My take on the contradictions in the structure of the USSR : the industrial proletariat and the rest of the working-class in attempting to build a socialist society are required by Marxism to manage their government on their own steam. They had this task right after the Civil War's decimation of the nation,an Olympian task to build a participatory Society, to include more and more of the masses of the population into the task of governance. Given the shape of events in the genesis and unfolding of the first 20 years of Soviet government, the Soviet state carried on with war-communism (1), - in consequence, step by step, an centralizing tendency overshadowed the democratic forms present in the relation of the Factory Committees and the Soviets to the Centre.
The almost impossible hindrances that presented themselves in socialist construction in a newly-liberated serf state (and an industrially and politically under-developed scarcity-state) aided the development of the centralizing movement and a partial displacement of the power of the proletariat by the bureaucracy. Combined with these objective deleterious material and spiritual conditions in the USSR, went authoritarian policies of the over-worked leadership around Stalin – which also is a mirror-image of Russia's backwardness and isolation surrounded by a hostile entente.
I conclude by stating that under the above conditions the Communist Party's growing bureaucracy and the CCCP government displaced some of the participatory decision-making that was to be invested in the proletariat. I am not a Trotskyist, but I see that there was a partial effacement of the political power of the workers by the bureaucracy, people motivated by a determined, struggle to build up and defend the Revolution. The USSR remained a Socialist State, but one shaped by the extremely adverse events in its inception and development.
____________________________________________________
1.Under "War-Communism" of the Civil War an extreme centralisation was put into place by Lenin. The economy of the areas controlled by the C.P. was put into the hands of a small number of organisations. (the Supreme Economic Council being most powerful). This Council had the right to confiscate and requisition supplies, -- the speciality of the Council was the management of industry. The Commissariat of Transport ran the railways. The Commissariat of Agriculture controlled what the peasants work-activity.
Posted by Andrew W. Taylor
Is the Revolution in sight?
looks like the barge may be lifting off a sand bar...
December 12, 2008
Bailing out the Boys like the little boats of Dunkirk
Bailing out the Boys like the little boats of Dunkirk
a poem by Andrew Taylor
Thank God, the System's sound
Our cornerstone firmly laid,
and our State neutral,
when it comes to
Bernard Madoff's Pyramid,
and me and my pussy
at Housing Unit #7, Paradise Row.
Thank God the road ahead is lit,
We'll all muck in
and do our bit for
the Corporations
and H.M.
The Queen.
I'm sure The Firm
observes our pep
bailing out the Boys
Like the little boats of Dunkirk
No, we are not yet round the corner
of this Dreadful Mess!
But we mustn't grumble,
Everything will come right
in the End,
and we'll laugh
as we remember
all the gangsters and good guys
Goodness! Will we ever
keep them straight?
a poem by Andrew Taylor
Thank God, the System's sound
Our cornerstone firmly laid,
and our State neutral,
when it comes to
Bernard Madoff's Pyramid,
and me and my pussy
at Housing Unit #7, Paradise Row.
Thank God the road ahead is lit,
We'll all muck in
and do our bit for
the Corporations
and H.M.
The Queen.
I'm sure The Firm
observes our pep
bailing out the Boys
Like the little boats of Dunkirk
No, we are not yet round the corner
of this Dreadful Mess!
But we mustn't grumble,
Everything will come right
in the End,
and we'll laugh
as we remember
all the gangsters and good guys
Goodness! Will we ever
keep them straight?
The Men Behind the Wire,
The Men Behind the wire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEsOfL2dvA
* (Pat McGuigan)
Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
Every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
Through the little streets of Belfast
In the dark of early morn
British soldiers came marauding
Wrecking little homes with scorn
Heedless of the crying children
Dragging fathers from their beds
Beating sons while helpless mothers
Watched the blood flow from their heads
Not for them a judge or jury
Nor indeed a crime at all
Being Irish means they're guilty
So we're guilty one and all
All around the truth will echo
Cromwell's men are here again
England's name again is sullied
In the eyes of honest men
Proudly march behind their banner
Firmly stand behind their men
We will have them free to help us
Build the nation once again
Onward people, step together
Proudly, firmly on your way
Never fail or never falter
Till the boys come home to stay
Foreign workers decry harsh dismissals from farms, Globe and Mail
by AMANDA TRUSCOTT
December 12, 2008 at 5:18 AM EST
Migrant farm workers are being pushed into cramped housing and fired without cause because of flaws in the government's temporary foreign worker program, labour activists say.
Some of the 70 workers dismissed last week by a Canadian-owned mushroom-farming company spoke out yesterday about what it was like to be fired without notice, two weeks before Christmas.
"It's pretty harsh. We have families in our countries," said Carlos, a worker from Guadalajara hired by Rol-Land Farms as a Spanish translator.
Carlos - the workers asked that their last names not be used - said his bosses called on his day off to say his employment had been terminated, and that in two days a bus would take him to the airport so he could return to Mexico.
It felt like a deportation, said Gorge, also from Guadalajara. "They didn't give us time to think, to choose. They just said, you have to leave the apartment, because they provide the apartment." He and three other men each paid the company $320 a month to stay in the small two-bedroom suite, he said.
Both men said they plan to stay in Canada and look for other jobs, but union officials said many of their co-workers had returned to their home countries before anyone could tell them their two-year work visas allowed them to stay.
Rol-Land Farms, a multimillion-dollar company based in Blenheim, Ont., 100 kilometres southwest of London, is owned by the Vander Pol family. They declined comment yesterday.
Given the current economic situation, it shouldn't be surprising the workers were let go, said Mark Wales, who deals with labour issues for the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
"Every day, there are thousands of people losing their jobs all around the world," he said. "Why would a farm in Ontario be any different?"
In the past, the company has been accused of firing workers who tried to unionize. At the news conference held yesterday by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Carlos and Gorge said none of the Mexicans, Jamaicans or Guatemalans fired last week had been trying to join the union.
It is illegal for agricultural workers in Ontario to unionize, but a decision last month by the Ontario Court of Appeal gave the province 12 months to rewrite the Agricultural Employees Protection Act to allow collective bargaining.
What happened to the Rol-Land farm workers exemplifies everything that's wrong with Ottawa's temporary foreign worker program, according to Dr. Jenna Hennebry, who heads the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"There's a great fear of replacement, of reprimand, of forced repatriation, a loss of pay, a loss of deposits to unregulated recruitment agencies, in particular cases. There's also problems in some cases of immediate eviction, as we've seen in this case."
The program is jointly managed by several agencies in both the federal and provincial governments. That's part of the problem, said Derry McKeever, an advocate with Friends of Farmworkers, a Chatham community activist group. He said migrant workers in Chatham live in houses without proper heat, water or electricity.
"Yesterday, we received a letter from the Minister of Labour saying that it's not a provincial responsibility. The municipality says it's not a municipal responsibility. The federal government says it's not a federal responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to take care of workers like this?" he asked.
Jason Bouzanis, a spokesman for Human Resources and Social Development Canada, said in an e-mail that foreign workers should report any abuse to provincial authorities, because they are supposed to have the same labour rights as Canadians.
December 12, 2008 at 5:18 AM EST
Migrant farm workers are being pushed into cramped housing and fired without cause because of flaws in the government's temporary foreign worker program, labour activists say.
Some of the 70 workers dismissed last week by a Canadian-owned mushroom-farming company spoke out yesterday about what it was like to be fired without notice, two weeks before Christmas.
"It's pretty harsh. We have families in our countries," said Carlos, a worker from Guadalajara hired by Rol-Land Farms as a Spanish translator.
Carlos - the workers asked that their last names not be used - said his bosses called on his day off to say his employment had been terminated, and that in two days a bus would take him to the airport so he could return to Mexico.
It felt like a deportation, said Gorge, also from Guadalajara. "They didn't give us time to think, to choose. They just said, you have to leave the apartment, because they provide the apartment." He and three other men each paid the company $320 a month to stay in the small two-bedroom suite, he said.
Both men said they plan to stay in Canada and look for other jobs, but union officials said many of their co-workers had returned to their home countries before anyone could tell them their two-year work visas allowed them to stay.
Rol-Land Farms, a multimillion-dollar company based in Blenheim, Ont., 100 kilometres southwest of London, is owned by the Vander Pol family. They declined comment yesterday.
Given the current economic situation, it shouldn't be surprising the workers were let go, said Mark Wales, who deals with labour issues for the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
"Every day, there are thousands of people losing their jobs all around the world," he said. "Why would a farm in Ontario be any different?"
In the past, the company has been accused of firing workers who tried to unionize. At the news conference held yesterday by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Carlos and Gorge said none of the Mexicans, Jamaicans or Guatemalans fired last week had been trying to join the union.
It is illegal for agricultural workers in Ontario to unionize, but a decision last month by the Ontario Court of Appeal gave the province 12 months to rewrite the Agricultural Employees Protection Act to allow collective bargaining.
What happened to the Rol-Land farm workers exemplifies everything that's wrong with Ottawa's temporary foreign worker program, according to Dr. Jenna Hennebry, who heads the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"There's a great fear of replacement, of reprimand, of forced repatriation, a loss of pay, a loss of deposits to unregulated recruitment agencies, in particular cases. There's also problems in some cases of immediate eviction, as we've seen in this case."
The program is jointly managed by several agencies in both the federal and provincial governments. That's part of the problem, said Derry McKeever, an advocate with Friends of Farmworkers, a Chatham community activist group. He said migrant workers in Chatham live in houses without proper heat, water or electricity.
"Yesterday, we received a letter from the Minister of Labour saying that it's not a provincial responsibility. The municipality says it's not a municipal responsibility. The federal government says it's not a federal responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to take care of workers like this?" he asked.
Jason Bouzanis, a spokesman for Human Resources and Social Development Canada, said in an e-mail that foreign workers should report any abuse to provincial authorities, because they are supposed to have the same labour rights as Canadians.
December 11, 2008
Karl Rahner on Nature and Grace (A Journey through his Early Articles) by Wandinger Nikolaus
http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/leseraum/texte/341.html
Abstrakt: In the first half of the 20th century K. Rahner gave very important impulses for a new understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. By taking up different approaches and trying to bring them into harmony, Rahner advanced theology. Looking anew at these texts provides us with a better understanding of Rahner's thought, but also of ourselves as human persons and of God's way to relate to us. And it might even serve to guide us into a new understanding of the human person in view of the challenges of the 21st century.
Publiziert in: Guest-Lecture at Heythrop College, University of London, Feb. 2003
Datum: 2003-03-05
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Christological Preface
2. God's Universal Salvific Will
3. Grace as God's Self-Communication
3.1 Uncreated Grace
3.2 The Experience of Grace
3.2.1 The Significance of the Experience of Grace
3.2.2 Transcendental Experience of Grace
3.3 Grace and Nature
3.4 The Supernatural Existential
4. For Further Thought
Endnotes
Before I get into Karl Rahner's theology of grace and his adjustment of the relationship between nature and grace, I have to make a confession: Actually one cannot talk about Rahner's theology of grace without his christology. Rahner could not have talked about grace the way he did, hadn't he had his christology in the back of his head at the same time. But - there is not enough to fit all of it into one lecture, and thus we will have to do in somehow. Fortunately for me, Rahner did the same thing. Most of his articles that directly deal with grace do not emphasize how necessary christology is for them, so we can do it too. However, we have to keep in mind that, although Rahner doesn't say so every time, for him grace is always Christ's grace, meaning that 1) it is the grace that comes from Christ's cross and resurrection, so Christ is really the source and mediator of that grace;1 2) that Jesus Christ himself is the ideal incorporation of grace, he is the model of a completely graced human being2: Christ's humanity can be understood as "that which comes to be and is constituted in its essence and existence, if and insofar as the [divine] Logos empties Himself"3, while from the human perspective the incarnation can be seen as "the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality"4. 3) that the effect of that grace is to make us Christ-like guiding us to follow him.5 Christ as a human being therefore is the model for us and our relation to God in manifold ways. What is really most relevant for any theology of grace is, how Rahner conceives the co-operation between the divine and the human element, in other words grace and nature, using christology as a model. Christ's divinity and his humanity do not co-operate as opposites or as rivals, but on the contrary it was one of the results of the great christological controversies that they form a complete unity while at the same time upholding their distinctness.6 This model, Rahner insists, also applies to the unity of God and a human person in grace, actually even to the relationship between Creator and creatures. Rahner states: "Radical dependence on … [God] increases in direct, and not in inverse proportion with genuine self-coherence before him."7 This may be viewed as a fundamental axiom of Rahner's theology, without which it is inconceivable.
What Rahner takes from soteriology is the conviction that through Christ, his death and resurrection, we know that God's salvific will is universal and without bounds. That is the key to access Rahner's theology of grace.
God's Universal Salvific Will
So Rahner reads Christian revelation as saying that God wants all human beings to be saved and presupposes that in his theology of grace. For Rahner that means that God's salvific will is not dependent on any conditions that human persons would have to fulfill. This will has not even been shaken by humanity's fall into sin, it includes all human persons no matter where or when they live, and thus is independent of their religious affiliation as well. That does not mean that all humans are saved automatically, because they still can reject God's offer of salvation. It does mean that God offers salvation to each and any human person without any preconditions. If there are people in hell, it is only because they rejected God's grace and His offer of salvation, not because God chose to withhold grace and salvation from some, as Augustine had still taught. Rahner gives biblical and systematic reasons for this interpretations. I will skip these here and simply mention that the Second Vatican Council took up this understanding, when it officially taught that all human beings, independently of their religious affiliation could be saved by God's grace.8 That is exactly Rahner's position. So, let us now proceed to the way he understood that grace.
Grace as God's Self-Communication
Two elements will guide us here: One is Rahner's "re-discovery" of uncreated grace; the other his emphasis on the experience of grace. Both occasions a new conception of the relationship of grace and nature, which can be summarized as his theory of the supernatural existential.
Uncreated Grace
Rahner's staring point in each case is a particular historic situation in theology. He comes across a great tensions of two theological positions with respect to the theology of grace. One is found in patristic theology and is also very near to Pauline thinking, the other was scholastic and was the usual way theologians thought about grace in 1939, when Rahner for the first time published his article on uncreated grace.9 Rahner accepts that for St. Paul the inner sanctification of a human person "is first and foremost a communication of the personal Spirit of God, …; and he [Paul] sees every created grace, …, as a consequence and a manifestation of the possession of this uncreated grace."10 Church Fathers concurred with that theology. For them God communicated, or one could also say, donated Himself in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that self-gift is called uncreated grace: uncreated, because it is God Himself; grace because it is a free gift.Scholastic theology on the other hand focused on created grace, i. e. means, by which humans conform to God's will, e. g. certain virtues. They can be seen as gifts from God for human salvation, but they are not God Himself, therefore they are created. They are "an inner transformation of the justified person as such, hence an inner quality"11 of him or her.
From that Rahner sets himself the task as to "how the two ways of looking at things, …, may be brought into harmony".12
To get there Rahner takes what at first seems like a diversion and discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's theology of the visio beatifica, the way the redeemed in heaven view God. For Rahner this is not a diversion, for the visio beatifica is the end for which grace is given, thus it is the highest manifestation of grace; and all grace we receive during our lives - be it created or uncreated - is given in order to wake our desire for eternal life and make us able to experience that visio beatifica.
