Per Caritatem

I have been reading Eric Gregory’s excellent book, Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship.  Although I do not have time to give a full review of the book, I want to summarize and highlight some of the themes that I have found intriguing and noteworthy. First, besides chapters devoted to Augustine and modern liberalism, Arendt’s Augustine, and Augustine’s relation to the Platonists and the Stoics, Gregory devotes an entire chapter to Augustine and feminist political theory (chapter 3). Augustine, of course, was not a feminist, and his views on women have been criticized on multiple occasions.  Nonetheless, Gregory shows how his variant of Augustinian liberalism and certain emphases in feminist theory are compatible and how bringing the two into conversation offers significant advances to current socio-political theory. In particular, Gregory believes that a feminist “ethic of care” provides needed correctives to deficiencies in liberal political theory, especially those social contract theories which tend reduce politics to mere (self-serving) interests.

Gregory engages several feminist theorists; however, I shall focus on his treatment of Joan C. Tronto. Rather than dismiss liberalism as yet another failed modern project, Tronto seeks to complete and correct its shortcomings. While Tronto advocates for care as a moral ideal for citizens, she does not argue for some naïve, overly sentimentalist notion of care blind to the evils and injustices of our concrete existence. As a feminist theorist, Tronto is acutely aware of the various asymmetrical power relations constituting the body politic and how dominant groups employ “race,” class, and “gender” for oppressive purposes. Her awareness of an ongoing interplay between, as Gregory would put it, love and sin is “relevant  for Augustinian civic liberals who draw upon Christian love and keep realist observations about power and sin in full view” (167). Unlike antiliberal critics, Tronto does not disparage rights-talk and the importance of political equality, nor does she promote a political theory that flattens all diversity and otherness. Rather, her ethic of care “emphasizes the values of attachment, community, and social responsibility,” while condemning the fictive main character of liberal theories, namely, man as autonomous, detached, and (purely) rational.  Like other feminists, Tronto criticizes

this fiction in terms of a hypermasculine understanding of autonomy linked to an abstract account of freedom as sheer power to initiate action. But, for Tronto, this fiction already is premised on a false choice between autonomy and dependence within the liberal imagination. The need for care does not fit into liberal models that see only autonomy or dependence. In reality, she claims “since people are sometimes autonomous, sometimes dependent, sometimes providing care for those who are dependent, humans are best described as interdependent” (Moral Boundaries, 162).[1]

In short, Tronto brings to the fore failures in the liberal imagination, yet her solution is not to give up on liberalism as a viable political theory or condemn it as somehow inherently flawed and destined to produce nihilism. Rather, she unmasks the false dichotomies and choices liberalism creates—either pure self-interest or social responsibility—and argues for a non-naïve political theory that values cooperation, solidarity, and interdependence. In other words, she argues for an ethic of care with the potential to transform liberal thought and praxis; a care that “can help change the way we see the political world” (171). Even so, like many Augustinians, Tronto recognizes that an ethic of care can be abused, misused, and employed for unjust purposes. This should come as no surprise to Augustinian liberals, who, following the lead of the North African saint, hold no utopian views regarding political regimes, democratic or otherwise. That a rhetoric of care can be used for exploitative purposes “should not mean that liberal democracies can proceed as if care is not necessary for a political practice responsive to injustice, persons in need, and the social conditions that frustrate human flourishing” (171).

Tronto’s focus on care and creating new values for democratic citizens is consonant with Gregory’s larger project of promoting “an Augustinian ethic of citizenship for the morally ambivalent conditions of liberal democracy”(13)—an ethic which takes seriously the need to cultivate virtuous citizens whose various loves respect the dignity and difference of others.

I hope to blog more on Gregory’s insightful book in the months to come, as it has given me much food for thought.

