\u201cWhat capitalism does,\u201d or \u201cwhat liberalism does,\u201d or \u201cwhat postmodernism does,\u201d or \u201cwhat fundamentalism does\u201d: the phrase should die an unmourned death. It does us all a great disservice, not for what it says but for what it leaves unsaid and the ways it misleads us.<\/p>\n
I most recently ran into the capitalism<\/em> variant of the phrase in the influential 1995 essay \u201cThe Californian Ideology,\u201d by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. The text is littered with the phrase; if you took the essay at face value you would conclude that at least in the minds of Barbrook and Cameron capitalism had transformed from a system and structure into a demon, possessing and directing the culture they dislike.<\/p>\n I am not opposed to such readings of the world<\/a> in principle; I think they may even get certain important things right<\/a> that we too often overlook in our \u201cdisenchanted\u201d modernity. If people want to talk of Capitalism and Marxism and Media and Liberalism and Technologism and The Beltway and The Kremlin and so on as capital-P Powers\u2014if people want to think about the ways in which there may be real spiritual realities at work behind some of the things we take for granted\u2014well, as the millennials say, I am so here for that<\/em>.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n But that is not how Barbrook and Cameron meant it. Nor is it how most people mean the phrase when they toss it around.<\/p>\n What they mean, instead, is something like this: People act differently in different systems and structures; the system and structure of capitalism [or liberalism or fundamentalism or\u2026] leads people to act in [this way that I think is bad].<\/em> It is, in other words, shorthand for an idea most of us can get behind.<\/p>\n That idea is important, too: people do<\/em> act differently in different systems and structures. What\u2019s more, when a given structure is pervasive, it can be difficult to resist or reject, or even to consider that it should be resisted or rejected. This idea is so important that Stephen Carradini<\/a> and I dedicated all of Winning Slowly Season 5: Structure and Agency<\/a> to the ins and outs of systems and structures, good and bad alike; the limits of individual action in the face of systemic pressure; and the ways we ought to leverage good systems and dismantle bad systems.<\/p>\n But. As much as this shorthand captures something important, it also obscures<\/em> something important: it is people<\/em> who act differently under those different structures, and people<\/em> who set up systems in the first place and maintain them afterward. This is not to dismiss the tendency of systems to perpetuate themselves, or to ignore the reality of systems which harm everyone in them and go on existing anyway. (Self interest is complicated.) Rather, it is to remind us how<\/em> systems come to be (people created them because they seemed in some way good to them), what<\/em> they are made of (people continuing to do what seems in some way good to them), and why<\/em> they are hard to dismantle (because many people\u2019s self-interest is aligned with maintaining existing institutions).<\/p>\n It is possible to think and act as if individual agency is all that matters, and this is fallacious. People do<\/em> act differently in different systems and structures, for good and for ill.\u00a0Capitalism, as a system and structure, serves as an environment in which enormous gains in productivity have been possible; but it also serves an environment where people reduce others (and themselves) to their productivity. \u201cLiberalism,\u201d as a system and structure, serves as an environment where many important gains in human liberties have grown up; but it also serves as an environment where the good of liberty has at times grown cancerous and indeed metastasized until the will of the individual is dangerously (and nonsensically) totalized. Contrast how people live and think and act in capitalist or liberal contexts with feudal or tribal contexts (to pick just two of the many contrasts we could) and you will see very, very different things. Systems matter; we cannot erase their impact on the individual.<\/p>\n But it is also possible to talk and act as if the structure, the system, is all<\/em>. This is the mistake the shorthand \u201cwhat capitalism does\u201d leads us to. Flip the emphasis in the previous paragraph: the environments of capitalism and liberalism matter, but people<\/em> continue to act in those environments. More than that, people continue to transform the structures and systems they inhabit, often in startling ways. Half a century ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that the most profitable corporation in the world<\/a> would also be among those most assiduously pursuing environmental responsibility and stewardship. People\u2019s continuous pressure, as well as the ascent to not only economic but also cultural leadership of people who care about this has changed capitalism in a good way. Social pressure on businesses has plenty of downsides, too, in our internet-rage-storm era; and there is much to critique about the ways that business leaders have come to dominate culture.<\/p>\n The point, though, is that systems and structures are more malleable than the shorthand credits them, and so we would do well to remember the limitations of the shorthand and indeed largely to abandon it unless we are often in the habit of qualifying it. It is too sloppy. Throw it out!<\/p>\n Or if not that (shorthands are<\/em> useful after all) then clarify often. Talk instead about structures, and systems, and people\u2019s ability to change them\u2014indeed to throw them out. Speak less often of \u201cwhat capitalism does\u201d and more often of what capitalism makes easy and what it makes hard, what avenues living in liberalism opens up and what it blinds us to, what virtues and what vices fundamentalism might inculcate.<\/p>\n (And if you want to have a conversation about Powers, have at it.)