Burqahs and Birettas

[I put this piece on the blog last January, but then moved it to my website. In view of the fact that the website gets far fewer visitors than the blog, I decided to move it back, slightly revised, to the blog.]

            The biggest problem facing Roman Catholicism today is the failure of its leadership to replace itself. The average age of female religious, male religious and priests keeps going up. Even if you grant that the Church in the United States was “overstocked” with priests and sisters in the 1950s, the numbers of young men and women entering religious life and priesthood today are nowhere near enough to continue parish life and the ministry of religious at a level that most of us would think desirable. The Church needs clergy and both Church and world need religious. Now is not the time in history for the Church to go AWOL in the face of the world’s challenges.

            Conservative elements in the Church, under the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, seem to be trying out the hypothesis that the root of the shortage problem is that priests and sisters since Vatican II have gotten away from an observably “spiritual” way of living. Presumably they have therefore also gotten away from the essence of a spiritually vital life. The answer is to return to pre-Vatican II styles of dress and liturgy.

            As a sociologist I think the “spiritual-abandonment” hypothesis obscures another motive, a motive probably unconscious among many. I speak from my own experience. The motive is social prestige. For most of my younger life I would have vehemently denied that a desire for social prestige had anything to do with my decision to become a priest and religious, but now I have to admit that such a motive probably lurked beneath my conscious thinking.

            If this motive is operating, the theory becomes that priests and religious no longer get the social prestige that can motivate new recruits, and that the way to get that prestige is to increase the social distance between them and the laity. Thus, for example, priests should not attend Mass like lay persons. If a priest does not concelebrate, he should attend Mass from a kneeler in the sanctuary. Religious and priests should return to wearing distinctive garb. Cassocks and birettas are coming back into style, and women’s groups are encouraged to return to old-style religious garb.

            We Friars Minor here at Quincy University are wearing our “habits” more than we used to. I do not see our motivation as a seeking after prestige, but as an attempt to dramatize the importance of certain values in an academic environment. The problem is that wearing a certain garb does not get at the core of the problem. If we were bold enough, we could issue religious garb to the entire faculty and require them to wear it on campus. The core of the problem is that the entire Church, and indeed the entire world, has to come to terms with modern culture.

            Church authorities point out that the Church in the “less developed” world is drawing priesthood candidates. Seminaries, they say, are full. However, those regions are starting from a much smaller base, and have a much greater need. For example, we consider ourselves in North America as severely under-staffed with priests, with one priest for every 1,536 Catholics. In Asia the ratio is one for every 2,310 Catholics, in Africa it is one for every 4,729, and in South America it is one for every 7,155 Catholics (Statistical Yearbook of the Church, as cited in “The CARA Report,” Summer, 2008). But large segments of society in Asia, Africa, and South America are hell bent on replicating the cultural patterns of western Europe and the U.S. As they succeed in doing this, will they run up against the same problems we are having? I think they will.

            If secularism is the lion, and the U.S. is the den of secularism, we have to “beard the lion in its den.” We have to deal with it where it is strongest, not where it is weakest.

The Head-scarf

            The wearing of distinctive women’s garb (the head-scarf, hijab, in more secular Muslim societies, or the burqah or chador in more religious ones) is a matter of controversy in many places. Iran is the most dramatic example. Under the Shah, women in Iran were encouraged to become educated and to abandon such garb. After the Khomeini revolution, the chador, the head-to-toe covering of women, was re-instated and enforced by law. These regulations, which the novelist Azar Nafisi portrays in Reading Lolita in Tehran, are oppressive, but seem mild in comparison to the practices of the Taliban, who burn girls’ schools.

            The Catholic Church hierarchy’s attempts to restrict discussion of priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, and inclusive language in the liturgy are the Catholic version of the same struggle, a struggle over the role of women. The hierarchy seems to believe that essential Church beliefs are under attack by modern gender norms, and that the Church must take a stand against those norms.

            The real issue is one that sociologists of religion have been discussing for the last forty years: can religion survive the secularizing influences of what we call “modernity”? We Catholics in the U.S. answer with a resounding “yes,” and even Benedict seems to recognize that we are doing something right here. But when it comes to patterns of gender behavior, the United States suddenly becomes the opposition. The Church here seems to be maintaining a remarkably high level of church involvement by its laity, far higher than that maintained in Italy, but we are accused of selling out to a secular culture. It would be tragic if the developments of the last forty years in liturgy and parish life here in the U.S. were to be replaced by a 1950s Catholic culture.

