Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: Sünde: als Verbrechen, als Komponente im sozialen Prozess; Marx, Nietzsche: Hass d. Sünde;

Kurzinhalt: ... there can arise the vertical invasion of barbarians, of people who do not understand the society as it exists and are in revolt against it. Such people come from within the society. The society has failed to bring them up to its own level ...

Textausschnitt: 1.2 Sin

21/3 The second differential is sin. Sin is a category not only of theological and religious thought. One of the fundamental inspirations of Karl Marx is perhaps his hatred and critique of the sins of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. There is a terrific hatred in Marx, and it is a hatred of sin. Again, in Nietzsche there is a hatred and critique of the sins of the masses, of what is all too human, of their resentment against human excellence of any kind, of their desire to bring everything down to their own level. It was against this that Nietzsche was reacting in affirming his transvaluation of values and his 'Superman,' and so on. For Nietzsche, of course, the fundamental expression of the resentment of the masses against human excellence was Christianity. Nietzsche lived fully the secularism of the modern time. For him God was dead, in the sense that God no longer exerted any influence upon human social, political, and economic life. Nietzsche wanted to think things out in full coherence with that fact. His explanation of Christianity as a resentment against excellence is, of course, a tool that can be turned against him. In Max Scheler's analysis the notion of resentment is given a twist, another application. For a while Scheler was a Catholic, and at that time he upheld the thesis that Protestant, bourgeois, capitalist society was the product of resentment against Catholicism and the feudal aristocratic hierarchy. The notion of resentment, it seems, can be used in all sorts of ways. (58; Fs; tblVrw bis 32/3)

22/3 These examples indicate that sin is a preoccupation not merely of religious and theological thought. Sin is an evident fact in human life, something one has to think of, something that accounts for the differences.

We will consider sin under three headings: sin as crime, sin as a component in social process, and sin as aberration. (59; Fs)

1.2.1 Sin as Crime

23/3 Sin as crime is, as it were, a statistical phenomenon. Everything is not going to be perfect. Sin as crime is more or less an incidental, statistical, and relatively small departure from accepted norms. It gives rise to laws, the police, law courts, tribunals, prisons. At the same time, it generates the notion of the good as 'keeping out of jail' - You're a good man if you're not in jail; that's all we can ask of you. It brings out the further notion that to attain further good is a matter of having more laws, more policemen, more courts. Against sin as crime, then, there is the law, and the law is a fundamental element in the apprehension of the good. As St Paul states in Romans 3.20, 'Through the law there is knowledge of sin.'1 And again in Romans 5.13 he writes, 'Before the law there was sin in the world, but the sin was not counted as sin since there was no law'2 (59; Fs)

24/3 Sin as crime is a matter of the crimes of passion, of moral failure, of bad will, of incomprehension. The criminal class to a greater or lesser extent is a class of those who do not understand the social setup. Criminals establish another society of their own with its own moral standards. There is a story of a gangster who shot a policeman, and when asked why he did it said he did it in self-defense3 he had moral standards of his own that gave evidence of an entirely different society, with criteria and laws of its own. In any society there can arise the vertical invasion of barbarians, of people who do not understand the society as it exists and are in revolt against it. Such people come from within the society. The society has failed to bring them up to its own level, or they have refused to ascend to the level of the society. The annual crop of infants is a potential invasion of barbarians, and education may be conceived as the first line of defense. (59; Fs)

