Murray Jardine
Auburn University
Abstract:
Murray Jardine responds to Sutton, Boyd, Ansley, and Newman’s commentaries on his work. He comments upon his relationship to Michael Polanyi, William Poteat, Colin Gunton, and Eric Voegelin, and reflects upon the unexpected side effects which an underdeveloped conceptualization of the Spirit within Latin or Western Christian theology have had on the unfolding of Western thought and politics. Jardine furthermore suggests directions in which Western theology should progress in order to rectify the theoretical and existential difficulties which have ensued.Keywords: Michael Polanyi, William Poteat, Colin Gunton, Eric Voegelin, Christianity, theology, political philosophy, political economy, gnosticism, millenarianism, trinitarianism
I would like to thank Victor Sutton, Dylan Boyd, Dalton Ansley, and Beth Newman for their perceptive comments on my work, particularly as it relates to Michael Polanyi and Bill Poteat.
Sutton and Boyd give an excellent rundown on the main thrust of my writings on the crisis of modern rationalism. At several points they correctly indicate where my analysis is dated or incomplete. For example, as I discuss, reform liberals of John Rawls’s generation were generally “first amendment absolutists,” arguing that speech or expression should be subject only to the most minimal limitations; expression could be regulated only in cases of clear threats to public safety or national security. But, as Sutton and Boyd point out, reform liberals now tend to endorse restrictions on expression that could cause psychological harm, particularly to minorities or historically disadvantaged groups. It is interesting to note that this conclusion can indeed be derived from Rawls’s principles; whereas Rawls would typically regard a person being censored as the worst-off, today’s liberals would be more likely to say that the worst-off person is the victim of hate speech. This rather wide range of possibilities inherent in Rawls’s principles illustrates one of the main contentions in my discussion of liberalism, namely its tendency to sink into a swamp of subjectivism once it abandoned its natural law/Protestant theological foundations.
As a point of information, a much more detailed treatment of this issue is John H. Hallowell’s The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology (1946). Hallowell (1913-1991) was a younger contemporary of Michael Polanyi and a colleague of Bill Poteat at Duke University. Also invaluable, and a major influence on my own thinking, is The Irony of Liberal Reason (1982) by Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. (1942-2023), who was a student of both Hallowell and Poteat. Spragens, very much influenced by Polanyi, extends Hallowell’s thesis, arguing that the Enlightenment’s humanistic aspirations were derailed by its reductionistic worldview.
Another issue mentioned by Sutton and Boyd is the decline of neoliberal economic policies, which even the tech sector seems to have soured on now. In doing so, they point to, without explicitly mentioning it, a significant change in the meaning of the term “conservative.” As late as when I wrote The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society, “conservative” still more or less referred to classical free-market liberals, but now the term tends to mean neo-nationalists or perhaps social conservatives. Certainly the Republican party of twenty years ago would have been astounded at Donald Trump’s trade and immigration policies. Conservative could also refer to the “tech right,” which still is more or less libertarian but now flirts with neonationalist ideas that the global capitalists of a generation ago would have found quite uncouth.
I particularly appreciate that Sutton and Boyd emphasize one of my favorite themes, that the cultural orientation of late liberal consumer societies is fundamentally aesthetic or, in Robert Bellah’s term, expressive individualist. Critics of today’s consumerism, left and right, persistently describe it as “materialistic” and even advocate an aesthetic ethos as an alternative. But “materialistic” describes the nineteenth century world of classical liberalism—saving and investing to produce coal mines, steel mills, and railroads. The purpose of today’s capitalism is to provide an endless supply of products (many, increasingly most, of which are not actually tangible goods but services) which allow people to express themselves as works of art. Nobody today thinks or lives like the paradigmatic materialist, Ebenezer Scrooge. It is true, as Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) presciently noted in his pre-counterculture The Technological Society (1954), that a materialist-technocratic system provokes aesthetic rebellions—but that it also quickly co-opts them and indeed can be strengthened by them. Postwar capitalism sputtered in the 1970s because by then virtually every household had all of the domestically oriented (that is, still more or less materialistic) consumer durables available, and only recovered when it focused on aesthetically oriented products. And the pre-counterculture postwar era looks like a paradise of democratic citizenship and corporate responsibility compared to the all-encompassing control and unrelenting psychological manipulation of today’s expressive individualist global capitalism.
I think there is one place where Sutton and Boyd do misread me slightly, or rather, actually may agree with me without realizing it. They dispute my claim that a consumer society “destroys individual competence,” arguing that today’s economy is dominated by a highly competent elite who have the resources to block out aspiring competitors and pass their wealth and power on to their children. This is undoubtedly true, but my argument in this regard was primarily about non-elite groups. Even with a highly competent elite, declining competence among the rest of the population can spell economic disaster; anecdotally, I frequently see articles in the Wall Street Journal about companies unable to find qualified people, and I hear the same from people in business and government (although this may be partly a matter of demographics).
