Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society
Issue Number Six
Introduction
Ernesto Cardenal: El Paraiso/Paradise
Anthony Mansueto: The Cosmohistorical Vision of Ernesto Cardenal
Boris Gubman: J. Maritain and N. Berdyaev on Nature and Culture
Paul Almeida: Totality, Reification, and Transcendence: Lukacs on the Individual in Bourgeois Society
Anthony Mansueto: Towards Synergism: A Personal Journey
Introduction
In this issue of Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society we are pleased to bring our readers a new poem
by Ernesto Cardenal, former Minister of Culture of the Republic of Nicaragua, currently
Director of the Casa de Tres Mundos, and one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century.
Fr. Cardenal has also agreed to join our International Advisory Committee. Cardenal's poetry
makes important formal innovations, recreating on new foundations the epic genre, which makes
the history of a people, or even of the cosmos itself, the focus of poetic creativity, rather than
the experiences of an individual hero. His cosmo-historical vision has long been an important
influence on our own work. We are honored to be able to publish one of his poems, and to
welcome him to our organization. For the benefit of readers who may be unfamiliar with
Cardenal's work, we are publishing a brief sketch of his life and an analysis of the political-
theological significance of his poetry.
The issue also includes two articles exploring the relationship between nature, culture, and the
divine in humanity's drive towards holism and transcendence. Boris Gubman's article focuses
on the religious philosophy of Jacques Maritain and Nicolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev regards nature
as a realm of natural necessity, which, from the standpoint of human reason, can only appear
chaotic and without meaning. It is only in the light of divine revelation, and divine action in
history, that the true significance of nature, as a meaningful part in a divinely ordained totality,
becomes apparent. Culture, for Berdyaev, is first and foremost humanity's effort to participate
in God's own creative activity. While good in itself, it can, when cut off from transcendent
religious values, become demonic and actually make humanity a slave to the very natural
necessity from which it seeks liberation. Maritain takes a more optimistic view, recognizing in
nature a creative, self-organizing dynamism which finally becomes self-conscious in humanity,
and which forms the basis for human participation in the transcendent values of the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful --and ultimately, therefore, in the life of God.
Paul Almeida's article analyzes the early philosophy of Georg Lukacs. Unlike both Maritain and
Berdyaev, Lukacs regards the drive for "totality" as an exclusively human phenomenon, without
an ontological ground in nature, and without a trans-historical telos in God. Realization of this
drive is held back by the emergence of market relations which fragment the meaningful totality
created by earlier, pre-capitalist forms of social organization and transform human society into
a system of only externally related individuals. "Transcendence," for Lukacs, is possible only
through the comprehensive reorganization of human society by the proletariat, acting through the
medium of the revolutionary party. The articles by Gubman and Almeida demonstrate both the
very real strengths and the limitations of historic Christian and Marxist approaches to the
problem, and thus help to highlight the beauty and power of Cardenal's synthesis which, we
believe, preserves the contributions and overcomes the limitations of both. Almeida's brief
discussion of Lukacs' early literary critical work, The Theory of the Novel, should also help to
shed light on the significance of Cardenal's formal innovations.
The issue concludes with a brief intellectual autobiography, prepared by the editor as a preface
to his book Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project.
The article traces the development of the author's own cosmo-historical vision, to which the ideas
of Maritain, Lukacs, and especially Ernesto Cardenal, have been extraordinarily important.
El Para¡so
Ernesto Cardenal
No es que el hombre hubiera estado en ‚l.
El G‚nesis ser¡a antievolucionista.
Sino que antes del hombre ya hab¡a para¡so.
Ireneo lo vio como un cambio perdido.
Un para¡so en perspectiva!
Ser¡a que no logramos entrar en ‚l.
Los primeros hom¡nidos
(lujuriante selva tropical)
quedaron en los umbrales.
Todo primitivismo es una primera inocencia,
como la de la ni¤ez,
y una desnudez.
Isa¡as, Oseas, Zarcar¡as,
profetizan el para¡so en el futuro.
Time y Newsweek andar n desnudos.
Pecamos en Ad n dice San Pablo. Los hom¡nidos.
El hecho es que hubo una libertad. Que se us¢.
Pero en Malm” vi con Daysi el largo muelle
en un B ltico con su azul de mayo
y cisnes en el mar, agua con algas, y al final del muelle
dos plataformas riurosamente separadas,
una para los hombres desnudos asole ndose,
en la otra las mujeres desnudas
y s¢lo los ni¤os nadando escondidos pod¡an verlas
sacando del agua las cabecitas como peces,
aunque los peces est n tambi‚n desnudos y no les da vergenza:
Por qu‚ la desnudez dio "verguenza"
no hay te¢logo ni cient¡ficio que lo explique.
Por qu‚ no andamos desnudos,
por qu‚ striptease, revistas pornogr ficas,
pesadillas de estar desnudo en la calle.
Ni el pasaje del G‚nesis lo explica.
Est n desnudas las palmeras y la garza?
Pero la mujer bajo las palmeras est desnuda.
La desnudez del G‚nesis sin herman‚utica todav¡a.
Ser por el pecado original que andamos vestidos?
A la orilla del Lago Turkana encontraron
entre f¢siles de hom¡nidos
el de un hoja de higuera!
moldeada en el barro ahora petrificado
un hoja de higuera.
Dicen que dejamos de tener pelo como los monos
para estar m s frescos bajo el sol tropical
y entonces fue que nos sentimos desnudos.
y los pigmentos negros fue un pudor de la piel.
Pero sea come fuere
el G‚nesis no contradice el Origen de las Especies
pues el para¡so
no es or¡gen sino meta.
Meta original, digamos.
Paradise
Ernesto Cardenal
It is not as if humanity could have stayed there.
If we had, then Genesis would be antievolutionary.
But before humanity existed, paradise already was.
Irenaeus saw it as "lost change."
A paradise in perspective!
It could be that we never even succeeded in entering it.
The first hominids
remained on the threshold
in the shadows of the luxuriant tropical jungle.
All primitivism is a first innocence
like that of childhood,
and a nakedness.
Isaiah, Hosea, Zechariah
prophesy a paradise in the future.
Time and Newsweek will walk around naked.
We sin in Adam, says Saint Paul. We hominids.
The fact is that we had freedom. That we used it.
But in Malm”, with Daysi, I saw the large pier in the Baltic
the water blue under the clear May sky
and swans in the sea, the water with seaweed, and at the end of the pier
two platforms rigorously separated,
one for the men, sunning themselves nude,
and the other for the women,
and only the children swimming hidden could see them
their little heads popping out of the water like fishes,
although the fishes themselves are also naked, and it gives them no shame:
Why nudity gives "shame"
no theologian nor scientist can explain.
Why don't we go around naked all the time,
why the striptease, pornographic magazines,
and nightmares of being caught nude in the streets.
Nor does the passage in Genesis explain it.
Are the palm trees nude, and the herons?
But the woman beneath the palm trees --she is nude.
The nudity of Genesis is without any interpretation whatsoever.
Is it because of original sin that we go around clothed?
On the shore of Lake Turkan they found
among the fossils of the hominids
the leaf of a fig tree!
molded in the clay, and now petrified
a fig leaf of all things!
They say that we stopped having hair like the monkeys
in order to be cooler in the tropical sun
and that it was then that we felt ourselves naked,
our dark pigments a sign of modesty on the part of our skin.
Be that as it may
Genesis does not contradict The Origin of the Species.
Paradise
is not origin but goal.
The original goal, let us say.
Translation by Anthony Mansueto, with assistance from Marc Zimmerman and Rodolfo Rincones.
The Cosmo-historical Vision of Ernesto Cardenal
Anthony Mansueto
With the publication of Cantico Cosmico, and its English translation, it is now possible
for readers of Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society to achieve a comprehensive appreciation
of the poetic achievement of Ernesto Cardenal. We thought that it might be fitting to
give readers unfamiliar with his work both a little bit of background on the poet
himself, and some critical pointers which might help them to understand the
significance of his contributions.
Cardenal was born in Granada in Nicaragua in 1925. After studying literature at the
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and at Columbia University, he returned
to Nicaragua and became actively involved in the struggle against the elder Somoza,
a struggle which issued in the abortive rebellion of April 1956. Several of his
comrades were captured and killed. Later in this same year he experienced a religious
conversion. Cardenal had had a long series of love affairs, which, however, left him
unsatisfied. "God simply showed himself to me as love ... In reality this was a thirst
for the absolute, which human love could not satiate, but I didn't know it. (Cardenal
1992: xvi)" He entered the Trappist monastery at Gesthsemani, where poet Thomas
Merton was novice master, beginning several years of close collaboration. After two
years he left, partly due to health reasons, partly because Merton was urging him on
to a deeper understanding of his religious vocation. He spent two more years at the
Benedictine Monastery of Santa Maria de la Resurecci¢n in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and
finally completed his studies for the priesthood at the Seminario de Cristo Sacerdote in
La Ceja, Colombia. The Benedictine tradition, with its vision of all human activity as
a kind of prayer, from simple manual labor through the most complex forms of artistic,
scientific, and philosophical creativity, and its historically positive outlook on the
human civilizational project, clearly left its mark on Cardenal's development.
After his ordination, he returned once again to Nicaragua, establishing a small religious
community, Nuestra Se¤ora de Solentiname, on the island of Mancarron in Lake
Nicaragua. Cardenal concentrated his efforts on developing the creative capacity of the
campesinos who lived around the community. Solentiname soon became a center for
artists and writers --and also a center of resistance to the Somoza regime. Gradually
Cardenal left behind Merton's commitment to nonviolence, and became convinced that
armed struggle was the only road to liberation for his beloved Nicaragua. He made
contact with, and eventually joined the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional
(FSLN), carrying out important diplomatic tasks during the final stages of the struggle,
and serving as Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government from 1979-1989.
Solentiname itself was destroyed by Somoza's Guardia Nacional.
Cardenal's poetry represents an enormous achievement, both because of its formal
innovations and because of the powerful vision which it articulates. On the formal side,
Cardenal's greatest contribution has been the revitalization, one might even say the
recreation, of epic poetry. The epic, of course, was the principal literary form of pre-
capitalist societies. The subject of the epic is not (for the most part) some one
individual hero, but rather a people as a whole, or even the whole universe, in the case
of certain cosmogonic epics. In an epic, the cosmos appears as an organized totality,
in the context of which individual and collective action is endowed with a definite
meaning and value. At the same time, human action appears to be relatively
insignificant, against the larger background of divine action or cosmic evolution which
frames the epic.
In a market society, it was no longer possible to write epics of this kind. On the one
hand, the industrial, democratic, and scientific revolutions vastly increased human
organizing capacities, making humanity, for the first time, a real participant in the
cosmic evolutionary process. At the same time, emergence of a market economy
undermined humanity's sense of the underlying unity of the cosmos, which appeared
increasingly as a fragmented aggregate of only externally related atoms. Order and
meaning, in a market society, are purely and simply an individual human product,
ultimately doomed to be swept away by the tides of history. This is reflected in the
form of the novel, which is the bourgeois literary form par excellence. The novel is
first and foremost the story of an individual hero who attempts to make of his world
an organized totality, whether through concrete social historical action or through some
process of interior, psychological development. (On the social basis and political
valence of the epic and the novel cf. Lukacs 1971).
Cardenal's poetry, especially his "documentary poems" such as Hora Zero and Canto
Nacional, and his master work, Cantico Cosmico mark a return to the epic form, but
with a difference. Like the classical epics, Cardenal's poems are not about an
individual hero, but rather about the history of his people, the history of humanity --
indeed, about the history of the cosmos. But unlike the classical epic they do not push
human action --even individual human action-- to the margins. Cardenal's universe is
one in which human civilization plays a critical, leading role, as a center for the
creation of dynamic complex organization. The worker, the organizer, the guerilla
leader, the artist, the scientist, and the philosopher all contribute to this great cosmic
drama. But then so, too, do two lovers embracing beneath the palm trees in a city park
in Bangkok or Brasilia, or the mother nursing her child in a tar paper hut in Lagos or
Lima. For Cardenal's epics are also, in their own way, lyrics and love songs.
In this sense Cardenal's poetry represents our first authentically post-capitalist
literature. The great realist novels, even those which fully implemented the program
of socialist realism such as the novels of Gorky or Silone or Malraux, are still
irreducibly bourgeois in form. They are still stories about individual heros. In
Cardenal we find once again the story of peoples, of planets, of the universe, enriched,
however, by the recognition, which was absent from the classical epic, of the vital
importance of human creativity to the cosmo-historical evolutionary process.
