Author: jwhorton

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CAPITALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HELL

One of the many crucial points where religion and politics inextricably if not explicitly meet is in The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis. Here, Screwtape, a senior devil giving instructions to a junior devil (his nephew, Wormwood) says the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that oneself is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition.” (Chapter 18)

C.S. Lewis did not write about politics very much, but it would be difficult not to see a connection between the philosophy of hell to the philosophy of capitalism, which, by its own admission, is all about competition.

Capitalists are not likely to put things quite so brutally as Screwtape does here—at least, not in public. What capitalism adds to this philosophy is a quaint, but ardently insisted upon frisson, which is that this competition will bring about the maximum possible good for the greatest number.

Screwtape would laugh out loud at that. One might divide capitalists into the naïve ones, who believe the frisson, and the cynical ones, who know it is rot but do not care. And I think that capitalism has mostly been cynical, rather than naïve.  As time goes by, the cynicism becomes more obvious, more brash, more contemptuous, and the naïve capitalist must turn cynic or drop the damnable capitalist ideology altogether.

Karl Marx himself, hardly a naïve individual, admitted clearly that capitalism had unleashed tremendous forces of production. But the tremendous wealth generated came at the even greater cost of human misery.

And it is one of the peculiar contradictions of capitalism that once you say a better way must be found, you are mocked for your naivete.  Apparently, anyone who opposes predatory cynicism is obliged to conceive of human beings as angels.  But capitalism, while mocking this alleged naivete, expounds a practice wherein apparently, the greatest good for the greatest number will be found by placing naked and untrammelled self-interest before all.  You may as well say that the best way to get where you want to go is to put a brick on the accelerator of your car and take your hands off the steering wheel.

Christianity is the long revolution against the zero-sum game that Screwtape proposes is built into the nature of reality.  The final triumph of Christ is the final defeat of this ideology in theory and practice.

So can Christianity still maintain its traditional doctrines about a hell of eternal torment?

I think not.  That is the Good News.  Hell is the first and last bastion of the zero-sum game.  Christians who still believe in hell as an eternity of torment or an eternity of annihilation are still clinging to the zero-sum game.  Nor can this game be defended by saying that within the traditional doctrines nobody is damned because of lack of room in heaven.  For as long as it is believed that the creation of humans must entail the risk of hell for each one of us (and that the risk was needed to make salvation meaningful) the inevitability of hell for some is built in, and therefore, so is the zero-sum game, the principle of hell.  Christ’s sacrifice becomes inadequate for salvation.  Instead, the agony of the damned becomes necessary to the bliss of the saved.  To believe in hell, therefore, is to take one’s orders from it, to be living under the same power that runs capital.

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REALISM HATS

A baseball cap or a cowboy hat are what you wear if you are nobody in particular.  You want to belong.  You’ll be as generic as possible to do that.  You are proud not to be different.

Those different people must be put down.

Hatlessness is okay, but eventually will grow suspect.  Even baldness has been turned into a hat.

That man over there in the slightly shabby clothes with over a million dollars in his bank account, he is not one of the elite.

Oh no.

He likes to go on about them.  The Elite.  Something about “Wine and cheese and Perrier water.”

He knows the script.  He helped to write it and forgot he was reading it ever afterward.

The hats are lining up.  They are taking sides.  All are “regular people” who need to “get on with their lives.”

Don’t ask them where they need to get on to.  This exceeds the event horizon.

They either have money or work faithfully for those who do.

It’s the money talking.  Even from people who don’t have any.

And beneath the money–for money is nothing at all, just like evil, but so very powerful–is the labour talking.

The groaning, back breaking, heart breaking, self-pity making labour.

The rat in the cage.

Oh proud rat.  You are not amongst the Elite, are you?  Of course not.  Good fellow.

The important thing is that you either wear livery or are the owner of it–the “brand.”

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Let’s go down a level or two.  Beneath the labour, even.  The Marxists go this far, much further than their enemies, but usually not far enough.

“In the sweat of thy face…”

Back to the Springtime of humanity.

Back to the origins of “things as they are,” back to the origins of “Reality,” now worshipped as a god, self-plucked from the void and much to be venerated by his followers, the “Realists.”

The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.

(But the Lord shall hold them in derision.)

Back to the birth of the “necessary evil” without which there can be no good.

So we are told.

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The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.  Their inanities are deadly and they know it.

But these are “good people” trying to “get by.”

