Everybody, except maybe David Brooks and his gang, knows it’s not working. By 'it' I mean the cultural/political/economic system we call 'society'. On one level you can say, "Well, has it ever worked?" And the answer is sometimes better, sometimes worse. But because the stakes are higher now it's more important than ever that it work better. At this point in the human story there are unprecedented numbers of people, and the systems to keep them fed, housed, and employed are very fragile. The environment and climate are suffering unprecedented stress. And humans possess now unprecedented levels of power, and the damage that could be done with that power if abused is also unprecedented. But the potential to use it constructively is unprecedented as well.
So all these factors make it more important than ever that 'it' work better. But nobody has a clue about how to do that. That's because we are, to use McLuhan's phrase, looking at the future in the rear view mirror, or to use George Lakoff's, we're thinking in the 21st century with 18th century brains. The narratives and metaphors we use to organize the social world are utterly inadequate to the challenges that confront us. They are in a deeply fundamental way misaligned with the Real.
The combination of population growth, increased levels of economic inequality, innovations in biotechnology and information technology will force a global reorganization. That's just common sense. What we accept as normal now will not be normal one hundred years from now. Something has to give. Current trends in technological development and in economic organization suggest that this future will be shaped by forces that will dehumanize most of the world's population unless an alternative humanizing counter narrative can be broadly accepted. The problem is not one of limited resources or productive capacity but of a failure of collective imagination and political will.
A new humanizing narrative better aligned with the realities of 21st Century must emerge. But what will be its source and inspiration? Certainly no plausible solution will be developed through anarcho-capitalism and the market–that's the consensus reality among the Neoliberal global elite right now, and it's the governing narrative from which we must be delivered. But then neither will a solution be developed from within the secular Left. Its agnostic understanding of the human being and its ultimate purposes are inadequate for reasons I explained in Part I. And certainly no solution will be developed through the fundamentally nostalgic and reality-averse appeal to traditional values. Something new has to be introduced into the system, and that ‘new’ has to have a galvanizing, unifying, inspirational impact on the collective human spirit.
This 'new' will work if it does an adequate job of realigning our imagination of the world with the Real. This realignment in part involves necessary adjustments to the Consensus Reality that are required by what science has uncovered about how the mechanics of the physical and life worlds work. But it more importantly it requires a moral realignment. It will work if it advances the ball in a moral sense, and this will require a more evolved imagination about how we organize and distribute our material resources. For it to work, it must offer deeper, nobler, more interesting possibilities for a human future than are currently broadly accepted or understood today. I want to suggest, indeed the whole mission of this blog has been to think about, how this future might be shaped by the 2000 year old Christian Humanist tradition for which the Catholic Church, for all its flaws and moral failures, has been and continues to be its most stalwart custodian. I'm not saying that it has 'the' solution, but I do think it, or perhaps more precisely, those of us whose understanding of the human have been shaped by it, have a critical role in shaping one.
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We are at a point in human history in which all the traditional narratives have broken down because none seems adequate to the complexity we humans are struggling to comprehend. Those who cling to the old narratives tend to be escapist and reductionist fundamentalists and dogmatists, their minds addled by chronic cognitive dissonance. Look at the candidates now emerging for the nomination of the Republican Party. Is there one among them that you can take seriously? They are tripping over themselves in their efforts to appear the greater buffoon. And the Democrats, while I'd argue that they are better aligned with the complex reality that we are trying to deal with, are mostly concerned about their own narrow self interests or with a culture-war liberation agenda, which, from my POV, amounts to so much rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. And the shrewdest and sanest among progressive Democrats and other progressives, the ones who realize that the fundamental problem is to change the narrative, to change the rules of the game as it is currently organized, have no real influence or power. They lack power because they don't have a robust, broadly appealing narrative that supports a progressive agenda.
And the churches, whether the Catholic Church or any other, are either clueless or lack any credibility when it comes to shaping a moral imagination of the future. Pope Francis has been a welcome breath of fresh air, and my optimistic side is hopeful that by the time his papacy ends he will have laid a foundation upon which others can build. But when it comes to the managerial class in the Church, the default has been disappointment and low expectations, and despite Francis there's little reason to think that we can expect much from the managerial class within the Catholic Church. The Christian humanist imagination of the future that will correct our current profound misalignment with the Real will have to arise from the bottom up.
So let me lay out here a little diagram that depicts my model for how "progress" happens, and then we can talk about how Christian Humanism has a role to play in relationship to it. This model owes something to William James and Charles Peirce, something to Plato, and something to thinkers like Jean Francois Lyotard and George Lakoff. It's simpler and easier to understand than any of the above, but I think it does a decent job of modeling what we know from common sense and a little bit of thinking outside the normal rutted ways of our 18th and 19th century brains.
The diagram lays out how I understand social evolution to happen. There is a polar tension between the Transcendent More and the Consensus Reality, and there is a tension between the Negative and the Positive. If there were only the positive, the control obsessed Managers would be happy, but it would be a static, changeless, stunted, suffocating kind of social existence presided over by the Grand Inquisitor or someone like him. If there was only the Negative, then we'd be living in nihilistic nightmare world in which everything sacred and worthy of reverence would be debunked, mocked, or at best regarded with supercilious, ironic detachment.