I will try a shortcut now and give you simply the result Rahner gains from these considerations. A very fundamental distinction for Rahner is that between two types of causality God exerts onto creatures: that of creation and what Rahner calls the really supernatural workings of God in the world. He does so in the language of Thomistic scholasticism. In creation God is the efficient cause, which brings forth something that is different from Himself. However, when God really acts supernaturally in the world (as in the hypostatic union, the visio beatifica and in bestowing grace on human persons), he exerts a different kind of causality, which Rahner calls quasi-formal.13
When you remember your philosophy - and I hope you do - you will know what a formal cause is: In Aristotelian thinking every material being consists of matter and form, one being the material cause, the other the formal cause. Aquinas generalized these ideas and taught that any being was, what it was, by its form, or its essence. So, e. g. the formal cause of the eye is the ability to see, the formal cause of a human person is the soul. Now when Rahner takes up that language, he says that in God's supernatural workings, He Himself becomes a formal cause in the human person. Put very simply that is the scholastic way of saying that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. Rahner emphasizes, however, that by expressing that with this philosophical vocabulary it becomes clear that this is not just metaphorical or figurative speech, it is real.
And Rahner accomplishes something else with that. As I said, the first version of this article appeared in 1939, scholastic and Thomistic terminology was a virtual must for Catholic theologians at the time. By using this terminology in order to show that the Holy Spirit really works in human beings, Rahner opens theology up for this new path of investigation. And he opens it up by way of evolution and not by way of revolution. My colleagues in Innsbruck who preside over the Karl-Rahner-Archive and are much better than I in historically situating Rahner's thinking emphasize that quite a lot: Rahner is not an innovator in the sense of leaving the material handed down through tradition behind, he became an innovator by working in the system and opening it up from within by showing that there were paths of inquiry not seen before or that when you applied the model in a very strict way, you had to move beyond what had become common-place into new ground. So the Rahner-scholar of today must be prepared to understand the tradition Rahner came out of and the terminology he used. Otherwise we will not be able to understand Rahner properly, or even worse, make him to say what we would like him to say.
Now let us return to the quasi-formal cause. We have stated so far that God as uncreated grace really becomes the formal cause of human supernatural acts. Rahner goes on now that we must ensure that in spite of God's becoming a formal cause in us, He still remains the completely transcendent and sovereign God and that His formal causality differs from all created formal causes we know. Therefore the prefix quasi-. Rahner stresses that from a systematic point of view this is nothing exceptional, because whenever we use a category formed from human experiences in the world and apply it to God, we have to modify it. We have to use it in an analogous way, or as Aquinas said, we have to transform it in the way of a triplex via. That means: What is said positively in it, has to be taken as really referring to God; but any finite concept has limitations: these have to be negáted with respect to God; that way the concept takes on a different, higher, meaning, which Thomas calls via eminentiae.
That has to be done with God's efficient causality in creation as well: God is efficient cause, but He differs from all other efficient causes in that He does not need a material cause for creation and He can create something that is at the same time ontologically dependent on Him and yet free and - in a certain sense - autonomous. The same now with God as a quasi-formal cause: God can become the inner principle of our supernatural acts, but can do that in such a way that His transcendence and infinity are not compromised in any way, while human supernatural acts still are our acts, and not God's. Therefore Rahner calls God a quasi-formal cause.
Now, what does that mean for the reformation discussions that had not been really solved: Catholics maintained that there was merit in good works; Protestants claimed that this was justification by works (Werkgerechtigkeit) that would make salvation a human accomplishment rather than a gift of God's grace. Seeing God as a quasi-formal cause for our supernatural acts in the way just mentioned, is nothing less but a solution to that problem by applying Rahner's axiom derived from Christology to it: dependence on God and autonomy in a certain sense are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually inclusive. Because God Himself is the quasi-formal cause of human supernatural acts, they are brought forth by grace, but they are nevertheless human acts; they are human accomplishments granted by God's grace. So merit from good works is not to be construed as excluding God's grace, while God's grace does not exclude human freedom. That is not to say that there was no thinking in terms of Werkgerechtigkeit in certain Catholic theologies; Luther's criticism did have a legitimate target. Yet, his criticism suffered from the same problematic presuppositions, namely that God's grace and human freedom are rivals. Rahner says they are not rivals, but sources of human salvation working in co-operation.
With all that in mind, Rahner also has a solution for the problem he started with: how do uncreated and created grace go together, how can biblical-patristic and scholastic thinking be brought into union. Rahner again uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic structure of formal cause and material cause: uncreated grace as quasi-formal cause of the supernatural acts of the graced human spirit and created graces as the material causes of these acts. Again philosophy teaches us that when we have a being composed of matter and form, neither of these principles can actually exist without the other; it is only the composite being that exists through the principles of form and matter. So form and matter presuppose one another or as Rahner says: "In this way the material and formal causes possess a reciprocal priority: … From this … there follows … the logical justification for inferring the presence of one reality from that of the other."14
Let us summarize, what we have so far: Rahner succeeds in construing a self-communication or self-giving of God in a scholastic terminology by revitalizing the patristic concept of uncreated grace and integrating that into a scholastic conceptual framework as a quasi-formal cause.
At the same time Rahner systematically distinguishes the order of creation and that of salvation, or we could say he distinguishes between nature and grace on a theoretical level. The differentia specifica is just the kind of causality God exerts in each case: "By His creative efficient causality (which is of course of a unique and divine nature) God constitutes the absolute other from Himself. By what we call incarnation, grace and glory, God does not create something other from Himself ex nihilo sui et subjecti, but He communicates Himself to the creature that already has been constituted."15 By the way, in defining the supernatural in this manner, Rahner also tells us that the theological concept of supernatural has nothing to do with any kind of superstition that seeks the supernatural in extraordinary, magical or esoteric powers. We will, however, see very soon that this distinction indeed is on a theoretical level only.
The Experience of Grace
The Significance of the Experience of Grace
I will now turn to Rahner's essay Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace16, which was first published in 1950 and again stands at a very interesting junction of two threads of theological thinking. The first thread is the so called Nouvelle Théologie17 and its conception of that relationship; the other thread is the prevalent Jesuit tradition on the subject and the more cautious and traditional approach of Pope Pius XIIth encyclical Humani Generis, which appeared in the same year. Rahner sympathizes with Nouvelle Théologie and shares its main concern, while at the same time he distances himself from their proposed solution in an attempt to take the Pope's reservations seriously.The prevalent Jesuit theology of grace at the time ruled out that human persons could actually experience grace, because it supposed we could only experience what pertains to our nature. Since grace is superadded to nature, it cannot be experienced. Rahner shared the Nouvelle Théologie's concern that such an approach had terrible consequences for theology, spirituality and living the faith in general. For, in that case, supernatural grace does not complement human nature, but comes to it as something alien and disturbing, and people cannot know about it unless by verbal revelation. If that revelation, however, finds no corresponding ground in human experience, there is not much difference between verbal revelation and verbal indoctrination: You have to accept what is said without any supporting evidential experience.18 The same applies to the theology of original sin: We cannot see it as a problem anymore in our lives, when we have gotten used to the idea that we are nothing else but natural creatures, nothing supernatural, nothing divine really convening to us.19
Against that conception Rahner wants to emphasize with the Nouvelle Théologie and with Aquinas that grace in principle can be experienced - however Rahner develops a concept of experience that differs somewhat from that of our everyday language.
Once again reaching back to Aquinas, Rahner stipulates that supernatural grace constitutes a formal object or a horizon for the human intellect and will, a horizon that is the precondition for the cognition of any particular object of human insight.20 This formal object is an a priori that conditions all human knowledge and freedom. So, it conditions every conscious human experience and in doing so it is conscious itself, Rahner says. However, it is not directly conscious: if I ask a person, if they experience that graced horizon, they may well truthfully answer no. But, Rahner argues, they still make this experience indirectly or unthematically, when they experience the world. This horizon is not in itself an object of experience, but it is experienced in that it shapes the experience of all objects. You may notice that what Rahner calls here indirectly or unthematically conscious would be called unconscious in our everyday language, which has, I suppose, been influenced quite a lot by Freudian terminology. In order to understand Rahner ourselves and to be able to communicate his thoughts to others, we have to take that into account, otherwise Rahnerian theology becomes unintelligible to most people. Rahner's distinction is more subtle than Freudian or everyday distinction: there we have only conscious or unconscious; here we have directly conscious, indirectly conscious and unconscious. And Rahner insists on grace's being at least indirectly conscious.
[I want to give a very simple example of what Rahner means by formal object and horizon:
The human eye is susceptible to electro-magnetic waves of a frequency between 0.38 m and 0.75 m. We call these light. There are waves with higher of lower frequencies and therefore we cannot see them, though for example bees can also see ultra-violet rays. Now in scholastic terminology we could say: The human eye's formal object is limited to the range between 0.38 and 0.75 m, while that of bees also includes the range between (0.28 and 0.39 m). Bees therefore can "see" more objects than us and they certainly see them in a different way from us, though we can hardly form an idea how that might be. The formal object therefore determines what entities can become direct or material objects.You can see from that example, what a formal object is, and you can also see that the formal object of the human eye is definitely finite. Aquinas and Rahner suppose that the formal object of the human spirit, of our intellect and will, is infinite. That means: Nothing exists that is principally outside the realm of human cognition.]Now Rahner goes a step further: It is supernatural grace that transforms the horizon of the human spirit, the infinite formal object of the human spirit really is shaped by grace. As a consequence, our intellect and will, the way we experience ourselves, the world and God, has been transformed by grace, and thus we can and do experience - though only indirectly - grace itself, or we could just as well say: God Himself. That way grace is the a priori horizon that shapes human experience, and can be experienced itself. It is, however experienced unthematically, and that is why someone might truthfully answer no, when asked about their experience of grace; why human persons may have an experience of God without reflexively knowing that they do; why the experience of God is not conditioned on any particular outward profession of faith; why, in the end, people may be saved by God independently of their religious affiliation, because they might be - as Rahner coined the term - "anonymous" Christians, that is: they nor only experience God's offer of grace unthematically, they also accepted it unthematically. Grace is therefore in the first place experienced unthematically and further effort has to be made to make that experience thematic. Rahner emphasizes "that the possibility of experiencing grace and the possibility of experiencing grace as grace are not the same thing"21. So, one might experience grace without realizing that it is grace.
I think this last point is very important. In the German-speaking countries a debate is currently going on, whether today's models of religious experience have not forgotten that God sometimes breaks into our world as alien and foreign and challenges humans to move out of our lazy and comfortable coziness. Many people who agree with that position criticize Rahner's theology of grace for bringing forth this unbiblical attitude. And it is true that Rahner wanted grace to be seen as something not alien to us. However, he distinguished very well between something being alien to us and something being perceived as alien by us. And Rahner challenges us that eventually anything that comes from the God, who created us, cannot be alien to us, but is complements our nature and that at a deeper, indirect, level of experience, we also perceive that. But on the direct and oftentimes superficial level of experience we might well have the impression that certain impulses are alien on us, while in fact they come from God in order to convert us, to turn us around. So, if the strangeness with which God's impulses sometimes enter our lives has been forgotten and suppressed in a lot of modern theology - be it as it may -, the blame for that should not be laid at Rahner's feet, but rather at too simplistic adaptations of his quite complicated and nuanced theology.
Transcendental Experience of Grace
If God offers grace to every human person because of His universal salvific will, and if grace forms an a priori horizon for the human spirit, this can also be called a transcendental horizon. Rahner uses the term "transcendental" very often and with a certain liberty, combining different meanings it has. Grace is a transcendental horizon because, 1) as a horizon, it transcends any particular realm of experience and permeates all of human experience; 2) as a finalization of the human spirit toward the divine, it transcends the world into the transcendent; and 3) as an a priori horizon, it can be analyzed by transcendental analysis, the philosophical method named by Immauel Kant, which Rahner uses in theology in the revised form of Joseph Maréchal, the Belgian Jesuit.Since such a horizon is indirectly experienced, and since it is transcendental, Rahner also says that it is perceived by a transcendental experience: this experience permeates all of human experience, it draws us toward the transcendent God, and, Rahner says, it can be analyzed and its existence proved by the transcendental method.
Grace and Nature
Unfortunately I do not have the time to explain transcendental method in detail. But you might know that it starts from a mental operation - like cognition or questioning - and looks for necessary preconditions in the human spirit for these operations. The preconditions it finds are proved to be real, because the operation whose necessary preconditions they are, was real. That way we can inquire into the nature of a human person: what has to belong to human nature, when humans are capable of mental acts like these? Now let us suppose a transcendental philosopher uses that method to analyze the human transcendental horizon, what will they get as a result?According to that theology which supposed that grace was beyond experience, our philosopher will gain insights into human nature and nothing else. Once we accept with Rahner that grace is indirectly experienced, this changes: The result will be, if the transcendental method has been adequately put to use, those properties of the human spirit that belong to it irrevocably, no matter whether their origin is pure human nature or the grace God offers irrevocably to humanity. The distinction between pure human nature and grace therefore cannot be drawn with certainty, because in concrete human nature, as we encounter it and analyze it transcendentally, they are already combined.22
So again Rahner proposes a more subtle distinction: not only between nature and grace, but between pure nature and concrete nature: the latter being human nature as it really exists as a consequence of God's acts of creating and gracing; the former being a theoretical concept that refers to what is minimally required for a creature to be human. But no human being exists that has only pure nature as its essence, because all human beings are already graced in their very essence.
So, what is the use of that new distinction? In accepting that concrete human persons are graced in their concrete nature, Rahner follows the Nouvelle Théologie. In holding fast to pure nature as a theoretical concept, Rahner tries to incorporate Humani Generis into his theology of grace. The encyclical had stated that in order to uphold the gratuity* of grace, in other words that God is free to give or withhold grace or that He does not owe23 us grace, we must accept that God could have created intelligent beings without calling them into communion with Him, i. e. without giving them any grace.24 In Rahner's terminology these would be creatures constituted by pure nature only, without any grace ordering them toward the visio beatifica. Rahner concurs with the pope that God could have created such intelligent creatures, but at the same time he stipulates that we know from revelation that He hasn't, because He has given grace to all people. Grace's gratuity does not entail its scarcity, Rahner insists.
However, compliance with church magisterium is not the only reason for Rahner's developing the concept of pure nature. It also ascertains that we whose concrete nature is co-constituted by grace can still experience this as a pure gift and should not fancy any obligation on God's side to grant it:25 "As a real partner of God's I must be capable of receiving His grace (unlike my existence) as the unexpected miracle of His love."26 Rahner thus stresses: Although a pious person will know that everything they are and have is God's gift, this is true about grace still on a second level. We could reasonably say: If and when God decides to create human beings, He by that act - though being His free choice - constitutes an obligation to Himself and a converse right of these creatures to everything necessary for them. This is a right granted by God, but still, once granted it constitutes a legitimate claim on God. Grace, however, is not some thing for Rahner, but - as we've seen - the communication of God Himself, a personal relationship with God, and for that reason there can be no claim or obligation for it. It is again - on a second level - God's free decision. Pure nature circumscribes exactly the boundaries of this human claim on God, concrete nature transcends them into the realm of free personal relationship. Grace, understood in that sense, exacts a two-fold characteristic in human persons: it kindles a longing for God's love in us and at the same time enables us to receive that love and love God in turn, and do that with the experience that it is "the ever astounding miracle, the unexpected gift, granted without any obligation"27.
