Karl Marx and Critical Theory
What I propose to do here is to offer a moderate critique of Karl Marx. What I am exploring here is in the context that he raises a valid question regarding the human condition.[1] Hannah Arendt is the inspiration for this approach to this topic, although I have been reflecting for decades upon the insights of Marx. I would view this essay as on the way toward an understanding of Marx that holds in tension what is valuable with what needs to be discarded.
I want to begin with a brief reflection involving some of the insights Karl Marx had.
Marx perceived the shift that took place in the rise of modernity. The philosophical tradition placed contemplation ahead of all human activities, for the wonder of the world human beings inhabit stimulated wonderment that led to the contemplation of truth, goodness, and beauty. As Arendt put it, Marx grasped that modernity placed emphasis upon labor, work, and action. Properly understood, labor, the biological life of man as an animal, work, which corresponds to the artificial world of objects that human beings build upon the earth with relative durability, where the task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things — works and deeds and words, and action, which corresponds to our plurality as distinct individuals, can lessen the space between us, give us the opportunity to build worlds together that turn our plurality, or difference, into productive engagements, and enable us to make ourselves visible and knowable to one another. This places human beings as social animals prior to human beings as political animals.
This suggests that natality and the miracle of the beginning are central to consider the human condition. The capacity of human beings to give birth to new realities means a constant need to reconsider the basics of the human condition. It is quite reasonable to expect the unexpected, and that new beginnings cannot be ruled out. Yet, this means that human beings can lack control of the effects of such beginnings. In this case, modern, automated societies engrossed by ever more efficient production and consumption encourage us to behave and think of ourselves simply as an animal species governed by natural laws. This suggests the vital importance for civilized existence of a durable human world, built upon the earth to shield us against natural processes and provide a stable setting for our mortal lives. Thus, human action is the process which human beings act together to make the world an increasingly friendly place in which human beings live.
Here is the problem. Culture, religion, and tradition are not background noise, as materialists of the left and the right often argue. Rather, they constitute the drumbeat to which whole civilizations march. The idea that one can reduce humanity to the economic has adherents among some free-market economists, most Marxists, and others.
The existence of a realm of the social world free of direct government involvement called civil society is the realm Marxist-Leninist-Maoist forms of communism negated. The virtue of the model for its proponents was that it offered a total mobilization of society toward goals set by the communist revolution he envisioned. The central instrument was a vanguard party dominated by a revolutionary elite. A crucial feature of this system was to make all aspects of social life satellites to this party. Thus, trade unions, leisure clubs, even churches, had to become transmission belts for the purposes of the party.[2]
Marx had an ideal of community, promising to save culture from technical civilization, an ideal that has its origin in the age of romanticism. We find it in the Communist Manifesto, as the goal of revolution in a free association of free individuals. In that community of the future in which division of labor is abolished, in which humanity is the highest being in the eyes of humanity, which each can exchange love only for love, trust only for trust, which produces human beings with all-embracing and profound mind as its constant reality, in which the total loss of humanity in capitalist society is followed by the recovery of humanity.[3] He is part of the Romantic movement or the expressivist tradition. This tradition is estranged from modern, complex, liberal-democratic-capitalist social arrangements. For Marx, the estrangement leads to revolutionary action.[4] He embraced the Enlightenment ideal of shaping nature and society to the purposes of humanity. He also agreed with much of the Enlightenment regarding the inhumanity of the present order. The Enlightenment protested the injustices and suffering in the world. Society is the common instrument of people who must live under the same political roof to pursue happiness. Therefore, the burdens and deprivations of this station are a savage imposition against reason and justice, maintained only by force. The Enlightenment provided a new consciousness of inhumanity of gratuitous and unnecessary suffering, and an urgent determination to combat it. Nothing compensates for the loss of happiness.[5]
Here is the reality. Modernization has turned out to be extraordinarily good at increasing production, consumption, and procreation. however, the labor theory of value claimed that each article has an inherent value and that automation would increase the cost of the material, thereby making competition resulting in the further oppression of labor. This theory has been invalidated by history, in which prices have decreased in capitalism with technology. Marx understood history in terms of processes of production and consumption much closer to animal life. His vision of human history as a predictable process is a story not of unique, mortal individuals but of the collective life - process of a species. The costs have been an ever-increasing tendency for human beings to conceive of themselves in terms of their desire to consume. Promethean powers — releasing processes with unfathomable consequences — are being exercised in a society of beings too absorbed in consumption to take any responsibility for the human world or to understand their political capacities. What we consume daily is far more urgent to sustaining life than the durable goods we produce. Their consumption barely survives the act of their production.
The Marxist today must be willing to accept as universal the conditions that Marx saw through his analysis of the social situation of his time in those countries that the industrial revolution had recently transformed. That is a highly questionable thesis, unless one is simply blind to the economic mobility and flexibility that capitalism has brought. People move up and down various economic classes based upon their stage of life and productivity. The workers became part of the bourgeois class Marx so detested.
We also need to explore the vision of a classless society. Marx would criticize all existing societies using as his yardstick the indeterminate and psychologically empty idea of a classless society. He places himself in an historical-timeless realm that does not exist, and from this privileged vantage-point he has confidence that an event or institution is not in keeping with the meaning of history.[6] Thus, social classes of the type defined by Marx no longer function as such today. They have been displaced by different, non-class formations such as bureaucracy and technocracy. The empirical question about the mood or influence of workers in this or that society today is no longer revolutionary but have become primary examples of bourgeois. The dynamic of perpetual change is, as Marx showed in the Manifesto, not some alien rhythm within capital, but rather is the very permanent revolution of capitalist production. At which point, the exhilaration with such revolutionary dynamism is a feature of the bonus of pleasure and the reward of the social reproduction of the system itself. [7]
Marx is known for his perspective on the bourgeoise. The hostility that Marx expresses toward the bourgeoisie and their conventional lives has its roots in envy for what they accomplished. This hostility places sin in the one envied and virtue in the one who envies, which can lead to the violent overthrow of those envied by those who envy them. This violence abandons rational discourse with the one envied, now looking at the acquisition of power as the key to justice. Power determines what is right.
The bourgeois are simply people in a city. They focus upon the horizontal relationship. The mindset accepts calculation of our own minds to manipulate things around us. It wants a reasonable religion. It excludes irrational elements. It has humanistic assumption of continuous progress of humanity. It is secular. It relies upon common-sense morality. It practices tolerance and self-discipline that results in an inner asceticism and a strong work ethic. They accept splitting of reason and feeling, making possible uncontrolled emotions.[8] Ruling groups can become in their thinking so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts that would undermine their sense of domination. In certain situations, the collective unconscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of society both to itself and to others and thereby stabilizes it.
Marx is also known for his view of private property. Hannah Arendt makes the point that private property provides a hiding place from the public sphere and what a society holds in common. It provides individuals a location within which to stand. This has led to the glorification of work over contemplation, thereby setting aside the ancient use of slavery for laborious tasks that deal with the necessities of life, freeing the owner of slaves to engage in the public realm of free thought and discourse regarding what society held in common.
In contrast, the Communist Manifesto calls for the abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. His criticism of private property is the sign of a failure to allow due importance to the individual in the life of society.[9] Marx focuses upon the alienating power of private property and the autonomous movements of capital over the hearts of human beings. Marx saw human beings as naturally related to objects. Their processing and production of objects part of their nature. He saw in this activity the natural manifestation of life for human beings. Given the result of this activity he could speak of it as alienation. Alienation means the alienation of the acting person that occurs because the product of this activity becomes the exclusive property of another. For this reason, private property is the expression of alienated human life. Private property signifies the spoiling of those who possess nothing. Thus, the manifestation of the life of human beings is their alienation, and their self-realization is their loss of reality, an alien reality, because now it is the property of another.
The argument assumes that the activity of human beings is a manifestation of their being. It also assumes that in their activity they realize and possess their own being. Let us ask a simple question. Would humanity experience no alienation if active individuals remained in possession of their own activity and products? Such a view betrays a romantic idealization of the kind of work done by preindustrial workers. Further, the romanticism goes so deep and is so individualistic that the exchange of products by individuals become suspect. Such views presuppose that the active ego already possesses its nature, which finds expression in its activity. This means estrangement occurs from themselves in the medium of a thing that they already have or produce.
Marx will later admit that only in community can the division of labor and the resultant one-sidedness of individuals be eliminated. Only in community is personal freedom possible. This was also the view of Rousseau. He says the human essence is the ensemble of social relationships. In this view, there can be no antagonism between individual and society since the individual is a function of social relations. However, the division of labor restricts the free development of individuals. He saw in the division of labor the self-alienation of human activity that makes possible both exchange and dependent work. The division of labor and exchange expresses an alienation of laboring human beings from their human nature. This alienation reaches its extreme form in salaried work, where money is exchanged for the capacity for work.[10] The expectation of doing away with the division of labor is as romantic as is the idea of individual self-realization through work. In the later works of Marx, he has the hope of a lessening of the work time of the individual.[11]He thought in his early days it would be possible on the ground of his social pathology of early industrial conditions to realize the classical German educational ideal of the profound and thoroughly versatile human being, by means of the revolutionary abolition of capitalist exploitation, class society, and division of labor in a future association of free individuals.[12]
Thus, Marx realized that a republic had to emerge wherever the private spheres have achieved an independent existence. He would denounce public opinion of the bourgeois as false consciousness. It hid before itself its own true character as a mass of bourgeois class interests. His critique demolished all fictions to which the idea of the civil society appealed. Such analysis tended to end discussion that might lead to the progress of truth.[13]
I. Labor
The glorification of labor in modernity was because of its productivity, which meant that it was labor that distinguished humanity from other animals. This productivity does not lie in any of labor’s products but in the human “power,” whose strength is not exhausted when it has produced the means of its own subsistence and survival but can produce a “surplus,” that is, more than is necessary for its own “reproduction.” Viewed as part of the world, the products of work — and not the products of labor — guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.