            Officially, celibacy has nothing to do with norms about women’s behavior. Celibacy is intended to allow the priest, in St. Paul’s words, to be “concerned about the things of God.” If he were married, he would have to be concerned about pleasing his wife. But in actuality celibacy requires that women be kept at a distance. Priests are not to socialize too much with women. Dropping norms of separation from women will result in the “loss of vocation,” and certainly history has borne this out. Sexual attraction is one of the strongest of human tendencies, one that certainly deserves to be labeled as “natural law.” The price of celibacy is separation from women, and, just as in racial matters, separate is inherently unequal.

            The real battle is over the issue of sexuality, and of how to manage it so that its power can build up society rather than destroy its fabric. The mullahs believe that women must be covered because otherwise men will be unable to restrain themselves. Men certainly have problems restraining themselves, but veiling the women will not solve the problem.

            The fact that we are not able to motivate young people in our country to accept Church norms about celibacy and the ordination of women says that the Church cannot avoid the issue. We are not persuading young men and women to live apart in the ways that celibacy requires. We are no more successful in persuading young women to dress in traditional religious habits than the authorities in Iran are in persuading young women there to wear the chador. A few will do it. The rest, unless forced by law, will choose otherwise.

The Solution

            The solution is that the Church must reconfigure its leadership to allow for the development of healthy male-female relationships. This does not mean accepting promiscuity, it means accepting fidelity. It is a scandal that canon law expels members of religious orders the moment the person “attempts marriage,” but defends the man or woman against expulsion when the behavior involves simple fornication. This norm contradicts the Church’s claim that it stands in favor of committed marriage relationships over temporary sexual liaisons.

            One obstacle, probably the biggest one, standing in the way of allowing priests to marry is the issue of property.  It costs a lot less to support a celibate man than to support a man with wife and children. That argument made sense when Church finances centered on the day-to-day operation of parishes and seminaries. But suddenly the Church in this country has had to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to pay lawsuits involving sexual misconduct of priests. If we in the Church can find huge sums of money to settle lawsuits, we should be able to pay a living wage to priests who have families.

            The experience of men and women in Catholic Worker houses is a good model. Many young people have been drawn to the Catholic Worker because of its style of living in poor neighborhoods and inviting needy men and women to share their home. The idealism that draws these Workers is the same as the idealism that drew so many of us as young men and women to priesthood and religious life. But often, as the days of struggling with human realities pass by, Workers find themselves drawn to each other and end up deciding to commit themselves to marriage. A few, like Dorothy Day herself, continue to live in the Worker communities and raise children there. Others leave but keep contact with the Workers and develop ministries that serve the Church and society in the places where they decide to live. There is no pressure to marry, and there is no pressure to avoid marriage. As God calls, the men and women involved are free to respond without censure by the group. In fact, their commitment to each other is seen as an enrichment of the group.

            Celibacy has locked the Church into a system where young men and women cannot commit themselves to the Church during the years when they have the most idealism and energy. Instead, they must spend those years in some other work. If their desire to serve the Church survives these years, they can then enter the seminary or religious life. They are now able to make a “mature vocational decision.” Meanwhile they have moved further and further away from the direct contact with younger people that could inspire those younger people to follow a Gospel calling. I decided in the sixth grade that I wanted to be a priest. Our parish had a kindly pastor in his late 60s. I admired him, but the man who had the most influence on my desire to serve the Church was his younger assistant, just ordained, who taught catechism in our school and brought his dog “Smoky” to the classes.

            Of course, as Rome knows, if men are allowed to marry and still be priests, women will not be far behind in seeking ordination. That is the dynamic of life in our cultures. The question the Church has to ask is, can we win this battle?

            Years ago I heard a Methodist minister predict that the Catholic Church will go the way of the Anglican Church. As the number of Anglican ministers declined, a lay movement sprang up and replaced Anglicanism with a new form of Christianity, Methodism. What was lost was Eucharist, the thing that Catholicism has always seen as central to a Christian life.

            No one has counted the number of young Catholic women who have left the Church to seek ordination in a Protestant community. No one has counted the number of young Catholic men who have reluctantly decided to choose another life course than priesthood because they were not sure they could commit themselves to lifelong celibacy. All we see are aging priests, sisters, and brothers. Meanwhile Church authorities keep hoping for a turnaround, light at the end of the tunnel.

            I don’t think it will work. The only solution is to back up out of the tunnel and make use of the light that is already out there.

The fatal wound in natural law

          Last summer I attended a two-day workshop against racism sponsored by a group called “Crossroads.” The Office of Social Concerns of the Springfield, Illinois diocese paid my way.

          I mention the sponsorship because it represents an effort by Catholic Church leadership to deal with the still-powerful effects of centuries of racist thinking in the world and in the Church.

