1) Hate is a choice. Education does nothing to help adults who choose to hate.
2) Every liberal should know how to raise hell at city hall. Look where it got the Religious Right.
3) Unless you’re a pacifist, you need to know what you’re willing to fight and die for.
4) If you are a pacifist, you should be able to explain to your loved ones why you wouldn’t have fought for the Allies in WWII, knowing what was at stake.
5) Every liberal should know how to handle a firearm and know how to get one.
6) No one gives a damn about your statistics.
7) Nice is not a virtue. Neither is pity.
8) The oppressed people of the world have not asked you to be their liberator. So quit patting yourself on the back, and quit beating yourself up.
9) Evangelicals and fundamentalists are not stupid. Liberals who think so are the stupid ones.
10) The Jesus Seminar hasn’t discovered the real Jesus any more than have the evangelicals and fundamentalists. Unless they are the ones with a direct line to god.
11) A question you should have an answer to: How do people manage to become Good, despite the odds? Wrong answers include education, consciousness raising, and folk music. Your answer should account for Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi.
12) Another question you should have an answer to: How do people manage to become Evil, despite the odds? Wrong answers include binary logic, patriarchy, and an uncaring society. Your answer should account for Hiter, Stalin, and Mao.
I am not screwing with you today. You go ahead.
IN general I like your points here. But I think reducing everything to individual agencyis the same mistake as reducing everything to biodeterminism or social or economic determinism. Conditions do affect the way people make decisions. I’ve always been taken with the Catholic Worker notion of making a world where it is easier to be good.
Also, I think you make too much of the pacifist issue. So few people even pretend to be pacifists. Some people in my own family served in the Merchant Marines rather than bare arms in WW II, and I know others whose families became medics for the same reason. No cowardice in that, and we are not talking about Quakers or Mennonites either. In general I think bringing up pacifism is trying to hard to be a smartass to put someone on the spot.
I am not a pacifist but in legal terms under the Military Selective Service Act as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States, I will be opposed on ethical and moral grounds to any war that I would “realistically be called upon to fight.” Technically this language came from cases of Jehovah’s WItnesses who objectged to earthly wars even though they believed eschatologically in fighting a final war for God. In the abstract and in a personal sense, I believe in self defense but I don’t trust countries to make decisions for me. Thoreau wrote a great essay about this that I am sure you are familiar with.
As for evil, I’d like to see you add some language about the banality of evil. I so agree that there is a problem with the “everyone is good just a little misguided” new agey thought that most of us try to believe, but truly I want people to understand that people who do great good and those that do great evil are not that far removed from the rest of us. It’s fairly easy to cross the line. And it is most certainly impossible to draw a line between the good people and the evil people such that we can just use police or the army to round up, contain or eliminate the evildoers.
This is good stuff. Thanks.
Smartassery is our speciality. But we wouldn’t want to try too hard at it. That would create excess supply, hurt demand, and decrease our profits. And we must have profits. ;)
I’m pretty much a Foucauldian, so I’m not trying to play up individual agency against other determinants. But, like the nature versus nurture argument, I find the individual agency versus social determinism argument too easy. Most choices have several causes and several motivations. To pick one as the end-all-be-all explanation is foolish, whichever one it is.
I’ll say more about my pacifism rant. My hunch is that many of my fellow liberals who are generally anti-war have not thought it through. That is, they have not done hard thinking about when war might actually be necessary and good (such as WWII, the usual candidate for a “good” war). This leads to a cheap pacifism, which is completely unlike the hard thought positions you have outlined. For “cheap pacifists,” service means little more than putting a sign in your yard—the same vote-by-shopping approach that the flag bumper sticker crowd uses. Real war is so much more serious than yard signs and bumper stickers. I wonder where they’d come down if we found ourselves really at war for our lives.
My copy of Blumenthal’s Banality of Good and Evil is within arm’s reach, so I’m right with you. Still, I want to know why we think people are Good or Evil. Most non-liberals don’t believe the “everyone is a little misguded” line, and they turn their backs on us when they see it coming because they believe it leads to harm. If people think you’re worldview will hurt them, you’ve got a lot of make up work to do.
Thanks for your great comments!
“Pacifism is opposition to the practice of war.”
If we go with the Wikipedia definition then I am a pacifist. I wouldn’t have fought in WW2 (the “good” war), but I certainly would have signed up for medical, clerical, chaplaincy or some other non-combat role. I’m not against putting myself in harms way for a good cause, but I feel that little good can come from organized killing.
