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A Radical Ethos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Dean Brackley
Dean Brackley*
Affiliation:
Central American University San Salvador
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Abstract

This article analyzes today's global values crisis as a matter of both personal and institutional failure. Social disintegration constitutes humanity's greatest challenge at the turn of the millennium. A viable future requires a new social project which embodies a new ethos—one which includes both traditional and liberal values and which avoids their vices along with the traps of authoritarian socialism. In order to spell out this new social project, the article describes the essential features of the traditional ethos and the liberal ethos: their economies, the understanding of nature, religion, history, politics, and ethics. This article argues that the needed participatory radical ethos incarnates Christian values for our time.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 7 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1997

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References

1 Küng, Hans and Kuschel, Karl-Josef, A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions (New York: Continuum, 1993), 13.Google Scholar

2 Unidas, Naciones, “Integración social,” Nota descriptiva 3 (New York: United Nations, 1994)Google Scholar, and Unidas, Naciones, “Hacia una sociedad para todos,” Documento de antecedentes 3 para la Cumbre Mundial sobre Desarrollo Social (New York: United Nations, 1994).Google Scholar

3 World Summit for Social Development, The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action (New York: United Nations, 1995), 5.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 8.

5 Bailie, Gil, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995).Google Scholar

6 Bamet, Richard J. and Cavanagh, John, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 16–17.Google Scholar A pre-Copenhagen U.N. document summarized the global employment picture like this: “Of a total worldwide work force reaching 2.8 billion, about 30% are not productively employed, according to the International Labor Organization. These figures include more than 120 million unemployed persons and some 700 million underemployed persons. They constitute the bulk of the [extremely] poor of the world, estimated at 1.1 billion persons” (Unidas, Naciones, “El crecimiento sin empleo y el derecho al trabajo,” Documentos de antecedentes para la Cumbre Mundial sobre Desarrollo Social [New York: Naciones Unidas, 1994], 1).Google Scholar

7 See Gutiérrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans, and ed. Sister Inda, Caridad and Eagleson, John, rev. ed. with a new introduction (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 21, 25, 56–57, 135–40.Google Scholar Gutiérrez argues that Utopian imagination should be grounded in both practice and present reality, and should be rational. For a good example of such realistic-Utopian thinking, see Ellacuría, Ignacio, “Utopia and Prophesy in Latin America” in Hassett, John and Lacey, Hugh, eds., Towards a Society that Serves Its People: The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press), 44–88.Google Scholar The use of “utopia” in this sense follows Mannheim, Karl, “The Utopian Mentality” in Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World/Harvest, n.d.; orig. German, ed., 1929).Google Scholar For Mannheim a state of mind is Utopian when its incongruity with present reality inspires action to transform that reality. The idea has been much developed and refined, especially by philosopher E. Bloch.

8 In conversation, March 1995, in San Salvador.

9 Lenski, Gerhard E. (Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966])Google Scholar distinguishes among various forms of society which might be called “traditional,” for example, societies based on hunting and gathering, on simple or advanced horticulture or on agriculture. Because of the prevalence of the agricultural form in Latin America, I limit myself to describing that form here.

10 In the United States, unlike most other places, “liberalism” (for example, “Kennedy liberalism”) refers to a political agenda which emphasizes government social spending and individual liberties. In this article, “liberalism” refers rather to the market-based societies with their middle-class mores. Both “liberals” and “conservatives” in the U.S. participate in liberalism understood in this way.

11 Because of its European origins, this multifaceted process is called “westernization” when imported from the west. The term has validity, of course. Nonetheless, despite considerable overlap, “to modernize” does not always mean to “westernize.” In fact, for non-western societies, to be able to distinguish them in practice is a condition for saving their national and cultural identity.

12 Brignoli, Héctor Pérez, Breve historia centroamericana (Madrid: Alianza, 1985), 29.Google Scholar

13 See the penetrating analysis of liberal individualism in Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar Macpherson stresses how the changes in outlook and practice depend on the transformation of human labor into a commodity. See also the outstanding analysis of contemporary individualism in the United States by Bellah, Robertet al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).Google Scholar

14 Following Benjamin Constant and others, Isaiah Berlin has distinguished between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom,” that is, “freedom from” and “freedom for” (Berlin, I., “Dos conceptos de la libertad” in Libertad y necesidad en la historia, trans. Bayón, Julio [Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1974], 133–82.Google Scholar Compare Paul, John II, Evangelium vitae [1995], no. 19Google ScholarPubMed). While liberal discourse gives absolute priority to liberty, it is obvious that the supreme economic value, capital, often eclipses liberty in practice.