1.2.2 Sin as a Component in Social Process

25/3 Secondly, there is sin as a component in social process, as the opposite to the development of civilizational order. Our Lord remarks in Matthew 18.7 that it is necessary that scandals come. In fact, the good of order does not develop in the glorious fashion I outlined yesterday. It develops under a bias in favor of the powerful, the rich, or the most numerous class. It changes the creative minority into a merely dominant minority. It leads to a division of classes not merely by their function, but also by their well-being. This division of classes gives rise in the underdogs to suspicion, envy, resentment, hatred, and in those that have the better end of the stick, to haughtiness, arrogance, disdain, criticism of 'sloth,' of 'lack of initiative,' of 'shortsightedness,' or in earlier times, of 'lowly birth.' Thus in the very process of the development of civilizational order, there result from sin a bias in favor of certain groups and against other groups, class opposition, the emotional charging of that opposition, and the organization of those emotions and that opposition in mutual recriminations and criticism. In time the pendulum swings from dominance by force and class law, through palliatives and concessions, to a shift of power and to punitive laws. Income tax in England at the present time seems to be an instance of punitive law. We find a great emigration of the best young brains from England, because they foresee no possibility of getting anywhere in their own country, where there is discrimination against what once was the leading class.4 Such a state of affairs interferes with creativity. It is not enough just to have a new idea, even if the idea is justwhat is wanted. The idea has to combine with power, with wealth, with popular notions, before it can be realized. It cannot simply emerge from the man on the spot, diffuse, give rise to new potentialities in a chain reaction. Developments become lopsided, curtailed. Completion of the development is demanded by disaffection, but it cannot emerge in the normal fashion of the spread of an idea. It has to come by management, from above downward, not from below upward. Management always needs more power. Without a constant increase in power, management is not able to control all the outside5 factors that might interfere with its plans. If it cannot exclude those factors, it cannot achieve its results. And so there occurs the rise and growth of a bureaucratic hierarchy. (60; Fs)

26/3 In spontaneous developments, the new ideas come where they may to the man on the spot who is intelligent, sees the possibilities, and goes ahead at his own risk. But in the bureaucracy the intelligent man ceases to be the initiator. He does not have the power, the connections, the influence, to put his ideas into practice. He becomes a consultant, an expert, called in by the bureaucracy. Activity is slowed down to the pace of routine paperwork. Style and form, that are inevitable when the man who has the idea is running things, yield to standardization and uniformity. Wisdom and faith yield to eclecticism and syncretism: Pick the best ideas, and the ideas that will suit everybody, or some of those that will suit everybody. The process of mimesis, of the people who were carried on in the movement even though they did not quite understand it, changes into drudgery and routine, with no understanding of what is going on.6 They keep on doing it because they have to live. Creativity has fewer and fewer opportunities for significant achievement. The lone individual is more and more driven onto the margin of the big process, of what is really going on.7 The masses demand security, distraction, entertainment, pleasure, and they have a decreasing sense of shame. (60f; Fs)

27/3 In this regard, I relate a story told me by a man in Montreal. His mother came from Germany and his uncles went to Detroit. His uncles put their sons through college by spending their lives working in factories. When they retired from the factories they could not just be idle, so they set up small machine shops where they worked on their own time. Their sons with the college educations were quite content to work in the factories just as their fathers had done, and they spent their spare time watching baseball games on television. Now that is not simply an individual matter. The older men belonged to a different time, when opportunities existed for the individual that do not exist today. The supermarkets have pushed out the corner grocery store, and so on all along the line. You have to be in big business to be in business at all, and in big business you have nothing to say. Thus there is a spread of frivolity. (61; Fs)

28/3 There is also esotericism: people retire into the ivory tower, and they have no intention of returning to the transformation of the situation. There is archaism: people preach the revival of the ancient virtues, but the ancient virtues are no longer relevant to the present situation; they were virtues once, but they are not what is needed now.8 There is futurism: achieve utopia by a leap; forget that the good is concrete - bonum et malum sunt in rebus: good and evil lie in the concrete, and the real ideal, the true ideal, is the potentiality in the concrete. There are what are called 'times of troubles,' wars to arouse social concern, to give people a stake in the nation, to give them the feeling that they belong together in one nation. There are the outer and inner barbarians growing to ever larger proportions. And finally, there is the universal state as an outward peace to cover over inner emptiness. Sin as a component in the social process lets the material development go ahead, and at the same time takes out of it its soul. (61f; Fs) (notabene)