Can Christians Escape Capitalism? Do They Want To?

D. Stephen Long's discussion of Devin Singh's new book Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford UP, 2018), 296pp. is found in the 15 February 2019 issue of Marginalia. He notes early in his review that "There seems to be no challenge to the distorting effects of capitalism available to theologians. There is only the flow of power through a theopolitical-economy, and we theologians cannot do much more than unmask it." That is very much my own frustration as well, as I noted, e.g., here in discussing the very insightful books of Todd McGowan. (Long's argument also bears close resemblance to MacIntyre's point, now nearly forty years old and coming in his discussion of Yeats' poetry as political philosophy, that there is no longer left to us any coherent political imagination outside the modern nation-state--or outside capitalism.)

It is not for want of trying to criticize capitalism, however, at least among theologians of the last three decades or so. Long begins by noting that Singh's is a critique advanced in part by some before him, most notably John Milbank and William Cavanaugh, as well as Daniel Bell, and before them all Dorothy Day's companion Peter Maurin.

Long does not mention--but I often have--the role that Alasdair MacIntyre plays in influencing Milbank, Cavanaugh, and many others. MacIntyre clearly had Day in mind when he argued that

Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities.

From here, Singh's book gets a good deal more complicated, and, according to Long's review, rather less than convincing. it seems the rage today--and among Christians, or at least concerning Christian topics this is especially true--to engage in these grand efforts at intellectual genealogy, as though that proves, much less solves, anything. I suspect my inner Freudian is impatient with these efforts because remembering is only one part of the triad--where is the repeating leading to working through? I suspect even more strongly my impatience is (Jordan Peterson call your office!) a result of being totally in agreement with Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In any event, about Singh's book the publisher tells us this:

This book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West. Examining the religious and theological sources of money's power, it shows how early Christian thinkers borrowed ancient notions of money and economic exchange from the Roman Empire as a basis for their new theological arguments. Monetary metaphors and images, including the minting of coins and debt slavery, provided frameworks for theologians to explain what happens in salvation. God became an economic administrator, for instance, and Christ functioned as a currency to purchase humanity's freedom. Such ideas, in turn, provided models for pastors and Christian emperors as they oversaw both resources and people, which led to new economic conceptions of state administration of populations and conferred a godly aura on the use of money. Divine Currency argues that this longstanding association of money with divine activity has contributed over the centuries to money's ever increasing significance, justifying various forms of politics that manage citizens along the way. Devin Singh's account sheds unexpected light on why we live in a world where nothing seems immune from the price mechanism.

On Misunderstanding Sacrifice

I have just finished reading and being edified by Terry Eagleton's newest book, Radical Sacrifice (Yale UP, 2018), 204pp.

Eagleton, for those who don't know him, is a wide-ranging and prolific theorist, literary scholar, and cultural critic who comes out of that always-fascinating world of the post-war British left. But unlike others whom one might mention here--the late Christopher Hitchens, say, or the tiresome pamphleteer Richard Dawkins--Eagleton has a Catholic background which shows up in some of his many books, including this one, where his grasp of both Scripture and theology is impressive and far outstrips many other academics who try to write about these matters.

In this regard, he is part of the world shaped by the late Herbert McCabe, and still populated by the great Alasdair MacIntyre. All three of these men, in ways that seem depressingly rare, understand the radical nature of the gospels and the fact that, properly understood and lived, Christianity is revolutionary in overturning so much of the neoliberal capitalism and violence of our world today. All three have sought to show (as, discussing McCabe and MacIntyre, I also did a bit here and here; and as Dorothy Day also did--for more on her see the book that Lance Richey and I edited for the splendidly named Solidarity Hall Press) that the relationship between Christianity and Marxism is far less antagonistic than has often been portrayed.

Christianity, as Eagleton, McCabe, MacIntyre, and Day have helped us to see, is also far more critical of the capitalistic world than most Christians realize. Every Christian, instead of making placards with John 3:16 on them to wave at sports events, should instead write this to chasten and harrow players (and their corporate sponsors) making millions for whacking balls and pucks around: "Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them." If they have especially big placards, they can put the whole quote from MacIntyre:

Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities.

Getting back to Eagleton's new book, I would note that among its several virtues, it makes some necessary and, it seems to me, overdue criticisms of parts of Girard's theories about sacrifice, mimesis, and the scapegoat. Eagleton, greatly respecting Girard's insights and achievements, nonetheless rightly says that, inter alia, Girard often greatly exaggerates, provides too few concrete historical examples, and ignores questions of class.

Eagleton begins by noting that the notion of sacrifice is too little understood today and too often derided based on narrow, incomplete, or outright faulty notions. So the first part of the book is an exercise in clearing the ground to help us move beyond the idea that sacrifice means nothing more than "the voluntary relinquishing of what one finds valuable. But renunciation is only one feature of sacrifice, and not always the most prominent" (3). As he goes on to say, "sacrifice cannot be reduced to self-denial" (4). It is, rather, a "polythetic term, encompassing a range of activities that have no single feature in common." If this is true in general, a fortiori it is so in Christianity where it "spans a number of activities (praise, thanksgiving, prayer, witness, peacemaking, dedication to God and the like)" (6).