<\/p>\n Yes, I am a millennial by age cohort. I mock these generational divides and characterizations because I think them mostly meaningless blather.\u21a9<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/section>\n","pubDate":"Fri, 09 Mar 2018 07:00:00 -0500","guid":"tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-09:\/2018\/stop-saying-what-capitalism-does.html","category":["ethics","technology"]},{"title":"Theological Anthropology","link":"http:\/\/v4.chriskrycho.com\/2017\/theological-anthropology.html","description":" A bit of context for this post: Off and on over the past year, and with some frequency since he picked up blogging again after Lent, Alan Jacobs has been tackling what he has variously called a \u201ctechnological history of modernity\u201d and the problems of the \u201cAnthropocene Era\u201d<\/a>, i.e.\u00a0a world in which humanity so dominates the world we inhabit that we are physically remaking it, but in which we increasingly feel cut off from our humanity. (I\u2019m eliding an enormous amount; you should really take a close look at the whole series of posts on Text Patterns<\/a>.)<\/p>\n A few posts recently have asked questions and thrown out some curious thoughts about the Biblical language of \u201cpowers and principalities\u201d and how they might be at play in our world today, and those are certainly worthy of pushing harder into as we consider. (See also this post by Matthew Loftus<\/a> in which he interacts with those ideas.) Needless to say, there is a lot of interesting stuff in play here, and I\u2019m intrigued to see where Jacobs goes with it\u2014even if, as I currently suspect, I don\u2019t agree with his every conclusion. So you can take all of this as a sort of sideways introduction to Jacobs\u2019 project (which is worth your time) and also to the kinds of things I may ramble on more from time to time here.<\/p>\n Jacobs\u2019 latest post<\/a> returns to a broader question that seems to be underpinning his whole project, and which I would argue is one of the essential: how do we even do<\/em> this kind of theology? And how do we answer the particular questions of our age in a way that faithfully extends the foundation laid for us from the Apostles\u2019 time till now?1<\/sup><\/a> From his original post<\/a> on the subject:<\/p>\n To this claim there may be the immediate response, especially from orthodox Christians, that theology need not be different in this age than in any other, for human nature does not change: it remains true now as it has been since the angels with their flaming swords were posted at the gates of Eden that we are made in the image of God and yet have defaced that image, and that what theologians call \u201cthe Christ event\u201d \u2014 the incarnation, preaching, healing, death, resurrection, ascension, and ultimate return of the second person of the Trinity \u2014 is the means by which that image will be restored and the wounds we have inflicted on the Creation healed. And indeed all that does, I believe, remain true. Yet it does not follow from such foundational salvation history that \u201ctheology need not be different in this age than any other.\u201d<\/p>\n We may indeed believe in some universal human nature and nevertheless believe that certain frequencies on the human spectrum of possibility become more audible at times; indeed, the dominance of certain frequencies in one era can render others unheard, and only when that era passes and a new one replaces it may we realize that there were all along transmissions that we couldn\u2019t hear because they were drowned out, overwhelmed. The moral and spiritual soundscape of the world is in constant flux, and calls forth, if we have ears to hear and a willingness to respond, new theological reflections that do not erase the truthfulness or even significance of former theological articulations but have a responsibility to add to them. In this sense at least there must be \u201cdevelopment of doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This all seems exactly right to me. Our robust doctrine of the Trinity, for example, was a doctrine developed specifically in response to the pressures and challenges facing the church in a specific age. The philosophy and the cultural context of Athanasius meant that the church had to answer who and what Jesus Christ is in relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit to the Father and the Son, and the Father to the Son and the Spirit, in a way that our own age does not demand<\/em> such answers. It is not that the question has ceased to be important, but changes in culture plus the Church\u2019s (mostly) faithful exposition of those answers in the centuries since mean other questions are now at the fore. Moreover, the other questions which are coming to the fore may indeed be questions the Church has never had to confront, and especially on exactly the terms she confronts them today.<\/p>\n And the challenge or question she confronts today, perhaps more than any other, is this: What even is<\/em> a human?<\/em> Put in a bit less \u201cmillennial\u201d a way: the question of human nature\u2014the ontology of the embodied, soulish, creaturely things we are\u2014is the central question of our day. If you want to understand the last seventy-five years of cultural change in the West, you need to ask: \u201cWhat do these people understand it to mean<\/em> to be human?\u201d If you\u2019re confused about how and why there has been such a radical shift in popularly-accepted views about human sexuality and gender, this is at least a significant part of the answer. The confusion about sex is a symptom of a much deeper confusion: about the very nature of homo sapiens<\/em>. Indeed, identity politics in general is symptomatic of deep confusion about human nature: how malleable it is or is not, and also what it means.