Seeking Wisdom

Those who have followed my work over the course of the past few years are aware that I believe we are in the early stages of a civilizational crisis –that as a civilization we no longer know what we are trying to accomplish, spiritually and politically. Specifically, I have argued, while the secular ideal of transcending finitude and contingency by means of inner worldly civilizational progress continues to order our social structure and drive policy and strategy at nearly every level, the ideal itself has lost credibility. They also know that I have advocated a re-engagement with the spiritual traditions of the Axial Age –Hellenic Philosophy, Judaism, Buddhism, the Upanishads, Confucianism, and Taoism, and those which emerged from them, such as Christianity and Islam, which I am convinced are by no means spent.  I have also argued that these need to be brought into a new level of dialogue with each other and also with the “sane core” of modernity, the revaluation of the human civilizational project which characterizes secular society, as well as with postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion. But this is –and is intended to be—a broad mandate for dialogue and deliberation. Increasingly people are asking me what way I teach and follow, even as I recognize the value of others, especially in the light of the profound crisis of the two institutions which I served in my youth: the Roman Catholic Church and the international workers movement. It is the aim of this essay to provide an brief and accessible answer to this question, not so much because I believe that it is a way that many will want to follow (and ultimately we all have our own ways) as because it may help clarify my interventions in some disputed questions regarding the university, the church, and the public arena.

Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by a way. By a way, I mean, quite literally, a way of being, of participating in Being. Being a rock is a way in a very broad sense; being a star sapphire is a more specific way. Being a plant is a way; being a cinnamon tree a more specific way. And so on. But since (I presume) most of those reading this are human beings, for all practical purposes, we are talking about ways of being human, even if some of these ways point beyond humanity towards a transcendental end.

The term is, quite simply, intended to compensate for the inadequacy of certain other terms, such as religion, philosophy, ideology, etc. It does this in three ways. First, the term religion is associated in the West, at least, with theism. It also lacks precise equivalents in non-Indo-European languages. The term way embraces nontheistic, atheistic, and even nihilistic ways of being human –and ways which have boundaries which may not coincide with the difficult to define term “religion.” Second, it focuses on ways of life and indeed ways of Being and not simply systems of ideas. Finally, because of its breadth and the spiritual connotation it gets from its frequent use in translating the Chinese word dao, it makes it clear that every way presupposes, implicitly or explicitly, answers to a whole complex of philosophical and spiritual questions. What can we know and how? How is the universe organized and is it ultimately meaningful? Is there some first principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and human action ordered? If so, what can we say about it? If not, how, if at all, can we find meaning? Make judgments of right and wrong, good and evil? What does it mean to be human? What is an excellent human being? A just society? How do we get there? These are what I have been calling the fundamental questions of meaning and value. There are certainly other ways to draw up the list and, to a certain extent, each way is defined by the questions is poses and much or more than by the answers it proposes. But this list is broad enough to give my readers some idea of what I mean.

A way, we should note, may privilege the spiritual, in the sense of humanity’s ordering to some transcendental end or it may privilege the political, in the sense of civilization building, but every way, even those that are nihilistic on the one hand or radically otherworldly on the other, has both spiritual and political dimensions, and these dimensions of a way are integrally bound up with each other.

This said, it should be possible for me to define, at least briefly, the way that I teach and follow and am working to define. Let me say to begin with that my way is self-consciously syncretic. Having been born Catholic, I am heir to both the way of  Hellenic philosophy and the way of Israel, and to the particular way in which these were been brought together  to define a new Catholic civilization in Europe in the years following the collapse of Hellenistic-Roman Civilization and the Roman Imperium. I am also part of a modern secular civilization which, however much I may criticize it, has shaped profoundly the way I think and live and the problems and contradictions of which have in large part defined my spiritual and political journey.  And I live in a globalized society which has posed by challenges to these ways, insights not available within my native traditions, and different approaches to forging a synthesis between foundationally very different spiritual and political traditions.

How has this all played out over more than fifty years of study and struggle?  Let me begin by stating my two starting points, starting points which remain definitive of my current way.  The first of these is the way of Hellenic philosophy, developed through the long “journey of the dialectic” which began with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, which continued in the great Muslim, Jewish, and Christian commentators, and culminated in the humanistic secularism of Hegel, Marx, and there interpreters. This way consists fundamentally of rising rationally to a first principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and human action ordered –and then ordering human action in accord with this principle, aiming ultimately at creating a collective political subject which makes humanity the master of its own destiny and, in effect divine. Most thinkers within this tradition have recognized that the resulting deification is collective only, leaving the individual finite, contingent, and alienated. And coming of age spiritually during the crisis of socialism (the traditions ultimate political expression) much of my own focus has been on understanding and coming to terms spiritually with the ultimate impossibility of divinization by means of innerworldly civilizational progress.

My second starting point was Israel’s encounter with God in the struggle with justice, a way which aims both at actually creating a just society and achieving knowledge of God, da’ath elohim in the process. This way, of course, merged with dialectics by the time of Philo, resulting in the various syntheses of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian commentators, and playing no small role in humanistic secularism. This philosophical syncretism between Athens and Jerusalem includes not only Ibn Sina, Moshe ben Maimon, and Thomas Aquinas, but also ibn Rusd and his Latin commentators, Gerhsonides and Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, and their interpreters. If it seems odd to include militant atheists in the same line with Thomas, remember where even the most radically critical dialectics has terminated. The dialectical tradition’s engagement with the God of Israel yields both Fromm’s monotheism so radical that it becomes a nontheism and Derrida’s late discovery of Justice (read Israel’s God) as the “undeconstructible.”

This way has, like all others, run up against serious challenges historically. Rabbinic Judaism is all about figuring out how to be just, and struggle for a just society, in a recalcitrantly unjust world in which the people of Israel have become a marginalized and oppressed minority. Islam, on the other hand, insists that it is indeed possible to join truth to power and command right and forbid wrong, if only we can solve the problem of leadership and institutionalization. The particular synthesis of ways into which I was born, and which represents my “native” tradition, i.e. Catholicism, takes the frustrations of the struggle for justice, symbolized by the culmination of Jesus’ own struggle on the cross, as the occasion of the “dark nights” of the soul which stretch us towards and beyond the fully human, leading to what Thomas called caritative wisdom, or a nonconceptual, experiential knowledge of God based on the supernaturally just act.  These dark nights carry us beyond a rational dialectical knowledge of God and ethical/political conduct, through the illuminative way in which we come to understand the mysteries and beauty of a universe which is not ordered to us, and ultimately towards mystical union, in which we become one with the first principle which reason showed us but which only now, and still only dimly, really begin to know.

I know that this characterization of Christianity and even Catholicism will seem alien to many who owe allegiance to those traditions. And it is, to be sure, the result of a profound confrontation with what I have come to believe are irresolvable contradictions in core Christian doctrines. As one of my students taught me more than 25 years ago, the claim that Jesus was the Jewish messiah is inherently anti-Semitic and negates the validity of the Jewish way, a validity which, by the way, the Catholic Church reaffirmed in Nostra Aetate.  If justification is not possible through works of the law but only through faith in Christ crucified, then the Jewish way just doesn’t work. But if the Jewish way does work, then Jesus of Nazareth’s death was at best a tragedy and by no means directly salvific. Similarly, as my grasp of dialectical metaphysics deepened, it became clear to me that it was quite impossible to be both finite and infinite, both necessary and contingent. And so ordinary understandings of the divinity of Jesus must be abandoned.

One response to this, of course, would be to simply embrace Judaism or Islam or some sort of Unitarianism. But I have always been deeply convinced that at the core of humanity’s spiritual drive is the desire to be God, even if spiritual growth ultimately requires us to come to terms with the fact that this is impossible. And just because the crucifixion was not salvific does not mean it was not meaningful –as a sign of the way in which Israel’s struggle for justice (and every other struggle for justice) ultimately stretches us beyond the merely human, leading us where we do not want to go (John 21:18). And while entitative deification is not possible, accidental deification, the deification taught by Cyril and Athanasius and explained by Thomas in his doctrine of connatural knowledge of God is. This is the deification which consists in loving with God’s own love and so being formed by and joined to God in such a way that we authentically share in Her nature.  And so I continue to affirm my continuity with the Catholic tradition and the compatibility of my own teaching in this regard with what Thomas taught in the Summa, even in the face of excommunication laete sententiae.

This is what my own heritage as a Catholic living in secular, radically politicized communities with large Jewish and Muslim minorities allowed me to understand and live. But this was only a stage along the way in my spiritual and political journey. A much deeper crisis was to come. Understanding that Jesus could not have been divine in the sense most Christians imagine him to be was only a first step in realizing, deeply and experientially and not just intellectually, that no one can be divine in that way and that is, in fact, a fallen spiritual aim. The critical event here was my reflection on the crisis of socialism. My work on the religious question and its place in both socialist strategy and socialist construction left me with much to contribute to the political debate which followed on the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But it was much more difficult for me to come to terms spiritually with the impossibility of the communist ideal, the ideal of creating a collective political subject which would, grasp the “conditions, line of march, and ultimately general result” of the cosmohistorical process, make humanity the authentic “subject-object” of that process, “reconciling existence and essence” and, in effect, leading to innerworldly divinization. This is in spite of the fact that one of the thinkers who influenced me most profoundly, and who formulated this ideal better than anyone else, Gyorgy Lukacs, made it clear that “for the individual, reification remains,” a problem had which obsessed me ever since I first encountered Lukacs while attending Paul Ricoeur’s lectures on Ideology and Utopia in 1975.

As I was finally coming to terms with this really, I became more and more deeply depressed. I came to believe that humanity was trapped in a “contingency hell” from which not even God could liberate us. After all, there can be only One God, and “participation” in the life of God is still not the same as Being as Such.  It is here that my serious engagement with Buddhism began. I had, to be sure, been exposed to Buddhism at a young age. My family spent time in Thailand when I was a child and I was, in part, raised by young Thai and Khmer women whose responses to my youthful temper tantrums demonstrated a calm, a firmness, and a wisdom that my mother never mastered –a response which always seemed to include a visit to some tiny street shrine and paying respect to those who had achieved a degree of enlightenment which, they gently reminded me, I had yet to attain.  But intellectually I was as much an opponent of Buddhism as I was of Protestant fundamentalism or atheistic neoliberalism.  Aristotelian, realist, politically engaged and civilizationally focused, Buddhist nominalism, the doctrine of emptiness, and what seemed like an incurably otherworldly ideal were all deeply troubling to me. And, frankly, I just didn’t buy the idea that life is suffering.

