In an essay I recently posted to this blog, Let’s Hear It for Amateurs, That Is, for Lovers, I used a quote from The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, to argue along a slightly different line than Professor Minogue had intended.
This is the quote from The Liberal Mind which was the beginning of my diversion in that last essay:
A free State is one in which there is a strong resistance to professionalization; it is marked by that “versatility” which Pericles claimed for Athens. [page 150]
Rather than follow the thrust of Professor Minogue’s statement, I argued that excessive professionalism was likely to lead to amoral self-service by professionals, even those in science and engineers who are held in line somewhat by their need to stick closely to reality. In speaking this way, I was dealing mostly with the tendency of human instruments to decay into institutions. This terminology is due to the American historian, Carroll Quigley. Under this way of thinking and speaking, an instrument is set up to serve a greater community such as the Christian Church or an entire civilization or the vaguely defined community of those who wish to understand our universe or world, said instrument almost certainly decaying eventually into a stagnant and self-serving institution.
Here, I’m going to deal with the dangers to free men of trusting entirely in professionals, even those who maintain their moral integrity and maintain the instruments they founded as such rather than letting them decay into self-serving institutions.
In addition to the institutional corruption I discussed in my previous essay, Let’s Hear It for Amateurs, That Is, for Lovers, there are also the more vulgar forms of corruption — self-serving acts by those who don’t even believe in their cause and also simple padding of the pockets by believers and non-believers alike. These vulgar forms of corruption, however dangerous in the short-term — and the biggest danger is perhaps their effect on those still in early stages of shaping their moral characters, are of little interest when I’m in my long-term mode. Let us go then, you and I, and enter realms where generations are spread out against the sky.
As St. Paul told us: we each have our role to play in the Body of Christ, in the various human communities of this mortal realm and some will be given the opportunity to play roles in the various human communities of the world of the resurrected. Yet, I’ll conjecture we’ll not be and not expected to ever be extreme specialists who leave the other job to the other fellow. In fact, in line with the analogy I’ve drawn between the Body of Christ and the Holy Trinity, our individual thoughts and skills and behaviors will be those of all other members of the Body of Christ.
This puts me at odds with many of the streams of political and social thought in this dusky period of the modern age. There have been some powerful and influential thinkers who thought of one or more communities of men in such as a way as to at least imply the individual human being is little more than a passing inconvenience. There have been more, perhaps the best of modern thinkers in these fields, who have turned the individual human being into a strange creature whose social relationships are voluntary and, if volunteered for, accidental.
Ultimately, my beliefs about even pragmatic politics are founded upon my understanding of the human being and his potential relationship to the Body of Christ and to other human beings in that Body as well as to God. This doesn’t imply a pietistic attitude. In fact, I’m increasingly inclined to the view that there is some validity to the concept of `scourge of God’, a term once applied to the likes of Attila and Genghis Khan but equally applicable to modern leaders including some of the most prominent of American presidents. This isn’t to say that we should be fatalistic or submissive to men who might serve God in the long-run, quite unconsciously, but most certainly do serve their own ambitious and greedy desires and those of their associates.
Put these long-range views aside for a moment and think in terms of the middle-range, the range of our lifetimes and those of a few generations before and after our own generation. At this range, a polity with well-informed and clearheaded decision-makers can aim to act in a morally well-ordered manner. The shorter end of the long-range is the domain perhaps of the Pope, according to historical rules of thumb, but mostly the long-range belongs directly to God: the Almighty gives us hints of the life we might one day share with Him but must of the long-range is incomprehensible if we think in terms of suffering or prosperity, both of which are showered upon the good and the bad alike. In addition, as I noted above, God’s ways of working will occasionally unleash scourges even upon peaceful and well-ordered societies. Sometimes we can come to realize, along with Isaiah and Jeremiah that this is the price we pay for living our own lives without considering the greater part of God’s story, of this world. The ancient Israelites didn’t respond properly to a new age in which barbarian conquerors had gained control of the wealth and technology of advanced pagan society. We modern men of the West haven’t responded properly to a new age in which great prosperity is punctuated by horrible wars. This historical mess has allowed the great growth of population and the spread of advanced technology even in the third-world at the same time that we see large-scale piles of human bodies as well as the brutal destruction of the infrastructure of entire countries which stand in the way, intentionally or not, of power-elites in one or more powerful countries.
