William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 3

Finally in chapter 4, “Scarcity and Abundance,” Cavanaugh uses the logic of communion to challenge the logic of the market. We are desiring beings, but only in God can our desires be put to rest. An economics that bases itself on the assumption of scarcity is not only based on hunger but also on endless human wants. Shopping, then, is finally about the “pleasure of stroking desire,” for in “scarcity is implied . . . the daily erotics of desire that keeps the individual in the pursuit of novelty” (91). Such a lifestyle, Cavanaugh insists is “the death of Christian eschatology” (93). Instead, of placing our hope in Christ’s kingdom breaking into this fallen world system, we continually distract ourselves with more consumption even as we shrug before “a tragic world of scarcity.” Worse, we come to develop a taste for hearing of global tragedies: “Even the suffering of others can become a spectacle and a consumable item: tsunamis sell newspapers” (94). Cavanaugh holds that the Eucharist should teach us of “the communicability of pain from one person to another” within the Body of Christ. Rather than individuals facing off in competition over a scarce supply, we become truly individual as we impart help to each other, becoming dependent upon each other. We cannot give into despair but must respond in eschatological hope, for Christ daily gives of his self that we may know “where we are going” (100).

There are numerous ways to go about responding to Cavanaugh’s claims. One, for instance, could place his theology within numerous streams of Christian reflection. He draws off the Christian personalism of John Paul II and the economic distributism of early 20^th-century Catholic ethics. He also shows a great debt to the tradition of virtue ethics currently taught by Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School. Likewise, Cavanaugh is much indebted to the Augustinian tradition of reflection on ordered and disordered loves within the City of God and the City of Man, as well as the new Trinitarian insights of Hans urs von Balthasar, to name only one theologian. Each of these streams of Christian reflection has strengths and weaknesses. One could also ascertain whether he has truly understood the experience and logic of late, global capitalism in the last few decades. Has he, for instance, ignored counter-examples that might go against his theses of hypermobilization of capital, of the creation of constant, movable desire, and of globalization as a false parody of true Christian catholicity?

However, I want to respond more personally as one First World, Christian individual to his book. In my experience, much of what he claims rings true, at least some of the time. I am ashamed to say that I have found myself at various points in my life addicted to the buying of things, and of late, equally tempted by the consumption of short bursts of image and experience though online social networking and news. I, too, have often thrown up my hands in despair at the news of overseas economic abuses, wondering where to buy my clothing, my coffee, or my children’s toys. And I, too, have taken a kind of superficial pride and joy in my “diversity,” listening to African music while I eat fajitas, read a Russian novel, and look forward to watching a Dutch film on video later that evening. I would rather play it safe and not have to interact with the truly poor, unless, of course they seem grateful and don’t smell too much. After I finished reading Being Consumed , I struggled with what I should do in response, and my first desire was to simply and sadly think I could do nothing. Of course, this would simply be to “consume” Being Consumed as part of the endless diet of ideas in a collegiate environment. Instead, I am praying and seeking how my family should act differently in what we eat and buy and give. I have talked to my wife some about the book and will continue to do so.

It does not seem to me that you need be convinced by everything that Cavanaugh claims in order to respond to it with repentance and action. For example, I am somewhat dissatisfied with his theology of the Church and world. He seems to conflate the distinction between them too much at times, the logic of the Eucharist almost dissolving the need for individual repentance. I can’t always tell if his doctrine of the Supper actually merges nature and grace or simply brings them into a particular and local relationship for our time. Likewise, his portrait of multi-national abuses does not reflect the experience of local managers who are attached to their workers and seek to work for change for their benefit. Nonetheless, I am still left crying mea culpa. Well, not only “my fault” per se, for that too is part of his point. I am joined to the Body of Christ, and I must learn to work within the messy, faulty life of that local community called a church if I am to develop with others the habits and practices that help address some of these matters. Happily, Cavanaugh has provided some examples worth learning more about:

• Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, based on the principles of distributism, is worker-owned and governed and contributes greatly to neighborhood health, education, and lower crime.
• CRS Fair trade program in coffee, chocolate, and handcrafted items seeks to deal directly with growers and local artisans to promote fair payment, as well as promote a sense of solidarity with those overseas.
• Church Supported Agriculture (CSA) seeks to create a direct market between local family growers and local churches in hopes of providing a face-to-face buying environment with growers and helping to promote sustainable farming.
• The Economy of Communion Project associated with the Focolare Movement promotes a business model that divides profits into 1/3 aid to the poor, 1/3 education promotion, and 1/3 business sustainability. As of 2006, 700 businesses worldwide had adopted their model.