What makes Christian notions and practices of sacrifice even more unique, as Eagleton notes later in the book, is their lavish, superabundant, extravagant, and promiscuous nature: turning the other cheek, returning good for evil, blessing those who curse us, forgiving seventy times seven, etc. In doing all these things, Christians are engaged in "eschatological forms of excess--absurdist, avant-gardist, over-the-top gestures foreshadowing a future in which exchange-value will have been surpassed for what Paul Ricoeur terms 'an economy of superabundance'" (104).

Incidentally, this theme of superabundance puts me in mind of Hans Urs von Balthasar's winsome sermon for Trinity Sunday that I have often read to my students over the years where he says:

God is not a sealed fortress, to be attacked and seized by our engines of war (ascetic practices, meditative techniques, and the like) but a house full of open doors, through which we are invited to walk. In the Castle of the Three-in-One, the plan has always been that we, those who are entirely "other," shall participate in the superabundant communion of life. 

With an eye on anthropological work, especially that of another fascinating British Catholic and highly regarded scholar, Mary Douglas (whose book, Natural Symbols, should be required reading for liturgists, inter alia), Eagleton looks at sacrifice in a number of cultures, ancient and modern, and finds there common themes of power and the exchange of powers, especially with a divine figure or figures. There is, here and elsewhere, a paradox at work: to sacrifice something is in some instances to be able to go on to possess it more deeply later and in different ways. So what looks like a loss initially is often but the gateway to a much deeper and more powerful grasp of it, or by it, later on.

With a second eye on the Old Testament in particular, Eagleton notes that it generally takes a dim if not hostile view of sacrifice at least insofar as it is thought to be a means of averting God's gaze from injustice or a cheap trinket thought to appease divine wrath in the face of unchanged and unjust behavior. (See, e.g., much of Jeremiah or Micah.) This leads Eagleton on, in the next chapter, to argue that sacrifice-as-suffering cannot be blithely endorsed for others to endure, let alone forced to volunteer for: "Jesus never once counsels the diseased and disabled who flock around him to reconcile themselves to their misfortune" (38).

This is an especially important thing for Catholics to hear who may be inclined, as the Church often is, towards a passive siding with reactionary regimes whose injustices are downplayed while people are told to "offer up" various sacrifices of poverty, human rights, and injustice. In doing so, Christianity, whether inadvertently or not, presses its ascetical tradition into the service of profit and the violence that so often attends profiteers and capitalists: "Asceticism, Marx considers, is an integral part of a profit-driven social order" (180, referring to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). (For more on this, see my notion of an "ascetical politics" which I discussed in three parts here by drawing on the fascinating and valuable work of Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis.)

But that is not to say that voluntary acceptance of injustice and suffering is without merit. Indeed, in the example of Christ Himself voluntarily accepting the horrors of arrest, torture, and crucifixion, we come once again to the notion of sacrifice as an exchange of powers enabling one to go far deeper and far beyond what one otherwise could have done. Here Mary Douglas is pressed into service, when she notes (in Purity and Danger) that "when someone freely embraces the symbols of death, or death itself,...a great release of power for good should be expected to follow." Nowhere is that more true than in the case of Christ.

In addition to his work on Marx, Eagleton has also read Freud (and Lacan, inter alia) very perceptively, which most people today seem incapable of doing. This allows him to say--without, alas, developing it to the extent I wished--that the silence of the Father faced with His Son on the Cross "may be compared to the silence of the psychoanalyst who refuses the role of Big Other or transcendental guarantor" (41). (One thing it took me a long time on the couch to realize was that such silence was not neglect or lack of interest on the part of the remarkable woman who was my analyst. It was, rather, the very condition of freedom, and a very necessary reminder that the responsibility for the authorship of our lives must not mindlessly be handed over to others, tempting though that often is for many of us--cf. both Fromm and Winnicott on this point--as well as Adam Phillips.)

Here as elsewhere, Eagleton, discussing notions of sin, puts these Christian theological claims into dialogue with Freud and his notion of the death drive. Picking up a theme--that of desire--that one finds increasingly today in a good deal of work in philosophy, theology, and psychology, Eagleton notes that "desire itself can become ritualized and automated, assuming all the coercive, anonymous force of a law. If Freud names this condition neurosis, Paul gives it the title of sin, which he regards as a matter of the unconscious. When I sin, he writes in Romans, 'I do not understand my own actions'" (47). In this light, sin is a fake floor or false consciousness that prevents us from having access to and "being aware of our true desire" (48).

Eagleton, however, later turns the death drive around in a way that perhaps only a Christian could to argue that "there is a sense in which the death drive, striving to defeat the flow of temporality with its compulsive repetitions, represents a way of being undead, and so lies on the side of the living" (95).

Marxism and Psychoanalysis (I)

Before the month of May--the month of the birth of both Freud (whose usefulness to Christianity I've argued elsewhere), and Marx--passes, let me return to a book I mentioned on here some time ago: David Pavón-Cuéllar's Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology (Routledge, 2017), 242pp. It is a sharply worded and polemically argued book published late last year. Why this book, and why now? I cannot speak for the author, of course, but if ever we needed irrefutable evidence for the central thesis of this book, we have it in the rise of Jordan Peterson, about whose execrable tract I wrote at length here.

That thesis is one I have long suspected myself: viz., that too much of contemporary academic psychology, especially in North America, is uninterested in human nature except insofar as it can be turned into a handmaid to advanced capitalism. As Ian Parker (about whom more below) notes in the foreword, "this is a book that meticulously documents how and why psychology is the enemy of both psychoanalysis and Marxism" (x).

