a possibility, I think such a retrieval must play an essential role. And that's why the Catholic and Orthodox traditions are important, not for their institutional moral authority, which is close to nil, but because they have preserved pre-modern forms and practices that need to play a role in a hoped-for cultural renaissance.
Central to this project is a retrieval of the idea that Christianity is about the redemption of time and space; it is not a religion of escape from either. But what made sense in a premodern cosmic imaginary dominated by the Great Chain of Being no longer makes sense in a cosmic imaginary shaped by Darwin and Bohr. Nevertheless, the Great Chain of Being was a metaphor that pointed to something deeply true about the structure of Being, i.e., its metaphysics embraced an idea of chaos/entropy in tension with the Deep Real as density of actualized form.
It was a spatial metaphor, but it allowed for the movement of lower to higher, from a potentiality in chaos to its actualization in form, which is to say, the Logos or the Mind of God. The history of the world, as I see it from my quasi-Hegelian, evolution-of-consciousness perspective, is the gradual interpenetration of Chaos by the Mind of God effected by humans in whom the Mind of God becomes gradually awakened. Science plays a role in this evolutionary awakening, but the more important evolution is moral, i.e., an evolution in humans from being directed by forces outside to new possibilities for evolution that work from within the human soul. As the human being becomes more him or herself, the world changes. More on this below.
This tension between Chaos and Logos is still a reality, even if we have no robust way of thinking it within the late modern imaginary. In other words, the Great Chain of Being points to a truth about Being for which we need a new metaphor that is better adapted to our current post-Darwinian/Einsteinian imaginary. I think the post-Einsteinian part of that opens up possibilities for thinking about Being as multi-dimensional, which is a postmodern way of talking about what premoderns and contemporary believers call the supernatural. Supernatural = Other-dimensional.
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So here's a rough, preliminary attempt to explore mostly the post-Darwinian part of that. I accept Darwin’s description of the chaotic, blind, groping, often cruel, impersonal, random forces that drive natural selection, but I see the randomness of natural selection as that into which fallen humanity has fallen. It was a fall into chaos, and the human mission is to be submerged in that chaos and to find within it a path toward redemption. One way to define 'redemption' is as escape, to get off the planet in a Buddhistic liberation from samsara. Another is to willingly accept one's submergence in the chaos and to gradually transform it--bring order and form to it-- from within.
This latter, I would argue, is the more deeply Christian idea. It's very similar to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or "world repair", especially as developed by Isaac Luria. Indeed, it's hard to understand the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection without it, even if in practice the Christian idea of salvation has been more Buddhistic. As, for instance, the Salve Regina, a beautiful medieval monastic Marian hymn, depicts humans as the poor, banished children of Eve living in exile longing to return home off-planet in a better world in the beyond. I'm arguing that the human mission is for individual human beings to be infusion points through which the "beyond' incarnates in immanent human practice in the time/space dimension we call our life on earth. The goal is the renewal of the face of the earth, but this will not be accomplished by some external intervention, but rather by human beings inspired by grace working in the world to transform it from inside out.
So the goal is not to escape earth, but gradually to transform it, to make a garden of the wilderness. And so in a very real sense it's biological evolution as that from which humans need to be redeemed, or more precisely, it is the human mission to redeem biological evolution by the power of something higher, i.e., something outside our limited time/space dimension. In other words, the human task is to redeem the earth from its subjection to the primitive, random, groping forces that shape biological evolution. Read Romans 8 in the light of that idea. But in order to do this, you need to believe there is something higher, something other-dimensional--which very few educated late moderns believe anymore (yet?)--at least in any robust way that has real stakes for the way they think about how they act in the world.
So I'm suggesting that a way to think about the logic of natural selection is to see it as the logic of Original Sin, if by Original Sin we mean the condition of Nature that is shaped by concerns dominated by survival and propagation. Original sin is, I want to argue, "evolution-without-grace", i.e., evolution without the influence of forces outside our space/time dimension. In such a condition it's natural for biological species to do whatever it takes to promote their biological flourishing. In humans we see this as the need to dominate and control (will to power), the need to accumulate and hoard material resources (greed), and the need to spread one's genes (promiscuous/predatory sexuality).
Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon, etc., are all prodigies of evolution-without-grace. Their behavior is perfectly "natural", and there is really no coherent understanding of the earth history that can push back against this "natural" behavior unless you allow for the possibility of a counter story Christians call redemption history, which I'm arguing is a story of 'evolution-with-grace'. Liberal ideas about pushing back either draft on Christian ideas or derive from Hobbesian/Lockean contract theory. Both are weak tea that provide no real foundation to deal with the crisis of culture in which we are currently implicated.
For Christians, redemption history starts with the covenant made with Abraham, culminates with Christ’s incarnation and death, and now continues with us humans post-Pentecost. But it's not only humans, but earth history that must be redeemed--and we humans, inspired by grace--the spiritual energy that inspires us from outside the otherwise closed Darwinian system--have the responsibility to be agents who enact that redemption. Human beings at their best, whether they are aware of it or not, are infusion points of grace. You don't have to be a believer to be such an infusion point--all humans are responding or failing to respond to this energy all the time--but the whole point of a spiritual practice is to increase one's capacity to be an effective infusion point, and in doing so to realize/integrate his or her Deep Self, the part of us that is created in the image and likeness of God.
For me this provides a compelling answer to the Cur Deus Homo question: Why was the Incarnation necessary in the first place? Christ's incarnation and death effected his submerging himself into the chaos of evolution-without-grace, i.e., the emptying of the unfallen into the fallen, the uncreated into the created, in order to effect a potential fusion of above with below so that after this event human and earth history might be infused with grace in an inside-out process that was not possible before. Before Pentecost, salvation could be imagined in Platonic or Buddhistic terms as an escape from illusion off an evil-dominated planet. After Pentecost, evolution-with-grace on planet became a new possibility, but now as something effected inside out, from within the human being acting in a world otherwise dominated by the logic of evolution-without-grace.
Before this event the transcendent dimension was open to certain extraordinary individuals, and they were the culture heroes and lawgivers who provided for their societies a code, a way of living that was in close alignment with the Logos or the Tao. These codes could be experienced only as an external command to follow the law. After Pentecost, the law is something that is experienced from within--in the heart, the seat of conscience. The post-Pentecost release of the Holy Spirit into history, I would argue, made what was available to what before was only known/experienced by a spiritual elite, and in doing so made transforming biological evolution from within a new possibility. This transformation is effected to the degree that people--whether they are Christians or not--have supple hearts capable for responding to grace. The redemption of the world is the cumulative effect of a process that happens heart by heart in little and large ways progressively through the arc of history. For this reason MLK was right, the arc of the moral universe is long, and it does bend toward justice.
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So how does this impinge on how we should think about the political economy? Is there any purer expression in the political and economic sphere of evolution-without-grace than the market? Is there anything in our contemporary political and economic life in greater need of transformation?
I would argue, therefore, that if you embrace the market as the main driving force in modern history, you are not a conservative in the traditionalist, principled sense—you are a Liberal. Liberalism was developed as a political-economic ideology in the 18th century to justify the “liberation” of market forces from traditional constraints, constraints that were grounded in Christian, i.e., redemptive concerns, to push back against, avant la lettre, evolution-without-grace.
Pre-Reformation Christian societies sought to restrain the logic of evolution-without-grace They established the monasteries for those who were more serious about growing in holiness, and the bedrock of monastic life was founded in the evangelical counsels--poverty, chastity, and obedience. These were practices designed to push back against the logic of evolution-without-grace—greed, will to power, and indiscriminate spreading of one’s genes.
Holiness is measured by the degree to which one’s Deep Self, the part of us that was created in the image and likeness of God, has come to gradually displace the Social Darwinian Self, i.e., the Self driven by greed, will to power, and the need to indiscriminately spread one’s genes. The idea that the goal of life was to become good as God is good, i.e., to restore the human as image and likeness of God, and to do so by engaging in a life-long inner transformative process got lost. To be good was simply to follow an extrinsic code, to stoically do one's duty, to follow the rules, as in Kant.
Post-Reformation societies in northern Europe tore down that redemptive social infrastructure—it got rid of the monasteries and with them the idea that the evangelical counsels provided a path of growth in holiness, i.e., a path for the supplanting of the Darwinian Self with the Deep Self. In doing so they substituted a new idea about morality that was more extrinsically legalistic than inwardly driven and Christian. There was a new, important emphasis on the individual and freedom, but freedom in the service of what? As traditional ideas about growth in holiness were cast aside, what I'm calling here the Social Darwinian Self and its fulfillment emerges as the new "natural" norm. This is the opposite of the idea of Christian freedom as articulated by St. Paul. (See Galations 5 and elsewhere. BTW, Paul's concept of the "flesh" and my use of the term "evolution-without-grace" are roughly synonymous.)