Until I realized that I did. What else is an inescapable contingency hell besides the most profound and incurable suffering –suffering for which even God is not an adequate answer?  My engagement with Buddhism began at the practical level and was assisted by my already significant engagement with the Confucian tradition, and especially with the Song Dynasty dao xue, which joined a Confucian insistence on the centrality of civilization building and a metaphysics which affirmed the priority of Being over Non-Being, with a practical integration of both Taoist natural philosophy and alchemy and Buddhist (mostly Cha’an) spiritual practice. This practice was critical in helping me come to terms with the fact that there was, in fact, no practice, political or spiritual, which would allow me or anyone else, or even humanity collectively to transcend contingency and become the “unique subject-object” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process.

Ultimately, however, I had to confront the seemingly fundamental contradictions between my Aristotelian and Hegelian philosophical commitments and my growing recognition that Buddhist practice was, in fact, illuminating. The groundwork for this had already been laid in Knowing God: the Journey of the Dialectic (Pickwick 2010) which, while affirming a metaphysics of Esse or Being, rejects the understanding of Being as substance, or self-possession in favor of a an understanding of Being as relationship, structure and organization –and ultimately as creative power or generativity. This approach allowed me to retain a number of core Aristotelian and Hegelian categories: Being, Essence, etc., while recognizing that individual participations in Being were, considered in themselves, empty of inherent existence. And even Being as such was not so much substance as relation, self-possession as a creative power that consisted in a pure and unlimited generativity.

These philosophical steps allowed me to understand clearly what Merton and other Catholics who have engaged seriously the Buddhist tradition concluded long ago: that Buddhism, especially in the tradition of prajnaparamita literature—is the apophatic theology or negative dialectics par excellence. Moving from metaphysics to spirituality or mystical theology, the message is simple. We cannot know what Being is for the simple reason that it isn’t something. We cannot know Being until we awake to the emptiness of all things in so far as the are perceived or pretend to exist in themselves. On the contrary, it is precisely through an awakening to emptiness that we discover Being as the pure power of creativity, a generativity which we know (as Moses knew yhwh) only in its passing.  The result of this realization, however, is not a nihilism or really, when properly understood, even an atheism. It is a recognition that we live in each other’s embrace and that we live by embracing others.

This said, like Merton, I continue to affirm that beyond any mystical union, as understood in the traditional Dominican reading of the Carmelite mystics and beyond any awakening to emptiness, there is a higher degree of enlightenment in which we know ourselves in and as Being.  It is, I believe, this degree of enlightenment which John Meister Eckhart sought to articulate in the fourteenth century and which the higher Mahayana and Vajrayana Schools of Buddhism point to with their doctrine of the Buddha-nature or tathagatagarbha, in which we all participate. Merton was working out this synthesis in the field of mystical theology when he died and the loss was immeasurable. It is our task to continue the work of synthesis across the sapiential and political disciplines today.

Let me say, in passing, that the resulting synthesis, even if it is forged through engagement between the ways of Hellas and Israel on the one hand, and Buddhism on the other, has much to learn from both what has come to be called Hinduism and from the dao xue. Santana dharma and the dao xue  were also forged out an engagement between the positive and negative ways: the way of the Upanishads and the Confucian ru on the one hand and the ways of the Taoists and Buddhists on the other.

So what about politics? What remains of the struggle for justice and its privileged locus as the place where we, like Israel, meet God? While I affirm the value and even necessity of spiritual practice (such as meditation) I reject the idea that this alone can lead to enlightenment. It is, rather, life –with both its beauty and its tragedies– which creates the conditions for enlightenment. Spiritual practice helps us harvest the lessons which life teaches. Of course politics is not the whole of life –there is whole business of loving and rearing children, aging and dying, all of which contribute in no small way to our spiritual development, a topic which merits further analysis and reflection. But politics is our public life, and since it has always been a constitutive dimension of my way, I want to say a bit more about politics before I close.

First, while the ideal of full enlightenment calls us to stretch beyond the merely human, we are stretched in and through human processes. The work of building civilizations and struggling for justice remains a privileged locus both for the cultivation of human capacities and for engagement with the limits of the human condition, limits which point us beyond the human and the political towards enlightenment. Second, as much as I may have come to reject as impossible the historic spiritual aim of the communist movement –the construction of a collective political subject which can make humanity the master of its destiny, i.e. divine, and believe that this fallen spiritual aim was, in fact, one of the reasons the movement often succumbed to totalitarian temptations, I continue to believe that the market is, by itself, an inadequate way of centralizing and allocating resources, for the simple reason that it is agnostic regarding questions of meaning and value and does not know what impact various activities have on the integrity of the ecosystem and the development of human capacities.   At the same time, I do not think that we really know yet how to transcend the marketplace without creating bureaucratic structures which unduly constrain autonomy and innovation and which create their own distinctive economic contradictions. I continue to believe in the necessity of conscious leadership if humanity is to progress. But I believe that this leadership must be predominantly (though not exclusively) a teaching authority and must be expressed in the context of a democratic and pluralistic polity with a strong civil society. In this sense I continue to see myself politically in the tradition of Gramsci and Silone and Mariategui.  Of course this tradition must come to terms with the fact that industry, which socialism never questioned, may well be destroying our ecosystem and that we need to transcend it in favor of revitalized and extended hortic technologies which cultivate existing potentials for growth and development rather than simply “combusting” existing organization and using the resulting energy to do work.  And we must come to terms with the fact that the “first oppression” and arguably the root of all others, is not that of some men by others, whether as social classes or peoples, but rather of women by men.

All of which brings us back to the irreducible and inescapable link between the spiritual and the political in finding our way.   I have always rejected and continue to reject the claim of the deconstructionists that it is rational metaphysics and the whole via dialectica which is behind “Western” technological ecocide, patriarchy, imperialism, and other oppressions. Quite the contrary, dialectics, as I argued in The Journey of the Dialectic, began as an attempt to overcome those oppressions. But it is, I think (as Mary Daly taught us) the failure to address the patriarchal roots of all oppression which left us open to an uncritical embrace of industrial techne on the basis of what it could do to advance human autonomy and self-mastery, and to imagine that if only we got the analysis, strategy, and tactics right we could actually become “the unique subject object” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process.  Dialectics, in this sense, is always a partial way; it must be completed by higher spiritual disciplines which carry us beyond the human desire to be God, and even beyond a recognition of the impossibility of that ideal (which is one way to describe deconstruction) towards an encounter with Justice, which Derrida calls the Undeconstructible, with which we become connatural in the supernaturally just act, through an awakening to emptiness and a realization of the impossibility of any attempt at self-possession, to the full enlightenment in which we know ourselves in and as Being. Once we understand that, we can return to dialectics and use it appropriately as both a spiritual and political weapon, and begin to chart the next steps in a civilizational project now deeply in crisis.

The following is the first installment of my work in progress, Universitas: Sapiential Leadership in an Era of Civilizational Crisis. I am sharing it in this format in order to catalyze debate –and, hopefully, sharpen my argument—before offering it for general publication. I invite your response, either through the comments section below or by email at mansueto@seekingwisdom.com, and look forward to a vigorous discussion.   

There can be little doubt that the university as an institution is in crisis. On the one hand, universities are a bigger “business” than ever. Once institutions which existed only in major civilizational centers, and then only precariously and with great difficulty, one can now find something claiming to be a university in virtually every neighborhood and suburb of every major city and in every market town of any significance in the United States, a pattern which is gradually extending itself globally. We invest more resources than ever in what has come to be called “higher education” and it plays an increasingly central role in the global grand strategy of civilizational actors at every level. On the other hand, universities have never been a more central focus of criticism across a broad political and ideological spectrum for failing to meet the diverse demands placed on them.

If we are to understand the nature of this crisis and how to respond to, we must begin by understanding the nature and origins of the university as an institution. This means situating it in the civilizational contexts in which it first emerged and the one to which it has since migrated. It is only in these contexts that we can define its mission –or the range of its possible missions— and then outline just how the university might actually fulfill that mission or those missions in the present period. This will, in turn, require addressing questions of sponsorship, governance and internal organization, financial support, and the programs of scholarship and research, teaching, and civic engagement which universities undertake.

This work is an attempt to address these questions from a very specific and well defined perspective. While this perspective has been laid out in some detail in earlier works (Mansueto 2005, 2010) we will devote significant attention to explaining and justifying it as we make our more specific argument regarding the university, since the latter will make little sense apart from that perspective. Specifically, at the sociological level, we will argue that the crisis of the university is part of a broader civilizational crisis, a crisis of the ideals to which human civilization has been ordered since sometime between 1500 and 1800 of the Common Era. Universities, we will argue, are carriers and instruments of definite civilizational ideals, and if we do not know what we are doing as a civilization we are unlikely to know what we want our universities to do.  Second, at the philosophical and theological level, I will argue for the enduring value of the ideals in service to which universities first emerged:

• the classical humanistic ideal of a political life engaged in deliberation regarding the nature of the common good and the ways in which it is best pursued and
• the spiritual ideals associated with axial and post axial traditions the pursuit of which, at least at the most advanced levels, has historically depended on (even if it has also gone beyond) the kind liberal education which also served the classical humanistic ideal.

These latter ideals, as they have come into increasing dialogue and competition with each other and with various secularisms, require such a liberal education if they are to be freely chosen and not simply embraced as a result of historical or biographical accident. Finally, I will argue on both sociological and normative, natural law grounds that it is the principal mission of the university to advance this complex of distinct, often competing, but interrelated civilizational ideals. While this does not exclude (and in fact organically includes) the cultivation of what we might call the “arts of civilization” (techne of various kinds) it is pursued first and foremost through what I call the exercise of sapiential leadership –leading deliberation among partisans of various post-axial ways of being human—and liberal education: the preparation of free human beings and citizens who can participate in this deliberation.