Marx adds that the circulation of money as capital is an end, for the expansion of value takes place within this constantly renewed movement. This circulation of capital has therefore no limits. The possessor of money becomes a capitalist. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what the capitalist aims at. The boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange value, is common to the capitalist and the miser. It is easy to criticize the role of money in assessing value in a capitalist system. However, if not that, what, or more importantly who, will assess value? The issue here is that money is an objective assigning value and thereby distributes labor, capital, and resources throughout society. The market will do this far better than politicians or bureaucrats. The reason this process is restless and never-ending is that new possibilities keep emerging out of the hopes and dreams of the people: producers, investors, workers, and consumers.
The central notion of socially necessary labor times is itself defined in terms of the processes and exchange ratios of a competitive market. Marx attempts to answer the following Kantian-type question: how are profits possible? How can there be profits if everything gets its full value, if no cheating goes on? The answer for Marx lies in the unique character of labor power. Its value is the cost of producing it, yet it itself can produce more value than it has. In view of the difficulties with Marxist economic theory, one would expect Marxists to study carefully alternative theories of the existence of profit, including those formulated by bourgeois economists. Such theories focus on the value of risk and uncertainty, but also include the value of innovation and alertness to and search for new opportunities. Such an alternative explanatory theory, if adequate, would remove much of the scientific motivation underlying Marxist economic theory.[14]
He will also say that the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus value. Surplus value presupposes capitalistic production. Capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labor power in the hands of producers of commodities. We had, historically, a transformation from feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. Scattered private property becomes capitalist private property. However, with the crumbling of the labor theory of value, the underpinning of its theory of exploitation dissolves. The charm and simplicity of this theory’s definition of exploitation is lost when it is realized that according to the definition there will be exploitation in any society in which investment takes place for a greater future product.[15]
Marx’s theory is one form of the productive resources theory of value. An alternative might say that the value of productive resources is determined by the value of the final products that arise from them, where the value of the final product is determined in some way other than by the value of the resources used in it, such as the concept of simple, undifferentiated labor time. For Marxist theory does not hold that the value of an object is proportional to the number of simple undifferentiated labor hours that went into its production. Rather, the theory holds that the value of an object is proportional to the number of simple undifferentiated socially necessary labor hours that went into its production. What is socially necessary, and how much of it is, will be determined by what happens on the market. There is no longer any labor theory of value.[16]
He then says that if the worker is deprived of the means of production, he or she is also deprived of the means of subsistence. Marx is wrong here. The producer owns the vision and direction of a business, which also has a value that the market will determine. Not everyone has the desire or ability to engage in business at that level. Employees choose to be part of the vision and direction of the business, or they look elsewhere. Further, if government agencies own the means of production, everyone becomes a slave of the State. Everyone would serve the interests of the State. While Marx fears the exploitation and enslavement of the worker in capitalism, his communist system would result in slavery of the masses as they serve the interests of the State, which in turn is set by the elite of the Communist Party. Marxist theory explains the phenomenon of exploitation by reference to the workers not having access to the means of production. It follows that in a society in which the workers are not forced to deal with the capitalist, exploitation of labors will be absent. In our society, large sections of the working force now have cash reserves in private property, and there are also large cash reserves in union pension funds. These workers can wait, and they can invest. This raises the question of why this money is not used to establish worker-controlled factories. Why haven’t radicals and social democrats urged this? Often people who do not wish to bear risks feel entitled to rewards from those who do and win. Yet, these same people do not feel obligated to help out by sharing the losses of those who bear risks and lose.[17]
II. Work
All this raises the issue of meaningful and satisfying work, which is often merged with discussions of self-esteem. This question is of importance for what remains of Marxist economic theory. In any society in which those unable to work, or to work productively, are subsidized by the labor of others. One might be left with the view that Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people’s lack of understanding of economics. We should note an interesting feature of the structure of rights to engage in relationships with others, including voluntary exchanges. Individuals might choose to help support types of activities or institutions or situations they favor. However, will even those people who favor these causes choose to make such charitable contributions to others, even when their tax burdens are lifted? Do they not want the elimination or abolition of poverty, of meaningless work, and is not their contribution only a drop in that bucket? Another view that might lead to support for a more extensive state holds that people have a right to a say in the decisions that importantly affect their lives. The entitlement conception would examine the means whereby people’s lives are importantly affected. Since inequalities in economic position often have led to inequalities in political power, may not greater economic equality be needed and justified to avoid the political inequalities with which economic inequalities are often correlated? Economically well-off persons desire greater political power, in a non-minimal state, because they can use this power to give themselves differential economic benefits. Where a locus of such power exists, it is not surprising that people attempt to use it for their own ends. The illegitimate use of a state by economic interests for their own ends is based upon a pre-existing illegitimate power of the state to enrich some persons at the expense of others. Eliminate that illegitimate power of giving differential economic benefits and you eliminate or drastically restrict the motive for wanting political influence. True, some persons still will thirst for political power, finding intrinsic satisfaction in dominating others. The minimal state best reduces the chances of such takeover or manipulation of the state by persons desiring power or economic benefits, especially if combined with an alert citizenry, since it is the minimally desirable target for such takeover of manipulation. One might think that the minimal state also is non-neutral regarding its citizens. It enforces contracts, prohibitions on aggression, on theft, and so on, and the result of the operation of the process is one in which people’s economic situations differ. There is an independent reason for prohibiting rape. People have a right to control their own bodies, to choose their sexual partners, and to be secure against physical force and its threat. To claim that a prohibition or rule is non-neutral presupposes that it is unfair. Similarly with the prohibitions and enforcements of the minimal state. That such a state preserves and protects a process that works out with people having different holdings would be sufficient to condemn it as non-neutral only if there were no independent justification for the rules and prohibitions it enforces. It has often been noticed, both by proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and by radicals, that the poor in the United States are not net beneficiaries of the total of government programs and interventions in the economy. If correct, this explanation implies that a society whose policies result from democratic elections will not find it easy to avoid having its redistributive programs most benefit the middle class.[18]
III. Action
The processes of growth and decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice, threatening the durability of the world and its fitness for human use, demands constant human action. The protection and preservation of the world against natural processes are among the toils which need the monotonous performance of daily repeated chores. This daily task bears little resemblance to the heroic deeds of legend. The sudden, spectacular rise of labor from the lowest, most despised position to the highest rank, as the most esteemed of all human activities, began when Locke discovered that labor is the source of all property. It followed its course when Adam Smith asserted that labor was the source of all wealth and found its climax in Marx’s “system of labor,” where labor became the source of all productivity and the expression of the very humanity of man. Locke introduced money as that which was lasting, and for which could work. The productivity of labor begins with reification, the erection of an objective world of things. Modernity has leveled all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. The emancipation of labor and the concomitant emancipation of the laboring classes from oppression and exploitation meant progress in the direction of non-violence. Many intellectual analyses of capitalist economies share the concern that the extensive use of machinery and the division of labor has led to the loss of individuality of the worker. The worker has lost charm. The worker has become an appendage to the machine. The process would lead to the same low wages everywhere. Yet, these fears have not become reality. Workers today require increased education due to the computerization of much of production. Shorter work weeks have led to leisure time potential for many workers. It is much less certain that it was also progress in the direction of freedom. It could result in all human beings focusing upon the necessities of life.
The work of fabrication is reification in a world of things. The process of making is itself entirely determined by the categories of means and end. The fabricated thing is a product in the twofold sense that the production process ends in it and that it is only a means to produce this end. Human beings adjust themselves to the world of things human beings have created which in the modernity means its machines. Thus, reification, which is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products, implies that human beings can forget their authorship of the social world. It separates the individual experience from the tradition and culture in which one is raised. It turns what could be a delightful home into alien territory. The dialectical movement between human beings as producers and the products human beings produced is lost to human consciousness. Reification is a dehumanized world. Since all traditions and cultures are human creations, of course there are alienating dimensions through which one will need to sift. Reification undermines any any positive relationship with western civilization and replaces it with revolution of the present order and the utopian dream.
The discussion of the whole problem of technology, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to humanity. The public realm for the fabrication of products is the exchange market, where one can show the products of one’s hand and receive the esteem which is due to one. The last meeting place which is connected with the activity of human fabrication is the exchange market on which the products are displayed. Commercial society sprang from conspicuous production and resulted in a society of labor that shaped a society of conspicuous consumption. The exchange market is the most important public place and where therefore everything becomes an exchangeable value, a commodity. Their value is relative to other things in the market. Universal relativity, that a thing exists only in relation to other things, and loss of intrinsic worth, that nothing any longer possesses an objective value independent of the ever-changing estimations of supply and demand, are inherent in the very concept of value itself.
The commodity is a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of the labor of people appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor. As Adam Smith would put it, the pencil is such a trivial thing. Yet, it will take materials from around the world to create a simple pencil in England. Producing any product requires a dynamic of social interaction across international boundaries. As a rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labor of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum of the labor of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labor of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labor of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labor of society only by means of the relations that the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor if they take the form of commodities, vanishes as soon as we come to other forms of production. For a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter social relations with each other by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labor to the standard of homogeneous human labor.
Marx adds that the circulation of money as capital is an end, for the expansion of value takes place within this constantly renewed movement. This circulation of capital has therefore no limits. The possessor of money becomes a capitalist. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what the capitalist aims at. The boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange value, is common to the capitalist and the miser. It is easy to criticize the role of money in assessing value in a capitalist system. However, if not that, what, or more importantly who, will assess value? The issue here is that money is an objective assigning value and thereby distributes labor, capital, and resources throughout society. The market will do this far better than politicians or bureaucrats. The reason this process is restless and never-ending is that new possibilities keep emerging out of the hopes and dreams of the people: producers, investors, workers, and consumers.
Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If people were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If people were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants would be enough. People can liberate themselves from labor and work, but they cannot liberate themselves from action and speech. To act is to take initiative and begin. It is in beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. In acting and speaking, people show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them, and thus, in sheer human togetherness. Many theories of human nature overlook the inevitability with which people disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object. The realm of human affairs consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt.
The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zōē, that Aristotle said that it “somehow is a kind of praxis.” It produces stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things. These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works, they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material. They themselves, in their living reality, are of an altogether different nature than these reifications. They tell us more about their subjects, the “hero” in the center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speaking. The reason is that the intricate web of human relationships involves many persons in the unfolding story of each of our lives. The contribution others make to our story is beyond our control. Although everybody started life by inserting oneself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his or her own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author. That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the pre-political and pre-historical condition of history, the remarkable story without beginning and end. But the reason each human life tells its story and why history becomes the storybook of humanity, with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of action. The specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and “reified” only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mimēsis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is appropriate only to the drama.
Montesquieu realized that the outstanding characteristic of tyranny was that it rested on isolation — on the isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and the isolation of the subjects from each other through mutual fear and suspicion — and hence that tyranny was not one form of government among others but contradicted the essential human condition of plurality, the acting and speaking together, which is the condition of all forms of political organization.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948) stays relevant as a reminder of how easily we can be led astray by following the crowd. She teaches us to look at history as the result of unique and complex conditions. Arendt wants the reader to reflect on the circumstances that have created their views, acknowledge their own fallibility, and to open to the possibility of having it all wrong. Her book is a warning of our tendency to choose simple narratives when other ideas may seem daunting or implicate us somehow. Arendt does not divide the world so neatly into ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’. Instead, she invites readers to a path of redemption.
The subterranean stream of Western history finally came to the surface and usurped the dignity of western tradition. That subterranean stream of western civilization includes slavery, the suppression of women, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism, all of which arose with liberal democracy and capitalism. This shadow or darkness within western civilization gave birth to communism and fascism. The horrors of Hitler and Stalin were not accidents or monstrous abstractions. Rather, most who worked with them and implemented their policies were ordinary conformists and followers; the kind of people we can find all too easily in any time, leading her to the controversial observation on the banality of evil. While we conveniently portray evil in monstrous ways, morons and imbeciles can embody evil just as well. One may be a diligent yet banal bureaucratic criminal. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful. She saw the moral and intellectual shallowness of Eichmann. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. Others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. That is the banality of evil. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. In this sense, thoughtlessness and evil are interconnected. That is the banality of evil. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.[19]
Thomas Hobbes is the philosophical foundation. Since power is only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from the outside; otherwise, it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. Hobbes embodies the necessity of power accumulation in the theory of the state of nature, the condition of perpetual war of all against all, in which the various single states remain in relationship with each other like their individual subjects before they submitted to the authority of a Commonwealth. This ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states. Hobbes based his position on the proposition that the never-ending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power.
Further, racism was central to the implementation of western imperialism. Nazi was pan-German movement; Bolshevism was a pan-Slavic movement. Both were imperialistic, with tribal theories of chosenness. Both had conflicts with Judaism. Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when the French have assumed the role of commanders of a special force, when the English have turned into white people, when Germans become Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western civilization. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of humanity but its unnatural death. To lose political rights means to lose rights of being human. They have lost those parts of the world and all those aspects of human existence that are the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice.
In its early chapters, she reminds the reader that the atrocities of the twentieth century had not ended with the war. Although there may be a temptation to see the Nazis as an isolated phenomenon, the product of a few ‘bad apples’, Arendt reminds us how easy it was for many European populations to adopt the mob mentality that gave rise to extremism. Her concern is that history tends to repeat itself when we absolve ourselves of personal responsibility. If we believe that we would not have been complicit (or even active) in these movements, we may allow our own social behavior to go unchecked. Arendt demands from her reader a personal investment in unlocking the true narratives behind Nazism and Stalinism. By reducing the complex history behind these movements to oversimplified excuses such as ignorance, we fail to be accountable for the past.
Emphasizing its “horrible originality,” Arendt understood in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948) totalitarianism to be an entirely new political phenomenon that differed “essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship” (OT, 460) and thus broke with all political and legal tradition. In the 14 chapters of the third part, Arendt analyzes the conditions and features of this “novel form of government” (OT, 460). According to her, crucial factors that made totalitarianism possible included collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war. While the leaders of the movements belonged to the “mob” (OT, 326), their many supporters were recruited from these rootless and lonely “masses” (OT, 311) through propaganda (OT, 341): “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (OT, 474).
Thus, totalitarianism is based on a secular, pseudo-scientific ideology that reduces the complexity of reality to the logic of one idea pretending to be able to explain everything. In its self-understanding, the movement is merely carrying out the alleged laws of nature or history outlined by the ideology. It is quintessential, however, that this “central fiction” a totalitarian system rests upon, is translated into a “functioning reality” (OT, 364) by a “completely new” form of “totalitarian organization” (OT, 364): Characteristically, the state is not a monolithic, strictly ordered system, but has a deliberately chaotic, fluid and shapeless structure with competing institutions and a “fluctuating hierarchy” (OT, 369), which makes predictability, trust and accountability impossible. Above this “maze”, however, “lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and supercompetent services of the secret police” (OT, 420). Thus, the organization combines deliberate chaos with the “iron band” (OT, 466) of total control through extreme coercion and terror.
While the regime openly claims unlimited power and aims at world domination, their “real secret” (OT, 436) are the concentration and extermination camps as their “true central institution” (OT, 438). According to Arendt, the camps “serve as laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified.” (OT, 437). The total terror in the camps is the “essence of totalitarian government” (OT, 466), because here total domination reaches its abysmal goal: To reduce “the infinite plurality” of human beings into one interchangeable “bundle of reactions” and thus eliminate “spontaneity itself” (OT, 438). It seemed as if the real mission of the totalitarian apparatus was to “to make men superfluous” (OT, 445). Therefore, the “hurricane of nihilism” (Canovan 2000, 30) unleashed by the totalitarian regime cannot create an new world order, but ultimately leads to nothing but unprecedented destruction: It even “bears the germ of its own destruction.” (OT, 478).
What makes totalitarianism difficult to understand is not only the gigantic scale of atrocities committed by it, but its senselessness. Arendt maintained that totalitarianism defy common sense understanding, because their crimes cannot be explained by self-interested or utilitarian motives or ends (cf. OT, 440). The camps did not serve evil, but useful purposes like forced labor or slavery, but showed that an “absolute” (OT, viii-ix) and “radical evil” is possible (OT, 443; cf. section 6).
Understanding totalitarianism despite this, is of the utmost political importance, because insight into its structures and mode of operation provides “the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.” (OT, 442)
Arendt discusses the transformation of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the non-totalitarian world, and the use of terror, essential to this form of government. Totalitarian movements are fundamentally different from autocratic regimes, as far as autocratic regimes seek only to gain absolute political power and to outlaw opposition, while totalitarian regimes seek to dominate every aspect of everyone's life as a prelude to world domination.
... Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Arendt wrestled with the truth because the alternative was to allow reality to become blurred by what is comfortable. In such blurring, totalitarian movements thrive. For Arendt, a key feature of totalitarianism - in contrast to other forms of tyranny or dictatorship – is the toying with truth, deliberate confusion of fiction and reality, and incessant use of mass media to manipulate the way millions of people experience the world. In our era of fake news, targeted messaging and ‘cancel culture’, there is still something profound in this warning. Arendt is alerting us to the use of propaganda and conspiracy to change the perceived structure of reality on a whim.
A central worry is that these conditions emerge by our own hand. It is the failure to engage critically with our own ideas that draws us into an echo chamber of isolation, detached from the world, and so paving the way for radical ideology.
One who acts never quite knows what one is doing, that one always becomes guilty of consequences one never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of one’s deed one can never undo it, that the process one starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who, paradoxically, does not act. All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs. The capacity to act freely produces a web of relationships that entangles its producer to such an extent that the producer appears much more victim and sufferer than the author and doer of what the producer has done.
Dealing with the unexpected consequences of human plurality in a redemptive way requires two qualities. Only the human capacities to forgive and to promise can deal with these problems, and then only in part. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “ sins ” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between people.
A. Redemptive action through making and keeping promises
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. If we are going to engage in redemptive behavior in dealing the unexpected consequences of human action, let us consider binding ourselves through the promise, thereby setting up an island of security that can give the gift of continuity and durability in the complex web of human relationships, amid the ocean of uncertainty that defines the future. The human capacity to make and keep promises is a way we can cope with the unpredictable consequences of plural initiatives. People can experience meaningfulness because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves in ways that faithfulness and promising creates a safe space for that to occur.
The story contained in the biblical book of Ruth is a story of laudable people who keep covenant with each other. The story occurs in a time when relationships within Israel were falling apart. In chapter eighteen of Judges, the tribe of Dan attacked the peaceful town of Laish. In chapter nineteen, a priest cuts up his wife into twelve parts. He sent one part to each tribe in Israel to deliver a message. In chapter twenty, the other eleven tribes attack the tribe of Benjamin. They almost destroy the entire tribe. They feel sorry about it afterwards. They give the few remaining men of the tribe of Benjamin the right to rape some of the women from another city. The book ends with the phrase: "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes." Something was happening in their society. Relationships of hospitality, of caring for one another, of being in connection with one another, were falling apart. They had a covenant with the Lord that bid them to act in faithful ways toward each other and toward the stranger in the land. In some ways, I am sure that last phrase represents sadness in the heart of God. People simply doing what they please. People acting with little sense of responsibility toward one another. They had promised to live with loyalty and kindness to each other, and they were breaking that promise.
