I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging for the last few weeks due to exams. They went . . .
We’ll see.
Basically, though, that means my life has been limited to two main things: studying for exams (“revising,” as the British say) and attending the local church. Since I thought I’d spare you my deep, profound reflections on the feasibility of “really responsive regulation” or the efficacy of the credit rating agencies regulatory regime in the EU, I instead figured I’d devote this post to thinking through why I started attending this church, and what I’m looking for in doing so.
Let me first start with some admissions and context. First, though I was raised in a Christian household, the faith never “stuck” with me. Something about the religion just didn’t click with my elementary school-aged self. By middle school, I would have claimed to be a strong atheist — I had believed that ideas of science and modern rationality had outdated a need for religion (we are told, after all, that “God is dead”). I think by the middle of college, I had come to a much more uncertain agnosticism: truthfully, I have no idea whether there’s an afterlife or some higher being out there.
Second, beyond the theological questions, I did have experiences with religious institutions. Early on, I did attend church with my family until I essentially boycotted it. For some reason, I didn’t like the children at the church; I didn’t like the preaching (I was so bored and would fall asleep, probably snoring just to be extra obnoxious); and I didn’t find any value to the lessons I was ostensibly learning. In college, when I was on my semester and summer “abroad” in D.C., I ended up going to a local church for about half a year — I loved it there, and I do intend to go back if I’m ever in the area, but I’m not sure it moved my faith much. Certainly, though, those experiences gave me much greater appreciation for religious institutions. All of those experiences, I should say, were with Protestant denominations of Christianity, and so it is the religion I am most familiar and comfortable with. (One of my friends was gracious enough to take me to a Sunday Mass at a Roman Catholic church in college, which I found fascinating. But beyond that and my experiences with Protestant Christianity, I have few direct experiences with the practice of religion.)
That background has given me a kind of comfort and curiosity about Christianity, especially more recently, but it hasn't given me a compulsion to seek the faith. I had enjoyed when in Classical Political Theory, for example, we read portions of the Bible or St. Augustine’s Confessions. But I didn’t feel a desire to actively read those texts given all the other books I want to read. (I’ll note that I think I’ll add Confessions to my summer reading, because I do think it’s a fascinating book.)
The proximate cause, then, for me seeking out a church was, I’d say, three-fold. First, I wanted to meet different people — I’m nervous by how much of a bubble I sometimes feel that I’m in, and I feel like churches with a sense of community (especially local community) are a great way of getting out of certain kinds of bubbles. (But see, of course, research on residential segregation and links to political bubbles.) Second, and related, I wanted to meet British people — not because I don’t love the diversity of London (they say you’ll hear five different languages walking five minutes in London, which I think is probably an underestimate), but because I feel some kind of obligation to meet non-transient, -cosmopolitan folk (LSE is 70% international) given the program I’m on is a cultural exchange program. Third, and most important, is that I’ve been thinking about a few ideas from Judith Shklar and her 1984 book, Ordinary Vices.
I’ll admit that I learned the central thrust of the book from (who else?) David Runciman’s History of Ideas; season 2 ends with a discussion of Judith Shklar, a somewhat obscure contemporary political theorist. I was somewhat aware of her work before (I wrote about one of her essays in my post about political theory a few months ago), but I hadn’t engaged with her work much. I’m currently working my way through the book itself, and this post focuses on the first few chapters that I’ve read.
Runciman’s telling of Shklar’s thought left me thinking about two ideas that I felt were especially compelling: first, Shklar says that we’re inevitably going to perform what she calls the “ordinary vices” of cruelty, betrayal, hypocrisy, snobbery, and misanthropy; and second, as vices of our personalities, they exist at both a personal and political level, and our political response ought to differ from our personal response to these vices. That second point will matter for thinking about formal politics, but I want to examine the first point mostly for this post.
If we’re inevitably flawed — if we’re inevitably cruel, betrayers, hypocrites, snobs, and misanthropes — then what do we do? As Runciman explains it, Shklar thinks that being ethical is about exercising good judgment — about being judicious about how much (and how) we allow ourselves to be viceful. Shklar’s most famous idea from Ordinary Vices is simple: put cruelty first. But putting cruelty first, she suggests, can lead to all kinds of vice, including, most troublingly, further cruelty. Think, for example, of communist dictators who have justified all kinds of cruelty in the name of emancipation and equality — in the name of eradicating cruelty. I came away from that episode thinking that Shklar’s ideas are helpful but wanting more depth — I wanted guidance that comprised more than just: “exercise good judgment.”