From here one might speculate that this special kind of freedom from obligation derives from the nature of personal relationships as such: love is per se a free gift; one cannot owe love to anybody. Rahner relates that argument, but then says it is not valid with respect to God.28 It is certainly true for a fellow human being whom I give my love: I am not obligated to love them, because I have not produced their desire for my love. Yet with respect to God, the situation is different: If He has made us as longing for and dependent on His love, could He then withhold it from us without contravening the sense of his very creation? Rahner rejects that possibility. So, God would owe it to Himself to grant it and thus it would not be a pure gift anymore.29 For that reason Rahner argues, the concept of pure nature is necessary in order to ascertain grace's gratuity. It designates what remains as a remnant, when the most inner centerpiece of the human person, i. e. their orientation toward God is taken away from their concrete nature. "Nature" in the sense of being the opposite of grace therefore is a concept for a remnant not actually found in the world.30
In the further development of his theology of grace, Rahner speaks less and less about pure nature, in order to finally drop it in his later writings. I think, however, what Rahner dropped was the ontic way of distinguishing pure and concrete nature, it was not his insistence on the gift of grace being gratuitous in a second order sense, when compared to the gratuity of our being created. We might also say: Even though God has created us and through grace caused our desire for communion with Him, the fulfillment of this desire is still not owed to us (though He might owe it to Himself) , because God wants us to enter into a personal relationship with Him, which can best be modeled on human love, which is gratuitous and not obligated.
From a methodological point of view we can say that again Rahner comes to a conclusion which he could have gained much easier by a personalistic metaphysics than by scholastic ontology; Rahner reaches it, however, through opening up scholastic thinking from within and thus made it possible that his conclusion could take hold in a theology dominated by that thinking and strictly supervised by the magisterium of the church.
The Supernatural Existential
What we have described and discussed so far, grace as a transcendental horizon that shapes all of human experience, has been called a supernatural existential. An existential is nothing less than an a priori that shapes all of human experience. When grace forms such an existential, it may be called supernatural in the sense already explained. So, what we were basically talking about all the time, is the supernatural existential, a transcendental, a priori horizon constituted by God's formal causality being an element in the concrete nature of the human spirit. The supernatural existential thus is an aspect of grace itself, it is the way grace is offered to every human person prior to all religious of Christian instruction or reflection.
For Further Thought
Let me add two considerations on some further uses of Rahner's elaborations:1) I think Rahner's systematic conclusion that we cannot draw a clear distinction between the purely natural aspects, the effects of grace and - in the same vein - the results of original sin in our concrete nature, has far-reaching consequences in any theological anthropology. We can distinguish three main traits of the interpretation of the human person in the history of thought: one that thinks very highly of humanity, deems it intrinsically good and expects it to be saved by merely overcoming all super-additions to this good human nature; another one that holds the opposite position and sees humanity as basically rotten and evil and therefore expects salvation from a harsh judgment; and a third that denies any in-depth structure of human nature, seeing humanity as just one type of animal among others. Now from Rahner's analysis, we can see that each of these positions has something to it: the first acknowledges humanity's orientation toward the good, but overlooks its volatility; the second recognizes the consequences of original sin, but overlooks that original sin never weakened God's salvific will for us and that therefore judgment might look quite different from what the prophets of doom would have it; the third treats human persons as if they were creatures of pure nature, without any trace of God's grace or human sin incorporated into their very essence. A Christian anthropology in Karl Rahner's footsteps can acknowledge that each of them is right to a certain degree, but can bring them into an integrated unity by overcoming their one-sidedness, and thus can see human nature more clearly.
2) Has anyone here seen Steven Spielberg's movie AI: Artificial Intelligence? Do you have an idea, what that might have to do with Rahner's theology of grace?
Well, for those who don't know the movie, the plot is told rather quickly: A couple has a son, who has fallen into a coma and in all probability will not recover. After a time the couple decide to adopt an android-son, a robot with the looks and character-traits of an 11-year-old boy that starts to love his adoptive parents and desires their love, once he has been really adopted by entering a certain code. After that, he calls his adoptive mother Mommy. However, unexpectedly the natural son recovers and awakens from coma and the couple has now two sons, one their own flesh and blood, and one of steel and silicon but with the same longing for their love. Now naturally the couple decide in favor of their human son. As a consequence the android becomes very desperate and seeks ways to be exactly like his human brother (the robot is not able to eat and drink). He wants to become fully human. By fulfilling that prerequisite, he hopes to win the love of his adoptive parents.
You may now realize that Spielberg conducts a thought-experiment in his movie that corresponds to Rahner's question: If someone creates a being as longing for and dependent on it creator's love, could that creator then withhold that love from his creature without contravening the sense of his very creation? The humans in AI do just that and it is true that they contravene the sense of their very creation. Correspondingly the android boy attempts to obtain his parents' love by works, by changing who he is; he wants to merit that love. In that he is not very different from many human children who think that they must merit their parents' love, or for that matter from many faithful believers who ever again commit the pharisaical fallacy of thinking that they have to earn God's grace.
Rahner's theology of grace tells us that grace is purely gratuitous, that by our efforts to become better human persons and better Christians we cannot earn God's love, for He has already given that love to us gratuitously and irrevocably; our efforts to become better human persons can merely enable us to accept that love as a free and gratuitous gift. In the same vein we could say: Although the creator contravenes the sense of his own creation by his behavior, still the creature has no right to his love, simply because love cannot be obligated. And here is the limitation of Spielberg's thought-experiment: either we would have to accept that one day robots could be produced that are capable of giving and receiving real love (as the movie certainly suggests) - then they would eventually also be capable of understanding its gratuitous nature; or they would only simulate an ability to give and receive love, then withholding it from them would not be a problem at all.
Now if it is true that our concrete nature receives its orientation from God's grace, and if that is the reason why we are able to enter into a gratuitous relationship to God, one might ask, whether that is not the reason for the ability to enter into gratuitous relationships of any kind, also with humans. In that case, the hypothetical intelligent creatures that God could create without a supernatural calling, according to Humani Generis, would be unable to enter into free and gratuitous relationships to anyone. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be so advanced that computers and robots can replace humans intellectually. Then this ability might become the distinguishing mark between human persons and intelligent creatures without personality.
Endnotes:
1 Cf. Rahner, K.: Nature and Grace. In: Theological Investigations 4 (= ThI 4), 165-188, esp. 176f.
23
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2 Cf. Rahner, K.: Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Transl. by W. Dych. London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1978, 202.
24
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3 Ibid. 224.
25
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4 Ibid. 218.
26
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5 Cf. Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, esp. 199f.
27
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6 "In the incarnation … we can verify …, in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature, namely that the closeness and the distance, the submissiveness and the independence of the creature do not grow in inverse but in like proportion. Thus Christ is most radically man, and his humanity is the freest and most independent, not in spite of, but because of its being taken up, by being constituted as the self-utterance of God." Rahner, K.: On the Theology of the Incarnation. In. ThI 4, 105-120, here 117.
28
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7 Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, here 162.
29
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8 Cf. AG 7; NA 1; LG 16; GS 22.
30
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9 Rahner, K.: Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace. In ThI 1, 319-346.
31
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10 ThI 1, 322 = S 1, 349f.
32
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11 ThI 1, 321 = S 1, 349.
33
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12 ThI 1, 325 = S 1, 353.
34
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13 Cf. ThI 1, 329 = S 1, 357f.
35
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14 ThI 1, 341 = S 1, 369f.
36
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15 Rahner, K.: Über den Begriff des Geheimnisses in der katholischen Theologie. In: S 4, 51-99, hier 90, own translation. Cf.: The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology. In: ThI 4, 36-76, here 65f.
37
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16 In: ThI 1, 297-318.
38
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17 For references on that see Rahner's footnote 1 on in ThI 1, 297.
39
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18 Cf. ThI 1, 299.
40
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19 Cf. ThI 1, 299f.
41
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20 Cf. Siebenrock, Gnade als Herz der Welt. Der Beitrag Karl Rahners zu einer zeitgemäßen Gnadentheologie. In: Theologie aus Erfahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner. Hg.: M. Delgado u. M. Lutz-Bachmann. Hildesheim 1994, 34-71, here 36, quoting Rahner, K.: Zur Rezeption des Thomas von Aquin. In: Imhof, P. / Biallowons, H. (Hg.): Glaube in winterlicher Zeit. Gespräche mit Karl Rahner aus den letzten Lebensjahren. Düsseldorf 1986, 49-71, hier 58. Siebenrock points out that Rahner used this terminology already in his first lecture series on grace: "Sed objectum formale est quasi ‚horizon' ‚ambitus' et ‚medium', in et sub quo positum objectum adventicium est cognoscibile". Rahner: De gratia Christi. Summa praelectionum in usum privatum auditorum ordinata. Innsbruck 11937/38, 299, quoted according to Siebenrock, ibid. 62, footnote 34.
42
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21 ThI 1, 300 = S 1, 326.
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22 Cf. S 1, 327 = ThI 1, 301.
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23 I quite disagree with the translator of ThI 1, 1, C. Ernst, when he translates "ungeschuldet" as "unexacted", saying that this is "not quite so important in the present context" (ThI 1, 304, note 2). I think it is very important, if one wants to follow the chain of thought in Rahner's argument, and I think the verbal paraphrase is not as complicated as Ernst seems to think.
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24 Cf. Humani Generis 26: "Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision."
46
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25 Cf. ThI 1, 304.
47
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26 S 1, 331 my own translation, cf. ThI 1, 305.
48
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27 S 1, 337 my own translation; cf. ThI 1, 310f.
49
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28 Cf. ThI 1, 305f.
50
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29 Cf. ThI 1, 307.
51
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30 Cf. S 1, 340 = ThI 1, 313.
52
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Author: Wandinger Nikolaus
© Universität Innsbruck - Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Abstrakt: In the first half of the 20th century K. Rahner gave very important impulses for a new understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. By taking up different approaches and trying to bring them into harmony, Rahner advanced theology. Looking anew at these texts provides us with a better understanding of Rahner's thought, but also of ourselves as human persons and of God's way to relate to us. And it might even serve to guide us into a new understanding of the human person in view of the challenges of the 21st century.
Publiziert in: Guest-Lecture at Heythrop College, University of London, Feb. 2003
Datum: 2003-03-05
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Christological Preface
2. God's Universal Salvific Will
3. Grace as God's Self-Communication
3.1 Uncreated Grace
3.2 The Experience of Grace
3.2.1 The Significance of the Experience of Grace
3.2.2 Transcendental Experience of Grace
3.3 Grace and Nature
3.4 The Supernatural Existential
4. For Further Thought
Endnotes
Before I get into Karl Rahner's theology of grace and his adjustment of the relationship between nature and grace, I have to make a confession: Actually one cannot talk about Rahner's theology of grace without his christology. Rahner could not have talked about grace the way he did, hadn't he had his christology in the back of his head at the same time. But - there is not enough to fit all of it into one lecture, and thus we will have to do in somehow. Fortunately for me, Rahner did the same thing. Most of his articles that directly deal with grace do not emphasize how necessary christology is for them, so we can do it too. However, we have to keep in mind that, although Rahner doesn't say so every time, for him grace is always Christ's grace, meaning that 1) it is the grace that comes from Christ's cross and resurrection, so Christ is really the source and mediator of that grace;1 2) that Jesus Christ himself is the ideal incorporation of grace, he is the model of a completely graced human being2: Christ's humanity can be understood as "that which comes to be and is constituted in its essence and existence, if and insofar as the [divine] Logos empties Himself"3, while from the human perspective the incarnation can be seen as "the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality"4. 3) that the effect of that grace is to make us Christ-like guiding us to follow him.5 Christ as a human being therefore is the model for us and our relation to God in manifold ways. What is really most relevant for any theology of grace is, how Rahner conceives the co-operation between the divine and the human element, in other words grace and nature, using christology as a model. Christ's divinity and his humanity do not co-operate as opposites or as rivals, but on the contrary it was one of the results of the great christological controversies that they form a complete unity while at the same time upholding their distinctness.6 This model, Rahner insists, also applies to the unity of God and a human person in grace, actually even to the relationship between Creator and creatures. Rahner states: "Radical dependence on … [God] increases in direct, and not in inverse proportion with genuine self-coherence before him."7 This may be viewed as a fundamental axiom of Rahner's theology, without which it is inconceivable.
What Rahner takes from soteriology is the conviction that through Christ, his death and resurrection, we know that God's salvific will is universal and without bounds. That is the key to access Rahner's theology of grace.
God's Universal Salvific Will
So Rahner reads Christian revelation as saying that God wants all human beings to be saved and presupposes that in his theology of grace. For Rahner that means that God's salvific will is not dependent on any conditions that human persons would have to fulfill. This will has not even been shaken by humanity's fall into sin, it includes all human persons no matter where or when they live, and thus is independent of their religious affiliation as well. That does not mean that all humans are saved automatically, because they still can reject God's offer of salvation. It does mean that God offers salvation to each and any human person without any preconditions. If there are people in hell, it is only because they rejected God's grace and His offer of salvation, not because God chose to withhold grace and salvation from some, as Augustine had still taught. Rahner gives biblical and systematic reasons for this interpretations. I will skip these here and simply mention that the Second Vatican Council took up this understanding, when it officially taught that all human beings, independently of their religious affiliation could be saved by God's grace.8 That is exactly Rahner's position. So, let us now proceed to the way he understood that grace.
Grace as God's Self-Communication
Two elements will guide us here: One is Rahner's "re-discovery" of uncreated grace; the other his emphasis on the experience of grace. Both occasions a new conception of the relationship of grace and nature, which can be summarized as his theory of the supernatural existential.
Uncreated Grace
Rahner's staring point in each case is a particular historic situation in theology. He comes across a great tensions of two theological positions with respect to the theology of grace. One is found in patristic theology and is also very near to Pauline thinking, the other was scholastic and was the usual way theologians thought about grace in 1939, when Rahner for the first time published his article on uncreated grace.9 Rahner accepts that for St. Paul the inner sanctification of a human person "is first and foremost a communication of the personal Spirit of God, …; and he [Paul] sees every created grace, …, as a consequence and a manifestation of the possession of this uncreated grace."10 Church Fathers concurred with that theology. For them God communicated, or one could also say, donated Himself in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that self-gift is called uncreated grace: uncreated, because it is God Himself; grace because it is a free gift.Scholastic theology on the other hand focused on created grace, i. e. means, by which humans conform to God's will, e. g. certain virtues. They can be seen as gifts from God for human salvation, but they are not God Himself, therefore they are created. They are "an inner transformation of the justified person as such, hence an inner quality"11 of him or her.
From that Rahner sets himself the task as to "how the two ways of looking at things, …, may be brought into harmony".12
To get there Rahner takes what at first seems like a diversion and discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's theology of the visio beatifica, the way the redeemed in heaven view God. For Rahner this is not a diversion, for the visio beatifica is the end for which grace is given, thus it is the highest manifestation of grace; and all grace we receive during our lives - be it created or uncreated - is given in order to wake our desire for eternal life and make us able to experience that visio beatifica.