Closely related to this positive argument regarding what universities are for is a negative argument regarding what they cannot and should not try to do. While universities can be mobilized in the support of other civilizational ideals –whether religious fundamentalisms of various kinds or the positivistic secular ideal of transcending finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, they are in fact poorly adapted to these ends and such mobilization undercuts their ability to carry out their fundamental missions. And the currently prevailing understanding of universities as engines of economic growth is even more fundamentally flawed. This is true both at the economic level and at the substantive, normative level of what it means to be human. While universities certainly can carry out research which leads to economic growth, they are by no means the only or even the best locus for such research. And while they can train skilled intellectual labor, doing so does not by any means guarantee the entry of those so trained into some real or imagined middle class. On the contrary, as technological progress driven by research carried out by universities and other entities eliminates the need for unskilled labor and as universities train more and more skilled intellectual workers, the latter lose the monopoly rent on skill which they formally enjoyed and are increasingly proletarianized. At present only the most capable graduates of the most elite universities retain such monopoly rents, and then only if they actually produce a continuous stream of new innovations. And the privileges of this sector, as well, are threatened by the sheer numerical superiority of India and China, which can produce more high order innovators with much less per capita investment than the United States, Europe, or Japan. And while the aspiration of ordinary people to earn a living wage must never be disparaged (earning such a wage is the precondition for any broader participation in spiritual and civilizational development), merely aspiring to ever levels of consumption, apart from some higher spiritual and civilizational ideal is not worthy of our calling as human beings.

All of this, in turn, implies a variety of conclusions regarding the funding, sponsorship, governance, and internal organization of universities (including such issues as academic freedom and responsibility), the nature of the professoriate and its place in society, and the program of scholarship and research, teaching, and civic engagement in which universities should be engaged.

The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the question of what a university is, considered in relationship to the civilizational contexts in which it emerged and to which it has migrated and will conclude with a statement of the mission of universities in the present period. Chapter Two will discuss the relationship between the university and an institution with which it historically had a very close relationship –the religious order or institute of perfection and its secular successor and counterpart, the political party. This relationship is central to our understanding of the university as once foundationally pluralistic and a place in which competing ways engage each other and as a community of those seeking to actually follow a way, led by professors who are real exemplars of a that way.  Chapter Three will explore the relationship between the university as a community of scholars, the institute of perfection as a community of practitioners of a way, and the other institutions of human civilization: religious, political, economic, etc. We will devote particular attention to the difficult question of who has the authority to found and sponsor a university and authorize the granting of degrees and to the delicate problem of preserving the autonomy of the university as an institution capable of criticizing and leading while at the same time ensuring that it serves the common good. Chapter Four will look at the question of the various members of the university: the professoriate and others who enjoy a ius ubique docendi, those who have been admitted to lower degrees, and students and ex-students. We will look at the question of academic freedom and responsibility and how it relates to broader human and civil principles of free expression and civic responsibility. Among other things we will address the difficult –and I think politically pressing problem— of partial literacy and of a growing population which has been partially but not fully initiated into the ways taught in universities, a group which provides much of the broad social base for challenges to its historic rights and authority. Chapter Five will outline a range of strategies for ensuring that the mission of the university is carried out, regardless of the precise unfolding of the current civilizational crisis. Specifically, we will look at ways to reform existing universities (and institutes of perfection), ways of creating new ones, and ways of conserving their traditions under conditions which may make institutional continuity difficult.

But first we need to consider the question of what a university is, an issue we will take up in the next post.

Barak Obama and the Democratic Party have won a decisive if incomplete and uneven victory in the 2012 General Election. The victory is decisive because the Democrats overwhelmingly won two of the three the campaigns that they actually fought by a significant margin: the campaign for Electoral College votes and the campaign for the United States Senate.  The victory is incomplete because the Democrats were denied control of the House of Representatives. This is due largely to the fact that Republican state legislatures elected in 2010 drew post-census congressional district lines which undercut the Democrats’ growing demographic advantage. It is uneven because the results varied enormously across ethnoreligious and geographic lines. The fact that the President’s margin in the popular vote is rather small is irrelevant, and not only because that vote has no legal effect. Because it is the electoral vote which counts, that is what both parties campaigned for. Had the race been fought for the popular vote, the Democrats would have invested in driving up vote totals in places like Dallas and Atlanta, in states they had little hope of carrying, as well as in the major metropoles which they knew they would carry. The Republicans would have done the same in places like Orange County and Riverside County, California. We simply don’t know what the results of such a campaign would have been –or at least cannot infer it directly from the results of this campaign.

The more interesting question is what this election means. We will consider this question at a number of levels. First, we will ask what it says about the direction of the United States as a civilizational center –what it says about what it means to be an American. Second we will look at its likely impact on US global grand strategy and thus its significance for the rest of the world.  Finally, we will draw out its implications for the likely evolution of civilizational-political dynamics both in the United States and globally.

First, however, we need to be clear about some basic facts.  The Democrats fought this election, as they have previous ones, as the representatives of the more progressive sectors of Capital. But their base within Capital was much narrower than in the last election and indeed even in previous elections which they lost.  Specifically, the Democratic Party dominated fundraising from only one major sector of Capital: Communications/Electronics, which includes the Information industry. Health Care and Pharmaceuticals split their investments. Other sectors which historically leaned Democratic, such as investment capital, real estate, etc. have fled. The remainder of the Democrats’ very significant funding base came from outside Capital, and specifically from  Labor, Education, Attorneys, Health Professionals (split with Republicans) and the mostly professional middle class voters who contributed the roughly half of the ideological and single issue group donations which went to the Democrats.  The Democratic Party, in other words, while hardly a “workers party,” is less beholden to Capital than it ever has been and to the extent that it is, derives its support from Capital’s most progressive sectors:  the Information and Technology sectors. Much of its support comes from nonprofit institutions which are, to be sure, large scale holders of Capital (in the form, for example, of university endowments), albeit Capital dedicated to civilizational progress, but which also depend significantly on federal and state support for research and teaching. Thanks to his grassroots fundraising network Obama has increased enormously the ability of the Democratic Party to fund itself outside of Capital and thus to act with greater autonomy.

The Republican Party, by comparison, has locked up essentially all of the lower technology sectors of Capital. The only higher technology sector it holds, and even then not decisively, is Defense/Aerospace. Interestingly enough it has continued to lose support in the health care sector both at the level of Capital and among health care professionals.  What it has picked up is most of a finance sector which, in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis saw the effective collapse of the independent investment banking sector which often leaned Democratic.  This trend is no doubt reinforced by the decision of most investors to be cautious about investing new capital and to focus on investments which increase efficiency (and thus shed jobs) rather than on investments which create new capacity.

Elections, of course, are not won simply by raising and spending money. We also need to look at the demographic returns. These are not yet fully available, but some basic patterns are clear. The Democrats overwhelmingly dominated the urban, Northeastern/Great Lakes, West Coast vote, the non-Euro-American vote, and the votes of those whose religious identity is other than Christian. Democrats also won the women’s vote and continued to make enormous progress in historically Republican but increasingly global and diverse suburbs in major metropolitan areas.  Republicans won the, rural, exurban/outersuburban, Southern, and Great Plains vote. The Mountain West was split, largely between states with significant metropoles and large Latino populations (New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada) and those without. Republicans won the “white” vote decisively and the “white male” vote overwhelmingly.

The only real exceptions to the broad geopolitical patterns are some pockets of Democratic strength in South Texas, El Paso del Norte, and rural New Mexico (all strong Latino areas) and up and down the Mississippi/Missouri river valley (which is the site of a large historic African American population , several medium metropoles which are not large enough to dominate their respective states (New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City) and Iowa, which has a small city/university town, monastery culture which is strongly pro-civilizational. The only major exception to the basic demographic pattern is that Democrats showed that they can win white male working class voters when they do something significant to benefit this sector economically. Thus the impact of the auto bailout in Ohio.

***

What does this all mean? First, at a civilizational level, it represents a continuing re-definition of what it means to be an American –a move away from the conceptions of the United States as a white, Christian nation and towards a deeper embrace of de Tocquevillian pluralism.  The United States is, first and foremost, a place where competing civilizational ideals thrive side by side, contending with each other but also learning from each other in a public arena which has the potential at least to become the locus of real deliberation regarding questions of meaning and value.  The Republican strategy of playing to white racism –the dominant strategy of that party since 1968, and quite successful in many elections— is no longer demographically viable. Even with solid white support and overwhelming white male support, the Republicans cannot hold the Electoral College. And if the Democrats choose to, they can chip away at Republican control of the white male working class vote simply by doing a few things which modestly benefit those voters, something they have been, for reasons we will discuss later, very reluctant to do.

At the same time, we should point out that this redefinition of what it means to be American is demographically driven and geographically constrained.  It is only in major metropoles that the understanding of the  United States as defined by its civilizational pluralism is really hegemonic. Much of the vast territory of the United States outside the Northeast, Great Lakes, West Coast, and Mississippi/Missouri valleys and outside urban centers in other parts of the country retains a resolutely “white” “Christian (read evangelical Protestant) identity.

At the level of strategy, the Democratic victory represents an embrace, if not fully conscious or consistent, of what might be called the United States’ natural civilizational strategy.  In order to understand this strategy we need first to consider the United States’ global comparative advantages –and challenges.

First, as a continental polity, US enjoys unusually diverse resource base, including both outstanding arable land, extensive pastures, abundant energy sources, from fossil and radioactive fuels through water, wind, and solar power, and abundant minerals. As George Friedman of Stratfor has pointed out, our rivers make the transportation of agricultural, extractive, and manufactured goods relatively easy.  While we are not fully self-sufficient, at least at the standard required by a postindustrial economy, and while our geography offers us numerous opportunities to engage the global market, it allows us enough self-sufficiency to be rather picky about the nature of that engagement. And our domination of the continent, reaching from coast to coast, leaves us singularly invulnerable to foreign attack.

Second, because it is more immigrant-friendly than all but a very few highly developed countries, and because immigrants themselves tend to have higher birthrates, the United States is in a better position demographically than, say, most of Europe or East Asia. This does not mean that we do not face a challenge in funding income transfers and medical care for an aging population, but we have rather more room than most other developed countries.

Third, the United States continues to enjoy a comparative advantage in high end innovation. This is due, on the one hand, to our constitutive diversity and pluralism and to an educational system which has continued liberal education through beginning university studies and which has invested heavily in basic as well as applied scholarship and research. It is this same commitment to liberal education which has made it possible for the United States to accommodate growing civilizational pluralism. Liberal education is the condition for engaging questions of meaning and value across civilizational lines and thus for polity which is both civilizationally pluralistic and (relatively) democratic.

