For the Healing
In a post, a FB friend recently asked ‘where are the healers?’
I shall quote him in full, because his words here express a yearning for reconciliation beyond division that many people feel, myself included:
‘I've scrolled through my newsfeed a lot less since things have become more and more divisive. While I've seen many "experts" on both sides celebrating the "stupidity" of people who don't think like them with laugh emojis, cleverly crafted memes, and various slogans, what I haven't seen as much are unifying voices. Where are the healers? I get it that militants, revolutionaries, and resisters have always been an important part of change, but so have healers. Where are they? Sometimes we need a navigator to help walk us away from our old and no longer relevant beliefs or to help us understand the humanity of the "other side." We could really use some strong moderators to help us remember all of our commonalities right now. Do you know of any truly independent leaders who are trying to bridge the "sides" and help us build upon our commonalities? If so, please write their name in the comments or send me a link to their work.
(And, yes, I post some of those satirical memes sometimes. So, I get it. It really is hard not to when you're frustrated.)’
I’m here, I said. For all that I argue, and often argue strongly, for certain positions, I never lose sight of the fact that the central problem of politics is that of determining how different people, with different views, are to reconcile their difference and manage their common affairs together. Disagreement is not only legitimate in politics, it is the very stuff of politics, the way by which we elicit and test the truth and work out a viable and common understanding. In other words, disagreement is always undertaken with some hope for an agreement at the end of it.
I dislike the way that social media reduces complex issues and divides people so sharply as to make reconciliation impossible, establishing the divisions so starkly as to make compromise not only impossible but unconscionable on the part of different parties. In arguing for change and transformation, I never lose sight of the fact that real and enduring change is a self-change on the part of each and all, and not just an institutional and structural change. Both things are required: the former without the latter is impotent, the latter without the former is empty.
I caution against a unity for the sake of unity at the same time. The nature of the ground upon which human beings unify matters a great deal. I value civil and social peace and dislike disorder, but peace without love and justice is no peace at all, only a military pact and a temporary truce in a continuing civil war. To unify without just settlement is usually to return to a broken, divided, and iniquitous status quo. To argue for peace and unity at any price is to denying the legitimate concerns and cries of people – of all people, people whose politics we like, and people whose politics we dislike. As much as we may dislike the politics of others, we are well served to understand the nature of their complaint. We may still not accept their complaints, but at least we will may have a better understanding as to their origins. I’ve been complaining a lot recently about the manner and tone of the people whose political ends I actually share in large part. I am always concerned lest people fetishize the means so in such a way as to displace the ends. George Orwell once tried to reason with someone who was deaf and blind to the damage their politics was causing. When Orwell challenged them, the person replied that ‘you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ But where, Orwell asked, is your omelette? It may often be necessary to break eggs, but I do want to see an omelette at the end of it, and one preferably without broken heads. As idealistic as that may sound, it is based on the deeper realism which recognizes the existence of transcendent standards of truth and justice which are independent of time and place, holding politics, laws, institutions, and practices to account whilst becoming a motivational object of will and action. To unify, there has to be ‘something’ for us to unify around, and it can often feel in present circumstances that both truth and justice – and the love that embraces each and all - is being either undermined or even openly rejected. Without that truth and morality at the centre - not just facts but values, not just science but ethics, and not just knowledge and know-how but popular will and active citizen consent/participation – then it will be difficult to reach out and connect with others let alone achieve unity.
I consistently argue for a unity, identifying the commonality that exists within the division, something that enfolds us and holds us together, that all sides in politics can recognize, a standard, indeed, to which all sides must respect and learn to conform their will to. Without a common shared standard, it is well-nigh impossible to avoid divisions in politics becoming intractable. That division is embedded in the DNA of the era, concomitant with the loss of a common authoritative standard and people and groups choosing their own goods as they see fit. In relativising the absolute, people have come to absolutize the relative, thereby losing the basis to compromise. Society is thus mired in the exchange of incommensurate values. In this struggle, each sides sees their own side as necessarily right and correct and the other side as irredeemable evil. The current divisions have been a long time in preparation; they are not accidents but embedded in the terrain.
I have made this appeal a number of times and I will continue to make this appeal, affirming the Greater Love that enfolds, sustains, and carries us all. The trick is to uproot division without coming to extend and entrench it in other forms, fostering new hatreds that feed off themselves. That is more easily said than done, of course. I have exchanged harsh words with people in politics, but always look for a possible agreement beyond the disagreement, justice as reconciliation and not retribution (recognizing that that takes both sides). Take to the trenches, and divisions become entrenched.
I write frequently of reclaiming power from the alien forms within which it has come to be encased. That restitution needs to be tempered by the humility of the Love that is expressed through sacrifice and service to others, lest it merely degenerate into prideful self-worship and idolatry. I argue for the power of humility.
