After the Future

October 31, 2012

Why Obama & Not Stein

The problem isn't Obama; it's the national Democrats, who as a group have become the Whigs of our time. They've become detached from their working and middle class base, they…

The problem isn't Obama; it's the national Democrats, who as a group have become the Whigs of our time. They've become detached from their working and middle class base, they don't know who they are, and they have no passionately held principles or moral compass. They're wimps in a knife fight for the soul of the country.

So sure, we have to vote for them, because to vote for the other guys is to regress the country according to their Social Darwinist agenda, and a Dem in office will at least slow that down. But the bottom line is that the Republicans know who they are, and in a war for the soul of the country the progressive left has no organization that can match GOP passion and conviction.

In the 1850s serious people with passionate convictions threw the feckless Whigs under the bus and formed a new party. Sooner or later serious people in our own time will have to do the same to the neoliberal-dominated national Democrats. The Greens are serious people, but they do not now have a serious party. They could, however, be part of the formation of one someday. The part that's missing now comprises the element essential to broaden its base–people whose progressive convictions are rooted in their religious convictions.

I don't expect that kind of alliance to happen any time soon, but IMO, it's what has to happen if there's any chance of pushing back against the GOP flood. Until then we throw more sand bags on the levee, for that's all voting for Dems accomplishes, but maybe it will buy us some time.

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13 responses

Jonathan

October 31, 2012

The basic problem would seem to be that in general the kind of people who have religious convictions don’t have the kind of religious convictions that lead to progressive politics. I believe that, as Charles Taylor has noted, the social and political groups who best expound a “gospel ethic” are the very ones least favorably disposed towards organized Christianity. The people most likely to produce among themselves the kind of revival you call for, are the ones least likely to call it religious, and thus to justify themselves with an ethics based in some worldview that won’t just crumble right back into materialism. For the person with religious convictions and a progressive politics, who furthermore wants to make a connection between the two (is this necessary?), there must be a way of accounting for the fact that a lot of people with very progressive, even visionary politics don’t find it necessary to have religious convictions as they’re conventionally understood.
But maybe it’s that conventional understanding of what passes for a religious conviction that is part of the confusion. It is still somehow possible to conceive of religious conviction as mere moralism. When in fact it ought to refer to something altogether other and grander.
I’m going to parrot Berdyaev here: When the organized, intellectual, artistic face of Christianity can embrace the radical freedom that is the supreme achievement of modern western society, and which it has in part and unintentionally been responsible for bringing into existence in the first place, but which it has since disavowed in a horrible fit of nostalgic moralizing — Then and only then will it be able to appeal to that society again, and convince it that Christianity has something to offer. Because people know their lives are haunted by boredom and vulgarity. Deep down, I think they know. But they will not listen, because they are actually too smart to listen, to any religion that tells them the meaning of their lives is to be found in the chastity belt of a lapsed patriarchy, or a simplistic account of life that falls back on good versus evil.

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Jack Whelan

October 31, 2012

Jonathan–I don’t disagree, and I have little expectation that Christian institutions or the managerial class that runs them will be out front on this.
What’s in the back of my mind is the religious motivations behind the civil rights movement here and in the states and also in south africa. I think also of the liberation theology movement in South America. And while it is moribund now, evangelical Christianity in the 19th century was a real driver for progressive change, and you see the vestiges of that in Sojourners, and Catholics have Dorothy Day, the Berrigans, and others, who clearly don’t represent institutional or majority opinion of people in the pews.
But I think the key is that there is something that lies dormant in the souls of ordinary Christians, which if awakened by inspired leadership could make a huge difference. Right now there is no inspired, credible leadership, so your description of the lie of the land is accurate. But I do believe there is a sleeping giant, and the question is what will it take to awaken it. And then the group that composes it will join with the progressive types you describe as not being particularly religiously motivated–the Greens and disaffected progressive secular Democrats.
My point is that the secular progressives will never succeed unless the sleeping giant is awakened. Sure, it may not happen, but then not much will ever happen. But in order for it to happen, both parties will have to agree to disagree on issues like abortion and gay rights. I’ve frequently written here that the cultural issues are deftly used by elites to keep the children squabbling, as the Romans so deftly kept the German tribal groups squabbling among themselves. But once the Germans figured out what they could do once they worked together, it was curtains for the Empire.

