Confessions of a Tamed but Renewed Idealist

Note:  Another “musing,” circa 2019.

Confessions of a Tamed but Renewed Idealist

I recently retired from 40 years of teaching ethics and religion at the university level.  During those years I was convinced of my positive world view, the causes of justice were making their impacts. I confidently sought to pass this perspective on to my students and represented it to my colleagues.  I was a product of a very heady time of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Yes, I am one of the often maligned “baby boomers.” But I was certain, not only that we wanted to change the world, but we in fact did change the world. This view of my generation was translated into my course material.  I wanted my students to understand the struggles we went through as a generation that helped to create the positive world that they inherited.  I was proud of what we had achieved, from civil rights and anti-war activism to gender political movements, especially for women and gays as well as environmental and climate awareness.   In the classroom, for example, there was greater diversity, more women, more students of color, more students from poor families and our course offerings included, liberation theology, feminism, and ecological concerns.  At all levels of our institutions, we fought for this inclusivity, awareness, and policy reforms.  

For me there was no doubt that the trajectory of history was “bending” to greater justice, and well-being for our country.  “Political correctness” was a positive notion.  We were to be sensitive and respectful, embracing the dignity that was deserved by marginalized groups that were beginning to gain their voice.  Kareem Adul-Jabbar in a Whittington Post op ed article in 2016 got it right when he said: “Although the extremes of political correctness can sometimes be absurd, America needs this trend to help it fulfill the spirit on the Constitution.  Our country was founded on principles of inclusion, which means acting compassionately toward the many different people who make up our nation. Almost every group who immigrated to America was at one time the outsider—mistreated, abused, and taunted.  Maturity means not having to relive our mistakes of the past but learning from them and doing better.  Our country needs more sensitivity, not less.” 

As a privileged white male, I was also proud of men who supported these movements and gained both a sensitivity and a wiliness to join the struggle.  Of course, this often happened with difficulty.  The story each of my syllabi told was crafted from this self-understanding, optimism, and sense of solidarity with others.   I tried to model and mirror these movements in my teaching approach, I did not lecture to them, I provided materials and class discussions for their own self-discovery.  It was a coherent world for me professionally.  I was idealistic about the world I lived in.  Yet I also was realistic. Of course, there were negative and cynical moments when my story got challenged by the emergence of forces that reacted to how these “achievements” did not benefit entrenched power or called into question their worldview.  But these counter challenges were on the margins of society.  So, I thought at the time.

Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian, and social theorist, best known for his “serenity prayer,” was pivotal in my thinking as it was being formed as a young seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. Niebuhr was one of the leading religious thinkers in the 20^th century attempting to understand American society and United States’ role in the world post WWI through the lens of religious categories and practice.  His work inspired Martin Luther King Jr., and at least four Presidents.  As an early pastor in Detroit in the 1920’s, witnessing the upheaval of industrial capitalism’s impact on his working-class church, Niebuhr wrote his first book, Leaves from The Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. It was a time to be cynical, yet his religious faith in gave him the conviction that even though “civilization built upon the drive of power and greed,” religious principles can still be “a leaven in it.” 

These insights were to become the basis of what became known as “religious realism.”  It combined rigorous social critique and a very inclusive Christian perspective.  This was the foundation of my identity and the bedrock of a worldview that helped sustain me through the challenges of the counterculture and radical politics of which I was a participant.  This was a very different religious perspective than the ascendent religious ideology portrayed and reinforced by our media and certain political leaders, nationalistic evangelicalism. 

Cynicism is Hard to Avoid Today

The world today has delivered a reality that has challenged my foundational sense of religion and politics.  Religious nationalism, the breakdown of restraints on economic self-interest, the rampant distrust of all our institutions, government, legal, religious and education is the world we now live in.  The cause of our the response to this reality has led to a so-called tribal mentality and the shoring up of our cherished identities for the sake of either defensive survival or militant aggressiveness for their world view.  

I left the professorate as the pandemic was just beginning, teaching my last courses on-line with a “zoom technology.”  The pandemic was laying bare what we had known for a long time, the vast disparities in wealth and the vast accumulation of wealth and power residing in a narrow band of Americans, whether of the left or right in persuasion. How to teach in this environment?  All a challenge to the story I had passed on to my students for decades. 

