US Election Reflections #4

Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom:

Martin Häaglund must have had me in mind when he wrote this book. It sums up the political depression I have been experiencing as we face self-destruction in our Anthropocene Age. We are social and political animals aiming to create a public realm, by which we will be able to conserve our lives and to know and feel happiness at least in its pursuit. This tension in homo sapiens came with our inherited ability to imagine, to use symbols to communicate with one another and so to know our past and anticipate our future.

I once wrote a book to sum up my “spiritual exercises in a postmodern world.” Martin’s book overshadows my weak attempt. He does not provide a utopia or blueprint of beatitude in the good place and good time to which we destine ourselves personally and collectively. In fact, he demonstrates that certainty in belief, including utopic or apocalyptic thinking, is an obstacle for moving towards our purpose. He points to some of the benchmarks and road signs on a path up the mountain to a thriving humankind. He also points out how it is our very fallibility, our mortality, our limitations that give us the power to keep on. Keep on living and loving while acting with others to do so with us. In the last years of my life, now unable to roam the universe as I was want to do in more youthful days, and being focused on the life that I wage here and now, where nothing is certain or settled, I am more driven to let go of my past deeds and some utopian future to care for those I love and about their deeds and future.

Martin articulates why secular faith in all its insecurity and finiteness can ironically transcend the religious faith in an eternal life and a transcendent being beyond this life. And that it is this realization that gives us the power to believe in ourselves and each other. And that realization leads us to achieve a spiritual freedom which is the final achievement and the ultimate thriving of humankind.

I am, we are, matter and time, subject to the necessary laws of entropy. In accepting that we can respond with syntropy, the reverse of entropy. We can defeat for a time, in our time, the forces of dissolution and fragmentation. I am body, we in association are body. And embracing that we are body, born of the matter of the universe, we project spirit, soul, universal consciousness. We are the humus of the earth, the ground, the dirt, the dust of stars, the root of humanity and humility.

To show that secular or natural faith is more important than religious or supernatural faith, and that our finite time is more relevant than immortality and eternity for spiritual freedom, Martin lets St Augustine, Martin Luther, and CS Lewis make his case. I would add one of my mentors, archeologist and Jesuit visionary, Pierre Teilhard der Chardin. “Immerse yourself in matter,” he said. Finitude and finality, a characteristic of our mortal existence, is a condition of possibility for this life, and for the love and care we enjoy in this life — embodied soul to embodied soul.

Secular faith is the path to spiritual freedom. Without the passing of life and our destiny with death, there would be no passing from the necessary time for survival to a free time where we, as individual persons and as personal associations, become who we want and choose to be.

Martin cites poets and novelists to portray the passage from secular faith to spiritual freedom. My own favorite story is of Huck Finn who commits the mortal sin of disobedience to the law of God when he decides after much soul searching to hide his friend Jim from being caught on their trip down the Mississippi. Huck figured that going to Hell for all eternity as he was taught in Sunday school was better than telling on his friend and returning him to slavery.

I have my own story of violating the rules of religion and morality for a love that changed my total intention and purpose. I hope to write it to my children and grandchildren. Won’t regret, can’t forget, what I did for love.

Human animals are living organisms that have purpose that they create in their free time and bestow on beings and the world though words and other images. Spiritual freedom from secular faith is not so much a “liberation from life and its sufferings, but rather a liberation of life and its passions.”

Having, taking, and making care for people in this world in this life is not just a matter of religious faith and culture to escape the sufferings of this life for eternal life in the next. It is a matter of how we have built our world, our home, and our society so that it is conducive to human life and spiritual freedom.

That is why social justice, the right political, economic, and cultural order of freedom, equality, and respect for all, is much more than charity (caritas) the care that keeps people subservient to the good will of private individuals. Justice through constitution and law aims for the opportunity and the achievement of agency for all, that is, where people are agents of their own lives, not just the receivers of private bounty or capital.

Here is where wage labor, what people do to have money for the necessities of life, cheats people out of their free time to repurpose their lives and achieve that purpose. Martin doesn’t have the map or model of the fulfillment of humanity, but he suggests some principles for action towards human fulfilment or self-actualization.

The social system that Häaglund promotes is evolving emancipation from the realm of necessity where humans are coerced to produce and choose what is necessary for survival; and increasing participation in the realm of freedom where humans use their time to produce what they want and do what they choose to give them purpose and fulfillment. Martin criticizes the current political economic order that relies on surplus value of workers time and effort to create wealth for a few and poverty for many.

This current order is one where wage labor predominates, and social wealth is valued as the aggregate of total wealth that is owned, where capital from profit of private enterprise is accrued and distributed to the individual and corporate investors and owners. Karl Marx, in critiquing the contemporary social economic order demonstrated that the criteria for national success in the modern political economy is the growth of aggregate profit or capital (GNP) measured in currency guaranteed by the State. This he said was the source of unequal wealth, oppression of workers, of growing poverty, of instable communities, and unnecessary suffering for masters and slaves, owners and workers, producers and consumers, rich and poor.

This writing is just an introduction to This Life which I urge you to read in anxious times today when our social, economic, political order is being radically disrupted. I read Häaglund’s book in context with the Sociologist Wolfgang Streek’s “How Will Capitalism End?” Streek describes what many others have said about the rapid changes taking place in our political, economic, cultural, ideological, and international order which we now call “liberal capitalism.” Disruption can mean disaster for many and it can mean the sign of a new growing order, hopefully more just and stable

Martin advocates not a specific or detailed vision of the good society but cite’s three principles to get there.

1. Reevaluation of value: measuring wealth or well-being in terms of socially available free time for individuals to innovate. A shared appreciation of the negative cost of necessary labor.
2. A means of personal ownership for all but, but a collective ownership of the means of production which is not used for profit.
3. To each according to their needs, from all according to their ability.

A social system incorporating these principles he calls, perhaps unpolitically, or unpractically for advocacy, democratic socialism, which he distinguishes from European Social Democracy, Redistribution of wealth, Regulation that promotes innovation in individuals and communities, Guaranteed Minimum Income.

He is not a foe of capitalism per se; and he claims that Marx was not. He sees any efforts to lessen enforced labor and increase human access to their free labor towards personal and collective flourishing as positive. It moves humanity on the path of reevaluating human value, restricting the profit motive or greed, and the matching of needs and abilities in community.

In earlier writings I have made the point that this coming election raise the question whether we are in a new Disruption and perhaps Foundation for the American Social Order. I feel we are. These two books may help us better understand what we are facing, how we might get through it, and achieve a new or renewed political order that is just and that animates humanity to be well and prosper.