I will try a shortcut now and give you simply the result Rahner gains from these considerations. A very fundamental distinction for Rahner is that between two types of causality God exerts onto creatures: that of creation and what Rahner calls the really supernatural workings of God in the world. He does so in the language of Thomistic scholasticism. In creation God is the efficient cause, which brings forth something that is different from Himself. However, when God really acts supernaturally in the world (as in the hypostatic union, the visio beatifica and in bestowing grace on human persons), he exerts a different kind of causality, which Rahner calls quasi-formal.13
When you remember your philosophy - and I hope you do - you will know what a formal cause is: In Aristotelian thinking every material being consists of matter and form, one being the material cause, the other the formal cause. Aquinas generalized these ideas and taught that any being was, what it was, by its form, or its essence. So, e. g. the formal cause of the eye is the ability to see, the formal cause of a human person is the soul. Now when Rahner takes up that language, he says that in God's supernatural workings, He Himself becomes a formal cause in the human person. Put very simply that is the scholastic way of saying that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. Rahner emphasizes, however, that by expressing that with this philosophical vocabulary it becomes clear that this is not just metaphorical or figurative speech, it is real.
And Rahner accomplishes something else with that. As I said, the first version of this article appeared in 1939, scholastic and Thomistic terminology was a virtual must for Catholic theologians at the time. By using this terminology in order to show that the Holy Spirit really works in human beings, Rahner opens theology up for this new path of investigation. And he opens it up by way of evolution and not by way of revolution. My colleagues in Innsbruck who preside over the Karl-Rahner-Archive and are much better than I in historically situating Rahner's thinking emphasize that quite a lot: Rahner is not an innovator in the sense of leaving the material handed down through tradition behind, he became an innovator by working in the system and opening it up from within by showing that there were paths of inquiry not seen before or that when you applied the model in a very strict way, you had to move beyond what had become common-place into new ground. So the Rahner-scholar of today must be prepared to understand the tradition Rahner came out of and the terminology he used. Otherwise we will not be able to understand Rahner properly, or even worse, make him to say what we would like him to say.
Now let us return to the quasi-formal cause. We have stated so far that God as uncreated grace really becomes the formal cause of human supernatural acts. Rahner goes on now that we must ensure that in spite of God's becoming a formal cause in us, He still remains the completely transcendent and sovereign God and that His formal causality differs from all created formal causes we know. Therefore the prefix quasi-. Rahner stresses that from a systematic point of view this is nothing exceptional, because whenever we use a category formed from human experiences in the world and apply it to God, we have to modify it. We have to use it in an analogous way, or as Aquinas said, we have to transform it in the way of a triplex via. That means: What is said positively in it, has to be taken as really referring to God; but any finite concept has limitations: these have to be negáted with respect to God; that way the concept takes on a different, higher, meaning, which Thomas calls via eminentiae.
That has to be done with God's efficient causality in creation as well: God is efficient cause, but He differs from all other efficient causes in that He does not need a material cause for creation and He can create something that is at the same time ontologically dependent on Him and yet free and - in a certain sense - autonomous. The same now with God as a quasi-formal cause: God can become the inner principle of our supernatural acts, but can do that in such a way that His transcendence and infinity are not compromised in any way, while human supernatural acts still are our acts, and not God's. Therefore Rahner calls God a quasi-formal cause.
Now, what does that mean for the reformation discussions that had not been really solved: Catholics maintained that there was merit in good works; Protestants claimed that this was justification by works (Werkgerechtigkeit) that would make salvation a human accomplishment rather than a gift of God's grace. Seeing God as a quasi-formal cause for our supernatural acts in the way just mentioned, is nothing less but a solution to that problem by applying Rahner's axiom derived from Christology to it: dependence on God and autonomy in a certain sense are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually inclusive. Because God Himself is the quasi-formal cause of human supernatural acts, they are brought forth by grace, but they are nevertheless human acts; they are human accomplishments granted by God's grace. So merit from good works is not to be construed as excluding God's grace, while God's grace does not exclude human freedom. That is not to say that there was no thinking in terms of Werkgerechtigkeit in certain Catholic theologies; Luther's criticism did have a legitimate target. Yet, his criticism suffered from the same problematic presuppositions, namely that God's grace and human freedom are rivals. Rahner says they are not rivals, but sources of human salvation working in co-operation.
With all that in mind, Rahner also has a solution for the problem he started with: how do uncreated and created grace go together, how can biblical-patristic and scholastic thinking be brought into union. Rahner again uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic structure of formal cause and material cause: uncreated grace as quasi-formal cause of the supernatural acts of the graced human spirit and created graces as the material causes of these acts. Again philosophy teaches us that when we have a being composed of matter and form, neither of these principles can actually exist without the other; it is only the composite being that exists through the principles of form and matter. So form and matter presuppose one another or as Rahner says: "In this way the material and formal causes possess a reciprocal priority: … From this … there follows … the logical justification for inferring the presence of one reality from that of the other."14
Let us summarize, what we have so far: Rahner succeeds in construing a self-communication or self-giving of God in a scholastic terminology by revitalizing the patristic concept of uncreated grace and integrating that into a scholastic conceptual framework as a quasi-formal cause.
At the same time Rahner systematically distinguishes the order of creation and that of salvation, or we could say he distinguishes between nature and grace on a theoretical level. The differentia specifica is just the kind of causality God exerts in each case: "By His creative efficient causality (which is of course of a unique and divine nature) God constitutes the absolute other from Himself. By what we call incarnation, grace and glory, God does not create something other from Himself ex nihilo sui et subjecti, but He communicates Himself to the creature that already has been constituted."15 By the way, in defining the supernatural in this manner, Rahner also tells us that the theological concept of supernatural has nothing to do with any kind of superstition that seeks the supernatural in extraordinary, magical or esoteric powers. We will, however, see very soon that this distinction indeed is on a theoretical level only.
The Experience of Grace
The Significance of the Experience of Grace
I will now turn to Rahner's essay Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace16, which was first published in 1950 and again stands at a very interesting junction of two threads of theological thinking. The first thread is the so called Nouvelle Théologie17 and its conception of that relationship; the other thread is the prevalent Jesuit tradition on the subject and the more cautious and traditional approach of Pope Pius XIIth encyclical Humani Generis, which appeared in the same year. Rahner sympathizes with Nouvelle Théologie and shares its main concern, while at the same time he distances himself from their proposed solution in an attempt to take the Pope's reservations seriously.The prevalent Jesuit theology of grace at the time ruled out that human persons could actually experience grace, because it supposed we could only experience what pertains to our nature. Since grace is superadded to nature, it cannot be experienced. Rahner shared the Nouvelle Théologie's concern that such an approach had terrible consequences for theology, spirituality and living the faith in general. For, in that case, supernatural grace does not complement human nature, but comes to it as something alien and disturbing, and people cannot know about it unless by verbal revelation. If that revelation, however, finds no corresponding ground in human experience, there is not much difference between verbal revelation and verbal indoctrination: You have to accept what is said without any supporting evidential experience.18 The same applies to the theology of original sin: We cannot see it as a problem anymore in our lives, when we have gotten used to the idea that we are nothing else but natural creatures, nothing supernatural, nothing divine really convening to us.19
Against that conception Rahner wants to emphasize with the Nouvelle Théologie and with Aquinas that grace in principle can be experienced - however Rahner develops a concept of experience that differs somewhat from that of our everyday language.
Once again reaching back to Aquinas, Rahner stipulates that supernatural grace constitutes a formal object or a horizon for the human intellect and will, a horizon that is the precondition for the cognition of any particular object of human insight.20 This formal object is an a priori that conditions all human knowledge and freedom. So, it conditions every conscious human experience and in doing so it is conscious itself, Rahner says. However, it is not directly conscious: if I ask a person, if they experience that graced horizon, they may well truthfully answer no. But, Rahner argues, they still make this experience indirectly or unthematically, when they experience the world. This horizon is not in itself an object of experience, but it is experienced in that it shapes the experience of all objects. You may notice that what Rahner calls here indirectly or unthematically conscious would be called unconscious in our everyday language, which has, I suppose, been influenced quite a lot by Freudian terminology. In order to understand Rahner ourselves and to be able to communicate his thoughts to others, we have to take that into account, otherwise Rahnerian theology becomes unintelligible to most people. Rahner's distinction is more subtle than Freudian or everyday distinction: there we have only conscious or unconscious; here we have directly conscious, indirectly conscious and unconscious. And Rahner insists on grace's being at least indirectly conscious.
[I want to give a very simple example of what Rahner means by formal object and horizon:
The human eye is susceptible to electro-magnetic waves of a frequency between 0.38 m and 0.75 m. We call these light. There are waves with higher of lower frequencies and therefore we cannot see them, though for example bees can also see ultra-violet rays. Now in scholastic terminology we could say: The human eye's formal object is limited to the range between 0.38 and 0.75 m, while that of bees also includes the range between (0.28 and 0.39 m). Bees therefore can "see" more objects than us and they certainly see them in a different way from us, though we can hardly form an idea how that might be. The formal object therefore determines what entities can become direct or material objects.You can see from that example, what a formal object is, and you can also see that the formal object of the human eye is definitely finite. Aquinas and Rahner suppose that the formal object of the human spirit, of our intellect and will, is infinite. That means: Nothing exists that is principally outside the realm of human cognition.]Now Rahner goes a step further: It is supernatural grace that transforms the horizon of the human spirit, the infinite formal object of the human spirit really is shaped by grace. As a consequence, our intellect and will, the way we experience ourselves, the world and God, has been transformed by grace, and thus we can and do experience - though only indirectly - grace itself, or we could just as well say: God Himself. That way grace is the a priori horizon that shapes human experience, and can be experienced itself. It is, however experienced unthematically, and that is why someone might truthfully answer no, when asked about their experience of grace; why human persons may have an experience of God without reflexively knowing that they do; why the experience of God is not conditioned on any particular outward profession of faith; why, in the end, people may be saved by God independently of their religious affiliation, because they might be - as Rahner coined the term - "anonymous" Christians, that is: they nor only experience God's offer of grace unthematically, they also accepted it unthematically. Grace is therefore in the first place experienced unthematically and further effort has to be made to make that experience thematic. Rahner emphasizes "that the possibility of experiencing grace and the possibility of experiencing grace as grace are not the same thing"21. So, one might experience grace without realizing that it is grace.
I think this last point is very important. In the German-speaking countries a debate is currently going on, whether today's models of religious experience have not forgotten that God sometimes breaks into our world as alien and foreign and challenges humans to move out of our lazy and comfortable coziness. Many people who agree with that position criticize Rahner's theology of grace for bringing forth this unbiblical attitude. And it is true that Rahner wanted grace to be seen as something not alien to us. However, he distinguished very well between something being alien to us and something being perceived as alien by us. And Rahner challenges us that eventually anything that comes from the God, who created us, cannot be alien to us, but is complements our nature and that at a deeper, indirect, level of experience, we also perceive that. But on the direct and oftentimes superficial level of experience we might well have the impression that certain impulses are alien on us, while in fact they come from God in order to convert us, to turn us around. So, if the strangeness with which God's impulses sometimes enter our lives has been forgotten and suppressed in a lot of modern theology - be it as it may -, the blame for that should not be laid at Rahner's feet, but rather at too simplistic adaptations of his quite complicated and nuanced theology.
Transcendental Experience of Grace
If God offers grace to every human person because of His universal salvific will, and if grace forms an a priori horizon for the human spirit, this can also be called a transcendental horizon. Rahner uses the term "transcendental" very often and with a certain liberty, combining different meanings it has. Grace is a transcendental horizon because, 1) as a horizon, it transcends any particular realm of experience and permeates all of human experience; 2) as a finalization of the human spirit toward the divine, it transcends the world into the transcendent; and 3) as an a priori horizon, it can be analyzed by transcendental analysis, the philosophical method named by Immauel Kant, which Rahner uses in theology in the revised form of Joseph Maréchal, the Belgian Jesuit.Since such a horizon is indirectly experienced, and since it is transcendental, Rahner also says that it is perceived by a transcendental experience: this experience permeates all of human experience, it draws us toward the transcendent God, and, Rahner says, it can be analyzed and its existence proved by the transcendental method.
Grace and Nature
Unfortunately I do not have the time to explain transcendental method in detail. But you might know that it starts from a mental operation - like cognition or questioning - and looks for necessary preconditions in the human spirit for these operations. The preconditions it finds are proved to be real, because the operation whose necessary preconditions they are, was real. That way we can inquire into the nature of a human person: what has to belong to human nature, when humans are capable of mental acts like these? Now let us suppose a transcendental philosopher uses that method to analyze the human transcendental horizon, what will they get as a result?According to that theology which supposed that grace was beyond experience, our philosopher will gain insights into human nature and nothing else. Once we accept with Rahner that grace is indirectly experienced, this changes: The result will be, if the transcendental method has been adequately put to use, those properties of the human spirit that belong to it irrevocably, no matter whether their origin is pure human nature or the grace God offers irrevocably to humanity. The distinction between pure human nature and grace therefore cannot be drawn with certainty, because in concrete human nature, as we encounter it and analyze it transcendentally, they are already combined.22
So again Rahner proposes a more subtle distinction: not only between nature and grace, but between pure nature and concrete nature: the latter being human nature as it really exists as a consequence of God's acts of creating and gracing; the former being a theoretical concept that refers to what is minimally required for a creature to be human. But no human being exists that has only pure nature as its essence, because all human beings are already graced in their very essence.
So, what is the use of that new distinction? In accepting that concrete human persons are graced in their concrete nature, Rahner follows the Nouvelle Théologie. In holding fast to pure nature as a theoretical concept, Rahner tries to incorporate Humani Generis into his theology of grace. The encyclical had stated that in order to uphold the gratuity* of grace, in other words that God is free to give or withhold grace or that He does not owe23 us grace, we must accept that God could have created intelligent beings without calling them into communion with Him, i. e. without giving them any grace.24 In Rahner's terminology these would be creatures constituted by pure nature only, without any grace ordering them toward the visio beatifica. Rahner concurs with the pope that God could have created such intelligent creatures, but at the same time he stipulates that we know from revelation that He hasn't, because He has given grace to all people. Grace's gratuity does not entail its scarcity, Rahner insists.
However, compliance with church magisterium is not the only reason for Rahner's developing the concept of pure nature. It also ascertains that we whose concrete nature is co-constituted by grace can still experience this as a pure gift and should not fancy any obligation on God's side to grant it:25 "As a real partner of God's I must be capable of receiving His grace (unlike my existence) as the unexpected miracle of His love."26 Rahner thus stresses: Although a pious person will know that everything they are and have is God's gift, this is true about grace still on a second level. We could reasonably say: If and when God decides to create human beings, He by that act - though being His free choice - constitutes an obligation to Himself and a converse right of these creatures to everything necessary for them. This is a right granted by God, but still, once granted it constitutes a legitimate claim on God. Grace, however, is not some thing for Rahner, but - as we've seen - the communication of God Himself, a personal relationship with God, and for that reason there can be no claim or obligation for it. It is again - on a second level - God's free decision. Pure nature circumscribes exactly the boundaries of this human claim on God, concrete nature transcends them into the realm of free personal relationship. Grace, understood in that sense, exacts a two-fold characteristic in human persons: it kindles a longing for God's love in us and at the same time enables us to receive that love and love God in turn, and do that with the experience that it is "the ever astounding miracle, the unexpected gift, granted without any obligation"27.