This notion of enmity confirms what I have long suspected and seen with my own eyes: academic psychology seems to be populated by, and to produce, nothing more than compliant, well-adjusted but badly formed and intellectually shallow members of the upper-middle class: as Pavon-Cuellar will argue later in the book, "psychology is so powerful among the privileged that it makes them forget the economy" (77). Anyone who has been forced to sit through a workplace seminar on "mindfulness" will immediately recognize this as true. If further proof is needed, then once again look to Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist of dangerously shallow learning (as another clinician and colleague of his makes painfully clear here) who is not at all unrepresentative of others in his guild. His book, as my above-linked review tried to make clear, totally ignores economic factors--indeed, scorns the very introduction of them as a distraction to his mythologizing about the libido dominandi of lobsters.

Even as a mere sophomore in psychology a quarter-century ago now in Canada I was shocked by trying to enter into conversations with my professors thinking they would of course have had basic formation in philosophy, history, literature, theology and much else. They had none. Nothing in my experience since then has led me to alter this view.

Seared into my memory is a conversation with my professor in child developmental psychology for whom I wrote a paper analyzing the then-new reports on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Canada. I titled it "Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me" and footnoted that line to, of course, Mark 10:13. In bright red pen, she circled this and scrawled, deadly earnest: "Who is Mark?" When, discussing the paper with her, I explained it was the name of the gospel writer in, you know, this thing called the Bible she appeared scarcely to have heard of it.

Not long after, in reading Robert Coles' biography, Anna Freud: the Dream of Psychoanalysis, I came across and have since often quoted the distinction that she makes in there and he quotes approvingly: between technicians and healers. Most of my psychology professors were technicians, adept in describing the patterns and apparent thought processes of, e.g., bees; in testing the workings of a sparrow's memory; or breaking down in painful detail the multivariate regression analysis of a study of rats on crack. But they couldn't have cared less about individual human beings, never mind wider cultural questions like economic justice, which would have rocked the boat and threatened their funding lines. So one must look elsewhere than today's "conformist psychology" (Jacoby) to find people who see the revolutionary potential in Freud and the tradition he bequeathed to us.

One such person, from within contemporary British psychology, who sees the revolutionary potential and criticizes the conformism, is Ian Parker, author of the foreword to Pavon-Cueller, and author of his own many works, including Revolution in Psychology: from Alienation to Emancipation. I am part-way through this book, and finding deeply edifying. I will say more about it another time, but for now can tell you it's a very worthwhile book.

He also has a brand new book just out, which I have ordered: Psy-Complex in Question: Critical Review In Psychology, Psychoanalysis And Social Theory.

To be fair, Freud himself was far from a revolutionary or a Marxist in many ways. While having achieved a relatively secure life as a member of the professional classes (he trained as a neurologist), he was nonetheless aware of the revolutionary potential of some of his ideas (recall, e.g., his famed comment to Jung as they are getting off the boat in 1909 in Freud's first and only trip to America: "They don't realize that we are bringing them the plague"!) but he was loathe to see the world rocked more than it had been during and after the Great War. He avoided political commentary and engagement as far as possible, which I find very understandable given that he was aware of the precarious place Jews occupied, especially in inter-war Mitteleuropa. Those who worked out some of the political implications of his thought have done so relatively recently--e.g., Eli Zaretsky, the late Paul Roazen, and perhaps most masterfully, as I showed on here, Todd McGowan.

Sure enough, psychoanalysis took hold in America, but it was, within short order and allowing for a few exceptions such as  Otto Fenichel, a psychoanalysis willingly defanged, domesticated, professionalized, medicalized by its own members; perhaps even worse, it was further largely captured by the rise of American ego psychology, which of course was embedded in the categories and patterns of capitalism. Along the way a few questions were raised about this--by, e.g., Erich Fromm, who saw connections between Marx and Freud--but such voices always remained a minority even during the heyday of psychoanalysis, which has now been over for thirty years, perhaps longer.

Why, then, return to such a tradition and such figures as Marx and Freud, whom Peterson and others gleefully conflate as the source of all evils in the past century? I think there is value in doing so not just to illuminate the conformism of psychology, but more especially because both Marxism and psychoanalysis alike remain powerful critics of conformism and idolatry within Christianity--to say nothing of the wider culture. To Pavon-Cuellar's book, then.

The author, a professor of psychology at the Unisersidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico, begins by asserting that almost all schools of modern psychology "shroud precisely that which Marxism and psychoanalysis strive to uncover" (6). This shrouding is motivated in part by an abstract idealism which seeks to avoid facing the "concrete material totality" of the body in the world today, especially the body of the worker in the economic conditions of the world today (13).

In his second chapter, Pavon-Cuellar argues that there is an important continuity between Freud and Marx even as they would of course have openly disagreed with one another on certain matters: "both will always be authentic materialists" (36). Both, moreover, recognize the lingering power of history, especially traumatic history, and know that it cannot simply be set aside. But both also assert that we are not prisoners of that past but can begin to liberate ourselves from it if we are willing to stand up and stand apart from that history. Thus both Freud and Marx are anti-conformists.

From here the book reviews various schools of psychology and psychoanalysis, noting that Lacan is the most anti-psychology of all psychoanalytic schools today. It then looks at Marxist psychologies before attempting to reconstruct a critical-practical meta-psychology, as we shall see.