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JP

October 31, 2012

“But in order for it to happen, both parties will have to agree to disagree on issues like abortion and gay rights.”
How in the world are people going to agree to disagree on fundamental moral questions?

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Jack Whelan

October 31, 2012

You do it because common sense tells you it’s in your interest to do it, and that the destructive consequences of not finding common ground are too great. We do it all the time on less significant issues in our workplace. Do we not work together in our jobs because we disagree about certain cultural issues. Well we have a job to do in the economic and political spheres, and we have to focus on where we agree and bracket where we disagree. But you need to have effective leadership to help people to do it. That’s the x-factor that’s missing.

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Jonathan

October 31, 2012

That’s the pragmatic point of view, and a very important point it is. But I’d like to mention that we also agree to disagree about “fundamental moral questions” when we realize that those questions are just that: questions, not black-and-white matters of good and evil. There is a kind of morality that transcends a legalistic ethics of “this is right, that is wrong.” The higher morality, the gospel ethic, teaches what we now call “tolerance” because it prizes creativity and freedom above righteousness, and an ultimate transcendence of the categories of good and evil. Compelled goodness is not really good. Plato saw this surprisingly elusive truth and of course the New Testament is full of it. There is more to life than the law. It’s true, a society can grow too permissive, morally lax, and therefore weak. But I’d take that kind of decadence over the moralists’ ideal, enforced order any day. It’s about a shift from the prohibitive and deconstructive to the creative and positive. Agreeing to disagree is about not always being so ready to cast the first stone.

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Jack Whelan

October 31, 2012

I agree. What people claim is Christian morality really isn’t. It’s Jewish legalism or Stoic virtue, both of which are fine. But the whole point of the Christian idea of morality as asserted in the gospels is that it’s impossible to be good, that only God is good, and that therefore our souls are at greater risk for thinking that we are good, especially when we work obsessively to be righteously observant according to what law or tradition prescribes. That’s a fool’s game, and It leads to what I’ve called ‘whited sepulcher syndrome’–squeaky clean and perfect outside, and dead inside–and there’s hardly anything worse described in the gospels.
So you cannot be an extrinsic Christian; it’s an oxymoron, and so therefore your intrinsic, conscience-driven motivations are not available to anyone else to be judged by them. People who call themselves Christian make those judgments anyway, but it has nothing to do with being Christian. It’s just what humans do, and Christians are human.
And we humans need rules to live by in our life together, and so we say No to things like slavery and economic injustice–or should. It’s not a judgment about individual motivation so much as it is about flaws in the social structure, and there’s nothing particularly Christian about making those judgments, just as there’s nothing particularly Christian about homophobic attitudes or thinking that there’s something wrong about abortion.
Nevertheless, when it comes to behaviors that have been proscribed by most traditional cultures, I think both sides have to withhold the judgments. Secular liberals are too quick to jettison anything traditional, and cultural conservatives are too resistant to letting go of attitudes that no longer make sense.
So we have to be patient with one another and behave with one another the way we behave at work, and focus instead on the issues where we have a shared sense of mission. I’m not saying that the conversation about cultural issues isn’t important, but that we shouldn’t let it get in the way of doing other essential work.
And I am saying that there is in what I call inchoate Christianity, the potential for consciences to be aroused so that they will step forward to right wrongs that you don’t have to be people of faith to find abhorrent, but that the slumbering conscience of American Christians is a sleeping giant that if awakened could have an enormous impact for the good. And I fear if it is not awakened, we are screwed.

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JP

November 1, 2012

“We do it all the time on less significant issues in our workplace. Do we not work together in our jobs because we disagree about certain cultural issues.”
Only because we have to work together. There’s still the undercurrent of anger, specifically moral anger, you just aren’t allowed to express it. But that doesn’t make it go away. It just means that you’re not in a position to act on it.
“Moral Anger: Some people think they have a right to be angry when others have broken a rule. That makes the offenders bad, evil, wicked, sinful. They have to be scolded, maybe punished. People with this anger style feel outraged about what bad people are doing. They say they have a right to defend their “beliefs.” They claim moral superiority. They gain the sense that anger is for a good cause. They don’t feel guilty when they get angry because of this. They often feel superior to others even in their anger. These people suffer from black-and-white thinking, which means they see the world too simply. They fail to understand people who are different from themselves. They often have rigid ways of thinking and doing things. Another problem with this anger style is crusading – attacking every problem or difference of opinion with moral anger when compromise or understanding might be better.”
http://www.asktheinternettherapist.com/articles/anger-management/

