A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • The worst kind of cocktail party – one with no booze

    Marvin, Jonathan, and Jennifer have been going around a bit about some of the same issues I talked about here regarding Christians, patriotism, politics, and Stanley Hauerwas. Now, unlike these three, I’ve never formally studied theology, much less under the man himself, so I always feel a little underqualified jumping into these discussions. But, fools rush in…

    I agree with Jennifer’s point that there are lots of ways of being “political” that can’t simply be reduced to voting and conventional political activism. Moreover, she’s right to point a finger at the mainline: all too often mainline Protestantism assumes the shape of a vaguely religious humanism that seeks to usher in utopia through political activism, seemingly willing to replace the gospel of Christ with the UN Millenium Development Goals.

    But Marvin gets at what I was trying (rather long-windedly) to say when he says in a comment on Jennifer’s post:

    the same scriptures that call the Church to be a different polis demand respect for the Emperor while ascribing fear to God, and demand subjection to the governing authorities while acknowledging the Lordship of Christ. The family, the corporation and the state do have legitimate claims on us. Subordinate to the claims of Christ and his Church, to be sure, but legitimate claims. Hauerwas frankly has nothing to say about how to do this balancing act, and this is the crucial pastoral theology issue of our time. How do you be a faithful Christian when you’re also a cog in the machine?

    I think there are resources in the Christian tradition for addressing this issue–concepts like natural law, vocation, “orders of creation” and so on–which have long been endorsed by mainstream Christians. But these are also the very things the “Hauerwas school” have railed against for downplaying or sacrificing Christian distinctiveness.

    My view, though, is that these are still useful approaches, even if they might need retooled a bit (e.g. a version of natural law that takes evolution seriously; a concept of vocation that doesn’t reinforce the status quo). There are resources out there for this which, as far as I can tell, the churches haven’t made a great deal of use of. But I do think they provide a more promising way forward.

  • More on the churches and patriotism

    After reading this comment thread over at Chris’ blog, it ocurred to me that there might be a communication breakdown of sorts between mainline Protestant and evangelical responses to the quote from Stanley Hauerwas under discussion.

    When Hauerwas first started churning out his jeremiads, they were aimed primarily at the liberal mainline establishment that, in his view, had compromised itself in taking “responsibility” for American society. But now, it seems that he’s finding a lot of readers among American evangelicals who find him a bracing antidote to the uncritical nationalism of a lot of their churches.

    To a large extent, these two groups may have very different experiences of what it means to be a church in American society. For instance, I’ve never been a member of a church that traffics in the kind of uncritical nationalism that others seem to be referring to here; if anything, the churches I’ve attended have no problem recounting the litany of American evil. Plus, I’m well-acquainted with secular critiques of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and military intervention; so hearing that God’s kingdom isn’t to be identified with the Pax Americana doesn’t exactly comes as shocking news. Becuase of that I tend to focus on what I see as the dangers of quietism and churcholatry arising from Hauerwas’ perspective. But if I was an evangelical I might have a very different impression.

    In light of this conversation I was particularly attuned to any potential nationalistic overtones at church this morning. I worship at an ELCA church that is definitely left-of-center, but also has many congregants who work for the government, non-profits, are in the military, etc. (The church is on Capitol Hill just a few blocks from our place.) The pastor’s sermon, as far as I was concerned, struck just the right notes. He talked, based on the gospel passage, about how Jesus’ yoke being “easy” means that it is perfectly fitted for us. He then went on to talk about how the American colonists threw off the yoke of the British Empire in order to craft a “yoke” based on human rights, democracy, and opposition to monarchical power.

    We are, he said, inheritors of that legacy which carries with it a responsibility to extend those blessings more consitently throughout our society. But beyond this, he went on, is our higher loyalty to Jesus’ more excellent way of agapic love. What we do as citizens of a republic must be set in the context of our allegiance to Jesus and the way of being in the world that he pioneered.

    We did sing “America the Beautiful,” but we closed with this song, which one would, I think, be hard pressed to identify with jingoistic nationalism:

    This is my song, O God of all the nations,
    A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
    This is my home, the country where my heart is;
    Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
    But other hearts in other lands are beating
    With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

    My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
    And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.
    But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
    And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
    Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
    A song of peace for their land and for mine.

