Star Trek v. Star Wars: Modernist Party v. Regressivist Party?
January 20, 2011, 8:46 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
Michael Lind thinks we need to reconfigure our political parties around our attitude toward progress.
It strikes me that this new two-party system would also leave many Catholics without a home –for obvious reasons, which we DON’T need to discuss here. In other words, THIS IS NOT A POST ON ABORTION.
But the underlying question, which I DO want to discuss here, is what is the Catholic idea on progress? It strikes me that it is complicated. Any ideas?
I doubt that there is a single “Catholic idea of progress, even in magisterial statements. The last of the propositions condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864) was that “the Roman Pontiff can and should accommodate himself to progress, liberalism, and recent civilization.” A hundred years later, Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical entitled “Populorum progressio.” It is often said that the wholesale slaughter of the First World War put an end to late nineteenth-century talk of progress, and the holocausts of the rest of that century certainly don’t encouragement a more optimistic assessment. It is a commonplace to distinguish between scientiic and technological progress and ethical or moral progress, and more than one person, Catholic or not, has argued that the latter does not keep pace with the former. At times it can seem that there is something inevitable about the former, but surely there is nothing inevitable about the latter.
Of course, we believe that the church is progressing, as it were, toward the end times, when Christ’s reign will be fully established. How that squares with more secular notions of progress isn’t very clear to me, though.
It just so happens that I have stumbled upon (literally) a thesis of my Father’s written in 1969 for his Master of Buisness Administration (1969) entitled Technological Forecasting In The Electronics Industry that was sitting upon a pile of books in my Mother’s basement. He begins by stating that man exists as an integral part of a complex system of persons, places, and things, all interrelated and held in place by an entity known to be God. (apparently one could say that in 1969 without being told it was not politically correct.) God created each individual, but as His invention, we are simultaneously singular and plaural, for man exists in relationship, and his progress is enhanced through mutual effort, not separate activity. He goes on to say that in the proper order of things, buisness and economic systems are intended to serve man, and thus the goals of economics and the people’s needs should not be mutually exclusive. He mentions that innovation depends upon freedom, that while economic systems are intended to serve man, man is intended to serve God, and concludes that in serving God, man has a fundamental obligation to seek Truth and avoid confusion. Although I had no trouble understanding his introduction and conclusion, I can’t even begin to understand the content regarding the role of innovation, automation and the ascendancy of planning in technological forecasting, but it appears, having worked for some time in the electronics and computer industry, he believed that the best offense was a good defense.
This is a good topic, and one that I think roils the church quite a bit because the notion of “progress” is so closely connected to liberal secular notions of some Lennon-esque utopia, or Lenin-esque for others. That has obviously been a concern of Ratzinger’s, that such a secular notion was introduced into the church.
But I think his encyclicals and speeches on social justice have been very strong and very much in the vein of Paul VI et al, and at the same time I think it’s a mistake to see those positions as advocating some kind of utopianism. I almost see it as a tragic vision, the poor will be with us always, and we do not throw up our hands as Christians.
I like very much a line from a Nicholas Boyle essay in the Tablet (9 July 2005) on Gaudium et Spes:
That strikes me as exactly right, and the title of his essay was, aptly, “On earth, as in heaven.” I take that to mean, in a poor interpretation, we work toward fulfillment of God’s will without expecting that we will complete that work which only God can complete.
Sargent Shriver’s life, as detailed in a post below, and JFK’s inaugural, as shown in the post above, seem to me to be exemplars of Catholic thinking in this regard. Hope and enthusiasm without hubris.
The American attitude, or rather attitudes, on all this seem to be played out in response to the Tucson shooting, in which some took an almost fatalistic view that evil happens and there’s nothing you can do, while others argued that gun laws or treatment of the mentally ill could help. Not to weigh in on which policy or prescription is correct, but I would lean toward the latter reaction, accepting that bad things happen but that we still must do all that we can do avert such evil.
Frank Manuel reviews theories of progress in his 1965 book Shapes of Philosophical History and briefly surveys recent Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox views. He notes the changes in 20th century Catholic thought, appears to be partial to the views of Christopher Dawson, and doesn’t know what to make of Teilhard.
pp. 140 – 145
http://books.google.com/books?id=QEKfAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=frank+manuel+philosophical+history+tillich&source=bl&ots=YCNlsYqYYv&sig=hUR6Gr81yB84bPEpyNz1HqY8-kE&hl=en&ei=kls4Te-DIcH78Aaale2MCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
It does seem that the notion of secular progress against religious values might be a bit problematic from a Catholic point of view.