War is often senseless, and counter-productive to ending suffering quickly. A hard look at WW2 will show world leaders and generals who were not very concerned for the ordinary folk caught in the cross-fire or indeed for the Jews being slaughtered until very late in the war. I believe we needed to stop Hitler, but I also believe we needed to have taken the rise of Hitler seriously long before the US got dragged into the war by Peal Harbor.
Often pacifism is linked to appeasment, I have been called a “Neville Chamberlain” as an insult for opposing the Gulf War. But I believe that real (or dare I say realistic) pacifism embraces the many permutation of non-violent resistance, and isn’t passive or weak in any manner.
I think there is a Taoist teaching of war, that talks of how sometimes despite our best efforts we are drawn into war. On that occasion one should do what one can to serve but with a heavy heart and great sadness. A spiritual reluctance.
Just some thoughts, from an internal conversation I keep having.
I think ultimately people are quite attracted to the idea that the bad people can be separated from the good. A prof I had in undergrad used to say “All social bonds are based on the hatred of witches.” (That’s just for you Jason. I figure you will get the symbolism:)) The thousand year old man used to say that the first religion was “Let em all go to hell except for cave 17.” It’s always about demonizing Others. With fundamentalists I like to have the “you mean if Hitler recognized Christ as his personal savior before he died he would go to heaven but Gandhi would go to hell?” It’s another smartass question, but sometimes I can go from there to understanding that the potential for evil and the potential for redemption are in all of us. (A paper I wrote this term on Romans has made me overuse language of redemption and adoption)
We probably need to articulate the notion that the “free will” (what would be the fc (foucaldian correct) term for that?:)) or moral agency that comes with “inherent worth and digintiy” includes the option for evil.
Perhaps it is the downside of our humanist inheritance (although I think other mainline Chrisitans have similar issues) that we have taken up a sweetness and light version of the progress narrative. (My brain is spinning in late 80’s postmodern mode thinking about how different stated and unstated beliefs function as “regimes of truth” in liberal religion.) This is where my obsession with the rhetoric of supersessionism comes from and why I try to write on it regularly.
What if Principles and Purposes or even mission statements more clearly addressed power and evil. While it may be somewhat unhip in the UU blogosphere to say so, I tend to agree with the UUA curriculum that evil without power is not so important. Perhaps racism without power is not racism, but love without power is not love. Or at the very least it is not justice.
But what if we could use something like Tillich’s position in Love, Power and Justice. Justice needs love with power. Love without power is meaningless sentimentality and power without love is tyranny.
Jason,
I suppose I am a bit of a Toaist when it come to war. Or as Ecclesiastes puts it, there is a time to make war and a time to make peace. But I don’t think its time to go to war until the time for peace is exhausted. Art of War makes the cost of war pretty clear and cautions would-be warriors to avoid conflict—or even to win without bloodshed—if there’s any way to do so. WWII and Afghanistan probably meet these standards. Vietnam and Iraq probably don’t. But no war is cut and dry. I suppose that’s another reason to be reluctant about rushing into battle.
James,
I’m pretty sure we can identify the good people and the evil people. MLK is good; Tim McVeigh is evil. The problem is that most of us don’t fit into either category. Somebody once said, show someone with no vices and I’ll show you someone with no virtues. Being good and being evil both require a lot of practice. Few of us put in the sweat equity. And yet, as a universalist, I believe even Hitler will be reconciled. We’ll all have to make peace in the end, even peace with Hitler.
I don’t know if there is a Foucauldian term for “free will.” I read Foucault as desperately concerned to preserve free will yet dispairing at how overdetermined our choices always are. By “overdetermined” I mean something like that our choices always have other co-deciders, that we never can make a completely “free” decision, and that this is the human condition. And yet we still do make choices and must take responsibility for them. Both liberals and conseratives may choice too simplistic and easy, cheap even. I suppose that’s why folks call Foucault a “posthumanist.” He’s made humanity too messy to be simply heroic. For him, free will would be a lifetime achievement award, not an everyday occurence.
The Enlightenment’s progress narrative is dead. Take your pick of culprits: WWI, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, OKC, 9/11. Progress only happens because we make it happen. There is no inevitability about it. And protests and picket lines ain’t it. Not anymore.