          The workshop began with a historical overview of how racist ideas and attitudes developed in our world. The narrators picked up the story in the 1500s, when European kingdoms began to explore Africa and the Americas.

          I say they “picked up” the story, because there surely must have been earlier examples of racism in history. Maybe those stories are too far buried in history for us to recover them with any degree of confidence.

          The history of racist thinking, even if we start the story only in the 1500s, is enough to call into question how well we can read moral principles from “the nature of reality.” Is it any more obvious from nature that homosexual behavior is morally evil than it was obvious for hundreds of years that certain kinds of human beings are less human than we are?

          It was certainly obvious for hundreds of years to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that certain human beings were less than others. Those were the years when the bishop of Rome not only claimed the authority to lead the Church, but claimed to lead the entire world. Pope Alexander VI, for example, decreed that all lands in the Americas east of a specified “line of demarcation” were to belong to Portugal, and all the lands west of that line were to belong to Spain. What Portugal and Spain were doing in those lands was using their military force to take resources from those places. If the people there had problems with such taking, it was obvious to the Europeans, including the bishop of Rome, that the people in those lands were somehow less important than Europeans, and possibly not as human. They were not as human as Europeans even if they became Christian. For example, natives could not be candidates for priesthood and religious life in the Church.

          Most of the present-day societies in Latin America still struggle with a three-tiered social structure: on the top are the “white” Spanish-origin people, in between are the mixed race people, the mestizos, the majority of the population, and on the bottom are the “indigenous” peoples, the people who have lived there for thousands of years.

          The fact that few peoples in the world have lived anywhere “for thousands of years” introduces complications in the story. Spain, for example, grew out of the mixture of several other groups, as its indigenous groups mixed with Jews and with “Moors,” people from African and middle-eastern regions. I suppose that it was a relief for Spaniards whose own genetic background was somewhat spoiled to find other people whose genetic background was undeniably more spoiled than theirs. Poor whites in this country have been comforted by the argument that they are at least not as bad as blacks.

          The history of this kind of thinking calls into question any use of the term “natural law” in the determination of what is right and what is wrong. If natural law is supposed to be able to be read from the nature of things, why has it been considered natural for so long to treat some people as less human than other people?

          This is no small problem. Some of the most intractable and peace-threatening situations in our world owe their origins to this kind of thinking. Just to limit examples to the last twenty years, think of the Bosnian conflict, or of the Rwandan genocide, of the Jewish-Palestinian situation, of the relations between India and Pakistan, or even of the Shi’ite-Sunni struggle within Islam.

          Sociology and other social sciences long ago rejected any argument based on “nature” It is too easy to paste the label “natural” on anything that you think is correct, regardless of the evidence for its correctness. “Nature” is a cop-out. In sociology, if I want to argue that a human practice or rule is good or bad, I have to provide empirical evidence for its goodness or badness.

          I write this in defense of John Joseph Lakers’s argument that natural law thinking cannot be the basis of moral judgments. His argument is tortured--see his book Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy and his website (www.qufriary.org/Lakers ). His argument is that is that several centuries of philosophical critique of natural law thinking have demolished the effectiveness of that kind of thinking. Lakers uses linguistic analysis and a literary approach to Scripture to arrive at the conclusion that moral judgments can only be based on what he calls “a metaphor of intimacy.” He defines intimacy as “passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement” of one human being with another or with God.

          A morality grounded in a metaphor of intimacy is, he says, “without foundations.” It is floating in a world of human relationships. But it is not floating so freely that “anything goes.” Using intimacy as a criterion for moral behavior can be far more demanding than natural law. For example, using intimacy as the basis for moral judgments would make it impossible for me to treat another human being as less human than myself.

          Citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lakers argues that every moral statement depends on terms whose meanings are based on a “form of life.” My translation of this is: “a term gets its meaning from its use in a story.” There are two kinds of stories that ground Christian moral thinking. One kind is based on the metaphor of power and judgment—God is an angry God who will punish you if you do not follow the law. The other is based on the metaphor of intimacy—God is passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully involved with each human being in history. The metaphor of power and judgment is found in those parts of Scripture that created “the Law”—the stories of Moses and the Israelites receiving the Law from God on Mount Sinai. The other metaphor is grounded in prophets like Jeremiah and Hosea, and even more in the New Testament stories of Jesus and the theology of Paul.

          Natural law was too easy. It got in bed with the worst of human tendencies and legitimated them for centuries. In the meantime the rest of the world gradually changed its moral judgments. The Church was slow to learn that some human beings are not less human than others. We were slow to learn that slavery is evil. We are only now learning that violence causes more problems than it solves. We are learning that sexual desires are not evil.