Protestantism at its best (imo embodied most fully by the Quakers) was a celebration of the individual conscience. But morality in Protestant societies in practice became more about doing good according to an extrinsic moralistic code where the code became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. It started, as all genuine spiritual movements do, as an interior impulse to recover a spiritual authenticity, but devolved into a rigid extrinsicism. And in doing so it threw out many of the older religious cultural forms that provided a framework for people to grow in holiness, i.e., into their Deep Selfhood. This framework was preserved to a certain extent in Catholic societies, but it cannot thrive in a world in which the secular imaginary that flowed from Reformation presuppositions is so dominant.
It became a commonplace, especially for the Calvinists, that wealth was a sign that one was blessed by God, and that he was among the elect predestined for salvation, and poverty was a sign that one was a reprobate predestined for damnation. It’s hard to exaggerate how upside down this idea is from pre-Reformation Christianity and the spirit of the Gospels, which makes it pretty clear that you’re more likely to find holiness among the poor than you are to find it among the rich. And the reason for that is that the rich usually got rich by being evolution-without-grace's winners and as such largely impervious to the counterforces (grace) that seek to transform and eventually displace evolution-without-grace.
Calvinism played a central role in effecting a shift in Western moral imaginary that created the conditions for Enlightenment rationality, Liberalism, and free-market capitalism--both the good and the bad that came with these. America is a profoundly Calvinist society, and all Americans--whether Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists--have to understand how their politics are shaped by Calvinism. On the left, American political imaginary is shaped by Yankee and Black Calvinism that led to the development of the social gospel in the late 19th century.
And on the right, the American political imaginary is shaped Southern Calvinism, mainly the Baptists and other evangelical sects that were inclined to rigid ideas regarding the inerrancy of Scripture and ok with slavery and later segregation.
Catholics—on both the left and the right—have to own how their moral imaginaries have been Calvinized. It's not about doctrine; it's about how our moral imaginations are shaped. In that respect most Liberal Catholics have more in common with secular Liberals and most conservative Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than either conservative or liberal Catholics have with one another.
And both liberal and conservative Catholics must accept that they have more in common with secular moderns than either has with their premodern Catholic ancestors, for whom a sense of the sacramental and the distinction between the sacred and the profane was a commonplace. The world is just as disenchanted for contemporary Catholics as it is for their secular contemporaries, and so their attempts to force the sacred into secular spaces fails in almost every instance. The old Catholic sensibility lingers where premodern cultural forms do, as in some Latin American societies. People whose imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism think of those old premodern practices as at best naively quaint, and so they fail to understand how those forms genuinely mediate dimensions of the Real that the modern imaginary filters out.
Disenchantment is a fact; re-enchantment is a possibility, but if it is to be effected, it will happen gradually from the inside out. That will require, I believe, retrieving much of what has been lost from premodern practice and imagination, but dialectically. Conservatives, particularly those with a Romantic bent, too often want to go native in the past, which never works. The challenge is to live through the modern secular as a kind of wandering in the wilderness with fidelity and by trusting that that such faithfulness will eventually lead to a renewal of the face of the earth. But this is a gradual, evolutionary, i.e, evolution-with-grace, process. We do what is called for now in the hope that future generations will build on it. Perhaps all we can do now is plant seeds that will germinate in the future. We do that in our actions in all the ways small and large that are a response to the flow of grace in our lives.
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Growing in Goodness/Holiness for Catholics is (or should be) central to their practice, and the sacraments and the life of prayer don’t make any sense without it. That’s why the Calvinists essentially got rid of the sacraments. They no longer made sense since mainstream Calvinism didn’t think it was possible to grow in Holiness—either one was saved or he wasn’t. They had a well-founded suspicion of spiritual elites, and so the idea was not to promote individual spiritual prodigies, (aka, saints) but rather to insist that all the regenerated were equals. There are always exceptions, and the exceptions prove the rule, the rule being that one had a conversion experience of some kind, and that was it. One's only moral responsibility after that was to follow the law as revealed in the scriptures, and for most there wasn't much sense of how the New Testament put the revelation of the old law in the Jewish scriptures into a new perspective.