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JP

November 1, 2012

“But I’d like to mention that we also agree to disagree about “fundamental moral questions” when we realize that those questions are just that: questions, not black-and-white matters of good and evil.”
If they are valid moral questions then they have moral answers.
So, the question becomes whether they are valid questions, I suppose.
My postulate tends to be as follows:
For every action that touches upon a moral decision, there is an appropriate moral answer.
Some actions and some things have nothing to do with morality. Some things do. And that’s life.

Reply
Jack Whelan

November 1, 2012

@jp–There are a lot of Christian who thought that Bonhoeffer was wrong to become in a plot to assassinate Hitler. They were using the gospel as a rulebook, and I don’t think you can. We can discuss what we would do in a hypothetical situation, but in the final analysis it’s something that is a matter of conscience and it’s between the individual and God. Same thing with any moral question including homosexual relationships and abortion, although I think abortion has a different status because at some point I do think that vulnerable, even if incipient human life has rights that need to be protected. But it’s not an issue that we’re really capable of discussing sanely at this point in our cultural development.
But while I would argue that we cannot judge anyone’s decision to have an abortion, I’d say the same about judging the individual slaveowner’s decision not to free his slaves. On one level it’a about the individual and his or her conscience, on another level it’s about what kind of society we want to have. There are two different value matrixes that are in conflict here, and both have legitimacy.

Reply
JP

November 1, 2012

What do you mean by “judging”? Are you talking punishment or simply informing said person that they have engaged in an evil and depraved actions?
With respect to the Bonhoeffer issue, the question is whether his actions were good or evil. I’m not trying to answer the question, I’m simply pointing out that there *is* an answer and that we need the framework to answer it. If the gospel isn’t the answer, then we need another framework.
The problem is that nobody even wants to try to agree on an overarching moral framework so that we can properly even think about things. All thinking involves judging (I pulled this recently from Meditations on the Tarot).
Evil actions spread evil. Good actions spread good.
Sitting here eating an apple (which I just did) is about as completely morally neutral as you can get.
There’s only one value matrix. You are making an artificial distinction between the individual and society, when the two are inexorably intertwined and, in the final analysis, they must be one and the same.

Reply
Jack Whelan

November 1, 2012

By judging I mean evaluating or deciding whether a particular action was good or bad. My point is that we can never make that decision when it comes to the actions of others. You can have an opinion, but so who cares? It only matters what you do when you are in that concrete situation.
I don’t think we can “know” what is good or evil, we can only make practical judgments about them in concrete situations. The emphasis is on ‘practical’, and all of our practical judgments are provisional and specific to a time and a place. There is no certainty, and there are no formulas, and frameworks are only learning aids.
This is not the same as moral relativism, because the choice I make in that moment in that place has trans-temporal and trans-spatial consequences–there is a right and a wrong choice with real good and evil consequences. And while some choices are more consequential than others, each moment presents us with choices in which we can do either the right or wrong thing. But the choice made here and now might be right while the same choice then and there might be wrong.
I don’t believe your eating an apple is morally neutral, because while some things we do are more or less consequential, nothing we do is morally neutral. And I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about when you say I’m making an artificial distinction between society and individual. Individual and society one and the same?!

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Jonathan

November 1, 2012

I love this, we’re producing a whole slew of thought-experiments for some Ethics 101 class. JP: Of course eating an apple is not morally neutral. Who grew the apple, harvested it and brought it to market? Where and how? Did you pay a fair price for it? Did you enjoy it as you should have? (If you didn’t, Aquinas would say you committed an act of gluttony.) The answers to such questions will give your act a moral color, however subtle and statistically unimportant (like my vote cast in Illinois).

Reply
JP

November 1, 2012

I just lifted my arm in the air. Look! Moral neutrality!
When I’m weighed in the scales, so to speak, the apple I just ate won’t matter.

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Why Obama & Not Stein

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