The Peace of a Good God
Or, the Hope that transcends Constant Battles
‘This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
David Brooks writes here:
‘We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases.
‘The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations — for individual status, wealth and power. But they are also motivated by another set of drives — for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment — that are equally and sometimes more powerful.’
‘People are wired to cooperate….
‘People have a moral sense. They have a set of universal intuitions that help establish harmony between peoples. People have moral emotions. They feel rage at injustice, disgust toward greed, reverence for excellence, awe before the sacred and elevation in the face of goodness….
‘People yearn for righteousness. They want to feel meaning and purpose in their lives, that their lives are oriented toward the good….
‘I wish H. R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. He’d know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.’
In this piece, I wish to challenge this zero-sum worldview that characterises a ‘realist’ view of politics, which sees the world in terms of a competition for scarce resources, a terrain which divides between winners and losers, the dominant and the subordinate. I don’t see how such a politics can be reconciled with a Christian or a religious ethic. So I wish to ask some hard questions of those who profess a faith in God and yet can be found espousing a ‘realist’ view of geopolitics, war and militarism. I can explain such a politics in terms of the "constant battles" thesis of human history and anthropology. Evolutionary biology would have no problem explaining war and conflict in those terms. But those who believe in a good God creating a good world have an awful lot of explaining to do with respect to the evidence for such a worldview. Religious people who profess a belief in God, and yet support such a ‘realist’ politics I take to be schizophrenic. There's no God to be seen in such a view of the world. If there is a God, He would surely be weeping at the way in which human beings are so keen to spend money and use their technical skills and intelligence to prepare for war. I take any God that could conceivably exist to be the transcendent source of good, and also the end to which we move. That God is our transcendent hope, standing outside of the cycles of reprisal and counter-reprisal. And that God is firmly on the side of those utopians and dreamers who reject ‘realism’ and the endless conflict of the constant battles thesis in order to pursue peace. They are the peacemakers and they are indeed the people that Jesus Christ blessed in the Beatitudes.
As I write this, I have been reading on Thomas Hobbes, a very realistic philosopher who believed that human life in the state of nature was ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ He expresses a conception of man that is pessimistic, mean, competitive, narrow and atomistic. It isn’t the rich conception of human nature that I know from natural law theory. But he’s a ‘realist’, and I, evidently, am not. I uphold an ethics of the person set within a social and communitarian understanding of human life. My view can be traced to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas’ zoon politikon, the idea that the human being is a social-political animal, an animal that needs to live in a society of others in order to realise its potentialities. Hobbes proceeds from the asocial individual of the state of nature, a being that lives in the constant fear of being harmed by others, and who is consequently perpetually moved by the will to harm others as a form of self-defence. For Hobbes, the state of nature is a state of constant war which makes life unbearable. Preferring peace to war, human beings therefore come together and choose to live in civil society than in the state of nature. There are two ways of achieving this peaceable kingdom – conquest, in which the strongest imposes the terms of peace upon the conquered; and compact, in which all consenting parties agree to give up the individual use of force and to institute a common power.
As a philosopher who argues for something called ‘rational freedom’, I would clearly give my support to the latter. This affirms the rationalist conception of politics, in which politics is about the peaceful reconciliation of differences and interests. As against this, the former solution affirms the ‘realist’ conception of politics, which conceives society from the point of view of the passions and drives of individuals, the aggression and the competition which only cease with the victory of the strongest and the vanquishing of the weakest. So, arguing for ‘rational freedom’, I opt for the compact, the agreement on the part of consenting parties. However, the troubling point identifies the contradiction at the heart of this solution. If human beings really are as Hobbes says they are, then the constant battles view of life I identified earlier is not just a characteristic of human beings in the state of nature, but a permanent feature of human life. In which case, any compact will be forever subject to disintegration as those party to it seek to gain an advantage over others. There will always be those putting self-interest first, seeing the cooperation of others in doing the right thing as an opportunity for them to seek to free-ride.
Since that is so, the rationalist view is always susceptible to being overthrown by the realist view, cooperation and agreement dissolving with the reassertion of the zero-sum competition for scarce resources. We are forever with Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all.’
Cracking the logic of collective action is a task that has been given to us by the problem of climate change. It is a problem that has evaded the solution of our greatest political philosophers since Plato. I could quote Cicero, Pufendorf, Grotius, Kant. I could present Bertrand Russell’s arguments for world government. That would just be restating what we already know, an ideal that we have never succeeded in giving practical institutional force to.
The problem of collective action is the problem of overcoming war between individuals, people and states. Peace can be attained only through the constitution of a power endowed with superior force that is imposed upon all parties, through agreement, giving life and force to a common power.