Finally, our historic commitment to high levels of consumption and relatively low rates of exploitation for our own population, while sometimes secured at the expense of other peoples, has forced a “high road” development strategy by making low skill, low wage production unprofitable, creating favorable conditions for human development. This in turn supports investments in education which increase the value of labor power and, as I will argue in an upcoming article, gives us a comparative advantage in trade and a naturally strong currency. It also gives us an unusual  kind of clout –as a global market. Export platform economies with which we may otherwise be in competition (e.g. Germany and China) are unlikely to try to inflict fatal damage on one of their most important markets.

With regard to our challenges, the following stand out:

First, the United States has failed to invest in the development of ecologically sound energy sources and transportation infrastructure, something in which we lag behind Europe and probably Japan, leaving us more dependent than we need to be on ecologically damaging and gradually depleting fossil fuels. While we have essentially no reason to fear external military threats properly understood (i.e. foreign invasion), this leaves us dependent on both our own reactionary extractive hinterlands and reactionary extractive states, distorting both our own public life and our foreign policy and leading to the unnecessary transfer of surplus to those who hold the rights to petroleum and other mineral rents.  Our position as a global exporter of grain and other crops as well as the viability of many of our coastal cities is threatened by global climate change.

Second, our population has become so diverse that it requires a transformation in our identity as a people. There is significant resistance to this transformation, as indicated by the high Republican vote totals and support for draconian anti-immigration measures in large parts of the country.  Unless our embrace of pluralism as constitutive of American identity becomes hegemonic, large parts of the country will continue to be left behind in development and the country as a whole will be held back.

Third, our comparative advantage in innovation is threatened by demands to reform the educational system in a way that more closely meets short term labor market needs. More precisely, the historic efficacy of higher education as a mechanism for upward social mobility and income growth is reaching its limit as developing countries like China and India, with much lower per capita investments but much larger populations flood the global market with skilled labor, making incomes for which ordinary university level education once sufficed accessible only to a tiny elite able to earn monopoly rents on skill and innovation –something which Robert Reich pointed out in his Work of Nations some 20 years ago. This in turn increases pressure for educational reform which, if implemented, will undercut our long term comparative advantage in innovation –as well our capacity to engage in public deliberation regarding questions of meaning and value across civilizational lines.

Fourth, because our comparative advantage in high end innovation is threatened and the monopoly rents on skill enjoyed by broad layers of our population are coming to an end as India and China flood the global market with skilled labor, our position as a low exploitation/high consumption and thus “high road” economy is also threatened. We can maintain our comparative advantage in high end innovation, but this is unlikely to engage the entire population. And if it did, then (in a market economy) the resulting monopoly rents would vanish. In a technologically innovative global free market economy the average wage rate will decline –ultimately towards zero (the point which is reached when all routine labor is automated). We cannot become a pure high-end export enclave like Singapore, for the simple reason that the sheer size of our population would undercut the monopoly rents at which such a strategy aims. That road is open only the city states. Nor can we follow Germany’s strategy of linking high levels of investment with a currency devalued by the partial integration of less developed countries into the Eurozone. The greater level of political integration in the US ensures that development gradually spreads to all geographic areas. And in the meanwhile, less developed areas, which are over-represented (because of the structure of the US Senate) undercut the implementation of such a strategy. Finally, for the same reason, we cannot remake ourselves on the model of India or China, integrating high end export enclaves with an impoverished hinterland. Assuming that it is able to secure its comparative advantage in innovation, the United States will have to find a new way to ensure that the resulting prosperity is shared. And this will require challenging the market allocation of resources —and thus our addiction to the (always illusory, for the vast majority) prospect of getting rich.

The United States understood as a cosmopolitan, civilizationally pluralistic project supported by an outstanding resource base, continued high levels of immigration, and an educational system which prepares people to innovate and engage questions of meaning and value across civilizational lines –and which finds some meaning beyond material consumption– has excellent prospects. The United States as a petroleum fueled white Christian nation with an educational system which trains skilled slaves for the global market is dead.

What I am calling our natural global grand strategy flows directly from a correct understanding of these comparative advantages and challenges.  First, we need to secure our resource advantages and improve our position vis-à-vis the threat of resource depletion and climate change by developing new technologies, especially ecologically sound energy sources and transportation infrastructure. We also need to begin to prepare for the impact of climate change on both agriculture and key urban centers, an impact which is probably now unavoidable if not necessarily inevitably devastating.

Second, we need to consolidate our demographic advantage by institutionalizing a policy of effectively open borders, limited only by legitimate security and law enforcement concerns.  This in turn requires that we consolidate the emerging American identity as a multiethnic, radically pluralistic polity and not the white Christian nation which so many still imagine us to be. We also need to plan for the eventual ebb of the immigrant tide as other countries resolve the internal problems which lead their most creative people to leave by strengthening support for high investment parenting and childrearing, providing generous subsidies for families with children, free day care and after school care, etc.

Third, we need to consolidate and strengthen our comparative advantage in high end innovation and our ability to create and sustain a civilizationally pluralistic polity by reaffirming our support for liberal education through the university level and our support for basic as well as applied scholarship and research.  Clayton Christensen, in a recent article in the New York Times (3 November 2012) argues that there are three types of innovations: empowering innovations, which make complex products and services available to a mass market, sustaining innovations, which replace existing products and services with better but not fundamentally different ones, and efficiency innovations, which introduce no new products or services but simply make the production of existing goods and services more efficient. Empowering innovations, he says, create new jobs because more people are needed to produce the new goods and services in question. Sustaining innovations replace jobs being eliminated by the phasing out of existing products. Efficiency innovations directly reduce the number of jobs.

I would suggest that there is a fourth type of innovation: fundamental innovations which create new civilizational capacities. Both from the vantage point of the substantively rational imperative of authentic civilizational progress and from the vantage point of creating jobs we need to invest first in fundamental, then in empowering innovations. Currently most innovations are directed at increasing efficiency, something dictated by the New Finance doctrine which encourages investors to increase returns first and foremost by reducing costs.

At the same time, we need to be honest with the American people about why we are investing in education and research. In an unregulated global market economy characterized by continued technological innovation the wages of most will decline (ultimately towards zero) even as their skill levels increase and that only those able to earn monopoly rents on skill and innovation (maybe 1/10 of 1%) will escape impoverishment.  This outcome can be avoided in the long run only by transcending the market order. (The same is true if the impoverished multitudes of the developing world are to escape from the low wage regimes which currently makes investment in their economies so attractive). Unfortunately we do not currently know how to do this. Historic socialism turned out to be a strategy for accelerating a particular phase of industrial development in a certain group of “left behind” or neocolonial societies. It has not turned out to be the strategy for transcending the market order which Marx hoped it would be. And we have not yet discovered a new way. The principal reason to invest in research and education is because they contribute directly to human development and civilizational progress.  The second reason is that they provide a way to ameliorate the downward pressure of globalization and technological progress on wages while capturing their potential contributions to human development and civilizational progress. This means modifying market outcomes by directly investing in fundamental and empowering innovations. But even this is unlikely to be enough. We need to make a commitment to an allocation of resources which allows everyone to continue to participate securely not just in production but in the development of their own capacities, in the life their communities, and in the spiritual disciplines of their choosing.

This latter change, in turn, means that the United States is going to have to discover, through its pluralistic engagement with competing civilizational ideals, some new source of meaning beyond economic growth. While the neoliberal claim that income transfers are always bad for growth is unfounded, they cannot be consistently defended if growth is our only aim. And growth itself is not an end but a means. Historically, it was legitimated by the positivistic secular ideal of transcending finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, an ideal which has now been largely rejected. Growth as a means of increased consumption is not a civilizational ideal but an abandonment of the human civilizational project in favor of what Plato called the “city of sows.”  It is my conviction that we will find this ideal in the deep truth, revealed by our civilizational pluralism, that there are diverse paths of human civilizational and spiritual development, and that most, if not all, are worth investment. Ensuring individuals and communities the room to choose their paths and the resources necessary to follow them is the only way to transform the global crisis of positivistic secularism and industrial capitalist society into the matrix for the emergence of something new and beautiful.

Thus far this analysis has focused primarily on the United States. That is because in spite of its objectively imperial role in the global system, the United States is a distinctive society with its own internal dynamics and imperatives and because it is these imperatives which, largely if not exclusively, drive the outcome of US elections. But the internal logic of the analysis has clear implications for humanity as a whole.  The logic of US society –at least the US society which has a future– points beyond any particular identity or interest towards an identification with the interests of humanity as a whole. If the United States is to secure its comparative advantages it will have to cease being petroleum fueled white Christian nation with an industrial economy dedicated to maximizing growth and consumption. Indeed, it will have to cease being any particular nation at all. It will have to understand its own development as catalyst for and participation in the development of humanity generally. It will have to understand human civilization as a participation in the larger cosmohistorical evolutionary process.  And it will have to understand that process as a participation in a mystery so great that it can never be definitively named.

In this way, even as the United States, with its recalcitrantly religious population, points beyond any possible white Christian identity, it also points beyond Marx’s secularism towards a strange and surprising possibility: that beyond fundamentalism and secularism Marx’s vision of a society devoted to the full development of human capacities might still have salience, and that the United States, which so long understood itself as the global adversary of that vision, might rediscover in it its own deepest identity. Warren Wagar, in his Brief History of the Future described just such a scenario in which the United States, led by its first “ethnic minority’ President, played a leading role in humanity’s response to climate change and capitalist crisis. Who knows?

***

Where do the parties stand with respect to this vision and this strategy? The Democratic Party, as we noted above, finds its base primarily among the most progressive sectors of capital (information and technology), in universities and other philanthropic institutions, among the professional middle classes profiting from globalization and information sector innovation, and among immigrants and ethnic minorities. President Obama’s greatest achievement is the development of an effective nationwide electoral mobilizing and fundraising machine, which has increasingly liberated the party from Capital, even as Capital has been abandoning it, and which has given the professional middle class and ethnic minorities’ electoral weight which is gradually compensating for the decline of organized labor.