The parallels to religion — and specifically Christianity — jumped out to me when listening to Runciman’s account. I’d venture to guess that all religions have a moral component to them, and they have institutionalized mechanisms for promoting those teachings. Moreover, Christianity assumes human flaws to be inherent (original sin), paralleling Shklar’s argument about the inevitability of ordinary vices. So I figured that looking to Christian teaching, and thinking through how Christianity institutionalizes its moral education, could be a good place to look for a supplement to Shklar’s thought.
Is Christianity a misguided place to look? I can think of a few arguments for why Christianity isn’t the answer: the problems of Christian cruelty and of ethics and faith. Both arguments have force, and so I feel a need to think them through and justify why I believe they are ultimately wrong.
The Problem of Christian Cruelty. The argument, I think, goes something like this: maybe Christianity has no moral high ground with which to teach morality. Many historical atrocities — much cruelty — has been inflicted on others in the name of Christianity, such that maybe its teachings are inapt for an ethical system that puts cruelty first. It was in the name of Christianity that conquistadors of the Spanish empire colonized, enslaved, and committed genocide against Native peoples of the Americas. It was in the name of Christianity that many slaveholders in the American South justified their peculiar institution. And Christianity’s moral stain isn’t just a matter of history: today, much coercion and cruelty against LGBTQ people, to take only one example, are justified in the name of Christianity.
Shklar writes of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The truth about Christianity, as Hawthorne saw it, was that it feeds and thrives on our natural propensity toward cruelty.” Hawthorne dramatized Puritan Massachusetts. He wrote about the ways in which its conformist ethic demonized non-Christians and how, when left with none to demonize, Christian theology “turn[ed] inward upon the self,” yielding self-hatred, and guilt, and humiliation. Thus the Nietzschean critique — that a religion of the meek that seeks to purify our natural inclinations yields a most pitiful version of humanity. Shklar summarizes: “The physical discharge of cruelty had been blocked by Christianity and turned inward against the self. Such a psyche was made to suffer cruelly from sin, guilt, and bad conscience. . . . In its long career, Christianity and its secularized offspring had made Europeans sick, crippled, tame, weak, awkward, mediocre, bored, timid herd animals.”
In light of that history and practice, why turn to Christianity for moral guidance?
The Problem of Ethics and Faith. A second argument might be that Christianity, perhaps, just doesn’t say all that much about ethics — that the fundamental message is about faith rather than ethics. I’ve joined the student Bible study at the church, and we have been reading the Epistle to the Galatians, where Paul instructs an early Christian church in Galatia about the proper teachings of Christianity. As I’ve had it explained to me, a central message in Galatians is that living according to law* cannot enable salvation — that only accepting a closeness to God can. Indeed, the final discussion question from our reading of Galatians 2: “How would you explain the difference between being moral and being a Christian to someone that thinks being good makes them acceptable to God?” Perhaps, one could say, there is not much there there, so to speak.
Each argument, I think, has force, but I don’t think they’re ultimately persuasive.
Begin with the problem of Christian cruelty. Here, I would make three arguments. First, the argument flies in the face of my own life and experiences. Many of the people whom I most respect are Christians, and their faith seems an integral part of what makes them respectable: their devotion to certain principles, their caring for others, their belief in the value of community, and so on. I find it difficult to summarily reject a doctrine that has so much force for so many people by adopting such an overarching critique, one that captures few of the nuances of my experiences.
Second, it seems to me unduly harsh to ideas, which are always pervertible. Many of the values I most care about — equality, freedom, human rights — are invoked to justify the worst of atrocities, but I do not ascribe the atrocities to those values. In other words, it seems to me that the burden must be not merely “x idea has been used for bad ends” but that something intrinsic about the ideas themselves leads to, or tends toward, bad ends.