Here’s the problem – a mere association of individuals, groups, or nations concerned with furthering their own self-interest can never, despite the common end of peace (or climate action and justice), establish a lasting peace among the associating parties. Without a common power, the common end remains abstract, lacks the means of its realisation, and is prone to dissolve through internecine rivalries. A common power of the kind required cannot be constituted by means of a simple pact of association or mutual help on the part of self-interested agents, such as we see in a military alliance in the world of geopolitical rivalry. That can never constitute a genuine peace, only a temporary balance of power. In his argument for ‘perpetual peace’, Immanuel Kant referred to a pact of association. The odds for its success are not good. We are talking here about a common power constituted by a covenant of union, through which all consenting parties voluntarily subject themselves to the common power, whatever that is – an individual ruler, absolute monarch, a democratic assembly, Kant’s republican community of co-legislators. We can see with the corporate capture of the national state how difficult it is to realise the public community within national boundaries. Imagine how difficult the effort is to create this common power on the international stage. Hobbes did not concern himself with ambitions for international peace. For him, the international system remained within the state of nature, and therefore would be characterised by the war of all against all between nations. The world was destined to be a sphere of universal rivalry and war, an arena of constant battles, a state of permanent war.
Hobbes never troubled himself with the question of how the covenant of union could be transferred from the domestic to the international arena. He probably felt that a balance of power was possible when the number of actors were few (between nation states) rather than many (within nation states) and when these actors have a better chance of defending themselves, as nations do from each other.
In an era of climate change and global warming, do these arguments possess any validity today? I say not. The whole notion of balance of power based on international rivalry makes absolutely no sense when all states are facing a collective force that is aimed against them all, threatening to bring them all down. We are charged with the task of constituting a common power on the international level that is capable of meeting that collective force. If we continue to play the old game of balance of power and national rivalry, then we are doomed.
The words that Norberto Bobbio writes with respect to international peace apply also to the need to establish a global framework for climate justice:
‘We confront today with regard to international peace the same dramatic problem that Hobbes confronted three centuries ago with regard to internal peace. The ideal solution is also the same. The League of Nations was a first attempt, which miserably failed. The United Nations Organization has attempted to make a step forward toward the constitution of a common power through the institution of international armed forces. But the step forward has not gone beyond the stage of good intentions. What we have witnessed in these recent years is a return to the system of balance. But this development is actually a step backward. We should never forget that the system of balance has always been a truce between two wars. I see no reason why things should be different today. It may well be that the balance based on terror is more stable than the balance based on fear, to which Hobbes's contemporaries and Hobbes himself entrusted their hopes for peace. The covenant of union is an ideal and unrealistic model. Nonetheless, it has not lost its heuristic strength. That is, it can still make us understand the reasons why domestic and international systems differ even today. And it makes us understand what direction our efforts should take if we believe that peace is today, more than ever, a common good.’
Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition 1993 ch 7
I agree with that rationalist conception of the covenant. But I recognize that it is vulnerable to the realist conception. Can we succeed in supplying the common power through our own self-legislating reason? That is one way of breaking the impasse. I will commit myself to that view. That, I don’t doubt, identifies me as one of the idealists, those affirming the capacity of human agency to transcend the ‘realist’ cycle of rivalry, conflict and war. But I will go further and will ground that transcendent hope in more than reason. I will ground that hope in God, the ultimate and the supreme common power, one that is not a human creation, one that creates all that exists, whose truth we must disclose rather than impose. That is my challenging thesis here.
And it makes for an interesting debate, one with some very disquieting implications.
So I ask a discomforting question here for a deliberate reason - why would a good God create a species destined to permanent war? In science and philosophy, it is the parsimonious argument that tends to be the best. That is the argument that explains the most facts by making the least assumptions. And that does not point to the existence of a transcendent hope/God. If the left in politics, the people who argue for love and peace, are idealists, utopians and dreamers … then so too are all those who affirm a religious ethic, Christian or otherwise. Because that ethic clearly contradicts the ‘realism’ of the zero-sum competitive world.
I have a book by Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc (with Katherine Register). It’s called Constant Battles (2003). He draws upon a wealth of archaeological and ethnological evidence to show that human beings have always waged vicious war upon each other, from hunter-gatherer societies in the past through agricultural tribes, then chiefdoms, to early complex civilizations. No one wanted to fight, but, caught between starvation and robbing their neighbours, were forced to fight. And the preferred solution is quite often the total annihilation of the neighbours.
There’s plenty of facts to back that up. And it puts an end to any notions of a Good God creating a Good Earth. Philosopher John Gray describes the human species as Homo Rapiens. And there is plenty of evidence with respect to planetary degradation and destruction to justify that description.
‘The impacts of Homo sapiens on this planet are enormous. We have turned about a fifth of the total land area of this planet into agricultural fields and pasture to feed ourselves; we are burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, thus altering the composition of the atmosphere and causing climate change; we are extracting at least 150 million tons of fish from the oceans every year; and we area leaving our trash everywhere. This predatory behavior has prompted John Gray, professor emeritus of London School of Economics, to call us Homo rapiens’ (John Gray, Straw Dogs 2003). (Lykke E. Andersen).
John Gray describes the human species as delusional and (self-)destructive, possessing no greater significance than that:
‘Sooner or later it, we, will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.’ (Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals).