Continues. 

Christians and Class Warfare

If you listened, in the aftermath of the Florida school massacre, to that moral cretin heading up the NRA, he fatuously claimed that there was a "God-given" right to bear arms. Even a cursory review of Catholic social teaching, which has reflected in very considerable detail on human rights since 1948, would show that there is no such right theologically understood. And if you listen to the great moral philosopher and intellectual historian Alasdair MacIntyre, you would know from his historical review that the very concept of rights is an entirely human invention dating no earlier than the year 1400. As a result, people like LaPierre resort to uttering rubbish fit only for the splendid riposte of MacIntyre: “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns” (After Virtue).

One of MacIntyre's great influences was the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe. Indeed, in the acknowledgements to Whose Justice? Which Rationality, the successor book to After Virtue (and part of the so-called trilogy along with Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry), MacIntyre pointedly and rather fulsomely acknowledges how much he owes McCabe more than anyone for the latter's critical responses to After Virtue.

I have previously reflected on some of McCabe's writings on here in conversation with other thinkers who come out of and are shaped by the post-war British left, including Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas.

But the work of McCabe's that bears on this debate in some ways, and which is perhaps the most challenging thing he wrote, is his 1980 essay "The Class Struggle and Christian Love," reprinted in God Matters.

The language of "class struggle" is of course more familiar to Eastern, especially Slavic, Christians than to anyone else due to the Russian Revolution. Some, especially Americans, may be inclined smugly to dismiss this language as a relic of losers in the Cold War. But as others have argued very recently, that language cannot be abandoned quite so facilely if one hopes to bring about any real political and economic change.

McCabe was writing when the Cold War was at its height, having been deeply influenced by Marxism, as was his close friend Terry Eagleton, a man of the British Catholic left whose books Why Marx Was Right and The Gatekeeper: A Memoir are rollicking good reads. 

In his essay "The Class Struggle and Christian Love," McCabe begins by stating that "the class struggle is the revolution--not just a means toward it, but the thing itself"(182).  He immediately notes that many, perhaps most, Christians will reject this notion of class struggle as incompatible with the gospel--and in doing so find themselves in bed with those who agree with them, viz., Joseph Stalin, Margaret Thatcher, and the International Marxist Group.

But, later in the essay, McCabe will more stoutly insist that Christian participation in the class struggle is in fact required by the dominical call to love our neighbor, and that such struggle and such love may sometimes be found in "circumstances in which even violence itself--by which I mean killing people--is not only compatible with Christian love but demanded by it" (185). 

Later still, he wants to unpack, just a little bit, what this notion of "class struggle" entails. It is not, he begins, just a variant on English class snobbery; it is not about simple conflict between haves and have-nots; and it is not differences of wealth that cause class conflict, but "class differences that cause differences of wealth" (188).

In mentioning all this, McCabe along the way notes that the gospels say nothing of course about these issues, though they say plenty about the dire perils posed by riches and the neglect of the poor. But the gospels are silent on any notion "that everyone has to have equal shares of wealth" (189). And if we think class conflict is about envious maneuvering to establish total equality with everyone having the same share, we are mistaken. Equally mistaken are we if we think we are not somehow already involved in a struggle, and have been for a very long time. Finally, we delude ourselves if we think there is a position of neutrality somewhere here: those who are neutral, he says, are inevitably on the side of "the class in power" (192). Christians cannot be neutral, he insists, but must fight against the class conflict and war.

What is that conflict and war based upon? Here, McCabe's Marxism is most clearly on display: in capitalism the fundamental divide, and so the fundamental factor in class conflict, is over surplus value created by workers (beyond what they need strictly for subsistence) which is appropriated by capitalists to enrich themselves and extend their own power in defense of their interests against others. The system of capitalism has at its heart an "intrinsic" need for class conflict (190).

There is, then, "human antagonism" at the heart of capitalism (192). That antagonism sometimes breaks out in open shooting wars in which the state goes to battle on behalf of the ruling classes to preserve them in power. Can Christians join in? Can Christians be involved in a class struggle up to and including the use of violence? Or is it the case that this antagonism at the heart of capitalist-driven class conflict means that it will forever be opposed to and by Christianity properly lived and understood?

Is Christianity, in other words, always going to be opposed to capitalism insofar as the former claims against the latter the possibility (however poorly embodied) that conflict can be overcome, that conflict is not inevitable, that we can live together in love? McCabe certainly thinks so: "Christianity is deeply subversive of capitalism precisely because it announces the improbable possibility that men might live together without war; neither by domination nor by antagonism but by unity in love" (193).

Christianity must therefore fight the class war because it is ipso facto fighting capitalism and its antagonism which is most precisely opposed to the universal call to love. But does the Christian fighting that war have to use violence or have the right to do so--or must it be forsworn? McCabe, as is his wont, calmly and carefully considers the arguments of his opponents while advancing his own. And so he picks up the Christian concern that any idea of a class struggle somehow requires violence, which no Christian can support. But does it? Does the idea of a class struggle inevitably mean a violent or armed struggle? McCabe says no: "It is perfectly possible to believe passionately in the importance of the class struggle and to renounce all political violence" (183).

He goes on to argue that there is no incompatibility in working, as a Christian, for the just overthrow of the ruling class while forswearing the killing of that class.