          I could be wrong, but I think we are learning that people born homosexual are better off in committed relationships with other homosexual people than in living without such commitment. I have yet to see how calling such a relationship a “marriage” threatens heterosexual marriages. I would think that more people striving to live a commitment would strengthen all people trying to live a commitment.

          I think we are learning that denying women participation in some human activities simply because they are women can no longer be defended. It is no longer obvious from nature that women are so different from men that women should not be allowed to strive to play certain roles.   If I am to relate respectfully and vulnerably to a woman seeking ordination, on what grounds can I tell her “you cannot do this”?

          The fact that public opinion seems to be increasingly in favor of the legitimacy of gay marriage and of the ordination of women in the Church is not a sign of the decadence of our culture but of the weakness of our natural law reasoning. We should not be ashamed to learn. We have done it often enough before.

On restraining health care costs

          We all know that we as a nation have to somehow cut back on our spending. We know that a large proportion of our spending is for health care. Unless we can slow down the expansion of health care spending, we will not be able to control our budget.

          Here are some reasons why health care costs are rising so fast:

           

               1. Medical providers have to multiply procedures and pay more for insurance because the threat of malpractice suits hangs over every medical decision.

               2. Doctors, hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies consume time and money administering our complex system of paying for health care. Every medical procedure involves decisions about who pays and how much. Everything has to be documented, either for insurance companies, the government, or both. The transfer of documentation from paper to computers is presented as reducing human effort, but computers make it too easy to introduce improvements and exceptions, and these increase complexity.

               3. The expense of inventing, testing, and marketing new drugs is huge. Pharmaceutical companies can rightfully claim that they charge thousands of dollars for a single injection because of what they have had to spend developing the drug.

               4. A similar problem exists with regard to the technology of medical care. New and often very costly machines to scan or treat the body more effectively are constantly being invented and marketed.  

               5. People are getting sick more than they used to. This is partly due to personal behaviors, such as eating too much, and partly to environmental conditions, such as allergies that may be caused by new substances in the environment.

               6. There are more people in the “likely to get sick” category. This means especially the older population, because as we get older, we require more health services of all kinds. The baby boom generation will swell the numbers of older people tremendously.

          The first five of the above reasons are heavily influenced by the profit motive.

               1. Insurance companies make money when doctors buy malpractice insurance. Lawyers make money from malpractice lawsuits.

               2. The sellers of computer technology and the work force that gets paid to process medical information profit from the complicated payment system we have.

               3 and 4. Pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers exist to make profit for their shareholders.

               5. Food processors and marketers, including restaurant operators, make profit from people who eat more, even when they eat more than they should. Industry is constantly inventing new products for the home and yard. Some of the new products will cause health problems, but, as in the case of asbestos or “black lung disease,” those problems may not appear for years.

          The bottom line is that the profit motive is behind much of our health inflation problem.

Market Distortions

          Governments have deep pockets. When a government pays for something, market forces are sidelined. The providers have an incentive to charge more for their products, and to invent products that they would otherwise not have invented. There is a disconnect between the taxpayer and the consumer of a particular health product. Patients will happily use a product that costs them little, and the cost is passed on to the insurance provider or the government. The insurance provider shifts as much of the cost as possible to the government. The government’s subsidies are becoming too great for the taxpayer to bear.

          Somehow it must become possible for government to say, “We cannot pay for this research or this service. We simply do not have the resources to do it.” But when a politician suggests this as a solution, his or her opponents cry “death panel.”

          The market forces arrayed against reducing subsidies that benefit wealthy patients are powerful: insurance companies, lawyers, information system manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, and the food and chemical industries.

          Simply allowing market forces to operate will not solve our problem of the cost of medical care. Ayn Rand does not have the answers.

Can physical and emotional scars be redeemed?

          Last Friday’s gospel was the story from Luke of Jesus appearing to the disciples, showing them his hands and side, and eating a piece of broiled fish with them. I preached on how all the parts of our stories, including the painful ones, will be part of our resurrected selves. Physical wounds, like the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and feet, will be visible in us, but caught up in a new fullness of healing. Mental and emotional wounds will also be part of our resurrected story, also caught up in that new healed fullness.

          One of the people present at Mass came up to me after Mass and said that she disagreed with what I said. She said that after the resurrection we will be perfect, “without any sin.” She was quite adamant that there will be no hint of any bad memory in our resurrected state.

          We went back and forth for a few minutes, of course without any resolution, but the exchange made me realize that I have rejected the spirituality I grew up with, which is the one she was defending. That divide, between a spirituality focused on sin and its removal, versus one focused on how Jesus’ sharing our story redeems that story without removing its memory, may be the most fundamental divide in present-day Christianity. It cuts across denominational lines. Catholics who share the first version of Christian spirituality may be closer to Protestant “evangelicals” than to me.