From here one might speculate that this special kind of freedom from obligation derives from the nature of personal relationships as such: love is per se a free gift; one cannot owe love to anybody. Rahner relates that argument, but then says it is not valid with respect to God.28 It is certainly true for a fellow human being whom I give my love: I am not obligated to love them, because I have not produced their desire for my love. Yet with respect to God, the situation is different: If He has made us as longing for and dependent on His love, could He then withhold it from us without contravening the sense of his very creation? Rahner rejects that possibility. So, God would owe it to Himself to grant it and thus it would not be a pure gift anymore.29 For that reason Rahner argues, the concept of pure nature is necessary in order to ascertain grace's gratuity. It designates what remains as a remnant, when the most inner centerpiece of the human person, i. e. their orientation toward God is taken away from their concrete nature. "Nature" in the sense of being the opposite of grace therefore is a concept for a remnant not actually found in the world.30
In the further development of his theology of grace, Rahner speaks less and less about pure nature, in order to finally drop it in his later writings. I think, however, what Rahner dropped was the ontic way of distinguishing pure and concrete nature, it was not his insistence on the gift of grace being gratuitous in a second order sense, when compared to the gratuity of our being created. We might also say: Even though God has created us and through grace caused our desire for communion with Him, the fulfillment of this desire is still not owed to us (though He might owe it to Himself) , because God wants us to enter into a personal relationship with Him, which can best be modeled on human love, which is gratuitous and not obligated.
From a methodological point of view we can say that again Rahner comes to a conclusion which he could have gained much easier by a personalistic metaphysics than by scholastic ontology; Rahner reaches it, however, through opening up scholastic thinking from within and thus made it possible that his conclusion could take hold in a theology dominated by that thinking and strictly supervised by the magisterium of the church.
The Supernatural Existential
What we have described and discussed so far, grace as a transcendental horizon that shapes all of human experience, has been called a supernatural existential. An existential is nothing less than an a priori that shapes all of human experience. When grace forms such an existential, it may be called supernatural in the sense already explained. So, what we were basically talking about all the time, is the supernatural existential, a transcendental, a priori horizon constituted by God's formal causality being an element in the concrete nature of the human spirit. The supernatural existential thus is an aspect of grace itself, it is the way grace is offered to every human person prior to all religious of Christian instruction or reflection.
For Further Thought
Let me add two considerations on some further uses of Rahner's elaborations:1) I think Rahner's systematic conclusion that we cannot draw a clear distinction between the purely natural aspects, the effects of grace and - in the same vein - the results of original sin in our concrete nature, has far-reaching consequences in any theological anthropology. We can distinguish three main traits of the interpretation of the human person in the history of thought: one that thinks very highly of humanity, deems it intrinsically good and expects it to be saved by merely overcoming all super-additions to this good human nature; another one that holds the opposite position and sees humanity as basically rotten and evil and therefore expects salvation from a harsh judgment; and a third that denies any in-depth structure of human nature, seeing humanity as just one type of animal among others. Now from Rahner's analysis, we can see that each of these positions has something to it: the first acknowledges humanity's orientation toward the good, but overlooks its volatility; the second recognizes the consequences of original sin, but overlooks that original sin never weakened God's salvific will for us and that therefore judgment might look quite different from what the prophets of doom would have it; the third treats human persons as if they were creatures of pure nature, without any trace of God's grace or human sin incorporated into their very essence. A Christian anthropology in Karl Rahner's footsteps can acknowledge that each of them is right to a certain degree, but can bring them into an integrated unity by overcoming their one-sidedness, and thus can see human nature more clearly.
2) Has anyone here seen Steven Spielberg's movie AI: Artificial Intelligence? Do you have an idea, what that might have to do with Rahner's theology of grace?
Well, for those who don't know the movie, the plot is told rather quickly: A couple has a son, who has fallen into a coma and in all probability will not recover. After a time the couple decide to adopt an android-son, a robot with the looks and character-traits of an 11-year-old boy that starts to love his adoptive parents and desires their love, once he has been really adopted by entering a certain code. After that, he calls his adoptive mother Mommy. However, unexpectedly the natural son recovers and awakens from coma and the couple has now two sons, one their own flesh and blood, and one of steel and silicon but with the same longing for their love. Now naturally the couple decide in favor of their human son. As a consequence the android becomes very desperate and seeks ways to be exactly like his human brother (the robot is not able to eat and drink). He wants to become fully human. By fulfilling that prerequisite, he hopes to win the love of his adoptive parents.
You may now realize that Spielberg conducts a thought-experiment in his movie that corresponds to Rahner's question: If someone creates a being as longing for and dependent on it creator's love, could that creator then withhold that love from his creature without contravening the sense of his very creation? The humans in AI do just that and it is true that they contravene the sense of their very creation. Correspondingly the android boy attempts to obtain his parents' love by works, by changing who he is; he wants to merit that love. In that he is not very different from many human children who think that they must merit their parents' love, or for that matter from many faithful believers who ever again commit the pharisaical fallacy of thinking that they have to earn God's grace.
Rahner's theology of grace tells us that grace is purely gratuitous, that by our efforts to become better human persons and better Christians we cannot earn God's love, for He has already given that love to us gratuitously and irrevocably; our efforts to become better human persons can merely enable us to accept that love as a free and gratuitous gift. In the same vein we could say: Although the creator contravenes the sense of his own creation by his behavior, still the creature has no right to his love, simply because love cannot be obligated. And here is the limitation of Spielberg's thought-experiment: either we would have to accept that one day robots could be produced that are capable of giving and receiving real love (as the movie certainly suggests) - then they would eventually also be capable of understanding its gratuitous nature; or they would only simulate an ability to give and receive love, then withholding it from them would not be a problem at all.
Now if it is true that our concrete nature receives its orientation from God's grace, and if that is the reason why we are able to enter into a gratuitous relationship to God, one might ask, whether that is not the reason for the ability to enter into gratuitous relationships of any kind, also with humans. In that case, the hypothetical intelligent creatures that God could create without a supernatural calling, according to Humani Generis, would be unable to enter into free and gratuitous relationships to anyone. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be so advanced that computers and robots can replace humans intellectually. Then this ability might become the distinguishing mark between human persons and intelligent creatures without personality.
Endnotes:
1 Cf. Rahner, K.: Nature and Grace. In: Theological Investigations 4 (= ThI 4), 165-188, esp. 176f.
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2 Cf. Rahner, K.: Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Transl. by W. Dych. London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1978, 202.
24
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3 Ibid. 224.
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4 Ibid. 218.
26
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5 Cf. Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, esp. 199f.
27
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6 "In the incarnation … we can verify …, in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature, namely that the closeness and the distance, the submissiveness and the independence of the creature do not grow in inverse but in like proportion. Thus Christ is most radically man, and his humanity is the freest and most independent, not in spite of, but because of its being taken up, by being constituted as the self-utterance of God." Rahner, K.: On the Theology of the Incarnation. In. ThI 4, 105-120, here 117.
28
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7 Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, here 162.
29
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8 Cf. AG 7; NA 1; LG 16; GS 22.
30
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9 Rahner, K.: Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace. In ThI 1, 319-346.
31
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10 ThI 1, 322 = S 1, 349f.
32
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11 ThI 1, 321 = S 1, 349.
33
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12 ThI 1, 325 = S 1, 353.
34
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13 Cf. ThI 1, 329 = S 1, 357f.
35
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14 ThI 1, 341 = S 1, 369f.
36
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15 Rahner, K.: Über den Begriff des Geheimnisses in der katholischen Theologie. In: S 4, 51-99, hier 90, own translation. Cf.: The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology. In: ThI 4, 36-76, here 65f.
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16 In: ThI 1, 297-318.
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17 For references on that see Rahner's footnote 1 on in ThI 1, 297.
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18 Cf. ThI 1, 299.
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19 Cf. ThI 1, 299f.
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20 Cf. Siebenrock, Gnade als Herz der Welt. Der Beitrag Karl Rahners zu einer zeitgemäßen Gnadentheologie. In: Theologie aus Erfahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner. Hg.: M. Delgado u. M. Lutz-Bachmann. Hildesheim 1994, 34-71, here 36, quoting Rahner, K.: Zur Rezeption des Thomas von Aquin. In: Imhof, P. / Biallowons, H. (Hg.): Glaube in winterlicher Zeit. Gespräche mit Karl Rahner aus den letzten Lebensjahren. Düsseldorf 1986, 49-71, hier 58. Siebenrock points out that Rahner used this terminology already in his first lecture series on grace: "Sed objectum formale est quasi ‚horizon' ‚ambitus' et ‚medium', in et sub quo positum objectum adventicium est cognoscibile". Rahner: De gratia Christi. Summa praelectionum in usum privatum auditorum ordinata. Innsbruck 11937/38, 299, quoted according to Siebenrock, ibid. 62, footnote 34.
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21 ThI 1, 300 = S 1, 326.
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22 Cf. S 1, 327 = ThI 1, 301.
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23 I quite disagree with the translator of ThI 1, 1, C. Ernst, when he translates "ungeschuldet" as "unexacted", saying that this is "not quite so important in the present context" (ThI 1, 304, note 2). I think it is very important, if one wants to follow the chain of thought in Rahner's argument, and I think the verbal paraphrase is not as complicated as Ernst seems to think.
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24 Cf. Humani Generis 26: "Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision."
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25 Cf. ThI 1, 304.
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26 S 1, 331 my own translation, cf. ThI 1, 305.
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27 S 1, 337 my own translation; cf. ThI 1, 310f.
49
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28 Cf. ThI 1, 305f.
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29 Cf. ThI 1, 307.
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30 Cf. S 1, 340 = ThI 1, 313.
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Author: Wandinger Nikolaus
© Universität Innsbruck - Alle Rechte vorbehalten
December 8, 2008
The Full Blown "Oprah Effect": Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism
By: Paul Street
http://www.blackcommentator.com/127/127_oprah.html
“The culture of New Age Racism also brought blacks to the age of Oprah” – Elaine Brown, 2002
I recently caught a snippet of television that was relevant for understanding the savage persistence of stark racial inequality in the United States. I was flipping the dial late at night and caught part of Oprah. She was speaking to Oscar favorite Jamie Fox, who appeared on a giant screen, sitting in front of a piano. They were talking about his experience playing Ray Charles in the movie “Ray.”
The multi-billionaire Oprah mentioned that she realized she could “be anything I wanted to be” when Sidney Poitier won the first Academy award ever given to an African American. She told Jamie that she loved him. The multi-millionaire Jamie informed Oprah that he loved her back.
They spoke cheerfully about the significant black presence that will be displayed at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, which is being hosted by the black comedian Chris Rock. “It’s really going to be a black-tie event this year,” Jamie said. Everybody laughed.
Jamie played a song on the piano. Oprah and Jamie exchanged some more “I love yous.” It looked like Oprah was tearing up. Many of her predominantly white female audience members seemed equally moved.
They were happy for Jamie and Oprah and Chris Rock and all the other African-Americans who have “made it” in the United States. And they were happy for America’s benevolent decision to slay the beast of racism and open the doors of equal opportunity to all. It was another chance for white self-congratulation and for whites to forget about – and lose more sympathy for – the large number of black Americans who are nowhere close to making it in post-Civil Rights America.
Still Savage Inequalities
For a considerable portion of whites in “post-Civil Rights” America, black-white integration and racial equality are more than just accepted ideals. They are also, many believe, accomplished realities, showing that we have overcome racial disparity. According to a survey conducted by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and Harvard University in the spring of 2001, more than 4 in 10 white Americans believe that blacks are “as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schools, and health care.”
The 2000 US Census numbers that were being crunched as this poll was taken did not support this belief. More than three and a half decades after the historic victories of the black Civil Rights Movement, the census showed, equality remained a highly elusive goal for African-Americans. In a society that possesses the highest poverty rate and the largest gaps between rich and poor in the industrialized world, blacks are considerably poorer than whites and other racial and ethnic groups. Economic inequality correlated so closely with race that:
To attain equal employment in the United States between blacks and white, 700,000 more African-Americans would have had to be moved out of unemployment and nearly two million African-Americans would have to be promoted into higher paying positions.
The poverty rate for blacks was more than twice the rate for whites.
*
Nearly one out of every two blacks earned less than $25,000 but one in three whites made that little.
*
Median black household income ($27,000) was less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000).
*
Black families’ median household net worth was less than 10 percent that of whites. The average white household has a net worth of $84,000 but the average black household is worth only $7,500.
*
Blacks were much less likely to own their own homes than whites. Nearly three-fourths of white families but less than half of black families owned their homes.
Meanwhile, blacks were 12.3 percent of U.S. population, but comprised nearly half of the roughly 2 million Americans currently behind bars. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold (500 percent), to the point where, the Justice Policy Institute reported in 2002, there were more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the U.S. On any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 were under correctional supervision – either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. According to the best social science estimates in 2002, finally, one in five black men was saddled with a prison record and an astounding one in three black men possessed a felony record.
“They’ve Got the NBA – What More Do They Want?”
Ask white Americans who think that blacks are equal to (or even ahead of) whites what exactly they are talking about and you won’t get census data. You’ll hear about Oprah, Michael Jordan, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, the guy who leads Jay Leno’s band, or the black lawyer or doctor who recently moved into their neighborhood. The white father of a white friend of mine contributes the following pearl of wisdom regarding what he sees as black Americans’ exaggerated sense of grievance and entitlement: “they’ve got the NBA – what more do they want?”
Wildly popular among white viewers, “The Cosby Show” helped fuel some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled “Cosby Knows Best,” the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family – headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) – functioned as “an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: ‘Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!’” “On ‘The Cosby show,’” Miller noted, “it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in. And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified.” Consistent with its mission of selling the American System and the related idea that America’s racial divisions had been overcome, “The Cosby Show” refused to permit any “negativity” on the screen. “This is a conscious policy,” Miller noted, observing that “Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, reads through each script as a ‘consultant,’ censoring any line or bit that might somehow tarnish the show’s ‘positive image.’ And the show’s upscale mise-en scene has also been deliberately contrived to glow, like a fixed smile. ‘When you look at the artwork [on the show’s walls], there is a positive feeling, an up-feeling,’ Cosby says. ‘You don’t see downtrodden, negative I Can’t Do, I won’t do.’”
Separatism and Its Consequences
Part of the problem behind many whites’ racial equality understanding gap is segregation, which continues at high levels. White women might flock en masse to their black princess Oprah’s Chicago television studio to receive inspiration, wisdom, and (on lucky days) surplus commodities, but Oprah’s home city is harshly segregated by race. The Chicago metropolitan area has a black-white dissimilarity measure of 80.8, meaning that more than four out of every five area blacks would have to move for African-Americans to be distributed evenly with whites throughout the metropolitan area. Within Chicago, 74 percent of black residents live in neighborhoods that are 90 percent or more African-American. The average Chicago black lives in a census tract where 4 of every 5 residents (81.1%) are African-American, while the average white lives in a census tract where less than 1 in 10 people (8.9 percent) is African-American.
Fifty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that “separate is unequal,” the average black K-12 public student in Chicago attends a school that is 86 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four schools, (or 47 percent) of the city’s 579 public elementary and high schools are 90 percent or more African American and 173 of these schools – or 30 percent of all public schools in the city – are 100 percent black.
Of the half million blacks living outside Chicago in the six county Chicago metropolitan area in 1999, 70 percent lived in Chicago’s Cook County, the great majority residing south of the central city. More than half (52 percent) of all suburban blacks reside in just 13 south suburban Cook County towns – this in a broader metropolitan area that is home to 265 local municipalities.
Under such separatist – dare we say apartheid? – conditions (and Chicago is no longer the most segregated city in the nation), large numbers of whites have only the slightest sense of the reality of black experience. The corporate-electronic visual mass culture is their main source on that experience and that medium presents a dangerously schizophrenic image of black America split between super-successful and largely admirable (not-all-that) black superstars (Oprah being the best of all) and dangerous (all-too) black perpetrators (though many successful black athletes and artists inhabit what seems to be in an intermediary category of their own: successful perpetrators). The majority of ordinary, hard-working black Americans who happen to be neither rich nor criminal are amazingly invisible on television and in the broader white-owned corporate communications empire.