But leave aside such principles: there are much more pragmatic considerations to forswearing killing. McCabe notes that any time you go up against the modern state, it is bound to win. You can recruit a few starry-eyed idealists to your cause--the IRA, say, or ISIS--but the other side will always have more men under arms and better arms, and thus will always defeat you. The ruling class, then, is much better at killing on a much larger scale than any of its opponents can ever hope to do.

Here McCabe quotes General Patton's aphorism that you don't win wars by getting young men to die for your country, but by convincing the other men to die for their country--a neat twist to this having been pulled off by the Americans and British in the Second World War, where the Soviet Union lost far more men than their erstwhile allies, and they all knew it but tried to avoid talking about it. In reading The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James 1932-1943 last year, I came across the suspicion expressed again and again by the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, along with his boss Molotov, and his boss Stalin, that the refusal of a second front in Europe until mid-1944, while not without certain technical considerations, was also secretly motivated by a desire to bleed Russia white. The British of course denied this at all times, and not totally insincerely, it seems to me; but at the same time we cannot forget that a scant 20 years before the British regarded the Bolsheviks as terrible enemies to be wiped off the earth.

And, in fact, much of this is born out later on. As David Reynolds' deeply fascinating book In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War showed, the British premier was certainly aware of the fact that the Russian losses were on a scale never seen or matched in the West, which is why Churchill's chapters on the war in Russia are among the shortest, least attentive, and poorly researched of his entire six-volume memoirs of the war. E.g., lavish attention is given to British battles in North Africa while Stalingrad gets only the barest treatment; Churchill also withheld certain criticisms of Eisenhower as the latter was elected when the former was finishing his last volume in the early 1950s. Seldom has the writing of "history" been so transparently tendentious and subordinate to the political moment.

But back to McCabe. who continues to note that there are other pragmatic but in fact powerful reasons to forswear violence: it takes you away from spending time and energy on the one thing that might dislodge the ruling class from power, that is, exposing its carefully concealed lie that preservation of its power is necessary for the preservation of the peace and prosperity of those further down the social hierarchy. For the moment, McCabe says, Christians doing this are doing the best they can, and are not mistaken in seeing what they see and doing what they do. Conditions are not yet in place for them to be called upon to do more. Capitalism, he says, has not yet reached that stage of crisis where Christians might be called on to undertake violent actions.

And here's where the essay starts to raise difficulties at least for me when he says that "I think...that the pacifist is mistaken in supposing that violence is always incompatible with the Christian demand that we love our neighbor" (185). I suppose my difficulty comes in part from having first read Stanley Hauerwas in the early 1990s when I was beginning to take theology seriously. His repeated arguments in favour of pacifism have never really left me. On this score, see, inter alia, his early The Peaceable Kingdom; see also his memorable essay "The Non-Violent Terrorist: In Defense of Christian Fanaticism" in Sanctify Them in the Truth; and then see some of his more recent works after September 11th, including War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity.

Though I don't know how pacifism works out in practice, it seems to me in theory, that is, in theology, to be true that Christians should forswear violence, for the use of violence seems to me to be a theological mistake in the strict sense: that is, God in Christ has kenotically abandoned the path of violence when, as the gospels make plain, He easily could have summoned legions of angels to destroy His enemies....but did not.

My difficulty with McCabe's claim is lessened, briefly, towards the end of his essay. For he turns to the practical question of how a Christian must fight the class war, and here he issues some strong counsels: "In the first place be meek" because nobody likes a loud-mouthed, ungracious bully-boy advancing a cause; such behavior is counter-productive. Second and further, be "loving, kind, gentle, calm, unprovoked to anger." Real revolutionaries, he says, are all these things and just to that extent "they are extremely dangerous" to the lies and liars of capitalism who view conflict as inevitable, as something one must be well armed against and willing to kill over. In addition, "we should not lose our sense of humour" and become tedious and unpleasant scolds.

But just when you think McCabe might left you off easy, he comes back to say "We still need though to face the question of revolutionary violence" (196). Here he notes with his usual self-critical bluntness that no churchmen have the right to demand nonviolence when "their cathedrals are stuffed with the regimental flags and monuments to colonial wars. The Christian Church, with minor exceptions, has been solidly on the side of violence for centuries" as long as it has supported the status quo and the right class. The Church's opposition to violence begins "only when the poor catch on to violence."

Nevertheless, it is not the case, he concedes, that the Church has always and everywhere been only on the side of violence in promotion of selected interests. The Church has not quite lost total credibility insofar as it has tried to maintain a call for justice, however poorly realized. And that call sometimes requires the use of violence. In doing so, we may not think it terribly loving to kill certain people--the love may not, he says, be very "perspicuous"--but we cannot conclude that such actions, sinful though they are, are totally lacking in love. They are motivated by love for the innocent who are suffering injustice. To that extent, then, we may describe violence not as intrinsically wrong but as at least partially loving.

Here McCabe knows his Christian history in ways that almost all of us today have forgotten. Here I was reminded of something Phillip Jenkins documents in hair-raising detail from just a century ago, and Jonathan-Riley Smith documents for at least ten centuries before that: the Christian tradition, until the aftermath of the First and then Second World Wars, never saw violence as intrinsically wrong and always to be avoided. That perspective, it seems to me, is a purely post-1945 development aided, in part, by popes going to the UN in New York to pound the podium and (ahem) pontificate "War no more!" Until those developments, the Christian tradition for the overwhelming part of its history did not presuppose that violence was ruled out of course with prejudice. Rather, it evaluated the use of violence based on broader moral considerations, including righting injustice and protecting the innocent.Thus it gave us the just war tradition, which tradition McCabe invokes here by saying that "the only just war is the class war, the struggle of the working class against the exploiters. No war is just except insofar as it is part of this struggle" (197).

