A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Economics for community

    As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an abstraction as exhaustive of the reality it describes as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

    Chief among these abstractions is the market. While the free exchange of goods and services is key to any flourishing economy, treating “the market” in isolation has some built in limitations. These include the tendency for competition to be self-eliminating (monopoly), the corrosive affect of encouraging the pursuit of self-interest on the moral context necessary to sustain the virtues the market order requires, the need for public goods and the existence of public “bads” (externalities), and the market’s blindness to judgments of value such as those pertaining to the distribution of wealth or the overall scale of the economy in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.

    Daly and Cobb also criticize the reliance on GNP as a measure of economic well-being. They argue that it doesn’t accurately reflect income, much less genuine economic welfare. Homo economicus is the model of the human self posited by much economic thought. It assumes a human being who’s interested primarily in maximizing utility understood in terms of consumption. Economics qua economics forbids us from making value judgments about individual preferences and seeks instead to understand how those preferences can be maximized. Finally, “land,” the economic stand-in for all of non-human nature, rather than being seen as a productive and living system with its own intrinsic value, is reduced to a largely passive and inert commodity. An overly idealistic point of view tends to see all resources as having their ultimate source in human ingenuity, presdisposing economics to ignore the question of the finitude of resources.

    All of these abstractions, Daly and Cobb contend, serve to create an overly individualistic and short-term picture of the world and lends support to similarly constituted policies. Their goal is to reconceive the context of economic life as being in service to community, including the wider community of non-human nature.

    To this end, they advocate a shift from short-term to long-term thinking, with particular attention to the scale of the economy. Their argument here is fairly simple: the economy is situated within an ecosystem which is finite in size (i.e in terms of resources). Therefore, the economy cannot grow indefinitely. They define “scale” as population x per capita resource use rate and maintain that our trajectory of growth is pushing against the limits imposed by the natural ecosystem within which our economic life exists.

    Consequently, what they think is necessary is an economy that is oriented away from growth and toward more of a steady-state model. Economic well-being shouldn’t be measured in terms of increasing consumption, but by a combination of economic and non-economic welfare. Individualism should be replaced by a vision of human beings as persons-in-community whose relationships to others are seen as constitutive of their identity. Economic development should focus on the well-being of the community as a whole rather than individuals.

    Concerning this last point, Daly and Cobb see communities as the fundamental building blocks of a sound economic order. But they are also decentralists who would like to see a revival of local communities over against the atomized cosmopolitanism that globalization promises. They envision a world in which one’s primary loyalty is to one’s local community, with increasing and overlapping circles of loyalty expanding outward. Unlike many on the Left, they have no particular affinity for “post-national” globalism.

    In fact, Daly and Cobb acknowledge that in our world the only entities currently able to resist globalization and foster steps toward an economic order more in line with their aspirations is the nation. They are more or less unapologetic nationalists, resulting in some surprising policy prescriptions that would put them at odds with much of the Left. They are against free trade and for protectionism for domestic industries by means of tariffs, they favor population control, and the form they advocate for most developed countries, including the US, is a curtailment of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Sounding for all the world like Pat Buchanan, they argue that a chief function of the nation-state is to secure its borders against unwanted immigrants. They oppose not only economic entanglements with foreign nations, but also foreign aid. All nations need to be self-sufficient, at least in essentials. Finally, the support a defense policy of what could fairly be called non-interventionism and suggest that a United States less enmeshed in a global market would have less cause for foreign meddling.

    The keystone of Daly and Cobb’s position, then, is a community of more or less self-reliant communities whose economic life is geared to stability and self-sufficiency rather than expanded growth. This is rooted in what they describe as a biocentric and theistic vision that sees all of creation as related to a good God and having value apart from human needs and interests. Their emphasis on the value of the biosphere leads them to support sustainable and organic agriculture and to favor subsistence agriculture over agriculture for commodity export as well as a tax system similar to that proposed by Henry George that treats land as a trust rather than a commodity.