In his book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored with Néstor Míguez and Jung Mo Sung, Joerg Rieger discusses how the production of a specific kind of desire functions within capitalistic Empires.  “Demand is infinite since, unlike needs, desires are infinite as well.  Thus, unlimited desire provides the basis for unlimited consumerism.  As a result, limited resources must be negotiated with potentially infinite desires” (58).  Rieger then turns to Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire.”  As its name indicates, mimetic desire is “not the ordinary desire of particular objects but the imitation of other people’s desire”[1] (58).  On this model, a “conflictual relation” emerges between the one who imitates another’s desire and the one whose desire is imitated.[2] This kind of struggle or conflict relation does not apply merely to individuals but to relations between larger social configurations.  As one can imagine, poorer nations often find their natural resources exploited, not to mention the exploitation of workers, that is, human beings de-valued and transformed into a cheap labor force so that desires of the wealthy can be satiated—not that they actually are satiated.  Such inhumane, instrumental treatment of course affects how the poor perceive themselves.  The poor, however, are not the only ones whose  subjectivities are shaped (internally and externally) by this never-ending-always-chasing-after-more social apparatus, the subjectivities of the wealthy are likewise constructed.  As Rieger explains,

Mimetic desire helps us to understand some of the deeper levels of human relationships and subjectivity under the current conditions of Empire, Subjectivity itself becomes what we might call ‘mimetic subjectivity’.  Competition is not simply based on the scarcity of desirable objects, as is often assumed, it is based on mimetic desire.  What drives economic progress, consumption, and the progress of the structures of Empire from this point of view, is that others want what the wealthy already have.  The result is the extraordinarily intense competition that has come to be accepted as the essence of free-market economies.  It is not hard to see that there is little room for [… ] an active subject, except at the very top of society.  But even there a constant battle ensues about who tops the lists, who is wealthier and more powerful, […] Mimetic desire can never be satisfied.  The problem is compounded, of course, for those who cannot keep up. When they are drawn into this system, they can only perceive themselves as failures, as theorists from the Southern Hemisphere have pointed out.  What makes this mimetic desire so effective in the pursuit of Empire is that it seems to have a snowball effect, and it seems that we are witnessing this effect in extreme forms today.  Moreover, there is a built-in reciprocity that leads to further escalation, since, in Girard’s words, “the model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of its imitator’ [Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” 12] (48-49).

Notes

[2] Ibid., 147.

In between dissertation reading and writing, I have been spending time with a wonderful book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung.  (Professor Rieger, is, I am delighted to say, the third reader of my dissertation).  I hope to have at least some time this summer to devote a few substantive blog posts to this book, which I have found thoroughly refreshing and on the mark with its assessments of our market-driven way of being.  In the meantime, let me whet your appetite with this witty excerpt discussing the market as “financial games”  involved “virtual goods” and played for the benefit of the elite few at the expense of the exposed many.

[I]n the economic jargon imposed by the businesses of hegemonic communication “the markets”, or even in the singular “the market”, does not refer any more to places for the exchange of goods, where producers and artisans sell and exchange their products.  It does not even refer to the most abstract derivations of the celebration of the buying and selling transaction.  Rather the market now refers to financial games.  The notion that the ‘market formulates prices’ within industrial capitalism has now given way to finances.  The great fortunes of today are not established by the possession of material goods but rather from bank accounts, financial wealth and other forms of “virtual goods” such as trademarks, patents, images, use of business ‘logos’ in the form of merchandizing, and so on.  Things virtual, fantasy or fetish, to use Marxist language, have replaced, scammed, and annulled what is real.  It is just like the story of the witty tailors who scammed the emperor by selling him a robe of non-existent cloth and telling the gullible crowd that only the wise can see it. So everyone refrained from telling the emperor that he did not have any clothes on, for then they would be considered stupid.  Today we all believe that things exist that others say exist, even though personally we do not see them. But in this case we have all been forced to wear these invisible robes and we all fear to discover that we are naked. The only one who is dressed is the emperor (“Empire, Religion, and the Political,” in Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung, 11–12).