I would challenge us all to learn more about these and other Christian options like them.

Community and Heresy

DBU student Kyle Worley over at his blog is discussing biblical interpretation and community. A theme that I am obviously interested in, his reflections raise some important questions for our reflection:

1. Does individualism lead to heresy?

2. Does community safeguard orthodoxy?

Here's his address: http://yougottaserve.blogspot.com/2009/09/doing-theology-only-for-community.html

Persons, Their Dignity, and Work (John Paul II series)

The encyclical Laborem exercens, written in 1981 while the Polish workers' movement Solidarity resisted its Communist government, speaks to the nature of work and the innate dignity of human beings:

"Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . ." (intro.)

"In order to continue our analysis of work, an analysis linked with the word of the Bible telling man that he is to subdue the earth, we must concentrate our attention on work in the subjective sense, much more than we did on the objective significance, barely touching upon the vast range of problems known intimately and in detail to scholars in various fields and also, according to their specializations, to those who work. If the words of the Book of Genesis to which we refer in this analysis of ours speak of work in the objective sense in an indirect way, they also speak only indirectly of the subject of work; but what they say is very eloquent and is full of great significance.

"Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the "image of God" he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject to work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.

"This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work. . . .

"[I]n the light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process-first and foremost of the production structure that work is-it should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.

"This explains why the analysis of human work in the light of the words concerning man's "dominion" over the earth goes to the very heart of the ethical and social question. This concept should also find a central place in the whole sphere of social and economic policy, both within individual countries and in the wider field of international and intercontinental relationships, particularly with reference to the tensions making themselves felt in the world not only between East and West but also between North and South." (section 6)

John Paul II ties work to the human vocation. For him, it is a biblical idea, one arising from the creation mandates of Genesis. Work must not, however, reduce human beings to their material existence alone. It must play a role in and recognize the nature of human beings--their personhood, their communal existence, their social and ethical existence, their need to make and create, to produce and partake. Human economic systems--socialist, communist, capitalist--that treat persons as objects, rather than as subjects, are to be condemned and brought to repentance.

The Law and the Life of Persons (John Paul II series)

Here's a fascinating passage from Evangelium vitae, "The Gospel of Life" John Paul II's encylical on culture of life issues:

Life is indelibly marked by a truth of its own. By accepting God's gift, man is obliged to maintain life in this truth which is essential to it. To detach oneself from this truth is to condemn oneself to meaninglessness and unhappiness, and possibly to become a threat to the existence of others, since the barriers guaranteeing respect for life and the defence of life, in every circumstance, have been broken down.

The truth of life is revealed by God's commandment. The word of the Lord shows concretely the course which life must follow if it is to respect its own truth and to preserve its own dignity. The protection of life is not only ensured by the spe- cific commandment "You shall not kill" (Ex 20:13; Dt 5:17); the entire Law of the Lord serves to protect life, because it reveals that truth in which life finds its full meaning.

It is not surprising, therefore, that God's Covenant with his people is so closely linked to the perspective of life, also in its bodily dimension. In that Covenant, God's commandment is offered as the path of life: "I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of" (Dt 30:15-16). What is at stake is not only the land of Canaan and the existence of the people of Israel, but also the world of today and of the future, and the existence of all humanity. In fact, it is altogether impossible for life to remain authentic and complete once it is detached from the good; and the good, in its turn, is essentially bound to the commandments of the Lord, that is, to the "law of life" (Sir 17:11). The good to be done is not added to life as a burden which weighs on it, since the very purpose of life is that good and only by doing it can life be built up.