The story of Ruth invites listeners and readers to share in the life struggles of the characters. It becomes what we would call a short story. It has an earthy spirituality in that it deals with ordinary people coping with everyday life. Life is messy. The characters in the story are faithfully obedient to the life envisioned in the covenant Israel had with the Lord. Boaz becomes an example of an Israelite who has regard for the stranger or foreigner in the land. Given the history of contention between Israel and Moab, this graciousness on his part might be surprising. An Israelite is to offer welcome to the foreigner. This story values simple acts of kindness. The story of Ruth connects an example of simple covenant faithfulness during the Tribal Federation period, a time understood as one of steady deterioration. The short story of Ruth has no murders and no villains, as do the books of Joshua and Judges. The story portrays life in a peaceable village setting among hardworking agrarian peasants.
Apart from passing references, the deity plays almost no direct role in the book. There are no great miracles. The Spirit of the Lord descends upon no one and the angel of the Lord visits no one. If the Lord is working at all, the Lord does so through blessing people who remain faithful to their covenant with the Lord and with each other. If the Lord is working at all, it is in the random happenings of life, accomplishing the divine purpose through ordinary people who overcome adversity by means of personal initiative, ingenuity, and acts of selfless devotion. If there is a theological perspective here, it suggests that divine activity is in the shadows, in the way people act toward one another. If the Lord is present, it is through responsible and faithful human beings. The story is the gentle folk tale of two women — one Israelite, one Moabite — and the circumstances that brought them together, kept them together, and bequeathed their story to Israel’s national epic, to world literature, and to the liturgies of both synagogue and church. It is among the briefest in the Hebrew Bible (only four short chapters). It is peopled by only a small handful of characters, who, apart from Boaz, are not mentioned elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. It focuses on the plight of a single imperiled family in a confined locale, with no sustained attention to national or international concerns. Its main characters are women. Its hero is (initially, at least) a non-Israelite. In fact, her gentile origins may also explain her general lack of reference to God. Naomi, Boaz, and the women of Bethlehem express belief in divine intervention. She does express fidelity. Yet, her confidence is primarily in herself.
The story of Ruth takes place in this type of society. Just an ordinary family with ordinary people involved. Naomi and her husband moved to a foreign land. While there, her husband died, and her two sons died without having children through their wives. She determines to leave the country and return to Israel. She tells Orpah and Ruth to return to their own families. That is what would make sense. Orpah would do so. Ruth, on the other hand, was determined to stay with Naomi. There was no law that would force her to do this. She freely chose to remain in a committed relationship with Naomi.
Despite the company of Ruth, Naomi is embittered at her many losses. Over the coming weeks, these losses are all reversed. This theme is important in our time, when the suspicion of so many is that all we have emptiness and all we must look forward to is emptiness. Granted, we may inappropriately emphasize finding significance, meaning, and purpose. We may boast too quickly that we have found them. There is some freedom to be had in viewing our lives as a trace. Even world-historical figures fade with the centuries. Authors and politicians once commonly known are known no longer. You and I are traces, barely leaving a mark upon the lives of those we touch. Yet, we do leave a mark, no matter how small it may be. Such humility regarding our “self” is a good wisdom to learn. The short story of Ruth would remind us that a life of losing ourselves in faithful relationships is the path to whatever meaning we may find in this life. Leaving a mark of such qualities upon the lives of others may be the modest hope we carry with us. We may not be “full,” but we are not empty either, as we act faithfully in our daily relationships. We have learned to scale back our expectations from life and offer what we can. We may die without knowing what the trace our lives might leave.
The book of Ruth is an altogether remarkable addition to the biblical canon. It is simply a tale, parabolic in its presentation of the importance and role of divine and human chesed, traditionally translated as “loving-kindness,” but also as “kindness” (2:20), “loyalty” (3:10), and in its verbal form, “deal kindly with” (1:8). The word denotes willful, directed compassion and faithfulness arising out of a committed relationship. Any action here is human activity within the mundane affairs and interrelationship of human beings. People are doing hesed, acting loyally and faithfully. They are keeping their promises. Even in the intentionally provocative setting of Boaz and Ruth on the threshing floor, the point remains that simple acts of covenant loyalty keep moving this story forward to its conclusion. If Ruth becomes an Israelite, it is because she behaves like one. Here is the kind of life that God blesses. When Naomi says that the hand of the Lord has turned against her, she puts herself on a par with the suffering of Job. She has a complaint against the Lord. She has no husband. Her sons die. She has tried to inflict more pain on herself by her actions. The Lord is at fault for her misfortune. The implicit complaint becomes explicit in 1:21, as she pictures herself as a defendant in a legal battle in which God has brought charges against her, but she does not know what they are. Job has a similar complaint. Orpah was a worthy woman, dismissed with the blessing of the Lord. Ruth, however, clung to Naomi, even as a man leaves his parents can clings to his wife (Gen 2:24). Ruth will become even more worthy. Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. This line is so memorable, in part, because it captures the entire story of the little book of Ruth. We remember these words because they reveal something essential about Ruth: She was a woman of deep love and faithfulness. I think it is also memorable because, like most famous and memorable lines, it has a power to shape lives.
Ruth is willing to leave her family and religion and unite to another. For a woman from Moab to do this is remarkable. Did she see something in this Israelite family that attracted her not only to the family but to their God? She would be loyal to Naomi and to her God. She exchanges her ethnic and religious heritage for the people, culture, and religion of Naomi. An ironic twist is that after Naomi just lamented the impact of the cruel hand of the God, Ruth offers her allegiance to God. She gave up all she had known. She faced an unpromising future, which makes her resolve hall the more remarkable. Like Abraham (Gen 12:1-6), Ruth sets out for a new land, among a new people, trusting Yahweh as her God. And God will bring about remarkable things through her. Ruth becomes a Jewish proselyte in the sense that human loyalty, self-renouncing fidelity, and doing the kindness of covenant loyalty to each other, become part of her life. She behaves like an Israelite. Jewish sources affirm this shift in her religious loyalties. However, the focus is on human loyalty and self-renouncing fidelity.
I Chron 2:10-17 gives the genealogy in greater detail. Judah had a son, Perez, through Tamar, his daughter-in-law. He had a son, Hezron, who had a son, Ram, who had Amminadab, who had Nahshon, who was a prince of the descendants of Judah. He had a son, Salma, and Salma had a son, Boaz. Boaz takes Ruth for his wife and has a son, Obed, a striking contrast to ten years of barrenness in Moab. The women encourage Naomi with the blessing of the Lord now upon her, reminding us that at the beginning of this little story, she thought of the hand of the Lord being against her. The child symbolizes the complete reversal of the ill-fortune of Naomi. She has been restored to fullness with the continuation of her family. Naomi has received new children. While the text does not fully answer the complaint of Naomi, she receives new tasks. The neighbors have a part to play in the naming of the child, as we also see in Luke 1:59. He became the father of Jesse, the father of David, the youngest of either four (I Samuel 17:12-14, 17), seven (I Chronicles 2:12-15), or eight (I Samuel 16:7-11). Thus, through a series of events, she marries Boaz. Ruth bore a son in Bethlehem. She had been alone, vulnerable, at a dead end, with no future or hope. Yet, she had a child, who would be the grandfather of David, who would be the ancestor of Jesus. In a strange sense, everything works out in the end. Naomi does not get her sons or husband back. Nevertheless, Boaz is there. Moreover, a grandson is there. In addition, of course, there is Ruth. Ruth, a far-from-royal, down-on-her-luck outsider, is the great-grandmother of the greatest king in the history of Israel, David. In a sense, the story of Ruth and Naomi is a story of David. As readers, we know this genealogy. Ruth did not. She knew only to be faithful to the relationships she valued. She was like Rahab, who broke from her people to join the Israelites and give herself to the Lord. Ruth was faithful in her relationships throughout the story. How ordinary can you get? People making choices in which they live responsibly, righteously, and faithfully. People choosing lovingly committed relationships.
The story of Ruth is a secular one. However, Naomi and Ruth are part of religious community that assumed the presence of the Lord in it. We need to recognize that while some people do have a life journey that leads them down the path of the extraordinary, for which we can all be grateful, the reality is that most people, including pastors, lead ordinary lives of daily faithfulness. They do so without receiving heights of emotion, lofty visions, or obvious miracles. To put it another way, we need to see the goodness and beauty of the ordinary life of faithfully and daily living an earthy and human life. Knowing what to do today to live faithfully may be all the insight we need to live this life.
The evangelical, holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic traditions, based on experiences of mystics in previous centuries, look to certain profound experiences that are essential to a life-changing relationship with Jesus. I admit that I still long for such an experience. I have grown in my trust and faithfulness. I at least think I have. I have grown in my ability to give myself to others, especially to my wife. However, certain experiences, whether in some love songs or in some hymns and songs of the church, seem beyond me.
In that regard, I have a scary admission to make. The most moving emotional experience I have had in my life was attending a Paul McCartney concert in Indianapolis, my two sons on either side of me. As much as we disagree on everything, that night, we agreed. We knew we were in the presence of greatness. Even at his advanced age, I heard the young man I knew as a teen. We were in an auditorium of people of multiple generations united in our appreciation for the music this man had produced. I thought I would not know the music as well from after the Beatles, but I knew many of them as well. The three of us could sing the words to most of the songs. I could not believe that I was in the same room with Paul. It was beyond anything I could have dreamed. It still is. It still brings tears of joy to my eyes.