I would therefore like to offer some thoughts for this troubled world. This world is a political world, a world of division between people, interests, and perspectives. Politics is about mediating those divisions, not suppressing them in the favour of one side or neither. At the same time, the possibility of mediation is dependent upon a common ethic, a sharing of common ground or common language. Unless this division is set within that wider ethic, we are a house divided and will assuredly fall. Instead of unity, each side will take to the trenches and assert their positions against each other, persuading no-one but their own side. Instead of a mutual learning, society will drown in a mutual indifference, insofar as differences remain passive and private, or tear itself apart in a mutual antagonism when people take those differences into the public square.
This past century or more, human beings have thought they could take morality into their own hands and go it alone as authors of their own destiny. What we have found is that, yes, we are indeed alone, and with nothing, the masters of nowhere. The danger is that, removed from the source and the end of life, belonging, and meaning that we share in common, this is precisely where we will end up: alone and pitted against each other, fighting over nothing through devotion to particular interests and loyalties. The masters of nowhere. Human beings live within social relations that are unequal and divided. There is no unity of purpose within those relations, and there is no commitment or devotion to common ends, since we exist on divided ground. On our own, without the transcendent standard of truth and morality we share in common, we are divided against one another. Politics thus ceases to be able to perform its mediating function.
Unless we set that division in a wider context through the recognition of a common standard – truth and morality - then we are divided to fall. My fear is that we are going to fracture, we are going to turn against each another.
Marx wrote of a “world still to win.” That view presumes the existence of a world that is worthy of winning. Such a world is beyond human self-creation, beyond possession, and beyond the controversies between human beings over the terms of that possession. One hundred years ago Max Weber wrote that 'where there is nothing both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.' (Politics as a Vocation). It doesn't matter which side wins in such a political world. Where there is ‘nothing,’ we have all lost our rights: the social struggle in which we are involved is just a sophist power struggle where might is right and justice is the interests of the strongest.
That's the very opposite of Jesus' example and message.
In a world that is riven by conflict, hatred, and animosity, we have a mission to be the living agents of the Love that bridges all divides, heals all broken relationships, and releases the joy implanted within the hearts of each and all.
So I offer this prayer that throughout the troubled times that are sure to come in this political world in which we live, and which threatens to divide us against each other, that we cleave to the Love of a God that enfolds, nourishes, moves, and redeems all. Because without that Love, we have nothing and we are nothing. That Love is the “something” that forms the true ground of our being, the “something” that we need to recover and hold on to over against Weber's “nothing,” affirming the world as objectively meaningful and valuable as against objectively meaningless and valueless.
That is the rebuilding that the world desperately needs today. Should we start from that premise, this world would be an immeasurably better place than it is today.
If I may offer some explanation of my own position here, I have met too many whose political ideals and causes I share, who are at the same time bereft of hope and mired in despair. I have no proof and no evidence to support my claims on God, no more than those without God have in support of their own claims. We live in uncertainty. Acting out of hope, as if we knew, despite not knowing, is what faith is all about. We can affirm reason as far as reason will go, whilst acknowledging that reason does not go anything like far enough when it comes to the requirements of a rich and meaningful life. To paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
I could have made life so much easier for myself in my relations to friends had I kept quiet on God. Whilst I share their politics, many have been baffled as to why I have gone anywhere near religion. It’s obviously stupid, superstitious, delusional nonsense, right? I once felt that religion was a fantastical projection of human potentiality that we just needed to see right, by way of a practical reappropriation of human power – Marx’s view – but over time, with more reflection, I became less and less sure. I have no great philosophical argument to prove my points here and answer the objections of critics. Their negations are philosophically effective. I have on occasion accompanied theologian and theistic philosophy friends as they present and debate their work in public. They attract the same group of atheists who advance the same destructive arguments, and there seems to be no way past those objections in philosophical terms. The critics and sceptics seem to win the debates so often the same way, I wonder why people provide a platform to them in this way. They win nothing, of course, since all that they show is the ultimate meaningless and purposelessness of the universe and of human life. In winning their point they have merely shown that there is no point, which begs the question as to why are they so passionate to debate and establish so sterile a point. It doesn't matter. The world should just settle into indifference, proclaim the god of Einstein/Spinoza that unfolds itself harmoniously in the universe in complete indifference to human affairs. It sounds rational, even liberating, but it isn't. If human society comes to mirror the objective valuelessness, meaninglessness, and purposelessness of the universe, then it will dissolve in a mutual indifference, or risk flaring up into a mutual contempt.
I have spoken many times of people of such persuasion over the years. I don't care for how they read science here. They have it wrong. At least atheist scientists I have great respect for, such as Christian de Duve, recognize that once we move into questions of significance and value, science has nothing to say. These are not scientific questions at issue, and so it is inadmissible to reduce religion to scientific statements. Those who press science into those areas to assert insignificance and valuelessness are guilty of mixing their logics. We are dealing with different orders of meaning.
