Archives for November 2016

American Demons and the Ghost of Calvin

November 17, 2016

Some years ago, at community recreation, we watched the movie “Selma.” It happened that at the same time, we had been reading together a biography of Lyndon Johnson, and we were in the midst of reading about his role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act. One young monk grew frustrated with conflicting portrayals of President Johnson. “I don’t get it!” he said at one point, “Was he good or not?”

The temptation to divide people neatly between good and evil, to separate the sheep from the goats as it were, is a perennial one. It tends to be stronger, however, in certain eras. In my opinion, this desire for black-and-white moral categories is stronger in times of social instability. Two highly influential, and more or less institutionalized versions of this dualism, are Manichaeism and Calvinism. A strong version of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, in which persons are destined either for heaven or hell, continues to exert a strong cultural influence in America, even post-Christian America. [See Joseph Bottum’s excellent book “An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, to see how a peculiar brand of American Christianity morphed into today’s liberal ideals, for example.] I experienced a kind of awakening to this aspect of American culture while watching Clint Eastwood’s (violent) masterpiece “Unforgiven,” and discussing it with a devout Protestant friend. It is interesting to consider Eastwood’s own development from the unforgivable crimes of the Wild West to the redemptive death of Walt Kowalski in the more recent “Gran Torino.” Kowalski becomes a champion and defender of the Hmong families whom he had disliked and mistrusted at the beginning of the film. Was Kowalski good or evil? A lot depends on when we ask the question.

I sense a certain lingering Calvinism in the contemporary American tendency to demonize. Labels like “racist,” “misogynist,” “xenophobe,” are useful and often descriptive of actual behaviors and institutional structures. I would not deny that. But we should use caution when applying them to persons. Let me return to Lyndon Johnson.

Was he good or not? Was he a racist? Like all of us, Johnson was complex, a mixture of good, even magnanimous impulses, along with resentments and weaknesses, especially when positions of power afforded him the license to indulge himself at the expense of, say, women who happened to be nearby. What I am saying, however, is not that we need to resign ourselves to a muddle-along world with good and bad in everyone. The mixture of the good and the bad is in part a side-effect of the fact that we are all unfinished. The dynamic and dramatic arc of a human life is what both (strong) Calvinism and Manichaeism deny. Walt Kowalski changed from being a person with suspicion and hatred toward others based on race to someone who was a friend and defender of the same persons. President Johnson also changed. As a white southerner, he did and said things, especially in his earlier life, that fit with the racist ethos of the circles in which he walked. But he also came from intense poverty, and had a feisty protectiveness for hard-luck cases that could mature into a zeal against injustice. So he also underwent a kind of conversion that made him a champion of civil rights. Other limitations, it seems he never overcame, which will be true for most of us.

Persons can also change for the worse, of course. My point here is that a label such as “racist,” when applied to specific persons, can have the effect of fixing that person in one moral location and foreclosing the possibility of growth. It reminds me of a friend I had growing up whose mother continued to accuse her of being on drugs…even though she wasn’t at first (she was highly creative and goofily energetic by temperament). Well, eventually she decided, “Why not use drugs, if I’m pegged that way anyway?” Literally damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That’s the danger of dualism. It tends to reinforce and bring about the very evil its adherents wish to combat, in addition to blinding those who are lobbing the accusations as to the dynamism of human life.

What I’m saying should not be taken to mean that we shouldn’t name injustices and their causes for what they are. When, however, we recognize that we and others have the capacity to change, we can set about to effect this change through rational argument and action. This is a painstaking process. Impatience with the process can tempt us to fall back on the expedient of power, as I wrote on Sunday. And the difficulty we have in believing that others can change is rooted in our experience of others as irrational, about which I wrote in the same post. When we perceive someone as irrational, another temptation is to despair, for we have no hope of rationally persuading that person to change.

Eastwood as Walt Kowalski. Is there any hope for this man? Is he good?

In “Gran Torino,” Eastwood draws on explicitly Christian language of repentance and forgiveness. So for the benefit of non-Christian readers whom I’ve been inviting to read the blog this past week, I should explain that this notion of personal change is not limited at all to Christian vocabulary. Aristotle and the classical tradition that followed him (in pagan Greece and Rome, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) understood human beings as possessing potential. Human infants are amazingly helpless compared to the offspring of other animals. But they also have greater potential. Morality is more or less a question of how we end up developing that potential, whether we become the sorts of persons that we aspire to, or fall short of this goal. As the example of Walt Kowalski suggests, we can’t know for certain how to characterize a life until it has reached its end. In the meantime, even my enemies and others who hold political opinions completely opposite of mine can change. So can I. Colonialists and slave owners of the past denied full human potential and rationality in slaves and in the colonized. But we risk doing the same when we deny rationality and potential in others.