There is also one place where I think Sutton and Boyd are at least partly wrong. This is where they argue that universal literacy has led to suspicion of experts and a proliferation of conspiracy theories, since people can now read a wide variety of sources, some of which will promote such theories. But the literate society of two generations ago certainly had more trust in experts than today. Most of the people who study these issues would say that the decline of trust in science and the rise of fantastic conspiracy theories would be more attributable to the new electronic media, which simultaneously create a Nietzschean chaos of different human world-interpretations and allow one to retreat into an ideological echo chamber. The world of print and even the era of early electronic media such as radio and television were more characterized by gatekeeping mechanisms that at least limited the availability of misinformation.
This issue may also be more ideological in nature. In The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism (2025), Dennis M. Patterson and Jacob Hale Russell (law professors at Johns Hopkins, not cranks, and sounding left-of-center politically) argue that the arrogance, condescension, and unwillingness to admit mistakes that characterize today’s professional classes tend to generate populist reactions and conspiracy theories. An anecdote that illustrates this point: Everyone will recall that at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, people were told that wearing masks was unnecessary, but a short time later most political jurisdictions made it mandatory to wear masks in public. This change would not necessarily in itself generate skepticism about public health expertise, as non-experts would know from everyday life that evidence often can be initially unclear. But this about-face was accompanied by ideological rhetoric that was certain to create anti-professional reactions. I distinctly recall reading, early in the pandemic, an article or opinion piece (I think in the New York Times,although I can’t find it now in a Google search) claiming that wearing masks was racist. Just a few weeks later, public health authorities characterized anyone who didn’t wear a mask as irrational, irresponsible, antisocial, and just about every other term of abuse imaginable, including even fascistic.
This example also illustrates a critical Polanyian insight (mentioned by Patterson and Hale, who cite Polanyi briefly). Science depends absolutely on the construction of ethical communities dedicated to the pursuit of truth. If scientists or other experts put personal advancement or reputation, ideological considerations, or the desire for political power ahead of the pursuit of truth, science fails. It might be argued that behavior of this type has become more common in scientific fields over the past two generations as liberal societies have descended into subjectivism.
In any case, I think Sutton and Boyd’s closing remarks are spot-on. My analysis is definitely too vague when it comes to concrete political and economic institutions and policies, although I must say that this is a failing endemic in communitarian/postliberal thinking. In my current research I have incorporated a couple of books which draw upon Karl Polanyi to address economic issues: biblical scholar Joshua Berman’s Created Equal (2008), which argues that the book of Deuteronomy contains the blueprint for a communitarian economic system, albeit in an agricultural environment, and the somewhat unfortunately titled Toward a Truly Free Market (2010) by John C. Medaille, which, far from being a libertarian manifesto, extends Polanyi’s discussion of the “fictitious commodities” of land, labor, and money to construct a framework for an economy of worker-owned enterprises. But this issue clearly needs more intensive analysis.
Ansley gives a very complete rundown on my attempt to apply Polanyi’s epistemology to issues of political order, and Newman provides a helpful critique of my more recent engagement with contemporary theology. Both discuss a central issue, namely the origins of the specifically modern/Enlightenment worldview. In my early writings I generally followed the argument frequently made by Protestant theologians and elaborated by Poteat in the context of oral vs literate/visual cultures—that modernity can be understood as the consequence of the incoherent medieval synthesis of Greek and Hebraic models of reality. Later, as I read more theology, I concluded that this argument was somewhat oversimplified, and tended to follow the argument of Colin Gunton (1941-2003) that modernity could be seen as the result of early Christianity’s inability to work out more thoroughly the doctrine of the Trinity, and in particular the tendency to understand nature in primarily Greek (or more precisely, Platonic) terms, as Gunton thinks Augustine did. But I think Newman makes a strong argument that Gunton’s reading of Augustine is weak; in a sense she says that Gunton reads a kind of proto-nominalism (nature as “universal forms in dubiously real matter”) into Augustine and misses his conviction that “grace is integral to nature.” As it happens, even before consulting with Newman I was becoming less enamored of Gunton’s analysis and more enthusiastic about Pope Benedict’s argument that Christian theology did develop a very elaborate doctrine of the Trinity but did not get far enough along in applying this to nature or human agency (mentioned briefly by Sutton and Boyd). This could be seen in Augustine’s dismissal of the possibility of natural science, and I think one could say that this tendency also runs throughout Protestant theology; Ian Barbour (1923-2013) puts this well in his classic Religion and Science (1997) when he says that “in neo-orthodoxy, nature remains the unredeemed stage for the drama of human redemption.” (454) Aquinas could be seen as attempting more fully to elaborate a Trinitarian conception of nature, but, if Lubac and Cavadini are correct, he suffered a fate similar to Augustine in having his work distorted into the neoscholastic concept of a “pure nature” independent of, or at least not infused with, grace. Based on more recent reading, I think I would want to say that a strong starting point for developing a theology of nature would be the work of Hans Jonas (1903-1993), particularly his brilliant collection of essays The Phenomenon of Life (1966). Jonas seems to point toward what I refer to as a more dynamic concept of nature than is found in Aristotle and which is only implicit in Augustine and partly developed in Aquinas, and it could be speculated that his analysis would be extended by incorporating it into a theology of the Holy Spirit.