Thanks, Prof. Kaveny. Great topic; very apropos given current events. Wish I could have time to study this topic.
Here is a talk by Anthony Padavano – if you substitute “progess” for “hope” – you can see the application to your post.
Highlights:
More than this, however, secularity is a value in its own right, a benefit to the human family and its religious enterprise. The Church, particularly, resisted most of secularity’s advantages. Some of the developments which came from secularity with little or no help from the Churches were:
Democracy
free speech and academic freedom
free press
separation of Church and State
the abolition of slavery
the rights of women
reproductive rights and responsible sexual autonomy
the right of either partner to terminate destructive marriages
the elimination of the death penalty
the rights of conscience over inquisitions and the suppression of free inquiry
a sense that the Christian Churches should not be divided nor the world religions in conflict with one another
workers’ rights and benefits and collective bargaining
universal education and health care
the legitimacy of the scientific method
an independent judiciary
the United Nations and the European Union
income tax graduated appropriately
the rights of homosexuals to civil unions and the equal protection of marriage
Would we want to live in a world without these advantages? Often, church resistance to secularity tried to give us such a disadvantaged world.
At the close of Vatican II, in response to the above:
Latin-rite married convert Catholic pastors
Ecumenical and Interfaith Weddings
the Pope at the World Council of Churches or praying in a Lutheran Church to honor Martin Luther or entering with devotion a synagogue or mosque
a formal apology by the Pope to the world for the evil done to it by Catholics
a majority of Catholic laity in favor of abortion in some circumstances, homosexual committed relationships, a married priesthood, the ordination of women (even though all of these were condemned by three popes in succession)
the legal status of homosexual marriages in traditionally Catholic countries
a conviction, Church-wide, by most Catholics that one remains a Catholic in good standing and is entitled to communion in divorce and remarriage, in homosexual relationships, after excommunication, resigning from canonical priestly ministry without dispensation, after an abortion
Catholics taking a bishop to court, favoring the bankruptcy of dioceses, forcing cardinals to resign in Austria and in the United States
world-wide acceptance of the ministry of non-canonical married priests
organized communities of Catholics favoring issues Church administrators condemn while insisting they are Catholics in good standing
a Pope meeting for hours, in a friendly environment, seeking no retraction, with Hans Kung, a theologian who seriously challenges the legitimacy of papal infallibility
Assisi days of prayer with leaders of world religions gathered with the Pope as his equal
a formal acceptance by the Pope of the Augsburg Confession, the charter of the Reformation
communion at the Vatican, by the Pope, to those who are not Catholic, such as United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair
A number of the above items could have led to formal heresy charges against John Paul II by the Council of Trent.
Pius X at the beginning of the twentieth century excommunicated Catholic theologians for less than this.
In the United States, some bishops, before Vatican II, excommunicated laity for not sending their children to Catholic schools. That, at a time when excommunication was terrifying in the extreme
Hope this isn’t too far afield from your question.
Sorry, forgot the link: http://www.catholica.com.au/gc2/ap/002_ap_210408.php
Jim Paulweis: You wrote: “Of course, we believe that the church is progressing, as it were, toward the end times, when Christ’s reign will be fully established.” I don’t know that I believe that, and I wonder on what you base that belief.
At Lk 18:8, Jesus asks: “But the Son of Man, when he comes, do you think he will find faith on the earth?”–a question implying a negative answer. At Mt 24:12, his prediction is that because iniquity will have abounded, “the charity of many shall grow cold.” And since the Church is constituted by faith and love, the two statements do give one pause.
Karl Rahner criticized the penultimate draft of Gaudium et spes because it lacked “a real and profound theology of sin.” It was content with lamenting immorality in a way that scarcely surpassed what mere experience might yield. The ineradicable depths of sin were overlooked. The ideology of a “better world” obtainable if people only willed it had replaced the “legitimate and necessary ‘pessimism’ that Christians must profess before the world.” It also neglected, Rahner thought, what a Christian theology of history must acknowledge: “that the antagonism between a world under the power of the Evil One and the disciples of Christ will never be mitigated but will grow ever more bitter in the course of time.” I don’t believe that he thought these defects were entirely satisfied in the final text.
My own view is that the authenticity of the Church, like that of individual Christians, is very hard-won and is always a very precarious achievement. There is no guarantee that one generation of more faithful Christians will be succeeded by another, nor that the holiness of the Church in one place in any one generation will be matched in any Church in another place. So I’m having a problem understanding your claim.