It is thus the Law as a whole which fully protects human life. This explains why it is so hard to remain faithful to the commandment "You shall not kill" when the other "words of life" (cf. Acts 7:38) with which this commandment is bound up are not observed. Detached from this wider framework, the commandment is destined to become nothing more than an obligation imposed from without, and very soon we begin to look for its limits and try to find mitigating factors and exceptions. Only when people are open to the fullness of the truth about God, man and history will the words "You shall not kill" shine forth once more as a good for man in himself and in his relations with others. In such a perspective we can grasp the full truth of the passage of the Book of Deuteronomy which Jesus repeats in reply to the first temptation: "Man does not live by bread alone, but ... by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord" (Dt 8:3; cf. Mt 4:4).

It is by listening to the word of the Lord that we are able to live in dignity and justice. It is by observing the Law of God that we are able to bring forth fruits of life and happiness: "All who hold her fast will live, and those who forsake her will die" (Bar 4:1).

John Paul II puts together the revelation of God's law, the nature of the covenant community, and the respect for human life and dignity that should mark our view of human persons and their communities. Life is not authentic without this fundamental respect for personhood. Once we begin to qualify away human life, deeming some as less than fully human, we risk before long sacrificng our human nature and our basic morality entirely.

Human Freedom and the Moral Law (John Paul II series)

John Paul II in this selection from Veritatis splendor argues that while humans have the freedom to use their reason to explore and understand the natural world and to seek out expressions of ethical action, this freedom is not intended for the radical autonomy preached by modernity. The conscience is not an idol unto itself. He warns that a loss of belief in definitive right and wrong is accompanied by a loss of belief in universal truth that can adjudicate between the claims of various individuals. Instead of a heteronomy, in which each person is a will unto himself or herself, one should recognize the existence of a participatory theonomy, in which persons enter into the law of God with their whole persons:

32. Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one's conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one's moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and "being at peace with oneself", so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience, and between nature and freedom.

33. Side by side with its exaltation of freedom, yet oddly in contrast with it, modern culture radically questions the very existence of this freedom. A number of disciplines, grouped under the name of the "behavioural sciences", have rightly drawn attention to the many kinds of psychological and social conditioning which influence the exercise of human freedom. Knowledge of these conditionings and the study they have received represent important achievements which have found application in various areas, for example in pedagogy or the administration of justice. But some people, going beyond the conclusions which can be legitimately drawn from these observations, have come to question or even deny the very reality of human freedom.

The rightful autonomy of the practical reason means that man possesses in himself his own law, received from the Creator. Nevertheless, the autonomy of reason cannot mean that reason itself creates values and moral norms. Were this autonomy to imply a denial of the participation of the practical reason in the wisdom of the divine Creator and Lawgiver, or were it to suggest a freedom which creates moral norms, on the basis of historical contingencies or the diversity of societies and cultures, this sort of alleged autonomy would contradict the Church's teaching on the truth about man. It would be the death of true freedom: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Gen 2:17).

41. Man's genuine moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of the moral law, of God's command: "The Lord God gave this command to the man..." (Gen 2:16). Human freedom and God's law meet and are called to intersect, in the sense of man's free obedience to God and of God's completely gratuitous benevolence towards man. Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. If in fact a heteronomy of morality were to mean a denial of man's self-determination or the imposition of norms unrelated to his good, this would be in contradiction to the Revelation of the Covenant and of the redemptive Incarnation. Such a heteronomy would be nothing but a form of alienation, contrary to divine wisdom and to the dignity of the human person.

Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to God's law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence. By forbidding man to "eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", God makes it clear that man does not originally possess such "knowledge" as something properly his own, but only participates in it by the light of natural reason and of Divine Revelation, which manifest to him the requirements and the promptings of eternal wisdom. Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation. Consequently one must acknowledge in the freedom of the human person the image and the nearness of God, who is present in all (cf. Eph 4:6). But one must likewise acknowledge the majesty of the God of the universe and revere the holiness of the law of God, who is infinitely transcendent: Deus semper maior.