The Democratic Party program tracks our recommended strategy quite well, even if it continues to be constrained by the party’s (declining) dependence on progressive sectors of Capital and the relatively weak (but increasing) weight  of the working classes in the class alliance which it represents. The only area in which the program is inherently weak is on the question of the aims of education and the reluctance to engage in straightforward income transfers to support consumption. This is partly because progressive sectors of Capital and rentierized professionals continue to dominate the party and understand that universal access to liberal education will undercut their children’s access to monopoly rents on skill and innovation. But it is mostly because the people as a whole have not yet relinquished their fantasy of someday getting rich. Because the support of the people depends on the promise of continuing upward mobility, it is difficult for the Democratic Party to be honest about the real function of universities and resist pressures to undertake ill-conceived measures designed to make them more efficient engines of upward mobility and short term economic growth.  It is also difficult to be honest that only income transfers will secure generalized prosperity.

With respect to the other challenges facing the country, the principal constraints are external to the Democratic Party coalition. Republican control of the House will make it all but impossible to make needed investments in ecologically sustainable energy sources and transportation infrastructure and support for high investment parenting. It will also be difficult to get authentic immigration reform, though the Republican Party is likely to divide on this question.  There is also real danger that pressure from finance capital and political stalemate between the two parties will force more draconian action on the debt and deficit than is consistent with long term development.

The Republican Party, by the time of the 2008 election, had been transformed largely into a vehicle of the most backward sectors of Capital, especially in the extractive sector, supported by a broad coalition of “left behind’ elements across classes that had fared poorly under a regime of globalization and information-sector innovation. Since then, the party has improved its position with Capital, largely as a result of the turn of one sector of Capital after another to a strategy focused on efficiency investments –when they are investing at all. This amounts to dis-investing in Civilization. It has maintained and even consolidated its base among the “left-behind,” largely by presenting itself as the defenders of the “white Christian nation” variant of American identity. Concretely this has meant a draconian stand on immigration, which effectively cost the party the Latino vote and vocal but not very effective advocacy for conservative social policy (i.e. opposition to abortion, gay marriage, etc.).

As we have argued in earlier articles, the depth of the current civilizational crisis makes it impossible to speak of a “ruling class” in the classical historical materialist sense of a class defined by its position in the relations of production which exercises largely uncontested hegemony over the social formation.  This is because apart from a compelling and shared civilizational ideal, such hegemony is impossible. Only a few sectors of Capital –the most progressive—are currently trying to rule, and they are able to do so only in the context of an increasingly broad popular and progressive alliance. The Democratic Party is the natural and historic vehicle for this alliance and the really important debates in US politics will be fought out inside the Democratic Party, between its properly capitalist, rentierized petty bourgeois, and working class elements.  These struggles will be over both substantive questions (the extent of the party’s embrace of the “natural” US strategy outlined above) and strategic questions. It is of particular importance that the party learn the lessons of the auto industry bailout and consolidate its electoral position by acting the improve the position of white working class voters, especially those hurt by the collapse of the housing market.

The Republican Party will most likely undergo a period of soul searching as it tries to come to terms with the collapse of the “white Christian nation” strategy which has served it so well since 1968. This will be difficult since there is currently no way for it to become a stable majority party. Its best hope is to return to a variant of the strategy pursued by liberal Republicans in the post New Deal Era, when they accepted the need for a welfare state but argued that it should be administered as much as possible through intermediate institutions and with as little bureaucracy as possible. The result was the development of some very creative policy proposals (e.g. negative income tax for low income families) which deserved implementation but presented no credible threat to the New Deal majority. “Liberal” Republicanism was above all socially and culturally liberal and based in the liberal Protestant churches (a reason for its decline). Adaptation of such a strategy to the present period will likely mean adopting a “social conservative but juridically tolerant” stance which fully accepts pluralism and just insists that it include the possibility of following a socially conservative ideal. Modifying the market order through the institutions of civil society, rather than the state remains a fruitful idea, though it is by no means foreign to the contemporary Democratic Party, especially its Clinton and Obama wings, which have largely captured the political and policy terrain once held by liberal Republicans. So this is not a strategy for a Republican majority. But then I am a Democrat … What it does is to suggest how the Republican Party might play the role of a loyal and effective –and procivilizational— opposition rather than an obstructionist and anticivilizational cabal, and ensure its own meaningful survival in the process.  The Republican Party of the future –if there is to be one—needs to be a party of Red Tories.

There are many, no doubt, who will regard this analysis as too optimistic. Let me be clear that there are grave dangers ahead and that it is by no means certain that the  Democratic Party will be able to complete the transformation it has begun and lead the United States in an even deeper transformation. And it certainly will not do this without conscious leadership from real visionaries, who are few and far between in the electoral arena. There is a continuing important role for those of us who have been called to speak the truth as best we can, even when it is uncomfortable, and who take a much longer durée approach than any electoral organism ever could. But things look much better now than they did two or even four years ago. The victory of 2008 has been confirmed and we are ready to take the next steps.

Let’s be sure we do.

Just a few years ago, faced with mounting evidence of the inadequacy of classical theories of secularization, scholars were struggling to understand and theorize the “return of religion,” something represented, on the one hand by movements on the political and cultural Left such as liberation theology and the New Age and, on the other hand, by movements on the Right such as Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.  This “return of religion” has been the occasion of numerous theoretical innovations, from deconstructionist Acts of Religion and “weak theologies” of the sort undertaken by the late Derrida, Badiou, Zizek, Agamben, and Caputo through the very different critiques of secularism (different from deconstructionism and from each other) mounted by John Milbank and myself.  It is not without interest, therefore, that the WIN-Gallup International “Religion and Atheism Index” shows a drop of 9 percentage points in the number of people globally who regard themselves as “religious” (from 77% to 68%) between 2005 and 2012, as well as an increase of 3 percentage points in the number who consider themselves “atheists.”

There are, to be sure, numerous problems with such studies, which, among other things, shed no light at all on what people mean when they say they are “religious” (or not). And of course being religious and believing in God are two quite different things. Nor does the survey address the widespread phenomenon of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” This said, I am inclined to believe that the data point to something real, something which I have sensed diffusely over the course of the past six or seven years. People are tired. They are tired of being preached at and judged and manipulated politically by religious leaders who claim to offer a solution to the crisis of modern, secular civilization but who in reality offer no such thing, and are simply exploiting their longing for meaning and their spiraling despair. And this is true both on the cultural left and on the cultural right and is reflected across most of humanity’s great spiritual traditions, if perhaps most intensely in Christianity and Islam (where the “return of religion” was most evident).

There are a number of reasons which might be cited for this change in mood. The first, of course, is the “new atheist” offensive of people like Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens. This seems unlikely, however. The new atheism is intellectually thin and misses the fact that religion asks different questions than science (why? rather than how?), a fact that this is admittedly also lost on most fundamentalists. At most the new atheism has made it a bit more difficult for scientists to engage religion (partially countering the very large religion and science literature produced mostly by scientists during the immediately preceding period, much of which was intellectually sloppy), challenging them to rally to the defense of more or less established scientific results, such as evolution. But this is, in my experience, largely a phenomenon of biology and has had much less effect in physics, which was always the center of the religion/science dialogue.

More relevant, I think, is the gradual recognition on the part of the people of the scope and depth of the sex abuse scandal in the planet’s largest single religious institution, the Roman Catholic Church.  It is no longer possible to deny that the sexual abuse of children, if not universal, is at least pandemic in the Catholic Church and deeply bound up with longstanding patterns of recruitment and initiation into the priesthood and religious communities of men.  It is not that all or most or even very many Catholic priests are pedophiles; it is that so many who are not have tolerated or even been drawn into practices which are universally abhorred by every or nearly every tradition on the planet, including their own. And this dynamic is, in turn, deeply bound up with the misogyny support for which the party in power in the Vatican has made the condition for continued communion with Rome.

And the crisis of the Roman Catholic Church is the crisis of every religious institution. Catholicism has cooked up its own particularly potent psychosexual brew, but it has no monopoly on misogyny or psychosexual abuse. The crisis of Rome can only draw attention to the extent to which Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism and so much of the rest of the religious right is about oppressing women.

This is not, however, sufficient by itself to explain the turn away from the return of religion. Coming from a Sicilian family I was raised, in significant measure, within an anticlerical milieu which was founded as much or more on the clergy’s reputation for sexual misconduct as on any political or philosophical considerations. My parents monitored my relationships with priests carefully and investigated any lingering in the sacristy during my tenure as an altar boy as carefully as they would have a similar lingering in a public restroom in a seedy neighborhood. Many of my relatives had nothing to do with the institutional church except at rite of passage ceremonies. Others, like my father, made their peace with it, but never lost a skepticism that seemed directed exclusively at priests as opposed to specific doctrines or devotions. But even those who kept away from churches entirely were deeply religious, their homes filled with statues of the Virgin and the lives with private devotions. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they were “spiritual but not religious” avant le mot.

And it is not like the recognition of religious misogyny is either new or the private monopoly of the militantly secular. On the contrary, the most penetrating critics of religious misogyny (e.g. Mary Daly) have themselves been feminist theologians and much of the spiritual awakening of the past few decades has centered around the recovery of the feminine expressions of the sacred.

The scandal in the Catholic Church –and its official reaffirmation of its commitment to misogyny—along with parallel developments in other traditions has catalyzed some significant withdrawal from engagement with religious institutions. But I doubt very much that it has affected spirituality or religiosity at a deeper level.

A third explanation for the turn away from the “return of religion” is the fact that first the political movements of the religious left (e.g. liberation theology) and now the political movements of the religious right (Christian fundamentalism and Islamism) have been more or less soundly defeated. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of the socialism deprived the liberationist trend of the strategic reserve it needed to mount a credible contest for power and thus undercut the eschatological fervor which drove the movement in between, say 1968 and 1985. Being effectively silenced by Rome, and accepting the silencing, didn’t help. And it is increasingly clear that the efforts of al Qaeda and the like are not going to lead to a restored Caliphate leading a united Dar-al-Islam in commanding right and forbidding wrong through the world.

Or have they been defeated? There is, in fact, evidence that they have met a worse fate still: modest, incremental success.  Liberationists of one stripe or another, or leaders sympathetic to them, govern more countries now (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and until recently Paraguay), on the basis of more or less free elections, than they had any reason to believe they could  take and hold by insurrection or popular war in 1980. And electoral Islamism of various stripes is proving itself quite effective in the wake of the Arab Spring, building on its success in Turkey.