I will go further than this point, though. Neither side of this “debate” is able refute the other, since we are talking incommensurate logics. So the question, for me, boils down to which side can make the most of human life in all its richness, its quest for meaning, its longing and desire, its suffering and frustration, in the understanding and, indeed, in the living of all of that. I have met too many people who are mired in misanthropic despair and negation of all hope for want of empirical evidence and logical proof to be swayed away from the search for God and God's Love. I can't prove the truth of this, and I can't say at any point that I have a truth that can be demonstrated. But that truth-seeking is so eminently nourishing in itself that I am willing to offer it as proof of the existence of a transcendent source of nourishment, putting us in connection with some anarchic excess that subverts and transforms the empire of facts to redeem all things.
I cleave to this through the thin, because I know by experience it brings me to the thick, and will always do so.
The demand for proof and evidence for God is a double-edged sword. Scientific and technological advance has given us the illusion that we may have certainty on the deepest of questions. Knowledge and know-how concern explanation and ability to manipulate matter and even people. But this is not the same thing as understanding. Once we move into questions of meaning and significance, the remit of such power ends. Philosophical reasoning, when hooked on misplaced presumptions of certainty, undercuts itself. People are crying out for hope and meaning, for belonging and healing. People discard faith for any number of reasons, many of which are understandable. People have been damaged by dogmatism and false certainties that under examination are revealed to be falsehoods without support. But philosophical critique can be acidic, dissolving all supports to leave human beings alone in a world that is objectively valueless and meaningless. I have reflected on this for years and years and will take that leap of faith, that heart leap, into the view that there is a good God that has created a good world, a world that is objectively good, enjoining us to act accordingly, conforming ourselves to, and confirming, that goodness within and without. Reason as far as reason will go, and then something more is needed, otherwise there is paralysis, decay, retreat, and defeat. The more reason, logic, and evidence you have, then the less of a leap you will have to make. But leap you must at some point, given the limits of reason. Briefly, to quote Chesterton, ‘you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.’ Which brings me back as to why the philosophy of truth-seeking is superior to endless philosophical arguments over the nature of truth and rival claims to possess and monopolize that truth. The philosophy of truth-seeking values human beings as knowledgeable moral agents within the ceaseless creative universe, disclosing truth in a creative unfolding; it is a view which sees human beings as having the root of the metaphysical matter within them.
In the end, this issue boils down to the question of which view is capable of offering the more plausible account of human nature and human life. There is a distinction here between the natural law (nature seen through the eyes of a moral reason common to us all) and a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism. The former encompasses more than physical explanation with respect to natural functions and refers to the correct understanding of desire, the quest for meaning, the cosmic longing for healing, wholeness, and belonging. It encompasses family, society, polity and all forms of human bonding. In this respect, the issue pits natural-law and virtue ethicists – myself - against the expressivist or emotivist, all those positions which dissolve ethics into mere value judgements, irreducible subjective choice, opinion, and preference. You can line the combatants up either side of this divide: those who affirm transcendent standards and norms as against the conventionalists who assert that truth and meaning are human projections in time and place: Plato and Aristotle and their successors (St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas and various other Saints, Pascal, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, myself) up against Hobbes and Hume and their very many successors in the modern world. The odd thing to note is that whilst the latter is the dominant position, many people continue to argue as though truth and morality still matter in relation to an objective standard or transcendent source that, in terms of the dominant morality, does not strictly exist. The Hobbes-Hume position has held sway for some time, but that hold is weak and weakening, having succeeded more by way of negation on the basis of a positivist science that is untenable. Philosophical reason and science cannot settle this question, only cut the foundations from under the position which cleaves to purpose, meaning, and goodness in the universe. The victory of the Hobbes-Hume position is a pointless victory, if victory it is; nothing has been won, since nothing can be won. All that has been achieved is the destruction of the cosmic hope and longing that inspires human beings to carry on living and loving when the facts of life seem continually to contradict our highest goods and deepest truths. Neither side can refute the other side clearly and directly in this clash with the tools of philosophical reason. The only way to decide is which side of this divide provides the most satisfying account of the richness of human life as it is experienced in the real.
I answer plainly: The natural-law and virtue ethicist tradition and those praxis philosophers who embodied the ideal in the real as it unfolds in history – transcendent truths unfolding in the historical process. We need to call back the transcendent standards which buttresses all things; we need to call back the soul. The Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and carries all, the Love 'that seeketh not its own.'
One of the books that really swayed me on this when I was implicitly – and often explicitly - an atheist philosopher was Jonathan Sacks' The Great Partnership. He writes:
'The search for God is the search for meaning. The discovery of God is the discovery of meaning. And that is no small thing, for we are meaning-seeking animals. It is what makes us unique. To be human is to ask the question, 'Why?'
