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THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Go, tell them that the worship of God is honouring his gifts in other men and loving the best men best each according to his own genius which is the Holy Ghost in men; there is no other God than that God who is the poetic genius of Humanity.
He who envies or calumniates, which is murder and cruelty, Murders the Holy-one.
He who would see the Divinity must see it in the children.
...Wm. Blake
...from Jerusalem
DISENCHANTMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD. The most general point I can make is that, in postmodern theology, the death of god occurs with the disenchantment of nature and society. The purpose of this essay is to survey the many social factors which tend to undermine the Drama of the Holy by which nature and society are sanctified. This analysis depends upon the argument, made elsewhere in detail but summarized below, that the god concept is entirely a natural and human process having the same ontological and intersubjective character as any other social fact. The objectivication of the god concept is located, in this understanding, in those social activities which bind people together in peace and justice. Given this understanding of the god concept, death of god arguments begin to make sense when we regard the desanctification of nature and society.
Desanctification Society is disenchanted when individuals lose their sense of connectedness to the whole and, in consequence, treat each other as objects to be managed or manipulated. Society is disenchanted when instrumental rationality displaces a substantive rationality oriented to human purpose. Technical rationality readily and easily serves the goals of impersonal organization in national affairs, in bureaucratic agencies, in private corporations or formal associations. Disenchantment grows and expands when the power of language is used to degrade a person or a people in prelude to war and pillage. Society is disenchanted as its most cherished themes are used to envelop lifeless commodities and thus channel human desire toward purchase and possession. Society is disenchanted whenever people are packed into total institutions: prisons, orphanages, group homes, armies, schools, or asylums. Society is disenchanted and all the work of centuries to fashion the drama of the Holy is set aside by considerations of profit, wealth or power.
Nature is disenchanted when resources are extracted without regard to the interconnectedness of the whole. Nature is disenchanted when plant or animal species are exploited in terms of the interests of an individual or a society. Nature is disenchanted whenever the rich genetic information of a species is discarded in order to harvest fur or feather. Nature is disenchanted when the reservoirs of air, sea and valley are filled with toxic wastes. Nature is disenchanted whenever one looks a tree and sees only lumber; looks at mountain and sees only ore; looks at a field and sees only frontage.
The role of any given social process in disenchanting the world is variable. In some societies, it is commodification of everything sacred which tends to subvert the drama of the Holy. In other societies, it is a massification process which turns everything human into an object to be studied and controlled by bureaucratic edict. The rise of the nation-state takes over for itself all of the authority and legitimacy heretofore ascribed to theology and to the god concept. The state sets itself as the repository of all morality; all power and all rationality. Small wonder so many religious groups find themselves at odds with state authority.
Whenever a bureaucratic elite gains control, brings order and instrumental purpose into human affairs, it disenchants the masses it manages. In school bureaucracies, in welfare bureaucracies, in criminal justice or in medical bureaus, impersonality and formal rules disenchant human beings and the human project. In the service of all such elites, well meaning or malevolent; in the advancement of their interests; in control and management of those massified populations, modern science serves them well to subvert both religion and the god concept that subsumes such social bonds.
Modern science, even with and often in its many successes, tends to disenchant wherever it touches the world. Modern science displaces the Drama of the Holy with the controlled experiment. It displaces the god concept with formal theory; it displaces mercy with rationality; it offers objectivity in place of intersubjectivity in the study of nature and society; it insists upon a mechanical linearity in place of the discontinuity of magic and miracle. Modern science honors legalism over compassion in its blind application of principle to case. In transforming the incredible richness of nature and society into impersonal interval and rational numbering systems, modern science strips the world of its charm, mystery, magic and surprise. Using the law of the excluded middle, modern science imposes a binary solitude that elides the vast middle ranges of value and being.
In most of North America, Northern Europe as well as in the socialist countries, the drama of the Holy has been confined to the smallest corners and niches of society. In the socialist societies, many forms of religion are pushed underground. Each day, otherwise compassionate and connected people pull apart the drama of the Holy in their capacity of clerk, manager, agent and bureaucratic functionary. Every sign of the Holy is pushed away at work, in school, in governance or in play. Conflating the drama of the Holy with particular religious denominations and particular peoples, secularization defeats the social process at school and it governance and thus, murders more than a people or an age; it mangles the interactional process by which people call themselves forth as cherished and sanctified social actors: as husbands, wives, friends, citizens, or members of an ethnic group. Disenchantment of nature and society constitutes a form of genocide that exceeds the worst of all wars, all purges, all massacres to date.
It is testimony to the stubborn convictions of everyday men and women that they persist in their faith, belief, hope and magic in spite of all vast cadres of bureaucrats, officials, managers and scientists could do to disenchant the world from top to bottom. In the face of modern science, most people kept to their ancient understandings as well as the standards and methods by which such understandings were confirmed. But, more and more, the realm of the Holy is reduced; more and more the time of the Holy is confined to the smallest possible; the most convenient moments. Religion and the drama of the Holy nestle uncomfortably in the niches and corners of a society made secular by economics and the politics in service of such an economics.
These many sided behemoths, lumbering toward Bethlehem, tend to destroy the god concept; destroy the god process; destroy the drama of the Holy. These processes and practices make each of us small, alone, and powerless in the face of the state, the corporation, the bureau or the vested interest group. It is the story of the obliteration of the god concept which is the topic of the rest of this essay.
POSTMODERN CONCEPTS OF GOD As with the drama of the Holy itself, the death of god is an event, in human terms, of immense consequence. Absent the god concept, the Drama of the Holy withers and dies for many if not most persons living today. Before setting out the factors that tend to limit or destroy the Drama of the Holy, let me summarize the god concept which informs the drama of the Holy.
God as Process The center point of this postmodern understanding of the god concept is that, through interconnected and interactively rich dramas of the Holy, human beings build a symbolic universe in which the god concept has the same ontological standing as any other human artifact. Just as a marriage, a friendship, an incorporated city, or a nation is a product of symbol using creatures, so too are priests, congregations, denominations and the god process which is so much a part of them. Each social fact is the product of a complex process in which a thing defined as real becomes, in the consequence of patterned and compatible human action, real.
The god process may occur at any given level of social organization--or it may fail. For most of human history, the god process was situated in an interactively rich group; a tribe, a family, a congregation or a people. As more formal organizations arose, they too absorbed and built a god process--hydraulic societies, colonial empire and feudal fiefdom all assimilate the god process to the social task and thus continue the god process. Death of god arguments become cogent when there arise secular forms of social organization in which the god process is displaced by technical rationality and instrumental purpose.
Secularization of the social process tends to appear whenever the social bonds characteristic of most religions call forth a reciprocity which defeats organizational goals. The secularization of the social process is beneficial to market systems oriented to profit. It is beneficial to exploitative colonialism as well as to slavery and to the use of migrant labor. Most generally, religion and the drama of the Holy is inimical to stratification of wealth, status or power. Whenever such strata exist, there must be some rationale by which most of the persons involved in the social process are excluded from wealth, status or power. These rationales are subsumed, in this reading of the postmodern condition, by the concept of degradation.
God as Universal Subject Inquiry into death of God arguments profit from attention to the nature of the acting subject. The analysis offered here is that, in societies marked by an encompassing sense and practice of community, the god concept is the universal subject through whose eyes one can look upon one's own behavior or that of others, judge it and thus have guidance in the modification of it. The god concept thus offers a stable and coherent vantage point at which one can be inserted into any given human drama, understand its dynamics, grasp its moral dilemmas, and apprehend local ideas of harmony and beauty.
There are many ways to conceptualized the universal subject; Hegel used the concept of 'Objective Spirit' in order to reference abstract Right, Morality and Ethics. Marx used a more human, fallible concept, that of Species Being while Tillich thought of God as Becoming a Universal Being as Such. In sociology, Durkheim spoke of the 'collective conscious' and Mead of the 'generalized other.' Presuming that such concepts speak to objectively existing patterns of human behavior, the truth value of such concepts rest in the way in which human beings are related to each other.
To the extent that a given society is organized so that each can take the role of the other, experience and sympathize with any and all others, the universal subject is constituted. But more than perception and sympathy are essential in the world of actually existing human beings for the god concept to emerge, such perceptions and such feelings must motivate action of a kind which enables and expands the agency of the other without diminishing or demeaning the agency of self or still other others.
In societies with a universal subject, universal standards are available to provide sure and certain knowledge, to make ethical claims as well as to offer aesthetic judgements about that drama. Such standards are lost as the universal subject becomes fragmented. Fragmentation of the acting subject occurs in history and thus the death of God is a historical rather than an absolute event. The story of how the god concept, as universal subject, is fragmented follows below but, in general, location of subjectivity in the single individual or into a chosen people favored of the putatively universal god works in such a way to desanctify both nature and society.
In particular, all systems of inequality; racism, class and status privilege, gender oppressions as well as imperialism all serve to destroy the Universal We and fragment the Drama of the Holy into sacred, profane and evil categories.
Facticity of the God Concept Given the social and cultural nature of the god concept and given its embodiment in situated human action, it is easy to understand that the god process has varying degrees of facticity. Given the meaning of the concept of religion as that which binds, then human activity which binds a people together in a cooperative and mutually supportive whole determines that facticity. While peoples as private person can be bound together by force or by legal contract behind which lays the force of the state, it is only believing, trusting, acting and understanding people who can be bound together in a distinctly religious process. The character of a god process in which believing, trusting, acting and understanding peoples do religion has several interrelated moments operative at differing levels of social organization.
First are the moments of compassion, cooperation and commitment situated in local time and space which create and make special bonds between people. These bonds unify and sanctify each to the other and renders each a significant part of the self to be cherished and sheltered. The enlivening and enduring generosity of spirit that arises in both the giver and the receiver is interpreted, rightly, as that which is holy in each of us. The Holy spirit, thus has an ontological basis to the extent such moments of compassion and mutual aid infuse the human project. In the act of forming and honoring those bonds, a particularized We emerges which forms the most visible embodiment of the god process.
Second are the widely known and accepted norms that tend to generate decent behavior between disparate members of a community. This set of norms, internalized into the personality of each member of a society adequately socialized, accompanies each person at all times and mediates all socially anchored behavior, even that between otherwise unknown persons. In purely sociological terms, such norms together with the bonds of group affiliation constitute a generalized Other which, directly experienced as civility, responsivity and comity, transforms easily into a generalized We.
Third are the various social mechanisms by which resources are redistributed on the bases of need rather than merit. These social mechanisms assume an encompassing and indirect reciprocity in which those who need them are given goods and services long before they are able to earn them. These mechanisms absorb much of the resources of a society yet they are the test of the reality quotient of the god process. Education of the young, public health services, economic security for the elderly, special enabling supplies for the handicapped, temporary support for those subject to the larger discontinuities of the economy or those distressed by natural calamity receive, in a truly religious community, that which they need to have in order to be full and esteemed members of the community.
In more prosaic terms, even the common roads upon which we travel, the sewage treatment systems upon which we depend, water and air purification measures as well common public spaces: parks, museums, malls and walkways bracket and embody the god process. Businesses which serve the common good yet are low or nonprofitable are given resources in timely and temperate measure; child care, clinics, food services, transport and recreational programs serve the common good. As long as such services are offered to people on the basis of need and desire rather than upon impersonal and partisan terms, they speak to the facticity of the god process; and conversely, to death of god arguments.
There is a case to be made that certain forms of social control, oriented to distributive justice and human dignity for inmates and staff alike contribute the drama of the Holy. Control measures which debase and degrade; which increase the totality of pain and anger in a society, on the contrary, validate death of god arguments.
In a companion essay, I discussed a powerful form of social magic which suffuses and calls forth ordinary social forms. The same magic, given belief, trust, hope and faith, can produce extraordinary transformations in person, people or institutions. The capacity of people, in cooperative symbolic interaction to create a social fact from out of nothing but the prophecy, the belief and the inspired activity of each for the other is the epistemic correlate, in postmodern theology, of the miracle of the loaves; of the mystery of communion; of the magic of healing. These are the god process in actual, physical, tangible action.
In a postmodern theology, taking the world as it is and seeing the world as it is becoming, the god process requires more than situated dramas of the Holy in which each person experiences directly the power and the compassion of the god process. In a fully connected global political economy, there are deep structures, the absent of which, testify to the limited and parochial character of the god concept. The death of god, in postmodern understanding is a fractal death; the god process can work excellently well in parts and places of that global political economy, but to the degree it is connected, the good done in one place may do much evil in another. It is not enough, thus, that the god process occur; it must occur in such a way that sanctifies all of nature and society else death of god analyses have merit.
The Death of God becomes, then, a specific, measurable, knowable condition in which decent social behavior is lacking; in which good work is difficult; in which the sense of fellowship and community are fragmented and in which the mechanisms of control however merciful and enabling; however strict and punitive, simply do not work to ensure domestic tranquility or prosocial labor. The theologic point in postmodern theology is that God is a valid social construct and is validated by such human behavior. The death of God, likewise, derives from specific social practices and can be observed by looking at the trends in key indicators of the health of the society.