          The divide is not limited to the laity. Our bishop of Springfield, Thomas John Paprocki, recently mandated that every Mass in the diocese should end with a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel against the power of the devil. Bishop Paprocki, who sponsored a workshop on exorcism in connection with last November’s meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, defended his mandate by stating that the devil is never more powerful than when he convinces us of his non-existence.

          In contrast to that spirituality, John Joseph Lakers, my friar philosopher and friend, likes to say, on the basis of thousands of hours of conversation with deeply troubled individuals and couples, “people sin not because they are wicked but because they are wounded.” He goes on to say that he has never encountered a situation where he thought the devil was involved. I don’t have nearly the same depth of experience as he has, but I have to say the same thing.

          I am reading Stanley Karnow’s history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson continued to prosecute the war, causing tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to lose their lives. He stuck to his policy, even after he had begun to realize that the policy was failing,  because he feared that his political opponents would charge him with being “soft on Communism” if he changed the policy. Surely there was evil in his decision, but was the devil involved? Of course I cannot prove that the devil was not, but the evil is understandable without reference to the devil.

          One of the ten trends that John Allen describes in his 2010 book The Future Church is Pentecostalism, and one of the features of Pentecostalism that he lists is “an emphasis on evil spirits.” He says “many Pentecostals say they have personally witnessed the devil or evil spirits being driven out of someone.” Is Bishop Paprocki tuned in to the wave of the future?

          I don’t think so.

          What I am experiencing in my own spirituality is a change in the way I view language. Jesus says that if my hand causes me to sin, I should cut it off. He also says that if I do not feed my hungry neighbor, I will depart from him into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Why do I not take the first statement literally, but do take the second one literally? When Jesus talks about the devil or the fires of Gehenna, he is using language metaphorically, just as much as when he says that I should cut off my hand.

          When I read the gospel stories in this light, I begin to read them with a whole different emphasis. Jesus’ struggle with the scribes and Pharisees, who were always accusing him of violating the Sabbath, becomes a struggle over whether God really wants the fullness of life for each human being, versus a God who seems more intent on punishing violators of “the law.” I am sure that the Pharisees would have agreed that God wants life for everyone, but their God was a God who achieved the goal by threats and fear. Jesus showed a God what does not use threats and fear. “I have come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

          Lakers develops a similar argument by reaching back into Martin Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Luther’s telling of the story of sin and redemption, Lakers says, has poisoned both Protestant and Catholic spirituality. It is only our present-day thinking about language that is beginning to free us from that poison.

          The genie of language is out of the bottle of Christian spirituality into which it was confined for the past several hundred years. No one will ever be able to put it back into the bottle, not even Pentecostal Africans.

        Again, following Lakers, I argue that postmodern philosophy may look like the destroyer of truth and goodness, but it can really open up a new freedom for Christian spirituality and a new dynamism in worship that will answer people’s needs, whether those people are in Nairobi, Kenya or in New York City.

Bonhoeffer's problem

          Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who was executed by Adolf Hitler in 1945. During the 1960s, Bonhoeffer’s book, Letters and Papers from Prison, became a best seller in American circles. I would formulate one of his ideas this way: what are we Christians going to do when our scientific world has solved all our problems? We have been praying to a “God of the gaps,” a God who steps in the fix things that we humans have not yet learned to fix. Once we get all the things fixed, what will be left for God to do?

          In the 1960s it really did seem as though the human race was on the verge of solving all its problems. At least it looked that way to us Harvard folks who were living in a very privileged environment. Once we saw the way a process was developing, we pushed the model out to the limits and assumed that reality would eventually follow the model. We knew that things can happen very fast. The automobile was invented about 1900, and now everybody in the world wants an automobile.

          That way of thinking fit very well with the structural-functionalist approach to sociology. Society is like a machine, and as we learn to make the machine work better and better, it will eventually function without problems.

          Another version of the theory uses “democracy” as the god-term. If a country will just adopt democracy, all its problems will be solved. We went into Iraq with this idea. Let the Iraqi people taste democracy and they will become a beacon on a hill, shining to all the Mideast, showing what wonderful things can happen when you adopt democratic institutions.

          We in the U.S., of course, see ourselves as the model for all the world to follow. It is therefore distressing to see our democratic institutions faltering. Democracy should lead to more participation in the political process by more and more people. What is happening is that our political process is being subverted more and more by money. Instead of democracy, we are moving toward oligarchy, the rule of the many by the few.

