Thanks again for a great post.

Exactly on the metrics. Beatriz Sarlo says that intellectuals should strive for the “middle distance”—somewhere between the forest and trees. But getting those metrics is tough. I’d want to start with mutuality, reciprocity and relationality, but those still aren’t really metrics.

Not going to GA this year. Maybe next.

We need to have clear metrics for success. They don’t recruit as well as pie in the sky (when you die thats a lie) but they do sustain. Lakey taught me that the left’s problem is that it is always focused on the immediate crisis or the eventual utopia and never anywhere in between. Can UUs use the socail gospel and Universalist heritage to build a vision of slow building against entropy?

“Building the kernel of the new society within the shell of the old” sounds like a great description for the role of Church/Sangha/Coven/etc. I’m fine with that occuring in secular locations too, but my feminist theology background is going to make me insist that it measured by things like “reciprocity,” “mutuality,” and “relationality.” My own experience with the local Green party made me suspect that many left-of-center groups are the Bizarra-world version of a small dysfunctional fundamentalist church. Perhaps I should be more open.

Let me try to be more precise about my socioritual critique. I’m fine with those. It’s why I go to shows in East Atlanta Village whenever I have the money and energy. My critique is that the socioritual “fix” is now preventing protesters from imagining new, more effective means of change. When the effectiveness is gone, you end up just going through the motions. I saw this so many times during my evangelical/charismatic days, and it was often called out. I don’t see that happening over on the left, at least not as a matter of course.

I think Foucault was on his way to Starhawk’s “power with.” (I hope, anyhow.) That’s why I think magickal metaphors may help so much here. But what are the practices?

The context for all of this now is a global one. I’ve found Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude very helpful for framing that for me, but I need to give them a second go for retention’s sake. You could read them as a post-marxist, post-dualistic philosophy for social justice. I wish there were a short, dense summary somewhere, but I’ve yet to find one.

What I really want to see happen in/for UUism is for “kernals of the new society within the old” to arise, take root, and spread. My fear/belief is that Loerh’s caricature of liberal theology is not only operational within UUism but dominant. In my mind, that amounts to a circle jerk.

It seems that we have found two poles of ineffectuality occuring. One one end there is the sentiment that “if only one heart is changed,” our protest/revival/movement and all its hours of work is successful. That, in my mind, is a waste of my time. Or as someone (probably Wilde) said, “The problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.” On the other end is the sentiment that nothing except absolute victory is worth the trouble. A beautiful cop-out because it make folks look so noble in their inaction.

Another concern for me is a developmental one. I worked for Jim Fowler for five years, and his Stages of Faith schema is pretty ingrained now. Simply put, I find the protest-and-picket model stuck in adolescence. Working through official channels is probably more adult, but you can get stuck there—or be ineffective there–too.

I think even the protest movements that have been successfull (say for example the protests of students in Korea in 87 or even most of the canonical protests in the US) have had the same socioritual downside that you mention. So I don’t think that factor is really meaningful.

I think your critique on grounds of effectiveness is basically correct, and also a good corrective against Loehr’s critique.”

Here is the Welch text I was thinking of:

The memories of the middle class often hinder the move from critique to action. Shaped by memories of conquest in the name of the common good (settling the West, the growth of technology, economic affluence, the military power of the U. S. during and after World War II), many middle-class people are paralyzed when we see that our work against the dangerous costs of this legacy of conquest does not have the same amount of immediate success. Given this disparity, the lack of control and precision in work for justice seems almost irresponsible. If control is the norm, then responsible action for justice is a contradiction in terms. American culture relegates such concerns to the young and the terminally idealistic. Responsibility is equated with action that is more likely to succeed, thus identifying responsibility with action that is by definition supportive of the status quo.
…
As Segundo states, the critical value of the “relativization of any and every political system, in the name of God,” is lost when the “eschatological reservation” is “generalized.”
Even before some new regime is worked out, it is criticized in the name of some new hope. At the same time, the opposed regime is being criticized under the same head but for opposite reasons. And even the search itself is relativized because there is no element in history that can be related causally to the construction of God’s eschatological kingdom. (14)
A search for only absolute victory leads to “faith and hope in something metahistorical and a disgusted turning away from real-life history.”(15)
Hope is paradoxically translated into a radically pessimistic view of the whole process of change, even when the latter is not violent, precisely because any and every change prompted by man [sic] cannot help but lose out to world-don-tinating sin. The kingdom of God can only be fashioned by someone who is free from sin, and that comes down to God alone.
…
The search for guarantees, and for single solutions, is often paralyzing. Taking as the norm of power the ability of the political and economic establishment to meet its goals, middle-class activists often become trapped in cultured despair. They are well aware of the costs of systems of injustice, but find it impossible to act against them because no definitive solutions are in sight. The memories of the middle class are all too often enervating and deceptive: deceptive in their accounts of cultural victory without victims, enervating in their emphasis on the failure of “utopian ideals.”

I think I am more willing to be generous of spirit and forgiving to protests however flawed than I am to overeducated folks like myself who can use fancy contintental philosophy terms to justify inaction. or restrict action to official political or nonprofit channels or otherwise choose to dishearten people who are well meaning.

Within our shared subculture, we absolutely need to combat the cult that believes in the sufficiency of good intentions. That was my response to the Unitarian Jihad joke that said “Good intentions are not enough” when all too often that very notion is at the heart of what passes for liberal religious discourse and action.