UNDERSTANDING THE DEATH OF GOD The death of God is, from the point of view of the universal human project, a terrible thing. In both premodern and postmodern understanding, it is the god concept which binds us together when otherwise we would be using each other to private purpose; which renews us in the spirit when we are sated in the flesh; which guides on our path in a time of confusion; which sanctions prosocial ways of life when it is easy to turn away; which helps us through the darkest moments of war, disease and death.
I want to stress the anthropological fact that there have been and remain thousands of societies each with their own god concept(s). These many and varied constructions of the god process have been conceived, constructed and embodied over the long centuries of human life. Most of the god concepts once live and powerful in the world are now dead to the world. Long before modern times and modern science, gods were appearing, changing and disappearing. The dynamics of their death are simple even if the process is long and bitter. One people move into a region, dominate it by guile, force, or persuasion using a wide variety of political or economic tools--then impose their god(s) upon the indigenous population thus engineering the death of those gods.
The word of the One True God often displaces a pantheon of gods in a region when the messengers of the one god speak of a universal brotherhood or unification of nations under god. Plural god systems have their social anchorage in societies marked by tight-knit kinship systems and loose-knit economic systems. The one true god sometimes displaces hierarchies of gods when the messengers of the one god speak of universal social justice, under god, while the priesthood of the indigenous god system speak of privilege and preference in the eyes of the gods.
Clinical Indicators If one wished to ascertain validity of Death of God assertions from a postmodern perspective, one would do well to look at the indicators of social health and solidarity which are the everyday expressions of the Holy. Most of these indicators are subsumed by the concept of social justice. We may judge, given the social nature of the God concept, the well being of God by looking at indicators of social justice. These indicators offer crude estimates of the facticity of the god process.
One of the most sensitive indicators, not definitive but indicative, are infant mortality rates. Infants are such sensitive organisms that small changes in essential resources make large and unpredictable changes in life chances. In a society where essential resources are scarce for all children, one must look for other indicators. In a world in which there is plenty of food and a surfeit of medical resources, the present of high infant mortality rates for one class, races or gender and low rates for other children bespeak the death of god; whoever can look upon the death of a child anywhere in the world and not feel the pain of a mother, is deficient in the Holy spirit.
A second indicator of the Death of God has to do with suicide rates. In any society where life is flat, dull and painful such that some significant segment of the population is at risk for self destructive behavior, that society is in its death throes. The suicide rate among Native American Indians, near 100 times that of the national average, is testimony to the success of the federal government in destroying the drama of the Holy among Native Americans in the bare century since the end of the wars against the Indians. The holy spirit of the Indians cannot survive the death of its culture and society.
In standard American society where native Americans, young Chicano men, suburban teenagers are at such risk from suicidal behavior, one must ask whether the institutions available to them are adequate to the drama of the Holy understood as simple affirmation of the status of young people. Alcoholism, drug abuse, deep depression, and unconcern for the social life world in which one must live signal the death of god.
Crime rates inform us of the reach and depth of the God construct in a society. In societies wherein the god concept is strong and central to the social process, there is very little crime. Among Amish, Hutterites, Orthodox Jewish, most Islamic nations, devout Christian base communities in Latin America or in pious Buddhist societies, the variety and brutality of crime found in every American city is absent. The structural features of low crime societies center around social justice practices, involve preference of things of the spirit to material possession, prescribe prosocial occupations and prohibit occupations harmful to others including usury, military or prostitution as gainful employment. It is not that punishment is certain, swift and harsh in low crime societies; rather it is that social justice and an abiding sense of community make harmful behavior unthinkable.
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and Catholics who push their religion to the background of their business lives or limit the sanctification process to their immediate family are quite capable of a wide variety of corporate crimes, white collar crimes, organized or street crime and most, assuredly political crime. Christians, oriented to market dynamics and obsessed with access to markets or raw materials and cheap labor have participated in the mass murder of over 80 millions 'enemies' since 1900. In organizing and enjoying the profits of such crimes, the facticity of the god process dwindles.
Corporations which systematically exploit their customers and endanger its workers; politicians who systematically sell off the political process or use political office against a minority group limit and cripple the god concept in their society. Business persons and state officials who aid and abet the production, distribution and dumping of dangerous toxins, drugs, or other pollutants commit murder in slow motion and thus murder the Holy One. Street thugs who solve their own problems on the backs of those weaker and more troubled discard the drama of the Holy in preference to the drama of alienated power. Doctors, lawyers and professors who betray the trust and faith of their patients, clients or students for private advantage all murder the Holy One.
The fate of the elderly offer a test of the sanctification of a society. To discard a whole generation after a lifetime of quiet, constructive labor in home, office, factory and field, murders that which is Holy in a society. Any new generation which inherits the vast wealth passed on to it from preceding generations murders the Holy One when it gathers that bounty to its breast and, then out of greed and avarice, says there is not enough to share with those whose labor produced most of it.
Where there is no joy, delight and engagement of life there is no God. Schools that don't teach; families that fail; factories that numb and silence the human heart; mean spirited social agencies as well as mass media entertainment that freezes body and mind while it deadens the spirit are signals that the Drama of the Holy is absent.
There are patterns of institutional behavior which engage and enliven some at the expense of others: prostitution, violent commodity sports, especially boxing and its deadly violence, public executions and other dramas of violence tend to murder the Holy One by elevating violence as a spiritual stance rather than grace or gentle tenderness. Both love and violence are psychogens which lend themselves to an interpretation of the presence of the Holy spirit; but they have far different effects on the facticity of the god process.
There are larger indicators of the Death of God which may be seen in the global political economy. The flow of food from the poorest, hungriest societies in the world to rich and fat nations betrays the Holy One. The use of force to get cheap resources or to destroy competitors in other countries is murder to that which is Holy in us. Profit from the sale of arms, toxins, and drugs that the peoples of one community may murder another people signals the death of the god process as a universal compassionate subject through whose gaze one can make judgments of good and evil.
War is a special case of desanctification. First comes the media and the agents of the state who desanctify another nation by labelling it the 'enemy' and labelling its leaders the Great Satan or the Devil Incarnate. Such symbolic degradations profanes and thus permits the murder of those so profaned. Anyone who bombs a restaurant full of people they don't know or who drops bombs from six miles up on people who have never done them harm murders the Holy One. Those who exult and rejoice in such personal or impersonal murder, murders the Holy One. One can, perhaps, justify violence and death within the logics of the Drama of the Holy. Many strain reason and rationality in order to do so. The spectacle of priests and preachers praying over the machines of death or the use of the Name of God to encourage others to kill is, most probably, and certainly objectively, the death of compassion, mercy and justice. Young, 1989
The nature and extent of warfare testifies to the nature and limits of the god process. Adjunct to and a consequence of the deterioration of the god process are mass migrations from exploitation; underground refuges from oppression; pretheoretical violence and accommodations to injustice. These together indict the god process as it is embodied in a nation or an epoch.
Degradation Tactics Dramas of the Holy tend to sanctify each person in a social group to every other person and call forth responsive action to need and desire. The newly emergent capitalism, guided by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mills, privileged instrumental rationality over substantive rationality since, given the existence of natural and social laws, substantive issues had been preempted. Such laws set standards and goals leaving technology as the variable of interest. Once technology improved, one could see the end of history. Instrumental rationality thus desanctifies politics leaving it in the hands of technocrats. Philosopher-rulers were to be advised by scientific experts on modernization processes.
Instrumental rationality is doubly desanctifying in that it requires that some persons for some or all of the time, be treated as if they were instruments to a larger purpose. Given a privatized version of purpose (say profit margins) people become surplus to that purpose as other instruments are adopted; automation tends to disemploy and discard workers while disemployed workers are of little interest to a market driven economy since they do not have wages with which to enter that market. The instrumental use of persons, outside the drama of the Holy is engineered in several ways. What ever tactic is used to degrade persons, the very use of those tactics presume the possibility if not the actuality of sanctification.
The easiest way to desanctify persons is simply to refuse to admit them to rite of passage in which they become full members of a social unit. Since rites of passage always and everywhere are sacred in character; they change the status of one by means of a social magic discussed in a companion essay, failure to admit a person or a group of persons to such rites results in an easy use of them for convenient purpose. Children, women, strangers, and minorities everywhere are excluded from the drama of the Holy and thus unsanctified to the social process.
Sometimes formal rituals are used to degrade those who have, previously, been awarded status through a drama of the Holy. Court room trials of persons accused of some forbidden act are, in part, degradation routines. Courts Martial strips the rights and privileges of officers and withdraws their legitimacy to order and to command. The Defrocking of priests or nuns is a degradation routine which strips one of a given social identity around which one has been organizing one's behavior. Expulsion from schools, disbarment from the practice of law, decertification from the practice of medicine--all are degradation routines in which a status change is made by the very same kind of social magic which elevated one in the first instance. Both are equally dramas of the Holy; both equally attest to the extensive use of sanctification in human affairs.
Propaganda, in its recent usage, tends to desanctify whole peoples. In earlier days, propaganda referred to the expansion of the drama of the Holy; to the propagation of faith. Since the time of the printing press and with the advent of electronic communications, propaganda has been used effectively to desanctify a whole people in prelude to warfare against them. Such a negative use of propaganda reached maturity in the early years of the Third Reich. Whom the Universal Subject would destroy, first they degrade.
More systematic degradation tactics are found in racist and ethnocentric practices. The use of pejorative labels with which to refer to Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Iranian, Iraqi or Ugandan peoples bespeak sensitivity to the sanctification process and to its demands to honor and to cherish a people rather than exploit and to discard them as surplus to the human project.
Contracts tend to restrict the range of reciprocity and to confine reciprocity to measurable, gaugeable activity. Ferdinand To‰nnies noted the transformation of society from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft with the accompanying loss of status (Stand‰) in favor of performance contracts negotiated by 'freely' consenting parties. Contracts do not speak to things of the spirit and thus secularize the social process wherever they appear. Contracts, to be enforceable in a court of law, must be limited to some measurable unambiguous activity. Kindness, compassion, grace, harmony, spontaneity, empathy, aid, and other spiritual features central to an unmediated drama of the Holy are outside the purview of contractual relations. Contractual relations are useful for any number of important social purposes but tend to be inimical to the religious impulse.
The tactics used to withdraw or restrict the drama of the Holy are many and varied in nature. All presume the efficacy of the drama of the Holy to mediate behavior in ways contrary to some set of partisan purpose. In the postmodern theology offered here, such routines and tactics determine the facticity of the god process and, in turn, cogency of death of god arguments.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE DEATH OF GOD IN HISTORY Primitive communal economies require one kind of god concept, slavery another kind, feudalism and colonialism still another while capitalism requires a privatized god concept. Bureaucratic socialism finds the god concept an obstacle to the production and distribution of goods and services while liberation theology and the Christian socialism it informs finds it essential. It is the story of transformations in political economy with which one begins to understand the death of god.
History records rapid and continuing transformations of the god concept. Invasions, migrations and predatory wars shove some gods aside, give preference to others and change the nature of most. In more specific terms, those local gods which interfere with the practices and purposes of conquerors were discarded and replaced by more tractable gods. Conquerors or their viceroys were invested with social, economic or physical power and used those powers are used to shape and reshape the god process. The old gods died to make way for the new. YOung, 1994.
When the followers of Jahweh gained control of the land of the Moabites, their judges and kings forced the Moabites to put aside their god, Chemosh. When the Moors conquered Spain, they brought their god and the mathematics that honored him. When the Aryans invaded India, they superimposed their religion upon indigenous religious views. China conquered Japan and gave it its religious culture. Colonists since the time of Columbus and de Gama used force and guile to discredit and displace local gods. In the Americas, In Africa, In the far East and in the far northern lands of Europe, 'false' gods were denied by colonial missionaries while armies extended the purview of the new god. Local gods are pushed aside in favor of the 'real' god.
Missionaries from Europe joined Spanish Conquistadors to murder and enslave the proud Inca, Aztec, and Mayan people. Along with their gods, the Mayans were murdered; these people are being murdered today by Guatemalan army squads in order to clear the land for export agriculture. Millions of Africans, proud in their religious heritage, were shackled and shorn of their tribal gods. Transported to the West Indies, South and North America, they were stripped of their gods. Later, US troops armed and trained in the Civil war brought a most uncivil slaughter to the American West. They decimated and confined Native American Indians to unthrifty parcels of land administered by state functionaries unfriendly to native American religions.
When a people encounters another they cannot subdue the competing gods are, sometimes, absorbed into the one. Thus, when Christians and Muslims meet on equal terms, Jahweh, God and Allah become different names for the same divinity. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Gautama all become disciples of the one god in the theology of the tolerant. Ecumenical movements as well as unitarian churches arise which collapse the old gods into new, universal subject.
When one tribe subdues another tribe, the gods of the subordinated tribe sometimes become devils to the first. The gods of Egypt became the devils of the Hebrew tribes. A hebrew term meaning 'adversary,' transposed Egyptian gods into a generalized malevolent spirit called Satan. The adversaries of the Muslim religion today are translated into the same term although the Muslim concept is much broader and encompasses more adversaries.