          Here is an example of what I mean. The Supreme Court decides in January, 2009 that we cannot restrict contributions to political campaigns by large corporate bodies. Although labor unions are among such corporate bodies, the corporations of the business world far outstrip unions in resources. The present Supreme Court is dominated by a majority put in place by Republican administrations. As I write, there is a concerted effort in Wisconsin and other states by Republican strategists to undercut further the slight power that labor unions still have, by removing the legal supports that made union influence possible. The country’s distribution of wealth becomes more and more unequal. The very rich get richer and richer, and the rest of the population has to work harder and harder just to stay even.

          The 2008 election of Barack Obama broke the pattern of wealthy influence on political campaigns, but is that break only temporary? By now the wealthy have learned from the Obama campaign’s use of the social media, and are well on the way to corralling the use of those media in the interests of the usual oligarchs.

          The ultimate danger (the scientist projects trends into the future) is that the managers will become so skilled at manipulating the political process that it will become impossible to challenge them. More and more money will buy more and more votes, which will result in legal institutions to protect the rich from encroachment.

          What makes this possible is the lack of attention to politics by large sections of the population. Their lack of interest makes the system vulnerable to the influences that money can buy in favor of candidates (TV advertising, expensive campaign literature and signage, creative use of social media). 2008 showed that when enough people pay attention, real political change can occur. 2010 showed how hard it is to sustain the interest of the people who made 2008 possible.

          This does not describe the operation of the perfect democracy.

          The 2008 banking crisis was caused by wealthy speculators playing dice with the economy. The crisis caused unemployment. When unemployment is high, incumbents lose, so the Democrats lost ground in 2010. The defeat of Democrats favors the wealthy, which means that the rich end up coming out on top after the disaster that they caused. The Republicans, who systematically dismantled the regulations that might have prevented the crisis, get voted into power, and can continue to skew the legislative process in favor of the rich.

          My conclusion is one that every politician has known all along: politics is a game. Winning one game does not guarantee winning future games. Winning coaches and teams have to keep inventing new plays and strategies. There is no way to solve problems for all time.

          Conclusion: Bonhoeffer was misled by a structural-functionalist set of assumptions. Those assumptions go all the way back to the Enlightenment, with its stress on “reason” as the guiding light for human living. As Marx noted, “reason” is a fiction. He argued that the ruling classes create the fiction in a way that preserves their advantages.

          The pessimistic scenario would say that the rich are able to lock down the process so successfully that it becomes impossible for anyone to break into it. The optimistic scenario would say that when enough people become dissatisfied enough to take part in the political process, the system will be revised.

          I have been doing reading in the Civil War and its aftermath. The aftermath does not give one confidence that the poor can overcome the advantages of the rich. After the Civil War, the very people who caused and lost the war, the southern planter class, were able to re-assert control over the lives of their former slaves. It took a hundred years before a civil rights revolution began to break that control, and the fifty years since then have shown how hard it is to overcome the effects of a bad political system. But things have changed, very slowly.

          All along it is a game. We all need to play it.

A Lenten homily

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

          I shared the gist of last Sunday’s homily with Fr. John Joe Lakers, and he told me to write it up.

          The gospel passage is John 9, the story of the man born blind. I focused on the final statement of Jesus to the Pharisees: If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now that you say “we see,” your sin remains. The Pharisees were so focused on the letter of the law of the Sabbath that they missed what God was doing in Jesus. They could not see.

          We think we see when we really don’t.

          I started off with a story about my Uncle Jim, who had trouble seeing toward the end of his life. But he kept driving, so my aunt would sit next to him and say “Stop sign, Jim,” and “Turn right, Jim.” He thought he could see but he could not. I used that story as humor, softening the congregation up for a more challenging message. I got some smiles.

          Three questions. (I warned the congregation that I am aware that one can get in trouble for asking questions--Socrates drank poison because he asked too many questions.)

          1) Are Catholic Church leaders so focused on a rule about no women priests and no married priests that they miss what God is doing? Do they think that they see God’s will but are actually blind?

          Just a question.

          I asked the question because both Fr. Bauer and I are 75 years old, and we do not see other people coming along to take our places. Is God telling us that our rules are too restrictive? I asked this question first, because I wanted to be an “equal opportunity” challenger. If I am going to challenge things going on in the secular world, I shouldn’t spare my own religious world.

          2) Are the people who want to send 12 million undocumented immigrants back to their home countries so focused on a rule about our borders that they miss what God is doing? Do they really want to break up a lot of families in order to preserve that rule? Are people who hold to that position really blind to God’s concern for people, and thus blind to what God is doing in the lives of those people?

          Just a question.