For me there was a growing sense that I failed my students by not better preparing them for a polarized world, especially in the United States.  I also came to feel that I had participated in the creation of this polarization by my teaching a world view that did not go more deeply into the systemic issues that continued to allow privileged and miscarriages of justice to continue.  The example that hit home for me was the student loan programs. The predatory nature of these loans was only part of the story which has been well documented relative to for-profit universities. What is has also been well documented but less publicized was how so-called legitimate universities used this money to grease their budgets by continuing to raise the cost of education.  The loans ostensively went to the students who paid these costs, at times being recruited when it was clear the students would not be able to repay the loans.  Universities were complicit in this scheme, very willing to accept the money, much which went directly to them.  Except for the most egregious cases like Aspire University which went bankrupt, universities were never fully held accountable.  

The practice continues today, though with minor fixes and regulations that end up hurting student access (the goal of the loan programs) rather than holding institutions accountable.  I and my colleagues were willing to go along with these practices.  I was unaware of the way in which many of my first-generation students were funding their education.  Or was I?  I had many conversations in advising sessions with students who were still struggling to pay their university bills to stay in school. I empathized with them, “so sorry you parents had to sell their car or mortgage their home to pay for your education.” An education that was supposed to give you access to the American Dream of self-sufficiency and financial security, in fact impoverished most students and their families the rest of their lives. My salary was paid on the backs of this type of educational funding. The inequality in our society was even further exacerbated.  My self-interest was an important cog in the system that fostered not just inequality in general but also systemic racism, because black and brown students were most often the victims of these loans.   

These facts of life in the United States revealed that my abstract idealism, though assuming a realistic social analysis, was not sufficient. Other than understanding my complicity, it was easy to abandon my idealistic world view and become cynical.  The question became for me: how to better understand my world and what should be my response?  

My last courses taught at Dominican University began to reflect a deeper criticism of American society. I used more material on how we are all embedded in an economic system that has become so dominant that we just take for granted its negative consequences.  My students became more conversant with the way in which neo-liberalism was not just an economic theory about how markets, if competitive, could best serve economic growth and wealth production, though never really functioning in our political and social realities. In addition, they began to see how neo-liberalism has become a cultural practice that defines everything we do in our lives, monetizing and privatizing what used to be public goods, from media control to how education is funded or consolidated into private school enclaves for the privileged.  Certainly, eye opening for the students and an important reminder to me about the strength and power of those forces that continued to be embraced with greater force in our social, cultural, and political lives.  Yet even though these curricular additions were moving in the right direction they gave no real explanation of why this reality came into being or given a motivation on how to move beyond it in our personal lives and part of democratic society.  

Retirement does have its advantages; without institutional responsibilities, my daily routines are defined with more flexibility.  Several writing projects and academic conference presentations have given me a chance to explore a greater understanding of our realities, working to go behind the ways in which our civic dialogue gets characterized as divisive, when in fact there is in our country greater agreement on the major issues of our time with a forthrightness and openness that has never existed, including all groups in our society.  My idealism began to return. The cause heightened disagreement, I would suggest, is due to what is at stake for individuals who stand to gain or lose with the outcome of the debate.  If you add to this the dynamic of the goal of political power the debate gets framed in a way that gets them votes, whether it is the right that uses tropes such as political correctness, critical race theory or cancel culture, or the left simplifying their message to motivate its base. Thus, in this environment it is for sure a difficult and divisive time.  But this should not obscure the fact that US society still has the capacity to build consensus and solidarity. How to do this?

As so often in my later intellectual development, I have turned to the work of the late UC Berkeley socialist of religion, Robert Bellah, and his co-authors Ann Swidler, William Sullivan, Steve Tipton and Richard Madsen to get answers.  In their co-authored book, Habits of the Heart, a national bestseller, they analyzed the implications of certain strands of individualism, utilitarian and expressive. They came with a well-developed language that gave voice to a narrow way to understand everyday life and our public discourse. This was American’s first language, and it has contributed to our current malaise and confusion about how to move beyond it to a more community minded, a common good perspective.    