For most of recent history, the past 1700 years, the god of the Hebrews has gradually displaced local gods leaving them dead or left as vestigial remains in the form of Saints, Angels, or more pejoratively; Devils, superstition, myths, and 'primitive' thought. Constantine, Justinian, and Theodosius adopted the Jesus symbol since the jewish sect which he informed offered an ideological aid to the practical problems of empire. The advent of the Jesus figure was pivotal to empire since the criteria for membership in a community of believers was faith and belief rather than birth and kinship. Baptism in water replaced circumcism as the rite of passage by which one entered into covenant with the sky god of the jewish peoples. Such change in access to the god process made Christianity a universal religion and, until displaced by modern science, provided a universal subject through whose eyes one could judge the worth of a thing.
Other religions had the capacity to become a universal religion and, given the trade and interconnections between economies in colonial Rome, there was need for a universal Other to which all would defer. However it was decreed by Constantine in 313 A.D. that Christianity was protected as the one and only Catholic (universal) church by the emperor. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 A.D. with the edict of Theodosius I. The purpose of all emperors in that century was to preserve the unity of the state. The unity of the one and only universal church was important to that purpose. Constantine convened the first general council of the newly emergent Catholic church in 325 A.D. in order to settle a dispute about the nature of the god concept. Theodosius I convened the second general council in 381 A.D. which endorsed his definition of Catholicism and so instituted that god concept as the received version. Over the next centuries, other disputes about the nature of the god concept were settled by other councils sponsored by other emperors (Parrinder: 430 et passim). The ancient god of the Israelite became the official god of Asia Minor, North Africa and Southern Europe. As Michael Wood put it, the Roman empire ran from Hadrian's wall in Scotland to the banks of the Euphrates in the East. It encompassed hundreds of tribes, societies, and their associated gods.
The barbarians poured down from the North to ravage and disperse the Roman empire. Alaric lead the visigoths to the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. and Odoacer finished the empire off in 486 A.D. But monastic orders keep the universality of the god concept flickering across northern Europe into the isles of Ireland. In the next centuries, the Christian god who embodied both universality and stability was mediated by peoples of the North who valued action and experimentation (Fleming, 1986:128. Monasticism added asceticism and stratification to preshape the social order to come into being with the advent of modern science.
By the 17th century, when the Moors and Moslems were expelled from Spain, the Hebrew god called Jahweh became ascendent in all of Europe. As Europe became the colonial metropolis of a vast empire in the next three centuries, the Hebrew god spread and in the spreading, was formed and transformed. However the god of feudal empire was not congenial to the god of capitalist expansion. Feudalism required too much reciprocity between master and worker; too much wealth devoted to feudal purpose; too much restraint on investment and upon market dynamics.
Slavery, feudalism and tribal exclusivity were all hostile to market dynamics and the free movement of profits. The Catholic Church emphasized community far too much and individualism far too little. In most Catholic countries, an exuberant indulgence in things of the flesh eroded the spirit of capitalism. Redistribution of wealth along the lines and channels of kinship together with expenditure of wealth in the interest of friendship limited accumulation for even the most industrious workers and shopkeepers. Protestantism, informed by the ascetic monasticism which came out of the arid lands of the mideast arose to resolve the tension between capitalism and Christianity. Protestantism changed the nature of the god concept from a universal subject acting on behalf of a whole people to validate its ethos to a private matter between sinner and Redeemer in the privacy of one's own conscious. The acting subject was decentered and the god process privatized.
MODERN SCIENCE AND THE DEATH OF GOD The death of God is engineered, in part, by the assumptions and activities of those in modern science. While many scientists, modern or otherwise, believe deeply in the god concept and act in harmony with their version of it, still the mission and the methods of modern science as a knowledge process sweeps away all competing pathways to knowledge and dismisses all mystical missions of any knowledge process that calls itself scientific. More than that, only modern science and the modern spirit stands apart from so much sorrow and so much joy, frozen to the core by its false neutrality, its blind and obstinate objectivity, its narrow linearities and its obsessive exclusion of middle values in order to force nature and social data into binary truth forms.
Modern knowledge processes played out against the premodern understandings about the source of order and change. In premodern understanding--understandings that predate the advent of science and technology--the source of all events was to be found in the acts of the gods while access to valid knowledge required communion with the gods. Hostilities between science and theology in Christendom as in the Muslim world were not without casualties. Bruno was burnt at the stake while Galileo was forced, on his knees, to deny what his eyes had seen and his mind had understood. Scientists obtained an uneasy truce by declaring that the majesty and elegance of the god concept was to be found in all of nature's work; he who studied the least of nature's creations studied and celebrated all the wonders God had wrought.
On their side, many modern scientists hold to scorn those who believe in the ontological independence of the god concept unmediated by human desire and human purpose. Astronomers study the skies and see no Sky God. Geologists study the formations and deposits of the earth and find a history that discredits the stories of creation and change put forward by tribes and sages. Anthropologists study several thousand societies and find each to have its own differing and competing creation myths; its own true gods; its own differing dramas of the Holy. Anatomists study the human body and find no repository for the human soul. Psychologists study the personality of their research subjects and find a neurotic fear of father and a neurotic self-doubt as the source of the god concept.
While the history of warfare between science and theology is far from over, still postmodern science holds out a hand and a world-view in which both science and theology rest much more comfortably than in the worldviews of premodern or modern paradigms. Postmodern science concedes the possibility of sanctification as a social process; concedes the possibility of miracles understood as nonlinear transformations wrought by faith and hope; concedes the facticity of the god concept as embodied in the omniscience of folk wisdom, in the omnipotence of social controls practices, in the omnipresence of internalized norms oriented to compassion and cooperation.
Postmodern science is hospitable to theology as modern science can never be since the two sciences take a very different view of the way nature and society works. In both its paradigm of human knowledge and in its intersubjective missions for the knowledge process, postmodern science offers a grounding for the god concept that postmodern theologians might want to think about. The missions and methods of modern science are hostile to the god concept and, to the degree they preempt the knowledge process, contribute to death of god analyses.
Methods of Knowing In the premodern approach, the ways of knowledge were manifold but all required the petitioner to make contact with the gods. One could enter the world of the gods by putting oneself outside the flesh...by absolute transfixion. Drugs, alcohol, chanting and breathing, dancing and flagellating, meditating and entrancing all provided pathways to the gods. The use of these psychogens, in various combinations by various peoples constituted the drama of the Holy that one can still everywhere see. In church, temple, shrine and synagogue, the mystery and the majesty of the Holy is created by absolute immersion in the drama of religious ecstacy.
Worldly experience and the impingement of sense impressions upon the mind were thought to be distractions in that the world was but a crude approximation of that perfection to be found in the Mind and Will of God. Sense data was distorted, as well, by the intellectual limitations of most mortals as well as their emotional desires which flared up to obscure and cripple a true understanding. Premodern methods for the acquisition of valid knowledge required one to abandon the shells of being and to merge with the infinite; with the Person of God through denial of self and sense. One must part with one's illusions, desires, loves and hates in order to find the reality behind the illusions of being. The teachings of Lao Tze put it this way:
Stop your senses,
Close the doors;
Let sharp things be blunted,
Tangles resolved,
The light tempered
and turmoil subdued;
For this is mystic unity
In which the Wise man is moved
Neither by affection
Nor yet by estrangement
Or profit or loss
Or honor or shame.
If ecstacy was the method--literally stepping outside one's ordinary state--then understanding the will of a god was the purpose of the knowledge process. One wished to learn their plans for two main reasons: to fit social behavior to the will of the god or to ask for intercession in the ordinary working of the world.
With the scientific revolution of the 16th through the 20th centuries, all this changed. The path and the purpose was radically different. The pathway to knowledge was closer and closer contact with this world; with atoms, flowers, snails, children and societies. One had to immerse oneself in things of the flesh and in the busy, throbbing, messy life processes of plants, animals, and human societies. Empiricism replaces mysticism as the source of knowledge.
With reliance upon empiricism came devaluation of inspiration, imagination, revelation and intuition as sources of knowledge. With its reliance upon quantification, things of the spirit became irrelevant. With its concern for objectivity, the role of interacting subjects in creating realities became bias and distortions of the knowledge process. In its suspicion of magic and mystery, it discredited the role that hope, belief, trust and desire played in producing nonlinear transformations of persons and social institutions.
The Mission of Modern Science Modern science began as a pathway to and an homage to the god concept. Both Newton and the British Royal Society dedicated their work to the glorification of the Christian god. With the publication of Principia in 1687, Newton gave the knowledge process a more modest goal and a more prosaic method. The mission was to uncover the regularities which shaped the course of stars and societies; the method was that of successive approximations to formal theory through sequential phases of hypothesis, observation, and reformulation of more valid thesis. With the method of successive approximations, one could come closer and closer to the eternal Laws of Nature which lay hidden under so much complexity and so much extensity.
While there remains great drama and great good in the scientific enterprize, the mystic rites of pre-modern religion had no place in the laboratory, field study or social experiment. The ability of astronomers to predict the return of Halley's comet occasioned great astonishment at one time but is commonplace today. The success of Pasteur in inoculation against the pox was thought by some to be magic. The development of the Salk vaccine was announced with great fanfare while the discovery of black holes in space or lorenz attractors in meteorology took away one's breath. The entire scientific world came to a halt to follow the experiments in cold fusion at the University of Utah in 1989. But the greatest drama of all in modern science was, sadly enough, the success of the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos in 1943.
Modern laboratories are now run without recourse to priests for benediction. Field experiments are undertaken without endorsement of the Catholic church. Journals are published without regard to their acceptability by a church hierarchy. Conferences convene without hymn singing or moments of prayer. Science is fully secularized while religion is scientized. Mary Baker Eddy tried to unite science and Christianity while Pierre Teilhard de Chardin collapsed God and evolution of the knowledge process into one. Their efforts met little popular success even though the intelligence behind each such effort was sharp and seized upon events and processes that did not fit easily within the linear and logical canons of modern science.
The success of mathematical formulae in predicting the path of a cannonball or the behavior of gases under pressure or the turn of a comet could not be denied. Of the two alternatives, either God, as a willful entity, must go or mathematical statements about matter and motion must go. Modern physics does not permit the hand of God to part the waters, to stop the stars on their path or to contain the nuclear bomb once critical mass has been attained. However, the irreconcilable was reconciled by simply identifying God with the vast order underlying Nature. But in so doing, God became remote and impersonal.
The mission of the modern scientist is to use mathematics to make a model in which Nature could be simplified and mirrored. The quest of Einstein for a Unified Field Theory was thought to be the last task of the physicist; the writings of Talcott Parsons was thought to be a sociological version of a Unified Theory of social structure and function; mathematics, again was to be midwife to grand theory. As Leon Lederman, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, put it: "We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt." He did not bother to add that only the initiated would be able to read it nor that, given such a formula, the need for politics and critique diminished.
In such a reading of the Intelligence of God, the Plan of God, the Mystery of God, the divinity of God becomes displaced by a simple algorithm that produces infinite variety and infinite length. It is true that many theologians in both Christian and Muslim religion--as well as informed lay persons simply equated the beauty, complexity, and elegance of that mathematical equation with the concept of God and let it go at that. Others, less willing to disembody God simply said that God was the Prime Mover and that the mathematically ordered world was His Idea; that we would have to live in it and content ourselves with an idle curiosity about where God now worked his Will.
Thus God was emptied from the knowledge process as both purpose and method of knowledge became secularized. First, we will look at the method for acquisition of knowledge in modern science, then the officially endorsed purpose of knowledge. In both instances, the god concept and the god process became subordinated to experiment, measurement, observation and theory.
Theory and God It is of great consequence to note that the central operating assumption of modern theoretical science was the closed, linear, coherent nature of the cosmos. A good theory was thought to be comprehensive, coherent and enduring. The attributes of good theory were similar to the attributes of a good conservative god for those who needed such a god concept to fill, justify and complete their lives.
In the modern age, the evolution of the god concept was a three part process: 1) from god as theory; to 2) theory with all the attributes of the Christian god but without the divinity then to a concept of 3) theory as sufficient unto itself.
It was assumed that good theory would be comprehensive in that it encompassed all of nature from the lepton, color and quark to the dynamics of entire galaxies. Natural theory encompassed the behavior from DNA encodings to the population dynamics of whole ecosystems. Social theory encompassed every unit act from the single speech act to the transformations of whole societies. It was assumed that good theory would be coherent in that each event would be logically connected to each and every other event by a tight and deterministic causality. It was assumed that one could appeal to theory to understand the behavior of even the most mysterious events.
In such god-like theories and theory-like gods, there would be no contradictions, no incompatible events, no parallel logics. The decalogue of modern social science became thou shall have but one theory and that theory is structural-functionalism. And thou shalt not put God before theory. Just as with monotheism, a statement would be true or it would be false...there was no middle ground for half-truths or for intermittent causal connections. Good theory and good gods were thought to be eternally present. Once found, a statement, thesis, or theory bridged the centuries and the geometries of space to sit on the heavenly throne of the sky-god it displaced.