“We Got the Message…Now Get On With It”
In my teaching and public-speaking experience, you can make progress with some whites who mistakenly think blacks are now “equal” (or better) by reminding them that the only blacks they “know” are on their televisions and citing the relevant disparity statistics. The really intractable blocks to white racial understanding revolve around the “why,” not the “what” of racial disparity. Insofar as stark differences in wealth, health, income, security and general well-being persist between blacks and whites, the large majority of white Americans deny that anti-black racism is the cause. Many whites point to the elimination of numerous discriminatory laws and barriers as well as the passage of equal employment legislation and affirmative action as proof that American society “bent over backwards” to guarantee blacks equal opportunity. Convinced that racism is no longer a significant problem for blacks, most whites find the real barriers to black success and equality within the African-American community itself. If problems for blacks persist, many whites and some privileged blacks (e.g. John McWhorter at the Manhattan Institute) think it’s only because too many blacks engage in “self-sabotaging” behaviors. “As white America sees it,” note Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, (2000), “every effort has been made to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they’re on their own.” In the glorious self-help “New Age,” it’s all about self-victimization and self-help. The thing is for black people to conquer their inner demons.
Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. “No place that I’m aware of,” wrote the respondent, “makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections – get on with it.”
Black Bourgeois Victim-Blaming as Music to White Ears
Even among some African-American intellectuals who describe themselves as “left” and/or “center-left,” there is a tendency in “the post-Civil Rights” era to question the notion that “race” or (more accurately) racism is a significant reason for the persistently disproportionate presence of blacks at the bottom of America’s steep socioeconomic and institutional hierarchies. In a recent PBS documentary revealingly titled “America Beyond the Color Line,” Harvard’s reigning black intellectual Henry Louis “Skip” Gates argues that “class” has replaced “race” as the main problem for black America. “Class” for Gates means that that poor blacks need to work harder and smarter to acquire the skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by their black economic superiors, including the leading US imperialist (favorably portrayed in “Beyond The Color Line”) Colin Powell, who is featured as an example of what blacks can accomplish when they work hard, study, save and behave decently.
The main “class problem” that Gates portrayed in “America Beyond” is that poor blacks just don’t…well…have any (class, that is). “Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people,” Gates says, “unless [poor blacks] decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you’re 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs…we’re doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society,” Gates told the Chicago Tribune in 2003, “is by mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What’s happened to these values?,” asks Gates.
“My father always said,” Gates elaborated, “and it’s true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we’d be running MIT. It’s true and there’s no excuse” (Johnson, “Beyond Gates”).
This was the key theme in Gates’ earlier PBS documentary “Two Nations.” In that earlier rendition of his version of the “class over race” thesis, Gates proclaimed that black poverty was about poor decisions: “deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding…”
By my Caucasian experience, this sort of talk is music to most whites’ ears. The majority of whites love to see black middle- and upper-class authority figures blame non-affluent blacks for their own problems. “See,” millions of American whites murmured after Cosby celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision by assaulting the black community’s “lower economic people”…. “…see this is what I mean. It’s their own fault. Don’t take it from me, don’t talk about racism, listen to one of their own. Listen to Bill Cosby.” With the perceived blessing of Cosby et al., whites are free to ignore numerous racist policies and practices they are personally responsible for tolerating and, often enough, perpetrating:
● racial bias in real estate and home lending that reflects and empowers the refusal of whites to live next door to blacks
● a largely policy-enforced shortage of affordable housing in predominantly white opportunity-rich communities
● the proliferation of expensive, publicly funded suburban and ex-urban roads and developments that encourage the removal of economic activity and social resources ever further away the disproportionately black inner city
● the funding of schools largely on the basis of local property wealth
● excessive use of high-stakes standardized and related zero-tolerance practices in predominantly black public schools
● the hyper-segregation of black children into high-poverty schools
● racial discrimination in hiring and union-managed apprentice-training admissions
● the racially disparate “War on Drugs” and the related campaign of mass black imprisonment and felony-marking
● the aggressive pursuit of welfare caseload reduction without concomitant efforts to increase economic opportunity in poor black communities
● the disproportionate investment of local public economic development funding dollars to communities that need assistance the least and the diversion of those funds away from communities that need those funds the most
● the widespread mainstream determination to blame poor blacks for their own plight and to ignore the deep and special historical and related ongoing societal obstacles to equality faced by African-Americans.
This list goes on.
Racism’s Two Levels
The main problem with the conventional mainstream white wisdom on the disappearance of racism is a failure to distinguish adequately between overt and covert or institutional racism. The first variety of racism has a long and sordid history. It includes such actions, policies and practices as the burning of black homes and black churches, the public use of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the open banning of blacks from numerous occupations, the open political disenfranchisement of blacks and the open segregation of public facilities by race. It is largely defeated, outlawed and discredited in the US. Witness the rapid public humiliation and political demotion of Trent Lott, who lost his position as United States Senate Majority Leader after he spoke in nostalgic terms about the openly segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond.
The second variety involves the more impersonal operation of social and institutional forces and processes in ways that “just happen” but nonetheless serve to reproduce black disadvantage in the labor market and numerous other sectors of American life. It includes racially discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices, residential “white flight” (from black neighbors), statistical racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping of schools predominately attended by blacks relative to schools predominately attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance, arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more. It permits whites to routinely engage in many of the same “self-sabotaging” behaviors that mainstream U.S. wisdom portrays as the essential cause of black inequality without experiencing the same degree of terrible consequences as are visited upon blacks for “bad” beliefs and actions. Under its reign, poor blacks are lectured to get their values and behavior together but no wake-up call is issued for structurally empowered white Americans to stop “deciding, deciding, deciding” to:
● deny blacks equal access to the nation’s highest opportunity communities through a panoply of well-documented discriminatory real-estate, home-lending, and zoning practices and policies.
● target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans.
● maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts.
● divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites.
● disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adults males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs.
● protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America’s imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation’s remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.
● permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents’ limited economic choices.
● go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.
● subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated “winner-take-all” election system that makes it absurdly difficult for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate their vital needs and perspectives into policy.
● attack “affirmative action” college admissions practices that help try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over “legacy” admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past.
The “Oprah Effect” and the Foretold Price of Civil Rights Victory
Richly enabled by policymakers who commonly declare allegiance to anti-racist ideals, the second, deeper level of racism has an equally ancient history that has more than merely outlived open, public American racism and the passage of civil rights legislation. Covert racism may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races.” Indeed, “it’s hard,” Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown note, “to blame [white and even some black] people” for believing – falsely in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown’s view – that racism is dead in America “when our public life is filled with repeated affirmations of the integration ideal and our ostensible progress towards achieving it.”
“There are [now] enough examples of successful middle-class African-Americans,” Georgetown law professor Sheryl Cashin notes, “to make many whites believe that blacks have reached parity with them. The fact that some blacks now lead powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites that racial barriers have been eliminated; the issue now is individual effort.” The “odd black family on the block or the Oprah effect – examples of stratospheric black success – feed,” Cashin observes, “these misperceptions, even as relatively few whites live among and interact daily with blacks of their own standing.” Episodes and events like the brief humiliation of Lott or the election of a black Mayor or U.S. Senator or City Hall’s criticism of racist sentiments on the part of bigoted white firemen offer opportunities for public officials and the broader mass culture to pat themselves on their back for advancing beyond the primitive state of open racism even while they promote policies that dig the hole of more covert institutional or societal racism yet deeper.
Martin Luther King. Jr. sensed some of the danger here at the outset. He noted in 1967 that “many whites hasten to congratulate themselves on what little progress [black Americans] have made. I’m sure,” King opined, “that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Most white people are so removed from the life of the average Negro,” King added, “there has been little to challenge that assumption.”
“Change Your Life,” Not the System: The Full Effect
Oprah’s usefulness in fueling white racism denial goes beyond the fact that she is one of the richest people in the world – sufficiently wealthy to periodically hand out millions of dollars worth of consumer goodies to hundreds of assembled middle-class white women in her studio audience. The full toxic “Oprah effect” is also about the how of her ascendancy. Like Powell, Rice, and perhaps now Obama, Oprah is perceived by many whites as succeeding because she’s “not all that black,” as Powell once described himself: because she has absorbed dominant white middle- and upper-class “self-help” values and rejects the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional effort to make white America face up to – and pay for – its racist structures, policies, and practices, past and present.
It’s a carefully cultivated perception. With her army of disproportionately Caucasian counselors, personal trainers, fitness consultants, personal chefs, massage therapists, interior designers, and New Age healers, Oprah has taken an “inner journey” toward primarily personal healing and accountability and away from the collective struggle for racial equality and social justice. “The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.” As her programming became ever more racially “sanitized” during the 1990s, Elaine Brown notes (in her excellent book The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002]), Oprah’s emphasis focused on “providing …comfort to what became her core audience of white women, in the form of ‘lifestyle’ and glamour ‘makeovers,’ diets, and New Age self-healing readings and practices and endless self-deprecating discourse over her own weight and ‘nappy’ hair.” “Winfrey carefully avoided using her unparalleled power and voice on behalf of black women,” Brown bitterly observes, “even as the political agenda pounded poor black women and their children ever deeper into poverty and degradation.”
Today, while American inequalities of class and color are worsened by racist imperial adventure in the Middle East, Oprah trumpets and exemplifies narcissistic personal obsession, egoistic wealth accumulation, and the narrow pursuit of individual “excellence” amidst permanent, unchallenged, and brutal social injustice. In Oprah’s world, it’s all about how to “Change Your Life,” a slogan that does not mean engaging with fellow African Americans, other people of color, and white allies in the difficult and often dirty struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. It’s mainly about private color-blind solutions and personal experience. It means working with what Brown calls “a group of whites possessing curious credentials” (New Age healers and consultants), the great struggle to look and feel better inside the smaller circles of daily life – circles that happen, in Oprah’s case, to be situated at the super-opulent heights of a grotesquely unequal societal pyramid that grants more than 2 billion world citizens less than a dollar a day on which to live the good life that is sold in Oprah’s show and magazine.
As for the participants in the upcoming and aforementioned “black tie event” (the Academy Awards), it is worth recalling the meaner side of black upper-class elitism, expressed by Chris Rock in his popular routine “Niggas vs. Black People.” Rock divides black America into two classes, Cosby’s “lower economic people” being the “Niggas.” “I love black people,” Rock says, “but I hate niggas! Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Klu Klux Klan.”
Now there’s something for Oprah’s predominantly white audience to get teary-eyed about, after a bit of advice on how to decorate their next palatial Hollywood mansion more perfectly in accord with the unmet needs of their inner child.
Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005
http://www.blackcommentator.com/127/127_oprah.html
“The culture of New Age Racism also brought blacks to the age of Oprah” – Elaine Brown, 2002
I recently caught a snippet of television that was relevant for understanding the savage persistence of stark racial inequality in the United States. I was flipping the dial late at night and caught part of Oprah. She was speaking to Oscar favorite Jamie Fox, who appeared on a giant screen, sitting in front of a piano. They were talking about his experience playing Ray Charles in the movie “Ray.”
The multi-billionaire Oprah mentioned that she realized she could “be anything I wanted to be” when Sidney Poitier won the first Academy award ever given to an African American. She told Jamie that she loved him. The multi-millionaire Jamie informed Oprah that he loved her back.
They spoke cheerfully about the significant black presence that will be displayed at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, which is being hosted by the black comedian Chris Rock. “It’s really going to be a black-tie event this year,” Jamie said. Everybody laughed.
Jamie played a song on the piano. Oprah and Jamie exchanged some more “I love yous.” It looked like Oprah was tearing up. Many of her predominantly white female audience members seemed equally moved.
They were happy for Jamie and Oprah and Chris Rock and all the other African-Americans who have “made it” in the United States. And they were happy for America’s benevolent decision to slay the beast of racism and open the doors of equal opportunity to all. It was another chance for white self-congratulation and for whites to forget about – and lose more sympathy for – the large number of black Americans who are nowhere close to making it in post-Civil Rights America.
Still Savage Inequalities
For a considerable portion of whites in “post-Civil Rights” America, black-white integration and racial equality are more than just accepted ideals. They are also, many believe, accomplished realities, showing that we have overcome racial disparity. According to a survey conducted by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and Harvard University in the spring of 2001, more than 4 in 10 white Americans believe that blacks are “as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schools, and health care.”
The 2000 US Census numbers that were being crunched as this poll was taken did not support this belief. More than three and a half decades after the historic victories of the black Civil Rights Movement, the census showed, equality remained a highly elusive goal for African-Americans. In a society that possesses the highest poverty rate and the largest gaps between rich and poor in the industrialized world, blacks are considerably poorer than whites and other racial and ethnic groups. Economic inequality correlated so closely with race that:
To attain equal employment in the United States between blacks and white, 700,000 more African-Americans would have had to be moved out of unemployment and nearly two million African-Americans would have to be promoted into higher paying positions.
The poverty rate for blacks was more than twice the rate for whites.
*
Nearly one out of every two blacks earned less than $25,000 but one in three whites made that little.
*
Median black household income ($27,000) was less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000).
*
Black families’ median household net worth was less than 10 percent that of whites. The average white household has a net worth of $84,000 but the average black household is worth only $7,500.
*
Blacks were much less likely to own their own homes than whites. Nearly three-fourths of white families but less than half of black families owned their homes.
Meanwhile, blacks were 12.3 percent of U.S. population, but comprised nearly half of the roughly 2 million Americans currently behind bars. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold (500 percent), to the point where, the Justice Policy Institute reported in 2002, there were more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the U.S. On any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 were under correctional supervision – either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. According to the best social science estimates in 2002, finally, one in five black men was saddled with a prison record and an astounding one in three black men possessed a felony record.
“They’ve Got the NBA – What More Do They Want?”
Ask white Americans who think that blacks are equal to (or even ahead of) whites what exactly they are talking about and you won’t get census data. You’ll hear about Oprah, Michael Jordan, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, the guy who leads Jay Leno’s band, or the black lawyer or doctor who recently moved into their neighborhood. The white father of a white friend of mine contributes the following pearl of wisdom regarding what he sees as black Americans’ exaggerated sense of grievance and entitlement: “they’ve got the NBA – what more do they want?”
Wildly popular among white viewers, “The Cosby Show” helped fuel some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled “Cosby Knows Best,” the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family – headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) – functioned as “an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: ‘Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!’” “On ‘The Cosby show,’” Miller noted, “it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in. And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified.” Consistent with its mission of selling the American System and the related idea that America’s racial divisions had been overcome, “The Cosby Show” refused to permit any “negativity” on the screen. “This is a conscious policy,” Miller noted, observing that “Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, reads through each script as a ‘consultant,’ censoring any line or bit that might somehow tarnish the show’s ‘positive image.’ And the show’s upscale mise-en scene has also been deliberately contrived to glow, like a fixed smile. ‘When you look at the artwork [on the show’s walls], there is a positive feeling, an up-feeling,’ Cosby says. ‘You don’t see downtrodden, negative I Can’t Do, I won’t do.’”
