I’ve been reading Albert J. Nock’s biography of Thomas Jefferson which is available for free download at Ludwig von Mises Institute.
In that book, Nock deals with lines of thought in Jefferson and his colleague, friend of his younger and older years, John Adams. Jefferson (almost) saw the American Constitution as having been engineered to make possible a grab for power by the non-producer class, the exploiters as we might label them. The qualification is because of Jefferson’s refusal to quite conclude in a clear manner that the political activism of most of the Founding Fathers was tied strongly to their economic interests. He kept separating the issues and writing, acting as if the Federalist leaders wanted a country suited to financiers but their Federalist politics was driven by separate political beliefs.
Whatever incompleteness there was in Jefferson’s overview of matters, he saw that the financiers, speculators, stock-jobbers, etc. were the dangerous interests in a country sitting on the edge of a vast continent of unclaimed wealth. For a good century and a half, the American greedy elite were able to satisfy their desires while leaving enough for the American producer classes. We may be seeing the end-game of this grab for power as bankers, politicians, certain types of industrialists, academics who support the power elites, and various others may well be in the process of destroying the disciplined and skilled laborers, the farmers, the entrepreneurs, the small-town bankers who toiled honestly — for short hours sometimes to be sure — to turn local savings into local mortgages and loans for local businesses. These producer classes, though they have been remarkably and frustratingly passive in the face of abuses of power, are perhaps the last remaining components of a true republic.
I’m going to try to step back and to look at matters I’ve written about before with a fresh view, though it’s hard to do this when I’m living through an ongoing crisis which might lead into a total collapse of the West. My emotions are at a high level, though that is perhaps not bad according to some modern brain research which indicates emotions can help drive and focus rational thought.
Let me start a short journey which will zig and then zag…
In some of my writings, I’ve proposed that our modern governments, as corrupt and exploitive as they’ve become, are mortal versions of organs which will be part of the Body of Christ in the world of the resurrected. I’ve also proposed that truer forms of governments, corresponding more closely to those organs of the Body of Christ, will arise by natural processes. There will be evolutionary processes of a sort, Darwinian selection processes which will destroy those political forms, economic as well, which aren’t developing towards that Body of Christ. We and our descendents may not see more than a hint of the organs of the Body of Christ and, even if we do see hints of the form of those organs, they’re not likely to develop properly in this mortal realm. So why is it worth the effort to develop this sort of view of human politics?
Let me try to summarize some of my claims which underly my efforts to understand man’s role in God’s Creation:
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Man is born a human animal, a bit on the unique side but part of the animal kingdom in all important ways, including in his mortal nature.
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Man has a brain which he can shape by responding actively to his environments, to environments he can learn about, to the entire earth, to the universe, to all of Creation. By properly responding in this way, a man is forming a mind which can, in principle, encapsulate God’s manifested thoughts.
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Human communities evolve through long expanses of history and develop within their own lifetimes.
It is a matter of Christian faith that some of us are being formed into members of the Body of Christ but we know little about what that really means. I take this to a radical conclusion: all human beings, including any who will not be saved, are members of a number of communities which are part of a selection process not so much different from that of the world, and I include those nasty aspects which can be described as “red of tooth and claw.” The selection process is at least somewhat like that of early single-cell creatures coming together in colonies and learning to live as one organism.
Yet the selection process must be much different from the formation of multi-cell organisms. Those who become members of that Body of Christ won’t be fully merged to become no more than a heart-cell to be used for the good of the entire organism. We will each be used for the entire organism, for sure, but we’ll also remain morally well-ordered individuals.
There are exploiters and producers, according to Jefferson and many others — including me. The exploiters are largely morally ill-ordered people filling legitimate, or plausibly legitimate, leadership positions. I think many libertarians and anarchists would agree that the exploiters are morally ill-ordered but would balk, to say the least, at any claim that the roles filled by those exploiters are legitimate, though we may not yet know exactly what those roles are. To be clear, I’m claiming something for which there is no strict analogy I know of, but imagine the space where your heart should be but it’s filled with a cancerous mass of cells which does some pumping of blood but will eventually destroy the entire organism.