I’m intrigued by your thoughts about evil and power, and the Tillich spin. Isn’t there something in traditional Christian baptismal vows about “resisting evil?” Successfully resisting evil might just be a good definition of progress. But how do you (successfully) resist evil in a wholly mediated society, where everything is marketed and ironic? My hunch is that paganism and Taoism have more riches here than humanism, Christian or otherwise.
I read your notion of Foucault and resisting evil as another version of Sartre’s existential bad faith. Tillich is interesting to me here in he focus that power is not the opposite of love but rather what love needs to make justice.
I’m looking for a way out of the bobo kneejerk self-reflexive irony “La Guerre de Golfe n’a pas eu lieu” idea. I generally think it is a defense mechanism to feel too smart to get our hands dirty in the work of making a difference. I think the protests and picket lines you choose to denigrate may be necessary but not sufficient. It takes a real asshole to always stand on the side lines and take snide pot shots at people actually trying to do something just because we are afraid of failure. (But its a kind of asshole that most of us are fairly comfortable being. Most of us would rather look smart and witty than risk looking sappy or futile).
Perhaps you are right and we can only do as Walter Benhamin says and “Be conservators of radical hope.” But ultimately the Universalist mission to give hope and not hell should still drive us. Beyond resisting evil we must envision a way of building good, however limited it might be (do a google for Sharon Welch and eschatological reservation).
My dismay with the “protest and picket” model is because I don’t think it works anymore. At some point it did. But new methods are needed now. Further, I think protests have become pseudo-religious rituals that people go to at least as much for the “church camp high” than for the cause, like a concert or the mall at Thanksgiving. (More on that here.)
I don’t disagree at all that we also need to build the good. My point is that the usual liberal modus operandi no longer works, and that we persist at it out of habit and self-serving desires. I believe the prophetic role carries with it two tasks: naming evil and envisioning the good. But, going back to my Taoism, sometimes one is needed more than the other. In any case, I work in a nonprofit and serve in several leadership roles in my faith community, so I’m hardly just “sitting on the sideline and taking pot shots.” And if I’m right, are they still pot shots?
Liberals don’t get a by just because we mean well. Or at least they shouldn’t expect one if what they’re really after is building the good and not just feeling good about meaning well. (See the second blockquote in point four here.) We need better tools if we want to effect change in a mediated world. I only have hunches about what those tools are and where they might be found. (I hope later this year to be able to follow up on that.)
Foucault was a prophet who named evil. Had he lived longer, I think, he would have gone on to name the good, or at least that’s where I see his History of Sex series heading. In the end, Foucault looked for ways the individual could use power on himself in order to oppose the dominant truth regimes, etc. Oddly enough, he turned to ancient spiritual disciplines for that. I wish he had gotten further down that road before he died. But I’m happy to use his wisdom for as far as it goes.
I’m with you on the difficulty of the task. And like you, I work within education and the NGOcracy. In refering to assholery, I did not really mean to provoke a need for justification from you. It is an article of faith that I believe we are on the same side.
I think even the protest movements that have been successfull (say for example the protests of students in Korea in 87 or even most of the canonical protests in the US) have had the same socioritual downside that you mention. So I don’t think that factor is really meaningful.
I think your critique on grounds of effectiveness is basically correct, and also a good corrective against Loehr’s critique.”
Here is the Welch text I was thinking of:
I think I am more willing to be generous of spirit and forgiving to protests however flawed than I am to overeducated folks like myself who can use fancy contintental philosophy terms to justify inaction. or restrict action to official political or nonprofit channels or otherwise choose to dishearten people who are well meaning.
Within our shared subculture, we absolutely need to combat the cult that believes in the sufficiency of good intentions. That was my response to the Unitarian Jihad joke that said “Good intentions are not enough” when all too often that very notion is at the heart of what passes for liberal religious discourse and action.
How can we “build a land where we bind up the broken” and “build a promised land that can be,” with a real emphasis on “that can be?”
I’ll admit, deep down I am a dual power anarchist and a Wobbly, building the “kernel of the new society within the shell of the old.” I’ll take the social movements warts and all. And it is probably true that much s Foucault showed that the exisitence of power (really negative power over) only exists in its practice (in critique of Althusser’s repressive state apparatus structuralism I suppose) I suspect that the power of good (what Starhawk and others might call “power with” only truly exists in its moment of practice. I am still touched by Peter Maurin’s old Catholic Worker notion, how do we make a world where it is easier to be good?
