Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Geschichte, Heilung; verschiedene Diagnose: Russel (Mensch böse), Popper (dumm, einfältig)

Kurzinhalt: A creative process is a learning process. It is learning what hitherto was not known. It is just the opposite of the mental coma induced by the fables and jingles that unceasingly interrupt television programs in our native land and even in the great ...

Textausschnitt: 7 Healing and Creating in History

1/7 The topic assigned me reads: Healing and Creating in History.
What precisely it means or even what it might mean, does not seem to be obvious at first glance. An initial clarification appears to be in order. (100; Fs)

2/7 We have to do with healing and creating in history. But no particular kind of history is specified, and so we are not confined to religious or cultural or social or political or economic or technological history. Again no people or country is mentioned, neither Babylonians nor Egyptians, Greeks nor Romans, Asians nor Africans, Europeans nor Americans. It would seem, then, that we have to do with healing and creating in human affairs. For human affairs are the stuff of history, and they merit the attention of the historian when they are taken in a relatively large context and prove their significance by their relatively durable effects. (100; Fs)

3/7 Now if "history" may be taken broadly to mean human affairs, it is not too difficult to obtain at least a preliminary notion of what is meant by the other two terms in our title, "healing" and "creating." For there comes to hand a paper by Sir Karl Popper entitled "The History of Our Time: An Optimist's View."1 In it he opposes two different accounts of what is wrong with the world. On the one hand, there is the view he attributes to many quite sincere churchmen and, along with them, to the rationalist philosopher, Bertrand Russell. It is to the effect that our intellectual development has outrun our moral development. He writes:

We have become very clever, according to Russell, indeed too clever. We can make lots of wonderful gadgets, including television, high-speed rockets, and an atom bomb, or a thermonuclear bomb, if you prefer. But we have not been able to achieve that moral and political growth and maturity which alone could safely direct and control the uses to which we put our tremendous intellectual powers. This is why we now find ourselves in mortal danger. Our evil national pride has prevented us from achieving the world-state in time.
To put this view in a nutshell: we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we also are wicked; and this mixture of cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles.2

4/7 In contrast, Sir Karl Popper would argue that we are good, perhaps a little too good, but we are also a little stupid; and it is this mixture of goodness and stupidity that lies at the root of our troubles. After avowing that he included himself among those he considered a little stupid, Sir Karl put his point in the following terms: (101; Fs)

The main troubles of our time—and I do not deny that we live in troubled times—are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided, because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.3

5/7 In upholding this contention Sir Karl was quite ready to descend to particular instances. He granted the wickedness of Hitler and Stalin. He acknowledged that they appealed to all sorts of hopes and fears, to prejudices and envy, and even to hatred. But he insisted that their main appeal was an appeal to a kind of morality. They had a message; and they demanded sacrifices. He regretted that an appeal to morality could be misused. But he saw it as a fact that the great dictators were always trying to convince their people that they knew a way to a higher morality. (101; Fs)

6/7 Now one may agree with Lord Russell. One may agree with Sir Karl. Indeed, there is no difficulty in agreeing with both, for the Christian tradition lists among the effects of original sin both a darkening of intellect and a weakening of will. But whatever one's opinion, it remains that there is a profound difference between diagnosing a malady and proposing a cure. Whether one stresses with Lord Russell the conjunction of clever but wicked or with Sir Karl the conjunction of good but stupid, one gets no further than diagnosis. On the other hand, when one speaks of healing and creating, one refers to positive courses of action. To this positive aspect of the issue, we now must turn. (101f; Fs)

7/7 The creating in question is not creating out of nothing. Such creating is the divine prerogative. Man's creating is of a different order. Actually, it does not bring something out of nothing, but it may seem to do so. William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, has described three stages in the career of a theory. First, "[...] it is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it."4 Such a theory is creative. (102; Fs)

8/7 Let me illustrate this need for human creating from the contemporary economic situation. Last year there was published a thick volume by Richard Barnet and Ronald Miiller with the title, Global Reach, and the subtitle, The Power of the Multinational Corporations. Its thirteen chapters fell into three parts. The first set forth the aims of the multinational corporations: they propose to run the world, for they can do the job and our little national governments are not equipped to do so. The second set of chapters delineated what the multinational corporations were doing to the underdeveloped countries: they have been making them more hopelessly worse off than otherwise they would be. The third set finally asked what these corporations, which in the main are American, have been doing to the United States; the answer is that they are treating the States in the same way they are treating the underdeveloped countries and, in the long run, the effects will be the same as in the rest of the world. (102; Fs)