The important thing is that there be a relationship between the two. You need the Critics to point out the inadequacies of the Consensus Reality because it is always inadequate since it is always dwarfed by the Transcendent More. The problem with the Critics lies in that they often don't believe there is a Transcendent More mainly because they have no direct experience of it, at least that they recognize. And so whatever they know about it is conveyed indirectly through the Consensus Reality's claims about it, which, during a decadent cultural period like ours, is a rather stale, misaligned, and static rendering of something that lies underneath it that is alive and dynamic. The problem with the Managers is that they prefer static and stale because it's easier to manage and control. They often have more in common with the Critics in their skepticism and resistance to the 'New' that the Prodigies and Disciples would introduce to them.
But because the Transcendent Real is not static or controllable, it is something that always exceeds our grasp of it, and yet it always beckons to us to approach it and to be changed by it. And the most influential of those who hearken to its beckoning are the Prodigies of the Transcendent Real. They are those whom we have recognized through history as mystics, artists, and prophets, and in some cases philosophers in the mode of Socrates, Kierkegaaard, and Nietzsche. They are the extraordinary people–the avatars, the bodhisattvas, the saints–who point us to the Real that transcends our ordinary experience, shaped as it is by the limiting filters of the Consensus Reality.
The Consensus Reality is a necessary collective social construction. It's the collective story we tell ourselves so that the world might make some sense within our limited ability to make sense of the fundamentally unfathomable. But it isn't pure fiction; it works to the degree that it is has some relationship to the Real or the Transcendent More. Progress is the change made over time effected by the continued adjustments that the Consensus Reality makes as it becomes clear that it is no longer adequately aligned with the Real. These adjustments are both moral and material. The Consensus Reality, for instance, has progressed to reject human sacrifice and slavery, to point out some obvious examples. It has also recognized that the earth is not the center of the material universe and that, despite Bishop Ussher's earnest calculations, it is somewhat older than six thousand years.
I think that the first thing a future-oriented, progressive Christian humanism would assert that goes beyond the scope of what secular progressives can assert is that we're not living in a closed system, that whatever most of us take for the Real is simply a provisional consensus reality, but that there is a Real, and that the goal of human history is to gradually align our Consensus Reality with it. This is a moral and intellectual task that has social and political effects.
Our current predicament lies in that our moral evolution has to catch up with what we've learned from science and with how that new knowledge has willy-nilly shaped 'it'–the modern cultural/political/economic social system. Moral evolution has been possible in the past because there have been throughout human history prophets, prodigies of transcendence, who have awakened in the rest of us the ways in which the moral Consensus Reality is misaligned with the Real. Gandhi, MLK, Nelson Mandela (all of them deeply influenced by the Christian Humanist tradition) are recent prophetic figures in this sense. Most recently Pope Francis has played this prophetic role regarding climate change and the Neoliberal economic system that is wildly productive while at the same time egregiously exploitative. The role of the prophet is not to develop a blueprint for reform, but to awaken our consciences. The blueprint can be developed by conscience-awakened Disciples and Managers.
The prodigies of the Transcendent are not merely inventive or clever; they discover or uncover aspects of the Real that are outside the perceptual or cognitive range of most ordinary humans whose experience of the Real is largely determined by the Consesnsus Reality. But these Prodigies need to have a connection with people in the Consensus Reality who are capable of recognizing the value of the 'expanded awareness of the Real' they present, to appreciate it, and to work with it in ways that gradually change the Consensus Reality and its social imaginary. Everything depends on the openness and ability of this core of people to recognize and work with the expanded awareness of the Real, and it's this core of people–these people whom I'm calling the "Progressives" within the church–who have sustained it through the centuries because they've kept it aligned with the Real when it has got out of alignment with it.
While misalignment with the Real is our chronic condition–it's what Christians call original sin–there are moments in history when this misalignment is more severe than in others, and at this moment, our Consensus Reality is deeply, deeply out of alignment, and that is why "it" doesn't work. Adjustments that work move us forward because they more adequately align the Consensus Reality with the Real, and so the only way we move forward is to find some more deeply adequate way to align the Consensus Reality with the Real. And so the question becomes, how might that happen?
This diagram above lays out a model that provides a way to understand how moral progress happens. It grounds my hope that progress will continue to happen, and that it is our long-term destiny no matter how many backward steps we take, how many disasters we suffer because of our inability or refusal to get properly aligned with the Real. Because from my Christian Humanist POV, at the heart of the Real is not randomness and cruelty, not the cold impersonal mechanics that from a purely materialist POV govern the cosmos. Rather we assert that we find there the Logos. Randomness and cruelty are indeed lowercase 'real', and that 'real' is an essential part of the story, but the Christian Humanist asserts that it is a 'real' that does not have the last word. It's a 'real' that can become progressively transformed by the Logos/Real, but only to the degree that we humans learn over the millennia to align ourselves with it, and that requires us to keep moving as it moves.
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