Most of my experiences do not stand out. I keep doing boring things like circling around the Bible, as well as philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Kant, Kierkegaard, and theologians like Barth and Pannenberg. I keep learning more of who I am and keep opening what I know of myself to others, especially my wife, with less concern about what they will think.
All of us have a gift to give. As we go through life, we discover that gift and offer it to others. That is the best any of us can do with our lives. It is so easy to think only of how others can give to us and nourish us. Part of maturing in life, part of the growth we need, is to discover what we can give back to others. We are so often impressed with the larger-than-life heroes of the big screen. In this part of the Bible, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua come to mind. The Hebrew people looked bac to a dramatic and divine moment in which the Lord delivered them from slavery and established a covenant with them, a covenant that bound them to each other as well. Later, there were the anointed King David and his descendants. There were prophets invited into the inner divine circle to hear the will of the Lord and receive a commission to proclaim that will. Such dramatic moments are memorable, the basis for many stories and songs. However, the book of Ruth brings out a side of life that I find reassuring. I find myself increasingly impressed by the heroes of daily life. They do not get to the front page of the paper. They are the ones who get up every day and have a reason for living this day. They find meaning and purpose in the dimension of the ordinary and mundane aspects of love and work. They are faithful in their work. They are faithful in their family and friendship circles. They are willing to live the values and principles in which they believe. They do these boring things every day. I am finding as many different ways to say it, but they keep their promises, stated and unstated, within the complex web of their relationships. They are the ones who make the world a happier and safer place in which to live.
B. Redemptive action through forgiveness
If we are going to engage in redemptive behavior in dealing the unexpected consequences of human action, let us turn to forgiveness, which serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose sins hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.
Refusal to forgive may be a moral act. Not forgiving may be a legitimate action, with its own progression, motivation, and justification. In many circumstances, the proper and most emotionally authentic course of action may be not to forgive. Such moral unforgiveness could be that of a truth-teller who refuses to pardon and avoids the temptation presented by reconciliation. Such a stand would say: Excuse me, but I will not reconcile with you until you acknowledge that you have abused me. You say: Thank you very much but I will not forgive you unless accompanied by the confession and repentance that I John 1:8-10 commends. Easy forgiveness makes for hard justice. Justice, in fact, will not happen through the path of easy forgiveness. When people persist in mouthing empty phrases and despising discipline, justice cannot happen. Thus, we may need to consider that forgiveness and unforgiveness are not opposites but points on a continuum. The same internal processes can lead to emotionally authentic resolutions in either direction. Anyone who has gone through the profound and punishing process of conscious forgiving or not forgiving emerges more self-aware, more related to others, and less burdened by the past. A famous saying is "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all."[20] This is not quite right. Understanding need not lead to forgiveness, but it can lead to wisdom.[21]
Reflect upon the difference between karma and grace. What you put out comes back to you, as in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, or even “as you sow, so you will reap.” You know the law of physics that for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is at the heart of the universe. It seems like grace has come along to upend all of this on the level of personal relationships. Grace upends our relationship with God. It defies reason and logic. Grace interrupts the consequences of your actions. In my case, and I suspect in your case as well, that is good news. Most of us have done plenty of stupid things, and much worse. Grace does not excuse our wrongs. Grace acknowledges in personal relationships that none of us will live our lives perfectly. We need to give and receive grace to maintain relationships that matter. In our relationship with God, grace acknowledges that we will never be religious enough. Somewhere, probably where we least expect it, we will fall short. Fortunately, we do not have to depend upon our religiosity. We know of this grace because God has offered it in Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, grace defeats religiosity and replaces it with grace.[22]
The letter to the Hebrews places so much emphasis upon forgiveness of sin. It does so based upon the Old Testament sacrificial system in the First Temple and the Jewish practice in the Second Temple. I would like to ponder for a moment why giving and receiving and forgiveness is so important.
The focus of the sacrificial system was forgiveness of sin. The problem with this focus is that it is too narrow. The web of human relationships is so intricate that even when we act out of the best of intentions, our actions can negatively affect others as well as ourselves. We may not have all the evidence that we could have had. We may act too quickly. We may not act quickly enough. We may not have developed the insight necessary into ourselves, the nature of people involved, or the seriousness of this moment, to act appropriately and courageously. Human action is always open-ended and therefore ambiguous. We may be physically sick, and this causes us to act in a confused way. We may never learn of the harmful effects of our well-intentioned actions.
The point is, there are many reasons to give and receive forgiveness that do not reflect the moral implications to which sin points us. Forgiveness helps to keep us going, not allowing a past act, whether a mistake or a sin, to define us. The human condition is such that we need forgiveness, and we need to extend forgiveness far more than we realize. We must not forget that we need to direct this redemptive activity toward ourselves.
The wearisome sequence of revenge for past wrongs that only provokes further revenge is a chain people can break only through forgiveness. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover. We would remain the victims of its consequences forever. Yet, a path needs to become open human relationships that says that what is done is not always done, the broken can be fixed, that the ravaged can be restored. That you can have another swing, that you can wife the slate clean, and you can go back to square one. Forgiveness is costly primarily to the one who forgives. The one who forgives gives up the right to justice or revenge and chooses mercy. Anyone who has truly forgiven another knows what this means. Respect for the person is sufficient to prompt forgiveness for the sake of the person. To think that we owe respect only where we admire or esteem the person constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.
I direct your attention to a few sayings of Jesus.
Matt 6.12 And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors
Matt 6.14-15 For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Luke 11.4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us;
Mark 11.25And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."
One who acts never quite knows what one is doing, and thus everyone becomes guilty of consequences they never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of one’s deed one can never undo it, that the process one starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who does not act. All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that one appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what one has done. To condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who forfeits one’s freedom the very moment one makes use of it. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving.
Jesus is consistent with his Jewish tradition in its emphasis of forgiveness. The entire sacrificial system was a way of helping people confront their need for forgiveness. That system dealt with sin, but also with unknown transgression. The story of Joseph in Genesis is a profound reflection on family relationships and the need for forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.[23] Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God — as though God, not humanity, would forgive through the medium of human beings — but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Human beings in the gospel are not supposed to forgive because God forgives and they must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing people from what they have done unknowingly. In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance. The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.
The most plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as intricately connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. What was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus. An example is Luke 7:36-50, “Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little,” and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self - revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with qualities and shortcomings no less than with achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.
The modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person.
IV. Marx and the Philosophers of Modernity
Modernity has thrown human beings upon the self. It encourages an exclusive concern with the self, as distinguished from the soul or person or humanity in general, an attempt to reduce all experiences, with the world as well as with other human beings, to experiences between the individual and the self. Modern humanity did not gain this world when it lost the hope of another world. Modern humanity did not gain life either, being thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inwardness of introspection, where the highest modern humanity could experience was the empty process of reckoning of the mind and its play with itself.
Marx recognized the weakness in the argument of Hegel that self-consciousness arises in the process of self-alienation. He describes the appropriation of objective reality by the spirit as a process of self-alienation and subsequent sublimation. The movement of the spirit consists in becoming something other as an object for itself, sublimating this other. The self estranges itself from itself, but then returns to itself in its estrangement. He was the first to conceive of this alienation as a phase in the self-consciousness of the spirit. The problem Hegel has here is that alienation involves separation. It would be a strange understanding of self-alienation that would be self-preservation. It would be better to think of the process as self-consciousness arising in the self-divestiture involved in interaction with others. This would mean that those enclosed within themselves are self-alienated in the sense that they never become their true or authentic self through engaging others. Marx was quite right to reject the Hegelian notion that the objectification of human knowledge is a sign of alienation. Marx also rejected the notion that one could reduce the relation to the world to a relation of possession. The alienation Marx describes regarding social structures is vivid and true to life because these structures manifest the traits of objective alienation. [24]
We need to be clear that objective alienation does not occur, since there is always a question of the identity that individuals make their point of reference in their relation to themselves and their feelings. Subjective identity formation is a confusing and ambiguous process. One may miss the true meaning of their lives. Their identity may express their alienation from the authenticity of their true identity. Alienation in profession or family life may express a deeper alienation from the true self. One may have the feeling of being at one with oneself, but it may be a delusion or a symptom of false security. Religious consciousness may also be under the spell of alienation. It may miss the reality of God. If talk about God no longer contributes to our understanding of the experienced reality of the world, then the religious consciousness is in the grip of alienation. For writers like Feuerbach and Marx, the religious consciousness is always an alienated consciousness, but even religious persons can admit that at times, they are right.[25] In contrast, he envisioned the communist society of the future as a condition in which individuals freely choose their activities. Society regulates the general production, making it possible for me to be one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fishing the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I like. However, in later years Marx recognized that labor cannot become a form of play. It would be necessary to limit the time spent in working and to increase leisure time, for only beyond the world of work does the true realm of freedom begin. All this sounds romantic, but has it proved true? An increase in leisure does not automatically assure an increase in human freedom or better opportunities for self-realization. For that reason, some Marxists have corrected Marx and promoted the idea that the communist society of the future must find freedom in labor rather than simply beyond it.[26]
Marx departs from the Enlightenment in identifying the atomistic, utilitarian philosophy of the Enlightenment itself, principally as expressed in its economics. The power of his thought is the union of this radical notion with the expressivist tradition. Individuals in modern society experience alienation because work and the product of work are separated from the individual and become an alien reality, with a dynamic of their own that resists and opposes the individual. This notion of alienation belongs to an expressivist structure of thought. The loss of the product involves self-diremption and its recovery is wholeness and freedom. He denounces a society that makes possession the central human goal at the expense of expression. The drive for possession belongs to the alienated world where human powers are detached from the individual and transferred to property and circulate as property. Humanity makes over nature into an expression of itself, and the process becomes human. This self-creation of humanity occurs through the fashioning of an adequate external expression. However, the first attempts at a human made world is division. By a cruel irony, the first step towards a higher life, takes humanity out of the paradise of primitive communism to the pain and cruelty of class society. However, divided people cannot achieve an adequate expression. Under class society, humanity is not in control of its own expression. They suffer alienation in their lives. This is matched by an alienated consciousness in which they take this estranged world seriously as though it were the locus of an alien force. Generic humanity does not recognize itself in its own objectification. Such class division is temporary, for once humanity has achieved sufficient mastery over nature, this division can be overcome. Generic humanity will return to itself, entering a realm of freedom, of integral expression, one which will belong to the whole society, in which human beings will experience reconciliation. Communism will be the abolition of human self-alienation. In this sense, communism is a form of humanism and of expressive fulfillment as it promises overcoming the divisions and oppositions to which human life, thought, and history have been prey. This reconciliation occurs because humanity has made nature over into its own expression. Reconciliation must come through transformation, because the subject is generic humanity; and humanity can only recognize itself in nature when it has put itself there through work. Such reconciliation will always be incomplete, for the frontier is always receding. Humanity is engaged in the Promethean notion of self-creation. The differentiated structure in Hegel becomes oppression and injustice masquerading as divine order. Marx released all the indignation of the radical Enlightenment at his conception of the state, and in the process distorted the Hegelian notion of the state. Marx did not reflect upon the transition to communism. His concern was with the practical need for revolution against capitalism. Speculation regarding the transition held little interest, likely because he had a simple-minded view of the transition. He seemed oblivious to the opacity and indirectness of communication and decision in large bodies of humanity. The promise of a leap into communism blinded Marx from seeing the social predicament of communism itself, including its limits of actualizing freedom. The practical problems of administering the freedom promised in communism is one that eludes Lenin as well and later communist thinkers.[27]
V. Marx and Alienation
As Arendt put it, science is giving humanity an Archimedean Point. Philosophically, the ability of humanity to take this cosmic, universal standpoint without changing its location is the clearest possible indication of its universal origin. It is as though we no longer needed theology to tell us that humanity is not of this world even though it spends its life on the earth.