The 'constant battles' of Homo Rapiens will wreak havoc on the planet, destroy other beings and bodies, and eventually end in a mutual self-annihilation. And the grass won't pay no mind. In The Symbiotic Planet, biologist Lynn Margulis argues:
'We people are just like our planet-mates. We cannot put an end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves. The notion that we can destroy all life, including bacteria thriving in the water tanks of nuclear power plants or boiling hot vents, is ludicrous. I hear our nonhuman brethren snickering: 'Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now,' they sing about us in harmony. Most of them, the microbes, the whales, the insects, the seed plants, and the birds, are still singing. The tropical forest trees are humming to themselves, waiting for us to finish our arrogant logging so they can get back to their business of growth as usual. And they will continue their cacophonies and harmonies long after we are gone.'
Margulis, 1998 ch 8 Gaia
It’s the killer ape thesis. And it goes well with the militarisation of the planet and the constant ratcheting up of the arms budgets on the part of national powers and rivals. 'We are monkeys with money and guns' (Tom Waits). Is that all human beings are, greedy, violent, aggressive apes with guns? You tell me.
I can answer these questions in defence of a Good God. What I can’t answer is the thesis that, if all human history is is a series of “constant battles” undertaken by human beings as killer apes – with no way of cracking the logic inherent to the parable of the tribes - then there can be no Good God at all. Human beings are no more than killer apes doomed to endless war until they finally succeed in wiping themselves out. If this is the case, we can forget being “progressive” in any sense, and forget the idea of a Good God of any kind. That’s a moral pointlessness that evolutionary biology and natural selection would have no problem in explaining. But if you give me zero-sum politics which divides the world into winners and losers with respect to an endless competition for resources, and if you give me endless rivalry between nation states or other such tribes, with no prospect for global cooperation, mutuality and peace, just endless militarisation, then please spare me your belief in a good Creator God creating a good earth, a loving God that creates us to love, to love the world, to love each other and to love God. Because it doesn't fit. Something has to go here, these alternatives are mutually exclusive.
Let us look at the world’s military pacts and alliances and ask why they are formed, what rivalries were in mind originally, what rivalries do they provoke, and whether they need to be transformed in light of a new world. Or are we condemned to remain forever in the same old world of allies and threats? I ask the question in light of Donald Trump’s demand that NATO members pay their fair share. Fair share for what, I would ask. There are those who would argue that NATO is no more than an international cover for American foreign policy, creating conflicts around the world under the pretence of protecting the world. And now it demands members pay for the privilege of that protection. Maybe it would be better to tell America to keep its money, spend it on its own decaying infrastructure and education system back home, take its armies and navies home, and leave the world in peace. We would then find that other nations are not the enemies and threats they are portrayed as being. Wouldn't we? Or is the other always, by definition, a threat and an enemy? If we stop threatening them, they would be inclined to be more friendly. To God, there is no other. The world of threats and enemies and constant battles is godless indeed.
But if this is the world, and certain nations prefer this way of life to another, then they need to back their preferences by supporting the main bulwarks of that way of life. My own work is all about creating clusters of co-operators on the planet to eliminate free-riding, to encourage free-riders into co-operation. Everyone agrees with cooperation. But it matters a great deal with whom we cooperate, and to what ends. History is full of examples in which the cooperative instincts of people have been hijacked by free-riders and diverted to private ends. I remain committed to a social order which puts an end to “something for nothing” on this planet, and establishes a direct relation between actions and consequences. People who commit to NATO should pay. If they don’t want to pay, they should have the guts to take their stand on their true commitments, and expose and challenge those who are pursuing their own interests under the guise of international authority. I take it that the reluctance to pay may well have something to do with the fact that associating members know fine well that a supposedly international body is actually dominated by a very particular foreign policy on the part of one nation state. I like the idea of people stating exactly where they stand, and not hiding behind the actions and leadership of others. Too many allies lack not only the courage of their convictions, they lack convictions. We need to be more robust in articulating the foundations of our way of life.
I tend to stay away from such debates on social media, because there are no easy answers, and short arguments, without context, evidence, sources and qualifying remarks, soon tend to degenerate into finger pointing and apologetics, one false position pitched against another. In fact, that’s how these debates actually start. I mean, taking Trump’s accusation that NATO members are not paying their fair share at face value and accusing European nations of financing their lavish welfare systems at American expense is a somewhat crude way of operating. I take no part in such ‘debates’, they divide immediately according to already established political positions, the sides are entrenched and already existing prejudices are reinforced. That’s enjoyable if you like such a thing. I don’t. It is shadow boxing based on false dichotomies. And it gets us precisely nowhere. I have no interest in divisive debates based on the accidental facts of history. The politics and the history, as complicated as they are, are actually the easy part. I am more interested in taking this debate to the level of necessary principle.
This question reminds me of the parable of the tribes: there are five tribes, four of which want peace and only one of which wants war – with the result that war prevails, even though the overwhelming majority of people want peace.
“The irony is that successful defence against a power-maximising aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power.” (Andrew Bard Schmookler, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. Berkeley: U of California, 1984, p 21).
In this parable, Andrew Schmookler shows that there are four possible options for the tribes that want peace as they face the one tribe that wants war: [1] destruction, [2] subjugation, [3] withdrawal, and [4] imitation.
“In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes.”