Theory was thought to transcend levels of systems in real time as well as scales of magnitude in phase-space. The behavior of the stars was to be perfectly predictable from the sum of its parts; from the sum of the forces acting upon those parts. There was supposed to be a mathematical progression from sub-atomic particles to entire galaxies. One and only one equation would, according the astro-physicists, subsume all levels and all scales of dynamic systems. If one sampled one region of phase-space, one had a reading which was true for all regions of phase-space.
The behavior of animals was thought to be reducible to physiology; physiology to genetics; genetics to chemistry; chemistry to physics. Reductionism to lower, more simple levels of subsystems was the order of the day for the modern scientist. There was no room for surprise, emergent causality, or shifts in outcome as between different combinations of atoms, elements, molecules and tissues. The coding of a given genetic packet always produced the same structure; a given structure always performed the same function. There was one and only one way to get to an oak tree, a skunk cabbage or a mass murderer in such a science. Everything that will happen is predetermined by everything that has happened while everything that has happened was implicit in that first moment when the cosmos erupted and the stars threw down their spears. Intervention by the gods was not possible in such a paradigm.
Cause and effect, in modernist paradigms, are tightly connected. Prediction was, in principle, one hundred percent possible. Absolute control was also possible in such a world. Both atoms, workers and societies could be preprogrammed to attain a final state. That is not possible in non-linear systems. As it turned out, the hard, tight science of atoms and elements did not fit the loose, variable workings of nature and society. The inability of social scientists to find tight, eternal laws of society was said to be from their personal deficiencies; from the relative youth of their science; from the sloppy ways in which they measured phenomena and controlled variables. Social science was held in scorn by those in the 'hard' sciences...i.e., those sciences in which precise laws could be formulated and mathematical equations could be fitted to the behavior of observed events. Natural scientists were viewed as only slightly more respectable.
Reconciliations For those who reconcile science and theology, nature is the handiwork of an omnipotent God. The regularities observed in the physical sciences force such Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist scientists to accept the idea of God as first cause who creates and walks away. The plan He made is in place for all eternity...or until He decides to end the world.
For many modern scientists, compliance with God's plan, as revealed by meticulous scientific work, is the pathway to the Holy Kingdom on earth. It is a very optimistic social philosophy that, at once, assigns much more agency to humans and in the same moment displaces the priest with the scientist as the final arbiter of God's Will and of normal behavior.
One of the more interesting attempts to reconcile God and science in christendom is that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Chardin (1959) insisted that Christians must accept the findings of science about the age and origins of the universe, the evolution of human kind as well as the development of the human psyche out of the interactions of the child with parents and others. Galileo, Darwin and Freud could not be ignored by theology nor could theology escape the challenge of science by appealing to metaphysics which subsumed and preempted natural law.
Chardin took the curious view that God was a becoming which was embodied in the social evolution toward a more perfect society. The person of Jesus presented the pattern for such evolution. God began as an 'alpha point,' i.e., merely the potential for perfection. Human and social evolution is headed toward an 'omega point', i.e., the embodiment of the perfection implicit in the journey from nothing to complexity which is registered on all the pages of modern science. For Teilhard as for modern scientists, it is in this world that godly intelligence and moral beauty as well as divine justice is to be found. This rendition of christian theology reunites the material world with the spiritual world even as modern science dismisses things of the spirit. Teilhard remains an outsider; a figure of interest but unassimilated in the teachings of the Catholic church, most Protestant denominations or in other major religions. He is a curiosity to keep and to contemplate rather than to integrate and to propagate.
But, for most modern thinkers in science and the philosophy of science, there is no room for God or gods in the exegesis of nature or society. God is a fiction that people used to explain that which they did not understand. Modern science could explain everything thus rendering God redundant. Modern science went from success to success even against the complaints of theologians of the old school.
In all the religions of the pre-modern era, Utopia was to be found in the spirit world. In heavens or in valhallas, one would find the end of sorrow and suffering. In some distance world, after death one would find reward and payment so lacking in this world for those who loved God and followed his ways. In the meantime, one could do as did Job; accept the fate that God sends to test his faith. In the 18th century, Utopias were located in this world; in the 20th century, the idea of Utopia fades into a Brave New World of managed control.
Modern science, thus, replaced the priest and the prophet with the scientist and the technician. In doing so, it turned the quest for compassion, mercy and justice into a impersonal, managed, objective and dis-spirited process complete with rules, rigorous logic in their application and ruthless suppression of those who deviate. The brave new world of science becomes the frankenstein monster of Mary Shelley which destroys everything it tries to save.
In order to understand the capacity of modern science to displace the gods, it is necessary to understand the political economy in which modern science finds its resources and its legitimations. Since the beginnings of industrial capitalism at Huddersfield in 1740, the study of nature and society became most profitable. Among most twentieth century economists, the market is thought to be the repository of all wisdom and the regulator of all disputes. Whatever society needs, the market, in its impartial wisdom will provide.
The spirit of capitalism, based upon a privatized version of the god process, locates the acting subject in religion and in economy in the single individual. Michael Wood, in his Legacy series, appoints Northumberland as the site for the emergence of property based individualism and thus the emergence of both protestantism and capitalism.
CAPITALISM AND THE DEATH OF THE GODS As with modern science, there is much that is helpful to the human project that comes with market economics. It is creative, productive, energizing, rewarding of individual effort and timely imagination. Market economics has fueled a magnificent knowledge system; it has overthrown ancient kingdoms and fuedalities; it has destroyed the structures of gender and racial privilege. Capitalism and the free market dynamics it carries has, as Marx said long ago, provided the resources by which a richer, fuller life is possible.
However, part of the social practices which leads to the death of God are found in the dynamics of capitalism. The logics of capitalism, unmediated by the drama of the Holy, make it seem reasonable to sell anything to anybody when a mutually agreeable contract can be struck. Free market ideology tends to desanctify all of nature and society. Workers are to be hired or fired on the basis of rational calculations about profit and loss. Resources are to be mined and milled apart from the harm done to the environment. Goods are to be sold without regard to the harm done to age, gender, race or national values.
Production of resources essential to health and well being are determined by market dynamics. If it isn't profitable, it is not produced and distributed. Low profit lines of production are displaced by high profit regardless of the social utility of either. Private demand displaces social need. Jobs and opportunities to work are mediated, sensitively by market dynamics. When surplus production accumulates, workers are disemployed. It simply does not make good sense, in terms of profit and loss, to keep people on the payroll when there is a lot of goods that are unsold.
Many forms of labor are stimulated by market dynamics which are forbidden by more religious considerations. Another essay in this series deals with occupations prohibited by the Drama of the Holy but, the point remains that such dynamics push 3, 5, 7, 10% or more of the labor force out of productive labor and into enforced and demeaning idleness. Such rejection from prosocial labor diminishes the God concept unless there are parallel systems of redistribution which are informed more by mercy and compassion than by suspicion and grudging charity.
Rational calculations of profit and loss, mediated by narrow definitions of ownership and entitlement spin off responsibility by owners and assessors. In secularized market societies, corporations count up profits while costs of production are shifted to customers, governments, future generations or to the environment. Adult children abandon aging parents to the tender mercies of a welfare system. Fathers refuse to pay child support in order to maintain a private standard of living. Such things could not happen in the Muslim world or in the Jewish world or in the Catholic world. Only in the secularized world of commodity capitalism are such resources so produced and/or withheld for profit.
Rather than creating cherished social relations, psychogens used in more sacred times as a pathway to the sacred are sold as commodity to whomever has the funds. Such sacred supplies, once used as a pathway to the Holy, are often appropriated by the individual as a pretheoretical response to the bitter imperfection of the social life world in which s/he must live out a lonely, competitive existence. In a society in which the worth of the individual is measured in possessions and in competitive achievement the vestiges of solidarity are echoed in the thin and lonely hours spent in consuming alcohol, drugs or in the depersonalized sex of prostitution and pornography.
Drugs, sexuality, violence, risk, and faith have been used as pathways to the Holy for millennia. Today, they are becoming commodities to be marketed freely and without limit.
Pharmaceutical houses spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements pushing drugs as the generic solutions to human problems. Cold remedies, tranquilizers, sleeping aides, and headache tablets are set forth as the solution to one's physical and mental ailments. In the effort to increase productivity as measured by the number of patients processed by a doctor each day, doctors take the easy way out...they prescribe for the symptoms rather than try to change the social conditions which produce both physical and emotional problems. It is much quicker to prescribe tranquilizers for the women who are depressed by the social roles they must play or for the men who must surrender social and moral power at work; it is much faster to prescribe drugs for these people than to try to eliminate patriarchy or bureaucracy...both of which alienate people from the social and moral power they need as humans to create their culture and to control, democratically, their social relationships.
So...drugs become the generic solution to all personal symptoms of alienation: depression, anger, rage, violence, crime, hyperactivity, perversion, and despair. The line between the therapeutic use and the alienated use of legal drugs tends to disappear as the prescribed drugs leave the drugstore. 5 of the top ten prescribed drugs are tranquilizers. 75% of these drugs are prescribed for women who use them as a pretheoretical response to alienated gender relations...along with alcohol. Tons of legal drugs reach the street via hijackings ordered and paid for by organized crime rings. Drug rehab centers find 2/3rds or more of the drug abuse by children involves prescription drugs.
Stockholders and officers of Pharmaceutical companies profit enormously from the generic solution put forth by thousands of T.V. commercials: if one has a problem, there is a drug to cure it. In modern America, there is considerable support among market liberals that the sale of pornography, sex, drugs and gambling should be legal. With each passing generation, the popular support grows for the decriminalization of supplies, the use of which was once contained within the realm of the sacred.
Thus market relations tend to desanctify everything brought to it. Workers, resources, sacred supplies, whole communities, all cherished social relations, as well as all offices are seen to be commodities to be sold to those with the wealth to buy them.
The emancipatory possibilities of market economics still waits for all those disemployed; all the children discarded to the streets; all the aged hurried off to nursing homes paid by state funds. The possibility of a good and decent life, made graphic by mass media continues to be subverted for third world peoples who see their enriched lands converted from staple foods to the production of export crops. The promise of capitalism is subverted for citizens of the third world who see their political process bought and sold to agents of the rich nations. It is subverted for parents in the third world who see their sons and daughters prostituted to tourists in luxury hotels while they themselves live in squalid barrios, favelas and ghettos.
Joining the narrowness of modern science and the bleakness of market dynamics to desanctify persons and to displace the drama of the Holy is another pretender to omniscience and omnipotence. In the past four hundred years, the nation-state has superimposed itself on tribe, community and society. As with science and market, the state has much to offer the human project in that its often destroys ancient enmities of clan and soil while expanding concern for civil rights, social justice and international peace. Yet there are problems too often ignored by all but the most persistent anarchists.
God and the State The concept of God has been assimilated to the concept of the state in many ways since the time of Constantine and Theodosius. If medieval people had to worship God; contemporary citizens are expected to treat the state as deity. Patriotism vies with piety for loyalty, talent, commitment and fervor of citizens. The parallels between God and State are many. We can review and reflect upon them since the gradual transformation of God into State leads to and is part of the process by which the God of our fathers and mothers disappears; by which the Death of God ensues.
1. Both God and the State are said to have absolute
authority over the people of a given society.
2. Both God and the State are said to embody the principle
of rationality: bringing all parts of the social order
into a working harmony under the benevolent and
watchful eye of their agents and judges.
3. Both God and the State claim the right to deal with
wrong-doers; they claim to be the receptacle of justice
and the custodian of punishment.
4. Both God and the State demand confession and repentance
for failure to believe; for failure to observe the
rules; for failure to tithe either church or state.
5. Both God and the State are served by a privileged
priesthood who interpret the Will of God or the State
to the people.
6. Both God and State designate a devil into which to pour
all the structural defects of God or state...and thus
exculpate God/state from criticism.
7. Both God and State tend to embody the interests of the
rich and the powerful.
8. As with the State, when the people get power, God tends
to become democratic, benevolent, and concerned with
social justice as much as formal justice.
When responsibility for social justice and for moral agency is preempted by any single institution, the god concept is separated from other domains of life and the universality of subjectivity thereby diminished. The general name we use for such a condition is fascism or more generally, totalitarianism. Investment of moral agency in any given institution thereby subordinates and exculpates other institutions.
Postmodern theology would repair the harm done to universal subjectivity, in part, by certifying every institution to contribute freely and fully to moral critique and emancipatory knowledge; cinema, family, state, church, news media, market and medicine. By such triangulation, the god concept is again constituted but this time without the alienation of agency which bothers a Marx or an Altizer so very much.
Hegelian Views of Rationality There is a very respectable but pernicious philosophic tradition that conflates the state and the Drama of the Holy. Hegel located the source of human alienation in the unalterable irrationality and inferiority of human beings. For Hegel, following Plato and privileging linear logic as the basis of reason, the state is the individual writ large; thus the state is the chief repository of what little rationality could be brought into the affairs of society...if the state were both rational and powerful enough.
