[Previous posts: I. Economics and the Political Imagination; II. Economics and the Vocational Imagination; III. Economics and the Educational Imagination; IV. Economics and the Existential Imagination]
(PREFACE: In my earlier, political writings contra liberalism I tried to make this argument: that individualism and secularism we find in modern, liberal politics are deeply problematic. At the time, I lumped all of modernity into a single liberal history and, in many ways, I still think this view holds true. What I failed to treat in those writings was the radicalization of this individualistic and secular shift that has further disfigured the imagus Dei into an instrumental means to money, capital, and economic power. This shift is what I have called the move from the man of reason—the person of the liberalism—to the economic man—the person of neo-liberalism.)
Making purely critical genealogies is not the hard work. Most people willing to see things as they are can sense the dis-enchantment and alienation that surrounds them. If not, then, as I suggested earlier, reading Tolstoy or watching “Office Space” quickly makes the point I (and many, many others) have been driving at.
The question now becomes: Where are the answers?
‘Phenomenology,’ ‘Psychoanalysis,’ ‘Postmodernism,’ and many other critical traditions of thought have made many of the same assessments of our times. What they have failed to do is to offer a realizable alternative—an alternative that does not simply try to further maim reality. Among their utopias and dystopias they cannot help but be infected—as I personally am—by the very era they are attempting to deconstruct. They cannot imagine an enchanted world because their horizon is itself thoroughly dis-enchanted. This impotence on the part of recent attempts to heal the modern wounds we suffer from leaves very few alternatives. Truth be told, I can only think of one: the Gospel.
Beneath the frustrated and angry—yet unable to act—posture that is all too typical for critical discourse, is the Gospel, always waiting, pregnant with dark truth. What is this ‘dark truth’? That we must die to live. And death comes first. This is the only way to literally model the life-through-death of the Savior. Even God had to die. First.
Here we find a more radical alternative than all the critical claims that modern times have produced: A Christian posthumanism. A rejection of both the rational, self-enclosed individual and the irrational, all-consuming economic man. A rejection of autonomy—that naive idea of self-determination—and economic power. The rejection of the modern ‘God’ as a mere option to man and the arrogance of the pre-modern ‘God’ as an idol carved in the image of man. In place of all these things we find the person as lover, the mad eros of the Cross, and the power of unselfish love.
Humanism and liberalism will always fail because they cannot avoid being anthropocentric. It will always love the human. They are fundamentally selfish. They deny the truth of theosis.
The call to love in the Gospel reveals that we can only realize our greatest hopes under a new order, the order of love—Divine and worldly love. Not the affectionate, hippy-love we have become accustomed to. This love comes in dark shades of death that bring true life.
The end of the age of economics—the age that has heightened the previous age of the secular individual—will only come through this Gospel truth:
In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24-25, NJB)
THE END
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In