What is the contemporary usefulness of this
heritage of Christian reflection upon the state? I think both Augustine
and Aquinas have something important to teach us. At the same moment, I
also think the realities of our modern world now require a radical
transformation of this heritage. First, the continuing usefulness…
The hopefulness of Aquinas, his sense of the ultimate unity of all
rational beings, can guard us against a premature despair about the
prospects for our modern world. There is a terrible danger in the
pessimism of Augustine when taken by itself alone. And it is a special
danger to the affluent and comfortable. Put simply, it is much easier to
contemplate the tragic moral limits of life when one is sitting besides
one’s suburban swimming pool than when one is walking the host streets
of the ghetto.
Hope deprivatizes our lives. It gives a way of getting hold of us. Hope
disciplines our private lives to hear and respond to the demand for
justice by the oppressed. Augustine’s sober realism needs the discipline
of the hope of St. Thomas, and the trust he had in the fundamental
rationality and social creativity of our species.
But it is also true - or it seems true to me - that hope needs the firm
guidance of a sense of reality about the continuing selfishness of men and
of nations. Otherwise hope cannot take the hold in the world as it is. And
when hope cannot take hold, it can become desperate, and can even be
transmuted into a kind of anger and bitterness against humanity that it
should remain so recalcitrant. Realism about self-interest guides hope
into the paths of the possible, and keeps it from becoming a mere
enthusiasm or, in its collapse, a prelude to cynicism.
This heritage of Augustine and Aquinas, then, have something important to
say to us today. But at the same moment, at least to my mind, it is also
true that the realities of today’s world call for a radical
transformation of this heritage.
Why? Because reality has changed. Old realism have become far less real.
Past Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara saw this. Reflecting upon the
nuclear stand off between the super powers, he said: “Today we can no
longer defend the people, we can only take revenge.” Whether we speak of
arms or of energy of the economic transactions of multinational
corporations, everywhere we see the realities of modern world spilling
beyond national boundaries. Increasingly we live in transnational world.
But although we live transnationally we have not evolved effective
instruments of transnational rule. International arms trafficking, for
example, is out of the control of any one nation. Similarly, no single
government - not even one as powerful as the United States - can bring the
multinational corporation under effective public security and control. Or
again, even the most powerful nation can no longer determine, by
themselves, the patterns of their own energy use.
Nevertheless, people still think of themselves as members of nation
states, not as citizens of the world. They identify themselves, which is
to say they defined their hopes and loyalties, as Americans or Russians or
Egyptians. This puts us all in a most perilous position, because when we
feel the inevitable pressure of our new transnational realities, our
sympathies remain too parochial to do anything but resent that pressure.
So we accuse our national leaders of lacking leadership, when the truth is
that no nation alone can lead the way it used to.
Even when people belong to transnational communities of religious faith,
still their sympathies usually remain fundamentally defined by their
national membership. In our Protestant Christian community, for example,
we have evolved a World Council of Churches. It was established in 1948,
two years after the United Nations. Today, these two bodies both suffer
from the same internal tension. Both institutions were set up by the
advanced industrial nations. Both institutions remain heavily dependent
financially upon the richer nations. But by the 1970’s both the World
Council of Churches and the United Nations became composed of a majority
representing the poorer and less developed nations.
This was inevitable. It simply reflects the realities of our world, where
a few have very much in terms of affluence and power and the majority has
very little. The result is that both institutions are now having
difficulty with precisely those national communities which were so
instrumental in their establishment. The danger is that the world’s
affluent and powerful will try to retreat behind their national borders.
The danger is they will not see that their power is not so simply
“their’s” as it once was, that power is more and more transnational,
that it is the power to cooperate and persuade.
All
this puts world religions in a most unique and unprecedented position.
Only the combined efforts of the world’s great religions, I think, can
break open our too narrow identities and too narrow sympathies. The old
realism of national interest may still define reality for national policy
makers. But within the world religions I sense a new realism growing. It
is a realism that responds to a new sense of how our species inhabits
planet. It is the realism that we live in a world at once inextricably
plural and inextricably interdependent. It is a realism that knows that a
world as interdependent as ours cannot long remain as unequal as ours. It
is the realism that knows that issues of distributive justice can no
longer be absorbed into a rapidly and indeterminately expanding world
economy.
Put simply, we stand on the threshold of a new world. And it is a world
that has not yet found a way to make itself work! It is a world which
challenges our religious heritages more fundamentally than anything any of
us had ever had to face before. It is within our partly shared, partly
diverse religious heritages alone, I believe, that we can find the moral
vision to invest this new world with a sense of common citizenship. It
does not mean that we must all become like. It does mean that we must all
become equal. It does not mean that we must all find one common religion.
It does mean that we must learn each others’ religions a way of learning
to respect one another. It does not mean the end of differences between
us. It does mean that these differences must now be negotiated within what
we know are the borders of a small and precarious planet.
The world is new. And it is a world where the old realism of “I want
mine, now, more!” is prescription not for individual survival but for
collective extinction.