I mentioned above that Hegel had the idea of absolute Spirit in which the universal subject was to be located. Hegel further subdivided absolute Spirit into abstract right which was the province of tort and criminal law; into morality which was located in the purpose, intention and action of the single individual; and into social ethics which was the domain of social institutions. Key institutions for ethics were; 1) the family, 2) civil society (economics and control agencies), and 3) the state headed by either a monarch or an executive office working with a legislature.
Again, following Platonic ideas of the superiority of Reason over spirit and desire, Hegel views alienation as the abandonment of Reason. For Hegel, his students and his followers, Marx aside, the solution to alienation was the rationality of science in the service of the state coupled with the use of state power to repress the 'natural' proclivities of humans to do evil to each other. The strong and rational state became, for Hegel, "The March of God in the World." The bad state is historical but the good state, the one which embodies Rationality is eternal. This justification of the strong state came to Americans more through the writings of Thomas Hobbes than W. F. G. Hegel. Convenient and partial readings of both Hobbes and Hegel tend to encourage the replacement of God with State.
Hitler and the Nazi intelligentsia adopted these arguments and used racial (ethnic) criteria to define the limits of religion, community, reason and rationality. Lenin, Stalin, and other bureaucrats in the Soviet Bloc thought that the state apparatus they ran embodied all that was wise and beneficent. They designated all opposition in all its varieties as the Devil incarnate to be cast out from civilized rule. In France, Germany, the United States as in other nations which view themselves to be modern and scientific, state authority is paramount; church authority is said to be a relict of primitive thinking.
Most often there is a wary truce between Church and State. The functionaries of the Church and the functionaries of the state tend to come from the same families; the same clubs; the same schools; the same class level so they are bonded by kin and by interests. Yet there is a chiliastic aspect of religion that is dangerous to the state. No one has worked this possibility better than did Max Weber. Weber agreed with Hegel that rationality was important to the human project and identified the bureau (cracy) as the repository of instrumental reason. However, instrumental reason is, for Weber, alienating and that alienation is embodied in Charismatic authority.
Charismatic authority can trump legal-rational authority overnight when times are bad. Most charismatic leaders come from outside the church hierarchy; from its lower ranks; or from more remote regions...and thus escape the bonds of kinship, friendship or class loyalty. Such charismatic leaders are able to delegitimate a state by reference to the holy spirit; to the ideal vision of community so seldom found in human affairs.
While the state has legions of soldiers and police to do its biding; while the Pope has legions of priests to do its biding; while a charismatic leader has only moral power to wield, still moral power can be awesome when wedded to social power. God and politics is an unmanageable combination for state bureaus. State bureaus are reduced to the use of repression and terror.
The investment of universal subjectivity in a charismatic
leader has many disadvantages chief among which is the scope of
her/his vision and the goodness of his/her heart. But more than
that, they die and leave moral agency bereft. Clamor and rancor
beset the sanctification process in the best of times while ugly
politics corrode the sanctification process in the worst.
In societies where the religious impulse is vigorous, state and church tend to be unified. In societies where the state is under the control of a powerful foreign elite, the church tends to concede, reluctantly, the hegemony of the state. In societies where times are bad and the state is hostile or indifferent to the fate of the masses, religion tends to provide the energy for change and renewal. In societies where times are bad and the state responsive, fascism tends to absorb the energy and genius of critics for social change.
In societies where times are good and the state responsive to the needs for social justice, the church and God tend to fade into the rituals of everyday life. When times get bad and the state unable to meet the demand for social justice, the functionaries of God demand control of state power...while functionaries of the State demand the priests begone.
When neither the hierarchal church nor the hierarchal state responds to the anguish of the masses, sects arise to claim God and to transfigure Him into their own needs for community and for dignity. God becomes up close and personal...in the very room where believers stand and testify. Thus is the dead God revivified and made a working force in the world.
God and Mass Society Structural features of mass society militate against the Drama of the Holy. The bureaucracy is the major unit of social organization in mass society. It is the epitome of massified relations. Authority is stratified; communication is impersonal; behavior is rule directed; the application of rules is rational, no exceptions except as another rule permits; and a role relationship exists only as long as the business of the bureau is being conducted. Self is constituted of short term identities narrowly focussed upon instrumental tasks for both staff and self as passive object.
The essence of a mass society is that each and every person lives in his/her own special skin separated from each other but processed en bloc through the routines of the bureau. In prisons, asylums, schools, churches, and hospitals as well as sports and politics, massification profoundly alters the universal subject; it rationalizes and specializes in the same moment it objectifies and dehumanizes its members.
The structure of the bureau transforms and degrades all persons which come to it into cases, clients or inmates. The form of a bureaucracy is tripartite; there is an elite who make the rules and oversee the policies of the bureau. There is a trained cadre who apply the rules impersonally and uniformly. Then there is a faceless mass of students, voters, patients, prisoners, welfare clients, parishioners, or soldiers to be processed in linear sequence through the routines of the system.
In a bureaucracy, there is no place for love or hate; for pity or for terror, for mercy or for jealousy. There is room for secrecy but it is the impersonal secrecy of the filing cabinet; not the conspiratorial secrecy of the adulterer or the traitor. The bureau is without a soul yet it is not innocent. It does not have the natural cruelty of the tiger and it may serve a very useful purpose...as do banks, libraries, traffic control systems and electro-generating plants. But all bureaucracy has an architect and a master which it serves. The master is an elite who plan it; who screen and select those who staff it; who write the rules to be applied and who benefit from it in terms of power or wealth. It is not an innocent creature evolved from the primeval ooze as did the tiger. It was built and can be discarded as easily as any other human construct.
I speak here of mass society: mass education, mass religion, mass medicine, mass corrections, mass sports, mass politics and mass market. I do not take as my referent of the concept of mass society all those things done in church, court, school, hospital, and on the playing field which are outside the logics of impersonal exchange; which violate the rules of the job; which circumvent the policies of the bureau. Indeed, it is the underground structures in every bureaucracy which bring mercy, pity, love and hope back into the language and actions of people who find themselves in offices, factories, stores and clinics.
In the final analysis, the structure of mass society is such that distinctly social relations cannot be experienced; the rules of impersonality, rationality and objectivity destroy social status and social bonds alike. The dynamics of mass society is such that there are no festive occasions in which people come together to create the drama of the Holy. The dynamics of rule driven response means that there are no social relationships out of which come a fine mutuality of adjustments in behavior to individual need or circumstance. The rules of impartiality and impersonality means that there is no bonding which makes us weep and laugh together; no language which elicits complementary behavior with talking individuals; no nth entity to reify and deify. Only faceless, mechanical exchange conducted without emotion or interest beyond the moment of exchange.
Bonding There is no bonding within a bureaucracy or between the cadre and the mass of petitioners who come before it. The fate of managers, clerks and clients are of no interest to an elite (except for the adverse publicity they might occasion) after they leave the boundaries of the bureau. What happens to a student after she leaves a class is a matter of indifference to a bureaucratized professor. What happen to a patient after he is treated for cancer and after he pays his bill is of no concern to the bureaucratized doctor. What happens to a client after she loses her suit for child support is of no concern to the bureaucratic lawyer. What happen to the customer after he buys his groceries is of no concern whatever to the clerk who just smiled at him and said, Merry Christmas!
The intense interpersonal contact which makes us human; which enables us to empathize, which calls forth shared frames of meaning answerable to the idea of the Universal Subject is discouraged within the bureau. The universal subject is not found in such a world nor is a generalized other or a collective consciousness. People who work side by side for years may know little about each other and care still less. There is no physical touch to connect each to the other; touch is far to dangerous, far to sensory an act--who has ever seen a welfare clerk come from behind a counter and comfort a weeping mother. Who has seen a hospital clerk come out into the parking lot and help a poor woman deliver her child. Who has ever seen a professor leave the podium and kiss a student who has fallen asleep. Such are the dynamics of the bureau.
Language The language of a bureau is stripped of its human
content. It becomes flat and colorless without
history or tense. It is without gender, volume or tone. The
bureaucrat speaks in the lifeless language of numbers; in the
relentless logic of rationality; in the ruthless calculus of
policy.
There is no imagery in bureaucratese; no poetry or simile. The spoken word does not travel beyond the institutional wall to Samarkand or Timbuctoo. In a bureau, a spoken word cannot make a joke; cannot pull a pun; cannot laugh or cry. The endpoints of desire, rage and wrath alike are unknown to the language of the bureaucrat. One might as well whisper to a computer or sing to a lamp as pun with a bureaucrat.
The wide ranging flexibility of the English language is lost on the narrow applications of the bureaucratic rule. In the bureau, a word must mean the same thing every time; much as a Big Mac must always have the same ingredients in the same order or be thrown out. To talk with a bureaucrat is to eschew surprise, delight and mystery.
One becomes angry with a bureaucrat not because she fails to do bureaucracy but rather because she fails to humanize the language; to bend the rule; to circumvent the policy in the name of mercy, pity and love. Authentic human beings must be offended by the mechanical repetition of bureaucratic regime...must be saddened that a thing with the potential to be a human must act like a robot. If there is such a thing as artificial stupidity, we find it at home in the bureau.
The colleges, schools, universities, and institutes in mass society turn out faceless bureaucrats who are expected to find the god process with all its joy and despair in the interstices of society; not in the heart of the bureau. The teachers of social workers betray them to the social work bureaucracy; the teachers of teachers betray them to the educational bureaucracy to which they go; the teachers of scientific management betray real, living human beings to the logics of technical rationality and routinization of life.
Socialization There is a lot of education in mass society;
and progressively less attention to morality,
ethics and intersubjectivity. The billions of dollars in human
and physical plant resources are given over to technical
training. The courses in which social values are taught are
secularized, objectivized and thus stripped of most of their
emotional content. Passion and desire are relocated into sports
and youth culture activities...separated from the god process and
privatized in the same moment.
There is much merit in technical training: each generation must master its own technology if the world is to be safe and efficient. Safe transport systems, reliable food systems, effective medical systems, responsive public agencies all require instrumental rationality But if work is to be sanctified, that is, informed by human rights and human obligations, then sanctification must occur. Human purpose does not infuse behavior when technical rationality takes precedence over substantive reason. Pity, love, mercy or hope are alien to the logic of the bureau. The guiding policies of the bureau set aside norms of reciprocity and mutuality. The purposes of the bureau take precedence over the purposes God/society.
In these days, the curricula of primary, middle, secondary and university are the battleground of rationality versus reason. Those who run bureaucracies need workers skilled in reading, writing and mathematics in order to keep records, control inventory, fill orders, or calculate costs and profits; they need workers who are capable of sitting passively all day fitting themselves nicely into the modules of space and time that bring order and sequence to the routines of the bureau. However, employers do not want the drama of the Holy to interfere with the impersonality of market, office, shop or factory; they argue for the separation of religion and education.
At the same time, most people today still live within the logics of premodern understanding; they embrace and venerate the god concept in a wide variety of forms. They want the sanctification process to mediate every act of teaching and learning in the socialization process. Often the god concept is limited by tribal, familial, gender, ethnic or class boundaries and is less than omnipresent or omnipotent but, within the boundaries of the tribe or family, every act from birth to death is to be mediated by the god concept.
There is a third approach in which society/God can remain in the school system...and thus retain it to the socialization process. Postmodern education links itself with postmodern theology. In such a reunification of school and religion, one is to teach a profound respect for religion; to insist that religion is part of the human process; and to provide each new generation with a religious education which permits both the worship of a sectarian God while providing room for other God forms.
This is anathema to the Baptist God or the Muslim God or the Methodist God, for whom independent pre-existence is claimed. It is blasphemy to the Catholic God who is put forward as a universal God. It is, however, amenable to the Hindu mind; to the Buddhist mentality; to the universalist-unitarian concept of God as the principle of good and justice in the world--but it is a serious problem for those who learned, in prior socialization, to worship a jealous God just as it is a serious impediment to the business of bureaucracy.
But socialization qua socialization must include religion...a binding of people in authentically social enterprize; a bonding of people to the collective interest; a sharing by people of essential resources; these together define an authentically human religion. The logics of mass society, and the bureaucracy which is the empty heart of mass society, creates too many problems of crime, loneliness, despair, suicide, exploitation, inequality, and abandonment. These unholy consequences of bureaucracy are not redeemed by the advantage which accrue to the directors and to the cadres which run them.
The Looking Glass process The looking glass process so essential to universal subjectivity in the business of constructing social reality is missing in mass society. Role enacting is short, episodic, and marked by the impersonal application of rules in terms of deductive logic. In such a role relationship, there is no shared history with which to interpret words or acts. There are no social bonds with which to transcend rules or orders: one can only carry out orders mechanically. Taking the role of the other; reflecting upon one's own behavior from the vantage point of the client, customer or inmate; feelings of shame or pride and modification of one's behavior in light of those judgments---all these elements of the looking glass process are lost. In the short and episodic role encounters of a bureaucracy, there is no future contact expected therefore no shame or guilt at the consequences of rule imposition or the execution of an order from another hierarchy.