This brings us to question of Cardenal's specific vision. Ernesto Cardenal is generally
classed with the theologians of liberation, largely because like them he arrived at a
position of support for the national liberation movements and socialism from within the
Christian tradition. This assessment of Cardenal is not, however, really accurate, and
fails to grasp the full significance of his achievement. Liberation theology, even when
it fully embraces Marxism as a method of social analysis and opts for social revolution
and armed struggle, remains largely within a still fundamentally Christocentric
problematic. The struggle for national liberation and socialism is affirmed as an
integral part of salvation history --i.e. an extension of Christ's saving work on the
cross --not as a stage in the realization of the self-organizing dynamic embodied in
creation itself. The progressive political valence of liberation theology notwithstanding,
this leads to serious errors in revolutionary practice: a tendency to lapse into a
glorification of redemptive suffering, and a tendency to invest the party, revolutionary
heroes or martyrs, with substitutionary messianic charisma.
While Christocentric motifs are not entirely absent from Cardenal's work, his
underlying political-theological problematic is quite different. Cardenal recognizes the
universe as a complex, self-organizing totality. This totality is present at first only in
abstract form.
In the beginning
--before space time--
was the Word
Everything which is, therefore, is truth.
Poem.
Things exist in the form of the word (Cardenal 1989: 25).
Matter is organization, and develops towards increasing levels of complexity, physical:
The universe is made of union.
The universe is condensation ...
Condensation, union, this is the stuff of which the stars are made.
The Law of Gravity
che move il sole e l'altre stelle
is an attraction between bodies, and this attraction
increases when the bodies move closer together ... (Cardenal 1989:
253)
chemical:
No electron wants to be alone (Cardenal 1989: 253)
and biological:
It rained during the night and the toads are croaking in the moonlight,
singing for the females, calling them to copulation
(Cardenal 1989: 254).
What a beautiful species, how I love it
every individual born from copulation
born for love (Cardenal 1989: 257).
The social form of matter represents a particularly advanced manifestation of this
process.
Conditions emerged which permitted the development of organisms
and then of organisms with consciousness, persons; and then
an organism which is at once community and persons (Cardenal 1989:
109).
Life generally, and human beings in particular, play an active role in the development
of the cosmos towards increasing levels of complex organization.
Life evolves not by adapting itself to its environment as Darwin
thought,
but by creating the environment ...
... human beings emerged from their caves
and started to build cities.
Always superior forms after inferior ones
in organization and structure (Cardenal 1989: 111-112).
The difficulty is that human social structure, and capitalism in particular, has become
an obstacle to this process of development.
Competition impedes cooperation.
There is a separation between one person and another.
A broken humanity.
A riot in Malaysia over devaluation, buses burned
and blood running in the streets like water from a hydrant.
At the hour when the stars shine over Wall Street,
At the hour when the banks open in London (Cardenal 1989: 254-
255).
Social revolution thus represents an integral part of the cosmic evolutionary process.
The more violent the perturbation,
the more intense will be the condensations
but even the most insignificant one develops
condensations even though they are of extremely weak intensity ...
However weak their original intensity may have been
the great condensations gradually become greater
and greater, and the small ones disappear, absorbed
by the greater ones, and finally there is left only a collection
of enormous condensations. Like them are the phenomena we call
socializations, and like them is
the Revolution ...
Capitalism will pass away. You will no longer see the Stock Market.
"As sure as spring follows winter ..." (Cardenal 1989: 255-256).
Ultimately, this revolutionary process issues not only in a new society, "Communal and
personal, classless and stateless," but "a new humanity, with new chromosomes,
(Cardenal 1989: 256)." This new humanity participates at a still higher level in the on-
going evolution of the cosmos towards its infinitely self-organizing Omega point.
We should, perhaps, note in closing, that while Cardenal has been a loyal and
committed member of the FSLN, his vision in many ways over-reaches even the
advanced political line of the frente. During the middle and late 1980s there was
growing political controversy over the poetic workshops organized by Cardenal's
Ministry of Culture. These workshops, which grew out of Cardenal's experience at
Solentiname before the revolution, attempted to tap into the experience and creative
potential of the workers and peasants to create a popular revolutionary culture. They
formed part of a larger effort to tap into the communitarian religious traditions of the
peasantry and proletariat in order to catalyze the formation of a new revolutionary
consciousness. The program fell out of favor with President Daniel Ortega's wife, and
leader of the FSLN cultural apparatus, Rosario Murillo, who felt that the poetry being
produced was insufficiently cosmopolitan, too political, and did not help the FSLN in
its struggle to present itself as a mainstream social democratic party and to garner
international support (Zimmerman 1990).
Important strategic questions were at stake in this struggle: i.e. the relative importance
of building relationships with allies who can provide needed financial and political
support and the task of "developing the productive forces of society," in the most
profound sense of developing the ability of ordinary workers and peasants to exercise
the poetic/prophetic office with which socialism endows them --the ability of young
men and women to dream dreams and of old men and women to see visions. The
choice here is between two goods, brought into tension with each other only by the low
level of political-theological development internationally, and the FSLN leadership
undoubtedly did what it felt best served the interests of the revolution. One cannot help
but wonder, however, if the decision not to invest more in developing the political-
theological capacities of the people did not in some way contribute to the gradual
erosion of popular support for the frente.
Be that as it may, Cardenal's work clearly represents an enormous poetic and
theological achievement. Cardenal has recreated, on a new and higher level, the
ancient form of the epic poem. He has carried out a complete rationalization of the
religious tradition, leading to a grasp of and love for the cosmos as self-organizing
totality, and, at the same time, has re-theologized the socialist project as an integral part
of a much larger process of cosmo-historical evolution leading beyond socialism, and
even communism, to the emergence of new species more beautiful than any we can
now imagine, and ultimately to consummation in an infinitely self-organizing Omega.
In this sense, Cardenal transcends both Christianity and socialism and achieves an
implicitly synergistic perspective.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cardenal, Ernesto
1980 Antologia. Barcelona: Editorial Laia
1988 Vuelos de Victoria/Flights of Victory. (ed. Trans Marc Zimmerman.
Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.
1989 Cantico cosmico. Managua: Nueva Nicaragua
1992 Los ovnis de oro/Golden UFOs. (ed. Russell Salmon, trans. Carlos and
Monique Altschul). Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press
Lukacs, Georg
1971 The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Zimmerman, Marc
1990 Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin:
University of Texas Press
J. Maritain and N. Berdyaev
on the
Relations Between Nature and Culture
Boris L. Gubman
The final years of our century have witnessed a growing controversy regarding the
relationship between nature and culture. This problem was not always present in
philosophical discussion. The emergence of a reflective understanding of the
contradictory relations between these two realities can be traced back to the beginning
of the Enlightenment. It became evident at that time that humanity is creating a specific
cultural universe, which uses the resources of nature and disciplines its basic drives in
the direction needed for the existence of the social body. J.-J. Rousseau and
representatives of romanticism spoke about the divorce between nature and culture as
a tragic event. Later Fr. Nietzsche understood the roots of the crisis of Enlightenment
culture in terms of the suppression of the life potential of humanity by artificial norms
and values inherited from Christianity. M. Weber interpreted this problem from the
point of view of the triumph of formal rationality in Western culture. The Nietzschean
and Weberian legacy had a great impact on the treatment of this problem proposed by
M. Heidegger, Th. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, M. Foucault and other postmodern
thinkers.
Twentieth century religious philosophy developed its own vision of the relations
between nature and culture under the impact of secular thought, trying to give a positive
response to the challenge of our time. J. Maritain and N. Berdyaev are, perhaps, the
most interesting religious philosophers who dealt with this problem. The coincidence
and divergence in their theoretical views concerning this question demands special
attention, revealing important features of religious thought of our century.
These two thinkers were born and raised in different countries, under different social
and cultural circumstances, but a chain of historical events linked their destinies
together. They met in Paris at ecumenical meetings (Berdyaev 1991). Discussing
different religious and theological issues, Berdyaev and Maritain were in agreement
concerning some important questions and felt mutual sympathy in spite of confessional
boundaries separating them. Berdyaev wrote that Maritain was under the strong
influence of scholastic tradition, whereas he himself followed a more existential pattern
of thought. He understood that Maritain was changing his orientation, becoming at last
"a modernist under the guise of Thomism." (Berdyaev 1991) This transformation
facilitated his alliance with left-wing Catholics and philosophers of other religious
persuasions concerned with cultural problems. A bridge of confidence between
Berdyaev and Maritain was built, perhaps, because of the belief in the power of
mystical experience that united them (Berdyaev 1991). At the time they met, Maritain
was the leading representative of "philosophia perennis." Berdyaev left his Motherland
and was well known in the West as a philosopher, modernizing the Russian Orthodox
world outlook. Both thinkers were trying to reform the Christian vision of the universe
to make it more adequate to the contemporary self-understanding of humanity. That is
why they were actively participating in the publication of Esprit in collaboration with
E. Mounier.
The harmonious balance between nature and culture, and their unity with each other,
can be conceived only on the basis of understanding the unique situation of humanity
in the universe. Both Berdyaev and Maritain share this philosophical presupposition
and try to show that the contemporary world is suffering from a lack of metaphysical
perspective on personal life. If we look at the individual existence through the horizon
of the conquest of the outer world, we lose the mysterious nucleus of humanity's
relations to being. No scientific discipline is able to exhibit according to Maritain and
Berdyaev, this existential dimension of man's life, its roots in the heart of being.
The metaphysical vision of reality breaks the chains of the scientific-naturalistic
understanding of the world. Maritain accused contemporary humanity of forgetting the
proper function of intelligence, becoming simply a tool in the whole mechanism of the
"psychological technocratic organization of the world of insects" (Maritain 1960).
Metaphysical wisdom surpasses the boundaries of empirically oriented reason, revealing
that humanity is a part of being. The same criticism is also typical of Berdyaev, who
was struggling with the spirit of the scientific approach to the universe.
Science tells the truth about 'nature,' correctly reveals the 'law' in it,
but it does not know, and it is not able to know anything about the
origin of the order of nature itself, about the essence of being and the
tragedy that is happening in the depth of being. Such things are in
the competence not of pathology, but of physiology -- a doctrine
about the healthy essence of the world; in the competence of
metaphysics, mysticism and religion. The realm of science and
scientific knowledge is the limited sphere of 'pathological'
knowledge; limitless being is not subjected to its laws, but only some
part of it. (Berdyaev 1989)
The metaphysical view of the universe demonstrates the narrow limits of scientific
objectivism.
Nature as it is considered by different scientific theories loses its relations with the
sphere of the mysterious, becoming something totally objectified and calculable.
Maritain and Berdyaev are in complete agreement concerning the inability of sciences
to comprehend the complexity of nature. Divine Being is for both the totality of
existence that is mirrored in created nature. The metaphysical path to natural
phenomena is entirely different from the scientific one, although they are
complementary. The metaphysical approach starts from reverence before the
unmeasurable, deep existential totality, whereas science consciously works within the
domain of the calculable and the particular.
Maritain defends the existential treatment of the problem of relations between God and
the created universe. God, according to the doctrine of existential Thomism, is the
source of the existence of different phenomena, the "mysterious fountain of Being,"
giving birth to a variety of things around us. (Maritain 1947) God's essence and
existence coincide, but in the sphere of created things existence precedes essence as gift
addressed to the universe by its absolute sources. Created material things are endowed
with a certain inner capacity for proliferation on all degrees of this material reality from
inanimate bodies to human beings. It stems from this existential gift received from the
source of everything, and the free activity of a human person is the result of the
perfection of this quality. Maritain claims that every inanimate thing, a plant, and
animal, or a human being can be considered as a bearer of the potential of
development. With the appearance of humanity, the freedom of spontaneity becomes
the freedom of autonomy. The human person is totally free, and this ability is
generated by the intensive activity of the human soul. The hierarchy of subjects,
according to Maritain's existential Thomism, results in humanity's free creativity. This
was his response to the scientific vision of nature and Sartre's atheistic existentialism.
The unbridgeable gap between natural phenomena and humanity does not exist in this
variant of religious thought: nature with the unmeasurable abundance of things inclined
to spontaneous development is not opposed to humanity's creativity, but, on the
contrary, is a certain prerequisite of the richness of the personal level of this hierarchy
of being.
Berdyaev shares Maritain's desire to portray nature as free from blind necessity,
excluding resources of creativity, but the two thinkers defend their views using quite
different philosophical arguments. The Russian philosopher is trying to overcome
scientific aberrations and considers nature to be a place where miracles, and not only
law-obeying events, are possible. Standards of scientific rationality, according to
Berdyaev, can be easily broken by events that surpass the ability of science to explain.