So, it’s a world of allies and threats, and a need for allies to pull their weight and pay their fair share in defending against such threats. That would seem clear. That’s the ‘realist’ view of politics.
But there’s something troubling in all of this, and that is the underlying pessimism of all this calculation at work. As a historian by training, it is not the harsh facts of conflict, violence and war that worry me. I have seen far too much of what human beings can do to be shocked about the reality of war and international rivalry – and the capacity of some to take advantage of others, as well as the propensity of the rich and powerful to bully others, and in the most self-righteous terms. I’ve seen the nations and empires rise and fall, seen cities razed to the ground, seen whole peoples exterminated, sent into captivity, enslaved, raped and tortured. The history books are the graveyards of political ideals. That doesn’t worry me as a historian mired in earthly affairs. But I do think that the whole ‘power politics’ scenario should worry any person who entertains the transcendent hope that human beings could possibly be better than their history in time and place. It is that transcendent hope that ultimately offers the decisive challenge against the ‘realist’ conception of politics. So I ask, against the 'realists' who get all excited by their wars and rivalries and guns and bullets - where is God in all of this?
A man I have great admiration for is the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He takes this parable of the tribes head on, and concludes in the end that often we are in situations in which no-one can do right, only wrong, and there is seemingly no moral to be drawn. I find the conclusion historically and politically realistic, but somewhat inadequate in an ethical sense. The moral would seem to be there is no moral in life, just a tragic human condition in which there is no way of breaking the moral impasse. “There can be situations in which there is no right course of action; where whatever you do is wrong; where every option involves the abandonment of some moral principle.” “If you introduce a single violent tribe into the region, violence will eventually prevail, however the other tribes choose to respond. That is the tragedy of the human condition.” To survive, human beings are often in situations when it is unclear what the right action is, and all you can do is whatever is necessary. It’s a challenging thought experiment.
But who, really, does this conclusion challenge? Not the historians. History is the cemetery of human hopes, the graveyards of kings, empires and tyrannies, the nations rise and fall and disappear unlamented into the sands. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, in the words of Shakespeare (telling the tale of yet another would-be king and tyrant who saw his power crumble to dust around him). And it offers no challenge to the evolutionary biologists, for whom the only point of the game of life is that there is no point other than staying in the game. Mere survival. 99% of the species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. And human beings will one day go the same way. So what, we may ask, when there is no point but survival?
But for anyone of a religious persuasion, the thesis is very challenging indeed. Because if there is at least one tribe that wants war, then we cannot act out of love and moral principle and hope to survive; but if we have to abandon love and moral principle in order to survive, our transcendent hope can only ever be in abstract, something we can never act upon. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps us locked into the logic of the parable of the tribes. And that constant battles thesis means that we live in a permanent state of war, Hobbes’ state of nature, the war of all against all, never to reach the peace of God. If we are to reach that peace, it behoves those of a religious persuasion to show us the way, to practise the way of peace, and bring us to the right road. And that means challenging the ‘realists.’
In The Coming Ecological Revolution, I argued these points in relation to games theory. I refer people to that work for a detailed treatment. Here, I shall provide a quote:
‘In the late 1980s, Martin Nowak developed a programme called ‘Generous’ which was capable of beating Tit-for-Tat. The weakness of Tit-for-Tat lay in the way it could be drawn into a destructive cycle of reprisal in face of a particularly nasty opponent. Again, the phrase of Gandhi springs to mind, ‘an eye for an eye leaves us all blind’. The fact is that the Biblical quote is an argument for proportionality, ‘measure for measure’ as in the Tit-for-Tat programme. A destructive cycle goes from bad to worse, which is what Gandhi meant. The history books are full of examples of this destructive cycle of reprisal at work. Franco-German rivalry came close to destroying European civilization. Tit-for-Tat is vulnerable to this weakness. ‘Generous’ avoids this cycle by randomly but periodically forgetting the last move of its opponent, effectively allowing the relationship to begin again. Should France in 1919 have forgotten the war indemnities Bismarck imposed in 1871? France and Germany began a new relationship in 1945 and European civilisation recovered. Martin Nowak had produced a computer simulation of the human virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation which are central to all the world’s religions. How to embody these in political society is the key question, a question which motivated the works of thinkers like Grotius, Leibniz, Kant and many others.’ (Peter Critchley, The Coming Ecological Revolution, 2011).
I shall make my position clear – I am with the ‘idealists, utopians and dreamers’ against the ‘realists’. I affirm a deeper and truer reality than the political 'realism' of those who play the power-game, one that transcends the immediacy of the empirical world. And that makes me very much a ‘God-botherer’, as an atheist friend once provocatively described me. I’ll be open about it. I am on the side of the peacemakers. I am an ‘inveterate peacemonger.’ As a believer in God, how could I not be? That’s a peace with justice, of course, which begs all manner of questions concerning the need to fight against injustice and for justice. That might well involve division and rancour. But, to cut to the point, I challenge the ‘realist’ view of politics that states that if you want peace, you must prepare for war. That politics condemns us to be forever preparing for war, never achieving peace. We will forever remain in a state of war according to that scenario. So the argument defeats itself.