The problem is governing.  People embraced liberation theology and Islamism because they had rejected the modern, secular ideals of deification by means of scientific and technological progress or the construction of a collective political subject and sought to re-situate the human civilizational project in a broader spiritual context which could at once ground their innerworldly aspirations for social justice and point beyond them towards authentic transcendence.  But governments do not create new civilizational ideals, much less a “new humanity.” At their best, they carry out land reforms and build roads and schools and clinics and create the conditions for economic development. If need be they defend their countries against aggression and oppression. At worst they shamelessly serve as the henchmen of the already wealthy, leverage political power to create private wealth, imprison and torture dissidents and occasionally carry out genocides. The only thing more disappointing than military defeat at the hands of the Empire is modest success at the polling place and a resulting obligation to meet eschatological expectations with mundane public policy initiatives.

This disappointment takes a particular form for the Christian fundamentalism which has been so influential in the United States. For three decades now the Republican Party has relied on the militance of Christian fundamentalists of various stripes who have worked the precincts for them, literally and figuratively, in the expectation that, once in power, they would outlaw abortion, draw a firm line against gay marriage, and in general save them from the chaos and social disintegration of late modernity. This group remains powerful enough that it is essentially impossible to win the Republican nomination for any major office outside of Maine without passing their (increasingly stringent) litmus tests. But in spite of many years of Republican government, abortion remains legal, the cause of gay marriage continues to advance, and the world is as frightening and chaotic as ever (at least to those who found it so in the first place).  The core of the religious right has responded by calling the bluff of increasingly more conservative “mainstream” Republicans, so that the people they are now targeting (e.g. Richard Lugar) are the very people who came to power on the first iteration of the social conservative strategy in the late 19060s and early 1970s. Opposing abortion is no longer enough. One must promise to outlaw contraception as well.  But in the process the religious right has scared its base, which is looking for stability and security, not upheaval.

Another way of looking at this is to say that the changes which the “return of religion” in both its left and right forms proposed to forestall have now largely taken place. The global market is triumphant. Another wave of peasants have been ripped off the land and thrown or lured into the cities.  Nation states and national cultures have been weakened, as have traditional institutions such as marriage. But the world has not come to an end. Second generation liberationists manage the integration of their economies into the global market, making at most a few modifications in the terms of trade. Next gen evangelicals, much to their parents’ dismay, are fine with gay marriage and can’t really understand what all the fuss is about. Whatever one thinks about these changes, one can only remain enraged for so long. Eventually you adapt or die or both.

The “turn away from the return of religion” is, from this point of view, just a very ordinary case of eschatological disappointment.

But is this all that is going on? Does the weakness of the ideologies of the “return” (again, both on the left and right) consist exclusively in the eschatological, or at any rate unreasonable political expectations that they created among their constituencies?

I think that the reality is, in fact, more complex. As I have argued elsewhere, humanity is in the early stages of a civilizational crisis. The modern secular ideal of transcending finitude and/or contingency by means of innerworldly civilizational progress (an ideal which is secular because it is innerworldly, but also spiritual or religious in the sense of ordering humanity towards a transcendental end) has largely been rejected, but nothing has emerged to take its place. Both liberationism and fundamentalism are ideologies of the earliest and, I think, now largely past stages of this crisis. Catholic liberationism, in its founding text, Gaudium et Spes, attempted to situate innerworldly civilizational progress in the context of a larger transhistorical vocation: participation in the life of God. Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and dao xue liberationisms, such as they were, attempted something similar with respect to their own specific understandings of humanity’s final end and highest Good. In this sense, liberationism really did represent an attempt to transcend modern humanistic and positivistic secularism and achieve a higher synthesis. But in practice, as Roger Lancaster pointed out in his 1987 book Thanks to God and the Revolution, it functioned as a linking ideology, binding social strata that were resisting or seeking to transcend modernity to what was essentially a still unreconstructed modern, secular, socialist project. That is not to say that nothing good came out of, or is currently coming out of, the regimes the movement helped create. On the contrary. But where people thought they were getting something radically new –a society ordered to the full development of their latent potential, rather than to using them as batteries to fuel economic development, instead they got a somewhat better deal as batteries.

The situation with fundamentalism is rather different. While it is a commonplace that fundamentalism is antimodern, as I have indicated elsewhere I do not believe that this is the case. Fundamentalism, rather, represents an attempt to return to early modern civilizational patterns centered on the ideal of divine sovereignty. It is an attempt to invoke this ideal as a replacement to the failed ideals of human political and technological sovereignty. This is why there is no Buddhist fundamentalism, in the strict sense (no God, no fundamentalism) and why Hindu fundamentalism is rather weak. But early modernity’s focus on divine sovereignty dissipated for a reason. Democracy and the market order both undercut the basis in experience for a single, univocal sovereign God. And while it might, at first, seem more meaningful to serve as a battery for God than for a large corporation or party-state, what people really want is not to be treated like batteries.

So what does this all imply, especially for those of us who have been a part of the “return of religion,” who reject not only theories of secularization but secularism as a civilizational ideal?

Let us begin by making it clear that religion did not, in fact, return, because it never really went away. Secularism, as we have noted above, is an attempt to transcend finitude and contingency by innerworldly means. If one wants to call this a spirituality, rather than a religion, that is fine, but various religions, in the sense of structures and institutions ordered to achieving this end accompanied the spirituality (Capitalism, Socialism). Pitting itself against religion was part of secularism’s way of concealing its real identity as innerworldly godbuilding. We might, to be sure, object that “late” modern or “postmodern” secularism is different, and itself represents first and foremost a rejection of the modernist godbuilding metanarrative. But when it is extended into a rigorous deconstruction of all metanarratives (itself just a generalization of Marx’s commitment to “a rigorous critique of everything existing”), it terminates, as the late Derrida demonstrated, in the undeconstructible, the demand for Justice which is just another name (Israel’s name, to be precise) for God.

Spirituality and religion, furthermore, will never go away. Being human means, as Sartre put it years ago, (noisome atheist that he was) the desire to be God. Even if we conclude that this is impossible, (as do Buddhists and existentialists) we must come to terms with that conclusion in the light of the underlying aim. And we seek God, or come to terms with God’s absence or impossibility, through definite structures and institutions. When people say that they are spiritual but not religious they are simply marking the beginning of a civilizational crisis. They are still seeking to transcend finitude and contingency, or to come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. It is just that no existing traditions or institutions provide them with a satisfying way. And so they window shop or free lance or seek using a private and idiosyncratic discipline.

This said, what I call the current Burnt Over Era offers us very precise lessons. The term (originally Burnt Over District), for those not familiar with it, is due to Charles Grandison Finney, founder of Christian perfectionism and sometime president of Oberlin College, who used it to describe conditions in Western New York in the 1830s, after so many revivals and reform movements had been through that there was no one left to convert. More broadly the term marks the profound disappointment which accompanied the realization that the visionary spiritual and civilizational project of the Second Great Awakening, after years of revival and reform and Civil War, led ultimately just to modern industrial capitalism. And this, of course, was the matrix out of which Christian fundamentalism (which rejected the identification of Kingdom building and civilization building in favor of a pessimistic premillenial eschatology) was first born.

If we are to respond effectively to the spiritual searching represented by the so called “return of religion,” and by the growing numbers who describe themselves as “spiritual” even as they distance themselves from “religion,” then we need to offer something which is authentically different from the modern secular ideal which makes human beings into batteries. This means situating innerworldly civilizational progress in a broader spiritual context, to be sure. But it also means redefining innerworldly civilizational progress in a way which makes it fundamentally about human development, technological, economic, political, and cultural but also and most importantly spiritual. We must, in other words stop using spiritual authority to advance innerworldly ends, and begin to organize and reorganize this world in a way that actually cultivates human excellence. Just what this means, of course, depends on how we answer some of the most fundamental questions which divide humanity’s great spiritual traditions. But I suspect that at least some of the answers will come as those traditions engage each other, thinking together about how to articulate the “innerworldly” (e.g. the demand for Justice) and the “otherworldly” (the pursuit of an Enlightenment which carries us beyond ordinary humanity) in a way which makes neither merely an instrument of the other.

Subsequent articles will explore this question in greater depth. It is, in fact, one of the principal aims of the Convivencia theology which I will introduce in this space shortly. In the meantime I invite continued dialogue.

Public liturgy may not, as Giorgio Agamben has claimed, be the foundation of public power. But public liturgies do, nonetheless, say something important about the shared assumptions of those who exercise power, and they help to shape as well as to express the teleological ordering of the civilizations which undertake them.  This is true even when, as was no doubt the case with the Opening Ceremonies of the Thirtieth Olympiad of the Modern Era, the organizers are almost certainly something less than fully aware of what they are saying.

Following Beijing and other recent Olympic Opening Ceremonies, the basic structure of the liturgy was that of a –very selective— reading of British history. The pastoral landscape of premodern England, represented by Glastonbury Tor, is literally ripped up by the forces of the Industrial Revolution, led by a group of top-hatted bankers. The fire-pit of modern industry, in turn, gives way to a digital era love story. There are only passing references to the Celtic heritage, no Anglo Saxon invasion, no Norman invasion, no Magna Carta, no Reformation or English Revolution, no labor movement, no colonialism or anticolonial struggles, and no heroic war against fascism. The Irish Question, without which the title Isles of Wonder (in the plural) makes no sense, was invisible.

It is, of course, not unusual for Olympic host countries to present an edited version of their own history. China, after all, left out not only the Cultural Revolution but the whole of its modern revolutionary history. The Salt Lake Olympics, while gesturing towards Native American history, did so in a way which avoided dwelling on the realities of conquest and genocide. We expect the host country to focus attention on its contributions to the human civilizational project, and not on its failures. The question is which contributions it chooses to highlight. The English (and was clearly their liturgy, not that of the many peoples of the modern United Kingdom) chose to highlight its role as the pioneer of the Industrial and Information Revolutions.

Or did it? Like every liturgy, the London ceremonies contain their own hermeneutic key.  In this case the key is H. Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s Jerusalem, which was sung by a children’s choir during the early part of the ceremony.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

The poem itself, of course , is at once patriotic and deeply self-critical  –even revolutionary— in intent, calling to account a society which claimed for itself the heritage of Christendom only to have instead built Satanic mills in which the accumulated organic and social capacity of millions was sacrificed on the altar of “progress.”  But in the context of the London ceremonies, the poem a different  function. It serves to mark clearly the significance of the sacred place in which the liturgy unfolds: Glastonbury Tor.