A recent biography of Bellah by Italian scholar, Matteo Bortolini, A Joyfully Serious Man, is an excellent introduction to Bellah’s ideas and his extraordinary life to embody the meaning of his ideas.  Additionally, forthcoming writings by his co-authors will provide added depth to the significance of his insights.  It is appropriate to call attention to these works at this moment in in the life of our nation.  These works do not get caught up in the polarized debates that seem at best to reinforce rather than help us move beyond what I think are false divisions for most Americans seeking engagement and solutions that build solidarity rather than fragmentation.  

I have often connected the work of Niebuhr and Bellah in my academic writings. Both were informed by a complicated mix of idealism and realism.  Both were informed by and critical of religious symbols that spoke to the health of a nation and at times truncated this vision with and American exceptionalism built on hubris and exclusionism. Both had the ability to think in dialectical or seemingly contradictory concepts, for example to paraphrase Niebuhr, he wrote that our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our inclination for injustice makes democracy necessary.  In Bellah’s case, he spent a lifetime exploring unintended consequences of human’s cultural evolution that had both positive and negative outcomes. For example, he helps us understand how the advance in greater individual self-determination, dignity, and liberation from oppressive control could turn back on itself to undermine collective solidarity?  He and his Habits of the Heart co-authors suggests a need to find a way out of the narrow individualism that helps to maintain fragmentation.  Their story is complex and requires a rewiring of how we think about religion, religious freedom and maybe our misunderstanding of our polarization itself.   Working through Bellah’s ideas, helped to restore my idealism with its necessary cautions from realism.  With Bellah’s death in 2013, the mantle of Bellah’s ideas is falling on the shoulders of this Habits of the Heart co-authors and their understanding of cultural evolution and interpretive sociology.  Their new book will help provide some clues on the way forward.  I also draw on their latest thinking in what follows.

Moving Forward

Modern societies, such as the United States, exhibit well entrenched cultural patterns due to many years of cultural evolution that provide the raw materials of our emotional and collective lives.  Bellah analyzed cultural evolution in terms of the changes in religion, which he defined as the “symbolization of man’s relation to the ultimate conditions of his existence.”  This allowed him to understand that in our modern world, we humans have become responsible for our own fate. We are no longer live in a world where our symbols of ultimate reality are assumed via traditional authorities that reside in outside ourselves in a heavenly sphere.  However, far from religion going away, it now finds its home in the individual self. In our complicated and differentiated world we are faced with multiple choices about which we now must decide.  Once this was a world just for intellectuals, poets, and artists, today It is a mass reality, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s conviction, “I am a sect myself.” Without the rigidity of doctrinal purity, both culture and personality are now viewed as endlessly revisable. We are thrown into a candy shop world.

According to Bellah’s early formulations of the modern world, this reality plays itself out in our politics, social life and how we understand our existential reality.  This formulation may seem too abstract when we talk about the “self” as an object of our own thinking. Using the language of “choice” may make this shift in our self-understanding clearer.   The concept of “choice” permeates all our lives. It is embedded in our Constitution and laws.  Even the way I conducted my classroom illustrates this cultural “genetic” code.  I did not lecture; I had my students explore their own personal decisions.  Individual choice and decision making was the focus.  However, at some point, I realized that this was not enough.  I began to find a way to offer my own position in a way that did not assume that I had all the answers.  Though I still saw this offering to help them figure out what was important to them.  The language of choice also is assumed in the way we talk about students as “consumers.”  It is all pervasive.

There is a very respectful dimension to this open discovery approach.  In my experience in the classroom, students in our culture began demanding that their voice be heard, they were brought up in a very modern “me” culture.  There was no way to go back to pre-modern world of experts.  This was an advancement in a sense of greater self-determination.  We applauded and helped to create a culture of wanting our students to have “agency.”  Our goal was to help insure their “resilience,” for the burden was now on the individual in our society.    Our modern world focused on the individual.  It is a cultural given.  It opened the door to the notion at each of us were autonomous individuals.  “Choice” is our American heritage.  Choice of religion. Choice of partners. Choice of education.  Choice of candidates. Choice of media. Choice of music.  At least we thought it was our choice.  Internet management of our needs, built on the grand tradition of advertising to “create” our choices gives us pause as to how much we have choice.  But this is another story.