<\/p>\n I think on the whole Jacobs is right when he suggests that much of what theologians have offered here\u2014perhaps especially theologically orthodox theologians\u2014is inadequate<\/a> to the task:<\/p>\n \u2026professional theologians have acquired in the course of their training a conceptual toolbox which they believe to contain the tools necessary to evaluate and critique cultural developments\u2026. in my judgment the existing toolbox is inadequate; but it does not appear that way to the theologians.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n To reiterate: the problem in Jacobs\u2019 mind is not the theologians\u2019 orthodox answers, but that we are in need of further development of the tradition and further application of the answers it provides. To return to the example I opened with: we desperately need a recovery and a ressourcement<\/em>, the (re)formulation of a thick and rich Nicene Christology. But we need that as a tool to answer different questions than the Fathers were answering, and so we need it as the foundation on which we build, rather than supposing that it provides already the answers we need without<\/em> further elaboration. We need to think about Incarnation as an answer not only to Gnosticism (which it still handily rebuts) but also to technologism and what I have started calling \u201calgorithmism\u201d: an unwavering faith that if we just have enough data and smart enough machine learning techniques, we will be able to solve all the problems of our humanity\u2014not least our embodied state.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n So it has analogies to that old Gnosticism, but there are also possibilities (or the appearance of possibilities) before us which the Fathers did not have to confront: the pursuit not in mystical but in technological terms of escape from the constraints of the body. And that pursuit is not merely the fever-dream of the Singularity<\/a>-seeking futurists. It is already the reality of a world of bodily modification, of at a minimum confusions<\/em> about racial and sexual categories (is \u201ctransracial\u201d an invalid category but \u201ctransgender\u201d a valid one<\/a>? If so, why?). And the reason I think Jacobs\u2019 project is important is that much even of the radical individualism, self-definition, and so on which so typifies our day is a result\u2014more or less direct\u2014of this shift in what is technologically possible<\/em>, and perhaps equally of what is conceived<\/em> as technologically possible.<\/p>\n What we need in response is the combination of a more coherent understanding of technology3<\/sup><\/a> and undergirding and shaping it a more robust theological anthropology<\/em>.4<\/sup><\/a> We need a thoroughly Christian account of human nature; and by that I mean a thoroughly Christ-oriented<\/em> account of human nature. The technological transcendentalists are not inventing something out of thin air. The desire to ascend to a sort of godhood runs deep in fallen human nature, but it is a perversion of the good and right desire to be like God in a way appropriate to our finitude. The theological work we need to be doing is not a sort of turning-away-from-God-toward-mere-anthropocentrism. Rather, it is turning to the inspired, image-making acts of Creation and Incarnation and asking how those answer the questions of our age, with the confidence that the answers we need are there in God\u2019s making us in his image, and then taking on our image and imaging himself to us in our very midst.<\/p>\n An aside: there are two modern thinkers, very different from each other, whom I think warrant careful consideration in approaching this project. One is a sort of necessary background: T. F. Torrance, whom I have only read on the Trinity, but whose works in general I have seen referenced in ways that make me think he\u2019s going to be helpful across the board here. In general, Torrance is too little read by American theologians as far as I can tell. The other is the (orthodox) New Testament scholar whom I have seen take Jesus\u2019 humanity<\/em> most seriously: N. T. Wright. A close reading of Jesus and the Victory of God<\/em> and its portrait of Jesus as a messiah whose humanity comes into view more clearly was enormously helpful in making me read the gospels again with some of this more clearly in view. I\u2019m sure there are others as well; I rather suspect an encounter with O\u2019Donovan would do me good, for example. But I also think there is a great deal of uncharted territory here, and a good deal of work to be done in a faithful development of our orthodoxy in a way that addresses humanity<\/em>.<\/p>\n Long enough for today. But more to come in spurts and drabs as I am able to read more and make more sense of these questions for myself.<\/p>\n I\u2019m borrowing the language of \u201cfaithful extension\u201d here from William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith\u2019s Evolution and the Fall<\/em>, which is an interesting work that tangentially but perhaps significantly relates to these same questions.\u21a9<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n I could readily scare-quote \u201csmart\u201d and \u201cmachine learning\u201d there; I think both of those words mislead in ways that mirror the kinds of mistakes Jacobs highlights in the same post I\u2019m interacting with here. Much<\/em> more on that in the future.\u21a9<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n especially of technology as a technique of control and therefore a possible avenue either of right worship as we carry out our Creation task, or of idolatry as we seek not to steward the world but to dominate and distort it.\u21a9<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n A phrase Jacobs has also used in this off-and-on series over the last year, but which I have been using for quite some time: it is always a happy thing to find a term or phrase being adopted independently.\u21a9<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/section>\n","pubDate":"Sat, 06 May 2017 10:50:00 -0400","guid":"tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-05-06:\/2017\/theological-anthropology.html","category":["technology","algorithism","alan jacobs","Christology","ressourcement"]}]}}
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