This kind of role involvement, when combined with the powerful incentives to obey orders leads to merciless, relentless destruction of the particularized we, the generalized other or the universal subject. Who can respect and worship such an nth entity as a bureaucracy? When human purpose is removed from human contact in the mechanical world of the staff of the bureau, any hope of Father-God is lost. With the loss of shame and guilt there is also the loss of moral responsibility. The stratification of authority results, as well, in the fragmentation of moral agency in what little morality remains.
When the drama of the Holy is absent, de-programmed by bureaucratic routines, then the extraordinary feelings for the superorganic are also lost. The annual office party or the occasional retirement party cannot serve the need for bonding and for mutuality so essential to the social project.
There is some small mutuality in the role relations of the bureau, however, the relationship between cadre and elite is asymmetrical; each member of each echelon is subordinate to the next, higher echelon. To each echelon there is some loyalty due; mostly upward in the logics of the bureau. To each client there is some reciprocity made: the welfare client does get coupons for food; the prison doctor does give the prisoner medical care; the student does get a job permit from the university clerk; the prisoner does get food from the warden and the sports fan does get to experience a reasonable facsimile of the Holy even if the Holy ends with the last whistle. Such is the limits of sociality in mass society.
The rationalized bureaucracies of mass society are located in the profane world of the mechanical and the technical. Without a sense of the sacred nature of social contact; without the drama of the holy in each meeting between two or more persons, God is truly dead. When bonding is absent; when language is dead; when socialization is empty of a sense of the holy, then God is dead. When role relations require blind and mechanical embodiment, then God is buried. Period. But few bureaus work as they are planned and in the failing, there sometimes emerges mercy, compassion and help.
God and the Televangelists There are many ways in which television ministries contribute to the destruction of the god process if we understand that process as one of social solidarity, social justice, compassion, mercy and an overarching tolerance for other god processes. I want to review two failings of teleministry for their meaning for an intersubjective theology. The first and least interesting is found in the personal failings in the private life of American televangelists. The second focusses in on the nature of the universal subject in electronic ministries. The first and most public criticism fails to provide emancipatory understanding since culpability is privatized to the person of the fallible minister. The second critique is more interesting to postmodern theology since it asks about the degree to which history exists in that ministry.
Personal Delicts The most obvious indictment to make of televangelists centers around the hypocrisy, the greed and the corruption of televangelists. Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson joined Jimmy Bakker to disenchant the god process. Jack van Impe preaches a form of intolerant and mean-spirited religion that does grievous harm to the sanctification process.
All of the teleministries make cynical, staged used of the technologies of theatre, communication and social sciences to enhance the flow of wealth to their coffers. In teleministries one finds the disembodiment of pastoral care and personal salvation which disembodies the god concept. In such disembodiment, personal delicts on the part of the televangelists seem to be their own private business.
Swaggart confessed, in 1988, in public and in tears that he had committed unspecified sins. His 'sins' included the use of prostitutes and the commodification of sex which such visit entail. Most peoples for most of human history enjoin the sexual capacities of people to the social process; one is to express one's sexuality within sacred social relationships.
Jim Bakker admitted a sexual encounter in 1987, with Jessica Hahn, a 'church secretary.' His ministry paid for her silence. But Bakker, with his wife, Tammy, had betrayed more than his marriage vows. The scandal deepened when the nature of his private use of donations became public knowledge. The Bakkers used these funds to support a life style that bespoke a life more secular than sacred. When people donate funds to a religious purpose, they intend it to promote social justice, to embody compassion and to forge a solidarity with those who are hurt by secular ways. The Bakkers betrayed that most holy of all intentions. Today (1991), Jim Bakker is in prison and Tammy is a guest on other religious networks; still crying, still pleading, still invoking the name of her god to coax donations.
In 1987 also, Oral Roberts said that God had threatened him with death if his television viewers did not contribute $1.3 millions to his teleministry. Most people viewed that attribution to their god as a form of blackmail by Roberts. The money was not forthcoming but Roberts survived the time allotted. The misuse of funds was not the destructive act in the case of Oral Roberts; what was harmful to the god process was the use of unethical tactics to squeeze money out of a congregation. To give out of fear of god or to stay the hand of an angry god is to attribute a mean spirit to god. Roberts had put himself in the position of a martyr to the wrath of god for the [alleged] failings of the viewers. There was little question about the propriety of the use of donated funds to the ministry; Oral Roberts had built a university, a hospital and an overseas mission that fed and sheltered children. (A later documentary questioned the efficacy of the mission].
Jerry Falwell, too, had problems expressing his sexual needs within the framework of the social relations deemed sacred by most persons oriented to the Christian ethic. His defection was doubly harmful since his ministry spoke of Hell and eternal damnation so often. Yet, as the chief spokesperson for such, Falwell had little enough fear of God in his own personal life. Either he had contempt for the wrath of god; or he lacked faith; or he viewed himself to be above the wrath of god. In each and any event, he subverted that god process which set forth a plan for life; which watched each and every person; which judged, rewarded or punished those who followed or betrayed the plan of god.
Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988 and used donations to support his campaign. While many people who donated might well have agreed with his platform; a very conservative one, still the unification of church and state seemed to vest far to much power in the state sector for market liberals as for those in postmodern life styles. Feminists, minorities, and corporate presidents alike were aghast at the thought of an evangelical minister. The use of state power to favor premodern understandings of the god concept were anathema to both modern and postmodern sensibilities. Many of those sympathetic to the views of Robertson could foresee the conflict and the set-backs that such a politics would entail.
The ministry of Jim Jones taught one how awful the union of state and church could be when, at Jonestown, that charismatic leader ordered the suicide of hundreds of his followers. Once again we learn that the location of morality in the single repository of the church-state can entail much mischief. Attribution of a monopoly over moral reason in the person of one man or woman is, equally, risky. That such religious movements themselves arise in a thoroughly secularized, indifferently racist society escaped most analyses. That social justice might be the solutions to social problems more so than migration or mass suicide remains to be weighed in the public judgments of Jonestown. What had been a progressive ministry in San Francisco became an authoritarian state in its isolation in Guinea.
Charisma unmediated by parallel centers of morality and social power is only as benevolent as the mood of the charismatic leader at the moment. When one comes to believe that one is the voice of god, failure to comply can invoke threats such as that of Oral Roberts. When others come to believe that one speaks with the voice of god, there is no limit to what might happen. In Jonestown as in the Mid-east, those who claim direct contact with the Will of God can move people to mass destruction. It takes little imagination to foresee what use such a person might make of nuclear weapons upon those nations that did not comply to the voice of god as relayed by Robertson or any other teleminister who speaks of sin, Hell and damnation.
Institutional Questions Yet there is another catalytic effect of mass religion that escapes most commentators on teleministries. The idea that a ministry can be massified; that one sermon fits all; that the healing, bonding effects of religion can be successful over radio or television is open to question. The notion that one can find salvation by laying one's hands on a radio or a television set sets aside the need for continuing interpersonal support if such miracles are to be maximal and are to last more than the passing moment. It is entirely possible that the death of god starts with the depersonalization of the religious process.
If the teleministry of a Falwell, a Roberts, or a Bakker were the pure embodiment of the Christian ethic or any religious tradition, still the fact that each is insensitive, indifferent to the fate of each person in the audience as a separate individual remains. The interactional matrix of any mass medium is too meagre, too informationally impoverished to respond in realistic fashion to the many and complex sources of sin and evil. The personal history of the individual supplicant is lost and in that loss is the diminution of subjectivity.
Even without the fakery of electronic staging, editing and enticing, one must think about how the effects of such remote and information deficient broadcasts have on the sanctification process. A case can be made that a Bakker or a Swaggart must know each person intimately in order to serve as an effective pastor. This is not an unreasonable demand or a special indictment; the same is true of doctors, lawyers, parents or counsellors; each patient, each client, each child and each troubled person is unique, has a unique configuration of circumstances. Mass recipes for preventative health, for educational goals, or for interpersonal skills serve as general guides but specific persons need specific diagnoses and therapies.
A case can be made that any person, however good and saintly she might be may do grievous harm to the god process when surrounded by script writers, stage managers, accountants, hired technicians all within a bureaucracy increasingly depersonalized and rationalized to the goals of growth, profit and control of its environment. What is true in politics, sports, education and welfare is also true to a lesser degree in the institutions of religion. Some things must be done in interactionally and informationally rich social relationships. Belief, trust, and faith are casualty to mass media presentments of the sanctification process.
The sanctification process is limited and diminished as well when teleministries are oriented to the construction of a monolithic universal subject to which all other embodiments of the god concept must yield. Fundamentalist preachers embody a prophetic voice and are well focussed upon the problematics of modern life; crime, materialism, divorce, alcohol and drug abuse, corruption of the political process and other attributes of the secular city. It is in the exclusivity and meanness of their prescriptions for moral agency in which they may fragment the universality of the god process. In rejecting the special ethos of other god processes, most other dramas of the Holy are degraded and demeaned. In the demand to conform to the one reading of the god process, the possibility of the god process is lost.
God and the City Ernst Troelsch (1931) has helped us to understand the role of the medieval city in changing the concept of God. The structure of feudality with its hierarchal organization was dominated by feudal lords and their knightly warriors. The priests and church officials made a second layer; and the peasants a third layer...the base upon which all other classes rested as 'nature and God intended.' Feudalism constructed a universal other even if it was one which privileged birth and station. There was a vantage point from which to judge the truth and rightness of action.
There was no place for the bourgeoisie in this class structure. They tended to concentrate in towns. As their economic power grew, the bourgeoisie were able to force concessions from feudal lords who needed or wanted the goods and services brought in from all over the Eurasian world and from Africa too. Merchants, traders, bankers, investors and importers need freedom; they need impersonal relations; they need flexibility; they need peace; they need access to free labor; they need freedom from the bonds of church and state. They came to be a fourth estate which, in the last four centuries destroyed slavery, feudality, primitive communalism, and now rules everywhere.
They need a God who is not a warrior God since they need the false peace of commerce. They need a god who is not an all- powerful god since they need room for human agency and for market hegemony. They do not need a god who has set his stamp of approval on feudality for all time since feudality funnels all power and wealth to the firstborn son of the manor. They need a God who puts agency in human hands; gives freedom to human beings; they need a writ to act freely from a Pope or a Patriarch. Above all, they need a God that does not situate Itself in every living creature, in every tree, in every mountain, in every dell and every dingle. Trees are to cut and sell; mountains are to mine and level; living creatures are to managed, organized and commodified. Workers must yield surplus value or be discarded. Customers must spend their discretionary income in order to realize profit.
Merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs and arbitragers do not need a God who endorses the preference of the nobility at the top of the social pyramid. They could not use a God who was god of the entire community. They need a special God to sanctify and to justify their stewardship of the economy. The Catholic God is inconvenient to business, He shares out among all the children of God. The Protestant God was more distant; more amenable to individualism and less suspicious of wealth. The Protestant God showed His approval of a man by giving him domination over fields and flocks; over markets and commodities.
The bourgeoisie forged a new god in the furnace of the reformation. They took what they wanted from the totalistic teachings of Calvin; from the asceticism of the Puritans and they changed the shape, size and writ of God. At first they became the stewards of God; then they became the keepers of the God concept displacing priestly intermediaries. Then they began a romance with science with which so they could dominate the metals, materials, and the workforce. With science they need not supplicate god; they could intervene into society and nature with the information and the technology provided by modern science.
The city is their place. Civilization is their natural environment. In building the city, nature is excluded from the god process. In building civilization, community is excluded from the god process. The form of their city and the form of their civilization are inimical to the sanctification of nature and society.
Harvey Cox is one of the most sensitive and engaging theologians in America today. Most of us would attribute the death of God to the impersonality, technicization, and bureaucratization of modern urban life. We would hold the city killed God. In The Secular City, Cox continues the work of Troelsch in praising the city...or rather the promise of the city in human liberation when he notes with approval that, in the modern city, people are free to choose their friends, their mates, their moral standards, their life styles without much concern for neighbors.
In a theme oddly parallel to Hamilton and Altizer, Cox sees a positive freedom in the anonymity and mobility of the urban complex. He equates this freedom of the city with the freedom promised by Christ in his gospel. Cox is aware of the terrible ravages done to the human spirit by city life at present but he thinks it is temporary and that the freedom of the city; freedom from small town interpersonal controls is parallel to the liberation of people from the restrictions of life in Jerusalem.
Those who see freedom in the anonymity of the city might want to consider the durkheimian thesis that sociality is the source of God and religion rather than privacy and impersonality. In the moment one finds such freedom, one does kill God...the collective god of society assembled and society acting.
Such a theology is particularly well suited for a market system in which each makes brief contact with others for their private needs. In a system where money is the driving force for the distribution of goods, love and social obligations are displaced as the reason for goods and services to be produced and distributed. I think one should be careful about such freedoms; careful about accepting the anonymity of the city as an embodiment of the message of Christ.