    I quite like this vision of patriotism. We can love our country and have a special responsibility for it because its ours, not because we think it’s better than everyone else’s. And we can recognize that other people love their homelands too, and that this shouldn’t be an obstacle to peace between nations. It appeals to my “little Americaner” sensibilities (or whatever the proper analogue of a “Little Englander” is).

    At any rate, though, I think this illustrates my point about different experiences of what it means to be a church in America and how to relate to the larger society.

  • The limits of Pollanism

    UPDATE: Now with links!

    The current issue of the American Conservative, in addition to featuring John‘s very cool cover story on “conservative cuisine” (which I may blog about later), carries Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan. This passage, where Dreher tries to draw a connection between Pollan’s “organic” conception of the environment and an organic conception of human society, caught my attention:

    DREHER: What about human society as an organism? Many people think of Wendell Berry as a man of the Left because he criticizes humankind’s unnatural exploitative relationship to agriculture and the environment, but Berry has argued on similar grounds against the indvidualist sexual ethic pervasive in contemporary culture. Is he on to something?

    POLLAN: Berry’s on to a lot of things. He’s a very wise man. Is he Right or Left? Those categories don’t fit him. He is a fierce critic of capitalism because he sees it destroying community, destroying traditional sexual relationships, destroying family. I agree with a lot of that, but not all.

    There is a blind spot in a lot of contemporary conservatism–not understanding that while capitalism can be a very constructive force, it can also be very destructive of things that conservatives value.

    DREHER: It’s also a blind spot of contemporary liberalism to fail to see how pursuing a sort of autonomous individualism when it comes to social forms undermines a community in the same way that capitalism does.

    POLLAN: That’s right. The Left can be blind to that possibility also.

    Now Pollan, being a good liberal, backs away somewhat from this idea, and with good reason – excessively “organic” conceptions of society tend to be quite illiberal. While everyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher agrees that our well-being is intimately tied up with our social context, traditional organic conceptions of society go much further than this.

    The question, in essence, is whether individuals exist for the sake of society or whether societies exist for the benefit of their members. The former tended to be the pre-modern view, while the latter is more a result of a post-Enlightenment outlook. While any society may, under certain circumstances, call upon members to make sacrifices for its well-being (in times of war, say), a strong “social holism” sees the value of individuals as being entirely, or almost entirely, constituted by the contribution they make to the whole. This, in turn, has justified routinely sacrificing the interests of some group for the putative sake of the the well-being of the whole. For instance, keeping a permanent class of slaves might be justified on the grounds that it enabled a society to reach an otherwise unattainable level of art and culture.

    Meanwhile, moderns generally see society as something that can, and should, be reformed in the interests of its members. Slavery is wrong, we think, because it permanently subordinates the interests of one group of people to others, regardless of what social goods it may or may not be conducive to. Likewise, over the centuries, the institution of marriage has been modified in light of widespread beliefs that it was hampering the well-being and happiness of various groups of people. Marriage based on property interest was challenged by marriage based on personal happiness. Patriarchial marriage was challenged by feminists. Exclusively heterosexual marriage is being challenged by gays and lesbians. And so on.

    The underlying idea here is that social institutions exist in order to allow people to flourish and can be modified accordingly; people don’t exist for the sake of social institutions. You might even say that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

    But, as Dreher suggests, an “organicist” way of thinking isn’t entirely foreign to Pollan’s outlook. Take, for instance, his discussion of animal rights in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan complains about the “individualism” of an animal rights movement that is concerned exclusively about the suffering and well-being of individual animals:

    [T]he animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. […] [Peter] Singer [insists] that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests–in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat–just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat? (p. 323)

    Now, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that “surely a species has interests” looks to me like it’s stealing a few argumentative bases. In fact, it’s far from obvious to me that a species has interests and I have a hard time seeing why the goods Pollan refers to couldn’t be secured by focusing on indvidual animals. After all, don’t individual animals have interests in survival and in the health of their habitat? What is gained, exactly, by positing an additional entity – the species – that has interests over and above the interests of its members?

    Pollan here seems to be expressing sympahty with the ecological analogue of social holism, a view usually traced back to Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” where an action is right when “it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This ecological holism, like its social counterpart, locates value in the whole, with the value of individuals playing a subordinate role.