It was, I believe, at the time of the twentieth anniversary of the close of Vatican II that the editors of Commonweal claimed that the Church was holier than it had been before the Council. I wondered at the time how they could know this.
I take it that the dictum that the Church is always in need of reformation is applicable to every other human institution as well as to each of us as individuals.
As far as institutions go, if we think of their policies and practices, we have to acknowledge that even the best of policies or practices have limited “shelf life” value. Furthermore, in adopting them, the institution made a prudential choice among available alternatives. Prudential choices, by their nature, can always be reasonably reevaluated.
Changes in times and circumstances can make some policies and practices and policies obsolete or obsolescent. Thus formerly good policies or practices can become outmoded and even foolish.
Progress or regress, then, in matters of policy or practice, is always relative to what is already in place and what is available as an alternative.
When it comes to individuals, it’s always good to recall Kierkegaard’s comment that each of us has to start at the beginning of our relationship to God. Or as he put it, each of us has to have our own encounter with Christ and respond to Him. Contra Hegelianesque notions, what our predecessors have done or failed to do does not change the fact that each of us has to make our own response. So no “progress” in these fundamental matters from generation to generation, from one era to another era, etc.
Fr. K – remember that Oswald Spengler used a “spiral” to describe historical progress. If my memory serves, it captured the notion of generational growth, death (upward spiral using the concept of an organism) but this spiral circled and re-addressed questions, issues, sin, etc.for every generation. It was a break with the current historical “linear” notion of historical advancement. Along with his spiral, his works captured the notion that the West was in decline (WWI); difference between civilizations and cultures; and he had a pessimism to his works that seems to capture your comments above (but not using “sin” language).
Not sure how this fits with a notion of the church always in an “imperfect” world….the lists above could be placed/interpreted using the Spengler’s spiral.
I think the short answer is progress is taking the increases in knowledge and applying them in conjunction with basic values.
The progress of the Church, currently, seems to be retrogressive.
And our secular world is torn by many divisions.
I think the relevant question is do we really want progress, even if we have to abandon some cherished beleifs we’ve had?
Fr. Komonchak – by my remark, I meant only that God has a plan for his creation, including us, that will culminate in the second coming, and he has ordered human existence and provides for us in ways that prepare the faithful for that day. We’re progressing toward – moving ever closer to – that day.
I didn’t mean to imply, and in fact don’t believe, that each generation is morally superior to the previous one.
I would add that, if the notion of a “faith journey”, in which we get to know and love God more as we move through life (that is, we progress in our relationship with God), doesn’t have validity, then an awful lot of homilies and books on spirituality will have to be torn up :-).
Clearly there has been tremendous progress in our understanding of the physical and biological universe, less so, I think, (or at least less manifestly so) in our understanding of psychology and sociology. Tremendous strides have also been made in communications and in other applications of scientific knowledge, including armaments. What counts as progress in other areas of individual and social life will, of course, be hotly debated. One of the things we might have learned from the 20th century, however, is not to presume that cultural progress is inevitable; I’m thinking, of course, of Germany.
The image I think of is that of rock-climbing: Yes, you can make progress, but this also means that a fall from the next step will be faster and harder. Authenticity is a precarious achievement (Bernard Lonergan).
To me a Church that made a full court press for ALL its members, clerical and lay to live with simplicity. Right now the first world with simplicity could easily bring well being to all it’s population and enough left over to bring a good simple life for the second and third world people. Simplicity therefore is the virtue to bring Christian justice =progress. . Simplicity is the prerequisite to bringing justice to the commonweal. Think Amish without the clothes and rural separation.
Is there anything in Scripture or the early Fathers that even suggests that humanity as a whole or even large portions of it will progress? By “progress” I mean elimination of problems step by step (as in modern medicine) or improvement of the commonweal by building stage upon stage of better material conditions, better human knowledge, or better human relations, and this on a large scale. There was, indeed, God’s covenant with Israel, but wasn’t this supplanted by Christ’s Kingdom on Earth or “Christendom”? Israel has had a sad history indeed, and Christendom is dead.
Yes, there are Augustine’s two cities, one of God and one of this world, with the one of God (Christ’s Kingdom) eventually fulfilling God’s intentions. But as I understand it that comes only at the end of time as we know it now.
It seems to me that the modern notion of “progress”, built upon the Enlightenment Socratic notion that virtue is knowledge and knowledge is science, died with the horrors of the 20th century.
It also seems to me that except for better knowledge, the only progress is the spiritual progress of saints towards God, and that to make a conscious attempt to be a saint is to take a wrong path towards God. Sanctity is motivated by love of God, not self-improvement (another modern notion).