How can we “build a land where we bind up the broken” and “build a promised land that can be,” with a real emphasis on “that can be?”

I’ll admit, deep down I am a dual power anarchist and a Wobbly, building the “kernel of the new society within the shell of the old.” I’ll take the social movements warts and all. And it is probably true that much s Foucault showed that the exisitence of power (really negative power over) only exists in its practice (in critique of Althusser’s repressive state apparatus structuralism I suppose) I suspect that the power of good (what Starhawk and others might call “power with” only truly exists in its moment of practice. I am still touched by Peter Maurin’s old Catholic Worker notion, how do we make a world where it is easier to be good?

On a more inellectual note, I would be interested in looking at your idea of good people and bad people and how they function as simulacra in Baudrillard’s framework. It is really fun to discuss this with someone familiar with both poststructuralism and theology. It is very rare that I get to converse with anyone with even my limited exposure to both of these worlds.

I don’t disagree at all that we also need to build the good. My point is that the usual liberal modus operandi no longer works, and that we persist at it out of habit and self-serving desires. I believe the prophetic role carries with it two tasks: naming evil and envisioning the good. But, going back to my Taoism, sometimes one is needed more than the other. In any case, I work in a nonprofit and serve in several leadership roles in my faith community, so I’m hardly just “sitting on the sideline and taking pot shots.” And if I’m right, are they still pot shots?

Liberals don’t get a by just because we mean well. Or at least they shouldn’t expect one if what they’re really after is building the good and not just feeling good about meaning well. (See the second blockquote in point four here.) We need better tools if we want to effect change in a mediated world. I only have hunches about what those tools are and where they might be found. (I hope later this year to be able to follow up on that.)

Foucault was a prophet who named evil. Had he lived longer, I think, he would have gone on to name the good, or at least that’s where I see his History of Sex series heading. In the end, Foucault looked for ways the individual could use power on himself in order to oppose the dominant truth regimes, etc. Oddly enough, he turned to ancient spiritual disciplines for that. I wish he had gotten further down that road before he died. But I’m happy to use his wisdom for as far as it goes.

I’m looking for a way out of the bobo kneejerk self-reflexive irony “La Guerre de Golfe n’a pas eu lieu” idea. I generally think it is a defense mechanism to feel too smart to get our hands dirty in the work of making a difference. I think the protests and picket lines you choose to denigrate may be necessary but not sufficient. It takes a real asshole to always stand on the side lines and take snide pot shots at people actually trying to do something just because we are afraid of failure. (But its a kind of asshole that most of us are fairly comfortable being. Most of us would rather look smart and witty than risk looking sappy or futile).

Perhaps you are right and we can only do as Walter Benhamin says and “Be conservators of radical hope.” But ultimately the Universalist mission to give hope and not hell should still drive us. Beyond resisting evil we must envision a way of building good, however limited it might be (do a google for Sharon Welch and eschatological reservation).

James,
I’m pretty sure we can identify the good people and the evil people. MLK is good; Tim McVeigh is evil. The problem is that most of us don’t fit into either category. Somebody once said, show someone with no vices and I’ll show you someone with no virtues. Being good and being evil both require a lot of practice. Few of us put in the sweat equity. And yet, as a universalist, I believe even Hitler will be reconciled. We’ll all have to make peace in the end, even peace with Hitler.

I don’t know if there is a Foucauldian term for “free will.” I read Foucault as desperately concerned to preserve free will yet dispairing at how overdetermined our choices always are. By “overdetermined” I mean something like that our choices always have other co-deciders, that we never can make a completely “free” decision, and that this is the human condition. And yet we still do make choices and must take responsibility for them. Both liberals and conseratives may choice too simplistic and easy, cheap even. I suppose that’s why folks call Foucault a “posthumanist.” He’s made humanity too messy to be simply heroic. For him, free will would be a lifetime achievement award, not an everyday occurence.

The Enlightenment’s progress narrative is dead. Take your pick of culprits: WWI, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, OKC, 9/11. Progress only happens because we make it happen. There is no inevitability about it. And protests and picket lines ain’t it. Not anymore.

I’m intrigued by your thoughts about evil and power, and the Tillich spin. Isn’t there something in traditional Christian baptismal vows about “resisting evil?” Successfully resisting evil might just be a good definition of progress. But how do you (successfully) resist evil in a wholly mediated society, where everything is marketed and ironic? My hunch is that paganism and Taoism have more riches here than humanism, Christian or otherwise.

We probably need to articulate the notion that the “free will” (what would be the fc (foucaldian correct) term for that?:)) or moral agency that comes with “inherent worth and digintiy” includes the option for evil.

Perhaps it is the downside of our humanist inheritance (although I think other mainline Chrisitans have similar issues) that we have taken up a sweetness and light version of the progress narrative. (My brain is spinning in late 80’s postmodern mode thinking about how different stated and unstated beliefs function as “regimes of truth” in liberal religion.) This is where my obsession with the rhetoric of supersessionism comes from and why I try to write on it regularly.

What if Principles and Purposes or even mission statements more clearly addressed power and evil. While it may be somewhat unhip in the UU blogosphere to say so, I tend to agree with the UUA curriculum that evil without power is not so important. Perhaps racism without power is not racism, but love without power is not love. Or at the very least it is not justice.

But what if we could use something like Tillich’s position in Love, Power and Justice. Justice needs love with power. Love without power is meaningless sentimentality and power without love is tyranny.