[Disclaimer: I can only claim some expertise in the theology of the Catholic Church. I’ve tried to indicate that my take on Calvinism here is focusing on a specific strand within a complex historical tradition. I hope that I have not mischaracterized Calvinist theology in general by doing so.]

The Presidency and the Will to Power

November 13, 2016

On Friday, I said that I would write something about why “emotivism leads us to court political power.” What is emotivism?

It’s not simply that we act on feelings when we should use our brains. We do fall into this trap, but the reason for this is not that we are childish or bad people. There is a history to our predicament. In what follows, it is important that you keep in mind that I believe that there is also a way out of our predicament.

We’ve all experienced futility in certain types of arguments. Many friends of mine in recent weeks have expressed their belief that supporters of Donald Trump are “irrational.” We experience others as “unreasonable,” unable to give reasons for acting as they do, believing what they do. When this gap appears, fruitful discussion evaporates. What we are confronting is the outworking of incompatible principles, or at least first principles for which we have no way of judging priority. Is it worse that Donald Trump’s rhetoric fuels racism, or is it worse that Hillary Clinton favors a permissive abortion policy (a question that confronted conservative voters)? How do we make judgments between free trade, job creation, health care, and all the rest when we can’t find any kind of bedrock on which we can all agree?

This is what I mean when I say that we are incapable, at present, of having a rational discussion about politics. Persons living in places as different as rural Mississippi, Portland, and Detroit have, unsurprisingly, espoused multiple first principles, and together we have no obvious way of negotiating between their rival claims on us. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out (actually pointed out, already back in 1981), the situation is even worse than that. The problem with first principles is that by definition, we can’t give reasons for holding them. Don’t we reason from first principles and not to them? But if so how does it come about that we seem to know what they are? And how in the world can I argue with someone who holds first principles that seem wrong to me?

The answer is that we don’t argue, for the most part. We pretend to argue, but what we are usually doing is trying to manipulate other people into changing their first principles, or at least into giving way and letting us follow our principles. This hidden power play of manipulation was already noticed by a much earlier philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He made the very strong claim that what appears to be moral reasoning in our public and private lives is really the expression of a desire for power. We then dress up this “Will to Power” with a respectable front of reasoned argument. In other words, when I say something like, “we should raise taxes on the wealthy and redistribute the money to the poor,” it is not completely off the wall to ask what my real motives are. Am I resentful of rich people, and want to see them taken down a notch? Will some of this money come to me? Do I get to enjoy feelings of moral superiority for apparently altruistic aims? Do I want the gratitude of poor people, so that they won’t be a potential nuisance for me? I could go on.

I’m not sure that I was aware of the extent to which Nietzsche was right until I entered the monastery, oddly enough. I’ve always liked Nietzsche, or perhaps felt that he was the primary thinker who needed to be answered if we were to have anything like a flourishing civil order. And to be honest about it, I suspected other people of emotivism, but assumed that my arguments and first principles were unassailable. Monastic life is about conversion, and one of the more surprising aspects of my own conversion (and if it’s real conversion, much of what we discover will come as a surprise, welcome or unwelcome), is the realization that I’m more a part of the emotivist problem than I wanted to admit.

So what have I done about it? Answering that will have to wait for now. Here, I want to finish off the modest point at the heart of this post.

If we have no way (yet) to resolve our moral disagreements rationally, and if our attempts to do so turn out to be assertions of power rather than reason, an important consequence follows. If, in a debate, we recognize that we lack the power to silence opposition and push through our moral agenda, we will try to enlist a more powerful third party who can do this for us. The very interesting sociologist Jonathan Haidt notices this very trend in the campus culture of microagresssion and victimization. Various strategies include organizing protests, public shaming on social media, and so on. But the election of a president is the big prize. He or she has the most power of all, and I suspect that one of the reasons that we have, over the past century, continually added to the power of the presidency, is that we’ve sensed at some level that we need a strong person to enforce policies that we can’t agree on as a people. Note that a major factor in this drift is the original sin of the American republic, that of slavery. We solved the problem of slavery by force, the force of the presidency no less. In contemporary life, when we have a president who shares our first principles, we tend to have a certain sense that good will has a chance of prevailing in the world, and when the president is someone who does share our first principles, history seems to be against us, evil prevailing, and so on. At some level we sense that it depends on power. “Q.e.d.” quoth Nietzsche from the grave.