    A lot of what’s contained in this volume will be familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to debates about the economics of sustainability. What I find appealing about Daly and Cobb is their desire to foster a more decentralized, humane, and participatory economy instead of increased centralization. I also think they’re more realistic than some in viewing the nation-state as the best hope for gaining some measure of democratic control over economic life. Too often folks on the Left put what appears to me as an unrealistic hope in international institutions like the UN which, after all, are even further removed from popular control and participation than most national governments.

    However, I still can’t help but have some reservations about Daly and Cobb’s vision. On a sheerly factual level, I wish they’d spent more time making the case of a finite economy. To a certain extent they seem to cherry-pick their opponents, using the most extreme-sounding quotes from people like George Gilder. I would’ve liked to see more engagement with serious opponents of their view. Secondly, they seem to me at times insufficiently appreciative of the real benefits of liberal individualism. Like many who oppose “community” to “individualism” they tend to paint the former almost exclusively in glowing terms that downplay the genuine difficulties of close-knit community. There’s a real tension between individual liberty and community control, however democratic. To the extent that the community exercises control over a particular area of life, it leaves less room for indvidual discretion. There’s a genuine balancing act there and I’m not sure Daly and Cobb have paid much attention to it (their discussion of population control, for instance, is disturbingly sanguine about China’s coercive policies without actually advocating them). Finally, they don’t, in my view, deal adequately with the objection that participation in an expanding economy is necessary for many people in the world to escape from grinding poverty.

    Overall, though, Daly and Cobb seem to me to be asking the right questions: Is an ever-expanding economy consistent with the limits imposed by ecological fragility? How do we reconcile the need for democratic control over the economy with individual freedom? What kind of balance should be struck between ties to local community and a more cosmopolitan outlook? How do we honor the value of God’s creation without sacrificing vital human interests? These all strike me as among the most important questions we face in the 21st century, even if I’m not satisfied in every case with Daly and Cobb’s answers.

  • Checking in

    Still on vacation – currently staying with some friends outside of the City of Angels. Boy, the California livin’ seems easy when the sun’s shining and the breeze is blowing. A little warm for my blood, but there you are.

    Tomorrow we fly back to Boston and then have exactly one week to pack before our move to Washington, DC. The ATR household will be spending at least the next year in our nation’s capital.

    I’ve been reading the Daly/Cobb book while on vacation. Very interesting stuff so far. They want to call attention to the limitations of the abstractions employed by economics that tend to isolate the workings of the market from real life. I think they make a good case, but am just getting into the section on the concrete implications of their vision. Their strongest point so far is that the size of the economy in relation to the larger ecosystem matters and that economics isn’t very good at taking this into account.

    Here’s a little Friday metal. More substantive posting will hopefully resume next week.

    UNEARTH – “Sanctity Of Brothers”

  • Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

    I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books.

    Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process theologian John Cobb.

    My views on economics have been in flux for the past few years. I was at one time attracted to the libertarian exaltation of the free market, but I’ve become increasingly convinced of the limitations of that view.

    The conservative side of me is skeptical that a system based on acquisitiveness can really be conducive to virtue, especially as the logic of the market threatens to take over more and more areas of life. The liberal side of me is unconvinced that the rising tide will really lift all boats, at least at a rate fast enough to forestall ecological disaster. As I’ve become more interested in environmental issues I’ve been exposed to the arguments of those who maintain that unlimited growth is a dead end, literally.

    Daly and Cobb seem to be following in the footsteps of thinkers like E.F. Schumacher. They embrace the market and recognize that central planning is unworkable, but they also want to situate the market within a social and moral framework that respects the integrity of communities, both national and more local ones.

    In this respect their project seems to hark back to the decentralized “humane economy” of conservative Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, a thinker I admire a lot. Their goal is to rethink economic policy in a way that treats human beings as more than an abstract homo economicus, as well as being sensitive to what, following Wendell Berry, they call the “Great Economy” of all life on Earth.

    I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m eager to see where Daly and Cobb go with their project and will probably post more on these ideas as I go.

  • Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism

    At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some additional material and so far (only twelve pages in) it’s good stuff.