Glastonbury is, for those who are not steeped in Arthurian lore, the legendary site of the Isle of Avalon and thus the final resting place of King Arthur. There is a long tradition, invoked by Blake’s poem, which says that Jesus visited there as young man along with Joseph of Arimathea and that the later eventually returned bearing the chalice which became known as the Holy Grail. Glastonbury is, in other words, the symbolic center of English claims to anchor Christendom.

It is with this in mind that we must turn to the conclusion of the ceremony: the parade of nations, during which athletes from every participating country came and planted their flag on the soil of Glastonbury, only to be ultimately surmounted not only by the Olympic Flag but by an even more prominent Union Jack (which, we must remember, is a flag of three unequally displayed crosses: those of St Patrick and St. Andrew with that of St. George superimposed over them).

What is the significance of the nations planting their flags, below that of the United Kingdom, on Glastonbury Tor? We are reminded of another hill to which the nations are supposed to stream.

 In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious ….

 He will raise a banner for the nations
and gather the exiles of Israel;
he will assemble the scattered people of Judah
from the four quarters of the earth. (Isaiah 12)
 

Glastonbury, legendary site of the Grail, is Jerusalem and England, as the post-reformation seat of the true Christendom, is the true Israel to which –the brutality of industrialization and empire notwithstanding— the peoples nonetheless still stream, setting their banners below hers.

All this puts in a very different light the refusal of the Olympic Committee to allow a moment of silence at the ceremonies in recognition of those who died at Munich 40 years ago.  It is not a question of such a somber moment being “inappropriate” in the context of the Olympic Celebration. Nor should it be allowed to pass on the grounds that the Palestinians (and countless other peoples) have also suffered, which they certainly have. It is, rather, that honoring the real, historical Israel would have undercut the imperial subtext of the liturgy and the enduring imperial reality which it founds.

There is, of course, a way to make this all seem much more palatable. Blake’s poem is social criticism. And there are ways in which the nations have streamed to London of which London and the United Kingdom should be proud. London is a great world city and the UK far more immigrant friendly than many places in Europe.

But this is not what the ceremonies were celebrating. Careful observers will have noted that among the cultural artifacts implicitly claimed for the UK by the ceremonies, more than a few were actually from the US.  From the vantage point of the British –from the vantage point of the imperium founded and refounded by the London Ceremonies—it is all one empire. The potestas may be exercised by the United States, but the auctoritas and gloria remain English.  Washington governs but London still reigns.

What difference does this make? Can’t the English be allowed to indulge in a bit of patriotic fancy? Of course they can. Certainly the US and Canada and China and every other recent host has done the same.  And did the (ethnically Irish Catholic) Danny Boyle and the other architects of the ceremonies intend anything like the message which I have found inscribed in their work? Almost certainly not.  But public liturgies at once reflect and found deeply rooted spiritual and civilizational realities. That is why even secular republics have Inaugurations and Civil Religion. It is the absence of such Civil Religion surrounding the United Nations (which has only a Secretary General, and not a Head of State) which reminds us just how far it is from being an effective international political authority. And the Olympic movement is one of the few places where such civil liturgies take place on an authentically international stage. Indeed, the Baron de Coubertin wrote that  “The first essential characteristic of the Olympics, both ancient as well as modern, is to be a religion … above and outside the churches.” The Olympic Opening Ceremonies are a kind of ongoing conversation which marks the global but still multicivilizational character of human society.  They are what we have instead of a global civil religion and point towards what we might be building beyond a global market and instead of a World State . What is said there matters. Spirit matters. And what England has said is troubling. I, for one, would like some clarification and invite it especially from partisans of the specifically English and Imperial Christianity the ceremonies invoked as the United Kingdom’s contribution to our quadrennial liturgical deliberation regarding the human civilizational project.

In a New York Times op-ed dated 29 July 2012, Andrew Hacker, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Queens College, argues that the insistence of high schools and universities alike that their students master algebra before graduating is fundamentally mistaken –and one of the principal causes of the failure of the US educational system to retain and graduate more students. His argument is fairly straightforward. On the one hand, he says, most adults, even active, engaged citizens and those in highly skilled professions, do not actually need or use algebra. On the other hand, he presents an impressive array of statistics showing that it is, precisely, an inability to pass algebra that is preventing our students from completing their high school and university studies.  He advocates substituting in the place of algebra courses in quantitative reasoning, “citizen statistics” teaching how, for example, the Consumer Price Index is computed, and courses in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

The issues which Professor Hacker raises are important and go the heart of current debates around both the nature and aims of liberal education and the reasons why so many of our students fail to complete their high school and university studies.  Unfortunately, by presenting the alternative as between continuing to do what we are currently doing (which obviously isn’t working) and abandoning a critical part of what has historically been regarded as integral to life as a free human being and citizen, he obscures the real nature of the issues at hand and excludes possible avenues forward.

To begin, let me explain why algebra is important –and not only for those who will use it, or more advanced mathematics dependent on it, directly in their future work. It is through the study of algebra that we have historically cultivated the capacity for formal abstraction –the ability to leave behind the particular determinations of things and consider only the logical relations between explicitly specified aspects of their definitions. It is not only mathematical physics and its derivative disciplines (the whole of modern science and technology) which depend on such reasoning. So do the humanities and social sciences, all of which make formally rational arguments for their claims. And this is especially true of philosophy and theology which, because they engage directly fundamental questions of meaning and value, lie at the core of a liberal education. I often explain philosophy to my beginning students as “word algebra” and tell them that doing philosophy means, fundamentally, resolving the difficult and mysterious questions, such as the existence of God or the possibility of grounding moral judgment, by moving symbols around on paper using a handful of formal rules which are not too different from those taught in algebra courses –and believing that the results, if not definitive, are authentically liberating and enlightening.  In order to be able to make rationally autonomous judgments regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, and thus have the ability to live as a free human being and engaged citizen in a democracy in which  questions are settled by rational discourse, it is necessary to have mastered formal abstraction and indeed for it to have become second nature.

This said, two points are in order. First, I would argue that many of the problems of the modern world are a result of a certain idolatry of formal abstraction. We assume that modern science, which actually provides only a very rigorous formal mathematical description of the universe, actually explains it and displaces the higher, transcendental abstraction employed by philosophy and theology in addressing questions of meaning and value. It does not. The result is a great deal of confusion and unwarranted despair at the spiritual implications of modern science –as well as unwarranted attacks on scientific results which are, within their proper sphere, at least well founded and often definitive.

At a more practical level, we have turned over the management of much of our economy to “quants” and technical analysts who develop sophisticated mathematical algorithms which they then use to guide investment strategies and manage risk, algorithms which have no way of knowing what allocation of resources actually best promotes human development and civilizational progress (or what constitutes such development and progress) and which have been shown to be ignorant of important, concrete, on the ground facts, attention to which historically kept capitalism, for all its problems, from becoming utterly irrational. There is considerable evidence that recent financial crises, including “Black Monday” in 1987 and the financial crisis of 2008 were significantly exacerbated, if not actually caused, by mindless reliance on such algorithms.

In order to understand the limits of formal abstraction, however, we must understand what it is and what it can do and why it is so attractive. And that means mastering it.

Given this, the question is how best to help as many people as possible master this discipline. It should be clear by now that simply requiring students to take courses in algebra and then either fail or be “passed on” isn’t working. And in fact it hasn’t worked for a very long time. It is just that in the past, when liberal education was the preserve of the aristocracy and large Capital, those who failed to master it (along with most of the other disciplines taught at great universities and liberal arts colleges) simply didn’t graduate and went on to take up positions of power and privilege which were effectively hereditary or, somewhat later, took “gentleman’s C’s” and received diplomas, lest they look too bad by comparison with the poor scholars they then hired as advisors and administrators. (It is important to remember that “social promotion” was applied first not to the poor or ethnic minorities but to the rich who endowed and effectively controlled the universities).

So what do we do instead? As an advocate of a question-centered approach to liberal education, I am sympathetic to Professor Hacker’s call for courses which provide students with a basis in experience for understanding what formal abstraction is and with an understanding of its civilizational significance. But I would add two caveats. First, the experience in question must actually be that which has historically enabled people to engage in formal abstraction. Alexandr Luria’s 1928 study of the social conditions for cognitive development in USSR showed rather definitively that only people who are engaged in sophisticated if/then reasoning in a complex market society actually develop the ability to reason formally. So it is not just a question of making formal operations accessible or showing how they are relevant. It is a question of giving people the experience of making important decisions in complex situations in which they must abstract from particulars and identify what criteria make a decision reliable and valid. Second, the courses in question must actually get people to the point of engaging in formal abstraction and formal operations, not just to the point of appreciating their civilizational significance.  This means, at some point, thematizing the principles of such abstraction which are, in fact those if not of algebra then of abstract higher mathematics generally. In other words, while we might start with concrete questions we must eventually get students to ask and answer such questions as “What is a Number?” and “What makes a mathematical formalism valid?” This actually takes them beyond algebra (which as taught in most places is simply the application of the Laws of Arithmetic in the general case) to a consideration of for what categories these laws are valid and thus to a rigorous course in the foundations of mathematics, something even most scientists and engineers never get.

It is not possible to spell out in detail in this context just how this might be done, and I am guessing that there are many variants which would work reasonably well. I have had a great deal of success, for example, simply telling students that we are going to talk about “relationships.” If this means relationships between people, then it is obvious right away that laws like those of arithmetic don’t apply. The fact that Tom loves Mary and Mary loves Joe does not mean that Tom loves Joe. Numbers are things which have had enough of their particularity stripped away that such laws do apply. And so students gradually get a sense of what is involved in formal abstraction. Concrete mathematics like what they learned in grade school deals with operations on particular numbers. It is basically counting using some short cuts. Abstract mathematics, such as algebra, deals with numbers or other mathematical categories in general and asks what laws apply and what makes operations on and propositions regarding such relationships valid.

By creating appropriate bases in experience, and then leading students through the exploration first of concrete and then of progressively more abstract questions we can actually teach not only the formal abstraction which is so critical to understanding how the world works, but also the transcendental abstraction they need in order to make rationally autonomous decisions regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value.

