Pitirim Sorokin and the Benedict Option

PS Frederic Baue's The Spiritual Society is a very readable book by a Lutheran pastor who draws extensively on Sorokin.

Are all the various versions of various publication years the same, or are any revised?

The fact that it's 90 today in Dallas ("Feels like 95" - Weather.com) might explain half of the hot copy from Rawlins above, defending our Rod in Full; the other humid half evaporates from its catch tray in recognition of my two years and counting of occasionally sober and always fraternal comments herein, offered as the only possible testimony to my agreement with the conclusion that, save for their both having drawn unwarranted conclusions, based on partial evidence, about conditions in the book trade, Rush and Rod have only the most occasional, accidental points of overlap.

[Lucky I didn't say anything about the dirty *knife*. - after Graham Chapman]

Talk about Yogi Berra's "déjà vu all over again" (as opposed to George Carlin's "vujà dé", the sense this has never happened before). The comment thread to Rod's post on "Family and Civilization" from February 5

blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/02/family-and-civilization.html.comments.html

is a virtual prologue to this one, right down to the back-to-back book recommendations from Major Wootton and me. If you ask me in what that earlier thread consists, I can only do a Palmolive Madge and reply, "You're Sorokin in it".

Scott, that's funny!

Which I don't suppose Sorokin will be.

Steve makes a good point in calling our attention to domestic mobilization during Word War II as a possible precedent for how society might respond to a potential collapse of its ability to sustain itself on the terms to which we've grown accustomed.

But I'm more pessimistic than Steve that something like domestic mobilization during Word War II would be possible today, let alone in the decades to come, if present trends hold.

At mid-century, we were much closer to being an "idealistic" -- as opposed to a "sensate" -- culture than we are today.

Perhaps the greatest irony with which those to the left of center must now contend is the fact that the 1960's and all they represent more or less did away with the moral resources by which our culture could pull together to undertake the kind of collective effort that we saw during Word War II -- the kind of collective effort that those to the left of center are often (and correctly) urging us toward.

The "sensate" cultural ethos of moral libertarianism mitigates against the moral communitarianism that any return to an "idealistic" cultural ethos would surely impose.

The two main repositories of vestigial "idealistic" culture today are religiosity and patriotism, both of which those to the left of center are skeptical toward.

The idea that -- in a crisis -- the populace will rally around some ideal other than God or country seems most unlikely to me, though not impossible per se.

But "ideational" people or movements are not and cannot be self-consciously "ideational" as part of some sort of dialectic to renew culture. Early Christians were such because they believed that the "way, truth, and life" was God incarnate in Jesus Christ, born, died, resurrected and coming again soon, real soon. That was ultimate reality to them and they didn't give a damn about the cultural world around them coming to an end, nor were they trying to create a new "ideational" culture to take its place.

That's true -- Sorokin says that once a culture moves past the ideational phase, it can't live as if it believed the ideational were true. He speaks of leading intellects of the Renaissance propounding a belief in God as a social utility, but this is doomed to fail. Nobody believes in God because it is good for them, or for any other instrumental reason (though they may profess belief in God because it advances their interests). They believe in God because He exists.

When their apocalyptic hopes were dashed, or delayed, Christians began to be more concerned about how to function as a community in the world. But as with Benedict, their community was not the nuclear family--mom and dad having sex and having kids--but celibate groups of men and women who desired holiness, to be pure virgins when the Bridegroom came to get them. Until the Reformation, part of Sorokin's "sensate" time, there was very little interest in the "ordinary" world.

Couple things. Monasticism has never been the ordinary way of being a Christian. There were Christian communities before there were monastic ones, and there have always been far more ordinary Christians than monastic ones. Remember too that after the Roman Empire in the West fell, the Eastern Empire at Byzantium continued for another thousand years. What is so interesting (to me) about the monks in the West, post-Rome, is how those communities seeded the chaotic remnants of Rome with the faith, and with practical knowledge (e.g., of agricultural practice) that helped the populace, in time, rebuild civilization. Remember that northern Europe had not been Christianized. St. Augustine didn't make his missionary trip to England until nearly the year 600 -- well after the last Roman emperor. Had the government in Rome collapsed, leaving behind a Christian population in its European territories instead of barbarians, history would likely have been very different.

Also, it's just not true that the sensate era ended with the Reformation. It ended with the victory of nominalism in the High Middle Ages, and the wars of the 14th century. The Renaissance, which slightly preceded the Reformation, is part of sensate time. And so is the Reformation. Sensate time doesn't mean that no one believes in God at all. It means that there is no commonly shared objective basis for recognizing transcendental truth. The Reformation, by privatizing the Christian conscience, was part of this process, which led to fragmentation (which is a good thing, if you believe that the Roman Church had an illicit monopoly on religious truth, but still, as a sociological matter, the Reformation continued the process of fragmentation and individualization).