    In the first chapter Polkinghorne discusses what he calls the “new natural theology.” There are two aspects of the physical world, Polkinghorne thinks, that provide “hints” of the existence of God. The first is the fact that our minds are fitted to understand the deep structure of the physical universe and that this structure can be expressed in elegant mathematical forumlas. “This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).

    Polkinghorne rejects as implausible the view that our ability to comprehend the fabric of the physical world and express it in the language of mathematics is a mere by-product of our evolutionary development:

    No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. (p. 2-3)

    He likewise rejects any “constructivist” account of knowledge which says that we merely project our preference for mathematical reasoning onto the physical world. “Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way” (p. 3). The great discoveries of physics, however aesthetically pleasing they may be, depend on the belief that it is nature speaking to us in revealing aspects of its deep structure.

    The second aspect of the physical world that Polkinghorne holds up as a hint of God’s existence is the purpose displayed in the development of the cosmos as a whole. He concedes that evolutionary biology has seriously undermined the old-fashioned design argument, but points out that the development of the physical world itself seems favorable to the emergence of life at a very deep fundamental level. This is the so-called Anthropic Principle, which refers to the fact that if certain very fundamental physical variables were even slightly different, life, much less intelligent life, would not have developed:

    What we have come to understand is that if this process is to be fruitful on a cosmic scale, then necessity has to take a very specific, carefully prescribed form. Any old world will not do. Most universes that we can imagine would prove boring and sterile in their development, however long their history were to be subjected to the interplay of chance with their specific form of lawful necessity. It is a particular kind of universe which alone is capable of producing systems of the complexity sufficient to sustain conscious life. (p. 6)

    As with the phenomenon of the universe’s “rational transparency,” Polkinghorne recognizes that there are alternative explanations for the life-friendly structure of our universe. One popular way of avoiding recourse to God is to opt for some version of a many-world hypothesis that posits the existence of multiple – or even infinite – universes originating from a single point. On this hypothesis the existence of life-sustaining universes won’t seem special or noteworthy since every possibility will be realized. Polkinghorne rejects various versions of this account on a variety of grounds, regarding the most plausible versions to be insufficient for the job and the others increasingly speculative and ad hoc (see pp. 8-10).

    It’s important to be clear on what kind of status Polkinghorne is claiming for this new natural theology. He writes that “the theistic conclusion is not logically coercive, but it can claim serious consideration as an intellectually satisfying understanding of what would otherwise be unintelligible good fortune” (p. 10). Unlike the older versions of natural theology which sometimes claimed to offer deductive proofs of God’s existence, this more modest version is content to exhibit the “rumors of divine purpose” contained in the physical world. It also, unlike some of the older design arguments, appeals to global, rather than particular, features of the cosmos, on the “character of the physical fabric of the world, which is the necessary ground for the possibility of any occurence” (p. 10).

    Polkinghorne also observes an interesting divide here between physical scientists and biological scientists. “Physical scientists, conscious of the wonderful order and finely tuned fruitfulness of natural law, have shown significant sympathy with the attitude of the new natural theology. Biological scientists, on the other hand, have been much more reserved” (p. 11). He cites Richard Dawkins here, and it’s noteworthy that among the “new atheists,” Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominently make their case against religious belief by appealing to biology.

    In fact, Keith Ward, in his Is Religion Dangerous? points out that critics of faith misfire a bit when they treat the traditional design argument as the primary reason for religious belief, thinking that in pointing out its shortcomings they are striking at the very heart of reasonable religious belief:

    There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs of God.’ The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence). (p. 92)

    Replace “Immanuel Kant” with “Charles Darwin” and you get an account of one seemingly popular view about the status of faith in a post-Darwinian world. As Ward goes on to point out, there have always been a variety of views about the various arguments for God’s existence and what level of support they provide to belief in God. Plato and Kant himself both offered reasons for believing in a Supreme Good that had little to do with the kind of natural theology popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Both Polkinghorne and Ward would, I think, refrain from claiming deductive or coercive certainty for the kinds of considerations they bring to bear in support of the view that the structure of the cosmos as we know it points to the existence of God. I suspect both would agree with Diogenes Allen who argues in his Christian Belief in a Postmodern World that “the fact that nature’s existence is unexplained by our sciences and philosophy should lead a thinking, inquiring person actively to consider the possibility that there is an answer to the question and indeed that God may be the answer” (p. 84).

