Quote of the Week: Jacques Ellul
After the elimination of the king, political importance was transferred, we said, to the institutions. But that didn’t last. Man, who felt his politics keenly, very quickly found it necessary to have proposed to him an incarnation mediating between this world and the other world. What was characteristic of regimes known as totalitarian is now becoming characteristic of almost all political regimes. There is no more relativity. There are no more ‘good-natured’ elections and reasonable discussions. The whole person is at stake every time.
Everything is political. Politics is the only serious activity. The fate of humanity depends upon politics, and classical philosophical or religious truth takes on meaning only as it is incarnated in political action. Christians are typical in this connection. They rush to the defense of political religion, and assert that Christianity is meaningful only in terms of political commitment. In truth, it is their religious mentality which plays this trick on them. As Christianity collapses as a religion, they look about them in bewilderment, unconsciously of course, hoping to discover where the religious is to be incarnated in their time. Since they are religious, they are drawn automatically into the political sphere like iron fillings to a magnet.
Of course, they do not believe in the crude, explicit dogmas. Like Helmut Gollwitzter (Christian Faith and the Marxist Criticism of Religion, 1970), they can be clairvoyant about the religious nature of communism, but they think they are cleared of the religious simply because they have denounced the cult of personality or the mystique of its practice. The fact is, however, that all they have criticized is the now defunct (except in China) religious phase of communism. They fail to see that we are now in a new phase of political religion extended into political action itself. Gollwitzer, an active partisan of political involvement, is a good example of this Christian attachment to the neoreligious. Politics has become the principal justification. Christianity no longer means much, but it is restored like new, and reinvigorated if Christians get into politics. Now it is Christianity which is justified by being legitimized in this way. Everything which carries the political message, everything expressed in terms of political commitment, is now justified and legitimized.
That is the new soteriology.
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons. Trans. C. Edward Hopkins (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 199-200.
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This quote captures much of what American politics has become over the last three decades. None of it has been for the good. Truth and Judgment no longer count. Will and Power are fully mobilized in the service of authoritarian Control.
Ask yourself: Where can this lead but to Totalitarianism?
Catholics, unlike Protestants, have a rich and compelling intellectual tradition. But in recent decades, this tradition is well on its way to being lost. One indication of this is that prudential judgment seems substantially diminished in Catholic ethical, political, and intellectual circles. Morality and Politics without Prudence is the “standard operating procedure” of the political activist and the advocate.
I’ve never seen a time where discussion about moral issues has been so abstract and removed from concrete intentions and circumstances — not to mention the state of the actor’s conscience — than now.
People discuss AIDS prevention as though the actor in question were some “universal actor” residing in the heavens above. They discuss abortion as though the frightful predicament of the women were of no consequence. Wars are declared to be just without regard to a serious consideration of means and ends.
Truth is an orphan in public debate. Everyone is out to win — at all costs. The end DOES justify the means in contemporary politics. The goodness of the end is all that matters. “By any means necessary.”
What this indicates is that ethics and politics has evolved into an abstract form of theocratic authoritarianism. There is a growing demand to use the instruments of State to insure authoritarian success. Dialogue is moribund. Only the Ideal survives — and Power … and Control.
Has the the principle of the choice of the lesser of two evils been put out to pasture? Does it no longer serve a vital function? Doesn’t it matter that all ethical and political acts must involve such a choice or tyranny will result? Are Christians becoming the new Authoritarian? Are we too much at home with our “totalitarian urge?” Have we come to the point where we are willing to control behavior through the exercise of brute power alone?
There is a great need for careful reflection on the logic of our journey. It is imperative to do this before we proceed too much further. As one who has been around the block many times, I find the dismissal of the intellectual order and prudential judgment to be more troublesome than any of the other issues facing this country. It determines everything else.
Whenever passages from the Bible or the Catechism are used as templates for conduct — when they are used quite apart from the circumstance, intentions, and conscience of the actor — the concreteness of ethics and politics is destroyed. Eventually, this destruction leads to wide-spread hypermoralism, and civil disruption and strife. Before long, the integrity of the entire nation is destroyed. That, certainly, cannot be what we seek. But it is integral to the logic of our current ways.
It’s right, we have seen the triumph of a political activism which thinks all things and all solutions must be political; it shows it is a new faith that demands universal appeal.
Obviously there is a place for politics — but, our central work should not be political, but outside of politics. But when people think the solution to every sin is politics, then they show they have raised politics up to a utopian faith and ignore the problems of the political state as a whole. On the other hand, this does not mean political states can’t do good for the people — which is what it should do, work to help the people within, not to control their lives. The difference is we see it has become a way to control lives, while ignoring the true place of politics which is for the common good, not the individual good.