If Calvinists behaved righteously, then they were righteous. In the meantime, the typical not particularly spiritually gifted Calvinists had no compunction about doing their Social Darwinian best to get rich and to increase their power and social status. Indeed their success in these endeavors was the measure and proof of their righteousness. Catholics are surely not immune here--especially American Catholics--but to the degree that they have not been Calvinized, Catholics feel guilty about surrendering to their Social Darwinian selves in ways that traditionalist Calvinists do not, especially with regard to the their attitudes to the poor. "God helps them who help themselves", etc., is their motto. Besides, most of the poor are probably damned.
So the Reformation unwittingly set the stage for the removal of constraints that kept the Social Darwinian Self in check. That liberation from these constraints released enormous productive capacity and wealth, but it also released forces that in an unprecedented way led to the destruction of traditions, local communities, and customary personal and communal ways of life that most conservatives insist they want to preserve against the intrusive state. But it’s not the state that has destroyed these traditional and customary ways of life, it’s been capitalism and its materialistic presuppositions. Lots of religious people in capitalist societies might believe that there is a spiritual dimension, but they live as if the material was the only thing that really mattered. Their religiosity is a thin patina that covers over their deepest ultimate concern, which is success as measured by materialist capitalist values. Andrew Carnegie thought himself as a good Christian, but we learn more about him by reading his Gospel of Wealth, not to mention the atrocious way he treated his workers.
The American state has been always a tool of capitalism, and both have evolved interdependently. Capitalism is the Sun; the modern state, the Moon. The bigger and more complex the capitalist economy became, the bigger and more complex the state. Without the one, you don’t get the other. The idea of limiting the state in a huge, complex capitalist economy is naively quixotic at best, and downright cynical at worst, insofar as a less intrusive state clears the field for pure Social Darwinians to do as they please with little or no constraints. If we’re to have a large, globalized capitalist economy, you need to have some mechanism for constraining and mitigating its worst excesses, and the only tool adequate for that is a strong state structured by the principle of subsidiarity and held accountable by a vigilant electorate. That's all we've got until there is some kind of new Axial alignment-(explained below)
Liberals—no matter in which party—are people who celebrate what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative/destructive character of capitalism, in other words, the Darwinian impulses as they work in the political economy. You don’t get the creative/productive/innovative without the destructive/disruptive. That’s a truism, but it’s something most conservatives I know don’t appreciate the implications of. One is that in North Atlantic societies it’s mostly educated elites—both Republicans and Democrats—who get the benefits of the creative-productive side of capitalism, and uneducated, rural and rust-belt working stiffs who suffer its destructive/disruptive effects.
Both Democrats and Republicans are “Liberals” in the classic sense. The difference between them, from my pov, is that Democrat elites are Liberals who understand that we pay for the creative benefits of capitalism with a destruction and disruption that affects ordinary working people disproportionately, and they care enough (or feel guilty enough) to try to develop programs that mitigate the negative effects on non-elites.
Republican elites are classical Liberals in the dark Calvinist sense who either don’t understand or don’t care about the destructive effect capitalism has on traditions and local communities and the ordinary people who live in them, and so don’t try to do anything to mitigate it. This mentality is rooted in a vestigial Calvinism that sees the poor as lazy reprobates deserving of their poverty and the rich as blessed by God. Double predestination still lives on in this perverse way.
Whatever. But Republican elites who say they stand for tradition and the integrity of local communities while at the same time embracing the creative destruction of capitalism are either cynical or naively incoherent. Principled conservatives like Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen understand this, and I recommend his book Why Liberalism Failed if you want a very thoughtful, eloquent articulation of a kind of principled conservatism that aligns with what I’m saying.
My principal reservation about Deneen lies in that he is complaining about the condition of the patient after the cancer has ravaged him. While I agree with his etiology of the disease, it’s already done its worst, and now the question is how to go forward. The authoritarian/corporatist/integralist, Trump/Putin/Erdogan/Xi model represents one very grim possibility that exploits the understandable fears and resentments of non-elites who have felt most the destructive/disruptive forces of market capitalism.