    The thing is that there is rarely going to be a single knock-down argument that is going to convince a person of important, life-altering truths, in religion or elsewhere for that matter. In ethics, or politics, or just in our own personal life decisions and relationships we often rely on converging lines of evidence and consideration rather than a single conclusive line of reasoning. Ward makes this point when discussing the contestability of various worldviews (such as materialism, idealism, theism). Every worldview has advantages and disadvantages over against its competitors in terms of things like clarity, explanatory power, being adequate to our experience, simplicity, consistency with other beliefs, etc. There’s no single algorithm that can demonstrable show one to be superior to all the others. What we should aim for, he says, is to elaborate our worldviews in “a critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretations” (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 97).

    This isn’t relativism. There’s a truth about the way the world is that our beliefs aim at. But we’re not given a failsafe process for determining what that truth is. All our attempts rely to some extent on personal judgment in weighing different pieces of evidence, as well as value judgments about what is good and beautiful. There does seem to be an irreducible epistemic pluralism in that reasonable people can come to different conclusions on these matters, even though a realist epistemology affirms that there is a single truth about the way things are.

  • Religious myths

    I got my hands on a copy of Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? courtesy of our local library and have been enjoying it very much.

    In the introduction alone Ward takes on several myths about the study of religion that tend to be propagated by its cultured despisers:

    1. “Religion” is a univocal term. Ward points out the obvious (but frequently overlooked or elided) fact that the term “religion” covers a broad array of phenomena and it’s by no means easy to identify a core of belief or practice common to everything we would identify as a religion. “Is Communism a religion? Or football? Or Scientology? How do we know what a religion is?” (p. 8). And this makes it extremely difficult to say that “religion” as such is good or bad:

    There are obviously many different sorts of things that we can call ‘religion’. Since religions have existed as far back as we can trace the history of the human race, and in almost every society we know about, there are going to be as many different religions as there are human cultures. They are going to exhibit all the variety and all the various stages of development of the cultures in which they exist. That is going to make it virtually impossible to say that religion, as such, at every stage of its development and in all its varieties, is dangerous. (pp. 9-10)

    2. The true nature of religion is given by its earliest examples. Early anthropological studies of religion that first took up the attempt to explain religion as a natural phenomenon made two questionable assumptions. The first was that religious beliefs were false and thus to be explained entirely in naturalistic terms. The second was that so-called primitive religion showed the “essence” of religion and that all more developed religions were ultimately reducible to this essence. Religion, the story goes, began when people attributed personalistic characteristics to the natural objects around them, giving rise to animism, the earliest form of religion. Gradually, however, these spirits were combined into a single spirit and monotheism was born. These beliefs were rooted in early humans’ attempts to make sense of and exert control over their environment. But now that we have science these beliefs have been revealed as superstitious and irrelevant.

    The problem with this view, says Ward, is that there is very little evidence to support it. We simply don’t have access to the religious beliefs of early human beings, nor do we know in what order they developed. “It seems more like pure speculation without any evidence at all — a story that might appeal to us, given certain general beliefs about the universe and a generally materialist philosophical outlook” (p. 13).

    3. Early people took their religious beliefs “literally.” We commonly assume that people in the past took their religious beliefs literally and only gradually do they start to think of them as symbols or metaphors. Sometimes atheists accuse more “sophisticated” religious believers of not really being religious since they recognize the role of myth, symbolism, and metaphor in religion. The implication is that real sincere religious belief means literalism.