This is how the situation might have been summarized by by two well-informed men of high intelligence: Isaiah and Jeremiah.
God’s story will move on. Our modern efforts to form something which might be called the political organ of the earthly Body of Christ have failed. It’s not hard to see why and it’s quite hard to see how humanity will move in the right direction to make another good try.
I can make a few more plausible comments, at least plausible to those of us who accept the Biblical (mostly Pauline) view of the Body of Christ as referring to a real entity which will arise: a creaturely equivalent to the Holy Trinity, but much more highly populated. There will be many human persons in the Body of Christ but only one Body in a manner analogous to the Trinity where there are three Persons in one God. Now for the comments:
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The Body of Christ and its individual organs will evolve from the bottom-up in a process at least somewhat similar to biological evolution, natural selection intertwined with the processes of chemical evolution of genes and regulatory processes that can set existing genes to different levels of activity. The detailed processes will be different but the complications and complexity will be similar.
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A promising organ of politics in the evolving Body of Christ still has to develop properly and that requires morally well-ordered human agents who make at least adequate responses to the problems and opportunities they face.
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We of the modern West (say 1800-2011) failed to form a stable and morally well-ordered political organ in our efforts to build a democratic, bottom-up, approximation to this organ. The predatory activities of the gangsters who flowed into the top levels of the hierarchies of our centralized governments and centralized banks and centralized corporations and so forth was an important factor in this failure but the most important reasons were the inability of the common citizens to fulfill the duties they claimed to take on even as they sought to take advantage of the rewards of being citizens of countries which were formally republics.
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It’s not likely in my opinion that the proper political organ of the Body of Christ will be structured according to our current catalog of political forms. In any case, we Americans perhaps made our effort a bit absurd by trying to build what was alleged to be a bottom-up system by top-down planning carried out by an elite gathered in Philadelphia behind locked doors and with the agreement that no private notes would be kept and no information given to non-participants.
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There is the additional complication that any gathering of political activists will serve particular purposes, as the Constitutional Convention of the United States served the centralizers of power and — eventually — those who would gain power and wealth by the ways and means of centralized banking, such as financing debt for governments, allowing them to spend more money than they truly have. To be sure, I do believe there were a few moral giants amongst the Founding Fathers and the regular guys amongst them, even most of the scoundrels, were more constrained in their self-serving ways by moral habits and custom. It remains true that they had feet of clay and a few had feet right up to their necks.
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Over time even in morally well-ordered countries with centralized governments, we can see the impact of the fact noted by Lord Acton: Centralized and powerful governments attract men with the moral character of gangsters.
As is true of all the organs of the Body of Christ, the political organs in their earthly form will evolve and develop by the processes which are part of God’s Creation. We can see those processes at work in biological evolution though we must go through the hard work of abstracting from our concrete being towards that domain of truths manifested by God, the domain I’ve called the Primordial Universe in prior writings.
Yesterday, I posted the essay, The Liberal Mind: The Essence of Liberalism in which I talked of one proposal for dealing with the increased complexity and richness of modern human communities and of the modern understanding of man as an empirical creature. We must develop new concepts and words and wrote, as I have before, of borrowing from modern physics and mathematics. After all, I imagine a creature such as man is at least as complex as the stuff of which he’s made and the spacetime he moves through. The interested reader might wish to check out the diagram I put in that essay to show what I mean by abstracting from the concrete and to show why I advocate doing this.
This is the work of those who are the abstract-thinking members of the Body of Christ. And this work of achieving an understanding adequate to our modern situation has to be done before the general citizenry can understand their own communities well enough to find ways to select better leaders and to force straying leaders back on track.
I often speak in harsh terms towards all of us in the modern world and it certainly is true that the simplest of men should detect something is deeply wrong with modern human communities, yet it’s the intellectual and spiritual explorers of Creation and those who make sense of those explorations in the form of philosophical texts and novels who have failed just because they have to do their work first.
And I think the work is being done, a bit late and a bit slowly. In some future age, perhaps it’s even opening now, that work will be done and the citizenry can do its work. God’s story will advance as we move forward towards a better, but still incomplete and defective, earthly version of the Body of Christ.