    In my view, the problem with ecological holism, like social holism, is that it can all too easily justify the sacrifice of sentient creatures for the alleged benefit of the whole. After all, if the value of individuals consists in their contribution to the whole, their interests don’t carry any weight apart from whatever contribution they may or may not make. Instead of being concerned with individuals, it gives overriding precedence to the whole. This is why Tom Regan dubbed ecological holism – perhaps unfairly – “eco fascism.”

    Fortunately, hardly anyone actually adheres to the strong versions of social or ecological holism that would deny any intrinsic value to individuals, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Pollan does. Nevertheless, there is a real opposition between pre-modern social organicism and ecological holism on the one hand, and post-Enlightenement social ethics and animal liberation on the other which focus on the well-being of individuals. The former give precedence to the “stability” and “integrity” of the whole, while the latter focus on the interests of individuals. Both the traditional pre-modern conservative and the ecological holist can tend toward the affirmation that “Whatever is, is right.” We see Pollan doing this when he justifies meat-eating as “natural,” as though morality doesn’t often require us to do things that are “unnatural.”

    I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone if I put my cards on the table and say that, at least in this case, I’m with the small-l liberals, animal rightists, and other post-Enlightenment philosophies. Which is not to say that there aren’t legitimate critiques of these philosophies – especially in their more extreme individualist forms. Certainly, part of an individual’s value lies in her role in community and the good of the whole can, in particular instances, trump the good of an individual, but, overall, a community has to be judged by the extent to which it enables its members to lead flourishing, satisfying lives.

  • Saturday metal – Independence Day edition (one day late)

    Iced Earth, “Declaration Day”

    (Yes, the line “freedom is not free” actually occurs in the song. And I have no idea what that freaky animation’s all about.)

  • How should Christians celebrate the 4th?

    Speaking of Christians and patriotism, I liked this piece from the Christian Century.

    I mean, I personally spent the 4th helping my wife study for the bar exam, but in principle I like what this article has to say.

  • Christianity, patriotism, and divided loyalties

    Ben Myers posted this bombastic Stanley Hauerwas quote (is there any other kind?) for Independence Day:

    I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.

    The quote is from an address to a group of seminary students, but it’s a good encapsulation of much of what Hauerwas has said about the relationship between Christianity and America over the years. Jim West provided a stern rebuke of Hauerwas here; Fr. Chris has some thoughts here.

    The question here is one of loyalties, but I think the terms in which it is debated are often simplistic: you’re either loyal to the nation (in this case, the US) or to the church. This misses the point that we have multiple overlapping and interpenetrating loyalties, which cannot be neatly and hierarchically ordered. (With one important exception that I’ll get to in a minute.)

    We find ourselves, simply as a result of the place we occupy in the world, with loyalties to family, friends, spouses, children, communities, employers, professional associations, charitable organizations, social clubs, religious bodies, and various levels of political community. As a general rule, these don’t need to be justified by recourse to some ethical theory, they are simply the warp and woof of our life together. Nor is there any simple algorithm for settling the conflicts that arise between these loyalties. Sometimes I may have to choose between loyalty to my family and loyalty to my spouse, or between my employer and my country, or between my religious community and my political community.

    An important qualification of all loyalties, though, is the more universal ethical context in which we exist and which, for theists anyway, flows from, is rooted in, or reflects the divine mind. This means that particular loyalties can only make limited claims on us. For example, a father’s duty to care for his children doesn’t entitle him to harm other people’s children. Loyalty to my country doesn’t justify inflicting injustice on citizens of other countries. In other words, preferential treatment of those to whom we’re connected by special bonds isn’t wrong per se, but it’s subject to qualification in light of more universal duties.

    Because our highest loyalty, if we’re Christians, should be to God, we are called to follow God’s will, so far as we can discern it, in all areas of our life. The national community, though it can and has become an object of idolatry, can, acting through the government, be one instrument for advancing these values. And, I’d add, that in many cases it’s the only agent in society that can do certain things. Self-styled radical Christians who want us to live in anarchist communes rarely seem to address things like infrastructure, environmental protection, and the social safety net. Are Christians supposed to abandon our concern with these things and leave the “dirty work” to the “heathens”?