    But Ward calls into question this assumption. For starters, we simply have very little evidence about the content of the religious beliefs of “primitive” people. “We simply have no way of knowing how they interpreted their religious ideas. The truth is that we know virtually nothing about the first origins of religious belief” (p. 13). Again, the assumption that the evolution of belief starts from literalism and gradually moves to symbolism and metaphor is more a philosophical dogma than the result of empirical investigation. In fact, Ward suggests, it may well be that literalism is the late comer on the scene:

    If humans have evolved, then it will be true that at some stage, many tens of thousands of years ago, human thought would have been less developed than it is now. But does that mean it would have been more literal? Perhaps literalness is a late development, and the idea that artefacts should literally be like what they represent — or even the idea of ‘literalness’ itself — is a concept that only developed when humans began to think scientifically or analytically. (p. 15)

    Ward cites anthropological investigations in India where worshipers are puzzled by questions about whether the gods are “real” or whether the images “really” represent them. And linguists have long recognized that virtually all human language is metaphorical to some degree. A purely literal language about anything, much less about the divine, may well be impossible for us. “Metaphorical thinking is deeply rooted in the human mind. It may be the case that very early human thinking was more metaphorical than literal in nature” (p. 15).

    4. It is inauthentic for religion to develop. This myth can take religious or anti-religious forms. The atheist may point to later, more sophisticated forms of religion as not reflecting the “real” nature of the faith. This is often an attempt to catch the “moderate” believer on the horns of a dilemma: either you’re a fundamentalist or you’re not a genuine believer. Ironically, the same argument can be made by fundamentalists of all stripes; the “faith once delivered” is taken to be a set of timeless truths that can never change, and any re-thinking of previous expressions of the faith is tantamount to apostasy.

    Ward’s contention is that one of the positive fruits of the scientific study of religion has been the realization that religions do develop and that later forms aren’t necessarily inauthentic expressions of the faith. Since religious ideas are ways of trying to give expression to a reality that is “beyond all images” they naturally become more or less effective over time. That doesn’t mean they have no basis in objective reality, but that they can never perfectly depict it and are therefore subject to critique and revision. “Once we escape the delusion that [religion’s] earliest stage provides its real essence, we will be able to see that it is a continually developing set of diverse traditions” (p. 20).

    5. Religious belief is primarily aimed at explanation. One common atheistic argument, related to a particular story about how religion developed, assumes that religious belief is primarily about explaining why things happen, a kind of proto-science. But once science with its superior explanatory power comes along, the “God hypothesis” is rendered unnecessary.

    This may be a powerful argument against, say, 18th-century deism, but it’s not particularly convincing as an argument against religious belief as such. It’s not at all obvious that religious people either today, or historically, believe in God primarily as some kind of explanatory hypothesis. For instance, it’s been a commonplace of biblical scholarship for some time that the ancient Israelites first became aware of Yahweh through the powerful experience of deliverance from Egypt and only later did his role as universal creator become apparent to them. They didn’t propose the existence of God as a hypothesis to explain creation; rather through their awareness of his power and loving-kindness it became obvious that he must also be the Lord of all creation.

    As Ward says, “if we look at present religious beliefs, they are not only, or even mainly, used to explain why things happen. They are used to console, inspire and motivate, but not to explain” (p. 17):

    It looks as if the roots of religious belief do not lie in attempts to explain why things happen. If we ask intelligent modern believers where the roots of their belief lie, many different sorts of answers would be given, but rarely that their beliefs explain why things happen. One answer, and I think it is a very important one, would refer to experiences of a transcendent power and value, of greater significance and moral power than anything human. The metaphors of religious speech — metaphors of ‘dazzling darkness’ or ‘personal presence’ — are inadequate attempts to express such experiences of transcendence. Why should it ever have been different? For all we know, early religion could have originated in experiences of a transcendent spiritual reality, especially in the vivid experiences, sometimes in dreams and visions, of shamans or holy men and women. (pp. 17-18)

    I’m sure Ward wouldn’t deny that religious belief can sometimes play the role of explanation, but more often than not this isn’t to explain particular phenomena, but to offer more “global” sorts of explanations. For instance, Leibniz’s question Why is there something rather than nothing? may not demand the existence of a god, but it can point to or suggest it. Likewise, the question Why the universe has the particular order it does, one that seems “fine-tuned” to give rise to intelligent personal life. The existence of a personal God can make sense of these global phenomena that appear to be beyond the reach of scientific explanation.

