FAITH SEEKING UNDERSTANDING… AND “CAPITALISM”: Silber asks a bunch of questions. I will sketch a response. Apologies for today’s inside-blogball feel–I do think major issues are being worked out here, so even if you have zero interest in Objectivism I think you will find something either helpful or infuriating in today’s Silber-related posts. (Note that I use “Silber” and “Arthur” at random in this post; they’re the same guy. I don’t know why I do this but I don’t have time to go back and make them all the same.)

1) I’ll answer his third question first: “[I]f…you acknowledge that your belief in God arises solely from faith, how important are your religious beliefs to you in general terms? What other areas of your life do they influence? And, to put one of the related questions more bluntly: doesn’t it bother you that you can’t defend your belief in God on rational grounds? If not, why not?”

This is the “why don’t you just believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn then? How is belief in God different from belief in the IPU?” question, I think. I’ll just say now what I’ve said before: Christianity best describes the world as I have experienced it. It best describes wrongdoing, beauty, and the heroism of Harry Wu. It explains the longing that suffuses a wanting world. It provides a basis for a non-selfish and non-Heloise-like “love is beyond good and evil” ethics.

It might do all this and still be false, I know; that is where faith comes in, perhaps. As I learned more about how closely Christianity mirrored my own experience of the world, I became intrigued and worried (I really didn’t want Christianity to be true) enough to pray. And as both the Bible and the doorkeepers in “Labyrinth” promise, knock and the door will open–my prayers were answered with faith, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Now, you might say that my experience was conditioned by a Christian or post-Christian culture. Perhaps. But given that I was raised with, if anything, fairly strong antipathy toward Christianity; given that my early reading in some respects prepared me for Christianity but in other ways dissuaded me; and given that becoming Christian meant giving up a lot of things I valued very highly, including things I had considered integral parts of my identity–given all that, I don’t think cultural conditioning is a sufficient or especially illuminating explanation. Coherent, yes; believable, well, not to me.

Thus I view the faith/reason relationship very differently from how Arthur views it. I don’t see them as opposites or hostile combatants. I’m not sure, but I suspect that’s a legacy of Protestantism as much as it is a legacy of the Enlightenment; it doesn’t work well with Catholic categories of thought. Catholics marry mysticism and rationality, affirming both. Once more I’ll plug Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on faith and reason (despite its philosophy-major prose, sigh). I also note that the faith/reason dichotomy Arthur is assuming is so starkly different from the understandings of St. Peter (“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear,” I Pet. 3:15) and St. Anselm (“faith seeking understanding”) that I’m not sure discussion can profitably proceed until vocabulary issues are cleared up. (Uh, that’s a nicer way of saying what Susanna Cornett said, I think.) Like countless Catholics before me, I found Christ as a direct result of the philosophical pursuit of truth, through dialectic and the personal experience with which dialectic works. So obviously I don’t view faith and reason as opponents.

In other words, when I say “mysticism,” I don’t mean the definition of mysticism Ayn Rand gives, as quoted by Arthur: “Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason.” I mean this: “a non-rational (either pre- or supra-rational) practice characterized by contemplation/meditation and an experience of supernatural union with the Divine (either dissolving into the Divine, as in Gnosticism, or achieving a love relationship with God Who is ‘other,’ as in Catholicism).” Non-rational but not anti-rational; evidence (though not proof, I suppose) is present, in all the reasons to seek out the Christian God that I mentioned above. And “mysticism,” as Catholics use it, is not a synonym for “faith”; it’s a practice or tradition.

So it’s not surprising that I would take issue with this statement of Barbara Branden’s, also quoted by Arthur: “To rest one’s advocacy of capitalism on faith, is to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies.” Faith and reason can be on the same side. (I also wonder how Martin Luther King, Jr., would have reacted to her pronouncement, “To claim that capitalism rests on religious faith is to contradict the fundamental principles of the United States; in America, religion is a private matter which must not be brought into political issues.”)

2. Now, on to capitalism. Silber asks: “Do you utilize your religious faith as a justification for capitalism — or do you defend capitalism on other grounds? If so, what are the other, non-religious reasons you provide as your defense of capitalism?

“If you do not consider an ethics of rational self-interest to be an underlying philosophical component of capitalism, what ethics do you think capitalism embodies? And if it’s not altruism (as I defined it in my earlier posts), what is it? More specifically … how important is altruism in your ethical theory, and how do you see it fitting into your advocacy of capitalism?”

Well, first, I’m not sure that the “capitalism” I would defend is the same as the “capitalism” Silber or Rand would defend. I noted in response to an earlier post of his that “capitalism” can mean anything from a Hayekian preference for the free market over top-down state regulation of production and consumption, to anarchy; anything from rejection of socialism to acceptance of self-interest as the ruling principle of ethics. I dig A and C but not B and D. Here’s my big post on the free market; here’s a more general statement of political principles.

You’ll note that my support of free-market economics is based in large part on my belief that this system is best for the poor. If Arthur agrees with that, as I expect he does, I’m not sure why he’s confused as to how a Christian could support a market-based system. The “preference for the poor” is key to my approach to politics. Now, I don’t believe an ethics of self-interest is best for the poor, though I imagine Arthur does; I believe in an ethics of charity. But welfare and regulation pretty obviously aren’t charity. (Here, have an article on Julian the Apostate and his anti-Christian welfare state!) The free market and charity together, in my view, produce the most virtuous possible modern society and best help those in need.

Rand’s understanding of “altruism” tends to mean “the denigration of self, first” rather than “the exaltation of some other, first.” The exaltation of another will in many circumstances require self-sacrifice–just as the man who puts freedom first will, in a dictatorship, find that he must suffer torture, imprisonment, or death for freedom–but the ideal is harmony of self and other, not conflict. The self is a gift, an offering, not a hated and despised thing. The Christian goal is the “wedding feast of the Lamb,” an image of unity and harmony of self and God, even though in this life I often must subdue my own desires in order to serve God. This is the difference between martyrdom (self-sacrifice because one loves God above all) and suicide (self-destruction because one hates oneself). Christianity condemns suicide and self-mutilation because, among other reasons, your life is a gift from God; to love Him is to love His work, thus you cannot love Him and destroy yourself.

So, I hope that gives Arthur a sense of where I’m coming from. More as events warrant.