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MARX, DAMNATION, AND THE BOGUS AUTHORITY OF CAPITALISM

This is from the first volume of Marx’s Kapital, Chapter 14:

The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the “war of all against all” more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species.  The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist.  It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.

A more recent capitalist objection to conscious regulation of production is the usual harping on about the failures of the Soviet command economy, such harping revealing a studied lack of imagination: as if the only conceivable alternative to market-as-god must be the undemocratic bureaucracy-as-god.

But more importantly, translating Marx’s view of capitalist competition into religious terminology, one might say this competition is the capitalist form of idolatry.  The effect is not simply that this false god, competition, demands and gets his supposedly rightful place in the scheme of things, but that he demands the right to invade and conquer and transform into his own likeness all non-competitive relationships.  Competition does not demand to be a god among gods, but the god, before which there shall be no other.

This is one reason why I speak so often about hell.  Ultimately, beneath a belief in infernalism is a kind of spiritual competitiveness, a demand that the universe be functioning as a system of scarcity (economics often being defined in the capitalist mindset as “competition for scarce resources”) which necessitates, even justifies competition.  “If there is enough salvation to go around for everyone, if we all will get God’s undying love forever, how could that love be worth anything?” is the plaintive and unspoken cry of the infernalist.  While accusing universalists of presumption (as if trust in God’s love simply had to be presumption, for some reason) the infernalist reveals a pride which does not want any salvation so bountiful that everybody gets it.  Where is the distinction in that?  Where is the achievement?  While the infernalist may go on about her unworthiness to be saved, her redemption being the product of God’s grace alone, she secretly feels she really has accomplished something, if she ends up in eternal bliss while others end up in the fiery pit.

This soteriology is a zero-sum game which pretends to be something better.  For the infernalist is not usually so vulgar as to say that there are only so many seats in heaven and a certain number of individuals must therefor be damned no matter what happens.  Theoretically, according to many infernalists, everyone has the power to accept God’s grace and thereby be saved, and therefor there is no reason why not everyone will, in fact, be saved, other than that there will likely be those who reject the grace, entirely of their own free will, of course.

But the infernalist well suspects in his schema that there will not only be the damned, but likely quite a few of them.  Human “freedom,” as he conceives it, is not only necessary to make salvation worth anything (God does not want predetermined “robots” in heaven, is the claim) but also pretty much makes universal salvation impossible.  If we are not free to choose damnation, salvation is nothing.  And if we are truly free to choose damnation, it is pretty much inevitable in this schema that some shall.  In this outlook, therefor, God is relieved of any blame for having limited the number of the saved, while the infernalist gets the proud and secret satisfaction of rescuing heaven from meaninglessness: without the damnation of some, the salvation of any is worthless.  The demand of pride that zero sum philosophy prevail over the universe is satisfied, while the Creator is held blameless of any limits placed on his generosity.  The hypocrisy is blatant.

Competition in the economic or soteriological sphere creates a need for hell: economically, or eschatologically.  And it may well be the case that Christianity’s training of humanity to accept hell on an eschatological level made it easier to accept hell on the factory floor or in the office cubicle.

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TWO CHRISTIAN TEMPERAMENTS

There is one Christian temperament, which might be characterized as apocalyptic, and which demands that there be a point, a wall, into which the wicked must run sooner or later and be permanently defeated.  Broken, humiliated, spiritually crushed by the truth they hate, unrepentant sinners are either annihilated or sent to a place of unending punishment.

Then there is another Christian temperament that insists, “God shall be all in all,” and that all is quite literally ALL: this temperament does not wriggle out of ALL in a lawyerly way by saying the damned are not part of ALL, or preach that weaselly nonsense about how God loves the damned and that it is this very love which will torture them forever, since they reject it.  (Talk about passive/aggressive!) As Rob Bell puts it, Love Wins.  Who knows?–perhaps love wins even retroactively, such that evil will never have existed.  Could this be the (granted, quite unimaginable, quite absurd) answer to the problem of evil?  Perhaps.

I confess I am, unfortunately, of the former temperament much of the time.  I do not know whether the enneagram is reliable or useful, but I am probably a one (and if not that, almost certainly a nine).  So I often have the pharisaical and unchristian weakness to desire the unrighteous be crushed rather than that they repent and be forgiven.  Fortunately, I also have the critical strengths of enneagram one, and measuring Christianity rigorously against itself, I come to the conclusion that the ALL in ALL (universalist) conclusion is the Christian truth, even if my vengeful heart is not always in it.  (I have selfish motives for universalism, I admit, though they are not relevant to the truth.  In other words, if universalism is not true, how do I know if I am saved or damned?  Infernalism is wretchedly coy on this matter, to be sure.)  My beliefs, my deeper understanding, are better than the passions of my angry heart.