That’s fine if we discard God and any notion of a hope or an ideal that stands outside the hard facts of human antagonism and war. Let’s be brutally honest here, human beings have been doing everything to everyone since ever, with mass graves pointing to violent deaths going back thousands of years. Homo sapiens? Well, maybe, we use our reason and knowledge to plan for war and engage in war. But homo spiritualis? What kind of God could create a warlike species such as this?
I say the Creator God is a good God who created a good world, and enjoins us all to live up to the beauty of that Creation. We are charged with the task of living in the peaceable kingdom on earth. And realizing that ideal involves so much more than the successful conclusion of military pacts. And it involves more than devoting our resources, financial and technical, to the militarisation of the planet. We can break the cycle of constant battles, because God as our transcendent origin and end holds out that promise to us.
Call that a naïve faith contradicted by the evidence. History has a self-transcending quality based upon creative human agency. Past history proves nothing with respect to the future. To say otherwise is actually to reject history. But I would take this point from evolutionary biologists who see no point in the game of life, other than staying in the game – survival by any means necessary. That’s a conclusion we can draw from the historical, anthropological and biological facts. A religious ethic says otherwise, and I have immense respect from religious leaders who are prepared to go out on a limb and make that point clear. I despise those who abuse and misuse religion and use it as a cover for some very nasty politics – the people who put the religious ethic at the service of a ‘realist’ politics practised by the ruling classes. Such people take the very thing we need from us and turn it into its opposite; they divide and distort and by their hypocrisy they drive people away from religion.
My appeal to all equally is grounded in God, a God beyond divisions, not to a specific institution or form of mediation, and certainly not to that kind of authority that peddles a hardball politics wedded to the status quo.
I argue for the existence of a Creator God who is Good, a God who created the world as good, a common goodness that we are all – I emphasise all – enjoined to live up to. We all share in that goodness. That transcendent hope I refer to locates a potential for the good within each and all.
In his book Good God, Jonathan Clatworthy asks: “What difference does it make if we believe the world has been created by a good God who does everything for the best, and has designed the environment to meet our needs?” I would argue that it makes a great deal of difference. For if we believe in a good world made by a Good God, then we will act accordingly, with hope and expectation that goodness and virtuous behaviour will be rewarded with peace on earth. Jon challenges the view coming from mechanistic science that we live in an objectively valueless world. Living up to the notion that we are created by a loving God enjoins us to make the commitment to the view that life is more than survival. We cannot rest with the moral impasse of the parable of the tribes. And we can certainly not rest with the ‘constant battles’ view of life as no more than a permanent war which has us concerning ourselves with survival by any means necessary.
Jonathan Clatworthy’s new book is called Why Progressives Need God, and it is well worth getting hold of.
“Environmental destruction, poverty in the midst of obscene wealth, one war after another. Our biggest crises are getting worse. Secularism makes this inevitable by denying any moral authority higher than the ruling classes.
Religious traditions offer accounts of who made us, for what purpose and how we should live. Some are more constructive than others. Monotheism, defined as divine harmony, tells us we are designed to live better than this. To achieve it our task is ethical.
When early modern Christianity entered a pessimistic, polytheistic phase, western society developed the secular alternative we still have, with its two conflicting agendas: a driving need to exert control and a reduction of all values to invented fictions. The effect is to disable opposition and treat the desires of the ruling classes as supreme.
Clatworthy draws on cultural analysis, political philosophy, Christian apologetics and theodicy to show how, in order to resolve our crises, progressives need to reaffirm the goodness of the natural environment as a blessing from a good god.”
That message is central to this piece, and gives the answer to the difficult questions I raised above. I’ve been trying to deliver this message for a few years now. But here is the problem I have in making the case. Many ‘progressives’ think a God a mere human invention and religion a childish delusion, a necessary illusion for those who lack the guts to see the harsh facts of life. I have this argument with them all the time, and my views are, for the main part, dismissed – “whatever created Gods get you out to act” is one response I have had, to which I reply that once we admit our gods/values are mere self-creations to serve our ends, they can command neither awe, reverence nor respect. There is no purpose in the world, the scientists tell me, no point to existence, no inherent value – there is no goodness to live up to. Science reveals the world to be objectively valueless, with some 99% of species that have existed already gone extinct. We are just one of those species, hanging on as best we can, with no greater meaning to our name other than survival.
I reject that view, for the reasons presented above. So I take God and the notion of the good world very seriously indeed. That’s the transcendent source and hope that we are enjoined to live up to, breaking the cycles of ‘realism’ in politics to bring us to peace on earth. The alternative is a ‘realist’ zero-sum view of a meaningless world in which mere survival is the name of the game. There is plenty of evidence for it. At this point, we need to decide which is to be master? What common power are we prepared to recognise? What power is the source and the promise of real peace? Peace with justice?