” I can’t even begin to understand the content regarding the role of innovation, automation and the ascendancy of planning in technological forecasting, but it appears, having worked for some time in the electronics and computer industry, he believed that the best offense was a good defense.”
Nancy –
Your father’s thesis sounds quite interesting — it relates technology to God, which most theorists don’t do.
Interesting too is his notion that innovation is an essential part of progress. Innovation begins in hope, and didn’t Chesterton say somewhere that a Christian as such much be a hopeful person? HOPe seems to be a pre-condition of progress.
However, Steven Jobs has seemed to prove your father wrong about proceeding defensively. I find Jobs particularly interesting as someone who has contributed mightily to human progress. I read recently that his company doesn’t make product decisions based on studies of what people want. He himself makes all those decisions His comment: “It isn’t people’s job to know what they want”! Does this imply that progress is dependent on authorities making decisions for ordinary folks? If so, is this truein all institutions, including the State and the Church? Hmmm.
JAK ==
You might be interested in this review by Russell Jacoby of a book on Utopias by the president of the American Sociological Association, Erik Olin Wright. It’s as much about the current state of American academic sociology as it is about the book. It is the most unkind, devastating review of any book I’ve ever read. Can sociology be this dead? Is it sociology’s job to invent Utopia as Wright, a Marxist, seems to think? Or does sociology simply map progress,i.e., report progress as well as failure?
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3790
I am assuming that the end of “progress” is a Utopia, of course. Whose job is it to invent Utopias? Plato invented the first one. Or was Moses’ land of milk and honey the first one? Th?ese days should lawyers invent them? Writers try to all the time. Or maybe the psychologists should? Theologians? Politicians? All of the above?
How necessary are leaders for progress, for Utopias? How much say should they have in shaping the end?
Ann: I loved Russell Jacoby’s 1975 book Social Amnesia, a critique of what happened to Freudian theory when it immigrated to the U.S. I wouldn’t entirely give up on sociology. Anthony Giddens has important things to say, especially his idea of recursiveness, which I am struggling to apply to the Church.
The idea is by now old that Marxism utopianism represents “an immanentizing of the eschaton.” Utopian ideas are certainly pre-Enlightenment–Thomas More!–and some trace them back to Joachim of Fiore and his expectation of a “third age,” that of the Spirit.
Re: utopias: intrinsic to the notion of “progress” does seem to be “progress toward something”. What is the “something” to which progress in science, medicine and technology is leading us? Would “improvement” be a better word than “progress”? Should progressives more accurately call themselves “improvers”? (“Improvives”?)
On Church progress: I think Fr. Jim Martin has an interesting piece in the “In All Things” blog today on the prioblem individuals face as they search for religious progress.
Jim P. –
You have a point. Still, what is an improvement? For MacIntyre, no doubt, improvement differs from tradition to tradition, and no doubt prophecy to prophecy to different cultures should be different. Sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for teh gander. I suppose it’s all a matter of practicala intellect when it comes to concrete judgments.
But are there general characteristics which all fulfilled nations must have? For instance, in every case will there be democracy? Or does monarchy suit some better? If so, what happens to our “inalieable rights”? Are they *all* truly inalienable, including that elusive pursuit of happiness by each individual in his/her own way?
JAK –
What does “recursiveness” in ecclesiology mean? In logic it’s pretty simple, though I’m sure in math it can get pretty hairy.
Hi, Ann, I suspect that for most of us, we don’t have an elegant theory to tie together our disparate notions of progress, but it’s an amalgam of goals like better health, less pain, more comfort, more leisure, longer life, less stress. Istm that technology and science are doing a good job in most of those areas. But what about goals like justice, peace, equity, fairness, mutual respect? It’s not clear that we’ve seen sustained improvement in those areas of human life.
Re: “general characteristics which all fulfilled nations must have” – would you say that the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is such a list of characteristics? http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml
Jim P.. ==
Fine question about the UN declaration. Maybe we could have a thread or two or three about it some time.
The list is a great one, but some parts are debatable, I think. The basic problem is that states are constrained by lack of means of fulfilling/exercising some of the rights — e.g., my right to adequate health care is limited by the number of doctors actually available. So it seems the *exercise* of the rights is not inalienable, and the problem becomes who decides who gets to exercise the rights and according to which set of priorities. Enter the horrid word “triage”.
As always, the problems are in the existential practices.
I’m a little late with this.