I think a good example of the difficulties raised by an incomplete theology of the Spirit can be found in the work of political theorist Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), who had some contact with Michael Polanyi and whose thought does have some similarities to Polanyi’s. Voegelin is famous for his thesis that the various modern secular ideologies are best understood as distortions of Christianity and, more specifically, are essentially revivals of the early Christian heresy of gnosticism, attempting to escape an evil world and achieve some kind of perfection through esoteric knowledge (gnosis), differing from the original versions of gnosticism in that the knowledge to be achieved is scientific (at least in appearance) rather than mystical. I think Voegelin is correct in seeing much of modern thinking as a distortion of Christianity (as numerous other people have argued), but his characterization of modernity as “gnostic” is much too broad-brush. Although it would require a long argument (which I am making in my current book project) to demonstrate, I think one could say that liberalism, certainly in its earliest versions, could be seen as a reductionistic version of Christianity; Marx and communism as a type of immanentized millenarianism, attempting to transform this world rather than escape it (Voegelin tends to use the terms “millenarianism” and “gnosticism” interchangeably, although the two types of belief are really quite different); Nietzsche and fascism/Nazism as forms of neopaganism (since they tend toward an ideology of constant struggle rather than any notion of future perfection); and Heidegger and postmodernism, including the vulgarized postmodernism that informs much present-day expressive individualism, as most closely resembling a gnostic mentality. More importantly, however, when Voegelin attempts to understand what went wrong in Christianity to produce such distortions, he tends toward a kind of process theology somewhat like that of Alfred North Whitehead, arguing that orthodox Christianity, by declaring revelation closed with Christ, created an essentially static conception of God and left humans with nothing to do but wait for the end of the world; such a theology could not give meaning to the civilizational progress of the later medieval era, so that Western people drifted toward gnostic or millenarian belief systems to make sense of this-worldly improvement. A process theology would leave open the possibility of new revelations that could allow humans to make sense of the scientific and technological advancements of the modern era. In Trinitarian terms, process theology can be seen as essentially an attempt to understand the action of the Spirit with a monolithic picture of God; the distinction between Father, Son, and Spirit is lost in an attempt to describe God’s action in the world, resulting in a conception of God’s action that itself has gnostic tendencies. Thus the inability of Christian theology to work out a more adequate conception of the Trinity ends up confusing the analyses of even those sympathetic to Christianity.
I think that some of these issues can be clarified by Poteat’s discussion of the differences between oral and literate cultures. As Ansley explains, Poteat argues that literate cultures tend to take the written word as their (tacit) model of reality. Since the written (or printed) word is a static object, literate cultures will tend to see reality as ultimately static (as in the case of the Greek philosophical conception of a natural order with an unchanging overall structure) or at least will have great difficulty in making sense of change and dynamism (as in the case of modern thought, which certainly did not see reality as static but was unable to articulate a coherent model of how change could coexist with order, thus eventually producing a picture of reality as chaotic change). Oral cultures do not necessarily take the spoken word as their model of reality; indeed the ancient pagan cultures took nature, particularly fertility, conceived in the personal terms of an oral culture, as their model. But the ancient Hebrews did, and this allowed them to achieve an understanding of reality as both dynamic and ordered. In some places Poteat describes this order as the faithfulness of God, the paradigmatic speaker, but in other places he conceptualizes this order as an “oral/aural logic” and argues that it tacitly informs Polanyi’s work. This logic could be another name for the action of the Spirit (and as Ansley points out, I briefly mention that some of Polanyi’s formulations seem to provide “intimations of the Holy Spirit”). Thus we could conclude that one way to approach the task of developing a more thorough theology of the Spirit, particularly with regard to human action and our relationship to nature, would be through an analysis of our capacity for speech. Of course, philosophers (especially over the past century or so) have discussed the speech act in great detail, but rarely have these examinations been placed in a theological context. Polanyi and Poteat, then, along with Jonas, could be the starting point for a more comprehensive Trinitarian theology and ultimately a reconceptualization of human agency, nature, and their relationship, leading finally to a new model of political and social order.