    Ward’s point in discussing these myths is that any study of religion that proposes to evaluate whether it is on the whole and all things considered a good or bad thing needs to look at it in all its complexity and as it is actually lived. Too often critics of “religion” are attacking what is essentially a straw man or an ideological construct.

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves.

    In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson and Tolkien about the importance of myth and how Christianity is the “true myth.”

    In October he writes to his good friend Arthur Greeves:

    What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary […]. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

    Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

    Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amound to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened… (pp. 288-9)

    Lewis picks up on this distinction between the thing itself and the doctrines about it later in Mere Christianity where, in his chapter on Redemption, he emphasizes that the theories about the Atonement are not the objects of belief, but the event itself:

    Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. […] A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (pp. 54-56)

    What I find intriguing here is Lewis’s insistence that the “true myth” itself can “work on us” without our having an explicit theory about how it works. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. Many (perhaps most?) Christians throughout history have no doubt enjoyed Christ’s benefits without having much in the way of an explicit theory of Atonement. Maybe it’s a legacy of intellectualistic Protestantism to put so much emphasis on holding the correct doctrine. More sacramental forms of Christianity have always believed that the benefits of Christ’s work come to us in tangible (edible!) forms, not just through understanding.

    Of course, there’s a danger in reducing Christianity to a kind of “magic;” there must, we think, be some cognitive element. An interesting question is raised here about people who are severely mentally handicapped and may have little or no grasp of doctrine. Surely we don’t think that precludes them from being beneficiaries of Christ’s work? But, leaving aside these hard cases, it does seem that an understanding of the “how” might not be completely “separable” from the “what.” There might be understandings of the Atonement, for instance, that are so wrong-headed that they preclude a decent grasp on what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do for us. And it’s not clear to me at least that believing that “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself” doesn’t entail some further beliefs about how this works. “Narrative” and “story” have become important notions in some recent theology, but is first-order narrative sufficient without some second-order doctrinal reflection?

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters:

    To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952:

    It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

    To Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959:

    To me the curious thing is that neither in own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question [of the inspiration of the Bible] in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone — both first class as literature — is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain…

    …That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

  • Is religion dangerous?

    Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for.

    I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or bad is a pretty muddled one. In addition to the probably insoluble matter of deciding what exactly counts as a religion, there’s no religion-less society to act as a control group in determing whether the influence of religion has been on the whole good or bad. And beyond that it’s very difficult to see how you would weigh the moral improvements against the moral defects that are arguably attibutable to a particular religion. Was the Inquisition worth the outlawing of infanticide? and so on. Plus there’s the issue of casuality: how do we know what’s attributable to religion? For instance, several scholars, including secular ones, have made the case that modern science arose in the West in part precisely because of the Christian worldview. The idea of a God who creates a universe that displays a rational order served as an impetus to discovering that order. But such a hypothesis hardly admits of definitive proof one way or the other.

  • C. S. Lewis on Barthians

    I was reading selections last night from a volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters and came across an interesting (and rather amusing) one to his brother on February 18, 1940. Apparently Lewis had recently encountered a group of zealous students of this newfangled theologian Karl Barth:

    Did you fondly believe – I did – that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my “sterness” was their “slush.” They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. “Under judgment” is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face…

    I don’t know if Lewis ever changed his opinion about Barth in light of the latter’s developed thought, but it’s interesting to see Lewis, the old-fashioned Christian humanist and upholder of reason in matters of faith and morals, clashing with the upstart “neo-orthodox” theology. Certainly “Barthians” of various stripes seem to dominate much of the field of academic theology nowadays, which makes you wonder where Lewis would fit in if he were still around. His critical approach to the Bible would not find favor with a lot of conservative evangelicals, but the high value he placed on human reason wouldn’t sit well with various neo-Barthian, “radically orthodox,” and post-liberal theologies.

  • Mitchell’s 8 Ways

    I took the red-eye home last night from the meeting I was attending in SF and so took most of today off from work to catch up on sleep and stuff around the house.