Separatism and Its Consequences
Part of the problem behind many whites’ racial equality understanding gap is segregation, which continues at high levels. White women might flock en masse to their black princess Oprah’s Chicago television studio to receive inspiration, wisdom, and (on lucky days) surplus commodities, but Oprah’s home city is harshly segregated by race. The Chicago metropolitan area has a black-white dissimilarity measure of 80.8, meaning that more than four out of every five area blacks would have to move for African-Americans to be distributed evenly with whites throughout the metropolitan area. Within Chicago, 74 percent of black residents live in neighborhoods that are 90 percent or more African-American. The average Chicago black lives in a census tract where 4 of every 5 residents (81.1%) are African-American, while the average white lives in a census tract where less than 1 in 10 people (8.9 percent) is African-American.
Fifty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that “separate is unequal,” the average black K-12 public student in Chicago attends a school that is 86 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four schools, (or 47 percent) of the city’s 579 public elementary and high schools are 90 percent or more African American and 173 of these schools – or 30 percent of all public schools in the city – are 100 percent black.
Of the half million blacks living outside Chicago in the six county Chicago metropolitan area in 1999, 70 percent lived in Chicago’s Cook County, the great majority residing south of the central city. More than half (52 percent) of all suburban blacks reside in just 13 south suburban Cook County towns – this in a broader metropolitan area that is home to 265 local municipalities.
Under such separatist – dare we say apartheid? – conditions (and Chicago is no longer the most segregated city in the nation), large numbers of whites have only the slightest sense of the reality of black experience. The corporate-electronic visual mass culture is their main source on that experience and that medium presents a dangerously schizophrenic image of black America split between super-successful and largely admirable (not-all-that) black superstars (Oprah being the best of all) and dangerous (all-too) black perpetrators (though many successful black athletes and artists inhabit what seems to be in an intermediary category of their own: successful perpetrators). The majority of ordinary, hard-working black Americans who happen to be neither rich nor criminal are amazingly invisible on television and in the broader white-owned corporate communications empire.
“We Got the Message…Now Get On With It”
In my teaching and public-speaking experience, you can make progress with some whites who mistakenly think blacks are now “equal” (or better) by reminding them that the only blacks they “know” are on their televisions and citing the relevant disparity statistics. The really intractable blocks to white racial understanding revolve around the “why,” not the “what” of racial disparity. Insofar as stark differences in wealth, health, income, security and general well-being persist between blacks and whites, the large majority of white Americans deny that anti-black racism is the cause. Many whites point to the elimination of numerous discriminatory laws and barriers as well as the passage of equal employment legislation and affirmative action as proof that American society “bent over backwards” to guarantee blacks equal opportunity. Convinced that racism is no longer a significant problem for blacks, most whites find the real barriers to black success and equality within the African-American community itself. If problems for blacks persist, many whites and some privileged blacks (e.g. John McWhorter at the Manhattan Institute) think it’s only because too many blacks engage in “self-sabotaging” behaviors. “As white America sees it,” note Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown in their excellent study By The Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race, (2000), “every effort has been made to welcome blacks into the American mainstream and now they’re on their own.” In the glorious self-help “New Age,” it’s all about self-victimization and self-help. The thing is for black people to conquer their inner demons.
Predominant white attitudes at the turn of the millennium are well summarized by the comments of a white respondent to a survey conducted by Essence magazine. “No place that I’m aware of,” wrote the respondent, “makes [black] people ride on the back of the bus or use a different restroom in this day and age. We got the message; we made the corrections – get on with it.”
Black Bourgeois Victim-Blaming as Music to White Ears
Even among some African-American intellectuals who describe themselves as “left” and/or “center-left,” there is a tendency in “the post-Civil Rights” era to question the notion that “race” or (more accurately) racism is a significant reason for the persistently disproportionate presence of blacks at the bottom of America’s steep socioeconomic and institutional hierarchies. In a recent PBS documentary revealingly titled “America Beyond the Color Line,” Harvard’s reigning black intellectual Henry Louis “Skip” Gates argues that “class” has replaced “race” as the main problem for black America. “Class” for Gates means that that poor blacks need to work harder and smarter to acquire the skills, education, habits and values possessed in greater degree by their black economic superiors, including the leading US imperialist (favorably portrayed in “Beyond The Color Line”) Colin Powell, who is featured as an example of what blacks can accomplish when they work hard, study, save and behave decently.
The main “class problem” that Gates portrayed in “America Beyond” is that poor blacks just don’t…well…have any (class, that is). “Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people,” Gates says, “unless [poor blacks] decide to stay in school, learn the ABCs, not to get pregnant when you’re 16, not to run drugs, not to sell drugs…we’re doomed to have a relatively small black middle class and huge underclass and never the twain shall meet. The only way we can succeed in society,” Gates told the Chicago Tribune in 2003, “is by mastering the ABCs, staying in school, working hard, deferred gratification. What’s happened to these values?,” asks Gates.
“My father always said,” Gates elaborated, “and it’s true, if we studied calculus like we studied basketball, we’d be running MIT. It’s true and there’s no excuse” (Johnson, “Beyond Gates”).
This was the key theme in Gates’ earlier PBS documentary “Two Nations.” In that earlier rendition of his version of the “class over race” thesis, Gates proclaimed that black poverty was about poor decisions: “deciding to get pregnant or not to have protected sex. Deciding to do drugs. Deciding not to study. Deciding, deciding, deciding…”
By my Caucasian experience, this sort of talk is music to most whites’ ears. The majority of whites love to see black middle- and upper-class authority figures blame non-affluent blacks for their own problems. “See,” millions of American whites murmured after Cosby celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision by assaulting the black community’s “lower economic people”…. “…see this is what I mean. It’s their own fault. Don’t take it from me, don’t talk about racism, listen to one of their own. Listen to Bill Cosby.” With the perceived blessing of Cosby et al., whites are free to ignore numerous racist policies and practices they are personally responsible for tolerating and, often enough, perpetrating:
● racial bias in real estate and home lending that reflects and empowers the refusal of whites to live next door to blacks
● a largely policy-enforced shortage of affordable housing in predominantly white opportunity-rich communities
● the proliferation of expensive, publicly funded suburban and ex-urban roads and developments that encourage the removal of economic activity and social resources ever further away the disproportionately black inner city
● the funding of schools largely on the basis of local property wealth
● excessive use of high-stakes standardized and related zero-tolerance practices in predominantly black public schools
● the hyper-segregation of black children into high-poverty schools
● racial discrimination in hiring and union-managed apprentice-training admissions
● the racially disparate “War on Drugs” and the related campaign of mass black imprisonment and felony-marking
● the aggressive pursuit of welfare caseload reduction without concomitant efforts to increase economic opportunity in poor black communities
● the disproportionate investment of local public economic development funding dollars to communities that need assistance the least and the diversion of those funds away from communities that need those funds the most
● the widespread mainstream determination to blame poor blacks for their own plight and to ignore the deep and special historical and related ongoing societal obstacles to equality faced by African-Americans.
This list goes on.
Racism’s Two Levels
The main problem with the conventional mainstream white wisdom on the disappearance of racism is a failure to distinguish adequately between overt and covert or institutional racism. The first variety of racism has a long and sordid history. It includes such actions, policies and practices as the burning of black homes and black churches, the public use of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the open banning of blacks from numerous occupations, the open political disenfranchisement of blacks and the open segregation of public facilities by race. It is largely defeated, outlawed and discredited in the US. Witness the rapid public humiliation and political demotion of Trent Lott, who lost his position as United States Senate Majority Leader after he spoke in nostalgic terms about the openly segregationist 1948 Presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond.
The second variety involves the more impersonal operation of social and institutional forces and processes in ways that “just happen” but nonetheless serve to reproduce black disadvantage in the labor market and numerous other sectors of American life. It includes racially discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices, residential “white flight” (from black neighbors), statistical racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping of schools predominately attended by blacks relative to schools predominately attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance, arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more. It permits whites to routinely engage in many of the same “self-sabotaging” behaviors that mainstream U.S. wisdom portrays as the essential cause of black inequality without experiencing the same degree of terrible consequences as are visited upon blacks for “bad” beliefs and actions. Under its reign, poor blacks are lectured to get their values and behavior together but no wake-up call is issued for structurally empowered white Americans to stop “deciding, deciding, deciding” to:
● deny blacks equal access to the nation’s highest opportunity communities through a panoply of well-documented discriminatory real-estate, home-lending, and zoning practices and policies.
● target blacks for historically and globally unmatched mass incarceration and felony marking, thereby richly exacerbating the already deep socioeconomic and political disadvantage of lower-class African-Americans.
● maintain strict lines of racial segregation between predominantly black and under funded inner city schools and predominantly white, affluent, and well-funded suburban school districts.
● divert hundreds of billions of dollars from social programs needed to assist the victims of domestic U.S. structural racism to pay for economically dysfunctional tax cuts that benefit the disproportionately white opulent few and to pay for an objectively racist foreign policy that pays its primary dividends to wealthy whites.
● disinvest in communities of color, helping create the barren material underpinning for neighborhoods where adults males with felony records and prison histories are more numerous than livable wage jobs.
● protect various overseas drug lords who happen to serve America’s imperial objectives while conducting a massive domestic anti-narcotics campaign that is significantly less effective and much more expensive than treatment when it comes to mitigating the ravages of substance abuse and generates the critical raw material (black bodies) for the nation’s remarkable, globally unmatched and white-run prison industrial complex.
● permeate severely disadvantaged black neighborhoods with predatory financial institutions that exploit ghetto residents’ limited economic choices.
● go easy with affluent white corporate and high-state criminals who devastate untold lives and communities with fraudulent practices and schemes while consigning hundreds of thousands of poor blacks to hard time in violent mass incarceration facilities for small-time narcotics transgressions that are deemed unworthy of imprisonment in every other nation in the democratic world.
● subvert the meaning and significance of American democracy by constructing a preposterously expensive, big-money and big-media-dominated “winner-take-all” election system that makes it absurdly difficult for racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities to translate their vital needs and perspectives into policy.
● attack “affirmative action” college admissions practices that help try to marginally compensate a minority of blacks for centuries of structural racism while maintaining silence over “legacy” admissions practices that reward predominantly white applicants (i.e., Harvard and Yale graduate George W. Bush) for being born into a family that attended the same school in the past.
The “Oprah Effect” and the Foretold Price of Civil Rights Victory
Richly enabled by policymakers who commonly declare allegiance to anti-racist ideals, the second, deeper level of racism has an equally ancient history that has more than merely outlived open, public American racism and the passage of civil rights legislation. Covert racism may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races.” Indeed, “it’s hard,” Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown note, “to blame [white and even some black] people” for believing – falsely in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown’s view – that racism is dead in America “when our public life is filled with repeated affirmations of the integration ideal and our ostensible progress towards achieving it.”
“There are [now] enough examples of successful middle-class African-Americans,” Georgetown law professor Sheryl Cashin notes, “to make many whites believe that blacks have reached parity with them. The fact that some blacks now lead powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites that racial barriers have been eliminated; the issue now is individual effort.” The “odd black family on the block or the Oprah effect – examples of stratospheric black success – feed,” Cashin observes, “these misperceptions, even as relatively few whites live among and interact daily with blacks of their own standing.” Episodes and events like the brief humiliation of Lott or the election of a black Mayor or U.S. Senator or City Hall’s criticism of racist sentiments on the part of bigoted white firemen offer opportunities for public officials and the broader mass culture to pat themselves on their back for advancing beyond the primitive state of open racism even while they promote policies that dig the hole of more covert institutional or societal racism yet deeper.
Martin Luther King. Jr. sensed some of the danger here at the outset. He noted in 1967 that “many whites hasten to congratulate themselves on what little progress [black Americans] have made. I’m sure,” King opined, “that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Most white people are so removed from the life of the average Negro,” King added, “there has been little to challenge that assumption.”
“Change Your Life,” Not the System: The Full Effect
Oprah’s usefulness in fueling white racism denial goes beyond the fact that she is one of the richest people in the world – sufficiently wealthy to periodically hand out millions of dollars worth of consumer goodies to hundreds of assembled middle-class white women in her studio audience. The full toxic “Oprah effect” is also about the how of her ascendancy. Like Powell, Rice, and perhaps now Obama, Oprah is perceived by many whites as succeeding because she’s “not all that black,” as Powell once described himself: because she has absorbed dominant white middle- and upper-class “self-help” values and rejects the supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional effort to make white America face up to – and pay for – its racist structures, policies, and practices, past and present.
It’s a carefully cultivated perception. With her army of disproportionately Caucasian counselors, personal trainers, fitness consultants, personal chefs, massage therapists, interior designers, and New Age healers, Oprah has taken an “inner journey” toward primarily personal healing and accountability and away from the collective struggle for racial equality and social justice. “The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.” As her programming became ever more racially “sanitized” during the 1990s, Elaine Brown notes (in her excellent book The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002]), Oprah’s emphasis focused on “providing …comfort to what became her core audience of white women, in the form of ‘lifestyle’ and glamour ‘makeovers,’ diets, and New Age self-healing readings and practices and endless self-deprecating discourse over her own weight and ‘nappy’ hair.” “Winfrey carefully avoided using her unparalleled power and voice on behalf of black women,” Brown bitterly observes, “even as the political agenda pounded poor black women and their children ever deeper into poverty and degradation.”
Today, while American inequalities of class and color are worsened by racist imperial adventure in the Middle East, Oprah trumpets and exemplifies narcissistic personal obsession, egoistic wealth accumulation, and the narrow pursuit of individual “excellence” amidst permanent, unchallenged, and brutal social injustice. In Oprah’s world, it’s all about how to “Change Your Life,” a slogan that does not mean engaging with fellow African Americans, other people of color, and white allies in the difficult and often dirty struggle to challenge hierarchy and democratize society. It’s mainly about private color-blind solutions and personal experience. It means working with what Brown calls “a group of whites possessing curious credentials” (New Age healers and consultants), the great struggle to look and feel better inside the smaller circles of daily life – circles that happen, in Oprah’s case, to be situated at the super-opulent heights of a grotesquely unequal societal pyramid that grants more than 2 billion world citizens less than a dollar a day on which to live the good life that is sold in Oprah’s show and magazine.
As for the participants in the upcoming and aforementioned “black tie event” (the Academy Awards), it is worth recalling the meaner side of black upper-class elitism, expressed by Chris Rock in his popular routine “Niggas vs. Black People.” Rock divides black America into two classes, Cosby’s “lower economic people” being the “Niggas.” “I love black people,” Rock says, “but I hate niggas! Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Klu Klux Klan.”
Now there’s something for Oprah’s predominantly white audience to get teary-eyed about, after a bit of advice on how to decorate their next palatial Hollywood mansion more perfectly in accord with the unmet needs of their inner child.
Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005
Langston Hughes' Poem "Put one more S in U.S.A"
Oh, the bankers they all are planning
For another great big war.
To make them rich from the workers' dead,
That's all that war is for.
So if you don't want to see bullets holding sway
Then come on, all you workers,
And join our fight today.
Put one more S in the U.S.A.
To make it Soviet.
One more S in the U.S.A.
Oh, we'll live to see it yet.
When the land belongs to the farmers
And the factories to the working men,
The U.S.A. when we take control
Will be the U.S.S.A. then.
But we can't join hands together
So long as whites are lynching black,
So black and white in one union fight
And get on the right track.