Still more, the death of God might not liberate people but rather create a situation in which all is permitted and those who are strong take what they want without restrain. If Durkheim is right about the role of collective consciousness in regulating private desires, and I agree with him, then Society/God is essential. To kill off God (understood as cooperative relations reified and deified) is to advocate the hobbesian war of each against all or nilihistic privatized will to power of Nietzsche or a privatized sensuality of de Sade. But until the tenets of humanistic anarchy are worked out; widely publicized and universally accepted, the fears of Ivan Karamazov/Feodor Dostoevski about personal freedom located in the private individual must be weighed when the death of God occurs: 'If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.'
God and Democracy Upon casual reflection, one might come to think that democracy is inimical to the God concept. If all authority over things of this world belongs to God: if God has his/her own inscrutable and eternal plan for society; if God is all knowing and all powerful, then democracy is little more than madness; little less than blasphemy. One does not elect one's god nor call for a referendum on God's will. Altizer has given this argument considerable force.
The idea of democracy understood as privatized mass politics is justifiably regarded as dangerous by those who argue for an elitist republican form of state governance. The sum total of private good does not add up to the common good. The sum total of interest groups lobbying the state does not add up to the general interest. However the sum total of elitist politics cannot speak to the general good since elites do not and cannot insert themselves into the lived experience of the mass.
There is another view however that is more amicable to the spirit of God and the democratic process. If we agree that social justice is the beating heart of religion; if we agree that God has a human face, then we can take the position that an multidimensional democracy is the one way in which a universal subject can be constituted. The multidimensionality of democratic politics is key to an encompassing universal subject. Democracy located solely in the civil sphere or in the state sector does little to integrate while it does less to facilitate status and esteem for other embodiments of the god process.
I emphasize that takes a strong, participatory democracy with interactionally rich and informationally rich dimensions to bring all of the interests of society into the political process. The exclusion of some strata: women, minorities, poor, young or aged, or religious intellectuals tends to fragment the god process. The desanctification of significant portions of society or nation limits the reach and range of the sanctification process and produces a partisan God; a distorted God; a God of the Elite.
There are those who assert that the stratification of wealth and power are necessary to the sanctification process; who argue that familiarity breeds contempt and disrespect. Nietzsche, innocence of some of the charges levied at him, is not innocent in this matter. In his, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that, as between the morality of the master race and the morality of slavery, the former in more noble. Many, reading him, immersed in stratified relations and understanding these relations as part of the natural order, use his arguments to sanctify the master races--and thus desanctify all lower social orders. But a more complete reading of Nietzsche, for what it is worth, reveals a contempt for both moralities. Nietzsche called for the emergence of an 'ubermann,' often but not necessarily translated as a superman. One can call for the attributes Nietzsche assigned to such a superior person without subscribing a monopoly of them to some one segment of society.
Nietzsche and the Death of God Nietzsche is often blamed for the death of God; he denies that deed. He claims only to report on the death of God. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche has a chapter entitled, 'the Madman,' (who is, one assumes, Nietzsche himself). The madman goes from church to church offering his Requiem aeternam deo. When it is rejected, the madman says:
I come too early...I am not yet at the right time. This
prodigious event is still on its way and is still traveling,
it has not yet reached men's ears. Lightning and thunder
need time, the light of the stars need time, deeds need
time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This
deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star, and
yet they have done it themselves! (Emphasis added).
What is being said here is that human beings themselves created a knowledge process; a structure of understanding that sets aside the mystery and magic of premodern understandings and makes the god concept redundant to natural laws and natural processes. Nietzsche did not invent modern science; he merely understood its logic and its meaning for religion and the inventions of heaven and hell. Nietzsche looked upon the death of god and saw despair; preferred a morality informed by rational philosophers, anticipated nihilism.
Nietzsche would not be of interest today other that for the fact that most people, modern and pre-modern alike, tend to agree: if God is dead, all things are permitted; if modern science is correct, humans are subject to the blind laws of economics and demographics. Postmodern theology is a bit more encouraging. It takes the position that if God is dead, we are responsible. If God is to be a living part of our lives, we are, again, responsible. Postmodern science is more optimistic; there is room for human agency since order and disorder exist in phase- space; the laws of nature and society are not iron laws but, depending upon which dynamical state obtains, merely tendencies. Within the postmodern world-view, nihilism is possible but sanctification is also possible. If philosophers and theologians cannot grasp that possibility, poets can.
Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) sounded a more positive note for postmodern sensibility when he wrote:
Is it so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived light in the Spring
to have loved; to have thought
to have done
To have advanced true friends
and beat down baffling foes
That we must feign a bliss
of doubtful future date
and, while we dream on this,
lose all our present state
and relegate to worlds yet distant
our repose?
Arnold's project, as was that of Blake in more turgid prose, was to help create a postmodern theology that retained the best of the Christian ethic while quietly forgetting ancient explanations and morality tales that seem so impossible in light of modern science. William Blake (1767-1827), an artist and engraver in vocation, was a Romantic in spirit in rejecting science as savior and a postmodern theologian in avocation when he wrote Go Spectre!, the verses of which introduce this essay. He too, speaks of the death of god but distributes credit far more widely than did Nietzsche. I build upon the work of Blake in another essay in this volume and refer the reader to it for the beginnings of a framework for a postmodern theology.
The postmodern perspective reaches far back in time and space to skeptics and doubters of every persuasion. One of the earliest to sense the catalytic effects of science was the great Arab mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam (c1048-1122). Khayyam is noted more for one verse; the Loaf of Bread verse but that verse was part of a much longer treatise on the knowledge process, the possibility of redemption and the best one could expect in a world shaped by recursive functions and rigid run of linear mathematics unseen and unseeable:
The Door of Life
Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint and heard great argument
about it and about; but evermore
came out by the same door where in I went.
Alike for those who for Today prepare
and those who after some Tomorrow stare
A Muezzin from The Tower of Darkness
cries: Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.
Why...all the Saints and Sages who discussed
of the two Worlds so wisely...they are thrust
like foolish Prophets forth; their words to
Scorn are scattered, and their mouths stopped up with dust.
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow
and with mine own hand wrought to make it grow
and this was all the harvest that
I reaped: I came like Water; like the Wind I go.
There was the door for which I found no key;
There was the veil through which I could not see;
Some little talk of me and Thee
there was...and then no more of Thee and Me.
One can see prior sources of Nietzschean despair in the poetry of Khayyam; one can also see the sources of an abiding romantic humanism which teaches us to gather our rosebuds while we may and not to spend too much time in idle debate about imponderables. Khayyam, as most literate people know, went to call for a book of verse, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and a good friend beside him. But Khayyam, a world class mathematician even today, had much more to say and one could well spend the time reading the poem in its entirety. Khayyam begins his poem but noting the work of Natural law. Persian mathematicians knew of the precision with which the stars wheeled in the firmament and the idiocy of belief that gods dwelt and determined their motion. His poem is a call to life and to love; one is to do whatever is done in this world since none other exists:
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Wake! For the Sun, which scatter'd into flight
the Stars before Him from the field of night,
drives along with them from heav'n, and strikes
the sultan turret with a shaft of light.
And, as the cock crew, those who stood before
the tavern shouted...Open now the door!
You know how little while we have to stay
and, once departed, may return no more.
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
your winter garment of repentance fling;
the Bird of Time has but a little way
to flutter...and the Bird is on the wing.
A book of verse beneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread...and thou
beside me singing in the wilderness;
Oh, wilderness is paradise enow!
Ah, my beloved, fill the cup that clears
today of past regrets and future fears;
Tomorrow! Why, tomorrow I may be
myself with Yesterday's ten thousand years!
Sometimes I think that never blooms so red
the rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the garden wears
dropt in her lap from some once lovely head.
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend
before we too into the dust descend;
dust into dust, and under dust to lie
Sans wine, sans song, sans Singer and...sans End!
...tr. Edward Fitzgerald
In re-visiting Nietzsche, Blake, Arnold, Khayyam and others, I make the case that separate human beings are responsible, together with science, social organizations, forms of governance, as well as in the dynamics of its economy, for the life as for the death of god. Individuals are themselves responsible for desanctifying nature and society as much as are structural changes in social organization, in socialization processes, in the use of language and in the deployment of technology which, together, render the god concept and the god process an endangered cultural asset.
In all of this is a grievous danger and momentous promise; yet a god concept which transcends the divisions of modern societies arises from the same economic and political processes that put the god concept in jeopardy. In a word, postmodern understandings of social process set forth in earlier essays afford a perspective, a framework by which these same divisions could be ameliorated and reorganized in a postmodern theology.
But that is not the end of the story.
There are some advantages to the death of god that must be weighed in if postmodern theology is to be true to the spirit of critique, balance and honesty. It is time to consider the advantages that accrue as the God of our fathers is discharged. Some of these advantages--to the human project--have been mentioned in passing in the critique of science, in the critique of free market dynamics and in the critique of the state. But there are liberating moments in the very death of god that need thought and judgment.
Freedom and the Death of God In modern American theology, there are some who see the death of God as an empowerment of human beings more than a writ for despair and nihilism. The death of god is required in order that humanism emerge and take responsibility for the good and evil that is everywhere, the result of human will and human action.
William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer are such optimistic prophets of the death of God (1965). Hamilton writes that the death of God is understood in the fact that,
...was once a God to whom adoration, praise and trust were
appropriate...but that now there is no such God.
Hamilton and Altizer view the death of God as emancipatory. It is a joyous event; a liberating event, Hamilton says. The fact of God and people in the world means that humans are subject to the will of God and thus not free to be their own masters. Humans can only be free when God is dead. As the Buddha says, If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
With the death of God, one is free to become godlike; to freely accept the wisdom of God; to freely do the will of God; to freely reach the same conclusions of God. Anyone who has been in the same room with an priest or a professor or a police officer not to mention presidents and popes, knows how such power differences stifle thought and sap the will.
Thomas Altizer agrees. He is convinced that there is no room for God and for humankind...humans can't be humans as long as God is around to tell them what to do. In his interpretation of the crucifixion, Altizer says that God, in his infinite wisdom, accepted that humans would always be slave to Him and His law as long as He, God, existed. So God permitted Himself to be crucified in the person of Christ that men and women could be free from God. The crucifixion liberated people from sin and death but in a curious way...it permitted them to be reborn as their own masters.
That this exposition by Altizer is a literal exposition of the real death of a real God is fantastical; that it is a metaphor is interesting if not charming...however charming it might be, it is diverting and of little aid to the quest for a Post-modern theology that serves the human project well. The major difficulty I find with such enthusiasm is that it appears to legitimate the desanctification via solipsic individualism, power bloc politics, massified institutions and rigidity in theory based policy. A more subtle intelligence might well see joy at the death of god to be insensitive to the faith and life of billions. One must ponder how it advances the human condition to destroy the belief of others innocent in love of their god and decent in the consequence of that belief.
However, the operative point of such an explanation is that we, collectively and individually do now have a certain freedom given the dethronement of a clock-like God and a god-like clock. There seems to be little evidence that humans have done much with that freedom...some would say they had it all along. Altizer has a point we must take seriously. The death of God could mean the birth of an authentic humane humanism. That it hasn't happened is neither the fault of God nor of Altizer but rather our own inadequate religion and religious applications.
There is another implication of death of god arguments one might contemplate. If god is all powerful and if omniscient, what is one to make of such catastrophe events as the holocaust. A reasoning person would have to conclude that god, in its wisdom had both agency and grounds for sending such wholesale terror. Others, so believing, exculpate themselves for participating or approving. Still others, sympathetic and appalled, have no reasoned grounds in faith or doctrine to dissent. There is something to be said for assigning good and evil to human hand and human intent.
God and The Holocaust The holocaust lead many Judaic theologians to accept the death of God. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein writes that it is impossible to believe in an all powerful God who unlooses the Holocaust upon the world:
For every Jew, whether he admits it or not, God died at
Auschwitz. After Auschwitz, it became impossible for Jews
to believe in the traditional Jewish God as the all
powerful, all wise, all-beneficent creator of heaven and
earth.
According to the Jewish concept of God, whatever happens in human history does so because God in his infinite wisdom and justice causes it to happen. For the faithful, it was God's Will that the Nazi regime exterminated communists, socialists, Jews, and later, Christians by the millions. Some orthodox rabbis believe that God punished the Jews for their sins through the agency of Hitler. Such an apology for God! Just what sins have Jews committed; just what standards does God hold for them that they must be so punished.
There is a more direct and more historical way of understanding the holocaust: Germans and many others believe, falsely, that Jews as an ethnic group, were responsible for poverty, depressions, warfare, atheism and all the problems of modern capitalism. This analysis fails to focus upon the whole of a political economy in which German peoples became immiserated. Germany had thrived as long as it had markets and colonies from which to draw wealth to sustain its national character. After the loss of both markets and colonies in World War I, Germany could not provide the resources for social justice; it could not support a deteriorating nobility in feudal style; it could not exercise power in world affairs and it had to pay enormous war reparations.