Certainly some of the critiques get at this latter burden, but I’m not sure I find them persuasive. Hawthorne may be right that Christian ethics are invoked to discipline members of a congregation, and in Puritan Massachusetts that may have been quite dangerous — but the idea in the abstract isn’t so (after all, social shaming is a crucial and natural way to institutionalize values). Similarly, the Nietzschean critique seems to be that Christianity makes us less proud of our natural ways of living, in favor of conformism and weakness. But is that so bad? To take the Shklarian view is to assume that our natural inclinations aren’t good — that we tend toward vice and that limiting at least some of those vices (foremost cruelty) is a good thing. Discipline is an important part of putting cruelty first. Going too far is, of course, a bad thing; McCarthyism is no virtue. But these are arguments about how extremist Christian values may become cruel and violent — they don’t imply that those values inherently will become such. Indeed, they may be better commentaries on extremism than they are on Christianity.
Third, and relatedly, what matters to me is about how ideas become lived — how we structure life around and with them. (Remember that my original motivation was to learn about how to live according to Shklarian ethics.) I think religion has historically been an important way in which societies have passed down ethics. Religions are therefore a good place to start for thinking through ethical questions precisely because they are lived and not merely analyzed in solitude. One of the wisest things I’ve learned while being in the UK, which I wrote about half a year ago, is the importance of community for ethics. Accountability, reputation, acceptance, guilt, shame — these are powerful forces in life, at least for me, and they point toward community and relationships as a means for becoming more moral. To put this point in a jargon-y, academic way: churches institutionalize accountability relationships by which members become beholden to the church’s mission. People systematically congregate to examine a central set of ideas, and they hold each other to account for living in accordance with those ideas. I think learning about how a church achieves its mission can be a way to think about ethical living even if I end up becoming disillusioned with the message of the church.
Turn now to the second problem — the problem of ethics and faith. This problem is somewhat difficult to answer since I am very much still learning about Christian thinking, but I can sketch out two potential answers, one of which I find more compelling than the other.
The first is a rough paraphrase of what I was told when I brought up a question in our study of Galatians 2. The argument is that ethics follows faith. That is, once one accepts the Gospel, then one will feel an obligation to act in service of God. And in doing so, one will act in an ethical way. Presumably this answer is in part to deal with a dilemma: a Christian can’t argue that ethics are irrelevant to salvation (surely the “creative compiler” who believes in their heart-of-hearts in the resurrection of Jesus but who acts cruelly in everyday life cannot make it to heaven), but he or she also can’t argue that ethics are just as relevant as faith, for the Bible teaches that faith in Jesus is the exclusive means of salvation. And the middle-ground answer (ethics are relevant but not as important as faith) seems rather vague so as to be unhelpful.
All that said, I would add two observations about this argument. First, note that it doesn’t give any prescription — it doesn’t teach how to be ethical, so much as assuming that one will seek to be ethical upon being faithful. In other words, this answer alone can’t get us to the goal of thinking about how to live an ethical life. We would need to look somewhere else (presumably to the Gospel and the life of Jesus). Second, and related, the argument either must gerrymander the meaning of accepting the Gospel to include some sense of ethics (i.e., that genuine acceptance of Jesus’s resurrection cannot enable the “creative complier” discussed earlier), at which point we’re back in the middle-ground of ethics and faith being connected but differently weighed, or it is an empirical statement about the meaning of acceptance (i.e., any who accept Jesus’s resurrection will seek to act in service of God). I think this argument is quite interesting and thought-provoking in terms of how to conceive of religious motivation and how that translates into ethics. But I am neither convinced of its instructiveness (for my specific purpose) nor of its analytical clarity.
Another argument is that, perhaps, Christianity in fact has much to say about ethics — and that much of that ethical teaching is separable from the faith (or, at least, that that teaching has relevance outside of the faith even if it is meant to be inseparable from faith). I do not know whether this argument will be controversial among practicing Christians. I have a weekly lunch with one of the workers at the Church, and when I discussed my original interest in the ethical teachings of the Church based on the ideas of Shklar, he responded with some skepticism: In essence, he thought, the core ethical teachings of Christianity just aren’t that surprising — one could come up with many of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount absent turning to Christianity. But in thinking more about Christianity, it does seem to me that a few core practices of the religion are in fact quite enlightening from a Shklarian perspective.