You're right that social ideals cannot be transvalued toward the ideational without a charismatic event -- conversion of some sort, on a mass scale. As a Christian, I would hope and expect that to be a return, en masse, to a substantive Christianity. But the trauma necessary for that to happen would have to be catastrophic, I fear. Look at 9/11. The pews filled up for about a month afterward, then went back to where they had been before. But look, there's no reason to think that the charismatic person or persons who come forward with a new revelation (or an old revelation repackaged with transformative new power) necessarily will be Christian.

One problem I have with Sorokin's scheme is that I don't know how universal it is. According to the general theory, when a culture goes too far down one road, it self-corrects. Why, then, do we not see this self-correction among the mass of impoverished African-Americans, to take one example? Shouldn't the Sorokin theory predict that their specific sensate culture, especially with the perpetuation of poverty via unwed childbearing as a norm (70 percent of all US black children born today have no father in the home), have by now prompted a return to more ascetic values among African-Americans? If it hasn't done so for them, is this not an example that disproves the theory?

On the other hand, Sorokin does seem to qualify this point, saying that if a culture gone too far into sensate decadence fails to accept an ascetic social ethic, then it will stagnate. (Similarly, a culture that taps out its creative potential in the ideational mode and fails to make a shift toward idealistic or sensate will stall out -- I think this may account for the relative intellectual and cultural poverty of the Islamic world post-medievally).

I am not au courant with the intricacies of Sorokin's particular flywheel theory of history, but as with Hegel's and Toynbee's, it will probably eventually come to be seen as missing the trees for the forest.

In Sorokin's case, I wonder how his "ideational"/idealistic/sensate thesis explains the rise and fall of the Sumerian, Aztec, Mongol, Celtic, Inuit cultures. Though the Inuit seem to be doing as well as they always have unless a few unfortunates tumble into the alarmingly expanding crevasses.

Further, from Rod's post, I am not clear how the so-called "Benedict" option will prove a countervailing dynamic to the "sensate" state wherein we now languish. Those neo-Benedictines will still be forced to render tribute unto the Caesars at the IRS to fund late-term abortions, infanticide, murder of the old, test-tube embryos and flask fetuses, dog-human clones (werewolfs?), etc. ad nauseam. They won't escape the barbarians. The Caliph may save them. For a price.

I am floundering in a puddle of aporia about spending $61 on Sorokin's book. That sum will purchase a quite delightful Brunello, which followed by an Armagnac and coffee, induce a more genial view of our cultural anomie.

I think the lack of self-correction regarding unwed motherhood comes from the fact that modern welfare is an artificial prop that did not exist before. The burden of caring for fatherless children fell on the church in Christian communities, where at least the child, if not the mother, would hopefully be taught Christian morality and hopefully go on to make wiser choices. I'm thinking of Christian orphanages and, of course, presupposing that they were nuturing,which is not neccessarily true. Hope that will keep everyone from jumping in with horror stories about evil, vile Christian caretakers. We all know plenty of them still exist.

There is simply no incentive not to be an unwed mother. If society disapproves then it is a bad intolerant society. If your nuclear family disapproves, you get extrs money for that(a living allowance for an apartment of your own). And for a young unskilled woman, welfare in many cases, pays better than any job she could find.

I wonder how many other artificial government props stand in the way of achieving Sorokin's idealistic culture?

This arugument supposes a sensate vs. Christian tug of war. I am not familar with how other religions handle unwed motherhood, although I have a pretty good idea about some and I am sure it is always the woman's fault.

Roland,

1) I had to look up apoira and au courant...easy now on the Greek and French...this is still America. Barely. I mean, we can see it from here.

2) Inuit culture is not doing well; serious dysfuntion. Modernity has put it in a bad way.

3) Anyone with four or more kids and an average salary (most neo-Benedictines qualify here) doesn't pay a thin dime in income tax. Escaping the barbarians is easy...just cut the materialism.

4) Why spend any money on Sorokin? Interlibrary loan it for free.

It means that there is no commonly shared objective basis for recognizing transcendental truth.

Calling perceived miracles an 'objective basis' is pretty dubious, Rod.

My problem with Sorokin is that he mischaracterizes Ockham and the point of rigorous thought. For all the pretensions that thinking at the time was on some higher plane, the reality was that gnosticisms, occultism, cleaned up pagan doctrines, and all kinds of problematic thinking were the norm. Dimitri Merezhkovsky's "Leonardo da Vinci" may not be the best description of Leonardo's life, but it's pretty illustrative of the intense and horrifying, often reality-devoid and contradiction-filled messiness of Western thought of the time that thinkers had to deal with and underlay its bloody conflicts and incidents. The clutter of magical thinking and false knowledge was corrupting all thought and had to be dealt with.

The obvious remedy was to enforce a discipline of asking for solid evidence, insisting on proper warrants, and rooting out logical/argumentative fallacies. And learning an attitude in which 'unimaginable' or 'unbelievable' propositions were tolerated, i.e. permitted to exist intellectually if based in proper logic and evidence, even though the conclusions were emotionally and politically unbearable. Such as Galileo's heliocentric cosmos.