I love the conclusion to Jon Clatworthy’s book:
‘When we believe there are no right answers, there is nothing to find; all that remains is to promote our own interests. This means that the most powerful no longer appeal to God [except as a rationalisation of their self-serving actions]; they only need to appeal to their own decrees. When we have power we easily convince ourselves that we know what is best for everybody. We imagine that our own intentions are so benign that there is no need for a moral authority above us. It is the oppressed and exploited who can most easily see the faults of the ruling classes. When they complain that the actions of their governments are wrong, they presupposing higher standards, moral truths that transcend human authorities and pass judgment on them….
When the behaviour of the ruling classes is publicly seen to favour the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless, or democratic governments like Britain sell military weapons to very different governments like Saudi Arabia, or nothing significant is done to reduce global warming, the cry goes up that their values are wrong. The cry would be a lot louder and more credible if the people voicing it could explain what they mean by calling them wrong, but we lost the language to do so when we privatised religion.’ [312]
That’s the transcendent hope that breaks the cycles that a realist zero-sum politics traps us within. That shows the power of God, the common power we can all draw upon, that activates are own moral power within. That's the answer I seek from a religious ethic. For a 'realist' view of constant preparation in a state of permanent war, we don't need God at all. God is a challenge to warmongers and militarists. If He wasn't, why on earth would we have need of Him? We get peace not by preparing for war, but by pursuing justice.
We need to have a good look at who our allies are and who the threats are. I’ll end on this note, we need to come out of this mentality of “us” and “them” on a planet divided by national rivalries. More easily said that done. My hope is a transcendent one. That is easily checked by those who think religion mere pious words which neglect history. If we lose that trans-historical standard, then we will remain killer apes fighting “constant battles” until the very last one that wipes us all out. Who, really, are we fighting? Who are we defending against? “I have seen the enemy, it is us.” Future security threats will come thick and fast from climate change and migration, and these are much more difficult to defend and fight against. Entire modes of thought and organisation need to change, and change quickly. Failure to change in that sense, and there will be no ground for any of us to stand upon. So much of our time, energy and resources is being devoted to these national rivalries – are we divided to fall, designed to fail? We had better start seeing the bigger picture on security.
I'm more than happy for humanity to break free of the shackles of all these nation states and break this cycle of "constant battles.” The world needs a new concept of security, environmental security based on international unity, and not military security based on national separation. And that transcendent hope, seemingly contradicted by all of history and politics, is located in God. If you want the realist politics of constant battles, then you have to abandon a belief in a good God. If you believe in a good God, then you have to become an inveterate peacemonger and give up studying war.
http://www.sciencemag.org/.../trump-s-defense-chief-cites...
And that rightly affirms the need we have for God as a transcendent standard, independent of time and place, by which we judge politics and try, as best we can within our power in time and place, to bring our actions into accordance with what is right and true. It's never less than difficult. The way of peace never has been easy and it never will be, such is the way life proceeds between social beings. There's no shirking the hard yards in politics. It is the faith, I say, that exists outside of politics that is our best hope of breaking the realist cycles of politics, removing us beyond being governed by biological imperatives in a meaningless world, and giving our politics a standard to live up to beyond mere power and competition for position and wealth. And paying fair shares for NATO will concentrate the minds of the payers – there will have to be a clarification of purpose. There's too much evasion at this level. Just what, exactly, are the members supposed to be paying for? What are the threats? Where do they come from? Who are the enemies? Who says so and why?
There's an interesting article here which asks "who is satan?" and proceeds to highlight satan's job as that of "calling attention to the unworthiness of mankind". It's a reductionism which we can see in certain "nothing but" arguments that fester in the age of ‘realist’ politics. The key line for me is: "It isn’t the devil that spreads evil across the face of creation—it is mankind. Other than human beings, YHWH has no nemesis, nor are there malevolent spiritual forces not under his authority. YHWH is ultimately a god of justice." Hence my query as to who the enemies are and what the threats are, hence my reference to a good God creating a good world and our need to act in accordance with that standard.
Why Progressives Need God by Jonathan Clatworthy
I recently had the pleasure of spending a very enjoyable day in the company of Jonathan Clatworthy. There was a fascinating discussion, and absolutely no shirking of the difficult questions. And Jon shows why transcendent hope matters, and why it gives human beings something that brings us together and take action in the teeth of some ugly facts in our social and political world. I wish Jon all the best with his new book. Here are the answers to the difficult questions above, in a strong and confident thesis that states the case for God directly and openly. The book is cogently reasoned, rich in detail and argument, covers extensive ground, but has real depth, and is highly pertinent to the key issues facing the world today.
I love the conclusion:
‘With a positive attitude to the forces creating us, we are helped to perceive true values by recognising that we are designed to be blessed – and so is the rest of creation. In this way, the monotheism of divine harmony helps us to affirm the meaning, value and purpose of our own lives, and at the same time to overcome our instinctive self-centredness for the sake of the common good. The things we need are given by God to the community so that the community may flourish. It flourishes when its individuals have positive relationships with each other, their environment and God.’ [p.314]
I well know that many people, including many of my friends, have no time for religion and God. They would identify themselves as 'progressives', and so are the very people who should read this book. Of course, they will argue that, since they are progressives, they don't need to - they are already doing the right thing. I can only urge them to read and see what it is that they are missing. The point is that progressive causes - justice, equality, fairness, democracy, rights - need to be supported by more than self-assertion and self-legislating reason, and there is a need to be clear on the transcendent ground upon which the case for those values and principles rest. Lose that ground, and we enter the realm of power struggles, where issues are settled by might - and that is the terrain in which norms and values become those of the ruling class, expressing the positions and interests of the dominant class.