By Texas, or Georgia, or Alabama leg
Come together, fellow workers
Black and white can all be red:
Put one more S in U.S.A
UPDATE: UE Members Occupy Chicago Plant in Struggle for Justice, Monthly Review Zine
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/ue-update061208.html
Chicago, IL - Saturday Evening, December 6
National news networks CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, as well as Chicago news media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news outlets, are reporting on the following dramatic developments involving UE members in Chicago.
Members of UE Local 1110 who work at Republic Windows and Doors are occupying the plant around the clock this weekend, in an effort to force the company and its main creditor to meet their obligations to the workers. Their goal is to at least get the compensation that workers are owed; they also seek the resumption of operations at the plant. All 260 members of the local were laid off Friday in a sudden plant closing, brought on by Bank of America cutting off operating credit to the company. The bank even refused to authorize the release of money to Republic needed to pay workers their earned vacation pay, and compensation they are owed under the federal WARN Act because they were not given the legally-required notice that the plant was about to close.
Below are some links to ongoing news coverage of this story:
* Associated Press, "Day 2 For Workers at Shuttered Window Plant," CBS2Chicago.com, 5 December 2008.
* Associated Press, "Laid-off Workers Occupy Chicago Factory," MSNBC, 6 December 2008.
* Associated Press, "Angry Laid-Off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago," FOX News, 6 December 2008.
* Rupa Shenoy, "Idled Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago," Chicago Tribune, 6 December 2008.
* Mira Oberman, "Laid-off Workers Furious as Bank Pulls Chicago Plant's Credit," France 24, 6 December 2008.
* "Fired Workers Will Stay 'Until We Win Justice'," NBC Chicago, 6 December 2008
Angry Laid-off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago
(Associated Press, 6 December 2008)
Bank of America, the country's second largest bank, has received $25 billion in taxpayer money as part of the $700 billion government bailout of the financial industry. The public was told that this bailout was necessary in order to keep credit flowing and prevent the loss of jobs. Yet the very-well-paid executives at Bank of America have actually cut off credit and forced the closing of Republic where workers were, at least up until Friday, producing energy-efficient doors and windows.
Jobs with Justice, the national worker rights coalition, is asking people to sign an online letter to Bank of America, demanding that they provide the needed credit to keep Republic Windows and Doors open -- or at a minimum, that they pay workers the money they are owed. Please go to this link to support this important struggle.
UE Local 1110 members, along with community supporters, picketed and rallied in front of Bank of America's main Chicago branch on Wednesday, December 3. They chanted, "You got bailed out, we got sold out!" Local 1110 President Armando Robles told the news media, "Just weeks before Christmas we are told our factory will close in three days. Taxpayers gave Bank of America billions, and they turn around and close our company. We will fight for a bailout for workers."
To support the members of Local 1110 in their courageous fight, send checks payable to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, to: UE, 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Messages of support can be sent to leahfried@gmail.com. For more information, call the UE Chicago office at 312-829-8300.
UE has already contacted Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and will soon be in touch with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), chair of the Senate Banking Committee, regarding Bank of America's apparent abuse of its public obligations under the federal banking bailout.
For future updates on this unfolding struggle, go to www.ueunion.org/
Chicago, IL - Saturday Evening, December 6
National news networks CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, as well as Chicago news media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news outlets, are reporting on the following dramatic developments involving UE members in Chicago.
Members of UE Local 1110 who work at Republic Windows and Doors are occupying the plant around the clock this weekend, in an effort to force the company and its main creditor to meet their obligations to the workers. Their goal is to at least get the compensation that workers are owed; they also seek the resumption of operations at the plant. All 260 members of the local were laid off Friday in a sudden plant closing, brought on by Bank of America cutting off operating credit to the company. The bank even refused to authorize the release of money to Republic needed to pay workers their earned vacation pay, and compensation they are owed under the federal WARN Act because they were not given the legally-required notice that the plant was about to close.
Below are some links to ongoing news coverage of this story:
* Associated Press, "Day 2 For Workers at Shuttered Window Plant," CBS2Chicago.com, 5 December 2008.
* Associated Press, "Laid-off Workers Occupy Chicago Factory," MSNBC, 6 December 2008.
* Associated Press, "Angry Laid-Off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago," FOX News, 6 December 2008.
* Rupa Shenoy, "Idled Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago," Chicago Tribune, 6 December 2008.
* Mira Oberman, "Laid-off Workers Furious as Bank Pulls Chicago Plant's Credit," France 24, 6 December 2008.
* "Fired Workers Will Stay 'Until We Win Justice'," NBC Chicago, 6 December 2008
Angry Laid-off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago
(Associated Press, 6 December 2008)
Bank of America, the country's second largest bank, has received $25 billion in taxpayer money as part of the $700 billion government bailout of the financial industry. The public was told that this bailout was necessary in order to keep credit flowing and prevent the loss of jobs. Yet the very-well-paid executives at Bank of America have actually cut off credit and forced the closing of Republic where workers were, at least up until Friday, producing energy-efficient doors and windows.
Jobs with Justice, the national worker rights coalition, is asking people to sign an online letter to Bank of America, demanding that they provide the needed credit to keep Republic Windows and Doors open -- or at a minimum, that they pay workers the money they are owed. Please go to this link to support this important struggle.
UE Local 1110 members, along with community supporters, picketed and rallied in front of Bank of America's main Chicago branch on Wednesday, December 3. They chanted, "You got bailed out, we got sold out!" Local 1110 President Armando Robles told the news media, "Just weeks before Christmas we are told our factory will close in three days. Taxpayers gave Bank of America billions, and they turn around and close our company. We will fight for a bailout for workers."
To support the members of Local 1110 in their courageous fight, send checks payable to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, to: UE, 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Messages of support can be sent to leahfried@gmail.com. For more information, call the UE Chicago office at 312-829-8300.
UE has already contacted Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and will soon be in touch with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), chair of the Senate Banking Committee, regarding Bank of America's apparent abuse of its public obligations under the federal banking bailout.
For future updates on this unfolding struggle, go to www.ueunion.org/
December 7, 2008
In Defense of the Coalition Government, by Michael Laxer
first published on NDP Left: The Ginger Project
http://ndpleft.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
There has been much debate in recent days on the Socialist left as to whether or not the NDP should participate in the proposed coalition government with the Liberal Party in exchange for various policy concessions and six cabinet posts. There are some who feel this is a betrayal of principles and an abandonment of our commitment to working class politics.
While I have some sympathy with this point of view, and while, it being unrelated to our agenda to create a Socialist Platform through the Ginger Project for the Ontario NDP, the NDP Left as a movement has no "official" position on this matter (or on any other parliamentary tactical issue), I personally feel that these arguments are strategically incorrect.
While it has shifted more to the left or to the centre over the decades, the NDP has always been a social democratic party whose purpose is, through parliamentary methods, to achieve the enacting of pro-worker, pro-equality legislation and to attempt to create a better society through what are avowedly reformist methods.
This being its goal, the creation of a genuine coalition government, with NDP members of a federal cabinet for the first time in history, is a striking and forceful victory for both the party and for the left more broadly speaking.
Some element of compromise is a reality of any form of democratic politics. A movement completely unwilling to compromise is by definition totalitarian. The question becomes, is the compromise one that is valid tactically and strategically in the short-term without undermining the long-term interests of the movement. I feel that in this case this is clearly true.
By entering into this coalition the NDP achieves several important objectives. It will push Canadian government policy (in the event that they take power), in a time when real, living Canadian workers face a darkly uncertain economic future, in a direction that will make it significantly more progressive and beneficial to these interests than would otherwise be the case. In far better economic times, and without even a formal coalition, the NDP moved the Martin government to adopt what would have been historic initiatives had they come to pass. The bar will be higher here and we can expect real movement in fundamental areas.
Further, and very significantly, it will legitimize the NDP as a party who is capable of being trusted with economic stewardship, even in times of economic distress. The entire basis of the coalition is to assume control of the economic agenda. It will be very difficult in the future for the Liberal Party to portray the NDP as incapable of governance in this area. In many respects, this coalition's formation will have the same psychological impact as the corporate welfare handouts in the United States. They help to shift the public view away from the dominance of a laissez-faire ideology that has captivated thinking in North America for a quarter century and towards a desire for government intervention in the economy.
Finally, a popular front style coalition, common throughout modern European history, in no way compromises the long-term ideological (such-as-they-are) and tactical interests of the NDP, which remains the sole meaningful representative of the Socialist left in a mass political sense in Canada. I would, indeed, argue that such a coalition would in no way harm the same interests even for a far more left-wing party. The reason, quite simply, is that rejecting such a coalition, given our standing at 18% in the polls, given the lack of other alternatives for us to influence government policy in the immediate future, leads simply to marginalization and irrelevance*. A snap election, right now, caused by a non-confidence vote, followed by an NDP campaign as "pure" as the last one (and that is what we would get) would reshape this as a Liberal-Tory fight and would likely result in a lower NDP vote and seat count, and the winning of a majority by one of Canada's two bourgeois parties (probably the more right-wing one at that).
This would hardly be a victory for the Canadian socialist left or Canadian workers.
Given our standing in the polls, given the threats to workers from both Harper and the economic downturn, and given the need to start to influence the economic debate and to shift it back to a more interventionist model, this coalition is, in my opinion, an accomplishment of real value for the NDP and I support it, I hope that left-wingers across the country will defend it and I hope it takes office in Ottawa.
* As a footnote it should be noted that it is for exactly these reasons that stridently Socialist, Marxist and even Communist parties in Europe have long been willing to enter into broadly bourgeois coalition governments. If you command less than a quarter of the vote (in some cases far less) and if "revolution" (whatever the hell that means) is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, how else can they seek to have an influence on the course of their countries politics?
http://ndpleft.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
There has been much debate in recent days on the Socialist left as to whether or not the NDP should participate in the proposed coalition government with the Liberal Party in exchange for various policy concessions and six cabinet posts. There are some who feel this is a betrayal of principles and an abandonment of our commitment to working class politics.
While I have some sympathy with this point of view, and while, it being unrelated to our agenda to create a Socialist Platform through the Ginger Project for the Ontario NDP, the NDP Left as a movement has no "official" position on this matter (or on any other parliamentary tactical issue), I personally feel that these arguments are strategically incorrect.
While it has shifted more to the left or to the centre over the decades, the NDP has always been a social democratic party whose purpose is, through parliamentary methods, to achieve the enacting of pro-worker, pro-equality legislation and to attempt to create a better society through what are avowedly reformist methods.
This being its goal, the creation of a genuine coalition government, with NDP members of a federal cabinet for the first time in history, is a striking and forceful victory for both the party and for the left more broadly speaking.
Some element of compromise is a reality of any form of democratic politics. A movement completely unwilling to compromise is by definition totalitarian. The question becomes, is the compromise one that is valid tactically and strategically in the short-term without undermining the long-term interests of the movement. I feel that in this case this is clearly true.
By entering into this coalition the NDP achieves several important objectives. It will push Canadian government policy (in the event that they take power), in a time when real, living Canadian workers face a darkly uncertain economic future, in a direction that will make it significantly more progressive and beneficial to these interests than would otherwise be the case. In far better economic times, and without even a formal coalition, the NDP moved the Martin government to adopt what would have been historic initiatives had they come to pass. The bar will be higher here and we can expect real movement in fundamental areas.
Further, and very significantly, it will legitimize the NDP as a party who is capable of being trusted with economic stewardship, even in times of economic distress. The entire basis of the coalition is to assume control of the economic agenda. It will be very difficult in the future for the Liberal Party to portray the NDP as incapable of governance in this area. In many respects, this coalition's formation will have the same psychological impact as the corporate welfare handouts in the United States. They help to shift the public view away from the dominance of a laissez-faire ideology that has captivated thinking in North America for a quarter century and towards a desire for government intervention in the economy.
Finally, a popular front style coalition, common throughout modern European history, in no way compromises the long-term ideological (such-as-they-are) and tactical interests of the NDP, which remains the sole meaningful representative of the Socialist left in a mass political sense in Canada. I would, indeed, argue that such a coalition would in no way harm the same interests even for a far more left-wing party. The reason, quite simply, is that rejecting such a coalition, given our standing at 18% in the polls, given the lack of other alternatives for us to influence government policy in the immediate future, leads simply to marginalization and irrelevance*. A snap election, right now, caused by a non-confidence vote, followed by an NDP campaign as "pure" as the last one (and that is what we would get) would reshape this as a Liberal-Tory fight and would likely result in a lower NDP vote and seat count, and the winning of a majority by one of Canada's two bourgeois parties (probably the more right-wing one at that).
This would hardly be a victory for the Canadian socialist left or Canadian workers.
Given our standing in the polls, given the threats to workers from both Harper and the economic downturn, and given the need to start to influence the economic debate and to shift it back to a more interventionist model, this coalition is, in my opinion, an accomplishment of real value for the NDP and I support it, I hope that left-wingers across the country will defend it and I hope it takes office in Ottawa.
* As a footnote it should be noted that it is for exactly these reasons that stridently Socialist, Marxist and even Communist parties in Europe have long been willing to enter into broadly bourgeois coalition governments. If you command less than a quarter of the vote (in some cases far less) and if "revolution" (whatever the hell that means) is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, how else can they seek to have an influence on the course of their countries politics?
Letter in Reply to a Friend about Political Choices in a time of Crisis
By: Andrew W. Taylor
I am not sure which Marxist-Leninist, Sandinista or Bolivarian political programme you were engaging in your good letter, so excuse me if I do not succeed in hitting the nail on the head! (You've always forgiven me in the past so I feel some liberty). One view you were broaching was the whole question of Reformism? I realise many say things can change gradually through greater and greater reforms --so revolutionary struggles are unnecessary, and if a working-class party is needed at all -- it should not be a revolutionary one.
I think this view fails to see how the state serves ruling-class interests. I believe that Administrations as they are constituted under Capitalism can not be trusted to carry out reforms. The governments give drops to the workers through an eye-dropper because their class-interest is with Big Capital.
Another view - social democracy - assumes collective aspirations to 'the Good State' can be realized in the present System and lead in time to a people-controlled Government. The experiences of my life - and my present view of the increasing size of the army of the unemployed, tell me the social-democratic UK, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada, etc., have not been able to build a people-friendly state. As capitalism convulses, destroying lives and producing a broken generation, they wonder like awed children. They know not what is to befall their privileged world or their power. The crisis-cycle of boom and bust is inherent in capitalism. So the social democratic prescription turns out to be a naive failure. Reforms like Unemplyment Ins. or Single Payer Health Care are reforms radicals should struggle to achieve - but these reforms do not alter the main anti-working class orientation of the present system.
The State, Big Business, and the Media compose a single Entity: there are certain conflicts -- but they are axes of one Corporate entity. The State is not neutral -- we see this all around us today.
I think it is my duty to become an adherent of an organisation of the working class composed of workers and their allies from academia and small business, etc. This party has in its programme the taking of state power from the capitalist class and the creation of a socialist state.
There are a number of revolutionary socialist paths: Cuba is the last quasi-Leninist one in our part of the world; Venezuela-Bolivia-Ecuador may be going down an incrementalist transfer from private-property dominance to socialized-property dominance... I can't judge which way things will turn out in the end. I do know the US government has attempted scores of coup d'etat against Cuba and to a lesser degree, Venezuela. Imperialism does not suffer such states to flourish or even exist! It is too distracting for the masses.
I can't choose between paths to socialism - the path is conditioned by the political culture. I think we may have major differences regarding pacifism. I am not a pacifist and instead follow the main Catholic and Humanist positions on just war.
“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.” Bertholt Brecht
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