The consequence of this view of the self in the modern world is that it is at the expense of a focus on the community or the common good. How we see ourselves as part of whole has eroded.  Solidarity, it has been concluded by most commentators, is more difficult to develop and sustain in the midst of a multiplicity of choices.  Yet we have no other option but to work with what has been wrought in modernity. How did this modern world evolve?  And a question that follows is whether there is something like a post-modern world.  Here we would have to analyze the role of critical theory in its deconstructionist approach.  Is it a logical outcome of a dismantling of tradition or at least an attempt to reinstate tradition on new terms?  Here Bellah’s notion of cultural evolution is germane, “nothing is ever lost,” comes into focus as a way not to “throw out the baby with bath water” (I wish for a better metaphor, “Throw out the pasta with the hot water” ???).  So, in a sense we also need to be reminded of this if we jettison “choice,” as an ill-conceived advance.  But first let us try to understand how we got to the modern world in the first place and how it got truncated into a new type of iron cage and how might there be a way out of it, to move forward with the insights of the modern world and create a new world of solidarity.

Bellah and his co-authors saw the Protestant Reformation as both an illustration of the modern world and as an engine to help spread the of a focus on individual freedom, particularly the dissenting wing of the Reformation, where the conscience of each individual was sacred. [Get Jim Quay’s reference to the book he is reading.] The Reformation Dissenters were the radical wing of the Reformation.  Once the authority of the Catholic Church was challenged, in fact toppled, it opened the flood gates of dissent, with many churches emerging to protect their view of Christianity.  Out of these protests and well-defined sects, freedom from oppressive rule become the bedrock of the Protestant personality.  This was positive as it challenged unrestrained traditional power. Yet at the same time it created closed sectarian enclaves that brought their own version of control.  Suspicion of centralized authority in society, created the need to create a disciplined counter sectarian reality.  The United States was largely founded on this principle of negative freedom, freedom from oppression.  This was built on the conviction that the dignity of each individual was a right and had to be protected.  The bedrock of our liberal democracy.

American history can be seen as struggles by oppressed and marginalized groups using this principle to galvanize support from liberal portions of society to give them hope that their cause could have legitimacy in the eyes of our founding myths.   Each immigrant group sought to call American society to be true to its own principles.  Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X at the end of his life, appealed to this principle.  During the height of the George Floyd protests calling for radical reform of policing, many of the Black Lives Matter leaders were calling into question that the “contract” for equal opportunity had been broken.  They were not saying the contract of our founding myths were wrong.  Bellah’s Broken Covenant book was a reminder that this is our next trial as a nation, ensuring the rights and dignity of all.  Yet the path to ensuring this for all through the focus on just one group was a problem for Bellah and has become a major concern for many Centrist thinkers and politicians.  George Packer’s book, for instance.  A closer look at so-called “identity politics” is needed. 

Bellah and other theorists have argued that the unintended consequence of this sacredness of the individual and the just cause of their group has led to so-called “identity politics” that has created a multiculturism that has led to social fragmentation and a lack of solidarity. This fits Bellah’s characterization of modern societies where the individual self is king and can choose its own path in society.  But does this have to be the full consequence of this reality?  I would argue that it does not.  If freedom for dominant society [its own identify politics, of privilege power, usually white] is legitimate, freedom for oppressed groups to organize should also be legitimate?  There is also much evidence that liberation movements, such as for women have been capable of being vehicles for other liberation movements.  I would argue “white identity” was the first identity politics, the mother of all identity politics.  “White nationalist groups are not the product of protest groups, the existence of white supremacy in the history of our country are the source of the injustices, but they had a great ally in the economic system of capitalism.

What has hindered the move to greater solidarity, the blame can be spread well beyond the protesting groups.  Bellah never lost hope that there could be a way forward.  It was an idealism however that was based on an honest reckoning with the injustices of the past.  In his book writing during the time of the US’s Bicentennial, The Broken Covenant, American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, he laid out his vision for a repentant nation.  For me it was his most hopeful yet most critical book about the United States.  I believe that American society needs to embrace the 1619 project of critical race theory to fully come to grips with our past.  Of course, it is a polarizing moment.  What would we expect of an honest self-understanding?  But it need not be. Hope comes out of being tried to our core. 