This semester I am privileged to sit in on the Lehigh University philosophy faculty seminar. It’s working through William Wimsatt’s 2007 “RE-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings” (Harvard Press). All this is relevant to the comments about “progress.” Wimsatt certainly does recognize that over the years much has been learned by doing scientific work. But he also emphasizes that we are and remain “limited beings.”
The book is described as follows: “This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans tryingtoo understand messy systems in the real worlde. Against eliminative reductionism, Wimsatt pits new perspectives to deal with natural and social complexities. He argues that our philosophy should be rooted in heuristics and modes that work in practice, not only in principle.”
A large part of his motivation can be glimpsed in this passage: “The history of scientific progress and the evolution of our conceptual categories is littered with one generation’s projects and category mistakes that have become the next generation’s impossibilities and conceptual truths.”
Wimsatt is no skeptic. But he’s also intellectually modest. I foresee having some quarrels with what he is up to, but I do think that he’s on to something important, namely that we often have to make do with what we as limited beings can find out about the real world and not cling to idealizations that supposedly can yield Cartesian certainties.
Though Wimsatt shows no interest in religion of any sort, my hunch is that what he says has some significant application to our study of the Bible. It may also be very relevant to making sense of “natural law” talk.
Bernard –
Which William Wimsatt is that? William K. Wimsatt, Jr., the critic and theorist, was a Georgetown graduate and had a Master’s from Catholic U. (Scholastic training will out :-)
Ann: I illustrate recursiveness in ecclesiology with St. Augustine’s comment that each of us singly is a child of Mother Church, but that all of us together are Mother Church, that the Church as the House of God that we enter is built of the living stones who enter it.
Interesting, JAK. Does your use of the idea include a rule which generates the elements? Baptism, for instance? Or some other rule(s)?
When you theologians talk about “the Church” does that usually include its material parts (the altars, the hosts, church buildings, even the people.) that come and go? I realize that exactness in speech can be self-defeating sometimes, but sometimes I wonder just what the most basic meaning of “the Church” is in theology, if there is one basic meaning.
I know there are lots of metaphors, but sometimes metaphors seem to do more harm than good in theology.
When I use the word “Church,” I mean the congregatio fidelium, the assembly of believers, the people. I believe that this was the fundamental meaning that Augustine had in mind, and Aquinas as well. Both of them were quite well aware that the people who constitute the Church come and go. The Church on earth was the community of believers in particular places and times, but in its broadest reach it refers to the whole assembly of believers “from Abel down to the last of the just.”
Metaphors about the Church, as well as any more theoretical models that may be built on them, refer to this basic reality: an assembly of people who are an assembly because they all believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
Ann, the author I mention is William C. Wimsatt. I know nothing about his education. He’s professor of philosophy and evolutionary biology at U. of Chicago. I haven’t seen any clear evidence of Scholastic training in his book. Of course, it doesn’t follow that this Wimsatt didn’t have any such training.
Thanks, JAK. This very afternoon I had a discussion with one of my favorite young people who was talking about “the Church” in the sense that a particular famous author thinks of “the Church”. For him “the Church” is, apparently, the historical Church, the part that appears in the highly critical history books and these days the parts that appear in the media. That/they are a somewhat different, I think, from “the official Church”/the Vatican/Rome that we talk about so often here, though, of course, they overlap.
I told my young friend to pay no attention to that particular historical-official Church, and she seemed to realize, I’m glad to say, that there is a good deal more to “the Church” than that, that it includes an all-important spiritual dimension.
Her famous author doesn’t admit that — he’s one of the atheists who wanted to arrest the Pope when he went to England.
I think we need some more specific terms to talk about these entities with non-believers and non-Catholics.
Thanks, Bernard.
I checked Wikipedia, and the Wimsatt I was talking about was in the English dept. at Yale and died in 1975. Big New Critic.
I agree with your fellow that we have to make do with tentative descriptions of the world, especially since the philosophers science now realize on quite certain theoretical grounds that all empirical knowledge is essentially uncertain and is therefore always subject to change.
But I also think we have to make do with the best available theology and ethics. As I see it, the biggest problem with the Church today is that the official Church still claims to have the same sort of certainty that Pius IX had , and so it continues on its merry old unselfcritical way, spiralling down into cult status. You’d think that Rome would have realized since Vatican II that Pius IX’s papacy was catastrophic *because* of that prideful, uncritical sort of self-estimation. At least the scientists realize that self-criticism is a condition of progress towards truth. Not that Vat Ii faced up to all the problems. But that’s another thread or two or ten.