Faith and miracle are far more important for him than scientific calculation.
Divine creative power may appear as something beyond human reason, as a miracle,
which does not, however, thereby cancel the laws of nature.
The miracle as a subject of religious belief does not cancel and deny
the laws of nature discovered by scientific knowledge. Laws are in
force even in case of miracle. The miracle is the victory of good,
supernatural forces over the forces of nature that are necessarily
acting according to a plan and not something canceling law in the
order of nature. (Berdyaev 1989)
And even more than that: miracles give a certain meaning to all processes in the
universe. The act of faith generates our meaningful outlook on the totality of nature
and history. "The resurrection of Christ is the absolutely reasonable fact of life in the
world; there is a certain Reason and Meaning in the victory of life over death, truth
over evil. Death and destruction, ruling in nature, are crazy and not reasonable."
(Berdyaev 1989)
Berdyaev's criticism of positivistic rationalism is quite similar to that of Maritain,
because he stresses that reason is not only something gnoseological, but has certain
ontological roots. In the ontological sense meaning is the positive center, the origin and
aim of being. "The denial of the world's meaning is at the same time the denial of
reason." (Berdyaev 1989) The hidden meaning of the universe is to be uncovered,
showing the existential richness of being and opening the perspective of freedom.
Overcoming rationalism, we are making a step forward towards the order of freedom.
"The suppressing necessity of nature is not generated by reason, and due to this fact it
is only necessary. The victory of the miracle over the order of nature is the victory of
reason and meaning. The order of freedom and the order of nature are reasonable."
(Berdyaev 1989) Science offers the vision of nature that is not as deep as that offered
by religious faith. Christianity, according to Berdyaev, is able to reveal the spiritual
in nature, the order of divine creativity, which is open for humanity as a miracle.
The cultural creativity of humanity was never at the center of attention in traditional
Christian thought. The emphasis on human creativity in contemporary religious
philosophy is the result of a very important change in its approach to eternal problems.
Old questions are reconsidered through the horizon of human activity, the effort to
create multiple cultural forms. Maritain and Berdyaev were among the pioneers in
remaking the image of Christian philosophy, paving the way to its clear cut
anthropological orientation in the end of the century. Maritain makes no demarcation
line between culture and civilization, saying that he considers them to be synonymous
in opposition to some Russian and German thinkers.
We could say that culture or civilization is the enrichment of human
life, concerning not only the material development, necessary and
sufficient to permit us to have a good life here, but also and first of
all the moral development, the development of speculative and
practical activities (artistic and ethical), which are worth calling the
human development in the proper sense of the word. It appears that
culture is natural in the same sense as the work of reason and virtue,
which accomplish it here on Earth. (Maritain 1968)
The Catholic author considers culture to be the result of human nature. Thomas
Aquinas thought that humanity was a complex substance, consisting of two substances -
- body and soul. The contemplation of God is the aim of his life, and his perfection
is connected with the set of intellectual, moral and theological virtues. Using these
anthropological presuppositions, Maritain develops his own view on culture as the
sphere of creative human activity, which is able to transcend the limits of a given
situation. Culture in Maritain's interpretation includes the material, the social and the
spiritual dimensions of man's life, but it is nourished primarily by religion. The
religious impulse appears as a positive driving force of cultural activity, attracting
humanity to the set of absolute values -- Truth, Beauty, and Good. Being the
definitions of the divine Being, they also represent the eternal goals of human creative
activity.
The existential approach to anthropology forms the basis of Berdyaev's philosophy of
culture. He claims that humanity is free by his very definition. "Freedom in its
positive expression and affirmation is creativity. Humanity possesses substantially free
energy, e.a. creative energy. But the substantiality of humanity is not the closed circle
of energy, within which everything spiritual is determined. In the very substantiality
of humanity there are deep bottomless wells." (Berdyaev 1989) Human freedom is
always risky, because any decision can lead to a successful outcome or to complete
failure. God is born in humanity, and humanity is born in God. To reveal the divine
resources, according to Berdyaev, means to uncover humanity's potential. "Humanity
is not only a microcosm, but a small God." (Berdyaev 1989) Humanity reflects within
itself both the universe and God.
Humanity is destined to create, but in trying to obtain self-perfection humanity is
developing in a direction that does not coincide with the production of the abundance
of cultural values. Berdyaev thinks it very important to reveal the existing antagonism
between self-perfection and culture. Culture is never a success, for this very reason.
Its failure lies in the ontology of human existence. No aim set by a human being can
be reached in a perfect way. Our desires are quite contrary to the results of cultural
activity.
Culture was born in the cradle of the religious cult, aspiring to express the mysterious
side of life through symbolic means. Berdyaev acknowledges the failure of historically
existing churches to express the absolute mystery of being. The means of the religious
cult are not sufficient for it. Culture in general is copying the pattern of religious cult,
and using its symbolic language, it aspires to express human resources. Its destiny is
tragic, because it is never able to penetrate into the realm of the absolute values, to
open the perspective of the truly creative view on being.
Culture in its inner essence and religious meaning is a great failure.
Philosophy and science are a failure in the creative knowledge of
truth; family and sexual life are a failure in the creativity of love;
morality and law are a failure in the creation of human relations;
economy and technology are a failure in the creative power of
humanity to rule over nature. Culture in all its revealed phenomena
is a failure of creativity, the impossibility to reach the creative
renewal of being. (Berdyaev 1989)
All of the misfortunes of human life are crystallized in culture, which is only a
symbolic expression of reality. Berdyaev's vision is thus far more pessimistic than
Maritain's. The Catholic author never claimed that all human cultural efforts are in
vain. For him, culture is something fruitful and good for the human person, whereas
for Berdyaev the self-perfection of humanity and cultural creativity are totally distinct;
ontologically humanity is destined to fail to express itself perfectly in its cultural
creativity.
Berdyaev is quite opposed to Maritain's vision of culture as something equal to
civilization. In this respect, he is much closer to Spengler and the tradition os German
"philosophy of life." Civilization in his interpretation is opposed to culture as a final
stage in its degradation. If culture is the offspring of the religious cult, civilization is
the result of the triumph of reason in the Enlightenment, which is abstract and
pragmatic. "Civilization in opposition to culture is not symbolic, hierarchical, organic.
It is realistic, democratic and mechanical." (Berdyaev 1990) It suppresses any kind of
individual creativity, erases everything personal. The will to power is against human
personality.
The relations between culture and nature are dynamic, changing with historical
circumstances in different epochs. Maritain and Berdyaev understood that the conquest
of nature is accompanied by the growing alienation of humanity. The triumph of
scientific-technological civilization can become a real disaster, having a devastating
effect and leading to catastrophe. They were trying to find the spiritual roots of this
crisis, developing a global view of the history of culture. The attitude towards nature
and the natural foundations of human existence is a part of the climate of culture.
Sharing this conviction, both thinkers were in search of the basis of the Enlightenment
humanistic culture that resulted in the tragic events of the twentieth century. They were
not against the Renaissance vision of humanity as center of the universe. On the
contrary, Maritain and Berdyaev were trying to build a bridge between Christianity and
humanism, saying that the theocentric world outlook and the belief that humanity is
never a tool, but an aim in itself, are mutually complementary. Starting from this
presupposition, they speak about the coexistence of the "two cities" in history. Sacred
and profane histories are bound together, and the development of mankind in time has
its own intrinsic aim and value. The human dimension of history is to be uncovered
and interpreted. This might be the necessary prerequisite for finding a way out of the
contemporary crisis, for building harmonious relations between humanity and nature.
Maritain believes that humanism has a tendency to make humanity "more human," and
at the same time to make it possible for him to "participate in everything in nature and
history that enriches him." (Maritain 1968) In saying so, Maritain is quoting M.
Scheler, claiming that humanity must develop its inner potential, using the forces of the
physical universe as an instrument of its freedom. Western humanistic tradition,
according the Catholic author never broke ties with its religious foundations.
Humanism is unthinkable without revealing the ontological roots of human existence in
the cosmic whole. Even pagan Antiquity gives us a lot of good examples of humanity's
involvement in the ontological mystery, but only the Christianity of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries paves the way to a sound pattern of religious humanism that still
stands as unsurpassed and a perfect example for future generations. Understanding God
as the supreme Truth, Beauty and Good, humanity is to perfect its intellectual, moral
and theological virtues, using all possible resources of nature and culture.
In forgetting the transcendental religious resources of the theocentric humanism of the
Middle Ages, humanity commits a very serious mistake. It is cutting its own ties with
the mysterious well of cultural creativity, leading civilization astray. The advent of the
anthropocentric humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the
downfall of the previously existing value standards. This was the classical period of
culture inspired by humanism. Instead of finding in the highest religious values the
supreme inspiration for human creativity, culture becomes attracted by its own
terrestrial claims, consisting primarily in the conquest of the material universe, violent
exploitation of its resources. The second stage of this drama took place in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maritain calls it the "bourgeois moment" of
culture of the Enlightenment.
This second moment represents a kind of demiurgical imperialism in
respect of the forces of matter. Without understanding that the effort
to perfect the nature of humanity ... must remain primary, culture
attempts to suppress the exterior, natural world, and rule over it
though purely technical processes. This is good in itself ... but
people began to hope that the physical-mathematical sciences would
bring into being a world in which it is possible to find perfect
happiness ... (Maritain 1968: 40)
In the process they began to lose sight of God. The twentieth century represents the
last, revolutionary moment in the development of humanistic culture, which brings with
it radical atheism. In this third period the human dimension is suppressed altogether
by the material side of life.
To rule over nature, ignoring the original laws of his nature, his
intelligence, and his life, humanity is forced more and more to obey
the nonhuman ... technical necessities and material energies which it
has unleashed, and which invade the human world itself (Maritain
1968: 41).
Having become a kind of "superman," humanity begins to look at God as a rival.
To overcome this tragic suppression of the really essential dimension of the universe,
revealing important traits of created nature and human nature, it is necessary to move
to another stage of cultural development. Maritain calls this stage "integral humanism,"
interpreting it as a fusion of Christianity and humanism. He thinks that human
creativity is a real treasure, but that it must be combined with respect for the very
highest values. The principles of personalism, the communal foundations of society,
pluralism, and a Christian theistic orientation constitute the basis of integral humanism.
Maritain thinks that this new vision of reality can restore the lost harmony between
humanity and the created universe, stop the violent conquest of nature, and reveal
positive resources for human creativity.
The reconciliation of humanity and nature is also a matter of central concern for
Berdyaev. His approach to the problem is based on the conviction that pagan culture
knows no revelation of God in history. An acute feeling for the pulse of history
appears for the first time in Judaism. Berdyaev claims that only Christianity made
humanity really free from the chains of nature, uncovering his ability to rise above the
necessity of its laws.
Only Christianity led humanity out of the chaos of natural life, put
him on his feet, returned freedom to the human spirit, and opened up
a new period in the destiny of humanity, the period when that destiny
began to be defined and resolved through a freely acting subject, with
humanity actually conscious of its freedom (Berdyaev 1990: 89).
After this radical break with the necessity of nature in Christian culture comes the
period of the Renaissance, the period of human self-glorification. The transition to this
period was conditioned by the failure of medieval Christianity to build a theocratic
Kingdom of God on earth.
The Middle Ages, by focusing and disciplining the spiritual forces of
humanity, were at the same time binding them. They were making
them obey the spiritual center. They were centralizing all human
culture ... On the dawn of the Enlightenment decentralization came,
the creative forces of humanity were set free (Berdyaev 1989: 101).
The Renaissance combines two elements, one coming from Antiquity, another from
Christianity. The Christian element was eventually surpassed by the pagan, marking
the beginning of a crisis for humanism which came to a head in the nineteenth century.
The Renaissance started from a kind of reverence before nature but gradually generated
a new attitude towards humanity's place of residence here on earth. The belief in the
capacity to conquer nature becomes a real moving force.
The conquest of nature changes not only nature, not only generates
a new environment, but also humanity itself. Humanity is radically
and essentially transformed under the influence of this process.
There a transition from organic to mechanical modes of organization
(Berdyaev 1990: 117).
Civilization appears to be radically hostile to humanity. Totally alienated from nature,
humanity's every effort to rule over the external world gives birth to multiple forms of
suppression of his freedom. The machine and mechanical necessity victoriously
triumph over every impulse of life.