Putting Cruelty First. It occurs to me that the central story of Christianity — the crucifixion of Jesus — is an allegory about cruelty. And when I was walking through the British Museum (pictures below) and thinking about Shklar and Christianity, it occurred to me that much of the iconography of Christianity essentially boils down to reminding the viewer of just how cruel humans can be. After all, crucifixion is not an ordinary method of execution; it is among the most cruel and unusual punishments one can devise, one meant to inflict an agonizing, public, humiliating death on the victim. Cruelty inheres in the figure of the cross, and it is difficult not to think about that cruelty when confronted with Christian imagery.
Interestingly enough, Shklar begins her book by reference to religion and argues that her ethics must exist outside of a religious framework. She distinguishes at the beginning between sin and vice — how sins are committed against God, whereas vices are committed against humans. For her, putting cruelty first must exist outside of a religious framework, for cruelty
is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm. . . . By putting it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it is a purely human verdict upon human conduct and so puts religion at a certain distance.
The crucifixion seems contrary to her analysis. If humans are said to be made in the image of God, and they are to be cherished as such, then it follows that putting cruelty first for its own sake can certainly follow from a Christian ethics. Indeed, isn’t the central paradox of Jesus in Christian teaching that he was both divine and human? And if he was so, doesn’t centering the violence done onto him reflect not only violence against God, but also violence against a man? It seems to me that the focus on Jesus’s crucifixion centers cruelty against humans as an ethical problem in itself.
I want to make the further argument that my (elementary) understanding of Christian ethics can be enlightening by reference to Shklar’s analysis of putting cruelty first. In other words, I want to show that thinking with the grain may yield fruitful ethical insights, even if one does not believe in the axioms undergirding Christian beliefs (e.g., the truth of Jesus’s resurrection, etc.).
Shklar says that putting cruelty first can lead to two tendencies: misanthropy or victim-glorification. The first is intuitive. When we immerse ourselves in the extent of cruelty in this world, it’s easy to come away thinking of humans as bad — as wicked creatures, capable of inflicting so much pain and damage on each other and our environment. (Just think of dog-lovers, who will often say that we do not deserve as kind-hearted companions as dogs. Wouldn’t everyone become some kind of animal lover after thinking about cruelty for too long? See, e.g., r/Eyebleach.) Putting cruelty first requires openly acknowledging the cruelty that exists. Cynicism isn’t far away.
Shklar also points, though, to a second tendency for those who put cruelty first. In reveling in the cruelty of the tormentor, they find solace in the virtues of the tormented. Those upon whom cruelty is inflicted become heroes: courageous people who define what it means to be a good person (think Mandela or Gandhi, Hamer or Anne Frank). Shklar is skeptical of our tendency to find as virtuous the victims of cruelty, not necessarily because she doubts any particular victims’ virtues but because she thinks the argument is facially absurd: to be a victim is to have cruelty done to you; victimhood doesn’t speak to your character. Her teacher throughout this book is Montaigne, the French essayist, and she critiques Montaigne’s tendency to valorize losers in wars, as if they were not equally seeking to be victors — to become the cruel tormentors. Thus, if one tendency of putting cruelty first is deep cynicism and despair about humans, the opposite tendency of victim-valorization is simply a salve for that cynicism: in doing so, the victims, in Shklar’s words, “are being used untruthfully, as a means to nourish our self-esteem and to control our own fears.”
It seems here that the Christian form of putting cruelty first does respond to these pitfalls. The premise of Jesus’s death is that of sacrifice — that in dying on behalf of humanity, Jesus might redeem and forgive humans for their sins. The story is simultaneously one about the wickedness of humanity and yet its redemption — how it might nevertheless be worthy of salvation. This is a story that on its face refuses misanthropy; it refuses to believe that people are irredeemably, irrevocably bad, even when they have committed the worst of vice and sin. This is a story that is victim-glorifying, of course, since the victim is said to be God. But in doing so, it reminds us that glorification is limited to something higher than us — in other words, such a sacrifice that ought to be glorified juxtaposes with humans, whose victimhood will nevertheless be subject to imperfections. In that sense, it seems to me that the central Christian teaching is one that affirms much of Shklarian ethics: it puts cruelty first while also recognizing and addressing the likely implications of misanthropy and victim-glorification.
Institutionalizing Reflection. There is a second way, I would submit, that Christian ethics may have much to teach, from a Shklarian perspective. I’ve been reading the Sermon on the Mount with the worker at the church over our weekly lunches. Last week, we got through the Beatitudes (11 verses!). But there was a particular line that, especially when he explained it, stood out to me.
