Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
The net, once away from the military and especially once Netscape introduced a GUI, somewhat in general and the blogosphere definitely in particular, followed the course of the French Revolution. With no original grasp of a reliable source — ontological, beneath or beyond man and nature — for ideals (e.g., liberty, fraternity, equality) the grasp, description and deployment of those ideals in daily work is reduced to the anarchy of individual opinion by the most aggressive individuals and cabals.
Thus the French Revolution produced the opposite of its moral, intellectual and political intent and despite the high sounding slogans the effects on the ground compelled reassessment. However, there was nothing left, at least in France, to reassess with.
During the 19th Century it was postulated that this environment of bloody tooth and claw in the human social as well as the plant and animal natural realms would bring forth the best possible conditions for all. The industrial revolution included this notion as a motivation and the trade unions eventually picked it up from the owners and applied it as best they could. Marx made it a centerpiece of his historical dialectics, though improved by numerous existential insights that made him in fact a significant theologian (horrible thought to us, but true).
Echoes of this postulate sound strongly throughout all modern scientific labors, from inorganics to psychology and economics. The churches, too, in both their “mainstream” and “evangelical” wings embraced this postulate as part of their eagerness to be accepted by scientists in the academic realm and by parishioners in the social and economic realms.
Romantic Philosophy already had contributed its own postulate, namely, that intention and good will can right all wrongs. And when that was allied with the postulate — now taken as a doctrine — of ineluctable improvement in all realms by the process of evolution, what we now call “Liberalism” or “Liberal Philosophy” was born. This was in the late 19th Century and it has not changed since. Nor has its appeal dimmed, despite facts. Nor will it dim because ego is forever young and liberalism refines out to aggressive, tyrannical ego.
Pelosi is a vivid embodiment, admired even by enemies for the starkness of her ego — showing that her enemies who admire that share her liberalism but with selfish impulses. Ego does not share.
Problem was, both doctrines, triumph of intention and good will on the one hand and ineluctable improvement through evolution on the other, were proven false by events of the middle 19th Century, including in this country, and then clear through the 20th Century and beyond.
Something else is in the situation besides intention and good will and some ineluctable improvement through evolution.
Come these folks now to … what? Establish new intention and good will? Reaffirm that evolution will bring us out with all good things in the end?
Obviously they grasp that the latter is not the case. But have they more than the former to carry the day, because, that has been tried for 200 + years and has not carried the day yet? No man but a fool relies on intention and good will, least of all his own.
St. Paul identifies an existential problem that cannot be solved in terms or resources available to man: “That which I want to do I do not do, and that which I do not want to do I do.” Each of us knows exactly what he is talking about. Every day we know from direct experience. St. Paul was the first Christian Existentialist Theologian, as Kierkegaard I believe also mentioned, and others have.
What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that codes of conduct are appropriate (as long as the conduct they promote is) but, like all law, cannot compel obedience. Nor can intention or good will.
Law expresses man’s essential nature in the mist of his existential situation, but it cannot compel in that situation. Nor can law enforcement because enforcement partakes of the ambiguities of the situation in which it operates.
So, let us have our codes of conduct — such are as old as culture and as required — whilst understanding their limitation. And let us also grasp that the situation hoped for by such codes is a matter of historical destiny and grace. It is an effect of the self-manifestation of God which, to use Paul Tillich’s words, “no autonomy can produce and no heteronomy can prevent.”
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