          3) Are a lot of us so focused on a rule that says “Never raise taxes” that we miss how that rule can hurt people and thus miss God’s concern for those people?

          Just a question.

          This last one skirts the edge of getting into politics. There was a school board election two days after this homily, and one party running for school board positions were basically campaigning on the platform of “no new taxes.” But the issue is a lot broader than just schools, and I decided I had to raise the question.

         Conclusion: We need to be alert to what God is doing in our place and time, and not let our human rules blind us to God’s action.

          I got a couple of compliments, but no return challenges. The criticisms may come yet, like little time bombs resting out there ready to explode just when I don’t expect it. If they come, I’ll deal with them. Nobody says homilies can be perfect all the time, and not even some of the time. Homily writing is risky business. I hope that at least we’re past the days when critics would come after the homilist with a gun.

         

The machine and the game

“The Marginal Sociologist Looks at Sociological Theory”

          It has been about ten years since I have taught a course in sociological theory, and even longer since I have taught a course in introductory sociology. Yet I cannot quit thinking about theory. At heart I am a neo-scholastic disciple of Thomas Aquinas (well, not exactly--we Franciscans think Thomas was superseded by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham).

          Open any introductory textbook in sociology, published even as recently as 2009, and you will find, in the opening chapters, a description of the main varieties of sociological theory. Usually there are three, sometimes four: “structural-functionalism,” “conflict theory,” “symbolic interactionism,” and sometimes “rational-choice theory.”

          Intro soc courses often have a lot of students. This causes instructors to cast about for ways to save work, and publishers are happy to accommodate such a search. They provide “test banks,” whole batches of multiple-choice questions from which the instructor can randomly select enough questions to make a decent quiz or test. By the time I last taught the course, in the late 1990s, the test banks were computerized so that the instructor just had to select items and, voila, the test would appear, ready to be duplicated and distributed to the waiting students.

          I found the items disappointing. I got the impression that the items were written by hacks hired by the publishers to fill up a quota. The items seldom matched what I had been trying to do in class. I tried to write my own multiple choice items. Doing this for a while created the following experience: I was spending four-fifths of my time trying to invent false answers to questions and one-fifth creating the true answers. I thought that was a poor use of my time.

          I gave in and used the pre-cooked test bank. My students failed miserably. I decided I needed a study guide for them to use as a preparation. I would give them the opening part of the multiple-choice items, without the false and true answers. That would give them a clue as to what they should be studying. After a while I noticed that many of the items had the form  “Socialization is . . .” “Relative deprivation is . . .”

          Well, this is stupid, I thought. Why not give the student the term and have the student tell me what it is. That way the student has to do the work of formulating the answer in his or her own words. I created a study guide with about three times as many terms as were likely to be on the test, and created the test by randomly selecting from the list. This procedure had an added advantage. Invariably some student is not able to take the test on the day appointed. The instructor has two options: adopt a hard line policy: you miss the test on that day, you flunk the test or lose it as part of your grade; or the instructor has to make up an alternate test. Making up an alternate multiple-choice test is a lot of work to do for one student, even if you are using a test bank. With my technique it was easy. I would just haul out the study guide, randomly circle one-third of the items on the guide, and hand it to the student.

          My procedure had an occasional criticism from students. (Well, an occasional criticism that I heard--who knows what the students were saying behind my back?) They said it depended too much on memorization. Yes it does, I said, but half of the mastery of any field is knowing the vocabulary of that field. There are other things the student needs to know, and I always supplemented my list of terms with one or two essay questions. I was too easy on my grading of these essays--part of my poor discipline described in my previous blog item was being unwilling to spend a lot of time grading long essays. But I digress.

          The test-creating technique had one unique advantage. Hundreds of student responses to an item asking for a definition of “socialization” resulted in a lot of unique formulations of the concept. I was always saying to myself, “well maybe the student is right--it could really mean that.” I kept boiling down my own definitions of concepts to simpler and simpler wordings, capitalizing on the creativity of students. That got me to developing a whole dictionary of terms with memorizable definitions. Too often the definition of a term in the textbook was three lines long, and who can memorize three lines of a hundred definitions? But memorization is useful. It allows you to reflect on the term, and apply it in your reflections.

Three Varieties of Sociological Theory

1. Structural-functionalism

          When I began my graduate studies in 1964, there was only one form of sociological theory: structural-functionalism. That is, there was at Harvard only one form of theory. Harvard’s competitors, especially the University of Chicago, disagreed, but they were not in our world. The Harvard world as I experienced it was ruled by Talcott Parsons, and he was the structural-functionalist. As I have described elsewhere in this blog, Parsons went around the world like an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up every scrap of theory and incorporating it into his Grand Synthesis. I did not know it at the time, but Parsons’s star was setting.

