No such thing

I got into a discussion with my father this morning about economy, and about how a Christian is supposed to approach the subject. Dad, being influenced heavily by process theology, argued from the view that human economy should be a reflection of nature and the ecology that surrounds and sustains that economy - that it should encompass and embrace opportunity and risk. He argued that as we were now, we were not doing a very good job of being capitalists - that the prices of our consumer durables do not currently reflect supply and ecological impact, and that our system has been operating under poor assumptions about the resources it can draw on.

There is a definite merit to his argument, but when the discussion turned to the topic of social elites, he kind of lost me on it. The implied premises were that human nature is defined by its origins in nature and in ecology, that it is fundamentally hierarchical and that human societies will inevitably form structures that benefit and privilege a few over the many. Of course, Dad is no Spencerite - by no means does he adhere to an idea that 'survival of the fittest' applies to society in the same way it applies to the natural world. He understands that human beings are capable of behaving ethically and are able to train the anti-social aspects of their nature through education, and that governments are obligated to place boundary conditions on the market and on our social and personal behaviour such that the economic elites don't cheat and exploit the rest of us.

Theologically speaking, I think he's standing on shakier ground when he makes assumptions about human nature. I hold that there is no such thing as 'human nature'. There is only the human, the natural and social conditions endemic to her existence, and what she does within them.

-- Hold on then, Matt. What do you mean, 'there is no such thing'? As a Christian, don't you have to believe that human beings have eternal souls, some spark of the divine within them?

Well, Matt, as a Christian I have to say I have to deal always with Jesus' question, 'who do you say that I am?' - and the answer is never as easy as many of us like to pretend it is. You reach back, further and further back, and any attempt to find some essence to humanity, some meaningful external reality that is binding on each and every one of us, and you will find that it crumbles into dust and slips straight through your fingers. (We are dust - to paraphrase Genesis - and to dust we shall return, right?) Perversely enough, humanity is its own best exception to every rule it makes for itself...

-- To those who glibly answer that we are 'made in the image of God', I ask - what does that mean to you? What is the 'divinity' which you ascribe to yourself? We're talking about the question of your existence; have you given it any thought at all? 'Reason', you say? That is the most popular answer, but it also has the distinction of being entirely wrong. We humans eat our seed corn, invest in nothingness, trade meaningless chatter, destroy the ecosystems that sustain us and squash those less fortunate than ourselves underfoot all the while. How 'reasonable' can we possibly be?

(To me, who Jesus is, is among the most important questions Scripture poses to a Christian. Sadly, this question is trivialised by too many in Christendom, who turn it into rhetoric - a meaningless Pavlovian response of 'my Lord and Saviour!' for a few seconds every week, while they continue on in their one-dimensional present-age existence for the rest. What kind of 'Lord' must this Jesus be to you, if you think when he told you to 'love your enemies' he would be cool with you waterboarding them, slamming their heads into walls, stripping them naked, electrocuting them, shooting them, bombing them? What kind of Messiah can Jesus be to you, when you hear of these wrongdoings done in your name - and say and do nothing? For all the outrage and the 'how-dare-yous' that were spent in the public square on Reverend Jeremiah Wright, at least he had the courage to get up in his Church and talk seriously about these existential disconnects that distort and shatter the American understanding of who Christ is.)

-- The big problem with being a socialist is that I have to deal with both the responsibility of the human subject and with the conditions which shape that subject. If I am taking the existentialist road that there is no human nature per se, I have to be very careful how I articulate myself as a socialist. The thinkers in the Marxist tradition who speak the most truth to me have been Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas - having articulated theories of the self rooted in language, communication and the intersubjective, they place responsibility for defining humanity back in our hands (or rather, on our tongues) rather than within historical and economic forces hopelessly beyond our control or understanding. In that, they allow for greater existential freedom than orthodox Marxism does.

-- But getting back to the problem of 'human nature', though, I have to reject the fiction of a 'human nature', to the effect that our essence is somehow pre-determined by our conditions such that human beings are inherently violent or inherently hierarchical. Because we have no such thing given to us, we are responsible for constantly creating human nature.

This creativity is at once the essence and the burden of our 'divinity', such as it is. I am constantly breathing life into this clay vessel even as I live out of that vessel - and I can choose within my constraints to employ these creative energies toward following Christ, toward shaping the conditions of our material existence to accommodate ever-greater sustainability and social justice, toward the revolutionary goal of the 'kingdom of heaven'.

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