"Toleration in its modern form is the solvent that dissolves the bonds of interdependency. It therefore makes society fit for the "new" ordering and regulating powers of the state."--A.J. Conyers, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit.
I've mentioned Conyers' book to several members of this blog as a good analysis of how Enlightenment political theory, especially Locke's, worked to undermine the rights of intermediate communities between the nation-state and the individual. I just ran across a blog review that offers a very thorough discussion of the book, though I would nuance things a bit differently:
http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1243/Long%20Truce.htm
Here's two passages from Conyers' book that this review discusses in some detail:
[T]he very character of modernity has accorded tolerance the status of a secular virtue. It is a virtue inasmuch as it strengthens a certain predisposition toward life together. It is secular in that the predisposition it strengthens is one of postponing or diverting the quest for meaning that is an essential component of social cohesion and the forming of groups or associations. Religion, of course, is what we call that quest, along with the practices and habits of the heart it engenders, The religious impulse is strong enough to bind people together, and also strong enough to set them at deadly odds with one another.
Toleration, as we modern people have defined it, is the decision to replace that quest with another one both practical and material in nature. Thus, it actually lessens the binding authority of community life, an authority that makes subtle appeal to manners, traditions, group sanctions, and respect for elders. At the same time, the ersatz virtue increases the need for organization, authority exerted from outside the group, formal laws, as well as emphasizing the protection of abstract "rights" that are divorced from what the living community calls the "good". . . .
What I am distinguishing as the practice of toleration, over against the doctrine that emerges from development of democratic liberalism, is the logical result of a recognition that our imperfections oblige us to listen to the insights of others. We are utterly dependent upon the gifts of society and tradition--even traditions other than our own. It is toleration that recognizes not the implied self-sufficiency of the individual or of various idiosyncratic groups in a supposed pluralistic world but the insufficiency of these limits and the ultimate need for a catholic vision. Even as the doctrine of toleration promotes isolation, the practice of toleration gently nudges us into community. Therefore, authentic toleration serves, and does not hinder, the forming and functional life of groups within society. It does not hinder in that it does not discourage the quest for ultimate meaning that is the inner light and life of any social group of any lasting importance.
Any thoughts?
I appreciate you bringing up some antidotes to Locke's thought. You are right that much of my thinking could be characterized, as I emailed to you and Dr. Naugle after listening to the Mars Hill Audio tapes, as thinking of a nineteenth-century Christian, walking with Bible in the one hand and Locke in the other. Other influences in my understanding of an individual, his rights, and the role of society and government are JS Mill, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, to some degree Thomas Paine, and more recently F Hayek, L von Mises, and to some extend Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. I am certainly looking for some acceptable antidote for the individual-focused liberty view held by the above to greater or lesser degree, because thus far I find it very convincing, also in a Christian context.
ReplyDeleteTo Conyers - I cannot follow his thought, and what I can follow I do not support. This must be certainly due to the fact that I am only dealing with one excerpt from his book.
*Is he saying that religion is the only way that people search for meaning?
*Is he saying that the idea of 'rights' is necessarily abstract and divorced from 'the good'. What is the grounds for such a statement, when Locke and others give explicit lines of reasoning to show that 'rights' are anything but abstract, and are necessary to even be able to discuss 'the good'?
*Why do our imperfections oblige(!) us to listen to others? The statement does not stand on its own, so I'm sure he gives some reasoning in the book. Do you know what the given reasons are?
Also - I do not necessarily understand his definition of 'toleration'. Is 'toleration' the decision to replace the quest for meaning in religion with some other quest? That seems to me to be a consequence of his-defined 'toleration', not a definition of it. Tolerance the way I understand does not arise from Mill or Locke, and is not compatible with their view of individual rights.
Maybe there are too many questions for a blog discussion, maybe it's better to address these over a cup of coffee instead.
I suspect you are right about the cup of coffee--which I'm always up for!
ReplyDeleteI confess part of the reason I went searching for someone else's treatment of Conyers is that I feel too busy to put together a thorough treatment myself for the blog. Did you have a chance to read the link I posted? He does a pretty good job summarizing the book.
The main idea Conyers is trying to get across is that if tolerance is a virtue, which he beleves, then it must have an end or purpose, but that Enlightenment thought, especially under Locke removed that end for political purposes, in part because thinkers like Locke were seeking to dissolve the ideological power of religions, as well as other social units that seemed to be too partisan.
Even if Locke and company did not intend for it to, tolerance as simply the refusal to judge another's position ends up maximizing the ends of the modern state and helps reenforce a community of individuals without community commitments, or so says Conyers.