Let the infernalists not say we universalists are naïve.  This accusation seems to be the position of N.T. Wright in his chapter on hell in Surprised by Hope.  This is, on the whole, a very good book, by the way.  But his defense of infernalism is pablum.  Perhaps I will blog about this at a later date.

I was inspired to write this short post while outraged by some of the latest fascist shenanigans of Trump followers, and my apocalyptic side was triggered quite violently.  Let these murderers of the truth be sent screaming hysterical and naked into the fiery pit, says one side of me–but it shall not be forever—says the better part.  God shall have them all at his side, eventually, and eternally, whether I want it so or not.

How Christianity tears a believer apart!

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PROBLEMS WITH THE FREE WILL DEFENSE OF INFERNALISM (#1)

I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism,  but just present a few thoughts.

The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will.  In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God.  And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell.  C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).

But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it?  I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete.  I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least.  Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it.  There is no point worrying about the matter.  (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.) 

That being said, how much free will do we have?  It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God.  It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.

Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice.  If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair.  (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place.  We would have reason to question his competence.)  In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.

In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true.  And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on.  I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will.  One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin.  But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation.  (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will.  Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)

Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap.  Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided.  It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.

The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.

Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head?  Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved?  C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed.  When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned.  We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.

Let me put this another way.  If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?

I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin.  But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin?  That is, must we not also be tempted to sin?  And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom?  Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted?  Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all?  To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me. 

But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up.  The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense.  They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell.  We all have this experience.  But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free.  Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with?  To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).

In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense.  And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin.  (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis.  The existence of sin is experiential.  On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)

Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now.  There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure.  This essay threatens to become a book.  Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway.  But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done.  Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.

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I’m Only Real

I’m only real
When I’m alone
I always cease to be
When giant faces loom about
To blink and
Silence me;

It is not fear
It is not dread
There’s simply nothing there
There is no bit
Of  “I am me”
I am not anywhere.

So look you sir
Now I’ll go pray
To get and keep a soul
To each his business
And desire
quiet I must be.

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CAPITALIST ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY AND RHETORIC

How do we discuss economics in our society?  Consider this from Michael Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future (1989):

“But those Keynesian concepts and statistics are value-laden.  “Gross National Product” is, after all, truly a gross measure and certainly a very capitalist one.  It assumes that any activity that yields a profit – be it the production of carcinogenic cigarettes or automobile engines that contribute to acid rain – is to be given a positive weight.  If the GNP goes up, no matter what its composition, it is thought that the society is advancing.  But that advance could well be a stride toward catastrophe, for example, toward a greenhouse effect that will threaten life itself.” (p. 217 Arcade Publishing 2011 edition)

This quotation here is evidence of how biased the culture is in favour of capitalism, how ignorant (to be generous) are those allegations from the Right that we are too socialist, when even the language of economics is geared away from socialism towards the values of capitalism.  Popular culture and corporate media do not discuss economics except in the terms that are useful to capitalism and imply that capitalist economics and economics in general are one and the same thing.  Unless we see this and step out of the capitalist frame of reference, our discussions of economics will always be biased in favour of the wealthy and powerful, viewing the world through their eyes while assuming our approach is ideologically neutral.

In addition, the rhetoric of capitalism constantly portrays it as the wild and risk-taking swashbuckler of economic systems, the very opposite of life under Stalin, where “the basic decisions with regard to work, production, and consumption were made by a centralized bureaucracy” (226).  Harrington continues:

“If, a believable joke reported, a Soviet pin factory was assigned a quota of so many tons of pins, it would turn out one monstrously large and unusable pin; and if it were told to produce a certain number of pins, it would achieve the numerical goal with a myriad of pins so thin that they were also useless.” (227)

It is easy enough to see the absurdity of such a practice.  But is it indeed any more absurd than the GNP fetish Harrington in effect describes?  We see here the Soviet and capitalist versions of what are essentially bureaucratic and robotic mentalities.  Truly, Noam Chomsky’s frequent condemnation of both camps, with their managerial arrogance, is not misplaced.

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THOMAS MERTON AND HOPE IN THE PRESENT

The worst temptation, and that to which many monks succumb early in their lives, and by which they remain defeated, is simply to give up asking and seeking.  To leave everything to the superiors in this life and to God in the next – a hope which may in fact be nothing but a veiled despair, a refusal to live.  And it is not Christian to despair of the present, merely putting off hope into the future.  There is also a very essential hope that belongs in the present, and is based on the nearness of the hidden God, and of His Spirit, in the present.  What future can make sense without this present hope?