Western humanity suffered a lot from the decline of humanistic culture, but the most
dangerous consequences of this civilizational process were felt in Russia. Berdyaev
expresses his opposition to bourgeois civilization, but at the same he understood
communist totalitarianism as the worst sign of cultural decline. He believed in religious
renewal as a way of saving the contemporary world. Berdyaev claims that Christian
socialism can solve the urgent problems of the contemporary world. His cultural ideal
in this regard is quite close to that of Emmanuel Mounier and other representatives of
French personalism, who were dreaming about the restoration of the lost harmony
between humanity and nature after the personalist and communal revolution.
Both Berdyaev and Maritain believed we have the opportunity to restore harmonious
relations between nature and culture. They dreamed of reconciling Christianity and
humanism, hoping that instead of the civilizational exploitation of nature, humanity
might be able to tap the resources of inner and outer nature for the benefit of his full
and free development. They understood that the conquest of nature can transform
humanity into a real slave --a slave of the constantly increasing desire to have
everything. When this happens humanity exhausts its creative potential. To avoid this
tragic outcome, humanity needs a certain positive orientation, a set of values. Both
thinkers rightly point out that nature and culture are to be understood as necessary
components in this universe of values crowned by the highest ideals of Truth, Beauty,
and Goodness.
REFERENCES
Berdyaev, N.
1989 Philosophia svobody. Smysl tvorchestva. Moscow: Pravda
1990 Samopoznanie. Moscow: Mysl
1991 Smysl istorii. Moscow: Mysl
Maritain, J.
1947 Court traite de l'existence et de l'existant. Paris: Hartmann
1969 Le philosophe dans la cite. Paris: Aubier
1968 Humanisme integral. Paris: Aubier
Totality, Reification, and Transcendence
Lukacs on the Individual in Bourgeois Society
Paul Almeida
From his earliest childhood, George Lukacs felt a profound personal sense of
alienation. Lee Congdon (1983) argues that this sense of alienation was rooted in
Lukacs' relationship with his mother, but was magnified by the impersonality of
bourgeois society. After childhood, Lukacs wasn't even on speaking terms with his
mother, who he had always felt favored his older brother. The theme of alienation
played a critical role in many of Lukacs' early writings. Soul and Form (1910), for
example, centered on the tension between men and women.
Lukacs also experienced a sense of cultural alienation: a Jew in the midst of a gentile
society caught in a spiral of virulent antisemitism, a native speaker of Hungarian drawn
to the cosmopolitan world of the European literary intelligentsia. One way in which
Lukacs attempted to overcome his sense of cultural alienation was by founding the
Thalia society --a counter cultural theater group which performed both traditional and
avant-garde Western European plays in Hungary between 1904 and 1908.
In many ways Lukacs' life works were shaped by this longing to overcome alienation.
In 1906 and again in 1909 Lukacs went to Berlin to study under the great German
sociologist, Georg Simmel. During this time he was exposed to Ferdinand Tonnies'
work on the transition from Gemeinshaft to Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft, generally
translated "community," refers to a mode of social organization based on shared beliefs
and values, and encompassing every dimension of human social existence.
Gesellschaft, on the other hand, generally translated "society," or "association," refers
to a much looser system of social arrangements in which individuals form a variety of
groups or "associations" in order to carry out definite limited social purposes, without
any wider sense of shared values or belonging. Tonnies' account of the transition from
organic communitarian society to differentiated and fragmented society resonated deeply
with Lukacs. Knowing historically that a less alienated, more communal society had
existed in the past, Lukacs organized his intellectual project around the task of
reclaiming Gemeinschaft.
I. The Theory of the Novel
The Theory of the Novel (1916), which Lukacs wrote during the First World War,
was an attempt to see how the historical transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft
is reflected in various literary forms. Lukacs describes the period of classical Greece
as the prime example of a genuine Gemeinschaft society. Lukacs called this the time
of the pure epic.
Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible
paths --ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars.
Everything in such ages is new yet familiar, full of adventure and yet
their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire
that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as that which
fuels the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire are
sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one
another, for fire is the soul of all light and always clothes itself in
light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded
in this duality: complete in meaning --in sense-- and complete for the
senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts;
rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become
itself, finds a center of its own and draws a closed circumference
around itself (Lukacs 1916/1971: 29).
By the late Greek period Gemeinschaft was already staring to break down, as seen by
the form of the writings of Plato. In Dante's Divine Comedy Lukacs notes a definite
transformation of literary form, paralleling the historical changes that are taking place.
The characters in Dante's work begin to have differentiated personalities, unlike the
epic, where the individual represents the whole.
Dante is the only great example in which we see the architectural
clearly conquering the organic, and therefore he represents a
historico-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel. In
Dante there is still the perfect immanent distancelessness and
completeness of the true epic, but his figures are already individuals,
consciously and energetically placing themselves in opposition to a
reality that is becoming closed to them, individuals who, though this
supposition, become real personalities (Lukacs 1916/1971: 68).
In the Theory of the Novel Lukacs continues to give a mimetic account of how literary
forms reflect socio-historical changes. After discussing the historical shift in form that
Dante's Divine Comedy introduced in medieval Europe, Lukacs points to the socio-
historical transition to the novel form in the works of Cervantes, and in particular in
Don Quixote. In the world of the novel, reality has become fragmented and de-
centered. It is no longer an organic totality of the kind which characterized the world
of the epic. This fragmentation parallels the historic rise of capitalism and bourgeois
society in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Kurrik (1979) argues
that according to the Theory of the Novel the novelist has a contradictory task. He
must construct a totality out of the fragmented and empty world he finds around him,
and then negate it, in order to show empathy with the organic world of the epic.
Lukacs identifies two types of novel, in the order in which they appear: 1) the novel
of abstract idealism and 2) the novel of romantic disillusionment. In the abstract idealist
novel reality has become abstract. The gods have abandoned the world leaving only
Christianity with its spiritless, objectified Church.
This world is the same one which God previously transformed into
a dangerous but wonderful magic garden; now turned into prose by
evil demons, this world yearns to be transformed back again into a
magic garden by faithful heroes. That which, in the fairy-tale, had
only to be guarded against so as to reserve the beneficent spell, here
becomes positive action, becomes a struggle for the existing paradise
of a fairy-tale reality which awaits the redeeming hero (Lukacs
1916/1971: 103).
The novel of abstract idealism is characterized by adventure novels where individual
heroes are abstracted from the fragmented world in which they live. The hero's goal
is to construct the best organic totality of the past, but in the end s/he always fails. The
individual is now posited outside of the social totality and transcendence appears
limited.
The other major novel form which Lukacs identifies in the Theory of the Novel is the
novel of "romantic" disillusionment." Lukacs describes this type of novel as one in
which a complete "second nature" is created in the psychology of individual subjects
completely separated from the objective world.
The elevation of interiority to the status of a completely independent
world is not only a psychological fact, but also a decisive value
judgement on reality; this self-sufficiency of the subjective self is its
most desperate self-defence; it is the abandonment of any struggle to
realize the soul in the outside world, a struggle which is seen a priori
as hopeless and merely humiliating (Lukacs 1916/1971: 114).
The characters in these types of novels are depicted as having "an overdetermined
desire for an ideal life" and "an uneasy conscience and the certainty of defeat." The
novel of disillusionment reaches its peak in the nineteenth century. It tries to create a
reality through self-reflection and is immediately disillusioned when put into action in
a heterogenous objective world. For the first time the effect of time becomes critical
in literature. The only way the individual is able to have hope for an integrated world
is by bringing together elements from past, present and future. Lukacs' mystified
vision of classical Greece becomes a foundation for his belief that totality is possible.
Lukacs believes the novel has reached its socio-historical limits. There must be a new
form of literature if a synthesis between the subjective and objective world is to be
accomplished. At this point in his life (1915-1916) Lukacs is slowly moving from a
neo-Kantian philosophical position to a Hegelian point of view. Hegel's method can
clearly be seen in the Theory of the Novel, but a fully teleological interpretation of
history is still lacking. Lukacs holds on to Kant's notion of the abyss between subject
and object, but historicizes this separation.
Lukacs now turns to Russia and Russian mysticism to find a new form which will
recreate the lost Gemeinschaft. Indeed, the Theory of the Novel was originally
intended as an introduction to a larger study of the works of Dostoyevsky. He sees in
Russia, and in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the closest example of an organic
totality in his own period. Still, this totality is limited. Tolstoy's vision remains mired
in natural necessity, and conditioned by the realities of subsistence agriculture.
Dostoevsky's writings, on the other hand, reflect the conviction that the abyss between
subject and object has become so great that transcendence is possible only on the basis
of a kind of apocalyptic confrontation. Dostoevsky's characters aim at bringing
"heaven back to earth" in a world abandoned by God. Only "great acts" such as
revolutionary terrorism, which go beyond bourgeois morality can lay the foundations
for a new society which will bridge the chasm between the subjective and objective
worlds.
Lukacs was deeply influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He served in the
government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1918, and wrote a number
of essays on Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution, some of which were published in
a book entitled History and Class Consciousness (1922/1971), which was quite popular
in the 1970's. His full transition to Hegelian Marxism can be seen in these writings.
Unlike his earlier work on the individual in bourgeois society, where the possibilities
for transcendence were severely limited, Lukacs now situates the individual in the
context of a definite social class situation, the nature of which determines the possibility
for transcending fragmentation and achieving totality.
II. History and Class Consciousness
The central essay in History and Class Consciousness is "Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat." In this work, Lukacs outlines the essence of
bourgeois society and its significance in the historical process. Lukacs begins by
building on the theme of "second nature" that he first developed in The Theory of the
Novel. In its historical rise to power, the bourgeoisie successfully created its own
"order," its own internal system of laws and abstractions that exist separately from the
objective world. Lukacs calls this illusory consciousness "second nature." Within the
context of this "second nature," the complex networks of interdependence generated by
industrial forces of production are transformed into a system of purely external relations
between things. This transformation of relationships into things, of dynamic
independence into atomistic independence, Lukacs calls "reification." Lukacs locates
the origin or genesis of reification in the commodity structure of bourgeois society.
However, if this atomization is only an illusion, it is a necessary one.
That is to say, the immediate, practical, as well as intellectual
confrontation with society, the immediate production and reproduction
in which for the individual the commodity structure of all "things"
and their obedience to "natural laws" is found to exist already in a
finished form, as something immutably given, could only take place
in the form of rational and isolated acts of exchange between isolated
commodity owners (Lukacs 1922/1971: 92).
Lukacs has now adopted the method of dialectical materialism, along with Marx's
ontology. Lukacs examines reification as an historical process, and asks how it impacts
various socio-economic classes.
Lukacs acknowledges that both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat live a reified
existence, but this reification affects each class differently. For the bourgeoisie, a
reified society is in its economic interest, "it feels at home in it." Since the process
of reification has created an artificial reality, the laws and the consciousness which it
constructs are unmediated by the outside world. If the bourgeoisie attempted to go
beyond the immediate existence of second nature, if it attempted to transcend atomism
and reification, it would self-destruct as a class.
This does not mean, however, that Lukacs had no hope for the future. On the
contrary, history is a dialectical process for Lukacs, and the static construction of
society under capitalism is a contradiction. The key to transcendence lies in the
contradictory way in which the proletariat is affected by reification. On the one hand,
the proletariat, "feels its own impotence" in this situation, with the loss of its product
in the production process.
The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental
categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker immediately
as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim, and which cuts
him off from his labor power, forcing him to sell it on the market as
a commodity ... And by selling this, his only commodity, he
integrates it (and himself: for this commodity is inseparable from his
physical existence) to a specialized process that has been rationalized
and mechanized, a process that he discovers already in existence,
complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more
than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanized and
rationalized tool (Lukacs 1922/1971: 165-166).
At the same time, Lukacs emphasizes that the rationalism and calculability of bourgeois
society, its drive to quantify every aspect of life, ultimately produces fundamental,
qualitative changes. The treatment of labor power as a commodity creates the
conditions for the emergence of proletarian class consciousness, enabling workers to
go beyond the immediacy of bourgeois consciousness and transcend the proletarian
situation. In this sense, for Lukacs as for Marx, capitalism digs its own grave, or at
least hires and pays its own grave diggers.
Lukacs thus writes of the worker that the very fact of reification and commodification
... forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition ... The
quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist
in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his
calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive qualitative
categories of his whole physical, mental, and moral existence. The
transformation of quantity into quality, is not only a particular aspect
of the dialectical process of development as Hegel represents in his
philosophy of nature and following him, Engels in the Anti-Duhring.
But going beyond that, as we have just shown with the aid of Hegel's
Logic, it means the emergence of the truly objective form of
existence and the destruction of those confusing categories of
reflection which had deformed true objectivity into a posture of
merely immediate, passive, contemplation (Lukacs 1922/1971: 166).