I should close by saying that not everyone who begins this journey is going to complete it. In fact no one completes it.  Liberal education has never had the 100% success rate which legislators and funders are currently demanding. Even at the best institutions only a handful of people become fully capable of making rationally autonomous judgments regarding questions of meaning and value. And even they are only at the beginning of a very long journey. Those who really master formal abstraction do so only to understand that there is a higher sort of abstraction (what I call transcendental abstraction) which asks about meaning and purpose.  That is what Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems are all about. And those who master transcendental abstraction and its practical applications find themselves set on the path of higher spiritual disciplines which stretch us beyond the merely human. We are all pilgrims. Our journey is endless and our destination unknown.  That is what makes it so endlessly interesting.

That said, we do make progress and we can find ways to help those joining this path to make more progress than they otherwise might. It is in that spirit that I offer these cautions and these suggestions and invite further deliberation on the role of mathematics in humanity’s long march from slavery to freedom.

Season of Light/Season of Darkness.

I have been waiting to compose this message because I fondly hoped that I would be able to send to our friends who have been so supportive throughout the past year news that our time of trial is over. As many of you know I have been involved in another intense period of interviewing which has taken me from Indianapolis to Fond du Lac to Denver, to Dallas to Seoul. Unfortunately, most of these institutions have not yet completed their searches and we are still waiting to hear whether or not I will have a position in January and if so which one.

This has been a terribly difficult year but also, in many ways, a rewarding one. We have had almost no income and have been living off our savings and the –quite extraordinary– generosity of our family and friends. Since May we have been in Upper Michigan, deep in the Northern Hardwood Forest (or foryest, as Coeli calls it, with a Slavic e (ye) which she acquired I know not where). Summer was cool and rainy, with almost no sun. Since the beginning of November it has been dark and cold and I have been hauling wood to heat our tiny cabin. On one occasion I had to postpone an interview because I was unable to reach the airport through the blinding snow. There is only limited cell reception here and we cannot get internet access where we are living, but have to drive into town. We have learned the meaning of exile, continuing to write and hope (it is the word, after all, through which we access the profound truth and power which is the basis of all reasonable hope …) as darkness seemed to close all around.

But there have been moments of joy. Autumn was magnificent as the maples and birches returned to the cosmos the light they must of have been given in an earlier summer, long ago, when the sun actually did shine. Or perhaps they have learned to live off starlight. I have learned that birch bark has great endurance. The Ojibwa have birch bark scrolls containing their wisdom ferreted away all around this forest. Some are thousands of years old. When we leave here I will bring birch bark with me. Wisdom endures, even if we do not.

I have also had the opportunity to travel around the country –and once outside it, to Seoul– and to engage an enormous variety of institutions around this great spiritual and civic discipline which we call the liberal arts. Much of what I found was sobering. It has often felt as if the opening in which I have lived for the past 25 years, cultivating sapiential, civilizational, and civic literacy among students who did not know that they sought it, leading communities in reflecting on fundamental questions of meaning and value, is rapidly closing around me as “higher education” replaces the university and the “instructional delivery” replaces liberating education. It has been frightening. But then I will find myself in a place I would never have expected to be, at a school with very little professed commitment to liberal education, addressing a faculty drawn overwhelmingly from technical or business disciplines, and my talk on the liberal arts will awaken something, “stirring dull roots with spring rain …”

The people crave wisdom; it is the elders who are at fault, have ceased to teach it. Let us just hope that the people find a way to gather the resources and restore wisdom’s house (and give us a room therein) before there is nothing left but those birch bark scrolls …

This is, for us, still a season of darkness and of dark learning. I am hopeful that the New Year will bring proof of the sun’s return. But if not, we will learn to be like those maples and birches of Upper Michigan’s brilliant autumn, returning light received in darkness, a warrant of wisdom’s endurance and a sign and foretaste of what is to come.

The first question which skeptics ask of religious believers is “How do you know?” This question is closely followed by another: “Who decides?” These are both, in fact, excellent questions. There are many, many religious teachers who make entirely unwarranted claims, and much religion is, as its critics allege, a system of mystifications which serves to legitimate power which is exercised to exploit and dominate. We will look at specific doctrines and system of doctrines which serve such purposes in later posts. For now I want to establish that it is possible to have authentic knowledge regarding religious matters, to provide readers with a simple standard to use in distinguishing between valid and invalid claims (while leaving in between a substantial grey area) and to settle once and for all the question of “Who decides?”

My answer to the first question –that our knowledge in spiritual matters comes from reason– is likely to be unpopular. Our age has a complicated relationship with reason. Some –especially those formed in the sciences– take it as the sole arbiter of what is true and what is not. But they also so narrow the scope of reason that any answer it might give regarding claims on behalf of meaning is fixed from the very beginning in the negative. We will see why in a minute. Others blame “Western Rationality,” for the many evils of the modern world, from the destruction of the ecosystem and the transformation of human beings into batteries by industrial modes of production, capitalist and socialist, for the totalitarian dynamic at the heart of the modern state, and for the crisis of meaning and values –for the death of the spirit in the modern world. They propose instead to found spirituality on feeling or intuition or revelation.

What both positions share is narrow concept of reason, one which unnecessarily limits the truths to which it can aspire. Let me explain.

Most premodern philosophical traditions distinguish between different degrees of rationality. For purposes of this discussion, I will use the Thomistic terminology, but there are others which might serve equally well. Thomas argues that while all knowledge begins with the senses, we actually know what things are by means of abstraction. There are, furthermore, three distinct degrees of abstraction. The first is totalization. Here we abstract from the individual –Fido or Fifi– to the larger totality or category to which they belong: that of dogs. The category, at this level, is still ill defined: a list of shared properties at most. But it is enough to allow us to use language quite effectively for everyday ordinary purposes.

The second level of abstraction we call formalization. At this level we analyze the structure of a thing, making a formal model of it, and thus arriving at a rigorous definition. The most common way of doing this, and the way which defines modern science, is by writing an equation or some other mathematical formalism. This type of abstraction is especially good at providing us with a rigorous description of how things work. Thus the connection between modern science and industrial technology.

What formalization doesn’t tell us is why things are the way they are and what their purpose is. This is the province of the degree of abstraction which Thomas called the separatio, because it separates out from things their act of Being and which we prefer to call transcendental abstraction, because it points us towards the transcendental properties of Being: Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Oneness.

Transcendental abstraction is fundamentally a reasoning about purposes. This is the kind of reasoning which helps us address spiritual questions –indeed questions of meaning and value generally. And it does this quite simply. If we ask what a thing is for, its purpose, and follow this search through all intermediate purposes, we arrive ultimately at the fact that everything seeks Being. Minerals seek Being by conserving their form. Plants seek Being through nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Animals seek Being through sensation and locomotion. And we humans, rational animals that we are, seek Being by creating new and ever more complex forms of organization.

This means that Being is not just a principle. It is also a value. As the object of perception, it is Beauty. In order to exist things need to have harmony and integrity and disclose their principle. As the object of judgment, Being is Truth. When something exists either in itself or in something else we affirm its existence. As the object of desire, Being is the Good. It is what we seek. And in itself, it is One. Try chopping something up. It is no longer –at least no longer what it was before its encounter with our knife. These are the transcendental properties of Being, the properties that everything has in so far as they exist. Thus the term transcendental abstraction.

Notice here that we have taken the same facts used by the scientific detractors of religion –basic facts describing the material universe– and, by looking at them just a little bit differently, using the lens of transcendental abstraction, we have already discovered a powerful spiritual truth. We have discovered that the universe we live in is not just a mechanistic system, but a rich, dynamic, meaningful system, yearning for Being.

And we have done this without appeal to any claims which cannot, at least, be rationally defended. Nothing we have claimed is the result of private intuition or special revelation. While someone might reasonably raise objections to what we have said, we can answer those objections by an appeal to further arguments. Those participating in the debate or listening to it can decide for themselves what they think.

This does not mean, to be sure, that there are no good reasons for doubt. For now we are just trying to show how religious knowledge is possible, and have sketched out an argument for the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and for the existence of a first principle of meaning and value merely as an illustration. A more rigorous argument, which we will offer in later posts, would have to answer some very credible objections. One the one hand, advocates of a narrower scientific rationality will argue that the universe can be explained more simply and economically in terms of random variation and natural selection, without recourse to the level of discourse we are suggesting, which points towards Being as a first principle and final cause. Others, whose attitude is more typical of late modernity and postmodernity, will ask why, if the universe is ordered to Being, it is so full of conflict, death, and destruction. We will answer these objections at an appropriate point in our discussion.

Similarly, our argument in favor of reason as the ultimate arbiter of religious truth is not meant to exclude higher wisdoms, a knowledge of first principles which is nonconceptual and experiential and which sometimes, at least, speaks to others in the language of image and story. But we do want to maintain that even if these other wisdoms are in some sense higher, offering an experience of a principle to the existence of which reason attests, but which it cannot comprehend, our ability to rely on the authenticity of such experiences depends on the witness of reason. Otherwise we would not be able to distinguish between progress towards enlightenment and a degeneration into ever deeper illusion.

But all that will become clearer as our discussion proceeds. What we have done thus far is merely to establish that rational deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value is indeed possible. And this in turn suggests an answer to the question of Who decides? in spiritual matters: ultimately each individual decides for him or herself. Human beings are constituted by the capacity for transcendental abstraction and it is ultimately up to each individual to decide which arguments they regard as convincing or at least credible and which they do not.

This said, some people have developed their capacity for transcendental abstraction further than others, having mastered humanity’s ongoing deliberations sufficiently to teach others that history or even to make fundamentally new contributions to the discussion. It is this capacity which is the basis of religious leadership. It is the task of religious scholars to lead their communities in deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. And it is the obligation of the people to seek out formation which can help them to develop the ability to make rationally autonomous decisions regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, to listen and give serious consideration to claims and arguments from diverse perspectives, and to decide where they stand on the basis of these arguments. But it is still the people, individually and collectively (depending on the question at hand) who decide both which scholars they will consult and which their arguments the accept.

It is in this spirit that the claims and arguments made in this blog, and in Seeking Wisdom’s other work are offered, both to other scholars and to the people as a whole. Let’s look forward to enlightening deliberations!