The Revolution

Had my last Foundations of Modern Philosophy revision class today, on Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation. We talked about how Weber made a distinction between an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility. The former referring to the grand, sweeping, passionate vision and the latter referring to a more pragmatic personal acceptance of consequences.

The blind pursuit of ultimate ends, though potentially dangerous, is also absolutely necessary. It's only great leaders, with such visions, tempered by a more pragmatic ethic of responsibility, who can affect real change in the modern world. A world, which for Weber, is one that is dominated by bureaucracy, alienation and disenchantment.

For Weber, my tutor said, the human condition is ultimately tragic. He said that when we got to his age, we would start thinking about such things more and more; about how ideals, however much you cherish and believe in them, are not attainable in their purest forms. Weber was not entirely spouting nonsense when he spoke of the world as a continual struggle for power and the state as the ultimate embodiment of violence. (Bleak, yes, but not entirely incorrect.) We can only struggle, and we can only get so far. Weber himself cites Martin Luther who, when pushed to recant his writings on biblical authority, proclaims "Here I stand; I can do no other."

And so the tragedy of the human condition sees humanity caught between great idealism and unachievability.

I think about how, while Luther was one of the great exceptions, and Protestantism spread rather successfully after his death, even if he were alive today, I doubt he would have said that his ideal had been entirely realised.

Ideals are not attainable in their purest form; you may struggle for your personal ideals all your life, to varying degrees of success, but for every great hope, there is greater disappointment. And we are constantly caught between the unlimited dreams that we can conceive, and the stark limits of what we can actually achieve.

And in the end, the end of us is just the end of us, concluded my tutor.

After that rather brief, and rather pessimistic aside, he quickly marched on, taking us through the text. I was very struck by his little diversion because he'd always struck me a very cheerful and ethusiastic person (he's also a great tutor, by the way, one of the best I've had these three years here, and that's saying a lot).

But I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised. Because anyone as clever as he is (and he's frightfully clever) would not have failed to notice that we live in a world that while beautiful in parts, is also immensely flawed. And if we are all there is to it, then yes, I think the human condition is ultimately tragic. We will never fully achieve our ideals in reality, and we often don't even live up to our own ideals in our daily lives.

And maybe you think, well, this is how it is. We are born, we die. And in between we struggle. And there are good bits and bad bits, but you know, I try to focus on the good bits, try my best to fix the bad bits, and if I can't then well, at least I've tried. And if it hurts too much, well, then I'll just try to forget.

But all the while you hear this little voice whispering, there's got to be more to life than this.

And there is. Because the truth is, we can't save ourselves. No revolution or institutional reform or global mass movement will really change anything, if we do not first grapple with the darkness that is in our hearts. The model of the self-seeking, utility-maximising "economic" man, while crude, does capture a significant part of the truth. So much of global injustice today can be attributed to sheer greed.

The very awesome Prof G. A. Cohen, who has written extensively in reply to John Rawls' Theory of Justice (among other things, that is; I also attended his lectures on Plato and Hegel & Marx - he is such a legend), criticised Rawls for having a strictly institutional conception of justice and equality. What good would that be if we can't even treat our fellow citizens with personal respect?

He writes that he's now much more convinced of the nostrum that "for inequality to be overcome, there needs to be a revolution in feeling or motivation, as opposed to (just) in economic structure ...short of a second coming of Jesus Christ ...there will bever be, many people would think, the needed change in motivation." (in If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? p.20)

I believe that no secular conception of morality is going to provide the much needed motivational change; not consequentialim (most famously Mill's utilitarianism), nor deontology (such as Kant's categorical and moral imperatives), nor virtue ethics (first conceived by Aristotle).

No amount of thinking, institution-building or revolution-inciting is going to fundamentally change the way we think and act; the way we treat each other.

What we need, is a spiritual revolution.

Christianity is shaped by the conviction that the eternal wisdom and divine word that is in and through all things, took shape in a particular human life, at a particular time. The divine became part of the flux of human history in order to influence and transform it from within, through communities dedicated to following the word made flesh.

There is an intense inwardness about true religion, and in this it overlaps with the current fashion for spirituality. It does indeed offer inward strength. But the religion of the Bible is not primarily about achieving inward tranquillity. It is just as much about being wracked by a sense of protest and lament at the state of the world: a protest and lament before the very face of God. It is also about seeking to be a sign, through renewed human relationships and restored human communities, that not all hope is lost.

Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, "We Should Not Fear Religion"

The Observer Sunday Dec 19 2004