This is why, for Lukacs, the proletariat is able to transcend reification and become the
subject-object of human history, while the bourgeois remains an obstacle to historical
progress.
Transcendence, however, is impossible for the individual, who is powerless
contemplating his reified existence. It is only the proletariat as a class which can
transcend the fragmentation of the commodity system and achieve the standpoint of
totality.
But Lukacs does not stop here. He goes on to discuss the complex forms of
organization which are necessary if proletarian class consciousness is to develop and
bourgeois society is to be transcended. By class consciousness, Lukacs means
the relating of consciousness to the whole of society, so it becomes
possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which it would have in a
particular situation if it were able to assess both the interests arising
from it, and their impact on ... the whole structure of society (Lukacs
1922/1971: 51).
For Lukacs, class consciousness must accurately reflect the specific objective economic
totality in order to be effective in transforming bourgeois society. Clearly, this is a tall
order.
It is in times of economic crisis that bourgeois laws become delegitimated and
proletarian consciousness begins to emerge. The abstract rules used to explain "second
nature" are unable to rationalize economic down-turns. This, for Lukacs, is the critical
period.
... when the final economic crisis of capitalism develops, the fate of
the revolution (and with it the fate of humanity) will depend on the
ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness
(Lukacs 1922/1971: 70).
The formation of class consciousness takes place, for Lukacs, through the leadership
of the Communist Party. The party must be well organized and have "correct theory"
if the struggle is to be successful.
... the sharp split in the organization between the conscious vanguard
and the broad masses is only an aspect of the homogenous but
dialectical process of development of the whole class and its
consciousness (Lukacs 1922/1971: 338)
In this sense, Lukacs is sharply critical of Rosa Luxembourg's doctrine of the
"spontaneity of the masses," the idea that the proletariat develops its class consciousness
organically, and will act appropriately when the revolutionary moment arrives.
The party also provides socio-psychological support for the proletariat, helping to build
proletarian solidarity in the course of the struggle.
The party as a whole transcends the reified divisions according to
nation, profession, etc., and according to modes of life (economics
and politics) by virtue of its own action ... this orientation towards
revolutionary unity and collaboration helps to establish the true unity
of the proletarian class (Lukacs 1922/1971: 339).
The party, therefore, is not merely an instrument of state power for Lukacs. Real
transcendence is a larger process which involves profound changes in the way human
beings related to each other and the world around them. The solidarity that develops
between human beings in the course of the struggle against bourgeois society is a
crucial part of this process.
***
This brings us back, of course to Lukacs' original concern --his drive to build
community, and thus to recover the lost Gemeinschaft. Lukacs started out his
intellectual journey profoundly pessimistic about the possibilities of transcendence. He
went through a brief period of flirtation with Russian mysticism and revolutionary
terrorism, until he finally found the answer to his question in the Hegelian Marxism
which he elaborates in History and Class Consciousness.
References
Congdon, Lee
1983 The Young Lukacs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Held, David
1980 Introduction to Critical Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press
Jay, Martin
1983 Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: University of California Press
Kurrik, Maire James
1979 Literature and Negation. New York: Columbia University Press
Lukacs, Georg
1916/1971 The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
1922/1971 History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
TOWARDS SYNERGISM
A Personal Voyage
Anthony Mansueto
People often ask me how I have come to believe what I do. My first impulse is always
to present them with the argument for my system, for what I have come to call
synergism, beginning with an explanation of the scientific foundations, and then
proceeding to lay out the system step by step, moving from logic to cosmology,
cosmology to axiology, and axiology to strategy, tactics, and organization. Inevitably
they answer that they have heard or read the arguments, that what they want to hear
now is the story behind the arguments.
This is a request which I have been reluctant to fulfill, because of my conviction that
my work must stand on its own merits, and convince or fail to convince on the basis
of reason alone. Still, the story itself may be useful as a point of entry for people who
are less theoretically inclined, and may give even those with a taste for theory a sense
of the interests which my system has evolved to fulfill.
***
When I was young, my grandfather used to take me on long walks through the
Bushwick-Ridgewood section of Brooklyn where he lived. He was a thin man, and had
seemed frail for as long as I can remember, but he could walk for hours on end. We
would wander on warm summer evenings past the long rows of decaying brownstones,
stopping from time to time to talk with one his old friends --most had long since died
or moved-- or to buy bread, cheese, wine and oil in one of the little delicatessens
which lined the main streets. We would wait under the elevated tracks for the clatter
of the trains, and climb up on the railroad trestle where my father had played when he
was a young boy. And we would talk.
It was a profoundly mysterious world that I entered when I was with him, deeply at
odds with the world of suburban tract homes, regimented grammar schools, and
sanitized postÄconciliar Catholicism in which I was growing up. It was a world filled
with a dark and impenetrable sadness but also with a terrible hope which I longed more
than anything to understand. He would speak of his childhood, and of his native
Trapani ÄÄof how his mother had died when he was young, and of how his father
had him apprenticed to a blacksmith "which was the same thing as be a slave." His
master didn't feed him, and he was forced to fend for himself, stealing fish from the
nets of unwary fishermen, and roasting them with garlic, lemon and olive oil on the hot
anvil in the foundry. He spoke of leaving Trapani in the midst of an epidemic and of
being held in quarantine for months, of living "seventeen man to one room" on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, and of how he learned to be a fabric cutter, bought a
house and raised a family. He spoke of raising canaries --"I used to lova so much
when the little ones they come alive," of making wine, stealing olive oil from
supermarkets, and of how we should come to visit him more often.
At other times he would take me into the basement of his house where he had a small
workbench, and he would show me the various tools he had made. He seemed to be
able almost magically to turn any thing one gave him into almost anything else. His
capacity for labor was like a magical force which reorganized and transformed
everything with which it came into contact.
Woven into this nostalgic tapestry, ÄÄwhich otherwise was not too different from
the sad reminiscing of any octogenarianÄÄ were threads of a history the real
dimensions of which I would only gradually come to understand. My grandfather
would speak of his days as a militant in the International Ladies' Garment Workers
Union, of how "the work they busta their ass and geta noth' in return," because "the
boss he is a no good scound' what he lives ona other people work. So we maka the
union." He would speak of the days of the "popular front" struggles with an
exhilaration which can only be called religious.
I remember, somewhat later, during the 1972 general election, a kind of family council,
at which my father asked my grandfather who he was planning support for President.
My grandfather answered,
McGov' non e vera socialista, pero Nix' he is a crook. I vota McGov'.
The old Liberal-Democratic machine of Representative Emmanuel Cellar was in decay,
so he organized a group of 12 and 13 year old kids, most of them African American,
who called themselves "Samuel's Friends" to work the election, and carried the district
handily. (My grandfather's name was Salvatore. His friends called him Sam. The
Black kids, not knowing the name Salvatore, assumed that his real name was Samuel).
Like most Sicilian men of his generation, my grandfather was radically anticlerical, and
would have nothing to do even with the "reformed" post-conciliar church in which my
father had become something of a leader. Once when we were passing a church he
stopped, turned towards me as though in a fury and said
A priest he is a no good. He is a womanize and steals the people's money.
He pulled out the ice pick which he always carried with him "for killa the scabs" and
drew it across his throat saying
We fixa good. We killa. Excepta the friar. They are ona side of the poor.
Still, he was profoundly religious, and it is his spirituality, rather than that of my
mother or my father, which I seem to have inherited. Once, I showed him a picture
of Our Lady of Sorrows, Maria Addolorata, being carried in procession on Good
Friday his native Trapani. He looked closely at the picture, his face overwhelmed with
an unspeakable sadness and said.
I know thata wom'. She isa very sad. The police they killa her son. So sad
she is, we worship her for it. I am not sure, but her son I thinka they calla
him Jes'."
It was only later that I discovered that my grandfather's religion represented a survival
of the very ancient Mediterranean cult of the Magna Mater, whose various forms, each
of which articulated a distinct dimension of the aspirations, sufferings, and struggles
of the peoples of the Mediterranean Basin, had been subsumed, albeit with significant
patriarchal distortions, in the cult of the Virgin Mother. Isis, the Great Cosmic
Librarian, storehouse of Wisdom, Demeter, the Grain Mother, symbol of the peasants'
labor, staging a cosmic strike to liberate her daughter, Persephone, symbol of the ripe,
harvested grain, from the forces of Pluto, the god of wealth --they were all there for
him, just beneath the surface, in that image of Maria, of Miriam (the name means
rebellion) searching for her captured son. And even though it was only later, after
decades of study, that I came to understand the significance of this ancient cult, from
the time I was a child, it was always the image of Mary --a woman clothed in the sun,
her skirt covered with stars like the night sky-- rather than that of Jesus which was most
powerful for me.
Layered over the cult of the Magna Mater was another, distinct form of religiosity, the
true nature of which also took me years of study to uncover. "Excepta the friar ..."
My grandfather was also an heir to the tradition of Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrese
Abbot who taught that the divine nature was fully present not in any one of the three
persons of the trinity, but only in the community which exists between them, and that,
furthermore, this divine nature is progressively revealed, even realized throughout
history. The Age of the Father, what we would call tribal society, gives way to the age
of the Son, rule by priests and kings, the tributary social order, which in turn gives
way to the Age of the Holy Spirit, when all things will be held in common. Joachim
was the first thinker to offer a progressive vision of human history as an active
participation in the life of God, and the first to argue that communism was both
possible and necessary if humanity was to realize its place in God's plan for the
universe. His vision captured the imagination of many members of the mendicant
orders. Not surprising, many were excommunicated or worse. But others held out
in the remote mountain villages of Sicily and the Mezzogiorno passing the tradition on
to lay confraternities, which then became a key constituency for the scientific socialism
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus "... the friar, they are on the side of
the poor."
My grandfather's stories spoke to me of an aspiration for a better world, of a deep
sadness but also of a terrible hope, ÄÄof a struggle which I longed more than
anything to understand ÄÄno, to enter into, to become a part of, and to carry on.
My father held a similar vision --but articulated it in very different language. He
turned down an appointment to Annapolis, which my grandfather's cunning had
extracted from a Brooklyn ward heeler, to fight fascism in Europe. When he returned
from the war he studied engineering under the GI bill, at Princeton, Columbia, and
New York University, and went on, together with a few of his colleagues, to establish
a construction management firm which, for a time, was the leader in its field.
Construction management, for those who are not familiar to the discipline, is essentially
the application of the principles of modern scientific management to the construction
industry --historically one of the technologically most backward, and politically most
corrupt sectors of the economy. The firm grew, in large part, because of the massive
expansion of the public sector during the 1960's. My father was a builder of schools,
of hospitals which, under the Hill Burton Act were required to dedicate a portion of
their services to low-income communities, and of vast installations for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.
My father's role in all of this was not that of innovator and organizer, so much as
bearer of the vision. He was able to transform the scientific rationality of his
colleagues into a compelling hope for a better tomorrow, and to connect that vision to
diverse and often suspicious constituencies --federal bureaucrats and general
contractors, labor leaders and international investors, and thereby helped to make the
vision a reality. By the end of the decade he was bringing home blue prints for "new
cities" he planned to build, cities which would be integrated from the very day of their
foundation, which would guarantee decent housing, education, and health care for
working class families, which would have public transportation systems that rendered
the automobile superfluous. I would spend hours just contemplating the plans for those
projects, which seemed to me to be a kind of technological New Jerusalem, a
fulfillment of the human potential for productivity, power, knowledge and solidarity.
The anticommunist hysteria of the 1950's made the socialist option an impossibility for
my father's generation. Like most second generation Italian Americans he was a loyal
Democrat, and during the 1950's drifted back towards the Catholic Church. There
was, however, more than a little of the socialist utopia in those plans for new cities
which we would pore over on cold winter evenings. And his Catholicism, while it
preserved elements of the older devotionalism, was first and foremost a religion of
salvation through ethical conduct and service to the community.
My mother came from a very different tradition. She was born in the town of Coeburn,
in Virginia, high in the Appalachian mountains. Her father, who came from a German
settler family (Groseclose) which had received a land grant in Wythe County signed by
none other than Patrick Henry himself, owned and drove an oil truck. Her mother
seems to have had somewhat obscure ties to the aristocratic families of the Tidewater
(she was a Bush and a Richmond), but came from a branch of the family which had
fallen on hard times. Nominally Methodist, their ties to the church seem to have been
tenuous at best. They were clearly not evangelicals of the type associated today with
the "Bible Belt." On the contrary, whenever we would visit my aunt, who still lived in
Southwestern Virginia, talk would always turn eventually to matters occult, and the
older women would recite stories of ghosts and Poltergeists, and mysterious lights on
remote mountain hillsides. When I was young, these stories frightened me, not so
much because of their content, but rather because of the hushed and mysterious tones
in which they were told, as though there was some Great Sin being committed just in
the telling. Today, I often wonder if some elements in my mother's family were not
heirs of the Craft, who, however, had internalized the Christian denunciations of their
cult as evil and demonic.