Arendt will say that it would be folly to overlook the too precise congruity of modern humanity’s world alienation with the subjectivism of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Hobbes to English sensualism, empiricism, and pragmatism, as well as German idealism and materialism up to the phenomenological existentialism and logical or epistemological positivism. However, it would be equally foolish to believe that what turned the philosopher’s mind away from the old metaphysical questions toward a great variety of introspections — introspection into sensual or cognitive apparatus, into consciousness, into psychological and logical processes — was an impetus that grew out of an autonomous development of ideas, or, in a variation of the same approach, to believe that our world would have become different if only philosophy had held fast to tradition. Events rather than idea have changed the world. Philosophers have experimented with their own selves no less radically and perhaps even more fearlessly than the scientists experimented with nature.
We have the curious discrepancy between the mood of modern philosophy, which from the beginning had been pessimistic, and the mood of modern science, which until very recently had been so buoyantly optimistic, has been bridged. There seems to be little cheerfulness left in either of them. Doubt has replaced wonderment as the origin of philosophy. The outstanding characteristic of Cartesian doubt is its universality, that nothing, no thought, and no experience, can escape it. No one explored its true dimensions more honestly than Kierkegaard when he leaped — not from reason, as he thought, but from doubt — into belief, thereby carrying doubt into the very heart of modern religion. Cartesian doubt did not simply doubt that human understanding may not be open to every truth or that human vision may not be able to see everything, but that intelligibility to human understanding does not at all constitute a demonstration of truth, just as visibility did not at all constitute proof of reality. This doubt doubts that such a thing as truth exists at all, and discovers thereby that the traditional concept of truth, whether based on sense perception or on reason or on belief in divine revelation, had rested on the twofold assumption that what truly is will appear of its own accord and that human capabilities are adequate to receive it.
That truth reveals itself was the common creed of pagan and Hebrew antiquity, of Christian and secular philosophy. This is the reason the new, modern philosophy turned with such vehemence — in fact with a violence bordering on hatred — against tradition, making short shrift of the enthusiastic Renaissance revival and rediscovery of antiquity.
The relationship between Hegel and Marx is known well. He viewed himself as one who took the idealist dialectic of Hegel and transformed it into dialectical materialism. He claims to be anti-idealist, but he builds upon the Hegelian conception or idea of universal contradiction and movement.[28] His rejection of Hegel’s Geist was an essential step from Hegel to the revolutionary dialectic identified by Marx. In doing so, he made humanity or the human species as the subject of history to which he could point to the proletarian revolution.[29] Marx fused the dialectic of Hegel with the materialism of Feuerbach to develop his notion of dialectical materialism. It has three fundamental principles. First, interpenetration of opposites. Second, the negation of the negation, Third, transformation from quantity to quality. Marx rejected idealism and said he understood Hegel better than Hegel understood himself.
Dialectical movement is basic to his understanding.
First, historical materialism was his analysis of history along purely economic lines. Historical materialism is a critique of the previous curse of human history. It identifies the purpose of history worked out in the clash of economic classes that results in the in the victory of the oppressed.[30] Each economic system has its interpenetrating opposite because they were all based on the domination of one class over another. This is true until we get to socialism, in which case this system is not built on class, and there is more the possibility of peaceful movement to pure communism. Each change is achieved only through violence and revolution, and that by the workers or proletariat.
Marx accurately saw the problem in the view of history we find in Hegel. Hegel helped all thinkers after him to focus upon the problem of estrangement or alienation. However, through the dialectical processes he saw alive in history, he thought he could show that humanity could find some degree of reconciliation in the historical process. Since Hegel is the primary philosopher of modernity, the perception that he thought the social arrangements of liberal democracy and capitalism held the possibility of reconciliation seemed contradicted by experience. For his critics, neither the individual nor the society finds reconciliation in modern social arrangements. It was easy for Marx to move from the obvious discontent with modern social arrangements to a revolutionary stance toward modernity.[31] Of course, the revolutionary movements inspired by Marx have led to discontent among many. The criticism by George Orwell remains true. Victorious revolutionaries, supposed acting on behalf of the oppressed, begin to look like the previous oppressors. To reduce society to just the economic is simplistic. Society is far more complex than he thought. In addition, the Marxist is blinded by his faith and does not allow himself to face facts, but only his theories. He is far too dogmatic.
Second, economic determinism grew out of his basic materialism. This determinism rests on the fact that one can classify society into two areas. One is the superstructure, which is the ideas, institutions, and all that is not economic, and the substructure, which is the economic or technological. The superstructure reflects the substructure, and thus the only way to change the society is to change the substructure. But those who control the substructure will not give up willingly, and violence must bring about the change. Marx also declared capitalism to be dying, and it must necessarily fall because of the force of history. His dialectic becomes obtuse to force everything into this mold. One should not try to force history into guiding presupposition, but rather should try to understand what it says in itself.
For Marx, an action is moral because it agrees with a law of historical development. If history operates by this law, why does it stormily demand that human beings must make this history through work and sacrifice, with many conflicts and tribulations? It would seem a different law of human will and action intervene. The question of the validity of this other law, the ethical question, is still open. The question is open the more violently people try to ignore it and the more wildly they anticipate the answer to it.[32] One of the historical limits of Marxism is that it has bound itself so closely with materialism. In fact, materialism acquired weight only as historical materialism discovered and appropriated it. Historical materialism is the affirmation in which the history of humanity is the history of human economic or an economic history. The control over nature that the science and technology of modern culture brought also led to submerging humanity to the natural and historical necessity or determinism of history. The tension present is determinist metaphysics combined with rational economic and political freedom.[33] It expresses the belief that the economic-social conditions of a society determine all other cultural forms and that the movement of the economic-social basis has a dialectical character that produces tensions and conflicts in a social situation and drives beyond them toward a new economic-social stage, which will be a synthesis that involves historical action. Every cultural form, such as science, art, the state, morality, and religion, are only phenomenal accompaniments of this one reality, expressions of the current relations of economic forces, attempts to disguise, beautify, justify. They may also be expressions of its discontent, instruments of its criticism, means of its alteration. No matter what, however, they are secondary forms or ideologies from which economics is differentiated as true historical reality.
One cannot deny the relative truth that social dialectics, rooted as they are in economic conflicts. However, truth becomes error if dialectics becomes a law for all history. At that point, it becomes a quasi-religious principle and loses any empirical verifiability.[34] As economic history, it is the history of a struggle between the ruling and ruled strata or classes of the community. History is the struggle between the economically strong and weak. The workers have been the losers, and under modern dominance of anonymous capital they are losers with accentuated necessity, in terms of the exploiter and exploited. There are accompanying phenomena to the economic, but these do not stop the class war which is waged with unequal weapons.
Historical materialism also predicts the future. The dominance of the possessors of capital will lead to crises of production and consumption, to warlike developments and revolutionary catastrophes. The masses become proletariat and creates pressure upon the middle class. The class of the oppressed will gradually be compelled to unify itself and seize the power lies in its hands and set up its own dictatorship. It erects a welfare social state, in which all other social sicknesses vanish with their common cause, and in which morality can become reality. Such was the eschatological hope of Marx. Historical materialism is a summons to the proletariat. It appeals to the insight of the proletariat in its openness to the economic meaning of history and the critique that leads to class warfare. It has faith in the goal, with the restoration of economic and political solidarity through unions and co-operatives and the dissolution of the present class relationship. In fact, what Marxism failed to foresee was that capitalist countries would freely erect barriers to the exploitation of the economically weak.[35] Such materialism led to the soulless human being.
