Carol and I were sitting at the table eating breakfast, Carol was telling me about something she was doing down at her office on Fish Island, when something outside the window behind her, moving in the breeze, caught my eye. Look, I said, rudely interrupting her, and pointing out the window. What, she said. The maple tree, it’s got buds, I said; our apartment is on the second floor so we look right into the branches of the Red Maple in the sidewalk across the street. The morning sun lit up the swelling purplish-red buds so that they stood out against the wall of the Whaling Museum, which was still in shadow. Carol turned, and looked. She wasn’t as interested as I was, and she turned back. Red buds on the maple tree, spring is coming, I said. She continued her story. Red buds on the maple tree, I thought happily to myself, listening to her story.
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Another model for churches, pt. 2
Part 2 in a series. Read Part 1.
The “Eccelsiola in Ecclesia”
I’m not interested in quite the same kind of new monasticism that Alisdair MacIntyre appeared to want; when he wrote After Virtue, MacIntyre called for a new St. Benedict, and within a few years MacIntyre had himself converted to Roman Catholicism. Unlike MacIntyre, I don’t see the answer to our problems coming from Catholicism, and indeed I see much of Roman Catholicism functioning as a destructive kind of imperium itself, rather than standing opposed to (or at least critical of) the imperium that is late capitalism and the postmodern nation-state. And while the barbarians are indeed at the gates, or really they’re beyond the gates and are actually in charge of our cities and nations, the social situation today is so utterly different from that in Benedict’s time that it is impossible for us to remove ourselves from society in the way Benedict’s monks did; or in the way that MacIntyre seems to long for.
Instead, I find inspiration in James Luther Adams’s studies of voluntary associations. Adams, with his deep concern for maintaining human freedom, saw voluntary associations as one of the key constituents of a free society which could maximize human freedom. Adams states that “any healthy democratic society is a multi-group society,” that is, a democracy must allow the existence of multiple groups in order to remain a true democracy. Membership in these groups must remain voluntary: “These [voluntary] associations are, or claim to be, voluntary; they presuppose freedom on the part of the individual to be or not to be a member, to join or withdraw, or to consort with others to form a new [voluntary] association.” (Adams, ed. Beach (1998), 183-184) By way of contrast, Adams identifies involuntary associations such as the family and the “state” (i.e., the nation-state); for nearly all persons, you don’t get to choose whether you belong to these two associations or not, you’re simply born into them. Similarly, in some nations, membership in the state-sponsored church is essentially involuntary. But in a truly voluntary association, you choose whether or not to be a member of it, and you can choose to leave it if you wish. Continue reading
How many…
Still knocked out by bronchitis, so here’s a dumb joke I heard at church today (thanks, Ken) in lieu of a real post:
Q: How many banjo players does it take to cook a possum?
A: Four. One to cook the possum, and three to direct traffic around him.
Another model for churches, pt. 1
Part 1 in a series
Back in 1981, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, in which he claimed that moral theory since the Enlightenment doesn’t work. In ancient Western culture, thinkers such as Aristotle presumed that human lives were lived towards some end; but this idea was abandoned by Western thinkers during the Renaissance. As a result, MacIntyre claimed, Western moral theories from the Enlightenment on simply don’t make sense. So this is basically one of those postmodern books that says the Enlightenment project has failed.
This raises the difficult question: How do we live a virtuous life, after it has become obvious that Enlightenment morality does not teach us how to lead a virtuous life? Nietzsche answered the same basic question by telling us that we should go back to the aristocracy of Homeric Greece — which would imply that most of us would wind up as slaves. MacIntyre says, in part, that we should go back to the ethics of Aristotle; but on a more practical level, MacIntyre calls for some kind of new monasticism:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history [e.g., of late Rome] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead — often not recognizing fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a God, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict. After Virture, 263
I vividly remember sitting in my senior philosophy seminar listening to Richard J. Bernstein excoriate MacIntyre on this point: “He wants us to go back into monasteries! That’s the whole point of this book!” As a leftist, Bernstein obviously wanted us impressionable college students to feel compelled to get directly involved in political process, and in changing the world through direct action; equally obviously, Bernstein thought that any kind of monastery would lead to passivism and quietism. Continue reading