Max Scheler and an Ethics of Feeling--Part 1

"Whoever has the ordo amoris of man, has man himself. He has for man as a moral subject what the crystallization formula is for crystal. He sees through him as far as one possibly can. He sees before him the constantly simple and basic lines of his heart running beneath all empirical many-sidedness and complexity. And heart deserves to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more so than knowing and willing."--Maz Scheler (trans. Manfred Frings)

The German ethicist and phenomenologist Max Scheler worked all his life on a theory of ethical personalism that influenced Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) in both positive and negative ways. Scheler's emphasis on a rich description of the subjective emotions of human beings was a method quite conducive to the philosophical and artistic Wojtyla, and as I will try to recount in future posts, and impacted Wojtyla's stress on human feeling and human value. At the same time, Scheler's descriptive project ultimately downplayed the importance of human choice, a stress absolutely necessary to the thought of John Paul II, as well as eventually rejecting theism for a more pantheistic belief in an evolving ground of being with both spirit (Geist) and force (Drang), a position the late pope could also not embrace. Nonetheless, some knowledge of Scheler's hierarchy of values and intersubjectivity is helpful in understanding how he shaped some of Wotjyla's early thought.

Scheler felt that feelings are fundamentally basic, that they have priority to our thoughts and choices. Our hearts tell us something about our values before our minds begin to conceptualize them. He categorized value-feelings (the order of loves) in the following way:

1. Holiness: the highest value-feeling. I suspect he meant something here not unlike Rudolf Ott's mysterium tremendum.
   
2. The mind's values: aesthetic (beauty); juridical (rightness); philosophical (truth).
3. Life-values or vitals: those values that are felt either within one's own body of as appearances in external objects.
4. Utility: all animals experience that something is needed or not needed.
5. Sensations: the lowest feelings, such as comfort, pleasure, and so on.

Our feelings, felt Scheler, have an inherent drift, for example, towards comfort, beauty, and order. The higher values are more durable, so they are also more fulfilling. They also, then, impart a sense of "oughtness" to particular actions. This sense of kairos, by which Scheler meant inner moral guidance, creates a feeling of the moment in which one's heart, mind, and will converge around the ethical decision. This does not mean that a sense of moral guidance in our feelings can be reduced to one's passions, for distortions of the values can arise.

Scheler also held that the person should be understood as found in one's actions. Each of us has the very early experience of separation from others, as well as subsequent feelings that connect us with others. He also categorized these:

1. "Caught" feelings that people share simply by being in the same place together. This is the experience of the mob.
2. "Fellow" feelings that people naturally share by living with another. This is the experience of the life-community.
3. "Joint" feelings are common feelings that people experience together. These do not occur naturally but are willed by people on the basis of moral principles; thus, they are the ideal basis of a society.
4. Feelings of emotive identification in which the experience is entirely collective are experienced in religious mysticism. Church members often combine the solidarity of the life community with sense of an all-inclusive personhood (Gesamtperson) of shared unity.

In my next post, I will explore further how Scheler distinguishes life-communities and societies, as well as how this gives rise to both perceptions of the divine and of economic and political ressentiment.

Can There be a Christian Culture?--Part 4

In light of the threat to stable meaning and ethics that historicism brought, one of the urgent needs was for Christian thinkers to account for human choice in a meaningful way. Are human beings really free? Can they make decisions and choices that are meaningful in any way that the average person could point to? Thinkers, again, took different directions. Some looked to raise human beings above the material and social world, offering two levels of existence. They were faced with trying to bridge the Kantian divide between the material and moral worlds.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, condemned the modern attempt to master the historical process as sin and hubris; nonetheless, he looked to a kind of self-transcendence of history in which the repentant person’s heart is given "agape power" from on high, rising with the promise of Christ from the edge of history. For Niebuhr, who seems to finally deny the reality of a resurrection of the body or an afterlife, this transcendent freedom is somewhat limited: "Man, in both his individual life and in his total enterprise, moves from a limited to a more extensive expression of freedom over nature. If he assumes that such an extension of freedom insures and increases emancipation from the bondage of self, he increases the bondage by that illusion." Niebuhr by reducing the claims of Christianity to existential "heart" truths rather than real claims about the actual universe actual created a kind of ghostly neather-world. Niebuhr was no gnostic, but neither was he finally looking to a real eschaton.

Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev went even further, seeing history not as a material but as a metaphysical work. Memory, being essentially non-material, points to the spiritual quality of human culture and its final eternal destiny. As such, a philosophy of history is to teach that the historical process is not “something that is alien to us, that is imposed upon us, that crushes and enslaves us.” As I've observed in another post, Berdyaev's personalism gave way to a real gnosticism.

Others, rather than posit a kind of two-tier world, embedded human responsibility within historical patterning itself. According to Herman Dooyeweerd, societies have religious ground motives that propel them along. What others identified as laws or forces of history are really God-given norms which can be obeyed or rebelled against with consequences: "Historicism . . . is the fatal illness of our 'dynamic' times. There is no cure for this unwholesome view of reality as long as the scriptural creation motive does not regain its complete claim on our life and thought." Dooyeweerd held that as long as historicism acted as a relativizing poison, anything like God-given norms could not be easily seen, but that did not mean they were not there,

For Brunner, too, human freedom is only true freedom when it acknowledges its dependence upon God. Human attempts to be autonomous from their Creator end in slavery. A “false liberalism,” which believes itself the ego-driven creator of reality, and “false determinism,” which robs human beings of any real creativity or action, both ultimately deny God’s existence. Yet this freedom was always to be bounded by the action of God in history.

For many Christian thinkers, the Incarnation of Christ was central to resolving the tension between destiny and freedom, for Christ made present what God promised for the future. For Eliot, as Dawson noted, religion is what gives spiritual freedom because “it alone brings man into relation with a higher order of reality than the world of politics or even culture.” While Eliot also believed in a more vertical world where eternity penetrates the world of time, he would not reduce that world to anything less than an incarnational one.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, too, recognized in Christ the concrete universal. Human freedom is a gift of God’s freedom, a locale for human action, yet “this space belongs to Christ,” and Christ’s incarnation as a human being and by extension in his people, “generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations” in which his meaning may be imparted.

For each of these thinkers and writers, then, Christ in some manner freed people from the material relativism and determinism of history, but they differed significantly on how to conceptualize that salvation. What they did agree on was that Christians must navigate between the twin dangers of complete egotism and pure determinism.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 3

The participants in the twentieth-century debate were all in agreement, nonetheless, that the meaning of history, if it had one, was a human meaning. The question as to whether history has socio-psychological laws was not precisely the same as to whether history has an inner dynamic that propels it in a certain direction, though the two were (and are) related. Human freedom as opposed to social and biological determinism concerned thinkers of all persuasions, as did whether history should be considered a matter of progress or of tragedy in light of two world wars. Had the last 40 years of violence disproved the early modern notion of progress? Equally, had the Hegelian notion that the divine Idea was working itself out in history been discredited by Nazi misuse of it?

Individualism and collectivism were, thus, important themes, and not just because of the rise of fascism and Marxism. They were at the heart of what to make of the politic orders of the last 50 years. They were also at the heart of what it means to be a human being within a political and social context. Finally, they were at the heart of whether human culture had any stable meaning at all.

Even deeper, then were what Ernst Troeltsch in 1922 had called the “crisis of historicism,” and what Benedetto Croce in 1916 had identified as the “humanity of history.” Historicism, the predominant worldview of nineteenth and early twentieth century Continental historians, held that each nation has its own intrinsic meaning, its own language, and is shaped by its history and place in nature. For some this suggested a divine guiding hand in giving expression to each nation, while for others this increasingly implied that no overarching human nature existed across cultures. For Troeltsch the crisis was that with historicism no objective laws or truths existed which could be applied to all people. People in their entirety are the product of their culture.

Croce in similar fashion decried the practitioners of individualist and/or collectivist historiography as reducing history to either a few powerful “men of genius” or to collectives as the producers of ideas. “Let him who cuts individuals out of history pay close attention,” Croce warned, “and he will perceive that either he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he has cut out with them history itself.”