I can only say that this argument makes sense of the direction that I have traveled over the years in philosophy. I write more on that at the bottom. Here, it is sufficient to say that I studied Marx in depth for a decade at doctoral level, and the man was worth the effort. I argued for Marx's realisation of philosophy as the abolition of philosophy, the realisation of philosophical norms and truths in making the world philosophical and giving us a world governed by reason. I still argue for a conception of 'rational freedom', but now make it clear that this reason involves more than a self-legislating praxis. I don't wish to see a world enclosed by a totalising Reason, and I don't think that value is merely a matter of imposure. I believe the world is objectively valuable and good, and that human agency is a matter of co-creation, not self-creation. In other words, you can't have your cake and eat it too - we always need transcendent norms and truths as something independent of the world, but incarnated in the world. I call it God, that anarchic excess left over from human concepts and theories, those fallible little tools by which we seek to come to know the whole. That excess I take to be something essential and something core. More on this at the bottom.
In the meantime, I encourage people to read these brief passages from the book to get the gist of the book's argument. I’ve only had it a couple of hours. I think it’s only published in November, so I’m not sure how many copies are available at the moment. The book’s argument is strong, hard-hitting, powerful and pertinent. I strongly recommend it.
Here are some passages from the book, to give a flavour of its message, argued cogently and at length in the main text:
‘Climate change, poverty, war. The problems facing modern secular world are getting bigger all the time. Mountains of literature detail what needs to be done but it remains undone. The governments of our modern democracies fail to achieve it, and perhaps do not intend to.
By denying any moral authority higher than humanity, at least on public matters, it leaves the ruling classes as the decision makers, not only on what we do, but on what we ought to do. What they want becomes right by definition. Being humans, just as flawed and selfish as the rest of us, they view the world’s problems through the lenses of their own vested interests. Until we admit – publicly, not just behind church doors – that there are better ways of doing things, we shall continue to destroy ourselves and our children’s future.’ [3]
The biggest problems we face are well known. The most urgent is environmental destruction … overshadowed by the greatest threat of all, climate change … [4-5]
Vested interests in the old ways work hard to prevent change… [5]
Much the same can be said of poverty …
Militarisation continues apace … an alien from outer space might have asked whether it would have been better to learn how to live together before we learned to split the atom… [6]
So we live at a time of competing crises. Countless publications tell us the things we need to do, but we do not do them…
To do better, we need to believe that there are right answers that transcend every government. There must be moral truths competent to pass judgment on the ruling classes, higher standards to which others can appeal against governments.’ [7]
Underline this bit ... 'to do better ...' To do better than zero-sum politics, constant battles, the killer ape thesis, and militarisation ... There's the answer to the question posed above, an answer based in a transcendent standard that lies outside of the politics, laws and institutions of time and place, which serves as a critical and normative standard that allows us to judge our actions and the actions of our rulers, orient them, inform them morally. And that higher standard lies outside of the destructive cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal that, ultimately, if it is not broken, leads to mutual self-annihilation. Here is the promise of peace with justice, perpetual peace. Here is the answer to those who think the human species will extinguish itself and go to oblivion unlamented and forgotten.
‘When we believe there are no right answers, there is nothing to find; all that remains is to promote our own interests. This means that the most powerful no longer appeal to God [except as a rationalisation of their self-serving actions]; they only need to appeal to their own decrees. When we have power we easily convince ourselves that we know what is best for everybody. We imagine that our own intentions are so benign that there is no need for a moral authority above us. It is the oppressed and exploited who can most easily see the faults of the ruling classes. When they complain that the actions of their governments are wrong, they presupposing higher standards, moral truths that transcend human authorities and pass judgment on them….
When the behaviour of the ruling classes is publicly seen to favour the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless, or democratic governments like Britain sell military weapons to very different governments like Saudi Arabia, or nothing significant is done to reduce global warming, the cry goes up that their values are wrong. The cry would be a lot louder and more credible if the people voicing it could explain what they mean by calling them wrong, but we lost the language to do so when we privatised religion.’ [312]
‘With a positive attitude to the forces creating us, we are helped to perceive true values by recognising that we are designed to be blessed – and so is the rest of creation. In this way, the monotheism of divine harmony helps us to affirm the meaning, value and purpose of our own lives, and at the same time to overcome our instinctive self-centredness for the sake of the common good. The things we need are given by God to the community so that the community may flourish. It flourishes when its individuals have positive relationships with each other, their environment and God.’ [p.314]
I love this last line. I am currently re-reading Rousseau, a philosopher I always had a soft spot for. And Rousseau writes beautifully on expanding our being through communion with something greater than we are, with Nature (Reveries), with Society/Humanity (The Social Contract), and with God (the Savoyard Vicar in Emile).