In any case, my mother devoted her youth to music, and obtained a scholarship to
Barnard. She hoped to become a concert pianist, but like so many women in the
1950s, abandoned her career to seek wholeness and salvation through motherhood. I
am, in so many ways, the product of her careful craftsmanship. For my first five years,
she was my constant companion. The strength of our bond gave me a sense of deeply
rooted connectedness, and of my own value, which would enable me to stand alone,
to sacrifice relationships, and even to engage in intense conflict when circumstances
required it, as they so often would in years to come. She spent endless hours reading
to me, opening up imaginary worlds which became the seedbeds of vision. She brought
me books of every kind, which allowed me to journey endlessly through space and
time. And she gave me space to be alone --to reflect on and ponder everything she had
given me, gradually digesting it, making it my own.
My mother converted to Catholicism when she married my father. Like my father, her
religion was basically one of ethical conduct. But it was also a religion of beauty. She
loved the grandeur of the ancient liturgy, and when the reforms of the Second Vatican
Council came, she mourned its passing. I would come home from school to the sounds
of Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude" and "Fantasie Impromptu."
Together, my father and mother and brother and I travelled. We journeyed to Rome
and Athens. I followed Socrates' path through the Agora and crawled though the
catacombs of the old imperial capital. I climbed the steps of the Great Observatory at
Chichen Itza and entered the sanctuary of Bangkok's Great Emerald Buddha. I grew
up feeling that each of these civilizations was my own, part of one great civilizational
project, a project that extended back millennia, and which was about to open up into
a bright and glorious new future for humanity. And I learned to appreciate the
contributions of ordinary people to that project, people whose names would never be
remembered: the people whose labor built the Parthenon and the Great Observatory,
the Basilicas and the Pagodas, as well as the people who designed them. Wandering
through the narrow streets of the old Arab quarter in Palermo, or floating down the
klongs of Bangkok, I came to know the tremendous beauty and energy of humanity.
Having seen what I had seen by the age of nine, I will never doubt humanity's capacity
for growth and development.
We travelled, but there were also quiet times at home. We lived, until I was thirteen,
on the far eastern edge of New York's Long Island suburbs, at the point where the
suburbs gradually gave way to the countryside. There were long summer afternoons
spent reading, or playing "Star Trek," or even softball in the court outside our house.
I had a friend, by the name of John Bastianelli. We would take out books from the
library about starships and space travel and UFOs and debate the relative merits of
photon and ion based propulsion systems. We would go on "expeditions" through the
woods and fields, collecting "specimens," and "analyzing" them (usually with disastrous
results) using our chemistry sets. There were deep dark summer nights when we would
spend endless hours gazing through my telescope, wondering what, and who, was out
there, hoping against hope itself that someday we might be among the first to make
"Contact," or pretending, in the way only a child can pretend, that we already had.
For me, the boundaries of the civilization extended much farther than Bangkok's Wat
Po or jungles of the Peten. I already believed, already knew that humanity was part
of something much larger than itself, a participant in a great cosmic project in which
our own civilization played a vitally important role.
These were the years of the New Frontier and the Great Society --years when it really
seemed that scientific innovation and civic responsibility would at long last triumph
over humanity's millennia of ignorance and egoism. The aspirations of the period were
perhaps best captured by the popular science fiction series Star Trek, which depicted
a society in which not only had poverty and hunger been vanquished and racial and
national contradictions overcome, but everyone performed useful, challenging labor.
The only hierarchies were those based on ability, and even these were remarkably fluid.
James T. Kirk, the 34 year old starship captain, was a kind of cosmic Jack Kennedy,
grouping around himself the expertise he needed to complement his own decisive (if
sometimes reckless) leadership. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, society on
the model of Star Trek seemed not only possible but inevitable. It was only a matter
of time.
The election of 1968 was something of a disaster for our family. The new Republican
Administration ushered in a long period of reduced investment in infrastructure,
education, research, and development. And my father's firm, which had always made
contributions to progressive Democrats, was placed on the Administration's blacklist.
Entire projects, including the one new city to progress beyond the visionary stage, were
impounded. Now in my teens, I watched helplessly as the market gradually destroyed
what my father's hard work had built up. It was this, more than anything, that set me
on the road towards socialism.
But other things were changing as well. Intensely religious when I was very young,
around the age of eleven or twelve I became alienated from the Church, partly because
of the irrationality of its dogmas, at least as the parish clergy were able to explain
them, conflicted with the scientific world view I was absorbing at school, and partly
because the hierarchy seemed to be contributing nothing new to the human civilizational
project. Even though I was only beginning to understand the tradition I had inherited
from my grandfather, it was increasingly apparent to me that any attempt to rigorously
draw out the conclusions of the values my parents had taught me pointed clearly beyond
the irrationality and individualism of the marketplace, towards what had historically
been called of socialism.
There was very little, however, in my own questioning, to propel me towards a full
blown atheism. I would, in all probability, have settled into a kind of anticlerical deism,
had it not been for the influence of my teachers at the Latin School of Chicago. The
school presented me, for the first time, with a profoundly secular milieu. The teachers
often expressed antireligious views. They never, to be sure, took on religion directly.
Rather, they simply conveyed in passing that sentiment, characteristic of the secular
intelligentsia, that "no reasonable person could ever believe in such things." And "such
things" included, apparently, not only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but also
God as such, and the ultimate meaningfulness and rationality of the world at large.
The various different departments of the school conspired with each other unconsciously
in this work. The department of mathematics eschewed a synthetic approach to
mathematics based on geometric intuition and deductive proof in favor of the artificial
and humanly contrived "rationality" of analytic geometry, to which we were introduced
by the tenth grade. The science teachers railed endlessly against the "teleological world
view," and lobbied constantly in favor of the idea that life, reason, and human culture
were ultimately the product of the random interactions of elementary particles,
expressing no necessity higher than the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.
The literature department, meanwhile, pushed Nietzsche and the existentialists, insisting
that humanity could find no meaning in a world governed by the laws which physics
discovered, but must, rather, create this meaning for itself. The school's adolescent
literary intelligentsia made its own the Sartrean slogan "Life begins on the other side
of despair."
To some extent, of course, this kind of sentiment was simply an intellectually
pretentious expression of the adolescent search for identity. But it would be a mistake
to underestimate the effect such an intellectual assault can have on a person's intuitive
capacity to grasp the underlying relationality, organization, and meaningfulness of the
world. I suspect that there are very many who never recover from being told by
someone in authority that the universe is ultimately without meaning.
Fortunately, my own intuitive powers remained strong. In my heart of hearts I never
doubted that there was a logic to nature and thus a meaning of some sort to the larger
cosmos which during my childhood had seemed so alluring and beautiful. But I needed
to reconcile my intuition regarding the meaningfulness of the universe with the claims
of scientific rationality, and to discover a more complex and satisfying way to
participate in the self-organizing activity of the cosmos than that offered by the Roman
Catholic Church.
Resolution came partly through my political activity, which began during this period,
and partly through my philosophical and theological studies. I was elected Vice
President of the Student Council at my Junior High School, at age 12, as an open
Communist, and the next year, when we moved to Chicago, became active in electoral
politics, working first for George McGovern, and then for a number of progressive
Democratic candidates for the Illinois state Assembly, learning the art of politics by
struggling toe to toe with some of Mayor Richard J. Daley's most experienced precinct
captains.
When it was not campaign season, I spent my free days exploring every nook and
cranny of the city, beginning first with the neighborhoods along the lakefront, then the
Northwest and Southwest sides. What I found was a universe infinitely richer, and
infinitely more complex, than anything I had ever imagined. I trudged through the
snow to watch the sun set behind the onion domes of the Orthodox Churches of the
Ukrainian Village. I watched the sun rise over the frozen lake. I peered into the
wholesale butcher meat markets along Randolph Street at Haymarket and the
fishmarkets along Fulton street. I walked down Halsted Street to Bridgeport, the home
of "The Mayor," and looked into the storefront offices of the insurance agents and real
estate agents and small time lawyers who seemed to form the matrix out of which the
city's political caste emerged. I walked past Cabrini Green, and began to wonder for
the first time, about the "rationality" of modern urban planning. Surely it didn't make
sense to pile all those poor people up on one place, and then abandon them. It was like
a concentration camp.
The city was like one vast organism, a complex unity which was able to comprehend
and integrate an incredible diversity of elements, each in its own way contributing
something unique to the creativity, the power, and beauty of the whole. And on
election day all these elements came together as the city struggled with itself to find a
higher unity, a more profound synthesis.
By night I would read revolutionary novels ÄÄMalraux's La conditione humaine,
Gorky's Mother, and began to find in the political struggle that sense of meaning and
direction, and that experience of transcendent solidarity, which the Roman Catholic
Church could no longer provide. Later, at the University of Chicago, I attended Paul
Ricoeur's lectures on "Ideology and Utopia," and began to steep myself in the writings
of Hegel and Marx, Lukacs and Althusser. But I also developed, thanks to the efforts
of a medieval historian by the name of Karl Morrison, a sense of the larger
philosophical tradition of which these revolutionary thinkers are the heirs. So I pored
over Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Teilhard and Maritain. Somewhere,
between the arguments of the Platonists and the Aristotelians, the Thomists and the
Hegelians, I found satisfying rational arguments for my own intuitive grasp of the
relational, holistic, self-organizing and teleological character of the universe. And Hegel
specifically was able to demonstrate to me convincingly that the logic of the city, in
which I had immersed my self since my family moved to Chicago in 1971, was not in
any sense opposed to the logic of the cosmos, to the orderly motion of the stars or the
steady cycle of the seasons, but was, in fact, simply a higher, more complex expression
of this same cosmic order, humanity's own gift to the universe, what we humans gave
back to God in exchange for the precious gift of creative initiative and spiritual
freedom.
It was during this same period that I began my tumultuous romance with dialectical
materialism. It was already clear to me (the efforts of my neoliberal professors at the
University of Chicago notwithstanding) that the marketplace was not an adequate
mechanism for centralizing and allocating society's surplus product. On the one hand,
the marketplace transforms all activities into merely a means of advancing individual
consumer interests, undermining the social fabric and eroding humanity's ability to
know and love the Whole. On the other hand, the marketplace has no access to
information regarding the impact of various activities on the development of human
social capacities, but systematically redeploys resources away from investment in
infrastructure, education, research, and development, and squanders them on luxury
consumption. My father's own career was testimony of this. He spent the 1960s and
early 1970s, a period when market forces were being held in check by progressive
Democratic administrations, building schools and hospitals, as well as the vehicle
assembly building for the Saturn V rocket. He spent the 1980s, when market forces
were unleashed, building luxury hotels. All this Marx and his successors documented
and explained.
At the same time, dialectical materialism seemed to have lost the sense, which I
treasured in Hegel, that human history was part of a great cosmic evolutionary process,
the process of God's own, gradual, self-realization, the sense that we are here for a
reason, to add something to the universe, in favor of an ultimately more somber view
of humanity as an island of meaning and order in an ultimately meaningless and chaotic
universe. This sense of ontological rootlessness troubled me, and even in the late
1970s I had a sense that it had something to do with the historical failures of the
communist movement. But I had not matured philosophically to the point that I was
ready to attempt a new synthesis.
In 1977 I moved to New Haven, and spent two years at Yale University, studying the
Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, Luther,
Calvin, Edwards, and Tillich, while continuing my militance in community struggles
and my private study of the Marxist tradition, under the tutelage of a Polish emigre
literary critic. This was a very difficult time in many ways. My two years at Yale
represented my first systematic exposure to Protestant theology. Unlike my professors
at the University of Chicago, most of whom at least tolerated my Hegelianism, the Yale
theologians taught that reason could at best pose theological questions, but that the
answers always came from faith, and that the human drive towards holism, far from
being authentic love of God, was simply a kind of refined selfishness. Christian love
was always self-effacing and self-sacrificial. The cross, which defied all reason, was
the norm for Christian belief and action.
At the conscious level I resisted this onslaught, for the first time embracing my Catholic
heritage as a bulwark against Protestant pessimism. But the exposure to Protestant
theology affected me in subtle ways that I have only gradually come to understand --and
only gradually overcome.