15 Holland, Joe and Henriot, Peter S.J., Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice, rev. and amplified ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983), 36.Google Scholar

16 See MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 During the past twenty years, “communitarian” theorists like Michael J. Sandel have criticized rights-based “procedural” liberalism by stressing earlier communitarian strains in founding U.S. traditions and the difficult but necessary task of grounding and pursuing values in a pluralistic society. For a critical summary of the communitarian critique, see Lasch, Christopher, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 69 (1986): 60–76.Google Scholar In a similar spirit, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has diagnosed the liberal roots of the values crisis and proposed a return to a virtue-based ethic. See MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).Google Scholar

18 The traditional ethos emphasizes what recent Roman Catholic documents call “social justice,” a technical expression indicating what individuals and groups owe to the entire community. The liberal ethos stresses what Aristotle called “commutative justice,” that is, the obligation to honor “horizontal” commitments, such as contracts, between individuals and groups. The liberation ethos emphasizes what Aristotle called “distributive justice”—what the community owes to its members.

19 See Paul, John II, Laborem exercens(1979), nos. 14–15Google Scholar, building upon John, XXIII, Mater et magistra (1961), nos. 91–92;Google ScholarSecond Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes (1965), no. 68;Google ScholarPubMed etc.

20 Local examples of a “new popular economy” are burgeoning in Latin America. Many stress the need to organize participants in the informal urban economy. See Montoya, Aquiles, La nueva economía popular: una aproximación teórica (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993);Google ScholarLuis Razeto, M., Economía popular de solidaridad (Santiago, Chile: Area Pastoral Social de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile y Programa de Economía del Trabajo [PRT], 1990);Google Scholar and Luis Razeto, M., Economía de solidaridad y mercado democrático (Santiago, Chile: Programa de Economía del Trabajo y Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 1988);Google Scholar for a global strategy, see Castañeda, Jorge, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin America Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993).Google Scholar

21 In The Socialist Decision (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)Google ScholarPubMed, Paul Tillich criticized self-styled orthodox Marxists for failing to appreciate that the synthesis (to use Hegel's term) of historical dialectic retrieves and transforms the values of past social theses. Not long ago, Harry Boyte stressed the same point for the benefit of new left activists in the United States in his celebration of burgeoning community activism. See Boyte, Harry, The Backyard Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann (The Land [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977], chap. 11Google ScholarPubMed) has also criticized a type of biblical interpretation of history which so stresses rupture with the past that it fails to recognize that God also acts to conserve the good of the present and retrieve the lost good of the past, especially the land. Feminist theologians, too, have warned that liberation theology dare not stress liberation to the point of ignoring these themes. See, e.g., Ruether, Rosemary, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 70–71.Google Scholar

22 Fukuyama, Pace Francis, “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989, pp. 3–18.Google Scholar

23 ”Social and socio-economic life is certainly like a system of ‘connected vessels’ …” (John Paul II, Laborem exercens, no. 20). Holland, and Henriot, (Social Analysis, 38)Google Scholar use the metaphor of “artistic creation” in this context.

24 Ellacuría, , “Utopia and Prophesy in Latin America,” 60–61.Google Scholar

25 If Gil Bailie is right (see n. 5 above), it will become increasingly difficult for violence to bond people together. Governments are experiencing an irreversible legitimation crisis in the use of violence. If Max Weber is also right, this will constitute a radical crisis for the state as such; for Weber defines the state precisely as the organization capable of upholding its claim to a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force to maintain order in a given territory (Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization [New York: Free Press, 1947], 154).Google Scholar

26 See n. 14 above.

27 The Puebla Document, nos. 513, 521, refers to politics in this broad sense. In the same spirit, Ignacio Ellacuría notes that “the social should be given more weight than the political” (“Utopia and Prophecy,” 79). Barnet and Cavanagh (Global Dreams) argue that economic forces are relentlessly eroding the political influence of nation-states. On the other hand, space is expanding for activities of non-governmental organizations.

28 On the centrality of solidarity for our time, see John Paul II, Laborem exercens, no. 8, and, especially, John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, nos. 38-40.

29 If traditional society is in crisis, the traditional Catholic Church is necessarily in crisis as well. The flourishing Protestant sects respond to this crisis, just as the Reformation responded to the crisis of feudal culture in Renaissance Europe. In Latin America a new Reformation is taking place both outside the Catholic Church and inside (Christian base communities and apostolic movements). If the Catholic hierarchy fails to overcome its traditional authoritarianism, especially if it fails to treat the laity like adults, it will find itself with few loyal communicants in the future.