Bellah and his co-authors point to drastic consequence of dissenting Protestantism that maintained an exclusive view of who was saved and how a message for all humanity had to be channeled via their version of Christianity.  Therefore, their relationship to non-members of their sect was to evangelize and convert other to their truth.  One way to ensure that their view of the truth prevailed, other than proselytizing was to wed themselves to political power to help advance their view of the American civil religion.  The fight for power by political elites over the nation became a fight for their exclusive world view.  In a country with two political parties as competing elites the main goal is to stay in power.  The highly differentiated world of identity groups was fair game for the elites to enlist these groups into their desire to hold onto power.  The marginalized groups also sought champions for their cause, in most cases this created strange bedfellows and contradictory alliances. Therefore, identity tribes or enclaves were used and pandered to for votes to gain power and to augment privilege.

Within the Republican Party, evangelicals latched on to a capitalist elite that often-despised religion or were just indifferent.  They brought with them a nationalism and racial antagonisms that had to be accommodated by the the Party. But more importantly they allied with capitalism, almost a competing religion that was based on narrow self-interest. Tenants of this competing faith were very much at odds with Christian values and in fact should have been seen as idolatry. 

Within the Democratic Party that promoted a meritocracy which should have been a boon to an underclass seeking opportunities to be at the table with the rest of society, was implemented in a way that created greater inequality.  As meritocracy was wedded with the maintenance of neo-labral capitalism, it brought about policies that made it harder for the underclass to advance. If people did not achieve in the world, it was their fault.  The focus on the agency of individuals became a good excuse or smokescreen to hide the fact that systemic policies favoring privileged elites was the result. Liberal Democrats were complicit and undermined their professed support for pluralism.  Blacks and people of color in particular had no other vehicle then the Democratic Party to pin their hopes.   

In this political environment of elite warfare for control of American interests for the sake of power. The only game in town was to accommodate one’s hopes to the political parties who became a version of the dissenting churches.  They had to maintain their purity and loyalty for the sake of power and each group had to submerge and seek to control the workings of the two Parties.  These alliances cannot hold.  What will it take to move beyond this impasse?  We are beginning to see cracks in these alliances.

Therefore, this not the whole story of our modern world and in particular American society.  The modern world is also the heir of the axial age and religious traditions that promoted universal values beyond narrow tribal interests of in our world identity politics.  Also emerged a secular state established to avoid religious monopolization and to help build a civic consensus of engagement and compromise along with a sense of transcendent values a faith that further built the sanctity of the individual yet avoided the minimization of collectives.

The legacy of these axial breakthroughs became embedded in the US. [Explain the Axial Age] Bellah and his colleagues identify four languages that are still alive and constitute the raw material of our current cultural evolutionary project. Two of the languages inform the individualism that is dominant as our first languages in American society, utilitarian individualism, and expressive individualism.   Less dominant today are two other languages, biblical religion, and civic republicanism. These are our second languages. At time in our nation’s history these languages were more informing to our self-understanding as a nation. Bellah and his co-authors maintain that these four languages still are embedded today in the lives of individuals struggling to understand themselves in the discordant existential reality they find themselves. In their conversations with Americans about what is meaningful they still give credence, beyond individualism to the importance of ultimate meaning that is not just about themselves and to a desire for a civic reality that upholds reasoned debate and compromise enshrined in our legal and political institutions.  People do not have to be divided within themselves.  They find resources to be more than what they might be pigeonholed as white evangelicals or secular atheists.  They are caring and struggling individuals seek wholeness.