We have failed to study reality and to think hard about proper ways of responding, of reshaping ourselves and our various communities. We have failed to create a proper moral order even in our families because we have — at best — tried to hold on to a way of ordering our thoughts and behaviors which is no longer coherent in this new world of immensely complex and complicated human communities, communities which we’ve failed to even try to understand. We have an understanding of the Bible and of human history in general which leads us to a state of psychosis, a separation from reality.
We need to respond in more appropriate ways to our opportunities and problems and this isn’t a task for specialists but rather for those who have a wide-ranging understanding of at least one major human tradition as well as a similar understanding of modern empirical knowledge. From such a foundation of knowledge, we can begin to understand our individual selves, our communities, our universe. We can respond to God’s Creation so that we can see a world: the universe seen in light of the moral purposes of God in His freely-chosen and freely-constrained role as Creator. A world is unified, coherent, and complete, though only in the very long-range since this universe is boiling over with the products of evolutionary and developmental processes. But, if we do our best in the middle-range, we can see — however tentatively — how we particular individuals and our specific communities should be ordered to fulfill our roles in this world, this true narrative — that is, morally purposeful tale.
This isn’t a job for a specialist. Nor should it be considered a job for some recognizable elite, though it’s clear that serious writers and thinkers from various fields will play important roles if they have the courage and faith to respond. But creative writers and thinkers are rarely specialists. Nor are those increasingly rare leaders we could label as `statesmen’, political leaders seeking peace and order and prosperity. Nor are most prominent specialists to be labeled as `only’, not if they are truly educated and truly alive in their mental and spiritual lives, not spiritual leaders seeking new ways to order the developing relationships between men and God, not entrepreneurial businessmen seeking to realize prosperity for their own selves and others, not lawyers and judges seeking new legal forms to consider rapidly developing and evolving individual and communal relationships, not architects and builders responding to new technology and new ways of living, not craftsmen seeking to give us the appliances and furnishings and decorations for our changing lives, and so forth.
We need some generalists to give us some overviews of the process of understanding this world, this story of which we are part. These generalists will work as poets and novelists, musicians and visual artists, architects and engineers, politicians and economists, house-builders and road-builders, etc. We need some generalists, some dreamers and visionaries, from the entire range of human efforts, but these generalists will be only a small percentage of all the workers in these fields. They must be communicators of not only their own efforts to respond to this dynamic world of evolutionary and developmental responses but also communicators of their professional communities. Generalists, whether specialists themselves or not, are dependent upon the efforts of specialists but they must go beyond and outside specialist efforts.
Moral order is sustained, enriched, even changed in fundamental ways when appropriate, by generalists and not by specialists nor even by some consensus of groups of specialists. Those groups of specialists can contribute to the overall understanding which will be manifested in some attempt at establishing moral order. Some members of those groups might even move into the more open regions of generalists, as some physicists did in advocating for controls on the nuclear weapons they had helped to design, but they do so as generalists who have a particularly good understanding of the underlying technical issues. Their moral judgments as such are no better because they might be brilliant scientists.
And what has this to do with the `freedom’ of which Professor Minogue speaks?
Our ultimate freedom is a sharing of the life — and freedom — of God by way of entry into the Body of Christ, the most inclusive human community in the world of the resurrected. In the meantime, we can realize some reasonable approximation to freedom, in our political and economic and cultural and familial aspects of our lives by understanding our world and responding to that understanding so that we ourselves can become images of God, encapsulating and understanding — however incompletely and defectively — God’s acts of bringing Creation into existence and shaping it in various ways. This understanding, and the proper ordering of thoughts and behaviors which it enables, gives us only a limited freedom in this mortal realm. We have to limit our actions or those of our communities in response to the acts of worldly powers — as Isaiah and Jeremiah tried to convince their fellow-Israelites. We have to limit our actions to consider our frailties and defects of person and communities. We have to limit our actions to those allowed by a physical universe we only partially and imperfectly understand. We have to limit our actions by a sense of modesty and humility, recognizing in some overall way that we don’t understand well enough to act in ways that put undue burdens upon our descendants or upon those who live in our age.
This is freedom: to realize the moral possibilities of our individual selves and our communities, to so realize by both a deep understanding and by well-ordered behavior. Such a project requires that wide-ranging knowledge and generalist attitude which I have been speaking of.