The shadow side, some would say the “demonic” side, was how such notions when tied to doctrines of the state led to Nazism or Communism, but just as important and as disturbing was the implication that most or all human choices were meaningless. That historicism actually undercut claims of Enlightenment progress or Hegelian idealism only opened the window for a further sense of meaninglessness. Was history's "truth" finally reducible to set of existential decisions by otherwise culturally-determined individuals?

For some such as Paul Tillich the category of the demonic need not be understand as strictly a spiritual category, but more like a general human Gestalt or archetypal flowering of irrational evil: "The dialectics of the demonic . . . the unity of form-creating and form-destroying strength. That is true of the demon who determines the great destiny which disrupts all forms of existence; it is true of the demon who drives the personality beyond the limits of its allotted form to creations and destructions it cannot grasp as its own. Where the destructive quality is lacking, one can speak of outstanding power, of genius, of creative force, not of demonry."

If history is the product of social and economic forces, if culture is the product of national collectives or even of a few inspired geniuses, or if a non-human force drives history (be it biological and/or spiritual), then human freedom would seem to be an illusion.

Berlin labeled any system that posited discoverable laws or outcomes for history as "deterministic," and charged them with being not only fatalistic but even desirous of a system that excused them from human action and freedom. He was especially distrustful of teleological systems: "For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose."

Strangely enough, history became reduced reduced to theodicy.

Nikolai Berdyaev and Personality's Gnostic Turn

The Russian philosopher and exile Nikolai Berdyaev in his 1944 Slavery and Freedom set forth his mature position on the human person, the political state, and freedom. He contrasted the triumphant existential subjectivity of God and of the human with the enslaving objectification brought by nature, by the collective, and by false views of religion. One caveat: Berdyaev especially prized the subjective and contingent nature of philosophy, so trying to describe his position is a bit like trying to track a moving target. He defended his pursuit of truth as necessarily contradictory in places because that is how humans think.

He did set out in Slavery and Freedom, however, his chief categories of thought: "the primacy of freedom over existence, of spirit over nature, subject over object, personality over the universal, creativeness over evolution, dualism over monism, love over law. The acknowledgement of supremacy of personality involves metaphysical inequality, distinction, dissent from fusion, the affirmation of quality against the power of quantity" (10). But these can perhaps be best summed up as the "principle of personality and freedom and the principle of compassion, sympathy, and justice" (11). Any system that seeks to crush human creativity does so because it denies the infinite creativity of each person. At the same time, without some measure of compassion and sympathy persons can turn inward and wither up, losing their freedom yet again.

Berdyaev, a former Marxist, was suspicious of the language of the common good, the collective, or even at times that of society or community. He feared any system that claimed to absorb the individual person into a collective whole, and thus, he also rejected any claims that the person's good came from society or that of the community as a unity. He also rejected any sense of social hierarchy except that of the natural hierarchy that arose from differences in talents and abilities, and even this he warned against encoding into a social or political hierarchy. Nonetheless, Berdyaev was an advocate of personalism, holding that personality could enslave itself in egoism and that individualism was not true personality unless it discovers itself in turning outward towards others.

For the Russian philosopher, each personality is truly unique, "unrepeatable," one of a kind, yet each personality must grow into itself, becoming a Gestalt of its parts. Like Martin Buber and the German phenomenologists, Berdyaev feared the self, the Thou, being enslaved by any force that objectified it. He saw this potential in the natural world and in human egoism, but he especially warned of it in political forces that sought to conform each person to a utopian vision. He did understand and value the language of communion, the turn outward 0f persons in relationships of compassion and love. Freedom is found in being subject to the truth, he insisted, but that truth is to discovered for each person. Obedience to the truth does not call for obedience to the claims of tyrants, and truth is not given but found.