Scientists of a certain type seem to take perverse pleasure in declaring that life is in fact meaningless. Here, for example, is Jacques Monod:
“Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes.”
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, New York, Vintage, 1972., p. 160
And, more bluntly, Steven Weinberg:
“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe ... It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, New York, Basic, 1977, pp. 154-5
Sacks writes:
As a mood, most of us have experienced times when that is how the world seems. In the midst of crisis or bereavement, the fabric of meaning is torn apart and we feel strangers in an alien world. Yet a mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact. As a general statement of the condition of the universe, there is nothing whatsoever to justify Monod's or Weinberg's conclusions. To grasp this, listen to perhaps the most eloquent account of atheism ever given, by Bertrand Russell in A Free Man's Worship:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.
Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship, in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, London, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 39
C'est magnifique, writes Sacks. ‘One can scarce forbear to cheer. But one can produce almost exactly the same peroration in praise of faith’:
“That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten - all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul's salvation be safely built.”
Sacks comments:
I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. Freud said that religious faith was the comforting illusion that there is a father figure. A religious believer might say that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure, so that we can do what we like and can get away with: an adolescent's dream. Why should one be considered escapist and not the other? Why should God's call to responsibility be considered an easy option? Why should the belief, held by some on the basis of scientific determinism, that we have no free will and therefore no moral responsibility, not be considered the greatest escapism of them all?
There is absolutely nothing in science - not in cosmology or evolutionary biology or neuroscience - to suggest that the universe is bereft of meaning, nor could there be, since the search for meaning has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion. We now need to see why.'
Can we prove life has a meaning? Clearly not. People have offered arguments, but they have been subject to damaging, even decisive criticisms. Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved. Consider trust. Consider love. I will be writing on this at length on this in my forthcoming Dante book. For now, another poet, Tennyson, suffices to make the point. In The Ancient Sage he writes:
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!
I’ve been re-reading Nietzsche. His view is not mine, in that he goes the whole hog and dispenses with truth and morality. I go the other way to reinstate scientific and moral knowledge. But I recognize that Nietzsche is consistent in a way that those who criticize religion in the name of science are not; they launch criticisms against religion as a projection of false objectivity that Nietzsche shows to apply to science, too. Those who consider that view eccentric with respect to science can now begin to understand why ethicists have been complaining for so long since the ‘death of God.’ In my re-reading I found Nietzsche to be arguing something I also argue with respect to fetishizing and freezing truths, systematising them so as to lose the movement and ossify the mythos, separating ourselves not only from God/nature/others/self but from the power that myths possess to alert us to the danger of our own excesses:
“For it is the lot of all myths to creep gradually into the confines of a supposedly historical reality, and to be treated by some later age as unique fact with claims to historical truth . . . this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth. The feeling for myth dies and is replaced by religious claims to foundation in history.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Penguin Classics, London 1993, p. 53
In losing the feeling for myth, we lose the movement and expansiveness and replaced it with the fraudulent veracity of claims to truth and reality. As a result, we no longer flow and grow. This goes a long way towards explaining the wretchedness and irrelevance of the wars over the existence or non-existence of God, since neither the theists nor the atheists who are locking horns here have any sense of the creative power of metaphor. In attempting to eat the Word, science consumes goods that it cannot properly digest and is therefore afflicted with – and afflicts – pain. The same applies to all attempts on the part of human beings to go it alone.
“Blessed are you, Gryphon, whose beak does not,
pluck the sweet—tasting fruit that is forbidden
and then afflicts the belly that has eaten!”
Dante, The Comedy, Purgatorio 32: 43-45
In this passage, Dante criticizes the Church – and all temporal authorities – that attempt to appropriate God’s justice to themselves in order to make it serve their own ends. The point applies by extension to any body or person, and delivers a lesson on systematizing and freezing the movement of the ethical power that infuses all things and impels growth. By literalising that power, we get the dogmatic orthodoxies of religion and the dismissive orthodoxies of science centred on fact, both of which serve to sever us from the real power of myth to hold a mirror before us, illuminating the tensions that lie deep in our souls.
In fine, we take justice back to source rather than subordinate it to political ideology, or systematize it as a theology frozen for all eternity. We establish the true relations and let the mythos flow and expand. We are none of us perfect, and none of us possess, let alone are in a position to monopolize the whole truth. We may legitimately express particular views in politics, and disagree with others, but it is illegitimate to deify our own side and act with self-righteous force, whilst demonizing contrary views. There is a healing beyond division.
I call it living the gospel, and you don't need the clever theology to do that. Properly understood, and the true understanding is only in the living, Christianity is hardcore - does it feed the hungry, does it satisfy the soul. In terms of economics it involves a commitment to producing goods that are truly good and services that truly serve - the common good, each and all as equals.