9/7 Now if the multinational corporations are generating worldwide disaster, why are they permitted to do so? The trouble is that there is nothing really new about multinational corporations. They aim at maximizing profit, and that has been the aim of economic enterprise since the mercantile, the industrial, the financial revolutions ever more fully and thoroughly took charge of our affairs. The alternative to making a profit is bankruptcy. The alternative to maximizing profit is inefficiency.5 All that the multinational corporation does is maximize profit not in some town or city, not in some region or country, but on the global scale. It buys labor and materials in the countries where they are cheapest. Its credit is unimpeachable and so it can secure all the money it wants from whatever banks or money markets are in a position to create it. Its marketing facilities are a global network and to compete one would have first to build up a global network of one's own. The multinational corporation is a going concern. It is ever growing and expanding. It is built on the very principles that slowly but surely have been moulding our technology and our economics, our society and our culture, our ideals and our practise for centuries. It remains that the long-accepted principles are inadequate. They suffer from radical oversights. Their rigorous application on a global scale, according to Barnet and Miiller, heads us for disaster. But as the authors also confess: "The new system needed for our collective survival does not exist."6 When survival requires a system that does not exist, then the need for creating is manifest. (102f; Fs)

10/7 While it can take a series of disasters to convince people of the need for creating, still the long, hard, uphill climb is the creative process itself. In retrospect this process may appear as a grand strategy that unfolds in an orderly and cumulative series of steps. But any retrospect has the advantage of knowing the answers. The creative task is to find the answers. It is a matter of insight, not of one insight but of many, not of isolated insights but of insights that coalesce, that complement and correct one another, that influence policies and programs, that reveal their shortcomings in their concrete results, that give rise to further correcting insights, corrected policies, corrected programs, that gradually accumulate into the all-round, balanced, smoothly functioning system that from the start was needed but at the start was not yet known. (103; Fs)

11/7 This creative process is nothing mysterious. It has been described by Jane Jacobs in her The Economy of Cities,7 as repeatedly finding new uses for existing resources. It has been set forth in the grand style by Arnold Toynbee under the rubric of "Challenge and Response" in his A Study of History, where the flow of fresh insights takes its rise from a creative minority, and the success of their implementation wins the devoted allegiance of the rank and file.8 (103; Fs)

12/7 I have spoken of insights, and I had best add what I do not mean. An insight is not just a slogan, and an ongoing accumulation of insights is not just an advertising campaign. A creative process is a learning process. It is learning what hitherto was not known. It is just the opposite of the mental coma induced by the fables and jingles that unceasingly interrupt television programs in our native land and even in the great republic to the south of us. (103f; Fs)

13/7 Again, insights are one thing, and concepts are quite another. Concepts are ambiguous. They may be heuristic, but then they merely point to unspecified possibilities, as highly desirable as justice, liberty, equality, peace—but still just empty gestures that fail to reveal how the possibilities might be realized and what the realization concretely would entail. Again, concepts may be specific, but then they are definite, rounded off, finished, abstract. Like textbooks on moral theology they can name all the evils to be avoided but get no further than unhelpful platitudes on the good to be achieved. For the good is never an abstraction. Always it is concrete.9 The whole point to the process of cumulative insight is that each insight regards the concrete while the cumulative process heads towards an ever fuller and more adequate view. Add abstraction to abstraction and one never reaches more than a heap of abstractions. But add insight to insight and one moves to mastery of all the eventualities and complications of a concrete situation. (104; Fs)

14/7 The creative process culminates in system, but the system is only system on the move. It never reaches static system that comes into existence and remains forever after. So it is that, when the flow of fresh insights dries up, when challenges continue and responses fail to emerge, then the creative minority becomes the merely dominant minority and the eagerness of the rank and file, that exulted in success, turns into the sullenness of an internal proletariat frustrated and disgusted by the discovery that a country in which, more and more, everything had worked has become a country in which, more and more, nothing works. Such is the disenchantment that, to use Toynbee's terms, brings to an end the genesis of a civilization and introduces first its breakdowns and eventually its disintegration. (104; Fs)