Bedyaev has been charged with testing the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, and I think rightly so up to a point, for he held the nature of Christ as divine-human to be emblematic of all persons. We all have "theandric existence" he insisted (45). At its best, this approach does recognize that the image of God in all persons includes a spiritual element of supreme worth. At its worst, though, this approach can exalt too quickly the human person while excluding the communal nature of our personhoods. Berdyaev was quick to isolate anything like truth from its community of origins:

"To freedom belongs supremacy over tradition, but the possibility of free living lies in the fact that there has been truth in the tradition. . . . Not for a moment does personality become a part of any organism whatever or of any hierarchical whole. . . . The source of human freedom cannot be in society; the source of human freedom is in the spirit. Everything which proceeds from society is enslaving; everything which issues from the spirit is liberating" (106).

There are immense problems with this, not the least of which is a lack of any real rationale for the social form of communion other than separate persons reaching outward in their isolation. Much of this begins with his over dependence upon a Kantian view of the universe as broken into a subjective moral law within and an objective deterministic world of nature without. Berdyaev doesn't consider a truly Trinitarian interpersonal world where individuals are made up in part by each other and, therefore, are truly dependent upon each other, not in an oppressive uniform anthill, but in a pattern of relations that only draws out the vocation of each more fully and yes, unrepeatably.

His position lead him also to treat the authority of God as limited to a kind of existential offer of relationship while distrusting the Creator's role as King and Lord. He held that God was not the provident master of the natural, physical world, but only ruled in the realm of spirit. Of course, this then, creates a dilemma as to why Christ needed to come to earth at all. The world, for Berdyaev is finally not the home of persons but a place of temporary suffering that offers some measure of personal growth. He comes close to being a Christian Gnostic, his persons trapped in and warring against an oppressive physical world of ilusion. Thus, his position shows us a danger of personalism without any metaphysical sense of community's value as more than just a meeting place of sovereign selves.

Emmanuel Mounier and Realities of Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier's 1949 volume Personalism represents his mature thought on the ideological and political position by that name that he helped promote in France during the first half of the twentieth century. While Mounier's career as a writer and social critic had been dedicated to a criticism of bourgeois liberal society, the Second World War forced him to recognize the potential for totalitarian abuse in both communist and fascist governments. Unlike his Catholic counterpart Jacques Maritain who came to support something like Wilsonian democracy, Mounier in his remaining few years was more drawn to a socialist vision. Nonetheless, Personalism,as Mounier himself admitted, did not necessarily obligate its adherents to one political platform. Indeed, one wonders that if Mounier had lived, might he have developed a personalist critique of socialism as well?

Mounier begins his slim volume by observing how the Christian notion of the person challenged ancient Greco-Roman notions:

1. Christianity counters the classic distrust of multiplicity with a notion of God's unity working itself out in the diversity of human actions of love.
2. The human being is increasingly understood as "an indissoluble whole" rather than a conglomerate of various elements.
3. God is personal and offers a personal relationship of intimacy and participation to each person.
4. The kingdom of God is not an abstract ideal but a promise of a transformed world and a changed inner heart.
5. God created persons as free creatures to grow and mature.
6. The Incarnation brings together heaven and earth, the mystical and the physical into a complex and affirming unity.

Personalism, Mounier insisted, is not Hegelian idealism, but a recognition of the embodied nature of human beings who in transforming the material, natural world are to "liberate things as well as humanity" (12). Wisdom, in its industry, does not exploit material existence but humanizes the natural world, a world "red in tooth and claw" (to recall Tennyson) which so often seems against us. Thus, we are possessed of a "tragic optimism," even in the face of struggle and effort.

Personalism is also not individualism, which Mounier dismissed as "a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defense" (18). Personalism is instead fueled by the drive to "decentralize" the human self, to give of oneself, donate oneself to others. Without communication comes madness; without giving comes destruction. We become fully persons as we embrace "an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation," as we give ourselves to others in self-bestowal. This also requires a stability of faithful relations with persons across time and space. We can best be faithful to those we remain with long-term.

Mounier had little patience with romanticizing a communal past of small villages, and he upheld not only the notion of human equality but human rights as that which protects and makes human freedom possible. Yet he also stressed the need for people to divest themselves of property and wealth in giving to others, thereby achieving their own personal and spiritual maturity. He imagined this affirmation of love as one requiring struggle both inwardly and outwardly, for the virtue of fortitude was absolutely necessary for personal growth.