True tolerance, he insists, does not postpone the search for truth but pursues it in various traditions while granting others in differing traditions a respite from political force or action.
By the way, I do hope soon you will have a chance to set out and defend why you hold that a model that embraces Mill, Paine, and Rand can be compatible with Christianity. I confess that I tend to write them off as soon as I hear their names, so I'd love to have a more nuanced understanding of them.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I need to work out my Christian defense for individual's rights.
ReplyDeleteOn a fundamental level, my defense would come from the fact that anything that rejects the individual's rights to his own life and admits that others can - by force - lay claims on that life, is not consistent with the theology of the individual that I see in the Bible.
In Christian theology use of force as means to an end is rejected (is it not?) and ultimately, non-Locke-ian view of rights, if such a view can even be consistently built, would have to state that one person can force another to do this or do that.
I agree that there is much that is troubling in Mill, Paine, and Rand, but I am merely naming them as some influences for how I have come to understand the rights of an individual. In fact, I think that the probable reason why you write them off (their open hostility to organized religion), is not a necessary outworking of the more fundamental idea of individual's rights on which they stand.
I think you're spot on about my reactions to Mill, etc. I think this interaction we've been having is good for me because it forces me to voice what I tend to assume, and it also makes me aware of areas-such as rights-where I'm pretty muddled in my thinking. So thank you.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm beginning to understand that when you use the words "force" and "life" you mean more than physical violence and physical existence. Is that accurate?
I also recognize that I need to work out a biblical and theological examination of physical state-level violence/force, and I'm hoping you can help me here. For example, how do we put together the teachings of Jesus on turning the other cheek with Romans 12 and the general use of violence by God in the Old Testament to accomplish his ends--Revelation, too, unless you want to read it as complete symbolism?
As far as ends and means, the end does not justify the means; rather, it *orients* the means. A means without an end, which is what is often charged of much of modern post-Christian America, is the sheer expression of power and technique with no moral vision. A means that is not congruent to the end is simply wrong. A means with a wrong end is also to be rejected by Christians; however, right means tied to the right end, I would contend, is deeply Christian, for we are oriented towards the eschatological kingdom, the renewed people of God, and the sanctified individual. I guess what I need you to show me is how a philosophy of individualism alone can be oriented towards the Christian mission.
---I think I'm beginning to understand that when you use the words "force" and "life" you mean more than physical violence and physical existence. Is that accurate?
ReplyDeleteYes, you are certainly right on that. By 'force', I mean force or not only physical violence, but also threat of physical violence or something equivalent to it, and by 'life' I mean not only physical existence in total, but also any part of physical existence.
--"As far as ends and means"...
I am not sure I can hold a conversation in general about the ends and the means; I would rather stick to the specifics. My main concern is whether or not it is consistent with Christianity to use force as means to accomplish ends (ends, say, of charity or godliness, not ends of justice which would muddy the situation since force would have been used by a perpetrator originally).
I understand why you might not want to engage the conversation on ends and means; it does get pretty murky at times, but that issue is at the heart of the critique that is coming out of philosophy and theology, as well as Christian sociology to some extent.
ReplyDeleteThe large meta-critique in many different variations is that the Enlightenment project (and this includes its economic, legal, and political manifestations)has been rendered incoherent because it abandoned teleological ends.
I'm not sure you can decide whether force, if by that we mean any means of coercion up to and including violence, is justified until we know what the purpose of government is and what the involvement of Christians and of the Church should be in that governing. In many ways, we're back to my initial question, how do we decide about the relationship between church and state. Oi Vey! I can see another post coming. . .
I am fine engaging in the conversation about means and ends, as long as we are talking about specifics.
ReplyDeleteSo - my claim is that Christianity opposes use of original force as means to accomplish ends. What would be an example that would make my claim invalid?
That is - what would be an instance where the teleological ends or the 'purpose of the government' would justify (on Christian grounds) the use of force? My claim is that no such instance can be found, but I would be happy to be shown wrong.
I see we're both up late. Honestly, this is where I'm still fuzzy because I haven't entirely worked out how we should put together the violence and non-violence in scripture.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in the patristic church after the legalization of Christianity, it was common to argue that Christians in government could use force if needed, while the church itself could not but should urge mercy and clemency. The line of reasoning (at least in Augustine's case) was that the state is a temporary existence meant to bear the sword against evil, while the church as the herald of what is eternal should model God's ultimate peace. In other words, violence (and I'm using that word instead of force to help keep me focused here) was permissible but not ideal, so the church should not take unto itself what God had assigned to the temporal order.
Yet, I confess, somethng bothers me about this. What do you think?