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965). (Image Books edition, 1968, page 184)

Hope in the present!  What a strange yet enticing concept.  When we think of hope, we think inevitably about the future.  When we live on the basis of hope too much, we begin to see that “hope is a beggar.”  It is so much better than outright despair, but only a wan shadow of what we really want.  To live on hope too much is to invite despair.

“Hope in the present.”  One might water this down by thinking Merton simply meant hope in the very near future, but I don’t think that’s what he’s about.  I think it has to do with a dimension of reality that is here now, but may not be clearly manifest to us, and perhaps in our looking at it that way, it does become clearer.  Constantly we are told in our culture to “focus on the present”: take Eckhardt Tolle, for example.  But perhaps what Merton is telling us here is not some ascetic cutting away of past and future to some infinitely narrow point called “the present.”  What he promises here is something more rich and strange.

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ON SLAVERY, THE LIMITS OF THE BIBLE, AND HOW TO READ IT

Good Christians created that [slave] trade and sustained it for three centuries—Catholic and Protestant alike.  And they were happy to do so because, whether Catholic or Protestant, they heard the Bible telling them that they could.  Up to the late seventeenth century, no Christians challenged the existence of slavery as an institution.  If you had taken a straw poll in any Christian gathering before that date, such as from the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in my own home city of Oxford, and asked whether slavery was evil, not a single Christian hand would have gone up to say yes, it was evil.  That is because the predominant voices in the books of the Bible accept slavery as part of the God-given fabric of the world.  Now it is entirely the other way round: not a single Christian alive, I think, would defend slavery, and so in this respect, all Christianity is now out of alignment with the Bible.    

Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and its Legacy (Oxford UP) 2016, page 9

Now one might argue that those Christians who turned against the slave trade and eventually helped abolish it were also being Biblical: that is, perhaps they argued that given that we are all made in the image of God, and that Christ died for all us humans (according to scripture) it must be nonsense to think one person has the right to treat another person as property.  To “love thy neighbor as thyself” would seem to demand the abolition of slavery.  But the significant point to make here is that even if anti-slavery Christians were not out of alignment with the Bible, it must be true that in order to make this turn from Biblically based slavery to Biblically based abolition these Christians would have to have been reading the Bible in a certain way—a way which saw sacred scripture as not constituting a comprehensive and explicit list of do’s and don’t’s, a way which saw scripture as giving the raw material for people to draw conclusions not explicitly supported by that same scripture.  And here we find, therefor, a cautionary tale for those who challenge every moral or doctrinal statement they do not like with with the challenge, “does the Bible say that?”

Consider how jarring it must have been, after all, in the late seventeenth century, to consider on the one hand Biblical principles that were counter to slavery, but at the same time a Bible that had no explicit denunciation of such a terrible and very widespread practice in the ancient world.  Surely this constitutes some kind of cognitive dissonance in scripture.  But whether or not we accept the doctrine of Biblical infallibility, might we attempt some kind of dialectical reading with acceptance of slavery as the thesis, the salvation offered by Christ to all as the antithesis, and the resulting explicit denunciation of slavery as the necessary synthesis presaged by the Bible, even if not explicitly?

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A Meditation on Embracing the Darkness

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was no rhetorical question.  Jesus did not know the answer.  If those last words of Jesus were not asked for real, if they were just some show to say to an unappreciating world, “look how much I’m suffering for you!” then Jesus was never fully incarnated, never had the full deal of the shittiest elements of the human experience, which includes not understanding why suffering and injustice exist: he was merely slumming.

Both trees—the tree Adam and Eve ate from and the tree Jesus died on—are absurd.  That is the whole point.  It makes no sense that from a creation that was good in every respect a choice was made that brought sin and death into the world.  It makes no sense that omnipotent God, the ground of all being, must suffer death for life to prevail.  If we could make sense of evil, that would mean God had ordered a proper place for it in the creation, or that evil was a force outside his control and rivalling him.  Christianity rejects both these positions.

Jesus did not die absurdly so we could make sense of our own pain.  He embraced the darkness and absurdity that we also are in.  His resurrection indicates there is an answer to his question, but we do not know what it is.

I know this is not a rational answer to the problem of evil.  My point is that this side of the grave there isn’t such an answer even imaginable.  But let me say that the cross and the Resurrection are grounds for faith in the unimaginable.