Having said that, however, he immediately returns to his earlier point to reiterate that "violence can have very little part in the class struggle as such" right now given current conditions (197), not least the overwhelming preponderance of force on the side of the ruling class.

Finally, in his closing paragraphs, McCabe almost anticipates what I said above about it being a theological mistake to condone violence because Christ forswore its use: "we cannot imagine Jesus taking part in such violence; he was wholly and entirely a perspicuous example of what love means; he was and is the presence of the Kingdom itself; we, however, are only on the road towards it" (197).

That road is rooted in the present but already concluded in the future. As a result, we can see with two sets of eyes: the injustice of the present, but its destruction and forgiveness in the future. As a result, Christians cannot hate anybody, even those who exploit the poor or inflict other injustices. The Christian engaged in class warfare can only do so once he understands that "hatred is impossible" and that even one's class enemies are those for whom Christ also died.

Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through: From MacIntyre to Freud and Marx Again

In looking back, as Catholic World Report asked me to do, over some of the significant books I read in 2017, at the top of the list has to stand Alasdair MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. I've discussed parts of it on here previously, but here are some longer thoughts.

It is this book of MacIntyre's more than anything else that has forced me to start thinking about Marx seriously for the first time, and to return to Freud and engage him anew as well. When someone as vastly learned as MacIntyre says what he does in this book, those of us who are not as learned and have much to learn from and through him pay attention and follow suit. Thus one finds oneself in some fashion pulled into the unfolding of tradition-as-sustained-argument and of teaching as mentorship to an apprentice, both of which MacIntyre discussed in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. 

I do not for a moment pretend that this is an exhaustive review; nor do I pretend to have understood some of its more "technical" philosophical arguments. Almost all of MacIntyre's books never cease to pay rereading over many years to continue to unpack so much of his densely argued prose, and that is certainly the case with this perhaps ironically named "essay" which, he says in the preface, is deliberately written for the non-specialist academic philosopher! MacIntyre expects a lot of his readers and refuses to assume that non-philosophers (his "plain persons") are incapable of following complex philosophical arguments.

Until 2017 a lot of those so-called plain persons had probably not heard of MacIntyre until some blogger came along hawking his tract about the “Benedict option” (does one opt for the bourbon cocktail of that name to go with the oysters, and which of those does one opt for--North Atlantic or south?).  MacIntyre, now closing in on 90, does not deserve, in the sunset of his variegated and vastly influential work as the greatest moral philosopher of the postwar period, to be remembered solely or even primarily for one paragraph (which he says he regrets more than anything he wrote) at the conclusion of just one book, After Virtue, which was so transparently traduced by the blogger in question.

In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity he has now come full circle in reminding us of the remaining potency and relevance of two figures most often thought to be at odds with Catholicism: Marx and Freud, both of whom were treated in MacIntyre’s first two books from the early 1950s. Freud still has much to teach us about the nature of our desires, and how we fail to be good reasoners when our desires go astray; and Marx still offers us a very powerful critique of how capitalism subtly exploits and fuels those desires, even to the point of invading and eroding Christianity from within.

Over the last six decades, as he went from Protestantism and Marxism to a phase where he was estranged by and from both, and had not yet seen his way back to Aristotle via Aquinas and thus into the Catholic Church, there is one constant in all of MacIntyre’s writings:  his desire to unmask the liberalism of modernity and its many disguises. In this he joins with his fellow British convert Cardinal Newman, as readers of the latter’s celebrated Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and perhaps even more his biglietto speech, will know.

Given his anti-liberalism, too many people reduce MacIntyre to a reactionary or else a communitarian, when he has repeatedly denounced both as being but the false choice proffered by the dominant liberalism of modern politics, where, as he put it, there are conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals—but we are all liberals condemned to think and act in terms of the modern nation-state and its various forms of disguised capitalism.

Have we any genuine and available alternatives? MacIntyre does not answer that question directly, instead suggesting—as he has for most of his life—further lines of thought where we might yet find some possible answers. The most promising place for answers, he reminds us in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, is one that most people will not care to visit, having decided in advance it is irredeemably unprofitable and hopelessly out of date. But the place—or, rather, person—MacIntyre says we must engage anew, after two centuries of misunderstanding, misrepresenting, or misapplying him, is Karl Marx. Too many of us are not willing even to hear that, let alone undertake such a process of learning because of a false assumption that the relationship between Christianity and Marxism is, MacIntyre says, one of “straightforward antagonism.” We have assumed such antagonism and in so doing have never yet, after nearly two centuries, actually had the necessary dialogue between Christianity and the critique posed by the Marx of the 1840s in, e.g., his Theses on Feuerbach. The early Marx was, MacIntyre contends, very much an Aristotelian long before he was an Hegalian, and in his Aristotelianism is thus amenable to Christianity (as Aquinas also also found the Greek philosopher to be).