That illness we now still call 'cancer' gets its name from the constellation. At the time of Ockham the height of Western medicine was to identify which sign of the Zodiac an illness corresponded to and to predict the course, prognosis, and efficacy of a treatment of the illness by astrology. Occultic diagnosis and treatment of illness remains into the present, and the story of Czarevich Alexander's hemophilia and Rasputin's role at the court of the last Czar is fairly illustrative of how it has lasted.

In the end Ockham is right- or, cannot be wrong- that beliefs for which evidence is inadequate can and should not be strongly maintained. That rule doesn't provide a directive to what to do with imagination, with individual phenomena of consciousness- but the implication is that some measure of constraint be applied.

The mystics, like John of the Cross, actually say the same thing quite explicitly: visions/revelations should be treated with an attitude of distrust and skepticism until and unless the life of the person genuinely transforms in their wake. We are to trust the evidence the lives give. The story that purports to explain things- nowhere near as much.

Roland de Dædalus Chanson Gunner's [Warren Zevon, RIP] charmingly Francophone fastidiousness is so refined ["Nobody expects the French Exquisition" - Ed., after climbing that internet-absurdists' peak, Mont ePython] I'm almost loath to recommend, as after his sybarite tastes, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock, for fear Nock, too, though no stranger to fallen-Man narratives from Olympian vantage, will seem to him the most vulgarian of mass-men. You'll know something of Nock has rubbed off when Roland, trilling his literary *Chansons d'amour* eastward, comes to refer to a great Russian writer not as Turgenev, but as "Tourgueniev".

Still, Nock's twilit reflections outdo Sorokin in at least one regard, being free for the asking; the chapter-head quotations alone supply one's daily RDAs for ambrosia (mind-food, if not soul-food, after Roland's classical distinction):

mises.org/books/nockmemoirs.pdf

"It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence"

Actually, Tathagata (the Buddha) beat Occam to the punch. However, rather than say that nothng matters, he came up with what might be called a model of a fourth state of civilization: the transcendent. That is, the going-beyond of both nihilism's "nothing exists so nothing matters" and Sorokin's three states of civilization. Turns out you can do both. Nothing really exists, but everything really matters. As with so many others, Sorokin looks only at Western culture and attempts to make a universal of the principles that he sees in it.

"The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably -- though ways are found to hedge on this -- the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of "man the measure of all things."

The first line here is about half right. The denial of universals carries with it the downplaying of that which is not experience. There is truth in things not experienced, but to really get to transcendence, you must experience the truths of the senses and the truths of the ideated - then you will see the truth both in the non-experienced and the experienced. Moving one step further, transcending both the experienced (what is observed, or the sensate) and the non-experienced (faith, or ideation), you will see truth and reality and find that the experienced and the non-experienced are not different.

Also, from a Buddhist standpoint (very much relativistic), man is not the measure of all things. Man is frail and dies, as do gods and demons and plants and animals and hungry ghosts and everythig else. However, it is in the human realm that one can transcend the duality that exists in all realms and achieve liberation into reality.

Of course, from a logical, Western standpoint, this is all nonsense. It's a denial of the either-or that dominates Western reality, and we can't have that...a both-and approach simply won't do.

To Cleveland's haikool turn for the idealist verse, after Thomas Dolby:

Good Heavens, Mr. Sorokinoto, you're beautiful!

To ally with one so determined to outwit the bad, and Inuit the good, is an honor and a privilege - and for me as well.

How many times must I say it! (Kept getting a message saying transmission failed.) No, really; haven't had a B&B in a week.

Apparently, Cleveland, BeliefNet servers, seeing your attempts at Benedictine decryption above, and your semi-auto 9mm Dan Brown-ing, feared you were en route to cracking The Da Crunchy Code as well...

My only comment about the "Benedict Option" idea is that, while it made sense to MacIntyre and fit with what he was trying to accompl, I'm not at all convinced that it would have made sense to Saint Benedict, or fit in with what he was trying to accomplish. In the first place, one could argue he was acting in response to what he considered a personal call from God, not out of "reading the signs of the times" or whatever. Also, if he was out to save anything, it wasn't civilization... it was souls - his own, and his monks. I think he probably didn't even expect that a Christian civilization would take shape on earth... I think, like Saint Paul, he was focused on waiting for his Lord's return and living in Christian perfection while on earth.

If I am right, what does this say about this course of action? Anything? Even in terms of practical questions, does it suggest that this sort of thing isn't really accomplished by a purposive decision??? Can we imagine that Saint Benedict was decisive b/c of God's providential action, and his response to a CALL rather than his wisdom / prescience in withdrawing from a sick world? Would he not have withdrawn also from Christendom had he lived at the right time and had that been proposed to him?

Also, as for self-sufficiency... the monastics were dependent upon the secular church for the sacraments. This was a lay order. So I think they envisioned being involved with the secular church... which was by this time I think part of the larger secular order...

I'm not sure what this all means for the B Option idea... but I'm just wondering what everyone else thinks...