There was more at work here than the intellectual content of Protestantism, which, with
the exception of some of Edwards' theology, I never found very compelling. First of
all, I was very lonely. I wanted very much to have a life partner, to find a woman
with whom I could share everything, from my most intimate secrets to my most
difficult theoretical quandries, someone who understood all of the passions which
moved me, from sexual desire to the desire for warmth and acceptance to my insatiable
drive for power. I had good female friends, to be sure, but the kind life partnership that
I sought eluded me. It seemed like all of the women who were interested in anything
serious were already in committed relationships, or had no interest in me, and that the
rest just wanted a "good time."
My prospects for any kind of career also seemed increasingly dim. It was already
apparent in the late 1970s that the academic job market was tight and getting tighter.
It was also already apparent that the kind of philosophy I wanted to write was very
much out of fashion. It was clear that I was unlike to find the kind of academic
sponsorship which is necessary for an academic career. I nonetheless applied to the
doctoral program in Ethics and Society back at Chicago, figuring it would at least be
intellectually more rigorous and stimulating than what I had found at Yale, but was
turned down. I frankly had no idea what I was going do after I became a "Master of
Arts in Religion."
In 1979 I returned to Chicago. Those were heady days for the left. The economic
stagnation of the 1970's seemed at long last to be opening up into a real crisis, and
municipal governments all around the country were in disarray. In just over one year,
the city of Chicago faced strikes by teachers, police, and firemen, turned the public
hospital over to Hyatt Corporation, and raised transit fares by 66%. To many of us it
seemed there was a real opening for the left. Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected
president, and when his program was announced it seemed that we might be able to
draw together ÄÄunder communist leadership no lessÄÄ a broad front of resistance
to austerity and militarism. And so I threw myself into the struggle, building a small
community organization in West Englewood, preaching on the virtues of socialism in
a tiny Lutheran Church, and serving on the steering committees of several ill-fated
"united front" and "popular front" formations. I was even named "Secretary of
Transportation" in former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson's "shadow government"
for the State of Illinois! By August, however, it became apparent that we had no base
outside the ethnic minority communities, where despair and social disintegration made
organizing almost impossible. Our base organizations atrophied as the real implications
of Reagan's victory began to take hold of the popular consciousness, and our popular
fronts disintegrated in a frenzy of sectarian strife.
Both my personal loneliness and the difficulty I experienced building a stable
institutional base, whether in the academic arena or in the "popular movements" I
interpreted as part of the "hegemonic individualism of capitalist society," as indeed they
were. But here was the danger. As I became increasingly isolated, and increasingly
angry, I began to call on the "ideal" of self-sacrificial Christian love both as a weapon
with which to attack bourgeois individualism, and as "bridge to the formation of
socialist consciousness." I was internalizing more than I realized of the Protestant
theological problematic with its Christocentrism and its cruci/fixation.
The result was an intellectual and spiritual detour, which led me into a deeper and more
explicit identification with both Christianity and Marxism than might otherwise have
been the case. My energies were turned away, at least for the time being, from the
task of achieving a new philosophical synthesis which transcended the limitations of
existing paradigms, and focused instead on elaborating a consistent Christian Marxism.
On the one hand this meant demonstrating theologically that only communism could
realize in practice the historic values of the Christian tradition, and that communism
was therefore obligatory for every Christian, and, on the other hand arguing to the
communist movement, on strategic grounds, that creation of a mass socialist movement
presupposed a breach with the hegemonic individualism of bourgeois society, and that
this was possible only on basis of what amounted to a religious conversion, whether this
was understood in Christian terms or in language drawn from some other tradition. I
became absorbed in the sociohistorical study of the Christian tradition, drawing on the
biblical sociology of Norman Gottwald and Marvin Chaney, on social historical studies
of various theological controversies, etc., attempting to build up an argument that, at
least in its origins (which for me were always the Yahwistic origins of ancient Israel,
not Christian origins in the narrower sense) Christianity was first and foremost a
movement towards creation of a classless and communal social order.
At the same time, I developed a highly original argument, based on Durkheim's
sociology, that atheism was first and foremost a form of bourgeois ideology. Durkheim
points out that, whatever deeper ontological realities they may disclose, religious
symbols are a kind of "collective representation" of society itself. Atheism, the
absolute denial of the sacred, is thus nothing other than a denial of society itself, and
thus provides an "ontological ground," if one can call it that, for bourgeois
individualism. These two strains of investigation came together in an emerging
strategic orientation centered on using existing religious solidarities as a "bridge to the
formation of socialist consciousness." Politically, this put me close to the Catholic left
in Latin America, though I was both more explicit than they had been both in my
commitment to the communist movement, and in my insistence that atheism was an
insuperable obstacle to communist organizing and socialist construction. More so than
liberation theology in the narrower sense, I loved the writings of Ernesto Cardenal,
whose poems articulated a vision of cosmohistorical evolution which resonated with my
own deepest convictions, and, like my own vision, stretched the boundaries of Christian
Marxism, pointing beyond it to a higher synthesis.
During roughly this same period, I became involved in a study of Italian immigrant and
ethnic history at the University of Illinois, and conducted some sixty interviews with
Italian Americans, only to discover that a significant minority were anticlerical
Christian socialists like my grandfather. I returned to Sicily for a time and conducted
more interviews, finding that the tradition there was alive and well.
In 1981 I moved to San Francisco, where I continued my studies, pursuing a doctorate
in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union. During my three years in
San Francisco I was exposed to nearly every dimension of the communist movement
as it existed in the United States at that time ÄÄparty building, united front, and
popular front, solidarity work, electoral politics and "theoretical struggle." I joined
what was then the Communist Workers Party, a mostly Asian and African American
group of Maoist origins, which was undergoing a period of self-examination, but was
suspended within a matter of weeks for "violations of democratic centralism," and
soon resigned. This did not, however, end the relationship. The party continued,
largely of its own accord, what amounted to a cross between an "investigation" of my
"case" and an open-ended theoretical dialogue. My work was never published in party
journals because, I was told, my critiques of atheism would be regarded as "too
controversial." But they were widely circulated among the party leadership, and seemed
to have some influence. In 1985, the party dissolved and reconstituted itself as the
New Democratic Movement. The new strategy called positioning cadre in key
institutions, and struggling for "cultural hegemony." There was a significant overture
to the religious left, religious traditions being recognized as one of many bridges to the
formation of what was now called "postindustrial society," along with new
technologies, democratic struggles etc. The party did not, however, accept my critique
of atheism, and indeed, sympathy for this aspect of my position seemed to be stronger
among the more orthodox Maoists, particularly those of Asian immigrant origin, than
among partisans of the new thinking, who had absorbed more than a little of North
American "new left" culture, with its incipient postmodernism. In 1986, now in
Pittsburgh and teaching at Carlow College, I somewhat reluctantly rejoined the new
formation. But the "new line," as it was called, never caught on, and the organization
disintegrated within a matter of two or three years, leaving little more than a mailing
list and an unemployed former general secretary.
During this period I had pulled together the results of my research on Italian Americans
in Chicago, which I presented as my doctoral dissertation, and had extracted from it
an article laying out systematically my analysis of "atheism as bourgeois ideology,"
which was finally published in 1988 in the international journal Social Compass.
Publishing, however, turned out to be very difficult. The academic reviewers who
evaluated my dissertation for publication just didn't buy my argument that there had
been a mass socialist movement in the Italian immigrant communities, much less my
analysis of the implications of that movement for socialist strategy. A similar response
met most of my other submissions. My holistic and teleological philosophical and
theological commitments were deeply at odds with the "postmodernist" consensus
prevalent in leftist academia, and my very explicit communism was hardly welcome in
most theological circles. And frankly the problem of defining the conditions for the
emergence of a mass socialist movement, and the construction of a classless and
communal social order, were not really regarded as a legitimate topic of academic
inquiry. And of course difficulty in publishing meant difficult in securing a permanent
academic position. I became part of the academy's "reserve army," earning just
enough to get by.
During this period I also became painfully aware that I actually had much less in
common with much of the Catholic left than I had believed. Discussions with
"liberation theologians," and leftist Catholic organizers alike ended with denunciations
of my "rationalism" and "theoreticism." I found myself put off by their anti-
intellectualism and what seemed like a mindless populism and a paternalistic
romanticization of "the poor." But still, it was hard for me to put a finger on the
precise nature of these differences.
All this came to a head in a rather unexpected way, through an encounter with one of
my students at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was teaching American Religious
History. Her name was Marcia Kannry. Marcia had recently resigned as Regional
Executive Director of the National Jewish Fund in Pittsburgh in order to finish her
B.A. --something which had been put off when she left the U.S. in her early twenties
to live the Zionist dream on a Kibbutz in Israel. An accomplished fundraiser, she had
gradually risen through the ranks of the Zionist hierarchy to a position of middling
responsibility, but she needed a degree to go further. And she was authentically
interested in knowledge. She had a fine, if somewhat haphazard and unsystematic
mind, her talent for incisive criticism over-reaching her capacity for constructive
thought. Her greatest virtue, however, was a passionate commitment to the truth, and
a willingness to sacrifice relationships, and even civility, for what she believed.
One day after a discussion of Virgilio Elizondo's Galilean Journey, Marcia stayed after
class, and asked me to join her for a cup of coffee. No sooner had we sat down than
she launched into what initially seemed like a mad tirade, accusing me of distributing
antisemitic literature in the course. As I sorted through this storm of words, however,
the outlines of a remarkably clear argument gradually emerged. Christology, she
argued, all Christology, is inherently antisemitic. The claim that Jesus is the promised
messiah, through whom alone redemption is possible, both negates Jewish national
claims (historically bound up with the expectation of an inner-worldly political messiah)
and Jewish claims regarding their own specific road to redemption, through fulfillment
of the law. She then went on to show how, more specifically, liberation theologians like
Elizondo, by stressing Jesus' struggles with the "Jewish power structure" of his day,
simply added insult to injury, reproducing ancient antisemitic stereotypes.
Marcia's argument opened up a whole new world for me. I had always been somewhat
uncomfortable with what I saw as the growing antisemitism of the left. One of the
attractions of the Communist Workers Party had been its rejection of the absurd UN
declaration that "Zionism is racism," preferring instead to regard Zionism as a type of
"bourgeois nationalism," something which, in Maoist terms, put it among the
progressive forces. Marcia was able to introduce me to forms of Zionism which went
far beyond bourgeois nationalism, and which were genuinely dedicated to building a
society which fully developed human social capacities.
More important, from my point view, however, was what Marcia's argument said about
Christianity. The truth is, I had never really known what to do with old Gesu. The
historical figure, dimly discernable through the accounts of the Gospels, had always
been singularly uncompelling to me. And the crucified and risen Christ of the Pauline
corpus presented insuperable theological problems for any attempt to elaborate a
consistent Christian Marxism. If salvation comes about through the death and
resurrection of Jesus, then it does not come about through the struggle for a classless
and communal social order, which is at best relegated to a secondary task which draws
out the implications of the salvific act. Progressive "reinterpretations" had always
smacked of intellectual dishonesty.
But there was more. I began to re-examine my whole pre-occupation with self-
sacrificial Christian love. Whatever the social basis for, and tactical usefulness of such
a doctrine in a context of armed struggle for national liberation (in, for example,
Central America in the 1970s and 1980s) it had little place in the struggle to build a
new society which taps into the full range of human social capacities. What we want
from people is not necrophilic self-sacrifice, but productivity, power, knowledge,
creative and nurturing love --things which add something to the dynamic, organized
complexity of the cosmos, rather than taking something away. Witness the difficulty
of the Sandinistas and their allies on the Catholic left in making the transition from
armed struggle to socialist construction.
In June of 1988 I was asked by the Catholic Bishop of Dallas to serve as Director of
his Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission. I found myself in a paradoxical position.
I now had the kind of institutional positioning which I needed to implement the strategy
I had developed during the 1980s --using religious traditions as a bridge to the
formation of socialist consciousness-- albeit under the very difficult conditions presented
by a city which serves as a kind of headquarters for the religious right. But I was
already beginning to move beyond the Christian Marxist theory which provided the
larger framework for that theory.
My starting point was simply to join to the original formulation of the strategy the need
to criticize the "otherworldliness" which was implicit in the Christological formulae,
more or less explicitly, depending on what political conditions would permit. After
early moves to put the diocese solidly behind the struggle of national minority
communities for increased representation on the city council, which helped to build for
me a lasting strategic reserve of support within the Latino community, and a parallel
move to "reorganize" the commission and neutralize what up until then had been a
Christian pacifist majority, I concentrated on two principal initiatives. First, I secured
an invitation for the Industrial Areas Foundation to come to Dallas to build a
congregation based community organization. My hope was that the active involvement
of the parishes in the public arena would create a basis in experience for rethinking the
political valence of the Christian tradition. I played the leading role in building the
sponsoring committee for this effort, recruiting over 50 congregations, making Dallas
Interfaith one of the larger organizations in the network, and indeed in the country.
