Kindred Soul

Here's the new "blog I love and learn from" (new, of course, only to me): Jack Whelan's After the Future.

Ah, a man after my own heart. In today's post (9/20 -- I can't find a permalink), he says:

I'm finished with the New York Times. Reading it used to be one of my great pleasures, but I have come to despise most everything it stands for.

And in yesterday's post (9/19), he said:

Fascism is the subordination of the economy to the state. Crony capitalism is the subordination of the state to certain economic interests. Crony capitalism is inevitable in a political society in which money drives policy. This isn't just a tendency in American politics; it's the reality.

An equal-opportunity scourge who lays into 'em right and left -- you go, guy! He also has a wise and wary take on the Roberts nomination (9/16), showing an estimable ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at once:

After all the crony appointments . . . I suppose we should be grateful that at least we have somebody in Roberts who is so qualified for the job. Maybe it's another sign of Bush's incompetence that he mistakenly nominated someone who is not the guy he thinks he is. You have to wonder. The conservative blogs certainly have their shorts in a knot about Roberts' presentation of himself as a moderate.

He may or may not be. His claim that he aspires to be a judge whose role is only to call balls and strikes is somewhat reassuring, but also misleading. The real question is how he defines his strike zone, and he gave us only a few hints about that. . . . [His declared judicial modesty and humility] is reassuring, but how much of that is tactical and how much sincere is hard to judge. So I agree with Biden--it's a crap shoot, and we just don't know what we're getting.

Nevertheless, I found everything he said to be what I would have hoped he would say. My concerns lie mainly with the company he has kept. He seems to be, or have been, rather too comfortable in the righter wings of the political spectrum. He says he's not an ideologue, but how do we know that? Since when are public officials' descriptions of themselves believable? . . .

But if I were a senator, I would vote for him.

Read the whole thing, I've left out some good parts.

On 9/12, Jack wrote on the limits of ambivalence, in the spirit of what I elsewhere called "nuance with cojones:"

[S]o many of the "nice" people I know here in Seattle . . . always think there are two sides to every issue. That's a fallacy of course. There are not two sides to every issue, but multiple sides and multiple levels. Every issue of importance these days is unfathomably complex, and more often than not it's impossible to know enough to form a certain opinion. Nevertheless, you have to take a stand. . . . [B]eing a good listener isn't enough. You have to take a stand, even if it's one quite different from either that taken by those on the left or right.

Yeah!

All right, let's pull back and look at the big picture. Who is Jack Whelan and what is he up to?

Here's his bio. He studied philosophy at Boston College and graduated from Yale Divinity School. He's been an editor, teacher and writer, and is now working on a book with the same title as his blog (which is "subtitled" "Eschatological Ruminations on Culture and Politics"). He describes himself as "a postmodern Catholic trying to figure out what that means in a Church still very much dominated by a premodern imagination of itself."

Although Jack is a committed Catholic and I am doggedly post-denominational, reading some of the awesome essays linked down his sidebar convinced me that we're working on closely allied projects, or hopes, or visions. He calls his "progressive post-secularism":

The basic premise is that the secularism of Enlightenment rationalism is deteriorating into an anti-human form of mechanomorphism and that a humanistic alternative must be developed to counterbalance it. I'm convinced that the world's religious traditions are the main resource to provide that counter-balance.

(I would say "the wisdom distilled from the world's religious traditions," rather than the traditions themselves, which also contain a lot of junk DNA -- politics and superstition. But that's where we differ, and I respect people who are faithful to a tradition as long as they don't start playing "My tradition can kick your tradition's ass.")

To continue visiting Jack's mind, "getting beyond the secular" requires first taking a good look at the "mechanomorphic" beast:

It only recently struck me how much the mainstream American thought world is framed by Nietzsche and Darwin. . . . They’re just there like the air we breathe, and we don’t think twice about how their ideas are our ideas. . . .

I don’t know if there is any more significant event in the cultural history of the 19th Century than Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. . . . Darwin’s evolutionism was hard, cold science, and it had a profoundly deflating effect on the [R]omantically inclined Victorian intellectuals. Nietzsche's nihilism, despite his being a man of profound spiritual passions, developed as the response of a religious man whom Darwin had convinced there was no such thing as spirit. And so arguably both Darwin’s materialistic evolutionism and Nietzsche’s response to it have had the most significant impact in shaping the thought world of the 20th Century and beyond. . . .