Even if the Marxist analysis has a dimension of truth, it remains faulty. To explain ideas as the result of class and economic interests destroys the basis of rational discussion and must lead to anti-rationalism and mysticism. If one was from a particular economic class, unless properly re-educated considering the oppressed class, he could dismiss your ideas. If the ideas one has is from the underlying ideology, and that ideology is from the dominant class that must be overthrown, then one’s ideas can be negated. This development of what we later called the hermeneutics of suspicion has far-reaching consequences. As expressed in critical theory, it is a significant obstruction to the rational discussion of truth. The essentialist and metaphysical approach of Marx interprets ideas and norms as the mere appearance of the economic reality of the oppressed/oppressor relationship. The workers party cannot make mistakes of consequence. All government, including democracy, is a dictatorship of the ruling class over the ruled.
However, as intellectuals could no longer apply this perspective to the economic realities they saw in the West, they started to apply a similar critique, critical theory, in a feminist critique, a critique of sexual expression, and a critique of race.
The primary inhibiting of the rational discussion of truth here is that truth resides only with those who embrace the ideology. The failure is clear – evil cuts through every economic class, every gender, and every race, piercing the heart of every person. No one, not even the enlightened ones who have grasped the truth of the critique, is immune from evil. It may well be that the privileged position of those who embrace the critique expose them to more evil than they imagine present in their opponents.
The insight of Marx led to the fundamental experience behind the reversal of contemplation and action was precisely that the thirst for knowledge that could be assuaged only after humanity had put trust into the ingenuity of its hands. Truth and knowledge could be won only by action.
The result was that philosophers became either epistemologists, worrying about an over-all theory of science which the scientists did not need, or they became, indeed, what Hegel wanted them to be, the organs of the Zeitgeist, the mouthpieces in which the general mood of the time was expressed with conceptual clarity. In both instances, whether they looked upon nature or upon history, they tried to understand and come to terms with what happened without them. Philosophy suffered more from modernity than any other field of human endeavor; and it is difficult to say whether it suffered more from the almost automatic rise of activity to an altogether unexpected and unprecedented dignity or from the loss of traditional truth, that is, of the concept of truth underlying whole tradition of the west. Productivity and creativity were to become the highest ideals and even the idols of the modern age. The shift to “how” suggests the priority of process over Being. Process remains invisible, inferred from the presence of certain phenomena.
VI. Marx and Religion
By the end of the 20th century, some important Marxist opinions were no longer valid.
Instead of one class or no class it was more probable that modern societies were heading towards a diversity of classes. The rich were not becoming richer while the poor became poorer. The middle class was not disappearing. It was growing larger. Society was not splitting into the two great hostile camps of the bourgeoise and the proletariat. If it was splitting it was into factions and into pressure groups.
It did not look as if the state would wither away. In fact, reforms were requiring a rapid enlargement of the powers of the state and an expansion of the bureaucracy.
The Marxian predictions were not being fulfilled.
Lenin resolved the crisis within the revolutionary movement by committing it to the totalitarian solution. The terrible doctrine was that utopia must be brought about by an indefinitely prolonged process of unlimited revolution that would exterminate all opposition, actual and potential. Utopian thinkers view themselves, when their people are in power, as the ones to punish the persecutors and rescue the victims. This system of a society of victims creates an antagonistic relationship in society. In the words of Karl Marx, it creates a dominant class and an oppressed class, thereby creating a revolutionary situation. But how is it that Lenin, and so many after him, have accepted easily and without apparent qualms the repulsive process of violence, executions, suppressions, deception, under the unlimited rule of self-appointed oligarchs? Why do the full-fledged totalitarians not shrink from the means they adopt to achieve their end? The answer is that the inhuman means are justified by the superhuman end: they are the agents of history or of nature. They are the people appointed to fulfill the destiny of creation.
They have been known as atheists. But in fact, God was their enemy, not because they did not believe in the deity, but because they themselves were assuming divine functions and claiming divine prerogatives. This is the root of the matter, and it is here that the ultimate issue lies. Can people, acting like gods, be appointed to establish heaven on earth? If we believe that they can be, then the rest follows. To fulfill their mission, they must assume a godlike omnipotence. They must be jealous gods, monopolizing power, destroying all rivals, compelling exclusive loyalty. The family, the churches, the schools, the corporations, the labor unions and co-operative societies, the voluntary associations and all the arts and sciences, must be their servants. Dissent and deviation are treason and quietism in sacrilege.
However, the monopoly of all power will not be enough. There remains the old Adam. Unless they can remake the fallen nature of a human being, the self-elected gods cannot make a heaven of the earth. In the Marxist gospel, the new person was emancipated by the revolutionary act from the deformation imposed upon the person by the few elites (usually capitalists). The delusion of some people that they are gods is, says Aeschylus, “the blind arrogance of childish thought.” It can become “the very madness of a mind diseased.”
Yet it is not a new and recent infection, but rather, the disposition of our first natures of our natural and uncivilized selves. People have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. Marx did not introduce new impulses and passions into humanity. Marx and his descendants exploited and aggravated impulses and passions that are always there.
Marxism founded a political religion upon the reversal of civility. Instead of ruling the elemental impulses, they stimulated and armed them. Instead of treating the pretension to being a god as the mortal sin original, they proclaimed it to be the glory and destiny of humanity. Upon this gospel they founded a popular religion of the rise of the masses to power. Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin carried this movement and the logical implications of its gospel further towards the end. And what is that end? An everlasting war with the human condition: war with the finitude of humanity and with the moral ends of finite people, and, therefore, war against freedom, against justice, against the laws and against the order of the good society, as they are conserved in the traditions of civility, as they are articulated in the public philosophy.[36]
This age needs less Messianic ardor, enlightened skepticism, and toleration of idiosyncrasies, ad hoc measures to achieve aims in a near future, more room for the attainment of personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find little response among the majority. What is required is a less mechanical, less fanatical application of general principles and a more cautious and less arrogantly self-confident application of accepted, scientifically tested, general solutions to unexamined individual cases. It requires a loose texture and toleration of minimum of inefficiency, even a degree of indulgence in idle talk, idle curiosity, aimless pursuit of this or that without authorization, which may allow for more spontaneous, individual variation and will always be worth more than an imposed pattern. People do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, and at times incompatible.[37]
Marx viewed religion as the expression of compensation for the real misery of social alienation. It can also serve as a protest to the misery. Marx's analysis of religion led him to the conclusion that while religion was concerned with the lofty issues of transcendence and personal salvation, its true function was to provide a "flight from the reality of inhuman working conditions" and to make "the misery of life more endurable." Religion in this way served as "the opium of the people," recalling that opium was widely used for medical purposes as a painkiller. Religion made the suffering of the worker bearable. He looked forward the time when workers could face their condition directly and dispense with an illusion that alleviated the suffering contained in their condition.[38]
The Marxist view is that all ideas and cultural forms reflect material motivations, especially the struggle of economic classes. This analysis was true of religion. Despite their high-minded doctrines, organized religion did not reflect the plight of the oppressed worker. This contradiction held because they reflected the interests of the oppressing class. The role of the churches within modern society was to keep oppressed workers at peace with their oppression. As a social opiate, religion served the interests of the ruling class. It encouraged workers to forego their legitimate concerns regarding their economic condition now to secure the false promise of eternal happiness. It enabled the entrepreneurial class to keep workers oppressed. Religion lulled the oppressed into self-defeating inaction. It wanted to replace the action of religion, which was inaction regarding anything that mattered, with the revolutionary action urged by Marxism.[39]
Marxism denounced the faith of the church as a relic of capitalism. Granting the dangers that capitalism presents, what have the churches done positively to prevent the rise of the soulless human being? The churches have too often stood with ruling classes and favored the economically strong. It is culpable in making the concerns of the body less important than the needs of the soul. It has stressed the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body in which the promise of God includes the whole person. In disobedience to its sacred text, it proclaimed the separation of soul and body. The church will always have a bad conscience in the face of both materialism and Marxism so long as it does not undertake an energetic revision of its anthropology in the light of its eschatology, thereby arriving at a quite different practical position towards action in history.[40]
However, the churches do not have to move in the direction that Marx had analyzed. Religion in modernity has the role of encouraging co-humanity as community. The industrial revolution led to a romanticist reaction to the conditions that rob humanity of its humanity and leads to the idea of community. True human community is that in which one finds oneself by surrendering oneself to the other. Such disclosure of personal co-humanity in community is polemically set against the concept of society as an artificial, arbitrary, organized arrangement of individuals for practical and businesslike purposes. Given large industrial cities, community means in this context the idyllically conceived village conditions of pre-modern times.[41]
VII. Critical theory
Critical theory departs significantly from Marx in locating the sources of domination in the realms of culture and ideology (system of beliefs) that imped human freedom, rather than solely in the economic structure of society. This move is significant because it implicitly recognizes the weakness of the economic analysis of Marx of liberal democracy. The proletariat had become the bourgeois and could no longer be relied upon to be the revolutionary class.
Critical theory takes the form of a critique of ideology by attempting to uncover distorting forms of consciousness, or ways of thinking. This technique draws heavily from the model of psychoanalysis proposed by the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud in its attempt to liberate people from illusions and constraints of their own making. This also led to a move away from the alienating factors of economics and toward alienating factors of gender and race. Oppression becomes psychological rather than the objective measure of economic class. Even the economically well-off could claim victim status, if they were of the right gender or race. Discrimination is an act by one person against another of which there is proof or disproof. Racism is an attitude, a psychological stance, of which there can be little proof or disproof. Thus everyone, especially the white person, is a racist. In like manner, all males are misogynists. The critique of liberal democracy as racist leads to alienation and resentment toward whites, thereby rejecting the common humanity white and black persons share. Critical theory wants to build upon this discontent in a way that leads to the destruction of the present liberal democratic social system while suggesting nothing with which to replace it except the failed system of Communism.