    The problem I see with the Hauerwasian view is that it has a tendency to elevate the church to the object of highest loyalty and threatens to collapse the distinction between Christ and the church. Gerhard Forde warned against seeing the church as an “eschatological vestibule” where the kingdom of God has already come in its fullness instead of as an earthen vessel where we hear God’s word and receive the sacraments. The church, as a human institution, is no more immune to corruption than any other, so we can’t assume that it deserves our unconditional loyalty any more than the nation does. In fact, a good candidate for the essence of Protestantism might be the imperative to criticize the church in light of the gospel.

    All of which is not to say that Christians should traffic in American exceptionalism. No nation can, contrary to what most of our politicians seem to think, be the world’s last, best hope. That title belongs only to God. Which is why we’re obliged not to identify any of the powers and principalities of this age with the divine will but to seek to embody that will in our life together. The point is that we all have “divided loyalties,” but Christians are supposed to (however imperfectly) order them to our universal duty to God.

  • Protecting basic constitutional liberties is not a boutique issue

    See Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Larison.

  • McKibben’s journey

    The Nation has a nice overview of Bill McKibben’s writing, focusing on some of the tensions and evolution in his thought.

    McKibben’s more recent writing (e.g. Deep Economy) has taken a turn away from the wilderness ethic and towards a focus on “durable communities” and responsible stewardship. Our technological prowess, it seems, will inevitably change the biosphere, so now the challenge is to learn to use our power responsibly. And yet, the solution isn’t just to find some sort of techno-fix for our problems, but to learn the possibilities of self-limitation:

    Even though the content of McKibben’s recent work is fairly upbeat, a tragic sense looms, because on some level we’ve already lost. We’ve lost the wild–the pure, sovereign “nature” McKibben venerated. Yet, having mourned, he has adapted his ideals. He now seems to endorse the view that, as he writes in his introduction to the anthology, “the traditional American distinction between raped land and virgin land was unhealthy, and that therefore good stewardship–husbandry, to use the old term–was required.” At least in our time, this shift represents a kind of growing up. The love of the wild involves ecstasy and innocence, properties of youth. Accepting responsibility for our role as stewards is a reconciliation to our circumstances. The world apart from man is gone; the solution to the planet’s problems is going to have to come from the species that caused them.

    To McKibben, stewardship is not a matter of further manipulating nature so as to extract carbon dioxide from the air and clear the way for the status quo. In The End of Nature, McKibben wrote that genetic engineering, while it might succeed in preserving a livable planet for humans, would represent nature’s final death throes. Today, “carbon-eating” genetically modified trees and crops appear to be on the horizon. McKibben doesn’t address these possibilities directly in his recent books. His silence suggests, at best, a lack of enthusiasm.

    For McKibben retains his profound discomfort with unbridled human power. Reasonable people–even reasonable environmentalists–can disagree about, say, the ethics of exterminating black flies with a relatively benign pesticide. There is something adolescent, perhaps, about McKibben’s insistence on braving the flies. But the alternative–expecting the world to be retooled for our convenience–is the attitude of a toddler.

    Many converts have come to the global warming cause, but most are rather like Christians motivated by fear of the Apocalypse. After all, you needn’t care about the trees or the whales or the polar bears to oppose global warming; you only need to care about yourself and your connection to the future. Of course, McKibben, too, wants passionately to avert catastrophe. But he knows that this may be at once too narrow and too ambitious a goal. On some level global warming is, to him, primarily a symptom of misguided priorities and insensitivity to the life surrounding us. Most of us root for the polar bears; we’d be very grateful to keep some semblance of the seasons, which have lent a backdrop of stability to our lives. But ultimately, we fear for ourselves, for our civilization and our grandchildren. If a technological deus ex machina could save us, we’d rejoice. Bill McKibben is looking for another kind of salvation.

  • More from Rowe

    A few days ago I wrote a post that took as its jumping-off point an article on the shortcomings of GDP by Jonathan Rowe in Harper‘s. I see here that Mr. Rowe has an entire archive of articles written from what I would describe as a generally decentralist green/left perspective that I find highly congenial. He even writes on a few occasions about possible alliances with traditionalist conservatives, “crunchy” cons and the like.

  • Happy birthday, America

    Just a short re-cap:

  • All men (heck, let’s say “people”) – created equal
  • Those people – they’ve got rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
  • And the government? Its job is to protect those rights
  • The government ultimately answers to the people

    • Judging by the way our leaders act, and what we go along with, it seems that it’s hard to keep all this in our heads, so I thought reducing it to a few bullet points would be helpful.

    Everybody got that? Cool.