          Structural-functionalism depended heavily on a metaphor of the organism. A human group is like an organism, with structures, just as the human body has bones and muscles. Each structure has a function: the bones keep you standing upright, and muscles keep you moving. In a human group, the structure is made up of the norms of the group. Each norm has a function. In the family, for example, the rule is that the father should provide economically for the family, and the function of that rule is to make sure the family eats. Organisms operate by “homeostasis,” which means that if anything in the environment changes, the organism tries to maintain a stable state. If you eat too much salt, the body excretes salt and gets back to its ideal balance of salt.

          You can see why Parsons’s star was setting. His model doesn’t deal well with fundamental changes, and it can promote over-simple stereotyping (the man earns, the woman loves).

          Yet the metaphor of the organism is powerful. Paul the Apostle used it in his image of the Christian community as the Body of Christ. The hand cannot say to the foot, “I do not need you.”

          Most of us think this way much of the time. Legislators are always trying to perfect the organism. “If we just make it illegal to . . .” And laws do solve some problems. Auto travel is safer than it used to be because we have created safer roads, and roads are created by legislators.

          To me, an organism is just a fancy machine. So the real metaphor is the machine. If you can construct the perfect machine (create the perfect set of norms), you solve society’s problems. But when we solve some of the problems, we often create others. We make more and more things illegal and we fill up the prisons and then have to pay to feed and house the prisoners.

2. Conflict Theory

          Along about 1960, sociologists began to pay more attention to Karl Marx. Marx had been pretty much ostracized from sociological thinking ever since the country got scared silly in the 1930s by the prospect of “socialism” taking over. Marx’s theory, which was just a sociological version of Georg Hegel’s theory of the dialectic, was that any human group invariably splits into the haves and the have-nots. He developed this theory in all kinds of directions, of course, but what he did for sociologists was sensitize us to the existence of conflict in any human group. Structural-functionalism, using the metaphor of the organism, saw conflict as a symptom of disease in the organism, something to be gotten rid of, like pain. In a well-designed organism, there would be no conflict. Marx’s theory said “Nonsense. There will always be conflict in any group.”

          To me, this is just another variety of the metaphor of the machine. All social groups have authority structures, and the haves struggle with the have-nots. Marx just added the idea that you will never construct a machine to eliminate conflict. Homeostasis gets replaced by conflict.

3. Symbolic Interactionism

          I mentioned Chicago as Harvard’s competitor. The University of Chicago boasted the oldest department of sociology in the country (founded in 1892). Harvard did not have a department until 1931. By the 1920s Chicago was creating a whole school of empirical research, called, of course, “the Chicago School”.

          Chicago was home to a philosopher named George Herbert Mead. Sociologists picked up Mead’s ideas and, under the leadership of Herbert Blumer, created a brand of theory called “symbolic interactionism.” It was “symbolic” because it said that all human behavior is mediated through language. Blumer called it “interactionism” because he saw all human behavior as structured by the unpredictable interaction of human beings with one another.

          To me, the metaphor of “the game” was a perfect way to sum up the theory. Herbert Blumer had once played professional football--what more natural thing than for him to see all behavior as a game?

          In a game, there are rules, but the rules can be negotiated and people sometimes cheat. More importantly, you can never predict the outcome of a game. If the rules are well-designed, the teams are evenly matched and the outcome depends on the creativity of the players in figuring out ways to play against the opponent.

          That fits the reality of society better than the machine image. Every time a legislator devises a new rule to solve a problem, someone figures out a way to get around the rule. We are in a game, with fluid expectations and no sure predictions. What looks chaotic at first glance (basketball always looks that way to me) turns out to have a structure, even though you can still never predict the winner.

Conclusion

          Years ago I read Gene Sharps’s three volumes on nonviolent action. I became convinced that nonviolence was the answer to society’s most serious problems. If we could just get people to behave nonviolently. . . I now realize that I was unconsciously thinking along a structural-functionalist line. Nonviolence can be a useful play in a game, but it can no more guarantee victory than a single play in a football game can guarantee victory. In practice, nonviolence almost always seems to be overtaken by people who grow impatient with its slow results and move into violent solutions.

          I now believe that there are no fool-proof solutions to any human problem. We are in a game with unpredictable outcomes. The story will go on and on, and no one can predict what twists and turns it will take. As Christians we are called to enter into the game, play it in as loving way as we can, and accept the fact that we will never control the outcome.

          The game metaphor has one very important advantage as a model. It is interesting and open-ended. If society really operated like a machine, we would either become pawns in a perfectly-ordered society, or we would all die of boredom.