That’s where we’re headed if some alternative with a robust consensus that, at least until the deeper, long-term restoration I'm calling for here, embraces the better (Whiggish/Transcendentalist) angels of the American Calvinist character reasserts itself. Trump is a bully and con man trading on the fears and resentments that work with everything that is primitive and ugly in the American Calvinist character.
Christianity from the very beginning has been universalist and anti-tribal, and so Christian tribalism is just as Social Darwinian (and therefore un-Christian) as any other form of tribalism. To defend the faith or the Church by a Social Darwinian logic is a sin against the Holy Spirit and a failure of both faith and hope. My faith leads me to hope against hope that the Holy Spirit will sustain the Church--as sacrament and as the community of the faithful--no matter what. And that no matter how bad things get, no matter how egregious our mistakes, we will never be abandoned so long as repentance is a possibility. And whenever the church has put its institutional survival above its fidelity to the spirit of the gospel, which it has done on countless occasions, it has sinned egregiously and in doing so diminished egregiously its spiritual authority.
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But the real threat for the future of humanity doesn't come from Trumpian or right-wing politics, but rather from Silicon Valley, metaphorically speaking. That's where evolution-without-grace is at its cutting edge, and it's becoming clearer with each passing decade that evolution-without-grace doesn't need human beings. Machines serve evolution's purposes quite nicely. And at this historical juncture, what resources do humans have that they can draw upon to constrain what seems at this point the inevitable dominance of the machines? From a purely Darwinian perspective humans are irrelevant, but from the Christian perspective that I'm trying here to articulate, humans are the whole point of evolution.
So what do I mean by a new Axial alignment? The Axial Age, a term coined by Karl Jaspers, was a remarkable transcultural moment in the history of human spiritual evolution to provide an intervention against evolution-without-grace. It occurred in a huge swath from China to Greece in the mid centuries of the first millennium BCE, from the emergence of Taoism, Buddhism, prophetic monotheism in ancient Israel, and Greek philosophy. Charles Taylor makes the Axial Age and the subsequent "disembedding" of culture that follows from it a central theme in his monumental A Secular Age. Recently its implications are explored in The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. by Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.
The Axial Age introduced into human thinking the idea of a distinction between transcendence and immanence, and that the transcendent world set a standard for behavior in the immanent world. ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.") The idea of the Platonic Good and the Neoplatonic One, the Mosaic law, the Tao were all concepts of the transcendence in relationship with immanence, and the goal of human aspiration was to become aligned with the transcendent good as opposed to immanent goods, what I described above as goods defined by biological flourishing or evolution-without-grace. From my pov, the Axial Age was an external (other-dimensional) intervention of the higher into the lower through the inspired thinking of prophets and philosophers who advanced their respective civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and the West. Christian civilization integrates the Axial traditions of ancient Greece and Israel.
So is a New Axial moment a possibility? It seems clear that one way or another there's going to be a radical discontinuity in human history in coming decades. Developments in machine learning, biotechnology, AR and VR virtually guarantee it. The question is whether humans as beings open to and responsive to grace will survive in such a brave new world. It seems to me that they cannot unless some kind of Axial awakening occurs because the power of evolution-without-grace is too strong to be resisted otherwise.
So is history dialectical? Are we on the cusp of a cultural realignment that integrates the modern with the premodern? We'll see. For those for whom evolution-without-grace is accepted as the only legitimate historical narrative, humans are expendable. Some even argue that the earth would be better off without humans. Or the other possibility as envisaged by transhumanists and poshumanists is a new eschatology as upload. Humans will become immortal machines, which is just another way for evolution-without-grace and the logic of the fall to win.
So what's at stake here? I don't exclude the possibility that developments in technology can be subordinated to the logic of evolution-with-grace, but unless there's some broad cultural awakening and with it the emergence of a new transcultural moment celebrating transcendence and its central influence in human affairs, it's hard to see how that might be possible. The forces of evolution-without-grace right now are too strong to be resisted.
So is such a broad awakening a possibility? Stranger things have happened. And so for those humans who are concerned about being evolutionarily obsoletized, it would seem that Christians and other heirs of the great Axial traditions need to play a role in formulating a counter-narrative that pushes back against the inevitability of the machines. But they can't unless they have a theology of the evolution-with-grace that makes sense and resonates with the broader culture.