Germany also lost World War II but its treatment after the war was vastly different. Located between the emerging Communist Bloc and fortified with aid from its former enemies, Germany throve. With a vastly different and more open markets in the world economy and greater demand, Germany experienced over 40 years of continual economic growth. It was not the Jewish bankers who made the difference between prosperity and economic catastrophe for the german people but rather it is the organization of the political economy of the world which raises and casts down a people.
There is, thus, a sensitive dependence upon the organization of the political economy and the nature of the god concept. We can begin to study the death of god by studying the way in which a political economy shapes and is shaped by the god concept by a brief overview of the shared history of both.
God and Renewal in Premodern Religion Today, the god concept oriented to community and to intersubjective religious processes is, once again, inspiring and informing the human project. Among 800 million Muslims, the Islamic religion offers attractive alternatives to the last 200 years of European domination. Given a choice between Western Capitalism and Bureaucratic socialism, Islam is preferable. In former Communist lands, Orthodox and Roman Catholicism as well as evangelical protestantism refresh and renew the human spirit made dead by the indifferent bureaus of the socialist state. In Central America, the Philippines and in much of South America, liberation theology interprets the scriptures through the eyes of the poor and disparaged in ways that commodity capitalism and multinational firms cannot. The Hebrew religion inspires, reunites and celebrates the Jewish diaspora in Israel today.
As times get bad in the third world and among those surplus to industrial and finance capital, people seek a more equitable way of life. Most grand religious narratives offer more in the way of social justice than does capitalism and free market dynamics. As times get bad in the socialist world, those surplus to the political and cultural process turn to one of many grand narratives which have succeeded in improving the facticity of the god process.
The social and economic implications behind these latest renewals of the god concept are varied in form and in width; some are narrowly exclusive and being so, exploitative of other religious groups. some are militant and being so, do not scruple to visit violence upon the unbeliever. Some are quietistic and lead people away from progressive social change.
For those who see choice only as between the two failed grand narratives; capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, premodern theology look good indeed. The case made here is that those choices are false choices; there are many more ways to organize the human process and to pursue the drama of the Holy than are contained in historically existing formulae.
The forms of religion that develop in the centuries in front of us will be very different in many respects but religion per se will not die until the last human being disappears from the face of the earth. That might well be many millions of years hence. In the meantime, for many people, the death of god is real. It is those people to whom and for whom this essay is addressed.
Right now, let us try to understand the ways in which modern science desanctifies the knowledge process, and in doing so, pushes theology and religion into the smallest possible corners and crevices of society. We will return for a more detailed survey of how the modern global political economy destroys the god process.
THE POSSIBILITY OF HOPE IN MODERN TIMES The world has a long way to go before it is thoroughly massified; thoroughly privatized; thoroughly stripped of the Holy. There are many societies which are only slightly secularized. Perhaps the USA and the USSR are the most thoroughly bureaucratized and massified in this epoch. Even these have many, many locations in which are found elements of the sacred; there remain many enactments of the Drama of the Holy; it is possible to get a glimpse of God on a few holidays and a few festivals and in a few enabling friendships.
There is still a lot of time for a suitable theology to be resurrected out of the dust of mass society; out of the best of the partisan gods we now find across the world. Compassion still flows strong and sweet in the face of tragedy. The marks of woe wrought by war and by poverty still appall us. We are not beyond hope by any means. Yet the possibility of hope depends in no small measure upon how open one can be to a reading of the social book that calls forth change.
The first step toward a postmodern theology requires each of us accept the responsibility for sanctifying all of society and nature. Prior to that must come an understanding that the present is not the endpoint of all social evolution; that there is more to be done. A smug satisfaction with one's own state and a sloughing off of the problems of society to those solutions thrown out by management science, by bureaucratic edict, or by fundamentalist missionaries are obstacles to change. One must first grasp the deficiencies of the present if one is to experience the anger and courage implicit in hope.
A century ago, the British and the French stood at the apex of such smugness, thinking their present estate, the culmination and omega point of all progress. Today Americans take that same impossible smugness into their councils of war and law. A century ago, Blake punctured that encapsulated fantasy in England. Today Noah Chomsky, George Page, Murray Bookchin, Dan Berrigan, Mary Daly, Elliot Currie and a thousand others offer a reasoned grounding for resanctification of nature and society. What Blake said of London yesterday is true of Detroit, Washington, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston today:
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street
Near where the Charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
wounds of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
in every voice, in every land,
the class-forged chains I hear.
How the fact'ry workers' cry
Every praying monk appalls;
And the hapless soldier's sighs
runs with blood down banker's walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
how the youthful harlot's curse
and the new born infant's tear,
runs to fill the banker's purse.
These things appalled Blake two hundred years ago. Two hundred years are but a moment in human history. We have centuries before us. Reason can tame rationality to the service of redemption. There is much to do but time enough to do it in. But to do it well, we must have a vision of how a better God; a better Religion; a better society can be built. To that end, it is useful to visit the various liberation theologies being fashioned by a new generation of intellects to augment and fill out those theologies which came out of the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial age.
We need both Christ and Marx; both Buddha and Mohammed; both Durkheim and Weber; both sociology and anthropology; both reason and rationality. Above all, we need faith, mercy, hope and peace.
REINVENTING GOD IN POSTMODERN TIMES Given postmodern understandings of death of god arguments and postmodern understandings of the god concept as intersubjective process, it is possible to resanctify nature and society. The question of universal subjectivity and transcendent standards for a global economy remain. While one can appreciate and respect the value of local, parochial embodiments of a God and a teaching of that God concept as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, still those of us encapsulated in a thoroughly postmodern world-view cannot bring ourselves to abandon that evidence which denies the assumptions of modernity about perfection, finality and preference by God or by Nature of some single, given social practice or some single theoretical structure. Even if we cannot have the God of our fathers, we want, desperately, to have a world that works and in which all comes right. As with Humpty Dumpty, once cracked, modernity cannot be put together again.
Beyond Nietzsche We needs must go beyond Nietzsche if we are to make the best of the promises postmodernity holds. We cannot resurrect lost Gods and make them credible. We cannot set one and only one pathway to the Holy and enforce it with unreflexive faith, belief or with crippling guilt. We have tasted of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge and we are no longer innocent. Having tasted, we are everyday more responsible for what we think and what we believe. The ancient patterns are gone and not all our weeping will rewrite them on our scroll. But we can set new patterns...emphasis upon the plural of pattern.
Chaos theory offers one a vision of social dynamics in which human agency is possible but limited. The theory and the science which so dismayed Nietzsche is not the science nor the theory which best describes the behavior of actual natural and social systems. The bifurcation points at which a nonlinear system enters into a new pattern of behavior also informs us of the limits of agency in each nonlinear state. Chaos theory affords one a view of a complex causal basin in which order and disorder are distributed. Chaos theory informs us that the end of all life is not the grey bland chaos of the Second Law but rather the creation of entirely new forms of order out of full blown chaos. The nihilism, cynicism and solipsism found by Nietzsche in a clock-like cosmos or by Altizer in a god-hewn world is irrelevant pessimism in a chaotic world.
Beyond Newton It was possible, in modern science to relegate the god process to that of an initial creator which, once creating the recursive, recurring and eternal laws of nature, retired to other pursuits or mayhap, immersed itself in those abstract laws of nature and society. Such a god can be perfect, omnipresent and omnipotent since the laws of nature are, in the modern world-view, perfect and thus inviolable. Gravity, the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of evolution can not be repealed. As Einstein put it, 'God does not play dice with the World.'
Postmodern critiques of science tell us that we do not live in a universe of regularity, of precision, of predictability. Postmodern critique stresses the cultural components of the knowledge process which reach deep into the conceptual beginnings of modern science to shape the framing of research questions, the outcome of research findings as well as the interpretation of research findings. Language is but one of many possible ways to conceptualize reality; as such it offers a window on a reality ever more complex than any one language or all languages taken together can reproduce.
Postmodern understandings in the philosophy of science tell us that, in the study of nature as in the study of society, one intrudes into and brings the object of study into being in ways that the objective assumptions of modern science forbid. Postmodern science thus robs even the most devout of modern scientist the comfort of a dependable dynamics and a rational creator. One might ask, What then is left? An answer is, whatever we want to create and to abide is left; and that is a very great deal.
In postmodern science the critique of Pure Reason mounted by Kant is irrelevant since pure reason does not and never did exist. The twelve natural, absolute and enduring categories of analysis offered by Kant as mediator of sense data are, in postmodern understandings of the knowledge process, displaced by a view of science in which categories of analysis are shown to be human and variable rather than natural and enduring. In recent years, fractal geometry and nonlinearity have entered the knowledge process; concepts not mentioned nor compatible with those of Kant.
Lyotard has argued, rightly so in my opinion, that grand narratives are not on in a postmodern world. The world is too messy, too connected, too contrary, too discontinuous to fit into the tidy world of grand theory even with its sacrifice of specificity. In such an world, ethical behavior means conformity to theory while justice means to reward those who conform and sanction those who dance to others rhythms of nature and society.
But even if grand narratives are lost to guide social philosophy, still wonderful narratives are available to the human project. In a companion essay, there are several such wonderful narratives mentioned along with their foundational concepts with which to guide the sanctification process in a postmodern world. The very messiness of the world revealed by Chaos theory means that incompatible wonderful narratives can occupy the same time- space continuum. The operative concept in Chaos theory with which to grasp such a geometry of the god process is that of the soliton. The technical features of the soliton need not delay us here but one should note that, given two solitons occupying the same regions of time-space, some can do so and maintain their integrity for quite a while in human terms. Other solitons interact and produce new forms of order which at some scales of human endeavor, are hostile to the human condition even if the solitons singly are more congenial.
We can reinvent the god concept in a postmodern modality such that stability and pattern are possible across societies; such that change infinitely unique variations are possible; such that human agency is variably possible; such that the dialectics between self and a 'universal we' are not frozen or alienating; such that nature and society are reunited as are generations even to the seventh. In passing, we discover a god process which does not favor a given people, gender or class; which does not privilege a given ethos or politics; which does not claim to set eternal and universal standards of truth, beauty and goodness.
Most people in their everyday embodiment of the god process do these things without thought and without concern for contradictions. Only those whose knowledge process is aligned with the linear logic of Bacon, Mills, or Kohlberg. As the good and gentle Alasdair MacIntyre put it, the morality of rule driven morality must give place to a much looser and more flexible virtue driven morality.
For the postmodern theologian, it matters little whether moral behavior arises out of duty or out of love. Each are equally harmonious to the sanctification process. It matters little whether one is virtuous out of a clear and lucid understanding of the values at issue and explicitly uses wisdom and judgment or whether one does it because saintliness is second nature to one. Once again we can appreciate the Kant who, in his later years, tried to ground moral behavior in a metaphysics that did not sit well with the purity and elegance of his critique of pure reason. Kant then becomes for us:
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, in blast-beruffed plume, [who] has chosen thus to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.
...Thomas Hardy
Rather than a hero and a giant; a fool or a senile old man, Kant is an admirable architect of modern science who, living today, would think about what postmodern science has to offer and build upon that to critique the role of reason and belief in the knowledge process. Kant is dead and so is the age that he embodied so well as icon.
In postmodern theology, then, are found a set of nonlinear moral guidelines for the resanctification of nature and society which, for those who need such, might suffice to inform a just society. Such a social philosophy relocates moral behavior in the larger social context rather than the private person only. Such a social philosophy relocates the notion of 'naturalistic ethics' from facts unmediated by human action to facts created, in part, by the human who use them for moral guidelines. Such a social philosophy suggests, after Phillipa Foot, that temperance is a first order metaphysic with which to reflect upon the dialectics of the god process.
Industry and sloth, contemplation and action, courage and
prudence, spontaneity and dependability, honesty and need, beauty
and deformity, health and illness, war and peace, sobriety and
passion, ignorance and understanding do not stand in hostile
contrast in postmodern theology but rather, stand as human
constructs which, in infinite and complex embodiment speak to the
ancient questions of the good, the right and the beautiful. What
is required is that we accept the human hand that authors such
concepts and the human purpose that authorizes and assigns
priority.
The universal subject in all of this is each one of us as we reflect upon our own and others' behavior. The universal subject is composed of the church, the state, the cinema, the university and the economy without privileging of one over the other and without exclusion of one from another. The universal subjective in this reading of postmodern theology is one in which the sanctification process occurs at every scale of human organization and reaches out to every species. The universal subject is thus one and many; much and less; long and short. Whatever the case the universal subject never antedates human history nor acts outside of human occupation.
If one needs a metaphor for the geometry of postmodern morality, it is not the single eye of the all seeing God nor the elegant equations of Grand Unified Theory but rather a hologram which contains all of an image in every fragment; the eye of a grasshopper which is composed of hundreds of lens each with its own special, different and valid point of view. But life and religion are too thick, too connected, too layered, too differentiated to be summed up in any one metaphor. Neither the golden rule or the kantian imperative subsumes that complexity and contrariety. The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Dharma Sutras and the teachings of the gentle Buddha too are insufficient to the incredible complexity of wisdom and justice. But the human soul, well tempered and compassionate, is sufficient to most purposes under the sun.
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