On a more inellectual note, I would be interested in looking at your idea of good people and bad people and how they function as simulacra in Baudrillard’s framework. It is really fun to discuss this with someone familiar with both poststructuralism and theology. It is very rare that I get to converse with anyone with even my limited exposure to both of these worlds.
I’m afraid I’m not all that familiar with Baudrillard (unless you count the Matrix movies), so I will need you to be my tutor there. But to get that started, could it be that they (saints and villains both) are “possessed” by those simulacra–which they even may have had a hand in creating? I’m going to have to chew on that…
“Building the kernel of the new society within the shell of the old” sounds like a great description for the role of Church/Sangha/Coven/etc. I’m fine with that occuring in secular locations too, but my feminist theology background is going to make me insist that it measured by things like “reciprocity,” “mutuality,” and “relationality.” My own experience with the local Green party made me suspect that many left-of-center groups are the Bizarra-world version of a small dysfunctional fundamentalist church. Perhaps I should be more open.
Let me try to be more precise about my socioritual critique. I’m fine with those. It’s why I go to shows in East Atlanta Village whenever I have the money and energy. My critique is that the socioritual “fix” is now preventing protesters from imagining new, more effective means of change. When the effectiveness is gone, you end up just going through the motions. I saw this so many times during my evangelical/charismatic days, and it was often called out. I don’t see that happening over on the left, at least not as a matter of course.
I think Foucault was on his way to Starhawk’s “power with.” (I hope, anyhow.) That’s why I think magickal metaphors may help so much here. But what are the practices?
The context for all of this now is a global one. I’ve found Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude very helpful for framing that for me, but I need to give them a second go for retention’s sake. You could read them as a post-marxist, post-dualistic philosophy for social justice. I wish there were a short, dense summary somewhere, but I’ve yet to find one.
What I really want to see happen in/for UUism is for “kernals of the new society within the old” to arise, take root, and spread. My fear/belief is that Loerh’s caricature of liberal theology is not only operational within UUism but dominant. In my mind, that amounts to a circle jerk.
It seems that we have found two poles of ineffectuality occuring. One one end there is the sentiment that “if only one heart is changed,” our protest/revival/movement and all its hours of work is successful. That, in my mind, is a waste of my time. Or as someone (probably Wilde) said, “The problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.” On the other end is the sentiment that nothing except absolute victory is worth the trouble. A beautiful cop-out because it make folks look so noble in their inaction.
Another concern for me is a developmental one. I worked for Jim Fowler for five years, and his Stages of Faith schema is pretty ingrained now. Simply put, I find the protest-and-picket model stuck in adolescence. Working through official channels is probably more adult, but you can get stuck there—or be ineffective there–too.
Now we are getting to a level where it is hard to come up with a quick response. Are you going to be at GA? Have you ever seen Electronic Civil Disobedience by the Critical Art Ensemble?
We need to have clear metrics for success. They don’t recruit as well as pie in the sky (when you die thats a lie) but they do sustain. Lakey taught me that the left’s problem is that it is always focused on the immediate crisis or the eventual utopia and never anywhere in between. Can UUs use the socail gospel and Universalist heritage to build a vision of slow building against entropy?
The ECD looks pretty congruent with Hardt and Negri, at least at a first glance. I’ll have to see if they’ve cited it any—they cite several examples of newish models they think might have a future.
Exactly on the metrics. Beatriz Sarlo says that intellectuals should strive for the “middle distance”—somewhere between the forest and trees. But getting those metrics is tough. I’d want to start with mutuality, reciprocity and relationality, but those still aren’t really metrics.
Not going to GA this year. Maybe next.
ECD predates Empire but there are some shared influences.
Great post!
How strange, too. I posted on the whole “pacifism versus war” discussion last week using Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a jumping off point. ()
To play devil’s advocate for a moment. True pacifism requires tremendous effort. As a white man in America I count my lucky stars that MLK used nonviolence as a path to ending segregation. Otherwise a whole lot more white people could have ended up dead!
In closing I agree with you regarding the so-called progressive left position of “pacifism” or “nonviolence…” These people blather on while ignoring/overlooking the fact they pay taxes everyday or that their inherited wealth perpetrates violence on a many, many people…..
Thanks again for a great post.