I can give this book a strong recommendation, it is very much the direction my own work has taken, journeying from a clear assertion of self-created values/praxis philosophy to the affirmation of transcendent norms outside of particular laws and institutions in our prevailing societies, an objective standard by which we evaluate our actions and hold each other and our practices and institutions to account.
I can probably best explain my point here by way of a personal comment. I was in the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989 when 96 Liverpool football supporters lost their lives. Over the years, the Hillsborough campaigners raised the demand for justice. What was this justice were they asking for and why were they asking for it? The disaster had been given the biggest inquest in history and had gone before a jury of peers, delivering a verdict of accidental death. In terms of our constituted law and authority, justice had been done. But it hadn’t, and we knew it hadn't. We knew that prevailing institutions had fallen short of justice. And we didn’t let the issue lie. The Hillsborough campaigners were affirming a justice that transcends the laws and institutions of time and place, that serves as a critical and ethical standard by which to evaluate our society and its practices, orienting behaviour to the good. That’s a transcendent value that sustains a transcendent hope that wrongs can be righted, and that the good can be achieved and justice can be done.
In my own work, I argued for a praxis-based philosophy based on a self-legislating reason. I specialized on Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas, and would also strongly recommend Leibniz. Why not settle there? That is quite a group of philosophers. Why the issue? The problem is that even Leibniz, who affirms the idea of a preordained order and harmony, and who therefore would seem to argue for disclosure over imposure (humans coming to recognise the truth of the world’s order rather than project truth upon that world through their praxis), holds that the propositions of the natural law possess only a conditional character. Such a view implies the conventional nature of truth, a view that takes us back to the sophists and the idea that man is the measure of all things, that value lies in the valuer, that truth is subjective, that justice is the interests of the strongest. It is for this reason that Kant devoted so much attention to the categorical imperative as distinct from imperatives which are merely hypothetical. I love Kant and have written extensively on him. But that is an awful lot of hard work to take us back to something we already had – the rules of traditional natural law were themselves categorical imperatives, and were understood as such.
So I always found something missing – the values I was affirming were not good simply because they were human creations, I was arguing that human agents should create them because they were good. There is a normative standard here that stands in some way independent of that act of creation. I had always suspected this, which is why I sharply distinguished Marx’s praxis from pragmatism. Even though Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach argued that we prove the truth through practice, this truth, for Marx, was not merely ‘what works’, but came with implicit values. I’m glad that new work in philosophy is confirming my instincts here. David Lay Williams’ Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (2007), for instance, shows how Rousseau affirmed transcendent norms as against conventionalism, the Hobbesian position. Anyhow, I now seek to integrate the “rational freedom” of the moderns with natural law and a virtue ethics sustaining the form/s of the common life. That’s work to come. We’ll see how it turns out one day.
These are things I need to address in my own work, in terms of how a transcendent ethic is to be embodied in communities of practice and character. To those who are still sceptical I’ll say this, many people in the world, people of faith and no faith, call for the common good. For a common end to be effective, we need a common power. Do we supply that power via the state and the self-given law (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant etc the moderns), through social forms of self-mediation (Marx), in a world of self-created values? If there is no pre-given morality, then we are charged with the responsibility to create our own …. But if this is so, where does that normative command come from? The argument that there is no pre-given morality, therefore we ought to create one is self-contradictory. I therefore affirm transcendent norms that are independent of self-created values as against a conventionalism that rejects them (Hobbes, for instance).
Some of the saddest words I have ever read are contained in an old book called Letters from Mesopotamia (I found it on the Guttenberg site). The book consists of a collection of letters from 1915-1916, during the First World War, sent home by a young soldier by the name of Robert Palmer. In an entry from August 4 1915, Palmer writes words which come straight to the heart of the matter:
‘It is dreadful to think that we've all been denying our Christianity for a whole year and are likely to go on doing so for another. How our Lord's heart must bleed for us! It appals me to think of it.’
Robert Palmer was killed within the year, in the battle of Um el Hannah, June 21, 1916, aged 27 years. He thus paid the ultimate price for that denial of the moral law within. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ the gospel says, and that means precisely what it says, without exception for race, colour, creed, nationality etc. So how long will those caught up within the 'constant battles' thesis going to go on denying their Christianity? Such 'realism' is treacherous ground for those with any moral principle in them. First you deny the moral law within, in time you will have no moral law within. God help the people whose leaders follow that path.
I shall end with words from a friend, Mark Pickles, words which show us how to break the moral impasse:
"Terror is easy; love (Agape) is hard. But love (universal love, or "Agape") can make the impossible possible. Love is the only option that, ultimately, God will allow to succeed. Nothing, ultimately, can conquer Love."
"Love begets love, and makes the seemingly impossible possible. Jesus told us it can move mountains."
"Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven", said Jesus according to Matthew.
Let us think about children everywhere who have been murdered by adults, or have lost their limbs through our violent ways and logic, be it from bombs around the waist, or loaded into trucks, or remotely from bombs dropped from drones or aircraft, ordered in by presidents, prime ministers and bishops.
I pray that the deceased are gathered up into God's eternal peace and joy. And I pray for children everywhere that we, mankind, have let down.”
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.