Second, I built a multilayer network of study groups, the purpose of which was to
transform the Christian faith of the participants into a bridge to the formation of
socialist consciousness. My hope was to recruit the most advanced elements to a
leadership core, which could continue my work, while I moved on to other cities to
replicate it, gradually building a national organization.
The first stages of this plan were successfully completed, but serious difficulties soon
emerged. The first had to do with the Industrial Areas Foundation. When I began
organizing in Dallas I took more or less at face value the IAF's claim to be uninterested
in larger questions of political theory or theology. I assumed that it simply organized
people to improve their communities, never advancing beyond what communists call
"trade union consciousness" to a critique of the underlying structure of capitalist
society, but also innocent of any political-theological agenda of its own. I assumed it
would be possible to relate to it as communists have always related to spontaneous mass
organizations, building up a concentration and gradually asserting leadership, while
respecting its distinctive role and its autonomy. What I found was something very
different, an organization with its own distinctive political theology and its own long
term political strategy. This perspective is best described as a kind of updated,
postmodern Augustinianism. Human beings are motivated by self-interest. Some have
broader and more complex self-interests than others; it is these who are able to
understand and tap into the interests of others, and who thus have the potential to
become leaders, and who can contribute in some measure to the welfare of the
community. But there is no rational basis for judgements of value, and certainly no
underlying, rationally accessible, ontological ground for the moral order. On the
contrary, authentic vision and values are accessible only through faith. Thus the central
role of the churches in the IAF's political strategy. Of course, the ecclesiastical
hierarchy remains the only legitimate interpreter of the deposit of faith. The result is
an irrationalist doctrine pregnant with authoritarian potential.
At the same time, the Catholic hierarchy was moving farther and farther to the right,
or more specifically, towards is own variant of neo-Augustinian, crypto-Protestant
Christolatry. The dominant expression of the trend is the Communio theology currently
in vogue in the Vatican. In 1990, the Catholic Bishop of Dallas, Thomas Tschoepe,
himself rather conservative, but also very unobtrusive, retired, and was replaced by
Charles Grahmann, a friend of Cardinal Ratzinger's, and someone determined to make
his mark on Dallas. But there were also more extreme expressions of this trend. Opus
Dei had made the University of Dallas one of its principal concentrations in the U.S.
And all this took place in a mileu already dominated by evangelical Protestantism. The
work of political-theological transformation proved very difficult.
Finally, my years in Dallas were also the years of the final collapse of the international
communist movement. My longstanding criticisms of the ruling Communist Parties
notwithstanding, this was a crushing blow. It is nearly impossible to recruit people to
a movement which is, at best, facing a prolonged period of rethinking. And it was
clear to me that more was at issue than just rethinking. Communism as I had known
it was over. It was time for something new.
And so, by the summer of 1990 it was already apparent to me that I would not be able
to realize my plans in Dallas. I began trying to consolidate a small core, and preparing
for a defensive struggle which would ultimately lead to a protracted strategic retreat.
And I was becoming more and more deeply convinced of the necessity to rethink
fundamentally the whole socialist project.
Earlier that year I had met Maggie Vosburg, who was serving as Assistant Chaplain at
the University of Dallas. She almost immediately became my principal deputy in the
political theological struggle, and she contributed immensely to the work of
retheorization which was soon to begin. She also became an authentic life partner, the
kind of life partner I had been seeking for years, and had given up hope of ever
finding.
Maggie brought to our partnership fine critical capacities. She soon went to work
exposing the damaging effects of neo-Augustinianism and crypto-Protestantism
everywhere, not only in our opponents, but in our own thinking as well. She helped
me to see that these doctrines were not only politically backward, because of their
pessimism and otherworldliness, but were also spiritually damaging, and represented
a kind of practical atheism, a denial of the divine drive towards holism, the self-
organizing dynamism, and telological centeredness present in matter itself. She brought
a powerful sense of the goodness, the underlying rationality, and the tremendous beauty
of the universe. She helped me to gradually recover and deepen my own sense of
connectedness to the cosmos, never wholly lost, but certainly strained and fractured by
years of personal isolation and political frustration, and thus helped to create in me the
spiritual conditions for the theoretical achievements of the past three years. Her own
training was rigorously Thomistic, acquired at the University of Dallas before it fell
into the hands of the extreme right. These Thomistic foundations are rounded out by
an apparently eclectic but internally consistent set of influences which range from
creation spirituality of Matthew Fox to the synergetics of Buckminster Fuller, from
Erich Fromm to Mary Daly, and from New Zeland novelist Kerewin Hulme to
German pscyhotherapist Alice Miller.
We were married in 1991, and left Dallas almost immediately. The past three years
have been a time of wandering for us --a time of exile. We lived in New York,
Washington, Albuquerque --even in a remote mountain cabin on the high road from Los
Alamos to Chaco Canyon-- before finally returning home to Chicago in 1993. We have
had to fight to earn just enough to survive, and have found it nearly impossible to
connect with people, either personally or politically. But it has also been a time of
immensely productive reflection and retheorization. In some ways, for me at least, this
has meant picking up where I left off, back in 1977, before my "grand detour" through
Christian Marxism --a return to philosophy and above all to Hegel. But I have come
armed with new weapons. I have the benefit of some seventeen years of study,
seventeen years of teaching and organizing experience. Having personally followed
the dialectic along both of the paths which along which it developed historically, after
the collapse of Hegel's synthesis --objective, religious idealism, and dialectical and
historical materialism-- I have been able to comprehend in a way very few others have
both the achievements and the limitations of these twin traditions. And along the way
I have deepened profoundly my understanding of the actual process of cosmic self-
organization. Partly this has been the result of formal study. I have made a real effort
to grasp the contributions of such new scientific disciplines as unified field theory,
complex systems theory, and postdarwinian evolutionary biology, which have more or
less demolished the old atomistic paradigm and laid the scientific foundations for a new
philosophy which recognizes the universe as a relational, holistic, self-organizing, and
teleological system. Partly it has been the result of years of organizing, which have
dispelled any illusions I may have had regarding either the possibilities for the
"spontaneous self-organization of the masses," or for imposing organization and
direction from the outside. Human organizations develop through a complex dialectical
process in which the most advanced elements pose questions which draw out the
implications and internal contradictions of the existing structure, thus driving the whole
towards a higher synthesis.
The result is what, for the lack of a better term, I call "synergism," though in many
ways it simply represents just another stage in the development of the dialectical
tradition which stretches back through Marx and Hegel, Spinoza and Aquinas,
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and beyond, to humanity's first (probably woman's first)
intuitions of Wisdom, of the underlying order of the universe, the Magna Mater which
gives birth to all things. At the core of synergism is the conviction that being itself is
organization, and that this complex, self-organizing dynamic realizes itself in an infinite
scale of increasingly complex and more highly integrated forms: the metric field, matter
itself, chemistry, biology, and our own social form of matter. And it does not end
there. The universe is ever struggling to become more creative, more powerful, more
intensely beautiful and more profoundly rational, more powerfully loving with that
nurturing love which always and everywhere gives life. The telos or aim of this
process, is nothing other than God herself. Human society is a laboratory for the
creation of dynamic, organized complexity, a key link in a grand cosmohistorical
project.
Synergism conserves from objective, religious idealism the conviction that there is an
underlying, organizing principle which makes the universe necessary --which guarantees
that there is cosmos rather than chaos, and of which everything is ultimately an
expression. This is the ontological ground which is missing in Marxism. But synergism
also conserves elements of the dialectal materialist tradition. First, I hold that the
organizing principal of the cosmos does not act from without, so much as from within
matter itself, which, even in its simplest form, the metric field, is endowed with
organization and with a drive towards increasing complexity and integration. Second,
development takes place through the interaction of particular systems with each other.
It is relationship which draws out the implicit holism of every particular, and drives
each to realize the totality of which it is an integral part. If God acts "from outside"
or "from beyond" it is always as final rather than as efficient cause, her incredible
beauty, wisdom, and goodness constituting an ever present lure for growth and
development.
I have, furthermore, conserved from historical materialism the critique of the
marketplace, which I believe continues to constitute an obstacle to the full development
of human social capacities, undermining the integrity of the ecosystem and the social
fabric, and holding back efforts to centralize the resources necessary for investment in
infrastructure, education, research, and development. Our aim, of course, is not
centralizing planning, which can never tap into the rich diversity of interests and talents
characteristic of a complex society, but rather some new structure, the nature of which
we are only beginning to understand, which uses the dialectic of the organizing process
itself to identify and tap into existing interests and talents, while catalyzing the
development of new aspirations and capacities in a way neither market nor plan have
been able to do.
Synergism is a politcal-theological system, where communism was merely political-
economic. Communism sought to harvest the fruits of human labor in order to catalyze
an ongoing process of social development. Synergism goes further, and seeks to
harvest the fruits of human social development, the fruits of the human civilizational
project, for the cosmic evolutionary process, for the realization of God's plan for the
universe.
I believe that there is a constituency for this vision, or rather a range of constituencies.
The first, and most important constituency, is among those highly talented elements in
society who have the ability and drive to innovate, or to carry innovations into practice,
in every sphere of human endeavor. These are the people who are on the cutting edge
of the arts, the sciences, and philosophy --people who are painting, writing epic poems
and symphonies, working out the unified field theory, or drawing out the philosophical
implications of the new science. But they are also the people who want to go to Mars,
or to Alpha Centauri or who want to build a global telecommunications system. They
are the people who want to reform education in the inner cities and tap into the
incredible potential which is languishing in our ghettos. They are the people who want
to invest their energies in raising children who are loving and creative, powerful and
wise. All these elements in society, who authentically make up the most advanced
section of the working class, find their efforts frustrated by the marketplace, as well as
by ideological problematics which devalue creativity and misunderstand its critical role
in the cosmohistorical evolutionary process. They constitute the core of our
constituency, the people for whom synergism is an organic expression of their own life
experience.
The second constituency is made of those who, with great efforts, are laboring to
conserve what remains of the ecosystem and the social fabric, and of humanity's
intuitive sense of the underlying unity and meaningfulness of the cosmos. These are
the true conservatives: mothers and fathers and grandparents, elders in village
communities around the world, true pastors who, the limitations of the theology which
they have inherited notwithstanding, have tried to shelter their people from the storm,
preserving the nurturing communal matrix out of which creativity emerges. This will
be a more reluctant constituency: reluctant to acknowledge that their traditions are not
sufficient, by themselves, to carry humanity forward, and reluctant perhaps to see their
resources taxed to support innovation, when in the past "innovation" meant simply a
new way to rip them off. But they are vitally important to our enterprise, and worth the
effort to win over, because they above all have conserved humanity's Archaic
connection with its ontological ground, the primordial matrix, mother of all things.
They are our principal strategic reserve.
The third constituency is composed of those elements of capital which are currently
engaged in the work of drawing humanity together into a single, integrated global
civilization, partly through the mechanism of the world market, but partly also through
the creation of international organizations, governmental and nongovernmental. These
"one-worlders," as their right-wing critics call them, are not only an important force
for world peace and for global ecosystem integrity. They are also capable and creative
organizers, who are mobilizing immense energies, often in the service of innovative and
progressive projects. They will soon discover that the world market, which made their
existence possible in the first place, is a frustrating obstacle to their organizing
activities. This constituency will be the most difficult to win. Entrepreneurs and
political leaders operating at the very summits of world power are not likely to believe
they need us, or if they do, they are likely to see us as an interesting addition to their
collection of "think tanks." But even this sort of tactical arrangement can be profitable.
The road ahead is difficult indeed. We face long years of continuing to develop our
vision. We must build relationships in all three of the different constituencies I have
identified, train the people we recruit, position them or help them to understand the
strategic importance of the positions they already hold, and mentor them as they work
out the implications of the synergistic vision in their own field of endeavor. But I am
hopeful, as hopeful now as I was when I was a child, on that warm December night
twenty four years ago, looking out from the steps of the Great Observatory at Chichen
Itza, the villages and corn fields of the Yucatan below me, the stars high above, my
heart racing, lured by God's incredible beauty to chance my life on the conviction that
what has been is only the beginning and that we humans, individually and as a species
are capable of so much more. I do not regret that decision, nor do I regret the often
difficult and crooked path which I have taken. I know that I, that we, our species, our
cosmos, are, all appearances to the contrary, still moving forward.