So the culture wars that have been fought now in America . . . have been more than a simple conflict between naïve religious faith and the arrogance of science. They’ve been about how the secularist mind with its implicit metaphysical nihilism has come to dominate mainstream cultural institutions . . .

I think we will not stay there for long. . . . [It's] the mentality of a culture that is in transition . . . that doesn’t really know its own mind anymore, that is neither here nor there, and so has lapsed into radically skeptical, quasi-nihilist mentality that the people on the religious right understandably reject without reserve. They don’t have to come up with a sophisticated intellectual rebuttal; the people there just know in their bones the secularism they oppose is wrong. In my bones I feel the same thing.

Don't let that fool you into thinking Jack is pro-Religious Right, though. Elsewhere, he says:

[T]he rage behind right-wing politics in America . . . has hardly anything to do with issues or policy; it has almost everything to do with threatened identity. And just as Muslim fundamentalists feel that their collective cultural identity is under threat of annihilation from the West, so do right-wing, mostly white root stock Protestants feel that their identities are being threatened by an increasingly pluralist, dynamically changing American culture. In Washington right now we’re witnessing an updated form of an old American social pathology. Let’s call it neo-nativism.

And just as the Muslims are right—their world will be inevitably destroyed. It doesn’t mean the destruction of Islam . . . but Islam will have to adapt to a rapidly globalizing world if it is to survive at all. And the same is true for heartland Americans on the rigid right. Their culture world will also be destroyed in the coming century, but that doesn’t mean the end of their faith. But they will have to find a way of being Christian that’s more future oriented.

Whelan is convinced that "the loss of the sacred . . . is at the root of what's ailing us today," and that "it’s possible to frame a postmodern religious alternative to the secularist worldview, and that’s what I mean by the post-secular." His model, like Marilynne Robinson's in The Death of Adam, is the religiously aflame activism of "[t]he abolitionists . . . the Progressive movement around the turn of the century . . . and the civil rights movement." He believes that broad and deep power to inspire can never come from the secular left -- or from the Democratic party, which

doesn't have within itself the resources to fight the battle which really must be fought, and that's to take the country back from Big Money. [Emphases added]

I'd like to go on and quote Jack on that steel cage death match, Thomas Jefferson vs. Wal-Mart, but I've got to stop this and let you go read him yourself. I'll end this . . . not rant, but rave, by quoting an e-mail he wrote to me about abortion:

I was moved by the ruthless honesty of your reflections on your abortion. I have been thinking about writing about the subject myself, but have avoided it, mainly because of my lack of any personal experience with it. But if I were ever to write about it, I don't think that I could have said any better what I think about the subject than what you wrote.

When you burn away all the b.s. being thrown by all sides in the abortion debate, one thing remains as an essential truth. The embryo, no matter what its stage of development, is a spiritual destiny trying to realize itself. There is something deeply mysterious and sacred here, and my problem with the arguments of both pro and anti abortion camps is that this sensibility gets lost. But it is deeply honored in what you wrote about your own experience.

I think the worst thing about the abortion issue is the way it has been made radioactive, so difficult to talk about except in the most ideological way. One's position on the subject has become the shibboleth that identifies one as either an intelligent progressive or a rigid Neanderthal. [Note: that's what it looks like on the left. On the right, your position identifies you as either every zygote's defender or part of the Culture of Death.] The same thing is true of any discussion of intelligent design in evolution. Either you're with the scientific community or you're a anti-intellectual moron or a new-age flake.

But then one must ask him or herself, who is it that defines what's normal reality? Who gave them all this authority? And the answer is that in our cultural milieu whoever shouts the loudest usually wins the day. But I would like to become part [of] a whispering campaign, a campaign in which thoughtful people sensitive to the mystery that always seems to fall between the cracks in our public discourse gets spoken about with reverence. Maybe it will become viral.

I only recently learned what the word "Shibboleth" means, and this is a perfect use of it. Also -- a whispering campaign! With that wonderful notion, I will end and invite you to check out After the Future.

Comments

[karen]

Well, he's definitely NOT an ideologue, is he? i love this world of computers... mostly. It lets me see inside the brains of great people and read their thoughts.

That rarely happens on the farm, but at least at the end of my day... the crap i encouter washes clean. {:0)} Usually.