    I also started reading a fascinating book called 8 Ways to Run the Country by Brian Patrick Mitchell. Mitchell, the Washington Bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily is seeking to complexify the Left-Right dichotomy in a way that makes sense of various ideological groups in American politics.

    Like some other political taxonomies such as the Nolan Chart, Mitchell posits a two-axis grid to plot various ideological groupings. But unlike the Nolan Chart with its rather simplistic axes of “personal freedom” and “economic freedom” (criteria which bias it towards libertarianism in a fairly obvious way), Mitchell plots along the axes of arche and kratos. Arche is social authority and kratos is political power. Thus various political positions can be identified according to the attitude they have to these two concepts.

    Thus you get the classic left-right spectrum of attitudues toward authority – the various -archies such as hierachy, the patriarchy, etc. and a top-bottom axis of attitudes toward political power, with akratists (those opposed to all political power) at the top. So, in Mitchell’s terminology, an anarchist, properly speaking, is someone who wants to abolish all social hierarchy, but wouldn’t necessarily oppose political power. Meanwhile, an akratist is primarily concerned with the use of force or coercion and may for that reason oppose government while being ok with social authority.

    Intriguingly, Mitchell says that this two-axis categorization is possible only in the west because it’s the west which separated social authority from political power in the first place. Christendom vested authority in the church and power in the state (obviously the reality is a bit more complex than that). This distinction makes possible political positions with varying attitudes toward these two social phenomeneon.

    With the grid in place Mitchell sees four major traditions of American political thought vying for dominance throughout our history. In the lower left are Progressive Democrats who oppose social hierarchy and want to use the power of the state as a means to bring about greater equality. In the upper right are Libertarian Individualists who oppose social authority (bourgeois morality, etc.) and government power. In the top right are Republican Constitutionalists who want to check state power in order to allow the institutions which embody social authority, such as church, family, and community, to flourish, and in the bottom right you have Plutocratic Nationalists who are comfortable using centralized state power to shore up the national community and seek a harmony among business, government, and social institutions.

    Adding to this already interesting mix, Mitchell refines these four quadrants, so you end up with a circle of eight positions plotted according to their views on arche and kratos with anarchists on the far left and akratists at the top:

    Communitarian (bottom-center): a pro-government pragmatist and technocrat “whose focus is always on the good of the community”

    Paleolibertarian (top-center): Anti-government but more comfortable with social authority than left-leaning cultural libertarians.

    Theoconservative (right-center): Primary concern is for the social instutitions that shore up family and faith; not overly fond of government, but willing to use state power to shore up these institutions.

    Radical (left-center): Chief concern is to overturn oppression and social hierarchy; like the Theocon on the opposite side of the circle, is suspicious about government, but willing to pragmatically use state power to serve the interests of the oppressed.

    Individualist (top-left): Takes a negative attitude toward government power and social authority; primary concern is personal, individual freedom.

    Neoconservative (bottom-right): Characterized by “belief in a strong central government to defend the established order, with all necessary cooperation between the social and political powers–church and state, business and government.”

    Paleoconservative (top-right): Suspicious of government precisely because he believes that the modern state is corroding traditional forms of life and culture. Wants a decentralized polity that allows local communities to set their own standards.

    Progressive     (bottom-left): Wants to use government power to aid social progress; anti-traditionalist and “confident that the human condition can be infinitely improved if we just keep trying.” More focused on democracy than individual rights and liberties.

    This is a really fruitful way to make sense of political ideologies that goes beyond Left and Right and even some of the more complex typologies. For one thing, it helps me makes sense of my own political views a little bit. I definitely tend toward akratism in Mitchell’s terms in that I’m highly ambivalent about the use of force and coercion and consequently can sympathize at least somewhat with Radicals, Libertarians, Paleolibertarians, Paleocons and Theocons. I’m far less enamored of the centralizers in the bottom half of Mitchell’s compass: the big-government progressives, the communitarians (at least in their nationalizing variety), and the neocons.

    Subsequent chapters, which I’ve just started to get into, define each position in more detail, largely with quotes from representative figures. The book is brief and clearly written and yet adds a great deal of nuance to the ways most of us think about Americal politics.