A form of distancing oneself from the presence of evil and suffering in the world is to adopt an ideological stance that allows us to be brutal, transgressing respect for life in the service of the utopian vision of classless society. It allows for a form of purity and righteousness for those who adopt the ideology and deny kinship with those outside the believing group. The victim scenario suggests goodness belongs to the victims of the evil oppressor, while righteousness and purity belong to the rescuer. The cost of projecting evil onto the other is ruthlessness. It sanctifies violence, war, sacrifice of others, and denial of equal humanity.
Religion can adopt this violent path, largely because sacred killing offers a form of purification. The stronger one feels that one engages in a battle with evil, the greater the temptation is to reach a mode of projection in which evil is external to us and in anyone we view as our opponents. One is pure because one has identified the other as the enemy of good and the embodiment of evil. It is another case of the scapegoat mechanism, where the devout place the pollution of evil on to the other. In this case, the violence of the devout transforms one into a higher unity of the warrior who has meaning and purpose for their battle and if necessary, their death. Violence serves a higher purpose.
Such a religious vision can transform into an ideological and atheist one, as it does in communism. Such violence affirms the purity of the one performing violence and the evil contained in the victims.
The rage of the oppressed permitted the suspension of conventional morality. In like manner, truth was relativized for the sake of the victim. The politics of victimization led to the view that there be no shared values or notions of justice common to all. Victims are entitled to use whatever weapons they can, including deception, violence, and revenge. They could view themselves totally from the standpoint of the victim. Granting the recognition that one may be a victim in the circumstance of a moment, this view legitimated being a victim in a way that defined one’s personhood and one’s life.
This theory led to the need to turn the educated within liberal democracy into an alienated class. It forces every relationship into an alienating critique of the relationship from which there is little hope for reconciliation. The reason for this is that any form of rationality or any economic theory is a mask for the basic master/slave, oppressor/oppressed relation. Their anger and alienation have stopped mature reflection. They are not at all concerned with what really exists. The result of such reasoning is alienation and resentment. Reconciliation becomes impossible becomes forgiveness becomes a sin that masks alienation. Such thinking ends rational discourse with each other or the possibility of normal human interaction.
Critical theory wants to convince those who live in liberal democratic society that the fascism of Europe in the early to mid-20th century was a reasonable and logical outcome of the system of domination created by modernity and the Enlightenment, instead of a radical break from its pursuit of its ideal of freedom and rationality.[42] Where it fails is that freedom and constitutional democracy offer the possibility of respect for the worth and dignity of individuals and within that system government is to respect the worth and dignity of its citizens as well as the respect and dignity of other nations. Fascism was a rebellion against the rationality, democracy, and capitalism that arose out of the Enlightenment. Further, Enlightenment frees the masses. The Enlightenment project of reason, science, as well as intellectual, economic, moral, and political freedom, combined with a legal structure to limit criminality and government, as well as military to defend against barbarians, has made the many free. The failure of critical theory blinded it to the barbarism arising in non-western society, whether in the old Soviet Union, China, or in Islamic countries.
However, critical theory, having established a connection between fascism and modernity, proceeded to label as fascist any attempt to modernity as the promoter of freedom, progress, justice, and rationality. Classic texts of western philosophy, such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, traditional forms of Christianity that relied upon these philosophical texts, and evangelical forms of Christianity that tied themselves closely with the emerging cultural, economic, and political institutions of modernity, came under the suspicion of repressed and unconscious distortions of the oppressor/oppressed theme, from which persons needed liberation. By its nature, critical theory becomes an ideology, a closed and total system that goes against the open nature of human knowledge. As a result, the ideology emphasizes the alienation between different ideological systems, rather than the common ground individuals share that then becomes a basis for whatever genuine discoveries and consensus one can achieve with those who differ.
The difficulty here is that critical theory has a point. The institutions created by imperfect human beings applied the principles of freedom and justice desired by the intellectual tradition imperfectly. The racism and the inappropriate use of American forces on foreign soil placed American values in question. American military power, corporations, and the institutional church, did little to alleviate the conditions of the poor around the world. However, such just observations led to programs that undermined values long held in the intellectual tradition. Some programs favored one race, viewed as victims, over another, viewed as the oppressor. It led to programs that undermined personal responsibility because of their perpetual victim status, cutting off those they intended to aid from the resources they needed to lift themselves from their condition, which was especially the intimate relation of family.
Jurgen Habermas, although a member of the Frankfurt School out of which critical theory arose, found a way to salvage Enlightenment rationality. He defended the tradition of modernity. He offers a meaningful concept of the rationality of actions, leading to an appropriate theory of action, a concept of social order, and a diagnosis of contemporary society. His point is that an indestructible moment of communicative rationality is anchored in the social form of human life. He offers a scaled down version of the categorical imperative of Kant in his exposition of discourse ethics. Central to his concept of discourse ethics is the domain Habermas terms practical discourse, which owes much to the work of Stephen Toulmin and the "informal logic" movement in philosophy. He makes the point that postmodernism, existentialism, and his colleagues within critical theory, pay a high price for taking leave of modernity. They give no account of their position, offering only critique. They resist any return to forms of thought, religious or philosophical, that shaped modernity. They blunt the distinguishing features of modernity that are freeing and liberating on the one hand from those that are repressive and alienating on the other.[43] Critical theory fails to perceive that the liberal democratic system assures its citizens that absolute power resides nowhere. Individuals, businesses, free associations within civil society (including religious institutions), political institutions, legal institutions, and so on, all have varying competitive and cooperative interests.
Culture determines what its citizens desire. An example would be women in Saudi Arabia who do not see the objective alienation they experience as women because the Islamic culture has shaped their desires for the roles they play in that society. People who know only totalitarian regimes do not expect that regime to respect their worth and dignity.
The society created by modernity has led to citizens who expect their worth and dignity to respected by the institutions they create through their participation in the cultural, economic, religious, and political institutions. Modernity and its liberal democracy and economic freedom in capitalism will fulfill its promise to many of its citizens. When it fails to fulfill its promise, it will generate discontent. The modern society is so strong that it can withstand many members who feel alienated from it and even hate it. Modern society does not imprison such citizens. It refuses to torture and kill such citizens. It can do this because it has confidence that enough citizens recognize the value of a social system that grants them such freedom. This restlessness of human society is a sign of its strength. The unrealized ideals of liberal democracy generate enough discontent to become the foundation of revolutionary change. Modernity promotes the ideal of individuals receiving respect from cultural institutions they help create through their participation in the economic, cultural, and political structure. Thus, if they do not receive it, discontent will follow, which, working within the system, leads to reform.
Liberal democracy builds within itself the possibility of reform. It does so through its encouragement of real conversation that encourages participants to have humility toward their views and openness to learning from the views of others. It distributes power over a broad range of levels of government and institutions of civil society. This regard for the individual becomes the basis for the legitimacy of all institutions. The capacity of American culture to renew itself is consistent with the intellectual and moral tradition of modernity. Reform movements have always been a part of the American experience. Abolition in the mid 1800's, Prohibition and Women's suffrage in the latter 1800's and early 1900's, are the obvious examples. The capacity for renewal is further refutation of critical theory. Rather, the free enterprise system, democracy, and a system of values based on personal responsibility and family ties, has the capacity for positive change without the coercion of the federal government or violent overthrow. The anti-slavery movement arose precisely because individuals perceived the moral failure of slavery: it denied to a race of people their right to express their worth and dignity and develop their plan of life. Although many fought to preserve the union of the states, without the moral agitation generated in newspapers and churches, the war to end slavery would not have occurred.
Critical theory has forgotten that forgiveness is essential in all human relationships, and that includes forgiving the institutions that they have created through their participation in them. Some people grow to love their resentment. They cannot envision what their life would be like without resentment. This can happen on a personal and national level. Such persons find it difficult to live in a human world, with all the imperfection and ambiguity that means, while at the same time recognizing that we take initiative and responsibility for this moment to move the future toward a peaceful and just place. Such thinking suggests that they want to take me to a world no human being could inhabit, maybe even one without economic classes, in the fulfillment of the dream of the romantic movement. They often develop some idealized and perfect picture, smoothly operating to their satisfaction, failing to deal with the rough, often difficult realities of a humanworld.
A form of liberal humanism sought to rationally persuade fellow citizens in the virtues of an expanded role for the federal government. It had a love for the country. This love of country arises because of its promise of being a kinder and more generous nation than others. We can have a lover’s quarrel with our country and promote its best interest. Genuine love expands. True patriotism extends minds and hearts to an inclusive vision of we accomplish together as human beings who have the privilege of living in a social world that respects our worth and dignity and in which have the freedom to pursue our understanding of the best human life we can live. Factual and theoretical discussions do not inspire. It could describe the country in terms of what it passionately hopes it will become. It had loyalty to a dream of the nation.
Critical theory places this part of the liberal political tradition into question. While Marx placed too much emphasis upon the economic, critical theory shifts attention from the economic to psychological experiences of oppression. It does not pay enough attention to the genuine economic issues facing peoples throughout the world. The shift to the psychological is also a shift to unimportant differences like gender and race. Economic matters can be matters of life and death. They are matters about which we can do something as a people, such as adopt economic freedom and lessen government interference, thereby allowing market forces to determine investment and prices. The color of skin and the difference in gender are matters about which we can do nothing, and thus, their reality requires nothing other than their acceptance.
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[8] Contemporary Philosophy course taught by Dr. Duane Thompson in the Spring of 1973 at Indiana Wesleyan.
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[20] Madame de Stael, Corinne, Book 18, Chapter 5.
[21] Jeanne Safer, Must You Forgive, Psychology Today, 1999.
[22] Bono: In Conversation, inspired some of these reflections on karma and grace.
[23] Hannah Arendt says too much when she said that the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.
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[38] Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843.
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