Mournier also rejected notions of freedom either as indifference to the physical world or as pure spontaneity of action. Freedom is instead human love working its way out in responsibility. "Our liberties can be no more than opportunities offered to the spirit of freedom" (62). Freedom and personality fulfill themselves in the higher transcendence of a divine purpose: "My freedom itself comes to me as something given: its supreme moments are not those in which I exercise most will-power; they are moments rather of giving-way, or of offering myself to freedom newly encountered or to a value that I love" (66).

Still, Mounier the activist realized that political responses were inevitably compromised. He held that the political and prophetic voices must listen to each other, as well as other kinds of gestures and movements, such as those of industry and contemplation. "Nevertheless, though to 'engage' oneself is to consent to make-shift, to something impure, . . .and to accept one's limitations," he observed; "it does not sanctify one's abdication of personality to any abandonment of the values that it serves. . . . The troubled and sometimes agonized conscience caused by the impurities of our cause should keep us far from fanaticism, in a state of vigilant criticism. . . . The risks we have to run, and the partial obscurity in which we have to take decisions, put us in the state of dispossession, insecurity and hardihood which is the climate of all great action" (92-3).

Mourier held out hope that the slow death of Christendom promised a Christianity "slowly returning to it first position; renouncing government upon earth and outward appearance of sanctification to achieve the unique work of the Church, the community of Christians in Christ, mingles among all men in the secular work,--neither theocracy nor liberalism, but a return to the double rigours of transcendence and incarnation" (122).

Christopher Lasch on the Need for a 3rd Way

The late Christopher Lasch is perhaps best known for his classic work of cultural critique The Culture of Narcissism in which he examines how the turn to a therapeutic culture set American society on an inward course that undercuts the basic civic structure necessary for healthy and fulfilling social life. The danger is that of the "Promethean self" that evaluates all of life's goods by its own self-centered calculus. In his sequel, The Minimal Self, Lasch examines how amidst an environment of threat and danger (e.g. escalating crime, terrorism, arms races, etc.) people turn from the Promethean self to a reduced minimal narcissism that seems to combine both self-sufficiency and self-renunciation. Survival and pessimism become the centers of such selves. Both options are fianlly deeply inward and selfish.

Lasch's last important work was The True and Only Heaven, a history of the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its criticism both of the unfettered market system and of the liberal state and the planned economy. In the last few pages of his groundbreaking history, Lasch offers his own opinion that any new populism would learn from the old populism in its critiques but it would have to offer an entirely different vision of wealth and community.

Lasch was something of a pundit, hated by both the Left and the Right, and was even a measured critic of the communitarianism of those like Amitai Etzioni, which he criticized as being concerned with political agendas without being concerned with moral life and personal change. Here's an example of his basic analysis:

"On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their own happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speal for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except that of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church--all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself--schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes--to become a business proposition, to pay its way, to show black print on the bottom line. . . .

"In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust; undermines the willingness both to assume responsiblity for oneself and to hold others accountable for their actions; destroys respect for authority; and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Consider the fate of neighborhoods that serve so effectively, at their best, as intermediaries between family and the larger world. Neighborhoods have been destroyed not only by the market. . . but also by enlightened social engineering. . . .

"Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that, in a democracy, trust can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balance by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole--its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members--than in the responsibility of individuals. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good." ("Communitarianism or Populism? 60-1, 64)

Tocqueville on Egoism vs. Individualism

Alexia de Tocqueville in the second book of his justly famous Democracy in America proposed to differentiate simple egoism (or selfishness) from the more seemingly benign motive of individualism. Tocqueville feared that democracy in its positive promotion of individuals and their freedom, as left to itself led to a society that eventually discouraged its people from civic participation and virtuous action:

"Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

"Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. (446-7)

"Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." (448)

Tocqueville's thought here raises some important questions:

1. How does a society that sets its people free to pursue their own ends hold together any notion of the common good?
2. Does democratic individualism naturally lead to a breakdown in community and tradition?
3. How would Tocqueville account for modern consumerism and technologies?