The presidency is not the only example. Catholics are tempted by the same kind of whiplash. Conservatives who felt that we were finally righting the ship under Pope Benedict XVI feel like we are quite suddenly and astonishingly weak under Pope Francis. Liberals who despaired of seeing the fruits of Vatican II realized because of the traditionalist leaning of the same Pope Benedict XVI, suddenly find blossoming of goodness and love everywhere under the same Pope Francis. The apparent rapport of the two of them doesn’t seem to affect this perception, which should lead us to believe that something other than a Manichean struggle between good and evil is going on, or at least that we have not characterized the struggle between good and evil properly, as one that goes through our own hearts and not through the conservative/liberal divide that we have inherited from the French Revolution. In the Catholic case, this over-reliance on the Holy Father is especially irritating to me, given that one of the best ideas, in my opinion, to come from the Council is that of subsidiarity. This means learning to solve problems at a local level without constantly appealing to higher-up third parties. To some extent, this implicates the project of Benedictine monasticism, properly understood.

Upcoming:
1) The problem of morality as a thing.
2) Will talking about it help? Or not?
3) Nietzsche (almost) right again: truth as relationship.

Love of Neighbor, Love of Enemies

November 11, 2016

Several persons have contacted me and asked me to share some thoughts on the election and its meaning and aftermath. What are our responsibilities as Americans, as Christians and Catholics? If anything, Tuesday’s results and the response of those who opposed Mr. Trump have crystallized in my mind certain ideas in moral philosophy that the brothers and I have been hammering out together for many years. I have found it difficult to convey these ideas in other fora, especially on-line discussions such as take place on Facebook. Our ideas tend to get distorted by the typical political and cultural narratives that pervade the internet and other media. Last year, I began to write out a systematic outline on this blog, but I think it’s worth going through the exercise again, with newer insights from Nietzsche, Max Scheler, James Alison, and William Cavanaugh. Not only that, but much of our work turns out to be applicable to the present political situation.

But this first post is meant to establish the context for everything else that is to be said, lest the rest of what I write appear as an irresponsible escape into navel-gazing.

We are still a nation of laws

…or at least we have always aspired to be. When political rhetoric of any kind is used as an excuse to perpetrate bodily harm or issue threats, this should be met not only with disapproval but with the full force of the laws against such behavior. Those of us who denounce violence will make our own insistence on this point more credible by our own principled respect for the law. There are multiple reports of violent incidents that are being connected to the election results. Most of what appears in the media (and, plausibly, most of what has actually taken place) is violence directed against persons such as Muslims and Mexicans, whose religious and ethnic identities are bound up not only in Mr. Trump’s rhetorical gestures, but in his stated policies. Some of the violence has been against Trump supporters. All violence is out of bounds and deserves the condemnation of every American.

Christian discipleship is authenticated by love of enemies

This past political campaign was demoralizing in its constant ratcheting up of the language of demonization. This happened on both sides, and neither side seems to see its own demonization for what it is. This makes civil discourse impossible. Or, perhaps the gradual breakdown of civil discourse has left us with no way of engaging in truly rational discussions (see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, chapter 2). Without the possibility of rational argument, the temptation is to resort to demonizing those who disagree. In many cases, we have no way of making common cause, even with those inclined to agree with us, without scapegoating someone (this Girardian insight has been inverted and made into a conscious political tool by Saul Alinsky). Christians cannot settle for this state of affairs, and certainly ought not to demonize those who hold divergent ideas from our own. Pope Saint John Paul II, while an archbishop in Poland, used the strategy of holding the communist regime to account for the gap between their official rhetoric and the actual state of affairs. Václav Havel followed a similar strategy in the former Czechoslovakia.

The simplest way of stating this is that we are commanded to love our enemies and not to meet violence with violence.

Christian social thought is grounded in love of neighbor

Who is my neighbor? The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump was an indication of a widespread sense in communities blue and red that the general drift of American politics has been at the expense of a great many Americans. Trump’s hope to “make America great again,” and Sanders’s “political revolution,” need to be seen in the long-range context of a failed war in Iraq, the ongoing symbiotic relationship between the federal government and defense contractors, banks, et al, 5.5 million home foreclosures, with virtually no repercussions for those responsible for this widespread suffering. The Washington and media elites are widely understood to belong to a utopian (i.e. “no-place”) globalist class that has forgotten the responsibility they have for their fellow Americans. Instead of seeing fellow Americans as neighbors with a common cause, elites unthinkingly deride the suffering as the irresponsible “47 percent” or lob them into the bucket of deplorables.

Again, I will have much more to say about how we got here, and what sort of strategies are needed to recover a sense of solidarity between Americans. In various ways, the healing follows from the principle of love of neighbor. The priest and the Levite, political insiders and beneficiaries of political power, were afraid to show compassion to the man left for dead on the way to Jericho. Perhaps we need to become outsiders, like the Samaritan, in order to see the suffering in front of us for what it is. Through the strengthening of local networks of concern, we can bring to bear a properly political pressure to bear upon government leaders, most of whom, after all, are chosen by us and work for us.

Love of God, love of neighbor, love of enemies. These are the measure of Christian witness, which is needed now.

Next: Why emotivism leads us to court political power.