While aware of the dangers of deformed Marxism, and while agreeing that the Catholic Church was right to condemn persecution of Christians in, e.g., China and the Soviet Union, MacIntyre would insist that Catholic (and other) criticism of Marxism often conveniently masks “obfuscating and reactionary social attitudes” designed to do little more than protect people in their “economic and moral complacency.” So it’s not that Marx has been tried and found wanting so much that he has been left untried because he has been rendered invisible, MacIntyre says, by the modern academic discipline of economics. I confirmed this claim by talking to a Catholic economist, colleague, and friend of mine, Doug Meador, who, well aware of currents in his field, and the types of topics discussed at big conferences of economists, very strongly agreed with MacIntyre here when I asked him, saying that most economists today under the age of 40 have probably never even heard of Marx!

Curiously, the same thing could be said—the same dynamic discerned—in an unthinking rejection of Catholicism which seeks to protect people in their spiritual complacency. Marxism has suffered the same fate as Catholicism in some ways—rejected by seemingly intelligent people who have almost no first-hand knowledge of it but nonetheless scorn it because of the mistakes made by some, or the abuses committed by institutionalized forms and authorities.

But MacIntyre is too careful a thinker, too fair a man, to allow uses and abuses of Marx even by self-proclaimed Marxists (in, e.g., the USSR, which in one place he calls a “deformed workers’ state ruled by a bureaucratic elite” and in another acidly dismisses as “Kruschev Enterprises Inc.”) to prevent him from seeing what is of lasting value. MacIntyre is the consummate Catholic thinker and thus a model for us all insofar as he reflects the ancient patristic practice of  “despoiling the Egyptians,” finding good whatever its provenance. This is clear not just in MacIntyre’s judicious thinking about Marx, but also and equally true in his work on Freud.

For MacIntyre, the same explanatory power he found in Marxism  he later found in Catholicism. What unites both, at least conceptually, is their ability to analyze the powers and principalities of the world and to sniff out their hidden mechanisms of control, violence, and greed—what St. Augustine famously called libido dominandi. When both function well, they are not merely metaphysical systems for understanding the world: they are also, and especially, embodied moral practices that seek to change the world. (The same could be said about psychoanalysis, albeit it on a more individual scale.)

Thus both Marxism and Christianity have the conceptual resources to advance a potent critique of our world today. As he bluntly put it in Marxism: An Interpretation (which was later revised and republished as Marxism and Christianity), “the two most relevant books in the modern world are St. Mark’s Gospel and Marx’s National Economy and Philosophy; but they must be read together.” Thus Marxism and Christianity are at their best, or least in danger of corruption, when they remain on the fringes of empire and economy, offering a critique of both.

When either Christianity or Marxism are not on the “peripheries” (to use a favorite word of Pope Francis), they both run the risk, almost invariably realized, of being captured, usually invisibly, within the confines and categories of capitalism, which, MacIntyre now says in 2017, “is not only a set of economic relationships. It is also a mode of presentation of those relationships that disguises and deceives.” To unmask those relationships, we must, MacIntyre says, learn “from Marx just what it was about capitalism—that appropriation of surplus value—that transformed the relationship of the cultural and social order so radically. “ While recognizing the prosperity capitalism has brought some, MacIntyre also insists in his latest book on recognizing that it has also “destroyed…traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived.” All this Marx had clearly foreseen two centuries ago.

The deceptive power of capitalism today is such that we often fail—at least, ironically, until Donald Trump came along—to take seriously those inequalities and those deprived and destroyed areas that have been increasing in the last several decades. And it is not just politicians who fail to own up to this: many churchmen have also often gone along with, or at least failed to criticize, these developments, which MacIntyre, in an updated 1995 preface to his Marxism and Christianity, sees as a dereliction of ecclesial duty: “Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities” (here one thinks immediately of Dorothy Day).

MacIntyre’s earliest published writings on Marx were from the 1950s and 1960s. Those writings were reprinted in 2008 in the collection, Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, edited by Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson. This book has received almost no attention, but for those hoping to understand his newest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, these Marxist writings, some of which I have quoted above, are necessary reading.

If in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity he has returned to renewed engagement with Marxism, he has also done so with psychoanalytic thought, which MacIntyre also critically appreciated in his very early book, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, and then later in essays reprinted in Against the Self-Images of the Age, where he argued that "psychoanalysis need not become the self-enclosed system which it so often is" (37). The tragedy of its becoming a closed system and ideology (as with communism) means for MacIntyre, as he wrote in 1958, that it obscures “Freud’s essential and unassailable greatness.”

In seeing what value psychoanalysis has when it is not self-enclosed, MacIntyre in 2017 shares much in common with the man I regard as the most interesting and unconventional psychoanalyst writing today (who also comes out of a British Marxist background along with MacIntyre), viz., Adam Phillips, whose biography of the celebrated psychoanalyst , D.W. Winnicott, MacIntyre cites approvingly. I have discussed Phillips on here extensively over the past two years.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is an astonishing book for a man who turns 89 this year. It shows no loss or diminution of his enormous powers of reason, his astonishingly wide-ranging reading, and his synthesis of that reading. It also shows once more his genuine modesty at admitting what he does not know sufficiently, or has not thought about rigorously enough. Again and again he admits, with disarming directness, where he got something wrong, or needed to add to, subtract from, or otherwise revise what he earlier thought and wrote. There is something enormously admirable about this, perhaps because it seems so rare today. It is a feature of nearly every book, including the most recent, but it is perhaps most clearly stated at the end of his updated (2003) edition of The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, where he says that “I owe at least as much and probably a good deal more to those with whom I disagree as to those with whom I agree….One’s severest critics are often those to whom one is most in debt.”