However, a nation that gives more weight to giving people labels, a white male Republican Judge or an Asian liberal reporter, feeds the divisiveness of our society.  Further, what gets defined as success and worthy of applause is wealth and success as promoted by how much gets reported in the media, Elon Musk and all his strangeness or an entertainer with a high-profile divorce.  Even organizations with a vocation to be counter cultural to these characterizations fall into the dynamic of polarization mentality and individualism.  Nonprofits, often with a religious sponsor, organized to do good, find themselves having to market themselves to compete with other organization doing the same thing, driven by the lack of political will to maintain public goods that have to be picked up by private actors.  The rituals of solidarity are less reported and not given the accolades that would help give balance to the second languages.  Government activities become the battleground for staying in power rather than serving the interests of a large majority of individuals wanting responsible government action.  We are in what seems to be an intractable moment.  Much is at stake, democratic institutions, public health and welfare and the life of our planet.  What is there to sustain idealism?

The good news is that historically times of crisis can bring out Kairos moments. This is when a situation lifts up unsuspecting heroes and movements that rise to the occasion. It is a breakthrough moment. We have been living in such a moment with the war in Ukraine, to take one example.  It is a test for the world and for modernity itself.  It calls into question business as usual in terms of economic inequality, global politics, energy dependence on fossil fuels and alliances with autocratic regimes and he future of democratic institutions and international organizations set up to maintain peace.  The Ukraine is teaching us a lesson in the need for solidarity and a pathway to solidarity.  The Ukrainians claim they ae fighting for democracy for all the world, even as they fight for their own democratic future. 

They have been an inspiration to organize an international solidarity coalition of governments which in the recent past found little to agree on and were in the midst of a stalemate to address global crises, including the pandemic.  At the individual and cultural level, we have seen a response of solidarity not witnessed for years. Ukrainian flags are flying all over the world.  Opera singers stage a solidarity concert in Times square. There is even bi-partisan support in congress for action.  Crises, propel us to act in strange ways.  The story is not all roses.  We would have given up on the Ukraine if they had not exhibited will for self-determination.  We do not know what kind of world there will be for the Ukraine after the way.  Will they be part of Europe and the West that just recapitulates global individualism?  Ironically the “choice” is up to us.  This a decision based not just on choice being a sacred right, but “choice” being informed by analysis and support of certain values and practices that can sustain this option for future generations to have as a choice, democratic and international institutions that will be strong. 

There are others if we pay attention. Paying attention to these moments of building solidarity not just for our tribe but for the whole, these are sacramental moments of solidarity. For example, a mariachi band, coming to serenade the town of Uvalde Texas.  Or a Times square opera salute for solidarity with the Ukraine.  We might even see possible breakthroughs with elite ruling class warfare at the governmental level that can come together to support the Ukraine.  Mark these moments in some type of ritual.  Also give greater coverage to the public opinion supporting the Ukraine, despite “hardship” at the pump and food distribution. We are not being bombed and our country is not being destroyed.  Yes, there is a real hardship for some countries in desperate need for food. This must be solved independent of the war in Ukraine.  Use this crisis as a way for people to come together to force counties to open ports for delivery.  If a bank sanction hurts this distribution, revise the sanction for food and keep the other sanctions in place. In doing so we will have to address how our energy and food supplies are founded on untenable realities, that implicate all of us.  

 Again, Bellah’s Broken Covenant book offers an approach to help use a crisis to develop solidarity.  The first step is to honestly acknowledge past missteps and injustices that have gotten us to where we are.  This is a confessional stance that helps us better understand our complicity and how we might craft solutions that work for all. Again, I would suggest that CRT is part of the response that is needed to better understand systemic injustices so that we correct these practices. I would also suggest that the often-derided critical theorists are also and essential though limited part of the response.  We need to know our history in all its ugliness.   

Coda:

To be updated:

These are topics that I had wanted to explore at the time; but I never went back to them.  From the perspective of 2025, I need to complete this musing.  

Individualism is here to stay.  Therefore, we need to conceive of a responsible “ethical individualism” that build internal and external solidarity is the answer.  Identity politics that divides is not helpful.

Back to Dominican, a union for whom?

Need to lift up these events giving great recognition and voice to them.  They may not be popular with the entrenched elites or media talking heads.

An anti-polarization movement, built upon an anti-unfettered capitalism movement that cuts across the four languages.  and BLM or gun violence.  Climate change.  pandemic

Is this where we are, Is there another looming language either negative or positive.