That does sound like a reasonable argument for Augustine's day, but I think we have come a long way in our understanding of the individual and the state since then, and the argument can no longer be accepted.
ReplyDeleteIf the argument states that we have to defer to the judgment of the state for its definition of evil, because the state has some inherent power, then the argument can be rejected by looking at extremes (do Christians need to respect Nazi authorities' use of violence against the Jews simply because of Nazi's definition of evil?) So I would accept the Augustinian argument
If, on the other hand, Augustine is arguing that the violence-wielding state should be replaced by the peace-modeling church, then I join him to the extent that we both condemn the use of violence as ends to means from Christian perspective.
So I think my claim still stands - Christianity opposes use of original violence as means to accomplish ends - although I would be happy to be shown an exception where this is not the case.
I should clarify that Augustine was also famous for comparing the Roman state to a criminal gang on a large scale, and the partristic fathers, such as Ambrose, were quite willing to oppose the imperial government if they felt they were doing something unjust. They were hardly treating the state as fail-proof or fool-proof. The question was rather, once Christians are in government, can they authorize violence against evil, which again Paul in Romans does treat as legitimate?
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit non-plussed by your claiming "we have come a long way in our understanding of the individual and the state since then." Who's "we"? :-D
I need more from you: just as I've yet to establish a claim for acceptable use of violence by the state (after all, I'm still trying to decide when it is acceptable), so you've yet to really support your claim that it is not. So far you've only asserted it. What *are* the biblical grounds for this? (For example, are you taking the position that the Sermon on the Mount either outweighs or somehow removes the justification of the Exodus event, the imagery of Revelation, or the wars of King David? I'm curious.)
Yes, you are exactly right in characterizing my thinking. I do think that the the Sermon on the Mount (taken together with the theology of Creation of the human being and the value of the human being) does outweigh(!) the imagery of Revelation, the wars of King David, and even the inverse reading of Romans 13 which is sometimes used to justify some ultimate authority of the governing over the governed.
ReplyDeleteI realize that I have not put forth a reasoned argument for this just yet. I am thinking about it and I want to do a thorough job, so it will probably be quite a while before I get to it; but you know my basic premise - the individual is more important than any group.
Oh - and about having come a long way - I could look for many arguments about, say, education, medicine, science, once held by Augustine or any other early thinkers that have been subsequently thoroughly replaced by later evolution in Christian thought; political economy is by no means the only realm where this is possible.
ReplyDeleteSo by "we" I suppose I meant - the post-Reformation or post-Enlightenment Christians. Don't you agree?
Thank you. That's already very helpful to see where you are coming from. We've got time for you to develop it thoroughly. I need similar time to begin to really think through the meaning of rights.
ReplyDeleteOne question to think about: is the individual truly more important than the Church? Couldn't they be equally important, indeed, indispensible to one another?
Opps. Sorry. Missed you on the last part. Each of the areas you mention is different. Obviously, I'm not going to look to late Roman views of the human body when I need a doctor. On the other hand, their views on education are still viable, and to mention Augustine, his De Doctrina Christiana is still a classic text on education. The patristics are still studied and adapted in current theological discussions. They've not been "evolved" beyond.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I would argue on theological grounds that they cannot be--the Church is the Church Universal across space and time, the fellowship of the saints cannot be reduced to my own generation or denomination.
And even if "we" means post-Enlightenment Christians, then you might be surprised to see how much of the weight of current theology is against a model of the individual and the state as the only players. Indeed, the brunt of Trintarian "development" in the last century has been to stress over and over that personhood is interdependent and communal and that intermediate associations of family, guild, and church, are the contexts in which the individual lives out his or her divine purpose. Though I should add, some version do not see the Church as intermediate but as a model or counter community to all things political.
By the way, I think some aspects of your own biblical position as you described it briefly in the last exchange resonates most with the Mennonite and Anabaptist traditions. Have you read John Yoder's The Politics of Jesus? It's a book that might track with some of what you hold
I agree that we cannot and should not discard the great Christian thinkers of the past. I am trying to neither discard past thinking nor accept it wholesale. I am merely saying that there are areas in their thought which were flawed. I guess I will need to look for examples to make my point. We do not take their word as 'inerrant' or 'infallible'.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion for reading Yoder. I have not read that book, and I should add it to my reading list.
I am quite familiar with some of the "communitarian" theology, but I've never quite bought into its prescriptions. I have seen value in this sort of theology for aiding my understanding of the nature of God, but beyond that I think that theology, when used inconsistently can be very dangerous, if it does not denounce the use of violence (or threat thereof) to accomplish ends, and most of it does not explicitly make this denunciation.