“Blessed,” Jesus is recorded as preaching, “are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:5). As my friend explained it, Jesus is not blessing any generic mourner; someone who mourns a family member’s death will not cease to be blessed in a few weeks when they have finished their mourning. Rather, those who are blessed are those who are capable of mourning, who are and continue to be attentive to the cruelty that exists even as it is so easy to become hardened to daily injustices.
Insofar as Christianity teaches methods of following through with that blessing, I think Christianity very directly teaches a way to put cruelty first in our everyday lives. And it does seem to me that systematic prayer, that requirement of daily (or weekly) reflection and consideration of what is good, inculcates such a mourning worldview. Moreover, doing so in a group — praying in front of others and vocalizing those commitments — builds lines of accountability that help turn sentiments into reality. I’m reminded of Shklar’s observation that the sentimentality of Virginian slaveholders — recorded, no less, in their diaries — was a method of assuaging guilt while avoiding doing the hard work of dismantling a morally bankrupt system of life. Openly professing one’s sentiments perhaps leads to more action than to mere guilt-assuasion, if only because it exposes one to charges of hypocrisy.
These thoughts are very much cursory ideas. I’ve attended only a few Sunday services, had only a few conversations with members at the church. And similarly, I’ve only read the first few chapters of Shklar's book. So I expect (hope) my thoughts will evolve and change. I would love your insights, though, since I am very much muddling through these ideas.
*There was ambiguity in the seminar as to whether Paul was discussing divine or state-based law, although as it was explained in the seminar, the term “law” seemed to be all-inclusive, i.e., to be closer to the idea of duty in deontological ethics than to law as a sociological phenomenon.
* * * * *
Roses: Life has been quite boring recently because it has almost entirely been devoted to studying for exams. But some fun things that happened over the past few weeks:
* I went to a second-hand bookstore with a Marshall friend. It was lovely. I’ve been on the lookout for books by some authors who seem really important that I’ve never read (Baldwin, Shklar, Schattschneider, Fenno, Cedric Robinson, Quentin Skinner, Skocpol, Converse, V.O. Key). Do let me know if you think there are others I should add to that list — I’m thinking mostly of political thinkers and historians. I ended up getting a C. Vann Woodward book (unexpected, but I’m very excited, especially as I begin to ramp up reading about Southern history for my dissertation) as well as a book by Skinner (more to be expected, since he’s the only UK person on this list).
* I got to attend senior politics thesis presentations, which were wonderful.
* I had my LSE friend over to make pizzas over the weekend, which was really fun! The pizzas turned out pretty well (all the props go to Andrew for making good dough).
* I had a really nice call with a fellow Marshall on Monday. I didn’t know her too well, and the one time I had called her before, I was worried that I had alienated her by asking too many questions. (She grew up on a farm, and I was just so curious.) But the call on Monday felt much less awkward.
* It turns out there’s a group of American Southerners around my age who are on a church fellowship, and they got paired with this local Anglican church. I’m getting to know some of them (I got lunch with one of them on Tuesday), and that’s been quite nice.
* I had a catchup call with one of my old Pomona professors, which is always nice.
* Andrew made gumbo, and it was truly glorious. Cajun food: one of humanity’s great treasures.
* I went to the British Museum on Monday since museums just opened up this week, and I wanted a bit of a break from academics after so many weeks of exam prep.
Buds:
* I’m going to start a collaboration with a connection at NYU’s Brennan Center looking at districting in the UK compared with the US, which will be interesting.
* I’m excited to catch up with friends; I feel like I’ve been ignoring much socializing (the roses list may be a bit misleading — almost all of that happened since this last weekend, after I had finished my exams!).
* I’m excited to get back into blogging and writing stuff that no one reads :)
* Some Marshalls are visiting London this weekend, and I’m going to see an old friend on Saturday, so both should be fun.
* I get to dive in more deeply into my thesis soon, which will be exciting.
Thorns:
* My sleep schedule right now is truly messed up. In part this is due to mistakes on Saturday (basically going to a pub on an empty stomach and getting unexpectedly drunk), but probably more important is that I’m trying to cut out coffee right now. After having around 3–4 cups of coffee every day for the last few weeks, I’ve decided to go cold turkey. Life feels very blurry.