Critics help us to see things differently, and even to help us live differently. In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre looks at the lives of four critical figures who offer us help in order to “live against the cultural grain…as economic, political, and moral antagonists of the dominant order.”

MacIntyre, in typical narrative style, focuses on Vasily Grossman (a Ukrainian Jewish writer in Stalinist Russia), Sandra Day O’Connor (an American jurist), C.L.R. James (a Trinidadian writer, activist, and cricketer), and Denis Faul (an Irish Catholic priest involved in the political troubles there). This prosopological method is similar to one he first used in his 2006 book Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922.

With the four lives in the present volume, MacIntyre seeks to ask about how each was both helped and hindered in reasoning about desires and in rank ordering of the goods of one’s life by both theoretical and practical considerations, starting with their families and schooling, which he takes to be utterly critical to the formation of virtuous character and thus sound reasoning. Families and schools are crucial insofar as they seek to inculcate in children three essential qualities: reliability, truthfulness, and imagination. Here especially one sees the influence of Winnicott's well-known ideas about the "good enough mother."

The result of narrating these four very different stories is to show that “human lives do have a teleological structure” but that the telos towards which each life aims will always and everywhere be incomplete until and unless it finds its fulfillment in “an object of desire beyond all particular and finite goods.” MacIntyre does not give a name to that “object,” for he is—as I suggested more than a decade ago in reviewing his book on Stein—the most apophatic of Christian philosophers—but he ends his book, and so perhaps the last major work of his own extraordinarily fecund life, by saying simply: “Here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins”—a suitably Thomistic ending if ever there were one.

Freud and Marx Against Psychology

This is a very welcome, very timely, and deeply fascinating book for reasons I shall describe after I've finished reading it: Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or against Psychology? by David Pavon-Cuellar (Routledge, 2017), 242pp.

Here is the blurb from the publisher:

The methods developed by Freud and Marx have enabled a range of scholars to critically reflect upon the ideological underpinnings of modern and now postmodern or hypermodern western societies. In this intriguing book, the discipline of psychology itself is screened through the twin dynamics of Marxism and psychoanalysis. David Pavón-Cuéllar asks to what extent the terms, concerns and goals of psychology reflect, in fact, the dominant bourgeois ideology that has allowed it to flourish.

The book charts a gradual psychologization within society and culture dating from the nineteenth century, and examines how the tacit ideals within mainstream psychology – creating good citizens or productive workers – sit uneasily against Marx and Freud’s ambitions of revealing fault-lines and contradictions within individualist and consumer-oriented structures.

The positivist aspiration of psychology to become a natural science has been the source of extensive debate, critical voices asserting the social and cultural contexts through which the human mind and behaviour should be understood. This challenging new book provides another voice that, in addressing two of the most influential intellectual traditions of the past 150 years, widens the debate still further to examine the foundations of psychology.

Crazy Communistic Christians

In one of the first books he published over his long, distinguished career as the most important moral philosopher of our time, Alasdair MacIntyre bluntly argued in Marxism: An Interpretation (which was later revised and republished as Marxism and Christianity) that “the two most relevant books in the modern world are St. Mark’s Gospel and Marx’s National Economy and Philosophy; but they must be read together.” (For those unfamiliar with MacIntyre, I give something of a retrospective of MacIntyre's writings here; I show here how revoltingly he has been traduced by some oversharing blogger; and discuss something of his use of Marx and Freud here.)

MacIntyre has returned to a new engagement with Marx in his newest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge UP, 2016). Here, MacIntyre says, we must learn “from Marx just what it was about capitalism—that appropriation of surplus value—that transformed the relationship of the cultural and social order so radically." While recognizing the prosperity capitalism has brought some, MacIntyre also insists in his latest book on recognizing that it has also “destroyed…traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived.” All this Marx had clearly foreseen two centuries ago.

The deceptive and destructive power of capitalism today is such that we often fail—at least, ironically, until Donald Trump came along—to take seriously those inequalities and those deprived and destroyed areas that have been increasing in the last several decades. And it is not just politicians who fail to own up to this: many churchmen have also often gone along with, or at least failed to criticize, these developments, which MacIntyre, in an updated 1995 preface to his Marxism and Christianity, sees as a dereliction of ecclesial duty: “Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities” (here one thinks immediately of Dorothy Day, as Lance Richey and I tried to show in our book).

MacIntyre’s earliest published writings on Marx were from the 1950s and 1960s. Those writings were reprinted in 2008 in the collection, Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, edited by Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson.

All these thoughts came back to me today in reading David Bentley Hart's op-ed in the New York Times, "Are Christians Supposed to be Communists?" Hart's work on re-translating the New Testament has forced this question upon him again, as he notes in this op-ed and elsewhere.

It is certainly a question worth considering again and seriously because it's never been adequately answered by Christians of the last century and more. The capture of the Christian imaginary and its colonization from within by advanced capitalism remains, to my mind, one of the most insidious problems of our time. Certainly my students this semester, reading, inter alia, Vincent Miller's Consuming Religion have, with great diffidence and discomfort, raised this question of whether we should be "communists." I have no great answers to this, but when men like Hart and MacIntyre say we need to be asking such a question anew, it behooves all of us to sit up and listen.